#why does every aspect of life have to become commodified

[syrasenturi]

love the internet killing art

[wen-kexing-apologist]

What the Fuck Is Boeing Doing Here?

Listen. 

I know that I don’t have to write an essay at the end of every episode of Only Friends. But you see, I have decided I need to either hit or break the number of essays I wrote for Moonlight Chicken. 

So, I want to talk about Boeing and the narrative purpose he serves. Mostly because there seems to be some contention around whether Boeing was introduced too late in the plot. But he wasn’t. Why?

Photo from @chicademartinica

Because Boeing serves as external pressure, not internal.

The final relationship boss if you will

Only Friends appears to have a four act arc. 

Act 1: We meet the characters, the couples are introduced to one another, they fuck, they establish some modicum of a relationship, and we see the aspects of their characters that are going to cause the tension points. 

Act 2: The couples engage in Chronic 20-Year-Old behavior and fuck up their relationships internally by: cheating, secretly recording, blackmailing, commodifying, misunderstanding, etc etc. 

Act 3: Everyone does everything in their power to ruin their own relationships further by trying to set a record for Most Number of Impulsive Decisions Made in One Sitting, thoroughly fucks their life and relationships, stops, thinks, “hmmm, well, I’ve tried everything else, I wonder if talking might help?” and starts resolving their relationships. 

Act 4: With the internal tensions resolved, make up sex had, and tenuous peace beginning to be forged between all couples, it is time to put their ability to weather external pressures to the test. 

gif by @25shadesoffebruary

Which is why we meet Boeing for the first time with Mew and Top, because Top and Mew have not fully reached a resolution when he arrives. Mew has decided he wants to give Top another chance, but we know Mew is having difficulty moving past his anger at being cheated on. Boeing comes in, pokes at the potential weakness/fracture points of Top, and is denied. So he turns to Mew, whose cracks have not been healed enough. 

The external pressure seems to have taken a hold, and the beginning of TopMew Round 2 is under threat of not taking off, because Boeing as an outside player has found a wound he can press in to. In Episode 11, Mew is once again, set on a course, (whether or not it is the one he would have ultimately chosen for himself without added suggestion remains to be seen), acknowledges that he doesn’t think that he is going to be Top’s last boyfriend, and does decide to try to move past his hang ups and start over with Top. 

Top and Mew have passed the test of external pressure. Boeing has served his purpose, he has poked and prodded, manipulated and made out, and Top and eventually Mew saw through it. 

gif by @moonkhao

So Boeing goes wandering towards his next victims, Sand and Ray. And again, we have a situation where one person in the couple is more susceptible to Boeing’s manipulations. In this case, Sand is the one, unsurprisingly, who is more likely to fall for Boeing’s flirting, though Ray is far more volatile of a person than either Mew or Top is. Which means that Boeing is in for an external pressure application treat because the thicker he lays it on with Sand, the more reactive Ray is going to become. 

Ray has a lot of changes going on in his life right now, he’s making some breakthroughs in therapy, he’s starting rehab, he’s waking up more to the ways that Sand has twisted himself in knots to help him and all the ways he has failed Sand in return. And Sand, our favorite wet blanket, is physically incapable of maintaining a single boundary with anyone that gives him positive attention. Which includes Boeing, and we knew this was a potential outcome because of how pissed Sand continues to be about the fact that Boeing left him for Top. Sand has never gotten over Boeing, it’s part of why he cares so much that Top “stole” him. 

Say what you will about SandRay’s opening in Episode 11 feeling a bit rushed, we want, or at least I can assume Jojo and co wanted some moments of peace and happiness between Sand and Ray to give them just a moment of stability. Because, I don’t think they are ready for the test of external pressure. They got this brief moment where they are happy, sappy, and in love, planning for the future, yada yada, but the fundamental internal issues between Sand and Ray, namely Sand’s inability to maintain a boundary and Ray’s inability to tolerate a boundary have not been worked through. Ray’s jealousy and ownership of Sand have not been worked through, Ray’s alcoholism has not been worked through, Sand’s compulsive caregiving have not been worked through. 

gif of Ray saying he won't be jealous, you know, like a liar by @firstmix

And in comes Boeing, calling Ray Sand’s friend, trying to get Sand to take him home with him, trying to talk to Sand alone. Flirting with Sand, reminding him that Ray isn’t his type, being physically affectionate. Boeing, once again, is serving as the external pressure testing the weak points in SandRay’s relationship, in this case Sand’s simpdom and Ray’s possessiveness. 

Ray’s method of getting between Sand and any other potential romantic interests has always been to suggest a threesome. To throw out a claim on Sand’s body, and to get right with Sand exploring other sexual options while Ray is still there able to watch, participate, and/or control the sexual encounter. It serves as a great way for Ray to stake his claim, to make people who thought Sand was single (when he is) feel like they are invading a relationship, etc. and up until now it has worked. 

But Boeing is the external test of Sand and Ray’s relationship. And Boeing is a chameleon that can slide in to anyone’s personality. And Boeing has no issue with sex or intimacy with total strangers, especially if it brings him closer to what he wants, as we know from him making out with Mew. So Ray takes the bait, offers a hangout with the three of them, and takes Boeing and Sand back to his house. Ray is, however, extremely insecure about his relationship to Sand, as we can see from the preview that Ray is buying in to Boeing’s External Issues Test. He wants to know if Sand has gotten over Boeing, he wants Sand to kiss Boeing, I do not yet know how that whole thing is going to end (though I for one hope there is at least a threeway make out if they don’t end up with an actual threesome) but considering that Sand seems pretty pissed in the preview, I don’t think it is going to go over swimmingly (haha get it? swimmingly, cause they…nevermind).

gif of a truly pining Sand made by @sunsetandthemoon

What I personally think Boeing is going to do with Sand and Ray’s relationship is expose the part of their internal struggle that they have not addressed yet, and that is either going to tear Sand and Ray apart (for you know…the three hours Sand is able to stay mad at Ray before Ray makes puppy dog eyes and Sand succumbs to his masochism once more). Or potentially, highlight the issues and allow Sand and Ray to talk through where the rough points in their relationship are (haha, can you imagine?)

Regardless of whether or not Sand and Ray pass or fail Boeing’s external pressures test, Boeing will have done his job exploring the strength of Sand and Ray’s relationship and will move on to testing the fractures in Boston and Nick’s relationship. Which, honestly, I think Boston and Nick have the strongest chance of passing with flying colors because they have been working through their internal problems extremely, extremely well the last few episodes. But we shall see what actually happens in the finale. 

Anyway, all of this to say, that if you think Boeing should have come in to this story earlier, I personally think you have misunderstood the purpose Boeing serves to the plot. He should not have been introduced while the group was still intact, because there were too many other moving pieces of internal dynamics issues that needed to be worked out without a random stranger coming in and trying to fuck with it. As we head in to the finale, we need to understand how the characters get to the end point of the story.

And I think we can only really do that, when we see how every couple holds or crumbles under the pressure of the outside world, now that they have that talking things through like adults actually may be a valid method of getting what you want out of a relationship.

Who knew? 

gif by @sunsetandthemoon

[ronnytherandom]

I forgot to watch content all week so i wrote about games ive been playing

9/2/2021: The Truman Show

You should fear your fears but embrace them and use them to guide you into the unknown, to explore and experience what life has to offer. Fear stands between you and the fullest experience of life so you must pass through it to better yourself. Heed not the walls built about you and the chains made to hold you. Though the architects insist it will preserve your life, containment is anathema to life. Do not take in faith the benevolence of powers that be; instead trust those who would support and liberate you, guide you through fear and into life.

As best I can lay it out, I think this is the philosophy of the Truman show but there is so much more to read into it also. There is critique of systems of commodification and celebrity (i.e. capitalism) reducing human beings to a consumable good as well as encouragement to find and pursue your goals despite adversity and even sensibility which is also tied to the illusion of economic responsibility. You can’t put a camera inside a human head, you can never “know” them without being an active and intrinsic part of their life, but also there is need for reciprocation. If one half exists with ulterior motive then the entire relationship is rotten; sincere humanity is what creates real connections. Without such your world is fake. A world built around one person is a world where no one can truly live. All these actors have given up basically their entire lives for the sake of watching Truman have his life built around him by outside forces, have allowed themselves to be commodified and dehumanised for the good of one man, Christoph. The man at the top has delusions of grandeur and thinks only of his own bottom line, he cares not for his subjects but simply wants them to do as he tells them because it benefits him to commodify their lives and interactions. Even then he cannot stand to lose control and in seeking to demonstrate Truman’s “realness” he structures his life so thoroughly that eventually there’s no reality left, only a script and adverts. But the people watching still empathise with Truman because everyone in the working class understands what it is to be trapped because real life is our own Truman show and one day we must all pass through fear, step out of the dome and create a real life for ourselves outside of the system of commodification which consumes everyone’s life and removes all realness and sincerity and emotional catharsis from it.

I unreservedly love this film.

14/2/2021: Assorted Game Reviews

Horizon Zero Dawn (Unfinished due to technical issues, 45 hours inc. parts of Frozen Wilds): This game is really cool and really fun. I think it is defined by its incredible setting which somehow creates a fresh feeling post-apocalyptic environment. Said environment creates intriguing alt-future lore and some very interesting environments to explore. I love the machine designs (especially tallnecks!) and was very sad to hear one of their contributing artists passed away recently but I’m glad their work lives on in this visually stunning game. I’m a sucker for Ubisoft-style open world games simply because it tickles a certain kind of itch and somehow this non-Ubisoft game has outdone Ubisoft on their own formula, which is hilarious, but also good for me as running around this world exploring and clearing map markers is engaging fun. Not least because of the combat. I have a minor criticism here that the combat feels slightly awkward on mouse and keyboard, the arrows never seem to go where I’m aiming, but aside from that the experience of fighting is a grand one. Enemies never lose their threat and I love the weak spot system the game employs which makes every tool useful in niche circumstance and rewards curiosity. It specifically manages this in a way that I feel the Witcher series could learn from if it ever returns; by making head on assault less viable and encouraging tactical hunting. I do feel this system makes hunting robots so fun that by contrast hunting humans becomes a chore however, though I noted this improves in the dlc with the addition of humans with elemental weaknesses limited in number as they are. I cannot speak for the story in entirety but what I encountered was pretty good, though I feel as if it was only just really getting going at the point where I could not continue. I find Aloy to be a compelling and well portrayed protagonist and though I can guess about her origin and the ultimate end of the alt-future apocalypse I still want to see how it plays out on screen, so will return to this as soon as I’ve fixed it.

Rimworld (122 hours. Familiar with but do not own Royalty Expansion):

Rimworld is one of those super special games that I don’t think I have a single problem with. Fair warning it can be brutal and is heavily dependent on RNG but this allows it to create truly unique and interesting scenarios on a constant basis. In the wider perspective it could be described as formulaic, with regular cycles of managing the settlement between raids and random events, but the devils in the details. Colonist traits, health and skills dictate how you play and sometimes you’ll be forced to adapt as some colonists simply refuse to perform some tasks. The depth of health particularly amuses me, in that each little part of someone’s body is modelled in a way. If you’re in a firefight you may take a single bullet which grazes your finger and you’re fine. Alternately it could pierce your human leather cowboy hat, your skull and kill you instantly and the game will tell you exactly what happened. The risk/reward element is addictive enough, and that’s without accounting for just how cool it is to see your colony slowly expand. Establishing more and more options for crafting is fun and shows off the full range of different items in the game which is fucking extensive. Between clothing, weapons, armour, sculpture and drugs to name only a few you have the opportunity to create many varied production lines either for your colonists or to trade for money and there is a lot of fun to be had here as well as it is quite satisfying to see psychoid you have grown personally become the cocaine your colonists snort to help them stay awake on limited sleep. From an archaeologist’s perspective it is especially cool to look back over your base and see the hints of how and why structures were built and remember the history of your limitations and development through structure. I think the lore of the universe is really cool too, a very 40k-esque kind of place except with far less order, somehow. But the universe does an excellent job of feeling alive and moving constantly on both a planetary and interstellar level. You can fully believe that while you build wooden shacks to shield yourself from terrifyingly low temperatures there are simultaneously rich pieces of shit living it up on the glitterworld that’s one system over. The music does an excellent job of creating the wild west frontier atmosphere the game cultivates to great effect. Ultimately, for just being a grid with a series of different numbers attached, this game does a fantastic job of creating a compelling, brutal and very real colony management experience. I dont think I can properly put into words the grandness and scope of this one. I didnt even mention the modding scene, which is expansive and tailors to basically any need you could have. The Rim is a terrifying place but theres so much fun to be had.

Factorio (86 hours, mostly 1.1): Having completed a game of Factorio I can tell you reliably that this is one of the best games ever made, thoroughly addictive and fun. If you like numbers, logistics, TRAINS, its gonna be your thing. Not to mention its probably the only documented case of a game with no bugs (so far as official forums are concerned). Strictly speaking this games combat is not the most engrossing thing but good lord do you feel it when you acquire a flamethrower. The way each aspect of the game (production, research, logistics, combat, upgrades for everything therein) feeds into the next is a really well constructed balancing act such that you must experience the full game in order to complete it and I always appreciate this kind of design. I think its one of the best tenets of factory game design especially as its something present in Satisfactory too. Beyond all of this generalised good the game is also excellent in its intricacies, the architecture necessary to build a maximum efficiency base, the level of planning and organisation that can be employed is mind-blowing. Not to mention the mod community, factorion is already an extensive experience and some mad bastards have seen fit to complicate it further, hats off to them. This really is a great moment in gaming.

