#mimetic circulation

[blindrapture]

composition no. 8 (so far)

REFRAIN

It's a voice calling to me in the night, a voice I recognize from deep within, a voice I only somewhat actually hear.

"Come back."

SONG OF ECHO

Come back. Haven't you seen thematic solitude for as long as you could?

Come back. There's merit in comfortable vanity where comfortable vanity is mimetic music.

Come back. Tell me all the abstractions you've found. Let's rebuild with them.

Come back home. You've been roaming long enough.

ETERNAL CONSTRUCTION SITE ONLY MUCH BIGGER

First I must say where I have been.

Imagine a mansion in eternity. Would it have a make immaculate or ruinous? The merit to perfect bricks is aesthetic, its mode ideal: a perfect brick is what we aspire for bricks to be, with edges sanded smooth and corners exactly pointed; a mansion constructed as such will be a perfect mansion, but would it describe an eternal one? Immaculate polish, maintained according to immaculate conception, does not stand alone without manual upkeep. And a mansion, as a construction, must stand alone (or else we are describing not a mansion but an eternal construction site).

So then, the bricks must be ruinous. Crumbled, imperfect, whittling away towards nothing. Right? Does that hold up for eternity? In a matter of time, the mansion would be a heap of heaps, and later still not even that, the grains of dust blown by wind(?) into the grand temporal circulation patterns, more a part of eternity itself than of the intended construct. Does that describe a mansion?

Obviously this exercise is linguistic, then, and there is no clean answer. Surely? But, if there is no answer, where have I been? An abyssal plain? The unanswerable strand? The perpetually temporary Street of Roads, on the outskirts of the center of fabled underscore? I exclaim, I have been in eternity's mansions.

In truth, I still do not know which of the two makes these mansions were (ideal, or dilapidated), and I present the above to you as condensations of suppositions that had entertained my mind in moments of lucid contemplation. I know only that these were mansions-- at least while I was in them. I was not only in the mansions. My pilgrimage has been winding, and you can find my footprints on many an eternal sand. I am here now speaking of the mansions.

Did they have purposes, or owners? What purpose does any mansion have but to present its inhabitant? A house is designed to be inhabited, and so if a mansion only needed to be inhabited, it would have been a house and have no need for the extravagant size. Adding extravagance to a house, even simply making it much bigger, is like installing a frame onto a canvas: it brings explicit presentation, it emphasizes the presence of presentation. The eternal mansion eternally presents whoever inhabits it.

I inhabited, for a while, an eternal present. That's a slightly different sentence where "present" now qualifies "eternal" rather than "I." The future could be seen from the back windows, the past from the books I'd read. For me, the inhabitant, it was hard doing to focus on either of those at all. The mansion, trappings and all, took up my time. I suspected, and even now think back and wonder, that I was not the only inhabitant. Maybe there were others, maybe there were to be others, and I was alone during my allotted stay. Maybe I was not alone and the mansion was simply that big. One is allowed to question-- anything, in fact, including-- whether I was "the inhabitant" and not a guest.

Where did the mansion come from? Where its materials, its constituent parts? Suppose an eternal mansion has eternal parts. Well, which kind of "eternal mansion," the immaculate or the ruinous? Whichever one the bricks, that one the parts: either way, they came from Earth, from Time as we have known it. I did not stay long enough to be absolutely sure of the specifics, though I have made observations. They are all of this sort: 

- I slept on a bed. - It remained the same bed for a number of days, months, more. - It would eventually change to a different bed, and never back to a previous bed. - I never saw it change, though I was not in the same room as the bed all of the time and did not make a concerted effort to see it change. - It was not always a particularly comfortable bed. Sometimes it was.

It is reasonable to assume the nature of the eternal mansion's bricks is the same, with imperfections being replaced when necessary. I did not observe those changes happening either, which on one hand may be more surprising, as there are a lot of bricks in a mansion and I ought to have seen the change happen at least once, but on the other hand may be just as you'd expect, as I do not make a habit of regularly and rigorously watching specific bricks in a wall all day every day. And, for that matter, this is rooted in an assumption. Perhaps the bricks operated differently than the materials of the interior.

I was not the perfect witness to the mechanisms of this mansion, as I spent the greater portion of my stay invested in my own thoughts and activities, those activities usually being further thoughts. I do not have a list of the things I thought about. I was there for a very long time. Many of the things I thought about, I will bring up in natural course in coming posts, blogs, websites, compositions.

It was, they were, mansions. Yet it was not peace.

NESTED

It was not peace, because I spent my days thinking without words. I was interested in this development at first, as it was a relief to change away from the constant words and noises of the brain to which I had grown so accustomed. This persisted, though, and after even a year of this I was now accustomed to mental silence, and words became rare. In that environment, the fluidity of the eternal, I wanted to maintain a pace of words in my head; I saw it as like a vitality without which I became at risk of transforming into a statue, or worse, a feral creature unrecognizing of humanity.

Consider the impossibility of being a writer of words, including the words on this very blog, when there simply are none. This wasn't your everyday lack of words, either. This was a mind that, from birth, was always buzzing, and growing, had many words, through life's chaos, plunging forward, often failing but always trying to articulate happenings and emotions in 26 characters and 9+ punctuation marks (the plus sign not even included in that 9), now sick of fire, weary of change, bruised by strife, aching, so aching, could keep going but instead decides to... stop, temporarily. "Temporarily" turns into "for a while." "For a while" turns into "from now on." Stories, what stories? Those stories? Those were written by a different man, and so they appear as such to my brain now. How can I proceed? How can I describe what went on in my head?

It's not that there were no words. Words in the head are more like.. abstractions of stimulus that calls for decision, they function in that role. Whenever something would happen that called for my decision, the words were there, eventually. Therefore, when I found myself in the eternal mansion, when I settled down to rest my aching legs awhile, I had nested within an environment of negligible stimulus, and my own psychology trapped itself. I was in trouble. All inertia had ceased; there was no more drive. But, do you see? There was nothing doing. Willing myself back into having words, in that place, would not happen.

Not without the dolls.

IN A SILENT WAY

The dolls helped me find words. I did not find the dolls at first, not for a long time that may have been a year. They were tucked away in a room of the mansion I did not venture around. The mansion was huge, and its interior felt like many different houses and structures strung together next to each other in one architectural design, so that after a little bit of preliminary wandering, I had settled on a set of rooms that could serve as a comfortable "house" for me to live in, and there was no reason to explore the rest (beyond curiosity, which the desire for rest at this point overshadowed). Any exploration would quickly run into the issue of exhaustion, as the true scope of that mansion had to have been on the scale of square miles.

The mansion's interior plan, as I eventually got a sense, had modularity to it. A bunch of rooms make up a "house." A bunch of houses are neighbors around a "courtyard," which in some cases is a literal open-roof courtyard (more like a whole park) and in other cases is an assortment of unique rooms. I had no reason to call them "houses" or "courtyards" other than my own need to name them, so don't get caught up in the names. Fundamentally it was all rooms, rooms, rooms.

In any case, my house bordered one given courtyard, and the dolls were in a room several courtyards away, so it was inevitable that I wouldn't find them for a long time. I spent that long time perhaps a little aware of the dolls, paradoxically. I was aware of the mental trap into which I had stumbled, an unequal venting of inertia until starting myself back up again proved more effort than all sense suggested, and furthermore I was also aware of an irrational Hope emerging from the wordless patterns of Tired... a hope that this lack of inertia which had itself come out of inertia would, itself, one day resolve. A hope that I would one day again move, spurred on by some hypothetical curiosity. I reasoned that a mansion like this must contain many curiosities-- many things that I would find curious. Surely. And it did, of course. But even in the profound period of laziness, I still had a hope that I would find some of them, and that I would react appropriately, find them.. curious.

I'm perhaps getting away from myself here. But this style of ramble is appropriate for the contents being narrated. These words fit the wordless, as it's not really about the words, but about the rhythms and structures, the inexhaustible exhaustion, the round-and-round roundabout riddles, every promise of a new subject seeing interruption as the discursive voice sinks into an old whirlpool. Really, it is no wonder that I spent much time resting, but now imagine these whirlpool sentences carrying on even when the words have ceased, imagine a ramble of empty sentences, a roundabout of punctuation-- then you will have considered the chamber music of my everyday life in that mansion.

That, for (I want to say "several") unbroken years, was my mental landscape. Some words, memories of words, washed up from the waves of blank, flotsam from a skillset I once had. It is vital to me now that I have or am retraining my articulation that I try many times to retroactively describe what it was like. Autobiography is a priority, and I am too spiteful to have gone through that and let it remain unspoken.

But the dolls.

I'm still not ready to talk about the dolls yet. There's a bit more I have to say.

THE FORMAL CAUSE OF METAPHYSICS

In a mind without words but shaped by the memory of words, time's passing is experienced elsehow. I felt it like emotions. In an environment without stimulus but shaped by the form of where stimulus might be, emotions are experienced without obscurity. I saw them like clouds. In an emotion without subject but remembered like any emotion with subject would be, time passes long-long. The proof is in the putting.

In talking of this now, having to pull my memories from back then and put words to the wordless, I fall back on the mannerisms of smart people whose works I have read far more recently. All this time, I've been speaking in the style of Samuel Beckett, and in the last paragraph I recalled some Michael Stevens. There simply are no words to adequately convey this, only references and signs, and signs signifying signs. What was that one. Umberto Eco. Of course.

