Halloween is a scary time (for those outside the dominant ideology, for those on the unfortunate side of power dynamics). I (We? No, too many variants in that we. Only common in our antagonist …and even I am only implicated indirectly) spend the days leading up to the 31^st much the way my cousin taught me to behave while passing a graveyard – by holding my breath.

Halloween in contemporary culture is deeply entrenched in capitalism. Halloween itself seems to be historically rooted in the celtic practices on the day preceding the festival Samhain. It was believed that on the day preceding Samhain, the deceased returned (as ghosts). Because of this, people would leave food and wine on their doorsteps and, if they left their houses, they would don masks so that they would also be mistaken as ghosts. There are other similar practices that have also contributed to our contemporary iterations of Halloween, but this one is what stuck to the dominant ideological formation and found itself being articulated and transformed throughout the middle ages – such as the interruption of the church, transforming the celtic festival into All Saints Day and the evolution from leaving out food and wine to ‘souling,’ a practice in which peasants would beg for food and would pray for people’s dead relatives in exchange. According to what history tells us, these traditions were revived by celtic immigrants in the 19^th century. However, it wasn’t until the 1950s that Halloween became a family affair and an occasion for elaborate costuming and candy-giving. Since this time, though, Halloween seems to have continued on this path, becoming the second most profitable holiday after Christmas.

What does it mean then to have a business model based around the concept of dressing up? What sorts of costumes get made? What are “the characteristics of the […] ideal user” (Latour 301)? Perhaps, more importantly for me, what happens for the non-ideal users?

The types of Halloween costumes that people buy (or create) tend to “come in three categories: scary, funny, or fantastical” (Wade). Halloween costumes, if one only looks around, also seem to be an exercise in exaggeration. The superhero costume, for example, falls quite firmly into the realm of the fantastical [though some certainly have aspects of the scary, where villains are concerned, or funny where certain characters (Deadpool?) are concerned]. The superhero is, themself, an exaggerated human possessing super strength, abilities, physique, wit. What does it mean then that these costumes (often with built-in abs) are prevalent? Perhaps this type of costume (and the figure of superhero in pop culture) speaks to the sorts of iterations of self that are to be aspired to in accordance to the discourse of the dominant ideology. What is to be desired, what is desired by the majority and then reinterpreted back into what is to be desired, is this physical exaggeration of self, is the “pinnacle” of human evolution. But then whose pinnacle? According to whom? What is the presence of built-in abs on a costume teaching a child to feel about their body? The ideal user of this costume isn’t meant to ask these questions, though; the ideal user subscribes and “accept[s] or happily acquiesce[s] to their lot” (Latour 307).

So what happens when you aren’t the ideal user? What happens when you are not in the position intended for articulation, not the intended “cab” for the “trailer,” as Stuart Hall describes it (in terms of an articulated lorry) (53)?

Well, from the perspective of the insider, from the perspective of the person on the inside of the dominant ideology, it is the job of the user to become ideal and anything outside of that is a failure on the user’s part. When we speak, for example, of “historical” and “cultural” costumes, it is clear from the articulations of the costumes themselves (the intended facsimile versus the materials used versus the “liberties” taken in design) that they are not intended for those who have knowledge of such things, not intended for those who can see their breakages. Even the pictured models betray this point. For good measure, here are a few popular examples of costumes on a costume website:

(complete with confederate flag on the hat!)

“What’s the big deal?” the insider asks. “It’s just a costume. It’s funny,” he says.

And yes, he does say this. In response to the recent attention a BC Halloween store received for its costumes’ trivializing of Indigenous cultures, the owner Tony Hudgens response was: “It is not our intention to offend any race or creed. We would like to stress that as some Halloween costumes might come across as controversial, our intention at Halloween Alley is to celebrate life (Halloween Style!), and have fun with our friends and families during Halloween festivities.”

But oh, Tony. Tony Tony Tony… Gentle, innocent, Insider Tony…

Your intention (if we are to take you at your word) and the costumes are not isolated things. As with what Hall claims of Baudrillard’s argument about the implosion of meaning, your desire to have this simplistic fun also “rest[s] upon an assumption of the sheer facticity of things: things are just what is seen on the surface” (49). To you, dear Tony, your bottom line and the use by the dominant culture is more important than those who are harmed by these iterations and by the intended articulation of the dominant subject donning such a costume.