 Destiny 2 (198 hours, all expansions, played some post Forsaken release, mostly Season of Arrivals onwards, spent roughly £20 on microtransactions):

This is a very interesting and enjoyable experience, but I must say it can be a bit controversial at times. What its does particularly well is moment to moment gameplay and design in all aspects. The game is stunning; between environments, cosmetics, shaders ships and ghosts there’s a vast range of incredible things to see, all rooted in the “pseudo-magi-science” aesthetic it’s got going on. The class design is excellent and you really do feel like you embody this rampaging madman / agile gunman / space wizard archetype, whichever you choose to play. The abilities, especially supers, are very satisfying. Everything has heft and power behind it which can be felt in all aspects of design; sound and animation is top notch. Movement is cool, you can feel how fast you move both on foot and in vehicles and the navigation has a little fun subtlety depending on your class jump, even if you can bounce unpredictably occasionally. But for the love of god why is the wall kick in there? It has only ever served to push me from a ledge into a bottomless pit. You're looking to remove antiquated content? Start there. Some guns are not so good to shoot but there’s such a great range of guns that are fun its like complaining about one drop in an ocean; and enemies are fun to shoot at, each faction distinct in meaningful ways and presenting an effective challenge. Speaking of oceans, that’s one way to describe the lore. I haven’t dived too deep but it keeps going down forever and everything I’ve read is intriguing. As a former Elder Scrolls lore nut this is something I could definitely sink my teeth into, though its much more of a pulpy sci-fi vibe than a pure nonsense vibe. I do think the game has a bit of a loot problem, primarily in regards to the conflict between high stats and looking good. This should never be a conflict, and yes you can apply ornaments to any purple gear but that’s not enough when I spend the entire time grinding power levels and thus must change armour and weapons on a constant basis to progress. This game needs a true transmog system and if not that, rethink how gear power level works. Perhaps rather than earning new instances of gear you always possess a version of it and the loot you acquire in missions just upgrades your instance to your current overall power level? This would serve to do away with the current upgrade system which I think is a needless additional grind. Perhaps it could be retained in using enhancement cores to empower gear as present but necessitating a whole upgrade module to keep your favourite weapon on hand is kind of painful honestly. There is also at present the issue of sunsetting gear, mildly controversial to say the least. If it’s necessary to streamline the game and make it function moving forward so be it but surely loot pools should be adjusted so you can actually get useful loot from older locations? And why sunset personal instances of gear which can be acquired at the regular power level anyway? I had to throw away my favourite bow and hunt down a new version of the exact same weapon for… what reason? I do think destination navigation leaves a little to be desired also. I get that having a physical hub world is meaningful but Destiny does not have a very extroverted community; I can count the times someone noticed me in the tower on one hand. And its not even like there’s fun activities to be found in the same sense as say Deep Rock Galactic, which really does take advantage of its hub. Perhaps for players who simply want to go about their business all of the vendors could be set into a menu system where just clicking an icon takes you to their menu from anywhere in the system rather than, per se, having to go through an entire loading screen (Which takes you to orbit and back) to reach a location which serves simply as the front for four menus. These are established player problems. As a dedicated PvE player I can say that this game is immensely fun in combat and growing in power does feel really good. It’s something I recommend getting into, there’s just some very large creases that need ironing which the Bungie should really take the time to address rather than pushing out new in game content every three months.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Speaking about disability in fiction, would you say Toph from a:tla is one of the best written disabled character? Is there anything that could've been improved about her character?

DEAR FUCKING GOD do I love Toph.  I would humbly submit to have Lady Toph “The Blind Bandit” “The Runaway” “Greatest Earthbender of All Time” “Inventor of Metalbending” Beifong harvest my organs to achieve eternal life if such a thing were possible.  There are a ton of things that Avatar: the Last Airbender does really well when characterizing Toph, and a few I wish they’d done differently.  [PLEASE NOTE: I am nondisabled, so if I err, please tell me so.]

Is she one of the best-written disabled characters?

She’s certainly a damn cool character whose disability informs but does not define her.  I can’t really say if she’s “the best” or one of, because I haven’t read everything, but I can say that I really like her.

First of all, her story is intersectional AS FUCK.  Toph’s gender, her disability, and her social class are so inextricably linked that there’s no analyzing any single element in a vacuum.  She’s all about being tough and independent.  Partially that’s about being underestimated because of her disability.  Partially that’s about being commodified because of her gender.  Partially that’s about being privileged due to her upper-class upbringing.  All three interact to inform her identity.

“Tales of Ba Sing Se” shows that blindness bars Toph from certain aspects of femininity — she can’t perform the traditional motions of making herself up, attracting young men, being pretty and delicate — which causes her to embrace a more accessible masculine identity.  “The Runaway” shows that Toph enjoys femininity as well as masculinity, but that she struggles to build nurturing relationships when she’s concerned with appearing weak, and that that sometimes leads her to cross ethical boundaries.  “The Chase” and “Bitter Work” are all about how Toph values her independence above all else — because she’s had to struggle against her gender and disability influencing others’ perceptions, but also because she’s had the privilege to avoid helping others due to her social class.  In “The Ember Island Players” she loves being represented by a big tough strong man, but she also clearly associates masculinity with power in a way that becomes troubling when contrasted with Aang’s horror at being played by a woman.  Etcetera.

Even the whole Earth Kingdom’s role as a sort of middle rung of imperialism – less powerful than the Fire Nation, more powerful than the Water Tribes and Air Nomads — informs both the relative strictness of its gender roles and the ability of individual Earth citizens to subvert those roles.  Toph’s identity, like the identities of the other Avatar characters, is inextricably linked to her position in society.

Secondly, Toph has a lot of the features of a complex and agentic character, and her disability is neither ignored nor centralized.  She’s often right, as when she becomes the first person to trust Zuko and the only person capable of making Aang an earthbender.  She’s often wrong, as when she tries to justify theft with a “they started it” argument or belittles Sokka for being a non-bender.  She’s often somewhere in between, as when she chooses to let Appa get taken by sandbenders in order to protect her friends or gets into screaming matches with Katara over matters of procedure.

There’s also the fact that Toph interacts with certain environments differently based on her blindness, drawing attention to (in)accessible aspects of those environments the others wouldn’t have necessarily noticed.  She finds sand and wood flooring inconvenient, she hates navigating water and ice, and she initially avoids walking on metal.  Although she’s not a big fan of flying, she mostly adapts as long as her friends actually remember that she can’t navigate when they’re on Appa’s saddle.

When conflicts do occur with the environment, Toph puts the onus on the environments and on other people to adapt or help her to adapt.  She’s amused and annoyed when Sokka tries to fake correspondence between her and Katara, or stupidly asks why she doesn’t like libraries.  She rips the bottoms off of her shoes.  She calls attention to her inability to do things like scan the ground while flying when her friends are at risk of forgetting.  She plays into others’ assumptions to try and get onto ferries or get away with breaking the law.

Another thing I like: the art style for Toph avoids the trap of “draw sighted person, change eye color, call it a day.”  She doesn’t turn to face people most of the time when she’s talking to them, but also doesn’t seem totally clueless as to their relative locations.  She gets the lay of the land by stomping her feet or pressing a hand against the ground, not turning to “look” in various directions.  She doesn’t bother to keep her hair from blocking her eyes, because her bangs don’t interrupt any sight lines.  She’s neither a comically blind character who apparently can’t navigate at all with sound or touch, nor a dramatic “blind” character whose every action comes off as those of a sighted character.  Toph repeatedly mentions that she doesn��t get the value in sight, clapping back at the assumption that of course she’d want to be nondisabled.

[Image description: A screenshot from “The Chase,” which shows Toph shouting at Katara, with her face turned away from Katara.  Toph is pointing in anger, making it clear that she’s addressing Katara and that she knows Katara’s location relative to herself based on Katara’s voice.]

One last small but important victory for Avatar: it passes the Fries Test.  It has two or more disabled characters — I can explain why Zuko counts as disabled if anyone’s not sure — who survive to the end of the story without being cured, and who have their own narratives rather than existing primarily to educate nondisabled characters.  As a bonus, they have at least one conversation with each other about something that isn’t disability-related.  The Fries Test is meant to be a minimum standard for representation, much like the Bechdel Test, but it’s still nice to know that Avatar passes.

[Image description: A screenshot from “The Ember Island Players,” which shows Zuko and Toph sitting on the floor in a hallway of the theater, talking about the play and about Zuko’s uncle.]

Is there anything that could’ve been improved about her character?

If I ruled the world, or at least the Avatar writers’ room, I’d start with two changes.  One’s small-ish, one’s big and controversial.

The small-ish change: tweak Toph’s narrative to make her earthbending super-abilities less directly counter to her blindness.  As it is, she has shades of a superpowered supercrip: a disabled character from SF whose superpower primarily acts to nullify their disability, thereby giving them the lived experience of a nondisabled person for most or all of the narrative.  Toph is definitely not an egregious example — she’s not Daredevil, who can use his superpowers to read handwritten papers, navigate unfamiliar environments, “feel” colors, detect tiny gestures, and shoot guns.  She does embody experiences with blindness like disorientation when flying and frustration with hanging posters.  She just also has several instances of not experiencing blindness when she (as she puts it) “sees with earthbending.”  I’m not sure what that tweak would look like, precisely, but I’d like to see one all the same.

The bigger change: I’d cast a different voice actor.  Jessie Flower is, based on what little I can find on Wikipedia or IMDB, not blind or visually disabled.  Disability rights activists are right now fighting hard against the trend of “cripping up,” wherein nondisabled actors use mimicry or makeup to pretend to have disabilities on TV and in the movies.  Avatar doesn’t go that far, because it doesn’t have Jessie Flower onscreen in (for instance) contacts that mimic blindness.  However, it nevertheless does not cast a blind actor for the role.  The issue here is that disabled actors are almost never allowed to play nondisabled roles… and disabled actors are also almost never allowed to play disabled roles either.  By failing to find a blind voice actor, the show denied that opportunity to a less-privileged talent.

The Guardian compares the issue to the way that cis actors of the wrong gender are too-often cast in trans roles, men used to play female characters onstage, and white actors used to play black characters in American movies.  I never know how much those comparisons make sense, because among other things they completely ignore intersections of those identities.  But I also think that it’s sometimes the best way to help people understand why excuses like “but it’s haaaaaaarrd to find blind female actors of Asian descent” don’t hold water.

And here’s where I go from “slightly controversial” to “extremely controversial” and might have to enter Witness Protection.  Avatar is getting a live-action adaptation in a few months.  I predict that it will cast a nondisabled actor to play Toph.  And I predict that the same voices which (rightly!) raised such a cry against “racebent” white actors playing Aang and Katara will be completely silent on the topic of “abilitybent” actors playing Zuko and Toph.  I’m saying this on Tumblr partially to get this statement out there:

I am an Avatar: the Last Airbender fan who will ONLY support the live-action show if it casts disabled actors to play disabled characters.

I’m saying it partially because I hope to be proven wrong, either because a blind actress will be cast as live-action Toph or at the very least because Avatar fans will object when a sighted actress is cast.  I’m also saying it because I think that fans can and should protest responsibly when marginalized voices are erased by beloved works of fiction.  Will casting a blind actress require more “work” to make the set accessible?  Probably.  Will casting a blind actress perhaps necessitate more CGI for fight scenes than using a sighted one?  Maybe.  Will it be worth it to cast a blind actress anyway, so that a girl with the lived experience of Toph can portray her on screen and actually get the chance to break into an industry that bars most blind girls from participating?  YES.

