At the Interface: Continuity and Transformation in Culture and Politics (At the Interface: Probing the Boundaries, 20)

At the Interface: Continuity and Transformation in Culture and Politics

At the Interface

Dr Robert Fisher Series Editor

Advisory Board Dr Margaret Sönser Breen Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Salwa Ghaly Professor Michael Goodman Professor Asa Kasher Mr Christopher Macallister

Professor Diana Medlicott Revd Stephen Morris Professor John Parry Dr David Seth Preston Professor Bernie Warren Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 20 A volume in the Probing the Boundaries project ‘Transformations in Politics, Culture and Society’

Probing the Boundaries

At the Interface: Continuity and Transformation in Culture and Politics

Edited by

Joss Hands & Eugenia Siapera

Amsterdam – New York, NY 2004

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation – Paper of documents – Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1732-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2004 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents Introduction Eugenia Siapera & Joss Hands

PART I

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Cultural Politics The Edge of Reason: the Myth of Bridget Jones Stephen Maddison & Merl Storr

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Representing Gender Benders: Consumerism and the Muting of Subversion Sofie Van Bauwel

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Politics, the Papacy and the Media Maria Way

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PART II

Political Cultures

The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Difference: An Analysis of the Newspaper Reports of the Yoruba/Hausa Ethnic clash of 1st – 3rd February 2002 Kate Azuka Omenugha

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The Role of the Alternative Afrikaans Media in the Political Transformation Process in South Africa Abraham G. van der Vyver

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Internet Regulation à la Turque : Historical and Contemporary Problem Analyses of the Internet Environment in Turkey Asli Tunç

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Asylum Politics in Cyberspace Eugenia Siapera

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Living With E-Utopia: Camus, Habermas and the Politics of Virtual Dissent Joss Hands

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PART III

At the Interface

The Conflicted Significance of Racial Controversies in Major League Baseball and American History Shane Aaron Lachtman

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Transformation of Trauma Without Rehabilitating Failure: The Dual Attempt at Reshaping America’s Memory of the War in Viet Nam in Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers (2002) R. C. Lutz

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Popular History and Re-membering the Nation Emine Onculer

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Notes on Contributors

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Welcome to a Probing the Boundaries Project Transformations in Politics, Culture and Society is an inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project which seeks to examine the emerging idea of 'transformation' and understand the associated models of change which are being developed in relation to it. The project aims to identify and assess the impact of transformations in politics, culture, and society. The role of media in provoking, supporting and representing such changes - for example, art and art history, cinema and film, literature and poetry, music, newspapers, and television and radio - will also be explored. The project will critically engage with a number of core themes; •

dissolution, liberation, reconstruction; political, and economic rejuvenation

•

invasion, resistance, revolution

•

the place of street drama, posters, graffiti

•

the importance of land

•

education, student rebellions, and the role of the intelligentsia

•

cultural revolutions: status of women, feminism, sexual freedom; representations of gender, ethnicity, sexuality; pornography; cultural difference and otherness

•

international confrontation; the impact of globalisation

•

third world issues

•

medical and social issues in film

•

role of religion and religious institutions

•

influence of new technologies and access to data

•

the role of the law and legal processes

Dr Robert Fisher Inter-Disciplinary.Net http://www.inter-disciplinary.net

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Introduction Eugenia Siapera & Joss Hands In a world increasingly characterised by flows of capital, persons and ideas, change and transformation acquires an unprecedented gravity. These multiple flows generate new patterns of economics, power and communication as well as a set of responses to such patterns. The force with which the ensuing process of transformation, continuity and struggle is re-organising the lived environment is startling. Thus there is an imperative for those that are subject, and party to, these dynamic encounters to make sense of them through contextualisation, reflection and a sharing of intellectual resources. While such reflexivity has been theoretically captured by social theory1, we have yet to chronicle the cultural changes and continuities that weave the fabric of our societies. To reflect requires that we stop for a moment, look back and trace our trajectory. This will reveal where the boundaries of society, culture, power and politics are made porous, disintegrate, are intensified or indeed are constituted anew. Such understanding is vital in that it creates new spaces for action. It is only through recording and mapping where these spheres meet, break apart and are reconstituted to form the ‘scapes’2 in which we live that we can hope to better understand where we stand, and perhaps even the routes available to us. It was in this spirit of shared resources and reflection that the conference that led to this book was convened. Scholars from across disciplines as diverse as political science, cultural and communication studies, psychology, philosophy and journalism gathered to offer new perspectives and shared dilemmas. The themes, or spheres, of culture and politics emerged as the substantive overarching concern of the academics and writers present. From its elitist connotations to its anthropological definitions, culture has always been political. At the same time, one has only to look at multicultural struggles to see the potency of the cultural within the political. However, the two are not co-terminus, and it is precisely the intensification and blurring of this boundary that underlies this book. The chapters, in their own distinct and individual ways, trace how culture and politics are both separate, but interwoven, and from their combination we can garner a picture of the construction, transgression and intensification of the boundaries that both link and divide these elemental spheres. Hence, chapters that foreground the cultural element were grouped together in the first part, while chapters prioritising the political comprise the second part of the book. Finally, in the third part, chapters explicitly address both elements.

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The first part on Culture raises important issues of transformations in ideas, narratives, lifestyles, identities, as chapters here deal with topics such as religion (Way), gender (van Bauwel), and lifestyle (Maddison and Storr). In dealing with such diverse themes, these chapters highlight both the complexities and the interrelatedness of contemporary cultural forms. In so doing, they throw into question the very boundedness of culture and foreground its susceptibility to political and historical context. Following actual everyday practices through focusing on film and television, chapters in this part tease out precisely the changes and continuities that characterise contemporary cultural practices. Steven Maddison and Merl Storr critically examine the popular narrative of Bridget Jones’ Diary by looking at the way in which it actually reinforces the very boundaries it seeks to transgress. They draw a parallel between this popular book and subsequent film and the current hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, thereby showing the mutual reliance of cultural formats on political narratives. A similar dynamic is manifest in the analysis of gender bending narratives and practices in Sofie van Bauwel’s chapter. In exposing the discrepancies between the theorising of gender bending and its actual reception by young television audiences, she shows that the academic and artistic subversion of boundaries does not necessarily have a popular counterpart. In this respect, if the political objective of gender bending has been to question gender boundaries through cultural practice, its equivocal and multiple readings point to the irreducibility of culture to politics, and the difficulties of translating cultural practices into political gains. A similar degree of ambiguity can be discerned in Maria Way’s analysis of the Papacy’s relationship with the mass media. By describing the changing relationship between the two institutions, Way shows the difficulties in attempting to harness cultural forms for political ends. If the focus above has been on the cultural, the second part offers a different perspective, prioritising the political. Chapters here revisit the relationship between the press and politics (Omenugha and van den Vyuer), and examine the novel political relationships fostered by new technologies (Tunc, Siapera, Hands). Kate Omenugha’s chapter shows clearly the direct involvement of the news media in power politics: the political use of news media by the diverse groups comprising Nigeria points to the dangers of excessive partisanship coupled with a lack of a common media culture. The potency of the media as a political tool is, however, great, when summoned by civil society. Braam van der Vyver’s report from South Africa provides strong evidence of the political force generated by the bonds of culture and community. While the above two chapters show the struggle between the cultural and the political, the next three, in focusing on new media and technologies, examine the dynamics and tensions generated as both politics and culture move into a new arena. Thus, Asli Tunc’s chapter on

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the attempt to regulate the Internet in Turkey, shows the inadequacies of existing political structures in coping with this new context. By pointing to the inability of official politics to regulate and control the dynamic and open Internet use in Turkey, Tunc shows the extent to which Internet cultures force change upon even the most rigid political interests. When, however, the Internet is used by established government agencies, its effects can be truly ambiguous. This is the argument pursued in Eugenia Siapera’s chapter. Focusing on the politics of asylum, Siapera shows the instrumental usage of the Internet by both refugee support NGOs and relevant government agencies in the UK, thereby pointing to the difficulties in normatively assessing the relationship of the Internet and politics. The task of normatively theorising this relationship is taken up by Joss Hands. In his chapter, Hands seeks to outline the dangers involved in separating the normative from the ideal. Mobilising Albert Camus’ idea of relative utopia, Hands provides a conceptual bridge that can then guide our political encounters with the Internet. All these articles highlight the idea that culture provides the ground of politics: its fragmentation/polarization in Nigeria, its mobilisation in South Africa, its ongoing struggle in Turkey, its tensions in Britain, and its hopes in civil society, show that culture is the sine qua non for politics. The chapters in the third part explore precisely this inextricability of culture and politics. The issue of racism is taken up by Shane Lachtman, whose focus is on sport, and specifically on Major League Baseball. Critically examining the ways in which certain individuals are stigmatised as racist while at the same time racist structures remain intact, Lachtman alerts us to the problems of attending to culture without attending to politics, echoing Walter Benjamin’s3 remark on the aesthetisation of politics. Reinhart Lutz’s chapter on the filmic reinterpretation of the Viet Nam war clearly shows the intricate connections between culture and politics. Thus, the Hollywood film When We Were Soldiers seeks to politically revalorize America’s involvement in the Viet Nam war ultimately having ambiguous results. Finally, Emine Onculer’s chapter shows that the collective re-imagination of national identity is fraught with dangers. Examining the recent Turkish film Salkim Hanim’in Taneleri, Onculer points to the marginalisation of certain groups involved in this one-sided effort, thereby reminding us of the multidimensionality of culture. It is here that the irreducibility of culture to politics becomes clear: the political aim of modernisation in Turkey appears only achievable through the effacement of marginal voices. Such voices, nevertheless, demand to be heard both culturally and politically. We believe, as editors of this collection, that the chapters below constitute a necessary moment of reflection. At the same time, however, they also constitute an active process of engagement with the urgent questions forced upon us by the flows of ideas, persons and capital alluded

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to earlier. While this process can never be complete, this book represents and documents the first step of an ongoing dialogue and a fruitful intellectual exchange. Amsterdam, July 2003 Joss Hands Eugenia Siapera (Editors)

Notes 1

Ulrich Beck, Giddens Anthony, and Lash, Scott, ed., Reflexive Modernisation (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Illuminations (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973).

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Beck, Ulrich, Giddens Anthony, and Lash, Scott, ed. Reflexive Modernisation. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Illuminations (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973).

Part I Cultural Politics

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The Edge of Reason: the Myth of Bridget Jones Stephen Maddison & Merl Storr Abstract In this chapter we attempt to uncover some of the political myths that underpin the popularity of the character of Bridget Jones, in both the two novels by Helen Fielding, and in the film of 2001. Our starting point is the widespread acclaim and recognition that Fielding’s character has garnered: she has been said to encapsulate “the spirit of the age”. We suggest that the popularity of the Bridget character rests in part on the identification solicited by her ‘ditziness’, a particularly postfeminist construction of heterosexual femininity. We also suggest that the novels are highly racialised and marked by strong class difference, where both sets of material and political inequalities are naturalised in the context of Bridget’s narratively disaster-prone life. We indicate ways in which the gender, class and racial myths of Bridget Jones reaffirm neo-liberal ideology, which abstracts the individual from the material context of which s/he is a product. Key words Feminism; postfeminism; femininity; popular culture; class; whiteness; heterosexuality; neo-liberalism. 1.

Introduction ‘That’s what’s so silly about feminism, darling. Anyone with an ounce of sense knows we’re the superior race and the only nigger in the woodpile is –’ ‘Mother!’ ‘— when they think they can sit around when they retire and not do any housework. […] I don’t know! You all seem to have some silly idea about getting Indiana Jones in your house loading the dishwasher. You have to train them.’1

Bridget Jones is no mere fictional character, she’s the Spirit of the Age. Her diary presents a perfect zeitgeist of single female woes. It rings with the unmistakable tone of something that is true to the marrow and captures what – alas – it is like to be female. Any woman of a certain age

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The Myth of Bridget Jones

can recognise elements of Bridget in herself. Indeed she is far more than the patron saint of single women: she is everyman, or rather, everyperson. She is the most enchanting heroine for the millennium.2 Actually of course Bridget Jones is a mere fictional character, albeit an exceptionally successful one. Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary has sold well over ten million copies in more than 30 languages worldwide.3 It was followed by an enormously successful sequel novel, Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, first published in 1999. The 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary made more money in the UK in its first weekend than any previous British film; at the time of writing a sequel film is in production. So if Bridget Jones is the spirit of the age, what age is this, and what kind of spirit? In this chapter we want to assess whether Bridget Jones is the symbol of political, cultural or social transformation that so many critics have claimed that she is. Our argument is that if anything she is the opposite: a symbol of conservatism, neoliberalism and postfeminism. Our opening quote from The Edge of Reason encapsulates those themes. Bridget’s mother’s “common sense” is reassuring precisely insofar as it produces a postfeminist attack on feminism and a neo-liberal sneer at “politically correct” objections to racism. It seems unlikely that many readers and viewers believe Bridget literally to be a real person: 4 her reality is an illusion created by the extraordinarily powerful ways in which the novels and films interpellate their audience, especially their heterosexual female audience. The “That’s me!” reaction noted by Whelehan5 and a host of other critics has also been strongly experienced by our own students when we have used Bridget Jones’s Diary in the classroom, and was neatly summed up by one student who stopped Merl in the corridor one afternoon to announce excitedly “I AM BRIDGET JONES”. Fielding’s use of the first person confessional idiom was one of the things that made the original Bridget Jones newspaper column, later to become the first novel, so popular and engaging, and Bridget Jones’s Diary is much fresher, funnier and less strained than The Edge of Reason. Each diary entry begins with a tally of Bridget’s weight, how many alcohol units she has consumed, how many cigarettes, how many calories, and an account of whatever other ongoing self-help regimen she is engaged in, including the number of positive thoughts she has had, the number of serious current affairs articles she has read, the number of National Lottery Instants scratch cards she has bought, and so on. The organisation and repetition of this account is the source of much of the “Bridget terminology” that has entered the wider culture, and it comments ironically on the kinds of pressures middle-class white women supposedly face in being women. Indeed the back jacket blurb of Bridget Jones’s Diary suggests that this commentary may constitute (among other things)

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“a dazzling urban satire of modern human relations”. However in our view it is overstating the case to suggest that this commentary, however amusing, constitutes successful satire, which we would take to be a political critique of social values, ridiculing and denaturalising them. In fact we argue that the effect of the comedy in these texts is rather more insidious than progressive. The slippage from self-conscious suspension of disbelief to interpellated over-identification embodied in the “That’s me!” reaction can also be seen in journalistic accounts of Bridget and her many media forays. Some of these constitute Bridget Jones as a noun rather than a fictional character (for example, a piece in The Guardian about the number of home-owning single women describes such women as “Bridget Joneses”6). Others seem wilfully to overlook the fact that she does not really exist in their enthusiasm to position her as their ego ideal or ideal sexual partner. For example, a generally critical review of the video and DVD release of the film concludes, “It’s a real shame because I wanted to get on with her as well as everyone else seemed to … But Bridget and I just weren’t destined to be best buddies”. 7 Most striking is Tony Parsons’ ongoing love affair with his fantasy Bridget in his column in The Mirror. Parsons manages simultaneously to hail the filmic Bridget because “a real woman looks like Bridget Jones” with her apparently fleshy excess,8 and at the same time to use his fantasy Bridget, “Bambi with a fag in her mouth and a bad man between her thighs”,9 to deride contemporary women and feminism. Our purpose in this chapter is to treat Bridget Jones not as a real woman, nor indeed as a real expression of the zeitgeist, but as a myth, in the sense of myth as “depoliticised speech”.10 We take it as axiomatic that culture is political and that popular culture is an arena of popular politics. In a well known statement of cultural materialism, Alan Sinfield writes: “Literary writing, like all cultural production, operates through an appeal for recognition: ‘The world is like this, isn’t it?’ it says in effect; and that has to be political”.11 It is precisely the success of Bridget’s appeal for recognition, the “That’s me!” effect, that makes “her” (it) such a politically potent myth. In this chapter we want to focus on three predominant sites of recognition. Firstly Bridget’s ditziness is foregrounded and rendered heterosexually attractive. The fact that Bridget, despite her class, education and professional status, is a one-woman disaster area is certainly the root of the humour in both the film and the novels, and is arguably also the single most important point of identification for the audience. Secondly Bridget’s whiteness is naturalised and unmarked. The fact that not only Bridget herself but all of her significant friends and family are white is apparently unnoticed both by the readers and by the characters, and yet it underpins both the narrative(s) and the characterisations in the novels. Thirdly, within our consideration

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The Myth of Bridget Jones

of femininity and whiteness, we will be indicating ways in which the novels constitute class. We will be suggesting that Fielding represents Bridget’s world as unproblematically middle class, and renders the particular privileges of this world in such as way as to efface class difference, and to naturalise the differential privileges available to neoliberal subjects, by reducing class to cultural capital in ways which occlude material inequity. 2.

Bridget the Neurotic Sex Symbol

Bridget Jones’s Diary invites readers to recognize themselves in the woes of Bridget’s obsession with her weight, her boozing and bingeing (as well as relishing the incitement to pleasure that her daily tabulations also represent), and as we have noted this interpellation appears to be successful. What is being offered as appealing is a fantasy about the impossibility of emotional or bodily control, where that lack of control and the irrationality it underwrites will become unproblematic with the consummation of heterosexual romance. In narrative terms, in Bridget Jones’s Diary instability, mutability and neurosis will be progressively solved by meeting a man, having sex, then going on mini-breaks with him, overcoming a range of narrative obstacles (having spots, being fat, smoking too much, getting drunk) in order finally, after much deferral, to marry him. The narrative logic of both novels is that given any emotionally significant circumstances the last thing that should happen is for Bridget to take responsibility for initiating or participating in rational discussion. This ditziness produces contradictory and complex meanings, none of which is successfully satirical. Bridget’s friends Shazzer, Jude and Magda function not only to offer the pleasures of female bonding which mitigate their “man trouble” with shopping sprees and bouts of boozing, but to naturalise and normalise Bridget. All of Bridget’s friends are more dysfunctional than she is – either by being more feminist, which is constituted as unfeminine, strident and emotionally uptight (Shazzer), or by being even more out of control, that is, too neurotic to be acceptably feminine (Jude). Self-determination and personal liberation are represented in the novels as unattainable delusional fantasies (“Am assured, receptive, responsive woman of substance who does not take responsibility for others’ behaviour. Only for own. Yes,” Bridget tells herself helplessly.12) This is underwritten by Bridget’s internal self-policing discourse about the guilty necessity of being a “feminist” in order to avoid total degradation and humiliation, while always naturalising the unattractiveness of being perceived as a feminist by men: “After all, there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism”.13

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Despite the first person confessional idiom of both novels, there are numerous instances in which Bridget shares information with her diary where Fielding is offering us insight unavailable to Bridget herself. These authorial ploys invariably demonstrate Bridget’s ditziness or lack of selfawareness. At key moments in the texts readers know more than Bridget knows herself, but crucially this knowledge situates us as affectionately protective of, or sympathetic to, her naiveté and gaucheness. For example, after the publication of her disastrous newspaper interview with Colin Firth, Bridget writes in her diary: “Have not heard anything back from Adam or Michael at Independent but sure they will ring soon and maybe ask me to do another one, then can be freelance in home office, typing on roof terrace with herbs in terracotta pots!”. 14 This device is most evident in The Edge of Reason while Bridget and Mark Darcy are estranged. At a number of middle-class social events – a weekend house party in the country, Magda’s daughter’s birthday party – Bridget’s diary entries apparently unwittingly cue us about Mark’s continuing desire for her. At one level, this device works to secure the romantic plotting of the novel and to reassure readers by offering them familiar generic codes that promise a resolution in which Mark and Bridget will be romantically reunited. At the level of myth, this cueing works to signify Bridget’s naiveté and lack of control as heterosexually desirable, as engendering masculine rescue, masculine lust, masculine protectiveness. One key way in which Bridget’s vulnerability is marked in these episodes is her gauche lack of cultural capital. For example, at a “scary party” in Bridget Jones’s Diary where all the other women are quoting Shakespeare and discussing opera, Bridget’s detailed knowledge of the TV gameshow Blind Date makes her far more attractive to the hero, for whom the women talking about high culture are pretentious and undesirable. This ideological codification of ditziness and lack of control as heterosexually desirable sits uneasily alongside the more overt attempts Fielding makes to engender a satirical critique of relationships. The novels may circulate categorisations like “smug marrieds” and “singletons” which appear to offer a satirical commentary on the social status of those with access to the structural privileges of marriage, but in both Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Edge of Reason the complexities of sexual and intimate relationships are narratively never a function of systemic structural matters, and thus the categories of “smug marrieds” and “singletons” function merely as poles for Bridget’s neurotic ambivalence about relationships. The discourses offered by Bridget’s self-help manuals (all 37 of them) provide substance for Bridget’s fatalistic internal dialogue rather than for a reading of the instability and contested nature of contemporary gender roles within heterosexuality. Whatever “crisis of identity” Bridget represents, it is one of personal neurosis rather than one

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The Myth of Bridget Jones

precipitated by material inequality. As we will argue shortly, this is one of the manifestations of the novels’ neo-liberalism. Heterosexuality is naturalised as myth in part through the representation of Bridget’s gay friend Tom, whose presence is tokenistic and disenfranchised. This is important because the category of heterosexual femininity is only distinctive as an individually experienced neurosis; as a material category, heterosexuality is not satirised or even marked. Throughout Bridget Jones’s Diary Tom functions as “one of the girls”, assimilated into their gang as a sign of their middle-class liberalism and urban sophistication (differentially marked from the suburban homophobia of Bridget’s mother). In this novel Tom, as a gay male character, also stands in for homosexuality, where lesbianism and female bisexuality remain absences which structure the integrity of the female homosociality. In The Edge of Reason Tom’s position is more tenuous. He remains present in the novel, and his emotional neurosis is still equivalent to that of Bridget or Shazzer, and thus the novel positions itself in the metropolitan milieu and claims its liberalism in the form of a presumptive anti-homophobia. Yet throughout The Edge of Reason there are a number of startlingly poorly handled gay jokes or narrative interludes that position homosexuality significantly more meaningfully than just a tokenistic cipher. Soon after Bridget and Mark Darcy become estranged she goes “emergency shopping” with Shazzer and Jude. Back at Bridget’s flat, drunk, they agree that Mark must be gay because “Why else would he go off with someone freakishly tall like Rebecca, with no sense of girlfriend-hood, no tits and no bottom – i.e. a virtual man?”. 15 A little while later, Tom turns up distressed because his sometime boyfriend Pretentious Jerome has told him that he does not fancy him. The others rush to comfort Tom by suggesting that Jerome must be as straight “as a very straight … penis”.16 The intended joke, in which both injured parties console their bruised egos by imagining that they have been rejected because they are the wrong gender, does not work because, politically, heterosexuality and homosexuality cannot be reversed in this way – they are not structurally equivalent. In both situations homosexuality is contingently visible, either as pretentious and body fascist (Jerome) or as a misogynistic disavowal of the feminine (Mark going after Rebecca the non-woman), while heterosexuality remains unmarked and naturalised. One of the most unsettling examples of this dynamic occurs when Bridget comes across Geoff Alconbury in London. Geoff is the husband of one of Bridget’s mother’s friends. He is known to us from the first novel as a sexist lecher whom Bridget has to fend off at family parties. In The Edge of Reason Bridget finds him in a gay pub wearing a comically gross leather outfit, clearly on a date with a rent boy. Geoff blusters out some excuse to Bridget but it seems significant that the most inappropriately sexist man in Bridget’s universe turns out to be queer (gay, bi, s/m,

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whatever). Thus the recirculation of the tired stereotype of the untrustworthy married queer signifies that gross sexism, as perpetrated by Geoff at family parties and the like, is not a malicious quality of heterosexuality. Geoff’s indiscretion (if we are to assume that is what it is) is not classified as typical “smug married” having-your-cake-and-eating-it behaviour, nor even as “fuck-wittage” in the way that other instances of men’s sexual misbehaviour are treated in the novels. It is not self-evident why whatever kind of emotional chaos Geoff is supposed to be going through should be differentiated from any one of Bridget’s and her friends’ messy episodes, and yet Fielding marks this episode as tawdry and disgusting rather than endearing and attractive. The novel’s homophobia thus prevents Bridget’s continual “dating hell” from turning heterosexuality itself into a problematic category. Fielding’s achievement is that she situates Bridget as chaotic, anxious and emotionally (and professionally) incompetent and yet still manages successfully to interpellate the readership of her novels as Bridget wannabes (or Bridget fanciers). She does this by constituting a successful neo-liberal landscape where a post-feminist acknowledgement of how awful men are does not mean that you have to do anything about them, and where heterosexuality is structurally unmarked but clueless femininity is heterosexually desirable. 3.

Bridget the White Goddess There is another significant aspect of this out-of-control, overanxious and neurotic femininity to which we wish to draw attention, and that is its whiteness. The whiteness of Bridget Jones (both the character and the film and literary texts) is unmarked, unspoken and all-pervasive. The very fact that whiteness is unmarked is an effect of its easy hegemony – its appeal to common sense.17 In this context Bridget’s ditziness and anxiety and the rather heavy-handed stereotyping of non-white characters in the texts are two sides of the same coin. Whiteness and neurosis have been discursively linked since the emergence of sexology in the late nineteenth century. The precise nature and causes of white neurosis were hotly disputed among Victorian sexologists, but the idea that sexual and racial categories were inseparable was taken for granted, and the belief that “civilised” and “cultured” white races were prone to psychological stress, especially psycho-sexual stress, was widely held. “Primitive” African or Asian constitutions were supposedly untroubled by either psychological complexity or the strains of “civilised” urban life. White women in particular, especially those of the more “refined” classes, were regarded as prone to collapse under the strain of modern living, particularly the strain of romantic emotions and relationships. The 1860s American neurologist George Miller Beard, for example,

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The Myth of Bridget Jones

saw a significant correlation between modern social organization and mental illness. A deficiency in nervous energy was the price exacted by industrialized urban societies, competitive business and social environments, and the luxuries, vices, and excesses of modern life. […] The labors of domestic servants, the harshness of rural existence, the brutalities of savage tribes, were nowhere near as mentally wearing and exhausting as the refinements of civilization. […] The Indian squaw enjoyed her ‘slow and easy drudgery … in the open air,’ spared the ‘exhausting sentiment of love,’ while the sensitive white woman had the more demanding anxieties of love to handle. It was absurd to expect that a Southern black should suffer from nervous diseases, or that insanity, epilepsy, and neurasthenia should flourish on the banks of the Amazon or the Nile.18 This Victorian construction of white femininity is echoed by Bridget Jones, who is not only obsessed with the anxieties of love but is also unable to cope with the demands of her professional career, her social obligations, or her urban living environment. Her attempts at television and print journalism are ludicrous, her appearances at parties (including her own dinner party) are heralds of disaster, and her living environment is literally falling apart, with an eight-foot hole in the wall of her flat forming the centrepiece of her disastrous London adventures in The Edge of Reason. The whiteness of these texts is thrown into relief by the ethnic stereotypes which constitute the non-white characters in the novels. All of these characters are “funny foreigners”: Bridget and her white friends have no interactions with black or other minority ethnic British people at all. The “funny foreigner” in Bridget Jones’s Diary is Julio, Bridget’s mother’s stereotypical Latin lover whom Bridget sums up as “a Portuguese tour operator with a gentleman’s handbag”.19 As a textual device Julio highlights the white masculinity of the hero Mark Darcy, who at the climax of the novel reveals, in a “thrillingly authoritative” manner,20 that Julio is a con man. In doing so Mark demonstrates once and for all his own intelligence, integrity, and devotion to Bridget; indeed, to echo our opening quote, he has become the Indiana Jones who Bridget hopes will soon be loading her dishwasher. The contrast between Mark and Julio also demonstrates that the exotic Other may be sexually attractive – “wild, drunk, unkempt and, frankly, just the type I fall for”, as Bridget writes of this final showdown21– but wholly unsuitable for a serious romantic relationship.22

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This racial, indeed racist, dynamic in the texts – an unmarked but mentally stressed urban whiteness counterpointed by an ethnic Other in the role of “funny foreigner” – is much more strongly present in The Edge of Reason. Two kinds of “funny foreigner” appear in this novel: the “wise African” and the “perverted Oriental”. The “wise African” appears in the character of Wellington, a young Kenyan man whom Bridget’s mother brings home with her from a holiday in Africa. Both the characters and the reader expect Wellington to be another Julio, and sure enough he does persuade the local Rotary club to give him a “charitable donation” so that he can buy a jet ski for his village. However he is by no means a con man on Julio’s scale, and even more importantly he is not Mrs Jones’s lover. The failure of Fielding’s satire is particularly marked in Wellington: while Bridget slyly contrasts his taste for CD Walkmans and jet skis with his supposedly solemn pronouncements on tribal traditions and ancient cultures, she nevertheless gratefully accepts his “very still and strong” sympathy over her troubles with Mark 23 and contrasts his “dignified graciousness” with the twittering white women and drunken white men at her mother’s parties.24 From the very first diary entry in which Bridget fantasises herself as “like Jemima Goldsmith or similar radiant newlywed opening cancer hospital in veil while everyone imagines her in bed with Imran Khan”,25 The Edge of Reason participates in a highly sexualised version of Orientalism in which white characters – specifically Bridget and Mark – are alternately threatened and adored by “Orientals”. There are two major incidents in the novel around which this dynamic unfolds: in both cases the “Orientals” are south-east Asians, and in both cases the threat they present is homosexual. The first occurs when Bridget insists that Mark take her home to his flat for the first time and they open the bedroom door to discover that “There, in the huge white bed, was a lithe oriental boy [sic], stark naked, smiling weirdly, and holding out two wooden balls on a string, and a baby rabbit”.26 Bridget immediately concludes that Mark is a “gay bestial pervert” who is “keeping oriental boys in bedroom together with wildlife” and she leaves the flat “hearing shouting in the manner of American troops being massacred by Vietcong”. 27 This homosexual threat almost destroys Bridget’s relationship with Mark, who later explains that the “boy” is really the schizophrenic son of his Filipino housekeeper, whose comically large family alternate between being “hysterical […] all over the house”28 and “want[ing] to worship Mark as a god”. 29 The second incident takes place in the Thai jail in which Bridget finds herself after a smuggler places drugs in her luggage at the airport. Bridget is awoken in jail by the attentions of the “Lesbian Ring” who “all started kissing and groping bits of me. […] Although obviously I felt violated, part of me could not help but feel it was so nice just to be touched. Gaaah! Maybe I am a lesbian? No. Don’t think so”.30 But just as Mark is really worshipped

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The Myth of Bridget Jones

“as a god” by the Filipinos, so the very next day Bridget starts to teach one of her Thai fellow inmates the words to Madonna songs and “Seemed to be considered some kind of goddess as knew words to Immaculate Collection all the way through”.31 Eventually Bridget is rescued from the jail by the combined efforts of Mark Darcy, her two best friends Jude and Shazzer, and her own uncharacteristic resilience which is much remarked upon and constantly praised by the other white characters. Both of these “Oriental” incidents act to confirm and naturalise the heterosexuality of the white characters involved by displacing the possibility of homosexuality onto a stereotypical Oriental Other. Such displacement is particularly necessary in Bridget’s case to preserve her heterosexual femininity in the face of her intense relationship with Jude and Shazzer, who begin their letter to her in jail with a declaration of love and who, when Bridget returns to London, share an intimately homosocial bedroom which might otherwise come dangerously close to the homosexual sleeping arrangements in the Thai jail.32 In Mark’s case the “Oriental boy” incident saves both his masculinity and Bridget’s future marriage with him from the spectre of Geoff Alconbury and his rent boy. The central object of the attempted satire in The Edge of Reason is the psychobabble of self-help texts. The novel establishes at the outset that Bridget and her white female friends are addicted to these texts, which are blamed for over-complicating heterosexual romantic feelings and for creating obstacles to heterosexual romantic relationships. As the novel progresses it is also revealed that Bridget’s white male peers also succumb to the blandishments of such texts, including Mark Darcy himself. That “Africans” and “Orientals” in the novel do not suffer from such problems, or from such texts, goes without saying. However there is one text which appears in the novel as a far more sensible and persuasive form of selfhelp than Mars and Venus could ever hope to offer: Rudyard Kipling’s “If”. “If” is introduced into the novel when Mark’s and Bridget’s respective fathers recite it drunkenly at a family party, and Mark then hands Bridget a note which turns out to be the text of the poem. Bridget subsequently finds it in her pocket while in the Thai jail and clings to it as a psychological life raft: just to hammer the point home, the novel reproduces the text of the poem in full at this point. Two political strands hang from this deployment of Kipling. The first is the novel’s awkward disavowal of Kipling’s imperialist legacy. The only character to comment on this in the novel is Pretentious Jerome, who complains that “It’s regressive, colonialist doggerel” but reduces this critique to the observation that “it fucking rhymes”.33 This moment in the novel effectively closes down any space for serious cultural politics or critique of Kipling by representing opposition to colonialist discourse as a trivial kind of “political correctness” spoken by an already ideologically excluded gay character. The second political strand is that constant re-

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reading of “If” helps Bridget to deal with the exotic horrors of the Thai jail, but once she is back in her strangely white corner of London she reverts to her chaotic, disaster-prone, “out-of-control” feminine self and has to be rescued all over again by Mark the white hero. The poem’s stiffupper-lip model of British whiteness sees Bridget through her encounters with “perverted Orientals”; but in her relationships with white men its exhortation to “be a Man, my son!” ultimately represents yet another selfhelp ideal which she cannot live up to – literally because she is a woman. Thus it secures her racial privilege as a white woman without disrupting her ditzy vulnerability in relation to white men. 4.

Conclusion

Bridget Jones’s emotional crises are supposedly precipitated by structural changes in contemporary gender roles in a world where women live alone, have professional careers and stay single and childless into their thirties. But this is the myth of Bridget Jones. The cultural and emotional landscape represented in the diaries is intensely conservative in terms of gender, race and class, as we have shown. The conservatism around gender consists in the prioritisation of women’s attractiveness to men above all other things. Indeed Bridget’s “crises” themselves are repeatedly presented as a spectacle for male desire and a male gaze. The fact that she is a walking disaster area is what makes her heterosexually attractive. The postfeminist logic of the novels is therefore that she can only have a career and be feminine if she is a disaster at work, and that she can only be “solved” by marriage. The conservatism around race is that whiteness is unmarked while ethnic difference is marked by “foreign-ness”. Thus Bridget’s cultural world is ignorant of multiculturalism, and any attempt to critique colonialist, Orientalist or Africanist discourse is viciously ridiculed as “political correctness”. The conservatism around class rests on the naturalised assumption that everyone in Bridget’s world is at least middle-class. Moreover class difference in the novels is always about cultural capital and never about material inequality or hardship. This allows the middleclass Bridget to be represented as the under-privileged one, and the social gaffes that result from her lack of cultural capital are part of the ditziness that makes her heterosexually attractive. Bridget’s “crises” are entirely neurotic rather than material; nothing that happens, from losing her job to taking out a second mortgage she cannot afford, ever has any permanent consequences in the material sphere. The myth of Bridget Jones is both a neo-liberal and a postfeminist one. The myths about identity that surround Bridget Jones are so resonant because they authenticate conservative modes of negotiating the current conditions of capitalism in the West. Financial deregulation, globalisation,

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The Myth of Bridget Jones

the de-unionisation and casualisation of labour, and the degradation of the public sector, amongst others, are all features of the current economic and political moment. These conditions all have a bearing on the cultural and political location occupied by Bridget, and on her narrative exploits. The myth of Bridget Jones is neo-liberal because it abstracts “the individual” from social and cultural power relations, and treats all problems as individual and emotional rather than as social and structural. It is postfeminist because it takes the social and political gains of feminism for granted and yet insists that they are ultimately less important than attracting a man. In short, the success and power of the novels’ and film’s interpellations of their audiences both signals and reinforces a depoliticised understanding of an unequal world. If Bridget Jones really is the spirit of the age, then this age is apparently still in urgent need of political, cultural and social transformation.

Notes 1

Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason (London: Picador, 2000), 375. 2 This paragraph is constructed from quotes from reviews which appear on the back jackets and inside pages of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason. The reviewers are, in order of appearance, Melanie McDonagh in The Evening Standard; an unnamed reviewer in the Sunday Express; Nicola Shulman in The Times Literary Supplement; Sally Emerson in the Daily Mail (emphasis original); Rachel Simhon in the Daily Telegraph; Virginia Blackburn in the Express; and Jilly Cooper in an unnamed publication. 3 Imelda Whelehan, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Reader’s Guide (New York & London: Continuum, 2002). 4 Although Whelehan (ibid.) does report that some readers did write to and even propose marriage to “Bridget” during the mid-1990s, believing that the original newspaper column on which the novel was based was genuinely autobiographical. 5 Ibid. 6 Alastair Ray, “What Are You Like? Bridget Joneses,” The Guardian, 15 October 2001. 7 Jessica Mellor, “Big Pants to Bridget”, The Mirror, 30 November 2001. 8 Tony Parsons, “Panting for Real Women,” The Mirror, 23 April 2001. Discourse about the weight gained by Renée Zellweger for the part of Bridget Jones seems to neatly capture the satirical dead end of the Bridget Jones phenomenon. “Bridget Jones is not merely a fat cow … [she] has

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the kind of beauty that makes you feel like getting stuck in” (Tony Parsons, “Bridget’s Just Like Bambi with a Fag in her Mouth … Oh, How I Adore Her: Tony Parsons on Why He’s Fallen V. V. Deeply in Love with Miss Jones,” The Mirror, 19 April 2001). The ecstatic rumblings about Zellweger’s “hello mummy” pants and minisculely rotund tummy do nothing to trouble the underlying discourses of regulation and punishment that often characterise contemporary representations of women’s bodies; indeed the level of commentary on Zellweger’s nonexistent bulges precisely marks the excessiveness of such regulation. 9 Tony Parsons, “Bridget’s Just Like Bambi with a Fag in her Mouth”. 10 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Grafton, 1973), 155. 11 Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading (London: Routledge, 1994), viii. 12 Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary (London: Picador, 1996), 208. 13 Ibid., 20. 14 Fielding, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, 181. 15 Ibid., 132. 16 Ibid., 135. 17 Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (London: Routledge, 1993). 18 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (London: Virago, 1987), 135. 19 Fielding, Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, 7. 20 Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary, 303. 21 Ibid., 302. 22 In the film version of Bridget Jones’s Diary “Julio” is replaced by “Julian”, a British smoothie with a sun-bed tan. We would suggest that one reason for this is quite simply that Julio is too gross an ethnic stereotype to “get away with” on film. 23 Fielding, Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, 131. 24 Ibid., 129. 25 Ibid., 3. 26 Ibid., 63. 27 Ibid., 67. 28 Ibid., 73. 29 Ibid., 78. 30 Ibid., 310. 31 Ibid., 311. 32 On homosociality, homophobia and homoeroticism see Maddison (2000) and Storr (2003) 33 Ibid., 284.

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The Myth of Bridget Jones

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Grafton, 1973. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Picador, 1996. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. London: Picador, 2000. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: the Social Construction of Whiteness. London: Routledge, 1993. Maddison, Stephen. Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture. London: Macmillan, 2000. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980. London: Virago, 1987. Sinfield, Alan. Cultural Politics – Queer Reading. London: Routledge, 1994. Storr, Merl. Latex and Lingerie: Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers Parties. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2003. Whelehan, Imelda. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Reader’s Guide. New York & London: Continuum, 2002.

Representing Gender Benders: Consumerism and the Muting of Subversion Sofie Van Bauwel Abstract Both within contemporary academic and societal discourses gender benders are almost always situated at the margins. From this position they subvert and reaffirm the hegemonisation of dichotomous gender roles. In both discourses gender bending is read as set of subversive practices. Largely based on the theories of Judith Butler, some academic discourses perceive the bending of gender as an act of resistance with the aim of re-ordering and re-conceptualising gender as a fluid concept. Gender benders play with gender roles and create ambiguity. By using different style characteristics gender benders are described as the bodily hybridisation of masculine and feminine stereotypes. The transgression of gender boundaries has been evaluated as preferably resistance through pleasure. Meanwhile gender benders came out of the margins and are now commodified as mainstream and accepted within mainstream popular culture, especially on the target group broadcasters MTV and TMF. Through commodification the resistance was absorbed and incorporated into consumer capitalism. In this movement the subversive potential of gender was muted. In this chapter I will account for the genealogy of a muted resistance in search of some logics of incorporation. More specifically, I will use a reception study of popular culture texts amongst young consumers. Keywords Gender bending; resistance; incorporation; popular culture; gender performance; reception study; media consumers; consumerism. 1.

Introduction

When we switch to the music channels on television, or leaf through a glossy youth magazine and even when we walk through trendy areas of western cities, we see young gender benders; performers that are playing a game by bending their gender and by doing so creating gender ambiguity. The academic discourse on gender bending is rather positive, in the sense that these performances are seen as acts of resistance against dominant or even hegemonic1 gender roles. Gender benders are read as a parody, as a questioning of masculinity and femininity. Given this ability to publicly question the dominant discourse on masculinity and femininity, some scholars argue that this resistance creates a space for cultural change

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Representing Gender Benders

with regard to the duality of gender roles. They hope to break the dichotomy of these gender roles and consequently make them more flexible and multiple. Both within contemporary academic and societal discourses gender benders are almost always situated at the margins. From this position they subvert and reaffirm the hegemonisation of dichotomous gender roles. In both discourses gender bending is read as a set of subversive practices. The resistance against the hegemonic gender roles by the bending of genders has become a discursive agenda in popular culture research. The transgression of gender boundaries has been evaluated as preferably resistance through pleasure. Meanwhile gender benders came out of the margins and are now commodified as mainstream and accepted within mainstream popular culture, especially on their target group broadcasters MTV and TMF. Through commodification the resistance has been absorbed and incorporated into consumer capitalism. In this movement the subversive potential of gender was muted. In this chapter I will account for the genealogy of a muted resistance in search of some logics of incorporation. More specifically, I will use a reception study of popular culture texts amongst young consumers: do they read the bending of genders as resistance through pleasure? 2.

Crossing Gender Boundaries

Some academic discourses on gender bending are based on the writings of Judith Butler. Gender bending has to be situated in a framework of gender entanglement. It is described as the bodily hybridisation of masculine and feminine stereotypes, through which gender ambiguity can arise. It seems that a consensus has been reached to consider gender as a cultural and social construction. The central idea of Judith Butler on this issue is that gender is not an expression of nature but that it is performative. Gender is seen as an act, that originates both under the weight of history and under the power of the consensus. One doesn’t have gender, a but one does gender; a performative act which is repeated to affirm identity. As Judith Butler has argued, [...]if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and perform in the mode of belief.2 So if gender is not expressive but performative, there is a space created for breaking boundaries by subversive repetition of gender 3. In doing so, hegemonic reality is questioned and room for re-created and

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changeable gender positions is developed. One presumes that when the bending of genders is convincing enough, it will be imitated by the audiences and can gain a place in the consensus. The ambiguous play of constructed self-images implies a gender shift. For gender benders, gender identity is nothing more than one image out of series of images. With this particular image they problematise masculinity and femininity. Anneke Smelik refers to David Bowie as an artist who explicitly bends his gender. By anticipating a strong visual culture he performs his self as an image. This image is so central that it actually became a style. As a result the notion of gender and gender identity as such is questioned. Although often confused with it, gender bending in popular culture is different from traditional transvestism. Transvestism is a theatrical play. The audience is well aware of the sex of the performer and he or she is seen as an actor 4. What’s more, it confirms the rigid polarity of the genders: “[...] transvestism display a tendency to treat femininity and masculinity as fixed categories possessing an essential reality of their own.”5 Gender benders playfully perform gender-acts and create ambiguity. By using different style characteristics gender benders are described as the bodily hybridisation of masculine and feminine stereotypes. Smelik distinguishes between male and female gender benders, because of the different positions they have taken according to their sexes. Wishing to cross boundaries, male gender benders are travelling to examine the other. This is a journey without any obligations. Contrary to that, female gender benders want to create possibilities to break the boundaries of their position as women in society (i.e. the position of the other), intending to show the audience new representations of masculinity and femininity6. 3.

A Toolbox for Gender Subversion

To confuse gender representation in popular culture, performers are using different style characteristics. One of the major elements in this entanglement is the concept of simulation. Simulation starts with the violation of all references with the aim of creating new cultural signs. A frequently example is Madonna: Thus, from her disengendering polysexual display in ‘justify’ to her drag dance in ‘Express Yourself’ to her representation as space-age dominatrix in the Blond Ambition tour, Madonna will continue to stimulate and deconstruct the “truth” of sex and gender. Though strategies of simulation, she transforms the “truth” of gender into drag, a dialectical fragmentation between two terms, and then fissures this destabilised sex identity further by means of

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Representing Gender Benders

splitting and displacement to advance a prodigious sexual plurality. In more general terms, her disingenuous figuration says much about the political promise of postmodern strategies.7 All stable and fixed references are lost. Feminist theorists in particular applauded the collapsing of the bipolarity of gender roles. By using mass media and their constructed images the entanglement is in progress. Gender play is the mix and match of styles that flirt with the signifiers of sexual difference, cut loose from their moorings. Such inconstancy underscores the fragility of gender itself as a pure construct. Thus gender play takes shape in a pastiche of multiple styles: masculinity and femininity fractured and refractured in erotic tension8. Another common way to play with gender is cross-dressing. Clothes are seen as a symbolic system. They are playing an important role in the production of the self. Marjorie Garber argues that cross-dressing is a criticism on the binary gender system9. She gives the following definition of cross-dressing: Cross-dressing is about gender confusion. Cross-dressing is about the phallus as constitutively veiled. Cross-dressing is about the power of women. Cross-dressing is about the emergence of gay identity. Cross-dressing is about the anxiety of economic or cultural dislocation, the anticipation or recognition of “otherness” as loss. All true, all partial truth, all powerful metaphors.10 Distinguishing gender bending from transvestism, Woodhouse conceptualises the drag as a theoretical and deconstructive social practice that analyses the structures from within11. Through the discourse of clothes the drag puts questions in the naturalness of gender roles. Marjorie Garber also marked crossover style as different from cross-dressing12. Crossover is a form of cross-dressing, but is more accepted in society than crossdressing. It’s often about women wearing pants and men using make-up. Garber defines crossover as a self-conscious parody outside of the underground drag clubs, out on the street. Even here the borderline is shifting towards a more flexible masculinity and femininity.

