Journal articles: 'Show driving of horse-drawnvehicles' – Grafiati (2024)

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The FEI (F?d?ration Equestre Internationale) is the international governing body for equestrian sport which established the new rules and regulations regarding the driving sport and the welfare of the horse from the aspect of animals' well-being (FEI, 2009ab). The FEI rules are applied to the Olympic disciplines of Show Jumping, Dressage and Eventing as well as Endurance Riding, Vaulting, Driving and Reining. The purpose of this paper was to present the FEI rules for international combined driving events which are prescribed by the national Rules and Regulations of the Croatian Equestrian Federation (HKS, 2007). The welfare of the horse must be beyond the economic interest and the demands of breeders, trainers, riders, owners, organizers, sponsors or officials. Good horse management requires the highest standards of nutrition, health, sanitation and safety. During transportation, feeding, watering, ventilation, weather conditions and safety must be taken into consideration. All riding and training methods in all stages of driving sport must treat horses as living beings and must not include any techniques which are not approved by the FEI and are degrading for the horse or cause them injuries and pain. Championships in driving sport (Dressage, Marathon, Obstacle Cones Driving) in Croatia are organized according to the FEI rules and the Croatian representative qualified in the last two World Championships in twohorse team driving (Baban et al., 2007, 2009). However, regardless of the individual success of Croatian drivers on the international scene, the traditional attitude of other drivers towards horses is still at a low level regarding the rules for the welfare of the horse. The competence of the driver is essential in the interests of the horse and the emphasis is placed on the practical experience of drivers and scientific research. The FEI especially encourages all those who participate in driving sport to achieve the highest level of education in training and management of horses. For this reason, within the scientific project, the education and training on the international level have been provided for the judges, who spread their acquired knowledge, through presentations at the seminars, to the other competitors in driving sport in Croatia. More time is needed for the full implementation of the FEI rules for the welfare of the horse at competitions in Croatia in order for all two-horse team drivers to understand that the welfare of their horses is more important than placement in competitions and money awards.

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Horse breeding in the Republic of Croatia, before its entrance into European Union, is in the transitional period. In the breeding sense, Croatian horse breeding is set according to the model of European countries and is trying to counteract with ?modern horse breeding countries?. Croatian Center for Horse Breeding - Djakovo and Lipik State Stud Farms (CCHB), with the Central register of equidae is, as the head national institution, responsible for running and maintaining national central equidae database (49 registers of horses and 27 registers of breeding types). Croatia has registered total of 21.796 equidae, from which 19.306 animals are horses. Registered horses according to groups make the total proportion of 37% warmblood horses, 59% coldblood horses and 4% ponies. Horse breeders are organized in breeders associations, which form federations of associations referring to separate horse breeds. Currently in Croatia there are four federations of breeders associations (with 43 associations and 11 private stud farms). Those verified breeding organizations are conducting independently breeding programs and fully maintain breeding and selection obligations for horse breeds for which they have approval of the Croatian Ministry. Native breeds in Croatia are Croatian Coldblood, Croatian Posavac and Medjimurje horse (Murinsulaner), while Lipizzan horse is considered as protected breed. Development of horse breeding is considerably supported with national subsidies. Internationally verified breeds which are bred in Croatia are Lipizzan horse, Pure Arabian horses, Thoroughbred, Haflinger and Gidran horses. The horse breeding in Croatia is developing in four different directions. Ecological breeding implies native horse breeds and is spread on the areas of protected nature resorts in Croatia. Croatians are through their history connected to horse breeding, which is even today irreplaceable in traditional cultural manifestations (Djakovacki vezovi, Vinkovacke jeseni, Sinjska alka, etc.), various horse shows and fairs and also in more ?modern? ways through recreation and entertainment. The third direction of development of horse breeding in Croatia is therapeutic riding, which includes 26 associations, over one hundred horses and over one thousand users organized under the Therapeutic Riding Association of Croatia. Sports horse breeding represents fourth direction in Croatian horse breeding. It is formed by four federations: Croatian Trotting Federation (trotting), Croatian Gallop Federation (gallop sport) and Croatian Equestrian Federation (endurance, dressage, military, show jumping, driving). Croatian Equestrian Federation includes 49 equestrian clubs. In the last four years between 455 and 582 competitors and between 495 and 581 horses (for show jumping 45%, dressage 31%, endurance 19%, driving 5% and military) were licensed annually. Croatia achieved noticeable results on the international scene in driving sports and in Paralympics. In all mentioned directions of Croatian horse breeding, the tendency should be directed to achieving higher breeding standards (nutrition, stabling, transport, training) and more rational using of horses. Such breeding and using of horses will lead to top bred horses and successful sport horses. This implies synchronized work through long period of time, respecting institutional and breeding rules.

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Conformation has long been a driving force in horse selection and breed creation as a predictor for performance. The Tennessee Walking Horse (TWH) ranges in size from 1.5 to 1.7 m and is often used as a trail, show, and pleasure horse. To investigate the contribution of genetics to body conformation in the TWH, we collected DNA samples, body measurements, and gait/training information from 282 individuals. We analyzed the 32 body measures with a principal component analysis. Principal component (PC)1 captured 28.5% of the trait variance, while PC2 comprised just 9.5% and PC3 6.4% of trait variance. All 32 measures correlated positively with PC1, indicating that PC1 describes overall body size. We genotyped 109 horses using the EquineSNP70 bead chip and marker association assessed the data using PC1 scores as a phenotype. Mixed-model linear analysis (EMMAX) revealed a well-documented candidate locus on ECA3 (raw P = 3.86 × 10−9) near the LCORL gene. A custom genotyping panel enabled fine-mapping of the PC1 body-size trait to the 3′-end of the LCORL gene ( P = 7.09 × 10−10). This position differs from other reports suggesting single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) upstream of the LCORL coding sequence regulate expression of the gene and, therefore, body size in horses. Fluorescent in situ hybridization analysis defined the position of a highly hom*ologous 5 kb retrogene copy of LCORL (assigned to unplaced contigs of the EquCab 2.0 assembly) at ECA9 q12-q13. This is the first study to identify putative causative SNPs within the LCORL transcript itself, which are associated with skeletal size variation in horses.

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Horses and their owners participate in an increasingly diverse range of equestrian pursuits including such activities as racing, show-jumping, endurance riding, carriage driving, dressage, hunting, pony club games, polo and leisure trekking. The majority of owners and riders within the disciplines of equitation appear to have a general preference toward using male horses as the chosen competition animal. Although not exclusively so, stallions and geldings are quite often physically bigger and stronger than fillies and mares and may enjoy some athletic advantage as a result. However, it is known from studies involving humans and small laboratory animals (mice and rats) that some gender differences in cognitive function may also affect performance where tasks involve 3-dimensional objects and elements of depth perception (Morris, Garrud, Rawlins, and O’ Keefe, 1982). The horse has laterally placed eyes (Budiansky, 1997 and Figure 1) and therefore a stereoscopic (binocular) visual field of approximately 65-70°.

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The traditional livestock industry in Inner Mongolia has evolved rapidly in response to social and economic transformations during recent decades, resulting in substantial impacts on the rural economy and livelihoods of pastoralists. Improved understanding of these changes and potential drivers may help foster strategies to sustain the pastoral system of this region. Using long-term climate, social-economic, and livestock (cattle, horses, sheep, and goats) population data from 1970 to 2010, we analyzed the dynamics of the livestock industry and main driving factors in the Xilinhot region—a central part of the Inner Mongolia Grassland. Our results show that the total livestock population increased dramatically in the past four decades, especially during 1987–2010. Livestock composition also changed substantially, with increasing sheep, goat, and cattle populations but a decreasing horse population. Pastoral population growth and land use policy were the primary drivers for livestock dynamics during 1970–2010. Livestock structure became differentiated progressively with changes in land use policy. Also, climate factors had an important influence on livestock production. The current study suggests that sustainable animal husbandry in this region requires government policies that promote ecological urbanization, livestock production efficiency, incentive systems for grassland conservation, and collective action and cooperation for enhancing social capital and resilience.

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The traditional Hungarian horse breed, Gidran has been close to the edge of extinction several times. Despite the multiple bottleneck effect, the breed has retained a part of its genetic variability, and performed prominently in carriage driving and show-jumping competitions. Maintaining of the Gidran breed is important in the point of view of world heritage; because besides Hungary, smaller Gidran populations exist only in Bulgaria and Romania. Taking advantage of the special inheritance features of mtDNA, our study focused on two mtDNA regions of Gidran mares. Altogether, 251 hair samples from various Hungarian studs were examined. The analysis was successfully made in case of 251 samples of the cytochrome b and in case of 246 samples of D-loop regions. Because of the distinct mutation rates of the two mtDNA markers, the number of the haplotypes and the way of grouping samples into haplotypes was different. Our key finding was that most haplotypes may be compatible with mare families of the stud book; however incidental mistakes in stud book have occurred only in a few cases. Our results indicate the importance of the preservation and breeding those mare families, which are molecular genetically more diverse than the others, and are in the edge of extinction.

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Background: Breeding of Crioulo horses in the southern region of Brazil is very significant. Notwithstanding, not all animals meet the standards defined for the breed, raising concern among breeders, owners and veterinarians, driving them to an effort to know and understand the development of Crioulo foals. In order to get a registry at Brazilian Association of Crioulo Horse Breeders (ABCCC), the foals must be presented to a certified technician as of 24 months of age and show the breed standards and measurements required. To date, there are no data concerning development of this breed available. Therefore, this study aims to describe the growth curve of Crioulo foals in the south region of Rio Grande do Sul.Materials, Methods & Results: The study was conducted in three Crioulo horse breeding farms in the cities of Santa Vitória do Palmar, Bagé and Aceguá, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, for a period of two years (2013-2015). We followed up on 267 Crioulo foals from birth up to 24 months of age. Biometric evaluation was divided in 26 periods, with 40 animals in each and random repetition of individuals. Period one: birth to seven days; period two: seven to 21 days; monthly from 1st to 24th month. The three breeding farms presented similar environmental conditions and the horses were submitted to similar management. Measurements were taken on a monthly basis, using a mechanical scale for weight and a hippometer for height. The analysis were conducted on SAS/ETS® version 9.2. Logistic non-linear regression model was used to obtain growth curves for height and minimum, medium and maximum weight of the foals on their respective ages, by this way six growth curves were produced. Results show an increase in weight and height at 24 months of age compared to the moment of birth. This increase was accentuated during the first months of life, both in weight and height. Thus, it is possible to observe that the first six months of life is characterized by a larger growth rate and is therefore, essential for the foals development, requiring special attention from the breeder and owner.Discussion: The growth curve obtained show that not all individuals reach the measurements required by the breed’s association, corroborating the empirical observation of breeders and technicians in their routine. This is also a concern related to other Brazilian breeds such as Mangalarga Marchador, Pantaneira, Campeira. For the mentioned breeds, the adequate growth curve has already been described aiming to controlling foal development. The ABCCC require that foals as of 24 months of age have the minimum values of 1.40 m 1.38 m and 1.38 m; and maximum values of 1.50 m, 1.48 m and 1.50 m, for males, females and geldings, respectively, in order to receive the Association brand and the permanent registry. According to the growth curve, the first two months of the foal’s life show the largest growth rate, reaching 78.4% of an adult’s height with average growth of 20 cm, reaching 1.05 m. Genetic features, nutritional and sanitary conditions, directly influence this period. Overweight associated to exercising increases the risk of musculoskeletal injury and represent a factor for stress on the joints. This should be a concern among Crioulo breeders and the knowledge of their growth curve is important for an objective assessment seeking for a gradual and weighted development. In this work, it was possible to determine the growth curve of Crioulo breed foals in the south region of Rio Grande do Sul, from birth up to 24 months of age, providing minimum, medium and maximum parameters referring to withers height and body weight.

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This article highlights that the world is now celebrating the centennial of three internal combustion engine-driven milestones. Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved controllable and powered flight at Kitty Hawk, with a barely adequate 16-horsepower gas engine they had made in their bicycle shop. Henry Ford in Detroit founded his motor company that rapidly made the horse obsolete and revolutionized our way of life. And in Milwaukee, the 22-year-old William Harley and 21-year-old Arthur Davidson sold their first motorcycle to schoolyard pal Henry Meyer. There is a unique uneven rhythm to a Harley-Davidson engine. In 1994, the company filed a widely publicized application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the sound as a trademark. Management decided to withdraw the application in 2000. The motorcycle is fuel-efficient, easy to park, and can maneuver through congestion. It can enhance the quality of life by providing the rider with a unique form of relaxation and enjoyment.

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Abstract Within extended orogens, records that reflect the driving processes and dynamics of early extension are often overprinted by subsequent orogenic collapse. The Copper Mountains of northeastern Nevada preserve an exceptional record of hinterland extensional deformation and high-elevation basin formation, but current geochronology and thermochronology are insufficient to relate this to broader structural trends in the region. This extension occurred concurrent with volcanism commonly attributed to Farallon slab removal. We combine thermochronology of both synextensional hanging-wall strata and footwall rocks to comprehensively evaluate the precise timing and style of this deformation. Specifically, we apply (U-Th)/(He-Pb) double dating of minerals extracted from Eocene–Oligocene Copper Basin strata with multi-mineral (U-Th)/He and 40Ar/39Ar thermochronology of rocks sampled across an ∼20 km transect of the Copper Mountains. We integrate basem*nt and detrital thermochronology records to comprehensively evaluate the timing and rates of hinterland extension and basin sedimentation. Cooling and U-Pb crystallization ages show the Coffeepot Stock, which spans the width of the Copper Mountains, was emplaced at ca. 109–108 Ma, and then cooled through the 40Ar/39Ar muscovite and biotite closure temperatures by ca. 90 Ma, the zircon (U-Th)/He closure temperature between ca. 90 and 70 Ma, and the apatite (U-Th)/He closure temperature between 43 and 40 Ma. Detrital apatite and zircon (U-Th)/(He-Pb) double dating of late Eocene fluvial and lacustrine strata of the Dead Horse Formation and early Oligocene fluvial strata of the Meadow Fork Formation, both deposited in Copper Basin, shows that Early Cretaceous age detrital grains have a cooling history that is analogous to proximal intrusive rocks of the Coffeepot Stock. At ca. 38 Ma, cooling and depositional ages for Copper Basin strata reveal rapid exhumation of proximal source terranes (cooling rate of ∼37 °C/m.y.); in these terranes, 8–12 km of slip along the low-angle Copper Creek normal fault exhumed the Coffeepot Stock in the footwall. Late Eocene–early Oligocene slip along this fault and an upper fault splay, the Meadow Fork fault, created a half graben that accommodated ∼1.4 km of volcaniclastic strata, including ∼20 m of lacustrine strata that preserve the renowned Copper Basin flora. Single-crystal sanidine 40Ar/39Ar geochronology of interbedded tuffs in Copper Basin constrains the onset of rapid exhumation to 38.0 ± 0.9 Ma, indicating that surface-breaching extensional deformation was coincident with intense proximal volcanism. Coarse-grained syndeformational sediments of the Oligocene Meadow Fork Formation were deposited just prior to formation of an extensive regional Oligocene–Miocene unconformity and represent one of the most complete hinterland stratigraphic records of this time. We interpret this history of rapid late Eocene exhumation across the Copper Mountains, coeval volcanism, and subsequent unconformity formation to reflect dynamic and thermal effects associated with Farallon slab removal. The final phase of extension is recorded by late, high-angle normal faults that cut and rotate the early middle Miocene Jarbidge Rhyolite sequence, deposited unconformably in the hanging wall. These results provide an independent record of episodic Paleogene to Miocene exhumation documented in Cordilleran metamorphic core complexes and establish that substantial extension occurred locally in the hinterland prior to province-wide Miocene extensional break-up.

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The Caune de l'Arago Cave (southern France) has yielded one of the best preserved and best documented sedimentary successions of the European Middle Pleistocene (Oxygen Isotopic Stages 14 to 12). Herbivorous ungulates (horse, reindeer, red deer, fallow deer, bison, musk ox, argali, and tahr) are well represented in the three major stratigraphic units CM1, CM2, and CM3. CM1 and CM3 correspond to cold and dry climate and CM2 represents temperate and humid environmental conditions. Dental microwear and mesowear analyses were performed for the ungulates from CM1–3 to test whether these methods of dental wear evaluation were suitable for detecting climate-driven changes in the dietary resources of the Arago ungulate community. We found that both dental mesowear and microwear indicate dietary traits and their relationship to climatic conditions as reflected by vegetation cover and community structure. In all units, even if some species seem to share habitats or resources, it appears that the overlap in their feeding ecology is very low. The CM1 and CM3 units, where pollen analysis indicates that the climate was cold and dry, show the lowest diversity in dietary traits. The CM2, where climate is known to be more temperate and humid, the spectrum of dietary traits is large—grazers, browsers, and mixed feeders are present.

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We present a metapopulation model of the spread of equine influenza among thoroughbred horses parametrized with data from a 2003 outbreak in Newmarket, UK. The number of horses initially susceptible is derived from a threshold theorem and a published statistical model. Two simulated likelihood-based methods are used to find the within- and between-yard transmissions using both exponential and empirical latent and infectious periods. We demonstrate that the 2003 outbreak was largely locally driven and use the parametrized model to address important questions of control. The chance of a large epidemic is shown to be largely dependent on the size of the index yard. The impact of poor responders to vaccination is estimated under different scenarios. A small proportion of poor responders strongly influences the efficiency of vaccine policies, which increases risk further when the vaccine and infecting strains differ following antigenic drift. Finally, the use of vaccinating in the face of an outbreak is evaluated at a global and individual management group level. The benefits for an individual horse trainer are found to be substantial, although this is influenced by the behaviour of other trainers.

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AbstractRecent molecular line observations with ALMA and NOEMA in several Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCG) have revealed the large-scale filamentary structure at the center of cool core clusters. These filaments extend over 20-100kpc, they are tightly correlated with ionized gas (Hα, [NII]) emission, and have characteristic shapes: either radial and straight, or also showing a U-turn, like a horse-shoe structure. The kinematics is quite regular and laminar, and the derived infall time is much longer than the free-fall time. The filaments extend up to the radius where the cooling time becomes larger than the infall time. Filaments can be perturbed by the sloshing of the BCG in its cluster, and spectacular cooling wakes have been observed. Filaments tend to occur at the border of cavities driven in the X-ray gas by the AGN radio jets. Observations of cool core clusters support the thermal instability scenario, which accounts for the multiphase medium in the upper atmospheres of BCG, where the right balance between heating and cooling is reached, and a chaotic cold gas accretion occurs. Molecular filaments are also seen associated to ram-pressure stripped spiral galaxies in rich galaxy clusters, and in jet-induced star formation, suggesting a very efficient molecular cloud formation even in hostile cluster environments.

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Conventional fault diagnosis and production calculation of an oil well can be conducted with the surface dynamometer cards, which are obtained by load sensor installed on the horse head. This method to measure the dynamometer cards is limited by the sensor maintenance and calibration, battery replacement, and safety hazards for staff. As the basic parameter of the oil extraction industry, electric parameters have the advantages of low cost and high efficiency. So the inversions of dynamometer card with electric parameters are attracting more and more attention. In order to solve the problem of insufficient data and consider the real-time performance in the actual oil extraction process, this paper proposes a novel hybrid model which consists of two parts: the mechanism model of polished rod load and the suspension displacement calculated with the space vector equations of motor and a data-dependent kernel online sequential extreme learning machine (DDKOS-ELM) model proposed to correct the output error of the mechanism model, which improves the kernel function selection and makes it real-time. Thus, the highlights of this paper can be summed up in two points: (1) under the circ*mstance of the bottom dead point detection without sensors, the mechanism modeling of the polished rod load and suspension displacement has been carried out from the perspective of mathematical model of AC motor; (2) a novel data-driven model based on data-dependent kernel online sequential extreme learning machine (DDKOS-ELM) has been proposed to improve the kernel functions selection. The coefficients in the data-dependent kernel function are optimized with improved free search algorithm (IFSA). The proposed hybrid model has been applied to a normal working oil well and the prediction results show better accuracy than the pure data-driven model and mechanism model.

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Horses have the ability to generate a remarkable repertoire of facial expressions, some of which have been linked to the affective component of pain. This study describes the facial expressions in healthy horses free of pain before and during transportation and social isolation, which are putatively stressful but ordinary management procedures. Transportation was performed in 28 horses by subjecting them to short-term road transport in a horse trailer. A subgroup (n = 10) of these horses was also subjected to short-term social isolation. During all procedures, a body-mounted, remote-controlled heart rate monitor provided continuous heart rate measurements. The horses’ heads were video-recorded during the interventions. An exhaustive dataset was generated from the selected video clips of all possible facial action units and action descriptors, time of emergency, duration, and frequency according to the Equine Facial Action Coding System (EquiFACS). Heart rate increased during both interventions (p<0.01), confirming that they caused disruption in sympato-vagal balance. Using the current method for ascribing certain action units (AUs) to specific emotional states in humans and a novel data-driven co-occurrence method, the following facial traits were observed during both interventions: eye white increase (p<0.001), nostril dilator (p<0.001), upper eyelid raiser (p<0.001), inner brow raiser (p = 0.042), tongue show (p<0.001). Increases in ‘ear flicker’ (p<0.001) and blink frequency (p<0.001) were also seen. These facial actions were used to train a machine-learning classifier to discriminate between the high-arousal interventions and calm horses, which achieved at most 79% accuracy. Most facial features identified correspond well with previous findings on behaviors of stressed horses, for example flared nostrils, repetitive mouth behaviors, increased eye white, tongue show, and ear movements. Several features identified in this study of pain-free horses, such as dilated nostrils, eye white increase, and inner brow raiser, are used as indicators of pain in some face-based pain assessment tools. In order to increase performance parameters in pain assessment tools, the relations between facial expressions of stress and pain should be studied further.

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The term Design Thinking highlighted the importance of design as a creative tool in promoting effective innovation; its importance has been increasing in academia as in business. Thus, today design is a more recent area of investigation whose main requirements define the limits and perspectives according to theory. In practice, it is necessary to establish the differentiation of values and innovations that make the object of study desirable. This article aims to show that the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro’s (UAQ) design-led thermal camera research and development, encourages collaboration between researchers, engineers and designers to implement this technology in a medical device whose goal is to prevent the formation of ulcers in patients with diabetic foot. The concepts applied to reach the goal are "Radical change of meaning" and "Interpreters" of the Design-Driven Innovation and the adoption of the method called “Asignification” developed in Germany by The Dark Horse design studio.

