#and that WHOLE process is inextricably connected to capitalism

[dogin8]

#it's important to be able to see this #that like. capitalism is not a person #it cannot ''teach'' because it isn't physical #but it's a system. it's society. it's education #like your parents were brought up to believe things and they taught them to you #and that WHOLE process is inextricably connected to capitalism

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Tech’s “attention rents”

Tomorrow (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

The thing is, any feed or search result is "algorithmic." "Just show me the things posted by people I follow in reverse-chronological order" is an algorithm. "Just show me products that have this SKU" is an algorithm. "Alphabetical sort" is an algorithm. "Random sort" is an algorithm.

Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.

But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.

There's an idea that a "good" algorithm is one that does not seek to deceive or harm us. When you search for a specific part number, you want exact matches for that search at the top of the results. It's fine if those results include third-party parts that are compatible with the part you're searching for, so long as they're clearly labeled. There's room for argument about how to order those results – do highly rated third-party parts go above the OEM part? How should the algorithm trade off price and quality?

It's hard to come up with an objective standard to resolve these fine-grained differences, but search technologists have tried. Think of Google: they have a patent on "long clicks." A "long click" is when you search for something and then don't search for it again for quite some time, the implication being that you've found what you were looking for. Google Search ads operate a "pay per click" model, and there's an argument that this aligns Google's ad division's interests with search quality: if the ad division only gets paid when you click a link, they will militate for placing ads that users want to click on.

Platforms are inextricably bound up in this algorithmic information sorting business. Platforms have emerged as the endemic form of internet-based business, which is ironic, because a platform is just an intermediary – a company that connects different groups to each other. The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.

Usually, those groups can be sorted into two buckets: "business customers" (drivers, merchants, advertisers, publishers, creative workers, etc) and "end users" (riders, shoppers, consumers, audiences, etc). Platforms also sometimes connect end users to each other: think of dating sites, or interest-based forums on Reddit. Either way, a platform's job is to make these connections, and that means platforms are always in the algorithm business.

Whether that's matching a driver and a rider, or an advertiser and a consumer, or a reader and a mix of content from social feeds they're subscribed to and other sources of information on the service, the platform has to make a call as to what you're going to see or do.

These choices are enormously consequential. In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, these choices take on an almost supernatural quality, where "Big Data" can be used to guess your response to all the different ways of pitching an idea or product to you, in order to select the optimal pitch that bypasses your critical faculties and actually controls your actions, robbing you of "the right to a future tense."

I don't think much of this hypothesis. Every claim to mind control – from Rasputin to MK Ultra to neurolinguistic programming to pick-up artists – has turned out to be bullshit. Besides, you don't need to believe in mind control to explain the ways that algorithms shape our beliefs and actions. When a single company dominates the information landscape – say, when Google controls 90% of your searches – then Google's sorting can deprive you of access to information without you knowing it.

If every "locksmith" listed on Google Maps is a fake referral business, you might conclude that there are no more reputable storefront locksmiths in existence. What's more, this belief is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy: if Google Maps never shows anyone a real locksmith, all the real locksmiths will eventually go bust.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing "clickbait") and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.

As I've written, I think this theory gives the ad-tech sector both too much and too little credit, and draws an artificial line between ad-tech and other platform businesses that obscures the connection between all forms of platform decay, from Uber to HBO to Google Search to Twitter to Apple and beyond:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

As a counter to Surveillance Capitalism, I've proposed a theory of platform decay called enshittification, which identifies how the market power of monopoly platforms, combined with the flexibility of digital tools, combined with regulatory capture, allows platforms to abuse both business-customers and end-users, by depriving them of alternatives, then "twiddling" the knobs that determine the rules of the platform without fearing sanction under privacy, labor or consumer protection law, and finally, blocking digital self-help measures like ad-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and other tech guerrilla warfare tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

One important distinction between Surveillance Capitalism and enshittification is that enshittification posits that the platform is bad for everyone. Surveillance Capitalism starts from the assumption that surveillance advertising is devastatingly effective (which explains how your racist Facebook uncles got turned into Jan 6 QAnons), and concludes that advertisers must be well-served by the surveillance system.

But advertisers – and other business customers – are very poorly served by platforms. Procter and Gamble reduced its annual surveillance advertising budget from $100m//year to $0/year and saw a 0% reduction in sales. The supposed laser-focused targeting and superhuman message refinement just don't work very well – first, because the tech companies are run by bullshitters whose marketing copy is nonsense, and second because these companies are monopolies who can abuse their customers without losing money.

The point of enshittification is to lock end-users to the platform, then use those locked-in users as bait for business customers, who will also become locked to the platform. Once everyone is holding everyone else hostage, the platform uses the flexibility of digital services to play a variety of algorithmic games to shift value from everyone to the business's shareholders. This flexibility is supercharged by the failure of regulators to enforce privacy, labor and consumer protection standards against the companies, and by these companies' ability to insist that regulators punish end-users, competitors, tinkerers and other third parties to mod, reverse, hack or jailbreak their products and services to block their abuse.

Enshittification needs The Algorithm. When Uber wants to steal from its drivers, it can just do an old-fashioned wage theft, but eventually it will face the music for that kind of scam:

https://apnews.com/article/uber-lyft-new-york-city-wage-theft-9ae3f629cf32d3f2fb6c39b8ffcc6cc6

The best way to steal from drivers is with algorithmic wage discrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again. This isn't the mind-control of Surveillance Capitalism, it's just fraud, shaving fractional pennies off your paycheck in the hopes that you won't notice. The goal is to get drivers to abandon the other side-hustles that allow them to be so choosy about when they drive Uber, and then, once the driver is fully committed, to crank the wage-dial down to the lowest possible setting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is the same game that Facebook played with publishers on the way to its enshittification: when Facebook began aggressively courting publishers, any short snippet republished from the publisher's website to a Facebook feed was likely to be recommended to large numbers of readers. Facebook offered publishers a vast traffic funnel that drove millions of readers to their sites.

But as publishers became more dependent on that traffic, Facebook's algorithm started downranking short excerpts in favor of medium-length ones, building slowly to fulltext Facebook posts that were fully substitutive for the publisher's own web offerings. Like Uber's wage algorithm, Facebook's recommendation engine played its targets like fish on a line.

When publishers responded to declining reach for short excerpts by stepping back from Facebook, Facebook goosed the traffic for their existing posts, sending fresh floods of readers to the publisher's site. When the publisher returned to Facebook, the algorithm once again set to coaxing the publishers into posting ever-larger fractions of their work to Facebook, until, finally, the publisher was totally locked into Facebook. Facebook then started charging publishers for "boosting" – not just to be included in algorithmic recommendations, but to reach their own subscribers.

Enshittification is modern, high-tech enabled, monopolistic form of rent seeking. Rent-seeking is a subtle and important idea from economics, one that is increasingly relevant to our modern economy. For economists, a "rent" is income you get from owning a "factor of production" – something that someone else needs to make or do something.

Rents are not "profits." Profit is income you get from making or doing something. Rent is income you get from owning something needed to make a profit. People who earn their income from rents are called rentiers. If you make your income from profits, you're a "capitalist."

Capitalists and rentiers are in irreconcilable combat with each other. A capitalist wants access to their factors of production at the lowest possible price, whereas rentiers want those prices to be as high as possible. A phone manufacturer wants to be able to make phones as cheaply as possible, while a patent-troll wants to own a patent that the phone manufacturer needs to license in order to make phones. The manufacturer is a capitalism, the troll is a rentier.

The troll might even decide that the best strategy for maximizing their rents is to exclusively license their patents to a single manufacturer and try to eliminate all other phones from the market. This will allow the chosen manufacturer to charge more and also allow the troll to get higher rents. Every capitalist except the chosen manufacturer loses. So do people who want to buy phones. Eventually, even the chosen manufacturer will lose, because the rentier can demand an ever-greater share of their profits in rent.

Digital technology enables all kinds of rent extraction. The more digitized an industry is, the more rent-seeking it becomes. Think of cars, which harvest your data, block third-party repair and parts, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as Yanis Varoufakis writes in his new book, Technofeudalism, where he explains how "cloudalists" have found ways to lock all kinds of productive enterprise into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose paper by Tim O'Reilly, Ilan Strauss and Mariana Mazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

The "attention rents" referenced in the paper's title are bait-and-switch scams in which a platform deliberately enshittifies its recommendations, search results or feeds to show you things that are not the thing you asked to see, expect to see, or want to see. They don't do this out of sadism! The point is to extract rent – from you (wasted time, suboptimal outcomes) and from business customers (extracting rents for "boosting," jumbling good results in among scammy or low-quality results).

