Barthes’ Mythologies Today: Readings of Contemporary Culture 2013005528, 9780415821223, 9780203568422

Citation preview

Barthes’ Mythologies Today

READINGS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE This is Barthes’ seminal text, reimagined in a contemporary context by contemporary academics. Through a revisiting of Mythologies, a key text in cultural and media studies, this volume explores the value these disciplines can add to an understanding of contemporary society and culture. Leading academics in Media, English, Education, and Cultural Studies here are tasked with identifying the ‘new mythologies’ some fifty or so years after Barthes’s original interventions. The contributions in this volume, then, are readings of contemporary culture, each engaging with a cultural event, practice, or text as mythological. These readings are contextualized by an introduction that reflects on the ‘how’ of these engaging responses and an ‘essay at the back of the book’, which replaces Myth Today with a reflection on the contemporary provenance of both Barthes and his most famous book. Thus, the book is at least two things at once, whichever way you look: a ‘new’ Mythologies and a book about Barthes’ legacy, an exploration of the place of theory in critical writing, and a book about contemporary culture. Pete Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Julian McDougall is Associate Professor in the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University, UK.

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

20 Mobile Technologies From Telecommunications to Media Edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth 21 Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination The Image between the Visible and the Invisible Edited by Bernd Huppauf and Christoph Wulf

27 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body Cassandra Jackson 28 Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory Russian Literary Mnemonics Mikhail Gronas 29 Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory Brett Ashley Kaplan

22 Cities, Citizens, and Technologies Urban Life and Postmodernity Paula Geyh

30 Emotion, Genre, and Justice in Film and Television E. Deidre Pribram

23 Trauma and Media Theories, Histories, and Images Allen Meek

31 Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies Matthew Rubery

24 Letters, Postcards, Email Technologies of Presence Esther Milne

32 The Adaptation Industry The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation Simone Murray

25 International Journalism and Democracy Civic Engagement Models from Around the World Edited by Angela Romano 26 Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art Performing Migration Edited by Rocío G. Davis, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, and Johanna C. Kardux

33 Branding Post-Communist Nations Marketizing National Identities in the “New” Europe Edited by Nadia Kaneva 34 Science Fiction Film, Television, and Adaptation Across the Screens Edited by J. P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay

35 Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet Olga Goriunova 36 Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television Melanie E.S. Kohnen 37 Artificial Culture Identity, Technology, and Bodies Tama Leaver 38 Global Perspectives on Tarzan From King of the Jungle to International Icon Edited by Annette Wannamaker and Michelle Ann Abate 39 Studying Mobile Media Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson 40 Sport Beyond Television The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport Brett Hutchins and David Rowe 41 Cultural Technologies The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society Edited by Göran Bolin

44 Generation X Goes Global Mapping a Youth Culture in Motion Christine Henseler 45 Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture Gender, Crime, and Science Lindsay Steenberg 46 Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media Historical Perspectives Edited by Siân Nicholas and Tom O’Malley 47 De-convergence in Global Media Industries Dal Yong Jin 48 Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture Edited by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik 49 Reading Beyond the Book The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo 50 A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media Jesse Drew

42 Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Hardcore Pornography Natalie Purcell

51 Digital Media Sport Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society Edited by Brett Hutchins and David Rowe

43 Ambiguities of Activism Alter-Globalism and the Imperatives of Speed Ingrid M. Hoofd

52 Barthes’ Mythologies Today Readings of Contemporary Culture Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall

This page intentionally left blank

Barthes’ Mythologies Today Readings of Contemporary Culture Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barthes’ Mythologies today : readings of contemporary culture / [edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall]. pages cm. – (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies ; 52) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mass media and culture. 2. Culture–Philosophy–History–21st century. 3. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. I. Bennett, Peter, 1961– editor of compilation. II. McDougall, Julian, editor of compilation. P94.6.B36 2013 302.23—dc23 2013005528 ISBN: 978-0-415-82122-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-56842-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Dedicated to Leslie Caron and other orthographical misadventures, Mike McDougall and the wheel that fell off.

My conscience and my history The myths that make me sing? (Nick Burbridge, 2002)

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

PART I Fables of Reconstruction 1 Fables of Reconstruction

3

JULIAN MCDOUGALL

PART II Mythologies 2 The Face of Assange

17

OSCAR GOMEZ

3 The X Factor

19

TIM WALL

4 Tastes of Paradise: The ‘Fair’ Trade Myth

24

JENNI RAMONE

5 Batgirl

27

WILL BROOKER

6 Education as Mythology

32

NICK PEIM

7 Sherlocks for the Twenty-First Century

41

MATT HILLS

8 Myths of the Digital Age

45

GABRIEL MENOTTI AND ANTONIO FERNANDEZ-VICENTE

9 The Zombie Walk

50

JULIA ROUND

10 The Mythologised Accretions of Press Freedom JULIAN PETLEY

53

x

Contents

11 In Search of Higg’s Boson

57

ANGIA VOELA

12 The Cultural Politics of Being a Knob

61

BEN PITCHER

13 Kylie Écriture

64

SUNIL MANGHANI

14 Signs and Symptoms of the Mad Genius

66

SIMON CROSS

15 The Museum of Champions, Hyde Park, May 2011

71

EILEEN KENNEDY

16 Femininity and the Body: Spectacle and Signification

75

RICHARD BERGER AND MARK READMAN

17 Reflections on a Passport

80

LIESBET VAN ZOONEN

18 Lobottonised Media—Mythological Thought for the Day

86

PAUL A. TAYLOR

19 Ripper

94

DAN LAUGHEY

20 The Face of Noomi Rapace

96

ROY STAFFORD

21 Time and the Pips

104

GARY SEAL

22 The National Team

107

JOHN POULTER

23 The Citroën Xsara Picasso

109

BEN TAYLOR AND STEVE JONES

24 The Peculiar Pose of Jessica Lynch

112

ANDREW PANAY

25 The 7/7 Bus

118

RUTH DELLER

26 Resisting the Myths: Dodging the Bullets JAYNE SHERIDAN

122

Contents 27 Vilnius: Discredited Capital of Culture

xi 126

EVELINA KAZAKEVIČIŪTĖ AND KĘSTAS KIRTIKLIS

28 The Shahida’s Claim: Ayat Muhammed Lutfi Al Akhras

131

NORMA MUSIH

29 The Myth of ‘Toxic Childhood’

138

JANE O’CONNOR

PART III Barthes’ Myth Today 30 Barthes’ Myth Today: Barthes after Barthes

143

PETE BENNETT

List of Contributors

169

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

Fables of Reconstruction

This page intentionally left blank

1

Fables of Reconstruction Julian McDougall

The ghost of Roland Barthes is suitably perplexed (Penman, 1981).

This book presents the outcome of a research enquiry, for which an international, interdisciplinary community of authors reimagined Barthes’s collections of Mythologies (1973, 1979) , producing new readings of, from, and for the cultural landscape. It has the same aims as we (re)imagine Barthes set out with—to bring to the fore ‘the categories and distinctions through which culture gives meaning to behaviour’ (Culler, 1983: 36). And we hope this book will be put to the same variety of work—as scholarly intervention, academic research, student textbook, and ‘popular’ writing as a ‘stand-alone’ set of readings of and (with) contemporary culture and in comparison to Barthes’s original collections. The ‘data’ assessed here, through discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 2011), is textual. Responding to an open call for abstracts, a range of published ‘experts’ in the fields of Media and Cultural Studies and related ‘disciplines’, problematic though such insulations are (Bernstein, 1996), produced essays for this new version of Mythologies. In the process of inviting and editing this range of work, we were asking a number of questions. What is a myth today? What constitutes theory? And who has the authority to impose a theory on myth? What will the various new mythologies tell us about the phenomenology of myth in culture today? What will these processes for ‘doing theory’ on culture tell us about academic ‘power’ and textual authority? We want, then, to present not only the ‘new’ Mythologies, but to explore what this process means, working with and within mythology, trying perhaps to ‘have it both ways’ (Sontag, 1993: xxxi). The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps evaporation, in short a perceptible absence (Barthes, 1973: 155). While reimagining the work of the mythologist as intellectual and pedagogical practice, this collection faithfully reproduces Barthes’s structural

4

Julian McDougall

presentation. To this end, we leave our exploration of the Barthes myth to the end, in keeping with his presentation of ‘Myth Today’ as a concluding essay, rather than as a framework for the outset. So, like Barthes, we present our collection of mythologies before we overarch and underpin them. So, we ‘bookend’ the edited collection with two interventions of our own. In these opening pages, we interrogate the essays published here as ‘data’ to elicit findings in relation to myth, theory, and expertise—with specific attention to the significance of these in contemporary Cultural Studies. To this end, we explore the implications of what we publish in relation to recent perspectives on the ‘discipline’ from Grossberg (2010), Turner (2011), Rancière (2012), and Bowman (2011, 2012). And, to conclude, we turn our gaze to ‘Myth Today’, getting inside Barthes so we can speak to myth—to reimagine from the vantage point of looking away from and at its ‘perceptible absence’—just as one must climb the Eiffel Tower to ‘pause’ the excess of its meaning. In this introduction, we offer two ‘framing’ editorial keynotes. First, we describe and deconstruct four emerging discourses that serve to (partly) categorise the analyses of contemporary myth that follow in the collection. And, second, we assess the significance of this project and its outcomes for the ‘discipline’ of Cultural Studies and its pedagogy.

BARTHES | MYTH Barthes is not chosen as our ‘vehicle’ coincidentally, or even largely because of his profile within our related disciplines. Mythologies offers a critical approach that is both a pragmatic and a spontaneous engagement with the myths that surround us all in our daily lives. It is, very much as our project must be, a compilation of responses to contemporary concerns and, in particular, issues surrounding mass culture. It includes a significant theoretical essay, ‘Myth Today’ (le Mythe aujourd’hui), but one that emerges from the pragmatic (and, in style, journalistic) ‘readings’ rather than underpinning them. There are fifty-four ‘readings’ in the original French version, with an additional, and important, theoretical essay, ‘Myth Today’, written out of and after the active readings and thus serving them rather than being served by them. This priority of engagement over theoretical speculation is key to Barthes’s model and our response to it. The 1973 English translation has twenty-eight of the readings, and we offer the same number of ‘reimaginings’ here. We asked our twenty-eight contributors to reacquaint themselves with ‘the “message” of the author-god’ but then to consciously build ‘a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (1977: 146). In other words, we have asked them ‘through’ Barthes to participate: not to reflect but to engage. This is exposing for ‘myth hides nothing’; it renders the world ‘open to appropriation by society’. (1973: 109) This puts it at odds with most conventional forms of academic writing. These negotiations appear explicitly or implicitly. This is our ‘data’. Unlike Barthes,

Fables of Reconstruction

5

we seek an international and intercultural diversity in our collection. While we resist the notion that his essays are (French) culture-bound or that they are ‘correctly’ read as developing the lineage of Saussurian thinking in the context of French cultural politics, it can be fairly said that there is scope for historical comparison. If Mythologies speaks to an early foray into the political ‘unveiling’ of myth as political action in 1950s Paris, then Mythologies Today wrestles with arguably more complex third orders of meaning—returning with a cynical, even jaded gaze to the arch-mythologist as a signifier—the ‘wildcard’ as mistaken for an orthodoxy. That is all, and that is enough.

METHOD We derive our methods of discourse analysis from the work of Fairclough (1995) and Gee (2004). The formal academic reading of culture, contemporary or otherwise, can be understood as a ‘figured world’. ‘Figured worlds’ are identified by Gee but attributed to Holland (1998), as ‘socially and culturally constructed realms of interpretation’ (1998: 52). Our concluding essay muses for longer on the mythological status of Barthes himself, but, for certain, our authors here are speaking the interpretive discourse of the culture-scholar within the idioms of such an imposed (and profoundly constructed) realm. Fairclough (1995) views discourse as triangular—combining the spoken or written language text (here, the essays), interaction between people to interpret the text (here, our editorial ‘mark’), and social practices (the combined effect of our intervention and the existing social relations of expert/ peer-academic/apprentice-student reader identities). The layers of epistemology that render myth as being what ‘counts’ must always already reinforce the symbolic power structures at work in textual/cultural pedagogy. Unless, as Barthes understood, our knowledge can depend on the ‘unmasking’ of our own idea—of doing this—a ‘kenosis’, toward this, our concession here is only a gesture. In reading our mythologies as exercising discourses, we might be accused of confusing or at least conflating the politically systematic, even quasi-scientific/ontological tendencies of semiotics—to reveal the ideological nature of the seemingly ‘natural’ with the poststructuralist epistemological deconstruction of the production of the subject in representation. This is a crude attempt at drawing fault lines, and any such ‘having it both ways’ will be, of course, an inevitable part of our ‘reimagining’. Furthermore, it is our avowed intent to liberate the work of the mythologist from the ‘delimiting’ effects of such insulations—either Barthesian or Foucaultian. If one must ‘get inside’ the Eiffel Tower, the same applies to Barthes himself and to our project. We interrogate mythology as discourse here, but profoundly from within. In Bourdieu’s words, in this way, we contribute to ‘the blurring of the differences between the field of restricted production’ (1984: 157).

6

Julian McDougall

FINDINGS: THEORY AND THE EXPERT From the essays produced by our ‘expert academics’, we identify four emerging discourses of contemporary mythology. The discourses overlap and are not contained and insulated by such categorization, but they demonstrate our ways of understanding this reimagining of theory, as editors and researchers. This is not, of course, simply demonstrative of contemporary culture, or even readings of such. What we deconstruct here is a textual field largely of our making. While the invitation was open, the editorial process of commission, redrafting, and acceptance has been configured along shifting axes, seeking to present sufficient international range to avoid thematic duplication and ensure that the gaze of the reader is upon the ‘now’. As a result, some ‘readings of culture’ were written but do not appear in these pages. They may be published elsewhere, or not at all. Other essays that can be read here have been ‘refocused’, cut down or extended, to comply with our editorial preferences, to be ‘more Barthesian’, to be less ‘academic’. To this end, we asked authors to bracket their academic instincts (to reference, paraphrase, or show how they have mined a ‘field’) and instead to ‘do Barthes’ on contemporary myth. We allowed minimal footnotes, because Barthes used these, but we reserve the luxury of academic references to ourselves in this introduction, imposing a scholarly authority with this apparently more scientific register. What we present is, then, a ‘figured world’ partly of our own construction, and thus, we can no more claim to ‘know’ myth today than Barthes did or could. Our only recourse is to get inside it.

TEMPORAL: REMAINING A TYPE OF SPEECH The systematic configuration of language as everything along polar, binary lines is and must be, of course, timeless (The ‘classic props of the music hall’ have been replaced by slick routines and lighting which serve to frame a vista of surgical body enhancement and augmentation). And yet, the focus can so we can look at replacement, extension, and response (This essay starts from Barthes’s discussion of myth as semiological system and extends it to consider the history of similar characters and also the impact of their appearance across media forms and across cultural boundaries in a globalised media ecology). Myth remains the ‘master category’, the mythologist the ‘watcher at the crossroads’ (Sontag, 1993: xxi, xxiii): This essay defines the myth of zombie walks as underpinned by a series of binary oppositions, such as the individual/hive; the political/recreational; and the technological/homemade.

Fables of Reconstruction

7

SECONDARY ENCODING: THE REAPPRAISAL AND AFFIRMATION OF SIGNIFICATION This discourse speaks an impulse to ‘update’ or extend: Needless to say, Joker’s bullet marked a point, a punch (coup de poing), what we might call a punctuation in the sentence of Batgirl’s narrative; it severed the ‘Bat’ from the ‘Girl’. It most prominently and profoundly speaks the very stock-in-trade of media and cultural studies, that of the textual expert-scholar, the teacher (The very notion of a ‘Sherlock for our times’ reifies an historical moment as calling for its own distinctive myths, even while Sherlock’s present-day narratives can be read as highly reactionary). The endurance of Barthes is here, the enthusiasm with which our authors speak this discourse of Brechtian ‘einverstandnis’ (Barthes, 1973: 171)—an ‘advanced’ complicity in the form of a metalanguage, which is that of the aesthete but nonetheless compromised by acceptance of this game of ‘hide and seek’ (‘Pippa Middleton’s bottom “too bony”, claim French.’. . . . The excitement, speculation, and fetishisation reveal something about the order of things . . . the signification of the body.). Whereas the overlapping, at first glance largely indistinguishable, temporal discourse speaks to the endurance of mythology as an interpretive regime, secondary encoding goes further to endorse the permeability of the regime, beyond the self-referential, toward a grand narrative of myth—even a sense of something prophetic in Mythologies, a playing out in the zeitgeist (If the face of Garbo was an idea, and that of Hepburn an event, the face of Assange combines both concepts, being intimately tied. . . . One could say that Assange makes Neussüs’s old dream come true, and that Utopia has at last found its Marx). Our times call for their own mythology; an old dream comes true, an order of things foreseen.

POLITICAL: STOLEN LANGUAGE This discourse most keenly observes—and reproduces in exercising—the political thrust of Barthes’s potential (vociferously self-thwarted) to vanquish myth ‘from the inside’. It is difficult to overemphasize the role of education as myth in our era. Education is the master-myth of our time. Its encompasses everything. . . . No longer seeking to mask inequalities, education discourses now constantly highlight them within a mythological structure that sustains the very inequalities it claims to challenge with the empty promise of redemption through improvement.

8

Julian McDougall

Since Barthes observed that the ‘other’ can only speak the language of (her) emancipation, our authors here testify in their opposition to the very power of the myth they (apparently) seek to unmask as such, to unveil the masquerade (It goes without saying that the media seriously undervalues serious thought. Less noticeable, however, are the myths the media creates when it does tackle cerebral matters . . . its depredation of thinking in the guise of thought). In a sense, this discourse, in being the most starkly combative and oppositional (to be aware of the inequality that the Fair Trade myth hides behind is to be armed and prepared to question the status quo) is the least Barthesian. While the ‘depredation of thinking in the guise of thought’, ‘the empty promise of redemption’, and ‘Barthesian theatricality’ are all, in themselves, signifiers of this form of writing as ‘perpetual production’ of ‘inflexion’, these applications stop short of ‘outplaying’ (Semiotics becomes a tool in power’s hands by bolstering what Said calls ‘Blake’s mindforg’d manacles’. I analyse his writings against Oslo to show that peace in the region has become sign-governed. Rather than reaching people, it bizarrely satisfies the world’s need for a moral theatricality in a Barthesian sense). They seek to do ‘something else’, more perhaps, to put something of semiotics to work.

NEGATIVE SPACE: OUTLAW DISCOURSE It is not only in the frivolity, the sense of ‘playing’ with Barthes, that we can locate a shift here toward something of the ‘outlaw discourse’ Sontag attributes to his ‘dismantling his own authority’ (1993: xxx): Rapace shares the facility that Hepburn had to engage with types and also to be individuated. Her image is at once classical and modern. I think she’ll go far. In the way our authors ‘take on’ a sense of the spirit of his writing, they all articulate a discourse of reflexive ‘knowingness’. As such, they are at once less-formally Barthesian and also less political in the sense of unmasking distortion (Kylie Ecriture offers a double reading. It deliberately reworks— almost line by line—Barthes’s original mythology text, ‘The Face of Garbo’. In doing so, it enacts a myth of Barthes’s own writing). Equally, they are less ‘teachable’ as analyses of text (As one object can carry different myths, one myth can tie itself to different objects. Barthes knew that; we know that.). However, the disarming of Barthes—the transposing of him into the discourse about him (another layer of which we add here by reading Barthes through Sontag into the equation)—can be read as an emptying, of the Barthes myth, so we can refill it, rendering his own mythology at once empty and full, akin to the ultimate paradox-signifier, the Eiffel Tower; these authors speak to “the intellectual equivalent of negative space” (Sontag, ibid: xxiv).

Fables of Reconstruction

9

RECONSTRUCTING THE PARTY PIECE The discourse types of the classroom set up subject positions for teachers and pupils, and it is only by ‘occupying’ these positions that one becomes a teacher or a pupil. Occupying a subject position is essentially a matter of doing (or not doing) certain things, in line with the discoursed rights and obligations of teachers and pupils—what each is allowed and required to say, within that particular discourse type. So, this is a case where social structure, in the particular form of discourse conventions, determines discourse. But, it is also the case that in occupying particular subject positions, teachers and pupils reproduce them; only through being occupied can these positions continue to be a part of social structure. Discourse, therefore, in turn determines and reproduces social structure (Fairclough, 1995: 38).

The four discourses we identify here are not ‘organic’. Rather, they are the product of a particular mode of interpretation. This mode is partly determined by our own editorial practices—rights and obligations, in Fairclough’s terms—and more broadly determined by our respondents’ reproducing two layers of teacher positioning: that of their own self-attributed and professional status (the confidence to bear witness to one’s own expertise) and also that of Barthes as the vertical discourse to ‘adopt’, or to ‘get inside’. Nor is the sample randomised or controlled. Rather, it is self-selecting on one level (academics responding to an invitation) and filtered on another (editorial approval). Thus, we do not claim to gaze objectively upon myth today. Rather, we can interrogate the discursive framing of myth as encoded through a ‘received’ language. We can do two things with this. Later, we return to the ‘Barthes myth’ itself, picking up the thread of ‘outlaw discourse’. Here, we want to suggest some implications of this research for the (non) discipline of cultural studies. In his polemical ‘call to arms’ for the future of cultural studies, arising from a vociferous critique of the history of its present, Turner (2011) seeks to draw attention back to the importance of pedagogy. We believe that the findings of our project are important in relation to this but may appear fraught with tension. It is not unusual for cultural studies teaching to simply consist of setting a canonical reading and providing an occasion for its exegesis. We can do better than that, and we need to, if we want our students to recognize both the productiveness and the availability of cultural studies’ fundamental conceptual apparatus (Turner, 2011: 175). The tension in our work arises from the ‘use’ of a canonical text—Mythologies. In other words, what we want to do with theory, and do with Barthes, by problematizing how theory ‘gets done’ nevertheless starts out from a canonical position. In giving authors ‘free reign’ to write a contemporary mythology of any length between the shortest and longest of Barthes’s equivalents, our

10

Julian McDougall

objective has been to ‘capture’ myth in between and across contexts and discourses, and it challenge the kinds of canonical exegesis Turner observes— toward ‘doing better’. The identities (and stories told implicitly) of our contributors—understanding themselves as academics, writers, critics, more or less ‘expert’—frames the presentation and remediation of everyday life. Our reading (from within) of our textual data is not a straightforward theoretical update—a (re)presentation but, rather, an exploration of process—of ‘being’ in myth with others. Our intervention—the nature of the utterances we elicit and edit—is part of the appropriation to which we bear witness. But, how is this ‘of use’ to cultural studies? In a call for a ‘Media Studies 2.0’, Gauntlett (2009) derided the theoretical orthodoxy of the ‘’1.0’ tradition, characterized by: A tendency to fetishise ‘experts’, whose readings of popular culture are seen as more significant than those of other audience members (with corresponding faith in faux-expert non-procedures such as semiotics) (2009: http://www.theory.org.uk/mediastudies2.htm). We can assume that Gauntlett would see the collection presented here as being ‘shot through’ with such a fetishizing impulse and indeed as amplifying this tendency, given that we are not only setting up—by the act of reimagining—Barthes as an expert on whom we can bestow renewed ‘significance’, but furthermore, are also presenting another 30 of us as having sufficient faux-expertise in reading popular culture. And while we resist the enclosure of Mythologies in the manifestation of semiotics as such a ‘nonprocedure’, handed down in a vertical discourse (Bernstein, 1990) to our students as a kind of ‘toolkit’, it is certainly necessary to justify this collection also in the light of one aspect of Turner’s self-depreciating lament: As teachers, charged with demonstrating how culture could be analysed, we were especially fortunate because we had a handy party piece available to us. When we introduced our students to semiotics as a simple technique of textual analysis, we could cruise over a wide range of popular cultural texts, demonstrating the kinds of information this analytical tool could generate. Teaching semiotics at the same time as we investigated what it could tell us about contemporary popular culture had the dual benefit of making us appear both knowledgeable and cool. Better still, it was not long before the students could do it too, and so our knowledge was attainable rather than elite (Turner, 2010: 82–3). The operative marker, of course, is the past tense—desired by Gauntlett and stated as historical fact by Turner. The book under discussion here is one element of a broader research project for which anonymous groups of students and teachers collaborated to generate more contemporary mythologies on a

Fables of Reconstruction

11

wikispace, allowing us a comparative vantage point to explore differences in approach according to shades of self-attributed expertise (faux, or otherwise). Interesting findings arose, including a tendency for students to adopt a kind of ‘apprentice-expert’ position, echoing a ‘Barthesian’ style, albeit through distinct discourses and starting points. In this set of outcomes, we see a working through of Turner’s ‘attainable’ practices, as opposed to Gauntlett’s hierarchy of significance; but nonetheless, we must observe that the expert-apprentice discourse is pervasive, and there is little in our intervention to challenge such a ‘disciplinary gaze’ (Bowman, 2012: 6). How could we possibly conceive of our reaffirming the significance of an expert in this way as being at all an act of liberating pedagogy for Media and Cultural Studies? What sleight of hand will we need to conjure this? Like Bowman, we are interested in the significance of two elements of Rancière’s (1991, 2009, 2012) thinking for Cultural Studies—his critique of ‘disciplinarity’ and his ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ parable. The facilitation of students to emancipation, following Rancière’s argument, requires that the teacher ‘must always be one step ahead’; in other words, re-distancing knowledge because the student: . . . is the one who does not know what she does not know or how to know it . . . he is the one who knows how to make it an object of knowledge at what point . . . knowledge that cannot simply be ordered in accordance with the ascent from the simplest to the most complex (2009: 8–9). A radical pedagogy, sufficiently progressive to match the political ideals of Cultural Studies, cannot maintain ‘stupefying distance’ that can ‘only be bridged by an expert’: The ignorant schoolmaster is named thus . . . because he has uncoupled his mastery from his knowledge . . . he does not teach his knowledge, but orders them to venture into the forest of things and signs (1991: 11). Adopting such a stance, we are compelled to say that the ‘significance’ of this collection is precisely in the ‘reimagining’ of the expert-scholar position and precisely not in the ‘application’ of a vertical discourse—in using discourse analysis to unravel the various ways of ‘getting inside’ Barthes here, we seek to exemplify such ‘uncoupling’, just as Barthes sought to ‘empty out’ his own ‘mastery’. The book is of use, then, as an experiment that shows the working; hence, this emphasis in this framing introduction. How theory gets ‘done’ is what we can teach here. The second element of Rancière’s work that we see as significant concerns the power-knowledge operations at the heart of disciplinarity. Bowman (2012) sets up a paradox in Rancière’s thinking: But then, if Rancière is so critical of the disciplines, because of their ordering, validating, hierarchizing and excluding effects on voices,

12

Julian McDougall entities, identities and bodies; if instead he advocates adopting an ‘indisciplinary gaze’ and stance, in order to see disciplinary partitioning and hierarchizing in action; why then what is to be made of his popularity in so many disciplines? What does it signify? And accordingly, is his strategy really capable of breaking the disciplines and which ones? And if so, to what end? (2012: 14–15)

Cultural Studies does not want to be a discipline, and the term is always used ‘under erasure’ (Derrida, 1976). Instead, it is argued, the academic teaching of, and researching into, popular culture is a political project. (We have traced and critiqued the genealogy of these ideas at length elsewhere; see Bennett, Kendall, and McDougall, 2011). What’s at question here is what our ‘resurrection’ of Barthes does to order, validate, and exclude. Certainly, taken at first glance as a celebration of the endurance of semiotics, our intervention is deeply problematic in relation to both Rancière’s critique (and Bowman’s reading of such) and Gauntlett’s derision. Both raise very serious questions about the way our students are caught in a traverse of our design between the ideal subject/‘spirit’ of Cultural Studies and our alienating pedagogic practices—our focus on ‘what’ to teach has obscured the much more directly political question of ‘how’ to teach or what teaching ought to be. In this light, offering twenty-eight Barthesian ‘master-readings’ of our students’ zeitgeist is surely part of the problem and not the solution. Hence, the paramount importance of viewing the secondary encodings at work here as an unraveling, unmasking even (notwithstanding the problematic nature of this concept), and perhaps even further, giving voice (more greatly problematic). If we want our students to ‘get inside’ theory, to be ‘indisciplined’ in this way, then we must treat this collection with a pinch of salt as a fluid and flawed experiment, one that can be replicated with any ‘master-text’ from the ‘canon’ of cultural theory. Grossberg (2010) seeks to shift Turner’s question of ‘what’s become’ toward a more optimistic vision of where we’re going. It will be very difficult to claim a synthesis between his view of what Cultural Studies ought to be and what we have done here, given his focus on the ‘new’, and not only in the sense of new culture, but also in attendant new theory. Hills (2012) is critical of this approach: The rupture or reorientation proposed by Grosserg reads culture as newly embedded in ordinary life, and as relocated without being wholly co-opted, but this ontology comes dangerously close to fetishizing ‘the new’, or abstracted novelty, without perhaps giving sufficient weight to continuities of culture, and generational circuits or cycles of culture’s mattering maps (2012: 3). This is precisely why we seek here to reimagine a canonised approach (mythology) as such a ‘continuity of culture’, with emphasis on the co-opting

Fables of Reconstruction

13

and reorientation of discourses of academia and cultural critique. We wish to introduce this collection as being, in the context of the (in)discipline of Cultural Studies, an appraisal of the value of theory, with the conditions of possibility for the ‘theorist’ under review.

REFERENCES Barthes, R., 1979. ‘Myth Today’ in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. California: California University Press. Barthes, R., 1979. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. California: California University Press. Barthes, R., 1973. Mythologies. London: Paladin. Barthes, R., 1993. ‘Death of the Author’ in Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana. Barthes, R., 1977. Image, Music, Text. London: HarperCollins. Bennett, P., Kendall, A., and McDougall, J. 2011. After the Media: Culture and Identity in the 21st Century. London: Routledge. Bennett, P. and McDougall, J., eds., 2013 (forthcoming—in press). Barthes’ Mythologies Today: Readings of Contemporary Culture. New York: Routledge Research in Media and Cultural Studies. Bernstein, B., 1996. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. London: Taylor and Francis. Bourdieu, P., 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. Bowman, P., 2011. Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus. London: Continuum. Bowman, P., 2012. ‘Rancière and the Disciplines’. Paper presented at Crossroads in Cultural Studies, Paris 2012. Culler, J., 1983. Barthes. London: Fontana Modern Masters. Derrida, J., 1976. Of Grammatology. New York: John Hopkins Press. Eliot, G., 2011. Middlemarch. London: Harper Collins. Fairclough, N., 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman. Gauntlett, D., 2009. ‘Media Studies 2.0: a response’ in Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, 1(1), pp. 147–57. Gee, J., 2011. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Grossberg, L., 2010. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press. Hills, M., 2012. Review of Grossberg (2010): ‘Cultural Studies in the Future Tense’. Culture Machine. Penman, I., 1981. Review of Blondie: ‘Rapture’ in NME (editor’s appendage). 17.1.1981. Rancière, J., 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. California: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J., 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. Rancière, J., 2012. Keynote speech at Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference. Paris: UNESCO/Sorbonne 2.7.12. Sontag, S., 1993. ‘On Roland Barthes’ in S Sontag (ed.). A Roland Barthes Reader. London: Vintage. Turner, G., 2012. What’s Become of Cultural Studies? London: Sage.

This page intentionally left blank

Part II

Mythologies

This page intentionally left blank

2

The Face of Assange Oscar Gomez

Julian Assange belongs to a type of celebrity whose main target is to change the world as we know it. Called by several media to be the new icon of freedom of speech, the most representative one in the upcoming worldwide revolution, his figure raises as much fascination as rejection. If the face of Garbo was an idea, and that of Hepburn an event, the face of Assange combines both concepts, being intimately tied. Wikileaks has undoubtedly been one of the most important journalistic events of the new century, whose supporting ideas have forced us to reformulate issues as wide as the boundaries between public and private spaces, the regimes of visibility in our culture, as well as the role of secrecy in the Information Society. Julian Assange is the image behind thousands and thousands of gigabytes of raw data the website provides. His figure would act in this sense as a real semiotic condenser who operates as the symbols do, and whose ultimate meaning is closely linked to the concept of utopia, understood as the strict opposite of an evil present. One could say that Assange makes Neussüs’s old dream come true, and that utopia has at last found its Marx. The temptation of the absolute mask that characterized Garbo’s face, and has continued to characterize the new mass idols since then, does acquire a deeper and renewed meaning: the theme of the secret becomes relevant, while the archetype of the human vanishes. Assange’s attitude toward government secrecies has curiously brought secrecy closer to him: now it surrounds Assange (camouflage, his whereabouts being unknown, his sexual affairs become public) and his organization, which rigorously fulfils the requirements of a secret society. Behind Garbo’s face, one could gaze on the Platonic idea of the human creature, a sort of archetype of the human face. Behind Assange’s face, what we find is the postmodern incarnation of the human creature in which identity cracks, being difficult to elaborate an ultimate sanction about his person. Assange has evolved from being a teen hacker, nicknamed Mendax (which means ‘unfair’) after Horatio, to being a hero fighting against the powerful and seeking a real freedom of expression. He has been also a villain, pursued by the US government for acts of cyberterrorism and put on trial for the alleged rape of two women. A martyr, a victim of a plot orchestrated by

18

Oscar Gomez

the US government, an egomaniacal dictator, as defined by one of his longtime collaborators, and so on. In Assange’s narrative trajectory, shaped by many voices eager to contribute to the collective story, we find a constant struggle against the standards that has led to the creation of several cultural types that, instead of canceling each other out, coexist quietly within our cultural system. The face, in any case, remains a face-object. Viewed as a transition, the face of Assange also reconciles two iconographic ages, confirming a returning process from charm to the awe—a diffuse sanction—of the drift of humanity. Garbo and Assange are linked by their status as idols enrolled in the cultural memory. In the Greek world, an idol designated the ghost, the apparition, the shadow, the double of a man—an elusive and intangible image that emerges in the dialectic and sets the human being toward death. An idol is the image of a corpse, a memorial within the scope of the sacred that turns out to be at the same time a construction, a certain deception. It is also an obstacle to be overcome, as Plato wanted. An idol is a border figure between the visible and the invisible that acts as a translator of the untranslatable, stating how the inexpressible depends on expression. As a language, the idol’s singularity is of the order of rhetoric: persuasive, and its success will always depend on its symbolic efficacy. The journey of the idol has been hard and complicated, having experienced, just like state secrets, a shift from private to public. However, the strains tending to both its conservation and its destruction have remained intact.

3

The X Factor Tim Wall

Here, x marks the factor we cannot define and so struggle to name. It calls upon the sense of ages past. X stands for that thing which is unsayable, or at least elusive; it records a name we know but cannot scribe. In the science of signs (semiology), it is a signified with a substitute signifier and a set of connotations unconnected to any other act of denotation. The X Factor television show intertwines the quest to find the person who has that elusive quality with the contestants’ personal journeys of selfdiscovery. It is constructed by its producers (as well as by its narrative and rhetoric) as a journey of discovery, and of self-discovery. These multiple narratives need controlling and ordering through a metanarrative in which we collectively (audience, judges, and singers) find the person with the X factor. Our engagement, though, remains highly personalised, embedded in the stories of the individuals who seek to achieve their dream by overcoming the constraints of background or circumstance. The X Factor is the chance. As an earlier televised talent contest put it, Opportunity Knocks. The door of fate is opened. Within the narrative arc of this series, each weekly programme sets out each stage of the journey of discovery, repeatedly calling upon the ‘backstories’ of the contestants. The X Factor is a production line for the end of the age of the record and the start of the age of something not yet formed, let alone named. The X Factor turns the process of star making into the textual form of a new music commodity. While the music industry used to make stars to sell records, the programme makes records to sell the process of making a star. It superficially resembles elements of the television talent contest, the docu–soap story of pop star lives, and the variety show, but The X Factor is as much the creation of the practices of the music industry as of television. Although the programme title seems to suggest that we are in pursuit of some sort of performance charisma, the Holy Grail of the quest, the embodiment of the X factor (as we are often reminded), is to be found in ‘the voice’. Or, more specifically, it’s to be found in ‘the recording voice’. The programme chains together the mechanisms of fate with the gift of charisma and its expression in the recording voice. The stories of antiquity are marshalled to explain how the central sign of the music industry’s central

20

Tim Wall

commodity is discovered and to invite us to participate in its discovery. It is noteworthy that the BBC launched a competing programme in 2012, calling the show The Voice. In an earlier version of the political economy of music, the record was the central commodity and the song its textual form. Just as it is the voice that sings the recorded song, it is ‘the recording voice’ that unites text and commodity. For all this attachment to the guiding principles of the music industry, and for all the emphasis within the programme that this is a search for the artist who will record the inevitable chart-topping song, The X Factor turns the process of star making into the textual form of a new music commodity. The show reimagines the elements of the pop process and reengineers them to make a new commodity. The artists and repertoire (A&R) division of a record company has the responsibility for finding the next generation of singing talent and selecting the songs that this talent will sing for recording sessions. When the main commodity, the record, is the product of this process, it does not need to be in public view; but now, records themselves no longer make as much money, so the twenty-first-century solution is to make the A&R process the content of a new form of engagement and the show a new commodity to be sold to television networks, themselves trying to come to terms with the challenges of new media forms. Interestingly, this emphasis on the recorded voice explicitly denies the usual claim that pop stardom is only about looks. In this context, the 2010 controversy about the use of autotune software in postproduction of the shows is instructive. Accused of digitally processing the singing of contestants to ensure they stayed in tune, the initial response from the show’s producers was to distinguish between the experience of the judges and studio audience and that of viewers at home. They argued that the vocal performances heard by the judges were not enhanced, leaving the integrity of discovery intact, while they claimed the vocal performances were improved for the entertainment of the viewing audience. To preserve the show’s mythology, and to protect the fundamental notions of discovery of talent, expressed through the recording voice, they needed to defend robustly the notion that decisions were based upon unmediated performance. While The X Factor reinvents the roles of music and television in the selection of a star, the idea of fame remains at the heart of the myth. Fame is the idea that drives, and so unites, the multiple narratives of the show. Fame needs no explanation. If the quest for the embodiment of the X factor constitutes the metanarrative, fame constitutes the metalanguage. It is the concept of fame that makes the programme comprehensible, just as it is the story of the winner’s success that orders how we comprehend how fame is achieved and stardom realised. Mythologically, stars are marked, their talent a gift. Economically, stars are investments, their bounty a return on that investment. Fame represents both the recognition of the star’s talent and the visible circulation of the star’s commodity status. If stars burn bright, but out of our orbit, fame

The X Factor

21

is the hidden force that guides their appearance, their place in our lives, and often, their swift disappearance. The X Factor may present us with the detail of how stars are found, invested in, and then sold to us, but this is not an expose of the cynical manipulation of our cultural and emotional commitments. Within the metanarrative of The X Factor, the X factor is the unnamed quality of the star, and fame its inevitable realisation. In establishing itself as a successful television format, The X Factor has come to represent the story of discovery and fame, but in the beginning, the programme needed to establish a frame of reference for us as viewers. Right from the outset, the show drew upon the life stories of the judge-mentors to do this. In the first series, the judges epitomised the key music industry staff who are central to selecting and making stars: the record company boss and the artist-manager. In the programme, these were Simon Cowell, the music-label entrepreneur, Louis Walsh, the pop group manager, and Sharon Osbourne the rock manager and docu–soap star of The Osbournes. In later series, the judgementors increasingly personified the very music stars that the contestants aspired to be. Dannii Minogue, Cheryl Cole, Gary Barlow, Kelly Rowland, and Tulisa Contostavlos all performed this role in subsequent series. The judge-mentors are not just functional roles, but they also represent distinct emotional archetypes. Each of these emotional positions makes sense in relation to the others. Cowell’s position as the teller of truth perhaps is the most often commented upon role. While his remarks about contestants’ singing abilities are often seen as insulting, his role is to be direct, judgemental, and yet honest. Set against this backdrop, Walsh is ‘the gusher’: excited and enthusiastic, yet somehow undiscriminating, often struggling to be heard against the audience’s enthusiasm. Osbourne’s emotional role was less clear initially, but over the first four UK series, she developed a new position as the knower of deeper truth. This truth was rooted in her personal experience and linked back to her role as the nurturer in The Osbournes. Minogue, and particularly Cole, took this position in later series, buttressed by the sense that these judges had experienced what the contestants were going through in a way that Cowell and Walsh just had not. The role of judge and mentor is unstable within the myth of the quest for the X factor and makes little sense in the televisual logic of the talent competition. However, in the mythical world of fame making, the emotional archetypes are more important than the functional roles they initially represent. At the commencement of each series, the judge-mentors are shown to be the people who will select the contestants who go on to the later stages (even though we know logically that they only see the preselected best and worst of those who audition). Midway through the series, their mentoring function takes over as they individually support the development of a cohort of contestant artists. In the final stage of each series, they are both advocates for several finalists and judges of all the weekly performances. The dynamic of these characters also requires a third functional role and emotional archetype. In the first UK series, former pop journalist Kate Thornton took the

22

Tim Wall

role, reprising something of her role in Pop Idol. In later series, Thornton was replaced by Dermot O’Leary, well known to young viewers from the Channel 4 reality show Big Brother. This is a complex role, combining the functions of narrator, interrogator, and contestant’s friend. At the heart of the myth of The X Factor is the play on audition/audience/ audient as relationships to sound and power. While the X factor cannot be defined, named, or represented, it can be experienced as sound. However, we do not experience sound as equals. Some of us experience sound as contestants who audition, some as listeners in the audience, and some of us as listeners who are allowed to judge. When we hear, we can do so as passive recipients or as active evaluators. We can hear a sound, or we can hear a case. Now little used except as a pun to indicate an audience of one, the word audient indicates a person who experiences sound and who learns and ultimately knows. So, while the audience witnesses sound, the audient assigns its meaning. In The X Factor, the contestant auditions, the audience bears witness, and three or four people act as audients. Our own role as audience members is mythologised. Just as the new forms of social media seem to offer a greater democratic participation than the old, The X Factor seems to offer us a say in the A&R process once denied to us. And, just as the old music industry insisted that, ultimately, we chose who the pop stars really were, we are assured that we have a role in auditioning the contestants. In the final stages of the selection process, we can vote for our favourites, securing their place in the future weeks. Even in the face of an insistence from the judge-mentors that a contestant is not good enough, we, by our collective will, can overturn that decision. The X Factor offers us an interactive role that extends beyond that of television viewer to text voter, and further into an engagement with comment, judgement, and consolation offered in the weekly post-show spin-off Xtra Factor, online forums, and Twitter hashtag exchanges. When we have made such a commitment to an artist, and to that artist’s journey, we are much more likely to buy the record that is the end product of the process. These, of course, are carefully managed orderings of our experience and time. The X Factor is late capitalism at work. It is the economic processes of primary extraction, the manufacture of a commodity, and the development of tertiary services to realise additional profit. As a series, the show represents each of these stages: selecting the potentially talented raw material from the spoil; refining the contestants’ potential to the market’s perceived requirements and commodifying this output into a saleable record; and, finally, building additional forms of consumption into further saleable services that turn the primary text into a metatext. These final services are themselves intangible. However, we are not in any simple way audience-witnesses to this commodification; we are ultimately its primary commodity: the family viewing audience. The X Factor production process is far more than the representation of star making. It is star making. But, while the star making of the old

The X Factor

23

music industry was focused on the primary function of selling a record, here, the record sales are merely additional profit. The process of star making constructs and engages an audience that extends beyond the narrow demographics previously targeted by the music industry and into the primetime audiences of television. In its post-Fordist production methods, Cowell’s independent music and television production company, Syco, makes both the record and the television programme, and sells the former to pop fans to sell the latter to television networks. The networks themselves will pay significant sums because the programme’s popularity enables profits to be made by selling the viewing audience to advertisers. Just as the programme invests in the raw material of contestants who may have ‘the voice’, Syco invests in the production of a record to make a television programme and the networks invest in a programme to buy an audience it can sell to advertisers. Each of these is a process of capitalisation, and while we are invited to share in the dreams of aspirant pop stars, it is the dreams and aspirations of the owners of this capital who ultimately survive the star’s decay into oblivion. The dream of a record-industry executive once was to find a voice as the basis of a long-term star, one who could provide a spectacular return on an initial investment. In The X Factor, a voice is the hook for a process that builds a short-lived pop star, as an incremental capitalisation in the long-term strategy to achieve substantial financial returns as a successful music-television franchise. While the contestants labour hard to develop themselves, the real returns flow to the holders of the capital resource. At one level, The X Factor is the pop process laid bare. At another, it is the multimedia promotion arm of a record industry and a careful delineation of the process of hype through which stars are made and their associated products sold. The experience of watching the show provides us with the cultural material we can use to ask ourselves important questions about the role that music plays in our lives, and how our senses of solidarity and humanity could serve us and our culture. However, this experience remains a carefully constructed ideological set of messages about how people prosper in our society. The metanarratives and metalanguage of The X Factor tell us that talent and opportunity are the keys to success, fame and stardom the ultimate ambitions. The real opportunity, though, is not one for singers but for music and television executives. The real opportunity is to remake pop music for an age in which the record is no longer the bankable commodity it once was. The secondary promotional function of television within music media has been transformed into the primary function of a multimedia company. The primary role for records is now merely to capture the incremental profit of exploiting synergies arising from Syco’s principle activity: trading in our economic status as audiences. Stardom is no longer the long-term process of capitalisation, but the short-term means to capitalise the audience. Ultimately, we all know this is all there; it’s just that we struggle to give it a name.