Have you even listened to the voices of those who you are attempting to clumsily represent? Look, Tony…

You see, the costume may have certain properties that grant it certain agencies on its own, but it exists, as with all things, “in a particular formation […] in relation to a number of different forces” (Grossberg 54) . Even if the costume has “no necessary, intrinsic” belonging, it still has a meaning (it exists within the systems of ideology and language …from which nothing can entirely escape) and this meaning “comes precisely from its position within a formation” (54). You see, you cannot simply have a costume of an indigenous dress, intended for the dominant (thus white settler) consumption void of its existence in relation to the genocide of indigenous and first nations people in Canada or the erasure of indigenous and first nations languages and cultures in the name of assimilation. In the same vein, it is not okay for Miley Cyrus to continue sporting dreads and it is not okay that I used to have my ears spaced to 00g. The narrative of activism around cultural appropriation works in direct relation to the theory of articulation and assemblage. Tony, Miley, if you were to accept that “contingent relations among practices, representations, and experiences […] make up the world” and that these articulations have a “structured and affective nature,” (Slack 126), I’m certain that you would start to see how the things you do are harmful and, maybe, how you could make them better.

With these issues in mind, I’d like to return to a different sort of ‘funny’ (offensive) costume. For now, let’s call these the ‘drag as joke’ costumes. These are the costumes, usually intended for cis d00ds, that involve over-accentuated breasts, a wig, and some sort of mock-sexy get-up.

note the description here…

Unlike drag (which I’ll admit has some of its own problems in its contemporary manifestation), it is not a parody of traditional gender roles and presentation, it is not a social commentary, it is not connected to a history of activism and oppression in its own right, and it doesn’t attempt any sort of artistry. Simply put, it is not trying to be part of that conversation. These costumes, as actants, are not seeking these assemblages – but they can’t entirely escape them, either. As such, the person donning these costumes is presented with a contest of “the different regimes of truth in the social formation” (Grossberg 48). In order to assert the power of the dominant ideology, the actor exaggerates the drag to obscene and ‘comical’ levels. They perform a parody – both of drag itself and of the traditionally-gendered female subject – in order to reassert the power of the dominant ideology of the m/f binary, constructed around and constructing our arbitrary ideas regarding genitalia and gender. In making this performance a joke, they also make femininity, drag, and transgressive gender performances/identities a joke, thus reasserting the power dynamic within those articulations.

I believe that this sort of costume and the ideas around it play a significant role in this year’s ‘hit’ costume. It’s received a good amount of backlash yet it’s still one of the top selling costumes and has sold out in many stores…

To the Insider, this costume probably doesn’t seem that different to the ones depicted earlier… and in a sense, that’s true, because those earlier costumes are still contributing harmful ideas to this cultural assemblage. At the same time, however, it is drastically different.

For those of you out of the loop, Caitlyn Jenner came out this past year as a trans woman. Now, of course, there have been plenty of (ok, not even close to plenty, but definitely ‘some’) trans women in the media (srsly, mom, have you never heard of Laverne Cox?) recently who could have easily ‘represented’ the trans community, but Caitlyn’s class status, whiteness, and age all worked together to create maximum visibility. This visibility, however, also made her the easy target of the dominant ideology’s ‘jokes.’ We see this manifesting here in the creation of a costume marketed primarily to cis men. Now, what does that do? Well, in the first place, by making it into a costume, it delegitimizes trans identities, it converses with the discourse that asserts that ‘gender’ is what is assigned at birth and that there are no deviations (this also erases intersex identities and discounts the extensive variation in hormones and genitalia that actually exist). Further, by marketing the product to cis men, by treating cis men as the ideal user, it undermines the process of self-identification for trans folks and asserts, in line with the dominant ideology and narrative of ‘trans deceit,’ that trans women aren’t really women and that, consequently, trans folks of all sorts aren’t really what they say they are.

It is for this reason that, at Halloween, I hold my breath. Now, if you’ve made the unfortunate mistake of interpellating me according to the articulations presented by the dominant ideology, you probably don’t get it. So I’ll just say this: clothing (‘costumes,’ if you will), behaviours, assigned genders at birth, sexual attraction/orientation, hair style/length, and names are all singular elements within assemblages. None have the inherent agency to gender anyone or anything – they only do so when articulated within the dominant ideology. If a self-identified man wears makeup, it does not change his gender – that makeup is merely the “trailer” to a different “cab” than what you were expecting. In the same way, those who – insofar as gender is concerned – have no “cab,” can pull at any “trailer” without it needing anything more – they “need not necessarily be connected to one another” (53).