The authors cite several examples of these attention rents. Much of the paper is given over to Amazon's so-called "advertising" product, a $31b/year program that charges sellers to have their products placed above the items that Amazon's own search engine predicts you will want to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is a form of gladiatorial combat that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to surrender an ever-larger share of their profits in rent to Amazon for pride of place. Amazon uses a variety of deceptive labels ("Highly Rated – Sponsored") to get you to click on these products, but most of all, they rely two factors. First, Amazon has a long history of surfacing good results in response to queries, which makes buying whatever's at the top of a list a good bet. Second, there's just so many possible results that it takes a lot of work to sift through the probably-adequate stuff at the top of the listings and get to the actually-good stuff down below.

Amazon spent decades subsidizing its sellers' goods – an illegal practice known as "predatory pricing" that enforcers have increasingly turned a blind eye to since the Reagan administration. This has left it with few competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

The lack of competing retail outlets lets Amazon impose other rent-seeking conditions on its sellers. For example, Amazon has a "most favored nation" requirement that forces companies that raise their prices on Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else, which makes everything you buy more expensive, whether that's a Walmart, Target, a mom-and-pop store, or direct from the manufacturer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

But everyone loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used "junk ads" to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/amazon-boosted-junk-ads-hid-messages-with-signal-ftc-says

The more of these junk ads Amazon showed, the more revenue it got from sellers – and the more the person selling a Lakers jersey had to pay to show up at the top of your search, and the more they had to charge you to cover those ad expenses, and the more they had to charge for it everywhere else, too.

The authors describe this process as a transformation between "attention rents" (misdirecting your attention) to "pecuniary rents" (making money). That's important: despite decades of rhetoric about the "attention economy," attention isn't money. As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

The authors come up with some clever techniques for quantifying the ways that this scam harms users. For example, they count the number of places that an advertised product rises in search results, relative to where it would show up in an "organic" search. These quantifications are instructive, but they're also a kind of subtweet at the judiciary.

In 2018, SCOTUS's ruling in American Express v Ohio changed antitrust law for two-sided markets by insisting that so long as one side of a two-sided market was better off as the result of anticompetitive actions, there was no antitrust violation:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3346776

For platforms, that means that it's OK to screw over sellers, advertisers, performers and other business customers, so long as the end-users are better off: "Go ahead, cheat the Uber drivers, so long as you split the booty with Uber riders."

But in the absence of competition, regulation or self-help measures, platforms cheat everyone – that's the point of enshittification. The attention rents that Amazon's payola scheme extract from shoppers translate into higher prices, worse goods, and lower profits for platform sellers. In other words, Amazon's conduct is so sleazy that it even threads the infinitesimal needle that the Supremes created in American Express.

Here's another algorithmic pecuniary rent: Amazon figured out which of its major rivals used an automated price-matching algorithm, and then cataloged which products they had in common with those sellers. Then, under a program called Project Nessie, Amazon jacked up the prices of those products, knowing that as soon as they raised the prices on Amazon, the prices would go up everywhere else, so Amazon wouldn't lose customers to cheaper alternatives. That scam made Amazon at least a billion dollars:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-alleges-amazon-used-price-gouging-algorithm-1850986303

This is a great example of how enshittification – rent-seeking on digital platforms – is different from analog rent-seeking. The speed and flexibility with which Amazon and its rivals altered their prices requires digitization. Digitization also let Amazon crank the price-gouging dial to zero whenever they worried that regulators were investigating the program.

So what do we do about it? After years of being made to look like fumblers and clowns by Big Tech, regulators and enforcers – and even lawmakers – have decided to get serious.

The neoliberal narrative of government helplessness and incompetence would have you believe that this will go nowhere. Governments aren't as powerful as giant corporations, and regulators aren't as smart as the supergeniuses of Big Tech. They don't stand a chance.

But that's a counsel of despair and a cheap trick. Weaker US governments have taken on stronger oligarchies and won – think of the defeat of JD Rockefeller and the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. The people who pulled that off weren't wizards. They were just determined public servants, with political will behind them. There is a growing, forceful public will to end the rein of Big Tech, and there are some determined public servants surfing that will.

In this paper, the authors try to give those enforcers ammo to bring to court and to the public. For example, Amazon claims that its algorithm surfaces the products that make the public happy, without the need for competitive pressure to keep it sharp. But as the paper points out, the only successful new rival ecommerce platform – Tiktok – has found an audience for an entirely new category of goods: dupes, "lower-cost products that have the same or better features than higher cost branded products."

The authors also identify "dark patterns" that platforms use to trick users into consuming feeds that have a higher volume of things that the company profits from, and a lower volume of things that users want to see. For example, platforms routinely switch users from a "following" feed – consisting of things posted by people the user asked to hear from – with an algorithmic "For You" feed, filled with the things the company's shareholders wish the users had asked to see.

Calling this a "dark pattern" reveals just how hollow and self-aggrandizing that term is. "Dark pattern" usually means "fraud." If I ask to see posts from people I like, and you show me posts from people who'll pay you for my attention instead, that's not a sophisticated sleight of hand – it's just a scam. It's the social media equivalent of the eBay seller who sends you an iPhone box with a bunch of gravel inside it instead of an iPhone. Tech bros came up with "dark pattern" as a way of flattering themselves by draping themselves in the mantle of dopamine-hacking wizards, rather than unimaginative con-artists who use a computer to rip people off.

These For You algorithmic feeds aren't just a way to increase the load of sponsored posts in a feed – they're also part of the multi-sided ripoff of enshittified platforms. A For You feed allows platforms to trick publishers and performers into thinking that they are "good at the platform," which both convinces to optimize their production for that platform, and also turns them into Judas Goats who conspicuously brag about how great the platform is for people like them, which brings their peers in, too.

In Veena Dubal's essential paper on algorithmic wage discrimination, she describes how Uber drivers whom the algorithm has favored with (temporary) high per-ride rates brag on driver forums about their skill with the app, bringing in other drivers who blame their lower wages on their failure to "use the app right":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Platform can't run the giant teddy-bear con unless there's a For You feed. Some platforms – like Tiktok – tempt users into a For You feed by making it as useful as possible, then salting it with doses of enshittification:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

Other platforms use the (ugh) "dark pattern" of simply flipping your preference from a "following" feed to a "For You" feed. Either way, the platform can't let anyone keep the giant teddy-bear. Once you've tempted, say, sports bros into piling into the platform with the promise of millions of free eyeballs, you need to withdraw the algorithm's favor for their content so you can give it to, say, astrologers. Of course, the more locked-in the users are, the more shit you can pile into that feed without worrying about them going elsewhere, and the more giant teddy-bears you can give away to more business users so you can lock them in and start extracting rent.

For regulators, the possibility of a "good" algorithmic feed presents a serious challenge: when a feed is bad, how can a regulator tell if its low quality is due to the platform's incompetence at blocking spammers or guessing what users want, or whether it's because the platform is extracting rents?

The paper includes a suite of recommendations, including one that I really liked:

Regulators, working with cooperative industry players, would define reportable metrics based on those that are actually used by the platforms themselves to manage search, social media, e-commerce, and other algorithmic relevancy and recommendation engines.

In other words: find out how the companies themselves measure their performance. Find out what KPIs executives have to hit in order to earn their annual bonuses and use those to figure out what the company's performance is – ad load, ratio of organic clicks to ad clicks, average click-through on the first organic result, etc.

They also recommend some hard rules, like reserving a portion of the top of the screen for "organic" search results, and requiring exact matches to show up as the top result.

I've proposed something similar, applicable across multiple kinds of digital businesses: an end-to-end principle for online services. The end-to-end principle is as old as the internet, and it decrees that the role of an intermediary should be to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly and reliably as possible. When we apply this principle to your ISP, we call it Net Neutrality. For services, E2E would mean that if I subscribed to your feed, the service would have a duty to deliver it to me. If I hoisted your email out of my spam folder, none of your future emails should land there. If I search for your product and there's an exact match, that should be the top result:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

One interesting wrinkle to framing platform degradation as a failure to connect willing senders and receivers is that it places a whole host of conduct within the regulatory remit of the FTC. Section 5 of the FTC Act contains a broad prohibition against "unfair and deceptive" practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

That means that the FTC doesn't need any further authorization from Congress to enforce an end to end rule: they can simply propose and pass that rule, on the grounds that telling someone that you'll show them the feeds that they ask for and then not doing so is "unfair and deceptive."

Some of the other proposals in the paper also fit neatly into Section 5 powers, like a "sticky" feed preference. If I tell a service to show me a feed of the people I follow and they switch it to a For You feed, that's plainly unfair and deceptive.