There was a time, at the very dawn of protohistory (i.e. long before this blog or even the whole series of blogs, long before I even had the "protohistory" reference I just made), when I spoke like this too, pulling from contemporary sources, signs signifying nothing but their own technicalities, and fired away my sentences like and as the teenager I was, tasked with describing a past far bigger than any of the words I heard. And the word of the day then was "abuse," unsatisfactory but at least a container of those fires that escaped my brain (far better described through signs like "the eldritch" and "cosmic horror," signifiers of the impossible). The word of the day now is not quite as simple as that, though it's one I recognized even then:

"Isolation."

It's the theme, you see, of all this. Here I sing, you see, the refrain. It's isolation. All the books I've read talk about it, and none of them capture it. How, then, can I capture the unspeakable? How do I speak of where I've been, for eight long adult years, without merely repeating the readily-dismissable forms of the past? It's the refrain, I sing. How do I write about years spent unwriting my own brain?

Well, as you can see, I elected to begin with a conceit: a conversation with a personal god that frames a longer expansion. That expansion treats the allegory, an invention, that is the eternal mansion. Within this expansion, there is a maze, barely mentioned. This composition is set within a maze, in contrast to other works of mine that have been mazes. There's still more to be said, and my pace in setting it all down has been slow, so I can't tell you how long it will be before I'm done. But that's alright. I want this composition to have a slow tempo anyway. Every word must be taken into the mind, considered as an effort. What you're reading, my EAT, my sweet, my last mirror, my lost reader, is the product of the resolution of its own conflict. I am writing now because I am no longer in those mansions. The writing treats a foregone conclusion because it's not really about those mansions. It is about finishing a long thought far bigger, too bigger, than the shadow of a name.

Now I have to kill the You again and try, but only try, to speak of I again. End the refrain, but we will return.

The secret is in the emotions. Isn't it always? The emotions felt in those mansions, devoid of any stimulus that those emotions would otherwise treat as subject and color, in the absence of any natural form, gradually and with conscious practice over the course of courses of times and time, must take on-- must reveal-- the form of emotions themselves. Cut out all distractions, and the form even of the formless may be discerned.

I saw them like clouds, and necessarily like rain and the rivers too. Therefore, I saw emotions, in their purest form, as water. "They come and go like weather..." said one memory of a creation of my head. "Picture yourself by the rushing river of human history as the flotsam of memories drift by..." said another memory of a creation of someone else's. "The Cloud of Look-Like," said one more memory of a creation of my head, "does not exist, yet those who behave as if it does manage to get something right. Therefore, existence is not the only form that our reality accepts..."

Emotions, being of a similar chemistry as that of memories (in fact, what are emotions if not memories stripped, with time, of their content, left only with their form?), move. They enter our focus, color whatever thoughts and sensations are in front of us, then carry on, leaving us to reckon with the consequences of our actions taken under colored impressions. "We are left holding the bag..." says a nameless memory, but I must disagree with that premise, as it supposes that emotions do this on purpose, out of some design of our greater suffering. We are the ones with the designs, we are the ones who create those designs over the course of years, and we leave emotions to hold the bag. Emotions do not have intent. Emotions are like clouds. They come, they paint a sky that we then interpret forms out of which we call "weather," they go none the wiser, neither the more foolish, only the dumber. (remembering what "dumb" actually means)

It is not inherently pleasant to stand within a rainstorm. It is neither inherently depressing to stand under an overcast sky. A sky devoid of clouds, beautiful to look at, leaves my body exposed to the ultraviolent rays of the Light of Knowledge, the Sun we must in our time put down. The rubrics of nature were set before us and did not presume our needs; to change them for one is to change them for all. We must be certain that we know what we are doing. We must understand, and to stand under that Ideal Sun is to exert more effort than life had before prepared me for.

To stay in the eternal mansions, without words, meant watching the slow flow of emotions go, never to know, only to low, never to yes, only to no. Observation yes, composition no. Forget all I know in hopes of one day remembering when I have a better emotional foundation. And that.. may never happen. It may never happen even with the fount of all human knowledge to drink from, it may never happen even with the solidarity of friend and foe engaging me on the daily, it cannot happen when devoid of all drive and alone in rooms I will not describe. I figured that much not long into my stay. And yet, without drive, there is no movement. This situation would resolve itself only painfully slowly, all the while watching my emotions... watching them go.

It was scary in the way that horror stories never know.

[tanadrin]

Not sure who the dysgenics post is vaguing, and I don't want to get into this off anon, but sterilization (ostensibly voluntary) of genetically inferior potential parents is an idea that I've seen advocated by someone concerned about dysgenics

It's a side post to big discussion involving some people I follow about Scott Alexander's pessimistic predictions for the future. All very silly Decline and Fall stuff, as @discoursedrome put it.

(And even then I think he was being too charitable--"the whole world looks like it's decaying if you live in the political and economic center of it and even small things are shifting around you" is true, but I actually don't think very big shifts are occurring--I could go on at length here, but suffice it to say I think US hegemony is assured for the time being, we're making progress even on the biggest issues facing our society, like climate change, and I simply do not think a 50/50 chance of humans destroying themselves within 100 years--or even experiencing a major global collapse--is realistic. I think Acott Alexander lives inside a bubble of people with a lot of really silly ideas about the world and how it works, where being clever is seen as a sufficient substitute for expertise, and he is there because he is fundamentally gullible to any idea packaged in the right aesthetic.)

But historically, the idea of dysgenics/eugenics arose in the context of Social Darwinism. I think Social Darwinism is a funny animal; it is a surface-level retread of some ideas that were in circulation in Britain for a long time before Darwin. Specifically, the idea of a hierarchy of virtue that exists alongside and underpins a hierarchy of class is nothing new--that in itself may be as ancient as human civilization, since every society needs an ideology to legitimate its power structures. But in the context of early 1800s Britain, you had the Whigs, the new middle class of the burgeonining Industrial Revolution, looking to join the ranks of power--either to position themselves against the lazy shiftless aristocracy who did not work for a living, or to join them, to be like "yes, we don't have titles [but please give us some!], but we're also not like those awful lazy/drunk/Irish poors." I think alongside the Whiggish enthusiasm for science and progress, Social Darwinism nicely blends both that older idea of a hierarchy of virtue with newer ideas about dispassionate natural processes to produce an idea with a lot more mimetic heft for the new age (if you don't know much about either Darwinism or economics) than the unfiltered Anglicanism of the pre-1860s generations, one which takes the exact same policy prescriptions and like 90% of the same underlying rationale ("we cannot improve the social condition of the poor; they will waste their money on drink and gambling, breed like rabbits if their children are no longer often starving to death or dying of cholera, and they will corrupt the virtue of our society") and adds just a light dusting of pseudoscience ("we cannot improve the social condition of the poor; they will waste their money on drink and gambling, breed like rabbits if their children are no longer often starving to death or dying of cholera, and they will have a dysgenic effect on the white race").

(Along with the corollary, obviously, that we should get rich people to breed more, because clearly wealth and intelligence and virtue are heritable.*)

I do not think Scott Alexander is a Social Darwinist. Almost nobody is these days, and while I think he sometimes takes some very bad ideas seriously, I do not think he is at "19th century British racist" levels of taking bad ideas seriously. AFAICT the kind of eugenics Scott Alexander would support is what's sometimes called "positive eugenics," i.e., not sterilizating people against their will, but making sure that (for instance) middle-class people aren't actively discouraged from having kids by the tax structure, and using genetic engineering if/when it becomes available to gradually improve longevity, health, and IQ. But where concerns about dysgenics do pop up in modern authors, they tend to echo or simply restate older Social Darwinist concerns--as a general argument against welfare, for instance. But Scott has also talked about how UBI is a good idea, and that's pretty much the welfariest welfare you could possibly welfare. So I assume he's not worried that if we give the poor food, we will be up to our eyeballs in shiftless drunk Irishmen within a few generations.

(*"Heritable" is a great word! Wealth, for instance, is indeed heritable! How much money you will have is strongly predicted by how much money your parents had. But "heritable" is obviously not the same as "genetic," and this kind of equivocation--like that between intelligence and education, or between virtue and conformity to arbitrary social norms, was the bread and butter of 19th and 20th century Social Darwinists.)

[bedlessbug]

Steven Baris Diagrams and Art

an important (although not necessary) feature common to diagrammatic-based art practices that distinguishes them from more “self-referential” artworks in the contemporary world—namely, these artists are often motivated to create more than mere objects or beautiful optical displays that point to nothing outside of themselves. Artists working in a diagrammatic vein are less likely to subscribe to Frank Stella’s famous statement, “What you see is what you see.” Certainly such a view would have been incomprehensible to most artists and artisans working in pre-modern eras, as there was little to no daylight between what we would call “artworks” and the cultural and religious structures of meaning underwriting them.

The vast majority of frescos, sculptures, paintings, drawings, reliefs, stain glass windows, manuscripts, mosaics, tapestries, and so on were meant to reflect or illustrate “higher order” religious, mythological, philosophical, or royal ideals. Contemporary diagrammatic-based art practices may or may not seek to reflect these kinds of ideals, but their makers generally “intend” for their artworks to point to something extrinsic to the actual artwork even if that something is difficult to pin down precisely.

I will even go out on a limb and suggest that in many instances, this “something extrinsic,” this “more than what you see” is indeed meaning itself

But even though meaning in contemporary art is often highly personalized and idiosyncratic, more than a few artists are compelled to articulate the inarticulable in their work through abstract, non-pictorial means; and I am suggesting that diagrammatic-based practices offers an especially viable platform for this to happen.

______________________________________________________________

by lending more or less equal significance to all the parts of the image, the viewers’ attention would be distributed in such a way as to encourage more correlative interactions among the various parts.