[djvpensayosehistorias]

Ratatouille - Artist vs. Critic

The story of Ratatouille is not simple. Remy doesn’t just want to cook. He knows that he has this ability, this gift, and he wants to be recognized for it. And cooking is not a rat activity. Remy has aspirations beyond his animal life. He says that he wants to leave his trace on the world to his father, to which he replies that he’s talking like a human. And Émile is concerned too, at the beginning of the film: standing on two feet, cooking, reading, watching television, those are human activities. But Remy does all of that, and he learned it from the culinary mastermind Gusteau himself. He finds human activity much more fulfilling for his creative spirit. Remy has to find his footing between these two worlds, animals and humans, and he has to confront his animality as he tries to become an artist. No human is fully human, and no animal is fully animal. The most particular aspect of Ratatouille is the conflict between the artist and the critic. Schaffrillas says that ego is the antagonist of the movie because it is pride and selfishness that usually comes in the way of our goals and fruitful relationships. But then I thought about it from the Freudian perspective, at a very basic level. The ego is the self. What in English is translated as ego, superego and id is in German Das Ich, das Über Ich und das es, in Spanish it is Yo, Superyo y el ello, in French, Le moi, le surmoi et le ça. While vanities and conceit can be diminished, ego itself cannot be eliminated because it is part of identity. And between the artist and the critic, ego plays a very interesting role. With their critique, the critic hurts the artist’s ego. Artists are proud of their art. They can also be very insecure about it, but then they have an ego that is already beaten down. The ego of the artist is very fragile because their work reflects their self, their identity. Because of the intimate relation with the work, incomprehensible to everyone else, any attack against the artpiece becomes personal. It is common to see artists behaving as rockstars, since they are the creative deities, but it is rare to see a critic superstar. Artists have the advantage of appealing to emotions, memories and fantasies. Critics, instead, appeal to value, discourse and method, something the average enthusiast is less engaged by, less familiar with. Artworks can be immediately related with the individual that produced them, but critique tends to be desubjectified, generalized within the canon, although opinions, the instrument of the critic, are just as personal and subjective as any artwork. Has opinion been commodified, like every other type of artform? I wouldn’t say so. But it is easier for the critic to disappear in comparison to the Author. How many people know of Death of the Author without knowing of Roland Barthes and the context in which he wrote his essay? Even if the critic succeeds in achieving fame, notoriety and ultimately influence, they are vulnerable to this sort of erasure. The goal in Ratatouille is to impress and defeat the critic. Anton Ego was prepared to give Gusteau another unfavorable review. But the artist must not view the critic as their adversary. Ego realizes this applies inversely to the critic after tasting Remy’s dish. The artist and the critic are not at battle. Critics do not only voice their opinion, they contribute to literary theory, they expand the language of critique and help others understand why they appreciate the art they so love. And while I deem critics those who emit critique professionally, the art consumer, the middle-man in this binary of artist and critic, also exerts the role of critic. While not the first, Marcel Duchamp said that the artwork is completed by the spectator.   Everyone can be an artist and everyone can be a critic. The critic is an artist too. A critic is not one who only gives negative criticism, but one who situates the artist in front of the eyes of the world. Full video here: 

https://youtu.be/6TDO9ZPKMvs

[arcticdementor]

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be heard trilling in the background, before her voice is overtaken by my own. “Don’t do that, love,” I say. Then, to the camera: “Does he seem like he’s in pain to you?”

It took my husband and me three years to understand that in fact I was right that day in the delivery room. Our son was hurt. And it will take him years to heal—longer than it should have, and that is on top of the injustice of the original wound—though I thank God every day that we figured it out.

The first breakthrough came when my husband David remembered a book about brain science he had read a decade earlier, by a doctor named Norman Doidge. It changed our lives, by allowing us to properly understand our son’s injury (and to understand why we couldn’t manage to get a straight answer about it from any of the “experts” we had seen). It’s been a tough road, but from that moment on, we at least knew what to do—and why.

A year or so later, we met Doidge and his wife, Karen, for dinner, and it is here that the story may become pertinent for you.

After we ordered, I told Norman I had a question I’d been wanting to ask—and that I wanted his honest answer to it, even if it meant that I had done something wrong. I proceeded to relay to him the entire tale, from the very beginning to that very moment, of what felt to me like our Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.

How was it, I then asked, that it took my husband and me—both children of doctors, both people with reporting and researching backgrounds, among the lucky who have health insurance, and with access through family and friends to what is billed as the best medical care in the country—years to figure this out, and that in the end we only did so basically by accident?

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it's now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was ... Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

…

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

…

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

…

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform.

…

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

You could, seemingly overnight, transform people’s views about anything—even everything.

The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America’s greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany. Flatness, frictionlessness.

The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive. Flatness.

Facebook’s longtime motto was, famously, “Move fast and break shit,” which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do.

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A’s by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements—because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn—will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

…

I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

Like them, our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.

And not just to save ourselves, but to save each other. The vast majority of Americans are not ideologues. They are people who wish to live in a free country and get along with their neighbors while engaging in profitable work, getting married, raising families, being entertained, and fulfilling their American right to adventure and self-invention. They are also the consumer base for movies, TV, books, and other cultural products. Every time Americans are given the option to ratify progressive dictates through their consumer choices, they vote in the opposite direction. When HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its on-demand library last year, it became the #1 bestselling movie on Amazon. Meanwhile, endless numbers of Hollywood right-think movies and supposed literary masterworks about oppression are dismal failures for studios and publishing houses that would rather sink into debt than face a social-justice firing squad on Twitter.

[lichenthrope9]

pandemic soundscape: sonic precarity and trauma

The guttural hum of a box fan and the soft, coded tapping of keys in my laptop’s keyboard are enough to fill my small bedroom. My bird screams occasionally from the next room and breaks the spell of predictability and quietude, and my mother stomps around in the kitchen or upstairs, making my soundscape feel precarious and uncertain. Her loudness corresponds to her anger. It is the element of the soundscape over which I have least direct control. This has become my everyday: my performance as a member of the household is indirectly reflected in the level of calm the house’s soundscape provides that day. Did I wake up on time? Did I do my chores? Did I call out sick from work? My every scrutinized action is incorporated into the intensity with which the cabinets get slammed open and closed in the kitchen. How I wish my door locked. It doesn’t creak or bang when it opens, but I can still hear the difference when the open door allows more sound from beyond the threshold. Besides, a suddenly opened door is usually closely followed by a demand of some kind, which always seems loud no matter the absolute volume. I don’t even know if I would prefer if she knocked. She has no concept of softness. She is an abrupt person, or maybe I’m simply too sensitive.

It is my hope that this glimpse into the sonic affects of my daily life has provided a sense of anxiety, because I wish to explore the sources of this very tension. What is it about the pandemic that has intensified these interactions to a point where I feel such intense scrutiny through sound? How does one’s control over sound, or lack thereof, create feelings of comfort or dread? Why is it that my bird, who is physically louder than my mother, does not raise my hackles as much as my mother’s tone? I will draw on Tausig’s work on dynamic intensities in protest settings, and Hagood’s study of noise-cancelling headphones to explain these phenomena.

Before the pandemic, my relationship with my mother was certainly fraught, but I usually had the option to leave the house when necessary. Now that I’m more restricted to these walls, every sensation is loaded with politics and directly impacts my health. Too much of the same set of sensations for too long feels oppressive; the walls close in and I get migraines or anxiety attacks. On the other end of the spectrum, a totally unpredictable environment generates panic or triggers dissociative episodes. My sonic surroundings very much play into this gamut of experience, affording calm only within a narrow band that balances bland predictability with stressful novelty.

In Exposure and Response Prevention therapy, a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy protocol to treat Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I was often told that OCD makes me “allergic to uncertainty.” The joke rings true in my relationship with sound, and with my mother. When I don’t know how she’ll react to my behavior, I withdraw into a bubble of sensory control. Such strategies of intentional social and sensory withdrawal are common in places where “personal space” is hard to come by, such as in airports or trains. In the words of Mack Hagood, “Modern transportation puts us in close proximity with diverse strangers while leaving the rules for interaction largely up to negotiation and interpretation. In such circumstances, it is little wonder that many people choose to retreat from sociality through books, newspapers, and media devices” (2011: 580). Though Hagood focuses on how such retreat can be commodified, my interest is in what type of people benefit most from the ability to retreat, and who is afforded such abilities. Certainly, many obsessive-compulsives, including myself, crave the ability to discreetly and temporarily dull or turn off the chaos of the outside world. Autistic individuals and trauma survivors also come to mind; therapists of my own have even recommended sensory deprivation tanks to treat trauma-related tension and anxiety (which I have yet to try, but emerging research finds sensory deprivation therapeutic for both acute and complex PTSD). This has serious implications for the embodiment of cultures within entire populations struggling with chronic mental health conditions. When uncertainty is an enemy, and there is a product that can defeat it even temporarily, sometimes it seems like there is no choice but to consume that product. This also helps contextualize the higher rates of drug use, particularly central nervous system depressants, in people with anxiety disorders, trauma, and/or autism-spectrum disorders. We are desperate to dull the world’s loud and garish chaos by whatever means necessary, and since those means usually cost money, capital rears its ugly head once again and mentally ill populations become a market to exploit, divide, and conquer.

So, many engage in a cycle of attempting to control or distance from their sensory environments to manage their health within those environments. But what is it about the environments themselves that create such intensities? It isn’t enough to say that loudness or “absolute intensity” of sound and sensory experience always generates anxiety; if that were the case, my bird would always be more of a stressor than my mother. For clarity, we can turn to the work of Benjamin Tausig, who conducted ethnography with the Red Shirt protestors in Thailand, some of whom used silence to create extreme affects of pity and mourning: “Diew told this story [of military brutality toward protestors] visually, through his costume and iconography. But he also told it through sonic figuration, with quiet and silence as dynamic poetic resources. It is possible that his silence achieved a political mobility that no sound could have matched” (2018: 7). In his guest lecture, I asked Dr. Tausig to elaborate on the effect of the boundary between Diew’s silent performance and the loud protest around him. Dr. Tausig said that Diew’s performance created a small, temporary zone of peace in the loud protest, where the chaotic, extroverted, overlapping affects of loud protest felt slightly muted in a disconcerting way (2020: paraphrased from Tausig’s lecture).

It seems, therefore, that the intensity of sound is not directly related to a physical aspect of loudness. Rather, Tausig says that “This was a poetic play with the dynamic possibilities of the gathering [protest at all its noise volumes]” (2018: 8). That is, the relationship between Diew’s silence and the surrounding loudness was what generated the affective component of the performance. This rings true for my experience in the pandemic. The sudden isolation in a single sonic environment created a microcosm in which the slightest deviation from baseline takes on various intensities.

[legmanns-moved]

Why I don’t interact with @gam.iru_ on Instagram

@gam.iru (idk what name they use) is a mestize puerto rican user who I have beef with because of their repeated instances of antiblack racism and racism against korean people, inappropriate sexual behavior, bullying of others, and a lot of other stuff. This post is going to act as my catch-all post explaining my reasons for no longer wishing to associate with them or their friends. I am not trying to “ruin their life” or intentionally make them look bad... they make themself look bad.

One of my main issues with them during the time that we were friends was their frequent use and defense of nonblack people, themself included, using the terms n*gga and n*gger. The first instance of the N word was in a group chat that we had back in early-mid 2018 for Cookie Run fans, where they would on occasion refer to certain individuals(cartoon characters, public figures, etc.) as "that n/gga", and then once I or another user called them out for it they'd insist that they were in the wrong headspace, failing to address the bigger issue.

To add from that, one of the things that lead to the termination of our friendship was their repeated defense of the use of the term "n/gger sugar" in a song by the band Queen, and continuing to listen to this song and mock me for it making me uncomfortable. This term is obviously racist, and there's never any reason for a nonblack person to use or defend it. From what I've been told byother users, gam.iru is claiming that they refused to listen to the song in question. I can confirm that gam.iru did not, in fact, avoid songs that contained the term n*gger. Their choosing to listen to the offending song in question was what made me first criticize the action. This first altercation (the first time I've called them out for the n word, not the first time it was used) was on April 17, 2019 at around 6 am EST, so 5 am for them.

Even if they were telling the truth with avoiding offending songs, it is still beyond inappropriate of them to try to defend or justify the use of this term by a nonblack individual, or furthermore claim that other individuals' actions are not racist because they don't think they're racist. Especially to me, a black person. Nonblack people do not get to dictate what is and is not considered antiblack racism, or try to tone police black people when speaking on antiblack racism. gam.iru did this on numerous occasions.

Another one of the things that they did was repeated racialized hateful remarks towards east asian musicians, specifically korean artists. Apparently, they've tried to justify this by citing that hating on kpop was a trend at the time, but the trend originated from racialized xenophobia and they knew that and simply didn't care. They repeatedly made comments lumping all korean people into one category, mocking korean artists, and all that, which is still racist regardless of intent. Using a racist meme doesn't excuse racism, and that was one of my problems with them. They also did this to a lesser extent with Japanese musicians who I listened to at the time, but I didn't mention that since their fixation seemed to be specifically on Korean people. They went a step further from simply "not liking" kpop to the mockery of korean people, bringing this up every single time other people in the group chat mentioned anything korean ,and making racist remarks.  This was my issue.

(please note that the screenshot where I call them Jack is from 2018, before they chose the name Carlos. I don't intend to deadname them, this is just a really old message. To update, they no longer go by Carlos either, and I don’t know what their new name is.)

The idea that Western artists represent and own the concept of free expression while Asian artists are "starved" and are always forced to suffer is not only racist propaganda, but dishonest. The implication that this is merely a Korean issue, when many corporations such as Disney or Atlantic Records have had repeated issues with pedophilia, abuse, and censorship of their own stars, is therefore racist no matter how you spin it. You cannot criticize the kpop industry while actively supporting the western music industry as if there's nothing wrong, which is something gam.iru has done. The entire trend of hating kpop was something started by mostly white men to emasculate east Asian men and mock them, citing that they "look the same", and mock teenage girls for liking these stars. Gam.iru , to date, has never apologize for making comments like this, or apologized to my friend, another black user, for her art "looking like a kpop stan's", and repeatedly inserting themselves into conversations discussing her interest in korean artists. All of this was done while spamming the chat with pictures of Queen (and occasionally other offending artists), whom Sharon and I had previously denounced as being antiblack in some form. I can assure you, since I was there for all of this, that gam.iru was not speaking from a place of supposed concern for Korean artists when they made these comments, but rather simply being an ass. 

