Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn: presence in absence

 The following is the text of a talk I gave about the first of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder at the ICTM "Laments" Symposium at the ANU on April 20, 2011

For some months, in preparation for this symposium, I have been trying to define the characteristics of the idea of “lament” in somewhat structural terms.  In fact, this goal of  articulating “lament” as a concept, as opposed to merely letting the multiple meanings of the word resonate as they will, has been, for me, a persistent irritation – like a mosquito constantly buzzing about one's head, impossible to swat.  Or perhaps it is more like one of those occasions when one forgets a name, or a word, that then remains frustratingly,  infuriatingly on the tip of one's tongue, because the tantalising idea that underpins the concept of “lament” is surely one of absence.

Every lament is an encounter with an absence.  The classic, canonic and central laments are the elegies and threnodies that mark the felt absences of death.  But, life being what it is, there are many other subjects for lamentation: lament for lost love, lament for lost youth, all the way to Beethoven's rage over a lost penny, which certainly qualifies as a lament, even if an infantile one.  And what has been frustrating me in my definitional musings is that I cannot think of one single example of a lament that does not encounter the lost, the absent; either actual or potential.

The nature of this encounter with absence vary by context.  A musical ritual of mourning usually serves to place an individual's grief in a communal context: to share, and to locate mourning within a cultural tradition.  In the lament as ritual, private grief is made public through communal enactment. 

By contrast, an artistic response to absence usually creates a presence: through art, music, poetry, an image of what or whom is lost is created within the work.  In the lament as art-form, from a real or literal absence, a figurative presence is generated: an image of the departed.  Here, private grief is made public through communicative representation.

The majority of my paper concerns the nature of this communicative representation in the first of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder  - “Songs on the Death of Children”.  The notion of “presence” is loaded, theoretically speaking, and is a contested one, and in some senses this short song of Mahler's is about to become the battleground on which the theoretical struggle for presence will be waged.  But first I'd like to fling a few visual and textural laments into the mix, to provide some depth and perspective on the relationship between presence and absence.   

Sir George Clausen painted Youth Mourning in 1916.  Interpretation here is not problematic: the image is of youth, as a vulnerable, naked young woman, lamenting the dead young men of the First World War.  The kneeling figure in a ritual posture of grief, together with the partial cross, frame in the background the waterlogged shell-holes of a Flanders field.  The interesting thing here is the portrayal of absence: in particular the cross being truncated at the edge of the canvas tells us that the focus of the composition of the painting has been shifted to what is central, to what is even more important.  The cross and the woman frame, enfold – cradle, if you will – what is at the centre of the painting. And what is central is … absent.  A palpable absence.  We could imagine the mourning woman as Isolde, singing to a dead Tristan that only she can see.  It is not that there is nothing at the centre of the painting: on the contrary, there is something, gone.  A presence through absence.

Rather than my waxing lyrical about this conceptual inseparability of absence and presence in the lament, it is probably better to let Shakespeare do so for me.  Certainly, Harold Bloom would approve of letting art speak in place of criticism.  Shakespeare's Sonnet 64 is both a lament and a love song, and makes the point of presence in absence more compellingly than I could:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

“A thought … which cannot choose but weep to have that which it fears to lose” actually maps the absent onto the present by force – weeping in the presence of the beloved in the face of the inevitability of absence.  There are two powerful presences in this sonnet: one is the speaker, invoking the personified force of time, ruin and destruction.  The other is his beloved – but she is absent.  She does not speak.  Her presence is only affirmed, held, cradled, by the words describing her inevitable departure. There is, it seems, inhabiting the concept of the lament as artwork a structural pairing  between presence and absence, in which the figure, the image of one gone is enfolded or framed by what is present: the metaphor I have been using is that of “cradling”.

This notion of cradling the lamented is useful in thinking about the first of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder.  The original Kindertotenlieder were a group of 428 poems written by Friedrich Rückert in 1833–34 in reaction to the illness and death of his two children Luise and Ernst.  They were an essentially private set of laments, not intended for publication and only published after Rückert's death in 1872.  Mahler chose five of the poems for his setting, which he wrote between 1901 and 1904.  I want to look in detail at the first.

Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn,
Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht geschehn!
Das Unglück geschah nur mir allein!
Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein!

Du mußt nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken,
Mußt sie ins ew'ge Licht versenken!
Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!
Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt!


 Now the sun will rise as brightly
 as if no misfortune had occurred in the night.
 The misfortune has fallen on me alone.
 The sun - it shines for everyone.

You must not keep the night inside you;
 you must immerse it in eternal light.
 A little light has been extinguished in my household;
 Light of joy in the world, be welcome

Already we have several presences.  Mahler's music enfolds and cradles the presence of the poet, himself gone, but allowed to speak through and with the music.  And the poet  inscribes a protagonist, the one who speaks and sings; a father who has lost as child in the night.  Overwhelmingly, though, the most palpable presence in the song is the absent  one – the dead child to whom the second stanza of the poem is (perhaps) addressed. Mahler's music cradles an image of the dead poet, whose poetic imagination enfolds an imagined grieving father, who speaks of, holds, cradles in words his absent child.

Now, at this point, as presences multiply alarmingly, it might be wise to invoke some theoretical and semiotic perspectives.  The aim is to seek clarification, but the probable result will be no doubt to further complicate the issue.  In a different domain – or possible different - the battle between “presence” and “absence” is the central issue of theory and criticism of the late twentieth century.  The deconstruction of what Derrida termed the “illusory metaphysics of presence” is the first item on the post-structuralist agenda.  For the criticism of literature and the arts, Derrida's assault on presence, simultaneous to and cognate with Barthes declaration of the death of the author, had the effect of rendering impossible the idea of authorial presence in a work.  Meaning is generated through the interplay of texts, the constellation of signs and codes brought together and to bear by the reader or listener in the act of interpretation.  The very idea of authorial presence – the notion that Mahler, or Rückert, are speaking to us through the words and music, bring a privileged and essential meaning to the work – is called into question by the inherent nature of language itself (and here, we treat music as a language) to subvert its own meanings: meaning is always partial, incomplete, deferred, provisional, in an endless cycle of intertextual interpenetration that Derrida terms difference.

This post-structuralist and deconstructive position is theoretically compelling.  However, it does have its opponents: John Searle was Derrida's most famous sparring partner in the world of philosophy, but in literary criticism the key figure is perhaps Harold Bloom.  Bloom's concept of artistic meaning is so centred in the notion of the artist wrestling with tradition, with the oedipal ghosts of his or her predecessors, that some notion of real authorial presence by necessity underpins his conception of meaning.  Christopher Norris described it well when he wrote “Bloom [seems] torn between a defence of poetry which holds to the ethos or Romantic individualism, and a deconstructive poetics which tends to dissolve such themes into an abstract system of tropes and relationships.  In the last resort, however, Bloom is always willing to invoke the terminology of 'voice', 'presence' and subjective origin which Derrida so resolutely tracks down to its metaphors”.

Less well-known than Bloom is George Steiner.  Steiner's 1989 essay Real Presences - subtitled “is there anything in what we say?” acknowledges the theoretical unarguability of a deconstructive position, but takes issue with it on ethical rather than theoretical grounds.  I shall return to Steiner's intriguing position at the end of my talk.

In the Mahler, we can see representational and intertextual signification at work in the song at the most obvious and accessible level of interpretation of musical meaning.  This is at the level I would term mimetic semiosis: the music makes imitative reference to ideas in the text, or to ideas that are easily inferred from the context, through the invocation of a referential musical language, to the vocabulary and grammar of which each listener has different and provisional access.

For instance, the repeated, paired couplets are a familiar musical figure, standing for, signifying “sighing” and invoking musical texts from Dowland through Mozart to Wagner, for those able to understand the code.  Second, the abrupt shifts of modality from major to minor evoke the shifts from light to dark in the poem, for listeners with even the most cursory familiarity with the affective references of Western music since 1500.