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I love memory. It reminds me of who I am and how to get home, whether there's bread in the freezer and if I've already seen a movie. It's less helpful on whether I've already met someone and utterly useless in reminding me if I owe money. Overall, though, I'd rather have it than not. Psychologists and philosophers tell us that memory is one of the ways in which we maintain the integrity of the self. I've never met anyone who's lost his memory, but we've all seen movies in which it happens. First, you lose your memory, then you're accused of a crime you can't remember committing. I forget how it turns out but I did once see a documentary about a man who'd lost his memory. It was horrible. It was driving him insane. He could remember his wife, but couldn't remember when he'd last seen her. He thought it was years ago although it had only been 5 minutes. Every time she entered the room, he traversed paroxysms of agony as though seeing her again after an eternity of waiting. The experience was overwhelming for both of them. Of course, psychoanalysts are unequivocal about the importance of memory: repressed memories are the very stuff of the unconscious and analysis helps us remember. When memories are repressed, bad things happen. As Breuer and Freud stated in 1893, "hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences". History has also long been concerned to discover a true memory, or at least an official one. And history has become one of the main cultural battlegrounds over the right way to remember. But lately, memory has become big business. Entire industries are devoted to selling it back to us. Not private memories, but the likely memories of a group. For example, my newsagent carries at least 3 "nostalgia" magazines, replete with loving photographs of old toys, reprints of old ads, interviews with old personalities, and so on. Fortunately, they're all just a bit too old and the absence of my personal nostalgia reassures me that I'm not quite as decrepit as Generation Xers claim. Nonetheless, amongst my 200-odd TV channels, there is one devoted exclusively to old shows, TVLand. It broadcasts nothing later than 1981 and, though its policies are clearly guided by contractual availability and cost, specialises in TV of the mid-1960s. Now that is getting dangerously close to home. And I confess that, after 30 years, re-viewing episodes of Julia or Petticoat Junction or The Mod Squad ("one's white, one's black, one's blond") is an experience both compelling and embarrassing. And again, this summer, as for the past 15 years, movie screens were awash in retro-films. Not films with old-fashioned plots or deliberately nostalgic styles -- such as Raiders of the Lost Ark -- but films based on cultural artefacts of the near past: The Avengers, Lost in Space, Sergeant Bilko, McHale's Navy, another Batman, The Mask of Zorro, etc. Indeed, now that we've lived through roughly six Star Treks, Mission Impossible, The Flintstones, The Twilight Zone, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Jetsons, and in view of the fact that even now -- even as I write these very lines -- locations are being scouted for Gilligan's Island: The Movie, it seems appropriate to ask if there is a single TV show of the 1960s which will NOT become a major Hollywood movie? That's not all. I have access to approximately 10 "golden oldies" music stations, some specialising solely in "PowerHits of the '70s" or "Yesterday's Country" or "Hits of the Big Band Era". In fact, I think Big Band is making a comeback on the pop charts. Maybe everything old is new again. On the other hand, memory has also become highly political. Much more that I ever remembered. All over the world, governments and institutions are rushing to remember the wrongs of the past and issue sincere apologies. President Clinton apologised to Japanese Americans, some Australian state and local governments to Aborigines, Canada to the displaced Inuit, Tony Blair to the Irish, Swiss banks to the victims of Nazi gold. The return of the repressed is apparently highly therapeutic and certainly very virtuous. Strangely, though, the institutional process of memory recovery is happening at precisely the time that the same recovered memory theory is under attack in the courts. After having been a potent argument in the 1980s, especially in cases involving a sexual component, recovered memory is now widely discredited. Indeed, even movies-of-the-week which at one time preached recovered memory as unassailable truth now regularly use it as the cover of false accusations and gross miscarriages of justice. Even the Canadian Minister of Justice is under pressure to review the cases of all persons jailed as a result of its use. It would seem that after having been private for so many years, memory has gone public. It's a political tool, a legal argument, a business. The opposite of hysteria: we suffer from too much memory. Which leads me to my problem. I can't remember Princess Diana. This is no doubt because I avoided all mention of her when she was alive. And when she died, I was away. Not far away but conceptually away. Away from the media. I didn't follow the news till days later, when it was all over and TV had moved on to something else. Her exit, of course, was rather nasty. Not the sort of thing I'd want to witness, but certainly the sort of thing I'd like to know about. And it didn't exactly happen away from the public eye. There was, it is said, a crush of paparazzi in hot pursuit. And there are allegedly tons of photographs. So how come we haven't seen any? How have the authorities managed to control all those pictures? Supremely concerned with her image in life, Diana is fortunate that others are concerned with it in death. At least the absence of photographs allows us to preserve an unblemished memory of Diana, beautiful, beneficent, almost a people's princess. It does seem though that her memory, like her fame, is largely a by-product of media exposure. If you're in it, everyone knows about you. You're everywhere, inescapable. Your smiling face beams down on millions, your every thought reported. And it's not just the excessive, tabloid press, the fake news programmes, and the tawdry scandal sheets that indulge in this oversaturation -- although they do indulge quite a bit -- but all media. Obviously, competitive pressures are to blame. And probably also a cultivated appetite for the sordid and the scandalous. The upside of so much attention, of course, is that, once you're gone, there will be lots of images and sound bites to remember you by. These will be recycled again and again and again. Today's fragments of time are tomorrow's memories. Consequently, if you must be a public figure, try to have a good exit. Consider perhaps James Dean's advice to "live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse." Especially a good looking corpse. Of course, if you're out of it -- out of the media system, that is -- then, you're just out of it. Nobody will remember you anyway. This is why Elvis will never die and John Kennedy will never stop dying. Except perhaps for his heavy Las Vegas phase, virtually all of the images of the King show him as magnetic, powerful, and exciting. Colonel Parker was careful about that. Elvis constantly exudes energy, an all-too-palpable physicality, forever re-energised and re-distributed by the film images of him. And the posters, and the sound of his voice, and the myth of his wildness. Fortunately, though, Elvis had the good grace to expire privately, beyond the public eye. In this, he resembled Marilyn, Rock Hudson, and Walt Disney. Of that event, he left no record. Indeed, the absence of such a record has allowed the remaining images to fuel a new myth. Endlessly re-circulated in a media sub-system, the images prove that Elvis lives! Consequently, people -- usually those first contacted by aliens -- keep spotting him at 7-Elevens, supermarket checkouts, and isolated gas stations. Apparently, he just wanted to live life normally. The fame had become too intrusive. And who could begrudge him that? So he faked his death, left no trace, and wandered off into the wilderness. To this extent, Elvis shares the fate of Hitler and the Romanovs whose deaths were deliberately obscured. As a result, Hitler lives on, at times on a desert island, sometimes in a bunker deep beneath the earth. And wasn't that Alexis, the tsarevitch? And over there, Anastasia? Aren't they having lunch with Amelia Earhardt? Kennedy, though, left a bad image, the queasy head shot. Too public, too visible, too shocking. It wasn't what James Dean meant. And that one image has absorbed all the others. This is ironic because Kennedy was the first president to look and behave like an actor whereas it would be years before an actor could look and behave like the president. Kennedy loved the camera and the camera, as they say, loved him. He had a permanent staff photographer who generated thousands of shots. He embraced television as no president had before, dominating the televised debates, holding live press conferences, opening the White House to TV tours. He invited Robert Drew to film his 1959 nomination campaign in Primary, giving him, as is always said in these cases, "unprecedented access". But the only pictures we remember come from Dallas. Gloria Steinem called it "the day the future died". Then, if we think really hard, we remember the funeral. But we can hardly remember anything else. Pictures of Jack campaigning, playing with the kids, receiving Marilyn's birthday greetings, are almost surprising. They're so fresh, as though we'd never seen them before. Kennedy should have died like Elvis, he would have lived longer in the imagination. As it is, he only ever dies and the very publicness of his death seems to have authorised its endless restaging. Has any film ever been more publicly scrutinised, examined, and re-created than the Zapruder film? The incident has littered the culture with such stock phrases as 'lone gunman' and 'grassy knoll'. It's also the birthplace of every crazy conspiracy theory. And everyone from the Warren Commission to Oliver Stone and Jerry Seinfeld has used the phrase "Back, and to the left". It's not surprising that our memory of public events should be bound up with images of those events. Most of us, most of the time, have no other access to them. This knowledge, combined with the pervasiveness of the media system, has led clever marketers of all sorts, to attempt to stage what Daniel Boorstin in 1961 called "pseudo-events". Events which exist for the benefit of the camera, with no real substance of their own. Their purpose is precisely to create an image, a feeling, a mood. Of course, every propagandist of any skill understood these facts long before Boorstin. How many photographs were doctored on Stalin's orders? How often was the mole on Mao's chin repainted? How often was Lenin's face itself repainted with embalming fluid? And didn't Adolf Hitler surround himself with the most exquisite filmmakers, photographers, and image-makers available? You just can't dictate without a firm grasp of your image. And that's the other side of modern times. Increasingly, we all have a firm grasp of image. We are no longer the media dupes which moralists frequently presume. The media have made us all rather sophisticated in the ways of the media. Everyone understands that politicians manage their images and stage events. Everyone knows that advertising is only creatively truthful. No one believes that what happens in a film really happens. We all realise that most of what's seen on TV is spin doctoring. We're hardened. And this is no doubt why the creamy sincerity of the eager tears which now attend public disclosures, the touchy-feely goodness of anyone who can "feel our pain" are so much in demand. No matter how fake, how contrived, how manipulative, they at least look like the real thing. At one time, popular culture merely suggested shock and violence. It did not show them directly. The Kennedy assassination marked the end of that time as people turned away from the screen in horror, asking "Did they have to show us that?" We're now in a time when popular culture suggests nothing and shows everything, in as much detail as possible. This is the moment of Diana's death and we turn to our screens demanding to see more, shouting "We have a right to know!" But a slippage may be happening. We know so much about media operations -- or believe that we do -- that the media may be losing their ability to define events and construct memory. This appears to be one of the lessons of the Diana coverage: the paparazzi in particular, and the media in general, were at fault. Public anger was directed not at her driver, her companions or her lifestyle, but at the media. That the behaviour of the paparazzi remains to be fully elucidated, and that Diana had the weight of accumulated prestige and exposure on her side, make meaningful commentary more difficult, but there is a clear sense in which the public sided with perceived sincerity and genuineness and against perceived exploitation. Clearly, these matters are always open to revision, but the anger directed against the media in this affair spoke of pent-up rage, of long nursed grudges, of a generalised judgment that the media have done more harm than good. Something similar is happening in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. The US media are apparently obsessed with this event and greatly agitated by the necessity of further coverage. Public opinion, however, has indicated just as firmly that it doesn't care and wants the whole thing to go away. There's a split between the definitional power of the media and public opinion, a drifting apart that wasn't supposed to happen. Media commentators of both the left and the right, both those who believe in media effects and those who decry the concentration of ownership, have long agreed on one thing: the media have too much power to tell us what to think. And yet, in this case, it's not happening. Indeed, 10 years from now, what will we remember? That Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky had an affair or that the media were very agitated about it? The way in which media images are linked to popular memory may be changing. We are less concerned with whether the media got the event right than with how they approached it at all. Already, concern over the Gulf War centres as much on the manner of coverage as on the legitimacy of the war's objectives. And the old complaint that the media cover elections as strategic horse races, thereby ignoring substantive issues, presumes the naivety of the audience. Everyone can tell exactly what the media are doing. So what will we remember? How will we feel in 40 years examining old footage of today's newscasts? Memory fades and images are about emotion. Will we experience the diffuse grimness of the WWII veteran watching Saving Private Ryan, identifying less with specific acts than with the general feeling of the moment? Probably. But perhaps we'll also carry with us a second layer of meaning, an equally diffuse recognition that the moment was constructed. I was watching a documentary last night about Hitler's last days. I'm sure everyone's seen it or something like it. The very fact I can be sure of this is the measure of the media's ability to shape popular memory. Hitler, visibly ailing, emerges from his bunker to acknowledge his last line of defence, a string of soldiers who are really only children. He stops as though to speak to one and pats the boy on the cheek. It's a profoundly creepy moment. One feels discomfort and distaste at being so close, one is acutely aware of the distance between the image's intention and the reality of which we have knowledge. Then, suddenly and imperceptibly, the camera shifts angles and follows Hitler down the line of soldiers, a standard travelling shot. It's invisible because that's the way military reviews are always shown. It works because we want a good view. It's compelling because it draws us into the scene. It looks so real and is plainly read that way, as historical actuality footage. But it's also plainly constructed. And that's increasingly what we see nowadays. We see the way in which images intend to connect to emotions. Maybe it's the future of all memory, to be disjointed and creepy. To acknowledge simultaneously the reality of the event and its fakeness. Rather like the performance of Hollywood actors or US presidents or publicly proffered sentiment. Clearly, we won't be dealing with the return of the repressed as we'll remember everything. We'll just have too much memory. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Attallah. "Too Much Memory." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/memory.php>. Chicago style: Paul Attallah, "Too Much Memory," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/memory.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Attallah. (1998) Too much memory. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/memory.php> ([your date of access]).

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Dream, 2008Go to visit a friend with vulvodynia who recently had a baby only to find that she is desolate. I realise the baby–a little boy–died. We go for a walk together. She has lost weight through the ordeal & actually looks on the edge of beauty for the first time. I feel like saying something to this effect–like she had a great loss but gained beauty as a result–but don’t think it would be appreciated. I know I shouldn’t stay too long &, sure enough, when we get back to hers, she indicates she needs for me to go soon. In her grief though, her body begins to spasm uncontrollably, describing the arc of the nineteenth-century hysteric. I start to gently massage her back & it brings her great relief as her body relaxes. I notice as I massage her, that she has beautiful gold and silver studs, flowers, filigree on different parts of her back. It describes a scene of immense beauty. I comment on it.In 2008, I was following a writing path dictated by my vulvodynia, or chronic vulval pain, and was exploring the possibility of my disorder being founded in trauma. The theory did not, in my case, hold up and I had decided to move on when serendipity intervened. Books ordered for different purposes arrived simultaneously and, as I dipped into the texts, I found startling correspondence between them. The books? Neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s lectures on hysteria, translated into English in 1889; psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers’s explication of a biological theory of the neuroses published in 1922; and trauma neurologist Robert C. Scaer’s interpretation, in 2007, of the psychosomatic symptoms of his patients. The research grasped my intellect and imagination and maintained its grip until the ensuing chapter was done with me: my day life, papers and books skewed across tables; my night life, dreams surfeited with suffering and beauty, as I struggled with the possibility of any relationship between the two. Just as Rivers recognised that the shell-shock of World War I was not a physical injury as such but a trigger for and form of hysteria, so too, a few decades earlier, did Charcot insistently equate the railway brain/spine that resulted from railway accidents, with the hysteria of other of his patients, recognising that the precipitating incident constituted trauma that lodged in the body/mind of the victim (Clinical 221). More recently, Scaer notes that the motor vehicle accident (MVA) from which whiplash ensues is usually of insufficient force to logically cause bodily injury and, through this understanding, links whiplash and the railway brain/spine of the nineteenth century (25).In terms of comparative studies, most exciting for a researcher is the detail with which Charcot described patient after patient with hysteria in the Salpêtrière hospital, and elements of correspondence in symptomatology between these and Scaer’s patients, the case histories of which open most chapters of his book, titled appropriately, The Body Bears the Burden.Here are symptoms selected from a case study from each clinician:She subsequently developed headaches, neck pain, panic attacks, and full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder, along with significant cognitive problems [...] As her neck pain worsened and spread to her lower back, shoulders and arms, she noted increasing morning stiffness, and generalized pain and sensitivity to touch. With the development of interrupted, non-restorative sleep and chronic fatigue, she was ultimately diagnosed by a rheumatologist with fibromyalgia (Scaer 107).And:The patient suffers from a permanent headache of a constrictive character [...] All kinds of sound are painful to his ear, and he does his best to avoid them. It is impossible for him to fix his attention to any matter, or to devote himself to anything without speedily experiencing very great fatigue [...] He has insomnia and is frequently tormented by horrible dreams [...] Further, his memory appears to be considerably weakened (Charcot, Clinical 387).In the case of both patients, there was no significant physical injury, though both were left physically, as well as psychically, disabled. In the accidents that precipitated these symptoms, both were placed in positions of terrified helplessness as potential destruction bore down on them. In the case of Scaer’s patient, she froze in the driver’s seat at traffic lights as a large dump truck slowly reversed back on to her car, crushing the bonnet and engine compartment as it moved inexorably toward her. In the case of Charcot’s patient, he was dragging his barrow along the road when a laundryman’s van, pulled at “railway speed” by a careering horse, bore down on him, striking the wheel of his barrow (Clinical 375). It took some hours for the traumatised individuals of each incident to return to their senses.Scaer describes whiplash syndrome as “a diverse constellation of symptoms consisting of pain, neurologic symptoms, cognitive impairment, and emotional complaints” (xvii), and argues that the somatic or bodily expressions of the syndrome “may represent a universal constellation of symptoms attributable to any unresolved life-threatening experience” (143). Thus, as we look back through history, whiplash equals shell-shock equals railway brain equals the “swooning” and “vapours” of the eighteenth century (Shorter Chap. 1). All are precipitated by different causes, but all share the same outcome; diverse, debilitating symptoms affecting the body and mind, which have no reasonable physical explanation and which show no obvious organic cause. Human stress and trauma have always existed.In modern and historic studies of hysteria, much is made of the way in which the symptoms of hysterics have, over the centuries, mimicked “real” organic conditions (e.g. Shorter). Rivers discusses mimesis as a quality of the “gregarious” or herd instinct, noting that the enhanced suggestibility of such a state was utilised in military training. Here, preparation for combat focused on an unthinking obedience to duty and orders, and a loss of individual agency within the group: “The most successful training is one which attains such perfection of this responsiveness that each individual soldier not merely reacts at once to the expressed command of his superior, but is able to divine the nature of a command before it is given and acts as a member of the group immediately and effectively” (211–12). In the animal kingdom, the herd instinct manifests in behaviour that impacts the survival of prey and predator: schools of sardines move as one organism, seeking safety in numbers, while predatory sailfish act in silent concert to push the school into a tighter formation from which they can take orchestrated turns to feed.Unfortunately, the group mimesis created through a passive surrender of the individual ego to the herd, while providing a greater sense of security and chance of survival, also made World War I soldiers more vulnerable to the development of post-traumatic hysteria. At the Salpêtrière, Charcot described in meticulous detail the epileptic-like convulsions of hysteria major (la grande hystérie), which appeared to be an unwitting imitation of the seizures of epileptic inmates with whom hysteria patients were housed. Such convulsions included the infamous arc en circle, or backward-arched bodily semicircle, through which the individual’s body was thrust, up into the air, in an arc of distress only earthed by flexed feet and contorted neck (Veith 231). The suffering articulated in this powerful image stayed with me as I read, and percolated through my dreams.The three texts in which I remained transfixed had issued from different eras and used different language from each other, but all three contained similar and complementary insights. I found further correspondence between Charcot and Scaer in their understanding of the neurophysiology underlying hysteria/trauma. Though he did not have the technology to observe it, Charcot insisted that the symptoms of hysteria were the result of real changes in the nervous system. He distinguished between “organic” causes of disease, and the “functional” or “dynamic” causes of such disorders as hysteria and epilepsy: as he noted of the “hystero-traumatic paraplegia” of a patient, “it depends upon a dynamic lesion affecting the motor and sensory zones of the grey cortex of the brain which in a normal state preside over the functions of that limb” (Clinical 382). He proposed a potentially reversible “dynamic alteration” in the brain of the hysteric (Clinical 223–24). Compare Scaer: “Clinical syndromes previously categorized as ‘nonphysiological,’ ‘psychosomatic,’ or ‘functional’ may be based on demonstrable dynamic neurophysiological changes in the brain” (xx–xxi).Another link between the work of Charcot and Scaer is their insistence on the mind/body as a continuum, rather than separate entities. The perspicacity of the two researcher/clinicians forms bookends to a model separating mind from body that, in the wake of the popularisation and distortion of Freudian theory, characterised the twentieth-century. Said Charcot: “the physician must be a psychologist if he wants to interpret the most refined of cerebral functions, since psychology is nothing else but physiology of a part of the brain” (cited by Goetz 32). Says Scaer: “The distinction between the ‘psychological’ and physical pathological manifestations of traumatic stress, as suggested in the term ‘psychosomatic,’ needs to be discarded” (127). He proposes that, instead, we consider a mind/brain/body continuum which more accurately reflects, “the pathophysiological, neurobiological, endocrinological, and immunological changes induced by trauma” and the bodily manifestations of disease which follow (127).Charcot’s modernity is perhaps most evident in his understanding of equivalence between mind and brain, and his belief in what we now call “neuroplasticity”. Dealing with two patients with hysterical (traumatic) paralysis, Charcot recognised the value of friction, massage, and passive movements of the paralysed limb, not to build muscle strength, but to “revive” the “motor representation” in the brain as a necessary precursor to voluntary movement (Clinical 310). He noted the way in which, through repetition, movement strengthens. The parallel between Charcot’s insight, and recent research and practice which indicates that intense exercise for stroke victims assists the retrieval of motor programmes in the nervous system, in turn facilitating increased strength and movement, is quite astounding (Doidge Chap. 5).Scaer, like Rivers before him, understands the “freeze” or immobility response to threat as a very primitive or arcane level of the survival instinct. When neither fight nor flight will ensure an animal’s survival, it often manifests the freeze response, playing “dead”. After danger has passed, the animal might vibrate and shake, discharging the stored energy, physiologically “effecting” its defence or escape, and becoming fully functional again. Scaer describes this discharge process in animals as being “as imperceptible as a shudder, or as dramatic as a grand mal seizure” (19). The human, being an animal, also instinctually resorts to immobility when that is the reaction that will best ensure survival. As a result of this response, energy that would have been discharged in fighting or fleeing is bound up in the nervous system, along with accompanying terror, rage and helplessness. Unlike other animals that naturally discharge this energy when safe, humans often cognitively override the subtle but essential restorative behaviours that complete the full instinctual response, leaving them in a vicious cycle of fear and immobility and ultimately generating the symptoms of trauma.Scaer writes, “this apparent lack of discharge of autonomic energy after the occurrence of freezing [...] may represent a dangerous suppression of instinctual behavior, resulting in the imprinting of the traumatic experience in unconscious memory and arousal systems of the brain” (21). He proposes a persuasive model of “somatic dissociation” in which the body continues to manifest a threat to survival through impairment of the region of the body that perceived the sensory messages, and disability that reflects the incomplete motor defence (100). He writes of his patients in a chronic pain programme: “We invariably noticed that the patient’s unconscious posture reflected not only the pain, but also the experience of the traumatic event that produced the pain. The asymmetrical postural patterns, held in procedural memory, almost always reflect the body’s attempt to move away from the injury or threat that caused the injury” (84).Scaer’s concept of somatic dissociation, when applied to some of Charcot’s case studies, makes sense of their bodily symptoms. Charcot’s patient P— experiences no life threat, but a shock that involves grief and shame (Clinical 131–39). On a fox-hunting outing, he mistakes his friend’s dog for a fox, accidently shooting it dead. The friend is distraught, and P— consequently deeply distressed. He continues with the hunt, but later, when he raises his fire-arm to shoot a rabbit, collapses with a paralysis of the right side (he is right-handed), and then a loss of consciousness, with consequent confused recollection. Charcot’s lecture focuses on the “word-blindness” P— evidences, apparently associated with post-traumatic memory-deficits, but what is also arresting is the right-sided paralysis which lasts for some days, and the loss of vision on his right side. It is as if the act to shoot again is prevented by a body, shocked by its former action. The body parts affected hold meaning.In the case of the barrow man discussed earlier; although he has no lasting organic damage to his legs, nevertheless, his “feet remain literally fixed to the ground” (Clinical 378) when he is standing, perhaps reproducing the immobility with which he faced the rapidly looming van as it bore down on him. His paralysis speaks of his frozen helplessness, the trauma now locked in his body.In the case of the patient Ler—, aged around sixty, Charcot links her symptoms with a “series of frights” (Lectures 279): at eleven she was terrorised by a mad dog; at sixteen she was horrified by the sight of the corpse of a murdered woman; and, at the same age, she was threatened by robbers in a wood. During her violent hystero-epileptic attacks Ler— “hurls furious invectives against imaginary individuals, crying out, ‘villains! robbers! brigands! fire! fire! O, the dogs! I’m bitten!’” (Lectures 281). Here, the compilation of trauma is articulated through the body and the voice. Given that the extreme early childhood poverty and deprivation of Ler— were typical of hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière (Goetz 193), one might speculate that the hospital population of hysterics was composed of often severely traumatised women.The traumatised person is left with a constellation of symptoms familiar to anyone who has studied the history of hysteria. These comprise, but are not limited to, flashbacks, panic attacks, insomnia, depression, and unprovoked rage. The individual is also affected by physical symptoms that might include blindness or mutism, paralysis, spasms, skin anaesthesia, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel, migraines, or chronic pain. For trauma theorist Peter A. Levine, the key to healing lies in completing the original instinctual response; “trauma is part of a natural physiological process that simply has not been allowed to be completed” (155). The traumatised person stays stuck in or compulsively relives trauma in order to do just that. In 1885, Jean-Martin Charcot lectured at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, including among his case studies the patient he names Deb—. She resides more evocatively in my imagination as “the lady in the carriage”, a title drawn from Charcot’s description of her symptoms, and from the associated photographs which capture static moments of her frenzied and compulsive dance:Now look at this patient [...] In the first phase, rhythmical jerkings of the right arm, like the movements of hammering, occur [...] Then after this period there succeeds a period of tonic spasms, and of contortions of the arm and head, recalling partial epilepsy [...] Finally, measured movements of the head to the right and the left occur; rapid movements defying all interpretation, for I ask you, what do they correspond to in the region of physiological acts? At the same time the patient utters a cry, or rather a kind of plaintive wail, always the same [...] You see by this example that rhythmical chorea may be in certain cases a grave affection [affliction]. Not that it directly menaces life, but that it may persist over a very long period of time, and become a most distressing infirmity [...] The chorea has lasted for more than thirty years [...] The onset occurred at the age of thirty-six. About this time, when out driving in a carriage with her husband, she fell over a precipice with the horse and carriage. After the great fright which she had thus experienced she lost consciousness for three hours. This was followed by a convulsive seizure of hysteria major, by rigidity of the limbs of the right side, and cries like the barking of a dog (Clinical 193–95).I found this case study early in my reading of Charcot, but the lady in the carriage stayed with me as a trope of the relentless embodiment of trauma in its drive to be conclusively expressed, properly acknowledged, and potentially understood. Hence the persistent pain and distress of Scaer’s MVA patients; the patients treated by Rivers, with limbs and vocal-chords frozen in a never-ending moment of self-defence; the dramatic hysterical attacks of the impoverished patients in Charcot’s Salpêtrière; and the rhythmical chorea of the lady in the carriage, her involuntary jerky dance a physical re-enactment of her original trauma, when the carriage in which she was driving went over a precipice. Her helplessness in the event which precipitated her hysteria is a central factor in her continuing distress, her involuntary passivity removing her sense of agency and, like the soldier confined endlessly and powerlessly in the trenches waiting for inevitable terrifying action, rendering her unable to fight or flee.The fact that the lady in the carriage may be stuck in a traumatic incident experienced more than thirty years before attests to the way in which trauma insistently pushes to be resolved. Her re-enactment is literal, but Levine acknowledges the relevance of a “repetition compulsion” (181), expressed originally by Freud as the “compulsion to repeat” (19). This describes the often subtle way in which we continue to involve ourselves in situations that are replays of traumatic themes from childhood—symbolic re-enactments. Levine revitalises the idea however, by focusing on the interrupted instinctual response that calls for physiological resolution: “the drive to complete the freezing response remains active no matter how long it has been in place” (111).The knowledge a traumatised person seeks is, in trauma, literally locked in the body/mind. It rises up through dreams and throws itself aggressively at one in memories that are experienced as a terrifying present. It twists limbs in painful contractures and paralyzes the limb that was lifted in defence. The fear of turning to face this knowledge locks the individual in a recurring cycle of terror and immobility. At its end-point, s/he survives in the pathological limbo of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), avoiding any arousal that might trigger all the physiological and emotional events of the original trauma. The original threat or trauma continues to exist in a perpetual present, with the individual unable to relegate it to the past as a bearable memory.It is possible to interpret such suffering in many ways. One might, for instance, focus on the pathology of an apparent system malfunction, which keeps the body/mind inefficiently glued to an unsolvable past. I choose to emphasise here, however, the creativity and persistence of the human body/mind in its drive to resolve the response to trauma, recover equilibrium and face effectively the recurrent challenges of life. As well as physical symptoms which exact attention, this drive or instinct might include the prompting of dreams and the meaningful coincidences we notice as we open our eyes to them, all of which can lead us down previously unconsidered paths. Does the body/mind only continue to malfunction due to our inability to correctly decipher its language? In relation to trauma, the body/mind bears the burden, but it might also hold the key to recovery.References Charcot, Jean-Martin. Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System. Trans. George Sigerson. London: The New Sydenham Society, 1877.---. Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System: Volume 3. Trans. Thomas Savill. London: The New Sydenham Society, 1889.Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Melbourne: Scribe, 2008.Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 7–64.Goetz, Christopher G, Michel Bonduelle, and Toby Gelfand. Charcot: Constructing Neurology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997.Rivers, W. H. R. Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.Scaer, Robert C. The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease. 2nd ed. New York: Haworth Press, 2007.Shorter, Edward. From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era. New York: Free Press, 1992.Veith, Ilza. Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

