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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Liesbet Van Zoonen, From identity to identification: fixating the fragmented self, 34 Med Cult & Soc 44 (2013)

Cultural and social theories of identity have in common that they assume both individual and collective identities to be multiple rather than single, to be dynamic rather than static, and to be volatile rather than consistent. In addition, they propose that identity is something that we do, rather than something that we are. Most research in this area has been informed by these axioms, and as a result we know quite a bit about how different groups and individuals, in varying contexts, use different cultural means to perform their identities, both for themselves and for others. Recent innovations in these theories, particularly those coming from queer studies and addressing the notion of intersectionality, have further intensified the understanding of identity as a relatively flexible outcome of specific social and cultural acts. All of this work has been articulated with a wider acknowledgement of ‘diversity’ as a desirable goal for social and cultural policy, not only to improve the quality of public services like education, broadcasting or health care, but also as a necessary element of commercial innovation and organisational value.

While most identity theories have acknowledged the structural and discursive constraints that enclose diversity, there has been less attention for recent forces that actively work against multiplicity and towards the fixation of single identities. The current volume is meant to bring these forces out in the open, and make them part of our theories and research about identity.i I will first present three widely different examples to clarify tendencies towards such univocality. Then I will show how these cases are part of a new ‘field’ of identity management, which is usually understood as emerging from post 9/11 challenges, and from the growing economic weight of online transactions. However, identity management as it is currently evolving, guided, in first instance, by clear state and corporate interests, also needs to be seen as inevitably producing cultural tensions and conflicts around identity.

Three examples

In 1993 The New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Steiner showing two friendly dogs in front of a computer, with the one saying to the other: ‘On the internet nobody knows you are a dog’. The cartoon captured the then current hopes about the internet as a space where the confines of individual and social identities could be left behind, and where new and creative modes of anonymous interaction would transgress off-line gender, ethnic and other divisions between people. Such sentiment was also expressed by serious academics, like Sherry Turkle of the MIT. Her book Life on the Screen (1995) offered an in-depth analysis of how (then still textual) online experiences enabled people to experiment and play with identities, and helped them ‘to develop models of psychological well-being that are in a meaningful sense postmodern: they admit multiplicity and flexibility’ (p.263). Nowadays, however, the anonymity of the internet and the construction of online personas that do not reflect offline identities have been reconstructed as ‘risk factors’ of internet use (cf. Van Zoonen, 2011). Governments, schools, parents and other concerned parties now standardly warn against online imposters, bullying and identity theft, and social network sites like Facebook or Google+ have policies requiring users to register with their real names and data, and prevent them from having more than one account. A version of The New Yorker cartoon that covers the 2013 situation, could still have the same caption, but would likely show more dangerous, even deadly dogs, evoking the meaning of ‘dog’ as the bad guy.

It is not only in the context of internet use that once celebrated discourses of multiplicity have been annihilated by constructions of duplicity. In the post 9/11 mindset that pervades Europe and the United States , the multiple identities of migrants, and of Muslims in particular have been reconstructed as possibly suspect. In the US this has taken the form of a revival of American patriotism, in Europe it has expressed itself in the proclamation of the death of multiculturalism. Governments across Europe are now exerting considerable pressure on their old and new citizens to identify more clearly with their ‘own’ nation’s history and values. The French, for instance, launched a controversial national debate in 2009 asking ‘what does it mean to be French’ resulting often in discussions about the possible ‘Frenchness’ of Muslims, and in proposals to fly the flag in French schools and to stage official rituals for the acknowledgement of French citizens. An Italian parliamentary committee proposed in early 2012 to make the national anthem compulsory in primary schools, therewith upsetting both the separatist North- and South Italians and the German- speaking inhabitants of Trentino. The previous Dutch government has proposed legislation that enforces singular Dutch citizenship: migrants to the Netherlands will no longer be allowed to keep the passport of their country of origin, Dutch expats requesting foreign citizenship will lose their Dutch passport.

Another example, this one of a more ‘popular’ (as in ‘by the people’) desire to fixate identities, can be found in the many genres of reality television. Audience research about the ‘mother’ of all reality TV, Big Brother, has shown that a key appeal of the program was to discuss whether candidates were ‘themselves’ or ‘fake’. In addition, BB-candidates across the globe would talk among each other about how they felt they could or could not ‘be themselves’ in the house (cf. Van Zoonen and Aslama, 2006), therewith assuming the existence of one real self that is rather than a constructed multiple self that does, as identity theory would say. The notion of such a real self that needs to be found and shown, is exaggerated, paradoxically, in make-over reality programs. In these programs, participants and their hosts invariably engage in conversations about doing the make-over for oneself and not for others, or as Heyes (2007: 21) says about the standard narrative in cosmetic surgery reality: ‘An authentic personality of great moral beauty must be brought out of the body that fails adequately to reflect it. Thus, in this context, cosmetic surgery is less about becoming beautiful, and more about becoming oneself’ (italics added-LvZ). The appearance of ‘authenticity’ as a key asset and value in contemporary western societies has been noted in other fields as well, for instance in tourism, commerce, politics and celebrity culture. A critical perspective on authenticity will include that it is an ascribed rather than an innate or essential quality. Authenticity is in the eye of the beholder and as the discussions among reality TV audiences testify, it is part of a negotiation and not an easily and objectively observable ‘fact’. The more important point in this context, however, is that the importance of the concept of authenticity points to a wider popular desire to identify ‘real selves’ that are true, single and consistent (see also Dubrofsky, 2007).

Univocality and control

The three examples show how commercial, governmental and cultural forces actively work against multiple and performative experiences and practices of identity. The current requirements for passport pictures may be seen as the metonymical expression of such forces. The normal everyday expressive face, with its smiles, nods, and tilts, with its glasses, colouring and covering has to be brought back to its bare features: no smiles, mouth closed, head uncovered, eyes visible, head not tilted, shoulders straight. These are all presented primarily as technical requirements to enable the officers of border control and - more importantly - facial recognition software to authenticate the person carrying the passport. Yet, the implicit cultural message of such stripped faces is unmistakable: there is one true original self that can be recognized and objectively authenticated.

Most other forms of ‘identity management’, the en vogue term for a diversity of mechanisms to authenticate individuals in specific contexts, demonstrate a similar tendency towards single and stable identities. Magnet and Rodgers (2011), for instance, have shown how the full body scans used for border and other forms of security screening are rather insensitive to bodies not conforming to standard abilities, sizes and gender. Such technologies actively construct disabled, oversized or transgender bodies as deviant and suspect. In practical terms this leads to these individuals being selected more often for further screening, in cultural terms it implies a return to a discourse of normalized dichotomous identities, female or male, able or disabled and nothing in between. To paraphrase Magnet and Rodgers (2012: 111), full body scans mercilessly turn bodies inside out in a search to discover ‘the truth’ of an individual identity. Further evidence of how identity management technologies tend to undermine the gains of understanding identities as multiple, comes from other forms of authentication. A recent documentary series by UK Channel Four, about technological advances in the House of the Future, shows how the father in the family has difficulty using the computer-controlled thumb-print door entry system, because his thumb is worn by decades of manual labour. More generally, academic research has shown that the fingerprint recognition does not perform equally for, for instance rural and urban populations (Puri et al., 2010). Likewise, various research in the US has shown how the particular state requirements of voter-ID laws negatively affect the turnout of African-Americans and other minorities (Sobel and Smith, 2009).

Many of these issues have been heavily debated within a civil liberties and privacy framework, with George Orwell’s 1984 and Bentham’s Panopticon as the regularly evoked popular and metaphoric short cuts to the risks and problems of identity management. In these discussions, the classic concern is with governments violating their citizens’ privacy and human rights, through surveillance , registration or data base linking. However, as Lyon (2007) has covered extensively, the everyday life worlds of, among others, work, consumption, leisure and health are also pervaded by surveillance technologies and the infringement of privacy. As a result, the civil liberties agenda has expanded to these sectors but also to the increasing relations between these spheres of surveillance and the threats of ‘federated identity management’, i.e. the interlinkage of databases and authentication procedures across and within domains. Google’s recent change in privacy policy is a case in point: under the new regime Google says it will collect information from all its services (a.o. Gmail, YouTube, Google+) into a single account profile, in order ‘to provide better services to all of our users – from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful or the people who matter most to you online’. Among the many people and groups raising privacy concerns, were – paradoxically – some 40 US state Attorneys General, representatives of a government that itself is regularly accused of breaching privacy and civil liberties.

Social sorting and consumption

Yet, while privacy and civil liberties issues dominate these controversies, there are authors who claim that such discourse offers a limited understanding of the risks of identity management. Lyon (2007: 115), for instance, argues that ‘the kinds of issues that are raised by urban data profiling, CRM [customer relationship management – LvZ] and security operations go far beyond the narrow confines of ‘privacy’ and ‘data protection’.’ He analyses in detail how various technologies and processes of identity management place people in social categories that are decisive for their everyday choices and opportunities: self-evident is the categorization of certain young men as likely offenders, but customer profiling may lead to price and perk advantages and disadvantages for specific customers, geographical profiling is of direct relevance to the maintenance or abolition of local stores and services, and health screening unevenly affects access to health services . Lyon concludes, therefore, that social sorting is as big a risk of identity management as the breach of privacy and the erosion of civil liberties is. It is in this context, in particular, that identity management also undermines the understanding of identity as multiple, not only because it puts people in certain fixed categories, but also because, of necessity, it needs to identify people as belonging either in one, or in the other category, but definitely not in more than one. It is telling that Google under its new privacy regime not only requests the usage of real names for registration but also allows itself to ‘replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services’.ii

The Google case is only the most brutal expression of a wider movement towards customer experience marketing (CEM). In a converged online/offline commercial environment such a process entails the ability to engage with a customer across a plethora of channels and ‘touch points’, and thus requires a continuous tracking of a uniquely defined consuming entity. If successful, this does deliver all kinds of consumer pleasures: Amazon is usually mentioned as the company that has indeed managed to offer its customers an enhanced positive experience because of its continuous registration of personal data and preferences.

On the other hand, there are many examples of the rapidly increasing cross-channel advertising going wrong. Avid Facebook users are continuously baffled by the bespoke advertising showing up in the sponsored frame of their profile page, leading mostly to one of two reactions: ‘how do they know I like this’ versus ‘why do they think I like this’? Both, however, cause consumer irritation and – predictably – Facebook users themselves have developed apps to remove such ads. Regardless of the success or failure of CEM procedures, and regardless of the fact that they become ever more detailed and reflective of our personal buying histories and preferences, as customers we are put into the all pervasive, but univocal identity of ‘consumer’. Our multiplicity is recognized only as far as we have bought products or services expressing it.