All of this raises the question of what a post-Big-Tech feed would look like. In "How To Break Up Amazon" for The Sling, Peter Carstensen and Darren Bush sketch out some visions for this:

https://www.thesling.org/how-to-break-up-amazon/

They imagine a "condo" model for Amazon, where the sellers collectively own the Amazon storefront, a model similar to capacity rights on natural gas pipelines, or to patent pools. They see two different ways that search-result order could be determined in such a system:

"specific premium placement could go to those vendors that value the placement the most [with revenue] shared among the owners of the condo"

or

"leave it to owners themselves to create joint ventures to promote products"

Note that both of these proposals are compatible with an end-to-end rule and the other regulatory proposals in the paper. Indeed, all these policies are easier to enforce against weaker companies that can't afford to maintain the pretense that they are headquartered in some distant regulatory haven, or pay massive salaries to ex-regulators to work the refs on their behalf:

https://www.thesling.org/in-public-discourse-and-congress-revolvers-defend-amazons-monopoly/

The re-emergence of intermediaries on the internet after its initial rush of disintermediation tells us something important about how we relate to one another. Some authors might be up for directly selling books to their audiences, and some drivers might be up for creating their own taxi service, and some merchants might want to run their own storefronts, but there's plenty of people with something they want to offer us who don't have the will or skill to do it all. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, a security auditor, a payment processor, a software engineer, a CFO, a tax-preparer and everything else that goes into running a business. Some people just want to sell you a book. Or find a date. Or teach an online class.

Intermediation isn't intrinsically wicked. Intermediaries fall into pits of enshitffication and other forms of rent-seeking when they aren't disciplined by competitors, by regulators, or by their own users' ability to block their bad conduct (with ad-blockers, say, or other self-help measures). We need intermediaries, and intermediaries don't have to turn into rent-seeking feudal warlords. That only happens if we let it happen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #rentiers #euthanize rentiers #subprime attention crisis #Mariana Mazzucato #tim oreilly #Ilan Strauss #scholarship #economics #two-sided markets #platform decay #algorithmic feeds #the algorithm tm #enshittification #monopoly #antitrust #section 5 #ftc act #ftc #amazon. google #big tech #attention economy #attention rents #pecuniary rents #consumer welfare #end-to-end principle #remedyfest #giant teddy bears #project nessie #end-to-end

[probablyasocialecologist]

The rationalisation of space under capitalism is one facet of the ideology of progress which has had a profound impact on the spatial organisation of society in nature. Marxist geographer David Harvey writes that ‘capital accumulation and the production of urbanisation go hand in hand’. For Harvey, urbanisation is a physical manifestation of the drive to produce a ‘rational landscape’ in which barriers to the turnover time of capital accumulation are removed. In this sense then, letting space lie fallow introduced unacceptable friction into the capitalist system. Highlighting this shift, urban and environmental geographer Matthew Gandy notes that ‘the very idea of rest, and of resting space in particular – letting the earth sleep – counters the accelerative and all-encompassing momentum of late modernity’. The incongruity, however, isn’t just a question of an anxious space of late modernity. The instrumentalisation of space is already apparent in the mid-19th century, when Ildefons Cerdà’s opening statement for urbanisation sought to ‘fill the earth’. And by the early 20th century, this programmatic vision for design was fully institutionalised when Ebenezer Howard’s seminal Garden Cities project ‘sought to maximise functionality through territory saturated with activity’.

Time is also rationalised and subsumed under the growth imperative, which legitimates practices used to force people into reconfigured social relations. As critical urban theorist Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago remarks, for example, ‘improvers couldn’t stand idleness, regardless of whether it referred to a quality of land or to poor commoners “wasting” productive time by contemplating their grazing livestock instead of embracing wage discipline as day labourers’. It was the capitalist project to proletarianise the population that transformed social relations connected more with ecological rhythms into the realm of the abstract rhythms of capitalism. Put another way, wresting productivity from humans – and non-humans – through labour discipline has always been a central feature of the project of capitalism, from the Enclosure Acts in England until today. Capturing ‘wasted time’ also had another social dimension: the production of new forms of citizenship meant to underpin the bourgeois vision of the modern metropolis. In New York City, for example, Sevilla-Buitrago interprets the construction of Central Park as a ‘special kind of enclosure … [that was meant to] shift behaviors from one regime of publicity to another’ in a battle that pitted the elite against the commoning practices of the New York City streetscape by recently arrived immigrants. While geographer Tony Weis has shown that the slow rhythms and periodic pauses of fallowing can influence social organisation in potentially progressive ways, we see above that the devaluation of idleness has instead promoted a capitalist subject synchronised to the rhythms of capitalist time.

Taken as a whole, the move to valuing progress over fallowing signalled a regime change that rationalised space and time, which, in turn, produced radical social, ecological and continuous urban transformations that, today, are felt on a planetary scale. Viewing the planet as a kind of perpetual growth machine with a core purpose of chasing profits, an ever-growing metabolism, is churning the earth in successive waves of creative destruction. This results in both acute and chronic pathologies of devalued human social relations, diminished diversity of the biosphere and a continually transformed urban fabric at ever larger scales. What impact has the growth imperative had on the design professions? Embedded in, and arguably a tool of, capital, the design professions have been criticised as largely geared towards solving the problems of wasted space to restore class relations and processes of accumulation. Can a design culture that sees itself as inextricably linked to growth retrain its analytical lens on social and ecological value production that exists outside capitalist sociospatial relations, rather than viewing moments of inactivity merely as opportunities to promote the next growth cycle?

#growth #capitalism #time

[makeste]

this is just a post listing all of the scenes in BnHA which underline Bakugou’s narrative importance and the way that it’s intrinsically connected to Deku and his storyline, because I really want to emphasize that the MORE THAN 300 CHAPTERS OF BUILD-UP just slightly outweigh the literal seven chapters in which he hasn’t played a major role just lately. recency bias is a thing guys, and we should all try to remember that.

not Kacchan establishing his goal and ultimate endgame less than one page after his introduction.

not Kacchan being saved by Deku less than an hour after burning his notebook and telling him to jump off a roof, establishing the contradictory nature of their relationship right from the get-go, and changing Deku’s destiny forever as All Might witnesses this moment and realizes that Deku is more heroic than he ever could have imagined. “you looked like you needed saving.” that’s a line that’s already had at least one callback, and with Deku now struggling in the current manga the time could be ripe for an even more powerful one.

not “win and save” being established as the two cornerstones of the hero philosophy all the way back in chapter 5, with Deku and Kacchan each embodying one of these dual aspects, and being narratively primed to walk opposite paths in their respective hero journeys, only to meet at the middle when they reach the end.

not Deku and Kacchan having an iconic battle less than ten chapters into the series, during which their rivalry is further established and the complicated history of their childhood friendship is expanded on.

not Kacchan’s first childhood flashback revealing that the pivotal, character-defining event of his childhood was baby Deku reaching out his hand and asking if he was okay.

not Deku instinctively reaching out to Kacchan yet again all of two chapters later, making a fateful decision which will have massive ramifications down the line and which will eventually alter the course of Kacchan’s character development.

not Kacchan’s teachers thoughtfully praising his “overwhelming tenacity” and All Might noting his potential for greatness early on the series.

not Deku choosing a hero name originally given to him by Kacchan, but repurposing and reclaiming it, and possibly paving the way for another parallel that’s just waiting to be capitalized on. Kacchan feel free to tell us more about your own hero name’s meaning whenever you get a chance.

not Deku becoming stronger by learning from Kacchan (win to save).

not Deku and Kacchan deliberately being paired together for their final exam and Kacchan having a fucking meltdown until Deku literally knocks some sense into him, at which point he immediately gets his head back on straight because the two of them are capable of getting through to each other in a way that nobody else can.

not All Might being all “THIS FIGHT SURE IS SOME GREAT FORESHADOWING FOR THE TWO OF THEM TEAMING UP TOGETHER IN THE FUTURE AS FORETOLD BY DESTINY.”

not Kacchan becoming stronger by taking a page out of Deku’s book (save to win).

not Deku being the last person Kacchan sees before the LoV take him away, and the two of them locking eyes until the last possible second before Kacchan disappears and Deku literally falls to his knees screaming in the most dramatic breakdown of the entire series.

not the two of them being singled out in a crowd of hundreds and framed side by side desperately cheering on All Might in his darkest hour in the battle which will change the entire course of the series.

not Aizawa literally saying that class 1-A revolves around Bakugou and Deku.

not Deku and Kacchan having the most iconic battle of the entire series and being all “goddammit I can’t figure out why my entire life revolves around you and it’s driving me crazy” and being fully honest with each other for the first time in their lives, and then having All Might come over and tell them “you two need each other, and you need to learn from each other, because each of you intuitively understands part of what it means to be a great hero, and by working together you will both one day be able to rise to the top.”

not Kacchan, and only Kacchan, being inducted into Club OFA a full two hundred chapters before anybody else.

not Kacchan and Deku obsessing over showing off for each other in the Joint Training arc while All Might looks on like a proud dad.

not Kacchan’s phenomenal progress in the JT arc being traced directly back to the lessons he learned from All Might and Deku.