4

Tastes of Paradise The ‘Fair’ Trade Myth Jenni Ramone

At a recent conference, a young delegate accused me of spoiling her enjoyment of chocolate when I suggested that the ‘Fair Trade’ banner was a marketing ploy and that a Fair Trade system yields very little benefit for the producers over standard international trade. Chocolate companies are not alone in their desire to gain the market share by assuaging the guilt of those consumers who feel a sense of discomfort when they are reminded of international inequalities. Fair Trade has become a very useful tool: it implies that the company is ethically sound and that whatever knowledge careful consumers might have about the working and living conditions of the cocoa producer, their guilt can be set aside so long as they buy Fair Trade products. But, the term ‘fair’ is entirely subjective: what is considered ‘fair’ by one individual might differ considerably from another person’s definition. One thing is certain—‘fair’ does not mean ‘equal’ when it comes to trade under a capitalist system. Cadbury’s Zingolo advertising campaign, aired on British TV in Autumn 2009, celebrated the new Fair Trade arrangement with Ghanaian cocoa producers, emphasising Western largesse and Ghanaian gratitude in its assumption of a harmonious fair-trading agreement. But, Fair Trade as a concept has been promoted far more widely than this; charities and governments use it as a method of facilitating international intervention and justifying global trade that perpetuates inequality. If myth is a type of speech or a message, the message propping up the Fair Trade system relies upon most consumers believing that it is fair to support trade that results in drastically unequal living and working conditions between producers and consumers. The myth is bolstered by claims of ‘relative’ wealth, that a few extra pence means very much to a Ghanaian farmer, and that despite being ‘poor’, farmers as shown in adverts like Zingolo are ‘happy’. This insistence on the picturesque persists in spite of the very visible clues of poverty and hardship with which the average European chocolate consumer would be very unfamiliar. Fair Trade generally relies upon donating a small amount of profit to the community where cocoa production takes place, and this donation is normally given in the form of community projects: building schools or medical

Tastes of Paradise

25

centres, for instance. Kraft Foods, the owner of Cadbury since January 2010, notes its commitment to help at-risk children and to improve education and working practices in the communities where cocoa is produced. However, the company’s aim, ‘ultimately’, as admitted on the section of its website dedicated to responsibility and sustainability, is to ‘ensure we maintain plenty of quality cocoa for generations to come’. In other words, the company invests in the community not to work toward a better distribution of wealth; far from it, the company maintains its investment in the region to ensure it can always produce enough chocolate. The results of Fair Trade, including such community outreach and educational programmes, provide powerful nations with opportunities to influence citizens of the subordinate culture in neocolonial style, safeguarding their trade relationships and profits. Twenty-five years ago, Yuri Smertin recorded that in the first wave of decolonization, more than 600 missionary, educational, philanthropic, and other private and government-sponsored US organisations set up in Africa. It was the first postindependence Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, who pointed to the unfair advantage that so-called Fair Trade companies possessed, referring to their tendency to influence the population with whom they traded through those charitable or educational foundations. In the context of the ongoing collapse of capitalist systems in Western Europe and America, the naturalization or celebration of neocolonial practices of global ‘Fair’ Trade may fail, as consumers become more aware of the myths that prop up the unequal distribution of the world’s resources. Let’s return to the conference delegate whose taste for chocolate had been so tainted by the suggestion that Fair Trade might in fact be something less than fair. Frustrated that I had questioned the altruism of Fair Trade in relation to one manufacturer, she asked, ‘Which brands of chocolate can I buy?’ To that, I had to answer that it was up to her to decide, that in fact no chocolate genuinely is produced ethically, and the same goes for almost everything else because no genuine equality exists in the capitalist marketplace. As part of the semiological system, the Fair Trade myth makes us understand that we are buying a product which offers more compensation to its producers than a similar product which is not marketed as ‘Fair Trade’. But, at the same time, the Fair Trade myth imposes on us both this responsibility to buy the product that claims to have been produced more fairly and an inability to question a capitalist trading system because, as the Fair Trade myth proclaims, it is ‘fair’. If you think the unequal sharing out of the world’s wealth that prevails is acceptable, then any current brand of chocolate will maintain that system, and your conscience is clear. If you don’t, then choosing Fair Trade won’t help because a capitalist economy leaves no room for compassion. But, to be aware of the inequality that the Fair Trade myth hides behind is to be armed and prepared to question the status quo. The Fair Trade myth corresponds to the needs of the liberal capitalist economic system that operates across much of the globe in the early twenty-first century by presenting, on the one hand, an assumption of inequality (necessary for the brutal capitalist system

26

Jenni Ramone

of competition), and on the other hand, acknowledging the human desire to protect and care for each other that is fundamentally opposed to the greed propelling all of competitive economy. Cocoa and sugar have a long history of workers’ exploitation, which was exacerbated when the European markets developed a deadly desire for sweet goods despite their minimal dietary value. Nevertheless, chocolate, once tasted, isn’t easily forgotten. It isn’t so much a case of choosing wisely between chocolate brands, but of being wise to the Fair Trade myth: whatever name by which trading takes place, if it isn’t equal, it just isn’t fair.

5

Batgirl Will Brooker

A scholarly monograph was published this year on Batman, the American hero who has been fighting crime in Gotham City for more than seventy years. But, his distaff counterpart, Batgirl, has received little comparable attention. Fittingly—for reasons that will become clear—we discover that the current Batgirl is not the first; her predecessor went by the hyphenated name Bat-Girl (following the precedent of Batman, whose mythic sign, explicitly designated ‘the Bat-signal’, was also separated, or disjointed, as his name was separated into the two signifiers ‘bat’ and ‘man’ on his first appearance in the late 1930s, neatly conveying the protagonist’s dual identity from the title onward). This previous Bat-Girl, aka Bette Kane (perhaps a textual marriage between creator Bob Kane and movie star Bette Davis, whose career enjoyed a renaissance at the time) was a different individual entirely from the character who has appeared in monthly periodicals since the late 1960s. It is well known from the ludicrous television programme—which attempted to capture pop art in tableaux vivantes, and in doing so, epitomised high camp—that this Batgirl is Barbara Gordon, daughter of Police Commissioner Gordon, and that she dresses in a form-fitting violet costume that cleverly suggests both the fashion boutique and the pantomime, achieving the distinction of appearing more femme even than her male counterparts Batman and Robin, who pout and flirt like showgirls at a Parisian striptease. Less familiar is the history of Barbara Gordon in the monthly comic strips, which continued long after the fad for pop art had run its course. Here we find Barbara’s origin story, the correlative to Batman’s creation myth, and it is far less stark, less resonant than the robbery and murder that drove young Bruce Wayne to a career of crime fighting. ‘The whole world thinks I’m just a Plain Jane—a colorless female “brain”!’ Barbara announces as she sews a costume for a masquerade ball run by her policeman father. And then: ‘Well! This “Batgirl” costume really does things for me! I can hardly wait for the shock I’ll give Dad!’ The move from Batman to Batgirl is the shift from a child orphaned in the America of the Great Depression to a teenager playing a prank on her father the ‘cop’, a playful, pop dilution of les évènements de 1968, cocking a snook (insulting or showing disrespect)

28

Will Brooker

at the older generation, much as Truffaut did in the 1950s with his mockery of ‘le cinéma du papa’ (and recall that ‘pop’, in American slang, is itself a mischievous substitute for ‘father’). If Batman’s adventures combine the hard-boiled detection of the roman noir with an inflection of the European gothic, Batgirl’s have the air of Archie comics or Leave It to Beaver, those depictions of sunny suburban life, with an edge of 1960s’ radicalism that creeps into the comic-book pages some five years after its explosion on the streets of Europe and America. Barbara, now known as ‘Babs’, launches a political career (‘If you want to boot the rascals out of office, kick off, Baby, with my blessing!’ her father tells her), addressing crowds in the mode of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The stories, written no doubt by an older generation, ventriloquize the youthful vocabulary of the previous decade like a teacher attempting to speak in the language of his students: characters are not tired but ‘spaced-out’, banks are a ‘rip-off’, and money (in an alchemical transmutation that recalls the words attributed by Rousseau to ‘a great princess’ during the French famine, ‘qu’ils mangent de la brioche’) has become ‘bread’. Thus, Batgirl functions throughout the 1970s as a figure of tame rebellion, allowing just enough subversion (‘It’s a fact that we embrace radicalism: look at these scenes of protesting youngsters!’) into what is inherently a conservative medium to capture the spirit of the age (again, with a built-in delay of a few years, which itself helps to soften and muffle the genuinely radical energy of 1968), though not its substance. Batgirl is a fashion plate of youthful demonstration (‘Look at these scenes of protesting youngsters!’), a flattening of the complexity of ideological struggle into simple slogans (the crowds that cheer Babs hold posters reading ‘Youth Has Taken Over’; ‘Boot them Out’) that can be contained and resolved within the space of a short comic-book story. In the 1980s, a perceived need for added ‘realism’ (a term used synonymously in this context with ‘darkness’, or sometimes ‘grittiness’, connoting a militarization of the genre, a surge toward hypermasculinity, a readiness to get ‘down and dirty’, like John Rambo in the films of the time) affected Batman and his extended family of characters, just as it did his broader network of superhuman colleagues (Superman, the Animal Man, and the Sandman all underwent similar changes at this particular moment). But, was this the time for Barbara finally to undergo her own trauma of losing her father and swearing a ‘strange vow’ on his grave to avenge him through a relentless (and, by definition, never ending) ‘war on crime’? Perhaps, but her creators chose otherwise. Rather than experience and in turn become transformed by trauma, Barbara was emptied of her own character and history, relegated to the role of object, and used as what we can only call, given the attempt to eroticise her torture and crippling, pawn-ography1 in the ‘Great Game’ between Batman and his nemesis, Joker. In one story, Joker—Bakhtin’s ‘broken grotesque figure’ of contemporary carnival—echoes Batman’s creation myth by shooting Barbara in the spine and making bawdy jokes as he

Batgirl

29

undresses her in front of her father, literalising the Electra complex that was inherent in their relationship from the start. Joker, as theatrical a villain as Batman is the melodramatic hero, is fully aware of creating a scene: of all characters in this milieu, he is the most conscious that he occupies a text and performs a textual function. ‘It’s such a shame you’ll miss your father’s debut, Miss Gordon,’ he declares, while recognising Barbara, the former librarian, as a literary device: ‘She thinks she’s a coffee table edition . . . there’s a hole in the jacket and the spine appears to be damaged.’ Joker’s bullet marked a point, a punch (coup de poing), what we might call a punctuation in the sentence of Batgirl’s narrative; it severed the ‘Bat’ from the ‘Girl’, and indeed, for the next twenty-five years (a longer period, in fact, than what now figures as the first half of her career), Barbara occupied the second term in this hyphenated pairing, the supple, flexible costume that identified her as a ‘crime fighter’ replaced by the more rigid framework of a metal wheelchair. Occupy? One might also say ‘inhabit’, for Barbara became a creature not of the night, the street, and the city, but of the mind; imprisoned by her body, she retreated to the interior space of her consciousness, and indeed, was rechristened ‘Oracle’, the name of course echoing the speaker (χρησμοί) at Delphi in ancient Greece, and holding its own particular irony, for of course (as noted above), a true oracle would have seen the inevitable end of Barbara’s Electra complex in its opening scene. Barbara was joined, in time, by companions who, like her, owed as much to ancient myth as to the popular mythology of the twentieth century superhero: Black Canary, the girlfriend of Green Arrow (himself an analogue of Robin Hood), another speaker whose power lies in her ‘sonic scream’, and Huntress (Helena Bertinelli), who is of course Artemis in all but name, given a modern dress of Catholic, Italian-American gangstericity. All this leads us to the present moment, and a curious development whereby, with fanfare but without explanation, the closure of Batgirl’s narrative is summarily reopened, or rather reedited. For we join her again in a new monthly story, in October of last year, restored to her former uninjured (and, once more, costumed) body with her spine apparently repaired. Only a miracle, we assume, could provide the answer, and indeed, that is all the answer we are offered: like the disciples watching the raising of Lazarus or the healing of the man with the withered hand, we are assured simply that we must accept and have faith. ‘Then a miracle happened’, the new Barbara tells us, walking into her father’s humble kitchen for the first time in twentyfive years; ‘I can’t believe it even now.’ Subsequent episodes attempt to refine the explanation, but this is the order of mystificatory, pseudoscience (‘The neural implant that would eventually allow me to walk again’) that, ultimately, tells us no more, and perhaps less, than the original hand-waving justification for Barbara’s resurrection: a miracle has taken place. And yet the aperture, the reopening of Barbara’s story, the joining of ‘bat’ and ‘girl’ in a new marriage through a weld of magic and technology, also involves erasure. Barbara now tells us, in the friendly, chatty captions

30

Will Brooker

that spill from her stream of consciousness, that she was only ‘briefly’ Batgirl, ‘the first time’. All the suburban soap-opera dramas of the late 1960s, the campaigns and protests of the 1970s, the relentless narrative drive that brought Barbara to the realisation that she was merely the butt of the joke (dindon de la farce), a punch line with Joker as the exclamation mark; all these stories now happened in a ‘brief’ blink of time. And her afterlife as Oracle, the long decades (twenty-five years; a lifetime or more for many comic-book readers) spent inside her own head? That history too has now dwindled; we are not given precise dates (for how could they possibly convince?), but Barbara specifies that she was shot ‘three years ago.’ Thus, the reediting of Batgirl, the rejuvenation that we are meant to applaud as a miracle, like the faithful at Bethesda watching a cripple raised from his chair, is in fact a reduction. The author-gods in this case, playing the role of Jesus, are, one suspects, not the writers of the comic book itself (the author in question supervised much of Barbara’s career as Oracle, and presumably, plays her part in this retelling under sufferance, from the simple need to keep her job), but the editors, who have decided the stories must once again address a younger audience and deal in simplified messages, like advertising slogans. The children of today, it is assumed, have no interest in a woman who ran for Congress in the 1970s; for them, 1968 is as distant as 1789; the stories told by the enfants terribles of the 1960s (Godard, Truffaut) have themselves become the cinéma du papa; Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are now distant icons, no more relevant than the busts of old Roman senators. So Barbara must be repositioned as twenty-three, or thereabouts, and her life revised to fit this new scheme. In the 1970s, Barbara led a crowd of cheering youngsters chanting ‘Boot them out’, ‘Give them the boot’; now, more powerful than Joker’s bullets, the ‘reboot’ of her monthly title has altered not just the circumstances of her present day, but her life history. So Barbara returns to the form-fitting violet suit of Batgirl; fitting, because it violates, is a violation2 of herself, her past, her hard-won identity as ‘Oracle’, the last twenty-five years, and indeed, the commitment that an older generation of readers has made to purchasing and following those stories, which we must assume now never happened, or happened somehow within a far briefer period of time, a super-compressed few years. What then does Batman, the ‘great detective’, make of this gross reauthoring of his companion’s biography? Why, nothing, of course. He turns a blind eye, and through his lack of response assures us that yes, it has always been thus: yes, Barbara has been active for only three years, and anything else must be a false memory. Batgirl is a particular focus of this brutal reboot, but in the closely connected universe of Batman, Superman, and their friends, any change ripples throughout the system like vibrations through a web, and only the strongest and most iconic remain unchanged; that is to say, usually the major male figures, rather than their distaff sidekicks. So we are asked to relearn the

Batgirl

31

histories of other minor characters, repressing our memories of previous stories and accepting them, as if on the orders of a psychoanalyst, as false or imaginary: former Bat-Girl Bette Kane is now restored to the narrative as the cousin of Batwoman (Kathy Kane) and goes by the new name Plebe (inevitably recalling ‘plebian’, and an audaciously inappropriate nom de guerre when we consider that Batman, Batwoman, and cousin Bette occupy the very heart of the Gotham City bourgeoisie). If we remember Bat-Girl as a character of the early 1960s, a predecessor even to Barbara Gordon, we are firmly told that this is not current ‘canon’, not ‘continuity’: those were mere dreams, and the current version is (for now, at least) the ‘reality’. For now, at least. Because the myth we have carefully learned and relearned can change again at the whim of the editor-gods; only recently, the announcement was made that Helena Bertinelli, the Huntress of Barbara’s Oracle career, no longer exists and has never existed. In her place is Helena Wayne, bearing the name, of course, of the dominant father-protector (Gotham City society is effectively run by the Wayne/Kane dynasty, as if guarded by the original author and the avatar he created to police that fiction after his death; fitting, perhaps, that the new Batwoman is both a soldier and a homosexual, a perfect marriage partner for the ‘gritty’, militarised Batman). Female characters in the superhero genre have an opportunity for stability and, in the editors’ term, ‘continuity’, if they model themselves directly on male icons, to the point of adopting the patriarchal name; Barbara Gordon, the policeman’s daughter, holds only a marginal position in this narrative network. She is obliged to adapt, to change, to rearrange her life and memories to fit the new order, and, like a lower-ranking officer in a new political regime, told to forget what she knew and consider herself lucky merely to be alive.

NOTES 1. ‘Pion-ographie’ in original. 2. ‘Viol’, in the original; carries a further sense of sexual assault or rape.

6

Education as Mythology Nick Peim

Education should never stop: it reaches all aspects of life. The Sopranos, vol. 5 Whether or not education is financially good for their country, the past half-century teaches that it is certainly good for the educated. Alison Wolf, Does Education Matter, p. 15

It is difficult to overemphasize the role of education as myth in our era. Education is the master myth of our time. It encompasses everything. It operates as a Heideggerian ontotheological principle. Education is correlated with being itself. To fall outside the domain of education is to be cast in the role of inferior other: indoctrinated naïf; primitive, if quaint, savage; untutored consumer; uncultivated oik; inarticulate footballer. Accomplishments in other fields are often defined negatively as symptoms of the lack of education. The myth of education is a dynamic structure, a series of specific myths in a turbulent system of differences. They tend to cohere around some dominant motifs. It is not a consciously determined, consistent, nor fully coherent package. It inhabits many discourses and many media. It is manifest in a range of contexts of representation: in TV soap operas, films, academic journals, political speeches, and acts of parliament. The grand, general myth of education may have national inflections, but it is transnational, now an essential feature of globalization. In our world, education is constantly being represented. It is being represented as essential for the well-being of self, nation, and world. Self-realization, we are told, depends on it. Philosophers of education uncritically accept both the Socratic maxim that to be fully human is to know oneself and the idea that education is the key to self-knowledge. Education, we’re constantly told, is equally vital for the prosperity of the nation. Education can render nations economically creative. What’s more, education can redress the wrongs of social injustice and can restore the moral fibre of the people. Education can even return to us the ideal community that we never had.

Education as Mythology

33

Education dominates politics. Social policy is predicated on the myth of the necessary progression between spheres of operation. Education is seen as the necessary training ground and nursery of the economy at large. Neoliberal governments, ironically, just like unregenerate, old-school Marxists, follow the myth that the econosphere supervenes and that education is the key to its success. Education is correlated with the great economic national project, blatantly affirming its deployment as population management. As education produces the distribution of identities within and for the social division of labour, governments promote the ethic of lifelong learning. From the national world leaders who dominate the global education market, education is exported as the key mechanism of development, ‘modernization’, and global ‘participation’. To join the club of the prosperous, it is essential to install the initiation rituals of global education. Even specific institutions have been exported and imported across the world. Most surprisingly, perhaps, and against all evidence to the contrary, education is presented—especially among education academics—as the key to social salvation. Redemption from inequality will be enacted by education, once the inequalities that education persists in reproducing have been somehow purged. This particular dimension of the education myth presents its most sinister motif. It is impossible for those who sponsor this myth to face the glaringly obvious fact that, as the sociologists have been telling us for years now, the apparatuses of education are clearly designed to reproduce inequality. For Barthes mythology is what turns culture into nature. The role of the mythologist is to expose the role of connotation and put into question the idea of an essential meaning. Those things in our world that are deemed to be functional—under a Barthesian mythological gaze—turn out to be laden with ideological meaning. Interrogating these meanings involves taking a critical look at the taken-for-granted ‘realities’ of our world. The machinery of modern education penetrates the most intimate recesses of our world. We can get some measure of this extraordinary phenomenon if we picture the world’s surface densely populated with the institutions of this deeply familiar apparatus. Landmarks in the topography of modernity, these nodes of education have metastasised to occupy all significant temporal phases of life, under the holy rubric of lifelong learning. As well as dominating both the built environment and the social experience, education penetrates into the personal. Education tells us both what we are and, most disturbingly, what we should be. We now understand what we are in terms of where we stand in the educational order. And wherever we stand, we are honour-bound, under the logic of education’s remorseless will to improvement, to see ourselves as lacking. Education adjures us always to see ourselves as a never-to-be-completed project of development, ever reaching beyond our present selves toward some mythical educational ideal. Education promotes the myth of perpetual enhancement, a life sentence. As the principle that governs our lives from the cradle to the grave,

34

Nick Peim

lifelong ‘learning’ exposes its darker, governmental side. It is ironic that the philosophy of education today has aligned itself with the nihilism of the improvement agenda and that ‘leading’ philosophers today actively promote a rationalist, universalist logic of well-being within unashamedly humanist discourses of ‘human flourishing’. How did this condition come about? There was, after all, little of the mythical about the project of state-sponsored education as fostered by its early political advocates and the pioneer bureaucrats who forged the shape and defined the purposes of universal schooling as the essential social apparatus for modernity. The governmental function was foregrounded. Elementary schools were to be places where wayward urban populations produced by industrialisation could be refashioned. They were to be ‘beacons’ of a wellordered, morally managed future. Placed in an ordered, morally sensitive environment, the raggedy figures whose faces peer out from nineteenthcentury school photographs could be remade as more or less self-regulating, more or less good and loyal citizens. They would be basically numerate and literate, manually skilled, mostly well fed, and imbued with national values. By the time World War I came around, the process of population transformation across Europe was fairly complete. That cataclysmic event, with its mass conscriptions and mobilizations, can be seen as the dubious triumph of this momentous change in the social landscape of modernity. The techniques of this form of government of the newly schooled society quickly became normalised. Age stratification, the definition of norms of progress and curriculum content, the deployment of pastoral discipline within the enclosed social space of the classroom, the ethic of self-managed motivation, the hortatory style of the assembly, the organisation of the playground as the meeting point of the child’s culture with the school’s culture (metonymic of the national culture)—all combined to transform the ethical substance of the child, as well as to cultivate a specific level of competence and knowledge that the complex economy of modernity required. The figure of the teacher, cultural worker in close social proximity to her charges, was developed as the key instrument of ‘governmentality’. The kindly disciplinarian dispenses education as the necessary correction of wayward tendencies. The agents of education will tell students not only what they need to know, but what they need to do and to be. Students will be educated above all in the norms of conduct befitting their social destiny. What’s more, there’s no hiding place. The second major phase of statesponsored education has seen an expansion of further education and higher education, the development—at the level of ideas and institutional provision— of lifelong learning. One key component of the hegemony of this idea—apart from its ontotheological promotion of education as a necessary, central feature of life—is its incursion deep into the field of work, where the identity of the worker is always subject to scrutiny in relation to ideals of development and progression. As the graduate quits higher education, she may face a future of endless supplements to her full-time, lifelong education thus far.

Education as Mythology

35

The principle of continuing professional development clearly suggests that the professional, at least, is always in a relation of lack to the expertise required to negotiate the primary knowledge acquired in full-time education with the always-changing demands of the so-called real world of work. As that world is increasingly beset by policy adjustments and initiatives instigated in the name of improvement, the reflective practitioner is condemned to a lifetime of self-doubt. Questioning all premises and the few certainties that may structure a drastically shifting world, the remorseless edict of Socratic ‘wisdom’ that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ supervenes. For the less-reflective nongraduate, flexibility is the key: be prepared to be retrained, reskilled, and refashioned—reeducated, in effect. The pedagogized society is ever ready to remould one’s very identity to render one more employable, wherever one stands on the social ladder. The recent expansion of nursery education, claimed as a political triumph and hailed by some as an extension of rights, signifies the governmental imperative to catch them young. Intervention is most effective in the earliest phases of ‘development’. The nursery curriculum transforms aimless play into purposefully directed activity. The three-year-old child is inserted into the discourse of normative development, just as the twenty-year-old undergraduate is subject to a discourse of ’employability’. The inescapable benchmarks or ‘norms’ preside over a soviet ethic of performance. Above all, strenuous efforts must be made to ensure that those segments of the population (in another era, ‘the poor’; now, the ‘socially excluded) are rendered ‘school ready’. The expansion of nursery education infuses both individuals and their habitats with the governance that education entails. While the individual may be the initial unit of focus, it is clear from the normative curriculum and regimes of inspection that the general aim of nursery education is the production of a citizenry attuned from the earliest possible time to the normative regime of development that the processes of schooling enact. Even at this nursery stage, the profile of the child is being formalized. Deviations from the norm are symptoms of ‘special needs’ and require remediation. The child’s very being is being charted on the grid of what someone already has decided counts as developmentally significant. Maturity here is not achieved in the form of independence from the grid, the norms, and the agents of judgment. It is rather achieved through bringing one’s identity in line with the judgments made and orienting one’s trajectory and one’s aspirations accordingly. Curriculum ‘key stages’ signify the always already-determined parameters. The curriculum is as restricted and limited in scope as the curriculum the conservative founders of philosophy of education envisaged in the 1960s, and a mirror image of the 1902 curriculum. But the curriculum content hardly matters. The ideal product of higher education must have been subjected to so much more than mere knowledge. Employability has become the essential quality. More significant by far than specific curriculum content is the

36

Nick Peim

range of transferable skills that have to be specified before any programme can be deemed worthy of validation. This not-very-hidden curriculum serves to justify the otherwise inexplicable expansion of higher education across the world. For those excluded from higher education, entry to the world of work is increasingly prefaced by the vocational curriculum. Induction into the world of work has become a normative pedagogic labour that requires continued submission to the ethic of improvement. Lifelong learning is now woven into the neoliberal emphasis on competition and improvement. Powerful nations, aspiring nations, and impoverished nations all emphasize education as the means to maintain, improve, or establish themselves in the global arena. Education is the key to modernization from China to Peru. The individual’s trajectory through education, with its emphasis on development, its competitive and differentiated contexts, its outcomes and aspirations, correlates with the national project. The national project loses its national character and aligns itself with the common worldwide pursuit of education. Successful institutions on the global educational stage, such as prestigious English public schools, are replicated literally, brick by brick. Wellington College, for example, now boasts a satellite school in Tianjin, near Beijing—the first of many, apparently—that has been ‘modeled exactly’ on existing buildings in Berkshire. Education has become established, by force of ‘reason’, as a defining power in the lives of individuals and social groups, and in the destiny of nations. The capillary extension of education in western national states follows the rise of its key institution, the school. The school’s deployment as a governmental force for population management and for the production and sustenance of differences, especially status/identity differences, constitutes a vital dimension in the emergence and maintenance of the modern nationstate. The expansion of higher education and nursery education and the rise of the ‘pedagogized society’ establish education as the ontotheological force that rules from the personal to the geopolitical level. Increasingly, education comes to be the measure of what and how things are. Increasingly, individuals are invited to understand themselves and the trajectory of their lives in educational terms. Equally, nation-states define their status within the global order—and, particularly, their sense of themselves as ‘modernized’ or developed—in relation to education. While any direct association of education with either economic or political global puissance is in fact doubtful, individuals, institutions, and nations increasingly understand themselves in terms of their educational orientation within a global distribution of sociocultural and economic authority. A vital dimension of the contemporary myth of education lies in the promise of social redemption. In spite of the common perception, especially among education academics, that education can be reconstructed in favour of social justice, it is clear that this now extensive, ubiquitous apparatus was never envisaged as a mechanism for the redistribution of social goods. The grafting of an ideal of equality onto the functioning of educational

Education as Mythology

37

state apparatus is a gradual, rhetorically very important, development that ultimately and paradoxically enhances the governmental effectivity of the system without ever fulfilling its ideological promise. Education has never realised the dream of social justice that so many of its advocates persist in proclaiming and insist on working toward so tirelessly. Given the persistence of social stratification as enacted by education, the persistence of this myth of equality is in fact something of an extraordinary triumph of ideology. In spite of the ongoing discourses of equality and social justice, state schooling was demonstrably and repeatedly shown to be riven with class, gender, and ethnically related inequalities. The classical sociology of education not only demonstrated that inequality was persistently the case, but also explained why it was so. In spite of generations of relative social mobility, the patterns of inequality enacted by education remain powerfully entrenched. So much so that that one may be legitimately tempted to believe that this social reproductive function is what education is largely for. Such a sacrilegious idea offends the sensibilities of the well-meaning academics in education who clearly believe that this powerful fact can be reversed, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The dominant idea that education can surely be redeemed from inequalities persists against all the evidence and becomes a necessary adjunct to the governmental forces and processes at work in the demand for constant improvement. Discourses of equality and social justice ensure that everyone, surely, has a stake in educational progress. The story of progress, however, has been discredited, persistently and decisively. The enormous political value of education lies in the very fact that it cannot simply be imposed. To be effective, education requires the willing participation of its subjects. Such subjects—whether individuals or social groups—must be constituted through a desire for self-improvement. Selfimprovement requires a structuring and context for its effective operation. In the era of education, it has also come to occupy the role of a general ontological principle. Self-improvement itself depends on the ‘technology’ of self-management, the technology of the self promoted remorselessly through education as the fundamental principle of citizen formation. This is also the fundamental principle of contemporary freedom, instilled from the first moments of consciousness and speech in the individual, through the family, the nursery, and the school. It is the ruling concept of good conduct; hence, the automatic references to education when there is a perceived crisis in population behaviours. When collective behaviours are deemed to be in need of correction, the ideal model is self-correction within publicly defined norms of good conduct. Self-fashioning as the principle of freedom, however, is always attended by the regulatory enclosures of the law, the institutions, the available practices, and the dominant ideas. While we may concede that all of these are subject to contest, historical movement, and active intervention of counter movements, in current forms of social life, an ethical imperative is driving norms that become a pervasive will to power. Socially disadvantaged groups are particularly subject to this force.

38

Nick Peim

Among its advocates, and few would explicitly renounce the title, education is represented as a gift. While particular forms and modes of education might be less than ideal, education itself is most frequently represented as and understood as an essential good. There is little need to examine the problematic logic of the gift. It is enough to say that the obligations (and certainly the consequences of the mode of their ‘acceptance’) of the gift of education are for life. It is also clear that education is an offer that we cannot refuse. In many cases, and for certain segments of the population, it is also, at the same time, an offer we can’t accept. Increasingly, education is represented as a gift that keeps on giving, throughout life. Those who either lack education, or who are perceived as being in danger of falling out of the educational arena, may be represented as being in need of reorientation, salvation, and realignment. This is the case with some major government-sponsored projects that have occurred recently in the United Kingdom, designed explicitly to address ‘social exclusion’, a contemporary, fashionable euphemism for poverty. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Sure Start scheme, designed to manage ‘social exclusion’, is predicated on the idea of education as a socially ameliorative force, as a gift that offers the promise of social advancement for both individuals and communities. That individuals and communities may not be well positioned to accept the so-called gift is never allowed to get in the way. A sign of education’s desire to penetrate the most intimate domains of social life, Sure Start schemes seek to intervene in the language development of so-called disadvantaged (i.e., impoverished and different) social groups. To verify its efficacy in this work, Sure Start produces its own statistical evidence of its own successful interventions, in spite of the well-established fact that language acquisition occurs independently of local contextual practices. Sure Start therefore must foreclose the kind of linguistic knowledge that would negate its own cherished language intervention practices. Its attachment to an ideal of education as a force for social improvement is thus predicated on a necessary, absolutely essential, ignorance of alternative accounts of language development and of the relations between social language differences and education. Sure Start reproduces a myth of educational intervention as a socially redemptive force, even while it operates in the opposite direction by pathologizing the language practices of socially disadvantaged groups. This raises very serious ethical questions about the selling of education as an end or good in itself. A key component of this process of reorientation was to promote (commonly unrealistic) aspirations for young people whose educational destinies already were negatively determined. Remaining within the juridical framework of education, even if the outcomes would be very modest, was clearly promoted as—and seen as—preferable to falling into the zone of exclusion. Through such schemes as Sure Start, education is presented and indeed operates as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’. But it also always acts as a governmental technology to manage the dangers of relative poverty. Populations unlikely

Education as Mythology

39

to experience the positive benefits of education are nevertheless adjured to submit to its remorseless logic of self-improvement. In the 1970s, Ivan Illich foretold of ‘The institutionalization of permanent education . . ., ‘endless education’ that swamps life in all aspects’. It hardly seems excessive, now, to claim that in the present condition of the social formation in western nation states, education has taken that ‘permanent’, ‘swamping’ form defining both the shape and the meaning of existence. Politics is now more concerned than ever with the management of the education machinery. Policy buys into the mythology that equates investment in education with future prosperity and with the implicit project of social justice. Education in modernity, however, is fatally neoliberal, structurally organised to maintain growing economic inequalities. What if contemporary education as the essential expression of ‘instrumental rationality’ (Weber’s ‘Zweckrational’), has become the most advanced, most pervasive, and most powerful expression of (Heidegger’s) ‘technological enframing’. Doesn’t education, as we know it, now seek to enfold beings as a way to transform them in its own image and render them productive and useful according to its own account of these things? And hasn’t this enframing become irreversible, as well as ethically questionable? What if the contemporary valorization of education itself—as though there could be an education itself!—were nothing more nor less than the expression of the triumph of education as an ontotheological principle? And, much to the distress, perhaps, of education academics, what if no ‘real’ education exists beyond the enclosures of instrumental rationality? What if no pure and uncontaminated, ‘proper’ education exists outside of, or beyond the contingencies of, its present historical configuration? The idea of some essential education other than schooling that existed in past examples, exists in some few ‘progressive’ cases, or might be brought into being in some rationally planned, pedagogically sound future belongs to the order of myth, a now untenable faith. The idea that education can redeem social ills has long been known to be incorrect. There is too much evidence to the contrary. The idea of ‘pure’ education lurks behind much ameliorative rhetoric that has promised to redeem education from the forces of darkness. At the same time, the school remains the key institution. Effective in providing the grounds and justification for the social division of labour, effective in producing a general ethic of (self-) improvement and self-management as social ideals, effective in intervening in the culture of the child and in promoting an official culture ensconced in curricula and in the value system of the school, the school remains the key governmental instrument of our era. The school’s well established and constantly refined technologies for person management, and for determining positive and negative modes of identity, continue to sustain a rabidly hierarchical vision of knowledge and social relations. The school operates as the paradigm institution of education. Education promotes a maniacally norm-related model of knowledge, identity, and development.

40

Nick Peim

Persistent resistance to education by certain social groups, ongoing and historically deep-rooted class differences in attainment, embarrassing statistics concerning differential achievements among ethnic groupings, disaffection, truanting, resistance to ‘the gift’ that education offers by individuals and all, littered spaces where pupils hang out to socialize, annual failures at general certificate of secondary education of a significant percentage of the population, failing schools—all of these phenomena signal dangerous fissures in the myth of education, even while the myth persists. No myth can sustain itself indefinitely in the face of its negations without a constant labour of conservation. In ‘Myth Today’, Barthes, in his excitement and faith in the potential of Saussurian analysis, proffers a sanguine account of the ‘scientific’ potential of the newly inaugurated mythological studies. Barthes’s faith in structuralism and semiology may today seem misplaced, as it probably seemed to him later. Nevertheless, Barthes’s reinvention of the idea of mythology, an essential precursor to deconstruction, continues to furnish possibilities for critique and refutation of hegemonic ideas in the political sphere, a sphere that Barthes’s own work helped to expand. The overarching mythology of education and its complex mythic structure may usefully be opened to diagnosis following the lead of Mythologies.

7

Sherlocks for the Twenty-First Century Matt Hills

Sherlock Holmes: one could not find a better illustration of the power of the human mind. The sparks of ratiocination allied to a thorough awareness of anthropological and cultural worlds, Holmes can always divine the essence of things. This stylized character is multiplied at the very moment that he assumes a singularity for us within fiction; we must deal with more than one Holmes. There has never been any lack of Sherlocks, each recognizable by the ‘natural’ excess of his detecting brilliance. Thus, we begin to see the mythological content of this consulting detective; neither a professional whose knowledge is properly social and institutional, nor an asocial loner whose know-how is atavistically locked inside the self, Holmes represents the benevolent bourgeoisie—with his servants, his biographer, his proletarian helpers, his payment per case—all clothed in meritocratic garb. His status is supposedly earned through performance, for example, through his magical readings of dust and detail and deportment, but such tricks merely affirm his nature. Social class is displaced by genius, a transition that should be awkward but is nonetheless smoothed over by dramatic richness. Today we are seeing a neomania for twenty-first century Sherlocks—not just in a British TV series Sherlock, but also in the American show Elementary, and even through a multiplex action hero Holmes; these multiple heroes are resolutely brought up to date as if film and television producers fear a lack of immediate, visible relevance more than they fear mortality or taxes. The filmic vision stamped as a ‘Guy Ritchie’ product, although ostensibly a period drama, rewrites history as a computer-generated spectacle, emasculating Holmes via its materiality of processing power and its vast teams of image renderers and software manipulators. In spite of this information technology and its swamping potency, Holmes becomes more virile than ever before—the clearest sign that a mythology is perhaps on the verge of collapse and that nature is about to definitively give way to technoculture. But at this point, the blockbuster Holmes triumphs over pastiches of Victorian proto-technology. This principle reassures audiences that nature remains more important than history, both inside and outside events projected upon the big screen.

42

Matt Hills

Now Sherlock and Elementary play a different game. For them, the formatting mechanism does not transform ‘history’ into a code for present-day concerns, but instead, contemporary settings are warped into versions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s cases. Canon is fired into the twenty-first century. John Watson becomes Joan Watson; Sherlock becomes a net celebrity. Smartphones abound, and techno-culture moves at a faster pace than the speed of television production and transmission, with the language of the ‘camera phone’ seeming out of date, even when first broadcast on BBC1 in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’. One might suppose that processes of historical change, discontinuity, and cultural struggle would become paramount in these ‘reimaginings’ of Sherlock Holmes for another new century. What is more curious is that the mythical character of our leading detective is purified rather than challenged through reinventions du jour. Bloggers can write, seemingly without irony, of the BBC’s Sherlock that ‘converting an old story into a modern context proves something about its timelessness. It says, “See? This is still true. This is still relevant!” ’.1 Myth functions in two stages here. First, the difference between original and ‘conversion’ is asserted, as the diversity engineered by new actors, new production design, and slick televisuality is amply celebrated. Then, from this plurality, a unity is mysteriously produced: the figure of Sherlock Holmes is true for all time, a common pattern underlying all the versions and all the competing visions whose diversity is but an empty house distracting from the essential bricks and mortar of the Holmesian edifice. Historical and production contexts are admitted only within the reign of branding and its truths, where difference has a commercial value and where it is vital that Sherlock can be distinguished from Elementary, and vice versa, so that each can successfully circulate in the marketplace of creativity without appearing to be purely copied derivatives of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic. As an alibi of the film and TV brand—and as a claim to ownership and originality—difference is essential to all the twenty-first century Sherlocks. So it is that media brands can defend their ‘uniqueness’ by referring to other ‘unique’ brands: Benedict Cumberbatch treads the Spencer Hart catwalk at London Collections, and Belstaff supplies the coat that defines this Sherlock’s silhouette and outline. Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is suited and booted beyond his apparent income; an urbane fashion classic perfectly at one with contemporary consumer culture, his masculinity realized simultaneously through mental prowess and sartorial elegance. Far from displaying a mind/ body dualism, this characterization indicates narcissism of the intellect and the gaze, notwithstanding gestures toward asexuality or ‘alien’ misconduct. But the price to be paid for this emphasis on each contemporary Sherlock’s branded uniqueness is that the collective noun—a deerstalker of Sherlocks?—sustains more than mere film and television commerce alone. Myth effortlessly combines the values of capital and art; the fact that Sherlock’s TV showrunners are the latest author-gods should not escape us. This is a weary ideology, one that closes down questions of public ownership

Sherlocks for the Twenty-First Century

43

while directing the energies of social media. Criticism promptly finds itself pitted against authorial tweets recuperating the author-god’s intention and conserving his cultural power in no more than staccato bursts of 140 characters. It is obvious that the taken for granted can do little other than thrive in a communicative space where economy of expression is at such a premium, and where even cultural shorthand may prove to be too verbose. Showrunners’ and movie directors’ names thus become another brand condensed into the general fog of mutually reinforcing brands and celebrities: Guy Ritchie, Lucy Liu, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee Miller, Spencer Hart, Steven Moffat, Robert Downey Jr, Belstaff, Mark Gatiss, Martin Freeman, Jude Law. Proper names are essential to the multiplication of twenty-first century Sherlocks, but showrunners’ names are especially ascensional, lifted up toward the creation of art and elevated to the realm of a higher humanity where the great tradition of Holmes can be curated, conserved, and creatively expanded. But above all, multiple contemporary Sherlocks are distinguished through the actors who embody them. Each brings a specific stardom, and each brings a distinct physique and physiognomy to the part. Robert Downey Jr’s wiry frame is just about plausible as a fistfighting, action-hero Holmes, while Jonny Lee Miller proffers a more robust, ‘blokey’ shape compared to the elongated and lean form of Benedict Cumberbatch. Likewise, Downey and Miller code a sense of the ‘geezer’ detective when set against Cumberbatch, whose appearance is strongly readable in relation to very differently classed embodiment. Questions of the heroic body are also filtered through portrayals of ‘bromance’ and friendship, as the Holmes-Watson (or Sherlock-John) pairing is marked by a power of transformation. Displaying a parasitic awareness of contemporary cultural norms and mores, these Sherlocks are reconfigured visibly and obviously to make ready sense to today’s audiences. And given such immediate makeovers, what can be said about the mythic unity underlying different Sherlocks who can otherwise be taken to represent their own self-branded distinctions and their own authorial artistry? Such projected unification has to ignore wilfully the updatings and the amendments marking each Holmes as of his time and culture. To engineer a sense of timelessness and universality, an overarching, fixed, and stable Holmes has to be deduced from the shifting signs and clues of popular culture. Nowhere is the essential Sherlock on view; this is a fiction produced out of and through fictions: a story about stories. Sherlock is almost an idea, a platonic idea of human reason and cleverness that can be readily referred to without ever actually being found in existence. But, by remaking a figure already sedimented in cultural history, new versions can align themselves with the virtues of history rather than shallow nowness. The basic activity of all contemporary Sherlocks is undoubtedly that of appropriation; languages of homage and fidelity permeate the public statements of showrunners and directors as they testify to a lineage stretching back to 1887.