There are more specific intertextualities.  The ascending chromaticism, descending diatonic minor vocal lines, and tonic pedals all recall Schubert's Der Tod und das Mädchen, clearly a resonant and appropriate text for the Mahler to evoke. There are other parallels with songs from the Schwannengesang cycle, Schubert's last.  Once the door of intertextuality is open, of course, many visitors come flooding in; for instance, Kofi Agawu has observed the presence in the music of the Kindertotenlieder of Brahms-like developing variation, and harmonic practice that echoes agner's Tristan.

One aspect of mimetic semiosis that draws attention to itself is the Mahler's use of the repeated glockenspiel strokes.  This recalls the sound of bells tolled to announce a death – the eponymous “death knell”.  Sometimes the age of the deceased dictated the number of bell strokes – and here, there are two strokes. 

Semiotically, these bells are doing more than making a mimetic imitation of funeral bells. They are of course small, and high – child-sized tolling, if you will – and quite specifically echo the text “Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!” - a little lamp has gone out in my household.  The little lamp is the soul of the child, and with these glockenspiel strokes Mahler offers an aural depiction of that childlike soul.

The graphic explicitness of this aural image of the soul is slightly trite.  Indeed, it is possible to find it quite comic – although revealing that we do not do so.  There is a visual analogy for this depiction which could be illuminating.  I think what Mahler has done sonically is similar to what the director has done visually in this piece of film:

The visual representation, from the third Harry Potter film, is of the soul leaving the body  - a bright white point of light, the visual analogue of Mahler's glockenspiel strokes.  This is extreme mimesis, representation or metaphor driven to excess.  It permits the most anachronistic intertextualities, between Mahler and Harry Potter – although I wouldn't go so far as to deny the aesthetic similarities between to two.  It is also, in both cases, trite in the extreme.

So where does this leave us in terms of presence and absence in the lament?  A surface level investigation of  semiosis, which highlights  the intertextual interplay of mimetic reference, quickly confirms a post-structuralist reading of presence in the musical text.  There is a shifting, provisional and partial presence of Rückert, Mahler, the imaginary father and child, conveyed through bells, sighs, and overtly referential musical symbolism.  It's not that difficult to follow the chain of intertextuality to find the presence of Schubert, Brahms, Wagner … or indeed Harry Potter.  

Indeed, perhaps because of this lack of interpretative difficulty that the entire deconstructionist project left music relatively untouched, compared with literature and philosophy.  The notion that referentiality in music is provisional, deferred, partial and incomplete is not exactly earth shattering, as it proved for language, as the specific nature of referential signification of music has always been problematic.  On the contrary, traditionally, the quest for musical presence, for authorial voice, has been located in the domain of structure; in the musical syntagm, rather than the musical vocabulary.  The presence of the composer has been observed in ideas like the unity and organicism of the musical work as a demonstration of compositional vision; or through the conceptual superstructures afforded by syntactical tools such as the leitmotif, or dodecaphonic organisation.    

Seeing the work's structure, rather than referents, as the site of meaning is what I shall term allegorical semiosis. This terminology follows that of postructuralist Paul de Man who sought to reprioritize structure – the 'rhetoric of pure figuration' – over symbolic or referential modes of meaning.  What happens when we look for meaning in the syntactical structure of music, without reference to possible mimetic, intertextual or extra-musical signification; but equally without reference to pre-ordained codes of musical structural interpretation – sonata forms, presuppositions of unity whether motivic or harmonic, as well as more recent a priori music-analytic symbologies such as gendered structures?

