Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age 9781628928457, 9781441149978, 9781441168337

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For Clifford Christians, the teacher, mentor, and friend who got it started.

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Contributors Mark Amerika is a digital media artist whose work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Walker Art Center, the American Museum of the Moving Image, and ACA Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of many books, including his collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press, 2007) and remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). He is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His Internet art may be found at http://markamerika.com. Vanessa Au is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, an organizing member of the Asian American Studies Research Collective at the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and a Senior Analyst at the Spring Creek Group, a social media brand analytics, strategy, and marketing services agency located in Seattle, WA. She has published articles in Flow, and presented research at numerous conferences including annual meetings of the National Communication Association, Association of Asian American Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and Popular Culture Association. Paul Booth is an Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies, and Communication Technology, at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author of Digital Fandom: New Media Studies (2010), and has published articles in Television and New Media, The Journal of New Media and Culture, Narrative Inquiry, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and The Journal of Narrative Theory. His work investigates the intersection of traditional and interactive media. His research interests also include participatory audiences, fans, popular culture, science fiction, television, narrative, games, technology, and mediation. He is currently writing about temporality and complex television. Jack Z. Bratich is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He authored Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) and co-edited, along with Jeremy Packer ix

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and Cameron McCarthy, Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (2003). His work applies autonomist social theory to such topics as reality television, social media, and the cultural politics of secrecy. He is currently writing a book entitled Programming Reality (Lexington, forthcoming), which examines reality programs (on and off television) as experiments in affective convergence. Richard L. Edwards is an Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences in the New Media Program at Indiana University’s School of Informatics, Indianapolis. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy from 2001 to 2004. His essays on political uses of new media, remix culture, and video practices have appeared in Film International, Spectator, and Flow. His most recent papers on remix culture and political mashups have been presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, New Media Consortium, and as part of invited talks. Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste is Associate Professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where he teaches Latin American cultural studies. He is also Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino/a Studies. His publications include Narrativas de representación urbana (Peter Lang, 1998); Rockin’ Las Americas (University of Pittsburgh, 2004), the first scholarly anthology of rock in Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas; and Redrawing The Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), a collection of essays on Latin/o American comics and graphic novels. His articles on Latin American cinema, literature, graphic narratives, music, and media theory have appeared in numerous journals, and he has also authored book chapters on Latin American graphic humor, cumbia, and urban transportation. Ted Gournelos is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media and Cultural Studies at Rollins College. He is the author of Popular Culture and the Future of Politics (Lexington Books, 2009) and several articles on oppositional culture in television, film, and emergent media. He has also co-edited three special issues of The Electronic Journal of Communication on irony and politics and a volume called A Decade of Dark Humor: How Humor and Irony Shaped Post-9/11 Politics (University of Mississippi Press. 2011). David J. Gunkel is Presidential Teaching Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of three books on the philosophy of technology, Hacking Cyberspace (Westview Press, 2001), Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology (Purdue University Press, 2007), and The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics (MIT Press, 2012). He has also published over

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Contributors  xi

thirty journal articles on information and communication technology, is Managing Editor of the International Journal of Žižek Studies, and is an awardwinning researcher, teacher, and digital media designer. More information is available at http://gunkelweb.com. Henry Jenkins III is Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, having left his position as the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Comparative Media Studies program in 2010. He is the author of several books on television and new media, including the landmark Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Grant Kien is Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Communication at California State University, East Bay. His research focuses on technography, qualitative approaches to technology research, globalization, communication and culture, mobility and communications networks as performative, symbolic, and interpretive spaces. Recent works include Post-Global Network and Everyday Life (Peter Lang, 2010), Global Technography: Ethnography in the Age of Mobility (Peter Lang, 2009), a chapter in the edited volume Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches (Peter Lang, 2009), and a chapter in Identity, Learning and Support in Virtual Environments (Sense Publishers, 2009). Stephen Maddison is Principal Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. He is the author of Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture (Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 2000), and has published work on the cultural politics of sexuality in a number of journals and edited collections. He has published essays on pornography in New Formations and in two new collections, Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualisation of Culture (IB Tauris, 2009) and Porn.com (Peter Lang, 2010), and is working on a monograph entitled The Myth of Porn. He co-runs the website http://www.opengender.org.uk. Sarah Neely is a member of the Stirling Media Research Institute and a Lecturer in Film and Media in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling. Her main areas of research are in film and television studies, and her recent research focuses on gender and identity in online environments. Related publications include a chapter on pornography and commercial sex in virtual worlds in Everyday Pornography (Routledge, 2010).

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Mark Nunes is Professor of English and Media Studies, and Chair of the Department of English, Technical Communication, and Media Arts at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia. He is author of Cyberspaces of Everyday Life (Minnesota, 2006). He is also editor of a collection of essays on glitch aesthetics, tactical media, and other “miscommunications” entitled Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (Continuum, 2011). Other recent publications include “This is not a Blog Hoax: Narrative ‘Provocations’ in a Participatory Media Culture” (Explorations in Media Ecology, 2010) and “A Million Little Blogs: Community, Narrative, and the James Frey Controversy” (Journal of Popular Culture, 2011). Julian Petley is Professor of Film and Television in the School of Arts at Brunel University, chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, principal editor of the Journal of British Cinema and Television, and a member of the board of Index on Censorship. His most recent books are Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009) and Film and Video Censorship in Contemporary Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Debra Benita Shaw is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. She is the author of Technoculture: The Key Concepts (Berg, 2008), Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance (Palgrave, 2000) and editor of Techno-death: Technology, Death and the Cultural Imagination (2009), a special issue of the journal Science as Culture. She is currently working on a new book, Strange Zones: Posthuman Urbanism & Metropolis which explores twenty-first-century subjectivities as constructed by the cultural institutions of contemporary cities. She has published widely on theories of science and technology, architecture and gender, and is also a photographer and member of a social center collective. Michael Truscello is an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Royal University in Calgary. His publications appear in journals such as Postmodern Culture, Technical Communication Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, TEXT Technology, and Cultural Critique, and he is contributing a chapter to The Postanarchism Reader (Pluto Press, forthcoming). He is currently at work on a book-length study of the role of technology in the anarchist tradition.

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Introduction Transgression Today TED GOURNELOS AND DAVID J. GUNKEL

T

his project has been in the works since the summer of 2008, when Ted spent a slightly bored afternoon walking a friend’s dog in sleepy Berkeley, CA, resulting in a few ruminations about digital media and social protest (as academics are wont to have). Specifically, he wondered what social protest would look like in a world of participatory media, should such a world actually become a widespread reality. It most certainly would not, one assumes, look like the tragically hip kids lounging around bus stops, nor would it look like the youngish pseudo-hippies drinking soy Thai iced tea as they read books about vegan lifestyles, or the other, olderish pseudo-hippies who seemed to feel more than a little guilty about living in a million-dollar home in the hills (but not quite guilty enough to pay fair property taxes). But if transgression doesn’t look like Code Pink singing off-key at 1 p.m. on a weekday in front of the U.S. Marine recruiting station, what does it look like? Does it look like the YouTube videos (ironic or sincere) of the protest-sing-alongs? We think not. We hope not. Since then, we have been inundated with both proclamations and examples of the importance, or lack thereof, of digital media for altering perceptions and breaking down social constructions, for shifting lines of debate and pushing the limits of the knowable, the understandable, the containable. Two of these examples, discussed in detail in Chapter 13 of this volume by Jack Bratich, are the 2009 G20 protests in Pittsburgh, PA, and the 2011 protests and revolutions throughout the Middle East, most notably the February protests (and subsequent crackdown) in Iran. These two examples resulted in a plethora of digital media texts, of “riot porn” on the one hand, as Michael Truscello calls it in Chapter 16, and cyber-organizing on the other, through Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter among other technologies (some of which are local, most notably the social networking websites through which hardliners could report activists to the government). What seems more important here for us, however, is how transgression against power and corruption, whether national or transnational, can take very different forms, especially as covered in the mainstream media (MSM). Is the Internet simply another “opiate for the masses,” in the vein of religion on the one hand and television on the other, as scholars

1

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2  Introduction

such as Nikolas Morozov (2011) have claimed? Or is it a set of tools for participation as much as entertainment? We should not fail to understand entertainment’s potential for democratic participation and the importance of establishing an infrastructure through which resistance can then function, whether it is by circulating videos that galvanize a population— like documentation of police brutality—or oppositional videos like we see with the use of Adobe Flash in populations under authoritarian regimes that censor easily scanned content? Was Twitter in Iran a positive development, or was it, as Morozov (1911: 13) argues: globalization and at its worst: a simple e-mail based on the premise that twitter mattered in Iran, sent by an American diplomat in Washington to an American Company in San Francisco, triggered a worldwide Internet panic and politicized all online activity … threatening to tighten online spaces and opportunities that were previously unregulated. Instead of finding ways to establish a long term relationship with Iranian bloggers and use their work to quietly push for social, cultural, and—at some distant point in the future—maybe even political change, the American foreign policy establishment went on the record and pronounced them to be more dangerous than Lenin and Che Guevara combined.

It is, this volume argues, both. Transgression 2.0 does not describe merely a new era of organization, of protest, and of rapid change made easier through new developments in the creation, distribution, and circulation of media; it also describes a new era of surveillance, of censorship, of monopolistic consolidation, and of the foreclosure of discourse. Indeed, we see this double-edged sword of digital media clearly in both the Pittsburgh and Tehran protests. In both, digital media was used to organize and circulate discussions outside the protest or cities involved, although it is less clear to what extent this transpired in Iran. In both cases it was undoubtedly useful, particularly for outside journalists and governments to see what was happening (less so, arguably, for those getting beaten, tear gassed, and arrested). In both, we saw a rising up of populations not known for social protest (Iranians, but also, crucially, Americans, who, as Morozov notes, despite all our access to Internet technology, are not engaged in extensive protests against a corrupt government, a terrifying prison system, or an unfree press (ibid.: 96)). However, perhaps most importantly for anyone who might see this as a harbinger of a positive new social order, we also saw the immediate and horrifying foreclosure of those protests. Both populations were dragged off without due process, tortured publicly (and on video) without cause, and intimidated into leaving their protests. We must agree that “it seems somewhat naïve to believe that strong authoritarian governments will balk at cracking down on protesters for fear of being accused of being too brutal, even if their every actions were captured on camera; most likely, they will simply learn how to live with those accusations” (ibid.: 54).

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Introduction  3

What strikes us about these two events is their media coverage, in both MSM and alternative venues. We expect protests in the Middle East to attract a lot of media coverage in the U.S., just as much as we don’t expect domestic protests (against war, globalization, or anything except healthcare and Barack Obama) to get any coverage except vitriolic characterizations of protesters as rioters or angst-ridden teenagers. However, we might expect YouTube to have more currency. After all, a 2008 video of a skateboarding teenager being abused by a Baltimore police officer has over five million views (and was partially responsible for that officer’s dismissal), and videos of “don’t tase me bro” Andrew Meyer during the John Kerry Q&A session have gotten well over six million views. The Iranian protest videos might perhaps be on their way to matching those numbers, but currently have around two million views combined, despite heavy coverage by MSM. However, the G20 videos have a tiny fraction of that circulation, with perhaps 15,000 views among all materials combined. This discrepancy in circulation and viewership tells us that it is not transgression alone, nor is it digital media alone, that will transform our social or media environments. In fact, we argue that it is neither of those things, but rather a shift in discourse around participatory media in general, “an emergent series and experience of them as the opening up of a closed communication system to environmental exteriorities and the potentialities that arise from that condition” (Parikka and Sampson 2009: 10–11). To “open up” does not mean necessarily to inject new discourse, nor does it mean to (re)interrogate existing discourse, but rather to reframe it in terms of kinetic, evolving movement within the public sphere and contemporary mediascape. More importantly, Transgression 2.0 rejects the visions of rational individuals making decisions in a friction-free digital or “free market” system, just as much as it rejects the technologically determinism and cyber-utopian approach to technology, media, and human agency. Developments in social norms, whether they act to break the structure of news, change our conception of “intellectual property,” rethink pornography’s relationship to our everyday lives, or reformulate how digital media is developing and constraining the possibility of protest, cannot be fully understood without grappling with their limits, their boundaries, and their transgressions. In other words, to understand what is possible in our world, we need to understand our limitations and those locations, moments, and techniques by which those limitations are most effectively (and ineffectively) challenged.

A Brief Genealogy of Transgression Transgression means many things to many people, and has a rich genealogy about which philosophers, sociologists, and cultural studies scholars (among others) often disagree both on the definition of the concept

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4  Introduction

and its lineage. This is discussed most completely in Jenks’s (2003) book Transgression, and we will not attempt a complete review of it here. However, it is useful to understand how transgression functions and develops, and so a brief overview will help to frame the chapters in this volume (each of which also deploys and operationalizes varying interpretations of the term and its history). In general, we might say with Jenks that to “transgress is to go beyond the bounds or limits set by a commandment or law or convention, it is to violate or infringe. But to transgress is also more than this, it is to announce and even laudate the commandment, the law or the convention. Transgression is a deeply reflexive act of denial and affirmation” (Jenks 2003: 2). Jenks expands this definition with a cultural critique that is itself indicative of how transgression is often mobilized and understood within cultural studies, as a (re)integration of potential militancy in a dispersed, privatized, and alienated socius (ibid.: 6). To understand transgression in this way suggests that it is an explicitly social and political act, function, or characteristic. Indeed, John Jervis (1999: 4) argues that: transgression, unlike opposition or reversal, involves a hybridization, the mixing of categories and the questioning of the boundaries that separate categories. It is not, in itself, subversion; it is not an overt and deliberate challenge to the status quo. What it does do, though, is implicitly interrogate the law, pointing not just to the specific, and frequently arbitrary, mechanisms of power on which it rests—despite its universalizing pretensions—but also to its complicity, its involvement in what it prohibits.

This definition is unabashedly influenced by sociology, particularly the work of Emile Durkheim, as in fact is much scholarship on transgression. Durkheim’s “social facts” may be generalized in three ways: 1) through “externality,” in which the social acts independently of individual thoughts, and “as such constitute any world that he [sic] enters”; (2) through “constraint,” in which “they are coercive when infringed” and thus “attempts to act otherwise than normatively transgress the implicit and explicit rule structure and invokes constraint”; (3) and through “generality,” in which “they are the very fabric of social ‘nature’” (Jenks 2003: 23). These “facts” are particularly important regarding transgression, as they suggest an idea of the socius that is both structural and poststructuralist, that is, both constitutive as a lingual/social process and existing outside of that process in a sort of institutionalized infrastructure. Just as importantly, however, they suggest that, as Michel Foucault argued decades later, society is constructed through placing limits on transgression rather than expanding the possibilities of/for freedom. In other words, as Mary Douglas suggested, “the ideal order of society is guarded by dangers which threaten transgressors” (as cited in Jenks 2003: 33).

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Introduction  5

This is a development often attributed to Hegelian dialectics. Perhaps best known (and most relevant here, as Jenks reminds us) is the “Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage” from the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which there is, as Jenks interprets it, “a passive resolve on the part of the Slave to avoid the confrontation with the Master and take refuge in a belief in a transcendental God. The Master now needs the Slave in order to persist and the Slave uses the conditions of his oppressive relation to the Master as the grounds for change, growth, becoming—historical ‘self-realisation,’” and thus there is a “disruptive, revolutionary potential” inherent to the dissonance of the dialectic itself (Jenks 2003: 60). Alexandre Kojève expanded on this idea by suggesting that what was missing in the dialectic, or perhaps what was the “secret ingredient” that builds this dissonance, is desire, which “opens the door to the very possibility of transgression through the primacy of self” (ibid.: 66). Hegel for his part complicates the picture by way of that passage from the first part of The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences to which Michel Foucault makes passing reference at the beginning of “The Discourse on Language” (Foucault 1972: 235): “But the man who flees is not yet free: in fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees” (Hegel 1987: 138). Hegel’s point, and one which we will need to keep in mind throughout the chapters that follow, is that any attempt at transgression is always and inescapably contextualized and regulated by the very system or structures from which one endeavors to break away. This understanding of both the opportunities and complications of transgression takes a larger step, one could argue, through Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille. Nietzsche in particular argued for: the collapse of the centre and the consequent decentralisation of values. In contradistinction to all of those turn-of-the-century metaphors from social theory stressing ‘integration’, ‘solidarity’, ‘community’, ‘structure’, ‘instrumentality’, and ‘culture’, in some of the language of unification and consensus, Nietzsche is recommending dispersion and fragmentation… . This is not a route for all, but for some. We cannot all transgress. (Jenks 2003: 70)

This flowered in the transgressive concepts in Beyond Good and Evil for Nietzsche and, as some scholars have (mistakenly) tried to explain and rationalize it, his mental breakdown and madness; For Bataille, at least as Jenks and others interpret it, this kind of thinking became a sort of hedonistic autism, a sociopathology as filled with excess as it was with misanthropy (in scholarship as well as lived experience). As Susan Suleiman suggested: For Bataille, transgression was an ‘inner experience’ in which an individual—or, in the case of certain ritualized transgressions of such a sacrifice or collective

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celebration (la fête), a community—exceeds the bounds of rational, everyday behavior, which is constrained by the considerations of profits, productivity or self-preservation. The experience of transgression is indissociable from the consciousness of the constraint or prohibition it violates; indeed, it is precisely by and through its transgression that the force of a prohibition becomes fully realized. (Suleiman 1995: 316–17)

Moreover, as Jenks (2003: 7) argues, for Bataille, the limits to our experience in the taboos that police them are never simply imposed from the outside; rather, limits to behaviour are always personal responses to moral imperatives that stem from the inside. This means that any limits on conduct carries with it an intense relationship with the desire to transgress that limit.

Bataille moved past the relationship between the socius and desire, however, in his ruminations on transgression. He argued compellingly, and in a similar vein to Durkheim, that transgression in some ways completes and validates the status quo and its norms and boundaries, while it also points out the breakdown and limits of those same norms and boundaries. This is perhaps most apparent in his early essay “The Deviations of Nature,” in which it is argued that the monstrous both shows or demonstrates (in Latin, monstrare) the natural order while also perverting and distorting that very structure (Bataille 1985: 53). In other words, “transgression is a component of the rule. Seen in this way, excess is not an abhorration nor a luxury, it is rather a dynamic force in cultural reproduction—it prevents stagnation by breaking the role and it ensures stability by reaffirming the rule. Transgression is not the same as disorder; it opens up chaos and reminds us of the necessity of order” (Jenks 2003: 7). This is, as Bataille (1985: 3) reminds us, “the pleasure of going to see ‘freaks’”. This concept was very influential on Foucault, whose definitions of “discourse,” “institution,” and “genealogy” are largely inflected by this view of social stability and change. For Foucault, transgression is an action which involves the limits, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses. The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration and this it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable. But this relationship is considerably more complex: these elements are situated in an uncertain context, in

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Introduction  7 certainties which are immediately upset so that thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them. (Foucault 1977: 33–4)

In other words, transgression is play within a system that likes to think of itself as serious; it continually opens up possibility in full knowledge that the area it opens will close again almost immediately. It is a state of continual revolution, or what Foucault’s successor Jacques Derrida will call an “interminable analysis” (Derrida 1982: 42), slippery and shifting, and thus impossible to completely comprehend or control. This is not to suggest that transgression operates outside the boundaries of the status quo, however; on the contrary, it is completely a part, if perhaps an insane part, of the normative. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White make a similar point in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), which is largely a consideration and application of Mikhail Bakhtin. For instance, they place their project in terms of a “broader and more complex cultural process whereby the human body, psychic norms, geographical space and the social formation are all constructed within interrelating and dependent hierarchies of high and low” (ibid.: 3). In other words, they argue that the “high” and “low” or “top” and “bottom” are in a constant state of (re) negotiation; this state is not a “ritual strategy on the part of subordinate groups” per se, but rather an a priori state of power in social relationships (ibid.: 4–6). They suggest, nevertheless, that scholars look beyond the issue of transgression (in this case in the form of the “carnival”) as “intrinsically radical or conservative,” and rather suggest that “for long periods carnival may be a stable and cyclical ritual with no noticeable politically transformative effects but that, given the presence of sharpened political antagonism, it may often act as catalyst and site of actual and symbolic struggle” (ibid.: 14). Moreover, they argue that established powers might not want to stop transgression, because if they did the buildup of dangerous transgressive energies might threaten the established order. Instead, releases like carnival (and perhaps, in many ways, media in general) might actually serve to act as a pressure valve for dissent and opposition, whether from the Right or the Left (ibid.: 167). Finally, it is useful to consider how this view of transgression manifests in the postmodern period, specifically in Jean Baudrillard’s contrast between “anomie” and the “transpolitical” or “anomaly.” As Dougal Phillips (2009: 204) suggests, For Baudrillard, the era of the political was the era of anomie: or revolutions, violence, crises. The era of the transpolitical is “one of anomaly; aberrations without consequence, contemporaneous with events without consequence.” Baudrillard’s anomaly infringes not on the law but on the norm. … It is a break

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with the norm that is neither a moment of crisis nor a systemic abnormality—the “laws” it breaks with are unknowable or impossible. … However, this rethinking of anomaly in distinction to and escape from anomie allows for, in a broader sense, an overturning of the negativity of the decentralization of power and an embracing of the perverse anomalies of individual desire as a new matrix of a untapped power.

We see here a synthesis of the major themes of transgression throughout this genealogy: first, transgression is a social fact that is not completely contained within, and not completely apart from, the social; second, transgression is anomalous but necessary to the functioning of the norm, what Slavoj Žižek (2001: 238) has termed “a constitutive exception”; third, transgression works beyond mere opposition and resistance to an inhabited Other; fourth, transgression embraces desire and play in order to self-consciously question the stasis and seriousness of the status quo, and thus while its politics are ambivalent, its power is both unquestionable and necessary.

Transgression in a Digital Age It is important to recognize that transgression in general is not necessarily the same as transgression as it is recoded and operationalized in a digital age, and it is certainly not the same as what we are calling Transgression 2.0, in which shifts in production, distribution, and circulation are changing the way in which we think about media production, consumption, and distribution (even if they are not, as the case could be made, actually making large changes in media ownership or gatekeeping functions). It does, however, have a history in emergent media forms, as scholars like Raymond Williams, Harold Innis, and Marshall McLuhan have pointed out for decades. Emergent media is always surrounded by controversy, possibly because it threatens our concepts of space and time, but certainly because it represents a shift in patterns of communication and social structure that is potentially threatening to established powers. This is immediately apparent in the first recorded account addressing media techology, Plato’s Phaedrus (1990), where Socrates expresses considerable concern over the impact and adverse social effects of the new media of writing. Moreover, as Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson (2009: 7) suggest: The anomalies of the new media are most often surrounded by moral panics. Such panics, whether around the cinema, television, video, computer games, or the Internet, with its malicious dark side, populated by perverts lurking around every virtual corner, can perhaps be seen as an attempt to contextualize new media in existing social conventions and the habits of the everyday. The media panics surrounding the Internet, for example, have highlighted

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Introduction  9 the contradiction between the ideals of a reinvigorated public sphere—an electronic agora for scientists, academics, politicians, and the rest of civil society—and of the reality of a network overflowing with pornography, scams, political manipulation, piracy, chat room racists, bigots, and bullies. In recent years we have seen how the Internet has been transformed from a utopian object into a problematic modulator of behavior, including addiction, paedophilia and illicit downloading. It has become an object for censorship—necessitating the weeding out of unpleasant and distasteful content, but also the filtering of politically sensitive and unwanted exchange.

Our job as cultural studies scholars, then, is to understand not just that this does happen, but why and how it happens, in order to locate (and potentially use) transgressive aspects of emergent media to enact or encourage emancipatory change. It is important to recognize that this is not easy; as indicated above, transgression is often politically ambivalent, and at worst is an excuse for repression or the establishment of codes of governmentality and disciplinarity (Kahn and Kellner 2005). As Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner (2005: 1) remind us, the challenge at hand is to begin to conceive the political reality of media such as the Internet as a complex series of places embodying reconstructed models of citizenship and new forms of political activism, even as the Internet itself reproduces logics of capital and becomes co-opted by hegemonic forces.

Two scholars who are often seen as optimistic (even utopian) regarding the potentials and transgressions of digital media echo this wariness. Lawrence Lessig, for instance, wrote in Free Culture (2003: 8) that for the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control of a vast amount of culture and creativity that it’s never reached before. The technology that preserve the balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture

In other words, technology may have allowed us to circumvent or problematize “intellectual property rights,” as Part 1 of this volume discusses in depth, but it has also allowed for the framing of Internet users as criminals, pirates, and even terrorists. As we write this in May 2011, as a matter of fact, the United States Congress is attempting to pass legislation that would even more severely restrict the use of media, and make it much more difficult to produce the kind of groundbreaking, synthetic work we have come to expect from (and in some ways equate with) the

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10  Introduction

Internet and digital culture more broadly. Indeed, even Henry Jenkins, whose optimistic work on fandom and participatory digital culture has become canonical in the field, argued in his book Convergence Culture that: at the same moment in which cyberspace displaces some traditional information and cultural gatekeepers, there’s also an unprecedented concentration of power with an old media. A widening of the discursive environment coexists with a narrowing of the range of information being transmitted by the most readily available media channels (Jenkins 2006: 211).

Since then his work has become even more nuanced and even wary at times, as is reflected in our interview with him in Chapter 12 . Nowhere is this wariness more apparent in terms of digital culture, and perhaps media in general, than with pornography. As Parikka and Sampson (2009) remind us, pornography is completely and utterly infused or paired with other digital culture, and has been since the beginnings of the Internet; moreover, this pairing has also coincided with the MSM portrayal of the Internet through the construction of a rhetoric of “moral panic,” in which new media technology is highlighted in negative terms (e.g., viruses, spam, etc.) and its users pathologized (e.g., the excessive female body, the abused female body, the “pirate” teenager, the tech-savvy Al-Qaeda operative) (Parikka and Sampson 2009: 161–2). This is not to suggest that pornography is inherently or necessarily transgressive. Indeed, as Paasonen (2009) reminds us, “while the Internet offers a virtually unlimited range of different pornography, this cornucopia is filtered through clear-cut categories of sexual identity and preference in portals and metasites,” and while it “might, as [Michael] Warner suggested, enable unexpected encounters, discoveries, and experiences that stretch one’s understanding of the sexual, this is not automatically the case” (ibid.: 173). However, and conversely, we must recognize that pornography does in fact serve a very useful and powerful function in contemporary society, at least in terms of delineating the lines of tension and breakdown that are the hallmarks of social evolution. Laura Kipnis’s Bound and Gagged (1996), one of the most interesting discussions of contemporary pornography and the politics within which it should be seen, makes just this argument: As the avant-garde knew, transgression is no simple thing: it’s a precisely calculated intellectual endeavor. It means knowing the culture inside out, discerning its secrets shames and grubby secrets, and knowing how to best humiliate it, knock it off its prim perch. (To commit sacrilege, you have to have studied the religion.) A culture’s pornography becomes, in effect, a very precise map of that culture’s borders: pornography begins at the edge of the culture’s decorum. Carefully tracing that edge, like an anthropologist mapping a culture system of taboos

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Introduction  11 and myths, gives you a detailed blueprint of the culture’s anxieties, investments, contradictions. And a culture’s borders, whether geographical or psychological, are inevitably political questions… . Pornography is also a form of political theater. Within the incipient, transgressive space opened by its festival of social infractions is a medium for confronting its audiences with exactly those contents that are exiled from sanctioned speech, from mainstream culture and political discourse. (Kipnis 1996: 164)

This should make us wary of hailing transgression as the saving grace of our society, and of condemning it as either a pressure valve or a cultural malaise. In fact, it is perhaps always both, and when it reaches the rapidly changing and circulating realm of digital media, those sides become more difficult to distinguish, delimit, and define. What we can say for certain is that transgression, and Transgression 2.0, provide us with a very useful set of lenses through which we can see (and hopefully understand) our world, and perhaps even a set of tools with which we can constructively interact with and even intervene in it. As Kipnis (1996: 202–3) argues within this realm of transgression, there’s the freedom, displaced from the social world of limits and improprieties, to indulge in a range of belongings and desires without regard to the appropriateness and propriety of those desires, and without regard to social limits on resources, object choices, perversity, or on the anarchy of the imagination.

Transgression 2.0: Rethinking Opposition in a Digital Age Our volume explores Transgression 2.0 in four parts or movements. The first, “Mashup/Remix/Repurpose,” investigates a digital media practice that occupies what is arguably the paradoxical position of transgression in contemporary culture. On the one hand, mashup and remixing are patently and unapologetically illegal. Produced by appropriating, decontextualizing, and recombining the creative material of others, the mashup is a derivative “composition” that violates the metaphysical concept of originality, the cultural status of the author and the authority of authorship, and every aspect of intellectual property law and copyright. On the other hand, and at the same time, these efforts have been appropriated and deployed as a way to produce new and original content, often in service to the controlling interests and dominant figures of the established culture industry. When DJ Danger Mouse, for example, recombined the vocal performance of Jay-Z’s Black Album with music plundered from the Beatles’ White Album, the recording industry responded to this violation by mobilizing every available legal remedy at its disposal. But when the producers of Fox Television’s Glee did the same thing in order to rework tired pop-tunes into fresh-sounding and marketable repackagings of material from back catalogs, the practice

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12  Introduction

was celebrated, supported, and encouraged. The mashup and remix, therefore, represent both the promise and the peril of transgression in contemporary media culture, and the first section seeks to make sense of this practice and its general significance. We begin with Richard Edwards’s “Flip the Script: Political Mashups as Transgressive Texts.” The 2008 U.S. presidential campaign was historically significant not only because it resulted in the election of the first black U.S. president but also because it was arguably the first national campaign to leverage the tools, techniques, and technologies of the mashup. From Shepard Fairey’s iconic “Hope Poster” to the “Vote Different” YouTube video, the election of Barak Obama was supported and advanced by clever user-created mashups of MSM content. Unlike previous efforts at grassroots video activism, which sought to signal a break with MSM forms, these recompositions embraced, repurposed, and recontextualized the texts of popular culture. These political mashups, as Edwards demonstrates, can undermine official campaign rhetoric, subvert mainstream news reports, reconfigure or decode the meaning of a candidate’s speech, and/or extend unofficial meanings latent in journalistic content. For Edwards, however, key questions remain concerning the mashup’s transgressive potential. Can any practice that firmly embraces popular culture, even if it is subverting it on some level, operate as an oppositional practice for real-world political change? Does the use of mainstream cultural texts materially compromise the street cred of oppositional political efforts? Can you, in other words— actually Audre Lorde’s (1984) words—use the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house? In responding to these questions, Edwards not only tries to make sense of the changing situation of political activism in the age of the mashup but endeavors to provide context for understanding its social and political potential. David Gunkel’s “Audible Transgressions: Art and Aesthetics after the Mashup” follows suit by investigating a recent problem with audio mashups and popular music. In 2004, when DJ Danger Mouse released the Grey Album, the mashup appeared to be an innovation that required considerable virtuosity on the part of the remix DJ. Currently, however, it appears that everyone and anyone can get into the remix. Even a mild-mannered biomedical engineer from Pittsburgh, for instance, can pick up a copy of Audio Mulch, load it on a laptop computer, and become a remix superstar. So how does one separate the wheat from the chaff in remix compositions? What distinguishes a “good” mashup from a mere conglomeration of different stuff? Gunkel attempts to sort out these questions, and he does so not by redeploying the usual cultural currency of originality, artistry, and virtuosity but by questioning the very metaphysical investments that underwrite and support these concepts. In other words, and to remix Nietzsche (1974) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (2007) in the process, if the gods of popular music are dead, this does not necessarily mean that anything goes

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Introduction  13

and all things are permitted. Rather it signifies the need for a thorough and fundamental re-evaluation of all aesthetic values. Gunkel takes up this challenge in an effort to characterize and define a new thinking of aesthetics for the mashup. This aspect is taken up and pursued further in Mark Amerika’s “Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/ch RemiX],” which is a conversation with one of the leading digital media artists concerning transgressive practices in contemporary art and literature. The dialogue begins with and takes as its point of departure the fact that Amerika’s original contribution to this volume could not be included because of rules and regulations concerning originality and its protection under the current intellectual property regime. Like Georges Perec’s Oulipian novel A Void (2005), there is something that is absent, and this absence, as Derrida (1982: 24) described it, immediately obtrudes and becomes “readable” in the trace of its erasure or withdrawal. It is in response to this original absence of an original—an absence that is unavoidable and always and already in play—that this conversation about derivation, quotation, and remixing in art and literature takes place. In doing so, the discussion not only exposes the inconsistencies and problems of the concept of “artistic creativity” and the cultural value of the “original” as they are typically understood and formulated but demonstrates how the pre-existing conditions of the glitch remix already undermine, rework, and repurpose the entire history and metaphysics of literary theory and practice. Rounding out the first section is Paul Booth’s “Saw Fandom and the Transgression of Fan Excess,” which investigates what becomes of the supposedly transgressive acts of fan-fiction remixing, when the source material is already exceedingly and irredeemably transgressive. The target of the examination is the Saw franchise, a series of seven torture-porn films (along with comic books and video games) that are notorious for their graphic violence. From one perspective, the Saw films appear to pre-empt the typical fan-instituted transgressions insofar as any low-fi remixed version is obviously unable to achieve the high-definition “shock and awe” of the slickly produced source material. Considered in this fashion, it appears that the Saw films are systemically immune to efforts at remixing, and the proof, as Booth demonstrates, is in the rather unsatisfying and seemingly docile remixes that have proliferated and circulated on the Internet. But from another perspective, these remixed fan compositions may be seen as transgressing Saw’s transgressions, redoubling and even reversing the excesses deployed by the original. Booth therefore argues that the Saw remixes are not necessarily “failed” attempts at transgression but critical interrogations and reworkings of the very expectations and assumptions of transgression itself. Part II “Pornography and Beyond,” looks at media’s dirty little secret. From one perspective—one that is considered to be and protected as correct and proper—pornography is transgressive to the core. Porne-graphein,

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14  Introduction

literally the “writing of harlots,” exposes what should be kept behind closed doors and not exhibited in public. It deliberately engages in practices that push up against the boundaries of accepted social and sexual mores, demonstrating those things that should apparently remain covered, hidden, and concealed from view. And as social/sexual tastes and expectations have changed (devolving or evolving, it all depends on how one considers it and who is doing the looking), it has continually had to amp-up its interventions, probing the new boundaries and prohibitions in order to violate them once again. From another perspective, however, pornography may be seen as the engine of innovation and development in media technology, especially when it comes to new business models and monetizing media content. In fact, the root of the word porno is closely related to the Greek verb πέρνημι, which means “to sell.” Some of the first commercially available photographs, for instance, were “dirty pictures”; the neighborhood video store, a fixture of late twentieth-century home entertainment, learned its trade and borrowed its business model from the adult book store; and pornography was clearly the first sector of the new Internet economy to figure out how to make a buck online. Porn, quite literally, is all about commercial exploitation. It is hard core capitalism. What this means, then, is that pornography, as a transgressive practice, is caught between a proverbial rock and a hard place (and by this time every word, every phrase, every concept is, for better or worse, inseminated with seemingly irrepressible double meanings). As D.A.F. de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1966) demonstrates, transgressive behavior, in order to be transgressive, requires something of an interminable analysis where each episode must be more extreme than the one that came before. Unfortunately, however, many scholars thus separate “normal” porn from “transgressive” porn, which reduces the potential and constrains the politics of the erotic: Scholars studying the information society tend to see users as rational—or “information-intense”—citizens engaging in information retrieval and exchange, whereas researchers addressing online pornography have been most inspired by alternative cultures, artistic, amateur, and independent practices. Consequently, studies of online pornography have tended to focus on case studies that counter and challenge generic, commercial heteroporn in terms of production, distribution, access, and aesthetics. .… These silences are telling. First they are telling of a general trend in studies of new media to focus on the novel, the futuristic, and the potentially avant-garde while attending less to continuities, predictabilities, or commercial texts. Second, these silences imply that the category of mainstream commercial heteropornography is assumed to be obvious, noble, and known without specific study, and that studying commercial pornography poses little analytical or intellectual challenge: Interesting [sic] examples are apparently located elsewhere. (Paasonen 2009: 168)

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Part II investigates and seeks to take account of this seemingly infinite operation whereby what had been transgressive needs to be continually questioned, violated, and exceeded in order to remain transgressive, while simultaneously interrogating and complicating the assumption that “difference” connotes dynamic change while the “everyday” must connote stasis. Consequently, we include this “explicit” and “adult” material (which is another set of curious euphemisms), not because sex sells, which of course it does, but because the theory and practice of porn has always and already been involved with the opportunities and challenges that we have identified with the term Transgression 2.0. Part II begins with Stephen Maddison’s “Is the Rectum Still a Grave? Anal Sex, Pornography and Transgression,” which seeks to examine and reconsider the current state of a “transgressive homosexual practice” that has apparently become hetero-normalized. As Maddison points out, by way of a reading of the texts of Mario Mieli, an Italian Marxist gay liberationist, and Leo Bersani’s iconoclastic “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” anal sex had been invested with revolutionary potential, representing a shattering transgression not only of male-dominated phallocentric selfhood but of murderous misogynous homophobia. For Maddison, however, the question now is whether and to what extent this transgressive potential remains. At the end of the first decade of the new millennium does anal sex still have the transgressive potential it had for Mieli and Bersani? What has happened to the practice in the past twenty-five years? Is the rectum still a grave? In addressing these questions, Maddison’s essay considers the politics of anal sex in hardcore pornography in the digital age, where this one-time revolutionary practice has now become one of the dominant articulations of heterosexual desire. Why, and how, Maddison asks, has anal sex become so omnipresent and normalized? Is it possible in these new contexts to recuperate, rehabilitate, or restore its transgressive potential? And if the rectum is still a grave, what forms of mortality does it broker? In addressing these questions, Maddison engages in a critical reading of the work of Mieli, Bersani, and Freud, as well as drawing on the work of queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem, the sociologist Henning Bech, and contemporary theories of neoliberalism. Questions of gender, sexuality, and sexual practice are often accompanied by concepts of identity, self-image, and subjectivity. Sarah Neely’s “Making Bodies Visible: Post-Feminism and the Pornographication of Online Identities” takes up and follows this thread by confronting and critiquing the undeniably seductive but also terribly misguided utopian rhetoric of cyberspace. From the beginning, the social opportunities afforded by networked computers were celebrated (almost without any significant critical hesitation or friction) for fabricating a mythical “level playing field,” where users could, in the words of Mark Dery, “float free of biological and sociocultural determinates,” escaping the restrictions

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of gender, race, ethnicity, and those “other problematic constructions” (Dery 1994: 3) that mark and mar social interaction. Neely not only argues that this utopianism is inaccurate and wrong headed but, what is perhaps worse, demonstrates how it has been employed to mask and legitimize a general pornification of culture where women and women’s bodies become increasingly exploited and commoditized. The main concern for Neely is the way online spaces, from social networking sites and sex industry profiles to user-generated content on sex blogs and sex-positive communities that offer opportunities for explicit self-representation, provide new modes of visibility and prosumer participation that do not always ensure the ideals of democratic involvement and equality but often-times recode and legitimate the legacy systems of exploitation. The paradox of online identity formation is that the networking applications that appear to be liberating and transgressive often turn out to be not only regressive but little more than a clever strategy for marketing the status quo. The obvious challenge for theorists, practitioners, and activists, Neely argues, is to learn how to occupy, organize, and operate on this contested terrain. Grant Kien’s “BDSM and Transgression 2.0: The Case of Kink.com” investigates the logic and consequences of this paradox as it is deployed and operationalized in the BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Submission, Sadism, Masochism) community. Drawing on work in critical theory and cultural studies (e.g. Baudrillard, Charland, and Foucault), Kien’s essay investigates the development and popularization of BDSM as indicative of the way a one-time underground online community comes to be mainstreamed through the very medium that gave rise to it. Part of this process, Kien argues, involves the commodification and marketing of the transgressive practices of so-called “perverts” and “deviants.” In this way, the restricted spaces of “profane” activity and forbidden sexual practices come to be reappropriated and redistributed by various interests of capital and, in the process, are successfully domesticated and repackaged as legitimate consumer products. Indicative of this development, Kien argues, is the incorporation of Kink.com and its legitimization as a prominent corporate entity both in its rise to dominance in the BDSM pornography field but also in its corresponding status as a formidable commercial enterprise in the San Francisco metropolitan area. In this way, Kien’s analysis of the particular case of BDSM pornography demonstrates the opportunity/ challenge of all transgressive undertakings, where success, often-times defined in terms of general acceptance, recognition, and even commodification, typically means failure. The final essay in Part II, Julian Petley’s “Sick Stuff: Law, Criminality, and Obscenity,” confronts the seemingly inconsistent and moving target that is obscenity. Petley’s investigation focuses on the illuminating case of Darryn Walker, a 35-year-old civil servant from South Shields in the northeast of England, who was arrested in February 2008 by officers from Scotland

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Yard’s Obscene Publications Unit. Walker’s arrest, Petley argues, raises important and vexing questions concerning the concept of censorship, the exercise of free speech, and the role of new media and technology. In particular, it demonstrates that, even in democratic societies, the Internet is not immune to efforts to surveil user activity and control access to information. It is by now well known that authoritarian states such as China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia restrict access to Internet content and subject users to surveillance in myriad ways, but in democratic countries it is generally assumed that such activities are, if not non-existent, at least confined to special cases involving extremely dangerous criminal behavior, like child pornography or terrorism. What is remarkable about Walker’s “transgression,” however, is the fact that it was exceedingly mundane and even uneventful. For this reason, Petley argues, the Walker case demonstrates the way in which surveillance and censorship, instead of being an exception, are increasingly being normalized as the rule, especially in Britain, which has the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s leading surveillance societies. As an expert witness involved in providing testimony at the trial, Petley provides an insider’s analysis by using actual documents from the Court’s proceedings to shed light on new and worrying approaches to justifying surveillance and adjudicating censorship in the age of the Internet. In the process, he suggests that what was “transgressive” in this case was not what Walker did but the way in which his actions came to be criminalized by the very institutions that were charged with upholding the law. Part III, “Media 2.0—Legitimacy, Power, and Information” redirects the question of transgression to address the media itself. New media are not just conduits carrying transgressive content, like BDSM pornography, to our computer screens, ear buds, or smart phones; their very form and function are considered to be transgressive. The recent development of Web 2.0 applications, which leverage user-generated content in amateurto-amateur (Hunter and Lastowka 2004) exchanges, shifts the focus of media communication from a situation where “content is king” to one where community and connection have become increasingly important and central. This shift, often celebrated as democratizing not only because it lowers the bar for full participation in “free speech” activities but also because it has been effectively deployed by actual democratic revolutions across the globe, confronts the hegemony of mass media and journalism in ways that appear to be unprecedented and transformative. This overthrow of the media gatekeepers and standard bearers, however, comes with a considerable price—legitimacy, credibility, and accuracy. A case in point is Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, which introduced the term “wikiality” in July 2006. This neologism was, as the program’s host Stephen Colbert explained, derived from the experience and features of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where “any user can change any entry, and if enough users agree with them, it becomes true” (Comedy Central

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2006). As proof of concept, Colbert urged his viewers to go to Wikipedia and deliberately manipulate population statistics for the African elephant, significantly increasing the reported number so as to make it appear that the largest terrestrial mammal was not in fact on the verge of becoming an endangered species. This collective action, although staged as a comedic prank, illustrates the very real opportunity/problem with these new media applications. Although prising open the one-time restricted and closed field of media content to virtually any and all comers, this democratizing of information production and distribution is not without significant consequences for our understanding of media and its message. The investigation of this material begins with Mark Nunes’s “Abusing the Media: Viral Validity in a Republic of Spam,” which asks the question: What counts as “legitimate” political discourse in a network society in which an increasing number of individuals have the means to gather, critique, alter, and/or circulate information? The target of Nunes’s investigation is Internet hoaxes—deliberate circulation of misinformation, error, and noise. Hoaxes, Nunes argues, do more than manipulate and, in the process, reveal the failings of the current media system. They also call attention to and foreground the political vitality of validity claims within new media systems. The challenge, as Nunes sees it, is to understand how the seemingly “pointless noise” of the hoax, rather than signifying a failure to communicate, offers a mode of alternative political engagement distinct from any attempt to recapture that action within the framework of “legitimate” discourse. Nunes, therefore, is concerned with the way in which digital media systems and applications, instead of being noiseless channels of news and information, offer new opportunities for all kinds of politically charged cross-talk, static, and disturbance that intervene in the seemingly smooth functioning of media content. Following the thread of this argument, Ted Gournelos’s “Breaking the News: Power and Secrecy in the Age of the Internet” analyzes what many consider to be the quintessential example of this kind of challenge/ innovation—WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, which has been in operation since 2006, came to prominence mainly by way of news stories published in what Gournelos calls mainstream media (MSM), when the organization leaked U.S. State Department diplomatic cables in November 2010. According to Gournelos’s analysis, Wikileaks “breaks the news.” That is, it beats MSM at its own game, investigating and breaking news stories that the big, centralized, and trusted names in corporate and government-funded journalism—BBC, CBS, New York Times, NPR, CNN, Time, Fox News, The Guardian, etc.—are either unwilling or unable to provide. In doing so, and at the same time, WikiLeaks also breaks the news in that it points out the blind spot of MSM journalism, exhibiting its structural faults, operational failings, and systemic inabilities. This does not, however, mean that WikiLeaks is without its own problems, complications, or difficulties. What

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Introduction  19

is needed, Gournelos suggests, is a critical engagement that is able to articulate and evaluate the significance of WikiLeaks and the effect of its apparently transgressive practices. WikiLeaks is obviously one of the best publicized examples of the way Web 2.0 developments can challenge and complicate existing methods of content creation, editorial decision-making, and information distribution. The majority of Web 2.0 applications, however, never attract this kind of MSM publicity, despite the fact that their operations can be just as revealing and transgressive. A case in point is reported in Vanessa Au’s “My Day of Fame on Digg.com: Race, Representation, and Resistance in Web 2.0.” On February 8, 2008, Au inadvertently became an Internet celebrity when a photograph of her wearing a Blacklava shirt that read “I will not love you long time” made its way from an acquaintance’s Flickr account to the content-sharing website Digg.com, where it quickly rose to the No. 1 position. The shirt, which deliberately references and repurposes a comment made by a Vietnamese prostitute to a U.S. soldier in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, was intended, as Au points out, as an act of resistance—part of an effort to question the construction of Asian American women as objects of white male sexual fantasy. Her appearance on Digg.com certainly had the potential to communicate this critical insight, and while it might have interrupted the narrative of the Asian as passive model minority, the public dialog which took place in the form of audience comments on both Digg and Flickr indicates that things can be and are much more complicated. Au’s autobiographical investigation of her own “day of fame” exposes and critically examines the complications of racism and ethnocentrism in the Web 2.0 world of user-generated content. In particular, her examination asks what this event tells us about how the Internet public reads acts of Asian American resistance in what is often claimed to be a post-race, color-blind society and, more broadly, how these acts of resistance and transgression come to be (mis)interpreted by others when they concern questions of race, ethnicity, and otherness. Part III concludes with an interview with Henry Jenkins, author of, among other books, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006a) and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (2006b). In this conversation, Jenkins not only explains how the new technologies and activities of participatory culture are changing expectations, assumptions, and opportunities in media content, but argues that fans and fan practices should be seen as potent political interventions that can have important and lasting effects on contemporary culture. Significantly, Jenkins complicates the standard technological determinist perspective, arguing that there is nothing inevitable about the idea that the introduction of new media technologies will result in the democratization of culture. The role of new media in participartory democratic transformations, whether it takes the form of fan advocacy for a favorite television

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20  Introduction

program or street protests against government oppression or economic policy, remains undecided and contentious … and that is a good thing. The final part, Part IV “Law, Social Disturbance, and Political Unrest,” takes up and explicitly pursues the legal, social, and political aspects of transgression that have been deployed, mobilized, or noted throughout the volume. By definition, transgression is the surpassing of or “step across” some limit or boundary. These limits are, more often than not articulated in laws, rules, and social contracts, which are established, maintained, and justified by various political organizations or social institutions. Transgression therefore occupies a curious position, one that both needs these structures as its very condition for possibility and that simultaneously questions and challenges their order, limits, and operations. Law—whether issued in the form of divine commandments, negotiated and codified in a social agreement, imposed by a self-appointed dictator, negotiated through some kind of democratic process, or even inscribed on the box top of a Milton Bradley board game—is the condition of (im) possibility for transgression. Because of this, everything should be sighted and addressed by what Slavoj Žižek (2006) calls “the parallax view.” From one perspective, a perspective that is always and already assumed to be the standard if not correct way of doing things, the transgressor cannot help but be defined as a deviant, wrongdoer, or criminal. She/he/it/they break the law. From another perspective, however, these transgressive operations call attention to and betray the structural limitations of the law itself often, but not always, with reference to some alternative figure of authority— god, human dignity, the rights of man, etc. The truth of the matter, as Žižek characterizes it by way of his particular and clever remix of Hegelian dialectics, does not lie on the one side or the other but emerges in the “shifting perspective between two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible” (Žižek 2006: 4). It is in this kind of parallax gap that transgression takes place, has a place, and stakes a claim on its future. Part IV begins with Jack Bratich’s “Sovereign Networks, Pre-emptive Transgression, Communications Warfare: Case Studies in Social Movement Media,” which investigates two different ways of perceiving the political impact and significance of Twitter. At the G20 protests in Pittsburgh in the Fall of 2009, when police arrested two men on charges of criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime, the media largely ignored them except through the sound-bites provided by the authorities. In the winter of 2011, just a little more than a year later, however, the picture was entirely otherwise, as mainstream news media celebrated the almost identical use of this social networking and microblogging platform as a crucial tool for coordinating Iranian street protests. In addition to being a technological object of fervent admiration in itself, Twitter became a crucial source of news, as reporters increasingly came to rely on tweets for information about on-the-ground events. One way to

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understand these two seemingly contradictory conclusions, Bratich argues, is through a revival of the friend/enemy distinction, in which the transgressions of those close to us are tolerated while similar actions of those deemed “enemies” become criminalized. Bratich’s chapter examines the new developments in network alliances that determine the “moving lines” delineating “acceptable” forms of social protest from criminal behavior. To complicate matters, Bratich asserts, political activists now face a new logic of law enforcement, which imposes punishment not after a transgression takes place but exercises pre-emption of perceived and potential transgressions. In convergence and social media, Bratich concludes, it is not that distinctions disappear or remain static but rather that they are reformulated in mobile and flexible ways. The second chapter in Part IV, Debra Shaw’s “Monsters in the Metropolis: Pirate Utopias and the New Politics of Space,” concerns a particular urban form of transgressive operations—squatting. Although typically lumped under the social problem of “homelessness” in North America, squatting has, in Europe at least, a distinct political character. Shaw addresses the issue by examining self-managed social centers, which are squatted buildings run by volunteer collectives. These collectives provide a space for alternative cultural and political activities by taking advantage of the dereliction which attends the spread of post-urbanism. Shaw examines these social centers as spaces of alterity in the contemporary city and argues that Rem Koolhaas’s concept of “Junkspace” can enable an interpretation of the city as virtual space, a reading imaged in films like The Matrix and William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, which represent a correspondence between urban space and cyberspace. With reference to Hakim Bey’s (2003) concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), a new politics of space is proposed in which social centers function to expose and confront the architectonics of what Giorgio Agamben (2009: 2) calls metropolitan dispositif through the technique of repurposing which, like hacking and DRM infringements, is a parasitic activity attuned to the practice of piracy. In this form, piracy re-emerges as a cultural trope precisely at the point where attempts to enclose cyberspace converge with anxieties about the meaning of public space in cities that are becoming increasingly privatized and segregated. Social centers, Shaw argues, may be understood as “intentional communities” of the “coming class” or what Hardt and Negri (2004) call “multitude” which may point the way to a creative encounter with the striated spaces of contemporary urbanism. Whereas Shaw’s chapter concerns the occupation and repurposing of physical space, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste’s “On the Mexican State’s War on Drug Violence: Transgression in the Representation and Circulation of Los Perro Salvajes” is interested in investigating the way in which oppositional and critical political actors are able to reappropriate and redeploy cultural capital and intellectual property. Following a tradition, which

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began with Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1971), Fernández L’Hoeste demonstrates how the work of the Mexican web cartoonist Edgar Clément confronts and critiques the dominant political and cultural order of the Mexican state by leveraging the power of new technology and appropriating the mythology of an Amerindian past, using both against the very establishment that controls and deploys these elements as the tools of its particular construction of national identity. Clement’s webcomics, especially Los Perro Salvajes, which is the focal point of Fernández L’Hoeste’s analysis, reuse the language, mythology, and technology of the Mexican government in direct opposition to the continued exercise of its hegemony, leading readers to question not only the official account of events surrounding the “war on drugs” but the validity and credibility of the “official sources.” In the process, Fernández L’Hoeste, like Dorfman and Mattelart before him, demonstrates how seemingly mundane cultural objects, like web-published cartoons and comics, can perform important cultural work that challenges and even undermines the status quo. The book’s final chapter, Michael Truscello’s “Social Media and the Representation of Summit Protests: YouTube, Riot Porn, and the Anarchist Tradition,” explores the role of social media, especially YouTube and other Web 2.0 video-sharing platforms, in the recent redefinition of radical politics, specifically the rise to prominence of insurrectionist anarchism. Insurrectionist strategies, Truscello demonstrates, have played a decidedly minority role within the general anarchist tradition. In the past decade, however, these factions have received inordinate media attention and exposure, and, as a result, the general public has now come to view all anarchism as insurrectionist (if anarchism is considered at all). And the Internet has only complicated matters. In the era of YouTube and other user-produced video-sharing applications, the Internet is awash with images of what some anarchists call “riot porn”—decontextualized videos of so-called “anarchists” clashing dramatically with riot police at various global economic summits. The recent development, popularity, and even celebration of user-produced riot porn video, Truscello argues, renders real political opposition increasingly difficult. On the one hand, riot porn images serve as the representation of a postmodern capitalist fantasy that fosters an abstract revulsion of lawlessness and lumps all forms of grass-roots political activism together under this criminalized construct. On the other hand, it is the proliferation and success of riot porn as the iconic emblem of oppositional politics that also deters radical social actors from understanding and promoting their message, despite its historical importance and position in the history of democratic politics and social movements. In other words, the use of new media technology, especially Web 2.0 applications, by socially involved anarchist organizations and groups, although

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increasing the visibility of their efforts, also and quite ironically constitutes the greatest challenge to their own success. Consequently, the real problem for oppositional politics, as Truscello points out, is to think through this problematic and learn to strategize alternative modes of transgressive and interventionist operations.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What is an Apparatus and Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1931. Translated by Allen Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bey, Hakim. 2003. T.A.Z.—The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia. Comedy Central. 2006. The Colbert Report. http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/ index. jhtml?videoId=72347. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dery, Mark. 1994. Flame Wars. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. 1971. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Translated by David Kunzle. New York: International General. Dostoyevsky, Fyódor. 2007. The Karamazov Brothers. Translated by Constance Garnett. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. New York: Cornell University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1987. Hegel’s Logic: Being the First Part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Translated by William Wallace. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunter, Dan and F. Gregory Lastowka. 2004. Amateur-to-Amateur. William and Mary Law Review 46(3): 951–1030. Jenkins, Henry. 2006a. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2006b. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. Jenks, Chris. 2003. Transgression. New York: Routledge. Jervis, John. 1999. Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness. Oxford: Blackwell. Kahn, Richard and Douglas Kellner. 2005. Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach. Cultural Politics 1: 75–100. Kipnis, Laura. 1996. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. New York: Grove Press. Koolhaas, Rem. 2002. Junkspace. October 100(1): 175–90. Lessig, Lawrence. 2003. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Group. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion. New York: PublicAffairs. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.

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24  Introduction Paasonen, Susanna. 2009. Irregular Fantasies, Anomalous Uses: Pornography Spam as Boundary Work. In The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, edited by J. Parikka and T. D. Sampson. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Parikka, Jussi and Tony D. Sampson (eds). 2009. The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Perec, Georges. 2005. A Void. Translated by Gilbert Adair. Jaffery. New Haven, CT: Verba Mundi Books. Phillips, Dougal. 2009. Can Desire Go On Without a Body?: Pornographic Exchange as Orbital Anomaly. In The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, edited by J. Parikka and T. D. Sampson. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Plato. 1990. Phaedrus. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Sade, D. A. F. 1966. The 120 Days of Sodom. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Trangression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Suleiman, Susan Robin. 1995. Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil. In On Bataille: Critical Essays, edited by L. A. Boldt-Irons. New York: State University of New York Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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1 Flip the Script Political Mashups as Transgressive Texts RICHARD L. EDWARDS Sampling is a new way of doing something that’s been with us for a long time: creating with found objects. The rotation gets thick. The constraints get thin. The mix breaks free of old associations. New contexts form from old. The script gets flipped. DJ Spooky, Rhythm Science The remix process acknowledges the contributions of others… . It is, after all, about a form of mutual exchange. However, in the process, one also relinquishes notions of authority and exclusive ownership, and must necessarily accept whatever future transformations occur. Bernard Schutze, “Samples from the Heap”

T

his chapter is about how political mashups “flip the script” around media activism in US elections. Such connections between new media, rebellious communication, and participatory culture are as old as activism itself (Downing 2001). In the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht argued in favor of a participatory media culture when he criticized the one-way nature of the commercial German radio industry and advocated that all radios should be able to transmit as well as receive. (Brecht 1932). In the 1960s, alternative video collectives such as the Videofreex and TVTV challenged the mass broadcasting model of network television with a combination of video activism, art happenings, and protest politics involving the newly available video technology of the Sony Portapak (Boyle 1997). In the 2000s, mashups are the latest manifestation of alternative media, citizen empowerment and participatory culture. A mashup combines two or more media sources into a new, derivative work. You can refer to political mashup practices in a variety of ways: remixing for democracy, DJ activism for the Web 2.0 crowd, “bedroom activism” for millennials, or even laptop activism for one’s Facebook friends (Ayers 2006; Jenkins 2006).

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Since their emergence during the 2004 US elections and their broad popularity since, mashups operate as transgressive texts that disrupt longstanding media norms, challenge conventional campaign strategies and rhetorics, and utilize the power of social media. Mashup artists embrace remix culture and its unique spins and commentaries on popular culture. In so doing, they produce an oppositional culture that no longer operates primarily on the fringes or in the margins of the digital mediascape. Video mashups bring together politics and popular culture by blurring the boundaries between agit-prop video and commercial parodies, the tactics of underground DJ and the strategies of major media companies, and usergenerated content and corporately financed media productions. Instead of older notions of radical media, cultural resistance, and culture jamming that advocated for disruptive and oppositional strategies against corporate and mainstream media (the “noise in the signal” model)1 the digital mashup mixes a new tune for activists. The mashup inverts the logic of culture jamming by seeking to create a derivative signal that rises above the deafening noise made by the mainstream media industries. The mashup thus exists as a cultural meme and pop culture artifact that can become as well known as the references it is appropriating and remixing; moreover, in many cases the mashup is more “original” than the original.

Hope or Socialism? Obama in the Age of the Mashup Shepard Fairey gained national attention for his remixed portrait of Barack Obama during the 2008 election cycle. Fairey’s “Hope” poster, as it came to be called, was a mashup of an Associated Press photograph and an iconic image of Che Guevara (See Figure 1.1). The “Hope” poster was a prominent visual element of the 2008 election for the US presidency, and was embraced by the official Obama campaign and progressive groups such as Moveon.org. Fairey is a long-time underground remix artist and founder of Obey Giant, as well as a prominent figure in films on guerrilla artists such as Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) and Beautiful Losers (2009). He modeled his now-famous poster of Obama on Jim Fitzpatrick’s 1960s mythopoetic poster based on an Alberto Korda photograph of Che Guevara.2 The “Hope” poster is an instant classic of campaign art, and was included as part of a highly publicized 2009 gallery retrospective of Fairey’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.3 In one of the image’s more interesting digital evolutions, Paste magazine created a website that allowed any end user to create their own “Hope” image by digitally manipulating one of their own photographs provided via webcam or file upload. Entitled Obamicon.me, the site further propagates Fairey’s artistic style by remixing photographic head shots with the “Hope” slogan or any other user-selected keyword. Among the most popular mashups: actor David Hasselhoff/”Hoff,” actor Jeff Bridges as The Dude in The Big

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Figure 1.1  Shepard Fairey’s “Obama/Hope” Poster (2008)

Lebowski/”Abide,” and President George W. Bush/”Fail.” Even long after the fervor of the 2008 election died down, users are still visiting Obamicon. me and generating new mashups based on the ever-fluid and changing landscape of politics and pop culture. Faris Alkhateeb, who also achieved widespread attention for a mashup of Barack Obama, represents a different form of mashup artist. According to the Los Angeles Times on December 31, 2009, Faris Alkhateeb was the person responsible for the popular “Obama Joker” image, which mashed up an Obama Time magazine photograph with Heath Ledger’s make-up design as The Joker from the Hollywood blockbuster, The Dark Knight. Alkhateeb’s Photoshopped image became an Internet viral sensation: it was the chaotic flipside to Fairey’s audacious image of hope (See Figure 1.2). Moreover, like Fairey’s “Hope” poster, “Obama Joker” has been widely imitated and copied. Whereas Fairey’s background and connections might have had something to do with the circulation and promotion of his “Hope” poster, there is a very different rationale for the success of Alkhateeb’s image. This is because Alkhateeb is neither an artist nor an activist. At the time he made his mashup, he was a bored college student, majoring in history, at the University of Illinois. He was experimenting with a Photoshop tutorial he found online. Then in the nature of today’s social media, he posted his digitally mashed up image to Flickr, an online photo-sharing service. The act of posting it online made Alkhateeb’s previously private act of creativity public. As part of Flickr’s photographic archive, another individual found Alkhateeb’s retouched image, and mashed up the image further by adding the word “socialism” as a counterpoint to Fairey’s use of “hope.” Subsequently posters of “ObamaJoker/Socialism” began to appear around various sites in Los Angeles. It was those posters that garnered mainstream notice, and led

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Figure 1.2  Faris Alkhateeb/Anonymous’s “Obama/Socialism” Poster (2009)

reporters back to Alkhateeb’s original mashup. And like Obamicon.me, there were many other web users who were inspired to create yet more mashups with a “Joker” theme, including liberal versions of this trope involving Sarah Palin and John McCain. Welcome to the loops and circuits of creativity in the realm of digital image mashups. In the stories behind the creative production and online circulation of digital image mashups, what Fairey and Alkhateeb did is not an exceptional story in the era of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Rather they are useful examples of the potentials and disruptions coming from the confluence of social media, participatory media, and popular culture in American politics. That Fairey and Alkhateeb are not similar types of digital creators is part of a new media reality. As evidence of the rise of the amateur in digital culture, Alkhateeb’s “ObamaJoker” demonstrates how almost any computer user can create a visual work or cultural meme with the ability to “go viral” with little to no artistic training (Keen 2007; Shirky 2008).4 As more and more regular citizens (as opposed to trained or professional artists) create, distribute, and exhibit their mashups, media remix becomes a form of activism that joins other communication technologies—such as video activism and journalistic blogging—as an available method of political and social protest, commentary, and witnessing (Faber 1990). Frequently, mashup activism takes the form of networked authorship, where the derivative activist works are the result of multiple individuals collaborating online through the facilities available in social networking and other Web 2.0 applications. “ObamaJokerSocialism” is at least doubly authored (Alkhateeb and Anonymous) with an assist from the creator of a Photoshop template for “jokerizing” portraits and the direct influence of Shepard Fairey’s own poster work.

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Mashups are seriously fun, but as a mode of empowerment among citizens and voters, are not simply meant as jokes, satires, or parodies— though they can involve or share those qualities. A mashup, regardless of its tone or mode of address, is a complex intertextual object that brings into relationship two or more previously separate texts. In a mashup, when these two or more previously separate systems of meaning come into contact or juxtaposition, a new, third meaning emerges and the resultant text can and should be read dialectically (Edwards and Tryon 2009). It is the digital age’s version of Eisenstein’s expressive montage by way of Bruce Conner’s found footage film practices for a participatory culture that has already been demythologized by Roland Barthes and whose most trusted news source is Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Fairey’s and Alkhateeb/Anonymous’s posters demonstrate how mashups are part of a process of remixing that encourages a succession of derivative works. As the cultural referents shift in each mashup, so too does our reading of Barack Obama. But what if both posters just swapped their captions? What if Fairey’s poster was subtitled “Socialism,” and Alkhateeb/ Anonymous’s poster was captioned “Hope?” In the first instance, since Fairey’s poster is based on a poster of Che Guevara, such a caption wouldn’t be ironic but potentially revealing of its source material. In the “Joker” poster, a caption of “Hope” might have better highlighted the incongruity of mashing up Obama and The Joker and, maybe even more strongly, signaled the creator’s dislike of Obama’s image as a steward of “hope.” Mashups are part of an ever-evolving semiotic chain of meanings that weave new texts and new narratives. In keeping with the etymological origins of text, from the Latin meaning “to weave,” a mashup is literally a thread being woven through the warp and woof of popular culture, and it activates “a knitting circle” that once started cannot be unraveled by the initial mashup author. To switch to DJ culture: when the party is rolling, the mix is live.

DJs and Political Mashups: “Re:volution USA” and “Auto-Tune the News” Remix culture is a culture of quoting, and of the remake. But it is also a culture of intervention and reinvention whose goal is entertainment but also communion and liberation. The artist at the controls wittingly yields to chance (in the form of glitches, among other things), and to the means at hand in his or her creative process—because while result matters, it matters less than the process, the performance, and the event. Anne Marie Boisvert, “On Bricolage”

The script-flipper and sampler par excellence comes from the world of underground music and hip-hop: the DJ. While many individuals who engage in remixes and mashups are more familiar with DJ Danger Mouse,

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Jay-Z, and Grandmaster Flash than Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, as DJ Spooky notes in his book Rhythm Science the connections between deconstructive poststructuralist French theory and the plagiarhythms of the hip-hop, underground music scene are “there if they ever come looking” (Miller 2004). Even when we are discussing visual media, the compositional logic of mashups is derived from the scratching “wheels of steel” of turntablism and the improvisational “freestyle” and “wildstyle” of club DJs (Miller 2004). As freelance hellraisers, the best DJs are agents provocateur. If they don’t quite épater le bourgeoisie, their remixed tracks attack and defamiliarize the canned and overcooked products of pop culture. With a nod towards Marshall McLuhan’s most famous formulation, the mix is the message. By comparing an early wave of online activist mashups in the 2004 US elections against those produced during the 2010 elections, we can begin to see how the practices of political mashups are evolving in relation to changes in participatory culture, social media, and digital remix technology. While remix authors can come from a variety of backgrounds and skills (and literally can be anyone with a computer and an online connection), my two examples will focus on DJs, specifically the British DJ duo Coldcut and Canadian performance artists NomIg contrasted with an American musical group by the name of The Gregory Brothers. During the 2004 US Presidential Election, United Kingdom audio/visual artists Coldcut and Montreal-based new media artists NomIg conceived “Re:volution USA,” or RevUSA in short, as an online multimedia political art project.5 Coldcut is the DJ team of Jonathan More and Matt Black. Coldcut’s media work is primarily rooted in DJ music and the underground club scene, but they have been new media pioneers and the founders of the Ninja Tune label and website, which distributes the work of remix artists. NomIg is also a creative duo: Stephanie MacKay and Ed Jordan. NomIg’s artistic ambitions lie more in ambient avant-garde video. Their video short, pdx_01, has been shown on the digital media festival circuit.6 Together, these media artists launched RevUSA in the months leading up to the 2004 Presidential Elections in the US as an innovative, cutting-edge interactive media project. Coldcut and NomIg built an online database that allowed individuals to upload and download existing mainstream media footage, usually short clips of less than 10 seconds. Since Coldcut’s More and Black are DJs, they supplied the site with 160 megabytes of their own musical samples and a remixed version of their political song, “Revolution.” The television footage and the sound samples were available to be downloaded and remixed by anyone who desired to do so. As they stated at their site, Coldcut hoped that “as many politically conscious Internet denizens as possible—including artists, grassroots organizations, filmmakers and the general public” would access the site and use “whatever else they can get their hands on.” Back in 2004, those interested

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in participating in this project would have needed a fairly new computer, their own video editing program, and a pretty good Internet connection, since the files were rather large for downloading. But if a media- and techsavvy user came upon this site, she could have accessed the raw audio-visual materials and created her own documentary mashup. The site also features a main page where other viewers could click on and view the uploaded user-generated videos. The RevUSA project was intended by its creators to operate as an online demonstration of media literacy, consciousness raising, and political activism. The site developed a large archive of usergenerated mashups in a pre-YouTube era. To show the possibilities of their project, Coldcut and NomIg created a mashup called “World of Evil.” It is five minutes of visual détournement and sonic detritus, a raucous mashup of mainstream television election coverage (mostly culled from the 30-minute nightly news broadcasts on network TV) rhythmically edited and scratched to a remix of their own activist anthem, “Revolution.” It was also, according to its creators, an example of documentary filmmaking. That artists working in remix culture claim that they are cross-pollinating the documentary film tradition into their political art project is not surprising given the omnivorous reach of the remix artist, where no media form is sacrosanct and where all found footage is up for grabs—audio-visual raw meat to be fed into the computer hard-drive, digitally digested, and then rendered as a complex and contradictory media concoction—activist and apolitical, straight and parodic, direct and off target, sober and hilarious, obvious and subliminal. Coldcut had big ambitions for this project. As it announced at its website, Coldcut hoped that its project would “incite the public,” and “unearth … the veiled wasteland of US politics in order to invoke social change and create a new forum for meaningful artistic interactivity.” Coldcut’s ideas about the power of user-generated video mashups at RevUSA were being implemented as social media and Web 2.0 culture begin to gain traction in 2004, and anticipate the growth of video mashups through then-emerging sites of participatory media culture such as YouTube and Facebook. But they had a clear vision of the activist potential of such online video mashups. NomIg argued that their project is in “contrast to most art which offers social commentary (which can often serve the artist more than the audience), Coldcut devised this scheme in order to motivate the audience to work through the material themselves.” As with many mashup projects, active involvement in media literacy and pedagogy is an important aspect of these projects. To expand how we may read a political mashup, it is worth considering Coldcut’s claim that its mashups are documentaries. One way to approach this is to compare the RevUSA project to other political documentaries released in 2004 such as Outfoxed and Farenheit 911. Coldcut describes its project like this: “The concept of this site is also a

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new form of documentary filmmaking. By offering audiovisual content in such a raw and concise form it is possible for the user to essentially create their own documentary experience by simply following the links and watching the materials in the order they choose—without the bias and editing decisions of the filmmaker.” Returning to the above comparison, Coldcut is implicitly arguing that documentary filmmakers such as Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed) and Michael Moore (Farenheit 911) have political agendas and particular biases. As filmmakers, they make creative decisions and use editing techniques that influence our understanding of pro-filmic reality. To put it plainly, Coldcut wants to cut out the “middlemen” (even well-known progressive filmmakers like Greenwald and Moore) and have the users create their own documentary experiences. For Coldcut, the mashup becomes a new way of reading media images and uncovering media biases. On the one hand, there is a utopian thrust behind this artistic vision. It is connected to media democracy and literacy movements. On the other hand, making mashups is a productive act that requires editing knowledge and an understanding of intertextuality. In that sense, you can imagine how Coldcut envisioned its users as “becoming the media” to contest professional news reporters or as documentary filmmakers to rival Greenwald and Moore. This desire to turn passive viewers into active consumers has been a main tenet of both old and new media activism from Brecht to Jenkins. In the past five or six years, political mashups have continued to evolve as transgressive texts in Web 2.0 culture. One key example is the Gregory Brothers and their mashup sensation “Auto-Tune the News.” Auto-Tune refers to a proprietary technology, made by Antares Audio Technologies, that electronically pitch-corrects singers and eliminates the need, in many cases, for performers to sing in tune. As Time Magazine writes, “[Auto-Tune] is like Photoshop for the human voice.” The resultant audio processing can have a vaguely metallic or robotic sound to it, but it has become a staple for musical artists such as T-Pain and Kanye West. Its use has become so ubiquitous in the music industry that it even spurred a protest song by Jay-Z entitled “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune).” The Gregory Brothers use this technology to create mashups of current news events and political figures. Their repurposed Auto-Tune technology is designed not to improve the vocal performance of professional singers, but to create digitally fabricated “singers” from spoken discourse. “Auto-Tune the News” is a musical and visual remix of broadcast and cable newscasts, which, as the name would indicate, uses the auto-tuning technology to transform speaking voices and turn various politicians, newscasters, and celebrities into hip-hop-style singers. The Gregory Brothers are actually three brothers and a woman who shares the same name. They are actual musicians and began as a band, but achieved their greatest fame through their YouTube videos. While most of their videos

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have been political in nature, their most famous video is “The Bed Intruder Song,” a viral smash in 2010, with an amazing 45 million views. As Wired Magazine reported on August 13, 2010, the video was also turned into a top-charting single on iTunes (one report places sales at 100,000 copies). And the Gregory Brothers are currently in a development deal with Comedy Central to create a new TV show. While “Auto-Tune the News” might recall comedy bits seen on commercial television, especially a show like Saturday Night Live, the Gregory Brothers’ YouTube videos belong more to the practices of the pro-amateur. As devoted and talented individuals who bring user-generated content up to professional standards, the amateur professionalism of these media productions successfully blur the boundaries between corporate and grass-roots media. Furthermore, the central gag of these videos—the appropriation of auto-tuning—operates as a clever take on the usually canned responses of politicians and celebrities. By remixing, editing, mocking, chopping up, playing with, and auto-tuning this footage, the Gregory Brothers continue in the footsteps of Coldcut/NomIg’s earlier art experiment. We need to be careful not to dismiss the cleverness of “Auto-Tune the News” as obscuring either its media literacy function or its transgressive intentions. It is hard to watch one of the Gregory Brothers’ videos and not feel that their creative appropriations and “songifications” are a new brand of remix activism. For example, “Auto-Tune the News” Episode 13c: “The Rent is Too Damn High! Song” has received over 2.2 million views on YouTube. It features a minor New York state gubernatorial candidate, Jimmy McMillan, who made a name for himself by creating his own political party, The Rent is Too Damn High Party. He was a classic one-note politician (repeating over and over that “the rent is too damn high” in New York), and he was the subject of parodies on TV comedy shows. But The Gregory Brothers do a bit more with their mashup. They foreground their DJ aesthetic even in the video’s description: “In the future, all political debates will be moderated by a DJ in a spaceship, and the debaters will sing and rap their way to glorious victory. Jimmy McMillan of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party demonstrates this utopian vision with a roaring rendition of his party’s eponymous theme.” While clearly humorous in intent, the description is matched by the content of the video which opens with a moderator at a set of turntables who introduces herself as “the DJ,” scratches a groove, and kicks off the debate where Jimmy McMillan’s voice is auto-tuned in rhythm with musical beats. Interspersed with edited and auto-tuned footage, the various Gregory Brothers appear as background musicians playing along with the song with intentionally silly costumes and make-up gags. The overall composition of the video fits a remix logic that does not seek seamless professionalism but moves assuredly between technical polish (as in the use of auto-tuning) and the deliberately amateurish (as in the video

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drop-ins). In fact, the remix intentionally reminds us to not mistake this video for high corporate culture and instead reminds us of its low usergenerated origins. Finally, as in many of the best mashups, what emerges is a memorable collision of a pop culture meme with a catchy musical hook that is intended to go viral. And while it might seem to be an unlikely conveyer of activism, the video does conclude with links to McMillan’s website (he is, after all, a third party candidate) and an Obamicon.me version of McMillan with the name of his party as the poster’s caption. In considering the shifts between 2004 and 2010, we can see the growing dominance of DJ aesthetics and remix culture. What began as alternative media logics are now regularly encountered by an electorate that has embraced mashup culture. The profundity of the shift may be seen in the acceptance of “Auto-Tune the News.” Whereas Coldcut/NomIg’s efforts six years earlier were clearly on the margins of Internet culture and engaged by only a handful of committed media activists and artists, the growth of online video and social networking has opened up new spaces and new communities for transgressive media texts. “Auto-Tune the News” is every bit as transgressive as “World of Evil,” but the DJ sensibility has now come up from the underground and can operate in plain sight. In an era where reporters relate and debate the manufactured spins of political campaigns as “news” and where TV news programs engage openly in opinion journalism, a project like “Auto-Tune the News” is the latest manifestation of a long-standing tradition in alternative media. Like Paper Tiger TV’s 1980s series “Herb Schiller Reads the New York Times” that used the newly available public access airwaves to excoriate the New York Times as “712 pages of waste,” the Gregory Brothers’ mashups likewise deconstruct and critique mainstream news reporting and political discourse.

The Election Will Be Remixed: De Vellis’s “Vote Different” We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us – as surely and perhaps as terribly as we’ve been redefined by broadcast television. William Gibson, “God’s Little Toys”

Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is one of those songs better known by its title than its actual lyrics, singing, or music. The seduction of the song’s title is powerful because it states succinctly the dilemma of radical social and political change: existing media systems such as television networks are unlikely to side with revolutionaries since media systems are invested in the economic and political survival of the status

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quo. In the book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins has a section with the same name in which he carefully remixes Scott-Heron’s formulation for the digital age. For Jenkins, the song refers to a particular media context when “networks and newspapers filtered out messages they didn’t want us to hear, and the exclusionary practices of these intermediaries fostered the demand for grassroots and participatory media channels” (Jenkins 2006: 210). As one of the most careful observers of participatory culture, Jenkins does not simply argue that new interactive digital technologies resolve this situation. He urges us to question such claims, but to also recognize what has changed in the digital era. Like the alternative media types that have preceded it (activist video, culture jams, détourned art), the mashup must be considered in relation to the economic, technological, and historical terms of its era. The game between activists and the mainstream media has changed. In the broadest strokes (and even though we should be skeptical about both formulations), earlier media activism against the hierarchical network “dinosaurs” of the “vast wasteland” of television should be reconsidered in the crowd-sourcing era of “cognitive surplus” made available by Web and mobile technologies. As Jenkins states in Convergence Culture (2006: 210): if … we ask ourselves whether the revolution will be digitized, our answers look very different. The Web’s low barriers to entry expand access to innovative or even revolutionary ideas at least among the growing segment of the population that has access to a computer. Those silenced by corporate media have been among the first to transform their computers into a printing press. This opportunity has benefited third parties, revolutionaries, reactionaries, and racists alike. It also sparks fear in the hearts of the old intermediaries and their allies.

Jenkins’s nuanced take on the digital media revolution grapples with many contradictions of today’s convergent mediascape. The presence of new media does not eliminate the power of old media. The Web both widens participation among citizens, while concentrating media ownership in fewer hands. Anybody can publish to the Web as a niche producer, but mainstream broadcasting still matters to how we view ourselves as imagined communities (Anderson [1983] 1991). US elections are a multi-billiondollar industry for commercial television networks, even as Web and social media are gaining a wider foothold among the American public. But even in such a conflictual media environment, political video mashups stand out and are proliferating. Websites (e.g. barelypolitical.com and politicalremixvideo.com) showcase literally hundreds of well-known mashups, and many of them, such as “Obama Girl,” have become Web sensations. In the 2008 US election, political video mashups contributed to Obama’s winning narrative, while simultaneously complicating Hillary Clinton’s aspirations. The Black Eye Peas’ Will.i.am’s mashup anthem, “Yes

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We Can,” received over 21 million hits on YouTube and spawned numerous new remixes such as the Republican-flavored response mashup, “No You Can’t.” To show how mashups can change a candidate’s narrative and “remix an election,” it is useful to return to Phil De Vellis’s mashup of a famous 1984 Apple Macintosh computer ad and Hillary Clinton’s own campaign video, “A Conversation with America.”7 Known as the “Vote Different” video, this mashup has been seen as inaugurating the power of remix culture in US elections. The video involves the recontextualizing of Clinton’s own campaign videos, and it advanced an oppositional reading of her candidacy to great political effect (from within her own party nonetheless). Hillary Clinton was hoping that her website and her “conversation” video (which also announced the launch of her exploratory committee to seek the presidential nomination) would show her as a powerful alternative from Republican President George Bush and his role as a “decider-in-chief.” She also wanted to improve on her negative approval ratings among a large segment of American citizens, who formed their initial opinions of her during Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s. And yet, showcasing her difference from President Bush and her desire to connect with voters was carefully subverted and flipped in this pro-Obama video mashup. Clinton’s well-produced and carefully staged “conversation” was placed in the context of the “Vote Different” video in the diegetic screen space of “Big Brother” orating to and manipulating the masses à la George Orwell’s 1984. Through a clever use of visual legerdemain—made possible by affordable and easily accessible motion graphic technology—De Vellis accomplished a forceful critique of Hillary Clinton and offered a vision of another Democratic Party candidate (Barack Obama) as a better change agent for likely primary voters. This mashup was the media event De Vellis hoped it to be; it changed the conversation as Obama went on to his eventual win in the Democratic primaries. As has been the case with the other examples provided in this chapter, it wasn’t only the wide reach of the Internet that helped popularize this particular mashup. It was the fact that the “Vote Different” remix was a cultural meme that had been standard fare for the 24/7 newsrooms and, as a result, was broadcast to many viewers who had never heard of or saw it on YouTube.