The difference though, I think, is that it is up to the person affected by the assemblage and made an Outsider by the dominant ideology to choose when these things are ok (for themselves alone).

Works Cited

“‘Racist’ Halloween costumes should be pulled from shelves, says B.C. man.” CBC News. CBC/Radio-Canada, October 27 2015. Web.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45-60.

Johnson, Jim [Bruno Latour]. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35 (1988): 298-310.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Articulation and Assemblage.” Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 125-133.

Wade, Lisa. “Racist Halloween Costumes.” The Society Pages: Sociological Images. W. W. Norton & Company, October 29 2009. Web.

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It has been a challenge for me to imagine how I might put the concepts we’ve encountered in this class together with the project I’m working on, which is currently focused on Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical project. I’ve found myself repeatedly linking the readings with the titular piece of technology in De Quincey’s final major autobiographical contribution, The English Mail-Coach, an essay published in two installments in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1849.

The mail-coach itself, already obsolete technology in 1849, the year of The English Mail-Coach‘s publication.

In use decades before the adoption of the electric telegraph, the mail-coach was the fastest available means of sending messages over long distances. Messages and people and technology travelled at the same pace and also in the same space. This spatial and temporal contiguity between passenger and mail, horse and coachman, wheel and road make visible the network of articulations that make up what De Quincey calls “mail-coach society” (237).

Andrew Franta, along with many other scholars, makes a link between social relations within the coach and English society in general: “Mail-coach society, like English society, has its classes, politics, fads and fashions, love affairs, comedies and tragedies; it is, in short, a microcosm.” But he also correctly notes that this “microcosm” is “organised around the mail and in accordance with its architecture, schedules, and routines” (326-7). In this unique society—almost, but not quite, the same as English society—the mail-coach system serves as a mediator in the sense explained by Slack and Wise (117). It simultaneously stands between, brings together, and actively transforms the human and non-human members of the assemblage it represents.

The mail-coach, a common feature in nostalgic representations of a simpler past.

In the above picture, observe the visible seating arrangement. In front, on the driver’s box, is the coachman. Beside him is a passenger, and behind him sit two more. The solitary seat to the rear of the coach is reserved for the guard, a liveried official who carries a horn to alert travellers of the coach’s approach and also a blunderbuss and two pistols to discourage bandits. On top of the coach, under a protective cover, is the mail. Inside the coach are four passengers we can’t see. These four, “the illustrious quaternion,” were members of the wealthy and privileged class, evidenced by their ability to pay for the expensive interior seats. They are thus socially far above the “trinity of Pariahs” (234) in the “cheap seats”—or at least, the less expensive seats (the poor are not actors in the mail-coach assemblage unless they are too slow removing themselves from the coach’s path, in which case they might be briefly articulated at the end of the coachman’s whip).

De Quincey describes how these seat-based class assumptions, “an old tradition of all public carriages from the reign of Charles II.” (234), become re-articulated within mail-coach society. De Quincey recalls how he and his fellow Oxford students, “the most aristocratic of people,” preferring “the air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat” afforded by the cheaper seats, “instituted a searching inquiry into the true quality and valuation of the different apartments about the mail”:

We conducted this inquiry on metaphysical principles; and it was ascertained satisfactorily, that the roof of the coach, which some had affected to call the attics, and some the garrets, was really the drawing-room, and the [driver’s] box was the chief ottoman or sofa in that drawing room; whilst it appeared that the inside, which had been traditionally regarded as the only room tenantable by gentleman, was, in fact, the coal-cellar in disguise. (235-6)

This “perfect French revolution” (237)—the leveling, or inversion, of social class distinctions—is contingent on the Oxfordians’ brash youthfulness, on their sympathy with the egalitarian ideals behind the events in France, and, above all, on the mediation of the coach’s architecture. The moment the passengers leave the coach, the traditional hierarchies of English society reassert themselves. De Quincey describes occasions when the mail-coach stops at an inn for a meal break and the exterior passengers attempt to sit at the same table as the interior passengers, a breach of protocol so ludicrous that an old gentleman dismisses the act as “a case of lunacy (or delirium tremens) rather than of treason” (234).