The results of this allegoric structural reading of the first of the Kindertotenlieder are significant.  Structurally, the music is extremely predictable.  There are two generative voice-leading principles at work.  One is a classic Schenkerian descent from the fifth scale degree towards harmonic closure:

But of course simple harminuc closure is never achieved.  Rather, the upper voice resolves upwards by semitone (another “sigh” in the mimetic plane).  From this point of quasi-resolution then initiates the second generative voice-leading principle: a non-functional ascending linear chromatic motion that rises as high as the B-flat (the highest point, as an accented upper neighbour-note, of the original structural descent) at which point harmonic function kicks back in, the B flat is reheard as a dominant minor ninth and the passage moves back towards the first principle of tonal resolution by stepwise descent.

This gesture essentially happens the same way four times in the song: each time there is a moment of discontinuity, a point at which the upward chromatic linearity overpowers the gravitational pull of the functional harmony.  This discontinuity is paralleled at the cadence points, in which linear chromatic motion arbitrarily intrudes and disrupts the goal-directed voice-leading.

The point is this: there is absolutely no rational  - musical – reason for the change of modality that precipitates the upward chromatic motion  and its consequent emotional intensification.  It is precipitated by a musical deus ex machina – a sudden and entirely logically inexplicable assertion of lightness or positivity.  This abrupt move from darkness to light entirely parallels the structural unfolding Rückert text : “The misfortune has fallen on me alone. The sun - it shines for everyone.” 

Theoretically, there is an important distinction here.  The music is not symbolizing grief, or giving some metaphorical representation of grief.  Rather, we are given in the actual structure of the music a play of figuaration that is that of grief, in abstract: the chaotic and unpredictable shift from hope to despair that characterises the structure of mourning.  This is where the fine distinction is to invoke the notion of allegorical semiosis - the rhetoric of pure figuration – instead of representative mimesis.

We are nearly at the end, and have explored some of the theoretical issues to do with the location of meaning in the first of the Kindertotenlieder.  We have looked at mimetic semiosis, representation, intertextuality, allegorical meaning, and musical structure as the site of the communicative power of the Mahler's music.  However, I would wager that we have been left unsatisfied: that none of these semiotic processes have adequately described what it is we understand from this music, and certainly none has captured the trope of presence in absence which seemed so intuitively compelling at the start of this paper.

In Real Presences, Gearge Steiner writes:

Face to face with the presence of offered meaning which we call a text (or a painting or a symphony), we seek to hear its language.  As we would that of the elect stranger coming towards us.  There is in this endeavour, as deconstruction would immediately point out , an ultimately unprovable hope and presupposition of sense, a presumption that intelligibility is conceivable and, indeed, realizable.  Such a presupposition is always susceptible of refutation.  The presence before us may be that of a mute (Beckett edges us towards that grim jest), of a madman uttering gibberish or, more disturbingly, of an intensely communicative persona whose idiom – linguistic, stylistic, hermetically-grounded – we simply cannot grasp. (p. 156)

And here perhaps is the elephant in the room.  This Mahler musical text comes towards us as a stranger, offering unprovable hope: that in this music, in these words, are cradled real presences, with whom we have genuinely transformative encounters: a grieving father, a lost child.  It is not, ultimately, the processes of signification that generate the most important meaning; it is ultimately ontological semiosis – the nature of being, the being-in-the-work; the presence and absence of real mourners.

What moves us, what makes the music profound, is that Mahler cradles in music Rückert's real and authentic grief.  The grief is not yet Mahler's own: Mahler had lost no children when he composed the Kindertotenlieder.  Sadly, he lost his four-year-old daughter soon after completing the piece, and wrote “When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs any more”.  And maybe this comment should alert us to what is at stake.

Steiner argues that while the deconstructive position is theoretically irrefutable, ethically we need to make a wager on the real force of ontological semiosis; on the power of being-in-the-work to be a communicative force; and thus on the value of the arts to be a genuine tool with which to understand the human condition.  Steiner particularly emphasis the role of music in this wager.