44

Matt Hills

In this regard, the real genius of Holmes is that reimaginings can be tailored to current trends and tastes while appearing to dissolve these surfaces into the profound depths of diachronic culture. Sherlock doesn’t plummet into the Reichenbach Falls in such a scenario, nor does he tumble to earth from atop a high building; his fall into negation is instead one that descends from real, historical cultural difference to imagined, ideological sameness. We are therefore dealing here with a character whose death is a strict impossibility, since whether or not any one author “kills” him off, Sherlock Holmes’ rebirth is always already guaranteed at the level of the idea, and on the plateau of mythological unity. Rebooting Sherlock for the twenty-first century is an action that misdirects audiences and critics alike. As long as we focus on the reboot—and again, the language of the computer that is switched on and off threatens to remind us of techno-culture’s dominance—then we fail to see that such reboots in fact retreat into ideologies of cultural timelessness, albeit deceptively dressed up in the sharp suits and the billowing coats of fashionable transformation.

NOTE 1. Huffington Post, 2012. ‘Sherlock: TV Worth Reading’, by Stephanie Earp, 14/3/12, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephanie-earp/sherlock-tv-worthreading_b_1344884.html. [Accessed 14 March 2012]

8

Myths of the Digital Age Gabriel Menotti and Antonio Fernandez-Vicente

Though, for Barthes, no ‘objects’ were ‘inevitably a source of suggestiveness’, let alone eternal, if ‘myth is a type of speech chosen by history’, the ‘history of myth’ will inevitably reflect the tenor of our times. Whether an age is defined qualitatively (as ‘Golden’), culturally (as ‘Jazz’), or technologically (as ours have recently been, following ‘Space’ and ‘Nuclear’ with ‘Digital’), these designations are clearly ‘chosen by history’ and ‘converted into speech’. Since the Digital Age is by definition that time when ‘the medium is the message’, myth readily assumes its seemingly natural role as the dominant system of communication, acting economically to abolish ‘the complexity of human acts’. Historical reality gives way to ‘the way we live now’.

THE MYTH OF PERPETUAL CONTACT What is the very meaning of digital communications? Mobile phones, tablets, laptops: they are naturalized objects that reveal semiological signs such as security, connectivity, fear of loneliness, anxiety, and the power of creating our own world of perceptions. Suppose the lack of all these digital devices. Those artefacts are becoming our environment, our objective world that is the expression of time and space domination. Nevertheless, like a religion, in Feuerbach’s terms, the human creation, the momentary illusion of personal well-being throughout the digital space may be converted into an Orwellian prison. Note that the mobile phone is ambivalent: a tool for human freedom, a form of uneasy acquiescence to the prevailing forms of social control. We may be watched through the GPS technology applied to our mobile phone. People are, in fact, controlled by the mobile phone: a lost call means an offense to the interlocutor. Experiences with emails complete the discipline of digital space: no answer, no interest. Digital devices are a sort of totem with magical properties. They seem to represent an iconic world, the screens in which we are living. And, as in epics, they lead us to hope and fear.

46

Gabriel Menotti and Antonio Fernandez-Vicente

The best that can be said about what might be called the Digital Age is that it provides a mythological environment in which ghosts and spirits are overlapped with the ‘real ones’. They are not perceived as merely images of a distant place. Instead, a greatly expanded hybrid world now emerges not simply as two different planes of reality, but as a one-dimensional world in which no one would not distinguish which is which. There is something enchanted in the way we communicate through the networks. It is indeed an invisible city beyond the real presences. It is very common to see people ‘engaged’ with their digital devices. People are engaged not only to desktop computers, but also to laptops, smart phones, and tablets. Something in the air seems to claim: ‘always keep in touch’. Connectivity, to be not there but inbetween, has become one of our ‘musts’. In other words, our lives are constantly interpenetrated by the spirits of others who are not physically present in front of us. It provides a feeling of security, even immunity. We have the power of choosing what we want to listen to, what we want to see. We are not the heroes of our lives, as in Dickens’ David Copperfield, but the writers of our own dramas. Digital technology enables the power for constructing a fictional world made of connections. The user is able to make a selection of the voices he likes to hear, the news he wants to read. In other words, he deals with the ability to connect to a self-made world and disconnect from the uncontrolled world. The user’s life becomes a drama whose characters and events are enabled by the user, as the demiurgic author of all these preselections. This kind of human being is not defined by actions, nor by the thoughts displayed on the screens. He is defined by the links, by the inclusion and exclusion. Perhaps one of the main functions of digital communication is not to communicate something to someone; it is to enhance people in a bigger whole. Indeed, one may feel the fear of not being networked. As in horror films, the networked become vulnerable as soon as the communication is broken. Human security can be brought under the control of a technologically unified and linked community. In the manner of Ridley Scott’s Alien, fear is resumed in this way: ‘In space, no one can hear you . . . ’. The invisible and distant individuals we can reach with our digital devices mean the elimination of fear—fear of being alone in front of the unknown; fear of becoming a monster once we are not hand in hand, virtually, with the others; feeling like a part of an ethereal city makes sense. On the other hand, these digital devices often provide glimpses into the content vacuum that gives rise to the search for pure connection as a remedy. As more and more people find themselves linking in networks that are, in fact, beneath their digital shadows, the lysergic detachment from the real presence and the concrete content becomes the dominant style of the everyday life. By refusing to take risks in an uncontrolled space of manufactured experience, the digital space of immunity denies the capacity to cope with demystified daily life.

Myths of the Digital Age

47

When the world consists not so much of a perpetual discovery of new things but merely a repetition of what we have previously chosen, our anxiety expresses the degeneration of a filtered perception. People feel anxiety when not in touch. This anxiety does not refer to the aim of being isolated as a unique singular. Rather, this anxiety has come to be recognized as an important element in the desire for imitation that has absorbed much of the modern attention once given to the originality. Thus, the author of the Digital Age becomes a homo sampler interlinked, made by fragments that are continuously running away in the digital space.

ANONYMITY ON THE INTERNET The fluid cyberspace can likewise be an impervious threshold, when it gets in the way of our conventions of identification and thus conceals even the most particular traces of one’s personality. In 1993, a New Yorker cartoon already had the truth of it: on the Internet, nobody knows one is a dog. Or a wanted felon. Or the president, for all that matter. Down below, the network relies on a very precise system of codified addresses. Superficially, however, it seems to be undoing all the modern efforts to attach a name to each fingerprint and a number to every person. The vantage point of informatics is denied to the majority of society. We look around, and it is as if the measures that kept subjects coherent have melted, making it impossible to tell the good from the bad from the ugly. It might be the final stage of universal connectivity, when individuals merge so seamlessly. Scholars from the last century were fascinated by the idea that billions of minds would soon come together in a single collective intelligence; they were paying less attention to this fusion of data bodies in an amorphous blob from out of space. Online, identities dissolve, leaving behind a pool of information marketing and surveillance companies alike can harvest. It is such a rich fodder for statistics—for the same old media clichés, one advertisement popping up after another. We are scrutinized and bled dry of our selves; nevertheless, there is no reason to feel exposed and even less alienated. In the realms of simulacra and simulation, one cannot be easily held to account for either words or deeds. And, if it is an identity that one misses, rest assured there is not a shortage. On the contrary, identities multiply. Any persona is up for grabs, by the means of a more-or-less annoying process of registration. What an unmissable opportunity for the aspiring self-made man: to become a subject assembled anew, free of karma, bound to triumph. Users may claim their name or a different one, provided the login is not yet taken. Names can be little more than a provisional contingency, made up in an instant or borrowed from others. The message is thus liberated from the very messenger, making expression freer than ever. On the Internet, the voices own their owners, populating our inboxes with quotes their authors

48

Gabriel Menotti and Antonio Fernandez-Vicente

did not mean. One should accept all contact requests with caution. This is a place where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents. Who knows who one’s friends might really be? Still, there are horrors worse than falling for a misleading screen alias. In the guise of an abyss, social networks gaze also. The day might come when we meet ourselves in one of them, posting autophobic status updates. The clone should disappear shortly after being reported as bogus. The feeling of violation will probably persist, though, along with the uncomfortable awareness that, amid the nameless masses, a black mirror is being held up for each one of us. As in real life, the hopes to secure our enfeebled identities dispose us to stronger protocols of control. We welcome everything that is put in place to put us in place; consider the convenient triangulations of personality allowed by Facebook connections, Twitter’s badges of verification, and the pervasive security questions that pry into our favourite colours and first teachers. Yet, there are limits to limits. Google+’s recent attempt to force all its users to sport their legal names sparked controversies, indicating the resistance of the online public to forms of unambiguous categorization. Whereas some uphold that this would be the only way to contain the spread of cyber scams and emotional abuse, others are ready to fight for the freedom to keep changing pseudonyms. Meanwhile, far from the grounds of Web 2.0, anonymity is not a right as much as a standard mode of existence. Looking back to this state of nature, textbooks from the future will probably dedicate their first chapters to 4chan, an English-language, image-based bulletin board. The website debuted in 2003, inspired by a similar Japanese forum. Now, as in the beginning, it does not require users to create a profile or register a nickname. In fact, there is no possibility of either. The most users can do is sign their posts one by one—but even that is not compulsory, and few people ever care. The result is many unidentified messages, which are all attributed to Anonymous. Anonymous turns out to be the author of pages and pages of discussion in the website. Browsing the threads, one gets an impression not of a crowd, but rather of a single character lost in heated discussions with itself. The chaotic babbling gets louder in the random board, open to any topic whatsoever. Here, information comes and goes almost as explosions. Every time a page is refreshed, it spills a new gush of affronts, inside jokes and—when the moderators are sleeping—stacks of things that cannot be unseen. The slipperiness of 4chan makes it hard to build the sense of a consistent community within it. There are meagre ways to navigate the threads and no permanent records of them. The main archive of the website lies in the hearts and minds of its unpredictable public, who keep feeding old content back into the forums, with imperfections increasing at each of these analogue-todigital reconversions.

Myths of the Digital Age

49

All in all, it feels less like a schizophrenic monologue than ambient noise, in which one is immersed and to which one is inevitably adding. It would be foolish, however, to take this pantagruelic buzz as mere coprolalia. In the contradictory rants of Anonymous, we listen to the Internet thinking aloud. The boards of 4chan are fertile grounds for information to both putrefy and procreate—a mangrove of the network’s folklore. Whatever survives such a cruel environment gets largely resilient, acquiring enough traction to spread far across the online distances. And, as they do with memes, the boards may breed collective action. Some threads seem like the uncertain synapses of a mind turned inside out, struggling to find the sources of animated GIFs or coordinate the takedown of a government website. Whether there is a higher purpose or is just for the lolz, Anonymous reaches toward everyday conflicts, engaging in support of filesharing culture, Wikileaks, and the #Occupy protests. With every move, it takes a more substantial shape, as a body growing out of syncretic iconography, uttering biblical quotes through default vocoders. The face it wears could not be more appropriate: the mask of a mask of a persona, a character from a movie from a comic from the fifth of November from a historical uprising. Somewhere along this chain, the smile of Guy Fawkes came to mean that ideas are bulletproof; they survive successive reincarnations. Another widespread emblem depicts Anonymous as an empty black suit in a straight posture, in a reminiscence of Wells’ Invisible Man, perhaps forewarning the downfall of morality. The lack of a head, brainless, with no features to hide, suggests the presence of the perfect executioner. Bastions of the old corporate media once dubbed it The Internet Hate Machine, and as Anonymous itself proudly declares, it does not forgive—it does not forget. It is as ruthless against histrionic teenagers as it is in debunking the scams of the Church of Scientology. All considered, Anonymous means to embody the mob’s intolerance toward the liberal subject and its narcissistic cults of self-fulfilment. As such, it follows the lineage of the infamous king that the Luddites made up—the ‘big baddie’ from whom they drew symbolic sovereignty to tear down machines in resistance against the oppressive status quo. It is a monster indeed, but so was the Hobbesian leviathan. Self-contradictory, its symbols represent more than a group of hackers on steroids: they stand for themselves, as a performance of the network’s consuming plurality. It is peer-to-peer-pressure made flesh, walking and talking and issuing denial-ofservice attacks.

9

The Zombie Walk Julia Round

It’s a Saturday afternoon at the end of October in the city centre of Bristol, England. Without warning, hundreds of zombies emerge from the underpass. They lurch toward the main shopping centre, leaving bloody handprints on shop windows, pawing at the sides of buses and cars. Traffic slows and then halts as the zombies cross the road. A van of people handing out free samples of drinks is mobbed; the quick-thinking volunteers scramble onto its roof and throw drinks into the horde, who gather around it, arms raised and calling for ‘braaaaaains’. Passers by watch, some happy to interact, others not so sure. Those who play along are dragged into the pack, mauled, and ‘bitten’. The mob keeps moving, slowly, with low moans and shuffling feet. The danger, it seems, has passed . . . until next time. Of course, this is not actually the apocalyptic rise of the undead, but instead, a ‘zombie walk’, an organised event that has become an established cultural practice at a global level since the early 2000s. Following on from ‘flash mobs’ (an assembly of people in a public place to perform a brief and random act, such as spontaneous applause, a dance, or similar), these zombie ‘flesh mobs’ now appear in a wide variety of scenarios and locations. Zombie walks have been used as political protest (such as the Occupy Wall Street movement), movie tribute, or simply a Halloween celebration. Like other forms of spontaneous community action, they are grassrootsorganised and arranged largely through social networking, viral emails, and word of mouth. Zombies have been read as a symbolic critique of capitalism ever since George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) but have seen a resurgence of popularity this last decade. What better symbol for a global recession than the zombie: hopeless, downtrodden, and unaware? They are the ultimate consumers—in fact, they do nothing but consume! In a constant state of decay, they also reflect the environmental concerns of our era. As mindless drones operating in a hive state, they can encapsulate many people’s feelings about the state of democracy and the global distribution of wealth and power. To be a zombie is the final full stop, a dead-end—a critique of technology, consumerism, control, ecology, the other, morality—and,

The Zombie Walk

51

really, anything else. The zombie has become an empty signifier, adaptable to the concerns of its era. The zombie walk however, is larger than its political uses and significantly more than the sum of its zombie parts. As the name suggests, the activity itself is made up of both artefact (costume) and performance (acting). As a communal gathering, it explores identity construction and confronts the myth of individuality. Costumes are seldom bought ‘off the peg’ and performance is essential—the vast majority of participants act like zombies for most of the walk (which can last for hours). The costume comes first. Of course, participants can be a ‘zombie-anything’: the only limit is imagination. Zombie cheerleaders, doctors, Charlie Browns, and zombie popes have all been spotted shuffling in the crowd. Dead celebrities (Charlie Chaplin, Amy Winehouse) often appear, as do nostalgic or period costumes (1950s housewife, geisha, undertaker, and so forth). Weeks of planning and construction may be spent in pursuit of individuation; the ‘just right’ costume is seldom bought ready-made and instead is modified from existing clothing, previous fancy dress, or compiled from charity shop finds. Large quantities of latex and blood appear, of course, and the standard of makeup is generally very high. Most participants base their costume on humour, although homage and shock value also rate highly. Then there is the walk itself. Some participants stay ‘in character’ for the whole walk; most will attempt to do so for at least some of the time. Moaning, shuffling, and calling for ‘braaaaaaains’ are the key elements here. However, the zombie walk is also a social activity, and so many zombies drink alcohol, chat, and smoke as they lurch along. The aftermath (once the performance is over) will frequently take place at a pub or other recreational venue. Why do people participate? The pursuit of fun is the most common reason, although community spirit and a love of zombies also feature. Families and children can often be found in the horde. The activity itself seems motivated by a dual imperative toward group bonding (zombies are never seen alone!) and individualism (both costume and performance are frequently elaborate and unique). The walk inscribes the duality of fear and play so often found in the gothic. Zombie walks are grassroots-organised and heavily do-it-yourselforiented; paradoxically asserting individuality through the expression of sameness. The walk and its organisation enact a series of tensions: the individual/hive, the political/recreational, and the technological/homemade. A dual imperative (of individuality versus groupthink) is played out during the walk, confronting participants and audience with a critique of identity: the myth of the self. My zombie is ‘not me’ (since my personality and memories are all gone), but at the same time, it remains ‘me’ (in appearance and body)—or at least what is left of me. The zombie is a symbol of negation, simultaneously there (in body) and not there (in mind). The zombie walk

52

Julia Round

interrogates the myth of the self by highlighting the paradoxical relationship between individuality and community. The zombie walk as myth demonstrates the paradox of self within the western mythology of individuality. It asks how a single person can maintain a unique identity within a community. In this way, it expresses and enacts our concerns about freedom within a society of political and social limitations. Viewed in this light, the zombie walker’s call for ‘braaaaaains’ is just that: a demand to express a unique self and have its cerebral activity and identity recognised.

10 The Mythologised Accretions of Press Freedom Julian Petley

The Sun newspaper of 13 February 2012 gave former political editor Trevor Kavanagh the best part of a page to protest: ‘this witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on press freedom’. The ‘witch hunt’ in question was the arrest of five Sun journalists accused of bribing public officials, and the former eastern bloc countries were Poland, Estonia and Slovakia, which, according to the World Press Freedom Index 2011–2012, compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), all had better records on press freedom than the United Kingdom, which had dropped nine places to number twenty-eight since the last such survey. Again in The Sun, on 7 October 2011, we read that ‘freedom of speech is a hard-won, centuries-old principle which did not arrive in the last shower with the Human Rights Act. It remains one of the foundation stones of democracy and is enshrined as such in the American constitution, with a few clear exceptions’. In the case of The Sun, however, these exceptions are actually remarkably numerous and generally involve those media of which the Murdoch empire disapproves (or which are Rupert Murdoch’s competitors, which more or less amounts to the same thing). So here, out of literally dozens of possible ones, are just three examples of the kinds of free speech The Sun, and indeed the Murdoch press as a whole, would like to suppress. On 28 April 1988, Thames Television showed Death on the Rock, a documentary about the killing in Gibraltar of three IRA members by the British security services, which had the temerity to question the official view of events. The programme and its makers became the targets of a truly vicious campaign of abuse and disinformation by the Murdoch press, in which The Sunday Times played the leading role, taking the government’s side against the broadcasters and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), which had cleared the programme for transmission. But The Sun also joined the attack, and on 29 April, under the headline ‘Blood on Screen—Thames’ Cheap Telly Scoop is Just IRA Propaganda’, it lambasted the IBA for not banning the programme, bellowing that ‘under the quivering geriatric chairmanship of ex-Dandy editor Lord Thomson, it does not merely lack teeth. It has not a fibre of strength or guts in its entire being’. The paper went on

54

Julian Petley

to smear one of the programme’s chief witnesses, Carmen Proetta, as ‘The Tart of Gib’, a calumny for which it was to pay dearly in the libel courts. On 25 November 1993, in the wake of the trial of the two boys who killed James Bulger, The Sun published an article that purported to show the ‘chilling links between James’ murder and tape rented by killer’s dad’. The film was Child’s Play 3, but the alleged ‘links’ depended for their validity entirely on a description of the film’s plot by The Sun, which quite simply distorted it out of all recognition. Nothing daunted, however, the following day’s front-page headline read ‘For the Sake of ALL Our Kids . . . Burn Your Video Nasty’. The result of all this hysterical clamour (in which, it must be admitted, The Sun was joined by other papers), was that in 1994, the Video Recordings Act of 1984, which had been helped onto the statute book in the first place by lurid stories about ‘video nasties’ in papers such as The Sun, was tightened up still further, giving the United Kingdom the strictest video censorship in the European Union outside of the Republic of Ireland. On 1 June 2003, the BBC broadcast a documentary about al-Jazeera in its Correspondent slot, in spite of a week-long campaign by The Sun to have the documentary banned. What the paper opportunistically latched onto was the extremely brief, and heavily pixelated, footage of the dead bodies of Staff Sergeant Simon Cullingworth and Sapper Luke Allsopp, who were killed in an ambush during the Iraq War; footage that the BBC, along with the other UK broadcasters and the press, had refused to show at the time of its original release. The programme had already been postponed for a month because the original screening would have coincided with the soldiers’ funerals. The Sun referred to the footage variously as an ‘atrocity’, ‘sickening’, and ‘beyond comprehension’, although, in fact, the only thing that was truly sickening about this episode was The Sun’s entirely cynical exploitation of the grief of the dead men’s relatives for its proprietor’s commercial ends. Thus, for example, a lengthy article on 28 May, headed ‘Bloated, Biased and Disloyal to Britain’, rapidly forgot the unfortunate relatives and launched into the main point of the story: a furious tirade against the BBC. Among other things, this article alleged that ‘senior officers aboard Britain’s Gulf flagship Ark Royal banned BBC News 24 and switched to Sky News [sic] after sailors labelled the BBC the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation’ and quoted ‘TV arts pundit’ (and sometime Murdoch employee) Jonathan Miller to the effect that ‘what Britain needs is a public broadcasting system that answers to viewers, not a bloated BBC hooked on extracting money with menaces from every home in the land’. Newspapers routinely calling for the censorship of other media is a paradoxical and extremely distasteful sight, and it casts a good deal of doubt on the sincerity of their demands before the Leveson Inquiry that press freedom must be protected above all else. Press freedom thus takes on the characteristics of a Barthesian game of ‘hide and seek’—less concrete than a ‘tendency’, permeable, unstable, and open to opportunism and parapraxis.

The Mythologised Accretions of Press Freedom

55

We might also consider how a newspaper such as The Sun utilises its cherished freedom. Take, for example, the Hillsborough disaster of 15 April 1989, in which ninety-six Liverpool fans died and 766 others were injured at a match in Sheffield because South Yorkshire police completely lost control of the crowd. From the very moment of the disaster, the newspaper entirely ignored the mass of evidence about police incompetence from fans who’d been at the match, and all too eagerly lent its services to a quite unbelievably squalid campaign, masterminded by the South Yorkshire police and the Tory MP for Sheffield Hallam, Irvine Pattnick, to put the entire blame for the tragedy on the fans themselves. Thus, under the headline ‘The Truth’, it ran a series of prominent subheads alleging that ‘some fans picked pockets of victims’, ‘some fans urinated on the brave cops’, and ‘some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life’. Nothing could be further from the truth, as was known at the time by those present at the event and as has been conclusively proved by the Hillsborough Independent Panel report published on 12 September 2012. Nevertheless, this was the utterly false and reprehensible version of the story The Sun felt itself entirely free to publish on 19 April 1989. We are minded of A. J. Liebling’s famous quote to the effect that ‘freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one’. When press barons and their allies defend press freedom, they’re not really standing up for the noble ideals championed by Milton, Paine, Jefferson, Mill, and others, much as they may pretend to be doing so. What they’re essentially defending is their freedom to do with their papers (and their journalists) just as they damn well please. They’re simply defending a property right in the guise of a free speech right. The freedom that most British national newspapers so stoutly and loudly defend is in fact a myth that conceals the reality of their largely captive state and represents a particularly acute form of Stockholm Syndrome. On 21 February 2012, the Education Secretary Michael Gove, who at various points has been a Times leader writer, comment editor, news editor, Saturday editor, and assistant editor, provided the perfect example of this mythologised notion of press freedom—and indeed of its enemies, too. In a speech to the parliamentary press gallery, he argued that ‘there is a danger at the moment that what we may see are judges, celebrities and the establishment—all of whom have an interest in taking over from the press as arbiters of what the free press should be—imposing either soft or hard regulation on what should be the maximum of freedom of expression and the maximum of freedom of speech. . . . Journalists should be more assertive in making the case for press freedom, and politicians should recognise that we have nothing to gain and everything to lose from fettering a press which has helped keep us honest in the past and ensured that the standard of debate in this country is higher than in other jurisdictions’. This simply cries out to be demythologised, and I suggest the following reformulation: ‘For a long time now, press barons and the editors and managers who act as their courtiers—all of whom take precedence over the

56

Julian Petley

general public as arbiters of what a free press should be—have imposed their own forms of restriction on freedom of expression in the papers they own and run. . . . The public should be more assertive in making the case for a free press, which serves the public interest, and politicians should recognise that that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by ceasing to quail before newspapers determined to bully them into doing their bidding’. Underpinning the mythologised view of press freedom, either implicitly or explicitly, is the idea that the prerequisites of a free press are a free market and freedom from statutory regulation. However, what the market, left to its own devices, produces is market-driven journalism, in which the commercial imperative severely constrains (and thus censors) what actually appears in print. Meanwhile, statutory regulation needs to be understood as including not simply negative prohibitions but also positive obligations—for example, as in the case of broadcasting, the requirement to provide accurate and unbiased news and current-affairs programming. Given the enormous importance that the press is now (very belatedly, thanks mainly to the vast body of evidence extracted by the Leveson Inquiry) recognised as playing in setting both the political and the broadcast news agendas, it does seem distinctly anomalous that it should be completely devoid of any positive informative or democratic obligations whatsoever—apart, that is, from those that more enlightened owners and editors impose upon their papers. To argue that requiring the press to observe certain positive obligations amounts to censorship is quite simply absurd, as it is to invite comparison with Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking Glass, who famously observed that ‘when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean— neither more nor less’. So, press freedom stripped of its mythologised accretions should be understood not as a property right, nor as merely a negative form of freedom, namely freedom from any form of statutory regulation that might interfere with the exercise of that right. Rather, it needs to be regarded as the positive freedom of audiences to be able to access a wide range of truthful and trustworthy sources of information, a right that they possess by virtue of being citizens of a democracy.

11 In Search of Higg’s Boson Angie Voela

The search for the elusive Higg’s boson, also known as the God particle, by physicists at CERN, Switzerland, and the announcement that they are close to replicating the conditions at the beginnings of the universe, qualifies as a new myth of universal significance. In this essay, I examine the mythologisation of science in the media, drawing on a recent BBC documentary about the CERN experiment, which is underpinned by a messianic discourse developing in the slim space between the announcement of the imminent success and the actual event. Moreover, the juxtaposition of matter and antimatter and the introduction of a third force that disrupts their equilibrium echo the oedipal discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis. My reading offers a critique of popularised psychoanalysis via a replication of the theoretical text of the Barthesian Mythologies and extends it to the popularisation of science. It also draws on Lacan’s differentiation between the truth of myth, science, and psychoanalysis and addresses the desire for ultimate truths and origins in lieu of the death of God. The other day, I watched the BBC documentary about the quest for Higg’s boson, or ‘the God particle’, by CERN scientists. The search was, of course, hailed as a historic discovery that would change our understanding of how the universe, and everything, works. Scientists at CERN, it was said, had caught ‘a tantalising glimpse’ of the Higg’s boson and hoped to ‘declare it discovered’ very soon. Hundreds of them worked on a six-billion-pound project, doggedly pursuing the elusive particle. One way or another, one of them explained, this was the end (of the search). For Higg’s boson to be detected, conditions similar to the big bang theory need to be created. One hundred metres below ground, the Hadron Collider, an enormous tubular, donut-shaped contraption with the circumference of a small town, does just that. And that’s how the story is told: as the heat of the big bang abated, the Higg’s field condensed. Particles entering it slowed down, flowing through like a trickle. This is what gave them mass. Mass is everything. Without it, nothing exists. Now scientists try to locate the boson by exclusion. Imagine a two-dimensional diagram, and start excluding areas in which the particle is definitely not to be found. The remaining areas are of interest.

58

Angie Voela

Further clarifications are given: everything relates to the symmetry of matter and antimatter. If the symmetry were perfect, matter and antimatter would cancel each other out. The fact that matter exists indicates an anomaly, a lack of perfect symmetry between the two. The symmetry must have been broken, and that is how the Higg’s field came to give mass to particles in the first place. I copy from my notes: ‘a moment after the Big Bang, the Higg’s field appeared. And this split apart a perfect symmetry between two of the fundamental forces of nature. And the Higg’s gave the particles of those forces different masses. And at the same time it gave mass to all the other particles’. I was intrigued by the theological overtones of this scientific genesis. I was also intrigued by the visuals: the graph of time, which extends backward to the big bang in a single, undisturbed line; the topological clarity of the scientists’ search; the particles in the shape of three-dimensional diamonds entering fast and immediately slowing down in a viscous field that is distorted in a wave-like pattern. And, above all, this split of the identical, symmetrical opposites. The advent of irregularity is visually represented by an arrow, the upper half splitting into two, creating a symmetrical threepointed shape. I immediately saw the psychoanalytic principles of that genesis: the splitting of the two by the third; the advent of the Father , which disturbs the prelinguistic union of the mother and the baby. The three-way parting is a latent reference to Oedipus at the crossroads, perhaps, or represents life gaining ground over the death drive and entropy, the latter being the natural tendency of the cosmos. The mythical-theological language envelops the obscure knowledge of science and promises to render something of its truth in a different, albeit equally trustworthy, form. I drafted a paper around the psychoanalytic ideas. But, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, I subsequently edited out all the psychoanalytic references. I was left with a mesh of ideas, thoughts, and free associations that, for lack of a better metaphor, resembled a garment that has just fallen off a coat hanger: still all there but in a different shape—a bit like the relationship between science and popular science. Ever so close, in endless approximation, is our quest for an infinitesimal locus in a hypothetical quadrant. We are not there yet, they say, but we are closing in on it. Every day, we are getting closer; we know where it hides. God is a particle, a quivering substance, an invisible entity that witnessed the beginning of the universe, a moment so close to creation that it witnessed the separation of time from the timeless dance of crazy particles running. The beginning of time is this three-way split, a separation, the third escaping the two and the one. Nothing excites (and abhors) me more than the prospect of a scientific proof of the advent of the Father. The imminent discovery promises an abundance of knowledge—everything we ever wanted to know. It’s the discovery of our lifetime they say—which is what exactly? Science fiction, which is always a step ahead of science, has

In Search of Higg’s Boson

59

already dreamed up what the Higg’s boson can do for us: at the moment of its discovery, the agitation of cosmic time produces a ‘flashforward’ for the entire humanity. People get a glimpse of their lives thirty years down the line and learn their destiny. Wasn’t that always our desire, foreknowledge and forethought, rather than knowledge of the past? Isn’t that what we would have asked for, if science would listen? Science does not listen. Ultimately, it does not heed morality or ethics. The drive that is science goes forward and onward, unstoppable. Science is the undiluted ‘it’ that seeks to devastate the existing body of knowledge to give us something more, to upset knowledge, meaning, and signification. Thus, we envisage our end/beginning, our not being there, the empty scene without us that captures our imagination. What awaits us? The beginning of the universe trapped in the belly of the Hadron Collider. Nothing makes me more certain that those scientists can capture God than the magnificence of that circular contraption. Awesome in its donut-shaped steel, this man-made ouroboros, the serpent that bites its own tail, the mystic symbol of perfection, is in fact more inspiring than what might be going on inside its belly—which makes me think that we should look awry, into the shape of things, to capture cosmic magnificence. Of course, we must wait before reaching the beginning-end. A frisson of excitement runs through the popular press: the boffs at CERN could inadvertently cause the destruction of the world. Excitement abounds at the infinitesimal possibility of something going wrong. Read: we all might be blown into oblivion. And we would all meet ‘God’. Competing teams of scientists are nervous and furtive in the run for who will get there first. The precipitation of time chimes with the clash of the particles: precipitations of particles, will, and efforts. It is wrong to assume that all big events come unannounced. Only disasters befall us unexpectedly. Good things must be announced. Gods must be announced. And Gods must not show their faces immediately if they are to keep their magic. The God particle is a tiny god holding the proof of a totally materialistic universe, the ultimate blasphemy–homage to the death of God. A frisson of excitement erupts at the ultimate demolition of his authority, in memory his hollow name. The new clergy, this hierarchy of scientists, are the keepers of the secret. And ‘the halo of the nano’—a very apt phrase used to describe the mystery that usually veils the phallus of science—is of their own making. Mystification is necessary. Popular science on TV will never rent that veil. As to taming knowledge, once one successful experiment is conducted, there will be another, and another, and another—meaning no more excitement. The advent of God will be repeated, making it just another mundane discovery after all, not a revelation. Were we misled? Why was the language of creation invented? How desperate are we for an event, any event, good or bad? Perhaps, as Baudrillard says, we are all so bored with our lives that we constantly reinvent ourselves in a trompe-l’oeil destiny, an innocuous,

60

Angie Voela

sanitized, and farcical destiny produced by ‘daily inflicting the ordeal of the last Judgement upon themselves’. The encounter with God (or his particle) occurs in an overdetermined scene, like the crazy particles dancing away in perpetual motion, the will of the scientist to capture one of them, or catching a fish with one’s bare hands. In the beginning, it was the ‘what’—the irreparable difference between myth and science, truth and myth, truth of myth, truth about myth, the endless permutations of conjunctions and disjunctions (although we will always have the categories of logic when all else fails)—all swimming around in the Hadron Collider waiting to be smashed against one another into a primordial new wor(l)d. And, let us be reminded, the Guardian notes, that ‘the God particle’ is a greatly exaggerated concept. Transparency and knowledge: ignorance and deception need not be tolerated.

12 The Cultural Politics of Being a Knob Ben Pitcher

How do we account for the enduring popularity of the BBC TV motoring show Top Gear? A classic feminist account might establish the usual psychoanalytic relationship between the motorcar and the symbolic male member, and would understand the programme as centrally concerned with the celebration of the phallus in the programme’s valorization of power and speed. We can think of Top Gear’s spinoff projects as likewise organized by these unsubtle priapic identifications: Richard Hammond’s Total Wipeout requires that contestants attempt to clamber over ‘The Big Balls’; in James May’s Man Lab, the symbolic phallus is located in the paraphernalia of the domestic tool kit. It is tempting to read shows like these as exemplifying a resurgence of old-fashioned attitudes and orientations untouched by the influence of feminism, as forms of unreconstructed patriarchal programming that represent a cultural regression to the casual sexism of the 1960s and 1970s. Though the trajectory of this reading is not invalid, it is certainly one that needs some modification if we are to come to grips with the complexities of gender politics in twenty-first-century Britain. Feminist wars of position have had an undeniable impact on the terrain of contemporary culture: as is widely recognized, masculine power is today necessarily wrapped in irony; sexism is placed between inverted commas. In this context, the symbolic authority of the phallus takes on a slightly different aspect. Clarkson, Hammond, and May are still indexed to the phallus, but in a bathetically diminished mode: it is no longer the all-powerful icon of male dominion but is given form as the ‘prick’, the ‘penis’, the ‘knob’. Critical commentary is explicitly, if unconsciously, structured by this psychic fascination with the reduced phallus: numerous articles, posts, and pages have a headline asserting something along the lines of ‘Jeremy Clarkson is a Cock’. To be a penis, a knob, or a cock suggests an apparent shrinking of power, yet it is arguably the perfect package for reproducing the illicit and unacceptable in superficially more enlightened times. Behaving like a cock—and being self-conscious about one’s knobbishness—becomes a way of foregrounding and making light of one’s incompetencies and shortcomings. Being a dick appears to fall short of possessing the phallus, but in the very act of doing

62

Ben Pitcher

so, it provides an alibi for certain kinds of behaviour. Clarkson’s reactionary, ill-informed take on the politics of climate change, for example, is not supposed to be a reasoned argument for the petroleum lobby; he’s not interested in being right, rather, he’s simply interested in being a dick. Why? Because by being a dick, he can be wrong and still get away with it. This, surely, is one of the reasons why Top Gear has such a broad popular appeal. Cockish behaviour provides a way of refusing to act responsibly or account for one’s actions or opinions, despite the widespread recognition that they are wrong. Our culture does not permit the serious expression of racism, sexism, or homophobia, and neither does Top Gear. The show’s comical opposition to ‘health and safety’ or ‘political correctness’ seeks to undermine rather than express authority. And yet, in being penile rather than patrician, dickish rather than dominating, Top Gear’s antiauthoritarian ribbing is invested with a considerable degree of power. It gives its audience a means of identifying with illicit opinions and illiberal behaviours, not by asserting them as rights (for rights can be challenged head on), but as wrongs. Wrongs cannot be challenged because they do not ask to be taken seriously in the first place. Before falling back on the trope of condemnation upon which Top Gear’s liberal-baiting depends, it is important to recognize the deep psychic investments at work here that make being a cock such an attractive model of contemporary cultural practice. Dicking about is a profoundly whimsical behaviour, and intense pleasures and excitements come from its arbitrary irresponsibility. Top Gear’s presenters vicariously channel for the show’s viewers a seductive fantasy of human freedom—a freedom to escape punishment, evade the law, forego the superego’s demand to do the right thing. Though it is right for us to acknowledge how this freedom is articulated through a reprehensible assemblage of reactionary, small-minded conservatism, this recognition does not detract from or cancel out the show’s joyfulness or pleasurability. Some of what gets wrapped up in the practice of being a dick, in other words, is a joi de vivre that exceeds our admonishment and critique. It is an indictment of our culture that enjoyment is still channelled through Top Gear’s brand of male desire, but this fact does not stop fun being fun. This does not mean that the show is beyond reproach, or that it isn’t deeply reactionary in its sexual, racial, and environmental politics. Of course it is. Yet it presents this politics in such a way as to make the accusation, like this critique, seem unnecessarily excessive. The underlying seriousness of the unreconstructed comedians of the 1970s meant that they could be easily killed off by alternative comedy; Clarkson et al. present a far trickier challenge, since their jokes lack all conviction. The defence of ‘only having a laugh’ works here because, in a sense, it is true: it is impossible to imagine that the consummate media professional presenters of Top Gear really do believe the knob-like things they do and say. They are cosmopolitans posing

The Cultural Politics of Being a Knob

63

as little Englanders, metropolitan sophisticates roughing up and dumbing down. The ironic distance that being a bunch of pricks provides absolves them of responsibility for their unacceptable public opinions, while simultaneously providing the platform that produces and reproduces those opinions all the same. And it is under the sign of the cock that a certain brand of masculine power perpetuates itself in British society more generally. Providing a means of ducking critique by partially agreeing with it (‘yes, I really am acting like a total penis’), dickish behaviour is disarming, even charming: the phallus survives in our contemporary culture by masquerading as a knob.

13 Kylie Écriture Sunil Manghani

Kylie belongs to a time when it is less the human face than the figure we imagine that plunges an audience into the deepest ecstasy, when one supposedly loses oneself in the pinup image as one might the callings of a dance floor, where the body offers a kind of absolute state of being that can be neither touched nor relinquished. A decade earlier, the posturing of Madonna was causing a commotion: that of Kylie, the reissuing of a time when the wink of an eye and mere billow of a skirt caused sensation. It is indeed an admirable body-object. In Spinning Around, forever memorable for a pair of ruched, gold lamé hot pants, the fetish surrounds her diminutive derrière. Yet, it is less the lithe body thrust upon us than the whole of the figure she sings with that draws us close. From between those high-glossed lips and disproportionally large, alabaster incisors, comes a thin, nasally vocal supremely suited to the cloning of the multitrack artiste. And, if mistaken for her own waxwork, the signs are all of a red-blooded woman whose breathy asides syncopate the music; with ease letting slip the Monroe-like temptation in Fever, ‘so now, shall I remove my clothes . . . ?’ In spite of its singular beauty, the body Kylie, posed yet lived as something free and staged, that is, both flighty and poised, acts out a succession of feminine forms (yet always as Kylie), from girl-next-door to disco diva, from Barbie doll to Hollywood chic, from magazine cover girl, and comeback queen to indie chick. The spectacle of the showgirl (the Las Vegas showgirl, for instance), of course, is less interesting as the choreography of ornament (as with the showgirls of Folies Bergère) than the flamboyant writing of the body itself. Kylie negotiates the gaze as with a play between lovers, which explains why neither she nor her onlookers are made to feel guilty for the desire to be unconditionally adored. It is true that the music video (which details the body in contorted and inviting poses, simultaneously revealing and concealing) lends itself to the charge of objectification, or at least the ironic citation of mere bodies. But, Kylie is no drag act; she revels in her sensuality and pronounces always with humour, whether in futuristic crystal-mesh miniskirt or a confining satin-fringe dress, the same callipygian curves. The deliberate play of glamour is less the affectation of beauty than the airing

Kylie Écriture

65

of a genealogy of beauty, namely those heavenly stars of yesteryear we only know from the pure light of the silver screen. The singer knows she is not ‘Kylie’ any more than she is the heroines she evokes. Barefoot and lolling about the beach, Bridget Bardot was known to have said of appearing before the camera: ‘I am myself’. For Kylie Minogue, it is the articulation of a role: ‘I change characters when I do a photo shoot. It’s kind of avoiding being me—which I’ve become very good at.’ And yet, with this adored body, something rarer than a performance enunciates: a kind of hedonistic aesthetics of the true dimension of object, not the representation of subject; a fantastical, bi-vocal gesture Helene Cixous refers to as ‘flying in language/stealing from language, making it fly’, or in this case, flying in the languages of style /stealing from the languages of style, making them fly. A performance gives the pleasure of something we cannot reproduce for ourselves; an embodiment, on the contrary, activates pleasure without separation, as jouissance. Kylie presents an alien form (or so she has been described) that is at once intimate yet strange, as if the mannequin leaning toward us delivers a secret smile, letting the seductions of the flesh as cultural code yield their place to an écriture of woman. The figures of Kylie oscillate with a transition once described as between two iconographic ages, from awe to charm; from the face of Garbo as aura or platonic odea, to the event of Hepburn as a delectable interplay of idiosyncrasies. Yet something quite different prevailed: the youthful erotics of detachment. The movie screen created the lascivious Bardot, yet the lens never tamed her indifference and ambiguity. As Simone de Beauvoir has said, ‘her eroticism is not magical, but aggressive.’ Today, the rightful heir is Kate Moss, whose body never flinches and declares nothing. If Kylie is alien, Kate Moss is unassailable. As body language, Kylie’s frankness is of the order of writing; that of Kate Moss, the order of photography. The body of Kylie is about play; that of Moss, surrender.

14 Signs and Symptoms of the Mad Genius Simon Cross

The funniest scene in Scott Hicks’s Oscar-winning 1996 film Shine, about piano prodigy David Helfgott who has a mental breakdown, begins when Geoffrey Rush as Helfgott shambles into a bar to play a grand piano that stands idle. At this point in the film, Helfgott, late of London’s Royal College of Music, appears emblematic of a mental patient, replete with selfmedicating cigarette. As he sits at the piano, a barroom bore looking for a cheap laugh hurls the ultimate piano-prodigy insult: ‘Sock it to us, Liberace’. Rush’s Helfgott displays no top-and-tails razzmatazz, of course; more like charity-shop couture. The would-be bar pianist seems to misrecognise the insult for what it was, social exclusion masked as a bad joke. At any rate, the jibe is Helfgott’s cue, and he begins to play, or rather, perform. So the question to be asked is this: what exactly does Helfgott perform? On one level, it is ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’ by Rimsky-Korsakov, among the most franticly paced orchestral interludes. In the opera from which ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ is taken, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, the magic Swan-Bird changes Prince Gvidon Saltanovich (the tsar’s son) into an insect that can fly away to visit his father, who does not know that his son is alive. And therein is the real meaning of ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’ performed by this former piano prodigy to unsuspecting drinkers: he performs a magical transformation, shedding mental otherness to triumphantly emerge as a musical genius before his adoring audience. This is a key narrative moment in Shine, a symbolic lifeline between Helfgott’s pre- and postschizophrenic identity as he emerges into the spotlight of celebrity recovery. Indeed, the fullest filmic realisation of Helfgott’s recovery does not rest on his flawless performance in the restaurant, which is apparently not the case in his live performances, but rather on his musical genius, which constitutes his real difference. Thus, now surrounded at the piano by fawning women, a drinker makes what would otherwise be the most ridiculous of bar-pianist requests (and here is another funny moment in the film): ‘Hey, give us Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’. Helfgott (the cigarette-inmouth now signifying beatnik cool) shoots back, ‘Sure, mate. Symphony or concerto’? Only a mad musical genius with spare time and a spare piano could ask this question. And it is funny precisely because he is serious.

