#they are simply not present in the narrative except as objects for us americans to debate over (and celebrate the suffering of)

[thevalleyisjolly]

I wish literally any other one of the nominated movies this awards season won instead of Oppenheimer. No offence to the actors (although really, what the hell did RDJ do that was so exceptional), but I'm physically upset that they rewarded such an Oscar-bait movie.

[sophiegold123]

Analytical Application 2: Structuralism and Semiotics

Definition: Myth 

Myth functions as a constructed system of signs and signifiers that have reinterpreted and recontextualized existing signs to convey ideological meanings, beliefs, and cultural narratives.  The ideologies and narratives are conveyed through seemingly natural phenomena or everyday objects that the myth has transformed  into symbols, signs, or signifiers imbued with cultural significance. Mythic narratives are not inherent but shaped by historical events and cultural factors. Roland states “Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.” (1)  This means that  myth has the ability to simplify and present things in a way that makes them appear innocent and timeless. Myth presents them as unquestionable, natural facts and in essence, transforms complex realities into simplified, eternal, and readily accepted narratives. As myth manipulates signs, it shapes collective beliefs and values that serve to reinforce dominant ideologies and social norms. 

  Analysis: 

The movie poster for "Geronimo: An American Legend" (1993) draws on mythic elements and archetypes to reinforce specific cultural narratives. Within the Western context, the depiction of a Native American man on horseback taps into cinematic and cultural myths surrounding the American frontier, exploration, and conflicts between indigenous peoples and settlers. At the center of the composition is the lone figure on horseback, portrayed as the hero in the narrative. Behind him, three larger white men appear suspended in the sky, each with a calm or serious expression, except for the one in the middle who wears a partial smile. These visual elements serve as constructed signs and signifiers, conveying ideological meanings and cultural narratives. The contrast between the distressed expression of the Native American figure and the potential symbols of authority and power represented by the white men, particularly the one resembling a military sergeant, suggests a clash of cultures. The heroism attributed to the man on the horse, fighting alone, contributes to the shaping of collective beliefs around historical events involving figures like Geronimo. The poster, through its use of myth, simplifies and romanticizes complex historical and cultural realities, transforming individuals into symbols laden with specific ideological meanings. The innocence attributed to the Native American figure, juxtaposed with the potential militaristic symbolism of the white men, constructs a narrative aligned with Western mythology and prevalent mythic constructs in Western culture. In doing so, the visual piece engages in the ongoing process of myth-making, reinforcing specific cultural narratives surrounding Native American history and figures like Geronimo.

Definition: Connotation

Connotation refers to additional meanings or values associated with specific visual or auditory elements in a film. All signified or signifying denoted material and aesthetic elements such as framing, camera movements, lighting, sound, etc. combine together to become the signifier of connotations. Aesthetic choices contribute to the connotative layer, adding depth, symbolism, or emotional resonance to the work. Christian Metz in his essay “Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema," states that connotation signifies “ the literary or cinematographic “style,” “genre” (the epic, the western, etc.), “symbol” (philosophical, humanitarian, ideological, and so on), or “poetic atmosphere” ”(2). This means that connotations are additional layers of meaning produced, such as the overall genre, symbolism, style or atmosphere of a literary or cinematographic work. These meanings are conveyed through the various elements present in the work. In essence, connotation produces added meaning attributed to filmic elements through aesthetic choices, contributing to the overall interpretation and experience of a film.

Analysis: 

The movie poster of “The Woman King'' (2022)  connotes the style, genre, and potential symbolism of the movie through various signs and aesthetic elements. The facial expression, postures, and  stances of the characters in the image signify that they are tough, fearless, unthreatened, and serious. The weapons they are holding and the amount of people behind the central figure signifies that they are a sort of army or group that is going to fight another group. The orange-red sky and the embers in the image signify danger or excitement. The fiery color palette creates a dramatic atmosphere, suggesting a sense of urgency and conflict. The words “A Warrior Becomes a Legend” signifies that there is someone who fights and is heroic or has done something big that will be remembered. The costumes include what looks like copper and a handwoven shirt, signifying material that used to be worn, not modern battlesuits. The weapons also look like knives, swords, and spears, showing no modern weapons like guns or bombs. The text “inspired by true events” signifies that this is about an historical event. All of these elements and signs combined connote that the genre of the movie is a historical action or drama. In addition, there are multiple women in the image, and the central figure is a woman, signifying that women are strong, fearless, and able fighters. The name of the movie “The Woman King” is impactful as the word “king” refers to a man who is a ruler, it signifies that in the movie the woman is instead the ruler, or the one with power. These signs connote an ideological symbolism, such as it being a feminist or female-empowering movie, as a woman being in power subverts normal gender roles. In summary, various signs and aesthetic elements in the movie poster for "The Woman King" intricately conveys the style, genre, and symbolic undertones of the film. 

Definition: Sign 

Signs are created from language, creating meaning through images which can be mental or

psychological. Saussure suggests that a word is seen as a sign, the signifier is the sound-image that the word creates and the signified is the concept that we connect the specific word to. Saussure states “The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.” (3)  This process is what contributes to language which is known to construct our reality. Signs are also arbitrary since there is no natural connection between the signifier (The physical form of the sign, such as a word, sound, image, or gesture) and the signified (The concept or meaning associated with the signifier). The meaning is socially constructed through shared conventions and agreed-upon systems. 

Analysis: 

In the movie poster “Nuns on the Run” (1990) there are many signs that work together to convey concepts and meanings. A signifier is  the images of Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane dressed as nuns, which signify disguise, humor, or a comedic situation. The poster plastered on a brick wall with the text “WANTED for the robbery of $1,000,000 REWARD” and their names, with images of the both of them signifying that the police are looking for them, hence why they are on the run. The choice of portraying the actors as nuns is arbitrary and relies on shared cultural conventions about the comedic potential of such disguises. The text at the top of the movie poster  “From now on, it's every nun for himself!” signifies a comedic theme as it is a play on words of “its everyone for himself”. This comedic effect relies on shared cultural meanings, as different languages may not have the same phrases. The facial expressions of the characters are scared and annoyed/mad, signifying a clash in personalities between the characters, which can add to the comedic effect. Overall the signs work together to create expectations for the audience about the movie, such as the narrative of two men disguised as nuns, running from the police with a comedic tone. 

Definition: Langue

Langue refers to the "code for expressing" thought according to Ferdinand de Saussure. It is used to create a vocal message that can be associated with an image that further becomes a concept in which people use it for communication. It is a system of signs in which there is a union of meanings and sound images. It is critical to note that langue is different from speech because it is "defined" meaning it cannot be interpreted differently whereas speech can be. (4)  Saussure highlights that language is a product of society stating “It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty.” (5) Meaning, it is not a natural or individual creation but rather a communal product shaped by the conventions adopted by a social group. These conventions serve as the shared framework that allows individuals within the society to use and understand language as a means of communication. Additionally, within language, each word limits the other because it specifies itself. It is critical to understand the function and structure of language because it reflects the way we see the world and what our reality is.

Analysis: 

The movie poster “Joyeux Noel” (2005) uses signs and langue to convey meaning and concepts. The title "Joyeux Noel" itself represents the langue, as it is a code for expressing the thought of a merry Christmas. The addition of the parenthesis "(Merry Christmas)" serves as a translation or interpretation of the title for those who may not understand French. It highlights the multiplicity and communal creation of languages as it is shaped by conventions adopted by a social group. The inclusion of "GOLDEN GLOBE° NOMINEE • BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM" is a linguistic element that communicates the film's recognition and achievement. The use of "NOMINEE" indicates a specific status within a broader system of recognition. The text "Christmas Eve, 1914" establishes the historical and temporal context of the film. It relies on knowledge of certain cultural conventions and contexts such as certain holidays. The text "On a World War 1 battlefield, a Momentous Event changed the lives of soldiers from France, Germany, and England" uses language to provide a brief synopsis or summary of the film's plot. This linguistic element serves as a concise representation of the narrative, conveying that the movie will be about soldiers during Christmas in 1914. The statement "Based on a true story" is a linguistic assurance that the narrative is rooted in historical events, conveying the historical genre.  In summary, the movie poster utilizes language as a system of signs to convey information about the film's title, accolades, historical setting, narrative overview, and authenticity. 

Definition: Semiotics of cinema 

The semiotics of cinema refers to the study of signs, symbols, and meanings within the context of filmmaking and film analysis. Semiotics is concerned with the study of signs and symbols and how they convey meaning. Metz tells us the basic figures of the semiotics of the cinema “montage, camera movements, scale of the shots, relationships between the image and speech, sequences, and other large syntagmatic units” (6). Semiotics delves into the language of film, examining how elements such as visuals, sounds, editing, and narrative structure function as signs and contribute to the overall meaning of a film.

Analysis: 

Within the Poltergeist (1982) movie poster, there are certain visuals that convey meaning, and help the audience form expectations and interpretations about the film. There is a far away shot of a little girl sitting on the floor in front of a tv her hands are placed on. Her hands are pressed onto the screen as if there is a connection between her and the television in such a way that she can not detach herself. This is unusual behavior for a child as little girls would normally be perceived to pay more attention to stuffed toys and dolls - much like the teddy bear that has been laid on the floor next to her. The tv is the only thing emitting light, making the image very dark with a spotlight on the girl and the glowing, static-filled television. This use of lighting enhances the eerie and supernatural atmosphere as the darkness adds an ominous and scary effect, conveying the movie as a horror film. In addition, the long shot emphasizes that no one is around the girl, signifying that she is alone and vulnerable. The fact that the girl's back is turned does not allow the audience to see her facial expression, leaving the audience with uncertainty of what role the girl plays in the narrative. The tagline ("They're here") is a linguistic sign that creates suspense and implies the presence of supernatural entities. The other “It knows what scares you” uses the pronoun ‘it’ rather than ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’. This reinforces the idea of sci-fi or even the monster-horror genre as well as increasing obscurity. In summary, the semiotics of the cinema in the "Poltergeist" poster involve the use of visual elements, text, light, and composition to communicate the horror genre, convey supernatural themes, and entice potential viewers by creating suspense and intrigue. 

 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 143.

Metz, Christian. "Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema" in Film Theory and Criticism, 67. Edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 66. trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1915).

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 15. trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1915).

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 9. trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1915).

Metz, Christian. "Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema" in Film Theory and Criticism, 66. Edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

[dragonofyang]

On Love and Lions Part 1: An Analysis on Love in VLD

“I have always believed that unity is where true power comes from, and true unity can only be born of love.” --Gyrgan, Paladin of the Yellow Lion

Voltron: Legendary Defender is a cartoon on Netflix that–with the final season available to watch on Netflix–has extremely regressive and harmful messages. The S8 on Netflix carries lessons about how war is good, that men shouldn’t respect the wishes and desires of women, that violence and abuse mean even victims aren’t deserving of forgiveness. Everything about that is 100% antithetical to what VLD was about throughout the prior seasons and each harmful message is another nail in the coffin of the original narratives of peace, respect, and fundamentally how everyone is deserving of love and forgiveness, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

In fact, the theme of love in VLD is something we at Team Purple Lion wish to discuss. It’s arguably the most absolutely fundamental theme of the show. Love destroys the universe, and love saves it over and over again. And love would have rebuilt the universe, but thanks to the edits ordered by the trademark holder, the universe that should have been born from love was instead born from one girl sacrificing her life because she saw no better option. She didn’t even get to tell her only remaining father figure goodbye. What kind of message is that? In the original final season, prior to the executive meddling, we should have seen how love was such a powerful force in the universe that it could not just repair this reality, but all realities. And it’s not just romantic love, but six types of love.

Now, for those of you more familiar with our work, we’ve discussed some pretty big concepts in VLD and how they’re addressed, and there will be even more in future episodes of our reconstruction Rise and Atone. VLD engages not just with its own predecessors in the Voltron franchise, but Beast King GoLion, Labyrinth, Frankenstein, and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey is all but the story bible for Allura’s arc. The concepts we are about to discuss date back to Ancient Greece, and while love can be more than these concepts, it’s important that we have a framework through which we can discuss and analyze love as it appears in VLD without getting lost in all the examples.

In American culture, “love” is not very well-differentiated between kinds because we only use one word: “love”. While we use it across all sorts of contexts, we have to add modifiers when we don’t mean romantic love or familial love, which are the most commonly-acknowledged forms of love. VLD, being written and edited by primarily Americans living in America, also encounters this issue, but it does not focus solely on romantic love, which can complicate how to interpret love in the show. We, however, would like to argue that not only is it all love, but it doesn’t all have to be good love, familial love, or romantic love. At the end of the day the plot is driven by love in its many forms. Love is so baked into the story that it’s quite difficult to extricate, dare I even say impossible, and that ultimately is part of why we were able to reconstruct so much of what was lost in S8.

The Ancient Greeks had many words for love, but we feel it’s important to discuss the dialogue that VLD engages in with various forms of love, using the Ancient Greeks’ framework as a guide. The model gives us concrete definitions of different kinds of love, and can help us as an audience understand the various forms of love that are present in VLD. It’s important that we define the different ways we can observe love being portrayed because much of VLD relies on the writing adage of “show, don’t tell”.

So without any further ado, let’s dig into what, precisely, is love.

As stated earlier, we’ll be using terminology coined by the Ancient Greeks, specifically six categories of love that we feel are most prevalent in the show. We’ve also deduced our own examples of these forms of love when they’re taken too far or flat-out discarded, which will be discussed in a companion article.

The six forms of love are as follows:

Eros: the most famous kind of love, an intense (and often sexual) passion for another being and seeing the beauty within them. This is the love that most closely aligns with romantic love as we understand it in a modern American context.

Philia: an affection and loyalty between friends, notable for its platonic nature, it is the love that arises between friends, and can be found among family, but the modern equivalent would be the found family trope.

Storge: this is the intrinsic empathy between individuals, primarily the attachment of parents to children. This form of love was primarily used to describe familial relationships, and the patience one sometimes needs when around blood relatives.

Philautia: put simply, this is self-love in its purest form. It is acknowledging your needs, wants, and happiness without apology. The Ancient Greeks considered Philautia to be a basic human need.

Xenia: while many might not consider this to be a form of love, it is hospitality, or as we define it, love between a host and their guests. Specifically, this would be the care a host gives to their guests in both physical (food, gifts, etc.) and non-physical (respecting rights, protection, etc.). Hospitality is massively important because if you are good to someone while they are in your home, they will be equally good to you if you visit theirs.

Agape: this is a Greco-Christian term, ultimately, and is a little more difficult to understand because it can be confused with other forms of love. At its core, though, it is a pure and unconditional love such as that between spouses, families, or God and man. It shouldn’t be confused for other forms of love such as Philia because unlike the other forms of love, which only focus on one aspect of humanity, Agape is the unconditional and universal love for everyone. It’s sexless, unlike Eros. At its core, it’s the love born of goodwill to all people, regardless of circumstance.

While these are only six categories, there are many ways of interpreting love, especially since there are so many avenues to see love–in good and bad forms–in VLD. These categories are also not inherently hierarchical, and are not presented in any particular order. Agape is the main exception, being more convoluted in its nature, and thus is discussed at the end. It also narratively serves as part of the culmination to the plot, so it carries a greater weight in relation to the alpha plot of the whole story.

Now, let’s examine how they present in VLD. As an official reminder, please remember that all analysis of VLD is done from a ship-neutral stance and we are not proposing any endgame romances. The sole purpose of this article is to discuss observable portrayals of love in its various forms, and to analyze both the text and the metatextual messages resulting from them.

Eros: Passionate Love

Eros… arguably this is the most contentious form of love presented in VLD, if only because of all the ship wars that occurred in the fandom. Eros drives the shipping communities of fandoms across the world, because it often stems from on-screen chemistry or the potential of the fleeting seconds where a spark flies but does not catch in canon. The beauty of Eros is that it ripples quietly through fiction, or it can be a tsunami ready to devour the story. It’s the quiet whisper of two women sharing a private moment, to the shouted declarations in the heat of battle. Eros thrums through fandoms in a desperate tempo for seeing a love as passionate as you can feel in characters who may never share more than a glance.

Plato actually had quite the influence on the word “Eros”, because “Eros” or erotic love, was largely regarded as a type of madness brought upon a person by seeing someone whose beauty strikes your heart with an arrow (Cupid’s arrows, anyone?). Eros is the love that drives you to despair if the object of your affections is cruel or uninterested, and it burns like a fire. “Falling in love at first sight” is the key concept here, and you can see it reproduced in fandoms across the world, though many cultures have their own names and terms for it. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott define “Eros” in A Greek-English Lexicon as “love, mostly of the sexual passion”. Plato, however, redefined the word to include a nonphysical aspect. He discusses it in Symposium and says that while (physical) Eros can be felt for a person initially, with contemplation you can and will fall in love with a person’s inner beauty, which for Plato was the ideal, since he specifically emphasized the lack of importance of physical attraction. In fact, Jung–who coined the Anima and Animus–has a similar approach, with an emphasis on unity within the self by accepting your internal Eros which manifests as your feminine Anima/masculine Animus.

In the text of VLD, Eros is remarkably subdued. This is partially due to its rating. Being a Y7-FV show, VLD can’t really have explicitly sexual content. Sure the implication can exist, but a lot of times sex has to be carried through metaphor if a story is to address it at all. Take the juniberry as an example. It’s a three-petal flower of a deep rose and softer pink, delicately topping a green stem, with a yellow pistil. In much of literary history, flowers represent female sexuality and beauty, and they are common representations of youth across genders.

Now, in strictly biological terms, flowers as a sexual symbol is a 1:1 accuracy in analysis, because the flower is the reproductive organ of a plant. I’d like to analyze the juniberry from a biological perspective, because understanding the anatomy of a flower can help us understand its role in literature as a metaphor for sex. The whole point of the flower is to be able to spread pollen across individual plants, whether by wind or by pollinators such as bats or bees, and breed to produce more plants. The actual reproductive organs of flowers are called the stamen and pistil, respectively. The stamen produces pollen, while the pistil collects pollen in its ovule to fertilize and create seeds. A stamen is a very slender filament, topped with what’s called an “anther”, which is where the pollen is actually released. The pistil, meanwhile, has a thicker base with a long body, usually topped with a few tendril-like structures called “stigma”.

Diagram by the Association of Societies for Growing Australian Plants [ID: A simple cross-section diagram of a flower. Three petals are visible on the far side, with reproductive organs drawn in the center. There is also a stalk and sepals at the bottom. Along the sides of the cross-section there are labels. On the left, a category called “Stamen” is labeled, with “Anther” and “Filament” pointing to two parts of the thinner reproductive organ. “Receptacle” marks the base of the flower, and “Peduncle (flower stalk)” marks out the stem. On the right, we have the label “Petal” and three labels under the category “Pistil”: “Stigma”, pointing to the top portion, “Style” pointing to the stem-like feature, and “Ovary” pointing to the rounded bottom. The label “Sepal” marks the leaf-like structure just under the petals. End ID.]

Now, when we look at the juniberries we see in canon, we can see that at no point are any drawn with stamens. They all have a single pistil growing from the center, and they’re topped with three stigma, meaning that all juniberries drawn on-screen are female juniberries.

Juniberries are a quintessential symbol of Altea, and they represent home to Allura, as well as what she’s lost. However, they also represent how Allura’s relationship to her own femininity is not some mystical thing determined by forces beyond her. Colleen gifts Allura a juniberry that was selectively bred from flowers she had available, and it’s identical in every way (that we can see) to the juniberries native to Altea. The message, though it’s subtle, is quite clear: Allura is in control of her femininity and can define herself however she pleases (“highlands poppy” versus “juniberry”). After the sexual undertones that threaded her relationship with Lotor, this is a very important message to convey, especially since a patriarchal story would punish Allura for the metaphorical sex in physical ways, such as how the season 8 on Netflix does.

Allura isn’t simply a vessel for male desire, nor is she a strong female character who doesn’t need a man. Her story is about finding agency separate from male expectations, without forsaking her own femininity in the process. Like the juniberry, she is feminine, but she is able to define herself, and the dark entity masquerading as Lotor reminds her of that with their conversation about calling the juniberry a “highlands poppy”. That’s what makes Lotor so dangerous to a traditional patriarchal values system: he reminds Allura that she has a choice.

It’s important to note that during their interactions Lotor never gives Allura a choice in the sense that he, a man, is allowing her one; he simply steps back and encourages her to make the choices to which she is entitled and to act on her emotions and desires. She is an agent of her own free will, and Lotor, being first her Shadow, challenges her to be smarter, quicker on the battlefield, and then as her Animus he challenges her to look inward and become in-tune to her own inner wants and needs. The other Paladins can offer some aid in that, but none of them strike her anxieties or hopes the way that Lotor can, being the crown prince and heir to her sworn enemy, and being half-Altean and half-Galra. He is, in a fundamentally physical way, the union of two races that were at war before Altea’s destruction, and to a survivor of that war, that forces Allura to question the beliefs she held in the beginning of the story. The stakes of success and failure are much higher with Lotor in the picture, and it’s easier to focus literary tension on two characters than five or six, so as a result of that persistent tension, we as the audience are given plenty of chemistry between two characters to spur Eros.

As we discussed last year in “Legendarily Defensive: Editing the Gay Away”, Keith was meant to have a gay relationship with another Paladin. We refuse to write conjecture on what his endgame romance was meant to be, however it is important to discuss Keith’s Eros in a metatextual sense. For example, let’s look at Keith and Shiro. Keith is a legacy character that dates all the way back to 1984 Defender of the Universe. His romantic subplot was relegated to excised footage and extremely subtextual if it managed to squeak past the axe. Shiro was able to be queer, however, due to the fact that he’s a DreamWorks-owned character who is new to the franchise, meaning that there isn’t a legacy that needed to be upheld.

Keith’s queerness, however, still acts as a spur to fuel the potential for Eros, and helps build tension between him and his fellow male Paladins. And I specify male Paladins because during season 2, Keith and Allura go off in a pod by themselves to see if Zarkon is tracking either of them. During the scenes with Keith and Allura together, it’s important to note the background music is remarkably flat and lacking in romantic cues. In prior iterations of Voltron, Keith and Allura are implied as endgame (DOTU), have the beginnings of an on-screen romance (VForce), or straight up just fuck on the page (such as in the comics). It stands to reason that this scene should at least imply some form of passionate chemistry here, but largely it’s two friends confiding in one another and trying to find reassurance as they confess their fears. Keith doesn’t have a moment to admire Allura’s beauty the way we see Lance and Matt do, and Allura doesn’t blush like how she does with Lotor or Lance. Without markers for any kind of Eros, the scene is a quiet moment of contemplation away from the stress, only to be broken by Shiro telling them to get back because the Galra Empire found the Castleship again.

So then where do we see passionate chemistry for Keith? At the risk of starting the ship-war again, his chemistry largely exists with Shiro and Lance. Shiro, narratively, functions as his Mentor, someone to guide and believe in him, who then gives up his position of leadership (sort of) so that Keith can grow. Bringing Shiro back prematurely makes it harder to see, but in a traditional Hero’s Journey, the Mentor figure teaches not-quite-enough to the Hero before disappearing, and the Hero grows on their own and becomes their own person. Naturally, this makes Keith and Shiro have tension, especially since Shiro was brought back prematurely due to marketing, so their relationship dynamic had to change to accommodate Shiro’s return. Lance, however, constantly baits and teases Keith, and Keith frequently rises to it and they argue. They butt heads and don’t have that sense of camaraderie that Keith and Shiro do, so right off the bat there is more obvious tension between the two of them. Eventually, Lance and Keith learn to trust each other, and in season 8 we finally see them settle their rivalry as they prepare to face Honerva. So while Keith’s dynamic with Shiro is more focused on camaraderie and growth, Keith’s dynamic with Lance is more focused on pushing each other to be better warriors and teammates.

Philia: Friendly Love

In VLD, we’re shown that friends can be found anywhere if you’re willing to put down the blasters and try to make them. We’re also shown that just because you’re on the same side of the battlefield, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re best buddies. Commander Lahn pledges his loyalty to Lotor after his base is saved by Voltron, and Keith and Lance butt heads so often you’d think one would sooner drop the other into a black hole. However, we should never discount the power of friendship, or rather, we should never discount the value of platonic relationships. This includes everything from friendship, to the found family trope, to the mystical bond the Paladins have with their Lions. Philia is the companion’s love, firmly rooted in platonic–and often intellectual–admiration.

