#inheritance! in the cultural framework these characters are working with

[loriache]

honestly i'm kind of interested in the idea of laios in an arranged marriage. because obviously straight-up inherited monarchies are ...bad, to say the least! but it's what the characters are familiar with (even laios' father's extremely local, extremely minor leadership role is inherited, presumably through the male line). and it isn't just about what they think the best way to run melini is; in terms of ensuring that the other longed-lived nations respect melini's continued sovereignty, having it passed down in a manner that's close enough to their own ways for them to understand it and respect it is important. And it seems like most of the other nations have leadership through inheritance - thought that isn't confirmed for certain except with the elves.

Also, a marriage carries the potential to establish foreign allies - something melini is certainly lacking. A marriage could come with resources they'll badly need, treaties of mutual defence, money, legitimacy and political capital... not that these things can't be worked around, but if laios isn't strongly opposed, there are a lot of advantages! and i don't think he would be, because that's the framework for marriage (conferring practical advantages, building intracommunity relationships and providing a partner to do important work that he can't do) that he had grown up with. he isn't exactly a romantic and I doubt he's holding out for any sort of relationship of that nature.

Like, I don't think it's impossible that they would go with this path, because it's the most obvious and it carries a lot of advantages and it's what almost all the decision-making characters would consider normal and not objectionable. and it could be so interesting.

I think Laios would have major hangups if expected (i.e., by Marcille) to establish a genuine, romantic interest in a woman. Whether because of his sexual or romantic orientation, or just his own deep-seated trauma about rejection and being inherently disgusting and scary. And I think he'd hate the idea of having kids, too, and be very frightened of being like his father. But I don't think he'd refuse on that basis; he could cope with a marriage contract, with clearly laid-out expectations and responsibilities. And when it came to having a kid, I think he'd be reluctant to express that he doesn't want to do it, because he isn't naive and he understood when he agreed to be king it would carry responsibilities like this. It's clear from his nightmare that he already felt pressure from his parents to have children, probably magnified by the fact his father has got a position, responsibilities and wealth to pass on. Obviously he isn't a perfect martyr, so he might struggle when it comes to actually going through with it - but I don't think he'd actually, outright refuse. I think he might do it even though he doesn't want to, and I think that could be really messy in a way that appeals to me.

I don't know, there's something about negotiating these kinds of complicated situations that's interesting to me. and i love a platonic marriage. If they find a woman who has an interest in education, for example, and can work with marcille on setting up schools and universities. she'd ideally be politically savvy enough to be an able partner to laios: even though kabru can and would continue to do a lot of that, there are different spheres that a queen and a prime minister can work within!

how would their relationship work? maybe she finds laios' perspective on the world, and his frankness, unexpectedly liberating after an extremely controlled, cloistered upbringing. maybe she had a rebellious phase, has magic, or something else which makes her a relatively unpopular candidate for marriage - even as melini grows in power, i doubt that they'd be getting offers for the cream of the crop in terms of perceived value on the marriage market, because laios' relationship is a bit too ambivalent/monstrous for that, and melini too new. maybe she's a widow! an older woman, wouldn't that be cool - though they'd want her young enough that she could definitely still have kids.

certainly i think he'd be happy for her to pursue other relationships, though ideally in a manner that couldn't produce illegitimate kids. with other relationships in play, that's even more interesting. like, both kabru and toshiro have complicated emotions relating to infidelity. i think kabru would actually find it quite cathartic to be in the kind of high-status environment that rejected his mother for perceived infidelity, pursuing an affair that all parties consent to, though he'd likely be incredibly aware of the public image - since "image" is what he was rejected for. toshiro... i just really really love the way he'd feel about being the "other woman" in laios' marriage, considering his feelings about his father and maizuru. especially given how much closer he is to maizuru than his mother, being in her position...! his emotions would be so complex, it's incredibly tasty. i bet he'd make a bunch of assumptions about how laios' wife feels about it and be totally wrong, and that's so interesting. also, i think laios' wife should fuck marcille (she and falin have an open relationship).

[starcurtain]

2/?

Kaveh and Alhaitham make sense, emotionality is indeed closely associated in Western culture with femininity, and low emotion and rationality with masculinity. In the eastern culture to which both characters belong, such patterns do not play a special role, and therefore this part of the fandom may perceive characters and their interaction differently, through the prism of other views (which becomes noticeable if you choose other languages on ao3 and look at the ratio of top/bottom tags). But it cannot be denied that the game is aimed at a wide audience, not just those players who are close to the culture and traditions of a particular region, and the creators understood how the Western audience sees the emotional presentation of the characters. But even here there are many intra-fandom distortions and the desire to make an "ideal" heteronormative pair out of them, which are not conditioned by the canon.

As for the parallels between Kaveh and his mother, no less parallels were drawn between him and his father, it's just that the fandom focused only on what he was interested in, presenting the situation as if he looked like his mother and not like his father, because they wanted to associate him with a feminine figure, not a masculine one. At the same time, Sachin said that Kaveh reminded him of the man he once knew (his father), but he (Kaveh) was made of more durable material. In the picture from the meeting with friends, he practically repeats his father's pose from an old drawing, and it is also clear that they are similar in appearance. In character, if not closer to his father, then at least he has no less traits from him than from his mother. His mother was described as rather withdrawn, unsociable, and focused primarily on work, while his father was altruistic, open-minded, somewhat naive and idealistic, and willing to help everyone, which ultimately led to his death. Even his desire to help Kaveh's mother was in key ways different from Alhaitham's motivations, because he was basically described as a man who primarily sought to help people, rather than "understand" them. That is, the interpretation of Kaveh's resemblance to his mother as emphasizing his "femininity" is primarily the view of fandom, distorted by the desire to fit the character into a heteronormative framework, intentionally emphasizing one part of the information and ignoring another part of it. If we look at the whole context, he was described as the son of his parents, who inherited traits and talents from both of them.

In terms of appearance, Alhaitham, while indeed "inexplicably ripped", is also more sexualized than Kaveh, and fandom often tries to "turn it around" by dressing Kaveh in tight and provocative clothes, and Alhaitham in loose and practical ones, but this does not correspond to the canon.

Sincere passion, especially in relation to one's work, is in principle not a stereotypically feminine trait, it is associated more with the archetype of yang than yin. Gentleness and tenderness or deliberate theatricality are considered feminine, but none of this is typical of Kaveh in the canon.

When paired with Kaeya and Diluc, Diluc is more stereotypically masculine in appearance, character, and behavior, but at least early on, he was often portrayed as smaller, shorter, and more outwardly cute than Kaeya, which shaped the tastes of a certain part of the fandom.

Sampo and Gepard, also a very popular couple, are not oriented towards a heteronormative pattern, and each of them exhibits different qualities.

-----------------------------------

I think your takes on many of the characters are very fair, and you have a good understanding of the characterizations that aligns well in many cases with how I personally understand the characters too!

The fundamental discrepancy in our thinking about this seems to boil down to whether or not you see fandoms as perceptive enough to choose the "preponderance of evidence."

I completely agree with your point that both male characters in Hoyo's ships often have masculine and feminine traits. Each character Hoyo creates definitely is three-dimensional, with a blend of interesting and oftentimes conflicting personality elements.

So I'm not trying to say "This character has all the masculine traits and this one has all the feminine traits" at all. Instead, I think fans overall are making their judgments--and applying their heteronormative lenses--based on the criteria: "Which one of these two male characters is more feminine than the other?"

Of course, as you note, what is considered masculine and feminine varies significantly by culture, which accounts for regional differences in shipping preferences, but I think in most cases, Hoyo has a clear pattern of giving one character a greater overall number of feminine traits than the other in their MLM ships, allowing for a pretty standard level of heteronormativity.

It's not "Alhaitham has no feminine traits." It's "Kaveh just has more feminine traits than Alhaitham," in essence. I believe that, for the most part, fandoms predictably label their top/bottom (or husband/wife) dynamics based on that central criteria--who is more feminine. (It's also why Phaidei is more popular than Myphai--Mydei just was given more feminine traits by the devs than Phainon was. That doesn't mean Phainon has no feminine traits--his sweet-hearted friendliness comes to mind easily--just that he has fewer feminine traits than Mydei, and therefore gets stereotyped into the "wife" role less often by the fandom.)

Going through some of the examples you mentioned:

Kaveh definitely is projected on his father as well as his mother, you're right. The entire Parade of Providence event was about us coming to understand how similar Kaveh is to his father. But this parallel is matched equally by his parallel to his mother in his hangout. If we're keeping a tally of "feminine versus masculine traits," being compared to a masculine parent and then compared to a feminine parent basically cancels each other out. 😂 Simultaneously though, Kaveh is given other traits stereotypically assigned to men as well: He's an alcoholic. He has a quick temper. He's a STEM major lol. Despite being incredibly kind-hearted, he can't read the room well and doesn't actually have good emotional awareness, often failing to understand the feelings of others until they're spelled out to him.

However, he still has (in total) more stereotypically feminine traits than Alhaitham, and that's what counts for the fandom's purposes. He's "pretty"--long-haired with braids, cute hairclips to pin his wispy hair down like a schoolgirl--wears significantly more jewelry than Alhaitham, cares about aesthetics and "beauty," has a more delicate-looking frame, etc. etc. His emotional outbursts at Alhaitham intentionally make him come across like a nagging wife, especially when he makes demands about their furniture, and his character stories confirm that he essentially does all the housework (although it finally seems like Alhaitham is picking up the slack a little more recently, if his birthday media was anything to go by). Kaveh operates on principles of kindness that come not from a patriarchal sense that he is wiser than others, but from the more traditionally feminine self-sacrificial brand of generosity. You mentioned "deliberate theatricality," and while I don't think Kaveh's is deliberate, I do think Kaveh's "accidental theatricality"--shouting, sighing, falling into despair over the slightest setbacks--is definitely coded as a more feminine approach to life (i.e. "hysteria") than the traditional stoicism expected of masculinity. More than any of that though, the narrative puts him into a rescued-princess role because he literally was "saved" by Alhaitham.

So no, it's not that Kaveh is the most feminine character ever; it's just that he's more feminine than Alhaitham.

Regarding Kaeya and Diluc, I'm not sure I can speak, because I don't personally ship it, so I don't have the greatest awareness of the dynamics the fans of that ship prefer. However, my thought is that this ship's statistics might be more profoundly impacted by culture than other ships--in particular, I get the sense that Kaeluc is much more popular in eastern countries than western ones, which definitely impacts what is considered "masculine" versus "feminine." I'm not from an Asiatic country, so I can't speak with any degree of expertise, but one of my guesses would be that Diluc's aggressiveness runs contrary to some expectations of masculinity in eastern countries, where there may be a greater sense that an ideal man should better control himself and mask his grief, marking Kaeya's outwardly stoic response and ability to hide his vulnerability as the more masculine personality.

Frankly, the reason I didn't touch ZhongChi is because, despite the fact that I love it, I actually think the devs regretted their decision to originally begin baiting that ship and have since hit the brakes hard. We haven't gotten a single sliver of new in-game content for ZhongChi since the end of Liyue's archon quest, not even a passing cameo of them together. Compare this to Alhaitham and Kaveh who are still getting new content even though Sumeru's plot has been done for two years now and I feel like you'll see what I mean. I think the devs realized they were playing with fire using a figure symbolic of China itself in MLM ship tease, and they walked back to avoid any repercussions.

Personally, I feel ZhongChi's popularity really has little to do with the game itself and much more to do with a confluence of outside factors (it was the first "tall male" MLM ship in Genshin Impact that wasn't colored by the whole "brothers" situation, giving it huge appeal not just for the eastern audiences but much more so with the western audiences; basically, part of ZhongChi's popularity is that it was just "Not Diluc/Kaeya" lol). I love this ship a lot myself, but I'm not sure ZhongChi is a good example of Hoyo's intentions, given that it seems like they really regret ever going down that path in the first place.

(I think ZhongChi may also be another ship heavily impacted by cultural differences--it might be interesting to examine whether fans perceive Tartaglia or Zhongli as the "top" more often by their specific country; my thought is that Zhongli's particular brand of elegant maturity and outward "emotionlessness" marks him as especially masculine in eastern countries, while Tartaglia's aggressiveness and bold behavior come across as more masculine in western countries.)

Regarding some of your other points, re: Ratio's bath and Alhaitham's tight-fitting clothes, I don't mean to sound rude at all, but this feels like a slight misread to me. Ratio's scenes in his bathtub and Alhaitham's tight-fitting clothes aren't intended to feminize these characters--they're being sexualized foremost for women, not men!

This:

Is the exact same thing as this:

Kafka isn't "masculine" when she is sexualized to appeal to men, right? So I promise, Ratio isn't "feminine" when he is sexualized to appeal to women.

Same thing with Alhaitham's tight clothes. When Alhaitham shows up in artworks looking like this:

You're not supposed to see him as feminine for the mere act of being sexualized--he's being sexualized for the female gaze. He's drawn this way to highlight his masculinity (abs, pecs, etc.), rather than diminish it, in an effort to appeal to female players. It just so happens this works on lots of bi and gay men too, but women are the primary audience here, and this kind of skin-tight design asserts, rather than dismisses, masculinity.

(By the way, not saying Ratio and Alhaitham don't have feminine traits, because they do! I just don't think the moments where they are sexualized for the female gaze are good examples of those.)

Regarding Sampo and Gepard, I think you have valid points that neither of them particularly conforms to heteronormative standards, but I also get the sense that Sampard was baited mostly through missable moments (I think Sampo's voiceline is probably the most overt tease for this ship?) and then it was really not emphasized much further by the devs--like a "Isn't this funny?" kind of thing, rather than getting a full-blown Alhaitham/Kaveh or Mydei/Phainon treatment. I think the objective was just different between Sampard and ships like Phaidei/Haikaveh; it seems less about selling the characters and more about just adding a bit of flavor to Belobog overall. (I'm so sorry to say it, but Gepard in particular is veryyy boring if you take the potential of a forbidden romance out of the picture; then again, maybe that's just me lol.)

Regarding your points about Sampo's cross-dressing, though, I actually think there may be another factor at play here:

Sampo is a trickster archetype character (i.e. Loki, Puck, or the Cheshire Cat). He's part of the Masked Fools, obviously, but more than that, he exhibits all the classic traits of trickster characters:

He is of ambiguous morality, helping us sometimes and opposing us in others

He is unpredictable and a "situation inverter"--when things are going bad, he appears to solve an otherwise unsolvable plot problem; when things are going well, he shows up to cause trouble

He's a comedic character who nevertheless has obvious hidden depths--he knows things he shouldn't

He's a thief and a conman, but also portrayed as having soft spots and helping those in need (think Robin Hood)

One of the key aspects of trickster archetype characters, however, is that they push boundaries, refusing to be confined to one side (neither good nor bad, neither kind nor cruel). Sampo is both literally a boundary pusher--he can cross the otherwise uncrossable seal between Belobog's underworld and overworld--and also a figurative boundary crosser--how much is Trailblazer willing to put up with him?

But one of the most important boundaries that trickster characters cross is gender. One of the most common traits of trickster archetype characters is cross-dressing or even complete shape-shifting to take the form of the opposite gender (think fox spirits shape-shifting into brides, Loki shape-shifting into a mare, etc.). Sampo's cross-dressing is perfectly explicable if you approach it from the context that he's representing an archetype of characters for whom the physical form is a tool of the trade rather than a central aspect of identity. Sampo's appearance, even down to Sampo's gender, is a facade, in essence.

There's a bigger conversation to be had about trickster archetype characters here and their portrayals in Christianized traditions versus non-Christianized traditions, but one of the other common traits of tricksters is that they are overwhelmingly male. (There are also female tricksters, of course, but they are significantly rarer than male trickster figures in global mythology.) Because this is a role so often given to men, we can choose to interpret male tricksters assuming femininity in a couple different ways:

Tricksters are "edgy" figures that are meant to make people uncomfortable by pushing boundaries; they are meant to be a cautionary tale that actually reinforces gender norms by showing men examples of what not to be

Tricksters are "comedic" figures that are not meant to be taken seriously; their play on gender is regarded as ridiculous, and their cross-dressing or shape-shifting usually ends with them being humiliated or punished, again reinforcing typical heteronormative gender boundaries

Tricksters are actually early examinations of desire, both acceptable and socially unacceptable, expressed in time periods before cultures understood principles of psychology; the fact that they are overwhelmingly male yet so often transform into women represents a historical grappling of men with enforced masculinity versus homosexual desire, so on

Whatever the case, the cross-dressing of male trickster figures can be a key part of queer-coding, but it doesn't usually lend itself to a serious queer narrative. More often it serves just to make the cross-dressing man the butt of a joke (ha ha, look at the buff guy in drag); in Sampo's case, the joke was getting everyone's literal wig snatched.

And regarding Argenti, maybe this is controversial of me, but...

Argenti is the most masculine character in Star Rail. Yes, I said it.

It's just that modern players don't understand him this way, because the type of masculinity that Argenti represents is culturally out of step with modern times.