Signs and Symptoms of the Mad Genius

67

It is through such humorous ambivalences, somewhere on the hinterland between the laughably funny and the peculiarly funny that Shine gives audiences a moving account of the journey through madness as art and heart. By doing so, it communicates that the piano prodigy Helfgott is different, but that his genius, not his madness, marks his difference. In this sense, the meaning of Helfgott’s schizophrenia is cultural not pathological. There would be no special meaning to a film of Helfgott’s life that rendered him merely another schizophrenic whose talents were irrevocably lost to madness alone. That Helfgott’s madness and musical genius are mysteriously linked is communicated not by science but by the weight of historical culture concerning the nature and personality of the artist. Plato first told us how poets possess furore poeticus that defied reason; that a poet’s inspiration was a form of divine or ‘good’ madness. By the time of the Renaissance, the creative authority of the nonconventional artist privatised this strand of thinking with the idea that melancholy was the true price of creativity and genius. The Restoration poet John Dryden then added further weight of expectation when he said, ‘Great wits are sure to Madness near alli’d/And thin partitions do their Bounds divide’. This association continued into the modern era in the romantic doctrine that to produce great art, the artist is necessarily sapped of health, mental or physical. Thus, England’s romantic prophet-in-chief, William Blake, invoked furore poeticus as the font of artistic motivations that gave form to his ‘visions’. Lord Byron equally valorized his own mad experiences, famously remarking, ‘We of the craft are all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched’. Not everyone has agreed with the romantic doctrine’s dread of normality, however. A counter view gained ground from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth in which the hallmark of the great poet was his rationality, or judgement. It culminated in Charles Lamb’s dismissive 1824 denunciation of the mad-genius myth when he pointed out that the greatest wits of his or any other age had only ever revealed themselves the sanest writers. His appeal for recognising healthy creativity was directed at what he saw was the ‘popular fallacy’ equating madness with genius, made against the backdrop of his daily grind dealing with his sister Mary, who, in the grip of insanity, had taken a kitchen knife, murdered their mother, and seriously wounded their father. It is doubtless hard to find a romantic urge when one has traipsed madhouses seeking insane certification in the hope of avoiding a hangman’s noose. The idea of the sane artist has never really caught on, as if it is not a good enough idea. We prefer that artists, painters, writers, and so forth meet our role expectations, that they suffer for their art. So, when the myth of the mad genius eventually expanded its cultural-historical limits to include the poets and writers Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Ann Sexton, madness and suicide became the price these women paid for über-creativity. Thus, while mental distress may have had nothing to do with Sylvia Plath’s literary talent, at the interface of her femaleness and this talent, or

68

Simon Cross

her ‘genius’ as the mythmakers prefer, the madness/genius myth has come to mean that the only way to acknowledge her genius is to confine it in connection with her suicidal madness. This is ironic since in Christine Jeffs’ 2003 film Sylvia, the promotional poster announced, ‘Life was too small to contain her’. Perhaps, though, the film’s portrayal of Plath as a tortured genius spurred to write by mental distress while being chemically palliated out of her ‘good madness’ serves to contain her public memory well enough. The myth of Sylvia Plath as unable to contain her madness/genius in a living body is given literally dramatic pitch in the same way the Romantics transformed the premature deaths of Keats (age 25), Shelley (age 29), and Byron (age 36) into a final spectacular literary act. It is also notable that there is no dramatization of Plath’s ‘suicide’ note, in which she wrote out her doctor’s telephone number and left correct coinage for a rescuer to use a public pay phone, which her friend and fellow poet Al Alvarez unromantically suggested meant that she did not intend to kill herself. Of course, there is nothing like a youthful suicide to add longevity to a creative career wrapped up in the myth of a beautiful death. We had perhaps better pass over the danger Plath’s oven posed to her two children asleep in an adjacent room. Plath’s continuing appeal as a writer who poured out her distress in ink is now due less to her writing and more to the fact she killed herself. In the context of Plath’s commercially successful afterlife, The Bell Jar foreshadows her inability to hold at bay ‘dark forces’ propelling her toward suicide. The dark forces are pathological and cultural; that is, her history of clinical depression from her teenage years cannot be isolated from the mythology of her doomed marriage to the English poet laureate Ted Hughes. Plath’s symbolic annihilation gave feminism its acceptably glamorous patron saint and a bastard philanderer to despise. Symbolic annihilation has enormous appeal for popular culture. Thus, the tortured image of Vincent van Gogh gave the notion of the mad artist a modern updating fuelled by myths including the assertion that he cut off his ear because he received no recognition for his talent. Fascination with van Gogh speaks of the destructive effects attached to artistic activity. The popular image that van Gogh was unable to come to terms with his genius and reworked his world in psychotic strokes is embedded in a web of cultural mythmaking of which van Gogh’s own ‘Self-portrait with bandaged ear’ is an unwitting element. No wonder that Hans Prinzhorn, psychiatrist, artcollector, and pioneer of art therapy, claimed in his 1922 book Artistry of the Mentally Ill that a score of ‘schizophrenic masters’ were at work inside Europe’s mental asylums; multiple vested interests there, you might say. Van Gogh’s letters to his younger brother Theo reveal that he knew well enough that his art and his mental distress were incompatible, and that he feared a diagnosis of insanity because he did not want permission from doctors to paint. Despite this, van Gogh’s creative and mental life is (con)fused in the intersection of fictional and nonfictional storytelling of his life and death. From Erwin Stone’s 1934 biography Lust for Life, later turned into

Signs and Symptoms of the Mad Genius

69

an Oscar-winning film of the same name starring Kirk Douglas; through Einojuhani Rautavaara’s opera Vincent (1986–87), based on van Gogh’s life in the Arles asylum; to Robert Altman’s 1990 film Vincent and Theo, focusing on Vincent’s relationship with Theo, popular culture has grabbed a mythical yet profitable slice of Vincent’s Ear (the capitalization matters because it signifies a movement between mad symptom and mythical sign). In the last three decades or so, we have seen expansion of the mad-genius myth to encompass new and almost exclusively male cultural heroes including musicians (David Helfgott, Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett, Brian Wilson), comedians (Lenny Bruce, Spike Milligan, Stephen Fry), actors (Robert Downey, Jr., Rod Steiger, Ian Holm), directors (David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Lars von Trier), chess grand masters (Bobby Fischer), playwrights (Sarah Kane), comic-strip artists (Robert Crumb), and even academics (award-winning Russian refusenik mathematician Grigory Perelman and Nobel Laureate John Nash). As Ezra Pound (who knew a thing or two about being made to appear insane) might have put it, in the expectation of madness, we see a professional ideology of what it means to be creative. What is interesting about some among these ‘mad genius’ figures is that popular mythology about their condition is countered by mundane accounts of their creative and mental lives. For instance, the film Shine succeeds as a story because it satisfies our need for a ‘recovery and return’ in the most hostile personal-domestic circumstances. However, a difficulty here is that Helfgott’s sister Margaret has written her own account of Helfgott family life to contradict the myth of Shine. She rebuts, for instance, the film’s portrayal of her father as a bully, as well as quoting friends and teachers angered and upset by what the film portrayed. The Helfgott family eventually secured a disclaimer against the film’s distortions, though the statement appears after 279 credits, where few are likely to see it. The story of how American John Forbes Nash developed game-theory economics and reshaped multiple mathematical fields before succumbing to paranoid schizophrenia at the age of thirty is told in Sylvia Nasar’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated biography, A Beautiful Mind. Ron Howard’s 2003 Oscarwinning version of Nash’s life borrowed Nasar’s title, as well as her own three-act narrative structure of genius, madness, and reawakening to show how Nash had apparently spontaneously recovered after more than three decades seemingly lost to schizophrenia. That the Nobel committee came close to denying Nash the 1994 Nobel honour because his mental condition does not feature in Howard’s storytelling. The film version of A Beautiful Mind deals neither with the politics of schizophrenia vis-à-vis Nash’s award of the Nobel Prize, nor the mundane realities of the schizophrenic label obscured by the mythologizing of Nash as a mad genius. Nasar, though, tell us that prior to being awarded the Nobel Prize, Nash had not received any of the recognition, medals, and honors routinely accorded mathematic scholars of his stature. Among Nash’s colleagues, powerful perceptions of him as too ‘sick’ to be awarded any prize,

70

Simon Cross

let alone the Nobel, reinforced his marginalized status even in the field of game-theory economics that he had revolutionized. The Swedish committee that finally confirmed John Nash as a Nobel Laureate only did so with great reluctance, and in the end, by a mere handful of votes. The case of John Nash illustrates how the mad-genius myth invests the mental lives of individuals with romantic allure. At the same time, the Nobel committee’s image of Nash as ‘sick’ led the members to the view that it might be risky bringing him into the glare of international media publicity—that he might fail to shine on the Nobel stage, as it were. What seems to have concerned the Nobel committee was that the dominant public perception of schizophrenia might overwhelm the meaning of the Nobel award they wished to bestow. In this sense, the Nobel Prize is part of a modern mythology exemplified in the film when John Nash is shown being applauded by fellow academics who understand the value not just of his award but of his suffering, not just for mathematics but for human creativity. The mad man (and only occasionally mad woman) is a protean figure in the popular imagination, slipping through in dreams, fairytales, ballads, paintings, sculpting, literature, and more recently, in cinema through the recurring guise of the mad genius. Madness and genius must be seen and understood concomitantly because each symbolises our culture’s fascination with the boundaries and reaches of our own mental functioning. The signs of mad genius in film—Helfgott’s piano-playing, Nash’s mathematics, and so forth—reveal creativity out of the chaos of symptoms. The meaning of the mad genius is heroic—strangely special—and utterly mythic.

15 The Museum of Champions, Hyde Park, May 2011 Eileen Kennedy

It took a leap of faith to step out of the sunny day in the green of Hyde Park and into the inauspicious black cube that housed memorabilia from players and teams in the Champions League from 1956 to 2011. Once inside, however, the makeshift cathedral to European football enclosed the earnest soccer pilgrim in a ‘sonic envelope’ of sounds of crowds and music, physically and psychically transporting her, but usually him, to inhabit simultaneously the spaces of past, present, and future football. The low lighting created a shared intimacy with the objects on display. Black-and-white photographs three metres high, depicting the gods of football: Beckham, Gerrard, Müller, all with the clenched fist of triumph; Maldini in open-palmed victory celebration; Eusébio and Puskás, midair at the moment of the strike; Best and Platini dancing with the ball; Van Basten’s graceful arm recalling his footballing moniker, ‘the swan of Utrecht’. Then, backlit like a collection of Russian icons, stood a display of Champions League Final programme covers. Surrounded by a sea of monochrome, the nostalgic colours and designs sparkled like jewels to seduce a patient public that waited in line to explore them with such ‘amorous studiousness’ that occasional gasps and muted cries could not help but emerge from the darkness. In the centre of it all was a top-lit glass case of torso dummies, each sporting the team jersey of a competing club. A holy glow shone from the brightly coloured but strangely disembodied objects, like a ghostly aura surrounding the teams elect. The Museum of Champions in Hyde Park was part of the brandscape of the Union of European Football Association’s (UEFA) Champions League, the 2011 final being held at Wembley Stadium in London between football clubs FC Barcelona and Manchester United FC. Football has been for many an opportunity to experience excitement and passion, feel part of a community, and espouse a local identity with which to take on the world. Mythologies of the local and national permeate the histories of both clubs in the final that year. The tragic air crash in Munich in 1958, which sealed a place in the national sentiment for the youthful Manchester United team, eager to challenge the limitations of the English football league, was evidence of a sense

72

Eileen Kennedy

of time-space compression in the early days of the European Cup—teams could play in Belgrade midweek and Manchester at the weekend. Or so they thought. Barcelona, too, has always been more than a club—a symbol of the continuous articulation of submerged Catalan nationalism, always ready to battle for the spirit of the stateless nation against its Castillian rival, Real Madrid. The European Cup brought El Clásico to an international audience in the 1960s. The clubs and the competition, therefore, have their stories entwined. Yet, in the context of the mega-event, such relationships have been subsumed into the sports commodity, deliberately branded, and fed back to football supporters for their consumption as if nothing had changed. The spectacle of footballing history interlacing the museum exhibits offered a very contemporary perspective on twenty-first century European identity. Like a car or a tin of beans, the essence of football can be manufactured and traded. But it is not a simple thing that is being bought and sold. Psychologists have argued that ‘the product’ at the core of sport is the uncertain outcome of the sporting contest. Uncertainty creates suspense— the tension between fear of a dreaded outcome and hope for a happy ending. An audience’s odd enjoyment of suspense could be explained by the suggestion that negative (or noxious) effect tends to produce greater arousal than positive effect. As a result, the residual arousal from negative emotions is said to amplify the experience of positive emotions when the happy ending arrives. Marketers know that excitement and anxiety foster identification with the team, and a willingness to witness the noxious effects from a painfully close battle, on the unlikely basis that dreams may come true. Sport comes ready equipped with the kind of drama that only the best scriptwriters can craft. But this presents both a problem and an opportunity for those wishing to capitalize on sport’s pulling power—sport can be a risky entertainment choice. Fans never actually know who is going to be in the final, and then, if the game is going to be any good. Too much uncertainty is not the ideal for a sports contest. Rather, suspense mounts at the same rate as does the spectator’s certainty that the feared outcome will materialize, stopping just short of total certainty. The formation of the Champions League was in itself an attempt to even out this unpredictability. The Champions League was created in 1992 from a transformation of the European Cup that had permitted too much risk by making possible the early elimination of the big European clubs. Yet, supporters need authenticity, too; so in 1992, the Champions League ‘brand’ did not start from zero—it capitalised on the long history of the European Cup. The League built the history of the other competition into the new brand using colours—black, white, and silver—chosen to connote the blackand-white television images of early European Cup football and the floodlit nighttime matches.

The Museum of Champions, Hyde Park, May 2011

73

Nostalgia was palpable to visitors to the Museum of Champions. The bright colours of the team shirts illluminated as the centrepiece were even more precious because of their ethereal setting. Museums could be thought of as a response to uncertainty—using technologies of display to comfort the public, assuring people that they are living in a world where our bewildering experiences make sense. The fantasized narrative in the Museum of Champions presented an undisrupted chronology, where the central players remained constant. The photographs showed giants of men—physical, strong, definite, and legendary. Banished were the permeable boundaries of contemporary gender identities. Masculinity in the Museum of Champions was cast from the superhuman mould of the ancients—captured in time, no fear of ageing there. And, since the anticipated future promised to remain true to this past, the museum could function as a house of dreams for the young. Nowhere in this dark space were the troubles of beleagured European identities at risk of loss of history, culture, and wealth from nations and markets more fitted for global capitalism—the stability of local heritage was represented at the core of the competition. Yet other footballing histories were being displaced by that very Champions League final. Wembley could not host both the final and the English football league playoffs, so despite the Football Association’s twenty-year contract to host them at Wembley, the latter went elsewhere that year. The FA Cup itself, the world’s oldest football competition, has long since been overshadowed by the wealth and glory offered by a place in the Champions League. Champions League money comes from television. Before the final, ITV was primed to make £8 million in advertising revenue, thirty-second spot ads being expected to fetch around £200,000—the United Kingdom’s ‘Super Bowl moment’. The following year, UEFA made a total of €1.1 billion, 79 percent being distributed among the participating clubs according to a complex formula that favours the biggest clubs in the richest leagues, thereby entrenching the advantage of the already successful. In addition, the raised international profile brings in more money for the clubs’ own commercial activities—it is all about the brand. Ubiquitous computing brings ever-new opportunities for sponsors to create a brand experience. Since TV spectators increasingly want to interact with laptops and mobile devices while watching football, sponsors are investing in ways to exploit ‘dual screening’. In 2011, Heineken became one of the first brands to launch an interactive game played in real time on the iPhone and iPod Touch, or via Facebook. According to Heineken, the game will change the way ‘football fans interact with the Champions League, creating a more social experience around watching matches’, replacing perhaps the more dated social experience that used to be available at a live game.

74

Eileen Kennedy

The existence of a demand for dual screening suggests that contemporary football spectators are only distractedly interested in the Champions League. Yet, given that the brand is organizing the way we engage with the meanings of football, maybe disinterest is our only defence. Enrapture may not be the most appropriate mode of reception of the narratives in the Museum of Champions. A casual glance at glory before shopping or a show may enable visitors to see more clearly than those captivated by the objects on display. The departing visitor’s encounter with a rather less-impressive fairground of branded football attractions in the park outside could certainly do much to put the narrative of legends into perspective.

16 Femininity and the Body Spectacle and Signification Richard Berger and Mark Readman

In this essay, we offer, by way of reimagining as an act of ‘updating’, two contemporary versions of the spectacle of the female body. These analyses offer equivalency and continuation to/of ‘Striptease’ and ‘The Face of Garbo’.

MYTH 1: THE STRIPCLUB BY RICHARD BERGER Roland Barthes’s opening gambit for his essay, ‘Striptease’, is, at first glance, a jarring contradiction: ‘Woman is desexualised at the very moment she is stripped naked’—for Barthes, this spectacle is based on fear, or the pretence of fear; eroticism is reduced to nothing more than a ‘delicious terror’. Barthes makes clear distinctions along class lines, too, examining both the awkward ‘amateur’ striptease and the more professional ‘sport’ of the Moulin Rouge. Today, the striptease is far more professional, but certainly no more erotic. In Mythologies, Barthes was attempting not only to unmask semiotically the language of mass culture, but also to ‘account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature’. When Barthes was writing his essay, Paris in the late 1950s was becoming full of striptease clubs, which catered to a discerning middle-class clientele; it was partially civilised. Now in the United Kingdom, few towns and cities do not have a strip club somewhere, if not more than one, which serves to prove Barthes’s reasoning that something quite middle class was now part of everyday life. It was once big business, with 3.5 million men each week visiting strip clubs in Las Vegas alone at the end of the twentieth century. These super clubs were more like nightclubs and therefore were much less about performance, or art, than in 1950s Paris. Art wasn’t the point. But, it never was. The stripteases of Barthes’s time attempted to appropriate the conventions and cachet of performance at least, but the strip joints of today cut straight to the chase; the women are almost naked before the strip begins. Men don’t notice the dancing, it’s completely redundant.

76

Richard Berger and Mark Readman

The female body is different now, too. In the 1950s striptease, the strip narrative began with the stripper fully clothed; she gradually revealed herself during the dance, only being fully naked right at the very end of the story. Today, the stripper is virtually naked from the start, and the strip goes on to reveal an augmented reality of fake tan, tattoos, piercings, hair extensions, pubic topiary, and plastic surgery. For Barthes, the time taken in shedding clothes makes us all voyeurs; the costumes the strippers wear establish immediately that women are objects in disguise. The trick, he says, is to make nakedness look natural, and therefore, chaste; the clothing is meant to make the body seem remote. In today’s strip club, the body is anything but natural, and the shedding of clothes exchanges nothing more than one virtual reality for another. Even when the stripper is naked, she isn’t naked; she must create a fantasy and maintain a distance throughout her performance. Barthes’s book is all about modern myths, and myths give shape and flight to other myths. The striptease (which is now far from a tease) is surrounded by the paratextual; confessional memoirs, novels, feature films, and reality television—plus decades of feminist cultural theory—have all created the myth that the stripper is empowered by what she does. The stripper is always portrayed as a bright undergraduate who enjoys the hours, the tips, and the exhibitionism. In these narratives, she’s never a single mother, struggling to pay the rent. This myth serves to allay any guilt the audience may feel. Gangs of men arrive at the strip club in packs, tempted by free entry and free drinks. They are then subdivided into their constituent parts and marshalled off to semienclosed booths for ‘private’ shows. The more they pay, the longer and more enthusiastically the already-naked stripper will dance. Despite the fact that some physical contact is allowed here, the dance is still fairly chaste since the man must perform at least as equally as his stripper. His performance displays to the rest of the pack how much he is enjoying himself. The role reversal’s end aim is to make the client the spectacle, and his awkward actions akin to the types of amateur dances Barthes documents. Now the strip club looks rather old fashioned. Its relative respectability has become its doom. Its presence on every high street, and the legions of respectable women attempting to lose weight by learning to pole dance, means it can no longer inoculate the public with the ‘touch of evil’ Barthes describes. The striptease has moved from the private sphere of the strip club, to both the public sphere of the local fitness class and the intimate sphere of the bedroom. In Barthes’s time, the striptease was a live, lived experience. Framed by at least at attempt at performance and art, it provided a public spectacle of female nudity for a middle-class, post-war Parisian audience. The modern strip clubs that followed in its wake oxymoronically went further in terms of how much naked flesh was revealed, and for how long, but this further stripped the stripper of any eroticism. The props in Barthes’s day could include cigarettes, parasols, and even gondolas—all acting as roadblocks on

Femininity and the Body

77

the way to the eagerly anticipated ending—but have now been reduced to a single steel pole, bolted from floor to ceiling. These props, which were on the outside of the body, are now on the body and, in some cases, are part of the body. Today’s private dance, which brought both stripper and audience closer together, actually moved them further apart. The augmented body of the stripper, now more naked than ever before, anticipated an ideal, but could never deliver. In writing about the striptease, Barthes predicted much about modern culture, and how middle-class concerns and activities would become universal. What he didn’t predict, however, was how these cultural moments would be reconfigured and how the fake reality of the augmented body would become more intoxicating than a ‘real’ woman’s body; the fake is now the real thing.

MYTH 2. THE BUM OF MIDDLETON BY MARK READMAN ‘Pippa Middleton’s bottom “too bony”, claim French.’1 The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April 2011 was a remarkable media event, not least because of the attention given to the sister of the bride’s backside; in the sacred space of Westminster Abbey, much of the focus was on the profane, subsequently spawning a Facebook appreciation page, at least one Twitter account, and a dedicated website. The excitement, speculation, and fetishisation reveal something about the order of things—the signification of the body. Shortly after the wedding, the comedian Richard Herring, in his satirical internet show As It Occurs to Me, introduced us to the character of ‘Pippa Middleton’s disembodied anus’2. In this absurd, grotesque invention, he draws attention to the mythologisation of the body in general, and particularly, the buttocks. Despite the suspension of disbelief involved, the conceit is built on a kind of logic; Herring excitedly announces that he has ‘the interview that all others wanted’ and entreats his audience to ‘please give it up for Pippa Middleton’s arse!’ But, his disappointment is palpable when it becomes apparent that he has inadvertently booked only the anus, rather than the ‘voluptuous buttocks’. When disparaged, the anus reasonably argues: ‘Hold on, why is it OK to be fascinated by a woman’s buttocks, publish photos of them and talk endlessly about them, but not her anus? I’m still part of Pippa’s arse—a crucial part’, which makes the satirical purpose explicit. This dislocation has a comedic effect (the voice of the anus is, incongruously, upper class, with a slight lisp), but performs a disordering of the body—it dismantles the social construction of the body through the fictional physical fracturing. In this sense, it is reminiscent of the Trickster myth of the Winnebago Indians, and one story in particular, in which the Trickster

78

Richard Berger and Mark Readman

colludes with his anus as an ally, but ends up punishing it for letting him down. Mary Douglas suggests that the Trickster’s journey from ignorance to knowledge describes cultural progress from an undifferentiated universe to one in which limits, functions, and social order are inscribed.3 And this ‘post primitive’ condition depends upon the production and reinforcement of meanings and boundaries. The buttocks and anus are inscribed differently in the social order; however, it is their physical proximity that continually threatens to jeopardise the order in which they are separated; buttocks can be associated with cleanliness and purity (think of those adverts for baby powder in which the buttocks of children are rendered ‘kissable’), whereas the anus is associated with contamination and dirt (in Herring’s sketch, the disembodied anus is referred to pejoratively through slang profanities as a ‘chocolate starfish’ and ‘rusty sheriff’s badge’, both reminiscent of Rabelais’s ‘dusthole’). However, problematically, the word ‘arse’ incorporates, and can refer to, both buttocks and anus, and the idiom ‘to bum’ means to sodomise. The discourse of the bum, therefore, must work hard to maintain this separation, while being caught in a double bind, for the erotic charge of the buttocks is dependent upon the transgressive possibilities of what they conceal and what gives them form and function. In the case of Pippa’s bum, this charge and tension is heightened by her association with royalty, and the solemnity of the occasion, which raise the stakes considerably. The discourse is fuelled by that which is disavowed—it is dependent upon, but does not acknowledge, the fantasies of transgression and, on these hidden foundations, is built a new ‘denatured’ nature in which the bum becomes form and texture—a kind of art object. Pippa’s dress, like that of her sister, was designed by Sarah Burton of the Alexander McQueen fashion house. The smooth, figure-hugging design with silk-covered buttons, like vertebrae, down the spine invokes the naked body, but a body denuded of its material functions; like Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus, this body exists in a nonmaterial realm, yet it provokes material desire—it is ‘immaterially material’. This tension between ‘reality’ and ‘unreality’ is also evident in the speculation about the means of production of such a bum; possible technologies through which the bum may have been enhanced, such as swimming, yoga, and Pilates, have all been mooted and even celebrated as evidence of achievement, but also as containing the possibility of emulation—anyone could have a bum like this. This technologisation of Pippa’s bum not only distances it from the unpalatable, excretory functions of the anus, but it confers upon it a kind of morality and integrity; this bum is the result of work and effort. Any suggestion that padded or otherwise engineered underwear might be responsible reveals this investment in the integrity of the bum-object, and also draws attention to the categorisation and legitimation of different kinds of technologies in the assessment of whether or not the bum can be considered ‘genuine’ and, therefore, praiseworthy. The perfect bum, then, is one that embodies the quality of

Femininity and the Body

79

sprezzatura, described by Castiglione as an all-concealing art4; Pippa’s nonchalant, self-effacing bum, therefore, represents a Renaissance ideal. But perhaps as significant is the chain of association activated by a profusion of signs around Prince William, previous royal weddings, and the imprimatur of Alexander McQueen, whose glamorous clientele and early death invokes the ghost of Princess Diana, about whom there was also considerable comment regarding her shape, clothing and, later, sexual habits. The resonance of glamour, sex, tragic early death, sublime emotion, piety, and respect during the royal wedding required some kind of outlet, and Pippa’s bum was the vent. Pippa’s bum is physiologically unremarkable, but mythologically significant; the investment in Pippa’s nether regions is a kind of carnivalesque inversion, like those described by Bakhtin5 and, like our medieval antecedents, we become gleeful, drunken serfs in those spaces where such transgression is permitted. Onto Pippa’s bum were displaced a range of anxieties, dissatisfactions, aspirations, and desires—a lot for one bum to contain.

NOTES 1. Metro, 11 June 2011. 2. As it Occurs to Me, 2011. Series 3, Episode 1. 17 May 2011. http://www. comedy.co.uk/podcasts/as_it_occurs_to_me/show/s3_1/ 3. Douglas, M., 2002. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge. p.100. 4. Castiglione, B., 1976. The Book of the Courtier. Bull, G., Trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 5. Bakhtin, M., 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

17 Reflections on a Passport Liesbet Van Zoonen

If there is a mythical document par excellence, it must be the passport. The proverbial Martian who does not know what things on Earth are, let alone what they mean, would see little more than a bundle of different sorts of paper—plastic, textilish, card stock, smooth, rough—with letters, a picture, and possibly some elaborate icons. A smart and sensitive Martian would notice that an earthling who looked like the image in the bundle guarded it carefully, and the Martian would therefore conclude that the bundle was important. Further investigation would reveal that the bundle allows the earthling to travel between ‘countries’, and that it also serves as proof of the earthling’s identity.

A TRAVEL DOCUMENT? That is the meaning of the passport at its basic level, at the level of a first order ‘semiological’ system, as Barthes would say: it is a travel and authentication document having a number of different signs, like a picture, extra-small print, and watermarks, proving that both the document and its owner are authentic. That meaning of the passport may be basic, but it is far from irrelevant. I remember clearly how not so long ago, our family wanted to board a ferry from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom. I carried an obligatory ID card for myself, and my passed-its-date passport with a picture, civic number, and birth date of my youngest son to prove his identity. I was convinced that the combined authentication documents would grant us access; I could prove I was me, and therefore, I could prove that my old passport was valid identification even if outdated, and this—in combination—would then say that my son was my son. The border control officer did not fall for my iron logic and mercilessly sent us back home. I saw East Midlands Airport staff do a similarly harsh trick; a couple who were both certainly more than ninety years old, on their way to visit their grandchildren, tried to board the airplane with their tickets but without picture ID. All such officers are obliged to do these things, when people don’t have

Reflections on a Passport

81

a correct ID or passport; for instance, when the passport picture does not resemble the person handing it over. Evidently, border police have not read Barthes; otherwise, they would understand that a certain discrepancy between signifier and signified is predictable, in fact inevitable, in any system of representation. On the contrary, nation-states and their border control standardly assume that a complete match between signifier and signified is possible and—this is where the first passport myth comes in—that biometric representation can provide it. The newest of the newest passports, required by all countries in the European Union, contain a chip with fingerprint information and require a picture that can be scanned by facial recognition software. The belief is that body parts and processes represent unique individual authenticators: that our fingerprint, iris, retina, face, or voice, and—to mention some of the less obvious biometrics—our body odour, heartbeat, gait, and butt are unique to us and provide infallible measures that prove we are who we say we are. This biometric myth goes hand in hand with the one of technological supremacy, and we can easily see where both go wrong if one considers the practicalities of travel and identification. One needs a process of interpretation to compare registrated biometrics to the ones found or observed in the situation in which they are controlled. That comparison will often be delegated to computers, but as we all know, they are prone to mistakes, power and system failure, or human error. My ‘own’ airport in the East Midlands, for instance, has had face recognition terminals in place for more than two years now, but the system is more often down than not, leaving us passengers in the rigid hands of human border police most of the time. Yet, to assume that foolproof technology and perfect humans would flawlessly assess biometric markers is a mistake, for—contrary to the biometric myth—those markers are ambiguous, as a Scottish police detective, Shirley McKie, has painfully experienced. In 1997, her thumbprint was found on a crime scene, while she claimed she had never been in the house. Nevertheless, she was subsequently suspended, fired, and arrested as a suspect of perjury, for which she was found not guilty. The case was thoroughly investigated by several police and parliamentary committees, which all concluded, in the end, that fingerprint comparison is based on weak methodology, especially ‘where it involves complex marks’1 (my italics). The final report, issued in 2011, said that, as a result, ‘fingerprint evidence should be recognised as opinion evidence, not fact’2, meaning that the ‘truth’ of a fingerprint is a matter of interpretation rather than indisputable fact.

COSMOPOLITANS AND TRAVELLERS All of this refers to the passport’s quality as a travel-and-authentication document. There are, of course, many more myths to the passport. As Barthes said, one object can become the carrier of different myths, and

82

Liesbet Van Zoonen

these can disappear again with time. It may be likely, indeed, that the passport will lose its mythical status in the future, but let’s postpone that issue for now and work further on other current myths, for instance, the one of the cosmopolitan. Those of us who came of age before ‘Schengen’3 will remember the excitement of crossing a European border complete with landmark, barrier, and customs office. If you had time and a friendly border officer, you would ask for a stamp to prove your entry into foreign territory. The result was a passport that said you had seen the world, or Europe at least, and that you were not a dull, provincial, petit-bourgeois who only knew and liked his own vicinity. This is all in the past: when some time ago, we took our children cycling in the eastern countryside of The Netherlands, we must have crossed the border with Germany at some point, because we arrived in a town that had German street names. The children’s sense of disappointment that they had not crossed a visible border was considerable. We thus retraced our route to see where we missed the border mark, but we could not find any. Obviously, we sneered, it had been removed with Deutsche Gründlichkeit. For the kids, there are other markers of cosmopolitanism now: they, for instance, can use the Facebook TripAdvisor app, which allows them to put their pins on a virtual map so their friends can see where they have been. Otherwise, they must do some serious, outside Europe travelling to assemble the collection of border-crossing stamps in their passport that would give them access to that mythical status of ‘cosmopolitan’: travelling for pleasure, at home in the world, open to others, and excited about the peculiarities of other cultures. Of necessity, a cosmopolitan is rich and rooted, because without money, travel would be no fun and without the roots; ‘travel’ would become something else entirely, truly nomadic, but also excluded and stigmatized. The word ‘traveller’, in the English language, is not only used for those who travel, but also for stateless, dispersed Roma people who move through Europe without a fixed residence. Often lacking a recognized passport, they do have a mythical status, but one that is rather dark. A UK Roma interest group lists about ten myths about the Roma that need refutation, for instance, that Roma are not foreign but have been part of British society for more than 500 years, or that most of them (90 percent) do not wander around in caravans but live in houses.4 Unlike the cosmopolitan, the Roma traveller is not admired, but rejected; not imitable, but suspected; not appreciated, but discriminated. Hence, a world of injustice and discrimination is symbolized in the presence or absence of a passport, and it is no wonder that within Roma circles, quite a controversy has erupted about the need for a specific Roma passport. The International Romani Union has tried to get such a document recognized, whereas the European Roma and Traveller Forum warns Roma that it would not have any validity as a means of identification or authentication for national authorities.5

Reflections on a Passport

83

NATIONAL LOYALTIES This controversy reveals that a particular set of mythical qualities of the passport is tied to national citizenship rather than to individual identity. While the document literally signifies who one is, the wider meaning is that one ‘belongs’ to a particular nation-state and adheres to its rules and cultural codes. The often-transnational status of Roma people does not satisfy this broader mythology of the passport as a key marker of the nation-state. Consider, in further evidence, the recent paranoia among some Dutch politicians about their colleagues who hold two passports: one from their country of origin and one from the Netherlands. In a series of embarrassing parliamentary encounters, the double-passport holders were questioned about their loyalty to the Netherlands. In 2004, a minister publicly scolded an MP for waving both her Moroccan ànd her Dutch passport in parliament instead of saying that she found The Netherlands more important than Morocco. In 2007, an MP proposed to prevent a Moroccan and a Turkishborn candidate from taking up executive posts in the new cabinet, because the candidate would embody irreconcilable conflicts of interests between the Netherlands and foreign states, and could therefore not be trusted. While public and parliamentary uproar about these allegations was considerable, it led nevertheless to a serious proposal to abolish dual citizenship, because, to paraphrase the responsible minister, ‘the Dutch passport is the crown on participation and integration into society’. Dutch expats, on the other hand, would be allowed to keep their Dutch passport when migrating to another country, because ‘we are proud of those Dutch nationals who export our knowledge and expertise’.6 So, the current Dutch government (which will leave after the elections of September 2012) not only writes a double standard into its definition of citizenship, but it also suggest that one nationality is better than two, and—how delusional—that of those two, the Dutch one would always be the best! One would laugh outloud if it weren’t so pathetic. Such an articulation of the passport with national loyalty is relatively new. The etymology of the word is not entirely clear. It could have come from a document that enables one to ‘pass the porte (gate)’ of a city, but it has also been said that it meant something like a ‘pass par tout’, a pass for everything. In any case, in previous times, it usually was a letter issued and stamped by an authority (often a king), telling that the carrier of the document was reputable, could travel through the country, and gain access to other nobility. For, of course, as nowadays, vagabonds could easily roam without documents, but would certainly not be welcomed everywhere. Tradesmen and workers also could travel without documents, but they would know the secrets of their trade or craft that would prove their trustworthiness to their unknown colleagues. In the Middle Ages, for instance, free masons recognized each other on the basis of shared and protected knowledge about masonry, hence feeding into the later myths about Freemasons as a secret

84

Liesbet Van Zoonen

society. Most passport historians7 refer to such early forms of identification (I am X), but connect the more specific form of ‘authentication’ that the current passport provides (I can prove I am X) to the needs of the emerging and warring nation-states. The American Civil War tightened authentication requirements there, and the outbreak of World War I meant that in Europe, too, the authentication of national citizens (as opposed to spies!) came to be seen as an absolute necessity. Ever since, a myth of national identity (loyalty, trustworthiness, allegiance) has been firmly tied to the possession of a national passport. To have none, or to have two (can one have even more?), has become deeply suspect, even in today’s globalized societies.

AWAY WITH THE PASSPORT As a travel document, however, the passport may have outlived its usefulness. As in the late nineteenth century when exploding railway travel caused such chaos in passport administration and control that the whole document was abolished for a while, nowadays, long queues, arbitrary control systems, and failing technologies are exercising an undeniable force toward more efficient and quicker systems for border crossings, especially at airports. Evidently, much of this came out of post 9/11 security desires, but the sheer mass of international travel too requires additional solutions. Interestingly, the various ‘trusted traveller’ cards that the UK and US governments are developing for usage at airports, enabling privileged border crossing, are not directly tied to a national identity. Instead, they are based on an assessment of being a low security risk and known passenger. Evidently, some citizens of some countries are unlikely to ever be considered ‘low risk’ (e.g., young men from Yemen or Pakistan), but in principle, trusted traveller schemes uncouple the modern link between nationality and identity, some one hundred years after its emergence. It thus may be that many of us won’t need a passport in the future, at least not for travel purposes. The savvy sign of cosmopolitanism will no longer be a well-stamped passport, but a trusted traveller card. It will still be a sign of privilege because, for reasons explained earlier, a real ‘traveller’ will be unlikely to acquire a trusted traveller card. Nevertheless, with the passport stripped of one mythical meaning, it might be that its silly signification of national loyalty could crumble as well. What does a passport mean, anyway, if it does not get us past the border? National citizenship? In my own country (The Netherlands), other authenticators are more helpful (and compulsory) to access one’s rights and fulfil one’s obligations: an identity card, a citizen-service number, a driving license, a health insurance code, and a digital-identity-code if you want to engage in online exchanges with the Dutch state. For interactions in the private sphere, such as with other individuals or with commercial organisations, a passport was never relevant to begin with. In addition, the possibilities of direct or remote measurement

Reflections on a Passport

85

of biometric information will take the whole need for a separate document away. The US army, for instance, is collecting biometric data from Afghan citizens, and especially from fighting-age males that come close to them. The resulting database, in combination with wireless scanners, is used for further identification and control at border crossings, but also in the fields or urban settings. No documents are needed. The film Minority Report, playing ‘sometime in the future’, shows how individuals are being identified by remote and mobile iris scanners, before being given permission to cross borders, access buildings, or simply buy stuff, also without paper trail. That is, of course, all highly controversial due to its infringements of civil rights, but it does suggest that we can do away with the passport altogether. As a travel document, it is outdated; as an authenticator of national citizenship, it is useless (let’s exaggerate). As a document that tells others who we are, it is too impersonal. This most individual of documents paradoxically looks the same for everyone. The state does not even allow you to take the best possible passport picture, smiling, with well-done hair, stylish makeup, or striking earrings; all of which would tell the world what a unique individual you are! Instead, we all have a red cover and collectively gawk into the camera lens, decoration and decorum obligatorily removed. With the passport in the bin, will we be rid of the nasty myths of national loyalty as well? Unlikely, because just as one object can carry different myths, one myth can tie itself to different objects. Barthes knew that, and we know that. The myth of national loyalty will thus find another anchor, which we then, again, will have to demythologize.

NOTES 1. O’Neill, E., 2011. Fingerprint evidence ‘based on opinion rather than fact’. The Guardian, 14 December 2011, last accessed July 9, 2012. 2. Ibid. 3. The Schengen treaty of 1985 removed border controls between five EU countries, and this has gradually been expanded to all EU countries. 4. http://grthm.natt.org.uk/myths-and-truths.php, last accessed July 23, 2012. 5. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Roma_Francais/message/1787, last accessed July 23, 2012. 6. http://community.expatica.com/forums/topic/185107/dual-nationalityescape-clause-for-dutch-expats-only, last accessed July 23, 2012. 7. E.g. Lloyd, M., 2005. The passport: the history of man’s most travelled document. The History Press. Robertson, C., 2010. The passport in America: the history of a document. Oxford University Press. Torpey, J., 2000. The invention of the passport: surveillance, citizenship and the state. Cambridge University Press .

18 Lobottonised Media—Mythological Thought for the Day Paul A. Taylor

‘The following contains opinions some viewers may find challenging’, warns the UK Channel 4 TV continuity announcer for the punningly entitled programme 4Thought. Apparently unironic, this announcement is intoned in the same way as the more usual warning: ‘The following may contain scenes of a sexual or violent nature that some viewers may find offensive’. It appears that, for a neophile media, challenging is the new offensive. 4Thought’s true significance, in contrast to the programme’s misleadingly cerebral title, resides in what it highlights about the media’s disturbingly conservative attitude toward concept-driven discourse—its pre-emptive, Minority Report-like, screening of imminent, incoming ideas. In this sea of media banality, it goes without saying that the BBC provides a tropical island refuge for serious programming; in reality, however, the BBC is arguably the most active anti-intellectual mythmaker precisely because of its pre-eminent cultural reputation for sober discourse. Its much-heralded motto of ‘Nation shall speak peace unto Nation’ could be rewritten more accurately as, ‘the petit-bourgeois nation shall speak arbitrary pieces of myth unto a grateful nation’. In defence of the BBC, two key environmental factors are mitigating against its ability to provide intelligent programming: 1) However noble its intentions might be, media broadcasting has innate myth-producing tendencies that have yet to be described more incisively and succinctly than McLuhan’s aphorism ‘the medium is the message’. Media content is invariably subordinated to the pervasive dominance of image and/or sound bite. Gestural tropes replace genuine thought so naturally and organically that, as Barthes put it, ‘the whole of Molière is seen in a doctor’s ruff’. 2) We live in selectively elitist, anti-intellectual times. While Premiership football receives record amounts of TV income for its unprecedentedly popular spectacle-of the neo-Darwinian prosperity of the fittest, and Simon Cowell throws tuneless believers to leonine crowds, the very notion of showcasing ability based upon education and learning is taboo.

Lobottonised Media—Mythological Thought for the Day

87

The first of the above barriers is something an intellectually aspiring and reflexively myth-busting BBC would need to battle constantly against. However, despite its supposed credo of ‘Inform, educate, and entertain’, the BBC has become a key part of the anti-intellectual zeitgeist with its enthusiastic subordination of the first two values to the third. While lots of the media’s lowbrow content does not bear serious thinking about, much more harmfully, nominally serious programmes just don’t bear thinking. But it would be wrong to lay the blame at the faults of popular culture; rather, we should focus upon the underacknowledged depredations inflicted upon thought by those we would normally view as its guardians—society’s purported thinkers. Such programmes as Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe demonstrate that it is indeed possible to stay true to the BBC’s founding credo, but they are the exceptions that prove the lobottonized rule—a rule so effortlessly practised by Alain De Botton, its eponymous and most egregious living exponent. In the lobottonizing process, thought is routinely decaffeinated through permeation by facile observations and sustained exposure to the conceptual equivalent of carbon dioxide. Thus leached of excessively stimulating properties, culture need not discombobulate us as Swann’s way is desublimated into the primrosed path of the self-help industry, resulting in the availability of How Proust Can Change Your Life at all bad bookshops. Similarly, in De Botton’s role as ‘philosopher in residence’ at Heathrow airport, a shimmy of intellectual aikido turns the infra dig notion of the airport novel into the masterfully vacuous The Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary. The attitude the media cultivates toward thought is something akin to an opera audience’s typically less-than-spontaneous laughter at a well-known feature of the plot—a slightly forced and arch form of appreciation based upon safe foreknowledge of what is to come.

