Submerged Environments:Taking Notice of Ecologies of Abjection
Neil Balan,
Division of Humanities, York University

This paper establishes a link between the development of Canadia broadcasting policy and the Canadian English-language independent production film and television unions. Using the unions' policy interventions around the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's 1999 Television Policy and the decline in Canadian dramatic programming as a case study, the paper examines how broadcasting policy shapes domestic industry labour market conditions and how labour intervenes in the policy process as representatives of their members' interests. I argue that labour's adoption of a coalition framework with the formation of the Coalition of Canadian Audio-visual Unions has positively impacted labour's power and efficacy in the Canadian broadcasting policy sphere.

     During the 1988 Canadian federal election debate, Liberal leader John Turner gave an enthusiastic performance in deriding Prime Minister Brian Mulroney over the policy of free trade with the United States. Turner aggressively attackedMulroney with the memorable accusation that the Progressive Conservatives were attempting to sell out Canada with "one signature of a pen". This exchange followed the famous so-called "knock-out punch" of Mulroney against Turner four years earlier over Liberal patronage appointments with the assertion that Turner "had an option". There have been gaffes and poor performances, but no post-1988 debate participant has enjoyed the pleasure of receiving the media praise Mulroney or Turner have experienced.
     This paper will present the thesis that the political media and political pundits should discontinue the practice of seeking out the winning line or "knock-out punch". In the five election campaigns since 1988, the media has not acknowledged the delivery of a "you had an option sir" line. No leader has been credited with that kind of performance and the obsession with the debates of 1980s does not seen to be fading anytime soon. Through a deep analysis of the newspaper media coverage of the Canadian federal election debates the paper will demonstrate that the political media elite has created expectations and raised the bar for debate performance that leaders cannot meet. This study will demonstrate how the press in Canada has created a scenario in which debates will continue to be seen as "draws", "close contests" or containing "no knock-out punches".

     This paper argues that the "spatial turn" in cultural studies ought to acknowledge the body itself not only as a site of differentiation (i.e., of affectation and style) but as a site of vulnerability and need. In this regard Emmanuel Levinas has theorized the positionality of the body as a radical susceptibility. To be sure "geographies" or material sites of culture and communication articulate the "manuscripts" or "mattering maps" that situate the look, behavior, intentionalities and affectations of bodies in a nexus of cultural values and expectations. In fact the body itself is a kind of socio-psychological terrain wherein manners of being, personal styles (indeed personality) are produced and reproduced in material/corporeal terms. As such bodies are not only the locale for social performances that are site specific, they are also locales for the deployment of vital energies and intentionalities that pattern the range and dynamism of things like body movement and voice in predictable ways. Hence if cultural geographies evidence a certain "texture" or "feel", the personalities of others also evidence an affective propensity that is similarly felt. But if the body can be understood as a cultural "site" in its own right, it is important to theorize the body not only as the site of cultural and personal transformation, it is also the site of an elemental susceptibility, enjoyment and suffering. To be "affected", then, would have this double meaning. On the one hand as the dynamic deployment of manners and styles, in many ways traversed by and fitted into the cultural surround and, on the other, as a vitalizing contact, proximity and invigoration. Indeed from the point of view of a Levinasian theory of embodied susceptibility, affect, in this regard, is irreducible to the specific deployments of affect and style we associate with social performance, it also signals the intrinsic value of feeling that manners and styles both sponsor and constrain.

     From internet audio streams to downloads to musical ring tones, new digital technologies and new cultural practices are facilitating changes to the way music is marketed, distributed and consumed. New outlets for the exchange (e.g. myspace. com) and sale (e.g. iTunes, Puretracks) of music are evolving and creating markets where none existed before. Internet service providers, not previously considered players in the music business, are now central points for the discovery and distribution of our favourite songs. Be it on cell phones, iPod's or the internet, the business of music is changing as novel spaces surface.
     As a distribution outlet, advertising model and web destination, the music subsection of myspace.com (2006) is emerging as an important marketing and distribution tool for musicians of various genres, be they independent or mainstream artists. Boasting over 27 million users (Brandweek 2005), myspace.com was originally conceived as a kind of Napstermeets- Friendster website. It has since blossomed into a community where users gather to exchange music and ideas about music. It is also a site where commercial interests rub up uncomfortably against artists seeking alternative ways of independently producing and distributing their music. In this light, myspace reveals itself as a site for music, a site for commerce, a social network for musicians and fans, and a space for interaction.
     Myspace.com is not simply an emerging site for the circulation of music; it is transforming the traditional landscape upon which artists market/share their products and upon which audiences discover music. As the music industry struggles to understand and react to the implications of the mp3 revolution, this exploratory paper analyzes myspace.com as both a web site and a social space for the marketing, distribution and consumption of music. Drawing on Bodker's (2004) ideas about the changing materiality of music, this paper also questions the impact of treating music as a digitized commodity.