He comes across as bizarre even to other characters in-game because he's a walking, talking caricature of feudal era knighthood. He's not even a reflection on the real behaviors of actual feudal era knights; he's a one-for-one, completely "play this trope straight" example of the pulpy, romanticized portrayals of knighthood which became popular in Europe in the 1300s.

He's not an accurate knight; he's the main character in a dreadful chivalric romance set in space lol.

He's an absolute exaggeration on every trait that "knights in shining armor" are supposed to have:

He's loyal to his lady (Idrila) to the point that it's hilariously obsessive

He's chivalrous to the point that loops back into inconveniencing everyone around him

He's mindlessly dedicated to his sworn oath

His fruitless search for Idrila is literally note-for-note the chivalric romance's "hunt for the holy grail" or "rescue the princess from the dragon"

He's an over-top-level of beautiful that makes him appear otherworldly, but it's also comedically performative (again for women's sake), with roses and spotlights appearing on him just for effect

He's Galahad. He's Roland. He's Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

Basically what I'm saying is that Argenti is literally "that guy on the cover of every trashy romance novel about knights":

(I'm sorry, Catherine Kean, I have no idea if your books are actually good or not; you're just my unfortunate example.)

Argenti's supposed to come across as weird because he's literally in the wrong genre, but I really do not believe he's supposed to be seen as traditionally feminine.

Boothill, on the other hand, is coming from a cultural tradition (cowboys/the American West) infamous for toxic masculinity--but also, because of that, rife with queer connotations. "Cowboy culture" basically entirely eschews women, who are background figures in Western media at best. Cowboy tales classically center men and only men, examining the complex relationships between them, which lends itself to lots of both intentional (and unintentional) homosexual tension. Brokeback Mountain didn't make so many ripples for no reason. 😂

I'm not a Boothill expert, so I don't have the receipts to show for him having numerous feminine traits to accompany his cowboy masculinity (the pink gun does come to mind though lol), but I think it's important not to forget his role in the story: Boothill is both a man on a mission of vengeance and a victim. In painting him as the sole survivor of his people's massacre, we see the same powerlessness as Aventurine was subjected to--initially, both were helpless victims to the same man, stripped of their right to bodily autonomy (Boothill's lore is a bit of a mess, if I recall, on whether he became a cyborg willingly or not).

Being a victim is obviously not inherently feminine, but the role of "victim" is so often assigned to women in media that it can be read as an emasculating position regardless. Simply put, it isn't manly to be defeated by your enemy and made powerless before him.

Thus, the fact that Boothill has lost everything and has never been able to achieve his vengeance and get back his "power" (thus, symbolically, his masculinity) from his oppressor is always a part of the conversation with this character.

I also feel compelled to note that there was no woman directly involved with Boothill's daughter; he found his daughter as a baby and raised her without any relationship to a woman (except his own adopted mother, Graey)--I think this is actually another point in the favor of Boothill having more feminine traits than Argenti; as shitty as this is, being willing to care for a literal baby is still seen by a lot of people as "women's work."

Anyway, I completely agree with your point that there is a lot of nuance to this issue--frankly, too much for tumblr posts to encapsulate--but I think that there's enough consistency to the design choices on the devs' part that I personally feel we can say Hoyo does have a clear pattern, and that clear pattern largely plays is safe with baiting ships that remain within the boundaries of a heteronormative sphere.

This is only my perspective though, limited as it is by my own frames of reference!

[imaginefinneganswake]

Wither hayrein honds tuck up your part inher.

Finnegan's Wake - James Joyce

ChatGPT40 literary report:

The line you provided, “Wither hayrein honds tuck up your part inher,�� seems to evoke James Joyce's distinctive style, although it appears somewhat fragmentary. If we assume it is either an exact or closely inspired Joycean passage, the following approach will help analyze it through the lens of Joyce's literary innovations, particularly referencing Finnegans Wake, his most experimental work. This text exemplifies his radical approach to language, which mixes multiple languages, sounds, puns, and dream-like logic.

1. Joyce’s Use of Language and Polysemy

Joyce was known for creating language that operates on multiple levels simultaneously, a technique central to Finnegans Wake. Each word or phrase can have several meanings, often fusing words from different languages and linguistic traditions. This phrase seems consistent with that tradition. Here's a breakdown of the possible meanings embedded in the words:

"Wither": The word "wither" could relate to the verb "to wither," as in to dry up or decay, or it may also reference "whither," meaning "where to." Joyce often played with such homophones, where one word can generate a variety of meanings, allowing for both physical and existential interpretations.

"Hayrein": This could be a portmanteau blending "hay" and "reign." It evokes images of agriculture and ruling authority—perhaps a comment on the decay or mortality of something once fertile or dominant. The "reign" part could also carry associations with sovereignty, control, or passage of time, invoking deeper metaphysical concerns about who or what has dominion.

"Honds": Likely a modification of "hands." Joyce frequently used variants of common words to suggest different associations, such as "honds" echoing Old English or Dutch/German influences (in Dutch, “hand” is also “hand”). This can evoke both literal hands and the concept of handling or taking action.

"Tuck up your part inher": This is a more challenging construction, though Joyce often created phrasal constructs that force a reader to think associatively rather than literally. "Tuck up" suggests gathering or preparing something, which may be physical (like clothing) or more abstract (like preparing oneself for a journey or task). "Your part inher" could relate to inheritance (a "part in her"), where "her" might symbolize the land, a role, or an allegorical figure like Ireland, history, or even the female figure as muse or motherland.

2. Possible Interpretations

The passage as a whole seems to play on the idea of action, inheritance, and responsibility. A breakdown could suggest:

Direction or Displacement: The phrase "Wither hayrein" may suggest movement or an inquiry into where something is going, possibly in the face of decline or decay ("wither"). This could be reflective of Joyce's frequent exploration of themes like the decline of Irish culture, personal legacy, or the inevitability of death and time.

Agrarian Imagery: The word "hayrein" evokes rural, agrarian imagery that recurs in Joyce’s work. It could symbolize a form of pastoral nostalgia, while also hinting at the transience of harvests, seasons, or power (with the duality of "reign"). This could tie back to a broader commentary on the passage of time, societal change, or a collapsing authority.

Agency and Action: "Tuck up your part inher" seems to compel action—telling someone to claim or prepare for their role, perhaps in a broader inheritance, whether material or metaphorical. Joyce frequently addressed personal responsibility within historical and cultural frameworks, often leaving characters struggling with the weight of their heritage and their place in history. This could imply the same sense of engagement, telling the reader (or character) to prepare to "play their part" in a shared historical narrative or personal destiny.

Feminine/Irish Symbolism: The phrase "your part inher" could refer to Ireland, often personified as a woman, as in many nationalist and literary traditions. If so, it may be addressing someone to take up their inherited role concerning the nation, history, or personal legacy—perhaps a call to action to preserve cultural identity in the face of change or decline.

3. Allusions and Themes

Joyce often wove classical, historical, and biblical allusions into his works, and this passage could be read with those lenses in mind. For example, "inheritance" is a biblical theme, and in the Irish context, it could refer to the inheritance of culture, history, or even the troubled political landscape of Joyce’s time.

The passage may suggest a struggle between loss (decay/wither) and inheritance, demanding that the individual "tuck up" (prepare) to take responsibility for a legacy that is at once fading and persistent. This could resonate with themes found throughout Joyce’s works, particularly concerning Ireland’s historical and cultural identity.

4. Conclusion

This fragment, though brief and abstract, reflects Joyce's typical complexity. It challenges the reader to engage with language on multiple levels, invoking historical, cultural, and existential concerns. The play with words such as “wither,” “honds,” and “inherit” may suggest themes of decay, action, and legacy, while simultaneously calling attention to the reader’s responsibility to interpret and inherit the meanings within Joyce’s language itself.

For literary experts, this line can serve as a microcosm of Joyce’s broader thematic preoccupations—mortality, history, and the complex interplay between individual and collective experience. It is a striking example of how Joyce compresses vast ideas into intricate wordplay, demanding that the reader unfold the layers of meaning embedded in every line.

[musicarenagh]

Tavo Man's "Gimugatiña": A Parranda Garífuna Anthem of Unconditional Love In the increasingly homogenized landscape of Latin music, Tavo Man (also known as Abuti) emerges as a vital cultural custodian, wielding his artistry as both preservation and innovation. His latest single "Gimugatiña" — which translates to "They have envy us" in the Garifuna language — functions as a multidimensional text, simultaneously serving as love song, cultural artifact, and quiet manifesto of identity. The Latin Grammy-nominated multihyphenate of Honduran origin has constructed a sonic experience that transforms the traditional Parranda Garífuna genre into something immediately accessible yet profoundly rooted in historical specificity. What's remarkable about "Gimugatiña" isn't merely its technical prowess but its strategic emotional intelligence — Tavo Man understands that unconditional love serves as the perfect thematic vehicle for introducing mainstream audiences to indigenous musical traditions. Beneath the track's immediate appeal lies a sophisticated cultural cartography. The rhythmic foundation demonstrates the percussive complexity characteristic of Garifuna music, with patterns that evoke centuries of resilience among a people descended from shipwrecked African slaves who intermarried with indigenous Caribbean populations. Yet Tavo Man resists ethnomusicological pigeonholing by incorporating contemporary production techniques that position this heritage within a modern context. The song's lyrical framework — focusing on a love that "doesn't listen to opinions and ignores all bad energies" — carries subtle socio-political dimensions when considered against the historical marginalization of Garifuna communities throughout Central America. The unconditional love being celebrated exists not just between individuals but potentially between an artist and his cultural inheritance, between a diaspora and its origins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zWfN491YBo As a Honduran artist now based in the United States, his work inherently addresses questions of cultural displacement and preservation. His multi-layered identity as painter, producer, and musician mirrors the intricate cultural weaving present in the Garifuna tradition itself — a tradition born from the fusion of African, Arawak, and Caribbean influences. The production choices on "Gimugatiña" demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of how traditional and contemporary elements can amplify rather than dilute each other. The percussion establishes authentic rhythmic architecture while guitars and bass provide familiar entry points for listeners unfamiliar with Garifuna musical traditions. This careful balancing act creates a listening experience that educates without ever feeling didactic. What distinguishes Tavo Man from many artists engaging with indigenous traditions is his multidisciplinary perspective. His background in visual arts — evident in his successful painting and drawing career as well as his self-produced music videos — brings a compositional understanding to his music that transcends purely sonic considerations. One hears in "Gimugatiña" a pictorial sensibility, with textural elements arranged to create emotional depth fields reminiscent of visual art techniques. [caption id="attachment_59895" align="alignnone" width="2000"] Tavo Man's Gimugatiña A Parranda Garífuna Anthem of Unconditional Love[/caption] This represents a particularly important evolution in how indigenous artistry enters global markets without surrendering its essential character or being reduced to exotic novelty. "Gimugatiña" ultimately succeeds as both cultural document and compelling musical statement because it trusts its audience's capacity for cross-cultural engagement. Rather than diluting the Garifuna elements to make them more palatable, Tavo Man invites listeners into a fully realized cultural space, allowing the music's inherent emotional resonance to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries.

For listeners seeking music that offers both immediate emotional connection and deeper cultural significance, Tavo Man's latest release provides a richly rewarding experience. "Gimugatiña" reminds us that unconditional love — whether between people or between an artist and his heritage — remains perhaps our most powerful tool for overcoming divisive forces. https://open.spotify.com/album/5sKttidk1TH1rzS7qAd5QT?si=A7o3474qTQet4amUjnnXNw

[paragonrobits]

I’m seeing Deku discourse that centers around the idea that he didn’t do anything to earn his powers, and apart from the fact that he worked out really intensely for several months just so his body didn’t immediately explode upon using his new power, and for a significant chunk of the series he still broke his bones every time he tried to use that power, and that the whole point of the powers was passing them down to a worthy user to keep the will of heroism and saving others going (in a way similar to the idea that ‘a single hero may die, but the legacy of what they did will keep going, and someone will finish what they started and save people in need of a hero’), but ultimately

i think the idea that Deku didn’t earn his power is ultimately missing the point of what his powers are actually about, and it’s pretty central to the speciifc flavor of superheroics that BNHA/MHA is angling towards?

namely, in this series, no one earns their power in a typical sense. people are just born lucky, or unlucky. These aren’t spiritual powers or things that arise through training and learning, but simply genetic happenstances that seem to be influenced by personality. Some people have stretchy eyeballs and bendy necks; cute and funny little things that functionally don’t do anything except maybe give them some unique advantages. And some people are born lucky and get super broken powers that let them overwhelm everything with raw power.

And other people get powers that mutate their bodies to such an extreme that they don’t look like what people think a human is. They look like animals, or they look completely monstrous. It doesn’t make them any less people, but others will think less of them for it.

And still other people have no powers at all; in a world where powers are closely linked towards identity, this makes them seem... off. At best, they’re seen as horribly unlucky. At worst, that just seems wrong, like there’s something inherently wrong with them. (And for my part, I contend that BNHA would nOT benefit from Deku being powerless. I’m still on the board of ‘people without powers are boring or at least not inherently more interesting because they’re Normal)

so, let’s look at the heroes that inspired Deku; Superman (as the powers of One For All seem to work as a way of explaining how you might get Superman’s powers; general super strength, and inheriting the abilities of those heroes who came before) and Spider-Man, the original friendly neighborhood superhero just doing what he can to help others out.

Superman is, of course, the original icon. He was the first hero like him, exemplifying a very specific cultural attitude of working to make the world a better place. Spider-Man ultimately takes the same approach.

But a point about the both of them is that neither of them ‘earned’ their power; they just have it. Superman is an alien whose people naturally develop those abilities in the right circumstances, while Spider-Man was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was given his powers by complete chance.

They didn’t work for those abilities, they just got them. In some takes, they were chosen, or specially selected for it, but they didn’t want it. They’re just people who happened to wind up with these amazing abilities.

So, then, what’s important about them is not what they did to get those abilities; that’s not important in this particular character angle. What’s important is what they chose to do with those abilities, and that was help to make the world a better place.

With these type of heroes, and thus Deku, its not how you got the powers, or about earning them. No one really earns anything, in this framework; things just happen. Deku, unlike his predecessors in the comic book lineage, chose to receive these abilities for the purpose of being a hero, and so wound up making the same choice they did; to work for the benefit of others and save people, no matter the personal cost.

and that’s what a superhero is all about; not getting those powers, but gaining them and choosing to use those abilities for the benefit of others.

[adifferenttime]

Honest Hearts: A Rough Rewrite

Hey! I’ve been working on an Honest Hearts rewrite-type-thing for a bit and figured I’d solicit feedback/assemble a post to store some of these ideas.

A detailed explanation of the premise is under the cut, but I’ve made this as a more interesting reintroduction to major locations, along with the characters who live there. I also have some lore consisting of letters, scripture, and holotapes that’s still in the early stages, along with a complete companion wheel for Salt-Upon-Wounds (he’ll follow you around for a little if you decide to help him out). Endings are now finished as well. I’m not planning on expanding this into a full mod, but I’m assembling everything in Twine so I can utilize branching dialogue and mimic skill checks.

I want to keep adding to and editing this because I’m having fun with it, so if you have any input, let me know!

Essentially, the story proceeds as written up until the point where Daniel sends you to either kill the White Legs or destroy their war totems. You quickly realize that their camp is deserted, at which point Salt-Upon-Wounds ambushes you, convo-locks you, and tells you that there’s an entirely different side to things here that you might not have considered.

Factions

The Mormons have established a theocracy in the Utah called Deseret, with New Jerusalem - what was once Salt Lake City - as its capital. Large numbers of them survived the initial apocalypse due to their pre-War focus on strong community ties and disaster prepping; over time, they have returned to the model of self-sufficient agrarianism that characterized the historical Mormon state of Deseret that existed in Utah in the 1800s. Their President, who wields supreme executive power, is also their Prophet. The Mormons believe he communes directly with God, but there’s some discontent in New Jerusalem over his hands-off approach to foreign policy and unwillingness to assemble a standing army. The Elders of the Priesthood are pushing him to allow for some kind of formal military to oppose what they see as revived versions of their ancestral enemies: America, Rome, and the “Lamanites” (this is what Mormons call Indigenous Americans; the “Lamanite” idea has historically been used as a justification for racism, and I’m reflecting that here because it’d be kind of heinous not to). In more than a few respects, Deseret serves as a mirror to the Legion and an exploration of the other side of the coin re: the tactics utilized by colonial empires to present themselves as legitimate while still claiming territory and steamrolling the opposition.