The Future of Political Mashups according to Olivia Kickin Chipotle Glaze Time Warner Moveon.org has been one of the more creative advocacy organizations in terms of online video and remix culture. Founded in 1998, Moveon.org is a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization with 5 million members. Moveon.org’s members make small voluntary donations to support the group’s work, including financing cutting-edge new media work. Moveon.org was behind

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the “Bush in 30 Seconds” video campaign, which encouraged people in 2003 to create their own election videos giving reasons for why Bush should not be re-elected. They have created TV commercials and web video spots using Hollywood stars such as Heather Graham to great effect in outreach and advocacy campaigns. And they understand the relationship between grass-roots and mainstream media, once trying to buy ad time during the Super Bowl (Jenkins 2006). Moveon.org’s inventive “RepubliCorp: Back From the Future” is the latest evolution in political mashups. In distinction to some of the usergenerated content considered thus far, “RepubliCorp” was created by a full technical crew including director Yaniv Raz and professional actors Olivia Wilde (from Fox’s House) and Romany Malco (from Showtime’s Weeds). Financed by Moveon.org, it has cinematic qualities and uses the latest social media integrations. It is a mashup in the technical Web 2.0 application sense. If you enable the video to access your Facebook data (by clicking a “confirm” button), what you will see is a customized audiovisual experience that pulls names and images from your Facebook site and incorporates them into the mise-en-scene. The integration of social media content personalizes the message and clearly adds to the pleasure of watching the video (See Figure 1.3). The four-minute video begins with a fake news story on CNNBC (a mashup of CNN and NBC): “breaking news” of an engagement between Pamela Anderson and The Jersey Shore’s “The Situation.” The signal of that broadcast then starts to get interrupted by a flickering image and a voice that is calling out. In the customized version using my Facebook data, the voice says: “Hey Richard! Can you hear me?” “Hey Richard! Are you there?”

Figure 1.3  Screenshot from Moveon.org’s “RepubliCorp” video, using Richard Edwards’s Facebook data (2010)

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A person calling herself “Olivia Kickin Chipotle Glaze Time Warner” (Olivia Wilde) finally takes over the screen, and tells you that she is transmitting from the year 2057. The video is a time portal to the future. Olivia says, “you are about to make a huge mistake. One that changes our country forever.” She is referring specifically to you not voting in 2010, and shows newspaper headlines with your name and your photograph that blame you for what is going to happen in the future. The video then relates a future where the Republican Party merges with Corporate America forming “RepubliCorp.” In this alternative future, Sarah Palin becomes President and declares “Ultrawar against Iran, Botswana, whatever country Bjork is from, The Shire, Harrah’s Casino in Atlantic City, and the Pacific Ocean.” In this future, everyone is rebranded, as in her new name filled with corporate slogans. The video shows you the names of some of your Facebook friends with similarly altered names. Stealing a page from The Terminator series (and also borrowing its set design from dystopic sci-fi films), Olivia tells you that an entire rebellion was formed solely for the purpose of sending you this message, and telling you to vote. Before the end of the video, Alphonso Petfinder Flavorblast (Romany Malco) shows up. In distinction to Olivia’s more plaintive requests to you, Alphonso is very aggressive. He goes right up to the video camera, points at you, and yells for you to go out and vote. In fact, he tells you that if you don’t vote he is “going to invent a time machine, come back there, and kick your dumb butt.” And Alphonso’s most prized possession is a locket he wears around his neck with your picture in it. At its conclusion, the video feels like a meme, a memo, and a memento mori all rolled into one. This video is intentionally humorous with an over-the-top sensibility. As a “get out the vote” advocacy campaign designed to encourage greater participation among younger voters, it goes beyond a typical political mashup and uses direct address and message personalization to encourage viewers to do their civic duty. This evinces the growing power of social media. Its integration of Facebook data and images personalizes the remix video for each user. Facebook integration also makes it an easy video to spread and circulate, with one feature being the ability to post the remixed video to your Facebook “wall” and share it with all your friends. While you can watch the video without customization, the very logic of its narrative and visual design is to encourage users to watch it online with access to your personal data. This social networking component reveals another boundary that will be transgressed by political mashups. Our private and personal content— indeed our digital life streams—will be remixed with public and political media. The pictures, names, and data underlying our social networks will be woven into the semiotic warp and textual woof of mashup culture. Rather than fearing these transgressions as an infringement upon our privacy (whether one opts into these recombinatory processes or not),

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Web 2.0 application mashups like “RepubliCorp” encourage us to add our subjectivity into the remix performance. Mashups will rely not just on other people’s content or remixed corporate media, but also build upon private data and our own embodiment within the digital mediascape. As more of our personal and social media is mixed into mashup culture, it is hard not to hear echoes of the activist pedagogies of Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, and Paolo Friere about how active audience participation can raise political consciousness. “RepubliCorp,” in keeping with progressive traditions of active engagement and committed authorship, literally asks the user to leave his seat and get up onto the stage (or in this case, into the mise-en-scène). As we have seen throughout this chapter, political mashups “flip the script” and wrest authoritative control on topics of public interest from a status quo of talking heads, spin doctors and paid commentators, and from prepackaged talking points, staged candidate debates and canned political speeches. But the “scripts” are not flipped automatically or inevitably. Mashups are transgressive because passionate users are willing to trespass into media territories that have traditionally been off limits to them for cultural, political, technological, or legal reasons. Moreover, whether amateur, professional, or pro-amateur, mashup artists will continue to transgress the blurring boundaries between political texts and popular culture, so we are glimpsing only a small fraction of the possible changes in political communication foretold by these practices. Finally, the rise of political mashups in the digital age reveals a critical pedagogical imperative as well: the collective need for expanded multimedia literacy efforts in the United States because the creative and educational potential of these transgressive texts must be met by an increasingly digitally trained and media-savvy electorate.

Notes 1. This formulation of “culture jamming” refers to Mark Dery’s work, especially his 1993 essay, “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs.” 2. The Alberto Korda photo is known as “Guerrillero Heroico (Heroic Guerrilla).” According to Wikipedia, it was taken by Korda on March 5, 1960. It is considered to be among the most famous photographs in the world. In 1967, Jim Fitzpatrick created his now iconic poster based on the Korda photograph. 3. In 2009, the “Hope” poster was also added to the permanent collection of the US National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. 4. Keen and Shirky take very different—at times, diametrically opposed—positions regarding the rise of the amateur in participatory Web 2.0 culture. Keen, in his book The Cult of the Amateur, sees the rise of amateur media producers as a dangerous trend that blurs the line between trained expert and ill-informed non-professionals, whereas Shirky, in his book Here Comes Everybody (2008), regards the rise of an amateur class of producers as a positive development for participatory culture, such as leading towards an expansion of knowledge sharing. 5. The RevUSA website is no longer online. It was located at http://revusa.net. All quotes about the RevUSA project are based on previously available Web material in possession

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Political Mashups as Transgressive Texts  41 of the author. For those who want to see parts of the RevUSA website, the “Wayback Machine” has archived several pages of the project. Go to web.archive.org for more information. The Coldcut video for “World of Evil” is still online at YouTube and may be found by searching for “World of Evil – Coldcut vs. TV Sheriff”. 6. Some of the ideas related to the RevUSA project were first developed in a 2005 conference paper delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in London, England: “Remixing the Real: Documentary Style, Digital Manipulation, and Interactivity in an Online, Multimedia Political Art Project.” 7. I have analyzed the “Vote Different” video at length as an allegory of citizen empowerment in an article co-written with Chuck Tryon. See Edwards and Tryon 2009.

References Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Ayers, Michael D. 2006. The Cyberactivism of a Dangermouse. In Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture, edited by Michael D. Ayers (pp. 127–36). New York: Peter Lang. Boisvert, Anne-Marie. 2003. On Bricolage: Assembling Culture with Whatever Comes to Hand. Horizon Zero, Issue 8 (accessed December 1, 2010). Boyle, Dierdre. 1997. Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 1932. The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication. From Brecht on Theatre, edited and translated by John Willett. New York: Hill & Wang. Dery, Mark. 1993. Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. Open Pamphlet Series. Downing, John D.H. 2001. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Edwards, Richard and Tryon, Chuck. 2009. Political Video Mashups as Allegories of Citizen Empowerment. First Monday: Peer Reviewed Journal on the Internet, “http://www. firstmonday.org”www.firstmonday.org (accessed December 1, 2010). Faber, Mindy (ed.). 1990. A Tool, A Weapon, A Witness: The New Video News Crews. Chicago, IL: Randolph Street Gallery. Gibson, William. 2005. God’s Little Toys: Confessions of a Cut & Paste Artist. Wired Magazine, July (accessed December 1, 2010). Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Keen, Andrew. 2007. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. New York: Random House. Miller, Paul D. 2004. Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schutze, Bernard. 2003. Samples From the Heap: Notes on Recycling the Detritus of a Remixed Culture. Horizon Zero, Issue 8 (accessed December 1, 2010). Shirky, Clay. 2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press.

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2 Audible Transgressions Art and Aesthetics after the Mashup DAVID J. GUNKEL

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panel on mashups, remixes, and bootlegs (NCA 2009), one of the attendees asked what was initially termed an “innocent question.” Although I cannot remember the exact wording, the gist of the inquiry concerned aesthetics: How can we decide whether a particular audio mashup is any good or not? What is it that separates a good mashup from a bad one? Or more pointedly, how can you tell whether something is a well-designed mashup as opposed to an accidental concatenation of materials simply thrown together? This line of questioning is, despite how it was initially presented, anything but “innocent.” It is a crucial and insightful inquiry that asks us to reconsider long-standing assumptions about art, artistry, and aesthetic judgment. Attempts to respond to these kinds of questions often, and unfortunately, make the situation worse. In a 2009 YouTube promotional video for Club Bootie, proprietors and mashup/remix gatekeepers Adrian and Deidre Roberts (aka DJ A1D) offer the following assurances: “Mashup culture is that—it’s kind of like the new punk rock. Anyone with a laptop and computer software can make a mashup. However, just cuz everyone can do it doesn’t mean everyone should. And we will dig through so many mashups to find the good ones. And that’s what Bootie really does; we showcase the best mashups in the world. Bootie is the quality control of the mashup world” (Figure 2.1). On the one hand, it can be reassuring to know that someone is sorting through the digital deluge of mashups and remixes in order to pick out the “good ones.” The Internet provides virtually unmitigated access to a flood of material, and sorting through it all can be a full-time job. Club Bootie, therefore, provides mashup fans and consumers with a much-needed service. They will sort through (in theory) every bit of what is currently available and hand-select only those remix compositions that are “worth” attention. On the other hand, this ability to sort and select is a powerful uring a recent conference

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Figure 2.1  Promotional Flier for Club Bootie

and influential occupation. One might justifiably ask: Why trust Bootie and its decision-making process? What are they filtering out, and why? What, in Bootie’s estimations, make a mashup, remix, or bootleg good? What controls, if any, are on their quality control? Who, in other words, gets to decide what is “good,” and on what grounds? This chapter will engage these questions by using what is arguably a mashup method. That is, it will bring two seemingly incompatible things together in an effort to investigate what results from their collision, interaction, and even abrasion. This approach is commonly marked in remix culture by the use of the term “vs.” as a nominal convention for identifying mashup compositions, i.e., Blondie vs. The Doors (Go Home Productions), Jay-Z vs. the Beatles (DJ Danger Mouse), The Strokes vs. Christina Aguilera (Freelance Hellraiser), etc. What is remarkable, and maybe even ironic, in this practice is that the term “vs.” borrows from and repurposes a long-standing legal practice, where court cases are officially identified by specifying the names of the two opposing sides involved in a suit, i.e. Bush v. Gore, Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., etc. By nominally conjoining yet distinguishing two opposing and seemingly incompatible positions, the term “vs.” (or simply “v.”) provides a convenient way to identify the site of conflict and the terms of a dynamic interaction. Unlike a court case, however, the objective of a mashup is not to decide ultimately in favor of one side or the other or to mediate the dispute in favor of some kind of compromise. My goal, therefore, is not to pick winners or losers in this particular debate or to strike some kind of workable “balance,” as Lawrence Lessig (2008: xvi) advocates, in order to retain the best which both sides have to offer. The objective will and must be otherwise. To put it schematically, we can say that the goal of the examination is to challenge the conceptual boundaries of the current debate and to offer a new aesthetic of the mashup that does not necessarily endorse or simply adhere to the status quo. It is, to sample and remix something from Friedrich Nietzsche (1989), not an effort to decide once and for all what

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is “good” and what is “bad” but rather to submit the way such decisions have typically been made to a thorough re-evaluation and critique.

Gaylor vs. Albini Let us begin by sampling the two sides of the debate as it currently stands. On one side there are the “utopian plagiarists” (Critical Art Ensemble 1994: 83), copyleftists, and mashup fans and pro-sumers—those individuals and organizations that celebrate the mashup, remix, and other cut-up and collage practices as new and original ways for creating innovative art and media content. This side is occupied by a diverse cast of characters who, at least initially, appear to have little or nothing in common: William S. Burroughs, DJ A1D, Negativeland, William Gibson, Google, and even Fox Television’s Glee. Despite what turns out to be little more than minor variations on a theme, what brings these figures together in an unlikely but influential coalition is a common interest in new creative practices that not only generate innovative and entertaining media content but also open up the gated community of the culture industry to other interests and players. “The Internet,” as Brett Gaylor (2008), director of Rip! A Remix Manifesto, explains, allowed me to connect from my island to the world, to communicate ideas to millions of others. And a media literate generation emerged, able to download the world’s culture and transform it into something different. And we called our new language remix. Funny things, political things, new things were all uploaded back to the net. The creative process became more important than the product as consumers were now creators, making the folk art of the future.

On the opposing side there are the critics—again a group of strange bedfellows that include not only entertainment lawyers, copyright advocates, RIAA lobbyists, and lawmakers of all political stripes and affiliations but also creative artists, visionary producers, and cultural innovators. According to this group, the sampling and mashing up of prerecorded material is nothing more than a cheap and easy recombination of other artists’ work

Figure 2.2  Stills from Brett Gaylor’s Rip! A Remix Manifesto

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by what are arguably talentless hacks who really have nothing new to say. Indicative of this opposing view are the comments offered by indie rock icon and producer Steve Albini, in the other remix documentary, Copyright Criminals (Franzen and McLeod 2010): I’ve made records with a lot of people; probably the most famous would be Nirvana, the Pixies, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. As a creative tool, like for someone to use a sample of an existing piece of music for their music. I think it’s an extraordinarily lazy artistic choice. It is much easier to take something that is already awesome and to play it again with your name on it. It’s sort of like a bad dance move or something. You think the people doing it should be embarrassed for behaving this way. You know. Or you think the people doing it should be self aware enough to understand that what they’re doing is cheap and easy and everyone else can tell that it’s cheap and easy.

The important and operative question here is not, at least for our purposes, what makes these two positions different. Clearly one could, as is demonstrated in both the documentaries that have been cited, examine the terms of the conflict in an effort to better understand the debate and even work out some kind of tentative solution or response to the dispute. These efforts typically result in a kind of inconclusive and unsatisfying outcome that ultimately perpetuates and even exacerbates the conflict. That is, by taking sides in the current debate or attempting to resolve the conflict through some kind of compromise or synthetic solution, one perpetuates the dialectical opposition, continuing to operate according to the terms and conditions that it makes available, controls, and regulates. Because of this rather unsatisfactory result, we can instead target and investigate the common ideological assumptions that both sides of the debate already endorse and must endorse in order to oppose each other and enter into debate in the first place. This alternative strategy recognizes, as Slavoj Žižek points out with reference to the general structure of this kind of transaction, that “the two sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field” (Žižek 2002: 244). Despite their many differences, both sides of this conflict value and endeavor to protect the same thing, namely artistic innovation, the creative process, and the figure of the creative artist. One side sees the mashup as providing new modes of artistic expression by opening up the boundaries of a closed art and media world in which producer and consumer have been too tightly controlled and regulated. “See mashups as piracy if you insist,” Sasha Frere-Jones (2005) argues in an article for The New Yorker, “but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as

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good as the great ones” (p. 3). On the other side, you have those who argue that there is not much originality or artistry in merely sampling and remixing prerecorded material. Taking someone else’s creative work, cutting and pasting it together, and then slapping your name on it is the province of the cheat and talentless, not the product of a true and original artist. “Real” creative work, like that exemplified by the cultural icons named by Albini (i.e. Nirvana, the Pixies, Led Zeppelin, etc.), takes time, training, and considerable effort. Formulated in this way, these two seemingly opposed positions concerning the mashup/remix are obviously fueled by and seek to protect the same underlying aesthetic values—originality, artistry, creativity, uniqueness, and innovation. Despite their openly acknowledged differences, the two sides of the argument share and agree upon a common and fundamental set of underlying values. This common substructure may be found in what is arguably the basis or even basement of Western thought.

Standard Operating Presumptions The phrase “basement of Western thought” refers, quite literally in fact, to a subterranean space situated at the center of one of the foundational texts, “The Allegory of the Cave” in book VII of Plato’s Republic. This remarkable story, which Socrates provides in an effort to elucidate the concept of education, concerns an underground cavern inhabited by men who are confined to sit in front of a large wall upon which are projected shadow images. The cave dwellers are, according to the Socratic account, chained in place from childhood and are unable to see anything other than these artificial projections. Consequently, they operate as if everything that appears before them on the wall (arguably a kind of motion picture screen or computer monitor avant la lettre) is, in fact, real. They bestow names on the different shadows, devise clever methods to predict their sequence and behavior, and hand out awards to each other for demonstrated proficiency in knowing such things (Plato 1987: 515a–b). At a crucial turning point in the story, one of the captives is released. He is unbound by some ambiguous but external action, dragged kicking and screaming out of the cave, and forced to confront the real world that exists outside the subterranean cavern. In this way, the story not only establishes a long-standing and widely accepted metaphysical edifice that differentiates between the real thing and its mere apparitions or shady copies but also an aesthetics that associates the real with the good and makes the copy something that is deficient, derived, and deprecated. “In this philosophy of mediation,” Jonathan Stern (2005) writes in direct reference to sound recording, “copies are debasements of the originals” (p. 218). The full consequences of this “philosophy of mediation,” which is, we should note, something of a default setting and one of the standard

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operating presumptions for Western art and media, is taken up and given explicit consideration in the final book of the same dialogue. Here Socrates proposes an image by which to examine and explain the nature of imitation. The image consists of a three-stage hierarchy of artisans and their artworks. At the apex, Socrates locates the real and true form of a thing that is created by the deity. Christian interpreters routinely associated this highest level with the unique creation ex nihilio of God, the originator of all things. Subordinate to this singular and unique creation, the Socratic account positions a first-order replication, which is produced through the art of a human craftsman. The skillful craftsman, Socrates reasons, produces his creation by looking at and trying as best as possible to approximate the exact features exhibited by the original form of the thing (Plato 1987: 596b). Or to give it a Christian spin, the human artist takes his/her inspiration from and copies the perfect forms already available and found in God’s creation. This derived product is subsequently copied by the painter who creates what Socrates calls a “third-order” replication or reproduction (Plato 1987: 602c). Although the craftsman technically makes a copy of some original thing, the name “imitator,” or more colloquially “copycat,” is reserved for the painter, for as Glaucon, Socrates’ interlocutor, argues, “he is the imitator of the thing which the others produce” (Plato 1987: 597e). In the parlance of digital media and remixing, the painter is equivalent to the mashup DJ who simply samples and replicates the creative work of others. Such activity, as everyone from Socrates to Albini would agree, requires little skill or knowledge; it is cheap and easy. “On this, then,” Socrates concludes, “we are fairly agreed, that the imitator knows nothing worth mentioning of the things he imitates, but that imitation is a form of play, not to be taken seriously” (Plato 1987: 602b). Because of this, Socrates famously proposes the expulsion of all imitative artists from his Republic, especially those remixers of the oral tradition, the singers and tragic poets (Plato 1987: 607a). This is precisely the kind of solution and remedy that is sought and advocated by the intellectual property hardliners and copyright supporters, those individuals and organizations who argue that sampling even one note of another person’s creative output is plagiarism pure and simple. Although not necessarily proposing exile, these individuals and groups endeavor to restrict and marginalize the practice by making it patently illegal. As originally articulated and arranged in the Republic, the operative terms for deciding what is and what is not valuable in the case of creative artwork is something that is ultimately located in the skill and efforts of the individual artist. At the top of the Socratic hierarchy is the prototypical figure of all creative work, God, the one creative genius that provides the conceptual anchor and flawless template for all others. Below this divine figure are situated the human craftsmen and craftswomen. Although nowhere near the level of the divinity in terms of skill or ability, these

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individuals apply their knowledge and talent to the fashioning of unique and original creative products—“artworks” in a very literal sense of the word insofar as the production of art is work and takes work. At the bottom of the scale there is the imitator or copycat—a mere representational artist. This figure occupies the lower rungs of the ladder, because s/he does nothing original. The imitator merely downloads and copies the work of others. Consequently, these “works,” if they can even rightfully be called that, are derivative, deficient, and not to be taken seriously, and this occupation is, by comparison with the other two, considerably less skillful, less knowledgeable, and cheap. For this reason, the imitators need to be if not expelled then at least tightly controlled and regulated. Although it will have been close to 2000 years before the first copyright statute would be drafted, Socrates would have certainly supported the measure even if he would have most likely found it rather lenient and perhaps too permissive.

Making Sense of the Mashup Although the Republic is an ancient text written well in advance of digital technology and modern intellectual property law, it prescribes the way in which all creative works in general have been understood and the approach that is taken in conceptualizing and dealing with the mashup in particular. On the one hand, skeptics and critics of the practice, like Albini, argue that sampling and remixing recorded music is not very interesting, mainly because it is, as a so-called “creative practice,” nothing more than cheap and easy imitation. According to Pete Rojas (2002: 1): Home remixing is technically incredibly easy to do, in effect turning the vast world of pop culture into source material for an endless amount of slicing and dicing by desktop producers. So easy, in fact, that bootlegs constitute the first genre of music that truly fulfills the ‘anyone can do it’ promises originally made by punk and, to lesser extent, electronic music. Even punk rockers had to be able to write the most rudimentary of songs. With bootlegs, even that low bar for traditional musicianship and composition is obliterated.

Although intended as a kind of endorsement of the democratizing potential of the mashup, Rojas’s explanation illustrates what many critics identify as the underlying problem. Mashup and remixing are just too easy. Anyone can do it, and it takes little or no real skill or talent. This argument, whether it is in practice actually true or not, holds water precisely because it is assumed that real art, following the dictates of the Socratic plan, is the product of a skilled and studied craftsman. Mere copycats who simply cut and paste the work of others by using easily obtainable software tools do little or nothing that could be considered creative, artistic, or worth serious consideration. There is therefore already in the text of the Republic

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a tension between a kind of democratic ideal—the idea that “anyone and everyone can do it”—and an elitism or a star system that makes art the province of a privileged few. It is, therefore, no surprise that Plato’s Republic promotes a polity ruled by an elite class of “philosopher kings” and eschews anything that looks like democratic populism. For Plato, as for many contemporary artists, agents/brokers, and even consumers, art is something made by an elite class of artists, entertainers, and celebrities. Only the specially skilled artisans and celebrity superstars, the ruling elites of the (pop)culture industry (i.e. The Beatles, Led Zepplin, Nirvana, etc.), are permitted to make what is properly considered art.1 Everyone else is situated as either a law-abiding and dutiful consumer of their products or a copycat criminal of their unique innovations. On the other hand, advocates argue in direct opposition to these criticisms that the mashup should be considered artistic precisely because it does require considerable effort and skill on the part of the remix producer. It is, therefore, not a kind of cheap and easy activity that just anyone can do but a truly artistic endeavor that is reserved for a small group of skilled remix artists. As Adrian Roberts points out, just because everyone with a laptop computer and some software can, theoretically at least, do a remix, this does not mean that everyone should do it or can do it well. The difference is that there are true artists of the mashup who demonstrate a kind of virtuosity with the turntable or the laptop computer that is unique and impressive in its own right and that cannot be easily accomplished by just anybody. Although staking out a claim that would be the exact dialectical opposite of that advanced by the critics, the advocates of the mashup make the same argument and on the same grounds. They too eschew the idea that “everyone can or should do it” and assert a privileged few as the properly revered pantheon of star remixers. This is precisely the raison d’être of Bootie, at least as it understands and promotes itself. Adrian and Deidre Roberts, the self-appointed gatekeepers of the mashup/remix community, sort through the large amount of material that is out there in order to separate the wheat from the chaff—the work of a true mashup artist from that of the talentless hack. Consequently, the remix community is just as enamored with superstars and celebrity artists as the critics seem to be. As John Shiga (2007) insightfully points out, already “by 2002, mash-up culture furnished its own set of ‘star remixers’“ (p. 94), including well-known DJs like Freelance Hellraiser and DJ Danger Mouse and remix brand names like Mark Vidler’s Go Home Productions. Of all the star remixers, however, the one that seems to get the most press is Gregg Gillis (aka Girl Talk). “Gillis may be,” Larry Hardesty (2009) reports, “the most popular mashup artist in the United States. He’s opened for Beck. He’s performed at the rock festival Lollapalooza. His MySpace page gets more hits than that of indie-rock sensation Wilco. When he tours, he packs good-sized clubs—like the Starlight Ballroom, where more than

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a thousand people pressed toward the stage, dancing” (p. 1). So what is it that makes Gillis stand out from the rest? For many fans, journalists, and music critics, it is his virtuosity and skill in assembling what are arguably impressive remix compositions. He is, for example, often credited for the sheer number of samples he is able to assemble and bring together in a single work. Hardesty, citing a Wikipedia article, points out that Gillis draws on no fewer than 24 individual sources for “Play Your Part (Pt. 1),” the first track on his album Feed the Animals (Hardesty 2009: 1). Angela Watercutter of Wired Magazine goes further in analyzing the data: “His latest album, Feed the Animals (released digitally in June with hard copies out September 23), brims with 300 song snippets in just over 50 minutes (compared to around 250 in his previous effort)” (Watercutter 2008: 1). And in order to help readers visualize just how impressive Gillis’s work is, Watercutter (2008) provides a detailed visual map of the album’s fourth track, “What’s it all About.” The cleverly designed graphic, a multicolor circular timeline complete with graphical icons of source material and precise time index numbers, illustrates an impressive array of 35 individual samples drawn from all corners of popular music into a single remixed composition that lasts 255 seconds. At the same time, this aesthetics has also been used by critics, who point out that Gillis often takes what is considered to be the easy route to producing mashup compositions. “He also,” Hardesty writes, “tends to pair instrumental tracks with hip-hop vocals, as the analysis of ‘Play Your Part (Pt. 1)’ might suggest. ‘In the mashup community,’ says Luke Enlow, a mashup artist from New Hampshire who releases music under the name Lenlow, ‘that’s kind of seen as a cop-out because it’s very easy to do, because you don’t have to worry about keys matching’“ (p. 2). Although critical of Gillis’s work, Enlow’s comment mobilizes the same values and argumentative structure as those fans who celebrate Girl Talk’s artistry.

Deconstructing the Remix By formulating their arguments in terms of artistic skill and effort, both sides of the debate play by the same set of rules and essentially value and seek to protect the same metaphysical and aesthetic investments. As long as the discussion continues in this fashion, little or nothing will change. Each side will continue to deploy and entertain what are by now easily recognizable arguments, somewhat predictable evidence, and, in the final analysis, unresolved controversies. And each will, at least within the context of the Socratic logic they share, turn out to be entirely justified and correct. In effect, continuing in this manner leads thinking about the mashup into a kind of intellectual cul-du-sac where we circle around the same problems and disputes ad infinitum. If there is any possibility to make progress in this endeavor, we will need to proceed otherwise. Toward this end, I submit that the mashup should, as Slavoj Žižek suggests of all transgressive practices,

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fully endorse what it is accused of (Žižek 2001: 182). That is, instead of arguing against the charge that mashups and remixing are cheap and easy by struggling to demonstrate their artistry, mashup advocates and supporters should embrace—but with a positive spin—the indictment that has been routinely leveled against them. In other words, instead of publishing one more article, writing one more book, or making another documentary film arguing for the artistry of the mashup by demonstrating the skill, knowledge, or virtuosity of the artist, the advocates of the practice should simply agree with their critics against them. Take, for example, Tecno-brega, a digital remix practice and scene that was developed in the northern part of Brazil, especially in the city Belém. The term means “cheap techno” or, more literally, “techno cheesy,” and everything about it is cheap. Tecno-brega sounds cheap. It takes pop music from the 1980s and replaces all acoustic instrumentation with deliberately cheesy or tacky techno sounds from inexpensive digital instruments and devices. It is made on the cheap in makeshift bedroom studios by individuals who are neither trained musicians nor music producers, and distributed on CD for cheap (approximately US$1.50 per unit) by unlicensed street vendors. And the result is considered cheap, that is, “being of lesser quality,” by anyone with even a modicum of musical taste (Johnsen et al. 2007). Consequently, Tecno-brega in both name and function deliberately celebrates the cheap and inauthentic as something valuable in its own right. Instead of pitching an argument against the critics by making a case for the artistry of the remix—in essence, playing by the Socratic rules of the game and deploying its logic and rhetoric—Tecno-brega says, in effect, “Yes, this is cheap, and that’s the point.” This maneuver does not, it should be noted, simply invert the Socratic logic, transforming what had been considered bad into good and vice versa. Inversion, as both Heidegger (1979) and Derrida (1981) point out, actually changes nothing insofar as the inverted schema keeps the original system intact and functioning. Instead these efforts institute what may be called a deconstruction. Deconstruction, despite widespread misinterpretations and misunderstandings that have become something of an institutional (mal)practice, does not mean “to take apart” or “to unconstruct.” The English language already possesses words which adequately describe that process—analysis, dissection, disassembly, or reverse engineering. Instead, “deconstruction,” as Derrida points out on numerous occasions (1981, 1993), indicates a critical practice that takes aim at and seeks to intervene in a particular field that is defined and structured by way of conceptual oppositions. In all these cases, however, the two sides are never on equal footing. One side always and already has the upper hand so that the other is defined as its negative and deficient counterpart. The moral and aesthetic conceptual pairing of “good” and “bad,” for instance, does not situate these two terms on the same level. Good is already the privileged term. It is considered to be the

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“good” one, while “bad” is, by comparison, understood and formulated as its opposite. That is, it is commonly defined as the absence or lack of what is considered good. Deconstruction is a means by which to intervene in this and every other conceptual pairing, and it does so by way of deploying what Derrida (1981) calls “a double gesture” (p. 41). To begin with, the conceptual opposition is inverted by strategically siding with the deprecated term. In the case of the Socratic legacy, for example, this would mean affirming the imitator or copycat against the term that has traditionally occupied the position of privilege—the celebrated artist or craftsman. This inversion, however, like all revolutionary operations— whether social, political, or artistic—does little or nothing to challenge the dominant system. In merely exchanging the relative positions occupied by the two opposed terms, inversion still maintains, albeit in an inverted form, the conceptual opposition in which and on which it operates. For this reason, deconstruction also entails a second step or gesture. “We must,” as Derrida (1981) explains, “also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept,’ a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime” (42). Deconstruction, therefore, comprises both the inversion of a conceptual opposition and the irruptive emergence of a new concept that transgresses the conceptual boundaries and exceeds its comprehension.2 Or as Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid) (2004: 33) writes, drawing an explicit connection between Derrida’s heady poststructuralist theory and the material practices of remixing: Interpenetration of one form into another mirrors the classic sense of binary movement that writers of semiotic philosophy and literature have been concerned with for several centuries now. Double movement, binary stratification, transience of meaning—all point to a strange game in which absence and presence, form and function, sign and signified, play in an ever-shifting field of meaning, a place where text and textuality switch place with blinding speed. That’s what mixing is about: creating seamless interpolations between objects of thought to fabricate a zone of representation in which the interplay of the one and the many, the original and its double all come under question.

Extending this “double gesture,” or what Derrida (1981) has also called a “double science” (p. 41), to the mashup, we can say that the practice does not just contest the Socratic system. It deconstructs artistry. Specifically, it inverts the customary and widely accepted conceptual opposition that not only distinguishes the skilled artist from the cheap imitator but arranges an aesthetics and attendant value system that privileges the former while making the latter a derived, deficient, and negative counterpart. Mere inversion of this conceptual pairing, however, is insufficient insofar as this kind of revolutionary gesture, like all revolutionary undertakings, does

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little or nothing to challenge the established rules of the game or its underlying substructure. Whatever it comes to be called—inversion, conceptual reversal, revolution, etc.—such an operation is always and already insufficient for transgression. The mashup, therefore, cannot and should not be satisfied with the mere overturning of the two terms that already structure and define the field. For this reason, the mashup also involves and facilitates the “irruptive emergence” of a new concept, one that exceeds the grasp and traverses the limits of the existing conceptual order. Although this might sound rather abstract, one can already find attempts to articulate such an alternative in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010: 94): Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant—and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing—that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.

What Emerson identifies in this passage from the essay “Originality and Quotation” is an understanding of imitation—what he decides to call “quotation”—that is no longer the captive of or a concept regulated by the Socratic legacy. “Quotation” as Emerson formulates it (and which I write in quotation marks in order both to recognize that it is derived from elsewhere and to distinguish it from the customary understanding of the term) is not just copying or reproducing the work of others. It is the creative borrowing and repurposing of what came before in an effort to do something else entirely. This new concept of “quotation” is not the mere polar opposite of what we typically understand as originality but the outcome of a deconstruction of the conceptual opposition that had distinguished quotation from original in the first place. Emerson was, in effect, describing the mashup and remix avant la lettre. Or as Miller (2004) explains, Emerson’s essay “prefigured much of the discourse around originality in twenty-first-century culture” (p. 68).

Conclusions In the end, we can return to the question with which we began: “What makes a mashup good?” Clearly one can and would have no trouble imposing the Socratic schema in an effort to respond to this query. Doing so would be both understandable and easy to accomplish and justify (and thus argue for or against the concept of the mashup itself). But it would also be (using the very scale in question to judge itself) intellectually cheap. It would, in effect, advance nothing innovative or new; it would merely replicate an ancient and well-established method of deciding these things. Alternatively we can, following the example provided by Emerson,

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proceed otherwise. Pursuing this other possibility, we may say that what makes a mashup “good” is not something that can be measured on the Socratic scale. In fact, it is, quite literally and deliberately, off the scale. What makes it “good” is the extent to which a particular mashup intervenes in this legacy system and facilitates its deconstruction. And some remix compositions do this better than others. All mashups, therefore, are not created equal. Some effect this intervention better than the competition. This is because, as Derrida (1993) points out, “there is no one single deconstruction” (p. 141), only specific and irreducible instances in which a deconstruction takes place. Furthermore, what makes one mashup’s deconstruction more interesting or successful than another’s is not something that can be situated in or referred to the old Socratic terms (i.e. artistic knowledge, skill, or virtuosity). These items are still far too metaphysical. Instead this alternative aesthetic will need to be understood as a kind of “materials science,” something that is attentive to the material effects of the practice in the subject matter at hand and not interested in speculating about immaterial causes operating somewhere behind the scenes. What makes a mashup good, therefore, is decided on the basis of the kind of interventions it deploys within the material of popular culture and the extent to which it makes these transgressions audible. In some cases the mashup might just make you want to dance, and there is nothing wrong with dancing. In other cases, however, and even at the same time, it potentially violates every aspect of the way we have traditionally made sense of art and aesthetics, causing nothing less than monstrous but incredibly illuminating short-circuits in the very material of Western thought. Finally, and this is crucial, in all of this there neither is nor can be finality. This is because deconstruction comprises, as Derrida (1981) insists, something of an “interminable analysis” (p. 42). And what makes it “interminable” can be understood in at least two ways. First, deconstruction always takes place as a parasitic operation that works within and by repurposing the materials and tools derived from a specific system at a specific moment. The audio mashup in particular feeds off and derives all its resources from popular music. Everything that comprises it—every note, every sound, every musical phrase, and every lyric—comes from something and somewhere else. It cannot, therefore, simply remove itself from the milieu of its host and stand outside what defines and delimits its very possibility. For this reason, the mashup, like any deconstructive endeavor, is never simply and completely finished with that in which and on which it operates, but also takes place as a kind of never-ending engagement with the systems in which it works and is necessarily situated. The mashup, like Michel Serres’s (2007) concept of the “parasite,” “doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop eating or drinking or yelling or burping or making thousands of noises or filling space with its swarming din” (p. 253). But this is, we need to remember and continually assert, a good thing.

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Second, deconstruction always and necessarily runs the risk of becoming recuperated by the conceptual field in which and on which it operates. “The hierarchy of dual oppositions,” as Derrida (1981) explains, “always seeks to reestablish itself” (p. 42). The seemingly inescapable pull of recuperation may be seen, for example, by the way advocates and fans of the mashup already accommodate themselves to the vocabulary and logic of the very Socratic system that the mashup puts in question and seeks to undermine. In other words, efforts to articulate what makes the mashup culturally interesting and important have the effect, whether intended or not, of domesticating its transgressions in the very process of naming its accomplishments. This is primarily because the very language that is at our disposal to identify these things is already part and parcel of the metaphysical system that is contested. We are, to sample and remix a statement made by Audre Lorde (1984: 110–14), in the difficult position of needing to use the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house. And when we start repurposing verbal instruments like “imitation,” “quotation,” and “cheap,” we inevitably risk falling back into the established definitions and metaphysical field that we sought to criticize and get beyond. What this means, then, is that the interventions and transgressions deployed and released by the mashup can never be considered finished or complete. The establishment—and this includes not only the oppositional voices on the copyright but also fans and advocates of the copyleft—will continually try to accommodate the mashup and remix to the Socratic rules so that we can both make sense of it and make it make sense. Because of this gravitational pull, the mashup, like any critical practice, must continually rework its own transgressions, repurposing its own interventions or remixing its remix, so as to avoid the efforts of the opposition as well as the well-intended but unfortunately just as repressive labor of its advocates.

Notes 1.

The exercise and the extent of this hegemony is not something that is limited to artistic practices or aesthetic theory. As Plato’s Republic already demonstrates, such an imposition of power is always contextualized politically and has far-reaching social consequences. For a critical investigation of the political dimensions and consequences of the mashup, see Richard L. Edwards (Chapter 1, this volume). 2. This “two-step” procedure can, for example, be illustrated in the story, included in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable.” This parable, which proceeds in several discrete steps, ends with the following remarkable statement: “The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one” (Nietzsche 1983: 486). Here, Nietzsche, who had initially formulated his philosophical ambitions as constituting a “reversed Platonism” (Nietzsche 1980: 199), moves beyond a mere revolutionary gesture, undermining and collapsing the very distinction between the true world and its apparitional others. According to Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen (1994), “the point is not simply that truth and reality have been absorbed by illusion and appearance. Something far more subtle and unsettling is taking place… .

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56  Mashup/Remix/Repurpose What emerges in the wake of the death of oppositions like truth/illusion and reality/ appearance is something that is neither truth nor illusion, reality nor appearance but something else, something other” (Virtuality, p. 15).

References Critical Art Ensemble. 1994. The Electronic Disturbance. New York: Autonomedia. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 2010. Quotation and Originality. In The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. III: Letters and Social Aims (pp. 93–107). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Franzen, Benjamin and Kembrew McLeod. 2010. Copyright Criminals. PBS, Independent Lens. http://www.copyrightcriminals.com/. Frere-Jones, Sasha. 2005. 1111151: The New Math of Mashups. The New Yorker, January 10. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/01/10/050110crmu_music#ixzz1C9ObbVcQ. Gaylor, Brett. 2008. Rip! A Remix Manifesto. Eye Steel Film. http://ripremix.com/. Hardesty, Larry. 2009. Bootleg Battle Lines: Rival Aesthetics in the Mashup Community. Technology Review, January. http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/21843/ page1/?a=f. Heidegger, Martin. 1979. Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row. Johnson, Andreas, Ralf Christensen and Henrik Moltke. 2007. Good Copy Bad Copy. http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/. Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: The Penguin Press. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Miller, Paul D. 2004. Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. National Communication Association (NCA). 2009. Question Authority: Challenges to the Stability of Authorship and Authenticity in the Digital Era. NCA Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, November 12–15. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869–1874. In Friedrich Nietzsche Sämtliche Werke Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 7. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1983. The Twilight of the Idols. In The Portable Nietzsche. Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Plato. 1987. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roberts, Adrian and Deidre Roberts. 2009. Club Bootie Promotion. http://www.bootiemashup.com/video/. Rojas, Pete. 2002. Bootleg Culture. Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/technology/ feature/2002/08/01/bootlegs/print.html. Serres, Michel. 2007. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shiga, John. 2007. Copy-and-Persist: The Logic of Mash-up Culture. Critical Studies in Media Communication 24(2): 93–114. Sterne, Jonathan. 2005. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Mark and Esa Saarinen. 1994. Imagologies: Media Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Watercutter, Angela. 2008. Mashup DJ Girl Talk Deconstructs Samples from Feed the Animals. Wired, August 18. http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/pl_music_1609. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. The Fragile Absolute: Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Revolution at the Gates. London: Verso.

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3 Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/ch RemiX] A Conversation with Mark Amerika Editors’ Note: Mark Amerika is a leading digital media artist, author, and educator. Named a “Time Magazine 100 Innovator,” Amerika employs new media technology to create emerging forms of art that actively challenge and deliberately transgress established boundaries. He is the author of numerous books, including two avant-pop novels The Kafka Chronicles (University of Alabama Press, 1993) and Sexual Blood (University of Alabama Press, 1995), and two monographs investigating the theory and practice of digital media art, META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press, 2007) and remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). He has written, produced, and exhibited a trilogy of award-winning Internet art installations made up of the hypertext fiction Grammatron (1998), an mp3 concept album called PHON:E:ME (1999) and FILMTEXT (2002), which incorporated a Flash art website, an mp3 concept album, an experimental artist ebook, and a series of live audio-visual performances. Most recently he produced and created the film Immobilité (2009), an art-house feature shot entirely on a mobile phone camera. Amerika’s digital artwork has been shown at museums around the world, including five major retrospectives, one each at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Ciberart Bilbao, FILE in São Paulo, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. He has received art commissions from venues such as the Walker Art Center, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, IBM, Sony PlayStation, and the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo. Amerika studied and completed his MFA at Brown University and is currently Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The following conversation began in São Paulo, Brazil in November of 2010, and developed after that initial meeting, quite appropriately, by way of the Internet. David Gunkel [DG]: I’d like to begin our dialogue by referencing another dialogue, specifically Plato’s Timaeus, which begins with Socrates counting: “One, two, three—but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of our guests of yesterday, our host of today?” (Plato 1981: 17a). Here, at the beginning 57

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of this ancient dialogue, Socrates begins by asking about someone who is absent. In doing so, he makes what is absent present by explicitly marking a lack of presence. Something that was supposed to have been there is not, and this lack of presence is only able to be made present as such by remarking on the trace of its withdrawal. So let me begin by also acknowledging and asking about an absence, about something that was to have been here but is not. What is absent is an essay that you had intended to contribute to this volume, something called “From Remixology.” And it is absent because of some stipulations regarding republication and competing works—issues emanating from our current intellectual property laws and put into question by the very work that is now absent. It seems then that we are at a crucial cultural moment when the creative opportunities of digital media (remixing, mashup, collage, cut-and-paste, etc.) directly oppose and challenge the legal structures of copyright and intellectual property that prohibit and even demonize things like republication, derivation, and plagiarism. What is an artist to do? Mark Amerika [MA]: Here’s the thing: I am not “I” and so there can be no definitive or proper version of me or my thoughts that can, in the end, be owned. If there is no definitive or proper version of me then I think it’s safe to assume that there cannot be a definitive or proper version of what it is I am writing becoming remixing at any given moment. The writing “I” is always pseudo-autobiographical: a remix-in-process continually cohering into what Whitehead (1978: 279) would call “an aesthetic fact,” although he was referring quite explicitly to “an intense experience” as an aesthetic fact. This resonates with my theory of remix because it’s only by becoming an aesthetic fact that I can experience concrescence although it’s not as if this concrescence can be captured as a still image owned by the vectoralist class [to borrow a term from Ken Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto]; rather, it’s a simultaneous and continuous fusion of the actual sensory data I am sampling from and manipulating as part of my remix practice [and here I am mashing up Piet Mondrian and Allen Ginsberg, though it just as easily could have been Stan Brakhage and Robert Creeley or Kathy Acker and Count Lautréamont]. The aesthetic fact of the matter is that you [not you in particular, David, but the quantifiable other, i.e. the all-consuming Singularity trying to lock down a version of “me” as myself, even though I too, like Whitman, am multitudes] cannot own my thoughts. No one can own my thoughts. They are just part of what, in my latest performance writing and publication project, remixthebook (2011), I refer to as the Source Material Everywhere (SME). Sure, there are going to be those who try to nail down a version of whatever traces I happen to be leaving behind and call it their property. But what they are really “owning” is a malleable version of an excerpt from my ongoing formation. Ron Sukenick (2000: 19) once wrote that “form is

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your footprints in the sand when you look back.” With my own approach to self-appropriation, what Ray Federman terms pla(y)giarism, and the unconscious remixing of the actual sensory data I am sampling from and manipulating as part of my research practice, I feel comfortable doing whatever I want with the Source Material Everywhere. This SME (SaME old SaME old, but forever cohering into new configurations, live performance or COMPOSITION BY FIELD that virtually “make it new” while perpetually perishing) is what the artist-medium continually samples from when spontaneously remixing and distributing their personae into the networked space of flows. Lately, I have been marking my presence in the form of what is sometimes called glitch aesthetics, or more specifically for this version we’re composing here, [G.]Lit/ch aesthetics. As a remixologist who trades in a multitude of media forms, everything from experimental novels to large-scale hypertexts to net.art to live VJ performance to directing feature-length “foreign films” as well as writing long, improvised tracts detailing my love affair with theory [starting with Derrida, yes?, and does that not put everything I do within a certain circa and back again?], I am happy to use whatever feels w-r-i-t-e—whether it be Plato or Playdough. The important thing is to annihilate the important thing [stole that one too—no need to cite—just Google it—and do with it what you will]. This is what it means to be avant-garde [the title of an excellent book of transcribed, extemporaneous talk performances by David Antin] as we move-remix [i.e. proprioceptively perform in auto-affect mode] through these in and out states of presence that facilitate the discovery of our formal tendencies. I think of these formal tendencies as revealing our aesthetic residuals. These residuals are exemplary fictions, form formally forming itself out of the Source Material Everywhere. In digital cultures, becoming this form is a processual body-brain-apparatus achievement. This SME is intuitively sampled and manipulated by the artist, the artist that Duchamp gave the attributes of a medium, a medium that would turn away from self-analysis while embodying the Next Version of Creativity Coming. Of course, I have already written most of what we are doing in this dialogue already, in “From Remixology,” although there is no longer a “Remixology” for this to come from since it has since been altered into something new again, something now titled remixthebook. The other essay, the one that we will not publish because it can’t be owned, is just another version of it. And that’s actually fine with me because it means we get to do our own cover version here in the [G.]Lit/ch RemiX [and by going [G.] Lit/ch we can situate it in a history of errors or, even better, accidental discoveries, and leave it open to further revision which means this version can never really be owned either although it may look like that on paper]. What’s funny is that by turning to remix, some might actually call into question whether I am being derivative. Derivative of myself. But “myself” who? As I was saying earlier, I am not “I” and so there can be no definitive

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or proper version of me. If there is no definitive or proper version of me then I think it’s safe to assume that there cannot be a definitive or proper version of what it is I am writing becoming remixing at any given moment. Which brings us back to you. Persona as shareware? DG: I’m glad you bring up the question of pronouns (as I deploy in my reply to you the very pronouns that are in question). Because it is always a matter of identifying the source and destination … the “I” who originates what is said/written/expressed and the “you” who is to receive what is sent. This remains remarkably the same (perhaps it is more of the SaME old thing) from the ancient formulations of Aristotelian rhetoric to Shannon and Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication. It is always a matter of senders and receivers connected by media through which messages pass. But this formulation, as normal and as natural as it may seem, is a metaphysical artifice and one that has had quite a history. And once again it is Socrates, that clever bastard who Plato could never quite put to work for his own purposes, who already toyed with an alternative. It is in the Apology (Plato 1982), the dialogue where Socrates is called to give an account of himself (a matter of pronouns) and what he does, that he deflects his response and responsibility elsewhere. “It is not I,” he says, “who have said and did all these things, but a god working through me.” Fast-forward to Roland Barthes (1978), who begins “The Death of the Author” by sampling that clever hook from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (without providing “proper” reference, I should point out): “What does it matter who is speaking? someone said. What does it matter who is speaking?” What “I” hear/read in the reply from “you” is an echo of this maneuver: “It is not I who write and produce this material as some original Kantian genius. I (if it is even possible to retain and reuse such subjectivizing pronouns) am only a nodal point in a network of information that is already in circulation and that uses and speaks through me. I am the medium of the remix and not its source. “Think of the artist as a medium.” Dialectical inversion, at least, if not full-blown deconstruction. MA: Yes, that’s it. If we transcode the spirit of the letter in Socrates for the twentieth-century artist, what we get is Duchamp’s metamediumystic entity [the not-I] creatively processing the Source Material Everywhere [Remixology’s conceptual God that the artist-medium devotes himself to as part of a trance ritual transfigured in time]. Duchamp suggested that the artist as medium triggered the creative act vis-à-vis pure intuition. Vito Acconci, on the other hand, once contextualized the artist as an open medium or instrument. He does not see the need to get bogged down in a specific medium per se, like oil painting, or clay, or photography. For him, the artist does not need to specialize in a medium, which would basically fix a ground for themselves, a ground they would then have to dig themselves

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out of, but rather, they should become a medium, or instrument, that acts on whatever ground is available. For the contemporary twenty-first-century remixologist who employs a kind of cut-and-paste-as-you-go digital lifestyle practice, this intuitively generated creative act is all about the postproduction of presence and can be connected to the avant-garde lineage of artists, writers, philosophers and other innovators of creative de[con]struction who methodically play with the source of creativity, but do so in a self-consciously transgressive way. I’m constantly sampling from and remixing both content and form from those figures whose source material stimulates my own praxis. Sometimes the sources are a bit subtle, as in Borges’ stunning investigation of the pseudoautobiographical “I” in “Borges and I” (Borges 2007: 246). It’s so short, just under 350 words, but in this brief ficto-critical “story-essay,” where he investigates [t]his shadow other, the one everything happens to, I am able to sample his philosophical investigation of the pseudo-autobiographical “I” and filter it through something William Burroughs once referred to as “the IS of identity.” [“Consider the IS of identity … when I say to be me, to be you, to be myself, to be others, whatever I may be called upon to be or say that I am, I am not the verbal label ‘myself’” (Burroughs 1998: 311).] Burroughs would say “to be a body, to be nothing else, to stay a body,” relating the pseudoautobiographical “I” back to the body as a platform for remixing the data. His literary cut-ups, wherein he remixed the formal methods of his painter friend Brion Gysin, were, of course, a part of the rival tradition in literature and gave birth to what Kathy Acker referred to as William Burroughs’s Realism. Acker herself used to talk to me about embodying the spirit of writers like Rimbaud or Verlaine. The keyword here is not spirit. In fact I may be misquoting her there. But she definitely said embodying. Her work comes across to the more middle-mind reader of literature as an in-your-face, post-punk aesthetic that I see as being simply submerged in this same rival tradition that all forms of transgressive art align themselves with. She and I would talk about embodying each other’s language as a form of creative crosscontamination. She was great at sampling from what was, for her at the time, recently translated poststructuralist texts published by Semiotext(e) and remixing them with data from her own unique life experiences as well as classic avant-garde narrative form. She wanted to have nothing to do with the concept of creativity per se and connected it, creativity, to the tradition of patriarchal writing. But I thought her remixological tendencies were the embodiment of creativity. This is due largely to my sense of measure, a sense that tells me we are in the process of intersubjectively jamming with the metadata everywhere. The Source Material Everywhere, as I calculate it in remixthebook. DG: Acker … definitely. She was, I would agree with you, one of the leading innovators in literary remix, “plagiarizing” (a word which all too often has unfortunate negative connotations but can, as the Critical

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Art Ensemble (1994) demonstrated, always be revalued and reinvested otherwise) everything from Dickens and Cervantes to William Gibson. In fact, I like to think that Gibson’s recent celebration of the remix as “the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries” (Gibson 2005: 118) is something Acker must have taught him back in 1988 with her remixing of Neuromancer in Empire of the Senseless. But I want to steer things in another, albeit related direction—one that has to do with all the name-dropping we have already had to (and perhaps could not avoid needing to) deploy. Typically when we tell the story—when we connect the dots that comprise this network we now call remix/mashup/cut-and-paste—we work into the mix proper names like Acker, Barthes, Brakhage, Burroughs, and Duchamp; innovative movements like ready-mades, dada, and surrealism; and practices like collage, bricolage, pastiche, DJing/Vjing, etc. I recently, however, heard of another alternative history (maybe not “alternative” so much as supplementary), one that deploys a different set of figures and activities. This past week (at the Cultural Studies Association conference in Chicago 2011) Richard Edwards (another contributor to this volume) suggested that the lineage of mashup might be better situated not in the avant-garde tradition of Surrealism and ready-mades but in the deliberate constraining and mathematically precise practices of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). His argument went something like this: What we see in DJ Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album,” for instance, is a constrained technique, whereby the artist deliberately limited himself to only two sources: Jay-Z’s “Black Album” and The Beatles’ “White Album.” And it was this limitation, this deliberately self-imposed restriction, that made “The Grey Album” possible. Remix, told from this perspective, therefore, is not “anything goes” and “everything thrown together,” as some critics might charge. Instead it is a carefully articulated and programmed set of constraints imposed in order to generate new forms of art in excess of the fantasy of genius, intentionality, and those other metaphysical authorities. I wonder, from your experience, whether this kind of Oulipean “constraint” plays a role in these recombinant practices and products? MA: Of course, the Oulipo artists are all about remixing under constraint. What is Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style if not an introduction to literary remixing? In fact, I start my remix culture seminar with this book and ask the students to return to the second session of class with their own remix of the banal story told over and over again in that book. Each exercise has its own title that then serves as a filter to port the remix style through. Any time you start setting your preferences, tweaking your parameters, or just initializing a formula to generate source material that you can then riff on, you are essentially creating the conditions for a remix performance. In the visual or sound arts, we would call this a procedural composition.

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For me, setting up these parameters is an excellent strategy for generating source material. For example, I was invited to contribute to a collection of essays on “Time and Technicity” featuring contributions from figures like Bernard Steigler (of course, it’s his subject), Ken Wark, J. Hillis Miller, etc., and the purpose of the book was to explore the theory and praxis of technicity in contemporary thought. Now, no offense to those who write smart academic essays, they are useful, especially to artists who are always hunting for more source material to sample from and manipulate into their own free form poetics. My own contribution, though, that appeared at the end of the collection, was “Technicity, StyleTime, and the Loop: A Gertrude Stein Remix.” Basically what I did was sample a block of text from Tender Buttons and infused it with a lot of the language that has formed around the interrelationship between technicity, technology, and time. As far as I’m concerned, Gertrude Stein composed her work in a style that I would call remixological. It employed loops, repetitions, and self-appropriation, often within the same sentence, as a way to visualize movement or, if you will, the way language embodies movement. Choosing an excerpt from the oeuvre of Gertrude Stein in general, and from her Tender Buttons in particular, was no random act. It could have been random, but like a lot of professional art DJs, I often spend a lot of time researching the archive for very specific source material to sample from for my remixes. For me, Stein’s writing is at once original (or even originary) and yet very calculated in the way it intersubjectively jams with samples from the formal methods of her time (Cubism would be the most obvious art form that she must have transcoded into her language performances, but really everything going on in the cultural milieu she spearheaded in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century). Still, there is a very specific Steinian style, a radical syn-tactics that she brings to the table. Contemporary literary hactivists might call it syn-tactical media. How does she do it? How does she create this poetic yet DJ-styled narrative of/on technicity that intervenes in the conventional meaning-making process that reeks of false consciousness? I’m not the kind of artist or scholar who wants to answer this question or even approach it in the guise of an academic paper loaded with advanced theoretical jargon per se [even though I am self-aware of how I am heavily sampling from it here in this dialogue with you]. I would prefer to just remixologically inhabit her style, what in the title I refer to as StyleTime, and then mash it up with language I find appropriate to the subject matter at hand. And it really feels like it all happens at hand, i.e. as if I were spinning her into the live set as part of the gestural economy my megamix performance brings into view. The end result is a work that I would put in the tradition of both conceptual and performance art, but that is heavily influenced by new media as well. Here’s a sample from the opening remix loops that start the piece:

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In the world there is technology, in technology there is language, in language there is meaning, in meaning there is feeling. In meaning there is feeling. In feeling anything is playing, in feeling, anything is enframing, in feeling there is autonomy, in feeling there is epistemology, in feeling there is harmony and entirely situated there is unfolding. All the beings have heartbeats and all the writers have knowing and all the structure has partitioning and all the machines have machining. This makes technicity. In the world there is technicity, in technicity there is language, in language there is meaning, in meaning there is feeling. In meaning there is feeling. In feeling anything is being, in feeling, anything is embodying, in feeling there is achievement, in feeling there is knowledge, in feeling there is thinking and entirely fabricated there is enframing. All the players have instincts and all the computers have processing and all the narratives have casings and all the filters have filtering. This makes style. In the world there is style, in style there is language, in language there is meaning, in meaning there is feeling. In meaning there is feeling. In feeling anything is spacing, in feeling, anything is disseminating, in feeling there is proprioception, in feeling there is autocannibalizing, in feeling there is gorging and entirely caffeinated there is speeding. All the robots have instincts and all the people have processing and all the stories have frameworks and all the investigations have investigating. This makes research.

Is this too theory? DG: There’s so much I can/want to say in response to this. And in a sense is this not what remix is all about, namely responding and the responsibility we—you, I, all of us—have of making a response? A response to each other, no doubt, by way of the medium of the work but also a response to the work, the work as work and not as a mere conduit for the artist formerly known as “author.” As everyone, from Plato up to Derrida, knows, what is both interesting about and a problem for writing is the fact that the written word “only says one and the same thing” (Plato 1990: 275d). It might be able to react, but it certainly does not respond. Remix, it seems to me, tries to take responsibility for responding—responding to the work, with that kind of careful and strategic attention that you describe, but also for the work responding to us, to our time, and to new things. And that appears to be, if I understand things correctly, what is happening with your engagement with Stein’s Tender Buttons. You are responding to it and taking responsibility for this particular mode of reading but also for other writers, other texts, other times, other possibilities, other others. But this gets us into the messy territory of ethics. What does it mean to respond? How does the remix and the remixer respond in a way that is or could be called responsible? Some one, not I of course but another, might reissue the charge initially articulated by one of Dostoyevsky’s (2007: 661) characters in the face of the collapse of that final and ultimate authority, the author of all things: “god is dead, anything goes.” I’m not necessarily asking you

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to formulate an ethics of remix, but how do you, how would you, respond to this question of responsibility? MA: Sampling from Bracha Ettinger, I would prefer to see daily remix practice as part of a larger, com-passionate agenda that feeds into [literally nurtures into being] a kind of co-response-ability as intersubjective imperative. In other words, daily remix practice takes responsibility for nurturing co-responseability in others and does this by dissolving the borderspace between the I and the non-I so that what emerges, or “co-emerges” (to use her term), is a mashup of subjectivities responding to the Source via emergent (and often times electronic) forms of peer renewal instead of a peer review. This renewal process changes the way we approach our profession and really calls a lot of out-of-touch academic protocol into question. In my book META/DATA, I see this co-emergence and the co-responseability that comes with it as a way to affectively become what I call the not-me. The not-me rejects a self-situated ethics of being and instead remixes digital flux personae into a transgressive form of networked performance that experiments with subjectivity in the field of distribution. It’s like what Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) writes in Rhythm Science (2004) when he refers to “persona as shareware” and Ettinger refers to as “transgressive shareability” (Ettinger 2006: 168). Daily remix practice is not a self-centered ritual of dissipating the ego. It’s much more intense than that. I think of it as a kind of embodied praxis where the artist-medium builds their chops by conducting an open source, cut-and-paste as-you-go, digital lifestyle practice that operates as part of this larger, com-passionate agenda to nurture feelings back into the mix. This is the only way we can even approach what Whitehead refers to as the Higher Phases of Experience. Feelings: nothing more than feelings. Of course, nurturing these feelings back into the mix requires total manipulation of the Source Material Everywhere that, for me, is a fictionalization process, one that is heavily politicized. Positioning persona as transgressive shareware is always a risk. The Assassin’s Creed that “nothing is true, everything is permitted” suggests that one can manipulate the Source Material Everywhere any way they please regardless of the consequences. As someone who has been labeled a writer of transgressive fiction, and whose very persona has virally infected the network under the name Amerika, nurturing feelings back into the mix always brings me back to writing, the techno-mother that births ethics in the first place. Writing is where remixed personae get processed (are processing or always becoming). The idea is to simultaneously become what you are writing as you write it, as it feels w-r-i-t-e. In my experience, it’s all about training yourself to play with your unconscious readiness potential so that you are able to create a total field of action where the artist-medium uses the writing instrument, the instrument

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of writing itself, to prophesize their future tense. This is also what it means to envision and, as Flusser reminds us, this envisioning is deeply connected to the gesture of writing. Where else are all of our thoughts to go? DG: Clearly this kind of engagement falls under that “interminable analysis” that Derrida assigns to all critical/interventionist forms of writing. We can, we must, and we should go on … and on and on. This is not necessarily “das Schlecht-Unendliche,” the bad or spurious infinite, of Hegel (1987: 137), but is, as Niklas Luhmann (1995: 9) argues, the way that “selfreferential closure can create openness.” Remix—a specific, embodied, and finite practice—continually feeds itself producing more possibilities for additional and virtually endless remixing. Source Material Everywhere (a spatial dimension) but also, and in addition, for all time (a temporal dimension). Cut loose of all conceptual anchors and authorities—gods, the author, truth, etc.—remix is cast adrift in an infinite sea of becoming. This is, as Nietzsche (1974) had pointed out by way of mobilizing these same nautical metaphors, not necessarily some sad and gloomy thing, because of what has been lost (and let’s not kid ourselves, what has been “lost” are all the firm moorings, certitudes, and assurances that had been assumed to be essential and fundamental). It is, in fact, the very source of our cheerfulness—the basis of a new Fröhliche Wissenschaft or la gaya scienza. Despite this, things do end and need to come to an end. Such an ending is not necessary, prescribed, or certain; it is more of a strategic decision—literally a cut into the material that cuts things off. So to bring this conversation to some kind of closure, to initiate the cut that will, at least for now, cut things off, I want to return to the thematic that organizes this entire volume and that you just referenced—transgression. As a so-called writer of “transgressive fiction” interested in channeling a “transgressive form of networked performance,” what is or what is called “transgressive” at this particular historical moment? If the very condition of possibility for transgression requires firm and established boundaries that are to be surpassed and violated, what sense is there to the notion of transgression at a time when it seems that all boundaries are up for grabs and “anything goes?” Is transgression as such still possible? And if so, how and where does it occur? MA: These days, I find that just by being myself, my entire performance as a digital flux persona comes across as a transgression. This feeling of being an outsider or even a cultural outlaw is especially visible in my role as a professor of art and art history. I’ll relate to you two stories to prove the point. The first involves a conversation I had a few months ago with the chair of my department. We were catching up on things and I was discussing some of my recent work, and the various solo and group exhibitions my work has enjoyed over the last few years. Without getting too caught up in the details, I think it’s safe to say that lately I have had

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just as many if not more international solo and group shows than most if not all of my colleagues, and there are some very talented faculty rostered in my department, so this is saying something. It’s also safe to say that my artwork and interdisciplinary artist persona has been written about more than any other faculty member in the department. This is not my ego talking, it’s just a fact. And yet at one point in the conversation, the chair, in all seriousness, asked me why I was in an art department. Not why I was a professor, or what direction my research was heading in, but why would I locate myself in an art department. It was a really good question and we talked about that for a while as if this were exactly the sort of question I should be asking myself. I think what he was suggesting is that even though my artwork is very much circulating and gaining widespread recognition in the global networks, what I actually do as an artist, the way my practice reflects the practice of everyday digital life, does not, unfortunately, fit in with or properly reflect how most art departments, including the one in Boulder, are programmatically structured these days. It ends up that just by being a kind of post-contemporary or interdisciplinary artist, theorist, novelist, and performer, i.e. someone who successfully transgresses disciplinary boundaries, I simply do not fit into an institutional mold that wants to clearly demarcate all of the proper territories for disciplinary-driven research to take place in. The second story involves the subject we’ve been coming back to during the course of this dialogue: the remix. I have been teaching a seminar I call Remix Culture. For years it’s been identified as fulfilling the theory requirement for our MFA students, students who I spend a great deal of time recruiting into our program and who are attracted to the research track I am developing within the program because of the way it creates a hybridized or transdisciplinary environment for them to invent new forms of theory that move beyond the print book per se and challenge traditional forms of scholarly production. These are issues that we directly address in the theory course and that emerging artists really need to think deeply about if they want to sustain a fair amount of influence over how their work is positioned within contemporary thought. The question we come back to throughout the semester is, “How can an artist remix theory into contemporary art-research practice and, in the process, reinvent both theory and practice as part of their creative research agenda?” Many of the discussions in this course have led to the experimental publication/ performance/digital project remixthebook. As I mentioned earlier, this book is coming out with the University of Minnesota Press. Not too shabby, if you asked me, and coming on the heels of my recent collection of artisttheory writings with MIT Press, means that I have published quite a bit of individually authored theory. It could no doubt be argued that lately I have been publishing more single-authored innovative theory with top academic presses than any of my colleagues in both the studio arts and art history

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programs in my department. But to my surprise, the department recently disallowed my seminar to count as a theory requirement as it has over the last four or five years, thus “disincentivizing” my personally recruited grad students to take courses with me. In one sense, this is just yet more of the incongruent departmental politics that all faculty face one time or another in their storied careers in academentia. But this also suggests to me that there is a lot of chaos just below the institutional surface, a kind of unsightly desperation, that’s trying to reign in any move toward what to me feels like a perfectly natural transgression of boundaries rendered by the social mediated digital culture I, and most of my students, find ourselves immersed in. Transgression, it ends up, still happens at the boundary space of the personal and the institutional. Sometimes it’s as easy as just being yourself, or at least the latest remixed version thereof.

References Acker, Kathy. 1994. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove Press. Amerika, Mark. 2009. Meta/Data: A Digital Poetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Amerika, Mark. 2011. remixthebook. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Antin, David. 1993. What it Means to be Avant Garde. New York: New Directions. Barthes, Roland. 1978. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang. Borges, Jorge Luis. 2007. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions Books. Burroughs, William S. 1998. Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. New York: Grove Press. Critical Art Ensemble. 1994. The Electronic Disturbance. New York: Autonomedia. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. 2007. The Karamazov Brothers. Translated by Constance Garnett. London: Wordsworth. Ettinger, Bracha L. 2006. The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Gibson, William. 2005. God’s Little Toys: Confessions of a Cut and Paste Artist. Wired 13(7): 118–19. Hegel, G.W.F. 1987. Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Translated by William Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Translated by John Bednarz and Dirk Baecker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Miller, Paul D. 2004. Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Plato. 1981. Timaeus. Translated by R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato. 1982. Apology. Translated by H. N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato. 1990. Phaedrus. Translated by H. N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Queneau, Raymond. 1981. Exercises in Style. Translated by Barbara Wright. New York: New Directions Books. Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver. 1963. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Stein, Gertrude. 2007. Tender Buttons. Sioux Falls, SD: NuVision Publications. Sukenick, Ronald. 2000. Narralogues: Truth in Fiction. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press.

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4 Saw Fandom and the Transgression of Fan Excess PAUL BOOTH

F

andom in the twenty-first century has reached a plateau. Since the early 1990s, the study of fans—people who feel an emotional attachment to a popular culture text—has become a fundamental component of cultural studies. Early studies of fans by Bacon-Smith (1992), Fiske (1992), and Jenkins (1992), among others, exposed the fans’ “tactics of the disempowered” to academia (Gray et al. 2006: 1). Fans were seen in contrast with mainstream popular audiences, closeted as to their fandom, and invisible except to their fan communities. In contrast, new technology has made today’s fan visible and typical. New media texts that cater to fan cultures have made fandom almost ubiquitous in contemporary culture. And fan studies itself has made fans more popular than ever. Classic fan studies tell of the inherently transgressive fan in a constant struggle against the dominant ideologies contained within contemporary culture (see Hills 2002). From poaching their own meanings based on the work of others to resisting the dominant messages in popular texts of the time, fans constantly engaged in transgressive work. For example, Jenkins argued that fans’ pleasures exist “on the margins of the original text and in the face of the producers’ own efforts to regulate meaning” (Jenkins 1992: 24). The contemporary mainstreaming of fandom, however, has created a new type of fan—one that may identify the dominant ideologies of the media, but also supports them. These new fans don’t replace old fans, but exist in tandem with them, complementing and working alongside them. The fan culture surrounding the Saw film franchise exemplifies this new state of fandom. Saw is itself an inherently transgressive text. It works against the ideological grain in two distinct ways: through horror excess and through narrative excess. Like the proverbial unstoppable cannon ball and the immovable post, the inherently non-transgressive fandom surrounding the inherently transgressive Saw franchise has created a new form of transgression—where the boundaries of fandom itself become transgressed. Saw, because of its excessive nature, offers fans a new route for fan transgressions. In this chapter, I examine online fan videos of Saw to elucidate these new routes. The digital environment has offered much

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freedom to fans to experiment and modify source texts (see Booth 2010; Hellekson and Busse 2006). In sorting through the numerous transgressions of the Saw franchise, fans must compensate for the endless possibility of excess that the digital allows. Instead of transcending the boundaries set by the narrative framing of the Saw franchise, the online videos created by fans seem to demonstrate a transgression of Saw’s excess through a return to a stable narrative structure.1 Ultimately, contemporary fans transgress fandom’s traditional transgressions.

The Saw Text and Fandom The Saw film franchise (seven films, released from 2004 to 2010) is a work of pure cinematic excess: at the present the “text,” which began as a short film, now also includes two video games, a roller-coaster, and a comic line, each iteration of which shows in gruesome detail the dismemberment and torture of various people involved with the pro/antagonist Jigsaw. Indeed, Saw has all the hallmarks of a “transmedia” franchise (i.e. a media story that spans different outlets), the type around which media fans usually congregate (Jenkins 2006: 97). On the one hand, Saw includes many components of cult worlds, including “seriality, textual density, and perhaps most especially, the nonlinearity of multiple time frames and settings that create the potentially infinitely large metatext … for fans to revel in the development of characters and long, complex narrative arcs (Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson 2004: xvii). Saw fandom, on the other hand, is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from what has been previously researched on fandom of cult texts.2 There are fewer fan productions of the Saw franchise than of other cultish texts.3 And because research on horror fandom (unlike sci-fi or cult fandom) is scant, as Hills suggests, traditional scholarship on horror is unable to fully account for fan practices (Hills 2005: 2). While the Saw films present a film series based in the notion of excess, much of the fan-created content that surrounds Saw seems benign and tame. By excess here, I mean that Saw films are both excessive in content—the torture scenes include copious amounts of blood, gore, and sinew—and excessive in narrative—the films themselves create a complex and selfreflexive storyline. The narrative content of the series exceeds traditional linear storytelling norms as each new Saw film forces a reconception of the narrative information that has come before. While the fan response to the Saw franchise has been warm—the films themselves are usually box office, if not critical, successes 4—the fan-created content seems paltry in comparison, as contemporary fans mimic the content excess of the Saw films, but not the narratological transgressions of the original Saw films. This is especially interesting because fan production itself has traditionally been seen as transgressive. Indeed, Jenkins’s (1992: 1) canonical

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work argues that fans break the boundaries of the original cult narrative by exceeding traditional reading strategies. This is not a pejorative statement, but is rather integral to a fan’s appropriation and subsequent negotiation of the original text(s). Fans transgress the bounds of the extant media text through their “work to resolve gaps, to explore excess details and underdeveloped potentials” (Jenkins 1992: 278). Readers create meanings from the texts they read, becoming, as de Certeau (on whom Jenkins bases his early scholarship) describes, “tactical” readers, who “make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open” (de Certeau 1984: 37). By creating fan fiction—works of original plot based on characters, situations, or events from popular media texts—fans “fill in the gaps” of narrative knowledge by adding to, augmenting, or adjusting the original text (see Hills 2002). In this way, fans transgress the boundary between consumer and producer as well as between author and audience (Jenkins 1992: 162–77). Further, as Bahng describes, fans “may allow themselves to be taken in by a film but can also become its fiercest critics and its most passionate rewriters” (Bahng 2006: 189). Bahng finds that The Matrix fan fiction is ultimately liberatory as it enacts readings outside the sexist/racist/classist ideology of the film. Ultimately, it is an extreme and proactive form of polysemy. Fan writing “sparks a recognition that the program is open to intervention,” as fans can “move beyond” the text in order to rewrite the story in their own way (Jenkins 1992: 155). The ubiquitous example of Star Trek fandom is apropos here: for example, the steadfastly chaste relationship between Kirk and Spock most deliberately is transgressed in the video “Star Trek 1 Nine Inch Nails 5 Closer” as the creator depicts Kirk and Spock entangled in all sorts of sexually charged cardiovascular workouts. Today’s fans transgress in a different manner. Thanks to the mainstreaming of fandom and the ease and accessibility of digital technology, fandom is no longer a closeted position. Furthermore, the popularization of fans as a marketing group (see Jenkins 2007) has also helped to make fandom a mainstream position, which may therefore have encouraged contemporary fans to transgress the transgressive act of fandom itself. To transgress an act of transgression is the ultimate (tongue-twisting) post-structuralist act: not to break the boundary of transgression, but to actually exceed transgression entirely. Ultimately, then, transgression is not just about breaking boundaries, but is instead about the establishment of new boundaries, of boundaries previously undiscovered. The move in fandom from transgression to a transgression of transgression mirrors a similar shift in media studies. Merrin’s (2009) concept of “media studies 2.0” connotes a paradigm shift in the study of media, in which “ongoing changes in digital media needed to be placed at the core of the discipline; backward-looking perspectives needed to be left behind; and the historical basis of the discipline needed to be opened up to critical scrutiny” (2009: 19). In other words, we need to think anew about media text, producers,

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and audiences.5 Media studies 2.0 is an attempt to “push the boundaries of [traditional] fields” by establishing new boundaries, new visions, and new ways of analyzing media. Fan studies is no different. By taking fandom out of the margins and into the mainstream, fan studies scholars may, in fact, be making the very act of fandom less transgressive as a whole. Yet, as I demonstrate with Saw fan videos, there is still a transgressive aspect to fandom. Saw, as a cult franchise based in excess, offers us an exemplary glimpse into these new boundaries. By not exceeding Saw’s transgressive text, the fan videos surrounding the Saw series transgress the act of fan transgression itself.

Saw: Transgressive Horror Arguably, horror films are themselves inherently transgressive: “The universe of the contemporary horror film is an uncertain one in which good and evil, normality and abnormality, reality and illusion become virtually indistinguishable … the refusal of narrative closure produces an unstable, paranoid universe in which familiar categories collapse” (Pinedo 1997: 9). As arguably the first in what has become a long line of “torture porn,” Saw transgresses—as many sadistic texts do—a normative sense of cinematic violence. As a horror movie franchise, Saw helped to jumpstart films which feature sadistic scenes of torture, violence, bloodshed, pain, mental anguish, and vocal caterwauling. The term “torture porn,” coined by film critic David Edelstein, describes a genre “so viciously nihilistic that the only point seems to be to force you to suspend moral judgments altogether” (Edelstein 2006: ¶5). As a genre of cinematic excess, “torture porn” is exploitatively gruesome, and features scenes which may be intended to shock, dismay or otherwise horrify an audience with a type of “freak-show sensationalism” (Edelstein 2006: ¶12). In the case of Saw, Jigsaw sets traps for his victims that punish them for what he perceives as ethical crimes. If they do not accept the often gruesome punishment they are killed. For example, in Saw I (2004), two men who wronged each other in the past are chained in a bathroom, a hacksaw made available to slice through their bound ankles. In Saw II (2005), police informant Michael Marks (Noam Jenkins) wakes up to find his head encased in a giant bear-trap, ready to spring shut, with a scalpel nearby. Next to him a videotape informs him that the key to the helmet is hidden behind his right eyeball. The choice to live or die is his. Similar “games” are played each of the films, as in Saw IV (2007), where a rapist is chained to a bed and must gouge out his own eyes or be ripped limb from limb, and in Saw VI (2009) where a man has the key to his lock sewn into his abdomen. Daniel Earle writes that torture porn consists of “the physical recording of the torturing process, the abjection of the human body, and the visual presentation of human pain and suffering” to serve as a mirror for the

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audience’s fascination (Earle 2008: 9). Ultimately, says Murray (2008), people watch torture porn not just to viscerally experience a slice of life they may not normally be able to, but to experience the bounds of human endurance. Torture porn becomes, therefore, a Rabelaisian exemplar of bodily celebration: by experiencing transgressions of limits of the human body, audiences reveal their own body’s physicality and tenacity (see Bakhtin 1984b: 19, 26). The viewing of grotesque violence has an established history. For example, authors as far back as the Marques de Sade have connected brutality with rampant sexuality. Literary scholar Browder (2006: 933) shows us that the true crime genre, with its focus on rough sex and violent crime, is often perceived by nonreaders of the genre as “warping” women who read it … indeed, to those who do not love the genre, true crime can easily appear to be nothing more than a form of pornography—a repetition of violence, and of sexualized violence, that heightens the senses.

Yet, readers of this genre are intelligent, thoughtful readers who can use the pornographic material to work through their own issues with, especially, sexual violence against women (Browder 2006). Another cultural effect of torture porn is how, as Lockwood states, it “allegorizes our society of control but also new worlds of becoming, intimating … the liberatory ‘collapse’ and rearticulation of subjectivity” itself (Lockwood 2009: 47). By focusing explicitly on the way individuals are seen and dissected (both literally and metaphorically), torture porn allows us to quietly critique our own place within a surveillance society (see Russell 1997). Yet, there is more to Saw’s transgression than is what is on the screen. The Saw film franchise goes beyond the transgressive nature of typical “torture porn” owing to its complex and daring playfulness with narrative stability as a form of “narrative excess.” Traditionally, “excess” is precisely what is not narratively connected to the rest of the story, what Chatman argues is “‘distracting’ but absorbing story material” (Chatman 1990: 69). Or, as Sundhom puts it, “excess comprises those elements that the viewer regards as not really being part of the story” (Sundhom 2001: 102). In other words, this view of excess sees the introduction of new material that deliberately does not “fit” into the established story.6 Saw’s narrative excess complicates these analyses, as the films in the Saw series present narrative information in a multi-linear system of narrative “reveals.” It is not that this excess does not “fit” into the narrative, but rather that the narrative is retrofitted with the addition of new material. In this way, the Saw series develops a complex reworking of temporality (a move that critics such as Sharrett dislike (2009: 33)). Each movie features extensive flashbacks to points in time before and during the first movie, which reveal new narrative information. It is

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not that each additional aspect of the movie franchise merely propels the overarching narrative forward, but that each complicates the narrative further by changing elements the audience already thought they knew. For example, Saw III (2006) and Saw IV, despite being filmed and released a year apart, actually take place at the same time, each bolstering the narrative of the others, while filling in the gaps in the narratives of the first two films. In Saw III, Jigsaw kidnaps Lynn to test her estranged husband Jeff. The final moments of the film reveal Jeff’s discovery of the kidnapping, his witnessing of Lynn’s murder, and his killing of Jigsaw with, appropriately enough, a saw. Saw IV parallels the events of III and ends at the same moment in time. The two films complement each other as the detectives in IV come across clues left in III, and clues in III (including an envelope—the contents left unknown until Saw VI) are shown being planted in IV. Saw VI puts this temporal reconstruction at the forefront, as flashbacks to scenes from previous Saw films permeate the film’s structure. Currently, such a complex narrative structure has mainly been seen on television, in shows like Lost (2004–10) and Dexter (2006–present). Saw, while a series of seven individual films, actually seems more closely akin to these television texts, as each individual film consistently comments upon and changes the larger narrative, no matter how confusingly non-linear the narrative structure becomes.