IDLE TALK—HIDING A DEAD BODY ON A BATTLEFIELD Myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear. (Barthes) Predictably excluded from the serious media’s self-regarding frame of reference, Martin Heidegger gives us the notion of idle talk to better understand the media’s reliance upon the ‘undifferentiated kind of intelligibility’ that replaces substantive thought with spectacle-infused pseudo-events and tautological media figures who are well known for being well known. In its contemporary form, however, idle talk is notable for the openness with which it disguises its true function. This paradox is illustrated by G. K. Chesterton’s short story ‘The Broken Sword’, in which a general guilty of killing a man in cold blood hides the body by engineering a full battle so that a single corpse will pass unnoticed. This is the (il)logical conclusion of

88

Paul A. Taylor

today’s society of the spectacle in which the realms of action, representation, and alienation are all combined in a mode of discourse that obfuscates through excessive exposure. The individual guilt of concept-killers like De Botton is more easily exculpated in the context of an all-out media war against unadulterated thought. Slavoj Žižek is fond of telling an Eastern European joke in which a security guard suspects a factory worker of stealing something, even though, every day, the worker just wheels away an empty wheelbarrow. On retiring, the guard begs the worker to reveal what he was stealing and duly receives the reply, ‘wheelbarrows!’ The media’s trick consists of not excluding thought in toto, but rather in finding well-appointed reservations in which intellectual endeavour is protected by the sort of freedom enjoyed by Native American casino owners. The marshals patrolling the boundaries of the reservation are journalists whose main qualification for pontification is their tautologically self-justifying status as pontificators. When space can be found for potentially disruptive intellects, supplementary distortion takes place through the application of reassuringly familiar stereotypes. This gives us the avuncular genius of Stephen Fry, the professional contrarianism of Dr David Starkey, and the winsomely toothy approachability of the galactically ubiquitous Professor Brian Cox. Based upon the guiding maxim that ‘the examined life is not worth living. lobottonized thought transforms philosophy’s timeless search for truth into a state of voluntary servitude to the prosaic demands of a time-conscious media. Gone are the days when clever ideological manipulations were required to achieve the desired outcome. Resolutely brazen, like Chesterton’s murderous general, De Botton explains his intellectually packaged anti-intellectualism thusly: My feeling is that the term ‘public intellectual’ should be stretched to include those whose ideas help to determine what goes on in the broad swathe of national life, not just poetry or the essay, but in education, housing, health, transport, architecture and so on. Most of the really influential intellectuals are now employed by the state and we’ve never heard of them. They don’t generally have a public profile, but they have a public impact—I think that’s where the confusion often comes in. We think we have no public intellectuals because we don’t have BernardHenri Lévy. But BHL doesn’t make anything happen; he just writes books that appeal to, at the very best, 20,000 of his country folk. What we do have here are people such as Mervyn King, who takes big, intellectually founded decisions on the future of the country, or Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, who ends up deciding how TV happens here. The most influential of our public intellectuals are those whose hands are on the biggest levers. For this reason I’d nominate King as the most influential, closely followed by Michael Gove, whose

Lobottonised Media—Mythological Thought for the Day

89

thinking determines how our children are taught. Thereafter, David Willetts, whose ideas impact on how our universities are run. The French have always celebrated their public intellectuals. Why are we so ashamed of ours? (Alain De Botton quoted in The Observer 08/05/11). Without dwelling upon the psychoanalytical significance of De Botton’s fascination with the size of power’s levers, his anti-conceptual manifesto achieves the unlikely feat of simultaneously channelling the spirit of Marx and contemporary Conservatism. His reinterpretation of the notion of the public intellectual both evokes Marx’s eleventh thesis on Fuerbach (‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’) and yet also manages to read like a roll call of the leading lights of today’s Conservative power brokers. Lobottonized thought acts as the intellectual WD-40 for the media’s systematized production of what ‘goes without saying’, producing, to paraphrase a well-known term, a media industrial noncomplex that works in close accordance with the sorts of rhetorical forms that underlie bourgeois myth.

THE BOURGEOIS MYTH OF THE MEDIA INDUSTRIAL NON-COMPLEX Droit de seigneur refers to the apocryphal medieval right of a lord to be the first to bed his vassals’ brides. The historical accuracy of the notion is less significant than the deeper underlying truth of its striking depiction of power’s amoral insouciance. In distinctly non-apocryphal contemporary media terms, this insouciance manifests itself as ethical and intellectual considerations of fitness for purpose are supplanted by the tautologously self-justificatory presence of media figures whose significance is based upon the extent to which they figure in the media. For example, immediately after the English summer urban riots of 2011, Kelvin MacKenzie an ex-editor of The Sun tabloid newspaper, was one of the commentators chosen to opine on the ‘state of the nation’ by the producers of BBC 2’s current-affairs programme Newsnight. Similarly, Alastair Campbell (former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s director of communications) is regularly consulted on a wide range of media issues for various TV and radio channels. Given the active role of the former in some of the worst excesses of British tabloid journalism (e.g., the malicious misreporting of events at the Hillsborough football disaster) and the latter’s contribution to the ‘dodgy dossier’ that misleadingly contributed to Britain’s involvement in the invasion and post-war tragedies of Iraq, the continued mythical media status of MacKenzie and Campbell provides eloquent testimony to the media’s systematically perverted nature. In medieval times, power’s self-justification required violent enforcement,

90

Paul A. Taylor

whereas today, it assumes much less dramatic, much more routinized and embedded forms. Before thought itself can be fully lobottonized through the use of such rhetorical forms as tautology, common-sense statement of facts and the privation of history, its petit-bourgeois environment needs to be cultivated using such forms as inoculation and identification. Inoculation ‘consists in admitting the accidental evil of a class-bound instititution the better to conceal its principal evil’ (Barthes). For example, the relocation of parts of the BBC to Salford’s Media City serves to inoculate the country from Northern chippiness and helps to label as churlish those who would persist in pointing out that such relocation applies predominantly to the broadcasting categories of sport and children’s entertainment. Identification, meanwhile, refers to ‘how in the petit-bourgeois universe all the experiences of confrontation are reverberating, any otherness is reduced to sameness. The spectacle or the tribunal, which are both places where the Other threatens to appear in full view, become mirrors’ (Barthes). By way of illustration, shortly prior to the last British election, a member of the audience on BBC TV’s flagship political-debate programme Question Time asked the panel of assorted politicians and public figures a pointed question about the desirability of the disproportionately public-school/Oxbridge University-educated nature of British political leaders. The chairman David Dimbleby (educated at Charterhouse school and a member of Oxford University’s [in]famous Bullingdon Club), proceeded to lightheartedly ask the panel (only one of whom was not public school-educated) who happened to be the most privileged amongst their own number. The direct class-orientated question was defused with a degree of sang froid that possibly only those incontrovertibly self-identified with the bourgeois power can muster so effortlessly. After the media’s necessary preparatory cultural processes of inoculation and indoctrination come the rhetorical forms of tautology and the commonsense statement of facts that, as we shall shortly see, combine to create a more effective privation of history. Encapsulated within the media, these forms mean that through our fibre-optic facilitated, twenty-four-hour news culture, we witness spectacles (most recently riots) as spectacles to be witnessed. Our high-definition images, however, are high definition only in a purely technical sense, working as they do only to promote heraldically predictable and uninformative modes of (non)questioning. For example, only a matter of days before the UK urban riots in August 2011, a seventeen-year-old boy died and four others were seriously injured after being mauled by a polar bear while camping on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. As part of BBC Radio 4’s lunchtime news coverage, the presenter interviewed a previous survivor of a similar attack. The interview concluded with the question, ‘and what did you learn from your experience?’ A suitably laconic response might have been: ‘I learnt that in addition to defecating in the woods, polar bears also attack people’.

Lobottonised Media—Mythological Thought for the Day

91

Interestingly, however, an uninterrupted diet of media tautology can still lead to a gourmand’s ability to draw fine distinctions of taste. Thus, the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations was widely criticized for its uninformative nature—as if any possible coverage of self-evident events on screen unfolding at a media-unfriendly real-time pace could hope to go beyond the common-sense statement of the obvious. Middle England’s call for the return of broadcasting doyens like David Dimbleby to add gravitas to the Jubliee reporting can be seen to fit squarely within Barthes’s notion of arbitrariness enshrined within an individual, whereby ‘The foundation of the bourgeois statement of fact is common sense, that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks it’ (Barthes).

THE PRIVATION OF HISTORY—THE WAR ON TERROR OF THOUGHT All that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from. (Barthes) The combined mythological effect of the above factors is strongest in terms of how history itself becomes lobottonized. The Queen’s Jubilee celebrations again provide an example of this process in action at a seemingly harmless cultural level. The BBC-filmed pop concert held outside Buckingham Palace included a short medley from Sir Elton John. The fact that he is the same person who performed an emotionally charged, bittersweet rendition of Candle in the Wind at the funeral of Princess Diana and a time of much public ill-ease felt toward the royal family passed unremarked. In terms of more significant world affairs, media talking heads have long been complicit in pretending that there is something significant lying within the media’s empty wheelbarrows—images without historical content. The tautologous commonsense of watching what the cameras put in front of us serves to obscure the systematic violence of a system that paradoxically fills its reports with vividly unilluminating images of violence without history. Typically cursory attempts by TV news to provide historical context to its items are dominated by metronomically metonymic images. Complex cultural histories become inseparable in our mediated mind’s eye with reductively familiar pictures—bombed-out downtown Beirut, emaciated African babies, Uzi-toting Israeli soldiers, and keffiyehwearing Palestinian stone throwers. Explicit spectacles supplant sustained consideration of their primary causes—past and present. A specific illustration from the BBC of the combined ideological effects of the media’s rhetorical forms can be found in the new hybrid form of ‘docudrama’, the 2009 BBC docudrama Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution. The programme blends historical narrative with dramatic reenactments of key events in the first years of the revolutionary government,

92

Paul A. Taylor

as well as interspersing the opinions of historians, novelists, and cultural commentators on those dark Parisian days. Dramatic effect was ramped up by using shots of the various contributors looking directly into the camera and voicing, in stentorian tones, excerpts from Robespierre’s speeches. In Terror!, Žižek acts as the agent provocateur. Alone among the contributors, he resists and contradicts the programme’s sustained depiction of revolutionary fervour as something that is unremittingly negative and demanding of unequivocal condemnation. Selectively edited for maximum shock value, his enthusiastic endorsement of the Jacobin violence necessary to achieve authentic social change is repeatedly juxtaposed with the British TV historian Simon Schama’s emoting of heartfelt contempt for anyone who does not share his unreserved condemnation. At the end of the programme, on the otherwise black screen appears the written statement that 55,000 people died during the Terror of 1789–1793. In a crude calculus of comparative historical deaths, and given the breathlessly offended tone of the preceding narrative, this is something of an anticlimax. The programme proves incapable of estimating a comparable figure for massively greater number of deaths attributable to the (admittedly less dramatic) diurnal grind of the Ancien Regime’s oppressive wheels. Frequently accused of tastelessness, ever since Diogenes, thinkers have at least put obscenity into the service of uncovering the much greater political obscenities that media-friendly intellectuals like Simon Schama are unwilling to see—the disowned levels of violence and harm visited upon others so that our liberal democracies may function smoothly. Quick to condemn the loss of life for radical political change, talking heads tend to be much more coy about the loss of human life considered an acceptable price to be paid for such ‘nonviolent’ actions as the US/UK-sponsored UN sanctions against Iraq (1990–2003), even though the evidence is in plain sight. For example, on the US current-affairs programme 60 Minutes. the then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked: ‘We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima . . . is the price worth it?’. She replied, ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.’ (5/12/1996) Whether the historical period under consideration is the Terror of the prerevolutionary Ancien Régime or today’s continuation of ‘normal’ international politics by other means—The War on Terror – the media routinely excludes from our consideration the mundane background facts of day-to-day violence and oppression in its pursuit of the politics of the spectacle. Ironically, a culture dominated by reality TV formats facilitates rather than lessens a cultural proclivity for reality displacement. This is what enables the coexistence of a calm discussion of 500,000 dead contemporary children and dramatically emotional depictions of political executions that took place more than 200 years ago. Terror thus becomes an interchangeably inane term to refer to both French Revolutionary violence and the modern West’s declaration of war upon an abstract noun. This is the mythological

Lobottonised Media—Mythological Thought for the Day

93

process designed to avoid recognising the true costs of institutionalized violence, to reproduce rather than question, ‘what goes without saying’. Thus, we have BBC costume docudramas about the French Revolution while there are no accurate statistics for the estimated hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died during and after the Allied invasion. The BBC’s coverage of the invasion’s aftermath was dominated for weeks by the undeniably tragic, but equally undeniable, individual death of Dr David Kelly and the related resignation of a BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan. Meanwhile, in the Congo, Western media are unable to inform us to the nearest million of the accumulated death toll from years of conflict.

CONCLUSION—A TALE OF TWO AXES In a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, Franz Kafka suggested that ‘we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? . . . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe’. What I believe is that today’s media substitutes the ice pick for the frozen sea within us with the sort of ice pick that was the last thing Trotsky saw. Paraphrasing Barthes, in our age of media mythology . . . what I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the insufficient condition of a truth that has lost its relevance in a frozen sea of idle talk.

19 Ripper Dan Laughey

The Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley; Donald Neilson, the Black Panther; Trevor Hardy, the Beast of Manchester; Mark Rowntree, the spree killer; Ronald Castree, the child murderer; Mary Bell the Tyneside Strangler . . . and, most notorious of them all, Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. These are just some of the serial killers roaming northern England from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Add to these infamous personalities a catalogue of bleak and blighted events over the same dark period, further tarnishing London-centric perceptions of them up north: the Miners’ strike, Leeds United hooligans, the Windscale nuclear fire, the Bradford City fire disaster, the M62 coach bombing, the Manchester Airport disaster, and innercity riots in Toxteth, Liverpool; Moss Side, Manchester; and Chapeltown, Leeds. Let us note, in this same period, plenty of tragic, violent, or dissident acts that were committed in the south of England and elsewhere. Indeed, statistical analysis would probably reveal the unexceptional character of northern crime rates, industrial disputes, terrorist attacks, and tragic accidents. But, still, it is the myth of the late twentieth-century north as dark, seedy, rundown, depressing, and downright unfriendly that persists in the contemporary collective imagination. Completely contrived, of course, would be an argument that suggested certain instruments of the state, the establishment, the national media, and so on, conspired to ascribe an ideology of barbarism and nonconformism to the people of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the great industrial cities of Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle. The myth of the north as a backward and unruly place was not imposed from above by some ruling elite located in the south; rather, it emerged from below and within, propagated by northerners, more so than anyone else. Yet the myth, once born, lived on and still does, resisting rational explanation and the course of time, with the Yorkshire Ripper remaining the case par excellence. The remediation of contemporary newspaper and television reporting of the thirteen women murdered by Sutcliffe between 1975 and 1980, blended into documentary and fictional reconstructions of the Ripper case, compounds the myth rather than challenges it. Subsequent developments

Ripper

95

in forensic science, especially DNA profiling, have the strangely unscientific effect of revealing fragments of a forgotten past, bringing closure to unsolved crimes once attributed to Sutcliffe, but reopening old wounds and exposing the ineptitude of criminal investigations. David Peace’s acclaimed Red Riding Quartet of novels play with these stark boundaries between fact and fiction, statement and rumour, truth and corruption. The second and third volumes in particular, 1977 and 1980, pastiche an atmosphere of confusion, malpractice, and fear about what will happen next. The West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police are impotent and incompetent in their search for the Ripper, yet they refuse to change their course. The Ripper cassette tapes posted to senior detectives warning them of future victims, later found to be hoax tapes, are given far too much credence to the detriment of more promising leads. Important files go missing. Police officers are just as likely to use prostitutes as arrest their pimps. And the vice detective from the Greater Manchester force, drafted in to shed new light on the case, is given the unflattering nickname ‘Saint Cunt’ by his West Yorkshire colleagues. Poetic license far outweighs any justice to history in Peace’s novels, but it is precisely the muddled collective memory of the Ripper case that affords the Red Riding Quartet a legitimate claim at capturing the spirit of the age. This is history not only capable of being rewritten amid a dearth of authenticity, but made more convincing by amplifying the deep uncertainty of the events it portrays. The chronological structure of the novels, accentuated by their numerical titles, hammer home the social realism. The most infamous Ripper, of course, is Jack. Any account of the Yorkshire Ripper cannot ignore the long shadow cast by his predecessor. But, Jack the Ripper is no mere myth; he has become a Baudrillardian simulation. Whereas Sutcliffe’s crimes—underneath the myth—are and were horrifically real, Jack is hyperreal. Both Rippers murdered prostitutes; both Rippers were believed to be in communication with police and the press (in Jack’s case, through the medium of letters); both Rippers dumbfounded detection. The historical fact that distinguishes Sutcliffe’s myth from Jack’s simulation, put simply, was that Sutcliffe was identified and brought to justice (eventually). Jack escaped—and so did any sense of his evil reality. That is why the Whitechapel area of London, where Jack the Ripper is suspected to have murdered at least five prostitutes and committed several other violent crimes in 1888, is now a popular tourist destination. Jack the Ripper sells merchandise, packaged tours, video games—a whole commoditised experience that is a testament to our times and their fascination with verisimilitude. The great murderers of London town are celebrated, like everything else in that great city. Yorkshire, understandably, has no plans for a similar visitor attraction. Not even a century of mythmaking and myth-remaking will change its mind.

20 The Face of Noomi Rapace Roy Stafford

In the short essay in Mythologies with the title ‘The Face of Greta Garbo’ (written in 1955), Barthes discusses Garbo’s onscreen face in the role of Queen Christina (the 1933 film re-released in Paris in the early 1950s). He sets out an argument in which Garbo’s face becomes the archetype of the human face, ‘a Platonic idea of the human creature’. He plays with a specific contradiction between the rigidity of the ‘mask’ and the humanity of the spatial arrangement of the features. Yet this is an image from twenty years previous, and Barthes goes on to argue that the face now represents the ‘fragile moment when cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty’. Somehow, Barthes has transformed the single image into something dynamic that spans a time-based process. Finally, he compares Garbo’s face to a contemporary (1955) image—the face of young Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn’s face is ‘individualised’ partly because she offers a social type—(‘woman as child’, ‘woman as kitten’)—but also because Hepburn’s face is capable of ‘an infinite complexity of morphological functions’—in other words, she does not present us with a mask, that traditional mode of playing as archetype. The essay has presented ‘Garbo’s face’—or, more accurately, the signification of the transition from one kind of cinema to another—as a ‘myth’ circulating in French society in 1955. This essay attracted my attention for several reasons. I had vaguely remembered reading it in the 1970s. More importantly, I had just watched the astonishing performance of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (1954), and I was in the midst of working on Nordic cinema and the emergence of a new character, the young female investigator—often defined by her opposition to older men. The most prominent of these new characters is Lisbeth Salander, played in the adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, first by the Spanish-Swedish actor Noomi Rapace. My aim is to explore the image of Noomi/Lisbeth using the work of Barthes in Mythologies as my starting point. Barthes’s elegant little essay is provocative in itself, but needs to be combined with his broader discussion of ‘myth as a system of communication’ in the same collection to appreciate its full value. Barthes gives an example of a more clearly ‘political’ myth—an image of an African soldier in the French

The Face of Noomi Rapace

97

Army saluting and seemingly looking toward the French flag. (This was an image on the cover of a copy of Paris Match that Barthes was offered at his barber shop.) He suggests three ways to read this image by focusing on different aspects of the sign and the process of signification. In the first, the soldier becomes an example or a symbol of French ‘imperiality’ (this is 1955, when France is fighting colonialist wars). In the second, the reader is aware of the construction of the sign, and the soldier becomes an alibi of French imperiality. But, in the third case, the reader responds to the ‘constituting mechanism of myth, to its own dynamics’. Signification becomes ambiguous, and the soldier is no longer a symbol or an alibi; he is the presence of French imperiality. Very usefully, Barthes points out that the three readings are in turn, cynical, demystifying, and dynamic. When media education began to grapple with semiology, the demystifying analysis was paramount. It took us some time to discover the ‘dynamic’ reader who engages fully with the ‘writerly text’. I realise that I’ve already run into a trap—to which I’d been alerted by Barthes in his preface to the 1970 edition of Mythologies. He pointed out that by 1970, ‘the semiological analysis of language’ had become ‘more precise, complicated and differentiated’. In other words, if I’m going to discuss a contemporary myth using Barthes’s writings from 1955, I shouldn’t attempt to deal with all the theoretical work associated with the semiotics of film that followed Mythologies. Instead, I will confine the semiological analysis to the original model and focus on Barthes’s other aim to make ‘an ideological critique . . . of mass-culture’. I will extend, however, the range of my critical tools beyond the semiotic to include other aspects of film studies. What would the Barthes of 1955 have made of Noomi/Lisbeth? The first task is to focus on a single image. There are many differences between both the aesthetics and the institutional practices of Hollywood in 1933 and Nordic cinema seventy-five years later. Though she is one of the two lead characters in the first film of the trilogy Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women, 2009), Lisbeth is only glimpsed in the opening scenes of the film—we see what she is doing, but we don’t see her face clearly. In this sense, she makes her ‘entrance’ in the office of her employer Dragan Armanskij, where she has been summoned to give her surveillance report to the client in the case of Mikael Blomkvist. Setting is important. Noomi/Lisbeth’s face is not an isolated image—it creates meaning as part of the mise en scène. When she turns to face the camera in a low-angle long shot, in which she fills the height of the frame, she is completely out of place. In the company office of glass, metal, and wood panelling—the Scandinavian interior design menu so familiar in the United Kingdom from recent crime fiction TV series—Lisbeth is dressed in a black leather blouson/motorcycle jacket, skin-tight black jeans, and boots with rubber soles several inches thick. In addition, she has a black t-shirt with a design in silver/white (it isn’t possible to identify it unless the viewer has specialist

98

Roy Stafford

knowledge) and a black scarf around her neck overlayed with a spiked collar. A metal chain hangs in a loop suspended from her heavy belt. Her shirt or sweater emerges from the cuffs of her jacket and covers much of her hands, which are clutching a white mug of coffee. In the first close-up of Lisbeth, she is shown in sharp focus between the out-of-focus figures of the client in the foreground and her employer in the background. This image shows more clearly Lisbeth’s black (dyed?) hair, her similarly black mascara and almost black lipstick, and the piercings in her earlobes and nostrils with their gold rings. The black eyes and lips show strongly against the pallor of her skin. Her hair is cut fairly short at the back and sides, but falls across the left-hand side of her face in a concealing curtain. The camera angle, with her head half-turned toward the camera, allows us to see the pronounced cheekbones and slightly pointed chin in an otherwise broad and well-proportioned face. When Lisbeth answers questions, she doesn’t look at the client but looks out of the frame. When she does turn to address the client, it is a prelude to closing the conversation and her withdrawal from the meeting. In this short scene, we’ve noted several aspects of Lisbeth’s appearance and her behaviour in terms of ‘body language’: clothes, accessories, hair, makeup, and movements are designed to discourage close contact of any kind. We could find several other ‘images’ in this and the other two films in the trilogy, in which the hairstyle is slightly different and the costume is slightly changed, but for our purposes here, the image described above will be sufficient for analysis. The first point to make is that the image of Lisbeth is not presented in the striking poses adopted for the stills taken from Queen Christina. Closeups don’t feature as regularly in contemporary cinema, and widescreen compositions do not enhance the posed figure—or the portrait—as much as the squarer and more ‘upright’ Academy screen shape (i.e., 1.37:1). In the 1930s, Hollywood studios promoted their (contracted) film stars via carefully produced studio portraits—now accessible via Internet sites where the glamour of the studio era is celebrated. In addition, cinematographers were also charged with creating lighting setups that showed stars literally in their ‘best light’. Neither of these practices is evident in the Swedish trilogy. Noomi Rapace is in effect ‘buried’ within her role, and the images of her ‘off set’ are designed to emphasise her transformation into character. It could be argued that the ‘absence’ of these attempts to glamourise is in itself a signifier. Other images of Lisbeth Salander circulate in other media, however, and we’ll discuss these later. For Barthes, the actor’s face is polysemic—several signs together make up the whole, the face of Garbo or Noomi. There are also levels of signification so that the ‘myth’ is a ‘second-order semiological system’. Each separate sign is made up of a signifier and signified. So, the presentation of the face involves hair, skin tone, makeup, accessories, etc., each of which is

The Face of Noomi Rapace

99

lit and photographed to create individual meanings, and these are in turn combined and ‘read’ in the context of costume, posture, etc., in the setting of the office. Let’s focus on the first level of signification. What are the meanings associated with (deep) black and straight hair, skin pallor, and dark lipstick? The possible associations are so many as to be almost overwhelming. Cold, sharp, hard qualities—or their opposites, lack of warmth, softness, comfort. The signifieds here might be concerned with defensiveness, lack of welcome, draining of vitality—perhaps even death itself—lack of emotion, sexual withdrawal (or sado-masochistic sexual attraction). In our attempt to bring these together, we may turn to those other signs of costume and settings. Perhaps these will anchor some meanings rather than others. Costume seems to confirm the meanings associated with the face, but the setting offers a contrast. The office is ‘cool’ rather than cold, ‘toned down’ rather than ‘extreme’, welcoming in a calm, orderly way, etc. Overall, the sign that is Lisbeth’s appearance in the office suggests a contemporary myth in Barthes’s terms that is recognisable as a hybrid of familiar social types that together create a new character. Most readers will recognise elements of a subcultural type known as the ‘goth girl’, signified by costume, hair, makeup, accessories, etc. The adjective ‘goth’ has many meanings that have changed over time. In contemporary culture, the gothic roots of horror and melodrama in literature, theatre, and cinema are widely understood. The ‘gothic’ is usually associated with Northern Europe and the romantic fictions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and the ‘revival’ toward the end of the nineteenth century that gave us stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others. This period has been suggested as an influence on gothic fashion, emphasising the ornate black materials of Victorian mourning clothes. But there are problems with attempts to relate this idea to Lisbeth Salander. A second aspect of goth subculture is its relationship to post-punk and further back to punk itself in its British/European cultural definition during the late 1970s and early 1980s. We can trace elements of Lisbeth’s appearance to the leather garments (including bondage gear), the body piercings, and aspects of makeup. But punk style was argued to be deliberately offensive, designed to shock. Lisbeth’s combination of punk and gothic creates something new—a studied, restricted offensiveness that also signifies a sharp intelligence and professional competence. This latter, in particular, goes against the punk ethos of the ‘untrained’. This signified of professionalism comes less from Lisbeth’s appearance and more from her behaviour (i.e., the delivery of a detailed report with its inclusion of invaluable research data). In earlier scenes in the film, we have seen her using various technologies, particularly computer systems. Armed with this set of readings, we now have to work out the overall meaning of the myth and relate it to the character of Lisbeth in the narratives,

100

Roy Stafford

as well as considering the ideological work that the creation of such a myth might have undertaken. Barthes helps us a little in his reference to Garbo’s role as Christina in which she has to play a character with ‘an undefined sexual identity’. Barthes argues that Garbo can do this without any form of transvestism, since her star image includes that quality already. We will have to consider Noomi Rapace as a star image and how she plays the role of Lisbeth. First, though, we need to consider the overt ideological project of the Millennium Trilogy. Stieg Larsson (1954–2004) was a financial journalist who also researched right-wing extremism and whose novels were intended to expose a range of social evils within the global community through a series of interconnected narratives based initially in Sweden. As a crime thriller writer Larsson has been considered as part of the long line of leftist writers creating social critiques of Swedish society in the form of crime fictions. The best-known contemporary writer in this vein is Henning Mankell, but the originators of the line were Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in the 1960s. Larsson made the decision to have a central character who was an investigative reporter, and Mikael Blomkvist is in some ways Larsson’s mouthpiece in the stories. Lisbeth Salander is one of three important female characters, but in terms of driving the narrative forward, she is the most important because, as a child, she was an early victim of the men involved in a criminal and political conspiracy. That conspiracy featured violence toward women (thus the title of the first book) and the young Lisbeth trained herself to become a form of female avenger. Unfortunately, given the length of the books, some of the narrative content was omitted from the film versions, including much of the narrative associated with the second female character, Erica Berger, Mikael’s business partner and part-time lover. This reduced the extent of the female-centred discourse in the films. (Some of this content was re-inserted in the extended versions of each film that were shown on Swedish television.) In addition, when the novels were translated into English, the first and third part of the trilogy had their Swedish titles changed to emphasise the actions of Lisbeth Salander as ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ and ‘The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’ (Swedish title, literal translation: ‘Castles in the air are blown up’). In other words, they emphasise the actions of Lisbeth at the expense of the political/criminal conspiracy at the centre of the trilogy. (The second title is The Girl Who Played with Fire in both Swedish and English.) We might argue that the ideological impact of this is to shift the focus away from the political discourse to a more mainstream entertainment discourse about retribution and vengeance enacted by a female action hero. In turn, we could refer this reading back to the punk/gothic hybridity of Lisbeth as a social type. The female characters in eighteenth and nineteenth century gothic fiction were usually victims and certainly not action heroes. It is the punk elements of Lisbeth’s image (including the fearsome Mohican

The Face of Noomi Rapace

101

hairstyle that she wears to court in the third film) that signify the strength of the character and the capacity to take revenge. Again, this emphasis comes from the film—as does the enlargement of the tattoo, which on the cover of the earlier book editions of the stories is a discreet tattoo on the shoulder, but in the films becomes a much larger tattoo down Lisbeth’s back. One aspect of the film image that Barthes does not seem to have considered is the possibility that films might be remade with a second version following the first quite quickly. In the early days of sound cinema, films were sometimes made with multiple versions in different languages, sometimes with different actors, all at the same time (i.e., re-using sets, etc.). Films were remade, but usually after several years. Remakes in another language often changed elements of the story and probably weren’t seen by the same audiences. Now an American remake of a European or East Asian hit film can occur within a few years. The Hollywood remake, or as the promotional material suggested, the second adaptation of the first book of the Stieg Larsson trilogy, was released in December 2011 as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, starring Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander. The comparison of two representations of the same character offers the possibility of enhancing the analysis of the Noomi Rapace image. There is no agreement about which is the best, the most ‘authentic’, etc., filmic construction of the literary character Lisbeth Salander. However, Rooney Mara is a younger actor, and she appears/acts younger. In that sense, she may be closer to the literary character, whereas Noomi Rapace is a few years older than Lisbeth. However, both performances depend to some extent on costume, makeup, etc., and acting skills to convey the meaning of the character. The differences in the image are related to the perception of Mara as younger and more girlish with less distinctive (i.e., ‘strong’) facial features and hair and makeup that is less of a goth/punk hybrid. These are subjective observations, but the ‘younger’ differentiation seems to have some general purchase with audiences. This suggests at least the possibility that the Mara image of Lisbeth is a different kind of hybrid character—in fact, perhaps a less hybrid, more coherent, and less problematic character. I’m hinting here that she offers a less ambiguous representation of a female action hero. Throughout all the time in which the two filmic images of Lisbeth have circulated, there has also been a third set of images readable in the books of the trilogy—as well as the still images that adorn the ‘tie-in’ editions of the books—and further material on film posters and all across the internet (including a ‘live’ artist’s drawn portrait on YouTube). Any extended analysis would have to consider both the potential meanings created by comparing two or more of the images as briefly attempted above and the institutional codes of the images and the power relationships between institutions—which would take us beyond the Barthes analysis of the 1950s. The issue isn’t that the American image of Mara/Salander is superior or inferior to the Swedish version of Rapace/Salander, but that the

102

Roy Stafford

institutional power of Hollywood makes the remake not only possible but available everywhere, including in Europe where the Swedish film was so successful. At the same time, Noomi Rapace has been embraced by mainstream international filmmaking, so the distinctive features of her face have been incorporated into English-language filmmaking. Film history also supplies a commentary here. Garbo, like Rapace, also left Sweden for Hollywood, but by the time of Queen Christina, her American films (with their European narratives) were much more popular in Europe than in North America. When Barthes wrote about Garbo and Hepburn, he was writing about an image potentially circulating globally (certainly in the case of Hepburn), but his perspective was from within French society and the myth ‘as communication’ was specific to that society—assuming that Queen Christina had not been re-released elsewhere. Certainly, he wasn’t faced with a global discourse constructed via social media platforms that might contest his reading and refer to different versions of the image. I realise that I have attempted an analysis that I can’t fully map out in the space available and that I have resorted to a range of critical tools beyond those that Barthes might have considered. Yet I have found the questions Barthes posed to be fruitful, and I want to conclude by trying to define the myth in terms of Barthes’s three different types of reading. In the first, the producer of the myth begins with a concept and tries to find an appropriate form in which to present it. Here, the concept is the female action hero, a new kind of character who uses her intelligence and computer skills to fight back against male perpetrators of violence. For the filmmakers, this is a cynical exploitation of a traditional character updated and transformed for modern audiences. (Larsson created Lisbeth in response to his memories of Pippi Longstocking, the action hero of Swedish children’s adventure stories.) The myth itself is arguably more clearly read in the Hollywood version of the film because of the institutional practices that ensure the success of Hollywood cinema—including casting, scripting, acting styles, etc. The second reading is the demystifying reading, which exposes the construction of the myth and leads back to the underlying ideological project of the narrative—the exposure of a political conspiracy. This political discourse is much more evident in the reception of the Swedish films but requires a familiarity with the tropes of Nordic crime fiction in which Lisbeth is more of a generic character and less of an individuated figure—in other words, her character is associated with both an equality agenda and with narratives in which male violence is associated with the unravelling of Swedish/Nordic democracy. Nevertheless, the demystifying approach fails to present the ambiguity of the character. The third reading is dynamic and creates ambiguity. This reading recognises that active readers will create their own interpretations of the myth,

The Face of Noomi Rapace

103

some of which will concur with either the cynical or demystifying readings, but others will create more complex meanings. Different audiences will interpret the myth in different ways. The cover design of the edition of Mythologies that sits beside my computer as I write includes a stylised image of Greta Garbo’s face, and as I glance at any one of the many images of Noomi Rapace’s face available through my browser, it seems that the two Swedish actors share the same strong facial features. Yet Rapace also shares the facility that Hepburn had to engage with types and also to be individuated. Her image is at once classical and modern. I think she’ll go far.

21 Time and the Pips Gary Seal

Just before 5 p.m. on 31 May 2011, the pips—six short tones used to signal the precise start of each hour—went missing from BBC Radio 4. In the blankness of that silence, devoid of the echoless voice of time, we saw the soul of the machine. In the moment of that abyss—an aural absence described by the Daily Telegraph as a ‘deafening silence’—the eternity of the significance of the pips momentarily surfaced, crystallised, and threatened to crumble. The myth of the pips is drawn from their context and history. Broadcast daily on BBC radio since February 1924, the pips have become the pulse underneath everything, the beat that regulates and delineates time’s passing, the ticking of the universe brought to the foreground once every hour. It is the chorus of the ephemeral, the infinite and perpetual enunciation of the impermanent and the fleeting. It is the sound of time itself. And so in the hiccup of 31 May, the brief silence of the robovoice became the momentary absence of time. That brief collapse of the machine was a glimpse of the end of days, the death of the myth, the pause of the infinite. The pips themselves are indeed the voice of a machine. Controlled and created by an atomic clock in the basement of the BBC’s broadcasting house, the pips are the ticking articulation of atomic physics. The roboticism of the tones—unemotional, echoless, measured, and precise—is itself the sound of certainty, the proclamation of scientific objectivity. It is the fanfare of physics, as musical as mathematics and equations, declaring mankind’s triumphant taming of time. As rational, as reserved, and as dispassionate as a radar or pulse monitor, the accentlessness of the pips is the very accent of factual immovability and scientific certainty. The pips speak of early-twentieth-century futurism and the exaltation of science and scientific discovery. The atomic clock, one imagines, still counts in black and white, bunkered in cold concrete and serviced by labcoats in accentless colours, mapping ancient and infinite questions of time with doubtless definition. But further than this, the pips, we are told, are coordinated not to Greenwich Mean Time, as is often assumed, but to the more precise UTC— Universal Time, Co-ordinated. Here, the very name betrays the scientific ambition: this is not a localised time of the personal or the subjective; it is the time of the cosmos. It is the quantification and scientific measurement

Time and the Pips

105

of the limitless and the universal. Like a more comprehensible translation of radio waves received from planets and stars and galaxies, the pips become the tick of the great celestial clock, invisible and omnipresent, harnessed, ordered, and transmitted by the BBC. Significantly, much of the myth value of the pips comes from the radio station with which they are most associated. BBC Radio 4—that great totem of Britishness, with its song of received pronunciation and the chirruping choirs of Westminster village—is itself a great host of mythological treasure. The very favourite of bourgeois, radio-listening middle England, it presents to its vast public the dream of order and orderliness; of perpetuity and stoicism; of objectivity, of measure, and of British values. Its schedules are a parade of bourgeois and myth. The shipping forecast, a litany of signs now (surely, for the bulk of its twenty-first century digital audience) stripped of its purpose and meaning, echoes in an alien language that speaks of pasts and elsewheres, reduced to a prayer of cadence and melody. ‘Fisher. Dogger. German Bight.’ It is a floating geography, collected, mapped and ordered in its own language in the nonspace of radio waves. Indeed, the very language of BBC Radio 4 is itself the language of time: Today; Woman’s Hour; PM—it defines its programmes, the very corpus of any radio station, through the language of time. Its schedules run and read like clockwork. Between programmes, the continuity announcers speak. It is they—those whose role stretches back, constant and continuous, through Radio 4’s past to its predecessor the Home Service and to the start of BBC Radio—that shape and usher the tangle of myth of the corporation, time, and permanence. Custodians of perpetuity and shepherds of constancy, they are guardians of this BBC myth, and indeed, their very job title celebrates time and forever as the core of the station. For its listeners, BBC Radio 4 constructs time: it is the current and the constant; it is always. Its value, its meaning, and its history, indeed its myth, lie in its permanence, its perpetuity, and its dependable order. Its value is its currency. So saturated is Radio 4 in the myth of always that, the story goes, commanders of the British fleet of nuclear submarines are to use the presence or absence of its broadcast signal to be a signifier of Britain’s survival or annihilation in the event of an attack. The commanders, we are told, are under instruction to use Radio 4 to check the life of our nation, to check for a pulse. If the country lives, Radio 4 lives. And so, as the rhythm and palpitating heart of BBC Radio 4, it is the pips that define and delineate the channel and in turn become the pulse of the nation. It is the pips to which we set our watches, and BBC time becomes our time. It is they that provide the tick of the clockwork, the heartbeat of the machine. Through this relationship with the BBC, the pips inherit this second layer of myth. The pips we hear today are the same pips of the heritage of the Home Service and British broadcasting. Each pip is the sound of now and the sound of always. In hearing the pip of today, we hear also the pip of the past; we glimpse for a moment an unbroken and endless song: the same pips that sounded on D-Day and the Coronation, stretching back and

106

Gary Seal

connecting us, placing us and the now within this history. The pips order us in our time. Just as BBC Radio 4 celebrates the great myth of Britishness and Empire— each night, the station ends its broadcast with the national anthem1 before switching transmission to the BBC World Service, known until 1965 as the BBC Empire Service—so the pips resound with heritage and British pride. The pips sound every hour except for 6 p.m., when the chimes of Big Ben are broadcast. As a substitute sign, the voice of the Palace of Westminster (does a more explicit sign of bourgeois British power exist?) bestows upon the pips an even greater significance. As modest, muted, and reserved as a British stereotype, the pips are the melody of majesty and Empire and relentless, stoical, interminable Britishness. Like all national myths, the pips are the subject of great fondness: they are fortified by affection. The pet name is drenched in affection: the diminutive, almost onomatopoeic substitute for the official name2 reflects at once an affection and an attempt to play down the myth, to understate, to unadorn and endear. The fondness for the pips is at once a fondness for their rich and complex myth and also for their unembellished, modest, and mythless simplicity. For the pips, like so many great signs, the illusion of mythlessness and artlessness is itself part of the music of its myth. The power of the myth of the pips, then, lies in their capacity to map, control, and become time. The pips are the pulse of the present and the instant, but also of the past and the future. At once second and century, the pips hold their present and their history (our present and our history) in a beep. They are at once instant and constant, time and timelessness. To glimpse them is to hear the now and the always. Their absence, therefore, was the faltering of this myth. At first as brief and insignificant as the pause of a continuity announcer’s breath before the next sentence, the full five-second absence momentarily emptied the pips of their myths. In that brief absence, we heard nothing but the quiet ending, the void of meaninglessness, and time without order. It was the collapse of perpetuity, of scientific certainty, of BBC command. The sound of the ravens fleeing the tower; the last syllable of recorded time. The horror of that ‘deafening silence’ was here, in the temporary emptiness of the myth.

NOTES 1. When interviewed in 2010 by the Daily Telegraph, Radio 4’s network manager Dennis Nowlan noted the importance and complexity of the station’s myths: “Whilst Radio 4 is always changing, there is an element of continuity and an element of tradition which many of our listeners find immensely important. The national anthem is a big cultural symbol and like many of these symbols it is complicated. That is to say it has all sorts of emotional meanings and can be read in lots of different ways.” 2. “The pips” is so much cuter than “the UTC signal” or the “GTS” as they are officially called.

22 The National Team John Poulter

The papers (remember them?) are full of comment about the latest major international competition. It is rarely otherwise. We are always either preparing for, attempting to qualify for, competing in, or coming to terms with, and trying to account for our failure in, one tournament or the other. ‘The other’? Yes, for the national team, the nation’s team, is of course the football team. It is also, naturally, male. This is not to deny that there may well be other sports that ‘we’ compete in, nor that females play football, but let us not be sidetracked by such eccentricities. In the course of the preparation and attempted qualification, much attention focuses on the makeup of the team. Indeed, no team is scrutinised like the national team. Inclusions and exclusions are endlessly and minutely analysed and appraised. This analysis and appraisal comes in different forms and carries different concerns. For some, the prime focus is on what the selection can tell us about the manager’s possible tactical approach to the competition and what his choices signal for the careers of those chosen and passed over. They observe such moves with the same level of criticism and disdain as the crowd around the park chessboard in Sarajevo. The air is thick with exclamations sparked by perceived oversights and false moves. In the critique of team selection, we also expose our own partisan nature. Why so many from that team? Why so many from that region? How could he leave out our local star player? For another group of analysts, the composition of the team offers an opportunity to divine profound insights into the state of national identity. The range of ethnicities, creeds, regions, and even cities represented are used to read off the cohesive state of the nation. They also encourage a survey of change. The journey from the first ‘different’ face to wear the team jersey to the first to wear the captain’s armband is presented as an illustration of the advance of ‘multiculturalism’. Such changes and the naturalisation of skilful migrants spark debates that highlight political extremes, with the last word usually going to unaffiliated pragmatists. Two good feet and a turn of pace are judged by most fans to more than qualify a player for citizenship. The exploitation of the rules allowing qualification for the team through grandparental links likewise raises the question of authenticity of national identity. And, even though this ‘choosing of the shirt’ provides an example

108

John Poulter

of ‘identification as an act’ over ‘identity as a given’, the nature of the other party in this relationship remains unaddressed. The existence of, and naturalness of, ‘the nation’ goes unquestioned, is hidden in view. Once the tournament is under way and we, having overcome both our opponents and our own ineptitude, are a part of it, we are able to really get to work on the reproduction of the nation. In the stadium, our representatives in the stands become a population clothed alike in our colours—a pigmentally homogenous mass, strikingly differentiated from their Others. The chosen ones lined up on the pitch produce the central performance of patriotism: eyes on the flag that is always out of shot, out of sight, in the mind. We watch them to make sure they are singing the national anthem. They mouth silently as the camera glides down the line. Back home, the population is immersed in the event. The national team sells papers, football shirts, and flags. There is money to be made, and no one wants to miss out. Restaurants are themed, shop windows re-dressed, and products rebranded. Broadcasters capture audiences for the matches and sell them to those pushing cars, razors, and beer. This is a male world. And they are also being sold unity, brotherhood. As the car ad fades into that forever unattainable bright horizon the lion roars, the eagle flies and we know that it’s game on. We have watched the instructional films and know our role. We join our mates on the sofa or in the bar and consume. We consume beer, snacks, and the myth of the nation. We perform with practiced aplomb our role as men, as mates, as patriots. This last role channels this unity and has it arrayed against the foreigner it both constructs and depends upon rather than risking it finding a target closer to home. In this moment of national communion, political and economic differences are elided and the thief sits down with its victim with a smile of camaraderie. It is a tableau of Anderson’s ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’—the nation. We’re all in this together. . . . In the exhibition of nations in the competition, we come to understand ourselves in relation to others. Those narrating the event ensure that their representations evoke and resonate with the discourses about Others we have been learning all our lives. Teutonic discipline and organization, and Latin flair and temperament, bookend our national character. They show us ourselves by establishing the features of the international landscape: the jagged mountains and fetid swamps that limit our own territory. The homeland. Mother? Father? Whichever, we are its children now grown to responsibility. The torch from dying hands has passed to us, and the weight of history presses us to ‘keep faith’. And afterward, once more experiencing the hangover of defeat, it is not uncommon for the mythic status of the importance of this game to be exposed and thus challenged. But the myth of the nation survives the debacle. If anything, it emerges not only unscathed but revitalised. As Renan observed, our shared suffering more than our shared victories binds us together and commits us to keep faith with the nation. And the national team is supremely well practiced at delivering safe doses of sanitised suffering to its subjects.