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Despite the now-traditional tendency of noir scholarship to call attention to the retrospective and constructed nature of this genre— James Naremore argues that film noir is best regarded as a “mythology”— one feature that has rarely come under question is its association with the city (2). Despite the existence of numerous rural noirs, the depiction of urban space is associated with this genre more consistently than any other element. Even in critical accounts that attempt to deconstruct the solidity of the noir genre, the city is left as an implicit inclusion, and the country, an implict exclusion. Naremore, for example, does not include the urban environment in a list of the central tenets of film noir that he calls into question: “nothing links together all the things described as noir—not the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings” (10). Elizabeth Cowie identifies film noir a “fantasy,” whose “tenuous critical status” has been compensated for “by a tenacity of critical use” (121). As part of Cowie’s project, to revise the assumption that noirs are almost exclusively male-centered, she cites character types, visual style, and narrative tendencies, but never urban spaces, as familiar elements of noir that ought to be reconsidered. If the city is rarely tackled as an unnecessary or part-time element of film noir in discursive studies, it is often the first trait identified by critics in the kind of formative, characteristic-compiling studies that Cowie and Naremore work against.Andrew Dickos opens Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir with a list of noir’s key attributes. The first item is “an urban setting or at least an urban influence” (6). Nicholas Christopher maintains that “the city is the seedbed of film noir. […] However one tries to define or explain noir, the common denominator must always be the city. The two are inseparable” (37). Though the tendencies of noir scholars— both constructive and deconstructive— might lead readers to believe otherwise, rural locations figure prominently in a number of noir films. I will show that the noir genre is, indeed, flexible enough to encompass many films set predominantly or partly in rural locations. Steve Neale, who encourages scholars to work with genre terms familiar to original audiences, would point out that the rural noir is an academic discovery not an industry term, or one with much popular currency (166). Still, this does not lessen the critical usefulness of this subgenre, or its implications for noir scholarship.While structuralist and post-structuralist modes of criticism dominated film genre criticism in the 1970s and 80s, as Thomas Schatz has pointed out, these approaches often sacrifice close attention to film texts, for more abstract, high-stakes observations: “while there is certainly a degree to which virtually every mass-mediated cultural artifact can be examined from [a mythical or ideological] perspective, there appears to be a point at which we tend to lose sight of the initial object of inquiry” (100). Though my reading of these films sidesteps attention to social and political concerns, this article performs the no-less-important task of clarifying the textual features of this sub-genre. To this end, I will survey the tendencies of the rural noir more generally, mentioning more than ten films that fit this subgenre, before narrowing my analysis to a reading of Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948), Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949), They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949) and On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). Robert Mitchum tries to escape his criminal life by settling in a small, mountain-side town in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). A foggy marsh provides a dramatic setting for the Bonnie and Clyde-like demise of lovers on the run in Gun Crazy (Joseph Lewis, 1950). In The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), Sterling Hayden longs to return home after he is forced to abandon his childhood horse farm for a life of organised crime in the city. Rob Ryan plays a cop unable to control his violent impulses in On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). He is re-assigned from New York City to a rural community up-state in hopes that a less chaotic environment will have a curative effect. The apple orchards of Thieves’ Highway are no refuge from networks of criminal corruption. In They Live By Night, a pair of young lovers, try to leave their criminal lives behind, hiding out in farmhouses, cabins, and other pastoral locations in the American South. Finally, the location of prisons explains a number of sequences set in spare, road-side locations such as those in The Killer is Loose (Budd Boetticher, 1956), The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), and Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948). What are some common tendencies of the rural noir? First, they usually feature both rural and urban settings, which allows the portrayal of one to be measured against the other. What we see of the city structures the definition of the country, and vice versa. Second, the lead character moves between these two locations by driving. For criminals, the car is more essential for survival in the country than in the city, so nearly all rural noirs are also road movies. Third, nature often figures as a redemptive force for urbanites steeped in lives of crime. Fourth, the curative quality of the country is usually tied to a love interest in this location: the “nurturing woman” as defined by Janey Place, who encourages the protagonist to forsake his criminal life (60). Fifth, the country is never fully crime-free. In The Killer is Loose, for example, an escaped convict’s first victim is a farmer, whom he clubs before stealing his truck. The convict (Wendell Corey), then, easily slips through a motorcade with the farmer’s identification. Here, the sprawling countryside provides an effective cover for the killer. This farmland is not an innocent locale, but the criminal’s safety-net. In films where a well-intentioned lead attempts to put his criminal life behind him by moving to a remote location, urban associates have little trouble tracking him down. While the country often appears, to protagonists like Jeff in Out of the Past or Bowie in They Live By Night, as an ideal place to escape from crime, as these films unfold, violence reaches the countryside. If these are similar points, what are some differences among rural noirs? First, there are many differences by degree among the common elements listed above. For instance, some rural noirs present their location with unabashed romanticism, while others critique the idealisation of these locations; some “nurturing women” are complicit with criminal activity, while others are entirely innocent. Second, while noir films are commonly known for treating similar urban locations, Los Angeles in particular, these films feature a wide variety of locations: Out of the Past and Thieves’ Highway take place in California, the most common setting for rural noirs, but On Dangerous Ground is set in northern New England, They Live by Night takes place in the Depression-era South, Moonrise in Southern swampland, and the most dynamic scene of The Asphalt Jungle is in rural Kentucky. Third, these films also vary considerably in the balance of settings. If the three typical locations of the rural noir are the country, the city, and the road, the distribution of these three locations varies widely across these films. The location of The Asphalt Jungle matches the title until its dramatic conclusion. The Hitch-hiker, arguably a rural noir, is set in travelling cars, with just brief stops in the barren landscape outside. Two of the films I analyse, They Live By Night and Moonrise are set entirely in the country; a remarkable exception to the majority of films in this subgenre. There are only two other critical essays on the rural noir. In “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir,” Jonathan F. Bell contextualises the rural noir in terms of post-war transformations of the American landscape. He argues that these films express a forlorn faith in the agrarian myth while the U.S. was becoming increasingly developed and suburbanised. That is to say, the rural noir simultaneously reflects anxiety over the loss of rural land, but also the stubborn belief that the countryside will always exist, if the urbanite needs it as a refuge. Garry Morris suggests the following equation as the shortest way to state the thematic interest of this genre: “Noir = industrialisation + (thwarted) spirituality.” He attributes much of the malaise of noir protagonists to the inhospitable urban environment, “far from [society’s] pastoral and romantic and spiritual origins.” Where Bell focuses on nine films— Detour (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Out of the Past (1947), Key Largo (1948), Gun Crazy (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Split Second (1953), and Killer’s Kiss (1955)— Morris’s much shorter article includes just The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Gun Crazy. Of the four films I discuss, only On Dangerous Ground has previously been treated as part of this subgenre, though it has never been discussed alongside Nicholas Ray’s other rural noir. To further the development of the project that these authors have started— the formation of a rural noir corpus— I propose the inclusion of three additional films in this subgenre: Moonrise (1948), They Live by Night (1949), and Thieves’ Highway (1949). With both On Dangerous Ground and They Live by Night to his credit, Nicholas Ray has the distinction of being the most prolific director of rural noirs. In They Live by Night, two young lovers, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), attempt to escape from their established criminal lives. Twenty-three year old Bowie has just been released from juvenile prison and finds rural Texas refreshing: “Out here, the air smells different,” he says. He meets Keechie through her father, a small time criminal organiser who would be happy to keep her secluded for life. When one of Bowie’s accomplices, Chicamaw (Howard DaSilva), shoots a policeman after a robbing a bank with Bowie, the young couple is forced to run. Foster Hirsch calls They Live by Night “a genre rarity, a sentimental noir” (34). The naïve blissfulness of their affection is associated with the primitive settings they navigate. Though Bowie and Keechie are the most sympathetic protagonists of any rural noir, this is no safeguard against an inevitable, characteristically noir demise. Janey Place writes, “the young lovers are doomed, but the possibility of their love transcends and redeems them both, and its failure criticises the urbanised world that will not let them live” (63). As indicated here, the country offers the young lovers refuge for some time, and their bond is depicted as wonderfully strong, but it is doomed by the stronger force of the law.Raymond Williams discusses how different characteristics are associated with urban and rural spaces:On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. (1) They Live By Night breaks down these dichotomies, showing the persistence of crime rooted in rural areas.Bowie desires to “get squared around” and live a more natural life with Keechie. Williams’ country adjectives— “peace, innocence, and simple virtue”— describe the nature of this relationship perfectly. Yet, criminal activity, usually associated with the city, has an overwhelmingly strong presence in this region and their lives. Bowie, following the doomed logic of many a crime film character, plans to launch a new, more honest life with cash raised in a heist. Keechie recognises the contradictions in this plan: “Fine way to get squared around, teaming with them. Stealing money and robbing banks. You’ll get in so deep trying to get squared, they’ll have enough to keep you in for two life times.” For Bowie, crime and the pursuit of love are inseparably bound, refuting the illusion of the pure and innocent countryside personified by characters like Mary Malden in On Dangerous Ground and Ann Miller in Out of the Past.In Ray’s other rural noir, On Dangerous Ground, a lonely, angry, and otherwise burned out cop, Wilson (Rob Ryan), finds both love and peace in his time away from the city. While on his up-state assignment, Wilson meets Mary Walden (Ida Lupino), a blind woman who lives a secluded life miles away from this already desolate, rural community. Mary has a calming influence on Wilson, and fits well within Janey Place’s notion of the archetypal nurturing woman in film noir: “The redemptive woman often represents or is part of a primal connection with nature and/or with the past, which are safe, static states rather than active, exciting ones, but she can sometimes offer the only transcendence possible in film noir” (63).If, as Colin McArthur observes, Ray’s characters frequently seek redemption in rural locales— “[protagonists] may reject progress and modernity; they may choose to go or are sent into primitive areas. […] The journeys which bring them closer to nature may also offer them hope of salvation” (124) — the conclusions of On Dangerous Ground versus They Live By Night offer two markedly different resolutions to this narrative. Where Bowie and Keechie’s life on the lam cannot be sustained, On Dangerous Ground, against the wishes of its director, portrays a much more romanticised version of pastoral life. According to Andrew Dickos, “Ray wanted to end the film on the ambivalent image of Jim Wilson returning to the bleak city,” after he had restored order up-state (132). The actual ending is more sentimental. Jim rushes back north to be with Mary. They passionately kiss in close-up, cueing an exuberant orchestral score as The End appears over a slow tracking shot of the majestic, snow covered landscape. In this way, On Dangerous Ground overturns the usual temporal associations of rural versus urban spaces. As Raymond Williams identifies, “The common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future” (297). For Wilson, by contrast, city life was no longer sustainable and rurality offers his best means for a future. Leo Marx noted in a variety of American pop culture, from Mark Twain to TV westerns and magazine advertising, a “yearning for a simpler, more harmonious style of life, and existence ‘closer to nature,’ that is the psychic root of all pastoralism— genuine and spurious” (Marx 6). Where most rural noirs expose the agrarian myth as a fantasy and a sham, On Dangerous Ground, exceptionally, perpetuates it as actual and effectual. Here, a bad cop is made good with a few days spent in a sparsely populated area and with a woman shaped by her rural upbringing.As opposed to On Dangerous Ground, where the protagonist’s movement from city to country matches his split identity as a formerly corrupt man wishing to be pure, Frank Borzage’s B-film Moonrise (1948) is located entirely in rural or small-town locations. Set in the fictional Southern town of Woodville, which spans swamps, lushly wooded streets and aging Antebellum mansions, the lead character finds good and bad within the same rural location and himself. Dan (Dane Clark) struggles to escape his legacy as the son of a murderer. This conflict is irreparably heightened when Dan kills a man (who had repeatedly teased and bullied him) in self-defence. The instability of Dan’s moral compass is expressed in the way he treats innocent elements of the natural world: flies, dogs, and, recalling Out of the Past, a local deaf boy. He is alternately cruel and kind. Dan is finally redeemed after seeking the advice of a black hermit, Mose (Rex Ingram), who lives in a ramshackle cabin by the swamp. He counsels Dan with the advice that men turn evil from “being lonesome,” not for having “bad blood.” When Dan, eventually, decides to confess to his crime, the sheriff finds him tenderly holding a search hound against a bucolic, rural backdrop. His complete comfortability with the landscape and its creatures finally allows Dan to reconcile the film’s opening opposition. He is no longer torturously in between good and evil, but openly recognises his wrongs and commits to do good in the future. If I had to select just a single shot to illustrate that noirs are set in rural locations more often than most scholarship would have us believe, it would be the opening sequence of Moonrise. From the first shot, this film associates rural locations with criminal elements. The credit sequence juxtaposes pooling water with an ominous brass score. In this disorienting opening, the camera travels from an image of water, to a group of men framed from the knees down. The camera dollies out and pans left, showing that these men, trudging solemnly, are another’s legal executioners. The frame tilts upward and we see a man hung in silhouette. This dense shot is followed by an image of a baby in a crib, also shadowed, the water again, and finally the execution scene. If this sequence is a thematic montage, it can also be discussed, more simply, as a series of establishing shots: a series of images that, seemingly, could not be more opposed— a baby, a universal symbol of innocence, set against the ominous execution, cruel experience— are paired together by virtue of their common location. The montage continues, showing that the baby is the son of the condemned man. As Dan struggles with the legacy of his father throughout the film, this opening shot continues to inform our reading of this character, split between the potential for good or evil.What a baby is to Moonrise, or, to cite a more familiar reference, what the insurance business is to many a James M. Cain roman noir, produce distribution is to Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949). The apple, often a part of wholesome American myths, is at the centre of this story about corruption. Here, a distribution network that brings Americans this hearty, simple product is connected with criminal activity and violent abuses of power more commonly portrayed in connection with cinematic staples of organised crime such as bootlegging or robbery. This film portrays bad apples in the apple business, showing that no profit driven enterprise— no matter how traditional or rural— is beyond the reach of corruption.Fitting the nature of this subject, numerous scenes in the Dassin film take place in the daylight (in addition to darkness), and in the countryside (in addition to the city) as we move between wine and apple country to the market districts of San Francisco. But if the subject and setting of Thieves’ Highway are unusual for a noir, the behaviour of its characters is not. Spare, bright country landscapes form the backdrop for prototypical noir behaviour: predatory competition for money and power.As one would expect of a film noir, the subject of apple distribution is portrayed with dynamic violence. In the most exciting scene of the film, a truck careens off the road after a long pursuit from rival sellers. Apples scatter across a hillside as the truck bursts into flames. This scene is held in a long-shot, as unscrupulous thugs gather the produce for sale while the unfortunate driver burns to death. Here, the reputedly innocent American apple is subject to cold-blooded, profit-maximizing calculations as much as the more typical topics of noir such as blackmail, fraud, or murder. Passages on desolate roads and at apple orchards qualify Thieves’ Highway as a rural noir; the dark, cynical manner in which capitalist enterprise is treated is resonant with nearly all film noirs. Thieves’ Highway follows a common narrative pattern amongst rural noirs to gradually reveal rural spaces as connected to criminality in urban locations. Typically, this disillusioning fact is narrated from the perspective of a lead character who first has a greater sense of safety in rural settings but learns, over the course of the story, to be more wary in all locations. In Thieves’, Nick’s hope that apple-delivery might earn an honest dollar (he is the only driver to treat the orchard owners fairly) gradually gives way to an awareness of the inevitable corruption that has taken over this enterprise at all levels of production, from farmer, to trucker, to wholesaler, and thus, at all locations, the country, the road, and the city.Between this essay, and the previous work of Morris and Bell on the subject, we are developing a more complete survey of the rural noir. Where Bell’s and Morris’s essays focus more resolutely on rural noirs that relied on the contrast of the city versus the country— which, significantly, was the first tendency of this subgenre that I observed— Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate that this genre can work entirely apart from the city. From start to finish, these films take place in small towns and rural locations. As opposed to Out of the Past, On Dangerous Ground, or The Asphalt Jungle, characters are never pulled back to, nor flee from, an urban life of crime. Instead, vices that are commonly associated with the city have a free-standing life in the rural locations that are often thought of as a refuge from these harsh elements. If both Bell and Morris study the way that rural noirs draw differences between the city and country, two of the three films I add to the subgenre constitute more complete rural noirs, films that work wholly outside urban locations, not just in contrast with it. Bell, like me, notes considerable variety in rural noirs locations, “desert landscapes, farms, mountains, and forests all qualify as settings for consideration,” but he also notes that “Diverse as these landscapes are, this set of films uses them in surprisingly like-minded fashion to achieve a counterpoint to the ubiquitous noir city” (219). In Bell’s analysis, all nine films he studies, feature significant urban segments. He is, in fact, so inclusive as to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss as a rural noir even though it does not contain a single frame shot or set outside of New York City. Rurality is evoked only as a possibility, as alienated urbanite Davy (Jamie Smith) receives letters from his horse-farm-running relatives. Reading these letters offers Davy brief moments of respite from drudgerous city spaces such as the subway and his cramped apartment. In its emphasis on the centrality of rural locations, my project is more similar to David Bell’s work on the rural in horror films than to Jonathan F. Bell’s work on the rural noir. David Bell analyses the way that contemporary horror films work against a “long tradition” of the “idyllic rural” in many Western texts (95). As opposed to works “from Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman to contemporary television shows like Northern Exposure and films such as A River Runs Through It or Grand Canyon” in which the rural is positioned as “a restorative to urban anomie,” David Bell analyses films such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that depict “a series of anti-idyllic visions of the rural” (95). Moonrise and They Live By Night, like these horror films, portray the crime and the country as coexistent spheres at the same time that the majority of other popular culture, including noirs like Killer’s Kiss or On Dangerous Ground, portray them as mutually exclusive.To use a mode of generic analysis developed by Rick Altman, the rural noir, while preserving the dominant syntax of other noirs, presents a remarkably different semantic element (31). Consider the following description of the genre, from the introduction to Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide: “The darkness that fills the mirror of the past, which lurks in a dark corner or obscures a dark passage out of the oppressively dark city, is not merely the key adjective of so many film noir titles but the obvious metaphor for the condition of the protagonist’s mind” (Silver and Ward, 4). In this instance, the narrative elements, or syntax, of film noir outlined by Silver and Ward do not require revision, but the urban location, a semantic element, does. Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate the sustainability of the aforementioned syntactic elements— the dark, psychological experience of the leads and their inescapable criminal past— apart from the familiar semantic element of the city.The rural noir must also cause us to reconsider— beyond rural representations or film noir— more generally pitched genre theories. Consider the importance of place to film genre, the majority of which are defined by a typical setting: for melodramas, it is the family home, for Westerns, the American west, and for musicals, the stage. Thomas Schatz separates American genres according to their setting, between genres which deal with “determinate” versus “indeterminate” space:There is a vital distinction between kinds of generic settings and conflicts. Certain genres […] have conflicts that, indigenous to the environment, reflect the physical and ideological struggle for its control. […] Other genres have conflicts that are not indigenous to the locale but are the results of the conflict between the values, attitudes, and actions of its principal characters and the ‘civilised’ setting they inhabit. (26) Schatz discusses noirs, along with detective films, as films which trade in “determinate” settings, limited to the space of the city. The rural noir slips between Schatz’s dichotomy, moving past the space of the city, but not into the civilised, tame settings of the genres of “indeterminate spaces.” It is only fitting that a genre whose very definition lies in its disruption of Hollywood norms— trading high- for low-key lighting, effectual male protagonists for helpless ones, and a confident, coherent worldview for a more paranoid, unstable one would, finally, be able to accommodate a variation— the rural noir— that would seem to upset one of its central tenets, an urban locale. Considering the long list of Hollywood standards that film noirs violated, according to two of its original explicators, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton— “a logical action, an evident distinction between good and evil, well-defined characters with clear motives, scenes that are more spectacular than brutal, a heroine who is exquisitely feminine and a hero who is honest”— it should, perhaps, not be so surprising that the genre is flexible enough to accommodate the existence of the rural noir after all (14). AcknowledgmentsIn addition to M/C Journal's anonymous readers, the author would like to thank Corey Creekmur, Mike Slowik, Barbara Steinson, and Andrew Gorman-Murray for their helpful suggestions. ReferencesAltman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 27-41.The Asphalt Jungle. Dir. John Huston. MGM/UA, 1950.Bell, David. “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror.” Contested Countryside Cultures. Eds. Paul Cloke and Jo Little. London, Routledge, 1997. 94-108.Bell, Jonathan F. “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir.” Architecture and Film. Ed. Mark Lamster. New York: Princeton Architectural P, 2000. 217-230.Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002.Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women.” Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993. 121-166.Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002.Hirsch, Foster. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999.Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.McArthur, Colin. Underworld U.S.A. London: BFI, 1972.Moonrise. Dir. Frank Borzage. Republic, 1948.Morris, Gary. “Noir Country: Alien Nation.” Bright Lights Film Journal Nov. 2006. 13. Jun. 2008 http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/54/noircountry.htm Muller, Eddie. Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998.Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley, C.A.: U of California P, 2008.Neale, Steve. “Questions of Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 160-184.On Dangerous Ground. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1951.Out of the Past. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1947.Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI, 1999. 47-68.Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres. New York: Random House, 1981.Schatz, Thomas. “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 92-102.Silver, Alain and Elizabeth Ward. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. London: Bloomsbury, 1980.They Live by Night. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1949.Thieves’ Highway. Dir. Jules Dassin. Fox, 1949.Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