Counterforces

The field of identity management then, as it is currently emerging, is pervaded by structural tendencies towards control and single identities. However, as a ‘field’ in the sense that Bourdieu developed, as a set of social positions and actors sharing specific actions and activities, tensions and contradictions are inherent and inevitable. Bourdieu’s field theory connects, in that sense, to Giddens’ proposition about a ‘dialectic of control’, whereby all rules and regulations produce their own opposition. Control and univocality as dominant features of identity management thus will construct their own political and cultural resistance, as was already clear in the anti-ad Facebook apps mentioned above. Privacy and civil liberties activists have successfully built a political agenda and achieved considerable success, for instance, with the abolition of a UK identity card scheme and the rejection of a Dutch national electronic patient data, but also with mobilizing a support base that makes them a respected stakeholder for national and pan-national governmental consultations.

Such activism against the control dimension of identity management also has cultural counterparts. Urban surveillance systems across the world, for instance, have witnessed artists performing in front of their CCTV cameras, and facial recognition systems have been countered with makeup and hairstyles that prevent facial detection. The award winning design project CV Dazzle, in particular, was set up out of concern about surveillance and privacy, and a desire ‘to show how we could adapt to occularcentric, surveillance-societies without retreating into anonymity, and, in doing so, celebrate style and augment privacy.iii

There has been much less visible discussion of and opposition to the single identity that is assumed in most current technologies and practices of identity management. This may be because univocality is considered less of a problem in a cultural climate that prioritizes ‘authenticity’ and is obsessed with being oneself, which – indeed – assumes one instead of multiple selves. Apart from the cosmetic surgery make-over television programs mentioned earlier, there are many other popular trends that further suggest a hegemony of a single identity. The search for the inner self , for instance, has created an industry of spirituality that produces a wide variety of commodities and services to help this still growing group of seekers. Political, social and corporate elites are nowadays judged as much on their authenticity as on their competence: ‘authentic leadership’ is the latest buzzword in a host of management manuals, in which it is proclaimed that ‘knowing your authentic self’ is a prerequisite to good leadership. Parenting guides are full of good advice to parents to ‘be true to themselves’, but also to allow their children to be themselves. In the (popular) arts and culture domains, ‘authenticity’ is a key concept to mark artists that have remained ‘true to themselves’ or ‘sincere’ as opposed to those who have sold out to commercial interests and have become dupes of the culture industry. In his diverse writings about authenticity, the Italian philosopher Ferrara (1998) has analysed extensively how contemporary obsessions with authenticity are a response to the postmodern fragmentation of identities. While he suggests that philosophically it is entirely possible to articulate authenticity with fluid and multiple identities, he also acknowledges that the more popular deployment of the concept presupposes an essentialist understanding of the self as unified and stable.

In such a cultural climate, it may be unlikely that there will be strong forces opposing the construction of a single identity that is typical for the emerging technologies and practices of identity management. Yet, as Lyon (2007: 177) argues, ‘when there is pressure towards finding single unique identifiers (...), the existence of multiple identities (...) is a constant challenge to the would-be hegemonic system’. Indeed, there are some occurrences of such opposition, most notably the successful mobilization of support for a change in the Australian passport. Since 2011 Australian citizens can chose male, female or X as their gender on their passport ,with X the option for intersex people, and allowing transgender people to identify as male or female. The changes came about as a result of pressure from an Australian group advocating gender and human rights, claiming that the dichotomous male/female registration discriminates against transgender and intersex people.iv While the acknowledgement by the Australian government of a third sex seems a relatively straightforward change of policy, on a cultural level it also fundamentally undermines dichotomous gender discourse and works, therewith, in close alliance with the project of feminists and other progressive forces to undermine stable notions of gender and other essentialist categories (notwithstanding the inevitable follow-up question of why having to register gender on a passport at all).

The Australian case shows that - like privacy -, univocality needs to be recognized and constructed as a risk in current regimes of identity management, in order to develop more desirable alternatives. Such a recognition forms the main legitimation for the particular angle of this special issue of Media, Culture and Society. The articles invited all critically address the tendency towards univocality in different systems and contexts of identity management. Aaron Martin and Edgar Whitley deconstruct the popular belief that biometric technologies enable the unique identification and authentication of individuals. Miriam Lips looks at current e-government policies fixate identities in ways that are contradictory to traditional notions of citizenship. Moving the discussion to the body as a location of identity and identity management, both Shoshana Magnet and Katina Michael and MG Michael explore whether and how medical technologies function as quartermasters, as it were, for future rigid developments in identity management.

With this collection of articles we feel we have contributed to constructing the single identity assumed in identity management as a social and cultural problem that needs to be solved. A further necessary step would be to search and select cases in which the multiplicity of identity is not only allowed at a discursive level, but also flexibly managed through technological institutional practices. The new Australian passport is one rare example thereof, and a further identification of other such ‘good practices’ would certainly help to break up the automatic univocality in current identity management. At present, the most likely sector where proposals and prototypes of such good practice will be found, is in the triangle of Technology, Entertainment and Design. The similarly called TED global network and the European PICNIC platform both offer talks, conferences, events and performances about innovations that are typified by user-centeredness, collaboration and openness. In fact, both bring together a wider movement of creative experimentation in which identity management issues also occur. At the PICNIC 2011 festival, for instance, UK hacktivist and artist Heath Bunting presented his ‘identity bureau’ in which he develops procedures for people to construct a new legal identity based on legal documents, that can be passed on to someone else after it is no longer of use.v To illustrate with a not so arbitrary example: an academic commuting from Amsterdam to Loughborough to teach and do research would not have to go through the almost insurmountable hassle of acquiring a national insurance number, tax code, health care, pension rights and a bank account for non-residents, but could simply buy the identity that allows for all of that off the shelf of an identity bureau. Needless to say that Buntings ‘expert system for identity mutation’vi could make him the object of UK and US governmental scrutiny because of the potential criminal and terrorist abuse they envision if Bunting’s multiple identities would catch on. Such a security reflex, while understandable, prevents a more extensive exploration of safe and trustworthy multiple identity management systems that would satisfy the practical quandaries of some people’s everyday lives, but – more importantly – acknowledge the cultural diversity and multiplicity that typify us.

References

Ferrara A. (1998) Reflective authenticity: rethinking the project of modernity. London: Routledge.

Heyes CJ (2007) Cosmetic Surgery And The Televisual Makeover. Feminist Media Studies, 7(1): 17-31.

Lyon D (2007) Surveillance studies: an overview. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Magnet S and Rodgers T (2012) Stripping for the State. Whole body imaging technologies and the surveillance of othered bodies. Feminist Media Studies, 12(1): 101-118.

Puri C, Narang K, Tiwari, A, Vatsa, M and Singh, R (2010) On Analysis of Rural and Urban Indian Fingerprint Images. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6005: 55-61.

Dubrofsky RE (2007) 'Therapeutics of the Self’: Surveillance in the Service of the Therapeutic. Television and New Media, 8(4): 263-284.

Sobel R and Smith J (2009). Voter-ID Laws Discourage Participation, Particularly among Minorities, and Trigger a Constitutional Remedy in Lost Representation. PS: Political Science & Politics, 42(1): 107-110.

Turkle S (1995). Life on the screen. Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Van Zoonen L (2011) The rise and fall of online feminism. In: Christensen M, Jansson A, and Christensen C (eds) Online territories: Globilization, Mediated Practice and Social Space. Peter Lang Publishers, 132-147.

Van Zoonen L and Aslama, M (2006). Understanding Big Brother: an analysis of current research. Javnost/The Public, 13(2): 85-96.

Footnotes

i This introducing article is part of a EPSRC ‘large’ grant on Identity Management, led by the author: IMPRINTS, EP/J005037/1.

ii http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/, Last accessed March 15, 2012

iii http://www.core77.com/blog/core77_design_awards/core77_design_award_2011_cv_dazzle_student_winner_for_speculative_objectsconcepts_20115.asp, last accessed August 28, 2012.

iv https://www.passports.gov.au/web/sexgenderapplicants.aspx

v http://www.picnicnetwork.org/heath-bunting-1, last accessed March 14, 2012.

vi http://irational.org/cgi-bin/cv2/temp.pl, last accessed March 16, 2012.

#identity #The Self #modernity #The Way We Live Now #self-actualizing #queer studies #intersectionality #self-actualization #identity theories #identity management #culture #consumption #media #society

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homestuckexamination · 6 years

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Homestuck: Execution of a Masterpiece - Part 1 - What’s in a Game?

Whenever people ask a Homestuck fan what Homestuck is all about, or why they should read it, the vast majority of people expects a roundabout response. It’s weird and complicated, some say. You have to read it to understand it. There’s this notion that Homestuck is an inscrutable work that requires hours upon hours to get any enjoyment out of it, and this school of thought is only reinforced by Homestuck’s slow beginning. People love Homestuck, but while the first Acts serve as a great introduction to the Setting, people tend to remember and get excited by things happening later on. Where are the Trolls? Some say, already knowing the existence of these characters. Is this the right Webcomic? Was another typical question tossed around before the Viz Media redesign removed any shred of doubt regarding the comic. A lot of people outside of the Fandom hesitate to get into it, whether it be the Length, stories they may have heard about the Fans, or thinking it’s all Nonsense.

And yet, whatever it is you personally believe about Homestuck, its notoriety on the Internet speaks of there being... Something more to it. Something interesting enough to keep over a Million users checking the website daily at its height. Something interesting enough to Crash Newgrounds and partially Megaupload, Youtube, and other services with a single major update. You may not know what that is, specially with the paradoxically self-deprecating attitude a lot of the people in the Fandom have taken. With the Hiatuses and the Ending, a lot of people have left Homestuck behind, and yet you may still see people occasionally mentioning missing it, following certain Livebloggers of the comic, or creating/reblogging Fanart. Even those who didn’t enjoy the ending, as things have settled down, still remember the story fondly, and while going through a bit of a hiccup currently, Hiveswap has sparked interest in the story anew.

So the question is, of course. What makes Homestuck good? Why did it captivate so many people if it really is cryptic and confusing? Or was it just a passing fad? Is there any actual veracity to these claims? Today, I am going to explain what’s captivating about this Webcomic, and then go through the entirety of the story showcasing turning points for the narrative and how they are executed in this Modern Shakespearean Odyssey. Be warned, there will be Spoilers, but I will try to confine them to the second half of this post.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

So let’s preface this addressing the big elephant in the room.

What IS Homestuck?

Even fans of the Webcomic may not be able to tell you specially well what it actually IS. It’s a Webcomic... But it’s not in a Comic Format, it’s more like a Choose your Own Adventure Game... But you don’t actually Choose anything... It’s been likened to Ulysses, as well as a Shakespearean Play. It’s been talked about as a Creation Myth by the author, as well as just ‘A Webcomic about Friends who Play a Game’, and a Webcomic about a Game in general.