4.

Me, Myself and I: Identity, Articulating the Self, and the Material Body.

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For Judith Butler gender is merely a play of appearance: gender is a style, a disguise13. The parodic effect prevents the fact that nothing is masked or disguised, because the masquerade cannot be based on an original gender identity. Butler uses Foucault’s assumption that a masquerade is a representation of what history has shown us. It is an indication that there are no fixed identities. He argues that a masquerade is a particular and hegemonic signifying system were subjects repeat gender signs as the essence of a particular identity. Parody especially shakes the binary gender system. According to Myra Macdonald masquerade means literally putting on a mask or a disguise. She refers to feminist film theory where the term has been adopted to suggest that “[...]when female stars exaggerate their feminine attributes, they denaturalise femininity and invite the audience to think critically and sceptically about the assumptions we normally make about it.”14 By employing a bricolage of particular poses, movements and acts an imaginary body is created or a identity is formed. This merely bodily identity is a cluster of femininity and masculinity. But at the same time it can also be a changing drag dance, playing a double game of gender. Alternately, hyper maleness and femaleness is shown15. The current interest in the body as a communicator of values and the persuasiveness of images in the popular consumer culture is situated in the profound transformation of the western industrial society. These images are a cultural effect of the increased celebration of the human body from the economic and political structures. The increase of pleasure, desire, diversity and the playfulness of values is characteristic for contemporary consumerism, often compared by the concept of hedonism. They are part of the cultural space that is formed by the process of post industrialisation. In this perspective there is a clear commercial interest in the body as a token of a good and wealthy life and as an indicator for the possession of cultural capital. The working body has become a demanding body16. The body is now seen as part of a self-project whereby individuals can express their own emotional needs. The body is now contingent and flexible: it can differ under influence of personal wishes or needs. The body seems to provide a foundation for the construction of identity17. Human beings are conceptualised as embodied subjects and the material body is the site in which differences of gender are constituted. Within a social constructivist paradigm these bodily expressions are conceptualised as discursive articulations: the body is seen as a receptor of social meanings. Far more radical is the view of Foucault. He sees the body not only as given meaning through discourse, but also as totally constructed by discourse. The body as a biological identity disappears and becomes a highly unstable socially constructed product. 18 In the academic discourse on gender bending, the basic assumption is that the body can be read as a communicator or an

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Representing Gender Benders

expressive text. Accordingly the performance of gender is situated in, on, around and through the body. The body is the site of the performance of femininity and masculinity. These genders are no essence of nature, but are formed by history and by the dominant consensus: “As an intentionally organised materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation [...].” 19 What is important is that one recognizes that the body is never neutral, because it is always gendered. The body is a site of the performance of gender: Considering that “the” body is invariably transformed into his body or her body, the body is only known through its gendered appearance. [...] My suggestion is that the body becomes its gender through a series of acts, which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time.20 5.

Consumerism and the Performing Self: Consuming the Self

The improvement of the distribution and the evolution of mass publicity created a consumer market for the personal, for the body. These changes are associated with a new type of personality, referred to as the concept of the performing self. 21 Commodification is, according to Shilling, the mode through which the contemporary societies seek to ensure a continuity in the way people present themselves. Using Goffman’s theory on the managing of the body Shilling22 says that the means for managing the self have become: “[...]increasingly tied up with consumer goods, and the achievement if social and economic success hinges crucially on the presentation of an acceptable self-image.” The performing self is embedded in a commodity-culture and a culture of lifestyle. The body has become the “visible carrier of the self” 23. The performing self gets recognition by successful acts of the self and is visible in the form of the body. Bending genders can be situated in this specific context where the social self is expressed through the body, which is a site of consumer demands. The self is seen as a bodily imago of the consumer society and it plays a very important role in the understanding and evaluation of the self in the public sphere. Turner argues that a bodily imago is essential for a good self-image24. In contemporary modernity the self equals the present self. The body is seen as a text or as an aggregate of meaningful signs. According to Jameson and Baudrillard the image of the body is central to identity, rather than the body as such25. Within the consumer culture of late modernity we find a reflexivity evolving around consumer choices whereby the self is constructed and reconstructed through the plurality of consumer choices. The self-constituting subjects

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“use commodities and their open-ended meanings to continually reinvent themselves.”26 All spheres of life are penetrated by commodification and the ideology of consumerism is present in contemporary society. This practical manifestation of this ideology is seen in the marketing strategies and advertising technique. As Conrad Lodziak 27 says this ideology is often articulated in mass media because the mass media are big businesses primarily concerned with selling audiences to advertisers. This ideology of consumerism is situated in a capitalist society where liberalism rules. Mass media are considered as a space for promoting this ideology. Consumption can not escape symbolisation in this context, as Lodziak has mentioned: “Consumption today is thus viewed as being grounded in the symbolic.” 28 This dimension of the ideology of consumerism in the symbolic refers to the notion that consumption is essentially the consumption of the symbolic. This is not understood as a passive process but rather as an active one in which the consumer is involved in a process of meaning negotiation.29 In this process of articulation discourses the symbolic provides the ability to construct self-identity and involves the possibility of creating new and fluid identities. 6.

Spectacle and Simulations: The Logics of Consumerism

Referring to the aspect of simulation, the readings of JeanFrançois Lyotard are quite relevant. 30 He assumes that contemporary media enable the formations of new identities. These ‘new’ identities are constructed by the performances which imply spectacles. The play of intertextuality, overacting, deconstructing the codes and meanings are style characteristics of contemporary modernity. Using parody, mimesis, irony and pastiche, a space has been created were new representations and performances can be read. Buikema et al suggest that this opens up perspectives for new gender representations that can be employed by those (i.e. others) who could hardly or not establish their own autonomous identities.31 Mandziuk describes the world as text and life as a series of simulations where: “Identities are dispersed into what Susan Suleiman calls a multiplied set of narrative and interpretative possibilities, “so that what results is a dizzying accumulation.” 32 Academics like to see popular culture as a place where the dizzying accumulations of meaning concerning femininity and masculinity are performed. Especially the emissions of the music channels MTV and TMF33 are considered a collection of borrowed and recycled images refusing to make any sense fixed of the cultural surrounding. MTV is seen as an ensemble of insignificance, an amalgam of images.34 MTV uses style, sensation, performance and spectacle rather than narration. John Fiske suggested that the visual images have no meaningful connection to the lyric of the song and the style is a recycling of images. These images

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Representing Gender Benders

are wrenched out of the original context and reduces them to free floating signifiers: “[...]of whose only signification is that they are free, outside the control of normal sense and sense-making and thus able to enter the world of pleasure.”35 In these quick changeable series of images the performer has a central place and frequently changes her- or himself. In this context MTV and other popular cultural products have an important place in the meaning of gender differences, offering meaning to fragmented identities of men and women. Using the term pop artist of both sexes, Anneke Smelik argues that gender bending is inherently connected with pop culture.36 Gender bending is often considered as a style or phenomenon within contemporary modernity where certainty is questioned and ambiguities and paradoxes are created. The fixed gender meanings are losing their unequivocality. All this has to be placed in the particular context of the commodification of signs. Commodity-signs are playing an endless game of destabilising long-term meaning and cultural order.37 According to Roseann M. Mandziuk the issue of public, text and context of popular culture are related to a political consciousness-raising: Such inquiry began with models that theorised simple linear interactions and hypodermic injections of information into otherwise passive subject. Alternatively, contemporary lines of inquiry seemingly have brought us far to out current theoretical location that is built on a multitude of “-isms” such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism. These new vocabularies have opened fresh debates about cultural discourse and popular media, raising questions about a multidimensional relationship among audiences and cultural texts that is far more complex than simple linearity.38 The uni-dimensional concept of the audience(s) is replaced by a multi-dimensional subjectivity. The attribution of meanings to a representation enables an interaction between the image and the referential frame of the audiences. So not every viewer will interpret the image in the same way. Buikema et al also suggesting that no one has the power to decide which interpretation is the right one. 39

7.

Discourses on Gender Bending

A. The Celebration of Power: Articulating Fluidity and Transgression.

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So far we have seen that in academic discourse gender bending is considered an act of playing with gender roles, of breaking through the gender boundaries and questioning hegemonic gender discourse. A few scholars have pointed out that especially transvestism ironically reproduces the fixed meanings of masculinity and femininity. A paradigm shift has taken place. Bending gender is a subversive practice stemming from the avant-garde entering popular culture. Gender benders raise questions about the dominant gender discourse and blur the boundaries of gender. Using Judith Butler, gender bending is seen as an act of resistance. Applauding the resistance of the gender benders, it seems that academics have forgotten the different meanings and polysemic readings of text. These fragmented and contradictory readings seem to disappear by the desire to break gender boundaries. Gender benders are seen as agents of resistance who are engaged in empowered discursive practices. The power referred to here is that which breaks the hegemonic discourse on masculinity and femininity. At least that is what these scholars hope for. The desired result is an effect of empowering the others. Mostly drawn on the theories of active audiences, the concept of resistance was incorporated in the discursive agenda of scholars on gender bending in popular visual culture40. Audiences are considered having semiotic power, i.e. the power of creating a plurality of meanings out of a text. Paradoxically these scholars are using the paradigm of the active readings of media texts but the polysemic signifying practices are not taken into account. As a concept power/resistance has entered the field of the social science. Resistance is seen as a twin sister of power mostly drawn on the work of Foucault. As with power the discursive positioning of resistance has grown. The two fields are linked together; as Mark Torpe suggests: This had had the effect of making resistance ubiquitous in a similar way to power and, at its most extreme, this culminates in the possibility of and communicative activity being rendered open to representation as resistance. 41 Linking power and resistance has resulted in an academic belief in the power of marginality. These margins are deconstructed and represented as resistance and radical social change. A dangerously uncritical construction of the margins appears on scene as sites of resistance. David Harvey describes this construction as a romantic turn.42 Such neo-romanticism, as Hartley points out, presents marginality as a subversive field with the powerfulness of force. The force is considered as a power of resisting and contesting the contemporary social order. Power, resistance and marginalisation are blurred concepts. Considered as floating signifiers these concepts allow academics to formulate their desire for

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Representing Gender Benders

social change, as Thorpe suggests: “The ‘margins’ and ‘resistance’, as revolutionary sites, are ‘good to think’ when one can think them from distance.” 43 On another level gender benders are attributed the power of being flexible. Flexibility is a concept frequently found in a capitalist neo liberal discourse, but is now transferred to the sphere of gender performances. The consumerist connotation is not at all far away. The euphoria of gender bending is dangerously entering the discourse of consumerism. Like the grasping of anarchistic street protest as a marketing tool gender bending is incorporated in the market sphere of popular culture. Gender identities are becoming goods to consume. B. Rearticulation: Resistance and the Logics of Incorporation. The resistance of gender benders is seen as related to the concept of bricolage. It describes “the re-ordening and re-contextualization of objects to communicate fresh meanings.”44 Objects, which already carried symbolic meanings, are re-signified in a new context. Gender bending reorders the gender acts and re-conceptualise gender as a fluid concept. Stuart Hall defines resistance as a changing metaphor for cultural change, allowing us to think about cultural transformations.45 Resistance is conjunctural and relational. It is not universal, but should be seen in a particular context and in a particular social relation. Thus, the resistance of gender benders has to be situated in a specific social context. Resistance can be read in the performance of gender bending, but not all the time and not always as monolithic. This reading depends on the context of the reader(s). Another assumption we have to abandon is that resistance has to be seen as the opposite of domination. According to Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst resistance can be fragmented. 46 Using the concept of Incorporation Resistance Paradigm (IRP) they assume that audience research can be problematic: “as whether audience members are incorporated into the dominant ideology by their participation in media activity or whether, to the contrary, they are resistant to that incorporation.”47 The duality of domination or resistance is maintained by academics. As Bourdieu has described it, resistance can be seen as a normative distinction of values of the classifier48. The academic distinction of resistance and domination creates two poles of a dichotomy. On the one hand we find the pole of the preferred reading of hegemonic discourse and on the other hand the pole of polysemy and resistance is constructed.49 Such a polarisation appears to neglect the possibility that a preferred reading can be contradictory and that resistance is polysemical and fragmented.

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Resistance is performed in mainstream popular culture. Gender benders articulate a resistance against the dominant gender discourse. This resistance is now re-formulated and can be perceived of as depending on and as co-operative with the market.50 It is a part of the hegemonic sphere and can change over time to power dominance. It seems that two discourses are active at the same time. There is a potential resistance against a hegemonic gender discourse, but at the same time this resistance is incorporated by a hegemonic consumer culture. Elaborating on this monolithic academic discourse on gender bending, which tends to read the performances of gender benders as resistance through pleasure, questions arise on the discourse of young media consumers concerning gender benders in popular culture. 8.

Muted Resistance: Reading Gender Benders

How do youngsters read representations of gender bending? To confront the theories elaborated in this article, I will now look at the reception of gender bending by young media consumers. Emphasizing the discourse of popular culture I focussed on youngsters for the reception study. Youngsters are not only seen by the broadcasters of music channels as the major target groups, the academic discourse on popular culture is also mostly articulated around young media consumers. Using the method of focus group interviews, I want to explore the process of reading and signifying practices of media discourses.51 Each focus group interview started with a screening of a collage of performances of gender benders. The respondents saw parts of video clips of Queen, Marilyn Manson, Madonna, Garbage and Texas.52 After seeing the collage of gender benders performances in popular culture 53, a focus group interview on the following topics took place: (1) masculinity and femininity; (2) gender bending, travesty and multiple gender identities; (3) practices of gender bending; (4) statement, play and empowerment. 54 A. Masculinity/Femininity and Boundaries How do the participants define masculinity and femininity? When the respondents talked about others they often used stereotypes. This was in contrast with the way they see themselves. It could be concluded that the youngsters of these group interviews still use traditional and very polarised categories of femininity and masculinity. In the interviews femininity is often defined as “emotional, not short-tempered and not too aggressive” (XA3-M), as well as “sensible” (XC4-M). Masculinity is then defined as the opposite: “masculinity is the opposite.”(XA3-M). All participants concluded that nature is the basis for masculinity and femininity and culture has an effect on nature. They don’t agree on the

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Representing Gender Benders

notion that gender is a construction. Still there is a place for gender benders, but gender is defined as an essence of nature, not as an element of culture: culture gives people the opportunity to create a little space where they can move themselves to one of the two poles of gender, whereas the participants still assume that nature and culture are very dichotomous. Although the respondents say that emancipation has changed the traditional gender roles they often use polarised stereotypes to describe femininity and masculinity. When doing so, they often use the biological gender to make a distinction between masculinity and femininity. When they talk about femininity and masculinity they often refer to female and male categories using biological differences. B. Blurred Boundaries and the Bending of Gender Most participants defined gender bending as a play with masculinity and femininity, mostly expressed in the vestimentary elements. The concept of gender bending was not well known by the interviewees.55 Although they described gender bending as a playful act they still use the categories male and female to make a description of the bending of genders. As a participant says: “You can’t really make sure what it is [...] one time it is a male, another time it is a female [...] but actually not really a male or female.” (XF4-V). Some participants describe gender benders as a third sex or androgyny: “Gender bending is a mixture. Like the image of Marilyn Manson, you don’t know what it is. He plays masculinity or femininity. But he doesn’t play a full masculinity or femininity. He just plays with both.” (XC2-M). The distinction between a male gender bender and female gender bender is often made. Many participants define a male gender bender as someone without a gender. Words as “male-female”, “sexless” or “mixture” are often articulated in connection with male gender benders. On the contrary female gender benders are described as masculine women. They are defined and described as “macho-women” and “sturdy”. But most respondents see female gender bending clearly as play with femininity and masculinity. The boundaries of “femaleness” are crossed by masculine “behaviour”: “They (the female gender benders) still have feminine manners, but they are sturdy. They become a little masculine.” (XG3-V). The participants of the focus groups define female gender benders as bending the feminine gender identity and not as bending the female sex. Most youngsters also differentiated between gender bending and transvestism. Gender bending is seen as weird, provocative and a way of shocking people. Like one participant who said that: Transvestism is more, [...] very stereotyped, where you use more very stereotyped feminine characteristic

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features and the other way around, meanwhile gender bending is actually constantly changing. A whole pool of masculine and feminine elements. It is not clear at all whether it is a male or a female. They really play with it. (MF1-V). Transvestism is again defined by the focus on the vestimentary elements, more particular the extreme play act with clothes codes. The words “disguise” or “dress up parties” are frequently used. Transvestism is seen as a performance which is not mutual. The artist gives a performance but afterwards he or she returns to his or her own gender identity. Irony or parody are elements often articulated with transvestism: A male who tries to imitate a female. That’s funny because that doesn’t work at all. Like Freddy Mercury, with his moustache and his hairy legs. That is just funny. (XB6-M). C. Practices of Gender Bending The respondents very often answer questions on the practices of gender bending of performers in contemporary visual popular culture by focussing on the play with feminine and masculine features. The play with traditional gender roles is also often explained throughout the behaviour or manners, which are part of the gender bending practices. Like the statements on Madonna: “In one video clip she wears earrings, or not? That’s feminine, no? But when she drives the car and the revolver. That’s exactly masculine. [...] She behaves sturdy, but you can see that she’s a female, but her behaviour is masculine.” (XF4-V). Sturdy behaviour is seen as typically masculine, but it does not make a woman less feminine. Also, men who do feminine tasks are not described as feminine. They are described as something between masculine and feminine. Appearance is the measure to make gender categorisations. D. Statement, Play and Empowerment. This theme concerns the readings of the participants on the encoding of the gender benders. Most participants interpret gender bending as a play, but they also read it as a form of resistance against the hegemonic discourse on gender, allowing them to obtain power. Many youngsters refer to equal opportunities between females and males. As one participant said: “People may not make any difference, it is ok to dress up like a male or female.” (XD1-V). Or as someone else said: “There is not really a difference between men and women.” (XB3-M). Although most

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participants articulated the differences between the sexes, they also point to their equality and the fact that gender benders make this statement: “I think that they [referring to gender benders] want to say that there is not only a difference between men and women, but also that there is equality.” (XG6-V). When participants discussed the theme of a statement they often linked it to the possibility of empowerment and agency: “You don’t have to be repressed, you have to be who you are, as if you feel like destroying, destroy. If you feel like performing as a woman, just do it.” (XB3-M). The breaking of boundaries was also mentioned a few times in this context. The bending of gender by Madonna has something to do with this: “Point out that there are role patrons in our society, and that they have to be broken.” (XA3-M) or as someone else pointed out that gender bending is about: “making the difference between men and women vague.”(XB3-M). Gender bending is seen to increase empowerment, female gender benders are seen to especially empower themselves. They connect power to flexibility. Flexibility is seen as a positive strategy in gaining power. The distinction between female and male gender benders is explicitly made, and female genders benders are articulated as new representations of femininity in contemporary culture. As in the work of Anneke Smelik, female gender benders are seen as performers who want to create possibilities to break the boundaries of their position as women in society.56 For women gender bending is seen as something necessary to go beyond an object of desire. The flexibility is seen as an element of empowerment. But some participants doubted the resistance and the assumption that gender benders are making a statement about femininity or masculinity. Gender benders are just using their bodily appearance. Articulating the performance to acting or shocking. Referring to Marilyn Manson one respondent said that: “I think that he wants to attract attention, he wants to shock, so that people buy his records.” (XD7-V). One participant also mentioned the commodification of gender bending and has doubts concerning the fascination of people for gender benders. He asked a question on the consumerist creation of this fascination. Female gender benders are far more making statements about equal opportunities and empowerment then male gender benders, at least according to the youngsters. Referring to Madonna and Garbage one respondent mentioned that: “They are playing a role, but somewhat deeper [...] Marilyn Manson is a fabrication for marketing. The only thing he has to do is list to his manager how he has to dress himself to shock the audience.” (XA3-M).

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Conclusion

When the empirical findings of this case study and the theoretical understandings of concepts such as gender performance and gender bending are confronted with each other, we can distinguish a number of crucial and interesting differences. While the naïve empiricist position should be avoided, the empirical data can nevertheless offer a challenging contribution to the theoretical and conceptual debate on gender performances and gender bending. In the academic discourse within the field of cultural studies and the poststructuralist paradigm gender bending is conceptualised as a series of subversive practices, transgressing the horizon of the dichotomous hegemonic gender discourse. Bending gender is seen as an act of resistance, aiming to re-order and re-conceptualise gender, which in turn results in the articulation of gender as a fluid concept. Through this move, power and resistance gained their momentum in this monolithic academic discourse, linked with the academic belief in the forces of marginality. In this romantic turn, these margins of gender identities are deconstructed and represented as resistance and radical social change. Power, resistance and marginality thus become blurred concepts or readily floating signifiers, which allow scholars to formulate their desire for social change. Resisting the gender boundaries seems to be read as the only possible meaning of gender performances. Drawing for the greater part on the theories of active audiences the concept of resistance was incorporated in the discursive agenda of scholars working on gender performance in popular visual culture. Through this theoretical frame audiences are attributed semiotic power in reading media texts. Paradoxically these scholars are using the paradigm of the active readings but in isolation from the polysemy of these signifying practices. When turning to the analysis of the interviews it is safe to conclude that the focus group participants do not read gender bending in the same way as the monolithic academic discourse on this subject. Their readings were more fragmented and some times even contradictory. Analysing their discourses has not only given an insight in the discourse of youngsters on gender bending in popular culture. It also contributes to the theoretical understanding of the concept of resistance as such and its articulations aimed against the hegemonic dichotomous gender constructions. The respondents did see the performances of gender benders as articulations of resistance, but did not completely detach them from the hegemonic constructions of femininity and masculinity. Especially when they talked about others they often made use of stereotypical, traditional and very polarised categories of femininity and masculinity. The gender dichotomy remains a very strong societal construction and the respondents do not manage to overcome it. Although the respondents acknowledge that

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gender performances result from nurture and not from nature, this discursive structure is very strongly embedded in the way these youngster articulate gender discourses. Nevertheless, as Butler57 has suggested, a space for resistance against these hegemonic gender roles is indeed opened, but in the specific way Smelik58 has suggested. The distinction between male and female gender that she has proposed, is effectively made by the participants. They see the concept of resistance exclusively reserved for female gender benders, who use their agency as a strategy for empowerment. When we take a further look at the context of these gender performances the consumerist dimension of popular visual culture also needs to be taken into account. In the theoretical approaches on gender benders these processes of commodification and the contemporary consumer culture is too often ignored. Partial and/or potential resistance against the hegemonic gender discourse is present but this resistance is incorporated by a hegemonic consumer culture. Both discourses are active at the same time, but through this incorporation the resistance against the gender dichotomy is re-formulated as conforming with and co-operative towards the market. Resistance against the hegemonic gender discourse does exist, but at the same time this resistance does not seem to be able to escape from the incorporation in a hegemonic consumer culture. Without celebrating the ideology of consumerism or holding on to the romantic idea of resistance the theoretical discourse on gender bending cannot avoid taking this context of a hegemonic consumer culture into account.

Notes 1

The concept of hegemony is used here in the tradition of cultural studies, i.e. as a consensual system of thinking about the world, whereby ideologies are naturalized to appear as common sense by voluntary agreement. Hegemony and power are conceptualised as a matter of persuasion and consent rather than merely as force. Hence power is never secured once and for all. In this paradigm, representation is seen as a key site because of the importance of the power of definition. (Christine Gledhill, “Genre and gender: the case of soap opera” in Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 337. 2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990b), 217. 3 Butler, 271-279.

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Anneke Smelik “Carrousel der seksen,” in Een beeld van een vrouw. De visualisering van het vrouwelijke in de postmoderne cultuur, ed. Rosi Braidotti (Kampen: Kok Agora, 1993), 24. 5 Ann Woodhouse, Fantasy Women, Sex, Gender and Transvestisme (London: MacMillan, 1989),79. 6 Anneke Smelik, 19-49. 7 Schwichtenberg, 141. 8 Schwichtenberg, 134. 9 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests. Cross-dressing & Cultural Anxiety (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993),151. 10 Garber, 390. 11 Ann Woodhouse, Fantasy Women, Sex, Gender and Transvestisme (London: MacMillan, 1989). 12 Garber, 159. 13 Butler, 271-279. 14 Myra Macdonald, Representing Women. Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media. (London: Arnold, 1995), 225. 15 Cathy Schwichtenberg, The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory (Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), 129-142. 16 Bryan S. Turner, The Body & Society (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 2-6. 17 Elizabeth Jagger, “Consumer Bodies” in The Body, Culture & Society. An Introduction,. ed. Hancock et al. (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000),46. 18 Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 70-99. 19 Judith Bulter, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” in Performing Feminisms, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990a), 272. 20 Butler, 274. 21 Turner, 4-6. 22 Shilling, 92. 23 Mike Featherstone, Undoing Cultural, Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1995). 24 Turner, 6-23. 25 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1995) and Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). 26 Jagger, 51-52. 27 Conrad Lodziak, The Myth of Consumerism. (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 6. 28 Lodziak, 30.

34

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Lodziak, 31. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 31 Buikema et al., 104-105. 32 Mandziuk, 177. 33 MTV (Music Television) and TMF (The Music Factory) are both music channels. MTV Europe is part of MTV Network Europe and offers an additional set of 5 specific music channels. MTV Europe is part of Viacom Inc. The Music Factory (TMF) is a music channel, which broadcasts 24 hours a day music and started in 1995. In 2001 MTV Europe bought The Music Factory. TMF broadcasts in The Netherlands and in the Northern part of Belgium (Flanders). It is a music channel with attention to the local music culture(Gerrit Van Der Rijt et al. “Young People and Music Television in the Netherlands,” European Journal of Communication, 15(2000): 80.) 34 Nicholas Abercrombie, Television and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996),16. 35 John Fiske, Television Culture. (London: Methuen, 1987), 250. 36 Anneke Smelik, 19-20. 37 Feathersone, 75. 38 Roseann Mandziuk, “Feminist Politics and Postmodern Seductions: Madonna and the Struggle for Political Articulations” in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory, ed. Cathy Swichtenberg (Boulder: Westview, 1993), 168. 39 Rosemarie Buikema et al., “Postmoderne cultuur en representatie” in Vrouwenstudies in de jaren negentig. Een kennismaking vanuit verschillende disciplines, ed. Margo Brouns et al. (Bussem: Coutinho, 1995), 85-88. 40 See: John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987); David Morley, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: Structure and Decoding (BFI TV Monographs No. 11. London: British Film Institute, 1980); Cathy Schwichtenberg, “Music Video” in Popular Music and Communication, ed. James Lull (London: Sage, 1992), 116-33. 41 Mike Thorpe, “Marginalisation and Resistance through the Prism of Retirement.” in Consuming Cultures. Power and Resistance, ed. Jeff Hearn et al. (London: Macmillan, 1999), 112. 42 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 100. 43 Thorpe, 127. 44 John Clarke, “Style” in Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and T. Jefferson.(London: Hutchinson, 1976), 177. 30

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45

Stuart Hall, “For Allen White: Metaphors of Transformation” in Stuart Hal: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley &et al. (London: Routledge, 1996), 287. 46 Nicholas Abercrombie et al., Audience (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 3-39. 47 Abercrombie et al., 15. 48 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 49 Abercrombie et al., 15-28. 50 Ken Gelder et al., Subcultures Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), 145148. 51 Following a pilot interview, 7 focus groups were recruited from 3 different schools. 54 youngsters, of whom 31 females and 23 males between the ages of 14 to 18, took part in the focus group sessions. Each group was homogenous in terms of age and education level. Each interview was conducted as a flexible, semi-structured discussion based on open-ended questions. The focus group interviews took place in secondary schools in the classrooms during the study hours. The group interviews lasted one hour or more and were conducted by the author and students of the seminar on multiple gender identities at the Dept. of Communication Studies (Ghent University) during January 2002. This seminar was tutored by the author. The interviews were audio-taped and fully transcribed. Table 1: Age of the respondents Age 14-15 15-16 16-17 17-18

Number 18 12 14 10

Table 2: Total respondents and gender per focus group interview Focus group A Focus group B Focus group C Focus group D Focus group E Focus group F Focus group G Total

Number 10 6 6 9 9 8 6 54

female 2 0 0 9 7 8 5 31

male 8 6 6 0 2 0 1 23

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52

These images of performances of gender bending were selected from a textual analysis (combination of content analysis and film analysis) of 24 hours of video clips on MTV and TMF (total 48 hours). 619 video clips were analysed of which 20 video's were coded as images of gender bending performances. 5 video clips were randomly selected from the sample of 20 clips. 53 In this context it is important to mention that the participants often refer to one of the artists who performed in the video's which were screened before the focus group interviews started. 54 Following transcription, each interview was thematically coded based on grounded theory. In the analysis we combined a descriptive and analytic characterisation of the interviews. In this chapter I discuss a linked series of themes with focus on the readings of youngster of gender bending in contemporary visual popular culture. 55 It is important in these terms to notice and take into account the performativity of the focus group interview and the use of language, which was produced enduring the interviews. 56 Anneke Smelik, 19-49. 57 Butler, 1990a & 1990b. 58 Smelik, 1993.

Bibliography Abercrombie, Nicholas Television and Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Abercrombie, Nicholas & Longhurst, Brian. Audiences. London: Sage Publications, 1998. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Bourdieu Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Buikema, Rosemarie, Meijer, Maaike & Smelik, Anneke. “Postmoderne cultuur en representatie.” In Vrouwenstudies in de jaren negentig. Een kennismaking vanuit verschillende disciplines, edited by Margo Brouns, Mieke Verloo & Marianne Grünell, 79-109. Bussem: Coutinho, 1995. Bulter, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” In Performing Feminisms, edited by Sue-Ellen Case, 270-283. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990a. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity . London: Routledge, 1990b.

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Clarke, John. “Style” In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and T. Jefferson. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Featherstone, Mike. Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity. London: Sage Publications, 1995. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Methuen, 1987. Garber, Margorie. Vested Interests. Cross-dressing & Cultural Anxiety. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Gelder, Ken & Thorton, Sarah. Subcultures Reader. London: Routledge, 1996. Gledhill, Christine. “Genre and gender: the case of soap opera.” In Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, 337-386. London: Sage, 1997. Hall, Stuart. “For Allen White: Metaphors of Transformation” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley & Kuan-Hsing Chen, 287-308. London: Routledge, 1996. Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Jagger, Elizabeth. “Consumer Bodies” In The Body, Culture & Society. An Introduction. edited by Hancock, Philip, Hughes, Bill, Elizabeth Jagger, Kevin Paterson, Rachel Russell, Emmanuelle Tuille-Winton & Melissa Tyler, 45-63. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1995. Lindlof, Thomas. Qualitative Communication Research Methods. Thousands Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995. Lodziak, Conrad. The Myth of Consumerism. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Macdonald, Myra. Representing Women. Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media. London: Arnold, 1995. Mandziuk, Roseann. “Feminist Politics and Postmodern Seductions: Madonna and the Struggle for Political Articulations.” In The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory. edited by Cathy Swichtenberg, 161-187. Boulder: Westview, 1993. Morgan, David L. The Focus Group Guidebook. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1998. Morley, David. The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: Structure and Decoding. BFI TV Monographs No. 11. London: British Film Institute, 1980. Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1999.

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Smelik, Anneke. “Carrousel der seksen” In Een beeld van een vrouw. De visualisering van het vrouwelijke in de postmoderne cultuur, edited by Rosi Braidotti, 19-49. Kampen: Kok Agora, 1993. Schwichtenberg, Cathy. “Music Video” In Popular Music and Communication, edited by James Lull, 116-33. London: Sage, 1992. Schwichtenberg, Cathy (ed.). The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory. Oxford: Westview Press, 1993. Thorpe, Mike. “Marginalisation and Resistance through the Prism of Retirement.” In Consuming Cultures. Power and Resistance, edited by Hearn, Jeff. & Roseneil, Sasha, 109-130. London: Macmillan, 1999. Turner, Bryan S. The Body & Society (2nd. ed.). London: Sage Publications, 1996. Van Der Rijt, Gerrit, d’Haenens, Leen, Janssen Ronald & Cor De Vos “Young People and Music Television in the Netherlands.” European Journal of Communication, 15(2000): 79-92. Woodhouse, Ann. Fantasy Women, Sex, Gender and Transvestisme. London: Mac Millan, 1989.

Politics, the Papacy and the Media Maria Way Abstract The Catholic Church is by its nature catholic – its religious intent seeks to cover every facet of everyday life and in recent years, the head of the Church, John Paul II, has indeed spoken about many areas that are considered by some not to be “religious in nature”. John Paul II has become not only a religious but also a media star1. Despite his evident ill health he has continued to appear in public, travelling the world to places unthought of by previous pontiffs. His media presence and his continual pleas for peace have brought him into the political arena in a new way. As spiritual leader of a fifth of the world’s people, he is the head of a considerable power block and his use of the media has brought him, and the Church he represents, to the attention of many outside that Church, some of whom have previously been disaffected by her, but many of whom have developed a new respect for its present leader. There are, of course, also those who do not like him, the policies, which he puts forward or the Church he represents. What is the policy behind this media presence – if indeed there is one? How has this presence been achieved? Has there really been a political effect? This chapter seeks to answer these questions by using both written and interview material as well as material from archive film. Keywords John Paul II; papacy; power; media; politics; communism; peace; Cuba; sexual mores. 1.

Introduction

The final loss of the Papal States by Pius IX at the unification of Italy in 1870 caused considerable angst to many devout Catholics, some of whom had offered to fight to retain the Papal States. Pius refused their offer. There are those2 who believe that the loss of the temporal power of the papacy aided the religious prestige of the office, in that losing temporal power meant that a greater concentration was made on the spiritual side of the work of the pope. The mid to late nineteenth century was a time of political ferment and in the Church there was a rise of a new piety, of ultramontanism, which Duffy3 describes as resulting in a: “suffocating churchiness, narrow, fearful and exclusive”. Despite this, due

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to the mass media he became what Duffy4 and Gilley5 have both described as an 'icon'. Certainly the mass media (in the forms of lithography, photography and newspapers) for the first time allowed the image of the Pope to appear on the walls and bookshelves of 'Catholic presbyteries, schools and homes'6. Duffy7 has suggested that, by the end of his reign, Pius IX was the most recognisable pope in history, thanks to photography and lithography. Since the 86 year old Leo XIII asked the Lumière Brothers to film him in 1896 (very shortly after the first commercial film was shown at the Catholic University of Louvain in November, 1885, and little over a month after the first commercial film was shown in Britain at the Royal Polytechnic Institute, Regent Street in February, 1896, now part of the University of Westminster, London), we have been able to see Popes as moving, flesh and blood people. Much more than a still image or a painting, the filmed image gives us an idea of a personality. In the 1950s, Pius XII (reigned 1939-1958) was 'the Pope' because not only did we see photographs of him in the newspaper, but also there were newsreel films of him. His media presence had eclipsed that of his predecessors and with the election of John XXIII to the papacy, a totally different personality shone through. Following the rather aloof, ascetic Pius, there was the jolly, fat old man who smiled and waved at the crowds in a much more informal way - something we are told he enjoyed 8. Pius XII, according to Blét, the noted historian, did not like appearing in public, but felt that it was his duty to do so9. With the over-exaggerated gestures and the unease that films sometimes show us, this is evident, although much more so in the case of liturgical and formal occasions than when he is shown in less formal settings, for instance in film, held at the Istituto Luce, of his 80th birthday audience with small children. Shortly after his election, John XXIII approached RAI, the State Broadcasting Company of Italy, to make a film about him. The resultant documentary, La giornata del Papa, (The Day of the Pope), was shown in February 1959. His personality shines out from the 'fly-on-the-wall' documentary, an early 'reality television' milestone, which is rarely spoken about. His reign came at a time when television was really taking off as a medium and this in itself made him more 'available'. For the first time, the reigning Pope could be present at our domestic hearth, whereever that hearth was, even if it was geographically distant (if not spiritually distant) from the Pope. The Ancient Roman concept of the domestic Lares, returning to Christian homes in the form of God’s representative on earth. Television, which began in Italy only in 1954, was taken up by the Roman Catholic Church quickly. Before the arrival of RAI television the Vatican had its own television station, set up for the Holy Year, 1950, using Swiss money. So early was this in the history of European television that it was only in 1950 that the first cross-Channel television broadcast

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was made, a broadcast which united Calais with the BBC in London by means of a very wavery picture.10 The Vatican television station was dismantled at the end of the year to be restarted under John Paul II in the 1983/1984 season. 11 Even earlier, Pius XII had been filmed by RTF for a programme to be broadcast at Easter 1950. His address was on the mass media and their possible use by the Church and this was one of over sixty speeches relating to the mass media in one form or another and many of these he wrote himself.12 Marchione describes him as “star struck”13 and he occasionally gave audiences to film stars (Newsreel film shows the presence of Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck, amongst many others) Paul VI, the successor of the natural television star, John XXIII, had what was perhaps an unfortunate disability – he was not photogenic. Cardinal Bea wrote of him: His slim and rather austere figure, the vigour which shines in his face, tense in recollection or in reaching for the goals which his will proposes, even the rather dark complexion of his face, do not tend to popular appeal 14 However, following the lead of his predecessor, who had begun to travel outside the Vatican, even if only in the State of Italy, Paul VI began to go on overseas trips. He travelled to the Holy Land (coverage was much lower key than that of John Paul II’s 2000 visit) and addressed the United Nations in New York, he also built on the start made by John XXIII in attempting to dialogue with those of other faiths. In addition, he continued and concluded the Second Vatican Council started by John. Importantly in this context, he also made many media appearances (particularly on television). The “prisoner of the Vatican” (as Pius IX described himself after the loss of the Papal States) had escaped. The pope who followed Paul, John Paul I, was seemingly a media natural. In the 33 days of his pontificate, films of his audiences show a man totally at ease with the medium, even though what he actually said often contained messages describing his unworthiness to be Pope and his lack of preparation for the job which had been placed upon his shoulders. He cannot really have thought that it was unlikely that he should be Pope. He had, after all, been Patriarch of Venice. This is seen as one of the top jobs in the Italian hierarchy and this was a position that two of his predecessors during the twentieth century (Pius X and John XXIII) had held. At that stage there had not been a non-Italian pope for over 400 years. Like John XXIII he was a smiling, jovial person, now remembered as 'the smiling Pope', which given the shortness of his reign is a testimony to the power of television. He was also innovative and courageous in his use of the medium. That a Pope should feel so at ease as to ask one of the altar boys to come forward to talk to him in front of the cameras and then

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use the child’s answers as a basis for his homily, even if we now learn that the altar boy had been pre-chosen, shows enormous confidence in a man who is always described as humble. 15 He was not a “media virgin” however and had written extensively for newspapers in the Veneto, notably in the Messagero di San Antonio in Padova.16 Then we had a Polish Pope. Since 1552 all of the Popes had been Italian, but suddenly there was a Pope from an Eastern bloc country – a communist country that was at the same time one of the most Catholic countries in the world. From his first speech on the balcony of St. Peter’s on his accession in October, 1978, he has used the media for his (and the Church’s) purposes. He has what Walsh17 has described as a: “… flair for exploiting the media [which] goes hand in hand with deeply conservative theological convictions.” It would seem, then, that the image we see on our screens of the pope has much to do with the personality of the man who is the pope and little to do with policy. What is the purpose of all of this media exposure? Ugo Morretto18 said: “Evangelisation, of course!”, something further upheld by the statement of Cardinal Roger Etchegaray who, when asked why John Paul II travelled so much outside Italy (he has spent more than a year of his pontificate in other countries), said: “To tell the world not to be afraid, to open the doors wide to Christ.” 19 Approximately a fifth of the world’s population is Roman Catholic, but in the “old world” attendance numbers are falling. The media presence of the Pope has in many ways lead to a “popecentric” church – much of the rest of the Church has become invisible unless, as happened in Colombia in November, 2002, a major church figure is kidnapped (or, as in the case of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, killed) for political or religious reasons. It is in that Western world, where numbers of practising Catholics are dropping, that the media are strongest and the effects of the media presence cannot be ignored. However, there has been a spin-off effect, which may or may not have been calculated by the Church – from the political castration of the 1870 loss of the Papal States through to World War II, the Vatican was relatively politically powerless. Even if the papacy had become more spiritually powerful, as Duffy suggests, 20 its temporal power was virtually nil. Stalin was said to have asked how many battalions the Pope had to combat the threat of Communism – and the answer was, of course, none. The presence of the Pope from the Eastern bloc was, however, to cause the Communist regimes to crumble. Perhaps, as another dictator [Mussolini] is reported to have said: “The crowd are like a woman – they need a strong man!” John Paul II has been seen as the strong man that leads the (not necessarily practising) Catholic crowd. The notion of John Paul as a “strong man” is continually mentioned in films of him, even those such as the BBC's Absolute Truth (1998) and John Paul II: The Millennial Pope, which were made by organisations outside the Church and which do not always support his views. This is particularly

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noticeable in the case of Absolute Truth, which discusses many of the problems faced by the Roman Catholic Church in the modern world. John Paul II: The Millennial Pope describes him on its sleevenotes as “a man at war with the twentieth century itself”. 2.

Politics

There seems to be a tendency for the viewer or listener to be faithful to one or two specific channels, despite the ‘zapping’ which has become prevalent since the advent of the chairside tele- or radio controller. If broadcasting on religious matters is only from religious channels, the 'unconverted' can be reached only by serendipity - because in zapping through the channels something catches the attention - the likelihood of finding such an 'attention grabber' in the context of religious broadcasting is severely limited. In Italy there are many “religious” channels. Telepace, which is classed as a devotional channel and relies on donations for its continuing presence, would not grab the attention of anyone unless they were already religious and wished to watch a certain type of devotional television. The other, a digital channel, SAT2000, set up by the Italian Bishops’ Conference in 1998 to give them a head start over other broadcasters in the race to the full digitalisation of television, which is supposed to be going to happen by 2010 in Europe, is more of a main stream channel and, according to their Director, Dr. E. Milano 21 [September, 2002], even their news gathering and broadcasting tends towards items which are ethically or in some other way related to the interests of Catholics and their Church. Programmes from this channel are broadcast via satellite and there is no totally reliable way of ascertaining their audience figures since even Auditel cannot be accurate in this regard. Their programmes are picked up by 40 Catholic television stations and what Milano described as 40 ‘friendly’ stations in Italy, as well as by some (an increasing number of) stations outside Italy. The satellite footprint means that they can be picked up as far away as the Sudan with a tracking satellite dish. However, the Pope’s travels have put his image onto all channels that carry news broadcasts – just as Paul VI and John XXIII escaped from the Vatican, John Paul II has escaped from the “religious channels” onto the news broadcasts of the major channels. While the legislation regarding religious broadcasting differs from country to country, most people who can do so, watch the news fairly regularly. In 2000, over 122 countries requested all of the images of the Jubilee Year 22, and others took some of the images to be broadcast. Although in the 2001 financial year the Vatican ran at a small loss, the communications arm ran at a profit. By means of a rather clever strategy of distribution and production, the actual distribution costs of spreading these images is relatively low

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One of the benefits of the Pope's travels is that many people (both believers and non-believers) have seen the Pope in the flesh. Not only does he command large audiences (His Phoenix Park Mass in Ireland drew a quarter of the population of Ireland; in Manila, Philippines, he drew ten million people), but his visit to Cuba in 1998 drew the highest number of media professionals anywhere, ever - including Diana, Princess of Wales' funeral - although it must be said that many of the Americans left when the Clinton/Lewinsky story broke. Cuba is seen as one of the last of the Communist countries and it was probably not the spiritual dimension of the Pope’s activities that drew the media there. Having been credited with causing the demise of the Eastern European Communist regimes23, the media were anxious to see what John Paul’s effect would be on this last bastion, a Communist country where Catholicism was seen as still a major influence on society, despite pressures from the Government. This was a visit which might finally bring down Castro’s regime. This probably had less to do with whether or not the bringing down of the regime would be a good thing and more to do with a good news story. In 2000 John Paul visited both Israel and Palestine. Now a sick man, he arrived looking very frail. By the end of the trip he seemed considerably stronger. He had been reported as saying that he had wished to visit the Holy Land, to visit the places mentioned in the Bible and to follow in the footsteps of St. Paul, for some time. For the media of the world, this was again a major event. He trod the line between the warring parties that left them both feeling that he was on “their side”. Peace was expected to break out as a result of his visit. On May 26th, 2003, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, was reported as telling an ecumenical conference (The Church and the International Order) at the Pontifical Gregorian University that the Holy See is a world power – but a moral power rather than a political one. “The raison d’être of the Holy See…at the community of nations is to be the voice that conscience expects, without diminishing … the contribution of other religious traditions” 24 Despite Tauran’s statement. John Paul II has been described as having “the crowd-pulling power of a political superstar”25 and as believing that the Church teaches “absolute truth that cannot be questioned.”26 The Pope is the representative of the “Prince of Peace”. The words in the English language version of the Mass that say: “I leave you peace, my peace I give you” have been taken up by the papacy during the whole of the twentieth century (further into the past, of course, having temporal power they were often themselves leaders of troops). Benedict XV, the Pope who became pontiff on the eve of World War I, made pleas for peace. Pius XI worked hard to discourage the opposing sides from

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starting World War II and his failure is said to have hastened his death. Pius XII made radio appeals for peace saying: “Nothing is lost by peace. Everything is lost by war.” The film Pastor Angelicus, made in 1942 and re-released in 1992 in videocassette, has a shot of “St, Peter’s Square in perfect peace”27, that shows the lighted window of the Pope’s study at a time when much of Europe was blacked out. This was perhaps put in as a sign of hope. John XXIII issued an encyclical on peace Pacem in Terris in April 1963, and had previously issued a letter in Portuguese asking for peace amongst peoples. 28 One of his visits was in fact to Assisi in order to pray for peace in the world. He also helped to settle the Cuban missile crisis in 1961 and began to create détente with the Communist bloc by seeing the daughter of Nikita Kruschev in audience and talking to others in the Communist bloc. Paul VI made many pleas for peace and instituted the first World Day for Peace on January 1 st, 1968 (World Peace Day is still celebrated by the Church on January 1st each year) and yet the high profile of John Paul II in the media, his “peace extravaganzas” at Assisi in 1984 and 2000 and his calls for peace at his Sunday Angelus talks have totally overshadowed the work of those who went before him. Ex-President Gorbachev has said that John Paul caused the fall of Communism, although Ascherson29 has said that he believes that John Paul: …spread a spirit of revolt, defiance, at a critical moment throughout Eastern Europe.» Well, I don't think he ever made a great dent or hole, certainly in countries whose basic religion was Orthodox, for example. For Carroll30, he is “strongly anti-Communist and yet profoundly suspicious of democracy.” Film of his first visit to Poland after the fall of the Communist regime there shows him incandescent with fury as he berates his fellow countrymen about their swift take-up of capitalism.31 Since the start of his reign, the world has indeed changed. The Communist bloc fell and the changes in Poland had stimulated this fall, but what have been the results of his other visits? 3.