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Abstract:

IntroductionCirque du Soleil, the largest live entertainment company in the world, has eight standing shows in Las Vegas alone, KÀ, Love, Mystère, Zumanity, Believe, Michael Jackson ONE, Zarkana and O. Close to 150 million spectators have seen Cirque du Soleil shows since the company’s beginnings in 1984 and it is estimated that over 15 million spectators will see a Cirque du Soleil show in 2014 (Cirque du Soleil). The Cirque du Soleil concept of circus as a form of theatre, with simple, often archetypal, narrative arcs conveyed without words, virtuoso physicality with the circus artists presented as characters in a fictional world, cutting-edge lighting and visuals, extraordinary innovative staging, and the uptake of new technology for special effects can all be linked back to an early form of circus which is sometimes termed illegitimate circus. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, in the age of Romanticism, only two theatres in London, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, plus the summer theatre in the Haymarket, had royal patents allowing them to produce plays or text-based productions, and these were considered legitimate theatres. (These theatres retained this monopoly until the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843; Saxon 301.) Other circuses and theatres such as Astley’s Amphitheatre, which were precluded from performing text-based works by the terms of their licenses, have been termed illegitimate (Moody 1). Perversely, the effect of licensing venues in this way, instead of having the desired effect of enshrining some particular forms of expression and “casting all others beyond the cultural pale,” served instead to help to cultivate a different kind of theatrical landscape, “a theatrical terrain with a new, rich and varied dramatic ecology” (Reed 255). A fundamental change to the theatrical culture of London took place, and pivotal to “that transformation was the emergence of an illegitimate theatrical culture” (Moody 1) with circus at its heart. An innovative and different form of performance, a theatre of the body, featuring spectacle and athleticism emerged, with “a sensuous, spectacular aesthetic largely wordless except for the lyrics of songs” (Bratton 117).This writing sets out to explore some of the strong parallels between the aesthetic that emerged in this early illegitimate circus and the aesthetic of the Montreal-based, multi-billion dollar entertainment empire of Cirque du Soleil. Although it is not fighting against legal restrictions and can in no way be considered illegitimate, the circus of Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the descendant of the early circus entrepreneurs and their illegitimate aesthetic which arose out of the desire to find ways to continue to attract audiences to their shows in spite of the restrictions of the licenses granted to them. BackgroundCircus has served as an inspiration for many innovatory theatre productions including Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) and Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers (1972) as well as the earlier experiments of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Mayakovsky and other Soviet directors of the 1920’s (Saxon 299). A. H. Saxon points out, however, that the relationship between circus and theatre is a long-standing one that begins in the late 18th century and the early 19th century, when circus itself was theatre (Saxon 299).Modern circus was founded in London in 1768 by an ex-cavalryman and his wife, Philip and Patty Astley, and consisted of spectacular stunt horse riding taking place in a ring, with acts from traditional fairs such as juggling, acrobatics, clowning and wire-walking inserted to cover the changeovers between riding acts. From the very first shows entry was by paid ticket only and the early history of circus was driven by innovative, risk-taking entrepreneurs such as Philip Astley, who indeed built so many new amphitheatres for his productions that he became known as Amphi-Philip (Jando). After years of legal tussles with the authorities concerning the legal status of this new entertainment, a limited license was finally granted in 1783 for Astley’s Amphitheatre. This license precluded the performing of plays, anything text-based, or anything which had a script that resembled a play. Instead the annual license granted allowed only for “public dancing and music” and “other public entertainments of like kind” (St. Leon 9).Corporeal Dramaturgy and TextIn the face of the ban on scripted text, illegitimate circus turned to the human body and privileged it as a means of dramatic expression. A resultant dramaturgy focusing on the expressive capabilities of the performers’ bodies emerged. “The primacy of rhetoric and the spoken word in legitimate drama gave way […] to a corporeal dramaturgy which privileged the galvanic, affective capacity of the human body as a vehicle of dramatic expression” (Moody 83). Moody proposes that the “iconography of illegitimacy participated in a broader cultural and scientific transformation in which the human body began to be understood as an eloquent compendium of visible signs” (83). Even though the company has the use of text and dramatic dialogue freely available to it, Cirque du Soleil, shares this investment in the bodies of the performers and their “galvanic, affective capacity” (83) to communicate with the audience directly without the use of a scripted text, and this remains a constant between the two forms of circus. Robert Lepage, the director of two Cirque du Soleil shows, KÀ (2004) and more recently Totem (2010), speaking about KÀ in 2004, said, “We wanted it to be an epic story told not with the use of words, but with the universal language of body movement” (Lepage cited in Fink).In accordance with David Graver’s system of classifying performers’ bodies, Cirque du Soleil’s productions most usually present performers’ ‘character bodies’ in which the performers are understood by spectators to be playing fictional roles or characters (Hurley n/p) and this was also the case with illegitimate circus which right from its very beginnings presented its performers within narratives in which the performers are understood to be playing characters. In Cirque du Soleil’s shows, as with illegitimate circus, this presentation of the performers’ character bodies is interspersed with acts “that emphasize the extraordinary training and physical skill of the performers, that is which draw attention to the ‘performer body’ but always within the context of an overall narrative” (Fricker n.p.).Insertion of Vital TextAfter audience feedback, text was eventually added into KÀ (2004) in the form of a pre-recorded prologue inserted to enable people to follow the narrative arc, and in the show Wintuk (2007) there are tales that are sung by Jim Comcoran (Leroux 126). Interestingly early illegitimate circus creators, in their efforts to circumvent the ban on using dramatic dialogue, often inserted text into their performances in similar ways to the methods Cirque du Soleil chose for KÀ and Wintuk. Illegitimate circus included dramatic recitatives accompanied by music to facilitate the following of the storyline (Moody 28) in the same way that Cirque du Soleil inserted a pre-recorded prologue to KÀ to enable audience members to understand the narrative. Performers in illegitimate circus often conveyed essential information to the audience as lyrics of songs (Bratton 117) in the same way that Jim Comcoran does in Wintuk. Dramaturgical StructuresAstley from his very first circus show in 1768 began to set his equestrian stunts within a narrative. Billy Button’s Ride to Brentford (1768), showed a tailor, a novice rider, mounting backwards, losing his belongings and being thrown off the horse when it bucks. The act ends with the tailor being chased around the ring by his horse (Schlicke 161). Early circus innovators, searching for dramaturgy for their shows drew on contemporary warfare, creating vivid physical enactments of contemporary battles. They also created a new dramatic form known as Hippodramas (literally ‘horse dramas’ from hippos the Attic Greek for Horse), a hybridization of melodrama and circus featuring the trick riding skills of the early circus pioneers. The narrative arcs chosen were often archetypal or sourced from well-known contemporary books or poems. As Moody writes, at the heart of many of these shows “lay an archetypal narrative of the villainous usurper finally defeated” (Moody 30).One of the first hippodramas, The Blood Red Knight, opened at Astley’s Amphitheatre in 1810.Presented in dumbshow, and interspersed with grand chivalric processions, the show featured Alphonso’s rescue of his wife Isabella from her imprisonment and forced marriage to the evil knight Sir Rowland and concluded with the spectacular, fiery destruction of the castle and Sir Rowland’s death. (Moody 69)Another later hippodrama, The Spectre Monarch and his Phantom Steed, or the Genii Horseman of the Air (1830) was set in China where the rightful prince was ousted by a Tartar usurper who entered into a pact with the Spectre Monarch and received,a magic ring, by aid of which his unlawful desires were instantly gratified. Virtue, predictably won out in the end, and the discomforted villain, in a final settling of accounts with his dread master was borne off through the air in a car of fire pursued by Daemon Horsem*n above THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA. (Saxon 303)Karen Fricker writes of early Cirque du Soleil shows that “while plot is doubtless too strong a word, each of Cirque’s recent shows has a distinct concept or theme, that is urbanity for Saltimbanco; nomadism in Varekai (2002) and humanity’s clownish spirit for Corteo (2005), and tend to follow the same very basic storyline, which is not narrated in words but suggested by the staging that connects the individual acts” (Fricker n/p). Leroux describes the early Cirque du Soleil shows as following a “proverbial and well-worn ‘collective transformation trope’” (Leroux 122) whilst Peta Tait points out that the narrative arc of Cirque du Soleil “ might be summarized as an innocent protagonist, often female, helped by an older identity, seemingly male, to face a challenging journey or search for identity; more generally, old versus young” (Tait 128). However Leroux discerns an increasing interest in narrative devices such as action and plot in Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas productions (Leroux 122). Fricker points out that “with KÀ, what Cirque sought – and indeed found in Lepage’s staging – was to push this storytelling tendency further into full-fledged plot and character” (Fricker n/p). Telling a story without words, apart from the inserted prologue, means that the narrative arc of Kà is, however, very simple. A young prince and princess, twins in a mythical Far Eastern kingdom, are separated when a ceremonial occasion is interrupted by an attack by a tribe of enemy warriors. A variety of adventures follow, most involving perilous escapes from bad guys with flaming arrows and fierce-looking body tattoos. After many trials, a happy reunion arrives. (Isherwood)This increasing emphasis on developing a plot and a narrative arc positions Cirque as moving closer in dramaturgical aesthetic to illegitimate circus.Visual TechnologiesTo increase the visual excitement of its shows and compensate for the absence of spoken dialogue, illegitimate circus in the late 18th and early 19th century drew on contemporaneous and emerging visual technologies. Some of the new visual technologies that Astley’s used have been termed pre-cinematic, including the panorama (or diorama as it is sometimes called) and “the phantasmagoria and other visual machines… [which] expanded the means through which an audience could be addressed” (O’Quinn, Governance 312). The panorama or diorama ran in the same way that a film runs in an analogue camera, rolling between vertical rollers on either side of the stage. In Astley’s production The Siege and Storming of Seringapatam (1800) he used another effect almost equivalent to a modern day camera zoom-in by showing scenic back drops which, as they moved through time, progressively moved geographically closer to the battle. This meant that “the increasing enlargement of scale-each successive scene has a smaller geographic space-has a telescopic event. Although the size of the performance space remains constant, the spatial parameters of the spectacle become increasingly magnified” (O’Quinn, Governance 345). In KÀ, Robert Lepage experiments with “cinematographic stage storytelling on a very grand scale” (Fricker n.p.). A KÀ press release (2005) from Cirque du Soleil describes the show “as a cinematic journey of aerial adventure” (Cirque du Soleil). Cirque du Soleil worked with ground-breaking visual technologies in KÀ, developing an interactive projected set. This involves the performers controlling what happens to the projected environment in real time, with the projected scenery responding to their movements. The performers’ movements are tracked by an infra-red sensitive camera above the stage, and by computer software written by Interactive Production Designer Olger Förterer. “In essence, what we have is an intelligent set,” says Förterer. “And everything the audience sees is created by the computer” (Cirque du Soleil).Contemporary Technology Cutting edge technologies, many of which came directly from contemporaneous warfare, were introduced into the illegitimate circus performance space by Astley and his competitors. These included explosions using redfire, a new military explosive that combined “strontia, shellac and chlorate of potash, [which] produced […] spectacular flame effects” (Moody 28). Redfire was used for ‘blow-ups,’ the spectacular explosions often occurring at the end of the performance when the villain’s castle or hideout was destroyed. Cirque du Soleil is also drawing on contemporary military technology for performance projects. Sparked: A Live interaction between Humans and Quadcopters (2014) is a recent short film released by Cirque du Soleil, which features the theatrical use of drones. The new collaboration between Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich and Verity Studios uses 10 quadcopters disguised as animated lampshades which take to the air, “carrying out the kinds of complex synchronized dance manoeuvres we usually see from the circus' famed acrobats” (Huffington Post). This shows, as with early illegitimate circus, the quick theatrical uptake of contemporary technology originally developed for use in warfare.Innovative StagingArrighi writes that the performance space that Astley developed was a “completely new theatrical configuration that had not been seen in Western culture before… [and] included a circular ring (primarily for equestrian performance) and a raised theatre stage (for pantomime and burletta)” (177) joined together by ramps that were large enough and strong enough to allow horses to be ridden over them during performances. The stage at Astley’s Amphitheatre was said to be the largest in Europe measuring over 130 feet across. A proscenium arch was installed in 1818 which could be adjusted in full view of the audience with the stage opening changing anywhere in size from forty to sixty feet (Saxon 300). The staging evolved so that it had the capacity to be multi-level, involving “immense [moveable] platforms or floors, rising above each other, and extending the whole width of the stage” (Meisel 214). The ability to transform the stage by the use of draped and masked platforms which could be moved mechanically, proved central to the creation of the “new hybrid genre of swashbuckling melodramas on horseback, or ‘hippodramas’” (Kwint, Leisure 46). Foot soldiers and mounted cavalry would fight their way across the elaborate sets and the production would culminate with a big finale that usually featured a burning castle (Kwint, Legitimization 95). Cirque du Soleil’s investment in high-tech staging can be clearly seen in KÀ. Mark Swed writes that KÀ is, “the most lavish production in the history of Western theatre. It is surely the most technologically advanced” (Swed). With a production budget of $165 million (Swed), theatre designer Michael Fisher has replaced the conventional stage floor with two huge moveable performance platforms and five smaller platforms that appear to float above a gigantic pit descending 51 feet below floor level. One of the larger platforms is a tatami floor that moves backwards and forwards, the other platform is described by the New York Times as being the most thrilling performer in the show.The most consistently thrilling performer, perhaps appropriately, isn't even human: It's the giant slab of machinery that serves as one of the two stages designed by Mark Fisher. Here Mr. Lepage's ability to use a single emblem or image for a variety of dramatic purposes is magnified to epic proportions. Rising and falling with amazing speed and ease, spinning and tilting to a full vertical position, this huge, hydraulically powered game board is a sandy beach in one segment, a sheer cliff wall in another and a battleground, viewed from above, for the evening's exuberantly cinematic climax. (Isherwood)In the climax a vertical battle is fought by aerialists fighting up and down the surface of the sand stone cliff with defeated fighters portrayed as tumbling down the surface of the cliff into the depths of the pit below. Cirque du Soleil’s production entitled O, which phonetically is the French word eau meaning water, is a collaboration with director Franco Dragone that has been running at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel since 1998. O has grossed over a billion dollars since it opened in 1998 (Sylt and Reid). It is an aquatic circus or an aquadrama. In 1804, Charles Dibdin, one of Astley’s rivals, taking advantage of the nearby New River, “added to the accoutrements of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre a tank three feet deep, ninety feet long and as wide as twenty-four feet which could be filled with water from the New River” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 171) Sadler’s Wells presented aquadramas depicting many reconstructions of famous naval battles. One of the first of these was The Siege of Gibraltar (1804) that used “117 ships designed by the Woolwich Dockyard shipwrights and capable of firing their guns” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 5). To represent the drowning Spanish sailors saved by the British, “Dibdin used children, ‘who were seen swimming and affecting to struggle with the waves’”(5).O (1998) is the first Cirque production to be performed in a proscenium arch theatre, with the pool installed behind the proscenium arch. “To light the water in the pool, a majority of the front lighting comes from a subterranean light tunnel (at the same level as the pool) which has eleven 4" thick Plexiglas windows that open along the downstage perimeter of the pool” (Lampert-Greaux). Accompanied by a live orchestra, performers dive into the 53 x 90 foot pool from on high, they swim underwater lit by lights installed in the subterranean light tunnel and they also perform on perforated platforms that rise up out of the water and turn the pool into a solid stage floor. In many respects, Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the inheritors of the spectacular illegitimate circus of the 18th and 19th Century. The inheritance can be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s entrepreneurial daring, the corporeal dramaturgy privileging the affective power of the body over the use of words, in the performers presented primarily as character bodies, and in the delivering of essential text either as a prologue or as lyrics to songs. It can also be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s innovative staging design, the uptake of military based technology and the experimentation with cutting edge visual effects. Although re-invigorating the tradition and creating spectacular shows that in many respects are entirely of the moment, Cirque du Soleil’s aesthetic roots can be clearly seen to draw deeply on the inheritance of illegitimate circus.ReferencesBratton, Jacky. “Romantic Melodrama.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730-1830. Eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O'Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007. 115-27. Bratton, Jacky. “What Is a Play? Drama and the Victorian Circus in the Performing Century.” Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History. Eds. Tracey C. Davis and Peter Holland. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 250-62.Cavendish, Richard. “Death of Madame Tussaud.” History Today 50.4 (2000). 15 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/death-madame-tussaud›.Cirque du Soleil. 2014. 10 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/home/about-us/at-a-glance.aspx›.Davis, Janet M. The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Hays, Michael, and Anastasia Nikolopoulou. Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.House of Dancing Water. 2014. 17 Aug. 2014 ‹http://thehouseofdancingwater.com/en/›.Isherwood, Charles. “Fire, Acrobatics and Most of All Hydraulics.” New York Times 5 Feb. 2005. 12 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/theater/reviews/05cirq.html?_r=0›.Fink, Jerry. “Cirque du Soleil Spares No Cost with Kà.” Las Vegas Sun 2004. 17 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2004/sep/16/cirque-du-soleil-spares-no-cost-with-ka/›.Fricker, Karen. “Le Goût du Risque: Kà de Robert Lepage et du Cirque du Soleil.” (“Risky Business: Robert Lepage and the Cirque du Soleil’s Kà.”) L’Annuaire théâtral 45 (2010) 45-68. Trans. Isabelle Savoie. (Original English Version not paginated.)Hurley, Erin. "Les Corps Multiples du Cirque du Soleil." Globe: Revue Internationale d’Études Quebecoise. Les Arts de la Scene au Quebec, 11.2 (2008). (Original English n.p.)Jacob, Pascal. The Circus Artist Today: Analysis of the Key Competences. Brussels: FEDEC: European Federation of Professional Circus Schools, 2008. 5 June 2010 ‹http://sideshow-circusmagazine.com/research/downloads/circus-artist-today-analysis-key-competencies›.Jando, Dominique. “Philip Astley, Circus Owner, Equestrian.” Circopedia. 15 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.circopedia.org/Philip_Astley›.Kwint, Marius. “The Legitimization of Circus in Late Georgian England.” Past and Present 174 (2002): 72-115.---. “The Circus and Nature in Late Georgian England.” Histories of Leisure. Ed. Rudy Koshar. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002. 45-60. ---. “The Theatre of War.” History Today 53.6 (2003). 28 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.historytoday.com/marius-kwint/theatre-war›.Lampert-Greaux, Ellen. “The Wizardry of O: Cirque du Soleil Takes the Plunge into an Underwater World.” livedesignonline 1999. 17 Aug. 2014 ‹http://livedesignonline.com/mag/wizardry-o-cirque-du-soleil-takes-plunge-underwater-world›.Lavers, Katie. “Sighting Circus: Perceptions of Circus Phenomena Investigated through Diverse Bodies.” Doctoral Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Leroux, Patrick Louis. “The Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas: An American Striptease.” Revista Mexicana de Estudio Canadiens (Nueva Época) 16 (2008): 121-126.Mazza, Ed. “Cirque du Soleil’s Drone Video ‘Sparked’ is Pure Magic.” Huffington Post 22 Sep. 2014. 23 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/22/cirque-du-soleil-sparked-drone-video_n_5865668.html›.Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.Moody, Jane. Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. O'Quinn, Daniel. Staging Governance: Teatrical Imperialism in London 1770-1800. Baltimore, Maryland, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. O'Quinn, Daniel. “Theatre and Empire.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730-1830. Eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O'Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 233-46. Reed, Peter P. “Interrogating Legitimacy in Britain and America.” The Oxford Handbook of Georgian Theatre. Eds. Julia Swindells and Francis David. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 247-264.Saxon, A.H. “The Circus as Theatre: Astley’s and Its Actors in the Age of Romanticism.” Educational Theatre Journal 27.3 (1975): 299-312.Schlicke, P. Dickens and Popular Entertainment. London: Unwin Hyman, 1985.St. Leon, Mark. Circus: The Australian Story. Melbourne: Melbourne Books, 2011. Stoddart, Helen. Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Swed, Mark. “Epic, Extravagant: In Ka the Acrobatics and Dazzling Special Effects Are Stunning and Enchanting.” Los Angeles Times 5 Feb. 2005. 22 Aug. 2014 ‹http://articles.latimes.com/2005/feb/05/entertainment/et-ka5›.Sylt, Cristian, and Caroline Reid. “Cirque du Soleil Swings to $1bn Revenue as It Mulls Shows at O2.” The Independent Oct. 2011. 14 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cirque-du-soleil-swings-to-1bn-revenue-as-it-mulls-shows-at-o2-2191850.html›.Tait, Peta. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. London: Routledge, 2005.Terdiman, Daniel. “Flying Lampshades: Cirque du Soleil Plays with Drones.” CNet 2014. 22 Sept 2014 ‹http://www.cnet.com/news/flying-lampshades-the-cirque-du-soleil-plays-with-drones/›.Venables, Michael. “The Technology Behind the Las Vegas Magic of Cirque du Soleil.” Forbes Magazine 30 Aug. 2013. 16 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelvenables/2013/08/30/technology-behind-the-magical-universe-of-cirque-du-soleil-part-one/›.

