Frictions in Cosmopolitan Mobilities: The Ethics and Social Practices of Movement across Cultures 180088141X, 9781800881419

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Frictions in Cosmopolitan Mobilities

For Majid, my joker (who else?)

Frictions in Cosmopolitan Mobilities The Ethics and Social Practices of Movement across Cultures

Rodanthi Tzanelli Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, UK

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Rodanthi Tzanelli 2021 Cover image: Rodanthi Tzanelli (from original photos by Anika Mikkelson, Zac Ong, Richard Hirajeta and Clément M. on Unsplash). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932429 This book is available electronically in the Geography, Planning and Tourism subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800881426

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ISBN 978 1 80088 141 9 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80088 142 6 (eBook)

Contents List of images and figuresvii Acknowledgementsviii PART I 1

Cosmopolitan irony: pluriversality and perspective A sociology of perspective Rethinking pilgrimage

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The poetics of justice: the joker as a modern(ist) character 24 Constructing the invisible border: comedy and transgression 24 The making of the Joker29 Resentment and justice as eternal returns 39

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The politics of resurgence: the joker as a factual-cinematic hero Manipulating reality Dark travel, American populism and cosmopolitan f(r)iction Western modernity’s border and the sovereign travelling subject

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PART II 4

Meta-realist plots: the road to selfdom 65 New pilgrimages, new problems 65 Image-memory and tourism: from economies to ecologies of imagination69

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Killing pleasure: heautoscopic performativity facing the neoliberal youlfie 74 Youlfie mobilities 74 Selfie genealogy, 1: digital-terrestrial pilgrimage and dark/ slum tourism80 Selfie genealogy, 2: unshackling Western captives through ‘young, cute minds’ 87 Pilgrims of the interior, prisoners of modernity 95

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The terror of image-making: heteroscopies of damaged hospitality 106 Interpreting ‘private’ space 106 Ecologies of violence: from institutional indifference to reactive incivility  114 Prisoners in/of ourselves: individualist imaginaries of (im)mobility 126 A time-travelling joke: spatio-temporal morphism in late capitalism 134

PART III 7

Conclusion: unlocking certitude

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Bibliography144 Secondary sources144 Primary sources175 Films175 Official websites175 Press175 Social media and blogs178 Index181

Images and figures IMAGES 1.1

Fast moving images of Gotham are blurred in Arthur Fleck’s mind

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2.1

The transformations of the protagonist: Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck and ‘Joker’

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2.2

Put on a funny face

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3.1

Demonstrator in Joker costume from Black Lives Matter protests for George Floyd in the Minneapolis riots

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4.1

The ‘Joker Stairs’

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FIGURE 1.1

Pilgrimage and Axes Mundi15

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Acknowledgements This book materialised in the months following the development of the COVID-19 outbreak into a global pandemic, when physical interaction and socialisation were severely affected for all of us. Aside from my companion, Majid, who was my sole physical constant and a rigorous critic of some of my ideas, and my Greek and Pakistani families, with which interaction was remote but constant, I owe the preservation of my sanity to a number of friends and colleagues, whose work, witty interventions and positivity kept me company. A word of thanks goes to members of the Magical Realism group on Facebook, and especially Peter Vincent-Jones, James Herbst, Vicky Helms and Gill Nicholas, with whom I had the most stimulating discussions on art, magical realism and new objectivity; several of my Leeds colleagues, who kept the lines of communication open and shared with me virtual coffees; Facebook friends, whose structured virtual broadcasts also structured my days and made them intellectually stimulating; the Tourism, Culture and Communication editors, Brian King and Wantenee Suntikul, for being supportive of my personal and collaborative (with Maximiliano Korstanje) work on critical tourism; the ISA Tourism Branch Publications Editors, Rukeya Suleman and especially Keith Hollinshead, who have been such good mentors on my work on criticality and worldmaking; and some TRINET discussants, who suggested new ideas on the ethics of hospitality. ‘Rethinking pilgrimage’, the final section of this study’s Introduction (Part I) was based on a research note published in Tourism, Culture and Communication, 20(4) (pp. 235–240) under the title ‘Virtual pilgrimage: an irrealist approach’. Cognizant grants rights to authors to re-use portions of the work in other publications.

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PART I

1. Cosmopolitan irony: pluriversality and perspective A SOCIOLOGY OF PERSPECTIVE We live in a world that espouses conceptual singularities as shortcuts to ‘truth’ – which is why we see people driving airplanes into buildings full of thousands of other people working for or admiring the icons of First World consumerist phantasmagorias as tourists. The capacity (and skill) to examine such tragedies of symmetrical somnambulism in ironic styles is usually judged against a standard of ‘soberness’, without actually questioning what ironic style entails in context. The willingness to interrogate the moral complexities of such cultural landscapes, which become dominated by ‘inherited verities’ and ‘singularities’ (Rapport, 2003, p.46), can only survive if the individual freedom to question them is recognised as a right. Unfortunately, such ironic styles of seeing and narrating the world can also offend and generate friction – for, ‘having rights’ comes with having responsibilities, including that to respect others. Though in itself an epistemological universal, ‘perspective’ exists in at least as many forms as the communities that humans create to host their values and norms. Originating in the medieval perspectiva, the science of optics, from the Latin verb perspicere (per: ‘through’ + specere: ‘to look at closely’) (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 2011, p.1071), perspective is just another word for episteme (epistēme), which has an identical meaning and refers to epistemological comprehension. We get to know things well – the etymological composition of epistēme (ístamai: to stand and metaphorically master + epí: on top of a surface) – but always conditionally: upon circumstances, strategies and the tools afforded to us in our cultural, social and physical environments. We should not forget to include ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’ in this heavy package of prerequisites – two rather ambivalent terms also determined by context. This book is a study of the friction that perspectives generate in cross-cultural contexts. My interdisciplinary spyglass is placed on these perspectives’ cultural substance, as this manifests itself in different communities’ ability to question or enhance individuality as a gateway to the creation of collective ‘life projects’. These ontological projects support such cosmopolitan values 2

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as those we find in the cultures of travel, artmaking and tourism, which are ridden with class, race, ethnicity and gender symbolisms pertaining to the right to mobility (Cresswell, 2006; Korstanje, 2018a; Sheller, 2018). Undoubtedly, contemporary travel reflects ‘differential mobility empowerments’ (Hannam et al., 2006, p.3), involving a spectrum of voluntary to involuntary or coerced mobilities, which are normalised or criminalised respectively (Salazar and Schiller, 2013). Although definitions – or ‘perspectives’ – of these activities are not universal, the ways they are experienced can point to meeting points and shared cultural horizons. I find theories of cosmopolitanism pedagogically useful when they have context, thus demonstrating their cultural applicability. Bouncing between theory and context helps one consider the limitations and potentialities of ‘cosmopolitan irony’ as a cultural genre, which is often entwined with political superimpositions on its substance. Although my ‘cosmopolitan irony’ draws up to a point on Turner’s (2002) recognition that an ironic stance towards one’s own culture is intertwined with their commitment to equality, reflexivity and openness, I am particularly interested in the ways ironic aesthetics produce ambivalent ethical stances. I am specifically interested in examining whether ethics and aesthetics always form a unity and continuum. I pay attention to the consequences of their separation, which do not have to be always negative. To me ‘ethics’ refers to habitual engagement with everyday events in various conscious and unconscious ways that are productive (generative and creative) and reproductive of realities. Irony often errs on conscious creativity – a quality for which mobile cosmopolitan ironists are treated with contempt by immobile rooted subjects. I will commence my investigation by refracting my theoretical analysis through a particular instance of ‘cosmopolitan friction’. This uses the content and multiple contexts of reception and consumption of a recent award-winning American film, Joker (2019, director Todd Phillips, screenwriters Todd Phillips and Scott Silver). Irony and art are good friends and cosmopolitanism thrives on audio-visual mobilities which involve variations of physical/embodied and cognitive/virtual travel, so this example will join other similar ones in subsequent chapters and should not be seen as the book’s focus. I opted to start with this example because its core theme is the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in a world of divisions and inequalities. Based on two famous DC Comics characters, the Joker and Batman, the story provides a potential narrative of their origins, as well as their associations with cosmic ideas of good and evil, transgression, justice and fairness. Set in 1981, the cinematic plot follows an aspiring stand-up comedian and party clown, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), who lives with his mother in the crime-ridden Gotham City. Suffering from a medical disorder causing uncontrolled laughter at inappropriate times, Arthur depends on social services to receive his medication and remain functional and employable. The withdrawal of these services, the

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loss of his precarious job because he is found to carry a gun, a series of revelations about Arthur’s family background and the continuous failure to achieve recognition in his profession, drive Arthur to insanity and crime. After murdering some harassing businessmen, his mother for lying to him about the identity of his father, his colleague for giving him the gun for self-protection and his favourite celebrity, Murray Franklin (Robert de Niro) on air from resentment, Arthur finds himself elevated to an icon of revolution by the disenfranchised and impoverished Gothamites. His dream to make people laugh and happy has turned into a social nightmare and Arthur himself is locked into a mental asylum, where he continues to kill and laugh at his own jokes. The film itself might be classified as an artistic critique of American inequality. However, this is not a film studies book, nor does it examine cinematic texts as such. A film sociology can use particular films as analytical conduits to develop theoretical models with which to study society; and a focus on their atmospheric potential does not produce a geographical account of them, only one focusing on the politics of place. I follow the Joker’s multiple discursive networks (as these are generated in new media sites and through my own interpretation of their content) to examine the persistence or suppression of ironic creativity across different temporal and spatial contexts. As a style, irony necessitates a ‘displacement’, allowing individuals to be habitually deconstructed and reconstructed (Bourdieu, 1977, p.90), a form of ‘alienation’ standing at heart of creative renewal and the moment of ‘arriving [at] home’ (Kateb, 1991). This is very different from the experience of asylum-seeking and refugee subjects – a context that informs negative perceptions of the term, ubiquitous in political and cultural theory of migration (e.g. see Berger and Kellner, 1993; Bhabha, 1994). It is also a perspective that may question (always in context) critiques of liquid modernity as the root of human alienation (Bauman, 2000). Not only do I consider the Joker’s literary texts and real social contexts as instances of societal chaos/destruction, which prompt self-reflexive growth, but see in the socio-philosophical core of this contradiction: a node. This node, which will reappear in other examples of artistic production as travel genres in later chapters, binds many networks of significatory production and consumption of perspective on the status of social and cultural reality. My intention is to travel involved readers through time and space, across millennia and different ‘world civilisations’, so that I excavate foundational commonalities and differences in the ways reality is constructed and performed in particular styles of mobility we know as ‘travel’, ‘tourism’ and ‘artmaking’. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ commenced its life as a project of participation in a ‘commons’ exceeding the boundaries of communal specificity and aspiring to embrace the world as a shared sphere. For some scholars, this aspiration clashes with the project’s rooting in Western and European cultures promoting

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manhood, whiteness, able-body-ness and individuality as universal values (Benhabib, 2002, 2004, 2008; Bhambra, 2016; Nussbaum, 2001; Werbner, 2008). The Western elitist aspects of cosmopolitanism challenge the concept’s commitment to inclusivity and borderless solidarity (Rovisco, 2019). For others, cosmopolitanism encloses the possibility to critically evaluate alleged universals, thus building cultural bridges that world travellers cross to meet different perspectival standpoints (Beck, 2006; Clifford, 1992, 1997, 2013; Hannerz, 1990, 1996; Nederveen Pieterse, 2004, 2006b). For yet others, we must heed how liberal communitarian arguments about multicultural ideals produce weaker versions of cosmopolitanism, because they emphasise universalist rights that are anything but equitably distributed or truly universal (Delanty, 2009b, pp.55‒56) – a note I take seriously. My own starting point is that world travels of the cosmopolitan type, which can be enacted in the mind, on foot or in endless combinations of these modes of mobility, always generate friction. The concept’s twin emergence in philosophy and thermodynamics has facilitated the development of scholarly arguments across different disciplinary (social science and humanities) contexts, in which ‘friction’ operates as a metaphor. Friction is a magical term, which bridges realms of reality, fantasy and imagination to generate alternative ways of looking at the mundane and the common. The shift from mechanical to social and political ‘facts’ is, in itself, a study on and of perspective. For example, Tim Cresswell (2014, pp.107‒115) draws on Prussian military theorist, Carl Philipp Gottfied von Clausewitz, to define friction in contexts of war as a series of serendipitous contacts that produce world-defining events. Closer to the cultural cosmopolitan problématique, Anna Tsing (2005) emphasises how friction challenges the universality of universals as ‘forms of truth’ that can only materialise in the local and the particular (Tsing, 2005, pp.4‒6). She sees in this materialisation a form of translation: as a ‘grip of encounter’ that enables global connectivity, friction, she concludes, reveals the ‘unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across [forms of] difference’ (Tsing, 2005, p.4). In fact, her suggestion that we adopt a geo-topographic perspective on friction recalls postcolonial literary theorist, Alejo Carpentier’s commentary on the nature of ‘marvellous realism’. Carpentier saw in the corresponding Latin American literary trend ‘an amplification of perceived reality required by and inherent in Latin American nature and culture’ (Huntington and Parkinson Zamora, 1995, p.75). This analysis of the fantastic genre focuses on its dwelling in the ‘natural and human realities of time and place’, which produces the ‘marvellous mixtures that exist by virtue of Latin America’s varied history, geography, demography, and politics’ (ibid.). Carpentier’s cultural-political ontology also connects to Cresswell’s thesis, who is more interested in the production of events of planetary significance. Carpentier stresses that the Latin American variation of marvellous realism is

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supposed to differ from European ‘magical realism’, which emphasises the artistic observer’s vision, and thus is clearly epistemological (Farris, 2004). The present study reconsiders this dichotomy between ontology and epistemology through the ways cosmopolitan friction produces knowledge based on experience, thus facilitating becomings (Tzanelli, 2020a). I return to the European dimension of magical realism below, when I further clarify my methodological framework. All these scholarly dialogues unveil the complexity of actually performing cosmopolitanisms: those that articulate its spirit and law through one’s individual existence without even realising or expressing the wish to do so (Beck, 2006, p.19). When we add the conundrum of unconscious performance to the cosmopolitan equation, which clashes with the conscious stylistic projection of cosmopolitan irony, and both to the fact that the cosmopolitan imagination suffers from a difficulty to capture pluriversality, it becomes more evident why I introduce the idea of friction. For this reason, I renounce cosmopolitan theory’s focus on universals and turn to a particular cultural adaptation of development theorist, Arturo Escobar’s (2018) notion of the ‘pluriverse’, to discuss the challenges postulated by the co-existence of actually existing differences. My ‘pluriverse’ refers to the co-existence of different universes, realms of meaning or lifeworlds, to invoke the structured phenomenologies of Berger and Luckmann (1996), Habermas (1989c) and Mannheim ([1936] 1968), at the moment these come into geographical and symbolic-experiential contact, without necessarily forming a uniform nucleus. For tourism studies scholars, such as Hollinshead (2009) and Hollinshead and Suleman (2018), who fashion similar subject-specific debates, ‘pluriverses’ would feature as situated enunciations of difference in locales fortuitously or forcefully ushered to tourismification. Tourism theorist Jamal (2019, pp.164‒169) nicely accommodates Escobar’s call to acknowledge alternative perspectives of being and belonging as non-instrumental, relational ontologies governing life in tourist destinations – something not always respected by the tourist developer. Pluriverses are frictional contact zones caught in the grip of tourist globalisation, mostly managed by national power, tourism experts acting on behalf of capitalist networks or, less frequently by indigenous populations. To speak of relational ontologies, as Escobar (2016, 2018), posthuman ethicist Braidotti (2013) and STS scholar Karen Barad (2007, 2010) all have, is to commit yourself to a cosmopolitan worldview that always subordinates economic objectives to the criteria of ecology, human dignity and social justice (Escobar, 2016, p.26). Notably, this book’s cosmopolitan story of friction does not commence with the creative activities of tourism experts, but those of cosmopolitan artists. I will be delving into the articulation of entirely fictional dystopian contexts by Joker’s transnational community of audio-visual technicians, filmmakers and writers, which allegorise the current breakdown of social bonds in American

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pluriverses before moving on to the reality planes of unplanned tourismification. As Rovisco (2013) has already noted in her work on cinema, some filmmakers’ work voices structures of feeling (i.e. care, compassion and empathy) that enable the audiences’ affective and intellectual engagements with ‘others’, whose access to cultural dialogue is limited. It is important to note that these cosmopolitan artists did not mobilise their transnational imaginaries in artmaking so as to generate tourism. The spontaneous eruption of film-induced pilgrimages around a movie featuring an anti-hero and condemning American social fragmentation, lack of solidarity, love and care, is an event built on a cultural translation (of a fictional personal story of descent to madness and crime into tourism performance) of a realist translation (of what is called an ‘artist critique’ (Chiapello, 2004) of the failures of modern life). Despite its intentionally grim fictional-realist surface, the story is filmed as a perspective on the world, only we never know when this perspective is the anti-hero’s making, or that of someone watching the social realities in which he finds himself. As a critique of welfare retrenchment that deprives a man wanting to make others laugh of his medication and sanity, the film makes viewers work hard to figure out whether at times they are transported to a magical world (in which there is love even for Arthur) or just a dilapidated Bronx apartment in which he hallucinates about having a romantic encounter with his neighbour. This palimpsestic making of reality is the ‘stuff’ of urban mobilities, which are not always backed by considerate design that meets the needs and capabilities of different communities (Jensen, 2013, 2014; Jensen et al. 2016; Büscher, 2019). Urban palimpsests store fragments of collective memories and the violence of amnesias, Huyssen (2003) argues. Following philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, he invites critical engagement with the past so that we counteract practices of ‘uncreative forgetting’ or ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (ibid., p.10), which either neutralise traumas to enable their anodyne consumption, or lead to uncontrolled eruptions of memory that kill people. Tracing the ‘afterimages’ of collective traumas – the outlines or shadows of artefacts, ideas and monuments vandalised and destroyed (ibid., p.163) in the name of a cause – is the job of the critical artist, the scholar and lay citizen, who refuse to either forget or let the past hinder the creation of viable futures. The outcome of this remembering, which actively seeks to interpret, rather than reproduce past events, aims to introduce the community to different angles of the same event, to teach that different discourses enunciate and thus create it anew. Again, such acts of reconstitution, which are also translations of events, are travels of the mind that bring into focus the ability of artists to mobilise irony in socially productive ways. I disagree with Rancière’s (2009, p.31) suggestion that ‘frames of visibility’ always ‘put things or practices together under the same meaning’. The ways communities make shared pasts visible and intelligible to themselves and

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others can find radical modification when a sense of irony is introduced in these pasts’ perspectival release. In cosmopolitan filmmaking this enterprise turns commoditised narratives (the films themselves) into ways of reconfiguring ‘the visibility of the common’ (ibid., p.48), thus throwing certainties of commonality back into dispute. Because filmmakers are world travellers, their work filters the ‘visible common’ (ibid.) through a multiplicity of conceptual, ideational and experiential itineraries; as a result, the ‘commons’ with which they associate themselves acquire the quality of a kaleidoscope. The same creative act of making things ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ to the world will be observed in non-Western contexts of ‘translation’, such as the Japanese, which will form another context in which attitudes toward cosmopolitan irony becomes productive of worlds (of travel and tourism). Evidently then, when I speak of ‘translation’ I do not refer to textual interpretations of culture but an ‘interdisciplinary field, the focus of which is the study of cultural interaction’ (Bielsa Mialet, 2010, p.156; Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998, p.6) in globalised contexts (Cronin, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2013). Likewise, I do not use the idea of ‘travel’ or ‘tourism’ as a medium of irony that supports forgetting, but a method enabling the hermeneutic organisation of our fragmented pasts and presents, to rescue critical afterimages from the rubble of modernity. On this, Latour’s reflections on translation are critical, because they introduce non-human actants in social interactions, such as forms of media – a crucial element in this study’s analysis. He cautions us that the myth of the medium as a ‘neutral tool’ subjected to complete human control and that of the human being’s ‘autonomous destiny’, which is not entwined with the tool’s potentiality to direct action, are symmetrical. It is more apposite to treat both as an interactive complex operating through ‘translation’. By translation Latour (1994, p.32) refers to ‘displacement, rift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies [the] two elements or agents’. Media act as both tools and symbols in social interaction, because they introduce uneven dialectics in communication – what Silverstone (2007, pp.108‒109) examines as ‘mediation’. I do not rush to consider filmmakers or local interlocutors as uncritical ironists or resentful hosts before careful investigation of the social context in which they act. Cosmopolitanism as a form of translation is a critical pedagogical project, which involves reciprocal cultural learning (Delanty, 2014, p.384). As an academic project, the study of cosmopolitan translatability calls for a more grounded approach, seeking to operationalise theory through empirical instances (Bielsa, 2014; Lamont and Askartova, 2002; Nowicka and Rovisco, 2009; Skrbis and Woodward, 2013). Such instances endow the present study with a core problématique: to both acknowledge specificity and the multiplicity of viewpoints (Skey, 2012, p.477; Stevenson, 2014, p.183). The collection of different perspectives is a hard job, which I manage as part of a team made

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up of people that I never met in person: mostly journalists. Methodologically, this book is indebted to the work of journalistic journeys into the pluriverses I explore and their storytelling of relational ontologies between hosts and guests, and artists and their audiences. Journalistic stories helped me reconstruct such cosmopolitan palimpsests in a scholarly style that differs in terms of approach from the original stories (on the journalistic field and cultural translation see Bielsa 2008; Bielsa and Bassnett, 2009). At the same time, the journalists’ tendency to record opinions and ideas verbatim allows me to examine the perspectives of other important para-informants, including artists involved in the making of the Joker and tourists in the Bronx, where some significant scenes were filmed and generated tourism. ‘Translation’ and ‘metaphor’ suggest multiple semantic movements across time and space, of ontological significance in domains of cosmopolitan friction. For these reasons, my methodological portfolio actualises cosmopolitan epistemologies in less orthodox ways. My methodological starting point on ‘cosmopolitan friction’ is the material (geographical, context-bound) and phenomenal effects of cosmopolitan encounters. To slowly return to the European artistic roots of magical realism, I note that real contact zones of cultural activity and encounter between pluriverses and the outside (including tourists, journalists and filmmakers) produce atmospheres of luminosity. ‘Luminosity’ is an atmospheric concept that refers both to the visible-sensible outcome of friction (we see ‘areas’ of light in the natural environment) and metaphorical illumination (of under-theorised areas begging for analysis and clarification in a critical style resembling Walter Benjamin’s ([1936] 1968; [1968] 1992) hermeneutic project). Atmospheres of luminosity are akin to particular viewpoints, angles of reference in a scholar’s cosmopolitan analysis. Thus, whereas my ontological and experiential portfolio draws on postcolonial marvellous realism, my methodology follows the epistemic nature of filmmaking that speaks the language of European magical realism: genuineness via technology. To adopt such a geolocative perspective is not to endorse regional analysis or methodological nationalism: my focus on instances of cinematic representation, reception and tourismification points to a critique of such methodological simplification in Beck’s (2016) critical-analytical style. We must think of the ways persistent and continuous friction produces sparkles and even fire, thus bringing attention to ‘hotspots’ or activity epicentres. It is this attention to spot and angle that I wish to exploit in this study as a methodology of perspective. Aware of the complex intertwining of aesthetics and ethics in the cosmopolitan imaginations (a term I pluralise, contra Delanty [2009b]), I turn my attention to a particular translation of two Eastern epistemological techniques into globalised technological innovation: the bokeh and the selfie. Both will form gateways into processes of cosmopolitan irony across Western and Eastern

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cultures that thrives on mobilities, such as different forms of (old and new) technology, travel, and variations of pilgrimage.

Note: The outside forms a bokeh to communicate his disturbed psychology. Source: Warner Bros/Photofest, 2020.

Image 1.1

Fast moving images of Gotham are blurred in Arthur Fleck’s mind

Bokeh is the aesthetic quality produced by blurring parts of a photographic image so that particular regions are sharply focused. The term originates in the Japanese word boke, which refers to ‘blur’ or ‘haze’ and is derived from the verb bokeru. The verb presents a variety of meanings, ranging from being blurry or out of focus, to behaving childishly, being senile, befuddled or even performing naivety/stupidity, as well as becoming engrossed in a detail (Online Japanese Dictionary and Study Portal, undated). Boke’s transposition into Western technology originates in the use in 1997 of the term corrupted as ‘bokeh’ in the magazine Photo Techniques. By that time, both spellings had been in use for about a year by a self-taught student of Japanese who wanted to read photo magazines in their native language (Johnston, 4 April 2004). The depth and quality of bokeh are determined by the make and quality of the lens: for example, ‘good’ bokehs corresponding to sharpening foreground images, such as portraits, necessitate good long tele-photo or macro lenses to produce a shallow depth of the field so that the subject ‘stands out’ against the blurred background. The arrest of Arthur as the killer of his TV show host, Murray

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Franklin, towards the end of the film, provides such a good bokeh moment: watching from the window of the police car as riots break out across the city produces a sharp focus of his demented character against blurred city lights and riot noise. Hence, its technological function aside, bokeh is an atmospheric concept. Common-sensical understandings of ‘atmospheres’ as ‘ambience’ or ‘moods’ induced by our perception of our environmental surroundings, are important for the concept’s definition. Atmospheres orientate humans in the environment, but this orientation is based on what they perceive of as their real environment. Atmosphere’s philosophical rendition in Germanophone hermeneutic phenomenology as ‘Stimmung’ (literally the uncanny), suggests that its qualities are based on an environmental connectivity between the human subject and the object on which their perception focuses (Heidegger, 1967; Bollnow, 2011). Thus, atmospheres are constellations of people and things, or ‘ecstasies of the thing’: the way the perceived thing (and corresponding unfolding event) qualitatively and sensuously stands out from itself (Böhme, 1993, p.121). Light and illumination are specific atmospheric manifestations that have found ample use in the cosmetic organisation of urban environments (Edensor, 2012). However, as explained before, this study facilitates a metaphorical elaboration on the cosmopolitan complexities of friction through philosophies of the moving image, which display both potentialities and limitations. Thus, I have less interest in following Edensor’s study of atmosphere as such and more on using his placement of atmospheric installations as epistemological tools. Simply put, my makeshift bokeh cosmopolitan travels will hopefully facilitate spatio-temporally focused sociological illuminations of frictional events as these events are perceived by those participating in them. That I am added in these environments as someone perceiving others’ perceptions is not a separate problématique but a phenomenon constitutive of my sociology of perspective. I will return to this in Chapters 3 and 4, where I will further unpack the aforementioned magical realist split between European artistic epistemology and non-European postcolonial ontology. The elaboration is of methodological significance, if we follow Bauman’s hermeneutic contribution to the social sciences. Bauman (1978, p.218) argues that ‘by spotting the general in the particular, by enlarging both the alien and one’s own experience so as to construct a larger system in which each “makes sense” to the other’ are essential components of hermeneutics. I add that this approach from the standpoint of the particular, the bokeh, does not just make them comprehensible (‘makes sense’), but also sensible: aesthetically and therefore culturally translatable. Where Bauman stresses cerebral comprehension, I focus on the contribution of its performative and embodied dimensions in this cerebral enterprise. This stresses how our being is trained to perceive

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the world, before we proceed to change this habitual environment and rituals to enable cross-cultural comprehension. Indeed, cosmopolitan friction (the moment of contact with the other) is the ‘event’ or momentum captured in a ‘good bokeh’ at a particular moment in time. Capturing it in the moment so that it is examined carefully at a slower pace, signals the passage from immediate multi-sensory encounter to reflexive apprehension (its social-scientific elaboration). In fact, for someone wishing to approach perspective with some critical sensitivity to cultural and social difference that does not concede to unlimited altruism, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bokeh techniques may stand in a critical reversal – an observation applying to the destructive revolution of the disenfranchised populations of Gotham City, as this is metaphorised in Arthur’s demented bokeh. Rather than resorting to an a-political aesthetic analysis, my approach to cosmopolitan friction hinges on the politics-with-aesthetics approach that we find both in Jacques Rancière’s (2009, 2011) work and in Felix Guattari’s (2014) ‘three ecologies’ thesis. Guattari’s analysis is particularly germane for inspecting angles of cosmopolitan friction. He begins by positing the presence and interaction of three distinctive ‘ecological registers’ involving the environment, social relations and human subjectivity (ibid. p.18). However, his conception of the environment refers not specifically to natural ecosystems, but the ways the mental plane interacts with subjectivity. This refers to people’s attitudinal dispositions, sensibility and minds, which Guattari believes to have been penetrated by media homogenisation processes to produce a dangerous singularity of perspective (see also Guattari and Negri, 1990, p.53). A similar analysis was recently fashioned as Bauman’s methodological stance against fundamentalism. In his assessment of the thinker’s critique of public use of social media, Davis (2020, p.28) reminds us of Bauman’s warning that such habitual technological use isolates people, because it allows them to just reproduce their own perspective. However, this disregards the cosmopolitan potential of technology and its facilitation of transnational dialogues. More helpfully, Bauman (and Davis) suggest that ‘real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you’ (Bauman and De Querol, 2016). Their second useful observation is that often fundamentalism does not support ‘a primordial surfeit of meaning’ but is the outcome of a deficit in meaning (Davis, 2020, p.30). I see in the latter one of the most discussed ‘conditions of modernity’ (Bauman, 1991), so any elaboration on it demands context to avoid abstraction. Although Guattari’s ecological model would suggest the interlacing of cosmologically bound artmaking with the local or native language, and the translation of both as homeliness, at-homeness, or as a form of hospitality (i.e. ‘this artwork belongs’), its abstract nature does not invest in cultural cosmopolitan specificity (Tzanelli, 2020a, p.179). Guattari (2014, p.47) is more interested in stressing how, despite their common origin in the ethico-aesthetic

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discipline, the three ecologies should be distinguished from it as practices. Where Guattari suggests that we resist capitalist domination by revolution, I caution that ‘specificity’ and its resurgent potentialities – what in Chapter 4 I investigate as a ‘narrowing of vision’ – can also produce the opposite of cosmopolitan openness. In the next two chapters it becomes more obvious how in the history of national and cosmopolitan artistic representations of the rebel and rebellion – the common folk ironist – the Joker’s bokeh can be very bad indeed, as it produces versions of methodological nationalism, nativism and fundamentalism. By the time we have reached Chapter 4, we will be in a position to understand how real social inequalities generate good analytical bokehs but very bad ecologies of perspective for sustainable futures. To examine cosmopolitan pluriversals, one needs to adopt a slower pace that is contextual and relational at the same time; favours phenomenological analysis (e.g. Vannini, 2013); and most importantly, thinks of atmospheric phenomena, such a ‘friction’ as processes. In both Cresswell’s (2014) and Tsing’s (2005) work, process is subsumed by or ignored in favour of materiality and metaphorisation respectively. The omission is strange, given that the new mobilities paradigm and the discipline of anthropology share in the realist belief of what Adey (2010, p.149) posits as everyday mobilities’ ‘thinking-feeling’ articulations. Although I pay less attention to the automobile revolution of modernity/modernities as such (e.g. Featherstone, 2004; Urry, 2004; Sheller, 2014), its implication in the social machination of the human body that Deleuze and Guattari (1983) discuss is indisputable. If friction in cosmopolitan encounters grants this study’s analysis with atmospheric process, the real ‘event-technique’ of cosmopolitan performance (by artists, tourists and locals) is the bokeh nature of the selfie. Practices of ‘zooming in’ and ‘closing up’ foreclose or enable potential connectivities based on ironic critique, by delineating spaces and culture as ‘our own’, by making, erecting or demolishing borders (Rumford, 2014). This brings me to a brief introduction of the selfie and its relationship to the bokeh. Selfie tourism features as a cosmopolitan frictional zone in this study, due to the spontaneous generation of tourism from the Joker in a poor American neighbourhood (on tourism and the border see Timothy, 2000, 2001). Local grievances about the selfie tourists’ insensitivity are examined in Chapter 4 as instances of damaged hospitality, after a scrutiny of what the selfie really is and where it comes from in Chapter 3. Selfie techniques and popular cultures are not necessarily identical in their intentions and motivations: as I explain in Chapter 3, the contemporary selfie as a technique involving pointing the camera at oneself, can be an ironic statement on individuality, or a way to connect to the world and laugh at oneself’s flaws. Contrariwise, the technique of individual and collective self-centrism and narcissism is an attack of both individual and collective growth and wellbeing.

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There is a structural likeness between bokeh and selfie techniques relating to the Japanese origins of both and their subsequent Western technological translation into expressions of individualism, subjectivity and material-phenomenological border-making. Especially bokeh’s original linguistic connection to performative innocence or knowing silliness in the boke marks a cultural border between propriety, transgression and belonging. In Western techniques of selfie-taking, this border is moved closer to practices of self-care even at the expense of caring for others – a change also reimported into modern Japanese culture in the era of globalisation. Such border-making feeds back into concerns regarding cultural translatability. Note for example, that, although the translatability of cultures features as a conditional form of cosmopolitanism, the process of translation itself may be informed by invisible, discursive violence pertaining to the domination of one cultural form over the other (Asad, 1986; Herzfeld, 2002; Tzanelli, 2015). In the following chapter I return to this journey’s starting point in the study: the creation of the Joker in the old garments of Arthur Fleck, the poor clown with no future or sanity to navigate the world. I discuss the creative vision of its makers and their intention to produce a critique of Western American cultures of thoughtlessness, through the withdrawal of hospitality in the form of welfare. I also explore the reasons and cost of choosing a particular style of narrating these artistically. This will help me regress in Chapter 2 to the origins of the concepts and characters with which the Joker’s creators had to engage in contemporary (comics) and historical (national literature and painting) popular cultures depicting transgression, rebellion and revolution. This will move us away from the film and into the recesses of cosmopolitan friction, as this is contextually enacted across different times through interplays of social status, power and identity.

RETHINKING PILGRIMAGE The promise to travel readers through millennia of human creativity generates more methodological and practical questions: how is such travel performed? Does it involve any continuity or association with organised tourism? Who can enact it? The questions multiply, if I do not clarify that I will be working along two axes of movement that have both multi-temporal and multi-spatial qualities on the one hand (horizontal axes), and cognitive, spiritual and affective qualities on the other (vertical axes). These axes evolve on a three-dimensional scale, by moving upwards or downwards and/or warping inwards, until the travel transforms into a tourist journey focusing on a particular destination, spot or neighbourhood, as is the case with the Joker. As the schematic organisation of this axial development attests, ‘travel’ begins as a purely cognitive activity involving interpretations of artistic creativity and proceeds all the way

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up to transforming into an embodied popular cultural pilgrimage in a particular location, or down, to transform into religious worshipping. However, between the first and the last transformation, one must account for the interpretative gaps that the researcher has to fill, as different spatio-temporal plateaus move between and across the two axes. Embodied tourism aside, such movements can be virtual – that is, emotional and cognitive – but also digital – if we account for the changes new systems of mobility introduced in our lives in the last two centuries (see Figure 1.1).

Note: There is purposive movement of three-dimensional quality in image-based pilgrimage that applies across the explored examples of cosmopolitan mobility in this study (protest, selfie tourism, film-tourism, digital tourism and artistic calligraphic travel). Source: Rodanthi Tzanelli, drawn in 2020.

Figure 1.1

Pilgrimage and Axes Mundi

The recognition that new media, especially those embedded online, maintain a link to travel and organised tourism, has featured in several publications dating back to the very start of the twenty-first century (Prideaux, 2002). However, such early analyses focused mainly on the materialities of tourism, including the internet’s infrastructural facilitation of conventional tourism, not what Germann Molz (2012) later flagged as a question of ‘networked sociality’ that acts as a form of ‘novel interactive travel’ (Germann Molz, 2012, pp.2‒4). Germann Molz’s reflections included little elaboration on the phenomenologies of such virtual connectivity beyond an analysis of travel affordances and the production of alternative socialities. This conspicuous gap invites reflection on what it means to use the internet to travel, not just in terms of community-making, as Molz’s excellent analysis attests, but phenomenologically, in terms of the quality of this movement (see also Hollinshead

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and Kuon, 2013 on tourism studies ‘fluid acumen’). Rosie Braidotti’s (1994) configuration of the ‘nomad’ as an analytical tool that helps us to understand migratory-travel practices is a useful starting point. Much like Bauman’s (1996b) configuration of the tourist and the vagabond, Braidotti stresses that mobility is not limited to physical movement, but accommodates multiple levels of experience that allow us to blur boundaries between different mobilities and work towards ways of knowing about alternative types of movement. When geography is removed from the picture, we can contemplate an epistemology of movement (Braidotti, 1994, p.23) that may allow us to reintroduce geographical specificity in comparative studies of place and culture. Several decades before Molz’s analysis, Graburn (1978) called for a ‘cross-cultural aesthetic’ approach to tourism as a sacred journey, promising a break from ordinary life in ‘a spiritual quest for the ultimate truth’ (p.24). Such analyses of tourism as a psychic ‘meta-movement’ propelling individual and collective changes (Coleman and Eade, 2004), encouraged further study of the intersection between tourism and pilgrimage. Anthropological classics of an obvious Eurocentric flair, such as Turner and Turner’s (1978) Image and pilgrimage in Christian culture, further prompted scholars to consider pilgrimages as both religious and secular, tourismified forms of mobility. These analyses were based on notions of the social world as a Heideggerian picture-postcard, ready to be experienced, apprehended, and consumed. Yet, continuums between experience, apprehension and consumption are not to be taken for granted. This is also the case with pilgrimage as an image-based ritual and a worship of deity icons. Studies of religious pilgrimage in Islamic contexts stress Islam’s aniconic or non-representational nature (Tzanelli, 2011), whereas contemporary popular pilgrimages (e.g. film tourism, music tourism, forms of dark tourism) of iconic nature prioritise the ‘pilgrims’’ ritualistic emotional investment in the practice itself (Couldry, 2003; Beeton, 2006; Tzanelli, 2013). If anything, secular and religious pilgrimages are morphologically connected: they both look to the subject’s break from ordinary (profane) time; demand personal investment in an idea that shapes the subject’s perception of the world; organise this perception with the help of ritualistic repetition of worshipping practices; and promise some sort of psycho-cultural transformation of one’s inner self from afar. The bokeh/boke and selfie-taking will structure the journey through millennia of world civilisational development that I promise to my readers. At first, the generation of any methodological and empirical links between popular cultural pilgrimage in the Bronx and a centuries-long development of the boke from Eastern and particularly Japanese calligraphic art to selfie tourism may sound absurd. As will become evident in the next few chapters, my analysis is equipped to make such connections epistemologically and ontologically useful because of such journeys’ constructions as a global cultural circula-

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tion with its own political economy. Du Gay et al. (2013 pp.4‒8) spoke of the ‘circuit of culture’ to analyse interplays between media representations, meaning-making, identity formation, production and consumption, as well as regulation, whereas Lee and LiPuma (2002), Cronin (2004) and Valaskivi and Sumiala (2014) discussed circulation as a cultural process with its own dynamics and constraints in commercial contexts. My assertion that we can enact a coherent journey through different cultures and in different spatio-temporal frames highlights both the journeys’ global circulatory quality in modernity and their complex connection of premodern and late modern circuits of belief (Colebrook, 2006). To put this leap of faith in diachronic mobility in context, I wish to develop a broader account of how social worlds are created and maintained through cross-cultural mobilities, such as those produced in boke/bokeh and selfie cultures. To achieve this, I heed Couldry’s (2012) advice that, especially to study cultural politics in media contexts, we must learn to treat linear perceptions of social reality with suspicion. To accept the free flow and circulation of ideas across different cultural contents and times as a methodology, we need to forgo perspectives reliant on linearity and immateriality and learn to use particular traces such journeys leave on social domains as our guides or signposts (Latour, 2005, p.79). If we accept this course of action, we become involved in multi-dimensional forms of pilgrimage: not only do we have to enact cognitive and emotional journeys into different worlds, we turn cultural circuits within and points of connection between these worlds into the object of our study. That I focus on transformations of pilgrimage into a secularised, popular culture in virtual environments, should not mislead readers to think that I separate economics from the politics of cultural circulation. Coleman and Eade (2018) note that historically, the voluntarism and egalitarianism of pilgrimage provided antecedents for contractual relationships, thus subsequently playing a significant role in the formations of capitalist landscapes in modernity. First of all, much like Cresswell’s and Tsing’s theses on friction, this type of pilgrimage invites macro-sociological analysis. It involves more than a focus on collective and individual appropriation of cinematic and literary stories, as well as accompanying artefacts, architectural structures and geographically demarcated sites and landscapes. It is more associated with the organisation of meta-movement within a virtual system of services that at least in neoliberal contexts of labour mobility interweaves capitalism with religion and both into the nation-state’s economic, political and legal structures of place-making and naming (Coleman, 2014, p.283). By the same token, we cannot think of the ‘pilgrim’ as a phenomenological traveller only. The pilgrim is a subject that transcends old secular vs. post-secular epistemic frames, because (s)he enters domains of economic performance and environments constantly structured and restructured to

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appeal to new markets (Gauthier et al., 2013). On the one hand, this creates ever-expansive realities for the pilgrim-subject as an ideal type: not only does it open new possibilities for performing travel as an imaginative/imagined form of movement, it pluralises the ways such travels are relayed to others. On the other, ideal pilgrims, including cinematic tourists, can be understood better when they are associated with particular ideological formations – otherwise put, if we consider their mobility habits and lifestyles first outside the ‘shrines’ that they visit (Singh, 2012). The observation is significant, not just for the tourist mobilities induced by the Joker in the Bronx, but also the development of premodern Japanese boke/selfie cultures into an assemblage of commercialised pilgrimages in modernity in Eastern and Western urban sites (only this demotes the film and its tourism mobilities into an example, rather than the real focus of this study). I discuss these transformations across Chapters 3 and 4, so that I examine closely the emergence of cosmopolitan networks of mobilities blending tourism, pilgrimage, labour migration and technology from the 1990s. These networks are not actually ‘spoiled’ because they are commercialised: for better or worse, the ethos of commercialism has been part of their genesis and development. Indeed, the idea of a commercial system (Reader, 2014) or multi-site (Tzanelli, 2018) have always been part and parcel of studies into Japanese pilgrimage. It is also not injudicious to argue that structurally, this phenomenon is manifest across different places that hosted secular, religious and post-secular pilgrimages, thus partaking in globalising processes (Cresswell, 2015, pp.83‒84). Thus, my approach cannot be limited to established approaches on ‘simulation’ in consumerist ideological contexts, but also involves pluralising representations of existing landscapes, heritages and cultures of actual sites and increasingly tourismified destinations. Much like markets, which act as heterogenous assemblages of human and non-human actors and institutions (Osella and Rudnyckyi, 2017), ideas of place are malleable (Cresswell, 2015, pp.109‒110) – or should be to some extent, if we do not want to adhere to fundamentalisms that different interest groups use to fix cultural memory. Hence, we must treat the classical political economic approach propagated by Baudrillard (1994) as only one of many prospective epistemological frames in this study’s digital journeys. There will be likely objections from tourism scholars and practitioners to a scholarly approach which proposes virtual peregrination or ‘websurfing’ of cultures and landscapes as a form of touristic pilgrimage. Such objections tend to ignore some factual occurrences: first, that a reading of popular cultural pilgrimages of the Lord of the Rings or Pokémon Go type as generic ‘consumerist packages’ tends to reproduce the old normative divide between serious travel for pedagogical purposes and ‘pop’ tourism for brain-wasted consumers (McCabe, 2005). Second, clinical separations between ‘virtual’ and ‘embodied’ pilgrimage are discriminatory in the most real sense, as they confine the

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true, ‘authentic’ experience of mobility to those who can move physically. Third, websurfing is now the first phenomenological window that tourism systems open to other world cultures, thus producing a prospectively embodied (tourist) clientele. Finally, it is noted that, when virtual pilgrimage is viewed as just an early ‘phase’ of mobility, leading to more ‘accomplished’ experiences of ‘being there’ in the flesh, it never acquires the status of an independent case for study epistemologically and methodologically. Each of these observations reintroduces a discussion on interconnections between reality (what we apprehend, consume, visit and relay to peers), subjectivity (how we produce our own subjective status as ‘tourists’ and ‘pilgrims’), and identity (how both tourists and popular pilgrimage destinations come to be named and claimed, as well as by whom). They prompt an examination of aesthetic engagement with the world ‘out there’, as well as what constitutes the world within our mind. This has been expressed by philosophers as the divide between ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’. It is worth reaching back to Graburn’s early work. Virtual peregrination typically exhibits a particular aesthetic texture, because it can be both episodic (we visit places online whenever we have time), intimate/personal (we can do this completely alone) and labour-intensive (we do this in early or late hours, or even during work times, but still with immense emotional investment). It is aesthetic because it enables (a) sensory (think of aesthesis in terms of senses) (b) formations of what is beautiful (aesthetics as appreciation of beauty, harmony and coherence) that (c) lead to apprehensions of the built and natural environment around us (Tzanelli, 2018). If these three aesthetic dimensions sound suspiciously European/Kantian, a fourth may be added: the subconscious hybridisation of sensory inputs and outputs that feed into aesthetic appreciation, which differ from culture to culture. In any case, the permeation of touristic-like pilgrimage as a practice by images and texts (we visit places through their online photographic, auditory and textual descriptions), shapes our engagement with the represented or simulated social and cultural worlds. Methodologically, we can think of virtual pilgrimage in two analytical stages: in the first stage, we may explore the extent to which the material immediacy of the world exists independently from the websurfer’s comprehension during their virtual journeys; in the second stage, we may consider pilgrimage online as ‘irreal’, in that it encourages the human mind to produce several world versions, each of them valid in its own right, and thus methodologically productive. Although this proliferation of worlds crosses paths with a specific version of reality produced by cyber-experts in tourismified pilgrimage business, it is ultimately irreducible to their dominant, let us say, imposed ‘reality’ (May, 2008). The irrealism that I propose re-examines understandings of ‘worldmaking’ as a force that shapes tourism around the world. Hollinshead defined this as

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‘the creative – and often “false” or “faux” imaginative processes and projective promotional activities – which management agencies and other mediating bodies engage in to purposely (or otherwise unconsciously) privilege particular dominant/favoured representations of people/places/pasts’ (Hollinshead et.al., 2009, pp.430‒431). Borrowing from Goodman’s (1978) predicament that we are neither able to encapsulate the ‘world’ as such, nor know that it exists as a uniform or fragmented totality, or as plural totalities, Hollinshead develops a novel take on tourismification. His ‘worldmaking’ is notably more ‘closed’ than Goodman’s, because it stresses that tourism experts select a singular world version. As business agents, they stabilise cultural reality in tourist destinations. Theoretically, outside tourism studies, Hollinshead’s worldmaking is not based on Goodman, but on Hilary Putnam’s (1996) and Nikolas Rose’s (1999) takes on Goodman. Simply put, what is ultimately ‘real’ in tourism contexts, as the revered (by popular cultural pilgrims) landscape, artefact or narrative, is what some ‘finished science’ will eventually say is real and thus ready for us to experience or consume. Within tourism theory, this resembles Urry’s thrice-revised ‘tourist gaze’, which was originally defined as the gaze of ‘experts’ that make tourism (see first edition, Urry, 1990). Hollinshead’s work has commonly emphasised the ways in which worlds of tourism are structured by industries and experts. It leans towards the ways through which reality closes in on us from someone’s perspective (from the scholar, the professional or the state). This trend informs his more recent collaborative work, which, borrowing from Nünning et al. (2010), explores ‘how social scientists themselves conceivably compose the vistas through which they make the very constructs that they deploy to carry out these worldmaking inspections’ (Hollinshead and Suleman, 2018, p.209). Such observations strengthen Hollinshead’s communication with Putnam or Rose. Their variations of ‘irrealism’ – the proposition that worlds proliferate all the time and experts step in to tame this process by selecting one version – and the adjacent debate on whether or not one or many versions of the world exist independently from our thinking of them are technical through and through. ‘Sorting’ the connection between externalist and internalist world-versions informs the reality-making of the technocratic planner and the policymaker. Although blends of tourism, pilgrimage and work do exist, they do not inform the disinterested tourist or pilgrim of leisure, as we know them. Whilst Hollinshead’s thesis outlines the ‘discursive’ power of the tourism business à la Foucault, it is less effective for virtual touring as an individual practice and a collective, popular cultural ritual of the ‘pilgrimage’ range. We must then revert to Goodman’s original suggestion to acknowledge that, as human beings in our digital journeys, we may create and inhabit different worlds. These may or may not cross paths with those of digital tourism and business experts: capital holders, advertisers and web designers. This version of worldmaking is

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closer, though not identical, to what is promoted by tourism scholars working within earlier hermeneutic traditions (see Caton, 2013). A few examples may be helpful. Studies on ‘gamification’ as a motivational experience that leads to visiting places are a case in point. I will not endorse discourses of ‘incentivisation’, which reduce online engagement with landscapes, cultures and customs to a money-making strategy. Playing a computer game, so that we familiarise ourselves with a real (physical) site, certainly follows a ‘script’ devised by designers. However, the involvement of designers in knowledge-making about place and culture is ontologically conducive in a pluralistic sense. It produces versions of the world(s) that it represents in the minds of game-players, which were not necessarily part of the designers’ script. A notable example is the Brazilian Tourist Board’s (EMBRATUR) introduction of the ‘Brazil Quest’ – an entertainment game intended to ‘educate’ prospective (digital-to-terrestrial) tourists in Brazil during the 2014 FIFA World Cup (Corrȇa and Kitano, 2015). Such gamifications feed into initiatives pertaining to the ‘festivalisation’ of the city and straightforward urban tourism, emphasising popular pilgrimages to heritage sites and postmodern entertainment and consumption hubs (cinema complexes, bars, galleries, stadiums, local markets) alike. Such pilgrimages are, in the original sense, peregrinations, urban flâneries that separate the game-player from ordinary time, prompting an investment in a cognitive meta-movement. The proliferation of digital itineraries connected to cinematic adaptations of ‘swords and sorcery’ literary genres is another case in point. Whole websites are now devoted to the reproduction of such fantastic worlds in a map-making fashion and with various adventurous plots. Independent subcultural universes emerge and spread from such corporate design of sites (usually linked to the movies’ production companies), with their own plots, rituals and connectivities. The Lord of the Rings and now the Hobbit trilogies were pioneers, with ever-expanding international fan groups, which now ‘move’ online and share in blogs, online diaries and via digital game-making. The Game of Thrones franchise prompted the design of several websites advertising landscapes from different countries that were used in filmmaking, suggesting more online visitations of remote, beautiful places by digital flâneurs. These initiatives are digitally productive and reproductive of worlds, in which some form of community emerges. Examples include variations of digital pilgrimage connected to The Da Vinci Code, with Louvre tours sitting next to genealogical searches in Scotland and ‘new age’ cult sites promising the retrieval of pan-human roots from Dan Brown’s story. A second is Avatar’s connections of real environmental activism in the Amazon, Brazil (one of the movie’s inspirations). It involves simulatory journeys into fictional Pandora’s natural environments, which have now acquired a global pool of pilgrims.