Cuba

When the Pope visited Cuba, it was a huge media event, an event even bigger than his 1979 visit to Poland. The sight of the aging Pope meeting the aging dictator (who has worn better), was transmitted round the world. The visit was judged a success. The imminent fall of Castro was anticipated and yet, as I write this in 2003, he is still there. Cuba is: “ … Fidel's island fortress,[where] dollar-fuelled hedonism and communist austerity live side by side.”32 In April, 2003, the laity of Pinar del Rio, one of the Cuban dioceses, spoke out against Castro’s detention of peaceful dissidents and Cardinal Sodano, writing on behalf of the Pope and at his request, wrote to Castro complaining of increased repression on the Caribbean island.33 Politically the Pope’s visit must, then, be considered a

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failure. It is a failure if we consider it only from the basis of the world political scene, but when considered from the point of view of the Roman Catholic Church, it has had some effect. The Cubans can now celebrate Christmas again and various Vatican officials have visited the island both before and since the visit of the Pope – at least for the Church there has been some opening up. It should be noted, however, that diplomatic relations were never broken off between the Church and Cuba. Just as Cuban students have studied in Eastern bloc countries, they have also studied in Rome, only recently did numbers of them begin to study in other parts of the Western world. 4.

The Holy Land

Peace has been noticeable by its absence in the Middle East for a very long time. The post-World War II division of Israel and Palestine cannot be said to have been a success. During the Pope’s visit it was thought that some long lasting result would miraculously occur. Morretto34 told me that all of the television networks present during the visit wanted only to show the political events – the Pope’s meetings with politicians and so on. They did not want to show the Pope as a pilgrim. The Vatican, of course, wanted to show this very thing, so had to set up its own crews, lighting and sound at short notice and in difficult circumstances, for instance, in the Church of the Nativity, to show the pilgrim Pope. The result of their efforts proved to be such good television that the networks then bought the images from CTV. CNN and other major channels showed the CTV footage of a praying John Paul II, intent on his prayer and his dialogue with his God, seemingly unaware of the camera crews around him. If nothing else, the intensity of his contact through prayer with the God of Peace gave many a new sense of the intense spiritual life of Wojtyla. Since John Paul’s visit, the Church of the Nativity has been besieged and damaged (May 2000). Christians are leaving the area due to an increasing sense of persecution and the Vatican has sent money to the Christian community to encourage them to stay.35 This visit has not brought peace; it has not brought stability; it has not created many conversions and the indigenous Christians are leaving. From a televisual point of view, it was a success. At this point one begins to wonder if the television presence of the pilgrim Pope has any point. 5.

Communism

The former Eastern bloc Communist regimes have indeed fallen. Poland, as mentioned above, took up capitalism quickly. On a recent visit to Moscow (October 2002) I shopped on Red Square opposite Lenin’s

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tomb and wondered whether he and the Communist dignitaries entombed with him were revolving in their tombs in the face of the luxury shops and many shoppers in the shopping centre before them. In many of the countries of the former Communist bloc there has been war: Chechnya and the former Yugoslavia, for instance. The Pope has repeatedly spoken of a “culture of death”; abortion, “runaway market capitalism, militarism, dependence on weaponry, the refusal of the Western world to take the end of the Cold War seriously and disarm”36 In some countries capitalism has taken over, and in others people are going without the basic needs of life. Duffy says: Communism identified the individual as a worker. Capitalism identifies the individual as a consumer. John Paul can make sense of man or woman as a worker because he believes not that work is an affliction that has been imposed on us as the price of sin, but an ennobling thing by which we shape the world. And so human beings' work is part of the moral activity that makes them human. So that dimension of Communism, for him, has resonances, he can sympathize, he knows what's going on, what's being said, and he thinks that there's a dignity and nobility about talking about `the workers'. He thinks there is no dignity or nobility in talking about ‘the consumers. 37 Although in the Russian visit, mentioned above, many people were seen praying in Russian Orthodox churches, the Vatican is in dispute with the Russian Federation, a dispute which centres around the Vatican’s policy of opening new Roman Catholic churches within the Russian Federation. Roman Catholic bishops and priests have been deported. Despite the fall of Communism, therefore, things do not seem to have improved overmuch. The rise of capitalism and unrest without any apparent effect on evangelisation must be a worrying phenomenon. The St. NicholaiKirche, Leipzig, where the Wände Movement which lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall started, was full in the Communist era and now has small congregations. Although the St. NicholaiKirche is Lutheran, this would again, seems to be symptomatic of failure of not just the Lutherans but also the Roman Catholic Church and other denominations to bring in practicants in the Western world. 6.

Peace

During the reign of this Pope he has continually called for peace. He has asked people to say the Rosary for peace. He has visited war-torn

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lands. The Balkans have been subject to bloody civil wars. In Africa, there have been wars in many countries and in many African countries Islam is gaining converts. In South America, there have been a number of conflicts where the Church itself has been attacked; the killing of 6 Jesuits in El Salvador in the early nineties; the killing of Oscar Romero the Archbishop of San Salvador; the continuing war in Colombia. If the Church is attacked by warring factions it may be either because it supports a right-wing dictatorship or because it is itself fighting to improve the lot of people in the country. In the United States, traditionally a religious country, the Government called yet another war, this time with Iraq, and attempts were made by the U.S. Government to tie the war not only to issues of terrorism, but also to issues surrounding religion. Despite John Paul’s best efforts, peace seems a distant dream. Not only that, but religion was used as a propagandistic tool. If, as Gilbert Levine, the orchestral conductor, has said, the Pope is more concerned with faith than with sectarian loyalties38 then this becomes a doubly failed quest. Badawi39 has suggested that it not religion that causes problems, but those who move away from faith towards ideology, and this has been a supreme example of such a move. There has been both political failure and a failure of one faith to understand another or, more correctly, the notion of faith has been misused. While it is often suggested that we live in an increasingly secularized society, religion has been instrumental in forming the culture of the society in which we live. In considering culture, it is not possible to ignore religion, yet the media often have no specialist knowledge of religious topics and, according to Richard Chartres, the Anglican Bishop of London, have a tendency to cast blame on religion for political problems. 40 Religious faith and the mass media have now become intertwined in present day culture and both may form and mould that culture, a culture that has moved away from single-faith areas to multifaith societies in much of the world. 7.

Sexual Mores

On many occasions, John Paul II has spoken of a culture of death in the world. He has spoken out against contraception and abortion as well as against euthanasia. For many people his stand on these issues, and on clerical celibacy and divorce, have led to a vision of him as old-fashioned, yet he is only underlining the teaching of the Church which he leads. Yet he has proved “the power of his office in the modern world.” 41 He has himself suggested that to live a Christian life today is to be “going against the current.”42 Further, in an address on April 24th, 2003, he suggested that there was a paradox in that many people would agree that the Bible was a good thing, but they still rejected the Gospel values it contained. 43 In

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July, 1968, when Humanae Vitae, the Church’s encyclical which confirmed its teaching on contraception, was published it was the first occasion on which many Catholics, both lay and clerical, opposed the Church and its leader. This damaged irreparably “the authority of the papacy and opened a fracture in the Church that has never healed.” 44 We are no longer in an age where people accept without question the words of their leaders. In his own Poland, abortion rates are high in what has always been seen as one of the most seriously Roman Catholic countries in the world. There are many Roman Catholics who see no problem in using contraception within (or outside) marriage. Young Catholics often live together without the benefit of marriage. The Church’s teaching on homosexuality (that homosexual people should not practice this homosexuality) is ignored by the gay community, a gay community, which increasingly has banded together to have its own voice within the Church, particularly in the United States. He has opposed many things: as the sleevenotes of John Paul II: The Millennial Pope sat: …he has defined himself by his opposition to many of the dominant secular ideologies and passions of our time. He has excoriated communism, feminism, capitalism, and consumerism. He has challenged our quest to maximize individual freedoms in the marketplace, in our bedrooms, even on our death beds. His insistence on God in our secular age poses the question: Is he lost or are we? John Paul’s stand on moral issues has not been helped by the spate of clerical abuse cases reported around the world. These have not only damaged the Church’s reputation and the viewpoint of the Catholic clergy as being capable of keeping to a celibate lifestyle, but have also been a political fiasco, damaging the Church’s presence in public life. In the United States, where the Church has been a considerable political force, the resultant scandals have caused a diminution of that force. One wonders, however, whether reporting has been entirely fair. What we are dealing with here are not only infractions of a sexual nature, but a destruction of trust. The institutional organisation, which enabled such cases to be “swept under the carpet”, has had to consider its actions and develop new strategies for dealing with such cases in the future. This can only be for the good as it will be much more difficult to operate what can only be called a “closed shop” in the future. It will be very difficult for the Church to regain the trust of those who have been hurt by these cases, many of them deplorable, and those who, while not personally affected by

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the cases, have had their belief systems damaged and have, in some cases, left the Church. 8.

Success?

Suro has suggested that the Pope sees himself as a spiritual rather than political leader, which is as it should be. Suro says: I think the pope has to be a prophetic figure, somebody who changed humanity. What he offered, what he suggested, the road laid out, if followed, would have transformed humanity in a spiritual sense. He was calling at the end of the twentieth century for a spiritual life to become the center of man's humanity, for all men, and certainly for all Catholics and all Christians to rediscover spirituality as the guiding force in their lives. If he had accomplished that, he would have been a millennial figure. 45 While he has been seen as the most political Pope of recent times (at the same time forbidding priests to become involved in politics), it would seem that this has not been one of the more successful facets of his papacy. He is seen by virtually everyone to be a man of faith. A man who, what ever his faults and failings, is certain in his convictions and who works to present them in the best way he can. Able to sell the ideas that he is secure in his convictions, he works hard (some say too hard!) to disseminate them, John Paul II certainly has the ability to sell. In essence, the Church is about advertising and selling its story, a story which it believes leads to eternal life. John Paul is seen as doing this rather well. What he can also do well is sell books! Karol Wojtyla, who became John Paul II, was a philosophy professor and has two doctorates, one from the Dominican Pontifical University (the Angelicum) in Rome, and the other from his home university at Krakow in Poland. These are both incredibly dense books, but he has sold in a way that no other academic has sold except perhaps for Stephen Hawking whose 1988 book, A Brief History of Time: from the big bang to black holes, one of those books which many have bought and few have read in its entirety. In the case of John Paul’s academic writings, published before his papacy, the decision to reprint them was a great publishing idea. Many of those who have bought them will have no understanding of the subject matter. They are not easy to read, being the writings of a philosophy professor, but are sold from Catholic websites (although the only official Catholic website is www.vatican.va) and through bookshops and, I am told by booksellers in both Great Britain and

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Italy, to those who see the Pope, hear his words and wish to buy into them in some way. He also writes poetry and his most recent volume Roman Triptych, Meditations, published in Polish on 7th March, 2003, sold out of its 300,000 first edition on the day of publication. An English language version is to be published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on June 29th, 2003. Can it be that he is such a great poet? Does poetry normally sell this well? The answers to both of these questions is, of course, “no”. Other popes have written books, even books of philosophy, and these have not sold so well. In the case of John XXIII, his greatest publishing success was Giornale del’Anima. This was, however, published posthumously in an edition edited by his assistant, Archbishop Loris Capovilla46. It is a readable spiritual work. The collection of newspaper articles written by John Paul I before he became pope, were posthumously published in an edited volume, Illustrissimi47 but these were written for an every day audience. I firmly believe that it is the media presence of John Paul II that has brought him the fame that sells the books rather than their content, something perhaps similar to sales of books by other media stars, more for the fans to have something relating to the ‘star’ than for content. 9.

Political Power

This pope, who is seen as an extremely political figure, does not therefore seem to have been much of a success except in the causing of the former Communist bloc – and even there the results have not been to his liking. In addition, the laity of the Church are making increasing demands for more power to be devolved to them. In the United States of America, where there has been a spate of abuse cases which has been given a lot of media coverage, a call has been made for what the New York Times, 15th November, 2002, called “the most organised and widespread challenge [to their power] by the laity in the modern history of the Church”. The laity are calling for more transparency, for publication of accounts and so on (although I would add that the Vatican and the British dioceses have now published their accounts for many years). The Bishops of the United States are evidently worried by this trend. A 12 th November article in the same newspaper, says that the Bishops are trying to win back lost ground and Bishop Wilton Gregory, the President of the Bishops’ Council of the USA, has talked (to the considerable annoyance of many quoted in the article) of people profiting from the present vulnerability of the Bishops. One person quoted says that the days of the Bishop doing “the kinglike thing” and saying “I’m the ruler … doesn’t go over any more.” 48 John Paul II, who has become the leader of a pope-centric Roman Catholic Church, certainly gives the impression of being a ruler – and this may well not “go over any more.” The Late Michael Ramsey, former Archbishop of Canterbury,

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believed that turning the Church political was not the answer to which New Testament study leads. It should continue to “point to Jesus, the Messiah, and his death.”49 However important it may be, Ramsey believed the Church could not “convert its Gospel into social reform,” even though he was himself a liberal. He may have been proved right by the reign of John Paul II. There seems to be some evidence that, despite the problems caused by the abuse cases and their backwash, the number of men coming forward for the priesthood is increasing. Figures published for Vocations Sunday, 2003, show that in 1978 (when John Paul came to the throne of Peter) there were 420,000 priests in dioceses and religious orders worldwide, at the end of 2001 there were 405,067. However, in 1978 there were only 5,562 permanent Deacons, at the end of 2001 there were 29,204, and the number of candidates for the priesthood has risen from 63,888 in 1978 to 112,244 at the end of 2001. 50 However, even with the priests that there are already there seems to be, at least to the Holy Father, a problem. On the 29 th March, 2003, he requested that priests be true to the Magisterium (the teachings of the Church) in the bioethical sphere and in the moral and canonical norms in the sphere of marriage.51 Sex would seem to have raised its ugly head once again! Much has been spoken about the devotion of John Paul to the Virgin Mary. Perhaps because of this, he is often seen as a pope who is particularly liberal to women and this was in fact the subject of an entire programme In sua immagine, which went out in the Sunday morning religious time slot on RAI 1 in September, 2002. He has, however, been persistent in his refusal to consider the possibility of artificial contraception. He has also persistently refused to consider women as priests, and for this reason many Anglican clergy have “come over to Rome” since the Church of England accepted women into orders. Certainly his attitudes have not increased the number of Sisters. In 1978 there were 990,768 nuns, but by the end of 2001 this figure had decreased to 792,317, and their average age has increased to the point that the younger ones are, in many cases, no longer able to earn enough to look after their older Sisters. He has had some success in his attempts at dialogue with other faiths. As the RAI commentary on the Assisi Peace Day in January 2002, said, there is probably nobody else in the world who could have gathered so many leaders from so many faiths into one place at one time. Everyone was there from the Animists to the Zen Buddhists. Muslims, Hindus, Jews and Christians of various denominations stood shoulder to shoulder. Each group prayed in their own way and also together. If Gilbert Levine is right and John Paul is more interested in the faith of a person than their sectarian loyalties, then this was indeed a triumph. One might point out here, however, that he is still stressing the importance of the

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evangelisation of his Church in the strongest terms, for instance in his address to participants in the Assembly on Evangelisation,52and the Vatican made strong representations to have the phrase “… religious heritage, especially Christian, in European countries” written into the draft European Constitution.53 It would seem that they have failed to do this, at least in the first draft which appeared on May 29 th, 2003. Apart from his longevity, he became the fourth longest reigning Pope in the history of the Church on May 1 st, 2003 (only Leo XIII, Pius IX and St. Peter have reigned longer and he will possibly overtake Leo XIII in the Spring of 2004), perhaps John Paul’s greatest strength lies in being a star of the media.54 Where Pius XII overacted, John Paul has managed to be professional in his media presence. He is able to “work the audience” in the way that good actors and performers can. During his reign, the television presentation of his visits, of his Masses both at the Vatican and abroad, has improved and has become in many ways, much more professionally polished. The Vatican does not leave the local hierarchy to work out the details of how and where Masses are to be undertaken – they send information on how the “set” should be built and on what they need to have. If comparison is made between the film of the Opening of Vatican Radio in 1931and the presentation of the Pope in the present day, we can see how things have improved, even though both John XXIII and John Paul I were also excellent media performers. Technology has improved and this has also helped, but John Paul II, who Suro mentions danced with two Australian girls during his visit to Australia, 55 has become a sort of rock ‘n’ roll Pope. He meets the real stars (Charlotte, Church, Bob Dylan, Luciano Pavarotti, U2). He (or his organisation) makes the sort of demands that only very big stars can make (security, sets, location). His legacy may not be in his pre-papacy academic writings, plays or poetry; in his encyclicals and speeches; in the number of converts he has brought to the Church (despite the wonderful placard, held up during his 1982 visit to Wales, which read: JPII – more conversions than JPR.56 It may not be in his political legacy, even if the fall of Communism in Poland was of major importance. His real legacy may be in bringing stardom and professional television productions to the Vatican. I asked a well-known priest-academic, a long-time observer of Vatican affairs, whether he thought the media presence of the Pope would change the job description of the next Pope and his answer was: Indubitably. The Holy Spirit may well choose the Pope who comes out best on the photographs as they go into the conclave.57

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Archbishop Foley, President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communication, asked the same question, gave an interesting answer: Popes have always been men of their time. Popes now have to be able to cope with the media, so there is no doubt that the next one will have to be able to do this. 58 The Church has been using pictorial images in one medium or another since its very beginning to spread its message. John Paul has continued to do this – not in paint or stone (although there are still statues and paintings), but by using television and, more recently, the internet. Crowd-puller, media star, politician, theologian, philosopher, even, at the beginning of his reign, shown as the sportsman, arch-conservative or populist, as with earlier popes, it will no doubt be years before his complete influence on the Roman Catholic Church and the world can be fully evaluated – the Church, as is often said, works in centuries not in days and only after the death of John Paul II will his full effect, spiritual, moral or political, be discernible.

Notes 1

See Maria Way (2003) Pope as Media Star: A Long Career Full of Reinvention. Published on CD Rom by Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. April, 2003. 2 E.g. Eamon Duffy in Saints and Sinners: The History of the Popes. (Acorn Video under exclusive licence from SC4 International. Based on the television series produced by Opus Television for S4C-Channel 4 Wales Television, UK in association with RTE Ireland and La 5 France.) 1997. Videorecording. 3 Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes. (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2002) 4 Duffy, 1999. 5 Gilley in Paul Johnson (ed.) The Papacy. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997) 6 ibid 7 Duffy, 1999. 8 e.g. Algisi (1963), Bonnot (1968), Gaeta (2000) Hebblethwaite (2000) 9 Interview of Rev. Pierre Blét, S.J. with author, November, 2000.

Maria Way

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Richard Dimbleby: Voice of the Nation. (London: BBC Enterprises Ltd. 1990) Videorecording. 11 Interview with Dr. Mario Farnetti, Archivist, Centro Televisivo Vaticano. 12 Le Pape et le naissance de la television. Un film de J. P. Chartiers. Montage de René Guerin. 1950. 13 Margherita Marchione. Pio XII: Attraverso Le Immagini. (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002). 14 Augustin, Cardinal Bea, in the introduction to James Walsh, S.J. The Mind of Paul VI: On the Church and the World. (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1964) 15 E.g. Interview by author with Prof. Roberto Giannatelli, Pontificia Università Salesiana, Roma, (who knew Luciani personally) October 2002. Interview by author with Archbishop John P. Foley, President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communication, Vatican, May, 2002. 16 Articles from this series published after his death in the book Illustrissimi: The letters of Pope John Paul I. (London: Collins, 1978) 17 In Johnson, 1997. 18 Interviewed by author on November 14 th, 2000, when he was Director of Centro Televisivo Vaticano. 19 Cardinal Roger Etchegaray <www.zenit.org/ZE03050909> 20 Duffy, 1999. 21 Interview, Author with Dr. Emanuele Milano, Director, SAT2000, September, 2002. 22 Information from Centro Televisivo Vaticano 23 See, for instance, ex-President of the U.S.S.R., Mikhail Gorbachev, discussing this in the BBC series Absolute Truth. 24 Jean-Louis Tauran <www.zenit.org/ZE03052503> 25 Absolute Truth. Executive Producer, Fiona Murch. London: BBC Productions, 1998 Part 3: The Smile of Time. 26 ibid. 27 Author’s translation of voice over on video. 28 John XXIII, Pope. Carta Apostólica Do Papa João XXIII. Il Religioso Convegno A Reza Do Rosário Para A Paz Entre Os Povos. 29 th September, 1961 29 Interview published on www.pbs.org in connection with John Paul II: The Millennial Pope. 30 www.pbs.org in relation to John Paul II: the Millennial Pope. 31 See Duffy interview on www.pbs.org (ibid) in relation to this 32 ‘Cuba Libre’ in The Observer, Sunday, May 12, 2002. and on www.guardianonline.co.uk 33 <www.zenit.org/ZE03042910 >

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34

Interview with author 14.11.2000. see www.zenit.org November, 2002. 36 Carroll on <www.pbs.org> 37 Duffy on <www.pbs.org> 38 Levine in John Paul II: the Millennial Pope 39 Sheikh Badawi, founder of the Islamic College, London, in his response to a speech by Dr. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, at a meeting of the European Atlantic Group, 7th May, 2003. 40 Speech by Dr. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, at a meeting of the European Atlantic Group, 7 th May, 2003. 41 In Absolute Truth. Part 3: The Smile of Time. 1997. 42 Speech to Italian Bishops’Conference, 19-23 May, 2003. <www.zenit.org/ZE03052003> 43 Address at the anniversary meeting of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, May 19-23, 2003. 44 In Absolute Truth: Part 3: The Smile of Time. 45 Suro, <www.pbs.org/the millennial pope/suro interview.htm> 46 Published in many editions and on CD Rom as part of Il vostro umile Papa. Una produzione del C.A.G. della Parrocchia S. Antonino di Concesio per Audiovisivi San Paolo. N.d. 47 Luciani, 1978. 48 New York Times, 15th November, 2002. 49 Chadwick, 1991, p.48. 50 <www.zenit.org/ ZE03051102> 51 <www.zenit.org/ZE03032808> 52 26th May, 2003, reported in <www.zenit.org/ZE03052621> 53 see, for instance, report on <www.zenit.org/ZE03052606> 54 Maria Way, (2003) Pope as Media Star: A Long Career Full of Reinvention. Published on CD Rom by Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. April, 2003 55 Suro, <www.pbs.org/the millennial pope/suro interview.htm> 56 The JPR in question was J.P.R. Williams the Welsh Rugby international player. 57 He wishes to remain anonymous! 58 Interview with Archbishop John P. Foley, President, Pontifical Council for Social Communication, 17th May, 2002. 35

Bibliography Algisi, Leone John the twenty-third. London: The Catholic Book Club.

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1968, originally published in English in 1963 and 1966 by Darton, Longman Todd Ltd., and translated by Peter Ryde. English version taken from revised French Edition translated by P.Léthielleux (Paris) from the original Italian published by Marietti Editori under the title Giovanni XXIII.) Bea, Cardinal Augustin. 'Introduction' in James Walsh, S.J. The Mind of Paul VI: On the Church and the World. (London: Geoffrey Chapman) 1964 Bonnot, Bernard R Pope John XXIII: an astute, pastoral leader. New York: Society of St. Paul. 1968. Chartiers, J. P. Le Pape et le naissance de la television. Un film de J. P. Chartiers. Montage de René Guerin. 1950. Duffy. Eamon. Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. 1997. Duffy, Eamon. Saints and Sinners: The History of the Popes. (Acorn Video under exclusive licence from SC4 International. Based on the television series produced by Opus Television for S4CChannel 4 Wales Television, UK in association with RTE Ireland and La 5 France.) 1997. Videorecording. Gaeta, Saverio. Giovanni XXIII: Una vita di santità. In the series “Uomini e Religioni”. Milano: Arnaldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. 2000. Gilley, Dr. Sheridan. 'The Emergence of the Modern Papacy' in Paul Johnson (ed.) The Papacy. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997. Hebblethwaite, Peter (Revised by Margaret Hebblethwaite)

John XXIII: Pope of the Century. London/New York: Continuum,

2000 Jackson, David M. Richard Dimbleby: Voice of the Nation. London: BBC Enterprises Ltd. 1990. Videorecording produced by David M. Jackson with an introduction by Ludovic Kennedy. John XXIII, Pope. Carta Apostólica Do Papa João XXIII. Il Religioso Convegno A Reza Do Rosário Para A Paz Entre Os Povos. 29 th September, 1961. Vatican City. Johnson, Paul (ed.) The Papacy. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997. Luciani, Albino (Pope John Paul I). Illustrissimi: The letters of Pope John Paul I. London: Collins. 1978. Marchione, Margharita. Pio XII: Attraverso Le Immagini. Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. 2002. Murch, Fiona. Absolute Truth. (London: BBC Productions, 1998)

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Videorecording Roncalli, Angelo (Pope John XXIII) Giornale del'Anima. This edition published on CD Rom as part of Il vostro umile Papa. Una produzione del C.A.G. della Parrocchia S. Antonino di Concesio per Audiovisivi San Paolo. N.d. Walsh, James S.J. The Mind of Paul VI: On the Church and the World. London: Geoffrey Chapman. 1964 Way, Maria (2003) Pope as Media Star: A Long Career Full of Reinvention. Paper given at IAMCR Conference, Barcelona, July, 2002. Published on CD Rom by Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. April, 2003

Part II Political Cultures

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The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Difference: An Analysis of the Newspaper Reports of the Yoruba/Hausa Ethnic Clash of 1st – 3rd February 2002. Kate Azuka Omenugha Abstract Nigeria is made up of about 250 ethnic groups, each with its own culture and language, each seeking its own voice and identity. This scenario has continued to create tension within the country, increasing the difficulty of a cross-cultural conversation. It has made the agenda of homogenizing the ethnic groups and creating a national identity very elusive. The many ethnic conflicts that have bedevilled the nation are a continuous indication that difference is a problem. The press in a multiethnic and multicultural nation such as Nigeria is expected to help foster unity and oneness. This chapter examines the role of the Nigerian press in the reports of the Hausa/ Yoruba ethnic clash of February 2002. Using newspapers that represent distinct ethnic voices in Nigeria, it argues that how much Nigerian press sees and reports in time of crisis is a construction of its ideological or cultural positions. As long as the press in Nigeria continues to be structured along this line, the question of a national identity may continue to elude the nation for a long time to come. Keywords National identity; ethnic group(s); Nigerian press; National Assembly; cult of ethnicity; conflicts; normative theory; colonial legacy. 1.

Setting the scene

The question of national identity has become an intense site for concern, debate and struggle throughout the world.1 In line with this concern, this chapter explores the Nigerian press as a tool in forging a national identity for the country. The premise for this is that the imperative for national unity constitutes a central value in the Nigerians’ mind. With multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity foisted on Nigeria by its colonial masters,2 successive governments have claimed an agenda of homogeneity typically reflected in these commonly used Nigerian slogans: “one nation, one destiny”, “the task to keep Nigeria one is a task for all of us.” Keeping Nigeria one has however been proving a horrendous task as every year, the nation witnesses many ethnic and religious conflicts, a continuous indication that difference is a problem.

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The Nigerian press could be said to operate in an environment that might be described as volcanic, waiting for eruption at the very slightest provocation. With over 250 ethnic groups,3 each with its own language and culture, each seeking its own voice and identity, Nigeria could also be described as consisting of cacophony of voices. Ikpe describes Nigeria as “one of the principal linguistic ‘cross roads’ in Africa”.4 In their work Agbaje and Adebanwi refer to a British writer who described Nigeria as being so complex that he wondered how Nigerians themselves understand it.5 Unlike some nations of the world such as Britain, Australia and America, which are also multicultural or multiethnic, Nigeria is not a settler country as all the ethnic groups have claim to the country’s roots. So ideally one should expect a more acceptance of differences and the question of ‘Otherising’ some groups not arising. Yet, many groups in Nigeria feel marginalized. For instance the fact that the languages of the three dominant ethnic groups in Nigeria, (the Igbo from the East, the Hausa from the North and the Yoruba from the West) are adopted in the country as the languages of the National Assembly and the languages taught in schools is irksome to the other ethnic groups. No doubt these minority groups see the adoption of only three languages other than their own as an indication of cultural assimilation, language being a signifier of cultural identity. Little wonder every ethnic group struggles for avenues through which it could put its claws of equality on the country as it struggles for its own share of, to use a popular Nigerian expression, ‘the national cake’. The corrupt leadership 6 that has characterized the nation since independence does not help matters as many Nigerians resort to violence in order to draw attention to their needs. Ojielo puts it this way: Violent action is now a preamble to negotiation in Nigeria rather than a last option if negotiation fails. Unless you embark on violent action, you cannot attract attention, and unless you attract attention, your group needs and interests will not be addressed. 7 Again to use a common expression used by Nigerians: “If you do not say ‘I am’, nobody will say, ‘You are’”. This tendency for group interests which is spiced with ethnic prejudice and mutual suspicion suggests impossibility in pursuing a national identity for the country. Nigeria has been bedevilled with many ethnic and religious conflicts in which thousands of lives have been lost. Ekwo8 gives a litany of some of the conflicts and clashes that have characterized the nation within the present political dispensation. A few of the examples would include: in June 8, 1999, 300 lives were recorded lost in the renewed ethnic crisis in Warri, in July 18, 1999, the Yoruba – Hausa clash began in

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Shagamu, Ogun State. Following the killing of mainly Hausa people in the clash, there was a reprisal killing of Yorubas in Kano on July 24, 1999. Also in the same month of July, the Umuleri and Aguleri neighbours in Anambra state started another fratricidal war, a war that led to the near annihilation of a whole clan. Following the introduction of the sharia in the predominantly Moslem Northern states of the country, a major crisis engulfed Kaduna state on February 21, 2000. Muslims and Christians slaughtered each other in unprecedented proportions. In the East, namely Aba, Owerri and Uyo, there was a blood bath in Hausa settlements there, seen as revenge by Igbos for the killing of their kinsmen in the North. The list is endless. In February 2002, there was yet another ethnic conflict in Lagos between the Hausa and the Yorubas. The press reports of this clash will be analysed later in this chapter. Again hundreds of lives were lost. The story? A man, presumably a Hausa man had gone to relieve himself in a place close to where the Odua People’s Congress (OPC)9 was having a meeting. When OPC members protested, the man responded in a way that angered the members and a fight ensued. The British tabloid The Sun titled the story, “100 die in Loo riots”. 10 Well, that is only one version of the story for the public was treated to a cacophony of conflicting versions by the Nigerian press. The above scenario paints a picture of how volatile the Nigerian community is and the great responsibility facing the press in an environment such as this. The press in Nigeria has often been accused of helping escalate the tension in the country.11 The journalists are accused of being enshrined in the ‘cult of ethnicity’, which beclouds their judgment as long as their ‘people’ are involved. To some, however, the press is doing its best in the midst of the confusion in which it operates.12 To this latter group, most of whom are media professionals, the press doesn’t make the events or create crises, but merely reports them.13 Given this conflicting assessment of the press, the Mass Media Africa Peace Centre in 2001 embarked on the study of Nigerian media coverage of conflicts in the year 2000. Part of the researchers’ objectives was to find out whether the press paid more attention to conflicts than development news during the period of review. The result of the study of three of the most popular magazines in the country indicates that Tell devoted 44.2% of its cover stories to conflicts, 58.8% to other issues, Newswatch 42.3% to conflict and 57.7% to non conflict stories while The News Magazine gave 48% to news on conflict and 51.9% to non conflict stories. Surprisingly, the researchers interpreted these data as meaning that the Nigerian press gave less coverage to conflicts than to other issues. Considering that many topics clamour for attention in the newspapers, put in the proper analytical perspective, such high percentages of news on conflict in the magazines are indicative that conflicts characterize the press reports in Nigeria. The researchers,

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however, agree that, “most of the organs appeared to have brought a lot of sentiments and sectionalism to bear on their reports.”14 It will be important to examine the role that is expected of the press in such a scenario like Nigeria. This will be discussed within the theoretical framework of the normative theory of the media and the society. 2.

The Normative Theory of Media and Society

The normative theory discusses how the media are expected to function for the good of the society. It suggests some of the obligations and responsibilities of the media, as these are perceived in various national societies.15 Of prime importance in this theory is the notion of ‘public interest’. Though a contested term, when applied to the mass media its simple meaning, according to Dennis McQuail is: that the media carry out a number of important, even essential tasks in a contemporary society and it is in the general interest that these are performed and performed well…. At the minimum, we can say that it is in the public interest that the media do not cause problems or extreme offence.16 These expectations are inextricably tied with responsibility, accuracy, justice and fairness in news reporting. Nigeria recognizes its multicultural and multiethnic nature with its inherent differences and in its constitution stresses the need to “live in harmony as an indivisible and indissoluble nation” and the need to “promote equality and justice for the purpose of consolidating the unity of our people”.17 Remaining one nation does not come on a platter of gold, but is rather accompanied by problems, conflicts and stresses. That a 30- month- old civil war with its tales of woes and misery was fought to stop the secession of some parts of the country from Nigeria is a constant indication that Nigeria wants to remain “an indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation”. The civil war fought in Nigeria between 1967 and 1970 is a history many Nigerians do not want to see repeated. Nigeria thus ranks tolerance of primmest importance to its remaining a nation. It may be argued; therefore that it is in the public interest for the media in Nigeria to promote tolerance among the differing groups and foster oneness in the country. Obiajulu argues that nations are made not born. In making of nations the aim becomes how to reorient component ethnic and interest groups to accept the overriding supremacy of oneness and commonality in interpersonal matters. He writes:

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For a sense of nationhood to prevail, a given people must feel and be perceived as culturally oriented and committed to the pursuance of a common cause seen as beneficial for their existence. 18 Herein lies the role of the media in such a plural society as Nigeria – to help foster oneness and to de-emphasize difference for the harmonious existence of diverse groups of people who want to remain “one sovereign and indissoluble nation”. It is within these contexts that we shall examine how the press fosters integration and tolerance in multiethnic Nigeria, especially in the reporting of conflicts, which may often characterize multiethnic nations. 3.

A Partisan Press - a Colonial Legacy

Some scholars have argued that the formation and resultant culture of the press in Nigeria is a colonial legacy.19 First, the Nigerian press has imbibed the propagandist nature of the colonial press. Second, the educated elite who felt marginalized by the colonialists were driven to seek “salvation and relevance in newspaper ownership and publication with foundations of primordial ethnic and regional loyalties as bulwarks of personal political programmes and ambitions.” 20 The result of this is the creation of a nationalist press dedicated to reclaiming the Nigerian nation from British colonial rule but with no time to institutionalise a national culture and tradition in its professional outlook, practice and philosophy. This legacy has encouraged partisanship in Nigerian press so that even after forty-two years of independence the press in Nigeria remains an advocacy press where political groups establish their own newspapers to advocate their cause, where ethnic groups demand vigorously to be heard through their own newspapers, where the government press becomes only its master’s voice, and wealthy individuals create their own media in which to propagate their ideology. The newspapers in Nigeria are often offsprings of political and ethnic tussles, created to give voice to sectional interests that gave them birth. Thus, embracing an “agenda of homogeneity” is to say the least, an uphill task. Such a scenario provides a breeding ground for subjectivity in news reporting. Journalists might be inclined to serve their publishers’ ideologies and prejudices and produce copies spiced with rumour and innuendo. 4.

Patterns of News Writing in Nigerian Newspapers

One dominant pattern of Nigerian newspapers is the strict adherence to the traditional style of news writing: ‘Who says (or did) what, to whom, when, where, why and possibly how?’ Popularly called

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the 5 Ws and H of news writing, this type of style of news report gives little room for back grounding the news. This pattern puts emphasis more on telling the news than on the press’s obligation to public life – an obligation that goes beyond just telling the news and unloading lots of ‘facts’ to considering the wider public interest and the good of the society as a whole. One implication of this type of traditional reporting is that journalists might not make conscientious efforts to do in-depth research of news, focusing more on what is said and who said what, than on the accuracy of what was said and its implications for the wider society. This is a very big weakness of the newspapers as it makes them more susceptible to propagating ethnic and cultural ideologies especially in the choice of news stories and in whom is given voice on issues especially where crisis is concerned. Galadima and Enighe assessing the news report in time of crisis see this pattern as a major weakness, describing the newspapers as “viewspapers”. According to them: There are more viewspapers than newspapers…. If one picked a copy of any print medium on the news stand, then one would see what is meant here: more interviews, less news. The reason for this is simple: In news, you investigate and get true facts, because you are not satisfied with what is said; but in views, you only interview people for their opinions on the crises and these opinions are often laced with prejudices, half truths and sometimes blatant lies.21 The preponderance for the views of a particular group of people to dominate the newspaper scene points to the major ethical problem facing the Nigerian journalists: sycophancy. Okunna quoting Hornby describes a sycophant as “a person who tries to win favour by flattering rich and powerful people.” 22 According to Okunna, more often, sycophancy leads to incompetence as a sycophant journalist could “twist facts, falsify information or indulge in sensationalism to promote the interest of the person being flattered”.23 It is not individuals alone that such journalist may wish to flatter. Journalists too seek the approval of some ethnic or religious groups and may sacrifice their ethical ideals at the altar of sectional and religious interest. This affects their choice of news subjects, the slants given to news stories and the language that is valorised. 5.

Method of Analysis

This study employs textual analysis in examining the newspaper reports of the Hausa/Yoruba ethnic clash. It seeks answers to the following questions: How does the Nigerian press see the nation in time of crisis – as

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an indivisible unit or as just parts in a whole? What dominant images are evident in the news stories? How is Nigeria as a text, read from such images? How do the press handle the power relations between the ethnic groups? What is the language of the press in times of crisis? As Marilyn French argues: “the real attitudes of the society often lie buried in view, and can be extricated only by close analysis of behaviour, language and images….”24 In examining the reports in the light of these questions, this study engages itself with the encoded news texts. In recognition of the polysemic nature of media messages, I do not assume that my academic reading of the texts would be universal for all the readers of the news texts. By closely examining the language of the news reports, I will, however, show the ideological layering of the press reports of the crisis in question. 6.

Sample of Newspapers

There is a deliberate choice of newspapers to represent distinct ethnic voices in Nigeria. Using ownership patterns and geographical location of the newspapers, the following newspapers Daily Champion, New Nigerian, The Punch are chosen to represent Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba ethnic groups respectively. The Guardian newspaper, though owned by the Ibru family who comes from a minority ethnic group, could not be said to represent the minorities as the minority ethnic groups in Nigeria do not have the political coalition to form a distinct voice in the country. The reports of the clash by The Guardian however add to the debate on the role of the press in Nigeria especially in time of crisis. What follows is a brief background of the chosen newspapers. A. Daily Champion: This is a newspaper from Eastern Nigeria, owned by one of the wealthiest Igbo people, Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu. Iwuanyanwu is also a political stalwart in the country. The Daily Champion is dedicated to the cause of the Easterners. The Vice Chancellor of the University of Calabar, Prof. Iyara Esu describes it as “the major paper we have east of the Niger, a paper that is indigenous to our people, that is the voice of people, this part of the country.” 25 B. New Nigerian: This paper was established in the Northern region amidst the political polemics of Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Pilot and Obafemi Awolowo’s Tribune. Azikiwe and Awolowo were forefront nationalists of Igbo and Yoruba ethnic groups respectively. They used their papers to further their political interests, which often were at par with their ethnic interests. The northerners felt left out of the political gimmicks, hence the establishment of the New Nigerian newspaper, seen as “a political creation (that) represents the views and aspirations of the north….”26

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C. The Punch, with the motto “a lively paper for lively minds”, was established in the 1970s by a Yoruba man, Late Olu Aboderin. The chairman of the board is also a Yoruba man called Ajibola Ogunsola. Its strong Yoruba affiliation is seen in the fact that until last year, over two decades of its existence, the newspaper never had a non-Yoruba editor. D. The Guardian: The Guardian represents a new crop of newspapers that lay claim on ‘independence’ from any political party, ethnic community, religious or other interest group. It claims that its ‘primary commitment is to the integrity and sovereignty of the Federation of Nigeria, and beyond that to the unity and sovereignty of Africa’. Owned by the famous Ibru family from a minority ethnic group, The Guardian is the most ‘national’ in outlook among the newspapers chosen, in terms of reach and content, but whether it has no affiliation to any interest group is difficult to decide given the complexity of the Nigerian society and the complex power relations that characterize such a society. Recently, a call to boycott the Guardian newspapers was made, posted to the Internet by one Vincent O. Erondu. The article titled “Boycott The Guardian Newspapers”27 written by the members of Nzuko Igbo28 USA, Inc, Washington D.C. chapter, accuses The Guardian newspaper of misinforming the public and carrying out “hate mongering directed against the Igbo in an effort to increase the ethnic tension in the country,” through an article credited to Reuben Abati, the chairman of The Guardian Board of Directors. One may argue that the group is probably expressing its opinion, but it also goes to show that the ethnic tension in Nigeria is always on the brink of explosion and underscores the need for journalists to engage in sensitive reporting. 7.

Sample Size

The editions of the newspapers that were analysed span from 4 – 8 February 2002, the week following the crisis when the newspapers were still agog with the news of the conflict. Five editions of each of the newspapers were analysed. This brings the total newspaper editions analysed to twenty. 8.

Press Reports of the Hausa – Yoruba Ethnic Clash of 1 st to 3rd February 2002: The Cause of the Clash

All the sample newspapers reported this clash. The reports were given prominence and the gory details captured in pictures. We shall examine reports of the clash by the New Nigerian and The Punch newspapers, the two newspapers that represent the voice of the Hausas and the Yorubas respectively. New Nigerian and The Punch present the readers with different versions of the cause of the clash.