Add to this the length and narrative shifts that occur through the story, and the ever-growing complexity of the narrative spanning through the entirety of the comic, and you have a metatextual behemoth the likes the Internet had never seen before. Perhaps bits and pieces of it, but not all together, and definitely not to such an extensive degree. But it really is not as difficult to understand as it may seem. All you need to do, is assess the Author’s prior works, and his intent with with his work, as well as Homestuck.

Before Homestuck.com was a thing, the website hosting Homestuck was Mspaintadventures. You can still read his old adventures, obviously, but back in the day Homestuck wasn’t specifically the focus- Rather, it was just the latest in a series of experimental stories Hussie had been working on. Going even further back in time, before MSPA was a thing, Hussie also worked on other things. ‘And It Don’t Stop’, and ‘Whistles the Midnight Calliope’ are stories Hussie created and illustrated, ‘Complacency of the Learned’ was a dropped project of his, and even further back he was part of a comic series at Team Special Olympics... Which. Was as awful as it sounds. And yet it’s thanks to these rather awful beginnings that we can begin assessing Homestuck in a clearer light.

The biggest key to being funny is to not be a dumbass. Really stupid people have a hard time being funny (intentionally). The smarter you are, the better the odds you have of being funny. Note that sometimes you run into really smart people who aren't funny, or lack a sense of humor. But note, this is VERY STRONG evidence that they are not nearly as smart as they appear to be! In my view at least.

When I equate humor as a product of intelligence, I mean it is primarily a product of awareness. The more you are aware of, and the more insight you have into a myriad of things, the more you will be able to successfully illuminate absurdity, and the more clever ways to accomplish this you will be able to conceive of. Awareness lends itself to an agile imagination. This is why stupidity is such comedic poison. Awareness of the world and that from which you draw your satirical muse is deadened by the mind-blunting forces that are associated with stupidity. These forces primarily are a lack of concentration and dedication, and inalertness to all that surrounds you and all content you are exposed to. As well as being quick to judge and label whatever does manage to get through the pinhole. Those are brain killers and comedy killers. They lead to hackneyed work at best, and incredibly awful, prejudicial, bigoted stuff at worst.

Now I don't mean to say I'm a real smart guy and that's why I'm funny, or EVEN VICE VERSA. I'm just pointing out that, in thinking back, becoming less obtuse and deepening my understanding of as much as possible was a turning point in beginning to understand what is and isn't funny.

I just try to make sure every page has some purpose, whether it's just funny or amusing, or advances the story in some way. The most important page is always the one I'm working on. I never put out pages just to take up space or kill time.

I think if a story manages to be a succession of meaningful, entertaining events, then that fluidity happens automatically.

I am making the kind of thing I would want to read. I am making the kind of thing I wish existed, but doesn't. Yet.

I write it because I enjoy it and assume everyone else will take pity on those who don't.

Back when MSPA first launched, the featured story was Jailbreak. A simplistic CYOA story about a dude trying to escape a prison, that allowed readers to submit commands. Once Jailbreak was finished, Hussie began Bard Quest, which followed up on Jailbreak’s spirit, but with multiple branching options. This proved to be too much for Hussie to keep track of, sadly, and ended up dropping the story. Then we move on to Problem Sleuth, a story that spanned the entirety of a Year, about Hard Boiled Detectives. In a similar way to Jailbreak, Hussie allowed people to submit commands and started to showcase more of his style and special brand of humor. Towards the end of Problem Sleuth however, Hussie knew how he wanted to end the story, and began to cherry pick the commands and even make them up entirely so that he could give the story the ending he wanted.

And this brings us to Homestuck, after Problem Sleuth was finished. Homestuck’s development is, in a way, an antithesis of Problem Sleuth. With Problem Sleuth, Hussie learned about the shortcomings of CYOA Webcomics, and got some more insight on the genre. So when Homestuck began, he already had a story in mind, but allowed people to submit commands, to explore the world he’d already crafted. As such, things that would be out of character or disrupt the story in a way he didn’t agree with were humored as intrusive thoughts. The first few Acts are a tug of war, between the Author wanting to push the story in the direction he envisioned, and the Audience having a degree of control over the characters in ways that bring new interesting ideas and possibilities. This is what makes the first Act feel like a drag for some people. They have been told about the story when it’s already going in the direction the author wants, but the beginning is a playful back and forth of narrative forces. It starts silly. It starts comedic. And it retains the comedy through all of it. But at the start, the lack of any concrete setting or storyline make everything feel like absurdist tomfoolery.

It’s those who enjoy this style or bear through it and get hooked on by the many plot hooks afterwards that learn there’s something more to the story, and this is what creates the divide between people within the Fandom and people Outside of it.

But this didn’t exactly answer the question did it? WHAT is Homestuck really?

Homestuck is a cultural amalgamation, and a way for Hussie to expose his inner world while improving as a person. Many people have attacked Hussie and Homestuck because of his work at Team Special Olympic, and the use of a few slurs- Namely the R word, through the first Acts of Homestuck, and while it’s commonly used up to Act 5, it falls in desuse afterwards. People outside of the circle see this and would argue that most of the comic uses slurs- However, the first Acts were made in a very small span of time, compared to how long Act 6 took to make. It was also an issue people had less awareness of back then. The further you get into the story, the more it touches upon very real themes, psychological issues, identity, orientation.

From the point of the Story itself, Homestuck is an intense Cultural Remix of old and new, mixture of Classical Themes with Pop Culture, touching everything from the Philosophy of Existentialism and Gnosticism to joking about the Obama Presidency. It’s Hussie, as a complex author, creating an intricate Multiverse with intriguing mechanics that draws inspiration from everything from Religious currents to Dragon Ball Z and Earthbound. But from the point of the Author, Homestuck is the exposition of themes Hussie feels are interesting to share with an audience, as he grows to understand more about the world around him, learns from his mistakes, and creates a work he would want everyone to enjoy.

And since it spanned a period of Seven Years, the themes it touches, the culture it reaches to, and the way Hussie himself behaves, slowly shift through the entirety of the narrative. You can see the growth, of both Homestuck and the Author, both in the art style and in the narrative, as time goes on. This is why Homestuck is so hard to pin-point and explain, because it could very well seem two entirely different stories at two different randomly picked spots. And yet, at the same time, it’s the way Homestuck evolves and grows that captivates many people, the way a simple story becomes something much more grand and intense.

And while this showcases what Homestuck IS, it definitely leaves a much more important question in the air...

What is Homestuck ABOUT?

Because of the same reasons discussed above, the very story of Homestuck seems ever-shifting depending on how deep in you are. Some people simply mention Act 1, trying to avoid Spoilers- The story about the protagonist, John Egbert, and his group of Online Friends, who play a Game together, which leads to unforseen consequences. Others will try to dig deeper into the story, but without giving specific details, perhaps teasing about some events later on in the story, or commenting about Time Travelling, but leaving it ambiguous and difficult to understand. Others may straight up decide to spoil a Plot Point in hopes of hooking their friends into the story, and yet, without the context of the rest of the comic behind it, the Plot Hook simply doesn’t stick as well as it should, and at worst, even makes others believe the story to be Ridiculous or Nonsensical.

Hussie himself has described the comic in various different ways through the years, with the most prominent two explanations being A Comic about Online Friends who Play a Game, and A Comic about Games. And you can see both of these being true through the entirety of Homestuck, the narrative does indeed begin with Kids playing a Game, and said Game is the very core of the Setting, around which the conflict revolves. At the same time, the Comic takes upon game-like characteristics, having an in-Universe inventory system the Kids mess around with, and draws themes from many other games- Building like in the Sims, a RPG-like levelling up system, and even going as far as to include Easter Eggs, Cheat Codes, Glitches and Corruptions occasionally. Homestuck makes fun of Video Game Tropes, while at the same time embracing them for its own purposes, whether it be to create a plot point or to add some comedic messing around with inventory management.

Because of this Videogame Style, too, and the Game the protagonists play, the author manages to combine a Modern Setting with Sci-Fi elements, and further digs into it with Fantasy themes. Magic and Science mix confusingly, Game Mechanics raise questions about Reality itself and Free Will, and yet in turn also allow for an incredible degree of Customization and Self-Insertion.

Through its parody of Videogames and its draw from multiple cultures, Homestuck builds one of its biggest strengths in its Versatility. It presents core ideas that become rational parts of the narrative, and allow the story to take any twist and turn imaginable without being far-fetched. People loved making theories about the direction of the story, people still make stories about the story, people love to make their own characters and include them in the setting, insert themselves. And it works! Because the Setting is Hyper-Flexible and allows for people to work with a solid foundation that spans so many fun things!

In turn, however, this also becomes one of the story’s biggest flaw when it comes to drawing in new people- The density of the story is such that most people will find something intriguing and interesting, and yet, people will find different things interesting and intriguing. So someone may read the first few Acts, and not get hooked, even though if they kept reading they would enjoy it! Conversely, others enjoyed the first few Acts, but perhaps missed some plot point along the way, or took a break and forgot something, causing confusion about later events and not letting them enjoy the setting as much as they should be. Homestuck is not a story for everyone. It has something for everyone, and it has an incredible amount of appeal to a number of different demographics, but because of this, there’s a divide among ‘when the good stuff begins’. This creates expectations- They will say the first Acts are bad, and then someone will read them and find them Hilarious and Charming. They will claim certain characters are the best and they can’t wait for their friend to get to them- But their friend fell in love with another set of characters, and now they want to skim over the thing the other was so in love with to get back to the action. Ultimately, this shouldn’t matter- If you think you’d enjoy Homestuck for what it is, it’s a great story with amazing characters. But within the Fandom, this creates a disparity on what parts of the story are good/bad/better/worse, and as such, may put off people who would otherwise love certain aspects of it.

Regardless of whether they enjoy it now or later, whether they enjoy it overall or don’t find enjoyment, Homestuck is what it is. An Hyperflexible Narrative about a Group of Friends playing a Game, parodying popular Game Tropes and getting more Intricate as time goes on, always dangling a new plot thread in front of the audience without providing all the answers, giving enough to keep their attention, but not enough to spoil them. Foreshadowing future events that, when happen, click in your head and make you realize how far back everything goes, and how everything is intertwined. It’s a crazy, often silly comedy. And in my opinion? It’s something people should give a try if they have the slightest bit of interest in.

There’s no shame in dropping the story at any point if you’re not enjoying it after all. Homestuck is long, and if you’re not liking it it’s okay to let it be and just think it’s not for you. But if it grabs you? It grabs you hard, and it makes you want more.

And while the story and the mechanics and the narrative it presents are incredibly intriguing and rather deep, there’s also something everyone who likes Homestuck enjoys.