Philia, as defined in A Greek-English Lexicon by Liddell and Scott, is “an affectionate regard or friendship, usually between equals”. Where Eros is the fiery passion between sexually-attracted adults, Philia is the platonic love between people who respect and trust each other. This is the love that flows like water, endlessly filling and refilling your emotional needs with good company, good advice, and generally just a good presence. Friendships are the ports we anchor ourselves at when the seas become too rough, and in VLD, where space is the most dangerous frontier and most of the universe is your enemy, friends are more important than ever for our Heroes and Heroines.

[ID: A screenshot of S4E1 “Code of Honor” with Allura, Lance, Coran, Shiro, Pidge, and Hunk sharing a group hug with Keith. Coran, Hunk, Pidge, and Allura are all crying, while Keith, Shiro, and Lance are smiling. End ID.]

Everywhere you look in VLD, you’re sure to find some kind of camaraderie between friends. Lance, Pidge, and Hunk make the Garrison Trio (or as I like to call them, The Planck Constant), and they get into shenanigans together. In fact, it’s entirely likely that had Lance and Hunk not decided to follow Pidge up to the roof, they never would’ve found Shiro, and subsequently Blue Lion. Later, when Voltron has allied with Lotor as the new Galra Emperor, they reprogram a sentry to become the eternally-fantastic Funbot. If you want a prime example of the fun that could be had between friends, those three are quintessential to the definition of Philia. They’re the first Youths you meet in the story, and it’s through their eyes we watch as a far-off intergalactic war comes to Earth at last. The show has us follow them as the audience, and we watch as they meet up with Keith, save Shiro, and then find themselves going from Earth to Kerberos in less than five minutes, and then by the end of their day, they’ve awoken Allura and Coran and are on Arus, thousands of lightyears away from their home.

We see the Paladins go from a rowdy group of teenagers with Shiro as the head to a group of five Heroes and Heroines capable of saving the universe. Lance helps Pidge get all the GAC coins she needs for a video game, and he’s always got the team’s back with his sniper rifle. Hunk always is ready to lend a hand, even when he’s scared of flying Yellow, but when the Taujeerans are in danger of falling into the acid as their planet breaks apart, he’s right there holding them up while the team gets the arc ship ready for takeoff. Our Paladins are the embodiment of the power of friendship, trust, and perseverance, and it’s that tenacity and dedication that should have carried our six Paladins to victory and brought the Purple Paladin back into the light he thought had forsaken him. Black, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, and White, together in a bond of pure platonic love. There’s an old phrase I’m sure you’re all familiar with: “blood is thicker than water”. The power of Philia and found family in VLD challenges that notion in the original S8 when Lotor is offered his vindication. “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”

Pick any two of our main protagonists and you’re sure to find a thread of Philia connecting them, because when you fight together as one, you inevitably become closer as the trust builds between you. In fanfic terminology, this is the root of the found family trope: strangers and friends finding themselves in a gripping adventure together, and discovering that they’re stronger together than they could be apart, and coming to see these people as more than colleagues or acquaintances. They become your family and people to defend, and the people you trust to have your back when it’s time to face down an enemy together.

That’s part of why Keith leaving for the Blade of Marmora is so fractious. He’s growing into a leadership role and obviously accustomed to it, but with Shiro’s premature return, there’s some growing pains as the incumbent leader and the former leader unintentionally butt heads. Keith needs to be in Black Lion without Shiro to complete his growth, but without a way to easily integrate him back into the team without messing with the legacy, Keith has to go. And like with any good friend, when you have to say goodbye, it’s a bittersweet affair. The team doesn’t want him to go, but in-canon he feels he can do more good with the Blade, but the meta reason is that his Hero’s Journey has been arrested. But, like with any good friend, the team is able to reunite with him at a later date and he integrates back into the group. They are wiser to the world, harder, but they are together again. And they need that unity when it’s time to face Honerva and go into battle for not just their universe, but all realities.

Storge: Familial Love

In English, we have many concepts of love, but generally we only treat the single word of “love” as a word for “love”. As a result, we tend to use other words to modify the type of love we mean, which can get things kind of sticky if you talk about X type of love but don’t specify that it’s X type and not Y type. With familial love, it can be relatively understood without being specified, but as you can see by my explication here, I still have to modify the word “love” with an adjective to describe the next kind of love I will be discussing. Storge, the familial love.

A Greek-English Lexicon defines Storge as “love, affection, especially of parents and children”. Storge, unlike Philia, is not a platonic admiration for a companion in the family, however it does denote respect. Storge is also not the idealized unconditional love of Agape (which we will discuss toward the end of this essay). Storge is the instinctive love for those in your family, especially between parents and children. I also argue the key aspect of Storge is that your family–for all the times you want to tear out your hair–will love you for the rest of their lives. And you’ll love them, because they’re people who have your best interests at heart, even if they don’t always express that well.

Coran, Coran, the gorgeous man himself is Allura’s second father figure (after Alfor), but he’s the only father figure for Allura in the show that’s alive. Coran’s protectiveness of Allura is well-documented. He was furious when she got captured saving Shiro, he warns her to be careful healing the Balmera, he worries for her in Blue, but at no point does he actually prevent her from making her choices. He wants her to have a full life, a happy life, or at least as happy as one can be when you’re one of the only survivors of a war. He’s a father through and through, and even if Allura is Alfor’s daughter by blood, Coran is the one who supports her during the most difficult stage of not just her life but the universe’s life. He loves her, he consistently reminds people to respect her and to think of what’s best for her. Not just as a princess of Altea or the heart of Voltron, but as a daughter. Alfor was her father, but he died before he saw her face the trials in the plot. Coran, however, he gets to see her grow into a woman even greater than what Alfor could have ever imagined. The audience might find him a little frustrating (such as in S8E1 “Launch Date”), and Allura takes his protectiveness in stride, but at the end of the day Coran is a gorgeous man with his heart in the right place, even if his execution is a little off the mark on occasion.

The Holt parents are also good examples of Storge. We see Colleen and Sam fight to tell Earth about what’s been going on, as well as finding their children. Colleen herself is a solid mama bear that anyone would want to have fighting for them in their corner, and we can see she gives no fucks about protocol when she’s told she can’t stay on Garrison grounds with her husband.

[ID: Colleen Holt glaring, her husband Sam behind her looking equally annoyed. She glares at Admiral Sanda (off-screen) as they argue. The subtitle reads, “You’ll get me the clearance.” End ID.]

While Colleen doesn’t hesitate to ground Pidge for running away to space, the fact of the matter is that she and Sam fought like absolute hell to protect their kids in the ways they had available to them. Storge is the love parents have for their children and these two human characters are the perfect examples of it, even if Pidge chafes a bit under being grounded. Sam and Colleen’s love for Pidge and Matt and Coran’s love for Allura are the perfect avenues to explore how Storge is love, even if it’s frustrating, but they also serve as an excellent foil for how that love can be horribly twisted.

Philautia: Self-Love

In S1E1 of VLD, when our human protagonists meet Allura, Sendak is barreling through open space to their location and hellbent on capturing the Blue Lion. Allura is able to talk to Alfor–or rather, his hologram–to seek guidance in the upcoming battle, and he says, “You must be willing to sacrifice everything to assemble the lions and correct my error.”

With VLD, there’s this idea of sacrifice, of giving your life for the greater good, but when discussing acts of love, we also need to talk about acts of love for yourself. We see many instances of characters sacrificing themselves for the greater good, the belief that their death will bring an eventual victory to the Paladins of Voltron and free the universe. Allura throws Shiro into an escape pod so he doesn’t have to suffer the abuse again, but in the process becomes a prisoner herself. Ulaz gives up his life to save the Paladins and keep the Blade of Marmora base secret. Thace sacrifices himself so that Galra Central Command can go offline and the plan can move forward. Keith nearly kills himself trying to break through Haggar’s barrier at the battle of Naxzella before Lotor intervenes and destroys the ship with a blast from his Sincline ship. Sacrifice is a massive part of the show, and needless sacrifices are always undone, but what message do continuous sacrifices leave us with as the audience? It leaves us with Alfor’s lesson: you must sacrifice everything to correct my mistake.

When you’re writing, one of the most basic things you must do to drive a plot forward is change something significant. In the beginning of a story, Character A might think Character B is wrong and has no idea of what it takes to do something, but then Character B later on needs to surprise Character A by proving they can do that thing or that they don’t need to. It forces Character A and the audience to rethink their initial assumptions, and it encourages tension and dialogue between characters that otherwise might not exist. It’s an internal motivation, and one that audiences will pretty much always find more gripping and compelling than a simple monster-of-the-week scenario. VLD is no different. “All Galra are bad/Altea is good” leads to meeting the Blade of Marmora and Alteans who took over their universe. The challenge to a character’s worldview is what makes turning these initial ideas on their head so satisfying.

So what could challenge the idea that you have to sacrifice everything? Especially to correct the mistakes of someone else?

Love. Not for others, not for family, not even for the greater good.

But for yourself.

To quote Audre Lorde, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Philautia is the love in which you put yourself first, not because it’s selfish, but because it’s self-care. Self-love is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an appreciation of one’s own worth or virtue” and Philautia has been recognized for millennia as a basic human need by the likes of Maslow and the Ancient Greeks. Recognizing your own needs and worth is a fundamentally radical decision, especially if you are in a position where you’re expected to prioritize the needs of others before your own.

S1E1 of VLD offers us pretty much every worldview that gets challenged later on in the series, except for Alfor’s. We see Alteans can be equally cruel, that Galra are not all evil. Voltron is a great protector, but it is also a great weapon, and Keith even calls it an alien warship in the very beginning, highlighting the danger Blue–and consequently Voltron itself–poses by merely existing. Philautia is not the exertion or prioritization of your desires, but the assertion of your needs. It can easily swing too far into selfishness and vanity, but making yourself heard is never a bad decision, and for those who are marginalized, women, trans people, disabled people, neurodivergent people, nonwhite people, it is an act of defiance. The sins of people in positions of power are not the burden for their victims to bear. If protesting is too much or too burdensome, simply taking the time to care for oneself is enough, because you can’t pour water out of an empty cup. Alfor’s plea to Allura was always meant to be overturned with the finale, especially since she’s facing down the antithesis of everything she believed in season 1. Honerva is selfish, manipulative, abusive, and an Altean woman. Alfor would ask Allura to give up everything she has left to destroy Honerva, but in the original and unedited season 8 Allura would have taken that plea and turned it on its head.

VLD’s Princess Allura is the first and only iteration to be a nonwhite girl and voiced by a black woman. Having her sacrifice herself is an extremely harmful message to little girls of color everywhere because it’s not the burden of girls of color to save the world. Their duty is to love themselves and know they’re able to be as brave and kind and intelligent as they’d like. Princess Allura’s arc is about a girl learning to not shoulder the burden of violence, but instead choosing to relieve herself and choose healing and creation, and in turn, her reward would be the literal universe at her fingertips.

And Allura isn’t the only character to learn to love themselves. Lance, as well, learns to become comfortable with himself. At first he’s comfortable and cocky and immature in Blue Lion, but then as the seasons progress and he finds Red to be more of a challenge, he learns he has to follow through with his actions and decisions. He learns that to fly Red, he can’t hesitate and just has to roll with the punches. He dubs himself “the sharpshooter” of the group, and at first he gets laughed at, but then he saves Slav from being trapped in prison once more by firing and making a near-impossible shot. He doesn’t have to forge ahead and fight recklessly, he simply has to see an opportunity and take it.

All our other Paladins learn to become more comfortable with themselves, as well. Hunk becomes more confident in being the voice of reason, and becomes an A+ diplomat in the process. Pidge is able to open up and be honest with her team about her secrets and fears, and in return is blessed not just with that weight off her shoulders, but the knowledge that her team is her family just as much as Sam and Matt are. Keith, too, learns that he doesn’t have to go it alone all the time. He’s able to relax and trust his team, and rather than burdening himself with doing everything, he’s able to rely on the skillsets of the other Paladins and make them a stronger team by focusing his attention on directing them, as opposed to commanding them.

Another interesting example of Philautia is Lotor himself, who at no point is uncomfortable with his mixed heritage, even when he’s called a “half-breed” or when one of his parents blames half of his heritage for his failings. The main reason that it’s not as blatant is because by the time the story begins, he’s been at peace with his heritage and his place in the Galra Empire for a long time, and thus does not play a significant role until he has his breakdown at the end of season 6.

This form of love is quite possibly the most frustrating, if only because so much of its payoff was in season 8. We should see Allura not give up her life in the name of sacrifice, but rather choose to become a goddess in the name of love. We should see Lance become unshakably confident in his abilities when it’s time to face the biggest bad guy of the series. The final season was meant to be a season won through love, and self-love is quintessential to that victory, because it gives viewers the message that your acceptance of yourself is vital to the world. It’s an important lesson for little girls everywhere to know that their worth doesn’t lie in how much of themselves they can give away, but how much of themselves they cultivate and grow, because if you trust in yourself and choose love, then you’ll be as powerful and strong as Princess Allura. It’s possible to be the brave and chivalrous Paladin while also being the princess who likes the occasional sparkly thing.

The lesson of Philautia in VLD is one of embracing your limits of what you can give, and reminding the world that you matter, because loving yourself is the greatest act of defiance when you’re faced with an enemy who wants nothing more than for you to make yourself smaller, weaker, more amicable if it would please them. It’s the reminder to be gentle with yourself, no matter what battles you face, because caring for yourself is just as–if not more–important.

Xenia: Love for the Stranger

Hospitality is a massive part of many cultures, I personally had a relative (who has since passed) who would always have an open door for the poor families in their neighborhood and the stove would always have something cooking. My own mother will cook especially for you if you need her to. There’s a reason “Southern hospitality” is famous. Good food, good company, and ultimately safety are what sets Xenia among the categories of love as defined by the Ancient Greeks. In VLD, this form of love is very sparse in comparison to love such as Philia, however it’s extremely important that our heroes engage in it. To quote Coran, “70 percent of diplomacy is appearance. Then 29 percent is manners, decorum, formalities and chit-chat” (“Changing of the Guard”). The remaining one percent, which Allura notes, is actual diplomacy and fighting for freedom. That’s essentially what hosting, good and proper hosting, is. It’s taking someone into your home and providing them with material comforts and necessities such as food, as well as non-physical ones like safety or protection, or extending and respecting their rights.

A good host will anticipate their guests’ needs because they have a love for their fellow strangers, and they show that love by providing for them. Xenia is the love of the stranger who has taken up space in your home and respecting their need to do so, but it’s also a reciprocal love. By extending your hospitality to a person, they will be more inclined to do the same for you and yours in the future. In Greece it was a complicated dance of gift-giving and receiving, spurred by the belief that one would incur the wrath of a god in disguise. While offending the gods was a big fear, it’s important to remember that good hosting and good guesting will create a deep bond between both parties because you’re respecting one another. Respect your wayward traveler and welcome them into your home, and they will entertain you with tales from far away lands, and in the future you will find a place at their table. Respect your host and the space they provide you, and you’ll receive gifts and care fit for a god. This giving and receiving encourages goodwill between strangers, and providing care to someone you don’t know is an act of love in its own right.

There’s a rule in American food language: “never return an empty dish”. This rule is especially prevalent in the US South and Midwest regions, but the general idea is that when you meet someone new (i.e. a new neighbor) you bring them a dish of something to welcome them and introduce yourself. You make small-talk, help them get acquainted with the area, wish them well, and then go on your merry way. Then, once your new neighbor has settled, eaten the food you gave them, and had time to make something new, they come knocking on your door and return that dish to you with a new food in it.

That’s a facet of what Xenia can encompass, and we see Xenia acted out in three key ways in VLD: Allura recruiting people for the Voltron Coalition, Lotor hosting the Paladins during their alliance, and Hunk showing his care for others through cooking.

Allura, for all her charms, isn’t that great of a diplomat, especially in the beginning of the story. When she meets the Arusians, she accidentally informs them that their dance of apology isn’t enough, which then makes them think they need to sacrifice themselves on a pyre. She thankfully recovers and lets them continue the dance, and then invites them into the Castle of Lions later. With the leaders of the rebel planets, she has a good presence and is rather suave with her guests, however when attention moves off her and onto the Paladins, and when the question of Voltron comes up, it’s extremely difficult for her to take control of the situation again. The loss of Shiro was fresh, and she really didn’t have a good answer that would reveal they couldn’t form Voltron, so she struggled with taking control back. This isn’t an indictment on Allura, but it is meant to point out how Xenia is not easy to learn. As we follow the Paladins, however, Allura gains confidence in her ability to speak publicly, and as they gather more allies it becomes easier for her to encourage alliances. She goes from panicking and trying to keep Arusians from dying to being able to communicate with allies and command a room. Xenia doesn’t come as naturally to Allura as it does to Hunk, and Lotor has had millennia of practice, but the important thing about Xenia is that you extend your hand and make the effort, even if it’s a little clumsy, because in the end you’re caring about strangers and welcoming them into your home and telling them they have a place at your table.

However, where Allura falls short in Xenia, we see both Hunk and Lotor shine. Let’s examine Lotor’s expertise, first.

Lotor is ten thousand years old, and it’s implied he’s spent much of that time playing the political game of the Galra Empire, as well as learning about other planets. It’s canon that he has a thirst for knowledge, and so couple his curiosity with his need to survive a very blood-driven political environment and you have a golden host forged in fire. It’s difficult to surprise Lotor, since he’s pretty much always two steps ahead of everyone. When he forges an alliance with the Voltron Coalition after his victory at the Kral Zera, Lotor has banners hung that bear the same symbol that Zarkon and Alfor fought under, which also adorns the shield on Green’s back. He specifically sought to recall the good times between the Galra and Alteans, and personally greeted the Paladins on his flagship. He encourages the Paladins to explore and use whatever resources they need, because as their host, Lotor–and by extension the entire Galra Empire–is now at their disposal. He’s the ever-perfect host, inviting his lower-ranked guests to make themselves comfortable, and acknowledging Allura’s rank as princess and personally escorting her along. In a lot of other high fantasy or sci-fi stories, showing the heroes around would get palmed off to a servant of some sort, especially if the host is duplicitous. However, Lotor affords our Heroes and Heroines quite a bit of respect compared to what other characters in his place might do, even going so far as to offer his own personal time to the princess when he has an empire to claim still. Given the canon politics, Lotor logically should have been in constant communication with various officers and securing their loyalty to him, but instead he takes time to approach his new allies and make them feel welcome in the headquarters of their former-enemy.

So while Lotor is arguably the best example of good hosting I’ve ever seen in a show (without it turning out to be some sort of ploy), Hunk’s style of Xenia is equally good if in a different way. While Lotor is shown to essentially be a master of decorum, Hunk is a master in the kitchen and the art of making room for everyone at the table. Hunk has only been in space for a few months to a few years (depending on when in the series we’re talking), he hasn’t had the millennia to research planets and learn all their customs, or train in diplomacy to make up for any lack of education. He’s just a guy from Earth who likes to cook and who especially likes to cook for others. In all prior iterations of Voltron, Hunk has always been “the food guy” or “the slightly dumb, but lovable one”. It’s not particularly flattering, and VLD even pokes fun at how flat his character is historically in “The Voltron Show!” by adding fart gag noises. In VLD, however, we see that Hunk is intelligent and brave, if anxious, and he’s more at home in a home than he is in a Lion. Hunk is a good Paladin, but he is quite possibly the best diplomat in the whole show.

A large part of Hunk’s diplomacy lies in listening. When he’s out in the field, he’s quite possibly the best listener out of the entire team. When there are guests on the Castleship, or when the Alteans are on the IGF-Atlas, he doesn’t just listen, he welcomes them. In scenes from season 8, we really get to see this shine, because as Hunk says in “Day Forty-Seven”, “food has a way of reminding people of moments in time.” Bringing good memories with food can go a long way to putting stress and anger behind people.

Every person has a dish that, when prepared, makes them relax and think of happy memories. In Hunk’s kitchen, everyone eats, and nobody is unwelcome. Whether you’re Commander Lahn and working with Hunk to save your planet from devastating radiation, or you’re an Altean who just wants what’s best for your people, Hunk will meet you halfway and try to see things from your perspective, and offer you a cookie because he feels like it. Hunk’s Xenia is not wrapped up in protocol or etiquette. His Xenia is found just across the kitchen table, with a plate of warm food and a friendly conversation, ready to listen to your troubles and offer a hug, if not a solution.

Agape: Unconditional Love

Now that we have discussed the five prior categories of love as defined by the Ancient Greeks, let’s examine Agape, which can be difficult to conceptualize. “Agape” originates a Greek term, however it wasn’t used very often until Christianity came into the picture, and thus it encompasses far more than even xenia does, because while Xenia is love in the form of courtesy to travelers, Agape’s prevalent definition stems purely from the idea that God loves everyone unconditionally. In fact, “agape” is the term used in the Bible to describe the unconditional love of God, but when you translate it to English, the word simply becomes “love”, losing the weight that it carries in Greek.

The idea of unconditional and divine love is not unique to Christianity or the Ancient Greeks. Throw a rock in any direction and I’m sure you’ll find a culture with a similar concept to Agape. The key aspects of unconditional love is that it is sexless–meaning attraction is unnecessary to feel Agape–and that it is founded in goodwill for others. It feels cheap to throw the quote “love thine enemy” around in this section, because that discounts the importance of Philautia as we discussed it earlier in this essay, but at the end of the day that’s what Agape means. The Bible–which influences much of the definition of this kind of love–would have people forgive the ones who do them wrong, but forgiveness does not mean forgetting, and loving someone doesn’t require forgiving them either.

In VLD, a man loved a woman so much he tricked his closest friends and allies into opening a rift in an effort to save her life. In the process, they both died and revived, cursed with immortality and a thirst for destruction. Zarkon was a man who loved Honerva so much that he doomed the known universe to 10,000 years of his tyranny. Honerva, when she regained her memories, sought vengeance against Voltron for not just losing her son, but also because she blames everyone around her for being the reason why her own son rejected her time and time again. Honerva is the antithesis to Allura in pretty much every way, and in the edited season 8, Lotor is condemned to a cycle of abuse because he’s never offered an opportunity to speak, just like how he was violently silenced by his mother when he disobeyed his father on the colony planet in “Shadows”. Honerva, however, is not.

[ID: A screenshot of S8, featuring from left to right: Lance, Keith, Allura, “Shiro”, Pidge, and Hunk. They face Honerva, who is facing away from the audience so we see the back of her head and suit. Screenshot from “Seek Truth in Darkness”. End ID.]

[ID: A shot of “Allura”’s hand grasping Honerva’s wrist and vice versa. Screenshot from “Seek Truth in Darkness”. End ID.]

Allura being a paragon of growing into Philautia gives other characters the ability to do the same, but as @leakinghate notes in “Seek Truth in Darkness”, that is not Allura’s hand, just as that is not Shiro next to Allura in the prior screenshot. Allura is not the one who was most wronged by Honerva. She was asleep and hidden from the universe. Lotor, however, was subjected to centuries of abuse by the hands of his parents.

Agape is a complicated love, one that requires a person to be able to love everyone unconditionally, but love does not necessarily mean “forgive and forget”. It’s important that Allura impart the enlightenment she gained on her Heroine’s Journey, because this is the point where she can be at peace and claim her cosmic reward, but she cannot do so without the person who was most wronged being able to face his oppressor: Lotor.

[ID: A close-up shot of Lotor glaring at the audience, with the subtitle text reading, “maybe I will take pity on you when the time comes.” Screenshot from “Seek Truth in Darkness”. End ID.]

As @leakinghate​ pointed out, Allura is the one to use her abilities to restore Honerva’s sense of self, but Lotor being present makes this confrontation all the more poignant and intense. This is the opportunity for us to see Agape in its full glory, but with the edits to the final season it’s a pale shadow of what could have been. The universe is about to be reborn because Allura and Lotor stay behind to repair the rift in all realities. We need that Philautia that Allura is able to embody, but we also need Agape. We’re shown countless times throughout the show that good and evil are not so clearly delineated, and that there are shades of gray everywhere. Lotor has been hurt so much by the one person alive who should have loved him unconditionally.