Saw Fandom Horror fans represent a different type of fan from those traditionally researched. While attentive to the objects of their affection, horror fans do not seem to represent the same type of tangible transgressions of their sci-fi counterparts. A cursory glance at fanfiction.net, an online collation of fan fiction stories about a variety of topics, makes this immediately apparent.7 As of August 2010, Saw had about 730 stories written in its canon; in comparison, a sci-fi/cult text that came out around the same time, Alien vs. Predator (2004), had nearly twice as many. If, however, traditional analyses of fans see the nature of fan work as productive of new readings of extant texts, then Saw fan texts represent a step beyond this view. Saw fans do transgress, but their transgression is of the inherent transgression of fandom. Partly, this new form of fannish transgression may come from the inherent instability of the digital environment in which these fans have grown up. As digital technology creates ethereal texts—texts that can be altered or edited with ease—the digital texts created by fans seem to be less permanent than if they were tangible. Yet, I think there is something deeper going on here, something beyond a shift in technology use. The past twenty years have seen the rapid assimilation of fandom into mainstream popular culture. Contemporary television texts now seem to court fans—recent shows like Lost (2004–10),

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Heroes (2006–10) and FlashForward (2009–10) embrace fan culture in a way that portends fandom’s larger cultural influence. In some ways, this may be owing to the work of Jenkins (2006) and other fan scholars who have put a more socially adept face on fandom’s antisocial mug. Regardless, the fans that grow up today—the fans of Saw who use digital technology to make movies, not to write short fiction—live in a world where fandom is no longer closeted. If fandom can “come out,” then it not only doesn’t need to be transgressive to make the same points, it also allows more people—people who may not embrace the excessive nature of fan fiction—into the fold. What Saw fandom seems to accomplish, therefore, is a transgressive act that is, in itself, transgressive only because it does not exceed the original. In a move that takes us from a form of traditional transgression to one that exceeds transgression, Saw fan videos present new versions of fannish activities as a return to a sense of normality. The first and most basic form of Saw fan film are fan-made trailers. These online videos mimic or otherwise emulate movie trailers that advertise up-coming films. As Keith Johnston shows, movie trailers are a unique entity in digital filmmaking, as fans make their own trailers for films both to parody and to proclaim an emotional attachment to the film (Johnston 2008: 158). In terms of Saw, the film-created trailers run the gamut from complexly edited scenes of gruesome violence from the previous Saw films (as in the fan-made “SaW V Fan Trailer _Contains Saw IV Spoilers“), or can be a teaser of sorts, showing glimpses of people walking, instruments of torture, or other spoils of the genre (as in “Saw Fan Film Trailer”). New trailers are put up all the time: a quick search at the time of writing (September 2010) reveals over 1500 “Saw fan film” results 8—although of course some may be videos made by people who just really dig miter saws. In some way or another, these trailers by definition must attempt to mimic the tension and horror in both the Saw films and the Saw film trailers. For example, in “SAW VI (6) Fan Made Teaser Trailer Edit— HD,” the trailer hints at various tortures that might become apparent in the actual film—teasing us with the larger brush strokes (“6 victims; 6 chances”) but never actually showing us anything. It is a common tool of movie trailers to do the same: to hint but not to show. These fan trailers, therefore, straddle an interesting ideological divide. They must differentiate themselves from the Saw franchise in order to be known as fan films, but they must also match the tone and intensity of the Saw trailers in order to fit within the genre they mimic. It would not be an effective fan trailer if it did not share the same characteristics as the style which it mocked/ upheld. In fact, the dual tension in these fan-made trailers—both adhering to and departing from the transgression of their corpus—mirrors the centripetal/centrifugal tensions in languages as aluded to by Bakhtin.

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For Bakhtin (1981: 272), language use exists as the contradiction of two inherently diametrical forces: the centripetal, or unifying, aspects of language (that is, the culturally imposed grammar and mechanical usage of language which centralizes and authorizes particular forms of language over vernacular forms of language), and the centrifugal, or socio-historical forces at play within language (that is, the characteristics of language as an organic and mutable entity). Indeed, all language exists in this tension: the pull of codification and the push of culturalization. Likewise, fan-made trailers enact a similar tension as the pull of genre specificity must be matched by a contrary push for uniqueness and individuality. Fan trailers are inherently transgressive in two ways: by virtue of the fact that they exist as minute instruments of Saw horror fandom, and by virtue of the fact that they exist as fan examples of productive consumption. But instead of resisting Saw’s ideological underpinnings, these videos present it as codified. If we can perceive the Saw franchise as a transgressive text— that is, excessive in both content and narrative form—then the fan video that does not mirror that excess negates the revolutionary aspect of Saw. By negotiating the twinned roles of homage and fiction, these fan creators temper the reactionary politics of Saw. Whereas homage mirrors the original, fiction exceeds its boundaries. These videos represent a qualitative difference between fan homage and fan fiction. Saw fandom seems not to present a stark reflection of Saw’s transgressions, but through that homage actually represents a transgression of normally excessive fan transgression instead. Ultimately, the mainstreaming of fandom, or the respectability of fan activities, has solidified the actions of fans through a renegotiation of textual aberrance. Positioned as examples of amateur advertising, these fan videos stabilize the Saw franchise in the same ideological place in society where it currently resides. That is, rather than reworking Saw in channels outside commercial or mainstream culture, as previous generations of fans might have, contemporary Saw fan-trailer creators emulate the work that already exists within the established parameters of acceptable filmmaking. Trailers are condoned and authorized shorts; fan-trailers emulate the traditional without breaking the bounds set by the text itself. A second type of video, Saw parodies, subtly change the role of the fan creator from the position set by the fan-trailers. Parodies are inherently transgressive, and Saw parodies mock the Saw franchise and its particular generic tropes. These types of videos might be considered anti-fan videos, as they represent a view of the media text that is as negatively opinioned as fans’ views are positive (see Gray 2003). But what is most intriguing with these fan parodies is that the very act of creating a parody of the Saw franchise ends up enacting a similar form of transgression as do the film trailers. Whereas fan-made trailers support the Saw system, Saw parody videos aim to destroy it—or at least knock it down a peg. But

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by virtue of the parodic aspect of the fan-created text, Saw fan parodies function because Saw is itself a work that revels in excess. Ultimately, while fan-created parodies may mock the Saw text, they do not destroy the underlying mechanisms of transgression that Saw presents. Parody itself is a revealing case of transgression, a literal breaking of (textual) boundaries. Bakhtin called parody “double-voicedness,” as it represents “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” which move together to create ruptured meaning (Bakhtin 1984a: 6). As both sides of the voice merge, Bakhtin argues, the “word, directed toward its referential object, clashes with another’s word within the very object itself” (1984a: 195). As I have argued in the past, parody works through innate cultural knowledge (Davisson and Booth 2010: 15). For example, to parody a film genre, one must have knowledge of the genre in order to exceed the boundaries of that genre. But the act of parody cements these boundaries firmly in place. Saw parody works in the same manner. By exhibiting extreme versions of Saw tropes, parody videos take the excess of Saw to an excessive level. For example, in the parody “Saw 14: The One Where Saw Constantly Screws Up,” the flawless traps that Jigsaw creates end up going horribly wrong. A character, for instance, learns that he narrowly escaped getting his head put in a vice because he “came in the wrong entrance” to his own house. Later in the parody, a bomb fails to go off, and Jigsaw runs over to a man chained up: “I’m here to fix your death helmet,” he intones, again parodying Jigsaw’s relentless mechanical perfection. In another parody, titled simply “Saw Parody,” two characters are chained in a bathroom, mirroring the situation in the first Saw film. To find the keys to their locks, however, they have to eat their way through a lunch of tuna sandwiches (their torture lies in the fact that they don’t like tuna). Saw fan parodies enact the double-voicedness that Bakhtin (1984a) describes. Through parody, we see the Saw films for what they are, unadulterated excess of unbelievability. Yet, by pointing out the implausibility, the parody reinforces the boundaries that function at the same level as the franchise. Fan parodies work in a similar manner to transgress their original texts. But because of the inherent transgression of the Saw franchise, these parodies exemplify a new form of transgression, one that upholds the excessive nature of the requisite text as much as it exceeds it. Here, the implication for the Saw parody videos reveals a shift from the traditional fannish obsession with reifying the boundaries of the original text to a new fannish activity of concretizing those same boundaries. Parody serves to transgress by exaggerating the moments of a text’s excess. Yet, when these fan-created parodies of Saw exaggerate, it is not to point out Saw’s moments of excess, but rather its implausibility. In doing so, the parodies confirm the moments of Saw’s excess as established boundaries.

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Indeed, it is this excessiveness that carries across in the third form of fan videos, Saw-inspired vignettes. In these short videos, actors play out situations similar to but not exactly like those featured in the Saw films. Some Saw-inspired vignettes attempt to mirror the narrative complexity demanded of Saw feature films, while others pay homage to the unique and dastardly torture devices. Few, if any of the filmmakers attempt to place their films within the narrative universe of Saw—for instance, nestled between the events of Saw V and Saw VI—but rather they exist in an ethereal temporality outside the Saw narrative. The characters, for instance, suggest that particularly nasty traps are from Jigsaw, but little mention is made of when he might have set them. By deflecting the issue of how these films fit into the already tight narrative of Saw, the fan filmmakers manage to present an original narrative that nevertheless matches the narrative of the Saw franchise. For example, in the fan video “Jigsaw’s Revenge: Best Serious Parody on YouTube,” the filmmaker adds a disclaimer at the beginning: “This piece was done as a FUN!! trailer like teaser for SAW 5. The outcome is only what I think MIGHT and COULD happen. This piece will give out info on the other 4 saw films. This will mean more if you have seen the others. This is for the true saw fan [sic].” By mentioning the other Saw films the filmmaker gives reference to his film’s reliance on the Saw narrative, but by simultaneously disavowing any relation to the series (“only what I think MIGHT and COULD happen”) he also violates that very reliance. The filmmaker situates the film as both a part of, and apart from the Saw franchise. Furthermore, the film itself is edited very much like the Saw films— choppy jumpcuts intersperse with dramatic dutch angles and camera tricks to indicate an avant-garde style of filmmaking. Yet, the actual narrative of the vignette is anything but Saw. There is no violence, no torture, no threat (although they do mention Jigsaw’s violence from the past). The main character, a police officer, is sent a tape player with a message on it—that he has to play a game in order to figure out who sent the tape player. With this plot, “Jigsaw’s Revenge” does not quite match the horror mentality of the Saw films. Is it really that horrific to know who sent a tape? It does, however, continue the puzzle/game theme of the film series, by integrating play tactics into the narrative. While “Jigsaw’s Revenge” may not be as narratively complex as the Saw films, nor as gruesomely horrific, it is, in its own way, exceeding the bounds of the already excessive Saw. Fan vignettes like this renegotiate the content of the Saw franchise, but do so in a non-reactionary way, through the same vehicle as the original transgression. Specifically, by integrating all the elements that make Saw transgressive—depicting the complex narrative, using clips of a dead Jigsaw, referencing the violence—but deliberately not

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taking them too far, the film manages to straddle that important tension between the film and the fan film. The fan film sits at the intersection of homage and parody (hence the name), and this special double-voicedness articulates not just its position contra-Saw, but also pro-Saw as well. Another Saw-inspired vignette similarly masks its transgression by falling short of Saw’s numerous excesses. Both “Saw FanFilm … Part 1” and its sequel “Saw FanFilm … Part 2” re-enact various torture scenes from the Saw films. For example, in “Saw FanFilm … Part 1” a character is chained up similarly to how a character was chained in Saw III, through both wrists, ankles, back, and jaw. In order to escape, he must pull the chains from his skin. However, in contrast to the professionally made film, the fan video shows little blood, almost no skin ripping, and takes a considerably shorter time to depict the payoff of painful horror at the end. Of course, fan films obviously do not have the budget of their professional counterparts, so the effects would necessarily be limited. But what is interesting here is not whether the actual torture is or is not realistic, but rather that the fan has not gone beyond the narrative of the original Saw film. Indeed, by mimicking the exact scene from Saw III, the filmmaker can even quote whole sections of dialogue from the film, simply transplanting the audio into the new video. Instead of “filling in the gaps” of the Saw narrative, as a more traditional fan scholarship would illustrate, this fan film merely recapitulates those gaps. “Saw FanFilm … Part 1” even has its own trailer, “Saw Fan Film Trailer,” exemplifying and mirroring the commercial positioning of the Saw franchise as well.9 Ultimately, it is not that “Saw FanFilm … Part 1” fails in some way, but rather that it succeeds in transgressing the presumed boundaries of fandom (boundaries that have been defined not necessarily by fans themselves but by a particular academic apparatus that has taken a particular shine to fans and fan culture) in which it has situated itself. Fan filmmakers like those making fan-made trailers, parodies, and vignettes enact a new form of transgression—a move that is not satisfied with the typical gesture of the breaking of boundaries but one that calls into question that very expectation and model of transgression. Saw, as a horror franchise and as a fan-centric text, is an exemplar of this new form of transgression precisely because the series’ internal contradictions and rewritings seems to encourage textual renegotiation. This renegotiation, however, is only made possible on a mass level through digital production and circulation techniques. Indeed, what might be more compelling about the level of fan engagement with the Saw franchise, at least regarding online videos, is that the fans’ excess—normally leveled at the original text—has seemed to turn inward, to engage with fandom itself. Fandom, as an inherently transgressive act, makes fan work inherently excessive, but when that work does not transgress the original, it is fandom itself that is exceeded.

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Conclusion Ultimately, whereas traditional fan studies might look at the areas of a text transgressed by the fan production, Saw fan videos online represent a different way of looking at fan excess. Fan productions traditionally express or reveal a tension or relationship hidden by the original text (e.g. the homosexual bond between Kirk and Spock). But when the original text is itself inherently transgressive, fan productions have no recourse for their revelations except to resist the excess of the original media text. What was once expressed is now inherent. What is “excessive” in the case of these Saw fan texts is not that they transgress the limits of Saw, but rather that they transgress both Saw’s excess and fan excess entirely. Importantly, the implications for this type of analysis do not rest with horror fandom. As the digital world rapidly encroaches upon the physical world, we may be living in an increasingly “transgressive” world. Fans make explicit our implicit understanding of active consumption, intertextuality, and transgression. It is through an analysis of fans that we truly see ourselves. Saw fandom, however, calls into question the nature of the transgressive act in a digital world. In other words, this “transgression of transgression” creates a möbius-like parody of excess. To truly transgress, in a manner exemplified by the fan-created works originally explored in the pre-digital age by Jenkins (1992), fans must not only force a reconceptualization of the original text, but must necessarily also break the boundaries that tie their work to the original. Saw fan videos do neither. Perhaps this is because Saw is already transgressive. But perhaps it is also because the idea of the “fan” has changed in the years since fan studies began. If the examination of fandom in the early 1990s represented a major break in media studies, in a move from the “encoding/decoding” model of Stuart Hall to a more participatory model by Jenkins (1992), then fan studies in the second decade of the twenty-first century has shifted again. Fans have become mainstream, and a shift in the reception of fannish texts has become more common. Many fans may no longer feel the need to distinguish their own views of the media text from the producers, as fans and producers may often be in agreement. While a strong contingent of active fans still transgress their chosen media texts, it may be that the visibility of fandom (as represented through the rise in ComiCon and other venues) has made such transgressions unnecessary. Which, of course, would be the ultimate transgression after all.

Notes 1. Obviously, one cannot make judgments about all fandom from one exemplar. Saw fandom may represent one type of transgression, but I do not imply that all fandom follows suit. But it does portend larger issues in the analysis of fandom.

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Saw Fandom and the Transgression of Fan Excess  81 2. See, for example, academic work on fandom about Star Trek (Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins 1992; Penly 1995), Doctor Who (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995); Xena: Warrior Princess (Gwenllian-Jones 2000); Babylon 5 (Lancaster 2001); and The X Files (Hills 2002). 3. On http://www.fanfiction.net, for instance (a collection of fan fiction stories), Saw has 729 stories written. In contrast, a cult text like Star Trek has 2679 and Star Wars has a whopping 23,294, while a comparatively non-cultish series like the comedy School of Rock has 879 published stories. 4. According to the website BoxOfficeMojo.com, as of September 2010 the first six films in the franchise have made in excess of US$370 million (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/ movies/?id=saw.htm (=saw2.htm, =saw3.htm, =saw4.htm; =saw5.htm; =saw6.htm). 5. See Booth (2010) for more on shifts in media texts and audiences. 6. It should be noted that both Kristen Thompson (1999) and David Bordwell (1985: 50) use Chatman’s conception of “narrative excess” to define moments that do not fit within the framework of the extant narrative. 7. Of course, the writing of fan fiction stories is different than the production of fan videos. I searched fanfiction.net as it represents a vivid cross-section of the popularity of different media fandoms. In a larger sense, the presence of fan fiction seems to be a good indicator of a large fannish presence online. 8. I should note that Saw 3D, the supposedly last film in the franchise, was released in October 2010, which may skew the results somewhat higher due to promotional materials released at the time. 9. “Saw FanFilm…Part 1” is not the only fan vignette that has its own fan-made trailer. Both “SAW: _Fan Film_Teaser Trailer” and “SAW (fan film) Teaser Trailer 2” also preview a fan vignette, “SAW (fan film).”

References Bacon-Smith, Camile. 1992. Enterprising Women: Television, Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bahng, Aimee. 2006. Queering The Matrix: Hacking the Digital Divide and Slashing into the Future. In The Matrix in Theory, edited by Myriam Diocaretz and Stefan Herbrechter (pp. 167–92). Amsterdam/New York: Editions Rodopi. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. Discourse in the Novel. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (pp. 259–422). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1984a. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1984b. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Booth, Paul. 2010. Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Browder, Laura. 2006. Dystopian Romance: True Crime and the Female Reader. The Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 6: 928–53. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davisson, Amber and Paul Booth. 2010. Intertextuality, Parody and Polyphony in Pepsi’s® 2009 Presidential Inauguration Campaign. The Journal of Visual Literacy.29, no 1: 68–87. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press (originally published 1980). Earle, Daniel. 2008. Torture Porn: Conceptualizing a Current Trend in Graphic Imagery. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, San Diego, CA, November 20. http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p256857_index.html (accessed February 1, 2010). Edelstein, David. 2006. Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn. New York Magazine, January 28. http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/ (accessed December 21, 2009).

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82  Mashup/Remix/Repurpose Fiske, John. 1992. The Cultural Economy of Fandom. In The Adoring Audience, edited by Lisa A. Lewis (pp. 37–42). New York: Routledge. Gray, Jonathan. 2003. New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6(1): 64–81. Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. 2006. Introduction: Why Study Fans. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (pp. 1–16). New York: New York University Press. Gwenllian-Jones, Sara. 2000. Starring Lucy Lawless? Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 14(1): 9–22. Gwenllian-Jones, Sara and Roberta Pearson. 2004. Introduction. In Cult Television, edited by Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta Pearson (pp. ix–xx). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse (eds). 2006. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. Hills, Matt. 2005. Pleasures of Horror. London: Continuum. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Afterward: The Future of Fandom. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (pp. 357–64). New York: New York University Press. Johnston, Keith. 2008. The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World: Trailers in the Digital Age. Convergence 14(2): 145–60. Lancaster, Kurt. 2001. Interacting with Babylon 5. Austin,: University of Texas Press. Lockwood, Dean. 2009. All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of “Torture Porn”. Popular Communication 7: 40–8. Merrin, William. 2009. Media Studies 2.0: Upgrading and Open-Sourcing the Discipline. Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1(1): 17–34. Murray, Gabrielle. 2008. Hostel II: Representations of the Body in Pain and the Cinema Experience in Torture-Porn. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 50. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/TortureHostel2/index.html (accessed February 1, 2010). Penley, Constance. 1995. Nasa/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. London: Verso. Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. 1997. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Russell, Dennis. 1997. Beyond Cheap Thrills: Dark Visions of Slasher/Gore Film Fans. Popular Culture Review 8(1): 59–74. Sharrett, Christopher. 2009. The Problem of Saw: “Torture Porn” and the Conservatism of Contemporary Horror. Cineaste 35(1): 32–7. Sundhom, John. 2001. Narrative Excess without a Cause: The Institutional Reception of Hollywood Family Melodrama in 1950s Finland. Southern Quarterly 39(4): 101–7. Thompson, Kristin. 1999. The Concept of Cinematic Excess. In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (pp. 487–98) (5th edn). New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tulloch, John and Henry Jenkins. 1995. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek”. London: Routledge.

Saw Films Wan, James, director. 2004. Saw. Blu-Ray. Lionsgate. Bousman, Darren Lynn, director. 2005. Saw II. DVD. Lionsgate. Bousman, Darren Lynn, director. 2006. Saw III. Blu-Ray. Lionsgate. Bousman, Darren Lynn, director. 2007. Saw IV. Blu-Ray. Lionsgate.

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Saw Fandom and the Transgression of Fan Excess  83 Hackl, David, director. 2008. Saw V. Blu-Ray. Lionsgate. Greutert, Kevin, director. 2009. Saw VI. Blu-Ray. Lionsgate. Greutert, Kevin, director. 2010. Saw 3D. Blu-Ray. Lionsgate.

Fan Videos “Jigsaw’s Revenge: ‘Best Serious Parody on YouTube’” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMAYe-vuy8I). “Saw 14: The One Where Saw Constantly Screws Up” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StP2G9MHigA). “SAW (fan film) Teaser Trailer 2” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0SIdjmty38). “Saw Fan Film Trailer” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChG4agrwas8). “Saw FanFilm…Part 1” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaCX3tWtB7w). “Saw FanFilm…Part 2” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy8qEmmxHUw). “SaW V Fan Trailer _Contains Saw IV Spoilers” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jglyo29GcDg). “SAW VI (6) Fan Made Teaser Trailer Edit—HD” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLWrh-kURGc). “SAW: Fan Film Teaser Trailer” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pguzc_CRA9U). “Saw Parody” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7dfWznTp5s). “Star Trek + Nine Inch Nails = Closer” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uxTpyCdriY).

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5 Is the Rectum Still a Grave? Anal Sex, Pornography, and Transgression STEPHEN MADDISON

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imon “Sick Boy” Williamson, anti-hero of Irvine Welsh’s novels Trainspotting and Porno, tells us that anal sex is “essential these days” and nowhere more so than in pornography, where “fit young birds always get it up the arse” and where “any young lassie serious about being a … star” must “take it up the shitter” (Welsh 2002: 177–8). According to Rotten.com (n.d.), “today, all-anal videos and DVDs dominate the market, constituting at least half the releases consistently ranked among the best-selling adult films charted by Adult Video News.” Lauren Langman (2004) has suggested that this preponderance of anal sex constitutes part of a larger “grotesque degradation” of women in hardcore (Langman 2004: 201), and elsewhere I have noted that the output of companies like Extreme Associates and Evil Angel, once considered extreme, now defines the norm for the kinds of mainstream porn charted by Adult Video News (Maddison 2009b). The newly emergent porn studies, typified by Linda Williams’s iconic collection (2004), may reflect the position of porn in popular culture by taking its legitimacy for granted, but in attempting to avoid the deadlocks of the feminist porn wars, some of this work avoids not only urgent political questions, but some of the most interesting ones as well. Indeed, as Susanna Paasonen (2010) has recently suggested, accounts of the increasing extremity and misogyny of porn run the risk of making generalizations, displacing a more nuanced and complex account of the kinds of meanings porn makes. In this chapter I want to consider the significance of anal sex in mainstream heterosexual porn to questions of gender, selfhood, and pleasure. In this analysis I aim to unpack the ubiquity and dominance of anal sex by considering it in the context of historical formulations of sexuality, politics and the body that have emerged from gay liberation, queer politics, and feminism. Eve Sedgwick has suggested that for women to be anally penetrated is to be used “as a man,” and that “there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means.

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Means anything” (Sedgwick 1994: 204, emphasis in original). She goes on to question the impossibility of meaningfully articulating the anus as a site of “women’s active desire” (p. 205). If Sedgwick is right, then this would indicate that all those gaping assholes in porn cannot articulate women’s desire. Should we then suggest that they articulate men’s desire? But desire for what? One key aim here is to discover whether radical gay accounts of anal sex that have proposed its transgressive potential can help us to find ways of both understanding the current fixation with anal, and ways of transgressively reinterpreting it. In an age of pornification, of increasing explicitness, and of apparently increasing sexual choices, it is especially noteworthy that the anus, potentially the most gender-neutral of genital zones, should be as assiduously gendered as it is in heterosexual porn. What does it mean that one of the primary articulations of heterosexuality in porn is women getting fucked in the ass? Catherine Waldby offers the notion of “erotic destruction” as a way of conceiving the “ecstatic confusions wrought upon the everyday sense of self by sexual pleasure” (Waldby 1995: 266). Destruction here conjures both the “tender violence” and the “terrors” of sexual practice that bring about a “momentary annihilation or suspension of … self” (p. 266). Waldby picks up the idea of destruction from the words of Jeanette Winterson’s lesbian protagonist in Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. Jess says, “I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me … I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer, and never be destroyed” (Winterson (1985), quoted in Waldby 1995: 266). Waldby considers ways in which we might understand heterosexual eroticism as a more mutual enterprise, and foregrounds the transgressive potential of anally penetrating men as a way of destroying the phallic imago and empowering a phallic woman (p. 272). One of the key elements of Waldby’s argument is her suggestion that the erotic potential of the male anus is intensified by the strength of the phallic taboo against it; that the enormity of the transgression and the cost of its destructive potential is what makes eroticism of the male anus so compelling. But Waldby points out that this intensification of erotic potential in men’s anuses usually involves a violent repression, where this potential is channeled “back into the penis” and into “violence against … those who … experience such pleasure themselves.” Thus, repression of the erotic potential of the anus can lead to both an intensification of the erotic “destruction” of women, and of homophobic anxiety and violence (p. 273). Current trends in mainstream hardcore would seem to uphold elements of Waldby’s thesis. Enrico Biasin and Federico Zecca (2009) have recently noted what they describe as a “new” hyperbolic mode of Williams’s famous characterization of hardcore porn as a “frenzy of the visible” (Williams 1990). This mode is characterized by fetishistic practices that were once

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synonymous with gonzo genres, but which may now be found across most porn styles.1 Primary among these practices is the kind of “extreme anal” that has cemented the reputations of porn auteur/performers like John Stagliano, Rocco Siffredi, and Max Hardcore, that foregrounds doublepenetration, ass-to-mouth, cum swapping, anal gaping and violent ass fucking. Pornography has made anal sex a primary articulation of heterosexuality. And with the exception of a small subgenre of pegging films that specialize in women fucking men with strap-ons, all of the anal intercourse in (heterosexual) mainstream hardcore consists of men fucking women in the ass. If the anus means anything, as Freud, Silverman, and Sedgwick remind us, it means “an erotogenic zone which is undecidable with respect to gender” (Sedgwick 1994: 97). That it means, in the mainstream porn of Elegant Angel, Vivid Entertainment, Wicked Pictures, and others, very specifically the receptivity of women’s anuses and the non-receptivity of men’s, points to the density with which gender is circumscribed in this kind of porn, and in turn to the density of the anus itself as a site of contestation and anxiety. In other words, the non-receptivity of men’s anuses makes meaning, as does the receptivity of women’s anuses; this asymmetry is especially striking given that, physiologically speaking at least, being anally penetrated is likely to be more pleasurable for men owing to the location of the prostate gland. The dominance of anal was something noted by Martin Amis in his now infamous article on the porn industry, “A Rough Trade,” published in 2001. Amis interviews John Stagliano and asks him, “How do you account for the truly incredible emphasis on anal sex [in the industry]?” Amis’s (2001) account of Stagliano’s answer bears quoting in detail: After a minimal shrug and a minimal pause Stagliano said, “Pussies are bullshit.” Now John was being obedient to the dictionary definition of “bullshit” which is nonsense intended to deceive. With vaginal, Stagliano elaborated—well, here you have some chick chirruping away. And the genuinely discerning viewer (jack-knifed over his flying fist) has got to be thinking: Is this for real? Or is it just bullshit? With anal, on the other hand, the actress is obliged to produce a different order of response: more guttural, more animal. As Stagliano quaintly puts it, “Her personality comes out.” He goes on: “You want guys who can fuck really good and make the girls look more … virile.” Virile of course, means manly; but once again Stagliano is using the King’s English. You want the girls to show you “their testosterone.”

Here the “undecidable” nature of the anus becomes foregrounded. The pussy, the genital organ associated with women, is “bullshit”, not only “nonsense” but defined by deception (in Amis’s words). Is the manifestation of pleasure in vaginal intercourse “real” or does it deceive the “genuinely

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discerning viewer”? How can that viewer, experiencing an affective frenzy, trust the veracity of her response in his? (That he’s “jack-knifed over his flying fist” may render the question moot.) The answer to the indeterminacy and deceptiveness of the pussy is the anus. Why? Amis, representing Stagliano, suggests it’s because being anally penetrated solicits a more “guttural” and “animal” response from the woman performer. But how is more guttural and animal more authentic, and to whom? Williams has famously argued that porn is driven by the fantasy of capturing the “truth” of female sexual pleasure (“indiscreet jewels”), but that its frenzied gaze upon the female body is a “narcissistic evasion of the feminine ‘other’ deflected back to the masculine self” (Williams 1990: 267). Stagliano’s suggestion of anally penetrated women demonstrating more virility and testosterone points to an obvious substitution, as we may suggest Amis substitutes Stagliano for himself. The anus is more authentic than the vagina, for Stagliano, Amis and the men they assume to be watching porn, because men have one too. Thus what is apparently a preoccupation with female authenticity becomes a narcissistic substitution of the anus, the indeterminately gendered orifice/ receptacle. Here the idea of the affective response to being penetrated is a fantasy belonging to men. It is worth emphasizing that the response desired by Stagliano (and by Amis) isn’t necessarily one of pleasure: “guttural” and “animal” are as likely to be affective responses to pain and discomfort. Amis notes that Stagliano defines these authentic responses as signs of female virility, not male virility (as we might expect). This transference typifies the “undecidability” of the anus: anal sex may offer an affirmation of phallic agency through the solicitation of a “guttural” response, but the preoccupation itself points to an identification with being penetrated. Langman suggests that “the symbolism of male masochism is blatant” in “painful anal” in porn (Langman 2004: 207). It is the vicissitude of the anus that enables such compelling male identification with it: men can be anally penetrated too. The logic organizing this hierarchy of authenticity and pleasure depends upon the absence of a female enunciative position. By definition, any response articulated by women performers is “deception” and neither Stagliano nor Amis consults women either making porn or watching it for their perspective. Indeed, this logic of men’s pleasure in women getting ass-fucked rather depends on a notion of “woman” alienated from rational articulation, agency and desire. That women are (anally penetrated) means that men aren’t “destroyed.” Amis, a distastefully prurient spectator, notes that Stagliano “again and again … wistfully and reverently” conjures the name of Rocco Siffredi, “the big-dorked Italian, and porno’s premier buttbanger or assbuster (to use the dialect of this tribe)” (Amis 2001). Amis here substitutes Stagliano’s homosocial desire of Rocco for his own, as he earlier substituted Stagliano’s anal desire for his own. Such a substitution guards against the kind of transgression Waldby describes as “destruction” (Waldby 1995: 267). She suggests that:

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If the point of the phallic imago is to guard against confusion between the imaginary anatomies of masculine and feminine, and to shore up masculine power, then anal eroticism threatens to explode this ideological body … anal erotics in the male body amount to … a taking of pleasure in being destroyed rather than being the destroyer. (Waldby 1995: 272).

In films like Torri, Tara and Bobbi Love Rocco (2010, dir. Siffredi), and Rocco’s Back (2009, dir. Siffredi) the sex scenes demonstrate an affective intensity and performative endurance that turns women into the “meat” repository for the demonstration of performances by male “plant” machinery (Willeman 2004: 21). Vaso-active drugs have banished the limp penis from hardcore pornography and installed new standards of male and female performance and physiology (Hartley 2006; Marshall 2002; Marshall and Katz 2002), giving rise to what Mark Davis refers to as the “Viagra cyborg” (Davis 2009) and what I have theorized as the biopolitics of the penis (Maddison 2009a). This discipline of performance and prowess overlaps with the emergence of anal sex as a dominant articulation of heterosexuality in porn. For Langman, “grotesque degradation,” which includes the current mode of anal sex under discussion here, is a product of cyberporn and works to compensate men for the privations of neoliberalism (Langman 2004: 212). Porn may offer the compensatory spectacle of “the cum guzzling slut painfully split open by a giant cock in her ass” (Langman 2004: 213) but in doing so it also installs a disciplinary injunction that is unrealistic to say the least. Alongside the injunction to hypermasculinity, porn also offers ubiquitous and “undecidable” anal sex, promising masochistic “destruction.” In this context, it is not difficult to interpret Rocco’s excessive and ecstatic demonstrations of phallic endurance as a violent repression of male anal eroticism, especially when such excess is channelled “back into the penis” and into the sadistic ass fucking of female performers from whom he constantly solicits attestations of their pleasure. In this rationality, pussies are “bullshit” because fucking a pussy doesn’t effect as convincing a repression of male anal eroticism as does fucking a woman in the ass. Yet the problem with repression, as any good Freudian knows, is that it is by definition leaky, inconsistent and insecure. Eve Sedgwick identifies “to use a woman as a man” as a popular euphemism for heterosexual anal sex, and I shall return to the instability of the “pussies are bullshit” rationality shortly. But what is at stake here? Is this simply a matter of unrecognized sexual desires? Of men liberating their frigid arseholes and enjoying it? Of restating the overwhelmingly patriarchal context of the hardcore industry? For Mario Mieli, an Italian gay liberationist writing in 1977, repression of anal eroticism is not merely an important way of securing a phallic masculine subjectivity, but of reproducing bourgeois capitalism. To be fucked is to be “ruined” both in materialist and gender terms (Mieli 1977:

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140). Drawing on both Freud and Marx by way of Fereneczi, Mieli suggests that the repression of polymorphous infantile scatological pleasure works to sublimate anal pleasure in the accumulation of money (Mieli 1977: 142). He argues that “if you know what tremendous enjoyment is to be had from anal intercourse, then you necessarily become different from the ‘normal’ run of people with a frigid arse” (Mieli 1977: 139). For Mieli, repression of Eros and economic repression are entwined, and find their most profound expression in the repression of anality, and its sublimation in capital accumulation. Mieli understood heterosexual male fear of being fucked as the cause of their “blind phallic egoism”, itself an obstacle to the attainment of true “reciprocity” and intersubjectivity (Mieli 1977: 140). So, while anal eroticism is transgressive in its liberation of Eros, its effect in desublimating the anal character’s neurotic accumulation of capital potentially effects a much wider social transformation. If “capital liberalises desire while channelling it into a consumerist outlet” (Mieli 1977: 129), anal sex holds the promise of anti-capitalist selfhood. Capitalist ideology depends upon the psychic repression of polymorphous desires and their expression in forms that reinforce social alienation, competition and the hysterical accumulation of money. For Mieli, the liberation of anal eroticism promises a mutuality of sexual experience that will not only prevent men from fucking women “badly” and foster greater identification with women, but will underpin a wider revolutionary transformation of the ways in which capitalism represses sexual energies, and institutionalizes exploitation. Mieli’s work is characterized by a deliciously radical campery that delights in flagrancy, queening-up both Freud and Marx alike. His work serves as a high watermark for the optimism characteristic of gay liberation, a perspective that explicitly linked sexual transgression and desublimation to wider social and political transformation. Ten years later, at the height of the Northern Hemisphere’s AIDS epidemic, Simon Watney offered a very different analysis of the political meanings of anal sex. If Mieli offers the gay man’s anus as the model for a widespread radicalization of erotic potential (“my arse is open to everyone …”; Mieli 1977: 145) Watney notes how AIDS discourse reinscribed gay men’s bodies in terms of disease and contagion born of precisely the kinds of excesses and permeability Mieli prescribes. In a reactionary backlash against the political gains of gay liberation and its erotic libertarianism, in the AIDS discourse of the mid-1980s gay sex and the gay anus become unsafe, in Sedgwick’s words, “fragile and fatal” (Sedgwick 1994: 210 n21). Watney (1987: 126) argues that the male rectum is the most thoroughly policed part of the male anatomy and this suggests that a particular effort is needed to redirect the libido away from deeply repressed memories of anal erotic pleasure in infancy, at a time when our primary awareness of our bodies is erotogenic. AIDS offers a new sign for the symbolic machinery of repression, making the rectum a grave.

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Watney offers a thorough analysis of the ways in which public discourse of homosexuality in the mid- and late 1980s in both the U.S.A. and Britain reinvested the totems of gay liberation radicalism—promiscuity, sexual flexibility, exploration, making the private public—in a moralizing agenda that threatened to turn back the advances that had been made by lesbians and gays in the previous decade. Where anal eroticism once promised symbolic dissolution and transgressive “destruction” of the (bourgeois, phallic) self, homophobic panic literalized the fear of death alluded to in these possibilities. Taking up the question of the rectum a year after Watney’s book was published, Leo Bersani (1988) offered his own analysis of AIDS discourse, noting the mainstream media’s concern with innocent and guilty victims. Gay men are the guilty victims of these discourses, which highlight gay promiscuity as insatiable and unstoppable. Bersani links right-wing rhetoric about AIDS with Victorian accounts of prostitution, and notes that in both, “women and gay men spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction” (Bersani 1988: 211) and suggests that “phallocentrism is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women” (Bersani 1988: 217, emphasis in original). In a critique of Foucault’s coyness about the gay life-style, the liberal pluralism of Weeks, Rubin and Watney, and the determinism of Dworkin and MacKinnon, Bersani seeks to recover the radicalism of sex, and in particular the radicalism of what Waldby might describe as “destructive” sex. He famously conjures “the infinitely … seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (Bersani 1988: 212) in a way that prefigures Waldby’s anally permeable heterosexual male and reminds us, again, that “the moral taboo on ‘passive’ anal sex in ancient Athens is primarily formulated as a kind of hygienics of social power. To be penetrated is to abdicate power” (ibid., emphasis in original). But I would suggest that Bersani’s analysis goes much further than Waldby’s. The anal eroticism Waldby imagines offers the appealing fantasy of a dominant masculinity transgressed by the potential penetratability of the phallic man. Such a fantasy is possible because men have an anus, and the possibility of its getting fucked always haunts phallic ideology, according to Waldby, a possibility that must be continually repressed along both masculine/feminine and heterosexual/ homosexual lines (Waldby 1995: 273). What is less explicit, and probably less transgressive, about the fantasy of anal eroticism which Waldby (and Mieli) enunciate is the extent to which it anticipates and desires an (un-transgressed) phallic subjectivity in the first place. As Bersani says: “If, as Weeks puts it, gay men ‘gnaw at the roots of a male heterosexual identity’ it is not because of the parodistic distance that

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they take from that identity, but rather because, from within their nearly mad identification with it, they never cease to feel the appeal of its being violated” (Bersani 1988: 209, emphasis in original). In the context of early forms of Queer culture and politics—S&M, drag, butch-femme—Bersani reminds us that if we are to come to terms with the politics of sex, where “parody is an erotic turn-off” (p. 208) and “sexual desire for men can’t be merely a kind of culturally neutral attraction to a Platonic idea of the male body” (p. 208) we must come to terms with our identification with, and our desire for, the “brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity” (ibid.). As phallic ideology always already anticipates and represses the desire for passivity it projects on to others, so the transgressive eroticism of men’s anuses always already desires the phallic subjectivity it seeks to “destroy.” There is a risk of tautology in Bersani’s argument, but he concludes by suggesting that “if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared— differently—by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential of death” (Bersani 1988: 222). This is of course where Mieli’s politics are heading—not merely a more erotically and socially satisfactory arrangement of existing institutions (like heterosexuality) but a radical transformation of the structures underpinning those erotic and social arrangements. Do such formations of eroticism, subjectivity, and psychic desublimation still offer the same kinds of transgressive potential that they did for Waldby in 1995 and Bersani in 1988? I want to pursue this question in the context of mainstream heterosexual hardcore pornography because it is, quite literally, awash with anal sex. One problem with the work of Mieli, Bersani, and Waldby is the relative lack of materiality in their analysis. This is one reason why I have referred to their conceptions of anal eroticism in men as a fantasy. There are very few places where we can adjudicate sexual practice, and while all three writers offer astute and politically shrewd analyses that address underlying structural questions that pose urgent problems to a variety of radical politics, the figure on which those analyses turn, the heterosexual man “destroyed” by anal eroticism, is strikingly elusive. In the very last sentence of her chapter, Waldby suggests that “what theoretical feminism needs now is a strap-on” (Waldby 1995: 275). But who is actually wearing it? And where are the men feminism is going to use it on? It is here that I want to return to the proposition that the abundance of anal sex in porn represents a repression of male anal eroticism. I have suggested that the phallic subjectivity Waldby wants to transgress by way of anal eroticism already presupposes desire for that phallic subjectivity. Given that the current vernacular of mainstream hardcore foregrounds “plant” performances on “meat” repositories (Willeman 2004), and upholds a biopolitics of the penis which disciplines erotic competence in women and men (Maddison 2009a), we might expect porn to successfully repress

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desire for its “plant” to be anally “destroyed”; indeed, we would assume that porn fails to manifest a heterosexual male anus at all. What use would it have for one? And yet this is not what we find in the films of Stagliano and Amis’s homosocial object of desire. Rocco Siffredi is probably the most famous man currently working in the industry. He has starred in over 1300 films, having made romantic adventures and comedies in the style of the Vivid Studio, as well as in his more familiar gonzo style with John Stagliano at Evil Angel Video, and eventually for his own company Rocco Siffredi Produzioni (Siffredi n.d.). Rocco’s films are characterized by the kinds of extreme anal I have already discussed, along with irrumatio, slapping, spitting, and other kinds of mild sadism. But they are also haunted by the spectacle of Rocco’s anus. A characteristic of the pile-driver sexual position allegedly invented by Max Hardcore, and a staple of Rocco’s performative repertoire, in which the female performer lies on her back projecting her rump vertically with the man entering her from a semi-standing position above, is that it exposes the ass of the male performer as his buttocks part with each thrust. A similar, and more concentrated effect occurs in popular doublepenetration positions. In order to project his penis forward enough to penetrate, unencumbered by his own thighs, or those of the other man, the male performer on the top, the second to penetrate the female performer, usually has to spread his own legs outside everyone else’s. This has the effect of parting his buttocks and exposing his ass; as there are limited angles by which to shoot double penetration and capture the genital action, the camera is usually placed just behind his buttocks, potentially exacerbating the effect. In general, the photography and direction of hardcore seeks to ameliorate these effects, often by using extreme close-ups to limit collateral display of the male anus. Rocco’s films, in which he usually stars and directs, frequently offer a different approach. In Rocco’s Bitch Party (2010, dir. Siffredi) Rocco pile-drives Bobbi Starr and Sindee Jennings in the sunshine by a pool. The camera lingers on Bobbi’s gaping asshole as Rocco repeatedly withdraws and reinserts his penis. With each thrust the shaded groove between Rocco’s buttocks contrasts with Bobbi’s gaping ass, and we catch glimpses of his wrinkled pucker. Here the striking visual equivalence between his ass and hers seems anything but a repression of his anal eroticism. At one point, he withdraws his penis and offers Bobbi his ass. She leans forward to rim him as he choke-fucks Sindee. He encourages her, “Oh, you know I love this, eh? Oh yeah, lick my ass, baby. More, more. I want to feel your tongue.” Lifting his balls, to push his penis into Sindee’s mouth, he reveals his anus, penetrated by Bobbi’s tongue. Toward the conclusion of the scene, piledriving Sindee’s ass, his buttocks parted and pushed at the camera, Rocco again shows the camera his anus. It doesn’t gape like Sindee’s, but it refuses to be unsignified; not only present, but sexualized, Rocco’s asshole displays

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itself to us. The first scene of Rocco’s Back (2009, dir. Siffredi) narratively plays out Rocco’s return to performing, as Tarra White and Aliz attempt to coax Rocco out of retirement; inevitably they succeed in this endeavor, and in the course of the genital action Rocco asphyxiates Tarra with his ass as she rims him. Do such scenes deliver opportunities for the kind of “destruction” Waldby is looking for? These are performances that foreground the technocratically superior “big dork,” relentless and ever-hard, its phallicism a function of filming and production techniques, towering over the faces and rumps of female co-stars. Let us not forget that what Waldby is interested in isn’t anal eroticism for its own sake, but rather its potential to transgress the logic of phallic eroticism and provide greater mutuality in heterosexuality. In this context, and read diegetically, Rocco’s explorations of his anal eroticism seem to offer few opportunities to reimagine a more mutual form of erotic destruction. His female co-stars could hardly be said to occupy a phallic destructive sexual role; in terms of the progress of the genital play, they are subjugated by Rocco’s ass rather than subjugating it. But extra-diegetically, Rocco’s ass may offer both female and male spectators more transgressive possibilities. Waldby’s interest in anal sex is essentially liberal, for very good political and strategic reasons. For her the anus allows women the opportunity to turn the tables on men, but glosses both the desire for phallic forms of masculinity in the first place (as I have already suggested) and the pleasure of female (and male) subordination, a “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self … beyond the fantasies of bodily power and subordination” (Bersani 1988: 217). In films like Rocco’s Bitch Party, Rocco’s ass isn’t a fully repressed anus, an absent or unsignified anus, but is instead a hungry anus. Rocco’s ass cannot satisfy its hunger (at least on screen; we can only speculate about its private activities) because it is circumscribed by the rationalities of homosocial ideology and fear of the erotic destruction Waldby might (theoretically, at least) subject it to. Above all, its hunger remains unsatisfied because it is a site of capital accumulation: Rocco is a brand, an auteur, a “big-dorked Italian,” practically a generic classification all his own, and certainly the center of a very profitable entertainment corporation. Rocco’s rectum cannot be a grave “in which the masculine ideal … is buried” (Bersani 1988: 222). But as with any complex formation, the density of meanings that accrue to the kinds of anal eroticism Rocco offers produces effects that cannot be entirely contained by the reinscriptive force of the brand identity. Can we offer a transgressive structure for watching Rocco’s porn? Stagliano’s pronouncement that “pussies are bullshit” and his “wistful reverence” for Rocco, in Martin Amis’s words, suggests that if Rocco’s ass is hungry then there is a relational context for that hunger to be expressed. Both men, known for their fixation with anal sex, take women “as a man,”

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simultaneously repressing their homosexual desires and reaffirming their homosocial romance. In this context, the hunger Rocco’s ass articulates in his films is sublimated, in accord with his anal character, in capital accumulation; Rocco is head of his own studio, and Rocco and Stagliano have been business partners and retain financial interest in their mutual back catalogue. Rocco returns to performing in order to overcome the sexual frustration of working in porn behind the camera, but also because “the business is so low” and because he’s spent “four million” building a new studio in Budapest and in doing so he reaffirms his phallic imago (Miller 2010). But this imago, demonstrating as it does such hunger (“Oh, you know I love this, eh? Oh yeah, lick my ass, baby. More, more. I want to feel your tongue”), such potential for anal eroticism, cannot but solicit “destructive” desires from diverse spectatorial positions. We may readily anticipate such transgressive desire in heterosexual women and gay men who watch Rocco’s films; as Bersani puts it, “from within a nearly mad identification with [male heterosexual identity] … they never cease to feel the appeal of its being violated” (Bersani 1988: 209). But we must also identify a destructive desire in heterosexual male spectators who, like Stagliano (and Amis), long not only to “spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction” (Bersani 1988: 211) but themselves desire to destroy the “big-dorked Italian” who stands not only as ideal archetype for the phallic imago, but as its bio-technical disciplinary standard (Maddison 2009a). Why has there been such an intensification of anality in contemporary porn? John Stagliano pioneered techniques that came to define the gonzo genre with his first Buttman films in the late 1980s; by 1994 the Adult Video News annual awards had introduced a new category for best gonzo. Initially Stagliano’s Buttman films foregrounded an ass fetish, rather than a preoccupation with anal sex; it was one of Stagliano’s associates, Adam Glasser, with his alter-ego Seymore Butts, who cemented gonzo’s tradition of “buttbanging” and “assbusting.”2 With trends towards the pornification of culture and the increasing diversification of hardcore production and distribution, it is easy to understand the dominance of gonzo in the current era of digital porn. Gonzo can be cheaply produced, with a seamless digital workflow from filming to publication and retail. And the cameraas-spectator in the scene reflects the increasingly intimate relationship porn spectators have with smaller screens and browsing-as-viewing modes of consumption. In this context, how can we expect male and female heterosexuality, and the complementary and mutually reinforcing sets of homosocial structures which discipline that heterosexuality, to remain constant and unchanging? If male homosociality secures the interests of men through the exchange of women and the repression of the homoeroticism that haunts men’s bonds with one another (Sedgwick 1985; Maddison 2000) and female homosociality “helps heterosexual women to further

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men’s interests” by being “one of the girls” while instating a lesbophobic boundary to police female gender identification (Storr 2003: 49-53), what are the effects on such structures of the kinds of anal sexuality and the wider commodity innovation in genital acts that is driven by the economic power of gonzo? Or to put it another way, does Rocco’s hungry ass promise a liberation of the frigid male arse (Mieli) a destruction of the phallic imago (Waldby) and the death of the masculine ideal (Bersani)? Sexual tastes and the sexual ideologies that police gender are increasingly driven by the needs of capital. Male homosociality depends upon the violent repression of the proximity of homoeroticism that upholds a phobic injunction against homosexuality. For some time now, we have seen this homophobic injunction become unsettled by trends towards an increasing consumerist exploitation of masculinity that have effectively gayed it up (exemplified in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and the “metrosexualization” of heterosexual men). Concomitantly, in a “post-gay” moment we are witnessing both the disappearance and the assimilation of gay identities (Bech 1997; Sinfield 1998). As neoliberal consumer culture has embraced homosexuality for its profit potential, emboldening queers of all hues, those queers have become literally less marginal than they once were. Thus assimilated, and generally lacking a transgenerational culture with which to reinvigorate and inspire the less experienced, queers have become less politically meaningful than they once were, to the point of “disappearing,” in Bech’s words. Queerness, and all it stands for, is less troubling than it once was. An economically significant effect of this is the so-called “metrosexualization” of heterosexual men, who have become subjects of the consumer culture just as upper-class women did in the early twentieth century and middle-class women did in the post-war period. Male narcissism, fashion and grooming are no longer signs of queerness, but of successful heterosexuality; gay men have thus not only disappeared politically and culturally, but aesthetically and stylistically as well. Have other aspects of homosexuality gained similar levels of familiarity and become less threatening? Do men still fear being penetrated as they did in the past? In the Northern hHmisphere we occupy, discursively at least, a post-AIDS moment. So what is left to fear in being fucked up the ass? We don’t fear queers (as we did); we don’t fear AIDS and STIs (as we should). Is there still an injunction against anal sex? Rocco licenses a post-gay preoccupation with anal sex, but a kind of anality that rigorously upholds a phallicism secured by economic and patriarchal interests. For Mieli, writing in the first years of gay liberation, anal intercourse was the aspect of homosexuality most feared by heterosexual men (Mieli 1977: 139). Have the intervening years made anal “destruction” a less terrible threat to homosocial subjectivity? Rocco’s hungry ass announces itself, outrageously, and in flagrant transgression of male homosocial ideology, through a partial desublimation of that ideology’s injunction against the possibility

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of male penetration. Thus brought forth, the hungry ass becomes part of the representational economy of Rocco’s oeuvre, soliciting destructive desires from fans and spectators of the kind of liberal transgression Waldby formulates. But this partial desublimation of Rocco’s hungry ass is effected through commodity forms of the digital-porn complex, thus resecuring a “repression of sexual energy by capital” (Mieli 1977). Rocco’s ass represents an inversion of Mieli’s desublimated anus. Where Mieli’s erotically liberated anus also promised a liberation from repressive capital accumulation, Rocco’s hungry ass is hungry for money. As such it represents a characteristic manifestation of neoliberal sexuality, where potentially transgressive desires, pleasures, and practices become detached from collective engagement and instead come to stand as guarantees of individual, atomized subjectivity. Thus Mieli’s investment in liberating heterosexual men’s anuses for erotic and political transformation becomes, in Rocco’s ass, capital accumulation and hypermasculine performativity. And worse, this “phallic imago,” in Waldby’s terms, is a property not of individual, alienated men but of what we might call the porn-pharma complex, that is leased to men through an ongoing series of monthly subscriptions to porn sites, and underwritten by the guarantee of vasoactive drugs that secure the plausibility of the “Viagra cyborg.” So much for Rocco’s hungry ass. But why is women getting butt-fucked a dominant mode of heterosexuality in porn? As I have suggested, in Rocco’s performative style we can see how fucking women anally disavows anal desire in men. The prevailing structure of porn in the style of Siffredi, Stagliano and their ilk is homosocial; masochistic desire for, and violent disavowal of, anal penetration and anal pleasure is a primary way in which porn organizes negotiations with women. As we have seen in discourses of anality (“pussies are bullshit”) and in the distribution of affective responses in porn (“guttural,” “virile”), women represent both the opportunity for demonstrating phallic prowess, and the possibility of failing to demonstrate that prowess. This latter possibility remains critical to the functioning of the porn-pharma complex, which constitutes hypermasculinity and capitalizes on the anxiety endemic to it. The rectum is thus, in part, intelligible as the death of a certain kind of phallic subjectivity, but not in the terms Bersani imagines. As phallic confidence dies, there is the promise of its resurrection. The rectum symbolizes masculine anxiety; what is resurrected through it is as unpalatable as faeces: resurrection is conditional upon consent to the ongoing extraction of profit potential. Big-dorked Italians and the guarantee of pharmacological on-demand hypermasculinity promise individual male supremacy and concomitant female subordination, but manifest what Nikolas Rose has called “government at a distance” (1996: 59).

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Notes 1.

2.

Gonzo porn, as distinguished from “feature” or narrative porn, aims to put the viewer into the scene, and often uses handheld camera shots, or a first-person perspective on the action, which tends to be edited less. Gonzo films tend to have lower production values, and less “gloss” than traditional features, although gonzo is itself now a diverse category. See P. Weasels, The Quick and Dirty Guide to Gonzo, http://www.gamelink.com/news. jhtml?news_id=news_nt_101_gonzo, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stagliano (both accessed September 28, 2010).

References Amis, Martin. 2001. A Rough Trade. Guardian, 17 March. Bech, Henning. 1997. When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bersani, Leo. 1988. Is the Rectum a Grave? In AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Biasin, Enrico and Zecca, Federico. 2009. Contemporary Audiovisual Pornography: Branding Strategy and Gonzo Film Style. Cinema&Cie: International Film Studies Journal 9(12): 133–50. Davis, Mark. 2009. Sex, Technology and Public Health. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hartley, Heather. 2006. The “Pinking” of Viagra Culture: Drug Industry Efforts to Create and Repackage Sex Drugs for Women. Sexualities 9(3): 363–78. Langman, Lauren. 2004. Grotesque Degradation: Globalization, Carnivalization, and Cyberporn. In net.seXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography and the Internet, edited by Dennis D. Waskul. New York: Peter Lang. Maddison, Stephen. 2000. Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture. London: Macmillan. Maddison, Stephen. 2009a. “The Second Sexual Revolution”: Big Pharma, Porn and the Biopolitical Penis. Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 22, (fall): 35–54. Maddison, Stephen. 2009b. “Choke on it, bitch!”: Porn Studies, Extreme Gonzo and the Mainstreaming of Hardcore. In Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualisation of Western Culture, edited by Feona Attwood. London and New York: IB Tauris. Marshall, Barbara L. 2002. “Hard Science”: Gendered Constructions of Sexual Dysfunction in the “Viagra Age”. Sexualities 5(2): 131–58. Marshall, Barbara L. and Stephen Katz. 2002. Forever Functional: Sexual Fitness and the Ageing Male Body. Body and Society 8(4): 43–70. Mieli, Mario. 1977. Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique. London: Gay Men’s Press. Miller, Dan. 2010. Rocco Siffredi Reveals Reasons for Return in Exclusive Interview. Adult Video News, http://business.avn.com/articles/Rocco-Siffredi-Reveals-Reasons-for-ReturnIn-Exclusive-Interview-384795.html (accessed September 28, 2010). Paasonen, Susanna. 2010. Repetition and Hyperbole: The Gendered Choreographies of Heteroporn. In Everyday Pornography edited by Karen Boyle. London and New York: Routledge. Rose, Nikolas. 1996. Governing “Advanced” Liberal Democracies. In Andrew Barry (Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose) (eds) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government edited by Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose. London: UCL Press. Rotten.com n.d. http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/pornographers/max-hardcore/ (accessed September 28, 2010). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1994. Tendencies. London: Routledge. Siffredi, Rocco. n.d. http://www.roccosiffrediblog.com/ (accessed September 20, 2010). Sinfield, Alan. 1998. Gay and After. London: Serpent’s Tail.

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100  Pornography and Beyond Storr, Merl. 2003. Latex and Lingerie: Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers. Oxford and New York: Berg. Waldby, Catherine. 1995. Destruction: Boundary Erotics and Refigurations of the Heterosexual Male Body. In Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. London and New York: Routledge. Watney, Simon. 1987. Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media (2nd edition). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Welsh, Irvine. 2002. Porno, London: Jonathan Cape. Willeman, Paul. 2004. For a Pornoscape. In More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, edited by Pamela Church Gibson. London: BFI. Williams, Linda. 1990. Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’. London: Pandora. Williams, Linda (ed.) 2004. (ed.) Porn Studies. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.

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6 Making Bodies Visible Post-feminism and the Pornographication of Online Identities SARAH NEELY I want to walk in the snow and leave no footprints.

W

positioned the Internet as a utopia where gender inequalities diminish in tandem with the corporeal, in reality—and increasingly—bodies do matter in online spaces. Although the quotation above seems to echo the sentiment of inhabiting a space where actions are uninhibited by bodily realities, the context from which it was taken, a pro-anorexia (or pro-ana) website, Ana’s Thinspiration, no. 25 in “40 Reasons Not to Eat,” is a disconcerting reminder that the Internet is not a utopia offering an easy escape from real-world problems. The rise in popularity of the pro-ana and pro-mia (bulimia) websites and their existence as a space for the cultivation of eating and body image disorders is alarming, not least because it is an example of one of the more significant Internet communities largely made up of young women. Historically feminists lamented the invisibility of women in relation to new technologies, but a cursory look at contemporary representations reveals a startling shift. Undeniably women are represented and self-represented online, but the differences in relation to the representation of the online identities of men are significant. Reminiscent of Berger’s influential thesis that “men act and women appear” (1972: 47), when compared to the active (male) techno-geek the presence of the woman in online spaces is more likely to be marked by her body, or what she looks like, rather than what she does. This chapter will explore key issues raised within the debates on post-feminism determining their efficacy in relation to the representation of online identities, arguing that gender inequalities and the continual quest for visibility in these online spaces is representative of more than just a general pornographication of culture, or mainstreaming of sex (McNair 1996), but is also representative of what Angela McRobbie refers to in her most recent book as “youthful female phallicism,” which functions as a hile cyberfeminism has often

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form of “post-feminist masquerade” whereby women’s achievements at work are diminished by a mask of femininity and a concentrated emphasis on the presentation of an appropriate and desirable feminine self. The mask more traditionally worn as one of “submission and servitude” is, in cases of “youthful female phallicism,” a more assertive one (McRobbie 2009: 84).

The Pornographication of culture Recent years have seen the publication of several studies addressing the ubiquity of pornography in mainstream culture (McNair 2002; Paul 2005; Levy 2006; Attwood 2009). Although the rise of porn culture does not eradicate the necessity to address the questions of long-running importance to anti-pornography feminists (Boyle 2010: 1), the general pornographication of mainstream culture is indicative of a much greater general failure to achieve gender equality, and while the abolishment of pornography would certainly mark a momentous step away from sexual exploitation, on its own it would hardly herald a new dawn for a fair and just society. The concern expressed by Karen Boyle for the tendency for research in this area to conflate commercial sex and sex is certainly justified. As Boyle argues, there are important distinctions to be made: “commercial sex is not sex for its own sake, it is sex for money” (Boyle 2010: 23); however, in contemporary culture it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the two. In fact, mainstream media frequently employs a “porn” aesthetic that is closer to traditional pornographic representations than a lot of contemporary porn. Linda Thompson, development worker for Glasgow Women’s Support project, described how in her own research, the “most distressing material was on Zoo’s website,” a mainstream magazine marketed to men (in Dines et al. 2010: 20). It is often the case that the most extreme material showcased on these mainstream sites is of readers’ partners or women who send in photos for competitions, where often the most extreme acts and risqué shots are met with the most enthusiastic responses. Like the appropriation of porn in mainstream culture in general, it is a “tongue-incheek” ironic tone of address that sanctions more extreme representations. For instance, a recent online advertisement for the men’s magazine Loaded (August 2010) features an image of a glamor model covered in a semen-like substance, presumably referencing the “bukkake” porn genre, a genre depicting sex acts involving the ejaculation of several men onto one woman. Similar representations of porn-parody/pastiche exist in less obvious places. As Gail Dines explains, a “porn ideology ‘lite’ is also delivered via women’s media” (Dines et al. 2010: 28). Arguably, the ideology presented in mainstream advertising is not always “lighter” or less extreme than what is featured in men’s magazines. Other advertisements addressing

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a wider demographic and using similar imagery to the Loaded ad include Lee clothing, who has also featured bukkake-influenced imagery in its advertising and, like fellow clothing brand American Apparel, is frequently criticized for campaigns which capture the aesthetic qualities and content of amateur pornography. The porn aesthetic and casual reference to the sex industry reaches broadly across a range of media. In music videos, pole dancing represents the new “girl power,” from Girls Aloud, who took their pole dance routines on tour, to Mylie Cyrus’s (aka Hannah Montana’s) pole dance at the Teen Choice Awards in August 2009, to Britney Spears and Toni Braxton’s music videos and Kate Moss’s popular pole dance appearance in a White Stripes video. Pole dancing is thus one of several activities associated with commercial sex that now appear with great frequency in popular culture, accompanied by a sense of “amnesia” in relation to the activities’ origins. Television lifestyle programs such as Bulging Brides (The Eyes Television, Canada, 2008) instruct contestants (and viewers) in how to undress like a stripper, an act which is presented as a rite-of-passage for the bride-to-be. Even the popular soft-core series Girls Gone Wild (Joe Francis, 1999–  ), thus far only available on video, has been given a mainstream makeover with the new “unrated” TV series Search for the Hottest Girl in America (HDNet, 2010). In teen films such as Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007) or American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999), pornography is often a source of light-hearted humor and in many cases is quaintly retro. The Internet itself, and its synonymy with” pornography,” also forms the basis for much mainstream comedy. See, for instance, The Daily Show (Comedy Central, 1996) and The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, 2005). Yet the uncomfortable underbelly of the realities of the pornography and the sex industries rarely make it into the mainstream. The circulation of the Playboy brand within popular culture is one example. On television, The Girls Next Door (aka The Girls of the Playboy Mansion) (E!, 2005– ) gave viewers privileged insight into the everyday lives of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends. As Diane Negra explains, the program is consistent with a general normalization of porn where none of the “seedy stuff” is allowed to sully the enjoyment of light entertainment (Negra 2009: 100). The Playboy bunny is featured across a diverse range of merchandise, a great deal of which has been intended for children, from clothing, to bedroom sets, to jewelry and pencil cases. In February 2009, the British high street store WH Smith withdrew its range of Playboy stationery after complaints from consumers. A representative for the company spoke in its defense, arguing that it was its most popular range of stationery and that it was of little harm because most children did not know the meaning of the Playboy bunny. This reflects the general reality of popular culture’s amnesiatic engagement with the pornographic, in which contexts are emptied and appropriation is seen as interpreted solely in the eyes of the beholder. Part of the critical enterprise of feminist media studies should be

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to draw attention to the need to recontextualize these practices so that we can recognize the unsaid that is always and already operative in the margins and behind the scenes. Because feminism is often interpreted by contemporary culture as anti-sex or anti-men, it is either silenced or positioned as an extreme (and thus invalid) viewpoint and history of struggle. Think of Lady Gaga in a 2009 interview with a Norwegian journalist, where she proclaims: “I’m no a feminist … I love men.”1 Gaga’s caustic relationship to the term is indicative of many varieties of post-feminism embracing what might be seen as “sex-positive” representations in favor of what might be interpreted as the “anti-sex” feminist discourses of the past; the rejection of feminism serving as the ultimate transgression.2 McRobbie’s most recent book discusses the growing tendency to present feminism as a “thing of the past,” tracing what she refers to as “provocative sexism” to the Wonderbra ads of the 1990s. In the company’s most famous ad, Eva Herzagova looks down admiringly at her cleavage while the text reads “Hello Boys!” The ad thus cleverly presents Herzagova as both the subject and object, a sort of double positioning that is now a well-trodden and accepted feature of contemporary culture where women’s complicity in sexualized representation is common. From “Rate-my-breasts” websites to readers’ wives features, the male gaze is seen as encouraged (and in some ways owned) by the objects of sexual desire, with women presented as in control and desiring objectification. Objectification is no longer disempowering, we are led to believe, but a sign of empowerment.

The Sexualization of Self in Popular Culture The sexualization of the self in relation to popular culture has been written about by a number of writers on post-feminism as a response to the perceived failures of feminism (Levy 2005; McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009). Where feminism has been interpreted as bodily failure (McRobbie 2009: 61), accompanied by a failure to express sexuality and often a decent sense of humor, post-feminist discourse compensates for these lacks with over-sexualized behaviors framed with an ironic knowingness. What Angela McRobbie terms the “post-feminist masquerade” involves a return to traditional notions of femininity combined with the perception of independence. Citing Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004) for illustration, McRobbie notes how its representations of female empowerment are often dictated by strict rules of fashion and beauty, modes of regulation that serve to displace traditional forms of patriarchy (McRobbie 2009: 3). Furthermore, the performances of acceptable femininity within mainstream culture have become increasingly regulated by values and an aesthetic typically associated with the sex industry. Thus, stripping à la Bulging Brides becomes the modern-day equivalent of what learning how to

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cook a good chicken casserole was for the bride-to-be of the 1950s. What is perceived as sexual functionality is only yet another prerequisite added to the list of desirable characteristics for young women. “Empowerment” from sexualization may be the discourse of postfeminism, but the reality is that the choices of “acceptable” femininity are rather narrow and the consequences for failing to meet the levels of acceptability are significant. Gail Dines, in her analysis of the pornification of culture, argues that, in contemporary culture, women are either “fuckable” or “invisible” (Dines 2010). Although the rhetoric of “sexiness” has been decorated with the rhetoric of empowerment, it only guarantees visibility and is more often met with the derision of misogyny. The repeated scrutiny of women in politics in relation to their perceived sexiness is testament to this. As Natasha Walter described in relation to Sarah Palin, “If a woman in politics does measure up to the right standards of sexiness, that does not make them immune from such bullying” (Walter 2010: 120). Instead of her politics, Palin’s body and, more specifically, a sexualized and degrading representation of Palin’s body became a significant focus throughout the Republican candidate’s campaign for vice-presidency in 2008. If “hotness” truly equaled empowerment one would expect that the former Alaskan governor, whose good looks secured her appearance on the front cover of Vogue in February 2008, would be at a likely advantage, and yet her “hotness” and the sexualization of her image throughout the campaign was clearly employed as a means of further undermining her credibility. The “naughty schoolgirl” dolls, blow-up sex dolls, MILF T-shirts, and cartoons all illustrate the paradox of “hotness” which, although necessary for women to achieve visibility in contemporary culture, is ultimately devoid of any real power or political agency. Post-feminism emphasizes women’s agency and choice, but that choice is usually framed within narrow definitions of femininity and underpinned by commercial imperatives. The multitude of makeover shows effectively illustrates the confines of acceptable forms of femininity. From What Not to Wear (BBC, 2001–7), to How to Look Good Naked (Channel 4, 2006–  ), to 10 Years Younger (TLC, Channel 4, 2004–  ), The Swan (Fox, 2004–  ), and Extreme Makeover (ABC, 2002–7), the emphasis is on identifying women’s agency to reconstruct the natural body within the acceptable range of femininity.3 What all of the shows have in common is their focus on women’s bodies as a project to be undertaken. The language employed distances women from attachment to their bodies. Instead of being seen as something to identify with, unruly bodies are put forth for scrutiny and discussion, among a general discourse that encourages the objectification of women’s bodies. Furthermore, the narratives of empowerment constructed by many makeover programs often focus on the woman’s ability to strip off in public as a marker of her strong mental health. When women are deemed to “transcend” their bodies it really just means that they are more able to

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objectify their bodies. Take the artist Sam Taylor Wood, who posed naked for Harpers Bazaar in December 2007. In the magazine’s interview, she describes how she “lost all inhibitions and insecurities about her body while undergoing treatment for breast and colon cancer.” The naked pose, the sexualized body, has become a logical mode of overcoming a variety of women’s bodily transgressions such as illness, disability, age, or pregnancy. Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” provides further illustration of an overt (and cynical) appropriation of feminist discourse.

Cyberfeminism and Online Utopia Although cyberfeminist perspectives have proffered the utopian possibilities of the Internet over the years (Adam 1998; Plant 1998), not all agree with such a positive feminist reclamation of cyberspace. Liesbet van Zoonen maintains that gender differences are still apparent, with women more likely to be targeted as consumers and men more often presented as “active creators” (van Zoonen 2002). Reports may cite women as the most rapidly rising online group, but as McCormick and Leonard argue, “cyberspace remains a man’s world… . Not only do white, heterosexual men outnumber other groups in cyberspace, they dominate as well”, with women more likely to be “lurkers” than active participants in online communities and discussion (McCormick and Leonard 2004: 184–5). Similarly, David Morley has more recently identified the Internet as continuing to be characterized by a largely homogeneous group: namely white, middle-class males under 50 (Morley 2007: 186). Much of the feminist utopian vision rests in the absence of bodily presence in cyberspace. Like other utopian discourse characterizing the early stages of the Internet, possibilities were deemed limitless, with the performances of gender more fluid and less bound by the binary distinctions attached to everyday realities. Bodies were irrelevant, obsolete, and unimportant, or what Mark Dery described in 1994 as “the upside of incorporeal interaction: a technologically enabled, postmulticultural vision of identity disengaged from gender, ethnicity, and other problematic constructions.” (Dery 1994: 2–3). In reality, the absence of the body in advanced technological cultures means that in some ways it becomes more sacred, more sought after, and increasingly fetishized. For instance, the performance artist Orlan, whose performances have involved dramatic, severe body modifications through surgical operations enacted as live events, may seem to be emphasizing the mutability of the body, transitivity, and a new cyborgic empowerment accessed through contemporary technological culture. However, the fact that Orlan sells the left-over bits of her body online after the performances belies the sacred role the body still plays. Often, invoking the absent body is at the top of the agenda of online activities. The question of “age, sex, location—a/s/l” is still foremost in Internet chatrooms (Subrahmanyam et

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al. 2004). Bodily markers are also evident in the screen names adopted by chat room participants. As Subrahmanyam et al. (2004) uncover in their study of teen chatrooms, screen names frequently reference the body and more specifically gender, with “chick,” “babe,” “boy,” and “man” included as quick shorthand notations of gender. Still, identity is malleable in cyberspace; representations are not fixed but fluid. As Sherry Turkle argued in the mid-1990s, online spaces often function as “laboratories for the construction of identity” (Turkle 1995: 184), offering a fantasy space for thinking about important aspects of identity. Our identities are not limited to the textual representations we choose to type on our keyboard; we upload photos of ourselves, snaps of people or events captured on mobile phones; we choose icons and avatars, and identity is expressed through remediation by linking to websites bearing our favorite films or music videos; we are captured on webcam or communicate through sound. The multiplicity of platforms and modes of self-presentation has the potential to, as Turkle described, lead to a perception of the self as “decentered” or one of many (e.g. “multiple selves”). In other words, because we are constantly moving across media platforms and in between identities, we are never quite the “whole” being of ourselves. On one hand, this fluidity of identity might be cause for celebration; however, in many ways a more hesitant interpretation may read contemporary culture’s increasing fetishization of the body and the rise of body image-related disorders as linked to the normalization of the sort of fragmentation of identity that online technologies enable. Susie Orbach’s new book, Bodies, charts the recent “obsessive cultural focus on the body” that she identifies as manifest in the growing rates of eating disorders, self-harming, body modification, etc. She writes, “we can ask whether the taking on of cyber identities in which the body is an interchangeable but essential category is just fun” (Orbach 2009: 73): It has become a feature of post modernist thought to celebrate multiplicity, to elevate fluidity over knowing and complexity over simplicity, and to see embodiment, like femininity and masculinity, as something we achieve through performing or enacting the body we want to have. … Playful and enriching as such ideas can be within literary theory, it is painfully apparent that they are not playful or enriching for those whose corporeal rudderlessness propels them to seek extreme solutions to what they experience as their physical incongruities. (Orbach 2009: 74)

Orbach’s claims may prove problematic when taking into consideration the range of body modification and self-mutilation across many cultures, including our own; however, her points about the painful bodily realities that often underlie the performance of identity are particularly salient within a consideration of online identity.

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Although the Internet may seem ripe for performances of identity beyond bodily representation, the reality of self-representations of women online is often that the technology does not erase the body but enhances it. Social networking sites, virtual worlds, etc. become spaces where women are more able to control how their body is represented. This might entail the choice of an empowering avatar, or even posting images that present a more sexualized self than would be presented in real life. As various studies on social networking have found, communication on social networking sites is often amplified or a significant departure from the presentation of self in real life. Online self-representations are often framed as “sex positive” and with an ironic wink to transgressing feminist ideals perceived as outdated. Yet the prevalence of sexualized self-representations from amateur porn to social networking profiles means that the sexualized image is normalized. As a result, representations become more extreme. Furthermore, even those aligned with subcultures or seemingly breaking with normative representations of women and pornography are ultimately defined and constrained by their underlying social and cultural positioning within online spaces. For instance, Furry Girl (furrygirl.com), an amateur porn site branded as “natural” and more representative of real women, may be unusual in that it features a naked woman with body hair, but the scenarios, poses, and acts depicted offer no great departure from what might be seen in mainstream pornography or an American Apparel advertisement.4 Natasha Walter’s recent book, Living Dolls, identifies a clear link between the soft-core aesthetics prevalent in everything from music videos to magazines and reality TV, and the overtly sexualized ways in which young women are presenting themselves online. One young woman she interviewed reflected, “Of course we all think, I want to be cool, and the answer to that for so many women seems to be, I know, I’ll have a picture of myself in my pants on Facebook” (Walter 2010: 27). Such an opinion reflects the findings of studies that emphasize the importance of visibility within social network sites (e.g. “If you’re not on Facebook you don’t exist”(Cohen 2008: 210)) and is further evidence of what Melissa Gregg refers to as the “broadcast impulse.” As Gregg argues, it is not necessarily a bad thing, but may be said to promote an active engagement with the construction of identity that encourages a new type of literacy that enables users to articulate complicated facets of their own identity with “regularity and ease” (Gregg 2008). Nevertheless, as I have argued in research exploring commercial sex in Second Life (Neely 2010), expressions of self in many online spaces are not unrestricted freedoms, but are often limited by the regulations entailed in the various programs and applications. This is true of Second Life, where “poseballs” enabling the depiction of sex acts are ultimately determined by their creators, but could also be argued in relation to a range of sites—from Facebook and MySpace to personal websites and

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dating sites, where a user is to a certain degree interpolated by the array of applications available to them and the available options available in the sites’ identity construction template (e.g. the questions asked on a dating website or the types of categories for personal details assigned for a social networking profile). Social networking sites may provide valuable spaces for the exploration of identity, but it is often framed through superficial networks of consumption. The inevitable regulation of how one presents oneself through various online platforms and applications reflects the general regulation of female agency which Diane Negra associated with a kind of post-feminism that “attaches considerable importance to the formulation of an expressive personal lifestyle and the ability to select the right commodities to attain it … [and] fetishizes female power and desire while consistently placing these within firm limits” (Negra 2010: 4). In this sense, the Internet serves as an ideal tool for regulating address, and a concentrated focal point for filtering the numerous ways in which women are interpolated.

Gender and the Internet Nicole Cohen has argued how within mainstream media women have been positioned as passive consumers, while men are positioned as the active agents or creators of media. Even in the age of the “prosumer,” heralded by the web 2.0 revolution, the old dichotomies inherited from previous forms of media remain in evidence (Cohen 2008). While it is difficult to ascertain the demographics of the blogosphere, various studies have produced opposing results, with some arguing that more blogs are penned by women (Perseus 2003) and others men (Viegas 2004). Trammell and Keshelashvili’s own study found that, of the sample of A-list blogs, the majority were maintained by men (70.8%) (2006: 13). Regardless of the lists of acclaimed blogs produced on a fairly regular basis, it is very rare that the top blogs have been written by women. This extends to microblogs; although Ellen and Oprah frequently feature among the top tweeters, it is also worth noting that their Twitter accounts function to promote their television shows and are not managed by the women themselves. Content is also often gendered as well, with the celebrated blogs by men more likely to be concerned with technology, while top rated blogs by women are more likely to be related to sex. See, for instance, The Girl With a One Track Mind, the London-based blogger’s account of her active sex life, or Belle de Jour, Diary of a London Call Girl, the popular blog that garnered much media attention and resulted in the publication of several books, and was the basis for the Channel 4 program Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2007–10), starring Billie Piper. Of the top Twitter lists, Stephen Fry features often for his witty observations and wry humor. Ashton Kutcher has acquired a substantial number of

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followers on Twitter as well for his daily posts on life in Hollywood, but his most notable and reported 5 post was when he uploaded a photograph of wife Demi Moore, bent over with rear fully exposed. One of the top female microbloggers to consistently appear at the top of the rating lists is Britney Spears, although, not surprisingly, the Twitter account is mostly managed by a team of people. Occasional tweets will be signed off as Brit to ensure her authorization and to authenticate the tweet, but for the most part the Twitter feed consists of people posting tweets (or photographs) on her behalf. There is no doubting the growing presence of women leading the technological developments and debates within online culture and the importance of some sites that are run and engaged by women. From the political power of “Mumsnet,” demonstrated in 2009 when David Cameron and Gordon Brown engaged with its online discussion forum and the many other politically active groups characterizing what Ms magazine has referred to as the “dot mom revolution” (summer 2009) to the feminist blogging communities such as feministing.org or the British feminist site the f-word, online spaces have become an increasing site for feminist activism. However, it is more often the case that websites dedicated to the celebration of women’s accomplishments in what have traditionally been relegated as masculine occupations of culture likewise conform to the sexualized representations of mainstream culture. There are many examples of women who are engaged in areas of technological expertise usually relegated for men, but are represented in a fashion that emphasizes their appearance or visibility over their activity or agency. For instance, in the gaming industry, historically represented as male-dominated, the presence of female game designers is relatively rare. It is interesting to note how with Jade Raymond, one of the industry’s few female developers, the emphasis is often placed on her good looks. For example, in the promotional materials for her game Assassin’s Creed, Raymond physically features as a significant focus.6 It is rare for game designers to achieve this kind of visibility in marketing campaigns. The reigning stereotype is of a typical male, nerdy, social misfit in ill-fitting T-shirt and jeans who is, most importantly, always behind the scenes. The Assassin’s Creed campaign, like the treatment of women politicians discussed earlier, is representative of acts of compensation. It is somewhat ironic that such sexualized images are the result of an Ubisoft initiative and while they might appear sexist, they ultimately serve to construct a positive narrative of gender diversity within a male-dominated industry. Indeed, it is commonplace for sites featuring women who operate in traditionally masculine domains to be given a “sex-positive” profile makeover. Nerdgirls, a site dedicated to “encouraging young women to pursue engineering and science,” features engineers, grad students, and calculus junkies whose profiles provide the details of their qualifications,

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while simultaneously asserting their “sexiness,” or, as the website’s tagline declares, that “smart is sexy.” The site’s post-feminist slant is evidenced in provocative profile pics, but also the inclusion of personal details categories that emphasize frivolity (e.g. “on boys,” “down time”). Declarations of love for Jimmy Choos and designer handbags align the Nerdgirls with post-feminist narratives such as Sex and the City (HBO 1998–2004) and is indicative of the complex, symbiotic relationship between consumerism and female sexuality. While the site aims to challenge conceptions of what it means to be an intelligent woman, the profiles jettison serious and professional recognition of their achievements in exchange for a more intimate and light-hearted tone that would rather worryingly be more at home on a website for sex chat. This is perhaps further evidence of the value of visibility over agency in relation to the representation of women in online spaces. Their Facebook site features the tag line: “We are the new pink.”