Grid-like visual grammars are stridently spatial, and as such, they eschew sequential/narrative modes of representation in favor of a spatial, simultaneous reception of information. This features prominently in many diagrams; ironically, even those attempting to “map” temporal features onto graphic displays (e.g. graphs, charts, time tables).

Krauss also makes an interesting argument when she states: “In the increasingly de-sacralized space of the 19th century, art had become the refuge for religious emotion; it became, as it has remained, a secular form of belief.” In this context she says the grid allowed artists to “magically resolve the para-logical contradiction between a materialist secularism and a spiritualism [metaphysics] in a sustained suspension.”

Pablo Picasso: Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper

For example, a glancing analysis of Picasso’s Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (see Figure 6), reveals the telltale presence of “white space” and how it functions to subvert traditional hierarchical composition and instead, prompts the viewer to “correlate diverse packets of information,” (e.g. text, hints of pictorial shading, geometric shapes, lines and notations).

Marcel Duchamp: Network of Stoppages

Francis Picabia

“in Dada, the diagrammatic served as one of three visual tactics—montage and the readymade being the other two—for embracing and representing this epistemological crisis.” Joselit traces several artists’ experiments with combining images and text where, among other aspects of their work, he hones in on their diagrammatic drawings, paintings and designs. Here he states that “such combinations of word and picture [“mimetic units”] are precisely what characterizes more ‘canonical’ Dada diagrams by artists like Picabia. In such works, image and text circulate within a single plane of signification.”

In full diagrammatic fashion, these works suppress mimetic picturing in favor of explaining, albeit in a highly idiosyncratic and enigmatic manner.

“The diagram reconnects the disconnected fragments of representation invented by cubism. This act of reconnection does not function as a return to coherence, but rather as a free play of polymorphous linkages, which, to this day, remain a central motif of modern (and postmodern) art.”

The viewer is enjoined to take an active role of cross-referencing and decoding.

As with so many conventional diagrams, what takes place in The Large Glass is a transfer of predominantly temporal relations (i.e. processes) into spatial/graphical relations—thus transforming a predominantly sequential order of “events” into a graphic display of simultaneous interrelationships.(3)

“…a relatively neutral blank ground in and around the images, words, symbols or notations. It is the strategic presence of the white space that prompts the viewer to focus less on the individual components, but instead to extract meaning by actively correlating one “packet of information” with another so as to conjure new and unexpected relationships.”

[ashleighlowemfa]

Hito Steyerl (2)

In defense of the poor image

Key words

Accelerates, it deteriorates // itinerant // reproduced // lumpen proletarian // effigies // stultification // mimetic // cineastes and esthetes // bureaucratic // blurred // amateurish // dematerialisation // semiotic // deterritorialization // dubious data pools // stupefaction

Quotes

"transforms quality in accessibility"

"Its filenames are deliberately misspelled" (me)

"Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable - that is, if we can still manage to decipher it"

" focus is identified as a class position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one's value as an image"

"In the class society of images, cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-end products are marketed in an upscale environment. More affordable derivatives of the same images circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television or online, as poor images"

"Resolution was fetishised as if its lack amounted to castration of the author"

"Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neo liberal restructuring of media production began slowly obscuring non-comercial imagery, to the point where experimental and essyistic cinema became almost invisible"

"Disappearing again into the darkness of the archive"

"but the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think necessary"

"Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. whether they like it or not"

"Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images - their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria"

"one the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather then contemplation, on previews rather than screenings"

[aetherscribe-blog]

Mimetic Circulation

How to turn Gods and Heroes into Myths.

   Have you ever read a book or watched a movie where there is some kind of legendary figure - let’s say a God of Destruction who wants to destroy the world, right? The writer clearly intended for this story to be a sweeping epic where the gods in their story are similar to that of actual myth and yet, this God of Destruction just feels like a guy who has godly powers? This god feels more like a character and less like a Myth.

   Recently I was looking around for inspiration for more stories and ideas, and I stumbled across the theory of Mimetic Circulation. This was the generation-long game of Telephone that people have played in history, using anything from religion to folk heroes as the prop of this action. So how exactly does it work? And how can it be incorporated into your writing?

   One day in Ancient Greece, somebody came up with an idea through philosophy that the world and everything must have been created by a superior race of beings, which he called the Gods. One day, when lightning cracked the sky, the people of Greece fearfully decided that it was one of the Gods, Zeus, that was angry with them. Another day, when they got a bountiful harvest, they decided through grateful assumption that it had been the Goddess of Harvest, Demeter, that had been pleased with their worship and granted the harvest to them. This is an example of how something as plain as generic gods turned into the Greek Pantheon - through the mental portrayal of the people who worshipped them. Whether through fear, joy or bewilderment, all it takes is one individual who had a new experience and the courage to speak out about it to mentally project how they see the Gods onto other people’s consciousness. Then, it begins again.

   It’s this long chain of mental projection, or Mimetic Circulation, that really adds richness to any culture that has mythological ties. This is also the reason why myths aren’t being made to this day, because it takes generations of people to turn a belief into a myth. And so I hear many of you asking me just how exactly this can be used in your stories when you do not have generations of people on hand? Well you do - you have characters and a rich setting to work with. But there is another way as well.

   I’ve written about H.P. Lovecraft before on this blog and it’s no surprise to anybody that he is one of my favourite writers of all time. He created his pantheon of indifferent Elder Gods, such as Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu and Dagon, and yet we can tell these gods aren’t just tangible entities - these are nightmarish deities spawned in the mind of one man. But how? Well, that is because H.P. Lovecraft was a very insecure and unstable individual who had a very traumatic childhood and early life. On top of that, his gods kept reappearing within his fiction. An example of this is Dagon, who appeared in the story based after his name, Dagon, where he simply appeared as a sea monster of terrifying proportions. In later work, however, Dagon reappears in The Shadow over Innsmouth as more of a deity or empowered being. This happens because Lovecraft kept circulating Dagon through different stories and, because of his neuroses, fears, xenophobia and (unfortunately) racism, every time he invoked Dagon or any other of his gods within his story, he would mentally project them with a new layer of horror or revulsion. His Mythos continues to go through this Mimetic Circulation to this day every time another writer, filmmaker or artist portrays the Lovecraft Mythos in their work, adding their own layer with their own mental projection.

   So how exactly is this useful? Well, it is useful especially to you fantasy writers out there who have legendary heroes or powerful gods, but they never seem to be mythical enough to the point of invincible intangibility. Instead, try to ask yourself - why is your benevolent god seen by humans as a nice god? Why do they see the evil one as a malevolent force? Gods will be seen and portrayed differently in a world bathed in peace to that of a world shrouded in fear.

   I hope this was useful or even at least interesting to anybody out there reading! If you have any questions regarding fictional writing or just about anything at all really, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and I’ll truly be happy to help! Happy writing!

- CR

[catilinas]

second punic war historical fiction pov character anna As In, Dido's Sister From The Aeneid Who Was Going To Maybe Be Murdered By Lavinia And Turned Into A River About It, assimilated into the roman goddess anna perenna (there's a cool motif about circular narratives in there. like we Are trapped in meanings that circulate like blood). in silius italicus' punica she helps out hannibal or something. Elaborate On That. (and it Needs to get weird about time + epic narrative in a laviniacore way.) the other pov character is iuturna As In, Turnus' Unwillingly Immortal Sister From The Aeneid Who Was Also A River Goddess. altar in the forum romanum despite her spending the whole aeneid on the side of the war that Lost to aeneas. And They Are Lesbians. turnus has always been hannibalcoded we Know this. did you know turnus and dido are also parallels and also Cousins. the potential for evil mimetic haunted sibling relationships is almost infinite. we are trapped in meanings that circulate like blood! second punic war is the main event but if it gets weird and nonlinear i think polybius should be there also. in what is very clearly a hostage situation. also hannibal is being pursued by an army of ghosts or something idk

[amrosenberg]

Taxonomies of Fandom

In the 19th century, taxonomies were a big deal. A hundred years after Linnaeus developed the system of binomial nomenclature, Darwinian natural philosophy emphasized that new and existing taxonomies should reflect the principle of common descent, giving rise to today’s system of evolutionary taxonomy. 

If you’ve read the Aubrey-Maturin series of nautical adventure novels, you might be familiar with Testudo aubreii, the majestic tortoise that Stephen Maturin named after his best friend Jack Aubrey. It is an honor not lightly to be given, a sort of taxonomy as immortality: “This is Testudo aubreii for all eternity; when the Hero of the Nile is forgotten, Captain Aubrey will live on in his tortoise. There’s glory for you.”  Putting a name to something makes it easier to understand and discuss; it can provide a starting point for study and for further investigation. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about taxonomy lately, thanks to a few conversations I’ve had this month with people looking for expertise on fans and fan studies for final projects. I’m always happy to chat about this stuff, but sometimes I’m unexpectedly run up against the limits of my expertise: to be honest, I don’t know a lot about sports fans, or the practices of fans of massive commercial domains like Disney.

I’m interested in transformative fandom, which is a relatively small (but impactful) slice of the pie, as well as digital platforms and the ways in which youth audiences in particular utilize affordances of those platforms to express enthusiasm. I suppose I’m a fan scholar in the same way that an expert in ants is an entomologist: it’s a useful bit of nomenclature, but don’t ask them about spiders. There’s obviously a lot of benefits to specialization: but for someone who has aspirations towards the public humanities, I’m increasingly aware of my own need to have a more comprehensive overview of the different types of fans. 

Over the 30 years of fan studies’ existence there have been numerous attempts to do just that: create a useful paradigm that neatly sections off fan practices into families and genii. The split between “transformational” and “affirmational” fandoms, first proposed by a pseudonymous fan in 2009 and later taken up by scholars like Henry Jenkins, is broadly handy, but problematic: it can lead to viewing “affirmational” fandom such as cosplaying, merchandise-buying, and information-collecting (such as in wikis) as purely mimetic and of lesser cultural value than “transformational” fan activities (see Hills, 2014). 