The White Legs are now more explicitly Shoshone, and I’m relying most heavily on the Timpanagos Band for names and historical inspiration (apparently the question of whether they’re Ute or Shoshone is pretty controversial, but I’m sticking with what the Timpanagos have said about it until someone corrects me). After migrating south in the wake of the Great War, the White Legs eventually settled in Ogden, about a day north of New Jerusalem. Initial interactions with the Mormons were friendly, but as New Jerusalem grew and its need for farmland and resources increased, tensions rose before culminating in open violence in around ‘76 or ‘77. Deseret’s party line is that the White Legs conducted a “raid” on one of their settlements and had to be driven away from Ogden; the White Legs claim the violence was not a raid, but a revenge killing after a Mormon killed a young man and was found not guilty by Mormon legal authorities (this is a theocracy, so “legal authorities” here can be understood as indistinct from “the church”). The Mormons established a new settlement on the ruins of Ogden, which they called New Canaan, and the White Legs fled to Salt Lake, where they have been dwindling in number ever since. Salt-Upon-Wounds’ plan to seek entry to the Legion is a last-ditch attempt to save his people from eradication when their neighbors and the land itself seems intent on killing them (not that that makes all the war crimes ok, which is a sentiment you’ll be able to express to his face if you engage him in conversation).

The Dead Horses are a pastoral society from out of Dead Horse Point, and are split almost down the middle along political lines. The more conservative, religious side opposes intervention in Zion. Graham desecrates the corpses of his enemies as an intimidation tactic, and because the Dead Horses’ religion is so eschatological and heavily focused on properly cleaning, preparing, and interring the dead, a big chunk of the religious leadership opposes him on that basis - they think his tactics are ungodly. They’re also worried that any Dead Horses who die in Zion and are interred there will be severed from their connection to Dead Horse Point and doomed to a separate, lonely afterlife. The younger, more progressive elements of the tribe are less traditionalist, sometimes less religious, and overall not as concerned about Graham’s treatment of the dead because of the potential benefit they might be able to derive from him. Follows-Chalk is their de facto leader, and while the Dead Horses don’t formally allocate political power, he’s among the most influential people in the informal tribal leadership. Most of the Dead Horses who’ve come to Zion have done so either because they support Follows-Chalk politically, or for practical reasons - namely, Graham’s access to a dizzying number of guns and his willingness to give them to anyone who’ll fight for him.

The Sorrows are now a terrace-farming agrarian society instead of hunter-gatherers (Zion has a lot of agricultural potential, and there’s already a few farming plots in the Sorrows camp you see in-game, so it’s not a huge departure from the canon). I’m keeping their Mexican heritage, but I’d like to give them some Ainu influences as well - partially for selfish reasons, but also because bears are extremely important to our culture and theology, which gels well with the elements of Sorrows culture and religion that appear in the canon. I’d like to keep the Survivalist because I like him, but I want to expand on their faith. One of the ways I’m doing that is by deciding they can still read English, even though they no longer speak it; it’s basically their equivalent of liturgical Latin. They’re also rigidly matriarchal and in contrast to the Dead Horses (who eschew formal political hierarchies) or the White Legs (who elect a chief who serves until he dies, is deposed, or voluntarily abdicates), leadership positions are allocated through matrilineal primogeniture; Waking Cloud inherited her position from her mother. Religious leadership, likewise, is only available to women. You’ll be able to talk to Waking Cloud about some of the ways this framework is incompatible with the Mormon perspective, and can appeal to her desire to retain power.

Characters

Canon Characters

Joshua Graham and Daniel are largely unaltered except through the addition of lore that gives insight into their cultures, motives, and pasts.

All three tribal leaders (Follows-Chalk, Waking Cloud, and Salt-Upon-Wounds) are either given new backstories, a different set of motives, or different approaches to one another/Graham and Daniel. They’re also explicitly leaders now - what power Graham and Daniel have, they derive from whichever tribal leader they’ve managed to attach themselves to. Of those three, I’m altering Waking Cloud the least and Salt-Upon-Wounds the most. Like I mentioned, I have a companion wheel for him so far and the bones of two other conversations - one, where you meet him for the first time, and the second, where you speak to him before the final battle. Will link as I finish them.

Original Characters

Each tribal leader now has a rival or right hand within their tribe so I can reflect the different ways the values of a specific community can express themselves.

Follows-Chalk’s primary rival among the Dead Horses is a man who refuses to tell you his name. That’s because using someone’s name in casual conversation is considered unspeakably rude, and the fact that Follows-Chalk is willing to share his own with you is, to Mysteriously Named Old Man Character, yet another sign of how disrespectful and laissez-faire Follows-Chalk is about their shared traditions. Old Man Character is suspicious of you initially, but if you speak to him more he starts to warm to you. The goal is to give you a sense that this he’s pretty xenophobic but for good reasons, and despite his political conflicts with Follows-Chalk, has a lot of love for him. He just wants what’s best for his family, and Follows-Chalk is part of that, even if Mysteriously Named Old Man Character thinks he’s making the wrong choices.

Kiiki is Salt-Upon-Wounds’ right-hand woman and intended as a contrast re: the approach to war and its costs. Salt-Upon-Wounds has done some horrible things and gets a fair bit of dialogue about that, but Kiiki is willing to go even further than he has with very little prompting. Her chief copes with what he’s done by trying to assure himself that the ends of war are worth the cost; Kiiki deals with it by trying to convince herself that the means weren't so bad, actually, and that anyone who isn’t nailing corpses to walls is being naive. All of that makes her sound pretty shitty, but she’s nowhere near as devoted to the idea of a Legion alliance as Salt-Upon-Wounds is. It only takes one very low Speech check to convince her that going Legion is a bad move, and one of the paths involves assassinating Salt-Upon-Wounds and installing her as the new leader as a way to stop the White Legs from joining Caesar. I haven’t added this path to the ending Twine because I’d like to finish Kiiki’s dialogues before I do that.

I’m replacing White Bird as the Sorrow’s spiritual leader with a woman named Imekanu. She’s incredibly old, savvy, and knowledgeable - she’s never been outside Zion, but has a store of books in English, Spanish, and Japanese that have allowed her some insight into what caused the war, if not the current state of the world. She’s also aware of the Survivalist’s origins - not because she’s entered any of his hideouts, but because she’s read over the scriptures and has correctly identified them as letters. Her perspective is that the Father in the Caves was a human being, but that doesn’t diminish his religious value. She sees him as analogous to the Buddha or a Catholic saint: human, sure, but still with access to some deeper truths about the purpose of man and the nature of human goodness. You’ll discover that this idea (that the Survivalist was a holy man rather than a literal god) is the most common perspective among the Sorrows, and you can talk to her about how this departs from Daniel’s perspective that the archetypal Father is divine, not human.

Quests

Each tribe has a specific quest that will either lower or bypass some of the penultimate checks that will determine your ending (people are more likely to believe what you’re telling them if you’ve already won their trust).

The Dead Horses: Joshua Graham has been putting the heads of the fallen up on pikes across Zion. The Dead Horses’ religion is deeply concerned with proper treatment of the deceased, and Graham’s decision to desecrate the corpses of his enemies goes against virtually everything they believe. The old man who won’t tell you his name asks you to take the heads off of the pikes and bury them deep in Zion, and to bring Follows-Chalk with you so you’ll have someone to tell you how to treat them properly. Over the course of the quest, Follows-Chalk will share some of his own beliefs about death, and you’ll have the opportunity to share your own. If you complete this quest without sabotaging it, Follows-Chalk will be willing to betray Graham to the White Legs before the final battle.

The Sorrows: This is basically just Ghost of She, but after defeating the Yao Guai you’ll discover a holotape revealing that the girl wasn’t killed by the bear, but by one of the murderers from Vault 22. Waking Cloud will speculate that maybe the Yao Guai wasn’t the ghost of the little girl at all but some other force that wanted to push you to discover the truth. If you wait until the end to tell Waking Cloud about the death of her husband, you’ll have to pass a Speech check of 75 to convince her you’re telling her the truth; completing this quest drops the check to 50.

The White Legs: Salt-Upon-Wounds will ask you to help him sabotage the Mormons’ preparations for the battle. If you help him with this, it’ll drop the Speech check for you to convince him to leave from 100 to 80. It’s not necessary at all to get the tribal confederacy ending, but a new note will appear in your inventory if you finish it and meet a couple other requirements (asking him certain questions, not attempting that one Speech check about religion, etc).

Endings

I’m trying to incorporate as much variety as possible, but there are three main ending paths: siding with the White Legs, siding with the other two tribes, and peace. The basic idea is that the outcome is predicated less on your direct intervention, and more on how other people act based on the facts they have available to them. Most of your influence is through your choices to hide or reveal key pieces of information, and the skill checks you need to access certain endings are less you convincing a character to do something and more convincing a character to believe you’re telling them the truth. There’s one major exception to this, it requires maxed Speech, and the ending it gives you is markedly bittersweet because you’re trying to get a guy to act against his own best interest. I’m writing all the endings up here, and will probably edit them as things change. The post where I explain them in more depth can be found here.

And that’s the story so far! Thank you for reading, and again: if there’s anything here you think is poorly-conceived, let me know. Thank you to @baelpenrose, who’s a grad student in the history of the American West, for helping me workshop a lot of this stuff. If you’ve got expert knowledge on any of the concepts I touch on or are personally a member of any of the groups I’m describing, please feel free to hmu: anon is on, and you’re always welcome to DM me. I’m just doing this for fun, but I still want it to be as not-shit as possible.

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Woman as alien: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains.  

Link/Page Citation

 "Woman as an alien, the non-patriarchal alien in a patriarchal society, the patriarchal alien in a non-patriarchal society, the non-patriarchal alien experiencing the stress of positioning as a patriarchal subject - all are strategies used by feminist science fiction writers to deconstruct patriarchal ideology and its practice." (1) This quote taken from an essay by Anne Cranny-Francis is for me a very suitable starting point for a discussion of Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains (1969). Written from within the counter-culture of the 1960s, this novel is Carter's excursion into the disaster story convention, a literary sub-genre which was very popular during the period of the Cold War. (2)

 Heroes and Villains is a very interesting and unsettling early book, and yet, surprisingly, one that has received "far less critical attention than one might expect." (3) Apart from a few interesting essays, (4) the existing studies of the book (primarily sub-chapters of monographs devoted to Carter) focus almost exclusively on the way the novel reverses gender stereotypes and undermines cultural codings of female sexuality as passive and masochistic. My point is different: I would like to show how, by having a female protagonist (and focalizer) who revolts against cultural stereotypes, Carter revitalizes the disaster story convention that in the late sixties seemed an exhausted and repetitive sub-genre of pulp fiction.

 In order to do this I am going to briefly present the British disaster story tradition, place Carter within its context, and then discuss Heroes and Villains as an atypical disaster story that, thanks to a woman-alien who disrupts mythical frameworks that people are confined by, points to new ways of constructing narratives. I will show how the female protagonist of the novel matures and gradually learns that her post-holocaust society is based on a set of false binary oppositions it has inherited from pre-holocaust Western patriarchal society, and that her world is slowly giving way to entropy. I will then prove that Heroes and Villains indulges in descriptions of chaos and decay in order to show the deterioration of once potent symbols and thus of the mythical order which they represent. Only then, once the old order disappears, can the female mythmaker create a totally new civilization, one that does not repeat old and static social paradigms, but is dynamic and mutable. Similarly, Heroes and Villains shows that, in order not to degenerate into pulp disaster, the story should refrain from recreating already known historical epochs (for example, a new post-holocaust Middle Ages), opting instead to create radically new societies ruled by women-aliens.

 Though it is rather difficult to state exactly what disaster stories are, a fair working definition of the genre seems to be the one given in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: "stories of vast biospheric change which drastically affect human life." (5) According to John Clute and Peter Nicholls, the British disaster story was born at the end of the nineteenth century when the first anti-civilization sentiments were being felt, and people began to mistrust the idea of the white man's Empire standing for reason, progress and science. In 1884 Richard Jefferies, a Victorian naturalist and journalist, published After London, a novel describing the ruins of the greatest city on Earth; in a post-cataclysmic future our civilization inevitably succumbs to nature, savagery and non-reason. In the following years such writers as H.G. Wells, Conan Doyle and Alun Llewellyn published numerous fantastic ac counts of natural- or human-provoked disasters, the retrogression of humankind, new ice ages, barbarian raids, the destruction of Europe, etc. (6)

 Though dating from the nineteenth century the genre did not flourish until the 1950s and early 1960s during the Cold War, when young British writers revived the old tradition by incorporating a new influence: that of American pulp magazines. American stories of the time were very pessimistic, as the recent war left many with a feeling of despair and fear of the nuclear bomb, political systems based on unlimited power and culture's imminent doom. In England there was a strong native tradition of gloomy fiction concerning authoritarian societies (George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess), and thus the young authors of disaster stories belonging to the so-called "New Wave" of British speculative fiction (J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss and others) had examples to follow. (7) Their older colleagues Walter Miller (in the United States) and John Wyndham (in Britain) were writing their post-holocaust bestsellers at that very time.

 Heroes and Villains seems to belong to the same tradition as the disaster story classics: Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibovitz or John Wyndham's The Chrysalides. (8) Miller and Wyndham describe the beginnings of a new civilization; their prose demonstrates how the deadly heritage of our times (pollution, mutations, decline and chaos) serve as the basis for another better world. In A Canticle monks of a second Middle Ages try to gather and preserve the records of our knowledge by rewriting all kinds of texts (just like the caste of Professors). Though they no longer understand what they copy, still there is hope that one day civilization will be regained. Wyndham's post-catastrophic society, in turn, is obsessed with the idea of purity and the norm. His characters want to recreate civilization in such a way as to make it immune to self-destruction. In its fear of deviations and mutants (bringing to mind the Out People) Wyndham's society is cruel and fanatical, but his novel is, just like Miller's story, full of hope for the future. Human folly and cruelty evoke terror and pity in order to improve the reader's mind. Carter's procedure in composing Heroes and Villains is to allude to Wyndham and Miller's tradition. Both Heroes and Villains and her other post-holocaust novel The Passion of the New Eve show to what extant literature today is repeating already known tales. Yet disaster fiction, a very commercial genre, enables Carter to reuse the stock motifs and to create her own often times shocking pieces. Her disaster novels may therefore be read as modern Menippea: a mixture of heterogeneous literary material. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, Menippea was the genre which broke the demands of realism and probability: it conflated the past, present and future, states of hallucination, dream worlds, insanity, eccentric behaviour and speech and transformation. (9)

 Heroes and Villains juxtaposes overt allusions to nuclear fallout and mutations caused by the self-annihilation of technological society with counter-cultural poetics: subversion of the social order, new hippie-like aesthetics, alternate lifestyles, and concentration on entropy, decay and death. Carter is no longer interested in the bomb--she does not warn against the impending holocaust; but instead describes in detail the gradual dissolution of social, sexual and cultural groupings which follows the inevitable disaster and which makes room for a new female-governed future. Thus, she deconstructs the markedly masculine tradition of after-the-end-of-the-world fantasies which deal with the creation of a new order, strong leaders and outbursts of violence (as is the case in the above-mentioned novels by Miller and Wyndham). In stock disaster stories women are either commodities or breeders who are fought for and whose reproductive abilities are to amend r the drastic decrease of population.

 In Heroes and Villains the Cold War motif of a post-holocaust civilization allows Carter to create an exuberant world of ruin, lush vegetation and barbarism. Three groups of people live among the crumbling ruins of a pre-nuclear explosion past: the Professors, who live in concrete fortified villages and cultivate old science and ideology; the Barbarians, who attack them and lead nomadic lives in the forests; and the Out People, radiation mutants cast out by all communities.

 The Professors are the guardians of this order, and they try to uphold standards and attend to appearances such as dress and accent. Marianne, the novel's focalizer, is the daughter of a professor of history brought up to live in an ordered patriarchal society and to study old books in trying to preserve knowledge. The futility of the Professors' work - abstract research done in white concrete towers, editing what nobody would ever read - demonstrates the arbitrariness of post-apocalyptic social roles. The caste of Professors, in wanting to be different than the irrational Barbarians, must devise artificial attributes of its individuality.

 Unable to cope with an existence devoted to cultivation of the past and attracted by the colourful and seemingly romantic Barbarians, Marianne helps one of them--an attractive young Barbarian leader named Jewel. He is very beautiful and he wears an exuberant savage costume, making him look like a Hollywood film star who plays in a wilderness film. For Marianne he embodies her desire and fantasies --on one occasion she even calls him the "furious invention of my virgin nights." (10) Moreover, his name might be considered an allusion to the beautiful savage girl whom Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim made the queen of his little kingdom. (11) Marianne's name might well be read as an allusion to Jane Austen's too-romantic heroine of Sense and Sensibility. (12) This canonical echo is contrasted with the association with pulp fiction: Marianne, a professor's daughter lost in the wilderness, evokes the character of Jane in the Tarzan stories. (13) It is by such literary allusions that Carter constructs her self-conscious pastiche, thus demonstrating the whole range of possibilities offered to a female character by romance and, at the same time, she points out the exhaustion of these conventions. John Barth in his Literature of Exhaustion postulates that "exhausted" literature might be saved by coming back to well-known classics and by echoing their extracts in new shocking contexts. (14) In this way Carter mingles her generically heterogeneous "prior texts".