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A. New Nigerian The following are the versions of the ethnic clash reports from the New Nigerian. Version 1 Initial reports said the clash was sparked off by the death of a Yoruba boy who was allegedly apprehended by Hausa youth for defecating near a mosque in the area . The report said the dead boy was subsequently taken to the residence of the Sarkin Hausawa (Hausa community leader) who allegedly said there was little he could do under the circumstances. The sources said this purportedly infuriated the aggrieved protesters who were said to have mobilized the youth in the area. The Hausa youth were said to have retaliated the attack on them in self-defence.29 Version 2 Trouble started when a houseboy went to a nearby bush to defecate. The area boys30 were said to have accosted him, beat him up and robbed him of about 3,000 Naira. This was said to have enraged the Hausa youth in the area who took the victim to the scene of the incident, rounded them up and inflicted injuries on them in retaliation. This was said to have attracted the OPC members purportedly holding a meeting in the area who allegedly mobilized and attacked the Hausa youth.31 Version 3 According to police sources, trouble started when a Hausa man could not pay for using a public toilet. Accordingly misunderstanding ensued and the young man was allegedly beaten up by some ruffians manning the public toilet. In the process, the Hausa man allegedly lost 2,500 Naira to the ruffians. He was said to have gone to report the incident to his kinsmen, who accompanied him to go and find out, but they too were attacked by the ruffians.32 B. The Punch The following are the versions of the reports of the clash from The Punch newspapers. Version 1 The confrontation started on Friday evening when a meeting organized by the OPC was allegedly disrupted by a man identified as a Hausa. Eyewitnesses said the unnamed Hausa man had gone to ease

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himself at a place close to where the OPC members were meeting. When the OPC protested, the Hausa man allegedly responded in a manner that angered them (OPC members). An argument reportedly ensued as a result of which the Hausa man received a slap. The confrontation later became bloody when scores of fully armed Hausa men allegedly invaded the meeting arena and attacked the members of the OPC some of whom received gunshots and machete cut wounds.33 Version 2 Somebody went to defecate in a public toilet. People normally pay when they go there. Area boys asked him to pay but he said he had no money to pay. So he was rough-handled and beaten up. He ran back and told his people that he had lost N2,000 and his wristwatch. They mobilized and they came and that was how the trouble started.34 The reader of the newspapers faced with this kaleidoscopic of versions would wonder which is the correct version. Even within accounts that seem similar the discrepancies in stories make it obvious that slants are given to the stories in favour of the ethnic group the newspapers identify with. The New Nigerian’s repetitive use of words like “banned OPC”, protesters, ruffians, etc to refer to the Yoruba combatants effectively closes the meaning on the Yorubas as a bunch of troublemakers who always run foul of the law. To the newspaper too, the Hausas “retaliated to the attack on them in self-defence”. The notion of self-defence is continuously emphasized in the stories of the clash carried by the New Nigerian newspapers, giving the reader a preferred reading of the image of the Hausa people as peace-loving who fought only because they were pushed to the wall. The Punch newspapers in the careful choice of the encoded signs adopted the same ideological closure and preferred readings of the texts. According to the newspaper, the confrontation became bloody when “scores of fully armed Hausa men invaded the meeting arena and attacked members of the OPC some of whom received gunshots and machete cut wounds”. Further reports in the newspapers say that the clash was put under control, but “fresh hostilities began when some houses said to be owned by the Yoruba were being attacked and set ablaze”. Continuing to effect the ideological closure, The Punch further reports: “pockets of Hausa men spread themselves around the area between Mushin and Idi Araba, shooting innocent citizens.” The Hausas are thus projected as being responsible for the loss of lives and properties.

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C. The Daily Champion and The Guardian The Daily Champion and The Guardian gave different versions of the cause of the fight with that of The Guardian coming closer to one of the versions given by the Punch. The striking similarity in the use of words and phrases heightens the suspicion that the story may have been written by one person, probably a freelancer. Sometimes too journalists engage in moonlighting. This is s situation where a journalist works for two rival newspapers at the same time and feeds them the same story. Although this may not necessarily be unethical, it however increases the possibility of replicating errors in any one story because if the story is inaccurate, it is inaccurate in more newspapers than one. 9.

Statistics of Casualties

There have always been divergent views on how best to deal with furnishing the audiences the statistics of casualties in case of war and crisis. There is the view that the correct figures should not be supplied as the proponents of this view feel that such would heighten the crisis and the insecurity in the country. This view however runs contrary to ethical values and principles in reporting and may undermine the credibility of the press. In view of the expected standard of performance of the press, like truthfulness and accuracy, there is another popular view that in all cases, the truth should always be told, to let the people know what they are up against.35 So, how does one handle the case of the conflicting and irreconcilable statistics, which the Nigerian press, bombarded the nation with in their reports of the Yoruba/Hausa ethnic clash? On Monday, 4th February The Guardian and The Punch gave the same statistics of casualties as 14 people feared dead while four houses were set ablaze36 while on the same day the Daily Champion reported that 70 people were dead and several houses and 15 vehicles burnt.37 By the next day, (Tuesday, 5th February), The Daily Champion records an astronomical figure of 300 deaths, 200 burnt houses, 1000 displaced families, 57 seriously wounded people and 150 people with minor injuries. 38 The Guardian reports tally with that of the Champion in everything except the number of deaths. The Guardian is silent on the number that died. The New Nigeria reports the death of only three persons39 while The Punch put the figure at 20.40 By Wednesday, The Punch put the death toll at 55 41 while that of Guardian came to 10042. The New Nigerian reports that ‘unconfirmed sources put the death toll at 100”, attributing to police sources that only 19 persons have died in the skirmishes.43 The question is which is the correct version? One remarkable feature of the Daily Champion is its apparent sensationalisation of the stories. All were reported as front-page news; the Daily Champion keeps heightening the

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tension to a crescendo. How else would one describe these headlines (mostly banner) recorded here in their daily appearance: “ 7O Killed in Hausa-OPC Clash, Lagos boils again”44 “Hausa-OPC clash: 300 now killed”45; Lagos mayhem spreads, 1,000 houses burnt46; Riots victims flee Lagos en masse, as fragile peace returns.47 The Guardian also displayed similarly worded headlines backing them up with front-page pictures of the displaced persons. 10.

Divided Voices of One Nation: An Assessment of the Press Reports in Time of Crisis

For many Nigerians, ethnic identity ranks highest of all the multiple identities that characterize an individual. An average Nigerian thinks of her or himself first as a member of an ethnic group before that of the nation. Thus, s/he thinks first of her or his group interest first before that of Nigeria. The press seems to be influenced by this tendency and continues to celebrate and give voice to people who champion ethnic identity, especially in times of crisis. This undermines the expected role of the press in a society as Nigeria that continues to strive for oneness as a nation. The use of the words ‘people’, ‘kinsmen’ as used by the press has come to be tantamount to sectionalism. Most of the times, they are used as tropes of difference representing ethnic ‘inclusiveness’ to the ‘exclusivity’ of ‘others’. These terms always imply a particular ethnic group to the exclusion of the ‘non members.’ This trope is highly valorised in the report of the crisis. Even statements attributed to highly placed people are laden with such tropes. For example, The Daily Champion reports Alhaji Wada Nas the former Minister of Special Duties as saying about the ethnic upheaval in Lagos: the north would not sit idly and watch its people being killed in the south west. … Northerners would retaliate if the authorities failed to protect their people in the south west and punish the offenders.48 Nas is from the north (predominantly Hausas) and therefore talking for his ‘people’. Such statements would continue to fan the ember of hatred and division among the ethnic groups. The performance of the Nigerian press in time of crisis could thus be summarized: The newspapers are more interested in colouring the stories to defend their ethnic group rather than identifying the real cause of the crisis and how the nation can forge ahead. To all the newspapers, the ‘unnamed’ man who purportedly triggered the crisis remained unnamed. None of the newspapers interviewed the man. Who knows, the man may not really exist. Rather more salience is given to castigating and blaming others

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while defending their ethnicity. It could be right to say that the Nigerian press is polarized along regional, sectional and ethnic lines with every side “protecting’ and “supporting” their kith and kin. There is a lack of authenticity of the sources of information, reaffirming the doubts expressed by Galadima and Enighe of the Nigerian press when writing about the Nigerian press reports of the June 12, 1994 annulments of elections, they wrote: “most of the reports we read in the press border on speculations than on hard facts. Even rumours and gossips picked up in taxi cabs and market places were good front stories” 49 There is an apparent celebration of the crisis, through sensationalism especially by the Champion and The Guardian newspapers whose affiliated ethnic groups are not direct players in the crisis. Like two naughty children encouraging a fighting duo to go on with their fight, the two newspapers through their pattern of news reports continue to add embers to the fire of the crisis and create unnecessary tension in the country. Salience is not given to how Nigerian can be forged as a nation and avoid such ethnic confrontation in future. For example, due attention is not given to the perpetrators of the conflict. Some of the newspapers merely reported that some people have been arrested in connection with the incident. Who are the people? What was done to them? It is when the press follows the arrest, trial and possible imprisonment of the perpetrators of violence that the citizens would begin to have faith in the institutions and begin to identify with a national identity. Nigerian journalists should learn to be bold especially when interviewing government officials. Instead of merely reporting their views, the government officials should be brought to task on their utterances especially when they reflect nationalist rather than national outlook. It is only in doing this that the press shall carve out a national identity for the country. 11.

Conclusion: A National press… Not Yet Dawn?

The recognition of the differences in Nigeria and among Nigerians has been a subject for concern. Two forefront nationalists Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria and Sir Ahmadu Bello, an eminent leader of the Northern peoples and the first premier of the region have provided Nigerians with the means to tackle their differences. While Azikiwe preached that ethnic groups should ‘forget their differences’ so as to forge a common centre, Bello insisted that these ethnicities should ‘understand their differences’ instead of transcending them.50 Yet, reports of these newspapers show that Nigerians have not ‘forgotten their differences’ as wished by Azikiwe, let alone moved to ‘understand their differences’ as Bello advised. Rather, much disruptive salience has been

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given to different ethnic identities. The heavy doses of insults, the tendency to castigate, insult and blame others while presenting and defending the position of ethnic groups are evidence of a nation whose ‘differences’ constitute a major hurdle to their quest for a possible national identity. Stratton and Ang are right when they suggested: The nation can assume symbolic force precisely in so far as it is represented as a unity; yet national unity is always ultimately impossible precisely because it can be represented as such only through a suppression and repression, symbolic or otherwise, of difference. 51 Can the Nigerian press afford to ‘suppress and repress’ differences for the nation to ‘assume symbolic force’? It is clear that Nigerian press reports operate within certain ideological frameworks. It is these frameworks which are explored, relieved, made explicit for the readers in repeated mulling of tales. The newspapers are interested not in reporting the truth, as it is, the events as they occurred, but to reconstruct and reaffirm their ethnic and cultural positions and identities. It really shows how possible it is for different people to view the same event and see totally different things. This lends credence to the idea that how much Nigerian press sees and reports in time of crisis is a construction of its ideological or cultural positions. It is a continuous indication that ‘we’ are different and difference is a problem. And as long as the press in Nigeria continues to be structured along this line, the question of a national identity may continue to elude the nation for a long time to come.

Notes 1

See for example Jon Stratton & Ien Ang “Multicultural imagined communities: cultural difference and national identity in the USA and Australia,” 135 – 162; Maria Koundoura, “Multiculturalism or multinationalism”, 69 – 87 & Ahab Hassan, “Counterpoints: Nationalism, Colonialism, Multiculturalism, etc in Personal Perspective,” 282 – 294, In Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity , ed. David Bennet (London: Routledge, 1998). 2 In 1914, Lord Lugard amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates for administrative convenience, bringing together peoples with distinct cultures, different languages under one nation. See Eno B. Ikpe, “A Brief History of Nigeria” in The Press in Nigeria, ed. Tony Momoh & Godwin Omole (Lagos: Nigerian Press Council, 1996), 19 – 39; Adingun Agbaje & Wale Adebanwi, “Informal National Conference:

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Memory, Restitution and Reconciliation in 21st Century Nigeria,” 2001, (26 April 2002). . 3 Ibid. 4 Ikpe, p. 20. 5 Adingun Agbaje & Wale Adebanwi, Op cit. 6 See Arthur Nwankwo, Nigeria: The Stolen Billions (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1999). 7 Ozonia Ojielo, “Roving and Stationary Bandits and the Rest of Us”, In Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists, ed. Uchenna Ekwo and Felix Abugu (Lagos: Mass Media Africa Press, 2001), p. 17 8 Uchenna Ekwo, “Nigeria’s Media in Crisis-Prone Democracy” In Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists, ed. Uchenna Ekwo and Felix Abugu (Lagos: Mass Media Africa Press, 2001), p. 4. 9 The Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) is a militant socio-cultural Yoruba nationalist organization formed in 1997. The Yoruba, numbering about 25 million, live in the South Western part of Nigeria. The southern Nigeriabased group opposed the late dictator Sani Abacha, and along with other pro-democracy groups was at the forefront of the political struggle to restore democracy. It has a large membership [which according to some reports runs to millions], which makes it vulnerable to the infiltration by extremely radical elements. Their protests became violent after the death while in prisoner of Mashood Abiola, who won the 1993 presidential election in 1993 but was subsequently imprisoned by the military government. 10 “100 Die in Loo Riots”, The Sun, 6 February, 2002, p. 6 11 Danladi-John Galadima and Jeno-Mary Enighe, “The Press in Nigerian Politics: An Historical Analysis of Issues, and Pattern of News Coverage,” The Nigerian Journal of Communication Vol. 1, Number 1 (2001): 62 – 74. 12 Onyema Okemefuna, “Sensationalism and Evening Newspapers” In Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists, ed. Uchenna Ekwo and Felix Abugu (Lagos: Mass Media Africa Press, 2001) 7 – 20. 13 Uchenna Ekwo, “Nigerian Media Coverage of Conflict in a Democracy: Year 2000 Report,” In Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists, ed. Uchenna Ekwo & Felix Abugu, 61 – 75. 14 Ekwo, p. 75. 15 McQuail, Denis (2000). McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (4th Edition) London: Sage Publications 16 McQuail, p. 142. 17 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (Printed by Federal Government Press, Mobil Road, Apapa, Lagos, 1999), p. 1.

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A.O. Obiajulu “Ethnicity and national integration: The Nigerian Situation” In Contemporary Issues in Sociology ed., Nkemdili Nnonyelu and A.O. Obiajulu, (Enugu: John Jacob’s Classic Publishers Limited, 1997), p. 245. 19 C. S. Momoh, “Introduction” In The Press in Nigeria ed, Tony Momoh and Godwin Omole, (Lagos: Nigerian Press Council, 1996), 1 – 18. 20 Momoh, p. 5 21 Galadima & Enighe, 68. 22 Chinyere Okunna, Ethics of Mass Communication (Enugu: New Generations Books, 1995), p. 49. 23 Ibid. 24 Marilyn French, The War Against Women (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), p. 157. 25 “UNICAL: V-C defends Nigerian graduates”, The Daily Champion, 4 February, 2002, p. 2 26 Galadima & Enighe, 63 27 Vincent. Erondu, “Boycott The Guardian Newspapers” http://www.gamji.com//NEWS1191.htm (22April, 2002) 28 Translated as “Meeting of Igbo (Ibo) people” Ibo is one of the dominant ethnic groups in Nigeria. 29 Raymond Tedunjaye. “OPC, Hausa Clash claims 3 lives in Lagos,” New Nigerian, 5 February, 2002, p. 1 30 This is used in Nigerian parlance for the group of social miscreants and hoodlums who ply the routes of Lagos intimidating people. They take the slightest opportunities of any disorder to loot properties. Indeed, they have been accused of starting some confusion to carry out their nefarious activities, and although the Government knows that they exist, apparently it has not been able to do anything about them. 31 Raymond Tedujaye. “OPC, Hausa clash claims 3 lives in Lagos,” New Nigerian, 5 February 2002, p. 2. 32 Sunday Ode and others “Riots worsen in Lagos,” New Nigerian 6 February 2002, col. 3, p. 2. 33 Rotimi Williams and others. “Another mayhem in Lagos”, The Punch, 4 February 2002, p. 56. 34 Ibid. 35 Tony Iyare and Ozonnia Ojielo. “How to report crisis” Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists, ed. Uchenna Ekwo and Felix Abugu (Lagos: Mass Media Africa Press, 2001), 39 – 47. 36 Alex Oliseh. “Tinubu blames Lagos Mayhem on miscreants,” The Guardian, 4 February 2002, col. 4, p.2; Rotimi Williams and others. “Another mayhem in Lagos, 14 feared killed, four houses burnt in OPC/Hausa clash,” The Punch 4 February 2002, p. 56.

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37

Christie Ohuabukwa and others. “70 killed in Hausa – OPC clash, Lagos boils again”, Daily Champion, 4 February 2002, col. 2, p. 1. 38 Christie Ohuabukwa and others. “Hausa – OPC clash: 300 now killed”, Daily Champion, 5 February 2002, col. 2, p. 1. 39 Raymond Tudunjaye. “OPC, Hausa clash claims 3 lives in Lagos,” New Nigerian, 5 February 2002, col. 2, p. 1. 40 Taiwo Adia & Remi Ladigbolu. “Death toll rises in Haus/OPC clash,” The Punch, 5 February 2002, col. 2, p. 1. 41 “Hausa/OPC clash: Red Cross recovers 55 bodies,” The Punch, 6 February 2002, col. 1, back page. 42 Alex Oliseh and others. “100 feared dead as Lagos clashes spread,” The Guardian, 6 February 2002, col.1, p. 1. 43 Sunday Ode and others. “Riots worsen in Lagos,” New Nigerian, 6 February 2002, col. 3, p. 2. 44 Christie Ohuabukwa and others. “70 killed in Hausa – OPC clash, Lagos boils again”, Daily Champion, 4 February 2002, col. 2, p. 1. 45 Christie Ohuabukwa and others. “Hausa – OPC clash: 300 now killed”, Daily Champion, 5 February, col. 1, p. 1. 46 Christie Ohuabukwa. “Lagos Mayhem spreads, 1,000 houses burnt,” Daily Champion, 6 February 2002, col. 3, p. 1. 47 Christie Ohuabukwa. “Riot victims flee Lagos en masse As fragile peace returns, “ Daily Champion, 7 February 2002, col. 2, p. 1. 48 Andy Asemota. “Northerners would explode if killings continue – Nas”, Daily Champion, 6 February 2002, col. 6, p. 2. 49 Galadima & Enighe, 68. 50 Agbaje & Adebanwi, 2001. 51 Jon Stratton & Ien Ang. “Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural differences and national identity in the USA and Australia,” In Multicultural States Rethinking Differences and Identity, ed. David Bennet (London: Routledge, 1998), 135.

Bibliography Agbaje, Adingun and Adebanwi, Wale. Informal National conference: Memory, Restitution and Reconciliation in 21st Century Nigeria 2001. (26 April 2002). Ekwo, Uchenna. “Nigeria’s Media in Crisis-prone Democracy.” In Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists edited by Ekwo, Uchenna and Abugu, Felix, 3-6. Lagos: Mass Media Africa Press Centre, 2001.

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Federal Republic of Nigeria. Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Printed by Federal Government Press, Mobil Road, Apapa, Lagos, 1999 . Ekwo, Uchenna. “Nigerian Media Coverage of Conflict in a Democracy: Year 2000 Report” In Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists edited by Ekwo, Uchenna and Abugu, Felix, 61-75. Lagos: Mass Media Africa Press Centre, 2001 French, Marilyn. The War against Women. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992 Galadima, Danladi John and Enighe, Jeno-Mary. “The Press in Nigerian Politics: An Historical Analysis of Issues, and Pattern of News Coverage”. The Nigerian Journal of Communication. Vol. 1, Number 1(2001): 62-74 Hassan, Ihab. “Counterpoints: Nationalism, Colonialism, Multiculturalism, etc. in Personal Perspective” In Multicultural States rethinking Difference and Identity edited by Bennet, David, 282-294. Routledge: London, 1998. Ikpe, Eno Blankson. “A Brief History of Nigeria” In The Press In Nigeria edited by Momoh, Tony and Omole, Godwin, 19-39. Lagos: Nigerian Press Council, 1996. Iyare, Tony and Ojielo, Ozonnia “How to report crisis” In Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists edited by Ekwo, Uchenna and Abugu, F, 39-47. Lagos: Mass Media Africa Press Centre, 2001 Koundoura, Maria. “Multiculturalism or multinationalism” In Multicultural States rethinking Difference and Identity edited by Bennet, David, Routledge: London, 69-87, 1998. McQuail, Denis. McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (4th Edition) London: Sage Publications, 2000. Momoh, C. S. “Introduction” In The Press in Nigeria edited by Momoh, Tony and Omole, Godwin, 1-18. Lagos: Nigerian Press Council, 1996. Nwankwo, Arthur. Nigeria: The Stolen Billions. Enugu: Fourth dimension Publishers, 1999 Obiajulu, A.O “Ethnicity and national integration: The Nigerian Situation” In Contemporary Issues in Sociology edited by Nnonyelu, Nkemdili and Obiajulu, A.O., 242 – 256 Enugu: John Jacob’s Classic Publishers Limited, 1997 Ojielo, Ozonnia. “Roving and Stationary Bandits and the Rest of Us” In Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists edited by Ekwo, Uchenna. and Abugu, Felix, 7-20. Lagos: Mass Media Africa Press Centre, 2001

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Okemefuna, Onyema. “Sensationalism and Evening Newspapers” In ” In Reporting Conflicts: A Practical Guide for Journalists edited by Ekwo, Uchenna and Abugu, Felix, 7-20. Lagos: Mass Media Africa Press Centre, 2001 Okunna, Chinyere. Ethics of Mass Communication. Enugu: New Generations Books, 1995. Stratton, Jon and Ang, Ien. “Multicultural imagined communities: cultural difference and national identity in the USA and Australia” In Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity edited by Bennett, David. London: Routledge, 1998.

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The Role of the Alternative Afrikaans Media in the Political Transformation Process in South Africa Abraham G. van der Vyver Abstract This chapter focuses on the role of alternative Afrikaans media during the process of political transformation in South Africa. Two initiatives, an alternative Afrikaans newspaper as well as a Travelling Rock Circus, branded as the Outlawed Tour, paved the way for the involvement of the Afrikaner youth in the political struggle to get rid of the despicable apartheid system. The formation of the newspaper, Die Vrye Weekblad, was aimed at exposing the strategies and deeds of a political regime that was at that stage using every possible means to keep political power out of the hands of the ANC. The editor of the newspaper, Max du Preez, became public enemy number one. He was continuously targeted by the apartheid government with law suits and threats of prosecution. The second initiative was conducted by a group of young rock musicians from within the Afrikaner community. They staged an Outlawed Tour, visiting university campuses and other venues that were frequented by the Afrikaner youth. Their songs, carrying messages of resistance, succeeded in ridiculing the apartheid regime. Although these initiatives were vehemently opposed by the Afrikaner establishment, they were enthusiastically supported by the Afrikaner youth, who was beginning to doubt the legitimacy of the unacceptable political dispensation under which they lived. Keywords Transformation; alternative; newspaper; music; rock circus; struggle; regime; apartheid. 1.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the role of alternative Afrikaans media during the process of political transformation in South Africa. Special emphasis is placed on initiatives to combat apartheid that came about during the last decade of the so-called apartheid years (1948-1993). Afrikaans, the mother tongue of the majority of White South Africans, was the dominant official language during the apartheid years. It has now been relegated to one of the 11 official languages of South Africa.

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A few important historical landmarks that preceded the replacement of the inhumane political system of apartheid with a fullyfledged democracy will be outlined. It is important to note that Nelson Mandela was released during 1990 and that he became the president of the first legitimate democracy in South Africa in 1994. This remarkable turnabout was a result of a more tolerable approach instituted by F.W. de Klerk who succeeded P.W. Botha in 1988 as president of South Africa. During the time of the Botha regime, the country was run by a small group of securocrats with Botha as dictator and conductor. On the one side of the media spectrum the Afrikaans papers were distributing government propaganda. On the other side the conventional English press formed part of an opposition that tried in vain to stem the tide of apartheid. Harvey Tyson, the editor of a leading South African newspaper, wrote: “only the Progressive Party, the Black Sash, some clergy, some communists and the English language press offered any uncomfortable moral challenge to racism and the government's methods.” Although there were a few sporadic attempts to inject some rational thought into the government's way of thinking, P.W. Botha was using his parliament to promulgate more and more emergency regulations. Regulations to curb the reporting powers of the media were introduced in a concerted effort to prevent media reporting on the atrocities conducted by government forces. During the period June to December 1986, a new set of severe media restrictions were announced by Botha's Cabinet. Grogan and Riddle wrote: “from mid June of 1986 some South African newspapers began to carry daily front page notices that they were being published under restrictions that amounted to censorship, and that what facts they were permitted to carry could be 'seriously misleading”. Political power was in the hands of a small elite group who consisted of hand-picked extremists known as the Broederbond - it translates to Brotherhood. This organization has been operating under a veil of secrecy since 1948. This secret organization maintained strict control over all state budgets and government appointments. Membership was only by invitation and no critical thinking was allowed. It was restricted to Afrikaner males who were married to Afrikaner wives. No exceptions were made. The formation of an alternative Afrikaans newspaper and a number of initiatives from the spectrum of the performing arts caused an unexpected burst of resistance from the ranks of the Afrikaner youth. Although these initiatives from the cultural community were packaged in sugar-coated format, they carried hard-hitting political messages. The thought-provoking impact of these messages played an important role in

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the fight against apartheid. A number of these initiatives will be discussed in the following section. 2.

An Alternative Afrikaans Newspaper: Die Vrye Weekblad

The inception during 1988 of an alternative newspaper, Die Vrye Weekblad, introduced a critical perspective with regard political events that was, up until then, quashed by the Afrikaner minority elite who was running the country. Bearing in mind that Afrikaans was for all practical purposes considered to be the language of the oppressor, the unexpected challenge that was mounted by formation of the Vrye Weekblad rocked the roots of the Afrikaner establishment. For the first time in forty years of apartheid, a newspaper had the audacity to question the policies of the government in its mother tongue. It goes without saying that the paper had to deal with low readership figures and flurry of attacks from the ranks of the conventional Afrikaner media. The Afrikaner establishment used the best legal brains in its communities to fight the Vrye Weekblad with regulations and law suits. Its editor, Max du Preez, became public enemy number one. The investigative practices that were adopted by the journalists working for this newspaper led to several lengthy and very expensive court cases. Although these cases were eventually won by the publisher, the prolonged legal battles drained the financial resources of the fledgling newspaper. Despite financial assistance, the paper closed down in 1993. By that time, it had reached its objective, i.e. to plant the seed of political introspection within the Afrikaner nation. The paper made a significant contribution by exposing many of the atrocities and acts of corruption that were committed by the so-called minority regime. On November 17, 1989 it published an exposé by one of the commanders of the security forces, Capt. Dirk Coetzee, to inform the Afrikaner about the activities of political hit squads and terror attacks on ANC leaders. The weaknesses of a paranoiac Afrikaner political leadership core were finally exposed. The Afrikaner nation, and more specifically the youth, began to discover what they previously suspected: the despicable system of apartheid was being enforced by murder and corruption. The Vrye Weekblad did not only deal with political matters. During August 1999 it published the results of an investigation that exposed how the head of the educational division of the state-controlled television agency, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), accepted bribes from a leading Afrikaans film producer. The official

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illegally awarded contracts to produce documentary programs to the film producer in exchange for a minibus vehicle and an amount of cash. Although several other newspapers published reports with regard to the bribery scandal, the senior management of the SABC, initially closed ranks and ignored the exposé. The reports nevertheless added impetus to the growing number of questions that were raised about the ethical disposition of the Afrikaner. Corruption and maladministration were featuring as recurring themes in the reportage of the Vrye Weekblad. After months of sustained media pressure, the official who accepted the bribes was exposed to an internal disciplinary hearing. His services were eventually terminated after a lengthy internal battle. 3.

The Performing Arts

A number of radical young Afrikaners used the performing arts to strengthen the political messages that were conveyed by the Vrye Weekblad. Rock Music in Afrikaans, an unthinkable art form in the early eighties, started to surface in clubs. The musicians all chose funny noms de plumes, i.e. Koos Kitchen, Johannes Church Organ and the Sizzling Whites (my translations). All of these musical acts packaged antiapartheid messages using Afrikaans lyrics and raunchy rock rhythms. The language of the oppressor was now used against the oppressors. In 1987 another landmark event took place when these Afrikaner rock artists put together a satirical musical, known as Picnic at Dingaan. Dingaan, for those who do not know the history of South Africa, was a Zulu chief who ambushed a large contingent of Afrikaner trekkers who left the Cape Province to find a new home in the province of Natal. The mere fact that an historical figure as Dingaan, who epitomised the struggle of Whites against Blacks, was now depicted in a less antagonistic role went against the grain of the Afrikaner establishment. The shows, nevertheless, drew full houses. This was the first sign that an informal Afrikaner school of thought who was questioning the apartheid policies of the government was slowly gaining momentum. One of the most unorthodox and radical platforms that were created to promote political transformation in South Africa was a travelling rock circus, named “Die Voëlvry toer.” This could be translated into the “The Outlawed Tour.” This rock circus sponsored by, you guessed it, Die Vrye Weekblad newspaper, was specifically aimed at reaching the Afrikaner youth and stimulating a critical thought process within their ranks.

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A number of budding young Afrikaner musicians put together a program of rock and ballad songs with political themes. All the songs were aimed at exposing the lack of real democracy in South Africa. The tour visited the four most prominent Afrikaans-speaking university campuses. In two cases they had to find alternative venues because campus authorities withdrew permission for them to perform. The concerts were not only well supported but it also paved the way for the rise of a new spirit of political awareness amongst the Afrikaner youth. The tour set the scene for the unlocking of the performing arts to voice their political opposition to the humiliating dispensation of apartheid. The Outlawed tour proved to be such a huge success that it was invited to play at other venues all over the country. In Durban their concert in the central Methodist Church Hall drew a crowd of 800 young Afrikaners. The Afrikaner youth has finally decided to join the revolution. In 1990 FW de Klerk announced that Nelson Mandela would be released. 4.

Conclusion

The political transformation process in South Africa gained unexpected momentum during the eighties as a result of a number of communication initiatives from within the Afrikaans community. This chapter dealt with two of these initiatives, namely an alternative newspaper and a travelling Afrikaans rock circus. The case studies cited serve as proof that media from all over the spectrum can be utilised by interest groups to promote a cause and to kindle a flame of resistance.

Bibliography Kriel, M. 2002. Waar is die “Alternatiewe Afrikaners” - 'n dekade na Boereblues en Voëlvry. http://www.upe.ac.za/afned/angel2b.htm# kombuis (15 August, 2001). Tyson, H. 1993. Editors under Fire, Random House: Sandton.

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Internet Regulation A La Turque: Historical and Contemporary Problem Analyses of the Internet Environment in Turkey Asli Tunç Abstract This study highlights the development of the Internet in Turkey by taking the contemporary regulatory problems into consideration. More specifically, it examines the recent controversial Internet law (RTUK law) and argues that this regulatory approach contradicts Turkey's efforts to be a part of the European Union and the main objectives of eEurope+ Action Plan which aims to build an effective telecommunication infrastructure that enables cheaper, faster Internet access in the knowledge-based economy and to stimulate the use of the Internet. Thus, this current situation poses an urgent need to create a new Internet law independent of the conventional Press Law. The issue is of critical importance for the development of telecommunications sector in Turkey and also for the improvement in the freedom of expression. This study primarily is a not only a discussion of the RTUK law and its social, cultural, political and technological implications in regard to Turkey's commitment to the Copenhagen Criteria but also an attempt to look briefly at the emergence of the Internet environment in Turkey. Keywords Internet; Turkey; Internet regulation; RTUK; European Union; Turk Telecom. 1.

Introduction “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent states from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television, or cinema enterprises. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions, or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security,

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territorial integrity, or public safety, for the prevention of disaster of crime, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.” 1 The Internet is a potentially powerful vehicle to mitigate and ultimately change social dynamics in a country. Aside from its immeasurable benefits such as its providing individuals and organizations the chance to communicate with a mass audience at low cost, the medium itself is a first truly international mode of communication. In foreseeing those opportunities of the Internet as a chance to make Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world,” 15 members of the European Union (EU-15) took a historical step and launched eEurope Action Plan on June 2000. In addition to this, a similar plan, called eEurope+ Action Plan was designed exclusively for the candidate countries as a compliment to the EU political commitments. The main objective of eEurope+ Action Plan was to “accelerate the putting in place of the basic building blocks for the information society” which basically meant an effective telecommunication infrastructure that enables cheaper, faster Internet access, investing in people who will participate in the knowledge-based economy, and finally stimulating the use of the Internet. In other words, candidate countries were expected to join the EU15 in its voyage from the information society to the knowledge-based economy and to strengthen the EU’s position as a leading actor on the world’s stage. Although over the years Turkey has applied for full membership many times, it was in the Helsinki European Council held in 1999, when Turkey was officially recognized, without any precondition, as a candidate state on equal footing with other candidate states. The decision has been regarded as the “fulfilment of an ambition that can be traced back to the Association Agreement in 1963.”2 Turkey’s national program for its commitment to the Copenhagen Criteria3 set the scene for a major constitutional reform package, building on the work of the Parliament’s Conciliation Commission. This package was adopted in record time on 3 October 2001 with an overwhelming majority, showing the Parliament’s determination to bring Turkey closer to EU standards. Parliament voted 474-16 in favour of 34 changes to the 1982 Constitution, which was drafted by the military after a 1980 coup and has been criticized for its restrictions on individual freedoms and its failure to acknowledge human rights issues. This was a significant step towards strengthening guarantees in the field of human rights and fundamental freedoms and limiting capital punishment. In particular, the amendments have narrowed the grounds for introducing limitations to

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freedom of expression and communication, freedom of the press and freedom of association. While implementing legislation has been under way, there was no particular attempt to endorse the eEurope+ Action Plan. The eEurope+ Action Plan aimed at preventing the haphazard violations of the freedom of expression on the Internet and to create a common ground for a global connectivity in addition to improving the telecommunication infrastructure. Other than changing the time frame for the privatization of its telecommunication giant, Türk Telekom, and promising to meet the International Monetary Fund’s economic requirements as well as the eEurope+ target, Turkey unfortunately developed no other regulatory measures related to the Internet to adopt their law to the action plan. On the contrary, the government pushed through Parliament a controversial media bill - a.k.a RTÜK (Supreme Board of Radio and Television) Law that clearly contradicted the very essence of eEurope+ Action Plan as well as the nature of the Internet. This particular law indicates a gross violation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and also a setback Turkey’s attempts to be a part of the European Union which will be elaborated with specific cases in the following parts of this chapter. On October 9 2002, The European Commission declared that only ten countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Cyprus, and Malta) were on course to join the EU by 2004. Turkey was not on the list nor was it given a date when entry talks would begin. The Commission accepted the aspirations of Romania and Bulgaria to join in 2007.4 Turkey, on the other hand, expected a date for talks at the meeting of the Council of Ministers in Copenhagen in December 2002 but was only given December 2004 as a negotiation date with the condition of the country’s meeting the criteria for EU membership. The political and cultural problems whch may explain Turkey’s faltering steps towards integration are beyond this chapter’s scope, however, the Turkish policymakers’ approach to the Internet is a good example where the government fails to grasp the significance of the technological capabilities of the Internet, its social implications and of implementing telecommunications liberalization programs, not to mention seriously jeopardizing Turkey’s efforts to get closer to the EU. 5 This chapter aims to present the Internet environment in Turkey by discussing the legal barriers to prevent the development of the medium from a historical perspective, and the role of the Internet in Turkish social and economic contexts . 2.

A Brief Look at the Growth of the Internet in Turkey

As in many developing countries, Turkey’s postal and telecommunications services were provided by the Post, Telegraph, and

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Telephone (PTT) company, which was a state economic enterprise under the control of the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications until the beginning of the 1990s. The classic tension between those for and against the liberalization of telecommunication markets led the Turkish government to split the post and telecommunications functions in 1994.6 Basic telecommunications services and many advanced services began to be provided solely by Türk Telekom, a joint stock company whose shares are 100 percent owned by the government. 7 Türk Telekom became operational in 1995 owning the whole telecommunications infrastructure including conventional telephone lines, satellite communications, cable TV lines, submarine lines and the Internet backbone. 8 The Internet was actually introduced to Turkey in 1993 owing to the efforts by teams from the Middle Eastern Technical University and the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK). They formed an “informal organization” known as TR-NET to promote the use of the Internet technologies in the country.9 In 1995, TÜBİTAK and METU approached Türk Telekom with a funding demand. 10 On September 28, 1995, Türk Telekom announced a tender for the creation of an Internet backbone for Turkey. An auction followed in October and November, and the winner was announced at the annual Internet conference on November 16 the same year.11 Consequently, TURNET became the first national Internet backbone. The TURNET contract was signed on March 1, 1996, for a seven-year term. Each year, Türk Telekom’s share was to increase, reaching 79.6% at the end of the seventh year. The creation of TURNET and a competitive ISP market led to a dramatic expansion of Internet usage in Turkey.12 During the first two years of TURNET operation the number of ISPs increased by 600 percent. Between 1996 and 2002, the number of Internet users in Turkey grew by approximately 800 percent, reaching over 2.3 percent of the population by 2002.13 A second backbone called TTNet has been operational since the beginning of 2000 and dramatically increased domestic and international bandwidth capacity and supported continued expansion of the Internet. Despite Türk Telekom’s considerable progress in recent years in increasing the capacity and the quality of the telecommunications infrastructure, there are numerous factors causing a glitch in the system. First of all, the growth in servers and users has not been completely matched by developments in the telephone network, with many rural areas still using analogue exchanges. Besides, overall economic state of the country does not seem very promising with the shrinkage in growth cutting the number of PCs sold and thus subscribers. On the top of these factors, government pushed through Parliament a controversial media bill (RTÜK Law) that clashes with the Constitution and the country’s commitments to the European Union. Turkey signed the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement, which mandates the privatization of basic

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telecom services market by the end of year 2005. A new telecommunications law was recently passed and this new law will bring the deadline committed to the WTO for telecom liberalization by the end of 2005 at the latest. This decision is evidently a part of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) emergency rescue package after the colossal financial crisis in the country. The new law will also bring more independence to Türk Telekom, making it an independent private incorporated company rather than a politically-controlled public company. Furthermore, the privatization effort of Türk Telekom became a test case for the government’s faithfulness to the IMF’s economic programme that has been on the agenda since 1999. This anti-inflation program meant to deregulate industry, reduce the government’s involvement in business, and encourage foreign investors. A failed sale would be a serious setback to the program and a further blow to Turkey's efforts to attract foreign capital since for Türk Telekom, a minimum revenue of US $11.5 billion is expected.14 Although Türk Telekom is still a wholly state-owned company, this situation is going to change in quite a near future with the scheduled transfer of up to 49% of its shares pursuant to the privatization programme in effect. Based on the new legislation, the government is in the process of selling 20% of the company to a strategic partner in 2003. Another 14 % of Türk Telekom would be sold in a foreign and domestic equity offering while the remaining 5 % is to go to its employees. Finally, 10% of the company is to be granted free of charge to the Directorate General of Posts in accordance with the new telecommunications-privatization law in order to ensure that the Postal Administration has the funding to keep up with modernizing its operations. The law covering the privatization of Türk Telekom initially required that the state would retain 51%. Yet many Turkish authorities were wary of allowing too much foreign control of Türk Telekom, which has 75,000 employees. 15 One of the latest plans is to offer a 31% stake, plus representation on the board (ESIS Master Report, 2001: 5). But foreign investors want control, not just seats on a board dominated by government appointees. And finally a new amending law (number 4673) has been enacted on 23 May 200, which has modified certain articles of the Telecom Law and enabled the sale of 100% of Türk Telekom, except for the “one” golden share reserved for the State. Additionally, this new amending law stipulates that direct or indirect ownership of foreign real and legal persons in Türk Telekom will be limited to 45% and monopoly rights of Türk Telekom will expire even prior to 31 st December 2003 deadline if public shares fall below 50%. 16 The liberalization of the telecommunication market evidently will make an immense impact on the development of the Internet. It will not only increase the capacity and quality of the infrastructure but also reduce the

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role of the government in this dynamic market that pushes for control over the content with recent regulations. 3.

Baby Steps to Create an Internet Environment

For the growing cohort of Turks the Internet is gradually becoming a significant tool of their social and work lives. The role of the Internet as a medium for elites is slowly shifting towards a common use of this tool for social interaction, entertainment and access to resources. As in many countries academic communities, mostly in three major cities (Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir) pioneered the promotion of Internet use in Turkey. In the last decade, however, the Internet went beyond the limits of campuses. Academic circles enjoyed a refreshing outlet to express their views on a relatively free platform. This trend immediately shifted to the field of online journalism at the beginning of the 21st century. Amidst the political and economic turbulence that has coincided with an extensive financial crisis and massive lay-offs in the media sector in 2001, the Internet seemed to be the only alternative to resist the media barons who have close connections with the political class. Thus, many efforts of creating independent news portals and media criticism websites have accelerated after this unfortunate development, where many prominent journalists and columnists lost their jobs. This downsizing in certain newspapers was, however, not directly related to this financial crises but only an excuse for getting rid of critical voices. A handful of columnists who have been digging out the corrupt financial relations between media moguls and politicians were the long time targets for the media barons. With this financial crisis, they found an appropriate excuse to fire those popular columnists along with the technical staff. Thus, these websites played a particularly important role in informing Turks living abroad about this rather Faustian act of muzzling the press. In addition to raising consciousness among the Turkish Diaspora regarding the crisis in the press, the Internet played a role as an alternative medium for by-passing the negative consequences of media concentration in Turkey. Apart from scholarly and journalistic efforts, the Internet gradually became an indispensable part in everyday lives of Turkish citizens. For instance, banking and financial sectors have always been leaders in terms of offering a wide range of services on the Internet. Since 1997, banks have been offering so-called ‘Internet branches’ where customers can carry out many of the kinds of transactions they would normally do in a regular branch office. Banks have strong incentives to move customers from the physical branch environment to cyber branches. For instance, cyber banks waive the customary transaction fees and can improve the quality of service by eliminating the waiting time in queues and finally can provide customized services to the most profitable

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customers. Furthermore, Turkish banks encourage their customers to apply for loans and use various applications on the Internet. Another interesting approach to the Internet usage comes from an ISP market leader, Superonline on the financial field. As part of its effort to create a portal that would draw customers repeatedly, Superonline has placed a financial simulation game on its website. The simulation permits people to invest ‘virtual money’ in the financial markets and track the value of the ‘portfolio.’ Shocking events such as natural disasters or terrorist acts can cast a stark new perspective on ordinary lived experience. Especially after the devastating earthquake in 1999, sociologists observed a boom in the number of people using Internet cafes in ruined towns.17 The Internet literally symbolized the feeling of escape from an aftermath of a disaster and a need for human contact with people who have similar pain and sufferings. Many people engaged in various types of exchange and created bonds of concern, support, and affection that united them. Internet cafés created a perfect cyber community in such a devastating experience. Internet cafés have been popping up like mushrooms in both urban and rural areas of Turkey since the end of 1990s. The exact number of those cafés is unknown. But according to various marketing research on Internet usage trends 61.4% of all users get online at Internet cafés and these places are seen as a cheaper short-term alternative to home subscription. 18 Despite the uneven diffusion of the Internet in various sectors of the Turkish economy, it is rather promising that in many sectors, such as health care and education, information and communication technologies (ICTs) became a powerful force for positive change. It is estimated that approximately 4 million Internet users reside in Turkey. This estimate is not solely based on the number of ISP (Internet Service Providers) subscribers. By the start of 2002, there were roughly 2 million when academic institutions were added in. This is about 3 percent of Turkey’s 66-million population. The actual number is much higher since it is difficult to find out the number of people who get online at Internet cafés, at offices or at schools.19 The general user profile in Turkey is youngsters mostly under the age of 30 (87.7% of the overall users) having at least a high school degree (65.8 % have a high school diploma, 20.8% have 2 or 4 year-college degree), mostly male (78.5%) living in urban areas mostly in 12 big cities.20 According to IBS's Turkish Internet Sector Report, although the size of the ISPs market varies, at the beginning of 2002, there are some 80 ISPs of which the largest is Superonline in this booming sector.21 In addition to a vibrant ISPs market and an active Internet culture that has been brewing for the past six years, there are also promising civil efforts to create an effective cyber community in Turkey. For instance, the Internet Society (ISOC) as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in

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operational relations with the UNESCO is trying to ‘teach facts about the Internet to the general public and are also doing their best to keep the Internet as a free platform in Turkey. They believe that they have a duty to tell Internet users their rights and help them to defend them.’22 ISOC also provides an international forum to address the most important economic, political, social, ethical and legal initiatives influencing the evolution of the Internet. This includes facilitating discussions on key policy decisions such as taxation, copyright protection, privacy and confidentiality, and initiatives towards self-governance of the Internet. These kinds of organizations are undoubtedly very effective in building an environment of bottom-up consensus with the help of the participation of thousands of people from throughout the world. 4.