To continue, the reason that their fetishization of dark skin was included in this list, is due to this being an aspect of racism. Talking about how you have a "preference" or whatever for dark skin while repeatedly engaging in antiblack racism and making comments about how hard it is to draw natural hair is disturbing. The fetishization of features associated with blackness, such as dark skin is weird as hell, and I personally take issue with it as a dark skinned person. It may not seem as significant to you, but comments like that make my skin crawl, as fetishistic racism is rather dehumanizing when you're at the receiving end of it.As someone who is dark skinned and female-presenting, I can say that the amount of sexual exploitation that dark skinned black girls go through because of this obsession with our bodies and features is incomprehensibly harmful to our psyche and self image. This fetishistic racism is also known as exoticism, which is what leads to people breeding for the aesthetic (people having mixed race children because they're "prettier") and white people adopting children of color for the Aesthetic, leading to psychologically damaged children who often times will have identity issues, be divorced from the culture, and in the case of white/poc mixed kids raised by white parents, be self hating towards the poc parent's race. This entire supposed "preference" for dark skin, juxtaposed with the fact that they have /only/ dated fairly pale white people is disturbingly fetishistic and made me and other black people who were in group chats with them violently uncomfortable.

Other racist aspects of their behavior during and after our friendship would be their frequent digital blackface and seeming mockery of mentally ill black people, as well as overuse (and misuse) of AAVE and treating black people as the punchline to many of their jokes. I can't explain what digital blackface is well in my own words, but it can be boiled down to a frequent use of black people and the black image as your way of "expressing yourself" (comments like your "inner black girl" or what have you), as a means of further commodifying the black image. Some articles/videos that explain it better than me: [X, X, X]

  In regards to mentally ill people, one of gam.iru's favorite subjects of ridicule until only recently (the past 3 months) was a mentally ill black woman who goes by Peaches online. She is a victim of repeated physical and sexual abuse who achieved notoriety in 2017(?) after running away from her home and making money through creating shock videos of eating her own feces, and sex work, when she was roughly 16 years old. Since then, her behavior has become more hideous, with attempts to sell her infant daughter and incidents of public exposure in areas where there are young children, molesting and subsequently murdering a puppy, and intentionally trying to give sexual partners STI's. There are more things that she has done, but I don't wish to go into more detail. I do not in any way intend to defend Peaches' behavior, and have limited sympathy given the severity of the crimes that she has committed. Nonetheless, gam.iru , and people like them, find this behavior-what should be clear cries for help- amusing. I can't express my disgust enough. 

Besides Peaches, frequent punchlines to gam.iru's bizarre humor were Wendy Williams, a talk show host whose rage and mental spiral has been played up by media for laughs, and Rick James, a musician who suffered from cocaine addiction and subsequently kidnapped, tortured, and sexually and physically assaulted women and girls on multiple occasions. Gam.iru unironically declared their being a fan of this man despite all of this on multiple occasions.(I really don't want to include every instance of them talking about rick james just trust me when I say it was a lot)

In regards to their misuse of AAVE, it would be inappropriate to call them out without acknowledging that just about every nonblack person I know also makes it a point to overuse and misuse AAVE. AAVE stands for African American Vernacular English, or alternatively BVE (Black Vernacular English). You probably know it better as internet slang or "stan twitter speak". This is another thing that gets misappropriated frequently in modern society, and I don't have the mental spoons to properly explain its history and the extent of why nonblack people using it is icky... to say the least. Being overly critical and outwardly racist towards black people while fixing your mouth to use our own dialogue for a trend is yet again another form of racism, and pretty nasty on their part. They're not the only person who does this or the last person who does it (this is a growing problem in society), but I take issue with them in particular for using AAVE as a joke while also being extremely antiblack. 

There are more articles that talk about this issue in detail, but to start here's this one: http://www.dailyuw.com/opinion/columnists/article_b7318c5a-fb7b-11e9-afee-a73bf103f2db.html

Besides racism, personal grievances that I and others had with them were their being uncomfortably sexual in conversation and in sfw spaces. Frequently, when we were friends, they would send nsfw memes in inappropriate locations, or a completely sfw situation would be turned into something unacceptable. The main server that I spoke with them in at this time is a child-friendly server, where we were more than clear on the fact that since there are younger individuals and people who are uncomfortable with sexual jokes here, any subject matter of that category would have to be put in certain channels. They failed to do this, and skated heavily on the fact that they were friends with many of the mods here (myself included, I admit I was too lax with them and their behavior) to evade being temporarily kicked or banned. For personal reasons, I don't want to find images of this subject matter and will not be sending any.

Another unrelated thing that's merely personal beef at this point (so I didn't include it on my story) was their repeatedly mocking/bashing/whatever their friend group from school in my DM's. By repeatedly, I mean on a daily basis. It scaled from being critical of one friend, who they believed had bad art and calling them "ddlg" (don't know their real name) while bashing them, their interests, etc. to repeatedly sending me pictures of their ex and their art and mocking everything about this person's existence. This ranged from their relationship with gender identity to things gam.iru found wrong with their art to bragging about mistreating them during their relationship. Although some of gam.iru's problems with this person were valid, as this individual's behavior on many occasions was unacceptable (will not go into detail), I now understand that this was a form of bullying, and regret all parts that I had in it.I will say that I didn't participate in the mockery of this person's art or their appearance, but my lack of speaking up on how mean gam.iru was being did enable them and give them a platform to be hateful rather than talking out their problems like a mature person would have.

This brings me to my last thing (which kind of ties back into racism), the incident that lead to our final falling out. After a series of comments mocking Kim Seokjin, a vocalist for the kpop group BTS, on June 19, 2019, I did finally ask them to stop.

(DM in question) 

After I sent my first DM, they proceeded to go invisible on Discord and leave every group chat or server that I was in. I was frustrated, but I felt that I'd said my piece, so I went to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was still upset, and seeing that I knew they were awake but had still failed to say anything in response (it was 11 am at this point, so they were awake), I sent another DM, being an ultimatum. At this point I'll admit I was not trying to be nice or cordial at all. I apologize for the vulgarity. 

This was the last time that I made any attempt to speak to this person. About a week later, a former mutual friend (who is also more racist, ableist, and what have you but that's a whole other can of worms that I won't be getting into right now! maybe in a few hours though once I've slept) sent this message in the mod chat of the main server that we all frequented, and I responded. 

That was the end of the conversation, until October 2019. In a server that I had been in that gam.iru happened to moderate, I noticed that out of the blue I had been removed from it with no warning.

^I contacted the ex mutual friend, and this is everything to be said on that issue. 

As of today, June 1, 2020, they have not apologized for any of their actions to any of the parties involved. Accordingly, I will not retract any statements made about them being grossly racist and just gross in general until all other parties involved get their according apologies. If I get wind of them saying/doing shit like this again, I'll be just as vocal on how and why they're racist and gross, and will keep doing so until all other parties get their apologies. I have no interest in ever being affiliated with this individual again, because they have single handedly been responsible for half the drama in my life since 2017 and even if they do manage to grow as a person at some point, the damage has already been done and I want nothing to do with them. They're simply a nasty person and I don't believe that given their history, seeing any performative bs during a time of crisis for the black community is appropriate on their part. Do with this information what you will, and have a nice day.

UPDATE (June 7 2020)-

This user has still failed to apologize and considers all of the aforementioned issues “petty” so yeah I’m keeping this post up.

[wakefield-gnapp]

Stop Eating Animals.

Society, as previously mentioned, kinda sucks. Especially here in the States, it’s normal to treat the environment as something that exists only to serve us, as something positive, but something that allows for unhindered taking, and seemingly no giving on our part. We’re raised in a social environment where this thinking has been naturalized, as such it’s rather frustrating to talk about any sort of justice related issue, especially but not only directly environmentally concerned. Some of these issues are becoming easier to discuss, and a lot of the traditional oppressive ways of thinking are being challenged, but I think there’s one that extraordinarily pressing that, while is making some headway, is still not a cultural norm, and that’s the exploitation of animals and how it relates to so many other topics. Or rather, stopping that exploitation.

Simply put, I think people should stop eating animals. It’s mean :( 

( I also don’t think we should be consuming animal products/byproducts )

We simply don’t have to eat animals to survive. Besides it’s not like most people, especially here, are eating well in terms of the quality and safety and nutrition of their food, most things are highly processed nowadays anyways, so what’s the point in slaughter of more animals than you’ll ever see in your life time and the devastation of the environment. There has to be reasoning to why someone does something though, I mean there doesn’t HAVE to be, but there should be otherwise what’s driving them? Obligation? I sure hope not. I think everyone should read the Singer paper I linked in my first post. Link here. Unfortunately just reading a paper isn’t going to change everyone’s mind, in fact there’s not one universal thing that is going to sway everyone to stop supporting the needless and senseless abuse and exploitation of animals and the environment, but talking about it to whoever is willing to discuss it is important. I say willing, not because those who are unwilling don’t need to hear it but rather it won’t be constructive, many people are opposed to listening to things that call out their way of life, and even if it’s not said in an aggressive manner, telling someone their way of life is mean and immoral isn’t a great way to get someone to think positively about what you’re telling them. So, to try and be nicer; Everyone, please stop eating animals? I’m not sure that’s still effective. Because even being polite, and even after presenting substantial evidence against the commodification of non-human nature, ( and humans in many cases ), people are sometimes still unwilling to change how they act, and I just can’t seem to understand it. It’s truly a shame that the dominant social paradigm and this process of naturalization is so hard to fight against. It also doesn’t help that every single person, is completely different, and even in the event that two people lived the exact same experiences and met the same people and ate the same things, they will still turn out different, even in the slightest ways.

      To try and get back on track, I’m advocating that people need to stop consuming animals and animal byproducts. The industry that has formed around the exploitation of animals, and I say this not lightly at all, is evil. And that may seem silly to say that something is “evil” especially nowadays, but I think it’s accurate. Maybe reprehensible is a bit more fit for modern times. Evil implies that the exploitation of nature is a moral issue, and while I completely think it is a moral issue, I don’t think that’s all it is. I don’t think that one needs to be “good” in a moral sense, to realize that we shouldn’t be commodifying, farming, eat, and using animals as a resource. Something most people I hope can agree with is the murder is not okay. Something that I don’t think people can agree on is that murder is never okay, I think some people might argue that in the situation of self-preservation taking another’s life would be acceptable, but I don’t think that’s particularly relevant, especially now in reference to animal consumption, because we are not in a fight that will determine whether we live or die. We don’t rely on hunting and gathering, there are some people that genuinely do, but modern-day Americans do not. So outside of morals, if we acknowledge that death, while inevitable for all living things is something that should be avoided, especially in a case where that death is not necessary, when possible, and reasonably can with more than plenty of non-animal based products. To put it plainly, why should we kill animals for goods if we can easily avoid it? But that reasoning relies on someone having basic compassion for other living things and a willingness for change that would result in a temporary learning curve in regards to different ways to eat new things, but apparently that’s too much to ask for most people.

But let’s set morals aside. And let’s also set aside needless killing. Maybe the fact that eating a plant-based diet is far healthier than a typical American diet is reason for someone. And if not, we can set aside personal health and we could look at the fact that animal agriculture is one of the primary contributors to our climate crisis and reduction in the consumption of animals would lead to dramatic changes over time. But it seems a minor inconvenience in relation to what they eat, seems to be too much for most people. Perhaps some are just ignorant, but veganism and plant-based diets, while still very very much a minor practice especially here in the states, are gaining a ton of traction, while merely just being to get more money, even the biggest of companies are acknowledging demand for plant-based foods, McDonalds will be introducing the McPlant soon, Burger King has had the Impossible Whopper for quite some time, Taco Bell has a feature Vegetarian section on the app, even pizza places are introducing plant-based alternatives to meat toppings. ( On a side note I don’t recommend buying anything from McDonalds, they’re a terrible company ). But like many other large industries, animal agriculture is a fantastic source of cheap money and it won’t be going away anytime soon. Because of the scale that animal exploitation operates on, it is rather hard to work against, because for some, it seems to be all in vain. When someone stops supporting animal exploitation, the only visible change is that in their own lives, in their daily routine and norms, in the mealtimes they share with others, and potentially even in their comforts, the physical impact, however big or small on an individual level is rarely ever seen, so it seems only to be ‘negatively’ impacting the way they live, they way they’ve always lived.

We’re in a very dire situation, politically, socially, environmentally, in every aspect of our lives, and food oft serves as a comfort in everyone’s lives. But not eating animals is such a simple yet monumental change. Please, stop eating animals.

[typhonatemybaby]

copypasta about liberalism for later reference.