 Wounded in an attack, Jewel escapes from the village and is followed by Marianne. He then takes her to his tribe and, despite her protests, proclaims her his hostage. Marianne is a total stranger among the Barbarians; they find her repulsive and unbearably alien; like a creature from outer space in a B-grade science fiction movie she provokes fear and hostility. An educated and self-assured woman in a tribe "caught in the moment of transition from the needs of sheer survival to a myth-ruled society," (15) she is thus a woman-alien. Interestingly, as early as the 1960s Carter used a science fiction stock character to talk about women in a society that is undergoing changes: in the 1990s Donna Haraway, in her famous "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in a similar way makes use of the science fiction concept of a cyborg. (16) Haraway follows Carter's footsteps, and indeed makes her point even stronger, as her "cyborg" comes from the social outside and is alien to traditional gender structures. As Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger explain:

  Haraway develops her "Manifesto" around the cyborg--product of both   science fiction and the military-industrial complex--as an   imaginative figure generated outside the framework of the   Judeo-Christian history of fall and redemption, a history that   unfolds between the twin absolutes of Edenic origin and apocalyptic   Last Judgment. Like Derrida, Haraway warns that (nuclear)   apocalypse might, in fact, be the all-too-possible outcome of our   desire for the resolution of historical time. Haraway too is wary   of cultural discourses that privilege resolution, completion, and   totality. (17)

 Marianne is alien to the tribe as she refuses to adopt traditional female roles. Thus, Carter uses science fiction literary conventions to talk about gender as performance much in the same manner Judith Butler will some twenty years later. (18) Elisabeth Mahoney in her above-mentioned study of Heroes and Villains reads the novel in the context of Butler's thesis, that "fantasy is the terrain to be privileged in any contestation of conventional configurations of identity, gender and the representation of desire." (19) This is a very good starting point and an interesting comparison but, as Elaine Jordan notices, "Carter did this sort of thing before Butler, so her work could just as well be used to explicate Butler." (20) The same is true for Haraway, Gordon, Hollinger and a number of other feminist critics often referred to nowadays in order to validate Carter's argument. But Carter turning to science fiction for her metaphors predates them.

 The tribe (whose descriptions bring to mind a 1960s hippie commune) is apparently governed by Jewel and his brothers, but Marianne soon realizes that the real source of power is Donally, an escapee professor of sociology, Jewel's tutor, and the self-proclaimed shaman of the tribe. For Donally the tribe is a social laboratory where he tries to perform an experiment: to wit, to introduce a new mythology designed to be the founding stone of new type of post-holocaust society. (21)

  It seemed to me that the collapse of civilisation in the form that   intellectuals such as ourselves understood it might be as good a   time as any for crafting a new religion' he said modestly.   'Religion is a device for instituting the sense of a privileged   group; many are called but few are chosen and, coaxed from   incoherence, we shall leave the indecent condition of barbarism and   aspire towards that of the honest savage. (22)

 When Marianne meets Donally she immediately recognizes his professorial descent: "his voice was perfectly cultured, thin, high and soft ... He had a thin, mean and cultured face. Marianne had grown up among such voices and faces." (23) Seeing in his study books which she remembered from her childhood (Teilhard de Chardin, Levi-Strauss, Weber, Durkheim) Marianne discovers Donally's attempts to rule the Barbarians according to the outdated formulas written down by pre-apocalyptic sociologists.

 Disappointed by the tribe, Marianne runs away only to be recaptured by Jewel, who rapes her, brings her back, and then ceremoniously marries her according to a ritual devised by Donally. With the tribe again on the move, Donally quarrels with Jewel and has to leave. Marianne gradually learns how to manipulate Jewel, her quasi-royal power grows, especially once she becomes pregnant and is to be the mother of Jewel's heir. When Donally sends a message that he has been caught by the Professors, Jewel goes to rescue him and both are killed. In the novel's finale Marianne decides to become the new female leader of a new society.

 This brief summary reveals that, in parallel with the action-adventure narrative, the novel also depicts Marianne's gradual psychological change. She learns how to articulate her own fantasies and to objectify the man she desires: Jewel. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that when her romantic illusions disappear she discovers her own deeper motivating desire in her relationship with Jewel: it is her newly awakened sexuality that counts, not the male himself. Though a tribal leader and a future patriarch, Jewel is in fact a passive object both Marianne and Donally struggle to possess. Linden Peach writes:

  In the relationship between Marianne and Jewel, Carter also   rewrites a further traditional story, that of a demon-lover, of   whom Jewel has many characteristics--he is powerful, mysterious,   supernatural; and he can be cruel, vindictive and hostile. However,   in her description of him, Carter challenges the male-female   binarism which ascribes so-called masculine qualities to men and   feminine characteristics to women. In discovering the nature of her   own desire, Marianne finds that male-female attributes exist within   each individual. The demon-lover is also reconfigured as part of   her own eroticisation of the male other. (24)

 New ways of looking at herself and others set Marianne free and empower her. Towards the end of the book she feels ready to construct a new narrative for herself and make the world around believe in it. A woman-alien dissolves the tribe's patriarchal structure and commences a new phase in its history. The old order based on binary oppositions (hero/villain, passive/active, natural/civilized) and a number of taboos that originated in pre-holocaust times are abandoned. Carter does not do what a standard disaster story author does: she does not establish a rigid binarism between the Professors and the Barbarians, i.e., the civilized and the savage. The post-holocaust narrative is for her a space where she "explores the blurring of conventional boundaries and binarisms and the way in which such artificial boundaries are maintained." (25) She re-uses existing narrative patterns of disaster fiction in order to break the "Wyndhamesque" formula and instead create a new and radical vision of the end of the world.

 Moreover, these post-holocaust times are shown to be not a new version of the old order, but an unknown epoch typified not by stability but by creative chaos. Step by step, Marianne realizes that the entire distinction Professors\Barbarians is as false and naive as the children's role-playing game called "Soldiers and Villains". As a female child growing up in a Professors' village she always had to play the part of the Barbarian, the villain, the other, while the boy she played with, the son of a professor of mathematics, always wanted to be a male civilized hero who shoots her dead. As a small girl she was brave enough to refuse to play such a game; now as a young woman she realizes that in the real world the basis of the division between the Professors and the Barbarians is a set of myths and superstitions. (26)

 The stay in the Barbarians' camp proves to Marianne that there is no other difference but old wives' tales: to her surprise (and in opposition to what she was told in the Professors' village) the Barbarians do not represent instinct, folklore and savagery alone. They do have a lot of superstitions; they do sport ridiculous tattoos, hairdos and costumes and they do believe in folk cures--but at the same time they are very far from unreflective "nature". When Marianne first sees Jewel he seems the embodiment of the wilderness: a man fighting to survive among hostile wildlife. But he immediately destroys this impression by quoting to her a relevant bit of poetry: Tennyson's poem about Darwinism. (27) Jewel is very well-educated by Donally and likes to boast of his knowledge of philosophical theories and the Latin names of beasts, which seems as irrelevant in the dirty Barbarians' camps as the Professors' lore in their concrete towers.

 The Professors and the Barbarians need each other to define themselves. Both tribes work hard to impress the opponent (the Barbarians wear tattoos and facepaint, the Professors organize armies of specially-equipped soldiers to defend their villages). They also blame each other for the hardships of post-holocaust life. Marianne's father, in explaining to her the reasons of the war between the tribes, asks at one point: "if the Barbarians are destroyed who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?" (28) Aidan Day remarks:

  The Professors, failing to recognise their own repressions, have   sought to hound that which is not gentle and ordered outside   themselves. They have committed the crime of finding external   scapegoats for realities within their own hearts and minds that   they find problematical. (29)

 In a world where the Barbarians discuss philosophy and shamans comment on being shamans, even the seemingly biological distinction human\inhuman is not stable and fails to structure reality. While roaming the jungle Marianne encounters mutants whose bodies and minds transgress the human norm. What is worth noting is the origin of the Out People motif: mutants and deviations often populate the worlds of post-apocalyptic stories, the above-mentioned example of Wyndham's The Chrysalides being the best known; but the way they are described is usually quite different. By transgressing the norm Wyndham's mutants reinforce the notion of being human, of possessing some mysterious human factor along with all the rights and duties, while Carter's Out People are just strange, speechless bodies:

  Amongst the Out People, the human form has acquired fantastic   shapes. One man has furled ears like pale and delicate Arum Lilies.   Another was scaled all over, with webbed hands and feet. Few had   the conventional complement of limbs and features. (30)

 Their appearance shows that overwhelming entropy is not external scenery the human race has to live in, but that it touches and alters the very essence of humanness: what humans are and what humans create is falling apart. Carter is re-writing an iconic disaster story motif (that of humans genetically altered by radiation), but she gives it a new ideological meaning. In classic male post-holocaust narratives mutants are disfigured humans who suffer for the sins of the fathers: civilization should start anew, albeit preserving its essential features (humanism, liberalism, traditional family values and consequently, patriarchy). Carter's Marianne, in watching the Out People, does not believe in re-establishing the old social order with its norms and values. Heroes and Villains is not about the rebirth of humankind, but about apocalypse itself.

 In this chaotic world--where there are no more essential differences between phenomena, and the randomness of things does not allow for any conventional divisions--race, species, gender and even time cease to exist objectively. David Punter comments:

  The conflict ... is a multivalent parody: of class relations, of   relations between the sexes, of the battle between rational control   and desire.... There are, obviously, no heroes and no villains;   only a set of silly games which men play. (31)

 Each entity possesses its own characteristic features; but on their basis no classification can be made as, gradually, all the points of reference are destroyed. Such a process is particularly striking as far as temporality is concerned--in the world of the novel there is no objective measure of time; everybody lives in the temporal dimension of his biological rhythm without calendars or chronometers. In Heroes and Villains the flow of time is stopped forever, as shown by the beautiful though useless chronometers that for Marianne are merely souvenirs from the past, elements of pure decoration. The book starts with a description of her father's favourite heirloom:

  [A] clock which he wound every morning and kept in the family   dining room upon a sideboard full of heirlooms.... She concluded   the clock must be immortal but this did not impress her ... she   watched dispassionately as the hands of the clock went round but   she never felt the time was passing, for time was frozen around her   in this secluded place. (32)

 Time itself has become an heirloom, a peculiar reminder of bygone days. For Marianne the ticking of the clock has no relation to the rhythm of life. Its ticking proved to be the sound of her childhood and her father's old age. She left it behind without regret as it had never served for her any purpose. The next chronometers she saw (dead watches worn by the Barbarian women for decoration) were signs of an even greater degree of timelessness as nobody remembered their initial function. The last clock in the book, a gigantic and dead apparatus, welcomes Marianne in the ruins of the old city: (33)

  Prominent among the minarets, spires and helmets of wrought iron   which protruded from the waters was an enormous clock whose hands   stood still at the hour of ten, though it was, of course, no longer   possible to tell whether this signified ten in the morning or ten   at night. (34)

 The gigantic size of this clock and its absolute deadness create the image of the total arbitrariness of any measure of time. Exhaustion and entropy know no time but the vague "now" which for a fraction of a second can at best turn into "a totally durationless present, a moment of time sharply dividing past from future and utterly distinct from both." (35) The post-holocaust landscape of ruined cities near the seaside adorned with dead clocks brings to mind a visual intertext: Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory. (36) In this surreal painting, influenced by psychoanalysis, gigantic dead clocks are melting down, showing that clock time is no longer valid. Dali and Carter (who adored the Surrealists and often wrote about them in both her fiction and non-fiction) are both trying to recreate inner landscapes: their critique of the contemporary world takes forms of fantastic neverlands.

 Carter's great admiration for the Surrealist movement results from the fact that, as she holds, theirs was the art of celebration and recreation. Their techniques haphazard and idiosyncratic, the Surrealists attempted to create combinations of words and images which by analogy and inspiration were supposed to evoke amazement; such art was based on a strong belief in humankind's ability to recreate itself. The world shown in their works is "deja vue", as in a nightmare we recognize separate elements which we have already seen as they date back to diverse moments of the past. It is a world deprived of time experienced in the mind. In surrealist art: "It is this world, there is no other but a world transformed by imagination and desire. You could say it is a dream made flesh." (37) In Heroes and Villains Carter attempts to use a similar technique to depict the post-apocalyptic world in which past, present and future intermingle.

 For Carter's characters the future offers no escape: they are doomed to inhabit the ruins and repeat social scenarios from the past. Living in such a world has the haunting quality of a nightmare: the self-conscious characters feel oppressed by the same surroundings, similar activities and repeated words. What is the worst is the fact that there is no escape in space either, as there cannot be anywhere to go: "There's nowhere to go, dear,' said the Doctor. 'If there was I would have found it". (38)

 Madness, drunkenness and paranoia seem to be the only ways out of the grotesque post-apocalyptic wilderness where everything is falling apart; indeed, the wild world Marianne enters (and finally renews) is entropy-ridden. The story's characters can hide only inside their troubled egos, as the outside reality is nothing but an everlasting nightmare. A stifling atmosphere of exhaustion and oppression is created by numerous images of overgrown vegetation, desolate ruins, half-destroyed houses full of fungi and rotting furniture, detailed descriptions of dirt and disease all in the atmosphere of sexual fantasy and paranoid visions. These images are too vivid and drastic to be mere scenery; it is the power of death and the different faces of decay that constitute Carter's style.

 Carter treats bits and pieces of old discourses (the above-mentioned allusions to Conrad and Austen, as well as to Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Wyndham) in the way the Barbarians use old garments and broken down pieces of machinery found in the ruins: apparently to adorn but, at the same time, to take delight in dissolution, destruction and death. Metatextually, Heroes and Villains depicts the de-composition of traditional modes of writing; Carter follows the example of such New Wave authors as Pamela Zoline (39) for whom the key narrative term is entropy. In the short story "The heat death of the universe" Zoline defines the entropy of a system as "a measure of its degree of disorder." (40) The "system" is post-capitalist affluent society, and in order to capture the experience of living within the contemporary mediascape she both depicts the chaos of her character's life and introduces chaos to her narrative.

 Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe" ends with the scene when the protagonist methodically smashes all pieces of equipment in her kitchen, thereby creating an irreversible mess of destruction; all forms give way to chaos. Carter's novel has a totally different post-apocalyptic setting, yet chaos and entropy are equally important. The narration of Heroes and Villains describes decay almost with pleasure and most certainly with great precision. The text changes into a study in decomposition, the anatomy of both our civilization and the disaster story genre: they both are killed in order to be examined. "For I am every dead thing"; (41) this quotation from John Donne would best summarize the world of the novel, which does not allow for any hope. The only emotion left is curiosity: Marianne the focalizer takes some pleasure in scientific observations of decay.

 Among the ruins and scattered heirlooms of the past a prominent place is given to old symbols, which at the moment of the world's death, change in significance. Deprived of their contextual power the symbols die, creating ephemeral constellations and gaining for a moment a certain new meaning. The anatomy of signification becomes a favourite pastime of Donally and, later, Marianne; but the way the two of them interpret signs differs. Donally seeks to maintain patriarchal mythical frameworks: the sharp unequal antagonism between male and female; civilized and uncivilized; reasonable and wild. Marianne tries to dismantle these oppositions: for her signs are reduced to aesthetics and the old signifying system dies. The moment she starts to observe signs for their own sake marks her growing understanding of the world around: she lives surrounded by the debris of a bygone civilization which one may study--but only for scientific purposes. New myths are yet to be created. The last conversation between her and Jewel best shows the difference between them. Jewel is still naive enough to believe in symbols, while Marianne analyzes them:

  But when he was near enough for her to see the blurred colours of   his face, she also saw he was making the gesture against the Evil   Eye. Suddenly she recognised it.   "They used to call that the sign of the Cross,' she said. 'It must   be handed down among the Old Believers."   "Did you call me back just to give me this piece of useless   information?" (42)

 The anatomy of symbolic meanings and their changes is best seen in the example of clothes. Both the dress and decoration worn by the Barbarians come either from the ruins (and thus from the past) or are stolen from the Professors' villages. Worn in new and shocking combinations, old garments gain new meanings. A similar process was described in one of Carter's fashion essays from the Nothing Sacred collection. The essay entitled "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style" analyzes the nature of apparel. According to Carter clothes are the best example of the decadent fashion of the sixties, as in those years they "become arbitrary and bizarre ... reveal a kind of logic of whizzing entropy. Mutability is having a field day." (43)

 The term mutability is the key notion for this essay, one written two years before the publication of Heroes and Villains. In this text Carter defines style as the presentation of the self as a three-dimensional object. Wearing eclectic fragments of different vestments "robbed of their symbolic content" (44) is a way of creating a new whole whose items are not in any imposed harmony. The theory formulated in the essay seems to be the key to understanding the symbolic meaning of clothes in Heroes and Villains, where mutability is not a matter of individual choice, but the condition of the whole dying civilization.

 In broader terms, symbols have meaning only in reference to the mythical structures behind them--and clothes are a perfect example of this process. In a patriarchal society, where the law of inheritance makes men value female chastity and pre-nuptial virginity, the wedding ritual has a deep mythical sense and the white wedding dress becomes a potent symbol. Donally makes Marianne wear an old deteriorating white robe during her marriage ceremony in a vain attempt to reestablish patriarchy in the tribe. For Marianne the dress is just an ugly relic of bygone epochs. Lost in the exhausted reality of dead symbols she feels she has to create their own future: first to escape the old symbolic order and then to devise a new mythology herself.