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Abstract:

February 15, 1999 THE DIGITAL EXAM digital was such a sanitary hi-tech word until my urologist snuck up from behind and gave me the bird shocked and taken back I try to ignore the painful experience by pondering the conundrum of hom*osexuality there had to be more to it than that "You can get dressed now" was the good doctor’s way of saying "Pull up your pants, Dude, and I’ll see you back in my office." but his casual demeanor seemed to exude foreboding "There is a stiffness in the gland demanding further examination. I’d like to schedule a blood test, ultrasound and biopsy." the doctor’s lips kept moving but I couldn’t hear him through the sheet of white fear that guillotined between us CANCER! The big C! Me? I spent the rest of that day up to my genitals in the grave I was digging. Hamlet gazing full into the face of the skull "Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well, Horatio. Before scalpel took gland. Back when he sang in a bass baritone." desperate for encouragement I turn to the illustrated brochure the informative flyer detailing the upcoming procedure where in the ultrasound and biopsy probe resembled the head of a black water moccasin baring its fang "Dang!" says I jumping back relief came 36 hours later something about the PSA blood test the prostate specific-antigen results leading the doctor to now suspect infection prescribing an antibiotic of course five weeks from now the FOLLOW-UP APPOINTMENT! and as the date approaches tension will build like in those Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon films when you know there’s a snake in the grass and Danny Glover isn’t there to cover your ass *** April 2, 1999 As it turns out, at the follow-up appointment, things had worsened so the biopsy and bone scan were re-scheduled and it was discovered that I do have incurable metastatic advanced prostate cancer. Of course the doctor is most optimistic about all the new and miraculous treatments available. But before I go into that, I want you to know that I find myself experiencing a strange and wonderful kind of peace. Hell, I’ve lived 70 years already — done exactly what I wanted to do with my life. All worthwhile dreams have come true. Made my living since 1968 as a "Performance Poet" — Billie Barbara and I have been together for 47 years — growing closer with each passing day. We have four great kids, five neat and nifty grandchildren. All things considered, I’ve been truly blessed and whether my departure date is next year or 15 years from now I’m determined not to wreck my life by doing a lousy job with my death. LIKE HAROLD / LIKE HOWARD like Harold I don’t want to blow my death I don’t want to see a lifetime of pluck and courage rubbed out by five weeks of whiny fractious behavior granted Harold’s was a scary way to go from diagnosis to last breath the cancer moving fast but five weeks of bitching and moaning was more than enough to erase every trace of a man I have wanted to emulate his wife sending word that even she can’t remember what he was like before his undignified departure no — I don’t want to go like Harold like Howard let me come swimming up out of the deepening coma face serene as if seen through undisturbed water breaking the surface to eagerly take the hand of bedside well wishers unexpected behavior I must admit as Howard has always been a world class hypochondriac second only to me the two of us able to sit for hours discussing the subtle shade of a mole turning each other on with long drawn out organ recitals in the end one would have thought such a legendary self centered soul would cower and fold up completely like Harold but no — when my time comes let me go sweetly like Howard *** April 7, 1999 The treatment was decided upon. Next Monday, the good Doctor is going to pit my apricots. From here on the Sultan can rest easy when Masten hangs with his harem. Prognosis good. No more testosterone - no more growth. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking forward to giving up the family jewels. I must say that over the years they’ve done me proud and to be totally honest I don’t think Billie Barbara will be all that disappointed either. I’m told that Viagra will help in this area., However, I’m also told that the drug is very expensive. Something like twelve bucks a pop. But hell, Billie Barbara and I can afford twenty four dollars a year.. Some thoughts the morning of— Yesterday I did a program for the Unitarian Society of Livermore. About 60 people. I had a bet with the fellow who introduced me, that at least 7 out of the 60 would come up after the reading (which would include my recent prostate musings) and share a personal war story about prostate cancer. I was right. Exactly 7 approached with an encouraging tale about themselves, a husband, a brother, a son. I was told to prepare myself for hot flashes and water retention. To which Billie Barbara said "Join the club!" I ended the presentation with one of those inspirational poetic moments. A hot flash, if you will. "It just occurred to me," I said, " I’m going to get rich selling a bumper sticker I just thought of — REAL MEN DON’T NEED BALLS A couple of days after the event The Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula is referred to as CHOMP, and the afternoon of April 12th I must say this august institution certainly lived up to it’s name. The waiting room in the Out Patient Wing is an event unto itself. Patients huddled together with friends and family, everyone speaking in hushed voices. The doomed keeping a wary eye on the ominous swinging doors, where a big tough looking nurse appeared from time to time shouting: NEXT! Actually the woman was quite sweet and mild mannered, enunciating each patient’s name in a calm friendly manner. But waiting to have done to me what was going to be done to me - the chilling word "NEXT!" is what I heard and "Out Patient Wing" certainly seemed a misnomer to me. Wasn’t the "Out-Patient Wing" where you went to have splinters removed? Of course I knew better, because in the pre-op interview the young interviewer, upon reading "Bilateral Orchiectomy" winced visibly, exclaiming under her breath "Bummer!" I recently came across this haiku — bilateral orchiectomy the sound a patient makes when he learns what it is Our daughter April lives in New York and couldn’t join the Waiting Room rooting section so as her stand in she sent her best friend Molly Williams. Now, Molly works as a veterinarian in a local animal shelter and a when I told her my operation was supposed to take no more than half an hour, she laughed: "Heck Ric, I’ll do it in five minutes and not even use gloves." NEXT! My turn to be led through those swinging doors, pitifully looking back over my shoulder. Wife, family and friends, bravely giving me the thumbs up. Things blur and run together after that. I do remember telling the nurse who was prepping me that I was afraid of being put to sleep. "Not to worry" she said, I’d have a chance to express these fears to the anesthetist before the operation would begin. And as promised the man did drop by to assure me that I would get a little something to ease my anxiety before he put me under. When the moment finally arrived, he said that I might feel a slight prick as he gave me the relaxant. Of course, that is the last thing I remember - the prick! Obviously, I‘d been suckered in by the mask man’s modus operandi. On the other side of this I surface to begin the waiting. WAITING for the catheter to be removed — for the incision to heal — WAITING to see if the pain subsides and I can loose the cane — WAITING to learn if my PSA will respond to treatment. Waiting—waiting—waiting—and I’ve never been a cheerful waiter. *** May 7, 1999 The doctor tells me I must keep taking Casodex— one a day at eleven dollars a cap - for the rest of my life. And no more doctor freebees. No wonder the listed side effect of this pricey medication is depression. But the recent funk I’ve fallen into is much deeper than dollars and cents. In the past I’ve had my share of operations and illnesses and always during the recuperation I could look forward to being my old self again. But not this time .... Not this time. Funny bumper stickers can only hold reality at bay for a short while. And anyway Billie had me remove the homemade REAL MEN DON’T NEED BALLS bumper sticker from the back of our car — She didn’t like the dirty looks she got while driving around town alone. *** Eight months later BILATERAL ORCHECTOMY never could look up words in the dictionary in a high school assignment writing an autobiography I described my self as a unique person scribbled in the margin the teachers correction fairly chortled "unique" not "eunuch" how could he have known that one day I would actually become a misspelling backed against the wall by advanced prostate cancer I chose the operation over the enormous ongoing expense of chemical castration "No big deal." I thought at the time what’s the difference they both add up to the same thing but in the movies these days during the hot gratuitous sex scene I yawn…bored... wishing they’d quit dicking around and get on with the plot and on TV the buxom cuties that titillate around the products certainly arn’t selling me anything I realize now that although it would probably kill them the guys who went chemical still have an option I don’t philosophically I’m the same person but biologically I ‘m like the picture puzzle our family traditionally puts together over the holidays the French impressionist rendition of a flower shop interior in all it’s bright colorful confusion this season I didn’t work the puzzle quite as enthusiastically... and for good reason this year I know pieces are missing where the orchids used to be "So?" says I to myself "You’re still here to smell the roses." *** January 13, 2000 Real bad news! At the third routine follow-up appointment. My urologist informs me that my PSA has started rising again. The orchectomy and Casodex are no longer keeping the cancer in remission. In the vernacular, I have become "hormone refractory" and there was nothing more he, as a urologist could do for me. An appointment with a local oncologist was arranged and another bone scan scheduled. The "T" word having finally been said the ostrich pulled his head from the sand and began looking around. Knowing what I know now, I’m still annoyed at my urologist for not telling me when I was first diagnosed to either join a support group and radically change my diet or find another urologist. I immediately did both - becoming vegan and finding help on-line as well as at the local Prostate Cancer Support Group. This during the endless eighteen day wait before the oncologist could fit me in. *** IRON SOCKS time now for a bit of reverse prejudice I once purchased some stockings called "Iron Socks" guaranteed to last for five years they lasted ten! but when I went back for another pair the clerk had never heard of them as a cancer survivor… so far in an over populated world I consider the multi-billion dollar medical and pharmaceutical industries realizing that there is absolutely no incentive to come up with a permanent cure *** From here on, I’ll let the poems document the part of the journey that brings us up to the present. A place where I can say — spiritually speaking, that the best thing that ever happened to me is metastatic hormone refractory advanced prostate cancer. *** SUPPORT GROUPS included in this close fraternity... in this room full of brotherly love I wonder where I’ve been for the last 11 months no — that’s not quite right… I know where I’ve been I’ve been in denial after the shock of diagnosis the rude indignity of castration the quick fix of a Casodex why would I want to hang out with a bunch of old duffers dying of prostate cancer? ignoring the fact that everybody dies we all know it but few of us believe it those who do, however rack up more precious moments than the entire citizenry of the fools paradise not to mention studies showing that those who do choose to join a support group on average live years longer than the stiff upper lip recluse and while I’m on the subject I wonder where I’d be without the internet and the dear supportive spirits met there in cyber-space a place where aid care and concern are not determined by age, gender, race, physical appearance, economic situation or geological location and this from a die-hard like me who not ten years ago held the computer in great disdain convinced that poetry should be composed on the back of envelopes with a blunt pencil while riding on trains thank god I’m past these hang-ups because without a support system I doubt if this recent malignant flare-up could have been withstood how terrifying… the thought of being at my writing desk alone… disconnected typing out memos to myself on my dead father’s ancient Underwood *** PC SPES in the sea that is me the hormone blockade fails my urologist handing me over to a young oncologist who recently began practicing locally having retired from the stainless steel and white enamel of the high tech Stanford medical machine in the examination room numbly thumbing through a magazine I wait expecting to be treated like a link of sausage another appointment ground out in a fifteen minute interval what I got was an 18th century throw back a hands-on horse and buggy physician with seemingly all the time in the world it was decided that for the next three weeks (between blood tests) all treatment would cease to determine how my PSA was behaving this done, at the next appointment the next step would be decided upon and after more than an hour of genial give and take with every question answered all options covered it was I who stood up first to go for me a most unique experience in the annals of the modern medicine show however condemned to three weeks in limbo knowing the cancer was growing had me going online reaching out into cyberspace to see what I could find and what I found was PC SPES a botanical herbal alternative medicine well documented and researched but not approved by the FDA aware that the treatment was not one my doctor had mentioned (I have since learned that to do so would make him legally vulnerable) I decided to give it a try on my own sending off for a ten day supply taking the first dose as close after the second blood test as I could two days later back in the doctors office I confess expecting a slap on the wrist instead I receive a bouquet for holding off until after the second PSA then taking the PC SPES container from my hand and like a Native American medicine man he holds it high over his head shaking it "Okay then, this approach gets the first ride!" at the receptionist desk scheduling my next appointment I thought about how difficult it must be out here on the frontier practicing medicine with your hands tied *** PREJUDICE "It's a jungle out there!" Dr. J. George Taylor was fond of saying "And all chiropractors are quacks! Manipulating pocket pickers!" the old physician exposing his daughter to a prejudice so infectious I suspect it became part of her DNA and she a wannabe doctor herself infects me her son with the notion that if it wasn’t performed or prescribed by a licensed M.D. it had to be Medicine Show hoopla or snake oil elixir certainly today’s countless array of practitioners and patent remedies has both of them spinning in their grave but Ma you and Grandpa never heard the words hormone-refractory even the great white hunters of our prestigious cancer clinics don't know how to stop the tiger that is stalking me and so with a PSA rising again to 11.9 I get my oncologist to let me try PC SPES a Chinese herbal formula yes, the desperate do become gullible me, reading and re-reading the promotional material dutifully dosing myself between blood tests and this against the smirk of disapproval mother and grandfather wagging their heads in unison: "It won’t work." "It won’t work." having condemned myself beforehand the moment of truth finally arrives I pace the floor nervously the doctor appears at the door "How does it feel to be a man with a PSA falling to 4.8?" it seems that for the time being at least the tiger is content to play a waiting game which is simply great! Mother tell Grandpa I just may escape our families bigotry before it’s too late *** HELPLINE HARRY "Hi, how are you?" these days I'm never sure how to field routine grounders like this am I simply being greeted? or does the greeter actually want a list of grisly medical details my wife says it's easy she just waits to see if the "How is he?" is followed by a hushed "I mean… really?" for the former a simple "Fine, and how are you?" will do for the latter the news isn't great indications are that the miracle herbal treatment is beginning to fail my oncologist offering up a confusing array of clinical trials and treatments that flirt seductively but speak in a foreign language I don't fully understand so Harry, once again I call on you a savvy old tanker who has maneuvered his battle scared machine through years of malignant mine fields and metastatic mortar attacks true five star Generals know much about winning wars and such but the Command Post is usually so far removed from the front lines I suspect they haven't a clue as to what the dog-faces are going through down here in the trenches it's the seasoned campaigners who have my ear the tough tenacious lovable old survivors like you *** "POOR DEVIL!" in my early twenties I went along with Dylan Thomas boasting that I wanted to go out not gently but raging shaking my fist staring death down however this daring statement was somewhat revised when in my forties I realized that death does the staring I do the down so I began hoping it would happen to me like it happened to the sentry in all those John Wayne Fort Apache movies found dead in the morning face down — an arrow in the back "Poor devil." the Sergeant always said "Never knew what hit him." at the time I liked that... the end taking me completely by surprise the bravado left in the hands of a hard drinking Welshman still wet behind the ears older and wiser now over seventy and with a terminal disease the only thing right about what the Sergeant said was the "Poor devil" part "Poor devil" never used an opening to tell loved ones he loved them never seized the opportunity to give praise for the sun rise or drink in a sunset moment after moment passing him by while he marched through life staring straight ahead believing in tomorrow "Poor devil!" how much fuller richer and pleasing life becomes when you are lucky enough to see the arrow coming *** END LINE (Dedicated to Jim Fulks.) I’ve always been a yin / yang - life / death - up / down clear / blur - front / back kind of guy my own peculiar duality being philosopher slash hypochondriac win win characteristics when you’ve been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer finally the hypochondriac has something more than windmills to tilt with the philosopher arming himself with exactly the proper petard an anonymous statement found in an e-mail message beneath the signature of a cancer survivor’s name a perfect end line wily and wise quote: I ask God: "How much time do I have before I die?" "Enough to make a difference." God replies *** STRUM lived experience taught them most of what they know so MD's treating men diagnosed with androgen-independent advanced prostate cancer tend to put us on death row and taking the past into account this negativity is understandable… these good hearted doctors watching us come and go honestly doing what they can like kindly prison guards attempting to make the life we have left as pleasant as possible to be otherwise a physician would have to be a bit delusional evangelical even… to work so diligently for and believe so completely in the last minute reprieve for those of us confined on cell block PC doing time with an executioner stalking it is exhilarating to find an oncologist willing to fly in the face of history refusing to call the likes of me "Dead man walking." *** BAG OF WOE there are always moments when I can almost hear the reader asking: "How can you use that as grist for your poetry mill? How can you dwell on such private property, at least without masking the details?" well... for the feedback of course the war stories that my stories prompt you to tell but perhaps the question can best be answered by the ‘bag of woe’ parable the "Once Upon a Time" tale about the troubled village of Contrary its harried citizens and the magical mystical miracle worker who showed up one dreary day saying: I am aware of your torment and woe and I am here to lighten your load! he then instructed the beleaguered citizens to go home and rummage through their harried lives bag up your troubles he said both large and small stuff them all in a sack and drag them down to the town square and stack them around on the wall and when everyone was back and every bag was there the magical mystical miracle worker said: "It’s true, just as I promised. You won’t have to take your sack of troubles home leave it behind when you go however, you will have to take along somebody’s bag of woe so the citizens of Contrary all went to find their own bag and shouldering the load discovered that it was magically and mystically much easier to carry --- End ---