One: we are defining it from  the outside ( yet still affected by it), and are defining it as being in distinction to materialism. That is: we are at least attempting to not be liberals because we are attempting to be materialistic. We feel materialism is a position that is to destroy liberalism  Ok so what does that jargon mean? Well this is about the idealism of liberalism and about how liberalism has this tendency to see the symptom yet not the cause, to see all of its solutions as being these situations where the structural basis has not actually changed but merely the wounds it created arent there A great example of this was when i was listening to a podcast the other day by afloweroutofstone (aka Brett, a big tumblr-left user, sort of famed amongst the more hardline and esoteric parts of that niche milieu, like for instance, me, for his bad takes), where he talked about his ideal socialist society. I would personally say that Brett is a liberal socialist, that he is an idealist socialist etc. In the podcast Brett talked about how his ideal socialist society would be a sort of mixed-market mutualist one where most property was personal or public, yet the private property form still existed and was still self sustaining. The society had landlords but " your landlord would know you didn't need him", it had renting, and there was still rentiership but that this problem was defeated by tenants unions and syndicalism. I feel this is a liberal approach to the socialist question because I hold that the problems that we face with capitalism arent just these surface problems of " well the poor proles all have to rent and cant own houses and its bad", but also that "private property is the concept that a person can enclose off a space they do not need in order to claim a rent on it. that an individual can extend their legal person over infinity enclosing any part of the world off from another human in order to claim a rent". I feel the solutions he offers are liberal because they rely entirely on this idea of a vast moral mass always being upright and upstanding in their tenants union. Its as if he saw the  Norman Rockwell painting " Free Speech" and conceived of the spirit of that painting as being the spirit of his new socialist society. Two: Liberalism  is dead, yet it was never alive Marx famously said : "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." 

I would put it that liberalism is dead politics and it lives by sucking political power from the masses, and lives the more the more power it sucks. This is power that the masses would use for their emancipation yet liberalism not only sustains itself through this parasitism, it defends itself also for it is against liberal societal structures that this power would be directed

This is why we see things like the Overton window, the dissipation of crude activism into the capitalist project and the co-optation of philosophy and cultural appropriation.This is not so much a moral failing of the activists or the philosophers ( though with the obvious exception of  the cultural appropriator)- it is the structure of liberalism going about its work. 

This is achieved via the means of enclosure of the commons, and enforcement of private property. It is an act of societal violence which forces all art to be commodified, and all politics to become subordinated to it. This is also why liberalism is so fiercely defended by those who benefit from private property: the Bourgeoisie. Liberalism is the class ideology of the bourgeoisie, who are the class of Rent and the class of Enclosure. their whole politics is a politics of phantasms: The Legitimate State, the hard workers, the rational calculus of business, the honest transaction and so on.

This brings me to point three which ive sort of already alluded to:

 Liberalism is about venerating the status quo. 

Stirner has something to say about this in the section of The Ego and its Own titled "political liberalism" which remains one of the better explanations of the ludicrous aspects of liberalism:

"The bourgeoisie is the aristocracy of DESERT; its motto, “Let desert wear its crowns.” It fought against the “lazy” aristocracy, for according to it (the industrious aristocracy acquired by industry and desert) it is not the “born” who is free, nor yet I who am free either, but the “deserving” man, the honest servant (of his king; of the state; of the people in constitutional states). Through service one acquires freedom, that is, acquires “deserts,” even if one served – mammon. One must deserve well of the state, of the principle of the state, of its moral spirit. He who serves this spirit of the state is a good citizen, let him live to whatever honest branch of industry he will. In its eyes innovators practice a “breadless art.” Only the “shopkeeper” is “practical,” and the spirit that chases after public offices is as much the shopkeeping spirit as is that which tries in trade to feather its nest or otherwise to become useful to itself and anybody else."

[chlopernicus]

Blog Post 4: Commodifying Identity

There are two sides to every coin. 

Television, film, fashion, etc.

These are all cultural artifacts that represent a time in our history. They tell a story of the human race, and can be used to artistically express and mirror the evolution and movement of human thought throughout time. But when money and power step into play, these potential tools become commodities for corporations, and are viewed soley by their sheer economic value. 

Marginalized groups can be viewed as equally vulnerable and profitable in such situations, and in this case, the LGBTQ community is the target up for manipulation. 

Kelly Kessler uses Showtime as a perfect example, specifically in regards to The L Word, and the social media platforms that emerged from the shows perceived popularity. 

I must say, growing up as a tomboy confused about her sexuality, with little to  no exposure, and her only role model being Ellen, I was searching for deeper validation. When the entire DVD box set of The L word was handed to me by my best friend my freshmen year in high-school, I was in awe, to say the least. It felt sacred, honestly. I pretty much knew I was gay, but I truly had no idea what that meant. I remember sitting at the edge of my bed every night, watching the show on a 12 X 12 inch crappy little TV. I remember being terrified that my mom would come in because I was still in the closet, and I would hide the DVD’s under my bed so she could never find them.

For me, at the time, the show was a validation of my identity, and it made me feel so much less alone and afraid. I also consider myself to be a relatively “aware” person even at a younger age. So as I viewed this world depicted to me in relation to my own life, I also do truly believe that I was at the same time conciously viewing it as a world of fantasy. I knew that my life would not be exactly like it was for them, but I also did not necessarily want it to be, so I was okay with the unrealistic aspect, as that is what a lot of entertainment is there for: to take us away from reality into an almost dream-like state. 

Years later I can now more clearly see the negative aspects of shows such as this. It angers me that one of my only sources for representation was so flawed. Kessler really does an excellent job at breaking it down and is critical towards the source, (the systems and corporations) as I feel she should be. This show did a lot of positive things for me as a young closeted tomboy, but there is no denying the reinforcement of hetero-normative and hyper-sexualized behavior that still exists, which I was not so able to see. The show was owned by a corporation, and the characters were mainly white, fashionable, feminine, attractive, and successful. It feels like these corporations are trying to make their controlled spaces queer but not too queer, just the right amount of queerness to make it still palatable for everyone else. For this reason, the show denied representation of so many different colors of the queer community. 

There is that fantasy aspect of entertainment that harbors this convenience filled world that we love so much. These artistic outlets have morphed into entertainment, and entertainment is meant to be an escape. The emergence of social media as a form of entertainment embodies this wonderfully. A lot of us use social media in such mundane ways, to pass the time and fill some void, such as boredom. It is this disengagement and mindlessness, when interacting with these outlets, that becomes so detrimental. It allows so much to slip under the rug, and into our subconscious, without us even knowing. 

The increasing “inclusion” of the queer society in mainstream media creates a false sense of equality. It makes us believe we are being accepted, when in reality we are being used as puppets to buy into this false sense of inclusion. It plays off of our need to feel accepted and understood and uses it to make a profit, especially attacking vulnerable and marginalized groups. 

When The L Word released their virtual reality online chat-room that was meant to create a vibrant sense of community, they in-turn did just the opposite without more privileged, active members truly realizing it. The system manipulated it’s vulnerable users by making the site more complex in it’s usability, using avatars that represented an extremely limited scope of the community, creating a sense of elite-ness that required users to be economically stable, and controlling the interface to only show and highlight content that they deemed important, while making other content much harder to find and see. This is so harmful to marginalized communities, that are already fighting vulnerability, because it creates and reinforces further separation within these communities. 

It is so important to have a sense of awareness, consciousness, and mindfulness when navigating through media outlets. With social media harnessing such a strong user interaction, where you have more power to navigate through your own experience, this idea of awareness is more important than ever. If you are a conscious user, you can better dodge these corporate bullets of propaganda and their attempt to guide your experience by creating a false sense of freedom. So much in life is about intention and perception. When interacting with a potential tool like social media, we must be aware of our own intentions as well as the intention of the source. 

There is a reason why we use social media and why it is so popular. We are obviously searching for something and some type of meaning or fulfillment, and corporations just take advantage of that. I believe there is some importance in these shows, and there is some potential usefulness to these outlets. We can attempt to use them as tools if we know how to navigate through them.

How can we use our powers for good?

Is there anything positive about shows such as these?

Is shitty representation better than no representation at all?

Consider your intention when interacting with these outlets....

Is there a recipe for the perfect/ideal all-inclusive representation? What does it look like?

[Side note and a super dope TedTalk:

Fifty Shades of Gay ]

[jasoncontemp]

Cape Town Art Fair Questionnaire

1.  

The Goodman Booth was very different to the Gallery space. In the gallery space the work is all spaced out and all work similar in visual aesthetic with some walls painted black. While in the booth all the work differs in medium and are placed very close together. In the booth I recognized work by Yinka Shonibare and Kendell Geers.

 Blank Projects gallery space is very spatious with work of a minimal aesthetic and focus on metals. In the Blank Booth there is a range of materials which are all crowded into the space. The only correlation between the two spaces would be the white walls and each space having a metal work/s. I recognized work by Igshaan Adams and Gallerist Tyra Naidoo.

 The two Stevenson Gallery/booth spaces were very similar in visual aesthetic. Both spaces focused on large wall work. Both spaces have sculptural elements to them. However the wall colour of Stevenson Gallery differs to that of the white booth at the art fair. I recognized work by Kemang Wa Lehulere.

 2. I ENJOYED:

Stephen Allwright

‘Fluid’

Ink, graphite, crayon, pencil and water colour on paper

2018

Initially I was drawn to this work purely for the sunflowers. However when further admiring the piece I started to love it more. I love the muted tones of the yellow paired with the dull pink of the man’s underwear. I really enjoy the way in which the character is drawn, his form is almost organic, and matching the shape of the chair he is lounging on. I am also very attracted to the repetition of texture in sunflowers, facial and arm hair, creating depth and shadow.

 Chris Soal

‘Kids see ghosts sometimes’

Toothpicks in polyurethane on industrial fabric

2018

This piece sparks a great amount of my interest. It pretends to be something it is not, which I am somewhat drawn to. From far this hanging piece seems to be a soft flowing fabric draped onto the wall to the floor. However when approaching the work it is evident it is actually quite the hazardous piece. Thousands of toothpicks stick out at the viewer, causing some discomfort to some. I really enjoy the texture created by the toothpicks and how it creates a movement.

Carolyn Parton

‘Notes on the wind’

Reconstituted paint strata

2018

What I enjoy most about this work by Carolyn Parton is the use of materials and colour palette. The piece has a great sense of movement due to all of the intertwining and swirling of the materials. I also enjoy the sculptural aspect of the work.

 I DID NOT ENJOY:

Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi

‘The masters unexplored library’

oil on canvas

2019

I do not enjoy the amount of greyness within this painted artwork. I believe that if one is going to resort back to being traditional and working with Oil on canvas, there should be something done different. However I find this piece to be very mundane and no different to any oil painting I have seen.

 David Koloane

‘Untitled (assemblage II)’

mixed media on canvas

1990s

In this artwork I di not like the materials used. I also question why it ha to be done on a canvas and not taken off the canvas and become some sort of sculptural work. The colours are also all very similar, blurring together becoming somewhat muddy.

 LR Vandy

‘Crimson and Black’

Hull

2019

I enjoy work that contains some type of textural aspect, however I do not feel like this artwork is complete. I do not enjoy the shapes created and find it to be oddly shaped.

 3. Many of the works are done in acrylic/oil paint. However there is a dominating presence of mixed media/ materiality based work in the fair. Many works use a minimum of two different mediums and are combined to create one piece, example; some work has fabric mixed with painting and sewing. There is also a great deal of works that use found objects. However, the one dominating medium used either primarily or secondarily is paint.

 4. The booths this year did not differ too greatly when referring to different colours, only when it was solo exhibits was it any different. The works are curated different in each booth, changing wall colours and spacing of work. Many booths keep their furniture simple with just a table and chair, while one or two booths had an exotic couch and furniture for the curators to lounge on. Some booths have many small works climbing and covering th wall, while some galleries chose to put one or two small works on a wall or one larger one.

 5. The labels were almost different for every booth. Here are the ways I noticed labelling:

·         Standard double sided tape labels onto the wall

·         Writing directly onto the wall and underlining it

·         Using stickers that are transparent

·         Written on paper placed into the floor

·         Instagram name instead of artist name

·         Labels not directly next to artworks but scattered around the booth

  6. The fair is organized to be a great never ending maze. However the booths are positioned in a way that transitioning booth to booth feels natural/ organic. There two or three ‘main’ walkways that lead directly to the back of the building, however due to open gallery booths everything simply bleeds together. Around every corner is art and even more art. The booths are structured in a way that if you walk around multiple times you could see something different every time; almost as if it’s a treasure hunt for art and sanity.

 7. The lighting this art fair was not done very well. Many of the works had glares and those that didn’t have glass were lucky. The light is however mainly focused in the booths, not so much the pathways. I felt the lighting felt more natural this year. There was no specific lights pointing out and at specific work. There was no one work that demanded more attention than the one next to it.

 8. As predicted a good amount of the people walking around were men in suits with their high-heeled wives on their arm. However there was a lot of differently dressed people. Many people were dressed fluidly, disregarding gender. Also many of the people seemed younger and on trend. There was no person who was standing out due to their fashion choice… Besides the man who wore a blue Hawaiian shirt which matched his blue crocs... Iconic.

 9. There’s a definite target market for people of many industries and tourists, but predominantly to those interested in Contemporary art. This is shown through the multiple stands found to the left and back of the convention Centre. There is fresh meals and wine available, promoting a target at so called ‘foodies’. It also attracts the market of book collectors. Many books are sold, example; Art Times, and someone who is interested in collecting these books can do so here. There is also some clothing attracting people wanting to have trendy/ limited edition printed clothing.

 10.