The Characters

One of the biggest draws in Homestuck, people will often mention, are the Characters. The group of main friends, along with everyone presented afterwards, some are more relatable than others, but ultimately they’re all enjoyable in some way. Hussie himself once said that he disliked writing characters he didn’t personally enjoy on some level. And you can see this even with the simplest of one-shot characters. They’re complex and flawed, and often come to either realize their own mistakes, or have someone else showcase their rights and wrongs. Their interests, their interactions with others, it creates for multi-dimensional characters that often feel like real people, which stick to a set of values and a type of personality.

This is magnified by the concept of the Hero Titles, what would be Homestuck’s equivalent to someone choosing a ‘Rogue’ or a ‘Paladin’ in a game. They don’t show up until later on, but even in the earlier acts these Titles give more context to the Characters’ personalities and what they did and what they will do next. And they can be applied to pretty much everything, even characters outside of Homestuck and even to yourself! Yet another layer of customization that keeps people interested in the setting, specifically because many Titles are left rather ambiguous. Flexibility is, once again, the name of the game.

And speaking of Flexibility? The characters in Homestuck are designed with Headcanon Flexibility in mind. The art style is often symbolic and rather undefined. Characters are represented by loose shapes, by their Symbols and their Colors, rather than a specific look, which has led to artists drawing them in all sorts of ways! All characters are, canonically, Aracial, a blank slate to project upon, and even the hair color is more often seen as ‘dark’ or ‘light’ rather than necessarily Black or White. Sure, Hussie slips some times because he has his own headcanons, calling babies ‘pink’ at times or mentioning about someone being ‘white’, but ultimately? Race, Height, Body Type, is often left ambiguous and shifts heavily, specially when Guest Artists begin to show up. And yet, whenever you see a specific character being interpreted in one way? It doesn’t matter what the artist’s specific Headcanons are, you can still tell they’re them. People will joke about certain characters being similar to each other with this symbolic style, but the fact you can always recognize them in fanart is a testament to their Design.

Ultimately

Homestuck is a weird and unique story, which is why it’s drawn so many people to it. Everything about it is a progression, an evolution. The Art Style improves as it goes on. The narrative gets more complex and gains more depth, building up from the very same base it started with. The characters grow and change through the story, facing relatable issues and inter-personal problems. The author gains more awareness, betters himself, grows as a person, and it reflects on the story and the themes it touches. A silly story about a group of Online Friends. A tale of self-improvement. A Creation Myth about what the author thinks is Right and Wrong. A collage of Classic and Popular Media combined in a new-age medium. A LGBT-positive tale with quite strong representation specially late-game representation. A versatile tale to entice people to get involved in the Fandom in one way or another.

It is not perfect. But it doesn’t need to be. It’s constantly pushing the boundaries that define it and experimenting, shifting in its angle and becoming more in tune with the issues in the world. A story about Hope and Change, a series of enigmas presented with just enough puzzle pieces missing to make you wonder and theorize, but not enough that things become frustratingly obtuse.

That is why Homestuck is so hard to define. That is why so many people enjoy Homestuck and have stuck with it for so long. And that is, if you think you would enjoy this silly narrative, why, you too should read Homestuck! Maybe it doesn’t stick! Maybe you simply don’t enjoy the style, and that’s fair.

But if you do enjoy it and follow through? It can and will shift your perspective on so many things.

Also, if you’re worried about not getting some of the Pop Culture references, like movies and such, don’t worry- I didn’t get half of them back in the day, and what they did was actually make me interested in movies I would’ve had no interest in whatsoever otherwise.

I’m specially looking at you, Con Air.

#Homestuck #Hiveswap #Upd8 #HSE #Hussie #Fanon #Canon #Longpost #Long Post

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Yesterday Is History: Meet the Latest Addition to the Time Travel Romance Genre

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There’s a reason that time travel romances are popular, and it isn’t just the success of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander (both the books and the television series). The idea of traveling to a different time is, in itself, a bit romantic, and lovers crossed by time and space pluck the heartstrings of hopeless romantics. Kosoko Jackson’s newly released Yesterday Is History hits all the right notes for the genre by both drawing on its predecessors and striking out in a new direction, giving queer readers—especially queer Black men—representation in a genre that’s normally more female-focused.

Andre Cobb is a young Black man set to be the salutatorian of his class at an elite high school—until cancer ruins all his carefully laid plans. Dre’s cancer requires a liver transplant and, as the book opens, the operation has gone successfully. His body has accepted the liver, and it’s possible he could get things back on track with his life, despite the school administration giving him as many hoops to jump through as they can throw his way. Faced with summer school in order to graduate on time (but losing his salutatorian status), or having to spend another year in high school, Dre desperately wishes he “could just go back in time and do it all over again. Go back, like, three years, tell my parents to take me to the doctor, find the cancer when it’s stage 0, and stop all of this from happening.”

And then, he jumps back in time. Not three years, but to 1969, where he meets a young man named Michael who takes Dre’s random appearance in stride. Michael fascinates Dre, despite his terror at what’s actually going on. When he jumps back to the present, he half believes he’s made up the whole thing, that he’s suffering some sort of side-effect from the surgery. It’s true, but not in the way he thinks. There are no hallucinations. But the liver he received belonged to a time traveling teenager—a teen whose family now wants to bring Andre into their secret world. The wealthy white family invites him over to explain things (in a scene that may intentionally evoke Jordan Peele’s Get Out). While the McIntyres do occasionally give off that think-they’re-woke-but-aren’t-quite vibe, the family is well-intentioned, and Blake, younger brother of Dre’s liver donor, becomes Dre’s time travel teacher.

From that set up, Dre hurtles back and forth, primarily between the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, deepening his connection with Michael while also developing a tenuous friendship with Blake (who, in the narrative, feels almost as though he’s from a world more foreign to Dre than Michael is). Jackson’s sense of 1969 and the following years is solid and cinematic, and while he’s spare with details, the ones he introduces give such a rich sense of history to the time and place that it’s like sinking into that moment. Dre’s sense of what it is to be a young gay man in 2021 offers a contrast to what it was like to be a young gay man in the momentum of the Stonewall Riots. While Dre is Black and Michael is white, Dre can still see ways in which his position as a contemporary gay man has greater privilege, based on the progress activists made in the forty year span between Michael’s time and his own.

Because of Dre’s comfort with his sexual identity, the drama of the story doesn’t need to revolve around any sort of that. When Blake asks Dre out on a date, it feels like a completely natural growth of their friendship—any awkwardness comes from Dre’s romance with his historical tether. Blake himself has greater concerns over the idea of having a boyfriend, due to his own family relationships, and it’s really enjoyable as a reader to have the point-of-view protagonist not struggle with that side of his identity, and to have his sexuality be accepted by his family with no drama. (Whether they accept his choice of career path is the greater struggle, and one with which many YA readers will be sure to identify.)

Jackson’s presentation of time travel is also very naturally done, so that the idea of it feels quite normalized. He never delves into the science behind it, or tries to explain the physics (aside from setting the rules to avoid the creation of paradoxes—something that becomes increasingly important as the novel progresses). The novel is better for it, accepting that time travel is something that happens to some people—a shrinking population, in fact, which is part of the reason the McIntyres sought to bring Dre into their family. The idea of time travel as a genetic quirk seems to draw on Audrey Niffeneger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, which Dre even references in the book: “You mean the greatest movie of all time? Yes.”

Movies

This Is How You Lose the Time War Solves the Time Traveler’s Wife Problem

By Natalie Zutter

Movies

7 Epistolary Time Travel Stories

By Natalie Zutter

While there are moments where some of the characters’ relationship growth seems to happen in time gaps (details about Dre’s mother’s first impression of Mrs. McIntyre are revealed after the fact, for example, and Blake and Dre’s friendship clearly progresses between scenes in ways that aren’t obvious until they later come into the narrative), that feels appropriate to a time travel novel. Jackson never cuts corners when it comes to emotional anguish, either, and despite the eventual feel-good conclusion, the latter half of the novel is full of tear-jerking conversations as Dre tries to fix mistakes—his own and others. The ethical questions of time travel intervention (or choosing not to intervene) are explored in ways that are personal rather than big picture, and that deepens the emotional impact.

Yesterday Is History joins other excellent time travel romances like Outlander, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Lora Innes’s similarly-YA aimed comic The Dreamer, in exploring those themes—and also in bringing to life characters that tug on the heart strings. Dre’s adventures are sure to stick with readers for a long time after reading… Just be sure that you grab some tissues before you get started.

Yesterday is History is now available to buy wherever books are sold.

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passiveagressiveukulele · 3 years

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FILM NARRATIVE 2

TEENS ON SCREENS

Coming of age story is my favourite kind of story. From 10 things I hate about you, Clueless and Breakfast club to Sing street and Ladybird I’ve seen it all (to say multiple times would be an understatement). Paradoxically, I’m not a big fan of the hero’s journey plot arc. It’s a very western, predictable, underdog-esque storytelling I find unfulfilling in most cases. But this formula doesn’t fall short for teen films. In fact, it does quite the opposite for me - it fulfils.

Teenage years are all about alienation, not fitting in, getting out of your comfort zone and finding your own way in the world. Basically, what I’m saying is - teenagers are superheroes. Grumpy, hysterical, annoying and frequently mean, but hey, flawed is the predisposition for human. And I find that films concerning these young humans carry a few interesting lessons that seem to get overlooked in other genres.

Babyteeth (and the other way is wrong)

Within coming of age stories there’s a particular subgenre of teen films - teen cancer films. The fault in our stars’ black and white clouds on a baby blue background are practically their trademark, but let’s not forget the lesser known classics such as A walk to remember, Midnight sun and very topical in 2020/21- 5 feet apart. The premise is simple - a dying girl only has only so much time left on this Earth so in 120 minutes of the film’s runtime a handsome (often angsty but free spirited) young dude knocks on her door, breaks ups her daily, medication induced routine, turns things upside down (to quote John Green: “gives her a forever within the number of days and she is eternally grateful for it”), but then after she’s gone he’s the one who realises that things will never be the same (along the way he also makes best friends with her dad who initially hated the dude).

There’s nothing particularly problematic about this storytelling formula itself, but rather the way cancer gets treated along the way. Writers gets so tangled up in the “romantic” idea of a pretty girl destined to die (something Jesse Andrews caught on in the early years of this trend and tactfully used it in the title of his Me and Earl and the dying girl). Even worse, in some cases this pretty girl’s soul purpose of the remaining days is to show her newly acquired dude “the way”. Alyssa Rosenberg’s definition of this trope stands - “Hollywood is determined to deliver a heavy dose of pain relief in the name of prettiness.”

This is why I found it particularly enjoyable to watch Netflix’s latest release Babyteeth. It’s a story about 16 year old Milla. Milla falls in love with a 23 year old Moses. Milla’s parents disapprove. Milla also has cancer. Notice how cancer comes last, how cancer is tied to also, how cancer does not define Milla.