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The cybersphere of popular pilgrimage is a sphere of several lifeworlds, often co-existing uneasily and at the expense of each other. However, one thing is sure: the design of such digital universes does not merely allow for endless transformations of leading narratives of place and culture in a ‘popcultural placemaking loop’ fashion (Gyimóthy et.al., 2015, p.18). It also does the unpredictable cultural work of community-building, which shapes real human connectivity ‘from afar’ and in a peculiar neo-cosmopolitan fashion open to more people around the world with an internet connection (Szerszynski and Urry, 2006). In this respect, several worlds from every online ‘popular cultural pilgrimage’ by digital pilgrims/flâneurs may emerge independently from those designed by technical experts. It would be problematic to conclude that digital worldmaking involves only the management of reality in a rational and technocratic sense, with individual digital tourists/pilgrims as the true experiential world travellers and the makers of cyber-pilgrimage as ‘armchair technocrats’. Still, in my analysis of popular cultural pilgrimage online, I do not espouse Urry’s traditional split between romantic and mass tourists. Nor do I maintain, following Urry and Larsen (2011, pp.201‒203), that gazing at real and fictional places or celebrating ideas and artefacts in tourismified contexts, instantiates terrestrially and socially existing practices, divides and identities (e.g. the ‘Romantic gaze’ is possessed by middle-class tourists). On the contrary, I argue that, when in the cybersphere, we arrive at fortuitous blends of the two types of tourist/pilgrim, with the possibility of arriving at a third: that of a sort of the ‘popular cultural worldmaker’. The popular cultural worldmaker traverses the world of digital designers while making new worlds, both alone and in unison with other websurfing pilgrims, with whom they can join forces in forming a community. These ‘popular cultural worldmakers’ can be romantic in their pursuit of personal sublimation through online travels, but also mundane in their fusion of work with virtual mobility. They are prone to hybridise ideas, rituals and practices, because no world narrative remains completely stable, but is always subject to alterations on the move. In this respect, popular cultural worldmakers may be viewed as popular artists of sorts, in constant dialogue with the technocraft of touristified digital business. This take on ‘artistry’, which amplifies the violence on reality and on human subjects, is crucial for the book’s central thesis. The following chapter explores the first phase of morphing the Joker pilgrimage in Todd Phillips’ rendition of this DC Comics anti-hero. To do so, I regress to an irrealist exploration of the hero’s genesis across different spatio-temporal plateaus moving downwards, to the past (as this is the journey that I initiate in this chapter). Having first looked at the socio-cultural and political context in which the movie was created and released, I then proceed to examine its temporally expansive deep play of rebellion, resistance and anarchist chaos. By ‘deep play’ refer to the

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malleable context in which ‘institutions, processes and social behaviours can be intelligibly described’ (Geertz, 1973, p.14). Following here Philip Smith’s (2011) masterful sociological repurposing of Geertzian theory as effective storytelling, I try to show that nothing is what it seems, that we must train ourselves in deciding when we must stay open and hopeful to the game of impressions and when we should quit. Such storytelling accommodates (a) the methodological thrill of solving a social puzzle, (b) the ability to connect miniature events and phenomena to grand themes, and (c) enlisting the emotional support of readers, thus committing them to follow the drama from start to finish. Through my journeys, I see how two of the principal forces of modernity, individual creativity (its socio-cultural dimensions) and statist or corporate bureaucracy (its political and economic ones), claim exclusive control over the realm of human experience.

2. The poetics of justice: the joker as a modern(ist) character CONSTRUCTING THE INVISIBLE BORDER: COMEDY AND TRANSGRESSION It sounds improbable that the Joker was the creation of chance, but it may not be incorrect to argue that its central character was developed incrementally in terms of performance. According to director and screenwriter Todd Phillips, the script for the film itself was also something that took shape during filming. Award-winning Joaquin Phoenix (cast as Joker/Arthur Fleck) explained that, likewise, his acting in some scenes was unplanned (Weintraub, 23 October 2019). If scripts provide a film with its core meanings, which actors mould into embodied performance, in order to understand the origins of this particular film’s ‘Joker’, we should have a quick look at Phillips’ artistic biography. The biography will not provide all the answers we need in a critical analysis of cosmopolitan irony and friction but will illuminate some recurring motifs in the director’s work. Such motifs feed into the artist’s ironic repertoires, providing source material for a situated analysis of cosmopolitan friction. In other words, I intend to use Phillips’ professional pathways as pathways of bokeh mobilities and networking in film markets. The mobility routes facilitate an understanding of the personal challenges Phillips faced in his attempts to develop his own critical style of filmmaking. Therefore, although not a film study, this chapter has to determine how he situated himself in the field of directorship and filmmaking – how, in Foucauldian terms, he learned to mediate his beliefs through a discursive labyrinth of rules, protocols and regulations in the film industry. This merits a brief examination of critical takes on authorship, a theme which I revisit in Chapter 4 in the context of cinematic tourism making. Critical takes on film texts in the social context of cinematic productivity have a very long history stretching as far back as the late nineteenth century. In fact, notions of authorship have always overlapped with social-theoretical currents where filmmaking developed as a twin aesthetic and critical exercise over social dynamics. Crofts (1998, pp.312–322) identifies several modes of authorship, with early ones using the idea of cinema as art to communicate Romantic sensibilities and rampant subjective individualism, and the latter 24

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erring on historical materialism and structuralism. This movement matches social theory’s development of focus on movements from the individual to society, and then the individual in society, as a monad exemplary of wider social processes of development (on which see Sorokin, 1969; Simmel, 1971). To be clear then, I use Phillips as an example of such movements in artistic modernity, thus implementing my bokeh methodology. In my exploration of genealogies of the selfie, I will regress to premodern times in a different cultural context, the Asian (Japanese), but follow them up to Japanese modernity. This journey will yield surprisingly similar results in terms of purposeful artistic mobility in terms of the presence of structural constrictions to creativity and individual agency. Otherwise put, I will map a global politics of mobility in terms of creative movement, which will take into account the structural variables that determine such movement and stasis (race, ethnicity, gender, class, status); how these change or remain the same across centuries; and what kinds of frictions they produce in cosmopolitan contexts of artmaking and embodied or virtual travel. In the following biographical vignettes in Phillips’ work, one notices a blend of and shuffling of authorial repertoires. Although generally averse to early Hollywood Romantic expressivity and more attracted to this type of psychological realism that we find in the creation of Arthur Fleck, external industrial and audience reception pressures appeared to have hardened the way he addresses problematic polarisations between politics and pleasure. We can safely trace the causes for this polarisation on an uncompromising Marxist tendency to challenge dominant ideologies in the ‘right style’. In filmmaking, this corresponds to naturalised narratives framed around realities of human misery and inequality (Tulloch, 1977, pp.533–545). To be clear, I do not intend to cast Phillips as an anti-Marxist – quite the contrary. In discussing his collaborative development of Fleck’s character, he admitted a fascination by ‘“left-footed characters” – people who are “out of step with the world”’ (Gross, 7 February 2020). Such statements can lead to further unwanted classifications of those who utter them as the proverbial insensitive slum tourist, who objectifies other people’s misery. I set aside such discourses for the moment, to make an observation on Phillips’ blended auteur style, as such left-footedness transcends the field of structural materialism to borrow from early nineteenth-century psycho-social genres. The idea of encapsulating social inequalities in film was born with modern technologies of the eye, such as filmmaking anyway. The psycho-social genre, which found its real contexts in urban poverty and the two World Wars of the following century, produced the ideal-typical character of the tramp of modernity, who remained out of step with progress while actually exposing its discontents. Indeed, the temporal ‘out-of-step-ness’ would also be perceived as an ‘out-of-place-ness’ when homeless-ness became endemic in

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the megalopoles (Cresswell, 2015, pp.179–181). The notion of asynchronistic or arrhythmic encounter with progress is found in many of Charlie Chaplin’s dramas, which featured scathing critiques of industrial progress, poverty, alienation and dehumanisation (Crofts, 1998, p.312). Cresswell (2001) suggested that the tramp was an American invention based on a ‘scientised’ knowledge that constructed physical dirt as a border, a civilisational margin. This spatio-temporal indeterminacy was amplified by the activities of homeless people, especially those of scroungers, who were among the first recycling amateurs of modernity that cleaned up the act of ‘civilised’ consumers (see Ferrell, 2006, pp.44–45; Tzanelli, 2015, pp.160–161). In fact, the song played in the Joker’s teaser trailer, ‘Smile’, was composed by Charlie Chaplin for his film Modern Times (1936). Born in 1970 in Brooklyn, New York, to a family of Jewish background, and raised in Huntington, Long Island, Phillips had to drop out of New York University Film School because he could not pay tuition fees and complete his first film at the same time (Broadley, 13 September 2007). Despite its limited theatrical release, his first documentary as a junior at New York University, Hated: G.G. Allin and the Murder Junkies (1993), which discussed the life and death of punk rock icon G.G. Allin, became a high-grossing film. At that early stage Phillips had displayed an interest in exploring invisible boundaries between deviance and criminality, as these were expressed through particular character vignettes – a special rendition of my bokeh cosmopolitan methodology. This psycho-social account of action, which is based on depicting interiority, stayed with him to date. Hated chronicled G.G. Allin’s development from his difficult upbringing in a small New Hampshire town, to becoming ‘the poster boy for public obscenity and indecent exposure, to his ultimate downfall as another drug addled musician who died in his sleep of an overdose on June 28 1993, just days before the documentary was set to premiere’ (Broadley, 13 September 2007). In a later interview Phillips explained that he developed his filmmaking technique and taste by watching Nick Broomfield documentaries not so much because of their political content, but their character-driven qualities (ibid.). Because of his taste for comedy and realist filmmaking, Phillips never connected to archetypal narratives of the ‘omnipotent Self’, who is built in God’s image, as Campbell’s (1993, p.319) cosmological theory of script-making suggests. The cyclical passage from fall to emanation and then becoming (a hero) remains incomplete in his stories, because his key characters always succumb to their weaknesses and demonstrate their ignominious tendencies. It is not coincidental that Arthur Fleck appears to be caught in a delirious nightmare of a traumatic childhood he cannot piece together, thus never managing to complete the transformative cycle of maturation (ibid. pp.320–321). However, it is incorrect to connect this (as per Campbell’s [1993, p.320] prejudice) to Phillips’ genre preference,

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which presumably works against cathartic pedagogy. It can be argued that this pro-Aristotelian endorsement of the tragic genre as the only worthy educational engagement with the arts has been responsible for the hostility Phillips experienced in his earlier career and his reorientation to dark drama. However, I endeavour to prove that this provides a shallow reading of motivation or outcomes in his work. Phillips’ second creative feature emerged in his highest grossing R-Rated Comedy of all times, The Hangover (2009), which won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and the Best Comedy at the 2009 Broadcast Film Critics’ Awards (Empire, undated). This feature, which centres on the uses of comic irony to explore alternative presentations of human nature, was present also in works he produced in other genres, such as the co-directed with Andrew Gurland Frat House (1998), a documentary about college fraternities. Into the twenty-first century Phillips wrote and directed the remake of Starsky & Hutch (2004) starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson and the School for Scoundrels (2006) starring Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Heder. He also produced and co-authored another high-grossing comedy, Due Date (2010), which starred Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis and featured as an intertextual reference in some Joker scenes. Whilst all these artistic productions do not deviate from Phillips’ interest in the comic genre, they also focus on explorations of the human capacity for cruelty and love at the same time. Phillips almost directed the satirical but controversial comedy Borat (2006), from which he resigned in early 2005 due to creative differences but was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his contribution to the film’s screenplay. It is believed that his resignation was precipitated by the outrage the film’s star, Sacha Baron Cohen, caused at a Virginia rodeo event, by jokingly telling spectators in his Borat alter-ego that ‘US President George W. Bush should drink the blood of Iraqi civilians he kills’ (World Entertainment News Network, 19 January 2005). It was stressed that this is not a study about a film or a biographical focus on its creators: behind Cohen’s questionable black humour, we will not find the politics of the moment but the enduring qualities of humanism as a moral science that the Enlightenment philosophes struggled to articulate scientifically as the pinnacle of freedom (Goodwin and Scimecca, 2005). Setting a boundary between good and evil, fair and unfair, and justice and injustice, is a nomothetic activity managed by the state. However, an accessibility to citizens articulation of laws, which recognise pluriversal particularities, is a necessary prerequisite for their universal recognition. From Comte to Durkheim and from Kant to Hegel, European sociological traditions struggled to define ‘imperatives’ of action, freedom and cognition, but they could not really adhere to specificity, as the particular defies law-making principles. As already explained in the introduction, Nietzsche attempted to challenge this taboo by

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positing borderline activities and their emotional states, such as humour and laughter, as mobile moral yardsticks, allowing for perspectival examination of ways of being human in context. The American pragmatist tradition somehow shifted the debate by focusing on the human ability to choose from a repertoire of options in terms of action (Mead, [1934] 1974; Meltzer et al., 1977; Scimecca, 1995, 2007), without resolving the conundrum of humour and its politicised genre, comedy. To date, laughter and humour continue to reside a purgatory between the licit and the illicit, the socially acceptable and the abject, because of their vital power to produce alternative horizons of action that challenge authority and power. Cautious in his professional decisions, Phillips features in spirit as a pragmatic proponent of these traditions. In fact, his decision to create a dark drama like Joker suggests a shift towards this type of transgression that we associate with philosophies of revolution – and more specifically, Skocpol’s (1979) observations on their affiliation with civil or internal wars stemming from social inequalities and translating into large-scale political attrition. When asked in a 2014 BBC interview if he believes in God, Phillips stated that he believes in a ‘higher power’ or ‘collective energy’ residing ‘in people that you might say is God’ (Smith, 24 September 2014; JH Wiki, 2020). This statement mirrors Leo Trotsky’s famous dictum ‘let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, though they be nameless’ (Trotsky, [1930] 1959, p.249), which also guided Skocpol’s work. The people’s vital force, which in the Joker is very dark and (self-) destructive, may suggest that, for Phillips, the poetics of comedy and the politics of revolution share at least one similarity, which transcends structure but retains its historical depth: they ‘turn the world upside down’, to invoke Hill (1972), only to reinstate the status quo ante. This archaic power of what Bakhtin (1981) recognised in the carnivalesque, which inverts social structure only for a while, also suggests an Eliadian (Eliade, 1954) stylistic reading of Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return of the same’ that orders the cultural cosmos through disorder. All these affiliations also connect to Guattari’s (2014, pp.40–44) ominous prognosis that problematic social ecologies are filtered through identificatory systems harbouring control mechanisms and divesting collectivities and individuals of their agency. It would be easy to read several of Phillips’ cinematic characters through Guattari’s (2014, pp.41–42) calibration of three types of subjectivity in capitalist societies: the serial of salaried classes, the uninsured and the elitist. In many respects, Arthur Fleck’s persona articulates a failed aggregate of these subjectivities: he tries to join the first category, desires to be recognised by the third (indeed, even be fathered by it), but is disposed in the second. In the following chapter, I explain in more detail that the Joker’s narrative belongs to the histories of global popular art and betrays the presence of historical continuities between rebellion and self-destruction. In fact, these histories

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are consciously recovered by the movie’s authors, who have an entirely different popular cultural starting point in the world of the comics. Todd let such intentionality slip when he admitted that his movies are about guys ‘making bad decisions that lead to mayhem’, because he ‘love[s] chaos, [even] in [his] own life’ (Erbland, 1 October 2019). Evidently, the Joker is not about an individualist bokeh, but an exercise in spelling out how a narrative’s human foreground can direct attention to the blurred background of social unrest. Moving the visible parameters of fictional Gotham’s full-scale revolution (an allegory of America’s current social state of unrest) to the domain of the invisible (that of affects directed against unjust power), singularises and consecrates the revolutionary hero as a martyr, which authority can also turn into a villain (Eliade, 1954, p.19). Despite Phillips’ protest that all he wanted to make was ‘a real movie with real budget’ that ‘did not push buttons’, or that ‘it is not the filmmaker’s responsibility to teach morality’ (Shepherd, 26 September 2019), the Joker/Arthur’s power to eternally return, where injustice has turned into structure, translates the invisible aspects of experience into decisions we find in the ‘real world’. There will be space to discuss what this realism appears in different world contexts, but for the moment let us focus on how the Joker was created. This will pave a smoother path towards a fulsome analysis of perspectival theory, down to the point at which we will be in a position to explore the fundamentalist belief as a structural process.

THE MAKING OF THE JOKER In 2014, Joaquin Phoenix expressed an interest in participating in a low-budget character film about a DC Comics character, like the ‘Joker’ (Weintraub, 12 July 2018). Like Phillips, he had previously declined offers to be involved in comics-based films, which seemed to him to be too mainstream and ‘loud’. The fortuitous collaboration of these two artists was based on the creative freedom that the Joker’s script afforded to both; however, pitching its unusual take on an established DC Comics villain was not that easy. After the premier of War Dogs in 2016 Phillips tried to convince Warner Bros to commit to a low-budget standalone DC Films product that would be different from the Marvel Studios blockbusters. The proposal came after the realisation that DC Films and Marvel Studios creations should be decoupled. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) and billion-dollar earner The Dark Knight (2008) had yielded immense profits for Warner Bros but Marvel Entertainment had started making its own very successful movies, including the sensational Iron Man (2008) and The Incredible Hulk (2008) – both set in the same world and ‘promising future instalments in that shared franchise’ (Riesman, 29 September 2017). The arrangement seemed to have been sealed by August 2017, when Warner Bros and DC Films announced their forthcoming col-

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laboration on such a film, with Phillips directing and co-authoring with Scott Silver, and Martin Scorsese and Phillips in the role of co-producers (Fleming Jr., 22 August 2017). The news was not welcomed by Jared Leto, who had played the Joker character in the DC Films–Marvel Studios shared franchise (the ‘DC Extended Universe’ or DCEU), especially because Warner Bros had allegedly promised him a standalone DCEU Joker film and let Phillips cancel these plans (Masters, 19 October 2019). Warner Bros also urged Phillips to cast Leonardo DiCaprio as Joker in the hope that his previous collaboration with Scorsese would attract him to this offer. For Phillips, who was set to introduce Joaquin Phoenix to the world of comics, this was never an option: despite his initial reservations, Phoenix became excited about the prospect of starring in a film with which audiences can engage more critically (Shepherd and Graham, 20 August 2019). This background is not a mere collection of trivia, but integral to the study’s exploration of fundamentalist hermeneutic scaffoldings, especially where social institutions such as the media are involved. To relate it better to the movement of the pilgrim in the horizontal axes mundi (time and space), fundamentalist hermeneutics introduces a great deal of conceptual rigidity and emotional turbulence in the journey. This is not the embodied form of deceleration or acceleration that Vannini (2014) explores in his work on mobilities, but a purely phenomenological movement (or meta-movement), which may nevertheless affect physical movement, as is the case, for example, with the organisation of protest (on protest and cinematic pilgrimage by artists see Tzanelli, 2013, Chapter 6). Because the power to act on the world and the ‘capacities for being affected are partly determined by the circumstances in which a being finds itself’ (Gatens and Lloyd, 1999, p.101), are also affected by externally introduced fundamentalisms, the moving subject may either lose their itinerary altogether, and begin to wander desperately (this is Bauman’s [1996b] ‘tourist’), or, alternatively, get trapped in a particular spatio-temporal site, fighting for their right to have a place/home (this is the localist version of xenophobia and tourismophobia – Tzanelli, 2018, Chapter 5). Even cinematic artists enact pilgrimages in their work, so to exclude Phillips and Phoenix from the study would be wrong. Barber’s (2003) celebrated thesis that we have been witnessing the phenomenological structuration of the globe into two opposing camps – that of Jihadist clan-driven terrorism and of McWorld infotainment consumerism – is a good starting point. The politics of mainstream blockbuster filmmaking returns us to Lazzarato’s (2011, p.47) observation that art-workers are often treated by the industry as a ‘machine of competences’ that can be implemented in every social sphere, thus enabling the reproduction of what Foucault (2010, p.225) termed ‘capital ability’. In these neoliberal landscapes, artists have to constantly showcase the right skills and attitudes that will allow them to become

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‘change agents and system innovators’ – only, their innovations are not really supposed to challenge the system (Lingo and Tepper, 2013, p.348; Lazzarrato, 2013). Phoenix’s persistence to not join mainstream comics cinematic adaptations and Phillips’ decision to go against the tide of serialised production of heroic violence are signs of resistance to this Manichean scaffolding. However, pragmatic pressures suggest that unless you work with this system you cannot have a job – thus, the negotiations with the cultural industrial establishment place the two artists at a haphazard crossroads between structure and agency. The freedom the Joker project afforded allowed for the resolution of Barber’s tension at an imaginary/creative level: both Phillips and Phoenix got their way in the creation of a critical take on mediating fictional anti-heroism as a symptom of a contemporary social crisis; but both of them remained part of a star system that represents the affluent Western classes. Acting involves what Bissell (2014, pp.485–487) calls a ‘creative synthesis of habit’. I repurpose Bissell’s observations: unlike Bourdieu’s (1990, p.73) suggestion that in everyday social contexts the body enacts and enlivens the past, professional acting imitates fictional pasts, often unfamiliar to the actor’s body. As a ‘composite’ artistic habit, which functions as a temporary prosthesis, acting a fictional realist character produces an alternative to the real set of relations. These relations constitute a relationship between the human body and a cultural and social world (Dewsbury, 2011). Artistic plasticity of fictional characters works with the idea that habit is more impersonal than Bourdieu would have argued, because the artist’s body always borrows and adapts elements from the fictional worlds from which the character comes. However, this borrowing is activated only when the professional artist manages to understand this world by observing the real environments from which the script develops. Similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) plastic assemblage, Phoenix’s acting of Arthur Fleck revives a past of violence (in the city of Gotham) which, although fictional, refers to the real memory archive of American neoliberal structuration (Manning quoted in Bissell, 2014, p.487). This composite habit sculptures the social at a molecular micro-level because it is the result of trained observation (by the professional actor) on how the fictional character would really be and act like, had he been a real subject. Phoenix put this neatly when he said that ‘everything that you come in contact with while you’re working becomes a part of the movie’ (Weintraub, 23 October 2019). To connect this to the discussion involving Phillips’ experimentation with psycho-social genres connected to the birth of the social margin in modernity, I note that reportedly, Phoenix faced particular challenges in his performance of Arthur Fleck. According to the actor, these challenges had to do with the character’s complete asynchrony with his social environments: as an individual with serious mental health problems, his realisation demanded a twin adaptation to the real contexts of American inequality

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and the otherworld of hallucination, dissociation and fantasy. Phoenix’s feelings towards Joker, he admitted, were rather complex: ‘I would bounce back between sympathy for him and then I would be repulsed by him’ (Weintraub, 23 October 2019). What most attracted Phoenix to the script was Fleck’s obscure motivations and uncharted emotional interiority, and what Phillips noted in a shared with Phoenix interview, as his intense narcissism: ‘he wants to kill himself but wants to do it in front of [others]…this idea that it should mean something’ (ibid.).

Source: AntMan3001 on Unsplash, 2020 (CC, no imposed copyright).

Image 2.1

The transformations of the protagonist: Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck and ‘Joker’

In some respects, the exterior habit of the character is historically entwined with various cultural manifestations of the joker/jester in modernity more clearly than his interior world. Production designer Mark Friedberg introduced Phillips to Hugh Sicotte, a concept illustrator who worked with Phillips on drawings of the character. These early depictions fed into the character’s looks, inspiring Makeup Department Head, Nicki Ledermann’s experimentations with Phoenix’s clownish look. Lederman is an award-winning makeup artist with a long credits CV for Sex and The City, The Greatest Showman, and The Devil Wears Prada, amongst other films. Her version of the Joker character traded ‘the dark, bloodshot, hollowed eyes and the prosthetic smile of past Jokers’ for ‘a look that felt more authentic for Phoenix’s real-life clown who exists in the real world where “humanity, close to its worst, leads this storyline, not superpowers”’ (Penrose, 30 October 2019). Small details, including a series of diamonds painted around Phoenix’s eyes, borrow from

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the characteristics of the classic Italian opera clown look, which is not supposed to be scary but to convey ‘some vulnerability, even some innocence’ (ibid.). Intriguingly, the character’s dressing also did not follow the formula set by previous movies. Instead, costume designer, Mark Bridges, decided that the Joker’s looks should reflect the 1980s fashion. As a result, Arthur Fleck ended up donning a maroon-red two-piece suit with shoulder pads, including polyester pants, an acrylic sweater looking inexpensive, a gold waistcoat, and a green collared shirt. A significant factor in the selection of distressed, low-quality clothing, was Fleck’s financial status ‘as he is living in a metropolitan area on the low rung, hand to mouth’ (Whitlock, 3 October 2020).The colour palette was influenced by two dissimilar events: Cesar Romero’s dressing of his outrageous Joker in green as an accenting colour and the style of Bernhard Goetz, a shooter of two criminals in 1984 New York, who was dubbed ‘Subway Vigilante’ (Snowden, 10 October 2020). Arthur’s more formal red suit in the film is a reference to The King of Comedy (1983), in which Rupert Pupkin (played by Robert De Niro) also appears in a red suit. As an equally unsuccessful and mentally unstable comedian, Pupkin stalks and kidnaps his favourite show host, Jerry Langford (played by Jerry Lewis) – a plot that provided inspiration to the makers and designers of the 2019 Joker (Dietsch, 8 May 2018). However, the attention to such detail also recalls the long tradition of portraiture and caricature, which reached its apotheosis in the pseudoscience of criminal physiognomy (Melosi, 2000), and the study of mask-like visages of Otto Dix’s archetypal carnival portraits in the Weimar years (Gale and Wan, 2018, pp.21–22). Though wedded to the American comics traditions, the Joker/Arthur’s circus appearance is a genealogical descendant of the American illusion of internationalism that we find in the European interwar movement of the New Objectivity. New Objectivity’s visual allusions to orientalist travels were designed for those who did not have the means to really travel. Publishing enterprises, such as Der Querschmitt by Alfred Flechtheim’s gallery, which featured such eclectic images of colourful oriental hybridity, also frequently featured known artists, such as Grosz, Klee and Schlichter (Gale and Wan, 2018, p.24). It can easily be argued that the nomadic nature of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century circus, with the marginalised identities of its ethnic travelling performers (ibid., p.30), finds a grim phenomenological update in Arthur Fleck’s social identity: now physically mobile only within the borders of the a single urban lifeworld, in which some modes of mobility, including his, are heavily policed (Cresswell, 2006, p.735), he confronts us with a transgressive psychogeographic landscape. This landscape is not that of old circus fairs, but contemporary America’s wastelands, in which entertainment can also involve putting your shoe on one’s head and mocking their white-pasted face (as yuppies do to Fleck).

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Clothing and makeup were matched with grotesque bodily movement, including dancing. To invent Fleck’s strange dance style, Phoenix drew on the performance of ‘The Old Soft Shoe’ by Wizard of Oz actor Ray Bolger. An early-career Broadway and vaudeville performer, Bolger played the Scarecrow in the iconic cinema classic, and was also an accomplished dancer. Bolger’s dance movements in the video communicated ‘this old arrogance’, according to Phoenix: ‘he does this of turning his chin up’ (Arnold, 1 October 2019). To portray Fleck’s unsettled mind Phoenix had to shed 52 pounds (24 kg) in preparation (de Souza, 2 October 2019) and to work hard on the character’s uncontrolled laugh, for which he watched videos of people suffering from pathological laughter (Stone, 14 August 2019). Phillips broke down laugh into three types: ‘The affliction laugh, the one of the guys laugh and the authentic joy laugh’, with Fleck belonging to the first category in which laughing ‘is almost painful, [a] part of him that’s trying to emerge’ (Tartaglione, 31 August 2019). The speed with which Phoenix lost so much weight left him with a disorder that made him easily fatigued and ‘obsessive about food and weight, causing him to withdraw from social events and interactions’ (Landsverk, 3 October 2019). These occurrences shed light on a less discussed aspect of the story, which does not emphasise welfare retrenchment but societal silence over the problems people with hidden disabilities face in their everyday life. That Arthur turns into the proverbial disfigured social body, which I discuss in the following chapter, is neither surprising nor unusual: his shadow subjectivity narrates the story of social disarticulation haunting late modernity (DeLanda, 2006). ‘Disarticulation’ is embedded in the film’s artistic forms, including the bodies of the actors. This includes the ways the music score was composed not to fit into the story but produce the story, and help its principal character develop in situ. Following Sergio Leone’s habit, Phillips asked Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir to write the score before shooting starts. She was specifically asked ‘to care about Arthur Fleck, the man who becomes the Joker’. As Guðnadóttir put it, Fleck is ‘actually just trying to be nice’ (Radio IQ, 3 October 2019). Using a cello to channel these emotions, she wrote a dark melancholy requiem for him. The esoteric feeling of her music is more reminiscent of the tragic genre, which in this case stands as an analogue to what Bakhtin saw in the ‘formal method’, with particular reference to sociology. This method is not the unique domain of aesthetic analysis but uses aesthetic tools to complete a diagnostic on social structures (Bernard-Donals, 1994, pp.13–14). Indeed, we cannot speak of ‘articulation’ without drawing on Bakhtin’s observation that aesthetic creations are more than the aggregate of the materials used by the artist. Using the work of the sculptor as a metaphor to discuss the formal method, Bakhtin claimed that materials have to be organ-

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ised by the artist with some intentionality so the ‘sculptural form’ created out of them is an aesthetically valid form of man and his body: It is in this direction that the intention of creation and contemplation proceeds, whereas the artist’s and the contemplator’s relationship to the marble as a determinate physical body has a secondary, derivative character, governed by some sort of primary relationship to the objective values – in the given case, to the value of corporeal man [sic.]. (Bakhtin, 1990, p.265)

Joker cinematographer Lawrence Sher clearly stated that the score ‘was such an instrumental part, not just to Joaquin’s performance, but to the camera operating, to the sort of energy in the room, and to make that scene really come alive’ (Radio IQ, 3 October 2019). A true actor-network approach overlays human agency in the production of this film’s artforms (Tzanelli, 2015, pp.30–32), with cameras emerging as actants in what Bakhtin (1990, p.260) saw in the ‘aesthetics of artistic and verbal creation’. It is worth adding that Guðnadóttir won an Emmy for the score she created for the HBO mini-series Chernobyl. The significance of this lies in the geo-topographical mode of her creation: she recorded in an actual decommissioned nuclear power plant, ‘effectively turning the plant into a musical instrument’ (Radio IQ, 3 October 2019). Her creative style recalls Tsing and Cresswell’s reflections on the poetics and politics of friction, in particular, how they connect to place and its cultural ecologies and materialities. The connection of friction to ecological dissonance recalls Guattari’s observation that activity in particular ecological contexts runs counter to the normal order of things, so that it produces new existential configurations (2014, p.30). The point at which Arthur says in the film ‘I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realise it’s a comedy’ paraphrases a Charlie Chaplin quote. Chaplin appears also in a viewing of Modern Times for the elite of Gotham City, whilst the city is shaken by riots. It is not coincidental that Chaplin’s persona makes such an appearance in the movie, given the actor’s association with one of the most turbulent periods of human history, dominated by economic depression and war. As explained in the introduction, we deal with palimpsests of violence that are communicated through an aspiring stand-up comedian – the best example of counter-repetition of the normal order. Arthur’s social immobility reflects his mental fixation on his abusive past, divesting his body/physis of vital resources for personal development, as these are so unequally distributed among the Gothamite social groups (on mobility and inequality, including disability see Cresswell, 2006, p.22; Frith, 2012, p.134; Sawchuk, 2014, pp.412–414). The fusion of ideas of paid comedy performance and serial killing symbolised in coulrophobia (the fear of

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clowns) becomes more pronounced in a scene where Fleck performs stand-up at ‘Pogo’s Comedy Club’ in Gotham. Pogo the Clown was the stage name of real-life professional clown and serial killer, John Wayne Gacy (Biography, 9 September 2019). Evidently, Arthur’s depiction is replete with historic references to real crime, so the more educated audiences can do more than admire Phoenix’s polished or ad hoc performances as a DC Comics villain. A progressive merging of Arthur Fleck’s mental disorientation with his on-stage joker/clown persona, which is addressed to adults and children at different gigs, turns him into a true bokeh: a foreground subjectivity that suffers from misrecognition (see introduction). It is very unclear for what his bokeh stands, before the moment Arthur begins to discuss his mental state with the healthcare worker that he sees regularly until cuts to social services put an end to their meetings. The consultant is keen for Arthur to continue to keep a diary of his mental state, which he has to bring with him to their meetings. The importance of Arthur’s damaged interiority as a sign of his times becomes evident in the many parallels drawn between his persona and that of Travis Bicle (played by Robert De Niro) in the Taxi Driver (1976), another psychogeographic account of alienation in urban contexts. In addition to his mental health notebook, Arthur has a notebook full of orthographic mistakes, in which he writes down his jokes. What the lens samples as orthographic disarticulation is significant: at some point, Arthur writes down ‘I hope my death makes more cents than my life’ – a pun on ‘sense’ that appeals to Arthur’s damaged sense-making functionality. In another entry, he writes ‘imagine that’s how you die, on the stret’, misspelling ‘street’. Dyslexia and mental illness form a continuum, strengthening a DeLandian reading of Arthur as the paradigmatic subject of disarticulated modernity – a point further strengthened by the fact that in his notebook he can spell ‘mental illness’ correctly. Likewise, the scribbles we see in Arthur’s medical diary are the invisible aspects of his composite body, which now begins to express what Phillips called ‘slow burn’ violence (Tartaglione, 31 August 2019). Phillips gave Phoenix a journal which acts as a prop in the film. ‘That was really helpful, but I wasn’t sure how to start… It became a really important part of discovery for me at that time,’ Phoenix said (Tartaglione, 31 August 2019). In fact, Arthur Fleck’s chilling line in the film ‘when I was a little boy I told people I was going to be a comedian, everyone laughed at me. Well, none is laughing now’ paraphrases British comedian and vaudeville performer, Bob Monkhouse’s: ‘people used to laugh at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they are not laughing now’. That Monkhouse had many handwritten books of jokes is reflected in Arthur’s propensity to carry his joke notebook with him. By not conforming to the ‘normal order’, Arthur Fleck is elevated to a symbol of many ecological dissonances, which are reflected both in his

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appearance, his fake makeup ‘social mask’ and his real painful laughter. It is as if we deal with manifestations of what Mills (1994, 1998) identified in white male Western historical partitions of social ontology that led to ideal abstractions of universal equality: the Cartesian cogito (‘I think, therefore I am’) was based on a suppos­edly universal human ability to think as a precondition of one’s subjective being, but never questioned the reality of some populations’ inability to control their own mental and physical existence (Mills, 1994, p.229, p.231). Arthur’s laughter incontinence that cannot hide behind a clownish mask, confirms this ontological crack between thought and action, which is most frequently recognised in the black subject. The rift between the inside and the outside is masterfully represented when, while waiting for his introduction to the show in the makeup room, a fully prepared clownfaced Artur writes on the mirror ‘Put on a Happy Face’.

Note: Arthur Fleck’s childhood dream was to become a renowned entertainer. As an unsuccessful adult stand-up comedian with mental health problems, he continues to hold on to this dream. Here he encourages himself to ‘put on a funny face’ just before the show. The image borrows from selfie techniques of close self-inspection (explored in Chapter 3). Source: Warner Bros/Photofest, 2020.

Image 2.2

Put on a funny face

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If we return to the character’s literally disjointed dancing, we can develop a stronger thesis on his invisible black ontology. Cresswell (2016) produces a cluster of vignettes on the embodied habitus of black men in the US across different historical eras. Among them, he accounts for a perceived by police authorities style of bodily movement that, though impossible to classify, enabled the justification of stop and search measures. Such ‘black moves’ included ‘“changing direction”, “walking in a certain way”, “[a]cting a little suspicious”, “making a movement that is not regular”, being “very fidgety”’ and so forth (Cresswell, 2016, p.16); excessive celebration, often in embodied forms (pp.17–18); the desire to escape slavery (‘drapetomania’ – p.18) and exaggerated dancing leading to a ‘profuse distribution of nervous matter to the stomach, liver and genital organs’ (p.19). This list of alleged social disarticulations, which are cast by the gaze of power as embodied ailments or grotesque habits, are also observable in Arthur Fleck’s public and private persona. Phillips’ cinematic Joker emerges as the aggregate of historical vignettes that channel narratives of violence into artistic forms. Under con­ditions of slavery and racist violence exerted first by colonial power and then recently by organised urban governance, the common ontological category of the ‘human’ that Enlightenment bequeathed us as the free, rational being with rights equal to those of others is revealed as a sham (Tzanelli, 2016, p.45). As a metaphor of black identity, Arthur’s physical and mental disarticulation connects to the tragic histories of embodied art that we associate with ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’. Played by two white actors (Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden) familiar with minstrel traditions in two consecutive shows (1943–1955, 1955–1960), Amos ‘n’ Andy was based on ‘coloured characters’ and set in the historic centre of Afro-American culture in New York City, Harlem. That shortly after the end of their second show, Gosden and Correll would lend their voices in a prime-time animated cartoon featuring anthropomorphic animals is neither coincidental, nor irrelevant to the story of fundamentalist hermeneutics. Having as inspiration the original Amos ‘n’ Andy gigs (Cox, 2002, p.224) and plotted around the voices and situations of the two blackface artists, this cartoon enterprise caged cultural blackness into a zoological museum for inspection and consumption. The belly-laugh atmospheres it generated for its audiences might have been more ambiguous in less racist epochs, but their spatio-temporal situatedness leaves little doubt for what they were. The bokeh produced out of the show’s virulent racist friction reminds us that having fun must also have its limits, if we are not to violate the vulnerable other’s rights.