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IntroductionThe perception of the archive as the warehouse of tradition is inflected with the notion that what it stores is also removed from the everyday, at once ancient but also irrelevant, standing still outside time. Yet, if the past is of any relevance, the archive cannot maintain a rigid fixity that does not intersect with the present. In the work of the Atlas Group, the fabrication of “archival material” reflects what Hal Foster has termed an “archival impulse” that is constructed of multiple temporalities. The Atlas Group archive interrogates forms that are at once still, excavated from life, while still being in the present. In the process, the reductive singularity of the archive as an immobile monument is opened up to the complexity of a radical stillness through which the past enters the present in a moment of recognition. What is still, and what is still there, intersect in the productivity of a stillness that cuts through an undifferentiated continuity. This juncture echoes the Benjaminian flash which heralds the arrival of past in the presentTo articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. (Benjamin, Theses)Klee’s Angelus Novus stands still between past and future as a momentary suspension of motion brings history and prophecy into the present. For “the historian of the dialectic at a standstill”, Walter Benjamin, historical materialism was not simply a means of accessing the past in the present, but of awakening the potential of the future (Tiedemann 944-945). This, Rolf Tiedemann suggests, was the revolution of historical perception that Benjamin wanted to bring about in his unfinished Arcades Project (941). By carrying the principle of montage into history, Benjamin indicates an intention “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event” (Benjamin Arcades 461). This principle had already been alluded to in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” where he had written that a historical materialist cannot do without a present in which time stands still, and later, that it is in the arrest of thought that what has been and what will be “crystallizes into a monad” (Benjamin “Theses” 262-263).Everywhere in Benjamin’s writings on history, there is something of the irreducibility of the phrase “standing still”. Standing still: still as an active, ongoing form of survival and endurance, still as an absence of movement. The duality of stillness is amplified as semantic clarity vacillates between one possibility and another: to endure and to be motionless. Is it possible to reduce “standing still” to a singularity? Benjamin’s counsel to take hold of memory at the “moment of danger” might be an indication of this complexity. The “moment of danger” emerges as the flash of the past in the present, but also the instant at which the past could recede into the inertia of eternity, at once a plea against the reduction of the moment into a “dead time” and recognition of the productivity of stillness.Something of that “flash” surfaces in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Michel Foucault: “a first light opens up things and brings forth visibilities as flashes and shimmerings, which are the ‘second light’” (Deleuze 50). The first flash makes “visibilities visible” and determines what can be seen in a given historical period, while the second makes “statements articulable” and defines what can be said (Deleuze 50). These visibilities and statements, however, are distributed into the stratum and constitute knowledge as “stratified, archivized, and endowed with a relatively rigid segmentarity” (Deleuze 61). Strata are historically determined, what they constitute of perceptions and discursive formations varies across time and results in the presence of thresholds between the stratum that come to behave as distinct layers subject to splits and changes in direction (Deleuze 44). Despite these temporal variations that account for differences across thresholds, the strata appear as fixed entities, they mimic rock formations shaped over thousands of years of sedimentation (Deleuze and Guattari 45). Reading Deleuze on Foucault in conjunction with his earlier collaborative work with Felix Guattari brings forth distant shadows of another “stratification”. A Thousand Plateaus is notably less interested in discursive formations and more concerned with “striation”, the organisation and arrangement of space by the diagrams of power. Striated space is state space. It is offset by moving in the opposite direction, effectively turning striated space into smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari 524).Whether on striation or stratification, Deleuze’s work exhibits more than a cautionary distrust of processes of classification, regulation, and organization. Despite the flash that brings visibilities and statements into being, stratification, as much as striation, remains a technique of knowledge shaped by the strategies of power. It is interesting however, that Deleuze sees something as indeterminate as a flash, creating structures that are as determined as stratum. Yet perhaps this is a deceptive conjecture since while the strata appear relatively rigid they are also “extremely mobile” (Deleuze and Guattari 553). Foucault had already given an indication that what the archaeological method uncovers is not necessarily suspended, but rather that it suspends the notion of an absolute continuity (Archaeology 169). He suggests that “history is that which transforms documents into monuments” (7). The task of archaeology, it would seem, is to recover documents from monuments by demonstrating rather than reversing the process of sedimentation and without necessarily relying on a motionless past. While there is a relative, albeit interstratically tentative, stillness in the strata, absolute destratification proceeds towards deterritorialisation through incessant movement (Deleuze and Guattari 62-63).If A Thousand Plateaus is any indication, the imperative for the creative thinker today seems to be stirring in this direction: movement, motion, animation. Whatever forms of resistance are to be envisioned, it is motion, rather than stillness, that emerges as a radical form of action (Deleuze and Guattari 561). The question raised by these theoretical interventions is not so much whether such processes are indeed valuable forms of opposition, but rather, whether movement is always the only means, or the most effective means, of resistance? To imagine resistance as “staying in place” seems antithetical to nomadic thinking but is it not possible to imagine moments when the nomad resists not by travelling, but by dwelling? What of all those living a life of forced nomadism, or dying nomadic deaths, those for whom movement is merely displacement and loss? In Metamorphoses Rosi Braidotti reflects upon forced displacement and loss, yet her emphasis nonetheless remains on “figurations”, mappings of identity through time and space, mappings of movement (2-3). Braidotti certainly does not neglect the victims of motion, those who are forced to move, yet she remains committed to nomadism as a form of becoming. Braidotti’s notion of “figurations” finds a deeply poignant expression in Joseph Pugliese’s textual maps of some of these technically “nomadic” bodies and their movement from the North African littoral into the waters of the Mediterranean where they eventually surface on southern European shores as corpses (Pugliese 15). While Braidotti recognizes the tragedy of these involuntary nomads, it is in Pugliese’s work that this tragedy is starkly exposed and given concrete form in the figures of Europe’s refugees. This is movement as death, something akin to what Paul Virilio calls inertia, the product of excessive speed, the uncanny notion of running to stand still (Virilio 16).This tension between motion and stillness surfaces again in Laura Marks’ essay “Asphalt Nomadism.” Despite wanting to embrace the desert as a smooth space Marks retorts that “smooth space seems always to be elsewhere” (Marks 126). She notes the stability of the acacia trees and thorny shrubs in the desert and the way that nomadic people are constantly beset with invitations from the “civilising forces of religion and the soporific of a daily wage” (Marks 126). Emphatically she concludes that “the desert is never really ‘smooth’, for that is death” (Marks 126). On this deviation from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the desert as smooth space she concludes: “we who inherit their thinking need to stay on the ground: both in thought, moving close to the surface of concepts, and literally, remaining alert to signs of life in the sand and the scrub of the desert” (Marks 126). In Marks’ appeal for groundedness the tension between motion and stillness is maintained rather than being resolved through recourse to smoothness or in favour of perpetual movement. The sedentary and still structures that pervade the desert remain: the desert could not exist without them. In turn we might ask whether even the most rigorous abstraction can convince us that the ground between radical nomadism and perpetual displacement does not also need to be rethought. Perhaps this complexity is starkest when we begin to think about war, not only the potentiality of the war-machine to destabilize the state (Deleuze and Guattari 391), but war as the deterritorialisation of bodies, lives and livelihoods. Is the war of nomadism against the state not somehow akin to war as the violence that produces nomadic bodies through forced displacement? One of the questions that strikes me about the work of the Atlas Group, “an imaginary non-profit research foundation established in Beirut to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon” (Raad 68) through the production and exhibition of “archival” material, is whether their propensity towards still forms in the creation of documentary evidence cannot be directly attributed to war as perpetual movement and territorial flexibility, as the flattening of structure and the creation of “smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari 389). One need only think of the reigns of terror that begin with destratification – abolishing libraries, destroying documents, burning books. On the work of the Atlas Group, Andre Lepecki offers a very thorough introduction:The Atlas Group is an ongoing visual and performative archival project initiated by Walid Raad …whose main topic and driving force are the multiple and disparate events that history and habit have clustered into one singularity named “The Lebanese Civil Wars of 1975-1991”. (Lepecki 61).While the “inventedness” of the Atlas Group’s archive, its “post-event” status as manufactured evidence, raises a myriad of questions about how to document the trauma of war, its insistence on an “archival” existence, rather than say a purely artistic one, also challenges the presumption that the process of becoming, indeed of producing or even creating, is necessarily akin to movement or animation by insisting on the materiality of producing “documents” as opposed to the abstraction of producing “art”. The Atlas Group archive does not contribute directly to the transformation of visibilities into statements so much as statements into visibilities. Indeed, the “archival impulse” that seems to be present here works against the constitution of discursive formations precisely by making visible those aspects of culture which continue to circulate discursively while not necessarily existing. In other words, if one reads the sedimentary process of stratification as forming knowledge by allowing the relationships between “words” and “things” to settle or to solidify into historical strata, then the Atlas Group project seems to tap into the stillness of these stratified forms in order to reverse the signification of “things” and “words”. Hal Foster’s diagnosis of an “archival impulse” is located in a moment where, as he says, “almost anything goes and almost nothing sticks” in reference to the current obliviousness of contemporary artistic practices to political culture (Foster 2-3). Foster’s observation endows this paper with more than just an appropriate title since what Foster seems to identify are the limitations of the current obsession with speed. What one senses in the Atlas Group’s “archival impulse” and Foster’s detection of an “archival impulse” at play in contemporary cultural practices is a war against the war on form, a war against erasure through speed, and an inclination to dwell once more in the dusty matter of the past, rather than to pass through it. Yet the archive, in the view of nomadology, might simply be what Benjamin Hutchens terms “the dead-letter office of lived memory” (38). Indeed Hutchens’s critical review of the archive is both timely and relevant pointing out that “the preservation of cultural memories eradicated from culture itself” simply establishes the authority of the archive by erasing “the incessant historical violence” through which the archive establishes itself (Hutchens 38). In working his critique through Derrida’s Archive Fever, Hutchens revisits the concealed etymology of the word “archive” which “names at once the commencement and the commandment” (Derrida 1). Derrida’s suggestion that the concept of the archive shelters both the memory of this dual meaning while also sheltering itself from remembering that it shelters such a memory (Derrida 2) leads Hutchens to assert that “the archival ‘act’ opens history to the archive, but it closes politics to its own archivization” (Hutchens 44). The danger that “memory cultures”, archives among them, pose to memory itself has also been explored elsewhere by Andreas Huyssen. Although Huyssen does not necessary hold memory up as something to be protected from memory cultures, he is critical of the excessive saturation of contemporary societies with both (Huyssen 3). Huyssen refers to this as the “hypertrophy of memory” following Nietzsche’s “hypertrophy of history” (Huyssen 2-3). Although Hutchens and Huyssen differ radically in direction, they seem to concur nonetheless that what could be diagnosed as an “archival impulse” in contemporary societies might describe only the stagnation and stiltedness of the remainders of lived experience.To return once more to Foster’s notion of an “archival impulse” in contemporary art practices, rather than the reinstitution of the archive as the warehouse of tradition, what seems to be at stake is not necessarily the agglutination of forms, but the interrogation of formations (Foster 3). One could say that this is the archive interrogated through the eyes of art, art interrogated through the eyes of the archive. Perhaps this is precisely what the Atlas Group does by insisting on manufacturing documents in the form of documentary evidence. “Missing Lebanese Wars”, an Atlas Group project produced in 1998, takes as its point of departure the hypothesisthat the Lebanese civil war is not a self-evident episode, an inert fact of nature. The war is not constituted by unified and coherent objects situated in the world; on the contrary, the Lebanese civil war is constituted by and through various actions, situations, people, and accounts. (Raad 17-18)The project consists of a series of plates made up of pages taken from the notebook of a certain Dr Fadl Fakhouri, “the foremost historian of the civil war in Lebanon” until his death in 1993 (Raad 17). The story goes that Dr Fakhouri belonged to a gathering of “major historians” who were also “avid gamblers” that met at the race track every Sunday – the Marxists and the Islamists bet on the first seven races, while the Maronite nationalists and the socialists bet on the last eight (Raad 17). It was alleged that the historians would bribe the race photographer to take only one shot as the winning horse reached the post. Each historian would bet on exactly “how many fractions of a second before or after the horse crossed the line – the photographer would expose his frame” (Raad 17). The pages from Dr Fakhouri’s notebook are comprised of these precise exposures of film as the winning horse crossed the line – stills, as well as measurements of the distance between the horse and the finish line amid various other calculations, the bets that the historians wagered, and short descriptions of the winning historians given by Dr Fakhouri. The notebook pages, with photographs in the form of newspaper clippings, calculations and descriptions of the winning historians in English, are reproduced one per plate. In producing these documents as archival evidence, the Atlas Group is able to manufacture the “unified and coherent objects” that do not constitute the war as things that are at once irrelevant, incongruous and non-sensical. In other words, presenting material that is, while clearly fictitious, reflective of individual “actions, situations, people, and accounts” as archival material, the Atlas Group opens up discourses about the sanctity of historical evidence to interrogation by producing documentary evidence for circulating cultural discourses.While giving an ironic shape to this singular and complete picture of the war that continues to pervade popular cultural discourses in Lebanon through the media with politicians still calling for a “unified history”, the Atlas Group simultaneously constitute these historical materials as the work of a single person, Dr Fakhouri. Yet it seems that our trustworthy archivist also chooses not to write about the race, but about the winning historian – echoing the refusal to conceive of the war as a self-evident fact (to talk about the race as a race) and to see it rather as an interplay of individuals, actions and narratives (to view the race through the description of the winning historian). Indeed Dr Fakhouri’s descriptions of the winning historians are almost comical for their affinity with descriptions of Lebanon’s various past and present political leaders. A potent shadow, and a legend that has grown into an officially sanctioned cult (Plate 1).Avuncular rather than domineering, he was adept at the well-timed humorous aside to cut tension. (Plate 3).He is 71. But for 6 years he was in prison and for 10 years he was under house arrest and in exile, so those 16 years should be deducted – then he’s 55 (Plate 5). (Raad 20-29)Through these descriptions of the historians, Lebanon’s “missing” wars begin to play themselves out between one race and the next. While all we have are supposed “facts” with neither narrative, movement, nor anything else that could connect one fact to another that is not arbitrary, we are also in the midst of an archive that is as random as these “facts.” This is the archive of the “missing” wars, wars that are not documented and victims that are not known, wars that are “missing” for no good reason.What is different about this archive may not be the way in which order is manufactured and produced, but rather the background against which it is set. In his introduction to The Order of Things Michel Foucault makes reference to “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in a passage by Borges whereanimals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable… (xvi)“The uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges”, writes Foucault, is the sense of loss of a “common” name and place (Order, xx). Whereas in Eusethenes, (“I am no longer hungry. Until the morrow, safe from my saliva all the following shall be: Aspics, Acalephs, Acanathocephalates […]”) the randomness of the enumerated species is ordered by their non-location in Eusthenes’ mouth (Foucault, Order xvii), in Borges there is no means through which the enumerated species can belong in a common place except in language (Foucault, Order, xviii). In the same way, the work of the Atlas Group is filtered through the processes of archival classification without belonging to the archives of any real war. There is no common ground against which they can be read except the purported stillness of the archive itself, its ability to put things in place and to keep them there.If the Atlas Group’s archives of Lebanon’s wars are indeed to work against the fluidity of war and its ability to enter and reshape all spaces, then the archival impulse they evoke must be one in which the processes of sedimentation that create archival documents are worked through a radical stillness, tapping into the suspended motion of the singular moment – its stillness, in order to uncover stillness as presence, survival, endurance, to be there still. Indeed, if archives turn “documents into monuments” (Enwezor 23), then the “theatre of statements” that Foucault unearths (Deleuze 47) are not those recovered in the work of the Atlas Group since is not monuments, but documents, that the Atlas Group archive uncovers.It is true that Benjamin urges us to seize hold of memory at the moment of danger, but he does not instruct us as to what to do with it once we have it, yet, what if we were to read this statement in conjunction with another, “for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin, “Theses” 255). By turning monuments into documents it is possible that the Atlas Group reconfigure the formations that make up the archive, indeed any archive, by recognizing images of the past as being still in the present. Not still as a past tense, motionless, but still as enduring, remaining. In the work of the Atlas Group the archival impulse is closely aligned to a radical stillness, letting the dust of things settle after its incitation by the madness of war, putting things in place that insist on having a place in language. Against such a background Benjamin’s “moment of danger” is more than the instant of sedimentation, it is the productivity of a radical stillness in which the past opens onto the present, it is this moment that makes possible a radical reconfiguration of the archival impulse.ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard U Press, 2002.———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. New York: Continuum, 1999.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, 2004.Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, 2008.Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse.” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3-22.Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1992.———. The Order of Things. London: Routledge, 2002.Hutchens, Benjamin. “Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-Archive.” SubStance 36.3 (2007): 37-55.Huyssen, Andreas. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2003.Lepecki, Andre. “In the Mist of the Event: Performance and the Activation of Memory in the Atlas Group Archive.” Scratching on the Things I Could Disavow. Ed.Walid Raad. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007.Marks, Laura. “Asphalt Nomadism: The New Desert in Arab Independent Cinema.” Landscape and Film. Ed. Martin Lefebvre. New York: Routledge, 2006.Pugliese, Joseph. “Bodies of Water.” Heat 12 (2006): 12-20. Raad, Walid. Scratching on the Things I Could Disavow. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007.Schmitz, Britta, and Kassandra Nakas. The Atlas Group (1989-2004). Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006.Tiedemann, Rolf. “Dialectics at a Standstill.” The Arcades Project. Walter Benjamin. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard U P, 2002.Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso, 1997.