 Thus, paradoxically, the novel combines the symbols of entropy and mutability; it shows the world in the moment of its disintegration, and yet the disintegrating elements are constantly being re-used to create changeable structures. In one moment we read a "Wyndhamesque" end-of-the-world-fantasy, in another Carter deconstructs this tradition. Roz Kaveney writes:

  The formalist aspects of Carter's work--the extent to which she   combined stock motifs and made of them a collage that was entirely   her own--was bound to appeal; sections of the SF readership   discovered in the course of the 1970s and 1980s that they had been   talking postmodernism all their lives and not noticing it, and   Carter was part of that moment. (45)

 Kaveney reads Heroes and Villains in the context of the science fiction readership in the late 20th century, and discovers how Carter makes use of SF conventions. Eva Karpinski in her essay "Signifying Passion: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains as a Dystopian Romance" refers in her reading of the book to the utopian tradition:

 The dystopian romance proves to be a suitable vehicle for Carter's didactic allegory of the relationship between the sexes, an allegory, one might add, that uses the utopian ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to re-write the myth of the Fall as it structures Western representations of the social and sexual difference. (46)

 Other critics, for example Elaine Jordan (47) use the label "speculative fiction," (48) and Carter herself in the famous interview given to John Haffenden calls her fiction "magic mannerism." (49) Thus, one can think of diverse generic formulas to describe the novel, although none of the labels is final, as the narrative itself is unstable and mutable.

 The novel also celebrates new feminist myths in order to playfully laugh at them on the next page. Having got rid of Donally and having won her mental struggle with Jewel, Marianne decides on a scenario that suits her best. She has found her identity and now wants to take control over the tribe and to become a post-apocalyptic leader, which she declares by paraphrasing the Bible: "I will be the tiger-lady and I will rule them with a rod of iron." (50) In this sentence she alludes to Donally's attempt to tattoo one of the tribe's children into a tiger-girl, something which ended tragically, as the baby died in the process. But the idea of the artificial creation of a "natural" tiger-human had some appeal to the Barbarians and thus Jewel wanted to get the tiger tattoo himself.

 When Jewel learned that at his age it was impossible, he planned to tattoo his and Marianne's baby. And now it is Marianne who is going to symbolically possess the tiger's strength and beauty: not by getting a tattoo, but by ruling "with a rod of iron" over the tribe. Her "rod" is probably going to be her knowledge and education, the love of reason her father taught her, combined with her ability to reconcile binary oppositions and blend nature with nurture, reason with instinct, the Barbarians and the Professors. Only a woman-alien can do this by creating a third, reconciliatory way between the two patriarchal societies. Marianne is aware that she is not yet living in the post-apocalyptic order, but still within the Apocalypse itself, that is, amidst the bits and pieces of the old world which is falling apart. Thus her declaration "I will rule them with a rod of iron" echoes Saint John's Revelation:

  and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be   delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.   And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with   a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his   throne.   And the woman fled into the wilderness. (51)

 Marianne misquotes St John for a purpose: she aims to give old patriarchal texts a new meaning for new times. At the end of the book Marianne is, physically speaking, "ready to deliver", as her baby is to be born very soon. But here the similarities with St John end: who can be identified with the devouring dragon? Perhaps patriarchal attempts to remodel the child so that it serves a purpose? After all, Donally and Jewel wanted him tattooed and ruling the tribe according to the old pattern of power. Moreover, Marianne (in contrast to Donally and Jewel) is not so sure the baby is going to be "a man child", and so she plans the future regardless of its sex. Finally, her flight into the wilderness is in fact an act of usurping political power herself: it is she who is going to become a tiger-lady and to rule the new "wilderness", the world outside the villages of the Professors and the camps of the Barbarians.

 "People kept wild beasts such as lions and tigers in cages and looked at them for information. Who would have thought they would take to our climate so kindly, when the fire came and let them out?" (52) which is how Marianne's father once explained to her why the exotic beasts roam the countryside devouring smaller creatures. After the apocalypse carnivorous cats once again become the king of beasts; they are the only ones that gained power instead of losing it. Predators could survive and rule. As this is true of tigers, perhaps it can also be true of people?

 Tigers and lions are very prominent in the novel; we very soon learn that Jewel is attracted to wild cats, which is perhaps the effect of his own weakness. One of his most vivid memories is the scene when, as a teenager, he met a lion face to face and survived only because the beast ignored him. This story (which he told to Marianne) anticipates the end of the novel: when Jewel gives up and goes to seek his death he encounters another lion and again fails to attract its attention. Marianne sees the animal and cannot but admire its fearsome beauty:

  She had never seen a lion before. It looked exactly like pictures   of itself; though darkness washed its colours off, she saw its mane   and tasseled tail which flicked about as it moved out of the edge   of shadow on to the dune. (53)

 Marianne is not disappointed; the lion looks "like pictures of itself": the thing and its representation for once go together. The mythical meaning of wild cats is going to survive the end of civilization and shall remain a handy metaphor. Marianne decides to rule over the tribe as its tiger-lady not in an act of imitating a queen of the wilderness fairytale motif, but in an attempt to start a new epoch with its new myths. (54) As Margaret Atwood puts it in her essay on Carter's stories "Running with the Tigers", as the tiger will never lie down with the lamb, it is the lamb the powerless female--which should learn the tigers' ways. (55) By the same token, Marianne wants to create a new definition for a power system in which the oppositions male/female, intellect/desire or civilized/wild are of no importance. (56)

 When Marianne gets to the Barbarian camp for the first time she finds herself imprisoned by the patriarchal myth of a new Creation. Both Donally and Jewel want her to act out a new Eve role in order to secure a re-enactment of history which would result in a repetition of the old social and political order. Jewel advises her at the time of her trouble in adapting to the tribe to pretend to be Eve at the end of the world. The original patriarchal myth of Eden is re-enforced by a tattoo Jewel has on his back whereby Eve offers Adam an apple, and by a number of metaphors and allusions. This myth is thus very prominent in the novel and suggests the strength of patriarchal ideology--parallel to the strength of the tribe's male leaders (and also of the Professors' village: both societies are exclusively male-governed). The rival mythical intertext--the Revelation of Saint John--appears not until the end of Heroes and Villains and marks the beginning of a genuinely new epoch when Marianne, a woman-alien, takes power.

 A woman-alien sets out to create a genuinely new social order and the question is whether she is going to recreate the hegemonic power-relations of patriarchal order in both the Professors' villages and the Barbarians' camps. In science fiction narratives aliens often perceive human civilization in a new way, one that enables us to see "normal" social order in a defamiliarized manner; Marianne is a stranger to her own world, she is not interested in the reversal of binaries, but in their liquidation. Carter does not celebrate her political victory as a birth of a genuinely feminist paradise: the very concept of "tiger-lady" cannot be taken too seriously. Marianne the Queen is demythologized from the very start of a reign which is going to prefer mutability to stiff order.

 Marianne the tiger-lady has a long road to power behind her. Heroes and Villains tells a story of her maturation in a world full of bits and pieces of old symbols and power structures. Marianne learns to see that these binding discourses are giving way to entropy, and that in her world of total chaos new myths have to be created --and that a new, post-patriarchal epoch is yet to be commenced. Moreover, a similar procedure might well be applied to the old literary genre Heroes and Villains pertains to: the British disaster story. By having an atypical protagonist, a female-alien strong enough to destroy patriarchal social structure, Carter manages to revive the exhausted convention and to create a genuinely new story.

 (1.) Anne Cranny-Francis, "Feminist Futures: A Generic Study," in Alien Zone. Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 219-228, p. 223.

 (2.) To call Carter a "feminist science fiction writer" would perhaps be an exaggeration (though the most influential science fiction lexicon, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Clute and Nicholls, does have an entry "Angela Carter"). Nonetheless, in some of her novels she purposefully uses fantastic literary conventions.

 (3.) Elisabeth Mahoney, "'But Elsewhere?' The future of fantasy in Heroes and Villains," in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 73-87, p. 73.

 (4.) One has to mention Eva C. Karpinski, "Signifying Passion: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains as a Dystopian Romance," Utopian Studies 11.2 (2000) 137-51; and Roz Kaveney, "New New World Dreams: Angela Carter and Science Fiction," in Flesh and the Mirror. Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 171-88.

 (5.) John Clute and Peter Nicholls, ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit, 1999), p. 338.

 (6.) Clute and Nicholls, pp. 337-339.

 (7.) For details concerning the New Wave of British speculative fiction, see Judith Merril, England Swings SF, Stories of Speculative Fiction (New York: Ace Books, 1968). The most important disaster novels written by the New Wave writers are J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (Harmondsworth and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1974) and J.G. Ballard The Wind from Nowhere (Harmondsworth and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1974).

 (8.) Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibovitz (Philadelphia, Lippincott and London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960) and John Wyndham, The Chrysalides (London: Joseph, 1955).

 (9.) Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, tr. by R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 96.

 (10.) Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (London: Virago, 1992), p. 137.

 (11.) Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

 (12.) Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Harmondsworth, New York, Ringwood and Auckland: Penguin Classics, 2007).

 (13.) Tarzan's adventures were originally created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and published in the years 1914-1950.

 (14.) John Barth, The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of Replenishment (Northridge: Lord John Press, 1982).

 (15.) Karpinski, p. 138.

 (16.) Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181.

 (17.) Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon, ed., Edging into the Future. Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 162.

 (18.) Butler talks about gender in terms of ritual practices, a role one adopts thus excluding other modes of behaviour. What is excluded forms the "constitutive outside" the zone of the suppressed from which gender roles can be challenged, much in the same way Marianne challenges social norms in the tribe. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 23.

 (19.) Mahoney, p. 75.

 (20.) Elanie Jordan, "Afterword," in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 216-219, p. 219.

 (21.) Carter's numerous shamans, for example the character from Nights at the Circus, are usually totally different. They are given a role similar to that of a writer: they believe in the magic they perform, therefore what they do has the mystical quality of a true primary text. In their context the comments and analysis by Donally seem artificial and exhausted.

 (22.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 63.

 (23.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 49.

 (24.) Linden Peach, Angela Carter (Oxford: Macmillan, 1998), p. 96.

 (25.) Peach, p. 87.

 (26.) For example, according to these beliefs, the Barbarians sew up cats in the bellies of the Professors' women, while the Professors in turn bake Barbarians alive "like hedgehogs".

 (27.) Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A. H. H.," in Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1992), Canto 56.

 (28.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 11.

 (29.) Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 45.

 (30.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 110.

 (31.) David Punter, The Literature of Terror--A History of Gothic Fiction from 1795 to the Present Day vol. II The Modern Gothic (London: Longman, 1996), p. 140.

 (32.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 1.

 (33.) The city is probably London and the clock Big Ben; the tribe is traveling south to spend the winter at the seaside and finally reach the gigantic ruin. Descriptions of London after various cataclysms are very common in disaster stories; examples are: Jefferies' After London, J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere and Wyndham's The Day of the Triffid. Once again Carter rewrites a canonical disaster fiction motif in a new way.

 (34.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 138.

 (35.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 148.

 (36.) Painting by Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.

 (37.) Angela Carter, "The Alchemy of the Word," in Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), p. 70.

 (38.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 95.

 (39.) Pamela Zoline, "The heat death of the universe," in England Swings SF, Stories of Speculative Fiction, ed. Judith Merril (New York: Ace Books, 1968), 313-328.

 (40.) Zoline, p. 316.

 (41.) John Donne, "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day," in The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London and Melbourne: Dent, 1985), p. 90.

 (42.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 148.

 (43.) Angela Carter, "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style," in Nothing Sacred (London: Virago, 1988), 85-89, p. 86.

 (44.) Carter, "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style," p. 86.

 (45.) Kaveney, 175.

 (46.) Karpinsky, 137.

 (47.) Elaine Jordan, "Enthrallment: Angela Carter's Speculative Fictions," in Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction, ed. Linda Anderson (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), 19-40.

 (48.) "A kind of sociological SF which concentrates on social change without necessarily any great emphasis on science or technology" (Clute and Nicholls, p. 1144).

 (49.) John Haffenden, "Angela Carter," in Novelists in Interview, (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 80.

 (50.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 150. This is uttered in a conversation when Marianne describes her plans for the future of the tribe: " 'they'll do every single thing I say.' 'What, will you be Queen?' 'I'll be the tiger-lady and rule them with a rod of iron.'"

 (51.) St. John's Revelation 12:4-6 in The Holy Bible: Old and New Testament in the King James Version (Hazelwood: World Aflame Press, 1973).

 (52.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 9.

 (53.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 140.

 (54.) Sarah Gamble suggests that the moment Marianne becomes a tiger-lady symbolically "implies that Marianne has now broken free of the stereotyped roles--daughter, victim, wife and whore--in which she has been complicit from the text's beginning." Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 79.

 (55.) Margaret Atwood, "Running with the Tigers," in Flesh and the Mirror, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 117-136, p. 358.

 (56.) A. Day elaborates upon Marianne's future reign: "But while, as tiger-lady, she is going to draw on primordial Barbarian energy, Marianne, it must be noted, does not give up her purchase on reason. It is this emphasis on maintaining reason that separates her from the Donally-inspired Barbarian cult of the irrational. At the same time as Marianne stops being a stranger to her own id during her sojourn amongst the Barbarians, reason emerges as a cardinal feature of her discovery of herself.... In Marianne's case reason may order, like an iron rod, the inchoate energies of the id, while the energies of the id--the energies of the tiger-lady--may enrich reason. This synthetic model is identified as specifically feminine, in contrast with the masculine insistence on self-definition through opposition to an other" (Day, pp. 51-53).      COPYRIGHT 2010 Eotvos Lorand Tudomanyegyetem, Department of English Studies

 No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.    Copyright 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.    

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[gravitascivics]

ANCIENT INFLUENCES

Past postings have made the case that two reasoned traditions affected the thinking of the founding generation of Americans especially among the educated class. Of course, these perspectives did not just appear in 1787.  They had a history in which one of the traditions stretches all the way back to the earliest English settlers making their way across the Atlantic and the other found its beginning in Europe during the 1700s.  

The first was the Calvinist religious view that promoted a covenant principle – the origin of the federalist thinking that played such a central role in devising the American constitutional framework both at the national and state levels.  The second was the importation of Enlightenment ideas that promoted reasoned, observably based evidence in the pursuit of truth.  

It also introduced the approach summarily described as the social contract (or as Daniel Elazar calls it, social compact) theory.  That is the promotion of a choice option – as opposed to a force or accident option – in the designing and implementing of a constitutional arrangement for a new polity or polities in the case of the US federal union.

But major influences did not stop there.  One other source, according to the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Thomas E. Ricks,[1] was the influence from long ago, the classical writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  This influence can be easily detected in the writings of the founding fathers.  

One common experience among these founders was the perennialism that characterized their education.  Higher education of the time was securely defined by that curricular philosophy; a philosophy that, to this day. emphasizes the works of the classical scholars from ancient Greece such as Plato, Aristotle, and from ancient Rome such as Cicero.  Ricks begins his presently cited work with,

The classical world was far closer to the makers of the American Revolution and the founders of the United States than it is today … It was present in their lives … Colonial classicism was not just about ideas. It was part of the culture, a way of looking at the world and a set of values.  The more one looks around early America for the influence of ancient Greek and Roman history and literature, the more one finds.[2]

The influence went beyond academic awe but verged on and surpassed a romantic attachment.

         These founders decorated their abodes with statues of ancient thinkers, designed their public buildings using classical architectural plans, and even named their cities for ancient cities or thinkers – there is Troy or Cicero, for example.

         They were especially taken with the ancient concern for the quality or word, “virtue.”  They saw it as not just what young women should preserve, but as an irreplaceable character trait for public officials to have – an unvirtuous office holder was automatically unworthy of the position and when found out should be removed from any position of trust.  

What did it, virtue, mean in this context?  Simply, that anyone entrusted with public responsibilities – which under a compact-al arrangement meant, to some degree, any citizen – had to put the common good above any private interest.  This served as the cement or some sort of lynchpin upon which a governing system held together.  It also reflects what this blog has offered as a definition for federal liberty, the right to do what one should do.

And this, Ricks claims, served as a binding sense among the founders throughout the Revolutionary period.  One piece of evidence supporting such a claim is that after reviewing some 120,000 documents of that time, – a study Ricks cites – the word “virtue” outnumbers the word “freedom” as virtue appears some six thousand times.

And as one looks closer to the classical influence, one finds by a healthy amounts of references, that the Roman effect, as opposed to the Greek effect, was found to be more practical in their recorded advice over political and governing matters. The Greeks were not totally dismissed. They were cited more as background and in that, Sparta took on a more privileged position than Athens. Athenians were judged to be too factionalized, turbulent, and flighty.

Of special admiration, the founders took a liking to the Roman, Cicero.  By one measure, he was five times the hero that Aristotle was.  And that preference extended to European thinkers, especially the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and was also noted among the intellectual leaders of the French Revolution.