Paola PIVI

Untitled (Leopard)

Photographic print, dibond, frame

I believe this to be a spectacle of wealth. Many wealthy Northern-Africans flaunt their purchased leopards and other wild animals while in the desert. However this also heavily links to a picture of American rapper, Tyga, who posted an Instagram image of himself posing with a pile of money and a leopard while on a jet. Rapper, Carbi B also flexes a leopard in her music video for her break out song ‘Bodak yellow’. Therefore I think the leopard has been commodified t a symbol of wealth.

 11.

Ande Stead

‘Life’

Hand forged stainless steel on granite base

To me this does not fit in the art fair. I think the theme dealt with could have been approached very differently and the specific way he approached it is overdone. I also feel like if the artist wanted to do something that has been done a multitude of times, they should consider size, placement, and other possible conceptual titles for the piece.

 12. Being second year I found more confidence to ask curators and gallerist’s questions. I spoke to many of the curators however the response differed with each. Some were more accommodating to my questions and curiosities, while one or two denied telling me prices.

 13. I did not notice any major branding besides Investec, but that could have just been my poor eyesight. This targets anyone who does banking and targets a wide range of people. This could be a sponsor because they may want to show that the Bank is interested in many industries, including Contemporary art, showing inclusivity in their brand. The fair would be a good place to target masses of people, both foreign and local.

 14. The convention center is a good place to hold this massive events as many other events occur in this space too, such as; seminars, design indabas and other large scale conventions.  The space is large and can accommodate large amounts of people. It is also very close to the city center and many other tourist attractions.

 15.

Albert Newall

‘Untitled’

Watercolour and ink on Paper

1952

 16. Smith Gallery was showing a large amount of Michaelis Graduate student works. One of the graduates showing, who was gaining a lot of attention, is Talia Ramkilawan.

 17. The Solo Booths are much stronger conceptualized booths than those of shared booths. The booth will be a coherent space. The curation of the booth will emphasize the work creating a distinct aesthetic and visual for the solo artist.

 18. One of the big names of the art fair was Georgina Gratrix. Her work has a very strong aesthetic and a specific process of creating which is visible. Many work seen in the art fair has similar motifs which Gratrix uses, showing she has influence in the market.

 Although she only had one work up, I heard may people mumbling over an artwork by Marina Abramovic. The level of art she creates and her status level within the industry always brings even more attention to her artworks.

 19. There were many works that resembled map-like visuals. Along with this many works dealt with themes of memory and capturing time. However it’s impossible to neglect the fact that majority of the work dealt with identity and the ‘self’.

 20. As a young artist right now I would love to be represented by Smith Gallery. It seems to be a good and open minded gallery space, as it exhibits many graduates at the art fair. However I would love to be represented by Smac Gallery. The Smac both had a wide range of mediums and subject matters, showing they are diverse and possibly always looking for new talent.

 21. I would also love to work for Smith. I would love the opportunity to work with young artists in the industry. If I worked for them I would want to be involved in every aspect of the Gallery.

 22. Curious as to why so many booths had their storage space open for the public to view.

 23. Yes. The space would have minimal emphasis on the furniture, and more emphasis on curation. I would want very similar works to be shown (possibly even a solo show) and have the whole booth transformed by changing the colours and lights. The space should be organic and one simple path to follow, nothing hidden behind walls.

[neworoldnews]

Wendy Lynne Lee says consumerism really is the end of the world.

Science, argued John Dewey, is ‘an instrumentality of the arts’. What he seems to have meant is that science is not only about seeking an objective understanding of the world but also about a commitment to truth as a social and aesthetic value. Perhaps this seems obvious, but there’s more to this bit of common sense – a ‘more’ that I think more important now than ever. For Dewey can help us see clearly why some people and societies have such an investment – intellectual and economic – in denying climate change, and also what we stand to lose if we do not act to mitigate its results.

In attempting to convince you of this, my argument will rely on four elements. Firstly I’ll recap the nature of the environmental and existential crisis posed by climate change. Secondly I’ll examine how climate change denial as a system of beliefs is connected with the capitalist worldview. I will make use of Dewey’s argument for what he calls the aesthetic in experience. And I will critically reinterpret Dewey’s argument in light of the counterfeit aesthetic required by the capitalist worldview.

John Dewey by Darren McAndrew, 2019

Dewey? Who He?

John Dewey (1859-1952) was a leading figure in the tradition of philosophy we call American Pragmatism. In his 1925 book Experience and Nature, he argued that many of our everyday experiences have aspects that are essentially aesthetic. These include richness, diversity, novelty and duration. This is what makes experiences worth having, and that is why everyone would also wish them to always be features of our future experiences too. It would surely seem that whatever endangers this sort of experience is something we’d want to confront head-on, for ourselves, and for the sake of generations to come.

Climate change plainly is just such a threat, especially since we know that human behavior is a major cause of it, and human behavior can change. This is not to deny that such change is a tall order, but simply to point out that it’s possible. When science showed us that smoking causes cancer, people began to stop smoking, however begrudgingly. The value of science, after all, isn’t that it gives us what we want; it’s that we recognize, even against our narrow self-interest, that knowledge is essential to any life worth living and any future experience worth wanting. If climate change threatens that future, we surely want to make every effort to mitigate it.

The trouble is that our actions, individually and collectively, tell a very different story. Not only do people deny that the climate change crisis is the result of human activity; they even deny that there’s any crisis to deny. This is the denial of denial: denial2 (denial squared). Denial2, the denial not only that climate change is caused by human activity, but that there is any climate change at all, isn’t merely a decision to ignore the facts of climate change; it’s behaving as if the facts were radically different than they are – that the world is radically differently than it in fact, is.

How can this be? What could persuade us to ignore what science has made so clear? What is the mechanism by which such a perspective could gain purchase in so many minds? We know that various aesthetic elements of our experience are already being degraded by the impacts of climate change. So, why aren’t we doing everything possible to mitigate the damage? Have we decided not to know? Can we decide not to know? It seems we can. After all, zoos are not the natural habitats of Sumatran elephants. Killer whales do not naturally belong in Sea World menageries. Natural history museum exhibits – however interactive – aren’t substitutes for lost mountain vistas and prairie expanses. Each is a counterfeit of the aesthetic in experience, at least as Dewey envisions it. They are poor substitutes for a natural world that we are killing. They show that we are good at fooling ourselves.

The Consumer Capitalist Worldview

For those wishing to uphold the capitalist worldview it’s vital to convince the rest of us that the aesthetic or positive qualities of our everyday experience are facilitated not by any thoughtful appreciation of nature, but by the endless consumption of products. In short, the measure of something’s value is how much stuff you can exchange it for. The difficulty, however, is that such a conception of value cannot be made to cohere with facts about the planet.

The plausibility of the idea that value is centrally to be found in the limitless exchange or circulation of products requires us to assume certain things:

Firstly, that we have either an atmosphere capable of absorbing endless emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants necessary to sustain that production; or else that we have adequate non-hydrocarbon sources of energy. The alternative energy sources are possible, but so far are either inadequate to sustain our current levels of consumption or else present their own environmental hazards.

Secondly that we have endless sources of clean water, breathable air, arable soil, rare earth minerals (for mobile phones and computers) and labor.

Thirdly, that we can be persuaded to behave as if the ‘world’ grounded in these presuppositions is how our planet really is.

Lastly, denial2 demands we be convinced not merely that the capitalist worldview mirrors facts about the planet, but that what the world it presents offers is what we (ought to) want – that the world it offers us is the aesthetically desirable world, and that consumption of goods is the highest form of aesthetic experience.

Among the key premises of contemporary capitalism is the idea that the planet upon which its enterprise depends is a self-recovering cornucopia of resources. This is what the economist Herman Daly calls ‘the myth of endless resources’ – including endless extractible hydrocarbons, endlessly cleanable water and scrubbable air, endless arable soil, animal bodies, and cheap labor, and perhaps most important, a limitless celestial vault in which to emit greenhouse gases (Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, 1996). This myth – the archetypal narrative of modern capitalism – is a core premise for capitalism’s central operative idea, that everything is a potential commodity – that is, that the value of something lies in its potential to be exchanged in the interest of profits. Given the combined power of the myth of endless resources and the idea that the value of everything lies in its potential to be commodified, it’s not surprising that the consequences include pollution, desertification, deforestation, disease, and the geopolitical instabilities that follow, all of this increasing human desperation.

These, however, are the fixable environmental crises. We can compel coal-fired power plants to install air scrubbers, develop new antibiotics and anti-viral drugs, plant trees, deliver food aid. The fixable crises make clear the radically different threat posed by the crisis of climate change. ‘Anthropogenic’ implies more than simply meaning ‘human-caused’: the anthropogenic element is also the barometer of the extent to which our disposition towards the planet is defined by the myth of endless resources. It is the extent to which we believe that ‘dilution is always the solution’; or that such a thing as ‘clean coal’ exists; that hydrocarbons are limitless; or even that human activities cannot generate a greenhouse effect. All these examples indicate the operation of the assumption that the capitalist ‘world’ is the actual planet on which we live.

To be clear, it’s not that we’ve given up the idea of a verdant world where an aesthetic experience of nonhuman nature is possible. It’s not that we’ve resigned ourselves either to the denuded world actually offered by capitalism and its products. Instead, capitalism offers us a counterfeit world: the world packaged and marketed as if it were the planet; as if the planet really were an endless treasure trove of the aesthetic experience to which we think we’re entitled. This isn’t cognitive dissonance; it’s epistemic simulacra – fake knowledge. Denial2 signals our commitment to painted zoo savannas, artificial shorelines, or ‘Sounds of the Tropics’ on iTunes, as if the consumption of a day at the zoo, the beach, or the spa offers exactly the aesthetic experience we desire.

A Myth Exposed

The trouble, of course, is not merely that this is a scam, but that it’s an unsustainable scam grounded in premises we know to be false and yet usually don’t actually think about at all.

• The myth of endless resources is false: The planet, its living and nonliving things, ecological systems, and atmosphere are not limitless repositories of extractables, recuperative capacity, and waste disposal.

• Commodification does not reflect true value: While the value of everything can potentially be converted to its exchange value, the planet cannot support an endless circulation of exchanges premised on infinite resources.

• Human nature is not defined exclusively by material self-interest: Human beings are both the labor and the consumers needed by the capitalist world. But the idea that material self-interest defines us is not part of our existential condition. Our self-interest does not necessarily coincide with industry’s self-interest, and there is more to us than self-interest anyway.

A detractor might point out that it’s not necessarily true that everything can be assigned a market value – that of course some things remain sacred. But this is manifestly false on the evidence, which seems to tell us that everything has its price. Moreover, deciding what counts as sacred is itself subject to the capitalist calculus. Critically endangered white rhinos slaughtered for the commodity value of their horns will become extinct, and documentaries about white rhinos aren’t white rhinos. Driven to extinction by the exchange value assigned to their feathers, passenger pigeons are now museum props for natural history exhibits. Sugar is routinely assigned a higher value than the sea creatures suffocated by Red Tide along the Florida coastline. The challenge then for the capitalist ‘world’ isn’t the preservation of some notion of the sacred to which we assign aesthetic value, it’s the preservation of the natural world itself. In 2018 a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that if global temperatures rise by 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, a tipping point will be reached with catastrophic consequences. There may be counterfeit opportunities for aesthetic experience, but there’s no such thing as counterfeit existential conditions. Indeed, the very idea of a replacement planet only exposes the lie of the premises of the capitalist worldview. Climate change thus brings into sharp focus the self-contradictory conditions of denial2, in that to deny that there is such a thing as climate change first forms an essential condition for the continuation of the capitalist world and its worldview, then ensures that the capitalist world will reach its apex in the destruction of the conditions necessary for its own continuation. In other words, denial2 instantiates what can be described as the ‘defining nihilism’ at the center of capitalism.

John Dewey and the Aesthetic In Experience

John Dewey’s concept of the aesthetic in experience offers a compelling lens through which to examine denial2. For Dewey, the aesthetic in experience is as much a feature of scientific investigation as it is of art, and crucial to making the world desirable as opposed to merely knowable. For Dewey, science is a variety of creative labor requiring imagination in addition to knowledge, experimental rigor, and appeal to such principles as falsifiability or elegance. “It would then be seen”, writes Dewey, “that science is an art, that art is practice, and that the only distinction worth drawing is not between practice and theory, but between those modes of practice that are not intelligent, not inherently and immediately enjoyable, and those which are full of enjoyed meanings” (Experience and Nature, p.358).

Each of science’s disciplines offers a unique way of interacting with the natural world, of coming to appreciate its interdependencies; and so each offers a unique opportunity for deeper forms of satisfaction. In short, science encourages development of an aesthetic sensibility grounded in the joy of knowledge – even (or especially) when it’s unexpected.

Science includes the aesthetic in experience because knowing is an ‘operative art’ (p.367) corresponding to the capacity for reflection. Science, as Dewey notes, is not only able to induce a unique enjoyment in an experience ‘reflectively chosen’ for its correspondence to the natural world, but defines itself as a sincere commitment to epistemic integrity – to following the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of whether it supports a preferred, or profitable, view of the world.