Everyone’s a Porn Star As pornographic representations have come to signify empowerment in contemporary culture, it is no surprise that it is often difficult to distinguish between a porn-aesthetic and actual porn. While Belle de Jour’s blog was lauded for bringing the “realities” of a taboo subject into the mainstream, the representation of life as a commercial sex worker in Belle’s book, like Girls of the Playboy Mansion and other mainstream representations of commercial sex in the mainstream media, puts emphasis on glamor and de-emphasizes the dangerous, less palatable aspects of work in the industry. Much of Belle’s account is concerned with her appearance, describing worries over appropriate attire, designer gear, and the importance of impeccable grooming, while the inherent risks of the profession (e.g. visiting the hotel room of a complete stranger as an object of sexual commercial exchange) are brushed off as part of the excitement accompanying life in a big city. In Belle de Jour, the empowered woman is read as a free agent of choice who has all the markers of success—metropolitan/ cosmopolitan life, an impressive wardrobe, and an exciting social life— achieved in exchange for engaging in an activity that she maintains is one of her favorite activities anyway (i.e. sex). She is impeccably turned out and, as she frequently mentions throughout, in true post-feminist style, getting ready is no easy (or inexpensive) task. She must spend hours preparing for clients. This is sometimes described in tedious terms; however, when read within a post-feminist context, where painful beauty activities like the waxing of sensitive areas of the body are revitalized as acts of pampering (Jeffreys 2005), Belle could be seen as having it all, with the extreme dedication to her body and physical appearance as the ultimate expression of “me time.” In fact, the first entry listed on Belle’s blog has little to do

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with sex, and instead begins with reflections on a variety of hair-removal methods and the most suitable lingerie for a glamor shoot (October 2003). Although glamorized representations of sex workers are hardly new to mainstream media, as Natasha Walter explains, “the difference between the Pretty Woman-style fairytale and current tales is that today we are asked to believe that these are genuinely honest accounts of what it is to sell sex” (Walter 2010: 50). From Twitter to sex blogs, the identity and authenticity of its authors proves to be of great importance. The impact of this can be felt in the various devices employed to demonstrate authenticity in online spaces. Tweets composed by celebrities on the move articulating personal and often mundane aspects of their daily life or behind-the-scenes glimpses into their professional activities serve to reinforce authorship. Photographs are issued—the one of Demi Moore’s backside is a good example—that may seem to transgress what would be deemed acceptable in an ordinary family photo album; however, the more personal, the more private the disclosure, the more authentic and legitimate the source. It is not surprising that when the conventional, posed shots of glamor models in men’s magazines are being slowly displaced with the increasing demand for topless shots of reality TV stars and readers’ wives or “ordinary” women (Walter 2010), that actual sex workers have also begun to shape their profiles in the mold of the amateur. In Glasgow, for instance, a number of sex workers now pen their own Belle-esque blogs about recent activities, from childcare and back-to-school activities to recent appointments with clients.7 Their sites are unusual in their conflation of the professional with the private, a reality that could be in danger of revealing their identity and increasing their vulnerability. While “ordinary” women increasingly objectify their image within online spaces by adopting images of sexuality that are considered largely culturally commodified, actual sex workers aim to emphasize the more “ordinary” aspects of their identity. Most likely, this trend can be explained as tied to the general focus in the pornographic industry on demonstrating a woman’s complicity and genuine pleasure in the production of even the most extreme pornography. Thus, acceptable forms of femininity in dominant male heterosexual culture present themselves as ordinary women who are always “up for it” and professional sex workers who, although ultimately motivated by money, are presented as just like ordinary women. The blurring between amateur and professional has proven to be a recognizable and growing trend within the pornographic industry. More porn is produced by women and—as is pointed out with some frequency— for women. Even when sites operated by women and featuring their own bodies are still motivated by commercial imperative, with most choosing to operate as subscription sites, emphasis is placed on the enjoyment of women in the pornographic exchange of their own bodies. The fact that “It is also increasingly difficult to distinguish labor from play in some forms

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of porn production and other forms of online sexual activity” (Attwood 2010: 242) is great news for the porn industry, in that it supports a general thesis of complicity. But although many sites are dressed up with the rhetoric of empowerment, it is on the same terms as the general contemporary post-feminist framework. One website, Ishotmyself, calls for women (or “artists”) to send in images of themselves in the hopes of receiving $200 if a folio is accepted. Accompanying captions employ an almost clichéd rhetoric of empowerment, with one reading: “Thank goodness we’re moved on from the stodgy old gender politics that would see Ivory W as a slave to domesticity. If anything, she’s making the iron work for her, not the other way round. She’s currently stitching something to put on, but she doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.” And another: “The woman is on a never-ending quest to turn cliché on its ear and use her oozing sexuality to control the universe (humble goals, aren’t they?), and she simply never falls short.” The Riot Grrl movement that grew out of the U.S. underground punk scene in the 1990s heralded the dawn of third wave feminism and the reclamation of femininity and embrace of sexuality that the extracts above articulate in crude caricature. The movement defined itself by a term that earlier feminists deemed derogatory (“girl”) but by appropriating it with a slight alteration—the removal of an “I” and the addition of two, or sometimes three, rrr’s (signifying a, perhaps angry, growl). As Genz and Brabon explain, “The distinction between ‘girl’ and ‘grrrl’ has been used to illustrate a common perception of a much wider division between postfeminism and third wave feminism, whereby the former is interpreted as middle-of-the-road and depoliticised while the latter is subcultural and activist” (Genz and Brabon 2009: 81). On a very basic level, in relation to online cultures, the variant spelling differentiates itself from significantly less empowered uses of the term “girl.” It is interesting to note the continual use of “girl” in the titling of a wide range of subcultural and alternative groups and websites. The instability of meaning inherent in labels such as “cyberchick” and “cyberbabe” in contemporary online culture perhaps serves as an indicator of the precarious position which women negotiate in online spaces and the uneasy relationship between activism and commercialism, agency and commodification. A growing area of what has been termed “alt.porn,” which draws from early use-group names and is now used to signify an egalitarian and independent type of porn, seemingly allows women to present themselves on their own terms, again reiterating post-feminist terms of choice and empowerment. Websites such as Furry Girl, discussed earlier, foreground their amateur nature; Furry Girl describes the site as “homemade porn” offering an alternative to the porn industry’s usual depictions of hairless, plasticized bodies. Another long-running site, SuicideGirls, bears the tagline “Beauty Redefined” and presents itself as a “sex-positive community” that

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challenges the narrow conceptions of beauty within mainstream culture, but more specifically, the porn industry. Women feature in a reasonable variety of shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most notable departure from more conventional pornography is the appearance of tattoos and piercings.8 Initiation into the website requires submission of a portfolio of photos which subscription members vote on in order to determine whether or not the “hopeful” is worthy of inclusion on the website. The underlying commercial imperative ultimately means that even though the young girls are depicted as empowered, they are still selling their bodies. The reality of this was made clear when, in 2005, forty SuicideGirls left the site, voicing concerns over unfair treatment and exploitation. SuicideGirls receive payment each time their photo is selected to appear on the website’s home page; however, there have been complaints about the methods and frequency with which certain models were selected. There were also reports that the SuicideGirls president, Sean Suhl, was “verbally abusive” and an “active misogynist” (Fulton 2005). Because SuicideGirls structures its site around “self-presentation,” the “Girls”’ accompanying personal blogs presumably offer testament to their own complicity. Like many other alt.porn sites, the vague associations with “art” act to elevate the site above debates around exploitation and the porn industry.9 For instance, the website Ishotmyself also aligns itself in this way by awarding its models with a monthly award for the most “artistic” shot. Although such awards seem to encourage creative expression of sexuality, because of the commercial imperative, shots are most likely framed to please an audience rather than the performer. An emphasis on women’s complicity and enjoyment in the production of sexually explicit images serves to obfuscate the fact that it still holds much in common with the mainstream porn industry. Chuck Palahniuk may offer high praise on the SuicideGirls website for offering “a non-commercial alternative,” but the fact remains that SuicideGirls still conforms to predictable conventions and language illustrated by a cursory glance at the categories offered for photo tags (e.g. pin-up, naked, punk rock, tattoos, blonde, white, pierced, big boobs, manga, cosplay, dreads, panties, cute, geek, sexy, pierced nipples). Although some may deviate from traditional cultural reference points of the porn industry, they still recall the porn industry’s shorthand categorization and commodification of women’s sexuality. The apparent contradictions held within the many representations of “empowered” female sexuality in online spaces reveal a great deal about the complexities of women’s engagement and representation with contemporary culture in general, but even more so in online culture where self-representation often masks exploitation and commercial imperative. Particularly in online spaces, from social networking sites, to sex industry profiles and sex blogs, to sex-positive community sites offering explicit self-representation, the blurring between the amateur and professional,

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sexuality and sexual commodification, means that the ground of both production and consumption is never stable and although prosumer culture is celebrated for its democratizing potential, as this chapter has attempted to illustrate, visibility and participation does not always ensure equality. In fact, web 2.0 may actually provide opportunities to enhance exploitation in that it gives the appearance of participation and active creation, while concealing the true agents (the SuicideGirls case is one particular example). In a recent tweet from FurryGirl (November 29, 2010), in reference to her strip-down protest at Seattle Airport in response to health concerns over the TSA’s new scanners, she concedes: “I guess if I was going to be Internet famous for something that’s not porn, it’s being the original* pantsless TSA protester.” FurryGirl’s self-filmed account of her protest was posted online and garnered attention from international press. An intelligent and politically motivated Internet activist, FurryGirl, like many others similarly engaged, is acutely aware that bodies most certainly matter in online spaces. Although FurryGirl might operate freely from networks of commodification in the sense that she operates her own independent website, what might seem to be transgressive actions (e.g. stripping off at a busy airport security gate) are ultimately interpreted as sensationalist news items in the popular press (FurryGirl’s story was reported in the UK tabloid, The Daily Mail). Similar to what McRobbie describes as “youthful female phallicism,” these representations of empowerment are performances, a “post-feminist masquerade,” that gives the illusion of equality rather than deliver the real thing.

Notes 1. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkzxwrdyRw0&feature=related. 2. As Diane Negra explains in her book, What A Girl Wants (2009), a more conservative brand of post-feminism gaining prominence in recent years emphasizes a return to “home-town” values and is illustrated by the growth in chick flicks and televsions series focusing on the working woman’s “retreat” to the comforts of a more traditional domestic life. This may also be seen as exemplified by Sarah Palin and other conservative figures in US politics who domesticate the transgressions typically associated with feminism by returning to an image of a strong homemaker, wife, and mother. 3. Occasionally the makeover show turns its attention to the male contestants. See, for instance, TLC’s 10 Years Younger and What Not to Wear, as well as ABC’s Extreme Makeover. 4. For a more detailed analysis of Furrygirl’s site see Feona Attwood (2007). 5. Only a few weeks following the posting, Kutcher became the first Twitter user to reach a million followers. 6. Thanks to Paul Delamore, a student on the Gender and Representation course at the University of Stirling, for drawing this example to my attention. 7. Thanks to Linda Thompson from Glasgow Women’s Support Project for drawing this to my attention. 8. One jaded subscriber complained that there seemed to be a “suicide-girl-look” in the same way that there was a “porn” look in the industry.

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Playboy has also claimed similiar allegiances to “Art” over the years, with Hugh Hefner recently declaring that “Playboy helped to change the very direction of contemporary art” (AP 2010).

References Adam, Alison. 1998. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. London and New York: Routledge. Associated Press (AP). 2010. From Dali to Marilyn Monroe. Playboy Auctions Art. November 8 (accessed November 30, 2010). http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ ALeqM5iGQ1T6TwH7R_EdyStRRfEIgsIhOQ?docId=d0c6edd3e78a458baff4183aa4d6a57e. Attwood, Feona. 2007. No Money Shot? Commerce, Pornography and New Sex Tast Cultures. Sexualities 10(4): 441–56. Attwood, Feona. 2009. Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualisation of Western Culture. London: IB Tauris. Attwood, Feona. 2010. Porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography. New York: Peter Lang. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin Books. Boyle, Karen (ed.). 2010. Everyday Pornography. London and New York: Routledge. Cohen, Nicole S. 2008. Gendering Facebook: Privacy and Commodification. Feminist Media Studies. 8(2): 210–13. Dery, Mark. 1994. Flamewars: The Discourse of Cyber Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dines, Gail. 2010. Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Dines, Gail, Thompson, Linda, Whisnant, Rebecca and Boyle, Karen. 2010. Arresting Images: Anti-pornography Slide Shows, Activisim and the Academy. In Everyday Pornography, edited by Karen Boyle. Fulton, Dierdre. 2005. SuicideGirls Revolt. The Portland Pheonix, October 7–13 (accessed September 12, 2010) http://www.portlandphoenix.com/features/ other_stories/ documents/05018238.asp. Genz, Stéphanie and Brabon, Benjamin. 2009. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gregg, Melissa. 2008. Testing the Friendship: Feminism and the Limits of Online Social Networks. Feminist Media Studies 8(2): 206–9. Jeffreys, Sheila. 2005. Beauty and Misogyny. London and New York: Routledge. Levy, Ariel. 2005. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Woman and the Rise of Raunch Culture. London: Pocket Books. McCormick, Naomi and Leonard, John. 2004. Gender and Sexuality in the Cyberspace Frontier. In net.seXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography and the Internet, edited by Dennis D. Waskul (pp. 183–91). New York: Peter Lang. McNair, Brian. 1996. Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture. London: Hodder Arnold. McNair, Brian. 2002. Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the Democratization of Desire. London: Routledge. McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. Morley, David. 2007. Media, Modernity and Technology: The Geography of the New. London and New York: Routledge. Neely, Sarah. 2010. Virtually Commercial Sex. In Everyday Pornography, edited by Karen Boyle. Negra, Diane. 2009. What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Post-feminism. London and New York: Routledge. Orbach, Susie. 2009. Bodies, London: Profile. Paul, Pamela. 2005. Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families. New York: Times Books. Perseus. 2003. The Blogging Iceberg: 4.12 Million Weblogs, Most Little Seen and Quickly Abandoned. Press release (accessed September 12, 2010). http://www. perseusdevelopment.com/corporate/news_shell.php?record=51.

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Post-feminism and the Pornographication of Online Identities  117 Plant, Sadie. 1998. Zeros and Ones. London: Fourth Estate. Subrahmanyam, Kaveri, Greenfield, Patricia M. and Tynes, Brendesha. 2004. Constructing Sexuality and Identity in an Online Teen Chat Room. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 25(6): 651–66. Trammell, Kaye D. and Keshelashvili, Anna. 2006. Examining the New Influencers: A Self-presentation Study of A-List Blogs. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, forthcoming (accessed September 12, 2010). http://www.kayesweetser.com/wp-content/ uploads/2008/02/trammell-keshelashvili-2006-self-presentation-on-blogs.pdf. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2002. Gendering the Internet. European Journal of Communication 17(1): 5–22. Viegas, Fernanda. 2004. Blog Survey: Expectations of Privacy and Accountability (accessed September 12, 2010) http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/survey/blog/results.htm. Walter, Natasha. 2010. Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. London: Virago. Whisnant, Rebecca. 2008–9. “It’s Easy Out Here for a Pimp”, Stop Porn Culture! Slideshow (accessed September 12, 2010). http://stoppornculture.org/slide-show-home/.

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7 BDSM and Transgression 2.0 The Case of Kink.com GRANT KIEN

T

his chapter uses a case

study of BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Submission, Sadism, Masochism) to discuss some effects of contemporary media on notions of sexual transgression. The study employs a classic critical cultural studies analysis of the popular online porn site Kink.com, and an informational depth interview I conducted with its founder and CEO, Peter Ackworth, in October 2010. Through a historiography of BDSM I illustrate the evolution of a subculture of subversive erotic practices closely related to the evolution of the Internet. Our civilization drives technology to ever greater feats, resulting in both intended and accidental changes to our environment and culture. As I have pointed out in previous work (Kien 2009), an intended change of the rapid seamless convergence of mobile and networked technologies into our everyday experiences, for instance, suggests that the concept of a separate virtual and physical reality, once taken for granted, is rapidly becoming nonsensical. The effect of this is the ontological impossibility of maintaining a separation of worlds and consequences. This impossibility seems to manifest quite noticeably in terms of erotic aesthetics and performativity, in which the everyday consumption and performance of kinky erotics over the past two decades appears to correlate with an online commodification and proliferation of kinky pornography. In this context, new rules and norms are established even while old cultural forms, including norms and mores, get remediated into new technological formats and performative scripts. I suggest that transgressions are one of the surest and clearest ways to identify what those rules, norms, and mores are, as they in theory cause the entire system to ripple with the effort to explain, contain, or co-opt them. Researching BDSM and its relation to Internet technology has revealed the development of a transgressive global community and subculture through online coordination over the past twenty years. Along the way, numerous aspects of this subculture have become intentionally 118

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mainstreamed through the very same medium that enabled its inception. This mainstreaming process seems to involve at least three steps: first, the steady commodification of what began as a derelict virtual commons populated by deviants; second, the enclosure of virtual spaces that were considered “profane” until their appropriation by capitalism; and third, the legitimation of certain erotic practices, many of which, until recently, were considered perverse and even symptomatic of mental illnesses. The development of Kink.com as a prominent corporate entity exemplifies these steps in both the nurturing and capitalist appropriation of a subculture: in its rise to online dominance in BDSM pornography, as an advocate for the acceptance of BDSM by mainstream society, and in its corresponding growth as a formidable physical communal presence in the city of San Francisco. In effect, Kink.com has developed into a node centering a particular network assemblage of peoples, technologies, and practices within what I suggest is a neotribally defined BDSM community. McLuhan (1995) described the phenomenon of “neo-tribalism” as a tribal formation structured through the use of electronic media. While Maffesoli (1996) is often referred to as introducting the term to sociological parlance, Bauman’s (1998) rendering of McLuhan’s original idea on a global scale is the notion at play in this analysis. Through its commodification and mainstreaming of previously transgressive erotic practices coalescing around the exchange of erotic aesthetics, Kink.com thus exemplifies the perfect smudging of virtual and physical environments into a singularized reality.

Performing Transgression To ground this discussion, I shall begin with the obvious statement that transgression is always cultural in nature, even in the juridical sense of breaking the law. Transgression is, then, the appearance of violating cultural norms. Drawing from Carey’s (1989) ritual model of communication and Nightingale’s (2003) description of audience–text relationships, my analysis assumes that moral codes are scripted within a sociocultural symbolic order that then gets enacted—or, in the language of symbolic interactionism, performed—in the material world. As new media formats are created and popularized, old scripts become remediated into new formats, and new scripts specific to the new medium may also erupt from interactions with and around the technology. For example, the repurposing and improvisation with texts such as Star Trek by Trekkies, or The Rocky Horror Picture Show by active audience members, demonstrate the eruption of new scripts specific to particular media and content. Changes in representations of sexuality throughout the twentieth century show that sexuality as a performative script has been excessively malleable in terms of its moral symbolic (and hence material/enacted) form. This process has

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of course been discussed at length by Foucault (1977), but it is important to consider that even within the past few decades, masturbation has been transformed from a sexual perversion to an indication of sexual health in popular discourses of sexuality. In this chapter, I focus on phenomena of sexual deviance including discourses and practices of perversion, kink, and sexual fetish. The relatively recent emergence of what is known as the BDSM community, comprising practitioners of these three and a few other categories of sexual deviance, provides a rare opportunity to study the correlation of the development of a new media platform in relation to changes in social norms. A historical dependency of BDSM on the Internet as a community-forming and discursive tool has been documented in various ways, which makes the examination of BDSM an important case study in coming to understand transgression in a web 2.0 world.

What is a “2.0 World” and a “2.0 Condition”? Throughout this chapter, I use the term “2.0 world” to refer to our present digital globally networked civilization, in which people and our global media apparatus seemingly ubiquitously interconnect us, and we share content with one another on a global scale. The “2.0 condition” is such that time is typically experienced as instant and always accessible, and space is often experienced as an inconsequential barrier, especially since the 2.0 experience is rooted in aesthetics. Previous research I have conducted on this condition (see Kien 2010) has demonstrated that the global media apparatus in its current incarnation depends a great deal on the appropriation of user-generated content to keep the media system generating economic value. In the work presented here, the capitalist appropriation of user-generated cultural norms, values, logics, and practices are the issue. One unmistakable finding of this study is that in the case of Kink.com, many pre-web 2.0 sexual transgressions which used to be kept private (i.e. kept out of mainstream/popular media) and discussed only in terms of medical illness have, in a 2.0 media condition, been commoditized and widely distributed to a global market, while others continue to languish in a standing reserve of deviance. Marketed thus, some new world transgressions remain consistent with the past definition of sexual transgression: the sudden shocking revelation of sexual practices that are generally not discussed in a positive light and are kept hidden from public view. The question is, then, what remains hidden from view and why? Rather than a simple break with mainstream morality by isolated individuals, I suggest the commodification of BDSM effects a sophisticated moral system achieved through the remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1998) of tastes and values entrenched in consumerist, quasi-psychological categorizations of individual sexual tastes. My research on BDSM and Kink.com reveals that in a 2.0 world, the content is not the main issue in this practice of

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consumer society identity building. Rather, the building of one’s personal brand of sexual expression within the broader rubric of sexual identity, in which BDSM represents a catalog of extreme signifying styles and practices, is emphasized through the open, freely circulating signifiers available through the Internet. Thus, transgression in terms of online erotic aesthetics is that which cannot be successfully commoditized and brought to market as a desired exchange commodity. Rather, such human practices get assigned to a purgatory of negative speculation and used as a comparative “dark side” of the sanctioned (through successful commoditization) aesthetic representation of the BDSM community until such time that they can be called forth to be aesthetically appropriated and successfully commoditized for mass consumption. It is of course the case that virtual world activities have physical world implications, for which consumers of pornography in general are quite grateful as it aids in satisfying a basic physical need. Beyond the sensational experience of consuming BDSM porn, however, I contend that this media condition contributes to a panoptic system of policed sexuality (Foucault 1979, 1990), in which many mainstream consumers further entrench distance between their consumption of porn and practices of BDSM in the physical world. In a post-networked world, our newest transgressions remain based on a rather timeless principle: the hiding of certain practices from social condemnation. In the case of Kink.com, certain erotic practices are kept from the moral judgment of consumers by simply refusing to enter them into the arena for discussion. It is important to recognize that however familiar and ancient the principle of social concealment may be, evolutions in digital media both make new methods of constructing transgression possible and at the same time reveal the arbitrariness (and conceptual fragility) of all things codified as transgressions. For Carey (1989), successful communication as culture occurs when a shared sense of community is formed through communicative practices. Extrapolating from this understanding, breaks with a sense of ritual and shared community may signal transgressions in society. That is to say, whereas communal recognition and identification with individuals’ practices as normal and consistent with the dominating symbolic order signify belonging, failure of a community to recognize and identify with individuals’ practices as normal signifies transgression. For Stuart Hall (2003), a failure to have meaningful discourse between the sending and receiving parties in discursive formations can happen in a number of ways, but to qualify as a transgression in the way I am using the term, there must be the invocation of an oppositional reading. That is, the receiving party must adequately understand the intended meaning in order to reject (i.e. transgress, behave contrary to) the message, rather than just reject it based upon unintelligibility. This is clearly the case with BDSM and Kink.com.

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Kink.com and the BDSM Subcultural Community The invention of BDSM is firmly rooted in a discursive community of people who sought one another out to share their ideas and everyday erotic practices that transgress the cultural norm. At the same time, these people have been keenly aware of how their everyday erotic practices— their transgressions—have kept them from sharing a sense of community with mainstream society. Hence, as read through Hebdige (1979), a transgressive subculture formed by appropriating and subverting the codes of mainstream culture, thereby challenging mainstream taken-for-granted understandings of sexual and erotic normalcy. Peter Ackworth describes himself and Kink.com as part of the BDSM community, and an advocate for the understanding and acceptance of kink in mainstream culture. This shared sense of community is most visibly reflected in the production side of Ackworth’s business, as his talent pool and many production personnel are drawn from the San Francisco and broader BDSM community of which he has personally been a member for many years. As part of his personal credo, Ackworth has been a long-time advocate for the broader acceptance of BDSM, and has not been hesitant to build this into part of the mission of his business. In our interview, he described plans for community outreach that included his envisioning of an educational program (KinkU. com), and he mentioned that he has given financial and in-kind assistance in various forms over the years to kinky community organizations. Meanwhile, it stands to reason that beyond the social benefit, Kink.com has a vested interest in the mainstreaming of BDSM, as it is both a way to expand the BDSM pornography market and build a solid alliance of popular support should there ever come a moralistic legal challenge to the business. However, in terms of business practice, Kink.com seems to make a committed effort to show what goes on behind the scenes and behind the boardroom doors of the company. For example, pre- and post-shoot interviews with the models are included in every video package to show a spirit of consensual erotic fun, and their portal includes a website of behindthe-scenes content. When I asked Ackworth (2010) about his commitment of resources to these non-profit-generating aspects of his business, he reiterated his personal commitment to demystify the process of Kink.com’s BDSM porn production and his goal of a broader acceptance of BDSM by mainstream society. Moreover, I suggest that it is an oppositional understanding of the signifying order of sexuality that motivates BDSM subcultural community members to apprehend—in a sense, to confiscate—the signifiers of erotic deviance. In as much as one might attempt to uniformly generalize motivations of a subculture, the goal is to displace the dominant reading of BDSM practices as negative and abnormal with the subculture’s preferred reading. But within the BDSM community proper, the result is tension and

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struggle between various structures of meaning (which inform individual opinions) held by the numerous different people who comprise the community. As actor-network theorists have pointed out, it isn’t an issue of which translation of everyday practice is correct, but rather which has the strongest network of alliances that allows it to dominate the discussion (Latour 1988). However, in pornography, this is seldom an issue, as it is often the most taken-for-granted assumptions about transgressions that enable their commoditization. Hence, for Kink.com, the decision is fairly easy to settle, as it is the alliance of consumer with commodity that directs which transgressions become commodified and which become reified as undesirable and relegated to a psychologically or morally determined categorical container until such time that they might find a more sympathetic consumer base that allows them to be taken to market. Moving forward from these two theoretical premises, the following pages demonstrate the process of how the above-described elements work together to create a new formation of erotic transgression in a -2.0 world. After a quick clarification of terminology and context, I will discuss the medium and what is unique about the channel of delivery for Kink.com’s content. Next, I will consider the content and what may or may not be different about it in light of the technological changes in the medium. Finally, I will speculate on some of the theoretical implications of social interactions around the medium. While the case study at the center of this analysis is the highly successful commercial porn website Kink.com and its founder Peter Ackworth, its sociocultural role can only realistically be understood when contextualized among community-based web and physical presences such as Fetlife.com, the San Francisco Society of Janus, San Francisco’s weekly Bondage a Go Go event, and the San Francisco Citadel BDSM playspace.

The Invention of BDSM Online The invention of the acronym BDSM is tied directly to the evolution of Internet technology. There are very few print sources from which to glean a timeline of its development as a concept and a community of practice.1 However, numerous online sources corroborate a popular understanding of BDSM’s origin and development into a subcultural lexicon forged by an online community.2 The letters BDSM themselves represent the erotic practices of bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism. However, BDSM as a communal scene and subculture also appropriates the erotic terms “kink,” “fetish,” and “perversion.” For the purposes of this chapter, the term “kink” refers to what many might consider uncommon acts that bring erotic gratification to the practitioner. “Fetish” refers to the erotic desire and use of objects, including objectified (i.e. fetishized) peoples. “Perversion” refers to any type of eroticism that

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lays outside the purview of mainstream erotic practices (which are labeled “vanilla” by those in the BDSM scene). Although definitions and interpretations of what BDSM properly signifies have been struggled over within the community, and indeed continue to be a subject of ongoing discussion, what is significant to understand here is that this amalgamation of erotic practices and the eruption of the signifier “BDSM” occurs at a specific technological moment in history. According to various sources, in the late 1980s and early 1990s selfidentified kinky people and practitioners of S&M began to connect with one another anonymously on the Internet (see Shadow 2002; TheMunch.org 2007; Wiseman 2003). For the first time, enabled by Internet technology, people around the globe (mainly in the USA) whose sexual practices were considered “abnormal” and “perverse” were able to find one another in common purpose with relatively little risk to their everyday lives. Within a matter of a few short years, an online subculture had formed around practices which were until that point largely kept secret and isolated, or part of a derelict and often dangerous street scene. As Jay Wiseman (1999) describes: SM was a lot more taboo and widely condemned than it is now. The SM “community”—such as it was—was much smaller and more underground than it is now, and the different groups tended to be smaller and more isolated than they are now. We didn’t know as much as we do now, and what knowledge did exist was harder to find—other than by personal trial and error. Almost all of the books, clubs, and so forth that exist today didn’t exist back then. The main “teaching” of the time was that being interested in SM wasn’t in and of itself proof that someone was seriously mentally ill.

As individuals began to recognize that they were in fact not alone in their so-called deviance, communities centered on kinks and fetishes sprung up, and BDSM as a sanctioned and policed set of practices between consenting adults began to institutionalize. The key discussion boards at the time were the Usenet newsgroups alt.sex-bondage, alt.sex.beastiality, and alt. sex-stories. This was not uncontested; the alt.sex groups hosted by the University of Waterloo, for instance, were shut down in 1994 3 as they were judged to violate the criminal code of Canada.4 It is important to note here that what became the BDSM community in the 1990s and into the present owes considerable homage to the Leather movement as part of the Queer Nation struggle. The important role of the Queer Leather community is often overlooked in the casual telling of BDSM history, even in spite of the fact that it is the Leather flag that BDSM practitioners eventually adopted as their own. Although Kink.com includes at least five exclusively gay porn sites and frequently flies the Leather flag above its studio and office site, the SF Armory, Ackworth expressed his

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surprise when I informed him of the origin of the flag during our faceto-face discussion. Thus here we have an indication of one of the first remediations of a pre-2.0 oppression: the erasure of queer history. While queer voices have been an important part of the BDSM community throughout its evolution, BDSM as a practice is often represented in the mainstream as an unproblematized heteronormative power erotics practiced between loving, often married, heterosexual couples, disconnected from the political struggles of oppressed peoples. Bisexuality and “heteroflexibility” are commonly expressed identities in the BDSM community, and homosexuality is an important identity within the BDSM scene, though less common than hetero.5 However, acknowledgment of the pre-Internet struggles, battles, and gains of the Queer Leather community on behalf of kinksters and fetishists is important and significantly underrepresented. In Leather bars and dungeons in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the “Old Guard” established many of the practices, rules, and protocols that, along with fantasy novels such as the anonymously published The Story of O (1954),6 would later become the foundational texts of the burgeoning BDSM community. The Leather community and the BDSM community continue in the present to exist side by side, sharing a flag, duplicating numerous practices, and often intermingling at events such as the annual Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. However, Queer Leather culture remains its own distinct gay identity, with its own bars and gay events that, while often not exclusive, are clearly different from the hetero-dominated BDSM community. Encouraged by discussions on the Alt.sex newsgroup and other forms of anonymous discussion, kinksters in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay area decided to take things a step further and meet up in person. What began as a small gathering of like-minded people munching on burgers at a local restaurant (the Flames coffee shop in Santa Clara, CA) over the course of a few years became institutionalized as a regular meeting dubbed a “Munch” (at Kirk’s Steakhouse in Palo Alto, CA). Within a short time, munches were happening throughout the U.S.A. and even in other nations, and the global online community of kinky people began to assert itself in physical space. By the mid-1990s, kink was out of the closet to those who sought it out, and had become a subcultural lifestyle choice for many people. This time frame also saw some important technological leaps that made it possible for mainstream society to access these subcultural forms. In the mid-1990s, three technological advances radically changed the range of choices for the construction of sexual subjectivity and erotic aesthetic consumer options available to mainstream society: the compressed image file format, the invention of the World Wide Web, and advances in the adoption and use of the Internet as a point of sale.7 The development of the compressed image format significantly sped up the time it took to transfer picture files over the Internet, reducing the transfer time from

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hours to minutes, and eventually, seconds. Coupled with the invention of the Internet browser which enabled viewing of graphics within web pages, web users were able to view and share images relatively easily online. Within a couple of years, the invention of compressed video file formats made the same phenomenon possible with video. The creation of the World Wide Web made it possible for users around the globe to easily navigate from website to website, significantly deterritorializing the cyberspace experience. Content became geographically unbordered, and in a new phase of McLuhan’s “global village” (1995) users gained access to cultural spectacles that had previously been unavailable or off limits. Finally, the commercialization of the Internet effectively put a point of sale in every home that had Internet access and a credit card. Able to shop in the privacy of their own homes, many consumers began to take advantage of the opportunity to discreetly explore their sexual desires, acquiring images and videos that appealed to their erotic appetites.8 Pornography exploded online, and in many respects pioneered numerous important developments in online marketing and Internet business practices. One of the early Internet entrepreneurs to recognize the opportunity the Internet offered in the pornography business was the aforementioned Peter Ackworth. Ackworth describes his own entry into the online world of kinky pornography as a business decision inspired by stories he had heard of other people who were making money by putting porn online, guided by his own erotic taste. He started out much like most others in that time period, scanning and mounting borrowed images on his website without much regard for copyright issues. His site, Hogtied.com, grew in popularity. As his business developed, he found that he needed a continual supply of fresh content that couldn’t be found elsewhere to maintain his community of repeat customers and build his web traffic. His solution to the problem was to move from Europe to San Francisco, set up a studio in a rented apartment, recruit female models and actors from the local kink and sex worker scene, and shoot still and video footage of himself interacting with the women he hired. For many years, Ackworth was the sole employee of what would develop into one of the world’s largest kinky pornography businesses. Ackworth’s career as a pornographer has spanned the maturation of the Internet over the past fifteen years, constructing his Kink.com enterprise through the establishment of numerous online porn sites. All the while, he has been an active participant in the San Francisco kinky scene, and has cultivated an audience of consumers of kinky porn that interact both through the consumption of his website’s pornography and through user forums. In the present day, web communities such as Tribe.com and, more popularly, Fetlife.com, have arisen to replace the void left by the early newsgroup forums and continue to unite kinksters and fetishists on a global scale. Ackworth and many of his employees and models may easily be found on such social networking sites. Meanwhile,

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kinky dating sites such as Bondage.com, Alt.com, Collarme.com, and numerous others connect individuals with compatible erotic tastes.

Naughty Content: A New Type of Old Script If we were to determine innocence by measures of naivety and good intentions, we might conclude that there are many innocent people. However, Durham and Kellner (2006) point out that there are no “innocent” texts. All cultural artifacts—textual, performative, and material—are laden with meaning, values, biases, and messages. This means that in spite of any intentions of their originators, all cultural artifacts participate in advancing relations of power and subordination. Prejudices like class, gender, race, sexuality, abelism, age, etc. are encoded within our artifacts and messages, as it is culture and history rather than any one person’s intentions that constructs our structures of learned meanings. Culture thus constitutes a set of discourses, stories, images, spectacles, cultural forms, and practices which generate meaning, identities, and political effects. As Ackworth described to me, early Internet pornographers often began their businesses through remediation of old images, by simply scanning pictures and mounting them online. Along with these images also came the remediation of narratives. To make it possible to acquire a constant supply of original content and thereby build his consumer base, he set up a studio in his apartment and began to produce film and video content for his first porn website, Hogtied.com. At that time, he did everything from the coding on the website to the filming and shooting to setting up and interacting on camera with the models in the scenes he was shooting. It was literally a one-person business, as the models worked on a shoot-by-shoot contract basis. When I asked where the ideas for his early pornographic scenes came from, he described his early work as the re-enactment of scenes he’d seen in magazines, and in particular House of Milan (aka HOM, Inc.). It is perhaps not surprising then that his first website, Hogtied.com, closely resembled the name and themes of the HOM publication Hogtie. The reproduction of scenes from these and other texts such as the aforementioned Story of O and Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series continue to figure prominently in Kink.com productions in the present. This is evidenced by both a review of their online library of content and perhaps more tellingly in the creation of Kink.com’s “Upper Floor,” which is both a set and functioning BDSM party room fashioned after a room described in The Story of O. Kink.com also follows a very narrative formula in its productions traditional in most pornography, typically ending the onscreen play with an (male) orgasm (aka “money shot”). Hence, the case of Kink.com clearly illustrates Bolter and Grusin’s (1998) concept of remediation (i.e. the content of any new medium is the old medium it replaces), and the reproduction of aesthetic codes of deviance and power-erotics. Interestingly, Ackworth described the

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relationship of pornography to the public BDSM scene as imitative in the opposite direction. Ackworth employs what he calls BDSM lifestylers in production roles, pays attention to feedback from participants, and involves the BDSM community in productions in various ways (as extras, for example) to ensure the integrity of authenticity in his productions. With such attention to the construction of authenticity, one might then assume that Kink.com is capitalizing on performative spectacles one might find in the public scene. According to Ackworth, however, the relationship of BDSM porn images to the public scene flows in the direction of life imitating art. He described that performers must play to the camera, not necessarily to each other or a public audience, to work well as pornography. Rather than recreating images one might witness in the public scene for sale on Kink. com, he has seen his own scenes reproduced in public dungeons and play spaces such as the SF Citadel and Bondage-a-go-go. He has seen people use pictures and scenes that he himself designed to express what they want to do, then recreate them to the best of their ability. Theoretically, Nightingale’s (2003) work on “[audience-text]” explains that we can expect this appropriation of texts by audience members as part of their meaningful everyday existence. As she points out, audiences act out the text for their own purposes, and use the text to improvise upon, sometimes inventing embellishments that go far beyond the original narrative. To return to the question of how these “naughty” texts are reproducing oppressions and traditional notions of transgressions, the most obvious problematic narrative elements are the traditional issues that arise in pornography in general: male/female power dynamics, unchallenged stereotypes, and moral judgments of their existence in the first place to name just a few. However, BDSM aesthetics often stands female/male power dynamics on their head, with women commanding, overpowering, and torturing men. Stereotypes are likewise often inverted or played up to the point of caricature, and in the case of Kink.com, there is a set of protocols that ensure the content doesn’t upset obscenity laws. The effectiveness of these tensions on mainstream attitudes about sexuality is worthy of lengthy discussion, but for this chapter, what is more relevant is the way in which these remediations have given rise to a new type of transgressive morality. That is, a system of moral categorization based on the ability to commodify transgressions. While Ackworth’s contributions to the BDSM community have been positive in many aspects, the limits to Kink.com’s textual interventions are ultimately guided by financial concerns. As Ackworth put it, the company’s list of prohibited content is limited by what he feels the audience can tolerate in terms of sales. In response to my question, “How does BDSM continue to push the boundaries of sexual expression into the future?” Ackworth explained: “There will always be extremes that the mainstream

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society will find objectionable. I don’t want to get more hardcore … there’s not a big market for more extreme content, it doesn’t really appeal to the masses. People accept it, but don’t choose it.” Hence it is ultimately the logic of the paying market that limits the amount of freedom of BDSM expression fought for in popular media as exemplified by Kink.com. This is new in the sense that it is the market policing the discourse of power erotics rather than the traditional medical-psychology approach to regulation. This is not to condemn Ackworth or Kink.com, as they are simply operating as businesses do, and if judged by intention as described at the beginning of this section, he and his producers would appear to be rather innocent. Rather, the point is to demonstrate how BDSM texts have given rise to a redefinition of transgression in a 2.0 world, and to acknowledge that online pornography has played a role in its change.

The Business of Selling BDSM The Frankfurt School described the culture industries as being concerned with the industrialization and mass production of culture. The three main criteria of the industrialization of culture include commodification, standardization, and massification. The industrialization of porn online is no exception to this. Rather, as a business greatly concerned with aesthetics, the Internet has made it possible to industrialize pornography with incredible efficiency. However, as I suggested above, the ease of duplication and disregard for copyright online made a steady stream of new content essential in securing repeat customers to porn websites. In this context, sexual transgressions have been steadily reappropriated as a frontier of capital. Of course, porn is as old as drawing itself, but what is unique in the 2.0 world is the exponential increase in pace of appropriation and opportunities for distribution. This has driven mass production, standardization, and mass distribution to new heights in terms of the consumption of eroticism. While this has undoubtedly contributed to some realignment of cultural values in terms of sexuality through visual reconstructions, it has done nothing to intervene in the economic logic of our culture. Rather, it works towards the legitimation of the existing capitalist system, and all of these principles can be exemplified by the case of Kink.com. Horkheimer and Adorno (1995) pointed out that organizations and institutions overpower individuals, and as such individuals are only as powerful as the institutions to which they belong. However, the main types of institutions/organizations that capitalism creates are businesses, motivated by profit. Products are secondary to the institution of the business itself. A key feature of consumer society is uniformity of needs and desires, and mass society is based on conformity to (or at least general agreement on) social norms. The culture industry works to filter common sense, and thus mass culture comes to dominate social interaction and discourse. Since

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standardization and uniformity are essential to massification, the same ideas must be present in multiple facets of culture. To be successful, the ideas reflected in mass culture and mass consumption must work towards reification of the social order, and must not radically disrupt it. The commodification of fetish is no exception to this theory. As it collapses fetishism (erotic desire of objects and erotic objectification of people) into commodity fetishism labeled as erotic taste, popularity of the resulting product in the market is taken as proof of its legitimate acceptance by society. In the case of BDSM acts, this effectively supplants the formerly oppositional reading into the dominant position, creating a new normal much like that described by Warner (2000) in his discussion of Queer representation and identity. Precedents in the pornographic magazine industry, such as Larry Flint’s various legal victories in his protracted battle for pornographic content in the name of freedom of expression, demonstrate that obscenity is in a constant state of redefinition (see Kipnis (1996) for an in-depth discussion of this issue). However, since successful commodification redefines certain BDSM acts as legitimate, the definition of obscenity becomes that which cannot be brought to mass market. Interpreting Cindy Sherman’s work, Laura Mulvey (1991) theorized that obscenity is the “close-up,” describing the revelation of the interior of things as horrific. Similarly, Benjamin (1969) illustrated that in consumer society we strive to bring things closer, and that mechanically reproduced media make distant objects seem attainable to the masses. A logic of universal equality of things thus becomes widespread, and this is especially so online. That is to say, no one thing seems to be more or less valuable than any other. In the online environment, for example, there is little to distinguish one mass-distributed jpeg image file’s value as being any more or less than any other mass-distributed jpeg image file. With this logic of universal equality, all aesthetics of erotics become equalized. However, as Heidegger (1977) pointed out, the result of technology is not to bring things closer, but rather to maintain a universal distancelessness which neither brings things closer nor pushes them further away. Consumption of online pornography is a scopophillic pleasure, bringing the image into view, but of course consumers still cannot touch the image itself, much less so the models in the image. The porn consumers’ reconciliation is found in touching themselves. The implication for the case of online porn is that the consumption of BDSM is not the doing of BDSM; it is, rather, an ironic aesthetic alliance with BDSM and its actual everyday practitioners through the doing of capitalistic consumption. What then are some of the changes in social patterns and behavior resulting from this situation? Perhaps most obvious, interest in and consumption of BDSM pornography, such as extreme bondage, pain, humiliation, torture, costume play, role playing, power exchange, group sex, various fetishistic fixations, age/race/species play, and much much

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more, used to be considered an indication of a deranged mental condition. With the invention of BDSM as a lifestyle choice and the popularization of BDSM as a pornographic choice, it’s okay for “normal” men to masturbate to this genre of content, especially when it’s done as a communal activity (i.e. there is a widespread community of people doing it, giving evidence of its normalcy). It’s okay to produce this genre of content as long as certain fundamental taboos are not broken (i.e. involvement of children, animals, scat/urine, sexualized blood, sexualized killing, and above all, an uncritical acceptance of the dominating capitalistic social order). To restate, these fundamental taboos are determined by (1) the content producer’s tastes and sensibilities as a self-identified BDSM community member, (2) legal anti-obscenity obligations, and (3) the paying customer’s tastes. To break this down further in terms of Hall’s aforementioned theoretical model, morality in the encoding of BDSM pornography comes from a structure of meaning rooted in the construct of a BDSM community: the San Francisco Society of Janus, the New York-based Eulenspiegel Society, dungeons and playspaces such as the SF Citadel, Bondage-a-go-go, and any BDSM practitioners aware of the rules and standards by which people interact in those spaces. This is combined with and magnified by the policing of the medium itself through obscenity laws, which do create some hard limits such as prohibitions regarding age and bestiality. Moreover, as Ackworth argued, even in terms of basic consumption, content is limited by what the audience can “tolerate.” A logic of scopophillic consumer culture has in many ways displaced the psychiatric discourse that once dominated the mainstream consumer’s structure of meaning for an aesthetics of BDSM. Mining erotic practices from the on-hand supply of psychiatrically-defined deviances, unsuccessful commoditization becomes the measure of obscenity. Transgression 2.0 is thus the calling forth of those aesthetics and performative scripts in spite of their lack of sanction through capitalistic economics.

Post-2.0 Transgression New media continue to foster the BDSM community, but also exploit individuals as a condition of their participation, just as FaceBook and other social media outlets do. As I have argued elsewhere (Kien 2010), privacy in our 2.0 networked world is the management of public identity through strategic revelations, rather than removing oneself from the public. There are thus a multiplicity of conditions that further describe transgression in this condition. Demanding “authenticity,” freedom of goods, going off the grid, being unduplicatable, interventions into dominating discourses, being too personal, refusal to participate, refusal to pay, calling the bluff of simulacra, a staunch DIY (do it yourself) ethos, acknowledging one’s class consciousness in the capitalist environment of the Internet, profane invasions of capitalistically cleansed digital space, ironic misrepresentation,

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airing dirty laundry, the reappropriation of violence from the state, irreverent humor, and the full list of shenanigans that social deviants and revolutionaries have relied on throughout history to intervene and break with the dominating discourse. As Baudrillard suggested, “Parody renders submission and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based” (2006: 467). Thus, in a 2.0 world, even our submission to the world of simulacra may be taken as a form of transgression, so long as it is a hyper-real simulation of submission acted out by one’s own free will. In the case of Kink.com, this is perhaps the final theoretical lesson needed for treating their work as a transgression, for their content can be an intervention into the dominating discourse of capitalism if the people producing it can maintain a sense of irony in the “doing” of it, even if the people consuming it can’t.

Notes 1. Jay Wiseman (2000a, 2000b) offers brief histories of BDSM, though these books are “how-to” manuals rather than an exposé of the concept. 2. See Kadrey (1994), Shadow (2002), Wiseman (2003), the Wikipedia entry on “Munch (BDSM),” and www.TheMunch.org (2007). 3. Full archives of the original newsgroups are available online at http://faqs.cs.uu.nl/ na-bng/alt.sex.bondage.html. 4. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.sex.bondage. 5. A tally of sexual identities on various BDSM websites easily demonstrates the predominance of heteronormative identity in the BDSM scene. When asked, Peter Ackworth of Kink.com answered that their customer base is approximately 90 percent male. 6. Available online at http://parousa.tripod.com/story-o.html. 7. Here, I mean not just the administrative and technological ability to conduct transactions, but the actual development of online business models that took advantage of the web browser as a point of sale. 8. This same innovation enabled consumers to order other types of erotic products (BDSM gear, sex toys, etc.) and have them delivered discretely to their front door, encouraging exploration into realms of sexuality that had previously entailed much more risk to curious individuals.

References Ackworth, Peter. 2010. Personal interview, October 8: San Francisco, CA. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. The Ecstasy of Communication. Translated by Bernard and Caroline Schutze. New York: Autonomedia. Baudrillard, Jean. 2006. The Precession of Simulacra. In Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (2nd edn), edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Malden: Blackwell. Bauman, Zygmunt. (1998). Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. (1998). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carey, James. 1989. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: Routledge. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas M. Kellner (eds). 2006. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (2nd edn). Malden: Blackwell.

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The Case of Kink.com  133 Durkheim, Émile. 1996. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In Readings in Social Theory, edited by Francis Farganis (pp. 90–100). Toronto: McGraw-Hill. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction,Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Hall, Stuart. 2003. Encoding/Decoding. In Critical Readings: Media and Audiences, edited by Virginia Nightingale and K. Ross (pp. 51–64). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovett. New York: Harper & Row. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. 1995. Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Kadrey, Richard. 1994. alt.sex.bondage. In Wired, Issue 2.06 (accessed November 15, 2010). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.06/alt.sex.bondage_pr.html. Kien, Grant. 2009. Virtual Environment: The Machine is Our World. In Identity, Learning and Support in Virtual Environments, edited by Sharon Tettegah and Cynthia Cologne. The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Kien, Grant. 2010. Privacy As Work: The Appropriation of Labor in Post-Global Network. In Post-Global Network and Everyday Life, edited by Marina Levina and Grant Kien. New York: Peter Lang. Kipnis, Laura. 1996. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. New York: Grove Press. Latour, Bruno. 1988. Part Two: Irreductions. In The Pasteurization of France, translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law (pp. 158–236). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: Mentor/Penguin. McLuhan, Marshall. 1995. Essential McLuhan, edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. Concord: House of Anansi Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Mulvey, Laura. 1991. A Phantasmorgia of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman. New Left Review 188: 136–50. Mulvey, Laura. 1996. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nightingale, Virginia. 2003. Improvising Elvis, Marilyn and Mickey Mouse. In Critical Readings: Media and Audiences, edited by Virginia Nightingale and K. Ross. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Shadow. 2002. History of Munches (accessed August 1, 2010). http://www.houseofdesade.com/munchhistory/history.htm. TheMunch.org. 2007. FAQ (accessed August 1, 2010). www.TheMunch.org. Warner, Michael. 2000. The Trouble With Normal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wikipedia contributors. Munch (BDSM). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (accessed August 1, 2010). http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title= Munch_(BDSM)&oldid=385643087. Wiseman, Jay. 1999. An Essay About “The Old Days” (accessed August 8, 2010). http://www.jaywiseman.com/SEX_BDSM_Old_Guard_1.html. Wiseman, Jay. 2000a. SM 101: A Realistic Introduction (2nd edn). Eugene: Greenery Press. Wiseman, Jay. 2000b. Jay Wiseman’s Erotic Bondage Handbook. Eugene: Greenery Press. Wiseman, Jay. 2003. A Beginner’s Guide to BDSM Munches (accessed August 8, 2010). http://www.jaywiseman.com/SEX_BDSM_MunchGuide.html.

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8 Sick Stuff 1 Law, Criminality, and Obscenity JULIAN PETLEY In February 2008, Darryn Walker, a 35-year-old civil servant from South Shields in the north east of England, was arrested at his home by officers from Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Unit. His alleged crime was to have posted on the Internet in the summer of 2007 a prose fantasy, Girls (Scream) Aloud (henceforth G(S)A). The story involves the members of the pop group Girls Aloud being kidnapped, raped, mutilated, and murdered, and their body parts then being sold on eBay. In October 2008 he was formally charged with an offense under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 (OPA). Interestingly enough, when the case came to court on June 29, 2009 it immediately collapsed; the prosecution offered no evidence, and the judge formally returned a not guilty verdict. Nonetheless, the fact that it was ever brought in the first place is extremely disturbing, as ever since the prosecution of the book Inside Linda Lovelace failed in 1976, it has generally been accepted that the written word will not be prosecuted under the OPA. Had the prosecution succeeded, the written word, in whatever medium, would once again have been liable to prosecution. Alternatively, the principle would have been established that what is legal offline is not necessarily legal online. But although the fact that the prosecution ultimately failed should be a cause for profound relief among those who care about freedom of expression, and especially those with a penchant for the transgressive, the fact that it was actually brought in the first place suggests a renewed desire in the UK to censor sexually transgressive material. This case also needs to be viewed in the light of the Criminal Justice Act 2008, which makes it an offense even to possess what it defines as “extreme pornography.” This too is indicative of a new censoriousness, but it also draws attention to the key role which, in the Internet age, surveillance plays in the censorship process, since the measure depends at least partly for its efficacy on people worrying that the authorities may be shadowing 134

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their Internet activity, thus scaring them into self-censorship by refraining from accessing and distributing certain kinds of material online. However, as I will demonstrate, it is not only sexually transgressive material which is being targeted by the authorities, and, among democratic countries, this kind of oppressive behavior is by no means limited to the U.K. On July 26, 2007 the tabloid Daily Star ran an “exclusive” story headed “Sicko Plots to Torture, Rape and Kill Girls Aloud” whose first line reads: “Pop beauties Girls Aloud are being stalked by a vile Internet psycho.” This is an entirely inaccurate statement, and as the story progresses it becomes clear that the Star is referring to a rather more mundane truth; the man to whom the paper refers in typical U.K. tabloid style as a “cyber-sicko” has simply published a fantasy, although admittedly a gruesome one, about the group. Indeed, the Star actually quotes from the prologue to the story, which clearly states: “I cannot stress enough that this is entirely fictitious.” The Star noted that it had reported the fantasy to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF, of whom more below) which “traced the host site back to America, and Interpol has been notified to help track down the operators and writer.” The IWF, the story adds, then alerted the U.K. police as a result of the Star’s tip-off. Girls Aloud are an absolute staple of the celebrity-obsessed tabloid press, and one of its members, Cheryl Cole, doubly obsesses this form of journalism, since at one point she was married to Chelsea and England footballer Ashley Cole. What we have here, then, is a classic example of what in a U.S. context John H. McManus (1994) has called “market driven journalism” and in a U.K. context Nick Davies (2008) has identified as an attitude of “if we can sell it we’ll tell it”, an attitude which results, in his view, in a “bias against truth” (138). UK tabloids may be more lurid and explicit than their U.S. equivalents, but there is nothing remotely transgressive about them, unless it be in their attitude to the truth, and to conventional journalistic standards in general. Their ideological position is essentially an authoritarian-populist one (at the last general election all but one stridently supported the Conservatives), and sensational stories such as the G(S)A one perform the double function of selling newspapers and engendering moral outrage. As Nick Davies points out, one of the unwritten rules of this form of modern journalism is “Go with the moral panic,” a rule which he notes as being “capable of generating stunning falsehoods as the facts are forced to fit the feeling” (142). According to the transcript of the interview with the alleged criminal Darryn Walker at South Shields police station on the morning of February 27, 2008, after the appearance of the Star article he e-mailed the website hosting the story, which he described as an “adult celebrity parody” (although the transcript has it—twice—as “parity”) “saying something along the lines of due to the distress and upset caused by the story could it please be withdrawn, and they e-mailed me back saying yes at your request the story has been withdrawn and all links to it have been deleted.” In

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fact, the story was taken down a week after it was first put up, and before the Star article was published. Walker then changed the characters’ names and put the story back up again. But then the original story mysteriously reappeared elsewhere on the Internet, and it was its reappearance, and the fact that the police knew that it had reappeared, which led to the Star story and Walker’s subsequent arrest. Walker was arrested and later charged under the OPA “on suspicion of publishing obscene articles.” Under British law an item is judged to be obscene “if its effect … is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, in all circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.” Until 1973 much the same definition was applied by U.S. federal courts, but in that year, in Miller v. California, the Supreme Court established a tripartite test to determine what was obscene, and thus not protected by the First Amendment. Explaining what has come to be known as the “Miller Test,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote: The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

There are still certain similarities with the OPA, but the greatest difference is that the invocation of “community standards” and “applicable state law” means that in the U.S.A. there is no uniform national standard of obscenity, which all but guarantees that something which is judged to be obscene in one jurisdiction may not be found to be so in another. If the police seize material which they believe to be obscene, they then pass the case to the prosecuting authorities, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which has to decide whether to prosecute for a criminal offense under Section 2 of the OPA or to go for what is called “civil forfeiture” under Section 3. Section 2 cases may be heard either by magistrates or by a judge and jury, but defendants who opt for the judge and jury option run the risk of a tougher sentence if found guilty. If the CPS opts for Section 3 then the material is brought before local magistrates, who can either release it or issue a summons for its forfeiture. In the latter case, any interested party can contest the summons, although they rarely do so, as it risks attracting unwanted publicity in the local press. Section 3 has no criminal consequences (the proceedings are against the material and not its distributor) but it does deprive publishers of what ought to be their right to trial by jury, and of other safeguards of the criminal law. In essence, it is nothing more than a quick and convenient (for the authorities, that is)

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form of local censorship carried out by police who are perfectly well aware that the material in question might never be convicted by a jury, and by magistrates who may well be ill qualified to sit in judgment upon it. It was under these inauspicious circumstances that Fanny Hill was destroyed in 1964, having been refused a jury trial under Section 2. In 1972, 134,000 copies of 34 different books were seized from Olympia Press, thus forcing its closure. This was the publisher which, in spite of the best efforts of HM Customs and Excise to police this country’s both literal and metaphorical borders, had introduced the besieged English to Lawrence Durrell, J. P. Donleavy, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and William Burroughs—for which, in some quarters, it was quite clearly never forgiven. However, as noted at the start of this chapter, in recent years it has generally been assumed that prosecutions of the written word for obscenity were a thing of the past. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was spectacularly acquitted in 1960, and although Last Exit to Brooklyn was found guilty in 1966, the Court of Appeal overturned the verdict two years later. In 1976 the prosecution of Inside Linda Lovelace failed, and the police were reported as opining that if that book wasn’t obscene, nothing was—which, if you’ve read the anodyne, light-hearted, how-to-enjoy-oral-sex romp, tells you a great deal about the standards of the police at the time. Similarly, in the U.S.A., when Fanny Hill, which was originally banned in 1821, was published in 1963 under the title John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, it was once again banned on the grounds that it was obscene. However, the publisher appealed, and the Supreme Court acquitted it on the grounds that it did not meet the then prevailing test of obscenity, laid down in Roth v. United States (1957), namely that it had to (1) appeal to prurient interest; (2) be patently offensive; and (3) have no redeeming social value. The Court agreed that the book might fit the first two criteria, but not the third. It is the fact that no prosecutions for the written word had succeeded since the 1970s, and thus had, to all intents and purposes, been abandoned, which made the prosecution of G(S)A so surprising, and so very worrying. Given the importance attached by the British courts to legal precedent, had the case succeeded, the written word, wherever published, would once again have found itself menaced by the OPA. The fact that G(S)A was published on the Internet should have made no difference whatsoever, and had the prosecution succeeded, it could have established the extraordinarily dangerous principle that what is legal offline is not necessarily legal online. I am not a disinterested party in this case; throughout my academic and journalistic career I have been interested in the workings of obscenity law, and indeed I acted as an expert witness for Darryn Walker. Moreover, the gist of my evidence related precisely to the above point about the OPA and the written word. As I put it in my witness statement:

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It is clear that Girls (Scream) Aloud belongs to a genre of fantasy writing about celebrities that flourishes on the Internet (although it is by no means confined to it). Amongst this writing can easily be found examples which are erotic or pornographic, and amongst these are numerous stories involving BDSM. Girls is an example of such a story, albeit a fairly “heavy” one.

I then went on to discuss how one might relate this particular piece of writing to other forms of literature, and, in particular, to enquire whether it was any more explicit or shocking than other works of fiction which are currently on sale in bookshops up and down the land and via the Internet. In order to do so, I compared the descriptions of scenes of sexual violence in G(S)A with descriptions of similar scenes in J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, George Bataille’s Story of the Eye, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. My point in citing these works was not to suggest that G(S)A was a work of comparable literary merit (and could therefore avail itself of the “public good” defense available under the OPA) but simply to argue that the scenes of sexual violence in G(S)A were no more explicit than some of those in the works mentioned above, and that if G(S)A was judged to be obscene then the same charge could equally be levelled at other works openly available throughout the country. Attempting to forestall the response that G(S)A’s apparent lack of literary merit laid it open to prosecution in a way that would not be possible in the cases of the other works cited, I suggested that the problem with this line of argument is that it assumes that there are literary standards upon which everyone is agreed and that there is an absolute and watertight distinction between works of “high” and “low” culture. Without wishing to go the full relativist or postmodern hog, I would strongly query such an assumption. In this respect it needs to be borne in mind that it has actually taken considerable time (not to mention critical effort) for Ballard, Bataille, Burroughs, and de Sade to be recognized as major literary figures, and for some their representations of sex and violence still remain a major stumbling-block. Thus judgments of literary merit are fluid, time-bound, contestable and, increasingly, contested. This is not of course to argue that one day G(S)A will be spoken of in the same breath as Story of the Eye, but it is to suggest that, as its representations of sex and violence are no stronger than those to be found in other written works which are openly available, it should not be singled out for prosecution simply because it is deemed by some to possess no literary or other merits. A second reason that it is extremely hard to understand why G(S)A was prosecuted under the OPA has to do with the accessibility of the material itself. As already noted, the Act defines an article as obscene “if its effect … is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, in all circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.” The crucial words, in the present context, are “persons

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who are likely, in all circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter.” As Geoffrey Robertson and Andrew Nicol point out: “The Act adopts a relative definition of obscenity—relative, that is, to the ‘likely’ rather than the ‘conceivably possible’ readership.” They further emphasize that the Act’s provisions “ensure that the publication in question is judged by its impact on its primary audience,” not on the “vulnerable”, the “reasonable person” or any other such dubious construction (Robertson and Nicol 2008: 201). There are thus many reasons to question the applicability of the OPA to G(S)A. First, the story was published on The Kristen Archives, which is hosted by the Alt Sex Stories Text Repository (ASSTR). The alt.sex hierarchy of discussion groups forms part of usenet, one of the oldest surviving network communications systems still in use and pre-dating the World Wide Web by over ten years. ASSTR is effectively an archive of every story posted in alt.sex since its inception, containing over 400,000 stories. Material hosted on the site is subject to little moderation, and some of it is indeed strong stuff. G(S)A was archived in the category “Just Putrid Stories.” Click on this category, and the following warning comes up: “The stories within this site are nasty, horrible and disgusting. If you continue on from here, you’re doing so knowing full well that you will be viewing really putrid literature, so you have no cause to complain. These stories have been placed behind this page just so no one will stumble upon them by accident” (Just Putrid Stories). Had one navigated one’s way to G(S)A, the following would have appeared as a prologue: The following is a work of erotic/sadistic fantasy set in a world in which women are disposable sex objects that exist solely for the pleasure of men. It contains themes of extreme sexism, misogyny, torture, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, murder, execution and male supremacy over women. I cannot stress enough that this is STRICTLY FICTITIOUS and in no way reflects my own views or opinions towards women. Under no circumstances should the violent situations of this story be re-enacted in any way. ALWAYS practice safe sex with consenting partners of a legal age. The characters in this story are fictitious and any similarities between any persons living or dead are purely coincidental. If you are easily offended by the themes I have described above then please read no further. If you are unable to differentiate between fantasy and reality and your actions are in any way likely to be influenced by these fictional events then you are not the sort of person that I want reading my work and you should commit suicide before an innocent person gets hurt because of your sick and perverted persuasions.

In other words, it would have been incredibly difficult for anyone to have stumbled across G(S)A completely unawares, and the chances of its reaching anyone outside its “likely readership” or “primary audience” were remote

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in the extreme. However, according to the prosecuting counsel in the case, David Perry QC, quoted in the Guardian on June 29, 2009, it was prosecuted precisely because the young fans of Girls Aloud might have located it by accident while searching the net for news of the band: “A crucial aspect of the reasoning that led to the instigation of these proceedings was that the article in question, which was posted on the Internet, was accessible to young people who were particularly vulnerable—young people who were interested in a particular pop music group.” But as John (now Jane) Ozimek, another expert witness in this case (indeed the one whose testimony was crucial), explains, the very popularity of the band served only to increase the unlikelihood of this happening: The very fame of Girls Aloud acted as a buffer against such accidental stumbling. Simply using Google to look for “Girls Aloud” would produce millions of hits— with the story in question nowhere in sight. Add a range of terms—such as “rape”, “murder” etc. and the chances of finding the story become greater—but then the innocence of the searcher must be brought into question. Go into safe search mode—and the story cannot be found at all. In other words, if parents regulate their children’s access to the internet, the entire basis for this case goes away. (Ozimek 2009)

So, the next serious question which this case raises is: Why on earth, if the OPA has effectively ceased to be used to prosecute the written word, and if G(S)A was highly unlikely to reach anyone outside its “likely readership,” did the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) report it to the police in the first place? Did they simply not understand the terms of the OPA and current prosecution practice in respect of that Act? In order to answer this question, we need to delve into the origins and functions of the IWF. In Britain, the increasingly widespread use of the Internet in the 1990s ignited a moral panic about the easy accessibility of pornography in cyberspace, and it was not long before the police were making it abundantly clear that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which hosted material which the authorities deemed illegal would be prosecuted as the “publishers” of that material, while the government let it be known that unless ISPs embraced self-regulation, the job would be done by legislation. This perfectly illustrates the point made by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu (2006: 73) that: Internet Service Providers are the obvious first target for a strategy of intermediary control. It can be great fun to talk about the Internet as a formless cyberspace. But … underneath it all is an ugly physical transport infrastructure: copper wires, fibre-optic cables, and the specialised routers and switches that direct information from place to place. The physical network is by necessity a local asset, owned by phone companies, cable companies, and other service

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Law, Criminality, and Obscenity  141 providers who are already some of the most regulated companies on earth. This makes ISPs the most important and most obvious gatekeepers to the Internet. Governments can achieve a large degree of control by focusing on the most important ISPs that service the majority of Internet users.

The direct result of what can only be described as a campaign of threats and bullying was that in September 1996 the major ISPs set up the Internet Watch Foundation (initially known as the Safety Net Foundation), a selfregulatory industry body to which members of the public could report Internet content that they deemed illegal, particularly in the area of child pornography. However, after three years, the government decided that the IWF was insufficiently effective and its workings were reviewed for the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Home Office by the consultants KPMG and Denton Hall. As a result, a number of changes were made to the organization’s role and structure, and it was relaunched in early 2000, endorsed by the government and the DTI, which played a “facilitating role in its creation” according to a DTI spokesman. Today the IWF describes itself on its website as: The UK internet Hotline for the public and IT professionals to report criminal online content in a secure and confidential way. The Hotline service can be used anonymously to report content within our remit. We work in partnership with the online industry, law enforcement, government, and international partners to minimise the availability of this content, specifically: • • • •

child sexual abuse images hosted anywhere in the world criminally obscene adult content hosted in the UK incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the UK.

The IWF further explains that: We help internet service providers and hosting companies to combat the abuse of their networks through our “notice and takedown” service which alerts them to content within our remit so they can remove it from their networks and we provide unique data to law enforcement partners in the UK and abroad to assist investigations into the distributors. (Internet Watch Foundation)

What this means in practice is that once the IWF has reported to the police the presence of content which it deems illegal, a British-based ISP will have no excuse in law that it was unaware of the presence of this material. In the highly unlikely event that an ISP ignores the IWF’s services, it will be contacted by the police and told to remove the material in question or face prosecution.

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Now, as the ISP which hosted G(S)A was based abroad, it was beyond the grasp of the IWF and the British police, but Darryn Walker wasn’t, and, thanks initially to the actions of the IWF, he was charged with a serious criminal offense. So this affair raises not only questions about the IWF’s competence when it comes to understanding the terms of the OPA but even more profound questions about the legitimacy and accountability of a body whose actions can ultimately lead to people going to prison, and, in some cases, being put on the Sex Offenders Register as well. (One might also add that it is extremely difficult to have any faith in a body which appears to fall hook, line and sinker for the oldest tabloid trick in the book—engaging in a circulation-boosting stunt under the guise of expressing moral outrage.) Although it was originally set up and now operates with strong governmental support, it is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act and its workings have never been the subject of any sustained parliamentary or public scrutiny or debate. But, then again, why should it be? The IWF does not enjoy even the dubious status of a quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization), and indeed takes considerable pains to stress in its literature and on its website that it is an independent, self-regulatory body. The problem, however, is that as such it lacks any kind of democratic legitimacy and legal authority for its actions, unlike, for example, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which carries out its video classification and censorship functions under the Video Recordings Act 1984, and whose classifications accordingly have statutory force, or the telecommunications regulator Ofcom, whose activities are statutorily underpinned by the Communications Act 2003. Furthermore, as the addition of “criminally obscene adult content hosted in the UK” and “incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK” to the IWF’s remit (which originally focused on child porn) ably testifies, ill-defined bodies such as this are all too prone to mission creep, whereby, without any proper public discussion, they quietly expand the range of their activities—usually under pressure from governments keen not to be seen to be acting as a censor and always on the look-out for “armslength” bodies ready and willing to do their dirty work for them. It is difficult to avoid the conclusions that either the IWF did not understand that the written word was effectively no longer captured by the OPA, or that it thought that different standards applied, or should be applied, to the written word on the Internet as opposed to the written word in other forms of media. Exactly the same considerations apply both to the police and to the Crown Prosecution Service. A further possible explanation for the behaviour of the police is that they were involved in some kind of fishing expedition during the course of which, they hoped, examination of Walker’s home and his computer would turn up yet more incriminating material. One’s suspicions that this may have been the case here are somewhat aroused by the fact that the transcript of Walker’s interview

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reveals that he was asked whether there were any images of children on his computer, as well as about the age of a character who features in Age of Execution, another story which he had posted on the Internet. Unfortunately this is an all-too-common police tactic in cases such as this; horror fans who have traded in videos not classified by the BBFC, and who were thus technically in breach of the Video Recordings Act, have had their homes raided by the police, and their correspondence, diaries, bank books, and much else besides seized and minutely examined (for further details of this kind of activity see Petley 2000). Another possibility is that the police may have been engaged in a spot of moral entrepreneurship. As I have pointed out elsewhere, when in 2005 the government consulted on creating a new offence of possessing “extreme pornography”, A worryingly large number of the police responses were marked by bitter resentment that those arrested and charged under the Obscene Publications Act had dared to avail themselves of the defences available under it, demands for more resources so that the proposed new measure could be enforced effectively, and complaints that the proposed offences were too narrow and the proposed sentences too short. (Petley 2009b: 427–8)

It may or may not be coincidental that the response from the Protection of Adults and Children Team, Kent Police, argued that: There remains a legislative gap in terms of written fantasy material specifically about child rape and murder, which is now commonplace. The legislation should include the possession of written or printed material of this nature as it is equally disturbing as the images and equally contributes to an offender’s motivation and fantasy.2

But, whatever the case, the officers interviewing Walker made their attitude towards G(S)A abundantly clear, describing it as “pretty sick” and “sick stuff,” while a paraphrase notes that “the officer pointed out that the defendant did not seem to realise why police believed his story to be such a problem.” However, as we have seen, in a legal sense, which is the only sense that really mattered in Walker’s situation, there really was no problem, that is, outside the minds of the IWF and the police. Nonetheless, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided that there was a case to answer under the OPA, and Walker was charged. In the face of enquiries by John/Jane Ozimek, myself and other interested parties, the CPS remained characteristically tight-lipped about this case, and consequently we have to rely to some extent on informed speculation

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concerning its progress towards the courts. What we do know is that the original decision to prosecute was signed off by the Chief Prosecutor of the CPS regional office for Northumbria. But whether the decision to prosecute was referred upwards to the CPS head office in London, and in particular to its head, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), we do not know, although there was a persistent rumor that when the London office discovered what was happening it tried and failed to halt the proceedings. It does need to be made clear that there was no necessity at law for such a referral to be made, but this in itself is anomalous, since prosecutions under the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 for the new offense of possessing “extreme pornography” mentioned above do require the DPP’s involvement. But even though no referral was legally required, it would surely have been odd if none had been made, given the importance of the case. Perhaps the local CPS thought that Walker, cowed by the negative publicity which his case had already attracted in the local and national media, would simply roll over and plead guilty. As noted earlier, this is a familiar police and prosecution tactic, and the former are certainly adept at ensuring that miscreants in the kinds of Video Recordings Act cases mentioned above get an extremely rough ride in the local press. But, whatever the case, it is crucial to understand that, had Walker been found guilty, the convention which has made the written word safe from prosecution under the OPA for more than 30 years would have been overturned at a stroke. This might have been merely an unintended by-product of the Northumbria CPS action, but equally it might have been a deliberate attempt to “rescue” the written word for the OPA and to reinforce the increasingly insistent message coming from the authorities that the Internet, at least in Britain, is by no means a censor-free zone. In this respect it is interesting that at the time of this whole affair, Kirsty Brimelow, a barrister with Doughty Street Chambers, stated that: There have been rumblings within the legal profession for some time over difficulties policing the internet. There is so much disgusting material that is easily accessible to the general public and can hardly be described as being in the public good. The legal system needs to tackle the internet and draw the line between unsavoury material and that which should be classified as criminal. (quoted in Ozimek 2008)

However, to his enormous credit, and in a decision for which any writer published in the UK should personally thank him, Walker refused to be bullied into submission and decided to exercise his right to trial by jury. By this time, not in the least coincidentally, he had lost his job. But, paradoxically, this actually helped him to fight the case, since he was eligible for legal aid. Had he been in employment, he might still have been eligible for a limited amount of this aid, but such is the stinginess of the legal aid

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scheme (which has since become meaner still) that he would have had to have paid a significant amount of the legal expenses involved, which would have been completely beyond his limited resources. Some 99.9 percent of people who will be denied legal aid under the new regulations will not be guilty of transgressions in the sense with which this book is concerned— rather they will be poor people unable to take action against their local council or some other powerful body which has wronged them. I hope by now I have made it clear that if this case had been lost, no bookshop in the land would have been safe, and publishers would have undoubtedly begun to self-censor. In that the Internet is a global medium, and that other countries are also looking to censor it in line with their own particular standards and concerns, the issues raised by Walker’s case are global ones, a point which I will discuss at the end of this chapter. What this story is primarily about is an attempt, which was nearly successful, to censor the Internet in the U.K., using U.K. laws and applying U.K. standards. It is also about what would have happened to the written word in general in the U.K. had the case succeeded. More broadly, it also sheds some light on the horrible, insidious, creeping authoritarianism that now so disfigures the U.K. However to return to the case in hand, by being unemployed, Walker was able to recruit the services of one of the major law firms in the north east, Kidd Spoor Taylor, who hired a leading QC, Tim Owen, who in turn was able to draw on the services of five expert witnesses. The CPS responded by hiring the leading QC, David Perry. By this time, the whole process had taken on a momentum of its own and seemed strangely unstoppable. Because, when Walker came to court on June 29, 2009, the prosecution produced no evidence, Justice Esmond Faulkes formally returned a not guilty verdict, and Walker was a free man. The CPS then issued a statement to the effect that: The prosecution had received [from the defence] a number of expert reports, one of which [Ozimek’s] cast doubt over the accessibility of the article to people searching the Internet and that it could only be found by those determined to find it. The prosecution was unable to provide sufficient evidence to contradict this and so took the decision there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction. (Crown Prosecution Service)

So, if you’re a friend of free expression, even if in this case you may not personally like the form of expression involved, this story has a happy ending. Well, kind of, and with distinct reservations. Walker was arrested, interrogated, and brought before a court—each of these a considerable ordeal in itself. Certainly in court he was visibly shaken in the extreme. His home and his computer were searched. His name was thoroughly

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besmirched by the press, both locally and nationally. He lost his job and couldn’t get another one. So on being found not guilty, did he receive a fulsome apology? No, he most certainly did not. And although the state signally failed to prove Walker guilty, he may well permanently find himself in the totally unacceptable position of having, to all intents and purposes, to prove himself innocent. Dirt sticks, and no more so than in today’s Big Brother state. So, for example, any potential employer requesting an enhanced Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check on Walker will have information disclosed to them about this case, even though he was found not guilty and the whole futile process collapsed in ignominy. Indeed, even entirely unfounded allegations, and allegations which have not resulted in any charges being brought, can now be included on people’s police records, thereby significantly endangering their employment chances— not to mention their reputations. Take, for example, the case of John Pinnington who, in 2005, was fired from his new job as deputy principal of Thomley Hall, a college for autistic children in Oxfordshire, after his employers had requested an enhanced CRB check. This revealed an unsubstantiated allegation of sexual abuse that had been made against him by an autistic child at another college for which he had previously worked. The police had investigated the allegation at the time and dismissed it. Nevertheless, the police argued that the law required them to disclose these allegations and, as a consequence, Pinnington lost his job, and his future chances of employment in a job involving contact with children were severely curtailed (Leach 2008). Furthermore, at the time of Walker’s abortive trial, the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 meant that anyone wishing to work in any way at all with children or vulnerable adults was shortly to face the requirement of being scrutinized and licensed by the newly created Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) under its Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS). The government estimated that some 11.3 million people would need to be on the database, but critics of this truly Orwellian nightmare put the figure as high as 14.3 million. Again, hearsay, rumor, and unfounded suspicion, known in the ever-swelling surveillance trade as “soft information,” would have been quite enough to get you on to the list and thereby wreck your employment chances. Indeed, no less a figure than Richard Thomas, the U.K.’s first Information Commissioner, counseled explicitly against the inclusion of such information and warned that if officials “start making wrong decisions or allow the data to get into the wrong hands the scope for damage to be done both to individuals and the system as a whole is quite considerable” (quoted in Slack 2009). Thus, for example, guidance given to case workers at the ISA reveals that those referred could be permanently blocked from work if aspects of their home life or attitudes are judged to be unsatisfactory. This states that case workers should be “minded to bar” cases referred to them if they feel “definite

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concerns” about at least two aspects of their life. Thus, for example, if a teaching assistant was believed to be “unable to sustain emotionally intimate relationships” and also had a “chaotic, unstable lifestyle,” he or she could be barred from ever working with children. Similarly, if a nurse was judged to suffer from “severe emotional loneliness” and believed to have “poor coping skills,” his or her career could also be ended (quoted in Donnelly 2011). It should also be pointed out that the case workers required to make these extremely sensitive judgments need have no minimum qualification or experience, are almost bound to err on the side of caution, and can decide whether someone should be barred from working with children or vulnerable adults without even seeing the person concerned (see also Barrett et al. 2010; Furedi and Bristow 2010). When the full implications of the VBS very belatedly began to sink in (when, for example, parents who gave their children’s friends a lift to school, or children’s writers who visited schools for one-off talks, realized that they would need to be vetted), public revulsion grew, but the government refused to budge an inch. However, the new coalition government which came to power in April 2010 postponed the implementation of the VBS (which was intended to go live in July) and at the time of writing is still reviewing the whole process. But should it rear its ugly head again, it is highly doubtful whether Walker, or anyone else in a similar position, could ever get a job working with (in the loosest sense of “with”) children and vulnerable adults. While one might breathe a sigh of relief that the convention that the written word will not be prosecuted under the OPA remains intact, and that it has also been established that this convention applies to words published online as well as in print, the fear now is that the authorities are increasingly creating other laws to suppress material of which they disapprove, especially on the Internet. Of course, there is as an absolutely glaring inconsistency here, as Tim Owen pointed out: On the one hand it is government policy to extend broadband access to every home in the country, while at the same time we all know that this enables one mouse click to the unpoliceable world of porn. The idea that, in a world where almost anyone can be an online publisher, you can use the 1959 legislation to police the written word on the internet is completely unrealistic. (quoted in Hirsch 2009)

But the solution to this problem, from the authorities’ point of view, is not to wake up to the complexities of regulating the media in a democracy in the Internet age but instead to work themselves up into an ever more illiberal frenzy in an effort to control not the uncontrollable but, rather, that which can be controlled only by the imposition of measures which

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one associates with non-democratic countries such as China and Saudi Arabia, which are an affront to civil liberties, and which are almost certainly in breach of the obligations imposed on the authorities by the Human Rights Act 1998. Thus, in the area of obscenity, we have witnessed not only this specific attempt to “rescue” the written word for the OPA, but, more generally, a gradual but very definite move away from a law based on the tendency of certain works to “deprave and corrupt” their likely audience and towards laws which take a “laundry list” approach to the subject, and which thus make it easier to prosecute works which are deemed by the authorities to be in some way sexually transgressive. In particular, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act makes it an offense even to possess, never mind distribute, what it calls an “extreme pornographic image.” The Act defines an image as pornographic if “it is of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal” and as extreme if it is “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character” and if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following: • an act which threatens a person’s life; • an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals; • an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse; • a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive); • and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real.