Ludicrous Regulatory Efforts

Despite the promising steps taken for European integration, limits on freedom of speech and of the press still remain a serious problem. Authorities frequently ban or confiscate numerous publications and raid newspaper offices, which encourage continued self-censorship by some journalists. The government unfortunately continues to impose some restrictions on religious minorities and on some forms of religious expression. Even though no specific legislation exists regulating the Internet, authorities do punish Internet users whose content they deem inappropriate. There are two well-known cases to prove this haphazard application. In May 1999, Coskun Ak, who administered an online discussion forum for the ISP Superonline ended up getting a 40-months prison sentence for insulting the state in a harsh critique of government human rights abuses on a message that was posted on the discussion forum by an unknown participant. One Superonline user warned Ak that this message might have contained criminal content although the aim of this forum was to present a variety of opinions in a liberal atmosphere. 23 Ak was held liable because he failed to remove the posting and for violating the Turkish Criminal Law, Section 159. Since “Ak was responsible for designing this website, by not deleting the messages from the website and by keeping it for the perusal of Internet users, he has committed a crime.” The Istanbul Fourth Heavy Criminal Court sentenced Ak for insulting and weakening the Republic of Turkey, the military forces, the security forces and the Ministry of Justice, to one year in prison for each insult, totalling four years.24 On November 2001, the Supreme Court reversed the ruling and as of February 12, 2002, the trial restarted in the Criminal Court. The acquittal is expected due to the amendments in section 159 of the Criminal Law. In another case, a high school senior, Emre Ersöz was similarly sentenced to 10-months of imprisonment for posting a message to a forum

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operated by Turk.net. He posted a message criticizing the Municipality security forces for brutally suppressing a demonstration of a group of blind citizens. This group allegedly was protesting an incident where a blind person fell into a pit formerly excavated by the Municipality. Ersöz actually had made a huge mistake by using his real name and e-mail address. A person who read this message informed the government office about Ersöz’s message. On December 24, 1997 an anti-terror team armed with automatic weapons took him from his house to the Anti-Terror centre where he was interrogated. He was then set free on probation. Later, in June 1998, the Criminal Court sentenced him to 10 months in prison for “insulting and weakening the security forces of the State” (sec. 159/1). His punishment was postponed due to his good manners in court. 25 On the top of all these haphazard restrictions, the latest regulations drastically changed the Turkish media landscape regarding the development of Internet culture on many levels. The Law No. 4676 on ‘Changes in the Laws on the Foundation and of Radio and TV Broadcasting stations, the Press, The Customs’ amending the Supreme Board of Radio and Television (RTÜK) came to the Turkey’s agenda on 7 June 2001 since The Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT) passed a draft law on the very same day. On 18 June, 17 articles of the 36-article draft law (in short RTÜK Law) were vetoed by the state President Ahmet Necdet Sezer citing incompatibility with the Constitution. Nevertheless, he turned the entire law to the Parliament ‘for reconsideration.’ 26 In a 16page reasoning for the veto he stated that the law contained elements that did not comply with the public interest, democratic traditions, basic rights and freedoms and were in contravention of the law and the Constitution. He argued that several provisions were not specific enough and had to be defined precisely. Examples for that are wordings such as ‘broadcasting that raises fear’ or ‘broadcasting that leads to pessimism and tendencies of hopelessness.’ The President maintained that such general terms would prevent the media from objective reporting and hinder the right to objective information. The Parliamentary Constitutional Court, however, debated only the articles objected as unconstitutional by the President and without making any changes in the text dispatched them to the general assembly. The three partners of the former coalition government have been categorically against any minute change in the text of the draft approved by Parliament and vetoed by the President as such a change would give the President the right to exercise his veto power again. In other words, no change was made to the draft rejected by the President, thus he had no choice but to accept the legislation submitted to him a second time. But he then asked the Constitutional Court to annul the measure by saying that ‘the measure imposed rules that are not compatible with democratic traditions, basic rights and freedoms and constitutional principles’ and adding that ‘leaving the regulation of the Internet to public

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authorities completely and linking it to the press law does not fit the characteristics of Internet broadcasting.’ 27 This troublesome RTÜK law not only increased fines for violating RTÜK regulations but also subjected Internet publications to harsh restrictions and punishments, much like traditional media. RTÜK as a regulatory body was established in 1994 to determine the conditions and priorities necessary for national and regional frequency planning within the framework of the European Convention on Transfrontier Television; issues broadcast permits and licenses to national and regional radio stations and TV networks; controls the transmitting facilities of national, regional and local radio stations and TV networks in line with frequency and band plans; issues regulations on related matters including conditions of channels, frequencies and band assignments, broadcast permits, license fees and compliance with the European Convention on Transfrontier Television; and finally draws up regulations on coded and cable broadcasts initiated by the PTT authorities within the framework of legal requirements. RTÜK has nine members, all of whom are parliamentary appointees. Under this new law, the Parliament elects five members; four other, chosen among candidates submitted by the Higher Education Board (YÖK), the military-dominated National Security Council (MGK) and by journalists’ associations, to be appointed by the government. RTÜK, playing the role of a media police, already inflicted more than 4,500 days of suspension to media organizations in 2000 for violations of broadcast principles. In 2001 alone RTÜK also punished 62 TV channels and 50 radio stations to a total of 3,236 days of suspension. 28 According to the initial draft version of the RTÜK law, the Internet has now been brought under the Press Law, which means that website owners will be liable to heavy fines up to $85,000 for publishing ‘falsehoods or insults.’ In other words, websites will be treated as periodical publications while the law seeks to apply the same restrictions to the Internet. The consequences of this law are two-fold. The first one is financial, leading potentially to a huge exodus of Turkish websites out of the country, dealing a major blow to local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the expansion of Internet and related sectors. For instance, the fines within the Press Law will increase at least one thousand times, the lowest penalty being 10 billion TL (est. $10,000). The other consequence is undoubtedly related to the violation of freedom of expression. The law initially proposed that all Internet websites would be checked by the authorities before publication, which could be clearly considered a restriction of freedom of media and expression. Censorship, a significant issue in Turkey when it comes to social, religious and political taboos would be carried to the Internet environment by this law. As this draft law states, website operators would be forced to submit a written petition to the Governor’s Office and after the official permission is granted, website

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operators would have to submit the printed copies of every single webpage to the Chief Prosecutor’s Office and to the Governor’s Office before they posted it on the Internet and also hardcopies of every updated webpage after publishing it online on a daily basis. When the nature of the Internet is considered, this approach appears absurd. As a result, the government eventually abandoned those particular clauses in the earlier draft of the law. After the amendments made to the Press Law on May 2002, the concepts of “Information Technologies” and “the Internet environment” are cited once to explain the punishment for contempt made in cyberspace. Many civil organizations such as the Turkish Information Technology Foundation, the Turkish Information Technology Association, and The Internet and Law Platform along with various ISP managers numerously expressed their concerns and protested the draft regulations by sending letters to the Parliament and showed their reactions by press releases. Their major concern is still mainly the Internet’s being discussed under the legal category of other traditional media like the printing press. In this way, the nature of the Internet and the many opportunities it offers are believed to be ignored. As many legal analysts and IT experts rightfully point out that the Internet as a new medium cannot be regulated under the conventional press laws. Although the absurd procedures offered in the draft law have been lifted, this was clearly an indication of a certain approach to the new technologies by the political establishment in Turkey. Internet’s unique structure, that blends many aspects of life such as commerce, entertainment, management, education demands a more sophisticated legal framework that should go beyond the limited mentality of censorship. While Turkey was struggling to grasp the realities of the Internet, on 11 April 2002, The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to oppose the use of ‘blocking’ as a way of regulating content on the Internet. The vote (460 in favour, 0 against and 3 abstentions) means that ISPs cannot be forced to restrict access to websites. On the contrary, they have been given the green light to continue with self-regulation. In fact, unlike Turkey, the European Parliament’s recent position against blocking cleared out serious concerns about this technically difficult and democratically questionable method to deal with the content. 5.

Conclusion

The Internet in Turkey has benefited considerably from the substantial expansion of the country’s telecommunications infrastructures that have a promising scope and penetration in recent years. In June 27, 2003, four major Internet Service Providers (Superonline, Doganonline, Koc.net, Bnet) along with two big companies (Siemens Business Services and Sabanci Telekomunikasyon) build an Internet backbone, TR-1 to

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speed up the domestic dial-up system. This recent effort can be considered a significant alternative to Türk Telekom’s TTNet. However, the Turkish policy-makers unfortunately fall far behind a dynamic social structure and a highly competitive Internet services market that are the major drivers of Internet expansion. As mentioned above, many haphazard applications of the Criminal Act and also placing the Internet under a subsection in the restrictive Press Law and treating anything posted or sent over the Internet as the same as if was published in a newspaper or broadcast over the airwaves are apparently outcomes of an archaic political mentality. In the final analysis, Turkey is on its way to the European integration where there is no turning back. If the government eventually succeeds to privatize Türk Telekom, this important development will be the first step to a fully liberalized telecommunication market and a chance to reach a fully democratized country. Notes 1

Article 10 of European Convention on Human Rights (Turkey endorsed the Convention on March 10, 1954) 2 Chris Rumford, “Human Rights and Democratization in Turkey in the Context of EU Candidature,” Journal of European Area Studies, 9 (2001): 93-105. 3 In 1993, at the Copenhagen European Council, the 15 members of the European Union (EU-15) agreed that “the associated countries in central and eastern Europe that so desire shall become members of the European Union.” Thus, accession would take place as soon as an applicant was able to assume the obligations of membership by satisfying the economic and political conditions required. At the same time, the member states designed the membership criteria, which are often referred to as the Copenhagen Criteria. According to the Copenhagen Criteria, the candidate country had to make a considerable improvement in guaranteeing human rights, and the rule of law, be able to cope with the competitive pressure within the EU by having a solid market economy, and also be capable of taking the political, economic, and monetary obligations of membership. 4 Harmonie Toros, “Politics in Turkey: Membership in European Union Still Far Off,” Global Information Network, 14 October 2002, 1-3. 5 Also on this subject see, “Obstacles on the Path to Cyber-Unification: Issues Related to the Internet in Turkey,” by Asli Tunç and Yesim Ulusu, a paper presented at the International Association for the Development of Information Society (IADIS) Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, November 2002.

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6

Ben Petrazzini, The Polical Economy of Telecommunications Reform in Developing Countries: Privatization in Comparative Perspective (Westport: Connecticut: Praeger Press, 1995). Daniel J. Ryan, “The Evolving Telecommunications Environment in Japan,” in Privatization and Competition in Telecommunications, ed. Daniel J. Ryan (Westport: Connecticut: Praeger Press, 1997), 23-35. 7 Wolcott, Peter et al., “Telecommunications, Liberalization, and the Growth of the Internet in Turkey,” The Information Society. April, 2001, 133-141. 8 Wolcott, Peter et al. The Internet in Turkey and Pakistan: A Comparative Analysis. An Unpublished Report of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, 2000. 9 Özgit, Attila et al. “Turkish Internet (TR-NET): Policies for Organizational Framework and Funding,” 30 April 1995. (24 September 2002). 10 Wolcott et al, 2001, 137. 11 Bulent C. Aybar, “Privatization And Regulation In Turkish Telecommunications: A Preliminary Assessment,” Telecommunications and Regulated Industries Abstracts 2 (2001): 9-25. 12 S. Barnes Dennis, “Turkey Plans $35 Million National Internet Backbone,” Newsbytes. 15 October 1998, 14-17. 13

Jon Gorvett, “Turkey Logs On,” The Middle East Journal. September 2000, 35-45.

14

Jon Gorvett “Turk-Telecom: The Jewel in Turkey’s Privatization Crown,” The Middle East Journal. March 2001, 31-35.

15

ibid, 32.

16

Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Privatization Administration, (12 March 2002).

17

Gorvett, 35. ‘Face of the Web 2000 in Turkey’ conducted by Strateji/Mori Research and Planning Co. and Ipsos Reid in December 2000 and ‘Personal Internet Usage in Turkey’ Research conducted by Arthur Andersen Management Consulting Firm in May 2000. 19 This estimate is the result of the World Bank data and various marketing research (i.e. IBS's Turkish Internet Sector Report,) (26 April 2002). 20 These cities are Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Adana, Bursa, Diyarbakir, Erzurum, Antalya, Samsun, Trabzon, Denizli, and finally Konya. 18

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21

Superonline has the biggest market share with 33%. E-Kolay (15.5%), Ixir (14.1%), Turk.net (9.8%), Vestelnet (8.1%), Turkport (6.2%), Isnet (2.8%), Koç.net (2.8%), Ihlas.net (2.1%) are other major ISPs in the Turkish Internet market (IBS Research, 2001). In December 2001, Ixir withdrew the ISP market and turned its customers over Superonline. 22 Internet Society, 4 December 2000, (25 April 2002). 23 Kemal, Altindas et al. “Censoring the Internet: The Situation in Turkey,” First Monday, 25 April 2000, (2 June 2003). 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Jonathan Evans. “Turkey Mulls Strict Net Bill.” (9 June 2003). . 27 Ugur Akinci, “50-Story-High Skyscraper for ‘Turkish Internet Administration,” 12 January 1999. (8 June 2003). 28 Reporters sans frontières, 2002 Annual Report.

Bibliography Akinci, Ugur. “50-Story-High Skyscraper for ‘Turkish Internet Administration.” (8 June 2003). Altindas, Kemal, Tolga Aydin and Varol Akman. “Censoring the Internet: The Situation in Turkey.” First Monday. (2 June 2003) Arthur Anderson Management and Human Resources Inc. Report. Degisim-tr. Internetle Gelisimde Türkiye. (Change-tr. Developing with the Internet. Turkish Case). Türkiye Is Bankasi Publications, 2001. Aybar, C. Bulent. “Privatization And Regulation In Turkish Telecommunications: A Preliminary Assessment,” Telecommunications and Regulated Industries Abstracts 2 (2001): 9-25. Benedikt, Michael. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991. Boulton, Leyla, (2002) “Turkey Seeks to Push Through Controversial Media Bill”, Financial Times 25 April 2002.

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Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices / Turkey - 2000. (23 February 2001). Dennis, S. Barnes. “Turkey Plans $35 Million National Internet Backbone,” Newsbytes. 15 October 1998. e-Europe+ActionPlan, <europa.eu.int/information_society/topics/international/candidate _countries/action_plan/index_en.htm> ESIS (the European Survey of Information Society) Turkey Master Report. (January 2001). Evans, Jonathan. “Turkey Mulls Strict Net Bill.” (9 June 2003). Gorvett, Jon. “Turkey Logs On,” The Middle East Journal. September 2000, 35-45. Gorvett, Jon. “Turk-Telecom: The Jewel in Turkey’s Privatization Crown,” The Middle East Journal. March 2001, 31-35. Gorvett, Jon. “Turkish Media Law: In Whose Interests?,” Middle East Journal, July-August 2002, 32-35. Tonta Yasar and Serap Kurbanoglu. “Networked Information in Turkey.” 29 May 1999. (10 September 2002). Toros, Harmonie. “Politics in Turkey: Membership in European Union Still Far Off,” Global Information Network 14 October 2002, 1-3. Wolcott, Peter and Seymour Goodman. The Internet in Turkey and Pakistan: A Comparative Analysis. An Unpublished Report of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, 2000. Wolcott, Peter. and Kursat Çagiltay. “Telecommunications, Liberalization, and the Growth of the Internet in Turkey,” The Information Society. April, 2001, 133-141. Wolcott, Peter and Kursat Çagiltay. “The Internet took Türk Telekom along with it,” (3 June 2003).

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Asylum Politics in Cyberspace Eugenia Siapera Abstract The movement of people across the globe, be it for reasons of political persecution or in a quest to escape poverty and destitution, has created important challenges for our understandings of ethics and politics, inclusion and exclusion, equality and justice. Drawing theoretically on the work of Derrida, this chapter argues that there is a permanent tension in asylum, because of the ethical requirement that it is extended to everyone, and the political necessity that limits are set. This permanent tension in asylum leads to the foregrounding of the politics of asylum, which, in accommodating the ethical demands, must remain open and ongoing. The empirical part of this chapter analyses the online counterparts of the two poles representing this tension: the government and NGOs supporting refugees. Looking at the online politics of asylum what is the picture emerging? And how can we make sense of it, in terms of our current understandings of (multicultural) politics and the Internet? The analysis concludes that the overall lack of reasoned and rights-based refugee voices, and the instrumentality of the government site impose a closure on asylum politics, only partially redeemed by the ambiguity of the instrumentality of the NGO sites. Keywords Asylum politics; online politics; immigration; Internet; ethics; hospitality. 1.

The Parameters of Asylum Politics

1

The intensification of human movement across the globe2 has renewed the dilemmas involved in asylum and immigration for the host countries. Asylum, and the questions it brings with it, has acquired particular prominence in Britain, which considers itself one of the major asylum destinations3. The British policy on asylum has changed three times in the last 7 years, reflecting the ongoing quest of successive governments and policy makers to find a balance between the contradictory demands of the country’s international commitments and a public opinion deemed hostile to refugees.

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But what exactly are the dilemmas involved in the politics of asylum? For Britain, and Europe more generally, the issue of asylum is marked by a commitment to personal liberty and political freedom, accompanied by an unwillingness to extend citizen and welfare rights to newcomers. This is clearly evidenced in the distinction drawn between ‘bona fide’ refugees, and ‘economic migrants’: the Geneva Convention of 1951, signed at the aftermath of WWII, was composed with other considerations in mind, such as the plight of the Jews and other victims of Nazism, as well as the beginning of the period subsequently known as the Cold War. This political and historical context is reflected in the currently held definition of a refugee as a person who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside his [sic] country of origin and is unable or, owing to such fear unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…”4. Evidently, signatories of the Convention hold themselves responsible for those considered victims of political violence, but not in any way responsible for victims of economic or sexual violence, although the end result, measured in human misery, appears to be the same. The absurdity of this becomes more pronounced when one considers the close links between politics and economics. Critics of globalization have pointed out that more and more people flee their countries to avoid the effects of unrestrained global capitalism, and the ethics and morality it engenders5. Thus, while signatories to the Convention accept their moral responsibility towards refugees, they, at the same time, evade this responsibility through imposing an arbitrary distinction between political and economic refugees, whereby only the former have a bona fide claim, while the latter are ‘bogus’. Why, however, having in principle accepted responsibility do we encounter such efforts towards its delimitation? Both pragmatic (e.g. economic scarcity) and ideological (e.g. racism) explanations can be offered here, but these can only account for the limitations of responsibility and not for its acceptance. To understand both, we may need to look into what preceded this acceptance, the call that preceded responsibility6. A point of entry into this discussion can be found in the work of Jacques Derrida7, for whom understanding asylum entails a movement towards deconstructing the concept of hospitality. The starting point of Derrida’s discussion is Kant’s Perpetual Peace8, and in particular his Third Definitive Article, according to which “The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality”. Hospitality is immediately afterwards defined as “the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another”9. Cosmopolitanism, for Kant, is evidently linked to the right of people to hospitality – no global citizenship rights are discernible here, nor duties and obligations for

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allegiance to the new country, integration, assimilation and the like. If hospitality is seen as the right of the person who asks for it, then it is quite clearly unconditional; there can be no limit or condition placed upon it. Here we can clearly discern the call of asylum: it is to the right of unconditional hospitality that it appeals, hence the need to respond to this, to assume responsibility. But this responsibility, the response to asylum with unconditional hospitality is ridden with dangers, fears and uncertainties: “If we decide everyone will be able to enter my space, my house, my home, my city, my state, my language, and if we think what I think, namely that this is entering my space unconditionally may well be able to displace everything in my space, to upset, to undermine, to even destroy, then the worst may happen”10. The call of asylum is therefore necessarily also met with the imposition of limits, conditions and their administration, “which means laws, rights, conventions, borders of course, laws on immigration and so on and so forth”11. This is how we can understand both the Geneva Convention as well as the domestic responses to asylum. In this manner, the politics of asylum is seen as the political management of the dilemmas involved in asylum and hospitality, between an unlimited responsibility and an unconditional hospitality, and the impossibility that these entail and the necessary movement towards their delimitation. Understanding asylum politics in this light has important implications. It prevents the imposition of closure to asylum and its dilemmas, since this would contravene the requirements of hospitality and the calls it contains, thereby prioritising its political aspects – ‘political’ understood here as ongoing and antagonistic 12. This, in turn, foregrounds the importance of the conduct of a politics that seeks to meet the dual demands of asylum in a society that understands itself as a multicultural democracy. From this point of view, it can be argued that the ethico-political dilemmas involved in asylum/immigration demand no ‘final solution’ but an ongoing, continuous negotiation, whereby any compromise must be but temporary. Such a position clearly prioritises the empirical examination of political conduct in those domains that can be understood as public. This brings us to the second theme of this chapter, the Internet, and more generally, the online aspects of political conduct. More specifically, the question posed here is: how is the Internet implicated in the political management of the issues raised by asylum? This is an empirical question that needs to be theoretically circumscribed through a discussion of the complex relationship of the Internet and politics.

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The Cyber Connection

The diffusion of the Internet sparked a wide debate on its contribution to democratic politics. The positions taken by various commentators can be very schematically mapped along the lines of cyberoptimism, cyber-pessimism, and cyber-scepticism 13. Specifically, the promise of the Internet for increased participation in democratic politics and for deliberation on important issues is at the centre of optimistic accounts of the Internet.14 Conversely, the unequal distribution of Internet access, the particular competences it demands of its users, its dissolution of affective and spatial ties, and its links to global capital are often cited reasons for cyber pessimism. 15 Cyber-scepticism enters in the middle, holding that rather than the Internet interfering with politics, it is in fact ‘actual’ politics that is interfering with the Internet – this position is linked to the well-known ‘normalisation’ thesis.16 All positions are persuasively argued, their evidence appears indisputable, their rhetoric convincing. Yet, it seems that in their quest to define the Internet, they have overlooked its contradictory character, the multiple uses to which it is put, and the varied responses such uses generate. In other words, it appears that Internetpolitics discussions have fallen prey to a kind of essentialism, which seeks to pin down the ‘essence’ of the Internet. To avoid such pitfalls, the current paper has adopted a position that can be termed ‘cyber-pragmatism’: rather than settling the debate on the Internet/politics diptych once and for all, it may be more fruitful to ‘localise’ or specify both the type of politics at stake, as well as the type of Internet use in question. This localisation may not provide a definitive answer to the questions raised by the Internet vis-à-vis democratic politics, but it may well enable a more pragmatic focus on a range of virtual politics. In so doing, this chapter follows the footsteps of those who have spoken of the necessity to ‘disaggregate’ the Internet, by examining the practices that constitute it. 17 Given the current concern with asylum, the focus here is on the online practices of the two main adversaries: refugee support groups and the government. These are taken to represent the dual demands of asylum: unconditional hospitality and the limits and administration imposed on it. This ‘localises’ the debate, which here concerns the online conduct of asylum politics. The questions raised here include: How do the two adversaries use the Internet? What does this tell us for asylum and, more generally, for the online conduct of politics? The next section addresses these questions empirically.

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NGO Web Sites: Participation, Solidarity, Commitment

The NGOs selected for this case study represent some of the main groups concerned with asylum in Britain: Refugee Council, Immigration Advisory Service (IAS), Oxfam GB, Amnesty International UK, Institute for Race Relations (IRR), and the National Coalition for Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC). These six NGOs were selected in order to cover a wide range of organisations working with refugees: while the Refugee council is a long-standing organisation, the National Coalition is a new and controversial one18. Oxfam and Amnesty are global NGOs campaigning locally for refugees, while the Institute for Race Relations has an explicit anti-racist agenda, extending its campaigning in support of all dominated and marginalized groups. These variations notwithstanding, all NGOs are unequivocally supporting refugees, thereby enabling their grouping together.19 The analysis of the websites took place on the basis of two questions: who are the publics/addressees of the sites, and how are they addressed? This focus on the publics and forms of communication enables an in-depth understanding of the uses of the Internet for asylum, since it outlines both those who are called or summoned to participate in this online politics, as well as the ways in which they are called to contribute. The publics identified include a general public, a public of professionals and a refugee public. These categories are not mutually exclusive, but rather denote different goals, priorities and forms of communication, whilst they also seem to engender different political outcomes. The types or forms of the communications addressed to these publics are thus multiple, and their tone variable. A. The General Public This public comprises all those interested in asylum and/or the groups’ work, but with no special knowledge or relationship to it. In this sense, this address aims to reach ‘all of us’, as it were, in our capacity as citizens. The communications addressed to this public include information on the group’s constitution and goals; news and relevant information regarding the issues of asylum/immigration, which have both a ‘formal’, informational dimension, and an aesthetic or expressive aspect; finally, invitations to participate in, or otherwise support the organisation. Information about the group and its activities is present in all the web sites, typically available through ‘about us’ links.20 Mostly concerned with providing a background to the group, its history, goals, and activities, such communication serves as an introduction to the more central communicative functions and aims of the web sites. For the general public, this is crucial information, as it will either draw them in, or else

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lead them away. If this is seen as the first communicative step, a second one provides more detailed information on the issues of asylum and immigration, often taking the form of ‘frequently asked questions’, such as ‘Who is a refugee”.21 This also includes links to news items concerning asylum and immigration found in other web sites, including mass media web sites. Moreover, links to newsletters produced by the NGOs themselves point to the importance of setting their own news agenda on asylum. The expressive and aesthetic aspects of the communication issued by these sites include narratives, stories, or testimonials by refugees talking about their experiences, as well as photographs, drawings, and other images. Here, refugees themselves speak ‘directly’ to the public and describe the situation in which they were of currently find themselves in. The tone here is a contrast to the dry reciting of facts discussed above – the language is simple, but the overall tone is an emotive one. Mostly, the refugee narratives are directly relevant to the groups’ aims; for instance, NCADC provides a link to the diary of Nikola, the young daughter of a family facing deportation, while the Institute of Race Relations has a link to an interview of Natasha Matembele, again the young daughter of a family who successfully appealed against their deportation. If the main concern earlier was to correct misapprehensions regarding asylum and immigration, the issue here is to communicate to the general public the plight of refugees, and the hardship they face in their quest for resettlement. The third communicative step is a crucial one, since it provides information on the campaigns undertaken: here one can find concrete political action by NGOs seeking to influence decisions on asylum. It is here, furthermore, that the groups can be observed diverging from one another. Thus, the Institute for Race Relations provides information on its campaign on Schools Against Deportation.22 Amnesty has a special interactive site on refugees, including a “ten facts, ten minutes, ten pictures” feature on asylum, as well as a report on the conclusions and recommendations of Amnesty's 1997 themed campaign on refugees.23 Similarly, the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns provides extensive information on its struggle against the deportation of asylum seekers, while Oxfam offers information on its campaign against the arms trade – the latter considered responsible for, at the very least, exacerbating refugee crises. Finally, all the above culminate in issuing a call for action. Thus, in a link titled ‘You have the power to stop deportation’, NCADC explain what type of action on behalf of the general public can prevent deportation. Both Amnesty and Oxfam provide detailed links on how ‘you’ can help, typically through membership, donations, and/or through electronic petitioning. Similarly, the Refugee Council asks the general

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public to participate in its campaign against the segregated education of refugee children through writing a letter to the Education Secretary. Moreover, all the NGO sites both request donations, and provide information as to how donations can be offered, with Amnesty, Oxfam, and the Refugee Council accepting donations online. The relevance of this address for the politics of asylum is evident: these websites manage to directly address the general public, thereby calling for its involvement and participation in the issues concerning asylum. In addition, they justify the necessity for this involvement in a dual manner, resting both in the public’s reason, through the facts and figures information, as well as on the public’s emotional response, through the aesthetic and expressive elements encountered. In this respect, the address of the general public seeks to alert and persuade this public to participate in the politics of asylum through supporting the NGOs’ work. B. The Professional Public This public comprises those with a professional interest in, or a service relationship to, refugees or asylum seekers. This address is the most prominent one in all but the two global NGO sites. This professional public includes other refugee support groups, legal and other advisers to refugees, researchers or academics with an interest in asylum/immigration, the government/policy makers, and the mass media. Again, the different communicative goals pursued entail different forms of communication. Other asylum NGOs appear to be the most frequent addressee here, and the type of information offered to them ranges from country reports and legal aspects of asylum to directories of relevant NGOs and job offers. Country reports, offered by Amnesty, IRR, Oxfam and Refugee Council, are an important resource for advisers to refugees, since information on country of origin can influence the decision of granting asylum. The Immigration Advisory Service, with its more legal orientation, provides detailed information on legal aspects of asylum, while the National Coalition offers information on outcomes of particular cases, which can then be used as precedents for similar cases. All sites include a list of links to the web sites of other NGOs in the field, often accompanied by the services these offer, constituting a useful directory for professionals. Another type of information encountered here includes the NGOs’ reaction to the government policy on asylum. Such reactions abound in the websites, all of which offer links to detailed discussions of the proposed policies. Of further interest here is the cross-referencing of each other’s reactions: the Refugee Council provides a link to Oxfam’s reaction to the Government’s White Paper on asylum and immigration ‘Safe Heavens, Secure Borders’, reciprocated by Oxfam, while the

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Institute of Race Relations comments on the law following the White Paper, providing links to both NCADC and Amnesty24. The language here tends to be technical, and the download files are quite bulky suggesting that the audiences/readers of these have more than a passing interest in asylum, as well as background and knowledge to understand these texts. All this evidence suggests there is a professional public being addressed here. While in general, the groups’ political reaction may be addressed to the policy-making community and to other NGOs who may be interested, it further seems to address yet another kind of professional public: the mass media. Both IAS and the Refugee Council have links to a ‘Press Office’, and ‘Press Releases’ respectively, which provide concise, often sound bite type of information, on the groups’ standing on asylum issues.25 Amnesty has a special site dedicated to addressing the news media, while Oxfam has a link to its ‘Press Room’.26 Such background information, along with other detailed and specialised knowledge, is also provided with a view to service the needs of the community of researchers in the field of asylum. The Institute of Race Relations provides several links to several reports, as well as a link to an academic journal27; similarly, Oxfam provides a link to one of its pages entitled ‘professional and academic’, and the Refugee Council offers both research reports and statistics on asylum. Clearly, the information offered to the professional public is of great relevance and interest to them, but given the current interest in the politics of asylum, a question emerges here concerning the political relevance of addressing this public. Whilst evidently ‘merely’ instrumental, this type of information has nevertheless an important political role. Through the continuous updates, through the crossreferencing, provision of directories and so on, this address appears to build a community of specialists, sustained through exactly this information exchange.28 The cross-linking and referencing among groups further supports the construction of bonds of solidarity between these NGOs, which are supported by this continuous exchange of information. In these terms, this instrumental type of information addressed to other NGOs, and advisers to refugees appears to support and consolidate ties between groups working in asylum/immigration. This is particularly important in terms of political participation since the Web can then be seen as empowering the groups not only by offering them an efficient means by which to disseminate information, but also through providing them with a means by which to build or strengthen affective bonds between them.

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C. The Refugee Public The third public addressed by the NGO web sites is the public of refugees themselves. This public comprises a range of people, with different positions and status, but who have in common the experience or contemplation of exile; these include people who were granted refugee status or indefinite leave to remain; those whose status is not yet determined (the so-called asylum seekers); and people outside the UK who may plan to request asylum. In the NGO sites studied here, the communications addressed to this public take mainly two forms: first, information and advice on asylum laws and legal aspects of immigration; and second, news on asylum and immigration. The most common form of communication addressed to this public is that of offering information and advice regarding asylum and immigration. The Refugee Council offers information and advice in 12 different languages, while the Immigration Advisory Service has a Bengali version of its main information. This information contains nonlegal explanations of the asylum and immigration laws and regulations, explanations as to how to proceed in forming and submitting an asylum claim, or request a work permit or a permit for a spouse and so on, as well as how to get legal and other advice on such matters. IAS further offers a detailed directory of legal organisations specialising in asylum/immigration issues, while the NCADC site advises those facing deportation on how to act 29. The refugee public is further addressed through the provision of links to news of particular interest and relevance to asylum and immigration. Such links are offered by most web sites, and, as we have seen in discussing the general public address, they can take the form of either links to web sites of newspapers with articles pertaining to asylum, or newsletters and magazines produced by the NGOs themselves. Here the refugee public can learn about the recent developments in legislation and asylum policy, as well as about forthcoming events. Clearly, while the refugee public constitutes one of the reasons for the existence of the NGOs examined here, it certainly does not appear to be the focus of their online communications. One can venture several hypotheses as to why this may be the case, but rather than embarking on speculation, it may be more fruitful to examine the political ramifications that this form of address takes. Again, as we saw in the address of the professional public, the communications here appear to take on primarily an instrumental character: the main goal here seems to be to disseminate information and practical advice to this public in order to enable them to successfully submit a claim, or to decide whether asylum in the UK is a viable option. Similarly, the news addressed to this public also has an

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instrumental aspect, namely that of keeping this public informed of the latest developments in asylum. This instrumentality may be interpreted politically, albeit in an indirect way. As argued earlier, the politics of asylum concerns the dilemmas of how to deal with the contradictory demands of hospitality, but this is viewed only from the perspective of the host: for it is the host alone facing these dilemmas, while the one seeking hospitality/asylum is issuing the calls. Under this light, to address these ‘guests’ summons or gathers them, thereby offering them indirectly a place in the politics of asylum. These communications addressed to it, in spite of their somewhat prosaic and certainly instrumental character, can be seen as a form of acknowledging this public, of taking them into account. As with the earlier address, this too appears to be in a sense prepolitical, in that it can be seen as a step towards entering the political debate on asylum, but given the invisibility of this public in the debate, this seems to have a crucial political relevance. Overall, to conclude the discussion on the NGO sites, they primarily seem to use the Internet in instrumental terms, to address three different publics, in a variety of ways. Of these, and the communications addressed to them, some appear to have a direct connection to the politics of asylum; first, the address to the general public through the informational and expressive/aesthetic communications, aiming at involving the general public; second, the address to the government/policy makers, through publicising reactions to policy documents and government suggestions on asylum, which aims at changing or influencing the government’s position on asylum/immigration; third, the address to the mass media, again through links to the groups’ reactions to policies, which aim at reaching the wider public and influencing its opinion on asylum. The remaining communications, although apparently less politically oriented still seem to have a political relevance, taking the form of solidarity among refugee support groups and NGOs, as well as of interpellation of the refugee public that appears as the great absentee in the politics of asylum. 4.

The IND Site: Laying Down the (Asylum) Law

The Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) is the part of the Home Office dealing with immigration and asylum, as well as with residence permits, and citizenship applications. In their home page30 they state their online mission as “help[ing] you understand UK immigration control and what your rights and responsibilities are when you make an application”. Already the language of this opening statement implies a varied set of ‘clients’ of IND, whom, in its ‘about us’ link it defines as returning UK citizens, visitors to the UK, those wishing to remain or settle in the UK, including those who seek asylum. To enable an understanding

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of the relevance of this site for asylum politics, the strategy employed was analogous to the one used for the NGO sites. The questions here similarly included the addressee and form or type of communication. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the addressees of the IND communications can be classified in terms of a general (British) public, a public of professionals, and an immigrant and/or refugee public. More functional than political, this site seeks to explain the UK law and policy on asylum/immigration, rather than participate in a political debate. This, as we shall see, does not absolve it from being implicated in the politics of asylum. A. The General Public of the IND This public is here addressed in an indirect manner, through the provision of general information regarding the IND in an ‘about us’ link, and also through the provision of links enabling a British national to apply for passport renewals and so on. Since this does not directly pertain to asylum politics, constituting a separate part of the IND competencies, it does not seem to merit a detailed discussion here. This omission however, is not lacking in consequences: the very fact that in its general public address the IND does not involve the general public in asylum politics points to the character of its web site as primarily an instrumental tool for the distribution of information. Nevertheless, the absence of any attempt to specifically target and communicate with the general public on asylum/immigration seems to be politically significant: in the tradition of the British civil service, IND attempts to insulate itself from (asylum) politics, notwithstanding its involvement in its actual production and practice. In the following addresses, the political relevance of an otherwise ‘objective’, and instrumental communication will become clear. B. The Professional Public and IND The professional public is primarily addressed through links to legal and policy information. Thus, a crucial link of the IND homepage is to ‘Law and Policy’ in Asylum/Immigration. This is addressed primarily to workers in the ‘immigration advisory sector’, aiming to become a ‘reference source’. The main links from this page are to legal and policy documents, including the Immigration and Asylum Acts 2002 and 1999. 31 The link provides a summary of the Bill and its main points, as well as links to the full transcript of the Bill32 and secondary legislation. This section further contains a link to a set of consultation papers published by the Home Office, which are provided in pdf format. 33 These papers range from a document on the use of Gamma radiation scanners to detect conceal persons, to a ‘working holidaymakers’ scheme and so on. These

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links are further accompanied by a set of links to ‘Immigration Rules’, and to ‘How we Apply the Rules’, which contain elaborate information on the actual implications of the Act, and their practical application. This specialist public is further addressed through another major link found in the homepage, a link titled ‘Asylum in the UK’34. In this link, the IND provides a summary of its position towards asylum, through an exposition of the main points of its more recent White Paper.35 Further, one can find in this page a series of links of items of particular relevance to refugee advisers and others working with refugees, including: a brief guide to asylum procedures explained in simple, lay terms; ‘country information’, which contains a Home Office assessment of “the thirty-six countries which generate the largest number of asylum applications in the UK”; information regarding the National Asylum Support Service (NASS), the agency responsible for the provision of the welfare to which asylum seekers are entitled, pending the outcome of their application; aspects covering the integration of refugees, including calls for proposals from refugee support groups; information on unaccompanied children seeking asylum; and lastly, replies to a set of questions, which range from explanation on how income support is calculated to why the IND houses refugees in a ‘no-choice’ manner. This information is very clear, avoiding legal jargon, and apparently seeking to explain the legal aspects encountered in other links in a more straightforward manner to those who work with refugees but who lack a legal background. While the above links are addressed to those who work directly with refugees or asylum seekers, the IND further provides a set of links to other professionals who may encounter asylum seekers or immigrants as part of their professional life. Thus, two more links covering specific aspects of immigration and asylum law and policy are addressed to employers and to the tourist industry and carriers.36 In the former, employers are made aware of the offence they commit in hiring persons described as illegal workers, and how to deal with it. This link further provides information on how to avoid discrimination when recruiting, and has an index of ‘some questions you may have’ on the subject. Employers are further addressed through a link to information on work permits, where they can download application forms for work permits for those entitled to work in the UK. The link for those in the tourism and carriers’ industries contains detailed lists of visa requirements, information on ‘group travel’, and details of what is considered to be the carriers’ liability for carrying persons without a legal right to be in the UK; this liability carried a ‘Civil Penalty Code’, whose details are provided online. A final set of links addressed to the professional public is found under the title ‘Press Releases’37, in which one can find news regarding immigration and asylum. As with the NGO press releases, these are intended not only for those working in asylum, but further for the mass

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media, and journalists who may be looking for the latest in asylum/immigration. In providing direct access to a wealth of relevant information, which is ‘encoded’ in both a formal legal manner, as well as in a more straightforward fashion, the IND site appears to quite literally ‘lay down the law’. It sets, in other words, the parameters within which such a professional public can operate, and the range of dealings that it is legally allowed to have with asylum seekers/immigrants. In so doing, in the detailed manner in which this is accomplished, and through the wide dissemination pattern associated with the technology of the Internet, this website appears to remove lack of information as a factor in the behaviour of professionals vis-à-vis immigrants and asylum seekers. Thus, in instrumentally communicating with the professional public, the IND site actually fulfils the political function of limiting the ways in which they can act towards refugees, and of removing any possibility for acting outside these confines. Here, we should note the differences between the instrumentality observed in the NGOs online communication to the professional public, and in particular to other NGOs. The argument then was that such communications foster solidarity whereas similar communications from the IND to professionals (including NGOs) appear to close or at least circumscribe the debate, since the IND’s function is precisely to set the limits of asylum/immigration. This difference can be accounted for in terms of the hierarchical difference between the government represented by the IND and NGOs and the professional public: these are not equal partners or participants in the politics of asylum, and thus communications to them reflect such a power differential. The mutual support and reinforcement of ties stemming from instrumental communications between NGOs turn into the setting of limits and confines of asylum when communicated by the government to NGOs precisely because of the power asymmetries and respective positions held. An even more pronounced difference is found between the government site and its last addressee, the immigrant and refugee public. C. The Refugee/Immigrant Public of IND This public is primarily addressed through three main links: first, through a link titled ‘Staying in the UK’38, a link to ‘Getting Immigration Advice’39, and finally a link to ‘Appeals’40. This public is also addressed in the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ part of the IND site, and in a link to the glossary of the site. The language throughout these links is explanatory, simple, and mostly jargon-free, and the communicative goal seems to be explanation of the legal and bureaucratic procedures through which a foreign national can stay in the UK.

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In the ‘Staying in the UK’ link, the interested party can find a wealth of downloadable leaflets addressed to specific categories of people, such as ‘au pairs’, ‘adopted children’, ‘highly skilled migrants’ and so on. These leaflets contain all the relevant information for a person under these categories. Furthermore, in this set of pages, the IND provides a set of links to application forms for those who are already in the UK, and explanations on how to fill them in. There is, finally, a link to information on ‘travel documents’, issued to (officially recognized) refugees and other categories of people. All these links are informative and explanatory, seeking to clarify the muddles of asylum/immigration, through the offering a profusion of information, and detailed explanations. The same spirit has infused the link to ‘Getting Immigration Advice’, which advises asylum seekers/immigrants on how to get advice, and warns them of ‘unscrupulous activity such as poor advice and overcharging’. In this page, the IND further provides links to refugee support groups, and in particular those that help advise asylum seekers, such as the Immigration Advisory Service, and the Refugee Legal Centre. Finally, the site provides a link to a section on ‘Appeals’, which explains the appeal process, and the rights of applicants in connection with this. Instrumentality seems to rule in the IND’s communications to this public, throughout which it puts itself across as a service provider to asylum seekers and immigrants. The most appropriate term to describe the IND’s dealings with this public seems to be that of bureaucracy. Weber 41 has argued that bureaucracy is not merely another way of social organisation, but the most rational one, and because of this, it will, for Weber almost inevitably, prevail over all other forms of social organisation: bureaucracy is “capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and it is in this sense formally the most rational known means of carrying out imperative control over human beings”. 42 This efficiency with which human beings are processed, classified as ‘legal’, ‘illegal’ and so forth, administered and managed by agencies such as IND leaves little room for questioning the values and goals ultimately guiding it. Further, this efficiency, evident in the IND’s communication towards all its publics, in its neat compartmentalisation of aspects of asylum, effectively shuts down any possibility for doubt, for exception, for discussion. In the case of the instrumental aspects of the NGO sites, it was argued that an important outcome was the inclusion and empowerment of refugees as a public; the IND instrumentality, however, appears to dehumanise asylum and the trauma of exile, and to reduce it to the mere processing of people, the following of rules and procedures. This can be attributed to the very different bases of the respective communications, the NGO being predicated on support, and the IND on the application of a predetermined set or rules. This is not meant to denounce the IND as having an exceptionally anti-asylum stance; rather, this ‘dehumanising’ and

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depersonalising aspect found in the relentless listing of rules and procedures is clearly a result of the bureaucratic status of the IND. In this sense, the closure imposed here on asylum is not the result of a particular political position on asylum (although it is also that), but the artefact of assigning the management of asylum to a bureaucratic agency, able and willing to deal with it only in its own terms. The promises for fairness in the eponymous White Paper43 are easily betrayed, in that fairness is reduced to operating only within certain confines, the premises for which are out of touch. The online aspect of this bureaucratic management of asylum is characterised by an unprecedented efficiency in its conduct but with no change of tone for asylum. 5.

In Conclusion: What of the Virtual Public Sphere?

This chapter started with a contemplation of the dilemmas involved in asylum, which, following Derrida, include the contradictory demands of hospitality for both an unconditionality and a limitation. The existence of such a fundamental contradiction in asylum points to the need to keep thinking, arguing, and fighting on or about asylum – in short, to the need for continuing the conduct of asylum politics. This view prioritises in the first instance analyses of political conduct, and this constituted the current focus. A second, empirically oriented, choice here has been to focus on the online practices of the two main adversaries in asylum, the government, which signifies the restrictive aspect of asylum, and NGOs supporting refugees, signifying the other pole. Following the preceding analysis, what conclusions can be derived vis-à-vis these online aspects of asylum politics? Two main conclusions can be reached: first, there was a general lack of refugee voices, and in the few spaces given to these voices, there was a striking lack of any rights-based aspects in the discourse, which is either aesthetic or emotional. A second issue in this online asylum politics is the ambiguous force of instrumental communication, which, although prevalent in both the government and NGO sites, appears to have very different outcomes for asylum. The preceding analysis must be interpreted in the light of a question: the question of who is silenced or who lacks voice in this politics, or perhaps in more Habermasian terms 44, the question of whether all those affected by this politics equally participate in it. Overwhelmingly, and certainly not unexpectedly, the silent one here is the refugee public. It is not that they are altogether silenced. Indeed, we have noted in the NGO refugee address, and the aesthetic aspect of the general public address, the provision of outlets for the refugee and exile experience to be voiced. It was moreover suggested that this could be interpreted as an attempt to humanise asylum, and to enable empathy with

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the refugee community. The problem here is in the form that the voice that asylum takes, or perhaps in the voice it does not take: in other words, we only hear the emotional plea of refugees for acceptance, and not the rational, rights-based argument that they should be accepted. Notwithstanding the humanisation of the issues involved, what is missing in this virtual politics is the right to asylum and the right to hospitality, both of which are clearly included in both the Geneva Convention and the philosophical foundations of hospitality (and asylum) discussed by Kant. In this respect, unless we get to hear the rational, rights-based arguments by the refugee community, their emotional plea alone distorts asylum politics, and makes asylum a case of compassion, and not part of our moral responsibility towards others. In this case we can criticise the virtual conduct of politics for only allowing a certain discourse from refugees, thereby effectively silencing a particular voice from this public or community. The emotionality involved in the conduct of asylum politics is accompanied by its exact opposite: the rigid, rationalistic instrumentality involved in the communication of rules and regulations encountered mostly in the government site, and secondarily in the NGO sites. Habermas45 sternly criticises instrumental communication on the basis that upon entering the public sphere, it contaminates it with systemic elements, and thus elements ultimately detrimental to politics. Yet we have seen here the equivocal role played by this instrumentality, and its involvement in asylum politics. This instrumentality can be thought of as ‘pre-political’ when NGO address other NGOs and the refugee public, in the sense that it prepares them to enter the political sphere and equips them with the information to do so. In the IND site, however, this instrumentality can only be thought as ‘post-political’, since it follows the political decisions taken elsewhere, and it merely seems to enforce these. It is perhaps due to this distinction, as well as to the hierarchical and power differences between the government and NGOs that the latter’s instrumental communication appears to have a positive effect on asylum politics, while the IND’s instrumental communication can only be seen as instituting a closure. This difference in its assessment, moreover, points to the direct relevance that this instrumentality has for asylum politics: in the communication of laws, rules, regulations and procedures, of relevant directories and so on, one sees asylum politics applied, and as such these communications should not be outside the scope of the politics of asylum; there is no reason why they should not be equally discussed, subjected to critique, accepted or rejected. In so doing, asylum politics will undergo a further democratisation, in which the Internet’s efficiency is crucial, in that it enables both the wide dissemination of such instrumental communication as well as its being made public and thus open to critique and comment. In those terms, it may be argued that the only means of

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effectively dealing with the closures imposed by a post-political instrumentality on asylum is to return this to the domain of politics, thereby making it responsible and accountable for its effects. This ambiguity, finally, of instrumental communication alludes to a somewhat more general point: that communicative formats, such as instrumental or emotional communication, cannot be interpreted outside their communicative contexts.