Science thus tells us not only about the kinds of complex and diverse worlds in which aesthetic experience is made possible, but also about the kinds of worlds where it’s threatened:

“There are two sorts of worlds in which aesthetic experience would not occur. In a world of mere flux, change would not be cumulative; it would not move towards a close. Stability and rest would have no being. Equally it is true, however, that a world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution… Because the actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the experience of a living creature is capable of aesthetic quality.” (p.358)

There are two ways – both illuminating – to read this passage. First as saying that the world that makes a place for the aesthetic in experience is precisely that world within which the natural processes and events that animate living things create the conditions for formulating value. Neither the world of absolute flux nor the ‘finished’ world would make possible experiences of any such kind, since in the world of flux there exists no opportunity for reflection or anticipation, and in the finished world nothing happens to be the subject of experience at all. No sense can be made of either as desirable, as nothing about them occasions wonder.

Neither of these possibilities, however, quite capture the capitalist ‘world’; and so I want to suggest an alternative reading, which says that insofar as the world of the aesthetic in experience demands truth-tellers committed to revealing the world in an experience of all of its ‘combination of movement and culmination’, it cannot afford to elect ends over means. Someone seeking a true aesthetic experience can’t afford to subordinate reason to ends already given, since to do so ignores a quality vital to doing science; that of the freedom from imposed presuppositions required for objectivity. Yet capitalism requires precisely the reduction of means to ends already given: the ends being commodification for profit. In the capitalist world, ends determine means because they govern what has value – what gets distilled from the flux as valuable, or in other words, marketable: hydrocarbons, sugars, animal bodies, labor… Nothing true about the world can matter to the capitalist as a capitalist other than insofar as it serves his ends: for him, things exist for exchange.

Having said that, the possibility for an aesthetic in experience does exist for the capitalist world. It exists according to premises that, while utterly anathema to the facts about the world revealed by the sciences, are nonetheless able to offer a sufficiently coherent counterfeit narrative, for which not only the denial of fact is made possible, but the denial that there are facts to deny is made possible: denial2. Dewey is right that an aesthetic in experience requires some conditions to ground its possibility; he’s also right that there exist conditions where no such experience is possible. But he doesn’t notice, or miscalculates, the fraudulent power of capitalism to determine a worldview wherein the ‘flux’ is commandeered by exchange value, and so consumption forms the ‘event’ of the aesthetic in experience.

Denial2, the denial that there is any such thing as climate change, is a result not of any truth that could be the product of open-ended empirical investigation as Dewey describes it, but rather of a worldview in which the reduction of all things to a lowest common denominator renders the planet as a repository of resources whose value is determined by their capacity to be commodified. The value of water isn’t as water, but rather as a substrate for chemical solvents for hydraulic fracturing, or an opportunity to cash-in on bottling its last clean drops; air is a repository for volatile organic compounds; soil a distribution medium for fertilizer; vegetation a substrate for high-fructose corn syrup; animal bodies are for deep-fat friers; human beings for labor.

Detached from its moorings in what Dewey recognizes as the aesthetic value belonging to the pursuit of truth, science becomes an instrumentality for capitalism rather than for art. But this isn’t merely because the technologies of extraction and manufacture are dependent on science. Rather, science must also continue to be associated with the aesthetic in experience, although to ends radically different from what Dewey had envisioned.

Water & Earth, Farshaad Razmjouie, 2019. Farshaad is a refugee from Iran, currently studying and living in Liverpool.

Bottled Water, A Case In Point

Consider, for example, bottled water. It is marketed as if shapely plastic bottles were water’s natural condition (rather like as if pink were the natural color of animal flesh). Companies compete for consumers via the aesthetic presentation of their packaging. One type of water, for example, advertises itself as ‘artisan’ and includes a bright pink flower on the plastic wraps of its twelve packs. Another brand goes for the more ‘euro-chic’ look of tall narrow bottles with sleek silver caps. Both brands capitalize on a scarce existential necessity by treating it as both scarce and abundant; that is, scarce enough to be priced like gold or diamonds, and abundant enough that polluting it via the processes necessary to bottle it in plastic bottles poses no significant hazard. The latter, of course, is false: it is also presupposed by the switch to bottled water in the first place. If we believed tap water was pure, or even safe to drink, who’d spend the money to buy bottled?

It’s at just this juncture, however, that the counterfeit aesthetic plays a key role. Bottled water is advertised as ‘clean’ or ‘pure’; but this isn’t because bottled water companies have any interest in what consumers know about their water. After all, tap water may contain less arsenic than their ‘clean’ product. Moreover, ‘clean’ needn’t mean clean (even if it’s true); it means ‘cool’ – as in what can be afforded by the affluent as water. Were the point simply the purity, then dewy pink flowers or shiny sleek cylinders would be unnecessary and the advertising wouldn’t need to promote sciencey-sounding promises, such as a reassurance that the product conforms to US Food and Drug Administration specifications and testing protocols.

The point I’m making isn’t about water. It’s about how the sciences are used by the world of capital to engineer its products, provide a vocabulary to its promises, and conceal its destruction of resources. The story of water is simply perhaps the most perverse variation on the theme of the counterfeit aesthetic, just because water is an existential necessity. Diverted by bottled water’s aesthetic claim to be ‘clean’, we’re invited to ignore important things that the sciences – chemistry, biology, epidemiology, neurology, bacteriology, environmental sciences – tell us; namely, that clean water for those who can’t afford bottled has become increasingly scarce due to industrial dumping, and/or the appropriation by international conglomerates of what’s left.

The upshot is, if we can be successfully conned into buying bottled water by transparently false advertising campaigns, is it any wonder that we’re susceptible to denial2? The bottled water story is about an existential necessity. Yet even this story is about the kind of fixable environmental crisis that climate change isn’t. If our analysis of bottled water shows the capitalist world to be inconsistent with a good life for the world’s poor, what anthropogenic climate change makes all the clearer is that the capitalist worldview is inconsistent with all life. This is why the denial of climate change is critically importance for the preservation of the capitalist system. Unlike other environmental crises where we’ve made our peace with the devil – giving up Sumatran elephants, polar bears, and leatherback turtles to extinction so we can keep driving SUVs and eating burgers – climate change gives the lie to the myth of endless resources and the edifice of endless consumption built on its rickety scaffolding. Climate change can bring it all down.

Can reflection on that possibility disrupt what seems a seamless disposition to an attitude of denial2? If we continue not to know what we don’t know, can firenadoes, melting ice caps, increasingly catastrophic hurricanes, mass human starvation and migration, or ever more virulent outbreaks of disease persuade us to change?

[chrismaverickdotcom]

Mavademics Recap: My Crazy Dumb Month of Conferences and Podcasts

I kind of wonder if anyone notices when I don’t update my blog. Most of my readers see it through the Facebook feed version, but I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even had a chance to go see a movie to review in the last couple weeks. If you follow me on twitter (@chrismaverick) or see the Facebook syncs from there, you likely know why. For some reason I got it in my head that it would be a good idea to do three academic conferences in a row. Like literally three weekends in a row. I’m glad I did it. I had a good time doing all three of them. But this was not a good idea… so very very not… I’m getting too old for this shit!!! But I wanted to have a recap of it on my blog as well, maybe for other people, but also just so I have a record for myself (if only to remind myself never to do it again!) So I figured I’d write this up really quickly now that I’m done.

From the top…

The first conference was the Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association(PCA/ACA) national conference, where I presented in the Comics and Comic Studies area. I go to this one pretty much every year, because it is more or less everything that is perfect about academia for me… an opportunity to apply complex literary theory to funny books. This one was in Indianapolis, so I drove there. My talk this year was titled “In Defense of a Thundering Dumbass: Marvel’s Self-Conscious Critique of White Masculinity in Iron Fist and The Defenders” and was about what you can probably guess it was about. Basically, I looked at the the Netflix version of Iron Fist, in comparison to the 1970s original comic version and used Edward Said’s Orientalism theories in conjunction with some Judith Butler gender performativity concepts to argue that the character of Iron Fist can only exist, in any medium — film or comics — as an exploration of the place of whiteness and masculinity in an transforming multicultural landscape and a response to white male anxieties of the specific era the story is taking place in. See… I told you… complex literary theory applied to funny books. Anyway, the short of it was that the TV show Iron Fist may not be the greatest thing ever, but it doesn’t really “suck” so much as it is an exploration of whiteness and masculinity in the “woke” era… and that’s sort of important but not for everyone. Along the way, I also made jokes about Tarzan, Manimal, and Kung-Fu Panda… I swear it all made sense at the time.

At the same conference… in fact, just a couple hours after I gave the Iron Fist talk, I was delighted to win the “Lent Award for Excellence in Graduate Comics Studies” for my paper that I did at the same conference last year, “Oracle of the Invisible: Sexual Assault and Rape in The Killing Joke” which was a super depressing deconstruction of how rape and sexual violence work in that book to build both Joker and Batman’s relationship in a hypermasculine economy based on violence and sex where Barbara (and Jim Gordon) effectively serve as necessary, but passive currency. That one was super technical and… well, obviously dark. So dark that I kind of didn’t think anyone actually liked it, so I was really surprised to win the award for it. But happy… for a brief shining moment it was almost like this whole pop culture academic criticism thing isn’t a complete and utter waste of time. 😁 And hey, I apparently get a trophy or plaque or something mailed to me, which is awesome. Because, after all, with my win of the Lent, I am now one step closer to completing my run at the fabled LEGOT, a feat that I don’t think anyone else has ever accomplished and yet, I’m on my way. I just need a Tony, Oscar, Grammy and Emmy and I’m done. Yeah, yeah, yeah… Fuck you! I’m closer than Philip Michael Thomas!

The next weekend I flew out to the Southern Sociological Society(SSS)‘s annual conference. This was a first for me. The conference was held in New Orleans this year, with a sub-theme of “Racial Theory, Analysis, and Politics in Trump America.” The same weekend, New Orleans also happened to be hosting Wrestlemania. So it seemed obvious to a few of us in the Professional Wrestling Studies Association (yes, that’s actually a thing, dammit!) that there should be a panel or two devoted to an analysis of Trump’s connection to the wrestling world and how it relates to the current sociopolitical landscape. Because, of course we did. I ended up giving a paper I called “Heel to the Chief: Donald Trump and the New World Order of Politics” which was a look at the rhetoric and semiotics of Trump speeches in comparison to professional wrestling promos and an analysis of how and why this was able to use hypermasculine performance to appeal to the working class American voter… by comparing him to other great wrestling promo givers: Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, The Undertaker, The Ultimate Warrior and Abraham Lincoln (yes, he was a wrestler… LOOK IT UP!). This seemed to go over pretty well, and after it was over I got interviewed by a New Orleans paper about my talk, research and my past as a professional wrestler. This does not get me any closer to my LEGOT. But I’m still closer than Philip Michael Thomas… and I’m pretty sure I’ve now been interviewed more recently.

Finally, this last weekend, I went the Northeast Modern Language Association(NeMLA… and yes I know how unfortunate an acronym that is)’s annual conference, which at the very least was here in Pittsburgh, so I didn’t have to travel. There I presented a paper that I called “Captain Falcon vs. Captain Hydra: Marvel’s Struggles to Address Multiculturalism and Identity Politics in Trump’s America.” This was about what I call “identity commodification” or the packaging of cultural identity, be it race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics or other aspects into a product that can be marketed in a world that privileges identity over character or narrative. That is, in the current identity politic driven, SJW wokeness vs alt-right conservatism, acronymerific (LGBTQIA+POCMRAKKK — and I swear to HOVA there’s got to be at least one person in this world who that accurately describes), Trumpian world, identity has become paramount over anything else, even in our funny books. This is maybe unsurprising; superheroes are sort of emblematic of ideology. That’s sort of the point. And since corporations are profit driven, even if the identity focused audience is ideology focused, capitalism essentially demands that there be a way to commodify that in order to monetize a product. So yay! We’re all part of the machine. Sadly, I did not win an award or get interviewed or anything after NeMLA… probably for the best… it’ll keep me from getting a big(ger) head. And Philip Michael Thomas didn’t even get to present, so I’m still WAY ahead there.

Running around the country doing these things totally fucked up my sleep schedule and I’ve literally been exhausted to the point that I sometimes forget where I am for the last week or so. And all during this, I also started and recorded the first three episodes of my new podcast, the first two of which are now up and available for listening. It’s called VoxPopcast and basically, it’s a combination of all of these academic thingamajigs I do PLUS the kinds of stuff I do on my blogs and the kinds of conversations one might have in a comic book store or bar. Pop culture academia and bullshitting all mixed together, with a floating roundtable of participants in the discussion from all walks of life (academic and non). So please, if you like the kind of stuff I do, follow the blog (http://voxpopcast.com), subscribe to the twitter (@voxpopcast) or the Facebook group, subscribe to it on on iTunes or Sticher or whatever it is you use, and leave us comments, suggest topics, volunteer to be a guest and write us podcast reviews and whatever it is that 1) gives us something to talk about 2) makes me famous so that I can earn a living and somehow get considered for the other four awards that will complete my LEGOT before that bitch Philip Michael Thomas passes me.

Samantha Jordan, Stephanie Siler, Kash Mira, Cenate Pruitt, Meron Langsner, Joe Darowski, Brandon Link Copp-Millward liked this post

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Mavademics Recap: My Crazy Dumb Month of Conferences and Podcasts was originally published on ChrisMaverick dotcom

[the-merricatherine]

What is Ontological Oppression?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moko_jumbie]

Ontology is the study of the nature of being, becoming, and existence. How do you see in the mirror? What do you see? Who do you see? Why?