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RESENTMENT AND JUSTICE AS ETERNAL RETURNS The original story of the ‘Joker’ as a comic’s cosmic villain is not as ambiguous in its social depth as Phillips and Silver’s crafting of Arthur Fleck. It is not coincidental that their Joker narrative is audio-visually framed with a retro design of the opening and closing credits. The film starts by displaying the 1970s Warner Bros logo to associate the movie with the dark and cynical character studies of that era, thus foretelling Arthur Fleck’s development into a villain. The closing credits borrow from silent comedy designs of ‘The End’ announcement on a title card, and appear when a laughing Arthur, now held in a high-risk mental health ward, has just murdered a psychiatrist and is chased by orderlies across a long corridor (Joker: Trivia, 2020). The beginning and the ending introduce a critical, even sinister take on discourses of ‘retrotopia’, which, for Bauman (2017), announces the stylisation of memory for consumption. ‘This is not a joke’ the film warns us; ‘it is the drama of social rejection and abjection, an allegory of civilisation as a kind of madness from the perspective of those who do not fit into its grand designs’. Wedded to the human and social costs of World War II, the ‘Joker’s’ 1940s persona was very scary before his traditional, clown and circus-like début in the 1970s. It is worth mentioning that the circus backdrop played a significant role in the staging of New Objective art of the Weimar years, which wanted to study the principles of non-conformism and the violent crime of Lustmord or sex/lust murder (Gale and Wan, 2018, p.21); in fact, these feature prominently in the social subtext of Phillips and Silver’s Joker scenario. Marvel Comics and DC Comics re-creator of the 1970s ‘Joker’, Steve Englehart (born Indianapolis, 1947), provides a very useful genealogy of the character’s connection to the 1860s popular game euchre, which was lacking a fifth jack, so a second joker was printed to rectify this absence of agency. With unambiguously hybrid Euro-African and Australasian origins, and with Canada claiming it as its own national heritage (Parlett, 1991, p.190), this trick-tacking game was based on particular skills: memory and tactics (Parlett, 1992, p.104). However, the ‘Joker Deck’ is specifically American and was introduced around 1860, with a joker card acting as a ‘trump’ or authoritative card with special powers. Englehart (2015, p.xii) describes the joker card as standing ‘outside the common reality’, with ‘no fixed meaning’ and a ‘loose grasp of identity in its genes’ – qualities he believes DC Comics creator of Batman, Bill Finger (Denver, Colorado, 1914 – Manhattan, New York, 1974,) and comics artist Jerry Robinson (Trenton, New Jersey, 1922 – Staten Island, New York, 2011), streamlined into the creation of the villainous character. Under the support of writer Rob Kane (New York, 1915 – Los Angeles, California, 1998), the artists

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produced a whole universe of part-supernatural, part-realist stories centring on the archetypal battle between good and evil. The Joker’s birth as a chaotic force or ruler of madness seems to stand at the opposing end from his genesis in a game of memory and tactics. Nothing could be more wrong: the idea of irrational rebellion actually helps world centres and their disparate national networks to structure memory. In the domain of mobile technologies Mondada (2011) stresses that professional practices of assembling geographies out of what Lazzarato (2013) described as human machines of competence with various mobility affordances, leads to productions of space. Assumptions that when we encounter heritage objects and narratives, we deal with fixed and stable locations are thrown into dispute. The assumption that they belong to an ‘objective, pre-existing world’ is challenged by the fact that they are used in ongoing negotiations of ‘reality disjunctures’ (Pollner, 1987). In reality, assembling a shared geography via narratological fragments that professionals collect from different parts of the world produces coherent hyperobjects: narrative-based objects that are objectified through practices of assembling. One of the objectives of this process is to conceal these objects’ (e.g. landscapes, artefacts and even culturally specific narratives) disparate origins and the activity of assemblage itself, so that they are sold as a single ‘package’ to consumers. In an earlier phase of modernity, Habermas (1989c) discussed such practices as a way of dealing with the past (Aufarbeitung): remembering and forgetting organised by national systems, which mobilise lifeworlds as source materials in their production of massive memory archives spanning several generations. Today, such games are managed by transnational networks (see also Bærenholdt, 2013), which nominate what counts as a valid form of heritage to be copyrighted and distributed by the state and its satellite markets. The Joker super-villain was born at this particular hypermodern juncture of systemic organisation of memory by world markets, which delegated the task of assemblage to professional machines, such as those of DC Comics. The process had as its end product a hyperobject: a de-territorialised Joker, who both concentrated disparate local memory archives to a single narrative and erased these narratives’ specificity. Nevertheless, the result of this marketable suppression and modification was the resurgence of local memory and the amplification of protest as forms of performative travel to one’s cultural interior (the pilgrimage of the diagram I provided in the introduction) – hence, more cosmopolitan friction. Such friction begins with repertoires of protest addressed to the world, so that it cosmopolitanises the protesters’ particular demands, but quite often, its core themes and petitions borrow from the ethos of the ‘myth of the outside and the inside’ (Bachelard [1958] 1994, p.212). Let me contextualise these observations. As a carnival hero of the Bakhtinian tradition (Brooker, 2012), but also an ‘artist’ (Coogan, 2006, p.78), an

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‘inverted superhero’ (ibid., pp.72–74), a ‘blackface’ in Jack Nicholson’s 1989 rendition of the character, a Jungian archetypal ‘shadow’ for psychoanalytical philosophy, and later on, again, a ‘mastermind with a plan’ for comics writers and screenwriters (e.g. The Dark Knight’s ‘Joker’ – Weiner and Peaslee, 2015, p.xv), the ‘Joker’ stands for the shifting border of human perception. The focus of such perception seems to be the role of aesthetic appreciation in performative contexts, as the Joker considers his crimes a work of art that merits an appreciative audience (Coogan, 2006, p.78). His narcissistic male ego is validated only when his main target, Batman, recognises his crimes as truly effective spectacles. We could consider him as the scariest magical realist character ever: the archetypal schizoid character of Puer Eternus. This is the childish self-deified subject that desires attention, and, if he does not receive it, he destroys those withholding it from him. The closer we get to Phillips’ version of the Joker, the more the character becomes associated with the troubled postcolonial magical realist subjects that we find in Salman Rushdie’s works. The transformation is recorded in the time span of the Joker literary and film genres: first, he features in cinematic adaptations as a perversion of Rushdie’s Saleem, his Bildungsroman hero in Midnight’s Children, whose journey through life is designed as an encounter with the collective past of his culture (Merivale, 1995, pp.332–333). Later, in The Dark Knight and the Joker, he becomes an extension of The Satanic Verses’ ‘native’, who dreams of assuming the master’s power so that he transforms into a sovereign subject, but becomes instead the ‘dark gangster-shadow’ of terrorism (Walker, 1995, p.357). We could associate the latter version with critical readings (e.g. Elliott, 2002) of Deleuze and Guattari’s ([1977] 2004) analysis of desire as postmodernity’s driving social force; however, I reserve this for the following chapter. That the Joker can be situated in the postcolonial magical realist tradition is an argument meriting further elaboration – not least because it has never been suggested before. As a thesis, it goes against Phillips’ explicit statement that he wanted to create a tormented realist character that breaks away from the traditional Jungian archetypes of evil. Yet, especially postcolonial magical realism is not just a literary genre, but a counterpoint to a Western vision of modernity ruled by a version of rationality imposed on native cultures. Slemon (1995, p.409) calls it an oxymoron, which suggests a binary opposition between the representational code of realism and fantasy: ‘a battle between two oppositional systems’ or worlds, ‘whose ground rules’ are so incompatible, that ‘neither one can fully come into being, and each remains suspended, locked in a continuous dialectic with the “other”’. Slemon assumes that the battle involves two coherent worlds, instead of pluriverses. However, at the fictional level of the cinematic text, we can assume that the clownfaced Arthur Fleck is the forgotten native of Bronx urbanity’s cultural milieu, which is ruled by the invisible eye of power (Dürrschmidt, 1997). His dream to introduce happiness

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to other people’s lives informs the internal structure of his own reality, which clashes with the ways he is categorised by Wayne Enterprises business yuppies as ‘trash’ to have a laugh at. This shaping and re-shaping of urban reality casts a sinister shadow over microcosmic perceptions of what good life, beauty, happiness or solidarity can achieve (Schütz, 1967, p.336). In Arthur’s case, such perceptions are literally crushed under a polished yuppie shoe, while he is trying to earn some pennies as an adverting street clown. For the makers of this Joker, reality trumps all over magic, destroying the possibility to build cosmopolitan bridges across different lifeworlds and colonising them instead to the detriment of the colonisers’ wellbeing (and life). Thus, Arthur as the killing Joker is the product of a shadow colonisation of his lifeworld by Wayne Enterprises and media corporations, which build ‘ephemeral environments’ on its ashes (Harvey, 1993, p.16; King, 1990). Unable to respond to these forces and rebuild his life as a fully recognised human subject, he assumes the mantle and progressively also substance of a killing machine: a shadow image of the professional machine of competences working for corporate power. This is a perfect example of how hyperobjectivity, which suppresses memory, produces its own nemesis, by resurrecting memory and re-generating pilgrimage to one’s interior. With Arthur as their symbol, Gotham’s disenfranchised mobs enact a destructive form of travel aiming to re-arrange conceptions of the inside and the outside – otherwise put, to make the affluent recognise the tramp as modernity’s valuable civilised centre, rather than border. That Phillips and Phoenix find themselves in a moral limbo as cogs in hyperobjective apparatus can be deceptive: more than the local groups of progressively tourismified Bronx, they see the bitter joke in all these machinations. The corporate apparatus of capitalism has colonised practice, but not creativity. Fictional returns of the repressed in the guise of the jester and the joker haunted collective self-narrations, producing and reproducing the hermeneutic structures of particular utopias. In these utopias, the world does not simply turn upside down; when we try to reset its orders, we find ourselves transposed to alternative realities. In these realities, the spirit of resurgence is politicised but a-moralised in terms of distinguishing between righteousness and partiality (that’s the effect of Bachelard’s partition of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ on society).

3. The politics of resurgence: the joker as a factual-cinematic hero MANIPULATING REALITY No world civilisation accepted an accusation of failing to develop well and achieve global recognition lightly. However, to achieve this precious benchmark, no world civilisation avoided ‘rectifying’ its internal blemishes and mishaps at the expense of its pluriversal realities. To demonstrate the coherence of a single Weltsanschauung or worldview, world civilisations oil the conservative wheels of their modernity more, and speed up their journey to perfection. Mannheim ([1927] 1986) was quick to explain that these moments in world history are followed by the engineering of a project addressed to modern audiences in rationalist terms, so as to make sure that those who want to see social change do not upset established norms and values. Progressive alternatives are left to rust in the storeroom, next to the broken bodies of those populations who failed the test of harmonisation – what racial studies scholars call ‘acculturation’, gender studies and LGBT activists ‘normalisation’, and disability theorists ‘ableism’. You do not have to operate gas chambers to eliminate ‘difference’: social death, silence, locking in the storeroom of collective memory is enough to kill pluriversality. Kumar noted that any utopia, including that of civilisational perfection, feeds on the idea of humanity’s malleable nature, so, as a state, it is never perfect and unchallenged (Kumar 1991, p.29). Unfortunately, it is from these dark and silent storerooms of the progressive but rusty worldviews that we see some of the scariest Jokers emerging, to wreak havoc once again and question the foundations on which world societies were built. The storerooms have a horrific function: they turn progressive pluriversal voices into the most harmonised conservative chorus. Singing the same song in one voice against not the old oppressors but those who made it to the light of civilisation deals pluriversality its final blow. This is a less explored ‘deep play’ of development: a game the Joker warns you that you can win, only if you throw acid on imperfect faces, to make them uglier, nastier and more dangerous than ever. What I have been trying to explain so far is that this play is structured around some basic phenomenological principles or ways of seeing as a practice of 43

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being a social subject. These practices are processes, rather than finished ‘events’. For the Annals School theorists ‘events’ (évènements) are short-term conceptualisations of the way history moves, pieces of a much bigger puzzle of experience that the human subject cannot capture in their lifetime (Braudel, 1972, vols I–II; Burke, 2003). To speak of such objectivised processes entails to move between episodes, short-term trips into world-history, and epochs or long-term journeys (la longue durée). Only a cameraman/woman and a scriptwriter can effectively squeeze such long temporalities in a two-hour cinematic narrative. The formative effect of long-term processes on reality involves some element of engineering that impinges on the aesthetic coordinates of the human imagination (Tzanelli, 2016, Chapter 1). But this engineering is distorted by an invasion of material processes that reduce the modernisation of the world to economic development. This self-justification of capitalist development, which simply denies recognition of its involvement in the making of the joker in the mantle of working-class, ethnic and other social mobs, is involved in the cyclical historical reproduction of violence. In their attempt to transcend the Marxist view that human history was subjected to the laws of distribution and exchange, Deleuze and Guattari ([1977] 2004) posited desire as its driving force. The human subject desires to acquire, but also to be oppressed by its own desire, so that they enter society. Much like Deleuze and Guattari, I see in this contradiction the tragedy of human nature; unlike them, I find that not all humans control the suppression of their desires: some ‘categories’ are more suppressed and not even recognised as full human beings. The idea of self-suppression would sound ridiculous to a black working-class man, who spends his life being told that he is not worth happiness and prosperity in and by a white bourgeois society, or a woman, who wants to achieve professional recognition. This brings the idea of the human body as a desiring machine under sharp criticism, as Deleuze and Guattari appear to generalise their conclusions on the production and reproduction of authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies in society. Desiring one’s repression entails having lived in a society where freedom is a possibility, even in utopian ideological terms; turning the body into a desiring machine appeals to the discourses of ‘advanced’ technological societies. It also involves the assumption that a disembodied human mind is a machine that calculates and records ‘reality’ frame by frame (Bergson, 1941, 1946), thus reinstating Cartesian fictions, which also reproduce social frictions. Even if we assume that subjectivity exists in such a fragmented state only, we cannot assume that it is naturally subversive (Elliott, 2002, pp.157–158). Let us turn the tables of this proposition, adopting the perspective of those living at the bottom of global social and cultural hierarchies. For non-Western cultures, the human mind does not inhabit a deconstructed body (Elliott, 2002), on the contrary, it is part of an embodied way of being. In practice, this involves

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the complex reworking of inchoate affective reactions to external stimuli into coherent emotional responses to the ways the social and cultural world is or might be (Tzanelli, 2016, 2017, 2020a). In such contexts, ‘desire’ is articulated as both a good to attain and part of the principle of hope – a principle, which involves being recognised as a full human being. In all these processes, there is little self-repression, only a series of pragmatic steps one needs to take to achieve this recognition. However, if what we see and perceive is just what is, then how can we have so many perspectives? The answer was never fully provided by the proponents of the Cartesian cogito, but the theosophical artists of the land of the Rising Sun. There, centuries ago, it was observed how shadows and angles of illumination, haziness and blurring pre-form reality as a mode of sensory friction. Once again, we must employ bokeh’s atmospheric-cinematic technique to explore the phenomenological dimensions of boundary-crossing: every bokeh has its negative image or Jungian shadow, associated with the mythological archetype of the trickster. The trickster’s bokeh qualities themselves, including their ability to confuse and manipulate, are the atmospheric afterimage of processes we know as status reversal. This reversal can be connected to dystopias of social pollution and physical-come-moral decay or the production of horizons of hope for equality, autonomy and freedom. There are two ways in which this reversal can be studied: the first is empirical and involves ascertaining the context in which such manifestations of revolutionary habitus occur. On this, we can specifically focus on contemporary events of protest, which explicitly used the Joker/Fleck sign as the protesters’ embodied armoury. The release of the film almost coincided with a series of urban protests around the world, in which protesters donned the stark white face and creepy red grin of the Joker. As always, the lightning rod was insignificant, compared to the actual cause of protests, which involved high corruption government levels and civic rights suppression. In Chile, unrest erupted due to a hike in metro fares, whereas in Lebanon it involved an instantly withdrawn tax on WhatsApp calls, and in Hong Kong a proposed extradition bill (McKenzie, 24 October 2019). In Lebanon and Iraq, artists produced posters in which the Joker/Fleck featured prominently, or edited his face into images on social media. Iraqi Ahmed Shawqi’s designs show in two pictures the Joker in flames and escaping from bullets and gas bombs. In another photographic fusion, the Joker appears to dance among the protesters, ‘showing his indifference to the repression of Iraqi security forces’ (The Baghdad Post, 14 October 2019). Deepening inequalities between the ruling elite and common citizens were repeatedly quoted by protesters, who, in the words of Lebanese street artist Mohamed Kabbani revealed that ‘The Joker is us…Beirut is the new Gotham City’ (Kaur, 3 October 2019). Again, therefore, the Joker became a signifying shell that visualised an atmosphere of discontent. In Chile, where people were protesting because of rising living costs, low wages, a lack of

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Note: The Joker outfit and makeup transformed into a mobile sign for protests around the world. However, its historic resonance and roots in American fundamentalism are undisputed. Source: Munshots on Unsplash, 2020 (CC, no imposed copyright).

Image 3.1

Demonstrator in Joker costume from Black Lives Matter protests for George Floyd in the Minneapolis riots

healthcare and the country’s flawed pension system, Jokerfaced forms were also popular. ‘Joker is a misunderstood character, vulnerable and abandoned. Chileans, the ones who do not belong to the social privilege class – which are the majority of us – feel the same way,’ said a protester (Kaur, 3 October 2019). Finally and most significantly, in the ‘Black Lives Matter’ peaceful marches organised in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd, we find protesters carrying signs ‘Justice for Floyd’ in neon colours, dressed and made up as Arthur Fleck. In this case, Jokerfaced protesters do not just demonstrate

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anger or racist injustice as a form of solidarity, they form embodied continuities with those who are not even allowed to breathe. We could reduce such examples to manifestations of the body as a desiring machine, trying to acquire what is denied to it; or we could point to the more obvious embodied articulation of the principle of hope for a better society in these protests. The body in protest becomes a malleable performative tool that does not deconstruct, but re-assembles in non-Western somatosensory styles. Its movement in time and space aspires to make the fragments of modernity whole again, thus physically articulating hope. Opting for the second interpretation allows me to focus on the ways ‘molecular’ micro-movements of affect connect to the macro-politics of social movements (Jellis and Gerlach, 2017; Merriman, 2018). It has already been argued by others that this connection of feeling to acting on reality and thus ‘doing politics’ reduces everything to a nomadic metaphysics that disregards attachment to place (Cresswell, 2006, p.26; Merriman, 2012). Although this observation holds some validity and I will be returning to it in Chapter 4, it is worth stressing how its molecular and static nature can produce a fundamentalist metaphysics in nomadic metaphysic’s stead. In fact, my thesis on cosmopolitan friction rests on the reality of such polarisations, rather than the desired restitution of sedentary utopias, in which belonging somewhere is a value to be safeguarded, like any kind of heritage. In practice, rather than in a metaphysical context, sedentarism thrives on social categorisations, the bread and butter of real inequalities and exclusions this time done by the disenfranchised. We need a more flexible model of power distribution that considers the pragmatic context in which people opt for either mobility itinerary, or, we risk demonising those who select an option perceived of as ‘immoral’ or not ‘just’. This returns me to its social and cultural specificity, which is addressed in pragmatic terms in this chapter and Chapter 4, and to questions of how we can address theoretical elaborations on cosmopolitan friction from such specific occurrences. In the real Jokerfaced protests we can make two connections between molecular and molar movements: the first hinges on the Joker cinematic script, which is one on social inequality. Its molecular psychotic ‘madness’ is geographically transposed elsewhere to supplement the script of particular cultures of protest. We notice several molar mutations (full-scale social protests) that draw on a single molecular referent: Arthur Fleck’s disappointment and rage for being excluded. Neumann and Zierold (2010, p.105) speak of the worldmaking potential of media products, which can be used to create semantic knowledge or models of alternative worlds – a thesis also donned in the argument that ‘sign industries’ generate social and cultural meanings (Tzanelli, 2007). However, in social movements, the creative effect of media users on reality seldom affects the lack of dynamism involved in novel meaning-production. Where art endorses unlimited visual adaptation and

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transformation, social movements connect artistic form to their own habitats of meaning (Titley, 2003). The stabilisation of meaning is achieved by haltering movement, and thus producing secondary frictions. All in all, one may argue that the ‘event’ of the aforementioned protests and marches is singled out from the continuous flow of occurrences to qualify as something special for global observers (Nünning, 2010, p.197). This narratological ‘weighting’ or rating of relevance, importance, utility [and] values’ (Goodman, 1978, pp.10–11) assigned to an event leads me to the second point I wish to make. The second connection, which is less researched by both mobility and social movement scholars, engineers out of the cinematic character’s social immobility a simulation of the privileged mobility of the postmodern pilgrim. The protesters promote a metensomatosis or body-transfer of the cinematic anti-hero that we associate with advertising strategies used by film corporations, which often even let their customers do the advertising job for them (on which see Seaton, 2002 and analysis in this chapter). This means that they endorse the abstract idea of cinematic pilgrimage through their style of protest (on the unrecognised commercial dimensions of pilgrimage during protest see Graburn, 2004; Tzanelli, 2013). As a result, the icon of Arthur Fleck becomes a travelling culture in its own right that enters various cyber-corridors, in which real social upheavals support the utopian restitution of justice. The makers of such simulations may be critiquing social issues that have specific geolocative identity, but even they have turned into what Cresswell (2006) critiques as ‘metaphysical nomads’ on the screen (Sutherland, 2014). Also, peculiarly, abstract nomadism, which on digital interfaces may appear to be endorsing a ‘dehistoricised and undifferentiated mobile mass’ (Cresswell, 1997, p.377), is actually the opposite, even when it is co-opted by ‘hegemonic’ media networks (Sutherland, 2013, p.7). Indeed, depending on the network, we may see a surprising preservation of the original message of rebellion in what is subsequently printed in news forms. Therefore, it is important to also explore processes of such anti-hero abstraction as essential aspects of the historicisation of turbulent events and their real principal characters. In fact, the second way the Joker’s status reversal assumes the qualities of an atmospheric afterimage invites us to revert to such world abstractions. Much like the film’s Joker, the mythological trickster stands for an archetype of societal rule-breaking that violates the principles of social and natural ordering. Associated with theft and the mocking of authority, tricksters are often portrayed as male or animalistic characters that may upset human and divine orders with their scheming. The God Hermes, the ancient Greek Pantheon’s messenger, was such a trickster. His double role of message relaying (the word hermeneutics, which refers to both the act and the socio-philosophical methodology of interpretation), originates in the Greek word ἑρμηνεύω (hermēneuō: to translate, interpret), from ἑρμηνεύς

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(hermeneus: translator) (Klein, 2000, p.344). The technical term ἑρμηνεία (hermeneía: interpretation) appeared first in Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneías (Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας: On Interpretation c.360 bce), one of the oldest existing philosophical works to address the relationship between language and cognitive comprehension (logic) and a foundational text of European cultural heritage, probably saved and altered by Arab scholars before entering Western canonisation. The intervention of God Hermes in this trajectory – a formula repeated across world religions, with as diverse divine tricksters as gender-neutral Norse Loki or spider-like West African/Caribbean Anansi, or the conventional fool of Russian folklore – places the art of interpretation on a frontier between human and sacred affairs. The introduction of uncertainty in communicational encounters with the divine extends to the method of interpretation: it is a sort of ‘madness’ that is resolved only by skilled theoreticians, who can ‘determine the truth or falsity of the message’ (Grondin, 1994, p.21). Interpretation has been an essential skill in the art of divination, a future-prediction technique that dispels uncertainty. Resembling a sort of death of endless possibilities, interpretation allows for meaning to ‘close in’ on reality – which is why it is significant that, aside from being a divine messenger, the inventor of speech/ language and a trickster, Hermes was also transporting souls to the underworld upon death (Hoy, 1981). Across world civilisations, hermeneutics has been associated with their respective religions (Islamic, Talmudic, Mesopotamian, Buddhist, Vedic, etc.) and considered an essential skill in the mediation of the word of God(s) to humans. That hermeneutics would transform from an essential divinatory skill to one of the most celebratory theories of understanding is evident in the wealth of nineteenth- and twentieth-century styles and schools drawing on it. These range from Romantic and methodological (a theory of understanding (Verstehen) through the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher but also Max Weber) to epistemological (associated with the work of Wilhelm Dilthey), ontological-transcendental (known mainly though Martin Heidegger’s and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s writings) to phenomenological (Paul Ricœur), Marxist (Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch), and radical or deconstructive (Jacques Derrida). Of these schools and trends, Derrida’s refashioning of Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology comes the closest to the function and role of the archetypal trickster. Because deconstruction undoes the methodological scaffolding of Western logic to examine its ‘parts’ and then construct a new meaning (what would amount for Derrida to the articulation of ‘difference’ – Caputo, 1988, pp.20–26), it invites humans to release themselves from the shackles of ‘logic’ – a point also made in a different way by Nietzsche. It is not coincidental that in the Axial Age’s early moments, the interpretation of reality would be the job of those spiritual performers, who articulated the realities of what was to come: the Age of Empire (Szakolczai, 2004). Or that

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such narratives were symptoms of a deep trauma produced by this liminal moment between the Axial and the imperial productions of reality (Alexander, 2003; Giesen, 2004). In this conjunction, tricksters as creators of culture would feature next to the character of the charismatic hero, whose role was to restore order. The dynamics between these two characters, which reflect those of the relationship between the Joker and Batman, involved movement – in particular, a movement of turbulence, starting from small, almost imperceptible moments, but gradually ‘gaining momentum and developing into an irresistible storm’ (Szakolczai, 2004, pp.265–266). This type of movement, which is animated by imitation, and is found in chaos theory and the anthropologies of liminality, finds its sociological variation in the work of Gabriel Tarde (1903). The movement incorporates economic organisation without collapsing into its logic, until the advent of modernisation and the transformation of capitalism into a globally shared structure. The consolidation of such changes in modernity, accentuated and repurposed the role of the trickster as an economic negotiator that can change sides as they see fit. The modern ‘culture storm’ is managed by a close observation of the rules of economic entropy (Nieburg, 1973) by tricksters, who can one moment be proponents of the system and the next organisers of a revolution against it. That mythical tricksters lack in social grace and tend to not display reciprocity or gratitude also metaphorises the timeless significance of gift-giving as a state of mind, which we tend to describe in terms of benevolence or malevolence (Szakolczai, 2004, pp.267–268). The trickster of modernity shares with their ancient counterpart this propensity to negative reciprocity, which is not just an isolated action, but ‘an entire mode of being’ (ibid., p.268). This mode of being, which will be examined in Chapter 4 through the practice of hospitality, undercuts perceptions of relational malevolence and benevolence that define durable social relationships, such as those we find in families. As catalysts in a story, tricksters are the gifted manipulators of impressions. So, their job is to question the water-tight categories of the divine and the human. Todd Phillips’ Arthur Fleck displays this duality as he transforms from a crazy broken man into an archetype of social revolution: a Jungian clown set to deconstruct American modernity’s unjust political and social scaffolding, thus becoming a transcendental icon, a super-human with terrifying powers to motivate mobs. That Phillips wanted to create an anti-hero with whom audiences would find hard to associate while at the same time pitying him for his experience of general rejection, suggests a connection to deconstructive hermeneutics. However, such Nietzschean/Derridian deconstructive hermeneutics transcend the limitations of Jungian archetypal readings of the trickster/joker/jester, to pair off, as already suggested in Chapter 1, with phenomenologies of the African American experience. The African American experience of sub-human interpellation registered in mythological narratives

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of the rebellious African trickster. These travelled across millennia, all the way from African Yoruban cultures to the New World, to produce new figurations of the enslaved subject’s ethic of resilience (Gates, 1988, p.41; Gates, 2004, pp.988–989). The same myths dispersed across Latin American and South American territories that were colonised before turning into autonomous national cultures divided across ethno-racial lines, such the Cuban and the Brazilian (Gates, 2004, p.36, p.260; Tzanelli, 2017, p.22, p.112). In cultures such as the Indian, the twin experience of colonial subjection and internal oppression of social groups produced comparable differentiations of human characters (Mohanty, 1999, p.26). As much as ostracization caused immense suffering, it also generated cultures of hope entangled with resilience but also a figurative universe in which master–slave roles reversed. What later world politics saw in the Trotskian vision of revolution, prefigured in such domains of colonial suppression/ repression. Thus, Homi Bhabha’s (1994) celebrated rendition of the postcolonial Indian subject as the performative effect of ‘mimicry’, the twin and overlapping mimicking and parodying of the colonial subject’s ethos, paved the way for examinations of such ambivalent articulations of freedom within unfreedom. We can also point to the creative African American imaginaries of ‘dismantling the master’s home by using his tools’, to follow Audre Lorde’s (2004, p.859) proposition. This trope also tied to the mythological figures of the ‘Signifying Monkey’ and ‘Br’er Rabbit’ (Brother Rabbit): the slave community’s pithy response ‘to the oppressor’s failure to address them as human beings created in the image of God’ (Earl, 1993, p.131). For theorists of religion, the culture of European colonial domination has acted catalytically in figurative differentiations of the trickster/clown between indigenous and Euro-American religious systems. Although the rebellious and mischievous trickster is a constant in world civilisations, its religious function as an effervescent mediator of the sacred, with some religious systems holding that laughter is a precondition for the acknowledgement of the world’s pluriversality and the basis of creation/birth, is not. Effervescence is the phenomenal counterpart of enthusiasm, which denotes an ‘ability to relate’ to the world (Hui, 2014, pp.172–173) through a multiplicity of intersecting mobilities of affect and history. Euro-American traditions tend to deny such world-openness, erring on a more fundamental projection of the sacred as an absolute reality (Ballinger, 1991, pp.21–22). Contemporary American and many modern European cultures lack Zarathustra’s laughter, as their moral traditions tend to be more Manichean and their perceptions of reality and ideality more fixed. Pivotal in this differentiation has been the intrusion of the Christian imaginary of sacrifice, which would also permeate the philosophical foundations of European alterity – a trend that influenced even Derrida’s ethics of otherness and hospitality (Derrida, 2000). The biblical world has no jokers;

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its hermeneutics are grounded on the idea of salvation from a fixed notion of sin. But the modern worlds of the supposed developed hemisphere are rife with such ideological mannikins, whose strings are pushed by populist leaders. The storerooms of modernity are open, and what comes out of them is not welcome.

DARK TRAVEL, AMERICAN POPULISM AND COSMOPOLITAN F(R)ICTION When the art of governance incorporates the art of filmmaking, critical literature, such as comics, and digital design, we end up with the production of ‘populist monsters’. Wessels and Martinez (2015) generated very effective links between such incidents and the popular cultural tropes of DC Comics’ ‘Joker’. Focusing their analysis on the significatory potential of one of the most violent episodes in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Joker (Heath Ledger), they discuss how image assembles via new digital technologies critiques of policy discourse. In the film’s episode, the Joker cross-dresses as a nurse to harass the hospitalised Harvey Dent, by proclaiming a desire to upset the established order, and later detonates the hospital. About a year after the film’s release, this scene began to inform theatrical protests against President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms, which were organised by the American populist political movement known as the ‘Tea Party’. Ledger’s proclaimed realistic rendition of Batman’s archenemy involved casting him as an anti-capitalist terrorist – an icon invoking in American conservative populist discursive circuits ideas of pure, irrational evil. The celebrated and notorious ‘ObamaCare’ initiative was read in such circles as an introduction of a federal redistribution of wealth, a fear that inspired the making of a photograph of Obama painted in the Joker’s makeup. Wessels and Martinez draw on Manuel DeLanda’s (2006) theory of assemblage, according to which a whole emerges from disparate elements, to discuss the organisation of this iconological articulation. DeLanda’s thesis, which draws on the human body’s circulatory system to discuss the ways it functions as one unit, provides a realist explanation for the ways popular cultural narratives inform social action. This explanation is based on an analytical connection between virtual and social interfaces, which end up forming parts of the same ‘social body’. Wessels and Martinez (2015, pp.70–73) argue that, as an example of affective social articulation, the Obama/Joker image was part-inspired by popular cultural participation in two innovative creative initiatives by Warner Bros and 42 Entertainment: a website in which fans could get involved in Dent’s civic dream to fight disorder with his election, and another in which this process is vandalised by the Joker in a series of graffiti-like disfigurements of Dent and hacking-like activities of the campaign

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(Owczarski, 2015, pp.152–158). Within the space of a few weeks, the practice of face-vandalism had assumed its own popular cultural entertainment uses, with other interconnected websites facilitating a ‘real-scavenger hunt, which involved a digital travel for clues of the Joker’s vandalism around San Diego’, complete with the uploading of the fans’ own ‘clownfaced’ images (Wessels and Martinez, 2015, p.71). The assemblage of this populist discourse against the progressive reforms of the first ever black President of the United states was not just, as Wessels and Martinez would imply, an act of digitally expressed cultural citizenship (Miller, 2008). It was an attempt to literally and literarily efface an educated middle-class cosmopolitan identity that does not fit the ideal phenotype allegedly characterising the ‘honest American nation’. The blackface minstrelsy is a transatlantic cultural form that subjected black people to ‘sentimental stereotyping’, thus strengthening the circulation of ideas of empire and racially pure nationhood on the popular plane (Pickering, 2008; Toll, 1974). Its etymological association with the notion of ‘interlocution’ enhances the stereotype of the skilful middleman (one of the original medieval meanings of the ‘interlocutor’) that engages audiences in talk. In American English, interlocutors were ‘entertainer[s] in a minstrel show who serve[d] as master of ceremonies and as a foil for the end men’ (Collins Dictionary, 2020), a role extending the idea of hermeneutics to that of social organisation of a racist ritual, no less. The clownfaced/photo-shopped image-poster of Obama carrying the title ‘socialism’, which was created by a student (Firas Alkhateeb) and then also taken up by reactionary documentary filmmaker Alex Jones (see his documentary The Obama Deception, 2009), features an attempt to highjack the enslaved black folk’s figurative rituals of resisting their master’s domination: a sort of counter-mimicry. What is attacked in the Joker’s évènement involves an emblematic idea of mobility rooted in contemporary cultures of travel, cosmopolitan irony and civil eloquence (e.g. see also Szerszynski and Urry, 2006), for which Obama is known. We must also add that Obama’s extensive media networking, which played a pivotal role in his successful candidacy, marked this identity as one of a trickster (Kellner, 2011), set to deprive the American people of their riches (Carter, 2012). In this network of linguistic and historical figurations, Obama articulates Americanness by generating links between deception, mobility and cultural intermixing – all things hated by American populists. The populist response to Obama’s increasing popularity and his promise to restore the feared welfare – a sort of ‘inverted terrorism’ – involved an increase in the trafficking of his clownified image as that of the ‘wrong kind’ of world traveller: a civilised ‘policy Jihadie’. As an iconic assemblage of image-bytes, Obama’s doctored poster perverts the aesthetic principles of the selfie as a cosmetic narrative of the self. It would be wrong to consider it as a bokeh, because

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it promotes a form of realism of problematic internalist-fundamentalist qualities. As such, the poster is closer to what Žižek (2002) sees in the fantastic projection of the fear that the other/enemy can destroy ‘our way of life’. This is a collective symptom of pleasure in fantasising self-destruction, which is masked under the pretensions of terrorist invasion, a sort of Schadenfreude. Obama as the other/enemy, who comes bearing the gifts of the nursing policies of care (the feminine masquerade of Nolan’s Joker/nurse), the skin-soul of an African American and the abilities of a Western media-controlling magician is labelled in this poster a ‘grotesque’ concoction of socialist development. What’s worse, he enunciates political authority from those spaces (welfare, care) that the populist audiences are accustomed to see only vagabonds entering their sacred national territories. Still, Wessels and Martinez’s (2015, p.70) suggestion that the Joker’s viral nature in all kinds of on- and offline spaces that collide with each other, including ‘T-shirts, memes, websites, placards, signs, bump stickers, face paints and jpeg files’, is incomplete. Such networked iconic circulations are constitutive of any ‘sign industry’ trading in media assemblages that produce tourism (Tzanelli, 2007, Chapter 1), and in our case, given the explicit connection of Obama and the Joker to post-9/11 tropes of terrorism, specifically dark tourism (on 9/11 tourism see Sather-Wagstaff, 2011). Pilgrimage sites normally form axes mundi, irruptions of the sacred, where humans recapture cosmological harmony in a profane social chaos (Eliade, 1959). Likewise, such pleasurable fantasies of ‘terrorist violence’ allegedly inflicted on the American psyche, attempt to restore a sense of shared semi-sacred national sentiment, by turning ‘kitsch’ into a key symbol of national unity in the touristified market (Sturken, 2007, p.22). If we refer back to the diagram I provided in the introduction (Figure 1.1), these fantasies commence with travels to the centre (pilgrimage), but spiral into tourist practice via digital consumption – the three-dimensional movement of the diagram. Under certain conditions, there is indeed the danger that such dystopian visions of risk and social death will inform realities, especially where democratisation has taken a hit by the re-emergence of retrogressive cultures, jingoism and xenophobia, both in the West and the East. The safe consumption of terror may, under certain circumstances, contribute to such development – in Sturken’s (2011, p.437) words: ‘the mode of re-enactment [of risk/the traumatic event] is always vulnerable to the charge that it facilitates too easy a connection [to criticism]’. Significantly for the current analysis, Potts (2012, p.233) sees in the emergence of a Ground Zero souvenir and tourist industry the endorsement of a voyeuristic visitor economy, which now stands alongside rituals of mourning the loss of loved ones in the terrorist event (Sharpley and Stone, 2009a; Stone and Sharpley, 2008). The ensuing trivialisation of collective mourning in ‘9/11 teddy-bears’ and ‘Osama Bin-Shot’ T-shirts parallels the Nazi uses of kitsch to create a sense of shared national sentiment – a ‘key

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element in superficial symbols of national unity’ (Sturken, 2007, p.22). The Joker/Obama assemblage is such an afterimage of a traumatic évènement (9/11) that cultural industries, such as film and tourism, have appropriated and turned into pleasurable consumption. Whilst denying the pleasure the consumption of kitsch induces in its audiences, the circulation of the Joker/ Obama icon in digital populist networks obeys to the rules of fundamentalist iconoclasm that transcends symbolic death. Its consumers literally desire to destroy human diversity and act on their desire. Hence, I conclude that the Obama/Joker icon is emblematic of a particular type of working-class mentalité associated with sentimental attachment to kitsch cultures (Holliday and Potts, 2012) and pronounced hatred towards middle-class cosmopolitanism. I have noted elsewhere (Tzanelli, 2011, pp.135–136) that this phenomenon exemplifies a cosmopolitan clash – or, better a point of friction – that we can trace across world cultures. This friction has distinctive horizontal (social and economic status) and vertical (ideological flows) dimensions, observes the conservative-communitarian rules of nationalism (the nation is seen as a ‘family’) and casts mobile cosmopolitans as travelling traitors. In fact, the populist trope of medicalised violation, which was serendipitously anchored on Nolan’s ‘Jokerfaced nurse’ and notions of ‘care rape’ in other populist iconographies of President Obama, explicitly evokes racial othering (Wessels and Martinez, 2015, p.77). Subsequent ‘Tea Party’ populist reactions to the introduction of airport body scanners reiterate this ‘tourismophobia’ through a rejection of surveillance apparatuses, which should not inspect the modern white male working-class body (see conservative columnist Krauthammer’s ‘anthem of the modern man’ – Wessels and Martinez, 2015, p.78). As we will see in Chapter 4, this image of mobile risk, an ‘inverted travelling fundamentalism’ of sorts, would also haunt local responses to cinematic tourism in the Bronx inspired by Phillips’ Joker. That misogynistic and homophobic style of surveillance adopted in local examinations of popular cultural pilgrimages in the Bronx is also complicit in populist deep plays of development. For an artist, who loves writing and directing stories that make people laugh and think through humour, the realisation that ‘outrage [has become] a commodity’ for the far left (Shepherd, 26 September 2019) and the ‘system is broken’ because of the right’s anti-welfare policies (Gross, 7 February 2020) is one bad joke too many. In such reflections, Phillips echoes Elliott’s (2002) critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus as a thesis that romanticises the schizoid hero of postmodernity with little attention to advancing a differentiation between fascistic and liberal democratic institutions: both are regarded as repressive apparatuses (Elliott, 2002, pp.161–162). Phillips’ retreating into artistic examinations of the battle between good and evil, as well as the sovereign and the carnivalesque with his Joker creation, generated its

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own friction and thus its own bokeh. The sparkle it set leads us to the historical recesses of ambivalence: the ‘jester’s’ role as a critique of Western authority. This will take us back to modernity’s institution of pleasurable mobilities and their own battles with tropes of pedagogy, seriousness and socio-cultural regimes of worth.

WESTERN MODERNITY’S BORDER AND THE SOVEREIGN TRAVELLING SUBJECT The trickster character’s premodern antecedent was the jester, a medieval ‘truth-telling’ figure that appeared in nineteenth-century Romantic literature in as famous works as Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). The figure embodying the act of speaking truth to the ultimate authority (the Middle Age’s monarch) turned in the nineteenth century in the hands of a circus clown, William F. Wallett, who self-styled as ‘Queen’s Jester’, into a daring educated gentleman, who differed from its earlier counterpart, the ‘fool’. The Shakespearean rendition of the jester/fool in King Lear, who utters what the ruler does not want to hear, differed significantly from its Romantic counterpart. These fools were considered ‘naturals’ in this role, because ‘they were ill adapted to function in society’ (Carlyon, 2003, p.14). However, their supposed cunning intelligence and grotesque body image also functioned in metaphorical ways as articulations of a utopian counter-world challenging the established order of things – which is why, for some scholars, they were embodiments the formal genre of rhetoric (Koepping, 1985, p.194). Where the early jester would often be a physically or mentally impaired person, the gentlemanly jester of the Romantic era served to expose how ‘the regimentation of industrialization made society ill adapted itself’ (Carlyon, 2003, p.15). The shift from innate natural inclination to acculturation projecting the free self, facilitated the realist genre of critical to modernisation and rationalisation novel, an example of which is Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854). The juxtaposition of the circus-like mentality of the jester to regimented modernisation in the modern trickster’s professionalism was registered in Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’. Not only did the carnivalesque stretch the importance of performance in the subversion of decorum to its political extreme, it highlighted the functional change of jesters/clowns from rebels to popular cultural entertainers. The transposition of these archetypal characters from popular theatrical scenes (Wise, 1989) to real political stages, with as notable examples as those of the famous circus clown Dan Rice (1823–1900), whose humour helped in the election of the twelfth US President Zachary Taylor (1849–1850) (Carlyon, 2001, pp.77–79), signalled a change in the material circumstances of human agency. The new trickster’s job was not just to overturn reality to show that

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the world is open-ended, but perform throughout their lives a journey, which explored what Gardiner (2012, p.52) sees in ‘a commitment to an “ethics of personalism” and the goal of a revived, “dialogical humanism”’. Placing this material journey (the ‘praxis’) against the utopian potentiality of art and the festival (the ‘poesis’), can be considered the structural environment within which ‘Romantic irony’ was born as a movement that challenged modernity’s mechanical materialism, utilitarianism and empiricism. The carnivalesque character of this journey was not supposed to fall back on the rampant idealism and mysticism of early Romanticism or its predecessor’s (Enlightenment) abstract sublimation of reason (Bakhtin, 1984, p.285). Its cosmopolitan irony was not supposed to fall back on ideas of Gothic madness and the terror of the sublime, but produce an entirely different epistemology, in which folk laughter and a symbolic degradation and renewal of things ‘brought the world close to man [sic.], gave it bodily form, and established a link through the body and bodily life’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p.39). The cult of the solitary and alienated Romantic traveller had no place in this journey, which was supposed to be an inter-human adventure in the world, physically leading to familiarisation with alternative worldviews and stylistically affirming the unity of humans in difference. This worldmaking journey was also supposed to resurrect the primordial Devil, whose ‘gay figure’ asserted the ambivalence of the trickster and gave them the power to question moral boundaries. Instead, the Romantic Lucifer won, with his ‘terrifying melancholy’ and tragic slant, his eternal sarcasm and his sombre infernal laughter (Bakhtin, 1984, p.41). If we are to establish a clear genealogy of what Seaton (1996) has coined as ‘thanatourism’, we should look at these tensions between the desire to keep the vital flow of life in the collective performance of ambiguity and a ‘sealed off individual life’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p.199), whose mystical attraction to death reduces this complexity to incoherent imagery (Tzanelli, 2020a, Chapter 4). The contraction of life to a still image has guided a particular ironic style of a detachment from the easy flow of everyday life. Trapped between two equally problematic forms of ‘detachment’ – Kierkegaard’s (1989) nihilistic and Simmel’s (1919, 1971) impression-collecting – this sort of irony endangered the vital role of the embodied popular figure of the clown as a refraction of, and estrangement from monologic authoritarianism (Gardiner, 2012, p.57). It may be advisable to see in these novel travel styles not Urry’s bourgeois ‘Romantic style’ of the ideal tourist subject, but a style exemplifying the mass cultural dynamics of modernity, as these were diffused ‘beyond the classes or categories with which they were once primarily associated’ (Löwy and Sayre, 2001, p.87). If accepted, this argument can explain how we have arrived at this particularly disturbing phenomenon of heritage kitschification that appeals widely and globally across classes but is mobilised politically in working-class chauvinism launched in the name of the ‘honest people’. Gardiner (2012, p.60)

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wisely quotes Lefebvre (1995, p.300) admitting that the Romantic attitude was ‘a reaction against the social insecurity of the individual’, who had rejected the dominant ideology, and of the ‘vast but minority groups that had been marginalized and bullied as deviants’. However, he does not look at the development of this ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott, 1985) into a weapon that heightens societal conflict and now threatens to kill the good life. The post-Romantic turn to the archaic communitarian utopias into a corporate project is masked today as dark, heritage, film or slum tourism. Such alleged community development projects threaten to generate alternative realities, which are based on the imaginary of revenge, resentment and monologism, not pluriversalism and cosmopolitan worldmaking. While today such working-class chauvinism turns into real violence in the ‘First World’, the equally disenchanted middle classes aesthetically recuperate the missing passion and authenticity from their lives, by producing their own staged dramas. However, in the era of massified tourism mobilities, even this bourgeois aesthetic can be streamlined across different classes, which then produce their own ‘cheap’ versions of bourgeois aesthetics (Holliday and Potts, 2012, chapter 5). In Chapter 5 I discuss the intrusion and massification of a novel post-Romantic trend in tourism known in sociologies of leisure as ‘edgework’ (Lyng, 1990). This is a monetised, controlled adventure/risk performance, which features as a pale imitation of the old carnivalesque cultures of role-reversal and protest against authority. Thus, even ‘on the fringes of the bourgeoisie, life becomes theatrical, an ideal stage’ (Lefebvre, 1995, p.300), but such a theatricality cuts dangerously across a border separating irony from sarcasm. Once we cross into the sarcastic territory, we acquire a certitude to which we should never aspire – a certitude that the world is a closed domain, fully interpreted by us and the powers that be. Whoever disagrees or happens to not fit physically into its parameters, should be eliminated. Alternatively, if we enter the recesses of the ironic domain, we are swallowed by a narcissistic – ‘thanatoptic’ in Seaton’s (1996) terms (see also Stone, 2006, 2013) – tide, from which we will never re-emerge as critical subjects (also Gardiner, 2012, p.65). Phillips’ exasperation with both the criticism of comedy for offending sensibilities and the festivals of decency that stick to facile optimism earned him more enemies than friends. In interviews, he pointed that public interpretations of his attempt to interrogate the ‘mayhem and chaos’ that stems from bureaucratic disorganisation (‘the consequences of cutting social services for mental health’ – Gross, 7 February 2020) were seen as endorsements of violence. Disposing of his previous ironic style to explore what happens when optimism and humour mask pain and suffering only to be attacked for doing it the wrong way must have been a blow. If anything, it validated his Lefebvrian suspicion that regardless of the critics’ political positioning, the denial to see the world as it is at any moment in time, rather than ought to be through ultra-Romantic or

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the ultra-Marxist goggles, sustains an attraction towards solipsism (Lefebvre, 1995, p.85). Phoenix’s intimation that he had the hardest time learning to laugh in ways that were intended to instil a sober-intendedness in the audiences – to produce a character whose laughter ‘is subdued and somewhat bitter’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p.38) in its painful glory – indicates that the Joker’s senior artistic team had in mind a project more in line with the aspirations of revolutionary Romanticism that failed to deliver human liberation. For this reason, only, the development of the jester/joker merits some additional analysis as a mobile archetype displaying a velocity towards the future. To invoke the Obama/Joker controversy again, this archetype’s movement from medievalism to modernity is horizontal/planar, in that it is based on status and identity, much like the cosmopolitan friction from which it is generated. To also return to the introduction’s observations on friction, the archetype exposes the hidden workings of the spaces of flows and power (Cresswell and Martin, 2012), as it can prevent the movement of ‘the undesirables’ (Cresswell, 2014, p.114), thus leading to more friction, a new bokeh and new utopian possibilities for self-actualisation (Tsing, 2005, pp.38–60). Although it is true that revolutionary atmospheres and contexts are often dominated by anger, rage and fear – something manifested in the description of revolutionaries as ‘humourless’ (Spier, 1998, p.1358; Goodwin and Pfaff, 2001, p.286) – it is equally true that humour’s ambiguity has served as the weapon of the weak since the medieval times. Using the analytical framework of la histoire des mentalités, Hart (2007, pp.4–5) stresses the importance of humour in early social protest. Her reference to the jester’s presence in royal courts as immune from punishment despite his critical humour suggests an agency. This agency activates the inversion or at least manipulation of reality in festive popular cultural imaginaries (see also Bakhtin, 1984, pp.452–453; Douglas, 1968, p.372; Zijderveld, 1982, p.207, p.306). However, humour and laughter are always group-bound: to appreciate the funny side of a joke, you must belong to the group that makes it (Bergson, [1900] 2005), as laughter does not just generate a bond (Boskin cited in Hart, 2007, p.6), it asserts its communicative presence. In the 1960s social protests students often performed humorous acts in front of police as a form of non-violent protest that both disarms power and attracts much-needed media attention (Davis, 1993, p.311). Discussing such framing incidents goes beyond the present study’s thesis, as does framing itself as a process of resource mobilisation (e.g. Tilly, 1978). Of more interest is to stress that famous African American artists, such as jazz musician Louis Armstrong and comedian Dick Gregory, exploited the power of humour to communicate subversive messages in variegated communities (Hart, 2007, p.10). Of paramount importance for the study of the Joker controversies is the discussion of emotions in such contexts of shared cultural meaning and collective identity – in particular, how