And rather than continue the cycle of abuse and take vengeance, he chooses to let go. We should have seen him take his power back, not in a godly or violent sense, but his power over his fate. He is not his father. And he is not his mother. He is more. By confronting her in this rift of all realities, we see the foreshadowing of season 6 come into full swing and while we are missing much of that original sequence between him and his mother, it’s important to realize that regardless of the content that was removed post-production, he takes pity on his mother in a sense. She’s a flawed person who made bad decisions. He does not owe her forgiveness, and he does not owe her love, but in her finally letting go of not just him but all the spirits of the original Paladins, Lotor himself is able to be free to love in the way he was denied: unconditionally.

The universe needs people who love themselves enough to choose a path of peace, and it needs to be made with the unconditional love of a parent, a friend, a lover, a god. It needs the eternal goodwill of its new creators because the people of the new universe will fuck up. They’ll make mistakes and hurt each other and Weblums will eat planets and the circle of life will continue. But being able to look at the fucked-up universe and say “I love you” is a power that not many have. It takes courage to look at the universe that has wronged you, wronged billions, hurt the found family that’s accepted you, and still find a way to love it.

The new universe is made of love just as the old one was. It’s made with passion, for friends, for family, for strangers, and for yourself. It’s made by people with love and hope and the intent to make the world they live in a little better every day. And that, ultimately, is the true love that spurs the story of VLD forward.

Stay tuned for a companion meta soon, in which we will discuss these forms of love and how they can be twisted and taken to unhealthy extremes.

Works Cited

Dos Santos, Joaquim and Montgomery, Lauren. Voltron: Legendary Defender. Netflix.

LeakingHate, et. al. “Legendarily Defensive: Editing the Gay Away in VLD”. Team Purple Lion. 12 Mar 2019. Web. https://www.teampurplelion.com/gay-romance-cut-voltron/

LeakingHate, et. al. “Seek Truth in Darkness”. Team Purple Lion. 2 Mar 2019. Web. https://www.teampurplelion.com/seek-truth-in-darkness/ Liddell, Henry and Scott, Robert. “Eros”. A Greek-English Lexicon. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3De%29%2Frws

Liddell, Henry and Scott, Robert. “Philia”. A Greek-English Lexicon. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dfili%2Fa

Liddell, Henry and Scott, Robert. “Storge”. A Greek-English Lexicon. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dstorgh%2F

“Self-love”. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-love

Payne, Will. “Botany for the Beginner”. Australian Plants Online. 2006. http://anpsa.org.au/APOL2006/aug06-s1.html

Potter, Ben. “The Odyssey: Be Our Guest With Xenia”. Classical Wisdom Weekly. 19 April 2013. Web. https://classicalwisdom.com/culture/literature/the-odyssey-be-our-guest-with-xenia/

@leakinghate​ @crystal-rebellion​ @felixazrael​ @voltronisruiningmylife​

[engmjr419]

Joice Heth and the Antebellum Depiction

An advertisement for Joice Heth from 1835 Source

Imagine, if you will, it is December of 1835. It’s the end of another week and you’re attending an exhibition in a hotel to settle down. You pay 25 cents at the door for admission, and you’re herded into the exhibition hall where a sea of white faces gathers around a central figure. In the middle of room, is an old black slave woman, filling the room with the smell of an old pipe. 

Her face is a field of wrinkles, her eyes stare blankly out without movement, and her nails are long, unkempt, and filthy. This is Joice Heth, the main attraction, the supposed nanny (or mammy) of George Washington, the father of a country. She entertains the crowd with catholic hymns, historical stories, and warm quotes while the mass of people poke, prod, and examine her beyond any reasonable boundary.

Who and what is she? It would not matter if you were young or old, rich or poor, Slave owner or Abolitionist. You would simply be a face in the crowd, looking at her, examining her, and considering her. Is she really George Washington’s nursemaid? Is she an automation made of black tar, whale bone, and India rubber? Okay, granted she definitely isn’t an automation made of tar, but curiosity still parades the mind thanks to rumors, gossip, and discussion amongst the audience.

To funnel these thoughts into a single sentence, a viewer’s background, social class, culture, and race influence how they digest and interact with entertainment. In this case, the entertainment is an enslaved old black woman paraded around the country under a guise of historical connection. How would you look at her? Would you see her as a pitiful slave? A fellow deceiver of the masses? A mummy? An automation? An animalistic creature? The nursemaid of George Washington? To be more direct, how a society and culture creates racial concepts, class, stereotypes, and caricatures influenced how the audiences of Barnum viewed, interacted with, and discussed Joice Heth.

           Throughout her travels with Barnum and Lyman, a curious multivalence marked the exhibit of Joice Heth. Did her decrepitude mark her as a human oddity, to be marketed like the Chinese woman with “disgustingly deformed” bound feet, the Virginia dwarves, and the Siamese twins whose paths she often crossed on the touring circuit? Was it her scientific value as an embodiment of the different aging processes of the different races that merited her display? Was she an attraction because of patriotic value as a living repository of memories of a glorious past? Because she was a storehouse of ancient religious practices? Or simply because she was a good performer? (Reiss 81).

Joice Heth was P.T. Barnum’s breakout humbug, the 161-year-old 46-pound nanny of George Washington. Barnum quickly discovered as he carried out exhibitions of Joice Heth, that the exhibit was not popular because it was extremely believable but because it wasn’t. The possibility that it was both real and not real enabled layers of discussion to build onto the act. This also preyed upon the growing concerns over identity and deceptions in the growing urban space, especially over increasing anxieties about race with identity in increasingly Abolitionist northern states.

P.T. Barnum played his role in presenting himself in that growing anxiety about deception, but Joice Heth played her own role as well. Race in the period of Joice Heth was beginning to be further looked at (this is ironically reflective of our current issues), especially in regard to identity and the desire for scientific assertions. (79).

Barnum’s first humbug manages to continue postmortem of both Joice Heth and P.T. Barnum, for little is known truthfully about her. The most information about her we have is from a twelve-page pamphlet published by Barnum, which was used for advertising so the information in it is questionable minimally and completely fabricated at worst (I lean for the latter).

A depiction of Heth and Barnum from the Potsville Herald, 1835. Source

Joice Heth was legally purchased by P.T. Barnum from John S. Bawling, who had previously been exhibiting her, for the price of 1000$. Barnum in future years made contradictory claims about his ownership of her as a slave. “In 1854 he claimed to be "the proprietor of the negress," while in 1869 he wrote that his payment only made him "proprietor of this novel exhibition”. These differing claims were made to save face, as the American Anti-Slavery Society had already been founded in 1833 and slavery was illegal in the North in the areas where Barnum was exhibiting the woman (The Joice Heth Exhibit).

The only definite thing we can say is Joice Heth died in 1836 of natural causes (despite Barnum’s claims and people’s theories that she wasn’t dead, the corpse was a fake, the autopsy was a hoax, and that she was preparing a tour of Europe as a phial of ashes) and that she was blind, paralyzed in both legs, and toothless. At the time of her autopsy (which Barnum still made an exhibition of at 50 cents a ticket) she was declared to be somewhere in her 80s, which is still pretty good considering the average lifespan of a slave was somewhere in the mid-20’s (Reiss 78).

The cover of the 12-page pamphlet published by an unknown author (presumably P.T. Barnum and co.)  Source

“Joice Heth, the subject of this short memoir, was born on the Island of Madagascar on the coast of Africa, in the year One Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy-four. Of her parents little or nothing is known, save what she herself relates of them…At the age of fifteen she was cruelly torn from the bosom of her parents and her native land by one of those inhuman beings, who in those days, to enrich themselves, made merchandise of human flesh” (Cook 104).

To fully view how people from different Antebellum backgrounds viewed Heth, we first can look at how Barnum presented Heath. In his pamphlet overviewing her, he mixed both Abolitionist wording with the Antebellum narrative of slave and slave owners. In the above except he says she was “cruelly torn from the bosom of her parents” but later on stating “A highly respectable gentleman of Kentucky…who has generously offered to set them free on being paid two-thirds of what they cost him” in regards to a deal from the owner of her great-grandchildren (a story that was created in face of Abolitionist criticism). This is to both satisfy the increasingly Abolitionist North and the Slave-owning south majority, though we cannot ignore that both sides had elements of the other in them at the same time.

He emphasizes that Joice was “treated by them (the Washingtons) as an hired servant rather than a slave” and “as to accommodate her in the enjoyment of the constant company of her helpmate (Peter)” referring to her transfer to another owner. The narrative continues like this, implying she has “great thankfulness” and she “is highly pleased with the idea of her remaining as she is, until death may finally close this mortal scene with her”, her life ended in Barnum’s possession. One cannot say if she was truly complicit in the act, satisfied with her role, mistreated as an object, or otherwise as the only account we have is from the mouth of Barnum who I personally would take with a grain of salt (as he was the proprietor of family-friendly deceptions) (Cook 105).

Top: The depiction of Joice Heth used in advertising from 1835 to 1836. Source

Bottom: An illustration from P.T. Barnum’s autobiography, Source

Furthermore, we must look at how Barnum and others presented her in depictions and in writing as many newspapers ran stories about the hoax. Many drawings, paintings, and sketches of Joice Heth depict her very differently, from alien-looking, to human, to more animalistic in nature from caricature to truthful depiction. The drawing above on the left is from the advertising poster used by Barnum, depicting her with dark, bark-like skin, elongated hands (referencing her supposed long, talon-like nails), and the clothing of the traditional mammy character (a bonnet and an aproned dress).

The drawing on the right is Barnum’s autobiography in 1855, in it she looks immensely less grotesque. The depiction used as advertising by Barnum is obviously an exaggerated caricature for the purposes of drawing in a crowd. It brings to my mind the concept of a “Tar baby” from the stories of Briar Rabbit, who also had roots from slave tales.

A depiction of Tom Rice, a popular minstrel show actor. Source

Caricatures of Black people and other people of color would be not foreign to the audiences of Joice Heth. Afterall, minstrelsy would have been in full swing by the time P.T. Barnum got possession of Heth. Even before then, caricatures of black faces, racist archetypes (specifically in our case the mammy), and exoticism (specifically the mystical minority concept) would be in the minds of the white faces observing her. Caricatures of these people would depict dark, almost pure black skin, exaggerated anatomy, and archetypical clothing, all of which is seen around Joice Heth.

Newspapers at the time described her in various ways, multiple from the New York area calling her an “animated mummy” (a bit harsh if you ask me). The New-York Evening Star describes her as “very much like an Egyptian mummy escaped from the Sarcophagus” while the New-York Sunday News said “This living mummy, on whose head 161 winters have sprinkled their snows” (Cook 108). A letter to the Editor of the New York Transcript shows some beliefs about “blacks” in relation to Heth’s passing and autopsy:

Another important physiological fact should be stated, which is, that blacks have a much greater tenacity for life than whites, and were it not that, like the domestic horse, they are broken down by servitude, they would live to much greater ages than the Circassian race -- and in the case before us, had it not been for the affectation of the lungs… together with what must have been fatigue to her, travelling and being subjected to the annoyance and importunity of her visitors, it is not improbable that the vital spark might have continued to flicker considerably longer (The Joice Heth Exhibit).

While this belief may seem completely odd and illogical to us at this point, let us not forget that a small population of our culture believes the world to be flat. People of the Antebellum era held the black individuals in their society at a different level, wherever that be on a lower one or a mystical one, typically both.

A political cartoon by Mark Knight of the Herald Sun of Serena Williams. Source

Blacks and other races in American society (among others) typically face racial based Dehumanization and Objectification, where the individuals presumed humanity is metaphorically taken from them and then the belief they have conscious, independent thought. This process obviously was done to slaves as they were treated as property rather than conscious individuals. It still occurs today, for example Serena Williams as well as many other Black Americans being called “gorilla” amongst other things and portrayed animalistically like the controversial political cartoon above.

Barnum does this with Joice through several points, from presumably purchasing her as legal property, to claiming and indulging in the fact she enjoys “Animal food” (it is unclear if that means horse, chicken, or dog), to creating an entire rumor that she is an Automation created from “India rubber, Whalebone, and springs” which only pushed audiences to further prod and examine her to further his humbug, “Her debility was a draw, too, for many came to gaze on- even to touch her- marvelously decrepit body” (Cook 105-106, Reiss 79).

Moreover, from the various newspapers and media calling her a “mummy” to Barnum publicizing, dramatizing, and broadcasting her autopsy as a “spectacular display of race”. As Benjamin Reiss puts it further, the autopsy “dramatized some of the new meanings of Racial Identity and provided an opportunity for whites to debate them (in a displaced register) as they gazed upon or read about her corpse” (79). Joice Heth was continually objectified by the masses, as a topic for discussion, as a thing to examine, and as a being to figure and unearth it’s identity.

The audiences of Joice Heth were probably never made up of one individual group. Poor or rich, Young or Old, Abolitionist or Slave owner, Southerner or Northerner. Each face in that sea of individuals had an individual thought and concept of Joice Heth, if she was real or fake, human or machine, aged beyond human limit or simply mundanely old, a pitiful slave held under Barnum’s thumb or a fellow deceiver who was comfortable in her servitude.

For whoever and however the viewer may have seen her, their opinion was influenced by what they were presented and what rumors they digested, their view of Black americans and slavery as a whole, and their fears or beliefs of identity and race. Joice Heth served to the masses as a way for them to further their concept of identity, race, deceptions in the growing urban site, and assert their influences on the new Antebellum era.

It is ironic then how I, another white face in the crowd, am looking upon Heth and considering her for myself in this era of racial discussion. That I am yet another white individual talking for Heth, in place of her own voice.

Phineas T. Barnum. “The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It In the Universe.” Edited by James W. Cook, 2005, 104-108.

“The Joice Heth Exhibit.” The Lost Muesum Archive, https://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/exhibit/heth

Benjamin Reiss. “P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race” American Quaterly, No. 1, Vol. 51, 1999, 78-107.

[doomonfilm]

Review : Parasite (2019)

Certain films that pass through the hallowed path that is Cannes Film Festival tend to generate monster levels of buzz, and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is no exception to that lucky rule.  The buzz around this film was so thick, in fact, that I decided to check this one out simply on the strength of the general publics’ word of mouth.  Without reading a review of or seeing a trailer for this film, I walked into my screening, and spoiler alert : my mind was blown. 

In South Korea, a family lives in a cramped, semi-basement level apartment, communcally struggling to make the ends meet.  After meeting with his friend Min (Park Seo-joon), Kim (Choi Woo-shik) lands an opportunity to tutor Park Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), the daughter of wealthy parents Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and Choi Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeng).  After visiting the family’s lavish home, designed by famed architect (and former resident) Namgoong, Kim is hooked, and immediately enacts plans to employ his family to Park Da-hye’s family in a myriad of sneaky ways.  After learning that Park Da-hye’s younger brother Park Da-song (Jung Hyun-joon) is an aspiring ‘artist’, Kim convinces Choi Yeon-gyo to hire Kim Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) as his art tutor, under the guise that she is a friend of a friend.  Quickly, the siblings find a way to get Park Dong-ik’s personal driver Yoon (Park Geun-Rok) fired and replaced by their father Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho).  After a bit of research and sabotage, the siblings also managed to get legacy housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun) fired and replaced with their mother Kim Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin).  With Kim’s family in place, and having convinced the family they are employed to that they are strangers, the group begins having visions of occupying a home like the Namgoong home.  Their world is shattered, however, when Moon-gwang returns under strange circumstances during a family camping trip in honor of Park Da-song’s birthday, and the fallout causes waves that are felt by all families connected to the home.

This film is a whip-smart, darkly comedic look at materialism and classicism, with a pinch of suspense and tension sprinkled in by way of deceit on multiple levels.  The Park family, while charming in their own right, clearly value objects more than people, with their fascination on American objects (read : consumerism) permeating to the point that they don the Kim family with American names, as if they are toys/servants.  Despite this subtle power move, the levels of deceit used by the Kim family throw the power struggle on its head, with their ruse being implemented so quickly and efficiently that an artificial trust is built between the two parties.  The classicism is presented via the extremely wide divide that exist between the help and the helped, with both the Kim family and Moon-gwang hiding ENORMOUS secrets literally right under the nose of the Park family due partly to the poorer familys’ need to do whatever they must to survive, and partly to the blind eye that the Park family turns on the poor and the old, with Park Dong-ik literally being repulsed by the smell of the old and the poor. 

This film would not work nearly as well as it does without the monstrous presence that the house exudes, with its notorious reputation as a product of a famous architect serving as a distraction to its own set of deep secrets.  The design of the home fits the decadence of the Park family, with its breathtaking aura being fueled by a mixture of simple (but grand) design that houses a litany of objects and a beautifully manicured lawn.  Moon-gwang’s return, however, opens a door that is both figurative and literal, showing that even those that are implementing a dangerous ruse have room to be surprised and shocked.  The home gives the Park family such a sense of comfort that it almost forms a literal haze around them, with young Park Da-song being the most perceptive member of the family due to his age and innocence being a strong protector against the fog of materialism and the jadedness that life experience creates.  

The writing in this film is textured and tight, with plenty of seeds planted that pay off brilliantly throughout the run of the movie.  The characters are as intelligent as they are funny, which allows them to play slightly over the top without sacrificing a sense of realism or damaging the ever-present tension that grows as the story unfolds.  The cinematography is fluid and flowing, as the camera moves among those that inhabit the world of the film like an observant spectre (much like some of the characters find themselves eventually doing).  The subtle undertones presented in the film feel like a reward to the audience, as Bong Joon-ho is careful not to spoon feed viewers or beat them over the head with information, relying instead on revealing things slowly and timely as the story progresses.  The balance found in the parallel locations of the semi-basement level apartment and the grand Namgoong home works well, with the big secret that the Namgoong home hides serving as a bridge that connects everyone.  The final half-hour of this film is as gripping and captivating cinema as anything I’ve seen all year.

The Kim family manages to be incredibly engaging despite being the true antagonists of the film (though the film really has no protagonists).  Song Kang-ho finds a way to exude pride that is surrounded by a reservation and acceptance of his squalid situation, with Jang Hye-jin’s strong personality offsetting Song Kang-ho's sadness.  Choi Woo-shik brings a teenage curiosity that he mixes with the eye of a hustler and opportunist, and Park So-dam runs the entire show with a keen mix of an assorted skill set, a sharp and actively observant state of mind, and a chameleon-like personality.  As for the Park family, Jung Ji-so displays a proper level of boy-crazy tendencies, and Jung Hyun-joon lets his child-like mischief fuel his performance, making his character reveals  and callbacks hit harder when they are played.  Lee Sun-kyun exudes a quiet strength fueled by an indifference to nearly everything, and a shallowness that eventually becomes his downfall.  Cho Yeo-jeong is arguably the most sympathetic of all the characters, with the love for her family playing against her deficiencies as a mother, wife and housekeeper, essentially making her a trophy wife with minor levels of autonomy.  Lee Jung-eun plays her opening background roles strongly, making her return to the narrative a reveal that opens entirely new pathways of audience experience, judgement and tension.  Appearances by Park Myung-hoon, Park Geun-Rok, Jung Yi-seo and Park Seo-joon round out the film.

This film is a hard one to talk about without revealing too much, and although I doubt that it would damage the experience of seeing this movie if you go into it with a bit of knowledge, this dish is one that is best served without prior knowledge in order to achieve maximum enjoyment.  If you’re a fan of the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, or you like your humor mixed with a respectable level of shock and subtle social commentary, then Parasite is your film.   

[oliverarditi]

The truths between instants

‘The camera cannot lie’ is a phrase that has had currency since the last years of the nineteenth century, although it may well struggle to retain any utility in our present era of  the digitally constructed image. It was always founded on a stark misunderstanding of visual experience. The camera, rather, can never speak truthfully, because the truth is never that people and objects are frozen rigidly between moments. Any facial expression presented in a photograph is a fugitive state, stolen from the transition between one movement and another: there was never a time when ‘that was the expression on their face’, because no observer ever read the meaning of a face from outwith the geometry of events that we perceive as the sequential flow of time. The truth is a moving target, which every still photograph is fated to miss. The camera presents us with images from which two of the four physical dimensions have been excised, and attempts to convince us that they can be readily reconstructed from the two that remain.

This is not to say that photographs cannot be truthful, simply that their defining characteristic of optical verisimilitude does not give them a greater claim on veracity than paintings, poems, pebbles, peaches, or parkour. Truth is not quantum, not a matter of discrete immutable facts, visual or otherwise; it is not digital, but analogue. Truth was abundantly present in Journey, Story, Memory, a career retrospective of the Sicilian photographer Ferdinando Scianna, into which we stepped, as though through a portal between worlds, from the demoralised, sun-bleached quadrangle of the former Franciscan friary that houses Palermo’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna Sant’Anna. Initially, a truth of Sicily; or beneath that even, a truth of Bagheria, a small town ten miles to the east of Palermo in which Scianna grew up. In these black and white images (as far as I know, all of Scianna’s work is monochrome) the contingency of a motionless optical impression is clear: a man balances on a pole over water, with rowing boats in front of him; a child runs along a street; a child is upside down, springing over a railing and down a terrace, one hand on each; two men are diving from a high rock, with no water visible beneath them. In none of these images is there a complete physical context, or sufficient narrative clues for the viewer to be certain of their prosaic ‘truth’; instead they must imagine, that the men are diving into water, that the end of the pole that is out of shot is anchored to the land or to a boat, that the child has risen early from bed and will later devour a bowl of pasta alla Norma provided by a weathered grandmother who has seen his like before and knows his tricks.

Truth arises in what the photographs direct us to outside themselves, and it arises between the images, in the connections that appear when they are viewed as a body of work. Scianna is both visually insightful and theoretically informed, and so he responds to the fleeting truths of visual experience neither with the heavy-handed objectivism of documentary photography, nor with self-expressive subjectivist formalism. In this show he chooses to group his work thematically, and it is only in the first exhibition space that the theme is geographically defined - and there it is also defined by the youth of the photographer, who did not leave his native town until he was twenty-three. In that context it is easy for him to let us know what truths have concerned him, but the individual works also read very clearly in that interzone between subject and object: Scianna aims to let the images speak for themselves, but he has clearly chosen carefully what kinds of image to construct, and knows very well what they are likely to say.

The subjects and genres that Scianna chooses are extremely varied, ranging from the intimate to the detached, the domestic to the public, the local to the cosmopolitan, the social to the aesthetic. There are still-lives, street scenes, portraits, fashion shots, landscapes and objets trouves. It would clearly be difficult to take one image in isolation, an aerial photograph of an island, say, or a piece of bent wire on a beach, and say ‘this is by Ferdinando Scianna’, but group enough of them together and his eye emerges unmistakably. He is an accomplished technician, manipulating depth of field and sharpness of focus in ways that emerge as characteristic once the viewer has taken in enough of his work, but what left the most striking after-images on my retina was his dramatic and geometric deployment of chiaroscuro, which reminded me at times of the work of the great American comic artist Jaime Hernandez. The two creators share some insights about visual grammar, and both marshal the affective power of geometric and graphic elements to comment on pictorial and narrative denotations.

Scianna’s fashion work, to which he came later in his career, is represented here by a series of photos he took for Dolce e Gabbana of the Dutch model Marpessa Hennink. In these, he engages critically with the absurdities and artificiality of the genre, often attempting to subvert its dominant tropes. At the same time he is clearly infatuated with the image of Hennink herself, which is extremely striking, but when that image is permitted to ‘speak for itself’ all of its specificities are swamped by the morphologically prescriptive fetish-commodity that images of women’s bodies become in contemporary visual culture. Huge prints of her face and her naked torso can only be read in the same way as any other hyperreal image of a beautiful, slender young woman. Much better is the image that positions her next to a homely, dirty butcher’s boy with a huge side of pork over his shoulders. In a way these pictures define the limit condition of Scianna’s critical insight, which usually leads him to endow his portraits with some context, but which also permits him to frame Hennink’s image as an autonomous aesthetic object.