23 The Citroën Xsara Picasso Ben Taylor and Steve Jones

In his analysis of the ‘New Citroën’, Barthes observes that the car appears to have ‘fallen from the sky’. Licensed by the pun in French of its name, ‘DS’, signifying Déesse, or goddess, Barthes reflects on the supernatural appearance of the vehicle, its perfection of form seeming to deny its origins on the factory production line and to prepare consumers for a rapprochement between technology and nature. We take as our subject the mediatization of a Citroën model of more recent vintage, the Citroën Xsara Picasso, first launched in 1999. Like Barthes, we argue that one of the key aspects of the car’s representation was the obscuring of its origins in the social world of production. However, we also show that the marketing for the car sought to associate it with the qualities of artistic genius and individualism. The definitive television advert for the Xsara Picasso was produced by the advertising agency Euro RCSG Wnek Gosper, one of a suite of adverts that played on the notion of a rebellious robotic production line. In it, the robots building the car engage in creative play, spraying Picasso-like designs on the cars’ paintwork. As the robots sense the factory foreman approaching, they re-spray the cars, covering up their artwork. However, they finish by surreptitiously applying a Picasso ‘signature’ to the vehicles before they leave the production line. The advert’s soundtrack, a song called Sympathique recorded by the American band Pink Martini, invokes a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire that extols the virtues of work-avoidance (and smoking). Although the English language version of the advert contained no strapline, the French version told viewers, ‘Vous n’imaginez pas tout ce que Citroën ne peut pas faire pour vous’ (‘You can’t imagine everything that Citroën can do for you’). In 2003, the Citroën account was passed on to another agency, BDDH, but their treatment of the brief pursued similar themes. In one of their adverts, the foreman, watching CCTV, witnesses the robots constructing a piece of modern sculpture from the parts of the Citroën. By the time he has returned to show a colleague the sculpture, the robots have disassembled it and rebuilt the cars as standard. The advert invites viewers to ‘free the mind’, presumably in the same way that the robots are themselves able to break free from their programming.

110

Ben Taylor and Steve Jones

The first feature to note here is the adverts’ representation of the production process. In many ways, the production of the motor car historically has been inextricably linked to a Taylorist form of industrial organization in which working processes were standardized, workers were treated as interchangeable, and nonhuman labour increasingly replaced its human form. The majority of car adverts make no reference at all to this production process, with many locating the vehicle within a natural wilderness or an urban landscape far removed from the factory. However, a minority of adverts do look to invoke this process, most famously the 1979 ‘Hand Built by Robots’ campaign for the Fiat Strada, which incorporated footage of Fiat’s Turin plant. The Citroën advert similarly seems to take us onto the factory floor, and yet in so doing, it manages to further obscure the reality of the assembly process, with the only evidence of the social nature of manufacturing coming in the form of the factory supervisor. Where the Citroën Picasso robots depart from earlier representations of the fully automated production line is in their capacity for creativity and misbehaviour. There is a sense of evolution at play here, with the robots transcending the limitations of their status as technologies to blur the distinction between nature and culture. These cyborgs are more mobile, more intelligent, and more mischievous than robotic forms are typically understood to be. For a number of years, the Citroën Xsara Picasso was one of the best-selling cars across Europe, and this success obviously depended on a carefully organised system of mass production. Yet the robots’ nonconformity strategically disavows the mass character of their manufacture. While the majority of car adverts look to assure us of the technological quality of the vehicle, then, the Citroën Picasso adverts focus instead on the individual flourishes apparently at the heart of the production process. Authorising this individuality is the ‘signature’ of Pablo Picasso, an arrangement agreed with his estate, but contested by some family members. As well as his creative work often being invoked as being revolutionary within the field of art, Picasso was something of a celebrity, remains a household name, and indeed can be seen as a brand. His own associations with Citroën include an episode in the mid-1950s when he apparently decorated a friend’s Citroën DS. However, in the branding of the Citroën Xsara, the genius-like creative qualities of Picasso are foregrounded: indeed, an advert for a diesel version of the model incorporated footage of Picasso at work. Car adverts often attempt to create a sense of singularity, represented at times by the vehicle being driven off into the distance, or through a deserted landscape. Here, however, this impression of singularity is invoked through the appeal to a notion of the eternal artistic genius that has now been passed on to the robots in the adverts. Barthes does not deal with the Frenchness of the Citroën, but the Xsara Picasso adverts certainly summon it up through the soundtrack, which conjures up a nostalgic sense of mid-twentieth century chanson. However, this appeal to nationality is rendered problematic on a number of fronts. Just as

The Citroën Xsara Picasso

111

France was Picasso’s adopted home after he left Spain, so the assembly of the Citroën largely took place at the Spanish PSA plant in Vigo. What is more, just as the term ‘DS’ played on its godly linguistic connotations, the name ‘Xsara’ was deliberately placeless, invented by the company not only to ‘represent a feminine person such as a queen of Babylon’, but also to invoke the ‘luxury’ of the tsars and the exotic connotations of ‘Sahara’. The original Citroën Xsara Picasso advert ends with the car emerging fully formed and perfect through a portal at the end of the production line. It reassures us that the fun-loving qualities of the robots have themselves been imprinted on the car, and suggests that this signature embodies genius, individualism, and a very humane form of technology. While one reading of the robotized world of mass production threatens us with homogeneity, control, and unemployment, the Citroën Xsara Picasso adverts develop another mythology, which re-enchants the increasingly de-singularised and de-territorialised practice of motoring with the promise of freedom, play, and creativity.

24 The Peculiar Pose of Jessica Lynch Andrew Panay

What are we now to make of the peculiar pose of Jessica Lynch? She appeared, “smiling beguiling” (as Paul Weller once sang) on the April 2003 cover of Newsweek, framed by a star-spangled banner. It is the smile of a youth, albeit one wearing the green fatigues of combat, and it is clear—some clarity of focus in her gaze unclouded toward the camera makes it clear— that, as yet, she has seen no combat, witnessed no deaths of her comrades, nor yet seen the face of the enemy. This is a photograph before experience, and it resembles nothing so much as the graduation pose for one of those American high school yearbooks. Indeed, Jessica was once acclaimed by her classmates, as though from a bygone era, Miss Congeniality. It is certain that somewhere in the annals of some municipal high school in a poor-white district of West Virginia where she comes from is a very similar photograph of a high school leaver. Miss Congeniality, of pleasant disposition, sympathetic, agreeable; her classmates were onto something! These self-same qualities recognised by her peers and motivated who knows by genuine affection, though perhaps just as easily by the absence of anything in particular to say about this essentially unremarkable person, are all qualities the US military’s public relations corps no doubt recognised when they approved this photograph for publication and concocted her story. The editors of Newsweek, that most congenial of American imperialist publications, surely understood immediately the impact that the juxtaposition of this photograph on its front cover would make alongside the haunting images and harrowing account of the soldier Jessica Lynch’s violent assault, her abduction, and the fevered speculations of her subsequent captivity. Newsweek’s front cover of Lynch in military garb is an extended high school graduation photograph, all youthful optimism and soft focus, bursting with potential. It contrasts strikingly with the account given inside of the desperate firefight following an ambush of her US armoured column in Nasiriyah, Iraq. Lynch is described as resisting heroically while her comrades lie wounded and dying all around her, before she is herself finally subdued, her weapon runs out of ammunition, and she is then dragged away amid the screaming cries of her enemies’ triumph into captivity, to await her fate: rescue or death. Lynch is a female soldier. of course, so the camera treats

The Peculiar Pose of Jessica Lynch

113

her lovingly. By contrast, a man would appear stern, emotionless, wearing his war mask. He is a combat soldier, a trained killer. But Jessica Lynch? Not so with this private. Her Newsweek pose presents a pretty, fair-haired white woman in combat greens that look just a little too big for her, suggesting a vulnerability that seems deliberately staged and is almost coquettish, is coquettish in ways that are just a touch unsettling. She is proclaimed as everyone’s daughter, sister, and sweetheart. Even her humble country origins mark her as an All-American girl, the girl next door of folksy Americana. Jessica Lynch inspires by her captivity in some dark foreign cell an orgy of communal patriotism at home. Preachers of the fire-and-brimstone variety loudly condemn the works of Satan and Islam both, while others moved to sudden remembrance take to tying yellow ribbons around trees and lampposts, and anything else that will serve just as well, the helpless rituals of previous wars. Still others attend candlelight vigils, prayers for her safe return, outdoors affairs of solemn intensity in small rural towns where every building appears to be constructed of slender wooden planks that are painted a kind of cracked and faded white. Two simultaneous impressions of Lynch are apparent reading Newsweek—innocence and heroism. In the American imaginary, these are not unaligned but are in fact historical correlates, something that no European surveying the ragged lines of their own national formation would any longer dare to venture or suggest. Jessica Lynch, her innocence and heroism, the patriotic coming together of determinedly ordinary folk that this inspires in small-town America, represents everything that is superior about America over its enemies of the East, apparently a complex of territories and peoples having no real differentiation or certain location, except whether they are for or against, welcoming or hostile, to US military aggression. More than this, though, and something that may provoke in foreigners only bewilderment or incredulity by degrees, Newsweek seems to say that as an American woman in what was once universally accepted as an entirely masculine arena, that of combat and the business of killing and being killed, Lynch, above all else, represents the superior values of western civilisation, and of the United States specifically, through determined progress toward woman’s liberation. Here, once again barely noticeable (which is exactly how it is meant to be), is evidence of the works of that damnable industry begun by Bernays, which is now inserted into the consciousness and activities of almost the entire planet, including theatres of global warfare. Newsweek asserts that the liberation of American women evidenced by the innocent and heroic soldier Jessica Lynch stands in positive contradistinction with what we know of the status and position of Muslim women of the dismal Middle East. In the west, we assert, our women enter the theatre of war alongside our men as equals, to kill and be killed. This is surely a peculiar kind of progress, and a strange sort of liberation. Historically, the relationship of women to war is lot less heroic sounding than this, though. Woman have always occupied a strange and uncertain

114

Andrew Panay

position in relation to their own potential for aggression and violence, since this has been rarely their own to assert but rather has been ascribed to them. What we find from the records is that where women are concerned, it is not violence or aggression that defines them in war but rather passivity and, ah yes, innocence. Women do not so much enter combat but provide meaning for it for others, for men. This is the western way of women at war, as facilitating the aggressive energies of men. Woman are fought over but do not fight; they provide a necessity for male aggression and violence since, somewhat ironically, they themselves are incapable of it. Women stand with the children in this regard. Men fight, at least honourable men fight, to protect woman and children, shield and shelter them. Why? Because innocence and passivity must be defended at all costs from the violence of men, other men, ‘them’, that historically fluid and contingent enemy. We must do this cosmic work, even at the cost to our own humanity, since the consequences of failure to do so are catastrophic, unthinkable, and will lead, so we are convinced, to civilisational ruin and collapse. This is why men must fight. Doing this work is what we mean in the west by heroic. So, in narratives of warfare that define for us the historical record, the most visible role women occupy during frequent periods of violent conflict is as victims, necessitating the kind of protection that we are convinced can only be provided through that special quality of masculinity, the propensity for deadly violence. The lot of woman in war is not heroism but suffering; this seems to be the best women can hope for. Even the character of women’s victimhood is specific, defined by particular focus and attention on the body. Though we may find some record to the contrary, women are typically excluded as violent combatants and are therefore denied the glorification that comes with injury or death sustained in armed combat, but they are prominent as the helpless recipients of violent sexual conquest, rape by the enemy, and they frequently suffer other tortures, witness the deaths of their children, grieve for the absence and sufferings of men, and experience bodily dislocation and physical confinement through forced captivity, as Jessica Lynch does. Indeed, in American culture, captivity provides the drama for an entire genre that defines from its very first settlements in New England to that part of the Middle East proclaimed by their forty-third president ‘The New Iraq’, the experience of women in time of war. It is a genre fixated on women’s victimhood defining them in relation to the depredations of the enemy, both realised and potential, and to the heroism that defines American masculinity. If we return once again to Newsweek, the story it tells of Jessica Lynch is filtered through a number of salient discourses: gender, race, and, though less prominently, class; but the narrative it constructs is woven through generic tropes that relate the suffering of women’s captivity in war with the collective experience of trauma experienced during conflict. Lynch’s captivity so described is felt by the entire nation who come together and offer prayers for her release, and upon whose redemption ultimately resides the redemption

The Peculiar Pose of Jessica Lynch

115

of all. The earliest captivity tales, autobiographies of abduction by Indians closely supervised and ultimately penned by powerful men of stern religious intolerance, accounted for this by divine intervention, so that captivity and then release from this bondage was understood as a consequence of the quality of faith in God. Since the individual woman captive represented the entire community, the quality of this faith was adjudged to be measured against not just her own conscience, but against the conscience of the entire social body. Captivity by Indian ‘others’, the godless savages lurking in the forests or waiting unseen in the vast open spaces of the great plains and parched deserts, became, through centuries of bloody struggle for territorial supremacy, a prime definer of the experience of being American. Each release from the clutches of the enemy strengthens and affirms the progress of the entire community, while each death traumatises and reduces it. The entire narrative drama is decided by its outcome, and its outcome becomes the entire meaning of the narrative as it unfolds. The fate of the captive, so entwined with the fate of her community, becomes a cosmic drama of ‘them versus us’, progress versus stagnation, civilisation versus savagery, and good versus evil. Jessica Lynch resumes the historical trope of women’s captivity in Newsweek, becoming a modern marker of the myth of community regeneration through trial by captivity, violence, and blood. This is the meaning of Newsweek’s front-cover photograph of her, the juxtaposition of this with the accompanying narrative inside of violent assault, heroic resistance succumbing only at the last to capture and captivity, and speculation of brutal trial and sexual torture at the hands of savage captors. Ultimately, as the captivity narrative dictates, Lynch must be redeemed. A captivity story like this always exists with its potential on an uncertain plane, between myth and the mundane. If, for example, the captive dies while she is incarcerated, or is merely released in return for a cash ransom or through some shoddy backdoor political transaction, this will not satisfy the requirements of myth. Since the historical resolution of the captive drama hinges on the community’s ability to reaffirm itself, such an outcome substituting the role of the community for the calculating strategies of private individuals, politicians, and diplomats is diminished by comparison and succeeds in generating only indifference, or angry cynicism. For a myth to succeed, the community must first feel that there is something at stake for it to lose, something so fundamental to its well-being and security that loss will be catastrophic. Thus, Jessica Lynch is presented as an everywoman, potentially our sister, our daughter, our sweetheart. In her occupation, in her role as soldier, she serves and represents us, doing the necessary but brutal work to ensure the future of the community. Except she doesn’t, not really, because at the same time, Newsweek cannot forget that she is a woman and therefore also an innocent, not a proper combatant, far from the safety and security of home, and now in perilous existence deep in the domain of the infidel enemy. Newsweek constructs its characterisation of Jessica Lynch and a narrative of individual and community peril that is mythic in its structure. It requires,

116

Andrew Panay

for final fulfilment of its function as myth, a resolution that satisfies the community’s requirements that it reaffirm the community entire—its legitimacy, its values and certainties, its mission and its destiny. The earliest captivities succeeded in this by reaffirming individual and community faith in God. So, when the captive was finally released, redeemed, this was understood to be by His grace, and served specific ideological and social functions, shoring up community obedience to pious religious orders, and strengthening the rule of the divines. As theocratic control later receded to be replaced by secular order and national identity, so the meaning of the redeemed captive underwent alteration also; divine providence was substituted for earthly vengeance and patriotic fulfilment. The captive’s faith in her eventual redemption through rescue shifted from that of God’s will to the skill (and impeccable timing) of the US Cavalry. In modern times, and in the case of Jessica Lynch, redemption and rescue comes in the form of the hyper-masculine US Special Forces. In a famous film western of the 1960s, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, a newspaperman is heard to remark, toward the dénouement of that picture, that ‘when legend becomes fact, print the legend!’ Newsweek printed the legend of Jessica Lynch’s terrible experiences in Nasiriyah and her subsequent rescue. It framed her at the outset as a woman soldier, supposedly the equal of her male colleagues, explanatory of the superiority of progressive western American values and ideals, while unable to reflect on the hideous imperialism buried within this proposition. Of Jessica Lynch the soldier, does she in fact transcend centuries of narrative descriptions of her vulnerability, innocence, and passivity to become liberated by her own violent action, which is historically the narrative prerogative of men? Well no, and this part of the fabrication is soon allowed to slide as the real intention of the Lynch story, the perceived brutality of her captivity and the masculine courage of her patriotic rescue, takes over. No sooner does Newsweek, and indeed the entire American (and much of the rest of the western) media, the running dogs of global imperialism, present the prospect of the liberated female warrior than it worries about her sexual vulnerability and is titillated by the images it conjures up for the anger of its consumers, outraged by thoughts of hyper-sexualised Iraqi men. As with the historical women’s captivity tale, concern becomes fixated on the female body. Lynch’s prettiness is commented upon and described, the girl-next-door quality of it; her diminutive physical stature is agonised over; and her wounded state becomes a speculative theme—her vulnerability is examined, fetishised. Women, including soldiers like Lynch, are constructed as needing protection by men, from rape, from their own sexuality, from their femininity. Lynch’s role in the military was not, in fact, that of a frontline soldier. She was not expected or meant by her country to fight. Her role, and the role of all US women personnel, was as support; Lynch was a ‘camp follower’. Though she was famously described as having been shot and wounded by the enemy prior to her capture, it turns out her wounds resulted from automobile collision during the initial ambush. Of fears of

The Peculiar Pose of Jessica Lynch

117

sexual assault and amid charges of rape by Iraqis, these were not recalled by Lynch herself or ever medically confirmed. Rape of US women military personnel, though far more likely to come from within their own squads and platoons, was subsequently far less likely to receive media coverage. At the time of her captivity, the war in Iraq was not proceeding entirely as those conducting it in Washington or Doha had intended. For a war so carefully prepackaged, so PR-ised, by this point in its presentation, there was a distinct danger of the whole artifice unravelling. It was not only that there continued to be confusion, obfuscation, and lies surrounding the reasons for waging war in the first place, but that it was taking so damned long and proving so damned difficult to win it. Moderate Iraqis, sensible Iraqis, freedom- and peace-loving Iraqis, were proving to be not quite so thick on the ground as the coalition had intended, and indeed, like ingrate children were at this point sowing the seeds of a future armed rebellion. The avowed intention to ‘win hearts and minds’, so often remarked upon by coalition military spokespersons, was going spectacularly awry. At first sight then, the story of an ambush of a US military column in Nasiriyah, subsequent firefight resulting in the deaths of many American soldiers, and Private Jessica Lynch’s violent abduction and captivity might seem unpromising material with which to launch a propaganda counteroffensive. Yet such is the power of myth that it serves propaganda with little or any recourse to the historical quality of the thing it portrays, beyond that which is mediated through the modern-military entertainment industry. Lynch’s rescue, when it came after two weeks, was a stage-managed event inside a hospital and had all the qualities of a Hollywood blockbuster, and just about as much realism. Not that this seemed to matter all that much even when the lie was quickly exposed. What was important above all else was that myth had been fulfilled. The captive innocent having survived her ordeal by maintaining her faith in her nation’s values, its mission, and its military was in the end redeemed because of this and returned home. Jessica Lynch returned to the United States to an ecstatic reception, an outpouring of national patriotic celebration, and was proclaimed a hero and accorded all spoils due to a modern American icon—audience with the nation’s chat show hosts, appearances on daytime and primetime TV, a book deal so that she could ‘tell her story in her own words’, and that ultimate accolade of American popularity, a made-for-television movie. ‘When legend becomes fact, print the legend!’ Indeed.

25 The 7/7 Bus Ruth Deller

Four bombs exploded in London on 7 July 2005. Three were on the London underground, and their impact was unseen. The fourth bomb exploded on a red London bus in Tavistock Square. While there has been speculation that Hasib Hussain’s device was intended for a fourth underground destination, the detonation above ground imbued his act with far more symbolic power than those of his associates. This was not a threat: this was a manifesto. Britain—and indeed Britishness—was under attack. A red London bus is a familiar image on tourist memorabilia and a sign of British identity all over the world. An attack on a London bus is an attack on Britishness—as former London mayor Ken Livingstone discovered to his cost when his successor, Boris Johnson, was elected on the back of a campaign to remove articulated ‘bendy’ buses from the capital and replace them with a new fleet of traditional-looking red Routemasters1. The battle for London buses is not simply (or even predominantly) physical—it is ideological. Since the 2005 bombings, the image of the blown up bus in Tavistock Square has become a familiar reference point for television and newspapers. Like the planes flying into the Twin Towers in New York, it has become an image used without need of explanation of context—an image that is not only part of the ‘7/7’ mythology (and indeed, the wider mythology of the ‘war on terror’), but has become its own myth. This possibly accidental detonation of a device on a single bus has become an index for the threat to British values, not only from fundamentalist strains of Islam, but also from all religious or political practices and ideas that endanger the hearts and minds of ‘true’ Britons. Repeatedly, the image of the 7/7 bus becomes decontextualised from the events of 2005 and serves, instead, as its own symbol of ‘Britishness’ coming under attack from dangerous ‘others’. A 2005 repeat showing of a Jon Ronson 1996 film, Tottenham Ayatollah, about Omar Bakri Mohammed, was re-edited to include an image of the 7/7 bus, with no explanation of what the bus was or why it was being used. When used as an establishing shot in science documentary Am I Normal? (2008)—a

The 7/7 Bus

119

programme featuring Christian nuns, worship and speaking in tongues, and spiritualist faith healing—it was anchored by a voiceover reminding us that religion has ‘inspired acts of terrible violence’. In a programme where Islam is not mentioned once, the bus stands as a symbol for problematic religion—of any type. The Panorama documentary True Brits (2008) uses the bus as a marker of its central thesis that multiculturalism has led to a crisis in British identity and a reminder that despite citizenship ceremonies, many Muslims still do not see their loyalties as to ‘our country’. The shot of the bus is anchored with a reminder that ‘a few British citizens made it clear their loyalties lay elsewhere’. Despite being British-born and educated, Hassib Hussain’s act renders him an ‘other’, an outsider. Indeed, the dilution of the Britishness of the 7/7 bombers is a key part of the mythology of the attacks. In the days following the attacks, then– Prime Minister Tony Blair, condemned the bombings as representing an ‘evil ideology . . . a battle of ideas, hearts and minds, both within Islam and outside it’. In another Blair speech, the Britishness of the four young men who carried out the attacks was not acknowledged, standing outside British values: ‘When they seek to change our country, our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed. . . . We will show by our spirit and dignity and by a quiet and true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs. . . . This is a very sad day for the British people but we will hold true to the British way of life’. In the years following, the Britishness of Hasib Hussain, Germaine Lindsay, Shehzad Tanweer, and Mohammad Sidique Khan has been further eroded and their ‘other’ status emphasised—their Wikipedia entries, for example, describe them as being of ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Jamaican’ origin, their right to British heritage revoked. However, although the 7/7 bus is ‘our’ mythological image as Britons, only some of ‘us’ are deemed to have the right to claim it and to condemn the attacks. While mainstream media and politicians from the dominant political parties were allowed to condemn the acts as a threat to Britain, the far-right group, the British National Party (BNP), were condemned for using the image of the bus in leaflets campaigning against multiculturalism. The right to use ‘our’ imagery, it seems, lies solely with those in positions of power, those who proclaim values of tolerance and moderation, yet exclude the voices of those on the margins whose ideologies may be incompatible with those seen as ‘legitimately’ British. Since the bombings, the red London bus has continued to act as a battleground. In 2008, writer Ariane Sherine posted on The Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ website, in response to seeing Bible quotes on buses. Sherine wondered whether atheists and humanists could raise money to fund bus advertising reading: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on

120

Ruth Deller

with your life’. The ‘atheist bus campaign’, as it became known, launched later that year and garnered much publicity. The Christian Alpha course ran its own bus campaigns, asking, ‘If God did exist, what would you ask Him?’, in a counter-battle for the territory of the buses. Yet in order for both atheist and Christian voices to be heard, they were expressed in a moderate way: There ‘probably’ is no God, but if there were, what would you ask him? In 2012, Christian-affiliated groups Anglican Mainstream and the True Freedom Trust attempted to produce a London bus campaign in response to Stonewall’s ‘Some people are gay. Get over it’ campaign (which had also run on London buses). The adverts, which would have said ‘Ex-gay, postgay, and proud. Get over it.’ were quickly denounced by both Transport for London and Boris Johnson, stating they did not believe the campaign fitted with their vision of a ‘tolerant and inclusive London’. Later that year, Johnson was seen endorsing another advertising campaign on the capital’s bus fleet. The Ahmadiyya Muslim community funded a series of bus adverts to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Their congratulatory message to the sovereign had the official crown-based logo of the Jubilee and the Ahmadi logo, reading ‘Love for All, Hatred for None’ either side. A press release stressed their historical relationship with the monarchy, highlighting their celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee over a century earlier, and emphasising the community and charity work the group were involved with, which they deemed as an act of devotion to their queen and country. A statement from their president, Rafiq Hayat, emphasised the message that ‘We share in our country’s pride and joy’. A website address for ‘Muslims for Peace’ reiterated that this version of British Islam was not one that sought to destroy or challenge, but one that was peaceful and subservient to two key markers of British identity: the monarchy and the red bus. The battle for the bus is not being fought over the orange-and-blue livery of the Stagecoach and Centrebus fleets, the grey and purple of First, the blue and white of Arriva—or any of the colours of buses more familiar to the majority of British residents. Nobody is debating the messages being displayed on the buses of Edinburgh or Cardiff, Exeter, or Newcastle, or of Holbeck, Leeds—where Haasib Hussain grew up. Instead, it is the red London bus—a bus which serves a minority of the British public—that is used as a symbol of British identity and unity; though, as the 7/7 bus makes clear, it more often represents our divisions. In October 2005, it was announced that a new red bus was being introduced to London’s fleet as a replacement for the one destroyed in Tavistock Square. Its name: ‘Spirit of London’. The naming of the vehicle serves to reclaim the 7/7 bus against those who would see Britishness eroded or who would use it as a vehicle for their own political, religious, or ideological means.

The 7/7 Bus

121

The myth of the 7/7 bus, and indeed of the London bus, is therefore a complicated one. It represents a British identity that appears solid and confident yet is repeatedly contested.

NOTE 1. At the Beijing 2008 Olympic closing ceremony, in which the games were ‘handed over’ to London, with Johnson acting as a representative, a large red Routemaster bus formed a centrepiece.

26 Resisting the Myths Dodging the Bullets Jayne Sheridan

Modernism resists mythologising, and postmodernism is overwhelmed by myths dans ce monde dans lequel nous habitons en. Mary Quant, 1960s innovator and modernist, is still not part of an identifiable mythology, and Vivienne Westwood, the practising silversmith and political activist, has yet to make up her mind which fabulous group she would like to join. Fortunately for fashion, and the exploitation of their creative personas, both British women designers are arch-pragmatists. Westwood solved the problem of being a single-parent, primary-school teacher, probably going nowhere, by moving in with an anarchist. Quant controlled years of angst, against prevailing morals and mores, by gardening with a flashlight at midnight, rather than shaking up the class system or the status quo. Holding onto their singular artistic integrities, they became peerless fashion designers like privileged, inventive couturiers without restrictions attached to names, ateliers, or existing labels, seeing avant-garde truths for themselves. Perhaps Roland Barthes would see Modern as ‘petit bourgeois’ culture becoming universal nature, through design and innovation, but so far, no one has performed this mythologizing magic on the mid-twentieth-century modernist, Mary Quant. From Wales, and when critiqued by the haute bourgeoisie, probably seen as from the regions, Quant represented the young. Influenced, as she was, by popular pursuits such as dancing, she was also seen as the ‘other’. Yet, following her delight in change, everyone, who possibly could, had hair cuts at Sassoon’s, wore opaque-coloured tights, flat shoes, short skirts, and zips as decoration; becoming new creations with individual identities, riding the wave of optimism and a new conformity. Experiencing art’s unifying power, at Goldsmiths in the 1950s where she met and married the Duke of Bedford’s kinsman, Alexander Plunket Green, Quant, as dedicated moderniser, was torn between totally embracing the liberation of the post-war economic revolution, with its disposable income and working women, on one hand, and distressing, cavalier womanising, practised by an unreconstructed old boys’ club, on the other. In her professional life, Quant was able to leave these dilemmas behind. If she had ever considered ‘sumptuary laws’, and the status they represented, to

Resisting the Myths

123

her, they were as if invisible, just part of her teacher parents’ school curriculum. Her impulse against the bourgeois norm, through her design interventions, meant we found ourselves no longer imitating elders, forebears or the nobility, for the first time in history. Her clothes, witnessing modernity in design, allowed a youthful freedom of movement, while she stayed faithful to older conventions in her own secret life. She recognised the importance of dress to happiness and understands the psychological advantage of feeling part of fashion. She sees clothes design as a decorative art, being most speedily communicated, and of most importance, because of its intimate connection to the body. In her first biography, she wrote of the ‘delicate art of putting oneself across . . . socially, professionally and commercially’. In responding to the ‘girls in the High street’ she set a new agenda, taking it away from the rich and the fashion establishment. She knew their need for experimentation had to be met, whether ‘dukes’ daughters, doctors’ daughters, or dockers’ daughters’. They wanted to try out the new. She delighted in their questioning spirits and in their lack of pretension.

A SITUATIONIST REBELLION Barthes might also categorise post-modernity as ‘petit bourgeois’ culture transformed into universal nature. For Vivienne Westwood, and Malcolm McLaren, taking part in a 1970s Situationist rebellion, defined by slogans, on t-shirts, self-mutilation, and the resurrection of the quaint concept of punk, their story is about a rites-of-passage culture clash. Westwood and McLaren rejected the ‘essential hippyness’ associated with the decade, allying themselves with Barthes’s position in his 1969 essay, ‘A Case of Cultural Criticism’. This would have chimed with Mclaren’s concerns at the time, with French politics and philosophies from 1968. McLaren’s and Westwood’s politicisation of clothing set the scene for punk, anarchy, and iconoclasm, and also for its commodification. When anarchists, the avant-garde or the radically political, move on to start other movements, seeming to renege on earlier positions, they are accused of hypocrisy or cowardice. The British bourgeoisie, for example, is particularly defensive about those who move on from an unconventional youth to make money and judgmental about how it is made. Westwood’s success, commercially, is seen as a disavowal of original principles, even though activists are engaged, often, in encouraging new generations to think for themselves. Realising that Westwood, and McLaren, were political innovators, as well as trendsetters, there seems to have been general confusion about the directions they could have taken. They did not see themselves as architects of happenings, but as influences on how their peers expressed themselves through their clothes. Categorised as a woman who grew up with a fierce intellectual curiosity, there is some doubt about whether this lust would ever have been satisfied without Vivienne Westwood’s chance meeting with Malcolm McLaren. He

124

Jayne Sheridan

was in a permanent state of revolution against his bourgeois background. This fascinated Westwood, whose gentle artisan roots were not objectionable to her. Of his rebellion, she was to remark, ‘Malcolm’s a one-off’. It was their passion for clothes, which united them. By the early 1980s, Westwood was beginning to see herself as a designer, after she and McLaren had decided she should concentrate on fashion and he on music. She began to research ideas and techniques at the National Art Gallery and at the V&A, and recalls how McLaren solved the problem of how to make a 500-yearsold pattern work for her Pirate collection. She took his advice and used it exactly as her research indicated, reconstructing the clothes exactly. It was this collection, by being seen in fashion magazines, that attracted buyers to the alternative, nonfashion-trained Westwood, who had begun her career assisting an anarchist, making clothing with semiotic rather than commercial intent. Since then, Westwood has continued to ignore status, to go for appropriation of earlier fashion tropes, encouraging her workers as disciples for causes, subverting symbols, moving on to new allegiances. Her acts, seeming to be against the bourgeois norm, have become a new bourgeois norm in a celebration of postmodernity.

READING THE FASHION SIGNS Quant, as the ‘quintessential Swinging London designer’, makes clothes that have been written of as signifiers for London’s resurrection after its wartime desperation and destruction. Hailing its designer as prime mover, a hessian dress has been said to signal changes in the city. It has been read as a political pamphlet, as a bearer of messages beyond the language of seams, fastenings, and belts. Decoding fabric, colour, and style, dismissing matters of comfort or practicality to suggest ideas of Bohemian revolt and deliberate nuances of androgyny, Christopher Breward has attempted to begin a mythologizing of Quant’s oeuvre. Modernism’s power continues to assert itself. Quant herself talks of fashion’s continuing narrative, and even through the illustrator, Anton Storey and his postmodern gaze, there is a refusal for the looks she invented to represent anything less than the total individuality of the person performing her life inside the dress. Westwood describes her methods for creating fashion as ‘synthesising things from the past’. As she works with today’s fabrics, she realises, there is the possibility of using them in ways not explored before, arguing that: ‘Fashion is the manipulation of materials’. Inspired by Balenciaga and Dior, whose looks were part of her youth, she remembers how, in the 1950s, proportions were changed. She notes that then, the hip was pushed forward, the back curved, and the nose was going up. She reinvented this image, using a cage and putting fan pleats over it, suggesting that the silhouette can be distorted in other ways. Recognising that in her career she has dealt with traditional and archetypal beauty in both clothes and models, she realises

Resisting the Myths

125

her thirty years in fashion have been a privilege and that she has never had to compromise her vision against banality. Influenced by fabrics and artefacts from Scotland and the regions, Harris Tweed, shown at Olympia in Spring 1987, with traditional, fitted look, its homage to the tailoring traditions of Savile Row, is not able to become part of a continuing legend. She may have started as an anarchist, but all her collections from Pirates to Punkature are so richly eclectic they defy a thematic. Mary Quant devised a logo, the simplified daisy, which appeared on all her products. It might never have existed. The legend, which this symbol represented, designed to become a timeless fashion label, is dissipated through appearances on television, new autobiographies, radio interviews, and archives in the V&A. Vivienne Westwood appropriates royalty’s golden orb, to hang on the ears of Vidal Sassoon receptionists, yet tramps up to Buckingham Palace to become a dame. Both these doyennes of British fashion refuse the categorisation, the point de capiton, required for myth, whether dans ou hors le contexte.

27 Vilnius Discredited Capital of Culture Evelina Kazakevičiūtė and Kęstas Kirtiklis

This essay is about a nonesuch cultural fact that accidentally became a determinant defining the course and diagnosing the condition of culture in Lithuania. As one cultural media suggested, this cultural fact divided the Lithuanian world of culture into two stages: before and after. After the event, the sphere of culture was thought over as being functionally much more diverse than it had been regarded before; from then on, the process of art creation has been observed vigilantly, and every artistic move has been constricted by a bureaucratic apparatus. ‘The biggest and the most real scandal in the history of Lithuanian culture’ erupted in 2009. The year that was meant to be a year of great celebration, commemorating the millennium since the name of Lithuania was first mentioned in a written source (The Annals of Quedlinburg) and including the festivity of the city of Vilnius as the European ‘capital of culture’, turned into the year of self-abasement and self-flagellation, owing to a mass media that operates as a myth-producing machine. Relying on a still-vital mythical consciousness of the crowds, it got involved in the process of knitting the web of myth. Firstly, it was the myth of the glorious past of Lithuania; yet, as it appeared, the glorious name of the country was oddly tarnished with the innocent blood of St. Bruno. Hence, the development of the myth of the glorious past was unexpectedly interrupted to be replaced by another, a completely opposite one—the myth of profit and disgrace. The long and rich history of the country had confronted the despicable present—‘Culture’ with the capital C was replaced by another construct with the capital C—Capital. But let’s come back to the very beginning. The people caught up in the media-set mythical web of expectation were waiting to experience something exciting and extraordinary, and this truly happened—with special attention and fuss in the newspaper headlines. Everybody was ready to be a part of a myth that would instruct how to perceive oneself, how to explain the world and man’s position in it—and behold, the myth had been constructed. No doubt, becoming the cultural metropolis of the year was considered a highly favorable opportunity for a small country—not only in making itself famous, but also in demonstrating an untapped cultural potential. As had

Vilnius

127

many former European capitals of culture, with a wish to seem inviting and not frozen in time, Vilnius paid special attention to contemporary culture. At first glance, the worked out National Programme seemed to be hypermodern indeed, pretentiously aiming at creating ‘The Truly New’. Yet, finally, it appeared to contain too much innovation. Thus, the programme was strikingly new in its conception of Lithuanian culture and gained distance from the conceptual frame of the millennium celebration based on the glorious re-creation of tradition and its continuity. Unfortunately, this initial intention had completely vanished under the broad range of innovative cultural projects and postmodern forms of art. For the implementation of the project and coordination of the National Programme, a public institution, Vilnius—European Capital of Culture 2009 (VECC), was founded to be responsible for the content of the programme and the project’s financial allotment. Facing unanticipated recession, the VECC had to overcome financial difficulties, since the country’s financial priorities had inevitably changed, and the budget of the project was sorely cut. According to the press, it was obvious that the millions-worth project was ‘dead’, and its death state was certified in the first month of the year. The VECC soon became a scapegoat for all the shortcomings and failures of the project. The public institution was criticized for making wrong decisions within the programme and suspected of wasting the funds. The capital invested for the capital of culture event was put under a magnifying glass: by whom, what for, and how it was disposed—these were the main questions prevailing in the public discourse. The national media escalated the issue by concentrating on the concept of financial opacity. The press was constantly questioning the cultural value of the events and estimated cultural products in terms of money. Eventually, not only the VECC was exposed as playing ducks and drakes, but also its cultural products were treated as possible evidence of both the financial affair and the critical state of culture. The characteristics of the discredited organization were transposed to cultural production and, as a result, Lithuanian culture became highly criminalized. Mass media entered the stage as an exponent of truth and defender of tradition and cultural self-consciousness. Its representatives thought that the novel cultural content of the programme worked out by the VECC lacked the elements of history, authenticity, and national identity, and thereby, supposedly, did not satisfy the expectations of the masses. Therefore, national media openly called for resistance against the new conception of culture. To reject it, the VECC project had to be discredited, and within the mythical scheme. Hence, contemporary culture and post-modern artifacts were deliberately viewed as incomprehensible and obscure, short-term, and shoddy. Since the perspective of uncommon contemporaneity reigned in the capital of culture, mass media started analyzing the ‘new clothes’ of contemporary art and discovered that, actually, it ‘wore nothing’. In other words, mass media insisted that contemporary art was meaningless and worthless: it was

128

Evelina Kazakevičiūtė and Kęstas Kirtiklis

no more than postmodern tricks composed to fool the public and, in the contemporary economic situation of Lithuania, the most hurtful aspect was the illegal obtaining of (or washing off) a huge sum of money. The press wrote that national artistic sensitivity was mocked at, and it was allowed by the local VECC functionaries who put on the masks of cultural experts to cover the faces of the clowns. In fact, they were caught up in a mythical mechanism and worked successfully as its tools. Mass media ironically stated that it was useful to find out the main postulates of postmodernism. ‘What are they? Knocking the public down; selling a work of art highly expensively; focusing on the creative process rather than on the longterm value of a created object’. Mass media offered a four-step recipe for becoming a genius in both art and business—a Van Gogh and a Rockefeller, it was claimed, in one. Anyone could only follow such contemporary practice: call some worthless phenomenon contemporary art, get the financial support and permission to make a contemporary ‘piece of art’, make it exceptionally shocking to the public, and receive the profit. Further involved in the development of the myth, mass media characterized contemporary art as poor in quality, reprehensible, considerably imitative, lacking moral principles, and therefore, ‘dirty’. And it worked. The myth of the contemporary art as an exceptional creative ability to launder the money had been constructed. What remained was finding some ‘evidence’ to confirm it. Indeed, it required a moderate effort to find one—the sculpture called Embankment Arch that soon was given another name suitable for the created myth, The Pipe. A unique sculpture built on the embankment of the river Neris in Vilnius requires and deserves a wider description. Its extraordinary shape repeats the contours of the embankment, joining its upper and lower parts thus forming a specific arch. As the author said once, it might be seen as the symbolic gates of Vilnius: on the one side, the gates to the old town, and on the other—the gates to the new city. According to the VECC visual arts project leader, the sculpture is a visual sign of the capital city inviting to come down to the river and meditate. It is supposed to accost the passersby for some time and encourage them to reconsider the altered environment: the natural site has been deconstructed into the area where nature and art meet in expectation of men to participate in a new discourse. On the other hand, made out of a rusty pipe, it perfectly fits in the energetic and technical context of the district, since the sculpture is situated not far from the building of Lithuanian Energy and the Energy and Technology Museum. As the VECC organizers stated, it served as a contemporary commentary on the world bound by energetic nets. This sculpture was believed ‘to expand the sculptural vocabulary of Vilnius and invite a spectator to experience the paradoxical power of the metamorphosis of seemingly useless and once solely functionally perceived elements’. However, the most popular Lithuanian mass media was of a different opinion. It appealed to the still-prevailing public aesthetic judgments influenced by the post-Soviet stereotypes—declarative signs and figurative sculptures. It put forward the following suggestion: the Embankment Arch did not

Vilnius

129

deserve to be recognized as a sculpture. Knowing that it could not work with all the recipients due to varying tastes, the mass media used another weapon to get a spectator confused or even annoyed—the sculpture’s quiteimpressive price. It raised the question: what was such big money paid for? Some newspaper sarcastically noted that the money might have been hidden within The Pipe. Never before has art been so relevant an issue in Lithuania, with the discussions having reached such wide horizons. Radio journalists interviewed a plumber and inquired how much it might cost to weld such a big pipe. Tabloid press announced a competition encouraging the readers to create a ten-times-cheaper analogue—a ‘network of pipes’ sculpture—for which they promised a cash prize! The people were stimulated to feel indignant by contemporary art in general and express their anger openly. Actually, such reflections on the sculpture revealed the signs of the culture of hate ranging from a harmless joke to caricature or sarcasm. Just as, years ago, a French mythical object—Tour Eiffel—was treated as a metal monster, which ruthlessly made the beautiful city of Paris ugly, the Lithuanian mass media took The Pipe as ‘a metal crudity’ that deformed the beautiful sight of the embankment: ‘the urban face of Vilnius was disfigured with the scalpel of an artist’. In mass media, this sculpture was depicted as a brutal intruder, a hostile body within the architectural (i.e., Baroque) context of Vilnius. The phenomenon of ‘pipe-art’ was treated as ‘infection of culture’, the bacteria of anti-art in a living organism of culture. Mass media claimed that ‘True Art’ (who could define what it is?) was in serious danger and Lithuanian culture approaching its agony. Yet, actually, almost none of the publications discussed the type or the conceptual meanings of the sculpture; therefore, the industrial pipe-art aesthetics was misunderstood, and the true artistic value of the created object left undiscovered. The myth of crime based on the financial value of the sculpture and its nickname opened up the way for various language games and verbal manipulations, often related to the European Capital of Culture event as, for instance, in the following case: the capital of culture had flown down the pipes. Mass media completed the spectrum of meanings of the sculpture in its own ways and detected the possible financial crime, thus capturing public imagination. The Pipe was literally worked out into a perfect technology or technique for financial machinations and metamorphosed into a ‘money laundering machine’. The mythical scapegoat was found as well—it was the VECC. It was implicitly expressed by the media mythmakers that the capital of culture was in the hands of the united cultural-political elite represented by the VECC and other cultural and political figures who supported the project. Furthermore, the organizers of the event were portrayed as transgressors who used dishonest and forced techniques (such as ‘blackmail’) for the realization of such projects as the one to which the Embankment Arch belonged. Mass media suggested that the VECC organization had materialized culture

130

Evelina Kazakevičiūtė and Kęstas Kirtiklis

while using contemporary art template to produce cultural commodities, the latter depicted as profit-oriented products. At the end of the year, the capital of culture event was thought over as the peripheral cultural event. In fact, the mass media made conclusions and gave nominations. According to the press, the VECC project was ‘a pot of gold’ that Lithuania did not manage to use. ‘What happens when a poor man wins a pot of gold?’—the media men asked. ‘The lucky man acquires a lot of friends, is remembered by the relatives and makes a sumptuous feast for everyone. He buys the necessary and, more importantly, the unnecessary things. Soon the swindlers visit his place—the ones who did not manage to join the circle of friends.’ That is how the media viewed the cultural process. Its representatives were convinced that if the ‘x-ray’ procedure for the VECC had been made, everyone would definitely see all the motives found in the story of a man with a jackpot. Another Lithuanian newspaper gave the ironic title of ‘Business Plan of the Year’ for the VECC project; meanwhile, the famous Embankment Arch was titled ‘The Symbol of the Year’, illustrating ‘what Lithuanian culture truly experienced in the year 2009’. Most probably, the myth of profit and disgrace would not have been born but for the economic circumstances, an anxious environment, overly high expectations, and the mythical enthusiasm of the mainstream media, which acted as a major (and most severe) expert critic of culture and art. It should be stressed that, in the press, however, The Pipe was not so much an aesthetic, but rather an ideological issue greatly acceptable in the contemporary ‘mythopoeia’. A post scriptum: the mistake made by Miss Lithuania 2008, who instead of calling Vilnius the ‘European Capital of Culture 2009’ worded it as ‘European Culture of Capital 2009’, seems to be fatal in becoming a prophetic vision of the Lithuanian cultural metropolis. No doubt, the media people noticed it and enthusiastically communicated it to the public. The mythical seed was sown: the idea of ‘European Culture of Capital’ flourished in the mass consciousness and later on grew into myth.

