Gossip and conspiracy discourse have long been epistemologically suspect, and recent critical treatments tend either to celebrate or to excoriate these social phenomena. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip heralds a new perspective, proposing that gossiping and speculating are not only defensible but also fundamental-indeed inescapable-ways of knowing. Offering a theoretical analysis that simultaneously abjures a traditional thesis, claims wide-ranging associative liberties, and insists on the groundlessness of all truth-making, Birchall engages in a tricky balancing act; the book aims to level the relationship between academic studies and popular knowledge-production and yet, almost paradoxically, to define a more radical role for cultural studies.
 
Repeatedly the book underscores that aporia haunts all knowledge-building and that the procedures of conspiracy theory and gossip-often critiqued for their sketchy grasp on confirmed truths-resemble the methods employed even by more legitimized forms of speculation, such as traditional scholarship. Early on, Birchall acknowledges fundamental debts to Michel Foucault-particularly to Foucault’s notions about the commingling of power and knowledge within discursive formations-and to Jacques Derrida, whose ideas on aporia, trace, absence, and responsibility inform the book’s deconstruction of knowledge hierarchies. Yet the text also builds on the revaluation of gossip initiated by Patricia Meyer Spacks’s 1985 Gossip, and it echoes the impulse to link conspiracy theorizing to postmodern experience that readers will recall from both Mark Fenster’s Conspiracy Theories (1999) and Patrick O’Donnell’s Latent Destinies (2000).
 
Birchall argues that cultural studies-often assailed within the university in precisely the terms used to castigate popular knowledge-has a more radical response available to it than the ultimately conservative struggle for “legitimacy” as traditional academic scholarship. Insofar as “true justified” knowledge and the social authority it enjoys are not objective facts but, rather, culturally conferred categories of convenience, to emphasize-rather than deny or displace-aporia presents a more productive cultural studies project than keeping the secret. Accordingly, traditional analyses of phenomena such as conspiracy or gossip are insufficient if they leave intact an assumed hierarchy dividing the putative experts from those whose practices are studied. On this count, implicitly, Birchall takes issue with Spacks, whose revaluation of gossip is couched within a traditional literary analysis requiring and showcasing specialized expertise. Challenging such hierarchies between the knowers and the known, this book argues that by relinquishing expert authority, by “thinking about the status of cultural studies . . . as a form of knowledge . . . we will have learned something from popular knowledges rather than just about popular knowledges” (31, emphases in original). Accordingly, gossip and conspiracy theory model the epistemological instruction popular culture can offer.
 
Birchall disclaims early on that no “Big Theory” structures this analysis; instead, she proposes an “athetic” line of investigation, operationally defined as “a kind of speculation that doesn’t involve positing a firm thesis or which operates under a stable principle” (118). This stance, she suggests, amounts to a deconstructive move toward knowledge-building, an approach Birchall defends against assaults-from both outside and within cultural studies-by commentators who propose to be anti- or post-theoretical or who reproach cultural studies for not being more “politically responsible.” Answering those who assail the “celebratory readings,” the “optimism,” the uncritical “populism,” or otherwise “speculative” approaches in cultural studies, Birchall reminds us that deconstruction has destabilized metaphysical certainties about the “political.” Sanctioning critical play instead, the book charges that scolding colleagues for their putative political irresponsibility betokens an unwittingly reactionary and destructive moralism that amounts to discursive border-patrolling. “If cultural studies is to be up to the job of understanding popular knowledges,” the author argues, it needs to avoid such prescriptions; “it has to consider the consequences of moralism displacing theory. . . . Moralism is nostalgia: it performs a politics appropriate to a different age” (26). Birchall’s response to reproaches couched in terms of an a priori “politics”-somewhat like that of the conspiracy theorist toward “official” culture-is to eschew debate with such assailants and to instead invoke an alternative discursive community. This strategy to emulate conspiracy is anything but accidental, for-true to what it advocates-the book does not simply study conspiracy theory and gossip; it also deliberately takes instruction from them.
 
The author acknowledges up front the inevitably speculative nature of the book’s contentions, but-for better and for worse-speculation, like “athesis,” means never having to argue for underlying assumptions and what some might deem arbitrary associations.¹ To mute the charge that her argument is hypothetical, for instance, Birchall asks how we can sort between causal and arbitrary connections. Capitalizing on this empirical liberty, she asserts a parallel among conspiracy theory-building, gossip, deconstruction, and cultural studies. All of these, Birchall argues, are “avatars for the undecidability . . . [and] the instability of knowledge, for the alterity that resides ‘within’ knowledge” (32). Here instability is not something to bemoan, but rather a condition to make peace with-or even make the most of-like the suspension of the gold standard or the dynamic of unfettered exchange. Not surprisingly, then, another connection that the text proposes among gossip, conspiracy theory, and cultural studies is their shared amenability to commodification. Knowledge and its marketability underpin academic anxiety about legitimacy, for
 

In order to sell knowledge, in order for it to have value, the knowledge economy has to disguise the aporetic tension between the impossibility and possibility of legitimate knowledge at the foundation of all knowledge: service providers and retailers have to convince consumers and shareholders to invest in knowledge by presenting it as useful, authoritative, unique, legitimate, and as theirs to sell in the first place. What is in fact risky speculation (investing in a knowledge that holds the trace of its own illegitimacy within it) with no appeal to a final authority, no guarantee of a profit, is presented as a safe investment.
 

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Paradoxically, blowing the whistle on this pyramid scam promises to make cultural studies not less but more productive-hence more valuable-and this process entails learning from the market-friendliness of conspiracy and gossip. For Birchall, such cultural artifacts as The X-Files represent instances of distinct new markets for alternative explanations, exchange-sites wherein something as quaint as credence is not even required. Whereas once alternative voices had been marginalized, technological advances such as the Internet have witnessed conspiracy theory’s “emergence [as] a distinct but disparate commercial industry” (35), one whose entertainment value obviates qualms about plausibility. By now, conspiracy has metamorphosed into a generalized willingness to sell and be sold alternative stories. Like Samuel Coleridge’s ideal fiction readers, conspiracy’s “audience, in fact, is being asked to suspend its disbelief, rather than to believe” (40). In Birchall’s reformulation, conspiracy, like tabloid gossip, accrues legitimacy not as a narcissistic and presumably paranoid, “truth” system, as O’Donnell infers, and not as an impulse to make mainstream discourse more inclusive, as Fenster proposes, but simply as a diversion for proliferating separatist audiences.

 
Birchall shares with Fenster and O’Donnell the premise that conspiracy narratives trade in a refusal of contingency and randomness, preferring instead the premise that hidden but identifiable causes and effects structure what appear as discrete phenomena. These narratives authorize what some might deem wildly associative connections wherein “[r]andom events . . . are translated into components of far-reaching schemes.” These schemes are salient, not because they are persuasive, but because they fill critical coverage gaps analogous to market sectors (Birchall 45-6). For instance, Knowledge Goes Pop singles out the death of Princess Diana and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center as events in which the demand for information outstripped the supply by mainstream reportage and created the type of vacuum a market abhors, a space enthusiastically filled by alternative hawkers of the “real” story. Uniquely, Birchall speculates that legitimated mainstream discourse-be it journalistic, political, or academic-indulges similar narrative strategies. That is, the hot scoop and the groundbreaking research project attract us because they assemble a new story based on available but previously un(der)interpreted evidence. The purity of the presumably legitimate press, moreover, proves questionable once alternative reportage on Diana or 9/11 gets co-opted by “official” news producers-ostensibly for scoffing purposes-and, in effect, later retailed at a reduced risk by the mainstream media.
 
Gossip, which “trade[s] in a tension between the public and the private,” functions in much the same manner as conspiracy theories do (92): out of concealed or otherwise unconnected events it assembles and sells a new story. The market here is equally vigorous, deconstructive even, because “[g]ossips are never sated. The revelation of secrets (true or untrue) does not satisfy-the desire to reveal or receive simply gets deferred elsewhere, searching for new material in an endless exchange of signifiers parading as signifieds” (24). As with conspiracy theory, gossip privileges discussion over conclusion and prolongs iteration over closure; thus, it mobilizes deconstructive principles. The meaning of particular items of gossip is beside the point, for instance, since “even when gossip passes information on, iterability ensures that it is haunted by the trace of the possible ‘death’ of the source of the gossip, making it always ‘other’ from the ‘original’ in that repetition” (136). Like Spacks, Birchall aims to rescue gossip from the pejorative connotations historically attached to it. In an independent move, however, this book underscores the fundamentality of the gossip market. Far more than an object of scholarly analysis, “gossip is a constitutive necessity: which is . . . very different from saying that it plays an important role in society” (108). Gossip “is at the heart of cognition, conditioning any history of knowledge or claim to knowledge put forward within the socio-cultural sphere” (108). To hold forth-even about gossip-is to gossip, in other words; gossiping and professing are synonymous in that both propose to make new sense continuously out of available circumstances. Ultimately, Birchall challenges Spacks’s project, and others like it, which leave intact the expert/object of study divide.
 
Repeatedly, Birchall draws telling parallels in the stances assumed by commentators on gossip, conspiracy theory, and deconstruction; here, it might be argued, the speculative stance and canny “conspiracy” strategy come in handy, for employing these two liberates Birchall to claim premises and connections which themselves need not be exhaustively supported. Accordingly, the book posits but does not overtly argue for the idea that the very effort to maintain the purity of the separate practices of journalism, critical theory, and cultural studies implies corresponding parallels across these fields. Many descriptions of alternative discourses actually function like fences around an in-group. Memorably, in Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton paved the way for this insight by pointing out how some signifiers that pretend to name signifieds actually function to designate belonging or exclusion; “weed,” he observed, does not identify any particular plant, per se, but instead designates any number of nameless plants whose shared characteristic is mainly their unwelcomeness in one’s garden. Implicitly, Birchall mobilizes this insight, suggesting that terms such as “paranoid” or “hysteric” identify only that some forms of utterance will not count as legitimate discourse. In journalism, for instance, the book interrogates what Mark Lawson had identified as a “collapse in editorial authority” in the mainstream journalistic incorporation of popular hypotheses about Diana’s death; Birchall locates a similar conservatism in Elaine Showalter’s book, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1998). Birchall finds that these approaches-like those of people who critique cultural studies-ultimately function to narrow what can be uttered by denying legitimacy from discursive “outliers.” Showalter’s diagnosis of conspiracy theories as a form of collective hysteria itself represents, Birchall suggests, a paranoid response to paranoia. Moreover, aporia-an inescapable doubt or undecidability-underlies the psychoanalytic system upon which Showalter’s dismissal of hysteria rests since Freud himself acknowledged the speculative dimensions of psychoanalytic “science.”
 
Birchall identifies a similar discursive border-policing in Umberto Eco’s responses to deconstruction, specifically within Eco’s complaint against the “Hermetic drift” presumably implied by deconstructive approaches to truth. Taking issue with Eco’s designation of the interpretive limits of deconstruction, Birchall’s book connects these complaints to Showalter’s diagnosis of conspiracy theorists. In a critical maneuver that literary theorists might find suspect, Birchall locates Eco’s take on deconstruction partly within ideas expressed by one of Eco’s fictional characters, the suggestively named “Casaubon,” in Foucault’s Pendulum.² For Birchall, Casaubon embodies Eco’s critique of “forms of overinterpretation,” which is to say interpretations guided by an uncorroborated, everything-is-connected approach that echoes the worldview of the conspiracy theorist (77). Fictional characters are problematic sources of authorial view and propensities, however. In Eco’s work, a monolith known as social consensus enables an equally monolithic “us” to adjudicate which readings do not qualify as legitimate, to sideline, in effect, persuasive flowers from overinterpretive weeds. Eco’s overinterpreters, then-deconstructionists, that is-share the fate of Showalter’s hysterics; both get excluded from the metaphysical community of “rational” interpreters. But the exclusion in either case, Birchall maintains, is arbitrary and the community is fictional.
 
And what if “the community” were not one? Birchall questions Eco’s notion of “consensus” by recalling François Lyotard’s critique of that same category in Jürgen Habermas’s work. Lyotard’s insight had been to establish that Habermas links “consensus” to a progress narrative that we might fruitfully question-“a concept tied to a narrative of emancipation,” in Birchall’s phrase-one that Lyotard finds (in his own words) “insufficient.” Following Lyotard, Birchall proposes value-neutral terms that help detach consensus from its role in this ideological narrative; here consensus is redefined simply as “a politico-economic instrument” (80). Thus, discredited narratives and their promulgators are not silenced by an official community any more than they struggle to widen that community. Instead, they turn for their sustenance to alternative audiences. Showalter and Eco fail in related ways to conceive of the possibility that those whose interpretations are excluded-the gossip and the paranoid along with the deconstructive cultural theorist-might seek and find sympathetic communities outside the rational paradigm or interpretive community. Discourse, in this reinterpretation, involves “dissensus” at least as often as consensus. To be sure, these connections among popular knowledge, deconstructive theories, and the cultural studies enterprise involve the same kind of wildly associative leap indulged by conspiracy theorists and gossips; about this Birchall is clearly conscious and for it the author is plainly unapologetic. The implied stance is that you don’t have to buy it unless you find it productive; conversely, if you find it productive that is legitimacy enough. In short, this book is a fully conscious illustration of reality-production, not simply a “study” of it; it is an audacious and energizing implementation some of deconstruction’s most provocative implications.
 
To invoke Birchall’s economic metaphors by way of summary, the book invites cultural studies to capitalize on a situation in which speculation is all there is. Since gossip and conspiracy-along with knowledge itself-ultimately correspond only to the forces of supply and demand, the upshot is: why not sell something new and generative? Knowledge Goes Pop insists that it isn’t marketing out-and-out relativism, and it faintly acknowledges that the desire to assign or to withhold credit for individual interpretations is not wrong or unusual. Indeed, “cultural theorists have to measure the soundness of an interpretation every time they look for information on the Internet, every time . . . they review the research of peers or examine student work” (82). But the tools with which soundness might be weighed are less in evidence than the myriad prospects for operating without apprehension of such tools. Almost as an afterthought, Birchall claims that what rescues this radical freedom to posit absolutely anything from solipsism or “irresponsibility” is a deconstructive redefinition of what “responsibility” entails. Calling on Derrida, Birchall likens “responsibility” to a heightened attentiveness to that which is radically singular, a responsiveness to particularity, and rests finally in a familiar kind of paradox, the deconstructive refusal to systematically define “responsibility.”
 
Of course, generalized rules for responsible behavior can both limit and safeguard us, and the particularization of responsibility can imply either liberation or constriction. Liberating as the book’s speculations are, they also generate some reservations. In Chapter Five, “Sexed Up: Gossip by Stealth,” for instance, Birchall offers an extended application of gossip-configured both as object of study and as analytical approach-in order to assess the role played by unsubstantiated speculation in the British and American justification for the 2003 Iraq war. This chapter is intriguing and, whether wittingly or not, the particular application it offers serves to dramatize tensions otherwise masked by the book’s celebration of aporia. The book quotes N. Fairclough’s observation that ideology governs our decision whether to prioritize content or context in weighing the soundness of reportage. When a newspaper shares the ideological concerns of its sources, Fairclough posits,
 

the reported discourse is not generally demarcated from the report itself . . . there is generally a focus upon the ideational meaning (the “content“) of the reported discourse and a neglect of its interpersonal meanings and its context.
 

(48, emphases mine)

This observation seems persuasive; journalistic reports on official statements-press releases by political figures, say-usually do tend to focus on content and downplay context. Reports on popular and “unofficial” knowledge, on the other hand, generally do seem to focus inordinately on context. As I read through this extended chapter ostensibly showing how gossip functioned in the lead-up to the Iraq war, however, I kept returning to this tension between content and context. Following Fairclough’s logic, I reasoned that readers whose worldview coincides with Birchall’s “gossip” might be inclined to prioritize the chapter’s content; on the other hand, readers whose interpretation of events contrast with Birchall’s might be inclined to seek contextual explanations for positions expressed in this chapter (which seem to exceed their stipulated purpose) and even for the chapter’s role in Birchall’s book, in the first place. Unequivocally, I would position myself within the former collectivity-a choir member if this report on gossip’s role in a gratuitous war could be called preaching-and yet the chapter came to feel strangely out of place in the context of this book. It runs the risk of sacrificing point to case, and in doing so it recalls Birchall’s memorable insight that, in gossip, one finds “signifiers parading as signifieds.” Upon finishing the book, I ruminated again on this unusual chapter and-perhaps cynically-I find myself speculating that perhaps the reverse could be equally plausible: that signifieds can masquerade as signifiers and, in this instance, that the case might actually be the point, that the book provides a pretext for this critique even if the reverse were also true. “Gossip by stealth,” indeed.

 
Consonant with this unsettlement about gossip as a knowledge-making procedure, the jubilation over aporia which the book stirred in general is dissipated when I weigh particular instances of radical speculation. Now, the utility-nay, the sheer mischief-of outfoxing scolds of any stripe presents a bandwagon onto which many a freedom-loving soul might hop, and I’m no exception. Likewise, the idea that those with alternative perspectives may prefer to address like-minded fellow exiles before abjectly appealing to imperious insiders has a revolutionary appeal to it-all the more so, perhaps, when posed in the name of deconstructive cultural study. But the vulnerability to incaution haunts this euphoria, too; there is something vaguely sobering, for instance, about shrugging off as “dissension” the bids for narrative legitimacy posed by, say, Holocaust- or evolution-deniers, given the political ambitions sometimes associated with such alternative explanations. In his review of Spacks’s Gossip, in fact, Steven G. Kellman frames a similar reservation with respect to the politics surrounding gossip in literature. Acknowledging the breadth of the author’s celebratory references to gossip in British and American texts, Kellman underscores, just the same, the slant imposed by any highly selective application of a generalized theory. Pointedly the reviewer observes that “there is far less gossip within Nineteen Eight-Four than within Barchester Towers, Vanity Fair, or any of Spacks’ other exemplary fictions” (153). Kellman’s point is that Spacks is reading literature quite selectively, isolating only texts where freedom of speculation is a given. In the same way, one can say, Birchall’s dismissal of those who worry about the “politics” of deconstruction takes for granted the climate of discursive liberty that “politically” oriented critics assume must be guarded. Gossip and speculation flourish, in other words, in contexts where civil liberty can be taken for granted, and the scolding of politically-minded worry warts conveys useful cautions. Repeatedly, Birchall urges that we “take on board” the idea that aporia underlies all knowledge-making, that we, too-deconstructionists, postmodernists, students of culture-go ahead and capitalize on aporia. After a while, my inner copy editor wishes to see that verb varied, and yet-rightly or not-I intuit an authorial reluctance to substitute one sensible alternative: “embrace.” Like sea water or pirates-perhaps like global and theoretical currents now so pervasive as to have de-legitimized resistance more than anything else-aporia is urged on us, each paddling our disparate canoes, each presumably learning to stop worrying and love the marketplace of ideas. That the invitation is attractive is a fact simultaneously invigorating and dispiriting. I am not at all sure that this is the brand of aporia that Birchall’s book consciously endorses, but it lurks here nevertheless.
 