     The technologically mediated versions of discourses on schizophrenia are contestable forms of social control. Through a five-minute multimedia performance, featuring live dance, graphic artwork, and music with voice over, I will issue multiple layers of simultaneously interacting themes of 'transforming scapes' in media and culture regarding schizophrenia. This advocacy/creative work will be followed by a discussion.
     First, I will show the transformation of the scape of theory. In doing so, I will highlight the necessity of evaluating schizophrenia from a critical erspective rather than a postmodernist stream of thought. This transformation is presented as necessary for emancipatory change and the redefining of the media scapes that have stereotypically portrayed schizophrenia. Second, I will show the transformation of the scape of liberation, from disenfranchisement into powerfulness, through my dance piece. A memorable aspect of this performance is that I am a woman with schizophrenia who is undergoing a similar transformation through academia.
     Lastly, I will show a transformation of the media scape itself as an overlapping of the themes of entrapment versus release, with negative versus positive representations. The latter theme will revisit how early history held people with schizophrenia in high esteem (Zilboorg cited in Rotenberg 1978: 3). However, this has since been replaced by negative stereotypes of schizophrenia. This presentation will revive early history's
conceptions of schizophrenia by making links with documented prophets who heard voices from God. Furthermore, the heightened perceptual awareness of people with schizophrenia will be constructed as potentially evolutionary.

     Faith in the Street is a 12-minute soundscape composition based in the discursive, creative practice of soundwalking and the study of sound ecology. The piece contemplates ideas about faith, consumption and overlapping acoustic territories in the modern city, and expresses the musical resonances that emerge from an inner ear in perpetual dialogue with the acoustic environment of everyday city life.
     Acoustic ecology is a field of research and creative practice that is finding increasing resonance with cultural studies scholars. Sound inhabits the interstitial spaces between constructed subjects and objects. It is experienced intellectually, as parsed messages about the environment, but also tangibly, as physical vibrations that pass through and around the human body: we live in sound, and sound develops meaning within us. The soundscapes of urban spaces have become increasingly suffused with industrial and commercial noise, blurring the boundaries between personal and public, sacred and commodified space. These acoustic territories merge physically in the air, and are remixed and re-signified in the artist's imagination. Field recordings of doomsday evangelists, missionaries, and bible-blitzers indicate the at-first incongruous presence of faith in modern public spaces. The evangelizing, at turns dominating and fatherly, is offset by commercial sound pollution, bringing the hawking of commodities and of religions into the same aural environment. Yet, the city is an acoustic space full of potential and often unrealized beauty, ready to be teased out of the frantic mess of motors, pop radio and megaphone prophets, and rewoven acoustically to reflect a more subjective interpretation of the modern soundscape.
     I profess my own faith in the street through musical performance, realizing the city's capacity for transcendence when re-interpreted and remixed with a critical and compassionate ear. Thus, dual and perhaps oppositional meanings of transcendence inhabit the same acoustic space. This composition reflects both the physical experience of soundwalking in urban territories, and the imagined and emotionally-constructed territories invented through subjective imagination and a desire for meaningful engagement with the modern acoustic environment.

     As both a performative style of creative, artistic practice and a mode of political action that critiques the form and function of the contemporary capitalist cityscape, the emerging practice of "urban intervention" seeks to inter/dis-rupt and directly intervene in the conditioned, taken-for-granted patterns of everyday life in the urban environment.
     Tracing the work of a small artist/activist collective that formed out of a course being offered through Toronto's Anarchist Free University, this creative work and accompanying artist/activist talk will critically examine the issues involved in the practice of 'urban intervention' through one recent, local, Toronto-based example: the Free Parking Space project.
In April 2005, the Pedestrian Mob collective began constructing car-sized model frameworks out of recycled cardboard fabric rolls. Secured by duct tape and a series of straps, the models were designed to be worn by an individual pedestrian, either walking or cycling. After the wildly positive reactions the group received from their first performative interventions in the Kensington Market area, they began taking the Free Parking Space model into different parts of the city and documenting their experiences.
     Within weeks the project began receiving critical attention from the media and the public alike, with articles appearing in Does, Eye, Now, and the Globe and Mail. Before long, however, the group also began to attract attention from the Toronto police, and in June 2005, two members of the project were targeted while wearing the models and charged with "careless driving". Still pending trial, this has become known as the "car(e)less driving" incident.
     Tracing this autonomous, anarchist-inspired example of auto-intervention from inception to conclusion, this talk will address the wide spectrum of anti-car critiques which were spawned by the Free Parking Space project?what the Globe and Mail called a "vehicle for dissent"? in the context of the larger politics of urban intervention as an emergent political/poetic, critical/creative, artist/activist practice.