Music makes utterly substantive what I have sought to suggest of the real presence in meaning where that presence cannot be analytically shown or paraphrased.  Music brings to our daily lives an immediate encounter with a logic of sense other than that of reason. It is, precisely, the truest name we have for the logic at work in the springs of being that generate vital forms. (p. 218)

And there I have to put to rest my own investigations into the semiosis at work in this little song of Mahler's.  It feels like I have conjured up a theoretical maelstrom whirling around the still, calm, centre of meaning in the song: which is the real, palpable presence of an absent child.  And despite the luminous theoretical reputations of some of the spirits I have conjured; Jacques Derrida,, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, George Steiner – I might, in the end, leave the last words on the subject of the ontological question of the reality of presence to Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore:

'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry.   'Is this real?  Or has this been happening inside my head?'

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?' (p. 579)

Stories

On the ABC Drum, editor Jonathan Green posted a marvelous piece about the media coverage of the Christchurch earthquake - "The media is not here to help. It does not feel your pain"

I posted a comment, which I am reposting here in an expanded form.

Great piece, Jonathan.

There is a curious thing happening here: in the interest of "human interest", the actual humanity of the subjects the media reports is stripped away. The human dignity and respect; the families and relationships; the complexities of why, and how, and what it means for individuals to be caught up in these terrible events - these things are jettisoned so the media can easily and quickly project an uncomplicated, powerful, but ultimately superficial image. Get the bloody headshot on the front page, and bugger the consequences. Or the context, or the respect, or the sympathy.

You pick yourself up on how the story becomes a "story" - going from a complex, human narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with characters and richness and depth, to a short, sharp, media moment. But the word - "story"- has lost its meaning. The actual story just an excuse for the images and their predictable effect. Just like porn, really, which a lot of this voyeuristic coverage is starting to resemble quite closely.

Increasingly, the actors in these porn-films-masquerading-as-journalism are the media personalities themselves. It happened during Cyclone Yasi, where the focus most of the commercial television wasn't the cyclone and its impact, it was shots of Peter Overton standing in the cyclone. It happened during the flood coverage, with Peter Doherty turning himself into an image, the only reasonable story behind which had to be "Journalist Makes Himself Look Like a Goose". These were both covered deftly, and scathingly, by Jonathan Holmes on Mediawatch.

Worst, it happened in Egypt, where the world's commercial media seemed to queue up to report themselves reporting from Cairo. For a week a complex story unfolded: a story about history, the nature of political pressure from popular support, the values of the Egyptian military, the nature international reaction in the US and the Middle East, Mubarak's personal intransigence, and the unique cultural, post-colonial and political context informing Egypt's lengthy and difficult history of self-determination. This story was covered, in places brilliantly, by analysts, commentators, and writers around the world.

Few of them were in Egypt.

The commercial television journalists in Egypt were there, in truth, for one reason: to get the shots of bloody heads, corpses, and wailing women when the real fighting started. Thankfully, the Egyptian people and military displayed more sense than the hungry TV news editors, and catastrophic violence was largely avoided - except for that ludicrous cavalry charge that was staged by Mubarak's heavies, I can confidently assume, precisely because the world's media was there to report it.











On ABC local radio just now there was an interview with a NZ Salvation Army major who is in Christchurch helping with the necessary counselling for shock, loss and grief. He is staying in a motor park, and talked of overhearing the occupants of the next-door cabin, a father and daughter. The daughter was asking when she could go home; the father was gently telling the child that their home was broken; then it caught fire; and now it is gone. They will not go home.

This is a story; and its a story that is being told hundreds of times across Christchurch.

Maybe we need more stories, and should grow up enough to read the ones that don't have pictures.

Why I use Twitter.

Just now, "educational technologist Mike Bogle" (or maybe just Mike Bogle) deleted his Twitter account, and wrote this excellent blog post describing why.

I posted a comment on his piece, and because it touches on the whole reason I believe (or want to believe) that Twitter is valuable, I'm posting a slightly edited version of my original reply to Mike here:

I’m determined to believe that the point of Twitter is precisely to break online identities out of professional or special interest silos, and give us the chance to interact as holistic individuals. I say I’m determined to believe it, in the sense that I think that’s what it can be, and maybe should be: but I remain to be convinced that’s what it is.