not Deku being triggered into activating a wholeass new fucking quirk because someone said something mean about Kacchan.

not Horikoshi answering the question of “so what’s next for Kacchan’s character development?” with “he’s going to begin the slow burn process of realizing that he needs to make amends to Deku.”

not Kacchan being focused on Deku during Tomura’s attack on Jakku, and realizing what he’s about to do, and immediately moving in step beside him without the slightest hesitation because he’s determined to stay with him and protect him.

not All Might literally saying “THEY WILL GET A CHANCE TO TALK YOU GUYS SO JUST BE PATIENT.”

not Kacchan unconsciously emulating Deku when he’s focused on saving, and mimicking everything from his exact style of strategizing down to his speech patterns, in the exact same way that Deku starts unconsciously imitating Kacchan’s own mannerisms and speech when he’s focused on winning.

not Kacchan’s milestone “Rising” chapter being explicitly centered around this transcendent moment when he reacts without thinking in order to save Deku’s life.

not Deku activating a wholeass new fucking quirk AGAIN because someone insulted Kacchan AGAIN.

not Kacchan being all “Deku’s not the only one whose quirk goes through Awakenings when he sees that his childhood rivalfriend is in danger.”

not Kacchan having an entire character arc devoted solely to the importance of him choosing a hero name, which he has yet to reveal to Deku.

last but not least, not a whole entire montage of Horikoshi interview quotes with him talking about the thematic importance of “win to save, save to win” (it’s literally what heroism means to him), and talking about Bakugou’s future, and how he’s determined to write an even better ending than the one in Heroes Rising, and how the story will have a conclusion where all of the characters come together in the end.

so yeah. just in case it isn’t clear from all of this,

Bakugou and Deku’s destinies are intertwined in a way that runs deeper than any other connection in the series

the two of them have spurred on each other’s growth throughout the entirety of the manga

their character development has revolved around each other literally from the start

their journeys mirror and complement each other in a way that enriches the narrative

they each represent one half of All Might’s legacy

and their bond is at the center of the series’s emotional resonance

and Horikoshi is not just going to all of a sudden forget all of that and ignore it entirely in the series’s final act. I literally can’t understand why anyone would think that. it’s all right there you guys. 300 chapters’ worth of history and development. this is how it is, and this is how it has always been. like it or not, these two idiots are both in this together, and their respective endgames are inextricably tied to one another. win and save, you guys.

#bnha meta #bakugou katsuki #midoriya izuku #bakudeku #bakugou meta #deku meta #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha #fifty-one images in this post lol #tumblr you have such a good thing going on right now seriously #why would you want to change that #is it because people like me keep making gigantic posts with fifty images apiece #don't answer that

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

So I’ve read the book A Game Of Thrones...

...thus now I’ll inflict this post nobody asked on you because I am like that.

I’ll be honest, I had had the books in my possession for a few years, but, as you probably know, you don’t choose when you read a book, the book chooses the right time to be read. Especially in this case, it didn’t feel right to read the books while the show (which had I been following weekly since... season 5 maybe? I’m bad at keeping track of this stuff) was ongoing, ergo now the timing finally felt right. So I brought the first book with me on my vacation, and I’ve read it mostly on the beach.

(Yeah, the chapters about the north and winter are kind of weird to read while you’re happily roasting under the sun, sitting on a banana-shaped inflatable seat and floating on the water, but hey.)

It’s been a while since I watched the first seasons of the show so my memories of it are shaky, but from what I remember the first season followed the plot pretty closely, and the main differences are in tone (the show going kinda overboard with a pretty pointless crassness) and in a less “channeled” point of view for obvious medium reasons since GRRM tells the story strictly through the eyes of a pretty limited array of characters while a visual medium won’t do that. (I’m assuming the books progressively increase the number of point-of-view characters, considering just a few of them die, at least any soon?)

Before reading the book, I thought the younger age of the characters compared to the show would rub me the wrong way, but I’ve found it to be a non-issue, both because the “voice” of the younger characters is not overly unrealistic for kids their age (at least not too much to break my suspension of disbelief), because the story itself acknowledges that they’re young and makes a point of it (I’m thinking Robb having to be Lord Robb, for instance), but also because the tone of the book is not as exaggeratedly sexual as I remember the early seasons of the show to be.

I’ve only read the first book so I don’t know if the tone stays consistent, but I’m suspecting that most of the “grimdark” accusations that are moved to the series are from people who think they know what the series is like. It’s dark - no doubt about it - but it’s about people for whom life isn’t meaningless, for whom values and emotions and relationships aren’t meaningless. But okay.

The plot of the first book made me roll my eyes again at how the show handled its final portion - the story originally took form around the Stark-Lannister conflict, and of course a billion other players appeared on the board and that wasn’t the core of the plot forever, but still the show decided that Cersei who? also who cares about the idea of “noble families squabble pointlessly while these threats develop from north and south”, ta-da, let’s just put everything in a cauldron and cook a soup with no narrative structure. The show has its last conflict between Dany and a Cersei-shaped cardboard figure, and it has to climb glass in order to make it compelling at all (literally the two characters have no personal history, Missandei had to die because otherwise there was no reason for Dany to have a personal investment in defeating Cersei other than she was the random person sitting on the throne she claimed for herself... The conflict between them was hyper-rushed, nothing made sense but happened because the plot said so, meanwhile Arya Stark is just there and doesn’t even catch a glimpse of the one person she’s always meant to kill more than anyone else, Sansa Stark who is the character who had the closest connection to Cersei in the narrative outside of the other Lannisters is just in Winterfell sitting there and probably knitting a sweater or something while foreshadowing freezes outside, and everyone else just... is there. Okay.

On the other hand, I can very well believe that GRRM’s indications for Dany’s ending would be, you know, going “mad”, because I can see that that was his intention all along - obviously I don’t know how the story will end but the impression I’ve got from Dany’s arc in the first book is that the whole point is that it’s a tragedy, and, sure, it’s possible that she’ll break what is essentially a curse inside her, but I don’t think so. The feeling I’ve gotten especially from the last few Dany chapters is that the point of her story is that her transformation into a “dragon” (waking the dragon, if you prefer) is an actualization of a curse that ran in her blood and now takes a hold on her. Her rising from the fire is actually the beginning of her fall, or better, there is no rise or fall, there is just the dragon curse she could never escape because it was her destiny all along, and she never really had choices anyway. The birth of her son and his simultaneous death, the birth of the three dragons instead, and everything else, awoke the dragon in her, and dragons are no nice, benevolent creatures. Her personality might be loving and benevolent, and I know she’ll act on those traits in the future, but the Targaryen curse flows in her. Obviously the dragon madness is inextricably interlaced with grief, and indeed it’s all about death - Dany’s own, after all, because the girl dies and the dragon is born from the fire, and while she’s still herself and undoubtedly still carries qualities she had before, the curse that lied (almost) dormant in her has finally taken ahold of her. I wonder if she’ll break free of the curse eventually - but it seems unlikely given how the story starts, the very act that makes her acquire power is something that just grabs her more tightly inside what I can’t see but a curse from how the author describes it.

The first book was pretty much introductory for many characters (not Ned’s, bye Ned), Arya’s and Sansa’s journeys have just been set in motion, Bran’s is sort of on hold waiting for being truly set in motion, while Tyrion and Dany have sort of similar arcs, a journey of acquiring agency, although in very different ways, for Tyrion he literally becomes a prisoner and struggles to get back home (not literally but to his family and his “place”), for Dany she starts literally as an object sold from man to man and eventually finds her “place” with the dragons and her own khalasar, and both of their stories will basically re-start from there. I don’t really remember the narrative structure of Catelyn’s chapters, maybe that’s the point, she’s always in motion, almost like she’s spinning. Asfghjkl I forgot Jon. His arc is also an introductory one, at the end of which he embraces the Night’s Watch as his family and his place.

The most disturbing part in the book, for me, would be Tyrion’s farce trial in the Eyrie. I suppose that Lysa Arryn and Littlefinger murdered Jon Arryn in the books too (the foreshadowing is there) and that knowledge made the scene extra creepy. I suppose I feel strongly in general about narratives about a lack of a lawful judicial process, of characters being falsely accused of things and being denied actual trials, which is something for instance JK Rowling plays with a lot to create the most disturbing situations in the Harry Potter books (it works) and incidentally a reason why Captain America: Civil War could have been a powerful movie if they hadn’t fucked it up thoroughly. Had I been tasked with writing the Captain America 3 movie, my plot would have involved a farce trial for Bucky (and possibly other characters) masqueraded as perfectly fine, and the characters finding out that the authorities behind the whole thing are the wider Hydra network that didn’t come up in the internet leak. People in power abusing their authority makes for powerful narratives, but nooo, the real bad guys have nothing to do with the authorities or the government and also... Steve Rogers is a bad guy too, because fuck you. Long live capitalism and right-wing ideologies amiright.