Of special interest was the reflections American founders bestowed on the downfall of the Roman Republic during the first century BC.  That became those governing factors that the founders zeroed in on in their decisions concerning the various elements of the republican structures they were designing in the late 1700s.

Ricks in his review of that history, informs his readers of the particular names from the Roman experience upon which the founders focused.  The heroes include, of course, Cicero, but also Livy, Plutarch, Sallust, Tacitus.  As villains that one can easily cite were Catiline and Julius Caesar.  And these names were not just familiar to the elites of America but also those of Europe.  

Two English writers of that time, in the late 1700s, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, shared their thoughts over that ancient time in their weekly essays, collectively known as the Cato Letters (Cato was a Roman soldier and senator). Apparently, these writers influenced the debate in America of that time as they were frequently cited by Americans concerning political principles and theory.  The Letters provided initial promotion of such rights as free speech.

At some future point, this blog will pick up on the effects classical literature had on this group of – one can safely characterize – nouveau riche Americans. This seems relevant to how these founders came about their ideals.  Yes, they were members of that age’s elite class, but they did not inherit their standing from long established family wealth; they were surely not the product of some aristocratic class.  

According to Ricks, of the ninety-nine signers of either the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution, only eight of them had fathers who attended college.  They, in other words, were for the most part first or second-generation men of means who owed their success to the opportunities America offered.  And in that, one can, to some degree, ascertain they had firsthand knowledge and empathy for the common American of their times.  It also gave them insights as to what truly constituted human nature.

[1] Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles:  What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (New York, NY:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2020).

[2] Ibid., 3.

[hellyeahheroes]

I like this article for many things. One is the high praises it sings to Monstress

My favorite recent example of this kind of relentlessly detailed, re-centering worldbuilding is Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s comic book series Monstress. There’s no naïve narrator here. The reader is thrust into Maika Halfwolf’s complicated, danger-fraught quest—for revenge, self-knowledge, and to possibly to save her kind—without any lead up at all. If The Lord of the Rings were Monstress, the story would’ve started already in Moria. Different races, societies, magical orders, cities, and families weave together in a dense tapestry that serves its own internal logic perfectly. Monstress borrows from any and every genre—high fantasy, horror, steampunk, alternate history, magical girl manga, paranormal romance—and makes itself an entirely new thing that has to be met on its own terms. To help the reader along who is craving more “telling,” every issue includes a bonus feature, a “history lecture” of a professor cat to her kittens. Monstress rewrites the rules so completely that it isn’t until a male character shows up on the last page of issue 4 that one realizes he’s the first male to appear since the very first scene of issue 1. It doesn’t feel “strange” to have an almost completely female cast in Monstress—it doesn’t even feel like some kind of explicitly feminist literary experiment—and it doesn’t feel “political” to have diverse ethnicities and skin tones represented, because it comes across as simply the way things are in that world.

The other is deconstructing how the white cis straight male authorities have set up what is considered good writing by them to be seen as “universal” features of one when it often steems from their own privileged position (in this case being able to emphasize with other white cis straight men they do not need to have expositions to understand the cultural context of their actions)

The first literary writer I heard express open frustration with the literary establishment’s rules for literary fiction was David Foster Wallace, at a talk he gave at the Boston Public Library shortly after Infinite Jest was published. In lit fic you aren’t even supposed to use brand names, he said, because that would “date” your story to a specific time, and literary fiction is supposed to take place in a “universal” world… Which he then pointed out was still supposed to have telephones and automobiles in it (so obviously WAS dated) but not—apparently—IKEA or Coca-Cola (i.e. not THAT dated). Wallace called bullshit.

Wallace was white, male, and privileged, but he was treated as a “young whippersnapper” by the establishment who wanted to tell him what he was and was not allowed to do in his writing. He had no qualms calling out the older generation of writers who had established the rules for modern fiction under the assumption that their experience was “universal.” It wasn’t. It was only “universal” for them. The particular strain of the literary establishment Wallace pushed back against was strongly invested in this mythic ideal of universality. Why? What did they gain from this idea?

They gained the ability to write stories where they could “show” and not “tell,” that’s what. They had this ability not because they were masterful stylists of language or because they dripped with innate talent. The power to “show, not tell” stemmed from the writing for an audience that shared so many assumptions with them that the audience would feel that those settings and stories were “universal.” (It’s the same hubris that led the white Western establishment to assume its medicine, science, and values superior to all other cultures. We’ll come back to that shortly.)

Look at the literary fiction techniques that are supposedly the hallmarks of good writing: nearly all of them rely not on what was said, but on what is left unsaid. Always come at things sideways; don’t be too direct, too pat, or too slick. Lead the reader in a direction but allow them to come to the conclusion. Ask the question but don’t state the answer too baldly. Leave things open to interpretation… but not too open, of course, or you have chaos. Make allusions and references to the works of the literary canon, the Bible, and familiar events of history to add a layer of evocation—but don’t make it too obvious or you’re copycatting. These are the do’s and don’ts of MFA programs everywhere. They rely on a shared pool of knowledge and cultural assumptions so that the words left unsaid are powerfully communicated. I am not saying this is not a worthwhile experience as reader or writer, but I am saying anointing it the pinnacle of “craft” leaves out any voice, genre, or experience that falls outside the status quo. The inverse is also true, then: writing about any experience that is “foreign” to that body of shared knowledge is too often deemed less worthy because to make it understandable to the mainstream takes a lot of explanation. Which we’ve been taught is bad writing!

Bolding mine. And I want to emphasize that last part strongly since this is what is behind a lot of rhetorics used by critics of more diverse books, comic books or movies. Claiming that they are badly written and breaking “show don’t tell” rule or “all about being a minority” when the book needs to explain where the character is coming from because the white cis straight male mainstream simply lacks knowledge necessary to get it. Or declaring character to be acting “bad” or “unlikeable” when the story concedes to these claims and does not try to provide that context they need to make character actions make sense.

Finally, there is this part that I agree wholeheartedly with

So if relentless centering of the naïve is not necessary in SF/F in order to meet the demands of literature, can we take things one step further? I would like to “decolonize” fantasy and science fiction. Literary fiction, I fear, is beyond help because of its overreliance on shared knowledge for its power. The only way to meet the literary “standard” of a “universal” story while writing about any marginalized individual—whether by culture or subculture, whether of color, queer, or even just a woman—is to make the story accessible to the educated white upper middle-class point of view. Even many of the great works of gay male literature like Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story fit squarely into this tradition, exploring the angst of discovery of one’s own homosexuality within the framework of a “great American novel” akin to The Catcher in the Rye.

But SF/F can do better. We can break the status quo and leave it broken into a completely new shape. This doesn’t reduce the potential power of an SF/F story: it increases it. Instead of a set of shared assumptions about “universal” setting, the SF/F writer has more control over every aspect of the reader experience. All fiction is metaphor, but in a story where the society, customs, and language are crafted rather than inherited, the reader experience of that metaphor can be all-encompassing. The reader learns powerful cultural norms and acquires the new language the same way they acquired their first one: through experience.

- Admin

[bidaubadeadieu]

sorry for the long post, but fwiw most of it is quotes of other writers

So I’m just gonna have some quick opinions. Just read these two contrasting pieces about contemporary antiracism training, particularly focussed on the work of Robin DiAngelo:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html?referringSource=articleShare

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/antiracism-training-white-fragility-robin-diangelo-ibram-kendi.html

There is a lot of background info here that I don’t think is very controversial, i.e. racism exists, even (or especially) among well-intentioned white liberals, and most people want to do something about it but don’t know what. Sure. Also, definitely big undercurrents of “who is allowed to have opinions we respect on race” where the discomfort among white people around trusting other white people on race issues is palpable. Nobody really goes out and directly says “should anybody care what a white woman has to say about race, or should we only be reading books on race written by BIPOC?” but I think that’s where one heart of the debate lies. In general, I like the Times piece better, the intelligencer piece runs a bit too close to “horseshoe theory” and “enlightened centrism” by claiming that the predominant figures of contemporary racism (including not only DiAngelo, but also scholars like Ibram Kendi) are actually reinforcing racism. Not so sure about that.

But I’m actually more interested in discussing another different facet of the interplay between these two articles, because it relates to my work. I’ll excerpt two portions:

Running slightly beneath or openly on the surface of DiAngelo’s and Singleton’s teaching is a set of related ideas about the essence and elements of white culture. For DiAngelo, the elements include the “ideology of individualism,” which insists that meritocracy is mostly real, that hard work and talent will be justly rewarded... [a different educator said] another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.”... [but then a critic said] “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees, and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values? How do all these people not see how inconsistent this is?”

And then:

Glenn Singleton, president of Courageous Conversation, a racial-sensitivity training firm, tells Bergner that valuing “written communication over other forms” is “a hallmark of whiteness,” as is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.”This is not some idiosyncratic oddball notion. The African-American History Museum has a page on whiteness, which summarizes the ideas that the racism trainers have brought into relatively wide circulation... These values are not neutral at all. Hard work, rational thought, and careful planning are virtues. White racists traditionally project the opposite of these traits onto Black people and present them as immutable flaws. Jane Coaston, who has reported extensively on the white-nationalist movement, summarizes it, “The idea that white people are just good at things, or are better inherently, more clean, harder working, more likely to be on time, etc.”

I just want to assert a defense of the the idea that rationality, individuality, and punctuality are elements of white culture, but critically, that they are not inherently virtues. Here’s where I think the author of the Intelligencer piece has bought into a myth, that science really is the privileged way of uncovering objective truths about the natural world, that hard work should be rewarded. These ideas are rooted in capitalism, and can easily be contested, for example:

The assumption that there was a single scientific method was reflected in the work of Comte, who asserted that there was a hierarchy of knowledge in which ‘science’ was the pinnacle. Consequently, Comte argued that even sociology could be a positive science modelled after physics —an ambition that sociology has long since abandoned, but one to which economics clings. Implicit in this belief is the proposition that the generalisations in physics are somehow more basic than those of the other sciences and certainly more basic than in the social disciplines, and that somehow everything can be reduced ultimately to physical generalisations. Reductionism in the spirit of Greek atomism lies at the heart of this assertion. This reductionism, this reification, this scientism, is, however, inconsistent with the wide range of real scientific practices and theories that are not reducible to physics. This inconsistency suggests that changes in belief and terminology are required. ... Similarly, from the Enlightenment, we have inherited a cultural image of the scientist as a hero overcoming ignorance and bringing reality under control. The effect is to privilege particular types of inquiry, particular social practices and their associated stories over other forms of inquiry. It is not so much that one should necessarily object to the use of a general term such as ‘science’ to encompass the wide range of systematic inquiries carried out into the character of the physical and social worlds; rather, it is that ‘science’ now carries too many misleading entailments, implying a privilege and a unity of method that cannot be sustained.

(The Cult of the Market: Economic Fundamentalism and its Discontents, Bolderman, 2007)

All this is to say an existence proof: there exists a framework which acknowledges the value that white culture places on individuality and rationality, while simultaneously acknowledging that those values contain both benefits and harms, to elements both within and without white culture. This framework acknowledges the societal loss that comes from rejecting forms like social philosophy, indigenous and customary legal systems, collective ownership of property, polychronic cultures’ perceptions of time, etc. We must, of course, still adequately prepare BIPOC children in schools for the values of the dominate white culture which will determine their quality of life, not eschew those values until they turn 18 and then throw them to the wolves of white supremacy, but we could also do better to acknowledge the ways that these values are in no way universal or guaranteed.

[rivkyschleider]

Annotated Bibliography

Winnicott, D. (1986) Home is where we start from. England: London

In this collection of essays we learn of Winnicott’s key teachings, presented to a lay audience.  He explains attachment theory, the ‘good enough environment’, the contribution of the Mother to society, adolescence and the relationship between the individual and their facilitating family group.  He explores concepts of health versus illness through his lens as a psychoanalyst in addition to to his medical background.  It is extremely helpful to see how foundation concepts of personality, the very make up of human emotional development can be applied to such a variety of cultural topics such as monarchy, the Pill and mathematics.  He brings clarity to these issues and offers me a model for applying depth of insight about the subconscious and the effect of early childhood environment on later life.  By uncovering gaps or repression in the individual’s psyche the psychotherapist can facilitate milestones of developmental progress, albeit at a later stage of maturation.

Yalom, I. (2002)  The Gift of Therapy.  US: HarperCollins

This is a handbook of 85 tips and instructions built upon 35 years of clinical practice and teaching.  He paints a picture of a therapist in a way that inspires me to rise to the challenge of training and the ongoing character growth that is so crucial to this profession.  He promotes curiosity, humility and transparency, and breaks away the the image of the therapist as an all-knowing provider of interpretations, or a blank canvas to absorb transference.  He gives a practical guide for mining the here-and-now aspects of the therapeutic encounter to further the process of therapy.  He describes tools  for incorporating the therapist’s own feelings into the mix as well as how to explore dream material, how to take a history and how to look at their present; how their daily life is organised and peopled.  He writes with deep pride on the privilege of helping others find meaning, health and joy.

Skynner, Cleese (1983)  Families and how to Survive Them  London: Vermilion

This was a a whistle-stop tour through all the major themes of child development, identity, attraction, relationships and family dynamics written as a conversation between Robin Skynner, a psychotherapist and John Cleese his former patient.  They discuss the continuum that exists with optimally healthy families at one end; dysfunctional families with inter-generational problems at the other; and the “normal” families in the middle in which we see an expected mix of ‘screened off’ feelings alongside coping mechanisms, defenses and social norms to smooth the way.  Skynner draws on Freudian ideas as well as later work by more recent therapists and analysts who looked at how families work as a system.  Each part affects all other parts of the system.  By considering inter-relationships through the eyes of a typical family we can learn about letting go of inherited mistakes and move forward to optimal family life.

Van Der Kolk, B. The Body Keeps the Score, United Stares: Penguin

This book is about how trauma impacts a person causing long term suffering to victims, their families and future generations.  Using scientific methods such as brain scans and clinically sound investigations, Van Der Kolk looks at how the mind and body are transformed by traumatic events; how neural networks are formed as coping mechanisms and may later morph into unwanted behaviours.  This is followed by a paradigm of treatment that seeks to give individual patients ownership of their narrative, their bodies and a route to self awareness and healing.  Yoga, EMDR, neurofeedback and theater are offered as examples of pathways to recovery and I believe that art therapy is another good candidate for an embodied type of therapy, one that does not rely on talking alone.  This book answered questions about my own pattern of mild symptoms and has opened up the whole field of mind/body connection in relation to trauma and healing.

Axline, V.M. (1964) Dibs In Search of Self.  London: Penguin

Virginia M. Axline has written the true story of Dibs, her client; a talented and sensitive child who was trapped in isolation due to the lack of emotional connection in his life.  Through psychotherapy - play therapy to be precise - he regained his sense of self and was eventually able to thrive, utilise his gifted nature and contribute to society.  It is an eloquent case study obliquely laying out the principles of play and art therapy.  The therapist built the safe environment in which the child could open up and slowly verbalise his deeply felt emotions.  reparation with his parents blossoms.  It is notable that the therapist made it safe for Dibs to express negativity.  This teaches us to think about hostility as a sign sometimes of adequate ego strength for the feelings to be articulated.  In that sense, aggression is a sign of health!  This book is a beautiful testimony to the power of psychotherapy to transform lives.  

Malchiodi, C. (2011) Trauma Informed Art Therapy and Sexual Abuse in Children. In: Goodyear-Brown, P. (ed.) Handbook of Child Sexual Abuse: Identification, Assessment and Treatment.  United states: John Wiley & Sons

This chapter deals with how art therapy helps children who have suffered sexual abuse to articulate their sometimes unutterable experiences in a manner that the therapist can understand while within what is tolerable for the child.  Trauma informed art therapy involves using art materials to address hyper-arousal and to teach relaxation, referencing the specific neuro circuit that is activated by hands on activities of a soothing nature.  The sensory and tactile qualities of art materials need to be taken into consideration, how they are central to trauma recovery, but equally how they may trigger memories of distressful events.  The somatic approach, using colour and shape enables children to locate the place in the body where trauma is held so they can learn to diminish distress.  The author comments on the relevance of culturally sensitive materials and projects.  This has been a rich article for me, linking my reading on trauma, with art therapy for a client group I may want to work with in the future.  

Cane, F. (1951) The Artist in Each Of Us. United States: Art Therapy Publications

This book bridges art and therapy.  It aims to give the reader a means to achieving a richer art and a more integrated life.  It looks at how movement, feeling and thought work together.  I was intrigued to read detailed technical instructions for accessing subconscious material which can be used to reach higher levels of artistic expression and also personal healing.  The case studies record the progress of her students and how transcendence was coaxed up through fantasy, play, rhythmic movements, chanting and other indirect means until it could be released for union with the conscious.  I tried out some of these techniques and was surprised to discover not only the catharsis, but also the unexpected outcomes of artwork spontaneously arising from my own psychological material.  It shows me how the perceptive teacher can awaken in her students their own creativity and direct them to find solutions for subtle or complex inner dilemmas.