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frustration or resentment can be masked as humour (Goodwin et al., 2000; Aminzande and McAdam, 2001). This shift I present both in the ambivalence of the film’s Bronx protests, in which the Arthur/Joker turned into a symbol of the mob’s anger against the affluent, and the humorous criticism of real Joker selfie pilgrimages in the Bronx in local/locative media shows. We deal with the circulation of humour as a symbol, an activity and a form of horizontal movement towards a future via collective emotional investment in boundary-making (Melucci, 1996, pp.80–82). We are in the domain of atmospheric production of identity, in which longer-lasting ‘moods’, such as those of mirth or amusement, feed into short-term explosive affects, such as anger (Ahmed, 2014). In the previous chapter I discussed in some detail the design of the Joker’s face in the film through interviews with Phillips, make up designers and Phoenix. The blackfaced Obama in this chapter asserts the persistence of this ritual across different social groups: there is something about excessive make up that sends a message somewhere to someone. Both examples are complicit in the horizontal movement of the ‘Joker’ as an idea that speaks to and through particular groups, as an embodied marker of identity. In other words, the Joker-image assembles a social (class) and bio-cultural (race, gender, disability) identity portmanteau that artists specifically streamline into their ‘completely new image of the world…a new reality of the world’s mortal flesh’ (Bakhtin, 1990, p.191). The film’s focus on a sexually and socially damaged character is in line with ancient depictions of the jester as a physically and mentally impaired character, but its fictional geolocation in the Bronx adds a racial element to the equation. Suddenly, Arthur is transformed into the abject migrant subject of this American borough, who cannot escape his ‘nature’. His slim chance to do so is afforded by pretending to be an embodied mythical someone else, who begins as the dream of a childhood birthday party, develops to a desire to become a media celebrity comedian and concludes in what the 1940s comics world had already cast as the opposite of justice (Batman). Evidently, then, if the film speaks the language of social critique beyond that of welfare retrenchment, it touches upon the position of black African American identity in the American nation. Unlike its British counterpart in racism directed against Asian ethic groups, Arthur’s social exclusion is based on embodiment and biology (Modood, 1997). In any case, the aforementioned semantic journey is an attempt on the part of the speaker (Arthur) to change the social dynamics in which he finds himself, while also inviting audiences to help – a venture ‘which amounts to a change of context’ (Weaver, 2010, p.31, emphasis mine). Alas, a change of context happens only through a bloody revolution of the weak, which destroys everything on its passage, including any utopian meaning. Nothing stands in its passage, including the playful

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ambivalence of humour as resistance to modernity’s homogenising tendency (Bauman, 1991; Weaver, 2007). Face art mediates on the meaning of the social and cultural border (Holquist, 1990, p.xix), and while doing so, produces a new mode of thinking about this world (Bakhtin, 1990, p.191). The face is the ‘soul of the body’, its most expressive surface and performance (Wittgenstein quoted in Jung, 1998, p.102). As Bakhtin himself suggests, echoing Meleau-Ponty’s (1970) existential phenomenology, ‘the body answers the world by authoring it’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p.175). This authorship of the composite body, which is at once biological, political and cultural in DeLanda’s (2006) philosophy of assemblage, resolves one of human existence’s fundamental dilemmas: should the human monad assert its egocentric tendencies, or should they perish in anonymity? The dilemma is resolved in the dialogical and intersubjective articulation of the collective through its multiple human monads, so that meaning is neither lost (anonymity), nor owned (egocentricity) (Jung, 1998, pp.78‒79). Problems arise when the ‘body social/cultural’ begins to behave like an ego, thinking in terms of a premium ownership on reality and beginning to legislate over its parameters and usage. This composite body is a Hegelian fiction that ‘wants to know itself’, but also wants to find within the confines of this self ‘the entirety of the external world; indeed its desire is to discover the domain of alterity as a reflection of itself, not merely to incorporate the world, but to externalize and enhance the borders of its very self’ (Butler, 1987, pp. ix‒x, emphasis in text). This process of self-reflecting, which I will explore under the analytical rubric of heautoscopy (speculating on the self – Chapter 4) and heteroscopy (speculating on the other – Chapter 5), stands at the heart of a semantic building of the world, as well as its material usage and sharing, in such banal leisurely activities as tourism and such take-for-granted reciprocal rituals as hospitality. Notably, the semantic reversal of roles in such artistic renditions of rebellion interrogates not just the shortcomings of power, but also those of rebellion. We may critique those enacting carnivalesque rituals for only succeeding in endorsing an aesthetic form of licentiousness (dérèglement) that never challenges the status quo (Eagleton, 1981), as well as that the very rupture of order can question the moral foundations of transgression. Rebellion is a form of cheating on the structure of reality that brings to the fore the two facets of the universal figure of anomaly and ambiguity: crooked thinking and a grotesquely extended body, turning both ‘into paradigmatic expressions of the experience and perception of absurdity in social arrangements and their governing values’ (Koepping, 1985, p.196). Tricksters-rebels violate all sorts of boundaries to realise their counter-worlds, so they signpost paradoxes of life, including the realisation that within social custom and the boundaries of language nothing can be neatly resolved, but when these boundaries are challenged, social cohesion collapses and someone may be hurt. In other words, it is unwise to forget

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that the politics of tolerance often entangle with those of restraint, so that we do not violate the freedom of others (Gardiner, 1992, p.37; White, undated). This also occupies a centrality in this study’s concerns about tourism deregulation and neoliberalisation (the McWorld) and its resurgent consequences in hospitality domains (Jihad). Therefore, I have little interest here in interrogating ‘terrorism’ as a political discourse connected to reactionary Muslim cultures. Instead, I consider how the poetics of otherness can deteriorate into a politics of sameness due to economic demands and ideological impositions. Barber’s (2003), Lapointe et al.’s (2018) and Eagleton’s (1981) theses should redirect attention to the dichotomisation of reality, and the demolition of the pluriversal principles of existence. This discourse could be easily re-narrated through the cosmic tale of Batman versus Joker, the concretisation of good versus evil, which sustains and endorses a particular type of moral immobility. This immobility originates in the comics genre’s violation of the basic principle on which the archaic and Romantic figures of the jester/ trickster operate as narrative characters, who dissolve boundaries and defy neat classifications (Douglas, (1966] 1993, p.208; Makarius, 1974). Regardless of whether we see in this the resurrection of ‘retrotopic’ imaginaries of the good, old times (Bauman, 2017), or the emergence of new forms of racism, misogyny and disablism (Sayyid, 2015; Beilharz, 2018; Davis, 2020), we deal with the return of fundaments (fundus) and their assembling into an ideology (‘ism’) of sameness (Tzanelli, 2015). This ideology places what seemed to represent the two moral poles, the Joker/chaos and the Batman/order, in more ambivalent positions. It is not coincidental that Phillips and Silver’s screenplay deviates from previous origin stories of the villain on the question of biological affiliation between the two characters. Arthur Fleck may be the illegitimate son of Thomas Wayne, and thus Bruce Wayne’s half-brother born out of a secret affair between Thomas and Arthur’s mother. This is a point never verified or sufficiently discredited in the movie. Carlyon (2003) concludes his reflections on the jester/trickster on an important note: that popular culture’s and academia’s embracing of the phenomenon of ‘speaking truth to power’ through the sentimental image of the clown does not always consider how satire may end up reinforcing power. ‘Cut loose from anthropologically-specific cultures,’ he says, ‘this symbol of subversion becomes [an] ahistorical, more polemical argument, than carefully analysed instance’ (Carlyon, 2003, p.17). Whilst the observation that joking about those whom audiences enjoy seeing mocked does not really subvert power is accurate in particular contexts, Carlyon does not expand on the survival of such subversion in modernity. His main focus is how comedy thrives on difference ‘and the powerless sport the most obvious differences, making the most obvious targets’ (ibid.). Also, ‘cutting loose from context’ is a comment focusing specifically on analytical fallacy. Beilharz (2018, p.102) focuses

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my exploration on the real problem with contemporary humour: it has been replaced with a shocking sarcasm that sustains political correctness and thus various forms of violence over the vulnerable. I will modify and reorient all these comments, by stressing that the survival of the jester in modernity, their transformation into professional satirists, speaks the language of the new knowledge economies dedicated to mass entertainment. This change has promoted an emotional-political differentiation in their role, ultimately sponsoring cultures of indifference, in which assuming the perspective of the weak is lost. That entertainment and satire do not necessarily support cosmopolitan solidarity should not come as a surprise, as this has never been their fixed function. Contrariwise, the trivialisation of their core function in cultures of the weak as a tool of symbolic reversal posits an ethico-political problem about cultural interpretation. While haltering the reversal of humour’s semantic effect, thus also blocking the social dynamics of the disenfranchised ‘speaker’ (Weaver, 2010, pp.31–32), it enhances those of the entertained audience. A real-life bokeh is produced by the friction generated in such contexts of semantic motion-blocking for one group only. This note will inform the analysis of Part II, which places the poetics of pleasure and wellbeing in the context of cinematic tourism.

PART II

4. Meta-realist plots: the road to selfdom

Note: An unremarkable staircase that was made famous by a film meme. The Highbridge neighbourhood does not look so empty any more due to constant selfie tourist mobilities. Source: Fang Yang on Unsplash 2020 (CC, no imposed copyright).

Image 4.1

The ‘Joker Stairs’

NEW PILGRIMAGES, NEW PROBLEMS A staircase in New York’s Bronx has turned into the latest international tourist meme destination (hash-tagged #jokerstairs). This flight of stairs, which is situated in the Highbridge neighbourhood and connects Shakespeare to Anderson Avenue, has been serving mostly as a local commuter zone, until Joaquin Phoenix, dressed as a clown, featured in the award-winning film Joker (2019) dancing on it. Phoenix’s acclaimed performance as Arthur Fleck was destined to turn this physical location into an Instagram sensation: today, not only do 65

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Joker fans visit the Bronx neighbourhood to take selfies while mimicking Arthur Fleck’s dance routines on the staircase, they proceed to upload their images on Instagram. In late 2019 Google Maps featured the staircase amongst ‘religious sites’ (Mahdawi, 30 October 2019) – a staggering development in the space of just a few months. In fact, this peculiar development originates in the ‘Dancing Joker’, a series of memes based on a promotional image for the film, in which the nominal character appears dancing on stairs. On 27 August 2019 a poster was released for the same film, in which the Joker performs the dancing moves that were destined to become ‘Instagrammable’. The theory of memes considers questions of materiality in the circulation and distribution of images and ideas predominantly in metaphorical ways. The metaphors on which it draws mobilise conceptions of bodily integrity: the body is penetrated from an outside force, which then uses it as a host to multiply messages. In the case of the Joker, the metaphor of multiplication by a tourist body complies with understandings of time in late capitalism: mobile communications and their platforms, such as Instagram, display the capacity ‘for ubiquitous and permanent connectivity rather than…potential mobility’ (Castells et al., 2007, p.248). As both a symbol and a reference system (Hartmann et al. 2019, p.4), temporality is subjected to mediated serendipitous movements. However, these movements are managed by the physical tourist body (Silverstone, 2002; Serelle, 2015), which, while standing on Highbridge’s stairs, begins to reproduce its spatial form across different virtual sites. The physicalisation of meme movement is crucial for this study, because it ties this serendipitous cinematic tourism mobilities to hospitality. Meme theory is based on a virological metaphor, which is compatible with conceptualisations of hospitality in tourism and migration studies (Seremetakis, 1994, 1996; Lazaridis and Wickens, 1999; Lazaridis and Koumandraki, 2001; Germann Molz and Gibson, 2007; Harper and Raman, 2008; Browning, 2013; Tzanelli, 2015, 2016, 2020b). This metaphorical thinking confuses biology with forms of social development, because it considers memes as duplicated cultural genes or brain operations that support imitation (Burman quoted in Valaskivi and Sumiala, 2014, p.233). The same reductionist principle has been applied to artmaking, whereby it is agreed that works of art produced by different artists are replicas, with one party demoted to a copyist and the other promoted as the innovator. Such notions of origins are always implicated in the politics of heritage and inheritance, which are fully racialised and gendered properties in global cultural politics, usually with women and non-white groups assuming the role of unimaginative imitators (e.g. Tzanelli, 2013, Chapter 1). Mirroring Part I’s introductory section, this section draws on a milestone in feminist analysis, concerning the rise in the study of increased mobility (Mihelj, 2002; Fay, 2016). This observation will lay the foundations

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of this Part’s problématique on imagination. Treating the ‘Instagrammable Joker’ meme as a viral event will set us on a journey into the politics of belonging and recognition in tourism and hospitality across cultures. Ironically, in the case of the Joker, a complex cultural-industrial machine with little interest in promoting tourism and plenty of it in copyrighting audio-visual products, ends up activating this virological distribution through its technologies of distribution and flow. The idea of controlling the flow of information so as to generate durable iconic products is a tall order in hypermobile environments, in which cultural meaning proliferates before it is successfully stabilised (Baudrillard, 1973, 1975, 1983). Although I clearly refer to Baudrillard’s political economy of the sign, I will place it in the New Left’s concerns regarding the ways structures of production and consumption focus on the regulation of risks, rather than the prioritisation of happiness. To examine this, I shift emphasis from Baudrillard to Bernard Miège’s (1987) celebrated thesis on les cultures de l’imaginaire (roughly translated as ‘culture industries’ but precisely rendered as ‘cultures of the imagination’). I endeavour to distinguish this portfolio from the one proffered by scholars such as Stijn Reijnders (2011), who prefers the term ‘places of the imagination’ to discuss popular cultural creativity. My analysis targets the ways unplanned and unintended mergers between the two processes, one cultural-industrial, the other popular-poetic, enhances the significatory (Tzanelli, 2007) or cognitive extensions (Boutang, 2012) of late capitalism at the expense of human happiness. For Miège (2011) les cultures de l’imaginaire are structural machines that sort labour tasks, so that different sectors deal with the nature of products, relations of production to their markets and underlying technologies of distribution and appropriation. The aim of such a sophisticated division of labour is to eliminate risk in the development of a ‘unique’ product (the industries’ editorial function/role) and to control how the product is sold to audiences (an attempt to regulate flow). If les cultures de l’imaginaire centre on structural control, ‘places of the imagination’ that freely emerge out of these industries’ carefully planned editorial and flow policies centre on the agential, if not at times serendipitous, nature of travel. Travel – both in the mind (digital and on the big screen) and on foot or by automobility complexes (cars, airplanes, boats, taxicabs and trains) – increases risks in the distribution and sustainability of products. Based on the Kantian free play of imagination with ideas, images and performances, travel may also draw on the memories imprinted on particular places, modify those and create a fine mayhem for industrial regulation. Reijnders’ take on ‘places of the imagination’ makes a similar connection with no reference to Kant through a modified use of Nora’s (1989) work on lieux de mémoire, physical sites that act as magnets for collective memories for the nation that controls them. However, he helpfully proceeds to relocate such sites in global

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plateaus of visual consumption, which inform tourism mobilities. Coleman and Eade (2018) already caution us that in thinking about ‘markets’ in relation to pilgrimage, we must adopt more sophisticated frameworks than those provided by economics. Markets produce their own moral guidelines ‘as an effect of cumulative interventions of a heterogenous assemblage, involving both human and non-human actors: market traders…state apparatuses, legislations, educational institutions…electronic trading and more’ (Osella and Rudnyckyi, 2017, p.9). The conflict between such arguments is not self-evident, so it needs clarification. Not only is imagination pivotal in mediation processes, when it enters settings of social interaction, such as those of tourism and hospitality, it becomes entwined with experience and memory. Where imagination has an element of appropriation, experience and memory partake in moral economic regimes, involving ontological (in)security (Hartmann et al., 2019, p.7). I argue that in travel and tourism mobilities there is always a confrontation between economies of the imagination and economies of surveillance and control, between agency and structures, as well as the systems these inhabit (Tzanelli, 2017). These days, both economies are heavily dependent on endless combinations of the eye of technology with the human eye and the eye of the mind. Unfortunately, these ‘eyes’ are often confused or used in the same analytical space without careful analysis of their cultural origins and agential specificity. The result is the production of a confusing social-scientific portfolio of ecologies of ‘bad ideas’, which is dubbed ‘critical’ after the Frankfurt School legacy’s development of critical theory, when it just supports negative criticism with no clear objectives. Another fallacy in this merger involves the identification of economies and ecologies of surveillance exclusively with cultural industrial apparatuses, ignoring that not only may localities mimic their protocols and ethics of exclusion, but promote reactionary insularities against anything and anyone regarded as a communal outsider. To avoid this trap while paying homage to the great Frankfurt School legacy’s thesis on human freedom, I borrow from the institution of the ‘academy of hope’ (Ateljevic et al., 2013) in tourism studies. This ‘academy’ accepts the reality of the institutionalisation of tourism across the world with all its shortfalls in terms of labour and social inequalities. However, it seeks ways to combat such inequalities between First and Third Worlds, as well as the Global North and South, by supplementing a ‘critical pedagogical portfolio’ with practical action. The ‘academy of hope’ advocates the interdisciplinary instillation of a pedagogical aesthetics of mobility in students and practitioners (Bianchi, 2009; Belhassen and Caton, 2011), which considers the pitfalls and possibilities of sustainability (Bramwell and Lane, 2014). Overall, my small contribution to the field of intersections between tourism, hospitality and the media draws on critical studies from communications, sociology, literary

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studies and cultural political economy. In line with this promise, the second part of the book suggests that the micro-event can feed into macro-activities, including policymaking (Deleuze, 1983).

IMAGE-MEMORY AND TOURISM: FROM ECONOMIES TO ECOLOGIES OF IMAGINATION Let us recall discussions on mediation and the construction of reality, which will forge a link to tourism mobilities: in media spheres, production has to follow the mechanical frame of time even when the end (or spontaneous outcome, as is the case with social media) is to create imaginary templates of temporality that defy it. Media production is wedded to a linear temporal progression in its distribution, if this is managed by an industry. However, when media users manage dissemination, distribution is structured around personal timetables, often also conforming to working and leisure times. Control over dissemination generates a feeling of immediacy, ‘true connection’ as social connectivity, which may also generate in turn a false sense of care (Silverstone, 2002, p.769; Scannell, 2019). The same haphazard pattern of perceived care informs the ways media-inspired tourism lead to contractions of time to ‘fictional events’ (in the movie) crucial for the generation of tourism and the structuring of hospitality. After Deleuze, one may argue that specific moments in an event end up summarising the entire event or situation, because the time that lapsed between its occurrence and the termination of the situation endowed its participants with better understanding of its core theme. Rhizomatic happenings produce event cartographies that thrive on accumulation of temporal experience, replete with disruptive and overlapping qualities (Deleuze, [1985] 2010; Bonta and Prontevi, 2012). Taking a selfie in dancing poses at the ‘Joker stairs’ is yet another popular cultural trivium exemplifying the ocular-digital mode of some new tourist mobilities, promising new simulacra of adventure to those preferring to frame their travel impressions through new and old media (Germann Molz, 2012, p.88). However, today this trivium both summarises the tourist identity of the physical spot in which this ritual is performed, and the ways its inhabitants are made to think about their home territory. Nevertheless, there is a massive difference between how locals may want to root their home in memory and how tourists may celebrate their transient encounter with it as an exciting sight (Germann Molz, 2018). The conundrums of imagination come to the fore once again, to help us to interrogate connections between place, memory and belonging in the era of cosmopolitan tourist irony. Mainstream theories of leisure and tourism seldom address the problems such trivia-come-tourism mobilities promote in the adjacent domain of hospitality: currently, residents of this Bronx neighbourhood are either throwing

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eggs at selfie aficionados to scare them away, or demand from them to spend their dollars in local business. Such unfortunate developments call for an injection of hope in our evaluation of not what tourists want to experience and how, but why locals do not want to be their hosts. Rather than clinically separating the affective potential unleashed by tourism mobilities in the social (Guattari’s (2014) understanding of ‘ecological’ emergence as a purely ethico-political event) from its responses in contexts hospitality (its affective immanence as this comes out of interactive processes), we should place both in a discursive cultural nexus (Tzanelli, 2018, Chapter 5). Evidently, although I am talking about a – collaborative, here and highly combative there – form of ‘worldmaking’ that produces worlds of tourism, I endeavour to extend Hollinshead’s (2009; Hollinshead and Suleman, 2018) original thesis to embrace designs of travel mobilities and landscapes that happen spontaneously and are mostly initiated from below. We speak of ‘mobilities design’ adhering to professional rules to improve physical and social access to places (e.g. Jensen, 2014), but ignore unplanned designs that, when left without proper attention, can seriously affect the lives of some social groups. Imagining and creating in a post-industrial world merits attention and attunement to people’s needs, not risk assessment rituals to avert consumption disasters (Braidotti, 2013; Ahmed, 2014). Tourists deserve the right to play and relax, so as to both expand their creativity and attend to their wellbeing. However, at the same time, imagining should not sanction partitions of the sensible (Rancière, 2011) to consign tourist hosts to labour without creative rights in hospitality (e.g. Tzanelli, 2020b, p.1265). When such partitions exceed the functional role of hosting (of course hosts are supposed to cater for the guests), we deal with subtle violations of human rights (similar to racialised and gendered constructions of plagiarism): Bronx is a borough with an identity conforming to the politics of race and class, so the Joker meme is a time bomb that can only explode on the tourist’s face. This makes me fit Reijnders’ (2011) ‘places of imagination’ in a revised Guattarian vocabulary that I reintroduce here as an ‘ecology of imagination’. Using one’s imaginative skills contributes to the making of a homely space (οίκος: oíkos: home), in which the spirit and the heart can take shelter in a conscious, meaningful and thus salient manner (λóγος: lógos: reason). Film tourism involves a series of events or chain reactions (e.g. watching the film, ‘travelling’ with it, checking the filmed locations on the web, booking holidays to them and visiting them – Tzanelli, 2007; Butler, 2011; Hudson et al., 2011; Kork, 2018) that stimulate ecologies of imagination. Integral to the ‘circuit of culture’ (du Gay, 1997), which involves interplays between media representations, identity formation or revision, production and consumption, as well as regulation in hospitality domains, ecologies of imagination go on to

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produce new ecologies of circulation, but also obstruction and immobility (Lee and LiPuma, 2002, p.192). Unfortunately, the Highbridge stairs’ ‘ecology of imagination’ is currently plagued by a particularly problematic entanglement between the selfie-tourist desire to mind-travel and have fun in Arthur’s shoes and the local need for peace that is ignored by the selfie tourists (Garoian, 2015, p.491). Such entanglements unleash bad affect, depriving all parties of their right to wellbeing. Where we put the finger of blame matters – above all, we need to be critical of our own well-meaning criticality along the way. I will try to adopt different viewpoints in this part of the study, ranging from the technocratic vision of the state machine to that of film art, and the mobile perspective of popcultural selfie aficionado to the vision of the Bronx resident grieving their lost peace. All these viewpoints have a story to tell about the complexity of the ecologies in tourism and hospitality. I contend that, if one pays proper attention to Hollinshead’s ‘worlds of tourism’ in this particular context, they need to resurrect the merological perspective of Nelson Goodman’s (1978) ‘ways of worldmaking’. Merology deals in immersive techniques of ‘focusing in’ on events, perspectives and arguments (Leteen, 2012), so as to treat them as what methodologists call ‘purposive sampling’. Unlike purposive sampling, the merological analysis considers the selected event/perspective as the/a whole (Putnam, 1996, p.20). Every time my inspection of an event shifts, readers will be transposed to a different world that exists in its own right, so my task is to figure out how these worlds communicate – or why they cannot communicate. There is no doubt that most of those perspectives can also assume gendered or racialised dimensions, as different forms of vision and different prioritisations in somatosensory apprehension align with different cosmic views and different experiences (Massey, 1994; Skeggs, 2004; Kaplan, 2006; Sheller, 2016). However, sticking to such categorisations can also endorse damaging essentialisations of epistemic repertoires – for example, forget that women can also be competent inspectors from afar or above. I stress again that representations of place through particular cinematic characters assume the form of distributed images and symbols, which in turn form material sites of circulation. In hospitality contexts such distributions also trigger or support the circulation of affective practices, which can also affect material conditions, where technologies, bodies, networks and physical objects maintain active roles (Ahmed, 2004, p.121). First we must accept that new digital media have attained a strong capacity to remediate content that we find in older digital media, such as comics, and that the difference between mass media and interpersonal communication is not clear (i.e. we are talking about new online communications with a strong interpersonal element – Thrift, 1997; McQuire, 2008; Castells, 2009; Grusin, 2009). Second, we must examine how spaces of emotional intensity in embodied hospitality emerge down the line

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and what sort of traces they retain from previous digital interactions (Thrift, 1997, p.288). This kind of inquiry examines ‘mobility affordances’ (Jensen, 2013, p.120) as a way of investigating the layering of ‘socio-technical systems, complex infrastructures, and mobile subjects in a research agenda focusing on how mobility is performed and how it is a multi-sensorial phenomenon’ (Jensen, 2016, p.2). Even more important is the examination of the ways old and new ideological-discursive formations of culture, society and identity begin to move across different channels in purposeful ways (Cresswell, 2006) – how, in other words, media worlds reconstitute the worlds in which people live and act. With this in mind, this part is organised as a mobile investigation into the ways representations, messages, and practices of tourism and hospitality associated with a cinematic text weave material worlds in a particular location of the New York City: the Bronx – or, more correctly, this ‘bit’ of the Bronx that featured in the Joker. My intention is not to treat the Bronx as a ‘city of bits’ (Mitchell, 1995), by examining how its famous staircase became a contiguous space that split the actual neighbourhood into axial conceptions of an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ formed by memory (Mitchell, 2003, p.17). However, unlike a geographer’s investigation into material traces of memory, the current study considers the translatability of practices associated with a community’s outside into contested cosmopolitan contact zones (Delanty, 2014). Hence, although the study’s layered design of mobilities informs research on frictional human encounters in places because of their transformation into abstracted spaces, it focuses on memory flows and stickiness as socialisation processes. Also, as much as it considers space and the social as mutually constitutive, it does endorse a Heideggerian thinking of both as abstract philosophical tools and ways of ‘being in the world’ (e.g. Malpas, 1999). In this respect, the ecologies of imagination that media assemblages bring to life need to be studied in urban context through actual social encounters that produce friction. Although the city offers us ‘an illusionary and deceptive vision of the past’, as many real histories are buried and covered (Gilloch, 1996, p.13), ‘new events or new encounters can help us to uncover the city’s true memories’ (Misztal, 2003, p.16). Thus, this part of the book sits at the intersection between forgetting and remembering the ways different events, social practices and identities are categorised in mediatised ways and how these mediations help us uncover memories in contextual ways. As Goodman (1996, p.157) has explained, when all these mediatised practices afford ‘truthmaking’ scenarios, in which we have no self-evident examples and ‘absolute axioms…to serve as touchstones in distinguishing right from among coherent versions’ other considerations must enter into our conclusions. Rightness is the outcome of a constellation

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of variables, including who believes what, who says what and how all these realise sociality in sustainable ways. Far from supporting absolute relativism in the next two chapters, I explain how social conditions inform how we feel our way through social worlds, and how they create hope for a better future.

5. Killing pleasure: heautoscopic performativity facing the neoliberal youlfie YOULFIE MOBILITIES Spending one’s time inspecting selfies taken in the middle of an overused staircase in an attempt to imitate a fictional deranged clown does not seem to support ‘serious’ social-scientific analysis. However, such a statement is ridden with a particular take on ‘relevance’, ‘importance’ or value’. A guide to the idiot’s methods challenges such elitist attitudes: what’s in a selfie, the subject’s soul, or their objectified appearance? Selfie studies do not feature in areas, such as that of the sociology of culture, which is populated with analyses of ‘great works of art’, mostly produced by white men and from a white man’s perspective (Nochlin, 1991; Pollock, 1999; Pollock, 2013), whereas in the field of art theory, they are restricted to analyses of self-portraiture (Iqani and Schroeder, 2016; Saltz, 26 January 2014). Notions of ‘popularity’ and ‘mass production’ take over the space of selfie analysis, thus shifting focus to critiques of industrial production and capitalist exploitation (Giroux, 2015). Mainstream analysis reduces selfie rituals to the study of narcissistic behaviour, whereas in media and tourism studies selfies may succumb to the beast of methodological positivism. Although the proliferation of social media mobilities in cultures of tourism has been the focus of extensive interdisciplinary analysis, most studies concentrate on ‘recovering’ alleged variables to predict selfie behaviour (Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier, 2009; Paris and Pietschnig, 2015). Often, in spite of these studies’ reference to sociological theory (e.g. Kozinets et al., 2017), their advocation of behaviourism replaces the social scientific focus on collective action with aggregates of contemporary individualism – the very method adopted by markets to expand their clientele. Of more critical social scientific relevance has been the focus on the role of selfie-taking in impression management and individual performance (Ellison et al., 2007; Lo and McKercher, 2015), as well as its connection to social networking (Ellison and Boyd, 2013) and the visual cultures of family tourism,

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which connect to technology’s contribution to tourism mobilities (Haldrup and Larsen, 2003, 2010; Larsen, 2005). Overall, these studies consider self-presentation as one’s way of participating in digital public cultures (Vivienne and Burgess, 2013) but also an effect of representation itself, which decentres the idea of ‘expressing’ one’s identity online (Palmer, 2010; Poletti and Rak, 2014). Despite their occasional employment of actor-network theory concepts and methods, many of these studies revise an all-too-familiar symbolic interactionist thesis: where in George Herbert Mead the I–You–Me relationship conditions the effects of the social self, in them the self ‘emerges’ as the I–You–Me–Digital Camera effect, when the selfie is uploaded on a social media site (Vivienne and Burgess, 2013, pp.285–286). Confusion is also introduced in these models, when scholars misread Judith Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ of the self to analyse tourist selfie cultures as an extension of Meadian interactionism or Goffmanesque self-presentation (e.g. Dinhopl and Gretzel, 2016; Kozinets et al., 2017), or when they reduce the tourist subject to a stop in a marketing-hermeneutic cycle (e.g. Stylianou-Lambert, 2012). Butler’s and Goffman’s theses on ontological emergence belong to different theoretical traditions; however, their difference does not inform such studies. The ontological effects of performativity draw upon, reproduce and are always-already distributed across different realms of unconscious becoming, when performance can be an act of conscious subjective self-invention. The same approaches refuse to address the problems inherent in the tourist gaze, which may desensitise one’s experience of the world. Ignoring Urry and Larsen’s (2011) clarification that gazing can acquire a dimension of play, strips selfie-taking of its genuine contribution to social connectivity. At the other end, over-critical studies on selfie cultures place gazing and harm in a continuum. Only these studies discussing selfie cultures in relation to family-bonding gesture towards appropriate uses of Butler’s work in the production of the social self (e.g. Haldrup and Larsen, 2003). In them, the body of the photographing subject is conditioned by social norms and ‘scripts’ (Butler, 1993) to encapsulate (and thus reproduce) idea(l)s of familial belonging. The hidden consanguine dimension in family photographing is significant, when it informs conservative communitarian immobilities – when, in other words, turning the camera on the family/community is equated with excluding from the picture the tourist guest with hostile intentionality. Like other scholars, including some oscillating between positivism and critical analysis (e.g. Kozinets et al., 2017), I abstain from conceptions of ‘selfie culture’ as symptomatic of narcissism (Lasch, 1991, pp.10–11; Wagner, 2015). Such epistemological desiderata may even unintentionally contribute to various forms of social discrimination. As I explain with some detail afforded by a historical-sociological approach to the selfie, these theses adopt a denigrat-

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ing attitude towards forms of play connected to childhood activities in Western countries to criticise adult forms of leisure, including tourism, often looked down upon as unserious travel pursuits (Huizinga [1949] 2016; McCabe, 2005); pleasure in caring for one’s body to female pursuits (Featherstone, 1991) that contribute nothing to a ‘decent’ public culture (Simmel, 1997c); and performative displays of the self to ‘Oriental cultures’ (Said, 1978). In addition to a feminist framework, my critical historical sociology of selfie mobilities has a decolonial basis, cautioning that often studies of everyday life reproduce a limited Bergsonian ‘mind’ (Alatas, 1972, 1974). This mind is ‘captivated’ by Western practices of problem-solving and selection that disregard the diversity of human experience and practice, casting old colonial frames of domination into neoliberal moulds. I will extend Alatas’ argument to discussions of modern technology, which is often maligned as the maiden of domination (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1999). Although I examine the rise of ‘narcissistic regimes’, I connect those primarily to selfie-making activities’ orchestrations by cinematic-tourist markets. Thus, my aim is not to critique the centrality of photography in tourism mobilities (Månsson, 2011), or dismiss the tourists’ contribution to productions of new visual representations of tourist destinations (Crouch and Luebbren, 2003; Robinson and Picard, 2009). Above all, I heed Sontag’s ([1966] 2013) observation that mundane and kitsch consumption, including that of the self, is enjoyed by most of us under agreeable circumstances that do not violate privacy. The suggestion that selfie-taking of the Joker type is a form of ‘touristic looking’ (Dinhopl and Gretzel, 2016, p.132) is a plausible thesis in tourist studies. However, considering selfie-taking as a transposition of Butlerian performativity in online spaces (ibid., p.131) is confusing. Dinhopl and Gretzel (2016) and Vivienne and Burgess (2013) argue that sharing and looking at selfies uploaded on social media creates personal relationships and forms of storytelling about the self. Borrowing from Urry’s ‘tourist gaze’ thesis (1990, 2002; Urry and Larsen, 2011), they use the concept of ‘performativity’ to refer to ‘knowing’, conscious performances and digital modifications of the self, rather than the unconscious and repetitive performances about which Butler (1993) spoke extensively in the context of gendered/sexual identity. Reference to an explicit performance of touring places and accumulating experiences is not identical to Butler’s painful and almost coercive at times embodied reproduction of a ‘social script’ on who one is supposed to be for others. If one faithfully followed Butler, they should consider the potential hermeneutic damage caused by selfie perfomativities on the social fabric. Such performativities are the effects of individual travellers’ interpellations by markets that see profit-making opportunities in selfie popular cultures; encourage consumers to repeat these rituals without imposing boundaries and rules on social conduct (the market ‘script’, to adapt Butler’s thesis); and thus, disregard the welfare

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of those permanently residing in the places that selfie tourists use as backdrops for their selfies. It is imperative to explain what constitutes a selfie that respects other people’s boundaries – and by this, I refer both to their physical and virtual integrity as subjects. Generally, as many scholars have noted, pictures, including self-portraits, produce narratives of subjectivity (Carbon, 2017; Schroeder, 2002). Some tried to define selfies, by stressing their twin function as objects (the photograph itself) and practice (selfie-taking) (Larsen and Sandbye, 2014, p.xxiii), articulating the desire to frame oneself and share this framing with an audience (Senft and Baym, 2015). Nevertheless, market interpellations in the age of ‘dataveillance’ are ubiquitous and pernicious: the I–Me–You–Camera subject is objectified in digital networks, often without the cyber-tourist’s knowledge (Beer, 2018). Thus, by analogy to host performativity, an accurate Butlerian perspective on the economic function of cyber-tourists or selfie tourists should consider them as non-human assemblages of a ‘you-’ or ‘me-as-spectacle’, produced during their exposure to a global Instagram network (Giroux, 2015). Such automated structuring of the self in representational systems of mobility does not refute individual ‘agency’ in terms of tourist performance and consumption (Edensor, 2000) but enmeshes both in the workings of capitalism. This is what Hollinshead (1999b) critiqued almost two decades ago, when he reflected on the powerful ‘legerdemain of tourism’ and the tourist professionals’ skill to make, remake and destroy social worlds (Hollinshead, 2009). Selfies are not just touristic lookings, they produce world versions from individual or micro-social perspective (e.g. small group selfies) (Tzanelli, 2017). Nietzsche’s (1974) suggestion that, in order to save ourselves from moralistic truth, we must adopt artistic techniques in our lives, was hinted at in one tourist selfie study (Kozinets et al., 2017), but not connected to Nietzschean studies or to Hollinshead’s opus on ‘worldmaking’. Unlike this study’s connection of tourism to institutional interpellation (e.g. museum productions of the gaze), Nietzsche’s (1974, p.107) conception of art as the ‘good will to appearance’ supports epistemically perspectival seeing as a way of knowing, which is compatible with one’s objectivity. For Nietzsche, perspectives are rooted in affects that allow one to adopt a practical and evaluative orientation in the ways they see the world. Thus, the selfie tourist’s worldmaking is constitutive of the maintenance of the stylised, ‘sovereign individual’, with an ability to control perspectives and discard the ones deemed harmful to their wellbeing (Nietzsche, 1966, p.12). For Sontag ([1966] 2013, p.270), among the dominant creative sensibilities available to contemporary subjects are those of high culture’s moralistic ruling, the aesthetic irony of ‘camp’, which refuses to be politically militant in uncompromising ways, and the ‘middle ground’ of

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avant-garde, which ‘gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion’. If we accept camp sensibility as such a world orientation, we arrive at a crossroads between complete indifference and anti-foundationalism. I do not wish to conflate this with Giroux’s division of selfie users between those retreating into a false sense of self-empowerment and those embracing modes of self-presentation as political. Giroux posits the latter as a technique of controlling one’s image ‘to expand the parameters of public dialogue, public issues and the opportunity for different political identities to be heard’ (Giroux, 2015, p.163), thus adopting a rigid stance against disinterested play in selfie performances. His activist perspective, which posits that selfie performers have to be persons of a particular race, with a disability or a sexual orientation deemed ‘disposable’ or ‘deviant’ to be worthy and legitimate users of the practice, produces a sort of proxy labelling. If, however, we consider Rorty’s ([1986] 2010) pragmatist critique of the suggestion that our practices adhere to a reality, then we are presented with a different option. Instead of considering the rejection of an unshakable reality as a nihilist cul-de-sac, we are presented with a new problématique to foreground selfie tourism mobilities without structural constrictions. Contra approaches to suffering calling for an unconditional respect for alterity, Rorty suggests that humans can avoid the impossible task of overcoming contingency and pain by transformation and appropriation, if they orient themselves towards the ability to recognise both (Rorty, 1989). Rorty’s corrective acknowledges the value of spectatorship and contemplation, where Giroux valorises action in its activist clothing – a pronounced Western attitude in analyses of the creativity of human action that legitimises one’s stance (Joas, [1996] 2005, p.167). Absolute activisms can only collapse into what Derrida called ‘fictional forms’ that trap humans in total categories (e.g. Arendt, 2001), missing a particularly important prerequisite for the achievement of the good life: human beings are essentially ‘stupid’ explorers of a vast whole that they can never comprehend with certainty (Tzanelli, 2020a, p.xix). Decisive action is based on a conflation of certainty with a certitude that one can claim only when all factual worlds have collapsed to one world version. Ironically, this call to adopt stupidity as an investigatory style comes from the hard sciences: microbiologist Martin Swartz, physicist Brian Cox and other known scientists recognise that research is always a leap into the unknown and call for the adoption of investigatory humility (Schwartz, 2008; Venkateswaran, 2015). The sentiment is echoed in experimental artist Judith Hopf’s work, which uses comedy and engagement with the ‘stupid’ act ‘as a rejoinder to the supposedly “wise” ideas of the ivory tower’ (Kerr, 13 February 2015). Certitude is a hard-earned prize involving treading the surface of various world-versions, to get to know their surroundings, their species and socialities.

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Let us try to examine our Bronx case again by adopting a Rortian stance. This stance will lead us to a number of observations, which I summarise in advance: the style defining selfie tourism in Highbridge is deprived of a foundational(ist) moral basis; it resorts to aesthetic performance, rather than performativity, in self-deprecating ways, so it is what we may call ‘camp-ironic’; and it acquires fundamentalist qualities, only when viewed from a particular polemical stronghold supporting the interests of some hosts and scholars (Tribe, 2001, 2007; Wilson et al., 2008). In favour of such polemic stances we must acknowledge that selfie tourists are mere conduits of a larger-than-them whole that they do not necessarily grasp. It is not just that with no legal or cultural-moral guidelines to behave, they are left to do what they like, ignoring local grievances; market ideologies allow for an ‘ethics of thoughtlessness’ (Hartouni, 2012) to subsume the aesthetics of good life in their activities. The herd ethos of commercialised popular cultural fandom calls for a return to Mead’s ruminations on unitary self-appraisal and the conditions under which communicative connection with our environment forms the precondition for healthy cognitive learning. As much as detachment can be defined as the prerogative of the premodern elite, its modern camp counterpart can also collapse into the self-same indifference for sympathetic engagement with the social and cultural environment. The promotion of an aesthetics of distance that resembles Bourdieusian ruminations on social distinction (Bourdieu, 1984, pp.6–7) is the effect of the ways capitalist expansion structures behaviours and environments, thus promoting the banalisation of anti-foundational nihilism as a particular form of performativity. Heretofore I communicate this uncritical banalisation through the term ‘youlfie’ and ‘youlfie tourism’, to denote the corrosion of self-integrity in contexts of socialisation that call for a meaningful and respectful communication with the hosts. To further contextualise what begins as a Rortian thesis on wellbeing, one may note that the youlfie tourist poetics of under-involvement adhere to the principles of comedy (Sontag [1966] 2013, pp.271–272), even though the film Joker is a thriller. ‘Comedy’ should not be confused with the particular genre but considered as a world orientation: a style of worldmaking or cosmopolitan vista promoting learning (Swain, 2009), which presupposes the presence of a silly, culturally uneducated subject. As a clueless enunciator, the youlfie tourist can contribute to reciprocal learning and the production of a culturally situated cosmopolitan viewpoint that can benefit hosts (Delanty, 2006, 2009b). There are, of course, some mishaps, explored in the following chapter in more detail. Lack of local knowledge can produce a toxic environment for others, when the youlfie tourist fails to retain a balanced perspectival approach to their surroundings: to include in the I–Me–You the you-ness of the host. It has already been aptly noted that we have moved to an age that selfie snapshots themselves have become ‘tourist sites’, thus transforming the tourist

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subject into a tourist attraction (Dinhopl and Gretzel, 2016, p.135). Thus, selfie tourism should be examined as part of the contemporary structuring of human sociality beyond psychologistic imperatives, because it belongs to the emergence of new mechanisms facilitating or obstructing individual autonomy (Mead, [1934] 1974). In light of these notes, I propose an alternative sociological definition of selfie tourism as a form of heautoscopic pilgrimage that may collapse into narcissism: a mocking ‘youlfism’ that accepts the other’s perspective only as a version of the self. This conditional proposition communicates with Ronald Barthes’ (1981, pp.12–13) suggestion that every photographic portrait produces the vision of the double for the subject, by coercing them to speculate on themselves (heautoscopy from [h]eaftόn [ἐαυτόν] or self, and skopō [σκοπῶ], or speculate, inspect). Barthes posits this disturbing effect as ‘one of ownership’: ‘is landscape itself only a kind of loan made by the owner of the terrain?’ he asks (ibid., p.13). Bronx or any other landscape serving as photographic background are loans to youlfies, who then have a lodge to reproduce themselves and split into two pieces. However, with the neoliberal youlfie, this fear of the double – here imitating a dancing Joker, there engaging in cinematic cosplay – is also the effect of market interpellations: from the moment they enter Instagram, they enter a market of impressions that appropriates their image. Barthes continues by observing how, with the photograph, we ‘enter into flat Death’ (ibid., p.92, emphasis in original). This symbolic death of the subject, who stands frozen in time but without the luxury to avoid their physical death in the future, propels youlfies to enter the labyrinth of a digital pilgrimage as a sort of meta-movement, a movement taking place in their mind (Coleman and Eade, 2004). However, these observations do not resolve the problem of perspective. We still do not understand what ‘selfie pilgrimage’ really involves; in which spatio-temporal coordinates it was born as an aesthetic sensibility, a value and a practice; what kind of ethico-practical tools one needs to examine these histories; or how the scholarly production of genealogical records is, in fact, yet just another perspective. To explore these questions, I provide two different genealogies of the selfie.

SELFIE GENEALOGY, 1: DIGITAL-TERRESTRIAL PILGRIMAGE AND DARK/SLUM TOURISM I start with the proposition that the Joker youlfie’s digital pilgrimage bears all the features of anti-foundational nihilism before turning into banal youlfism. In real life, like all humans, youlfies have to resign to the certainty of death at some unknown moment in the future. However, in a simulating world of play, characters such as Arthur-the-Joker introduce the all-essential Schadenfreude

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one experiences for skipping death, while watching others dying a horrible one (in a movie). First, we must inspect the effects of this performance: Margaret Archer (2003) exposes the irreducible sociality behind all individual acts, by stressing the origins of organised social conduct in endoscopic routines of the self. Her thesis, which rises above the holistic and organicist bases of behaviourism of which some selfie tourist studies suffer, prompts us to consider youlfie interactions in unregulated neoliberal contexts as distortions of Dionysian creativity (travel pleasure). I refer to the Dionysian spirit of which Nietzsche spoke as transcendence of one’s identity and subjective self-limitations (Nietzsche, 1988). This vitalistic application of art-to-life promotes ‘tourist akrasía’ (a: without + krátos: power or strength), a particular form of diminished judgement due not to weakness of will (e.g. see Dann, 2015, p.262), but a consciously taken decision to transcend the normative realm and thus break free of social regulations. It is not coincidental that philosophical investigations into tourism recognise akrasia as a prerequisite for individual eudaimonía or wellbeing (Fennell, 2006), or that critical analyses of tourism employ a Rortian framework of pragmatic choice to this end (Caton, 2012). Much like Seaton’s (2002, p.138) ‘metempsychotic travellers’, who pay homage to the life of a cultural hero or heroine by acting their experiences, dressing like them and visiting their fictional environs, Joker youlfies follow a scary script in their journey but do not experience existential insecurity, as the script is a ‘repetitive imitation of…role models’ from their own culture (ibid., p.138). The script of this ‘youlfie culture’ refers to that of the cinematic story that inspired tourism in filmed places. Thus, in this section, I refer to the ways a repeated ritual’s structural characteristics currently inform a Western globalised perspective of play. I stress again that the cinematic youlfie’s metempsychotic ability is the effect of a Goffmanesque imitation/performance of the cinematic hero (Joker) by tourists, rather than performativity in the Butlerian sense. It helps markets to consolidate the tourists’ ‘metensomatosis’, the constant migration of different souls into their body (Seaton, 2002, p.150), which acts as a conduit for experiences-as-products. Thereafter, one must explore the metempsychotic processes involved in the Joker youlfies, the ways the soul and experience, rather than the body of the hero, invade the youlfie’s subjectivity. This question is introduced in this chapter, but revisited in the next one from the host’s perspective. Arthur becomes an Instagram cult figure at a key moment in the film’s plot, when he has lost his moral compass altogether after murdering his colleague, Randall, for revenge. The staircase dance accentuates this disconnection of action from self-control and consequences, turning a broken man with whom we could sympathise, to a deranged criminal. Thus, one may argue that the emulation of this moment’s performance by cinematic tourist youlfies is impregnated with a variety of unsavoury connections to thanatourist and

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slum tourist insensitivity, frequently displayed in commercialised heritage settings. This returns me to the discussion introduced in the previous chapter on the clownfaced Obama’s function as a form of dark tourism. However, the very term needs further elaboration now. We can begin by adopting one of the oldest, vaguest, but most appropriate here definitions of dark tourism as ‘the presentation and consumption…of real and commodified death and disaster sites’ (Lennon and Foley, 2000, p.198). Exploited by tourist industries for their concentration of memories of suffering, such sites partake in a variety of practices of kitschification through the organisation of anodyne tours, during which visitors can even take selfies next to sites of pain (Stone, 2006, 2013; Sturken, 2007; Stone and Sharpley, 2008; Sharpley and Stone, 2009b; Potts, 2012; Hodgkinson, 2013; Korstanje, 2016, 2017; Korstanje and George, 2018). The organisation of the tourist experience by professional experts around an artificially coherent narrative of the tragic event is part of the staging of tourism as an educational pursuit (Marcuse, 2008; Martini and Buda, 2020), so any trivialisation of participation in relevant tours involving selfie-taking is deemed unacceptable. Recently, there has been widespread criticism of selfie-taking practices in Holocaust sites both by journalists (Drury, 21 March 2019; Parker, 22 March 2019) and scholars (Dubrofsky, 2018). Considered disrespectful to the suffered dead, especially when it involves the encapsulation of a joyful atmosphere in pictures, selfie-taking is discussed as a version of ‘selfism’, a form of group-experienced desensitisation, updating tourist akrasía into an unethical activity. If we adopt McCannell’s (Korstanje, 2018a, p.61) understanding of tourist identity, then selfism is informed by the narcissistic relation between self-talking and the self. I prefer the term ‘youlfism’ for its mocking implications. Youlfism becomes inextricably associated with notions of profanity (Mitschke, 2016), because it is deemed to violate the implicit and explicit rules of serious performance in sites of collective memory, such as Auschwitz. If we take on board Collins-Kreiner’s (2010) argument that even secular pilgrimages are often loaded with religious overtones and Buchmann et al.’s (2010) observation that the physical element in pilgrimage is constitutive of its experiential seriousness, then digital Joker youlfies are practically disqualified from the definition. However, I proceed to revise this thesis. For the moment, we should reserve the idea of authorised or ‘felicitous’ performance for further analysis in Chapter 4. Felicitous performance is an idea Bourdieu (1991, p.74) borrowed from Austinian linguistics to discuss the ways ‘illocutionary acts’ are legitimised (Austin, 1962, p.4) – in other words, enable the performances of youlfies in our case to gain or lose in credibility. This credibility involves the youlfies’ identities as visitors to death sites through the performances they adopt and share with others, on and offline.