I mentioned non-human actors earlier. The agency of things is a central assumption in De Quincey’s analysis of the mail-coach system, which “recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient slaves to the supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organisation” (232). In this description of the perfectly functioning mail, De Quincey invokes not people but tools—instruments and the guiding baton—as well as the parts of an animal’s body. There’s nothing unusual about comparing the perfection of an institution to the organic unity of a healthy animal, but there is reason to think that De Quincey regarded the linkages between the instruments as something similar to Stuart Hall’s idea of articulation: “the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions . . . the so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse is really the articuation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness'” (53). The unity De Quincey identifies is highly contingent, and the object of his essay is “to analyze the logic of mediation – not in idealized abstraction but in particular instances and with particular attention to the material agencies of transmission” (Franta 325). I am tempted, almost, to interpret De Quincey’s objectives in The English Mail-Coach as similar to those of a sociologist, one using tools that anticipate the work of Hall and Latour.

The mail-coach system was a relatively stable network, reliably delivering mail and transporting passengers from 1784 to the mid-eigtheenth century, when it was phased out to be replaced by the new rail system. De Quincey’s mail-coach, the “spiritualised and glorified object” (233), was very specifically the mail-coach of his youth, and its special status derived from the awesome significance of its cargo, “the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo,” English victories in the Napoleonic Wars, which formed a powerful articulation with De Quincey’s own “impassioned heart” (233).

“To this hour Mr. Palmer’s mail-coach system tyrannises by terror and terrific beauty over my dreams” (232).

The vital importance of the letters bundled on top of the coach invests those who ride with the mail with a sense of mission and shared glory. De Quincey delights in the awe and terror that causes gates to fly open at the mail-coach’s approach and carters to precipitously remove their carts from the path. He fancies himself and the other exterior passengers to share this authority: “We, on our parts, (we, the collective mail, I mean,) did our utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them” (240). Even the horses are made to understand the nature and importance of their mission, communicated through the “inter-agencies . . . between the horse and his master,” which “spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse” (244). Here the complex assemblage of articulations—from the horses to the reins and whip to the coachman to the bundled papers to the inscribed messages to the distant battles, all mediated through and articulated to the mail-coach, the mail-coach system, and the nationalist spirit of the times—achieves a sublime unity, but a unity that cannot last if even a single element is removed or rearticulated.

In the second installment of his essay, De Quincey relates an incident which illustrates the contingency of the mail’s supposed unity. Two or three years after the Battle of Waterloo, a time of relative peace after three decades of conflict, De Quincey arrives at the Manchester post-office. He is late for the mail-coach, but the mail-coach, very unusually, is running late as well due to “a large extra accumulation of foreign mails” (266). The cargo being of no particular importance, no one’s in any hurry to leave, and soon after their departure, the coachman, the guard, and De Quincey, the sole passenger, fall asleep. De Quincey later awakens in time to witness, but not stop, the collision of the mail-coach with a small cart carrying two young lovers. The young woman is almost certainly killed by the impact. The mail, which Quincey earlier praises as seeming to possess “a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances, of storms, of darkness, of night, overruled all obstacles into one steady co-operation” (232), has failed utterly. The “inter-agencies” linking horse to coachman collapse with the man’s inattention. The entire assemblage disintegrates because the mail is no longer articulated to a nationalist mission, a circumstance which leads first to delay and then to disaster.

Many other questions occur to me now, not least De Quincey’s mediating role as autobiographer and the personal, economic, and ideological concerns articulated to, and through, the cultural product he published in Blackwood’s. These are issues I may return to in my doctoral work, but they are thankfully beyond the scope of the present probe.

Works Cited

De Quincey, Thomas. “The English Mail-Coach.” Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Ed. Joel Faflak. Peterborough: Broadview, 2009. Print.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45–60. SAGE. Web. 31 Aug. 2008.

Franta, Andrew. “Publication and Mediation in ‘The English Mail-Coach.'” European Romantic Review 22.3 (2011): 323-330. JSTOR. Web. 9 Oct. 2015.

Slack, Jennifer Darryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.

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The photos above are connected, not by geographical location or photographer, but rather by hashtag: #liveauthentic. A quick Google search will yield endless images tagged as such, most of them highly-curated and (ironically) inauthentic in their likenesses. The spare, wholesome, outdoorsy aesthetic seen in these photos has had an influence on numerous aspects of commodity culture and design. It can be seen in the DIY hipster trends made popular by stores such as Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters and publications like Kinfolk, a magazine devoted to “small gatherings” and slow living. Inherent to the movement, which I will call the “neopastoral,” is a particular combination of North American nationalism, nostalgia for a pre-capitalist past (as iterated by and through present-day consumer culture) and a yearning for direct “contact” with nature.