Dalley, T. (ed.) (1984) Art as Therapy. An Introduction to the use of art as a therapeutic technique. London: Routledge

This book is an introduction to the theories that underpin art therapy and is broad in it’s range of contributing authors.  We get an outline of the role of art within a therapeutic framework, the manifestation of art as play, as a language of symbols and development.  The historical links between art education and art therapy are explored; the differences and what they have in common; and a possibility for merging the two fields. Each chapter on a specific client group offers insights for working with these vulnerable people in a way that will give direct therapeutic benefit. 

I found the chapter on art therapy in prisons to be particularly enlightening.  The author was clear about the actual constraints of working in that environment, what the pitfalls might be and she presented practical guidance on overcoming them.  She promotes a vision for how arts can transform the most ant-social of prisoners into creative, productive people; this raises pertinent questions for the current justice system.

Price, J. (1988) Motherhood, What it Does to Your Mind  London: Pandora Press

A fascinating book delving into the psychology of mothering written by a female psychiatrist and psychotherapist.  It ties up the concepts of attachment theory with the realities of modern relationships and societal expectations.  It is presented through the lens of a Woman, a woman who lived through her own mother-daughter dynamic, pregnancy, giving birth, breast feeding and the like.  She looks at how our culture and family story play out in our own lives whether consciously or unconsciously.  By normalising much of the natural difficulties of mothering, this book can offer solace in trying times.  

I am a mother of four boys and pregnant with my fifth child, so I am justified to claim that his book ought to become mainstream knowledge.  It is through lived experiences that we can most genuinely form opinions and then reach out to help others in a professional capacity.

Case, C. Dalley, T. (1992) The Handbook of Art Therapy  London: Routledge

This handbook is a bird’s eye view of the profession.  It covers the theories of psychoanalysis and how it intersects with art as well as a detailed look at the practical aspects of employment as an art therapist in jargon-free language.  This gives a beginner art therapist a survival guide for those inevitable first forays into work.  I gained a grasp on the complexities surrounding room set-up or lack of appropriate dedicated space.  A how-to guide on various forms of note taking making use of the same example session throughout the different formats was extremely helpful.  There is clear preparation for supervision, referrals, working in an institution, operating as part of a team versus being isolated and potentially being misunderstood.  Reading this was an important step towards becoming a competent practitioner. 

[argyrocratie]

Inculcating humility about our assumptions is an important role for the history of science in the classroom. In schools, the history of science, when taught at all, is generally deployed in ways that are intended to reinforce the rightness of current thinking. Past scientists are valorized when their views seem to prefigure our own, or treated with condescension or even contempt when they do not. If past theories diverge too far from present ones, they may even be characterized as ‘‘pseudoscience’’ (a term most historians of science would banish if they could)! Thus, in biology textbooks, Lamarckism tends to appear only as a foil to Darwinism (despite the fact that Darwin accepted the Lamarckian thesis of the inheritance of acquired characters, and indeed, tried to provide a mechanism for such inheritance with his theory of pangenesis). Similarly, phrenologists and physiognomists almost always appear, at best, as figures of fun, and eugenicists as both obtuse and morally  repellent. There is rarely, if ever, an effort to get students to ask why their ideas seemed right to so many people at the time. Were students to reflect on why intelligent and serious people held views now considered erroneous or even absurd, it might prompt the realization that some views they now taken to be self-evident may well meet the same fate.

We can also learn from the history of eugenics that some cultural values are pervasive and highly persistent. What united eugenicists was not agreement on any particular policy or method, but rather a perfectionist ideal, which led them to despise dependency on the care and protection of others. The critics are much closer to the mark than the enthusiasts in their historical focus on cultural  attitudes rather than coercive means. Eugenicists of all stripes also shared a disposition to think of genes as determinant of behavior, attributing pauperism, feeblemindedness, sexual promiscuity, alcoholism, criminality, and many other undesirable traits to bad heredity—sometimes to a single gene—and to look to science in general and genetics in particular for the solution to intractable social problems.

Hereditarianism has, for a long time–predating any organized eugenics movement–provided a persistent and powerful framework for thinking about human difference. In a recent article on the Adverse Childhood Experience study, the author describes Nadine Burke’s important work on the impact of early childhood stress and trauma on adult health(Tough2011). Burke is quoted as saying that ‘‘in many cases, what looks like a social situation is actually a neurochemical situation’’–despite the fact that her patients almost invariably experienced terrible home and community situations, and, as a letter-to-the-editor noted, the neurochemical responses were a symptom, not the cause. But we still reach for genetic explanations whenever we experience disappointing policy results in the domains of education, the economy, and so forth. That is why we keep reprising the same debates, such that the arguments surrounding theBell Curvein mid-1990s were virtuallyidentical  to  the  arguments  of  the  IQ  controversy 20 years before.

(...)

Finally, an historical perspective suggests that, in times of fiscal crisis, these culturally-pervasive attitudes are likely to converge with resentment at the economically unproductive to produce ruthless policies. When people express revulsion at eugenics, it is rarely the movement for ‘‘free love’’ that they have in mind, although that would also be part of a complete history of eugenics, but rather compulsory sterilization, the killing of mentalpatients and other  ‘‘useless  eaters,’’ and above all, the Holocaust. These were largely policies and practices of the 1930s and later, not the 1910s and ‘20s, when it is often said that eugenics reached its peak. Although the first sterilization law was passed in 1907, most were enacted in the 1930s, when those laws already on the books were also much more aggressively enforced. In the 1920s, many eugenicists had favored segregation over sterilization. That changed with the Depression, when segregation came to seem too heavy a nexpense and budgets for custodial institutions shrank. Policies that seemed unthinkable when times were  flush came to seem simply commonsensical when times turned tough.History suggests that they could become thinkable again given a similar level of economic stress.

[himboskywalker]

Star Wars combines three elemental things which revolutioned pop culture and ensured not just the immense success of the franchise in the popular psyche,but especially the lightsaber.

1. Building the foundations of the entire story on all of human history,mythology,and storytelling. Star Wars is a fantasy epic,in every way that matters,in the building bricks of its story it is a fantasy epic. It was inspired by classical operas which inherited entire cultural histories of sagas and storytelling going back to the Vikings and its entire arc is the hero’s journey. Lucas himself has discussed how much he was inspired by Wagner’s epic ‘The Ring’ which is also one of the primary influences on Tolkien. The struggle is good versus evil,light versus dark,and borrows archetypes from nearly every culture’s mythology or legends. It’s framework is built from the bones of King Arthur,Greek Myths,Beowulf, and the Samurai.

All of human storytelling is influenced by these sources,but Star Wars tells itself in parallels and echoes. It is the story of a boy who leaves home and becomes a man,but it is also a story of heroism and glory,of adventure and triumph and strength. It is also a story of great sadness,of betrayal and the fall of man,of the fight of good versus evil. It is a saga,an epic,a drama,a poem,a story we have told since humans have told stories. And humans love symbols and associations and parallels,things that always represent something more.

This is the proliferation and weight of the sword in human history. It has literally,from its inception been a cornerstone in the human myth and story,and not just in Western culture,this is true across Africa and Asia and in nearly every culture across the globe. It’s important to us because it represents many things,like heroism and strength and nobility,but ultimately the bearer must sacrifice great effort to have the skill to use it. It’s used for ornamental purposes of course,but at its most prestigious is when weilded with skill,by someone who has agonized for the talent of sword mastery.

Practice and mastery have always been considered highly moral. It’s commendable and admirable and most people do not possess the dedication to acquire true mastery. As such sword masters in history are the pinnacle of the hero,it’s inherent to the morality of dedication to the sword itself. And what better feat of morality and heroism than agonizing over the mastery of a laser sword? Not just anyone can wield such a weapon,just as not anyone could wield Exaclibur. Arthur did not pull a bow from a stone and Beowulf did not slay a dragon with a spear. Angels in the Hebrew and Christian tradition didn’t carry whips but swords. Themis’s weapon of justice was a sword,Joan of Arc bore a sword,Susanoo,Vishnu,—I could literally go on for pages. It had to be a sword,no other piece of material culture caries the same weight and cultural memory as the sword,nor as much symbolic and mythological meaning. And in the most prolific stories the swords are characters themselves,such as Excalibur,Gan Jiang and Mo Ye,or almost every sword from Lord of the Rings,which stems from the Germanic traditions of storytelling.

2.Color theory and design!Star Wars revolutioned film effects and created a whole new plethora of visual silhouettes we can immediately identify. Visuals carry great power and just as OP said,sounds as well. Phenomenal designs and visual work have literally changed film history and popular culture,take Lord of the Rings as a great example. You want shorthands for your art so powerful you create new archetypes and a great way to do that is work with color theory and human psychology. Another mark of success in film is to create a design so good it goes hand in hand with the content itself. The weapons from Lord of the Rings were real swords and brilliant ones at that,it was master work by phenomenal designers and smiths which resulted in pieces like Sting or Anduril or Glamdring becoming widely recognizable.

Star Wars does all of the above. It combines legendary silhouettes with brilliant color theory and design,going off things we’ve known about human psychology for quite a while. We associate blue and green with good and red with bad. Color is perception. Not only do the lightsaber use incredibly easy color work but they use light which not only looks visually breathtaking but also carries its own meaning and symbology. These characters and their weapons are light itself,and swords which already carry great associations of power,are now lit up like lightning with power. And they sound powerful,it plays on all our senses that these weapons are dangerous and full of electric strength.

3. Star Wars revolutioned a lot of things and one of the most important was toy production for pop culture. A lot of people know about the deal Lucas made with the prophets from the merchandise in order to make Star Wars and how that resulted in a massive array of merchandising. But this played a key role in the permanent sticking point of the lightsaber in people’s imaginations. When many of the larger franchises and films came out before Star Wars,take the Errol Flyn swashbucklers for instance,or the Sword in the Stone,then you couldn’t go out and buy the weapons used in the films,naturally.

But when Star Wars debuted something miraculous happened. In 1977 as a small kid going to the theater and having your mind absolutely shattered by SPACE KNIGHTS WITH LASER SWORDS you had an incredibly unique experience,which was when you went home after and obsessed over it and went to go play lightsaber fight with the neighbor kids,you could do it with actual toy lightsabers. Not just sticks,not your imagination or pvc pipe,but actual freaking real lightsabers. This was revolutionary to have that kind of merchandising for a film like Star Wars and it made such a massive impact on the children of that generation it’s literally difficult to fully encompass it in smaller anthropology studies. Look up interviews or discussions of people who saw the OG trilogy in theaters and the correlative impact of having access to lightsabers to play with,because they’re everywhere,hell ask a family member. The toys of Star Wars are often discussed but what comes up less is the deep psychological impact that made with the young audience members,who were breathtaken with a story as old as time and could then go home and live it,and then their children could,and their grandchildren. Fans are obsessed with creating lifelike lightsabers like almost no other piece of popular culture,to the degree that the first real,honest to god lightsaber has been invented,because it implanted so deeply in our minds.

listen nothing in sound design will ever come close to the sheer power of the sound of a lightsaber turning on

[ragethewriter]

Character Question Tag!

Rules:  Pick one of your characters, answer these questions, tag some people <3 I was tagged by @rosecorcoranwrites (thanks homie! <3), and the character I’ve picked is Arcana - the snarky, Hybrid clan mastermind!

~ ~ ~

1) What was the first element of your OC that you remember considering (name, appearance, backstory, etc.)?

Well, since the Hybrid Clan is a collection of mythical creatures, I had to start with the fact that she’s the kitsune.  I built her character based off her animal traits, the backstory they required, and talents that would reference her myth origin as a trickster entity.

2) Did you design them with any other characters/OCs from their universe in mind?

YUP.  Firstly, because i wanted the kitsune to be part of the protag-friend-trio, so I had to round her out a bit alongside Talon and Ira.  Secondly, because the Hybrids come in pairs so I had to consider her canon baeeeeeee <3 

3) How did you choose their name?

Well fun fact, Arcana is not actually her name - or rather it’s not a name at all, in her culture.  Djinn’eylah refused to give her daughter a proper name of inheritance, and instead referred to the child as “the arcana”, or “the secret”.  By the time she reached the Hybrid clan, Arcana decided to embrace this title as her “name” and call-sign - as she’d formed an identity around her secrets.  

So TLDR: I needed her (latin) name to be in line with her backstory and her bitch mother.

4) In developing their backstory, what elements of the world they live in played the most influential parts?

Hnnng oh man so much of it, where to start.  Arcana’s Breed (or one of them) and all the slave-race mess obviously dictated how she was raised - in this case, as a little Fox-Blood gremlin wired into the database of the Scribes and their archives. (She’s essentially her culture’s equivalent of a kid raised on unsupervised internet access.)  There’s also all the world elements that formed the framework of her abusive childhood, her mother’s story, and explanations for why Arcana is the way she is - but that’s a TED talk for another time.

5) Is there any significance behind their hair color?

Yup - platinum blonde goes well with fennec fox ears.  But more importantly: she got it from her mama.

6) Is there any significance behind their eye color?

Also yup: as she did not get it from her mama.  Her eyes are a vibrant violet/indigo/cerulean mix that doesn’t belong on land mammals.

7) Is there any significance behind their height?

Lol yes... the Fox-Bloods have the amusing reputation for being the smallest canine Breed - on par with the Domestics.  Compared to timberwolf behemoths like Caecius, her 5′5 stature is clearly not built for feats of strength.

8) What (if anything) do you relate to within their character/story?

Definitely her sense of dark humor, lazy extroversion, and bravado.  She’s the type that pulls all-nighters in spouts of chaotic genius, socializes like the most idgaf bitch on the block, and flips down her shades to watch the apocalypse.

9) Are they based off of you, in some way?

Heck yeah.  Of all the Hybrids that took bits and pieces of me - she ended up with the biggest share of my personality.  It mostly comes through in her manner of speech.

10) Did you know what the OC’s sexuality would be at the time of their creation?

Yup.  Though I have discovered a thing or two about other facets of it while writing her.

11) What have you found to be most difficult about creating art for your OC (any form of art: writing, drawing, edits, etc.)?

Drawing her GOD DAMN TAILS.  HOLY SHIT.  THERE’S NINE OF THEM.  WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY EVEN DOING??? TOO MUCH, THAT’S WHAT.

12) How far past the canon events that take place in their world have you extended their story, if at all?

Well I can’t say anything about canon, yet - but in my head she has a whole future laid out for her, her bae, and all her mischievous little foxy sons! she has five of them send help

13) If you had to narrow it down to 2 things that you MUST keep in mind while working with your OC, what would those things be?

1) She is self-destructive, self-hating, kindof a bitch, and definitely needs help. 2) ... ask nicely.

14) What is something about your OC that can make you laugh?

Her snarky snark and her sailor mouth.

15) What is something about your OC that can make you cry?

The crushing, overwhelming weight of her selfless existential guilt.

16) Is there some element you regret adding to your OC or their story?

Yeah, the fact that the coolest part has to happen off-screen.  Maybe I’ll just write side-stories for it.

17) What is the most recent thing you’ve discovered about your OC? 

  (✿ʘ‿ʘ)  If I break her thoroughly enough, she is prone to a whole host of unhealthy behaviors.

18) What is your favorite fact about your OC?