That binary also ignores the large swathes of people that perform both types of fandom, or whose fan practices exist somewhere in between, or not on that axis at all; it’s also slightly outdated. In 2009, transformational fans who wrote erotica about non-canonical ships could still be safely said to be “against” canon in some way, non-sanctioned and acting transgressively out of bounds. I would say that in many cases, that is far from the case today. 

Something I’m interested in is how fan practices develop and spread from one “genus” of fandom to another. (Presuming “species” is an individual fandom, and “genus” is a group of species connected by ancestry and shared practice). You see this in the phenomena in sports RPF, for example: slash fanfiction is a genre of practice developed by media fandom (TV/film fandom) in the 1970s and 80s, but it has been “adopted out” so to speak to form the nucleus of a sub-species of sports fans. 

This circulation of practice is especially notable in the field of transcultural fandom (see Morimoto, 2017). Fan practices developed in the context of East Asian pop music fandom, such as chart-boosting, have made their way over to Western fandoms and communities centering on non-music media objects. Digital platforms afford this circulation, which in turn results in a blurring of boundaries between fan species and increasing difficulty in parsing out which “type” of fan someone is. Practices are contagious and amoebic. The type of sparkly fancams intially made by K-pop idol fans were adopted by Succession stans. 

Like the animal kingdom, there’s just so much going on. To say nothing of what was going on. Which types of fans have gone extinct? Which modes of interacting with media are now archaeological artifacts, thanks to the shifting relationality of the apparatus of cultural production with respect to audiences? 

I think that especially in a time when many groups who might not explicitly consider themselves “fans” have freely taken up digital practices developed and popularized in fandom spaces, investigations into the origins and classifications of fans and fan culture has the potential to provide broader behavioral insights into online communities. 

[billieraphael]

“In Defense of the Poor Image” - Hito Steyerl

“On the one hand, [the poor image] operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.” ー Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image”

In her essay titled In Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl situates herself within the contemporary digital revolution of semiocapitalism, where means of image production and image value exist within a visual hierarchy based on the quality of its resolution. However, Steyerl argues that the poor image opposes the value hierarchy of high resolution images by establishing its own economy. Incidentally, both the poor and rich image exist within the same system of commodification; as Steyerl writes, “poor images are thus popular images”, in that they operate on a democratic level. They allow access and participation on a mass scale uninhibited by the confines of institutional exclusivity. It functions as a rejection of the “rich” image by purposefully denying the value of high resolution. Like its name suggests, a poor image is inherently substandard. It’s own pictorial quality is defined by its material atrophy. As the poor image constantly cycles through the process of reupload, download, edit, share, copy, paste, it frees itself from the value of high resolution by instead inheriting a form of cult value, influenced by its distribution into the cultural aether. Steyerl identifies that “poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images—their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement”. Once it enters the network of popular image, the poor image is able to redefine value through social capital, a cultural currency defined through virality, influence and clout (John Lorinc,  "Your Kids, The Influencers." Corporate Knights 14, no. 2 (2015): 50-53.). It is iterative, responding to its environment through mimetic evolution. A poor image becomes an open invitation for cultural producers, since its inherent fragility allows for continual remix and reproduction. As such, it becomes a transgressive bastardization of the original image, displacing itself from the hierarchy of high art images. The poor image, then, is a transformative copy propelled by the circuits of demand that is stimulated by its own popularity. 

All these qualities, however, are precisely what grant the poor image its seductive condition; the poor image is still an object of cultural production, within the informational image economy. In separating itself from the value of high resolution, the poor image is commodified through its accessibility. Rather than being sequestered by the gatekeepers of the rich image, its affinity for rapid distribution and potential for volatility are fetishized by markets that operate in the exchange of culture and information. As Steyerl states, “the networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia”. I think this is most evident in the spheres of digital culture, where markets operate in a “meme economy”. The meme has become synonymous with the poor image, in that it exists within the same structure of production and commodification. Like the poor image, its visual repertoire hinges on the bastardization of the original image, which lives on and degrades through the process of iteration, transgression, and transformation. As a cultural artifact, it serves the same function of communication that reflects the ideas of popular culture. And just like the poor image, a meme’s value lies in its inherent trashiness; a meme is characterized by its irreverence to labour and quality, which grants it the capacity for virality and spread (Yvette Granata, "Meme Dankness: Floating Glittery Trash for an Economic Heresy." In Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, edited by Bown Alfie and Bristow Dan, 251-76. Punctum Books, 2019. pp. 259-260). Its status as mutable and proneness to appropriation is what fetishizes a meme within the image economy. A meme’s relationship to democracy and popularity are what give it political clout. 

As Yvette Granate wrote in her essay "Meme Dankness: Floating Glittery Trash for an Economic Heresy",  “[a meme is] free marketing, free branding, free labor. This is the economic normality of capitalist appropriation—but now mixed with the weird image board flow of the Internet meme” (Granata, 267). As a poor image, a meme is able to be seen by many, and its fleeting temporality takes advantage of the condition of its environment, in that its velocity, intensity and impressionability seduce its audience; a meme opposes the value hierarchy of resolution, yet simultaneously plays into the system of informational capitalism.

[robhorninginternalexile]

the influencerization of everything

From this LARB essay by Sarah Brouillette about Caroline Calloway:

We see in her case a set of conditions that are likely to intensify as the publishing industry continues to struggle: toward convergence with social media culture, the self-branding industry, gig work in the form of self-publishing, with a growing army of hungry creatives vying for attention. They are serving a new kind of consumer, too — a topic for another piece — who is drawn less to physical paperbound books and more to free content with options added, like that $100 personal phone call, and to the kinds of subscription-based services that reduce the risk of disappointment if you don’t get what you paid for.

For a long time now, I’ve argued that social media incentivize (and then ultimately compel) the production of the self as a commodity — they reconstitute self-expression as perpetual advertisements for the self, demonstrations of one’s human capital, as well as one’s capacity to leverage attention and, as Brouillette emphasizes, the promotional labor of others. The rise of influencers is indicative of the normalization of these practices, and a harbinger — it seems like most forms of work will eventually be influencerized, and workers will have to leverage their personality, their “personal brand,” to get work or to perform it up to managerial expectations. Taylor Lorenz points out in this piece how this has happened in journalism.

But the other side of the coin that Brouillette gestures toward above seems just as important: how influencerization has changed consumption, how it reflects and drives a destabilization of the object of consumption. In other words, once static objects (books, etc.) become “content” — fluid, upgradable, networked, subject to spontaneous (or spurious) customization, directly social in that one can immediately recirculate it, comment on it, argue about it, “react” to it with a button, and so on.

It may become increasingly strange to consume objects we cannot immediately imprint with some avatar of ourselves, that we can’t immediately augment (by paying extra or performing some kind of labor). It’s not “interactivity” per se, because it is not reciprocal and it is mostly systematized and delimited by the interfaces through which media is consumed. But it is a matter of manifesting “influence.” No kind of consumption can occur outside the awareness of the asymmetries of attention that directly govern it. 

When one thinks of, say, free-to-play games, it’s easy to construe their constant attempts to milk money from you as annoying. But it may be more accurate to think of that as part of the entertainment, part of the means for subjectivizing the player, for making them feel as though they are being paid attention to, being recognized. 

This is how I understand the “new kind of consumer” Brouillette mentions. The vicarious fantasy inherent in consumption can be supplemented by more direct forms of engagement; consumers no longer need to be trained how to enjoy vicarious, imaginative experiences in the same way they used to. The emulative, mimetic aspects of consumption are more straightforward now, given the channels consumers have to immediately produce their responses and see what reactions they attract. 

Every commodified experience concretizes some aspect of the “influence” that has produced and circulated it, and the process of consuming it is now a matter of tapping into that and trying to realize it somehow for oneself.  

[femalerose23]

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Content

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Due to the means GW works it is risk-free to think it was all or mainly LBM. Because of the method Cardarine works users as well as animal research studies showed that Cardarine is related to substantial reduction in body fat. Where Cardarine or GW50515 ends up being exceptionally intriguing is that PPARD activation boosted mitochondrial biogenesis in the muscle mass, which can redesign your muscle mass cells! In research studies of qualified and inexperienced mice, Cardarine triggered quickly shiver muscle fiber to transform to slow down jerk muscular tissue fibers. As a result of this Cardarine is often called an exercise mimetic as only workout can normally make these modifications to your metabolism and fiber structure. At simply 1mg daily for 3 weeks a medical test showed a typical gain of 1.21 kg in LBM which is almost 1 extra pound of LBM per week which is definitely ridiculous considering the time framework and also the fact that they were not also training. Unlike Ostarine, LGD-4033 does not appear to enhance liver enzymes however like Ostarine it did negatively impact great cholesterol levels.

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However it is highly likely that the adverse effects at this dose would probably be the same or even worse than testosterone. In recent times, steroid usage has been expanding throughout the UK - not only among gym-goers and bodybuilders, as you would certainly expect, however in certain specialist areas, too. peptides-uk information BPC157 Sweden ideas 's why, in mid-2019, we introduced the initial UK-based hair steroid testing solution, aiding family members legal representatives as well as work environments alike to stamp out the issues brought on by the psychological and emotional negative effects of anabolic steroids. Today tried heavy shoulder presses, and got a brand-new individual finest. My prevoius was 80 kg x 1 associates, currently I handled 80 kg x 3 associates conveniently.