Ultimately I think that the way forward for education lies in finding ways to engage whole people in learning interactions, not just the narrow slices of ourselves we choose to portray as our identities in any given context.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for subjecting my twitter followers to a random mix of professional links to education and music articles, political commentary, word games, jokes (often ribald) and the odd tirade about the Australian rugby team. I know that mix sits oddly with those who started following me at (say) an education conference.

But that’s who I am.

I do wonder why we try so hard to present edited versions of ourselves , and I’m also convinced it has something to do with the level of disengagement currently endemic in Western education at all levels. Among students and teachers, if we are honest about it. It’s a crisis of relevance; of failure to see the point (and here I mean the human point, the existential point) of learning; and I think that’s because we don’t connect with whole people.

Twitter lends itself to this role because of its intrinsically democratic structure: all tweets have equal place in the timeline, and the 140 character limit forces the dominant to "yield the conch" to the next speaker in a delightfully leveling way.

I guess I could advocate a similar argument for how Twitter and other social media are potentially transforming journalism, politics ... but the bow I have drawn is already long enough.

Sorry to use your comment section as a rant opportunity, but I think you have hit on something very important.

Help!

Well, it's actually another Beatles song I'm interested in ...

I'm working (belatedly; it's a time-consuming business not making bomb threats against a national newspaper) on a submission for Savannah Ganster's Love project.

What I need - quickly - is as many people as possble from around the world to record themselves singing the chorus from the Beatles song "All you need is love". Just these words:

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need.



I'm going to mash it up into an international chorus for world peace ;-) Or something like that.

Don't worry about being in time, in tune, at the right pitch or anything like that. I will use your voice as part of an internet chorus - it will all be processed electronically, so don't worry about how good you sound! I know people get nervous about singing in public - don't be. I'm going to get my kids to do it - if you have some, why not get them too?

Thing is, the project is already a bit overdue and I need your voice ASAP. So don't spend an age agonizing or practising - send an mp3 (or any other sound) file to jonathan.powles@gmail.com. Please! It will only take a minute and the outcome will be something lovely and genuinely international.

On (not) being Spartacus

Last week, to my very great surprise, I became caught up in the margins of a currently-unfolding media story.  Julie Posetti, journalist and University of Canberra academic, live-tweeted reports from a journalism education conference in Sydney, as a consequence of which Chris Mitchell, editor of The Australian, has threatened to sue her for defamation.  The case has rapidly become a cause célèbre on Twitter (trending with the #twitdef hashtag).  For the most succinct account of the story, read Andrew Dodd's account in Crikey.

While they were fresh in my mind, I wanted to jot down some thoughts and ideas about what happened. Happened to me, that is.  What happened, and continues to happen, to Julie is far more serious and has far wider implications for social media, journalism and academia.  I suspect it is also far more dangerous to write about right now - a fact that should give all of us cause for profound concern.

I should pause at this point and say that what follows is not an academic analysis.  I am an academic, moreover one who champions, uses and reflects on social media as part of my professional life.  I use Twitter as a tool in the classroom (and the virtual classroom) as it pushes students towards engagement, interaction, conversation and critique.  This is a much healthier place to be, educationally, than the poor buggers having to sit in the lecture theatre uncritically absorbing every fact or opinion I drip-feed into their heads simply because I can profess the privileged identity of "Lecturer".  I suspect there may be some analogies that can be drawn between education and the media around the issues of identity, authority, and privileged access to "facts".  At some point in the future I shall certainly write an academic article on #twitdef and its impact on academic practices and values.  But this is not it.

Nor - and this is most important - nor is what follows in any way "journalism". As Caroline Overington has written in the Australian, "the work of beautiful writers and fearless reporters can’t be done by just anyone".  I can assure you I am neither beautiful nor fearless.  I am plain, timid, and very ordinary.  I just want to post a personal reflection.  Not for "publication", like a fearless reporter - I have no desire whatever to penetrate Caroline Overington's inner sanctum.  But for "conversation", for discussion with, well ... anyone who's interested. Just anyone.