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two of the core texts of philosophy’s linguistic turn in the twentieth century: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus, revered as the Bible of Logical Positivism, was written by a young Wittgenstein between his studies at Cambridge and his time in the trenches of the Italian front in World War I; the posthumously published Investigations engendered the heterogeneous school of ordinary language philosophy and served as an important influence on practitioners of postmodern philosophy. That the later work was written in part as a corrective for the narrow conception of language and the metaphysical excesses of the earlier work raises the question of what led to the older Wittgenstein’s philosophical transformation. In Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space, & Architecture, Nana Last has produced an important study of this turn in Wittgenstein’s view of language. Last sheds light on the architectural experiences that led Wittgenstein from an account of language emanating from a putatively panoramic perspective based on knowledge of logical form to an interior view of language, where the spaces that compose what Wittgenstein called “the city of language” unfold before the philosopher as he walks its streets. That is, the experience of planning and building his sister’s house led Wittgenstein to a new way of seeing and describing lexical reality. As Last shows, this way of seeing is consonant with the spatial imagination of the architect.

 
The opening chapters focus on the complex relationship and transformations that occur between the Tractatus and the Investigations. As Last observes, Wittgenstein was interested in far more than simply repudiating his early work. The break from the Tractatus entails a significant and therapeutic alteration of the philosopher’s relation to language-from outside to inside. This transformation is carried out through an array of new spatial metaphors for describing the internal dynamics that constitute linguistic practices as well as the perceptual vantages that permit access to those dynamics. The new spatiality advanced in the Investigations leads ineluctably to more expansive views of language by challenging and ultimately supplanting “the attenuated and restrictive spatiality definitive of the Tractatus” (10). Last’s argument vividly engages the discipline of architecture to stage this critical encounter between the rigid sense of space in the early work and the fluidity of space and perception in the later work. The Investigations could spring from the early work thanks to the liberating spatial analogies provided by architecture. As Last shows in this rich comparative study, this immanent critique of the Tractatus can be appreciated only if we move about the overlapping boundaries between architecture and philosophy in Wittgenstein’s work.

 
Last’s approach, however, raises the question of where interdisciplinarity takes place. How is successful communication across disciplines possible? Last uses Wittgenstein’s house to offer an evocative account not only of the way the spatiality of architecture transformed his early attenuated vision of philosophy by shattering the insularity of the enterprise, but also of the way it alters Wittgenstein’s philosophizing. The work of the philosopher was no longer conceived as the product of a fixed perceptual vantage above language and all other forms of knowledge; rather, for the later Wittgenstein, philosophical seeing becomes a dynamic effect of playful, meandering travel through linguistic spaces called language-games. Ordinary language, conceived now by Wittgenstein the architect as the fluid medium of practices, invites interdisciplinarity. The resulting common ground for a philosophical architecture or an architectural philosophy is replete with conceptual tension; such friction ignites creativity while militating against transcendent and fixed claims to knowledge and authority.

 
Last begins with the vertical spatiality that informs the logical analysis of the Tractatus. This putative view from above allows the philosopher to see the logical distinction in language between the sensical realm of sayable and showable propositions and the nonsensical realm of religious and ethical utterances, which may resemble logical propositions in form but are actually meaningless. With this circumscribed view of what counts as philosophical language, the Tractatus is best understood as a work in the tradition of the Vienna Circle that sought to reform philosophy by eliminating metaphysics and speculative epistemology in service of a logical and empirical science. This line between sense and non-sense is described profitably as distinguishing science from non-science. Paradoxically, the limit of language is discernible only from above, the Tractatus contends, and therefore transgresses its own strict adherence to the immanence of logical form by climbing the ladder to this transcendent perspective. Last analyzes the “mystical,” transgressive viewer of the Tractatus in spatial and perceptual (as opposed to logical) terms, and thereby illuminates a philosophical concern with perception that unifies Wittgenstein’s early and late work. Her emphasis on seeing underscores the importance of the break from the view from above language celebrated in the Tractatus and toward the horizontal and spatial orientation of vision of the architect that is fleshed out in the Philosophical Investigations.
 
The spatiality of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations involves less a repudiation of the vertical space posited by the Tractatus than an incorporation of the early work’s vision of language into a more variegated, contingent, and context-sensitive description of how we use language. This transformation of Wittgenstein’s perspective is tied intimately to Wittgenstein’s experience as an architect. Last substantiates this relation by paying close attention to allusions to and metaphors of building, construction, and designing space-builders, materials, engines, sites, digging to bedrock, the incomplete and expanding city of language, and so on-in the Philosophical Investigations.
 
Last takes up the often repeated contention articulated by Wittgenstein’s student G.H. von Wright, that Wittgenstein’s house is “of the same simple and static kind that belongs to a sentence of the Tractatus,” and, moreover, that its static and stark elegance is in “striking contrast” to “the continual searching and changing in Wittgenstein’s life and personality” (78). That is to say, in von Wright’s view, the house is the aesthetic fulfillment of the logical form of the Tractatus; it cannot be seen as producing or contributing to the dynamic and complex descriptions of language-games in the Investigations. Last argues, to the contrary, three main points: One, that the two years Wittgenstein spent on his sister’s house were part of a decade-long search for peace and purpose outside of philosophy; two, that the spatiality of Wittgenstein’s architectural practices led to and nurtured the philosophical breakthroughs marked by the Philosophical Investigations; and three, that the Investigations themselves created a “philosophical frame” that permits comparison between philosophy and architecture generally. When the house is viewed through the philosophical lenses of the Philosophical Investigations, Last contends, both the philosophical and architectural enterprises are envisioned along dynamic lines. This entails a break from “the line of thinking” encouraged by “the Tractatus-Stonborough-Wittgenstein House association . . . that demands architecture be understood as structured, concrete, and absolute,” an opinion bolstered by the apparent numeric precision of the Tractatus that leads readers to regard the work as architectural in character (81). More significantly, conceiving the house as an innovative and intermediary architectural experience between the Tractatus and the Investigations creates new perceptual ground for comparing the works and seeing them in complementary terms that can erase any conceptual and biographical break between the young and old Wittgenstein. As Last shows, Wittgenstein’s life-long technical, aesthetic, and philosophical interests were striking and substantial, and challenge the accuracy of bifurcated depictions of his life and work.
 
The story of the design and construction of the house is intricate. Last tells how Wittgenstein appropriated responsibility for the plans from his friend Paul Engelmann. In distinguishing Engelmann’s vision of the house from Wittgenstein’s, Last makes it clear that the former’s role was at best minimal. Indeed, Engelmann himself came to regard the house as Wittgenstein’s and saw his own plan as plainly inferior to the one Wittgenstein realized. Last goes beyond Engelmann’s and others’ assessments of the quality and originality of the house’s design to consider Wittgenstein’s contributions to the practice of architecture itself, but with limited success. If Wittgenstein’s architectural work had an innovative effect on the practice of architecture, such an historical and empirical study has yet to be written. It would entail detailed descriptions of the way Wittgenstein’s house altered architectural practices from Engelmann to the present. What Last seeks to show is that in entering into the practice of architecture, Wittgenstein learned how “to overcome the idealized solipsism of the Tractatus and to reintegrate both the subject and the practice of philosophy with the wider culture” (93). Contemporary readers of Wittgenstein will recognize the porosity of the boundaries of language-games, the fluidity of grammar, and his thoughts on the end of philosophy (as a subject rather than as a practice) in this architecturally inspired act of overcoming the closed and unlivable image of philosophy behind the Tractatus.
 
Although the clean austerity of the house’s exterior seems to substantiate von Wright’s claim, Last takes us through the interior to show Wittgenstein’s use of entries and light, as well as the repeated and varied patterns in metal and clear and opaque glass that mark off public and private rooms. These features call to mind the indeterminacy of rules and boundaries, the remarks on continuous seeing and changing aspects, and the calls to the philosopher to “slow down” and return to the “rough ground” of language so central to what Wittgenstein thought of as the “involved journeyings” that compose the Philosophical Investigations. But the tour also includes an assembly of reminders of concerns associated with the Tractatus. Last’s reading of these works and her architect’s eye make her a learned, critical, and informative tour guide through the home’s interiors, as well as a dependable commentator on how aspects of the translation of a two dimensional design into a three-dimensional house illuminate spatial features uniting the entirety of Wittgenstein’s philosophical oeuvre. Consider, for example, her reflection on the spatial relation of the house’s central hall to the dining room: “Wittgenstein’s decision to place translucent glass on the dining room side and clear glass on the hall side,” writes Last, “distinguishes the two spaces even as it connects them.” She continues:
 

This decision highlights the complex nature of the boundary as connector, divider, and sign by emphasizing its materiality and location in space and allowing it to present disparate faces as it is approached from opposite sides. This last aspect literally constructs Wittgenstein’s fundamental understanding of language in the Investigations as presenting distinct images when viewed from divergent points: “Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.”
 

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The transcendence posed in the Tractatus expresses desire for an unencumbered view of language, and that freedom remains desirable even as the Philosophical Investigations operates on the assumption of transcendence’s impossibility. To create unencumbered views, open spaces, and easy access are all interior architectural problems tackled on the horizontal plane of a floor plan. For Wittgenstein, applying this horizontal perspective to philosophizing involves resisting the seductions of transcendence and icy perfection, eschewing claims to privileged knowledge and perception, and devising a provisional and expandable set of therapies to help the philosopher through the various entanglements encountered when moving from architectural plan to actual construction. For Last, the effect of these therapies can be seen also in Wittgenstein’s turn away from a picture of language to a series of studies on how language actually works. Where the fluidity of architectural vision leads to visual and traversable passages between spaces, in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language this fluidity in seeing leads to “family resemblances,” an informal network of similarities that enrich concepts and connect philosophy as one space in language to the other spaces-music, art, mathematics, etc.-we associate with wider culture. Last’s study leads to an appreciation of the fragile, provisional, and dynamic character of spatiality in both the practice of architecture and in the dynamic relations between and within language-games, as described by Wittgenstein.
 
Language is not an enclosure, for the later Wittgenstein; it is not the “house of Being,” as Heidegger posited. Rather, language is a landscape, a labyrinth, which cannot be seen as a whole: There is no Archimedean perspective available and it is in a constant process of growing and dying. No vantage within language permits a sense that the whole coheres and no boundary is solid enough to be impermeable. This melding of actual and possible in Wittgenstein’s later philosophical vision is the lasting effect of experimenting with architectural design. For any reader of the Investigations, Wittgenstein tells us, there is no single path through the landscape of language. The acts of walking and seeing are primarily creative enterprises impeded by a range of entanglements produced in the complexity of language and by the desire to rise above the uncertainty, mess, fatigue, and friction of travel by foot. For Wittgenstein, the path from architecture back into philosophy is not a linear matter of leaving one for the other. As Last argues convincingly, the path reveals heretofore unseen and unsuspected edifying relations between architecture and philosophy and their distinctive ways of seeing and thinking.
 

We all know that happiness is a form of stupidity. Once The Declaration of Independence promises the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right, it’s difficult not to think of happiness as a form of indoctrination. Shiny happy people are, first and foremost, unthinking rubes who watch reality TV, shop at outlets, vacation at Disneyworld (or, worse, Las Vegas), and generally enjoy vapid forms of cultural entertainment. Happily engaging in these activities simply proves the lack of capacity for critical reflection. Perhaps this is why academics who have dedicated their lives to criticism have such a difficult time presenting themselves as generally optimistic. Consider how often academics in the humanities convey genuinely good news as a complaint. News about receiving tenure (which rewards scholarly accomplishment with a job for life) is followed by something like, “Now I’m stuck here forever.” News about receiving a major fellowship (finally the time to do the work one really wants to do) is followed by, “Now I’m obliged to finish this book.” It’s as if we have to cast good news within a broader, pessimistic view of the world lest we appear to be happy and, therefore, stupid. Once optimism is unmasked as naïveté, it seems to produce a backlash in which, among the smart set at least, in order to prove oneself as sophisticated and subversive, one has to be generally unhappy and perhaps a little depressed.
 
It’s this dynamic that Michael Snediker seeks to displace for queer studies. How, Snediker asks, can queer theory conceive of optimism as a useful and interesting site for critical investigation? How can one develop a queer understanding of optimism that doesn’t simply reinforce its opposite, pessimism? One way into these questions might be to explore the centrality of camp in queer culture, but Snediker doesn’t go that route. More ambitiously, his study uses optimism as a conceptual wedge to overturn queer theory as we currently know it. Snediker begins Queer Optimism with the astute observation that optimism is a centrally unthought term among the writing of the most well-known queer theorists of the past twenty or so years. Since its invention in the late 1980s and early 1990s, queer theory (and here, Snediker means theoretical work by Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman) has inadvertently produced a situation in which queer sexuality is equated with melancholia, self-shattering, shame, or the death drive-all negative, destructive, and, for Snediker, essential pessimistic concepts that foreclose analytic engagement with positive affect. Engaging with optimism reverses that situation by putting the question of queer identity back on the table. The generative movement in early queer studies was the critique of identity as the site of psychological and political normalization. Important as that critique was in the early 1990s for reimagining political agency, it also tended to idealize the destabilization of identity and the affirmation of incoherency in oneself. As Snediker puts it,
 

Dissatisfaction with a given regime of coherence [e.g. heteronormativity] might sponsor a critical commitment to dismantling coherence tout court. Such a dissatisfaction, however, might likewise productively sponsor a reconfiguration of coherence-the cultivation of a vocabulary of coherence that more precisely does justice to the ways in which coherence isn’t expansively, unilaterally destructive, reductive, or ideological.
 

(25-6)

Snediker uses queer optimism in order to mobilize the second possibility against the first. At his most ambitious, Snediker asks how a critical investigation of optimism might lead to a new understanding of some fundamental categories: queer desire, queer ontology, and queer representation.

 
So what exactly is queer optimism? This isn’t an easy question to answer, and not just because queering concepts tends to make them difficult to pin down. In his discussions of what queer optimism might be, Snediker is much clearer about what it’s not rather than about what it is. Snediker is very careful not to equate queer optimism with the kind of hopefulness that Lee Edelman aggressively dismantles in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman argues that a liberal politics based on hope for the future carries with it an investment in the fantasy of the innocent child. Because of this, liberalism sets in motion an ideological circuit that idealizes reproductive heterosexuality while excluding non-reproductive, queer subjectivities. In response, Edelman argues quite forcefully that queer politics must embrace a kind of negativity that refuses this investment in the future and, in so doing, breaks with this ideological circuit. For Snediker, queer optimism isn’t hopeful because it’s not futural. It’s not at all attached to the kind of heteronormative temporality that Edelman describes. (And, I should add in passing, Snediker gives an excellent critical account of the aggressive edge of Edelman’s argument, which he reads as symptomatic of a demand issuing from the super-ego.)
 
To explain what a non-hopeful optimism looks like, Snediker initially turns to Leibniz-or, better, to Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz’s claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds. It’s hard to get more optimistic than that. But, as Deleuze explains it, Leibniz’s claim needs to be understood against the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War and the effect of war on political philosophy. The baroque world is a world in crisis, a world that has to be rebuilt “amidst the ruins of the Platonic Good.” For Deleuze, and for Snediker following him, Leibniz offers a model of optimism that suspends hope for a better world because it affirms the current world as it is. “If this world exists, it is not because it is the best, but because it is rather the inverse; it is the best because it is, because it is the one that is” (Fold 68). Optimism is something like the optimal affirmation of the goodness of the world in its present state, even if that present state doesn’t actually look all that great.
 
Leibniz’s version of optimism hinges on faith, belief in the goodness of God. Understandably uncomfortable with reproducing a theological version of optimism, Snediker queers it by recasting Leibniz’s version of optimism through object-relations psychoanalysis. Snediker turns to Winnicott’s essay, “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications.” Reworking Freud’s discussion of identity-formation and the death drive, Winnicott acknowledges that once the subject uses an object for purposes of mastery, the subject destroys the integrity of that object. At the same time, Winnicott argues, this destruction is not usually total. In practice the object most often survives its own destruction, not only demonstrating the limitations of omnipotency assumed by the masterful subject but also suggesting a capacity for endurance in the object itself-in spite of the ways in which the subject may have used, harmed, or damaged it. In this way, the object can become a model for optimism. The point is not that the subject affirms the object, that the subject is optimistic about the object’s survival. Rather, it’s the reverse. The endurance of the object affirms a capacity for endurance about the subject that the subject may not see or be able to anticipate. It’s this external aspect of optimism that most interests Snediker. That is, for Snediker, optimism is much less about a subjective state in which one feels happy or hopeful and more about a sense of affirmation that comes from the outside and exists alongside a sense of pain, damage, or loneliness. For Leibniz, optimism is a form of subjective affirmation based on faith. Winnicott allows Snediker to develop a de-subjectivized version of queer optimism that doesn’t idealize or glorify a process of de-subjectification but suggests instead that optimism comes from the shards of the world in crisis, shards that must be affirmed and, in the process, transformed.
 