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One may object to the likening of a popular cultural ritual to serious dark tourism, whereby we encounter the ‘casual or even voyeuristic visitors [standing] alongside those mourning the loss of a loved ones’ at sites of collective mourning, such a Ground Zero (Hodgkinson, 2013, p.22). It is also worth bearing in mind that youlfie rituals in the Bronx are a spontaneously emergent phenomenon, not organised by tourist experts. Nevertheless, the ritual’s situated metempsychotic rationale and content adhere to the cinematic gaze of disaster – the disaster of poverty and uncontrolled anger unleashed on society by the disenfranchised mobs for which Artur Fleck acts as the unlikely hero/ leader. As we saw in Part I, the movie’s text is informed by America’s real social context, so we should be mindful of its fictional hero’s elevation to martyrdom by lynching mobs of poor people. This means that, as ‘experiential souvenirs’, youlfie pictures frame the Bronx staircase in a style amenable to what Klein (2007) has termed ‘disaster capitalism’, a process involving cultural-industrial capitalisation on any kind of tragedy. In our case, Arthur stands for the larger-than-himself trauma of poverty and welfare retrenchment at the heart of a rich nation. Let us concede for the moment that it may be pertinent to associate youlfie rituals in the Bronx to variations of slum tourism, if it is posited as a form of ‘adventure tourism’ (Merrill, 2016; Rolfes et al., 2009). Involving visits to urban areas plagued by poverty, housing shortage and other social problems, such as crime and unemployment, slum tourism has developed into a new way to encounter the sublime in what is physically, socially and culturally demarcated as ‘ugly’ and ‘underdeveloped’ (Tzanelli, 2015, 2016). Slumming commenced its life in the big nineteenth-century European metropoles (London, Paris) as both a profitable enterprise for journalists and adventurous flânerie for middle-class men wishing to inspect the ways of the social underworld (Seaton, 2012). Seeing past the implication of slumming in middle-class welfare activism, which contributed to the emergence of a welfare state, helps us connect the habit to contemporary cultures of ‘edgework’ (Lyng, 1990). This involves the mobilisation of different types of voluntary risk-taking in the organisation of leisure and sport activities, which are deemed to be dangerous, such as freediving, skydiving and parkour (Yar and Tzanelli, 2019). More recently, scholars have criticised the masculinist emphasis on physicality in edgework studies, pushing for the development of analysis on such activities’ emotional and collaborative dimensions, while also expanding the repertoire of leisurely activities that should be included in such studies (Newmahr, 2011). Edgework affords an unmistakable link between cultures of ‘worry’ connected to travel and new cultures of secular pilgrimage, such as the ones inspired by movies (Korstanje, 2017, pp.43–44): where traditional edgeworkers prioritise physical risk-taking endeavours as strategies of enhancing mental and physical

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‘toughness’, or a sense of ‘self-realisation’, Joker youlfies discard even such self-development programs to simply play a criminal with impunity. Slumming and emotional risk are important then. Enabling visitors to immerse themselves in risk-free environments replete with the ‘inverted aesthetics’ of poverty (Robinson, 2012, p.xv) and in some cases also racial exclusion, slum tourism can be even more voyeuristic and exploitative than dark tourism, as it objectifies living cultures (Frenzel, 2012, 2016, 2017). There has been a heated debate over the rise of ‘professional’ and ‘altruistic slumming’ (Steinbrink, 2012, p.214) in fully commercialised visits to slums, as some scholars posit the question of tour guides’ and companies’ self-interest and profit-making that never benefits local economies (Carter, 2005; Freire Medeiros, 2009, 2012). The latter is an important point to which I return in the following chapter. Here, we must concentrate on the notion of the ‘inverted sublime’ introduced in tourism studies by Bell and Lyall (2002, p.72, pp.92–93). The inverted sublime helps us to describe how morbid atmospheres encoded in ideas of depth, (emotional) abyss or (moral) descent connect material natural planes (horizontal sublime) to industrial structures (vertical sublime). Otherwise put, the inverted sublime connects perceptions of slums as authentic enclaves to a McDisneyised world of spectacles (Taylor, 2000). Ironically, it is this authenticity that youlfie mobilities in the Bronx challenge by simulating it. In Joker selfies, we are past the Adornoesque premonitions that, in a disenchanted world, we deal with duplications of reality, placing the image on an equivalence with an external whole (Adorno, 1991; Adorno and Horkheimer, 1999, 2010). At least for disciples of first-generation critical theory, the dream-like quality of arcadian flânerie is based on the diminution of interpretation to objects of consumer pleasure (Benjamin, [1936] 1968; Buck-Morss, 1983). As the consumer is placed in the omnipotent position of the judge, the interpreter of reality and the performer of their tailor-made tour, consumerism is promoted from an economic ideology to a cultural worldview (Bauman, 2005). Such scathing critiques of consumerism neatly unpack the parameters of postmodern phantasmagorical work, now done by the tourists themselves (Joker youlfies as product interpreters), but say very little about the actual content of this performance/work. I want to shift attention to contents, not just as the performative instantiation of youlfie tourism in the Bronx, but also a novel version of unregulated ‘contents tourism’, a niche that in Japan preserves centuries of cultural custom and history. In this part of the chapter, I will limit this discussion to the ways Joker youlfies activate a process of ‘geolocative thanatoptics’ that exceeds the work (Benjamin’s demoted artistic ‘werk’) involved in their performance, so as to rewrite space and place on the world-wide-web. A process of popular cultural ‘worldmaking’ ensues, close to the formation of ‘contents’ that we encounter in contents tourism. Any

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popcultural renditions of pornopoverty tourism and social unrest concentrated in iterations and the itineraries of the movie’s anti-hero assume the quality of pilgrimage as an aesthetic practice. This aesthetic hue produces global reiterations of a domestic, Japanese rendition of media tourism, with serious consequences for the production of unregulated tourism in the Bronx. Japanese ‘contents tourism’ (kontentsu tsūrizumu) entertains a double definition: the first, which is supported by Japanese governments, stresses the ways a region or place is endowed with ‘narrative value’ (monogatarisei) or a theme (tēmasei) through industrially managed productions of atmospheres. Such productions involve the advertising of particular images and activities that are actively linked to such regions, thus ‘branding’ them (Yamamura, 2020, pp.1–3). The atmospheric dimension of this version prioritises the physical qualities of the region, as well as the ways cultural industries stage in them their storylines (Tzanelli, 2018, pp.47–48). The second version is linked to ‘anime pilgrimage’ in Japanese communities and has a stronger focus on the performances themselves, rather than the ways these are co-opted by tourism policymakers. In this second interpretation, one is concerned with the ways pilgrimages generate emotional bonds between people of similar interests ‘through the shared narrative world’ (Yamamura, 2020, p.1). A ‘contents tourism’ approach allows us to consider a tourist-led production of pilgrimage through rituals and practices on location (Seaton et al., 2017, p.265). Okamoto’s (quoted in Yamamura, 2020, p.4) definition of ‘contents’ as ‘information that has been produced and edited in some form and that brings enjoyment when it is consumed’ also applies to the practice of digital manipulation of selfies, as well as their uploading on Instagram under a specific hashtag. The imagological quality of such selfies ‘cuts across particular media forms to focus on the narratives: monogatarisei (narrative quality)’ (Beeton et al. 2013, p.146). The Joker case suggests that we enlarge these definitions of ‘contents’ so as to examine not ‘differential configurations of self and landscape’ (Wylie, 2005, p236), but the ways social media technologies generate a nexus between embodied and virtual pilgrimage, pointing to some form of ‘heritage’. The Joker’s slumming heritage invites youlfie pilgrims to walk through sites of misery and derangement to experience the sublimation of a collective social death, which is embodied in Arthur’s condition. Youlfie slumming enters the world of a sanitised, virtual-cinematic museum of caricature misery, from which even active learning has been removed. Employing Austin’s (1962) conclusion that language is not primarily a referential system for making true or false statements but a technology with which we practically do things, Laurier et al. (2016) examine how the practice of walking is central to reading the map app in ways reflexively tied to walking. Like map apps, Instagram postings invert the cartographic imaginary’s function, as they allow for the reinvention of locales in interface interactions on a moment-by-moment

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basis (ibid., p.118; Frith, 2012). Producing a remote co-presence with actual visitors of the photographed site and its subject(s), Joker youlfie snapshots emulate practices of walking (or dancing in this Bronx spot, like Arthur). This digital rendition of ‘edgework’ also renders images with a narrative quality of playing on the move (see also Richardson, 2013 on game playing). Above all, Instagram postings can narrow time and space (de Souza e Silva and Sutko, 2010, 2011), so as to ‘close in’ on a single subject’s experience and thus their monogatarisei (narrative quality). The youlfie’s digital narrative closure is reconfigured through the hashtag and text accompanying the image, which focus on a particular physical spot: the ‘black spot’ (Rojek, 1993) of dancing Arthur’s derangement. Laurier and Brown (2008) discuss this as part of a sense-making process, involving media manipulations that turn in our specific case simple locating of youlfie whereabouts to ‘dark/slum’ fan pilgrimage activity. Thus, the Joker’s ‘geolocative thanatoptics’ emerge on particular internet/digital platforms and virtual interfaces through embodied pilgrimages à la ‘contents tourism’ to physical sites (the Highbridge staircase). Projected across different media platforms and not just film (e.g. Beeton et al., 2013), the original site acquires an excess of meaning that leads to the proliferation of on-site tourism performances (Seaton et al., 2017, p.25, p.79; Seaton, 2019; Yamamura, 2015, 2019). Instead of viewing the two ‘sites’ as unrelated, it is better if we consider how they produce dynamic spatio-temporal continuities in terms of active perceptions of time–space – what Deleuze (1993) called a ‘fold’. The Joker mobilities’ creative possibilities are activated in a virtual expanse in magical realist ways that fold reality into fantasy in amplified ways. Otherwise put, the Joker’s geolocative thanatoptics capitalise on the scopic qualities of the death drive (Korstanje, 2017, pp.59–60), while also allowing for a human-driven automation of urban signage and advertising (Latour and Hermant, 2006). In youlfie pilgrimages automation may even overtake human reflexivity, producing spatial hybridity for the tourist. Nederveen Pieterse (2006a) sees two variants in hybridisation, a cultural one, which allows for fusions of cultural practice and ideas, and a structural one, which prioritises institutional sorting of old ontological and structural models into a new sort of mélangé. This adheres to speedy processes of cultural hybridisation as this unfolds in tourismified places without any articulate consideration as to its structural dynamics – what Hollinshead (1998, p.124) laments in unison with Lanfant (1995) and Bhabha (1994) as a sort of ‘unreflexive’ transmission of locality in spaces of consumption. At the same time, Hollinshead (1998, p.129) notes that tourism mobilities can also gesture towards the negotiation of spaces and temporality between different cultural groups, including, in our case, the polarised hosts and youlfie guests of the Bronx. On the part of the youlfie guest, it is precisely such spatio-temporal ambiguities that activate and sustain pilgrimage as an event out of regular local space and culture (Augé, 2008).

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Here we encounter another hurdle: regardless of whether we think of it as paying homage to a location, a fictional hero, a real literary figure or an author (on which see Butler, 1986; Busby and Klug, 2001), the commercialisation of literary tourism as pilgrimage continues to be treated in tourism scholarship and business as one of Western modernity’s inventions and machinations. The acknowledgement, for example, that literary and film pilgrims accrue or display some form of ‘cultural capital’ (Kim et al., 2007), or that the activity itself is based on a search for meaning endorsing ‘deeply-held values or contributing to self-identity’ (Hyde and Harman, 2011, p.1348), suggests that the promise of creating a third space, in which different cultures meet, never comes to fruition. As much as youlfie mobilities in the Bronx can contribute to the emergence of a third space, in which hybridised performances turn a functionally important area into a small shrine, their logic never seems to transcend the Western thoughtlessness of anarchic individualism (Marangudakis, 2019) or what Dann (1977) analyses as a form of ‘tourist anomie’. This trend merely replicates the values of a Western system of mobility that, while celebrating postmodern deconstructions of originality and reality (Wang, 1999; Steiner and Reisinger, 2006, p.299; Brown, 2016, pp.168–169) it forgets to apportion contributions of the other in the process. Hence, we must revise our approach to what selfie practices are again, by thinking about their diachronic depth. Contents tourism provides a cultural compass, and its carrier will be a transmodern Bauman on a trip induced by forbidden substances.

SELFIE GENEALOGY, 2: UNSHACKLING WESTERN CAPTIVES THROUGH ‘YOUNG, CUTE MINDS’ So far, in scholarly attempts to establish selfie genealogies we observed yet another unwarranted triumph of Western epistemologies of mobility. I contend that the triumph’s basic tenet – that self-portraiture stems from the ways European high art reinforces Western technological heritage – is falsifiable in Lakatos’ (1970, p.130) terms: it consciously ignores the essential contribution of Asian pragmatics to worldmaking routines that challenge conventional notions of tourism and travel. If we consider travel worldmaking as a cultural style built into a world (Nünning and Nünning, 2010, pp.7–8), we must ask what (geo)locating an invention that revolutionises its communication implies for knowledge production but also socially transformative praxis (Pritchard et al., 2011). Heretofore, I argue that considering the selfie as a Western invention disregards the practice’s rhizomatic nature – especially its spontaneous re-emergence in Asian popular cultural pilgrimages as products of la longue durée de voyage. Thinking of Japanese selfie mobilities as spectral phenomena exceeding the ocular field (Hollinshead and Kuon, 2013; Hollinshead and Suleman, 2018; Tzanelli, 2015, 2016, 2018) will eventually lead us to some

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reconfigurations not of what tourism is as a fixed fact, but how it is performed as a decolonial form of ontological becoming (Tzanelli, 2020a). The ‘decolonialisation’ to which I refer exceeds, but includes debates concerning the postcolonial condition as an extension of imperialist structures of thought (Nederveen Pieterse and Parekh, 1995). In this and the following chapter, we must acknowledge how colonisation continues to manifest itself in contemporary contexts in invisible ways that disempower people, who were never born subjected to a colonial machine (Lindsay, 2011, pp.23–24). Therefore, my reference to decolonisation also communicates with Ateljevic et al.’s (2009, p.549) note that critical tourism studies need more resolute approaches that deconstruct ‘dominant Eurocentric perspectives and thereby develop fresh sense/new sense conceptualisations of the world (as seen through tourism)’. Thus, my main concern is how creative action is trapped in a habitual cage built by modernity in such ways, that one cannot think of acting outside Western structural frameworks. Such frameworks lead to a ‘thickening’ of the cinematic tourist subject’s experience, rather than a sense of ordering the cultural spaces that they traverse; their treatment as ‘colonial’ texts, rather than lived places; and, finally, and despite the shrinking of this experience to a single spot, available for performative tourist experience (the youlfies’ staircase), their assumption of a godlike omniscient stance, which helps them to erase local presence altogether (Lindsay, 2011, pp.18–21, p.27; Germann Molz, 2018; Tzanelli, 2018, Chapter 5). I will argue that Japanese youth experimentations with photographic technology should be seen as the selfie’s master rhizome. Currently, Western technological genealogies of the selfie discuss American pioneer, Robert Cornelius’ production of a daguerreotype of himself as the first selfie ever (The Public Domain Review, undated). Today, this genealogical ‘datum’, which circulates on the web as a digital ‘black spot’ (Rojek, 1993) – a world made out of celluloid (Taunton, 2010), no less – is also materially marked (‘signposted’ – MacCannell, [1976] 1989) as a sort of global dark heritage: a copy of Cornelius’ ‘first ever selfie’ adorns his tombstone at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Library of Congress, undated), sealing its ‘Western invention’ as a global memento mori. There are two problems with the proposition that we treat this particular image as the origins of contemporary selfie cultures. First, it lets technological innovation subsume cultural practice – in other words, the notion of innovation/invention rests on technology (the daguerreotype), rather than social practices (a blend of bodily and spiritual mobility necessary for the enactment of selfie-taking). Thus, the Cartesian beast rears its ugly face once more, claiming that the head matters more than the body, instead of treating mind, body and heart as a unity. Even after correcting this misconception, we have to address a second objection: it is questionable whether the ‘event’ of Cornelius’

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‘selfie-taking’ can be accepted as a conscious attempt to produce a selfie to share with others – in all likelihood, it was the outcome of experimenting with new and highly unpredictable technological equipment. Although accident is part and parcel of invention, intentionality is important in definitions of selfie creativity. Indeed, intentionality is a point downplayed in selfie studies in popular culture and negatively emphasised in critiques of the practice in political economy. Clear intentionality to share with friends is observed for the first time in 1913, in the production of a picture-selfie by thirteen-year-old Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaeva, for the purpose of sending it to a friend. The picture was taken while Nikolaeva was looking at a mirror (Atchison, undated) – a neat example of heautoscopic creativity intended as a token of friendship. The Duchess used a Kodak Brownie (released in 1900). In the letter she sent to her friend she also communicated her excitement about this by confessing that her hands were shaking when she was taking the picture (Daily Mail Reporter, 26 November 2013). The genealogical link of selfie endeavours to youth activities is even more obvious in the 1990s Japanese kawaii or so-called ‘culture of cuteness’, which denotes an interest in ornamental productions of female selfies in photographic forms. Significantly, in the Japanese world of selfies, the Western division between spectator and objectified subject in the frame ceases to exist: ‘the self becomes not only a producer, but also the only and final message, which is generated against a real or digital mirror and sent back to one’s self’ (Pan, 2015, p.107). Equally important in this heautoscopic routine is the ritual’s material background: the big city. Cityscapes serve a functional role in the flâneuse’s journey into a beautified self, digitally manipulated and shared with friends. Equally important is that in other photos of the same period cityscapes featured as foregrounds only in unadorned images of locals and residents, who were treated by photographers as strangers or foreigners (ibid,. p.108). Contrariwise, the digital Japanese flâneuse is the principal heroine of the camera – but, as I explain below, she is a heroine that, unlike Bauman’s (1996a) pilgrim, seeks to push modernity’s discontents out of the frame, so that she does not become a disorientated tourist. Pushing modernity out of the frame in favour of timeless heautoscopy has a more politicised meaning than one may assume at first. The twentieth-century Japanese society structured its participation in Western modernity without removing indigenous adherence to patriarchal and authoritarian conduct of heritage (Dales and Bulbeck, 2013, p.160). The prescriptive formula of unquestionably respecting the elderly and the long-deceased ancestral spirits generated reactive mechanisms among the younger generations. Fighting for their own voice in the context of a lingering recession that commenced in the 1990s and challenged Japan’s ascent to the much-desired global civilisational top through combinations of economic development and westernisation

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also did not help. The burst economic bubble affected especially female professionals, who found it difficult to balance personal life and career under increased work pressures – a change that tied with the rise of the ‘second wave’ of Japanese feminism (Ehara, 2013, pp.168–169). A combination of unemployment and social pressure to conform to social etiquette also produced an unbearable situation for those just starting their adult life. Sociologist Shinji Miyadai suggested that youth communication patterns in this context presented a staggering fragmentation (Shimauchu-ka: nebulisation), with many small groups forming ‘isolated universes’ in hyper-consumerist styles (Miyadai cited in Sawai, 2013, p.206). Indeed, one may claim that unquestionable obeyance of generational hierarchy combined with prescriptive acceptance of westernised developmental etiquette inculcated a particular passive-aggressive form of retreatism in youth that resulted in the adoption of harmful versions of heautoscopy. It would be wrong to see in Japanese youth’s split self-image a straightforward rendition of Bauman’s ‘tourist’ as a modern subject lacking identity. Though one may concede some element of cultural translatability between Western and Japanese social changes in terms of modern existential crisis (e.g. see Delanty, 2014 on varieties of cosmopolitanism), there are also significant differences to account for between the two. Perhaps the most important difference ever since the 1990s has been one based on gender, with young men adopting a more pessimistic and retreatist attitude, often full of physical anger directed against their parents (Graburn, 2012), and women resorting to a form of cultural pragmatics that acknowledges the interplay between structure and agency (Rorty, [1986] 2010; Alexander, 2006). Japanese female pragmatism sought to preserve personal emotional commitment to community-building in its ‘nebulous’ 1990s forms, while acknowledging the invasion of materialism in everyday life. This meant that, despite the need for rootedness, the stylistics of the Japanese feminist turn better matched global historic trends in political and cultural mobilities than the Japanese cultures of masculinity. Not only would the Japanese become more nomadic in their attempt to generate intellectual space for creativity, they would seek to destroy the very rooted citizenships that they simultaneously wanted to have. Braidotti (1990, 1994) has already stressed such associations between nomadism and women’s struggle to achieve fair social representation in creative spaces. Here I proceed to cover the second aspect of female mobilities, which highlights how social marginalisation in the national domain produces the most rigorous enemy of national(ist) investment. Whilst Japanese women continued to invest in belonging in private spheres, in public domains they disinvested in damaging political projects involving the valorisation of public culture. Feminist action in post-growth Japan fractured nationalist unity in favour of belonging to a publicly recognised constellation of private spheres, by challenging the old

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pattern of ‘instructive relationships’ that maintained gendered orders (Ahmed, 2004, p.119). I argue that, when Japanese youth heautoscopic routines started displaying the symptoms of a modernity ‘gone mad, bad and sad’, the Japanese feminine poetics of the self presented the ‘selfist’ language of the market as the only exit route from socio-cultural constrictions, allowing Japan’s cosmetic youth cultures to open up to the world. Equally brutal in its technologies of control with Japanese tradition, this opening turned image-making into a variation of neoliberal business practice, facilitating individualism and innovation (Honneth, 2004; Honneth and Hartmann, 2006). Discourses of ‘self-realisation’ and ‘personal responsibility’ are parts of neoliberalism’s global ‘ethical bible’ (Evans and Sewell, 2014). The same discourses do not define just the identity of the Japanese twenty-first century ruling class, but are widespread across the country’s populace. Generating a loop between self-realisation and institutionalised expectancy to conform to neoliberal rules, the discursive poles of kachigumi (winner) and makegumi (loser) seem to supplant personal and communal wellbeing with variations of economic success-as-recognition (Deguchi, 2013, p.59). As much as this story appears to be a variation of the new ‘Western spirit of capitalism’, which co-opted disinterested creativity and art in post-industrial urban formations of modernity (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2018), its distinctive postcolonial and gendered depth invites us to also consider it apart from such set analytical frameworks. Capturing differences between male retreatism and female soft activism is not easy. Japanese scholars discussed how social fragmentation inflicted on Japanese society from the 1980s and the 1990s also endorsed the rise of an interpretation of ‘privatisation’ in psychological terms known as yasashisa or ‘gentleness’. The idea drew on established phenomenologies of the Japanese spirit that attributed to indigenous culture the qualities of gentleness. Practically, this described both the attitude people adopted in creating a conflict-free familial environment and a habitus of non-intrusion or considerate distancing from other people’s private life (Katagiri, 2013, pp.152–153). Japanese culture is based on a strict moral code splitting subjects into private and public – a phenomenon persisting even in our postmodern era, where scholars note a proliferation of public spaces (Sheller and Urry, 2003) and a pathological abandonment of privacy in favour of ‘influencer’ achievement (Bauman, 2003). The origins of this code can be found in the classical Japanese notion of ohoyake (or ooyake) as an indigenous feudalist rendition of bureaucratic publicness, a Chinese-imported legalist term contrasted to si or privateness, and a modern imported rendition of the public sphere from the West (Deguchi, 2013, pp.57–58). It seems then that conceptions of privacy/privateness (watakushi) were foreign imports superimposed on a society fully identifying with state

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bureaucracy. For other scholars, however, the real domain of exchange, or public sphere (gouko) was a different process in premodern times, replete with the phenomenological qualities of Zen Buddhism and its temple system. As opposed to the previous analysis, which considers the legalistic basis of economic mobility, closer to organisational structures we know as (tourist) industries, this comes closer to the existential dimensions of travel theory. Phenomenologically, the Japanese subject’s core is still divided across two realms of being, the honne or private self, and the tatemae or public self. Where the honne is deemed to possess destructive powers that translate into anything from nihilism to an onset of individualism, for the Japanese the tatemae is recognised as a sort of ‘acculturating mechanism’, a path to satoyama or civilisation. Indeed, satoyama ‘equates the in-between landscape’ of cultivated land and urbanised civilisation with the ‘soul of Japan’, allegedly promoting the unity of the Japanese people with the landscape and enabling post-industrial machizukuri (community building) (Favell, 2015, pp.150‒151). When the heautoscopic tendencies of the Japanese youth became the popular cultural norm, young men began to display the signs of total immobility: unemployment, rejection of travel, depression and suicide. This phenomenon manifested also among professional men, who could die from overwork, a phenomenon known as karōshi (Kanai, 2008). This male attitude to pressure, which was also connected to a rise in juvenile delinquency, turned Japanese gentleness into a perceived pathological ‘other-directness’, a ritualised intersubjective production of the self that degenerated into lack of autonomy (Katagiri, 2013, pp.154–155). Traditionalists treated with hostility the female youth’s response, even though on a symbolic level it mirrored the action adopted by the Japanese state against underdevelopment and international isolation. Other directness found its apotheosis in the adoption by young Japanese women of ‘body work’, which promised to provide the illusion of personal control through physical exhibition. Bodikon gyaru, or the ‘body-conscious girl fad during the 1980s’ (Miller, 2003, p.273), can be considered as the negative image of the male karo-jisatsu or the male worker who dies from overwork or depression. In both cases, we deal with an individualised projection of national phenomenology, involving the consented murder of the intimate self to allow for a public version of it to emerge in world spheres. However, because turning the individualist potentialities of honne into a technique of beautification in a kawaii community of physically beautiful beings clashed with notions of satoyama propriety, women simply turned privacy into a new version of the public. Actively developing into a self-help manual to control behaviour in a McDonaldised society that favoured Western spectacles, kawaii mobilities challenged satoyama as human incorporation into Japanese land, in favour of a cosmetically presentable landscape that locals share with strangers/ tourists. The technological dimensions of this cosmetic surgery also clashed

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with traditional conceptions of art, while reinforcing the objectification of the female body. Hence, one may say that Japan’s story of enforced globalisation is based on an ‘illicit’ script of travel into the self so as to connect with the world – drafted by young women. Positing the body as a commodity, the Japanese script translated into a ‘style of flesh’ (Butler, 1990). This style is not just open to what Frühstück (2000) sees as the ‘remodelling’ of the body (e.g. through cosmetic surgery), but a surface (naimen) that native power can traverse, possess and market to the world of the spectacle as ‘heritage’. Pollock (1988) suggests that in Western art, modernism is replete with masculinist myths, which are supported by ways of seeing and socially placing art objects, especially women. Canonical works displayed in museums are mostly produced by male ‘geniuses’ and structured by relations of class and sexuality, often in places of sexual exchange, such as brothels, that turn the nude female body into an object with no agency or voice, ready for consumption by a structured male gaze (ibid., p.259). Contrariwise, the works of the few more recognised female impressionists place humans in private areas or ‘domestic space’, or in public spaces of bourgeois recreation and sociality (ibid., p.248). The same game of inscribing gendered difference onto a heterosexual matrix dominates the ways contemporary Japanese culture organises access to modernity and mobility. Featuring especially in the spectacular city, but also in places of tradition, this inscription acquires an additional differentiation based on an encounter between satoyama art and kawaii popular culture. Indeed, where the former produces an autonomous male author and spectator, the latter generates a pleasurable positioning for women as spectators and actors (Kelly, 1998). However, the question of agency vis-à-vis action is a different story. At times, the result of this change was the conditional incorporation of young female bodies into Japanese popular cultural contexts of transactional value, with the simultaneous exclusion of female agency from both the authorial spaces of culture and the imagined community itself. Traitors of Japanese national purity, but marketable property objects (ohoyake), women could not make in art or indeed in tourism. The construction of knowledge economies, such as those of tourism, on the logic of property (DiMaggio and Unseem, 1978; Fuller, 1992) has been driving Japanese copyright law in the anime and manga industries (Schendl, 2016). Women are absent from these manifestations of transactional publicness. Their alleged propensity to an immature feminine version of ‘nebulous selfism’ is reminiscent of the kind of anarchic individualism we find in other rapidly modernised countries (Marangudakis, 2019) and of the Western brand of tourist anomie (Dann, 1977), with an intimate twist. The twist introduces unconventional patterns of socialisation, which clash with machizukuri and threaten the integrity of a nation wishing to ascend the global civilisational ladder.

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The feminisation of kawaii culture, which today also involves the cute fashioning of young men (Monden, 2017), would amount to the effemination and puerilisation of the whole nation, if managed by women. In the context of speedy modernisation, the indigenous culture of gentleness did not translate into feminine kawaii leadership but a ‘soft individualism’ allowing for the hyper-consumerism to thrive as a male attribute. Tribe and Mkono (2017) talk about ‘e-lienation’ in their exploration of the impact of ICT technologies on the modern travelling mindset, whereas Bauman (De Querol, 25 January 2016) condemns social media for their effect on human connectivity. Though rather totalising, such theses speak the language of this realist facet of late modernity, that bases communication exclusively on technocratic mediations of interaction, rather than technology as a tool. Japan has been the victim of such a slide into technocracy. Embodied not in the moga or desired cute woman, but the otaku or male computer geek, with the propensity to self-enclosure and the production of fictional universes, this model was also deemed to be short of the Western standard of ‘hard individualism’, or modern consistent self (Katagiri, 2013, p.149). Japan’s modernisation/westernisation was based on a dialectical contradiction between emancipation from feudalism and willing submission to market authoritarianism in collaboration with state authoritarianism (Fromm, 1941; Honneth, 2009). Of particular importance have been the politics of affect and emotion in feminine popular cultural perspectives on creativity. The shift from the life-long stability of Fordist environments to post-Fordist casualisation and endless professional mobility ‘liquidised’ social lives (Bauman, 2000) to such an extent that Japan moved to the notorious ‘hotel family’ phase of development (Katagiri, 2013, p.150). Kawaai mobilities make an appearance at this crucial moment in Japan’s urban histories, when women and young daughters experience what, following Arlie Hochschild (2005, pp.4–5), we may identify as a ‘narcissistic rupture’ from the feelings of security and individualised centrality associated with family life. The set of ‘feeling rules’ or the cultures of emotion, in which women were inculcated, was changing rapidly, and a practical response was necessary to ensure adjustment for their healthy individual development. As much as selfie production originates in market processes of image making worldmaking, its affective core has been the need for social and cultural embeddedness. The 1990s proliferation of self-photographing among Japanese schoolgirls, who would exchange images with friends and paste them into kawaii albums, became an inspiration for young photo-artist, Hiromi Toshikawa (aka ‘Hiromix’) to create Seventeen Girl Days, a ‘photo-diary’ of self-posing young women. One of these women became famous due to her pioneering style of self-posing in front of the camera; her own kawaii album was acclaimed by manufacturer Canon in 1995 (Miller, 2018).

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Such individualised pioneering in selfie creativity was popularised en masse in a female invention by Japanese video-game company Atlus worker, Sasaki Miho. Inspired by the popularity of girl sticker and photo culture, Miho developed, after considerate resistance by her male employers, with Atlus and leading Japanese video-game company, Saga, the ‘Print Club’ (Purinto Kurabu). This inspiration involved the famous ‘photo sticker booths’, which sprang initially in game arcades and later in shopping areas, train stations, bowling establishments and other popular cultural hotspots. Including a computer connected to a colour video camera and a printer that allowed the manipulation of digital images, these booths became major attractions for groups of teenagers wishing to take selfies that make them look cute (Chalfen and Murui, 2004). The Purinto Kurabu invention could be recognised as the foremother of front-facing mobile-phone cameras (Sandbye, 2018, p.310), smartphone apps and other innovations, including Snapchat and the notorious Instagram used by Joker tourist youlfies. It is fair to note that the practice of uploading self-images online came from Nathan Hope’s uploading of an image in Australian Internet Forum in 2002, which was also connected to the first use of the term ‘selfie’ (Kruszelnicki, 12 August 2014). Hope’s self-photographing was connected to the display of a minor accident he had while in stupor, but the act itself does not connect to any conscious repetition of selfie-taking that we find in Japanese contexts. The practice of selfie-taking is unambiguously Japanese and female in its origins, with its kawaii roots outlining a very different reading of Joker touristic youlfie-taking. This challenges not the moral foundations of the argument positing ‘selfie’ as selfism, but the epistemic premises on which it is based. Considering the Eastern registers of what philosophers of science call ‘internalism’, will help us deconstruct the taken-for-granted origins of selfie mobilities as Occidental virtual/digital pilgrimages connected to new consumerist mobilities.

PILGRIMS OF THE INTERIOR, PRISONERS OF MODERNITY Internalism is part of a cluster of theories of knowledge interrogating the sufficiency of factual belief. As explained in the Introduction to Part I, we get to know things well conditionally and upon circumstances, strategies and tools afforded to us by our social and physical environment. Epistemology as the nomothetic reasoning of knowledge (the ‘conditions’) is not a given – to recall Austin (1962), calling something true depends on the credentials of the person who says it is true. Knowledge requires justification, which for some can only be acquired through external stimuli (externalism), whereas others argue that it has an internal source (internalism). The controversy found its apotheosis in

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the so-called ‘Gettier Problem’, according to which sometimes, justified belief can be based on sheer luck but fall short of knowledge (‘we just have hope’ or believe without having concrete evidence) (Gettier, 1963). As scholars, we need to rely on justification to regard social phenomena, which nevertheless may originate either in our interlocutor’s or our studied community’s (or whole culture’s) ‘mind’, or reside out there, in the ‘world’, from where we can retrieve them as ‘evidence’. When it comes to thinking about heritage, justifications in terms of beliefs begin with a source of internal knowledge, which nevertheless is accepted as a ‘fact’ (without justification). Prioritising relationality (‘we believe together’) over justification (we base our conclusion on facts) is one of the basic tenets of foundationalism, which Nietzsche refuted in his work. Critical sociologists, such as Luc Boltanski and Levent Thévenot (2006), advanced these debates by suggesting that things hold true only after we take them through a series of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ tests. Yet, such a proposition does not always solve the problem of fundamentalism, as such experiments still have to regress to a source of reality that is not (or cannot be) questioned (Thévenot, 2014). Needless to add that foundationalism can be traced in modern and premodern societies and cultures, but paramount to stress that it can produce varieties of fundamentalism. The otaku phenomenon is one such product of millennia of internalist knowledge, which began with explorations of the source of authorship as human creativity. Not only does this journey help us revise our understanding of tourism’s, and in particular selfie tourism’s worldmaking power, it will dispel its fundamentalist gendered and racial assumptions. We observe this fundamentalism in Japanese culture in gendered registers of knowing that affect being (a woman, a man or a homosexual). Most national cultures develop a form of disemia (Herzfeld, 2005, p.14) or double signification of social phenomena. This involves the pairing of two conflicting moral codes that correspond to two conflicting meanings: one based on self-knowledge (anger stemming from imagined Western complaints about an alleged Japanese civilisational deficiency) and another on self-presentation (the performative means used to conceal this insecurity at any cost). The moga is in Japanese culture such a bivalent term denoting a kawaii slutty young woman, who enjoys embodied exposure on the selfie lens to attract attention. Her presence exposes the fragility of cultural integrity – a term I use here to denote both the supra-subjective coherence of the alleged national spirit and the anomic behaviour displayed by women wishing to break free from it. Mogas feminise consumerist excess, enunciating their identity through experiments with styles, especially those with European credentials; they use these props to secure dates with older men and profit from the sexual exchange (Goto-Jones, 2009, p.118). Inciting moe or deep passion presents mogas simultaneously as ‘delinquents’ and an externally observable cause of

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transgression for men. However, philosophically, their behaviour champions ‘internalist accessibilism’: what they do and what they believe in are accessible to us (BonJour, 1980; Chrisholm, 1988). Indeed, the main access to knowledge through encounters with mogas has been monetised in the touristified now anime heritage and involves the fixation of onlookers upon a particular character feature that mogas champion (e.g. glasses, clothing, etc. – see Miho, 2015, p.122) in fetishist ways. Contra to the moga’s complete physical exposure, the otaku geek’s concealment behind a computer reproduces purikura’s scopic rationale as a cross between the passport photo booth and the arcade video game. Otakus travel virtually with their minds, while observing behind screens like an all-seeing eye, whereas kawaii mogas objectify their bodies and actively contribute to the dissemination of their double image among friends, family and increasingly social media strangers. Otakus are associated with observation (and self-observation) of mental states (Feldman, 2004, 2005). Their propensity to depression, self-isolation and anger directed against family and cultural authority are externally accessible as symptoms of Japanese socio-cultural pathologies. It is not injudicious to argue that this Japanese gendered differentiation of perspective ends up replicating the taxonomic gaze of the state (Scott, 1998) as the practice of apprehending from without on the one hand, and the gaze of the tourist/traveller/consumer (including the virtual) as a practice of apprehending from within on the other. It is significant that historically, kawaii as a style was pioneered by those schoolgirls who rebelled against traditional calligraphic rules. Using mechanical pencils that produced very fine lines, and writing in big round characters with what we know today as ‘emoticons’, dates back to the 1970s. Such scripts, which were so crowded that it was difficult to read, helped to institute kawaii as a culture based on the figurative production of the comic (burikko ji) and ‘fake-child style’ writing, on which companies such as Sanrio based their famous merchandise Hello Kitty (Miller, 2004; Craig, 2020). Kawaii’s culturally odourless branding, which eliminated miniaturism as national exoticism from the notion, helped to popularise the style across the world. Nevertheless, removing specificity from the product had consequences ridden with normative ambiguity: few know today that kawaii encloses Neo-Confucian understandings of the Woman as a docile being. Kawaisō, from which kawaii derives, refers to the piteous/pitiable being arousing compassion while projecting light through blushing. This oscillation between pitiable and admirable qualities, which encloses ideas of self-consciousness, image-semblance and vestige, originates in Lady Murasaki’s novel The Tale of Genji (Kato, 1979). Written in the eleventh century in kana (Japanese phonetic script) for a female audience and not in kanji, which was considered a man’s territory, the novel explores the machinations of court society through the emotional life of Hikaru Genji

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(‘Shining Genji’), the son of an ancient Japanese emperor, known to readers as Emperor Kiritsubo, and a low-ranking concubine called Kiritsubo Consort (Knapp, 1992). The novel’s adherence to the principles of monogatari (oral narrative genre) provides us with a clear genealogical connection to the anime pilgrimage version of ‘contents tourism’ (kontentsu tsūrizumu). Above all, the story and the style in which it was written connect to what in the 1980s and the 1990s context came to be recognised as kawaii burikko behaviour: a particular gendered performance involving the feigning of cuteness, followed by physical alterations, such as dramatic makeup, large contact lenses or cosmetic eye surgery to create the illusion of cuteness (Miller, 2004). I will rephrase to make an analytical point regarding the origins of contemporary selfie culture: the kawaii movement’s premodern and recent genealogies converge upon the pragmatics of a particular gender performativity that produces ‘cosmetic cosmopolitanism’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 2006b). This cosmopolitanism miniaturises – that is, individualises – an essentially political process of self-beautification, involving the political unit’s (nation-state) careful education of desire, with an aim to attain a credible public face in global hierarchies of cultural value. Cosmetic cosmopolitanism in Japan corresponds to the ‘soft individualism’ I introduce above. The cultural style was pioneered in the late 1970s by the middle classes, which introduced leisure regimes promoting excessive consumption in Japanese society as a counterpoint to the goal-orientated ‘hard individualism’ of industriousness (Yamazaki quoted in Katagiri, 2013, p.148). Hard individualism would subsequently morph into a karōshi attitude towards self-realisation, whereas soft individualism spoke of consumerism as comforting abandonment to materialist pleasures. As a process, cosmetic cosmopolitanism adheres to an Asian version of cultural pragmatics, which mobilises phenomenologies of experience to produce the illusion of ‘smooth surface’ – an observation justifying Nobuyoshi Kurita’s argument that kawaii ‘cute’ is a ‘magic term’ (World Heritage Encyclopedia, undated). Much like the premises of magical realism as a postcolonial movement, which relayed the ordinary magic of nature (‘tropical vegetation’) and the ‘unbridled creativity of…natural forms’ into a territorially bound cultural blueprint on monumental canvases (Carpentier, [1947] 1995, p.85), kawaii performativity produced cultural heritage through the objectification of the Japanese female body. Bodikon gyaru, or the ‘body-conscious girl fad of the 1980s’ (Miller, 2003, p.273) discussed above, enabled a ‘body magic’. For Power (2010, p.74) this magic marks people ‘with identities that are collectively agreed and fictive’, but ‘[i]n constructing a playful shared fiction of identity, an individual experiences herself [only] as others see her’. ‘Smoothness’ and ‘surface’ are essential in the analysis of both Japanese popular culture and global selfie culture, because both technologise the body in particular ways.