This issue of identity is also of the essence to the #twitdef story.  I have followed @julieposetti on Twitter for a year now, and her identity is a very slippery fish indeed.  Delightfully so.  As a journalism academic at the University of Canberra, I have her listed in both my 'media' list and my 'education' list.  I have her in the 'cultcha' list, reserved for people who make interesting observations about the state we're in - for instance I find her quite personal commentary on her parenting both fascinating and useful to my own.  She's also in my 'ACT' list, one of my favourites.  I love the way that Twitter enables conversations that are simultaneously global and local, universal and parochial.  When Julie came under attack from a national newspaper owned by a global corporation, there's no doubt that one of the reasons my instincts were to defend her was because she was part of my community - a neighbour.  The part social media plays in redefining our sense of 'belonging' (to whom? to what? to where?) is an aspect of all this #twitdef kerfuffle that has not yet got a run.

When the story broke of the defamation threat general indignation let loose on Twitter, the blogosphere, and in some sections of the online media.  Dozens expressed concern about freedom of speech, the legal issues involved, the issues of journalistic ethics, and the ideological war that appears to be raging between The Australian and social media as a phenomenon.  My own gut reaction was primarily concern for her as an academic, engaged in what is now normal academic practice.  I have recently returned from the late-summer European conference circuit, where I was live-tweeting the sometimes controversial proceedings like a deranged canary.  Thus I joined in the general upwelling of solidarity, and tweeted some comments and messages of support to Posetti for what I felt was an unjustified action against her, and a threat to the medium itself.  I tweeted "Mitchell isn't actually suing @julieposetti, as much as suing Twitter itself, for it is the latter that can damage the reputation of the Oz. And is now doing so. Therefore #iamposetti . And so's my wife :-)"

That last bit, about my wife, was a joke.  Not an original joke; it was a reference to the "I'm Brian" scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, which itself is a parody of the "I'm Spartacus" scene from the Kubrick film Spartacus. To make it crystal clear that what I wrote was an allusion, and not to be taken literally (Julie Posetti is not my wife; I have never met her) I put the little symbol ':-)'.  In current internet parlance, one of the things that symbol signifies is that the writer is joking.

Forgive me for stating the bleeding obvious.  However, one of the fault lines that is running through the whole #twitdef debate surrounds the social media literacies required to interpret contextual meaning.  In 140-character Twitter, there's a tiny little parole and a hell of a lot of rapidly-shifting langue (but that's getting to the academic article that this isn't).  There's another identity issue here - a commonality among those conversant with the argot of social media, and a gulf between them and those who do not.  Do you speak internet jive?

At the same time, I posted another tweet on the same theme: "Crap! Mitchell is sueing @julieposetti! The Oz has a week to get its shit together or I’m blowing the place sky-high. #twitdef #iamspartacus".  

Once again, this was an allusion; this time to the "Twitter Joke Trial" of Paul Chambers in the UK.  Chambers tweeted exactly that wording, as a fairly unfunny "joke" about Robin Hood airport in Doncaster.  Despite in no way being serious (this is clear from his surrounding tweets), he was nevertheless prosecuted and convicted under the UK's anti-terrorism laws.  During his appeal, thousands retweeted his original tweet as an expression of support and solidarity, adding the #iamspartacus hashtag, a reference to the Kubrick movie.  In other words, saying "if you are going to prosecute him, you'll have to prosecute me too".  My own tweet, exchanging "The Oz" for "Robin Hood airport" was intended to draw an analogy between what I believe was the overly heavy-handed treatment of both Chambers and Posetti.  Taken together, my three tweets were a call for the Twitterverse to support Posetti in a similar fashion to the thousands who had supported Chambers.  That intent was quite serious, even though there were "jokes" involved.

I wonder what would have happened if, instead, I had retweeted Julie's original tweets reporting the conference? With the #iamspartacus hashtag?  Or if hundreds or thousands of us had done so?  Would Chris Mitchell be suing us all?  I thought about doing so, but I was too afraid  (see, Caroline?  You really are safe from me).