This provocative combination of Winnicott with Deleuze is at the heart of what I think is most interesting about Snediker’s project, which I would describe as an attempt to rethink optimism and love through two central operations: the isolation of singularity against attempts to generalize it in models of exemplarity, and the serialization of that singularity in lyric poetry. Snediker develops his claims most powerfully through literary analysis of four poets: Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop. Although Queer Optimism begins with an opening chapter that critiques Butler, Bersani, Edelman, and Sedgwick for assuming pessimistic views of queer sexuality that effectively foreclose the positive and affirmative nature of affect, the book’s most compelling claims get developed through analysis of poetry. Each of the chapters in Queer Optimism is organized around a theoretical model from queer theory that Snediker displaces through sophisticated and focused close readings. This mode of argumentation might be a turn-off to some readers who, like myself, are deeply interested in queer theory but are neither Americanists nor modernists. But Snediker handles it quite masterfully. His readings are sharp, and rarely does he lose focus on the central theoretical problems that his chapters announce. Throughout, he develops a new set of terms for thinking about queer sexuality in its intersections with poetics and literary form.
 
One of Snediker’s most salient points (a point that deserves more attention than he gives it) is that queer isn’t best understood as deviation from social norms but rather as a kind of singularity that emerges within the Winnicottian space of object relations. In this account, queer is no longer opposed to norms but becomes a moment of optimistic affirmation through which new sets of norms can be created. Snediker develops his claims for singularity through chapters on Crane and Dickinson. Chapter One of Queer Optimism focuses on the network of smiles in Crane’s poetry, reading the figure of the smile not as a sign of ironic suffering but as a singular affirmation of joy produced through its repetition. Snediker develops this thesis against the backdrop of Bersani’s writings on self-shattering, showing how the smile survives as a poetic artifact that endures beyond Crane’s suicide. Like the object in object relations that survives beyond the subject’s attempt to destroy it, Crane’s smiles are involved in a poetics that sustains “relationality” beyond all forms of anti-relational thinking (77). Chapter Two reads the figure of the smile in Dickinson in order to show how her repeated emphasis on pain highlights the surprising singularity of joy-surprising for Dickinson and, perhaps, for her readers as well. Instead of reading Dickinson’s emphasis on pain as a queer performance of masochism, Snediker reads the repetition of pain as Dickinson’s attempt to isolate and understand the feeling of joy as a positive affect that is, for Dickinson herself, only minimally understandable.
 
The other salient point that Snediker insists on is that this understanding of queer is best thought through a poetic-and not a theatrical-notion of the person. In some ways, this is Queer Optimism‘s most powerful insight, one that should stand as a serious challenge to queer studies. While a theatrical notion of the person has allowed critics to show the constructedness and naturalization of norms, it also tends to assume a vision of politics and culture that is fundamentally anti-aesthetic. The revelation that norms are artificial is revelatory only to the extent that one assumes a worldview in which art and nature are firmly separated. But, as Snediker argues, a poetic notion of the person assumes that the person is first and foremost a literary artifact (a point that could be significantly elaborated through a reading of Barbara Johnson’s account in Persons and Things of personification in lyric and law). In Chapters Three and Four, Snediker focuses on Jack Spicer and Elizabeth Bishop, respectively. Especially for modern poets working against T.S. Eliot’s poetics of impersonality, the literary nature of the person becomes the basis for exploring the persistent singularity at the heart of the person through the serial nature of lyric poetry. Although Spicer explicitly espouses Eliot’s poetics of impersonality, Snediker shows that his serial poem Billy the Kid attaches singularity and repetition to the problem of the poetic person. For Bishop, this repetition is related to love. Snediker reads submerged reference to Crane in her poetry as an attempt to develop a logic of love based on “a particular form of incomplete or imperfect repetition” (191). In a sense, both Spicer and Bishop explore the inner workings of the Winnicottian space of object relations and its implications for queer identity and love through a Deleuzian sense of repetition and seriality.
 
Queer Optimism is a book that rewards careful reading. It will no doubt be of interest to specialists in modern American poetry. But its redefinition of queer and its insistence that we rethink identity through a poetic understanding of the person make the book a major contribution to queer studies as well.
 

Paris, 2001: an exhibition that commemorates the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of the Holocaust stirs up a vehement public debate. Georges Didi-Huberman, a critic and unconventional art historian of Jewish descent who has written on European painting and the depiction of hysteria in photography, contributes an essay to the exhibition catalog highlighting four particular photographs from the exhibit, which prompts further outrage.¹ More outrage, one might wearily note, than information about the camps had caused at the time the photographs were made; but less, perhaps, than was caused when the first atrocity images of the liberated concentration camps appeared in Western newspapers and news reels in 1945. What is it about these photographs, after all these years of exposure and all our familiar outrage regarding their subject, that still prompts intense polemics?
 
Didi-Huberman’s contributions to this debate have now been translated into English. The translation includes the original exhibition catalog essay (Part 1: “Images in Spite of All”) and Didi-Huberman’s response to critics (Part 2: “In Spite of the All Image”; originally Images malgré tout, 2003). The oddly old-fashioned, elaborately detailed table of contents will make no sense to anyone who hasn’t already read the book; this questionable editorial choice appears to indulge the author, as does the decision not to present the other side of the debate, which appeared in the pages of Les temps moderns (March-May 2001), in columns by Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux. The book would have benefitted from a translation of these articles, since Didi-Huberman engages in frequent exegesis with them. Clearly, without these provocations, the second half of this volume would not exist. But the choice to translate Didi-Huberman is timely. While the debate has distinctively French concerns, the larger problematic of the (limits of) representation of the Holocaust remains a fraught subject for Western scholars, and Didi-Huberman’s polemic takes the discussion in a new and productive direction.
 
The controversy over the Parisian exhibition focused on four famous photographs from Auschwitz, taken at the height of the Final Solution in 1944. The photographs were taken by members of the so-called “Sonderkommandos,” Jewish victims who were forced to participate in the genocide of their own people by removing the Nazis’ victims from the gas chambers and destroying the corpses through fire or mass burial (sometimes, in response to wartime stringencies, both). The identity of the photographer/s is uncertain; surviving records left by members of the Sonderkommandos indicate the names of those involved in making the images. These records also show that they were able to smuggle the camera into the camp and the film out again, in a toothpaste tube, with the assistance of the Polish Underground (10-11). These are the only surviving images that show any aspect of the gas chamber operations, and because they represent an act of resistance by victims of genocide, they have retained an exceptional status among Holocaust sources. However, their exhibition in Paris was considered by some to be a provocation-either to Holocaust deniers, who would challenge the veracity of these admittedly poor images, or to more sophisticated viewers who expressed affinities with Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker, whose remarkable documentary “Shoah” (1985) proscribed the use of archival images in favor of eyewitness testimony and film shot at the scenes of the crimes in the 1970s-80s. Holocaust deniers, of course, have never depended on actual evidence to promulgate their delusions. On ethical and aesthetic grounds, the second set of criticisms is more substantial and reflects a peculiarly French concern with a kind of Bilderverbot (prohibition of religious images). Wajcman accused Didi-Huberman of fetishizing these images in a perversely Christian fashion (“the passion of the image” 52). The exceptional status of the Sonderkommando photographs thus opens up debate about the memory and visual representation of the Holocaust in a nation which has not yet come to terms with its “Vichy syndrome,” to apply Henry Rousso’s term.²
 
Exceptional, unique, special: these are the English equivalents of the German prefix sonder. In the Nazis’ perversion of the German language, Sonder-nouns became hallmark euphemisms: Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) meant murder; Sonderkommandos (special operatives or units) meant surviving victims who had to perform inhumanly gruesome tasks, or die. Didi-Huberman refers to them as “living beings in spite of all, very provisional survivors,” whose extinction was always intended (106). The Sonderkommandos were regularly purged; the Nazis did not intend them to survive to offer their testimony. Victims such as Zalmen Gradowski, who could barely recognize themselves as human beings alive in the camps, existed as if perpetually “on the threshold of the tomb”-their own, their families’, their people’s (163). These uniquely suffering individuals were uniquely placed to witness genocide; they were, to coin a term, Sonderzeugen (special witnesses, all male). Given their continued presence at their intended extermination, their witnessing “in spite of all” renders their verbal and visual testimony invaluable. Didi-Huberman argues in favor of the exhibition of precisely these photographs because they depict the perspective of victims who were deliberately deprived of everything fundamental to human existence and yet, “in spite of all,” managed to resist deliberately, in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, in order to provide testimony to the crimes against them and their people. For all these reasons, Didi-Huberman argues, these images not only should but must be viewed.
 
Most provocatively, for his opponents, Didi-Huberman opens his essay with the assertion, “In order to know, we must imagine for ourselves” (3). The idea that anything about the Holocaust-surely one of the best documented and most thoroughly researched crimes in history-and particularly about the experience of the Sonderkommandos needs to be “imagined” caused an uproar of misunderstanding. Those supporting Lanzmann’s formal proscription read Didi-Huberman to be invoking an impossible kind of empathetic evidence, indeed an irresponsible form of subjective speculation. But Didi-Huberman offers a more specific and more useful understanding of the nature of this particular photographic evidence. He writes, “An image without imagination is quite simply an image that one didn’t spend the time to work on” (116). Work is required of ethically- and historically-minded viewers. He reminds us of the Nazi intention to document the genocide, which produced a massive amount of damning evidence even after they changed their minds in the midst of the war and began to destroy it. Against this intention to document successful destruction, he places the Sonderkommandos’ heroic efforts to document criminal destruction as successful resistance. Recalling the words of Sonderkommando survivor Filip Mueller (one of the most haunting witnesses in “Shoah”), Didi-Huberman argues that just as the surviving victim claims that the impossible was real and that “one must imagine” or one cannot conceive of Auschwitz, so too must we challenge the limits of the visible and our understanding. In German, this would be rendered as vorstellen: “to imagine” is “to place before oneself” what is otherwise unknowable; thus imagining is an act that bears with it an ethical imperative, because knowledge has been gained and we are therefore responsible for it. As Didi-Huberman argues, “To imagine in spite of all, which calls for a difficult ethics of the image: neither the invisible par excellence (the laziness of the aesthete), nor the icon of horror (the laziness of the believer), nor the mere document (the laziness of the learned). . . . I would say that here the image is the eye of history: its tenacious function of making visible” (39).
 
And since even the Nazis appear to have refrained from filming or photographing the actual operations of the gas chambers (though of course this evidence may have been destroyed), these images are the most proximate available. Critics have worried that the exhibition of these four images might inspire deniers or draw only perversely attracted viewers who wished to be titillated by horror. Attempting to “imagine” oneself in the midst of this most inhumane of human crimes, they argued, created an ethical risk of either dishonoring the experience and memory of the victims, or placing the viewer in the untenable position of the perpetrators. They also feared that these partially legible images depicting only a subset of the destruction process would come to be seen as representative of the entire genocide, thus reducing the scope, scale and extension of the horror to a few randomly captured moments. But the critics were, according to Didi-Huberman, creating an impossibly high bar for admissible evidence. Since there is no single image which can depict the entire Holocaust in its ghastly diversity, they refused to view any other actual images of the genocide, and turned Lanzmann’s ethical, situational decision into a dogmatic one. Critics objecting to the lack of representativeness in these images fall into a reductive trap: “Wajcman sought the all image, the unique and integral image of the Shoah; having found only not-all images, he dismisses all images” (124). Didi-Huberman plays with the notion of comprehensiveness while critiquing the possibly fetishistic delectation of iconic images-an ethical risk particularly in the case of these “special” photographs.
 
In the context of this very French debate, Didi-Huberman insists on the necessity of viewing these images, which had so improbably been created and more improbably survived: “They are infinitely precious to us today. They are demanding too, for they require archeological work. We must dig again in their ever so fragile temporality” (47). Here he adds a significant dimension to the ethics of historical memory: mere viewing is insufficient. It is not enough to look at the exhibit, in order to “never forget.” These images represent a “flash,” in Walter Benjamin’s terms: they are a rip, or a “rend” to use Didi-Huberman’s term, in the flux of time (47). Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” sees such moments as dangerous and significant; in these moments, history is recognized as a process rather than a static or given “past.” The second half of Images in Spite of All, written in response to the storm of criticism (rather like Benjamin’s famous “angel of history,” blown backwards into the future yet still looking at the past), articulates the meaning of “imagining” in response to the inspirational “rend” in time. In a certain sense, all historical understanding requires an intuitive leap into the abstraction of historical distance; R.G. Collingwood on “historical re-enactment” or Wilhelm Dilthey on subjectivity would be useful here, but Didi-Huberman speaks from within a poststructuralist, primarily Lacanian and Foucauldian critical framework. This intuitive leap is not easy; it requires imaginative “work,” which must not be confused with irresponsibly assuming that one can “feel” or “identify with” the trauma that others felt or experienced.
 
In order to imaginatively “see” the four photographs and attempt the archaeological work, Didi-Huberman argues, first of all they must be seen together rather than separately. They were taken in a sequence and they were taken under duress, which is more vivid when they are seen together. Reproductions of the images often crop them so as to highlight the figures, presumably because this is seen as the most useful documentary element, showing the victims themselves; they also realign the image so that the figures appear more “natural,” standing straight up. The photos have also been retouched to outline distinct female figures (35-6). While this ostensibly retrieves the possibility of some individual identity, these retouched images also tend to make the women look young and attractive in a disturbingly sexualized manner (it’s impossible to know the actual ages or names of these female victims, and the sexualizing of the images suggests the Nazis’ gaze rather than the photographer’s). Didi-Huberman highlights the way in which cropping out the original blackness at the edges of the images dislocates the photos from their original perspective and deletes information about their authorship: the fact that the clandestine photographer had to hide in the crematorium building and shoot the images through a doorway or window, which contributed to their blurriness and distorted angles (34-6).
 
Using the images as they were made, in a series, offers the possibility of montage. For Didi-Huberman, montage is a technique that “opens up our apprehension of history and makes it more complex. . . . it gives us access to the singularities of time and hence to its essential multiplicity” (121). No single image, however iconic, comprehends the diversity of a flow of single instants that is the human experience of reality. The films of Jean-Luc Goddard and Alain Renais suggest to Didi-Huberman a mode of expressing that diversity through motion in time (discussed at length in the last two sections). A montage of text and images can contribute to the same imaginative work in historical inquiry. Just as for the filmmaker there is no one image, but rather images working together as film, for the historically sensitive viewer no photograph should stand alone or be assumed to speak for itself. Montage is thus potentially a new ideal form for illustrated historical narrative, and histories derived from visual evidence. Didi-Huberman argues that “montage intensifies the image and gives the visual experience a power that our visible certainties or habits have the effect of pacifying, or veiling” (136), drawing an allusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Notorious, where fear is instilled via distillation (the audience knows that Cary Grant is uncovering the secrets hidden behind vintages of wine, but afraid that he will be caught in the act). Here Didi-Huberman is also alluding to an argument developed throughout his oeuvre, about a distinction between the visible and the visual, the realm of the apparent and the realm of the transcendent. The visual will only sometimes, through art, appear in traces: “With the visible, we are of course in the realm of what manifests itself. The visual, by contrast, would designate that irregular net of event-symptoms that reaches the visible as so many gleams or radiances, ‘traces of articulation,’ as so many indices…. Indices of what? Of something-a work, a memory in process-that has nowhere been fully described, attested, or set down in an archive, because its signifying ‘material’ is first of all the image” (Confronting 31). In his Confronting Images (2005), Didi-Huberman goes into greater detail about the way a Renaissance painter such as Fra Angelico could deploy “a whack of white” to signify divine miracles such as the Annunciation (24). Didi-Huberman’s attention to figuring the visual iconically, a distinctive Christian art practice, opened him to criticism once the images under scrutiny were Holocaust photographs. If the montage produced a holy icon, the critics argued, Didi-Huberman’s ethical quest to honor the memory of the victims was a failure. No “rend,” no differend, no trace, no “whack” nor any visual transcendence was to be received through the document of suffering, because none was offered to the victims.
 
These photographs haunt us, which is one way of saying that we can’t seem to see them or talk about them sufficiently to exorcise the evil that travels with them. Perhaps the sonder attribute of these four photographs can be revised, not as a statement of the limits of representation, but as an exception that provokes new rules. They remain contentious because of the ethical stakes involved in acknowledging the humanity of the crime they record. Didi-Huberman reminds us that these four exceptional images survive “in spite of all,” and as such demand imaginative work in order to be received and recorded within memory “in spite of all.”
 

I can’t help it: trilogies are nerd Kryptonite. My childhood library was chock-full of science fiction and heroic fantasy books organized into epic troikas, all of which made grandiose claims about their ability to forever change my sense of literary genre, if not of consensual reality itself. As a result, any three books that self-consciously present themselves as a trilogy have for me an aura of importance about them, one that requires further interrogation. Kenneth Goldsmith’s American Trilogy-The Weather, Traffic, and Sports-is no exception.
 
In the first half of the last century, Ezra Pound claimed in his ABC of Reading that “artists are the antennae of the race” (73). In a global digital economy, though, both wireless and networked signals come at such speed and quantity that a set of rabbit ears will no longer suffice. In 1980, Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney updated Pound’s metaphor in “Parasite Maintenance,” comparing contemporary artistic sensibility to the satellite dish. From such a perspective, artists are devices for the accumulation and concentration of cultural data, cool and dispassionate. The quality of the objects and texts that they produce depends in part on what “Parasite Maintenance” refers to as “the will to select” (77). The individual’s ability to receive and process the ambient signals that constantly bombard all of us helps constitute contemporary criteria for a successful artistic career.
 
As Craig Dworkin notes, self-declared “Word Processor” Kenneth Goldsmith’s ongoing personal project-which Goldsmith has successively dubbed “nutritionless writing,” “uncreative writing,” and “conceptual writing”-falls squarely into this tradition of poetry as a sort of technologized, high-volume appropriation (34). This is especially true of recent works such as the massive, audacious Day (Figures, 2003): a volume that transcribes an entire issue of The New York Times and presents it in book form. In this context, even Goldsmith’s curation of the decade-old UbuWeb <www.ubu.com>, a large digital archive of avant-garde sound recordings, concrete poetry, video, outsider art and related critical materials, is arguably part of the practice of uncreativity-perhaps even Goldsmith’s greatest work.
 
Goldsmith normally proceeds by identifying a neglected (because mundane, or, in Goldsmith’s terms, “boring”) repository of cultural discourse, such as an average edition of The New York Times (Day), or the names of artists and albums from his extensive LP collection (6799). He then transcribes the contents of that repository meticulously, reconfigures the resulting digital manuscript as a book, and attaches his name to it. Though such projects have been common in the art world since the heyday of Conceptualism, they are relatively rare in what Charles Bernstein refers to as “official verse culture” (246), where even Jackson Mac Low and John Cage (two of Goldsmith’s muses) occupy an uneasy position. By porting an established practice for aesthetic production from one field of cultural endeavour (gallery art) to another (poetry), Goldsmith has simultaneously constructed himself a career and staged an intervention that has changed the stakes of contemporary poetics.
 