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Significantly, a gendered approach to the concept does not excavate the racist subtext, which has been aptly recognised in studies focusing on the effects and policies of racial exclusion: such ‘cosmetics’ are strategies of valorisation that help power to justify the purging of difference in favour of uniformity and cultural perfection (Back, 2003; Nakamura, 2002). As such, their technocratic rationale is phylogenetic: they produce a gender/race matrix to justify internalist notions of national heritage (Tzanelli, 2011, 2016). Such cosmetic processes are often observed in cultures subjected to forms of Western control (for comparison with Greece see Tzanelli, 2020a) and they support the mobilisation of indigenous renditions of the gender matrix in resolutions of ethno-racial political belonging. Although politically, they activate a troubled dialogue with an imagined essentialised West, which is perceived of as a harsh critic, their clearest manifestations are observed in purely cultural domains. In Western art, the interplay between surface and depth informs understandings of the ‘picturesque’. As a mode of aesthetic appreciation that has been co-opted by the tourist industry to package tourist destinations, the picturesque invites tourists/hosts to see and apprehend the natural world through travel brochures and internet images: artificial landscapes that normalise particular viewpoints on the gazed culture (Todd, 2009, pp.163‒166; Urry and Larsen, 2011, p.174). The picturesque is also widely associated in popular culture with camp sensibility, due to its propensity to project worlds via imagery and photographing (Sontag, [1966] 2013, p.263). This attention to surface/form as content is characteristic of the experience of Western modernity at large (Frisby, [1985] 2013; Alexander, 2008). We can add as a scholarly extension of this sensibility that in Western epistemologies only a ‘thick description’ is supposed to allow a researcher to reach a culture’s core (Geertz, 1973, p.29). The same attention to the magical picturesque is associated in Latin American cultures with the ‘baroque’, which in Alejo Carpentier’s ([1975] 1995, p.93) postcolonial magical realism denotes a ‘constant of the human spirit’ characterised by ‘the horror of a vacuum, the naked surface and the harmony of linear geometry’, with the latter being a venerated quality in the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Kawaii culture is a hybrid of what Bauman (1996a, 1996b) saw in permutations of the decentred tourist and the ascetic pilgrim: both actors travel ‘surfaces’, but the latter can also enter and modify ‘contents’. This observation returns us to the diagram that I provided in the Introduction to Part I (Figure 1.1). In Japanese culture, the realm of the honne produces the Japanese version of the pilgrim who travels ‘the interior court’ or ‘surface’ (naimen) (Muro cited in Graburn, 2012, p.56), where reality is projected in mentalist terms. This experiential travel is always susceptible to representationalism, a theory of knowledge that critics of Western epistemology based on the suggestion that knowing is not ridden with a priori intentionality but constitutive of and

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interconnected with practical standpoints (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp.163‒165; Taylor, 1989, p.14). Following Tensor Posadas (2018), one may even compare the Japanese pilgrim/tourist variant to the eighteenth-century German Romantic figure of the Doppelgänger or ‘double-walker’ between and across historical and cultural boundaries: a transgressing investigative character that makes worlds on the go. Because in Japanese culture the reality is always projected in one’s mind, the naimen would eventually come to act as a ‘camera lucida’ that takes pictures of the pilgrim’s mental states. In contents tourism in particular, today the naimen is the territory of virtuality, which produces an archive of beautified ethno-racial and gendered identities (Huerta, 2018, p.105). The gender/race/ethnicity matrix is circular, almost autopoetic in its hybridity, as it legitimates itself on the basis of its legitimation by Western and statist authority/authorship. Thus, naimen pilgrimage is the privilege of the contemporary otaku inner travel, which is already equipped with mechanical technology, enabling the projection of inner movement to the outer world – what in Japanese is called fūkei or landscape. Such technological pilgrimage is also commonly associated with an epistemological shift during the Meiji period from internalist to externalist apprehensions of reality (Tensor Posadas, 2018). However, in the centuries before the naimen was supplanted by the mechanical (cinematic) tools of kontentsu tsūrizumu, it occupied a gendered regime of authorship. In this regime, acceptable projections of inner states were sourced from traditional Chinese-imported aesthetic categories informing calligraphic practice. Calligraphic theory centres on deliberations on the artist’s or viewer’s mind, with particular reference to will or viewpoint (yi): calligraphers endowed with youyi or intentional creativity consciously create, whereas those inclined towards wuyi or unconscious production create ‘on the go’. Although it is the wuyi calligrapher’s hectic inclination that is recognised as truly artistic and superior, both in the West and the East (Shi, 2018, p.876), most practitioners and theorists believe that perfection can be achieved through youyi, which matches innate talent and creativity with the development of a repertoire of brushstroke strategies in more reflexive ways (Singh, 2014, pp.212–213). Wuyi in calligraphic criticism refers to the philosophical term wuwei or action by no action. This is a theoretical perspective on the world that is matched with spontaneous action that comes after hard (including also somatic) training (Slingerland, 2003). Unlike the Bourdieusian perspective on habitus as inculcated behaviour, which the middle-class subject seeks to perform also consciously to accrue desired cultural capital, wuyi promotes an aesthetic of spontaneity that starts with intentional training before intention sinks into amnesia. Forgetting intentionality promotes artistic perfection – a trend approximating, but not conforming to the aesthetics of impressionism (Frisby, 1992). Indeed, social miniaturism as part of the Japanese worldview,

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Chinese calligraphic appreciation of wuyi, and postcolonial magical realism share in this ‘merological’ approach to reality (Goodman, [1951] 1977; [1968] 1999). However, unlike the original merological theory, in such non-Western trends inferring the whole from the detail is not derived from the mind, but from hard training of the mind’s eye, in unison with the subject’s heart and body. The aesthetic of spontaneity could also provide us with an alternative perspective on educational travel from that established in Western leisure frameworks. According to surviving sources, a major factor contributing to the cultivation of calligraphic spontaneity was the consumption of wine – in fact, since the Tang Dynasty, wine and art have featured prominently as creative triggers in many calligraphic texts. The kuangcao school of calligraphy in particular, advocated spontaneity and self-abandonment in the craft’s perfection – that is the absence of rule as ‘the ultimate rule’ (Shi, 2018, pp.875–876). Although some soft drugs, such as alcohol, lull the senses, they also loosen inhibitions, allowing their users to externalise feelings. To direct this towards creativity promotes a re-civilising attitude: yi (from which wuyi and youyi derive) as artistic expression refers to a particular form of internalisation involving incorporating external data and projecting them back onto a surface as symbols (Kao, 1991, p.55). Where surface is today the cosmetic exterior in Western terms, the yi acts with the help of soft drugs (the path-makers) to metamorphose loose behaviour into an aesthetic idea and eventually into artwork (Sturman, 1997, p.21). Therefore, the substance-induced uncontrolled behaviour of calligraphers points to a deep connection between one’s ability to create masterpieces and one’s intimate interior. It helps to note that the invention of the press is materially and technologically connected to alcohol production: the Gutenberg printing press was a modified screw press for pressing wine – something which prompted Gutenberg to comment on the inextricable connection between literal flows and alcohol-induced flows of truth as a godsend (Nail, 2019, pp.350–351). The gendering of intimacy and privacy in Japanese culture is an accepted fact across the social sciences (Ehara, 2013). Across the centuries, the feminisation of the private sphere promoted a counterpoint to masculine worldmaking in politics – a phenomenon shared with other cultures in the West. Buck-Morss (1992) recognised this in the aesthetic engineering of hegemonic masculinity in Kantian philosophy, which surgically removed emotions from the human subject to produce the ideal of the male cosmopolitan warrior/protector. Whilst documented as a male activity, Eastern calligraphy opposes this aesthetic surgery, by granting emotions and the intimate self a special role in the activity itself. The role of emotions was prominent in the processual stages (known as the ‘stirring of the mind-heart’ or xin – see also Shi, 2018, p.879) of transforming a generalised idea into specific calligraphic symbols (Kao, 1991,

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p.66). The psychosomatic process of calligraphic creation was enmeshed into a philosophy of being, whereby the artist’s spiritual ideals and values were seen as ‘at once aesthetic, ethical and ideological’ (Escande, 2015, p.166). The advent of westernisation in Japan changed some of these parameters of social action and interaction, introducing a clash between tradition and modernity. One of the starkest changes in Japan has been the aggressive promotion of kawaii as a form of experiential consumption in the late twentieth century. An essentially homemaking activity of adorning the female body and projecting this beautification onto virtual surfaces, the culture was destined to become both the cornerstone of Japanese heritage and Japan’s ticket to the global political and cultural Eden. As the youthful Japanese ‘feminine mystique’ assumed the qualities of mobility, its propensity to ‘unhinge meanings of culture, nation, and of [male ethno-national] interest group’ (Jamal and Hollinshead, 2001, p.64) began to enable a not always very sensitive contestation of novel worldviews connected to tourism. To refer back to Figure 1.1, Japanese female mobilities facilitated the shift from pilgrimage to three-dimensional tourism. Tourism and its variant travel philosophies are globally structured on institutional doxa (ibid., p.65; Bourdieu, 1977, 1984, 1998), which is now also organised on the logic of image-management by cultural industries (Tzanelli, 2007). Tourism’s discursive manifestations at this structural level are thus ‘declarative’ in powerful ways, especially when they sanction unsuspected and quiet collaborations between statist culture producers/heritage producers and corporatist culture producers/heritage producers (Jamal and Hollinshead, 2001, p.68). The cute and neat kawaii syndrome that informed contemporary Japanese aesthetics and national identity replaced the Male Kantian Warrior with a disemic image of the cheap, feign, but cute selfie Woman. In manga comics, this character even displayed propensity to physical violence (Shiokawa, 1999). At first, this seems to contradict Japanese tradition, if one is not familiar with Japanese folklore’s renditions of the sublime, the picturesque and the horrific as one and the same thing. In Japanese folklore the yōkai are understood as a form of mystery intended to terrify – I stress ‘form’, as they are creatures dwelling ‘the contact zone between fact and fiction [and] belief and doubt’ (Komatsu quoted in Myoki, 2020, p.98). Initially intended to always terrify, some yōkai were subsequently depicted by famous artists as cute. Artists have been inventing new variations of them at least since the Edo period: although their supernatural abilities include shapeshifting (bakemono or obake), they could also possess emotions and personalities, or be related to ancestry (Foster, 2015). Yōkai’s connection to ancestry is explained on their derivative emergence from the most respected departed elders (nigi-mitama), who, if cajoled with the right rituals, could accrue status to their believers as protective gods. Other yōkai that do not entertain sufficient veneration amongst the living are

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malevolent spirits (ara-mitama), bringing misfortune. Kai as mystery has evolved into heritage tourism in Japan, organised under the leadership of the state as a form of pilgrimage focusing on authors, yōkai artists’ birthplaces, religious destinations (e.g. temples), manga/anime-inspired performances and places known for their ancient connection to monogaritarisei traditions (Komatsu, 2017). Correspondingly, as a phenomenological occurrence, yōkai is divided into three semantic domains: that of event, of mysterious presence and the visualised object or zōkei (Myoki, 2020, pp.98–99). To conclude then on this historical detour, the semantic significance of yōkai/zōkei presents us with the animist version of photography, which produces the human subject’s double image. Such reproduction becomes constitutive of semantic ambivalence, when it unsettles hierarchies of being and belonging, because it suggests alternative options/images to its audiences. Like its ancient calligraphic counterpart, yōkai/zōkei is connected to a source of authority residing in the phenomenal sphere or an Otherworld, which sanctions the creator’s (yōkai artist, calligrapher) authorship in this world. The function of this author is civilisational, as it involves the calming of spirits, the obliteration of ugliness and the restoration of harmony, as Zen-Buddhism dictates. The emergence of selfie mobilities counters this arrangement of reality: much like the teenage girls’ illegible script decorated with smileys, yōkai ugliness and horror introduced into Japanese culture another perspective on reality. This perspective appeared as a domain residing outside tradition and heritage and as an event observing the nomothetic rules of anomic creativity. This is so, because over the centuries, the carefully cultivated wuyi was replaced by a technologically manipulated script/image in photo-booths and then mobile camera phones that only required the simple mastery of tools. This is the 3D world of tourism that I introduced in this study’s diagram. The fact that this radical ‘script’s’ illegitimate authors were women refusing to be tamed by formal education (chinkon is the calming of spirits in yōkai culture) is also telling of the persistence of gender norms in Japanese culture across centuries. Where in the past calligraphic pilgrims and yōkai artists attained access to heritage through hard ascetic work, kawaii proto-youlfies opted for the herd ethos of sociality, which promoted co-creation through travels of the mind, the eye, and, increasingly in an interconnected world, physical travel to other cultures, in which photographic knowledge is enacted. Selfies are travel machines to a point in the past, which is personalised (they are what Soulages (quoted in Chlebus-Grudzień, 2018, p.11) calls one’s ‘photographic cogito’) and thus more often than not, devoid of collective national memory connotations. As ‘memory prostheses’, selfie photographing creates ‘a specific image in the present, of what will soon be the past, for the future’ (Konecki, quoted in Chlebus-Grudzień, 2018, p.8). Taking youlfie snapshots replaces the collective devotion to the memory archive with individualised

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mobilities from one particular moment to another. Unhooking the Japanese female mystique from its sublime yōkai spirituality was never accompanied by a recognition of the female human subject as articulate. To heritage legislators, kawaii scripture remained illegible, even when it acquired technologically informed imagological dimensions. Unlike the Indian woman’s self-sacrifice to observe the rule of heritage, the fake Japanese kawaii woman severed her link to Japanese heritage. Therefore, unlike the sati’s subjection to authority (Spivak, 2010, p.60; Spivak, 1999), Japanese women opted for this type of transgression that fosters an anarchic individualist spirit of belonging associated with subcultural movements (contra Maffesoli’s (1996) neo-Durkheimian analysis of ‘neotribes’ as a secular/profane variation of community-building, but in line with Stiegler’s (2010) notion of hypomnesia or externalised time-bound communication as the precondition of original creative thought). Using the technological tools of capitalist networking and the ideological frameworks of neoliberal individualism as means to an end, was meant to deliver female proto-youlfies from the unfreedom of tradition. The result of this action has been far more complex, and its global consequences far more enduring, than anyone might have anticipated in the 1970s in Japan. From a scolded by male businessmen proposition, this self-photographing narrative would take to the world stage as selfie documentation of travel, conviviality, and even demonstration of ‘cool’ connectivity with the masses, as selfies of politicians with members of the electorate prove. However, my focus remains the epistemic roots of selfie-taking as a travel glance, so, I adopted the non-linear style of kawaii subaltern femininity as a legitimate method of research. This involved a pastiche of temporal frames, which connected disparate moments called méroi (μέροι or parts) from global spaces of modernity. Otherwise called ‘vignettes’ (Tzanelli, 2008; Cresswell, 2016), these parts produce coherent psychogeographic spaces, in which a coherent whole of action, experience and intentionality eventually manifests as a stable mobile cultural pattern. Setting aside for a while the lamentation of modern fragmentation, I re-articulated Walter Benjamin’s angel of time as a cyborg, equipped with a camera, a heart and a mind to monitor different home territories, their inhabitants and visitors/strangers: the tourists. I will advance this method in the following chapter. My aim is to decolonise selfie studies that connect to understandings of travel and tourism. In this chapter I did this by inspecting a variety of assumptions: that they are an invention rooted in Western art and technology; that they lack depth and seriousness, because they contradict non-Western indigenous heritage registers; and that they are straightforward products of superficial popular culture connected to new narcissistic trends at all times. In the spirit of Derrida’s metaphysics of presence, I tried to approach selfie genealogies as an experimental phármakon

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(φάρμακον) (Derrida, 1981): a medicine alleviating or curing alienation, thoughtlessness and patronising behaviour associated with sexist and racist tendencies, which may end up poisoning the patient (Stiegler, 2012). The following chapter illustrates through research at another point in time and in different geographical coordinates, kawaii culture’s subsequent mutations into Western selfie cultures in a globalised world. Unfortunately, as one problem was resolved, another will emerge. This is the fundamental question of biopower – and I do not refer merely to its bureaucratic institution of sorting citizenships, but also, especially in tourism and hospitality contexts, the makeshift ways hosts employ its styles to reproduce discriminatory scripts of belonging and moving through alien, home and visited territories. As Pareto (1966) once stressed, governing relies on the employment of force, guile, or a combination of both. This combination employs an impersonalised idiom to treacherously convince individual actors that they are always subject to a supra-individual force, so the ‘interpretative, constitutive power of human subjectivity is superseded by powerful, objective social functions’ (Rapport, 2003, p.53). The displacement of kawaii movements to the domain of marketable popular culture, aimed at suppressing the morphic qualities of existential power, to remember Jackson (1996), in favour of ‘institutional processes of governance’ (Eves, 1998, p.20). This happened in the hope that governance would favour the market logic over a disinterested poetics of creativity. But common folk with interests in marking home territories can also govern space and culture in equally brutal styles. From this perspective, the Joker youlfie’s journey across physical (Highbridge) and digital (Instagram) realms is what Rapport (2003, pp.44–45) explores as a form of ‘alter-cultural action’ steeped in irony. Its networked rituals across time and space strive to achieve human ‘world-openness’ through a set of practices, so as to satisfy the pilgrim of their position above and beyond ‘a locally and temporarily restricted point of view’ (Stagl, 2000, p.35). But biopower produces friction in such banal host-guest encounters, which subsequently generate new bokehs. These are the bokehs of inhospitality, affective misalignment and micro-power, which interlock different communities in a deadly embrace (Cresswell, 2014, p.111).

6. The terror of image-making: heteroscopies of damaged hospitality INTERPRETING ‘PRIVATE’ SPACE The best contributions to the literature on hospitality commence their explorations from conventional communitarian observations. It helps to remember that Derrida’s (2000) and Derrida and Dufourmantelle’s (2000) celebrated thesis was based on precisely such a utopian premise of disinterested reciprocity, which begins to crumble when put to the realist test. I want to perform such a deconstructive move with the help of hermeneutic phenomenology and prompt readers to speculate on our master scenario: imagine that a staircase situated next to your flat becomes a shrine for film fans, who feel compelled to stand half-way to its top and take selfies at odd times. This is the stair you climb every day to go to a bus stop or the tube station, from which you commute to work; the stair you use when you take your kids to school; the stair you pass during your usual leisurely walk routine, now that retirement allows you to spend time on idle contemplation; and by which you meet with your girlfriend or boyfriend in the evenings. The abrupt way in which this staircase enters the tourist service economy is bound to: (a) shatter your sense of time in the form of routinised performance and identity ties – what Lash and Urry (1994) associated with ‘glacial time’, a slower pace of temporal movement. (b) However, it will also mess up with your perception of spatial integrity and upset a sense of ‘privacy’ you shared with neighbours or loved ones during your past ruminations in this space (Cresswell, 2002, pp.12–15). I stand by two observations: first, that routinised performance is constitutive of spatial integrity, so its fragmentation into public and private components can disrupt the local sense of privacy. However, I also note that a similar dislodging from routine takes place for the tourist, who ‘enfolds’, retreats into themselves to perform ‘Joker tourism’. The results in both cases is a dramatic de-feminisation of the gaze on the Highbridge neighbourhood: the ‘feminised gaze’ stresses embodied interactions and uses of space that draw on tropes of family intimacy, sociality and the ‘enjoyable life’ (Bærenholdt et al., 2004, pp.69–71; Wearing and Wearing, 1996). Time acceleration in modern societies (Rosa, 2013) and the concomitant alteration of pace with which domestic 106

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and leisure time are organised in capitalist societies (Wajcman, 2008, 2015) are central to the design of mobilities such as tourism. The ‘timeless time’ of technology (Castells et al., 2007) produces an open-ended plane of everyday action, in which identities and experiences are produced through a haphazard dialectics of presence (Silverstone, 2002). The Bronxer Joker experience and the experience of Japanese women who joined labour markets in the 1990s seem to come much closer now. Due to its connection to the dramatisation of contemporary psychopathologies existing in the developed world, the Joker pilgrimage exceeds the role of conventional popular cultural activities, such as those of film-tourism: it is part and parcel of what social theorist Margaret Archer (2003) has termed ‘internal conversation’, a figurative and dynamic dialogue within and with ourselves and our imaginary others that contributes to our emergence as coherent subjects. Here I posit a hypothesis based on journalistic and other media narratives, which switches our attention back to the local Bronxer, who naturally wonders: the Joker/Arthur is a deeply disturbed human being suffering from loneliness and thirst for revenge, so anyone wanting to dance like him in front of the camera is either a cruel human, or just another ‘stupid’ tourist. What do they really want to achieve through such a performance? Are they seeking to transform into the pathological character? Switch now back to the Joker tourist, who produces a selfie and posts it on Instagram: Instagram selfies are thieves of time, in the sense that they rob the selfie tourist of their kinetic, embodied memory of the ‘being there’ in its multi-sensory dimensions. This effect is also reflected in the robbing of place from the host, who is left out of the selfie frame at all times (see also Ritzer, 2019, p.76 on hospitality and nothingness). As the Bronx incidents of local tourismophobia attest, a combination of two types of death – of proximity and healthy empathic connectivity (Chouliaraki, 2006, p.50) – result in damaged hospitalities. Spirited geometries of the social world are diametrically opposite to processes of privatisation, and when disturbed, also affect vernacular tempos (Aron, 1956; Frisby, 1992, [1985] 2013). The second observation is that this youlfie invasion in the Bronx is productive of local responses. To develop my terminology a bit more, such responses turn the heautoscopic performance of tourists that we explored in the previous chapter into a heteroscopy performed by the hosts (gazing at the héteron [έτερον]: other): locals begin to scrutinise, sort and assess visitor habits, mostly in highly moralised styles. It helps remember how Latour and Hermant’s (2006) otherwise compassionate journey into Paris’ intimate corners was ethnographically based on ‘oligopticons’ from which the city could be seen in its entirety. Latour and Hermant’s method is not just miniaturist (ολίγον: little, less), but also not necessarily always endowed with deep local knowledge that comes from embedded experience (ολίγον from ολίγωρέω: to overlook).

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A collection of oligoptics may ‘[help] us to grasp the importance of ordinary objects, starting with the street furniture constituting part of inhabitants’ daily environment and enabling them to move about in the city without losing their way’ (Latour and Hermant, 2006, p.1), but not necessary fully understand the objects’ users. It is paramount to admit that this chapter’s psychogeographic accounts are products of a second or third order critique of tourist oligoptics that, ironically, does not escape the tourist’s epistemological status. A digital tourist interloper of sorts, who spies on journalistic gossips about local gossips and then collects impressions of more local/locative reactions from media series, I am the most distant digital ethnographer ever to write about the Bronx. At the same time, I am not a tourist, because I do want to look within and deeply under the surface. I argue that the leisurely tourist spectators, who refuse to actually look around and venture instead into their own soul with the help of touristic cinematics, produce their unhappy host counterpart. I believe it is significant that youlfie rituals are staged on a liminal (or rather, liminalised by disorganised public policy) spot. What I mean by that is that youlfies do not visit Arthur Fleck’s fictional house, which was staged in an actual building located at the 1147 Anderson Avenue, NY 10452 in the Bronx, but prefer to reproduce a publicly open, and thus safe, performance of madness. Visiting Arthur’s home exposes the youlfie to a horrific interiority, setting them in front of a broken and dirty mirror on which Arthur stares as he does his makeup and speaks loudly to himself. What Barthes (1981) saw in the fear of the double, or a surface of the subject that is reproduced in photographs to reveal no depth other than that arbitrarily attributed by its owners, runs the risk of leaping into the real, and asking the youlfie to take a good and hard look at what they actually do. As for the reluctant hosts, they are left in an affective limbo, in which they are invited to make policy without policymakers. Lashley (2019, p.4) has explained that, behind the issues of commercial exchange, a society’s culture ‘advocates a common set of expectations about general attitudes, values and behaviours on a range of moral and ethical issues’. In Deleuze’s (1988) governance vocabulary, the local host becomes a sort of ‘folding’ of relations of force upon themselves, but also, I would add, an ‘artist’ in the game of truth, which they paint on their own local canvas in bold colours. Thus, although this schema of reciprocal interaction appears to stem from a pure Arendtian perspective on judgement (Arendt, 1958), it articulates a biopolitics better connected to Foucault’s posthumanist project and Fuller’s (2011) scientific sorting of ‘Humanity 2.0’, in which the sorting of subjectivities and ontologies happens, amongst other domains, cybernetically. The interactive constitution of the host also translates MacCannell’s (1973) ‘staged authenticity’ in tourist settings into a ‘baroque’ (exaggerated, but also paradoxical) variation of ‘simulatory authenticity’ of the emergent cinematic tourist setting: a Joker

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staircase. In this simulation, the host is completely absent in the flesh from the ‘event’ (selfie-taking), but omnipresent as the figurative resentful joker of a modernity gone wrong, bad and mad – the very modernity cheerfully co-opted by their youlfie/guest in poses emulating a cinematic script of misery. The joker/host’s decorative function within this performance is answered back by the real Bronxer host, who openly names and (re)claims this little youlfie spot through acts of indignation. Below I explain that this battle of wills bears the cultural features and legal prescriptions of the new knowledge economies (Fuller, 1992; Lash and Urry, 1994), because it translates space/place use into a discourse of heritage-as-property. Drawing on Adam’s (1990) differentiations between social and natural time, Lash and Urry (1994) argued that in post-Fordist urban contexts, economies of space have become overdetermined by economies of sign (see previous chapter on selfie routines and marketable hermeneutics). This happens to such an extent that civilised humanity’s temporal integrity has replaced the evolutionary or ‘glacial’ movement of time with speed we cannot control or comprehend (Lash and Urry, 1994, p.243; Soja, 2000, pp.265–266; Sheller and Urry, 2004, pp.3–4). In many ways, this is reiterated in Fuller’s (2011, 2012) magnum opus on ‘Humanity 2.0’, which spells out the organisation of humanity into classificatory – and I would add significatory – ‘projects’ embracing ecological, biomedical and cybernetic concerns in speedy temporal frames. Not only are the new movements so ‘instantaneous that they cannot be experienced or observed’ (Lash and Urry, 1994, p.242, emphasis mine) in the reflexive styles of what used to stand for pilgrimage, their modal essence as episodic ‘events’ has deprived humans of certainty and security about the future. Such pervasive insecurity is heightened by the ways humanity is subsumed under a problematic ecological rationale (Barron, 2003, p.82; Fuller, 2008, 2012), which commercial hermeneutics uses to justify economic Darwinist development. In this, one finds echoes of Bauman’s (1989) connection of the Holocaust to modernity as a utopian pursuit that marries thoughtlessness and indifference to human betterment. So, to clarify, from a tourist studies perspective, the Bronx incidents teach us that we still have pilgrimages, but their nature as aesthetically reflexive moments in one’s lifetime are overdetermined not by class but situational status. The change is based on a functionalised partition of reflexivity that helps contemporary tourist economies to define who is qualified as a guest and who is a host. We are back to the Rortian argument that anti-foundational nihilism should prompt humans to merely recognise the unbearable presence of contingency and pain in the world, even when we contribute to its making with small acts. Nevertheless, Rorty does not consider the logic of late capitalism as a superstructural agent: economic expansion based on neoliberalisation strategies ‘spreads’, in Arendt’s words, ‘like a fungus on the surface’ (Arendt

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quoted in Hartouni, 2012, p.117), eventually penetrating the epidermis and damaging the social nervous system. Arendt was not interested in the culture of economic development but the reasons some perfectly nice people end up being mass murderers, as was the case with many petty officials and common people who were involved in the Holocaust in serendipitous ways. However, her recognition that no satanic greatness kills humans, only the banal fungus of indifference and rationalisation (e.g. Bauman, 1989), can be applied to the structuring of the city on neoliberal models of development. I claim that the spontaneous and unplanned logic of partition between host and guest in cinematic tourist mobilities such as those in the Bronx is a peculiar mutation of post-Fordism. Following the style of postmodern pilgrimages, the mutation is cognitive in nature, because it uses motifs of production/ consumption specialisation not just to organise, but colonise the realm of the invisible: on the one hand, selfie tourist consumption is streamlined into patterns of emotional edgework (see previous chapter); on the other, hosts are consigned to actual invisibility in such tourist rituals, or not asked if they want to be hosts and under what conditions, and thus condemned to a reactive nihilism resembling that of cinematic Arthur’s. This is the latest mutation in ‘cognitive capitalism’s’ (Boutang, 2012) repertoire of labour organisation: it induces damaging human emotions through unplanned expansion of global media networking and tourism mobilities (Larsen and Urry, 2008; Büscher and Fletcher, 2017; Scribano and Sánchez Aguirre, 2018). Ally in this colonisation of the human imagination is the spontaneity with which some places turn into what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg (1991, 2002) calls ‘third places’: physical spots connected to the Main Street and commercial units and personalised by consumers as places of socialisation. For Oldenburg such places act as refuge areas from work or home, and for scholars using his work, such personalisation can be enhanced by businesses (Mehta and Bosson, 2010, p.779). I connect Oldenburg’s discussion to Rojek’s (1993) ‘black spots’ to comprehend the ways cognitive capitalism that uses the consumer as producer, designs selfie mobilities around practices of emotional edgework (see also previous chapter). These practices then amplify the hosts’ emotional investment in these posts/areas, turning them into heritage. Important here is to note how such third places/black spots as the Highbridge youlfie staircase actually end up endorsing anti-social behaviours by upsetting notions of intimate time-as-space, with all the associations this encloses with psychological security and everyday aesthetics marking personalised territory (Lang, 1987). To make the analysis specific, in the Bronx, hordes of fleeting strangers (film-tourists) have already began to reinterpret a spot of ‘Bronxer space’ on their own terms. It has been noted that most renditions of the borders, whether these are physical, geographical or virtual, metaphorical or emotional, may ‘invoke a unique type of fascination’ for tourists (Timothy

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quoted in Bianchi at al., 2020, p.293). From their perspective, which is that of play and therefore the exercise of a basic human right, the cult staircase is not a non-place of capitalist (post)modernity (Augé, 2008), but the backstage of a performance tailored for them. This tailoring is mediated by a movie and an ever-expanding hash-tag community they join with their own Joker selfie. Not only does this modify the invisible properties of the territory, it activates a local ‘politics of sensibility’ (Scribano and Sánchez Aguirre, 2018; Scribano and Lisdero, 2019), rife with emotions of frustration and resentment towards youlfies. Neoliberalism bridges creative transgressions with individualism, because it normalises unregulated consumer behaviour. The distorted Dionysian style of youlfies is set to both colonise other lifeworlds’ landscapes and strengthen the unregulated colonisation of tourist imaginaries by markets. As explained in the previous chapter, the cinematic tourist’s ‘eternal return’ – in the Bronx’s stairs, the recreated Japanese anime village outside Tokyo, or the Hobbiton’s film stage in New Zealand, to name but a few examples of such bespoke youlfie mobilities – generates a beautiful phenomenological cocoon for tourists, in which they produce ‘sacred objects’ (Eliade, 1964, p.32). Contrariwise, locals become trapped in the visible, sensory world, where such objects retain either a practical (e.g. passage to transport) or an affective (e.g. gathering spaces) meaning connected to the profane time of everyday life and work (Eliade, 1954, pp.5–9). Therein lies the beginning of fundamentalist partitions in hospitality: though not identical, the youlfie’s narrowing of frame (tourists’ zeroing on themselves as touristic landscapes) will inform and be informed by tourist markets that prioritise profit. Then market deregulation will produce an even narrower vision in inhospitable reactions of localities to such intrusion. To follow Eliade’s sociological religious terms, the getik (visible) partition of experience acquires the qualities of retentional memory for the locals/hosts, who renounce film-pilgrims’ menok (invisible) repetition of selfie rituals through resentful activities. This uncompromised perspectival dualism matches Barber’s (2003) suggestion that the colonisation of human lifeworlds by infotainment – what he calls ‘MacWorld’ – has produced its Nemesis in Jihadist-like reactions set to destroy its perceived roots in the West. Simply put, the trend of globalisation-as-consumerism and anti-globalisation-as-anti-consumerism reinforce each other in contexts of neoliberal deregulation. This is what Lapointe et al. (2018) and Korstanje (2013) attack in their exploration of the function of sustainable development in tourism: not only has it become an ‘Empire-like discourse’, especially when it is carried by international deterritorialised institutions, it has fed into tangible policies of neoliberalisation that reinforce market dominance over the values for which travel activity once stood.

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The economist Friedrich Hayek’s utopia has instituted the rule of the jungle: the weirder the innovation in ‘experience’, the more controversial its ethical core, the more the tourist subject may feel compelled to engage in experimentation (see Buda’s 2015, pp.84–86 excellent analysis of spatio-temporal collapses in conflict zones due to tourism). This has become prevalent in contexts of urban neoliberal structuration, where social polarities and the plurality of everyday mobilities (of work and leisure as well as suffering and play) open some opportunist fissures for markets. The Joker staircase in the Bronx is exemplary of such contemporary urban transformations of space, in which conceptions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are spontaneously hybridised. It is contentious to claim that the Highbridge staircase is ‘public space’: as Marcuse (2004) notes, such definitions stumble upon issues of ‘ownership’ as a category managed by different experts in the absence of policy mechanisms on public space. In the Bronx (stair)case this should involve at least local administration and (inter)national tourism legislators, if not also local spokespersons. The absence of these mechanisms means that individualist interpretations of usability and access destroy local inflections of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989b). Silverstone (2007) aptly articulates this in terms of mediation as a process of transformation, which constitutes everyday life’s possibilities and sustains our common humanity. He proceeds to add that ‘no ethics of, and from, the everyday is conceivable without communication’, which should enable an ethics of care and responsibility (Silverstone, 2002, p.761). To connect this observation to the second selfie genealogy from Chapter 5, we should consider how the Bronx staircase assumes the function of a contact zone in Pratt’s ([1992] 2003, pp.6–7) eloquent analysis of the symbolic places of interaction between colonisers and colonised. This contact is spurious, as it compresses the Bronxer stance to a fictional (cinematic) ‘then and there’ that suits the cinematic tourist gaze, thus depleting the host’s historical presence (Lindsay, 2011, p.25). Currently, youlfie tourists can parade the space as ‘cosmopolitan citizens’, while locals are demoted to non-human quantities with no opinion on its use. Such material hybridisation, which thrives on the instability of meaning (of space usability) – what can be termed a discursive ‘deficit’ – has real-life consequences. Indifference triggers the production of ‘islands of certainty’ (Davie, 2013), within which, while communities of interest and affect attempt to restore stability in the face of anomic behaviour, they promote insularity and inhospitality. We walk the domain of neoliberal structuration, in which idea(l)s of entrepreneurial innovation, unrestrained individualist ‘freedom’ and neo-Darwinian competition shape the social (Evans and Sewell, 2014, p.63). This shaping of the social cracks open a fissure in contemporary public cultures, as these are named and claimed by different groups, including city dwellers, fleeting film

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pilgrims and digital flâneurs. The fissure’s base is aesthetic: on the tourist guest’s side, it borrows from techniques deployed in camp art as contestation of fixed notions of beauty and the will to good appearance. However, unregulated contexts of hospitality displace such articulations to the normative domain of life satisfaction, recognition, reciprocity and wellbeing (Nickson and Warhurst, 2007). Rather than being beneficial, this change is catastrophic for the integrity of the human spirit and its ability to create and enjoy its creations. These are the things tourism and hospitality philosophies promise us when we engage in relevant activities corresponding to visiting cultures or teaching others about our own (Veijola et al., 2014; Tzanelli, 2020b). On the host’s/city dweller’s side, the fissure borrows from phenomenologies of whiteness and masculinity, among other things, to express some basic desires and needs for social recognition, acceptance and civic participation (see Hollinshead, 1999b, p.279 on the ways tourism contributes to social ‘disarticulation’; Ahmed, 2007, p.160 on whiteness and the production of social space; Jamal, 2019, p.85 on the perspectival dualism of recognition and distribution in tourism; Sheller, 2018, p.33 on mobility as a form of justice). It is worth stressing that this phenomenological construction of identity is cemented by a poisonous homophobic and sexist repertoire of representations, mostly mediated on the TV and the internet. Suffice it to stress at this stage that a clash of ‘interpretative horizons’ – by analogy of Koselleck’s (1985) horizon of expectation and experience – produces a dangerous affective rift in tourism’s public cultures. The rift between the intrusive and insensitive youlfie guest and the reluctant host emplots problematic affective scenarios not of tourism (on tourist emplotment see Fjellman quoted in Hollinshead, 1999b, p.275) but inhospitality. To diagnose the affective danger through a contemporary (post-secular) modification of Nietzsche’s (1966) conception of ‘transvaluation’, I place emphasis on the host’s plea for peace of mind and uncluttered space in their everyday life. This is an oligopticon I retrieved from actual Bronxer testimonies, so it has some ethnographic validity in my research on Joker-induced inhospitality. The elimination of spatio-temporal disturbance is placed at the centre of the remaining analysis as one of the absolute legal and moral preconditions for the healthy maintenance of hospitality (à la Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000). From now on, talking about camp aesthetics will not suffice. Instead, we must trade campness for avant-gardism to consider how the employment of the Nietzschean ‘artistic lifestyle’ has been co-opted by the capitalist machinery in cities (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). Heretofore my analysis of youlfie incidents in the Bronx will be guided by what Eve Chiapello (2004) calls the ‘artist critique’ and Boltanski and Chiapello (2018) consider as a progressively weakened reaction to capitalist destructions of sociality.

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ECOLOGIES OF VIOLENCE: FROM INSTITUTIONAL INDIFFERENCE TO REACTIVE INCIVILITY As ‘freedom campers’ or alternative Joker travellers/pilgrims, youlfies are hypermobile subjects in a neighbourhood afflicted by social immobility. Not only is the Bronx exemplary of racial segregation at the heart of America’s dreamland, its political neglect invites markets to dress its macabre life expectancies, homelessness and poverty in exotic cinematic garments. It is uncertain if the Joker’s character was consciously inspired by such geographies of misery, but his habitus potential for the tourist gaze is unquestionable: it generated a tourist site, which may not be adhering to the rules of ‘tableaux’ simulations of the past but borrows from this niche’s characteristics to connect celebrity to place (Rojek, 1993, pp.136–137). The origins of the ‘Joker villain’ in the 1940s comics culture endorses this connection to tableaux simulation: the original Batman #1 villain was a terrifying character, who was most likely inspired by Conrad Veidt’s performance in the 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs (Andrae, 2011). An adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1896 novel with the same title, the film would eventually be placed in the horror category, even though its plot was closer to the swordfighting or ‘swashbucklers’ Romantic ‘knights’ genre. The bizarre classification can be explained, if one considers the influence its director, German Expressionist filmmaker, Paul Leni, had on its gloomy Gothic style and the terrifying physical appearance and performance of its key actor, Veidt. Above all, however, the film and the derivative comics character, were the mythopoetic product of a global economic crash that would lead to two consecutive World Wars. Both the Veidt/Gwynplaine physically deformed character and the mafia-like 1940s Joker projected the collective social angst of a very troubled humanity that had lost its moral compass and was ready to endorse the most heinous acts against its own members. What is often read as a ‘tableaux’ accommodation of mere coulrophobia or fear of clowns in the subsequent design of the Joker (e.g. see Weiner and Peaslee, 2015, p.xvi) may in fact be hiding the human fear of collective social death due to irreparable corruption. Because the world was undergoing a difficult existential phase, its cultural archetypes began to express polarised visions about the future. This simultaneous attraction to and abjection of physical and moral ugliness, as well as its connection to narratives of death, produced thanatourism or dark tourism. The Bronx pilgrimage spot makes more sense when placed in these events, which were definitely enshrined in the popular cultural biography of the Joker character. The cycle of tourist site-production does not end there, but spirals into the formation of an unclassified ‘heritage’ site (and on this, we may think again of

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the 3D change of pilgrimage into tourism in the study’s diagram). One obvious result of the colonisation of the Bronx staircase by youlfies, who mix with, and often stumble upon locals, commuters and Bronx children en route to school, as TV channels and dedicated journalists report (Eyewitness News ABC7NY, 21 October 2019; NBC New York, 25 October 2019), is the exacerbation of a clash between leisure and civic horizons. Turning a staircase into a heritage spot (through its discursive interpellation as local territory) is a reaction to what Foucault calls a ‘franc port’. This referred to the genealogical justification of economic zones as spaces of exception, with zoning technologies and/or international regulation (Ong, 2006; Best, 2007; Dean, 2013). The symmetrical but antagonistic development of youlfie tourist markers with inhospitality markers orchestrates such a political theatre in which an unremarkable area becomes exceptional. Sylke (2008) notes that the hybridisation of urban spaces has had obvious social and cultural impacts on the right to the city. These include an ‘attack on the street’ as a place of civic assembly, the closure of hybrid black/ white working/middle class places due to shrinking user support, and the transformation of automobility nodes into shopping centres that redefine user capacity on the basis of income. Highbridge residents have already expressed concerns that this overtourist surge may attract developers and lead to a rise in housing prices in an area already suffering from poverty (NBC New York, 25 October 2019). We can agree that selfie cultures and practices are not an ‘evil’ social development, but their embeddedness in cultures of institutional ‘adiaphorisation’ is. Originating in Bauman’s attempt to comprehend how in surveillance, ‘systems and processes become split off from any consideration of morality’ (Bauman and Lyon, 2013, p.8), adiaphorisation exemplifies the apportionment of indifference and punitive control in contemporary regimes of population management. The contemporary global order reflects intersecting regimes of mobility (Salazar and Schiller, 2013, p.189) that in turn signify access to citizenship rights (Cresswell, 2013; Bianchi et al., 2020), and cosmopolitan belonging (Franquesa, 2011). Place now these regimes, which in the case of the Bronx involve its residents’ racialised control, next to the de- or non-regulation of selfie tourism. The latter can become emblematic of ‘narcissistic regimes’, by analogy to the shrinking of conventional welfare regimes in the developed nation-states of the world (as I repeatedly stressed in Chapter 5, selfies can also act as tokens of love, sociality, bonding and ‘good ideas’ – Guattari, 2014). Sociologist Sylvia Walby (2018), whose work focuses on welfare regimes, makes an important observation with regards to the gendered hermeneutics of market development: where notions of ‘fixed capital’ and ‘technology’ dominate such operational interpretations, female labour is discriminated against. Indeed, female labour is mostly interpellated in terms of ‘human capital’ by neoliberal markets – a thesis presenting similarities with hospitality

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studies concerns about the discriminatory feminisation of hospitality in tourist contexts (Odih, 1999). The Japanese context of gendered mobilities supports this thesis up to a point, but calls for modification when markets realise that they have to work with the creative capital of female labour to develop digital products. The modification is offered by sociologist Fiona William’s work on intersectionality and social recognition – an issue of which state bureaucracies admittedly fall short. However, unlike Walby, Williams suggests that to address the question of recognition, we must view the erosion of social citizenship as an intersectional issue and account for parameters besides those of gender, such as race/ethnicity, disability and class (Williams, 2009, p.13, pp.20–22, p.26). Such erosions have two parameters: the first connects participation in a consumption-dominated commons to the right to place and both to what Tuan (1996, p.445) termed ‘fields of care’. Such fields are not instantly generated in touristified spots for tourists: care emerges with the input of time that they spent in a particular place and through the relations that they develop with its dwellers and fellow travellers (Bærenholdt et al., 2004, p.42). The second parameter involves the function of ‘place image’ (Shields, 1991, p.60) in the emerging film-tourism economy, which is mostly generative of economies of hospitality and ecologies of good and/or bad imagination. The account of selfie genesis in gendered practices of worldmaking that I provided in Chapter 5 is complemented in the present chapter with a more intersectional appreciation of misrecognition in hospitality. As Hartmann et al. (2019, p.7) stress after Livingstone (2009), listening to all participants is not just ‘a noble claim…but also a precondition for breathing life into the ethical claim of mediation’. Here I have no choice but to first macro-socialise my focus, so as to consider the global geopolitical hierarchies against which the value of individual nation states and their administrative units are measured, and how this measuring has a knock-on effect on the status of individual citizens within national economies (Tzanelli, 2011, pp.110–111). Therein lies the nation state’s dishonesty: whereas it imposes fiscal-cum-moral obligations upon its voters, sanctioning all entrepreneurial creativity that borrows from ideas legally demarcated as someone else’s ‘property’, its operators do not hesitate to turn to the same practices without licence when need arises (Herzfeld, 1992, 2005). I employ William’s and Walby’s observations analogically in the context of selfie tourism mobilities in the Bronx, where money-making and deregulated technological networking are prevalent: the host (or rather, those reluctantly interpellated as ‘hosts’), who provides the tourist selfie economy with its ‘human capital’, is bound to suffer discrimination in service provision. Such discrimination does not even enable the management of private life as a version of what Japanese legal frameworks recognise in publicness; it passes the worldmaking keys on to business managers, who are at loss as to how to

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keep the peace while making money, from sheer lack of situated knowledge. It will soon become obvious why I do not commence this analysis with theories of migration and racism but feminist analyses of those and gendered discrimination. The Bronxer style of inhospitableness draws on gendered repertoires of resentment and sexist or homophobic imagery to discredit cinematic tourist youlfism. Let us now have a brief appraisal of the impact of adiaphorisation on host– guest relations in the Bronx. The fact that locals post videos of cosplay tourists cluttering up the neighbourhood to express their dismay, or tweet ‘PLEASE DO NOT COME HERE’ to prospective visitors (Heritage, 25 October 2019), generates interesting epistemological observations on contemporary changes in Meadean interactionism. Posting such videos online is a technique of ‘exposure’ mimicking two formalised ways of seeing the world: the first is that of modern institutional surveillance, which enables Bronx residents to counter-adiaphorise at the expense of youlfies, rather than institutions and tourist business (Korstanje, 2017, p.12). This heteroscopy (the scrutinisation of others) turns the damaged bond of reciprocity and care that we associate with hospitality into a public social fact – by analogy to tourism’s status as an ‘international social fact’ that shapes cross-cultural, regional and state policy and practice (Lanfant, 1980). The second approximates that of an art connoisseur, who has developed a ‘good eye’. Notably, the good eye ‘looks mostly at the site of an image itself in order to understand its significance, paying most… attention to its compositional modality’ (Rose, 2012, p.52). As Tuan (1997, p.183) notes, there is a qualitative difference between apprehending the visual qualities of an environment and the feel of a place, which takes significantly longer to acquire. It seems then that the Bronxers’ interactive experience with film tourists can turn them into distant spectators of their own abode. On the one hand, this mediatised practice invests in ‘serious’ ownership discourses, which it juxtaposes to youlfie camp triviality. This repurposes the youlfie aesthetics of distance to discredit such tourist pursuits as uncivilised behaviour. On the other, the practice of posting such ‘incriminatory evidence’ transcends the borders of the visual field, turning the videos’ forgotten landscape/background (the Shakespeare-Anderson Avenue in the Highbridge neighbourhood) into a land(mark) with history for the Bronxers, ‘a sense experience that can be learned and cultivated in serious compositional terms’ (Marks, 2000, p.23). Much like the digital imagery of computer games (Nitsche quoted in Rose, 2012, pp.57–58), the practice restores a set of rules currently missing from selfie tourist practice. It does so, by borrowing and adapting from the very Western institutional practices that perpetrate racial, gendered and class discrimination in modernity. Posting protest posters replaces conventional tourist signposts (e.g. MacCannell, [1976] 1989; Beeton, 2016) with inhospitality markers, where the authorities and markets display indifference

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towards fair regulation of territory and citizen welfare. Consolidated on ideas of heritage and ownership, such activism also bears all the characteristics of what Herzfeld (2019) called ‘subversive archaism’. This is a repertoire of performative acts that challenge the moral authority of modern Western variations of bureaucratic power connected both to the state and to markets and closely related to middle class orderliness and style. One may even argue that the Bronxers’ activist repertoires display ‘flamboyant traditionalism’ as a style of loyal citizenship, where both state officialdom and tourist traffic seem to demonstrate only disorderly habits. A third effect this ritual has as a violent production of factuality involves the emanation of ‘intermediate time’, or the blending of multiple temporal sequences in a single composition (Keightley, 2012, p.221). Keightley (2019) argues that this factual production can be embedded in place as this is shaped by embodied performances, but I would argue that the self-same process can lead to further multiplication or destabilisation of place as a real geographical and memory node. Thus, in the Bronx’s case, the murder of tourist pleasure is sealed, as the Joker selfie-pilgrimage spot in Highbridge is elevated to a religious site on Google, thus simultaneously losing its specificity as a Bronx location. Again, this has real-life consequences for the neighbourhood’s residents. Though temporally now mobile, the ‘Joker stairs’ become spatially diluted into media generalisations of locality, which undermine the recognition of the host’s more stable lived temporal experience. The problem for the interpellated host is, in the words of a young Highbridge resident, a rising feeling of ‘disrespect’, as residents cannot use the stairs to go to work or school ‘out of fear of appearing in photos’ (Vad, 22 October 2019). This self-exclusion from photos is not identical to the Bronxers’ desire and expectation to be ‘in the frame’: the latter is composite of having a say in the design of their everyday mobilities. Intriguingly, then, we deal with a Bronxer compositional discourse that is at once stylistically adapted to Western vision and phenomenologically critical of Western ocular violence: from the perspective of a journalist or a tourist, the stairs may be a getik token of local mobility, but in the Bronxers’ hearts and minds it is part of their existential territory. Perhaps we need a more nuanced approach to pilgrimage than that proffered by Eliade’s dualism: Guattari (2014, p.6) uses the term ‘existential territory’ to discuss the relational processes involved in productions of subjectivity. Such processes are in fact pragmatic, he says, because they involve decisions that happen ‘on the go’, hence in entanglements of one’s milieu, socius and incorporeal ecological dimensions. Entanglements matter: in reality, the staircase’s getik mobilities (of work, everyday sociality and so forth) have joined the Bronxers’ existential territory from the moment they were claimed by youlfies. Now the selfie tourist hotspot stands for a sociable getik-menok for locals, who have taken to the digital and print arms to exorcise tourist newcomers.