So there: my tweets in support of Posetti chock-full of clever intellectual contextual reference, layers of allegorical meaning, and whatnot.  All that notwithstanding, perhaps tweeting any kind of tweet containing the words "The Oz" and "I'm blowing the place sky-high" was not the cleverest thing I had ever done.

Then the farce started for me personally.  First I received a somewhat peremptory email from Geoff Elliott, Media Editor at The Australian, wanting to know if I was the author of the #iamspartacus tweet.  The next day he called me, repeated his question about my tweet and then stated "we're referring it to the police".  Of course, I was rather frightened and bewildered at that point.  Crikey reported the incident as a footnote to their coverage of the Posetti story.  The Australian rang the ANU, my employer, for comment as to why an ANU academic should be tweeting this sort of stuff.  Fortunately, sensibly and correctly, the ANU's only comment was that I was tweeting in a private capacity - but there we go; the issue is once again one of identity. Finally, Elliott wrote a short and slightly derisive piece about me on his blog at The Australian.

And there it rests.

My first reaction to Geoff's piece was combative.  I wanted to want to respond, indignant, to set the record straight.  I was offended by his sarcastic interpretation; there were in my view several significant omissions in his story; and his attempt to link my actions as a private individual to my employment as an academic seemed curious and contrived.  

However, I didn't respond, and I'm pleased I didn't.  Much as I disagreed with it, Geoff is entitled to put his view, and certainly entitled to do so without abuse or mockery. Freedom of expression is one of the essential principles underpinning the whole #twitdef issue, and has been undermined by the level of caustic vitriol that has been directed both ways during the debate, both on Twitter and in the press.

In particular, I was saddened to see Sally Jackson, social media writer for The Australian, subject to extended attack from a handful of tweeters after an article she wrote reporting the Posetti story.  She has written about that in her column.  One of the issues she faced was the anonymity of the worst of those savaging her - and here the slipperiness of identity on Twitter can allow cowardly acts indeed. 

Cowardly, fearless; clever, dumb; personal, professional; profound, inane: for me, the whole reason Twitter is a qualitatively different medium from those that existed previously is that it makes possible close-up, informal, messy, contradictory, to-and-fro interaction. Really human interaction.  There is not space in 140 characters to take a coherent ideological position, expound a crystal-perfect argument, or cite a dozen references.  Twitter makes us get messy.  Twitter forces us to chat.  Sally Jackson uses twitter well.   She uses it well professionally.  But she also spent some of Saturday chatting about how to remove graffiti from her wall, and about playing games with her son.  She even had a brief but pleasant exchange with me about chutney, despite the fact I support the other "side" on the twitdef issue.  The messy, human informality of Twitter can have a negative side - as was seen in the abuse directed at Sally.  But it also has a positive side: it shows the necessarily imperfect human faces behind all our carefully-constructed public profiles.  It shows individuals, not institutions; shows the people behind the paywalls. 

So I'm glad I didn't follow my initial reaction and lash back at Geoff Elliott.  I had dug back in his tweet stream to last October and found a series of jokes he and Sally had made about full wastepaper baskets: a series of "bin laden" jokes.  It would have been very easy to follow the lead of his piece about me, paste in a screenshot and subject him to a bit of tit-for-tat ridicule about the appropriateness of such levity for someone in his position. 

But that would have been puerile and pointless.  I'm delighted Geoff and Sally made these jokes.  It reveals them as human beings, not just pawns in institutional ideological battles about the future of media.  It gives dimension and contour to their identities.

The day after he wrote his piece about me, Elliott tweeted "Fair cop. One grumpy fellow said today citing the plod re the dumb sparticus tweet was not cleverest thing I had done. I agreed."

Not an apology, not a formal retraction, not a published justification.

Just a tweet.  Like a normal bloke.  Like ... just anyone.

And a tweet is good enough for me.