As a kind of briefer epic, The Weather, Traffic, and Sports serve collectively as a formal denouement to Day, because they codify and professionalize the practice I’ve just described. The similar size, shape, and design of these books suggests what even a cursory read will confirm, that the same basic dialectical move is at work in all of them: a reframing of the “everyday” that defamiliarizes it and allows us to return to mundane moments in order to reexamine them in a new light. As such, The American Trilogy succeeds admirably, but also suggests that there are limits to the artistic shelf-life of the “uncreative” moment (more on this notion shortly). These books are united formally by more than their explorations into a series of neglected but omnipresent cultural forms (the weather report, the traffic report, the sportscast). They all have a specific relationship to a specific medium: the radio-and, for the last two books in the trilogy, to digitally streamed radio broadcasts in particular. It is relatively easy to establish a typology of Goldsmith’s work in relation to the particular medium he happens to be transcribing at the moment (and even to predict where he’ll go next by considering the gaps in such a typology-film, video, and television being the most obvious omissions), yet literary studies often overlook material media. As a result, Goldsmith’s long career as a DJ on New Jersey freeform radio station WFMU is an underexamined part of his practice as an artist.
 
The Weather, Traffic, and Sports are all profoundly aural texts, representative of particular patterns of listening to text and transcribing it. They are exercises in taking dictation, which, as Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell (in Dictations) have argued, is always in part about a kind of negation of the transcribing self, but is also always a reassertion of the amanuensis as an author in her or his own right. Paradoxically, Goldsmith’s considerable personal reputation as an “original” author is rooted in his ability to (for the most part) cleanse his transcribed texts of the most obvious signs of his own presence and, as Ron Silliman has noted in a blog post on “the Cult of Kenny,” in Goldsmith’s ability to choose which “boring” moments to transcribe (Silliman).
 
The Weather (2005), the first of the three books, was the result of a process that could have been executed at any point over the last half century. Beginning with the first day of Fall 2002 and continuing through the last day of Summer 2003, Goldsmith used a cassette tape recorder to transcribe New York City weather reports from the US’s oldest all-news radio station, 1010 WINS. In The Weather, “uh,” “er,” and “eh,” as in “We have, uh, cloudy skies, uh” (5), serve to mark the fidelity of Goldsmith’s transcription process. Even if these signs are always approximations, they suggest that every noise, hesitation, and unintentional vocalization in the recordings finds its way into the typescript. Of course, this is a fiction that marks both the limits of what the literary form can convey and the impossibility of going back to verify the transcription itself. Goldsmith’s earlier books, especially Fidget and Soliloquy, mobilize similar tropes to mark both what’s gained and what’s lost in the space between tape and print.
 
True to Silliman’s hypothesis, though, these are not just any weather reports for downtown Manhattan. Beginning in the section titled “Spring,” they also include the weather reported for downtown Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm-the US invasion of Iraq. At the moment when the announcer begins the sentence, “As for Middle East weather, it continues to be favorable for military operations” (39), the politics of the mundane become visible. This is a turning point in the book; by the next page, the announcer is referring to the “battlefield forecast” as a regular broadcast feature (40). Here are shades of Marshall McLuhan’s arguments about the radio as a medium that, without requiring much from its listeners, sutures the nation together in times of war (McLuhan 260). The Weather suggests that even radio weather reports are not innocent. After the battlefield forecasts begin, the frequent mention of RADAR, for example, points to the origins of its instruments in the military-industrial complex. That the Baghdad weather reports eventually trickle down to nothing and the war continues is, in the end, more disturbing than their abrupt appearance. The result is a kind of pathetic fallacy that connects Goldsmith to the tradition of the American Transcendentalists and likely to Romanticism itself: as much as anything else, the weather in The Weather serves as an index of the national mood.
 
As a coda, it’s worth noting that “Spring” is marked as the valuable section of The Weather in another way as well. It is an extremely limited edition of signed and numbered artist’s books from Didymus Press (2005), with wood engravings by James Siena. The alchemy of letterpress can turn even the most mundane discourse into a rarefied commodity.
 
The cover text of Traffic cites Godard’s Week-End (1967) as a major influence. This is one of many careful positionings of Goldsmith’s work in the context of the 1960s art world. The epigraph, from an interview with Andy Warhol about his beginning the “Death” series after overhearing a traffic announcer cite the projected staggering highway death tolls for a coming holiday weekend, is another. These moments of name-checking indicate that by the time the books in The American Trilogy start to appear, the inspiration for Goldsmith’s overall aesthetics had shifted from the investigations of Cage and Mac Low into boredom and the “found” poetry of Bern Porter to Andy Warhol and 60s pop’s mechanical reproductions of popular culture (I’ll be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which Goldsmith edited, was published in 2004; Andy Warhol: Giant Size, a Phaidon coffee table book to which Goldsmith contributed several essays, appeared in 2006).
 
Like The Weather, Traffic is a book that is ultimately about circulation and global-cultural flows. In terms of the emerging critical interest in circulation (after the recent work of scholars such as Benjamin Lee and Edward Li Puma, Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli) this book is timely. Goldsmith’s work is about nothing if not the circulation of cultural forms, bringing tropes from 60s visual art into the realm of poetry in ways that it had not previously been, deforming and transfiguring it in the process. As with its precursor, Traffic consists of text transcribed from the radio station 1010 WINS, but there is an important difference in terms of its production: Goldsmith sourced the text in Traffic from a digital stream rather than from an audiotape. Again, there are precedents in Goldsmith’s earlier work for the transcription of large swaths of digital discourse, notably No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, which consists largely of text copied from Usenet newsgroups between 1993 and 1996 according to their adherence to an “Ә” (schwa) rhyme scheme, then arranged alphabetically and syllabically. Here, the material is audio, not text, but it is important to note that Goldsmith was and remains an innovator in terms of the use of digital discourse in poetry.
 
As with The Weather, Goldsmith’s connection to the tradition of American letters in Traffic is stronger than might initially appear. Like the previous book, and in keeping with much of Goldsmith’s output since the art project “Broken New York”, Traffic is a psychogeographic exploration of a key aspect of New York City. The concern with highways and traffic raises inevitable comparisons with the American tradition of writing about the road, even if the text that, say, Kerouac transcribed was considerably more inchoate.
 
Sports, the final volume of the trilogy, is the most ambiguous of the three. Is Goldsmith’s kind of writing a sort of athletic event, or does it attempt to lay bare the machismo of the Great American Pastime as an accountant’s recital of numbers, statistics, and trivia? The book is a complete radio transcription of the longest 9-inning Major League Baseball game on record (New York Yankees vs. Boston Red Sox, August 2006), and thus not boring or mundane at all. Brian Kim Stefans has observed that, counter to Goldsmith’s claim that he doesn’t have a readership because his books are unreadable, this is actually quite a gripping text. Like Traffic, Sports was transcribed from digital audio, more precisely from the WFAN broadcast of the game on the YES (Yankees radio) Network. Goldsmith’s original idea was to transcribe the game as a broadcast from WEEI, a Boston station, and to publish the two versions of the game as a mirror-text, but he could not locate a source for the Boston transmission. As the old cliché goes, history is written by the winners.
 
A well-developed mythology has developed about Goldsmith’s absolute refusal to alter his source material in any way. The cover text of Sports invokes Goldsmith’s “exact parsing of language,” but the idiosyncrasies of transcription and copy editing are all over the book. For example, p. 117 presents “baked lays” for “Baked Lays.” And how are we to read “$39.95 per month” (43)? Did the announcer say “thirty-nine ninety-five per month” or “thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents per month,” or something else entirely? Whether Goldsmith is concerned with or even capable of “exact parsing,” part of what makes these texts intriguing is that they demonstrate over and over again the slippage that is part and parcel of every instance of signification.
 
As media history scholar Susan J. Douglas has described, many early radio “broadcasts” were actually recreations from textual notes (201, 210 and passim). Thus, this book’s aesthetic move is already part of a long tradition; it’s easy to imagine someone using this text as a performance score. Like Goldsmith’s No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 (one of the few print samples of the kind of text that was typical of the pre-Web Internet), Sports is a valuable historical document, because it includes all ads and other information normally cut out of game transcriptions.
 
In the cheeky tradition of much appropriation art (e.g. Emergency Broadcast Network’s 1992 classic Commercial Entertainment Product), Sports begins with the reproduction of the full copyright statement from the New York Yankees, explicitly forbidding reproduction or transmission in any form. Goldsmith sent copies of this book to as many people as he could identify in the Yankee organization in an attempt to provoke them, but nothing happened. Goldsmith had a similar experience when he approached the Warhol estate to secure the necessary permissions to reprint Warhol’s interviews. They laughed and told him that for all they cared, he could take the words; the multimillion dollar branding deals in which media juggernauts like the Warhol estate and the Yankees are constantly involved are in the realm of images and branding, not script. Stakes are low in poetry.
 
The Weather, Traffic, and Sports together mark an ending to the “uncreative” or “boring” phase of Goldsmith’s larger project. Goldsmith has already remarked on several occasions that his next book, whose working title is Capital, will be a spiritual sequel to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, focusing on New York in the 20^th century rather than Paris in the 19^th. In what appears to be a move away from the refusal to explicitly edit his source material, Goldsmith insists that in Capital, “all the lines are zingers.” This reiterates earlier moments in Goldsmith’s oeuvre (particularly No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96) as much as it does something new.
 
Goldsmith has always been a movement of one. His work will inevitably spark imitators as various innovative writing practices did before it, but there is a unique trajectory here-what Deleuze & Guattari call a “line of flight” constituted by nothing so much as the avoidance of what others have done before, and the careful resuscitation and poaching of moments of potential betrayed by the actual events of history.
 

This essay reveals key plot details of the graphic novel Watchmen and the film based upon it.

On March 6, 2009, Warner Brothers released a motion picture based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel, Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder and written for the screen by David Hayter and Alex Tse. The history of this project is long and contentious. Moore has insisted the work can never be filmed successfully. According to legend, when the director Terry Gilliam planned an earlier attempt, Moore offered one word of advice: don’t.¹ Several months before the release of the Snyder version, Moore declared, “I am spitting venom all over it,” and added a “magical curse” against the enterprise (Boucher).
 
Perhaps Moore’s curse lacked sufficient throw-weight to reach California; or it could be that even the cleverest wizard cannot thwart the Sauronic power of Warner Brothers, at least not without a posse. The film at this writing seems on track for profitability, primarily through strong response from the comic’s dedicated fan community (Thrill). So another effects-heavy, green-screened, $200 million epic goes into the ledgers, vindicating (or flouting) bullish (or bearish) views about the box office in hard times. Why should we care, old fan-boys who have always been watching the Watchmen?
 
On first inspection, Snyder’s film seems mainly a technical achievement, remarkable for its frame-to-panel fidelity, but perhaps not deeply engaged with the best virtues of the original, such as its notoriously non-linear narrative and its relentless interrogation of all media, including its own. Is the Watchmen movie just another Inevitable Comics Conversion, part of a cinematic tulip craze that must inevitably bring us Superbaby, or Submariner vs. Pirates of the Caribbean? On the other hand, could there be something more substantial at stake in what is, after all, a careful attempt to translate a notably difficult work into a powerful, rapidly evolving medium?
 
In fact, Snyder’s film does not belong among the hothouse flowers, and ought to be considered as much for its significant departures from Moore and Gibbons as for its uncanny ability to translate their conception to the IMAX Experience. We should take the film seriously, if only because, in the mortal words of the Comedian, “It’s all a joke.” In fact, a particular joke comes to mind.
 

(1) Check out this act!

 
The joke to which the Comedian refers (though not yet the one of which I speak) is the central crime in Moore and Gibbons’ graphic novel: a massively destructive prank involving teleportation, a giant artificial organism, and psychic fallout designed to induce post-traumatic nightmares. (As will be apparent, the jokes under discussion here are not strictly speaking funny.) This horrible trick provides a gravitational center for the constellation of doublings, pratfalls, taunts, and twisted recognitions that illuminate the panels of Watchmen. In most if not all these instances, the operative trope is savage irony, as in the bloodstained smiley button with which the comic opens, resonating against the psychotic anti-hero Rorschach’s claim to know the “true face” of the city. Echoes and variations ripple through succeeding pages in passing references to faces, smiles, and bloodstains. At its most ambitious, this trope gives us the memorable moment in the Martian crater Galle, where the disintegration of Dr. Manhattan’s clockwork flying machine produces a planet-scale model of the stained icon, laid out as the point-of-view zooms steadily up from the planet, though unperceived by the figures who occupy the scene (Moore and Gibbons, chapter IX, pages 26-28).²
 
These juxtapositions and cross-cuttings, and the deep logic of double meaning to which they answer, evolve naturally from Moore’s basic approach to comics art, which he has described as a particular design idiom, or “under-language”:
 

What it comes down to in comics is that you have complete control of both the verbal track and the image track, which you don’t have in any other medium, including film. So a lot of effects are possible which simply cannot be achieved anywhere else. You control the words and the pictures -and more importantly -you control the interplay between those two elements in a way which not even film can achieve. There’s a sort of “under-language” at work there, that is neither the “visuals” nor the “verbals,” but a unique effect caused by a combination of the two.
 

(Wiater and Bissette 162-3)

According to Moore, comics afford unmatched opportunities both for “interplay” and other sorts of play, especially puns, doublings, echoes, and other strategies for overloading the signifier. The fifth chapter of Watchmen, for instance, represents a graphic palindrome, in which the number and placement of panels on the first page represents a mirror reversal of those on the last, the second reversing the penultimate, and so forth. The centerfold spread in this remarkable design, the two innermost pages, presents an X or chiasmus (or perhaps two mirrored Vs), a figure that simultaneously incites and frustrates interpretation.³ As Moore says, this type of design language seems unique to comics. Just try anything like it at 24 frames per second.

 
Yet that is, more or less, what Zack Snyder and company have attempted, and their remarkable feat of cinematic chutzpah sets up the dark joke to which we are coming. Despite the reputation Snyder has earned for textual fidelity from his previous film, 300, Moore remained hostile to the Watchmen project. Asked for comment a few months before its release, he offered this view of the relationship between comics and the movie business:
 

There are three or four companies now that exist for the sole purpose of creating not comics, but storyboards for films. It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise. Comics are just a sort of pumpkin patch growing franchises that might be profitable for the ailing movie industry.
 

(Boucher)

Those who have tuned their receivers to the resonance frequency of irony may need to drop the gain a bit, because Moore’s observation pins the needle in the red. It is hard to imagine a twist of fate quite so pure, intense, and nasty. If Moore is right (and the point seems at least plausible), the relationship between film studios and comics publishers has become more than usually corrupt. Leading publishers no longer care about comics in and of themselves, that is, as explorations of the under-language, but only as storyboards, the genetic material of films and other franchise commodities. Yet here, among the stack of stock-keeping units, we have a movie called Watchmen, a likely commercial success, and creditable on a technical level as well. Its general design and visual texture are remarkably faithful to the graphic novel. Time and again, key panels from the comic are reproduced with apparently obsessive precision. Overall, the outcome could have been much worse (see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or better yet, don’t).

 
It would seem to follow, then, that Watchmen is one of the most successful storyboards in cinematic history. The man who curses Hollywood has, entirely against his will, produced something of great value to his adversaries. This is, to one way of looking, simply our old friend the political economy of the sign: same as it ever was, infinitely capable of subsuming any impulse to critical distance, or difference. Or, if we retain some capacity for resentment, we might describe the situation as an irony worthy of Alan Moore. To find a more egregious case, we would have to turn to truly historic instances: the face of Che Guevara on a billion sweatshop T-shirts, or the relics of the saints.
 
Ironies on this scale demand an approach both cosmic and comic. On the one hand, they call to mind the phenomenon called a singularity, an infinitely dense point that swallows everything within its gravitational grasp. Welcome to late- (or end-?) stage capitalism, where as Thomas Friedman says, the world is truly flat: spun down into an accretion disk circling the central, all-devouring maw, a scenario ruled by that other great law of cultural physics: Never give a saga an even break. As noted, there seems to be a deep correspondence between cosmology and comedy. So the singularity has its correlative in the world of stand-up comedians. It is the dirtiest joke in the world, popularly known as “The Aristocrats.”
 
Here is the general form of the joke, which is traditionally told serially by a group of comedians, each trying to extend or embellish the previous effort: A family act auditions for a talent agent. The agent is unimpressed with the standard performance. When he asks what else the performers can do, family members present a series of bizarre sex acts, a sort of Homeric catalog of organs, orifices, parts, products, and possibilities, which grows more extensive with each iteration of the joke. The punchline is both obligatory and largely meaningless. When the last perversion has been performed, the agent asks what the act is called. The answer is, The Aristocrats!
 
Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza’s documentary about this joke (2005) makes two things very clear. First, the joke is not especially funny. Second, it says something profound about the entertainment industry and the culture in which it operates. The Aristocrats joke is the black hole rendered into language, a limitless accretor of charged expression. It is the very emblem of the process that spirals in from the funny papers, to the comics houses, to the movie studios, ultimately reaching the central anomaly, an infinite concentration of transnational capital. As we have said, Watchmen has now passed the event horizon of this economic catastrophe. Thus Moore’s tour de force of cosmic irony has been fed into its own trope, ironically fueling the industry its author abominates. Watchmen thus collapses into that general version of The Aristocrats, joke without end, that we call contemporary entertainment. We could say, with every measure of regret, that the joke is now on Alan Moore; but to leave matters here would minimize a complex situation that deserves further treatment. The cosmic joke is not simply on Moore, but perhaps on all of us.
 