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Bronxer protest is directed against the Western machineries of representation that Joker youlfies use in their pilgrimage, as these turn them into examples of ‘primitive or tribal’ societies (this is also what Jameson (1986, p.68) designated as the ‘Third World’). The rebels expose how American mainstream culture has been entangled with other world cultures into the culturally homogeneous effect of capitalism (Ahmad, 1992, p.95; Bennett, 2000, pp.177–180). The Bronxers’ demotion to landscape ambience in youlfie journeys into demented crime, portrays their privately experienced pluriworld as a single world of exotic adventure. No understanding is displayed of the place’s multiple historical trajectories – in fact, no youlfie has displayed an interest in exploring those in their invasive visits. Currently, youlfies get out of Ubers, take photos of the stairs, and then leave the neighbourhood without actually contributing to the local economy. The habit projects a desire to never leave the space of the tourist bubble because stepping outside the holy ground of Joker pilgrimage involves contact with the profanity of poverty, crime and justified now local resentment toward spoiled middle-class ‘brats’. The trope of ‘disrespect’ is ubiquitous in local activism, with posters on lampposts and walls along the staircase alerting visitors that ‘it is disrespectful to treat our community and residents as a photo opportunity’ (Vad, 22 October 2019). Such activism sits rather uncomfortably next to local economic need. The Office of the Bronx Borough President Ruben Díaz Jr. tweeted: ‘When you visit, check out http://​ilovethebronx​.com and @TheBronxTourism and learn about some of our borough’s many fine attractions and restaurants…and spend some $$$ in The Bronx! (@rubendiazjr).’ Possibly in support of such commercialisation, Diaz also posed on the staircase for a selfie that featured in a short report in CBS News (22 October 2019). A Bronx resident’s shouting ‘Pick a side’ (Vad, 22 October 2019) at an indulgent youlfie acquires symbolic resonance: it speaks of the widening gap between the staircase’s everyday users and its leisurely visitors. At the same time, however, it instantiates a conservative communitarian discourse (e.g. Delanty, 2009a, pp.66–70) that refuses to accept contemporary compositions of space as a hybrid territory. Delanty (2009a, p.69) notes that this stream of communitarianism, which he terms ‘governmental’, assimilates discourses of communal belonging into policy regimes of discipline and classification. Conservative/governmental communitarianism’s naming-and-claiming tactics in everyday popular cultures are reminiscent of worldmaking techniques of nominalisation of space as tourist destination (Rothman, 1996; Hollinshead and Suleman, 2018). However, the usurpation of such discourses by the disempowered local players, who want to defend ‘their own territory’ against the prospective organisation of cinematic-tourist business on their doorstep, ends up favouring authority. Accusations of ‘theft’ may provide an excuse for the intensification of control of what are deemed to be ‘problematic social groups’, in the interest

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of the market economy, with responsibilities ‘increasingly enforced very much to the detriment of individual rights’ (Creaney and Hopkins Burke, 2015, unpaginated). Anti-tourist communitarianism assumes a recuperative function in contexts of intense, uncontrolled and rapid tourismification. It is not exactly unforeseen that the Bronxers’ tactical articulation of nostalgia takes the form of damaged reciprocity: ‘the virtue that has allegedly decayed always entails some measure of mutuality…that has been, perhaps irreversibly, ruptured by the self-interest of modern times’ (Herzfeld, 2005, p.149). Thus, it is dissatisfaction with the circumstances of this forced hospitality that activates such nostalgic recuperations of what never really was, not genuine yearning for the past (Davis, 1979). Equally tragically, as the Borough President’s twitter attests, no reflections on future potentialities for thriving (Davis, 1979, p.16; Boym, 2001) are communicated to the media by locals. The neoliberal mantra of successful individualism is translated into collective communitarian achievement in the marketing of the Bronx, which colonises the space of memory-work and identity reconstruction (Habermas, 1989a, p.143, pp.150–151; Bennett et al., 2009). There is a separate discussion to have on whether this lack of reflexivity is real or performative – in fact, the content of the Desus and Mero episode gestures towards the latter, but with a large dose of resentment. The Joker’s ‘black spot’ is translated into a black temporal hole, set apart from sustainable strategising for the Bronxers’ collective welfare. As aptly noted by others (Grey Ellis, 24 October 2019), memes are always trading real for fictional context. Van Dijck (2012) explained that social relations are not just mediated any more, but especially in digital media contexts, they are brokered by such media. A relevant observation to make involves how social media’s performative aspects may generate crime opportunities benefiting from routinised social activities: posing in clown costumes in the famous staircase can ruin one’s day and pocket, or lead to tragedy, if one does not know that the site is associated with petty crimes. Though relaying the locals’ resentment for youlfies in a comical way, local show Desus and Mero presenters disseminate a more complex message to audiences, condensed in the episode’s title ‘Don’t Get Robbed at the Joker Steps in the Bronx’. Mero’s vicious response to an ecstatic youlfie explaining on camera that he visited the site because he ‘wanted to feel and experience’ like the Joker, is: ‘No you do not’ and ‘You can’t shoot a movie, where I once smoked angel dust’ (#DESUSandMERO #BodegaHive, 21 October 2019). The sarcastic tone of utterance constructs an ‘inside joke’, which is primarily addressed to Bronxer audiences in the auditorium and at home. Mimicking another interviewed female youlfie in a ‘retarded’ style that appeals to the old history of black comedy sustains an effective incongruity between the joyful attitude of the youlfie and the reality of racial violence, while also narrowing

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down the joke’s inherently polysemic nature (Billig, 2005, pp.30–31). Equally important is the use of openly racist or slang terms between Desus and Mero in the studio that reinforce conviviality and familiarity (Hewitt, 1986; Weaver, 2010) in the face of what is perceived by Bronxers as a patronising, if not racist, tourist attitude. Building on local tourismophobia, Desus and Mero construct a discourse on objectivity in terms of local knowledge, familiarity, an alternative expertise and ‘trained judgement’ (Emmel and Clark, 2011, p.9). Youlfies are dumb to think they can perform a pilgrimage in their minds next to pickpockets and criminals. This attitude conflates perceptions of cosmopolitan irony with justified sarcasm. As Lockyer and Pickering (2008, p.809) caution us, humour is not necessarily diametrically opposite to seriousness ‘not least because it can have serious implications and repercussions’ – especially when some forms of humour involve assumptions about gender, ethnic or other minority culture roles and identities. To reinforce a point I made in Chapter 4, all jokes are in-group jokes with spatio-temporal limitations. This is also attested in Lockyer and Pickering’s (2008, p.810) exploration of British comedy styles with the advent of neoliberalism. However, if to appreciate the funny side of a joke, you must belong to the group that makes it (Bergson, [1900] 2005) – laughter does not just generate a bond (Boskin quoted in Hart, 2007, p.6), it asserts its communicative presence – then we must know the aesthetic and political rules of the group. Both youlfies and Bronxer broadcasters are joking, but their styles share only fragments of a shared dark narrative, which they re-arrange in very different ways indeed. Without offering justification for such behaviour, a tourism expert should consider the local perspective in the context of mobility justice and ethics (Sheller, 2018; Jamal, 2019). This provides a different form of selfie, which extends the scopic to the non-representational realm of affect (Thrift, 2007, 2009): space is in the mind, the heart and the eye in complex geo-aesthetic combinations of being and becoming. This selfie adheres to the principles of a blended getik/menok materialist phenomenology, which deconstructs the Joker tourist pilgrimage in an adjacent to youlfie (in terms of technology) but independent (in terms of technique and optics) media frame: that of a locative TV show. Nasty in its language, Desus and Mero is nevertheless a record of the invisible aspects of whiteness, as these are imprinted on a small piece of landscape (the staircase) (Ahmed, 2007) that is colonised – or recolonised, if we draw on the Bronx’s biography – by tourist hordes (Turner and Ash, 1975). In the Bronxer frame, the ‘right to offend’ by joking is modulated by the joke’s hierarchical movement: it matters ‘whether humour kicks socially up or down, whether comic aggression is directed “at those who are in positions of power and authority”’ (Pickering and Littlewood, 1998, p.225; Lockyer, 2009).

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In this respect, we deal with the politics of movement (Adey, 2006; Cresswell, 2006, 2010), which can push human subjects up or down, right or left, but always in relation to their horizons of social opportunity. Again, depending on perspective and performance, liquid modernity and mobility may mingle in various ways, here producing what Weaver (2007) calls ‘liquid racism’, there ‘liquid sexism’ or ‘liquid disablism’, and so forth. American culture is replete with such micro-frames of experience, from which I first single out the racial one: the county’s initial colonisation by white populations for settlement purposes. This is translated by contemporary Bronxers into a transient colonisation by film tourists – a development exceeding unrefined traditional ‘cultural imperialism’ frameworks. Note how my shifting sociology of perspective re-appropriates the tools of a heritage-tourist gaze, equipped with modernity’s quintessential scientific technique of ‘on-screen dollying’ (Lundberg et al., 2017). This heritage is what I translated into a mechanical eye, which allows me to inspect the filmed sites from all possible angles and ‘afar’ (Tzanelli, 2016, p.79; Szerzynski and Urry, 2006). Nevertheless, Desus and Mero’s narrowing of frame is not enough for an appreciation of cinematic tourist technology’s impact on all the existential territories involved in Joker’s cultural assemblage of production and consumption. For every mocking Bronxer there is a hurt tourist/pilgrim – and, let us not forget, a director and two in our case screenwriters, who tried hard to avoid such frictions. A suspicious hermeneutician, or someone who favours implementations of discourse in visual culture, would not miss the fact that Joker director Todd Phillips complained in interviews about the ways the ‘Woke culture’ ruined the comic genre, pushing him away from making movies favouring laughs, such as the Hangover ‘trilogy’, Old School and other such creations catering for audiences enjoying the edge between offence and self-reflexive mocking. Stressing the ubiquitous presence of comedy-haters who attack artists on social media, he concluded that ‘it is hard to argue with 30 million people on twitter. You just can’t do it, right? So you just go, “I’m out”…I think that what comedies…have in common – is they’re irreverent’ (Erbland, 1 October 2019). The Joker’s darker slant comprised a defensive anticipation of attack that an artist cannot ward off. Indeed, adopting a hermeneutics of suspicion, pushes me to turn our rolling camera to a particularly disturbing spot of Bronx’s cultural background, blurring the foreground of play that Phillips favoured in his career. My bokeh brings ‘Woke’ into focus, an African American vernacular term referring to the maintenance of awareness on issues of racial and social justice found in William Melvin Kelly’s 1962 article ‘If you’re woke you dig it’ and Barry Beckham’s play Garvey Lives!, which calls for the awakening of black folk (in Garvey, 1923, p.5). Popularised through ironic teen memes and the Black Lives Matter movement (Workneh, 16 May 2016), Woke’s contem-

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porary usage originates in the 2008 soul singer Erykah Badu’s song ‘Master Teacher’, which includes the phrase ‘I stay woke’, meaning stay vigilant and responsive to political matters (Hess, 19 April 2016). The song went on to create a #StayWoke community hashtag and Badu even mobilised it to demonstrate solidarity with the Russian feminist group Pussy Riot (ErykahBadoula, 8 August 2012). Woke culture’s anti-racist message and Phillips’ selection to place Arthur Fleck’s home in the heart of the Bronx make one wonder what the ‘Joker’ really represents. Some indication of how to answer this question was provided in Chapter 4, where I discussed the explicit connections of the archetypal trickster/joker to histories of authority, the presents of intersectional inequality and the futures of utopian worldmaking. Veering between narcissistic fantasy, drugless hallucination and the desire to project an (elaborately antique white) comic identity, brings Arthur a tad closer to the enforced personas of colonised black subjects of which Frantz Fanon (1963, p.32) spoke in Black skin, white masks. Although Phillips reportedly admitted an antipathy to ‘Easter Eggs’ and surprises in his moviemaking, his reference to Woke culture when he was pressed to discuss his take on gun violence is not coincidental. It may not be injudicious to suggest that the Joker’s allegory of welfare retrenchment and working-class suffering is also a critique of America’s racist culture. This violent culture generates such anti-racist backlash, that Phillips previously had to distance himself from British comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen’s medley of slapstick and crypto-political satire in his impersonation of fictitious wannabe gangsta rapper ‘Ali G.’, and fictitious Kazakhstani television reporter ‘Borat’, in whose early stages of creation Phillip was involved (see Chapter 3). Whilst ‘Ali G’s’ impersonation was critiqued on account of the fact that Cohen, an educated middle-class Jewish comedian, borrowed from street style uneducated Black-British ‘yoof’ stereotypes (Howells, 2006; Lockyer and Pickering, 2005), ‘Borat’s’ homophobic, misogynistic and racist character outraged many different constituencies, including the Kazakhstani government that accused Cohen of representing the country in transnational media circuits (e.g. Sanders, 2007, p.249) as an uncivilised place at a time it was trying to rebuild its national identity. The Kazakhstani government’s concerted attempt to rebuild the national image against the film’s popularity, which generated international curiosity about Kazakhstani culture, conflicted with its subsequent encouragement of international cinematic tourism, which nevertheless harmed the country’s harmonious economic development across different sectors (Pratt, 2015). Kerry’s (2016) study of Kazakhstan’s post-Borat image re-building around a multi-million dollar ‘Heart of Eurasia’ campaign, involving the production of feature films on the country’s mythic past, provides another significant element for the present study’s analysis of Joker tourism.

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This element brings us closer to a conclusion on cosmopolitan friction’s ability to illuminate ‘reality’ in bokeh styles. Let me enter other disciplinary grounds and methods to explain better – for, when it comes to questions of tourism-mobility justice, we can always draw on ultra-realist frameworks, with a caution that they cannot replace phenomenologies of experience. One of the most densely populated boroughs of the city, the Bronx is the home of various minority cultures, including Hispanic-Latino (56.4%) and African American (43.6%) groups; in addition, the languages spoken at home are at about 60% non-English, as the borough continues to receive high numbers of immigrants (Bronx County/Borough, Population Census, 2019). With its ethno-racial genesis mostly connected to amalgamations of Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and especially Jewish Americans, whose numbers have dwindled only in the late twentieth century, and with the addition of black immigrants from other parts of the city, the Bronx became notorious for its high crime numbers committed by ethnic gangs in the 1920s and remained so for a long time. A rapid decline in the quality of life from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, which was connected by some scholars to the destruction of existing residential neighbourhoods, and the creation of high-rise residential blocks and instant slums (Gonzalez, 2004), continued until more recent decades, when an attempt to revitalise the borough saw new construction projects and increased cultural activities. It is questionable whether this ‘revitalisation’ lifted disenfranchised populations from poverty and crime – or, equally importantly, whether it addressed practical and existential questions pertaining to its development into a ‘pluriverse’. A multi-dimensional ‘cultural complex’ comprised of collections of disparate communities organised as distinctive worlds is very difficult to manage (Escobar, 2018). The Bronx is currently characterised by low owner-occupied housing unit rates (19.6%) and high numbers of people without health insurance under 65 years of age (8.9%) (Bronx County/ Borough, Population Census, 2019) – a tragic reminder of the cinematic Arthur’s post-ObamaCare status in New York’s neoliberal jungle. Thus, Desus and Mero’s mediatised reactions relay more than the Bronxer’s egg-throwing aggression against youlfies. At a basic fundamental(ist) level, they contribute to a slide in decivilising action, which is not that dissimilar to feudal violence and the assertion of consanguine social closure, where ‘civilised rules’ seem to apply only to those with the right income and connections. For Highbridge residents, the attitude is justified on the basis of lack of ‘consent’, which should be obtained by youlfies wishing to explore the space residents use in their everyday lives – a complaint prevalent also in slum tourism contexts (Bednarz, 25 April 2018). Overall, the Bronx’s tourism/inhospitality human ‘figurations’ become dependent on an institutionalised now sense of injustice that perpetrates cultures of resentment and

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shame-rage (Ray, 2018, p.58). Such institutions featured as homely TV shows that promote crude jokes. However, ‘deeper seeing’ into structural forms of violence informed by indifference (Córdoba Azcárate, 2018, p.12) or rigid border surveillance (Jones, 2016, p.8; Bianchi et al., 2020, p.300) reveals that local prejudice is informed by institutionalised scopic regimes no less: the very weapons of conservative/governmental communitarianism. It helps to recall Hollinshead’s (1999a) suggestion that tourism acts as a form of surveillance over other worlds, in that it sustains a pliable mix of normalising discourse and universalising praxis. By privileging certain understandings of heritage in and through tourism, professional and institutional tourism worldmakers achieve location governance through forms of judgement that is fashioned as an unquestionable (policymaking) truth. The same rationale informs Urry’s (1990, 2002) earlier definitions of the ‘tourist gaze’ as the gaze of the middle-class professional or tourist, who travels the world to collect impressions. But note how the Bronxers practice in their reactions ‘mimicry’ (Bhabha, 1994, p.86): they produce their subjectivity as situational hosts in styles similar to that of their absent policymakers and their annoying youlfie guests. However, their mockery of authority carries a certain menace that comes with ambivalence, as their use of mediatised tools of power suggests. The televised mocking of tourism youlfies connects to sexist and homophobic articulations of the guest that recuperate conventional discourses of cultural contamination. These are ubiquitous in instances of spontaneous and unregulated tourismification of locations, which served as filming spots (on which see Tzanelli, 2006, 2007, 2018; Veijola et al., 2014). The mocking’s enunciator becomes a distortion of the Bakhtinian joker/rebel of premodern rural lifeworlds, whose purest aesthetic form once served as the romantic hero of national intimacies (Bennett, 2000, p.180; Bernard-Donals, 1998, p.118). Such enunciations borrow from the repertoire of fantasies concerning sexual abjection and fear of communal ‘bodily penetration’ by a peculiar hermaphrodite stranger, set to destroy social bonding. A countervailing externality open to multiple resignifications (Mouffe et al., 1992, p.9), this ‘sexual pervert’ allows for the constitution of a reactive critique concerning the loss (to an externality: the youlfie tourist) of an equally fantastic ‘political autonomy’. The tourist’s akrasia (Dann, 2015 – see also Chapter 5), which is, after all, the time of the affluent classes’ festival, has already desisted local time through appropriations of ‘local’ place. Heretofore I note that, for the ‘host’, it has also appropriated the symbolic space of the festival, which used to belong to the lower social strata. With this role-swapping, it is the local working-classes’ turn to accuse privileged youlfie tourists of ‘immunity to political [masqueraded as sexual] assimilation’ (Igrek, 2018, p.249) and appropriate old bourgeois accusations that ‘common people’ fail to observe neatly ordered structures of being and behaving (Lancaster and Di Leonardo, 1997, p.371).

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PRISONERS IN/OF OURSELVES: INDIVIDUALIST IMAGINARIES OF (IM)MOBILITY It seems then, that the tourist’s carnivalesque behaviour is repurposed by Bronxers in a game of discursive interpellation of the ‘other’, who enters ‘our territory’ without permission. I would note that, at the time such reactions hit the digital press, this interpellation had already made its way into the ways the Joker was read by audiences and critics as a sinister endorsement of contemporary radicalistic tendencies. Phillips must have felt frustrated that, after his attempt to circumnavigate Woke enemies of the comic genre, he had landed in the middle of another controversy. Whereas there has been no Woke political correctness activism against the film, the popcultural policing of its creative content switched to a neighbouring domain: several critics noted that, due to its alleged ‘sympathetic’ representation of the anti-hero, the Joker may be empowering an overwhelmingly male subculture that goes by the label of ‘incels’. We have now arrived at the causal core of the murder of pleasure, with which I commenced my spatio-temporal genealogy of the selfie. Whilst the Bronxer other can be posited as the victim of bureaucratic rationalisation, with the right to protest, the tourist is placed in a position from which they cannot respond. Thus, behind the mantle of this mobile identity, the figure of the affluent tourist assumes the qualities of the subaltern that we find in self-immolating Indian customs. A common rational conclusion would present Joker youlfies as privileged; however, in the existential territory of the Bronxers they are treated as the subaltern archetype of cosmopolitan friction: sexually abject, feminised and sinful. Across millennia and remote lands, the subaltern subject retained a femininised stigma, which continues to organise the global heterosexual matrix. As proposed in the previous section, cosmopolitan circuits of discursive mobility across time and space merge variations of victimhood with subalternity in politicised portmanteaus, producing a subject with no legitimate voice. This objectified subject, which must always die to observe the unwritten rules of heritage, is the bokeh’s carefree and leisurely voice. The term ‘incel’, which is a portmanteau of the words ‘involuntary’ and ‘celibate’, comprises what the Southern Poverty Law defined as an ‘online male supremacist ecosystem’ spreading across several digital communities involved in hate speech and crime (Southern Law Poverty Centre, 2019). Although incels are mostly heterosexual males of no identified ethnic makeup (Ling et al., 24 April 2018), and their culture’s genealogy is matriarchal, their psycho-biological self-narration shares a consistent set of characteristics across different cultures and countries: they cannot connect romantically and sexually to a female partner, even though they desire such connection, they are

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socially very shy and often suffer from a form of cognitive or psychological disability (Tait, 8 May 2018). Inconsiderate portrayals of cognitive difference may include generic incel representations of people with autism or Asperger’s syndrome – a connection not necessarily based on medical facts. Contrariwise, it is proven that most incels suffer from acute forms of narcissism, which alternate with self-loathing, suicidal thoughts and tendency to organise mass murders. Incels are mostly white men from the developed world – something which provides us with a particularly pertinent link to sociological analyses of serial killers as misogynistic blue collar or middle-class men suffering from some form of perceived social misrecognition, isolation and mental instability (Grover and Soothill, 1999). The connection of incel activities to patriarchal structures, which admittedly can also relate to expressions of white supremacy and racism, resembles the distortion of Japanese male-led calligraphic pilgrimages into otaku digital introversions, mostly externalised as anger and violence against the loved ones. The Devil is in the detail, so we must heed Southern Law Poverty Centre’s (2019) observation that ‘white supremacy and male supremacy [become] one and the same’ in the nationalist incel’s concept of the ‘white shariah’, which endorses the rape of white women by white men as the only way to save the white race, ‘since white women tend to leave white men for their non-white counterparts, thus making violence necessary’ (on racist and sexist extensions see Nagle, 2017; Salter and Blodgett, 2016). The subculture’s spread and diversification in the West begs the question of its specificity: is it a variation of Eastern philosophy’s recourse to gender norms to articulate ideals of cognitive strength and skill or is it a sui generis contemporary manifestation of damaged cosmopolitanism? When examined as a bokeh, the friction produced by each instance appears to be different in volume and lucidity. However, the objectives of both cultural formations share in androcentric supremacy and the formation of feminised subalternity. Both bokehs are bad in that they have harmful or criminogenic extensions; both draw on the nomothetic nature of communitarianism; and both are ‘good’ in that they are interesting cases to examine. The interesting aspects of an incel bokeh relate incel pathologies to broader constructions of a self-enclosed reality that sustains ‘digital travel’: incels consider the digital public sphere as their own territory to traverse. In this territory they can reinstate their lost self-worth, often by engaging in criminal activities against women, ranging from bullying to threatening, sexual luring by using false identities and humiliating by posting intimate pictures of women without consent (Crofts et al., 2016; Douglas, 2016; Lenhart, 2009; McGlynn et al., 2017). Claiming the internet as the ‘manosphere’ should thus be examined within the broader context of gender-based victimisation, and what Yar and Drew (2019, p.579) see as ‘an anti-feminist backlash that has licensed a

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“toxic masculinity” which embraces the use of sexual humiliation and abuse as an instrument of patriarchal control’. As an ecology of bad ideas (Guattari, 2014, p.18) ‘incelitis’ commenced its life in ‘INVCEL’, a mailing list set up by Canadian university student Alana for loners of any gender, who had never had sex, or failed to have a relationship (Taylor, 30 August 2018). Alana, who soon realised that her own case of loneliness was connected to her unacknowledged queerness, distanced herself from digital and on-site activities of incel groups after the 2014 Isla Vista Killings (University of California, Santa Barbara) committed by Elliot Rodger – one of the four major cases of incel-led mass murders in recent North American history (Baker, 1 March 2016). Rodger left a lengthy manifesto and a series of YouTube videos, discussing his involuntary celibacy and desire to avenge his rejection by women (Dewey, 27 May 2014). Notably, his elevation to sainthood amongst global incel communities, which still share memes of his face superimposed onto Christian icons (Branson-Potts and Winton, 26 April 2018), provides an unsettling association with selfie pilgrimages in the Bronx. The crisis of self-presentation and sexual acceptance plaguing incel psychology is manifest in the incels’ willingness to undergo painful cosmetic surgery even in their genitalia (e.g. penis extensions) to become more attractive to potential female partners (Jeltsen, 7 June 2018; Myers, 6 July 2018). The obsession distorts the tendency of the cosmopolitan traveller to interrogate the cultures of visited destinations and preserve their forms in images, in which travellers themselves participate autobiographically: sensitivity to novelty translates into an almost surgical technique of beautification resembling that of the magical realist artist (Gale and Wan, 2018, p.58). The endemic Darwinism in the incels’ understanding of sexual selection, or their pronounced support of raping women rejecting their advances, is also coupled with systematic sharing of selfies in online platforms, such as Reddit, through which they connect with their follow ‘sufferers’ (see Attacked by Snakes [18 October 2019], a YouTube collection of ‘incelfies’). Such selfies, which are supposed to portray the pictured subject’s pain of rejection, are unique tokens of narcissistic nihilism and stand in diametrical opposition to the playful intentionality of tourist youlfies. It helps making what may seem at first a spurious connection between misogynistic incel tactics and the ancient cultures of the trickster: the trolling victimised women suffer by such men in online environments has been repeatedly explored as the resurrection of the trickster as an online community character (Campbell at al., 2002, 2009). The symbolic shape-shifting character of these digital tricksters has also featured in analyses of confidence cybercrime (Tzanelli, 2016, pp.100–102; Yar and Steinmetz, 2019, pp.131–142). It is important to mention that Phillips’ Joker character did inspire some public incidents that could easily be labelled terrorist by police, which had no way of distinguishing between humorous performance and real threat to public safety.

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One of those is Missouri Jeremy Garnier’s streaming of himself on Facebook in a Joker suit, with appropriate clown makeup and a voice emulating Arthur Fleck’s intonation. Garnier filmed himself having a monologue addressed to 2,000 viewers while driving to a local mall and smoking a pipe: ‘Yeah, I can’t be inebriated when I am planning on, you know, killing a bunch of people. It’s not something you can do. I’m live on Facebook right now. I’ve got like nearly 2,000 people watching me’ (Simpson, 5 March 2020). Incel selfies externalise a damaged honne striving to transform into a tatemae, by means of picturisation. They are affective signs, certain of their significatory content and thus intended for those who had experiences matching the experiential profile of the so-called ‘blackpilled’. This notorious ‘black pill’, which is ‘swallowed’ by incels, symbolises their alleged marking by biological determinism, fatalism and unattractiveness (Beauchamp, 16 April 2019). Its folksonomic origins are traced in the Matrix film franchise (The Matrix, 1999; The Matrix Reloaded, 2003; The Matrix Revolutions, 2003; The Matrix 4, forthcoming, 2021). More specifically, it originates in the first film’s call by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to Neo (Keanu Reeves) to select between taking the ‘blue pill’ (for incels, this will transpose the male subject to a world of illusions, as blue-pilled guys treat women as equals and ask them out in conventional, non-pushy ways) and a ‘red one’ (to enable the male subject to allegedly see the world as it is: ‘red-pilled men are alphas who have seen the light and seized the sex/power/glory owed to them by their biology’ [Dewey, 27 May 2014]). This dichotomy formed the most important crossroads in which a ‘men’s rights movement’ ever stood. The blackpiller’s sexist fatalism and the redpiller’s hegemonic masculinity are currently juxtaposed to the bluepiller’s hopeful support of women’s rights and the possibility of imagining and actualising a world in which they can hold the reins of power. Much like serial sex killing (Soothill, 1993), the incel’s supremacist ecology seems to articulate central themes in certain existential territories of modernity, which undergo ‘decivilisation’ (Elias 1996, p.401). That such territories or ‘realms’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1996, pp.110–120) normally partake in worldmaking activities that we associate with leisure, travel, tourism (Hollinshead and Suleman, 2018) and cultural-industrial image-making (Ray, 2018, pp.63–64) may not be self-evident, but their effect on reality is pernicious and a cultural constant in Western modernity. Decivilisation is a de-developmental process of societies lacking a healthy revolution in human mores due to the incremental naturalisation of inequalities and the unquestioned adoption of forms of social violence against difference (Elias, 1996, p.66). Decivilisation partook in the most studied case of mass murder in human history, the Holocaust, which was based on a societal failure to acknowledge the power of structured rationalisation to endorse indifference. Such indifference to suffering banalised evil among common people, who

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would subsequently turn into the executors of a programme of ethnic cleansing (Bauman, 1989). As a militant group of ‘detached [from mainstream society] outsiders’ (Elias, 1996, p.220), the incels enact a similar programme that gives meaning and purpose to their life. As an existential nihilist, the incel reaches his individualistic completion through the self-righteous belief that his problems originate from an external source, a self-reliant active female agent. This self-verified certainty or belief resists reality and truth tests to develop to a variation of fundamentalism. Part and parcel of the ways Western modernity empowers the human subject to scrutinise its highest values, and thus devalue them, this fundamentalist variant of existential nihilism accelerates Western civilisation’s self-destruction (Nietzsche, [1910] 2013, paras.689–690). As a self-educating experience enlarging the human subject’s cultural horizons (Meethan, 2001; Franklin, 2003, 2009; Hollinshead, 2007), travel can be a mechanism of aesthetic cosmopolitanism (Lash and Urry, 1994, pp.256–257; Beck et al., 1994; Szerszynski and Urry, 2006) and successful individuation in societies that endorse cultural cross-fertilisation (Swain, 2009). Travel produces a plethora of both ‘consciously-led’ and unconscious ‘banal instilments’ of alternative perspectives about sociation, connectivity and significatory alignment with cultural alterity (Hollinshead and Suleman, 2018, p.203) – the opposite of what is purported by incel foundationalist self-enclosure. For any critical scholar, to suppress such potentialities of pedagogical flourishing so as to nourish damaged male egos amounts to what Pollock (1988) identified in the patriarchal closure of spaces of feminine creativity in art and should ring a diagnostic alarm. Ironically, by crossing civilisational borders, incels’ schizoid agency succeeded where sane epistemology failed: its visceral violent script of ‘hybrid masculinity’ (Ging, 2019) – a masculinity that failed to achieve hegemonic standards and thus resorted to selective mixing of violent self-affirmation, self-loathing and perceived victimisation in the hands of an insensitive Woman-other – accurately spoke of critical tensions shared by different civilisations emerging, thriving and declining at different times and in different places. Although cutting through Eisenstadt’s (2000, 2001, 2003) ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm without actually reproducing it, the incel/otaku case of decivilisation belongs to cosmopolitan debates in political and social theory, which, so far, have failed to address the potency of popular culture to create varieties of social bonding in any organised manner. Incel schizoid discourse projects innate inability to articulate desire for its object, the Woman, who, surely, as enactor of a consumerist prostitution of the self, is the cause of all social ills. Perhaps Deleuzeans and Guattarians should reconsider their genderless critique of the Freudian rejection of desire and the Marxist subjection to production–consumption from this particular angle more carefully. Nietzsche’s ([1910] 2013) ‘will to power’ and Benedict de (Baruch) Spinoza’s

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(1985) ‘conatus’ as the impulsive drive to live have also been consistently translated by authority both into means of patriarchal-militarist domination and a critique of consumerist aesthetics. The false given here is that, surely, consumerist satisfaction and commercial success must be desired by women only, whom poor ‘incels’ have to satisfy. Silencing the biopolitical landscape on which life, vitality and human creativity are constantly re-inscribed, also erases the basis of cosmopolitan inequality in mutual respect and recognition. The Western manosphere’s porosity is remarkable and infinitely creative in its destructive engagement with the other sex. By ‘manosphere’ I refer to an internet-based organisation of misogynistic ideologies sustained by far-right and alt-right groups. The phenomenological dimensions of the manosphere stretch back to nineteenth-century androgenic ethno-symbolisms (Enloe, 1990, p.45; Walby, 2006, pp.124–5; Tzanelli, 2008, pp.154–155), which instituted national(ist) loyalties in gendered forms (Bederman, 1995). The Kantian Warrior of cosmopolitan imaginaries is one such link often discussed without any clear understanding of the complexity it introduces in the relationship between political ethics and the aesthetics of creativity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.27; Buck-Morss, 1992, pp.6–8; Tzanelli, 2020a, Chapter 5). Genealogically, there is a problematic link between manliness and civilisation as Europeanisation and/or westernisation, which emerged during the crystallisation of nationhood as an ideal of belonging. The internet era produced global flows that both strengthened and weakened such imaginaries of belonging. Because of its deterritorialised form, the internet brings together ideas, groups and causes with an alarming speed (Urry, 2007; Castells, 2004, 2009). The internet may be a gift to humanity, but it can turn into a weapon of self-destruction, because of its ability to replace the ‘molar human machines’ of sexual desire with the desire of the molecularly organised soldiers of capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, pp.33–35). Standing between the need to belong and the desire to have a voice, the human subject finds themselves wrapping – or rather, ‘warping’ – inwards, in endless self-reflexive tests. There is a troubling connection between this decivilising genealogy and that of incel cultures. It is not coincidental that, in the urban argots of poor immigrant neighbourhoods, in which gang machismo and performative grandstanding are badges of belonging, the selfie tourist’s televised ego is understood as the mirror image of the ‘inself’. Desus and Mero mock together with their local audiences tourist youlfies as such inself/incel beings of diminished judgement, unwanted by their resurgent hosts and literally and symbolically stuck in a single spot (a staircase). This immobile spot places the youlfies’ cultural horizons through simulations of criminal derangement in an illusionary picture frame. It is impossible to think of a clearer definition of incel immobility. ‘Inself’ is a popular cultural corruption of ‘incel’ replete with intentionality, as it enables associations with self-reflection, mirroring and body image. The

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metaphor of mirroring is pertinent: mediatised urban vernaculars use the term ‘inself’ in proclamations of abject homosexual acts (wL Element 2, 21 June 2019), positing the inself as a male who ‘curves his cock downward over his taint into his ass’ (wL Element 1, 21 June 2019). Much like the process of taking a selfie, beautifying it and uploading it on Instagram to be seen/experienced in yet another temporal frame, the ‘language-in-use’ nature (Sandywell, 1998, p.197) of the inself reveals the tourist as a subject ‘out of time’, or at least out of sync with their social surroundings. Similarly ‘inselfilia’ is the ‘deep affection towards the opposite gender version of yourself’ (Blue_Sphinx 19 October 2014), and ‘inselfity’ is an intersection of ‘insecurity, panic and narcissism that drives one to constantly seek validation by posting endless selfies on social media websites’ (P-DEW 15 August 2014). The latter explicitly connects to Joker selfie tourism mobilities, if one removes etiological and contextual interrogations of the act itself, as homophobic enunciators usually do. Equally important is the emergence of the term ‘in-self joke’ to describe jokes one has with oneself, which is apparently ‘typical of people with no friends or imaginary friends’ (ToastedUnicorn, 1 December 2013), and ‘inselfitis’ as a ‘mental condition’, whereby one refuses to accept different perspectives on a given subject and believe their own version of reality is the only correct one (Stallworth, 7 April 2006). Thus, in Desus and Mero’s examination of Bronx Joker pilgrimage, selfie tourism mobilities are pronounced as a grotesque visualisation of Psychopathia Sexualis. This visualisation allows the host to articulate their own identity through practices of negation (Foucault, 1998): unlike their cyborg guests, who pose in contorted dance styles to take selfies, they are ‘straight’, decent folk, minding their own business. While talking about the new selfie mania and noting that often people are freezing cold in the notorious staircase, Mero jokingly adds in the TV show: ‘what about having sex in the [Highbridge] stairs’? (#DESUSandMERO #BodegaHive, 21 October 2019). Sex and selfies begin to merge into a discourse on selfism not that dissimilar from Lasch’s (1991) sexist thesis in the ‘culture of narcissism’, in which decently brought-up people cared for by their mother in healthy heterosexual families are the only way to ‘immunise’ communities from inselfitis. The ‘epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality’ (Butler, 1990, p.vii) masks – but always complements in constitutive, rather than auxiliary ways – folksonomies of communitarianism, as these assume various class and ethno-racial forms of utterance (on class see Lamont, 2000). We should not miss a telling slide in definitions of inselfitis to realist descriptions of problematic mental health. The definition provides a shortcut to Arthur/Joker’s psychotic outbreaks and total disconnection from reality, accelerated by poverty, social misrecognition and lack of healthcare. From this angle, my camera dolly cannot fight through the ‘opacity of violence

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to think from the standpoint of [someone] else’ (Kant, quoted in Giroux, 2015, pp.155–156). Not only do digital/televised urban conversations of the Desus and Mero type pronounce selfie cinematic pilgrims as a sort of viral onset, inducing a complex psychosomatic affliction that connects to the neoliberalisation of urban intimacies, they politicise them as a particular form of fundamentalism. Structurally speaking, enunciations of popular cultural heautoscopy as contagious solipsism bear striking similarities to Islamophobic rejections of the other who conceals herself (behind a hijab or a burka) to practice suspect mystical rituals with foreign divinities. Much like the Sufi pilgrim, who looks inwards to find a connection with Allah, the youlfie secular pilgrim looks inwards to find a connection with late modernity’s hidden God: the human/individual monad. These are not random associations, but meaningful relocations of established nihilistic genealogies, such as those featured in Oswald Spengler’s ([1926] 2013a) ode to Nietzsche in The Decline of the West, to contemporary contexts of consumption and production. Spengler’s racist and sexist schema of artistic, political and religious development and decline in various civilisational patterns, identified ideological iconoclasm in Faustian nihilism, indifferent curiosity in Apollonian nihilism, and complete withdrawal from the commons in the Indian nihilist enfolding into the self. As role-playing is allocated across youlfies and (Highbridge) Bronxers by discourses of the Market God, Spengler’s mythological categorisations acquire ‘transcultural currency’ anew. Youlfies can be accused of nihilist conformity, alienation and hedonistic narcissism, but also praised for their commitment to be stupidly open to experimentation, questioning certitude for things and absolute ‘knowability’ of what is valuable (Crosby, 1988; Novak, 2017; Pratt and Tolkach, 2020). But Bronxers can only be cast as the opposite of such subjects endowed with creative passion, certain of what is real and what has to be eliminated: such nomadic enfolders into a narcissistic self. I will return to these observations in the conclusion, because they open up unexplored avenues for popular cultural investigation. The paradoxical parallel between old and new pilgrimages is fulsomely recorded in Giroux’s (2015, p.155) scathing attack on selfie culture in the age of corporate surveillance, via Honneth’s (2009, p.188) lamentation of individualist nomadism as ‘an abyss of failed sociality’. Yet, we must be cautious here, as, if not contextualised, this attack approximates the Bronxer script of wrongful conspiracy. Bronxers may feel that, in secretive collaboration with their techno-cultural god, neoliberal youlfies succeed in trafficking alien culture/place in the cybersphere, or in eliminating the host’s lifeworld while enjoying ‘digital intercourse’ with their hypermodern selves. This sort of perspective posits sarcastic comedy as an axiological response to tourism mobilities: tourists are completely devoid of answerability and responsibility towards the other (Bakhtin, 1990); hence,

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they are unable to fully reveal, or understand, themselves as composite subjects beyond their picture (on Bakhtin and answerability see Sandywell, 1998, p.200, p.203). As enactors of a constant metensomatosis of movie characters into their body, they suffer from a separation of their picture from their inner self. This sustains the ethics of a market truth, in which ‘worlds of tourism’ are worlds of surveillance, turning policing by outside powers into constant self-checks (e.g. Hollinshead, 1999a). To recapitulate then: the Bronxers’ digital/televised counter-coding allows the reluctant hosts to condemn tourist hedonism, the unrestrained consumerism of suffering mediatised in movies and youlfie ‘pornoviolence’ (Ray 2018, p.63). Appropriating both the tools of media representations of American social pathologies and the medicalised gaze of tourist professionals, it aims to discredit disinterested leisure as a sign of Western decay, sloth and lack of empathy for the other. However, I do not wish to adopt the naïve stance of a volunteer or educational gazer or actor embracing suffering alterities. Rather, I attempt to explain how a much-praised by critics and cultural-industrial institutions work of popular art produces a chain of unintended consequences (fan thanatourist/risqué cultures, local inhospitality, local media counter-coding and hostility towards mobile strangers) by geolocating its principal anti-hero, who instantly canonises it as ‘influential’. This popular cultural art also enters the ‘great time’ of myriad critical and uncritical readings in youlfie mobilities, which facilitate communicative struggles, spatio-temporal configurations (Bakhtin, 1981, pp.250–253), and self-other relations (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.2–10).

A TIME-TRAVELLING JOKE: SPATIO-TEMPORAL MORPHISM IN LATE CAPITALISM The Bronx selfie tourism incidents are not just emblematic of what Hollinshead (1999b) discussed as the ways in which public culture is invented in different formal registers. They refer to a more complex phenomenon in late capitalism than the invention or interpretation of culture by governments. Instead, we deal with the ways public cultural space emanates from the activities of capitalist networks that control global representational mechanisms (cinematic and digital). This web of effects, intricately weaved by dark tourist markets into physical locales, appears to produce a series of frames. Human populations are functionalised in such frames as sign readers for and of an upcoming Joker industry (see also Tzanelli, 2007 on ‘sign industries’). Such representational activities are, for example, interpreted by their consumers (film tourists) anew, through embodied performances (in filmed sites) independently from the skilled tourism practitioners. The ‘sorting’ and ‘advertising’ job of such practitioners, or their authorising by central state power in the form of deregulated

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tourism, comes after the spontaneous establishment of such sites as spaces in which popular cultural performances are enacted. Complete lack of regulation becomes complicit in institutional lack of care, recognition and distribution of social goods, which relate to the elevation of tourism to a shared heritage and culture, as well as its contribution to the strengthening of hospitality rights and duties. This problematic emplotment of hospitality fosters the destruction of a particular type of diversity: that of perspective. Forming two rival camps, youlfie tourists and unsolicited hosts articulate two irreconcilably opposing viewpoints on what constitutes ‘public’ and ‘private’, even in contexts of hybrid activity and mobility, such as that of a public staircase. Such disarticulations of reality unleash destructive affective forces in contexts of cultural interaction, which cast particular perspectives as ‘objective truths’ (Danston and Galison, 2007, p.197). Perspectival disarticulation weds the production of new public cultures to the production of affective iconoclasm: the destruction of the opposing camp’s (youlfies) play and wellbeing. The coin’s reverse (to hospitality care) side is coated by the destructive forces of the local ‘reverse’ or ‘mutual gaze’ as this is fixated upon youlfie pilgrims (Herzfeld, 1992, p.61; Gillespie, 2006, p.348; Maoz, 2006, p.225; Urry and Larsen 2011, pp.214–215; Tzanelli, 2015, pp.157–158). Filled with the contempt and resentment readily and often wrongly attributed to its guests, this gaze is as anti-reflexive as what it claims to rectify behaviourally and psychosomatically in its unwanted visitors. Likewise, however, I wish to reinforce that, behind this destructive dualism of good host/bad guest or vice versa, we may find that, at least in the Highbridge controversy, the true legal target is the state’s adiaphorisation in the fair distribution of place, and the markets’ willingness to let it turn into ‘abstract space’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p.73): a replica of New York’s ‘islands of enclosure’ for the privileged (Soja, 2000, p.299). Reinforcing the urban culture of terror, which is feeding on crime and poverty (Wacquant, 2004), such decivilising processes (Ray, 2018, pp.49–50) trap both the cocooned youlfies and the resentful Bronxers into dehumanising scopic regimes that destroy variations of wellbeing. We should not confuse scopic technologies with equipment such as cameras used by tourists. Here we discuss discursive practices that may or may not communicate with such equipment. Such confusions are promoted in radical critical theories that confuse ways of seeing with technological materialism (Ellul, 1964). Most of the worldmaking constructions of Highbridge place and culture presented in this Part of the book are products of the digital and journalistic machine, which encloses multiple voices, political interests and cultural desires. Thus, my framings end up being meta-frames of events, as these are articulated by worldmaking agents with a polemical eye and occasionally an appetite for sensational storytelling. In this respect, my composite picture tries

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to organise nihilism into a meaningful and useful methodological technique for the study of contemporary popular culture, without claiming absolute ownership of a reality that is fragmented in many phenomenological nodes. A separate ethnographic scrutiny of the Highbridge area may uncover different perspectives on hospitality and more supportive local attitudes to youlfie tourism than what acquired ample media attention. Indeed, even my critical journalist voices have captured a couple of local voices that expressed a wish for further tourist development. Undoubtedly, this desire lends itself to further critiques concerning the development of neoliberalism into a monologue on modernity. But this is the theme of a separate study.