The neopastoral aesthetic has by now become popular enough to be the subject of satire, having been critiqued by projects like Summer Allen’s Kinspiracy Tumblr and Instagram’s “Socality Barbie.” The parody account, which features a Barbie doll – the ultimate commodity symbol – posing against various wilderness backdrops, was started in June of this year and has now reached 1.3 million followers. The anonymous Portland-based wedding photographer who runs the account shoots her pictures in real locations and makes much of Barbie’s wardrobe by hand, but she also relies upon Photoshop to achieve the kind of “seamless” authenticity that she satirizes. She tells Wired, “People were all taking the same pictures in the same places and using the same captions […] I couldn’t tell any of their pictures apart so I thought, ‘What better way to make my point than with a mass-produced doll?’”

Instagram seems to be the perfect technology for this type of satire, given that it is a primarily visual platform which operates on a model of plurality and reiteration, while also capitalizing on nostalgia for old media such as the polaroid camera.

Many of the qualities of postmodernism that Fredric Jameson identifies in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism can be detected in the neopastoral: the weakening of historicity (or an unrealistic, nostalgic depiction of history such as the romanticization of homesteading activities); a breakdown of the distinction between “high” and “low” culture (seen in Instagram as host of both photography as art and photography as window to popular culture); a “depthlessness” (manifest in the superficiality that the aesthetic propogates); a proliferation of images and a world of “screens”; the “waning” or “flattening” of “affect” (emphasized in the uncanny similarity between the images that propel the neopastoral trend); and a set of new technologies (such as Instagram and Tumblr) concerned with “reproduction of images” rather than “industrial production of material goods” (Jameson).

Likewise, Stuart Hall explains:

“In so-called postmodern society, we feel overwhelmed by the diversity, the plurality, of surfaces which it is possible to produce, and we have to recognize the rich technological bases of modern cultural production which enable us endlessly to simulate, reproduce, reiterate and recapitulate” (Hall 49).

The neopastoral is especially well-mobilized by technologies like Instagram that enable this kind of endless simulation and reproduction. There are other factors, though, that help to influence and formulate the popularity of the trend. Hall’s model of “articulation” and Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise’s notes on “assemblage” can help to further analyze the various components that converge in such cultural movements. The qualities that Jameson attributes to postmodernism are just a few of the many “articulations” that comprise the neopastoral trend as “assemblage.” Jameson’s notorious pessimism regarding postmodernism foreshadows the kind of techno-phobia at play in “kids these days” arguments by baby boomers and the like. Slack and Wise write against the tendency to identify the “problem” solely in “technology and its effects,” as this is a “mechanistic” and “technologically deterministic” approach that does not account for why these technologies were developed in the first place, nor for their ubiquity in today’s world (126).

Therefore, though it’s tempting to blame the negative effects of the neopastoral on the IOS or on social media technologies, Slack and Wise advise us to avoid this tendency. Sure, Instagram can bring out the most superficial and inauthentic qualities in the best of us, but it alone cannot be held responsible for the symptoms of a cultural phenomenon.

“Articulation can be understood as the contingent connection of different elements that, when connected in a particular way, form a specific unity” […] “Elements, understood as articulations, can be made of words, concepts, institutions, practices and affects, as well as material things”  (Slack and Wise 127).

Socality Barbie, for example, may not be a technology in its own right, but it is an articulation, a “unit” that “connects many elements” including social media technologies, photography, the iPhone, the desire for community, advertising, in-jokes, parody, commodity culture, etc.

In no particular order, here’s a list of some elements that “articulate” or assemble themselves via “contingent connections” in the formation (or assemblage) of the neopastoral as satirized by Socality Barbie:

• The privileging of images over text in magazines like Kinfolk.
• The lack of racial diversity in magazines like Kinfolk and websites like FOLKlifestyle.
• A desire for an authentic experience and the verisimilitude (as seen in hashtags like #nofilter) that drives particular modes of self-expression on social media sites like Instagram
• Upper-middle class boredom/fetishization of “leisure” activities like camping, picnicking, canoeing, etc.
• North American heteronormative ideals and expectations
• Instagram as a medium capable of editing, photoshopping, photo-sharing and photo-rating via “likes”
• The hashtag as a “community-forming” device
• The impulse towards community, as facilitated by social media.
• The fact that the iPhone is always at hand (for those who own them)
• The growing force of advertising on Instagram, which has become inundated with subtle product placements which are meant to “feel organic” to users’ feeds.
• Disenchantment with consumer culture, yet a feeling of powerlessness to escape it.
• Millenial nostalgia for pre-capitalism (as stemming from that powerlessness, but also as an independent articulation), evidenced in a return to projects such as grass roots co-ops, handmade artisanal products and other previously anti-consumer categories. This tendency can also be seen in the use of hand-crafted Mexican blankets and rustic backpacks as props on Socality Barbie.
• Back to Nature fantasies: the idea of a “pure” nature is more a fantasy now than ever before, due to widespread environmental devastation brought about by urban sprawl, pollution, and the possible exhaustion of key natural resources. Hall’s note about Marxists believing that “something is ultimately only real when you can put your hands on it in Nature” can perhaps also be applied here (57).
• Hipster Christianity: Another trend that Socality Barbie satirizes is right there in the name itself. The Socality Movement is a group that, since 2014, has been committed to the evangelism of communal Christian values. They aim to “bring the heartbeat of God to humanity” via social media platforms. That the neopastoral is driven by movements like Socality supports Hall’s observations about “the extraordinary cultural and ideological vitality which religion has given to certain popular social movements” (54). He writes that “no political movement in society can become popular without negotiating the religious terrain. Social movements have to transform it, buy into it, inflect it, develop it…they must engage with it” (54).
  
• Nationalism, and especially Americana (on display in countless #liveauthentic Instagram posts that use the American flag as backdrop)
• Mason jars
• 3rd wave coffee
• Mountains
• Wood: as prop, texture, and symbol

In order to avoid mapping this cultural phenomenon as a kind of teleological “accumulation,” I have created a mind map to more accurately represent the always-moving impermanence of these kinds of articulations, in a kind of “constellation”:

text2mindmap (1)

What is fascinating to me about the concept of technology as assemblage is that it is both ephemeral  and yet also has some kind of affective power:

“It is important to remember that a technological assemblage is not a simple accumulation of a bunch of articulations on top of one another, but a particular concrete constellation of articulations that assemble a territory that exhibits tenacity and effectivity” (Slack and Wise 130).

In a year or so, the neopastoral will likely have been usurped by another cultural movement. Socality Barbie’s already becoming residual. But the fact that the neopastoral movement does have power right now is evident in its influence on consumer culture (it makes us (ME) buy stuff) and also in its ability to be satirized (via Socality Barbie). Linda Hutcheon has argued that postmodernism operates via parody, and that postmodernism’s “initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as “natural” (they might even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism) are in fact “cultural”; made by us, not given to us” (Hutcheon 1-2).

So what role does parody play in today’s post-postmodern culture? Is Socality Barbie a successful satire or does it only succeed in reinforcing (and not critiquing) the neopastoral aesthetic? If, in post-postmodernism, we have already accepted and internalized the fact that nothing is “natural,” why do we still earnestly pine for the natural and the authentic? Why do we create elaborate personal identities (brands, even) based on this longing? What has happened to postmodernism’s sardonic approach and is there still a place for irony in cultural critique?

Works Cited

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45–60.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Slack, Jennifer Darryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Agency”, “Articulation and Assemblage.” Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 115–33

Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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Etymological Preamble

“Articulation” is rooted in discourses of both law and the body. Derived from the Latin articulus, meaning “small connecting part,” the word referred to the location at which joints or ligaments connect, and is still employed in our current use of “articular surfaces” in the language of anatomy. But ironically, “to join together” also presupposes a separation, because one cannot join that which is already same. To join is also to separate into joints. This is why we retain the sense of “uttering distinctly” and apply it to pronunciation and elocution. In the late 16th-century, perhaps retaining the Roman spirit of legality, articulation meant “to set forth in articles,” or to lay out the clauses of a statute or contract. While this sense has largely fallen out of use, articulate maintains an affinity with its sister word article. Today we often use it to mean expressing or formulating an idea well, or the proper adherence of performance to intent. Here there may be something of a betrayal of the spirit of the word, because in language “expression” alone lacks meaning without a connecting part, that is to say, communicative exchange.

Postmodernism or What

As if it isn’t enough that postmodernism is a term that is often talked about but little understood, the very fact that it is often talked about and little understood is interpreted as a symptom and taken up as a point of access into its meaning.

As the story goes, the modern era emerges out of Europe sometime in the late nineteenth century. With it a sense of unity and wholeness in the world becomes impossible, and people long for it back. Then, in the 1960s, the postmoderns come out and say that this story is a fabrication and that unity and wholeness is overrated anyway. They say they want to hear another story, and another.