(2) A stronger loving world

 
Several times in the graphic novel, Moore and Gibbons use the print equivalent of a match cut, where a shot of a character in one context dissolves to a new scene or point in time, the character’s position and posture unchanged. This effect, like most of Watchmen‘s semiotic signatures, answers to a general principle of similarity-in-difference which is the logical underpinning of irony. The greatest divergence between comic and film lies with the machinations of Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias), the story’s world-conquering supervillain. Both film and graphic novel include passing references to an episode of the 1960s television series, The Outer Limits, entitled “The Architects of Fear” (first aired October 30, 1963, a year after the Cuban missile crisis). In the TV episode, a scientific cabal contrives a phony alien invasion to convince the superpowers to end nuclear conflict in the interest of planetary defense. This is, of course, very like Veidt’s plot in the graphic novel.⁴ Veidt teleports a gigantic, telepathic lifeform to an address on 7th Avenue in New York. The creature dies in agony, unleashing a psychic pulse that kills every person in the vicinity, leaving millions subject to recurrent nightmares about invaders from another dimension. The apparently alien corpus delicti, and the piles of dead bodies choking the streets (as Veidt has promised in an earlier advertising slogan: “I WILL GIVE YOU BODIES BEYOND YOUR WILDEST IMAGINING”), give tangible evidence of a cosmic threat, securing the new peace.
 
If Moore’s architecture of fear is Rococco (or perhaps Deconstructionist), Hayter, Tse, and Snyder offer something more along Bauhaus lines. They eliminate the giant, cloned psychic brain, oneiric fallout, and any suggestion of interdimensional travel. Instead, the attack on New York (in the film, one of several world capitals struck simultaneously) involves a more conventional weapon of mass destruction. In the film, Veidt teleports to each of his targets a device that apparently applies the same intrinsic-field nullification that transforms physicist Jon Osterman into the superbeing called Dr. Manhattan. Veidt evidently builds his cosmic bombs from a prototype power reactor given him by the blue superman. The devices are said to leave an “energy signature” tying them indisputably to Dr. Manhattan.
 
No doubt this change in the narrative was dictated primarily by the need to keep the film’s running time under three hours; but even so, the revisions change the story in very important ways. For starters, Dr. Manhattan becomes central to the film’s plot, while in the graphic novel he remains essentially incidental, in spite of his superhuman abilities. In the comic, once Veidt has deceived him into withdrawing to Mars, Dr. Manhattan has no immediate significance for humanity. Though he makes several important appearances on the comic’s stage (silently blessing the union of Laurie Juspeczyk and Dan Dreiberg; blasting Rorschach out of existence), he plays no direct role in Veidt’s Alexandrian master-stroke, beyond failing to stop it (indeed, there is always Moore irony).
 
The situation in the film is radically different. Here, Veidt does not simply distract Dr. Manhattan in order to pull off a bizarre prank; rather, Veidt makes Dr. Manhattan the focus of the fraud, the butt of his massively murderous joke. Veidt produces Dr. Manhattan as the alien threat, appropriating the destructive component of his superpower to devastate the world’s great cities. Like his print predecessor, Veidt encourages the superman to remove himself from the new society; but the film’s Veidt goes a crucial step further, converting Dr. Manhattan’s absent presence into a source of world-dominating power, both political and thermodynamic. In the film, Dr. Manhattan is not merely tricked into exile; he is stripped of his charisma as the condition for a new world order.
 
The realignment of the plot in the film makes a considerable difference for the overall shape of the narrative. This impact is most clearly visible in the concluding scene, which is nearly identical in both versions. The last moments take place in the editorial offices of The New Frontiersman, defined in the comic as a radical right-wing tabloid. Incensed at the US-Soviet detente that has followed Veidt’s coup, and desperate for material to print, the editor assigns his assistant, Seymour, to fill a hole in the upcoming issue with an item from a “crank pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. The top item in this pile (which evidently works on a Last In, First Out basis) is the journal compiled by Rorschach and committed to the mails before his final confrontation with Veidt. The journal contains a complete account of Rorschach’s investigations, including a direct indictment of Veidt, backed up by business and financial details.
 
In the final panel as well as in the final frame, Seymour reaches for Rorschach’s book, teasing us with the possibility that the world is about to See More, though there is (in either case) no more Moore to see. Yet for all its visual fidelity, this moment reads very differently on the screen than it does on the page.
 
In the graphic novel, publication of the journal may destabilize Veidt’s balance of terror, by starting an investigation that could unravel the threads of his fraud. Once the phony alien in New York is debunked, there will be no threat from beyond the stars to constrain nuclear brinksmanship. Rorschach’s journal thus represents a terrible presence: quite possibly a truly ultimate weapon, or Doomsday Book.
 
In the film, however, prospects seem both happier and more deeply perverse. Even if we assume exposure and prosecution of Veidt (an enterprise that would likely demand cooperation of both adversarial powers), the foundation of his bloody peace would almost certainly survive. The Veidt of the film does not invent aliens from space, but rather demonstrates the murderous potential of a real superbeing, using aspects of his own power. In both comic and film, Dr. Manhattan remains at large, whereabouts unknown; but in the film, this absence constitutes an impending threat. No matter what befalls Adrian Veidt, any future geopolitics must account for his possible return. After Veidt’s horrible Halloween prank, the world will always live in fear of Dr.Manhattan’s judgment-in every sense of the word.
 
Read on this level, Snyder and company’s ending seems to improve on Moore’s fatalistic vision. The joke we have just heard may be The Aristocrats, yet we may smile all the same, at least on first presentation. Perhaps, in this regard, the Watchmen film simply reflects the enormous cultural difference between the late 1980s (Thatcher, Reagan, and the climax of the Cold War) and the post-Millennium years (the decade of 9/11). Since a visually faithful adaptation of Watchmen must include the Twin Towers in its cityscape, as well as images of mass murder in New York, some avoidance or tropism seems in order. So the film’s moment of mass murder features bodies gracefully rising from the ground, not falling from the skies, before they disintegrate without trace. After the attack, we see a giant, hemispherical crater (an image unique to the film), but none of those no-longer-unimaginable bodies that might affront audience sensibilities. The extension of Veidt’s holocaust to sites beyond New York also seems consonant with this process.
 
Yet for all its careful evasions of real, historical horror, the Watchmen film nonetheless proceeds from, and reproduces, a distinctly post-9/11 ideology. Moore insists on the implausibility of any utopia, while Snyder and company seem attuned to a different Realpolitik. By re-engineering Moore’s implausible plot, the architects of the film imagine a more durable and impenetrable balance of terror. Their world will live in constant fear of further attack even if it learns the first incidents were spurious. The implications seem clear enough. The film gives us terror absolute, terror metastatic, terror as inevitable condition of everyday life. The revelation-proof utopia of the Watchmen film thus offers a rather clear portrait of the current world order-a recognition that might wipe away our initial smile.
 

(3) Picture book strange loop

 
If these connections to 9/11 and the Homeland Security State seem too far-fetched for a discussion of popular entertainment, we might instead consider the divergence of comic and film as a matter of media and technology. Here again, the altered status of Dr. Manhattan seems crucial. In both versions, he withdraws from the world before the final scenes; but as we have seen, this fact reads differently in each. In the comic, the world becomes obsessed with invaders from beyond the stars, shifting the balance of anxiety away from Dr. Manhattan. By the end of the book, he is gone and largely forgotten. In the film there is no such displacement: Dr. Manhattan becomes World Enemy Number One, so his absence exerts a paradoxical presence. Though gone, he is unforgettable (as an ad in the comic for one of Veidt’s perfumes declares, Oh how the ghost of you lingers!). Moore subjects the superhero to something like deconstruction, laying bare the limits of his relationship to humanity, and ultimately abstracting him from our experience. By contrast, Snyder and company weave the absent superbeing into the heart of their new world order, producing something more like apotheosis.
 
Anyone who has been monitoring the development of cinefantastique over the last thirty years may detect a parable here. Dr. Manhattan is in every sense a virtual superman; and as far as the industry of spectacle is concerned, we can say actual as well. The great blue nude of Snyder’s film is an elegant amalgam of old-fashioned, carbon-based acting (Billy Crudup’s remarkable characterization) and computer-generated imagery (CGI). Close-ups featuring the character’s disconcerting, actively scintillating eyes take us deep into the so-called Uncanny Valley, where CGI efforts historically come to grief; yet Snyder’s reintegrated superman seems monstrously unstoppable, both in the world of his story, and perhaps in ours. Those eyes are deeply disturbing, but hard to erase from memory.
 
Dr. Manhattan belongs to a proliferating line of comic-book and fantasy figures (Jar-Jar Binks, Gollum, Ray Winstone’s Beowulf, most of the Marvel superheroes) who populate the leading edge of Posthuman Hollywood. Precisely where this front is headed remains a matter of speculation. The recent finale of Battlestar Galactica, with its montage of Japanese robotica insinuating that even now Cylons walk among us, may prove as prophetic as it is corny. Gibson’s Idoru comes to mind, leading one to wonder whether a state that elects character actors and other players (Reagan, Schwarzenegger) might someday be led by a Non-Player Character. So perhaps it is fitting that Snyder, Hayter, and Tse refocus the plot of Watchmen to center on their indestructible, ineluctable superman. Whether or not the Watchmen film says anything about the contemporary politics of terror, it certainly reflects a cinematic watershed. To update Super Powers and the Superpowers: the superman exists, and he’s digital.
 
Perhaps the two versions of Watchmen belong to different aesthetic contexts, divided not so much by the transition from Cold War to War on Terror, as by another Millennial passage. Consider a second offering from the discontented winter of 2009, this one by the blogger Clay Shirky:
 

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves-the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public-has stopped being a problem.
 

(Shirky)

As Rorschach might say, an industry died in New York last night-or in Denver, or in Seattle, and if Shirky is right, all round the networked world. This obituary for the publishing business casts stark light on many matters covered here: on the one hand, on Moore’s lament about the decline of comics into a “pumpkin patch,” and on the other, on the epiphany of the CGI superman that shines through the film’s plot changes. Above all, though, this apocalyptic note rings out over the final visual signature of both comic and film, that moment when Seymour reaches for a fatal or futile book.

 
While the book in the comic seems dire, in the film it is more of a grace note. We might extend this diegetic or literal reading to higher levels as well, turning from the message to its mediation. The final image in the comic represents a last, emphatic assertion of Moore’s ironic master-trope: the convergence of opposites, or as it is often called in Watchmen, Fearful Symmetry. Here is a picture of a book that has not been opened, completing the last page of a book that is about to close. Like most other points of convergence in the comic, this moment is haunted by Rorschach, whose “face” is marked by mirror shapes. By the end of the story, Rorschach has been revealed as the man who knew too much, so when he symbolically reappears, we should prepare for dire enlightenment. Yet the subject of this final revelation may be not so much the world, as the work itself. Though Rorschach’s journal is very different from the graphic novel in which it is imagined, it seems fair to say the final image of the book refers at least obliquely or artifactually to the comic-which is, after all, the book we are holding in our hand, as we study an image of a hand and a book. Read in this way, Moore’s Watchmen goes out with a glowering reminder of the power of reading, writing, and perhaps the “under-language” of comics.
 
By definition, the film cannot produce this immediate self-reference, since it abducts Watchmen into a very different medium. The film’s final recourse to the image of a book risks a certain nostalgia. Nostalgia (the pain of memory) implies loss or devaluation. Moore complains of cinematic “spoon feeding” (Boucher) and the writer and comics artist Adam Cadre notes that for all the visual genius of the film, its messages are thrown serially across a giant screen, not deployed in an elegant, convoluted sign-system that demands artful discovery (Cadre). Since these points seem undeniable, it is easy to feel a certain cynicism about the film’s reproduction of Seymour and the book. Perhaps the final tableau, viewed on the IMAX screen, comes down to nothing more than this: Hey kids, hope you enjoyed the movie-remember to read a book now and then: preferably a comic from the DC division of Warner Brothers!
 
Having sunk this far, those of my generation (especially academics) may slip readily into the next stage of descent, which has been named the Gutenberg Elegy (Birkerts). How sad, goes the whinging chorus, that we have fallen away from the good, old world of books-even comic books. If one were persuaded by cultural conservatives in the last, or indeed in the present administration, that reading is imperiled by new technologies, or by the collapse of commercial publishing, one might beg space for Alan Moore aboard Professor Bloom’s Ark-not that any berth would be found, even far below the waterline, or that Moore would accept such passage.
 
Not to put too fine a point on it: whinging never helps. If any past master deserves remembrance here, it is not Gutenberg the goldsmith, but William Blake the prophet, grand master of fantasy comics avant la lettre. Further, there seems no particular reason to mourn, since unlike the Blake of Watchmen (the Comedian who dies in New York), the Blake of our visionary tradition seems very much alive, at least in certain hearts and minds. Not for nothing is Alan Moore’s current work in progress a massive project called Jerusalem (Boucher).
 
One clear indication of Blake’s spiritual survival may be Alan Moore’s notoriously renegade stance toward the popular culture industry, illustrated by his staunch refusal to view any film made from his work. Who watches the Watchmen? Not Alan Moore. Moore’s refusal to participate in the industry of spectacle strikes a bright line between page and screen, in spite of all attempts to confuse them. His feud with the film business asks those of us who care about his writings to keep them out of the pumpkin patch, remembering that they are formally challenging, highly original efforts, not simply frozen embryos of movies.
 
Yet, as we have seen, for all its revolutionary consciousness, Moore’s ending is at least potentially less hopeful than Snyder and company’s. His numinous book may open to ultimate revelation or Apocalypse, evoking, as Moore quotes John Cale, “a stronger loving world to die in.” On the other hand, the film’s book seems more likely the image of a new world order, a stable dominion, albeit one of architectural terror.
 
Such is, in effect, the way we live now, and perhaps there is something to be said for making the best of it. If we swap elegy for paean, it might be possible to elicit a more hopeful reading from the final image of the Watchmen film. Where the comic offers Fearful Symmetry, perhaps, if we can avoid the pitfall of cynicism, the film might supply a less ominous pattern. Specifically, the film’s repetitious return to the book might constitute what Douglas Hofstadter calls a Strange Loop:
 

an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.
 

(Hofstadter, 101-102)

Applying Hofstadter’s terms, the “upwards movement in a hierarchy” would be the transition from the old medium of ink and paper to the brave new world of polygons and bits. The paradox or strangeness would manifest on two levels, literal and symbolic, the first supplied by the image of the book, the second by the mechanism of absent presence, which Snyder and company have made even more prominent in their version than in the original. In the most immediate sense, this absent presence is Rorschach, author of the Doomsday book, whose identity is always linked to his mirror opposite, Dr. Manhattan, the present absence of Watchmen‘s world order. Behind both these figures, however, lies the ultimate uninvited guest: Alan Moore, whose credit you will not find in the marathon roll that follows the final shot.

 
The “strangeness and charm” of this procedure (to borrow Moore’s borrowed language) lies in the paradoxical reassertion of primary genius against overcoming or obsolescence. No matter how plausible or faithful its appropriation, the film does not fully displace the comic book, or indeed, its author. Things might perhaps have been different had Moore signed on with the American dream machine, but to his lasting credit, he refused. So when we come back to the book, in the radically different context of Zack Snyder’s posthuman epic, we are, in Hofstadter’s sense, closing the uncanny circuit. We may not be “exactly where we started out,” but we must acknowledge certain lingering presences.
 
If we manage to see the film’s bibliophanic moment as a “level-crossing feedback loop” then perhaps there is some hope for narrative, after all, even in the Valley of the Uncanny, among all those strange faces with deeply spooky eyes. Dr. Manhattan, the latest poster-boy of CGI, is not the only spectre haunting our technological sublime. Alan Moore is out there, too, channeling William Blake, casting spells and curses, continuing to cover the page. If we have to bury Gutenberg, or newspapers and publishing houses-and perhaps someday, in these increasingly hard times, even the mighty Warner Brothers-the idea of magical, subversive texts will remain.
 
Irony survives the death of irony, if by no other process then through the perdurably perverse logic of the World’s Dirtiest Joke, whereby, the poet advises from Hell, “the most sublime act is to set another before you” (Blake 151). If absence can be presence in the Rorschach space of modern media, then obsolescence can just as well signify vitality. Snyder and company may offer what is, logically considered, an impotent parody of Moore’s book of revelation; but their inversion reminds us that other works, other worlds, and other revelations remain to be produced. No invention is final, no weapon ultimate, no act so sublime (or obscene) that it cannot be topped by the next guy. So we may imagine, in the mental frames that always roll off after the end of any film, books of the future, both wonderful and terrible.
 
Perhaps these are books of new strangeness and charm, the kind that never appear in print. In any case, we read on.
 
Who watches these watchmen?
 
We’re the Aristocrats!
 

Perhaps the most iconic cinematic image of manhood from the days of the presidency of George Bush 41 (1989-1993) is that of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular cyborg in the ad for the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, sitting atop a motorcycle, wearing a black leather jacket, black T-shirt, and black sunglasses from whose left lens a red point of light glows, an enormous phallus of a gun held in his right hand and pointed aggressively upwards, the entire image darkly swathed in an ominous blue-black neon glow. The image encapsulates the menace and might of Schwarzenegger’s newly rearticulated identity as a futuristic killing machine. Always a bit of joke in such films as Stay Hungry (1976) and Conan the Barbarian (1982) and its sequel, Schwarzenegger benefited from James Cameron’s innovative use of him as the implacable Terminator in the 1984 film of that name, a sleeper box-office hit and one of the great films of the 80s. But, as Schwarzenegger told talk-show hosts unironically when he campaigned for the 1991 sequel, he was now playing a “kinder, gentler Terminator.” This sequel, Schwarzenegger suggested, had been tailored to fit the ideological and rhetorical design of the Bush presidency. In the first film, Schwarzenegger’s cyborg, returning from a future in which machines bent on eradicating all the remnants of human life rule the earth, was an unstoppable agent sent to kill the woman, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose unborn child, to be named John, would eventually lead the human resistance against the machines. In contrast, Schwarzenegger’s cyborg killer in the sequel is the hero, programmed to save the now teen-aged John Connor. The cyborg, to be sure, retains his uncouth instincts to destroy all in his path, and must be counseled by sarcastic but sensitive John in murder-etiquette. This kinder, gentler Terminator learns not to annihilate the hapless humans who inconvenience him but, with cybernetically enhanced precision, merely to wound them in non-vital areas. The spectacle of crippled, wounded, whimpering, maimed men, lying at the feet of the looming Terminator, is an exact image of its time. As J. Hoberman writes, “Politically, Terminator 2 suggests the merging of Schwarzenegger and Schwarzkopf, techno-war and Technicolor. This is truly the Desert Storm of action flicks” (qtd. in Rushing and Frentz 201). I think that this film’s associations with war extend beyond Desert Storm to World War II and its cultural afterlife, specifically its images of fascism and the Nazi. Fusing tropes of Nazism in American popular culture with its homoerotic tableaux, tableaux embedded in the construction of fascism, Terminator 2 is a pivotal text poised between the backward-looking Reagan years, in which a Classic Hollywood star turned national leader presided over the nation, and the era of both postmodern techno-war and postgay articulations of sexual identity.
 