The portraits in the show include images of some cultural figures of personal significance to me, such as Martin Scorsese, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roland Barthes, and most interestingly Jorge Luis Borges. Each portrait, most of which position their subject alongside some significant object, or in some meaningful place, is accompanied by an essay by Scianna on his relationship with them, or on the circumstances of the shoot. Borges was apparently amused, in a very Borgesian way, as Scianna notes, ‘to become the object of images he would never see’. This seems an interesting commentary on the observation that photographs preserve an optical impression that has no counterpart in visual experience, other than the experience of looking at a photograph.  Nobody else ever saw those images of Borges, except in the photographs that Scianna took; the visual truth of Borges was and remains unavailable, to him and to us, except in the moment of seeing him.

The broad sweep of this extensive and almost overwhelmingly varied exhibition enables the entire oeuvre of more than fifty years’ work to emerge as geographically situated in relation to the artist’s roots in Sicily. I haven’t mentioned Scianna’s travelling, or the images he captured in far-flung places, but they are a significant part of his body of work, and in the short, insightful essays with which he introduces each section of the show, he demonstrates unequivocally how grounded he is in his native soil. This awareness of a relationship with his point of origin enables Scianna to grasp truths about other places, about the world, that can be elusive in the absence of a solid frame of reference.  Like the exact rectilinear boundaries of his photographs, Sicily provides Scianna with such a frame. I forget who it was that said in something I recently read, that to be a citizen of the world it is necessary to know where you come from; I would struggle to justify such a claim with any evidence relating to the island’s aesthetics, or artistic or photographic traditions, but I am left by the exhibition with a very powerful impression that this is definitively Sicilian photography. This is the mutable, emergent truth that seeps out between these transient monochrome flashes of the imagery that Scianna traversed on his journey away from and towards his home.

[theculturedmarxist]

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck; written by Boden, Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet

The production and release of Captain Marvel, the new science fiction superhero adventure from Marvel and Disney, has a number of remarkable features, but none of them involve the film’s drama, action or characters.

Briefly, Captain Marvel, in convoluted fashion, follows US Air Force pilot Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) who absorbs an awesome energy source, making her potentially “one of the universe’s most powerful heroes ever known,” according to the film’s publicity.

However, six years later, she is suffering from amnesia, doesn’t know who or what she is and has become a member of the repressive Starforce Military under her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law). The shapeshifting Skrulls, the apparent enemy, force Danvers to crash-land in the US in the mid-1990s. But all is not what it appears. Danvers discovers secrets about herself and about a “galactic war” between two alien races.

Not much of this is interesting, although it is noisy and “action-packed.” Captain Marvel, as a film, is predictable, empty and tedious. The more “sensitive” scenes on Earth, focusing on Danvers and her African American friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and daughter (Akira Akbar), are possibly the most contrived and least convincing.

The first genuinely noteworthy fact about the new film, not surprisingly, concerns money.

Disney, the film’s distributor, is the world’s largest media company, with some $100 billion in assets. With a market value of $152 billion, it ranks as the 53rd largest company of any kind in the world, just behind Total (oil and gas), Merck (pharmaceuticals), the Bank of China (one of the four leading state-owned commercial banks in China), Unilever, DowDuPont and BP.

Media reports place Captain Marvel’s combined net production and global marketing costs at $300 million. To date, the film’s global box office stands at $774 million.

Captain Marvel is truly “corporate entertainment”—i.e., the very process by which it came into being prevents it from being entertaining or enlightening in any meaningful fashion.

This type of large-scale, officially sponsored filmmaking, whose success is avidly promoted and tracked by the media and business publications in particular, inevitably intersects and overlaps with other aspects of American establishment culture. In the case of Captain Marvel, this means militarism and feminism specifically.

The US Air Force was involved in the production of Captain Marvel.

In fact, Task & Purpose reported that Marvel Studios launched the official start of production “with a photo of Larson, and Air Force Brig. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt, then-commander of the 57th Wing and the service’s first female fighter pilot, atop an F-15 at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.”

“To prepare for her role, Larson,” according to The Wrap, visited the Air Force base “to join simulated dogfights. The film’s red-carpet premiere included testimonials from Air Force men and women and a flyover by the Air Force’s Nellis-based Thunderbirds.”

Task & Purpose, a website that follows the American military, also cited the emailed comments of Todd Fleming, chief of the Community and Public Outreach Division at Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs: “The Air Force partners on any number of entertainment projects to ensure the depiction of Airmen and the Air Force mission is accurate and authentic. Our partnership with ‘Capt Marvel’ [sic] helped ensure the character’s time in the Air Force and backstory was presented accurately. It also highlighted the importance of the Air Force to our national defense.”

“[Captain Marvel] is not part of a recruiting strategy but we would expect that audiences seeing a strong Air Force heroine, whose story is in line with the story of many of our Airmen, would be positively received,” Fleming said.

The issue of female recruitment is no small matter. American imperialism, recklessly gearing up for war against Russia, China and other rivals, needs vast new supplies of human fodder. Task & Purpose explains, “The spotlight on airmen [in Captain Marvel] comes at a time when the Air Force, like the other services, is hunting for the next generation of pilots. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps are all short 25 percent of their pilot billets, according to a GAO [Government Accountability Office] report published this summer; the Air Force in particular has doled out cash incentives like candy in a vain effort to prevent pilots from defecting to the private sector. Indeed, the branch’s plan to increase its number of squadrons by 76 to Cold War levels will require an additional 40,000 personnel, further straining the service’s recruitment capabilities. At the Air Force Academy, female cadets are increasingly encouraged to vie for pilot spots to help bridge that gap.”

Larson, who has made all sorts of useless (or worse) comments about #MeToo, alleged sexual abuse and her own “social activism,” like most of affluent Hollywood, is entirely oblivious to the criminal role of the US military, the greatest source of terror and “abuse” on the planet by an order of magnitude of 100 times or more.

The female heroism in Captain Marvel, of course, has been greeted with plaudits. Entertainment Weekly noted excitedly that the film would “mark the first time a woman will be headlining her own solo superhero movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also marks the first time a woman will direct a superhero film for Marvel Studios: Anna Boden will co-direct with her Mississippi Grind partner Ryan Fleck.”

The hope is that Captain Marvel will do “for women” what Black Panther did “for African Americans”—which is, of course, nothing whatsoever, except for a small layer of prominent studio executives, writers, performers, etc.

This comment from Deadline is typical: “One film finance source believes that it’s pretty much certain that Captain Marvel will see $1 billion around the world and break the glass ceiling for female-led pics at the global B.O. [box office], dashing past Wonder Woman’s final global of $821.8M.”

As is this Vox headline: “Why Captain Marvel’s milestone status creates so much pressure for it to succeed—Why Captain Marvel represents more than just a superhero movie.” The article proposes to answer these important questions: “What does a woman superhero mean for Marvel Studios and the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe]? What are the takeaways from Captain Marvel’s already overwhelming box office success? What does the film have to say about feminism? What might have happened if it had flopped? And who gets to shape the conversation and narrative surrounding it?”

The final and perhaps most remarkable feature of Captain Marvel involves its writer-directors. (And, secondarily, its performers. What are Larson, Jude Law and the talented Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, whose acting in The Land of Steady Habits we recently praised, doing in this rubbish?)

We have made the point previously on more than one occasion about the objective significance of the “long march” of numerous so-called independent or art filmmakers toward empty-headed, “blockbuster” movie-making. We noted the examples of Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, etc.), Alan Taylor (Terminator Genisys), the Russo brothers (the Captain America and Avengers franchises), Kenneth Branagh (Thor), Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, etc.), John Singleton (a Fast and Furious installment), Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, one of the James Bond fantasies), Marc Forster (another of the Bond films, Quantum of Solace), Sam Mendes (yet another Bond film, Skyfall) and Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman).

To that list, one can add the more recent examples of Jon Watts (two Spider-Man films), Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok), Ava DuVernay (A Wrinkle in Time) and Ryan Coogler (Black Panther).

In a number of these cases, the filmmakers had earlier indicated vaguely oppositional political views or a certain concern at least for the fate of broader layers of the population.

The lure of large amounts of money is obviously an issue. But perhaps the more pertinent question is: what are the social and ideological conditions that make writers, directors and performers susceptible to this “lure”? It is not inevitable. Artists, including in the US, have been known to repudiate such offers with contempt. Almost inevitably, however, such resistance has been rooted in political and social conceptions and opposition of a left-wing character, sustained by a confidence in the better instincts of the population and its willingness to struggle. Those conceptions and that confidence are sorely lacking today.

The directors of the dreadful Captain Marvel, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, should not be entirely unfamiliar to readers of the WSWS, although the context—big-budget Hollywood—may be unexpected. We have reviewed two of their films in the past, Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008).

The Atlantic notes with surprise that Fleck and Boden “until now have worked in the realm of quiet, sensitive indie films.” More than simply “quiet” and “sensitive,” Half Nelson centers on an obviously left-wing high school teacher working at an inner-city school in Brooklyn.

A 2006 New York Times article about the making of Half Nelson is worth citing. The Fleck-Boden film, wrote Dennis Lim, “is a political allegory, a film about a would-be visionary who wants to change the world but can’t get his act together and is often his own worst enemy. It’s not a stretch to read it as a comment on the sorry state of the American left.”

“‘That was more or less conscious,’ the film’s director, Ryan Fleck, said of the political subtext.” Fleck and Boden “started writing Half Nelson … four years ago, as the Bush administration was preparing to invade Iraq and the antiwar movement was gaining momentum. ‘It felt like we were going to protests every other week,’ Mr. Fleck said recently. ‘But ultimately you don’t have the energy to do it all, and you feel like you’re doing very little. A big part of the frustration was the inability to make meaningful change.’

“The activist spirit comes naturally to Mr. Fleck, who was born to socialist parents on a commune in Berkeley, Calif. As a child he was taken to rallies and protests. As a teenager he read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.”

In an interview with Slant magazine, Fleck, asked about religion, replied jokingly “I was raised communist.”

Fleck and Boden’s Sugar, about a Dominican baseball player playing in the minor leagues in the US, the WSWS commented, was “about immigration and acculturation, capitalism and exploitation, hospitality and loneliness.”

Now, a decade later, Captain Marvel.

The same 2006 Times article referred to above contained this passage:

“Mr. Fleck said he hoped that their future projects would remain, however obliquely, rooted in a sense of social justice. ‘Filmmaking is kind of a vain hobby when maybe we should all be taking to the streets,’ he said. ‘But it seems irresponsible not to be informed by politics in some way.’

“Ms. Boden’s idealism is more tempered. ‘I don’t have an inflated sense of what a movie can do,’ she said. ‘But you can at least try not to put something out there that you don’t believe in.’

“Mr. Fleck added: ‘That’s a rule we try to follow, to not put garbage in the world.’”

Unfortunately, they have now.

[judgestarling]

Driving Professor Sydney Brenner

One of my scientific idols, Sydney Brenner (1927–2019), who helped determine the nature of the genetic code—he discovered two termination codons—who co-discovered mRNA, and who shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2002 for deciphering the sequence of events leading to the development of a multicellular organism from a fertilized egg into an adult nematode, died on April 5, 2019. He was 92. In my only face-to-face (actually face-to-back) conversation with him, many years ago, I told him that his cigarettes will kill him. And, indeed, they did… at 92.

I met Professor Brenner in 2002 when he was awarded the Dan David Prize in Israel, had a brief correspondence with him via email in 2013, and throughout my entire scientific life, I devoured his papers and commentaries.

The Dan David Prize is a weird institution. It is governed by my former employer, Tel Aviv University, and the Dan David Foundation, a somewhat secretive private charity that supports a variety of academic causes, with a heavy emphasis on archeology. Every year the Dan David Prize grants three awards of $1 million each for outstanding achievements in three categories: Past, Present, and Future. Each year, an academic committee decides the specific topics for each of the categories to be recognized the following year. (The selected fields for 2019, for instance, were Past: Macrohistory, Present: Defending Democracy, and Future: Combating Climate Change).

Prize laureates have to donate 10% of their prize money to doctoral scholarships for outstanding Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholarships for outstanding researchers in their own field from Israel and around the world.

The first awards ceremony took place at Tel Aviv University on May 2002. The theme for the first Future prize was Life Sciences and the prize was split among three laureates: Sydney Brenner, John Sulston, Robert Waterston. (Seven month later, in December 2002, we learned that that Brenner and Sulston were awarded the Nobel Prize together with H. Robert Horvitz for “for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death.”)

As expected, the novelty of the million-dollar prizes attracted a lot of attention from the Israeli press. Most of the journalists, however, focused on John Sulston, who had the courage to insist that some scholarships be awarded to Palestinian scholars.  

In 2002, I was the “Gordon Professor of Life Sciences” at Tel Aviv University—a grand title accompanied by no endowment—but in May 2002, for two days, I had an even more impressive title, I was Sydney Brenner’s chauffeur. His assigned chauffeur for the series of lectures and ceremonies simply stood him up, and I volunteered to drive him from the hotel to the University for his scientific lecture to faculty and students. Professor Brenner was not very impressed with my miniature Honda, but he was happy that I did not raised any objections to his chain smoking in my car. My ride with him constituted the first and last time that I enjoyed the traffic congestion in Tel Aviv, as it meant having a long conversation with Prof. Brenner.

Brenner first asked me if I knew Francis Crick. I told him that Crick was a scientific hero of mine, but that I think that his “reverse learning theory of dreams” was an unworthy detour. 

“That’s what I think too,” he replied, “but since Crick was always right in the past, I’ll withhold judgement. People didn’t believe his tRNA, his selfish DNA, and his Central Dogma, but he was always right. I have the nagging feeling that his theory on dreams will also turn out to be true” (1).

“And what about Jim Watson,” I asked.

“Don’t want to talk about that racist arse,” was his quick reply.

When we arrived at the place where he was supposed to give his first talk, I asked him about the slides. 

“I’ll be careful,” I said, “I promise not to drop the slide tray.”

“What slides?” he muttered and rushed to the podium.

He then proceeded to deliver one of the most fascinating lectures I’ve ever listened to. No slides, no notes, just a stream of consciousness by a feverish brilliant mind, who demolished every logical distortion, every sign of mental laziness, and every methodological shortcut.

Genomics? “Enormous factories for generating billions of data points that are a poor substitute for thinking.”

All other -omics? “Forget about them. It’s biochemistry, stupid.”

Universities? “Places where students can Xerox themselves to death” (2)

The human genome project? “A billion-dollar generator of junk-DNA sequences.”

He then proceeded to tell us how he reached the conclusion that sequencing the human genome in its entirety is not the only way to gain insight into the workings of human genetics.

It was the middle 1980s and several people, including Robert Sinsheimer and Renato Dulbecco started pushing for the establishment of a mega project to sequence the human genome. Given the speed of the sequencing technology at the time, a major stumbling block was finding people who would be willing to do such a seemingly boring and tedious task as sequencing the genome. Walter Gilbert advocated a large center, highly integrated, and organized along industrial lines. Sydney Brenner half-jokingly suggested establishing “a penal colony where sentences consisting of large-scale sequencing projects would be carried out.” 

The prospect of becoming involved in an industrial project did not appeal to Brenner. There must be a way to get results without sequencing every piece of junk in the human genome. He came up with two alternatives: sequencing the human exome, i.e., about the 1% of the human genome that was known to perform a selected-effect function, or find a Readers Digest version of the human genome that could be sequenced faster and more cheaply than the human genome, yet would be as scientifically meaningful and rewarding.

Someone—Sydney Brenner did not remember whom—suggested he look into a paper published in the late 1960s in American Naturalist.

“What, I’ll find my answer in a nudie magazine?” said Brenner, playing on the difference between “naturalist” and “naturist.”

And there it was, in a paper by Ralph Hinegardner (Evolution of cellular DNA content in teleost fishes. 1968. Am. Nat. 102:517-523) at the end of Table 1: Tetraodon fluviatilis (green pufferfish) with 0.40 picograms DNA. 

A congeneric species with a smaller genome was subsequently found, Tetraodon nigroviridis (green spotted pufferfish) with 0.35 picograms. For reasons that most probably concerned availability of tissues, Brenner’s choice was another pufferfish, the famous, poisonous, and exorbitantly expensive Japanese delicacy, the fugu (Fugu rubripes) (3). 

In 1993, he reported the initial characterization of the fugu genome (Brenner S, Elgar G, Sanford R, Macrae A, Venkatesh B, Aparicio S. 1993. Characterization of the pufferfish (Fugu) genome as a compact model vertebrate genome. Nature 366:265–268). He found that the fugu haploid genome was 7.5 times smaller than the human genome of which more that 90% was unique. The fugu genome had a similar gene repertoire as the human genome, and according to Brenner and colleagues, “it is the best model genome for the discovery of human genes.”   

Sadly, his suggestion to completely sequence Fugu and only sequence the human exome did not convince the granting agencies, which at this point in time were desperate to find the next “moonshot,” the next big project, that could be sold to the masses as a cure-all for all humanity’s ailments (4). 

A partial fugu genome was published in 2002 with Sydney Brenner as the last author one year after the publication of the human genome. The genome of Tetraodon nigroviridis was published in 2004, three years after the first draft of the human genome. Brenner was not an author on this paper.

After Brenner’s lecture in 2002, I started reading everything Professor Brenner had ever written… with one exception—a seventy-four page methodology paper (Barnett L, Brenner S, Crick FHC, Shulman RG, Watts-Tobin RJ. 1967. Phase-shift and other mutants in the first part of the rII B cistron of bacteriophage T4. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 252:487-560) that Francis Crick predicted no one will read. As far as I am concerned, Crick was right again.

The second time I communicated with Prof. Brenner was eleven years later.

In 2013, as I was fighting the obscene conclusions by the equally obscene ENCODE Project, I discovered that the accepted historical narrative according to which the term “junk DNA” was coined in 1972 by Susumu Ohno as part of his work on the role of gene and genome duplication was inaccurate (see here). The term was used in the literature at least 12 years before Ohno used it. The trail of clues led me to Cambridge in the late 1950s, and following a suggestion by Tim Hunt, another Nobel Prize Laureate, who used the term “junk DNA” independently of Ohno, I contacted Dr. Brenner.

Dr. Brenner was very generous in his answer

October 7, 2013

Dear Dr. Graur

I can confirm that we were using the idea of junk in the genome in the sixties in Cambridge. Indeed in the late fifties we were very much concerned with this big puzzle: Analyses of the nucleotide composition of bacteria showed that the ratios of AT to GC varied in different bacteria from 1:3 to 3:1, whereas the composition of ribosomal RNA (which we thought at the time was the information intermediate) was constant. One possibility was that the coding information only occupied a small fraction of the DNA the rest being junk. [Noboru] Sueoka killed this idea when he showed that the composition of the DNA could be measured by equilibrium sedimentation and that when he sheared the DNA to smaller sizes separation of two kinds of DNA did not occur and the composition was maintained down to small pieces. It was the discovery of messenger and understanding the degeneracy of the code that solved this problem.

All through the sixties we were concerned with the problem of the C paradox in higher organisms. DNA contents varied over enormous amounts which had no relation to biological properties. The development of  CoT analysis by Roy Britten revealed that this could be explained by the fact that "single copy" DNA represented only a minor fraction of the DNA and that large and variable fractions could be represented by repetitive DNA with different annealing rates.

We also had to contend with the fact that the heterogeneous RNA in animal cells (which was the messenger) had a very high molecular weight suggesting that the genes of higher organisms were very large - of course we did not know that there were introns at the time. It was very natural to use the term junk to describe this useless DNA and I was using in Cambridge in the sixties and I gave lectures on this in the Woods Hole Physiology course in 1968 and 1969, where incidentally I read the papers which showed the small DNA content of the puffer fish. Of course we had a lot of difficulty to explain to people why this useless DNA was being maintained and had not already disappeared. This type of “logic” is still part of the psychology of most people and especially of the ENCODE gang.

My distinction between two kinds of rubbish - junk and garbage - which you quoted in your paper, came much later when I discovered that most languages made a distinction between the rubbish you keep and the rubbish you throw away.

I was interested very much in your [ENCODE] paper (could you send me a copy please) and I am still working on the problem.

I think the key is to understand that there are two processes going on in our genomes. One is change in the DNA by mutation or transposition and other is its fixation. I think that the assumption that selection does not work for neutral changes and that they can only be fixed by random drift is wrong. The big driver for fixation of neutral changes is linkage to selected genes - the hitchhiking effect.

You may also be amused by the story that when micro RNAs were discovered somebody wrote to me demanding that I withdraw a statement I had made that 97% of the human genome was junk. I replied saying I was willing to change this figure to 96.8% And another one: when asked what the function of all this extra DNA was our reply was it was there to maintain the viscosity of the nucleus.

Thank you for being so patient.

Sydney Brenner

In December, I got permission to quote his email

I feel most remiss in not replying to your letter more promptly. You are welcome to quote from the letter.

Sydney

Sadly, that’s where the correspondence ended. My follow-up emails went unanswered and his colleague in Singapore, Dr. Byrappa Venkatesh, wrote to inform me that Prof. Brenner “has not been well,” and may not have seen my emails.

Notes

(1) Crick’s publication on the reverse theory of dreams has been cited over a thousand times in the literature, but did not prove popular with psychologists. It did, however, reinforce modern post-Freudian ideas that dreams are meaningless, and the paper by Crick and Graeme Mitchison on reverse learning contributed to the marginalization of dreams in clinical psychological practice.

(2) Brenner was known for his legendary love of wordplay. For example, he instructed students to “neurox” (copy from paper to brain) rather than Xerox (copy from paper to paper. He also invented “Occam’s broom” to complement “Occam’s razor.” The function of Occam’s broom was “to sweep under the carpet what one must in order to leave your hypotheses consistent.” 

(3) In 2013, Tetraodon fluviatilis and Tetraodon nigroviridis were found to be misclassified, and were subsumed into genus Dichotomyctere. As expected, molecular biologists didn’t give a shit about the proper biological nomenclature; since 2014 the name Dichotomyctere nigroviridis was only used 30 times, whereas the invalid name Tetraodon nigroviridis was used more than 4,000 times. The genus Fugu is actually a minor synonym of the valid name Takifugu. The valid name in this case fared better than Dichotomyctere. In the last 10 years, Fugu has been used 3,960 times, while Takifugu was used 9,430 times. 

(4) All subsequent wasteful and boastful megaprojects from ENCODE to the Brain Project can be traced to the decision to reject Brenner’s proposal. And as we all know, the Human Genome Project has indeed eradicated all disease, ended world hunger, stopped global warming, and put an end to the use of Comic Sans in PowerPoint presentations.

[consilium-games]

A Rambling and Brain-Fried Post on Hermeneutics

It's a godless and blighted hour (11AM) as I write this, and scheduling heartache has left me swirly-eyed and sleep-deprived. Lately I've absorbed a pretty specific combination of media that's led me to think dazedly about hermeneutics, basically "systems of interpretation of a work of media" such as stories. And in light of my past couple games, and a game whose premise I haven't finished chewing on, I think getting some thoughts down (and maybe even some discussion?!) might help someone. I don't know, maybe me?

Inciting Events

By now anyone reading this has heard of Undertale. Spoilers happen here. The creator of Undertale recently released a . . . possibly-related videogame called Deltarune. I say possibly related with good reason, and I don't intend to directly spoil the game as it just came out, but it gave me interesting questions about narrative interpretation--hermeneutics--more generally. I also will probably talk a bit about Doki Doki Literature Club! which you might not have encountered or played. Some high-level spoilers will occur. This post will contain zero 'fan theories', as that has nothing to do with my game-design beat--rather, academic theories on "how do people approach interpreting stories" has a lot to do with my pretentious narrativist game-design ethos!

Also of note, I've watched a playthrough of a videogame called Witch's House, and without spoiling that, it struck me that one of the puzzles will behave drastically differently, depending on whether the player reads one of the ubiquitous hints. Meaning, not only do the hints constitute a mechanic, but discerning how to trust hints becomes a game objective. And further, since "reading a hint" is an in-game action, but recalling a hint is not, the game may behave unpredictably to the player who reads a hint, doesn't save, dies, and reloads--and doesn't read the hint again.

Lastly, I've revisited some analyses of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, and it put me in mind of discussions about This House Has People In It and The Cry of Mann, and in particular: discussions about those discussions, arguments about how presenting interpretations can color people's formed interpretations. And last warning, I'm still pretty brain-fried, I'll blame that if I end up rambling incoherently.