This is a story about Milla’s first love. Milla meets him on a train station, where he makes an entrance to her life high on adrenaline, foolishness and immaturity (and some other substances, as we later find out). It’s all it takes for her, she can fill in the rest. It’s her call to adventure.

It’s clear she’s intoxicated by him, it is unclear how he feels about her. Her fascination has no explanation. And it needs none. He’s her first (potentially unrequited) love. In his talk about first love, Stephen Fry said that it demands to be unrequited because “it’s such an act of giving and it requires so much back that it can never be given back. It’s an atom bomb... like matter meeting anti-matter. It’s almost important that all you do is worship, yearn and long.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SciBpkvtGe0

What writers of these teen cancer stories fail to understand time and time again is that cancer is not what makes cancer girl’s love tragic. When heart skips a beat and when it aches, when hands sweat and they touch, when eyes meet and tear up it’s romantically tragic enough. Love will inevitably run its course and the characters know it in their bones, but what matters is that they give it a shot. They worship, they yearn, and ultimately - they long. And all of this is accompanied by an impeccable soundtrack (but more about that in the following case study).

We are who we are (or how to swap Sufjan Stevens and the Psychedelic Furs for Blood Orange and Chance the Rapper)

Speaking of subgenres in teen films, Luca Guadagnino is on a good way to create his own - a coming of age story of a sexually troubled young man in Italy. Apart from the before mentioned protagonist, other tropes of this genre include - swift unmotivated pans, hyperactive piano scores and excessive amount of adolescent boredom. (And truly, the latter is the show’s biggest throwback - the slow pacing of 8 one hour episodes very soon starts to resemble a Bela Tarr project).

Whereas in his previous feature, Call me by your name, Guadagnino characterised his protagonist and surroundings with a playlist which mainly included Sufjan Stevens’ hits such as Futile devices, Mystery of love and Visions of Gideon, here he adopts a much more versatile approach. Sometimes directly in the shot, sometimes outside it and sometimes barely in it and muffled by the earphones Fraser never seems to take out, the music of David Bowie, The Smiths, Little Simz, Backstreet Boys, Kanye West, Frank Ocean and most importantly, Blood Orange is at the very heart of teenage landscape.

This is something almost every teen movie/series seems to get right - the role of music. Sometimes retro, sometimes indie, sometimes unbearably underground, but everpresent. The only other genre that employs this much melody are musicals and I’m sure we can all agree they’re a separate category. Just think about the role Clueless had in launching Radiohead’s career straight into the jaws of the mainstream or Bowie’s German rendition of songs used in Wir kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. Lately I noticed a frequent use of singles by The The and Sharon Van Etten in all things considering characters aged 15-19.

What both Babyteeth and We are who we are do alongside comprising a colourful playlist is employ instrumental pieces that built up a library of leit motifs. In Babyteeth string quartets establish Milla’s relationship with her mother and in We are who we are piano transitions serve as a constant reminder of Fraser’s kindred spirit.

I suppose the inexperienced ears must come in pair with the inexperienced heart. When you’re young everything you hear is new, different and intoxicating. The overload of emotions can only be covered by a wide range of sounds. In turn, this only makes the cinematic landscape all the more exciting. I think many filmmakers would benefit from building up an archive of characterful tunes instead of leaving it all up to teen movies, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch.

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robertogreco · 6 years

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Strict Forms

This is a thread from last month that I've been thinking about ever since, but never got around to posting here. It starts with a series of tweets from Guillermo del Toro:

Tweets on why I am interviewing Michael Mann and George Miller (2 weeks each) about their films this Sabbatical year.

I sometimes feel that great films are made / shown at a pace that does not allow them to "land" in their proper weight or formal / artisitic importance...

As a result, often, these films get discussed in "all aspects" at once. But mostly, plot and character- anecdote and flow, become the point of discussion. Formal appreciation and technique become secondary and the specifics of narrative technique only passingly address[ed]

I would love to commemorate their technical choices and their audiovisual tools. I would love to dissect the narrative importance and impact of color, light, movement, wardrobe and set design. As Mann once put it: "Everything tells you something"

I think we owe it to these (and a handful of filmmakers) to have their formal choices commemorated, the way one can appreciatethe voigour and thickness and precision of a brushtroke when you stand in front of an original painting.

Aaron Stewart-Ahn responds, in particular to the final paragraph above:

Our media literacy about movies tends to prioritize text over subtext, emotion, and sound vision & time, and it has sadly sunk into audiences' minds. I'd say some movies are even worth a handful of shots / sounds they build up to.

To which I added:

Our education system prioritizes text. Deviation from text is discouraged.

“To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity.”

“Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power; together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order.”

That comes from “Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box,” by Trinh T. Minh-Ha in Woman, Native, Other (via):

Nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-in-convention-language of “clarity.” (”A wholesome, clear, and direct language” is said to be “the fulcrum to move the mass or to sanctify it.”) Clear expression, often equated with correct expression, has long been the criterion set forth in treatises on rhetoric, whose aim was to order discourse so as to persuade. The language of Taoism and Zen, for example, which is perfectly accessible but rife with paradox does not qualify as “clear” (paradox is “illogical” and “nonsensical” to many Westerners), for its intent lies outside the realm of persuasion. The same holds true for vernacular speech, which is not acquired through institutions — schools, churches, professions, etc. — and therefore not repressed by either grammatical rules, technical terms, or key words. Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save — at any rate to mean and to send out an unambiguous message. Writing thus reduced to a mere vehicle of thought may be used to orient toward a goal or to sustain an act, but it does not constitute an act in itself. This is how the division between the writer/the intellectual and the activists/the masses becomes possible. To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. True, but beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train. Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power; together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order. Let us not forget that writers who advocate the instrumentality of language are often those who cannot or choose not to see the suchness of things — a language as language — and therefore, continue to preach conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing: principles of composition, style, genre, correction, and improvement. To write “clearly,” one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify; in other words, practice what may be called an “ablution of language” (Roland Barthes).

See also Keguro Macharia on strict academic forms (and various other posts on linearity and academia):

Proposals for radical ideas in strict academic forms. Radical thinking requires radical forms. It’s an elementary lesson. Perhaps more academically inclined people should co-edit with poets. Figure out why form matters. I am most blocked when I resist the forms ideas need to emerge.

Update [7 January 2018]: To go with the above, I think it makes sense to add this passage from Ryan Brown’s “Fred Moten: A look at Duke's preeminent poet”:

As for how he thinks of his own writing, Moten explained to the literary journal Callaloo that he doesn’t see poems as neatly wrapped ideas or images. Instead, he believes that “poetry is what happens… on the outskirts of sense.” What do you think?

This unorthodox approach to writing extends beyond Moten’s own projects, spilling over into his teaching philosophy. In a Fred Moten English class, a standard essay on a piece of literature might be replaced by a sound collage or a piece of creative writing reacting to the reading. It’s an attempt, he said, to get his students to write like they actually want to write—not the way they think they need to for a class. What do you think?

“School makes it so that you write to show evidence of having done some work, so that you can be properly evaluated and tracked,” he said. “To me that degrades writing, so I’m trying to figure out how to detach the importance of writing from these structures of evaluation.” What do you think?

Second year English Ph.D student Damien Adia-Marassa said this means that Moten’s classes are never the same. Last Spring, Marassa worked as a “teaching apprentice” in one of Moten’s undergraduate courses, “Experimental Black Poetry,” for which he said there was never a fixed syllabus. What do you think?

“He just told us the texts he wanted to study and invited us all to participate in thinking about how we might study them,” Marassa said. What do you think?

But is Professor Moten ever worried that students will take advantage of his flexibility with structure and content? What do you think?

Actually, he said, he doesn’t care if students take his courses because they think they will be easy. What do you think?

“I think it’s good to find things in your life that are easy for you,” he said. “If someone signs up for my class because they think it will come naturally to them and it won’t be something they have to agonize over, those are all good things in my book.” What do you think?

In the Spring, Moten will switch gears as a professor, teaching his first creative writing course since arriving at Duke—Introduction to Writing Poetry. But whatever the course title may imply, he won’t be trying to teach his students how to write, he said. Instead, he hops they’ll come away from his class better at noticing the world around them. What do you think?

And he hopes to teach them to that, in order to write, you first have to fiercely love to read. That’s a skill he learned a long time ago, out in the flat Nevada desert, when he first picked up a book of poems and started to read, not knowing where it would take him.

Update [23 February 2018]: Here come several more passages that fit with this theme of breaking forms.

First, Fanta Sylla on “Metrograph Celebrates the Inventive Truth-Telling of St. Clair Bourne”:

Let the Church is so free of form and spirit that, presented without context, it could easily be seen as a fictional piece. It is not clear how much the scenes are staged, or, indeed, whether they are staged at all. Right from the first interaction, in which what seems to be a religious teacher laboriously explains the purpose of a sermon, there is a distance with the people filmed (broken on occasion by extreme zooming and direct address), as well as a writtenness and theatricality in the dialogue that can be delightfully confusing. What one learns while watching Bourne is that there are many ways to enter a subject, and one mustn’t refrain from exploring them, especially not in the name of nonfiction convention.

And now “Hilton Als on Writing,” in an interview with T. Cole Rachel:

T. Cole Rachel: Your essays frequently defy traditional genre. You play around with the notions of what an essay can be, what criticism can be, or how we are supposed to think and write about our own lives.

Hilton Als: You don’t have to do it any one way. You can just invent a way. Also, who’s to tell you how to write anything? It’s like that wonderful thing Virginia Woolf said. She was just writing one day and she said, “I can write anything.” And you really can. It’s such a remarkable thing to remind yourself of. If you’re listening to any other voice than your own, then you’re doing it wrong. And don’t.

The way that I write is because of the way my brain works. I couldn’t fit it into fiction; I couldn’t fit it into non-fiction. I just had to kind of mix up the genres because of who I was. I myself was a mixture of things, too. Right? I just never had those partitions in my brain, and I think I would’ve been a much more fiscally successful person if could do it that way. But I don’t know how to do it any other way, so I’m not a fiscally successful person. [laughs]

[…]

I believe that one reason I began writing essays—a form without a form, until you make it—was this: you didn’t have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story. In an essay, your story could include your actual story and even more stories; you could collapse time and chronology and introduce other voices. In short, the essay is not about the empirical “I” but about the collective—all the voices that made your “I.”