From the authorities’ point of view the measure has the obvious beauty of tick-box simplicity, leaving no opportunity for the defendant to argue that the material in question does not “deprave or corrupt” or has some form of literary or other merit: if the necessary ingredients are present in a work or works in their possession then they are automatically guilty, are liable to be sent to prison, and will have their names entered on the Sex Offenders Register, which will all but destroy their job prospects. On one level, the narrative outlined above all too clearly illustrates some of the processes whereby the U.K. has achieved the dubious distinction of becoming one of the most heavily surveilled societies in the world. The most powerful driver behind this plunge into the world of Big Brother (and in this context it is extremely important to understand that Orwell’s 1984 is about the U.K., not the U.S.S.R.) has undoubtedly been the “war on terror,” in which people have been frightened into abdicating many of their rights and freedoms in exchange for enhanced “security”. Specifically in relation to the Internet, the much-trumpeted presence there

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of material regarded as transgressive by the authorities has played a key role in legitimating ever greater levels of surveillance of its users. Some of this material relates directly to the “war on terror”—thus, for example, the Terrorism Act 2006, passed as a result of the London bombings of July 2005, makes it an offense to publish anything which directly or indirectly encourages people to commit, instigate, or prepare acts of terrorism, with indirect encouragement including anything that glorifies terrorist acts and offenses (whether in the past, future, or generally) and from which it could reasonably be inferred that these acts or offenses are to be emulated at the present moment. The first person to be convicted under this Act was a young woman who had written poems in praise of the Mujahideen and expressing her desire to be a martyr; it has also been used against students researching terrorism and extremism who have downloaded the “wrong” kind of material. In terms of sexually transgressive material, ever since the Internet became a popular communications medium, it has been attended in the U.K. by fears about what it contains, fears which have been greatly fanned by the popular press. Thus, in February 1994, the Home Affairs Committee published a report whose opening words were: “Computer pornography is a new horror,” and in 1996 the Observer’s new technology correspondent noted that, to judge from British media coverage of the Internet, there are basically only three stories: “Cyberporn invades Britain”; “Police crack Internet sex pervert ring”; and “Net addicts lead sad virtual lives” (quoted in Craig and Petley 2001: 190). Such stories have continued to proliferate, and have quite clearly played a role in helping to legitimate the growing determination on the part of the UK authorities to regulate the Internet. That such determination exists is indubitable. For example, when David Currie stepped down as chair of the telecommunications regulator Ofcom in 2008, he noted that there was no mention of the Internet in the Communications Act 2003, arguing that at the time it was passed, Parliament took the view that it was “still so new and its implications so uncertain that a period of legislative forbearance was called for.” He then added: “Ask most legislators today and, where they think about it, they will say that period is coming to an end” (quoted in Petley 2009a: 80). The various ways in which this period is indeed coming to an end are neatly illustrated by the story which is the main subject of this chapter. The activities of the Internet Watch Foundation illustrate two of those ways, namely requiring U.K.-based ISPs to block certain kinds of material regarded by the authorities as transgressive, and informing the police of the presence of such material. The activities of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service illustrate regulation in the most basic and old-fashioned sense of the term—namely arresting and arraigning an alleged transgressor: the utopian idea that in cyberspace one is in some way or other beyond the reach of the law, either literally or metaphorically, is usefully detonated

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by what happened to Darryn Walker. And the creation of the offense of merely possessing, in whatever form, certain kinds of pornography is clearly meant to deter potential transgressors from accessing this kind of material in the first place, particularly if it’s on the Internet—in other words, it installs a censor inside the head of the individual subject. Taken both singly and together, these measures clearly depend for their success on a high level of both surveillance of Internet users and awareness on the part of those users that they may indeed be the subjects of surveillance. There are obvious parallels here with the operations of the Panopticon, and I have explored these elsewhere (Petley 2009b). I have argued throughout this chapter that the story of Darryn Walker and the issues to which it relates, namely the growing official intolerance of various forms of transgressive material and the steady development of the database state and the surveillance society, go way beyond the rights and wrongs of the particular case of G(S)A to present an extremely worrying reflection on the state of civil liberties and human rights in the U.K. today. But it goes further still by illustrating the various ways in which the Internet can, in practice, be censored and its users surveilled and disciplined by any state which chooses so to do. Such behavior is normally thought to be confined to authoritarian countries such as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Burma, but it is technically possible anywhere. What generally deters democracies from behaving in this manner, or at least from doing so overtly, is the fear of being seen to overstep the democratic mark and to act in a manner which recalls Orwell’s Big Brother. In such circumstances, however, fears about the presence of transgressive material of one kind or another can be and indeed are exploited to justify censorious and oppressive behavior which might otherwise be thought to be beyond the democratic pale. This is precisely what has happened in the U.K., while in Australia the government is pressing ahead with plans for the mandatory blocking of net pages refused classification by the Australian Communications and Media and Communications Authority, and Nicholas Sarkozy has made it clear that he plans to use France’s presidency of the G8 in 2011 to promote international cooperation on greater regulation of the Internet. The U.S.A. is, of course, extremely fortunate in having the First Amendment, which would make most of the censorious behavior outlined in this chapter impossible there, but even in the U.S.A. the presence on the Internet of material deemed sexually transgressive by the authorities has served as the pretext for attempts at censorship such as the Communications Decency Act in 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act in 1998, although these were ultimately seen off by the Supreme Court thanks to the First Amendment. However, more recently, Internet content which is regarded by some as transgressing not sexual boundaries but national security considerations, namely the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, has ignited calls for censorship of all sorts and kinds—Peter

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King, of the House Homeland Security Committee, called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be charged with terrorism, Newt Gingrich suggested he be treated as an “enemy combatant,” Vice-President Joe Biden labelled him a “hi-tech” terrorist, the US Air Force forbade its members from looking at the websites of those newspapers which had published information from WikiLeaks, the Justice Department opened a criminal probe with a view to bringing possible criminal charges under the Espionage Act, the Library of Congress blocked access to the site, the White House Office of Management and Budget forbade all unauthorized federal government employees from accessing classified documents on WikiLeaks or any other site, companies such as Amazon, Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal cut financial links with the site, and so on. And yet, at the beginning of the year, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton had delivered a ringing endorsement of Internet freedom, proclaiming that “we stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas” and that “access to information helps citizens hold their own governments accountable” (Clinton 2010). This speech was very clearly aimed at the Chinese authorities, notable for having constructed what has been called the Great Firewall of China in order to keep out material which they regard as transgressive in ways both political and sexual, but it is quite clear that democratic countries too can and do censor the Internet and surveil its users when it comes to matters which they in turn deem to be transgressive. The definitions of the transgressive may indeed vary from country to country, but its usefulness as a pretext for censorship and surveillance is, it seems, universal.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Tim Owen QC of Matrix Chambers, Andrew Wraith of Kidd Spoor Taylor, Jane Fae Ozimek and Clarissa Smith for their various contributions to this chapter. 2. Responses to the consultation were initially available on the Home Office website. However, they are now no longer there.

References Barrett, Mervyn, Sue White and David Wastell. 2010. Why We Should Scrap the Vetting Database. London: The Manifesto Club, http://www.manifestoclub.com/socialworkreport (last accessed January 11, 2011). Clinton, Hilary Rodham. 2010. Remarks on Internet Freedom, 21 January. http://www.state. gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm (last accessed January 11, 2011). Craig, Thomas and Julian Petley. 2001. Invasion of the Internet Abusers: Marketing Fears About the Information Superhighway. In III Effects (2nd edn), edited by Martin Barker and Julian Petley. London: Routledge. Crown Prosecution Service. 2009. CPS Statement on Darryn Walker. http://www.cps.gov.uk/ news/press_statements/cps_statement_on_darryn_walker/. Davies, Nick. 2008. Flat Earth News. London: Chatto & Windus. Donnelly, Laura. 2011. Innocent People Could Have Lives Wrecked by “Big Brother”

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152  Pornography and Beyond Vetting Checks. Daily Telegraph, January 17, 2011 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/ 7279600/Innocent-people-could-have-lives-wrecked-by-Big-Brother-vetting-checks. html (last accessed January 11, 2011). Furedi, Frank and Jenny Bristow. 2010. Licensed to Hug (2nd edn). London: Civitas. Goldsmith, Jack and Tim Wu. 2006. Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, Afua. 2009. How to Police Popslash. Guardian, July 4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2009/jul/04/girls-scream-aloud-obscenity-laws (last accessed January 11, 2011). Internet Watch Foundation. About the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). http://www.iwf. org.uk/about-iwf (last accessed January 11, 2011). Just Putrid Stories. http://www.asstr.org/~Kristen/putrid/index.htm (last accessed January 11, 2011). Leach, Ben. 2008. John Pinnington Sacked After CRB Check Reveals Unsubstantiated Abuse Allegations. Daily Telegraph, June 29. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2213421/ John-Pinnington-sacked-after-CRB-check-reveals-unsubstantiated-abuse-allegations.html (last accessed January 11, 2001). McManus, John H. 1994. Market-Driven Journalism: Let the Citizen Beware? Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ozimek, John. 2008. The Obscene Publications Act Rides Again. The Register, October 6. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/06/obscene_publication_girls_aloud/ (last accessed January 11, 2011). Ozimek, John. 2009. UK Obscenity Law: Where to Now? The Register, June 30. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/30/obscenity_law_where_now/ (last accessed January 11, 2011). Petley, Julian. 2000. “Snuffed Out”: Nightmares in a Trading Standards Officer’s Brain. In Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics, edited by Xavier Mendik and Graeme Harper. Guildford: FAB Press. Petley, Julian. 2009a. Web Control. Index on Censorship 38(1): 78–90. Petley, Julian. 2009b. Pornography, Panopticism and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. Sociology Compass 3(3): 417–32. Robertson, Geoffrey and Andrew Nicol. 2008. Media Law (5th edn). London: Penguin. Slack, James. 2009. Big Brother Database on Adults Working with Children May Ruin Innocent Lives, Warns Watchdog. Mail Online, June 11, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-1192207/Big-Brother-database-adults-working-children-ruin-innocent-lives-warnswatchdog.html last accessed January, 2011.

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9 Abusing the Media Viral Validity in a Republic of Spam MARK NUNES What counts as “legitimate” political discourse in a network society in which increasing numbers of individuals have the means to gather, critique, alter, and/or circulate information? In such a media landscape, what constitutes a valid political act? Transgressive engagements with media provide a useful entry into a discussion of these topics by forcing us to come to terms with what it means to engage in proper or legitimate political action. Theories of tactical media use suggest that hoaxes, pranks, and other subversive acts force our awareness onto the often unquestioned ideologies and underlying power structures in a wide-reaching forum, and in doing so provide a much-needed corrective (or purgative, perhaps) to that system. Implied in this reading of tactical misappropriations of mass media is an assumption that a kind of didactic or dialectic moment underpins these transgressive acts—that once the prank or hoax has played itself out, this transgressive impulse gives way to a legitimizing framework that justifies the attempt at subversion. One must be careful, it would seem, that when calling attention to the systemic failures and limitations of our mediated public sphere, one does not merely amplify the noise. To do otherwise would be just plain wrong, right?

The Harding Institute On the day after the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, members of the McCain-Palin campaign began to break rank. For weeks, we were informed, McCain aides had been harboring strong misgivings about Sarah Palin’s qualifications for the office of vice-president. Fox News Chief Carl Cameron broke the news on the Fox Report, stating: “we are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA … . We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent rather than … a country just in 154

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itself” (“Fox News” 2008). Repeating these allegations on The O’Reilly Factor, Cameron stated: “She didn’t understand, McCain aides told me today, that Africa was a continent and not a country and actually asked them … if South Africa wasn’t just part of the country as opposed to a country in the continent” (“Fox’s Carl” 2008). As might be expected (and as many will remember), the story spread quickly across the media. By Friday, Palin was back in Anchorage, declaring the allegations “cruel and … mean-spirited,” “immature,” and “unprofessional,” calling the anonymous sources “cowardly,” and criticizing them for “taking things out of context and then [trying] to spread something on national news” (Yardley and Cooper 2008). By Monday, however, at least one campaign aide proved willing to step forward and name himself as Carl Cameron’s source: Martin Eisenstadt. Martin Eisenstadt is a Senior Fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy, a conservative think-tank dedicated to propagating the work and beliefs of twenty-ninth President of the United States Warren G. Harding. On his blog that Monday morning, Eisenstadt (2008a) wrote: I was perfectly happy staying under the radar as an anonymous source for Fox News’ Carl Cameron, but now that Palin has accused her accusers … and begun to cast doubt on the Fox News report, maybe she’s right to a certain extent. For those of us on the McCain campaign who thought that she acted like a rogue diva and lost John the election, maybe we DO have a responsibility to come out in public. But Sarah … careful what you ask for: some of us may have more to reveal. So yes, to be clear, last week I was the one who leaked those things to a producer at Fox News who works with Cameron. Carl and his producers are good guys, and I don’t want them to have to worry about protecting their sources (and going through the wringer ala [sic] Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) on something like this.

Once again, it did not take long for the news to spread. This time it would be MSNBC with the on-air scoop, with David Shuster declaring: “we now have a face and a name with these allegations: a McCain foreign policy advisor” and quoting directly on air from Eisenstadt’s blog (“Schuster” [sic] 2008). The only problem: Martin Eisenstadt is a fictional character. Two days after MSNBC’s “scoop,” the New York Times reported that “a pair of obscure filmmakers” named Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish were responsible for a year-long hoax that culminated in this well-timed posting on November 10. What started as an attempt at a TV pilot—a parking attendant “spouting offensive, opinionated nonsense in praise of Rudolph W. Giuliani”— evolved (after Giuliani dropped out of the race) into the figure of Martin Eisenstadt, founder of the Eisenstadt Group, Senior Fellow at the (equally fictitious) Harding Institute, and John McCain campaign advisor. His blog

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offered readers “insider knowledge … [mixing] weird-but-true items with false ones that were plausible, if just barely.” Although he was revealed as a hoax on more than one occasion in the months leading up to the presidential election, that did not stop fellow political bloggers from citing him as a source. And while it would not have taken much more than a Google search to uncover the hoax, on the morning of November 10, MSNBC was far from alone in taking the bait—with the Los Angeles Times and The New Republic also falling for the hoax, along with blogs across the political spectrum (Pérez-Peña 2008). The success of the Eisenstadt hoax, or any hoax for that matter, depends on the media’s inability to affirm any reality beyond its own incessant circulation of signals. The hoax offers up “culture jamming in its purest form,” according to Mark Dery (1993), calling attention to the carnival of information that has supplanted public discourse. Without question, hoaxes are a form of “bad” behavior—they are “creative crimes,” to use Jello Biafra’s phrase, intent on “abusing the very mass media that sedates the public” (quoted in Dery 1993). As veteran hoaxer Joey Skaggs 1 notes, hoaxes are not “mere” jokes on mass media; by abusing the media, they provide opportunities to reveal the inherent failures within the media system through a form of asymmetrical warfare: “As Joey Skaggs, I can’t call a press conference to talk about how the media has been turned into a government propaganda machine… . But as a jammer, I can go into these issues in the process of revealing a hoax” (quoted in Dery 1993). The response of the media to a hoax, once it has been exposed, is fairly predictable—and the Eisenstadt prank was no exception: the hoax served as a cautionary tale for an industry and a profession increasingly driven by the rush to find and break headlines within a 24-hour news cycle.2 And it would seem that such was the moral intended by Gorlin and Mirvish themselves, who indict not only the cable news networks but also the myriad bloggers who link to and perpetuate whatever story is most likely to spread, regardless of the source. They conclude: “Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television” (quoted in Pérez-Peña 2008). Yet while similar pranks that expose and exploit flaws in the source vetting process have been celebrated as effective instances of tactical media interventions (such as the Bhopal/Dow Chemical “apology” perpetrated on the BBC by The Yes Men on November 29, 2004), the Eisenstadt hoax was for the most part either dismissed as a trivial stunt or condemned for its detrimental impact on public debate. Sheldon Rampton (2008), for example, writing for Counterpunch, bemoans the fact that while Eisenstadt had been exposed as early as the summer of 2008, the hoax continued to “[inject] a significant amount of noise and confusion into American political discourse … even after it has been repeatedly exposed.” William K. Wolfrum, the blogger who persistently worked to reveal the hoax in the

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months leading up to November, likewise calls attention to the distracting effects of the Eisenstadt blog: “As if there isn’t enough misinformation on this election, it was shocking to see so much time wasted on things that didn’t exist” (quoted in Pérez-Peña 2008). His interview in the New York Times ends with Pérez-Peña asking (somewhat tongue-in-cheek): “and how can we know that Mr. Wolfrum is real and not part of the hoax?” to which Wolfrum can only respond: “Yeah, that’s a tough one.” The light-hearted exchange, however, gets to a core issue in distinguishing the Eisenstadt hoax from more celebrated pranks: while hoaxes function subversively by passing themselves off as something they are not, a “good” hoax, it would seem, must always “come clean” at some point and return to a form of legitimate communication (a good faith effort to speak the truth) in order for it to do its political work. The “bad” hoax, however, driven by an errant desire to confuse and mislead, simply adds to the noise within the mediascape. This view is apparent in Rampton’s comments on the “ethics” of hoaxing. While he acknowledges the target of Gorlin and Mirvish’s prank—their critique of the media’s willingness to run with an unvetted source—he distinguishes the Eisenstadt hoax from other media hoaxes by their unwillingness to call off the game once the hoax was exposed. Joey Skaggs (1999) himself makes a similar distinction between the “good prank … meant to target closed-mindedness, prejudice, hatred and unquestioning thinking” and scams with a more vicious or sophomoric intent—“the equivalent of the burning-bag-of-poop-at-the-door trick on the Internet.” Likewise, in Mother Jones, Dave Gilson (2009) cites Eisenstadt as one of a “new crop of political pranksters” motivated by “attention, rather than intention” and with “little agenda beyond yucks—and bucks.” Such an argument maintains that without this moment of return to legitimate communication, more harm comes from the hoax than from the noisy media system it purports to prank. From Rampton’s analysis, the Eisenstadt/Palin hoax resulted in what Philip K. Dick called the fake fake: “an authentic object that has been made to look as though it is in fact non-genuine. The Eisenstadt hoax has actually turned Carl Cameron’s story about Sarah Palin into a real-world ‘fake fake.’ In the process, it has created a great deal of empty, pointless noise and confusion.” And the “pointless noise” continues. While Gorlin and Mirvish have indeed stepped forward as the hoax’s perpetrators, they have not retired Martin Eisenstadt. In the weeks following their interview for the New York Times article, Eisenstadt (2008b) blogged and released a video in which he “exposed” the Pérez-Peña article as itself an elaborate hoax—part of the Yes Men’s hoax edition of the New York Times, which was distributed on November 12, 2008—the same date as the Pérez-Peña piece. He elaborates on this campaign of misinformation targeted against him in his “memoir,” I am Martin Eisenstadt (written by Martin Eisenstadt, but copyright Mirvish and Gorlin), in which he also distances himself from the “charlatans

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Gorlin and Mirvish” as “willing opportunists, all too happy to be portrayed as brilliant media satirists” (Eisenstadt 2009: 272). It would be easier to claim that Eisenstadt has morphed from hoax into satirical character (in the style of Stephen Colbert’s on-air persona) were it not for the fact that blog postings as recent as the summer of 2010 still seem intent on duping bloggers and mass media outlets with misinformation.3 While revealing themselves as perpetrators of a hoax, Gorlin and Mirvish have, in effect, allowed Martin Eisenstadt to thrive in his chosen profession. “Good faith” hoaxes have found their place within a critical discourse surrounding tactical media. What, though, of the prank that refuses to “play nice” by never calling off the game? Are such transgressions merely burning bags of poop at the door of new media, or is there a political engagement at work? To get at this question, we must first address some of the underlying assumptions about what it means to “do politics” in new media.

The Internet, Politics, and Rational(ist) Discourse In many ways, the dominant discourse addressing the political potential of new media has changed very little over the past decade: distributed networks grant access, thereby placing political processes into the hands of the people. We see this in the rhetorical framing of the 1998 “Move On” email petition, which within days had collected thousands of signatures and enough momentum to eventually become its own political action committee. A similar rhetorical framing accompanied the ousting of President Estrada in Manila in 2001, when middle-class Filipinos coordinated mass demonstrations through a take-over of television and through the viral spread of cell phone text messages (Rafael 2006: 299). Clay Shirky (2008) gives a similar interpretation to flash mob events in St. Petersburg in 2004, and in Belarus in 2006, where Short Message Service (SMS) texting allowed not only coordination of mass gatherings, but provided access to a means of publicizing, through word and image, an assembled people’s resistance and a government’s oppressive response (pp. 164–71). As recently as David Kirkpatrick’s (2010) The Facebook Effect we hear a similar tale: how through the Facebook group “Un Millon de Voces Contra Las FARC,” citizens inside and outside of Columbia gained access to an efficient tool for voicing resistance to and coordinating mass demonstrations against terror and oppression (Kirkpatrick 2010: 1–8). In the instances cited above, access to new media allows for a form of insurgent politics that shares some key features with the asymmetrical tactics of the media hoax. Note, however, how “access” conflates political and technical concerns as civic participation becomes a matter of one’s ability to send, receive, and relay messages. In the words of Joe Trippi (2004: 4): “If information is power, then this new technology—which is the

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first to evenly distribute information—is really distributing power”; and one can hear it as well in Twitter’s claim on its “About” page that it “can give a voice to even the weakest signals.” In effect, public discourse falls under the influence of what James Beniger (1989) describes as “control revolution” technologies and their instrumental logic—a Weberian rationalization of actions into “processes” with an emphasis on efficiency and performance.4 Transmission models of communication (from Claude Shannon onward) ultimately reduce discourse to information—a signal that “travels” from sender to receiver efficiently and with as little noise interference as possible. In this context, it is quite fitting for Rampton (2008) to refer to the Eisenstadt hoax as “pointless noise.” Hoaxes do indeed function as noise within the media system, in that they put “spurious information”5 into circulation. A hoax succeeds by exploiting what Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949: 21) refer to as “equivocation” within the system: the degree of uncertainty on the receiver’s part that the message received was the signal sent. Note that for Rampton, it is not the noise offered by the hoax that causes his frustration, but rather its pointlessness. Likewise, Shirky (2008) is quick to acknowledge that in deploying social media, what differentiates “political engagement” from “triviality” is not the act itself (an ice-cream-eating flash mob, for example), but the sense that something is “at stake” in the act (p. 171). And we see a similar distinction at work in the celebration of Howard Dean’s pre-Iowa Caucus campaign as a leveraging of new media to facilitate grassroots involvement in the democratic process— and the offhand dismissal of the “triviality” of this new media leveraging after the Iowa Caucus when dozens of rave, heavy metal, and hip-hop remixes of Dean’s “I Have a Scream” speech went viral on the web.6 Such accounts of the political potential of new media practices ultimately rest on an assumption that good-faith actors will make “legitimate” use of these resources toward “legitimate” political ends. It strikes me, however, that such an assumption reveals a disconnect between the rhetorical framing of political practice in new media and the actions of individuals creating, consuming, and disseminating ostensibly political content online. This disconnect becomes all the more apparent when attempting to account for inherently transgressive acts, such as hoaxes and pranks. In contrast, we might profit more from following Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey’s (2009) recent call for an “evil media studies” and consider how the hoax, in exploiting this conflation of political and technological access, operates as a Baudrillardian “strategy of the object.” Fuller and Goffey note how “strong normative principles for communication,” as theorized by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel among others, necessitates the exclusion of a wide range of “bad” practices in an attempt to legitimate “good” communication; the result is “a perception of language and of logic in which faults, glitches, and bugs started to be seen simply as accidents, trivial anomalies easily removed by means of a better internal

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policing of language” (2009: 146). Again with reference to Habermas, and more specifically his theory of communicative action, Fuller and Goffey note the degree to which “consensual communication and cooperation has the function of excluding and thus distorting our understanding of practices that are not necessarily rational in form” (2009: 145). Such an approach to discourse would demand that no matter how transgressive the act, all communication must return to a rational framework to legitimate itself. In contrast, if we were to allow a place for “bad” practice within our understanding of the role of new media in political discourse, we would be forced to consider the hoax in all its “triviality” and irrationality, without waiting for its recuperation within “good” communicative practice to have a political function. To do so would also reveal the degree to which access is configured within a series of normative exclusions in the name of goodfaith communication. Of course, Habermas’s theory of the public sphere (and its normative emphasis on “consensual communication and cooperation”) has haunted discussions of the democratic potential of computer-mediated communication from the mid-1990s onward.7 While a number of important critiques of Habermas (Warner (2005) and Negt and Kluge (1993), among others) have questioned the inclusiveness of the public sphere, and how united such a public is in its interests, my concern here with “access” is focused more on how Habermas’s concept of a “people’s public use of their reason” structures discursive access through a process of discursive exclusion—and how this process of exclusion is replicated in discussions of the democratic potential of new media (Habermas 1991: 27). As early as the Gauss Lectures in 1971, Habermas (2001a) attempts to distinguish between goaldirected “purposive-rational action,” driven either by instrumental rules or strategy based on analytical knowledge and a norm-governed “communicative action” driven by “an intersubjective recognition that is based on a consensus about values or on mutual understanding” (pp.  11–12). For Habermas, “reaching understanding” provides a normative framework that is not only distinct from goal-oriented action, but is cast as the “original mode of language use” (Habermas 1981: 285–8). There are a number of significant implications for such a positioning of language. First, it allows Habermas to assert a mode of rationality distinct from the instrumental logic of rationalization identified by Weber and dominant in the logic of control revolution technologies, as discussed by Beniger (1989). Second, it asserts a framework for legitimating discourse based on good-faith action toward consensus rather than conflict, as suggested by strategy.8 And finally (following on Searle), it establishes an entire range of language uses as “parasitic” in relation to an “original mode of language use” based on consensus (Habermas 1981: 288). This final point has notable implications for a discussion of the media hoax. The legitimation of a particular mode of communicative exchange

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at the expense of a broad range of other practices asks us to leave unchallenged notions of “authentic” discourse and the primacy placed on mutual understanding as an underpinning for communicative action. Within such a framework, “bad acts” have no validity claims in their own right. This point is most clear in an essay dating to 1974 on “communicative pathology.” Habermas (2001b: 154–5) notes that “systematic distortion” of communication arises when universal validity claims to intelligibility (of the expression), sincerity (of the intention expressed by the speaker), and normative rightness (of the expression relative to a normative background) is violated and communication nonetheless continues on the presumption of communicative (not strategic) action oriented toward reaching mutual understanding. This is only possible by splitting communication, by doubling it up into a public and a private process.

From Habermas’s perspective, then, the hoax distorts communication by engaging in “private” strategy under the guise of a public discourse oriented toward “mutual understanding.” “Bad acts,” in effect, have no validity claims and hence no “right of access” within communicative action. What’s more, the media hoax offers a double distortion—not only does it engage in strategy, but a strategy very much of the object, exploiting the equivocation that arises once “access” becomes a technological concern governed by the instrumental logic of the network. It is ironic, then (to say the least), that while Habermas should work hard to distinguish instrumental rationality from discursive rationality, the widespread embrace of the democratic potentials of new media (at times in the name of Habermas and the public sphere) should blur the line once again in this conflated understanding of “access.” The embrace of new media as a tool for “distributing power” attempts to maintain a Habermasian faith in a public sphere of rational exchange while at the same time converting political action into a process that is subject to an instrumental “logic of maximum performance” (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). The hoax undermines this faith in two directions: by exposing this conflation of the instrumental and the discursive, and by revealing a validity claim to “going viral” distinct from any claim to a normative rationality. Consider, for example, a recent instance of Habermas’s ongoing hesitancy to embrace the role of new media as a forum for a public sphere and its ability to “operate as a cleansing mechanism that filters out the ‘muddy’ elements from a discursively structured legitimation process” (Habermas 2006: 416). In a footnote to his article on “Political Communication in a Media Society,” Habermas (2006) addresses the “reintroduc[tion of] deliberative elements in electronic communication” by way of the Internet. He writes:

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The Internet has certainly reactivated the grassroots of an egalitarian public of writers and readers. However, computer-mediated communication in the web can claim unequivocal democratic merits only for a special context: It can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes that try to control and repress public opinion. In the context of liberal regimes, the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world tend instead to lead to the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated publics. (Habermas 2006: 423)

The ability of individuals to participate in the formation of public opinion (i.e. access) stands as an “unequivocal” good. What concerns Habermas here is the fragmentation of a public into publics, in which access to a deliberative forum no longer assumes a “common concern” (Habermas 1991: 36). What concerns me, however, is that while the words are indeed Habermas’s, they achieved a level of circulation well beyond his published footnote when they appeared, in slightly altered form, as a series of postings on Twitter by a user named Jhabermas. The tweets were, of course, a species of hoax that for a period of days set a number of journalists and bloggers to wonder: “had the 80-year-old doyen of the Frankfurt School for social research joined the twitterati?” (Jeffries 2010). While it may be tempting to dismiss such moments as “trivial anomalies easily removed by means of a better internal policing of language,” to do so is to ignore the viral as a form of communicative action with validity claims distinct from those asserted by “mutual understanding” or a faith in a more “authentic” and primary mode of language use.

Access/Contact, Source/Relay Any attempt to dismiss hoaxes as mere anomalies or pathological media practices would have to deny the increasingly apparent fact that hoaxes have become fairly mainstream communicative acts. As Skaggs notes: “Everyone’s become a prankster… . [Pranks have] become so ubiquitous that it’s become harder for what’s really meaningful to stand out” (Gilson 2009).9 Rather than distinguishing between the meaningful prank and the silly gesture, however, I would suggest that the media hoax has become ubiquitous because validity claims to the viral gain force within communication systems with high degrees of equivocation. Misinformation is, after all, as much a part of “authentic” political discourse as any campaign message, be that the commonplace acceptance of “spin” by news media consumer and producer alike, or the policy-oriented distortions used to impact public debate on matters as large as the run-up to a war (Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”) or healthcare reform (Obama’s “death panels”).

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Rather than creating an environment in which greater access to greater informational resources leads to a more inclusive arena for rational debate, distributed networks create an environment in which the ability to circulate creates its own rhetorical weight. We may want to disentangle “meaningful” flash mobs from silly hijinks, but as civic and communicative acts, ultimately we cannot. In contrast to a model of the public sphere structured as “disinterested” discursive exchange, the distributed democracy of new media suggests a mode of communication that is predicated upon the viral and dissipative qualities of the network itself. In a Republic of Spam, what matters is not some distinction between signal and noise, intended and spurious, but the ability to enact the viral. The irrationality of this viral agency explains how Gorlin and Mirvish can use, word-for-word, Howard Kurtz’s on-air exposure of the Eisenstadt hoax (“Martin Eisenstadt is a fake, a fraud, a scam artist”) as a front-cover endorsement for the book I am Martin Eisenstadt.10 The power of a hoax to ride this viral agency speaks to the degree to which any one individual participates within a distributed public sphere as relay within a larger, emergent discursive structure. Validity claims to the viral also reveal the degree to which strategy and instrumental logic have likewise collapsed upon one another—a fact realized by spammers and hoaxers alike. Information networks allow for a strategy of error optimization: for example, I am Martin Eisenstadt and Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue showing up on Amazon as “Frequently Bought Together” titles, or Richard Kim and Betsy Reed’s (2009) Going Rouge, a collection of essays gathered from progressive press outlets and newspapers, designed, it might seem, to optimize error on search engines. None of this is to imply that “truth” somehow no longer matters in a political context. As I reread Gilson’s (2009) article in Mother Jones, I am reminded by an ad on the website that “Truth matters… . Support media that tells the truth and drives the national conversation.” The problem with placing faith in “media that tells the truth,” however, is that we are asked to do so within a new media environment that conflates rational discourse with an instrumental rationalization through an emphasis on access, efficiency, and maximum performance. As tempting as it may be to distinguish between “good” and “bad” media uses, such rhetorical positioning stands at a considerable disconnect from the most vibrant of new media practices. Consider, for example, the role YouTube played during the U.S. Presidential Primaries in 2007. While candidates exploited the rhetoric of access in an attempt to present a more “authentic” view of the candidate—capturing behind-the-scenes footage, close-up conversations, or personal dialogues—YouTube users were also placed in the position of producing equally “authentic” video commentary on the candidates. Access implied not only a close proximity to the candidates, but to the candidate’s discourse as well—discourse that users could remix and redistribute at will, regardless of how “trivial” the

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outcome. YouTube, while presented as a distribution of power toward democratic ends, and one that put candidates “in touch” with their constituents, would seem to suggest something far closer to Bakhtin’s dialogism than Habermas’s rational-critical discourse: “a ‘grotesque symposium’ that breaks down fixed and hierarchical distinctions, as opposed to something resembling Habermas’ ideal speech” (Gardiner 2004: 38).11 Access, in its dialogic form, expresses itself through the ability to manipulate discourse “without any distancing at all, in a zone of crude contact, where we can grab at everything with our own hands” (Bakhtin 1982: 26). Our models for effective, legitimate political discourse have failed to keep up with the power of the medium as a political forum. Rather than attempting to filter the noise from the signal, and the crude from the meaningful, I would argue that we need to adopt a model for new media discourse that need not distinguish a normative framework for rational deliberation from a strategic or instrumental understanding of discourse. Or to put it more simply: rather than insisting on an agency of the subject, capable of acting upon and responding to an intention to “come to an understanding,” how might we begin to think through a political agency of the network itself? Distributed networks require that we theorize a mode of politics and a model of social space in which sustained debate may well carry less social capital than the ability to circulate and replicate. One can see this not only in the “triviality” of the hoax but also in more “meaningful” new media events as well, such as in the role that Twitter played inside and outside of Iran in the summer of 2009. Certainly for some in Tehran, Twitter served as a tactical tool for on-the-street coordination (in keeping with the dominant rhetorical framing of the political potential of new media). For countless others, however, the simple act of reading a tweet marked #iranelection, and then retweeting it moments later, took on the political significance of being engaged in a democratic cause. With literally thousands of tweets tagged #iranelection circulating on Twitter each minute, it is hard to see something that would suggest a rational, deliberative public sphere. As with the hoax that refuses to come clean, Twitter problematizes what it means to be a source, authentic or otherwise. In effect, Twitter reveals the degree to which the relay takes precedence over the source in new media networks. As a communicative act, it is spam—not rational discourse—that provides the best model for what Twitter politics seeks to achieve—an agency of the network itself that transforms individuals, willingly or otherwise, into nodes within an emergent, distributive system: what Tony D. Sampson (2010) has recently referred to as a Tardean “universal contagion” of the network. An Enlightenment faith in a deliberative, autonomous subject may recoil from this image of network agency, but it speaks to a reality of political engagement and social action in a network society. Certainly “authenticity” matters, but in this shift of emphasis from source to relay, authentication emerges as a distributed process. The very

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problematic nature of authenticity is foregrounded by this medium. The idea that Twitter played a “central” role in Iran in the summer of 2009 quickly became conventional wisdom and a part of the mainstream media discussion of the events in Tehran.12 Coverage emphasized the medium as “practically ideal for a mass protest movement,” while at the same time acknowledging that it is “chaotic, subjective and totally unverifiable” (Grossman 2009). Amid thousands of tweets purportedly coming from the streets of Tehran, concerns arose over whether or not certain posts were the result of governmental misinformation. The Iranian government countered that it was British intelligence and the CIA providing misinformation, manipulating Twitter to assert an outside, Western influence on Iranian domestic affairs. In the midst of all of these uncertainties, a consensus on “reliable” sources did emerge—in good part from their persistence within trending topics and retweets rather than any source validation external to the network itself. Most notable of these was the figure of persiankiwi, an anonymous poster who became one of the most heavily “retweeted” sources on Twitter, and by far the most heavily cited in the traditional press, showing up in Time, the Telegraph, Atlantic Monthly, and others. After over 800 posts in a couple of weeks, her Twitter account went famously silent on June 24. How we are to read her silence is a matter of speculation: dissolved into anonymity? Arrested? Murdered? Or hoax? As with Pérez-Peña’s playful question to Wolfrum, the possibility of a “legitimate” source being a hoax is always hovering as a potential within new media exchanges. The ability of spammer and citizen alike to hijack a trending topic means that at any moment there are competing strategies laying claim to viral validity. And at a significant level, it is clear that regardless of her legitimacy as a source, persiankiwi did much to enact a viral agency of the network, achieving an authentication and validation through the very act of her replication in countless relays. Ultimately, truth claims take a secondary position to the dynamics of the system itself—and here is where things get tricky—a dynamics that must thrive regardless of whether or not the signals can be authenticated beyond the fact of circulation. None of this is to take away from the reality of the individuals who risked their lives on the streets of Tehran, or to suggest that it is irrelevant whether or not persiankiwi was really on those streets. Nor is this to suggest that Martin Eisenstadt is no more or less “real” than any other node or relay on the network. It is, however, to suggest that new media practices cannot depend on authentication and “proper” use of rational deliberation to legitimate discursive action. A viral validity demands that we rethink assumptions about agency, deliberation, and rational exchange as necessary precursors for a democratic public sphere. One cannot, then, hope for salvation through “better internal policing” of anomalies and distortions, or a more intense mode of filtering signal from noise. Hoaxes,

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“bad” or otherwise, do more than reveal the failings of a media system. They also foreground the political vitality of viral validity claims within new media. Our challenge is to understand how the “pointless noise” of the hoax, rather than marking a failure to communicate, offers a valid mode of political engagement distinct from any attempt to recapture that political action within a framework of “legitimate” discourse. The hoax forces us to recognize the limits of a rhetoric of rational access and the opportunities for engaging the viral on its own terms. Such is the potential for political action in a Republic of Spam.

Notes   1. Dery (1993) dates the media hoax as culture jam to the mid-1960s and the work of Joey Skaggs, the hoaxer who successfully managed to gain mainstream news coverage for stories on a “Cathouse for Dogs,” a vigilante etiquette squad, and a medical report on the curative properties of cockroach hormones.  2. MSNBC’s own response falls into this pattern as well. While reassuring us that the network “issued a correction on air within minutes of making the error,” spokesperson Jeremy Gaines is equally clear on where to lay the blame: “the story was not properly vetted and should not have made air” (quoted in Kurtz 2008).  3. For example: his recent apology for unintentionally implicating the Heritage Foundation in the alleged (and non-existent) Elena Kagan sex tape scandal (Eisenstadt 2010).  4. Beniger (1989: 241–78) argues that with the increased speed of production that accompanied industrialization, the need arose for increased speed in distribution and consumption. In this context a systematic coordination of manufacturing, distribution, and marketing/advertising would emerge requiring increasingly complex systems of process feedback and information flow.   5. In Shannon’s model of communication, of course, there is no true distinction between signal and noise other than the fact that noise is unwanted signal, hence “spurious information” (Shannon and Weaver 1949: 19).   6. In the words of Newsweek’s Bret Begun (2004): “You live by the Internet, you die by the Internet… . One minute the Democratic presidential hopeful is harvesting new voters and campaign contributors online. The next, he’s being haunted by tech-savvy turntablists… . It’s the type of stuff you’d hear at nightclubs, not political rallies.”  7. In The Virtual Community, for example, Howard Rheingold (1993) concludes what is primarily a celebratory book with a series of alternate readings of computer-mediated community, ultimately giving the reader a choice: “Virtual communities could help citizens revitalize democracy, or they could be luring us into an attractively packaged substitute for democratic discourse” (p. 276). He continues: “The public sphere is what [Habermas and others] claim we used to have as citizens of a democracy, but have lost to the tide of commoditization. The public sphere is also the focus of the hopes of online activists, who see CMC as a way of revitalizing the open and widespread discussions among citizens that feed the roots of democratic societies” (pp. 279–80). For other early readings of the Internet as public sphere, see Connery 1997; Foster 1997; Knapp 1997.  8. In effect, “Processes of reaching understanding aim at an agreement that meets the conditions of rationally motivated assent (Zustimmung) to the content of the utterance. A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly, or strategically through exerting influence on the decisions on the basis of a calculation of success” (Habermas 1981: 287).  9. Skaggs makes a similar comment in a Wall Street Journal article on the blurring line between “real” pranks and social media phenomena such as flash mobs (Gamerman 2008).

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Viral Validity in a Republic of Spam  167 10. After the publication of I am Martin Eisenstadt, Kurtz was once more on the air for CNN’s Reliable Sources, discussing the hoax. Waving a copy of the book in his hand, he declared to his audience: “Can you believe this? I denounce the guy as a lying stink and he’s using me to sell books, that is, the people behind him are using me to peddle this thing” (“Amazing!” 2009). Of course, this is exactly what he was doing within a viral media ecology, regardless of his rational intent. 11. As a number of recent critics have noted, Bakhtin’s dialogism provides an important supplement or corrective to Habermas’s public sphere, allowing for a range of “legitimate” language uses that fall outside of the ideal speech situation. In addition to Gardiner (2004), see also Hauser 1999; Hirschkop 2004. 12. Time magazine, for example, declared Twitter “the Medium of the Movement,” reporting on the U.S. State Department’s request to Twitter to delay a system upgrade for fear that an interruption of service would impede protests in Iran (Grossman 2009).

References “Amazing!” CNN’s Howard Kurtz on Martin Eisenstadt’s New Book. 2009. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBwjk_wI_I. Bakhtin, M. M. 1982. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Begun, Bret. 2004. “Yeagh,” the Remix. Newsweek, January 20. http://www.newsweek.com/2004/01/20/yeagh-the-remix.html. Beniger, James. 1989. The Control Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Connery, Brian A. 1997. IMHO: Authority and Egalitarian Rhetoric in the Virtual Coffee House. In Internet Culture, edited by David Porter, pp. 161–79. New York: Routledge. Dery, Mark. 1993. Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. http://markdery.com/?page_id=154. Eisenstadt, Martin. 2008a. Eisenstadt the Source for Sarah Palin Africa Leak … and Proud of It. Martin Eisenstadt’s Blog, November 10. http://www.eisenstadtgroup.com/2008/11/10/ eisenstadt-the-source-for-sarah-palin-africa-leak-and-proud-of-it/. Eisenstadt, Martin. 2008b. Hoax New York Times Puts Hoax Version of Martin Eisenstadt on Front Page! Martin Eisenstadt’s Blog, November 12. http://www.eisenstadtgroup. com/2008/11/12/hoax-new-york-times-puts-hoax-version-of-me-on-front-page/. Eisenstadt, Martin. 2009. I am Martin Eisenstadt: One Man’s Wildly Inappropriate Adventure with the Last Republicans. New York: Faber and Faber. Eisenstadt, Martin. 2010. Apology for Elana Kagan Sex Tape Story. Martin Eisenstadt’s Blog, June 2. http://www.eisenstadtgroup.com/2010/06/02/ apology-for-elena-kagan-sex-tape-story/. Foster, Derek. 1997. Community and Identity in the Electronic Village. In Internet Culture, pp. 23–37. Fox News: Palin Didn’t Know Africa was a Continent. 2008. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWZHTJsR4Bc. Fox’s Carl Cameron and O’Reilly Discuss The Palin Farce. 2008. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFJ-bJTIx-0. Fuller, Matthew and Andrew Goffey. 2009. Toward an Evil Media Studies. In The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, pp. 141–59. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Gamerman, Ellen. 2009. The New Pranksters. Wall Street Journal, September 12. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122119092302626987.html. Gardiner, Michael E. 2004. Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere. In After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere, edited by Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 28–48. Gilson, Dave. 2009. Jumping the Snark. Mother Jones, November/December. http://motherjones.com/media/2009/11/jumping-snark. Grossman, Lev. 2009. Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement. Time. June 17. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html.

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168  Media 2.0—Legitimacy, Power, and Information Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2001a. Objectivist and Subjectivist Approaches to Theory Formation in the Social Sciences. In On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 3–22. Habermas, Jürgen. 2001b. Reflections on Communicative Pathology. In On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 129–70. Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. Political Communication in a Media Society. Communication Theory 16: 411–26. Hauser, Gerald A. 1999. Vernacular Voices. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Hirschkop, Ken. 2004. Justice and Drama: On Bakhtin as a Complement to Habermas. In After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere, pp. 49–66. Jeffries, Stuart. 2010. Jürgen Habermas: The Most Unlikely Twitter User? Guardian, February 2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/02/ jurgen-habermas-twitter-philosopher. Kim, Richard and Betsy Reed. 2009. Going Rouge: Sarah Palin: An American Nightmare. New York: OR Books. Kirkpatrick, David. 2010. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World. New York: Simon & Schuster. Knapp, James A. 1997. Essayistic Messages: Internet Newsgroups as an Electronic Public Sphere. In Internet Culture, pp. 181–97. Kurtz, Howard. 2008. MSNBC Anchor Duped by Scoop. The Washington Post, November 13. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/12/ AR2008111202624.html. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. 1993. Public Sphere and Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pérez-Peña, Richard. 2008. A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence. New York Times, November 12, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/arts/television/13hoax.html. Rafael, Vicente. 2006. The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines. In New Media Old Media, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, pp. 297–313. New York: Routledge. Rampton, Sheldon. 2008. The Eisenstadt Hoax. Counterpunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/rampton11142008.html. Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Sampson, Tony D. 2010. Error-Contagion: Network Hypnosis and Collective Culpability. In Error: Glitch, Jam, and Noise in New Media Cultures, edited by Mark Nunes, pp. 232–53. New York: Continuum. Schuster. 2008. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucfA86t7sH4. Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shirky, Clay. 2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Books. Skaggs, Joey. 1999. The Art of the Con: A Notorious Prankster Uses Hoaxes to Expose the Media. Extra! March/April. http://www.joeyskaggs.com/html/comm/comm.html#10. Trippi, Joe. 2004. The Revolution Will Not be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything. New York: HarperCollins. Twitter. 2010. About. http://twitter.com/about. Warner, Michael. 2005. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Yardley, William and Michael Cooper. 2008. Palin Calls Criticism by McCain Aides “Cruel and Mean-Spirited.” New York Times, November 7. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/ us/politics/08palin.html?_r=1&ref=television.

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10 Breaking the News: Power and Secrecy in the Age of the Internet TED GOURNELOS A friend of mine in the United States, Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers, uses a phrase that I’ve become fond of. “Courage is contagious.” That is, when someone engages in a courageous act and shows other people that that act wasn’t an act of martyrdom, rather that it was an intelligently designed act, it encourages other people to follow him. Julian Assange [We] are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement—if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness—will inspire not reform, but disgust. [The] “transparency movement” … is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff. Lawrence Lessig

In the spring of 2011, a man named Nick Johnson placed a billboard of Julian Assange (founder and head of the (in)famous whistleblower website WikiLeaks) overlooking a busy street in Hollywood, California. The image, a pixelated and stylized photograph of Assange looking into the viewer’s eyes with his hand held to his face in a classically “pensive” expression, carried the tagline “WikiLeaks: giving us the truth when everyone else refuses to” (see Figure 10.1). The billboard was paid for by a group of activists and donors recruited through Epic Step, a website created to publicize events and issues its members feel are under-represented in contemporary mainstream media (MSM). The story of WikiLeaks is short but rich, and has been documented in numerous sources within months of its rise from obscurity to notoriety 169

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Figure 10.1  In 2010 a group named Epic Step raised money for a billboard in support of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, which appeared in Hollywood, CA.”

(see e.g. Leigh and Harding 2011; Mitchell 2011; Sifry 2011). Since its founding in 2006, WikiLeaks has hurtled through the release of details regarding operating manuals at Guantanamo Bay in 2007, Sarah Palin yahoo emails in 2008, and, most famously, the Collateral Murder video (documenting the suppressed murder of unarmed Afghani citizens and two Reuters journalists by U.S. forces) and the massive document leak dubbed “Cablegate” by MSM pundits in 2010. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will largely avoid discussion of the leaks or the website in and of itself, and focus instead on the politics, the potential, and the limitations of such oppositional forces on the Internet. WikiLeaks is perhaps the quintessential example of what I consider to be “transgression 2.0”; it is not unidirectional (1.0), nor is it yet an open and lived environment (3.0). Instead, it represents a fascinating but problematic set of shifts in the discourse over the power and gatekeeping of information. In other words, WikiLeaks “breaks the news” not only by scooping (and inspiring or providing source material for) MSM news sources, but also by forcing “normal” people, as well as journalists and the powers that be, to rethink the role and status of information itself.

WikiLeaks and the Evolution of a Critical Voice There are many examples of this “rethinking” process, but for me the beginning was the Federal trial in which powerful Swiss bank Julius

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Baer sued WikiLeaks for the release of information given to them by an anonymous whistleblower that indicated several tax-evasion and moneylaundering schemes. Indeed, the basic premise of the case was more than a little strange; is it even possible to sue a website, especially if it does not represent a company, a national base, or even a coherent/singular set of ideological statements or arguments? Can the release of documents leaked by a third party function under the same logic as circulating music through Napster or movies through bit torrents? At first, it seemed, the juridical answer was yes. The judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, ruled that the website be shut down pending review of the case. However, in a rare reversal, he backtracked just two weeks later. This wasn’t only for free speech reasons, but also because the site was de facto impossible to control, as it was immediately mirrored in dozens of places after Judge White’s original decision. He stated that “the court has serious questions about the effectiveness of any order this court might issue, given the current state of affairs, that these matters are fully out in the public domain, in the virtual domain” after his earlier decision “backfired as it drew huge numbers of visitors to so-called mirror sites set up by Wikileaks.org that provided a back door to the site. White said the publicity generated by his earlier ruling was a factor in his reversal” (Gollner 2008). On even the most basic levels, this is a complex set of events. There are several key issues at stake. First, it is important to understand the initial concept underlying WikiLeaks. Founded in 2006 by Australian hacker, open source software developer, and activist Julian Assange, the website’s initial mission statement argued that its “primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior [sic] if in their governments and corporations” (Sifry 2011: 174). That was probably not far from the truth; WikiLeaks was created using a heavily secured version of MediaWiki, an open source software platform used by many organizations, most notably Wikipedia. MediaWiki allows users to “crowdsource” information, in which they can create, upload, share, and edit communal documents and other media. The software is simple and user-friendly, and indeed I use it for the students in my own undergraduate courses. However, WikiLeaks by its very nature as an “open society” or “transparency” site, or even a whistleblower forum, necessitated that it be very careful about restricting access, both to users who might seek to remove or alter leaked information, and (eventually) to users who might seek to upload or download information that was not verified and thus could both tarnish the reputation of the website as a source for authentic, reliable information and be a source for the dissemination of misleading, false, and potentially dangerous information. This is probably at least in part responsible for WikiLeaks’s changed mission statement, which was altered recently to

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read: “a non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to our journalists” (Sifry 2011: 174). It also reflects the change in ethos from a source of information for others to analyze to the status of self-proclaimed journalist conglomerate, and seems to be a reaction at least in part to Assange’s increasingly oppositional (rather than informational) approach, in which he posits WikiLeaks as a forum for regime change and/ or information warfare (Sifry 2011: 175).1 Beyond WikiLeaks as a concept and software structure, it is important to recognize why WikiLeaks was created; in other words, what need did it intend to meet (or, conversely, what was the perceived need for its existence)? It is of course well known by now, at least in cultural studies circles, that MSM journalism is (and perhaps always has been) insufficient on its own for the establishment or maintenance of a progressive or even democratic society. From the seminal work of Noam Chomsky discussing the Vietnam War (2002) to Robert McChesney and the connections of media, money, and power (2004, 2005, 2008), it has become a truism that journalism has not only failed us as a society, but is, in Jon Stewart’s words as he confronted the pundit hosts (or, as he called them, “partisan hacks”) of CNN’s Crossfire, “hurting America.” This has manifested, as I and others have argued, in a series of popular culture interventions into news discourse, from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to The Boondocks and South Park (Gournelos 2009; Gray et al. 2009; Jones 2009), as well as more direct interventions like those from The Yes Men or Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert themselves in spaces normally reserved for journalism (e.g. the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2006). However, it has also manifested in several sources of highly respected and credible alternative news sources from a more traditional “journalism” approach like ProPublica.org, blog aggregates like The Huffington Post or even individual blogs like The Daily Kos. These sources, as well as the popular culture interventions, all point to a central set of difficulties with MSM journalism (or MSM in general): as gatekeepers of information and agenda-setters, MSM is highly suspect due to a common adherence to and fear of a complex set of state and corporate interests. This has always been the case, but only with the second Iraq War and the alternative voices amplified by the Internet was the displacement of centralized/consolidated information control seen as even possible, let alone desirable. In other words, WikiLeaks is paradigmatic not only of a broader cultural and political recognition of the failure of journalism, but also of the search for viable and powerful (meaning relatively safe and reliable) alternatives. That element should not be understated: WikiLeaks as a phenomenon is fundamentally social as part of a Zeitgeist, not the inspired actions of just a few individuals or as a result of a few lucky opportunities. This is particularly important as

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we consider that the story of WikiLeaks is told by both supporters and its opposition in terms of this narrative, largely from the perspective of the two approaches to MSM journalism that I discuss below. The third significant element to the WikiLeaks story is its opponents, in this case the powerful bank Julius Baer, but also various other corporate and state interests, most notably the United States government itself. This is not a simple story of speaking truth to power, but rather is again evidence of needs engendered by a historical shift in the conception of power itself. Julius Baer just as much as the U.S. government is a neoliberal entity, whose reach goes beyond the understandable modern boundaries of corporation, geography, or even the logic of capitalism itself, reminding us (especially after the economic collapse and bailouts of 2008 to the present) of Marx and Engels’ critique of systems in which “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels 1988: 16). In other words, these transnational entities are vague assemblages of money, power, and myth without foundations of coherent logic, limit, or even identity. It makes them incredibly difficult to either completely understand or effectively fight. Because WikiLeaks was able to circumvent and to no small degree laugh in the face of the seemingly omnipotent interests of a big bank and the U.S. government, it serves as a symbol of dissent against the complicity of state and corporate interests from a decentralized (if not populist) perspective, and was honored for that reason by the British organization Index on Censorship. That decentralized and populist nature of the website reflects a deeper mythology surrounding the Internet as both the savior (or perhaps creator) of the public sphere and an impervious realm in which the powerless can and will fight the powerful with a reasonable chance for success. This stems at least in part from technology guru John Gilmore’s idea that the Internet “treats censorship as damage and routes around it” (as cited in Elmer-Dewitt 1993), a logic inherent to the creation of the Internet itself, but also the idea that decentralized and populist uses of the Internet lead to a proliferation of voices that rely on each other for power, in a techno-centric reflection of oppositional theories ranging from Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” to Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 2003; Hardt and Negri 2004). The idea that the Internet is potentially an open society, in which total freedom of information connects with public relations as a tool of the masses rather than the elites, is very Romantic and very seductive, especially in the context of the repeated failure of journalism in the face of rampant abuses by state and corporate interests. That Romantic ideal is itself dangerous, however, and although I do believe we as scholars and as citizens of a globalized world should fight for it, we should also recognize that it can both make things like WikiLeaks possible and constrain their impact. The website was and is, after all, extremely limited for a number of reasons. The public face and founder of the organization is part of that, at least in terms of the ability for powerful interests

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to over-identify a complex phenomenon with an individual’s personality and desires. However, it is also the case that WikiLeaks was unable to act as a wiki. Because the information it retrieved or was given could be potentially dangerous (at least for state and corporate interests, but by extension the externalities of soldiers, diplomats, and civilians as victims of violent reprisals), and because it thus had to be verified, vetted, and redacted, it was never released to the “crowd” for the kind of open and collaborative work that has made Wikipedia and dozens of other websites effective. Instead, the website partnered with the interests that it was supposedly meant to challenge: MSM journalism and state power. This leads us to a central question, therefore, that the case of WikiLeaks can perhaps clarify: Can the news be broken? More specifically, if the Internet cannot function alone, but must be part of a larger (and at least partially MSM) system, then can it truly be a transgressive force? I argue that it can, but is also constantly mitigated (and thus under threat) by the ability for MSM and the hybrid state/corporate interests to frame, constrain, and deflect its power. This is not only due to external forces, but also the internal forces of the actors themselves (the leakers, the staff that control the Internet gateways, their external support, the Internet infrastructure, and the very real and very powerful world of public relations). As I have argued elsewhere in terms of oppositional politics on MSM itself through television shows such as South Park, moreover, this is within the very logic of oppositional politics; when liminal and central forces collide, they function simultaneously to break apart and reify each other. WikiLeaks provides a useful example in which alternative voices are foreclosed by the structures in which they appear and act even as they serve to broaden and question those structures.

Critiquing Mainstream Journalism: Two Approaches Media has been one of the privileged targets of cultural studies, from Frankfurt School critiques of the “culture industry” to contemporary exposés on the negative influences of the digital culture. Critics have largely been ambivalent about journalism, though, outside of a relatively small wing of the field that has grown larger since the Vietnam War and the largely docile press corps of the Reagan era. There are two major trends within the critique of journalism: in the first, the complicity of and interconnection among journalists in MSM and the state and corporate interests that provide both funding and source material are the center of discussions of bias and intentionally manipulative gatekeeping and agenda-setting; in the second, journalism frames a worldview that places the media at the center of contemporary society, and threats to the MSM are thus framed as threats to the world. Both are worth discussing at length, although I will not do so here. The first argument is perhaps the better known, and is often called “political economy” within cultural studies circles, despite the fact

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that in Marxist terms “political economy” is simply an understanding of the sociopolitical ramifications of economic conditions and policies (thus making it a necessary facet of any cultural studies scholarship). Two of the seminal figures in this movement are Noam Chomsky and Robert McChesney, the former famous for his discussion of the dangerous, conservative (if not reactionary), and anti-democratic relationships between MSM journalism and established state military interests in Manufacturing Consent (2002), and the latter famous for The Problem of the Media (2004), in which he frames MSM as closely connected to an oligopoly of umbrella corporations whose interests deeply inflect MSM content (and which are again largely tied to conservative, established power interests). The interrogation of the media as central and essential to our society forms a second major trend in critiques of MSM journalism. There are a multitude of voices here, but two stand out for the current discussion: Lawrence Lessig (2003, 2006, 2008), whose work on intellectual property, open source software, and participatory media has shaped the way in which we think about and defend populist developments in intellectual and artistic development both online and off, and Nick Couldry, whose 2003 Media Rituals critiques the social and cultural power invested in MSM. Lessig’s arguments are largely well known; suffice it to say that he is committed to fighting for the growth of democratized and populist intellectual property outside the constraints of an increasingly corporate-leaning intellectual property regime within the United States. This is significant for the current discussion because Lessig thus repeatedly points to the power of MSM to constrain development of new ideas and technologies, rather than only ideology and information (the focus of the more traditional “political economy” approach). In other words, although he largely ignores the economic power of the MSM, and indeed does not discuss journalism as such, he does often point to the other forms of gatekeeping and agendasetting within it, in which creation itself becomes a dangerous and difficult process if not sanctioned by the industry. For instance, instead of looking at the economic basis for media conglomeration in the Motion Picture Association of America or the Recording Industry Association of America, two of the biggest MSM industry groups and lobbying wings, he instead examines their use of juridical intimidation and harassment to restrict the circulation and development of intellectual or artistic development outside the constraints of the MSM. In other words, Lessig is concerned with the technological and intellectual constraining of opposition through the media. Although this is not directly applied to MSM journalism, his method and target of analysis is extremely useful for understanding the role the MSM plays regarding the use and interpretation of alternative sources; as I argue later regarding the relationship between the Guardian newspaper and WikiLeaks, this role is both symbiotic and parasitic, and is often very ambivalent in terms of politics and rhetoric.

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Nick Couldry explains this from the basis of sociology rather than law, by suggesting that the MSM constructs a “myth of the mediated center,” which he describes as “the belief, or assumption, that there is a centre to the social world, and that, in some sense, the media speaks ‘for’ that centre” (Couldry 2003: 2). In this way Couldry is arguing along with Lessig that MSM is a negatively constraining force on society, but in terms of binding mythology. Drawing from Durkheim and Bourdieu, Couldry argues that media rituals affirm the media as a force in which rituals serve to connect us not through an “affirmation of what we share, but with the management of conflict and the masking of social inequality”(2003: 4). This adds a crucial element to the arguments surrounding the power of MSM, moving beyond simplistic economic or technocentric arguments. He argues that the ritual space of the media … is highly uneven. It is formed around one central inequality (the historic concentration of symbolic power in media institutions) but is shaped locally through many detailed patterns, particularly the categories … through which we understand our actions and orientations in relation to the media. (Couldry 2003: 13).

These actions are constructed in three steps, according to Couldry: in the first, social categories and boundaries are created and emphasized by the media (e.g. normative divisions due to sexual orientation). In the second, the categories and boundaries are expanded to signify underlying social values (e.g. the sanctity of marriage), and in the third, those values emphasize that the coherence and unity of our society itself is at stake in their maintenance through ritual (e.g., allowing gay marriage will destroy heterosexual relationships and thus U.S. society) (Couldry 2003: 26). This permeates our entire existence, according to Couldry (2003: 42), and necessitates a rethinking of the MSM’s relationship to our reality through the search for alternatives: Once we drop the assumption that society has a core of “true” social values waiting to be “expressed,” then we are free to reread contemporary processes of social and cultural definition for the open-ended conflicts that they really are. Perhaps the most fundamental term of conflict is the definition of “reality” itself, although “reality,” of course, is registered in different ways in a range of contexts: the “reality” addressed by government policies of social control, economic “reality,” the “reality” of national mood, the “reality” of the fashion and entertainment worlds. Because society’s symbolic resources are very unequally distributed (with media institutions being the main beneficiaries of that inequality), these ongoing conflicts of definition are marked by symbolic

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This “openness” to challenge outside of the MSM suggests that Couldry is interested less in the constraining of oppositional voices than with the overwhelming nature of the MSM, and implies that those voices might be found in alternative venues. However, Couldry does not in fact point to those venues; like many political economists (and indeed like many scholars of cultural studies in general), he is concerned more with the critique of the existing system than pointing out existing, functional, or effective locations of opposition. Unfortunately, the opposite is true just as often; many scholars point to utopian politics through examples of cultural production and, most significantly for the present discussion, technology, as indications of a growing culture of opposition or populist self-actualization. This is extremely problematic, especially when it takes an uncritical approach to the Internet and journalism or activism. One example of the conservative or reactionary repercussions of this perspective is Brian McNair’s (2006) Cultural Chaos: Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. The book starts off well, and is largely reminiscent of scholars like Lessig: [T]here is a zone within which creative, constructive things happen… . This anarchy is one source of what we might call progress (or evolution). By extension to the sphere of materialist sociology, a world characterised by a vibrant cultural chaos (as opposed to elite-imposed order) is a world less likely to be vulnerable to control by dominant elites and ruling classes, be they communists, capitalists, Islamic fundamentalists or Christian conservatives; a world in which, in that state somewhere between order and chaos which best describes the times in which we live, top-down control is eroded, bottom-up creativity flourishes, and the struggle for human freedom can be advanced in new ways. A world governed by the non-linear dynamics of cultural chaos is, in short, a different world to that imagined by the materialist sociological tradition, with its assumptions of the ruling and the ruled over, of the dominant and dominated, of the superior and subordinate, of passive mass and active elite. (McNair 2006: xxi)

Unfortunately, the resemblance largely ends there. Rather than looking for the alternatives sought by Lessig and Couldry (or even McChesney and Chomsky in their work as activists), McNair suggests that alternatives are unnecessary, because they already exist within MSM journalism itself. He argues that although elites desire control, this desire is insufficient in the face of the developments of new technology in which competition and

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productive volatility are central and have “substantially weakened the capacity of nation-states to police information flows” (McNair 2006: 9). In other words, he retreats to some of the standard technocratic rhetoric of neoliberal doctrine (pp. 14–15). Although McNair seems to have some grasp of geopolitics, he often equates what he sees as effective with a set of universal trends (e.g. press scrutiny of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal as evidence of good, adversarial journalism that demonstrates dissenting voices, rather than an example of right-wing-influenced media using a sex scandal to neuter an occasionally progressive administration). More importantly, he attacks a “control” paradigm of critical theory by attempting to refute arguments from early political economy theory (i.e. Marx) and, occasionally, a contemporary example (although this almost always means Chomsky) without engaging most of the critical authors that have shaped the field and directly refute the lines of reasoning from which he draws (see e.g. pp. 21–6, 35–6). Perhaps even more dangerous, McNair refuses to engage the economic issues with MSM, including access, ownership, state control or influence, or corporate power, and pairs that with suggestions that social divisions on the basis of race, gender, etc. are meaningless in the face of a supposedly postmodern “plurality of truth” (p. 12). Cultural Chaos is thus more in the line of Francis Fukuyama (and indeed uncritically accepts the “end of history” argument (p. 9)) than any progressive writer, although without the interesting lines of argument and moments of brilliance that make Fukuyama so dangerously influential. McNair’s basic argument is that the news media is not biased, and that the blogosphere is creating a new world order of late-capitalist, idyllic, public sphere discourse (drawing explicitly and problematically on Habermas throughout). His attacks on authors who critique the mass media, particularly those who engage its conservative or reactionary bent and its consolidation into a few immensely powerful transnational companies, stand in for any arguments he himself might make or seek to prove. Interestingly enough, the works he attacks (but rarely cites or deals with extensively in terms of the depth of their arguments) are often extremely detailed analyses filled with statistical evidence, textual evidence, and content analysis across decades of journalism in the U.S. and abroad. McNair, on the other hand, uses sparse “analysis” of a few events (e.g. his stunning assertion that coverage of Abu Ghraib is evidence of an evenhanded approach in U.S. and U.K. media treatment of the Iraq War), anecdotal evidence, and citations from conservative or reactionary (often neo-con) think-tanks for his arguments, without doing any sustained or deep analysis. Instead, like many others who herald the coming of a new age of the Internet, McNair makes dangerously reductive and vague statements like “one consequence of the ideological realignment set in motion by the end of the capitalist–communist division has been the universalisation (or

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de-ideologisation) of concepts such as freedom and democracy” (McNair 2006: 38). In other words, this is a perfect example of a neo-con writer masquerading as a leftist cultural critic, in the vein of Friedman and many of the “centrist” columnists for The Washington Post or the New York Times: in a transformed environmental context the propaganda model, and contemporary applications of the control paradigm in general, fail to account for the unruliness and ideological fluidity of media outputs, or to understand the complexity of the processes which produce them… . [F]ar from being control mechanisms at the disposal of elites, the same four filters—economic, political, ideological and technological—acts as catalysts for a democratizing cultural chaos (McNair 2006: 36).

Indeed, he often seems to suggest that if there is bias within MSM (which he often denies has an impact on public opinion, despite the research done by organizations like Fairness and Accuracy in News Reporting), it is against the ruling elites (pp. 42–3). Although McNair is certainly not the dominant voice in contemporary research on journalism, he is evidence of a troubling trend in rhetoric surrounding the possibilities of the Internet. Kahn and Kellner (2005), two far more self-critical and analytical critics, often lapse into similar problematic perspectives on new media as an oppositional force in which “there has now been a new cycle of Internet politics, which has consisted of the implosion of media and politics into popular culture, with the result being unprecedented numbers of people using the Internet and other technologies to produce original instruments and modes of democracy.” They have a point, to be sure. There have been many examples in recent years of Internet technologies used to challenge established power, whether that is politicians’ gaffes, evidence of corporate influence (e.g. in “astroturfing” or “greenwashing”), or state censorship or cover-ups. However, their assertion that the Internet is filled with “contradictory forces” and is a “contested terrain” does not serve to dampen their enthusiasm for anti-capitalist movements, hacktivists, or “watchblogs,” and they (perhaps unintentionally) minimize the use of the Internet by conservative, corporate, or reactionary forces beyond what they frame as fringe movements.

WikiLeaks and the Transformative Power of Transparency How does this relate to WikiLeaks, however? Isn’t the “transparency movement,” for which the website seems to be a herald, a positive thing? Won’t it redefine journalism as we know it? Perhaps, but there are questions

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that remain to be answered. What exactly do websites like WikiLeaks tell us about the power of the Internet and its supposedly progressive consequences in a global mediascape? The first and most obvious repercussion of the WikiLeaks saga is the ability for alternative new media structures (as opposed to MSM new media structures) to “scoop” established journalism agencies. This can happen by, on the one hand, finding stories first, and on the other, being able to digest, publish, or widely distribute information that MSM is somehow constrained from releasing. WikiLeaks has done both. Much of its early released information, from text messages sent in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to evidence of corporate malfeasance by Icelandic banks before the economic crisis of 2009, was information outside the scope of the MSM journalism, at least in part owing to the unwillingness of many leaders within the MSM to pursue such information due to its corporate gatekeeping and agenda-setting functions, but also owing to the strategies by which WikiLeaks obtained the information. Moreover, WikiLeaks was able (at least in the beginning) to process a great deal of information (both in terms of content and of decrypting files like the Collateral Murder video) through opening it up to volunteers on the Internet. As transparency activist and advocate Michael Sifry (2011: 78) has argued: if you make a problem visible, or put it out on the web in a form that lots of people can swarm around, often a solution will be found. “Crowdsourcing” is the term often used to describe this process, though I think it’s somewhat of a misnomer. We aren’t outsourcing a job that used to belong to professionals (such as investigative journalists) and giving it to a crowd to do; we’re inviting lots of civic watchdogs to add their eyeballs and time to the process of making governments more transparent and accountable.

This is not, of course, exclusive to alternative journalism organizations; the Guardian, one of WikiLeaks’s eventual partners in “Cablegate” among other events, has “crowdsourced” material, most notably the 2010 release of expense records for Members of the British Parliament. Significantly, however, even that process would not have been possible without the “more traditional watchdogging efforts of freelance journalist Heather Brooke, who diligently kept making requests under Britain’s nascent Freedom of Information law to obtain the records” (Sifry 2011: 82). The Guardian was also at one time itself forced to post sensitive documents on WikiLeaks, because the British government censored the release of information regarding Barclay’s Bank (and even at one time the very mention of the documents as being available online) (Leigh and Harding 2011: 63). It is important to recognize that “breaking” the news before MSM sources does not significantly reduce their power or legitimacy, at least at this time, since they can pick up any new stories and release them within minutes of the

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initial postings by alternative sources. Moreover, as I discuss below in terms of the Guardian’s use of WikiLeaks, and have argued elsewhere in terms of The Daily Show and The Onion (Gournelos 2009), this strategy by MSM organizations both allows them to insulate themselves from responsibility and to report on controversial or biased topics without themselves seeming complicit. However, sites like WikiLeaks “break” the news in another way as well; they fracture the reliance on corporate and state-sanctioned news structures and power by suggesting that MSM journalism is not up to the job of keeping us informed, a fact of which we are constantly reminded both by journalism’s massive failures over the past decade and by the increasing volume of critiques of journalism by celebrities and politicians. Sifry suggests that there are three major ways in which alternative journalism has risen to equal (and in some ways surpass) MSM journalism, beyond the merely economic factors of the decreasing cost of audio-visual and computer hardware: in the first, “information,” Sifry argues that the “social sharing of data—be it MP3 files or once-secret government documents—is out of anyone’s control once the material is in digital form. And anyone who wants to form an association of like-minded souls can do so in seconds, using search tools, social networks, or just plain old e-mail” (Sifry 2011: 51). In the second, “connectivity,” he suggests that top-down models of information gathering and exchange (e.g. email lists) are insufficient in comparison to “many-to-many” approaches like we see in blog aggregators, wikis, translators, and file sharing. In the third, “time,” Sifry reminds us that the Internet organizes material in such a way that an almost limitless depth of information can be accessed rapidly if it is made available, unlike “old media” which is limited by the temporal and physical constraints of for-profit MSM structures like television, radio, and print (p. 52). Due to those three elements of technological developments combined with the ability to use those developments (i.e. they are not yet constrained to a great degree by corporate or state interests, although as I will argue, WikiLeaks provides us with a cautionary tale here as well), it is possible to suggest, as McNair does, that the Internet provides us with sufficient alternative and dissonant voices, as well as the availability of source material, to render critiques of the MSM obsolete. This is, in fact, supported by some of the elements that currently characterize the alternative journalism and transparency movements. First, the Internet is seen by sites like WikiLeaks as a mediated space, not as an end in and of itself. However, over the course of its five-year history even WikiLeaks has taken different approaches to that space: initially a “wiki-fied conduit for raw information dumps,” it transitioned to a gatekeeper itself, with “tight editorial control and production,” and finally a partner for MSM itself, “where deals are negotiated with major media on the timing of their releases” as well as in “analyzing, rejecting, and releasing documents in a slow and careful process,” which, as Sifry notes, “vests too much power in [WikiLeaks founder] Assange personally” and is “prone to conflict with those media partners” (p. 173).

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Second, if done correctly the Internet provides alternative journalism sources with a security and locatability/usability impossible in geographically located (and thus potentially compromised by the state) and/or physically produced media. Indeed, Sifry argues that “dispersed networks and powerful encryption technologies are taking away some of the long-held advantages that state actors have had over their subjects” (2011: 167). Assange himself developed an open source software project that is a perfect example of this aspect of the transparency movement. Called Rubberhose, it allowed human rights activists to surrender a password under torture that would reveal one layer of information while protecting other layers, to create the illusion of complicity while not actually giving anything of value to their captors (Leigh and Harding 2011: 45–6). In addition, the Internet by its very nature, and especially if emphasized by archived web 2.0 structures, is perfect for research, as source material can be located in multiple locations, across temporal boundaries (i.e. different versions of the same document can be retained to avoid tampering or data loss). Third, the Internet as it is currently conceived operates seemingly beyond the boundaries of state and corporate power (at least in terms of MSM, as I will discuss below). This is often framed in somewhat utopic and hopeful language by the transparency movements (e.g. Sifry 2011: 189), but WikiLeaks again points us to a darker reality in which the state cannot shut down a website, but it can frame it negatively. Sifry’s Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency, for instance, provides us with a strong critique of the U.S. hypocrisy surrounding its approach to Internet Freedom with regard to WikiLeaks as opposed to alternative voices in more obviously authoritarian regimes, and notes that “the reason the current confrontation between WikiLeaks and the United States government is a pivotal event is that, unlike these other applications of technology to politics, this time the free flow of information is threatening the American establishment with difficult questions” (Sifry 2011: 140). He rightly suggests that its status as an alternative and Internet-based source of opposition is not only freeing, but also makes it open to a form of attack not readily used on MSM sources: For there is nothing that WikiLeaks has done that is different from any other newspaper or media outlet that has received leaked government documents, verified their authenticity, and then published their contents and analysis. If WikiLeaks can be prosecuted and convicted for its acts of journalism, then the foundations of freedom of the press in America are in serious trouble (Sifry 2011: 142).

Indeed, despite their overall hostility to WikiLeaks as an alternative source to MSM journalism, Guardian journalists Leigh and Harding are also critical of the somewhat schizophrenic (or at least two-faced) characterization of the leaks by the U.S. government, and note that at the very

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least the leaks were of great significance for countries without a free press (Leigh and Harding 2011: 210–11). In many ways WikiLeaks might be seen as a perfect example of Transgression 2.0. It certainly transgresses powerful state and corporate interests and constraints. It also transgresses the very idea of what makes effective public discourse and how journalism functions within it. Moreover, it uses several models of citizen–actor interaction to maximize not only security and visibility, but also the political impact of the information released. WikiLeaks thus functions not only to transgress established political, economic, and juridical structures, but does so in such a way as to highlight and focus attention on individual acts of subversion (or courage, to use Assange’s terms from the epigraph of this chapter) rather than the website as hero in and of itself. This is not without its limitations, however, and WikiLeaks epitomizes its share of those. As even a champion of the transparency movement like Sifry admits, participation does not necessarily connote political change (e.g. with developments in eGovernments), and even if it did, that change would hardly be exclusively progressive. Other scholars are even more critical of “participatory” media as a vanguard of emancipatory politics, most persuasively discussed, I think, in Mark Andrejevic’s iSpy (2007). There are three major issues at stake in the foreclosure of Transgression 2.0 in the manner of WikiLeaks: in the first, state and corporate forces seek to frame alternative voices in such a way as to degrade or destroy their credibility. In the second, those weakened alternative voices are appropriated by MSM to form a “symbiotic” (but in fact largely parasitic) partner, in which crowd sourcing or citizen journalism and evaluation is exchanged for evaluation by elites or established regimes of truth. In the third, powerful interests learn from the transgressions of alternative voices in order to prepare for or further constrain them. WikiLeaks was largely ignored in the beginning, but its profile quickly rose along with its successful leaks and, more significantly, its ability to safeguard its leakers and to avoid shutdown from state or corporate powers irritated by its wanton refusal to play nice. Indeed, as Leigh and Harding note, a few years into WikiLeaks’s activities (around the time of “Cablegate”), “the media and public were torn between those who saw Assange as a new kind of cyber-messiah and those who regarded him as a James Bond villain. Each extremity projected on to him superhuman powers of good or evil” (Leigh and Harding 2011: 6). Indeed, they chart the ways in which Assange was potentially threatened by established powers angry at the actions of WikiLeaks: Assange was facing four separate lines of attack. The first was physical— that someone would beat him up or worse. The second was legal—that Washington would attempt to crush WikiLeaks in the courts. The third was

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technological—that the US [sic] or its proxies would bring down the WikiLeaks web site. The fourth and perhaps most worrisome possibility was a PR attack— that a sinister propaganda campaign would be launched, accusing Assange of collaborating with terrorists (Leigh and Harding 2011: 97).

This was, in fact, the case, although physical threats to Assange (who was and is extremely paranoid about security, and now avoids appearing in the United States at all) have never been verified. This is not for lack of rhetoric, as many authors have noted; FOX News in particular hosted a variety of guests calling for Assange’s imprisonment or death, and figures as public as Sarah Palin tweeted and blogged (as well as expressly stated on MSM) similar sentiments. Even generals who, as Leigh and Harding note, “had gallons of genuine civilian blood on their own hands,” both attacked WikiLeaks through Assange and repeatedly mischaracterized the extent and impact of Cablegate, asserting that the Assange and his partners “had blood on their hands” (Leigh and Harding 2011: 113).

Mainstream Media and the Framing of Opposition Significantly, however, even those who collaborated extensively with WikiLeaks, especially those from MSM sources, framed the website, Assange, and the other insiders in negative terms, although in a far more subtle (and perhaps more insidious and revealing) manner. Indeed, Leigh and Harding’s book, created and published exclusively through one of WikiLeaks’s greatest collaborators, the Guardian, is in many ways a tabloidesque character smear peppered with conflicting statements about the status and impact of WikiLeaks or its projects. Unlike other discussions of the topic, whether they are utopian lay discussions like Sifry’s (who is himself critical of Assange) or dystopian scholarly works like Morozov’s The Net Delusion (2011), the book rarely cites its sources in any detail that might make them easily traceable and verifiable, uses a great deal of hearsay, and often degenerates into problematic and seemingly irrelevant assertions or characterizations. This is significant because instead of dealing with WikiLeaks itself, as software, hardware, a social phenomenon, or a source of journalism or even information, the MSM journalists who directly profited from its existence frame it in terms of a person, specifically a person easily framed as abrasive, callous, etc. In other words, rather than treat the WikiLeaks phenomenon and the transparency movement on their own terms, Leigh and Harding attempt to shift the debate into the realm of easily understood (and thus easily misrepresented) gossip and/or singular narrative. The book even begins with a “cast of characters” rather than a table of contents or list of figures or illustrations. This is, unfortunately, typical of

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the authors’ approach. They begin their discussion of Assange himself with a narrative drawn largely from his 2006 online dating profile, and pepper the entire book with negative rhetoric surrounding him that often casts him as insane, a misogynist, an introverted nerd/geek, a womanizer, and a naïve, paranoid, and vain manipulator. He is characterized as part of a set of “unwashed radicals” (p. 16) and Leigh and Harding make sure to note that Assange himself occasionally “forgot to wash” (p. 34), that he doesn’t like football but “swiftly charmed” people (p. 108), was seen as “going out of control” (p. 138) and in search of fame (they end the book with the Rolling Stone characterization of him as “rockstar of the year”(p. 249)). His relationships with women are foregrounded early in the book as negative (p. 69), and developed through a discussion of the sexual abuse charges leveled against him by two women in Sweden that sounds like a popular tabloid exposé more than the rhetoric of established journalists (e.g. pp. 148–55). The relevance to the discussion of WikiLeaks seems to be taken for granted entirely, although it is never argued as such. This extends to the other WikiLeaks associates as well. Throughout, there is a strong and disturbing negative perspective of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization struggle (unsurprising, since, many scholars have noted, most MSM engage in similar smear campaigns) (e.g. pp. 56–7), and the cyber-attacks that followed the corporate attacks on the website in 2010 are repeatedly characterized negatively or in diminutive terms as “childish actions” (p. 207) or “a committed online group of underage libertarians and cyberfreaks” (p. 204). This extends to discussions of WikiLeaks as a significant actor with important information, in a strange turn reminiscent of the U.S. government’s own dual characterization of WikiLeaks as worthless/inconsequential or incredibly dangerous. In this context, though, it serves to remind us that a threatened MSM journalism attempts repeatedly to minimize the role of alternative voices while still often relying on them for content (especially as MSM investigative journalism becomes increasingly rare, censored, or constrained by slashed budgets). “Positive” characterizations of WikiLeaks’s role are troubling as they mask a parasitic role played by MSM journalism. Leigh and Harding make it clear that although WikiLeaks did successfully produce some original reporting on its own, especially in the early years, the stories did not get much traction until they were appropriated by MSM (p. 58). It is also referenced as not only desiring, but needing the attention of MSM, despite its ability to be a “publisher of last resort” that could, unlike the Guardian itself, “laugh at lawyers” (pp. 61–2). Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (who wrote the foreword to Leigh and Harding’s book) is quoted as characterizing Assange as “a little freelancer” (p. 196), and the book suggests continually that WikiLeaks produced a great deal of useless information only understandable (or worthy of making into a “story”) by the practiced hands of MSM journalists. In other words, WikiLeaks is just

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one useful tool among many, but not worth much consideration otherwise (p. 60), and “was, if anything, a new breed of publisher intermediary” (p. 7) whose safety was assured primarily because his collaboration with established MSM news sources meant that putting him on trial would have forced editors of five major newspapers to follow suit (p. 11). Moreover, the book actually avoids discussing most of WikiLeaks’ scoops (as details of Assange’s personal life seem to be more important), and either minimizes its role while heroizing MSM journalism (especially the Guardian (p. 106)) or negatively characterizing those people who are eager to get their hands on the documents (e.g. Icelanders who wanted information on their banks after the financial meltdown (p. 67)) as being either irresponsible or “bulldozed into a particular point of view” as opposed to a perceived neutrality of MSM journalism (pp. 70–1). When it is difficult if not impossible to avoid the impact of the website or its leaked information, it is characterized as an “Assange experiment in media manipulation” (p. 60) in which he plays people and institutions “like a pied piper” (p. 68).

WikiLeaks and the Ambivalent World of Opposition Although this sort of framing is troubling, it is also somewhat expected, as both legacy media and MSM in general characterize any potentially emancipatory or Leftist threat through such rhetoric. However, the ability of established power structures to constrain or limit even this early form of Transgression 2.0, let alone the implications of the lessons they have learned from their interactions with it, are far more frightening and should give us pause whenever we consider the potential of Internet voices to challenge the dominant. As Couldry himself notes (2003: 53): New media, whatever their differences from old media forms, are not disconnected from the material processes by which society’s symbolic resources are centralised, and this is why many are concerned, for example, at the impacts of corporate pressures… . The very idea of new media as automatically “transformative” in their social impacts is perhaps just the latest and most fashionable version of the myth that through media we access both our central realities and our future.