Setting Out

There's a lot of literature about literature, and literature about literature about literature. Perhaps some day people will spill ink about ink than anything else. Fortunately, we haven't yet entered a boundless singularity of self-referentiality. So I can afford to stake out a couple terms I expect I'll mutter:

hermeneutic: a specific approach, strategy, or philosophy to understanding a work. This can be totally informal ("Christian songs are easy to write, just take a pop song and replace 'baby' with 'Jesus'") or very rigorous ("Derrida's analysis of identity puts it to blame for religious and nationalist fanaticism"), but just treat it as technical shorthand for "approach to understanding a thing".

auteur theory: mostly used in film analysis, in our backyard it means "the author of a work arbitrates its meaning". So, eg Stephen King can definitively and canonically say "Leland Gaunt is an extradimensional alien, not Satan, the Adversary and the Prince of Darkness, from orthodox Christianity". And if King says this, that makes it true and the audience should understand Needful Things in light of this fact King told us with his mouth but not with his story.

Death of the Author: by contrast, 'Death of the Author' means that once a work has an audience (the creator published it, or put it on Steam, or hit Send on Twitter, or just played a song on their porch), the audience has liberty to interpret it however they please, and the creator's word about What It Means has no more weight than the audience. Which would mean that if King tells us Leland Gaunt is an alien, and Needful Things is closer to Lovecraft than King James, that's cool--it's a neat theory, Steve, but I think it's about . . . (Note: I don't know if King has made this claim, but Needful Things does have a few weird neat textual indications that Gaunt is some kind of Cthulhu and not the Lightbringer.)

code-switching: technically from linguistics, borrowed into social sciences, in this post it means a creator of a work putting something into the work that implicitly or explicitly prompts the audience to consciously alter or monitor their interpretation. As a very simple example, suppose someone says with a straight face and deadpan delivery, "I'm a law-abiding citizen who supports truth, justice, and The American Way." Now, suppose they make air-quotes around 'law-abiding'--it rather changes the meaning, by prompting the audience to reinterpret the literal wording.

Okay, I . . . think that'll do. So hi, I'm consilium, and as a goth game designer it should come as no surprise that I like my authors with some degree of living-impairment. Interpreting a text has an element of creativity to it that the creator simply can't contribute on the audience's behalf. More than that though, there just seems something off about the idea that, say, a reader of Needful Things might read about Sheriff Alan Pangborn, and interpret the specific way he defeats Leland Gaunt as allegorical of how cultivating creativity, community, and empathy can help prevent the dehumanization of consumerism and capitalism--only for King to say "no, Alan was just a parallel-universe avatar of the Gunslinger and thus could defeat Gaunt, who was just an extradimensional eldritch predator". If King were to say such a thing after audiences have gotten to know and love Alan on the terms presented in the text, and King were to come back with "maybe that's what I said but that's not what I meant"--my response would have to be a cordial "interesting theory, but it doesn't seem supported by the text".

So, I generally like Death of the Author! But . . . but. I've taken to gnawing on this idea in this game-design blog because--of course--It's More Complicated Than That. Roleplaying games as a medium work about as differently from other media as, say, sculpture and songwriting. And despite essentially just putting bells and whistles and protocol on top of possibly the oldest human artistic medium--storytelling--RPGs have a lot of weirdness they introduce for analysis and critique.

For example, my reservations on Death of the Author! Specifically: taking "in-character, in-game events and narration" as the work of interest, and "the other players at the table" as the audience, what happens when you describe your character Doing Something Cool--based on a mistake? We need a teeny bit of "creator as arbitrator of meaning", so we can at least say, literally, "oh, no, that's not what I meant"! Otherwise, the other players' "freedom of interpretation" leads to your character doing something nonsensical and now they have to have their characters respond--they have a worse work to create within.

This gets at something pretty foundational in treating RPG stories as art: almost any other medium has a creator create a work as a finished thing, and only then does an audience ever interpret it. Whether plural creators collaborate or not, whether the work exists as apocryphal oral tradition and mutates through telling, whether some audience members take it up as their own with flourishes (such as with a joke), there still exists this two-stage process of "author creates" and then "audience interprets". Except in stories within roleplaying games as generally practiced.

In RPGs, the creators almost always constitute the entire audience (I'll ignore things like "RPG podcasts" and novelizations of someone's DnD campaign here, as they make up a vanishingly tiny minority). The audience of the work not only creates it though--they experience the work almost entirely before you could ever call the work 'completed'. Even if we falsely grant that every game concludes on purpose rather than just kinda petering out because people get bored, leave college, have other things to do, or whatever else killed your last game, players experience the story in installments that don't exist until the end of the session. So "interpretation" gets . . . weird.

Basic Hermeneutics

On a surface level, the story of an RPG usually doesn't demand a lot of depth and analysis: some protagonists, inciting incident, various conflicts, faffing about as the PCs fail to get the hint, some amusing or tense or infuriating whiffs and failures along the way, and charitably, some kind of resolution to the main conflict and dramatic and character arcs. Usually metaphors tend to be explained straight up ("my character's ability to 'blur' things reflects her own weak personal boundaries and over-empathization"), and motifs often even moreso ("guys, seriously, what happens every single time your characters see spiders?"). A lot of this comes from necessity of that very immediate, improvised, as-we-go nature of the medium! You have to make sure your audience gets what you intend them to get--because in mere seconds they'll create some more story that depends on the bit of story you just created. And back and forth.

But, quite without realizing it or meaning to, we can't really help but inject other chunks of meaning into stories we help create. Maybe even chunks of meaning that contradict others' contributions at the table. Spoiler alert: I do not have a theory or framework to address this. The Queen Smiles kind of digs into this, but this goes beyond my current depth. So, what can we conjecture or say, what scaffolding could we build, to build a more robust "literary theory of game stories"? I have some basics as I see them:

Auteur theory (creator arbitrates meaning)

This can only apply to one player's contributions, not across plural players.

Necessary, for both basic clarification and because perfectly conveying the ~*~intended meaning~*~ frankly just doesn't work as a thing you can do off the top of your head when your turn comes to say what your character does.

GMs (where applicable) shouldn't use this to defend poor description or ill-considered presentation of "cool things for PCs to care about and cool things to do about it"--just because the GM intended the cop to be sympathetic doesn't make him so, and if he's not sympathetic . . . the protagonists will not treat him so.

Dead authors (freedom of interpretation)

Players can try this out on their own characters, and should, but should ask other players about their characters if something seems odd, confusing, intriguing, or otherwise. "You keep making a point of meticulously describing your character's weird nervous tic. The exact same way every time. How come? What's it mean?"

Players of course can answer engagement like this any way they please, including stabbing themselves with the quill: "you figure it out, if your character were to ask mine, mine would supply her answer which I may or may not know".

GMs (where applicable) should really lean on this: improvise, throw ideas and themes at the wall, and frantically build on top of the audience's ideas, since those ideas clearly resonate with the audience.

Code-switching (deliberately modifying interpretation)

We all do this all the time: the dragon is not telling you to roll for your attack, after all. The GM is, by switching between narrating the world, and communicating with a player.

More subtly we do this when switching between "what our character believes" and "what we players reasonably expect". Your costumed superhero might think of herself as righteous vengeance incarnate, but you hope everyone at the table knows you think she's conceited and delusional at best, and a full-bore psychopath at worst. This hopefully doesn't mean you play your psychopath superhero any less sincerely, but it does require a bit of ironic detachment, you know something about her that she can't know about herself (beyond that she's a fictional character, of course).

Even more subtly, sometimes weird game interactions (of the rules, other PCs, other players) imply things we wish they wouldn't, but can't quite control, and often everyone knows this. "Why can't you muster up your courage one more time?!" "Because I ran out of Fate points," your character doesn't say. Instead, your fellow authors share a look over the table, and gingerly tiptoe around an obvious, character-appropriate thing, and seize on some other thing to say or do, hopefully just as obvious and character-appropriate. But, everyone switched codes, from "characters doing things for reasons" to "the rules inform our story, and we follow them because they help".

Prepaid analysis (game-specific themes or arcs)

A lot of games have some baked-in themes right off the shelf, and provide good starting points and directions of inqury for interpreting a story born out of playing them. Monsterhearts deals with teenage cruelty and queer sexuality. Succession deals with faith, one's place in the world, and how these relate to morality. Bliss Stage tumultuous coming-of-age and taking care of one another, or failing to. If you use eg Lovesick to tell a story that you can't approach or interpret in light of "dangerous, unstable, desperate romantics"--you probably picked the wrong game. You should pick a better game.

Besides these themes, many games also have more abstract ideas--arcs or processes--that they really enshrine. Exalted gives Solars (mythical heroes patterned after ancient folklore) a mechanic called "Limit Break" which mechanically funnels a Solar toward destroying themselves with their own virtue. Likewise, even if you somehow excise Monsterhearts' focus on teenage cruelty and sexuality, you really shouldn't play if you want to avoid social stigma as a theme, because most of the mechanics hinge on it.

We players often deliberately bring in some themes and ideas we'd like to play with, too. "I want to play a character whose determination will be her own undoing--and probably everyone else's." Or even just "I really like themes where physical strength is tragically and stupefyingly unhelpful". Those make for great starting points and prompt good questions to interpret stories!

I know someone with more literary theory and less sleep deprivation could add a few basic givens, but I think this at least goes to show we have ground to stand on and territory to explore. And probably more importantly, it points out some useful kinds of questions we can ask about the story of a game and how to interpret it. So, why did I ever bring up Undertale back there?

Audience Awareness

The following works have something in common: House of Leaves, Funny Games, This House Has People In It, The Cry of Mann, The Shape on the Ground, Undertale, and Deltarune. Besides "being very good", they all explicitly pose the audience as an entity within the story--but, they do it in a very unusual way.

See, the story of a Mario game is about Mario even if the player controls Mario--and though it's a subtle distinction, this also applies to eg Doom, where you play as an explicitly nameless faceless protagonist, intended to be your avatar. Even in the most plot-free abstract game, if we can salvage out a story (if perhaps an extremely degenerate and rudimentary one like 'how this game of chess played out'), the 'story' happily accommodates the audience within it.

That's not how the list I gave does things. Not at all.

Instead, the works I listed single out the audience as something else: in House of Leaves, unreliable narrators call out the unreliable interpreter reading the narrative. In Funny Games, the audience doesn't participate--but the audience watches, and the film knows this, and singles the audience out as complicit in the horrible events that unfold. This House Has People In It casts us as the prying NSA subcontractor watching hours of security footage and reading dozens of e-mails, and makes it clear that even our Panopticon of surveillance doesn't give us a complete account of reality. The Cry of Mann casts us as gibbering voices from an eldritch plane of cosmic horror. The Shape on the Ground poses as a disinterested and clinical psychological test, but it clearly has some ideas about what would lead us to take such a 'test'.

And then there's Undertale and Deltarune. Last warning, I'll say whatever I find convenient about Undertale and probably '''spoil''' something about Deltarune in the process. I do not care.

Hostility to the Audience

If Undertale itself had a personality, one could fairly describe it as "wary of the player": it plays jokes and tricks, but it knows the player is a player, of Undertale, which Undertale also knows is a videogame. It gives you ample chance to have a fun, funny, and sometimes disturbing game, with a lot of tempting and tantalizing unspoken-s hiding juuuust offscreen. But Undertale's point as a work involves giving you the chance to not do that while still, technically, engaging with the game.

Namely, the Genocide Run. By killing literally absolutely every single thing in the game that the game can possibly let you kill, the game very purposely unfolds entirely differently--and on multiple playthroughs, the game will outright take notice of multiple playthroughs, and challenge you for--in effect--torturing the narrative it can deliver by forcing it to deliver every narrative. Let's think about that for a moment:

Most videogames have some kind of excuse of a narrative, and lately, many have really good, nuanced stories to tell--and many of those even go to the (mindbendingly grueling) effort of delivering a plurality of good narratives that honor your agency as a player--maybe even a creator, as best a videogame can with its limitations.

But, what can you say about a story that has multiple endings? Or multiple routes to them? And what can you say about a story that, in some of its branches, simply goes to entirely different places as narratives? It strains the usual literary critical toolkit, to say the least.

Now, a game like Doki Doki Literature Club! approaches this exact same idea of addressing its story as manipulable by the player, of the player as an agent in the story, but in a pretty straightforward way as far as "a narrative that works this way": the narrative already describes "and then the player came along and messed everything up". All of the player's different routes serve this one overarching narrative: the game has an obsessive fixation on you and wants you to play it forever (which, given its nature as (roughly) a visual novel . . . perhaps asks quite a lot).

Undertale takes a step back from even this level of abstraction, though: the implicit and often hidden events of its world and narrative unfold / have unfolded / will unfold, and a given player's "story" consists of "what the player does to this multi-branched narrative-object". The game judges you to your face for contorting its weird timeline-multiple-universe meta-story . . . but lets you do it, to prove the point it wants to prove.

And without much controversy, we can conclude that point roughly summarizes to "playing games just for accomplishment and mastery doesn't give as rewarding an experience as immersing in the story and characters". The subtler point under that, though, comes out through multiple playthroughs: "immersing yourself in a story and cast of characters too much will harm your life and your enjoyment of other things". Undertale, were it a person, would probably look nervously at you after several 'completionist' playthroughs to "see all the content", and it explicitly describes this exact behavior to the player's face as something objectionable--even calling out people who watch someone else play on streams and video hosts.

"Just let it be a story"

Which brings us to Deltarune. I've no doubt dozens of cross-indexed internet-vetted analyses and fan-theories will arise in the next few months (and I look forward to them), but on a once-over the game seems to have one specific thing to say to the player's face: "you are intruding on a story that isn't about you". The game opens with an elaborate character-creator (well, for a retroclone computer RPG), then tells you "discarded, you can't choose who you are, and you can't choose who the character is either". It has fun with giving the player dialog options--then timing out and ignoring the input. It even tells the player in in-game narration that "your choices don't matter". The story itself doesn't even care very much about the player's character, instead hinging on the development and growth of an NPC, following her arc, without much concern for the player's thoughts on the matter. And at the very end, after playing mind-games with the player's familiarity and recognition of Undertale characters--the close does something both inexplicable and disturbing. This is not your story: it's not about you, your choices don't affect it, and it doesn't care what you think.

As an aside, it seems like quite a good game--but I think that comes in part because of this very drastic intent and the skill with which it executes that intent (ie, bluntly at first, subtly enough to almost forget, and then slapping hard enough to prompt a flashback).

And holding this alongside Undertale's stark (even literal) judgment of the player for 'forcing' the narrative to contort to accommodate the player's interaction with that narrative, it seems clear to me that where Doki Doki Literature Club! has fun with the idea of "player as complicit in something gross, and as motivating something cool", Undertale and Deltarune seem much more interested in making the player take an uncomfortable look at how they engage with narratives.

Defensive Hermeneutics

On one hand, Funny Games, The Cry of Mann, and Undertale and Deltarune stare back at the audience, judge them, treat them as an intruding, invading, even corrupting force from outside the work, criticize the audience for enjoying the work, and even call the audience out for engaging in detailed critique, like some kind of cognitive logic-bomb, or a cake laced with just enough ipecac to punish you for eating more than a slice.

But on the other, House of Leaves, This House Has People In It, The Shape on the Ground, and Doki Doki Literature Club all want the audience to participate, to scrutinize, to interact with the narrative and question it, as well as themselves. What does that first camp have in common besides wariness and hostility to the audience, and what does this second camp have in common besides treating the audience as creative of the work's meaning? I'll call it "a defensive hermeneutic".

Notionally, the audience has hermeneutics: ways of understanding a work. But, a creator can't help but have some understanding of the likely mental state and view of a(n imagined) audience, approaching the text in some way. A creator can thus bake in or favorably treat some approaches over others, and can even use this to guide criticism about their work.

That first group, which I'll call "defensive", has one striking common feature: the 'surface level' plots either don't matter, or have very simple outlines. Funny Games' plot is exactly as follows: two psychopaths terrorize, torture, and eventually murder an innocent family. The Cry of Mann shows us what looks a lot like a small child trying to mimic a melodramatic soap-opera, before Things Get Weird (and any extant 'surface level' plot goes under the waves). And Undertale and Deltarune give us the stock "hero appears in strange land, arbitrary puzzle-quests ensue, climactic final confrontation restores peace to the land". This serves as the set-dressing and vehicle for the actual plots--or sometimes simply cognitive messages--to get into the audience's minds:

"What, exactly, do you get out of slasher torture-porn movies? Why do you create the market for things like this?" "Are you sure about where your sense of empathy and identification points you? What makes you think you have a grip on reality enough to judge who's right and relatable, and who isn't?" "Don't just passively consume games like they were kernels of popcorn. But don't gorge yourself on the same dish, either--there's more out there, but you have to look for it."

In short: these works don't want you to nitpick the works themselves. Their entire message consists of second-or-higher-order interpretation. To put it another way, they want to make sure you don't pay attention to the handwriting, because the gaps between the words spell out a poem and the words themselves only create those gaps.

Participatory Hermeneutics

By this same token, I'll call the second camp "participatory": they treat the audience as a kind of creator in their own right--Borges did this a lot and with relish in his later years, and Doki Doki Literature Club! makes it a game mechanic. A creator using this "participatory" hermeneutic essentially doesn't consider their work 'finished' until the audience interprets it. This should sound familiar. The audience contributes meaning to the work, by interpreting it, and a "participatory" work counts on it. And, to contrast with the "defensive" camp: they use complex (sometimes even overcomplicated) plots, which matter and inform interpretation, and tie into the second-order meaning that the work attempts to convey. The "surface level" plots don't solely carry a tangled "interpret this" into the audience's brain. Instead, the surface plot has enough complexity to have a plot-hole, enough character depth to have problematic characters, and enough weight on its own merit to have unappealing implications. In other words: even without convoluted postmodern hoity-toity highfalutin' hermeneutic jibberjabber, a member the audience can find a story they can just enjoy on its merits.

Before anyone angrily starts defending the characters in Undertale or complaining about the directionlessness of This House Has People In It, I hope I've made it really clear, I lumped these works into these two categories based on an overall tendency and commonality, in approaching this one really abstract concept, and as with any work, any binary you can think of will have gradations if you look among "all works, ever". And, even more importantly:

I really love all these works, and I love what they do and how they do it. They all also have flaws, because flawed humans made them, and flawed humans enjoy them. That all said: the "participatory hermeneutic" has everything to offer for my purposes, while the "defensive hermeneutic" . . . might get a post of its own someday.

So What Now?

In aeons past, I wrote about feedback and criticism, and this seems like a good time to dust off that idea with a new application. In particular, that old post talks simply about players (and GMs where applicable) helping each other to contribute their best, and get the most enjoyment out of a game. Here, we'll look at some basic questions players can pose each other as creators of a work, rather than participants of a game or members of an audience.

So let's take that 'player survey' and repurpose it for Dark Humanities and getting a toehold on literary criticism:

Can you describe your approach to your character?

What do you want to convey about your character?

What was one thing you want to make sure we all understand?

How do you interpret my character so far?

What theme or motif do you think our characters express together?

What misconception or misunderstanding would you like to clear up or prevent?

What themes do you want to explore?

And just like the 'player character questionnaire', everyone should update and refine their survey every few sessions. As a given game goes on, for example, you might get to know one of the PCs so well that you never need to worry about "misconceptions or misunderstandings", regarding that character's motivations and personality and thematic implication. But, that character's connection with eg themes of parental abandonment might change, and when that topic comes up, you can devote a question or three just to asking things like "might your character be treating this person as a surrogate mother-figure?" Maybe the player never thought of it that way! Maybe the player thinks that would be a great idea! But neither of you will think about it without pausing a moment to consider things like this.

And once everyone has shared a bit about their characters' themes and clarified everyone else's, you can discuss deliberately pursuing an idea, through your characters. Obviously your characters have no motivation for this, but your characters don't even exist, so they don't have any say in the matter.

For example, cyberpunk naturally deals with corporate oppression, alienation, dehumanization, and technological obsolescence. But, when one PC regularly takes recreational drugs, and baits another into joining them, a third concocts elaborate revenge fantasies, and a fourth picks up broken people like stray cats and tries to parent them into being functional . . .

Maybe they all share a more specific theme of "dysfunctional coping mechanisms". The drug-user is nice and obvious--and their partner joining them in partaking perhaps has a need to belong. The vengeful obsessive might be compensating for feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability by hurting or preparing to hurt others. And the self-styled Good Samaritan and would-be Guardian Angel might be doing the opposite--just as unhealthily.

Importantly, everyone keeps playing their character, the character they made, the character they want to play. But, with some good chewy discussion about story, everyone can also look for spots where, indeed, their character might just so happen to--do something to further this sub-theme of "dysfunctional coping mechanisms", on top of the background of alienation, obsolescence, and dehumanization.

Academic, critical, literary discussion of roleplaying games as games seems like a sadly underexplored subject. But critical discussion of the stories themselves, the ones happening at each table, might as well be completely unknown--so here's hoping someone can build on this!

[rumandtimes]

I Don’t Trust Atheists on TV

__________________________________________________

Winfred Thoroughfare

Assoc. Reasonable Man Contributor

There’s something unsavoury about television personalities in general, but especially those that address the topic of religion. As a reasonable man, I don’t trust religious personalities on television at all, but I couldn’t say that I distrust overt atheists any less or believe in them any more than the commercial evangelists.

The Call To Atheism

For an out-and-out atheist to take to the stage and the limelight, they must have some sort of mission. Namely, to sell their book, but on the back of that goal they have a supplementary objective: the destruction of religion. TV atheists usually don’t espouse the benefits of one religion over another and typically hate them all. Their goal is to destroy world religion. But as most of them in the English-speaking circuit come from the United States or England, they usually set their targets for Christianity, making little distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism, but viewing Protestantism as slightly more evolved because it can in certain cases be more secular, and usually making no distinction between Orthodoxy and liberalism, since such a divide is unimportant to the U.S. / U.K. audience.

While they are no worse than idiots spreading religious lies and falsehoods to a closed loop of believers on TV, televisions atheists are often consumed by their particular egos and in propagating the achievement of their respective book. Even atheists who feign humility will go on and on about how humble they are, and take the stage to speak of how they do not care for recognition. The companionship of atheism and egoism is likely, probably because the atheist feels as if there is a thousand-year-old tradition spanning human existence up into the majority of the present population, yet they alone in their limited group of intellectuals have solved the ultimate problem: that the big, existential lie of monotheism does not exist.

Everyone knows it’s not so simple. It is an easy matter to prove that any religious text is demonstrably false, and every religious tradition is inconsistent and inane more often than not. But that does not negate the purpose religious has in society, which is not a historical or scientific one, but a bluntly cultural function that often guides socioeconomic behaviours.

Christianity in the United States, for instance, is a markedly isolationist, greedy, and self-indulgent religion; it exists to justify the biases of the congregant, not to challenge a sense of conformity or growth. While American Christians might take umbrage with that observation, pointing to charitable works by their millions of churches and blanket ideals of amicability, religion in America is more often an economic identity or a regional heritage than a calling to a universal standard, and the threat of hell to the nonbeliever out-levers the embrace of opposing factions to a ubiquitous degree.

The Mormons, who may call themselves the most American sect of Christianity (as they claim Jesus was an American) prioritise charity, discipline, and humility for the congregant — all which could be viewed as selfless virtues. But, of course, the Mormons are also extremely strict about social habits such as embracing all forms of abstinence, and their charity comes as a cloak over the dagger of proselytisation and attempts at conversion. Humility on the individual level may be cooperative, but at the institutional level it plays a part in enforcing conformity and obedience from the top down. Charity comes with expectation, discipline comes with sacrifice, and humility comes with ceding control. While it may be hard for a believer of such transactional and oppressive religion to hear, there are forms of Christianity that ask the believer to give up nothing, and instead revel in what there is to gain in following ‘the one true way.’

While religions are often polluted and poisoned by administrative strangling of the freedoms of their lower communities, all religions at their centre have a commentary about the nature and purpose of life, a narrative on the conquest of death, and a guide to live a happier and better existence. Most people are not blind to the corruption of the global clergy, but are happy to ignore and accept the nonsense in return for the community and spiritual gains, or at the very least, the illusion of these comforts. The evangelist atheists underestimate this along with the capacity of their audience whom they ostensibly hope to convert, and underestimate the mortal terror most people have of death and living a useless life.