“Postmodernism” has been applied to both specific techniques and broad assemblages; from a shorthand for self-reflexive and metafictional experiments in (mostly American) cinema and fiction during the 1960s and 70s, to sweeping accounts of “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”

It has also been characterized as an effect wrought on the generation of readers who grew up reading criticism and literature that theorized modernism, rather than exemplified it.

Today it has become fashionable to posit postmodernism’s end and stake a claim in postpostmodernism, but perhaps now we are even post that. Wherever one stands, it is perhaps with irony that one recalls how an aesthetic movement’s self-conscious rejection of the past and the evocation of the new is a defining hallmark of modernity (yes, that one).

Hall’s Objection

In an interview with Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall gives an account of the way the modernism undermines realism, rationalism, and representational form, but he doesn’t think of postmodernism as something radically and fundamentally different. Instead, he sees it as quantitative change, an exaggeration or extension of modernism updated for new experiences, instead of something qualitative. “The attempt to gather all [the new things postmodernists point to] under a singular sign—which suggests some rupture or break with the modern era—is the point at which the operation of postmodernism becomes ideological in a very specific way,” Hall insists, meaning postmodernism may locate tendencies, but the location of postmodernism itself is only ever an imaginary relation (47). So while contemporary culture’s appeal to historical identity is indeed radically de-centered and fragile, this is a deepening of the same skeptical wound formed in the modern era. Before we hear the claim that ‘we have never been modern,’ we can imagine Hall saying, ‘we are not yet postmodern.’

What results is something of a balancing act between finding ways for meaning and signification to exist while at the same time recognizing their instability. Among Hall’s overview of postmodernist theorists, his critique of Baudrillard exemplifies this best. He accuses Baudrillard of a “super-realism,” which transposes facticity for contingency—an absolute and irreconcilable gap between appearance and reality (49). Instead, Hall argues for an “endlessly sliding chain of signification” where there may be no final meaning, but that meaning still exists. He likes Baudrillard’s assertion that “Above- and under- ground is not a very useful way of thinking about appearance in relation to structural forces,” but rejects the assertion that this is because it is all appearance. The strategies Hall employs by frequently appearing on television, then, can be seen as an assertion of the modernist project’s ability to engage the popular. Hall’s “excitement that is generated by the capacity to move from one thing to another, to make multiple cross-linkings, multi-accentualities” seems in a self-reflexive way performed in his engagement with television and popular identity.

Broadcasting Infrastructure for the Avant-Garde

I became very interested in Stuart Hall’s work earlier this year when I saw The Unfinished Conversation as part of the “Encoding/Decoding” exhibit at the Power Plant in Toronto. Taking Stuart Hall’s essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” as a starting point, the exhibit showcased work by black video artists such as Terry Adkins and Steve McQueen, with The Unfinished Conversation as a centre piece, a video-installation documentary on three simultaneous screens drawn entirely from archival footage depicting Hall’s own on-screen mediation, along with the cultural milieu of Caribbean diaspora, New Left activism, and jazz music of which he was a part. I was drawn to The Unfinished Conversation because it was directed by John Akomfrah, who directed the film Handsworth Songs, an experimental documentary from 1986 depicting race riots in London, which seemed to me a powerfully singular example of the need to document a violent event told from the non-position of acknowledging the impossibility of representation in documentary form, or depicting subjects who occupy a single cultural or historical identity.

A police officer attempts to strike a protestor with a billy club, Handsworth 1986

The installation was extremely compelling, but it seemed to be of an entirely different persuasion than Handsworth Songs. Even though “Encoding/Decoding” was free and open to the public, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was participating in something exclusive. It was the final day of the exhibit in a room equipped with very expensive video infrastructure in a refurbished warehouse on Toronto’s Harbourfront, and I was the only person there. I couldn’t shake this feeling, and it was only when I began to write this probe that I realized it has something to do with Handsworth Songs’ imagined public audience. Since it was produced by a publicly-funded television channel for broadcast and re-broadcast, its attempts to undermine conventional documentary form read like a justifiable antagonism today, whereas the Unfinished Conversation, which although was commissioned by the Arts Council of England, seems mandated more by artistic prestige.