Typically when I stop with my steroids, my toughness reduces as well as I am reducing weight. This time around I lost weight on the scale at the very least however aesthetically it really did not resemble it as well as I preserved my toughness. Finally, the outcomes of the present research revealed useful effects of both SARMs on the muscle mass framework and also metabolic rate in ovariectomized rats.

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It is worth discussing that taking SARMs is NOT as reliable as steroids. If they were then everybody utilizing steroids would certainly have stopped and switched over a very long time earlier. Having stated this, SARMs are taken at a much reduced dosage than steroids/testosterone. A normal Ostarine dosage is 20mg for 8 weeks yet a typical 8-week testosterone dosage would certainly be anywhere between mg per week, so if Ostarine was taken at a similar dosage would certainly similar testosterone results happen?

The truth is that results produced by sarms are smaller than the results of utilizing traditional steroids but they are most definitely safer. With each brand-new version, sarms are coming to be more efficient, so they might eventually produce even more powerful outcomes than traditional steroids. I obtained it for myself, not as much to be gaining mass yet basically for after steroid cycle.

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" I am considering my legal alternatives, in terms of where I stand as well as what I can do. That could cost me a great deal of cash and I'm not sure I can manage to do that. They are playing with individuals lives and also credibilities, and also it's incorrect. Building muscular tissue and also bone toughness would profit a UFC competitor and also as formerly discussed, that is what ostarine does. Two Russian UFC boxers, Ruslan Magomedov and also Zubaira Tukhugov, likewise lately checked positive for ostarine. In their instances, the UFC and USADA did not think that supplement contamination was a valid explanation, as well as provided both with 2 year restrictions.

SARM piling can lead to cutting fat at the same time while developing muscular tissue, according to unscientific research study on SARMs forums. For example, LGD-4033 and also S-23 have been provided to balance out the bulking results of testolone.

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He sent out 20 products in to be tested and also every one came back unfavorable for ostarine. I am thinking that also if it was that item or an infected supplement, or a contaminated batch, after that the odds are reduced of it coming back favorable. ' You ought to watch out for ostarine's numerous synonyms, consisting of MK-2866, enobasarm, -3-( 4-cyanophenoxy)- N- [4-cyano-3-phenyl] -2- hydroxy-2-methylpropanamide, and also GTx-024 on supplement labels'. The objective of this research is to check the safety of GSK in males and females with COPD and also muscle weakness.

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LGD-4033 as well as S-4 have been stacked for their impacts on weight loss, as have LGD-4033 and also SR9009 Stenabolic and also GW501516. Testolone is shown in studies to enhance lean muscle cells without increasing fat mass, and also to be extremely bioavailable in its oral supplement form. It also enhances speed and endurance throughout exercise, which can aid with making faster muscle gains. It assists to improve muscle stamina, significantly delays the onset of exhaustion. There is additionally a blurred line in between sporting supplements as well as nutritional supplements, which can make law challenging. In July last year, a South African supplement maker safeguarded its item, after a competitor it funded returned an AAF from one of its products. Biogen sponsors Extreme Combating Champion competitor Demarte Pena, that was issued with a lecture after an AAF for testosterone was mapped back to 'Testoforte for Stamina', produced by Biogen.

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Both OS and LG boosted muscular tissue vascularization, as well as OS had a stronger impact than LG on vascularization. On the other hand, LG possessed much more effect on muscle metabolic enzymes by raising LDH and CS tasks, whereas OS entirely caused a high CS task. A hypertrophic effect on muscular tissue fiber size was not observed under either SARM therapy. In addition, the uterotrophic impact of both of the examined SARMs at higher does might be a limitation for their application. All rats obtained a soy-free rodent diet (ssniff Spezial Diät GmbH, Soest, Germany) throughout the experiment. OS and also LG were supplied with the soy-free diet (ssniff Spezial Diät GmbH). The staying food in the cage was evaluated once a week to determine the ordinary daily food intake of a rat by separating these information by days in between the considering and variety of rats in a cage.

In Experiment II, intramuscular fat web content was established in the quadriceps femoris muscular tissue in Non-OVX, OVX, as well as OVX+LG 4 teams. In both experiments, a reduced dosage of 0.04 mg/kg BW/day was computed based upon a human-equivalent dosage enough for improvements of complete lean body mass and also physical feature. To check out dose-dependent impacts, 10-fold as well as 100-fold does were made use of. SARMs and also prohormones are 2 types of supplements used for bodybuilding and also getting a ripped, reduced look. While they both result in muscle gains, they're entirely different compounds with entirely different biochemical impacts. Because some SARMs are best for bulking as well as others are shown to be particularly reliable for reducing, they're sometimes integrated, or piled, in research study studies.

The study will inspect the results of GSK on muscle mass assessed as adjustments in leg strength, muscle mass, as well as functional steps such as walking capacity. https://peptides-uk.com/bpc157/canada/ was established to enhance muscle mass size, reduce fat, and increase testosterone degrees. Below at Top Body Nutrition, we are an organization with body home builders in mind, providing a big choice of supplements for a variety of various objectives. In this area, you will certainly find both SARMS, as well as products that are similar to SARM products. In-Vitro research studies reveal that RAD-140 has a much higher binding affinity for the androgen receptor than testosterone and also dihydrotestosterone. It likewise revealed that it was highly selective in skeletal muscle as well as bone, with just a weak hostile effect in androgenic cells. RAD-140 does likewise have an extremely weak interaction with progesterone as well as estrogen because of it not responding with any kind of various other steroid hormone receptors to any type of significant degree.

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As reported by The Sports Integrity Campaign, Gordon Gilbert also faces the very same issue with the same supplement. " These firms require to be frightened to place things like ostarine into their items", he suggests.

" A couple of UFC competitors, who are 12 months into their 2 year bans for ostarine, messaged me", he explains. " One is rather a renowned fighter, as well as he vouched on his children life that he had not taken ostarine.

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The ordinary everyday dosage of OS and also LG was calculated based upon the everyday food intake and the mean BW in the cage on the particular week. After 13 weeks post-OVX, all animals were euthanized under CO2 anesthesia. Blood product was gathered for further evaluation of creatine kinase as a pen of muscle damages. The gastrocnemius muscular tissue, soleus muscular tissue, as well as longissimus muscular tissue were drawn out. The GM as well as SM were considered and also all muscle mass were frozen in fluid nitrogen as well as saved at − 80 ° C up until more analyses. Either left or right muscle mass were made use of randomly in either histological or enzyme analyses.

Webster states that he spent his life cost savings trying to find the resource of the ostarine, which he argues might have been due to contaminated supplements or salt tablet computers. ' The UKAD expert testified that the amount of ostarine located in my body was the lowest that has actually ever been reported (4 nanograms/ml) which would certainly make it near impossible to establish the source', reads his declaration.

[collapsedsquid]

Karp and Thiel have both described these controversial contracts using the language of “nation” and “civilization.” Confronted by critical journalistic coverage (Woodman 2017, Winston 2018, Ahmed 2018) and protests  (Burr 2017, Wiener 2017), as well as internal actions by concerned employees (MacMillan and Dwoskin, 2019), Thiel and Karp have doubled down, characterizing the company as “patriotic,” in contrast to its competitors. In an interview conducted at Davos in January 2019, Karp said that Silicon Valley companies that refuse to work with the US government are “borderline craven” (2019b). At a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in July 2019, Thiel called Google “seemingly treasonous” for doing business with China, suggested that the company had been infiltrated by Chinese agents, and called for a government investigation (Thiel 2019a). Soon after, he published an Op Ed in the New York Times that restated this case (Thiel 2019b).

However, Karp has cultivated a very different public image from Thiel’s, supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016, saying that he would vote for any Democratic presidential candidate against Trump in 2020 (Chafkin 2019), and—most surprisingly—identifying himself as a Marxist or “neo-Marxist” (Waldman et al. 2018, Mac 2017, Greenberg 2013). He also refers to himself as a “socialist” (Chafkin 2019) and according to at least one journalist, regularly addresses his employees on Marxian thought (Greenberg 2013). On one level, Karp’s dissertation clarifies what he means by this: For a time, he engaged deeply with the work of several neo-Marxist thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. On another level, however, Karp’s dissertation invites further perplexity, because right wing movements, including Trump’s, evince special antipathy for precisely that tradition.

[...]

As a case study to demonstrate the usefulness of his modified concept of jargon, Karp takes up a notorious episode in post-wall German intellectual history: a speech that the celebrated novelist Martin Walser gave in October 1998, at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt. The occasion was Walser’s acceptance of the 1998 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The novelist had traveled a complex political itinerary by the late 1990s. Documents released in 2007 would uncover the fact that as a teenager, during the final years of the Second World War, Walser joined the Nazi Party and fought as a member of the Wehrmacht. But he first became publicly known as a left-wing writer. In the 1950s, Walser attended meetings of the informal but influential German writer’s association Gruppe 47 and received their annual literary prize for his short story, “Templones Ende”; in 1964 he attended the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, where low ranking officials were charged and convicted for crimes that they had perpetrated during the Holocaust. In his 1965 essay about that experience, “Our Auschwitz,” Walser insisted on the collective responsibility of Germans for the horrors of the Nazi period; indeed he criticized the emphasis on spectacular cruelty at the trial, and in the media, to the extent that this emphasis allowed the public to maintain an imaginary distance between themselves and the Nazi past (Walser 2015, 217-56). Walser supported Social Democratic Party member Willy Brandt for Chancellor and even joined the German Communist Party during that decade. By the 1980s, however, Walser was widely perceived to have migrated back to the right. And when he gave his speech “Experiences Composing a Sermon” on the sixtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, he used the occasion to attack the public culture of Holocaust remembrance. Walser described this culture as a “moral cudgel” or “bludgeon” (Moralkeule).