To broach this fact, many TV atheists speak to the fact that they don’t care what a person believes or how they find comfort, so long as it falls within the cliche utilitarian principle that it does not harm another person. For these atheists however, that is a hard definition to make, because they are very much building a public profile and a career on exterminating religion because they view religion as necessarily irrational and damaging.

Take the prominent TV atheists, while all of them are somewhat fading as of late: Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Stephen Fry, Daniel Dennett, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Nye — it is difficult to trust any of them on the topic of religion. Not because they can easily and conveniently poke holes in religious structures, as we all can, a child can grasp the paradoxes and mistruths of a religious story or text, but because they do not offer an alternative set of mind.

Becrying a problem and then failing to point to a solution helps no one. How will religion die? Where is the answer to that question? They avoid this question. Yet, to the TV atheist, questions of god are easy: Is God all-good? Of course not, because the world is a place that is not all-good. Is God anthropomorphic? Of course not, expecting the creator of the universe to resemble humankind is a clear limit of human hubris and egocentrism. Is God real? Of course not, there is no evidence that a god exists, and all religious accounts we have are clearly incorrect, so there is more reason not to believe and remain atheist or at the very least agnostic than there is reason to believe, therefore any god does not exist. Everyone but the deepest and most repressed religious fanatic has asked themself these questions and come to these rather obvious conclusions, and they didn’t need to map it out in a lengthy book to do so. Yet, still, to the vast majority of people it simply does not matter.

If you meet a Christian on the street and become upset that this man could believe in such a stupid, corrupt, and repressive religion as the Christian church, what will you do? Tell him that the church is corrupt? He will respond that the message of Christianity is dependent on Jesus, who is perfect, not the church, which may well be corrupt.

What if you tell him that Jesus did not exist? Or that Jesus was just a man, and not a deity or demigod as the Christians claim? He will respond that it is irrelevant, because the Bible is a narrative handed down through the generations and not a book of current events, and he values the heritage of traditions set forth in the Christian faith, regardless of the perception nonbelievers have of the Bible, and regardless of whether the account of Jesus exactly correct or not the message of Jesus is real, and that is all that matters.

What if you tell him the message of Jesus and the Bible is inconsistent and self-contradictory? He will respond that it is the duty of a good Christian to see the true, all-good message of the Bible by picking out the good parts as scripture, and ignoring the bad parts as a list of examples of traps of sin not to fall for.

Any argument you throw at this man about the history, epistemology, or philosophy of the Christian faith are irrelevant, because all he cares about is the end result: a belief that Christian teachings will guide a good life, and holding an absolution from the fear of death. Atheists can spout off their nonsense as much as they want, but unless they have a good alternative on how to live a meaningful life and how to not fear death, nothing they say actually focuses on the points at hand. And it is these two questions atheists routinely fail to address.

The TV atheist would tell you to live a life that feels good and helps others, and to accept the inevitability and futility of death. Not only are such statements callous and almost entirely incompatible with human psychology, they are easily criticised through quite valid complaints against hedonism and fatalism. Just as easily as religion in practice falls prey to the atheist attack, atheists’ advice in practice also can quickly fall flat. If religion is a lie, it is a lie that helps the individual live their life.

Atheists are brought back to their initial debate: If god (a higher, infinite purpose) doesn’t exist and if believing something doesn’t hurt anyone else, there is no use in changing the world as it is. But religion is an exception, because while it may help the individual, it hurts society, therefore there must always be a separation between church and state. Yet atheists are forced to reconsider the fact that religion is actually bad for society, and if it indeed isn’t at least worse than the alternative, then to consider the problem that promoting atheism actually trips the lines of not hurting others.

If atheists are spreading anti-religious rhetoric because they know religion to be false and consider it useless or redundant, but in so doing break the spirits of religious people, they are causing harm to others with out of a personal grudge or for the purpose of a vanity project. And if it turns out that human beings start to feel hollow and morbid in the broad absence of religion, or a replacement of religion, and the atheists are not able to provide that replacement, then they will have dismantled a potentially essential part of society, not only in transgression of their values of utilitarian freedom of ignorance and freedom of belief, but also to the detriment of many disillusioned peoples’ lives.

TV atheists would tell you that religion actually does not offer people anything, and everyone would be better off without believing in myths and lies, but people believe in existential lies all the time. The whole of human existence is based upon illusion, not least of which the illusions of the senses and the illusions of consciousness. Religion may be false, religion may be stupid, but by the very rules atheists set for themselves about what is acceptable for other people to believe, religion does not cause enough harm to justify an atheist making a highly public profile and international campaign in favour of destroying religion.

Atheism is not the same as education, as, again, many religious people are fully aware of the gaps in their religion already, but they choose to ignore them. That is an informed decision to remain ignorant of a problem, which is very different to being ignorant of that problem in the first place. Atheists setting out to teach Christians the truth about Christianity because they want to look so informed has a reverse effect of making the atheist look foolish and narrow-minded. Once atheists are making arguments about the weakness of religious thought, it is no longer an educational session but is just that, an argument, and if TV atheists are utilitarian as they claim then they should recognise there is no utility in arguing a moot point. Even is a religious person lapses from a religion based on being persuaded by arguments, they might change their nominal identity and retract support for a religious movement, but are their core values and daily routines really all that likely to change. They are the same person, but they just no longer check the “Catholic” box on registration forms, and now they will attend annual atheist book signings instead of attending weekly mass (which one could argue is a downgrade in practical social terms).

Many of the complaints atheists have are also complaints religious people have: Corruption in churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues; Vapidity of religion in politics; Deviation of contemporary religious teachings from the revelation of ancient religious texts; The failure to modernise the message of some religious doctrines on a regular basis. These are not religious failures, but social failures, and as the religious person would be quick to point out, religion is the solution to social ills, not the cause.

An atheist arguing with a believer about society, where religion is the solution to one person and religion is the problem to the other person, won’t get anywhere. It would be much more useful to actually argue solutions. Bill Nye arguing religion in the objective that undermining Christianity would somehow bolster Darwinism was misplaced; he should have stuck to solely explaining evolution rather than argue with someone who refused to listen to what he was saying based on irrelevant defiance of facts. That is not a religious problem — as many, if not most, Christians embrace evolution (not to mention, many nonbelievers refute evolution on baseless grounds) — it is a problem of dealing with an idiot. Tracing the gospel of Jesus will never advance that conversation, because that was not the question at issue, and Nye should have seen through and restrained himself from the red herring. Just because an idiot wants to invoke a “religious exception” to facts does not mean it is worthwhile to focus on the appeal to religion, as the tantrum against facts is the real point of contention.

TV atheists going off about religion in public sounds more like TV religionists than not. They both have a message to sell for their own sake, usually a financial or even spiteful incentive to push those ideas, and are driven above all by an egoism of hearing themselves speak a correction to the flawed masses while reaffirming just how right they are and how their own rules do not apply to themselves. In short, they want attention.

An instance I completely lost all possibility of respect for Richard Dawkins is when he gave a televised speech and took questions from an audience. All the audience were likeminded to him, as you might imagine the kind of draw to a commercial book promotion for a text Dawkins had authored and was willing to sell and sign for a price. There was no ‘reaching the masses,’ only an atheist author playing an atheist crowd, or — as they say — preaching to the choir. One spectator asked Dawkins a moral question, a chance for Dawkins to build a moral philosophy to replace the absence of modern religious guides to life, and that question was, shockingly, if gay incest was morally acceptable and even healthy. Disturbingly, Dawkins agreed with his pervert fan and said that it was okay, specifically for a lesbian mother to have sex with a lesbian daughter, or for lesbian sisters to have a long-term or exclusive sexual relationship.

A perfect example of how TV atheists will say anything to sound contrarian and build up a stir while playing their fanbase, and of how completely devoid of the human condition their thinking is. Having sex with a family member, or against an imbalance of power, is not solely wrong because it could lead to genetic diseases or questions of parenthood as Dawkins assumed. Those are costs to be reckoned after the fact. But it is wrong in the conception of the act because it violates the family structure and destroys the development of a normal and healthy life if a parent views their own child as a sex toy to be groomed into adulthood, and it violates the requirements of happiness and satisfaction in consent if there is a power imbalance in a purposefully mutual relationship.

While the loser in Dawkins’s audience obviously didn’t realise it, there is a need in human relationships to have a bond on a personal level, to have an unconditional bond on a parental level, and to have a familial bond on the sibling level (including cousins). People’s relationships are not just sexual.

Promoting incest in the presence of contraception or homosexuality as Dawkins did in an offhanded comment is disgusting and disturbed, because such a broken system would be harmful to the people involved on a social, biological, and individual level, depriving them of the value of having a family. Viewing each person as a sexual object, and each household as a harem in the process of self-breeding where people have no worth outside of being violated by their close kin, not only undermines the first and most major drive that people have in forming new relationships despite the risk with new people but it also corrodes the safety and security of life at home. There is a reason that most people don’t have an urge to have sex with their family members, and where it does happen occasionally it has never in the history of any human society on Earth been viewed as most normal and best long-term option.

Just because people consent to something does not mean it is good for them, and two lesbian siblings having sex with each other could only lead to disaster (or is likely the product of some previous disaster), no matter whether Dawkins and his acolyte have given them the go-ahead. As pornographic as it might feel to have sex with a sibling to the Dawkins-brand of utilitarian, such a perversion of biology could never compare to the fulfilment of going out into the world and meeting someone who cares for you on a purely sexual level without destroying the deeper relationship you have with a sibling for the rest of your life after the hormones wear off.

Most people know that hooking up with an ex or a co-worker is a bad idea, yet Dawkins is telling people to go for their mom if she’s into it and they bring a condom. And as a biologist, hiding behind the title of biology to push evolution as a trojan horse for atheism, Dawkins should — should — have immediately noted that such a stance is evolutionarily unsustainable if adopted to any real degree, and that it comes off as somewhat homophobic and ill-informed to acquaint doing gay stuff with doing incest and then say it’s cool only because “they can never have children.” Gay people are not black holes of morality, nor are they dead ends of evolution, which Dawkins neither said nor implied, yet that was implied by what he said.

Perhaps tellingly, Dawkins and fan completely failed to understand the fact that sex is a behavioural more than a procreative act — another misconception about human nature Dawkins ironically shares with the church. As a general rule, as well as an absolute rule, say no to incest.

While that’s Dawkins, and maybe people never respected him anyway, the other TV atheists have a repetitive air to their talks of wasting their time (Bill Nye), pushing an ulterior agenda (Sam Harris), going on a pointless rant (Stephen Fry), flattering their own ego (Richard Dawkins), suffocating people with the obvious (Daniel Dennett), being generally unsufferable if not all of the above (Christopher Hitchens), failing to properly contextualise the issue (Neil deGrasse Tyson), or acting out as a contrarian (Bill Maher). If being reasonable is the only goal of the TV atheist, they ought to reason out the fact that religion does play a role in people’s lives, and solving the issues of child rape or poor education or genocidal conflicts are not as simple as saying, “abolish the church,” because the church is a manifest if flawed representation of religion, and religion itself is not responsible for those atrocities.

If anything, religion is a meaningless term — especially in hyper secular and materialist societies like the United States, Britain, European Union, China, and Russia — and especially in hyper dogmatic societies such as Pakistan, Iran, Tanzania, Israel, and Argentina. Religion means whatever the religious person wants it to, and that is not due to ignorance as the TV atheists believe, but is actually by design.

People convert religions, lapse, mutate, and protest their teachings in accordance with their own beliefs. Just because this happens behind the scenes and in silence for most people does not mean the internal doubts and realignments do not take place. And at the end of the day, religion is still there, because people need a sense of purpose and a reason to live their lives, and because most people (unlike the impenetrable exterior of the common TV atheist) don’t want to die — and the concept of death includes aging, being outperformed by rivals, feeling useless, losing a sense of purpose or time, feeling regret over memories, and facing the unknown in both the present and the future.

Religion helps people by telling them lies. Such as in America, American-Christianity telling people everything happens for a reason, telling people that god has an individual purpose for them, telling people that money does not corrupt but instead empowers, telling people that they are guaranteed to live forever in a perfect existence after the first inevitable death which they already know is coming, telling people that they can never be alone because god is always with them, telling people if they do the right thing the right thing will happen for everyone in the end. No one in their right mind could live in a world where they did not believe each of these things were true, regardless if religion is what gets it to them.

Having a handful of rich, famous, and disillusioned men complain about the idiot commoner rejects reality, or complain that the idiot commoner is being scammed by the insidious clergyman, because they just won’t accept that their lives are meaningless, and that there is no plan, and that there is no afterlife, is — frankly — mean-spirited, impractical, dishonest, harsh, and somewhat insane. Atheists may have qualms with the rabbinic tradition, but what is the harm whatsoever in a Jewish person believing that they have a calling in life and suspending disbelief is something challenges that identity? That does not mean that religion cannot or should not be reformed constantly, but the TV atheists need to start asking what is their calling, and what truly does it mean to be religious.

[xtruss]

Q. & A.

Robin DiAngelo Wants White Progressives to Look Inward

The Author of “White Fragility” Discusses Her New Book, “Nice Racism.”

— By Isaac Chotiner | July 14, 2021 | Robin DiAngelo

“All white people have absorbed racist ideology, and it shapes the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves in the world.”Source photograph by Jovelle Tamayo (2019)

In 2018, Robin DiAngelo, an academic and anti-racism consultant, published the surprise best-seller “White Fragility.” The book, which argues that white people tend to undermine or dismiss conversations about race with histrionic reactions, climbed best-seller lists again last summer, when the murder of George Floyd and the surging Black Lives Matter movement forced American institutions to address structural racism. Major corporations, such as Amazon and Facebook, embraced the slogan “Black Lives Matter” and brought DiAngelo in to speak. Millions of Americans began to consider concepts such as systemic racism and look anew at the racial disparities in law enforcement, and DiAngelo became a guide for many of them.

DiAngelo’s success was not entirely without controversy: critics claimed that her definition of “white fragility” was broad and reductive and that DiAngelo, who is white, condescended to people of color. Carlos Lozada, of the Washington Post, wrote, “As defined by DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable. . . . Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point.” In The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote that DiAngelo “makes white people seem like flawed, complicated characters; by comparison, people of color seem good, wise, and perhaps rather simple. This narrative may be appealing to its target audience, but it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone else.”

Last month, DiAngelo published a new book, “Nice Racism,” which argues that even well-intentioned white progressives—the types of people who might read DiAngelo’s work—are guilty of inflicting “racial harm” on people of color. She writes that “the odds are that on a daily basis, Black people don’t interact with those who openly agitate for white nationalism,” but they do face a different danger: “In the workplace, the classroom, houses of worship, gentrifying neighborhoods, and community groups, Black people do interact with white progressives.” She continues, “We are the ones—with a smile on our faces—who undermine Black people daily in ways both harder to identify and easier to deny.”

I recently spoke by phone with DiAngelo about “Nice Racism.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether her work includes structural critiques of racism, why she has become so popular over the past year, and whether it’s possible to disagree with her and not be a racist.

How important is attending workshops like the ones you run and talk about in the book if America is going to become less racist?

I’m not sure that it has to be a workshop, but it does have to be education in some form or format, because we’re not educated in this country on our racial history, and of course workshops are an excellent way to gain that education. If they are not followed up and sustained by continuing conversations, then they’re not very effective. Stand-alone, onetime workshops I don’t think are effective.

What is the goal of your work, if white people, as you say, are never going to be completely free of racism?

Less harm, to put it bluntly. I am confident that as a result of my years in this work, I do less harm across race, and that is not actually a small thing. That could translate to one hour longer on somebody’s life, because the chronic stress of racism, for Black people and other people of color—literally, it shortens their lives. I would definitely like to do less harm.

Your work starts from the premise that history and society have made all white people racist. But I was trying to figure out whether you were making a structural critique or offering structural solutions to racism, in part because so much of the book is about workshops.

The foundation of the United States is structural racism. It is built into all of the institutions. It is built into the culture, and in that sense we’ve all absorbed the ideology. We’ve all absorbed the practices of systemic racism, and that’s what I mean when I say we are racist. I don’t mean that individuals have conscious awareness of anti-Blackness, or that they intentionally seek to hurt people based on race. That’s not what I’m referring to when I make a claim like all white people are racist. What I mean is that all white people have absorbed racist ideology, and it shapes the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves in the world, and it comes out in the policies and practices that we make and that we set up.

What needs to change structurally?

Well, the homogeneity alone at the top guarantees that advantage would be built into those systems and structures by the people in the position to build them in. This doesn’t have to be conscious or intentional, but, if significant experiences and perspectives are missing from the table, they’re not going to be included. If a group of architects is around a table designing a building and all of them are able-bodied, they’re simply going to design a building that accommodates the way they move through the world. It’s not an intentional exclusion, but it will result in the exclusion of people who move differently.

You have to have multiple perspectives at those tables, and you can’t just take the additive approach, like, “Oh, well, we included some more diversity,” if you don’t also address power. That’s what I wanted to say. You can have policies that appear to be neutral, but, because we don’t account for just centuries of social discrimination, the impact of those policies will not be neutral.

Your book is a critique of individualism, by which you mean, as you put it, “Our identities are not separate from the white supremacist society in which we are raised, and our patterns of cross-racial engagement are not merely a function of our unique personalities.” What is the problem with individualism?

Individualism cuts the person off from the very society that the concept of individualism is valued in. That’s the great irony, right? If we were in a more community-oriented or collective-oriented society, we wouldn’t value being an individual the way that we do. We have been conditioned to see that as the ideal, that every one of us is unique and special and different, and if you don’t know somebody specifically you can’t know anything about them.

Of course, on one hand, that’s true, right? I don’t know everybody’s experience and life stories and so on, and we are also members of a social group. By virtue of our membership in this social group, we could literally predict whether you and I were going to survive our birth—and our mothers also. It’s like saying, you know, upon my birth, it was announced, “Female,” and then I have been completely exempt from any messages about what it means to be female. We wouldn’t say that, because we know that the moment I am pronounced female, an entire set of deep cultural conditioning is set into place.

I don’t think anybody would say, “My gender has had no influence whatsoever on my life.” When it comes to race, we want to take ourselves out of any kind of collective experience. These are observable, describable, measurable patterns. Does every single person fit every pattern? Of course not, but there is a rule that the exception of course makes visible.

You also talk about an ideology that is called universalism, and you say it functions similarly to individualism, and write, “But instead of declaring that we all need to see each other as individuals (e.g., ‘Everyone is different’), we declare that we all need to see each other as human beings (e.g., ‘Everyone is the same’).” To be clear, “everyone is the same” is not what universalism is, correct? My understanding of universalism is that it’s essentially saying, “We’re all human beings and we all deserve to be treated as human beings.” Do you see it differently?

I’m sure there’s different nuances of the term. When I use it, I’m using it to capture this idea that these categories have no meaning, at the same time that one group consistently is seen as objective and able to represent everybody else’s experience. The example I often use is that we have film directors and then we have Black film directors, or we have film directors and then we have women film directors. We only mark that which is not that universal norm, right? And, in so doing, of course, we reinforce this idea that some people are objective and can speak for everybody.

You have many scenes throughout the book of you talking to people at workshops, and sometimes they get contentious. You write that after one training session two people, “a white woman, ‘Sue,’ who had been sitting next to a white man, ‘Bob,’ approached me and declared, ‘Bob and I think we should all just see each other as individuals.’ Although in my work, moments like this occur frequently, they continue to disorient me on three interconnected levels. First, I had just gone over, in depth, what was problematic about individualism as a means to ‘end racism.’ How could Sue and Bob have missed that forty-five-minute presentation?” In several of the scenes you get annoyed or frustrated with people for not getting the point of what you’re saying. Is there a tension between seeing white people as irredeemably racist and fragile, and also thinking that the best way to change their consciousness is to berate them a little bit in these group settings?

I’m explaining. I don’t know that I’m berating at that point. It’s, like, “O.K., let me help you understand why that is actually a problematic response. Let me break it down for you and explain.” I’m an educator, right? So I want you to understand what that does, how that functions in the conversation. Having just laid that out, yes, I do continue to feel frustrated, because I do have an expectation that people will have some insight or at least some food for thought. When it’s framed as “We think this,” as if they actually didn’t hear any part of it, as if they have no sense that I have a different take on it and that take might have some weight or some value in relation to theirs, that does throw me off. There is a kind of scratching of the head that happens. You would think at this point I would be used to it, but not always.

You have a list in your book of things that are racist, including some obviously racist things such as blackface. One of the things on the list is “Not being aware that the evidence you use to establish that you are ‘not racist’ is not convincing.” Is there a tautological aspect to this?

Yeah, I mean, I think what is missing that makes that problematic is the humility and the curiosity, given that the vast majority of white people live segregated lives, have never studied systemic racism, all the way through higher education. You can get a Ph.D. in this country and never have discussed racism. You can be seen as qualified to lead virtually any organization with no awareness or ability to engage in these conversations on racism. Given all that, it’s the lack of humility about what you might not be understanding. It’s not granting that this is arguably the most complex, nuanced, social, institutional, cultural, societal dilemma of the last several hundred years.

I may land, after thoughtful reflection, on “That’s not going to work for me,” but that’s very different from rejecting it out of hand in a way that will allow no more information or nuance to come in. I think I’m a great example of someone who must at some point make a decision about the validity of the feedback I’m getting, right? Because I couldn’t possibly follow it all. I’ve worked hard and long to gain some ability to do that, and I have people that I can check in with to help guide me in that. Trusted and authoritative sources. But somebody who’s never really thought about these issues, couldn’t answer the question of what it means to be white, and just rejects it out of hand, I think that’s problematic.

Another entry on the list is “Not understanding why something on this list is problematic.” This seems to imply that someone who disagrees with you, Robin DiAngelo, is racist. Is there another tautological issue there?

Well, maybe one of the challenges in the way that’s framed is that “racist” is such a strong word. Keep in mind that the subtitle is “racial harm,” right? I deliberately didn’t say how white progressives are racists but how we perpetuate racial harm within a racist society. Again, rather than “Am I missing something? Can I thoughtfully engage in a conversation about this?” is it just “Nope, nope, nope”? I mean, if somebody fundamentally, at the base, accepts the existence of systemic racism, accepts that they have inevitably been shaped by it, and is willing and open to struggle with that, challenge that, then there’s going to be lots of nuance in whether we agree or disagree on particular things. I’m really talking about people who haven’t done any of that work and still feel it’s completely legitimate for them to determine what is valid and what is not.

The list also includes “Lecturing bipoc people on the answer to racism” by saying things like “People just need to . . .” This was obviously written by you, a white person, in a book that tells people that they “need to” do various things. Is there a circularity there?

Well, I’m always asked to make sure I give the answer. It’s not as interesting to me as the analysis.

What do you mean?

For me, the analysis of racism, the question of how things function—that’s fascinating and interesting. I do believe that, if you understand more deeply how racism functions, you know that answer in the sense of what to do, what not to do, what kind of basic orientation skills will help you in almost any situation. There’s constant pressure when you write a book to “Make sure that last chapter tells people what to do.” What was the other part of what you asked?

On the list of racist things is lecturing people of color about the answer to racism, and saying people just “need to” do things. Since your book is talking about the answers to racism and telling people what they need to do, I thought it was interesting that that was on a list of things that were racist.

Yeah, but notice that the book is written by a white person to white people. I’m not lecturing bipoc people on what to do but I’m offering some analysis, some deconstruction of things that white people often say and do, and letting my readers know that that’s generally considered problematic. How do I know that? Years of feedback, years of witnessing, of falling in it myself, which I hope I demonstrate. If you are already starting from a place of denial of systemic racism, then we’re just having two different conversations. It’s like climate change. If somebody denies climate change, we’re not going to have that conversation.

Your book argues that white people should not presume to speak for people of color. Do you think that’s an accurate description, and can you talk about the importance of that?