From a profile of Lorna Simpson, by Dodie Kazanjian:

Lorna graduated early from SVA and was doing graphic-design work for a travel company when she met Carrie Mae Weems, a graduate art student at the University of California, San Diego. Weems suggested she come out to graduate school in California. “It was a rainy, icy New York evening, and that sounded really good to me,” Simpson says. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into.” She knew she’d had enough of documentary street photography. Conceptual art ruled at UCSD, and in her two years there, from 1983 to 1985, Lorna found her signature voice, combining photographs and text to address issues that confront African American women. “I loved writing poetry and stories, but at school, that was a separate activity from photography,” she says. “I thought, Why not merge those two things?”

Arthur Chiaravalli in “It’s Time We Hold Accountability Accountable”:

Author and writing professor John Warner points out how this kind of accountability, standardization, and routinization short-circuits students’ pursuit of forms “defined by the rhetorical situation” and values “rooted in audience needs.”

What we are measuring when we are accountable, then, is something other than the core values of writing. Ironically, the very act of accounting for student progress in writing almost guarantees that we will receive only a poor counterfeit, one emptied of its essence.

“How to Teach Art to Kids, According to Mark Rothko”:

“Unconscious of any difficulties, they chop their way and surmount obstacles that might turn an adult grey, and presto!” Rothko describes. “Soon their ideas become visible in a clearly intelligent form.” With this flexibility, his students developed their own unique artistic styles, from the detail-oriented to the wildly expressive. And for Rothko, the ability to channel one’s interior world into art was much more valuable than the mastery of academic techniques. “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing,” he once wrote.

Update [10 July 2018]: Here’s a great thread from Dr. Lucia Lorenzi on form in academia, but also on the value of silence and pause.

I have two academic articles currently under consideration, and hope that they'll be accepted. I'm proud of them. But after those two, I am not going to write for academic journals anymore. I feel this visceral, skin-splitting need to write differently about my research.

It just doesn't FEEL right. When I think about the projects I'm interested in (and I have things I want desperately to write about), but I think about writing them for an academic journal, I feel anxious and trapped. I've published academic work. It's not a matter of capability.

I think I've interpreted my building anxiety as some sort of "maybe I can't really do it, I'm not good at this" kind of impostor syndrome. But I know in my bones it's not that, because I'm a very capable academic writer. I know how to do that work. I've been trained to do it.

This is a question of form. It is a question of audience, too. The "what" and the "why" of my research has always been clear to me. The "how," the "where," and the "who," much less so. Or at the very least, I've been pushing aside the how/where/who I think best honours the work.

In my SSHRC proposal, I even said that I wanted to write for publications like The Walrus or The Atlantic or GUTS Magazine, etc. because this work feels like it needs to be very public-facing right now, so that's what I'm going to do. No more academic journal articles for now.

With all the immobilizing anxiety I've felt about "zomg my CV! zomg academic cred!" do you know how many stories I could have pitched in the past year alone? SO MANY. How much research and thinking I could have distilled into creative non-fiction or long-form journalistic pieces?

It's not like I haven't also been very clear about the fact that I probably won't continue in academia, so why spend the last year of my postdoc doing the MOST and feeling the WORST doing my research in a certain way just for what...a job I might not get or even want? Nah.

Whew. I feel better having typed all that out, and also for having made the decision to do the work in the way I originally wanted to do it, because I have been struggling so much that every single day for months I've wanted to just quit the postdoc entirely. Just up and leave.

In the end, I don't think my work will shift THAT much, you know? And I've learned and am learning SO much from fellow academics who are doing and thinking and writing differently. But I think that "no more scholarly journal submissions" is a big step for me.

I also feel like this might actually make me feel less terrified of reading academic work. Not wanting to WRITE academic articles/books has made me equally afraid of reading them, which, uh, isn't helpful. But now I can read them and just write in my own way.

I don't want to not have the great joy of sitting down and reading brilliant work because I'm so caught up in my own fears of my response having to replicate or mirror those forms. That ain't a conversation. I'm not listening if I'm already lost in thinking about how to answer.

That's what's so shitty about thinking as a process that is taught in academia. We teach everyone to be so hyper-focused on what they have to say that we don't let people just sit back and listen for a goddamn moment without feeling like they need to produce a certain response.

And we wonder why our students get anxious about their assignments? The idea that the only valid form of learning is having something to say in response, and in this way that is so limited, and so performative, is, quite frankly, coercive and gross.

As John Cage said, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it." When it comes to academic publications, I am saying that no longer have anything to say. I do, however, have things to say in other places to say them.

My dissertation was on silence. In the conclusion, I pointed out that the text didn't necessarily show all the silences/gaps I had in my years of thinking. I'd wanted to put in lots of blank space between paragraphs, sections, to make those silences visible, audible.

According to the formatting standards for theses at UBC, you cannot have any blank pages in your dissertation. You cannot just breathe or pause. Our C.V.s are also meant not to have any breaths or pauses in them, no turns away, no changes in course.

I am making a course change!

Update [7 March 2019]: Maya Weeks makes this point on Twitter:

i'm so over the fetishization of language!!!! not every1 is ~good~ at formulating thoughts thru words & we need systems that reflect ppls' various strengths! prioritizing work done in words (rather than literally any other action, like dance, or organizing) is elitist as hell!!!

u might think i'm kidding about this but i'm a professional writer with 2 degrees in language (linguistics & creative writing); i have been thinking about this for 12 years

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ratherhavetheblues · 4 years

Text

CLAIRE DENIS’ TROUBLE EVERY DAY “It doesn’t fit”

The films of Claire Denis tend to elicit a tribute to her audacity. On the heels of that given, there is the thrill of a supposed pronounced modernity. Viewers and reviewers directly understand that narrative means virtually nothing to her, because her forte is “mood” and “texture,” being apparently applied in such a way as to constitute a new and superior logic.

A film like, Trouble Every Day (2001), our challenge today—and quite widely thought to be her breakaway magnum opus—happens to be suffused with not only the narrative of Ingmar Bergman’s film, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), but also Bergman’s, The Passion of Anna (1969); and more Bergman to come. Those infrastructural crises therewith, which Denis handles—as always, with sophistication and delicacy—do not, in fact, countenance cannibalism as a cosmological method. Nor do they countenance a mobilization of neuroscience to develop a medicine to curb sadistic murder by which the gratification remains, but free of messy bloodshed and messy law.

It must be made clear from the outset that Denis has no time, per se, for the infantile fantasy-pastime of vampires. Two broad hints concerning that matter should suffice. In connection with the stately Japanese filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu, she shuts the door in this way: “I dislike cinephilia and the cult of auteurism” [which is to say, genre, tried and true entertainments, like horror movies]. A second distancing, from a BBC broadcast on the subject of violence in, Trouble Every Day, says a mouthful: “This film concerns what happens when you tangle with something that is stronger than you are.”

Moreover, the gauntlet she tosses down comprises a showdown—involving a Shane being a shame far from well-known and far from readily resolved. We will have many opportunities here, to ponder its features. But its amazing overture should come first.

On a black screen, we hear a keyboard placing three beats, for a baseline, a calm baseline. A slight lift of intensity in that poise discloses a couple parked in the night. The woman’s presence is a sketch of blackness with a touch of her white shoulders and face. She is in her forties as is he. She is a blonde, and she’s smiling. Slowly they kiss. The musical motif spreads unhurriedly. He strokes her throat. A more earthy kiss ensues. A singer with a low voice covers the rest of this vignette, in voice-over.

Look into my eyes.

You see trouble every day.

It’s on the inside,

So don’t try to understand.

(The kiss endures.)

I get on the inside of you.

You can blow it all away,

Such a slight breath.

And I know who I am.

(The screen becomes black. A refrain in strings intensifies the mood.)

Look into my eyes…

Hear the words I can’t say…

Words that defy…

And they scream out loud.

(A Gallic air takes form, in the key of Marianne, having been released from the days of eighteenth-century revolution and reason. [A protagonist, in Scenes from a Marriage, is named Marianne—ironically!] And here the ancient stones, defining the riverbank of the Seine, solidify with a warm golden glow. Upon that stage, two golden pillars and a silver to their right describe the makings of an interplay, an interplay crucial to the work of Ingmar Bergman.)

I get on the inside of you.

You can wave it all away,

Such a slight thing,

It’s just the raise of your hand…

(Two reddish statements, and a golden between, followed by the morning sky with pink and purple clouds racing across the firmament.)

And there’s trouble every day,

There’s trouble every day,

There’s trouble every day.

(The luminous blue, carrying the title upon black, becomes sliced, rippling on the Seine, a reminder that trouble every day stems from a horde of resentment that life is harder than most want to engage.)

The penultimate coda of this dazzling lightshow involves apparitions in the sky and reverberance down low. Two down beats, and a cut to an appalling love. However, it’s probably advisable to go slowly from the highs to the lows. At the outset of Bergman’s The Passion of Anna, Andreas, a farmer/ artisan smiles when noticing a lovely, unusual color in the sky while trying to repair his broken roof. He becoming a disgrace, unable to counter Anna’s evil; and also Marianne, proving to be deviously rational and frivolously rebellious—they marshaling their incompetence in the twentieth century. But we encounter here a toehold of another, new century which finds “real security” [Anna’s mantra] to inhere in a huge and remarkably homogeneous gratification free from ever having to engage in bona fide grown-up reflection. We begin our conundrum back in the skies with a commercial jet in flight, focused upon the “First Class” area, where a couple of newlyweds toast their honeymoon to Paris with champagne. June, the glowing bride, is about to join the other’s mentioned as being a great disappointment, and even so far as being Gallic. But the disappointments here require innovation to fathom, due to the glue sticking to so many souls. Her first presentation is to refer to the map on the screen confronting her at the seat ahead of her. The schematic diagram resembles the features of a video game, but she discloses, “That must be Denver” [airport]. Denver or not, the payoff, identifying them as very likely Californians, is valuable orientation. Its irony goes a long way, to Marianne’s estranged husband, Johan, a neuroscientist (in Stockholm, in the twentieth century), who was slated to be the new Chair at a university in Cleveland—Cleveland, in the parlance of Bergman, and latterly Jim Jarmusch and his friend, Claire Denis, standing for very poor grades. As it happens, Johan is found to be lacking, and he doesn’t get to enjoy Cleveland. But here—with a kind of behind-the-back-basketball-move—he becomes known to one, Shane, the new groom, also a neuroscientist. And though they occupy discrete centuries, a cinematic current has sprung up (as deft as a Bergman drama), because all these folks carry troubling, though variant, traits, by which one might sharpen a keener sense of present dilemmas and promising delights.