She’s part octopus, and that will never not be hilarious to me.

~~~ AND I WILL TAG @authorkimberlygrey , @wingedcatwblr, @siarven, @constantbellpepper , @adiwritings, @callmeweeeh, @sadragons and @creatinmaven !

[yngwrthr]

“After the German worker’s revolution of 1918-1919 had been betrayed and crushed by the Social Democrats (SPD), the early 1920s saw a period of relative stability slowly settle upon Germany. Despite the fact that further attempts by the German Communist Party (KPD) to challenge the SPD’s rule were weak and ineffective, the possibility of Europe-wide socialist revolution continued to be a topic of conversation among Leftist intelligentsia in postwar Germany. This sense of possibility seemed justified: the Soviet Union had succeeded in surviving its civil war and from a distance seemed to be on a path to successful stabilization; the KPD’s membership continued to grow in the permissive atmosphere of the Weimar Republic; and, with the exception of Italy, Fascism did not yet appear to be an immediate threat. In spite of their deep conservatism, the Social Democrats continued to hold up Marxism as their ideology, legitimizing it and thus making it into an open, officially sanctioned field of discussion.

It was in this environment that Felix Weil, a young graduate of the Frankfurt University who, at age 20, had fought with the workers during the revolution of 1919, began to use his great inherited wealth to finance initiatives for Marxist theoretical discussion. Having written his dissertation on “the essence and methods of socialization,” financially supported left-wing artists such as George Grosz and taken part in the social circle around KPD members Klara Zetkin and Paul Frölich, his joking self-description as a “Salon Bolshevik” was not far from the truth. One of the initiatives he financially supported was the First Marxist Workweek [Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche] a retreat at a hotel on the edge of the Thuringian Forest in which more than two dozen Marxist intellectuals, most of them affiliated with the KPD, gathered to discuss the latest works by Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács, respectively “Marxism and Philosophy” and the seminal History and Class Consciousness. Among the attendants were Korsch and Lukács themselves, Horkheimer, Zetkin, and economist Friedrich Pollock. As it turned out, thanks to Weil’s efforts, this gathering could retrospectively be seen as the first “seminar” of what would become the Frankfurt Institute of Social Theory, since throughout the next decade most of its participants would become affiliated with the Institute in some function or another.

After the Workweek the time seemed appropriate to go forward with Weil’s project for “an institutionalization of Marxist discussion beyond the confines of middle class academia or the narrow mindedness of the communist party.” After successfully convincing the ministry of culture of the necessity of an institute for the study of sociology connected to the University of Frankfurt but independent from it, Weil’s first instinct was to appoint the director position to either Lukács or Korsch. But this proved impossible. The largely conservative professorship and administration of the University of Frankfurt — already up in arms about the study of sociology, which was to them “mere socialism” — would have strongly opposed the admittance of such politically active communists as faculty. Under these considerations, Weil was obliged to offer the directorship to Karl Grünberg, a senior Marxist economist from the University of Vienna. Grünberg had been affiliated with Austrian Social Democracy for more than a decade and had once made plans to create a social research institute with the notorious SPD theoretician Karl Kautsky at its head. At the end of 1923, once Grünberg was chosen as the director, construction of the Institute’s building on the Frankfurt University campus began.

Grünberg’s address at the inauguration of the Institute paints an optimistic picture of a world already in an inevitable transition to a freer society:

There are pessimists who stand horrified and amazed in the midst of the ruins which the process of change brings with it…They see the ruins not just as the ruins of their own world, but of the world as such…in contrast with the pessimists there are the optimists…Supported by historical experience, they see, instead of a decaying form of culture, another, more highly developed one approaching…[These] people, whose numbers and influence are constantly growing, do not merely believe, wish and hope, but are firmly scientifically convinced that the emerging order will be a socialist one, that we are in the midst of the transition from capitalism to socialism and are advancing towards the latter with gathering speed.

Grünberg’s Marxism stemmed from precisely this worldview. For him, the transition to socialism was only a matter of time and “scientific” certainty:

It is found that the driving pressure of the material interests which are systematically at work in economic life, and their collision one with another, produce a regular progression from lesser to greater perfection. And just as, from the point of view of the materialist conception of history every single expression of the life of society is a reflection of the current form of economic life, so equally, all history — except in primitive conditions — appears to be a series of class struggles.

This mechanistic view of history was precisely the kind of Marxism that later members of the Frankfurt Institute such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse would turn later their backs on. For them, as well as for earlier Hegelian Marxists such as Lukács and Korsch, dialectical materialism was not the science that predicted the automatic transformation of society. It was instead a critical consciousness that emanated from within the contradictory character of society that pointed to the possibility of overcoming those very contradictions.

But to see Grünberg’s traditional, mechanistic Marxism as mere wrong-headedness or as a quaint artifact of the times would be to not do it justice historically. The political situation at the time seemed to indicate that a transformation of the social order was coming. It was not necessary to be affiliated to a particular party to see the recent European revolutions and the formation of the Communist Third International as the harbingers of a new era of an all out battle between capitalism and socialism — a battle out of which socialism might very well emerge victorious. In this historical period, before the series of defeats the Left suffered throughout the majority of the 20th century, to think that the simply “more advanced” character of one social system would automatically replace the current, crisis-ridden one might not have been as obviously over-optimistic as it appears today.

This worldview was the reason the research of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research during these years included little reference to the quintessential recurring themes of the Frankfurt School as we remember it today: aesthetic theory, German idealism, and Freudian psychoanalysis. This set of theoretical tools would have seemed, from the perspective of Grünberg’s “optimism,” irrelevant: his mechanistic Marxism, affirmed by history’s concurrent unfolding, would have taken them as remnants of bourgeois enlightenment rendered obsolete by Marxist theory, which needed only to be put in practice to render this sort of enlightenment wholly obsolete. This was an attitude that, at this point, only the Hegelian Marxists Lukács and Korsch had explicitly warned against. Quoting Marx’s dictum, “Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realized,” Korsch had criticized theoreticians of the Second International for their assumption that “scientific Marxism” had effectively superseded philosophy — a criticism that could have very well been applied to Grünberg.

It was in the spirit of this “optimistic” traditional, mechanistic Marxism that the Institute began to output its large amount of research. A look at the titles of some of these projects shows a picture of the extent to which the Institute understood its task as the collection of empirical research within the framework of revolutionary politics: The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System by Henryk Grossman; Experiments in the Planned Economy of the Soviet Union, 1917-1927 by Friedrich Pollock; The Economy and Society of China by Karl Wittfogel; The Theory of the Capitalist Agrarian Crisis: a Contribution to the Explanation of Structural Changes in American Agriculture by Julian Gumperz.

By the late ’20s, with such research underway, the Institute was in fact shaping up to become what Weil had wanted it to be from the very beginning: a “foundation similar to the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow — equipped with a staff of professors and students, with libraries and archives” — an institute which would be worthy of one day being “presented to a [soon to come] German Social republic.” On the one hand, the Institute’s endowment was large enough and on the other, its curriculum independent enough from the conservative Frankfurt University, that it could give ample and exclusive sponsorship to young Marxist graduate students, from mainstream Communist Party members to Trotskyists. Its facilities housed a library of more than 37,000 volumes and an archive of historical documents on the German labor movement and the Revolution of 1918-1919, a collection whose focus and scope were one of a kind. Weil and Grünberg had created an institution that saw its present academic role as only a preparation for its real role: the center for the social sciences in a post-revolutionary Germany.

But the revolution never came. In fact, the political situation was taking a sharp turn to the Right. From 1926 on, it became a common practice of hostile conservative forces within the university and the government to dig up the communist past of Institute affiliates, such as Weil and Grossman, as a way to rile up dissent against them. This was made easier when in 1930, the Weimar administration, in its last struggle to maintain stability in a country that had become politically polarized into Communist and Nazi camps, made it illegal for people on the governments payroll to belong to either of these parties. Finally, in the same year’s election the Nazi party won a majority in parliament. Left wing students of the Frankfurt University, including some graduate students affiliated with the Institute, had to organize security contingents after Nazi youth began demonstrating at the university gates. Such defensive tactics could offer only temporary protection. The election of Hitler as chancellor was only two years away.

In 1930, two years after a stroke left Grünberg unable to continue his work at the helm of the Institute, Horkheimer replaced him as director. He shared none of his predecessor’s “scientific” optimism. In view of the threat that the rising tide of Nazism presented to an academic institution run by Jewish Marxists, Horkheimer transferred the Institute’s finances to Switzerland and set the stage for flight. Horkheimer’s inaugural speech was very different from the one Grünberg gave only seven years before. He spoke, not of an unstoppable thrust towards socialism, but instead referred to the necessity for a backward glance, an accounting for the failure of the emancipation that had only a few years ago seemed just around the corner. He did this by proposing a look at the roots of Marxian Critical Theory, the enlightenment philosophies of Kant and Hegel, together with an approach to empirical sociology informed by Freudian psychoanalysis and focused on mass psychology. For Horkheimer the traditional Marxist economics of Grünberg, Grossman and Wittfogel were no longer able to explain the shape the world was beginning to take.

The regression in political consciousness that had taken place, since the failure of the German revolution of 1918, culminated in the popularity and electoral success of the Nazi party. Horkheimer’s pessimism, shared by younger members of the Institute such as Marcuse and Adorno, was a recognition of this fact. To some critics, the pessimistic turn towards theory that the Frankfurt School took in the 1930s represents a cowardly abandonment of revolutionary orthodoxy towards a safe liberalism; to most of its advocates as the fortunate correcting of the more “dogmatic” aspects of orthodoxy. And yet, seen in this historical context, it was neither. It was instead the result of an immeasurable political failure. Kant, Hegel, Durkheim, Freud — the enlightenment the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism revisited, having once seemed a fait accompli to be safely filed away as a past victory, was now in danger of being negated, forgotten, neutralized. If Grünberg’s brand of orthodoxy once dictated the obsolescence of this kind of enlightenment, the political events of 1933 had been such a giant step backwards that it was now forward thinking orthodoxy that had become unable to grasp the present. This is what Adorno meant when he began his own retrospective summation, Negative Dialectics in 1966, with a melancholy inversion of Marx’s dictum: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.””

[d33-alex]

Jordan Peterson and Conservatism's Rebirth

The psychologist and YouTube star has brought the concepts of order and tradition back to our intellectual discourse.

Jordan Peterson doesn’t seem to think of himself as a conservative. Yet there he is, standing in the space once inhabited by conservative thinkers such as G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr. and Irving Kristol. Addressing a public that seems incapable of discussing anything but freedom, Mr. Peterson presents himself unmistakably as a philosophical advocate of order. His bestselling book, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” makes sense of ideas like the “hierarchy of place, position and authority,” as well as people’s most basic attachments to “tribe, religion, hearth, home and country” and “the flag of the nation.” The startling success of his elevated arguments for the importance of order has made him the most significant conservative thinker to appear in the English-speaking world in a generation.

Mr. Peterson, 56, is a University of Toronto professor and a clinical psychologist. Over the past two years he has rocketed to fame, especially online and in contentious TV interviews. To his detractors, he might as well be Donald Trump. He has been criticized for the supposed banality of his theories, for his rambling and provocative rhetoric, and for his association with online self-help products. He has suffered, too, the familiar accusations of sexism and racism.

From what I have seen, these charges are baseless. But even if Mr. Peterson is imperfect, that shouldn’t distract from the important argument he has advanced—or from its implications for a possible revival in conservative thought. The place to begin, as his publishing house will no doubt be pleased to hear, is with “12 Rules for Life,” which is a worthy and worthwhile introduction to his philosophy.

Departing from the prevailing Marxist and liberal doctrines, Mr. Peterson relentlessly maintains that the hierarchical structure of society is hard-wired into human nature and therefore inevitable: “The dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent.” Moreover, young men and women (but especially men) tend to be healthy and productive only when they have found their place working their way up a hierarchy they respect. When they fail to do so, they become rudderless and sick, worthless to those around them, sometimes aimlessly violent.

In viewing political and social hierarchies as inevitable, Mr. Peterson may seem to be defending whoever happens to be powerful. But he’s doing nothing of the kind. He rejects the Marxist claim that traditional hierarchies are only about the self-interested pursuit of power. Human beings like having power, Mr. Peterson acknowledges. Yet the desire for it also drives them to develop the kinds of abilities their societies value. In a well-ordered society, high status often is a reward conferred for doing things that actually need to be done and done well: defending the state, producing things people need, enlarging the sphere of knowledge.

Mr. Peterson does not deny the Marxist charge that society oppresses individuals. “Culture is an oppressive structure,” he writes. “It’s always been that way. It’s a fundamental, universal existential reality.” But he breaks with prevailing political thought when he argues that the suffering involved in conforming to tradition may be worth it. When a father disciplines his son, he interferes with the boy’s freedom, painfully forcing him into accepted patterns of behavior and thought. “But if the father does not take such action,” Mr. Peterson says, “he merely lets his son remain Peter Pan, the eternal Boy, King of the Lost Boys, Ruler of the non-existent Neverland.”

Similarly, Mr. Peterson insists it is “necessary and desirable for religions to have a dogmatic element.” This provides a stable worldview that allows a young person to become “a properly disciplined person” and “a well-forged tool.”

Yet this is not, for Mr. Peterson, the highest human aspiration. It is merely the first necessary step along a path toward maturity, toward an ever more refined uniqueness and individuality. The individuality he describes emerges over decades from an original personality forged through painful discipline. The alternative, he writes, is to remain “an adult two-year old” who goes to pieces in the face of any adversity and for whom “softness and harmlessness become the only consciously acceptable virtues.”

Like other conservative thinkers before him, Mr. Peterson’s interest in tradition flows from an appreciation of the weakness of the individual’s capacity for reason. We all think we understand a great deal, he tells his readers, but this is an illusion. What we perceive instead is a “radical, functional, unconscious simplification of the world—and it’s almost impossible for us not to mistake it for the world itself.”

Given the unreliability of our own thinking, Mr. Peterson recommends beginning with tried and tested ideas: “It is reasonable to do what other people have always done, unless we have a very good reason not to.” Maturity demands that we set out to “rediscover the values of our culture—veiled from us by our ignorance, hidden in the dusty treasure-trove of the past—rescue them, and integrate them into our own lives.”

In Western countries, that effort at rediscovery leads to one place. “The Bible,” Mr. Peterson writes, “is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization.” It is the ultimate source of our understanding of good and evil. Its appearance uprooted the ancient view that the powerful had the right simply to take ownership of the weak, a change that was “nothing short of a miracle.” The Bible challenged, and eventually defeated, a world in which the murder of human beings for entertainment, infanticide, slavery and prostitution were simply the way things had to be.

As many readers have pointed out, Nietzsche’s critique of Enlightenment philosophy—he once called Kant “that catastrophic spider”—is everywhere in Mr. Peterson’s thought, even in his writing style. It is felt in his calls to “step forward to take your place in the dominance hierarchy,” and to “dare to be dangerous.” It is felt in risqué pronouncements such as this: “Men have to toughen up. Men demand it, and women want it.”

A famous passage from Nietzsche describes the destruction of the belief in God as the greatest cataclysm mankind has ever faced: “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?”

Mr. Peterson chronicles the misery of individuals now drifting through this “infinite nothing.” But he rejects Nietzsche’s atheism, along with the conclusion that we can make our own values. In telling readers to return to the Bible, Mr. Peterson seeks to rechain the earth to its sun. That seems impossible. Yet a vast audience has demonstrated a willingness, at least, to try.

For Mr. Peterson, the death of God was followed inevitably by a quick descent into hell. During the “terrible twentieth century,” as he calls it, “we discovered something worse, much worse, than the aristocracy and corrupt religious beliefs that communism and fascism sought so rationally to supplant.” The Holocaust and the gulag, he argues, are sufficient to define evil for us, and “the good is whatever stops such things from happening.”

That is perfectly good Old Testament-style reasoning. Mr. Peterson adds Christian tropes such as the need for an “act of faith,” an “irrational commitment to the essential goodness” of things, a recognition that although “life is suffering,” sacrificing ourselves, as if on the cross, is pleasing to God.

Mr. Peterson’s intellectual framework has its weaknesses. He invokes recent social science (and its jargon) with a confidence that is at times naive. His often brilliant “12 Rules for Life” is littered with Heideggerian rubbish about “the betterment of Being,” in places where a thinker of Mr. Peterson’s abilities should have seen the need for a more disciplined effort to understand God. He lacks Nietzsche’s alertness to the ways in which the great religious traditions contradict one another, leading their adherents toward very different lives. Thus while Mr. Peterson is quite a good reader of the Bible, it is at times maddening to watch him import alien ideas into scripture—for instance, that the chaos preceding the creation was “female”—so as to fill out a supposed archetypal symmetry.

Nonetheless, what Mr. Peterson has achieved is impressive. In his writings and public appearances, he has made a formidable case that order—and not just freedom—is a fundamental human need, one now foolishly neglected. He is compelling in arguing that the order today’s deconstructed society so desperately lacks can be reintroduced, even now, through a renewed engagement with the Bible and inherited religious tradition.

Before Mr. Peterson, there was no solid evidence that a broad public would ever again be interested in an argument for political order. For more than a generation, Western political discourse has been roughly divided into two camps. Marxists are sharply aware of the status hierarchies that make up society, but they are ideologically committed to overthrowing them. Liberals (both the progressive and classical varieties) tend to be altogether oblivious to the hierarchical and tribal character of political life. They know they’re supposed to praise “civil society,” but the Enlightenment concepts they use to think about the individual and the state prevent them from recognizing the basic structures of the political order, what purposes they serve, and how they must be maintained.

In short, modern political discourse is noteworthy for the gaping hollow where there ought to be conservatives—institutions and public figures with something important to teach about political order and how to build it up for everyone’s benefit. Into this opening Mr. Peterson has ventured.

Perhaps without fully intending to do so, he has given the dynamic duo of Marxism and liberalism a hard shove, while shining a light on the devastation these utopian theories are wreaking in Western countries. He has demarcated a large area in which only conservative political and social thought can help. His efforts have provided reason to believe that a significant demand for conservative ideas still lives under the frozen wastes of our intellectual landscape.

If so, then Mr. Peterson’s appearance may be the harbinger of a broader rebirth. His book is a natural complement to important recent works such as Ryszard Legutko’s “The Demon in Democracy,” Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” and Amy Chua’s “Political Tribes.” Representing divergent political perspectives, these works nevertheless share Mr. Peterson’s project of getting past the Marxist and liberal frameworks and confronting our trained incapacity to see human beings and human societies for what they really are. As the long-awaited revival of conservative political thought finally gets under way, there may be much more of this to come.

  by Yoram Hazony, The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2018  www.wsj.com/articles/jordan-peterson-and-conservatisms-rebirth-1529101961

Mr. Hazony is author of “The Virtue of Nationalism,” forthcoming Sept. 4.