I’ll take this detour away from the book as my clue to end the post, but please feel free to come chat with me or ask my thoughts about anything related to the book! 😊

#asoiaf #a game of thrones #blabbering me

[objectsofourselves]

Objects of Ourselves

The fabricated commercial object is one that is easy to understand. They're often designed to read clearly, and packaged with a narrative around its values and history as a brand in order to sell. Compared to the somewhat murky and difficult task of defining an individual human identity, objects, and especially branded objects, are seductively straightforward. So it seems almost inescapable that with the rise of mass production and consumer culture originating in the United States following World War II, the object becomes inextricably wrapped up in matters of personal identity. During this time, a great volume of artistic work began to probe the complex ways these objects relate to identity, as well as create identities of their own. Sometimes these objects represent ideals of identity, and other times serve as a means to understanding and realizing identity itself.

It might seem a little bit jarring to talk about something as individual as identity as being heavily influenced by mass produced objects, whose very indistinguishability from one another might seem antithetical to the uniqueness implied in our conceptions of identity. And perhaps even more so tracing these connections back to the United States, with its cultural prioritization of the individual over the collective. Yet, this seems almost inescapable given the combination of new media technologies that could reach more people than ever before when combined with American capitalism. As stated by Marshall McLuhan in his essay "Understanding Media," "after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace... Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man— the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society" (754). Consciousness became a collective experience with these new technologies, something McLuhan dubbed "the global village," and these societally shared experiences understandably lead to a sort of shared, common identity. And these communication technologies were immediately appropriated by corporations who, armed with them, could advertise to a larger audience than ever before and sell them all the same thing, and in selling them all the same exact product could take advantage of economies of scale to create higher profits than they'd ever made before. The most efficient context for American capitalism to run under, it became clear, was one in which uniformity of advertising lead to uniformity of desire, which in turn lead to uniformity goods purchased. And, as some of the artists in this exhibition will demonstrate, these purchased objects themselves provided a unifying effect in creating readymade identities.

In talking about these matters, it's necessary to talk about the art movement that was one of the first to directly concern itself with these matters of consumer culture: the pop art movement. Appropriating the style and imagery of advertising as well as the mass produced found objects of the 1950s and 60s, pop art challenged what could and couldn't be considered as high art, and in doing so questioned whether the sort of meaning and value found in fine art and its more rarefied and individual production could also be extended to the ubiquitous and cheap consumer objects of the era. Of course, the impact all of these objects and questions of their meaning on issues of identity wasn't lost on these artists. In response to mass media and a shared set of American brands, Andy Warhol in an interview with Gene Swenson provocatively declared "“I want everybody to think alike... Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way" (747). Whether or not Warhol actually believed these statements and how good of a thing these observed effects were, however, is less clear, and in doing so the space becomes much richer in the questions this ambiguity poses.

Are these objects and their effects on identity actually a bad thing? Do mass produced objects sold by corporations take away individuality in their consumers, or is identity something more resilient than that? And how much individual meaning can be found in reproduced objects? Is it, like what's accepted to be true with fine art, something that is dependent on the viewer, and thus individual and unique even if the observed object is the same as what everyone else is viewing?

This exhibition looks at works beyond the pop art movement, spanning a range from the 1960s to the 2010s, as some other interesting developments in discussions of objecthood happened in other movements such as Minimalism. But, plenty of works in this exhibit have also been included where questions of objects and identity might not be at the forefront or explicit at all. These works have been included as they allow for a more nuanced and holistic interpretation of what we mean by objecthood; how to read objects and extend those readings to things that are less clearly or tangibly "objects," such as in Untitled Film Still #6; the relations between objects and various social and economic factors, such as in Soup Can and Sunset; and, perhaps most interestingly, how objects can be a source of empowerment, such as in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima; or even self reflection and mythologizing, as in My Bed and Narcissus Gardens. The works have been organized in a progression that starts from the most obvious consequence of these objects, their economic signifiers, and works its ways to how they relate to ourselves in the most intimate ways concerning matters of our purpose, permanence, and understanding of our self.

#Harrison Charles and Paul Wood. Art in Theory: 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell 2000.

[bk-lostintranslation]

ESSAY: Globalization - Limits & Liminality as Explored in “Paprika”

Kon’s animated film Paprika, through symbolic and stylized means, serves as a critical frame for the phenomenon of globalization. 

X-Posted at Pangaea Journal

Inspired by Yasutaka Tsutsui’s titular novel, Paprika begins much in the same fashion as it ends: in medias res, with a phantasmagorical montage of cultural iconography, quirky characters and surreal scenery interwoven at a frenzied pace, each scene jumping into the next with a fluidity that coalesces time and space itself into a distinctly Einsteinian continuum. Audiences are left dazed, disoriented, yet intrigued: there is no way to know whether the introductory sequence is chronicling a dream, or reality, or a freakish blend of both. This destabilizing visual narrative is fairly typical of Satoshi Kon’s craft, yet what calls for critical focus is the unique symbolism underpinning his work. Beneath its rich and densely-layered imagery, the film tackles a number of pertinent issues: from whether multimedia has warped from a benign platform into the jealous architect of our desires; to the tragic dissolution of individual ideas and complex cultures into a miasma of grotesque transnationalism; to whether the weakening friction-of-distance within a digitized world has brought us closer together, or merely distorted the very axes upon which time-space functions and is perceived. Indeed, at its crux, the film embraces a broad spectrum of issues uniquely linked to globalization, all while invoking relevant aspects of human fallacy and social degradation.

Central to Paprika, from the beginning, is its clear disdain for the linearity and two-dimensionalism of traditional narrative. Instead, like a hallucination, there appear to be no distinguishable boundaries between characters or places, no fixed destinations or rational coordinates. The most vivid example is the introductory sequence, where the eponymous protagonist, Paprika, leaps winsomely out of a man’s dreams and into the physical world: flitting from brightly-lit billboards as static eye-candy to a well-meaning sentry spying through computer screens to a godlike specter freezing busy traffic with a snap of her fingers to an ordinary girl chomping hamburgers at a diner to a stylized decal on a boy’s T-shirt to a motorcyclist careening through late-night streets (0:06:12-0:07:49).

Space and time are rendered meaningless – or, rather, are reshaped into something entirely novel and surreal. As Paprika navigates through a complex and dynamic mediascape, she effectively embodies the spilling-over of the virtual into the physical world – and, more significantly, of both the subtle and blatant permeation of media-based globalization in every step of our lives. Indeed, with its alternately fascinating and disturbing chaos of imagery, the very premise of Paprika blurs the boundaries between the inner and outer-worlds, conveying through both symbolic and subtextual allusions the phenomenon of globalization run riot – a dreamscape that unfolds with the benign promise of forging new connections, only to seep past the barriers of reality and engulf and reshape the world to the imperatives of dystopian homogeneity at best, and the subjugation and disintegration of individual autonomy at worst.

It can be argued, of course, that it is hypocritical for animation – in many ways the nexus of metamedia in its most intrinsically illusory form – to lambaste globalization. The media pivots on globalization in all its multifaceted vagaries, and vice versa. Renowned social theorist Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase ‘the global village’ in his groundbreaking work The Medium is the Message, was one of the first to point out that the form of a medium implants itself inextricably into whatever message it conveys in a synergistic relationship: “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered (26).” That the media and the phenomenon of globalization go hand-in-hand, shaping and influencing one another, therefore goes without saying. However, what the imagery of Paprika draws attention to is how the multiplicity of media leads to unpredictable consequences and vicissitudes – which are not always quantifiable or even tangible. Much in the same way technology and global interconnectivity have narrowed – at times even erased – the demarcations of time and space, so too have they led to paradigm shifts of what it means to belong to a static, physical place as a cultural and individual identifier.

Globalization is often defined as fundamentally kaleidoscopic, with a dizzying mobility of ideological, economic, physical and cultural interchanges across a rhizomatous network – but one that is increasingly powered by its own unstable energies and its own besieged and untidy logic. Of particular interest is the ‘disembodied’ component of globalization, where the flow of information and capital is increasingly encoded and abstract, and thus increasingly more likely to permeate local spaces that may not always be open to such profound transformation, imposition and redefinition. In their work, The Quantum Society, Zohar and Marshall liken the chaotic, fractal nature of the modern world to quantum reality, stating that it

…has the potential to be both particle-like and wave-like. Particles are individuals, located and measurable in space and time. Waves are ‘nonlocal,’ they are spread out across all of space and time, and their instantaneous effects are everywhere. Waves extend themselves in every direction at once, they overlap and combine with other waves to form new realities, new emergent wholes (326).