Notes 1

This research was supported through a European Community Marie Curie Fellowship, under contract number HPMF-CT-2001-01401. 2 Stephen Castles, and Mark Miller, The Age of Migration: International Migration Movements in the Modern World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993). 3 According at least to the popular press. For instance, The Sun referred to Britain as ‘the No 1refugee magnet’ (14 Sep 2002). When absolute numbers are taken into account, the UK is the leading recipient country for asylum seekers, with the US and Germany in the second and third position respectively. If, however, population and income are taken into consideration, Britain ranks 8 th out of the 15 EU countries (source: UNCHR, 2002, Refugees by Numbers, available at http://www.unhcr.ch/cgibin/texis/vtx/home/opendoc.pdf?tbl=VISITORS&id=3c149b007). 4 See p. 16 of the 1951 Geneva Convention, Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, (22 April 1954). Full text available at 5 See for example, A. Sivandan, “Refugees from Globalism,» Race and Class 42, no. 3 (2001). 6 See Nathalie Karagiannis, “Preceding 'Global Responsibility': Autonomy, Knowledge, Power,» in International Intervention, ed. M. et al. Davis (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). 7 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 2001). 8 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1759/1991 [cited May 2003]); available from 9 Quotes taken from the online edition of Kant, available at 10 Jacques Derrida, Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with Jacques Derrida (Online text of discussion with Geoffrey Bennington, 1997 [cited

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May 2003]); available from 11 Derrida, op.cit. 12 This conception draws on the work of Chantal Mouffe, e.g. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000). 13 This formulation draws on Barrie Axford, “The Transformation of Politics or Anti-Politics,» in New Media and Politics, ed. Barrie Axford, and Richard Huggins (London: Sage, 2001). 14 E.g. Howard Reingold, The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerised World (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993). 15 E.g. Julian Stallabrass, “ Empowering Technology: The Exploration of Cyberspace,» New Left Review, no. 211 (1995). 16 David Resnick, “Politics on the Internet: The Normalization of Cyberspace,» in The Politics of Cyberspace, ed. C. Toulouse and T. Luke (London: Routledge, 1998). 17 Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet : An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 2000). 18 NCADC was at the centre of a funding row, when it was awarded ₤340,000 by the National Lottery Fund. The Daily Mail, a ‘mid-brow’ tabloid with a prominent anti-asylum stance, started the controversy, by referring to the NCADC as ‘a shadowy organisation’ and accusing it of ‘links to terrorists’ (23/10/2002). 19 For a more detailed analysis of online NGOs see Eugenia Siapera, “Asylum Politics, the Internet, and the Public Sphere: The Case of UK Refugee Support Groups Online,» Javnost/The Public (forthcoming in 2004). 20 E.g. Amnesty International UK: 21 Refugee Council: 22 23 24 , and 25 and 26 and 27 Class and Race, Sage Publications. 28 This argument, and its implications for understanding online communities, is pursued in more detail in Siapera, op.cit.

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29

See: , and 30 31 32 Reflecting the division of labour among different government departments, this is located at the HMSO web site: 33 34 35 ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain’, HMSO, 2002. 36 and respectively. 37 38 . 39 . 40 . 41 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1947). 42 Weber, op. cit., p. 337. 43 This is in fact the previous White Paper, titled ‘Fairer, Faster and Firmer: a Modern Approach to Immigration and Asylum, published on 27 July 1998, available online at: http://www.archive.officialdocuments.co.uk/document/cm40/4018/4018.htm. 44 See Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 45 Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas MacCarthy, 2 vols., vol. Vol.1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

Bibliography Axford, Barrie. “The Transformation of Politics or Anti-Politics.» In New Media and Politics, edited by Barrie Axford, and Richard Huggins. London: Sage, 2001. Castles, Stephen, and Mark Miller. The Age of Migration: International Migration Movements in the Modern World. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley. London: Routledge, 2001.

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———. Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with Jacques Derrida Online text of discussion with Geoffrey Bennington, 1997 [cited May 2003]. Available from http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/frenchthought/derrida.htm. Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. ———. The Theory of Communicative Action, Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas MacCarthy. 2 vols. Vol. Vol.1. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch 1759/1991 [cited May 2003]. Available from http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm. Karagiannis, Nathalie. “Preceding 'Global Responsibility': Autonomy, Knowledge, Power.» In International Intervention, edited by M. et al. Davis. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. Miller, Daniel and Slater, Don. The Internet : An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000. Reingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerised World. London: Secker and Warburg, 1993. Resnick, David. “Politics on the Internet: The Normalization of Cyberspace.» In The Politics of Cyberspace, edited by C. Toulouse and T. Luke, 48-68. London: Routledge, 1998. Siapera, Eugenia. “Asylum Politics, the Internet, and the Public Sphere: The Case of UK Refugee Support Groups Online.» Javnost/The Public (forthcoming). Sivandan, A. “Refugees from Globalism.» Race and Class 42, no. 3 (2001): 87-100. Stallabrass, Julian. “ Empowering Technology: The Exploration of Cyberspace.» New Left Review, no. 211 (1995): 3-32. UNCHR, 1951, Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. 22 April 1954 [signed: 28 July 1951]. UNCHR, 2002, Refugees by Numbers, available at http://www.unhcr.ch/cgibin/texis/vtx/home/opendoc.pdf?tbl=VISITORS&id=3c149b007. Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1947.

Living with E-Utopia: Camus, Habermas and the Politics of Virtual Dissent Joss Hands Abstract The cycle of hope and despair which has characterised our thinking about computer mediated communication (CMC) has been reflected in the utopias and dystopias that have informed our imagined futures and helped construct our concrete presents. However, the tendency for utopia to look a lot like dystopia, depending on the perspective from which it is perceived, has been a motive for some to abandon utopian thinking. The loss of utopia as an ideal, I will argue, has left a paucity of hope in our recent thinking on CMC. Instead we need to reformulate utopianism as a project that could never become interchangeable with dystopia, wherein utopia is a field of expression and recognition; the task then to find a space between the remaining forms of totalising utopianism and the opposing loss of idealising hope. Keywords Technological utopianism; CMC; relative utopia; Camus; Habermas; civil society; public sphere; rebellion. 1.

Technological Utopianism

In the 1937 edition of the Encyclopédie Française H. G. Wells presented the idea of a “world brain”, this would be a “permanent world encyclopaedia […] a world synthesis of bibliography and documentation with the indexed achieves of the world.” 1 His projection included the hope that such an enterprise would result in the, “dissolving of human conflict into unity” and therefore, “its creation is a way to world peace.” 2 Eight years later Vannevar Bush proposed a more immediately possible, but similarly hopeful concept: the Memex machine. The Memex would use microfilm technology, wherein books would be reduced to one ten thousandth of their size, and thus, “a library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk.” 3 This desk would comprise a set of screens to display the microfilm, various levers for manipulation, a keyboard and whatever other input devices might be available. The result, “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications”, and which would provide the capacity for, “associative indexing.”4 Rather than having a linear card index one could access the Memex’s data bank by building trails between articles and ideas that one would tie together to form permanent networks of association, which

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could of course be forged into new knowledge with almost infinite flexibility. Thus the machine would mechanically reproduce, “the intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.” 5 This technology might, Bush tells us, produce a real leap forward in human intelligence, a way out of our “shady past” and thus “man’s spirit would be elevated.” 6 Such utopian ideas are not unusual in the intellectual history leading towards CMC. However, to our eyes such grand claims may seem a little naïve, particularly in light of the realities of the Internet and the World-Wide-Web, where the storage capacity of a world brain, mixed with the associative indexing of the Memex, have taught us that information does not always equal knowledge and that the kind of intelligence on offer is not always spirit elevating. However, this has not stopped equally utopian contemporary visions from emerging. William J. Mitchell has taken real distributed computer systems and projected the potential social developments the technology may generate. Following on from the relatively modest visions of Wells and Bush, Mitchell sees a new dimension of the world brain as a space in which we can begin to exist, a new world, not of representation but simulation. He tells us that, “We become true inhabitants of electronically mediated environments rather than mere users of computational devices.”7 Our interactions with computers become equivalents of moving through space, we can pass through the accumulated knowledge of our culture, we are asked to imagine, a “10-million-volume, digital, online, humanities research library” 8, and to consider the task of designing its façade which would be no bricks and mortar project but one of organising, “thousands of pixels on thousands of screens scattered throughout the world.”9 Likewise, we can move through virtual galleries, or visit virtual museums that have no limits in space and time; we need no longer trouble ourselves with the gritty contingencies of reality - the spectre of the world brain is still with us. This utopia is one that Michael Benedikt has traced as a common one; the dream of the celestial city, he claims, has much in common with these visions of cyberspace, common qualities of “weightlessness, radiance, numerological complexity.”10 Thus, with the kind of technology we now have, we believe we can dispense with the failed attempts to build such structures in reality and design this as a virtual space, “giving inhabitable visible form to society’s most intricate abstractions, processes and organisms of information”11 This fanciful hypostatising of abstractions finds form equally in our more prosaic dreams, those rooted in our material lives. One dominant example today is the notion of the perfect market place; a transcendent and magic arena where free exchange of knowledge and understanding is translated into the free exchange of goods, services and profit. One of the Internet’s first salesmen, Nicolas Negroponte, observes,

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Tomorrow, people of all ages will find a more harmonious continuum in their lives, because, increasingly, the tools to work with and the toys to play with will be the same. There will be a more common palette for love and duty, for self-expression and group work.12 As part of this vision Negroponte postulates the future as one where intertwined with non-alienated work is transcendent consumption, happening in electronic malls; no longer will there be traditional retail spaces where, the checkout lines are interminable, the staff is disagreeable, and the product has always run out. Owners of such operations should be advised: The digerati don't need you any longer. And very soon everybody will be digital.13 Such a vision is surely concomitant with Benedikt’s celestial city, the synapse like links of the world brain are seen here as the infrastructure supporting global networks of money and power; the surface level being the advertising, the slick content and services, the hyperlinks taking us to ever newer and more exotic and unexpected delicacies. 2.

A Utopian Hegemony

Whether the hyperbole of Negroponte is true or not, what certainly is true is the underlying place of this technology within our global political economy, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out: In the case of the Internet, for thirty years it was designed, developed and funded primarily in the public sector, mostly the Pentagon, then the National Science Foundation – that’s most of the hardware, the software, new ideas, technology and so on. In just the last couple of years it has been handed over to people like Bill Gates who, at least, you have to admire for his honesty: he attributes his success to his ability to ‘embrace and extend’ the ideas of others, commonly others in the public sector.14 The utopian view of Negroponte and others is not really surprising as a defence and extension of the vested interests described by Chomsky, and

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indeed such positions offer this as being not only the case, but also as being desirable and right. However, what is elided is that making all of this happen requires actual labour – real persons sitting in offices, call centres and business parks. As Rob Shields has rightly claimed, most of the actual work is as dull, repetitive and alienating as any that has preceded it, these are, “unequal, virtual spaces of labour. They are stratified by power and status.”15 And inevitably, “the expropriation of the value added by labourers work continued to take place.” 16 At this point the liberating utopian technology of the Internet starts to sound a little more like the older not so liberating technologies that have fuelled the kinds of critiques offered by, amongst others, the Frankfurt School. We might start to suspect that there is something about this technology that is simply the next stage in well rehearsed story. Thus we find ourselves in familiar territory in which, as I commented in my opening remarks, utopia/dystopia is really a question of perspective, or indeed more concretely, social position. In this mode Ziauddin Sardar argues that while the abstracted ideals projected onto CMC might well reflect the celestial cities and virtual town halls we long for, this longing is by no means a universal one, and that the reality that is constructed in pursuit of such fantasies is quite different, it is a hegemonic strategy, a colonial vision. He argues that the pursuit of cyberspace is an act of cultural and psychological violence akin to the conquering of physical territory; it revisits an old narrative, the search for wealth, domination and demonisation of the conquered. The structures and palaces of cyberspace may well be recognisable to the subjects of older empires as versions of more concrete edifices of oppression. Thus we have, “constructed western utopias, where all history can be revised and re-written, all non-western people forgotten.”17 This claim does not seem unprecedented, if unintended, in the literature of technological utopianism; H.G.Wells seems unable to conceive of his utopia without a transparent efficiency freed of unreliable human contingency. His world brain is a technological salve on the road to this utopian proposition. This utopia is one that is based on the oldest, Plato’s Republic, and unsurprisingly elides, “modern democratic methods and all the fallacies of our equal justice.”18 From this stem Wells’ flirtations with the use of eugenics as a road to human perfectibility, the later realities of which present us with an unsavoury reminder of how easily a utopia can become a dystopia.

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A Utopian Critique

However there are critical, and in many respects revolutionary, engagements with CMC that take on board the kinds of arguments presented above, but refuse to accept such deterministic readings, offering instead a transformative and utopian vision of their own. The notion of cyborg subjectivity which, since its inception by Donna Haraway, has been extremely influential and well debated, and which in summary, envisions the use of CMC by those who we might understand as colonised to take advantage of their post-human condition to construct hybrid identities contrary to the primary logic of a system based on foundational myths of, “‘Western’ science and politics - the tradition of racist, maledominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource.” Hence, Haraway tells us, “the cyborg is […] oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.” 19 Picking up on some of Haraway’s ideas Mark Poster makes the argument that a shift in the subjectivity, and thus the political role, of those who use it will be inevitable, “because the Internet inscribes the new social figure of the cyborg and institutes a communicative practice of selfconstitution, the political as we have known it is reconfigured.”20 He claims that the concepts of democracy and freedom must be reconsidered, they must account for the freedom that is, “not the presence of validity claims or the actuality of critical reason, but of the inscription of new assemblages of self-constitution.”21 The utopia is transcribed into the field of a reformulated subjectivity, a rebirth. We can thus recognise in the ideas offered by Haraway and Poster the familiar utopian tendency towards eliding democratic methods in favour of a break, from which a new more ‘genuine’ democracy will be born. However, the worry is that by seeing democracy as realised in identity play freed from the bonds of the flesh, it is also conceived as outside the constraints of critical reason, and thus a utopia beyond the bonds of normativity. That is not to say that we can’t imagine an evolving subjectivity that recognises the fantasy of the Cartesian self and the value of becoming – indeed this is vital, but that the identity of democracy and subjectivity as play fails to provide the constraint of an obligation to hold to commitments, promises and validity claims though time. Thus communicative relationships in this scenario will necessarily become nothing more than temporary attitudes. Ironically, the librating potential of cyborg subjectivity then becomes its most constraining feature; it isolates subjects by fetishising difference above identity, and thus makes the notion of community, commitment and freedom difficult, if not impossible, to sustain.

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It can then be argued that such ideas of overcoming, and the spaces in which it can take place, carry with them the logic of that which they oppose; it is this utopia or that, my vision of perfection or yours. We have not a movement towards the dialogical, a dialectic of becoming, but an absolute stultified binarism in which all possible dialogue is transformed into the spectacle of empty attitudes. This is the worst of all possible worlds, one in which every temporarily struck attitude exists within the isolation of its own differend, captured within a kind of totalitarian particularism. 4.

Facts and Values

The tendency of utopianism to develop beyond normative constraints, as described above, seems to be a common failure which applies equally to the other visions touched on. In all these cases the technology is abstracted from its social context, from its everydayness. This provides us with a definition, and explanation of, the trajectory of utopia towards dystopia. One way to resist such a trajectory from utopia to dystopia is to be incredulous towards the former. The difficulties and abstractions of the debates surrounding utopia/dystopia, not surprisingly, have been resisted via empirical work which focuses precisely on the everydayness of CMC, in part to temper the grand visions or sweeping critiques, in part to bring it into the realm of practical discourse. This has been very productive and informative, involving just such an incredulity towards utopian daydreaming that I have touched on above. Christine Hine has set out a field of virtual ethnography as a methodology of understanding CMC, in particular the Internet, through its complex fabric of interaction, discourse and identity performance. Thus she has argued for a move away from the fanciful notions of the “clever men” who have “extrapolated from extreme cases”, and claims, most of this thinking has been conducted on assumptions about the capacities of the Internet without ground in observations of what the current relationship of Internet interaction with time and space actually is.22 The reality of the Internet is more down to earth and spatially and temporally limited. While it still breaks down some of the constraints of space, time, body and identity it is also tied to a system of connection and flow, a system that is, “increasingly the site of the exercise of power by the elite.”23 In that sense we can see this kind of response as one that wants to re-integrate a normative agenda into the fabric of our understanding and

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ensure that the move away from building castles of philosophical abstraction surrounding the idea of CMC, echoing Rob Shields’ claim with regard to virtual labour, and here as there this critique can be seen as a positive response to the utopia/dystopia division. The emphasis on understanding the realty of practice has produced valuable insights, many of which do raise questions about the sense in which utopian visions are even worth considering. However, the incredulity towards utopian thinking inevitably means that some of the productive and desirable elements of such thought are also lost. While empirical investigation may help to lay the groundwork of reasonable boundaries of discussion, as regards the current state of the art, it doesn’t always help in formulating idealisations upon which we can build a path that is informed by hope. Thus in work that is theorised empirically as a principle there is, therefore, an inevitable tendency to reproduce the existing state of affairs as given, and the need to engage with what we have now in the context that it now exists. The definition of norms is then circumscribed in its reaction against a utopianism free of such concerns, even to the point in some cases of leaving behind normative arguments for fear of a tainted utopianism. For example, we can see this tendency manifest in the work of Manuel Castells, whose meticulous and undoubtedly significant and influential three volume study, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture has been accused of lacking, “a normative analysis that would provide us with a critical standpoint.” 24 Thus, to abandon the dream of utopia because a refusal to accept the world as it is ends up with terror can be as unappealing as the other options. We need utopias to nourish our everydayness, to provide hope – not simply in imagination but in praxis. The question becomes: is there a way of promoting an ideal without succumbing to another celestial city scenario? Can we marry normative constraint with utopian idealism? 5.

The Idea of a Relative Utopia

I am mindful here of the response that Albert Camus received, shortly after the second world war, after he suggested to a friend that, “After the experiences of the last two years, I could no longer hold to any truth which might oblige me, directly or indirectly, to demand a man’s life.”25 Such a claim, he tells us, provoked an unexpected response, “Certain friends whom I respected retorted that I was living in utopia.” 26 The idea that refusing to act on a principle, even one as apparently universally unproblematic as the refusal of the legitimacy of murder, can be seen as utopian might seem a little far fetched to us. However, after the grand and disastrous schemes to which Camus’ circle had been witness, the idea might not seem quite so difficult. In fact we

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only have to look at the actual use of murder as legitimate political action, in very recent days, to take the point. One must live in the real world, this is the usual refrain. Indeed the reason why such a statement may be considered utopian is elaborated by Camus’ suggestion in the opening lines of The Rebel, What is a Rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself. A slave who has taken orders all his life, suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command.’27 So it is that despite, indeed because of, the point of decision, the refusal as affirmation becomes, or at least moves towards, a creative act. Thus to deny is also to assert, and implies the notion of hope and of possibility, the possibility of a better state, a more forgiving world. Thus inevitably the act of dissent must contain some element of utopian thinking. In essence this refusal, the refusal to demand the life of another, reflects a core claim of mutual, or reciprocal, recognition. The accusation that this is a utopian desire seems to me to spring from the notion that there is a universal claim being made – an equality of value that places personhood as an achievable universal measure. This requires that dissent must be in a form that accedes to such a central demand, to refuse the legitimacy of murder is to refuse the obliteration of the other’s perspective, no matter how odious. But at the same time Camus has an intrinsic suspicion of any utopian thinking. His well documented falling out with Sartre was a result of his refusal to countenance the activities of the Soviet Union, and his belief that the teleological dialectic of Marxism is ultimately a dangerously utopian fantasy. However, he is not unaware of the contradictory problems inherent in his position: People like myself want not a world in which murder no longer exists (we are not so crazy as that!) but rather one in which murder is not legitimate, here, indeed, we are utopian – and contradictory. For we do live, it is true, in a world where murder is legitimate, and we ought to change it if we do not like it. But it appears we cannot change it without risking murder. Murder thus throws us back on murder, and we will continue to live in terror whether we accept the fact with resignation or wish to

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abolish it by means which merely replace one kind of terror with another. 28 We must live in the real world, but we must not live only in the real world. So it is that he argues that if we are to have a world in which murder is not legitimate then we need to reconsider the idea of utopia, and in this spirit he offers an alternative conception of utopian thinking. Utopia as we have understood it has been, “whatever is in contradiction with reality.”29 Instead we need not an absolute utopia but a relative one, in which we do not fall into the old patterns that lead to terror, but are selflimited by our refusal to accept any principle that would lead us to turn the value of life into an abstraction to be exchanged for that principle. This is a vision which promotes utopia as a space of possibility, of becoming. In Camus vision the outcome looks something like deliberative democracy on a world scale, “a world parliament…in which all people will participate”, but significantly until then we must, “resist on a world scale; and to resist by means which are not in contradiction with end we seek.” 30 This kind of utopian prospect is, “our last frail hope of saving our skins.”31 Such resistance is thus a normative claim fused with a utopian motivation. Such a relative utopia is quite different from those embedded in the social and economic systems that he had seen dominate the first half of the 20th century, and continue to dominate now. Thus, Camus claims from his mid century perspective, that the struggles to come will not be between utopia and reality, but between different versions of utopia. The hope is thus not to reproduce another absolute utopia to compete with those already in position, but to act and resist with a more modest vision of a future, “free of messianism and disencumbered of nostalgia for an earthly paradise.”32 To rebel therefore, without succumbing to absolute utopia, demands the recognition of the other rebelled against, even in the act of overcoming. By retaining the motivating idealisation of a relative utopia, in which mutual recognition is universally recognised, norms are provided with idealisation, in that sense relative utopianism drags reality with it, and is also anchored by it. Thus we have a plural universalism in which, even in the most extreme circumstances, there must be recognition of an existing order, even while it is being dismantled or resisted – or simply circumvented – otherwise resistance will reproduce that which it resists. In doing so utopian thinking ceases to be in contradiction with reality. Dissent’s reliance on the motivating hope of a relative utopia, in which the principle of mutual recognition is universally acceded, means that it must be grounded in argumentation, or the preparedness to live with full responsibility for failure. Without this there will be no recognition of

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intersubjectivity as the horizon of existence; and that is to submit to the legitimacy of murder. Such a procedural principle of argumentation is defined by Jürgen Habermas as action oriented towards mutual understanding, and is useful here as the basis of moral decision making. The logic of his theory of communicative action demands, argumentation is a reflective form of communicative action and the structures of action oriented toward reaching understanding always already presuppose those very relationships of reciprocity and mutual recognition around which all moral ideas revolve in everyday life no less than in philosophical ethics.33 The foundation of mutual recognition in argumentation thus envelops the sense of relative utopia offered by Camus, but Camus’ idea provides it with a further idealising motivation, a resistance to existing in contradiction with reality. Thus, the Habermasian defence of argumentation is itself protected against the common accusation that it is an abstraction leading to impossible utopian conclusions. In short, the foundation of relative utopia is the attempt to make concrete the refusal of the legitimacy of murder. This must be underpinned by a call to recognise the normative principle of mutual recognition, which is generated via communicative action. Thus the abstract norms of mutual recognition and the concrete idealisation of utopianism fuse. Here the projection of a relative utopia, nourished by the norms of mutual recognition, provides a ground on which we can formulate dissent as the essence of a plural universalism, and therefore its ideal formulation. 6.

The Internet and Civil Society

The Internetworking of CMCs, more that any other technology, has the open architecture to allow reflexive relationships amongst its users. The Internet, as its practicable manifestation, is a technologically generated intersection of discourse and the struggle for recognition. It is able to provide the capacity for persons to argue freely, form bonds of mutual recognition and, of course, dissent - and as such is a space where we can begin to construct a projection for an electronic utopia that we can live with. Not a world brain unifying into absolute utopia but a global space proliferating into relative utopia. An initial inference from these points is the possibility that what we have here is a set of criteria which are essentially descriptive of the public sphere,34 where participants in argumentation are free to exchange opinions and form actions free from distortion. Thus, one could argue that

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in the context of CMC the ‘virtual’ public sphere is the starting point where relative utopia, as E-Utopia, can be posited. This raises the question of whether the Internet does or could form such a discursive space. This is a problematic assertion for several reasons. On a theoretic level it has been argued that the fragmented nature of the interactions characteristic of CMC represent not pubic opinion, arrived at via broad rational-critical debate, but those individuals and groups that have access and know how. Indeed, many of the arguments against the Internet representing a new public sphere reflect problems with the concept of the public sphere itself, primarily the argument offered by Nancy Fraser pertaining to the representation of differentiated identities and the nature of the discourse itself.35 In short that there is no single public sphere, no single rational discourse, and that the interests represented therein are by no means universal, thus to enter the arena of the public sphere one must accept a set of values that may not be your own. The projected fragmentation has indeed been reflected in Internet practice. Zizi Papacharissi has observed, in a study on online political deliberation, As the Internet gets more fragmented special interest groups attract users who want to focus the discussion on certain topics, providing opportunities for specialized discussion…As the virtual mass becomes more subdivided into smaller and smaller discussion groups, the idea of a public sphere that connects many people online eludes us.36 Similarly studies into the use of CMC to build civic networks linking communities and authority have looked at the way in which actually existing governmental and non-governmental networks have attempted to bring CMC into the realm of local governance and community formation – i.e. how the net actually functions to build subjectivity and democracy. In his study of local civic networks that were set up to, “offer new channels to access the main channels of democracy,” 37 Damian Tambini argues that the result is not an opening up of public spheres and a strengthened democracy but a confused set of overlapping and inconsistent practices. While Tambini offers no normative comment on this it is clear that the technology we have is in no way capable, or likely to be capable of, sustaining anything like a public sphere. While networks mediated by government and organisations reliant on government funding tend to exclude disadvantaged segments of society and contain the uses of online

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discussions and dissemination of information to narrow areas, networks formed from grass roots organisations do not have any formal connection with officials and therefore tend to be ignored. They do offer much more freedom in their breadth of discussion, but alongside this is less reliable information and accountability. Both kinds of networks are far too limited in access to approach any kind of universality in the sense that the concept of the public sphere requires. Therefore the arguments Tambini makes suggest practical restraints that would make the Internet as it stands ineffective in forming the buffer between civil society and state. If we respond to such ideas by positing something like Fraser’s notion of counter public spheres then it becomes difficult to see where this differs substantially from civil society. In this case the notion that the Internet offers a step towards a relative utopia in the form of a public sphere is not a particularly useful one; rather I want to think not of the public sphere but the kind of communicative relationships of the wider lifeworld, of civil society itself. I want to examine the possibility that the looser bundle of interactions and bonds that form the lifeworld, and those that form the Internet, might intertwine as this relative utopian space. Habermas tells us in Between Facts and Norms that, “Participants in argumentation proceed on the idealising assumption of a communication community without limits in social space and historical time”, and that, “such participants must presuppose the possibility of an ideal community ‘within’ their real social situation.”38 Critics suggest that such claims ignore the reality that there are always distortions which make that presupposition a redundant one – thus the ideal speech situation appears fantastic, and this being so gets it dismissed as utopian, in the strong sense, by those who see discourse as inescapably submitted to questions of power. Thus in following such a response we would be returned to the attitude of Camus’ friends to his utopianism; and I believe would be making the same mistake. Habermas is under no illusion about the possibility of realising the ideal speech situation, just as Camus is circumspect about the chances of actually eliminating murder, “I am not so crazy as that,” says Camus. Habermas also makes this clear: this formulation could mislead one into thinking the ‘ideal communication community’ has the status of an ideal rooted in the universal presupposition of argumentation and able to be approximately realised. 39 He freely admits that real situations and their constraints exist, and will always exist, but that does not mean those constraints preclude

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the idealising assumption, as reciprocal recognition will always exist on a horizon of becoming. As he explains: lifeworld contexts certainly constrain actors latitude for action and interpretation, but only in the sense that they open up a horizon for possible interaction and interpretations.40 In summary, of course we are restrained by others, but without that restraint there could be no hope of actual intersubjectivity, the very thing upon which mutual recognition is predicated. Therefore we can see the ideal speech situation as a motivating duty based in mutual recognition, on-line as well as off. In this scenario there is no sacrificing of means to ends because to aim towards that point is to try and build the relative utopia, knowing it may never eliminate murder, but by doing so we contain within our actions the fundamental imperative that murder is not a legitimate way to act, in that sense once we have accepted the grounds of mutual recognition, upon which any notion of a functioning relative utopia must be predicated, as such we are already on a path towards Camus’ relative utopia. Even if this journey begins with only two fellow travellers, it’s a start. Thus here we can move away from the total, and away from the public sphere, without abandoning the universal. For this reason I will think not about the public sphere and its problems of practical universality, but civil society and the principle of universalisation. The question then becomes the degree to which the binding elements of mutual recognition apply to relationships that exist outside traditional conceptions of meeting. Habermas states that to implement the unforced communication constitutive of mutual recognition, we simply need places to do so free of the structural constraints of the system, the usual terms apply of, “forums, stages, arenas and the like.”41 If we believe that the person with whom we are communicating to be a person, even if the arena or forum of interaction is virtual, then by definition the constraints apply. Indeed, when moving past his conception of the public sphere as the limited bourgeois space that he describes in The Structural Transformation of The Public Sphere Habermas claims in Between Facts and Norms that, Every encounter in which actors do not just observe each other but take a second person attitude, reciprocally attributing communicative freedom to each other unfolds in a linguistically constituted public space. 42 The public space (not sphere) which is cyberspace is just such an arena, and the fact that it can be constructed linguistically from beginning

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to end does not detract from this. Clearly relationships that exist solely on line will have differences, for example the way that validity claims are tested may seem weaker than face to face communication. However, that does not mean we should not attempt to express ourselves according the same binding principles; there are at least a further three good reasons for doing so. Firstly, research has indicated that most computer mediated relationships do actually co-exist on and offline, “most interactions taking place in the virtual sphere actually expand on and reinforce face-to-face acquaintances and exchanges.”43 Secondly the impact of relationships can be just as potent and subject to violation and pain on-line as off. 44 Thirdly, and most significantly, CMC has the same set of background assumptions as any other kind of communication, and submits to the four domains of reality that, according to the theory of communicative action, are tested by any validity claim: claims of truth, truthfulness, rightness and comprehensibility are just as much offered on line as off; the fact that some of them are more easily concealed is of interest, but not of significance. The distinction, for example, in redeeming a claim of truthfulness is that it may require the production of evidence outside the realm of cyberspace, but this does not contradict the obligation to prove trustworthy in any validity claims offered on-line. This is moving towards an understanding that the motivating force of relative utopia also applies to conduct on-line. This entails that the fabric of a normatively regulated CMC reflect the wider civil society of which it is a part. This makes sense if we consider civil society to be, “the space of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks – formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology that fill this space,”45 and consisting of, as Norberto Bobbio describes it, “the realm of social relations not regulated by the state,”46 which have been mapped as sets of interlocking, overlapping and varied associations, volunteerism, social movements and dense webs of intersubjectivity. A view of civil society which Cohen and Arato claim entails, “the normative principles defended by radical democrats” 47 The correlation between civil society and CMC is further strengthened when we consider that the Internet and civil society also have analogous family resemblances. Firstly, the combination of text based internet communications, such as email and newsgroups, with the distributed hypermedia of the World Wide Web, recreates the latticework pattern of relationships that constitute civil society. That is the combined effects of personal, informal group and institutional communication. The World Wide Web allows the kind of parallel and interlinked networks that formulate and sustain relationships of interest and shared values such as social movements, and the civil bonds of family and community. All of which require mutual

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recognition, and thus to be grounded in communicative action. In that sense to submit to the use of CMC is to submit to the normative imperatives embedded in all communication, the call is then to idealise these norms into a concrete utopian vision. 7.

Digital Dissent and Relative Utopia

The scenario spelled out above is not only an abstract one, but is being built in practice. When social movements and organised resistance emerge from the latticework of factors described we should not be surprised when they celebrate dissent. Indeed once they are recognised as embedded in the mutual recognition of civil society, they begin to look like they are fellow travellers on the road to relative utopia, particularly when those groups are overtly motivated by a common dream of global justice and democracy. Naomi Klein’s observations of the mix of groups that have become loosely known as the movement by its members, or the anti-globalization/anti-capitalism movement more widely, support this view. She points out that they, have not coalesced into a single movement. Rather, they are intricately and tightly linked to one another, much as ‘hotlinks’ connect their websites. This analogy is more than coincidental and is in fact key to understanding the changing nature of political organizing.48 This is an arrangement that Klein has referred to as the hubs and spokes model. “The hubs are the centres of activity, the spokes are the links to other centres, which are autonomous but interconnected.”49 The best known and some would say over examined example of this, though I make no apologies for revisiting this territory myself, is that of the Mexican Zapatistas, whose tactics and structure has come to be almost a template for new social movements, and is inextricably intertwined with the Internet. This local resistance movement turned their campaign into a global cause célèbre by using the Internet to spread local issues with universal themes of resistance and rebellion, coupled with a mastery of semiotics; Sub-Commandant Marcos with his balaclava and pipe has become a rallying figure, precipitating a widespread awareness which has led the movement to unprecedented influence, if not actual success. Manuel Castells has even described the Zapatistas as indicative of new formations of identity,50 empirically interesting but contestable and contested, yet in this context we can move beyond that observation to a claim that is far less contestable, that the Zapatista’s are working on the basis of some unspoken formation of a relative utopia. Firstly, their actions

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treat cyberspace as an extension of the mutual recognition of civil society, of the lifeworld, and as such this provides them with their normative framework. Secondly the claim is supported by the Zapatista’s move beyond the abstract normative framework of mutual recognition to the formulation of concrete demands, for example for recognition by the state of Mexico, and indeed the more utopian demand for radical democratization of global capitalism. However, because these demands are nourished and informed by the first principle the utopian idealisation remains a relative one. This is borne out in their connection with the multivariate movement that sprang up in 2002, against the then impending invasion of Iraq, which encompassed a huge diversity of interests organised in no small part via the Internet, and clearly reflected the “hubs and spokes” model. One of these hubs, the web site Znet, circulated a statement entitled We Stand For Peace and Justice, and asked for support on the position that, I stand for a world whose political, economic, and social institutions foster solidarity, promote equity, maximize participation, celebrate diversity, and encourage full democracy. 51 This was signed, and a further statement added, by Subcomandante Marcos on behalf of the EZLN, in which he responds by entreating the, “civil society of Mexico and of the world to promote the knowledge, discussion, enrichment and signing of the manifesto,” and that, “the right to rebellion, to defy those who oppress us with various alibis (always the gods of Power and Money with different masks), is universal.”52 This is a statement which clearly echoes the pluralist universalisation referred to previously. The kind of refusal and dissent, the argumentation and cooperation, that the virtual spaces of the Internet share with actual formations and movements, are not only desirable, but are the criteria on which a reclaimed utopian theorising of technology must begin. This is the real alternative to the visions for cyberspace discussed earlier in this chapter, allowing us to re-insert hope into the equation without it spiralling into absolute utopianism. That technology here might actually be a tool for, and of, relative utopia is added to by its employment in the ongoing reinvigoration and reconfiguration of civil society. The questions of whether CMC can, or should, help in going beyond this role, towards forming something like Camus’ notion of a world parliament, or indeed more modest proposals such as deliberative links to government, force themselves forward here, but while space prevents the specifics being discussed we can note the emergence of

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organisations such as the world social forum as a groping, in however flawed a manner, toward such goals. Though these questions are real and are being debated53 because they are practical and not conceptual they do not detract from completeness of the central claim of this chapter – that dissent, civil society and the Internet should come together and work in pursuit of the ideal of a relative utopia. Ambition, in this context, does not equal absolutism. Thus this ideal, and the evidence that in certain forms it is being perused, provides an imperative to protect it from colonisation by the various manifestations of absolute utopianism, the one in our most immediate sights being the dictatorial utopia of global capitalism. This is surely a world in which Camus’ call for us to “resist on a world scale; and to resist by means which are not in contradiction with the end we seek”54 needs be met with commitment, vigilance and hope.

Notes 1

H.G.Wells, “World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia”(6 November 2002) < http://sherlock.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html > 2 Ibid 3 Vannavar Bush, “As We May Think,” in Reading Digital Culture, ed. David Trend (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 9-13 4 Ibid 5 Ibid 6 Ibid 7 William J. Mitchell, E-topia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 43. 8 William J. Mitchell, City of Bits (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 55. 9 Ibid 10 Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 15 11 Ibid 12 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (London: Vintage Books, 1995), 221. 13 Nicholas Negroponte, “The Future of Retail” Wired 1st July 1998 (17 th May 2003) 14 Noam Chomsky, “Power in the Global Arena,” New Left Review 230 (1998): 3-27 15 Rob Shields, The Virtual (London Routledge, 2003), 120. 16 Ibid, 131.

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Ziadin Sardar, “Alt.civilizations. faq, Cyberspace as the Dark Side of the West” in Cyberfutures, ed. Ziadin Sardar & Jerry Ravetz (London: Pluto Press, 1996),14-42. 18 H.G.Wells, A Modern Utopia (Thirsk: House of Stratos, 1905), 212. 19 Donna Harraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150-151. 20 Mark Poster, “Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere”, (10 Sept 2002), 21 Ibid 22 Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London: Sage, 2000) 83-84 23 Ibid 24 Nick Stevenson, “The Future of Public Media Cultures,” in Culture and Politics in the Information Age, ed. Frank Webster (London: Routledge, 2001), 63-81 25 Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1976), 31. 26 Ibid 27 Albert Camus, The Rebel (London: Penguin, 1953), 19. 28 Camus (1986), 31. 29 Ibid 30 Ibid, 45. 31 Ibid, 41. 32 Ibid, 31. 33 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), 130. 34 These qualities, however, are not exclusive to the public sphere, or by themselves constitutive of it. 35 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to The Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 109-142. 36 Zizi Papacharissi, “The Virtual Sphere,” New Media and Society Vol. 4 (1) (2002), 9-27. 37 Damian Tambini, “New Media and Democracy: The Civic Networking Movement,” New Media and Society Vol.1(3) (1999): 305-329 38 Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 322. 39 Ibid 40 Ibid 41 Ibid, 361. 42 Habermas, (1996), 361.

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43

Mario Diani, “Social Movement Networks” in, Culture and Politics in the Information Age, ed. Frank Webster (London: Routledge, 2001), 117129. 44 For example see the ethnographic work carried out by Sherry Turkle and discussed in Life on the Screen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996) 45 Michael Walzer, Towards a Global Civil Society (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), 7. 46 Norberto Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989),22. 47 Jean L. Cohen & Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 19. 48 Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows (London: Flamingo, 2002), 16. 49 Ibid, 17. 50 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 8081. 51 “We Stand For Peace and Justice,” Znet, 27 March 2003, (27 March 2003), . 52 Subcomandante Marcos, “Zapatistas Statement on 'We work for Peace and Justice,” Znet, 5 April 2003, (5 April 2003). . 53 See George Monbiot’s book The Age of Consent (London: Flamingo, 2003) which has been published as this book is in final preparation. 54 Camus, (1976), 55.

Bibliography Benedikt, Michael. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992. Bobbio, Norberto. Democracy and Dictatorship. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 Bush, Vannavar. “As We May Think,” In Reading Digital Culture, edited by David Trend, 9-13. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to The Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 109-142. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992 Camus, Albert. Neither Victims Nor Executioners. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1976 Camus, Albert. The Rebel. London: Penguin, 1953 Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity Oxford, Blackwell, 1997 Chomsky, Noam. “Power in the Global Arena,” New Left Review 230 (1998): 3-27

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Cohen, Jean & Arato, Andrew. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992 Diani, Mario. “Social Movement Networks” In Culture and Politics in the Information Age, edited by Frank Webster, 117-129. London: Routledge, 2001 Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996 _______Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990 _______ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature New York: Routledge, 1991. Hine, Christine. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage, 2000. Klein, Naomi. Fences and Windows. London: Flamingo, 2002. Mitchell, William. City of Bits. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995. Mitchell, William. E-topia. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. London: Vintage Books, 1995. Papacharissi, Zizi. “The Virtual Sphere” New Media and Society 1 Vol.4 (2002): 9-27 Poster, Mark. “Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere” http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/writings/democ.html> (10 Sept 2002) Shields, Rob. The Virtual. London: Routledge, 2003. Sardar, Ziardin. “Alt.civilizations.faq, Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West,” In Cyberfutures, edited by Ziadin Sardar & Jerry Ravetz, 14-42. London: Pluto Press, 1996 Stevenson, Nick “The Future of Public Media Cultures,” In Culture and Politics in the Information Age, edited by Frank Webster, 63-81. London: Routledge, 2001 Tambini, Damian. “New Media and Democracy: The Civic Networking Movement” New Media and Society 3 Vol. 1 (1999): 305-329 Walzer, Michael. Towards a Global Civil Society. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995. Wells, Herbert. A Modern Utopia. Thirsk: House of Stratos, 1905. _______ “World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia,” (6 November 2002)

Part III At the Interface

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The Conflicted Significance of Racial Controversies in Major League Baseball and American History Shane Aaron Lachtman Abstract This chapter explores public controversies over racist statements made by three people in three different decades – player Jake Powell in 1938, Manager Alvin Dark in 1964, and owner Marge Schott throughout the 1990s. I argue that throughout these episodes, Major League Baseball, the media, and the public often act in unison to chastise individual racist statements while ignoring their own discriminatory practices. My findings suggest that the condemnations of individual speech facilitate the historical persistence of discrimination because they have been substituted for anti-racist practices. Keywords Controversies; discrimination; Major League Baseball; media, consumers; race; Major League Baseball history; political efficiency. 1.

Introduction

One of the biggest recent racial controversies in America began when Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker was quoted in the December 23, 1999 issue of Sports Illustrated making a plethora of bigoted comments against several cultural and national groups, homosexuals, and women. For several months after the interview was published, Rocker was constantly portrayed both in public conversation and in the media as a pariah-like, stigmatized person. On January 31, 2000, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Allan H. (Bud) Selig, issued a two-month suspension and fine against Rocker. Anti-racist disciplinary action against an individual is not unprecedented in baseball, which is widely considered to be both the national pastime and oldest professional sport in the United States. Even though the suspension and fine were eventually lessened, a stigma continues to dominate Rocker’s public persona and seems doubtful to ever end. However, the public and Major League Baseball’s condemnation of Rocker is ironic because charges of racism are still levied against the very same fans, media and baseball executives who act to condemn publicized instances of racist speech.1 In fact, although Rocker has been vilified in the mainstream culture, he is actually celebrated by some, and has even received standing ovations at some baseball parks. Quite plainly, the

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condemners (the public, the media, and Major League Baseball) and the condemned appear to resemble each other because both act in a variety of racist ways. The most glaring difference between the two are that the condemned individuals are limited to speech acts while the condemners discriminate more through tangible actions against the members of racialized groups. These circumstances lead to my desire to reassess society’s (the condemners) relationship with branded racists to better understand what has been obscured by polarizing rhetoric. I hope to revitalize debate over who is really rational and who is immoral. By historicizing the political efficiency of baseball’s racial controversies against individuals, I also hope to facilitate a more complicated understanding of discrimination and race relations. In short, I argue that the polar perception of ‘racist’ versus ‘anti-racist’ inherently fails to recognize the complexity and contradictions of both the condemned and the condemners. Major League Baseball does not perfectly fit the role of ideal arbiter and condemner because of its history and accused present relationship with racial segregation both on and off the field. Major League Baseball has a unique role in racialized controversies because they have the authority to formally discipline their associates and employees. Punishment of racist speech is commonly associated with condemnation of racism, but a series of studies depict Major League Baseball, an entity of individually owned organizations, as engaging in consistent patterns of discriminatory behavior itself. In Racial Segregation in Major League Baseball Sociologists Satya Pattnayak and John Leonard published statistical evidence that Major League Baseball was positionally segregated with whites playing primary positions, blacks playing periphery positions, and Latin players existing in a middle tier. Their 1991 findings were most recently affirmed by Richard Lapchick’s 2003 Racial and Gender Report Card.2 Similarly, the baseball media does not fit the role of unbiased observer because they are widely accused by sports observers, academics and their own members of engaging in racially segregated hiring, biased player coverage and slanted voting for awards ranging from Most Valuable Player to Hall of Fame enshrinement.3 The fans of Major League Baseball, who are intrinsically connected to the media, are also accused of racism via game attendance, commercial endorsements, all-star voting and memorabilia collecting.4 Such documented behaviour contrasts notions that the public disdains discrimination and casts their anti-racist actions as hypocritical. Despite the quantity and seriousness of the accusations, my chapter will demonstrate that none of the individuals or group entities can be dismissed as unequivocally or irredeemably racist. For example, Major League Baseball features large quantities of non-white players and a religious minority, Bud Selig, who is Jewish, as commissioner. The

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baseball media similarly covers a multitude of players who are non-white and often votes for non-whites for the highest honours like seasonal awards and the Hall of Fame. Fans attend games and cheer passionately where non-white players are often numerically significant and/or dominant, starring figures. These positive conditions of acceptance cannot extricate the fans, media and Major League Baseball from charges that they have biases and racist tendencies: these expressions are limited and do not preclude other, negating or contrary actions. Similarly, the individuals accused of racism will also be shown to be equally complex and contradictory regarding racial issues. Perhaps Major League Baseball, the media, and the public hypocritically penalize individual discriminators in order to avoid their own institutional discriminatory tendencies. My findings that controversial individuals are complex and anything but static racists contradict popular images. These conclusions may be useful in relocating the historical relevance of anti-racist actions to the trans-historical existence of racism. I hope my discussion will promote further investigation into the construction of positive and negative personas in America’s popular memory. While I will not attempt to cover every major incident of racist language in baseball history, in this instance I will give some context for the major issues of race in baseball by first explaining my theoretical positions and then focusing on three prominent individuals accused of racist acts: Jake Powell, Alvin Dark, and Marge Schott, because the controversies they generated are historical deviations and precedent setters. 2.