     My paper addresses the question "What potential exists for scapes of resistance, or opportunities to challenge present boundaries and structures?" I assert that skateboarding is a fluid scape ? a horizontally arranged form of negotiated resistance that challenges and re-signifies the functional meaning of urban design.
     I argue that skateboarding inhabits a fluid, negotiated socio-cultural position in-between commercial exploitation and a perceived authenticity as an act of play, of freedom and selfexpression. Skateboarders negotiate subject positions between these two poles, and that negotiation is a form of resistance that shifts between modes of implicit and explicit activism.
     I demonstrate the different modes of resistance by examining three short video clips of skateboarding activity in downtown Toronto. The first clip (3 minutes, 34 seconds) presents skateboarding as an implicit act of resistance that seeks to re-signify the meaning of urban space through the act of skateboarding as play. The second clip (2 minutes, 33 seconds) demonstrates a more explicit mode of resistance as the skateboarders engage with security personnel in an urban space functionally designed to facilitate commercial activity. The third clip (4 minutes, 53 seconds) is footage of explicit acts of resistance by young people who, through the act of skateboarding, are trying to establish public space in a corporately privatized urban environment.
     In specific relevance to the themes of the conference, I discuss the communicative modes by which such acts are organized and the results skateboarding-as-resistance has achieved in changing both the conceptual and physical landscapes of urban environments.

     In an increasingly complex and global marketplace, tourists have a rapidly growing, boundless range of varied tourism products and destination options from which to choose. In order to combat challenges of increased competition among the growing number of available and accessible tourism sites, destinations have engaged in advertising to develop comprehensive place identity programs in efforts to differentiate themselves and to emphasize the uniqueness of their tourism product. The proposed academic paper presentation is to present the results and implications of an empirical study that examined the representation and portrayal of place in tourism destination advertisements by investigating the relationship between destination place identity and tourism advertising imagery. Using a case study of travel magazine advertisements promoting similar types of destinations in the Caribbean region, the study demonstrates the ineffectiveness of tourism advertisements in portraying a discernable place identity, largely a function of the type and quality of place-specific and non-place specific images contained in the tourism advertisement.
     The implications of these findings in terms of place and space relate closely to the theme of "Emerging Spaces, Transforming Scopes". The way in which destinations are represented not only raise questions over the claimed importance of distinctive place identity, but also over the changing way in which place is imagined in relation to tourism. Tourism is essentially a placebased phenomenon that relies on the projection of place identity to attract tourists. Ironically, tourism advertising, with its use of similar non-place specific images, influences a dilution of established destinations; blurring identities, erasing boundaries, and homogenizing spaces. Increasingly separated from the historically rooted and physically bounded entities of geographic space, new notions of place, resulting from its commodification as a mass produced product for tourist consumption, has challenged present national boundaries with an emerging imagined space of no definite characteristics, no fixed boarders and no meaningful boundaries. The effect has been a rendering of places that are indistinguishable, interchangeable and easily substituted for one another, and thus, transforming the way we look at the world.

     This article reports the findings of an ethnographic study of internet use conducted in Barbados. The goal was to analyze the Internet in everyday life. It examines in detail the effects of the Internet, focus on the types of activities performed online, and explore how these fit into the complexity of everyday life. Studying the Internet in Barbados will address questions such as the significance of the Internet in the home and users relationships with and connections to imagined and physical spaces.
     The questions I address are: by what processes can and do Barbadians maintain cultural connections to place via the internet. Furthermore, focus was placed on what Barbadians find in the internet, what they make of it and how they can relate its possibilities to themselves and their futures. The findings could reveal a great deal about both the relationship between technology and identity in a Barbadian context.
     I set out to identify and explore the process by which "the user" becomes an active and significant figure in the social shaping of the internet (see Bakardjieva and Smith 2001). The "user" here refers to Barbadians who are domestic users and have access to the internet in their home. The rationale for this study begins with an examination of the research conducted by two British scholars Daniel Miller and Don Slater in 2000. They conducted one of the first ethnographic studies on the internet in Trinidad. Their rich analysis illustrates how the internet is increasingly shaping, and being shaped by users' lives. One of their significant findings includes a detailed account of the complex integration between on-line and off-line worlds.
     The notion of virtuality has played a key role in previous social research on the Internet. The term suggests that media can provide both means of interaction and modes of representation that add up to "spaces" or "places" that participants can treat as if they were real (Miller and Slater 2000: 4). My ethnographic research begins with the assumption that the notion of cyberspace is not a place apart from offline life. Rather than starting from virtuality, I am interested in starting the investigation of the Internet from within the complex ethnographic experience. The method of data collection included ethnographic interviews of 32 users from ten households in the same neighbourhood.