Indeed, all of the authors I have discussed at length (except McNair) point to the dangers inherent in relying on the Internet for dissident voices or organization (e.g. Leigh and Harding 2011: 242; Sifry 2011: 178–82), especially due to the hypocrisy of amazon.com and other online gateways which bowed to the pressure of the U.S. government to remove access to WikiLeaks in terms of fundraising or server space for supposedly violating the terms of their service agreements. As Sifry notes, “not everyone can respond with the resilience of WikiLeaks, which dealt with its situation by

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spreading to more than one thousand mirror sites in dozens of countries, making it effectively immune from takedown pressure from any one country authority” (Sifry 2011: 181). The dangers inherent in any utopian perspective on the Internet as an oppositional or emancipatory force come most strongly, strangely enough, in The Net Delusion, written by a centerist who is certainly not critical of the desire to spread U.S. values abroad, in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “were started, if anything, to spread the gospel of freedom and democracy” (e.g. Morozov 2011: x, 42–3). His warnings about “unbridled cyber-utopianism” are particularly relevant to any discussion of WikiLeaks and, indeed, about the “positive” or “progressive” side of any Transgression 2.0: unbridled cyber utopianism is an expensive ideology to maintain because authoritarian governments don’t stand still and there are absolutely no guarantees they won’t find a way to turn the Internet into a powerful tool of oppression. If, on closer examination, it turns out the Internet has also empowered the secret police, the sensors, and the propaganda offices of a modern authoritarian regime, it’s quite likely that the process of democratization will become harder, not easier. Similarly, if the Internet has dampened the level of antigovernment sentiment—because people have acquired access to cheap and almost infinite digital entertainment or because they feel they need a government to protect them from the lawlessness of cyberspace—it certainly gives the regime yet another source of legitimacy. If the Internet is reshaping the very nature and culture of antigovernment resistance and dissent, shifting away from real-world practices and toward anonymous virtual spaces, it will also have significant consequences for the scale and tempo of the protest movement, not all of them positive. (Morozov 2011: 27–8)

He also notes that although the situation in the U.S. is certainly not good in respect to opposition on the Internet, it is even worse in many other supposedly pro-democracy governments, particularly Great Britain and Australia (both of whom, significantly, have had censorship efforts through anti-pornography or anti-libel laws and judgments thwarted by WikiLeaks). Moreover, he makes a compelling case for the heralding of a new dawn of “freedom” as a fundamentally neo-conservative viewpoint (he calls them cyber-cons), with no more data to support their hopes and claims than was present in the case for war in Iraq since it is often without context or selfcritical analysis (see e.g. Morozov 2011: 18, 30, 38). As he suggests, “yes, [the Internet] can be used to pass on antigovernment information, but it can also be used to spy on citizens, satisfy their hunger for entertainment, subject them to subtle propaganda, and even launch cyber attacks on the pentagon” (pp. 46, 104), and although crowdsourcing and social networking are potentially a positive force for oppositional politics (see e.g.

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pp. 52–3), “the existing imbalance of power between the state structures and their opponents means that from the beginning the more powerful side—in virtually all cases, the state—is better positioned to take advantage of this new central decentralized environment” (p. 136). This is, as many scholars and key figures in technology developments have noted (e.g. Eli Pariser in his 2011 TED speech), one of the key problems with envisioning opposition on the Internet. The economic and physical dependence of the Internet on corporate powers, who are neither forced to adhere to free speech or press laws nor indeed by anything other than their bottom line, is problematic at best even in pro-democracy countries. This represents a far greater threat in many ways than statecensorship efforts as they are commonly understood, although the division between state and corporate power is more than a little fuzzy. As Morozov notes, the anonymity, privacy, and expectations of fair service are far from guaranteed, and are already disappearing under the auspices of companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and many others both large and small (especially the smaller, and thus potentially more vulnerable Internet service providers (ISPs)) (see e.g. pp. 100–1, 213), in which oppositional voices and indeed even entire social networks can be destroyed instantly, with no warning, and with no recourse. Although Transgression 2.0 represents a positive and potentially transformative avenue for increased transparency, accountability, and researchability of established government, corporate, MSM, and other powerful interests in contemporary society, we should be extremely wary of placing too much hope in it without first making sure to somehow safeguard its (relative) autonomy (which is, as Morozov himself notes, a possibility) (pp. 110–11). More importantly, perhaps, without doing so, activists with the resources of WikiLeaks might be secure behind mirrored servers and complex encryption; however, more amateur (poorer, less welleducated, or even with less access to open information gateways) activists are made more vulnerable by the signposting of locations of dissent that inevitably occur in Transgression 2.0. Media opposition, Internet based or not, will never supplant boots on the ground and banners in the streets, and no amount of libertarian or utopian ecstasy will change that fact. Change is almost always messy, certainly if it is systemic; for every Tunisia there will be a Libya or Saudi Arabia, for every WikiLeaks an Iranian crowdsourced surveillance gateway, for every stab at democracy as a fundamental right a response that there are other reasons why we form and sustain our imagined communities, and for every claim that the Internet will set us free there is a reality that much activism on it is simply an illusion, sound and fury signifying nothing. This is not to say that we should not try. As transparency advocate Andrew Rasiej has noted:

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Power and Secrecy in the Age of the Internet  189 The issue is not whether WikiLeaks did the right thing, or whether it should even exist. The real question is what responsibility to governments and institutions like them (for example the Roman Catholic Church) have to build systems within their power structures so that they remain accountable? When those in power work harder to protect themselves than to maintain mechanisms of oversight and justice, opacity wins out over transparency—but only for a limited time. Eventually, a weak link in the hierarchy of power shows up. What is needed is not a call for radical transparency, which some might interpret WikiLeaks’ mission to be. Rather, we should be demanding that the default setting for institutional power be “open,” and when needed those same powers should be forced to argue when things need to remain closed. Right now, the default setting is “closed,” and the public is just left arguing. (Sifry 2011: 12)

Perhaps the most encouraging and troubling aspect of the movement embodied by WikiLeaks is thus its brand presence, exemplified by the billboard in Hollywood praising the website and, significantly, Assange as its public face. It is encouraging that the transparency movement, or indeed any oppositional movement, can gain that much symbolic power and currency in contemporary society. However, it is troubling that the issues so quickly become reduced to image rather than content. When we look at Transgression 2.0, we must ask ourselves. Who is transgressive, what are they transgressing, why, and with what potential impact? More importantly, perhaps, we must remember that opposition is not enough, just as courage is not enough; what we need is not a hero, but a method by which each person becomes empowered not only as a viewer, a consumer, or even a producer, but as a citizen.

Note 1.

As many scholars have noted, this is not paradigmatic of shifts within digital information forums; indeed, many websites have been created in reaction to both the inspiration and the perceived failure (or anarchic ideological slant) of WikiLeaks (e.g. OpenLeaks.org and efforts by MSM sources like the New York Times themselves).

References Andrejevic, Mark. 2007. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Chomsky, Noam. 2002. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon. Couldry, Nick. 2003. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (original edition 1980). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 2003. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schitzophrenia. New York: Viking Press (original edition 1972). Elmer-Dewitt, Philip. 1993. First Nation in Cyberspace. Time International, December 6.

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190  Media 2.0—Legitimacy, Power, and Information Gollner, Philipp. 2008. Judge Reverses Ruling in Julius Baer Leak Case. Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/29/us-baer-idUSN2927431720080229. Gournelos, Ted. 2009. Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gray, Jonathan, Ethan Thompson, and Jeffrey Jones (eds). 2009. Satire TV: Comedy and Politics in a Post-Network Era. New York: New York University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Jones, Jeffrey. 2009. Entertaining Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kahn, Richard and Douglas Kellner. 2005. Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach. Cultural Politics 1. Leigh, David and Luke Harding. 2011. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. London: Guardian Books. Lessig, Lawrence. 2003. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin. Lessig, Lawrence. 2006. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books. Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 1988. The Communist Manifesto. New York: W.W. Norton. McChesney, Robert (ed.). 2004. The Problem of the Media. New York: Monthly Review Press. McChesney, Robert (ed.). 2008. The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press. McChesney, Robert, Russell Newman, and Ben Scott (eds). 2005. The Future of the Media. New York: Seven Stories Press. McNair, Brian. 2006. Cultural Chaos: Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. New York: Routledge. Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion. New York: PublicAffairs. Sifry, Micah. 2011. WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.

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11 My Day of Fame on Digg.com Race, Representation, and Resistance in Web 2.0 VANESSA AU 1 Almost as soon as the Internet came into popular use in the mid-1990s, scholars began writing about the Web as a site of empowerment for the colonized, marginalized, and dispossessed, a virtual (or “cyber,” as it was often termed) space where we could establish a voice otherwise inaudible in the public sphere. Enthusiasts have claimed, for example, that blogs allow anyone’s voice to be heard and resist hierarchical modes of communication (Gurak et al. 2004). Some scholars have examined the potential for people of color, in particular, to go online to build communities, negotiate their identities, create spaces to make our voices heard, contest oppressive visual and discursive representations, and even dialogue with our oppressors (Burnett 1999; Gajjala 2004; Gajjala and Gajjala 2008; A. Mitra 2001, 2006; R. Mitra and Gajjala 2008; Schuler 1996). The liberating and democratizing potential of the Internet for the dispossessed became a popular trope in critical and social science research conducted in that era. The Web was enthusiastically lauded as a site for fresh new beginnings, where race and gender seemed, at times, invisible, changeable, or of little consequence, as one could masquerade oneself in limitless ways. The potential for the transgression of dominant ideologies of race seemed infinite—We could release the constraints on our representations and challenge the power dynamics that fix “Othered” identities in “real life.” The idealistic tone of scholarship about the Internet’s importance for marginalized communities of color was tempered by research dealing with issues of access—the gap between “the haves and have-nots” or “digital divide,” which typically formed along racial lines (Hoffman et al. 1996; Hoffman and Novak 1998; Mack 2001; Norris 2001). The issue of Internet access within the United States and Canada is slowly fading away as the main issue of contention as access continues to increase steadily, and some scholarship on the use of the Internet by oppressed communities continues to carry a celebratory tone (Harrison & Barthel 2009; R. Mitra 191

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and Gajjala 2008). There is a related issue, however, that has gone largely without comment—how people navigate the Web and interact with other users differently now that the technology has shifted from a Web 1.0 to a mostly Web 2.0 environment. Our entry to the Web—both in terms of the technologies we use and the ritual practices we have constructed around those technologies—changes continuously, and some of the biggest changes were those brought about by Web 2.0, which gained momentum in the early to mid-2000s. According to Tim O’Reilly (2005) of O’Reilly Media, founder of the Web 2.0 conference and the first to give a name to this shift in the employment of web technology, Web 1.0 was characterized by, among other things, a tendency to publish content to a website. Similarly, Davidson (2008: 709) suggests that “Web 1.0 is best characterized under the general rubric of data: primarily Web sites and tools that allowed for massive amounts of archiving, data collection, data manipulation, and searching, sites and tools mostly created by experts or commercial interests.” This was, for the most part, a unidirectional process, wherein the content producer, experts, and commercial interests such as Britannica controlled the content that they posted to their sites using whatever directory structure they felt would most suitably organize their content for their readers. There was little interaction with visitors to websites beyond clicking on hypertext links and, perhaps, email and basic commenting functions. Users generally kept track of websites they liked with bookmarking capabilities in their web browsers. Participation and interaction with web users would come later with Web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies have enabled a far greater level of user involvement through such activities as interactive content creation, commenting, ranking, sharing, and evaluation. As Davidson (2008: 709) suggests, “Web 2.0 describes not only the new set of tools but also the new relationships between producers and consumers of those tools… [and] is best defined by interactivity and user participation.” The well-known Wikipedia and other wikis, for example, allow people to collectively write and publish content that, joined with other contributors’ written submissions, become one big online user-generated encyclopedia; Amazon features customer reviews of their books and tracks the popularity of each of the products they sell; eBay relies on user-generated star ratings to establish the credibility of sellers and buyers; Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and many other Web 2.0 sites allow users to tag and geocode photos, videos, and other shared, user-generated content, replacing author-generated taxonomies with user-generated “folksonomies”; Google PageRank analyzes link structures among websites to return higher quality search results; Digg gives users a way to “digg or bury” web content to produce daily lists of websites ranked by popularity or, as they claim, “Digg surfaces the best stuff as submitted and voted on by the community”; and sites like del.icio.us, reddit, and StumbleUpon replace personal bookmarks saved on client web browsers with an entire system

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of web-based “social bookmarking” where users can, again, rank, tag, and comment on web content for the purpose of sharing with other users. O’Reilly describes all this activity as “harnessing collective intelligence” wherein web applications become more valuable as more users take part. These shifts reflect an evolution in the way we interact with the Web and other users. They also decenter such notions as “authorship, publication, refereeing, collaboration, participation, customizing, interdisciplinarity, credentialing, expertise, norms, training, mastery, hierarchy, taxonomy, professionalism, rigor, excellence, standards, and status” (Davidson 2008: 712). As such, they demand a critical look at the Internet’s potential to affect something at a far more theoretical level—signifying practices. It is absolutely critical to consider how Web 2.0 technologies and their accompanying rituals and practices might actually change the circulation of public discourse about, and representations of, the racialized Other. Web 2.0 practices that appeared initially to be trasnformative, transgressive, and liberatory, as it turns out, can reproduce the very hegemonic oppression it appeared to undermine in the first place. Using this personal case study, I interrogate the specific elements of Web 2.0 that might be complicit in continuing to circulate, or even increasingly circulating, the same colonial ideologies and power structures that sustain themselves offline and were an obvious presence in Web 1.0. In particular, I reveal the particular ways in which Web 2.0 might enable or even encourage dominant groups to construct differently (discursively and in an ideological sense) or manipulate the online acts of resistance performed by racialized Others.

My Web 2.0 Day of Fame My starting point is my inadvertent and rather public involvement in Web 2.0. This involved a photograph of me in an army green T-shirt posted online, which catapulted me to Internet fame for a day. The shirt, which reads “I will not love you long time,” references a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket in which a Vietnamese prostitute says to an American GI, “Hey baby, you got girlfriend Vietnam? Me so horny. Me love you long time.” The line “me so horny” has since been reproduced in countless pop culture texts, including rap group 2 Live Crew’s song Me So Horny, which reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot Rap Singles in 1989. Earlier constructions of Asian women as prostitutes actually pre-date Kubrick’s film by nearly a century. According to Robert G. Lee (1999), more than 10,000 Chinese women were forcibly brought to the United States as prostitutes in the late nineteenth century, a visceral reinforcement of Edward Said’s (1999) claim that the West had orientalized the East by exotifying Asian women. Since then, many pop culture texts and Western practices have reproduced this narrow construction of Asian women as sexual playthings, particularly for white men.

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My shirt was intended to be a statement of resistance to the construction of Asian and Asian American women as objects of white male sexual fantasy, both in Full Metal Jacket and in the broader American imaginary. By wearing the shirt, the statement became my own as I attempted to disrupt the narrative of the apolitical model minority, while contesting the popular construction of Asian women as sexual playthings. As Vincent Pham and Kent Ono (2008) explain, wearing or producing activist counter-shirts that requires linking knowledge of Asian American history to humiliating stereotyped constructions of Asian Americans is itself a rhetorical act. Using the “knowledge of flawed colonial representations to produce a rhetoric of resistance” (p. 180) allows us to be seen, not as passive model minorities, but rather as activists and political participants. What transpired after, however, was not liberating or worth celebrating as online experiences for some people of color might have been in the Web 1.0 era. I have an acquaintance by the name of Jeff Croft who, as a web designer, speaker, and co-author of several books on web design, is extremely popular online. He has, at last count, an impressive 9,003 followers on Twitter and, on the less popular photo-sharing site Flickr, 430 friends (still a relatively high number). When he posted my photo to his Flickr album, it was not long before someone who follows him on Flickr chose to “digg it” on the Digg website with a click on the “thumbs-up” icon. Millions, in fact 24 million unique visitors per month, follow the Digg bookmark-sharing website to seek out popular blogs, videos, news, and other content on the Web, making it one of the top websites in the world, according to Inc.com.2 The page hosting my photo on Flickr made it to number one on Digg.com on February 8, 2008, with 5,706 “diggs.” The Digg website displays a thumbnail of the page being “dugg” and allows people to vote by clicking “digg” (clicking the thumbs-up icon) or “bury” (clicking the X icon) to move the page up and down its ranks (see Figure 11.1). Users can also make comments on the content or pass it along to others via Facebook or Twitter (both of which rely on Web 2.0 applications), or “old-fashioned” email. Sharing content using Web 2.0 technologies such as these is rapid-fire and can reach thousands of web users in seconds. Content is picked up by Web 2.0-based social networking and bookmark-sharing sites, where information is quickly shared, and then shared again and again seamlessly across websites and blogs and other applications. This user-directed, participation-dependent pattern of usage is, of course, what characterizes Web 2.0. In this case, it became clear that some people “dugg” the Flickr page hosting the photo of me while making critical remarks about my intentions, my politics, or even the way I looked, perhaps as a way to ensure an audience for their own racist comments. For example, one commenter named jmgoody311 posts, “Is ‘Suckie suckie- 4 dolla!’ still game?” while Thomashauck writes, “Just because you have a big nose …” and Poidh

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Figure 11.1  On Digg.com, users can rank user-submitted web content by choosing to “digg” or “bury” it.

posts, “Looks like you loved someone long time (for twenny dolla) then regretted it. And now you are bitter.” There is even an additional layer of participation on Digg because users can not only digg (or vote their approval for) web content, they can also digg or bury the comments that other people post such that some comments can get “minus” diggs and be prioritized “below viewing threshold” until the user clicks “show” to view them. This is undoubtedly a Web 2.0 level of functionality still quite new to the Web. jmgoody’s comment, for example, has the second-most diggs at 1525. As one commenter Seantubridy pointed out, “It’s really disturbing how so many racist and sexist comments are getting dugg.” But Seantubridy was outnumbered by the users who were making those racist and sexist comments. After the shock and horror of being thrust, almost unbeknownst to me and certainly without my consent, into the virtual spotlight, and of reading the relentless online racist and misogynistic commentary from participants of what became somewhat of an online sideshow, it occurred to me that I was not feeling liberated, centered, lifted, or heard the way many people claimed they felt as people of color making a presence online in the Web 1.0 era. This feeling is perhaps shared by other academics and critics for whom, according to Geert Lovink (2008), excitement for Web 2.0 is rather low. My inadvertent and uncomfortable online journey signaled to me an end of innocence (if that is not too dramatic), of the web for the colonized, marginalized, racialized Other online.

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Theorizing about the Other in Web 1.0: The Good Old Days? Communication scholar Larry Gross (2007) suggests that the Internet enables a “disembodied performativity” in a space where “no one knows you’re a dog, or whatever you choose to present yourself as” (p. vii). Rahul Mitra and Radhika Gajjala (2008) argue that it is this very disembodiment that makes the Internet an inherently queer space, which opens the doors to so many possibilities in research on race, representation, and identity. The potential for negotiating and performing one’s identity had become a trope in Internet research, as was the democratizing potential of online participation. Citing the use of email discussion lists by South Asian women, Gajjala (2004) posits that the Internet serves as a means for furthering “equality” and giving a voice to the voiceless. She explains that women in the Third World can build “feminist safe spaces” online where they can network and dialogue with one another (p. 1). Likewise, Ananda Mitra (2006) sees the Internet as a “cybernetic safe place” in a world of increasing xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment where the dispossessed can be protected from the public gaze and, at the same time, find a space to voice themselves and correspond with dominant groups that yield power over the dispossessed. He argues that many Indian websites remain unknown and unlikely to be stumbled upon, which serves as a natural protection from the gaze of the dominant culture (clearly, he had not discovered the website StumbleUpon). Ananda Mitra and Eric Watts (2002) also assert: “the centrality of any voice is always open to challenge … because of the unique structure of hypertext, where any page or utterance is necessarily connected with other pages and utterances without any particular page having an intrinsic power over the other” (p. 487). In an earlier article, Mitra (2001) also offered the optimistic prediction that, because the Internet decentralizes the means of message production, “anyone can produce and circulate messages, and those messages that are voiced could lead to a realignment of power relations” (p. 43). He posits that, in fact, “there has never before been as much opportunity for dialogue as offered by the Internet, where the marginal can not only speak, but can expect a response” (p. 32). So long as the call “is eloquent enough,” he claims, the dominant will inevitably face a “crisis”—whether to acknowledge it or not (p. 32). Mitra does not provide specific details of how and where on the Web such dialogue would be initiated and sustained, or explanation for why the powerful would suddenly take an interest in the marginalized and oppressed. Tasha Oren (2005) views the Internet as a place where “racial grievance” can be displayed by the Asian American community. Corporations, she explains, frequently “miscalculate the ‘sensitivities’ of Asian Americans” when they produce offensive representations of Asians and Asian Americans on apparel, advertisements, and other consumer products. Abercrombie & Fitch’s 2002 line of Asian-themed graphic T-shirts featuring buck-toothed,

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slanted-eyed caricatures of Chinese men and Adidas’s 2006 $250 limitededition Y1 Huf shoes imprinted with a similar graphic are prime examples that have recently infuriated the Asian American community (see Figures 11.2 and 11.3).3 Oren (2005) argues that these offenses occur because there is a lack of association between Asian Americans and racial anger in Americans’ collective cultural imagination, which facilitates our positioning as a demographic “free of past grievance—in short as honorary whites” (p. 353). In other words, Asian Americans might not be the target of racial insensitivities as often as we are if, perhaps, there were more visible public expressions of Asian American anger about our stereotyped and humiliating representations. Oren names the websites of Secret Asian Man, Angry Asian Man, and Big Bad Chinese Mama as texts that use anger and media criticism to publicly voice such racial grievance and anger (see Figures 11.4, 11.5, and 11.6). She calls these “bridging texts” because they bring Asian American grievances into the realm of mainstream popular culture thereby disrupting the trope of Asian repression. Oren explains that they are effective because “mainstream expressions of racial grievance, of anger, of a refusal to ‘suck it up’ are at once metaphoric and actual interceptions. In their textual presence and performance they can short-circuit old ‘oops’ formulas by insisting on the specificity of [Asian American] experience” (p. 356). These arguments are similar in tone and consistent with much of the

Figure 11.2  Adidas’s 2006 $250 limited-edition Y1 Huf shoes featuring a slanted-eyed, buck-toothed caricature.

Figure 11.3  One design from Abercrombie & Fitch’s 2002 line of Asian-themed graphic T-shirts featuring buck-toothed, slanted-eyed caricatures of Chinese men

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Figure 11.4  Kristina Wong’s Big Bad Chinese Mama website.

Figure 11.5  Phil Yu’s Angry Asian Man blog.

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Figure 11.6  Tak Toyoshima’s Secret Asian Man online comic strip.

other research on the impact of Web 1.0 for oppressed communities. But these Web 1.0 spaces they examine in their work as detailed above are clearly different from the Web 2.0 environment in which my day of fame transpired. Gajjala’s work, for example, is heavily focused on email distribution lists and static websites created by Third World women’s organizations. Gross interrogates the notion of disembodied performativity on static websites, as well, and, in a recent publication, Gajjala, in partnership with Rahul Mitra, analyzes queer blogs that did not seem to have any Web 2.0 functionality. Similarly, Ananda Mitra’s studies center primarily on static websites, as does Oren’s look at “bridging texts” such as Big Bad Chinese Mama, Secret Asian Man, and Angry Asian Man.4 There are general themes common to theories about how colonized and marginalized Others carved out a space online in the Web 1.0 era. They focus on the allowance for marginalized people to find a space for their voice, to dialogue, and to perform public grievance over their visual representations. They also point to the somewhat contradictory notion of safety from the gaze of the colonizer. Finally, in the era of Web 1.0 there were only minor concerns about the impact of evolving web technologies and practices for people of color. For example, Gajjala and Gajjala (2008) noted recently that panics over social networking, a Web 2.0 phenomenon, generally fall into one of two camps: being “misunderstood,” or being “deceived” for someone else’s gain. These are issues, they point out, which originated with the use of earlier asynchronous communication technologies such as bulletin boards and listservs. In other words, they claim that the problems arising from Web 2.0-driven social networking sites—miscommunication and deception—are nothing new and, it seems, little to be alarmed about.

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Complicit Practices and Enabling Structures in Web 2.0 Lisa Nakamura (2008) is one of the few scholars who has commented on the impact that these technologies might have in critical studies of visual culture, race, and identity. She explains that research in the Web 1.0 era focused on the Internet as an alternative reality where people could control their representations of self and embodiment, including race and gender. The topics of self-representation via online avatars and racial passing online are, in fact, among the topics covered in Nakamura’s (2002) book Cybertypes. However, research on Web 2.0, she argues, needs to critique the claim that the Web harnesses collective intelligence by allowing users access to equal participation.5 She comments that “the bits of microcontent generated by the Web 2.0 technologies are incomplete, poorly articulated or even inarticulate-seeming, evocative rather than denotative” (p. 194). With this, Nakamura invites other scholars to continue to critique the idealistic belief that Web 2.0 actually enables a so-called “collective intelligence.” In Lovink’s (2008) analysis of blogging and Web 2.0, he notes that even in the liberal and tolerant Netherlands, blogs have been dominated by bloggers who, under the banner of free speech, go on openly racist online diatribes. What is it about Web 2.0 that most profoundly changes the rituals and practices of navigating the Web such that, instead of forging a collective intelligence, we merely reproduce colonial patterns of power that exist offline? While there are countless characteristics, practices, and technologies that comprise Web 2.0, there are several I consider to be of particular consequence in the ideological construction of the racialized Other: 1 User rankings and, as a result, hierarchical structuring of web content. 2 The sharing/reposting of web content (to indicate approval or disapproval with that content). 3 Functionality that enables users to hijack or colonize web space to displace the author’s content with oppositional, often racist views. There are many examples of the ways in which these distinctly Web 2.0 practices force us to realize that there is less of a collective intelligence forged, and more of an intricate and dynamic system that reifies existing colonial power structures.

Reposting and “Post-race”: Reconsidering Colonized Voices in Web 2.0 Dominant ideologies and the privileging of content. The rhetoric of Web 2.0 sites suggests that they put more power in the hands of the people, but this also means that there are new ways by which voices are elevated or suppressed, privileged or lost. The very common practice of ranking or

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voting in Web 2.0 is often used to establish one’s online credibility or popularity (or the quality of one’s posts). For example, buyers and sellers on eBay are awarded a star for each transaction to indicate their experience of doing business on the site. Stars of various colors are awarded by eBay as users rise up the ranks, and particularly productive sellers can even earn a “power seller” icon. Buyers who pay on time and sellers who sell their goods in the condition described and in a timely manner generally receive positive comments from other users who have interacted with them. There are also other means by which users with more votes, stars, diggs, or whatever measurement the website uses are highlighted. On Digg, shared/reposted contents with the most diggs from other users rise to the top of the rank and occupy a position at the top of their home page when users sort by “most dugg” (this is where a thumbnail of my photo from Croft’s Flickr resided for one long, nerve-wracking day). Furthermore, because comments posted to Digg are collapsed and hidden from view unless they too have multiple votes or diggs, or the user chooses to view posts with “minus diggs,” what happened in my case is that the comments that reproduced the humiliating construction of Asian women as prostitutes or of Asians as inept at speaking English, or that made light of my act of resistance, were dugg and rose to the top of the page. So of the 346 comments posted to Digg, the most highly ranked (most dugg) comments read like this (see Figure 11.7). While all web content may start out on the proverbial “level playing field” where anyone can have a voice, Web 2.0 enables the dynamic production of hierarchies of users and content. That is not to say that the technology is in any way deterministic, but ranking systems that preserve the supposedly democratizing potential of the Internet are not

Figure 11.7  Comments posted to Digg are collapsed and hidden from view unless they have enough votes, or “diggs,” to rise to the top of the page.

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as liberating, transgressive, or empowering as might have been assumed during the Web 1.0 era. Instead, in Web 2.0, values and points of view that are privileged and made more visible and accessible on Web 2.0 reflect the dominant culture’s ideologies just as in real life. Kathy Sierra’s (2007) notion of the “dumbness of crowds” presents some validity here. Having a great mass of users participate in the ranking of content for other users does not always produce a collective intelligence, but may instead produce a collective stupidity that reflects and recirculates dominant status quo ideologies. Negotiating the dominant gaze. In the era of Web 1.0, Mitra (2006) noted the transgressive potential of the Web when he referred to the Internet as a “cybernetic safe place” where the “dispossessed” can be both protected from the public gaze and allowed a space to voice themselves. Marginalized others could connect and dialogue, yet be protected from the gaze of the colonizer because of its vastness and, by definition, the absence of a system to link everything together in any meaningful way. That has changed. Web pages no longer stand alone in a vast web of sites loosely connected by simple hyperlinks. Rather, social media that harness Web 2.0 technology make it nearly impossible to hide in plain sight. There is no longer protection from the public gaze once content is picked up by Web 2.0-based social networking, bookmark-sharing and content-aggregating websites, where content is quickly shared, and then shared again and again seamlessly across websites and blogs and other Web 2.0 environments. In Web 2.0, content and links to content move quickly. Not only is there no protection from the dominant gaze, there is greater power for web users to redirect the gaze sometimes squarely in your direction when you least expect it via content reposting and tagging. Links among like-minded bloggers characterized the primary means by which Web 1.0 content producers established networks and drove web traffic to one another’s websites. Neil Talbot (2002) uses the term “inter-linky-loving goodness” (p. 131) to describe this relationship among bloggers. Web 2.0 has restructured the way in which content is related. Websites that engage Web 2.0 technologies enable and indeed encourage users to redirect or repost content from one website to another, quite likely without your knowledge, much less your consent. This clearly happened in my case. While I knew to go to Croft’s Flickr website to see the photos from the weekend, I did not realize that the page with my photo on it had been “dugg,” or linked to and voted on at Digg until a number of friends, acquaintances, and even a professor in my department emailed me to express their surprise at my instant Internet fame and sympathies for the racist, highly sexualized, and just plain insulting slew of comments that sometimes anonymous visitors to both the Digg and Flickr pages were posting. What replaces the “inter-linky-loving goodness” among

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like-minded members of a particular online community is something more like a virtual spotlight that anyone can take hold of and point in your direction, whether you want it or not. Indeed, this makes it nearly impossible to form any assumptions about who your audience is and who is looking. The Web’s transgressive potential thus becomes compromised in a manner predicted well before the dawn of even the digital age when Socrates, in the Phaedrus (247c), lamented that the word, once written, could be abused by anyone without the consent of the original speaker. Web 2.0, while introducing new challenges, also appears to resurrect older ones. An added complication to the rapid-moving and sharing of content and resultant out-of-your-control shifting of the public gaze is that many websites that host reposted content or links, such as Digg and Facebook, have their own commenting functions independent of any sort of commenting function of the original site hosting the content. So even if one deletes the original content (my photo on Croft’s Flickr, for example), comments and dialogue can remain visible so long as the person who reposted the content or link chooses to leave them there. Not only does it become impossible to hide from the public gaze, there are traces left behind of voices of those who might fervently contest one’s point of view, or wish to publicly ridicule one’s attempt to express it. With Web 2.0, it is hard to tell who is looking, why they are looking, and with whom they are sharing this gaze. Resignifying practices and colonizing space. A theme that belies all of these shifts with the introduction of Web 2.0 is the loss of control over one’s voice and the space in which that voice is heard. Gajjalla (2004) studied “espaces” wherein the main problems were participants’ chattiness and persistence of banter tangential to the original topic. However, she was, of course, examining email distribution lists and basic websites. In the Web 2.0 environment, dialogue takes place in spaces that are far more technologically complex and more open to public participation. Chattiness and off-topic posts from people within the community seem like comparatively insignificant problems given the oppositional, “against the grain,” and often racist dialogue that commonly erupts on discussion boards and online comments pages in a Web 2.0 environment. Nakamura (2008) examines one such case in which the Asian American community set up an online petition to protest a Details magazine article titled “Gay or Asian” which features the photo of an Asian American man with captions inferring that Asian men are effeminate and indistinguishable from gay men. Nakamura explains that while most signators decry the racism of the Details article, some use the site “against the grain” by employing the space of the online petition to “protest the protest” (p. 194). This hijacking or colonizing of web space becomes a far more prevalent occurrence in the Web 2.0 environment precisely because of its highly user-driven nature. It

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is not long before a counter-hegemonic space is recolonized. The original mode of counter-hegemonic transgression becomes stifled, foregrounding a reactionary transgression that is reassertive of the dominant ideology. With this in mind, Oren’s notion of a “bridging text” demands particular reconsideration. Again, she asserts that expressions of Asian American grievance or anger in mainstream popular culture disrupt the trope of Asian repression. Oren explains that narratives of Asian American passivity can lead to miscalculations of our tolerance for racially offensive cultural significations. But when audiences can contribute to the production of a bridging text, such as on the Flickr and Digg pages that hosted my photo, they can shift the meaning of the text itself. Users of social networking websites sometimes even reignite expressions of traditional or “old-fashioned” racism, which Chesler et al. (2003) define as the “expression of traditional negative prejudice, bigotry, stereotypic beliefs about the inferiority or even dangerousness of people of color” (p. 219), particularly when readers can post their contributions to the dialogue anonymously. Although theorists including Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2006) argue that a more socially acceptable “color-blind racism” has replaced old-fashioned racism, old-fashioned racist sentiments seem to flourish when identities are hidden or falsified online. At least half of the comments on either Digg or Flickr could not be read, even generously, as a support for, or recognition of my act of grievance. Instead, many of the comments are anonymous insults and ad hominem attacks condemning my opposition to problematic representations of Asian women. Often they are neither subtle, nor color-blind. For example: Sie Sind Schwach says: So, you won’t “Love me long time”, you’re scrawny, and quite angry. What use are you then? Are you good at math or something? It doesn’t seem like you have a developed sense of humor. I thought plain looking girls were supposed to try harder. lossjim says: [to the owner of the Flickr page] you have one friend with SERIOUS issues, and, to boot, comes off like most “holier than thou” asian chicks, with a low self esteem, but need to be seen/appreciated? whatever, good luck with your “good friend”.

Other comments reinscribe the very discursive construction I was contesting, namely the Asian woman as prostitute/object of white male sexual fantasy, or they perpetuate other humiliating constructions of Asian Americans such as the non-English-speaking foreigner. For example: jonolan says: No boom-boom, no visa! promqu33n says: needs more chinglish. me no love you longtime. slider527 says: ahahaha me want fly lice with that asian girl.

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The narratives created in these spaces—one that condemns and ridicules my act of grievance, and another that reproduces and reinscribes humiliating archaic constructions of Asian Americans—overshadow and displace expressions of Asian American grievance both literally and discursively. In other words, they become secondary, parasitic transgressions of my original counter-hegemonic transgression. Oren points out the importance of bridging texts in interrupting narratives of Asian American passivity but the construction of a whole new text—pages upon pages of online reader-generated comments—clearly takes up more space in a literal sense than the original “bridging text” on the web page. Social media sites like Digg and Flickr invite public dialogue which effectively becomes incorporated as part of the text, thereby enabling this secondary reactionary transgression. This type of transgressive potential was absent from Web 1.0 sites such as Angry Asian Man, Secret Asian Man, and Big Bad Chinese Mama. Space allotted to an act of grievance can now be effectively taken over to reignite even older expressions of racism. What happened on Flickr and Digg around my voicing of racial grievance suggests that, while any disruption of the persistent narrative of passive model minority is important, it is crucial to consider how the text might produce different meanings when it is visually and discursively colonized. The voices of the dispossessed and marginalized get lost as they are visually and discursively displaced, hijacked, or silenced by those who speak louder, or in greater numbers, especially as content is voted on and elevated in status and visibility. The nature of the reposts and comments indicates that we are, in fact, far from existing in a post-race society in which racial equality has been achieved and is thus a bygone topic. In contrast, the online racial discourse observed in my case study as well as in the Details magazine case discussed by Nakamura, and certainly others as well, indicate that many people readily subscribe to very conservative, static, bigoted notions of race, and these technologies seem to serve as a ready arena for the recirculation of these racial meanings. It is interesting to reflect on early observers of the Web who envisioned it as a space where “users can float free of biological and sociostructural determinants” (Dery 1994). Hobson (2008) explains that what has actually transpired is the reproduction of offline power dynamics that can manifest online in “disturbing and retrogressive ways” (p. 212). New media, he argues, perpetuate old ideologies, undermining previous narratives that posit a web-enabled “transcendence from race, class, gender, and other markers of difference” (p. 112). Web 2.0 practices of ranking, reposting, and commenting and then another ranking, reposting, and commenting on those comments have enabled the recirculation and privileging of bits and pieces of incredibly disturbing and regressive racist discourses as demonstrated by what transpired on my day of fame on Digg.

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Mocked and misunderstood performances of resistance. Pham and Ono (2008) explain that mimicry, a notion interrogated at length by Homi Bhabha, is a tool used by the colonizer to control the colonized, one that signals what is appropriate for the Other. They point to the aforementioned Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts bearing offensive caricatures of Asians as one instance of such mimicry at work in the control of the racialized Other. These acts of mimicry enacted by the dominant group, they argue, serve to reify their colonial power. However, as Pham and Ono point out, mimicry can also create a space for the colonized to resist, and in that space they can point out flawed colonial representations. In my own case study, I was indeed contesting a “flawed colonial representation” by wearing a shirt that read “I will not love you long time.” I was, of course, pointing out that I am cognizant of the popular construction of Asian women as objects of white male sexual fantasy that was sedimented in the American imaginary by the popular film, Full Metal Jacket. Further, I was demonstrating my rejection of that narrow colonial representation of Asian women. Based on a reading of the comments posted on Flickr and on Digg, it is clear that some commenters demonstrated, however, what Stuart Hall (1973) would call an oppositional reading. Many, because they seemed unaware that the irreverent phrase on my shirt referenced a scene in a particular film, read my shirt differently—they seemed to think that I believe conceitedly that others want me to “love them long time.” This is a clear case in which my message and intentions were misunderstood entirely due to the commenters’ ignorance of the shirt’s popular culture reference. For example: Vspazv on 02/08/2008: I’m trying to figure out if the double entendre was intended. (as a side note entendre isnt in the digg spell check). inajiffy on 02/08/2008: Can someone explain to me the origin of this phrase? Apparently I live under an internet rock (which, most of the time, I’m okay with). sloppjyoe890 on 02/08/2008: I go to a college where my dorm is like 80% black, they make fun of me constantly, you wanna know the best defense. Laugh and talk shit on them i have made so many friends crossing racial boundaries by making racial jokes, its all in good fun and if someone gets offended by it then just apologize. my generation is a dave chappelle generation we can joke about this stuff, i’m sure if that asian girl didn’t want to be made fun of she wouldn’t have worn that shirt. i realize my grammar a sentence structure is wrong go ahead and make fun of me, its all in fun. michaelb1 on 02/08/2008: Probably looking for sum yung gai. albinorhino101 on 02/08/2008: Who’s long tim? AndrewWiggin on 02/08/2008: Am I square because I don’t get it?

In fact some of the commenters posted comments trying to explain the joke or point out that other commenters misunderstood the message the shirt was trying to convey:

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Race, Representation, and Resistance in Web 2.0  207 TheCount on 02/08/2008: I think you may be missing the point of the joke. It’s not supposed to be another cliche, it’s supposed to go against it. Coffeedemon on 02/08/2008: Full Metal Jacket. The second half when they get to Vietnam. Its part of a conversation where Joker (I believe) is in negotiations with a prostitute over the price of her services. bjs3171 on 02/08/2008: way to miss the point. brickbat on 02/08/2008: Apparently used by Vietnamese hookers to attract Foreign GIs during the Vietnam war. Its referred to in Full Metal Jacket http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Metal_Jacket Papillon Soo Soo as Da Nang Hooker: A prostitute who approaches Joker and Rafterman at a street corner during the first scene in Vietnam. She is memorable for the sales-pitch phrases: Me love you long time, me sooo horny and Me sucky sucky, in exchange for fifteen dollars.

In other cases there were people who, at some level, demonstrated some recognition of my shirt’s reference to a very specific line from Full Metal Jacket, but who contested or trivialized my performance of resistance by mocking and mimicking me (see Figure 11.8). Comments left on Croft’s Flickr page also mocked and mimicked: katipunera76 says: this is an old, trite shirt. i would suggest she express her and your pseudo-progressive outlook with a tool NOT from urban outfitters. plus, it was probably made in a sweatshop. Zod’s Pics says: Here are some other t-shirt ideas: “No, I don’t wok my dog.” “No, my other car is not a rickshaw.” “No, I don’t eat fried lice.” Just curious: are those offensive? If so, is her shirt also offensive? Really, you think this t-shirt is saying something profound about stereotypes and racism, but actually you are just reinforcing them. It would be like a black guy wearing a shirt that said, “No, I can’t dunk a basketball.” or “No, I don’t steal cars.” It would be more effective if you just wore a shirt that said, “F*ck off, whitey.” Which really makes this no different than the white racists it is aimed at.

Figure 11.8  Many who commented on Digg.com contested or trivialized my performance of resistance by mocking and mimicking me.

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What happens when contestations of mimicry, or expressions of “racial grievance,” are transgressed; themselves mocked, mimicked, or misunderstood? To put it another way, what does one make of the colonizer mocking and mimicking the racialized Other precisely because we are demonstrating resistance and racial anger at our subordination? It becomes clear that there is a mutually reinforcing dynamic at play. Multiculturalist rhetoric has us believing that Asian Americans have entered some sort of post-race existence as model minorities. It would follow that, if this reflects the dominant ideology, it is unsurprising that people react to our acts of resistance and demands for apology and recognition with transgressions of their own to reassert hegemonic racial ideologies. Oftentimes, as in my case, commenters expressed this through their mockery and mimicry of my performance of racial anger and contestation of their portrayals of Asian women. They did not react to my display of racial anger with support. If mimicry and mockery are indeed tools used by the colonizer to control the colonized and to signal what is appropriate for the racialized Other, then it seems my transgression through my contestation of colonial representations was deemed inappropriate and perhaps threatening. I had redeployed the strategy of mimicry against the colonizer, the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (Lorde 1984), but comments about my performance of mimicry (of Full Metal Jacket) mimicked me, making for a rather complicated network of mimicry. But does their mimicry and mockery render our display of racial anger through the production of “bridging texts” ineffective? Simply disrupting the trope of the repressed Asian, as suggested by Oren, clearly falls short when readers can disrupt my disruption, or effectively transgress my counter-hegemonic transgression by adding to the text and images on the web page with their own commentary to redirect the readers’ focus. One clear message of racial grievance, or bridging text, transforms into a cacophony of voices occupying the space, some supporting the original message, others contesting it or mocking the author, and still others involved at some level in the back-and-forth banter. There appears to be no privileged position situated outside of this endless circulation of disruption/transgression, rendering these critical interventions “interminable analyses” (Derrida et al. 1981). In sum, visiting a space on the Web sometimes involves not just reading the author’s message, but rather using the original content as a starting point for dialogue, discussion, contestation, and argument which not only decenters the original text, but also creates a space for mimicking and mocking it. This is far more consequential when that original message is one from the marginalized voices of racialized Others with a serious message (even if conveyed with tongue in cheek) about how we are constructed by the dominant group.

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Conclusion The democratizing potential of the Internet for the dispossessed became a popular trope in scholarship during the Web 1.0 era. The Web was lauded as a site where race and gender seemed invisible, changeable, or of little consequence. The vastness of the Web and selective creation of hyperlinks among sites was said to provide natural protection from the dominant gaze where marginalized Others could dialogue with one another and even seek responses from the dominant group if they wished. Asian Americans could even disrupt the trope of passivity and repression through the display of bridging texts. Themes common to these theories about how colonized and marginalized Others have been liberated by the Internet in the Web 1.0 era focused on the opportunities for us to find a space for our voices, to dialogue, and to perform public grievance over our visual representations. Few scholars discussed the significant drawbacks to online participation aside from excessive chattiness and off-topic posts, or being misunderstood or deceived for someone else’s gain. But the Web and the ways users interact with it have undergone significant changes. Web 2.0 technologies have enabled a far greater level of user involvement and interaction through such activities as content creation, commenting, ranking, sharing, and evaluation. I have challenged models of empowerment of early Internet scholars that focus on the liberating potential of the Internet for racial minorities by interrogating the ways in which these new Web 2.0 structures and practices are complicit in circulating online the same colonial ideologies and power structures that dominant groups sustain offline. Web 2.0 can actually enable reactionary transgressions in response to the counter-hegemonic transgressions initiated by marginalized groups. Voting and ranking content on social media websites, for example, is ubiquitous and often determines how content is placed on a page (or not). This reproduces the status quo rather than opening up a space for marginalized voices. Further, the rapid-fire sharing and reposting of web content happens out of anyone’s control, consent, or even awareness, and the participatory and collaborative nature of Web 2.0 can render one’s intentions, as an author of web content, irrelevant. It becomes impossible to maintain a public online safe space or hide from the public gaze particularly when users from the dominant group shine the spotlight on us with the intention of inviting public condemnation, ridicule, or even threats of violence. Users intent on sabotaging expressions of racial grievance and other voicings can quite easily colonize web spaces. And, as in real life, marginalized voices get pushed out as dominant voices support other dominant voices and they, both figuratively and literally, rise to the top. What this demonstrates is that

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transgression in Web 2.0 is neither linear nor unidirectional, but is instead multi-layered and transactional. Counter-hegemonic attempts to transgress status quo racial ideologies are often met with reactionary transgressions reassertive of the dominant social order. Web 2.0 enables this dynamic and complex system of spaces and voices that can be shared and republished, recolonized and resignified, mimicked and mocked. But these transgressive acts are still as critical as they are difficult to protect in our Web 2.0 environment. Through this constant cycle of tensions, shifts in meaning, and stolen spaces, there will be moments when the marginalized racial minority transgresses the dominant racial order, even if those moments are fleeting and sure to be reappropriated, resignified, or reclaimed. The need for further critical attention to the dynamics of power that circulate and sustain Web 2.0 structures and practices is obvious. The question now is how we are to intervene.

Notes 1.

I am indebted to LeiLani Nishime for her valuable suggestions, and to the editors, David Gunkel and Ted Gournelos, for their careful reading and feedback. Thanks also to Jeff Croft for the taste of Internet fame. 2. http://inc.com/magazine/20080701/horse-race-searching-for-the-next-digg.html. 3. News of the Adidas Huf shoes was even reported by the BBC in this article at http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4895898.stm, while Emil Guillermo wrote a particularly insightful piece for SFGate about Abercrombie & Fitch available at http://articles.sfgate. com/2002-04-23/news/17538190_1_abercrombie-fitch-t-shirt-asian-american. 4. The “Secret Asian Man” comic by Tak Toyoshima and “Angry Asian Man” (Phil Yu) have a presence in various Web 2.0 spaces today, including Twitter and Facebook, but Tasha Oren’s discussion focuses primarily on their respective websites which, for the most part, do not enable Web 2.0 features such as tagging, commenting, voting, sharing, and so forth. 5. This is related to race and representation online even though Nakamura does not explicitly make that connection. But she does touch on some of the observations about online racial discourse which I share in this chapter.

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Race, Representation, and Resistance in Web 2.0  211 Gurak, L., S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratcliff, and J. Reyman. 2004. Introduction: Weblogs, Rhetoric, Community, and Culture. Into the Blogosphere. Retrieved September 1, 2009 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/introduction.html. Hall, S. 1973. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham [England]: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. Harrison, T. and B. Barthel. 2009. Wielding New Media in Web 2.0: Exploring the History of Engagement with the Collaborative Construction of Media Products. New Media & Society 11(1–2): 1–2. Hobson, J. 2008. Digital Whiteness, Primitive Blackness. Feminist Media Studies, 8(2): 111–26. Hoffman, D.L. and T.P. Novak. 1998. Bridging the Racial Divide on the Internet. Science 280(5362): 390. Hoffman, D.L., W.D. Kalsbeek and T.P. Novak. 1996. Internet and Web Use in the U.S. Communications of the ACM, 39(12): 36–46. Lee, R.G. 1999. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lorde, A. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Lovink, G. 2008. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York: Routledge. Mack, R.L. 2001. The Digital Divide: Standing at the Intersection of Race & Technology. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Mao, L. and M. Young, M. (eds). 2008. Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric. Logan: Utah State University Press. Mitra, A. 2001. Marginal Voices in Cyberspace. New Media & Society, 3(1): 29–48. Mitra, A. 2006. Towards Finding a Cybernetic Safe Place: Illustrations from People of Indian Origin. New Media & Society, 8(2): 251–68. Mitra, A. and E. Watts. 2002. Theorizing Cyberspace: The Idea of Voice Applied to the Internet Discourse. New Media & Society, 4(4): 479–98. Mitra, R. and R. Gajjala. 2008. Queer Blogging in Indian Digital Diasporas. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 32(4): 400–23. Nakamura, L. 2002. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge. Nakamura, L. 2008. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Norris, P. 2001. Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Reilly, T. 2005. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Retrieved July 30, 2009 from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html. Oren, T.G. 2005. Secret Asian Man: Angry Asians and the Politics of Cultural Visibility. In East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture edited by S. Dave, L. Nishime and T.G. Oren (pp. 337–60). New York: New York University Press. Pham, V. and K. Ono. 2008. “Artful Bigotry & Kitsch”: A Study of Stereotype, Mimicry, and Satire in Asian American T-Shirt Rhetoric. In Representations: Doing Asian American rhetoric, edited by L. Mao and M. Young. Logan: Utah State University Press. Schuler, D. 1996. New Community Networks: Wired for Change. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Sierra, K. 2007. The “Dumbness of Crowds”. Retrieved July 1, 2009 from http://headrush. typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/the_dumbness_of.html. Talbot, N. 2002. Weblogs (good God y’all) What are They Good For (Absolutely Nothing— Again). In We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing our Culture, edited by R. Blood (pp. 130–2). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

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12 Fandom 2.0 An Interview with Henry Jenkins Convergence does not depend on any specific delivery mechanism. Rather, convergence represents a paradigm shift—a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communication systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture. Despite the rhetoric about “democratizing television,” this shift is being driven by economic calculations and not by some broad mission to empower the public. Media industries are embracing convergence for a number of reasons: because convergencebased strategies exploit the advantages of media conglomeration; because convergence creates multiple ways of selling contents to consumers; because convergence cements consumer loyalty at a time when the fragmentation of the marketplace and the rise of file sharing threaten all ways of doing business. In some cases convergence is being pushed by corporations as a way of shaping consumer behavior. In other cases convergence is being pushed by consumers who are demanding that media companies be more responsive to their tastes and interests. Yet, whatever its motivations, convergence is changing the ways in which the media industries operate and the ways average people think about their relation to media. We’re in a critical moment of transition during which the old rules are open to change and companies may be forced to renegotiate their relationship to consumers. The question is whether the public is ready to push for greater participation or willing to sell the same old relations to mass media. (Jenkins 2006: 243)

Editors’ Note: Henry Jenkins is one of the rare scholars to have successfully made the transition from “old media” to “new media.” His 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture was a groundbreaking work on polysemy and its sociopolitical implications, grounded in the approaches of his mentor, John Fiske. In the following decade, however, Jenkins moved increasingly to an interest in digital culture, particularly after his move to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and wrote From 212

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Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games with Justine Cassell in 1998. His most influential work on digital culture to date is his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, which in the following interview he discusses in terms of the contemporary political, cultural, and media landscape. He is currently a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Ted Gournelos [TG]: Stemming from your work on fandom, how do you envision fan (re)workings of cultural production as transgressive acts? What are they transgressing, and what is at stake politically in these acts? Henry Jenkins [HJ]: Writing about fan fiction in the 1980s and 1990s tended to stress such practices as resistant or transgressive. More recently, I have discussed them in somewhat more ambivalent terms, such as participation. From the start, the fan has a particularly complex relationship to mainstream commercial culture—a relationship defined through fascination and frustration, one which is in some ways aligned with and in other ways opposed to the interest of those who produced the original series which they use as the raw materials for their creative play. The initial case for reading them as transgressive or resistant rested on several claims: 1 The idea that these fans were often part of a “surplus audience,” i.e. female fans of male-directed action adventure series who were not part of the demographics the producers were courting for their programs. As such, they brought alternative pleasures and fantasies to bear on these texts, which were expressed through the ways the characters and situations were retrofit through their acts of “poaching.” 2 The idea that in this process, fans often pushed beyond what could be included in mainstream culture, embracing, for example, alternative constructions of gender and sexuality through their homo-erotic writings. 3 The idea that in pursuing these fantasies, they step outside of intellectual property regimes that seek to regulate who can create and share stories about these characters, often resulting in further radicalization. They are in fact part of larger debates about remix or free culture, which continue to be one of the major battlegrounds of the digital era. My current work on “fan activism” pushes all of this one step further, showing how the infrastructure and social network of fandom is yielding new kinds of political practices which are entering into real world struggles for social justice, as in the example of the Harry Potter Alliance which is fighting around a range of human rights issues. That said, fans are also increasingly being courted by the creative industries, especially in the era of the Web 2.0, and they still seek to shape

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the official texts associated with their favorite franchises in ways that can make them “collaborators” with—rather than “resistors” to—”the Powers That Be.” Following some recent writing by Derek Johnson, I am using “collaboration” here in a politically loaded fashion—suggesting someone who works within and seeks to change dominant structures of power and in the process risks being called a traitor to both sides since they occupy an unstable and impure position. In my most recent work, I am trying to reconcile the work of cultural studies, which stresses the agency of those who engage with participatory culture practices, and the work of critical studies which stresses the structural advantages of Web 2.0 industries, which seek to capture and commodify those creative energies. One way to do so is to stress the ways that fans themselves have taken aim at some of the features of neoliberalism which have concerned critical studies accounts, including issues of privacy and data mining, constraint over intellectual property, and deployment of free labor practices. Here, again, we can see fans as both part of the system of a redesigned version of consumer capitalism and as one of the leading forces fighting to reform that system in order to create a more diverse and democratic culture. TG: It is interesting that you are framing fandom and transgression here in terms of activism, especially since that element is largely missing from existing literature on fandom. Could you expand on the potential for fans to be activists, rather than through the earlier models of resistance or even oppositional culture? This seems a rather radical evolutionary move from polysemy, or even the sort of “photoshop for democracy” and culture jamming applications of fan culture. How is fandom as activism transgressive, in other words? Is it transgressing the normative pathways through which opposition occurs in industrial/corporate constructions of the fan? Or perhaps transgressing the normative pathways through which “activist” is constructed and integrated or rejected by the dominant? HJ: In fact, fan activism has been part of the picture from the very beginning—if we mean by this, fans mobilizing to assert their collective interests in relation to the culture industries themselves. For example, the early Star Trek fans organized letter-writing campaigns to keep their series on the air, an act which many see as the defining moment in establishing contemporary media fandom. The template for fan organizing developed by Bjo Tremble and Joan Winston in the mid-1960s still circulates on the Web today and has informed many such campaigns through the years. Beyond this, of course, fans have taken collective action when they are threatened with Cease-and-Desist letters, a pattern which has been repeated many times, especially since the Web has pushed fandom into greater public scrutiny and has allowed for fans to work more easily

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towards collective interests. Fans have organized in response to constraints imposed on their practices by Web 2.0 companies, whose interests are often misaligned with those of their consumers. But, by fan activism, I also mean something more than that. I mean the capacity to move from the utopian fantasies which Richard Dyer and Frederic Jameson have argued are at the heart of the appeal of popular entertainment and towards an attempt to realize some of those goals in the real world through political and social movements. This potential was always there. Andrew Ross has written about the efforts of the Communist Party to develop inroads into science fiction fandom as early as the 1930s and 1940s. I described in Science Fiction Audiences the ways that queer fans had lobbied the Star Trek producers to include a same-sex relationship on the series. We may be seeing more and more examples now, like the Harry Potter Alliance, which are seeking to build on these shared fantasies as a platform for political action. The group seeks to build a Dumbledore’s Army for the real world and to use it to tackle genocide, global warming, gay marriage, media concentration, fair trade, disaster relief, collective bargaining, and a range of other issues, some of which flow easily from the themes of the books and J. K. Rowling’s own political imagination as a former Amnesty International activist, some of which require metaphorical leaps of faith. These fans are unafraid to take on those who control the franchises whose fantasies fuel their efforts—for example, challenging Warner Brothers to move their chocolate contracts to countries which follow fair trade agreements. And we are seeing more and more traditional activist groups tapping into the fantasies of popular culture to find metaphors that are refreshing political speech. Immigrant Rights groups are reclaiming Superman as an undocumented alien. Labor organizers in Madison, Wisconsin are using Star Wars imagery to signify their struggles against the Imperial Walker (their actual foe is Gov. Scott Walker). Pro-Palestinian protesters are marching through the Occupied Territory dressed like Na’vi from Avatar. This may well be “photoshop for democracy” pushed to the next level. All signs are that this fusion of popular culture/participatory culture and politics is reaching young people who have fallen through the cracks in the past. They are culturally active but not politically active, and thus forging a bridge between fan culture and activism may help them find their voice as political agents. If we trace this back to Dyer’s and Jameson’s somewhat different notions of entertainment as a utopian discourse, both contain accounts of mechanisms of social control which they claim prevent fans from acting on these fantasies in the real world. But the theorists forgot to tell the fans because all over the world, fans are taking to the streets and demanding a reality more aligned with their fantasies.

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In the past, the language of resistance and transgression only got us so far. Critics argued that cultural resistance had not led to actual political change. But these new forms of fan activism can be measured by the same criteria as more traditional kinds of activism—money raised, people mobilized, votes cast, people at rallies. If I am reluctant to use the term, transgression, now, it is that we have used it too easily in the past and thus blunted its power to account for the kinds of changes I am talking about. TG: In Convergence Culture you argue that the increasing interconnectedness of the forms, methods, and distribution of cultural productions has laid a groundwork for radically re-envisioning the way we look at authors, distributors, and receivers. Is this an inherently transgressive shift, and is it based mainly in technology, or a view of technology (or, perhaps, an integration of technological mediation into everyday life)? Is it sustainable? HJ: Technology is certainly a factor in these shifts, though I doubt technology in and of itself would have been sufficient to tip the scales in this new direction without a history of grass-roots efforts to promote a more participatory model of culture and without emergent business models and practices which seek to leverage the affordances of a networked society. These are ideas we develop even further in my forthcoming book with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Producing Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, which looks specifically at shifts in how culture gets circulated as more and more people gain access to the means of cultural production and distribution. I am far from sure whether this is transgressive or not, but it is certainly transformative in the sense that it is allowing new players to emerge, new kinds of culture to be produced, and new kinds of relationships between consumers and producers. In some cases, these shifts force mainstream media to be more responsive to its existing audiences. In some cases, these shifts allow independent media makers greater access to the market, and in some cases it is allowing some transnational media producers a chance to be heard in the U.S. context. And in most cases, it is allowing people to more directly shape the kinds of culture around them. Is this sustainable? I am not sure. I recently stumbled back on a passage from my mentor, John Fiske, whose reaction to new media was that it would offer “new opportunities to struggle” since it shifted the ground conditions and changed the affordances available to participants but did not insure any particular outcome. My work seeks to identify where those struggles are taking place by pointing to examples where grass-roots communities and creative artists have helped to shift the terms of their participation. Like Fiske, I don’t think we can predict the outcomes, but we can help to educate the publics that are going to be involved in these struggles.

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TG: That is a very revealing quote from Fiske, especially in the current climate. What I think is particularly important about that is that there seem to be three dimensions to this argument: the first, which of course Fiske himself found of primary concern, is the acts of the “authors” (or fans, subsequent authors, responders, etc.). However, the second and third are distribution and circulation modes, which are again largely ignored in the literature. Could you speak about how distribution and circulation could be new sources for opposition and/or transgression in terms of digital media and culture? Another element to this is the possibility of the reintegration of opposition into the mainstream or dominant; thinking again about distribution and circulation, what should change in our conception of how oppositional or transgressive culture functions in the contemporary mediascape? HJ: Yes, more than anything else, the emergence of digital media may be changing conditions of distribution and circulation. In the new book, we will use distribution to refer to older mechanisms involving top-down control over the flow of media, while we use circulation to describe a hybrid system for spreading media, more and more shaped by the bottom-up efforts of unauthorized participants. Keep in mind that we are using “unauthorized” here to refer to many activities which are often labeled as piracy by the media industries, but which may in fact still enhance rather than damage the value of their properties. You are right that we’ve paid much more attention in the past to conditions of grass-roots production, which is why I think we are just now understanding the full implications of a system of circulation where more and more control rests in the hands of grass-roots participatory communities to shape what media gets passed along and to whom. Some of this is what others are describing as memes or as viral media, but I find these unattractive metaphors because they do not do justice to the agency of the participants and thus fail to ask the social and cultural motives shaping the exchange of these materials. I am still struggling with the term, transgression, here but it may be more appropriate than opposition, given that they are breaking outside of established practices, crossing fixed boundaries, but may or may not see themselves in direct economic or political opposition to the powers that be. In many cases, they are simply using the media at hand as cultural resources for expressing their perspectives with their friends; in some cases they may be simply seeking to spread the word about media content that they value. But their choices to pass along content are often read as threatening by those in the media industries because they are unpredictable and unregulated by old protocols. These companies are frightened by what they see as conduct which is out of their control and which can change their fortunes in such a dramatic fashion. So, these participants are not acting outside

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of capitalism; they may not even be resisting capitalism in a conscious or direct manner; but they are disrupting the business models upon which consumer capitalism has operated, forcing companies to rethink their relations with their consumers. I do not imagine these practices are permanantly transgressive or oppositional. A lot depends on how the system responds to these pressures. There are all kinds of schemes out there to build such grass-root efforts back into the logics of consumer capitalism. More and more companies are talking about lead users, crowd sourcing, user-generated content, or viral media, all ways of staking a claim to the generative labor of fans as producers and circulators of media content. But, as they do so, these companies are also changing their own policies and practices in ways that force them to be more responsive to their consumers. In many ways, negotiation may be better than either transgression or opposition as a description of this process, since for the most part the consumers are choosing to continue to operate within the terms of consumer capitalism but they are seeking a greater say in how that system operates. TG: The recent developments in the Middle East, from the Cairo demonstrations to the Libyan revolution and the ongoing debates and interventions by other nations, seem to be transgressive acts that have taken the world by surprise. However, they also seem to be in many ways predicted by your work on convergence. Do you see them as connected? How deeply, and in what way? HJ: Yes, I see them as part of the shifts which my work has sought to describe. There’s still a lot we have to learn before we can make definitive statements on what has taken place [and I am not an expert on the Arab world]. What we know is that young, digitally connected activists have played a very active and highly visible role in each of these liberation struggles, often working hand in hand with more established revolutionary groups who are deploying more conventional tactics. From speaking to young people from some of the countries involved, it is clear that there is no easy separation between how these young people developed ways of working through government constraints on digital use to download pop music, say, and the tactics they are deploying now to circumvent government constraints on grass-roots organizing and mobilization. In the case of Iran, it turns out that the social media was used less to organize within the country than as a means of tapping into global diasporic communities to attract and mobilize supporters in the West and as a means of attracting media coverage from CNN and other large news organizations. The fact that people could get firsthand reports—Tweets, videos, photographs—shared by participants shifted the affective context within which the West received news of these uprisings and thus helped to shape public opinion here in powerful ways.

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Sasha Constanza-Chock, writing about the Los Angeles Immigrant Rights movement, has deployed the term “transmedia mobilization” to refer to the ways that [younger] activists are deploying any and every available channel, tapping all appropriate technologies, to get their messages out. In all of these cases, young activists are the first to deploy dispersed rather than centralized channels for creating and sharing their messages, putting more control in the hands of local activists to shape and spread their own representations. Such tactics are paving the way for young people to play key roles in such campaigns. All of this is very much part of the kinds of participatory politics that I described in the final pages of Convergence Culture. TG: This is again an interesting set of issues that you bring up, and again an interesting step from earlier work on digital culture and politics. There are two dimensions that are particularly interesting: first, you seem to suggest that digital media in these contexts was overblown in the Western media as an actor, rather than a tool, of the opposition, and that in fact it was largely used to connect to external (e.g. diasporic, especially in the West) interests regarding Iranian politics. Expanding on that, how much interest and faith should we put in these technologies? Is it Web 2.0 here that is transgressive, or is it the momentary use of these technologies within a certain context that made them transgressive (and thus perhaps easily foreclosed, as we have seen in subsequent oppositional movements in the Middle East, or never even opened, as we see in the Palestinian opposition movements)? What are the implications of either answer, assuming of course that it is probably a combination of the two? Second, you interestingly suggest (and, I think, contra Lessig) that the acts of opposition we see in file sharing and hacking are actually not only transgressive but actively oppositional and, perhaps, even pedagogical, as they are teaching elements of cooperation and systemic limitations that could easily be applied elsewhere in more overtly political contexts. Could you expand on that idea? HJ: The introduction of a new media raises expectations of change, creating the stage for the kinds of “new struggles” which Fiske described. The myth of the digital revolution allows us to imagine the possibilities of change, allows us to see once established norms and institutions are subject to rethinking and reinvention. In the case of networked technologies, they create new conditions of access to information, control over the circulation of messages, and the capacity to form networks which give rise to certain hopes for a more democratic society. There’s nothing inevitable about the outcome. People will have to fight to get the results they want. But the presence of the technology brings about a changed set of perceptions. In that sense, this is not a technological determinist argument.

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I would argue that by playing with these technologies in relatively mundane ways, trying to access a forbidden file, learning to tell your story via a blog, forming bonds with strangers through a social network site, the society acquires skills, a kind of latent capacity for action, which may be deployed towards more serious ends later. They are learning how the tools work and what they can do. They are learning what it feels like to take collective action. They are discovering their own voice through sharing media with each other. And when other conditions are right, when the time comes, then those latent capacities can be put into action to change the world. This is part of what I was trying to get at when I spoke about fan activism earlier. By the time fans have run a letter campaign to try to prevent their favorite series from being canceled, they have done everything they would need to do to mount any other activist campaign—identify an issue, locate pressure points, plan tactics, rally and educate supporters, and publicize their efforts through the media. When these fans get pushed about copyright issues, they often become more radical about the system under which their fair use of media materials is constrained by corporate interests. The combination of these new capacities and the new orientations make them that much more likely to contribute to other efforts at social change. Something like this may well have happened across the Arab world. Most of these countries have a higher than average density of young people, many have been surprisingly active users of new media, many of them have broken out of theocratic and institutional controls over their access to popular culture, and many of them have forged strong online communities. And I am sure in many ways, which we are just starting to understand, these shifts have had an impact in the political changes that are happening there, even if, as seems likely, they used more traditional means to organize within the country and relied on digital media primarily to send messages out to the rest of the world. Is this resistance, opposition, transgression? Perhaps, but it is also participation. I don’t think we can draw these lines as sharply as previous generations of cultural studies writers imagined. I think the system has proven more elastic than many would have imagined. TG: With that last point about elasticity in mind, could you preview a bit of what you think should happen or should be done to safeguard the potentials of participatory politics? Often we in the U.S. take for granted the supposed “freedom” of the Internet, and suggest exporting it abroad to foment democracy rather than looking at our own questionable systems of technology and both state and corporate control. Movements to “safeguard” the Internet have taken the form of “net neutrality” and “fair use” among other things, but have been largely limited in impact and

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scope. Could you speak to what you think needs to be done now, as well as perhaps why and how it needs to be done? HJ: The first point I would make is that we should take nothing for granted in this space. There is nothing inevitable about the idea that the introduction of new media technologies will result in the democratization of culture. I suspect those who make such claims would not agree on what we mean by democratization—democratization of access? Of participation? Of control over the means of production and distribution? Of ownership? Of representation? We can and no doubt will debate how widespread the participatory culture practices I am describing here are even in Western democracies, but we can agree that there are still significant numbers of people who face strong economic, cultural, educational, and political obstacles which block meaningful participation. Insofar as the values implicit in the push towards a more participatory culture are ones we share, those values are only going to be extended through continued struggles and critiques of existing structures. There is something so urgent and real about these struggles—whether within national or transnational contexts—which make old divides— such as the schisms between critical and cultural studies—seem trivial by comparison. Cultural studies has kept a strong focus on shifting forms of cultural agency and on the potential of networked communications to create new forms of collective identities, whereas critical studies has stressed structural constraints which limit opportunities for meaningful participation. Cultural studies has offered us a vivid image of what we are fighting for, while critical studies has offered us the most compelling description of what we are fighting against. Cultural studies has focused on issues of digital access, education and literacy, net neutrality, and intellectual property as the core struggles of our time, while critical studies has focused on the political economy of corporate consolidation, the neoliberal restructuring of governance, and the exploitation of “free labor” under Web 2.0. Any meaningful political agenda for the future will need to draw elements from both strands if it is going to fully address potential threats to participatory culture. There’s lots of conceptual work to be done in sorting out the relationship between these two strands of cultural critique, but the goal should be to find the common ground which allows us to fight more effectively to expand values we share rather than infighting among theorists over who’s more right in their analysis of the present situation. Above all, such changes require us all to move outside our comfort zones as theorists and public intellectuals, to engage in conversations with people who come at these issues with different perspectives. Some of these struggles will be fought through governmental policy but with the privatization of many key aspects of governance, the reality is that

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many of these changes are going to require us to develop more effective strategies for negotiating with corporate decision-makers who shape the conditions under which culture gets produced and circulated. I don’t think we can conduct these negotiations by holding industry at arms’ length and refusing to engage with the realities of consumer capitalism. And some of them require expanding the skills which are accessible at the grass-roots level to ordinary citizens, which is why I see issues of media literacy as fundamental to any larger agenda for media reform. We need to avoid two tendencies which result in less effective reform efforts—on the one hand, the complacency which comes from a rhetoric of digital inevitability (an occupational hazard of the cultural studies position) and on the other, a fatalism and a cynicism which denies the possibility of structural changes (a danger implicit in the critical studies position). The key first step is recognizing that this is a struggle, that there will be partial victories and temporary setbacks, that we are describing a contested terrain which requires active intervention but which seems ripe with potential. This struggle towards a more participatory culture is not new—Brecht explored its possibilities in relation to radio, Enzensberger in relation to local access television—but it may be the defining struggle of our era because of the ways that the popular embrace of digital media is bringing about, ready or not, reconfigurations in the relations between consumers and producers, between citizens and governments, and between students and teachers.

References Cassell, Justine and Henry Jenkins. 1998. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Forthcoming. Spreadable Media: Producing Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. Tulloch, John and Henry Jenkins. 1995. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Dr. Who and Star Trek. New York: Routledge.

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13 Sovereign Networks, Pre-emptive Transgression, Communications Warfare Case Studies in Social Movement Media1 JACK Z. BRATICH In spring 2010, a number of musical artists made waves when their videos sparked controversy with their visualization of sex and/or violence. While Beyonce and Lady Gaga’s duet Telephone was alleged by CNN to have been pulled from MTV’s line-up, Erykah Badu’s Window Seat and M.I.A.’s Born Free were removed from YouTube, that supposed paragon of participatory culture. These cases thus each tested the limits of media platforms with varying degrees of openness. Traditional media like MTV have long practiced forms of extensive censorship of videos based on objectionable material (from its almost ritual banning of some Madonna videos since the 1980s to the re-editing of numerous others to the blacklisting of certain videos and themes soon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq). There is little surprise that they would continue in this tradition. But the advent of participatory media complicates this notion of censorship. Platforms like YouTube depend on user-generated content, as well as user-generated evaluations. At the same time participatory media sites contain guidelines and codes for the content of posts. The Badu and M.I.A. case made people aware that there are indeed guidelines for posting, but the decisions on how and when the guidelines are enforced remain obscured to virtually all users. When does an expression violate the terms of participation, the End User Licensing Agreement, the sociotechnical protocols of interactive media? Embedded in the concept of transgression is the establishment of a line or a limit whose crossing constitutes a cultural or juridical violation. How are such divisions and lines being drawn in an age of media convergence, in which both culture and law are in a state of flux? In which spheres are these lines being drawn? Which social actors and institutions are 224

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empowered or disempowered from doing so? In other words, what is the topology of transgression in an interactive age? This chapter examines new developments in network politics, social media, and dissenting movements that determine the status and function of these moving lines. It focuses on case studies involving dissent networks in which Twitter has been a vital actor. Self-organized social experiments in networked movements find themselves regulated, deterred, and criminalized. What do these cases have to offer us in understanding the changes in warfare and dissuasion via networks and social media? Discussion of transgression typically centers on content (e.g. intellectual property) and meaning (e.g. standards of taste and sensibility). While these are key sites of struggle, in the following examples we find that transgression belongs to usage, not to meaning. Once we realize the limits of user-generated content we can examine user-generated use. I argue that user-generated usage changes the rules of the game, altering not only who decides on boundaries but also questioning the very concept of transgression. Convergence scholars note the contemporary collapse of binaries.2 By extension, I contend that in convergence and social media distinctions don’t disappear—they get reformulated in mobile and flexible ways. Binaries like popular/public, friend/enemy, and insider/outsider re-emerge, but via a discrimination among hybrids. A term like “frenemy” names one of these hybrids; indexing the links across binaries but also the need to monitor and modify the hybrid in order to articulate the lines. How do sovereign interventions operate, especially in continually turning frenemies into either friends or enemies? Transgressors now face a different logic. Rather than wait for a line to be crossed, sovereign power interrupts and preventively intervenes in practices. Operations here draw from police powers and information warfare tactics: action (mobilization) and inaction (immobilization). These recent developments are tied to a history of communications warfare, especially as a type of dissuasion. Drawing upon the work of Galloway and Thacker (2007) on the topology of network politics and upon autonomist theories of subjectivity, antagonism, and ontology (especially Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno), I examine the entanglements of social movements and social media as a development in this communications warfare. Ultimately, I argue that we are witnessing a convergence of sovereign and network powers, one that expresses new modes of control while setting the conditions for new forms of antagonism.