There is a nuance there. When people of color aren’t present, do you understand enough about racism that you can represent, generally, that perspective? That’s different from speaking for them. I, again, am talking to white people as an insider, as somebody who shares all the same socialization. I have challenged some of that, and that is a lifelong endeavor—it’s been twentysomething years. Here’s lessons learned, gathering from my own research, from mentorship, from Black scholars, white scholars, practice. I’m sharing lessons learned and observations made and analysis, and hopefully it’s useful.

Another thing on the list is claiming “to have a friendship with a Black colleague who has never been to your home.” Isn’t that up to the two people in that situation, one white, one Black, to say whether in fact they have a friendship? How do you make a judgment like that, not knowing specifics?

Well, in my experience, many Black people have shared that there are white people who believe they have relationships with them that the Black person does not share. It’s a polite, respectful kind of acquaintanceship, but there’s a level of trust that isn’t present, and the white person is not aware of that. I’m also talking about when white people use friendship with a Black person as evidence that they are free of racism. Not only would that not be good evidence in general—because, trust me, I have friendships with Black people, and I do on occasion say and do hurtful things—but if you haven’t even ever been to their home and you’re using them as your evidence that you couldn’t possibly be racist, I would offer that the relationship may not be as close or deep as you think that it is.

On your list of racist things is “Speaking over/interrupting a bipoc person.” Maybe this goes back to our individualism conversation, but is that the type of thing that needs context, and might not belong on a list that also includes things like blackface? Certainly, in some situations, personal or at work, people speak over one another. In some cases, obviously, that’s a sign of racism, and in other cases it might just be the way people talk or the way they interact. How do you disaggregate that?

Well, first of all, it’s a range. There are things on the list that are more obvious, and then there’s some more insidious, subtle things, and they don’t stand alone. You talked over that Black person, and that’s your personality and you always do it, you do it with everybody, but that’s the tenth time that day or that week that that person has been talked over, and they’re left having to wonder, Isn’t this about the fact that I’m Black? It sure seems like it happens to me more than other people. They’re on that wheel of trying to assess that.

I think part of our arrogance and our entitlement is that we don’t have to consider the impact of our actions on people who are positioned differently in relation to us. A great example is, if I work in an overwhelmingly male workplace and that’s how they talk to one another—they yell at one another, they talk over one another—great, but when you do it to me it’s going to have a different impact. I would want and expect them to be attentive to that. I can just hear somebody saying, “Oh, I have to watch everything I say.” Well, you know, is that really that much to ask, that we should just be aware that there is historical harm between our groups, and that you do need to think about the impact that might have?

You write, about the things on the list, that “the intentions are irrelevant to the impact.” Is it that they’re irrelevant, or is it that circumstances matter?

Let me think about how I want to phrase this. I am pushing back and trying to close all of the escape valves that I have seen my fellow white people use over the years, and focussing on intentions is a very common escape valve for saying, “It shouldn’t matter, because I didn’t mean to.” On the one hand, I’m glad you didn’t mean to, but it does matter and it did have an impact, so let’s let go of your intentions and move over here and take responsibility for the impact. I’m trying to, again, take that escape hatch away, so maybe I’m being stronger than necessary because I don’t see a lot of nuance in people who are new. Sometimes you kind of have to say, “Here’s the boundary. Don’t even go there. Let’s just go here until you get a little more skilled at that.”

There’s one scene in the book in which some white women begin crying because a Black woman is telling a story about her son and the police. You call the white women to account for reacting in such a way, and taking the focus off the Black woman. That’s followed by a chapter about white silence—the idea that white people not speaking up or not showing how they’re feeling about racism is also a problem. Sometimes it seems like maybe you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in some of these workshops.

I would say in some ways you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and that applies to all of us. In other words, we just simply are not going to get this right. There are many, many tensions in this work and that is one of them, but again, that should never be the reason you don’t struggle to get it a little more right. I don’t think I took them to task. I observed and I had a realization. I hope I framed it that way. Sometimes, in watching the dynamic, I realized, like, Oh, this is not our place to be comforting Black women about the pain of racism right now. I also add, you know, a hand on the back, just a real “Hey, may I touch you? May I put my hand on your back?” you’re showing your presence, but you’re not actually telling people that something’s O.K. or going to be O.K. from your position. I find that to be problematic. There’s no way you can tell me it’s O.K. from your position as a member of the group that perpetrates this and benefits from this.

You write, “Although motivated by compassion, this seemed deeply inappropriate to me.”

Yes, although motivated by compassion. I’m clear. I didn’t stand up and call anybody out. It was an observation that was kind of like, you know, Note to self: don’t do that.

You’ve spoken to large and small companies, especially after the murder of George Floyd forced many institutions to address instances of racism. How does it feel to have your work at the center of this conversation, and what is it about your work that you think makes so many companies want to turn to you?

Well, some of this I can answer because the Black people in many of these companies bring me in, and they understand that their white colleagues are more likely to hear it from me, and that there’s a way that I can name it and it’s harder to deny than when they try to name it. Oftentimes, that then makes room and space for them to continue forward with what they’ve been trying to do. What I bring is an insider’s perspective that, again, is harder to deny. Implicit bias is such that, consciously or not, I’m probably granted the benefit of the doubt even before I begin in a way that Black people are not.

When a Black person is laying out how racism functions, they pretty much can only point the finger outward. I mean, they can share their own experience, which white people don’t share, and then they can explain to white people that what white people are doing is harmful. When I do it, I can point it both inward and outward. When I point it inward, it gives room for other white people to admit that they have said and felt and done the same things. There’s a little bit of, like, O.K., if she can admit that, then I can admit that. It brings down some of the defensiveness, and yes, it does at the same time center white people. This is one of the great tensions of the work. There is no way outside of the construct we’re in.

You’re saying that you’re bringing something to the table that would be harder for a person of color in our society to bring to the table?

It’s only one piece of what should be at the table, but it’s a piece that’s been missing for so long.

— The New Yorker

[ricxieoreta-blog]

DEFINITON

LITERARY JOURNALISM

Literary journalism is a form of nonfiction that combines factual reporting with some of thenarrative techniques and stylistic strategies traditionally associated with fiction. Also called narrative journalism.

In his ground-breaking anthology The Literary Journalists (1984), Norman Sims observed that literary journalism "demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects. The voice of the writer surfaces to show that an author is at work."

The term literary journalism is sometimes used interchangeably with creative nonfiction; more often, however, it is regarded as one type of creative nonfiction.

Highly regarded literary journalists in the U.S. today include John McPhee, Jane Kramer, Mark Singer, and Richard Rhodes. Some notable literary journalists of the past century include Stephen Crane, Jack London, George Orwell, and Tom Wolfe.

See the observations below. Also see:

100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction: A Reading List

Advanced Composition

Article

Essay

Literary Nonfiction

Prose

Classic Examples of Literary Journalism

"A Hanging" by George Orwell

"The San Francisco Earthquake" by Jack London

"The Watercress Girl" by Henry Mayhew

Observations

"Literary journalism is not fiction--the people are real and the events occurred--nor is it journalism in a traditional sense. There is interpretation, a personal point of view, and (often) experimentation with structure and chronology. Another essential element of literary journalism is its focus. Rather than emphasizing institutions, literary journalism explores the lives of those who are affected by those institutions." (Jan Whitt, Women in American Journalism: A New History. University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Characteristics of Literary Journalism - "Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are immersion reporting, complicated structures, character development, symbolism, voice, a focus on ordinary people . . ., and accuracy. Literary journalists recognize the need for a consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are filtered. "A list of characteristics can be an easier way to define literary journalism than a formal definition or a set of rules. Well, there are some rules, but Mark Kramer used the term 'breakable rules' in an anthology we edited. Among those rules, Kramer included:". . . Journalism ties itself to the actual, the confirmed, that which is not simply imagined. . . . Literary journalists have adhered to the rules of accuracy--or mostly so--precisely because their work cannot be labeled as journalism if details and characters are imaginary." (Norman Sims, True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism. Northwestern University Press, 2008) - "As defined by Thomas B. Connery, literary journalism is 'nonfiction printed prose whose verifiable content is shaped and transformed into a story or sketch by use of narrative and rhetorical techniques generally associated with fiction.' Through these stories and sketches, authors 'make a statement, or provide an interpretation, about the people and culture depicted.' Norman Sims adds to this definition by suggesting the genre itself allows readers to 'behold others' lives, often set within far clearer contexts than we can bring to our own.' He goes on to suggest, 'There is something intrinsically political—and strongly democratic—about literary journalism—something pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite.' Further, as John E. Hartsock points out, the bulk of work that has been considered literary journalism is composed 'largely by professional journalists or those writers whose industrial means of production is to be found in the newspaper and magazine press, thus making them at least for the interim de facto journalists.' Common to many definitions of literary journalism is that the work itself should contain some kind of higher truth; the stories themselves may be said to be emblematic of a larger truth." (Amy Mattson Lauters, ed., The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist. University of Missouri Press, 2007) - "Through dialogue, words, the presentation of the scene, you can turn over the material to the reader. The reader is ninety-some percent of what's creative in creative writing. A writer simply gets things started." (John McPhee, quoted by Norman Sims in "The Art of Literary Journalism." Literary Journalism, ed. by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer. Ballantine, 1995)

- Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects' worlds. . . . - Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor. . . . - Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.- Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers' sequential reactions.

Background of Literary Journalism

"[Benjamin] Franklin's Silence Dogood essays marked his entrance into literary journalism. Silence, the persona Franklin adopted, speaks to the form that literary journalism should take--that it should be situated in the ordinary world--even though her background was not typically found in newspaper writing." (Carla Mulford, "Benjamin Franklin and Transatlantic Literary Journalism." Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830, ed. by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning. Cambridge University Press, 2012)

"A hundred and fifty years before the New Journalists of the 1960s rubbed our noses in their egos, [William] Hazlitt put himself into his work with a candor that would have been unthinkable a few generations earlier." (Arthur Krystal, "Slang-Whanger." Except When I Write. Oxford University Press, 2011)

"The phrase 'New Journalism' first appeared in an American context in the 1880s when it was used to describe the blend of sensationalism and crusading journalism--muckraking on behalf of immigrants and the poor--one found in the New York World and other papers.

PERSONAL NARRATIVE

Personal narrative (PN) is a prose narrative relating personal experience usually told in first person; its content is nontraditional. "Personal" refers to a story from one's life or experiences. "Nontraditional" refers to literature that does not fit the typical criteria of a narrative.

Write a Personal Narrative that

Engages the reader by introducing the narrator and situation

Organizes events to unfold naturally; manipulates time and pacing

Develops details of events with description and action

Develops characters with physical description and dialogue

Uses vivid verbs, sensory details, similes, metaphors, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and personification to set tone and mood

Uses transitions and varies sentence beginnings

Closes with a reflection

Has all no excuse words and conventions correct

Has exemplary presentation (neat writing that is pleasant to read)

TRAVELOGUE

A film, book, or illustrated lecture about the places visited by or experiences of a travelLER

[123designsrq]

CHAIR DESIGNS THAT TRANSFORMED THE WORLD OF DESIGN

Chairs – can you imagine residing with out one? One of the first matters we need the instant we set up our domestic is the furniture we are able to use to relaxation ourselves. Over time, the shape, form, materials, layout language – the entirety has evolved except for our primary want to relaxation in opposition to a surface. I’m sure that while you read this, maximum of you're seated on a chair! Now deliver that chair a long hard look and think about the years of layout practice that went into making the design what it's far today. Inspiring, right? The iconic chair designs showcased here have performed a element in our history – from reflecting the desires of the world, merging art and layout to even creating practices that transformed the manufacturing ideology, all people have to pay homage to these innovative designs.

Konstantin Grcic’s Chair _One “Chair_ONE is constructed much like a football: some of flat planes assembled at angles to every other, developing the three-d form. I assume my method became a mixture of naivety and bluntness. Given the threat to paintings with aluminum casting I notion that I must take it all the way. The greater we labored on the models the more we found out to recognize the structural logic behind what we have been doing. What commenced as a easy sketch, a series of cardboard fashions, prototypes, is now a real chair.” says the designer Konstantin Grcic. The German industrial clothier is thought for having a pared-down aesthetic together with his practical designs being characterized via geometric shapes and sudden angles.

Tejo Remy’s Rag Chair Tejo Remy works as a product, interior, and public space designer together with Rene Veenhuizen in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Where there may be abundance of materials, there's additionally an abundance of waste. Considering the entirety as material, Remy contains present information, circumstances, or determined goods into new situations, or simply put, repurposes the products to provide them a brand new life. The ideology behind this collection is elegantly simple, “make your very own world with what you stumble upon like Robinson Crusoë created his personal paradise on his island.” says Tejo.

Gaetano Pesce’s Pratt Chair In 1984, at a Pratt Institute laboratory in Brooklyn, Italian clothier Gaetano Pesce forged nine chairs the use of the equal mold. For each, he modified the resin formula ever so slightly. The first, jiggly as Jell-O, collapsed immediately on the floor. The second stood up, but, with one touch, toppled over. The third, fourth, fifth, and so on, grew increasingly sturdy, however the eighth and ninth were so inflexible that they were uncomfortable for sitting. The purpose for this experimentation? To prove that the difference between art and layout is simply a slight alteration within the chemical formulation. This narrative has been the center of his design practice for decades! Pesce explains, “A chair—you take a seat in it, and it’s comfortable. But the identical chair, when you convert the rigidity, it will become a sculpture. There is not any distinction. An architecture critic from Italy once made a book talking about how there's no difference between a spoon and the town. The spoon is small, the town is huge, but they're all objects. Architecture is simply an item with a big scale; an item that you could enter inside.”

Hans J. Wegner’s model GE 225, also known as the Flag Halyard Chair With The Flag Halyard Chair, Hans Wegner acknowledges the early modernists such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer, and proves that he too masters designs in chromium-plated steel pipes. An iconic and dramatic lounge chair, this engineered stainless steel frame comes with a seat and back made of plaited flag halyard (A ‘halyard’ is a line/rope that hoists or covers a sail.) However, the story behind the design is more than just a dialogue of art history. The shape of the chair’s seat was conceived during a family holiday in Århus, Denmark. The story goes that Wegner conceived this design while on the beach towards the end of the 1940s. He supposedly modeled the grid-like seat in a sand dune, presumably with some old rope that lay close to hand. The chair went into production in the 1950s and its unlikely combination of rope, painted and chrome-plated steel, sheepskin, and linen are still landmark in the world of furniture design.

Enzo Mari’s Box Chair The Box chair become designed by way of Enzo Mari in 1971 for Castelli. This self-assembly chair consisted of an injection-molded seat and a collapsible tubular metal body that came aside to healthy right into a box, for this reason the name! Enzo Mari is taken into consideration one among the most intellectually provocative Italian designers of the overdue twentieth century, recognized for products, furniture, and puzzles alike. Mari adhered strictly to rational layout – “constructed in a way that corresponds completely to the purpose or function”. Mari’s commitment to rationalism stood the test of time, gaining him work with giants like Muji and Thonet at the cease of the century while minimal, user-friendly design made a comeback.

Charles & Ray Eames DKR, also known as the Wire Chair Charles Eames famously said, “The function of the designer is that of a very good. Thoughtful host waiting for the desires of his guests. ” The couple that revolutionized American furniture design. Eames have created a universal reaction to what everyone needs from a chair. A simple, gracious shape that suits any frame and every place. It’s what makes the chair a conventional worthy of museum collections—and residing rooms, laundromats, lobbies, and cafés. With its unmistakable character. The Eames Wire Chair DKR isn't always just aesthetically fascinating however reminds us of the emergence within the Fifties of popular culture. A motion which in terms of furniture design added decorative elements back to the forefront. With its cool, vivid steel wire and “lascivious” bikini shaped padding the Wire Chair Bikini represents more than most different furniture gadgets the decadent popular culture of 1950s America. Speaking of the 50’s, I’m glad to see the ones red Formica tables disappear!

Adolf Loos Cafe’ Museum Chair This beautiful chair changed into designed by Adolf Loos in 1898 to supply that renowned Cafe Museum in Vienna. Its timeless charm comes from the subtle curves of its silhouette. Received with the signature steam-bent beechwood that creates stunning accents. At the pinnacle of the legs and inside the two parallel curves that grace the open backrest. The structure of the piece has an elliptical section that gives it lightness, making the design ageless.

Shiro Kuramata’s How High The Moon ‘How High The Moon’ by Shiro Kuramata is made of extending mesh. Thin sheets of that have been steel-cut and extruding. The chair has no interior frame or assist yet gives the define of a chair. Its transparent shape retains the form and silhouette of a traditional upholstere armchair. ‘Freeing from gravity’ was one of the key issues for Kuramata at some point of his entire career. Hence accelerating mesh was a perfect fabric for the designer. The chair appears mild and prone yet amply strong sufficient for use. This chair’s look is the end result of the overlapping hashing of the mesh sheets (it definitely does appear to buzz inside the air)

Ron Arad’s Big Heavy A collection from Big Easy, the steel chair design by way of Ron Arad in 1988 shows that a volume. As simple shape, can be translating, without compromising the design principles. Thru a reinterpretation of substances and production processes.‎ The model acquire from a optimistic gesture showcases. The visible softness and fullness of the volumes, promising comfort.‎ Big Easy explores the rotational molding and the usage of polyethylene as a fabric. It’s design language invites you to relaxation irrespective of the cloth use. Proving the dominance of the form over substances on this case.

Hans Coray’s Landi Chair Developed for the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition. The Landi Chair by way of Hans Coray occupies an crucial region in the history of twentieth-century design. This classical chair by way of Hans Coray set up. The new typology of a three-dimensionally molded seat shell on a separate base. The lightweight, stackable Landi Chair is strong and weather-resistant: its 91 holes permit water to flow. Technical innovation, systematic use of materials, minimalist forms. Understating beauty are the elements. That have made the Landi Chair into a conventional over the years. Which looks as sparkling and essential as ever. This is a quick starting to the history of considered one of the maximum iconic merchandise used globally. The humble chair. We will hold this collection to show off more of these designs. Percentage the know-how of how each chair is a description of the temper of the sector in their time. Read the full article

[theliterateape]

Donald Trump Will Never Be Impeached

By Peter Kremidas

Donald Trump will never be impeached.

Even though he should be.

Even though the deluge of facts Mueller finds will be damning.

Even though it is the right thing to do.

It won’t happen.

Because in order for impeachment proceedings to move forward, it requires Republican support. And since when did facts and doing the right thing have anything to do with Republican policy?

If facts and the right thing mattered to Republicans, we’d have comprehensive legislation to mitigate the effects of climate change, Obamacare wouldn’t be under constant sabotage, gun control would be at least honestly debated instead of the current non-starter policy of giving us a "You’re fucking kidding, right?" face, they wouldn’t still be pushing the economic policy of give rich people more money and just wait that we’ve all watched fail multiple times, they would have never even started kicking gay people so hard that bigots’ votes come out their mouths.

I mean shit, they wouldn’t even be Republicans. Ignoring data and just going balls first into "Because we said so," is kind of their whole brand now. Of course, it’s always with our balls they do that with. And yes, for the purposes of metaphor, women have balls, seeing as Republicans tend to rack them the hardest. I didn’t forget about you. How many times do they have to govern like a coked out frat boy with a penchant for social darwinism and then royally fuck up before the country collectively figures out that maybe they aren’t trustworthy?

The answer, and it actively yanks joy out of from my heart to say this, is never. And we liberals should have figured this out decades ago. And yet here we are hanging our hopes on them to see all the damning evidence Mueller is about to hoist up a flagpole and then do the next logical thing. But think about it, think about it honestly, and yes, objectively, when has this American political party ever given us reason to believe they would do the next logical anything?

Here’s the part where I say, "Yes, yes, Democrats have their problems, too." Which I have to do because we live in a country and media culture so intellectually lazy they can’t handle the idea that it isn’t just both sides, that the two major political parties have different types and degrees of problems, that there is no left wing equivalent of the Limbaughs, Hannitys and Coulters of the world, that the far left is not equivalent to the far right in behavior nor efficacy of ideas, or even that, get this, there isn’t even such thing as a political spectrum except in the imagination as inadequate metaphor.

WIth that out of the way, let’s get into the disincentives and complete lack of incentives republicans have to impeach Donald Trump. You are right to point out that’s Trump’s approval numbers are historically bad, as I assume you have been doing that for several paragraphs now. But let’s look at the process of impeachment. The first step is a vote by the House of Representatives on one or more articles of impeachment. It needs a simple majority vote. And Republicans, who have the majority, represent districts gerrymandered beyond recognition. So while nationally Trump is unpopular, in the districts most Republicans represent he is doing just fine. These Republican representatives no good and well that if they go against the president, it goes against their district. If they go against Trump, they lose their jobs. And they know it.

But surely these voters would be swayed by the sheer magnitude and severity of charges against Trump. Right? Damnit, please don’t make me laugh. And by laugh I mean cry. And by cry I mean scream into a pillow. And by scream into a pillow I mean build an underground bunker and stock it with non-perishables and an incredible digital library. I’m reaching for humor here because trust me this is just as depressing for me to write as I imagine it is for you to read.

Because these voters in these districts are consumers of what has been the biggest enemy of responsible governance for a long time now, right wing media. This is a genre of radio, television, and internet personalities that makes its money but pushing the rage button in people’s brains, with little regard for facts or consequences. It’s an addictive rush they elicit, and they are extremely good at it. It is also hugely profitable.

It is no exaggeration to call this propaganda, and to call it dangerous. It creates an extreme skepticism of traditional source based media, and replaces that with a trust in right wing propaganda that is being extremely loose with facts. And when they are told that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or that Obamacare has death panels, or that Hillary Clinton is selling nukes to the Russians, they believe it. Not only will this contingent of voters, who their representatives are beholden to, be completely unconcerned with whatever charges are brought up, debate will be with them will be impossible because we do not even occupy a shared reality.

If you want a preview of how republicans and their constituents will react to Trump impeachment proceedings look no further than the present world. They attack the messenger, Mueller. They accuse him of dishonesty. They ask why there is no focus on the crimes of Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that they are non-existent. There is no situation in this media climate of pervasive financially lucrative brainwashing where any articles of impeachment pass the house of representatives.

The Republicans have nothing to gain and everything to lose by going against the president, and it’s because of the rabid right wing base they require support from. And, it is also important to note, our distorted cultural view of what defines fairness and objectivity when we talk about politics, and the huge amount of false equivalency it engenders, only serve to embolden these far right narratives via continued tolerance for (so called) conservative talking points as if they are just the other side of a rational debate.

If you find hope in a democratic controlled house post 2018 elections, I once again point you to how extremely gerrymandered the districts are. Roughly 30 percent of the country has been sectioned off in such a way that a disproportionate amount of power has been given to the angry and gullible. It is extremely unlikely we will see Democrats in power in Congress in 2018 or at any point during the Trump presidency. I’m sorry. Just as I said when I said Trump would win the presidency, I very much want to be wrong here. I actively want to be convinced otherwise.

Because at this point in America’s history, what is true simply does not matter. And what is right doesn’t matter either. The truth may be that we already lost this fight on Nov. 8, 2016. And maybe we’re trying to avoid confronting how devastating the consequences of that loss truly are. And maybe that’s why we cling to hope that we may yet fix the wrong done on election night. But I do not think these hopes are realistic. We can now only look forward to 2020, where instead of running as a complete outsider, Donald Trump will be running for president with the power of the incumbency and full backing of the RNC, with the likely benefit of expanded voter suppression laws.

[gavinhalm]

A Discussion of Tom Gunning's “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations”

Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theatre, Trick Films, and Photography's Uncanny.

In one of his more famous essays on photography, Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations, Tom Gunning describes the medium as being fraught with a double existence as both an icon, or bearer of resemblance, as well as an index, which points to the photograph as a literal, empirical trace of past-time. Also essential to this view is the fact that photography is inherently a kind of scientific, chemical/mechanical machine free from the "unreliability of human discourse" (i.e., an image making medium far different than drawing or painting). But, the most striking aspect of photography's early development and mass consumption were the feelings of discomfort experienced by many when viewing this new technology, along with its association with the occult.