CANCELLED:
Intersection of Social Classes and Gender Relations:
A Case Study on the Socio-Cultural Domestication of Mobile Phone in Port-au-Prince
Margareth Cormier,
Department of Communication, University of Ottawa

     The paper I am proposing examines the questions that arise when a female filmmaker crafts her own erotic image outside the dominant practices of commercial film and porn. Considering the long trajectory of erotic cinema made by women, with a specific focus on the films and performances of Carolee Schneemann alongside the debates started within feminist psychoanalytic film theory in the mid-1970s, I will discuss the importance of considering erotic self-portraiture as a key feminist act in cinema and art. I will draw out the ways in which erotic representation of oneself can actively position the artists' body not as "sex object, but as a willed, erotic subject commanding her own image" (1). The paper aims to challenge and re-think not only the representation of women in the dominant political economy of Hollywood and commercial pornography but also wishes to challenge the monolithic position imposed on feminist film theory since the 1970s in regards to the active male gaze and the passive female subject. Through an exploration of Carolee Schneemann's 1967 Fuses in dialogue with my recent film self seeking frenzy (which draws great inspiration from the former) I will argue how through the unique position of the female artist deriving pleasure from the creation of her own erotic form many of the restrictions imposed by both mainstream visual culture and the institutionalization of certain methods of feminist thought can be challenged and worked through allowing a space for feminist art to move past the tension that Carolee Schneemann describes as being "permitted to be an image but not an image-maker creating her own self image" (2). The paper will be accompanied by a short clip from Fuses as well as a longer clip from self seeking frenzy.

     This paper will investigate the notion of "revolt," and more specifically what does this term mean to us today, how has its meaning changed over time, and what is its function in culture and in art. By concentrating primarily on Julia Kristeva's philosophical writings on this topic, this paper will begin by providing a rough overview of the current meaning of revolt and its practice, or non-practice. It will subsequently delineate the etymological evolution of this term and its semantic shifts or what Kristeva calls its "plasticity," which she insists is dependent on the historical context. Taking this notion of plasticity, which also implies mobility and activity, this paper will discuss Kristeva's notion of "the semiotic" modality of language and its indebtedness to Sigmund Freud's theory of the primary process thinking and the unconscious. This Freudian shift will help to also illustrate one of the most fundamental qualities and meaning of "revolt" that persisted throughout its etymological evolution, the notion of a backward movement or return. This regressive movement into an earlier state is crucial to both Kristeva's conception of "the semiotic" and what she insists is the foundation of "revolt," the pre-linguistic and somatically oriented state of our existence (the ntrauterine, the infantile stages and the archaic). She contends that poetic language, in particular the texts of the avant-garde poets such us Mallarme, Artaud and Joyce, by means of its close affinity with "the semiotic" modality, through its emphasis on rhythm rather than denotation or representation, "reminds us of its eternal function: to introduce through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, and threatens it. The theory of the unconscious seeks the very thing that poetic language practices within and against the social order: the ultimate means for its transformation or subversion, the precondition for its survival and revolution" (3).
     By drawing on Kristeva's notions of "the semiotic" and "revolt" this paper will discuss how both concepts can be applied to cinematic practices, as a way to challenge the dominant modes of representation imposed by the capitalist institutions and economic system of entertainment. It will conclude with a brief discussion and a screening of a film created by me, titled her carnal ongings, which will demonstrate the exploration of "the semiotic" modality in cinema and hopefully the intimations of "revolt."

     For a film's audience, the "object" is displaced; the audience is lacking a direct relationship to the representamen---the filmstrip. In the context of experimental film, the filmmaker has very material/bodily connection to the filmstrip. Often, the filmmaker's hand is felt hen viewing the film, returning the viewer to the originary object of analysis, back to the filmstrip. Not surprisingly, this re-placement can affect the viewer's understanding to the projected image, shocking the viewer into a holistic experience of the "film." In this presentation I will explore this perceptual process of signification in experimental film through the application of Julia Kristeva's theory of significance on Stan Brakhage's visceral masterpiece "Black Ice." The shattering decentredness, eclipsing of the ground-figure relationship, emotive power and critical tension (between what I will argue are re-presentations of the sex drive and the death drive) have fuelled my interest in this film. By presenting "Black Ice," analyzing the text, and then allow the audience to re-experience the film as my conclusion, I hope bring greater understanding of how and why experimental film means.