The three-screen installation version of the documentary was edited and re-composed for a home viewing audience under the title The Stuart Hall Project, which has not received mainstream distribution and remains relatively obscure. In The DVD booklet for the home documentary, the political theorist Mark Fisher describes his experience of Hall’s on-screen mediation:

“Even as I was taking Hall and the popular intellectualism which he so charismatically exemplified for granted, forces that would erase the culture which enabled him to occupy a position in mainstream media were already on the march. What mattered here was not just Hall personally, but the kind of broadcasting infrastructure – which included elements of BBC, Channel 4, the Open University – that gave him a space to speak to a mass audience. Of course, this space was not gifted; it was fought for. The other side were fighting back, and the left-wing media space Hall had striven so hard to win would eventually be erased by a broadcasting culture driven by short-term success, a culture aimed at consolation and distraction” (2).

Channel 4’s logo, mid disarticulation

It seems that the broadcasting infrastructure Fisher is referring to, through a particular network of institutions, artists, and activists in Britain in the early to mid 1980s, allowed for a popular (read: Public) enactment of the response to postmodernism articulated by Hall. Taking Channel 4 as an example, the growing, grant-funded film sector was given an unprecedented public audience under the channel’s mandate to serve “tastes and interests not generally catered for” by other UK broadcasters. The content produced by under this mandate often appear like radical deconstructions of the tv form, from William Raban’s impressionist meditations on industrialization to Robert Ashley’s schizophrenic “tv opera” Perfect Lives. But perhaps the most aligned with Hall’s own project are the 16 films produced by the Black Audio Film Collective, of which Handsworth Songs was the first. Through the deconstruction and radical reinvention of television tropes, these films seem to take up the “implosion of meaning” generated by the postmodernist moment, and challenge what is determined to be culturally marginal. But much like Stuart Hall’s critique of Baudrillard, they do not revel in a state beyond meaning or language, but rather, take the difficulty of representation as their project, and seek to uncover what they can from personal memory, marginalized voices, fragmentary images, and new languages.

Two More Black Audio Film Collective Films (For the Interested)

Reece Auguiste’s Twilight City is an experimental documentary or essay-film commissioned by Channel 4 in 1989. Weaving in and out of archival footage, interviews, and poetic narration, the film attempts to depict London at the end of the Thatcher era as a psychic space rife with uncertainty. The film is framed by a correspondence between a mother, who decided to leave London for her home in the Dominican Republic and wants her daughter to travel with her, and the daughter who grew up in London and is puzzled by what a trip could mean. Through interviews with intellectuals and activists, a sense of what it might mean to live a life without signification and meaning as a member of the Caribbean diaspora in the centre of European affluence.

Who Needs a Heart? takes the group’s suspicion of documentary evidence even further. The group describes the film as a “parable of political becoming and subjective transformation” that “explores the forgotten history of British Black Power through the fictional lives of a group of friends caught up in the metamorphoses of the movement’s central figure, the countercultural anti-hero, activist and charismatic social bandit Michael Abdul Malik, formerly known as Michael X and christened Michael De Freitas, who left England in 1970 and was tried and executed for his role in an unsolved murder in Trinidad in 1975.” By experimenting with form within the representative medium of documentary, the BAFC undermine received notions of what counts as verification or documentation. And while it seems very much in the spirit of a postmodern skepticism of the referential status of art, it doesn’t take any pleasure in it. Instead, it seems that the “dispersed multiple identities, radical contingency, and irreducible ludic plurality of struggles” mentioned by Zizek serve as a kind of starting point from which glimpses of meaning can still be achieved. While the visual aspect of the film is drawn primarily from archival footage—visual evidence as a trace of the real—the audio is constructed through avant-garde composition that stands as a trace of something else—personal memory or the gaps in recorded history itself. Through the manipulation or excision of diegetic sound, the film challenges representations of the British Black Power movement that try to contain or dismiss it.

Works Cited:

Akomfrah, John. Handsworth Songs (Channel 4, 1986)

—Who Needs a Heart? (Channel 4, 1991)
—The Stuart Hall Project (British Film Institute, 2013)

Auguiste, Reece. Twilight City (Channel 4, 1989)

Born, Georgia. “Strategy, positioning and projection in digital television: Channel 4 and the commercialisation of public service broadcasting in the UK,” Media, Culture & Society 25:6 (2003): 778

Fisher, Mark. “On Stuart Hall.” The Stuart Hall Project, British Film Institute. Pamphlet. 2013.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45– 60.

Julien, Isaac and Mercer, Kobena. “De Margin and De Centre.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds Morley, David and Chen Kuan-Hsing. London: Routledge, 1996.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Agency,” “Articulation and Assemblage.” Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 115–33.

Zizek, Slavoj. “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London, Verso: 2000.

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