The Uncanny and the Double

To describe the startling, “uncanny” experience felt by 19th century viewers of photography, Gunning begins with a fascinating quote from Balzac's novel Cousin Pons, where the author states, in a narrative digression shot-through with notions gleaned from Spiritualist metaphysics, that the figure or thing represented in a photograph exists as a kind of specter or ghost that is constantly producing, shedding, or radiating images of itself outward towards the camera in order to be recorded. In essence, the sensitized photographic plate, via the camera's lens, captures moments of a kind of spiritual singularity emanating from the Real World, and Real Things, and freezes them all forever, in a kind of half-religious and proto-quantum mechanical matrix of psychology, observation, recording, and iconographic image making not far removed, for Gunning, from any number of Christian panel and canvas paintings executed over the previous millennium.

Next, Gunning steers the discussion towards another famous author of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud, who locates the feeling of the uncanny through a personal story in which he found himself walking in circles through a shady part of town filled with prostitutes, thus experiencing repetitively strange and uncomfortable feelings and perceptions while in orbit around this urban space.

Without getting into the peculiar erotic connotations (for Freud himself) implicit within this story, or the refined way Gunning links Freud’s own complex theory of the “Return of the Repressed” to his walkabout, it is enough to say that the uncanny, spooky, deja-vu feeling Freud describes was the impetus for his important concept of the “Double”: Doubling refers to the representation/projection of the ego outward that can assume various forms outside the physical self of the subject (twins, mirroring, reflections, self/portraiture, etc), and has no small connection to aspects of primitive animism as well as the mythological story of Narcissus, and, of course, to photography as a medium. 

What photography does, according to Gunning, is to provide a technology which could summon feelings of the uncanny through a visual-empirical doubling of reality, thus grounding Spiritualism in science/technology and helping to give it quasi-rational justification for proliferating its beliefs.

He also relates other pseudo-empirical methods of communication with the dead to his discussion, such as the example of the Fox sisters who became famous for their seances whereby they rapped out messages from the beyond (Morse Code-like, and in an empirical auditory way that could also be “directly” sensed)–Even famous public figures of the time, such as Thomas Watson of Alexander Graham Bell's laboratory, often fell into believing the efficacy of the sisters’ contacts with the otherworldly. Spiritualism now becomes, according to Gunning, intertwined with the development of early forms of mass communication and the scientific/technological in general.

Doubling of the Double Through the Photographic Mirror of American Spiritualism

A whole host of optical methods were used by spirit photographers to prove the existence of the Spirit Realm, the most successful of which was the sandwiching of different negatives in order to reveal the sought-for ghostly figures in a final photographic object–From President Lincoln's towering ghost standing behind his seated widow (complete with his hands upon her shoulders), to multiple exposures of dead children's faces next to their mothers, to strangely arranged circular galleries of ghostly heads, all were examples of the different arrangements spirit photographers executed in order to display the other-worldly beings and loved ones from the beyond. 

Often appearing within these photographs were, incredibly for their early viewers, images people had seen elsewhere–Recognizable public images lurking both out in the Real World, and within in the dark recesses of the secret archives each spirit photographer possessed, were somehow (re)appearing. In order to rationalize these doubly-doubled images’ inclusion, a spirit photographer would argue that, in order for people to recognize the spirits, they themselves must use common, understandable imagery for communicative reasons. So, in short, the spirits were also producing photographs, which is a profoundly revelatory thesis that had deep metaphysical implications for both the realms of the living and the dead.

Photography also engaged in a fascinating alliance with another aspect of Spiritualism in which entranced mediums would throw up, evacuate, or generally excrete "materializations" of some uncertain gelatinous substance (in this case, not of a silver halide nature) that often included yet more images of the dead. Also, Spiritualists claimed that by merely holding a piece of photographic material, without the aid of a camera, one could produce images of ghosts, or, even more incredibly, a ghost in its entirety could be materialized via (any) photographic methods and then be touched, and even smelled.

One of Gunning’s most impressive examples during this discussion uses the instance of the ghost of one Katie King, whose supposed conjuring famously fooled one of the finest British scientists of the era, William Cookes, and would end up giving more than a little credence to the beliefs of the Spiritualists through his association–Though it was later shown that the medium who conjured Ms. King looked identical to the ghost she was purportedly summoning, thus conjuring a spirit that was, in essence as well as literally, a living double of a dead double (perhaps the most truly astonishing instance where photographic material begat the very thing it represented).

All of these meta/physical mechanizations involving photographic technology take us in one direction or another from the material, to the immaterial, and back to the material again, providing the structure for an infinite empirical/spiritual feedback loop. What could be more uncanny, or more to the point, what could provide more exemplary evidence for the existence of the Spirit Realm, then a new technology being able to not only open the doors of perception, but to actively enable communication with the Other Side? 

Indeed, in Spirit Photography the mediating technology itself takes over the human medium's role, and the most profound connection between photography and Spiritualist manifestation lies in the concept of the sensitive medium (literally and figuratively, as both the sensitive medium that conjures up the ghosts, as well as the sensitive plate that captures them)–This double figuration of a sensitive, doubling medium is the ultimate medium-as-message.

--

What Gunning does throughout his essay is weave a very subtle, very detailed socio-historical analysis which provides an exceptional lens through which to observe one of the final sociocultural waves in the 19th century that shifted the larger focus from the religiously-subjective, to the near complete domination of the empirical/visual in our own present culture, and his analysis convincingly fuses together issues relating to period gender bias, economics, legal issues concerning fraud and quackery, the spectacles of magic shows, and showmanship itself. †

In the end, Gunning returns to the idea that Balzac found so compelling in which photography didn't simply capture the trace of something, but that this something was involved in a nearly endless series of self-referential image production. Therefore, what we end up having during this time in Western history is a situation in which the feeling of the uncanny, the idea of the Double, the fear of death, along with a new technology, engenders a metaphysics that would have the spirits on the other side creating infinitely reproducible photographs of themselves in order to communicate with the living. 

We have, in short, a model of the universe where things reproduce themselves through a never ending re-production of images, but have no real, “original” existence outside of these images. Sounds uncannily familiar, doesn't it?

Notes:

† Cf. the film The Spiritualist Photographer, by the great 19th/20th century contemporary filmmaker-magician Méliès, which exposed the entire farcical display of Spiritualist photography's practice in order to produce a film that disrobes the specious, tenuous ties Spiritualism had to the scientific, and unveiled it as being all novel spectacle and showman-like trickery rather than an awe inspiring event.

[juniperpublishers-fashion-b-blog]

A Model for a Virtual Fashion Museum- Juniper Publishers

Abstract

The matrix of the 21st century, characterized by a new reality resultant of the new technological and sociocultural context, seems to impose the design of new communication tools by reviewing today's museum models based on a deep reflection on the contemporary museum studies. After this immersion in research, we believe having achieved the design of a more innovative virtual fashion museum.Keywords: Fashion; Museum; Virtual; CommunicationGo to

Introduction

We have tried to look at the fashion curating discipline under a new cultural paradigm, i.e., as an open, transversal and endless practice, in order to design a multicultural conceptual board crossing diverse areas such as art, technology, design, culture and society, for which we defined the main objectives of this research as:

o To make a conceptual revaluation of the past and present time so as to design multidisciplinary creative atmospheres, to test innovative exhibition models adjusted to the Digital Era besides attempting to contribute for the dissemination of knowledge and culture;o To contribute for a higher relevance of fashion and costume as anthropological and sociological tools, working on a global context;o To reinforce the obvious need of using the internet in the museum context;o To understand the new systems of cultural communication as well as the new individual and social values, using them as a starting point of the design of an effective platform to communicate fashion.

Go to

Fashion And The Museum

PRE 1970

Although fashion has been overlooked as a research subject in theoretical studies for several decades of the 20th century as well as having been relegated to the field of history, during the second half of the previous century important academic and theoretical studies in the socio-cultural fields started to consider fashion as a subject of research and to see it under different approaches and perspectives, which reinforced its importance not only as a phenomenon but also as an important tool to analyze individual and social behaviors as a reflection of sociopolitical, economic and cultural changes.On the other hand, the evolution of the Visual Culture studies-the interaction between Art and Society - would necessarily connect cultural studies, art history, critical theory and other fields connected with the social sciences, enlarging its focus to the new cultural products of a renewed urban landscape contaminated by visual images (from photography to advertising, from fashion to cartoons, movies, cosmetics, design, etc.).Culture, today, is related to 'meaning practices' that allow examining the society trough the artifacts, with which the museum is deeply involved."Museums are deeply involved in constructing knowledge in this way through those objects, narratives, and histories that they bring to visibility or keep hidden” [

1

].It was also during the end of the 20th century that fashion started to be showcased in museums beyond the historical and anthropological contexts and be regarded not merely as a consumption phenomenon but as providing cultural meanings - interpreting from the identification, evaluation and relation of the artifacts with culture through conceptual frames of beliefs and values.The roots of the concept of contemporary fashion exhibition date from the 1940s through a major traveling exhibition - Le Théâtre le la Mode - that took place in Paris, in 1945, immediately after the ceasefire. This interdisciplinary platform was organized by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Française, aiming to reaffirm the sophistication of French culture and regain clientele for the haute couture fashion houses - an important business sector before the World War II - in the new economic scenario and the distribution of money wealth. This important exhibition opened ceremoniously at the Pavilion Marsais, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, winning about 100000 visitors and later traveled through the most important capitals - from the European cities of London, Barcelona, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Vienna before heading to New York, Washington and S. Francisco.The exhibition gathered around it the 'crème de la crème' ofthe Parisian cultural intelligentsia, sharing the stage of an imaginary theatre with small-scale sets designed by famous artists and inhabited by miniature dummies (in a 50|100 scale) wearing the most luxurious dresses by prestigious Parisian couture houses. Curiously the exhibition was designed by a group of famous artists and metteurs-en-artists while in exile, including Christian Bérard (director), Jean Cocteau, Boris Kochno, Eliane Bonabel, Jean Saint-Martin and André Beaurepaire, among others, with the objective of raising money for the reconstruction of the Nazi devastated France. The exhibition not only achieved its goal and raised millions of dollars to help the French economy but was also the rudimentary stage of an innovative form of exhibiting through context.During the following decades Fashion as a creative discipline would always be associated with large blockbusters, especially the ones with the main goal of economic recovery or small exhibitions exclusively directed to the costume experts and historians.

POST-1970

The democratization of fashion in the sixties - the transformation from exclusive and luxurious couture garments for the elite into a clothes culture accessible to the masses - led the museums to adjust the perspective [

2

].Until de beginning of the 1970s garments were ignored as an exhibition subject per se and were preserved in a very orthodox way, being exhibited almost exclusively on 'costume museums' in a very discreet way, utterly conservative and historically correct, protected from the viewers' gaze through the massive window displays or simply supporting other historical subjects. Thus, the curator's role was restricted to the physical preservation of the collections rigorously inventoried and exhibited in second-class galleries.It was during the 1970s that Fashion Curating emerged as a discipline, via the relationships that important museums established with exceptional fashion and image experts - such as the legendary Diana Vreeland, a former fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar and American Vogue, who started a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art-The Costume Institute, NY, and the cosmopolitan fashion photographer and costume designer Sir Cecil Beaton, who organized the memorable exhibition 'Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton' at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.If, for his exhibition, Beaton joined together an extraordinary and exquisite collection using his personal relationships with European royalty, international socialites, French couturiers and beautiful people - which was later donated to the V&A -, reinforcing its already important collection, presenting for the first time, all the garments contextualized through a contemporary vision, Vreeland went further.Diana Vreeland curated a series of eleven exhibitions for The Costume Museum at The MET and the retrospective The World of Balenciaga (1972) was repeatedly attacked by her dissidents as having the gall to emulate the hallowed halls of the Art world [

3

] but widely acclaimed by its audience at the same time. "The World of Balenciaga introduced a brand new approach to costume exhibitions. In a spectacular setting, a fashion designer for the first time was given the focus reserved in museums for great artists” [

4

].In 1973 Ruth Berenson reviewed Vreeland's Balenciaga exhibition in the New York Review, remarking that the show "accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of bridging the gap between art and fashion”. Berenson remarks on the general prevailing tendency of the art world to dismiss the creativity of fashion and calls Balenciaga "the last great artist of fashion” [

3

].Vreeland inaugurated a new concept of lighting, which came directly from her former editorial experience. Rejecting the most conventional lighting solutions, she turned the best angle or a beam of light into an object of study and used contextual artifices, such as the enormous baroque wigs in 'The Eighteen Century Woman' (1982-83) or the armors and stage props of the acclaimed Spanish singer Lola Montes for 'The World of Balenciaga' (1972)."Her displays, which often included as many as one hundred mannequins, would appeal to the imagination and plunge the viewer into a milieu - perhaps a celebration of a great moment in Hollywood, or her versions of the eighteen century. She wanted the clothes to appear fashionable to the contemporary viewer. As she had done in her magazine pages, Diana Vreeland would give the viewer something more” [

4

].Mrs. Vreeland ignored the rigorous recommendations of her conservative conservation staff and her representations were often incorrect historically, as stated by Eleanor Dwight: "Working with Vreeland was quite frustrating. While the staff members wanted the clothes to appear as they would have in the time period they represented, Vreeland wanted the clothes to look 'now' [

5

].Contradicting the canons of that period, she promoted an intimacy between artifacts and viewers in a time when curators detested the idea of having the public to close to the exhibited pieces. Vreeland frees the clothes from the massive window displays and instead exhibits them on wood platforms covered with colored fabrics or mirrors so as to create a distance and reinforce theatricality.Diana Vreeland extended her avant-garde editorial point of view to the museum context and changed this field "with an uncanny sense of style and drama” [

5

]. She imprinted her personal and non-expert touch by experimenting exhibition contexts that were theatrically dramatized, redefining a new lexicon of sensorial stimulation which went far from the visual sense, introducing soundtracks along with provocative color palettes, using strong scents, subverting the exhibit supports as well as the mannequins.Diana Vreeland inaugurated a new concept of lighting, which came directly from her former editorial experience. Rejecting the most conventional lighting solutions, she turned the best angle or a beam of light into an object of study and used contextual artifices, such as the enormous baroque wigs in 'The Eighteen Century Woman' (1982-83) or the armours and stage props of the acclaimed Spanish singer Lola Montes for 'The World of Balenciaga» (1972). Her displays, which often included as many as one hundred mannequins, would appeal to the imagination and plunge the viewer into a milieu - perhaps a celebration of a great moment in Hollywood, or her versions of the eighteen century. She wanted the clothes to appear fashionable to the contemporary viewer. As she had done in her magazine pages, Diana Vreeland would give the viewer something more” [

5

].Both collaborations achieved not only enormous popularity and increased the range of visitors but has also contributed to a further review of the fashion exhibitions, clarifying the relations trough Curating | Exhibition Making and Fashion Curator | Fashion Editor.

The new museum formats

The discussion on curating dates back from the 2001 symposium Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility, organized by the American organization Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, as stated by the Cultural Program Director ofthe Pew Charitable Trusts, Marian A. Godfrey: "Curating Now has set a standard of critical dialogue that will challenge the other disciplines to create similar opportunities for artistic discourse that reaches both the Philadelphia region and beyond it” [

6

].From this time on museums have been exploring different methodologies and contents, searching to frame themselves in the development of Technology and the Interactive Era."A new generation of museum professionals has attempted to reinvent the museum, to bring it to the twenty-first century as a place that can compete with other recreational venues for leisure time, a place more identified with providing opportunities for celebration than for contemplation. The thrust of today's museum is to 'attraction status', to be a 'destination', and to appeal to a mass audience. To achieve this, the direction of exhibition and education programs inevitably shy away from universal ideals and moves towards the familiar and commonplace. In the battle between high and low culture, low seems to have the upper hand” [

7

].So it is possible to identify now innovative models and concepts, such as:

a. The Virtual Museum (referred to in the next section).b. The Object Museum, always related to extraordinary architecture masterworks, such as The Solomon Guggenheim Bilbao.c. The 'Participatory Museum', focused on the study of the motivation, availability, and relevance of the 'participant' viewers, in order to interact with the community, a concept designed by the American curator Nina Simon that has been tested in museums around the world, such as the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, the Dutch Museum of Natural History, the Copenhagen Museum or the Zuiderzee Open Air Museum.d. The 'Project Museum' created around expressions of popular art and exploring the effects of the mass-media culture. Unorthodox, the 'Project Museum' is populist, experimental, fun, sensorial, immersive, being the 'The EMP' - Experience Museum (Seattle) its prime example.e. The 'Museum on The Road', an itinerant museum format that crosses architecture with avant-garde artistic expressions, a concept launched by international fashion brands, such as Chanel with the 'Chanel Mobile Art' (Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, NY and Paris, 2008-2010) and the Fondazione Prada with 'The Transformer' (Seoul, 20082009).f. The 'Popup Museum', an ephemeral concept started by Fondazione Prada in 2012, January, through the initiative '24h Museum', designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Rem Koolhass and the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli in partnership, opened for only one day in Paris, during which the sets underwent the interactive metamorphosis that included lighting effects and vigorous DJ.sets of electronic music.

At the same time, the most recent studies known as 'New Museum Theory' - theories that question and revise the conceptual principles of Vergo's 'New Museology', even though they admit they are much related - identify four paradigmatic archetypes of the future museum:

a. 'The Sanctuary', as a result of the most traditional way to see the museum as a sacred contemplation space.b. 'The Market Directed', focused on business plans more devoted to tourism than to the community, which tries to explore very popular contents, momentary blockbusters, tied to strong advertising campaigns and merchandising.c. 'The Post Colonial Museum' that develops reconciliation discourse, redesigning the post-imperial representation to offer new approaches to the history and the cultural the identity of the colonial contexts.d. And finally, the 'Post Museum', which has not yet very defined boundaries but already points to a dynamic cultural center, active, multidisciplinary, tolerant, multicultural and careful with minorities, characterized by calendars that include, together and/or intersected, different avantgarde cultural expressions such as art, photography, video art, fashion, publicity, world music, cinema, street-art, performing arts, discussions and controversies, etc.

The museum in the digital era

This research focused on the Virtual Museum due to today's cultural dynamic and effervescent context."It's cheap. It's fast. It offers great shopping, tempting food and a place to hang out. And visitors can even enjoy the art” announced the New York Times in one of 1997 issues [

8

] about the Virtual Museum.As an important communication tool to produce culture and disseminate knowledge, the museum faces now the new paradigm of technology and interaction. Ignored for several years by the museum, the webspace started recently beginning an important strategic media, allowing the design of different contents for different viewers, giving global access to their digital archives, virtual galleries or even to virtual contents related to real ones through Immersive Virtual Reality.As a matter of fact, in the end of last millennium, some of the most well-known museums started very carefully and timidly to use the Internet mainly as a database, rarely using it to support disciplines connected with fashion and design.The existing model of Virtual Museum - in the real sense of the expression, with no physical space and based on Andre Malraux's Imaginary Museum - arose mainly as the preservation of cultural identity, and its prime examples are the Brazilian 'Museu da Pessoa' or the 'Virtual Museum of Canada' and recently the 'Century of The Child' by MOMA.Its typology is defined by:

a. Big clusters around common subjects (the city, the region, the country);b. A particular theme ('Museum of the Future', 'The Alternative Museum', 'Virtual Museum of Typography', among others);c. The life and work of individuals (Virtual Museum of D. Quixote, Virtual Museum of André Malraux, etc.);d. Scientific issues (e.g., Virtual Museum of Bacteria).

To our knowledge, no initiative focused directly on the fashion industry or design was issued until the end of 2011, with the exception of the largely acclaimed and reported 'Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum' by the Italian fashion house of Valentino.The detailed analysis of this virtual museum allowed us to identify its stronger and weaker points, as defined by Paola Moscati [

9

]. "The Virtual Museum is not the real museum transposed to the web. The Virtual Museum is not an archive a database of, or electronic complement to the real museum. The virtual museum finally is not what is missing from the real museum [

9

]. A virtual museum must support an interdisciplinary approach, through the implementation of complex semantic associations, which will allow the user to understand the culture that is behind the objects and contextualize them.” [

10

].Quoting Silva (2012) - who states that The Valentino Museum does not provide a surprising experience - we can conclude that:

a. It is slow because visitors must download an app for every single access.b. It is distant because the immersion is limited to static 2 and 3D spaces.c. It is limited, because it is about one single designer, being thus as a mere database.d. It is not comprehensive because its aim is the sole promotion of the label and the couturier.e. It is closed and not interactive.f. It is not registrable.g. It is controlled and nondemocratic.h. It is mainstream, not experimental.

Go to

Conclusion: A New Format Of Virtual Museum

The result of this research is a conceptual design within the virtual territory, which is a communication platform that optimizes the Internet's potential [

11

].We believe to having achieved an original, unique and innovative model because its design was based on the real acceptation of the concept of the virtual museum since it is not associated with an existing entity or real content, on the contrary, it aims to establish cooperative networks, bridges among institutions and curators, artists and designers in order to interact with a large spectre of Internet browsers [

12

].The final result was in line with the 'W3 Consortium' recommendations' principles, especially the Web for everyone; Web for everything; Knowledge Base e Trust and Confidence, as well as two important reports connected with the relationship between Museum and Technology, namely NMC: Horizon Report>2012, 2012 to 2015 Museum Editions (New Media Consortium | Marcus Institute for Digital Education in the Arts) and Museums and the Web 2011 (Pew Research Center), which present short, medium and long-term recommendations for the museum action [

13

].We have also considered the main guidelines of immateriality curating particularly to the issues involving the responsibilities and control systems in collaborative work [

14

].The basis of the model uses the following keywords:

i. Immersiveii. Informaliii. Interactiveiv. Personalizedv. Virtualvi. Creativevii. Sharedviii. Provocativeix. Experimentalx. Laboratorialxi. Dynamicxii. Global

The designed archetype aims to explore new maps, products and cultural practices using an interactive and dynamic grammar, supported by collaborative networks, which will be the source of exhibition subjects under different approaches, languages, and media, creating thus a space for a shared laboratory as well as the experimentation of ideas.Although it is not our aim to define it's technological framework, for now, it seems obvious that it should use the 'Virtual Reality' and 'Augmented Virtual Reality' technology; we designed a navigation menu as the basis for further development [

15

].Furthermore, it is very important to consolidate an extensive collaborative network that includes Kurators, Curators, Web and Animation Designers as well as digital artists, video- artists, movie directors, photographers, public relations, sponsors, artists, thinkers, and theorists, with the aim of optimizing each of the future exhibition contents.We envision a design clearly inspired by the concept of MOTEL, in the sense in which is generally understood: "A hotel providing travelers with lodging and free parking facilities, typically a roadside hotel having rooms adjacent to an outside parking area or an urban hotel offering parking within the building” (dictionary.reference.com/), i.e., a very dynamic space that houses exhibition contents in alternation using a vast range of multidisciplinary languages and interacting approaches to communicate, and teach.It seems of great importance to offer a mobile website, designed to mobile devices at the same time as a traditional website directed to visitors surfing from their desktops, although it will be mainly accessed by mobile devices.Aside the main interactive fields, we aim to optimize the interaction with the viewers through a large range of applications (apps) that help to conceptualize and contextualize the exhibited objects and artifacts besides endowing exciting moments of discovery through various devices.Special consideration will be given to social network practices to allow viewers to tag, comment and share videos, images and audio contents, thus reproducing its impact and dissemination. It is also important to clarify our intention to reach an extensive range of viewers, so that our mission of sharing and teaching is ensured.Particular consideration will also be given to the continual development of technology connected with smart objects, also known as 'The Internet of Things - a convergence of multiple technologies ranging from wireless communication to the Internet and embedded systems and to Micro-Electrical- Mechanical Systems (MEMS)-, as highly recommended by the NMC-Horizon Report: 2012 & 2013 Museum Edition Reports.Finally, we regard as very important to carry out the following strategic actions before launching publicly our MOTEL - Fashion Virtual Museum:

a. Validation of the conceptb. The search of a mobile operator for sponsoringc. Consolidation of the network in all areasd. Definition of technological supportse. Design of navigation menus | web design | appsf. Discussion of territories and conceptual frameworks by a closed board of curatorsg. Design and edition of exhibition contentsh. Layouti. Sponsoring and promotion

To know more about Journal of Fashion Technology-https://juniperpublishers.com/ctftte/index.php   

 To know more about open access journals Publishers click on Juniper Publishers