Theoretical Framework

Baseball’s history is a complicated text. Structure can be found in the history of Major League Baseball through its actions and discourses. In my research, I have found the existence and structure of a collective sovereign entity. This entity consists of three overlapping, interacting groups: Major League Baseball, the sports media and the general public. These three institutional branches take action at the bequest of another branch to continue their harmonious coexistence. For example, the media seems to only report discrimination if the public witnesses it firsthand. Coinciding, Major League Baseball does not seem to take antidiscrimination actions unless the media, or indirectly the public, demand it. If actions and opinions are conditioned by rules and power prevails over truth, my reading seeks to depose certain aspects of dominant logic that are based on fiction. I will deconstruct the actions of the collective sovereign to reveal how condemnations are politically efficient for their ability to delay and obscure reality. I am searching for fuller truths that have been forgotten by formulaic responses to overt

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discriminatory language. I suspect that there are more complicated reasons behind the condemnations of certain individuals than a progressive effort to reclaim the status of non-whites as full citizens. When Major League Baseball, the media and the public achieve non-discrimination ideals, they will be better suited to lead an anti-discrimination war. In an ideal antidiscrimination war, punishing racist speech will be one of many battles aimed at eradicating inequality and not events used to deny the seriousness of systemic inequality. Controversies are unique events in public discourse because they break with codes to speak the repressed language of the conscience. I speculate that American race relations devolve when individuals are crucified for speech acts and powerful institutions are not criticized for their discriminatory actions. A fundamental flaw in the controversy process is the public labelling of these controversial speakers as either a monstrosity or a virtuously misrepresented individual. Such labels exclude the possibility that the supposedly offensive language represents shortcomings in public consciousness, social conditions, and recent history. I am interested in the relationships between reality, reason, and fables. Popular history should neither depend on the original slanted interpretation. Present needs demand a massive historical reassessment of inherited knowledge about our racial history and its purported heroes and villains. The labels of racist and anti-racist do not properly signify their given meanings, but rather their usage attempts to prove a simplified, politically efficient reality. In short, the labels deflect blame from the masses and empowered institutions onto stigmatized individuals, thus creating a situation where only institutions hold the right to discrimination. 3.

The Controversial Individuals

Large-scale racial controversies about offensive speech made by individuals are not a new phenomenon in baseball. One of the first major controversies concerning an individual occurred in 1938, when Yankee outfielder Jake Powell was suspended for making offensive remarks on a radio program. Another significant incident took place in 1964, when San Francisco Giants manager Alvin Dark received prolonged national attention for remarks reported in a newspaper. In 1978, Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith made racist remarks in a public speech about African American fans that became the subject of heated debate. In 1987, Dodger President Al Campanis was forced to resign for comments he made on television about the mental and physical makeup of African Americans. Throughout the 1990s, Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott was severely disciplined both for offensive speech and discriminatory behavior against all types of people.

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I will not attempt to cover every incident of racist language in baseball history. I will instead focus on three of the most prominent individuals accused of racist acts: Powell, Dark, and Schott because the controversies they generated are uniquely important. First I will look at Powell, who was the first baseball player and employee ever officially disciplined by Major League Baseball for racially offensive language. His case has set precedent for the treatment of both Campanis and Rocker decades later. I will also trace the parties who both condemned and defended Powell to reveal the politics of amelioration. Second, I will look at Dark, who was the first manager ever accused of racism. He became the focus of the first large-scale racial controversy against an individual in (what is generally recognized as) the post-integration era. The lack of disciplinary action (and suspension of law) against Dark set the precedent for the lax treatment of owners Ted Turner and Drayton McLane when they made racist comments decades later. This controversy reveals how Dark’s professional rank dramatically altered public and organizational response. Thirdly, I will look at Schott, the first baseball owner to be disciplined for racial remarks and for discriminatory hiring practices. Her case evokes issues about arbitrary enforcement, of the relationship of gender to the sovereign, and the disparities between speech and actions. The experience, treatment, history, and reality of race in Major League Baseball is, as with the rest of American society, a conflicted experience filled with large contradictions. I will explore the creation of both racists and anti-racists throughout time while questioning the traits attributed to each. A. Jake Powell In 1938 Yankee outfielder Jake Powell was the centre of controversy over his anti-black remarks on a popular radio show. Although baseball completely excluded blacks from playing, Powell was nevertheless suspended for what he said. The commissioner’s ten-day suspension of Powell was a very severe and unusual disciplinary action and contradicts the popular notion that during the segregation eras Major League Baseball never took action against racism. The media directly involved in this case (the radio station) also took action by pulling Powell from the air immediately. This further supports the idea that overt verbal racism in the segregationist 1930’s was taboo. However, the motivations to act against racism are not simple and straightforward, and need further exploration. During this controversy, not all of the media vilified Powell. For example, white newspapers treated Powell’s remarks quite differently from black newspapers. In the black newspapers, Powell was portrayed as

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a bestial racist who defied civilized morality, while Major League Baseball was portrayed as a responsible disciplinary authority. In contrast, white newspapers described Powell as a rational human who made a single, understandable speech slip. It is most probable that the white media’s excusing of Powell’s racist speech is symptomatic of the white population’s devaluing of blacks as inferior to whites, just as humans frequently consider animals inferior. The most plausible explanation for Major League Baseball deviating from the white media is that Major League Baseball felt financially obligated to please their black customers. Major League Baseball acted as an artificial sovereign power by penalizing an individual to protect offended African Americans fans. However, my research will demonstrate that their public discipline actually masks both their staunch protection of Powell and their institutional hiring segregation. The Associated Press first reported the story on July 30th. It was nationally circulated in white newspapers and recounted that Powell was suspended for 10 days for comments made during a pre-game radio interview. The Associated Press wrote that Powell made “a slighting reference to Negroes,” by saying that as a policeman in Ohio, he used his “club” to hit “Negroes” (with the article referring to Powell as using “a colloquialism” to describe Negroes) on the head. The article emphasizes that Powell was not purposely offensive, rather the language was only offensive to “members of that race,” as represented by the phone calls and a “Negro delegation” at the following game.”5 The delegation’s attendance at the following game indicates that despite being barred from playing, blacks were a quantifiable consumer group who monetarily supported Major League Baseball. Considering that whites characterized Powell as non-malicious and blacks demanded extreme disciplinary action in the form of expulsion, the suspension could be characterized as both white baseball’s response to black demands and as an effort to maintain the unity of a white political body who did not uniformly accept overt verbal racism. Since the black protesters must have been cognizant of segregation, it is worthwhile to explore why they were offended by his remarks. One key aspect is that segregation and racism were not considered synonymous. This allowed segregationists to argue, among other things, that separation was mutually beneficial. Segregationists, like baseball’s commissioner, Judge Kennesaw Landis, could thereby support segregation and anti-racist actions by condemning overt verbal racism while supporting separate and unequal segregated social circumstances. Unlike for the white press, the Jake Powell story was important to the black press and made the front pages of both the weekly papers and the sports section. Alongside pictures of Powell and Landis headlines titled “HE TALKED” and “HE ACTED!” the story “Powell Insult Gets ‘Boot’

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of Judge Landis,” appeared as the lead story in the national edition of the Pittsburgh Courier Press. The story elaborates on several details of the controversial interview, the organized response by black civic groups, the security imposed exile of Powell from the team hotel, and the possibility that Powell would not be tolerated by fans in all but two Major League cities.6 The article presents far more information than the Associated Press’s, which is symptomatic of the differences between all of the black and white newspapers I reviewed. Differences in the two articles are that the Associated Press wrote that Powell “used a colloquialism,” while the Courier News and other black newspapers wrote that Powell said “niggers.” Another important difference is the Associated Press not specifying what body part Powell said he hit, while the Courier News specified it was “over the head.” The censoring of racial language in the white press is odd and ironic because whites controlled the social power differential and enacted discrimination. If they were really against the values represented by the colloquialism, it seems probable that social conditions would have been more equitable. These conditions connote a white media concealing discrimination, contrasting the black media whom announced the presence of the racists, perhaps in order to overcome them. Overall, the white press shields the audience from the details of Powell’s words, as if the Associated Press or its readers are ideologically opposed to discrimination or violence. However, the lack of opposition to discrimination is well addressed by there being no mention in the Associated Press of segregation in baseball or society. Clearly, blacks, and thus their newspapers, took civil rights and racialized issues seriously. In contrast, neither whites nor white organizations protested Powell because they did not have similar interests regarding discrimination issues. Rather, whites, including Judge Landis and Yankee management, are constantly quoted as dismissing Powell’s words as accidental and meaningless. While the Pittsburgh Courier mentions that “fair-minded sports fans of both races” were angered, no articles quote a white person as being angered about Powell’s remarks. The black press’s columnists wrote uniformly about Powell, their desire for a harsher punishment, and inclinations to continuously hound Powell and to boycott baseball and the businesses of its owners. The suspension was just the beginning of Major League Baseball and the New York Yankees’ public relations campaign in Chicago and New York to counter negative publicity. Black newspapers interviewed Yankee executives who described black anger as justified, stating that the entire organization regretted Powell’s words while also describing Powell’s remarks as an unintended “slip of the tongue.” 7 Powell made a publicity-apology tour in Harlem. A picture of Powell with the newspaper reporters during his visit to the Chicago Defender’s Harlem office was the

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front page and center picture of their August 20th edition. A regretful apology letter was also published on the front page. Powell wrote that he regretted the slur, recognized that black fans paid his salary, and concluded with a personal story that the two blacks who took care of his home “are two of the finest people in the world.”8 Ironically, the Pittsburgh Courier printed another signed Powell letter from his visit to their Harlem office denying that he made the offensive comments and that they were actually a reporter’s remarks.9 As mentioned previously, the interview in question was not taped, creating a problem of verification and reproducibility. (If more whites could actually hear the Powell interview, and hear him multiple times, perhaps they would have reacted differently). This was the first time Powell had given such testimony, which may have been a response to the angry Washington crowd that threw bottles at him in his first game back just days earlier.10 The content of Powell’s apology tour indicates the intense pressure the black population exerted on Major League Baseball and its employees. The black press’s prominent coverage of the tour indicates how seriously they had been offended and their own possible needs to reconcile themselves with Major League Baseball, a business which advertised in their pages and gave their writers access to games. In contrast, the white press continually did not report the Yankees public relations tour or the reactions of the black community. Perhaps some white readers would have thought pandering to blacks was degrading or they would have felt awkward seeing an overt racial power reversal. Ironically, the controversy and Powell’s obscurity in baseball history contributed to the unpredictable circumstances that prematurely ended his playing career and life. The controversy and a sub par season made Powell’s playing infrequent the rest of the season. He continued with the Yankees until 1940, when he cracked his skull in spring training and did not return to the majors until 1945 playing for both Washington Senators and Philadelphia Phillies. Interestingly, he retired just before Jackie Robinson signed a minor league contract with the Dodgers, and it was the Phillies who most threatened Robinson’s integration.11 After his retirement, Powell worked as a security guard in Ohio and in 1948 committed suicide in a police station after being arrested for writing bad checks.12 The Powell controversy illuminates how urban black northerners and the black media responded to overt racism in entertainment. The reactions of black northerners and black media shaped Major League Baseball’s official response despite the white media’s apathy and inattention. In later years, Major League Baseball would similarly punish Al Campanis and John Rocker when they made publicly offensive remarks.

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As black newspapers dramatically decreased in circulation and number, the white baseball media, although composed virtually of all whites, gradually became like the 1930s black media and denounced all racist speech. While Americans in the post-segregation era often view periods of segregation as racist, it is clear that black Americans could tolerate segregation while still finding verbal racism unacceptable. Unlike popular notions of a socially and politically disempowered people, African Americans took concrete actions to shape the institutions they came in contact with. Also, African Americans, ranging from the average fan to their media institutions, fundamentally integrated with white America, which contradicted notions of a separate, subservient group. Conversely, these circumstances mark the limitations of white social dominance. The anti-racist actions taken by Major League Baseball and the Yankees signify the ability of segregationists to behave in both discriminatory and anti-racist ways. Thus, the issue of segregation was not simply considered a matter of discrimination. The Powell controversy exemplifies the ability of an individual’s words to draw public attention to racism, while still being unable or unwilling to provide significant criticism about society’s larger racial inequities. B. Alvin Dark In 1964, San Francisco Giants manager Alvin Dark was the centre of controversy when he was quoted making a series of overtly racist comments in the New York newspaper Newsday. The ensuing controversy was and still is considered to be the most serious racial controversy centring on an individual since Jackie Robinson’s 1947 rookie season. 13 The controversy is the first time that a baseball professional’s career and public character were seriously jeopardized by discrimination in the integration era. It also marks the first and only record of a controversy concerning managerial bias, despite the many non-white players who continue to report bias (usually in memoirs and interviews only after their retirement). Dark's comments, as reprinted in reporter Charles Einstein’s 1989 novel Willie’s Time: * We have trouble [atrocious mistakes] because we have so many Spanish-speaking and Negro players on the team. They are just not able to perform up to the white ball player when it comes to mental alertness. * You can’t make most Negro and Hispanic players have the pride in their team that you can get from white players. And they just aren’t as sharp

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mentally. They aren’t able to adjust to situations because they don’t have the mental alertness. * One of the biggest things is that you can’t make them subordinate themselves to the best interest of the team. You don’t find pride in them that you get in the white player. * You don’t know how hard we’ve tried to make a team player, a hustling ballplayer, out of Orlando [Cepeda]. But nothing has worked for so long...he doesn’t sacrifice himself...I’d have to say he’s giving out only 40 percent. * Stoneham won’t trade Cepeda or Willie McCovey. They know it and they know they’ll get paid well if their averages are good.14 Like the perpetrators of the other controversies I explore, Dark refuted that he had made the controversial remarks. In response, the commissioner responded that he did not think Dark would say anything purposely malicious, which is similar to what Judge Landis said in 1938 about Powell. However, unlike Landis who punished Powell, Commissioner Ford Frick excused the story as a “misunderstanding” and argued that Dark had no history of discrimination.15 The act of excusing racist comments based on “character judgments” also occurred twice in 1999, when baseball owners Ted Turner and Drayton McLane made offensive remarks in public. Turner made slighting remarks about Christians and Poles, while McLane reportedly said on the radio that “it was hard to reach Hispanics because the game of baseball is strategy and skill and it’s complicated.”16 Turner and McLane’s statements were terse compared to Dark’s. However, the events played out in a similar way, where no action was taken against them. It is interesting to wonder if Powell would have been excused for his many statements if so many people had not heard him live. Conversely, if Dark had said the same thing on radio, would he have been severely punished? There is ample evidence to support claims that Dark spoke the words he denied saying. There was also reason to worry that such words reflected how Dark performed his managerial duties. As an institution connoting qualities of a sovereign authority, Major League Baseball seemingly had set their standards about public speech acts in the Powell case. However, these standards were arbitrarily suspended for Dark. As the first public exception, the Dark case deserves further scrutiny. While it is possible that Dark did not say what the reporter-friend wrote, other journalists believe the articles quotes were accurate because they claim to have heard Dark make similar comments.17 Also, baseball star Orlando

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Cepeda wrote in his autobiography that Dark was a racist and treated Latinos and blacks in a discriminatory way.18 At the time, the San Francisco media, the national media, Giants players, baseball professionals, and even Civil Rights organizations and leaders (including Jackie Robinson) were overwhelmingly supportive of Dark. When columnists in other cities mentioned that Dark probably had made the comments, it was usually followed by excusatory language calling him imperfect but not a Klansmen. The columnists also mentioned that Dark should not be fired over the incident while lamenting that society was overly sensitive. I could not find an article that lamented the possibility that Giants players had been discriminated against by Dark for many years.19 The lack of concern for victimized non-whites is similar to the white media’s lack of concern for the blacks Powell claimed to have beaten up 26 years earlier. Such apathy to potential victims reflects larger social devaluing of non-whites. However, black newspapers also barely reported the controversy, indicative of both shrinking page size and the possibly that they did not want to criticize Major League Baseball because they viewed the institution as progressive. In 1964, black newspapers, which were still politically active, were probably more concerned with contemporary civil rights issues, and were saturated with what they viewed as more pressing debates. During the Powell case, the black media may have been influenced to reconcile with Major League Baseball because of their economic relationship. However, in 1964 African Americans and their newspapers may have also associated the institution of Major League Baseball with northern progressives because every Major League team was in a northern city, which in general were viewed as far more progressive than southern cities. With these conditions, blacks may have begrudgingly accepted people like Dark as superior to the southerners they were battling for civil rights. In such a scenario, the political efficiency of their response required them to imitate Major League Baseball and suspend the penalties persecuting racists. Charles Einstein’s 1989 Willie’s Time provides new insider information on Dark, the controversy, and Giants players. Einstein, a Giants beat reporter in 1961, writes that while taking a walk with him in Milwaukee, Dark saw an interracial couple, called it a “disgrace” and moved to “break that up.”20 During the controversy, Einstein also reports that Willie Mays held a non-white players team meeting in his Pittsburgh hotel room. Einstein emphasizes that Mays and Dark had a long history together, including as team-mates, and as manager-player. Mays pointed out to others that Dark had made him the first black team captain in Major League Baseball. Mays also pushed for the players to support Dark for the rest of the season and convinced them that winning was more important to him than racism.21 Also, he writes, Mays did not want “the rednecks” to

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“make a hero out of him.” In addition, Einstein notes that Mays did not think racism affected Dark’s managerial judgment and feared that a midseason coaching change would hurt the team’s competitiveness. Mays’ strategizing contradicts his popular legacy, which is riddled with accusations from figures like Jackie Robinson who argue that he bowed to and allowed discrimination against non-whites. Ironically, Jackie Robinson also voiced public support for Dark. Mays, and other non-white players, who were not vocal dissidents, may be too often criticized by others as selfish, uncritical or stupid. Dark’s Giants teams were famous both for having an unprecedented amount of Spanish speakers and blacks, as well as for underachieving. Einstein wrote that Dark at least partially believed what he was saying based on observations constructed over a long, frustrating period of managing. Einstein describes that despite his knowledge to the contrary, “Dark had compartmentalized his thinking, whites in one group, non-whites in another.” 22 Dark’s alleged thinking is similar to Paul Wachtel’s psychological findings that people project negative stereotypes and values on people they define as belonging to a different group, while seeing people of the same group sympathetically. In addition, interactions between people of different races are characterized by physical distance and conversational brevity far greater than interactions between people of the same group.23 To Dark, non-whites had animal and nonhuman qualities and when he interacted with players who had different personalities than him, he very likely projected those differences as negative symptoms of racial differences. The popular scapegoat of the Giants underachieving teams was poor team chemistry, which was attributed to the team’s unprecedented roster diversity. The racial friction was uniquely portrayed as between African Americans and African Latinos. A popular interpretation of the Giants failings, and one that Dark accepted in his speech act, is that subhuman virtues of non-whites disrupted the play of virtuous whites. Dark was fired after the 1964 season because the team had failed to perform up to expectations for several years. However, Dark was later given many more high profile jobs. Over the years, the 1964 controversy has simply become a small asterisk in the annals of baseball memory, with little impact on Dark’s reputation Major League Baseball’s reputation was also not affected (either during or after the incident) for their lack of disciplinary action. The dearth of criticism about baseball’s lack of discipline may be related to people believing that a dampened reputation was punishment enough or possibly because Dark always denied saying what the interviewer wrote. With the lack of concrete evidence, the debate over how Major League Baseball should have handled things is problematic. I have found that the media covered the events of the Dark controversy sparingly. The baseball world

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did not engage in a prolonged debate about the status of race or report on how the controversy affected the team, unlike with Powell and Schott. Perhaps this is because Dark was already considered close to being fired, or maybe national news was reporting other racial issues that made discrimination in sports seem petty. C. Marge Schott From 1992 through 1999, Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott was repeatedly the focus of controversies and disciplined by baseball for discriminatory remarks. Her various comments and actions resulted in a one year suspension in 1993 (she was reinstated in six months), a 1994 letter of reprimand and mandatory donation, and a 1996 suspension with an agreement that Schott would pursue selling the team. A 1991 legal deposition, which I will soon highlight, is intriguing evidence of Schott’s discriminatory attitudes and the manifestations of such attitudes in her professional life. Schott’s words are permanently recorded and available to all, unedited and uninterrupted. This contrasts with the Dark case, where he was able to deny the context and meaning of his words with little repercussion. Schott was often depicted by the media and fans as a monstrous historic throwback, incapable of conforming to society. The comments that Schott has made are likely related to how other baseball owners felt in previous decades and quite possibly how many Americans of all backgrounds still, at some level, feel about others. Much of what is intriguing about Schott is an unsettled question: is she a monster who defies the law or just one of the only people willing to reveal her values? If the second scenario were true, the backlash against Schott, like Powell and Dark before her, may be more about hegemonic anger that her public speech acts reveal a very imperfect society. As with Powell and Dark, I am concerned with how the image of an upstanding individual changes into the image of an outlaw. I am also interested in the sincerity of the public’s scorn at these individuals. In this section I will survey Schott’s offensive remarks, beginning with an article detailing a December 6, 1991 legal deposition. The team’s former controller alleged that he was fired by Schott because he expressed to her that he was upset by her racial slurs and discriminatory hiring practices. From 1984 to 1991, the team’s 97 hirings resulted in only two blacks employees, with one as a low level minor league instructor and the other as basement maintenance. The deposition, originally only published in the New York Post, features dialogue concerning topics like her calling Martin Luther King Day “Nigger Day,” citing a stuffed gorilla in her office as proof that she had blacks in the front office, deploring “moneygrubbing Jews,” owning a swastika arm band, not doing business with Jews, calling players “million dollar niggers” and “dumb niggers.”24 The

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listed actions and comments all debase non-whites with animalistic and negative qualities. Her resistance to hiring blacks in the front office or being involved with Jews in business may be an insight into how other teams and American businesses once did, or still do, operate. Concurrent with her derogatory views, there were no non-whites in her front office. Similarly, in 1997, a black businessman accused the Reds of stopping his purchase of a minor league team once they learned that he was black. This indicates that even after Schott got in trouble for discrimination, the organization may still have acted consistently to exclude non-whites. The perseverance of Schott’s discrimination after the penalties may be indicative of just how difficult it is for people to change their values. Similarly, Schott’s continued discrimination may be indicative of why stigmas remain long after apologies and explanations. Racism may have been an outgoing quality in Schott’s personality. An Oakland A’s employee alleged that during an owners conference call Schott told her: I wonder what the commissioner wants this time. Is it this race thing? I’m sick and tired of talking about this race thing. I once had a nigger work for me. He couldn’t do the job. I had to put him in the mail room and he couldn’t even handle that. I later found out the nigger couldn’t read or write...I would never hire another nigger. I’d rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger.25 Ironically, the person Schott was talking to, unknown to her, was a black woman. Schott must have assumed she was not talking with a nonwhite because of baseball’s front office hiring practices feature a profound dearth. That Schott felt comfortable saying such things during an owners’ conference call may be indicative of an environment conducive to such talk. However, Schott also said similar things to reporters, so it is hard to know what environments she judged to be safe for candid discussions. Schott’s other controversial publicized comments included: Hitler was “OK at the beginning, but then he went too far;” “some of the biggest problems in this city come from women wanting to leave home to work;” “Only fruits wear earrings;” “I don’t like when they come here, honey, and stay so long and then outdo our kids. That’s not right;” and, referring to Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, “he says, ‘No want Cadirrac, no want Rincoln, want Mosh Shott Boo-ick.”26 Schott’s numerous comments are ridden with a bias and insensitivity that are virtually unparalleled for a public figure during the time period. Schott degraded multiple groups and was the first baseball personality to publicly insult

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women and gays, as other personalities would in future years. Overall, Schott represents the stereotypical phobic principles of middle twentieth century America that stigmatize non-whites, foreigners, gays and women who did not conform to the ideals of domesticity. Despite the abundance of Schott’s offensive remarks and practices, many people find her to be a sympathetic figure, whereby she is not necessarily perceived by all as a static, unredeemable bigot. To some, including Schott, her words do not prove reality, but are fables misused against her. The following press clippings show that she should probably not be simply dismissed by the public and history as a simple, weird, or bestial extremist. A 1990 Associated Press story titled, “Schott, Davis patch things up,” is about her relationship with Eric Davis, whom she would later be accused of calling derogatory names. 27 It is hard to know what to make of the apparent inconsistency, but the story’s image of her crying with Davis in his recreation room indicate that her racial slurs about Davis did not reveal the full extent of her views about him or other African Americans. If Schott was a brute, static racist, it is unlikely that she would cry over her relationship with a black player. However, Reds employees later witnessed her refer to him with racist derogatory names. Ironically, the story also mentions that Davis was booed all year by the fans even though he was one of the team’s best players and the Reds won the World Series. This echoes many other non-white players who have complained that fans show outward dislike for non-whites who get top contracts. With this in mind, it seems clear that Cincinnati fans had a very awkward and inconsistent relationship with their star black player. While Schott seems to have respected Davis on a personal level, she did not hire a black, or other non-whites in a capacity beyond playing, such as for coaching or being an executive. However, to her credit, one Jew, Cal Levy was hired as marketing director and Schott worked closely with him despite Schott’s apparent negativity towards Jews. Do her antiSemitic remarks about businessman signify a proclivity to apply negative stereotypes onto individuals she already disliked? This speculative condition would demean the quality of Schott’s racism because it implies that stereotypes did not pervert her judgment of people. However, these conditions are purely speculative and may contain only small elements of truth. Schott’s expressed admiration of Hitler and ownership of a Nazi relic would seem to indicate, at the very least, a socially offensive passivity to anti-Semitism that enhances the offensiveness of her antiSemitic remarks. In former all-star Curt Flood’s autobiography, he mentions that a Jewish minor league player he knew, (whom he would not name), was declined promotion to the Major Leagues in the late 1950s because of anti-Semitism.28 This indicates that non-whites and minorities could be discriminated against by people with Schott’s ideas even in the integration era and that verbal racism could reflect systemic

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discrimination. With this in mind, Major League Baseball and the public’s condemnation of Schott may have had much to do with protecting her former, current and potential victims. Through their many actions against Schott that culminated with her forced sale of the team, Major League Baseball, the fans and the media acted as a collective anti-discrimination authority. In her apologetic speech to owners at baseball’s winter meetings in Louisville, Kentucky, Schott characterized herself as being sad about the controversies. She also said, “I know in my heart that I am not a racist or bigot” and that she “always believed in equal opportunity for everyone and that individuals should be judged by their merit, not by their skin colour, religion or gender.” As the only female owner in Major League Baseball, she claimed to have been discriminated against by other owners. While admitting imperfections, she poetically added that she was not the cause of racial problems and that “minority issues have been present in baseball long before I came to the game.”29 Schott’s words depict her as a non and anti-racist. She describes sex discrimination as an issue in her life, business, and especially baseball career because all the other baseball owners were male. Similarly, her depiction of racial inequality in baseball before she bought the Reds in 1984 sharply addresses the topic that Major League Baseball had a racially imperfect past and present which rendered their discipline of her to be exceptional and hypocritical. With these issues in mind, Schott’s status as a criminalized person is not because of her actions, but her words. If baseball and the public really thought discrimination was so horrible, wouldn’t they have been equally as forceful with the segregated hiring conditions that were a real part of the Reds and the rest of baseball? Schott successfully returned the accusation of being a discriminator, recalling that Major League Baseball and society perform the same acts they condemn her for. Analogous to the definition of a rogue, Schott provoked penalties from Major League Baseball because she did not respect its public language codes. Her employment discrimination was only an issue when she made verbal infractions, signifying either that employment discrimination was socially acceptable or unsustainable without linguistic offences. Some people who disliked and were offended by Schott agree that her persecution by baseball and society were inconsistent and hypocritical. Many people were very conscious that Major League Baseball, the public, and the media were making biased exceptions. When Schott was being pressured to sell her controlling interest by other owners, a June 27, 1999 Cincinnati Enquirer column stated that “uneven discipline of oddball owners begs the question of sexual discrimination.” The article mentioned that months before Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner said Christianity is “for losers” and responded to a reporter’s question that, upon meeting the

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Pope, he would tell him a Polish joke. In response, Commissioner Selig did not even make a public statement. Ironically, just a few weeks before the article, Astros owner Drayton McLane was alleged to have said on the radio that “it was hard to reach Hispanics because the game of baseball is strategy and skill and it’s complicated.” Selig, the columnist criticizes, exonerated McLane based on a single telephone call. 30 Debate about why Schott was being prosecuted often featured the rationale that she was continuously loud, offensive, and embarrassing to baseball. Ironically, Turner and McLane’s remarks are similar to Clark Griffith’s previously mentioned controversial comments. Both were in informal settings and were easy to deny as out of context or false. However, like Griffith’s, the comments are seriously degrading and indicative of larger biases. If Schott had ever hired a serious amount of non-whites in her front office, perhaps her comments would have been taken less seriously. Turner and McLane both had hired the only two black general managers in Major League Baseball history, making their verbal transgressions against Poles, Christianity, and Hispanics relatively mild slips because they superficially did not reflect real world behaviour. They were seen as racial progressives unmatched by their baseball peers. Perhaps passivity about their comments also comes from the public’s polar focus on black-white race relations as the central aspect of American social imperfection. Turner’s statement against Christianity is a jab at a dominant national majority who has not experienced similar persecution as a demographic minority. Similarly, in a secular nation, criticism of the dominant religion also does not reference discriminatory realities like Schott’s words did. However, the lack of concern about the people McLane termed Hispanics may be symptomatic of how mainstream anti-Hispanic values are or about society’s lack of concern about the group, (which could be caused by hegemonic acceptance or rejection of the group). 4.

Conclusion

The condemnation against certain individuals and teams for insensitive remarks is that the condemners, who include Major League Baseball, the media and the public, have long traditions of discriminatory behaviour. While Marge Schott purchased the Reds in 1984, it is clear that any image of the team as racial utopia before her tenure is incorrect. Even Reds legend, and Major League Baseball’s all-time hit leader, Pete Rose publicly described how he was harassed by management in 1963 and encouraged not to hang out with the black players because it angered the white players.31 Racial discrimination is thereby a historically continuing condition that has varied in extent and form.

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Baseball’s racial controversies have transcended different historical eras. However, the racial controversies themselves have not varied significantly in content from 1938 to the present. Offenders are still whites, who construct non-whites negatively. If reactions by Major League Baseball, the media, and its fans reactions against individuals have not precluded either group from becoming completely non and anti-racist, (as is proposed by the earlier mentioned studies), the ability of the controversies to illuminate wider social conditions is deserving of more sensitive attention than previously recognized. By thoroughly examining popular controversies, I hope that fuller consideration of the events and people involved can facilitate a deeper understanding of discrimination and race relations. Clearly, Major League Baseball, the general public, and the media combine to form a powerful entity which creates and arbitrarily enforces their law. Together, they have acted harmoniously in dealing with racial controversies since 1938, forming a close alliance whose dynamics need further study. The frequency of these events is also noteworthy and worthy of future scrutiny. The lack of more controversies may indicate how strongly coded racial language is in our society, making the breaking of the code rare, but obvious and disturbing. The fact that the three offenders constructed non-whites in similarly derogatory ways may indicate that the social construct of race has not significantly changed throughout the studied time periods.

Notes 1

Major League Baseball is a governing body representing the interests of all Major League Baseball teams and is distinctly from employee groups like the Major League Baseball Players Association. Pattnayak, Satya (with J. Leonard), “Racial Segregation in Major League Baseball”, Sociology and Social Research, 76: 3-9, (1991). 2 Ron Thomas, “Black Faces Still Rare in the Press Box,” Sport in Society, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996). 4 Andrew Hanssen, “The Cost of Discrimination: A Study of Major League Baseball”, Southern Economic Journal, 1998, 64(3), 603-627. Also, Andrew Hanssen, Torben Andersen, “Has Discrimination Lessened Over Time? A Test Using Baseball’s Star Vote,” Economic Inquiry v37, n2 (April, 1999): 326. 5 Associated Press, (7/30/38). 6 unsigned, The Pittsburgh Courier News, 6 August 1938. 7 ibid.

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unsigned, Chicago Defender, 20 August 1938. unsigned, The Pittsburgh Courier News, 20 August 1938. 10 Roscoe McGowen, “Powell Survives Bottle Barrage,” New York Times, 17 August 1938. 11 Jackie Robinson is popularly considered the first African American player in the modern era when he began playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. He is now a cultural icon in the United States, as is evidenced by an abundance of books, plays, and movies about him. Also, most popular or academic books about race in America mention him. 12 Ben Garlikov, “Pants’ Dies a Suicide; Played Here,” Dayton Daily News, referenced in Chris Lamb, “L’Affaire Jake Powell: The Minority Press Goes to Bat Against Segregated Baseball,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Vol. 76, No.1, Spring 1999, p. 24. 13 Jimmy Cannon, Journal-American, 8/5/64 and Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, (New York, NY.: Oxford University Press, 1983). 14 Charles Einstein, Willie’s Time: A Memoir, (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1989), 207. Einstein is summarizing the Newsday article, which I have not yet been able to receive. 15 Leonard Koppett, “Dark Denies Prejudiced Views About Giants Attributed to Him,” New York Times, 5 May 1964. 16 Tim Sullivan, The Cincinnati Enquirer, 27 June 1999. 17 Einstein, 209. 18 Orlando Cepeda, Herb Fagen, and George Cantor, Baby Bull: From Hardball to Hard Time and Back (New York, NY: Taylor Publishing Company, 1998), 75. 19 For San Francisco media, I only surveyed the San Francisco Chronicle. 20 Einstein, 213. 21 ibid, 209-211. 22 ibid, 209. 23 Paul Wachtel, Race in the Mind of America (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 12, 15. 24 Phil Mushnick, “The Big Red-Faced Machine,” New York Post, 20 November 1992. 25 Ronald Blum, Associated Press, 27 November 1992. 26 USA Today, 6 June 1996. 27 Associated Press, 4 November 1990. 28 Curt Flood, The Way It Is (New York, NY: Trident Press, 1971). 29 Associated Press, 9 December 1992. 30 Tim Sullivan, The Cincinnati Enquirer, 27 June 1999. 31 Maury Z. Levy and Samantha Stevenson, Playboy, September 1979. 9

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Bibliography Cepeda, Orlando, Herb Fagen, and George Cantor. Baby Bull: From Hardball to Hard Time and Back, New York: Taylor Publishing Company, 1998. Desser, Arna , James Monks and Michael Robinson. “Baseball Hall of Fame Voting: A test of the Customer Discrimination Hypothesis.” In Social Science Quarterly, Volume 80, Number 3, 1999. Einstein, Charles. Willie’s Time: A Memoir. New York: Penguin Books. Flood, Curt. The Way It Is, New York: Trident Press, 1971. Garlikov, Ben. “Pants’ Dies a Suicide; Played Here,” Dayton Daily News, referenced in Chris Lamb, “L’Affaire Jake Powell: The Minority Press Goes to Bat Against Segregated Baseball,” in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Vol. 76, No.1, 1999. Hanssen, Andrew. “The Cost of Discrimination: A Study of Major League Baseball”, Southern Economic Journal, 1998, 64(3), 603-627. Hanssen, Andrew and Torben Andersen. “Has Discrimination Lessened Over Time? A Test Using Baseball’s Star Vote.” In Economic Inquiry, v37, n2, 1999. Levy, Maury Z & Samantha Stevenson. Playboy, September 1979. Pattnayak, Satya and J. Leonard. “Racial Segregation in Major League Baseball”, Sociology and Social Research, 1991 76: 3-9. Thomas, Ron. “Black Faces Still Rare in the Press Box,” in Sport in Society, edited by Richard Lapchick. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996. Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Wachtel, Paul. Race in the Mind of America, New York: Routledge, 1999.

Transformation of Trauma Without Rehabilitating Failure: The Dual Attempt at Reshaping America’s Memory of the War in Viet Nam in Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers (2002) R. C. Lutz Abstract We Were Soldiers (2002) seeks to recover, for commercial mass audience entertainment purposes, a part of the American historical experience which has caused deep traumatic fissures in American society and has often been considered an emblematic American failure. Through its carefully selected and produced slice of history, the film relies on a sufficient recuperative transformation of cultural attitudes among its domestic audience, and seeks to accelerate and help shape this process. It aims to re-valorize select aspects of its historical subject at a precise historical moment, shaped by cinematic, cultural and political developments, which is deemed advantageous. Yet the film also seeks to acknowledge the overall historical failure of America, with its parallel massive disruption of civic consensus and political order. It tries to avoid critical dismissal by refusing to project a monolithic message too directly at odds with a still lingering, if slowly receding, negative collective memory and the factual outcome. Thus, the film reflects the most current transformation of America’s collective memory of a traumatic war experience. Keywords Viet Nam War; America; post-colonial cinema; Trauma; Mel Gibson: Oliver Stone; Francis Ford Coppola. Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers (2002) is a rather curious and unique American film about that country’s war in Viet Nam1. It certainly does not fall squarely in any of the accepted sub-categories of the genre that saw its first commercial mega-hit with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), which perfectly captured the popular American mood toward the subject of this war at its time. Instead of presenting the war as a “psychedelic muddle,” a meaningless slaughter such as Full Metal Jacket, (1987) or a dubious enterprise conducted by unwilling, unmotivated, and mislead troops, such as Platoon, (1986), Hamburger Hill, (1987), or an atrocity, Casualties of

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War (1989) leaving behind soul-and-body damaged veterans, Coming Home (1978), Rambo I, (1982), Born on the First of July, (1989), We Were Soldiers tries a henceforth novel approach. Like the exceptional, but commercially less successful Heaven and Earth (1993), the film manages to contribute a new aspect to a large story, rather than relying on rehashing well-established stereotypes. The film also avoids another observed first impulse of transformation, changing historic defeat and its attendant trauma into a filmic revenge fantasy. Here, Rambo II (1985) comes to mind. There, the film inscribes on the American protagonist the characteristics historically associated with the indigenous Communist enemy: Rambo is the underdog, fighting advanced (Soviet) military almost with his body alone, just as the “pyjama” clad Viet Cong of popular belief. He is captured and tortured, just as the opposition charged the Saigon government and its US Allies were doing to captive enemy soldiers, spies and collaborators.2 The Vietnamese are clearly the puppets of their Soviet allies, who take over and command the “war” against the intruder, just as US military was often seen as doing in South Vietnam. When Rambo shoots down the Soviet attack helicopter, the film has effected a massive transformation of trauma, but at the high price of fabricating a historically meaningless revenge fantasy, and by fictitiously claiming the role of the underdog. We Were Soldiers transforms trauma in a more subtle and intellectually, psychologically and historically version of much more veracity. Thematically, We Were Soldiers seeks to recover, for a commercial mass audience and for obvious entertainment purposes, a part of the American historical experience that has caused deep traumatic fissures in American society. It deals with a war that has often been considered a singular, and emblematic American failure. To this end, the film begins with a careful selection, and filmic reproduction, of a slice of history of this war most suitable for its effort. In so doing, the film can establish a reasonable claim to historical accuracy, and from this position of recognized historical legitimacy it can begin to pursue its rhetorical and ideological goal without facing immediate dismissal and ridicule as typical “Hollywood” version of reality. We Were Soldiers is not a sheer fantasy along the dimensions of Apocalypse Now, which superimposed a collective dreamscape over even the geography of Southeast Asia, with an imaginary river running along lines nowhere to be found there in reality. Thus, the capricious exercise of transplanting Joseph Conrad’s novel about the Congo to Viet Nam and Cambodia ironically demonstrates, yet again, the culturally nonchalant way in which Hollywood, and, one may presume, occasional American politics, deals with its subjects. This becomes especially poignant when subject and message are supposedly in opposition to such an approach. There is a deep irony in the fact that Apocalypse Now operates in much the

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same fashion in the area of filmmaking as it charges the US of operating in the area of warfare. The opening lines of Francis Ford Coppola, in Elaine Coppola’s remarkable documentary about the making of the movie, Hearts of Darkness (1991), spoken at the film’s premiere at Cannes in 1979, seem to acknowledge as much. “We were like the US in Vietnam,” intones the filmmaker, “we had access to too much money, too much material, and little by little, we went insane.” This certainly is the film’s view of the war, and it does convey it with all the power of a major Hollywood production, and to spectacular cinematic effect. With its carefully selected and produced slice of history, We Were Soldiers relies on the assumption that its domestic audience has experienced already a sufficiently recuperative transformation of collective cultural attitude and memory of the war in Viet Nam. By 2002, it was hoped that American audience members have largely recovered from the immediate trauma of an increasingly unpopular war that has been tied so powerfully to photographic and televised visual imagery. From the beginning, when the war in Southeast Asia reached American cultural consciousness, visual images much more than signs in any other medium have served as a fulcrum to shape collective cultural attitudes towards the subject. Thus it seems only fitting that a transformation of that trauma be based on visual imagery as well. For America, there exists a trilogy of iconographic images from the war in Viet Nam that each triggered a transformation in cultural attitudes and political responses to a far away military struggle. Each of the three visual images almost immediately became iconized and invested with a meaning beyond its immediate circumstances. This often globally inscribed meaning for each icon derived mostly from an American point of view, and/or a global, ideologically charged view of America. These two perspectives knew at best little of the concrete historical and contextual circumstances out of which each visual was lifted to become an icon in a globally contested battle. At worst, context was suppressed or manipulated for ideological purposes. In the age of mechanical mass production of the visual image, whether derived from film footage or still photography, emergence and dissemination of the attendant context of each individual “snapshot” that was used to transform public opinion and policy thus fatally fell behind the speed with which each visual was bestowed with attached “signifieds” on a world stage. The first such image is that of the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk Thich (“Venerable”) Quang Duc at a busy intersection in Saigon on June 11th, 1963. The televised suicide of the burning monk, whose followers had alerted Western media in Saigon of the occasion, shocked the Western world. It quickly achieved iconographic status and as such has been used, for example, in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1967). In the Swedish film, the footage serves to symbolize the heroine’s nervous

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exhaustion and psychic fatigue that results from living in a world that has given birth to such atrocities, captured in traumatic pictures representing political and personal despair. Politically in America, the image of Quang Duc and six further monks who followed him in the same fashion, led to a profound dissatisfaction with the leadership of the Republic of Viet Nam (South Vietnam in common US usage). It did not help that Madame Nhu, sisterin-law of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, referred to the events as “monk barbecues.”3 Political disaffection with a South Vietnamese regime alienated from the mass of its people led the USA looking for different alternatives to Diem, hoping to transform South Vietnamese leadership. US President Kennedy and his top advisors condoned a coup against Diem, rather acting along the lines suggested in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), in order to transform America’s sinking political fortunes in South Viet Nam. In Stone’s vision, Kennedy’s staunch anti-Communism (“we shall pay any price, and bear any burden”) and fascination with counter-insurgency is transformed into a highly fictitious, wished-for alternative. The Kennedy of JFK is acting from a gradual learning experience that has him secretly prepare for the gradual disengagement of America from Southeast Asia – a presidential transformation for which there is scant historical evidence. The second picture that became an icon that galvanized and transformed American public opinion and turned at best lukewarm remaining support for the war effort into outright opposition, is Eddie Adams’s shot of the South Vietnamese Police General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The photo shows the moment just before the older policeman, standing in uniform on the left, is executing with his revolver a young captured Communist infiltrator in civilian dress on the right. The event happened on the third day of the so-called Tet Offensive in February 1968, when North Vietnam4 had hoped to win the war by launching an all-out offensive in the South during the national lunar New Year holiday celebrations. The plan was to hit the enemy unawares. The Communists, believing in their own ideology, thought that the initial attack would shatter the military forces of the Saigon regime and would be followed by a general anti-government popular uprising throughout the South, sweeping away any further resistance. Reality proved different, and the South survived with civilians generally loyal to the government. The Communists also murdered 3,000 Vietnamese citizen leaders in the city of Hue, which they had captured and held for an extended period of time. Adams’s picture, however, became an icon for the anti-war movement since it seemed to show a callous murder of a young man by a uniformed representative of the Saigon government. From 1968 on, it enjoyed near-universal recognition in the Western world. Woody Allen used it to decorate the living room of his anti-hero, played by himself, in

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his dark Stardust Memories (1979). It is against the backdrop of this picture that Woody Allen’s protagonist mentions that “doves are rats with wings” in the movie. It is a fitting line summing up the film’s existentialist, cultural and personal pessimism that circumscribed much of the state of American collective culture of the times. What Adams’s photo does not tell, however, is the historical fact that the captured enemy irregular was a Communist captain, who had just murdered a Saigon police officer, his wife, and their three young children. When Loan ordered the execution of this man, his subordinate refused, so Loan carried out the act himself. Yet the context of this picture never enjoyed the same circulation as the image itself, the iconic status of which proved of immense power and led to an absolute transformation in America’s conduct of its military and political engagement in the war raging in much of Southeast Asia. Another picture resulting from the American engagement in Viet Nam that immediately achieved stark iconographic powers is Nate Ut’s photo of a young Vietnamese girl running naked towards the camera after having just been wounded on the back by an American napalm strike. The billowing dark smoke in the background, the seemingly callous, noncaring facial expression of the American G.I.s on the road behind the running, crying girl, all contribute to the picture’s iconic power. As Denise Chong reveals in her book The Girl in the Picture, the photo shows nine year old Kim Phuc who was wounded during a US napalm strike on enemy positions near her South Vietnamese village on June 8, 1972. Kim survived her wounds as Ut drove her to Saigon, and for years suffered incredible pain from her burns. After using her for their own propaganda purposes after their victory in 1975, the Communists let her travel to Germany to receive advanced treatment. In 1992, she defected Viet Nam and moved to Canada, founding a family of her own. Again, the picture itself reveals little beyond the immediate suffering and pain of its central subject, and the construction of its iconic qualities was done to serve various ideological causes. Yet as powerful an image of trauma as the photo resembles, its publication did little to transform contemporary American attitudes and cultural beliefs about the war. By June 1972, American public policy was determined to disengage from the war in Southeast Asia, and of the 70,000 American troops in Viet Nam, down from over 500,000 in 1966, only about 6,000 were combat units. America sought to extricate itself from a commitment of which it had become wearied by the often tragic and misguided circumstances of its fulfilment. In Viet Nam, the situation on the ground had traumatized and transformed those who had blindly believed in easy solutions to stemming Communist advances in the complex field of postcolonial Southeast Asia.