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IntroductionIn March 2015, I visited the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (established 1967) in the “cherry capital of Australia”, the town of Young, New South Wales, in preparation for a student excursion. Like other Australian folk museums, this museum focuses on the ordinary and the everyday of rural life, and is heavily reliant on local history, local historians, volunteers, and donated objects for the collection. It may not sound as though the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (LFFM) holds much potential for a fashion curator, as fashion exhibitions have become high points of innovation in exhibition design. It is quite a jolt to return to old style folk museums, when travelling shows such as Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2011 – V&A Museum 2015) or The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier (V&A Museum 2011­ – NGV 2014) are popping up around the globe. The contrast stimulated this author to think on the role and the power of curators. This paper will show that the potential for fashion as a vehicle for demonstrating ideas other than through rubrics of design or history has been growing. We all wear dress. We express identity, politics, status, age, gender, social values, and mental state through the way we dress each and every day. These key issues are also explored in many museum exhibitions.Small museums often have an abundance of clothing. For them, it is a case of not only managing and caring for growing collections but also curating objects in a way that communicates regional and often national identity, as well as narrating stories in meaningful ways to audiences. This paper argues that the way in which dress is curated can greatly enhance temporary and permanent exhibitions. Fashion curation is on the rise (Riegels Melchior). This paper looks at why this is so, the potential for this specialisation in curation, the research required, and the sensitivity needed in communicating ideas in exhibitions. It also suggests how fashion curation skills may facilitate an increasing demand.Caring for the AudienceThe paper draws on a case study of how Chinese people at the LFFM are portrayed. The Chinese came to the Young district during the 1860s gold rush. While many people often think the Chinese were sojourners (Rolls), that is, they found gold and returned to China, many actually settled in regional Australia (McGowan; Couchman; Frost). At Young there were riots against the Chinese miners, and this narrative is illustrated at the museum.In examining the LFFM, this paper points to the importance of caring for the audience as well as objects, knowing and acknowledging the current and potential audiences. Caring for how the objects are received and perceived is vital to the work of curators. At this museum, the stereotypic portrayal of Chinese people, through a “coolie” hat, a fan, and two dolls dressed in costume, reminds us of the increased professionalisation of the museum sector in the last 20 years. It also reminds us of the need for good communication through both the objects and texts. Audiences have become more sophisticated, and their expectations have increased. Displays and accompanying texts that do not reflect in depth research, knowledge, and sensitivities can result in viewers losing interest quickly. Not long into my visit I began thinking of the potential reaction by the Chinese graduate students. In a tripartite model called the “museum experience”, Falk and Dierking argue that the social context, personal context, and physical context affect the visitor’s experience (5). The social context of who we visit with influences enjoyment. Placing myself in the students’ shoes sharpened reactions to some of the displays. Curators need to be mindful of a wide range of audiences. The excursion was to be not so much a history learning activity, but a way for students to develop a personal interest in museology and to learn the role museums can play in society in general, as well as in small communities. In this case the personal context was also a professional context. What message would they get?Communication in MuseumsStudies by Falk et al. indicate that museum visitors only view an exhibition for 30 minutes before “museum fatigue” sets in (249–257). The physicality of being in a museum can affect the museum experience. Hence, many institutions responded to these studies by placing the key information and objects in the introductory areas of an exhibition, before the visitor gets bored. As Stephen Bitgood argues, this can become self-fulfilling, as the reaction by the exhibition designers can then be to place all the most interesting material early in the path of the audience, leaving the remainder as mundane displays (196). Bitgood argues there is no museum fatigue. He suggests that there are other things at play which curators need to heed, such as giving visitors choice and opportunities for interaction, and avoiding overloading the audience with information and designing poorly laid-out exhibitions that have no breaks or resting points. All these factors contribute to viewers becoming both mentally and physically tired. Rather than placing the onus on the visitor, he contends there are controllable factors the museum can attend to. One of his recommendations is to be provocative in communication. Stimulating exhibitions are more likely to engage the visitor, minimising boredom and tiredness (197). Xerxes Mazda recommends treating an exhibition like a good story, with a beginning, a dark moment, a climax, and an ending. The LFFM certainly has those elements, but they are not translated into curation that gives a compelling narration that holds the visitors’ attention. Object labels give only rudimentary information, such as: “Wooden Horse collar/very rare/donated by Mr Allan Gordon.” Without accompanying context and engaging language, many visitors could find it difficult to relate to, and actively reflect on, the social narrative that the museum’s objects could reflect.Text plays an important role in museums, particularly this museum. Communication skills of the label writers are vital to enhancing the museum visit. Louise Ravelli, in writing on museum texts, states that “communication needs to be more explicit and more reflexive—to bring implicit assumptions to the surface” (3). This is particularly so for the LFFM. Posing questions and using an active voice can provoke the viewer. The power of text can be seen in one particular museum object. In the first gallery is a banner that contains blatant racist text. Bringing racism to the surface through reflexive labelling can be powerful. So for this museum communication needs to be sensitive and informative, as well as pragmatic. It is not just a case of being reminded that Australia has a long history of racism towards non-Anglo Saxon migrants. A sensitive approach in label-writing could ask visitors to reflect on Australia’s long and continued history of racism and relate it to the contemporary migration debate, thereby connecting the present day to dark historical events. A question such as, “How does Australia deal with racism towards migrants today?” brings issues to the surface. Or, more provocatively, “How would I deal with such racism?” takes the issue to a personal level, rather than using language to distance the issue of racism to a national issue. Museums are more than repositories of objects. Even a small underfunded museum can have great impact on the viewer through the language they use to make meaning of their display. The Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner at the LFFMThe “destination” object of the museum in Young is the Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner. Those with a keen interest in Australian history and politics come to view this large sheet of canvas that elicits part of the narrative of the Lambing Flat Riots, which are claimed to be germane to the White Australia Policy (one of the very first pieces of legislation after the Federation of Australia was The Immigration Restriction Act 1901).On 30 June 1861 a violent anti-Chinese riot occurred on the goldfields of Lambing Flat (now known as Young). It was the culmination of eight months of growing conflict between European and Chinese miners. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Europeans lived and worked in these goldfields, with little government authority overseeing the mining regulations. Earlier, in November 1860, a group of disgruntled European miners marched behind a German brass band, chasing off 500 Chinese from the field and destroying their tents. Tensions rose and fell until the following June, when the large banner was painted and paraded to gather up supporters: “…two of their leaders carrying in advance a magnificent flag, on which was written in gold letters – NO CHINESE! ROLL UP! ROLL UP! ...” (qtd. in Coates 40). Terrified, over 1,270 Chinese took refuge 20 kilometres away on James Roberts’s property, “Currawong”. The National Museum of Australia commissioned an animation of the event, The Harvest of Endurance. It may seem obvious, but the animators indicated the difference between the Chinese and the Europeans through dress, regardless that the Chinese wore western dress on the goldfields once the clothing they brought with them wore out (McGregor and McGregor 32). Nonetheless, Chinese expressions of masculinity differed. Their pigtails, their shoes, and their hats were used as shorthand in cartoons of the day to express the anxiety felt by many European settlers. A more active demonstration was reported in The Argus: “ … one man … returned with eight pigtails attached to a flag, glorifying in the work that had been done” (6). We can only imagine this trophy and the de-masculinisation it caused.The 1,200 x 1,200 mm banner now lays flat in a purpose-built display unit. Viewers can see that it was not a hastily constructed work. The careful drafting of original pencil marks can be seen around the circus styled font: red and blue, with the now yellow shadowing. The banner was tied with red and green ribbon of which small remnants remain attached.The McCarthy family had held the banner for 100 years, from the riots until it was loaned to the Royal Australian Historical Society in November 1961. It was given to the LFFM when it opened six years later. The banner is given key positioning in the museum, indicating its importance to the community and its place in the region’s memory. Just whose memory is narrated becomes apparent in the displays. The voice of the Chinese is missing.Memory and Museums Museums are interested in memory. When visitors come to museums, the work they do is to claim, discover, and sometimes rekindle memory (Smith; Crane; Williams)—-and even to reshape memory (Davidson). Fashion constantly plays with memory: styles, themes, textiles, and colours are repeated and recycled. “Cutting and pasting” presents a new context from one season to the next. What better avenue to arouse memory in museums than fashion curation? This paper argues that fashion exhibitions fit within the museum as a “theatre of memory”, where social memory, commemoration, heritage, myth, fantasy, and desire are played out (Samuels). In the past, institutions and fashion curators often had to construct academic frameworks of “history” or “design” in order to legitimise fashion exhibitions as a serious pursuit. Exhibitions such as Fashion and Politics (New York 2009), Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism (Oslo 2014) and Fashion as Social Energy (Milan 2015) show that fashion can explore deeper social concerns and political issues.The Rise of Fashion CuratorsThe fashion curator is a relative newcomer. What would become the modern fashion curator made inroads into museums through ethnographic and anthropological collections early in the 20th century. Fashion as “history” soon followed into history and social museums. Until the 1990s, the fashion curator in a museum was seen as, and closely associated with, the fashion historian or craft curator. It could be said that James Laver (1899–1975) or Stella Mary Newton (1901–2001) were the earliest modern fashion curators in museums. They were also fashion historians. However, the role of fashion curator as we now know it came into its own right in the 1970s. Nadia Buick asserts that the first fashion exhibition, Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton, was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, curated by the famous fashion photographer Cecil Beaton. He was not a museum employee, a trained curator, or even a historian (15). The museum did not even collect contemporary fashion—it was a new idea put forward by Beaton. He amassed hundreds of pieces of fashion items from his friends of elite society to complement his work.Radical changes in museums since the 1970s have been driven by social change, new expectations and new technologies. Political and economic pressures have forced museum professionals to shift their attention from their collections towards their visitors. There has been not only a growing number of diverse museums but also a wider range of exhibitions, fashion exhibitions included. However, as museums and the exhibitions they mount have become more socially inclusive, this has been somewhat slow to filter through to the fashion exhibitions. I assert that the shift in fashion exhibitions came as an outcome of new writing on fashion as a social and political entity through Jennifer Craik’s The Face of Fashion. This book has had an influence, beyond academic fashion theorists, on the way in which fashion exhibitions are curated. Since 1997, Judith Clark has curated landmark exhibitions, such as Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back (Antwerp 2004), which examine the idea of what fashion is rather than documenting fashion’s historical evolution. Dress is recognised as a vehicle for complex issues. It is even used to communicate a city’s cultural capital and its metropolitan modernity as “fashion capitals” (Breward and Gilbert). Hence the reluctant but growing willingness for dress to be used in museums to critically interrogate, beyond the celebratory designer retrospectives. Fashion CurationFashion curators need to be “brilliant scavengers” (Peoples). Curators such as Clark pick over what others consider as remains—the neglected, the dissonant—bringing to the fore what is forgotten, where items retrieved from all kinds of spheres are used to fashion exhibitions that reflect the complex mix of the tangible and intangible that is present in fashion. Allowing the brilliant scavengers to pick over the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life can make for exciting exhibitions. Clothing of the everyday can be used to narrate complex stories. We only need think of the black layette worn by Baby Azaria Chamberlain—or the shoe left on the tarmac at Darwin Airport, having fallen off the foot of Mrs Petrov, wife of the Russian diplomat, as she was forced onto a plane. The ordinary remnants of the Chinese miners do not appear to have been kept. Often, objects can be transformed by subsequent significant events.Museums can be sites of transformation for its audiences. Since the late 1980s, through the concept of the New Museum (Vergo), fashion as an exhibition theme has been used to draw in wider museum audiences and to increase visitor numbers. The clothing of Vivienne Westwood, (34 Years in Fashion 2005, NGA) Kylie Minogue (Kylie: An Exhibition 2004­–2005, Powerhouse Museum), or Princess Grace (Princess Grace: Style Icon 2012, Bendigo Art Gallery) drew in the crowds, quantifying the relevance of museums to funding bodies. As Marie Riegels Melchior notes, fashion is fashionable in museums. What is interesting is that the New Museum’s refrain of social inclusion (Sandell) has yet to be wholly embraced by art museums. There is tension between the fashion and museum worlds: a “collision of the fashion and art worlds” (Batersby). Exhibitions of elite designer clothing worn by celebrities have been seen as very commercial operations, tainting the intellectual and academic reputations of cultural institutions. What does fashion curation have to do with the banner mentioned previously? It would be miraculous for authentic clothing worn by Chinese miners to surface now. In revising the history of Lambing Flat, fashion curators need to employ methodologies of absence. As Clynk and Peoples have shown, by examining archives, newspaper advertisem*nts, merchants’ account books, and other material that incidentally describes the business of clothing, absence can become present. While the later technology of photography often shows “Sunday best” fashions, it also illustrates the ordinary and everyday dress of Chinese men carrying out business transactions (MacGowan; Couchman). The images of these men bring to mind the question: were these the children of men, or indeed the men themselves, who had their pigtails violently cut off years earlier? The banner was also used to show that there are quite detailed accounts of events from local and national newspapers of the day. These are accessible online. Accounts of the Chinese experience may have been written up in Chinese newspapers of the day. Access to these would be limited, if they still exist. Historian Karen Schamberger reminds us of the truism: “history is written by the victors” in her observations of a re-enactment of the riots at the Lambing Flat Festival in 2014. The Chinese actors did not have speaking parts. She notes: The brutal actions of the European miners were not explained which made it easier for audience members to distance themselves from [the Chinese] and be comforted by the actions of a ‘white hero’ James Roberts who… sheltered the Chinese miners at the end of the re-enactment. (9)Elsewhere, just out of town at the Chinese Tribute Garden (created in 1996), there is evidence of presence. Plaques indicating donors to the garden carry names such as Judy Chan, Mrs King Chou, and Mr and Mrs King Lam. The musically illustrious five siblings of the Wong family, who live near Young, were photographed in the Discover Central NSW tourist newspaper in 2015 as a drawcard for the Lambing Flat Festival. There is “endurance”, as the title of NMA animation scroll highlights. Conclusion Absence can be turned around to indicate presence. The “presence of absence” (Meyer and Woodthorpe) can be a powerful tool. Seeing is the pre-eminent sense used in museums, and objects are given priority; there are ways of representing evidence and narratives, and describing relationships, other than fashion presence. This is why I argue that dress has an important role to play in museums. Dress is so specific to time and location. It marks specific occasions, particularly at times of social transitions: christening gowns, bar mitzvah shawls, graduation gowns, wedding dresses, funerary shrouds. Dress can also demonstrate the physicality of a specific body: in the extreme, jeans show the physicality of presence when the body is removed. The fashion displays in the museum tell part of the region’s history, but the distraction of the poor display of the dressed mannequins in the LFFM gets in the way of a “good story”.While rioting against the Chinese miners may cause shame and embarrassment, in Australia we need to accept that this was not an isolated event. More formal, less violent, and regulated mechanisms of entry to Australia were put in place, and continue to this day. It may be that a fashion curator, a brilliant scavenger, may unpick the prey for viewers, placing and spacing objects and the visitor, designing in a way to enchant or horrify the audience, and keeping interest alive throughout the exhibition, allowing spaces for thinking and memories. Drawing in those who have not been the audience, working on the absence through participatory modes of activities, can be powerful for a community. Fashion curators—working with the body, stimulating ethical and conscious behaviours, and constructing dialogues—can undoubtedly act as a vehicle for dynamism, for both the museum and its audiences. As the number of museums grow, so should the number of fashion curators.ReferencesArgus. 10 July 1861. 20 June 2015 ‹http://trove.nla.gov.au/›.Batersby, Selena. “Icons of Fashion.” 2014. 6 June 2015 ‹http://adelaidereview.com.au/features/icons-of-fashion/›.Bitgood, Stephen. “When Is 'Museum Fatigue' Not Fatigue?” Curator: The Museum Journal 2009. 12 Apr. 2015 ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2009.tb00344.x/abstract›. Breward, Christopher, and David Gilbert, eds. Fashion’s World Cities. Oxford: Berg Publications, 2006.Buick, Nadia. “Up Close and Personal: Art and Fashion in the Museum.” Art Monthly Australia Aug. (2011): 242.Clynk, J., and S. Peoples. “All Out in the Wash.” Developing Dress History: New Directions in Method and Practice. Eds. Annabella Pollen and Charlotte Nicklas C. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming Sep. 2015. Couchman, Sophia. “Making the ‘Last Chinaman’: Photography and Chinese as a ‘Vanishing’ People in Australia’s Rural Local Histories.” Australian Historical Studies 42.1 (2011): 78–91.Coates, Ian. “The Lambing Flat Riots.” Gold and Civilisation. Canberra: The National Museum of Australia, 2011.Clark, Judith. Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back. London: V&A Publications, 2006.Craik, Jennifer. The Face of Fashion. Oxon: Routledge, 1994.Crane, Susan. “The Distortion of Memory.” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 44–63.Davidson, Patricia. “Museums and the Shaping of Memory.” Heritage Museum and Galleries: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Gerard Corsane. Oxon: Routledge, 2005.Discover Central NSW. Milthorpe: BMCW, Mar. 2015.Dethridge, Anna. Fashion as Social Energy Milan: Connecting Cultures, 2005.Falk, John, and Lyn Dierking. The Museum Experience. Washington: Whaleback Books, 1992.———, John Koran, Lyn Dierking, and Lewis Dreblow. “Predicting Visitor Behaviour.” Curator: The Museum Journal 28.4 (1985): 249–57.Fashion and Politics. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.fitnyc.edu/5103.asp›.Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.tereza-kuldova.com/#!Fashion-India-Spectacular-Capitalism-Exhibition/cd23/85BBF50C-6CB9-4EE5-94BC-DAFDE56ADA96›.Frost, Warwick. “Making an Edgier Interpretation of the Gold Rushes: Contrasting Perspectives from Australia and New Zealand.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11.3 (2005): 235-250.Mansel, Philip. Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costumes from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.Mazda, Xerxes. “Exhibitions and the Power of Narrative.” Museums Australia National Conference. Sydney, Australia. 23 May 2015. Opening speech.McGowan, Barry. Tracking the Dragon: A History of the Chinese in the Riverina. Wagga Wagga: Museum of the Riverina, 2010.Meyer, Morgan, and Kate Woodthorpe. “The Material Presence of Absence: A Dialogue between Museums and Cemeteries.” Sociological Research Online (2008). 6 July 2015 ‹http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/1.html›.National Museum of Australia. “Harvest of Endurance.” 20 July 2015 ‹http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/collection_interactives/endurance_scroll/harvest_of_endurance_html_version/home›. Peoples, Sharon. “Cinderella and the Brilliant Scavengers.” Paper presented at the Fashion Tales 2015 Conference, Milan, June 2015. Ravelli, Louise. Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Riegels Melchior, Marie. “Fashion Museology: Identifying and Contesting Fashion in Museums.” Paper presented at Exploring Critical Issues, Mansfield College, Oxford, 22–25 Sep. 2011. Rolls, Eric. Sojourners: The Epic Story of China's Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1992.Samuels, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 2012.Sandell, Richard. “Social Inclusion, the Museum and the Dynamics of Sectorial Change.” Museum and Society 1.1 (2003): 45–62.Schamberger, Karen. “An Inconvenient Myth—the Lambing Flat Riots and Birth of a Nation.” Paper presented at Foundational Histories Australian Historical Conference, University of Sydney, 6–10 July 2015. Smith, Laurajane. The Users of Heritage. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Vergo, Peter. New Museology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.Williams, Paul. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007.

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Introduction A snapshot, not unlike countless photographs likely to be found in any number of family albums, shows two figures sitting on a park bench: an elderly and amiable looking man grins beneath the rim of a golf cap; a young boy of twelve smiles wide for the camera — a rather banal scene, captured on film. And yet, this seemingly innocent and unexceptional photograph was the site of a remarkable and wide ranging discourse — encompassing American conservatism, celebrity politics, and the end of the Cold War — as the image circulated around the globe during the weeklong state funeral of Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States. Taken in 1997 by the young boy’s grandfather, Ukrainian immigrant Yakov Ravin, during a chance encounter with the former president, the snapshot is believed to be the last public photograph of Ronald Reagan. Published on the occasion of the president’s death, the photograph made “instant celebrities” of the boy, now a twenty-year-old college student, Rostik Denenburg and his grand dad. Throughout the week of Reagan’s funeral, the two joined a chorus of dignitaries, politicians, pundits, and “ordinary” Americans praising Ronald Reagan: “The Great Communicator,” the man who defeated Communism, the popular president who restored America’s confidence, strength, and prosperity. Yes, it was mourning in America again. And the whole world was watching. Not since Princess Diana’s sudden (and unexpected) death, have we witnessed an electronic hagiography of such global proportions. Unlike Diana’s funeral, however, Reagan’s farewell played out in distinctly partisan terms. As James Ridgeway (2004) noted, the Reagan state funeral was “not only face-saving for the current administration, but also perhaps a mask for the American military debacle in Iraq. Not to mention a gesture of America’s might in the ‘war on terror.’” With non-stop media coverage, the weeklong ceremonies provided a sorely needed shot in the arm to the Bush re-election campaign. Still, whilst the funeral proceedings and the attendant media coverage were undeniably excessive in their deification of the former president, the historical white wash was not nearly so vulgar as the antiseptic send off Richard Nixon received back in 1994. That is to say, the piety of the Nixon funeral was at once startling and galling to many who reviled the man (Lapham). By contrast, given Ronald Reagan’s disarming public persona, his uniquely cordial relationship with the national press corps, and most notably, his handler’s mastery of media management techniques, the Reagan idolatry was neither surprising nor unexpected. In this brief essay, I want to consider Reagan’s funeral, and his legacy, in relation to what cultural critics, referring to the production of celebrity, have described as “fame games” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall). Specifically, I draw on the concept of “flashpoints” — moments of media excess surrounding a particular personage — in consideration of the Reagan funeral. Throughout, I demonstrate how Reagan’s death and the attendant media coverage epitomize this distinctive feature of contemporary culture. Furthermore, I observe Reagan’s innovative approaches to electoral politics in the age of television. Here, I suggest that Reagan’s appropriation of the strategies and techniques associated with advertising, marketing and public relations were decisive, not merely in terms of his electoral success, but also in securing his lasting fame. I conclude with some thoughts on the implications of Reagan’s legacy on historical memory, contemporary politics, and what neoconservatives, the heirs of the Reagan Revolution, gleefully describe as the New American Century. The Magic Hour On the morning of 12 June 2004, the last day of the state funeral, world leaders eulogized Reagan, the statesmen, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Among the A-List political stars invited to speak were Margaret Thatcher, former president George H. W. Bush and, to borrow Arundhati Roi’s useful phrase, “Bush the Lesser.” Reagan’s one-time Cold War adversary, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as former Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were also on hand, but did not have speaking parts. Former Reagan administration officials, Supreme Court justices, and congressional representatives from both sides of the aisle rounded out a guest list that read like a who’s who of the American political class. All told, Reagan’s weeklong sendoff was a state funeral at its most elaborate. It had it all—the flag draped coffin, the grieving widow, the riderless horse, and the procession of mourners winding their way through the Rotunda of the US Capitol. In this last regard, Reagan joined an elite group of seven presidents, including four who died by assassination — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy — to be honored by having his remains lie in state in the Rotunda. But just as the deceased president was product of the studio system, so too, the script for the Gipper’s swan song come straight out of Hollywood. Later that day, the Reagan entourage made one last transcontinental flight back to the presidential library in Simi Valley, California for a private funeral service at sunset. In Hollywood parlance, the “magic hour” refers to the quality of light at dusk. It is an ideal, but ephemeral time favored by cinematographers, when the sunlight takes on a golden glow lending grandeur, nostalgia, and oftentimes, a sense of closure to a scene. This was Ronald Reagan’s final moment in the sun: a fitting end for an actor of the silver screen, as well as for the president who mastered televisual politics. In a culture so thoroughly saturated with the image, even the death of a minor celebrity is an occasion to replay film clips, interviews, paparazzi photos and the like. Moreover, these “flashpoints” grow in intensity and frequency as promotional culture, technological innovation, and the proliferation of new media outlets shape contemporary media culture. They are both cause and consequence of these moments of media excess. And, as Turner, Bonner and Marshall observe, “That is their point. It is their disproportionate nature that makes them so important: the scale of their visibility, their overwhelmingly excessive demonstration of the power of the relationship between mass-mediated celebrities and the consumers of popular culture” (3-4). B-Movie actor, corporate spokesman, state governor and, finally, US president, Ronald Reagan left an extraordinary photographic record. Small wonder, then, that Reagan’s death was a “flashpoint” of the highest order: an orgy of images, a media spectacle waiting to happen. After all, Reagan appeared in over 50 films during his career in Hollywood. Publicity stills and clips from Reagan’s film career, including Knute Rockne, All American, the biopic that earned Reagan his nickname “the Gipper”, King’s Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo provided a surreal, yet welcome respite from television’s obsessive (some might say morbidly so) live coverage of Reagan’s remains making their way across country. Likewise, archival footage of Reagan’s political career — most notably, images of the 1981 assassination attempt; his quip “not to make age an issue” during the 1984 presidential debate; and his 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate demanding that Soviet President Gorbachev, “tear down this wall” — provided the raw materials for press coverage that thoroughly dominated the global mediascape. None of which is to suggest, however, that the sheer volume of Reagan’s photographic record is sufficient to account for the endless replay and reinterpretation of Reagan’s life story. If we are to fully comprehend Reagan’s fame, we must acknowledge his seminal engagement with promotional culture, “a professional articulation between the news and entertainment media and the sources of publicity and promotion” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall 5) in advancing an extraordinary political career. Hitting His Mark In a televised address supporting Barry Goldwater’s nomination for the presidency delivered at the 1964 Republican Convention, Ronald Reagan firmly established his conservative credentials and, in so doing, launched one of the most remarkable and influential careers in American politics. Political scientist Gerard J. De Groot makes a compelling case that the strategy Reagan and his handlers developed in the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign would eventually win him the presidency. The centerpiece of this strategy was to depict the former actor as a political outsider. Crafting a persona he described as “citizen politician,” Reagan’s great appeal and enormous success lie in his uncanny ability to project an image founded on traditional American values of hard work, common sense and self-determination. Over the course of his political career, Reagan’s studied optimism and “no-nonsense” approach to public policy would resonate with an electorate weary of career politicians. Charming, persuasive, and seemingly “authentic,” Reagan ran gubernatorial and subsequent presidential campaigns that were distinctive in that they employed sophisticated public relations and marketing techniques heretofore unknown in the realm of electoral politics. The 1966 Reagan gubernatorial campaign took the then unprecedented step of employing an advertising firm, Los Angeles-based Spencer-Roberts, in shaping the candidate’s image. Leveraging their candidate’s ease before the camera, the Reagan team crafted a campaign founded upon a sophisticated grasp of the television industry, TV news routines, and the medium’s growing importance to electoral politics. For instance, in the days before the 1966 Republican primary, the Reagan team produced a five-minute film using images culled from his campaign appearances. Unlike his opponent, whose television spots were long-winded, amateurish and poorly scheduled pieces that interrupted popular programs, like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Reagan’s short film aired in the early evening, between program segments (De Groot). Thus, while his opponent’s television spot alienated viewers, the Reagan team demonstrated a formidable appreciation not only for televisual style, but also, crucially, a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of television scheduling, audience preferences and viewing habits. Over the course of his political career, Reagan refined his media driven, media directed campaign strategy. An analysis of his 1980 presidential campaign reveals three dimensions of Reagan’s increasingly sophisticated media management strategy (Covington et al.). First, the Reagan campaign carefully controlled their candidate’s accessibility to the press. Reagan’s penchant for potentially damaging off-the-cuff remarks and factual errors led his advisors to limit journalists’ interactions with the candidate. Second, the character of Reagan’s public appearances, including photo opportunities and especially press conferences, grew more formal. Reagan’s interactions with the press corps were highly structured affairs designed to control which reporters were permitted to ask questions and to help the candidate anticipate questions and prepare responses in advance. Finally, the Reagan campaign sought to keep the candidate “on message.” That is to say, press releases, photo opportunities and campaign appearances focused on a single, consistent message. This approach, known as the Issue of the Day (IOD) media management strategy proved indispensable to advancing the administration’s goals and achieving its objectives. Not only was the IOD strategy remarkably effective in influencing press coverage of the Reagan White House, this coverage promoted an overwhelmingly positive image of the president. As the weeklong funeral amply demonstrated, Reagan was, and remains, one of the most popular presidents in modern American history. Reagan’s popular (and populist) appeal is instructive inasmuch as it illuminates the crucial distinction between “celebrity and its premodern antecedent, fame” observed by historian Charles L. Ponce de Leone (13). Whereas fame was traditionally bestowed upon those whose heroism and extraordinary achievements distinguished them from common people, celebrity is a defining feature of modernity, inasmuch as celebrity is “a direct outgrowth of developments that most of us regard as progressive: the spread of the market economy and the rise of democratic, individualistic values” (Ponce de Leone 14). On one hand, then, Reagan’s celebrity reflects his individualism, his resolute faith in the primacy of the market, and his defense of “traditional” (i.e. democratic) American values. On the other hand, by emphasizing his heroic, almost supernatural achievements, most notably his vanquishing of the “Evil Empire,” the Reagan mythology serves to lift him “far above the common rung of humanity” raising him to “the realm of the divine” (Ponce de Leone 14). Indeed, prior to his death, the Reagan faithful successfully lobbied Congress to create secular shrines to the standard bearer of American conservatism. For instance, in 1998, President Clinton signed a bill that officially rechristened one of the US capitol’s airports to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. More recently, conservatives working under the aegis of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project have called for the creation of even more visible totems to the Reagan Revolution, including replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s profile on the dime with Reagan’s image and, more dramatically, inscribing Reagan in stone, alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore (Gordon). Therefore, Reagan’s enduring fame rests not only on the considerable symbolic capital associated with his visual record, but also, increasingly, upon material manifestations of American political culture. The High Stakes of Media Politics What are we to make of Reagan’s fame and its implications for America? To begin with, we must acknowledge Reagan’s enduring influence on modern electoral politics. Clearly, Reagan’s “citizen politician” was a media construct — the masterful orchestration of ideological content across the institutional structures of news, public relations and marketing. While some may suggest that Reagan’s success was an anomaly, a historical aberration, a host of politicians, and not a few celebrities — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them — emulate Reagan’s style and employ the media management strategies he pioneered. Furthermore, we need to recognize that the Reagan mythology that is so thoroughly bound up in his approach to media/politics does more to obscure, rather than illuminate the historical record. For instance, in her (video taped) remarks at the funeral service, Margaret Thatcher made the extraordinary claim — a central tenet of the Reagan Revolution — that Ronnie won the cold war “without firing a shot.” Such claims went unchallenged, at least in the establishment press, despite Reagan’s well-documented penchant for waging costly and protracted proxy wars in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Similarly, the Reagan hagiography failed to acknowledge the decisive role Gorbachev and his policies of “reform” and “openness” — Perestroika and Glasnost — played in the ending of the Cold War. Indeed, Reagan’s media managed populism flies in the face of what radical historian Howard Zinn might describe as a “people’s history” of the 1980s. That is to say, a broad cross-section of America — labor, racial and ethnic minorities, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists among them — rallied in vehement opposition to Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies. And yet, throughout the weeklong funeral, the divisiveness of the Reagan era went largely unnoted. In the Reagan mythology, then, popular demonstrations against an unprecedented military build up, the administration’s failure to acknowledge, let alone intervene in the AIDS epidemic, and the growing disparity between rich and poor that marked his tenure in office were, to borrow a phrase, relegated to the dustbin of history. In light of the upcoming US presidential election, we ought to weigh how Reagan’s celebrity squares with the historical record; and, equally important, how his legacy both shapes and reflects the realities we confront today. Whether we consider economic and tax policy, social services, electoral politics, international relations or the domestic culture wars, Reagan’s policies and practices continue to determine the state of the union and inform the content and character of American political discourse. Increasingly, American electoral politics turns on the pithy soundbite, the carefully orchestrated pseudo-event, and a campaign team’s unwavering ability to stay on message. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ronald Reagan’s unmistakable influence upon the current (and illegitimate) occupant of the White House. References Covington, Cary R., Kroeger, K., Richardson, G., and J. David Woodward. “Shaping a Candidate’s Image in the Press: Ronald Reagan and the 1980 Presidential Election.” Political Research Quarterly 46.4 (1993): 783-98. De Groot, Gerard J. “‘A Goddamed Electable Person’: The 1966 California Gubernatorial Campaign of Ronald Reagan.” History 82.267 (1997): 429-48. Gordon, Colin. “Replace FDR on the Dime with Reagan?” History News Network 15 December, 2003. http://hnn.us/articles/1853.html>. Lapham, Lewis H. “Morte de Nixon – Death of Richard Nixon – Editorial.” Harper’s Magazine (July 1994). http://www.harpers.org/MorteDeNixon.html>. Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Ridgeway, James. “Bush Takes a Ride in Reagan’s Wake.” Village Voice (10 June 2004). http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0423/mondo5.php>. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Zinn, Howard. The Peoples’ History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Howley, Kevin. "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>. APA Style Howley, K. (Nov. 2004) "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>.