PART III

7. Conclusion: unlocking certitude The paradox that, like art, everyday life acquires meaning through what Dilthey (2010) called ‘lived experience’, but this experience can only be revealed though its objectification in literature, artistic production, human behaviour and social institutions is not a new observation. However, the struggle to escape this objectification is certainly a feature of the modern mobile human, who is searching for an epistemological immediacy that objectification does not provide. In other words, even the nomad, who believes in endless movement, may enact a pilgrimage that will afford this visceral encounter with the world as it is, and thus eschew the separation of their knowledge from experience altogether. The irony of this desire, which is of ontological significance, because it produces the pilgrim, is that it always manages to hide the process of objectivisation without obliterating it. All meaning making needs this externalisation to complete a hermeneutic cycle, and all experience is unmediated up to the point at which it is recognised as a process with hurdles, unexpected turns and even more surprising outcomes. To deny that this is what we do every time we want to understand reality – what Bauman (1978, p.230) calls the urge to control meaning – means that we allow our physical and inner journeys to enter a discourse over which we have no control and also no monitoring. Discourse is another external process (to our desire this time) of classification into categories, managed by institutions that assign us with roles and duties which we may never have wanted to have. Discourse can interfere with a healthy hermeneutic cycle, because it introduces in its processes what institutions want to leave to the unconscious and unprocessed domains of civic engagement. For any critical engagement with real-world problems, regardless of their mobilisation of techniques of free association, dérive or otherwise, artists and non-artists need to master an awareness of the workings of discourse. Awareness that we enter processes of interpellation, labelling others and ourselves, or thinking of reality in particular frames, helps to avoid the fundamentalist entrapments that certitude sets to us as individuals and members of a community of interests, identity or affect (Althusser, [1976] 1984). At the same time, it is chimeric to think that we can simply transcend mediation in a world in which even our significant others are reached through it. The real problem has to do with the repression of glaciality in the time we make and take to construct or participate in representations and self-presentations. Silverstone (2002, p.774) sees in such modes of engage138

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ment a moral obligation: certitude and certainty that things are just so produces islands of unshakable conviction, commonly associated with ideological immobilities, such as those produced by terrorism, xenophobia, tourismophobia and conservative communitarianism. Such immobilities find their mirror image in those who speak from privilege to legitimise their own mobility as a universal occurrence (Skeggs, 2004, p.60). I wish to relate these abstract observations to contexts of socio-cultural friction, where different versions of reality based on social or cultural identity and status come into focus. The contact zone between these versions, which ultimately inform the nature of different lifeworlds, is also the area in which methodological bokehs emerge. Every bokeh’s emergence tells a new story about the state of human encounters, as well as what obstructs cross-cultural understanding, solidarity and exchange. All four key chapters of this study are dedicated to unpacking real instances of such obstruction of desire to mobility, communication and cross-fertilisation through travels of the mind, digital travels, physical tourism, but also artmaking and community-making. And there are mutations of the same obstructive structures across different horizons of expectation, so it may be wrong to assume that artistic elites do not deal with institutional pressures and ideological impositions. The difference is in the intensity with which such impositions assert themselves, here blocking particular pathways to individual and collective growth, there eliminating any kind of growth (see Bauman, 1998, p.86 on stratification and citizenship; Adey, 2017, pp.116–130 on degrees of mobility and the politics of difference). Where artists, such as Phillips and Phoenix have a repertoire of diplomatic adaptations to the system of cultural production, Bronxers can only follow the tide of tourismification. Where white male art is structurally supported by states and markets, Eastern feminine creativity is downgraded to a craft with an auxiliary function to capitalist mobilities. Where selfie tourists turn into neoliberal youlfies in digital neoliberal spheres, but can just switch their camera off and go on with their private lives, Highbridge residents are condemned to both enact and accuse such tourists of an inselfitis that mirrors and reproduces unhealthy Western psychopathologies. The methodological bokeh comes into being where hermeneutic movement stumbles upon such structures of identity and action, to not unearth already existing obstacles and barriers to exchange, but build them into worlds originally formed as zones of cultural cross-fertilisation (Goodman, 1978, p.14). Bauman’s (1978) conclusion that meaning is relationally produced conforms to the Bakhtinian notion of dialogicity that attends to pluriversal specifics (Bakhtin, 1984, pp.48–50). Davis (2020, p.35) sees in such relationality Bauman’s understanding of ‘active utopianism’, whereby the shared understanding of futural activity is followed by a genuine mastery over the object and objectives of speculation. It is, however, worth stressing that in

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such reinforcements of communal direction towards a better future, the onus of work falls on those endowed with a creative imagination. This is not the rational human that produces policies of categorisation – at least not if they cannot envisage futures through a conversion of personal stories into public collective biographies. Some such individuals work outside the fringes of bureaucracy but articulate its machineries in humanist or posthuman terms better that those working in technocratic domains. Bakhtin, who had no knowledge of posthuman ethics, noted once that the encomium (the civic funeral and memorial speech) stands among the most potent forms of biography bequeathed to us by ancient Greek culture. This is not just the deceased individuals’ ‘internal chronotope’ (that is, the time-space of their represented life), but pre-eminently their ‘exterior real-life chronotope’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p.131). In the latter, the ‘representation of one’s own or someone else’s life is realised either as a verbal praise of a civic-political act or as an account of the self’ in and for society (ibid.). Hence, not only does the posthumous individual chronicle enter the long duration of memory, its factual veracity contributes to the negotiation of truth-making and the production of social knowledge, as is also the case with Bauman’s (1978) thesis on consensual hermeneutics. There is another conclusion following this ambiguity, which is inherent in the human attraction to the politics of chaos. As much as actors in chaotic politics appear to have turned the world upside down, their participation in ritualised violence cannot avoid the promise of a structured future (Turner, 1969). All rebellions aspire to institute alternative realities, hence new orders, which promise to be better and more just than what they overturn. As such, their ethos and their leaders adhere to the poetics of hope, a new transmodern order of potentially planetary dimensions (Dussel, 1985, 2013). The human tendency to dream of and fight for the realisation of a counter-world is entwined with mythologies of the trickster and the jester, whose cunning and often crooked intelligence ‘shows the real world off as what it is or seems to be’ (Koepping, 1985, p.194). The ‘methodological trick’ when considering the potency of such mythological archetypes is to recognise that they may serve the ideology of order and sameness when they do not embrace the values of sacrifice. It has been argued that only a suffering messiah, who is ready to sacrifice themselves, truly works for the actualisation of a revolution (Bataille, [1957] 1986, p.63). In this respect, regardless of what one thinks about Arthur Fleck’s portrayal of mental disability, narcissism or social dispossession, his design as a progressive narrative achieves precisely this aim. From a person who laughs uncontrollably (a neurological disorder) and plays pranks to make others laugh as a professional – that is, from buffoonery – he begins to gain self-awareness as a socially abject person – that is, affirms the nature and borders of a civilising process, only to eventually help to overturn it (Radin, [1956] 2015). Indeed,

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the notion of the sacrifice is more pliable than its association with physical death or dispossession: it is the end of a state of things so that a new reality emerges. There are factual, realist and symbolic world reversals, among which is that of a subject’s coming into being through artistic ascesis. Hard experiences during the years of buffoonery and comedy often turn artists, such as Phillips, into pilgrims. While acknowledging their participation in ritualistic carnivals, these artists begin to adopt a different, more detached perspective in their favourite counter-worldly projects. Comedy transforms into tragedy. Within the new genre’s structures, the artist employs the tools of the comic genre only to relay what one may call a ‘New Hyperobjectivity’. As an artistic project or movement, the ‘New Objectivity’ was contextually bound to the years of the Weimar Republic. Its aim was to relay in art the need to order the world, generate social symmetries and, in its most conservative renditions, help maintain the political status quo (Gale and Wan, 2018, p.15). Frantz Roh defined ‘post-expressionism’ on the ways artists decide to focus on – and simultaneously perceive – particular objects from all those available to them. This act of selection, he said, ‘is already an act of creation’ (Roh, [1925] 1995, p.16). Where expressionism had shown a preference for the fantastic, the New Objectivity prompted artists to look at the real world with all the horrors revealed in the works of George Grosz and Otto Dix, but with new eyes (ibid., p.17). The New Objectivity was the offspring of social unrest following a World War that had left humanity questioning its ability to not just grasp reality, but also make it liveable in harmonious ways. It is not coincidental that the eyes that record and relay contemporary horrors belong in the Joker to Arthur Fleck’s malformed personality. Arthur is the perfect subject for Roh’s thesis, in that he ‘breathes the rhythm of history’ and relays the human subject’s oscillation ‘between devotion to the world of dreams and adherence to the world of reality’ (Roh, [1925] 1995, p.17). His crippled sexuality and hallucinatory engagement with fantastic interlocutors make him a metaphor of social disempowerment in America’s wasteland (McCormick, 1994). Arthur’s transformation into the Joker is thus an allegory of how complete loss of touch with reality leads to its amplification, bringing into focus its lack of order and empathy (Gale and Wan, 2018, p.94). Late modernity’s ‘New Hyperobjectivity’ achieves a tragic progress in the realm of human desire to be free of structural constraints. Because its human proponents, mostly artists who are de facto involved in cultural industrial projects and hence capitalist mobilities, want to preserve a sliver of autonomy in their work, they transform themselves into an early version of the traveller. Such travel subjects may even regress to the early styles of hermeticism that Adler (1989, 1992, 2002) recognised as the progenitors of modern forms of travel/ tourism. The departure from reality only serves to amplify artistic engagement

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with it, but from another perspective – Roh’s ‘new look’ – which focuses on the principles of massification and abstraction. We are in the domain of new mobilities induced by hyper-globalisation. For philosophers of movement, ‘hyperobjects’ are understood as things massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. A ‘hyperobject’ for example can be something like the biosphere, or a world-changing event, such as a viral pandemic, and can involve temporalities different from the human ones, as it often exceeds those of the human life span. However, humans are able to perceive of hyperobjects in spaces arranged around interrelationships between the aesthetic properties of objects (Morton, 2013, pp.1–3). Such philosophies attribute a realist quality to the manifestation of hyperobjects, as they relate them to what Morton called the ‘end of the world’: the removal of microspheres of experience so that a massive sphere is assembled through them in ways better understood by humans through experience. The small mediates and makes the massive accessible, in however flawed ways. But there is also a downside to this process: the ‘New Hyperobjectivity’ in artistic narratives of culture and society pronounces the latest phase of globalisation through hypermobilities of practice, ideas and custom that remove specificity from the picture and transform experience into a marketable product to sell anywhere. This is the new cosmopolitan era, which has its positives and its negatives: it can promote healthy dissociation from passive nostalgia and localism, and produce new forms of solidarity that hybridise place, identity and belonging. The ways this movement conveys how the past begins to serve different purposes in the hands of artists, tourist pundits and disenfranchised communities as a future template points to a structural similarity: the specific turns into massive and abstract, hence an enterprise in removing place specificity in the name of commercial success or community building. By the same token, the ‘New Hyperobjective’ feeds into the violence of abstraction (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999) to produce worlds that are not necessarily living lifeworlds, or to actually overlay those with the patina of time out of time. In such theatres of violence, an artistic epic or a personal selfie travel into a physical destination or the cyberspace always run the risk of being co-opted by institutions or capitalist organisations as objects (Taussig, 1997; Tzanelli, 2020a). Because of their extension and spread through temporal and spatial dimensions that humans can grasp only through the aestheticisation of relations, including social relation, hyperobjects are very marketable. To survive the violence of abstraction, humans feel the need to favour their microspheres of experience: to support neighbourhoods against anyone and anything introducing novelty that may lead to further abstraction. The result of this violence is further fragmentation of reality into small enclaves. People and their communities have to navigate cultural and societal constraints strategically, so that they can both belong to hyperobjective formations and retain their own habitats of meaning,

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in which reality merges with the ordinary magic of sociality and friendly interaction. The bridge between reality and ordinary magic, which often manifests itself in films, is not disconnected from the utopia of the good life. In one of humanity’s darkest moments, on the eve of World War II, when artists were persecuted and self-exiling as a protest to Hitler’s oppression, Max Beckmann noted how the new officialdom was making an effort to ‘lower the happiness and the way of living of mankind to the level of termites’ (Gale and Wan, 2018, p.96). It is debatable whether history simply repeats its toxic recipes in new wine bottles in contemporary contexts, such as those that I attempted to unpack. What can be better defended as a proposition is the tendency of human creativity in art, in popular culture and in everyday rituals to endow places and culture with some ordinary magic. The purpose of such endowment is to create experiential bridges, which ‘lead from the visible to the invisible’ (Beckmann quoted in Gale and Wan, 2018, p.97). Material circumstances connect to the aura of experience, producing affective worlds that bind humans. Therefore, my methodological proposition that a comparative study of pilgrimage into different epochs and contexts uncovers structural likenesses in the manifestation of cosmopolitan frictions is also constitutive of practising ‘hope’ as more-than a utopian endeavour. It is a practice that makes hope real and active in the world. If so, then a sociological study of cosmopolitan friction and its bokeh moments provides a valuable methodological portal into those domains of human experience, in which the world reveals itself in ways inaccessible to structured, rational apprehension. Otherwise put, not all is lost (in translations of situated experience), and we can always try (and succeed) to comprehend reality from the standpoint of others.

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Shepherd, K. 26 September 2019. ‘Outrage is a commodity’: Director Todd Phillips bashes ‘far left’ criticism of ‘Joker’. The Washington Post. https://​ www​.washingtonpost​.com/​gdpr​-consent/​?next​_url​=​https​%3a​%2f​%2fwww​ .washingtonpost​.com​%2fnation​%2f2019​%2f09​%2f26​%2ftodd​-phillips​-joker​ -outrage​-culture​-gun​-violence​-critics​%2f (accessed: 25 March 2020). Smith, N. 24 September 2014. Getting direct with directors…no.13: Todd Phillips. BBC. http://​www​.bbc​.co​.uk/​films/​callingtheshots/​todd​_phillips​.shtml (accessed: 15 April 2020). Tait, A. 8 May 2018. We must try to understand how unwanted virginity leads self-hating incels to murder. New Statesman. https://​www​.newstatesman​.com/​ 2018/​05/​we​-must​-try​-understand​-how​-unwanted​-virginity​-leads​-self​-hating​-incels​ -murder (accessed: 16 April 2020). Taylor, J. 30 August 2018. The woman who founded the ‘incel’ movement. BBC News. https://​www​.bbc​.co​.uk/​news/​world​-us​-canada​-45284455 (accessed: 16 April 2020). The Baghdad Post. 14 October 2019. Designer puts character of ‘Joker’ in Iraqi demonstrations. https://​www​.thebaghdadpost​.com/​en/​Story/​44296/​Designer​-puts​ -character​-of​-Joker​-in​-Iraqi​-demonstrations (accessed: 27 May 2020). Whitlock, C. 3 October 2020. The style transformation of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker. The Hollywood Reporter. https://​www​.hollywoodreporter​.com/​news/​joker​-style​ -transformation​-joaquin​-phoenix​-1243670 (accessed: 24 May 2020). Workneh, L. 16 May 2016. Jesse Williams wants you to ‘stay woke’ in new film on Black Lives Matter. The Huffington Post. https://​www​.huffingtonpost​.co​.uk/​entry/​ jesse​-williams​-stay​-woke​-documentary​-black​-lives​-matter (accessed: 27 March 2020). World Entertainment News Network. 19 January 2005. Phillips quit Borat after receiving death threats. http://​www​.contactmusic​.com/​starsky​-and​-hutch/​news/​phillips​ -quit​-borat​-after​-receiving​-death​-threats (accessed: 15 April 2020).

Social media and blogs Attacked by snakes. 18 October 2019. Reddit reaction: incel selfies. YouTube. https://​ www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​YCHzm9L9mWk (accessed: 17 April 2020). Biography. 9 September 2019. John Wayne Gacy (1942–1994). https://​www​.biography​ .com/​crime​-figure/​john​-wayne​-gacy (accessed: 21 May 2020). Blue_Sphinx. 19 October 2014. Inselfilia. Urban Dictionary. https://​www​ .urbandictionary​.com/​define​.php​?term​=​Inselphilia (accessed: 7 January 2020). Broadley, E. 13 September 2007. HATED director Todd Phillips. Suicide Girls. https://​www​.suicidegirls​.com/​girls/​erin​_broadley/​blog/​2679902/​hated​-director​-todd​ -phillips/​(accessed: 15 April 2020). CBS News. 22 October 2019. ‘Joker’ Instagram fans flocking to the Bronx for the #JokerStairs. YouTube. https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​9eSK​_8x​_28s (accessed: 31 January 2020). #DESUSandMERO #BodegaHive. 21 October 2019. Don’t get robbed at the Joker steps in the Bronx | DESUS & MERO | SHOWTIME. YouTube. https://​www​ .youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​jZmq01RFhzI (accessed: 10 December 2019). Dietsch, D. 8 May 2018. The ‘King of Comedy’ is the perfect inspiration for a Joker film. FandomUK. https://​www​.fandom​.com/​articles/​joker​-king​-of​-comedy (accessed: 2 June 2020).

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SouthofBostonpizzaguy, 12 November 2019. Inselftion. Urban Dictionary. https://​ www​.urbandictionary​.com/​define​.php​?term​=​Inselftion (accessed: 7 January 2020). Stallworth, C.A. 7 April 2006. Inselfitis. Urban Dictionary. https://​www​.urbandictionary​ .com/​define​.php​?term​=​Inselfilitis (accessed: 7 January 2020). Stone, S. 14 August 2019. Joaquin Phoenix reveals the dark, real world origin of his Joker’s laugh. Comic Book Resources. https://​www​.cbr​.com/​joaquin​-phoenix​-origin​ -joker​-laugh/​(accessed: 20 May 2020). Tartaglione, N. 31 August 2019. Joker’s Joaquin Phoenix & Todd Phillips on creating DC character study & finding that laugh. Deadline. https://​deadline​.com/​ 2019/​08/​joker​-joaquin​-phoenix​-todd​-phillips​-venice​-film​-festival​-press​-conference​ -1202708685/​(accessed: 20 May 2020). The Public Domain Review. undated. Robert Cornelius’ self-portrait: the first ever ‘selfie’ (1839). https://​publicdomainreview​.org/​collection/​robert​-cornelius​-self​ -portrait​-the​-first​-ever​-selfie​-1839 (accessed: 10 February 2020). ToastedUnicorn. 1 December 2013. Inself joke. Urban Dictionary. https://​www​ .urbandictionary​.com/​define​.php​?term​=​inself​%20joke (accessed: 7 January 2020). Vad, J. 22 October 2019. Tourists flood the ‘Joker stairs’, frustrating Bronx residents. The Gothamist. https://​gothamist​.com/​arts​-entertainment/​tourists​-flood​-joker​-stairs​ -frustrating​-bronx​-residents (accessed: 9 December 2019). Weintraub, S. 12 July 2018. Exclusive: Joaquin Phoenix on his ‘unique’ Joker movie and why it scares him. Collider (e-News USA). https://​collider​.com/​joaquin​-phoenix​ -joker​-movie​-details/​#dc (accessed: 15 April 2020). Weintraub, S. 23 October 2019. Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Williams go deep on the challenges of making ‘Joker’ and that ending. Collider (e-News USA). https://​e​ -news​.us/​joaquin​-phoenix​-and​-todd​-phillips​-go​-deep​-on​-the​-challenges​-of​-making​ -joker​-and​-that​-ending​-collider​-com/​ (accessed: 25 March 2020). wL Element, 1. 21 June 2019. Inself. Urban Dictionary. https://​www​.urbandictionary​ .com/​define​.php​?term​=​In​-self. (accessed: 6 January 2020). wL Element, 2. 21 June 2019. In-selfsex. Urban Dictionary. https://​www​ .urbandictionary​.com/​define​.php​?term​=​In​-self (accessed: 7 January 2020).

Index anime Japanese village outside Tokyo 119 Armstrong, Louis jazz musician 67 art 149 see also social movements and irony 11 and kawaii popular culture 101 and wine see wuyi as the ‘good will to appearance’ 85 camp 121 cinema as 32 crime as work of 49 disinterested 99 European high 95 face 69 feminine creativity in see gender; politics of mobility histories of embodied 46 histories of global popular 36 field of, theory see selfie Japanese calligraphic see selfie male see gender New Objective 47 of divination see religion of filmmaking 60 of interpretation see hermeneutics popular 142 popular cultural 142 utopian potentiality of 65 Western 112 works of 74 ‘artist critique’ the new spirit of capitalism (Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello); see capitalism artist critique (Eve Chiapello); artmaking, capitalism, late modernity artmaking 11, 74 and community-making see cosmopolitanism cosmologically bound 20

#Jokerstairs 73 academy of hope in tourism studies 76 adiaphorisation (Zygmunt Bauman) 123 aesthetics see pilgrimage and ethics 11 bourgeois 66 camp 121 everyday 118 impressionism (David Frisby) 108 inverted see sublime ironic 11 Japanese 110 of artistic and verbal creation 43 of distance 87 of good life 87 youlfie 125 affect bad 79 communities of see atmosphere; emotions community of 146 intersecting mobilities of 59 micro-movements of see social movements non-representational realm of 129 politics of affect 102 affects and perspectives see hermeneutics and power 37 explosive 68 agency absence of 47 human 43, 64 see also jester; Joker (2019); trickster individual 33 structure and 39 Alkhateeb, Firas creator of clownfaced Obama 61

181

182

Frictions in cosmopolitan mobilities

cosmopolitan contexts of 33 transnational imaginaries see cosmopolitanism atmosphere see phenomenology as ‘ambience’ or ‘moods’ 19 joyful 90 of discontent see affects, emotions atmospheres belly-laugh 46 morbid 92 of luminosity see bokeh; friction production of 93 revolutionary 67 Atmospheres see bokeh; boke; design mobilities; filmmaking; photography Aufarbeitung Jurgen Habermas see memory authoritarianism market 102 monologic 65 state 102 authority cultural 105 histories of see Joker; trickster mockery of see mimicry moral 126 Western 108 yōkai/zōkei as source of see contents tourism; heritage autonomy horizons of 53 individual 88 lack of in Japanese gentleness 100

Bob Thornton, Billy actor (School for Scoundrels, 2006) 35 Bodikon gyaru body work (Japan) 100, 106 bokeh 17 see also atmosphere and friction 135 and selfie 21 and Woke 130 as Japanese and Western techniques see translation cosmopolitan methodology 34 cosmopolitan travels 19 good and bad see hermeneutics history of 18 incel 135 individualist 37 methodological 147 see also hermeneutics methodology 33 of inhospitality see tourismophobia real-life 71 trickster’s 53 Bolger, Ray actor 42 boundaries see jester; Joker (2019); trickster boundary-crossing and bokeh 53 Bridges, Mark Joker costume illustrator 41 Broomfield, Nick documentary maker 34 Bush, George W. US President 35

Baron-Cohen, Sacha actor (Borat, 2006) 35 becoming geo-aesthetic combinations of being and see ontology ontological 96 unconscious 83 becomings see experience biopolitics see Humanity 2.0, truth biopower see hospitality; see discourse; gender; race blackfaced 68 black pill and incel folksonomies 137

camp irony of 85 capitalism cognitive 118 corporate apparatus of see neoliberalism disaster (Naomi Klein) see dark tourism; slum tourism homogenous effect of 127 late 142 logic of late see governmobilities, neoliberalism, glacial time molecularly organised soldiers of 139 transformation of 58 Western spirit of see Japan workings of see tourism mobilities

183

Index

carnivalesque (M.M Bakhtin) 64, 65, 66, 69 carnivalesque (M.M Bakhtin) see jester; Joker (2019); social movements; trickster Chaplin, Charlie actor 34, 43 cities capitalist machinery in 121 citizenship cultural 61 loyal 126 rights 123 social (Fiona Williams) 124 citizenships rooted 98 city see oligopticons and bokeh 19 ‘festivalisation’ of 29 of bits (William Mitchell) 80 of Gotham 39 vision of the past 80 clownfaced 45, 49 complexities cosmopolitan 19 moral 10 complexity 14, 65 see also ecology/ ies, tourism; hospitality; ethics; aesthetics concerns ecological, biomedical and cybernetic see Humanity 2.0 Correll, Charles TV show actor (Amos ‘n’ Andy, 1943–1955, 1955–1960) 46 cosmopolitan irony 11, 14, 16, 17, 32, 61, 65, 129 Cosmopolitan irony 10 cosmopolitanism 11, 13, 22, 98 aesthetic 138 cosmetic 106 see gender; performativity damaged 135 middle-class 63 cosmopolitanisms actually performing 14 creativity aesthetics 139 and artistic mobility 33 anomic 111 artistic 22

authorship as human 104 conscious 11 Dionysian see travel Eastern feminine 147 entrepreneurial 124 feminine, in art see art; artmaking heautoscopic 82, 97 human see place ironic 12 of human action (Hans Joas) 86 poetics of 113 popular cultural 75 selfie 97 see gender; politics of mobility critical theory see economies of imagination; economies of surveillance and control; ecologies of imagination; cultural industries; Frankfurt School first generation see public sphere critical tourism studies see academy of hope; critical theory; transmodernity critique artistic, of American inequality 12 genderless 138 ironic see cosmopolitan irony of America’s racist culture 131 of Anti-Oedipus 63 of consumerist aesthetics 139 of tourist oligoptics 116 of welfare retrenchment 15 of Western American cultures of thoughtlessness 22 of Western authority 64 pragmatist (Richard Rorty) 86 reactive, of ‘political autonomy’ 133 social see cosmopolitanism critiques of consumerism 92 of industrial production 82 of industrial progress 34 of liquid modernity 12 of policy discourse 60 cybersphere 30 Dancing Joker see meme dark tourism, post-9/11 tropes of terrorism 62

184

Frictions in cosmopolitan mobilities

decivilisation see violence otaku 138 see also modernity and the Holocaust De Niro, Robert actor 41, 44 design 15 digital 60 of digital universes see mobility/ies Game of Thrones 29 designers digital 30 web 28 dialogicity 147 see also pluriversality DiCaprio, Leonardo actor 38 Dicken, Charles writer and novelist 64 disability pluriversality 51 Downey Jr., Robert actor (Due Date 2010) 35 ecologies of imagination see memory of surveillance 76 economies contemporary tourist 117 knowledge 117 see design mobilities; tourism mobilities; contents tourism national 124 of hospitality 124 of sign 117 of space 117 of space and sign 117 of the imagination, of surveillance and control 76 economy emerging film-tourism 124 market 128 political 77 see critical theory; selfie genealogies political, of the sign 75 selfie 124 service 114 voyeuristic visitor see selfie tourism edgework 91 definition of (Stephen Lyng) see risk, worry

digital retention of see ecologies of imagination; economies of imagination; cultural industries; memory emotional 118 traditional edgeworkers 91 emotion 67 cultures of 102 and gendered worldmaking 109 and music (Hildur Guðnadóttir) 42 politics of see affect Englehart, Steve Marvel Comics/DC Comics Joker creator (1970) 47 ethics 17 habitual engagement see cosmopolitan irony of care and responsibility see hospitality of exclusion 76 of market truth 142 of personalism 65 of thoughtlessness 87 political 139 posthuman 148 évènements 52 see also time experience see memory; dark tourism African American see race and apprehension 24 and intentionality 112 and selfism 90 and technology 115 and the tourist gaze 83 horizon of expectation and experience (Reinhart Koselleck) see time human, and practice 84 interactive 125 invisible aspects of 37 lived see artmaking; hermeneutics micro-frames of 130 microspheres of 150 of ‘being there’ see pilgrimage; tourism of colonial subjection and internal oppression 59 of mobility 27 of Western modernity see contents tourism partition of see pilgrimage

185

Index

self-educating 138 temporal 126 see experiential territory the cinematic tourist subject’s 96 femininity kawaii subaltern see selfie filmmaker documentary (Alex Jones) 61 German Expressionist (Paul Leni) 122 filmmakers 14 as world travellers see cosmopolitanism filmmaking 32 see style art of see imagination blockbuster 38 realist 34 style see cosmopolitanism; pilgrimage technologies of the eye 33 Fleck, Arthur development of Joker (2019) 33 fictional Joker (2019) 11, 22 Frankfurt School see critical theory freedom and Enlightenment see modernity and the African American experience 59 Frankfurt School thesis on see critical theory unrestrained ‘individualist’ see individualism friction and protest 48 cosmopolitan 11, 14, 32 see atmosphere; bokeh; phenomenology; hospitality; place; politics of mobility poetics and politics 43 racist 46 sensory 53 theory of friction 13 friction’s cosmopolitan see bokeh frictions social 52 Friedberg, Mark (Joker, 2019 production designer) 40

fūkei landscape (Japan) 108 Galifianakis, Zach actor (Due Date 2010) 35 gaze cinematic, of disaster see disaster capitalism; edgework cinematic tourist 120 feminised 114 heritage-tourist 130 male 101 mediatised, of tourist professionals 142 museum productions of the 85 mutual see hospitality of power 46 of the middle-class 133 pf the tourist/traveller/consumer 105 tourist 122 gender 98 see performativity; see incel matrix see race minority cultures 129 norms 111, 135 pluriversality 51 politics of mobility 33 right to mobility 11 globalisation see ‘New Hyperobjectivity’, New Objectivity as consumerism 119 enforced 101 Japan 22 tourist 14 Gosden, Freeman TV show actor (Amos ‘n’ Andy, 1943–1955, 1955–1960) 46 governance and folding of relations (Giles Deleuze) see hospitality art of see governmobility urban 46 governmental communitarianism 127, 133 Gregory, Dick comedian 67 Guðnadóttir, Hildur music composer (Joker, 2019) 42, 43

186

Frictions in cosmopolitan mobilities

Gurland, Andrew Frat House co-director 35 Heder, Jon actor (School for Scoundrels, 2006) 35 heritage patriarchal and authoritarian conduct of 97 hermeneutic cycle 146 see critical theory fundamentalist 38 movement see bokeh hermeneutics and Bauman see phenomenology and racism 61 commercial see neoliberalism consensual 148 deconstructive (Nietzsche, Derrida) 58 definition and history 56 fundamentalist see racism gendered 123 of suspicion 130 honne or private self (Japan) 100, 107 hospitality 69 see tourism; worldmaking and biopower 113 conceptualisations of 74 creative rights 78 damaged 21 ethics of otherness 59 fundamentalist partitions in 119 practice of 58 structuring of 77 tourism and 76 withdrawal of 22 Humanity 2.0 (Steve Fuller) see governmobility humour and ambiguity see jester and bokeh 71 and boundary-making 68 and comedy 36 and laughter 36 and resistance to modernity’s homogenising tendency 69 as group-bound 67 black 35 power to communicate subversive messages 67

hybridisation cultural and structural (Jan Nederveen Pieterse) 94 hybridity spatial, of the tourist see hybridisation the gender/race/ethnicity matrix 108 hyper-globalisation see globalisation; mobility/ies hypermobilities 150 imaginaries cosmopolitan 139 creative African American 59 individualist 134 popular cultural 67 retrotopic see time of revenge see emotions tourist 119 imaginary cartographic see space, place Christian, of sacrifice 59 templates of temporality 77 incel bokeh 135 definition of 134 and narcissism 135 supremacist ecology see decivilisation incel activities and crime 135 incel selfies and honne 137 individualism 119 anarchic 95 contemporary 82 expressions of 22 hard 102 hard, and industriousness 106 neoliberal 112 soft see cosmopolitanism; Japan subjective 32 successful see neoliberalism industries anime and manga 101 cultural 93, 110 culture 75 sign see economies of signs tourist 90 industry film 32 Joker (2019) see cultural industries

Index

sign see economies of sign tourist 62, 107 inequalities deepening see race, social movements incremental naturalisation of see gender; race labour and social see politics of mobility; mobility justice social 21 see also film tourism; politics of mobility inequality see Joker (2019) cinematic script American 12, 39 cosmopolitan see mobility justice; politics of mobility intersectional see gender; race mobility 43 inhospitality see hospitality, inequalities insularity 120 Joker-induced 121 local 142 markers 125 see selfie tourism ‘internal conversation’ Margaret Archer see selfie intimacy family see private sphere, selfie irrealism see worldmaking Japan and cosmetic cosmopolitanism 106 and modernisation 102 and pilgrimage see contents tourism and technocracy 102 ‘hotel family’ phase see gender; politics of mobility urban histories of 102 jester 148 survival in modernity 71 Joker (2019) and moral poles 70 Obama as 60 see also African American experience; resentful, of modernity; emotions Jokerfaced see social movements Joker/rebel Bakhtinian 133 Joker (2019) staircase 117, 120, 126

187

karōshi death by overwork (Japan) 100, 106 kawaii culture see Japan see also gender kontentsu tsūrizumu contents tourism (Japan) see contents tourism landscape biopolitical 139 Ledermann, Nicki Joker (2019) Makeup Department Head 40 Leto, Jared actor 38 Lewis, Jerry actor 41 machizukuri community building (Japan) 100, 101 magical realism and baroque 107 and Goodman’s merological approach to reality 109 as a postcolonial movement see kawaii European and Latin American differences 14 European artistic roots of see cosmopolitanism postcolonial see Latin American magical realism masculinity hegemonic 109, 137 hybrid see incels Japanese cultures of see individualism toxic see incel memes theory of see media memory cultural 26 game of 48 local 48 structure see jester, Joker (2019) stylisation of 47 systemic organisation of 48 uncontrolled eruptions of see emotions

188

Frictions in cosmopolitan mobilities

mental health 39 see inequalities, politics of mobility mimicry (Homi Bhabha) 133 minstrelsy, blackface history of 61 mobilities see bokeh, cosmopolitan irony, selfie audio-visual 11 bokeh 32 capitalist see neoliberalism cinematic tourist 118 consumerist 103 cross-cultural 25 cultural 98 design see artmaking, filmmaking, technology design of 80, 115 everyday 21, 126 see place female see gender, mobility justice, politics of mobility gendered 124 getik see pilgrimage individualised 112 intersecting 59 involuntary or coerced 11 Japanese female see gender; mobility justice; politics of mobility Japanese selfie 95 Joker (2019) 94 kawaii see aesthetics; affect; gender; emotions; gender new 150 selfie 84, 111, 118 see pilgrimage; photography social media see technology/ies tourism 26, 66, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 86, 94, 118, 124 tourist see selfie urban 15 youlfie 92, 119 see narcissism; selfie mobility aesthetics of 76 affordances 48, 79 and liquid modernity 130 artistic see artmaking; filmmaking as a form of justice 121 degrees of 147 desire to 147 diachronic 25

discursive see cosmopolitanism economic 100 global politics of 33 intersecting regimes of 123 justice 132 justice and ethics 129 labour see neoliberalism local 126 modernity and 101 modes of 13 multiple levels of 24 new systems of 23 privileged see selfie professional 102 representational systems of 85 right to 11 spiritual see pilgrimage styles of 12 tourismified forms of 24 virtual see media; selfie Western epistemologies of 95 Western system of 95 modernity and discrimination 125 and Japanese youth 99 and mobility 101 and ‘on-screen dollying’ see film tourism; technology and scroungers 34 and the Holocaust see neoliberalism and youlfie/guest 117 capitalist (post) 119 commercialise pilgrimage in see city conservative wheels of 51 disarticulated 44 existential territories of see decivilisation fragments of 55 global circulatory quality in see pilgrimage, technology heautoscopy 97 Joker/jester in 40 late 42, 141 see ‘New Hyperobjectivity’ liquid 130 liquid (Zygmunt Bauman) 12 status and identity see cosmopolitanism storerooms of 60 trickster of 58

189

Index

urban formations of 99 Western 97, 138 Western vision of 49 moga see gender; performativity Monkhouse, Bob British comedian and vaudeville performer 44 monogatarisei narrative value (Japan) 93, 94 movement and imitation (Gabriel Tarde) 58 artistic see New Objectivity axes of see pilgrimage, worldmaking Black Lives Matter see mobility justice, race bodily 42 cognitive meta- 29 creative see artmaking, filmmaking epistemology of 24 European interwar see New Objectivity glacial 117 hierarchical 129 horizontal see time imaginative/imagined 26 inner see hermeneutic phenomenology, internalism, otaku kawaii 106 meme 74 men’s right see incel meta- 24, 25, 38 see pilgrimage, technology, virtual travel ,virtual tourism of the pilgrim 38 phenomenological 38 philosophers of see ‘New Hyperobjectivity’ politics of 130 postcolonial 106 style of bodily 46 Tea Party see fundamentalism temporal see time three-dimensional see pilgrimage, technology, tourism mobilities movements dance 42 kawaii 113 mediated serendipitous see time

molar 55 semantic see hermeneutics social 55 subcultural 112 naimen surface (Japan) 107, 108 see hone; phenomenology narcissism 140 see selfie and ‘youlfism’ 88 culture of (Christopher Lasch) 140 acute forms of see incel narcissistic rupture (Arlie Hochschild) 102 nation and collective memories 75 as a ‘family’ see communitarianism; hospitality community building (Japan) 101 state 124 neoliberalism as a monologue of modernity 144 definitional characteristics 99 neoliberalism see youlfie ‘New Hyperobjectivity’ 149 New Objectivity see magical realism and realism see magical realism nigi-mitama respected dead elders (Japan) 110 Nolan, Christopher film director (Batman Begins, 2005) 37 non-place (Marc Augé) of capitalism 119 oligopticons Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant see gaze oligoptics tourist see gaze ontologies relational (A. Escobar, R. Braidotti, K. Barad) 14 ontology black (Tim Cresswell) see politics of mobility, race, movement cultural-political (Alejo Carpentier) see magical realism European postcolonial ontology 19 Western (C.W. Mills) 45

190

Frictions in cosmopolitan mobilities

otaku see inner travel; see internalism; pilgrimage; incel geek 105 phenomenon 104 otaku 105 out-of-place-ness see city/ies palimpsests urban (Andreas Huyssen) see memory; violence particularities pluriversal see pluriversality performance definition (Erving Goffman) 83 performativity and the youlfie’s metempsychotic ability 89 definition of (Judith Butler) see performance (Erving Goffman) heautoscopic 82 host 85 kawaii 106 perspective 10, 28, 47 activist see disability, gender, race alternative 138 as objective truths 143 Bourdieusian 108 Butlerian 85 detached 149 Eurocentric 96 feminine popular cultural, on creativity see gender geolocative 17 individual or micro-social 85 Japanese gendered 105 merological see methodology methodology of 17 mobile, of popcultural selfie see selfism, narcissism of Nelson Goodman 79 of play 89 of the host’s 89 of the scholar, the professional, the state 28 of the weak 71 on reality 111 sociology of 10, 19 topographic 13 white man’s 82

youlfies, youlfism 88 see also bokeh; discourse; diversity; hermeneutics; inequality/ ies; magical realism; methodology; modernity phenomenology/ies existential 69 of experience see affects; atmospheres; emotions; travel; tourism of the African American experience see race of the Japanese spirit 99 of virtual connectivity see technology of whiteness and masculinity see gender; politics of mobility; race getik/menok materialist see pilgrimage hermeneutic 114 see atmosphere; bokeh; pilgrimage; technology national 100 Phillips, Todd Joker (2019) director and screenwriter 11, 30, 32–40, 42, 44, 47, 50, 58, 130, 131, 134 Phoenix, Joaquin Joker (2019) actor 11, 32, 37–40, 42, 44, 50, 73 photography animist version of, in zōkei see contents tourism, technology tourism mobilities see technology, virtual pilgrimage pilgrimage see flânerie; see ‘New Hyperobjectivity’ and markets see selfie tourism; selfie travel and protest 56 anime 93 see media; contents tourism Bronx see place cinematic see selfie tourism; memory; media commercialised 26 cyber- 30 dark/slum fan 94

Index

digital see internalism digital-terrestrial see place heautoscopic see narcissism Japanese 26 Joker (2019) 30, 127, 140 see youlfie/s Joker-selfie see place multi-dimensional forms of 25 naimen 108 popular cultural 23, 30 popular cultural, in the Bronx 24 postmodern 118 post-secular 26 protest and cinematic see artmaking; filmmaking religious 24 secular 91 selfie 88 technological see mobilities technology 26 transformations of 25 virtual 27 see anime pilgrimage; contents tourism virtual, embodied see social media Pilgrimage Turner and Turner (1978) 24 pilgrimages Asian popular cultural 95 calligraphic see otaku film-induced 15 Lord of the Rings, Pokémon Go 26 Occidental virtual/digital see internalism place see cosmopolitanism, hybridity and celebrity 122 and monogatarisei 93 and the politics and poetics of friction 43 and time see postcolonial magical realism attachment to 55 comparative studies of 24 destabilisation of see memory fair distribution of see adiaphorisation ideas of 26 knowledge-making about 29 ‘local’ 133 politics of 12 right to 124

191

‘place image’ (Rob Shields) 124 place-making political and legal structures of 25 places and ordinary magic 151 fictional 30 filmed 89 of tradition 101 physical and social access to 78 representations of see worldmaking symbolic, of interaction 120 touring see tourism mobilities tourismified 94 places, lived 96 places, of sexual exchange 101 ‘places of the imagination’ (Stijn Reijnders) 75 plagiarism see gender, race pluriversal 147 pluriversalism 66 pluriversality v, 10, 14, 51 see diversity pluriversals cosmopolitan 21 pluriverse see pluriversality popcultural placemaking loop see cultural industries; film tourism; cinematic tourism populism American v, 60 pornoviolence youlfie 142 privacy/privateness 99 race see gender politics of mobility 33 white see gender racial studies pluriversality 51 realism marvellous see magical realism psychological 33 representational code of 49 reality/ies pluriversal see magical realism regime/s epistemic of heterosexuality (Judith Butler) 140 gendered, of authorship see contents tourism intersecting, of mobility 123

192

Frictions in cosmopolitan mobilities

leisure 106 moral economic 76 narcissistic 123 of discipline and classification 127 of population management see biopolitics of worth 64 scopic 143 see economies of surveillance and control welfare (Sylvia Walby) 123 retro design for Joker (2019) 47 retrotopia (Zygmunt Bauman) see time Rice, Dan famous circus clown 64 Romero, Cesar actor 41 satoyama civilisation (Japan) 100, 101 Scorsese, Martin film director 38 Scott, Walter Scottish novelist 64, 66 Shawqi, Ahmed (Lebanese artist) see social movements Sher, Lawrence Joker (2019) cinematographer 43 Sicotte, Hugh Joker (2019) concept illustrator 40 Silver, Scott Joker (2019) screenwriter 11, 38, 47, 70 space/place as discourse of property 117 sphere feminisation of, in Japanese culture 109 of several lifeworlds see pilgrimage phenomenal and the Japanese Otherworld 111 public (and Chinese notion of privateness) 99 public (gouko) 100 shared 12 social 38 spheres media 77 private, and Japanese women 98 world 100

Stiller, Ben actor (Starsky & Hutch, 2004) 35 tatemae or public self (Japan) 100 Taylor, Zachary US President 64 technologies digital see artmaking, filmmaking impact of ICT see mobilities design mobile see memory modern, of the eye see filmmaking, selfie of control see economies of surveillance of distribution and dissemination 75 scopic 143 social media see economies of the imagination zoning see economies of surveillance technology see time as maiden of domination see critical theory cinematic tourist see artmaking, filmmaking, economies of the imagination cosmopolitan potential of 20 European magical realism see New Objectivity forms of see travel photographic 96 tourism, labour migration 26 Western see boke; bokeh; cosmopolitanism tēmasei theme value (Japan) 93 terrorism and ‘Jihad vs McWorld’ thesis see fundamentalism as political discourse 70 The Satanic Verses 49 tropes of 62 welfare as inverted see fundamentalism test realist (Luc Boltanski and Levent Thevenot) 114 tests reality and truth 138

Index

thanatoptics geolocative 94 see pilgrimage; place; virtual travel; thanatourism see dark tourism, pilgrimage ‘third places’ (Ray Oldenburg) 118 time and hyperobjects 150 and Joker (2019) meme 78 and labour 27 and space see friction and space, of represented life see worldmaking and the human subject see digital pilgrimage; selfie as-space 118 contractions of 77 glacial see capitalism horizontal axes mundi 38 in late capitalism 74 Instagram selfies 115 intermediate 126 local see place mechanical frame of see technology moment in 66 movement (in modernity) 55 ordinary 29 (ordinary) profane 24 profane 119 social and natural 117 -space perceptions 94 Time acceleration see capitalism, mobilities times leisure see mobilities premodern 100 see Japan tourism 77 3-D world of 111 adventure 91 affective scenarios 121 and film 63 and the border 21 and the internet 23 as an ‘international social fact’ 125 cinematic 32, 63, 131 see film tourism; see mobilities contents 92, 108 see kawaii, gender contents tourism see heritage, media tourism, film tourism,

193

cross-cultural aesthetic approach 24 cultures of see media mobilities dark 24, 90 dark/slum v, 88 ecologies of see memory embodied 23 family 82 film 78 global media networking 118 heritage, in Japan 111 institutionalisation of 76 Joker (2019) 114, 131, 140 legerdemain of see worldmaking literary 95 materialities of 23 media 93 media assemblages 62 media-inspired 77 mobilities 76 mobility justice 132 philosophies see hospitality physical see artmaking pop 26 post-Romantic trend in see edgework public culture 121 selfie 12, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 88, 123, 140 slum 66, 91, 132 sustainable development 119 worlds of 78, 79, 142 see worldmaking, artmaking youlfie 87 see also art; artmaking; and cosmopolitan irony; film; hospitality; mobilities; pilgrimage; tourism tourismophobia see hospitality ‘tourist gaze’ (John Urry) see selfie, tourism mobilities, performativity, technology translation see cosmopolitanism, hermeneutic phenomenology as an interdisciplinary field 16 cultural 15 realist 15 Western contexts of 16 transmodern order (Enrique Dussel) see mobility justice, politics of mobility

194

Frictions in cosmopolitan mobilities

travel 41, 48, 50 and memory see place and pleasure 89 as mechanism for aesthetic cosmopolitanism 138 cognitive/virtual 11, 12, 16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 26 contemporary 11 cultures of 61 see tourism, mobilities dark 60, 61, 65 digital 61 see incels educational see worldmaking embodied, virtual see mobility, mobilities experiential see virtual, digital travel glance see selfie idea of 16 impressions 77 into the self see internalism mobilities 78 otaku, inner 108 performative 48 physical 111 see selfie tourism physical, of the mind 111 selfie see mobilities, tourism, filmmaking worldmaking 95 see also risk; tourism mobilities; worry Travel in the mind, on foot 75 traveller cosmopolitan 136 early version of see artists; pilgrims fellow 124 phenomenological see atmosphere; aesthetics Romantic 65 world see cosmopolitanism; cyber-pilgrimage; digital tourists travellers/pilgrims Joker (2019) see filmmaking; tourism mobilities; worldmaking metempsychotic see metensomatosis; pilgrimage; tourism

world see cosmopolitanism; filmmakers, filmmaking travels cosmopolitan 19 digital 147 of the mind 147 orientalist see New Objectivity to the centre see pilgrimage world 13 trickster/s 148 history of 64 indigenous and Euro-American religious systems 59 rebellious African 59 and rebels see boundaries unfreedom Japanese female proto-youlfies see selfie utopia of the good life 151 the economist Friedrich Hayek’s see governmobility; neoliberalism utopia (Krishan Kumar) 51 utopianism active 147 utopias and the Joker in modernity 50 archaic communitarian 66 sedentary see heritage violence against difference 137 and working-class chauvinism 66 cyclical historical reproduction of see decivilisation discursive 22 ecologies 122 feudal see decivilisation; hospitality gun 131 heroic 39 narratives of 46 ocular 126 of amnesias (Andreas Huyssen) see memory on reality 30 opacity of 140 otaku see emotions

Index

palimpsests of 43 physical by women in manga 110 racial 128 racist 46 ‘slow burn’ 44 structural forms of 133 terrorist 62 Wallett, William F. circus clown 64 ‘white shariah’ nationalist incel’s concept 135 Wilson, Owen actor (Starsky & Hutch, 2004) 35 worldmaking and artistic technique 85 and Asian pragmatics 95 and merology 79 and processes of image making see artmaking; filmmaking and the sovereign individual 85 and variations of irrealism 28 as cosmopolitan vista 87 cosmopolitan see pluriversality

195

definition in tourism theory (Keith Hollinshead) see artmaking; filmmaking digital 30 gendered practices of 124 popular cultural see contents tourism tourism’s 104 utopian 131 wuwei action by no action 108 wuyi inclination 108, 109, 111 yōkai folklore mystery creatures (Japan) 110, 111, 112 mystery creatures in Japanese folklore see contents tourism youyi intentional creativity 108, 109 zōkei mysterious prese of visualised object in folklore (Japan) see contents tourism