In his famous essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Leo Bersani argues against the utopian impulses in queer theory-as evinced by Jeffrey Weeks’s argument for the “radical pluralism” of homosexuality-to celebrate the socially progressive aspects of queer culture. Bersani writes
 

It has frequently been suggested in recent years that such things as the gay-macho style, the butch-fem couple, and gay and lesbian sado-masochism, far from expressing unqualified and uncontrollable complicities with a brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity, or with the heterosexual couple permanently locked into a power structure of male sexual and social mastery over female sexual and social passivity, or, finally, with fascism, are in fact subversive parodies of the very formations and behaviors they appear to ape. Such claims, which have been the subject of lively and intelligent debate, are, it seems to me, totally aberrant.
 

(207)

As Bersani points out, these claims ignore the troubling possibility that such phenomena as “the gay commitment to machismo” reveals that queer desire runs the risk “of idealizing” (208) the very forms of gendered identity that condemns queer desire in the first place. Bersani continues:

The logic of homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man’s enemies. . . . a sexual desire for men can’t be merely a kind of culturally neutral attraction to a Platonic Idea of the male body; the object of that desire necessarily includes a socially determined and socially pervasive definition of what it means to be a man.
 

(208-9)

If what we desire as queer men and women is precisely implicated in the very constructions of gendered identity we must challenge and attempt to topple in order to secure our erotic and social freedom, our path to this liberation, Bersani argues, is hardly a clear-cut one. It can only be “a struggle not only against definitions of maleness and of homosexuality as they are reiterated and imposed in a heterosexist social discourse, but also against those very same definitions so seductively and so faithfully reflected by those (in large part culturally invented and elaborated) male bodies that we carry within us as permanently renewable sources of excitement” (“Rectum” 209).

 
In this essay, I argue that films like Terminator 2 enact the queer theory debates indexed in Bersani’s essay, forcing queer desirers to acknowledge the complicity with normative standards of gendered identity in our desiring, but also exposing the queer nature of these normative standards. After all, any viewer of the film is asked to marvel at and share in the spectacle of myriad forms of masculine perfection in the film, ranging from Edward Furlong’s all-American boy ephebe to Schwarzenegger’s hypermasculine cyborg to the Aryan perfection of Robert Patrick’s more advanced T-1000 to Linda Hamilton’s futuristically jacked, hypermaculinized womanhood. The film incites desire for the varieties of male beauty, albeit in a prescribed version. Maleness-in these properly Aryan forms, of course-becomes a smorgasbord of visual delights in this film, an ever-beckoning display of queer delectation for the whole family. Terminator 2 is a family film that reoedipalizes its audience by presenting the Father as a kinder, gentler Terminator; as a perverse family film, it remakes the family in its own queer image. The film forces us to acknowledge that while queer desire may be troublingly complicit in the structures of normative power that pathologize it, those very same structures proceed from an oddly analogous fascination with the homoerotics of power, especially in its most virulent, which is to say, its fascist, form. Terminator 2 cloaks its sadomasochistic fascist fantasies in the guise of the violent, melodramatic family film. In that lies the sickening allure of this duplicitous and agonized film, an allure that promises covert queer themes within the film’s allusive system of unacknowledgeable yet undeniable fascist images.
 
The present essay emerges from a larger study of the representation of masculinity in Hollywood film of the “Bush to Bush” era-from 1989 to 2008, the period presided over by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. My study examines the fate of the figure Susan Jeffords discovers, in her important study Hard Bodies, at the threshold of the Bush I era, the “New Man,” who represents a break with 1980s hardbody masculinism. The Beast of Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast metonymically represents this new development in cinematic manhood: “He is the New Man, the one who can transform himself from the hardened, muscle-bound, domineering man of the eighties into the considerate, loving, and self-sacrificing man of the nineties” (Jeffords 153). Shifting the focus to Terminator 2, Jeffords prophetically glimpses what would be the result of this seeming innovation in manhood: “The film’s complex reasonings supply a ‘new’ direction for masculinity, not, as in the 1980s, outward into increasingly extravagant spectacles of violence and power (as Rambo and Ronald Reagan showed, these displays had become self-parody), but inward, into increasingly emotional displays of masculine sensitivities, traumas, and burdens” (172). The New Man of the 1990s, argues Jeffords, shifts “the ground away from the externalities through which [masculine] logic had been defined in the 1980s to the ‘new’ internal qualities of the more ‘human’ man” (176). “But,” she continues,
 

this is not a simple negation but rather a rewriting, a repetition, a retelling of the story of masculinity… And though that rewriting seems on its surface to be a rejection of so many spectacular identifications of masculinity of the 1980s-technology, violence, power, command, strength-its mainframe is still very similar: the reproduction of masculine authority (now freed from civil authority) through the affirmation of individualism.
 

(176)

If film is the language in which nations dream, and if dreams are indeed wish fulfillments, as Freud taught us, Terminator 2 is a dream of American manhood that fulfills a wish to combine the “hard, stoic, isolate” and “killer” American manhood of D.H. Lawrence (65) with a newly awakened sensitivity. This unwieldy fantasy of reconciling killer with nurturing instincts continues to play out in American movies and in the national construction of gender in the inter-Bush years.

The Cyborg as Queer Allegory

 
Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny has proven extraordinarily suggestive for studies of the cyborg. Following Freud’s formulation of the uncanny, Bruce Grenville writes that
 

the cyborg is uncanny not because it is unfamiliar or alien, but rather because it is all too familiar. It is the body doubled-doubled by the machine that is so common, so familiar, so ubiquitous, and so essential that it threatens to consume us, to destroy our links to nature and history, and quite literally, especially in times of war, to destroy the body itself and replace it with its uncanny double.
 

(20-21)

The greatest threat the cyborg poses is that its danger is too familiar to be readily recognized and “worse yet, we may be unnaturally attracted to it” (Grenville 21). Donna Haraway has described her influential feminist “cyborg myth” as being “about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (154). Haraway’s utopian cyborg emerges as the result of “three crucial boundary breakdowns”: human/animal, animal-human/machine, and physical/non-physical (151). As such, “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (154). But the Terminator films are afraid, very afraid, of a cyborg world, seeing it as decidedly dystopian.

 
The cyborg has emerged as one of the most productive topics for postmodern work on feminism, race, class, and gender. As the most important and sustained cyborg narrative in Hollywood film, the Terminator films, particularly the first two, continue to demand a considerable amount of critical scrutiny. When the highly charged allegorical power of the figure of the cyborg is added to Schwarzenegger’s star persona, now evolved into that of national political figure, this persona emerges as a welter of gendered, sexual, and racial anxieties that relate in multivalent ways. “Arnold’s ability to insinuate himself into any discourse or any metaphoric moment or any narrative thread is a remarkable feature of his stardom,” write Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz (22). Such an understanding of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator-like ability to infiltrate discourses and cultural spaces relates to an important aspect of the Terminator’s metaphorical value: the human-metal cyborg serves as an allegory for sexual “passing” and closeted homosexuality. Able to pass as human but containing within him a secret identity destructive to human life, the Terminator, the enemy of human reproductivity, is an unstable and challenging metaphor for queer people. Moreover, the cyborg-as-superman-the heightened, cartoonish version of manhood represented by the hypermasculine Terminator image-allows us to consider the nature of queer desire. Like Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” written between the release of the two Terminator films, the Terminator films themselves fuse themes of fetishism and gay desire. The queer cyborg of these films, in its utterly adamant opposition to futurity, can be read, in the paradigms of Lee Edelman, as the embodiment of the queer death drive.¹
 
Terminator 2 occupies a central allegorical position in the cultural effort to denature homoerotic imagery so that it can be redeployed for mass-consumption, in order to effect, in the words of Michael DeAngelis, the “accommodation of homosexual and heterosexual positions of spectatorial access” (157). The Terminator’s association with leather culture is the most vivid indication of its fusion of straight and gay sensibilities. As DeAngelis writes, the cultural “configuration of black leather as an element of gay culture . . . has no inherent or exclusive associations with homosexuality” (157). But the postwar leather phenomenon “was appropriated by emerging gay biker clubs in the 1950s” (157).² William Friedkin’s 1981 film Cruising appeared to associate leather-clad gay men with violence in the popular mind.³ The Terminator films draw on longstanding cultural fantasies of gay leather culture but also on the denaturing straight appropriations of this culture to produce a hybrid new masculine identity that embraces hypermasculinity while attempting to keep homoerotic energies and associations at bay-a wobbly enterprise, indeed. Adding to its leather-daddy themes, the film’s dependence on tropes of biker masculinity corresponds to overlapping fixations in gay S/M subcultures. “Images of bikers started cropping up in homoerotic physique magazines of the 1950s,” writes Juan A. Suárez, in “elaborate fetishistic scenarios” (156): “the physicality of the biker contrasted with the effeminacy, frailty, and neuroticism attributed to homosexuals both in popular representations and medical and psychological discourses” (158). In addition to representing fused straight and gay iconographies of manhood, Terminator 2 provides extraordinarily vivid evidence of the resurgence of an interest in fascist iconography in Bush-to-Bush films, which here bears directly on its appropriation of homoerotic imagery. Discussing his difficulty in explaining his project of the linkages between fascism and homosexuality in modernity, Andrew Hewitt notes the response he would sometimes receive: “Oh, now I get it! You mean leather and S&M, and all that stuff!…” (3). Hewitt’s project reminds us that fascism used homosexuals as objects and victims; Terminator 2 redeploys gay leather and S&M imagery appropriations of fascist iconographies for newly proto-fascist purposes. Indeed, all the Terminator films, but especially the first sequel, revisit the imagery of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s disturbing Scorpio Rising (1964), another film that may be said to fuse leather, biker, and S/M iconographies in a manner suggestive of the controversial overlap between Nazism and homosexuality. “The Nazi imagery in the film,” writes Suárez, “assimilates the bikers to Nazi troopers on the basis of their violence and gang-like structure” (164). If juvenile delinquent John Connor stands in for the “nihilistic and mutinous young outlaw” in search of a leader, the two Terminators stand in for the leaders whose guidance may result in fascism. Like Anger’s film, Cameron’s demonstrates the “connection between totalitarianism and kitsch” (Suárez 165). Indeed, Terminator 2 can be described as, to use Andrew Hewitt’s phrase, “fascist kitsch” (206).⁴
 
Schwarzenegger’s star image provides the fascist logic of the Terminator films. As Yvonne Tasker writes, Schwarzenegger embodies “two poles, of excess and narcissism on the one hand, ‘heroic health’ on the other, [that] can be seen to provide the limits for the meaning of the muscular body” in cinema and popular culture. He has been widely admired by the American public for the latter qualities. Yet admiration
 

quickly shifts into unease, which shifts into speculation about the appeal of Schwarzenegger to the masses of America. In particular Schwarzenegger’s foreignness, his immigrant status, carries [for critics like Ian Penman, who sees Schwarzenegger as “American Fascist art exemplified, embodied,”] disturbing associations of a Nazi past, a Europe from which so many fled . . . . [reminding] us of the appeal that Nazi art made to an idealized classical culture.
 

(Tasker 81-2)

Terminator 2 signals that along with an increasingly less covert deployment of homoerotic imagery in Hollywood films came the volatile cultural baggage associated, most often perniciously, with this imagery. Given that Schwarzenegger’s own star manhood synthesizes fascistic and homoerotic themes, Terminator 2 represents an overdetermination of linkages among hypermasculine bodies, homoeroticism, and the fascist manifestations of both.

Homoerotics of The Fascist Male Body

 
We can consider Terminator 2 as a recent example of the fictions of eroticized fascism created by nonfascists (if Cameron can be given the benefit of the doubt) treated by Laura Frost in her discussion of modernist texts. Frost distinguishes between historical fascism, with its ever present real-world threat, fictionalized modernist fascism, and the “pure literary masochism on the Sacher-Masoch model” (36). The chief fascist figures of Terminator 2, like those in modernist novels, undergo “transformations, often switching from aggression to submission”-this is clearly the case in Schwarzenegger’s cyborg and to a certain extent of Sarah and even the T-1000. These transformations, however, never occur in Sacher-Masoch:
 

when the masochist’s manipulations are unmasked or the “torturer” is submissive, the scene is over. . . . In Sacher-Masoch’s texts, the “tormentor” must always be coaxed into playing her role; in fictions of eroticized fascism, the fascist figure is historically circumscribed as unremittingly cruel. However, in [fictional erotic scenarios], a passive or sexually compelling fascist can be imagined.
 

(36)

These works of “imaginatively distorted fascism” “play masochistically with fascism . . . . Fantasy makes possible a sexually responsive fascism and can transform enacted political violence into erotic sadomasochism” (Frost 36).⁵

 
In a particularly striking moment in the first Terminator, Kyle describes post-apocalyptic life in the machine-world hell to Sarah, and explains why the machines have targeted her for termination:
 

Most of us were rounded up, put in camps for orderly disposal. [Pulls up his right sleeve, exposing a mark.] This is burned in by laser scan. Some of us were kept alive… to work… loading bodies. The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever. But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink. His name is Connor. John Connor. Your son, Sarah, your unborn son.

The mark Reese shows Sarah, burnt into his skin, resembles a concentration-camp number. His description of the machines’  
relentless campaign to “exterminate” human life parallels the Third Reich’s program in WWII Germany to exterminate social undesirables like Jews, gypsies, the infirm, the mentally retarded, and homosexuals. Terminator 2‘s aesthetic constructions of manhood also informed the rise of fascism in World War II Germany. I would argue that the films’ uses of Schwarzenegger draw upon collective, popular images of Nazi masculinity, the image of the Nietzschean superman that the Nazis distorted for their own purposes. Terminator 2 all but explicitly develops these implicit themes in the first film, threatening to reveal the films’ secret-that they enshrine and fetishize fascist manhood-drawing upon as they disavow the homoeroticism that undergirds it.

 
In his essay “The Contemporary Political Use of Gay History: The Third Reich,” gay filmmaker and scholar Stuart Marshall reminds us of the overvaluation of Aryan masculinity and male friendship in the Nazi era in Germany. Aestheticizing and eroticizing “the masculine fighting man,” the Nazis “produced endless representations of male beauty for the populace to identify with or to idealize, most notably through their official art, which made frequent references to Hellenic Greek art and culture” (Marshall 79). The Hellenic masculine colossi of Arno Breker, the Official State Sculptor of the Nazi era, emblematized this interest. The German state did not equate the eroticism that undergirded the socially and politically necessary institutionalization of male friendship with sexuality but rather with “desexualized” and “cosmological love.” “But homoeroticism can easily become transmuted into homosexual desire, and this was the root of the Nazis’ problem” (Marshall 79-80). The homoerotic history of Nazi ideology demands a far denser scrutiny than can be provided here, but we can focus on a few salient points. All the Terminator films share Nazi Germany’s simultaneous adulation for and anxiety over the idealized nude form, and a desire to return to origins. The first three films open with sequences that depict the barren, laser-lit nightmarish nighttime world of our post-apocalyptic, machine-run future, in which enormous death-machines crunch their immense tires over rows of human skulls. We then see Terminators being born into our present, crouching in fetal positions that also resemble the cool tranquility of classical sculpture. (In sharp contrast, cries of anguish and a quivering body accompany human Reese’s “birth.”) Invited to admire their form without succumbing to baser voyeuristic impulses, what Freud called the “tormenting compulsion” to look at others’ genitals, we see nude Terminator bodies but no full-frontal nudity. (After repression sets in, the desire to see others’ genitals becomes a “tormenting compulsion.” Even more independent an impulse than scopophilia, cruelty comes easily to the child, for the affect of pity, like shame, develops late [Freud Three Essays 58-9].⁶) This device extends even into the time-travel-free Terminator Salvation (2009), which, through the wonders of digital technology, restores the massive Schwarzenegger-cyborg to his younger 1984 form, which we are invited to gape at anew in all of its naked perfection even as male frontal nudity remains decisively obscured.
 
Considering the work of art critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) as the foundation of the German cult of male beauty that culminated in the fascist movement, George L. Mosse describes the ways in which the Nazis resolved the problems posed by the fetishized image of the male nude, which threatened to inspire homoerotic feeling. Winckelmann “had already attempted to make his Greek sculptures acceptable to middle-class sensibilities by raising his naked youths to an abstract plane, transforming them into a stylistic principle.” Key to the minimization of these figures’ erotic impact was their “transparent whiteness” and tranquility. “Reese, what’s it like to go through time?” asks Sarah in the first film. “White light,” he responds, adding that he alone, being human, experiences pain in time travel. The white light of transparent classical beauty rendered potentially disturbingly erotic nudity into “universally valid and immutable symbols. The Nazis took up this argument and extended it,” making sure that when the male nude was displayed, male skin was always “hairless, smooth, and bronzed,” the body rendered “almost transparent,” in hope that “with as few individual features as possible, it would lose any sex appeal,” becoming an “abstract symbol of Aryan beauty, not unlike the athletes in Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Olympics” (Mosse 172-3). Given the supreme and idealized whiteness of all the Terminators, including Reese’s anti-Terminator human protector, the films may be said to constitute a revisiting of the Nazi problematics of beauty, with much the same result, an abstraction of nude physicality into mythic symbol. In the first film, the Schwarzenegger Terminator’s first confrontation, with punks in shabby clothes and Mohawk haircuts, pits his idealized form against their degenerate masculinity. When he dons their clothing, however, he symbolically merges his ideal form and their degeneracy, giving his first version of the Terminator a kind of punker trashiness, a hobo chic, one adumbrated by Reese’s stealing of a homeless man’s pants. But in Terminator 2, Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, though he steals clothes from a redneck-typed tough in a country and western bar, appears sleek and blemishless, a rarefied abstraction of his punk-trash former self. In fact, with his newly refined, cut-down physicality, no longer bulgingly Mr. Universe but now much more humanly proportionate, Schwarzenegger is, in some shots, very beautiful, almost, relatively speaking, femininely soft. His massive bulk a sign of vulnerability, Schwarzenegger provides an incoherent, disorienting sign of manhood here.
 