Unarguably, the focal point in Paprika is globalization as a catalyst of “new realities.” But while these can be captivating and edifying, allowing us to create or explore new identities, or to grow more closely tethered together, they can also represent the sinister infiltration of exploitative elements within our most intimate lives. This is made chillingly evident through the plot of the film, which centers on the theft of the DC Mini – a futuristic device that allows two people to share the same dream. While intended as a tool to help treat patients’ latent neuroses and deep-seated pathologies, the film makes clear that, if misused, this prototype can not only allow an intruder to access and influence another’s dreams, but can unleash the collective dream-world into the sphere of reality itself. The DC Mini, on its own, would function as a tepid metaphor for the symbiotic dance between globalization and technology. But following its theft, the resultant chaos it invokes sets the riveting, psychedelic stage upon which the inner-world of dreams erupts out into mundane reality, a fantastical convergence that not only threatens the safety of the entire city, but also denies each citizen their own private realm of dreams, within which they have the freedom to nurture a true inner-self. As Dr. Chiba – the no-nonsense alter-ego of our dreamscape superheroine Paprika – remarks: the victims of the abused DC Mini have become mere “empty shells, invaded by collective dreams… Every dream [the stolen DC Mini] came into contact with was eaten up into one huge delusion.” The scene is made particularly memorable by its vivid visual symbolism: two droplets of rainwater on a car window merging into one, highlighting the irresistible flow between not only dreams and reality, but the liminality of globalization as a fluid force that cannot be bound by temporal or spatial delineations (0:52:12-0:52:37).

It is precisely this unpredictable fluidity that runs rampant across real-life Tokyo in the film, wreaking havoc in its wake. Of particular interest is the gorgeous riot of imagery employed to represent the collective ‘delusion:’ the recurring motif of a parade, in all its clamorous splendor, that unfurls through the city streets, infusing spectators with its own peculiar brand of madness. For its eye-popping and mind-bending details alone, the sequence warrants close examination. But accompanying the visual feast is the nightmarish gamut of cultural, technological, social and historical commentary embedded within its imagery. To the cheerful proclamations of, “It’s showtime!” a procession of Japanese salarymen leap with suicidal serenity off of rooftops; below, the bodies of drunkenly-staggering bar-hoppers morph into unbalanced musical instruments, while families frolicking through the parade transform into rotund golden Maneki-neko to disturbing chants of, “The dreams will grow and grow! Let’s grow the tree that blooms money!” Here, in a scathing political lampoon, politicians wrestle one another in their eagerness to climb to the top of a parade-float; there, a row of schoolgirls in sailor uniforms, with cellphones for heads, lift their skirts for the eager gazes of equally cellphone-headed males.

Satoshi Kon does not bother with coy subtext; he announces the mind-degenerating effects of globalization on both dramatic and symbolic planes: a parade that swells into disorder and eventual destruction, headed by a clutter of sentient refrigerators, televisions, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, deck tapes and automobiles. Traditional Japanese kitsch competes with lurid Americana; cultural symbols like Godzilla and the Statue of Liberty waltz alongside such religious icons as the Virgin Mary, Vishnu and the Buddha, while disembodied torii arches and airplanes soar overhead to the discordant serenade of money toads and durama dolls. The effect is at once hypnotic and horrific; the vortex of collective dreams lures in countless spellbound bystanders, transforming them into just another mindless facet of the parade, from a robot to a toy to a centerpiece on a parade-palanquin. Witnessing the furor, one character dazedly asks, “Am I still dreaming?” and is informed, “Yes. The whole world is” (1:11:09-1:12:42)

In her book, Girlhood and the Plastic Image, Heather Warren-Crow remarks that Paprika “…proffers a visual theory of media convergence as not only an issue of technology, but also one of globalization… [Its] vision of media convergence is one in which boundaries between cultures, technologies, commodities and people are horrifyingly permeable… While our supergirl is eventually able to stop the parade… these multiple transgressions cause mass confusion, madness, injury and death (83).” If this seems a dark denouncement of globalization, one cannot deny that it is in many respects fitting. With the vanishing delineations between nations, cultures, ideas and people arises the phenomenon of “cultural odorlessness,” or mukokuseki. The term was first applied to rapid social transformations in Koichi Iwabuchi’s book Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, although the phenomena can just as readily be applied to postmodernity in all its miscellaneous facets (28).  While globalization has engendered new intimacies and easier connections (on the surface), this overwhelming grid of interconnected information has simultaneously become a web trapping human beings inside it. Individuality – on a national, local, or personal scale – has been pushed aside in favor of a real and virtual superhighway powered by pitiless self-commodification and voracious consumership, within which the cultivation of a true self no longer holds meaning. One particular scene in the film captures this with wistful succinctness. As a weary Dr. Chiba gazes out of the window of her office, her livelier alter-ego Paprika (real or imagined) appears superimposed before her reflection. “You look tired,” Paprika says, “Want me to look in on your dreams?” to which Chiba replies, “I haven’t been seeing any of my own lately.” Against Paprika’s winsome overtones, her own demeanor strikes a chord that is dismal in its flatness. Although Chiba’s profession is to dive through the colorful welter of others’ dreams, it is her grasp of her own self that proves the ultimate fatality in this venture (0:24:10-0:24:23).

Indeed, it has often been argued that as both the physical and disembodied aspects of globalization grow increasingly more pervasive, so too do diverse organs of surveillance – from institutionalized dogmas meant to restrict personal development by branding it as outdated or subversive, to internal and external disciplinary structures meant to monitor and subjugate a person’s ‘inner-self:’ the very stuff of his or her dreams.  Such themes, while hardly novel, are nonetheless relevant, tethered as they are to such iconic works as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, both of which – through literal and metaphorical means – examine societies wherein people are subject to relentless government scrutiny, mind-policing and the absolute denial and denigration of privacy.  Foucault’s work, in particular, is useful for deconstructing social mechanisms. Utilizing a genealogical historical lens, Foucault traces the slow and oppressive transformation – as opposed to ‘evolution’, a phrase often touted by proponents of liberal reform – of the Western penal system. His main focus is to illustrate how, despite our self-congratulatory complacence at moving away from the barbaric model of medieval punishment, in favor of gentler and more civilized modes of discipline, we have in fact simply transferred the imperatives of controlling human beings – be they deviants or conformists – from their bodies to their souls. As Foucault states, “Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights,” thus intimating that the organs of institutional control have not grown less harsh or restrictive, but simply less overt (11).

Certainly, by relying on a framework of internal rather than external constraints, it has become possible to erode the very modicum of individuality, reducing human beings to what Foucault describes as “docile” bodies complicit in their own exploitation. Foucault lays the blame for this phenomenon on a capitalist system whose economic and political trajectory has led society to a place of commodification and classification (“governmentality”), where the complexities of dynamic individuals are pared down into reductionist categories of ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable.’  According to Foucault, surveillance and regimentation as a means of producing compliant individuals is the crux of modern economies, to the point where society has transformed into an industrial panopticon – a nightmarish perversion of Jeremy Bentham’s original ideal. As such, whether individuals live as offenders within a prison, or as free citizens, is irrelevant. The scant difference in both their constraints is measured by mere degrees (102-128).

In Paprika, these issues are not explicitly announced, but are instead woven through the story’s fabric in an alternately lulling and disquieting fashion. Noteworthy scenes – such as where Paprika, a captive chimera with butterfly-wings, is pinned to a table while a man literally peels away her skin to paw rapaciously at the prone body of Dr. Chiba, nestled pupae-like within, to the moment where Detective Toshimi Konakawa, harried by recurring nightmares, bittersweetly comes to terms with boyhood dreams he had suppressed in order to survive by the dictum of a cold and prescriptive adult world – are all reminders that it is our inviolate inner-space that makes us uniquely human. To allow it to be invaded, subjugated and erased is to reduce ourselves to passive automatons, our every desire governed, our every choice predetermined. In Paprika, this knowledge blossoms only when each character delves deep into themselves, to find at their core the dream-child that remains untouched by reality’s smothering hold, and to discover within that dream-child both untapped softness and strength. “She’s become true to herself, hasn’t she?” Paprika playfully remarks of the somber Dr. Chiba, when the latter finally comes to terms with her repressed affection for the bumbling genius Tokita (1:15:42).

For Paprika, it is evident that social or technological transformations cannot be powered by the erosion of individual dreams. To do so is to condemn the world to an eldritch darkness sustained only by greed. The film’s penultimate scene, where the egomaniacal chairman – the true thief of the DC Mini – looms as a monstrous giant over the despoiled city, proclaiming, “I am perfect! I can control dreams and even death!” could almost serve as the critical foreshadowing of globalization taken to its bleakest conclusion: the desecration of nature and humanity alike by a self-serving force that, in its thirst for absolute control, will cancel out the very diversity of dreams that once made globalization possible. It is only when Paprika – fusing with Dr. Chiba and Tokita – reemerges in the form of a baby to battle the chairman, is equilibrium restored. “Light and dark. Reality and dreams. Life and death. Man and woman. Then you add the missing spice [Paprika],” she recites, as if listing ingredients to a recipe (1:19:50-1:20:32). Yet, in keeping with theme of liminality and indeterminacy, the key to vanquishing the chairman is not in these binary oppositions, but in their capacity to combine together and shape the world into more than one thing at once. As Paprika swallows the chairman whole, reversing the shadowy post-apocalyptic city to its original state, battle-scarred but still intact, the audience is reminded of fluidity of the quantum world. Life and death, dreams and reality, destruction and rebirth, all coalesce within an ever-transforming continuum.