Polemological Convergence Culture Much of the literature on convergence, co-creation, and prosumption locates conflict primarily as an intellectual property question (who can own cultural products) and occasionally as a labor issue (who produces

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value). Moreover, the relation of political culture to popular culture is often relegated to the realm of governance (narrowly defined as problemsolving) and participation in electoral campaigns. Missing is what Michel De Certeau (1984) called the polemological dimension of culture. Polemology locates popular culture in a long (even archaic and nonhuman) tradition of warfare. The “ageless art” of tricks and ruses permeates the texts and practices comprising everyday life, a cat-and-mouse game with power that also produces innovation, creativity, invention. While polemology was a significant dimension of late twentieth-century fan studies scholarship, it seems to have vanished, even within the same thinkers’ writings.3 For example, the semiotic insurgency model of Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers (1992) has been replaced by a twenty-firstcentury triumph of the textual warriors in his Convergence Culture. The consumers, in this formulation, have won. Jenkins (2006) argues that polemological tactics like culture jamming have become obsolete (p. 215). These celebratory models have eschewed concepts like incorporation and subsumption for co-creation and participatory production. However, this strategic thinking is bounded by a context of consumption. The main asymmetry, when it appears, is between producers and consumers. In convergence culture the elevation of the fan-consumer becomes the prototype for transgression. Throwing out these tactics seems to remove the possibility of any antagonism from the outside. But the fan-activist is not the only figure through which we access media tactics. Another process, or really a context, may be reintroduced here, namely warfare and the polemological. What happens if we expand politics from the polis to the polemos, from the government of citizens to the control of combatants? Polemology allows us to bring together media convergence with the history of communications warfare, especially as they involve the very social media often cited as features of convergence politics. The twentieth century saw a hundred-year integration of US popular culture into war campaigns. From the ideological meanings embedded in war films to the institutional and industrial links between Hollywood and the Pentagon, entertainment has been a crucial instrument for the war over hearts and minds (Robb 2004; Valentin 2005). The twenty-first century’s war on terror is no different, and may even be considered to be the culmination of these efforts. Authors who have studied “militainment” see the increasing militarization of media culture moving beyond textual representations and into interactive simulations (e.g. video games), fashion, and participatory culture (Anderson 2006; Stahl 2010; Hay 2011). The resurgence of governmental interest in cyberwarfare has resulted in the recruitment of hackers through games like NetWars and a CNN broadcast of a war game simulation (Greenberg 2010). Recruitment of citizens as unofficially deputized agents, especially for P2P surveillance,

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makes participation the key activity for a democratized spy-and-snitch culture (Andrejevic 2007). These representations and simulations are in fact part of an old military desire to understand, infiltrate, defuse, and/or conduct the enemy’s culture. From early propaganda research to the Cold War model of researching insurgent culture to the more recent study of enemy social networks, the field of communications has been central to psychological operations (Mattelart 1994; Simpson 1994). The outside enemy’s culture is only one part of contemporary communications warfare. The domestic terrain, the homeland, with all of its social interactions, has been integrated into Terror-War (Hay and Andrejevic 2006). These recent developments are part of a broader transformation in military affairs that seeks “full spectrum domination,” one that explicitly involves understanding culture and communication. We could in fact separate this work out from the usual attention paid to news as information warfare and call it “communications warfare.”4

A Tale of Two Twitters At recent global summits and national conventions, we have witnessed the proliferation of network powers. The txtmobbing actions at the 2004 Republican National Convention were monitored and pre-empted through a variety of police techniques, like managing physical crowd movement and making mass arrests. Four years later at the 2008 RNC, moreover, police didn’t even wait until people were in the streets: we saw pre-emptive arrests of media documenters (both “new” media like Indymedia and “old” media like Pacifica News). An even more striking example of these state interventions took place a year later, at the G20 protests in Pittsburgh, PA. Police stormed the motel room of Eliot Madison, where he and others had set up a communications node (part of the Tin Can Comms Collective (TCCC)) to distribute gathered information about the demonstrations. This hub contained hardware like police scanners and computers, and involved, among other things, tweeting. In essence the TCCC was taking publicly available information and redistributing it to protesters on the streets, often propagating what police were already saying (e.g. dispersal orders). Madison was charged with “criminal use of a communication facility, hindering apprehension or prosecution, and possession of instruments of crime” (emphasis added).5 The control of space and the power to pre-empt are, from a ground-level perspective, tactical responses to these technologically enhanced directaction swarms. From another angle, the very capacity to determine the target of deterrence and intervention is a sovereign power. Sovereignty here is a power source whose domain is space (typically territory) and subjects

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(relationships). In recent political theory (specifically Giorgio Agamben’s [2005] rereading of Carl Schmitt), sovereignty is the authority to declare emergency and thus suspend the law. Sovereignty is a concentration of the political decision; namely the ability to determine a state of exception. Beyond the juridical sphere, we could say that it involves the capacity to make distinctions, anchored by the authority to determine the topology of the political. Which subjects are inside and which are excluded? Sovereignty determines codes of usage but more importantly when they can and cannot be implemented. An obvious example of social media sovereignty may be found in one of the top ten most powerful tweets of 2010, according to Twitter. It was emitted by the President of Ecuador: “Gobierno declara estado de Excepción #Ecuador #30S.” The Latin American sovereign issued a state of exception, declaring a state of emergency through the social media platform. But this example takes social media to be a vehicle for the expression of power across vaster spaces (and faster times). The ability to integrate Twitter and other social media into prescribed projects while excluding others gets closer to the broader powers of sovereignty at stake here. What is the topology of network sovereignty? This sovereign power becomes sharper when contrasted to other social movement media. Remember that a few months before the Pittsburgh G20 case, US politicians, pundits, and news anchors effusively praised the role of Twitter in the Iranian election protests. The ability to bypass Iranian state-run media was depicted as a moment where social media and freedom were united again. The state of exception meets American exceptionalism; freedom over there 5 crime here. Moreover, later in 2009 Twitter made an appearance at the second annual Alliance of Youth Movements conference. Launched during the prior year with a summit in New York City, the AYM gathered together an ensemble of media corporations, Obama consultants, social network entrepreneurs, and youth organizations, under the auspices of the State Department. Representatives came from old media (MTV, NBC, CNN) and new (Google and Facebook). The AYM created an online Howcast Hub, which “brings together youth leaders from around the world to learn, share & discuss how to change the world by building powerful grassroots movements” (Alliance of Youth Movements, http://www.movements. org/). Among the series of how-to videos produced for the site were How to Create a Grassroots Movement Using Social-Networking Sites, How to Smart Mob, and How to Circumvent an Internet Proxy. Through the training videos we are incessantly reminded about the code of AYM’s genetically modified activism: Make sure you avoid violent extremism. You will need permits. Respect property. Use leaders. Speak forcefully without being incendiary. Avoid obscenities and violent imagery. Use as your model Cold War Latin American anti-Communism (anti-Castro,

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-Chavez, -FARC). A Cold War discourse thus appears at certain moments to frame this infowar. The underlying presumption, not surprisingly, is American exceptionalism: these networks should proliferate elsewhere, since the US has reached the pinnacle of openness and democracy. Elsewhere (2009) I have called this Alliance an example of a “Genetically Modified Grassroots Organization” (GMGO). Neither wholly emerging from below (grassroots) nor purely invented by external forces (the astroturfing done by public relations groups), emergent groups are seeded (and their genetic code altered) to control the vector of the movement. These are hybrids, mutations without clear identities or immediately obvious affinities. They are rather movements whose potentialities and vectors are shaped by their conditions of emergence. At the 2009 summit, speakers from Twitter (Jack Dorsey, Founder and Chairman) and YouTube (Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics) contributed to a panel called “Using Social Networks to Effect Change.” Meanwhile, a “How to Use Twitter to Effect Change” video premiered. In this video, after some opening advice on using hashtags and attracting followers, we are given tips on being trustworthy as well as more practical mobilization tactics. The voiceover instructs us to “Alert your followers in real time and issue a call … to mobilize your people on short notice” (an example shown in the vid: “#cityhall Don’t forget! Friday @ 2pm. B there!”). We are told to be cognizant of “real time advantage” in which “on the scene citizen reporters can provide valuable information to others in the area.”6 The video also helpfully lets us know that you can tweet even if the government shuts off mobile phone services. But what if they confiscate your hardware, as with the Madison case? We are reminded here that information warfare and digital politics do not solely take place in an abstract “datasphere” but rely on material conditions like technical hardware access and the (im)mobilization of bodies. Moreover, the Howcast video drops in a little tip for better infowar. In the global solidarity section, they suggest “ask[ing] followers to change their location to your city.” This sleight-of-face is precisely something one might find in spycraft training. In the 2009 summer Iran protests, CNN and other media outlets were relying on tweets as if they were authentically coming from the streets of Tehran. Tweets were taken at face value as accurate reports of facts on the ground, ignoring the role of disinformation or what Jayson Harsin (2006) calls “rumor bombs.” Social media produced a bottom-up mist, creating not a fog of war, but the fog-machine of war. If this AYM tip is any clue, it is likely that many of these Iranian tweeters were indeed from elsewhere.And in one final telling twist, during peak moments in the June Iranian demonstrations, a Twitter co-founder was emailed and asked to delay a scheduled maintenance downtime. Who made the request? Jared Cohen, the State Department press contact for the Alliance of Youth Movements.7

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Security Mutants, Alliances, Monsters The AYM’s networked “people power” is the newest mutation in the post-Cold War model of fomenting youth-oriented insurgencies.8 We see an interesting divide here. In residual Cold War logic, the sovereign adversaries like Iran and Egypt are said to have state-run mass media (which needs to be fought via social media). The US, meanwhile, has state-friended social media. Twitter-usage in the Iranian case and in the AYM video is a State-friended type. But that determination of friendliness immediately encounters a peer hybrid, another usage—namely the Madison G20 case. Here Twitter usage was criminalized as a state-defined internal enemy. How can we think of these differences? Are they selections among variations, means of creating conditions for the success of some hybrids over others? Who is empowered to make this distinction? This convergenced version of Schmittian friend/enemy distinctions among frenemies has special relevance insofar as the binary is superimposed over another one, the foreign/domestic. Panics over domestic dissent have shaped much of twentieth-century American political culture, from the immigrant rabble-rouser to the foreign mole to the domestic extremist (Rogin 1987; Bratich 2008). The past twenty years or so have seen an added dimension to this fusion, one that is especially salient for the Terror-War. As a number of analysts note, terrorism as a target allows for the centrality of “unspecified enemies,” a position whose content can be filled in by “whatever enemy” those with discursive and material power so choose (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Debord 1998; Massumi 1992; Der Derian 2001). The unspecified enemy only rarely takes the concrete form of an actor, and is instead considered dangerous because it can appear at any time. As a virtual figure, the indeterminate enemy strikes without warning and comes in many guises, generating a permanent sense of unease. This indeterminacy also fosters sovereign empowerment—only some actors can determine just who can become an enemy. The content can be filled with anyone, but not by anyone. In this way, user-generated content finds its limit in the unspecified enemy, since only some users can determine it. These networked enemies are not just enemies that take on a networked form of organization (e.g. Al-Qaeda), but a chain of associations that creates links among groups and organizations (determination within the unspecified enemy). How a network individuates is key here.9 A social movement network tips into the intolerable, and is pre-empted. The key goal here is prevention. Pierre Levy (1999) notes this pre-emptive tendency: “power must continuously thwart the emergence of a collective intelligence that would enable the community to forsake such a power” (p. 82). As Melinda Cooper (2006) argues, the recent construction of military threats follows epidemiological models where pre-empting emergence is a key strategy 10

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In these recent cases, a sovereign state of exception could be enacted partially because domestic dissent is rendered sensible through a Terror-War discursive context. For one thing, Pentagon personnel refer to domestic dissent as “low-level terrorist activity.” Raids on anti-war activists in Minneapolis were, according to the FBI, carried out to root out “activities concerning the material support of terrorism” (Furst and Simons 2010). More materially, eco-activist property destruction carries a prison sentence prolonged due to “terrorism enhancement” measures.11 The FBI’s four major categories of domestic terrorism include “anarchist extremism,” including the anti-globalism and anti-capitalist movements (which could be said to apply to the G20 protestors such as Madison) (FBI.gov). Moreover, the friend/enemy distinction here is not focused primarily on the content produced (though this type of censorship still appears). It concerns the type of usage. User-generated discontent is not merely the “wrong” kind of content—it is the spread of dissensus through experimenting with the forms of organization and the technical affordances for democratic action. This is user-generated usage, which has a long history within communications struggles. Recently we have seen versions of this emerge around Low Power FM, community wireless, hackers, modders, etc. Even earlier, the politics of amateur uses and technical-social competences infused communications subjects from early ham radio operators (Douglass 1987) to CB users (Packer 2008). In these cases, the hardware as well as the social and technical protocols of communications is at stake. Turning back to foreign policy, sovereign prevention has an explicit name: “counter-radicalization.” Counter-radicalization is a Terror-War initiative hatched in the sovereign body, exemplified by the Presidential Task Force on Confronting the Ideology of Radical Extremism, as well as the more dispersed network of experts forming the International Centre for Study of Radicalization and Political Violence (Task Force 2009). The stated goal is to deter religious extremism (Islam, of course; not other theisms). Tactically it also involves the dissuasion of extremist uses of digital technologies. Counter-radicalization programs aim to rehabilitate former radicals and, ultimately, prevent radicalization through a combination of outreach, engagement, education, and cultivation of moderates. Currently, counter-radicalization targets external figures (namely those in other nation-states). But one set of guiding questions in the Task Force’s Integrated Strategy paper portends the future: “How can the United States be better prepared to prevent emergent domestic radicalization? Does the United States need to develop its own counterradicalization programs? Are there ‘best practices’ to consider?” (Task Force 2009: 1). In a convergence culture, especially a polemological one, the foreign and domestic are not clearly delineated (though this goes back at least as far as guerrilla camouflage and undercover spies). If the history of domestic dissent management is any indicator, counter-radicalization will quickly be shaped

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by endocolonization, the name Paul Virilio gives to the process whereby apparatuses originally designed for external enemies turn inward (cited in Dyer-Witheford 1999: 79). But we do not have to wait for endocolonization to understand that warfare is waged not only via the mobilization of consent but also via the immobilization of dissent. A number of researchers have analyzed these operations, starting especially within the propaganda efforts during World War I (Stauber and Rampton 1995; Ewen 1996). In these efforts, managing the growing power of masses (noted by such luminaries as Harold Lasswell and Walter Lippman) was paramount, which meant devising means of recruiting, directing, and harnessing them (Ewen 1996). The “public” became a keyword for this managed population. The public was to be both domesticated and persuaded (to identify and align with a position). At the same time that a public was being mobilized through persuasion, other agents were being immobilized through dissuasion (Virilio 2000). The Palmer Raids, the Espionage Act, and the Sedition Act all worked to ensure that only particular opinions and actions would be operational in the name of the public. Throughout the twentieth century similar practices comprised a history of domestic enemy production, from immigrant radicals in the 1920s and 1930s to the Red Scare over fifth-column communists in the 1950s to domestic extremists in the 1960s and 1990s (Rogin 1987; Bratich 2008). Current forms of network power emerge out of this history of communications warfare.

Sovereign Transgressions The network form, as a number of scholars have argued, is as much about control as it is about freedom (Galloway 2003; Chun 2006). The twisted twitter tale gives a glimpse into the contemporary conditions of the control of dissent and transgression. Connectivity is not reducible to a participatory power that equalizes nodes and actions—it produces another asymmetry. Forms of connectivity are positioned as a threat; they are not just resources for freedom. Networks don’t just expand; they seek to eliminate potentially incompatible nodes, the ones that cannot be absorbed. Sovereignty mixes with networks: criminalizing user-generated usage, forging alliances, determining enemies. Is it not a contradiction to say that network power now finds these sovereign concentrations within it? Not if we recognize what Galloway and Thacker (2007) call the topology of network power. As they note, networks are internally heterogeneous, containing within them “antagonistic clusterings, divergent subtopologies, rogue nodes,” even “incompatible political structures” (p. 34). We could call this a convergence of network and sovereign power, one in which network forms can incorporate all types of authority and organization, including sovereignty (p. 18).

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What is sovereign power within these networks? In the cases above, it is the ability to make distinctions, a “selective articulation” (p. 19). The network/sovereignty convergence is notable insofar as sovereign protocols seek to pre-empt some forms of connectivity. When the two meet we begin to see an increase in repressive intervention into, and pre-emption of, information use. This is clear with regard to the ability to determine proper modes of dissent. Galloway and Thacker (2007) call this an “exceptional topology,” noting that, “America’s networked power rises only in proportion to the elimination, exclusion, and prohibition of networked power in the guerrilla and terrorist movements” (p. 40). To this I would add any networked dissensus that potentially can be linked to terrorism (the “unspecified enemy” that continues to expand its categorical power into such domains as “anarchist extremism”). This internal inconsistency is an asymmetry regarding capacities—one network has access to protocols of terrain management, of making distinctions via criminalization. At different times, networks emerge out of, traverse, and depend on institutions (Lovink and Rossiter 2005). In the cases above, determining the unspecified enemy and dissuading action is accompanied by institutional actions such as criminalization. It is a variation of what Mark Andrejevic (2007) calls “digital enclosures,” now fueled by the hybrid power of networks and institutions. At the same time, certain network alliances are hatched and nurtured by traditional institutions (like the State Department). The Alliance of Youth Movements assembles selected nodes into the network using network tactics. Here is where we can return to the discussion of transgression and convergence by examining line-drawing. Sovereignty, in order to dissuade via the punishment of transgressors, needs continually to draw and redraw the demarcation among hybrids, to incessantly select among mutations in order to pre-empt certain mutations from emerging as dominant. Often, these divergences within convergence are framed in familiar binaries (e.g. friend/enemy, public/popular, foreign/domestic). But it is the convergence of these very binaries (in mimicry, frenemies, domestic terrorists) that creates the terrain. Sovereignty intervenes into this terrain to make selections and eliminations. Which mutations to friend? Which to defriend and turn into a threat? How to engineer and cultivate the most valuable mimics? Which mimic is too close to becoming powerful?12 Lines not only have spatial dimensions (turfs crossed, proximity of the mimic); in network politics they are profoundly temporal. Pre-emption is a delimitation of vectors and futures. It establishes conditions of emergence (“this is what the G20 protests will look like”). Even criminalization works on this preventive gambit. We are dealing with a different temporality: not one in which a line is created and then someone crosses it, but in which a line is created in order to show how an actor will have crossed it. That line

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might disappear (e.g. the criminal charges dropped against Madison’s G20 actions), but the chilling effect and dissuasion of future actions remains. It is this dissuasion of action that is key to understanding the specific modes of pre-empting transgression in a contemporary warfare context.13 In a Rand anthology edited by Arquilla and Ronfeldt (2001) (of “it takes a network to fight a network” fame), John Rothrock (1997) defines infowar as “the degradation of adversaries’ capacity for understanding their own circumstances, but also the capacity to neutralize any effective use of whatever correct understandings they might achieve” (quoted in Terranova 2007: 132). For Terranova, this component of information warfare is indispensable for comprehending what she calls a “futurepublic” (2007); a collective intelligence is thus inextricably linked to its agency, here defined as the ability to act on its information. Once again we move from user-generated content to user-generated usage. The content of the information in itself is not eliminated (aka censorship). What is neutralized is rather the passage from information to action, from meaning to mobilization. Sovereignty here is the capacity to defuse capacities. Sometimes it involves cutting the lines of communication by confiscating hardware or suspending service. More generally, transgression now depends on crossing the following line: “do not trespass into the terrain of actionable information.”

Conclusion: Antagonism and the New Transgression Contemporary communications warfare entails a convergence of network and sovereign power (the concentrated police function; bifurcating into friends/enemies). Polemological convergence entails preventing some forms of emergence while encouraging others, directing as well as thwarting other possible convergences. Sovereign modes of individuation act upon a milieu outside of it, seeking to promote certain kinds of mutations. But can they contain those mutations? For Galloway and Thacker (2007), new network sovereigns will breed an anti-web politics. For Lovink and Rossiter (2005), this external milieu is a “constitutive outside—a process of post-negativity in which rupture and antagonism affirms the future life of the network. The tension between internal dynamics and external forces comprise a new ground of ‘the political’.” What can sovereign/network convergence establish as new conditions for dissent even while dissent is turned into an (emergent) enemy? One way to answer this is to examine another kind of line, namely the antagonism at the core of convergence (even if that core is now distributed rather than centralized). Social media rely on open network access, but are too easily framed via democratic rhetoric (i.e. participation, interactivity, freedom). At the same historic moment, we are also witnessing a concentration of the state’s

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basic raison d’être, the monopoly on violence. Lines are thus antagonistic, increasingly making visible the sovereign interventions that undermine network culture’s apparent consensus.Networks form their identities in antagonism, an antagonism not necessarily against an already defined enemy, but around the unspecified emergence of other alliances. This is decomposition—an attempt to defuse in advance the potential powers of some forms of self-organization. The convergence that results from warfare is a reproposal of thresholds, a recomposition of divides. How do we think this new transgression? First, we can reverse our perspective on transgression and see state forces as transgressors. The examples above highlight the state sovereign as a subject in antagonism, an agent in a war on domestic dissent. It is a creator and violator of lines. It desires to usurp the capacities for action, for mobilizing around information. This disruption doesn’t just tactically prevent a local demonstration. When sovereign power acts as a network it disrupts usergenerated usage—the capacities of innovation, the practices of freedom, and the powers of making common embedded in dissent networks. User-generated usage is thus an expression of a broader power. Technological developments embedded in socialized production, as autonomist theorists have noted, foreground the powers that have ontologically accumulated (Negri 2005), that produce “species-being Resurgent” (Dyer-Witheford 2004) and that create anthropological expressions (Virno 2009). The network/sovereign hybrid’s transgression is an interruption not of a particular action, but of the power to act (what Negri (1999) and others call “affect”).14 For these thinkers, capital is the subject that attempts to absorb and neutralize ontological capacities, but in the cases explored here, it is the state’s peculiar relationship to the war machine that comes to the foreground. The network sovereign is thus an antagonistic subject, one whose eugenic interventions depend on the deprivation of powers and the prevention of what a body can do. It remains a “despot,” a figure that relies on the sadness of others (Deleuze 1988: 25; Hardt 1993). The second transformation of transgression is a response to the first. If the network sovereign is the transgressor, user-generated usage requires a different sensibility. Let us revisit the sovereign power of invoking a state of exception. Paolo Virno (2004) argues that the state of exception had a counterpart in the seventeenth century, the “right of resistance” (p. 42). Against the disruptive and invasive procedures of centralized power, the jus resistentiae was invoked to “defend plural experiences, forms of non-representative democracy, of non-governmental usages and customs” (p. 43). And this right was defensive, as it involved “safeguarding forms of life which have already been affirmed as free-standing forms, thus protecting practices already rooted in society” (p. 42). Now, we might say, the safeguards are not just for already existing customs and practices under threat of extinction. Instead, refuge is for the

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forms of life not yet arrived, for emergent mutants, for conditions under which new forms are innovated. This type of security, seemingly hidden for centuries, now returns as its own type of mutant. Antagonism as militant refusal involves experimentation in alliance-making and in organization. It means developing new hybrids of networks and institutions. These mutants need protecting against State transgression, the bringer of alienation in the guise of making alliances. The regularity of customs that historically refuse and pre-empt states of domination now emerge as monsters, ones in battle for difference, variation, and metamorphosis. They are the demonstrative, exhibiting the creation of new modes of existence.15 The network sovereign emerges as the enemy of this creativity, a despot against these popular customs. From transgression to preservation, the right to resistance is an archaic custom now revived as network refusal. It involves creating and defending lines, rather than crossing those established by others. Opening up to the archaic unleashes a number of virtual tendencies, ones that can only be briefly mentioned: (1) the polemological revival of a war-machine, one whose functioning to ward off the concentration of power was a preventive mechanism (Clastres 1987; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Wilson 1998); (2) the concentration and emergence of a nonhuman or elemental quality within networks, a transversal entity irreducible to ontic constructions (Galloway and Thacker 2007); and (3) a reversion to a notion of sovereignty as espoused by Georges Bataille (1991), namely the unproductive use of wealth and subjective expenditure.16 Antagonism, Negri argues, opens up the ontological process again. It means reappropriating the lines and determinations set by despots. It would be naïve to begin chanting “Whose Tweets? Our Tweets!” But without enthusiastically protecting and cultivating the expressive common that is the motor of any democratic politics, we will continue to be spectators watching these neo-authoritarian digital enclosures deploy their weapons of social disruption.

Notes   1. Portions of this chapter have been previously published in “User Generated Discontent: Convergence, polemology and dissent”, Cultural Studies Vol. 25, Nos. 4–5 July–September 2011, pp. 620–39  2. Henry Jenkins (2006), David Gunkel (2007), Pierre Levy (1999), Aram Sinnreich (2010), and others have noted that our traditional binaries (e.g. system/user, producer/ consumer, professional/amateur. Industry/fan, inside/outside) no longer carry the same weight in what has been called a convergence, remix, configurable culture. Thinkers vary on the resulting suggestions, from proposing new binaries to merging previous ones (e.g. produser, prosumer).  3. While polemology was limited to understanding consumption, one could easily extend it to other media practices like amateur production, hacking, and information warfare.  4. This is not to say that journalism has an insignificant role to play. For a fascinating

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 5.

 6.   7.   8.

  9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

revisioning of news as infowar (especially as it involves the affective mobilization of populations) see Terranova (2007). The following week, his home in Jackson Heights, Queens, was raided in the early morning and his roommates were detained while the police searched the premises for sixteen hours. While the charges were eventually dropped, the items confiscated from the house (including computers, printed material, phone directories) continued to be held as potential evidence of a broader case. Chilling effect. In 2010’s summit, we also had a breakout group whose title could have been Eliot Madison’s tagline: Generating Information to Monitor Violence. One wonders how the AYM would treat the use of another source of info to be tweeted (e.g. police scanners). Jared Cohen eventually left the State Department to become the head of Google’s Ideas Department. For an analysis of the AYM and social media in Egypt (including the role of Cohen’s Google colleague Wael Ghonim, see Bratich 2011. We don’t know if Gene Sharp, the Albert Einstein Institute, or the National Endowment for Democracy (the folks who influenced other branded youth movements and colorcoded oppositions such as Serbia’s Otpor and the post-Communist Oranges of Ukraine) were directly involved in the Iranian protests. But Sharp’s fingerprints (even if only via printed matter) are all over it. In any event, the color revolutionaries from Moldova and elsewhere were featured at the AYM summits. For an example of research that attempts to predict the emergence of enemy networked individuation, see Gutfraind 2007. See also Elmer and Opel (2008) for a variety of twenty-first-century dissent-management techniques via pre-emption. More recent examples of sovereign management of mediated protests include two events in August 2011. First, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit disabled communications networks in parts of its train service where protests against a police shooting were scheduled to take place. Second, in the aftermath of the UK riots, government authorities looked into means of suspending Blackberry messaging during national crises. For instance, part of the Alliance of Youth Movements’s origin story involves the US military stumbling upon an Al-Qaeda training manual and seeking to use its insights (even producing its own manual). The emergence of this AYM involves both mimicry of as well as differentiation from an enemy network. This dissuasive dimension involves post hoc criminalization as well. In the UK Riots of August 2011 two young males were arrested for attempting to mobilize people through Facebook, even though the actions themselves never materialized. According to Negri (1999), there are four powers that comprise affective production and its ontological qualities (pp. 85–6): (1) the power to act (capacitation, agency, ability to produce effects); (2) the power of transformation (to combine activities, to connect an action to what is common—here we can locate the recursivity of species being as a self-valorization); (3) the power of appropriation (in which every obstacle overcome determines a greater force of action; actions absorb the conditions of their realization); and (4) expansive power (as appropriation persists in an omnilateral diffusion, the capacities to act themselves increase to the point of a transvaluation of their conditions). The first three powers are Spinozan while the fourth is Nietzschean. Affect is a type of subjectivity with an ontological quality. Species-being encompasses all four powers; it is a series of virtues that persevere, even expand, over time. Thanks to David Gunkel for pointing out this etymological link between monstrosity and demonstration. Much exposition needs to be done to connect the autonomist multitude to a Bataillean sovereignty, especially as the latter eschews expansion on the side of production for a development from the side of consumption (one free from the exigencies of labor). However, one could elaborate the multitude around how it absorbs or transmutes its own creative powers (how a “common” is formed through this circulation and not just productive power). Perhaps the ontological accumulation or species-being has historically developed to the point where sovereignty can be shared within an “undifferentiated subjectivity” (Bataille 1991). For a key introductory text on the convergence of Surrealism (including Bataille) and Autonomist Marxism, especially concerning “selfvalorization,” see Grindon 2007.

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Alliance of Youth Movements. http://www.movements.org/. Anderson, Robin. 2006. A Century of Media, a Century of War. New York: Peter Lang. Andrejevic, Mark. 2006. Interactive (In)Security. Cultural Studies 20(4–5): 441–58. Andrejevic, Mark. 2007. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Arquilla, John and David Ronfeldt. 2001. Networks and Netwars. Santa Monica, CA: Rand. Bataille, Georges. 1991. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy–Vols. 2 and 3. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books. Bratich, Jack Z. 2008. Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Bratich, Jack. 2009. The Fog Machine: Iran, Social Media and the Rise of Genetically Modified Grassroots Organizations. Counterpunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/ bratich06222009.html. Bratich, Jack. 2011. Kyber-Revolts: Egypt, State-friended Media, and Secret Sovereign Networks. The New Everyday: A Media Commons Project. http://mediacommons. futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/kyber-revolts-egypt-state-friended-media-and-secretsovereign-networks. Chun, Wendy H.K. 2006. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clastres, Pierre. 1987. Societies Against the State. New York: Zone Books. Cooper, Melinda. 2006. Pre-empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror. Theory, Culture & Society 23: 113–35. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Debord, Guy. 1998. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco, CA: City Lights. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Der Derian, James. 2001. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military–Industrial–Media–Entertainment Network. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Douglass Susan J. 1987. Inventing American Broadcasting: 1899-1922. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dyer-Witheford, Nicholas. 1999. Cyber-Marx. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Dyer-Witheford, Nicholas. 2004. The Return of Species-Being. Historical Materialism 12: 3–25. Elmer, Greg and Andy Opel. 2008. Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future. Winnepeg, MB: Arbeiter Ring. Ewen, Stuart. 1996. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2010. Domestic Terrorism: Anarchist Extremism. http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2010/november/anarchist_111610/anarchist_111610. Furst, Randy and Abby Simons. 2010. FBI cites terror link in raids of local activists. Star Tribune, September 24. http://www.startribune.com/local/ 103716104. html?elr=KArksUUUycaEacyU. Galloway, Alexander. 2003. PROTOCOL, or, How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Galloway, Alexander R. and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit. A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Greenberg, Andy. 2010. No Hacker Left Behind. Forbes Magazine, March 1. Grindon, Gavin. 2007. The Breath of the Possible. In Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigation, Collective Theorization, edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber (pp. 94–107). Oakland, CA: AK Press. Gunkel, David. 2007. Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Gutfraind, Alexander. 2007. How Do Terrorist Cells Self-Assemble? Insights from an AgentBased Model (December 20). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1031521.

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Case Studies in Social Movement Media  239 Hardt, Michael. 1993. Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harsin, Jayson. 2006. The Rumour Bomb: Theorising the Convergence of New and Old Trends in Mediated US Politics. Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture 39(1): 84–110. Hay, James. 2011. Extreme Makeover: Iraq Edition. In FlowTV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, edited by Michael Kackman, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Payne, Alison Perlman and Bryan Sebok (pp. 217–41). New York: Routledge. Hay, James and Mark Andrejevic (eds). 2006. Homeland (In)Security. Special issue of Cultural Studies 20(4/5). Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Levy, Pierre. 1999. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Translated by Robert Bononno. New York and London: Plenum Trade. Lovink, Geert and Ned Rossiter. 2005. Dawn of the Organised Networks. Fibreculture 1:5. http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/lovink_rossiter.html. Massumi, Brian. 1992. Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear. PLI—Warwick Journal of Philosophy 4(1/2): 175–216. Mattelart, Armand. 1994. Mapping World Communication: War Progress Culture. Translated by Susan Emanuel and James Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Negri, Antonio. 1999. Value and Affect. boundary2 26: 77–88. Negri, Antonio. 2005. Politics of Subversion. Cambridge: Polity Press. Packer, Jeremy. 2008. Mobility Without Mayhem: Cars, Safety, and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Redden, Jim. 2000. Snitch Culture. Venice, CA: Feral House. Robb, David L. 2004. Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Rogin, Michael. 1987. Ronald Reagan: The Movie. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rothrock, John. 1997. Information Warfare: Time for Some Constructive Skepticism. In In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age, edited by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (217–30). Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Simpson, Christopher. 1994. Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945–1960. New York: Oxford University Press. Sinnreich, Aram. 2010. Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Stahl, Roger. 2010. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Stauber, John and Sheldon Rampton. 1995. Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Task Force on Confronting the Ideology of Radical Extremism. 2009. Rewriting the Narrative: An Integrated Strategy for Counterradicalization. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto. Terranova, Tiziana. 2007. Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-Racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics. Theory, Culture & Society 24(3): 125–45. Valantin, Jean-Michel. 2005. Hollywood, the Pentagon and Washington. London: Anthem. Virilio, Paul. 2000. Strategy of Deception. London: Verso. Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Virno, Paolo. 2009. Natural-Historical Diagrams: The “New Global” Movement and the Biological Invariant. In The Italian Difference, edited by Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano (pp. 131–48). Victoria, Australia: re.press. Wilson, Peter L. 1998. Escape from the Nineteenth Century. New York: Autonomedia.

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14 Monsters in the Metropolis Pirate Utopias and the New Politics of Space DEBRA BENITA SHAW [W]e have now reached the point where transforming the city becomes our prime necessity, the very condition of our existence. (Negri 2008: 156) The derelict space is a zone of indeterminacy that bodies-in-becoming may make their own. (Massumi 1992: 104)

On April 2, 2009 two buildings in the East End of London were raided by the Metropolitan Police Territorial Support Group1. Both buildings had been instrumental in the organization of the demonstrations planned to coincide with, and protest against, the meeting of the G20 group of the world’s richest countries, prompted by the burgeoning financial crisis taking place in the nearby Excel Center. The building near Liverpool Street had been deliberately squatted by committed activists to serve as a “convergence space” for people traveling to London from other parts of the UK and abroad. The other building, in Whitechapel, had functioned as a self-managed social center for nearly five years. In the flurry of press interest that followed the raids, what was exposed to public view, albeit briefly, was a significant resource in the infrastructure of civil disobedience. This chapter will examine the potential of Social Centers in terms of the way in which they emerge from, and take advantage of, the particular architectural and social-psychological structures of the contemporary city. My argument will be that they point the way to a new means of thinking space, attuned to the way in which city architecture and cyberspace are mutually constitutive. Central to my analysis will be a return to Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone and, in particular, what he calls “psychotopology” (2003 [1985]: 101) which, as I will demonstrate, 240

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becomes relevant to conceiving of a new politics of space at a time when, in David Harvey’s words, “[u]rbanization … has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever” (Harvey 2008: 37).

Scarce Bohemian Spaces Referred to by Naomi Klein as “scarce bohemian spaces in a rapidly gentrifying world” (2001), social centers, in their current form, probably first emeraged in Italy in the 1970s. This was the decade that saw a shift in the Italian economy from barely completed industrialization to a rapid embrace of flexible accumulation. Indeed, what is probably the oldest surviving social center in Europe, Leoncavallo in Milan, was originally founded in 1975 and has survived to spearhead what Pierpaolo Mudu calls the “second generation” (2004: 921) of social centers in the 1980s which has seen the spread of social centers around other cities in Europe.2 In an attempt to plot the history of social centers in the U.K., Stuart Hodkinson and Paul Chatterton have compiled a table which shows a steady growth from the early 1980s to 2006. Some are owned or rented but the majority are “occupied” (that is, squatted). It is these provisional and contingent spaces with which this chapter will be primarily concerned. In general, social centers are organized on the basis of non-hierarchical anarchist principles, which may include consensus decision-making, equal sharing of tasks and organizational management, a commitment to inclusivity and a flexible structure which means that members join collectives voluntarily rather than by application. Broadly aligned with demands for the right to the city, they function as essential resources for political movements; facilitating planning meetings, fundraising activities, and the production of props and banners for large-scale demonstrations. With the rise of neoliberalism and the concomitant reduction in outlets for creative expression which are not wholly commodified or co-opted for the purposes of commodification, social centers have increasingly lent themselves to facilitating alternative art events and performances. Most are committed to DIY (do-it-yourself) culture and the larger and more established spaces house radio stations, recording studios, rehearsal spaces, and artists’ and photographers’ studios. “Those who join a Social Center,” according to Mudu, “often end up by masterminding the creative drive behind new cultural trends in music and theatrical activities” (2004: 925). There is also an emphasis on environmental issues and a commitment to waste reduction and recycling. An important aspect of this is the skillsharing workshops that most social centers offer on a regular basis which generally include the kinds of skills required to refurbish and maintain

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occupied buildings as well as bicycle maintenance and the resurrection of craft skills that have largely fallen into misuse such as dressmaking, knitting, mending, silk-screen printing, and baking. In global cities like London, Paris, and Berlin, social center participants have become increasingly international so that the free sharing of language skills has become a regular feature of social center activities. In addition, as computers have become cheaper and are regularly disposed of by companies and individuals upgrading to new models, “hacklabs” have also become a regular feature of social centers. These function to provide people with computer skills as well as offering Internet access to homeless people and those without the resources to access a broadband connection. They have also become hubs for the promotion and development of free software, creative recycling of hardware, and the facilitation of “citizen journalism.” Another important function of social centers, particularly in Italy, Spain, and Greece, has been in resistance to the implementation of the Bologna Process, the stated aim of which is “to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) based on international cooperation and academic exchange”.3 In practice, this has meant the standardization of university degrees across 47 countries with an emphasis on orientation to the demands of international employers and a narrowing of the scope and flexibility of knowledge production and learning. Equally, it has contributed to the rise of university audit culture, an emphasis on standardized testing, and a reduction in employment security for university staff. Social centers have responded by providing outlets for creative learning outside of the institutional constraints of the university. The London Freeschool,4 for example, which makes use of several social center venues across the city, mixes practical skill-sharing with seminars which address political issues through the analysis of social and critical theory and thus provide a structure which enables those without the resources to attend university to access different forms of knowledge while also facilitating considered responses to complex social issues. The fact remains, however, that social centers and the volunteers who manage them are continually under threat. In countries where squatting is illegal, collective members risk criminalization and imprisonment. In England and Wales, where squatting is a civil rather than criminal offense, social centers are still at risk from raids by police looking for “criminals,” unscrupulous landlords who attempt violent, illegal evictions, and unwelcome attention from the press looking for scandalous stories. There is also the ever-present possibility of the sudden curtailment of activities by the granting of a court order which enables high court bailiffs, generally accompanied by the police, to remove people and property from the premises. Nevertheless, evictions have been successfully resisted and, in those neighborhoods where social centers have been welcome, the weight of public opinion has often acted to preserve what has become a valued community resource.

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Strange Zones At a time when the distinction between public and private space in the city is being eroded by the appropriation of large tracts of city space for commercial purposes, with a concomitant increase in surveillance, restricted access, and policing of behavior, social centers function as spaces of alterity. They have emerged at a historical conjuncture in which the spatialization of the world in terms of nation-states and trading zones is superseded by the geography of networks, and cities have become nodes in the flows of information and capital which structure the relationships of global commerce (Castells 1996). Under these conditions, to be “at home” in the city is to be subjectivized to shifting paradigms of conformity according to the dictates of post-Fordist working practices and the specific forms of individualization demanded by the market economy. Giorgio Agamben suggests that cities can no longer be thought of as homogeneous zones of concentrated political and cultural power; as “politically and spatially isonomic.” “[W]e are not,” he says, “facing a process of development and growth of the old city, but the institution of a new paradigm whose character needs to be analyzed” (2008). Agamben distinguishes between the city as a locus of territorial power and the metropolis which is “the dispositif or group of dispositifs that replaces the city when power becomes the government of the living and of things” (2008). In other words, he offers a way of thinking space as inseparable from biopower. In the concept of metropolis, the management of space and the management of bodies according to the disciplinary procedures identified by Michel Foucault as productive of post-industrial subjectivities are seen as mutually constitutive. The city as seat of sovereign and legislative power which reaches out to the territories that it controls gives way to the idea of metropolitan space as the paradigm of disciplinary power. This “strange zone where it is impossible to decide what is private and what is public” (Agamben 2008) corresponds to, and expresses architechnologically, the biopolitical subject of contemporary neoliberalism. Thus, the occupied autonomous spaces of the city, abandoned commercial premises, disused warehouses, vacated industrial units, and the like which have been appropriated and repurposed to house activities that potentially escape, re-vision and confront the structural exigencies of striated urban space may represent a move towards what Agamben (2008) calls “a confrontation with metropolitan dispositifs.”

Intentional Communities of the Coming Class Carmona et al. refer to social centers as “movement institutions … institutions that are flexible, nomadic and inserted in the swarm of the multitude … factor[ies] of the coming class” (2008, emphasis in original). The

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multitude, a term introduced by Hardt and Negri, refers to a new concept of class emerging out of the current hegemony of affective labor or what they call “‘biopolitical labor,’ that is, labor that creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself” (Hardt and Negri 2005: 109). As they demonstrate, the requirement to “informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective” (p. 109) is not restricted to service industries but affects all forms of work in the contemporary world. Thus, all workers, despite differences in the way in which they identify outside the sphere of work, confront capital equally. The potential of the multitude lies in the very organizational and communictive skills that are exploited in affective labor; the realization of the potential to establish new forms of networks which can be mobilized to confront the networked world of biopolitical labor. This is the “becoming common of labor” (p. 222). The “coming class” cannot conceive of utopia in a world beyond or a space outside of history or a place yet to be discovered. The individualist utopias of modernity, as Negri points out, “cannot sustain the experience of the multitude” (2008: 30). In postmodernity, it is instructive to return to the meaning of utopia as “non-place”; no longer transcendent but immanent; “[i]t is within the world that Utopia becomes possible” (p. 32, emphasis added). In this sense, to conceive of utopia as a political project is to become attuned to the excess that is brought into existence by the system itself; to the spaces, both actually existing and conceptual, that are opened up by a system continually in flux. In 1985, Hakim Bey published an essay which argued for the recognition of what he called “Temporary Autonomous Zones,” “a certain kind of “free enclave” [which] is not only possible in our time but also existent” (2003: 97). Bey avoids defining TAZs or prescribing how they should be created; rather, he is concerned to show how they have existed historically and to suggest their common features. To generalize, then, the concept of the TAZ involves the occupation of “empty spaces on the map” (p. 117), recognition of “the importance of aesthetic theory,” “what might be called ‘pirate economics,’ living high off the surplus of social overproduction,” “the concept of music as revolutionary social change” and a “shared air of impermanence” (p. 124, emphasis in original), features that are shared by most if not all social centers. Bey finds the origin of the TAZ in the “sea-rovers and corsairs of the 18th century” and their “‘intentional communities,’ whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law” (p. 95). These “pirate utopias” (p. 117) existed at a time when, in the Caribbean in particular, many islands were “deserted or even unclaimed” (p. 116), and the vastness of the ocean had not yet fallen under international law (a point to which I will return later). But what remains to be explored is the possibility for the existence of the TAZ in the spaces of contemporary post-urbanism, in what Negri describes

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as “a world that no longer has an ‘outside’” (2008: 29). Bey offers a useful strategy in the concept of “psychotopology … the art of dowsing for potential TAZs.” “We are looking,” he says, “for ‘spaces’ (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones – and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice” (2003: 101). It will be my contention that social centers are TAZs that emerge from the specific psychotopology of post-urban architecture; from the dereliction to which the system is always and already inclining. I will argue for an understanding of social centers as elucidating a form of transgression specific to, and produced out of, the production of space, and its corresponding subjectivities in the era of advanced capitalism. I will continue, therefore, with an examination of what constitutes post-urban space, its cultural representations and conceptual equivalents, before turning to some ideas that may help to elucidate a framework for thinking through the significance of social centers as spaces from where the coming class may confront metropolitan dispositifs in an age which Negri believes may be “pre-revolutionary” (2008: 30).

Secured by Design For David Harvey, “[t]he freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is … one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights” (2008: 23). In this, he echoes Henri Lefebvre who, at the end of “Right to the City,” first published in 1968, demonstrates how the right to the city is neglected in favor of a “right to nature” or, put simply, a right to leave the city. As he writes, “[t]he claim to nature, and the desire to enjoy it displace the right to the city. This … claim expresses itself indirectly as a tendency to flee the … city” (Lefebvre 2005: 157–8). It is this same tendency that is expressed today in commodities which evoke “the right to nature” or which enable consumers to establish their identities as sophisticated urbanites; living in the city but able, at the same time, to transcend it. This is evident in the contemporary city in the growth of gated communities; bastions of middle-class achievement which wall off those who successfully navigate the neoliberal economy from those who are deemed to have failed. “In Rio,” writes Anna Minton, “inhabitants of armed, gated compounds commute by helicopter so they can avoid the streets and barrios of the city” (2009: 61). In the U.K., a policy spearheaded by the Association of Chief Police Officers in 1998, called “Secured by Design” and based on the recommendations of an American town planner and architect, Oscar Newman, provides the template for all new builds. “This leaves us in the strange position,” writes Minton, “of having police officers, rather than architects, responsible for the way places look and feel” (p. 73). Thus, the architecture explicitly establishes constraints which refer to legal

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prohibitions against transgression while, at the same time, providing a zone in which residents have bought the right to freedom from the constraints, real or imagined, of city living. As Fredric Jameson famously pointed out in his chapter on postmodern architecture, in the contemporary city, “former streets … become so many aisles in a department store” (1991: 98). There is thus an erosion of the distinction between inside and outside such that the logic of consumerism, of the mall, comes to dominate the concept and the experience of city space. Gated communities have much in common with the shopping mall, not least in the way that surveillance, both electronic and in the form of uniformed security, polices the movement and comportment of bodies within the space. Both are wary of “outsiders”; of criminality. One shopping mall in the U.K. recently banned the wearing of “hoodies” (hooded sweatshirts) because the fashion was associated with “criminal” behavior: loitering, the spraying of graffiti, and petty theft. Both spaces emphasize cleanliness, visibility, exclusivity, and a particularly circumscribed notion of “pleasure” connected with eating, the provision of children’s activities, “pampering” (particularly for women), “healthy” exercise, and, of course, shopping.

Junkspace For the celebrated architect Rem Koolhaas, shopping malls are the quintessential expression of Junkspace, the architectural equivalent of Soma, “like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends” (Koolhaas 2002: 176). Junkspace, “the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning” (p. 175), is potentially limitless, unconstrained; formed and yet formless, “flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screen saver” (p. 177). This is “space as vacation,” where we are “united in sedation,” the expression of the “Corporate Sublime.” Thus, Junkspace is political: It depends on the central removal of the critical faculty in the name of comfort and pleasure… . Intended for the interior, Junkspace can easily engulf a whole city. First, it escapes from its containers – semantic orchids that needed hothouse protection emerging with surprising robustness – then the outdoors itself is converted: the street is paved more luxuriously, shelters proliferate carrying increasingly dictatorial messages, traffic is calmed, crime eliminated… . The global progress of Junkspace respresents a final Manifest Destiny: the World as public space. (pp. 183 and 186)

The logic of choice and consumerism, then, grounds the biopolitics of contemporary urbanism and constructs enclaves of normativity which reach out into the wider city to determine the meanings of built space and

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urban habitation. “The reified quality of the post-urban city,” according to Chaplin and Holding, “is like the experience of dining in a fast food restaurant” (2002: 190) with a menu that offers “a sustainable array of attractions” which, needless to say, “sets up a focus which often places the aspirations of the tourist above the needs of the local inhabitant.” In fact, under these conditions, local inhabitants themselves come to identify with their predetermined roles in the sense that, in order to take advantage of the experiences which the city offers, they must, in effect, become tourists themselves and thus subject to the “crowd control, funnelling and shepherding” (p. 191) which attends the tourist experience or else exclude themselves from some areas of the city altogether. And the city as Junkspace vomits its detritus in the form of those unable or unwilling to pay the price for its maintenance. It isn’t only money one needs to exist in Junkspace but the willingness and ability to spend in accordance with its regulations. This is why, in the UK, there are laws against helping oneself to the discards of consumerism, whether in the form of unwanted furniture and other durables left out on the street or the mountains of food discarded by supermarkets and restaurants at the end of the day. Expensive to maintain, Junkspace requires continual investment. It is labor intensive; hence the armies of night-shift workers who undo “the damage of the day shift in an endless Sisyphean relay” (Chaplin and Holding 2002: 179). This is also the reason for the covenants which constrain the inhabitants of gated communities. The doubtful privilege of home ownership must be attended by regulations which maintain the exchange value of properties in accordance with the continued production of the tourist city. The twenty-first-century urban subject is thus ideally constructed on the basis of a set of behaviors and predispositions based in conformity to consumerist ethics, rather than shared historical or class associations. As Koolhaas says, “Junkspace pretends to unite but it actually splinters. It creates communities not out of shared interest or free association, but out of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an opportunistic weave of vested interests” (Koolhaas 2002: 183). “This is a world,” as Harvey points out, “in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action, becomes the template for human socialization” (Harvey 2008: 32).

Cyberspace How, then, might Junkspace be thought psychotopologically? Under what conditions might it nurture an oppositional response to the tourist city? In what sense does it lend itself to transgression? To address this, I would like to turn to Fredric Jameson’s “Future City,” in which he reads Koolhaas’

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Junkspace as “a tendency [which] has been around for some time, at first unrecognized … like a virus undetected” (Jameson 2003: 74). Indeed, it may be more productive to suggest that what has remained undetected is not Junkspace itself but the way in which it discloses its own impermanence. This is what Jameson glimpses in Koolhaas’ description of the fragility of Junkspace architecture: “sometimes an entire Junkspace – a department store, a nightclub, a bachelor pad – turns into a slum overnight without warning: wattage diminishes imperceptibly, letters drop out of signs, air conditioning units start dripping, cracks appear as if from otherwise unregistered earthquakes; sections rot, are no longer viable, but remain joined to the flesh of the main body via gangrenous passages” (Koolhaas 2002: 180). As Jameson points out, this hallucinatory description is reminiscent of “the nightmare moments in Philip K Dick” but “these moments are no longer terrifying; they are in fact by now rather exhilarating; and it is precisely this new euphoria that remains to be explained” (Jameson 2003: 74). I believe that an explanation can be found in the psychotopological possibilities that Junkspace presents in its association with the other morphable objects of consumer culture, primarily computers which are, in themselves, nothing but an empty architecture awaiting a program but are also given to mutability; hackable and full of exchangeable components.5 Junkspace, in its deteriorating form, presents itself as similarly adaptable; as a vast playground for the imagination of another world. Indeed, the potential of Junkspace was recognized in the Wachowskis’ 1999 film The Matrix which followed the lead of William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and the writer credited with coining the term “cyberspace” in imaging a correspondence between city space and the virtual space actualized by the manipulation of code. As I have argued elsewhere (Shaw 2008), The Matrix utilizes the concept of hacking, as applied to software manipulation, to suggest that the dereliction which is an inevitable consequence of the way in which the speculations of capital mark the city, is precisely the space from which insurgency originates. Although, as I read it, The Matrix is primarily concerned with critiquing Jean Baudrillard’s somewhat monolithic analysis of the “hyperrealist sociality” (Baudrillard 1983: 53) which mediates all relationships in late capitalism, what it represents is a relationship between computer and city architecture where hacking takes advantage of weaknesses in the system imaged as abandoned buildings and low-traffic areas of the city. Transgression here is implicitly understood as an emergent property of a cybernetic social system. Another way of reading The Matrix, of course, is as a utopian representation of the possibilities offered by the Internet for the creation of a digital commons. Ideas that were circulating in the mid-1990s spoke excitedly of the World Wide Web as potentially unenclosable and lauded the freedoms offered by the “third space” of widely distributed online communities. “To such authors,” wrote Stephen Graham and Alessandro Aurigi in 1997,

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“the apparent or alleged erosion of the public realms of cities, by implication, need not necessarily concern us: such realms merely need now to migrate toward the brave new world of electronic mediation” (Graham and Aurig 1997: 20). The reality, of course, is that the majority of web traffic is thoroughly commodified and the much-lauded Web 2.0 has largely become a space in which social networking provides content for the relational databases which feed market analysis; a case of user-generated content generating the cultural life of the user (see Beer 2009). Similarly, as Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has observed, the much-lauded openness of the Web is today being superseded by “post-Web applications and services [which] are built around artificial scarcity” (Anderson 2010). Nevertheless, anarchist-oriented volunteer organizations like Indymedia and Riseup, which make web resources available specifically for the purpose of facilitating communication among and between activist groups, have enabled social centers to publicize their activities and make/maintain connections with other autonomous spaces and volunteers. Coupled with the mobile phone, the Internet has become indispensable for organizing quickly against the threat of hostile institutions of the dominant (e.g. illegal evictions or property seizures). However, as Chris Carlsson points out, “[t]ypically, online communities are criticized for promoting disembodied and immaterial connections. Too often political campaigns that may once have mobilized a street action or something directly physical have instead turned into a cascade of emails and online petitions” (Carlsson 2008: 206). In this sense, the Internet fails to fulfill its potential as a new commons precisely because it replaces and somewhat neutralizes the effectiveness of actions which depend for their impact on the presence of bodies. In a preface to the 2003 edition of T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Hakim Bey denounced his earlier enthusiasm for the potential of the Internet as a “technology in service to the TAZ.” “What a joke,” he writes, “What’s left of the Left now seems to inhabit a ghost-world where a few thousand ‘hits’ pass for political action and ‘virtual community’ takes the place of human presence” (Bey 2003: 111). Thus the Web here may be seen to confirm Chris Jenks’ description of transgression as “a deeply reflexive act of denial and affirmation” (Jenks 2003: 158–66). Emerging initially as a space which offered the hope of facilitating activities antithetical to the dominant cultural formations and social structures, it has, finally, become a place where they are reinforced by the containment (rather than the silencing) of dissent. This is perhaps most potently illustrated by WikiLeaks, the website that enables “whistleblowers” to deposit documents which expose corruption in government and corporations. As I write, the instant exposure of US diplomatic communications which throw doubt on the integrity of politicians in several countries around the world has elicited a concerted backlash that condemns WikiLeaks in terms which appeal to “national security” and raise the specter of “terrorism.”

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The transgressive act thus enables a reassertion of the hegemony of surveillance, even as it exposes the manipulations of the dominant ideology. And the Web is deeply implicated as both the facilitator of the transgression and the space where counter-forces are mobilized.6

Virtual Space However, although the Internet itself has proved a disappointment in providing a new space for political action, there is nevertheless a sense in which cyberspace as a concept has opened the way for a rethinking of the meaning of space. As Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out, “the computer and the worlds it generates reveal that the world in which we live, the real world, has always been a space of virtuality” (Grosz 2001: 78). In Gilles Deleuze’s reading of the Bergsonian concept of duration, the virtual emerges as the unthought Other of space conceived of as ordered by human history and as the ground, or condition, of such an ordering. In simple terms, to think space in terms of virtuality is to recognize, not only that it could be differently configured but that what is in space is not determined by it and vice versa. Grosz reads the virtual as “the capacity of the actual to be more than itself, to become other than the way it has always functioned” (2001: 130). Applied to thinking about architecture, virtuality thus offers strategies for conceiving of “inhabiting otherwise” (ibid.), and Jeremy Gilbert reads Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude “as a potential” (emphasis in original) in terms of “Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual as the field of infinite potential, of relations without fixed terms, from which the actual is crystallised” (Gilbert 2008: 167). It is interesting, then, that McKenzie Wark also utilizes the concept of virtuality to describe the “surplus of possibility” that is exploited by hacking. As he describes it, the virtual “is the inexhaustible domain of what is real without being actual, what is not but which may be. To hack is to release the virtual into the actual, to express the difference of the real” (Wark 2003: 352). The euphoria of Junkspace, then, is in the disclosure of its virtuality; the surplus of possibility that it unwittingly projects; its potential as purposebuilt space which has surpassed its designed purpose and can thus be repurposed. I want to expand here on the concept of re-purposing and its connection with hacking in order to explore the potential for new forms of community and the reconceptualization of city space which social centers may promise.

Parasites and Piracy “Re-purposing” has become a buzzword for a technique of the “new austerity,” part of the retrenchment of capital in the name of “recovery,” referring to the adaptive reuse of everything from household items to

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fashion. But re-purposing has a history born of the inventiveness of poverty. Turntable techniques, including “the scratch,” employed by hip-hop DJs were, as Paul Gilroy has pointed out, developed in the spaces of urban poverty “where real instruments [were] an expensive luxury but where record players [were] commonplace” (Gilroy 1987: 211). Music created with repurposed technology is a quintessentially urban form and, much like pop art, a mode of postmodern aesthetic production that uses the products of the culture industry in such a way that their significance in the economy of cultural production is critiqued and destabilized. It is also fundamentally parasitic in that it changes the meaning and function of its host, without destroying it or affecting its essential structure. Hacking, as David J. Gunkel explains it, is a similarly parasitic activity. Gunkel points to the way in which Jacques Derrida presents the parasite as an idea that defeats either/or categories (and thus the logic which constructs language) in that it “occupies a structurally unique position that is neither simply inside nor simply outside. It is the outside in the inside and the inside outside itself. Parasitism, therefore, takes place in a way that is never simply external or externalizable” (Gunkel 2001: 5). He also finds a correspondence between parasitic activity and Donna Haraway’s concept of blasphemy. As he explains it (2001: 6), [l]ike a parasite, the blasphemer is not an alien proceeding from and working on the outside. S/he is an insider, who not only understands the intricacies of the system but does so to such an extent that s/he becomes capable of fixating upon its necessary but problematic lacunae, exhibiting and employing them in such a way that disrupts the system to which s/he initially belongs and must continually belong.

Thus, hacking, “like a parasite, takes place in and by occupying and feeding off a host that always and already has made a place for it to take place” (p. 9). What Gunkel wants to make clear is that hacking is not a form of “corrective criticism” (p. 7). It does not negate the system or point out its weaknesses. In this sense it is akin to what Deleuze and Guattari call a “line of flight” (1987: 559–61); one that could be said to resist reterritorialization. Similarly, peer-topeer file-sharing is a parasitic activity which slips, opportunistically, between different strata of the economy of exchange. It makes use of the logic of the market yet its transactions fall between the informal arrangements of a gift economy and the strategies of piracy, an activity in itself which has significant correspondences with the re-purposing of space. As Chris Land points out, “the pirate is a figure in full sympathy with the Zeitgeist of the early 21st century” (2007: 169). Referring to the Disney franchise Pirates of the Caribbean, he suggests that Jack Sparrow “is the embodiment of liberated, post-modern subjectivity … a revolutionary triumph of desire over the repressive order of bureaucratic, state-sanctioned

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organization” (p. 170). In other words, the pirate is ripe for consumption in an era when the Nike® slogan “Just Do It” exhorts us all to take our desires for reality but only if we can afford to pay for it. But today piracy “refers primarily to copyright theft and those in the entertainment industry who are so busy commodifying the pirates of the Caribbean are also those most vociferously opposed to its current practice” (p. 185). Indeed, it is likely that Digital Rights Management (DRM) infringements have become associated with piracy because attempts to regulate cyberspace have often been based in maritime law drafted during the age of piracy on the high seas. Henry H. Perritt Jr. has suggested that “[I]n cyberspace, a digital packet is analogous to the pirate ship” (1999: 172) and in 2001 Lieutenant Commander Steven M. Barney, Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U.S. Navy, explicitly recommended that “[i]f it is true that the realm of cyberspace has a strong conceptual parallel to the realm of physical space, then the navigational regimes applied to physical space under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea … can be a useful and familiar conceptual framework” (Barney 2001: 57–8). What might be called the contemporary jouissance of piracy depends on identification, not only with the cavalier individualism of Jack Sparrow but equally, as Land suggests, with the “full-blown desire for a new social order” (Land 2007: 189) pioneered by the early eighteenth-century sea-going pirates of the “golden age,” at a time when “the North Atlantic was a smooth space which had not yet been striated by the grids of naval control” (p. 184). As I have demonstrated, the promise of cyberspace as a similarly smooth space has already been compromised by the grids of control imposed by commodification. Despite the fact that these same processes have produced lacunae which have been exploited by digital pirates, it is not cyberspace itself, but the way in which it enables a conception of space as virtuality that is helpful in understanding the way in which it produces a reading of city space as similarly open to piratical manipulation.

Conclusion: Towards a New Politics of Space Squatting has a long and politically varied history and is, in various forms, a worldwide phenomenon. Although it is impossible to generalize, it is fair to say that, for most people who stake a claim to empty land or property, the prime motivation is the need for housing, rather than a political commitment to exposing the inequities of private property. Nevertheless, the existence of squatter communities, in whatever configuration, exposes the systemic injustices of capitalism, particularly in its contemporary, advanced form, and raises questions about the right to not only a reasonable standard of housing but the right to the city per se. In today’s increasingly segregated cities, social relationships are mediated by capital, which has privatized vast tracts of city space, and structured by

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consumerism which imparts the architectonics of the shopping mall to streets and living spaces. In what Rem Koolhaas calls “Junkspace,” the distinctions between public and private space and between inside and outside become indeterminable, other than through the operation of increasingly stringent surveillance which serves to mark out grids of access and exclusion. But Junkspace, by the very nature of its need to adapt to market forces, is susceptible to dereliction. It is this tendency which produces what Fredric Jameson calls the “euphoria” of Junkspace which, he says, “needs to be explained.” I have argued that it can be explained in terms of the affective milieu of cyberspace which, as imaged in films like The Matrix and William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, is shown to map on to and influence our understanding of city space so that dead Junkspace discloses its potential in terms of parasitical and piratical activities, like hacking and DRM infringements, which challenge attempts to enclose and striate the digital domain. It is the potential of dead Junkspace as virtual space that is exploited by self-managed social centers which repurpose space designed for commercial or industrial use by claiming squatters’ rights and opening the space for the production of alternative cultural and political activities. These monsters in the metropolis have emerged in precisely the spaces of the world in which Junkspace is most densely accumulated,7 where it is established enough to have begun to reveal its impermanence and where the potential of virtual space is realized through our immersion in cyberspace. Although the transgressive potential of cyberspace has only been realized as, at best, a means to facilitate grassroots organizing and, at worst, a substitute for resistant activities and a space which recuperates those activities while reconstituting the dominant order, it nevertheless enables space to be rethought beyond the dichotomies of public/private and open/closed. A new politics of space may be less about claiming the right to the city than about exploiting its architechnological inconsistencies as a means to expose and confront the institutions of metropolis.

Notes 1. For a report on and analysis of the raids see London Indymedia at http://london. indymedia.org.uk/articles/1181. 2. In 1989, Leoncavallo was stormed by the police in response to the Mayor’s capitulation to the demands of the building’s owner to evict the squatters. As Andrea Membretti reports, “[t]he violent intervention of the police and the strong resistance of the activists … produced a wide social and quite transversal support for Leoncavallo, in Milan and all around Italy”. (Membretti 2007: 356). 3. http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/. 4. http://londonfreeschool.wordpress.com/. 5. In 1991, William Gibson wrote, “The Street finds its own uses for things – uses the manufacturer never imagined” (in Benedikt 1991: 29). 6. The right-wing former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, referred on her blog to Julian Assange, the public face of WikiLeaks, as “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.” She continued: “[h]is past posting of classified documents

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254  Law, Social Disturbance, and Political Unrest revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/29/sarah-palin-obama-wikileaks_n_789438.html. 7. This statement is, I will admit, contentious. At the time of writing, there is no documented overview of the social centers movement in a global context. Differences in the law with regard to squatting in different countries make it difficult to determine a specific correlation between the emergence of social centers and the density of Junkspace because of the necessity, in some places, for social center activists to keep a low profile. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation does hold in the case of most large European cities, and London activists have had contact with collectives from the USA, Canada, and The Phillipines. Equally, the presence of squatting tropes in popular cultural productions like The Matrix and cyberpunk fiction certainly speaks of a generalized apprehension of the possibilities of Junkspace.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2008. The City, The Plague, Foucault, Ungovernableness, etc … Transcribed and translated by Arianna Bove from audio files. Void Manufacturing (accessed August 4, 2010). http://voidmanufacturing.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/ giorgio-agamben-the-city-the-plague-foucault-ungovernableness-etc/. Anderson, Chris in conversation with Tim O’Reilly. 2010. The Web is Dead? A Debate. Wired, September (accessed December 11, 2010). http://www.wired.com/magazine/ 2010/08/ff_webrip_debate/. Barney, Steven M. 2001. Innocent Packets? Applying Navigational Regimes from the Law of the Sea Convention by Analogy to the Realm of Cyberspace. Naval Law Review XLVIII: 56–83. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchmann. New York: Semiotext(e). Beer, David. 2009. Power Through the Algorithm? Participatory Web Cultures and the Technological Unconscious. New Media & Society 11: 985–1002 (accessed September 21, 2010). DOI: 10.1177/1461444809336551. Benedikt, Michael. 1991. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bey, Hakim. 2003. T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia. Carlsson, Chris. 2008. Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists and Vacant-Lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today! Oakland, CA; Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press. Carmona, Pablo, Tomás Herreros, Nicolás Sguiglia, and Raúl Sánchez Cedillo (trans. Nuria Rodrigues). 2008. Social Centers: Monsters and Political Machines for a New Generation of Movement Institutions. eipcp (accessed September 17, 2010). http://eipcp.net/ transversal/ 0508/carmonaetal/en. Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol 1. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Chaplin, Sarah and Eric Holding. 2002. Addressing the Post-urban: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York. In The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis, edited by Neil Leach (pp. 185–99). London; New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. London; New York: Continuum. Gibson, William. 1986. Neuromancer. London: Grafton Books. Gilbert, Jeremy. 2008. Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics. Oxford; New York: Berg. Gilroy, Paul. 1987. There Aint No Black in the Union Jack. New York: Routledge. Graham, Stephen and Alessandro Aurigi. 1997. Urbanising Cyberspace? City 7: 18–38. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2001. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. Gunkel, David J. 2001. Hacking Cyberspace. Boulder, CO; Oxford, UK: Westview Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Pirate Utopias and the New Politics of Space  255 Harvey, David. 2008. The Right to the City. New Left Review 53: 23–40. Hodkinson, Stuart and Paul Chatterton. 2006. Autonomy in the City?: Reflections on the Social Centers Movement in the UK. City 10(3): 305–15. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York; London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2003. Future City. New Left Review 21: 65–79. Jenks, Chris. 2003. Transgression. London; New York: Routledge (Kindle edn). Klein, Naomi. 2001. Squatters in White Overalls. Guardian, June 8. http://www.guardian. co.uk/world/2001/jun/08/globalisation.comment. Koolhaas, Rem. 2002. Junkspace. October 100: 175–90. Land, Chris. 2007. Flying the Black Flag: Revolt, Revolution and the Social Organisation of Piracy in the “Golden Age”. Management & Organisational History 2(2): 169–92. Lefebvre, Henri. 2005. Writings on Cities. Translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK and Victoria, Aus: Blackwell. Massumi, Brian. 1992. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press. Membretti, Andrea. 2007. Centro Sociale Leoncavallo: Building Citizenship as an Innovative Service. European Urban and Regional Studies 14(3): 255–66. Minton, Anna. 2009. Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mudu, Pierpaolo. 2004. Resisting and Challenging Neoliberalism: The Development of Italian Social Centers. Antipode 36(5): 917–41 (accessed September 29, 2010). DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2004.00461.x. Negri, Antonio. 2008. Empire and Beyond. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press. Perritt Jr., Henry H. 1999. Jurisdiction in Cyberspace: The Role of Intermediaries. In Borders in Cyberspace: Information Policy and Global Information Infrastructure edited by Brian Kahin and Charles Neeson (pp. 164–203). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shaw, Debra Benita. 2008. Systems, Architecture & The Digital Body: From Alphaville to The Matrix. Parallax 48, 14(3): 74–87. Wark, McKenzie. 2003. A Hacker Manifesto [Version 4.0]. In Anarchitexts: A Subsol Anthology, edited by Joanne Richardson. New York: Autonomedia.

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15 On the Mexican State’s War on Drug Violence Transgression in the Representation and Circulation of Los Perros Salvajes HÉCTOR FERNÁNDEZ L’HOESTE Since the time of the revolution of 1911, Mexico’s cultural establishment has glorified and romanticized the Amerindian past, thanks largely to the work of intellectuals like José Vasconcelos. This notion, better known as indigenismo, stands in sharp contrast with the actual living conditions of Amerindians in Mexico, which, as a rule, experience dire poverty. However, for many years, official government discourse has continued to appropriate Amerindian heritage and transform it into one of the most effective tools for the implementation of Mexican national identity. In this text, I contend that the work of Edgar Clément, one of the most innovative members of a new generation of cartoonists, posits a critique of Mexican political and cultural order by turning around the Amerindian past and using it against the very establishment that put it into action as tool of identity. In his graphic production, Clément embraces the indigenous past to problematize injustice among Mexican nationals, like the uneven implementation of NAFTA or current national policy against drug cartels. Embodying millennial sensibility, his act of transgression—not only does he employ the tools of government against it, but he also circulates a critique through unrestricted channels of distribution—combines the espousal of technology and the refashioning of identity politics. Clément’s denunciation of Mexican policy is so acute that he not only questions the official version of events (the view of the drug war as a conflict between good and evil), but even its very validity. In Los Perros Salvajes (The Savage Dogs), Clément’s webcomic at Interzone (his web page, titled as homage to William Burroughs), the Mexican government recruits a group of ex-angel hunters that will hunt and destroy the forces of drug cartels. Surprisingly, these fighters are able to transform themselves into nahuales, their animal kindred spirits—in 256

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this particular case a pack of rabid dogs. Nahuales belong to indigenous tradition; however, in Clément’s case, they are also formidable warriors with supernatural, contemporary abilities. In this sense, the cartoonist takes up the Amerindian past to contest the inequities of the present. To begin, he disparages official policy in a way that supersedes national media’s meek coverage of Mexico’s brutal drug violence, suggesting a degree of corruption and intrigue that goes beyond mainstream accounts. In his webcomic, official cynicism is out in the open and government is presented as the assailant, violating conventional boundaries of the population. In addition, he sustains that the drug trade is a practice involving parties of many kinds, making it difficult to distinguish between actual delinquents, those operating outside the law, and crooks affiliated with the state. Between them, defenseless and abandoned by the government, stands the general population. In short, the war on drug violence, a contradiction in itself, is a campaign against the Mexican people. By incorporating indigenous belief and sci-fi aesthetics—these nahuales are outfitted with cybernetic protheses—Clément highlights how modernity, evident in the circulation of this narrative via the Internet, bypasses the habitual channels of social exchange in national society and invites class conflict. Thus, within the national context, Clément’s work in Los Perros is a fitting example of the inventive uses of old notions enhanced by new media, underlining hybridity as critical tool. In Mexico, cultural actors like Clément are employing the Internet to circumvent and question censorship, both official and criminal. To do this, they combine the technological acumen of the cyber-age and ingenious manipulation of schemes like indigenismo. Previous works by Clément, who was a member of the now-defunct Taller del Perro, perhaps the best Mexican alternative comic collective from the late 1990s, include his masterpiece Operación Bolívar (OB), a graphic novel detailing a U.S.-led conspiracy to take over the Americas. In it, the Church, the Mexican elite, the national media, and drug cartels are allied in an effort to take over Mexico and, in complicity with the U.S., transform Latin America into a drug supplier for rich nations. In OB, angels are an object of trade. Their eyes are used by the Japanese for laser research. Given its extraordinary qualities, their hair is highly pursued by firms like General Dynamics and the musical instrument industry. Their feathers are treasured by authors eager to become literary giants. Their blood makes excellent firewater. Their meat, which is edible, possesses medicinal properties. Their weapons are made from powerful superconductors, which the defense industry is more than willing to replicate; and, to make things worse, once they have been processed, their bones make the most potent narcotic. Yet, once the angel hunters uncover the plot against Latin America, they play the role of champions of Mexican national identity. Amid the struggle, the one redeeming quality of angel hunters is their capability to reconnect with the Amerindian past and transform

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into nahaules, which gives them formidable superpowers. Though it was published twice in different printed formats, most recently, OB has circulated freely through the Internet in PDF versions, substantiating Clément’s reputation as critic of the establishment. Los Perros Salvajes works as a sequel to OB, with many of the same tropes and circumstances: angel hunters whose hands have been cut, armed forces with dubious loyalties, a certain fascination with military warfare technology, imagery from the sports industry, etc. Occasionally, even a character from OB will show up in Los Perros Salvajes. However, once we contemplate this latter exemplar of Clément’s production, what stands out as most striking is the degree of criticism of the current Mexican administration’s anti-drug policy, based largely on a war that, thus far, has claimed thousands of lives and provided little relief amid a conflict that threatens to engulf all 31 Mexican states.1 While OB appears more peculiar in its criticism of the inequalities of NAFTA and Mexico’s lack of preparation for a global trade offensive, Los Perros is more upfront and grounded in its inquest of current policies by the Mexican government. The fact that Los Perros was envisioned from the beginning as a cultural product to be released via the Internet and thus enjoy wider circulation certainly supports this notion. Clément’s analytical vein is most remarkable given the lack of explicit criticism evident in major national media, which habitually pander to the interests of the government (and, most recently, the drug cartels) and exhibit a lengthy record of self-censorship. The difference points to the importance of graphic narratives within Mexican cultural tradition.2 Mexico has long held a spot as a place where comics played a key role in the consolidation of national identity. Other Internet outlets, such as blogs, do not bear the prestige of this tradition. Nowadays, be it through graphic novels or webcomics, Mexican cartoonists do claim this benefit. Moreover, in recent years, intimidation of the press by drug cartels has become so common that it has ratified the lack of investigative journalism evident in most Mexican media. A recent plea in September 2010 by El Diario, the largest newspaper of Ciudad Juárez, is indicative of this situation: in a front-page editorial, it asked drug cartels to say what they want from the newspaper (Archibold 2010). Clément isn’t the only one who has noticed the severity of the situation. On August 3, 2010, National Public Radio ran a story on the effect of current drug violence on the Mexican press. The story quotes information from the Americas program at the Committee to Protect Journalists, according to which more than 30 reporters have been killed or have disappeared since President Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug cartels in December 2006 (NPR 2010). On August 16, 2010, the Los Angeles Times ran a story introducing a new term to the equation: narco-censorship, a practice that describes the influence of drug cartels on the circulation of

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news in Mexican society (LA Times 2010). Coming from renowned U.S. sources, these stories stand as evidence that, beyond the previous degree of self-censorship practiced by Mexican journalism—willing to appease the official sector in exchange for a piece of the action in government advertising—the current drug conflict has exacerbated the degree to which Mexican journalism abstains from sharing information with the general public.3 If before it was a matter of guaranteeing financial support by way of official advertising, now it has become, quite literally, a matter of life or death. Given the muteness of the Mexican press and the fact that very few dare to denounce the rampant level of corruption in national authorities—which has contributed to the tacit acceptance of drug kingpins in many corners of the country—the degree of affront of Clément’s cultural practice is even more noteworthy. In addition, to understand how ingrained drug culture is within Mexico’s national scene, it is important to consider the context of a relation between government and drug trafficking in certain portions of the country. Prior to collaboration between Colombian drug organizations (at first, in charge of production and distribution) and Mexican cartels (initially, solely in charge of minor distribution; currently, in control of most of the supply), there was a lengthy tradition of involvement between drug-running organizations and the official sector. According to journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas, The planting and trafficking of drugs started in the early 20th century, with Chinese presence in important regions to the northwest and north of the country. And later [it was] under the control of “revolutionary” military leaders. The operations, control, and trafficking were handled by narco-traffickers, but were under the political control of regional heads of the “revolution.” (Valdez Cárdenas 2009: 33)

In other words, since the beginning of the current political order—the period signified by the Mexican revolution— sectors of the public administration were actively linked to the farming of crops associated with the drug trade. That is to say, after the revolution, the reach of government was so vast that it actually involved narco-trafficking. In fact, Valdez Cárdenas notes, Academic versions claim that, during the Second World War, Mexican and U.S. authorities agreed on the farming of poppy in the mountainous zone of the states of Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa, given a climate favorable to this and other crops, to obtain opium rubber and make morphine, and provide this powerful painkiller to U.S. soldiers in combat. (Valdez Cárdenas 2009: 34; Grayson 2010: 24)

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Thus, with the acquiescence of the U.S. government, Mexico played a role in the drug trade well before the arrival of Colombian kingpins seeking new routes for their products. In fact, as the quote clarifies, Mexican drug production was an asset for the U.S. government and was properly integrated into a scheme designed to attend to the needs of injured military personnel as early as World War II. Thus, the longevity of this relation signals the difficulties associated with any criticism emanating from national media and should evince the risk implicit in the production of a comic strip that, though fictional, puts forward a blunt critique of failed government policies. Currently, the Mexican comics market is largely dominated by local powerhouses like Grupo Editorial Vid, which edits, publishes, and markets comics licensed from other countries (to the despair of national illustrators and cartoonists). Vid even exports to other Latin American nations, intensifying its stranglehold on the Latin American comics industry. Perhaps somewhat frustrated with these conditions, artists like Clément have sought innovative, more readily accessible venues for their graphic production. Chief among them are websites and blogs dedicated to the work of a handful of talented Mexican cartoonists, who operate as a new, loosely associated collective. Places like Producciones Balazo and its associated websites, Esto es FERPECTO!!! (This is Ferpect!), El Muertito Sabrosón (The Juicy Little Dead One), and Cadaver Exquisito (Exquisite Corpse) belong to a network that shares the work of people like Sebastián Carrillo (aka Bachan), Clément, Humberto Ramos, José Quintero, Patricio Betteo, Lucas Marangón, Francisco Herrera, and Tony Sandoval, most of whom have published in printed form with the alternative press Caligrama Editores. Together, these sites offer a window into the work of a new, more critically oriented generation of Mexican cartoonists, a group of cultural actors bent on bypassing habitual channels for the circulation of graphic narratives. While much of the production of these sites is of a more idiosyncratic nature, little content deals, at least tangentially, with political issues. To make a living, many of these cartoonists freelance for advertising agencies or labor as illustrators for the publishing sector. At times, some contribute to more independent, alternative publications, like the political satire magazine El Chamuco. Most have turned to the webcomic as a means of financial independence, realizing the potential of new technology and the progress in Mexican telecommunications since the turn of the century.4 As a medium, despite their ascending popularity, Mexican webcomics are so young that it was only on October 10–11, 2009 that the first meeting of Mexican web cartoonists took place in the capital city. Comprehensive samples of Mexican authors are available on the Web and usually highlight the fact that the webcomic has been more effective than printed versions at transgressing societal and political barriers (México Habla 2009). However, among the new generation of cartoonists,

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few are as openly critical of the status quo and politically oriented as Edgar Clément. His critical verve, evident in publications as esoteric as Kerubim, a title published under Caligrama, has gained him a reputation as the enfant terrible of Mexican comics. Hence, given the degree of independence of this handful of cartoonists, it is encouraging that someone like Clément decides to take on, in his very own style—with a webcomic—the mishandling of policies addressing the rise of drug violence in Mexico.5 In this sense, the medium’s potential is clear. While critical of Mexican society, other webcomics have not taken this subject head-on. Some cultural actors are simply more political than others. In itself, this act represents a powerful contravention of established boundaries between the Mexican state and this cadre of cartoonists, accounting for the lack of official support for many of its members. Clément, for example, has applied for government scholarships, with little success.6 As a cultural practice embodying critical transgression, Clément’s work addresses a significant problem in contemporary Mexican society by way of emphasizing a connection between the Amerindian past and the postcolonial present. This is the cartoonist’s approach to the hybrid nature of Mexican reality, combining cultural aspects of different time periods and spaces. Following independence from Spain, Mexico’s development was closely tied to its indigenous past, though in disconcerting ways. Nominally, racial discrimination was over; in practice, it persevered. Following indigenismo, Mexican identity politics are rooted on equality achieved through mestizaje, the mixture between Europeans and local tribes. Nonetheless, a closer look at the ethnic structure of Mexican society reveals this policy’s failure. In this way, the recklessness of government policy, so bent on the annihilation of adversaries through whatever means necessary, is portrayed in the context of greater struggles of the general population: the significant decrease in population during the 300 years of Spanish rule, the subsequent suffering of country folk at the hands of political caudillos throughout the nineteenth century, and the bloodbath set forth by the revolution, which left a lasting desire for political stability (at whatever cost) within the majority of the population. To accomplish this connection, Clément continually ornaments his storyline with images reminiscent of each of these historical processes, repeatedly clarifying how Amerindians have habitually experienced the losing end of the struggle. During the colonial period, indigenous populations were deemed expendable. In the nineteenth century, they were exploited as soldiers, just as in the revolution. Their intervention was nominal, lacking formal repercussions in terms of standard of living. In Clément’s version, though, Amerindian heritage, rather than toe the official line, acts as transgressor, debunking the myths and fallacies of the political establishment.7 Los Perros is proposed as an action webcomic, very much along the spirit of OB, which, for all its critique of unfair trade, stands as a very competent

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Figure 15.1  A menacing view of the government’s elite troops.

sci-fi thriller. The initial frame of “Los Perros,” for instance, shows a group of special-forces commandoes rappelling from assault helicopters (see Figure 15.1). A closer look at the first member of the squad shows a skull-like proboscis, hinting at the disturbing nature of this group of men. However, the skull also points to the use of animal parts in the outfits of warriors during the indigenous past. That is to say, from the beginning, soldiers are contextualized historically. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, who are remarkably effective at positioning themselves as champions of the general population, the Mexican military lack an organic relation with their people. The average citizen views Mexico’s armed forces with suspicion and reticence, particularly if one takes into account a longstanding reputation of corruption in the federal government.8 In addition, despite the government’s theoretical independence in many matters (e.g.

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Figure 15.2  A critical view of President Calderón and his official discourse.