Shane’s namesake, a film figure from the previous century, and a generous loner, in fact, quickly becomes an obverse in the new century. Later that night, he visits the bathroom. His mission, though, is very odd, namely, a protracted fantasy of June, nude, covered in blood. He savors that shock; and now we have to get down to brass tacks about lovemaking in this groom’s perspective. To convey what transpires here in all its baffling flight, we’ll complete that down beat, snubbing all the vivacity having been put on display at that remarkable overture, a gift including a down beat of its very own, whereby a touch of motion reveals a very different world—a world of quiet, infinite ecstasy having been instrumentally joined by a finite sensibility deriving its gifts of action from a matrix of paradoxical love. (The musical opening, by an agency called “Tindersticks,” will have bid to bring us to that love.) That it is vastly bound to a process which “can wave it all away,” becomes the core of this crisis and the introduction of one of the masters of bloodshed, namely, “Core,” on tap by way of that wayward down beat.

There is much about her that is a common hooker, preening that day by her ugly van in a part of the outskirts never having been graced by a serious thought. A truck driver, with his windows decorated with hanging toys, perhaps prizes from festivities of “games of skill,” bites on the lure. (Neither of them can compare with the huge vehicle, particularly its slats of rubber on its side, bringing to mind an elephant.) We see close-up her hyena-eyes; and we link them to the pink clouds there, above a hodge-podge of electrical towers, charmless of course, as is its worn-out golden patina up there. We’re spared the transaction itself; but the kill on the ground tells what has occurred. From out of a pretext of pleasurable coitus, her intensities slide, in a one-track race (where tempering is there to show discipline) to punishment and its dominance, its advantage over others. The grotesque corpse has been not only beaten, but eaten as would a wild beast. The ambiguities of that phenomenon lead us to vast intricacies of contemporary struggle and delight.

We should consider the year—2001—when this film was produced. In Denis’ France, religious fanatics had had a decade-long field day butchering “infidels.” Then there was 9/11, and more of the same. Then a blizzard of school shootings. Then Trump. All of whom fatally lacking intrinsic nuance. This was, then, a world history Bergman never encountered in the form of undeclared wars. That violence, however, as Denis well knows, intersects with a rage of blind self-esteem and a leveraging of effete affluence to dispense with the demands of nature itself. Anna’s rampage could identify a cause—“Security,” however puerile. What our guide is engaging in this film is a tidal wave of energy for the sake of destroying depths, those depths seen in the overture.

The immediate sequel to that slaughter at the highway tends to sprout parody. Core is braced with a former neuroscientist whom everyone calls, “Leo.” (He being in the footsteps of Johan, the self-styled, “sexy-guy”/ psychologist, and whom Shane has far more interest in than with June. That would leave Core, the new Marianne, as a kind of lawyer shark, always on the go.) Leo’s a bust as an inventor of a panacea for cannibalism—Shane’s only interest; but he’s a kind of sheep dog in rounding up wayward, Core. (Though just as basely naïve as the other members of that scientistic cult, Leo is the only one having been visited—slightly—about the farce of his “researches.” [His pratfall falls in line with the sterility of Johan’s embarrassments in the rat-race to bring cogency where, in fact, another range of cognition beckons while at the same time the straitjacket of “hard” science prevails. His dashing optics on his chic motorcycle to finesse his partner’s indiscretion involves his cleaning up the blood and flesh lingering upon her face and body. The gentleness of this concern places him [in fact much older than the other protagonists] as making a hapless equilibrium while the callow pipsqueaks of his sad mistake consult their inner child.) Whereas Johan and Marianne were regarded—by a socialite magazine—to be perpetually honeymooners, the this-century honeymooners sport all woolen apparel, in the spirit of Bergman’s, The Serpent’s Egg (1977); but very much also bringing to the table the rigor of Anna, the slasher of flocks of sheep. (Abel, in The Serpent’s Egg, having also been a blue-blood, and even more dysfunctional than the protagonists in Scenes from a Marriage. Shane and June’s plane, about to land, cruises over Leo and Core’s dead-end. Along a spiral staircase there, we notice a stained-glass window, reminding us of the skillful, bemusing and feckless artisan, Andreas, in Anna’s blistering saga, where an outrage would be a one-person idiocy, not a generational idiocy.

As such, the arrival of the Californian lovebirds at their five-star hotel involves a woman taxi driver dressed like a polite apache—exactly what an LA up-and-coming would like to see through his ridiculously stunted vision. The two of them in their woolen garb (he in baby-blue) create a little buzz when the desk clerk sees that the establishment has been chosen by a “Doctor” Brown. (Blue on the outside, shit on the inside.) Before that, the rather morose visitor rubs his eyes continually, leaving the servant behind the desk ill at ease. Shane, the name being a non-stop joke, demands someone handle the bags, which elicits from the staffer, “Quite so, Mr. Brown!” The porter chosen is a young girl, Christelle, one of the chambermaids on their floor. From out of his adolescent reflexes, he treads closely behind the girl, intent on her nape, and once into their room, with Christelle beginning to make the bed (June helping her), he flops upon it, as so many snotnoses would find to be part of his supposed mystique. (This bit of distemper had been preceded by his formulated carrying of June across the threshold to be deposited on the bed. The threshold included the room’s number, 321—a backward slapdash, failing totally to attain to the sublime.) The unflappable, deadpan maneuvering by Christelle in face of the ugly American, is right out of Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot (1953). (Real surreal France, by way of an Irishman.)

Before the full-scale damage gets underway, we want to savor another instance, this time in the old century, of that rugged individualism evincing from Christelle. In her capacity of divorce lawyer, Marianne comes across what she would tend to refer to as an unskilled laborer—the middle-aged client using the term, “housewife.” The latter, otherwise comfortable with an attentive husband, insists that her marriage lacks cogent love, and that she’s determined to attempt to discover the real thing. Marianne, the daughter of a lawyer and looking down her nose at the audacity of small cash-flow, finding something her sainted family wouldn’t touch, concludes the interview with candid frostiness. Shane—a mid-century name for courage—will eventually butcher the young laborer, being a measure of how Bergman’s troubled souls had it relatively easy.

The honeymooners choose Notre Dame Cathedral to extend their questionable tour of the City of Light. Instead of pondering the structure itself, and its functions, Shane, beyond redneck, regards the ancient recipient of intense reflection to be a pretext for recalling a Hollywood melodrama. On an exterior height he thinks to be funny by igniting the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom of the Opera. There also he plays a stiff-corpse vampire. June proves to be only too polite here, showing that (as we’ll discover), whatever her French life before the rich Californian came into it, it has capitulated to an ugly know-nothing. And then a turnaround—not for them, of course—brings to the melancholy trek a sign of deep joy. Up there pissing around, her green headscarf catches a welcome gust, and both of them gaze as it soars above the ancient buildings and bridges. The limestone-white baseline of the City becomes touched by that verdancy. In another Bergman film, namely, Summer Interlude (1951), many such vivacious happenings occur, as if drawing a self-important figure to get real. There it’s called a “glitch.” And the ballerina being summoned to no avail stays mediocre. (Just before Christelle is attacked by the American—June’s aunt having referred to him as “like a church mouse”—the chambermaid soaks her aching feet in a sink, in the nether part of the palace. The supple motions of her simple bath links her to the disappointing ballerina. Christelle [and also Marianne’s annoying client] had lived in a vague but viable terrain of the “glitch,” which appears in spades at that glorious overture. Cadging goodies from the carts, when the coast is clear; lying back on Shane and June’s bed, smoking one of their cigarettes, when the coast is clear; and, when approached by Shane in the deserted changing room, she grabs on to some social climbing by way of the rude rich boy, Christelle has a way to go. But, in a population running on empty, nothing but deep lucidity works. The lady eclipsing Marianne, in the old century, would have had room to slip. The prima ballerina therein could fool herself that a little gust of whimsy amounts to, “I’m actually happy!” Christelle, we realize, doesn’t have the luxury of not knowing how to beat the odds. There is as much metaphor as gore in this film’s disclosure. Cannibalism spreads a wide net, never more lethal than when being “inspirational.”)

Shane, seldom asleep and seldom with June—“I like you June,” is his flaming—has come to the honeymoon capital to reboot a last-ditch effort to find merit in Leo’s hapless cure for going too far. He arranges a visit to Leo’s former high watermark, where the scientist now in control rains on his millennial binge. “So as far as what he discovered, don’t make me laugh! I hope you haven’t come all this way for that nonsense…” Shane, incorrigible, latches on to a maternal colleague of the skeptic—who, were he truly bright, would not be wasting his on time, in that lab, with a daft green liquid on an endless mechanical revolution, in the service of plumbing the human sensibility—who surreptitiously arranges a meeting by which the elusive Leo can be found. (The harsh treatment [scientific advantage] spins Shane into a reverie of another embarrassing disadvantage he had endured at the hands of someone who at least would not be a fan of vaping. [Very much now being a case of choose your poison. Prior to that retreat, we see June in a black, woolen hijab.] The plunge to that painful memory involves the deflated, so-called investigator, covering himself into bed, fully clothed. As with the lab of hard knocks, the flash-back displays human brains and PhDs hoping to confirm the dynamic of consciousness there. But unlike the first critic, sneering at Leo as a feeble theoretical innovator, this apparition, and its flaming redhead boss, shows contempt to Shane, for stealing the possible revenues of Leo’s long and sad foolishness. “You like money, don’t you Shane?”/ “So what? I convinced my boss to take an interest of a Frenchman working on a shoestring budget. That’s all…” The questioner turns to his affair with Core. He, church mouse style, emotes, “Love is not the word for it.” Openly hating this little creep, she asks, “You believed the lawyers, Brown? What about betrayal? What’s your stance about betrayal, Mr. Brown?… Semenal was the game, and you knew it… Huge profits were to be made… You stole Leo’s work and wife. Now get out of here…Get out!”)

The sympathetic lab lady does show the way to Leo (Shane predictably rude). But the real gift from that transaction is another of the ladies in lab coats at the former lair of Leo wishing she could have a six-month vacation. Overhearing that impossibility, the one who fired Leo has going through his mind, and giving us a flash-back, the permanent vacation of the accident-prone mediocrity. (This extended tapestry of despair lives up to Bergman’s theatrical incisiveness.) Leo tells the power that be, “You know that I don’t ask for much. Just a favor. I need a little time. You can help me…” But getting things right may take initiative first, and then a “favor.” The response to Leo seems to corroborate that action. “It doesn’t fit!…It does not fit!” [a stupid, essentially cowardly gesture, goes nowhere but disaster].

Shane arrives in time for the auto-de-fe which Core choreographs after another kill, this time in their own abode. Leo had arrived, to stand in that conflagration, relieved, at last, from a disaster of smarts, beyond his vision, and, moreover, a failure of courage on the scale of an epidemic. (Shane, too, had arrived after the blaze had begun, where he felt necessary to both attempt to rape her, and, facing her teeth, kill her—making his getaway, as would Anna.) Two compensatory moments have been brought to bear. Although the death toll includes the odd couple and their worm-worn exterior—a grateful dead on top of a perverse career—the lovely collie dog included from out of a “glitch”-prone taxi culture our protagonist uses, puts the cold American freak to shame; as does the tapestry of blood by Core (not unlike the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat).