So too, as the film’s open-ended yet distinctly uplifting ending makes clear, is the process of globalization inherently free-flowing and malleable in its interaction with its environment. Rather than focusing on the split between globalization as a force of cultural erasure versus a celebration of differences, the film highlights the alternately delicate or brutal negotiations between the two: a friction that is necessary to keep the phenomenon in flux. Zygmunt Bauman’s book and selfsame concept of Liquid Modernity proves especially useful here, in that in order to comprehend the mutable nature of the modern world, it is necessary to look beyond traditional models and regimented perceptions. As he makes clear:

Ours is … an individualized, privatized version of modernity, with the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual’s shoulders… The patterns of dependency and interaction … are now malleable… but like all fluids they do not keep their shape for long. Shaping them is easier than keeping them in shape. Solids are cast once and for all. Keeping fluids in shape requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort – and even then the success of the effort is anything but a foregone conclusion (8).

Of course, the exchange of images and ideas across a would-be deterritorialized realm does not mean that the myriad components within must lose their separate identities. Rather, those identities become more essential than ever, bringing with them their own consequences and questions – all of which must be understood through the dynamic lens of globalization, until we come to understand not only the frailties of the social order, but how they can improved, in order to make connections both genuine and mutually-beneficial for a polyphonic future. The answers lie not within the inherently-shifting structure of globalization, but rather in its creative use. In the film’s final segment, where Detective Toshimi Konakawa purchases tickets to the movie, Dreaming Kids, after decades of stultifying self-repression, speaks of the capacity of globalized multitudes to enthuse as well as to ensnare the individual’s dreams. Globalization does not exist in a vacuum; even as it threatens to engulf nations, localities and persons into a bilious swamp of depersonalized shells, so too can it be transformed by the nature of the worlds it encounters. The change is double-edged and double-sided; the effect is a living, breathing bricolage that grows and alters as we do – and how we do.

That said, it is evident that Satoshi Kon’s message is not one of a facile globalized utopia. Rather, it is about the dangers of losing ourselves within such a seductive phenomenon, whose effects can too easily be maneuvered toward mass surveillance and subjugation. For Paprika, the cross-flow of cultures, ideas, commodities and people is illustrated as an unceasing process, but one that we ourselves are responsible for shaping. If done right, there is the tantalizing promise of a happier, freer life, within which globalization may enhance rather than exploit our dreams. But if done wrong, Kon’s narrative is bleakly apocalyptic – a world fallen victim to a hostile and all-pervasive force that gnaws away its very humanity. While the film’s content-driven, as opposed to structural, formula can be mystifying and overly-abstract at times, there is no denying its visual ingenuity: a multimedia extravaganza that beautifully translates the welter of dreams into reality. With its alternately fascinating and disturbing chaos of imagery, Paprika blurs the boundaries between the inner and outer-worlds, conveying through symbolic and subtextual allusions the phenomenon of globalization run riot – a dreamscape that yields both brighter possibilities and special connections if we do not allow it to diminish us, yet also a sinister agency of mass domination and dystopian homogeneity if we fail to put it in its proper place.

Works Cited

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY, Random House LLC, 1977.

Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, Duke University Press, 2007.

Kon, Satoshi, director. Paprika. Madhouse Studios, 2006.

MacLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Message. Corte Madera, Gingko Pr., 2005.

Warren-Crow, Heather. Girlhood and the Plastic Image. Lebanon, University Press of New England, 2014.

Zohar, Danah, and I. N. Marshall. The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics and a New Social Vision. New York, Morrow, 1994.

#essay #review #academic writing #paprika #satoshi kon #japan #globalization #anime #published

[firstfootingscotland]

Bogha-frois Conversations: Will Hammond

Early this year during Glasgow’s Celtic Connections Festival I had the pleasure of joining a host of incredible LGBT+ artists for a performance and a panel around the theme of Bogha-frois: LGBT+ Voices in Folk. A brainchild of Pedro Cameron (Man of the Minch), Bogha-frois began as a workshop at the Scottish Storytelling Centre and takes its name from the Gaelic word for “rainbow.” The energy around Bogha-frois has enacted a metamorphosis - far beyond a standalone workshop, panel, or critically-acclaimed gig, Bogha-frois is a movement celebrating gender and sexual diversity within traditional and folk music, song, and dance in Scotland. Following the events in Glasgow, I wanted to continue these conversations and proposed a series of monthly blog posts. It’s hope this series will be a place for dialogue around the intersections of traditional arts, identity, and each artists’ path as a LGBT+ person. This month’s Bogha-frois conversationalist is percussionist Will Hammond! 

Tell me a story... what was a moment when you felt both your identity as a traditional musician and your identity as a LGBTQIA+ person were in focus? (1)

Obviously the Bogha-frois workshops and concert were a pretty decisive event for this. During those days it felt most apparent and explicitly like "this is what this is about, this is inextricably part of who we are and what we're doing", which did feel like the first time outside of maybe being at pride or a protest that I've felt quite so "out" and among similar people, and the only time where the musician part of my identity has been equally in focus. I'd had a few conversations with other queer musicians about navigating the world the ways we do prior to those workshops, and each time my thoughts of "I'm sure I'm not the only person" became "oh, wow there are other people experiencing these things!" So, to have so many people gathered for the workshops and concert laid out this confirmation on a scale that was very affirming. 

How do you identify? What are the pronouns, descriptors or other words you like to use, if any, to describe yourself in regard to your LGBTQIA+ status. 

 I'm bisexual, in that I am capable of being attracted to people of more than one gender. My own gender is a total mess and I use he/him pronouns but they/them pronouns are fine, kind of whatever, really. Genderfluid and nonbinary are terms that fit; I don't think I really know what I "identify" as on an that instinctive visceral level. If I introspect on it, I always come out thinking "I don't know what feeling like a man or a woman or anything else feels like, I just feel a bit unpleasant." I find personally trans/cis is a pretty quirky binary in itself. "Do you agree with the doctor who said 'it's a boy' when you were born?", I mean, I guess, yeah sometimes but also sometimes not, right? 

(percussionist Will Hammond, photo by Amelia Read)

Talk about your perceptions of LGBTQIA+ identity (both yours and others) within your experience playing traditional music in Scotland. 

When I've played in Scotland my own and others' identities have either gone unmentioned and un-talked about or they've been the focus of the event- referring to the Bogha-frois concert, so my experience has either been extremely welcoming and accepting or I haven't had to think about it. Being English and mostly working in England, I don't expect my experiences of this in Scotland to be comprehensive or universal for Scottish musicians. 

In what ways do you feel your identity as a LGBTQIA+ person and a traditional musician intersect, overlap, engage? 

I am fairly open to talking about my queerness with other people I play music with, and most of these people, if they are not themselves lgbtq in some ways, have usually demonstrated that I can trust them about it. Ever since I first read about it I've enjoyed exploring the idea of music as a verb rather than a noun. I also like the line of thought leading off about how a musician who is just walking down the street, or making a cup of coffee, or trying to get to sleep, is still a musician. Even if what they are doing in those moments is not musicking, their musician-ness has affected how they experience and interact with the world. I think, for myself, I can draw definite parallels to my queerness in here. How applicable that is for other people is totally up to them, of course. At the moment I have "trans rights are human rights" written in block capitals down the side of one of my main instruments, and I don't exactly present as the most obviously straight person in the world, so I suppose I'm not trying particularly hard to keep my queerness and my musician-ness separate. 

Talk about your experience connecting with other LGBTQIA+ folks both inside and outside the traditional arts. 

I have worked a couple of times with other lgbtq artists in the trad scene and beyond, but prior to the Bogha-frois workshops it was never a specific condition or factor of us working together. It would emerge over the course of us practicing usually, or I already knew about the other(s) going in and would tell them about myself. 

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A post shared by The Cusp (@thecuspmusic) on Apr 8, 2019 at 9:08am PDT

(Will’s band The Cusp with fiddler Imogen Bose-Ward and harpist Ada Francis)

If you’re comfortable sharing, talk about any incidents of homophobia or transphobia that you’ve witnessed both inside and outside the traditional arts. 