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Abstract:

Until the mid 1980s, Bordo writes, anorexia was considered only in pathological terms (45-69). Since then, many theorists such as Malson and Orbach have described how the anorexic individual is formed in and out of culture, and how, according to this line of argument, eating disorders exist in a spectrum of “dis-order” that primarily affects women. This theoretical approach, however, has been criticised for leaving open the possibility of a more general pathologising of female media consumers (Bray 421). There has been some argument, too, about how to read the agency of the anorexic individual: about whether she or he is protesting against or operating “as if in collusion with,” as Bordo puts it (177), the system of power relations that orients us, as she writes, to the external gaze (27). Ferreday argues that what results from this “spectacular regime of looking” (148) is that western discourse has abjected not only the condition of anorexia but also the anorectic, which in practical terms means that, among other measures, the websites and blogs of anorectics are constantly being removed from the Internet (Dias 36). How, then, might anorexia operate in relation to itself?In the clinical fields the subjectivity of the anorectic has become an important area of study. Norwegian eating disorder specialist Skårderud has discussed what he calls an anorectic’s “impaired mentalisation,” which describes a difficulty, as a result of transgenerationally transmitted attachment patterns, in regulating the self in terms of “understanding other people’s mind, one’s own mind and also minding one’s own body” (86). He explains: “Not being able to feel themselves from within, the patients are forced to experience the self from without” (86). While a Foucauldian approach to eating disorders like Bordo’s might be considered a useful tool for analysing this externalised aspect of the anorexic predicament, anorectics’ difficulty with feeling “themselves from within” remains unexamined in this model. Ferreday has described the efforts, in more recent discourse, to engage with the subjective experience of “anorexic embodiment” (140). She is conscious, however, that an enduring preoccupation with “the relation between bodies and images” has made the relations between embodied selves “almost entirely under-theorized”, and an understanding of the lived experience of eating disorders too often reduced to the totalising representations of “abject spectacle” or “heroic myth” (153). In this context Ferreday has welcomed the publication of Warin’s ethnographic study Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia for providing a point of access to the subjective experience of anorectics. One important aspect of Warin’s findings, though, remains unremarked upon in Ferreday’s review: this is Warin’s astonishing conclusion from her investigations that anorexic practices successfully “removed the threat of abjection” for her participants (127). It is exactly at this point in the current debate about eating disorders and subjectivity, and the role of abjection in that subjectivity, that I wish to draw upon the Gothic. As Hogle maintains, abjection has a significant role to play in the Gothic. Like Warin, he refers to Kristeva’s notion of the abject when he describes the “throwing off” whereby we might achieve, in Hogle’s paraphrasing of Kristeva, “a oneness with ourselves instead of an otherness from ourselves in ourselves” (“Ghost” 498-499). He describes how the Gothic becomes a “site of ‘abjection’” (“Cristabel” 22), where it “depicts and enacts these very processes of abjection, where fundamental interactions of contrary states and categories are cast off into antiquated and ‘othered’ beings” (“Ghost” 499). This plays out, he writes, in a process of what he calls a “re-faking of fakery” that serves “both to conceal and confront some of the more basic conflicts in Western culture” (“Ghost” 500). Here, Hogle might be describing how the abject anorexic body functions in the “spectacular regime of looking” that comprises western discourse, as Ferreday has portrayed it. Skårderud, however, as noted above, has suggested that the difficulty experienced by those with eating disorders is a difficulty that involves a regulation of the self that is understood to occur prior to the more organised possibility of casting off contrary states onto “othered” beings. In short, the eating disordered individual seems to be already an embodied site of abjection, which suggests, in light of Hogle’s work on abjection in the Gothic, that eating disordered experience might be understood as in some way analogous to an experience of the Gothic. Following Budgeon, who has stressed the importance of engaging with individual “accounts of embodiment” as means of moving beyond the current representation-bound impasses in our thinking about eating disorders (51), in this paper I will be touching briefly on “pro-ana” or pro-anorexic Internet material before proceeding to a more detailed analysis of Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. Punter, drawing on trauma theorists Abraham and Torok through Derrida, writes that “Gothic tests what it might be like to be a shell […] a shell which has been filled to the brim with something that looks like ourselves but is irremediably other, to the point that we are driven out, exiled from our home, removed from the body” (Pathologies16). In response, I will be suggesting that the eating disordered voice enacts the Gothic by dramatising “what it might be like to be a shell” since that embodied voice finds itself to be the site of abjection: the site where behind its distractingly visible “shell”, the ego, using anorexic idealisation, is compelled to use anorexic practices that “throw off” in an effort to achieve an ever-elusive sense of oneness. Due to Punter's long familiarity and shared vocabulary with a wide range of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, I will be particularly referring to his evocations of the Gothic, which he has characterised as a “kind of cultural threshold” (Introduction 9), to demonstrate how an examination of eating disordered experience alongside the Gothic might promise a more nuanced access to eating disordered subjectivity than has been available hitherto. Marya Hornbacher maintains in her memoir Wasted that anorectics, far from hating food, are in fact thinking about it constantly (151). If anorectics always think about food, the visual content of their Internet sites might seem to suggest otherwise: that their thoughts are mostly occupied by bodies—particularly thin, emaciated bodies—which form the material that these sites call “thinspiration” for the “pro-ana” writer and reader. Thinspiration, although not yet recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary, is understood to designate inspiring words or images of thinness that, further to Hornbacher's observations, might be understood as helping the food-obsessed anorectic to manage that obsession. Many pro-ana sites have their own thinspiration pages which, aside from the disturbing frame of the pro-ana verbal content that can include specifying dangerous techniques for abstaining, vomiting and purging, might be little more distressing to a viewer than any readily accessible fashion imagery. On the pro-ana site, however, whether mixed among the seemingly ordinary images or in a section all on its own,the spectre of the walking dead will often intrude. A “pro ana thinspiration” Google image search might yield, similarly, a small cadaverous corner to the purportedly inspiring imagery. It might also yield a tweeted response, from a pro-ana tweeter, to what might have been similar images of thinspiration which, far from affording inspiration, seem to have prompted intense anxiety: “I see the pictures I put up, then I see the morning thinspo everyone tweets, and I just feel gross ..[sic]”. This admission of despair sends a fearful, anxious affect loose among the otherwise serene uniformity of the “thinspo” imagery from which it had ricocheted, apparently, in the first place. Thinspiration, it seems, might threaten just as often as it assists the eating disordered subject to achieve self-regulation through their anorexic practices and, as this screen shot suggests, the voice can offer the researcher a small but potent insight into the drama of the eating disordered struggle.Psychologists Goldsmith and Widseth have stated that Hornbacher’s Wasted “gives the reader a feel for what it is like to live in an anorexic client’s head” (32). Although the book was a bestseller, newspaper reviews, on the whole, were ambivalent. There was a sense of danger inherent in the turbulent, “lurid” details (Zitin), and unresolved nature of the narrative (MacDonald). Goldsmith and Widseth even refer to Hornbacher's reported relapse and rehospitalisation that followed a “re-immersing” in “the narrative” of her own book (32). Kilgour has observed that the Gothic is a space where effects come into being without agents and creations prosper without their creators (221). While Radcliffe's novels might tend to contradict this claim, it is important to note that it is at the borders between explication and a seeming impossibility of explication that the Gothic imaginary draws its power. Miles, for example, has argued that Radcliffe is concerned not so much with dispelling the supernatural per se but with “‘equivocal phenomena of the mind’” (99-102). In Wasted, Hornbacher writes of her fear of “unsafe” foods whose uncanny abilities include the way they “will not travel through my body in the usual biological fashion but will magically make me grow” (20). Clearly, Hornbacher is not referring here to reasoned premises. Her sense, however, of the ambiguous nature of foodstuffs bears an important relation to Radcliffe's “equivocal phenomena”, and indeed the border-defying aspects of Kristevan abjection. In Abject Relations, Warin discovered that her anorexic participants shared what seemed to be magical beliefs in the ability of foodstuffs to penetrate the body through skin or through the nose via smells (106-127). The specific irrationality of these beliefs were not at issue except that they prompted the means, such as the washing of hands after touching food or shoving towels under doors to impede the intrusion of smells that, along with the anorexic practices of starving, purging and vomiting, served to protect these participants from abjection. When Hornbacher describes her experience of bulimia, the force, textures and sheer weight of the food that she eats in unimaginable, enormous quantities so that it bursts the sewer and floods the basem*nt as vomit (223) become all the more disconcerting when the disgusting effects, whose course through the sewer system cannot be ignored, are preceded by evocations of occasions when she anxiously searches for, buys, consumes and vomits or purges food: “one day you find yourself walking along, and you impulsively stop in a restaurant, order an enormous dinner, and puke in the woods” (120-1). Hornbacher’s eating disorder in fact is figured as an insidious double: “It and I live in an uncomfortable state of mutual antagonism. That is, to me, a far cry better than once upon a time, when it and I shared a bed, a brain, a body” (4). This sense of the diabolical double is most evident when the narrative is traversed by the desperation of an agitated protagonist who seems to be continually moving between the constricted upper spaces of dormitories, rooms and bathrooms, and gaping, sewerage filled basem*nts, and whose identity as either the original or the double to that original is difficult to determine. For Hornbacher, even at the end of her memoir when she is presented as almost recovered from her eating disorders, the protagonist not only continues to be doubled, but also exists in fragments: she speaks to herself "as if [she] were a horse", speaking "severely to [her] heart" who will pull her down "by the hair" into a nightmarish sleep (288-289). Punter has elaborated on the way dream landscapes in the Gothic open space into paradoxically constricted but labyrinthine infinities that serve to complicate what he has referred to as the two dimensions of our quotidian experience (Pathologies 123). In Wasted, beds give way to icy depths of watery sleeps, and numerous mirrors either fragment the body into parts or alienated other selves, or yield so that the narrator might step, suddenly, into “the neverworld” (10). Out of the two in the doubling, it is not so much the eating disorder—the “It”—but the “I” that becomes most monstrous as occasionally this “I” escapes onto the empty streets where, glimpsed crouching, anxious and confused in a beam of headlights, she reminds us of Frankenstein’s creature on the mountainsides or in the wastes since, as her capacity to articulate is lost in that moment, she becomes an “othered” object in the landscape (173). When, one winter, Hornbacher develops an obsession with running up and down the hall at her school at five am, she sprouts fine fur all over her translucent white skin and begins “to look a bit haunted” (109); later, in a moment of horrifying self-awareness, she realises that she “looked like a monster, most of [her] hair gone, [her] skin the gray color of rotten meat” (266). Punter writes that it is in the “dizzying heights and depths” of the Gothic that such agitation can become frantic: “in vertigo, the sense that there is indeed nowhere to go, not up, not down, and also that staying where you are has its own imponderable but terrible dangers” (Pathologies 10). Hornbacher states that the “worst night of [her] entire life” was spent with “the old familiar adrenaline rush pumping through [her] [….] running through the town, stopping here and there and eating and throwing up in alleyways and eating and blacking out” (273). This ceaseless, anxious, movement, where it is not clear who or what is doing the pursuing, but clear that it is a flight from the condition of abjection, is echoed in the very structure of Hornbacher’s memoir, which moves back and forth in time, seemingly at random, always searching for the decisive event that might, at last, explain or give a definitive beginning point to her disorders. Not only is the “beginning” of the disorders—an ultimate explanation or initiating event—sought but never found, but the narrative also concludes with an Afterword in which the narrator is, demonstrably, yet to recover, and even as she lies in bed next to her husband, is unable to rest (289). As Punter writes: “In Gothic, we do not directly ask, What happened? We ask, Where are we, where have we come from—not in the sense of a birth question, but as a question of how it is that we have ‘come adrift’” (Pathologies 209)—a question which, as Hornbacher finds, she is unable to answer, but nonetheless is obsessed with pursuing—to the point where the entire narrative seems to participate in the very pursuit that comprises the agitated perambulations of her eating disordered body. Although the narrator in Hornbacher’s Wasted, is strikingly alone—even at the end of the memoir, when she is represented as married, her husband is little more than a comforting body—throughout the text she is haunted by the a/effects of others. Hornbacher’s family is shown to be a community where the principle of nurturing is turned on its head. The narrator’s earliest evocation of herself presents a monstrous inversion of the expected maternal relationship: “My mother was unable to breast-feed me because it made her feel as if she were being devoured” (12). The mother’s drive to restrict her own eating is implicated in the narrator’s earliest difficulties with food, and the mother’s denials and evasions make it all the harder for the narrator to make any sense of her own experience (156). A fear of becoming fat haunts all of the family on her mother’s side (137, 240-1); the father, conversely, is figured in terms of excess (22). When the two grandmothers care for the narrator, behind their contradictory attentions towards the young Hornbacher—one to put her on a diet, the other to feed her up (24)—lies a dearth of biographical material. The narrator’s attempts to make sense of her predicament, where her assertion, “there were no events in my life that were overly traumatic” (195), sounds the edges of this void and only serves to signal that this discomforting contested empty space is traversed, as Punter might suggest, by “the hidden narrative of abuse” (Pathologies 15). Certainly the vague awareness of a great-grandmother who, “a hefty person, was mocked” (98) hints at the kind of emotional trauma that might be considered too abject to be remembered. Punter observes that in the Gothic we are in the wake of the effects of events that we cannot know have even happened (Pathologies 208), and the remains of history that assault us “are not to be obviously or readily learned from; for they are the remains of the body, they are the imaginary products of vulnerability and fragility, they are the ‘remains’ of that which still ‘remains to us’; or not” (Pathologies 12). Hornbacher’s sense of disassociation from her self as a body, and the specificity of her own feelings, which she is only ever able to describe as “pissed or fine” (203), evokes an over-smooth shell, like the idealised images of thinspiration that both belie and reveal their anxious nether sides. Even at the conclusion of the memoir, the narrator still does not “yet” know what it might mean for her to be “well” or “normal” (283). Hornbacher writes: “I always had this mental image of me, spilling out of the shell of my skin, flooding the room with tears” (25). In eating disorders, the self, which has never been whole and entire, or self-regulated in Skårderud’s terms, struggles to self-regulate against the ever threatening encroachment of the abject in a way that suggests essentially Gothic scenarios; in eating disordered self-narratives like Hornbacher’s Wasted, this struggle is evident in the very Gothic dynamics of the text. Without the Gothic, which affords us a means of perceiving eating disordered subjectivity in all of its detailed and dramatic dimensions—a subjectivity that theorists to date have found difficult to grasp—neither the abjection inherent in the “spilling” nor the anxious idealisation of the very somatic sense of the ego in the “shell” in Hornbacher's statement can be, I would suggest, sufficiently understood. ReferencesAbraham, Nicolas, Maria Torok, and Nicholas T. Rand. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Tr. Nicholas T. Rand. Vol. 1, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Bray, Abigail. “The Anorexic Body: Reading Disorders.” Cultural Studies 10.3 (1996): 413-29. Budgeon, Shelley. “Identity as an Embodied Event.” Body and Society 9.1 (2003): 35-55. Dias, Karen. “The Ana Sanctuary: Women's Pro-Anorexia Narratives in Cyberspace.” Journal of International Women's Studies 4.2 (2003): 31-45. Ferreday, Debra. “Anorexia and Abjection: A Review Essay.” Body and Society 18.2 (2012): 139-55. Goldsmith, Barbara L., and Jane C. Widseth. “Digesting Wasted.” Journal of College Student Psychotherapy 15.1 (2000): 31-34. Hogle, Jerrold E. “‘Cristabel’ as Gothic: The Abjection of Instability.” Gothic Studies 7.1 (2005): 18-28. Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection.” A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012: 496-509. Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995. MacDonald, Marianne. “Her Parents Always Argued at Meal Times. So, Perched in Her High Chair, She Decided Not to Eat. At all. Marianne MacDonald reviews Wasted: Coming Back from an Addiction to Starvation.” The Observer: Books, 22 Mar. 1998: 016. Malson, Helen. “Womæn under Erasure: Anorexic Bodies in Postmodern Context.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 9.2 (1999): 137-53. Orbach, Susie. Bodies. London: Profile Books, 2009. Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age. New York: Norton, 1986. Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. Houndsmill: MacMillan P, 1998. Punter, David. Introduction. A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012: 1-9. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (the 1818 Text). Ed. James Rieger. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974. Skårderud, Finn. “Bruch Revisited and Revised.” European Eating Disorders Review 17.2 (2009): 83-88. Warin, Megan. Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia. New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 2010. Zitin, Abigail. “The Hungry Mind.” The Village Voice: Books, 3 Feb. 1998: 135.