28 The Shahida’s Claim Ayat Muhammed Lutfi Al Akhras Norma Musih

Ayat Muhammed Lutfi al-Akhras, age 18, from the Deheishe refugee camp, exploded in a suicide mission at a supermarket in Kiryat Yovel, Jerusalem on 29 March 2002. Two Israelis were killed because of the bombing and twentyeight were injured. At the end of that year, al-Akhras was to have completed her high school studies and marry. Al-Akhras was the third Palestinian shahida, or female suicide bomber, of the second Intifada, and the second to leave a videotape after her.1 In the video al-Akrhas left behind, one can see a young woman in the process of becoming a suicide bomber. She is not yet a suicide bomber, but she is no longer a civilian either. She stands firmly across from the camera. There are no flags in the background. The religious signifiers that we have become accustomed to seeing in the videotapes of other suicide bombers are also absent. Behind her is a white curtain, through which a bright light enters. The position of the figure in front of the strong light darkens her. Al-Akhras’s eyes are turned downward during most of the video, toward the pages she is holding in her hands. But there are two moments during which her gaze turns to the camera. These two moments occur at the beginning and end of the video. Her gaze is direct and sharp. It leaves no doubt—indeed, she is looking at someone. Someone is standing there with her in the same room. Someone is filming. I wonder about the identity of the cameraperson. It is clear that he or she is not a professional photographer. What was this person trying to do by toying with the lens to zoom in and out? Was this the enthusiasm of someone discovering the magic of the camera for the first time? Was it the cameraperson’s or al-Akhras’s idea to stand in front of the white curtain? Who was responsible for setting the scene? The figure, the woman-girl, looks into the camera, signalling with her expression: ‘we can begin’. Immediately her eyes turn downward to the papers she is holding with both hands. At first, I struggle to make out the features of her face, but after a few moments, the camera zooms in, enabling me to look at her. Her eyelashes are dark. I cannot decide whether she has painted them or whether they are always like that: pretty, black, and long. She is dressed in black. Her black turtleneck resembles what a criminal might wear in an action movie, or an intellectual in a French film.

132

Norma Musih

The camera zooms in and out clumsily. Her voice is decisive. The speech becomes dense; the spaces between the words shorten. At a certain point, she begins to make almost theatrical motions with her right hand, while the left hand continues to grasp the pages. When she finishes speaking, she fixes her gaze back at the camera. She looks at the cameraperson, at us, at me, and signals, now also with her hand, ‘That’s it. You can stop filming’. In the Israeli media, al-Akhras was described as a terrorist. The media coverage focused mainly on a psychological analysis that attempted to explain her reasons in terms of personal problems. She was depicted as a naïve and manipulable creature who was driven into the act without choice. Her individual political agency was not part of this discourse. But, if we listen to what she had to say, we may realize that the picture is much more complex: In the name of God, All-Merciful: Among God-fearing, believing men, there are those faithful to the promises of God, and there are those among them who have passed away, and there are those among them who await the bounties of this world. The justice of God is great. I, the living shahida Ayat Muhammed Lutfi al-Akhras, I perform this act in the name of God, the Omnipotent, may His name be praised, and in response to the cry of the victims, the martyrs, and the blood [that has been spilled], of the grieving mothers and the orphans, and of all the oppressed and powerless on the face of the earth, and also in response to the call of the honorable and holy al-Aqsa [Mosque]. And I say to the leaders, the Arab rulers, wake up, stop sleeping [a defiant expression – NM], and stop acting in a shameful and humiliating fashion. Stop ignoring your obligations to Palestine. The leaders of the sleeping Arab armies embarrass themselves. Through their television screens they watch the daughters of Palestine who are fighting, and they continue to sleep. I say that my call, my cry will be heard by every self-respecting Arab and Muslim: al-Aqsa, al-Aqsa, Palestine, Palestine. God is Great. God is greater than all the tyrants and oppressors on the face of the earth. The intifada will continue until victory. The shahida Ayat Muhammed Lutfi Al-Akhras2. Ayat Al-Akhras’s speech is intriguing. She directs her appeal to Arab males, to Muslims, to Arab leaders, to the leaders of Arab armies. She demands that they fulfil their duties, that they protect Palestine. But they are asleep and humiliated. They do not heed the cries of the weak—the victims, the grieving mothers, the orphans. She acts in the name of an omnipotent God, for al-Aqsa, but not only for them. She acts in the name of all powerless persons, whoever they may be. There is something touching, even innocent, in al-Akhras’s declaration. She feels that if not for her alone, no one could act for them, for the

The Shahida’s Claim

133

oppressed. She is disappointed in the powerlessness of Arab men and leaders and decides to take action herself. It is interesting to note that besides one oblique reference—‘all the tyrants and oppressors on the face of the earth’—the Jewish public is absent from al-Akhras’s speech. The essence of her appeal is directed, as already stated, toward Arab men, in contrast to the announcements of other suicide bombers, which are directed primarily at the Jewish/Zionist public, the State of Israel, or the Israeli military. It is as if al-Akhras dismisses or erases the Israeli Jews. They are not the primary issue. In a way, she almost says, ‘My speech has no room for you. I am not speaking to you. You are not the object of my appeal’. Al-Akhras says ‘I’ four times: ‘I, the shahida’, ‘I carry out this act’, and ‘I say’. The last phrase, ‘I say,’ is uttered twice. She, her ‘I’, prepares itself out of linguistic repetitions. Her ‘I’ is the active self. She has strength, the ability to act. Through the repetition of the self, al-Akhras constitutes herself as an active, powerful subject. She is no longer a subject requiring protection; it is she who is capable of defending others. And yet, this very reiteration leads one to suspect that perhaps she is not completely sure of this ‘self’. Al-Akhras is speaking to Arab rulers, to the leaders of Arab armies. She turns to them from within the videotape, which will be televised only if, and after, she carries out her mission. She speaks about them and turns to someone else. But to whom? Speaking about the Arab males, she says, ‘Through their television screens they watch the daughters of Palestine who are fighting, and they continue to sleep.’ And who are the daughters of Palestine who are fighting? That is al-Akhras herself. It’s as if she says to them: ‘I, a young woman, though I may be insignificant and lacking in means, must perform this work of defending the oppressed and liberating Palestine—a duty that is yours to fulfil.’ She is forced to fulfil this duty for lack of another option. At least in this sense, the text does not unsettle the existing order. She does not claim that it is the role of women to defend Palestine. She states that this is the role of men. But her action does subvert it, since she, a woman, with her own body, executes the task. Her action subverts it from a political standpoint. Like a drag queen who is convinced that true femininity exists, al-Akhras, too, is convinced that her act belongs to the role of men. In a way, she is not only accepting the traditional role of men to defend women, but she is also accepting the forms of resistance that men initiated in Palestine, the suicide missions. This discloses the paradox of the act: her act delivers a subversive effect, even though she does not declare it as such in the video. There is something melancholy in al-Akhras’s appeal to Arab men. She is not willing to give up on Arab men; she does not succeed in mourning the loss of the figure of the Arab male who liberates and defends. Al-Akhras denies the loss, demanding/expecting action from Arab males. There is an aspect of self-documentation to the video that the female suicide bomber has left behind. She documents her body, whole. She says,

134

Norma Musih

‘I am the living shahida. Now I am speaking to you from life, look at me, look at my body, and look at the life existing in me’. Through the video, al-Akhras acquires not only the means of production of death, but also the means of its representation. She tries to gain control over the representation of her preparation to die and kill, but this control is temporary and doomed to failure. The very moment in which it became possible to look at the figure of al-Akhras in the form of her filmed image was also the moment signifying that her body no longer existed. The explosion made her visible but nonexistent. Moreover, she is visible because she no longer exists. The video replaces her existence. Through the video recording she had left behind, she achieves a kind of return from the dead, the utmost artistic accomplishment. Had the shahida refrained from carrying out her act as planned, we would not be the addressees of her image returning from the dead. The figure of the shahida in general and of al-Akhras in particular corresponds in some way to that of Antigone, suggesting a connection between the shahida and a tradition of female struggle against the social order. It is important to clarify here that al-Akhras may not have seen herself as acting out of feminist motivations, but out of nationalistic motivations alone. Yet it may be possible to connect her to this tradition, even if only for a moment, so as to broaden our understanding of her act and of its mythological significance. Antigone is portrayed in Sophocles’ play as a figure who calls the law into question—state law, religious law, patriarchal law. She is a defiant figure who challenges custom, but at the same time, demands public recognition. So too is al-Akhras: defiant, publicly lashing out at the Arab men, who represent patriarchal law, as well as at the State of Israel or at the western world (‘all the tyrants and oppressors on the face of the earth’). At the same time, like Antigone, she demands to be heard, to take her place in public discourse, and to receive public recognition. Al-Akhras thus plays a double game with the establishment: even as she challenges the latter by her act, she also demands recognition from the same establishment via the video that she leaves behind. In her appeal to Arab men, she acknowledges their authority and demands that they stand firm beside her, that they rise up and take action. Like Antigone, who raises claims against King Creon’s authoritative narrative, al-Akhras raises claims against the authoritative narrative of the State of Israel, which portrays her as a terrorist, as well as against the male Arab leadership. In their actions, both Antigone and al-Akhras assert their right to redefine their identity and subjectivity and the roles entailed by these positions. Their actions are also their way of consolidating a momentary stake on a competing narrative and moral law. In acting as they do, they transgress gender boundaries, blur familial roles, pose new laws, and lay the foundations for an alternative morality. Antigone’s questioning of Creon’s law leads to her death. The shahida’s questioning of the law of the State of Israel is made possible by her death. But, in contrast to Antigone, who only

The Shahida’s Claim

135

endangers her own life, the Shahida kills not only herself but also others, for otherwise, her claim would not be heard in the public sphere. Another question arising from the juxtaposition of al-Akhras and Antigone is the question of representation. Who does al-Akhras represent? Is it the voice of God, heard at the beginning of her address when she chooses to recite a passage from the Koran? Does she represent herself alone—‘I, the living shahida’? Or the victims and the blood, the grieving mothers and the orphans? In whose name does she act? She represents those who have no voice, but this representation is a one-time affair—because she will no longer be able to represent them after the act is executed, and because she does not really want the daughters of Palestine to follow suit. Hegel, Lacan, Irigaray, and others view Antigone as representing kinship relations, the power of relation through blood, and the figure of Creon, in binary opposition, as representing the law and moral order. Judith Butler, diverging from this conventional positioning, writes that what Antigone represents is not kinship in its ideal form, but its deformation and displacement. Al-Akhras, too, acts out of a displaced configuration of kinship: but her kinship relations, broadened to include ‘the grieving mothers and the orphans’, are defined not by blood but by the spilling of blood. Thus, although kinship relations appear in the case of both al-Akhras and Antigone, they do so in a very different way. Antigone claims that the act she has performed—burying her brother in opposition to the law of the state (represented by Creon)—is one she would not have carried out for another family member such as a husband or child. Antigone constricts the laws of kinship to apply to a single case, while al-Akhras acts in the name of all grieving mothers and orphans, in the name of all Palestinian victims, and in the name of all the oppressed on the face of the earth. Broadening the kinship law for which she acts, she creates a new family, new kinship relations. Moreover, al-Akhras calls into question the patriarchal kinship structure predicated on a hierarchy between men and women, with the man playing the role of the father, the protector, and the saviour. She does not annul this role, but rather claims that men have failed to fulfil it. In appealing to Arab men, al-Akhras in effect says, ‘Stop behaving in this embarrassing, humiliating manner. Stop ignoring your obligations to Palestine.’ Where the relation of Antigone and of al-Akhras to their respective kinship laws converge is, on the one hand, in the fact that both figures choose to perform acts of resistance on the basis of these laws; and on the other hand, in the vulnerability and instability of these kinship laws, exposed paradoxically through those very acts. In the case of Antigone, Judith Butler regards her deployment of existing power structures against themselves as a model of political action. This move by Antigone makes it possible to expose the inherent instability of every social law, including that which presents itself as natural or irreplaceable and attains this position by perpetually marginalizing other possibilities of existence. As for al-Akhras, it is difficult to regard

136

Norma Musih

her act as a model of political action, for her action brings about the end of life, the end of dreams; there is no hope in it, no surprise, and no possibility for something new and different from the endless chain of slaughter. At the same time, the structure of the political context in which al-Akhras acts is very similar to that against which Antigone is struggling. For Israeli law—which has imposed itself on the Palestinians living in Israel, as well as on those who live beyond the Green Line—presents itself, just like Creon’s law, as the natural and only option available, trampling since 1948 on the social, cultural, and individual rights of the Palestinians and marginalizing other possibilities of existence and other kinds of relationships that could have been constituted between Jews and Arabs. Against this backdrop, there is no doubt that al-Akhras’s act is an act of resistance: both against Palestinian men and against the State of Israel. Through the video she has left behind, al-Akhras responds to the question, ‘Who has done this?’—the question asked by the Israeli public in the case of al-Akhras, and also the question asked by Creon in response to Antigone’s act of resistance. But, in their respective acts, Antigone and al-Akhras also expose the vulnerability of the kinship laws for which they have chosen to act. Antigone exposes the vulnerability of a law that holds true in one case alone; Al-Akhras exposes the vulnerability of the law as one that may be endlessly generalized: ‘I perform this act . . . in response to the cry of all the oppressed and tyrannized on the face of the earth’. As in the case of Antigone, for al-Akhras, too, the spoken address has great meaning. The act in this case is not only an act of language but also one of space. The announcement receives final authorization—it is stamped, so to speak—by the explosion of the bomb and the death of the body. For al-Akhras, just as for Antigone, to publish one’s act in language is in some sense the completion of the act. Al-Akhras completes her act via the broadcast of the videotape in which she exposes her identity and her motivations. The speech act here is reproduced through the media channels, the commentators, the witnesses, the organization that takes responsibility for the attack, and so on. Al-Akhras’s act is performed in language and spreads out in space, and thus, since she operates from within language, and cannot otherwise, her act is never completely her own. At the same time, al-Akhras, just like Antigone, refuses to accept the symbolic order; she refuses to accept the given world of significations. which consecrates and privileges the link between masculinity, universal law, and subjectivity. And like Antigone, al-Akhras does not in this refusal condemn herself to expulsion from language. In her very speech and act, she fashions a claim and a position that deploy conventions in an unconventional manner, thereby fraying the ‘rules of the game’. The moment when the video is recorded, the moment that preceded the mission chronologically but was exposed only afterward, is the moment of language. This is the moment that marks al-Akhras’s separation from herself, from her life, but also from the possibility of carrying out a different act

The Shahida’s Claim

137

in language—one which may or may not adhere to the norms of power and the language from within which she acts even as she defies them.

NOTES 1. Shahida (‫)ﺓﺩﻱﻩﺵ‬, refers to a woman who dies a martyr’s death or was killed by the Israeli forces. In everyday language, we usually hear the word shahid (‫)ﺩﻱﻩﺵ‬, which is the masculine form of the term. This classic Islamic term derives from the Arabic word isstyshahad (‫)ﺩﺍﻩﺵﺕﺱﺇ‬, which refers to someone who dies a martyr’s death consciously for the sake of God. This kind of suicide is allowed by Islamic law and is distinguished from an act of suicide that comes from a lack of care for those left behind. 2. Translation from Arabic: Nada Matta.

(The author wishes to thank Ariella Azoulay for her always insightful comments.)

29 The Myth of ‘Toxic Childhood’ Jane O’Connor

A prevailing myth in contemporary western society is that the quality of childhood has deteriorated in recent decades and has become ‘toxic’. According to the mythology of ‘toxic childhood’, this is largely due to the increasingly screen-based culture of today’s children and young people. This narrative of how the supposed innocence of childhood is being ruined by progressive aspects of modern life can be found running through public and professional debate, and has gained momentum since the turn of the millennium and the advances in digital technology which that has brought. Within the mythology of toxic childhood, children only exist as a focus for adult concern and as emblems of all that is wrong with modern society. From this perspective, contemporary childhood is being damaged by a range of negative influences, including junk food, inadequate day-care provision, not enough outside play, and too much school-based testing, resulting in children who are dissatisfied, unhealthy, ill mannered, and sad. However, it is the fast pace of today’s media technology with children watching too much television, playing violent computer games, and being allowed to wander alone through the ‘dark village’ of the world wide web that apparently do the most harm to idealised notions of a happy childhood. The belief that childhood should be a time of goodness, recreation, and communing with nature is part of the cult of childhood innocence that is as much a myth as that of toxic childhood. Both myths can be understood as discourses about childhood that have historical and cultural antecedents, toxicity in terms of Protestant religious beliefs about original sin and children needing strict discipline to become civilised adult members of society, and childhood innocence in terms of romantic notions about childhood emanating from the writing of Rousseau and his peers in eighteenth-century Europe. Ideals about the natural goodness of children have informed the dominant construction of childhood in western society over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during which time social, conceptual, and practical boundaries were carefully constructed between childhood and adulthood. The power lay most definitely with adults who awarded themselves jurisdiction over their younger counterparts and thus the right to instruct, control, and direct their thoughts and behaviour through formal education, state institutions,

The Myth of ‘Toxic Childhood’

139

and patriarchal family structures. The mythology of toxic childhood can be seen as an attempt to regain this control, which is feared to be slipping away from adults, by problematizing children’s use of technology, especially the internet, which holds the potential to enable children to escape from the confines of childhood and belong to the wider world in their own right and on their own terms. Talking about childhood as ‘toxic’ therefore begins to seem like a way of making children a scapegoat for all that is wrong in the society that adults have created. Phrases such as ‘the barbarians are not only at the gate, they’re in the womb’1 serve only to compound this conceptualisation of children as the enemy. Demonising children’s use of technology works to disempower children and highlights adult fears of the agentive, powerful child who engages with public life and makes connections beyond his or her domestic sphere and outside the jurisdiction of parents and teachers. The ideological status quo of childhood innocence and submission to adult authority, and the existing power imbalance between adults and children, is thus retained via the growing public acceptance of the naturalness of the myth of ‘toxic childhood’. To weaken and destroy the image of the mediasavvy powerful child and to reinvent the contemporary child as damaged, toxic, and even nonhuman is to counter this perceived attack on the power position of adults.

NOTE 1. From Palmer, S., 2006. Toxic Childhood: How the modern world is damaging our children and what we can do about it.

This page intentionally left blank

Part III

Barthes’ Myth Today

This page intentionally left blank

30 Barthes’ Myth Today Barthes After Barthes Pete Bennett

We are looking . . . for something we can use, not something that will use us. We ought not to issue theory with a blank cheque to spend our time for us (if we do, it will certainly spend more than we can afford). (Barry, 2002: 7). . . . the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life. (Barthes, 1975: 36)

THE CONTINUING PREFACE In his original preface to Mythologies, written in 1957, the year of its publication, Barthes reflects on the origins of the project in a series of monthly essays ‘suggested by current events’. He details the process by which these newly coined ‘myths’ came to be ‘systemised’ by ‘this particular essay at the end of the book’, Myth Today (Barthes, 1972: 10). Though Barthes suggests that ‘systemise’ is ‘all it does’, its actual effects and ‘significance’ were rather more long lasting. It was not only developing a ‘science of signs’ (whatever you choose to call it) but also setting an agenda for all who were interested in ‘meanings’. This ‘particular essay at the back of the book’ has more genuinely modest ambitions. Much of what it does try to do, however, is also engaged with Barthes’s long-term pursuit of signs and meanings. In the mid-1950s in France, Barthes ‘sought . . . significant features’ as we have done, individually and collectively in the second decade of the twenty-first century: fifty-five years apart, but in some senses, ‘a galaxy far away’. Given that Barthes is interested in the character of this ‘significance’, his first thought is to acknowledge his own part in its making, its identification and clarification. ‘Is there a significance which I read into them?’ he asks: ‘In other words, is there a mythology of the mythologist?’ Barthes suggests that ‘the reader will easily see where I stand’ in a phrase both completely transparent and yet becoming more disingenuous as the years go by (Barthes, 1972: 11). The ‘stance’ of both Barthes and ‘the reader’ has long been a source of contention. Barthes is a writer and his subject, ‘writing’; hence, the title of Susan Sontag’s dedicatory essay, Writing Itself. For Barthes, according to Sontag, ‘writing becomes the record of compulsions and of resistances to write’ (Son-

144

Pete Bennett

tag [ed.], 1993: xv). Now, this might be more apparent in the later work, but there is discursiveness (‘an ideal digressiveness and ideal intensity’ Sontag calls it; 1993, xv) in all of it always: a practice that is always at least the equal of what it preaches (ibid). We can hardly escape the ‘snare of infatuation’, which leads from the writing to the work, the oeuvre, which Barthes pejoratively describes as ‘the transcendence of a unitary sacred product’ (Barthes, 1977a: 136). Barthes declares himself as delighting ‘endlessly in writing as in a perpetual production, in an unconditional dispersion, in an energy of seduction which no legal defines of the subject I fling upon the page can any longer halt’ (ibid). In all things, he is remarkably open, so we too should be. The process of writing, of thinking is laid open in a Brechtian fashion (Barthes championed Brecht in France); a metaphorical half curtain is pulled deliberately inadequately across the mystique of the genius writer, the Author-God. ‘I had a head full of Nietzsche’, he confesses, but ‘the influence was purely prosodic’ (Barthes, 1977a: 106). Similarly in the 1970 preface to another edition of Mythologies, a writing which had very much become ‘work’, he is keen to maintain a life for it as ‘Text: a magnanimous word: it shows no partiality to the difference’ (Barthes, 1977a: 136). This preface is in no sense defensive, or curative; rather, it is keen to reinforce the historical contexts in all of their complexities and banalities. His account of the ‘book’ is once again transparent. ‘I had just read Saussure’, he writes ‘and as a result, acquired the conviction that by collective representations as sign systems, one might hope . . . to account in detail for the mystification . . . ’ (Barthes, 1972: 8) This is no recantation either; why should that be necessary? In a text that consistently rails at the ahistorical character of petit-bourgeois culture, what could be more ‘natural’ than recovering the historical context? Thus, there is absolutely no temptation to update them. That, hopefully and properly, is the job of others, since it is not only the observable reality that is different but also the ‘double theoretical framework’. Though there is some casual claim (I think justifiable) for the importance of Myth Today in initiating semiological analysis, it is coupled with a further admission that the 1970 version of semiology is ‘more’ (precise, complicated, and differentiated): the theoretical ‘locus’ no less. Thus, for Barthes, some thirteen years after initial publication, Mythologies embodies a form ‘which belongs to the past’. One wonders what his preface to the new English version of 2012 might have contained. By 1970, approximations of the trajectory from semiotics to semioclasm were being made, and Barthes was continuing to write: ‘no denunciation without an appropriate method of detailed analysis’ (Barthes, 1972: 8).

MYTHS OF ORIGIN AND SIGNS OF REALITY The removal of the Author . . . is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text (Barthes, 1977b: 145).

Barthes’ Myth Today

145

What is Barthes today? Barthes is a form of speech, a mode of signification. To earn the qualifier ‘Barthesian’, as those collected here have attempted, is to be defined not by object or material but by a signifying consciousness’. Barthes, like ‘myth’, is semiological. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. He was, after all, the author of his own book length critical study, On Roland Barthes. The supremely playful act? Not so, merely a seamless part of a life spent epitomising his critical inclinations. With Racine and Balzac, as with Barthes: ‘let the essay avow itself almost a novel’ (cited by Sontag, 1993: xv). For Barthes, even writing about himself was always about seduction: The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself) (Barthes, 1975: 6). It is this ‘writing itself’ that constitutes this collection, this response to and through Barthes. Not as reenactment, or even homage, but as critical and creative approach, renewed rather than merely revisited. We have both a ‘spontaneous’ and pragmatic engagement with the myths that surround us all in our daily lives without the feigned innocence of historical reconstruction. There is no presumption of innocence here; rather, there is a productive recognition of the various contexts, historical and cultural, that give this work its particular ‘flavours’, aware perhaps that ‘it is the taste of words that makes knowledge profound, fecund’ (Sontag [ed.], 1993: 465). This is writing which is both fully aware of its status as a new Mythologies and fully engaged in readings of contemporary culture; myth is, as Barthes suggested, a double system, ‘like a turnstile’. Our contributors were asked to reacquaint themselves with ‘the message of the Author-God’, or, in this case, ‘messages’, since the phenomenon of Barthes necessarily rose into view (Barthes, 1977b:146). Barthes has become a network of relationships: personal, public, intellectual, textual, inter-textual, as ‘teacher, man of letters, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean auto-biographer’; all of these (Sontag, 1993: vii). And this extends also to those nonhuman objects: the Eiffel Tower, steak and chips, the Citroen. Within this engaging but equally engaged set of contexts, our potential contributors were effectively asked to consider Mythologies in its various manifestations, as a ‘text’ on Barthes’s terms. This is, as Sontag suggests, the idea of text as an adversary notion. For Sontag, in true Barthesian fashion, this has two aspects: the suspension of conventional evaluation and the subversion of established classifications. Innocence folded into experience, turning the text upon itself. In this way, the book you are reading is, as all potentially are: ‘a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (Barthes, 1977b:146). Those who have contributed to this

146

Pete Bennett

‘space’ have been asked to consider ‘through’ Barthes the proposition that ‘myth is not defined by the object of its message but by the way in which it utters this message’. They have also been asked by Barthes, as we all are, ‘to live to the full the contradiction of our time’ (Barthes, 1972: 11).

BARTHES: HUMAN, GOD, MYTH The longer you live the better you get (Bob Dylan). A multiplicity has neither subject nor object . . . (Deleuze/ Guattari, 1988: 9). And what if we hadn’t read Barthes? (Repression: not to have read Barthes would have been an extraordinary defect for one editing a collection of responses to Barthes). But what of consumers of myths? Where do their reading duties begin? They are, many of them, beyond the thrall of the author-god. And yet, as a mythologist, my connection with the world may well be ‘an order of sarcasm’. (Mental note: ‘it is this constant game of hideand-seek that defines myth’) Can this author be removed? Will he always be ‘the past of his own book’? Like it or not, Barthes himself cannot be removed. Ask as he did ‘What is a myth today?’ and one answer is Barthes himself (Barthes, 1972: 107). As if to address the pedantic Dr Casaubon’s futile quest1, Barthes has become to some extent ‘the key to all mythologies’. Take the opening of Sontag’s unwitting elegy on the postwar ‘intellectual notable, whose work . . . most certain will endure’ (Sontag [ed.], 1993: vii). What critic could resist this critic? However, we are doing this without reverence: Barthes must be taken at his words: ‘writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin’ (Barthes, 1977b: 146). ‘In what he writes there are two texts’: his ‘gig’ is the duplicity of the signifier. Myth, he reminds us, is ‘a double system’, a value for which truth is no guarantor; ‘nothing prevents it from being a powerful alibi’ (Barthes, 1972: 122). Barthes is perhaps in this context comparable to the Eiffel Tower he so artfully interprets. Working within the contours of culture, myth, and ideology, Barthes is unavoidable: ‘no glance he fails to touch’. And this project, to extend the analogy, simply takes Barthes’ advice on the subject of the ‘tower’ and applies it to Barthes himself: ‘you must . . . get up on it and, so to speak, identify yourself with it’ (Barthes, 1979: 4). Here Barthes is treated the same way; we get up on him and into him in order to get beyond him, to go further. Because as ‘Teacher, man of letters, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer’ Barthes does, like the tower seem ‘ineluctable, because it (he) means everything’ (ibid). With Barthes, you must participate: not reflect but engage. This is exposing for ‘Myth hides nothing’, it renders the world ‘open to appropriation by society’ (Barthes, 1972: 120). This puts it at odds with most conventional

Barthes’ Myth Today

147

forms of academic writing. These negotiations are fascinating, whether they appear explicitly or implicitly.

THE PREPARATION OF THE ESSAY This project began with a simple premise, a thumbnail sketch. First, there was to be a re-imagining of a canonical text, one which John Storey has described as ‘one of the founding texts of cultural studies’ and a reconsideration of the significant critical essay that, fifty-five years ago, explicated this master text (Storey, 2009: 242). At the heart of this endeavor, as much as Barthes, the ‘author-god’ was the whole issue of theory and its practice in academic and critical contexts. Mythologies Today was potentially to be a vehicle for explorations of what Brecht called ‘Classical Status as an Inhibiting Factor’(Willett[ed.], 1964: 272–273). Then there was to be a full-blown critical essay that would revisit/renew/ update/develop, Barthes’s powerhouse contribution ‘Myth Today’ (‘le Myth Aujourd’hui’). Barthes himself calls for ‘the subjective grasp of history in which the potent seed of the future is nothing but the most profound apocalypse of the present’ citing Saint-Just’s’ strange saying: ‘What constitutes the Republic is the total destruction of what is opposed to it’ (Barthes, 1972: 158). However, he goes on to warn us off the ’trivial sense’: ‘One has to clear the way before reconstructing’. So we return to Barthes in the company of flexible and innovative contributors, setting aside the seductive notion of ‘The Complete Edition in a new translation’, which Sam Anderson (2012) reviewed rapturously in the New York Times as follows: ‘For a book devoted almost entirely to 60-year old pop culture, Mythologies feels surprisingly relevant today’ (Anderson, 2012). This is surprising, not least because it quite quickly seemed little relevant to even Barthes himself. Of course, Barthes’s poststructuralist identity does not obliterate, ‘call time on’, or even replace his structuralism (particularly his flexible semiology, which seamlessly connects both). Whatever he might himself recount or indeed recant, the former remains an element of the latter. However, one of the substantial reasons for renewing Mythologies ‘today’ is predicated on the argument we advance in After the Media (Bennett, Kendall, and McDougall, 2011) concerning the precariousness of ‘the media’ as a unitary idea. What we argue there is for ‘an emerging field of “post-media cultural studies”’ which attempts to come to terms with ‘the hybrid media landscape in which traditional power is exercised alongside “prosumer” distribution of culture’. It is an approach that asks simple and searching questions of the kind of dominant ideology models that partly inform Mythologies. It seems uncontroversial to suggest that Barthes was writing into a new ‘discipline’ at the very birth of a new kind of consumer culture. Fifty years on, it can be argued that this ‘world’, which Barthes wrote into

148

Pete Bennett

being by making it an object of study, is in the process of being overturned and/or undermined. Thus, whatever the appearances to the contrary, we potentially stand in a place not dissimilar to Barthes’, though helpfully with Barthes’s work as an invaluable context from which to work. Even ‘invaluable contexts’, though, cannot easily explain the appetite or even need for a ‘new’ unabridged English version in 2012. This is a text that has remained largely unrevised: Barthes saw it quickly as a historical piece. It is interesting, too, to contemplate this paradox, summed up by Neil Badmington, editor of the brilliant four-volume Roland Barthes critical companion; ‘Although Barthes often dismissed Mythologies in his more mature work, it remains his most influential book’ (Badmington, 2010) From the point of view of Barthes’s premise in Myth Today, it seems hardly possible that ‘Many of Barthes’ insights apply just as powerfully to contemporary culture as they did to post-war France’. However, as Anderson freely admits, ‘with Barthes, it’s always dangerous to reduce things to a basic idea’ (Anderson, 2012). Barthes’s friend Alain Robbe-Grillet, in Why I love Barthes, insists the essence and appeal of Barthes work lies in its slipperiness: it ‘never stops abandoning positions that it pretends to have won’ (Robbe-Grillet, 2011: 21). ‘World is crazier’ wrote the poet Louis MacNeice ‘and more of it than you think: incorrigibly plural’2. So it is with Barthes. Derrida’s eulogy ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’ begins ‘How does one reconcile this plural?’ (Derrida, 1981: 259) How can one avoid or resist ‘the death of the author’: ‘the duplicity of the signifier determines the character of the signification’ (Barthes, 1972: 122). Barthes’ fateful and untimely fatal collision occurred on 25 February 1980 and is awash with signification. He was leaving a function given by Francois Mitterrand, who reputedly was an admirer of Mythologies, a contingency rather than a cause as was the site of the accident, the rue des Écoles, for a man associated with so many ‘schools’. For a short time, Barthes enjoyed anonymity, otherwise unthinkable, a kind of bloodied innocence: Unconscious and bleeding from the nose, without his identity card or any other form of identification, he was taken to the Salpetriere hospital by ambulance. No one knew who he was which is why the media did not get hold of the news until much later (Calvet, 1994: 248). In an article published in the art critical journal October in a Festschrift for Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982, Douglas Crimp considered the meanings of Barthes’s ‘absurd’ death partly in the context of innuendo circulating that it was a kind of suicide (Crimp, 1982). Crimp sets this aside and addresses instead the movement of Barthes’s late work, which is widely considered, he concurs, ‘a volte-face, a repudiation of Barthes ‘position’ against the authorial voice’. ‘Barthes’, he continues ‘is said to have renounced writing for autobiography’: the ‘is said to’ is vital, perhaps part

Barthes’ Myth Today

149

of an order of sarcasm that its subject prophesied: his favourite motto was ‘Larvatus prodeo’ (‘I advance pointing toward my mask’) (Gabara, 2006: 17). Crimp’s sub-section three ‘Another Trilogy’ is anyway offering a different take, which further evidences Crimp’s tolerant eye: ‘To work on oneself may seem a pretentious idea: but it is also a simple idea; simple as the idea of suicide’(Crimp, 1982: 64). The death of the author is not necessarily a murder or mercy killing: even immortality and eternity cannot be endlessly abjured. For Crimp, the ‘horror’ of it is clear: ‘It is Barthes death that allows him to come into being, to become an essence’ (Crimp, 1982: 65). Using Camera Lucida not as evidence of Barthes’s suicide but rather as his final critical contribution, Crimp helps us to understand the challenges of setting Barthes’s lands in order: This is what he recognized as deathlike in photography: . . . for what society makes of my photograph, what it reads there, I do not know (in any case, there are so many readings of the same face); but when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person; others -the Other -do not dispossess me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their mercy, at their disposal, classified in a file, ready for the subtlest deceptions . . . (ibid). It is to this challenge that Derrida rises and we must, too, buriers and praisers all: ‘Thus it will have been like this, uniquely, once and for all’ (Derrida, 1981: 259). He too reaches for Camera Lucida and Barthes’s account of the ghostly power of the photograph’ The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs—in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives . . . and the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum (Silverman [Ed.], 1988: 267). In such a context, one can only inhabit the signifying consciousness, creating interventions, texts, which attempt to elude/sidestep/postpone/avoid ‘rules’, which are ‘stubbornly unrealistic’. For Barthes in writing, this means fragmentation, and so we share Derrida’s declaration: I don’t yet know, and in the end it doesn’t matter, if I will be able to make it understood. Why I must leave these thoughts for Roland Barthes fragmentary or why I value them for their incompleteness . . . these small pebbles thoughtfully placed only one each time on the edge of a name like the promise of return (Derrida, 1981: 260). For Crimp, what mortality means is ‘no longer being able to assume another voice, to abjure earlier pose or fiction’. He relates this ‘fate’ to

150

Pete Bennett

Barthes’s comments on the need for ‘shifting ground’ when elected to be, in Crimp’s words, ‘professor’ of something he no longer professed’; It is precisely because it persists that writing is forced to shift ground. . . . To shift ground, then can mean to go where you are not expected, or, more radically to abjure what you have written (Crimp, 1982: 66). This shifting of ground has been a key characteristic of Barthes’s career, this ‘trajectory’ that he records in shorthand in ‘on Roland Barthes’: Let us follow this trajectory once again. At the work’s source, the opacity of social relations, a false Nature; the first impulse, the first shock, then, is to demystify (Mythologies); then when the demystification is immobilized in repetition, it must be displaced: semiological science (then postulated) tries to stir, to vivify, to arm the mythological gesture, the pose, by endowing it with a method; this science is encumbered in its turn with a whole repertoire of images: the goal of a semiological science is replaced by the (often very grim) science of the semiologists; hence, one must sever oneself from that, must introduce into this rational image-repertoire the texture of desire, the claims of the body: this, then, is the Text, the theory of the Text. But the Text risks paralysis: it repeats itself, counterfeits itself in lustreless texts, testimonies to a demand for readers, not for a desire to please: the Text tends to degenerate into prattle (Babel). Where to go next? That is where I am now (Crimp, 1982: 66). That was more than thirty-five years ago. What of Barthes’s myth today?

NATURAL HISTORY Barthes is very explicit about ‘where’ Mythologies came from, a place at once emotional and intellectual: ‘a feeling of impatience at the sight of the “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense dress up a reality. . . . Undoubtedly determined by “history”. In short, ‘I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn”.’ (Barthes, 1972: 10). He sets himself the task of ‘tracking down’ ‘the ideological abuse . . . in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying’ (ibid). The continuing popularity of the book suggests he had some success, perhaps, or does it? For Barthes, the dangers of a contemporary culture, ideologically appropriative, centre on its ability to take history from the equation: to absorb, drain, distort, and transform it. This, he said, is ‘The very principle of myth: it transforms history into Nature’ (Barthes, 1972: 128). In his Mythologies, this is brilliantly and provocatively argued: ‘myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it things lose the memory that they once

Barthes’ Myth Today

151

were made’ (Barthes, 1972: 143). This is the ‘purple patch’ of Myth Today, a thrilling analytical and critical ride, a process that, in time, even the myth ‘Barthes’ would be susceptible to. It’s a sequence that begins in the section ‘Reading and Deciphering myth’ with an account of how myth is received and the process by which one passes from semiology to ideology. As ever with Barthes, the reader is the key, though here an active ‘patsy’ to ideology’s sniper rifle: ‘It is the reader of myths himself who must reveal their essential function’ (Barthes, 1972: 130). And this reading is decontextualized, well, reconceptualized since the question becomes ‘How does he receive this particular myth today?’ (ibid) In this way, its meaning becomes naturalized, a semiological system becomes a factual one: ‘It is not read as a motive, but as a reason’, hence, myth “is experienced as innocent speech” (Barthes, 1972: 128). This makes it very resistant to resistance: it is at the same time ‘imperfectable and unquestionable’. Barthes, in fact, suggests ‘the best weapon against myth is to mystify it in its turn’ (Barthes, 1972: 134). At this point, Barthes names his enemy and provides a broad historical context. In the most provocatively titled section, ‘The Bourgeoisie as a Joint Stock Company’, Barthes brings his argument to a crescendo. For Barthes, mythology is part of an elaborate ‘scam’ whereby the ruling class effect a disappearance in broad daylight by ex-nominating itself, a process of ultimate naturalization. Here, ‘bourgeois’ becomes synonymous with ‘national’, and ‘ideological’ becomes ‘universal’. This process is absolute: ‘everything, in everyday life’ as the range of mythologies have inferred and predicated on ‘the representation of that which the bourgeoisie have and makes us have’ (Barthes, 1972: 139). However, the subtler point concerns the historical, since ‘These normalized forms attract little attention, by the very fact of their extension in which their original is easily lost’ (ibid). Here is the path directly to simulation and simulacra: for postmodernists like Baudrilliard (1983), this process was also suffused with nostalgia: When the real is no longer what is used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality of second hand truths, objectivity and authenticity (Storey [Ed.], 2009: 412). For all his apparent ‘Frankfurt school, Culture industry’ inflexibility, Barthes is offering an also subtle account of the way contemporary culture speaks, noting that it is the historical sense that is most importantly absorbed. Bourgeois ideology is the process ‘through which the bourgeoisie transforms the reality of the world into an image of the world, History into Nature’ (Barthes, 1972: 140). In ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, Derrida proposes that a reading of Barthes’ first and last works might mean ‘perhaps a history might gather itself, a history related to itself’ (Derrida, 1981: 262). He continues: ‘History

152

Pete Bennett

having become Nature in this collection as if . . . ’ confessing that he has capitalized History and Nature because Barthes always did (ibid). Derrida refers to a passage in Camera Lucida where Barthes alludes to the historian Michelet, the subject of an early study as the only one, who ‘conceived of History as Love’s protest’ against ‘indifferent Nature’, who returned both concepts to active service. However, Derrida concludes: ‘I don’t think he (Barthes) believed in this opposition [Nature, History] (or in any others)’ (Derrida, 1981: 262). It is here where theory and theorist cohere, or at least overlap, as we overwrite ‘Myth as Depoliticised Speech’ : ‘Semiology has taught us that myth has the task of giving a historical intention a natural justification and making contingency appear eternal’ (Barthes, 1972: 142). Considering Barthes’s Myth Today, today, and by implication, the Barthes myth today, we are all too aware of the dangers: ‘Myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it things lose the memory that they once were made’. Notice this is not ‘lack’ but ‘loss’, something at once poignant and yet at the same time an offence, ‘a language robbery’, even an intolerable laceration. These issues were to permeate, one way or another the whole of Barthes’s work. Though his notion of ideology is classic Marx (in which ‘men and their conditions appear throughout ideology inverted as in a camera obscura’ (Sontag, 1993: 140fn), Barthes nevertheless opens up many possibilities for both himself and his contemporaries and followers to pursue. This not only reads well, but also, fifty-five years later, provides a persistent sense of threads, which we might ‘follow’ or elsewhere weave into something new and ‘now’. The analysis also, as we have implied provides a decent basis for this return to Barthes, this re-imagining. Barthes is sometimes held responsible for all of the imagined ‘sins’ of structruralist semiotics, which include the ultimate paradox: accusations of a criticism that is as ahistorical as the myths it attempts to unveil. Now, Barthes is a decidedly difficult man to pin down, capable of ‘mastered asides’, his connection with the world ‘an order of sarcasm’. Writing of Voltaire, as the last happy writer, he writes ‘with dogged explicitness’ of two happinesses that are artfully juxtaposed (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 152–53). “Voltaire’s first happiness was doubtless that of his times” “Voltaire’s second happiness was precisely to forget history.” Mythologies is very much of ‘his times’, and history is that to which he wants us to ‘awaken’. Here is the germ of Barthes’s life’s work on writing, but more especially reading, on establishing the reader as a maker of meaning in entirely the way that myth is denying them that role. Though his politics are sometimes hard to define, the political character of his work cannot be in doubt. Barthes’ ‘political’ encompasses ‘the whole of human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world’ (Barthes, 1972: 142). It is this that myth ‘washes clean’. In the most famous

Barthes’ Myth Today

153

example from Paris Match, ‘the contingent, historical, in one word: fabricated quality of colonialism’ (Barthes, 1972: 143). And for colonialism; also for Barthes himself: In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity (ibid). This is a massively influential passage, leading partly from the structuralist Barthes to the poststructuralist Barthes (and modernist to post-modernist) and to this punchline: ‘things appear to mean something by themselves’ (ibid). The assault on the conceit that a stable relationship might exist between signifier and signified can wait for later. It will lead unerringly to ‘The Death of the Author’, a hypothesis that is also concerned with the temporal, being not ‘merely an historical fact’: The temporality is different. The Author, when believed in is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author start automatically on a single line divided in a before and after (Barthes, 1977b: 145). This is part of an abandonment of teleology, of any search for ‘essence’ for ‘The Author . . . who, exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it’ (ibid). In its place, even in Myth Today, we have an approach that is very much closer to Foucault’s (and Nietzsche’s) ‘genealogy of History’; hence, ‘History never ensures the triumph of pure and simple of something over its opposite: it unveils, while making itself, unimaginable solutions, unforeseeable syntheses’ (Barthes, 1972: 158). Later, in The Death of the Author, we get a clearer steer: writing of the ‘modern scriptor’, he suggests that he ‘traces a field without origin—or which at least has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins’ (Barthes, 1977b: 148). Like Foucault, Barthes’s approach ‘does not oppose itself to history . . . it opposes itself to the search for “origins” ‘ (Foucault, 1991: 77).