Mexico’s distinct relation with Cuba), the Mexican military’s close rapport with U.S. armed forces is viewed warily. As if to ratify this sort of judgment, the second installment of the webcomic starts with the statement “El pretexto fue la Guerra al Crimen” (The War against Crime was an excuse), framing an image of current President Felipe Calderón behind a podium (see Figure 15.2).9 Calderón is portrayed with a mischievous smirk on his face, backed by a toothy bodyguard loaded with what appear to be packs of cocaine. In front of them, playing the part of a TV camera, there is a machine-gun with a digital screen, in open allusion to the accessory role of audiovisual media. Next to Calderón’s podium there are a few skulls and bones, possibly resulting from the scandalously widespread dismembering of cartel members and public figures (or regular citizens) caught in the crossfire of drug wars. Calderón’s angry, vengeful demeanor, typical of

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his tirades against the drug cartels which dare question the state, appears untarnished by these circumstances. This pose, so typical of the Mexican political establishment, in which the presidential figure has habitually held formidable power, contrasts strikingly with adjacent images of supplicating Amerindians and resigned peasants, situated beneath the feisty Calderón. These images are, as I argue, important historical markers. They situate the war against drug cartels in the context of previous struggles, many of which have impacted harshly upon the overall sum of the population (in particular, upon impoverished Indian and Mestizo sectors) and embedded harsh memories in a national collective consciousness. Most clearly, they depict the current conflict in the context of a war between the establishment and the Amerindian population. In Clément’s case, however, the indigenous past is a reminder of the government’s dirty conscience. Clément is particularly dexterous when it comes to the positioning/composition of his images. The placing of images of suffering Indians beneath the president is just a cue for the location of indigenous populations, quite literally, within the general structure of Mexican society. As in some of his other publications, Clément goes as far as imitating the style of renowned versions of national art, in a self-parodical twist of his graphic production and the national artistic tradition. Consequently, his Indians and peasants evoke life-size murals by Diego Rivera and other artists in the collection of national museums. Through this very parody, Clément alludes to how the image of the Indian was appropriated by the state, thanks to official co-optation of the muralist movement, including some of the most politically committed artists in the Mexican arts scene. In this way, image-wise, the Indian became the face of the nation, while in reality social prejudice persevered. To the side, the cartoonist includes a cover of a volume of the Mexican children’s library (Biblioteca del Niño Mexicano), a collection launched over 100 years ago with illustrations by renowned national icon José Guadalupe Posada, predecessor of the muralists. Next, Clément assures the reader that this entire process—the exploitation of indigenous masses—is the result of a lengthy record of “satrapía y occidentalización” (satrapy and Westernization), opposing once again Amerindian and Mestizo Mexican identity to Euro-American dictates, proper of the upper class. The allusion to Posada, the great precursor of national iconography, situates Clément’s account within a very fixed historical context, in which images of indigenous origin became identified with an official culture. Most recently, two cornerstones of the Mexican cultural establishment, the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA) and the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE, a renowned publishing house), released a new edition of this collection (Nueva Biblioteca del Niño Mexicano 2010). Thus, Clément’s reference to the collection, in the context of a new, revised edition, may be construed as a critique of historical revisionism, a practice

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that is widespread in Mexico thanks to the official supply of history books for the national public school system. (School books are revised regularly, as new presidential administrations and changing political allegiances wish to reflect a variety of viewpoints.) In the context of Los Perros, though, the surfacing of the collection is akin to signaling the importance of this juncture—the war against the cartels—as a turning point of Mexican democracy, just as previous events in national history (the revolution, the arrival of political plurality, etc.) have embodied changing times. Nevertheless, as a measure of assurance, the accompanying narrative clarifies that nobody will be naïve enough to actually fall for the theory of a tough policy on crime, least of all when the government is the outcome of an election process plagued by irregularities and a margin smaller than 1 percent of the overall vote, according to the author (“Aquí nadie se traga lo de la guerra al crimen. Hay quien cree que se trató de un golpe mediático para legitimarse después de una elección plagada de irregularidades y ganada con un margen menor a 1%”).10 The text then alleges that the object of the government’s recalcitrant policy against drug cartels, which has resulted in so many deaths, is threefold: (1) to contain the Chinese drug trade, centered on the so-called escama de dragón (dragon scales, a powerful narcotic first mentioned in OB); (2) to organize the drugs and arms trade under a friendly monopoly; and 3) to activate the armed forces, thus shielding the southern border of the U.S.A.11 As we have seen, Chinese immigration played a role in the beginning of the Mexican government’s relation with drugs. Thus, it isn’t altogether illogical that, once again, it plays a key part. In addition, the second point singles out the government’s habitual monopoly on power, unwilling to share authority with anyone. The third point hints at the degree of complicity between the armed forces. Since Mexico’s armed forces are trained and supplied by the U.S.A., this is also plausible. Overall, these three assertions add to the conspiratorial nature of the narrative, a common feature in Clément’s fiction. Next, Clément identifies the narrating voice, bringing into the open the relationship between politics and religion. An angel hunter describes how an elite military squad descended on them and cut off their hands with machetes while they were hard at work dealing with an angel. Needless to say, without their hands they’re useless. Nevertheless, to identify the commandoes who attack the angel hunters, the narrator uses the word “matachín,” employed in Mexico to describe indigenous religious dancers but generally believed to signify warriors. Thus, Clément once again merges the boundaries of pre-Columbian heritage with current nomenclature, taking us to the days of yore, when parts of Mexico stood high for a ruthless military culture. Amerindian lineage is a pedigree of warriors. Then again, what is remarkable about Clément’s graphic narrative is the explicit nature of its criticism, clearly portraying Calderón as the champion

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of this fraudulent order. In a country where freedom of speech involves evident risks, such outspokenness is an offense. If the men who attack the angel hunters are matachines, it must be because of a convenient connection between the state and the indigenous tradition. In other words, Calderón represents an order that uses Amerindian heritage at its own convenience, sans any sense of actual respect for the past. In addition, the hunt for angels is symbolic of the abusive exploitation of Mexican resources. Mexico is expected to contribute to the global economy to the full extent of its capability, never mind that such contribution might impact negatively upon some of its nationals: in this case not the actual angels, but the millions affected by uneven policies of international trade, legal or not. In this way, the narrative effectively hints at the repeated times in which Mexico’s Euro-American establishment has sold out the country to the detriment of Amerindian and Mestizo populations. Clément’s approach to this type of relationship is refreshingly ironic: religious context might be very important for this narrative, but nobody in the story has actually suggested that angels represent any nationality or are independently relevant. A Catholic Mexico might be the setting for this conflict, but the harm that comes to the nation from the pursuit of angels is mostly in the form of bloodshed sparked by ascending violence, as in the present conflict with drug cartels. This is important to note, since Clément’s trangressive exercise works not only against the state, but against other institutions like the Church, which he identifies as equally problematic, having forsaken the average population. Like the government, the Catholic Church has played a key role in the manipulation of indigenous tradition, effectively concealing it under Judeo-Christian constructs. Many colonial churches bear the image of the sun above their entrance as a way to lead Amerindians into familiar grounds. In other cases, as in the Church of Jesuits in Guanajuato, Christian images rest, quite literally, above indigenous creatures. Judeo-Christian tradition is imposed on indigenous heritage. Hence, if the webcomic and its circulation via the Internet target a questionable government, it should also work against any other institution deemed equally corrupt. To complicate things further, the narrator identifies his assailant as Pancho, el Zeta. Originally, Zetas were a group of elite special-forces units eventually seduced and recruited by drug cartels, evolving into the most violent paramilitary enforcement group in the country.12 Mexican press coverage indicates that Zetas are recruiting members of elite groups from the nearby Guatemalan Army, known as Kaibiles (the name is derived from an indigenous leader who challenged the conquistadors), who are renowned for their ferocity and tenacity (Otero 2005). And, according to Clément, Kaibiles will be an additional tool of the state in its effort to suppress drug cartel violence. Thus, the very mention of Zetas (or Kaibiles) points to the murderous nature of government, particularly

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when, in an echo of past actions, it appropriates a term of Amerindian origin. The adoption of the term Kaibil highlights the fact that, even within the intricacies of military order, manipulation of the Amerindian past is symptomatic of the deceitful ways of the political establishment.13 At this point, within the thread of Clément’s narrative, the Zeta Pancho appears to be working for an unknown party; his allegiance isn’t clear. When he addresses the handless angel hunters, he exhibits no pity. The hunters, in turn, are hanging from crosses, increasing the quasi-religious nature of the confrontation. On one hand, there is the Judeo-Christian heritage (the crosses), and on the other, the ways of Amerindian ancestors (the nahuales), which are being exploited by Euro-Americans to advance mass deception. Pancho’s agenda is duplicitous. He seeks to recruit angel hunters to eliminate his enemies (supposedly, other criminals and delinquents) in a vigilante style. To this effect, he offers them a bagful of Ameros (a clear allusion to Judas’s 20 pieces of silver).14 But, when it comes to achieving a goal, Pancho does not care whether his ways allude to Western culture or indigenous contest. In his quest to serve the state, any method will do. To make things even more appealing, Pancho offers the angel hunters a solution for their recently acquired physical handicap: a set of state-of-the-art sport protheses, illustrated in the comic strip with a faded background interlacing four key elements: to the left, images of Somali pirates (the alleged suppliers of the devices); a frayed swoop (à la Nike, though respectful of copyright) and its accompanying slogan: “Just Do It!”; an image from the early days of medical science, picturing a group of seventeenth-century Europeans in a surgery room; and finally, a Jolly Roger. From a conventionally Mexican perspective, most of these elements seem problematic. African heritage has been erased from national history, effectively rejecting a major element in Mexico’s past. U.S. commercialism, the source of considerable tension between neighboring administrations, is consistently viewed with mistrust. And European tradition, be it scientific or academic, can always be construed as cultural imposition. The Jolly Roger, on the other hand, evokes the many attacks of vessels departing the port of Veracruz for the Iberian peninsula, in convoys that were targeted incessantly as they removed the riches of New Spain. In the end, only the Amerindian past is reliable: attachment of these devices will allow the angel hunters to embrace their kindred animal spirit, their nahual, and once again rule uncontested in the night. Sicarios, the young paid assassins common to the many drug cartels operating in Mexico, are the theoretical target of this ruse, pretending to combine leading-edge technology and indigenous sagacity. It’s then that, in a full-fledged color panel, the author introduces the Perros Salvajes, which is the name angel hunters have embraced to describe their unit. The image shows a pack of humanized dogs dressed in peasant clothing, straw hat included. The fact that they’ve chosen peasant

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clothing is significant, since it situates the characters in the context of previously mentioned struggles, when this humble attire marked the difference between popularly supported uprisings, and uniformed Spanish or Mexican forces. The animals’ expression, with wide-open, incandescent eyes and salivating tongues, is particularly menacing. So, when we see a group of soldiers clad in high-tech gear and infrared goggles, close to attacking a nearby vehicle guarded by armed personnel—their hand gestures are explained in technically oriented English, denoting the origin of their military training—it comes as no surprise that the Perros appear in the middle of the night. The end result is a butchered torso, which hints at the brutality of the attack by the Perros, a not so distant echo of the methods favored by drug cartels.15 Next, we see the Zeta Pancho complaining on the phone. Surprisingly, the Perros seem to have attacked his very own soldiers, leaving the mutilated, bloodied torso as the only reminder (such has been the degree of carnage). In short, the renegade soldier is victim of his own inventions. Within this conflict loyalties are fragile and, when it comes to affiliations, one can never be sure who works for anyone. This is Clément’s particular way of problematizing the lack of a moral center for the conflict. In a conflict with shifting allegiances, it is impossible to view violence in terms of good vs. evil. The Zeta then phones a member of the Church, a cardinal whom he claims is remarkably effective at networking and money laundering, since the income from the tithe is not closely monitored. Once again, Clément incorporates his criticism of the Church into the overall scheme of things. When the now human-like team of angel hunters arrives—they no longer appear as humanized canines—Pancho delivers a manila envelope with images of their future victims, a handful of police and military officers. In the vignettes, the envelope is highlighted by its different coloring (à la Schindler’s List), which reproduces the yellowish tint of this kind of envelope, set against the rest of the imagery, which is in black and white. When an angel hunter states, astonished, “Son puros policías … y militares” (It’s just cops … and soldiers), the Zeta justifies the measure, reminding his new hunters that the victims used to harass and persecute guerrilla movements back in the 1970s, so it’s an opportunity to get even. In other words, the Zeta’s cynical attitude unveils the lineage of official repression in Mexico: the fact that, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Mexican government led a systematic campaign to keep under surveillance left-wing sectors, in many cases associated with indigenous communities in outlying parts of the country. The text then clarifies the importance of nahuales (their assassination of individuals in a seemingly indiscriminate fashion) as elements of communication. The actions of nahuales serve as an excuse to discuss the methods of torture of the military and the drug cartels. In a chart-like

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manner (see Figure 15.3), the narrative offers explanations for victims who were tortured, and lack extremities or a head (they must have undergone interrogation); who are missing fingers or eyes, or have a finger stuck in their ear or mouth (they were snitches); with a bullet hole in their heads, with heads covered with a bag, or with their hands tied (they intruded on someone else’s territory); and lastly, who appeared covered with a blanket or diluted in acid (usually, victims with access to privileged information or from a higher echelon). Unfortunately, these categories must now include a more sinister, macabre one: dismemberment by nahuales, which seems to lack an explicit meaning, though its nature is evidently threatening. In short, to ground his fiction, Clément educates the reader about aspects of violence ignored by the threatened press and a government unwilling to share general information, offering a catalogue of torture. As usual, to contextualize the work of nahuales, Clément appeals to indigenous folklore and mythology, incriminating a headless body, with flint knives attached to its arms. The character is labeled “El Hacha Nocturna” (The Night Axe) and is accompanied by a text mentioning “un gigante alto y

Figure 15.3  A taxonomy of torture with an Amerindian context.

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muy corpulento, y descabezado” (a tall, very well-built, and headless giant) as well as an Aztec sculpture of a woman’s dismembered body. In all, the cartoonist represents the evolution of violence as the logical consequence of the national cultural order, as the object of a prolonged social, historical construct. If violence appears rampant in Mexico, it must be because it emanates from the nature of customary interaction across the ages, from the evident entanglement between descendants of Europeans and Native Americans, he suggests ardently. Thus, when the following image portrays a military vehicle shredded to pieces—a Hummer, of all vehicles—the conclusion is immediate. This horrid act of destruction must have been accomplished by a pack of rabid nahuales. The high-ranking military questions the nearby soldier, “¿Narco? ¿Guerrilla?”, to which the terrified soldier can only answer, “Perros, General. Hay mordidas de perros por todos lados” (Dogs, General. There are dog bites everywhere). When the soldier mentions a witness, we recognize a character from OB, Juan Grande, the oldest of angel hunters, who walks through the streets of the city playing a trumpet and mourning his elders, and whose hands were amputated by a mischievous angel turned bad, called “El Protector” (The Protector). After the general talks to Juan Grande he calls the president, having concluded that the level of violence merits the bringing forth of kaibiles, the elite armed forces group originally from Guatemala. In other words, to combat a consequence of the indigenous past, what better measure than a renegade indigenous unit at the service of the state, replicating the lengthy pattern of abuse? The general’s underling appears altogether uncomfortable with kaibiles, whose notorious reputation is a sign of the extremity of circumstances. The image of Mexican kaibiles, red-beret soldiers packed with combat gear and war face paint, appears next to the national coat of arms and phrases alluding to the group’s motto: Si avanzo … Sígueme. Si me detengo … Aprémiame. Si retrocedo …. Mátame. ¡Kaibil! (If I advance, follow me. If I stop, urge me on. If I retreat, kill me). In Clément’s version, the kaibil is the contemporary equivalent of the Amerindian renegade, the Tlaxcalans, who were used by Hernán Cortés to defeat the Aztecs and eventually impose Spanish rule in Mexican territory. Their origin might suggest a native lineage, but, operating within the constraints of a national institution, they only serve the interests of the state. The images show a conversation between a politician—a secretary of the presidential cabinet; most likely the defense secretary—and a military officer. The officer guarantees his men’s sense of patriotism, but the skeptical politician inquires sardonically about the soldiers’ monthly wages (12,000 pesos, or roughly $1,000 per month) and recalls how the Zetas were recruited from among GAFE contingents. The government officer then suggests the need for a more effective solution, since the drug cartels will surely offer more money to these new men. The obvious solution, he claims,

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is to have them injected with Chinese Sangre de Dragón (Dragon’s Blood), the very substance whose trade they’re theoretically trying to prevent. When the military officer questions the measure, the politician reiterates that it’s nobody’s intention to get rid of the drug-producing Chinese, but rather to control them. Clearly, the government does not fight drugs for the sake of the population, but to reassert its power over every segment of the population. Once the Kaibiles get the drug, they will be prepared to face nahuales, having transformed themselves into fierce humanized cats (thus, dogs vs. cats). Again, to preserve the established political order, the government will resort to any means necessary. According to the state, once the indigenous past has served an effective purpose, it must be annihilated and put in its appropriate place, to preserve the privilege of Euro-American members of Mexican society. What stands evident in Clément’s world is the almost complete absence of right and wrong. Zetas, Kaibiles, the military, the government, they’re all immersed in the conflict for personal reasons, seeking some form of benefit. Clément’s critique is so sharp that it fails to contemplate even the basic paradigm suggested by official discourse: that of a basic conflict between good guys and bad guys. In Clément’s webcomic, transgression consists not only in the violation of certain tacit rules of Mexican society— like the adoption of tools of identity of exclusive use of the state, the questioning of an intimate relation between media and the political establishment, or the bypassing of conventional media (press, television, radio, etc.) to circulate a more effective critique of a national juncture—but in the actual condemnation of the overall order of the nation. Thus, beyond the fact that his cultural production targets sectors of society alienated by the status quo—the younger generations, so accustomed to technological advancement and communal improvisation—Clément’s merit as cartoonist, as member of a nascent medium, is his will to propose and forge new paths for the delineation of flaws in national society, and to try to establish a precedent for the way in which cultural actors should contribute to the problematization of Mexican matters. Further development of Los Perros Salvajes has taken Clément’s work in appealing directions. Once the Perros are eliminated by the Kaibiles, a female hunter called Yoon transforms into a goddess and resurrects the rest of the pack. Along the way, the Perros cover two key episodes of recent Mexican history, both of which may be interpreted within the overall context of the state’s conflict with drug cartels: in the first place, the plane accident in which Secretary of the Interior Juan Camilo Mouriño lost his life on November 4, 2008, and second, the kidnapping of Diego Fernández de Cevallos, aka Jefe Diego, a lawyer, senator, ex-presidential candidate, and leader of Calderón’s conservative National Action Party (PAN). Little is known about the actual reasons for the plane crash. In Fernández de Cevallos’s case, despite many conjectures, his kidnapping hasn’t reached a

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resolution. Mexicans hypothesize eagerly about both events. Nonetheless, both cases point to the fact that citizens affiliated with the government or the party in power, who were once deemed untouchable, are now viewed as potential targets of new, more brazen enemies of the state, much like in the conflict between the Colombian government and Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel. After all, Escobar was behind the destruction of Avianca flight 203 in November 1989 and the kidnapping of many renowned politicians and members of government. The key difference lies in Clément’s suggestion of an indigenous mythological element in both acts and the fact that, generally speaking, the Colombian press’s coverage of the conflict was more combative than the Mexican media’s. In a country like Mexico, where the press practices self-censorship devotedly, there’s great merit in the fact that a cartoonist dares to circulate a version of events challenging the government’s viewpoint. In a place like Colombia, for the most part, the press criticized the government’s actions acerbically. Thus, there wasn’t an apparent need to posit a critique based on the theoretical appropriation of indigenous heritage (which the Colombian government has failed to implement) or the embracing of technologically savvy alternatives within popular culture, like the webcomic (which, for the most part, Colombian culture lacks). In this sense, within the overall context of Latin American culture, Edgar Clément’s graphic production represents both an act of transgression and a novelty. In terms of the Internet, Mexico’s exhibits a relatively low penetration rate: 27.2 percent of its population. However, within Latin America, it has the second largest population of users: 23.9 million (Internet World Stats 2010). This number alone substantiates the efforts by Clément and his fellow cartoonists to bypass conventional media and ratify the critical nature of their cultural production. In plain terms, Mexico already has a large number of users (by Latin American standards), but the potential for growth is remarkable, thus empowering the webcomic as medium. In the midst of this context, the way in which Clément combines Amerindian tradition (pre-Columbian systems of beliefs) with aspects of modernity (the protheses, warfare equipment, etc.) invites readers to rethink the relationship between Mexico and its past and present, following new paradigms. In Clément’s world, the way of the Mexican state is no longer the prevailing one and, most surely, can be effectively replaced by options that are within easy reach of most of the population. Thus, with an almost effortless swipe, the webcomic manages to destabilize a fixed standard: the circulation of a version of reality that promotes the vision of national society promoted by the political and economic interests of the ruling classes. If Clément’s achievement is an indication of things to come in terms of criticism for the overall policies of the Mexican government, it is evident that, in the near future, even with its heavy advertising quota and other strings attached that it can pull, it will be very complicated for the

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state to restrain general access and circulation of messages more critical of its policies within the general population. The Perros might start with a critique of the drug war, but it won’t be their last prey. And more Mexicans like Edgar Clément will surely follow.

Notes 1.

At present, the State Department has issued a travel advisory for U.S. citizens traveling to many of the states along the border as well as some of the central ones, but, given the current climate of affairs in the neighboring nation, this list seems set for a rapid increase (travel.state.gov 2010). 2. As Anne Rubenstein argues in Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to The Nation, comics played a key role in the consolidation of a feeling of nation and literacy projects in Mexico (Rubenstein 1998). 3. When it comes to an assessment of the relation between the Mexican state and national media, there have been repeated allegations regarding the degree of influence of government. In fact, when Mexico’s PRI lost power in 2000, the strength of this connection was evident in the high number of publications that faced crisis as political change took place and financial support was reoriented. In general, allegations of the government’s impact and/or influence on media are recurrent in Mexico. Renowned publications like Proceso have been adamant about this sort of criticism (IFEX 2007). Two years before the end of its term, data show the current Mexican administration spending 16,493 million pesos on advertising, when the entire amount spent by the previous Mexican administration (led by Vicente Fox) was 16,324 million. At this rate, government expenditure on advertising will surpass any sensible expectations (El Economista 2010). Recent press coverage details how the majority of the advertising expenditure (57%) is oriented towards television, despite complaints by printed media, so willing to partake in government expenditure (Etcetera 2009). Thus, to a certain degree, it is feasible to say that the Mexican public has grown accustomed to a cozy relation between national media and bodies willing to influence local news coverage. 4. Since the advent of NAFTA and the privatization of the communications sector, Mexico’s overall level of technology has improved drastically. Cell phone usage has increased rapidly. By 2008, Mexico had 73 million subscribers and a 69 percent penetration rate. Though Mexico’s phone rates are still relatively high—owing to lack of competition— the quality of communication technology has experienced a remarkable improvement (Budde 2010). 5. Publications like El Chamuco occasionally indict Calderón’s drug policy, but their content seems more conventional in its graphic and narrative approach (El Fisgón 2010). 6. According to Clément, “In terms of scholarship … well, bad. This year I didn’t apply to the National Council for the Culture and the Arts (FONCA), they changed the date and it confused me, but I hope to apply next year. I’ve applied for five years. It gives me the impression I don’t qualify as a creator with trajectory, I lack printed books or evidence of exhibits: being graphic and literary I’m neither graphic nor literary” (Edgar Clément, email message to author, October 13, 2010). 7. Then again, if Clément’s embracing of Amerindian mythology seems a tad unconventional for purposes of criticism and as act of transgression, it is, most likely, because the audience has internalized the pre-eminence of government in relation to the indigenous past as tool of identity. Unlike the government, which pays lip-service to indigenous tradition, Clément’s work considers the durability of certain cultural practices in the Mexican population—the fact that Mesoamerican communities believe in the hallucinogenic powers of certain crops and sponsor their consumption in a relatively controlled fashion, mostly oriented through religious rituals. These rituals account for the distinctive nature of some of Clément’s illustrations. They also justify the mention of nahuales, as drugs are consumed to communicate with kindred animal spirits. Thus, whether they involve the distribution side or an object of cultural consumption, drugs hold a lasting record within Mexican reality. In a way, they are intimately tied to a longer

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

memory of the nation, so sponsored by the revolution’s appropriation and mishandling of pre-Columbian heritage. Thus, from the perspective of national identity, Clément’s reliance on the Amerindian past certainly involves an act of transgression, turning the government’s defense of pre-Columbian beliefs against its very self. Distrust of Mexican authorities is discussed at length in Alan Riding’s Distant Neighbors (1989), a seminal text on Mexican identity. According to Clément’s stats, readers of Los Perros fluctuate between 1,200 and 2,500 per day for each installment of the webcomic. Though the numbers are low by U.S. standards (with about 15,000 hits per day), they are very representative of a growing Mexican readership. With figures of this sort, on an individual basis, illustrators like Clément are able to claim an audience comparable to those of older, more established media. In addition, the fact that Internet penetration in Mexico is still relatively low (by U.S. standards) underscores the medium’s enormous potential as tool for communication. To address this gap, Clément is even contemplating the possibility of producing in English (Edgar Clément, email message to author, November 9, 2010). In fact, Calderón’s election was the result of a contested electoral process, sowing deep division within Mexico’s population, with allegiances falling, for the most part, along class lines. The IFE (Federal Election Institute) declared that the margin was the narrowest one in the history of modern Mexico. Sinophobia granted, the second tenant of this theory is not as far-fetched as one might imagine, given the Mexican government’s proven support of petty drug dealers and smugglers during the 1960s and 1970s—witness the dramatic level of corruption in Mexico City’s police under Chief of Police Arturo Durazo Moreno (1920-2000)—and its previous involvement in the supply of narcotics to the U.S. government. As for the tangible activation of Mexico’s armed forces, the main criticism for this argument is the imposition of a single-handed approach to a very complex set of circumstances, as though the military were the only solution for a situation that evidently demands social investment and a multiplicity of methods. Calderón’s approach to the drug conflict, so heavy-handed, so reliant on the armed forces as a tool of resistance, has generated widespread concern among Mexican nationals, who do not wish to see their country engulfed in a conflict that might impact negatively upon foreign investment and tourism. Their name comes from their now deceased leader, Arturo Guzmán Decena, whose police radio code was “Z1.” Initial Zeta recruits were members of the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), trained in places as distant as France and Israel (and even at the now renamed School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia). The website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science includes the Report of the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), which describes Kaibiles in the following way:

The Kaibiles 42. The substantiation of the degrading contents of the training of the Army’s special counter insurgency force, known as Kaibiles, has drawn the particular attention of the CEH. This training included killing animals and then eating them raw and drinking their blood in order to demonstrate courage. The extreme cruelty of these training methods, according to testimony available to the CEH, was then put into practice in a range of operations carried out by these troops, confirming one point of their decalogue: “The Kaibil is a killing machine.” (American Association for the Advancement of Science 2010) 14. Within Clément’s fictional world, the Amero is the currency imposed by the U.S.A. once it has been able to hegemonize and unify the Americas behind its political and economic agenda, effectively institutionalizing Latin America’s role as backyard. 15. In a nod to the scene from Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), in which a pair of Colombians dispose of a body with a chain-saw, Mexican drug cartels have embraced the habit of dismembering the bodies of their enemies as a means of promoting fear.

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References Aguilar Valenzuela, Rubén. 2010. Gobierno: gasto en publicidad. El Economista, June 21, 2010. http://eleconomista.com.mx/columnas/columna-especial-politica/2010/06/21/ gobierno-gasto-publicidad. American Association for the Advancement of Science. 2010. Report of the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (last accessed August 15). http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html. Archibold, Randal C. 2010. “México Paper, A Drug War Victim, Calls for a Voice.” New York Times, September 20. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/world/americas/21mexico.html. Beaubien, Jason. 2010. Mexico’s Drug Cartels Use Force to Silence Media. National Public Radio (last modified August 3). http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=128929784. Budde. 2010. 2008 Latin America—Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband in Mexico and the Caribbean (last accessed October 15). http://www.budde.com.au/Research/2008-LatinAmerica-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-in-Mexico-and-the-Caribbean.html. Cadaver Exquisito. 2010. (Last accessed July 10). http://cadaver.produccionesbalazo.com/. Clément, Edgar. 2006. Operación Bolívar. Mexico: Caligrama Editores. ——. 2007. Kerubim y otros cuentos. Mexico: Caligrama Editores. ——. 2010. Los Perros Salvajes (last accessed November 22). http://www.interzone.produccionesbalazo.com/. De Palma, Brian. 1983. Scarface. Universal Pictures. El Fisgón. 2010. Las guerras irregulares de Obama (y la guerra irregular de Calderón). El Chamuco 206:10–14 (last accessed September 5). http://www.elchamuco.com.mx/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=344%3 Aedicion-206&catid=43%3Aediciones-anteriores&Itemid=65. Esto es FERPECTO!!!! 2010. (Accessed July 10). http://estoesferpecto.produccionesbalazo.com/. Etcetera. 2009. Revistas: otra vez al margen de publicidad gubernamental (last modified September 24). http://www.etcetera.com.mx/articulo.php?articulo=1468. Grayson, George W. 2010. Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. IFEX. 2007. Political Magazine Accuses Government of Using Official Advertising to Pressure Media (last accessed August 15, 2010). http://www.ifex.org/mexico/2007/10/05/political_magazine_accuses_government/. Internet World Stats. 2010. Latin American Internet Usage Statistics (last accessed October 15). http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats10.htm. México Habla. 2009. Webcómics en México (last accessed August 15, 2010). http://mexicohabla.com/2009/webcomics-en-mxico/. El Muertito Sabrosón. 2010. (last accessed July 10). http://muertito.produccionesbalazo.com/. Nueva Biblioteca del Niño Mexicano. 2010 (last accessed August 15, 2010). http://www.audiolibros.bicentenario.gob.mx/. Otero, Sivia. 2005. Confirman presencia kaibil. El Universal (last modified October 31). http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia. html?id_nota=131520&tabla=nacion. Producciones Balazo. 2010. (Last accessed July 10). http://produccionesbalazo.com/. Riding, Alan. 1989. Distant Neighbors. New York: Vintage. Rubenstein, Anne. 1998. Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to The Nation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. State Department. 2010. Travel Warning Mexico (last modified September 10). http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_4755.html. Valdez Cárdenas, Javier. 2009. Miss Narco: Belleza, poder y violencia. Historias reales de mujeres en el narcotráfico mexicano. Mexico City: Aguilar. Wilkinson, Tracy. 2010. Under Threat from Mexican Drug Cartels, Reporters go Silent. Los Angeles Times (last modified August 16). http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/16/ world/la-fg-mexico-narco-censorship-20100816.

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16 Social Media and the Representation of Summit Protests YouTube, Riot Porn, and the Anarchist Tradition MICHAEL TRUSCELLO We’re getting sick of watching demonstrations against anything. They haven’t helped anything or changed anything so far. We have to change stuff ourselves. Directly. The A-Films Collective (quoted in Hedden 2009: 150) Diffuse and sporadic “anti-globalization” protests, however brave and dedicated, are a poor match for the concentrated might of the multinationals, cosseted, shielded and kept out of trouble day in, day out, by governments vying for Michelin stars of hospitality and by the heavily armed forces they command. Zygmunt Bauman (quoted in Dahlberg and Siapera 2007: 2)

This chapter explores the role of social media, in particular YouTube, in the social construction of contemporary anarchism. In the era of “clip culture,” the Internet is awash with images of what some anarchists call “riot porn,” decontextualized videos of anarchists, often using Black Bloc tactics, clashing with riot police at various economic summits or affiliated anti-capitalist demonstrations. The Black Bloc tactics emerged in Germany in the 1980s, and caught the attention of the North American public during the 1999 Battle of Seattle. Basically, a Black Bloc is a form of protest in which autonomous individuals assemble dressed in black and proceed to disrupt a capitalist summit or similar event by committing violent acts against private property. One need not self-identify as an anarchist to participate in a Black Bloc, but typically most participants are anarchists. A Black Bloc is “a tactic open to anyone who seeks to escalate the social and economic costs of repressive governmental activities” (Paris 2003: 276

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321). What makes a Black Bloc particularly disturbing to liberals and conservatives alike is what Jeffrey Paris calls its “distinct ungovernability” (p. 320); for many anarchists, however, a Bloc enacts free assembly that prefigures a post-capitalist society. The Black Bloc, some argue, embodies what David Graeber calls the “conjunction between direct action and direct democracy” that typifies most radical social movements in North America (Graeber 2010: 130). In the widespread adoption of its central principles and practices, Graeber contends, anarchism “now holds as the effective center of the revolutionary Left” (p. 123). The popularity of the Black Bloc tactic coincides with the emergence of pervasive portable recording technologies and the Internet, a combination that has catapulted insurrectionary anarchist iconography into the forefront of radical visual culture. The popularity of such spectacular propaganda surpasses the more substantial contributions of what Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt call “mass anarchism,” which involves the construction of social movements and the radicalization of organized labor—”reforms,” they stress, “won from below” (Schmidt and van der Walt 2009: 20). The riot porn trend began with the emergence of Indymedia in Seattle in 1999, and video incorporated into documentaries such as This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2000) and Breaking The Spell (1999), the latter distributed by the anarchist group CrimethInc (see Figure 16.1). Other documentaries, such as Berlusconi’s Mousetrap (2001), Breaking the Bank (2000), and Kilometre Zero (2003) also depicted alter-globalization protests at the turn of the century; these films are by no means entirely riot porn, but fall within the more general genre of the summit protest film. With the appearance of YouTube in 2005, and other video-sharing sites, however, riot porn found new life, and the visage of the riot cop, what Richard Day calls “the death-mask of the social,” took on an iconic presence in radical visual communication. Day writes, “What good citizens are supposed to get

Figure 16.1 The “Battle for Seattle” in 1999 produced a radical visual aesthetic still popular in the anarchist milieu. This still frame from This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2000) shows the now iconic image of a militarized police officer firing tear gas into a non-violent crowd.

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from the construction of the situation of ‘world trade meeting,’ I think, is a glimpse of the ultimate fantasy of postmodern capitalism: the realization, if only for a short time, if only in a small space, of the society of control in its perfected form” (Day 2007: 250–1). The “newest” social movements (Day 2005) must give serious consideration to representations of contemporary radical activism across social media. While anarchism was largely dormant during the postwar heyday of cinema, it now finds itself ascendant during the era of the Internet and social media, and its aesthetic dominates the transgressive practices of the revolutionary Left. The argument of this chapter is that the aesthetics of social media such as YouTube and its “clip culture” tend to foreground the minority strain of anarchism, insurrectionist anarchism, instead of the historically more dominant form, mass anarchism. While insurrection is always a possibility, and recent protests in places such as Greece and Egypt might qualify as insurrectionary attempts, my premise here is not to attack the tactic of insurrectionary anarchism but to problematize the popular belief that anarchism is by definition insurrectionary, based on images of riot porn, and not a heterogeneous political philosophy with a varied and provocative history (see e.g. Graham 2005, 2009; Hirsch and van der Walt 2010; Marshall 2010). Anarchist forms of transgression have multiplied and spread with the advent of social media; but this fact should not overshadow the historical reality of mass anarchism and its contributions to global labor struggles of the past 150 years.

The 2010 Toronto G20 Summit Protests: A Familiar Media Narrative The G20 Summit protests in Toronto, Ontario in June 2010 witnessed the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. Approximately 25,000 protesters demonstrated at Queen’s Park on Saturday, June 26, after a week of smaller protests throughout the city. By the end of the day, a Black Bloc protest had smashed corporate storefronts in downtown Toronto and burned four police cars left tantalizingly in the middle of strolling mobs. Over 1100 people were arrested and at least 800 jailed, many for up to 36 hours. Over 300 people were charged, but most of these charges were later dropped. The police were accused of threatening a jailed protestor with rape, beating and arresting reporters, firing rubber bullets at peaceful protesters, and randomly arresting people who were not part of the protest. Over $1 billion was spent on security for the G20 Summit in Toronto and the G8 Summit in Huntsville, which in total placed over 10,000 police officers, as well as thousands more security guards and Canadian military personnel, in downtown Toronto. While the abuses of the Toronto G20 Summit made history in Canada and surprised many Canadians, the abuses are quite familiar to observers of global trade summit protests in the decade following the 1999 “Battle in Seattle.”

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The similarity of the events in Toronto to the April 2001 Summit of the Americas protest in Quebec City places them in a broader context of contemporary transgression of social norms constructed and maintained by a hegemonic corporate media: this similarity demonstrates the relative stagnation of summit protests in a Canadian context, after nearly a decade of economic unrest; it also suggests that the stagnation of tactics and self-perception within the anti-globalization movements is both deeply problematic and tied to the framing of such protests by mainstream (i.e. corporate) media. Consider, for example, sociologist Kevin MacKay’s summation of the Quebec City protests: Between Friday, 20 April, and Sunday, 22 April [2001], the police launched 5,192 canisters of tear gas and fired 903 rubber bullets into crowds of protesters. Some protesters were hit at point-blank range by these projectiles, resulting in several broken bones, and the crushing of one young man’s throat. In addition to these assaults, police made 463 arrests—many of them involving excessive force and some utilizing “snatch squads” that roamed the streets of Quebec City and violently apprehended protest organizers. The cost of the summit police action, the largest in Canadian history, was over $100,000,000. (MacKay 2002: 26–7)

Almost a decade later in the Toronto protests, the same authoritarian police tactics, criminalization of dissent, and record-setting costs appear. In fact, rather than moving towards a less violent and abusive system, the national security state apparatus, which studied the Seattle protests (Mittal 2010) and adapted to alter-globalization movement activities, has increased its surveillance capacities and violent repression of dissent with every summit. MacKay argues that “the immense police reaction to protesters [in Quebec City] revealed the coercive, oppressive capacity of the capitalist state, and served to weaken the state’s hegemonic control and symbolic capital” (MacKay 2002: 27). The protests “served to ‘make power visible’ on the streets of Quebec City” (p. 28). Few radicals would argue with such an analysis. After all, protests are among the few opportunities outside waging war that the true nature of the capitalist state becomes so explicitly visible to the general public (whether the public chooses to understand this nature is another matter). However, as the symbolic power of the capitalist state continues to be tarnished, its material power continues to expand. The “systemic” or “objective” violence of capitalism, to use Slavoj Žižek’s terminology, “is invisible since it sustains the very zerolevel standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent”; systemic violence, he says, is like the “dark matter” of physics (Žižek 2008: 2). Typical, then, of the summit protests is a hegemonic media reaction that finds violence only in the actions of the protesters.1 Media scholars

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refer to this phenomenon as the “protest paradigm” (Chan and Lee 1984), and typically it means “the press shows low tolerance for social conflict and high concern for social order by advocating suppressive measures to end protest, supporting government policies and criticizing protesters harshly” (Rauch et al. 2007: 132). In response to this perception of a violent threat to the capitalist order, the state allocates more resources and legal impunity for the repressive apparatus. Summit protests thus function in paradoxical ways, both providing the necessary transgression to foreground systemic state violence, and legitimating the expansion of the repressive apparatus based on mainstream media framing biases. In Toronto, the media opined frequently about the property damage caused by the Black Bloc; little was said about the daily structural violence of global capitalism, and the vast majority of protesters who were non-violent were used to deligitimize the violent protesters (see Figure 16.2). Protesters were called “thugs” and “multi-issue extremists” by politicians and security personnel, and the mayor and city council of Toronto unanimously celebrated the actions of the police; in fact, future mayor of Toronto Rob Ford declared the police were “too nice” (Rider 2010), even though a later report by the Ombudsman of Ontario characterized the police actions in Toronto as the biggest “compromise of civil liberties” in Canadian history (Nguyen 2010). The many declarations of solidarity with the police by public figures in mainstream media in the immediate aftermath of the protests had severe repercussions with public opinion. An Angus Reid

Figure 16.2 Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s most popular weekly newsmagazine, epitomized mainstream coverage of the 2010 G20 Summit protests with this July 19, 2010 cover.

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poll “found that 73 per cent of Torontonians and two-thirds of Canadians believe police treatment of protesters was justified during the G20 summit” (Gillis 2010). Public perception of the summit protests, much like the state response, reflects a narrative so familiar at this point 2 in the march of the alter-globalization movements that for many activists, and certainly for the general public, the images of summit protests, especially the images of Black Bloc assemblies, have come to represent the philosophical breadth and active depth of the alter-globalization movements. In the past decade little progress has been made to convince the general North American public that summit protests, especially those involving Black Bloc tactics, are effective and justified. Even though what Giorel Curran calls the “anarchist impulse percolating through oppositional politics today” (Curran 2007: 7) has had an enormous and varied effect on alter-globalization movements, to the general public and the corporate media the only kind of anarchism that exists is the kind represented by the image of a Black Bloc smashing windows at an economic summit. The problem, I wish to suggest, is not Black Bloc tactics; rather, the problem is that the true heterogeneity, international scope, and diverse tactics of contemporary alter-globalization movements, especially their anarchist expressions, are ignored by the very constituents who would benefit from them. This historical amnesia is amplified by social media such as YouTube, on which clips of anarchist-inspired riots at summit protests and elsewhere have become popular viewing—so popular, in fact, that the genre has a name: riot porn.3 While the popular dissemination of filmed riots or police brutality also often exposes lies promoted by the police and state officials, I argue that such spectacular images, when foregrounded in anarchist-made videos instead of more substantive representations of anarchism, are often less helpful to radical social movements than we might assume because the messages of these images are so susceptible to corporate media framing, and because research shows that “when groups are framed or depicted as threatening or deviant, [observers] can become less tolerant” (Arpan et al. 2006: 16). The public opinion polls from Toronto suggest that this observation continues to hold true. In other words, anarchist media have not overcome corporate media biases in the minds of the general public because anarchist media themselves promote the same visual culture being used by corporate media to demonize anarchists, instead of creating and promoting more heterogeneous forms of radical visual culture.

Mass Anarchism In their history of the anarchist tradition, Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt suggest that anarchists generally practice one of two broad strategies: insurrectionist anarchism or mass anarchism. The insurrectionist tradition “argues that reforms are illusory and organized mass

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movements are incompatible with anarchism, and emphasizes armed action—propaganda by the deed—against the ruling class and its institutions as the primary means of evoking a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge” (Schmidt and van der Walt 2009: 123). The second strategy, mass anarchism, “stresses the view that only mass movements can create a revolutionary change in society, that such movements are typically built through struggles around immediate issues and reforms (whether around wages, police brutality, or high prices, and so on), and that anarchists must participate in such movements to radicalize and transform them into levers of revolutionary change” (p. 124). Arguably, insurrectionist strategies have played a “decidedly minority part” within the anarchist tradition (p. 128); however, in the past decade insurrectionist practices, especially by neo-Situationists (various culture jammers, for example) and anarcho-primitivists (elements of revolutionary environmentalism), have received inordinate attention, and the general public has come to view all anarchisms as insurrectionist, if anarchism is considered at all. Within the anarchist press, conversely, there is arguably an overrepresentation of “Primitivists, Platformists, sectarians, and hyper-individualists—proponents of strains of anarchism that are almost completely unrepresentative of the movement as a whole” (Graeber 2010: 123). Internally, anarchists have always maintained a healthy debate over strategies, as witnessed by platformist Wayne Price’s recent essay on “The Two Main Trends in Anarchism” (http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/8087). Price’s “two main trends” roughly correspond to Schmidt and van der Walt’s distinction between insurrectionist and mass anarchism; Price does not see labels as terribly useful, but their respective positions on revolution, class, and unions are important. Uri Gordon recently described the division as “Old School” versus “New School,” and David Graeber ascribes the labels “big-A” and “small-a” anarchism. Clearly, the infamous The Coming Insurrection, anonymously authored by The Invisible Committee and published abroad in 2007 (receiving an official English translation in 2009), reflects the traditions of insurrectionist, New School, small-a anarchism. I would add to that list “academic,” since many of the New School anarchists embrace ideas that have become canonical in Western graduate programs in the past 40 years. In the case of The Coming Insurrection, the label of “academic anarchism” may also apply because the suspected author, Julien Coupat, wrote a dissertation on Guy Debord at the EHESS (The School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences). While these labels may not be terribly significant because they apply to factions of a very small subculture, they are potentially more significant in the context of globalized digital media and a capitalist order in various stages of collapse. Globalized digital media permit the rapid spread of ideas in ways no previous media have. The relationship between forms of anarchist transgression and forms of new media has received scant attention from

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anarchist academics, but in an age of globalized and increasingly accessible social media the classic anarchist debate over tactics should theorize media as integral to revolutionary platforms, whatever their orientation.

Can YouTube Be a Site for Radical Politics? The use of video in anti-authoritarian politics dates “back at least to the birth of the medium” (Hedden 2009: 147). Contemporary anarchist use of video is both international and in the service of many struggles: “From Palestine to the Philippines, Louisiana to Argentina, anarchists are using video as a tool in the fight against media monopolies, State violence, racism, occupation, gender norms, patriarchy, global capitalism—the list goes on, with anarchists highlighting the resistance of everyday people on every front. Video is used for everything from surveying the police to experimental films, from narrative shorts to journalistic broadcasts” (Hedden 2009: 148). Anarchist film has, until the advent of the Internet, traditionally been hard to find, because, as Andrew Hedden suggests, “the anarchist movement was weakest during the years of film’s ascendancy as a medium, roughly from World War II to the end of the century” (ibid.). This may explain the perceived absence of anarchism as a significant participant in radical politics during the same period. More commonly available are commercial films featuring anarchists, but since early cinema there has been a “demonization of anarchist protagonists” (Porton 1999: 10); in fact, the “vast majority of anarchists in commercial films are associated with irrationality and violence” (Porton 1999: 11),4 an interesting parallel with both the popularity of riot porn and the mainstream media framing of Black Blocs. Both the relative absence of anarchist films and the culture industry demonization of anarchist subjects suggest that the era of digital media, and probably more accurately the YouTube era, marks the beginning of any kind of popular dissemination of self-representation by anarchists. This popular dissemination began with the 1999 Battle in Seattle and the formation of Indymedia, as suggested by Hedden’s study of anarchist video production: “The growth of Indymedia has, of course, been spurred by summit protests, as has the anarchist movement in general. Those surveyed mentioned protests in Prague, Quebec City, Genoa, and Gleneagles as galvanizing moments for becoming involved in video production projects” (Hedden 2009: 150). Given the coincidental emergence of contemporary alter-globalization anarchism and summit protest video, it is unsurprising the anarchist community in North America continues to promote the aesthetic of riot porn. However, it is important to note that anarchist video activism should not be completely reduced to it. The Zapatistas, for example, promote the use of video cameras by their members to “capture human rights abuses” and “to produce educational and creative works” (Fernandez 2007: 229).

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According to Carlos Fernandez, indigenous autonomy movements have promoted “widespread adoption of communication technologies”: “Video is being used intensely by Andean, Mayan, Afro-Columbian, and other communities throughout Latin America” (2007: 229). In this case the anarchist aesthetic is heterogeneous, perhaps a by-product of an anarchist propensity to avoid normative aesthetic standards (Porton 1999: 231). Such an approach may prove more adaptive to capitalist state repression: “The lessons of Zapatista video, the digital media of the Other Campaign, and the multiple channels of movements for democracy have yet to point to some decisive strategy or theory for employing media. No particular tool, production process, or content has fit recent movements better than others” (Fernandez 2007: 235). A basic problem with the aesthetics of anarchist video activism emerges from the subculture in which it is produced. With limited resources and video production training, anarchist filmmakers have embraced a low-tech, DIY aesthetic as emblematic of anarchist principles; however, some have argued that this aesthetic has limited appeal for a mass audience. For example, Kyle Harris suggests that the aesthetic choices of activist films undermine their narrative and seriously restrict the size of their potential audience: “Created with limited resources and training, [activist documentaries’] technical and structural flaws undermine the power of the story. Viewers easily dismiss weak stories and poorly conceived films. Anarchism maintains its status as an esoteric subcultural practice rather than a dominant social force” (Harris 2007: 211). Such practices emerge from romantic and avant-garde artistic traditions (Harris 2007: 216) that do not speak to contemporary mass audiences: “Unfortunately, gestural camerawork, punk aggression, and Surrealist and Dada explorations of the non-rational have paved the way for the pitfalls of DIY video production: sloppy camerawork, blown out sound, poorly lit images, and incoherent narrative” (Harris 2007: 211). Harris advocates for “classical narrative strategies” (p. 213) and more attention to the social and historical context of the story (p. 214). Cindy Milstein also opposes the tendencies of contemporary anarchist video activism. “Why is anarchist art so often a parody of itself, predictable and uninteresting?” she asks (Milstein 2007: 297). Milstein believes that contemporary anarchist art often reproduces “the culture of distraction,” such as “documentaries without a narrative, or screen prints that reduce social conflict to ‘us’ versus ‘them’“ (p. 302). The “culture of distraction” is another term for what Franco Berardi calls “semiocapitalism,” the “new regime characterized by the fusion of media and capital” (Berardi 2009: 18). Semiocapitalism, perhaps best embodied by social media such as YouTube, induces a “state of permanent electrocution that flows into a widespread pathology which manifests itself either in the panic syndrome or in attention disorders” (p. 36). This condition creates a depressed

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“cognitive worker” because “his or her own emotional, physical, intellectual system cannot indefinitely support the hyperactivity provoked by the market and by pharmaceuticals” (p. 37). Instead of invoking an insurrectionary moment, riot porn arguably feeds the psychic crisis of semiocapitalism and induces a state of panic and distraction. Instead of art that produces distraction, Milstein advocates for art “to depict resistance not as fragmentation per se, for mere description has lost all power of critique, but to illustrate how social acquiescence to it has become a valued commodity” (Milstein 2007: 302). Ultimately, she wants art that “surprises and provokes, sometimes upsetting a few carts in the process, and that isn’t identifiable as anarchist art by its look but instead by its sensibility” (p. 307). Milstein does not offer examples of her favored aesthetic, but perhaps Lewis Call’s reading of the film V for Vendetta (2006) as a “striking cinematic argument for postmodern anarchism” (Call 2008: 166) suggests an aesthetic that is anarchist by “sensibility” rather than by form. While the film’s aesthetic is not very radical, Call believes that the telling of this story about a masked freedom fighter named “V” in a fascist future London embodies “a postmodern narrative about a subversive political symbolism which can spread through a culture like a virus or meme, rewriting that culture as it goes” (2008: 170). To Call, the most interesting quality of the film is the free-floating signifier of V’s Guy Fawkes mask and the ways in which its anarchist potential eludes and subverts the fascist symbolic order of the state. “The face of Fawkes does not offer a specific political message of brief and dubious relevance,” writes Call. “Instead, it offers something much more useful: a subversive system of symbolic representation” (p. 170). Is this what Milstein is after? Maybe not. But a wide range of options exist between the DIY punk aesthetic of the conventional summit protest film and the more classical narrative trajectory but subversive concepts in V for Vendetta, which, incidentally, has its own mob scene in the film’s climax. Undoubtedly, social media such as YouTube provide a significant site for the spread of radical ideas using visual culture. With YouTube, the site for ideological dispensation is multimodal and indefatigably mobile. YouTube has been described as “a site of participatory culture” (Burgess and Green 2009: vii), an “accidental and disordered” public archive or a paradigmatic case of “an archive without museums” (p. 88), a form of “vernacular creativity” (p. 26), “redaction” (p. 35) and “clip culture” (Snickars and Vonderau 2009: 11), a “platform” both “industry and user driven” (Snickars and Vonderau 2009: 11), a database, the most recent transformation of television, a form of “premediation” (Grusin 2009: 63) or “divergence culture” (Grusin 2009: 66), “the site of dynamic and emergent relations between market and non-market” (Burgess and Green 2009: 90), “a hybrid information management system” (Kessler and Shafer 2009), and a site of “data-driven control” (Andrejevic 2009: 421). Several pundits in the technology press have described YouTube as the most

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important technology of the past decade; online video usage was up 53 percent in 2009 over 2008 (Parr 2009), and YouTube was the third most visited site on the Internet as of February 2011 (http://mostpopularwebsites.net), yet it remains difficult to define. Part of this difficulty arises from the changing shape and functionality of YouTube, which has in recent years (notably following its acquisition by Google) made substantial concessions to corporate intellectual property owners. Within such a contested and morphing technological platform, is it possible to assess the potential for radical politics? To date, YouTube has primarily aided radical politics by spreading images of abhorrence beyond the circulation of broadcast media. YouTube has been the source for some visual flashpoints for radical and progressive politics in Canada, including the video of Robert Dziekanski being tasered to death by the RCMP at Vancouver International Airport in 2007 (see Figure 16.3),5 the 2009 video of Jay Philips being attacked by racists in Courtenay, B.C.,6 and the infamous capture on video of police provocateurs at the Security and Prosperity Partnership protest in Montebello, Quebec in 2007 (see Figure 16.4).7 These amateur videos, made available globally to a non-activist audience through YouTube, may challenge false nostalgia about policing, race relations, and corporate and governmental transparency in Canada. Certainly, the videos provide provocative material for aspiring radical and progressive activist filmmakers; Paul Manly, the individual who filmed police provocateurs at Montebello for the Council of Canadians, transformed his short video into a feature documentary on the Security and Prosperity Partnership, for example. In the context of other social media, it may be argued that YouTube does not reshape power relations in Canada substantially (Nimijean and Rankin 2008: 68), or that YouTube, like other ICTs, contributes more noise than effective action to social movements in Canada (Wright 2004); however, I argue that the principal contribution of YouTube to the anarchist tradition so far has been its platform for the advance of a particular form of radical

Figure 16.3 A still frame from the YouTube video of Robert Dziekanski’s death by Taser at the hands of the RCMP in 2007.

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Figure 16.4 Police provocateurs at the 2007 Security and Prosperity Partnership summit were identified by Internet patrons after video taken by Paul Manly was circulated online. Note the similarity in footwear worn by both police and “protesters.”

politics, a politics still trapped in anti-organizationalist posturing and spectacle without making a connection with organized labor and other forms of solidarity. Even though YouTube participation contributes to capitalist circulation, the site remains an accessible platform for images of capitalist and state repression. What anarchists and other radicals have not done successfully is transform accessible representations of anti-capitalist revulsion into social mobilization in North America. The narratives of summit protests, in particular when violence is involved, have been dominated by hegemonic media and their conventional frames. The counter-hegemonic narratives within riot porn remain largely confined to radical subcultures. Infamous videos and images from summit protests around the world tend to become the moments that define those summits, and policies generated by the summit participants or complaints publicized by protest groups are often forgotten. The G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy in 2001 is remembered by the violent death of protester Carlo Giuliani at the hands of Italian police, who shot him and ran over his body twice with their van. A judge later dismissed charges against the police officer who shot Giuliani, Mario Placanica, claiming his actions were a legitimate form of self-defense. Photographs of the brutal killing proliferated online through alternative media and photo-sharing sites such as Flickr. The 2009 G20 Summit in London, England is remembered for the death of Ian Tomlinson, a passerby who was assaulted by police while walking home from work. The assault was captured on video by an American tourist.8 The video clearly shows Tomlinson being hit and shoved to the ground by police, even though his hands are in his pockets and he is walking away from the police. A second video emerged which showed the officer hitting Tomlinson with a baton behind his knees moments before shoving him to the ground. Multiple pathology reports could not decide conclusively that Tomlinson’s death, which occurred minutes after the assault, was caused by the assault. The officer responsible for shoving Tomlinson, Simon

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Harwood, was not charged with manslaughter, and in 2010 he faced an internal police hearing for gross misconduct. Summit protests, at least since Seattle in 1999 and the establishment of Indymedia Centers, have consistently produced memorable moments caught on video. The advent of video-sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.TV, and many others has generated a wealth of protest videos that on occasion become the material for feature documentaries such as This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2000), Breaking The Spell (1999), The Miami Model (2003), and You, Me and the SPP (2009). Riot porn mimics mainstream media coverage of protests in the way it reduces ideological conflict to violent and spectacular confrontations. As Simon Cottle writes, … focusing exclusively on the spectacular and visual it is all too easy to lose sight of the sociological and powered nature of strategic and discursive struggles enacted within and through such mediated displays, and that are likely to be animating them. Demonstrations and protests, by definition and democratic enactment, are invariably a means to an end, not the end themselves, and we therefore need to understand how their communicative aims have been realized or derailed in the encounter with media and other claims-makers. The politics of spectacle does not subsist in spectacle alone. (Cottle 2008: 866)

While insurrectionists and other militant protesters may claim a necessity for violent conflict with riot police and against the private property of global corporate brands during economic and political summits that advance the agenda of the corporate elite, and while these protesters may feed their passion for revolt on images of insurrection, the decade since Seattle has not demonstrated in North America an insurrectionary fervor or anything resembling widespread revolt. In fact, arguably, most political protests are now much smaller in numbers than they were a decade ago, and the agenda opposed in Seattle has proceeded apace, with the income disparity gap between rich and poor in America, for example, equal to Great Depression-era statistics. Riot porn in North America has remained circumscribed by the machinations of the economic elites: riot porn images are generated almost exclusively at summits, events that have become routine for the security apparatus. Other parts of the world, however, have witnessed riots against capitalist inequality outside the staging of a summit; consider, for example, the recent protests in Greece, Italy, and other parts of Europe against the “austerity” measures of the G20. While the general public in North America seems to reserve its violent outbursts for professional sports championships, political traditions elsewhere have produced militant responses to capitalist exploitation. These phenomena are not easily explained, but the general reticence of North American militants to confront the state and its corporate oligarchy outside the performative

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setting of a major summit suggests the contemporary marginalization of militant protest in North America, the pervasive reach of corporate media propaganda, and perhaps a strain of protest culture that performs to the expectations of the new media paradigm and its spectacular appendages. An important question remains, therefore: Is the predictability of summit protests and the riot porn they generate a function of mainstream media coverage of protests, or of alternative media inscriptions in archives such as YouTube? Protest coverage in the mainstream media has changed little in decades. A wealth of research demonstrates that mainstream media are overwhelmingly critical of the protesters, or completely ignore the protesters, when the status quo is threatened (Gitlin 1980; Murdock 1973; Rojecki 2002; Shoemaker 1984). Boyle and Schmierbach also note, “media coverage of activities that take place outside of or threaten the system is often particularly lacking in mobilizing information” (Boyle and Schmierbach 2009: 6), which may contribute to an explanation of why North American labor movements have been relatively muted in response to an aggressive neoliberal transfer of wealth. In addition, mainstream coverage tends to focus on the (often violent) activities outside the summit, rather than articulating to any significant extent the policies and consequences of the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, or other international capitalist organizations meeting inside the summit (Leung 2009: 256). Negative representations of protesters not only appear to delegitimize their causes, they also “serve as a negative reinforcement against protest, as compared to the media’s positive influence on traditional engagement” (Boyle and Schmierbach 2009: 7). Lisa Leung’s study of the media coverage of the WTO conference held in Hong Kong in December 2005 reaches conclusions applicable to most such events: it could be argued that the role of mediatized violence is multi-faceted for the Hong Kong media. First, the portrayal of the WTO conference as ‘violent’ is an indigenization policy with the aim of ‘selling’ the event to the Hong Kong readers. Second, it serves a political purpose, to justify violence by the police in the name of public safety and order. Third, the local news media was merely conforming to and perpetuating the ‘violent’ image of the WTO conferences, which has been inculcated ever since ‘the Battle of Seattle’. The episodic and continuous nature of the international conferences such as the WTO conference allows violence to become a mediatized ritual. (Leung 2009: 261)

The 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto was framed in exactly the same terms, with burning police cars and Black Bloc protesters capturing the newspaper headlines, while the class war politics of austerity measures being articulated by the participating governments received scant (or uncritical)

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attention. Such lopsided coverage perpetuates the idea that what economic elites do is non-violent and necessary, while people who protest the structural violence of global capitalism are portrayed as violent “thugs,” to use the word preferred by the mayor of Toronto and the local press. Most readers will see the violence of the protest as a local phenomenon, but dismiss the structural violence of global capitalism as distant and invisible, and therefore inconsequential. Leung is also correct to identify the government, the protesters, and the media as “bedfellows in search of media attention and approval.” “Violence, and the subsequent mediatization of it, became the expression of this ‘union’ [in Hong Kong],” explains Leung. “For the government, the staged violence (and the quelling of it) served as proof of government competence and determination, as well as of police strength. For the antiestablishment protesters, violence became a tool to attract international concern for their plight. For the mainstream media, it became a moneymaking opportunity” (2009: 266). This union of antagonists around mediatized violence, from an anarchist perspective, must be broken. As Kalle Lasn, the editor of Adbusters, wrote in a January/February 2011 editorial, “Maybe it’s time we deny them [the capitalists] their regularly scheduled spectacles and try something new. Next time they call an economic summit, why don’t we just ignore them?” (Lasn 2011). If studies of mainstream media viewership and its relationship with political participation are accurate, then mediatized violence from summit protests tends to affirm hegemonic positions held by the government and the corporate media rather than the counter-hegemonic or revolutionary positions occupied by protesters. The desire to mobilize resistance to capitalist hegemony without appealing to the mainstream media, however, presents substantial challenges. Does this strategy entail a preference for invisibility and anonymity, and, if so, does this (mainstream) invisibility contribute to a “spiral of silence” in which hegemonic policies, seemingly uncontested from the mainstream media vantage, appear to be legitimated? If protesters continue to confront capitalist mobilizations such as economic summits using militant methods, are they doomed to repeat the statemanaged orchestration of mediatized violence in which the popular press inevitably portrays the protesters as the illegitimate party to violence?

(Anarchist) Civic Participation versus Electoral Politics Some of the early research on the relationship between Internet usage and political activity suggests that the Internet’s most notable impact on social life is to promote anarchist tendencies, even if the participants do not recognize them as such. For example, “recent work on civic participation concluded that the Internet’s greatest impact lied in social and civic but not on electoral or governmental arena” (Zhang et al. 2010: 78).

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By “civic” participation, the scholarship refers to “activities that address community concerns through non-governmental or non-electoral means, such as volunteering for building a homeless shelter or working on a community project” (p. 76). These non-governmental activities could be seen by anarchists as forms of solidarity or expressions of what Richard Day calls “an affinity for affinity” (Day 2005: 9). In addition, “Results showed that reliance on social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace was positively related to civic participation but not to political participation or confidence in government, which was not surprising, because these social networking sites are geared toward maintaining relationships with their friends and can have potential for stimulating community involvement” (Zhang et al. 2010: 76–7). Combined with the ability of ICTs “to accelerate and geographically extend the diffusion of social movement information and of protest” (Garret 2006: 207), social media may represent the most potent technological force for contemporary anarchist politics. The challenge for anarchists lies in both the current dependence on capitalist technology oligarchies such as Google and Facebook for social media platforms, and the subcultural aesthetics of anarchist propaganda and art. The first problem—the fact that the most popular social media platforms are privately owned—ensures that any activities carried out on capitalist platforms (such as YouTube) are contributing to the neoliberal agenda of what Mark Andrejevic calls “data-driven control,” and the second problem—the limited range of anarchist aesthetics—diminishes the potential audience for anarchist ideas. Contemporary anarchism must move beyond “semiotic street fights” (Thompson 2010: 31), beyond the politics of representation and toward a politics of production (p. 22). Whether this passage requires violence, as A. K. Thompson believes, is subject to debate. For Thompson, the Black Bloc tactic offered many white, middle-class kids in the alter-globalization movement the conditions necessary to pass into a post-representational politics. He sees the Black Bloc “primarily in its role as limit situation for the white middle class” (p. 21), and its riotous activities as “open-ended spaces where active experiments with violence became possible” (p. 25). While I do not have space to detail the complexities of his argument, I will recommend the scope and tenor of his thesis be expanded to encompass a broader conception of violence. If the violence of a Black Bloc provides some kind of passage for the white middle class into the politics of production, it remains a spatially segregated, temporally limited, and ultimately state-managed form of passage. Radical North American politics require a broad anti-capitalist social movement, and waiting for global trade summits to produce self-righteous images of capitalist repression that will be mutated into narratives of state legitimacy by the mainstream media is a limited strategy at best, a stagnant and self-defeating strategy at worst.

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Notes 1. In the case of the Toronto protests, a major newspaper, The Toronto Star, pursued the issue of police violence and managed to bring charges against one officer. However, this investigation left the impression that there was only one bad apple, and not a systemic abuse of power. 2. McFarlane and Hay suggest that “marginalizing [mainstream media] frames” are common in the coverage of protests, frames which “emphasize violent crime, property crime and riots, carnivalesque and freakish aspects of protest, childish antics, and moral and social decay” (2003: 218; see also Gitlin 1980; Rosie and Gorringe 2009). 3. For example, a video titled “The Best Of Violence – G8 – 2007 – Riot Protest – Police Car” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgPWg25R_Xc) has over 353,000 views on YouTube. Another Black Bloc video, “G8 Protest Riots – How it all Started” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDqThVpu1AM), has over 278,000 views. A video of a military “snatch and grab” from the Pittsburgh G20 Summit (http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=G8CNa_viKg0) has over one million views. Recent anarchist riots in Greece have produced several popular videos. Video of a 2005 anarchist attack on Greek riot police headquarters (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frfu2xXP91g) has over 200,000 views, and videos of anarchist riots following the 2008 murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos by Greek police officer Epaminondas Korkoneas have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. For a prototypical example of riot porn, see a video that was uploaded while this chapter was being completed (and hence does not have a substantive view count): “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0GfTeyBexw). 4. Porton believes that “the most powerful sources of anti-anarchist literature and cinema probably lie in two interrelated traumas from the late nineteenth century which still reverberate in our own era: the brief, but spectacularly ill-fated, alliance of Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev in 1869–70 and, some years later, the popular misinterpretation of Maletesta and Paul Brousse’s doctrine of ‘propaganda by the deed’ as a justification for random acts of terror” (Porton 1999: 13). 5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CR_k-dTnDU. 6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICPVt0rH8So. 7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow. 8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HECMVdl-9SQ.

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294  Law, Social Disturbance, and Political Unrest http://www.canada.com/news/Toronto+biggest+compromise+civil+liberties+Canadian+ history+Watchdog/3938393/story.html#ixzz1D7fkrkwb. Nimijean, Richard, and L. Pauline Rankin. 2008. Can Movements “Move” Online? Online Activism, Canadian Women’s Movements and the Case of PAR-L. In Mobilizations, Protests & Engagements: Canadian Perspectives on Social Movements, edited by Marie HammondCallaghan and Matthew Hayday (pp. 62–80). Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing. Paris, Jeffrey. 2003. The Black Bloc’s Ungovernable Protest. Peace Review 15(3): 317–22. Parr, Ben. 2009. The YouTube Generation: Online Video Usage Up 53 Percent in ’09, May 20. http://mashable.com/2009/05/20/online-video-growth/. Porton, Richard. 1999. Film and the Anarchist Imagination. London: Verso. Rauch, Jennifer, Sunitha Chitrapu, Susan Tyler Eastman, John Christopher Evans, Christopher Paine, and Peter Mwesige. 2007. From Seattle 1999 to New York 2004: A Longitudinal Analysis of Journalistic Framing of the Movement for Democratic Globalization. Social Movement Studies 6(2) 131–45. Rider, David. 2010. Council Commends Police Work. The Toronto Star, July 8, GT1. Rojecki, Andrew. 2002. Modernism, State Sovereignty and Dissent: Media and the New Post-Cold War Movements. Critical Studies in Media Communication 19(2): 152–71. Rosie, Michael, and Hugo Gorringe. 2009. “The anarchists’ World Cup”: Respectable Protest and Media Panics. Social Movement Studies 8(1): 35–53. Schmidt, Michael, and Lucien van der Walt. 2009. Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Shoemaker, Pamela J. 1984. Media Treatment of Deviant Political Groups. Journalism Quarterly 61(1): 66–75. Snickars, Pelle, and Patrick Vonderau. 2009. Introduction. In The YouTube Reader, edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (pp. 9–21). Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. The Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Thompson, A.K. 2010. Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Whoriskey, Peter. 2009. American Union Ranks Grow After “Bottoming Out”. January 29. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2009/01/28/AR2009012801621.html. Wright, Steve. 2004. ‘Informing, Communicating and ICTs in Contemporary Anti-capitalist Movements. In Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movements, edited by Wim van de Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht (pp. 77–93). New York: Routledge. Zhang, Weiwu, Thomas J. Johnson, Trent Seltzer and Shannon L. Bichard. 2010. ‘The Revolution will be Networked: the Influence of Social Networking Sites on Political Attitudes and Behavior. Social Science Computer Review 28(1): 75–92. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. New York: Picador.

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Index

Acconci, Vito 60 Acker, Kathy 61–2 Ackworth, Peter 118–32 Adorno, Theodor 129 Agamben, Giorgio 21, 228, 243 AIDS 91–2, 97 Albini, Steve 45–8 Alkhateeb, Faris 28–30 Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) 228–30, 233 alt.porn 113–14 Alt Sex Stories Text Repository (ASSTR) 139 Amazon 186, 192 American Apparel 103 Amis, Martin 88–9, 95–6 anal sex 15, 86–98 anarchism 22, 276–8, 281–7, 291 Anderson, Chris 249 Andrejevic, Mark 183, 233, 291 Antin, David 59 Aristotle 60 Arpan, L.M. 281 Assange, Julian 151, 169–72, 181–6, 189 Attwood, Feona 112–13 Aurigi, Alessandro 248–9 auto-tuning technology 33–4 Bahng, Aimee 71 Bakhtin, Mikhail 7, 75–7, 164 Ballard, J.G. 138 Barney, Steven M. 252 Barthes, Roland 30, 60 Bataille, Georges 5–6, 138, 236 Baudrillard, Jean 7, 132, 248 Bauman, Zygmunt 119, 276 BDSM community 16, 118–32, 138 Bech, Henning 15, 97 Beckett, Samuel 60 Belle de Jour 111–12

Beniger, James 159–60 Benjamin, Walter 130 Berardi, Franco 284 Berger, John 101 Bersani, Leo 15, 92–8 Bey, Hakim 21, 240, 244–5, 249 Bhabha, Homi 206 Biafra, Jello 156 Biasin, Enrico 87 Biden, Joe 151 Black, Matt 31 see also Coldcut Black Bloc tactics 276–83, 289, 291 blogs 109–10, 200 Boal, Augusto 40 Boisvert, Anne Marie 30 Bologna Process 242 Bolter, Jay David 127 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo 204 Borges, Jorge Luis 61 Bourdieu, Pierre 176 Boyle, Karen 102 Boyle, Michael 289 Brabon, Benjamin 113 Braxton, Toni 103 Brecht, Bertolt 26, 40, 222 Bridges, Jeff 27–8 Brimelow, Kirsty 144 British Board of Film Classification 142 Brooke, Heather 180 Browder, Laura 73 Burger, Warren 136 Burroughs, William 44, 61, 138, 256 Bush, George W. 27–8, 38 Calderón, Felipe 258, 263–6 Call, Lewis 285 Cameron, Carl 154–5, 157 Carey, James 119, 121 Carlsson, Chris 249 Carmona, Pablo 243 295

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296  Index censorship 17, 134–7, 145, 150, 173, 224 Chaplin, Sarah 247 Chatman, Seymour 73 Chatterton, Paul 241 Chesler, M.A. 204 Chomsky, Noam 172, 175, 177–8 Clément, Edgar 22, 256–73 Clinton, Hillary 36–7, 151 Club Bootie 42–3, 49 Cohen, Jared 229 Cohen, Nicole 108–9 Colbert, Stephen 17–18, 172 Coldcut 31–5 Cole, Cheryl and Ashley 135 Colombia 272 Comedy Central 17 Constanza-Chock, Sasha 219 convergence of media 212, 224–6, 231 Cooper, Melinda 230 Cottle, Simon 288 Couldry, Nick 175–7, 186 Coupat, Julien 282 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act (2008) 134, 144, 148 Critical Art Ensemble 61–2 Croft, Jeff 194 Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) 136, 142–5, 149 cultural studies 221 Curran, Giorel 281 Currie, David 149 Cyrus, Mylie 103 Daily Star 135–6 Davidson, C.N. 192–3 Davies, Nick 135 Davis, Mark 90 Day, Richard 277–8, 291 de Certeau, Michel 71, 226 de Sade, D.A.F. 14, 138 de Vellis, Phil 37 Dean, Howard 159 deconstruction 51–5, 60 Deleuze, Gilles 173, 250–1 Derrida, Jacques 7, 13, 51–5, 59, 64, 66, 251 Dery, Mark 15–16, 106, 156, 205 Details (magazine) 203, 205 Dick, Philip K. 157, 248 Digg (website) 19, 192–5, 201–5 digital divide 191 Dines, Gail 102, 105

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DJ Danger Mouse 11–12, 49, 62 documentary film-making 32–3 Dorfman, Ariel 21–2 Dorsey, Jack 229 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 64 Douglas, Mary 4 drug trade 256–73 Duchamp, Marcel 59 Durham, Meenakshi Gigi 127 Durkheim, Emile 4, 6, 176 Dyer, Richard 215 Dziekanski, Robert 286 Earle, Daniel 72–3 eBay 192, 201 Edelstein, David 72 Edwards, Richard 62 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 53–4 Engels, Friedrich 173 Enlow, Luke 50 Escobar, Pablo 272 Estrada, Joseph 158 Ettinger, Bracha 65 Facebook 32, 38–9, 108, 131, 192, 194, 291 Fairey, Shepard 27–30 Fanny Hill 137 fans and fandom 19, 69–80, 220 Faulkes, Esmond 145 Federman, Ray 59 femininity 104–5 Fernandez, Carlos 283–4 Fernández de Cevallos, Diego 271 fetishism 130 Fiske, John 212, 216–17, 219 Fitzpatrick, Jim 27 Flint, Larry 130 Ford, Rob 280 Ford, Sam 216 Foucault, Michel 4–7, 92, 119–20, 243 Frankfurt School of social research 129, 174 Freelance Hellraiser 49 Freire, Paolo 40 Frere-Jones, Sasha 45–6 Freud, Sigmund 15, 88 Fry, Stephen 109 Fukuyama, Francis 178 Full Metal Jacket (film) 193–4, 206–7 Fuller, Matthew 159–60 Furry Girl (website) 108, 113, 115

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Index  297 Gajjala, R. 196, 199, 203 Gajjala, V. 199 Galloway, Alexander R. 225, 232–4 Gardiner, Michael E. 164 Garret, R. 291 gated communities 245–7 Gaylor, Brett 44 Genz, Stéphanie 113 Gibson, William 21, 35, 44, 62, 248, 253 Gilbert, Jeremy 250 Gillis, Gregg 49–50 Gilmore, John 173 Gilroy, Paul 251 Gilson, Dave 157, 163 Gingrich, Newt 151 Girls Aloud 103, 134–5, 140 Giuliani, Carlo 287 Giuliani, Rudolph 155 Glasser, Adam 96 glitch aesthetics 59 Goffey, Andrew 159–60 Goldsmith, Jack 140–1 gonzo 96–7 Google 192 Gordon, Uri 282 Gorlin, Eitan 155–8, 163 Graeber, David 277, 282 Graham, Heather 38 Graham, Stephen 248–9 Green, Joshua 216 Greenwald, Robert 33 Gregg, Melissa 108 The Gregory Brothers 31–5 Gross, Larry 196, 199 Grosz, Elizabeth 250 Grove, Steve 229 Grusin, Richard 127 The Guardian 175, 180–6 Guattari, Félix 173, 251 Guevara, Che 27, 30 Gunkel, David J. (co-editor) 251 Gwenllian-Jones, Sara 70 Gysin, Brion 61 Habermas, Jürgen 160–4 hacking 250–3 Hall, Stuart 80, 121, 131, 206 Haraway, Donna 251 Hardesty, Larry 49–50 Harding, Luke 182–6 Hardt, Michael 21, 173, 244, 250 Harris, Kyle 284

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Harry Potter Alliance 213, 215 Harsin, Jayson 229 Harvey, David 241, 245, 247 Harwood, Simon 288 Hasselhoff, David 27 Hebdige, Dick 122 Hedden, Andrew 283 Hefner, Hugh 103 Hegel, G.W.F. 5, 66 Heidegger, Martin 51, 130 Herzagova, Eva 104 Hills, Matt 70 hoaxes 18, 154–66 Hobson, J. 205 Hocquenghem, Guy 15 Hodkinson, Stuart 241 Holding, Eric 247 homosexuality 92 Horkheimer, Max 129 horror films 72–4 Human Rights Act (1998) 148 Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) 146 Innis, Harold 8 Inside Linda Lovlelace 137 insurrectionary anarchism 22, 278, 281–2 internet service providers (ISPs) 140–2, 149, 188 Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) 135, 140–2, 149 Iranian protests 1–3, 20, 164–5, 228–30 Ishotmyself (website) 113–14 Jameson, Fredric 215, 246–8, 253 Jenkins, Henry 10, 36, 69–71, 75, 80, 226 Jenks, Chris 4–6, 249 Jennings, Sindee 94 Jervis, John 4 Johnson, Nick 169 Johnston, Keith 75 Jordan, Ed 31 see also Nomlg Julius Baer (bank) 170–1, 173 “Junkspace” concept 21, 246–50, 253 Kahn, Richard 9, 179 Kellner, Douglas 9, 127, 179 Keshelashvili, Anna 109 Kim, Richard 163 King, Peter 150–1 Kink.com 16, 118–32 Kipnis, Laura 10–11

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298  Index Kirkpatrick, David 158 Klein, Naomi 241 Kojève, Alexandre 5 Koolhaes, Rem 21, 246–8, 253 Kurtz, Howard 163 Kutcher, Ashton 109–10 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 137 Lady Gaga 104, 224 Land, Chris 251–2 Langman, Lauren 86, 90 Lasn, Kalle 290 Last Exit to Brooklyn 137 Ledger, Heath 28 Lee, Robert G. 193 Lefebvre, Henri 245 Leigh, David 182–6 Leonard, John 106 Lessig, Lawrence 9, 43, 169, 175–7, 219 Leung, Lisa 289–90 Levy, Pierre 230 Loaded (magazine) 102–3 Lockwood, Dean 73 London Freeschool 242 Lorde, Audre 12, 55 Lovink, Geert 195, 200, 234 Luhmann, Niklas 66 Lyotard, Jean-François 161 McCain, John 29, 154–5 McChesney, Robert 172, 175, 177 McCormick, Naomi 106 MacKay, Kevin 279 MacKay, Stephanie 31 see also Nomlg Maclean’s (magazine) 280 McLuhan, Marshall 8, 31, 119, 126 McManus, John H. 135 McMillan, Jimmy 34–5 McNair, Brian 177–81, 186 McRobbie, Angela 101, 104, 115 Madison, Eliot 227–30, 233–4 Maffesoli, Michael 119 makeover programs 105 Malco, Romany 38–9 Manly, Paul 286–7 Marx, Karl 173, 178 mashups 11–12, 26–40, 42–55, 58, 62–3 Massumi, Brian 240 masturbation 120, 131 The Matrix (film) 248, 253 Mattelart, Armand 22 media studies 71–2

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Merrin, William 71 Mexico 256–73 Meyer, Andrew 3 Mieli, Mario 15, 90–3, 97–8 Miller, Paul 52–3, 65 “Miller Test” 136 Milstein, Cindy 284–5 mimicry, use of 206–8 Minton, Anna 245 Mirvish, Dan 155–8, 163 Mitra, Ananda 196, 199, 202 Mitra, Rahul 196, 199 Moore, Demi 110, 112 Moore, Michael 33 More, Jonathan 31 see also Coldcut Morley, David 106 Morozov, Evgeny 184, 187–8 Morozov, Nikolas 1–2 Moss, Kate 103 Mouriño, Juan Camilo 271 Moveon.org 37–8 MSNBC 155–6 Mudu, Pierpaolo 241 Mulvey, Laura 130 Mumsnet 110 Murray, Gabrielle 73 MySpace 108, 291 Nakamura, Lisa 200, 203 Negra, Diane 103, 109 Negri, Antonio 21, 173, 235–6, 240, 244–5, 250 neoliberalism 247 Nerdgirls (website) 110–11 New York Times 157 Newman, Oscar 245 Nicol, Andrew 139 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 43, 66 Nightingale, Virginia 119, 128 Nomlg 31–2, 35 Obama, Barak 12, 27–8, 30, 36–7 Obscene Publications Act (1959) 134–44, 147–8 obscenity 16, 130–1 definitions of 136–9, 148 Ofcom 142 Olympia Press 137 Ono, Kent 194, 206 Orbach, Susie 107 O’Reilly, Tim 192–3 Oren, Tasha 196–9, 204–5, 208

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Index  299 Orlan 106 Orwell, George 37, 148 Owen, Tim 145, 147 Ozimek, John 140, 143, 145 Paasonen, Susanna 10, 86 Palahniuk, Chuck 114 Palin, Sarah 29, 39, 105, 154–7, 170, 184 Parikka, Jussi 3, 8–10 Paris, Jeffrey 276–7 parody 76–80, 132 Pearson, Roberta 70 Pérez-Peña, Richard 157 Perritt, Henry H. Jr 252 Perry, David 140, 145 persiankiwi (tweeter) 165 Pham, Vincent 194, 206 Philips, Jay 286 Phillips, Dougal 7–8 Pinedo, Isabel Cristina 72 Pinnington, John 146 Pirates of the Caribbean (films) 251–2 Pittsburgh protests (2009) 1–3, 227 Placanica, Mario 287 plagiarism 47, 61–2 Plato 8, 46–9, 57–8, 60, 64 Playboy 103 pole dancing 103 polemology 226 pornographication of culture 102–4 pornography 10, 14–16, 86–98, 102–3, 111–14, 121–3, 126–31, 134, 148, 150 see also “riot porn”; “torture porn” Porton, Richard 283 Posada, José Guadalupe 264 post-feminism 104–5, 109, 113, 115 Price, Wayne 282 Quebec 279, 286 Queer Leather community 124–5 queerness 97 Queneau, Raymond 62 “quotation”, new concept of 53 racism 204–5 Rampton, Sheldon 156–7, 159 Rasiej, Andrew 188–9 Rauch, Jennifer 280 Raymond, Jade 110 Raz, Yaniv 38 Reed, Betsy 163

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remixing 11–13, 29–40, 46–55, 57–68 repurposing 250–3 RevUSA project 31–2 Riot Girl movement 113 “riot porn” 22, 276–8, 281–5, 288–9 Rivera, Diego 264 Roberts, Adrian and Deidre 42, 49 Robertson, Geoffrey 139 Rojas, Pete 48 Ross, Andrew 215 Rossiter, Ned 234 Rothrock, John 234 Rotten.com 86 Rowling, J.K. 215 Rusbridger, Alan 185 Sade, Marquis de 73 Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act (2006) 146 Said, Edward 193 sampling 44, 47–8, 58–65 Sampson, Tony D. 3, 8–10, 164 Sarkozy, Nicholas 150 Saw films 13, 69–80 Schmidt, Carl 228, 230 Schmidt, Michael 277, 281–2 Schmierbach, Mike 289 Scott-Heron, Gil 35 Seattle protests (1999) 276–7, 283, 288 Sedgwick, Eve 86–91 Serres, Michel 54 sex workers 111–12 sexualisation of the self 104–6 Shannon, Claude 60, 159 Sharrett, Christopher 73 Sherman, Cindy 130 Shiga, John 49 Shirky, Clay 158–9 shopping malls 246 Shuster, David 155 Sierra, Kathy 202 Siffredi, Rocco 89–90, 94–8 Sifry, Michael 180–7 Skaggs, Joey 156–7, 162 social centers 240–5, 249, 253 social networking sites 108–9, 194, 204, 291 Socratic thinking 8, 47–55, 57–8, 60, 203 sovereignty 227–8, 232–5 Spears, Britney 103, 110 squatting 21, 242, 252–3 Stagliano, John 88–9, 94, 96

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300  Index Stallybrass, Peter 7 Star Trek 71, 119, 214–15 Starr, Bobbi 94 Steigler, Bernard 63 Stein, Gertrude 63–4 Stern, Jonathan 46 Stewart, Jon 172 Subrahmanyam, Kaveri 107 Suhl, Sean 114 SuicideGirls (website) 113–15 Sukenick, Ron 58–9 Suleiman, Susan 5–6 Sundhom, John 73 surveillance 17, 134–5, 146–50, 246 taboos 131 Talbot, Neil 202 Taylor Wood, Sam 106 Tecno-brega 51 “temporary autonomous zones” (TAZs) 21, 240, 244–5, 249 Terranova, Tiziana 234 Terrorism Act (2006) 149 Thacker, Eugene 225, 232–4 Thomas, Richard 146 Thompson, A.K. 291 Thompson, Linda 102 Tomlinson, Ian 287 Toronto protests (2010) 278–81, 289–90 “torture porn” 72–3 trailers for films 75–6, 79 Trammell, Kaye D. 109 transgression conceptualisations of 20, 71, 79–80, 118–19, 132, 209–10, 220, 224–5, 235–6, 249–50, 271 genealogy of 3–8 in a digital age 8–11 Transgression 2.0 8, 11, 15, 109, 115, 120–1, 131–2, 170, 183, 186–9 Tremble, Bjo 214 Trippi, Joe 158–9 Turkle, Sherry 107 Twitter 20, 109–10, 159, 162–5, 194, 225, 228–30 Valdez Cárdenas, Javier 259 van der Walt, Lucien 277, 281–2

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van Zoonen, Liesbet 106 Vasconcelos, José 256 Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) 146–7 video, use of 283–4, 288 Vidler, Mark 49 vignettes 78–9 Virilio, Paul 232, 235 Waldby, Catherine 87–98 Walker, Darryn 16–17, 134–7, 142–50 Walter, Natasha 105, 108, 112 “war on terror” 148–9, 226–7, 230–1 Wark, Ken 58 Wark, McKenzie 250 Warner, Michael 10, 130 Watercutter, Angela 50 Watney, Simon 91–2 Watts, Eric 196 Weaver, Warren 60, 159 Web 2.0 applications 19, 22–3, 29, 32, 192–5, 199–205, 209–10, 219, 221, 249 Welsh, Irvine 86 WH Smith 103 White, Allon 7 White, Jeffrey 171 White, Tarra 95 Whitehead, Alfred North 58 Whitman, Walt 58 WikiLeaks 18–19, 150–1, 169–75, 179–89, 249 Wikipedia 17–18, 171, 174, 192 Wilde, Olivia 38–9 Williams, Linda 86, 89 Williams, Raymond 8 Winston, Joan 214 Winterson, Jeanette 87 Wiseman, Jay 124 Wolfrum, William K. 156–7 Wu, Tim 140–1 YouTube 3, 32, 163–4, 192, 224, 276–8, 281–91 Zapatistas 283–4 Zecca, Federico 87 Zhang, Weiwu 290–1 Žižek, Slavoj 8, 20, 45, 50–1, 279

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