But, come to think of it, there’s a third lift, this time wafting into the horror from a long time ago, namely, the Alfred Hitchcock “mystery,” The Lady Vanishes (1938), also on a cusp where the planet teeters toward utter nullity. Across the way from Leo and Core’s, there are two young men presenting many surprises. The first being, that though they speak French, they are as British blokes as the British blokes in the Hitchcock film, rushing across the Continent, by train, to catch the last days of the cricket Test Match. Their crowning indiscretion is curious concupiscence about the bizarre fortress and the glimpses of Core at her upper windows’ prison. After some false starts, they breach the barricades (Leo now at work as a mild-mannered general physician, in lieu of Superman), and one of them falls prey to Core’s predilection for shock and awe. That would be the risk-taker of the pair, hungry for perhaps going viral on Twitter and Facebook. (This recalls the puerile ballerina, in Summer Interlude, after her first bout of lovemaking, claiming that the boy, far more capable of love than she, will now brag about it to his friends.) His avuncular buddy proves that he is more than a one-track mind, warning often that the break and entry should be rapidly abandoned. Eventually, this other disturbing pair of love birds leaves Core drenched in the bloke’s blood and with shards of the boy’s chin sticking on her cheeks, at which time the petrified friend retreats to the house across the street. In the Hitchcock, both cricket crazies claim that they had never noticed that there was an elderly lady, across the aisle from them, not to mention that she had now become missing. Missing links being an epidemic.

We’ll catch Shane up, in the aftermath of dragging a bloody Christelle to a less used area, as if she were a victim of the bull ring. He buys a sweet puppy, in hopes of compensating June’s being largely abandoned in the Love Capital. (On the way home, standing in the Metro, he sandwiches the little innocent between him and a woman. A young woman glares at the jerk, but glaring is all she does.) June has found the pup, and also she has located her husband, in the shower. She calls out several times, with some asperity. He ignores her calls, concerned with giving himself a much-needed clean-up, where blood overtly streams on the shower curtain. The shower eventually ends, and he’s seen in close-up, as if all is well. Pan to June, giving him a stressful look. Then close-up to him and his patented dead eyes. She again is seen, with the scab of her cut lip. “Thanks for the dog,” she says, knowing it won’t be theirs for long. He flashes a facile grin, and says, “I feel good… C’mon…” They kiss. She notices a little flow of blood coming down the shower curtain. [More Hitchcock.] “I wanna go home,” he mumbles. “OK,” she woodenly tells. And the blood-red leather gloves she’s wearing holds the disinterested creature. A muffled roar. A close-up of her eyes discloses a puzzle. Her eyes suddenly open wide. Another stream of Christelle’s blood occurs on the curtain; it might have proved embarrassing, if anyone there had cared a damn. Losing her evocative green scarf, she ends up with a Notre Dame tourist scarf with four views of Jesus.

The partnership between Denis and Tindersticks represents a unique inroad of the history of cinema. (Compare this innovation with Bergman’s standing pat with mainstream classical composition, perhaps measuring the distance from old to new). From out of the recent disc, “No Treasure but Hope,” here’s a bit of lightning readily readable. Whereas the soundtrack of “Trouble Every Day” comprises a melancholy tone poem, the tune here uses its pregnant thrum to make merry with irony and gentle love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q9MY-tQbpw

#claire denis

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ogxref · 7 years

Photo

THE NEW NORMAL MANIFESTO / Benjamin Bratton

A strong emphasis on emerging technologies and speculative philosophy

The program itself is also an experiment → mix seminar, studio and technical workshops in an alternating sequence of modules that closely link conceptualization and prototyping, one folding into the other.

Moscow → a century or more of unmourned, unprocessed utopian regimes.

The think-tank we are hosting at Strelka takes urbanism as as medium whose messages are both determinant and up for grabs

The New Normal

TNN → several connotations:

The first is that design must map these bizarre circumstances anew if it has a hope to ever designate their futures.

From there a second connotation, working to enforce new normative claims is clear. Design’s reaction to the new normal can’t be phrased only in terms of acceptance or resistance, but of re-determining what norms will be.

In order to make new normative claims, we need a language to do so. It may very well be the that the most valuable thing we could hope to design is a viable glossary with which to name our situations directly.

The curriculum is structured as a series of intensive modules in which students will critically engage urban futures in traditional and non-traditional ways: formal analysis, scenario development, site modeling and programming, speculative design, quantitative cultural data analysis and visualization, and the contemporary philosophy of technology, design, and aesthetics.

As our program considers what Russian urbanism may be and do, our brief takes the year 2050 as a target. But whereas, for others, that year may underwrite “design futures” (where the future is an alibi into which present problems are deferred) for us it does not. 2050 is not the future. We are designing 2050 right now, with every little and large system we use or abuse.

Longer circuits between decision and outcome should be more carefully internalized, not because it would be ideal but because it is the most practical approach. It presumes a “thick now” in which the depth and complexity of this wider moment (roughly 1850CE -2050CE) is seen more comprehensively. Cities and ecologies operate at rhythms that are both much faster and much slower than human social time. To engineer them one incremental decision at a time sets in motion a trophic cascade that can, in principle, coalesce into an emergent intelligent order, but which also lets local pathologies pile-up into landscape-scale irrationalities.

With our 2050 brief in mind, the urban is taken more as a format for design than a genre of design. Cities are media for the circulation of potentials (as well as the encapsulation of foregone conclusions) and to search that potential this means getting out of our own skins.

Among our trending trends is demeaning the real by conspiracy, fake intrigue, superstitious populism, clickbait science, causality/correlation fallacies, and motivated inference.

In the exact spot where a viable future should be, something insufferably backwards fills it in: a psychotic simulation of medieval geopolitics burning as bright as creepy clown hair.

Notion that the segmentation of stacks may force diversification and speciation of software and hardware by hemispherical ‘Galapagos effects’

Synthetic Sensing:

the cuttingest-edges of urbanism are at the level of sensing and sensation, both human and machinic. Smart city scenarios are full of sensors in the service of administrative loops, but they tragically undersell the potential of machine sensing at urban scale.

the surfaces of the city are made more vital as they respond to light, touch and motion in new ways, and for the other the living inhabitants’ sensory apparatuses are infused with new layers of hot and cool stimulus.

Biosensing, 360 video, 3D-scanning, virtual reality and augmented reality, studying how these sensory systems ‘read’ the world.

Speculative Megastructures:

It is in datacenters, distribution warehousing zones, ports, crop fields and energy farms where the logistical sublime of algorithmic urbanism has reshaped the built environment perhaps most decisively.

Given their scale they surely count as megastructures, but of a different sort than the now-canonical 1960’s-era utopian models of the Metabolists, Buckminster Fuller, or Constant.

This urbanism for inanimate objects is not a speculative exercise, but now one pillar of what is and will continue be the norm.

Megastructures have played a starring role in urbanism’s own historical ‘speculative design’ avant la lettre. They have been a way to make sense of planetary scales and non-local integrations; they have extruded diagrammatic plans of utopian society into domed section; and they have been —from Exodus: Voluntary Prisoners to Biosphere 2 — a figure of totality, social or ecological or both. Their currency is traded for and against ideas of what those totalities should be, and so they are, at least in this way, models that are at once descriptive, predictive and projective. Now as the Anthropocene binds social time to geologic time, the totality of totalities becomes a yet more critical, and in no way hypothetical, geodesign brief.

interest in discontiguous megastructures as the essential platforms. The cloud urbanism that now drives core-periphery dynamics links moments of production, distribution, habitation and consumption into fantastically regular cycles.

Murmansk: we will take the think-tank north to the Arctic coast where Russia (along with Norway, Canada, and others) is building automated shipping ports in anticipation of the further melting of the polar cap and the opening of the Northern Passage. There is little that is more “new normal” than a networked archipelago of hyperborean robot cities, sending containers back and forth to one another across the top of the planet.

Accordingly, while our projects will illustrate integrative scenarios, we will also focus on micro-protocols, games and ruses, not as minor exceptions but as a primary grammar for how spatial systems work

Pattern recognition

We are a species whose success is based in pattern-recognition but this comes at the price of false positive and negatives. Cognitive biases run deep.

Perceptual/cognitive prostheses, like the telescope and microscope, allow us to see things that we could not see before, and to see things as we could not see them before. With them we deduce and induce different, less wrong patterns in how things work, but this requires counter-intuitive and even anti-intuitive methods

Upon querying the world, we need a summary of a summary of the answer before we can make sense of it, so make use of interpretive prosthetics like data visualization and statistics. This is, however, a “new normal” shift on which our knowledge institutions and economies are choking. In principle and sometimes in practice, new cognitive information tools, such as formal data analysis and visualization, are important ways of finding and sorting unusual patterns.

The trick is to use quantitative methods not only for analysis (to compose descriptive models) but also as a drawing method as well (to compose predictive and projective models) and to use statistical visualization to specify rich fictive detail for our scenarios.

Platform Aesthetics

The development and communication of speculative urban platforms will feature plan, section, elevation, and satellite scale diagrams, and also work with/against tropes of branding, POV jump cuts, paradoxical use-case narratives, and all the ‘known-unknown’ sleights-of-hand that turn audiences into users, developers, believers, and collaborators.

platform systems are not reducible to politics or markets, but have their own economics and aesthetics that allow them to work as they do. As urbanism itself variously sprints and meanders toward platform economics, those aesthetics take on more gravity.

New Urban Practices

comfortable with counterintuitive perspectives and working across differing scales than their current circumstances may allow them.

In recent decades, design practices may have been divided into sub-disciplines (graphic, industrial, interaction, architectural design, etc.) and now they are supplanted by another distribution (robotics, ecology, biotechnology, software-augmented intelligence, etc.) I counsel applicants that the latter does not directly replace the former as some more-proper avant-garde, and so instead new urban practices should mix a few of older and the newer.

the real “deliverables” of our program are new design practices.

new hybrid practices: our programme will provide room for such practices to be incubated and prototyped. Here, however, the connotation of “hybrid” specifies not just interdisciplinary synergy, but is more in line with forms of now normal asymmetrical battle, operating on many fronts with dissonant messages aimed at the same goal and sometimes without clear attribution of blame, credit or authorship.

The questions of what is the new normal, what it should be, and what should be resisted and never normalized are poorly served by the simplistic narratives that brand this moment

Design always takes a risk when addressing any state of exception, in that its techniques of mitigation may prematurely normalize, and so sustain, a pathology that would otherwise dissipate by its own failures. In hopes of protecting what is good, design interventions can smooth the way for what is harmful to carry-on. Sometimes the best defense is to let something destroy itself.

#benjamin #bratton #newnormal #strelka

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