“Experiences Composing a Sermon” adopts a stream of consciousness, rather than argumentative, style in order to explain why Walser refused to do what he said was expected of him: to speak about the ugliness of German history. Instead, he argued that no further collective memorialization of the Holocaust was necessary. There was no such thing, he said, as collective or shared conscience at all: conscience should be a private matter. Critics and intellectuals he disparaged as “preachers” were “instrumentalizing” and “vulgarizing” memory, when they exhorted the public constantly to reflect on the crimes of the Nazi period. “There is probably such a thing as the banality of good,” Walser quipped, echoing Hannah Arendt (2015, 513). He did not spell out what ends he thought that these “preachers” aimed to instrumentalize German guilt for. He concluded by abruptly calling on the newly elected president Roman Herzog, who was in attendance, to free the former East German spy, Rainer Rupp, from prison. Walser’s speech received a standing ovation—though not, notably, from Ignatz Bubis, then the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who was also in attendance. The next day, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bubis called the speech an act of “intellectual arson” (geistiges Brandstiftung). The controversy that followed generated a huge amount of debate among German intellectuals and in the German and international media (Cohen 1998). Two months later, the offices of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung hosted a formal debate between the two men. It lasted for four hours. FAZ published a transcript of their conversation in a special supplement (Walser and Bubis 1999).

[...]

I asked at the beginning of this paper what beliefs Karp shares with Peter Thiel and what their common commitments might reveal about the self-consciously “contrarian” or “heterodox” network of actors that they inhabit. One answer that Aggression in the Life World makes evident is that both men regard the desire to commit violence as a constant, founding fact of human life. Both also believe that this drive expresses itself in social forms like language or group structure, even if speakers or group members remain unaware of their own motivations. These are ideas that Thiel attributes to the work of the eclectic French theorist René Girard, with whom he studied at Stanford, and whose theories of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and herd mentality he has often cited. In 2006 Thiel’s nonprofit foundation established an institute to promote the study of Girard and support the further development of mimetic theory; this organization, Imitatio, remains one of the foundation’s three major projects (Daub 2020, 97-112).

The text that Karp chose to analyze, as his case study, also shares a set of concerns with Thiel’s writings and statements against campus multiculturalism and political correctness; Walser’s speech became a touchstone of debates about historical memory in Germany, in which the newly imported Americanism politische Korrektheit circulated widely. In his dissertation, Karp does not celebrate Walser’s taboo speech in the same way that Thiel and his associates have sometimes celebrated violations of speech norms.[11] However, he does assert that jargon, and the unconscious aggression that it expresses, plays a role in the formation of all social groups, and refrains from evaluating whether Walser’s jargon was particularly problematic. Of course, the term “jargon” itself became a commonplace during the U. S. culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s, used to accuse academics and university administrators who purported to be speaking for vulnerable populations of in fact deploying obscure terms to aggrandize themselves. Thiel and his co-author David O. Sacks devote a chapter of The Diversity Myth to an account of how the vagueness of the word “multiculturalism” enabled activists and administrators at Stanford to use it in this manner (1995, 23-49). The idea that such terms express ressentiment and a will to power is consistent with the theoretical framework that Karp went on to develop.

I think this piece is trying to tell a story but honestly I don’t know that that story is.

[thelonguepuree]

Dickinson’s “items” have been successively and carefully framed to give the impression that something, or someone, is missing. While the recovery of Dickinson’s manuscripts may be supposed to have depended on the death of the subject, on the person who had, by accident or design, composed the scene, the repeated belated “discovery” that her work is yet in need of sorting (and of reading) may also depend upon the absence of the objects that composed it. These objects themselves mark not only the absence of the person who touched them but the presence of what touched that person: of the stationer that made the paper, of the manufacturer and printer and corporation that issued guarantees and advertisements and of the money that changed hands, of the butcher who wrapped the parcel, of the manuals and primers and copybooks that composed individual literacy, of the expanding postal service, of the modern railroad, of modern journalism, of the nineteenth-century taste for continental literary imports. All of these things are the sorts of things left out of a book, since the stories to be told about them open out away from [a] narrative of individual creation or individual reception … This is to say that what is so often said of the grammatical and rhetorical structure of Dickinson’s poems—that, as critics have variously put it, the poetry is “sceneless,” is “a set of riddles” revolving around an “omitted center,” is a poetry of “revoked . . . referentiality”—can more aptly be said of the representation of the poems as such. Once gathered as the previously ungathered, reclaimed as the abandoned, given the recognition they so long awaited, the poems in bound volumes appear both redeemed and revoked from their scenes or referents, from the history that the book, as book, omits. … The argument of Dickinson’s Misery is that the century and a half that spans the circulation of Dickinson’s work as poetry chronicles rather exactly the emergence of the lyric genre as a modern mode of literary interpretation. To put briefly what I will unfold at length in the pages that follow: from the mid-nineteenth through the beginning of the twenty-first century, to be lyric is to be read as lyric—and to be read as a lyric is to be printed and framed as a lyric. While it is beyond the scope of this book to trace the lyricization of poetry that began in the eighteenth century, the exemplary story of the composition, recovery, and publication of Dickinson’s writing begins one chapter, at least, in what is so far a largely unwritten history. As we have already begun to see, Dickinson’s enduring role in that history depends on the ephemeral quality of the texts she left behind. By a modern lyric logic that will become familiar in the pages that follow, the (only) apparently contextless or sceneless, even evanescent nature of Dickinson’s writing attracted an increasingly professionalized attempt to secure and contextualize it as a certain kind (or genre) of literature—as what we might call, after Charles Taylor, a lyric social imaginary. Think of the modern imaginary construction of the lyric as what allows the term to move from adjectival to nominal status and back again. Whereas other poetic genres (epic, poems on affairs of state, georgic, pastoral, verse epistle, epitaph, elegy, satire) may remain embedded in specific historical occasions or narratives, and thus depend upon some description of those occasions and narratives for their interpretation (it is hard to understand “The Dunciad,” for example, if one does not know the characters involved or have access to lots of handy footnotes), the poetry that comes to be understood as lyric after the eighteenth century is thought to require as its context only the occasion of its reading. This is not to say that there were not ancient Greek and Roman, Anglo-Saxon, medieval, Provençal, Renaissance, metaphysical, Colonial, Republican, Augustan—even romantic and modern!—lyrics. It is simply to propose that the riddles, papyrae, epigrams, songs, sonnets, blasons, Lieder, elegies, dialogues, conceits, ballads, hymns and odes considered lyrical in the Western tradition before the early nineteenth century were lyric in a very different sense than was or will be the poetry that the mediating hands of editors, reviewers, critics, teachers, and poets have rendered as lyric in the last century and a half. As my syntax indicates, that shift in genre definition is primarily a shift in temporality; as variously mimetic poetic subgenres collapsed into the expressive romantic lyric of the nineteenth century, the various modes of poetic circulation—scrolls, manuscript books, song cycles, miscellanies, broadsides, hornbooks, libretti, quartos, chapbooks, recitation manuals, annuals, gift books, newspapers, anthologies—tended to disappear behind an idealized scene of reading progressively identified with an idealized moment of expression. While other modes—dramatic genres, the essay, the novel—may have been seen to be historically contingent, the lyric emerged as the one genre indisputably literary and independent of social contingency, perhaps not intended for public reading at all. By the early nineteenth century, poetry had never before been so dependent on the mediating hands of the editors and reviewers who managed the print public sphere, yet in this period an idea of the lyric as ideally unmediated by those hands or those readers began to emerge and is still very much with us. Susan Stewart has dubbed the late eighteenth century’s highly mediated manufacture of the illusion of unmediated genres a case of “distressed genres,” or “new antiques.” Her terms allude to modern print culture’s attempts “to author a context as well as an artifact,” and thus to imitate older forms—such as the epic, the fable, the proverb, the ballad—while creating the impression that our access to those forms is as immediate as it was in the imaginary modern versions of oral and collective culture to which those forms originally belonged. Stewart does not include the lyric as a “distressed genre,” but her suggestion that old genres were made in new ways could be extended to include the idea that the lyric is— or was—a genre in the first place. As Gérard Genette has argued, “the relatively recent theory of the ‘three major genres’ not only lays claim to ancientness, and thus to an appearance or presumption of being eternal and therefore self-evident,” but is itself the effect of “projecting onto the founding text of classical poetics a fundamental tenet of ‘modern’ poetics (which actually . . . means romantic poetics).” Yet even if the lyric (especially in its broadly defined difference from narrative and drama) is a larger version of the new antique, a retroprojection of modernity, a new concept artificially treated to appear old, the fact that it is a figment of modern poetics does not prevent it from becoming a creature of modern poetry. The interesting part of the story lies in the twists and turns of the plot through which the lyric imaginary takes historical form. But what plot is that? My argument here is that the lyric takes form through the development of reading practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that become the practice of literary criticism. As Mark Jeffreys eloquently describes the process I am calling lyricization, “lyric did not conquer poetry: poetry was reduced to lyric. Lyric became the dominant form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped margins of culture.” This is to say that the notion of lyric enlarged in direct proportion to the diminution of the varieties of poetry—or at least that became the ratio as the idea of the lyric was itself produced by a critical culture that imagined itself on the definitive margins of culture. Thus by the early twenty-first century it became possible for Mary Poovey to describe “the lyricization of literary criticism” as the dependence of all postromantic professional literary reading on “the genre of the romantic lyric.” The conceptual problem is that if the lyric is the creation of print and critical mediation, and if that creation then produces the very versions of interpretive mediation that in turn produce it, any attempt to trace the historical situation of the lyric will end in tautology. Or that might be the critical predicament if the retrospective definition and inflation of the lyric were either as historically linear or as hermeneutically circular as much recent criticism, whether historicist or formalist, would lead us to believe. What has been left out of most thinking about the process of lyricization is that it is an uneven series of negotiations of many different forms of circulation and address. To take one prominent example, the preface to Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) describes the “ancient foliums in the Editor’s possession,” claims to have subjected the excerpts from these manuscripts to the judgment of “several learned and ingenious friends” as well as to the approval of “the author of The Rambler and the late Mr. Shenstone,” and concludes that “the names of so many men of learning and character the Editor hopes will serve as amulet, to guard him from every unfavourable censure for having bestowed any attention on a parcel of Old Ballads.” Not only does Percy not claim that historical genres of verse are directly addressed to contemporary readers (and each of his “relics” is prefaced by a historical sketch and description of its manuscript context in order to emphasize the excerpt’s distance from the reader), but he also acknowledges the role of the critical climate to which the poems in his edition were addressed. Yet by 1833, John Stuart Mill, in what has become the most influentially misread essay in the history of Anglo-American poetics, could write that “the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.” As Anne Janowitz has written, “in Mill’s theory . . . the social setting is benignly severed from poetic intentions.” What happened between 1765 and 1833 was not that editors and printers and critics lost influence over how poetry was presented to the public; on the contrary, as Matthew Rowlinson has remarked, in the nineteenth century “lyric appears as a genre newly totalized in print.” And it is also not true that the social setting of the lyric is less important in the nineteenth than it was in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, because of the explosion of popular print, by the early nineteenth century in England, as Stuart Curran has put it, “the most eccentric feature of [the] entire culture [was] that it was simply mad for poetry”—and as Janowitz has trenchantly argued, such madness extended from the public poetry of the eighteenth century through an enormously popular range of individualist, socialist, and variously political and personal poems. In nineteenth-century U.S. culture, the circulation of many poetic genres in newspapers and the popular press and the crucial significance of political and public poetry to the culture as a whole is yet to be appreciated in later criticism (or, if it is, it is likely to be given as the reason that so little enduring poetry was produced in the United States in the nineteenth century, with the routine exception of Whitman and Dickinson, who are also routinely mischaracterized as unrecognized by their own century). At the risk of making a long story short, it is fair to say that the progressive idealization of what was a much livelier, more explicitly mediated, historically contingent and public context for many varieties of poetry had culminated by the middle of the twentieth century (around the time Dickinson began to be published in “complete” editions) in an idea of the lyric as temporally self-present or unmediated. This is the idea aptly expressed in the first edition of Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry in 1938: “classifications such as ‘lyrics of meditation,’ and ‘religious lyrics,’ and ‘poems of patriotism,’ or ‘the sonnet,’ ‘the Ode,’ ‘the song,’ etc.” are, according to the editors, “arbitrary and irrational classifications” that should give way to a present-tense presentation of “poetry as a thing in itself worthy of study.” Not accidentally, as we shall see, the shift in definition accompanied the migration of lyric from the popular press to the classroom—but for now we should note that by the time that Emily Dickinson’s poetry became available in scholarly editions and university anthologies, the history of various genres of poetry was read as simply lyric, and lyrics were read as poems one could understand without reference to that history or those genres.

Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005)

[blackswaneuroparedux]

When art imitates life

The idea that art may imitate life is at least as old as Aristotle's Poetics, the book that-in the West at least-is the most widely recommended text on how to write fiction. It's even recommended by screenwriters to screenwriters.

The idea of imitation comes from the central concept of Poetics: mimesis, which is about the relation of a piece of fiction to the world. In English, it is almost always translated as imitation, mirroring, copying, or some such.

Stephen Halliwell, author of The aesthetics of mimesis, however, has shown that this was just one family of meanings of mimesis. A second family of meanings was something like simulation or world-making, which for fiction is arguably more important.

This is what Halliwell says:

“Reduced to a schematic but nonetheless instructive dichotomy, these varieties of mimetic theory and attitude can be described as encapsulating a difference between a "world-reflecting" [conception] (for which the mirror has been a common though far from straightforward metaphorical emblem), and, on the other side, a "world simulating" or "world creating" conception of artistic representation.”

In an 1884 magazine article entitled "The art of the novel," Henry James wrote that a novel is "a direct impression of life." Without saying so explicitly, he was going for the first of Aristotle's meanings of mimesis, the one in general circulation. Robert Louis Stevenson disagreed in a reply that he called: "A humble remonstrance."

Here's part of what he wrote:

“Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art in comparison is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.”

Although James was the famous novelist and Stevenson merely the author of children's stories like Treasure Island, it was James who was wrong and Stevenson who was right.

**The Rape of Europa by Laurent de La Hyre, 1644

[arecomicsevengood]

A Year Of Reading Acknowledged Masterpieces #2: Saul Steinberg’s The Labyrinth

Maybe my most pointless worry is for how aliens, or whatever civilization comes after us, will struggle to learn anything from the jumble of signals that is this modern moment of our undoing. Our language and its referents cannot be understood without full immersion, and so much of what holds a privileged place in our culture, like religion or celebrity, correlates to daily existence in a confused and unclear manner. I dwell on this theoretical future because my far more pressing worries make art feel useless and decadent. As much as I love work that feels like it’s arrived as an artifact from a parallel universe, like Peter Greenaway’s The Falls or Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women, they only confuse the issue of an easily imagined not-too-distant future where everything recognizable is extinct, and even man’s many gestures at mimetic realism and journalistic explanations appear to the only prevailing consciousness as incomprehensible as the Codex Seraphinus.

It is in the context of this insane existential anxiety that Saul Steinberg’s work functions as a huge relief. Here the big ideas and our idle habits are captured in the same graceful line. It’s beautiful and funny, thoughtfully considered but never belabored. Everything feels like the platonic ideal of ideas being captured in a distilled form; if I were to liken it to music I would cite John Fahey. Fahey had a hit record with a Christmas LP, Steinberg’s work achieved a high circulation due to its placement in The New Yorker. The cartoons in that magazine seem vaguely notorious for being unfunny and inscrutable, at least to a generation that remembers vividly that one Seinfeld episode and was otherwise weaned on the gags in The Far Side. There are people who dismiss Christmas music as a concept as well. While Steinberg’s work definitely lives up to any rep for dry wit, I don’t really view any of it as being gags. Once you remove the expectation that this work is intended to elicit a laugh it becomes pretty easy to see it as just great art, and its placement in a widely-circulated magazine is just a better delivery system to the masses than art galleries are.

Here’s a Steinberg cartoon the New Yorker reprinted a few months back. It’s from a different time period than the stuff in The Labyrinth. It contains a caption, which none of the pieces in The Labyrinth do, though whether or not they did on their first publication is unknown to me.

The Labyrinth is an art book somewhere between a monograph and a sketchbook, edited and ordered for maximum readability as sets of ideas are explored. Many of those ideas are about drawing, and the drawing often feels close to doodling, as many pieces explore what you can do with a single line without removing pen from paper. It is arguably “not comics,” in that there isn’t a story you read from panel to panel, but the relationship to comics is pretty clear. If you are a maker of “avant-garde” or “art” comics, this book would be as informative to your process as reading E.C. Segar’s Popeye* would be for someone who writes Iron Man. Originally published in 1960, it was recently reprinted by NYRB, although not through their comics imprint, which has published artists whose work is prefigured here. Certain drawings seem to outline ideas that would be elaborated on in Pushwagner’s Soft City (drawn in the seventies, and published by NYRB a few years back), and drawings of people playing music, where the sound is rendered as various abstractions, bring to mind stuff in Blutch’s Total Jazz, published by Fantagraphics in 2018, though NYRB handled an English-language version of his book Peplum in 2016. There’s also stuff in the drawing that calls to mind Sasaki Maki’s Ding Dong Circus. All of these works are done by people outside of the U.S., and I can’t really assert with any historical certainty that those people saw the work in question before their own undertakings, though the amount of copies of The New Yorker that are printed make it seem not impossible. It also seems like Steinberg might’ve attained something of a celebrity status enough that potentially photographs of his drawings of women on bathtubs would’ve made it to Life magazine or something. As great as the drawing is, I’m not sure how much of it you would deliberately copy unless you were seeing individual images in isolation. Seeing so much collected in one place the takeaway is how unaffected it all is: It might inspire you to do more sketchbook drawing to see if you can capture the energy of life as effectively as Steinberg did, but you’re certainly not going to capture the verve of his line by studiously redrawing his work.

In terms of intent, Steinberg’s cartoons set a precedent for Jules Feiffer’s Explainers strips, which would run in The Village Voice a few years later. Feiffer, of course, was well-versed in various kinds of comics, having worked in Eisner’s studio, and his avid readership of the earliest comic books is documented in his book The Great Comic-Book Heroes, but there’s not really anything in that stuff suggestive of the sort of observational acuity of the middle-class that you get in his writing, that is present in Steinberg’s work. The depictions of playing music are rendered similarly his depicting to other forms of communication as outgrowth of power dynamics. The drawings of art galleries and artist’s studios exist alongside pieces that seem to primarily document his own drawing process, all of it capturing how much of mankind’s energy is spent choosing to willfully distract itself, how much we throw ourselves into art. In Feiffer you read these self-involved and circular monologues and dialogues of educated neurotics. Steinberg depicts what these people get up to when they’re not talking through their thoughts, but the reader can still intuit the neuroses through posture and gesture, and the depiction of the social settings that create them.