IN THE PRISON OF HIS DAYS In the prison of his days, teach the free man how to praise3 (Auden). Myth Today concludes with a section that almost seems an afterthought or afterword. It is shot through with a measure of reluctance, even resignation, though ultimately in the teeth of inevitable defeat, Barthes fashions an almost millenary call to arms. This is an exhortation to seek three kinds

154

Pete Bennett

of reconciliation: between object and knowledge, between description and explanation, between reality and men. These ‘men’ are ultimately the ‘myth consumers’ whom Barthes’s mythologist must ‘cut himself off from’, ‘men’ whose very cultural lives have been subjected across Mythologies to that ‘order of sarcasm’ that Barthes reckons is the relation of the mythologist to the world (Barthes, 1972: 157–158). It is inconceivable today to hold popular culture in such apparent contempt, and Barthes and the text are to some extent harmed by this. Barthes is seen by some as an unreconstructed high-cultural elitist passing scornful comments over other people’s lives. It is this tone, this plaintive tune that mars the work, it is argued, even though so much of Mythologies still seems surprisingly relevant. It is certainly true that Barthes is at times dismissive; he writes, for example, of the popular evangelist Billy Graham, that ‘If God is really speaking through Doctor Graham’s mouth it must be acknowledged that God is stupid’ (Barthes, 1997: 64). However, this seemingly indiscriminate ‘anger even against injustice’, as Brecht had it, must be seen in a set of significant immediate contexts and then in the broader context of Barthes. Marianne Dekoven, in her classic cultural history of the 1960s, Utopia Limited, reads Mythologies as exhibiting the ‘contradictory structures’ of a classic 1960s text (despite its date of publication). For Dekoven, Barthes is ‘just as much ventriloquizing as he is occupying the position of the infatuated customer, in order to understand, demystify and repudiate that position’ (Dekoven, 2004: 60). However, at the very same time, Barthes is opening up the space on ‘postmodernism’s valorization and reinvigoration of the popular’ (ibid). Santayana famously suggested that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are forced to repeat it’,4 and though Barthes often plays liberally with historical context, we would be foolish to chide a fifty-five-year-old text, conspicuously unaltered, for its signs of age. ‘A people without history’, Eliot suggested, ‘is not redeemed from time’ and some of our discomforts with Mythologies are certainly ‘without history’5. In fact, the mistake we can make is that which can be identified in the early Barthes, of being too text-oriented, of neglecting how the text is re-made by subsequent readers. When we get beyond the immediate contexts which characterize (flavour) Mythologies, it is clear that this ‘grievous fault’ was adequately addressed in Barthes’s subsequent intervention. This past has clearly been remembered: he, who killed the author, also freed the reader. In fact, it is tempting to read ‘The Last Happy Writer’, his (as-evercontroversial) reading of Voltaire, as quasi-autobiographical, or at least archly positional. Written in 1958, contemporaneous then with the publication of Mythologies, it speaks suggestively of both then and now. Sontag argues that ‘Throughout his work Barthes projects himself into his subject. . . . He is Fourier. . . . He is Gide’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: xxxii). And perhaps, ‘Voltaire,’ the last happy writer’. How often does a simple substitution produce insight?

Barthes’ Myth Today

155

What have we in common today with Voltaire? (For ‘Voltaire’, read ‘Barthes’, especially for us the Barthes of ‘Mythologies’). From a modern point of view his philosophy is outmoded’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 150). Consider also: In short what separates us from (Barthes) is that he was a happy writer. Better than anyone else, he gave reason’s combat a festive style (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 151). And then, fold in these words from his inaugural lecture in 1977: ‘Words are no longer conceived illusively as simple instruments, they are cast as projections, explosions, vibrations, devices, flavours. Writing makes knowledge festive’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 464). This brings us to the question of context and a critique of Voltaire’s ‘reasons to be cheerful’. They were explicated earlier, so let’s look a little further. Referencing Voltaire’s times, Barthes explains that ‘the times were very harsh and Voltaire has everywhere described their horrors’, implying a writer’s particular responsibilities (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 152). This is a key aspect of Barthes’ project, whose horrors, while less explicit are no less pressing. Andrew Leak describes Barthes’s attitude to the burgeoning philistinism and anti-intellectuality of French cultural life as ‘a posture of isolation and singularity’ (Leak, 1994: 9). There is a palpable sense of threat that is difficult to gauge: it becomes a mission, a vocation. Here again, the Voltaire analogy is striking since Barthes claims that ‘no period has helped a writer more, given him more assurance that he was fighting for a just and natural cause’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 152). This runs fairly close to what Barthes implies about the contemporary prospects of the newly coined role of ‘mythologist’: ‘True, he will have no trouble in feeling justified: whatever its mistakes, mythology is certain to participate in the making of the world’ (Barthes, 1972: 157). The mythologist, it seems, is attuned to the fully jointed contradictions of his time. And yet Barthes also foresees ‘difficulties, in feeling, if not in method’ for ‘the mythologist, if ever there is one’ (ibid). Exactly the difficulties, in fact, that this section of the essay is addressing, difficulties in ‘feeling’, in the tenor, the pitch, the mode of address. And here again, the ‘history’ has to be brought in line with the sensitivities of the creative critical act. Even accepting Stuart Hall’s arguments that in terms of the discipline, cultural studies, ‘the search for origins is tempting but illusory’ (Proctor, 2004: 37), there is a clear consensus that what Barthes was doing in Mythologies was groundbreaking, perhaps metaphorically at least a ‘paradigm shift’. And new territories often require not only new maps, but new cartographies: an exploratory language to record the act of exploration. According to Sontag, Barthes only has one response to such a conundrum: ‘He always wrote full

156

Pete Bennett

out, was always concentrated, indefatigable’, in the teeth of it (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: viii). He was also writing out of a position, as a man of letters, an intellectual, a literary critic, risking a reputation on that which all thought trivial, ephemeral, and unworthy of consideration. This was necessarily a defensive position, not superficially but profoundly. Much of the strength and resilience of Mythologies comes from this detached, rigorous approach, tempered by a genuine horror at what he had discovered and was ’unveiling’. As one of the first to take mass culture seriously, it is hard to be too critical about his exaggerated unease about it. This is a period we have lived through and for which we can find a context. Barthes’s bearings are provided by his education, his experiences, and the tenor of the times. The almost Lovecroftean unease at the invisible ideological enemy which manifests itself ominously in invective and nostalgia is not specific to Barthes. As Genesko suggests, Mythologies belongs to ‘a period rich in cultural criticism’ (Genesko, 1998: 167). Genesko identifies three groundbreaking books that share this mixture of unease, nostalgia, and regret, which seems so alien and aloof to the modern reader. To Mythologies, Genesco adds McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride (1951) and Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957). His hypothesis is that each of these (separately) had a sense of regret ‘about the emergence of a mythic consciousness whose distinguishing feature was that it did not want to be identified, and that it erased itself in order to move fully and powerfully perfuse and influence social and cultural life: French bourgeois ideology ex-nominates itself; American magazines offer satisfyingly comprehensive attitudes and opinions to their readers; and the emerging mass form is a “faceless” and “classless” and “characterless” culture’ (Genesco 1998: 168). There is though, according to Genesko, a difference between these three key thinkers in respect of ‘what is lost and the consequences of this loss’ (ibid). For both Hoggart and Barthes, there are distinctions to be made in this struggle between traditional working-class culture and that mass culture that was sure to replace it. Hoggart makes this explicit by dividing his book into two parts (‘The Older Order’ and ’Yielding Place to the New’) and by admitting his partiality: ‘I have said little about the valuable social changes of the last 50 years and much of the cultural changes which are accompanying them’ (Hoggart, 1992: 318). For Barthes, on the other hand, there is a division between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, which is partially bridged by a persistent but under pressure traditional popular culture. Barthes offers two examples of this phenomenon, which garner sympathetic treatment, the most famous of which is ‘The World of Wrestling’. Barthes labels all-in wrestling as ‘the spectacle of excess’, but goes on to suggest that wrestling ‘partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights’ (Barthes, 1972: 13). What follows then is a tour-de-force of criticism, which argues that wrestling’s ‘Great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat and Justice’ is every bit as substantial and meaningful as opera or high drama (Barthes, 1972:17).

Barthes’ Myth Today

157

And as this ’vulgar’ activity is addressed and acknowledged, so the writing soars also. ‘Each moment is wrestling is therefore like an algebra which instantaneously incites the relationship between a cause and an effect’ (ibid). However ruthlessly Barthes debunks the ‘image trove’ of consumer culture (shopping, washing powders, women’s magazines, even plastic), what makes so many of these vicious vignettes memorable is the energy expended on them, the relish with which the offending items are ‘consumed’. And, in this very act, their significance is guaranteed, since proper attention has been paid to them. Thus, again, Barthes seems himself like ‘The last Happy Writer’, grounding his ‘system of the non-system . . . on a contradiction’, finding, like Voltaire, a ‘festivity constituted by this incessant alibi’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 157). Moreover, on countless occasions, ‘(Barthes) cudgels and dodges at the same time’ (ibid). For all of the theoretical intent, and political necessity, Barthes recognizes the limitations of the mythologist as clearly as the corrupting influence of myths: ‘His speech is a metalanguage, it acts nothing: at the most it unveils. . . . ’ He also realises that the necessary detachment of the mythologist ‘from all the myth consumers . . . is no small matter’ (Barthes, 1972: 157). At this point in Myth Today, Barthes expiates the matter in a manner that contains much regret and considerable empathy. ‘When a myth reaches the entire community’, Barthes explains, ‘it is from the latter that the mythologist becomes estranged’ (Barthes, 1972:158). ‘Estranged’ has a Brechtian flavor, suggesting perhaps two kinds of ‘alienation’, one a function of ideology and the other a contrived response to this, a literal contradiction. Moreover, myth has a very different kind of airing when Barthes writes that ‘any myth with some degree of generality is in fact ambiguous, because it represents the very humanity of those who, having nothing have borrowed it’ (ibid). This is not contemptuous or aloof, and it is with some regret, rather than relief, that Barthes accepts that ‘To decipher the Tour de France or “The good French wine” is to cut oneself off from those who are entertained or warmed by them’ (ibid). The issue has been mediated by subsequent treatments of ’the popular’ but it has not gone away: readings of The X Factor, for example, or Top Gear are bound to encounter this abiding ambiguity: ‘The mythologist is condemned to live in a theoretical sociality’ (ibid). This is where Mythologies formally ends, in this ‘Afterword’, in this momentary pause, contemplating the ‘difficulty pertaining to our times’. For the truth is that in 20,000 provocative, insightful, flavoursome words, Barthes has both theorized his ’mythologies’ and moved on through them to the next set of challenges. Knowing only too well that ‘one has only learnt to get the better of words for the thing no longer has its say’, that he ‘constantly runs the risk of causing the reality he purports to protect to disappear’, there is nothing else to do but move on. He is already as it were, theorizing his own theory, seeking what is not ‘presently’ feasible in a time that must ‘speak excessively about reality’; ‘a synthesis between ideology and poetry’; the power to render the wholeness of reality (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 159–160).

158

Pete Bennett

Also, those reconciliations, which his subsequent work will progressively attempt and which stand ‘between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge’ (Barthes, 1972: 160).

THE JOY OF TEXT Taken on first reading as a systematic assault on ‘the essential enemy’ (the bourgeois norm) Mythologies may seem to operate like a companion piece to Adorno’s The Culture Industry. ‘Mass Culture is unadorned make-up’ (Adorno, 1991: 61), Adorno wrote contemptuously: ‘the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2001:41). However taken in its essential contexts, past and present it represents a significant marker of a larger and more substantial journey. For it is Barthes’ work influencing and influenced by many others, individually and collectively, moving in an out of invented and ascribed movements which connect those crude Frankfurt school accounts in which ‘the only freedom left appeared to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulation the system distribute to each individual’ to those like De Certeau (the author of that somewhat satirical summary) for whom ‘Today the text is society itself’ (De Certeau, 1988: 165). The problem for Barthes is that in this exploration of contingencies, the ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ work too often becomes an unbidden narrative of cause and effect and for the systemizer who deplored the ‘sclerosis of systems’ accusations of recantation and betrayal. In particular, and with the ever-popular and accessible Mythologies as the fixed point (unrevised) in a changing world, he was accused of a long withdrawal from the structuralist semiotics that he had once embodied. The journey to Camera Lucida was to a point which ‘couldn’t be further away from the semiotic analysis he introduced to France in the 1960s’ (Lotringer, 2011). However, while accused of turning his back on what he’d earlier professed, he was still largely held responsible for all manner of its ills. Even Foucault’s scathing account of that ‘certain way of thinking’ during the years 1945–1965, published in his Preface to Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari seems to reserve a barb for Barthes. ‘One had to be on familiar terms with Marx’, quips Foucault, ‘not let one’s dreams stray too far from Freud’ and ‘one had to treat sign systems—the signifier—with greatest respect’ (Deleuze, 2006: xiii). As ever, Barthes seems to need to be classified. He resists all attempts to conform. Like ‘every text’ in Derrida’s model, he participates is one or several genres, he belongs without belonging. His will not and cannot be appropriated, classified, or preserved, committed as he is to a regendered genre, la loi, the law of madness, living always ‘within and without the work, along the boundary’ (Derrida, 1980: 65). Lotringer reports that ‘after

Barthes’ Myth Today

159

the publication of . . . Anti-Oedipus in 1972 Barthes declared (somewhat flippantly) that he had “no father to kill, no family to hate, no milieu to reject: great Oedipal frustration” ’ (Lotringer, 2011). For Barthes, there is no direction home. What maintains Barthes as a credible commentator and original thinker is both his usefulness (Sontag saw him as ‘the most consistently intelligent, important and useful critic’ of his era (Budelis, 2010)) and, despite his elusiveness, his openness about the shifting ground: abjurations are not disguised but made explicit de rigeur. Going where he was not expected to go was a way of life. By the time of his election to the Chair of Semiology, many of the real tensions inherent in this role had been addressed: not resolved but certainly embraced. By 1977, ‘The semiologist is, in short, an artist (the word as I use it, neither glorifies nor disdains)’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 475). By this point, the author-god is dead, and the reader is free to ’make frolic’, turning his attention to revitalizing the ’readerly text’. Pleasure has entered the game on the side of the reader too, since textual pleasure is not imitative but productive. The writerly text actively repositions the reader. With this relationship clearly understood so too the ‘play with signs as with a conscious-decoy, whose fascination he savours and wants to make others savour and understand’ (ibid). Nothing emphasizes this shift more than Barthes’s indication that’“this semiology . . . is not a hermeneutics: it paints more than it digs’ (ibid). The distance travelled is from unveiling as a political act to playing ‘with the sign as with a painted veil’ (ibid). Paul De Man was recording this journey, with some little disdain as early as 1972 in his essay ‘Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism’. De Man implies, through offering Foucault and Deleuze among others as the agents of this, the movement to a poststructuralism which invalidated semiology as clearly as it postdated structuralism (De Man, 1990: 177–190). In fact, as we’ve said, Myth Today ends with ‘the limits of mythology’. Barthes is in constant conversation about both, negotiating a ‘science of signs’ into the ‘wild card of contemporary knowledge’. In simple terms, the semiology of the speaker is a poststructuralist semiology, whatever tension that provokes. It concentrates on the referent and the impossibility of an ultimate referent ever being reached. De Man sees clearly the implications of this for textural analysis of all kinds: ‘the rationality of the critical meta language is constantly threatened and problematic’ (De Man, 1990: 190). By 1977, even the feasibility of the metalanguage has gone: ‘Semiology cannot itself be a metalanguage’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 472). Of course. this is a direct contradiction of ‘His (the mythologist’s) speech is a metalanguage it acts nothing’ (Barthes, 1972: 157). However, what has got him there is ‘precisely in reflecting on the sign’. It is semiology that discovers that ‘every relation of exteriority of one language to another is in the long run, untenable’. It is the ‘long run’ that Barthes is in for: ‘The Text always postpones . . . ’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 472).

160

Pete Bennett

It is this ‘essentially adversary notion of “the text” that killed the Author, but sustained the critic, subverting established classifications, suspending conventional evaluations. Who speaks literature, writing? We shall never know for the good reason that writing is “the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin”. Once the mystique of the text, often sustained by authorial genius is shown to be an illusion all that remains is materializing: and pleasure and promiscuity replace reverence, ‘identifying the text with the purest moments of perversion’” (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 412). Representation is hardly feasible, since the real is not represent able only demonstrable. It becomes, for Barthes, ‘a space of alibis (reality, morality, likelihood, readability, truth)’ (ibid). Keeping a check on desire, on pleasure, Barthes’ notion of jouissance is bound up with notions of disrupting the relationship between readers and texts. In The Pleasure of the Text, he flirts with the ‘Notion of a book (of a text) in which is braided, woven, in the most personal way, the relation of every kind of bliss: those of ‘life’ and those of the text, in which reading and the risks of real life are subject to the same anamnesis’ (ibid). WAITING FOR AN ALIBI The multiple must be made ((Deleuze, 1988: 7). I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 477). The anthropologist Clifford Geertz declared that the study of culture, defined as ‘webs of significance he (man) himself has spun’ is ‘not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (Cohen, 1985: 17). This is a good match for Barthes’s cultural project initiated in Mythologies: ‘Semiology is not a grid; it does not permit a direct apprehension of the real through a general transparency which would render it intelligible’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 474). Though Barthes in Myth Today accepts Sausurre’s formulation of ‘this vast science of signs’, he also states that mythology is ‘but one fragment’ and anyway ‘semiology has not yet come into being’ (Barthes, 1972: 110). Moreover, the sketch he offers for the mythologist, ‘if ever there is one’, is uncertain and speculative. As, in some sense, a model reader, the mythologist is, from early designations, a ‘creator’, a maker of ‘mythify’ (op. cit.: 157). Lotringer, writing of Barthes’s final project, The Preparation of the Novel, suggests that, having spent his early career ‘deconstructing bourgeois myths . . . the time had now come to make up his own’ (2011). This he describes as a ‘crude fiction’, whereas we might argue that ‘making up his own’ is Barthes’s way since Writing Degree Zero. In his Inaugural Lecture, Barthes uses Mallarmé to render this explicitly: ‘All method is a fiction’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: 476). However, this is implicitly also here in Mythologies, a best seller from the year of its publication: ‘Let the essay

Barthes’ Myth Today

161

avow itself a novel’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: xv). Anyway, as Barthes reminds us in The Death of the Author, ‘The temporality is different’ and it is always a struggle to get Barthes to stand ‘on a single line divided into a before and an after’ (Barthes, 1977b: 145). It’s little wonder that the work of Brecht appealed to Barthes: demystifying myth had all the same jouissance as alienating alienation. What Brecht famously wrote about Marx, Barthes may well have written about Brecht: When I read Marx’s Capital I understood my plays . . . this man Marx was the only spectator for my plays I’d ever come across (Willett, 1964: 23n). Brecht was an idiosyncratic Marxist and Leak is right to say that such a loose formulation was ‘useful’ to Barthes. Leak goes on to suggest that ‘Barthes’ attitude toward constituted theoretical thought in Mythologies— and elsewhere—could be described as cavalier, in the best sense of the word: he picks up concepts, uses them, and drops them when they have outstayed their welcome (Leak, 1994: 38). From the very start, for Barthes, ‘Writing is no way an instrument for communication; it is not an open route’. Rather ‘writing is a hardened language which is self-contained’ (Barthes, 1967: 25). The work is the work. Barthes doesn’t need an opportunity to write the ‘novel’ since the ‘novel’ is already here, its fragments striving for a wholeness beyond their reach. ‘Literature is like phosphorus’, Barthes wrote in Writing Degree Zero, ‘It shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die’ (Barthes, 1967: 44). This is a project that sets itself against myth, since explicitly, ‘myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die’; rather it turns the meanings it feeds on into “speaking corpses’ (Barthes, 1972: 132). In writing always ‘at full tilt’, as Sontag describes it, Barthes is offering a criticism that is simply part of ‘writing’, of literature. This is a commitment that constitutes Barthes’s identity as a writer. This is not about a retreat into autobiography but rather a seeking, through complete absorption, through intensity, ‘that point where only language acts, “performs”, and not “me” (Barthes, 1977b: 143). Right to the very end, Barthes is seeking that fulfilment which is in real terms unfeasible: ‘It’s just the will to fulfilment that blazes, that’s indestructible’ (Barthes, 2002: 55). He is waiting for ‘a trigger, a chance event, a mutation: a new ear for things’ (Barthes, 2010: 304). He constitutes as a living soul the best defence. Since ‘it is extremely difficult to vanquish myth from the inside’, he will stand outside, excluded but unrepentant. Barthes proposed that Mythologies should primarily allow the study of ‘how a society produces stereotypes. Stereotypes represent the very antithesis of Barthes’s writing, “the word repeated without any magic as if it were natural” ’ (Barthes, 1975: 42). The danger is that the ‘canonical constraining form of the signifier’ becomes at worst ‘the present path of truth’ (ibid). Nietzsche writes about the truth as a solidification of old metaphors, Barthes about the sedimentation of knowledge. Barthes dreams of a ‘new linguistic science’ that would

162

Pete Bennett

study ‘the progress of their solidification, their classification through historical discourse: this science would doubtless be subversive’ (ibid). And ultimately, this ‘science’ becomes recognised as a creative art that “paints more than it digs”. Moreover, in Brecht’s terms, those who wish ‘to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties’ (Brecht, 1966). Brecht’s blueprint, written in the 1930s, not only ‘for writers living under Fascism’ but ‘even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails’ provides a telling context not only for Mythologies but also for the work Barthes consistently resisted calling his ‘oeuvre’. Brecht calls for ‘the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed’; Barthes spends a whole career in a series of professional risks. Brecht then asks for ‘the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed’; which may stand as a description of Mythologies and pretty much everything else: unveiling ideology, testing the alibis of myth. Here with the ‘skill to manipulate it as a weapon’ is Barthes’s critical project, always looking for new forms for old truths and old for new, offering writing to make knowledge ‘festive’ (ibid). However, the two difficulties that are most revealing are the final two, since they unwittingly characterize Barthes as semiologist, mythologist, and showman. First. ‘the judgment to select those in whose hands it (the truth) will be effective’; for Barthes this may be his most telling contribution since ultimately he trusts the reader: ‘there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader’ (Barthes, 1977b: 148). Even though the mythologist ‘acts nothing’ he works on behalf of the reader, rendering the ‘readerly’ text as ‘writerly’ text. For Barthes, ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’ (ibid). Barthes’s work is provisional and though not exactly a ‘pedagogy of the inexpert’, his ‘teachings’ are predicated on ‘an exploration of the histrionic or ludic’ (in many ingenious modes) (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: xvii). As Sontag suggests, ‘The point is not to teach us something in particular’, but rather ‘to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached’ (ibid). The ‘many ingenious modes’ meet Brecht’s final and most impactful challenge: ‘the cunning to spread the truth among such persons’. Barthes shares with Brecht an ability to escape classification, to stay a step ahead, and not by concealing but by confessing, using the tools of myth to do the job. Barthes, like myth, ‘always has an “elsewhere” at his disposal’ (Barthes, 1972: 122). Barthes builds a whole career on a series of alibis and aliases: Michelet, Gide, Racine, Voltaire, Fourier, but most of all, ‘Barthes’: I am not where you think I am: I am where you think I am not (ibid). In the faux classifications, six of these, half a dozen of the others, we find the game afoot. We are asked to believe for example in Myth Today that ‘we cannot yet draw up the list of the dialectal forms of bourgeois myth’, though

Barthes’ Myth Today

163

its principal rhetorical forms number seven! These though are not in order, ‘but it is obvious that those given here such as they are fall into two great categories’ (Barthes, 1972: 156). These are apparently ‘the Essences and the Scales’, a ‘Zodiac’ of the bourgeois universe. Speak that I might see you. Barthes has a profound dislike of systems, so his system building needs careful consideration. When Barthes proposes five narrative codes, Hawkes is dismayed that apparently Barthes undermines this theory by admitting that ‘of course all codes are cultural’ (Hawkes, 1977: 118). However, thinking outside of the box, even his own box, is Barthes’s stock-in-trade. Identity is a movable feast. In Camera Lucida, he almost tracks it down: The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares) (Barthes, 1982: 13). In the photograph, he seems to find a kind of simple truth, a promise perhaps of closure: ‘In terms of image repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell-the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object’ (ibid). Lotringer records that ‘On the day of his death, Barthes left on his typewriter an unfinished text entitled “One Always Fails to Speak of What One Loves” ‘ (Lotringer, 2011). Failure was just not an option.

AFTERWORD: WHITE WRITING: A WRITING OF OUR OWN We are nihilistic figments, all of us; suicidal notions forming in God’s mind (Franz Kafka). Barthes was one of the great public teachers of our time. Mythologies is his most influential book. Central to the issues of both Mythologies and Barthes is the issue of classification, that which Derrida deftly explored in the Law of Genre and declared a ‘principle of contamination’ (Derrida, 1980: 65). There is no such thing as a genreless text nor, it seems, an unallocated theorist. The French do better, adding ‘Semiologue’ to ‘essayiste’. We force him to be ‘structuralist’ and then criticise him for heresies committed within and upon his own church. Perhaps little wonder then that ‘Barthes often

164

Pete Bennett

dismissed Mythologies in his more mature work’ (Badmington, 2010). But never out of print and widely translated, it is the text that defines him (and at some level confines him). The ‘issues’ with Mythologies are theoretical, contextual, and hypothetical when the entire premise of the project, and we would argue that ‘the’ project is not just ‘this’ project, is that practice literally takes precedence over theory. The ‘essay at the end of the book’ is always ‘trumped’ by those full-blooded, momentous encounters with contemporary culture, forged in ‘the full the contradiction of my time’: ‘since all it (Myth Today) does is systematize topics discussed previously’. And once done, it’s done: ‘this is why I have made no attempt to bring it up to date’ (Barthes, 1972: 11). Mythologies certainly outlived him, spawning two very different English ‘extensions’ not desperately long after his death. Gilbert Adair’s Myths and Memories (1986) was very much an homage to Barthes (and George Perec), written in a Barthesian key with a Barthesian intention: to unveil what Adair calls ‘tiny shards of a common nostalgia’ (Adair, 1986: xiv). Two years earlier, Len Masterman (and his team of teachers and academics) had produced their Television Mythologies: Stars, Shows and Sign (1984), which brought Barthes’ methods to bear on popular British television. The mood is one of liberation. On the back cover, Masterman claims that his book ‘is designed to help shift the ground of debate around television, and to encourage others to give popular television the critical attention it deserves’. In his introduction, he evaluates the impact of Mythologies very openly: (Mythologies) ‘spoke vigourously and directly to many people who had for some time been questioning the eternal verities of English literary culture. . . . Mythologies turned these values upside down’ (Masterman, 1984: 1). Though ‘dated and removed from British cultural interest’, the enormous impact of the text was undeniable: ‘What Mythologies demonstrated was the centrality of power relations. . . . ’ In a Britain reluctant to entertain ideological readings of reality, Masterman writes that ‘Mythologies cut decisively through these carefully constituted distinctions between politics and history’ (Masterman, 1986: 2). Mythologies, thus, remains a major work and an impactful one, a cornerstone of a career spent ‘writing itself’. Though it would be sacrilege to do so, it is tempting always to see Barthes as auteur, the very thing he ‘killed’ in 1967, and Mythologies as a signature work. We have already tentatively suggested the coherence of what we are equally reluctant to call Barthes’s oeuvre. Sontag merely indicates that ‘Barthes’ literary career was run concurrently with a (very successful) academic one and in part as an academic one’ (Sontag [Ed.], 1993: viii). The way through this may remind us again

Barthes’ Myth Today

165

of why Mythologies remains a relevant text (and all of it) in its insistence on a focus on how society produces stereotypes and on the struggle to hold on to a world with contradictions and depth. This world must be ‘traversed’. What Derrida says might stand for all of us: I will not make an allegory out of it and still less a metaphor but it was, I remember, that while travelling I spent the most time with Barthes (Derrida, 1981: 282). In his extended elegy, Derrida visits both ends of Barthes explicit journey both points of ’embarkation’ and finds the essential concerns much the same. Even the fabled ‘white writing’ which he identifies in the work of Camus a documentary style, according to Barthes, which documents an awareness of alienation, carries with it the inherent dangers of all language in all worlds. Its ‘neutral objectivity’ must be continually contested, rather than technically achieved. Writing Degree Zero, book and concept, like the work of the mythologist is ongoing, aiming for a purity and transparency it knows only too well can (perhaps will) ‘harden into a new set of conventions’ (Moriarty, 1991: 40). In fact, Lombardo argues that here, ‘Writing is an act of will, which must be all the stronger if one is disenchanted’ and that’“The will to write is a form of work’ (Lombardo, 2010: 24). And in her study The Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes, she too returns to both the complexity of the task: ‘Work is also seen as desire, the labor of Sisyphus and the professional technique of the writer’ and the nature of the problem, that ‘white writing, even if it manages to express the emptiness of modern man and indicate the end of literature, ends by becoming a stereotype, a cliché’ (Lombardo, 2010: 25). The solidification of words, ‘their densification throughout historical discourse’ is the issue to which Barthes’s many tentative formulations of ‘a new linguistic science’, not least in Mythologies are addressed. This is the consistency that appears sometimes missing to the naked eye, mistaking paradoxes for recantations. Derrida’s account is fairest: Roland Barthes traversed periods, systems, modes, ‘phases’ and “genres”: he marked and punctuated the stadium of each, passing through phenomenology, linguistics, literary mathesis, semiosis, structural analysis and so on: his first move was to recognise in each of these their necessity or richness, their critical value and light, in order to turn them against dogmatism (Derrida, 1981: 282). Always, the centrality of power relations negotiates the appropriate response; hence, the stylistic experimentation, in teaching as much as writing: For what can be oppressive in our teaching is not finally the knowledge or culture it conveys, but the discursive forms through which we propose them (Sontag, 1993: 476).

166

Pete Bennett

He talks about renewing the manner of presentation since as teaching presupposes power the fiction that is method must strive to ‘bear only on the means of loosening, baffling, or at the very least, lightening this power’(ibid). This all comes from his Inaugural Lecture, as does another statement of intent that really only serves to ‘systematize topics discussed previously’. He sums up his fundamental ‘method’ for loosening this power as ‘if one writes, fragmentation, and if one teaches, digression, or to put it in a preciously ambiguous word, excursion’ (ibid). ‘We shall not cease from exploration’, Eliot wrote, ‘and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started’. At Barthes’s ‘start’, he wrote; ‘The Novel is a Death: it transforms life into destiny, a memory into a useful act, duration into oriented and useful time’. Even more pertinently, he continues: ‘But this transformation can only be accomplished in the full view of society’, ‘myth hides nothing’ (Sontag , 1993: 52). Derrida records the process with remorseless compassion: His deaths, those he lived in the plural, those he must have linked together trying in vain to ‘dialecticize’ them before the ‘total’ and ‘undialectical death: those deaths that always form in our lives a terrifying and endless series (Derrida, 1981: 279). And so it is to the end, and from the start. The testimonies of his students confirm this: ‘Those who attended his lecture course recall the remarkable fluidity of his delivery, the deep and enveloping timbre of his voice, the warm phrasing that endowed his authority with infinite goodwill—oratorical skills that are confirmed by the sound recording of the lecture course’ (Léger, N in Barthes, 2010: xx). So, too, the critics, unable to finally free the later Barthes from the early, to return Mythologies to the shelf, they were constantly drifting between ‘the object and its demystification’ (Barthes, 1972: 159). Neil Badmington says it all: Re-reading Mythologies while working on the expanded English edition last year brought home to me why the text is still relevant: while much separates the 1950s from the present, Western culture remains riddled with appeals to ‘common sense’ and ‘human nature’. Myth endures. But a euphoric alternative rages in Mythologies (Badmington, 2010). Barthes wrote in Writing Degree Zero about burning brightly and attempting to die, and much later, about a different kind of heat, of warmth. Barthes’s touchstone Brecht asked only for an epitaph that would read, ‘He made suggestions. We carried them out’. ‘Such an inscription’, he thought, ‘would honour us all’ (Brecht, 1976: 218). Maybe for Barthes, the great public teacher, this would suffice.

Barthes’ Myth Today

167

NOTES 1. Dorothea’s elderly husband in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Casuabon is attempting the perfect book (free from criticism). It is rather archly titled ‘The Key to All Mythologies’ and never published. 2. MacNeice, L. Snow. 3. Auden, W. H. In Memory of WB Yeats. 4. Santayana, G., 1905. Reason in Common Sense, vol. 1. 5. Eliot, T. S. Little Gidding.

REFERENCES Adair, G., 1986. Myths and Memories. London: Fontana. Adorno, T., 1991. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge. Anderson, S., 2012. How Roland Barthes Gave Us the TV Recap (accessed on 2/11/2012 at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res = 9C07E5DA1E3CF934A15756C0A9649D8B63) Badmington, N., 2010. Why is the Church like margarine? accessed on 2/11/2012 at http://www.apieceofmonologue.com/2010/02/badmington-on-roland-barthesand.html). Barry, P., 2002. Beginning Theory: an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barthes, R., 1967. Writing Degree Zero. London: Jonathan Cape. Barthes, R., 1972. Mythologies., London: Jonathan Cape. Barthes, R., 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barthes, R., 1977a. Roland Barthes. New York: MacMillan. Barthes, R., 1977b. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana. Barthes, R., 1982. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, R., 1997. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. California: University of California Press. Barthes, R., 2002. A Lover’s Discourse. London: Vintage. Barthes, R., 2010. The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980). Columbia: Columbia University Press. Bennett, P, Kendall, A, and McDougall, J., 2011. After the Media: Culture and Identity in the Twenty First Century. London: Routledge. Brecht, B., 1953. Kalendergeschichten, Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag. Brecht, B., 1966. ‘Writing the truth: Five difficulties’, in Galileo. New York: Grove Press. Brecht, B., 1976. Brecht: Poems Part Two. London: Methuen. Budelis, K., 2010. Barthes’s Hand: accessed on 3/11/2012 at www.newyorker.com/ online/blogs/books/tny2 ) Calvet, L. J., 1994. Roland Barthes: a Biography. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Cohen, A., 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge. Crimp, D., 1982. ‘Fassbinder, Franz, Fox, Elvira, Erwin, Armin, and All the Others’ in October, Vol. 21, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (summer, 1982), pp. 62–81. Massachusetts: MIT Press. De Certeau, M., 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Man, P., 1990. ‘Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism’, in Yale French Studies, 77, pp. 177–190.

168

Pete Bennett

DeKoven, M., 2004. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2006. Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum. Derrida, J., 1980. The Law of Genre, in Critical Inquiry, 7(1) (Autumn), pp. 55–81. Derrida, J., 1981. The Deaths of Roland Barthes in Silverman, K. (1988). Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 259–296. Foucault, M., 1991. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in P. Rabinov [ed.], The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin. Gabara, R., 2006. From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the first person. California: Stanford University Press. Genosko, G., 1998. Undisciplined Theory. London: Sage. Hawkes, T., 1977. Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Routledge. Hoggart, R., 1992. The Uses of Literacy. London: Penguin. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T., 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Leak, A., 1994. Roland Barthes: Mythologies. London: Grant & Cutler. Lombardo, P., 2010. The Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes. Athens, Georgia: Georgia University Press. Lotringer, S., 2011. Barthes after Barthes (accessed at http://www.frieze.com/issue/ article/barthes-after-barthes/ 2011) Moriarty, M., 1991. Roland Barthes. California: Stanford University Press. Procter, J., 2004. Stuart Hall. London: Routledge. Robbe-Grillet, A., 2011. Why I Love Barthes. London: Polity. Santayana, G., 1905. Reason in Common Sense. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sontag, S. [Ed.], 1993. A Roland Barthes Reader. London: Vintage. Storey, J. (Ed.), 2009. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a reader (4th edition). London: Longman. Willett, J. (Ed.), 1964. Brecht on Theatre. London: Methuen.

List of Contributors

Julian McDougall is Associate Professor in the Media School at Bournemouth University. He is co-editor of the Media Education Research Journal and author of The Media Teacher’s Book (Hodder, 2010), Studying Videogames (Auteur, 2009), After the Media: Culture and Identity in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2011), and Media Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2012), as well as a range of research-based journal articles and book chapters relating to media education, literacy, and cultural studies. Oscar Gómez belongs to the GESC (Group of Studies of Semiotics of Culture), directed by Jorge Lozano, where he develops several research activities from a semiotic point of view. Under the cover of this group, he is currently working in a project on Wikileaks, writing articles for magazines such as Revista de Occidente, and preparing his doctoral thesis on the Idols phenomenon. Tim Wall is Professor of Radio and Popular Music Studies, and Director of Research in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom. His published research includes studies of the BBC specialist music radio, internet radio, online fandom, jazz and popular music history, and the way that music is mediated on television. The second edition of his well-respected book Studying Popular Music Culture was published in 2012. Jenni Ramone is a Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies and co-director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is the author of Postcolonial Theories (Palgrave, 2011) and Salman Rushdie and Translation (Continuum, 2013) and co-editor of a double special issue of Life Writing journal, on women’s postcolonial diaspora life-writing, and of The Richard and Judy Book Club Reader (Ashgate, 2011). Will Brooker is Director of Research for Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and editor of Cinema Journal. He is the author of

170

List of Contributors

several books on popular narratives and their audiences, including Batman Unmasked and Hunting the Dark Knight. Nick Peim is Senior Lecturer in the College of Social Science at the University of Birmingham. He has written extensively about English teaching, cultural and curriculum politics, education as governance, research theory and philosophy, and the history of schooling as a human technology. Nick’s main intellectual interests are in continental philosophy, history, and social theory. Recent publications include various critiques of the contemporary world order of education. Matt Hills is Professor of Film and TV Studies at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of five books, including Fan Cultures (Routledge 2002) and Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twentyfirst Century (IB Tauris 2010). Matt has published widely on cult film, TV, and fandom—including a recent contribution to the edited collection Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (McFarland 2012)—and is currently working on a study of BBC Wales’ Torchwood. Gabriel Menotti (Brazil, 1983) is a doctor in Media and Communications (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Communication and Semiotics (Catholic University of São Paulo). He acts as an independent curator engaged with different forms of cinema and grassroots media. He has organised pirate screenings, remix film festivals, videogame championships, porn screenplay workshops, installations with film projectors, generative art exhibitions, and academic seminars, among other things. His works and research results have been presented in events such as ISEA, the São Paulo Biennial, and Transmediale. His first academic book, Através da Sala Escura (Intermeios, São Paulo, 2012), investigates the history of movie theatres under the light of contemporary art practices and VJing. Currently, he is a visiting tutor at Goldsmiths, University of London and Middlesex University. Antonio Fernández-Vicente is Professor of Communication Theory at the Faculty of Journalism, University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), PhD (2007) in Communication Science by the University of Murcia (Spain), author of El Presente virtual (Fragua, 2008), and editor of Nomadismos Contemporáneos: formas tecnoculturales de la globalización (EDITUM, 2010). Julia Round (MA, PhD) is Senior Lecturer in the Media School at Bournemouth University, United Kingdom, and edits the academic journal Studies in Comics (Intellect Books). She has published and presented work internationally on cross-media adaptation, television and discourse analysis, the application of literary terminology to comics, the ‘graphic

List of Contributors

171

novel’ redefinition, and the presence of gothic and fantastic motifs and themes in this medium. She is currently completing a monograph on comics and the Gothic (McFarland, 2013). For further details, see http:// www.juliaround.com/ Julian Petley is Professor of Screen Media at Brunel University, co-chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and a member of the advisory board of Index on Censorship. His most recent publication is Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Angie Voela is a Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies, University of East London. Her research interests include gender in film and literature; psychoanalytic and philosophical approaches to identity; psychoanalysis and space; and myth in contemporary culture. Her recent publications appear in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, Subjectivity, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and The Journal for Cultural Research. Ben Pitcher is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Westminster. He is author of The Politics of Multiculturalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and has written articles on subjects ranging from the relationship between race and neoliberal capitalism, to Obama’s ‘post-black’ politics, to why it is that cultural studies practitioners get excited about the HBO show The Wire. His second book, Consuming Race (Routledge, 2014), explores how the ideas we have about race are produced and reproduced in everyday acts of consumption. Sunil Manghani is Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He is author of Image Studies: Theory & Practice (2013), Image Critique (2008), and co-editor of Images: A Reader (2006), an anthology of writings on the image from Plato to the present. Simon Cross is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University. He is author of Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Eileen Kennedy is an Associate Researcher in the School of Sport and Education, Brunel University, an Adjunct Professor of Sociology of Sport at Syracuse University and a Doctoral Tutor for the EdD in Higher Education at Liverpool University/Laureate Online. A central strand of her research has focused on the analysis of discourses of gender and identity within the mediated culture of sport and fitness. She is the co-author of Sport, Media and Society (Berg) and co-editor of Women and Exercise: The Body, Health and Consumerism (Routledge).

172

List of Contributors

Richard Berger is Associate Professor at the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP), Bournemouth University, UK. He is also co-editor of the Media Education Research Journal (MERJ). Richard’s main research interests are in education and literacy. Mark Readman is a Lecturer in Media and Education in The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice at Bournemouth University. He is interested in the manifestation and mobilisation of concepts, particularly creativity, but he has never written about bums before. Liesbet van Zoonen is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University, and Professor of Popular Culture at Rotterdam University. She is currently conducting research about the paradoxes of identity management, and its acceptance or refusal in the future. Paul A. Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Communications Theory at the University of Leeds. A founding Editor of the International Journal of Zizek Studies, he is the author of a number of critical interpretations of contemporary media, including most recently: Zizek and the Media (2010), Critical Theories of Mass Media (2008), and Heidegger and the Media (forthcoming). Dan Laughey is Senior Lecturer in Media Theory at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of Media Studies (Kamera Books, 2009); Key Themes in Media Theory (McGraw-Hill, 2007); and Music and Youth Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Visit his Media Theory Blog at http://danlaughey.com Roy Stafford is a freelance lecturer and writer working in cinema-based film education in the northern England. He has written extensively for film and media students, including five editions of The Media Student’s Book (Routledge 2010) in partnership with Gill Branston. His textbook on ‘Global Film’ will be published by Routledge in 2014. Gary Seal has taught English and Media for nine years and is Subject Leader for Media at City of Norwich School. John Poulter is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Analysis at Leeds Trinity University College. His research mostly focuses on the ways in which the nation and national identity are constructed, maintained, shaped, and challenged. Steve Jones and Ben Taylor both teach media and cultural studies at Nottingham Trent University. Andy Panay is a Lecturer in Cultural Sociology at the University of Abertay Dundee.

List of Contributors

173

Ruth Deller is Senior Lecturer in Media at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her research and teaching interests are varied, and she has published on a range of topics including: gender and sexuality in TV talent shows, TV audiences’ use of Twitter, religion in Doctor Who, and how fan communities adapt to a changing Internet. She is currently working on a book about religion and spirituality on British TV and is co-editing two journal special editions: one (with Sarah Harman and Bethan Jones) on the Fifty Shades book series for sexualities and another (with Fiona Attwood) on ‘rethinking makeover and transformation’ for the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Jayne Sheridan is Fashion Communication Lecturer in the School of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield. She studied with the cultural critic Antony Easthope at Manchester Metropolitan and has taught Film, PR and Journalism at Liverpool John Moores and Huddersfield Universities. Her book, Fashion, Media, Promotion: The New Black Magic, was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2010. Evelina Kazakevicˇiu-te· is a graduate student at the Institute of Journalism, Vilnius University. Kęstas Kirtiklis is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Logic and History of Philosophy, Vilnius University. Norma Musih is a PhD student and Associate Instructor in the Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University. Jane O’Connor is a senior lecturer in Childhood and Family Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. She has a background in Primary Education and her research interests focus on cultural discourses around childhood and representations of children and young people in the media. Peter Bennett is Senior Lecturer in Post-Compulsory Education at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He is co-author of After the Media: Culture and Identity in the 21st Century (2011). He is also the co-author and co-editor of a range of Communications, Media and Film textbooks, as well as Framework Media; Channels (2003). He is co-author and Chief Examiner of Communication and Culture, A level, and a regular provider of INSET to teachers.