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After ceasing hostilities with the forces of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam and its southern Communist allies after January 1973, America sought to collectively forget about its Viet Nam experience. Repression of traumatic memory was evident in popular culture and public policy. Hollywood did not dare to approach the issue, and the nation’s attention soon turned to the scandal of Watergate that should engulf the presidency. The war in South Viet Nam ended for many Americans with the stark image of utter defeat that can represent the third transforming visual icon of the war: the famous shot of the U.S. helicopter picking up Americans and Vietnamese refuges from the rooftop of the CIA building in Saigon (not the embassy, as mythology of the picture has it), on April 29, 1975. When North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gate of Saigon’s presidential palace a day later, America desired nothing more than to forget about what it considered a painful episode. What followed the immediate trauma of defeat in America was, of course, suppression: Viet Nam became a taboo throughout the late 1970s in America, just as refugees began pouring into the country. Lan Cao’s novel Monkey Bridge tells of this attitude from the point of view of the “repressed” reminders of that war, the Southeast Asian refugees. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) illuminates America’s cultural stance at this juncture in time. It adds to its brilliant visual depiction of a culture in near-terminal decay when its pan of Travis Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) dilapidated apartment reveals for a few long seconds a North Vietnamese flag (perhaps carried during an American anti-war rally, or captured or bought in Viet Nam). This and, more prominently, Travis’s ubiquitous flak jacket and his mention of an honourable discharge from the U.S. Marines establishes him as Hollywood’s quintessential Vietnam veteran of the first post-war decade. He is considered drugged, crazed, armed and dangerous, having utterly lost his mind due to the transformative trauma of the war he has fought in. His figure is echoed in the persona of the first Rambo, who is a far cry from the later revenge fantasy figure. We Were Soldiers clearly speaks to an American audience vastly different to that who saw itself in Taxi Driver in 1975, and who cheered along the Rambo-sequels in the early 1980s. Gibson’s movie also goes beyond the soul-searching of Platoon and Coming Home and seeks to accelerate and help shape a further process of transforming trauma. It aims to re-valorize select aspects of its historical subject at a precise historical moment, shaped by cinematic, cultural and political developments, and chooses a moment that it deems advantageous for such a project. Yet the film also seeks to acknowledge the overall historical failure of America, with its parallel massive disruption of civic consensus and political order, to achieve its goals in Southeast Asia. The film tries to avoid its critical

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dismissal by refusing to project a monolithic message too directly at odds with a still lingering, if slowly receding, negative collective memory (still holding on to its past icons) and the factual outcome of the war. To achieve its dual ambition of a recuperative and partially sustentative transformation of its subject, the film chooses an event set at the relatively pre-traumatic onset of the conflict, in November 1965. After President Diem was killed in a coup that removed him from power on November 1, 1963, Viet Nam disappeared from the front of the Western cultural consciousness. Diem’s successors were busy fighting with each other for power, and Buddhists no longer felt discriminated by a Catholic president. So the self-immolations stopped, graphic footage of which had rocked the conscience of the Western world and transformed opinions about the Saigon government, leading to Diem’s fall. In the absence of major transformative pressure on Lyndon Johnson’s administration following in the footsteps of the assassinated Kennedy, American policy towards the war in Viet Nam remained one of support for the anti-Communist government of South Vietnam. Even as the political infighting of the military men who had replaced Diem grew to a crescendo and was clearly threatening the collapse of the country and its fall to Communist forces, Johnson and his military planners were not willing to abandon the Republic of Viet Nam. With the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving him virtually free hand, Johnson agreed to an unprecedented built-up of US military forces in South Vietnam, and the first combat units of the Marines were landed in March 1965. American military commanders soon began to search for the enemy, trying to transform the war into a conventional battlefield they were trained and equipped to win. Basing their strategies on the their eventual defeat of the French forces in open battle, and their growing military victories over the South’s armed forces, North Vietnamese strategists initially prepared to meet the American soldiers in the field. We Were Soldiers thus chooses an early period of the conflict and confines itself almost exclusively to the military war at a time when the military and political leadership of the North’s Democratic Republic of Viet Nam were somewhat obliging American war plans. This historic moment enables the film to pursue its strategy of the transformation of a traumatic past by building on a re-valorization of the heroism emerging from and manifesting itself in battle. This is aided by utilizing visual and sonic aesthetics that Saving Private Ryan (1998) established for the genre. Yet Gibson and his crew are careful to allow for some degree of alterity and divergence. The film opens to a flashback of French soldiers, expressing with “pays merde, guerre merde” a common subsequent American sentiment (“shitty country, shitty war”). The subsequent massacre of the hapless French convoy in the ambush of the Viet Minh fighters immediately reminds the audience of the ferocity and vicious

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outcome of war. Yet when the scene dissolves to the pages of a book revealed to be read by Gibson’s character, (then) Lt. Col. Harold (“Hal”) Moore of the US Marines, it subtly reveals its transformative approach. Yet Hal Moore, a historical army commander who lived to write about the battle depicted in the film, was an anomaly. Commander of the battle, which he retells in his memoir We Were Soldiers Once … and Young, on which the film is based fairly accurately, Moore was the exception among the Americans debating and going into Viet Nam in 1965. He actually studied the past of the French colonial war against her Vietnamese subject people, who fought primarily through the (Communist-led) Viet Minh for their own independence. It is of course tragic (and beyond the scope of this article) to remember the fatal clash of different mind-sets at the end of World War Two in Viet Nam. Ho Chi Minh seriously believed that the Americans, who had kicked out their own colonizers, the English, would support his similar endeavour against the French. The Americans, traumatized by Stalin’s almost immediate brutal grasp of all of Eastern Europe as far as his Red Army could advance, could never see beyond Ho Chi Minh’s Communism. Thus, they gave in easily to the pretence offered by the French, keen of reviving their Southeast Asian empire, that Viet Nam was needed as a bulwark against the global terror grasp of Communism. Aside these historic reflections, which can illuminate why American combat soldiers suddenly found themselves fighting in the jungles and highlands of a country most of them had never heard of before, Moore stands out exactly because he possessed a sense of history. His actions stand in stark contrast to those of America’s political leadership: the leather-bound, thick tome prepared and translated for American policy makers and military leaders by the French after their departure from Indochina, entitled “Lessons Learned,” was immediately deposited in the Library of Congress. It was never checked out by anybody, however, until a researcher found it in the mid-1990s. We Were Soldiers proceeds to show Moore and his Marines as a well trained, highly motivated, and committed fighting force. Moore shows leadership skills, concern for his men, and planning ahead, exactly the qualities which the American military was accused of having lost later on in the war. His troops are a far cry from the dishevelled soldiers and veterans of previous Viet Nam war movies, where lack of motivation is usually visually underlined by showing a demoralized band of unkempt men. It is made clear in these films that the sorry visual state of the soldiers does not necessarily come from the strain of battle, but that it reflects an inner disengagement, or “internal desertion,” as military historian Paul Keagan has termed it. In his times, long before the onset of disillusion about the war in the minds of many historical US soldiers, Moore is still an exception. He

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is of the calibre of John Paul Vann, Edward Lansdale, and a few others. Yet historically, for every one of them were at least ten like General Paul Harkins, leader of Military Assistance Command Vietnam in 1965. Harkins proved so inept and out of touch with the country and the war the US was meant to assist fighting, that soldiers used to call every particularly stupid manoeuvre “to pull a Harkins.” By November 1965, the American soldiers had not yet been fully subjected to the political double-talk and deception that would reveal a wide gap between their experiences in reality and their strange counterparts in the official version put out by an increasingly frustrated military and political leadership. This “credibility gap” and the attendant official lies would eventually transform America’s reaction to the war its soldiers were fighting in, and lead to the scenes captured in films like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, for example, or Casualties of War, that precede Gibson’s movie. By focusing on the exception of Hal Moore, We Were Soldiers manages to transform the trauma of an ill-lead and ill-used American army suffering in the well-known conflict in Viet Nam. Moore acts almost as if he were too good to be true; nevertheless, history shows that the man really existed and performed like this, inspiring like-minded performances by others. Yet ultimately, Moore was too far removed from the General Staff and the political leadership in Washington to effect more than tactical successes. Finishing his tour of duty in 1966, he would leave Viet Nam in the course of his career as an officer soon after the action depicted in the film. To transform lingering and previously established and reinforced visual images to the contrary, We Were Soldiers carefully grounds the army’s men in their families, focusing on their wives and mostly young children, and showing them as caring and personable. Here, the film restores to the genre an aspect of reality often lost, and shows the social setting of the warrior the film is about to follow into battle. And Gibson does more than the superficial: the women are given screen time to voice their own concerns. The issue of lingering racism in America at that time is addressed when a Black army wife tells of hair salons bearing signs for “White” or “Black” only, since the Marine base is set in Georgia of the South. The film highlights Moore’s speech to his troops before they embark for ship transport to Viet Nam, and alludes to a historical problem that deeply troubled the historical commander: President Johnson’s ambiguous, if not to say half-hearted attitude to the conflict in a place he called “a little piss-ant country.” Johnson resented the Vietnamese and their conflict for interfering with his grand plan for the Great Society in America. Under Johnson, the army still operated under peacetime provisions that called for the rotating out and dismissal of some of

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Moore’s best-trained and most experienced men. They were sent to battle deprived of some of their best troops, who were enjoying their discharge from the army that had trained them for a mission they were not called on to perform. Yet generally, the film leaves politics out of its focus and hones in on the people whose mission it is to transform political mandates into historical reality. When Gibson’s movie cuts to its “location” for Viet Nam, a viewer familiar with at least some aspects of the respective geography will immediately recognize the trees, bushes and grasses of Central California. A few plaster anthills and assorted rocks are strewn over the location to enhance what are actually the grounds of Camp Ord, California, where the movie was shot in March 2001. Few directors have gone as far as Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone, who recreated their “Vietnam” in the Philippines or Thailand. As regards verisimilitude of location, We Were Soldiers occupies some middle ground between Stanley Kubrick’s use of an abandoned South England gas works to stand in for Da Nang and Hue in Full Metal Jacket, or the rather inferior Green Berets starring John Wayne in a “Vietnam” where the sun sets in the East5 and the landscape looks understandably much like Georgia, USA, where it was shot. Ironically, the producers of We Were Soldiers recruited the “North Vietnamese Army Regulars,” who were to fight the Marines, from the Southeast Asian student population of San Luis Obispo and San Jose in California. They are first- or second-generation immigrants who fled with their families from the very Communist power they play in the film. At relatively substantial levels, clearly surpassing previous generic norms, screen time is given to the North Vietnamese side - the “Other,” transversely played by Vietnamese-Americans. The opposing soldiers are introduced around the commander, who is played by Don Duong. Duong has been one of Vietnam’s movie stars, and agreed to play in this American film, just as he had played in Tony Bui’s VietnameseAmerican movie Three Seasons. In Vietnam, Duong is well known, having played, for example, in The Residential Complex (1998). This is a bittersweet tale of the people who are quartered by the Communist victors in the rooms of a hotel that is turned into a residential compound after the Fall of Saigon in April 1975. The film ends in the 1990s, with the former hotel turned residential complex that has become home to many families, being torn down to make room for the construction of a new hotel financed by international owners. With this, the film is chronicling Viet Nam’s own transformations. Indicative for the strict hold that the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam still seeks to exert over the representation of its nation’s past, Don Duong was severely criticized for starring in a film that depicts the American soldiers other than as the bloodthirsty murderers and callous monsters as they are shown generically in state-approved films in Viet

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Nam. Duong was called a “traitor” in Vietnam, and authorities considered banning him from film work for five years. Their desire for a monolithic, orthodox depiction of national history clearly had clashed with the atmosphere of a more probing, transformative approach. In the Fall of 2002, a deeply disillusioned Don Duong announced that he would no longer play in foreign films. Soon after, he left Viet Nam and moved to the West, living with relatives. Perhaps he is awaiting a transformation of the apparently unbending, doctrinaire stance of the censors of culture in his home country6. As the opposing armies clash in We Were Soldiers, there is the expected graphic footage of the battle. The leadership decisions of Moore and his North Vietnamese counterpart are shown that, in Moore’s case, saved the battle for the Americans. On both sides, soldiers are individualized, including a bespectacled young Vietnamese who may owe some of his screen image to that of the young Soviet revolutionary student “type” in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) who appears just before the famous Odessa Steps sequence. In Gibson’s film, the Vietnamese speak their language, and interact like individual humans rather than the familiar “hordes” of countless lesser films. They are far more developed cinematically than the “Vietnamese” who torture De Niro’s character in The Deer Hunter while happily chatting away in the actors’ native Thai. At the end of the movie, with Moore’s men barely victorious, the American audience can breathe a collective sigh of release. Not only is the trauma of battle transformed into post-battle elation and catharsis, the image of the Viet Nam war has also been affected by a transformative revalorisation of some of its participants. Yet graphically, with a heap of North Vietnamese war dead reclaimed after American departure from the battlefield, the movie introduces a note of dissonance. This is reinforced by a North Vietnamese officer’s statement that this early success will only lead the Americans into a deeper tragedy. In the end, the shot of an American woman receiving the news that her husband has fallen in battle is juxtaposed with a parallel shot. It shows the North Vietnamese war widow of the bespectacled junior officer, whose diary is returned to her. The sad features on both actresses’ faces bespeak an eternal truth of war: its victims reach both sides of the confrontation. For both obvious narrative and also thematic reasons, We Were Soldiers does not show what happened next and is told in the second, smaller part of Harold Moore’s memoir. A few days after the battle at Ia Drang that is shown by the movie, the North Vietnamese army nearby ambushed a second, similar group of US Marines. Led by an American officer who was much less experienced, circumspect, and present-minded

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than Moore, the American force was massively defeated and suffered very high casualties. Yet the North Vietnamese, under Vo Nguyen Giap, quickly learned by late 1965 that they could not achieve their political goals and win their war if they continued to fight the war the way the Americans wanted to fight it and were prepared for it. Soon, the North Vietnamese tactics and general strategy would shift towards fighting the long war of attrition that would ultimately bring them victory. Ironically, victory came by conventional military means in the Spring of 1975, after the planned general offensive of Tet 1968 failed militarily but politically broke the remaining will of America to stay involved in the war. Pictures such as the ones imbued with iconic power that have been discussed above helped funnel popular American opposition to a war that the doyen of American journalism of these days, Walter Cronkite, had judged “unwinnable” on national US television in the days after Tet. With its choice of subject and narrative scope, We Were Soldiers reflects the most current transformation of America’s collective memory of a traumatic war experience. By 2003, America appears ready to acknowledge the steps that brought the nation into its war in Viet Nam, and appreciate a multi-facetted representation of the many truths of that conflict. On the other side, unfortunately for Don Duong, the Communist government of Viet Nam still clings to an official desire for a monolithic representation of their version of the war events. Clearly, the American public is more receptive to probe transformations than is the administration of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, even 28 years after the conflict ended with their historic victory.

Notes 1

The correct spelling of the country, according to the system of transcribing Vietnamese language by using the Roman alphabet plus diacritical remarks, is Việt Nam. The diacritical remark is not used in the text of this article. Common American usage is Vietnam, and this word has been used when the context implies an American perspective. 2 For a cinematic representation of a similar electroshock torture as that suffered by Rambo, but applied to a presumed Viet Cong collaborator, see, for example, the scene of Le Ly’s torture in Heaven and Earth. 3 Quoted in Nguyen Cao Ky, Buddha’s Child, p. 88. 4 From the proclamation of Vietnamese independence by Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi on September 2, 1945 until the formal reunification of North and South Viet Nam in 1976, the Communists called their state the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. Since 1976, the official name of the country is Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

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5

Since Viet Nam’s Coast faces mostly East and certainly does so at the supposed location of the movie, there can be no sunset over the ocean, in spite of the movie’s depiction to the contrary. 6 Duong’s fate is reminiscent of that of celebrated North Vietnamese war journalist Duong Thu Huong, whose critical fiction about the war and its aftereffects on Vietnamese society led to her imprisonment and expulsion from the Communist party in the 1990’s, and who lives in seclusion in Hanoi by 2003.

Bibliography Cao, Lan. Monkey Bridge. New York: Viking Press, 1997. Chong, Denise. The Girl in the Picture. New York: Viking Press, 2000. Hayslip, Le Ly. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. New York: Doubleday, 1989. ______. Child of War, Woman of Peace. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Huong, Duong Thu. Novel Without a Name. New York: William Morrow, 1995. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking Press, 1983. Lanning, Michael Lee. Vietnam at the Movies. New York: Fawcett Books, 1994. Marr, David. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. Moore, Harold. We Were Soldiers Once … and Young. New York: Random House, 1992. Nguyen, Cao Ky. Buddha’s Child. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1990.

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Popular History and Re-membering the Nation Emine Onculer Abstract History has often been used as a means to legitimize the state’s hegemony as well as to create a feeling of solidarity among fellow citizens by making references to a shared past. This was the case in the newly formed Republic of Turkey and the nationalist historiography was rarely challenged until 1980s. Little attention has been paid to the Ottoman past as a way to downplay the continuities with a multi-ethnic empire. However, recently, there has been a proliferation of historical novels and films re-discovering the Ottoman heritage. This new sphere enables the representation of some traumatic events and alternative narratives, which were absent from the official historical narrative. One of these events was the Capital Levy of 1942-1944, which aimed at taxing the non-Muslim bourgeoisie. It was brought to the attention of the public by a novel written by a member of the national assembly in 1990, followed by the filming of the novel in 1999. The chapter focuses on the film, Salkim Haiimin Taneleri, and outlines the changes in the discursive space that made the creation of these cultural products possible. It also concentrates on the differences between different types of media, that is academic historical works and popular historical films highlighting the different types of remembering they propose. Keywords Historiography; Turkey; Ottoman Empire; film; cultural history; popular history; memory; nation; narrative. Introduction “Leave history to the historians” was the reaction of the president of the Turkish Republic to a heated debate about the Armenian massacres in the media. The Turkish state, which has insisted on its policy of outright denial concerning the Armenian massacres, was disconcerted by the statements of prominent Turkish historians acknowledging the Ottoman state’s responsibility in the catastrophic events of 1915. This controversy was then turned into a debate on different strategies of engaging with the past in contemporary Turkey. Can we really confine the discussions about the past to the boundaries of a discipline? What may be the causes and implications of this increased interest in history? What does this mean in

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terms of the changing conceptualizations of the nation? The following is an attempt to deal with these issues with regard to the Turkish case. Since the 1990s the Turkish public became more engaged in history and memory, demonstrated by the proliferation of cultural products that are concerned with the Republican and Ottoman past. Among these were historical novels, collections of Ottoman court music, and historical movies. For the first time language courses in Ottoman Turkish were being offered, which were received with enthusiasm. Many people began tracing their family lineages and collecting information about their places of origin. Guided tours to historical sites, which used to appeal only to tourists, began to attract local people. This was a peculiar transformation with regard to Turkey where becoming modernized had constituted the main agenda since the late 19 th century. This outlook had implied a future-oriented perspective that limited the production of history within the boundaries of the official discourse. In addition, what formed the basis of Turkish national identity was an allegiance to western norms and ideals with which the Ottoman past did not correspond. Thus, until recently the past was not popularized and history did not penetrate the everyday life of the society. In Turkey, it is very difficult to reflect on historiography without taking into account its relations with nationalism. As with all other newly emerging nations, considerable effort was spent for its “imagination” during the period of consolidation. The Republic was taken as the zero-point that implied a radical rupture from the Ottoman Empire. The official elite took measures to underline this breach especially through interventions in the fields of language and history since these are the two fields that are crucial in the formation of a national identity. The dissolution of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire resulted in confusion. How to sustain national solidarity in the aftermath of the empire appeared as the ultimate problem. As Zürcher argues, the Republican cadres became more involved in promoting ideological mobilization rather than political mobilization of the masses due to suspicions towards the unrest in Anatolia, which rose as a reaction to the centralizing ambitions of the nationalist elite.1 Among the immediate policies were the adoption of the Latin script and the endorsement of a new historiographical consciousness. In the early years of the Republic the politicians themselves undertook the mission of writing the national history where they traced the lineage of the ‘Turk” back one thousand years and emphasized the central Asian origins.2 The Ottoman past was usually underplayed as a means to emphasize the novelty of the republic. The rupture from the Ottoman Empire was accentuated to indicate the Republic’s presumed Turkishness in contradistinction to the empire’s multi-ethnic composition. What resulted was a mythical past that was spatially dislocated, and severely disconnected from collective memory,

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which prevented an engagement at the popular level. According to Chatterjee, “the definition of a cultural identity for the nation is possible only by excluding many from its fold”.3 The unifying principle in the Turkish case was defined in terms of ethnicity and this process of imagining the essence of the nation-state was based on a dynamic configuration of inclusion and exclusion. The nationalist elite, which identified modernization with Westernization, imposed its project from above and at the expense of the masses. As Keyder argues, the society did not figure as a negotiating partner in this project of modernization. Thus, the nationalist elite proceeded to construct the history of the nation without necessarily getting into a dialogue with the masses. Hence, the traumatic events preceding, and leading to, the formation of the Republic, including the expulsion and destruction of the non-Muslim population of Anatolia, could be silenced in the official discourse. Given the major role of these events in the homogenization of the nation and the creation of a “Turkish” (a.k.a. Muslim) bourgeoisie by the rewards gained from these events, the silencing was even more acute. 4 How do these traumas figure in this recent obsession with the past? The catastrophic events of Turkish history are all highly contested today. They are usually treated as “national issues” by the state as illustrated by the extraordinary reaction to the debate on the Armenian massacres. However, since the 1990s there emerged multiple discourses concerning the past. This is related, among other factors, to the unprecedented influence of global forces upon Turkey as a result of which the tutelary position of the state was undermined. During the same period, identity movements started to gain ground in Turkey, each with its own version of the past. There was a proliferation of alternative channels through which information, signs, desires, and images could be produced and distributed. Especially with the end of the state’s monopoly over the media different conceptualizations of the past became visible. This situation was different from previous periods on two accounts. First, these historical narratives were more popularized and consumed by a larger community. Therefore, they were packaged in such a way so as to appeal to the majority and priority was given to their marketability rather than ideological value. Second, these novel versions of the past brought some alternatives to the monolithic construct of national historiography upheld by the state. This development carried the potential to bring about a critical engagement with the past in a collective way and to provide a less exclusionary framework for national unity. However, as will be argued below, these new accounts are employed as a means to define new boundaries of Turkishness, where certain groups were depicted as outsiders. Therefore, through these memories certain groups are re-membered while others are dis-membered.

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In these newly emerging discourses, the Ottoman past is rediscovered. It is important to note that what is remembered and how it is remembered is actually very much embedded in contemporary debates. Thus, a focus on the way the past is narrativized can provide us with clues on recent public controversies. What emanates from these narratives is the multi-ethnic character of Ottoman society in which Istanbul occupies a central position.5 Stress on its multi-ethnic composition is usually accompanied by a nostalgic description of the refined culture of its population. Life in Istanbul especially during the late 19th century is portrayed as the golden age. This nostalgia is emblematic of the ongoing negotiations over national identity. In addition to the advocators of identity movements who demand a system where differences are tolerated, the urban middle classes who have identified themselves with the Republican ideal of Westernized citizens also appear as one of the main proponents of this nostalgia.6 It reflects their resentment towards the rural migrants who have accumulated enough wealth to challenge the primacy of the urban culture.7 It is thus ironic that the multi-ethnic Ottoman past is taken up as an issue by both the identity movements that ask for recognition of differences and those who feel threatened by this increasing urban visibility of the heterogeneous nature of Turkish society. The prospect of European Union membership has also been influential in these debates. There is a growing contestation over the parameters of Turkishness and the degree of Europeanness. While multiculturalism is hailed as an asset in this project, those who do not fit into this framework are excluded. Hence, just as non-Muslim communities are incorporated8 in this mosaic, to use an often-alluded term, covered women, the underclass, Kurdish minorities and the rural migrants are left out of this picture. Multiculturalism is defined in a limited way. It almost serves as the continuation of the Republican modernization project. Once interpreted in this way, it is used as a pragmatic tool to confirm Turkey’s Europeanness. As mentioned earlier, paving the way for the emergence of alternative historical accounts was the creation of a relatively independent field of cultural production. Unlike the alienating field of historical discipline, the shape of cultural products enables consumers to internalize the past that is offered to them. Since there are no systematic truth-claims that restrict the creation of these products, these popular products can be considered as having the potential to intervene in the repressive mechanisms of ‘central historiography’. They can do this by resorting to collective memory. Therefore, it can be argued that the sphere of cultural production has the potential to open a way to make marginalized groups and memories more visible, and to give voice to alternative accounts of the past. It can generate an environment that stimulates multiplicity.

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The turn to memory is a recent phenomenon. Even though the debates on the possibility of knowing the past have a long history, it is only recently that memory has been evoked as a way of knowing the past. One of the influences was Michel Foucault’s notion of power and his intricate analysis of how power is implicated in knowledge production and category formation. Foucault proposed the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges”, as a form of resistance to the hegemony of dominant knowledge-systems9. What he coined as genealogy was the analysis of these subjugated knowledges, that is a “set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or in sufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located down on the hierarchy…which involve… a popular knowledge”10. He located struggle in what he called counter-memory, which involves a search for these hidden knowledges that disqualify the unequivocal nature of “scientific” knowledge11. Memory began to be defined as a field of resistance. The nature of collective memory was evoked as the absolute other of linear national histories. With the pioneering work of Halbwachs, collective memory was identified as distinct from individual memory. As Halbwachs argued “it is in society that people normally acquire…recall, recognize, and localize their memories”12. Hence, he based the dynamics of memory and remembering in the specific interests and perceptions of the social group. Given the determining relationship of identity and memory, such an argument appears very plausible. Lowenthal also drew attention to the importance of memory’s influence on identity. Hence, collectivities build their identities through the recollection of the past. He also realized the embeddedness of historical narrative in contemporary negotiations. Thus, “just as we are products of the past, so is the known past an artefact of ours.”13 Following Andreas Huyssen, it is possible to say that the crisis of modernity has brought about a new conceptualization of temporality. What we face is memory loss and memory fixation at the same time. Nostalgia and a turn to memory arise as a reaction to the homogenizing forces of modern capitalism. 14 Therefore, memory is viewed as a field of resistance in the face of the objectifying forces of history. Pierre Nora who makes a distinction between “real memory” and history also shares this utopian perspective of memory. According to Nora, “(h)istory is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.”15 However, recent studies have challenged this distinction between history and memory. The dynamics of memory do not exactly work outside the frame of history, but the two constantly interact. As Sturken argues, it is necessary to observe how history and memory are “entangled” rather than perceiving them as opposites of each other. It is necessary to differentiate between the memory of the dominant groups and that of the

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subjugated groups. However, memory does not necessarily constitute an “uncontaminated” field of resistance.16 Thus, a turn to memory through these popular works may also serve to foster additional relationships of power. One must be wary of how these discussions about the past are entwined with contemporary debates. The growing literature on memory is in agreement on the observation that remembering is a political endeavor embedded in the present. Huyssen, draws attention to the role of the new media in the recent obsession with memory by focusing on the way memory is commodified. However, rather than simply ignoring these popular products as works that trivialize memory, he argues that we should be more attentive to the types of remembering they propose and how this may be related to the newly emerging discourses.17 One should not be too hasty in emphasizing the transformative potential of memory to challenge the institutionalized forms of history. It is crucial to analyze the works on memory in terms of contemporary power configurations. I will try to do this by focusing on the feature film, Salkim Hanim’in Taneleri that attempts to challenge the omnipresence of the nationalist framework that was imposed on the way the past is conceptualized.18 The main theme of the film is the Capital Levy of 1942-43, which is an extraordinary tax aimed mainly at the nonMuslim population. The film was adopted from a novel written by a member of the parliament and it initiated intense public debates that took place in the broadcast and print media, first in November 1999 when it was shown in the theaters and then in September 2000 when it was shown on the national channel, TRT.19 The Capital Levy Law was valid between 1942 and 1944. There are very few studies on how it was put in force since the use of archives is strictly supervised by the state. Ayhan Aktar’s work on this issue has provided the most extensive analysis so far. He argues that in the official discourse the law was presented as a means to tax the speculative profits gained during the Second World War and to decrease the amount of cash in the market.20 However, according to him, the Capital Levy constituted part of the policies of the early republican state to undermine the nonMuslim minorities. He argues that a campaign against the non-Muslims had already started before the Capital Levy. The main reason for this was that while it was possible to “Turkify” the Muslim - but not necessarily Turkish - elements of the new nation such as the Kurds and the Circassians, this was not conceivable for the non-Muslim minorities.21 Thus, the Capital Levy was mainly a measure taken against minorities in an attempt to “Turkify” the bourgeoisie. The goal was to transfer the capital to the “Turkish” bourgeoisie.22 The government claimed that the policy was a sign of their commitment to the Turkish cause, which necessarily implied that the non-Muslims are defined as foreigners. During the early 1940s this ideology of otherization had

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become apparent. For example, the non-Muslim minorities were often depicted as greedy and immoral in newspaper articles and cartoons. 23 According to Aktar, this prepared the ideological basis for what was to follow. Before the declaration of the law, the statements of the politicians focused on the importance of such a project for national independence. The law was described as a means to cleanse the Turkish market from foreign elements. Assemblies, which consisted solely of Muslim businessmen, were gathered to decide on the proportions. They completed this task in only one month. The proportion of the taxation was based on a religious grounding; it differentiated between the Muslim, NonMuslim, Convert and Foreign taxpayers. The estimation of the proportions did not only depend upon the amount of capital owned but also on consumption patterns and visibility in the public sphere.24 They were completed in a hasty and arbitrary way, which resulted in an immense difference between the amounts of taxation levied to citizens with the same income. The taxpayers were to pay the stated taxes in 15 days and in no way could they raise an objection to the stated proportions of taxation. Those who could not pay their taxes were sent to a labor camp in Askale, near Erzurum to work on the railroads. The difference between the Muslim and non-Muslim taxpayers was considerable. In Istanbul, 87% of the taxpayers were non-Muslims. They were responsible for 97% of the taxes.25 Since they were given such a short notice, the possessions were sold at prices much lower than their real value. One of the interesting aspects of this process was that it was directed at the visibility of excessive consumption, which was identified with the non-Muslim minorities. According to the statesmen, this contrasted with the ideal of a classless society that they had in mind.26 During the early years of the republic, this event along with the general attitude of the republic alienated the minorities and reproduced their status as outsiders. However, this issue was overlooked until the late 1990s when a novel about the Capital Levy resulted in a public debate, which amplified after the production of the film. This film is crucial in terms of thinking about the nation and what constitutes the inside and the outside, the familiar and the stranger in contemporary Turkey. As Bhabha argues, the boundaries of the nation are ambivalent and dynamic. Different groups propose different narrativizations, each one embedded in different power configurations. Hence, the narratives of the nation are “as much acts of affiliation and establishment as they are moments of disavowal, displacement, exclusion and cultural contestation”.27 Nations are “narrative” constructions that are produced as a result of competing cultural discourses. In this negotiation, the position of the “other” is not fixed, but rather varies according to the contingencies

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of the moment. In these narratives of the nation, memory and history arise as major sites of negotiation. The negotiation over the boundaries and meanings of the nation and what constitutes the national identity has become even more profound with the challenges of globalization. A discursive analysis of the film Salkim Hanim’in Taneleri highlights the exclusionary politics that have emerged in the post-1980s. The film is based on the events surrounding the declaration and application of the Capital Levy. However, the focus is not on the destructive consequences of this incident for the minorities, but rather on the vulgarity of the new class created as a result of this tax, that is the nouveau riche. Thus, the dominant theme is one of rivalry between Anatolia and Istanbul. It is the story of how the “greedy” culture of Anatolia has plundered and replaced the “refined” culture of Istanbul. The Capital Levy is depicted as a point of fracture in this respect. It is portrayed as the origin of the “decay” in the moral qualities of Istanbul as a result of the transfer of wealth into the hands of the migrants. Therefore, it creates new boundaries and new exclusionary frameworks without engaging in a critical relationship with the memory of the event. The migrants are presented as the agents responsible of the traumatic event, the state does not figure to a large extent in this narrative. One should consider this representation in the context of the contemporary debates in Turkey for every act of memory is embedded in the present. As was discussed before, the 1990s was dominated by a growing polarization between those groups that adhered to a secular ideology and those with Islamic sentiments. In addition, the identity movements, centered on the Kurdish movement, were starting to gain ground. Given this context, this film was part of the attempt to redefine the Turkish identity against these challenges. It can be argued that the film was part of a discourse that aims to re-member the nation through these memories. Both the feeling of bitterness among the urban middle classes and the prospect of European Union membership fostered this nostalgic outlook. In addition, the multiplication of channels through which this could be communicated was influential in creating new types of desires, which generate novel exclusions. What emerged was nostalgia for the multicultural life in Istanbul, for the times when the hierarchies were more stable. This was actually a reaction to the increased visibility of Anatolian migrants in big cities, especially in Istanbul. Thus, the main issue was a feeling of resentment against changing cultural hierarchies. Who was to represent the nation was being scrutinized, as the boundaries between urban/rural, Islamic/secular and Turk/Kurd became blurred. Certain groups interpreted this as a failure of the modernizing thrust of the Republic. The main characters of the film are Halit who is a wealthy Istanbulite and his two assistants, Bekir and Durmus who are migrants

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from a town in central Anatolia. The first part of the film focuses on the migrants’ struggle in the city. Durmus, who is a latecomer, is more aggressive compared to Bekir. His determination to “make it” in the city is so intense that he robs and murders a Jewish accountant. When the Capital Levy is announced, they take advantage of the situation and get wealthier as they bribe the committee members and learn in advance the properties to be sold. They are often represented as greedy, violent, unreliable and dishonest. They are depicted as lacking the moral qualities and the refined tastes of higher classes. Thus, the class biases of such a representation are evident. The migrants inherently lack such moral qualities that the Istanbulites are endowed with; it is not part of their habitus. Their ignorance of higher-class tastes is mocked; their Anatolian accent is exaggerated in order to emphasize the contrast between the two groups. With an ironic twist, it turns out that Halit’s grandfather was also a convert and that he has to pay an extraordinary tax. While Bekir starts to question this situation and tries to help Halit and his Armenian assistant, Durmus does not stop at anything and eventually succeeds in buying Halit’s mansion and convincing Halit’s mistress to live with him. The unsettling of the balances between Halit Bey and the newly migrated Bekir and Durmus represents the “decay” the Capital Levy causes. This is a recurrent theme in recent works that are concerned with representing the past. The memory of the past is most often accompanied by nostalgia of the good old times when everybody knew his place 28. Salkim Hanim’in Taneleri is no different in this respect. The story is woven with contrasts between the true Istanbulites, be it non-Muslim minorities or those who have learned to act like Istanbulites, who speak with an Istanbul accent, who are familiar with the manners of the upper classes, and the Muslim migrants from Anatolia who lack these symbolic tools. The contrast between Halit and Durmus becomes more apparent as Durmus settles in the mansion. He is cruel towards the servants, he doesn’t know the code of proper dressing and he is vulgar towards women. In fact, his representation is identical to the representations of the new rich who have grown after the 1980s. In short, he lacks the cultural capital of the “true” Istanbulite. What is important in this representation is that this is a very contemporary situation and the way it is projected onto the account of a historical event carries some political meanings. The nostalgia for, and the discourse of, multiculturalism mask a desire for “Europeanness”. While, the non-Muslim communities can be contained in this representation, what to do with the migrants who appear as the absolute other of the urban elite becomes a problem. As the rural migrants accumulate wealth and become more visible in the urban areas, the Republican ideal of Turkish identity becomes contested. This results in the creation of new exclusionary frameworks based on class and status.

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Therefore, the story is concerned less with remembering the trauma, and more with projecting the contemporary resentments onto the film. Still, there is a very subtle critique of the state by the use of the metaphor of rape. Halit’s wife, Nora, an Armenian woman, is mentally unstable. Placed in a mental hospital, she constantly rambles about the child she has lost. Towards the end of the film, it becomes clear that Nora’s condition is due to her experience with Halit’s father, Sabit Pasha who was a soldier. Unable to bear a child during her marriage, Nora is raped by Sabit Pasha. This could be read as representing the relationship of the center to the margins. Since she is not able to deal with this family secret, she commits suicide in the end. This may be read as a metaphor of the story of Turkey where traumas that are not worked though continue to haunt. This event then becomes one of the many secrets of Turkey. There are other moments where the nationalist framework is challenged like the scene where Halit’s Armenian assistant, Levon, says that they are a tired community making reference to previous traumas, particularly the Armenian massacres. However, these do not disrupt the general framework in which the discriminatory policies of the state are not criticized. There also references to the condition of amnesia concerning this issue. In one scene Levon is told by a migrant how they used to have nonMuslim neighbors and how her mother used to tell her stories about them. When Levon remarks that the stories were probably not very good ones, she answers that only the good ones have remained with her. Thus, the traumatic events are made explicit and their absence in communal memory is emphasized. These may be interpreted as interventions to the nationalist framework, which denies or ignores these events. However, the definition of collectivities always necessitates the demarcation of the strangers. Even though the film makes the tragic aspects of Turkish history visible in a subtle manner, it also creates other exclusionary boundaries, feeding on the current negotiations. Thus, the non-Muslim minorities are re-membered as a result of the current political and social configurations while those who do not fit in this framework are depicted as strangers and thus are dis-membered. As a result of increased mobilization of people, commodities and signs as well as the strengthening of identity movements in the 1990s has created an ambivalence concerning national identity. The nationalist project of creating “modern”, that is secular, urban and educated citizens became scrutinized. It is possible to examine this film as a text that contains the traces of these feelings of failure, negotiation and reconstruction. It forms part of the discursive space that has emerged recently for discussing cultural aspects of national identity. An analysis of the film is helpful in denoting the forms of exclusions that are exercised in Turkey. By situating the “Anatolianness” of the migrants in

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contradistinction to the “refined” culture of Istanbul, the film uses the memory of a historical event to make a statement about today. Hence, the distinction between the past and the present becomes blurred.

Notes 1

Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998). 2 Busra Ersanli Behar, Iktidar ve Tarih: Türkiye'de “Resmi Tarih» Tezinin Olusumu, 1929-1937 (Cagaloglu, Istanbul: AFA Yayınları, 1992), 94. 3 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 154. 4 Caglar Keyder, “Whither the Project of Modernity?,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Sibel Bozdogan et al (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) 5 The homogenization of Istanbul was never fully accomplished, although the population of Armenian, Jewish and Greek communities dropped as a result of several events among which were the imposition of Capital Tax in 1942 levied disproportionately at the expense of the urban “religious” minorities and the mob riots which culminated in the destruction of Greek properties in Istanbul in 1965. 6 The Islamic groups also promote the ideal of the Ottoman past in order to emphasize the compatibility of Islamic rule with multi-religious composition. 7 See Oncu, 1999 for a similar discussion regarding cartoons. 8 This recognition is also very problematic. In all of these accounts nonMuslim communities are denoted as wealthy. This creates a dangerous essentialism that caused the application of discriminatory policies towards the non-Muslims in the first place. 9 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 81. 10 Ibid, 82. 11 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaka, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977) 12 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 38. 13 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 216. 14 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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15

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 2-25. 16 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering (California: University of California Press, 1997). 17 Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 21-38. 18 Tomris Giritlioglu, Salkim Hanim’in Taneleri (Turkey: Avsar Film, 2002), videorecording. 19 See Bali, 2001 for an analysis of how the film was received in the mass media and the differences between the reactions of the Jewish and Armenian communities. 20 Ayhan Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve 'Turklestirme' Politikalari (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2000), 140-1. 21 Ibid, 137. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid, 143. 24 Ibid, 155. 25 Ibid, 15. 26 Ibid, 155. 27 Homi Bhabha, “Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London ; New York : Routledge, 1990), 5. 28 Since the 1990s there has been an increase in the number of biographies and autobiographies of “Istanbulites” and novels regarding Istanbul’s history that were published. In all of these works, the issue of women comes to the surface. The western-looking women of the past are emphasized to counter the public visibility of covered women in the urban space since the last decade. Hence, the issue is ultimately related to what can be made visible in the public sphere and what is to be confined to the private. Bibliography Aktar, Ayhan. Varlık Vergisi ve 'Turklestirme' Politikalari. Istanbul : Iletisim Yayınları, 2000. Bhabha, Homi. “Narrating the Nation.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha , 1-7. London ; New York : Routledge, 1990. Bali, Rıfat. “Toplumsal Bellek ve Varlik Vergisi.” In Hatirladiklariyla ve Unuttuklariyla Türkiye'nin Toplumsal Hafizasi, edited by Esra Ozyurek, 87-126. Istanbul : Iletisim Yayinlari, 2001.

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Behar, Busra Ersanlı. Iktidar ve Tarih : Turkiye'de “Resmi Tarih» Tezinin Olusumu, 1929-1937. Cagaloglu, Istanbul : AFA Yayınları. 1992. Chatterjee, Partha.. The Nation and its Fragments : Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaka, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Giritlioglu, Tomris. Salkim Hanim’in Taneleri. Turkey: Avsar Film , 2002. Videorecording. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia New York: Routledge, 1995. Huyssen, Andreas. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia.” Public Culture 12(2000):21-38. Keyder, Caglar. “Whither the Project of Modernity?.” In Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, edited by Sibel Bozdogan and Resat Kasaba, 37-51. Seattle : University of Washington Press, 1997. Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 2-25. Oncu, Ayse. “Istanbulites and Others: The Cultural Cosmology of Being Middle Class in the Era of Globalism.” In Istanbul: Between the Local and the Global, edited by Caglar Keyder, 95-120. Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering. California: University of California Press, 1997. Zürcher, Erik Jan. Turkey : a Modern History. London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, 1998.

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Notes on Contributors Sofie van Bauwel works as a teaching and research assistant at the department of communication studies of the Ghent University. She is also a member of the working group film and television studies of the Ghent University. Joss Hands received his PhD in Philosophy and Critical Theory from the Manchester Metropolitan University in 2000. He is currently a lecturer in Communication Studies at APU, Cambridge, and is doing research into the use of computer-mediated communication in local democracy. Shane Aaron Lachtman received a Bachelor of Arts in History and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a Master’s of Arts in History at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently at Columbia University in the African American Studies and Sociology departments. Reinhart C. Lutz received a Ph. D. in English Literature (with a second emphasis in Film Studies) from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1991. Research interests include war and cinema, art and totalitarian regimes, cinema of Viet Nam, with articles published and papers given in the field. In 2003, teaches as a language instructor and consultant at CII Group, Berlin, Germany. Stephen Maddison is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies in the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies at the University of East London. He is the author of Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters (London: Macmillan, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Kate Azuka Omenugha is at present studying for her PhD in Media Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She has years of university teaching experience in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria before coming to England for further studies. Her research focuses on the issues of identity, women and representation. Kate Omenugha has published in academic journals. Emine Onculer was working as a teaching assistant at the Sociology Department of Istanbul Bilgi University at the time of writing this paper. Currently she is a PhD candidate at Columbia University.

Eugenia Siapera received a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include the politics of asylum and the media, the Internet and politics, and multiculturalism and difference. Recent publications appeared in New Media and Society, Javnost/The Public, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Merl Storr is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of East London. She is the author of Latex and Lingerie: Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers Parties (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2003). Asli Tunç is an assistant professor at the School of Communications at Istanbul Bilgi University and is currently serving as the head of the Media and Communication Systems Department. She received her Ph.D. on mass communications at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her current research is concerned with the cultural impacts of new media technologies in Turkey. Most recently, she contributed to the book series, The Media in Southeast Europe and Quality Press in Southeast Europe published by Southeast European Media Center (SOEMZ) in Sofia and also to an upcoming Turkish book on Internet studies to be published by Imge Publications. Abraham G. van der Vyver is a member of the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. Maria Way is a lecturer in the School of Media, Art and Design at the University of Westminster. Her interests are in the media and religion and she has researched extensively at the Vatican, most recently under the auspices of the Leverhulme Foundation, who awarded her a study abroad scholarship in Rome (2001-2002).