This is done largely without language. If on first publication they were accompanied by typeset lines of dialogue beneath them, those have been excised for posterity. When a selection of drawings of Russia appear, you recognize it by changes in architecture and fashion. Towards the end, however, there are a few pieces that use lettering as part of the landscape of a piece to convey the meaning of the word being used, i.e. a piece where the word “sick” is laid up in bed. The afterword, dating from the time of the first printing, calls these drawings “conceptual art,” a term which would soon after be applied to something else entirely, making this attempt at nomenclature the sort of historical footnote that’s funny to me. These pieces aren’t the best stuff in the work. They have this children’s book illustration quality that nonetheless brings home how beyond language the rest of the book is. It’s a lesson in expression being taught by someone impossibly fluent, a genius condescending to explain himself: I probably would not have come up with this piece’s introductory paragraph, explaining a way into the work, without their precedent. After readers have been shown what humans are, they’re bestowed tools to understand language. These pieces appear at the end because they’re a way out of the labyrinth, out of Steinberg’s system of association between drawings where lines go wild, and back into the world of humdrum communication.

I have read speculation that music’s initial evolutionary purpose involved soothing the young. A mother’s lullaby, like a cat’s purring, is its origin, and both language and instrumental ornamentation followed later. The musicality of Steinberg’s line, as presented here, follows a similar arc, where beginning from a baseline of recognition at shared humanity, and advancing through harmonic extemporizing with each new suite of drawings serving as a piece of counterpoint, becomes both more abstract and more articulate. The end result is something like an ethnography and something like a symphony.

(*: I’m probably going to talk about Popeye next month. At least one motivating factor behind this series is to get away from the promotional cycle of hype for the new, and look at work worth of being approached almost like items on a syllabus. I hope it doesn’t result in too much writing where I list influenced works to make a case for “historical importance.”)

[anniekoh]

weaponizing maps

More proof that fetishizing “knowledge” (or transparency) without considering the political powerlines is irresponsible if not outright exploitative. (Previous post on “trojan horses of participatory mapping”)

Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas (2015) by Joe Bryan and Denis Wood

“'Map or be mapped,' the saying goes among those associated with the wave of participatory mapping that began in the 1980s. Weaponizing Maps gives this saying radically new meaning, with equal parts analytic depth and political charge. Readers inclined to use maps for causes of social justice will proceed fully informed of the daunting forces they are up against—from the counterinsurgency designs of the world’s most powerful military to ostensibly progressive scholars who deploy the fine tradition of participatory mapping toward dubious ends.” —Charles R. Hale, PhD, Director, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, University of Texas at Austin

“Joe and Denis trace how maps, over and over and over again, perform vital discursive work, how they transform territory into property, how they create facts, and how those facts seem to, time and time again, serve the particular interest of the state and/or capital at the expense of certain groups of people.” —Human Geography

From Chapter 8 (p 148-149) on the Bowman Expeditions in Weaponizing Maps

In retrospect, it’s easy— perhaps too easy— to see the México Indígena project as an inevitable weaponization of indigenous mapping...  “indigenous communities” whose collective rights to property, recognized in the aftermath of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, were actively slated for conversion to individual titles under the auspices of sweeping land reforms introduced in 1993. 

... Most of these lands were formally recognized as ejidos, created through the restitution of lands to agricultural workers upon the dissolution of large estates or haciendas. Another category of communal property, the comunidad agraria or comunidad indígena, recognized existing forms of communal land tenure and often closely followed colonial-era arrangements. Both categories worked well enough on paper, accommodating revolutionary demands that rights to land belonged to those who worked it, and establishing a regime of collective property rights that functioned alongside private property rights. In practice they proved problematic for state officials who, among other challenges, were notoriously vexed in their efforts to map these lands and properly register their ownership. Their indeterminacies and ambiguities created what historian Raymond Craib has termed a “fugitive landscape” that at once escaped official control and abounded with opportunities for malfeasance and illegality. In the wave of the market-oriented reforms of the 1990s, Mexican officials targeted this this fugitive landscape for “regularization.”

...To achieve these goals— of dissolving communal lands and registering private property— Mexican officials created PROCEDE [an acronym for the Program for Certification of Ejidal Rights and Titling of Urban Lots]. As with land regularization programs elsewhere, PROCEDE required the production of new surveys and maps as a crucial first step toward regularization. These surveys and maps did not necessarily reflect on-the-ground tenure arrangements so much as create, in the abstract, an imagined order on which regularization could be modeled. The program had immediate and far-reaching implications for rural Mexico that went well beyond the simple titling of land. As the México Indígena team put it, “For thousands of indigenous communities in Mexico, the PROCEDE program represents a silent revolution, undoing social property and changing communal ownership patterns that in some cases date back to pre-Colombian times.” Much as allotment policies were used to dissolve tribally held lands in the United States in the late 1800s, PROCEDE actively sought to incorporate indigenous lands in Mexico into the market through registration of individual rights and subsequent privatization. The effort amounted to assimilation by economic means, relying on the market to overcome centuries of political and economic marginalization frequently justified in terms of race.

Raymond Craib’s research looks fascinating by the way. 

Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (2004)

In Cartographic Mexico, Raymond B. Craib analyzes the powerful role cartographic routines such as exploration, surveying, and mapmaking played in the creation of the modern Mexican state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such routines were part of a federal obsession—or “state fixation”—with determining and “fixing” geographic points, lines, and names in order to facilitate economic development and political administration. As well as analyzing the maps that resulted from such routines, Craib examines in close detail the processes that eventually generated them. Taking central Veracruz as a case in point, he shows how in the field, agrarian officials, military surveyors, and metropolitan geographers traversed a “fugitive landscape” of overlapping jurisdictions and use rights, ambiguous borders, shifting place names, and villagers with their own conceptions of history and territory.

The archive in the field: document, discourse, and space in Mexico•s agrarian reform, Journal of Historical Geography (2010)

Abstract:  The archive in the field: document, discourse, and space in Mexico•s agrarian reform In the immediate aftermath of Mexico’s revolution (1910–1920), increasing numbers of surveyors, agronomists, and agrarian bureaucrats headed out to the countryside to implement the agrarian reforms promised in the decree of 1915 and the Constitution of 1917. In this essay I ask a very basic set of questions about the use, evaluation, and making of spatial knowledge in a revolutionary context: when bureaucrats went in to the field after the revolution, what did they do? What roles, if any, did local inhabitants themselves play in the processes that unfolded? And what constituted the acceptable body of knowledge -- the archive -- necessary to resolve persistent boundary questions that impeded the reform?

Relocating Cartography, Postcolonial Studies (2009)

481-482: The scholarly trend in recent decades has been to view scientific activities such as surveying and mapmaking as two cogs in an imperial machine*a ‘scopic regime’*grinding across far-flung colonies and distant landscapes...  

The importance of such work should not be underestimated. For one, it initiated (or at least dramatically extended) a turn away from a focus on maps as generally mimetic representations, as unproblematic ‘statements of facts about the earth’s surface’; rather, it sought to situate maps within a social, cultural and political world and as products of practices that were integral to the history of cartography

Second, such work served as a corrective to the celebratory, legitimation narratives*populated by bold explorers, objective scientists, and mimetic maps*characteristic of much of the history of cartography.

485: Here [in his book Relocating Modern Science] Raj intersects with a welcome, if long-overdue, shift in emphasis in the history of cartography in recent years: a recognition that the history of cartography needs to pay attention to the role of people other than imperial scientists, explorers, and bureaucrats in the acquisition, circulation and creation of spatial knowledge and representations.

[maastrichtiana]

I’ve waxed poetic on it before and by god I’ll do it the future, but Speed Racer and Jupiter Ascending are equally balanced distillations of pure childhood wish fulfillment, the kind of shameless fun the children adults once were swore once upon a time they would never loose, and the Wachowskis kept it, what willing suspension of disbelief? This is non-mimetic character-forward art honey boy the same stuff fairytales and folklore and religion is made of and there’s a reason those stories keep circulating across millennia. The kind of stories you’d tell yourself playing in an afternoon that happened all at once, collapsing in on you as soon as your headspace changes, the bafflingly complex stories we engross ourselves in for hours that we can never quite recall.

Lana and Lily live rent free in my brain

100 FILMS IN 2015 → Jupiter Ascending (2015) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “I CREATE LIFE!! …And I destroy it.”

Here is my feeling about this movie: it is your garbage. It is garbage for you. “Is this how straight dudes feel at the movies all the time????” I hissed SEVERAL times during this movie. “Like someone carefully noted down your early pubescent fantasies and then threw 100 MILLION DOLLARS at them?” 

Top marks go to evil space royal Eddie Redmayne, whose breathy ennui is offset by bouts of mummy’s boy shrieking, all delivered with a “petite-mort” look on his face that suggests he is being fellated by eternity itself.

Someone on tumblr described it as the novel all girls wrote when they were 14 and frothing with a mix of swelling hormones and fading Disney fantasies, which I have to say is accurate to the point of pain. I mean, gorgeous Russian toilet scrubber finds out she is actually a space princess when a werewolf space marine rescues her from death at the hands of Greys? Pardon me, werewolf ANGEL space marine with a Sad because his wings are gone. And then everything is Alexander McQueen dresses and melodrama and bees, for some reason, and Eddie Redmayne doing his best heroin-addicted Voldemort impression.

The plot is this: the Wachowskis were given an extraordinary amount of money to make whatever the hell they wanted, and what they wanted to make is exactly what we all, secretly, deep down, want to make: the big-screen adaptation of that Stargate fanfic you wrote when you were fourteen that really went off the rails and began to inhabit its own universe, complete with original characters, wolf-men, and bees. That’s Jupiter Ascending.