When you were born, you had no self-awareness. You had to experiment— feel, touch, smell, learn, and most importantly, live pain and pleasure. Eventually you came to know the ecology of your senses, as your self; your fingers, your body odor, your voice, or lack thereof. Your identity is born. And once you begin to utilize and recognize these tools of living, you recognize those same traits in others.

Others.

The contrast is made immediately; there was never an escape, and there was never a pretense. There was only You, and there are Outsiders. This contrast extrapolates into every situation you experience with Others (and other Things) until your death, even with a weak sense of self.

Whether you exist or not was never a question, and may never become one for many, even through decades of experimentation. Nevertheless, Others have often already decided for you:

“Are a boy, or a girl?” “Are you a human?”

And so, the white race, the Human race became itself.

Many individuals have decided that Others are less than human: from ancient Grecian speciations of Georgian peoples by Hippocrates, to Amerika’s withholding of humanist ethics from African peoples by founder Thomas Jefferson, to Nazi Germany’s mimicry of Amerikan pogroms (that time aimed at both Blacks, non-Black Jews, and Afrikan Jews)

[Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Spanish Renaissance humanist, philosopher, theologian, and proponent of colonial slavery and caste.]

Whenever this individual has enough social clout by ancient standards, those views were adopted and enforced by the populous. In effect, they embody a passive form of the pogrom, ready to marginalize, exile, or kill.

The recurring theme from an international perspective is a hierarchy created in which Europeans were viewed as most human — in other words, to be exempt from slavery upon some pseudoscientific natural right. These Europeans, who would continue in tradition to develop these theories into the ideology of white supremacy, would eventually refer to themselves as collectively “white”. The self-actualization of a person calling themselves “white” was a process that entered the ontologies of individuals, and eventually became the self-actualization of entire populations of people who would eventually know themselves as “white”.

This caste system, this hiearchy, is not materially different from its predecessor as much as it is rhetorical. It would eventually be reproduced throughout the world in fractala as Europeans raced to colonize every non-European society they could: in colorism, in who is most often affected by xenophobia, in who is considered an Amerikan, and who is considered to be Truly Jewish.

In time, colorism becomes a function of colonies as an ideological characteristic of European imperialism: another progrom. Not so different from Confuscian ideological tenets being forcefully injected into Vietnam by the Han Chinese. In turn, global anti-blackness becomes the impetus of all ontological hierarchy.

Just as those celebrity humanists of the past decided they were non-Black, and therefore human, so would their peers and kin, so would their progeny and all they deemed to be the fruit of “humanity”.

And who were Africans by the time Europeans had sunk their fingers into the World?

Chattel. Property. Colonized. A history, controlled. A future, denied.

More like apes than human. More like a fixed capital, than living. In summary, non-human, free for the taking, and ripe for killing.

Genocide by public pogrom: if you hate the Blacks, you are free to do so as long as they are your property or a runaway. Free, or enslaved. Their land is for the taking, too. No regrets! But the mixed ones are slightly worth more: more trustworthy, more attractive, more human than the darker ones, and so feel free to consider that if you so choose. The Blacker, the deader.

The effects of European ideology “white supremacy” and their invasive imperialism became apparent in all aspects of life, from sugar cane fields in Waitikubuli (Dominica) to Eastern perspective on Africa.

[link to thread: https://twitter.com/pityfvck/status/894405427701719042]

This was all enforced without consent of any of the mothers, fathers, agendered adults and children, grandparents, who would permanently lose their cultures and connections to home, their families, and in the future, the idea of what home is.

If this pattern of “the darker, the deader” continued and all dark-skinned Black people were wiped off the face of Earth, eventually lighter-skinned Black people would be next, and perhaps their non-Black, colored peoples deaths would follow in suit.

The overarching theme (the superstructure) is white supremacy, and the means of enforcing white supremacy is anti-Blackness. Anti-Blackness makes Black labor (the cultural, material, and ontological base) a primary tool in creating and sustaining civilization as we know it. Anti-Blackness takes the shape of assimilating non-Black peoples into whiteness, or an identity adjacent to whiteness (eg. Native Amerikans being able to own and trade slaves, whether they did or did not). It takes the shape of cultural theft, commodifies it, and makes it non-Black. It takes the shape of widespread poverty, societal and economic underdevelopment, genocide, the erasure of history, etcetera. Anti-Blackness does all of this, while denying even the most self-hating Blacks a chance to become anything more than what they are: Black, non-Human, and lesser-than-thou.

What those before us have witnessed is the creation of a caste system that fractalizes and reproduces itself at every level of life in Amerika. What we are witnessing today is the application of such a caste system that has essentially defined Blacks, the less-Humans.

The aforementioned process described above, of losing one’s humanity, is known as social death. It is a horrendous process that has permanently affected Black peoples more than any population of people on Earth; at the precise moment Africans began being dragged through the Middle Passage, or even earlier during the Arab slave trade (≈500 AD) as subhumans across continents, to India and to China, they were never allowed to return to their ethnicities, or to be Africans. They became Blacks. They became a subhuman Other, or subaltern. This is the unique case of Blackness, one that has never been addressed by any of the participants of chattel slavery— including the Church.

In the process, of becoming chattel and Blacks, Africans were stripped of their families, permanently separated from people who they could continue speaking to using their tribe’s language, or relate to spiritually. This continued on, and on, and on, millions forced to adapt to their new surroundings, new families, only to lose them again. This happened for centuries upon centuries, ten fold.

Eventually, most had no choice but to be Black, to forget or abandon most if not all of their identities, and to adopt the identity imposed on them. No longer could they reject this identity, for there was no other to claim.

[Elmina Castle; oldest European building in existence south of the Sahara; ne of the most important stops on the route of the Atlantic slave trade]

The pre-Columbian period, the late Middle Ages, reveals no archive of debate on the questions of what to do with the ontologocal effects of slavery, as they might be related to that massive group of black-skinned people south of the Sahara.

No one asked: Should they have social death forced on them, as opposed to physical death (i.e. executions)? Should this form of chattel slavery be imposed on the internal poor, en masse? Should the scale of White slavery become industrial? Should the children of the White slave be enslaved as well?

This chattel slavery became unique to Black people in that we were offered no conditionals whatsoever, and neither was any progeny of ours. Suddenly, children were born Black (as opposed to Afrikan), and had to be told they were slaves by any slave who had a modicum of dignity. Even with dignity, slaves existed without knowing what slavery meant. Black became synonynous with slavery and social death, an existence soon recognized and exploited by white Humans and non-Blacks with greater Human proximity (eg even Seminoles natives exclaimed they would not be made Black) .

It was a genetic and ontological remaking of an entire population of peoples resulting in conditions such as permanent placelessness and cultural appropriation — in which Afrikan indigenous cultures that are still maintained by the Afrikan diaspora can be accused of appropriation of non-Black culture by those who use ideas such as sovereignty to further Black ontological genocide. And of course, the effect these accusations have is always of greater, more “positive” response than any accusations of cultural appropriation by Black peoples, which is always questioned and critiqued and given a less authentic merit.

Slavery didn’t only recreate the existence of Africans. It also developed a contrast to what it means to be Human.

At all walks life, working class or bourgeoisie, Black people continue to face this ontologocal erosion that allows them to be discriminated against regardless of how much money they claim, or land they “own”.

Author David Eltis asserts in his book (Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery) that European society’s decision to not capture slaves from Europe’s own territory was a “bad business idea.” Eltis writes:

“No Western European power after the Middle Ages crosses the basic divide separating European workers from chattel slavery. And while serfdom fell and rose in different parts of early modern Europe and shared characteristics with slavery, serfs were not outsiders either before or after enserfment. The phrase ‘long distance serf trade’ is an oxymoron.”

According to Eltis, population growth patterns in Europe during the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s heavily outpaced growth patterns on the continent of Africa, demonstrating chattel slavery’s devastating effects on Africa’s growth patterns. In fact, Europe was heavily populated enough to easily provide 50,000 White slaves a year to the “New World” without serious disruption of either international peace or existing social institutions that supervised potential European victims. Even class warfare could have been been unlikely due to lower labor costs, a faster development of the Americas, and higher exports and income levels on both sides of the Atlantic. He explains in great detail how the costs of enslavement would have been driven way down if Europeans had taken White slaves to America instead of Black slaves from Africa, noting

“shipping costs… comprised by far the greater part of the price of any form of imported bonded labor in the Americas. I we take into account the time spent collecting a slave cargo on the African coast as well, then the case for sailing directly from Europe with a cargo of [Whites] appears stronger again.”

To Eltis, the decision to capture slaves from Africa was nothing more than symbolic. White chattel slavery would have destroyed the value of consent and social contract amongst those of the “white race” that were strictly reserved for the convict, beggar, indentured servant, or child. Even under heavy coercion during the Middle Ages and late modern period, “the power of the state over [convicts in the Old World] and the power of the master over [convicts of the New World] was more [defined] than that of the slave owner over the slave.” (Eltis) Karl Marx also takes note of the unnecessary political costs to civil society, had Europeans been willing to enslave Whites (Capital, 895–896), implying there must have been more to the decision.

However, according to afro-pessimist theorist Frank B. Wilderson III (Red, White, and Black) claims slavery is symbolic by refuting two misunderstandings:

He states that work, or alienation and exploitation, is not a constituent element of slavery, and that profits are not the most important motivations in slavery .

If slavery is “the permanent, violent domination of… alienated and generally dishonored persons,” (Orlando Patterson), then the basic characteristics of slavery “are accumulation and fungibility.” (Wilderson)

This is a much more accurate definition, as it still describes all the elements necessary to create a slave, regardless of race or ethnicity. But it also implies that Black people, at least in Amerika, are still slaves.

“The ontology of slavery is the [extent] of the Black.” — Frank B. Wilderson III

[1860′s Savannah, Georgia]

Ontological oppression is sad, and it is also materially oppressive.

Even with the whips, the manual plantations, and Harriet Tubman out of the picture, there still exists a fungibility in Black existence that maintains an ontological hold over Blackness; Black people are still moved around and generally treated as fixed capital itself:

— through gentrification and natural disaster, not allowed to move back home until the individual or group of individuals has already forgotten that it is their home but lost.

— through constant cultural appropriating with little to no respect for Black consent, as if the culture is being produced for all to rape and distort until it is Black culture no more

— through mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex that capitalizes on low to no-wage labor of prisoners who, much of the time, are in jail for crimes that are no longer criminal (eg possession of marijuana)

—through underdevelopment which leads to widespread illness (mental and physical), famine, and the magnification of damage done by natural disasters that leas to further privatization of underdeveloped lands by its neocolonial predators

etcetera, because all these forms of exploitation are only possible in Amerika and Europe due to the chattel slavery of Afrikan Blacks. The same social death that inspired Amerika through all its stages of development and earlier would become the same to use against Jews in Nazi Germany, albeit without lasting ontological social death post World War II. We are left to our plantations and social death as a sort of anti-Human antimatter. Can Black lives matter when Black people aren’t considered people at all— aren’t considered to be living, but are subject to a constant state of dying?

[Wismin Wright carries her belongings out of her hurricane Maria-damaged home on September 23, 2017 Wesley Village, Dominica]

Even now, as “post-racial”, or “post-human”, views of political society take hold over the minds of so called “people of color”, anti-blackness reproduces itself why ignoring the critiques of Black society left without an ontology that can be their own.

No longer is it possible for us to go back to a Africa, for even there we are viewed as cultureless. It is humanly impossible to exist without such an identity. And while cultures we produce are raped and pillaged by non-Black people (in spite of our collective desire for that culture to not be warped into what is essentially a mess), we end up again as a chattel of culture .

We are constantly molded into caricatures for what is essentially Amerikan imperialism, where eventually rappers can exist everywhere and suddenly everyone can say “nigga” because Black people are no longer allowed to maintain their own culture. The word “nigga” becomes less and less coded, because our ontology isn’t allowed to exist — because our consent, as Blacks, never existed:

What are we other than Blacks?

What are Blacks, other than…

The Black has become a bleak reality, because it is now our ontology — the Black state of being. Like the blues, it will always carry with it the weight of ancestral trauma growing heavy in time under capitalism and the ideology of white supremacy that made mules of Blackness for all, but Blacks, to benefit from in any way they see fit in the future.

What this means is that anti-Blackness can now flourish proper within any economic system, Left or Right. Ontological oppression, then, is a tool used to create a sort of platform that all societies, except the utopian, can thrive on — a widely untouched hegemony that preys upon Black communities.

“Without this gratuitous violence, the so-called great emancipatory discourses of modernity— Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement— political discourses [relying on modes/grammars of suffering], and their [theories] of exploitation and alienation, might not have developed.” — Frank B. Wilderson III

The implications of this truth only mean that the complete destruction of what the European Human deems “civilization”, ideologically and materially, is the only way to end an anti-Blackness that even the dichotomous Left versus Right is built on (by white people who benefitted from white supremacy and continue to today).

Until this hegemony is rendered obsolete and replaced with a true New Humanism, or until Humanism is done away with completely, this world and civilization itself will continue to be anti-Black.

Suggested Reading: History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter Red, White, and Black, Frank B. Wilderson III