One of the commonplaces of the Hitler biography is that, as an Austrian with dark hair and features, he himself did not embody the model of Aryan perfection he promulgated as the universal standard. As an Austrian with dark hair and features, Schwarzenegger does not fully represent the master race of the Nazi ideal, either, even if he otherwise embodies the “superman.” For this reason, the T-1000 of Robert Patrick is especially fascinating as an upgrade of masculine perfection, the ideal Aryan “often compared to the ancient Greek ideal type,” who exemplifies heath in mind and body, pointing backward to a “healthy world before the onset of modernity.” The T-1000 comes closer than Schwarzenegger’s Terminator to copying the Nordic perfectionism of the ideal Nazi male, “tall and lean, with broad shoulders and small hips” (Mosse 169). Schwarzenegger’s cut cyborg body here seems like an attempt to match Patrick’s ideal measurements, but still emerges as a less perfect model of male physicality from a fascist perspective. It is little wonder that the T-1000 is a more advanced model, and Schwarzenegger, however hulking, the underdog; this conceit only makes sense from a racist perspective.
 
Terminator 2 draws on two of the most familiar images in gay iconography, both of which have fascist undertones: the leatherman and the cop. Given Schwarzenegger’s status as a cartoon of manhood, it is easy to see in Terminator 2 a kind of parodistic disposition towards the fascist male ideal, precisely because of its homoerotic overtones. The depiction of both Schwarzenegger’s and Robert Patrick’s bodies, competing perfectionist models of male physicality, recalls the classically chiseled bodies of Nazi art, but also of gay artists like Tom of Finland, who incorporates such iconography in his drawings of hypermasculine (yet strangely softened) men engaged in various baroque configurations of gay sex. Like Tom of Finland’s work, and also the theoretical work of queer theorists like Leo Bersani, Terminator 2 engages in the dangerously unstable project of drawing out the appeal of fascist manhood for gay men, an appeal then remanufactured as a spectacle for straight audiences. As such, the kinder, gentler Terminator 2 is a much less reassuring film than it would appear.
 
“Military life, as glorified by the Nazis, did indeed attract gay men,” writes Micha Ramakers in a study of Tom of Finland’s work, “the best-known example being Ernst Röhm’s doomed SA corps, which, at Hitler’s command, and with his personal involvement, was destroyed during the Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934). The attraction German soldiers-and their outfits-held over gay men also is clear from the work of a number of gay writers” (161). (We should note that while Röhm was gay and so were some SA officers, the SA eventually had around 3 million soldiers, so not all of its members can be assumed to have been gay.) Ramakers, in an exculpation of charges frequently brought forth against Tom of Finland, argues that his work cannot be equated with Nazi iconographer Arno Breker’s: “Tom’s work is dedicated to the glorification of the male body,” Ramakers argues, “in all its vulnerability: his bodies are constantly being penetrated in every possible way and through every orifice. In that sense they form the antithesis of the Nazi body, which was in every way a closed, impenetrable body” (165). If Breker’s “anti-bodies” express the Nazi fear and loathing of the corruptible body, the bodies in Tom’s work glorify, for Ramakers, “an abject form of corruption, indeed one persecuted by the Nazis” (165). Even if we appropriate Terminator 2 as a queer work that plays with the transgressive appeal of fascist forms of masculinity-the leatherman, the cop, and also the butch woman; even if we treat the film precisely not as Schwarzenegger and company would have us see it, as some kind of weirdly hyperviolent but resolutely sentimental family-values film (which framing of the film is also a disavowal of the violence and eroticism of sentimentalism as a genre), the film’s fascist imagery cannot be defended in the terms Ramakers uses to defend Tom of Finland.
 
Cameron’s work indulges in and explores fantasies of the corruptible, vulnerable male body to a degree that is unseemly and transgressive for a conventional Hollywood film, but there is no celebration of this explosion of the confines of the representation of male physicality. Rather, there is something else: a fascinated, wonderstruck desire to see this explosion again and again, in ever more ingenious and voyeuristic ways. The film exhibits, in the ample imaginative license for dark fantasy it gives the viewer, a fascination with precisely the most volatile, potentially pernicious tropes of gay male identity. For example, in one shot of the T-1000 in silver liquid metal form, we see him fall from the ceiling of an elevator on to the ground. The shot unmistakably suggests falling excrement. The T-1000 returns cyborg masculinity to the anal/excremental/sadistic stage of Freud’s theory of childhood psychosexual development, a regression related to fantasies in the popular imaginary of homosexuality as regressive returns to childhood sexuality or to arrested development. Phobic associations such as these abound. Yet the film also truly does disturb its solicited straight audience in its sustained suggestion that all forms of manhood and masculinity are inherently fascistic and homoerotic in their appeal. In its own bizarrely self-conflicted and bombastic way, it’s a radically de-minoritizing movie, making homoerotic desire universal.
 

Pedophilic Fantasies

 
Kristen Thompson writes of Terminator 2 that “although there is no romance, John’s friendship with the Terminator and that relationship’s humanizing effect on the latter provide considerable emotional appeal” (42). I would go further to argue that it is precisely in the nature of the John-Terminator relationship as a romance that the film’s emotional appeal lies. If Terminator 2 is diabolical fun for the whole family, perhaps the film’s most awesomely perverse touch is its family-unfriendly foregrounding of pedophilic themes which organize all of the other themes we have examined.⁷ Even more perversely, Terminator 2 is a pedophilic fantasy from a child’s perspective.⁸
 
The fascist fantasies circulating in the film center upon young male John Connor’s body, which both Terminators war over. In classical Greek culture, the eromenos is the young male object of desire for the erastes, the older man, who initiates the eromenos into intellectual and sexual knowledge. As played by Furlong, John Connor is a surprisingly vulnerable young man, an ephebe who suggests the eromenos of Greek pederasty, even as the Terminators, with their secret reserves of knowledge past and future, suggest the erastes. The battle of two military “men” over the vulnerable young John also recalls a popular image in gay appropriations of Nazi masculinity. In a typical Tom of Finland construction-it should be noted that this artist always fiercely denied any associations with Nazism (which, unlike Ramakers, I do not find convincing)-“two men are depicted, an army officer and an undressed, muscular young man. The military man penetrates the youngster and at the same time jerks him off. The young man uses both hands to push the soldier’s buttocks towards him, to enable him to enter his rectum as deeply as possible.” So intense is their passion that they fail to notice “a second soldier,” of lower rank, spying on them, and “clearly aroused by the performance” (Ramakers 162). Terminator 2 replicates this Tom of Finland scenario by having two “soldiers” war over the possession of a young male’s body. In one deleted scene, the T-1000 investigates John’s room, running his hands fetishistically over John’s possessions; numerous shots of John riding a motorcycle with the T-800 suggest sodomitical intercourse. But Terminator 2 also suggests desire on the part of the pedophilic object. After the first encounter with the T-1000, after which the T-800’s body is riddled with bullets, John examines the T-800’s body, uttering such suggestive lines as “This is intense” and “Get a grip, John” as he runs his own hands over the Terminator’s supple leather-clad body. The running theme of the Terminator’s education by John, his obeisance even to orders from the boy such as “stand on one leg,” continue this theme of switched-tables in the erastes-eromenos relationship, the eromenos initiating the innocent erastes into knowledge.
 
Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” corrects the oddly utopian streak in queer theory, its often uncritical celebration of homosocial brotherhood, as exemplified by Michael Warner’s work.⁹ One point Bersani fails to note, however-and which Terminator 2 makes spectacularly apparent-is straight culture’s appropriation of homosexual iconography and homoerotic themes. If gays have sometimes disquietingly fetishized the very contours and textures of a murderous sexual regime, this regime has also acted upon its fascination with our own fascinations, seen our appropriation of its own form as a form of inimitable worship it itself seeks to imitate. Terminator 2 gives us a series of prismatic lenses through which to view mythic masculinity, gay, straight, homoerotically heterosexual, even heteroerotically queer (if we think of Sarah’s multivalently phallic sexiness).¹⁰Terminator 2 is as steeped in homoerotic desire as an Alan Holingshurst novel.¹¹
 

The Fascist Family

 
E.T.A. Hoffman’s 1817 short story “The Sand-Man” is the central literary work that Freud analyzes in his essay on the uncanny. In one particularly harrowing episode in the story, the young boy Nathanael surreptitiously observes a nighttime discussion before a blazing hearth between his father and an odious friend, Coppelius: “Good God! as my old father bent down over the fire how different he looked! His gentle and venerable features seemed to be drawn up by some dreadful convulsive pain into an ugly, repulsive Satanic mask. He looked like Coppelius” (175). Nathanael’s terror allows him to be discovered. Coppelius first threatens to take away his eyes, but after the father’s desperate protestations, instead unscrews the boy’s hands and feet, realizing in the process of reattaching the appendages that “the old fellow”-presumably God-knew what he was doing after all. The Oedipal confusion between his kindly old father and loathsome Coppelius, the two men’s subsequent war over the body of the boy, and the images of castration-not just eyes but hands and feet, a parodistic orgy of the castration-complex Freud will theorize a century later-illuminate the battle between the Terminators in Terminator 2.
 
Rushing and Frentz argue that the Terminator of the first film is “the technological telos of the ego, the sovereign rational subject of modernism,” the “eradication of the inferior [human] shadow” that appears to us as “unspeakably Satanic,” “a macabre caricature of the obsolete human self” (168-9). In their view, Terminator 2 “rehabilitates its central commodified icon, Arnold Schwarzenegger, from a demon into the savior of humanity-thus effectively stealing John Connor’s destiny” as the messiah, as his initials would suggest (184). The transformation of Schwarzenegger from Satan to messiah in Terminator 2 brings us back to the confusion between the kindly father and Satanic Coppelius in Hoffman’s “The Sand-Man.” Terminator 2 represents a fantasy of oedipal father-son relations in which the “Satanic” nature of the Father can be controlled, deployed at will, and rendered a secondary sub-routine, as evinced in the scene in which John both orders the Terminator to brutalize some musclebound dudes who have rushed to John’s defense and teaches the cyborg not to kill. Transforming the cyborg into the murderously benign father relies upon an understanding of the Father as inherently murderous, far from benign.
 
Sarah’s speech in the sequel makes this view astonishingly explicit: “Of all the would-be fathers that came and went over the years, this ‘thing,’ this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.” In the “family values” era of Reagan and Bush I, Sarah’s speech has a powerfully surprising resonance. She exposes the family-values myth as such by arguing that a crisis in fatherhood exists pervasively, suggesting it cannot be limited to, say, the poor black community. Clinton, the child of a single mother whose brutalization he witnessed and fought, would make a war against “Deadbeat Dads” a feature of his Presidency. (Evincing the incoherency of his presidency, he would also demonize the so-called “Welfare Queen.”) The uncanny resonance of Terminator 2 for many viewers is precisely its re-deployment of the killer cyborg as killer father-protector. As the adult John says movingly to the “obsolete” T-800 model in the 2003 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, “Do you know that you were the closest thing to a father that I ever had?” The dark joke in this film is that Skynet sent this T-800 to kill John’s future self precisely because John’s emotional attachment to the model allows the model to infiltrate John’s stronghold. The futuristic machines understand the enduring power of oedipal attachments. In the Terminator films, it is the father who is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer-and in Terminator 2, we get the father who finally melts, a symbolic wish literalized in the climax.
 
This longing for a loving father whose innate brutality is reprogrammed for protectiveness is parodied in the T-1000, whose ardent interest in John is no less intense than the T-800’s, but also in the figures of Sarah and Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the African-American scientist at Cyberdyne who will be the catalyst for Skynet’s take-over. Sarah’s fearsome phallic mother pointedly withholds emotional love from John, admonishing him for having rescued her from the asylum as she checks his body for injuries, her stinging words making him cry. With her taut body and black military gear, she looks like a rogue commando and, as many critics have pointed out, very much like a Terminator. The movie struggles over whether or not to affirm Sarah’s phallic motherhood. In large part, it revels in her musculature and fierce martial prowess, but it also makes the scene in which she finally breaks down, hugs John, and tells him that she loves him an especially wrenching moment. It has her sacrificially lower John into safety at the refinery at the end so that she can face off the T-1000 herself, and, though it gives her a thrilling near-triumph at the climax when, like Ripley in Aliens, she shoots volley after volley of bullets into the T-1000’s disoriented form, it also refuses to allow her to destroy the T-1000, reserving the final heroic stroke for Arnold. Thrillingly taut and courageous an action heroine though she is, Sarah is the most highly ambivalent figure in the film, because according to the homoerotic logic of the film the phallic mother is an inadequate compensation for the tender toughness of the cyborg father.
 
Dyson is depicted as a loving but absent father. In a scene in the Special Edition DVD, his wife (S. Epatha Merkerson) chastises him for not wanting to spend more time with the kids; he smilingly relents and agrees to take them to an amusement park. While Dyson represents both the absent father and the evils of cold, rationalist science-Sarah accuses him from a maternalist standpoint of not “really knowing what it is to create a life, to feel it growing inside you”-he is nevertheless in many ways a warmer, more humane figure than Sarah, more malleable, less inflexible, as his decision literally to trash his life’s work to avert nuclear holocaust shows. The film also locates in this upwardly mobile black family a sensuality not present elsewhere in the film. In a scene with disquietingly racist overtones, Dyson’s wife licks his neck as she greets him clad in a bathing suit: even if middle-class aspirers, blacks sign sex. The implication is that the white family-John’s loveless adoptive parents, phallic Sarah who stands alone and refuses affection-is bereft of love, emotion, and sexuality, whereas the black family risks losing their ties to and claims on such affectional intensities in their pursuit of white middle-class ideals. They’re in danger of becoming white machines, losing their sexual and emotional vitality. If Sarah represents a fantasy of transforming into the ultimate white machine-masculinist and devoid of emotion-when her uncomputerized yet no less efficiently murderous, Terminator-like vision takes in the Dyson family, she fuses gendered modes of white supremacist gazing at the objectified black body. “White surveillance, incorporating both male and female gazes, of black bodies is sexualizing and dehumanizing,” writes Janell Hobson (39). Capturing this black family within her phallic gaze, fascistic-leather-garbed Sarah objectifies them as freaks of sexual appetite despite their middle-class, aspirationist trappings.
 
Sharon Willis considers the relationship between Dyson and Sarah Connor, particularly in light of the speech in which Sarah accuses Dyson of being one in the line of masculinist scientists who create destructive technologies (“Men like you built the hydrogen bomb…You don’t know what it’s like to create a life, to feel it growing inside you,” says Sarah to Dyson, in a triumph of the essentialist, maternalist rhetoric that runs uncomfortably alongside masculinist violent ideologies throughout Cameron’s increasingly constrictive oeuvre). The film’s association of traditional scientific power and its disturbing potentialities with the African-American Dyson endures as a troubling, underexplored feature of the film’s more overtly articulated gender politics and implicit racial politics. Dyson, like Charles S. Dutton’s supporting character in Alien 3 (1993), is the African-American who must sacrifice himself so that the white, female hardbody-heroine may live, as his self-sacrifice in the destruction of the Cyberdyne offices evinces. As Willis writes, “why do white women’s hardbodies seem to be propped on the ‘ghosts’ of African-American men? [This is a] displacement of one difference onto another . . . . that should alert us to the mixed and ambiguous effects of our popular representations, where figures of social and sexual ambivalence” and of “undecidable identity” are all intensely eroticized. Because of race’s ongoing difficulty for culture, its difficulties can be more reassuringly “siphoned off” onto sexuality (126). But surely this is only in relative terms-sexuality proves to be a highly disturbing figure in the film, especially when seen in the context of race.
 
Sarah’s paramilitary look and skills adumbrate the film’s larger connections to the world of military might and its ramifications for social “others.” Combat-geared Sarah, like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, parodies the uniformed authority of T-1000’s cop, himself (itself) the parodistic version of military authority. The figure of the cop as the incarnation of “formless evil” comes across, in Fred Pfeil’s words, as a “particularly pungent if fortuitous maneuver, given national exposure of the racist brutality of Police Chief Gates’ Los Angeles Police Department a scant few months before this film’s release” (239). The Los Angeles Riots inspired by the beating of an African-American man, Rodney King, by police officers and their subsequent acquittal provide an eerie backdrop for the film’s figuration of villainy as “steely-eyed Aryan form” (Pfeil 238). Though Dyson and his family never come into contact with the T-1000, Sarah’s suggestively fascist look signals that she, too, embodies the T-1000’s connection to the fetishization of military power and phallic form. If this film appears to be suggesting a resurgence that must be disavowed as fascist imagery, then Sarah’s home invasion of the Dyson family reminds us, chillingly, that Africans have been available as targets of not only United States racism but also of the murderous ideologies of other nations, most pertinently that of Nazi Germany. We tend to think, understandably, predominantly of the annihilation of the European Jewish population in this period. “The sheer magnitude of crimes against Jews has tended to obscure the issue of state-sponsored violence against Black Germans,” Heide Fehrenbach notes in a book on the subject (87-8). Terminator 2 eerily recalls the themes of the Nazi regime in all of its frightening dimensions.
 