     Adorno writes that the "lack of imagination which is cultivated and inculcated by society renders people helpless in their free time" intimating the question of time as the last conquest of sovereign power over life, the complete occupation of the possibility of improvisation or imagination by preoccupation, the limit of which is idiomatically characterized by that deceptively banal phrase "killing time." What does it mean that the temporalities of occupation and preoccupation increasingly appear inextricable in an era of globalization.
     Our paper seeks a clearer understanding of the relationship between immaterial labour, what is today increasingly taken to be the dominant modality of "work time," and what we still tend to regard as "free time": leisure under late capitalism. We bring into proximity two projects--Adorno's and that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri--in the interest of considering what it might mean today for power to smuggle an increasingly "immaterial" labour into leisure. We posit that such a turn means the making properly biopolitical of work-time oriented towards the production of life in the modality of docile preoccupation, which is felt, of course and crucially, to be self-willed. What is it about the field of possible position-takings which ensures the "direct" production of social relations. The condition of contemporary temporal privation, and of increasing atomization, are strategies of capitalist sovereignty which sustain themselves in spite of profound popular ennui by rendering free time "helpless," by denying systematically--through in part the very organization of space in, for example (and example par excellence), a Wal-Mart--the experience of pleasure through freedom and collective action.
     We are centrally concerned with how the "conquest of happiness," which characterizes the temporal dimensionality of a globe labouring under biopolitical production, can be rearticulated and reappropriated for a politics of hope which aspires to begin to undo the evacuation of imagination and yearns to affirm the latent but identifiable desire for solidarity and selfgovernance.

     Within visually-oriented online games, limits on character appearance and attributes can cause people to be less than pleased with their virtual experience. In these spaces, virtual currency and the virtual goods that can be purchased with it are imbued with power. Through the purchase of goods, facilitated by currency, players can change their clothing and other goods that they possess, simultaneously changing their attributes and appearance. In order to facilitate these purchases, many players resort to using "real" offline money to purchase virtual currency. In recent years, there has been significant growth in a practice termed "gold farming" in which individuals and companies enter into online games, gather virtual currency, and sell it to players for offline money.
     This paper details the crossing of the borders between virtual spaces and offline life in terms of the practice of gold farming and the purchase of virtual currency and goods. Although such purchases can lead to benefits for players, there are significant issues surrounding the currency production of ingame farmers. It will be seen that in producing virtual currency, workers are engaging in practices surrounding virtual consumption that are linked to offline alienation from their means of production and from other individuals. Despite the apparent separation between virtual and offline spaces, virtual currency serves as a means not only of crossing the borders between the two, but of significantly affecting individuals' experiences within both worlds in both positive and negative ways.

     In this paper, I investigate a media and pop-culture version of female adolescent sexuality. Drawing on Judith Timson's 2005 Maclean's cover article ("The female chauvinist pig: how it became cool to treat yourself like a piece of meat") and the movie Girl Power: Girls Gone Wild, Volume 7, I explore a female adolescent subculture (Clarke et al., 1976) as it is portrayed in the media depiction of the "female chauvinist pig," as well as how it is consumed through the popular culture video phenomena Girls Gone Wild. "The female chauvinist pig" is a term coined by April Levy in her book, The Female Chauvinist Pig: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture and is the inspiration for Timson's article. Throughout my investigation I draw on Foucault's (1994) and Lesko's (2001) theoretical discussions of Bentham's panopticon and the social organization of power, and Lesko's (2001) exploration of adolescence as an administrative technology.
     I entered into this study intending to illuminate how a young female subculture enacts power through explicit sexuality. Youthful female sexuality is a hot commercial commodity (prominent in an influx of teen/young adult pop-star personas and an age-defying cosmetic culture geared towards adult women), but we are critical of its presence at our own dinner tables, in our classrooms, malls, etc. I suspected I would see the young women we commercialize and criticize in the same breath throwing our objectifying stares back in our faces by taking ownership of their sexuality. However, as I embarked on a journey into the world of girls gone wild, I was shown a much more complex picture. In this paper, I argue that the "girls gone wild" are produced and consumed in the context of North American culture at large, but that their performance are directed by, and for, a ubiquitous male gaze.