The role of the phallic mother-domineering and dominant-in the national imaginary was pivotal to fascism in Nazi Germany, as Andrea Slane has demonstrated. Though I am in complete disagreement with her assessment of Hitchcock, her discussion of his 1946 film Notorious, whose chief villains are Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a European Nazi living in a secret Nazi stronghold in Brazil, and his mother, sheds light on the representation of Sarah here. Parsing the views of Philip Wylie, who in his 1942 study Generation of Vipers compared the domineering Nazi “mom” who destroys the men of the nation to Hitler, Slane writes that “Domineering mothers might not only cause their sons to become fascist but in fact act like fascists themselves. Madame Sebastian is a fascist by virtue of her suffocating mothering in Wylie’s sense as much as she is a suffocating mother by virtue of her fascism” (130). Slane points out that the effeminate Alex Sebastian is presented not as the violent, frightening oedipal Nazi father but instead as the victim of the “masculinized, domineering mother Madame Sebastian…As a result of this emphasis, Alex emerges as surprisingly sympathetic for a Nazi character in 1946, precisely because he is less to blame for his politics than his mother is” (131).¹²
 
Sarah’s masculinized sexuality serves several functions, one of the most important of which is to accommodate the retooled Schwarzenegger/Terminator image to the reshaped Terminator mythos of this film. Sarah is the split-off, “bad” mother-father to the good Terminator’s new benevolent, masochistic father-mother; her aggression highlights his vulnerability and emotional accessibility. The Aryan fantasy of the T-1000 everywhere suggests a transforming social world for which Sarah prepares her son, a new fascist state in which all is warfare, aggression, and fetishized military surfaces. The relevance of these configurations for queer theory lies in the ways in which the T-1000 bears the residues of queer sexual appropriation of images of masculinist power. Moreover, the character demonstrates the endurance of cultural erotic fixations upon these very images, libidinal investments that are to a certain degree sublimated but are also explosively prominent. Sarah functions as a queer sexual fetish object as well as a disciplining force. She is the Law of the Father as much as its enemy, chastising sensitive John for his sensitivity, conditioning him always to be more properly masculinist, not to care about her or to care about anything at all except his mission (this is why Sarah’s breakdown, in which she hugs John as she weeps, is heartbreakingly moving rather than some kind of concession to essentialist gendered stereotypes of motherhood, or at least not only a concession: this is the moment in which Sarah finally relents in her unyielding campaign to masculinize John). She is both the Law of normalization and its perverse undermining, in that it is precisely the hypermasculinity she adopts to socialize John properly that lends her an air of sadomasochistic, queer sexuality as exciting as it is disturbing. (This hypermasculinism can also be said to have a resistant quality in that it allows her to defy her hystericization by the phallocratic psychoanalytic institution that incarcerates and brutalizes her. The extraordinarily unpleasant scenes of her abuse at the hands of smug psychiatrists and lascivious and violent security guards stand in for the discourse of hysteria that attends to the construction of womanhood from the late nineteenth-century forward.¹³) Sarah seems the fulfillment of the maddeningly indecipherable, haunting final image of Karen Allen in the gay S/M leather gear get-up in William Friedkin’s disturbing, distasteful, and brilliant film Cruising (1981), about an undercover cop (Al Pacino) investigating a serial killer’s murders within the gay S/M subculture of late-70s New York City. Sarah’s narrative arc transforms her from the Sacher-Masoch model of the icy, sadistic female tormentor into the proper Oedipal mother, nurturing and disciplining John. If, as we noted earlier, Terminator 2 can be described as fascist kitsch, the figures of the good Terminator as leather-daddy, the evil Terminator as cop, and the Terminator-like phallic mother correspond to S/M culture’s fetishistic appropriation of fascist tropes. And in its redeployment of these themes, the Terminator franchise has lost none of its popular culture appeal, as evinced by the fourth installment of the film franchise, Terminator Salvation (2009), starring Christian Bale as an adult John Connor, and the FOX television series version of the films, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which extends the mythos to its rightful place as fascist kitsch’s double, sentimental family drama, albeit in often challenging, daring ways (which may account for the series’ abrupt 2009 cancellation after only two seasons).
 

Cyborg Narcissus: Or, the Queerness of Cyborgs

 
While Susan Jeffords’s argument in Hard Bodies was oracular in many respects, on a key point it was not: Hollywood’s depiction of individualism from the end of the Reagan era forward has turned out to be much less than affirming. The masculine individualism that Hollywood has represented since the late 80s has been a fissured one, as demonstrated by the roaming identities of Carter Nix in De Palma’s Raising Cain (1992), the bifurcated male psyche in Fight Club (1999), and the collective male ego of Zodiac (2006), representations that defy any notion of a structural masculine coherence. I propose that this split in the Hollywood representation of masculinity reflects a sustained conflict between narcissistic and masochistic modes of male identity. A narcissism/masochism split informs the conflict between Schwarzenegger’s masochistic Terminator-protector and the narcissistic villainous Terminators of the sequels, a split that epitomizes the larger one that runs through Bush-to-Bush films.
 
In Slavoj Žižek’s view, the Terminator of the 1984 film represents the mindlessness and relentlessness of the drive: “The horror of this figure consists precisely in the fact that it functions as a programmed automaton who, even when all that remains of him is a metallic, legless skeleton, persists in his demand and pursues his victim with no trace of compromise or hesitation. The terminator is the embodiment of the drive, devoid of desire” (22). This point is intensified and literally articulated in the 2003 sequel Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, when the short-circuiting Terminator rather desperately shrieks at John (Nick Stahl), now a man in early adulthood: “Desire is irrelevant. I am a machine!” On the face of it, Žižek is right. If the Terminator represents the desireless machine, then it most successfully embodies that American fantasy of an inviolate male body, now not only resistant to but utterly devoid of desire. Yet how irrelevant is desire to the Terminator films, especially the sequels? I would argue that part of the Oedipal drama of the films, especially its sequels, is the growing and plangent desire on the part of the Terminators, not just Arnold but the villainous ones as well: Terminator 2‘s sleekly upgraded T-1000 (Robert Patrick), whose liquid metal body can morph into new shapes, and Terminator 3‘s T-X, more commonly referred to as the Terminatrix (Kristanna Loken), an even more advanced robot whose human-looking mimetic liquid metal exterior covers a lithe endoskeleton. The Terminator comes to seem not a figure of desirelessness but of queer desire that is typed as narcissistic.
 
In section VII of his famous 1836 essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that “man is a god in ruins” (231). To consider this suggestive phrasing within the parameters of a new narcissistic/masochistic split in American masculinity, we can say that Hollywood manhood, shown as fundamentally split, in its masochistic mode corresponds to this Emersonian view, representing the ruination of the chief American god, the normative white male. With this theme of ruination also comes a desire for wholeness, to see the destroyed male body reconstituted. The first sequel to Terminator establishes the Bush-to-Bush pattern of the destruction and restoration of the white male body. Again and again, Schwarzenegger’s body undergoes physical assault: he is bashed into walls, riddled with bullets, punctured with an iron spear that goes completely through his prostrate body. His head is pounded by a movable anvil into the wall; half of his face gets torn off in combat, revealing the pulsing-red-eyed metal man beneath; his arm gets caught in the grinding wheel of a metal press that recalls Industrial Age accidents. Shorn of arm and deficient of face, the cyborg delivers his final, deadly blow to his enemy while lying on a conveyor belt.
 
Panning the film, Terrence Rafferty locates the central flaw in the “insane conceit” of making Schwarzenegger the underdog. Schwarzenegger’s T-800 model is outmatched by the T-1000, “a more advanced Terminator model.” “This new Terminator isn’t a brute: he’s made of some sort of liquid metal, with shape-shifting properties, and he’s sleeker and more versatile than the old Arnold model” (316). In contrast, the “T-800 is almost human here: since he’s been superseded by the spiffier model, we can see him as a vulnerable guy (or guyoid), and shed a tear when he sacrifices himself to save humanity from nuclear holocaust” (317). Pace Rafferty’s view, there are several interesting implications in the film’s refit of Schwarzenegger. One of these is the disorganization of the traditional male spectatorial position-instead of exclusively looking through Schwarzenegger’s eyes, we also look at him, invited to gape at his dismembering even as we marvel at his body’s endurance and prowess. The first Terminator effected this same spectatorial disorganization, inviting us to gawk at Schwarzenegger’s cyborg as a cartoon spectacle of manhood, but in the sequel we are asked also to sympathize. We are asked to sympathize with the taciturn Terminator’s increasingly masochistic availability as an icon of stoic suffering. As Brett Farmer writes in a reconsideration of Freudian theories of masochism, masochism, while highly conventional for the female subject position, is “profoundly disruptive for male subjectivity, in which it subverts the moorings of an active phallic identification” (242), and however motivated by opportunistic commercial desires on the part of director and star to present Schwarzenegger as a family-values hero, the film’s make-over of Schwarzenegger as a suffering and violated machine-body has some unsettling implications.¹⁴
 
Terminator 2 brings out the Christian core of masochism, the destruction and restoration of the body of a beautiful white man. When John holds up the cyborg’s bullet-riddled leather jacket to the sunlight, the pattern of light through the bullet holes recalls the purported image of Christ on the Shroud of Turin. The T-800 sacrificially gives up its life at the end of the film, countermanding John’s tearful demands that he remain alive-the cyborg father dying for the teenage delinquent’s would-be Christ. In this film, the good cyborg’s destruction at the end, endlessly anticipated in a series of brutal physical pulverizations, is a kind of restoration, an honorary achievement of humanity upon the killing machine.
 
There is an extraordinarily plangent moment (in the Special Edition DVD) when the cyborg submits to a special operation in which the chip in his “learning computer” brain is removed to allow for adaptability and change-in other words, to allow him to become more human, “and not such a dork all the time,” as John puts it. In full phallic woman mode, Sarah, like a postmodern Judith, the biblical heroine who cut off the head of the evil ruler Holofernes, attempts to smash the chip, thus rendering the Terminator inert. Like the angel staying Abraham’s hand, John prevents her from destroying the chip, screaming “No!” Noticing the delay when reactivated, the Terminator asks very simply, “Did something happen?” The vulnerability and the innocence of the Terminator here matches the refinement of his physical image. The cyborg is D.H. Lawrence’s hard, isolate, stoic, killer American manhood as New Age man, as vulnerable as he is murderous.
 
Maintaining a tortuous tension between the simultaneous murderousness and vulnerability of Schwarzenegger’s cyborg, the film expresses and fulfils the desire to see a male body violated and destroyed, but then reconstituted. This film innovates the now-ubiquitous computer-generated imagery (CGI) technique of morphing, which allows one image to blend or melt seamlessly into another. The god in ruins theme is expressed not only through the endurance and suffering of the T-800 but also through the endless reconstitutions of the morphing T-1000, whose constant physical transmogrifications connote his liquid properties-the essential softness of his hard, chiseled body, which nevertheless looks diminutive and even fragile in comparison to Schwarzenegger’s hulking own. In addition to being able to simulate the surfaces it touches-human bodies, checkerboard-pattern linoleum floors-the T-1000 can recover from almost any injury. Though the T-1000, who can turn parts of its body into deadly phallic instruments-long, protuberant, knifelike blades an especial favorite-routinely punctures and pulverizes human victims (to say nothing of other machines), its own body is a site of constant injury. Robert Patrick’s cop experiences as much trauma as he delivers. Routinely the recipient of furious rounds of machine-gun bullets, turned into crumbling ice by an oceanic tide of liquid nitrogen, his head punctured by bombs that leave gaping holes in their wake, his torso sheared in half, the cyborg cop absorbs recurring rude shocks, displayed as gaping silver-edged wounds in his hard/soft flesh that swell and then fade away, restoring his Teflon-smooth body to pristine perfection. Oscillating between modes of male power and violability, switching from phallic murderousness to pliant malleability, the T-1000 is both god and ruin.
 
Masochism and narcissism have both been associated with queer masculinity. In “Homo-Narcissism: Or, Heterosexuality,” Michael Warner critiques the psychoanalytic construction of homosexuality as narcissistic desire. “Imagining that the homosexual is narcissistically contained in an unbreakable fixation on himself,” Warner writes, “serves two functions at once: it allows a self-confirming pathology by declaring homosexuals’ speech, their interrelations, to be an illusion; and more fundamentally it allows the constitution of heterosexuality as such” (202). The queerest aspect of cyborg manhood in Terminator 2 is the T-1000’s narcissism, his unbreakable fixation on his own infinitely malleable body. A mimetic poly-alloy, this morphing cyborg can resemble any surface it touches, but no matter how many permutations it undergoes or the alterity of its myriad forms, the T-1000 always reverts back to its own primary image, that of a lean, chiseled white man. One would expect to see, in this scene of his birth in our present, the T-1000 initially appearing as a silver blob of liquid metal, but from our first glimpse of him he is his white male self. We never see the mimetic T-1000 assume the shape of this man; he is always already this white male body. The T-1000 appropriates an unfortunate cop’s professional identity, but not, significantly, the cop’s physical body; the implication is that the T-1000 already has a perfect body all his own. A copy with no original, the T-1000, no matter how many other bodies he copies, always reverts back to his first image, as if he were constantly attempting to capture an imaginary illusion of wholeness. Though pounded, pummeled, punctured, perforated, and pulverized, the T-1000 always restores his own image, surveying his own recreated form, staring at parts of his body, getting a charge from his own endlessly renewed cohesion.
 
The homo-narcissism of the T-1000 fully conveys itself only in a scene that appears to carry the opposite message. In a purely excessive, extraneous moment in the psychiatric hospital where Sarah is imprisoned, the T-1000, phallically rising up in the form of a tiled linoleum floor, duplicates the form of a portly, plug-ugly security guard as he gets an automated cup of coffee. Duplicated, the guard stares at his own replicated image; but the T-1000 is also staring at itself now in the original model of the guard. Suggesting that it feels it has unsatisfactorily replicated itself, the T-1000 pointedly shoots its phallic finger into the guard’s eye, as if retaliating against an original yet inferior image. The phallus through eye serves as a kind of phallus-restoring castration, the narcissistic cyborg’s rebellion against an original that utterly lacks the clone’s smooth and sleek perfection.
 
In an especially striking scene in which the T-1000 transforms into ice in the nitrogen-tide, he looks like a piece of postmodern art. (One imagines a title: “Untitled [Cop in Ice].”) Parts of his body break off, and he stumbles to the ground, losing limbs. When his forearm breaks off, he looks at it with horror and shock: this is Narcissus’s despair at the loss of his idealized image, the stared-at stump no less graphic a sign of castration than the boy Nathanael’s twisted-off hands and feet in Hoffman’s story. Now Schwarzenegger’s T-800 utters his famous line, “Hasta la vista, Baby,” as he shoots the frozen and maimed T-1000, blowing him to smithereens. We see not only the T-1000’s narcissistic trauma, the loss of his ideal image, but also the masochistic T-800’s satisfying vengeance, a vengeance that confers a kind of masculinist integrity upon the older, less advanced, but more honorable model.¹⁵
 
If masochistic manhood has emerged in psychoanalytically inflected queer theory as a radical break with normative manhood, films made during the Terminator 2 era, such as Dances with Wolves (1990) and Schindler’s List (1993)-and later films as disparate as Fight Club (1999), The Passion of the Christ (2004), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), and A History of Violence (2005)-make clear that masochism can have normalizing as well as disruptive effects. In these works, the ravaged, ruined male body, writhing in masochistic pain, can destabilize audience expectations and spectatorial positions, forcing an audience to see normative manhood in highly unusual and challenging ways that defy and disrupt normativity. But they can also, by fulfilling the audience’s own masochistic fantasies and ennobling theatrical, self-conscious suffering, restore the model of normative masculinity with an unflinching resolve that results in this model’s greater cultural and social entrenchment. If the normative male body is left vulnerable in the face of challenges to it in the form of new, probing, questioning critiques from feminism, culture and race studies, and queer theory, masochism emerges as an ingenious method for fatiguing this vulnerability, subjecting manhood to an apparent critique that leaves it wounded and thrashing but ultimately restored, better for the challenge, stronger for having demonstrated its resilience. Masochism provides normative manhood with a regimen that ensures its resilient health.
 
As Suárez writes of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, “masochism and self-immolation are the subject matter of the last section of the film, which features bikers riding at night through a city,” as the “sound of roaring engines and screeching tires” punctuates their revels. These revels become more and more dangerous as the bikers lose control of their bikes and crash: we can see that “the sadism of [previous sequences] appears introjected by the group and leads to self-annihilation in the final climactic shattering of man and machine.” Again, these could be descriptions of Cameron’s film. Like Anger’s film, Cameron’s culminates with an image of “final self-annihilation”: Schwarzenegger’s sacrificial demand for his own termination (Suárez 171). Schwarzenegger’s masochism cannot, however, be called the introjection of a previously exhibited sadism; rather, his position has been masochistic all along, the images of the maimed police officers allegorizing his own masochistic subjectivity. Schwarzenegger’s self-immolation at the end does not represent resistance but rather the ultimate acquiescence to the normative order, albeit one that he sanctions through his death: the restoration of the family, his exclusion from which renders the restoration poignantly bittersweet. Masochistic self-sacrifice emerges here as a way of purging difference on all registers-foreignness, outsize bodies, homoerotic associations, cyborg bodies, the damaged, irreparable body-leaving the properly heterosexual, if pointedly fatherless, human family intact.
 
The queer subject position in Terminator 2 emerges not in the vulnerable, underdog, masochistic Terminator but in the sleeker, craven, implacably cruel, narcissistic T-1000, shaking his finger in disciplinary dismissal of the phallic mother and writhing in anguish at the climax in his enforced destruction in a hellfire that suggests punitive, Dantean torment. In this spectacular climax, Terminator 2 exposes the masochism inherent in reactionary, normative manhood as it revels in the queer heroism of the cruelly narcissistic villain. In the equally ideologically wobbly but also vastly underrated Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), the advanced Terminator’s narcissism is depicted even more directly: after a bathroom bout with Schwarzenegger’s once again fumbling, even more masochistic Terminator [“I’m an obsolete model!”], the sleekly sinister Terminatrix eyes herself approvingly in a row of mirror-stage bathroom mirrors. The dull and cumbersome Terminator Salvation (2009) does away with the delicious narcissism of the diabolically advanced Terminator altogether, instead aiming to restore the might and menace of Schwarzenegger’s T-800 model when it was an unstoppable killing machine of humans in the original Terminator, and to go back even further by introducing the bulky, rough-hewn, skull-faced T-600 line. Accordingly, the 2009 reboot, with its endless array of styles of masochistic manhood, is the least queer-toned of all of the films, though in its sub-plot depiction of the trio of Kyle Reese (the human hero of the first Terminator) as a younger version of himself that suggests the ephebe, a new human-machine hybrid named Marcus who appears to be a sculpted human male for most of the film, and the mute but resourceful young African-American female child they care for, the film suggests yet another new-style queer family. Terminator 2, however, remains unsurpassed in the volatility and potency of its unwieldy brew of themes. The film suggests the centrality of queer identity in constructions of masculinity in the inter-Bush years, even or especially when those constructions reveal their ambivalence towards fascistic monumentality, raising new questions in turn about the implications of such gender constructions for queerness as well.