In a performance context I haven't experienced any myself, which has been nice, but on at least two occasions during practices with other musicians, after coming out to them as bi they have immediately asked me about how open my partner and I are to threesomes. Outside of music, just in the last couple of years I've been called slurs in shops multiple times, in the loos at Newcastle railway station a man told me that I'm in the wrong queue and should be in the ladies'. I've been given "that look" by several men for being in public with other queer people. Once, someone I used to work for grabbed my wrist and tried to scrub off my nail varnish with her hand as if she thought that would work and was an acceptable way to treat another adult. I've certainly not had as hard a time as some people I know, but I have plenty of my own evidence for how marriage equality certainly didn't end homophobia, let alone transphobia. 

How do you see the traditional arts changing in regard to LGBTQIA+ people? What are the further changes you would like to see? 

I'm stuck with being a convert, a backslider, and a reformist with respect to trad music. I didn't get into folk until I was introduced by a friend. I was maybe 17, by which time I'd already been playing music in some form or other for about 9 years. Then playing, listening to, learning about, trad things became a focus until I was maybe 21, when I learned a bit more about abstract expressionism and free improvisation and started enjoying the weirder sides of trad playing more and the "regular" playing a bit less. It was partly burnout from having finished university but getting outside of the folk bubble having spent a short time intensely involved in it was definitely a breath of fresh air. The final project of my studies was a summary of this process in a way, looking at how genres are constructed in the modern age and how occupying the spaces between them can result in some interesting things. I'm fascinated in the ability to use this music to tell stories and preserve memories. I'm also aware of the parallel consequence that allows this music to distort realities and, through entirely benign inaction, forget. I hesitate to speak for the Scottish traditions as I'm only an occasional visitor, and in the words of Leon Rosselson, I'm not suggesting any sort of plot. However, there have been times I find it difficult to look at the amount of lighthearted crossdressing, not so lighthearted crossdressing, "shapeshifting", "enchantment", utter disinterest in marriage, and portrayals of homosocial relationships in traditional songs and not feel concern when these things are overlooked.  Even more so when they are explained away in a manner that preserves the current cisheteropatriarchy like it's something that's always been there. The places this music comes from are important, and preserving it and celebrating it definitely is a worthy pursuit. It then follows that to gloss over the parts that don't fit our construction of history is partly what leads us to situations where it takes a whole room of queer musicians simply pointing out that we exist, maybe for ourselves as much as for an audience, to get people thinking about it. As such, and though I recognise that it's difficult to apply current terminology around sexuality and gender to historical time periods, "The Folk", whoever they were, ought to be perceived as less monolithically heterosexual and gender conforming. Applying this way of thinking and looking can go forwards as much as backwards, and  achieving a greater diversity of voices in the trad scene is an important goal, I think.

First Footing is a collaboration between dancer and dance researcher Nic Gareiss, the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Moray House School of Education, and the School of Scottish Studies with support from Creative Scotland. For engagement opportunities check out the First Footing website.

(1) Following methodology developed by Fiona Buckland in her book Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-making, I began each conversation asking artists to tell me a story. This, Buckland reminds us, redistributes significance to the voice of the artist, rather than the anthropologist/researcher/interviewer. In Buckland’s words, “the meanings they made from the practices are more crucial than whatever meaning I impose with the theoretical tools in my standard issue doctoral utility belt.” (Buckland 2002, p. 11) This feels incredibly important when collaborating with folks whose voices have so often been underheard or marginalized.

#bogha-frois #rainbow #will hammond #therewillbevibes #queer #bi #bisexual #trans #non binary #enby #nb #traditional music #percussion #newcastle #newcastle on tyne #Fiona Buckland #queer theory #conversations #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA+

[queernuck]

The Immigrant Settler

When considering Irish-American identity, as well as white immigrant identity as a whole, so many focus upon the popular narrative regarding American immigration, one that begins at the point of bourgeoisie disidentification between an Anglo-American class which descended ideologically, when not genealogically, from the earliest of settlers, and immigrants of Irish, German, Italian, and other largely Western European descent. Through a process of differentiation and the invocation of processes of Orientalism, antiblackness, Balkanization, and so on, an American ideation of immigration is spread to discourses on both European identity through a sort of reversal, much in the way that Jacksonian ideology and structures of genocidal violence informed the means by which fascism, and specifically fascist acts of genocide, were enacted by the Nazis and more generally are continued through structures of systemic genocide in postmodernity. The transition into the modern, and later the postmodern, through the growth of American hegemony and the hegemonic structures of American cultural identity.

The origins of Irish-American identity lies, first, in an origin that I believe even Sakai would recognize as proletarian. However, the transformative act of immigration, the process that Sakai realizes as “settling” can in turn be described through a metapolitical questioning which asks exactly what lead to the derealization of proletarian origins and the eager acceptance of American hegemony seen in instances such as the heavily Irish character of the early New York police forces, or the reflection of such in the predominance of American colonial subjects within the American military. Specifically joining these apparatuses of colonial expansion, acting as a settler population through American imperial power as a means of expansive division is in fact part of how Irish-American, Italian-American and other national identities were realized: their histories are inextricably linked to antiblackness, to colonialism, in that their realization was in providing what Sakai characterizes as a “thin white line” between slaves and the moneyed white classes. Moreover, that many came over as part of agreements where they worked as “indentured servants” before becoming part of a larger European society within the colonial America, such that they can achieve a status unattainable within the proletarian demarcations given in European life. Effectively, Sakai recognizes a sort of cynical reversal of the American founding mythology: indeed, there is promise, a vital promise of prosperity that is found in the founding of America, but this is only accessible by becoming part of a well-to-do class, by a process of supposedly rightful ascent into a petitie-bourgeoisie. The means by which Sakai describes this are specifically formed such that he reverses the notions of ascendence which describe ideologies of American exceptionalism: it can only be the land it is claimed to be because it rests upon exploitation, that prosperity can only be found through an arbitration of capitalist violence that is specifically settler-colonial in design. The core impetus of Settlers is this very impetus: the means by which settlers conceived of a land they had never seen as rightfully theirs.

The westward growth of a nebulous European character within American immigration lead to a vital conflict between North and South: both maintained a certain acknowledgement of slavery as specifically formed through violence and instability, and that it could only be maintained through the same sorts of forces of destabilization seen in postmodern American operations of power. However, whereas the North saw the solution in the creation of an entirely white continent, one that could be divided internally but unified through whiteness, through opposition to an eventually disappearing population conceived of specifically in opposition to whiteness. When Sakai discusses the means by which Seminole tribes that had taken on escaped slaves were considered unified in their own eyes but as a collection of disparate populations to be separated and controlled by the eyes of the colonizer, one sees the demarcations of national identity that are necessary to colonial power, and how these are developed into neocolonial identities through processes of reversal. Even the formation of national identity through supposed decolonization often retains a national bourgeoisie, a Maoist-ordained class of well-to-do peasants which are vitally realized in their relationship to a process of becoming a landlord, of adopting their aesthetics, their habits, and their ideologies in order to at least gain a resemblance to them. Similarly, the notions of labor aristocracy are formed in this fashion, such that even within structures of apparently laboring classes one can find the means by which a petite-bourgeoisie are formed. Being able to look back upon this, when postmodern notions of “disruption” are so predominant in the realization of schizophrenic patterns of consumption, the process of becoming-petitie-bourgeoisie, of gaining that subjectivity is often obfuscated but vitally reflected within structures of capitalist entry. Rhizomality does not banish arboreal structure, but rather inscribes upon it and acts through it.

The means by which rhizomal structures may be fostered in protracted people’s war, through Maoist means of creating affinity are contrasted with the means in which structures of white supremacy draw a sort of natural affinity, use a fascist development of desire to create ideations of “populist” identity, whether in the name of neoliberal reform or in outright fascist ideology. In discussing the election of Andrew Jackson, Sakai discusses the means by which a supposed “populism” replaced and overinscribed upon any possibility of proletarian consciousness that mirrors the supposed character of American right-wing ideology, the means by which it at once appeals to the frontier and to the city. The ideation, the libidinal conception of Trump creates an American myth of national reclamation that redoubles Sakai’s characterization of Jacksonian identity but transposed within schizophrenic identities of late capital: Trump is self-made, but all the same retains the descent of greatness that defines American ideologies of settling and national creation. The creation of a specific identity of whiteness as a political tactic, the patriotism that is cultivated not merely in action (and in fact, secondary in any sort of action) but moreover through the creation of a certain ideological figure which can then stoke the libidinal flows that are otherwise forbidden, the means by which populism can stand in for love, desire, sexuality, so many various structures of desire that are far beyond the figure in themselves. The means by which Milo Yiannopoulos described Trump as “daddy” is not unusual, is not unprecedented; the very means by which fascism may contain homosexual desire, homosexual transgression, is part of the means by which, like Žižek’s discussion of pedophilia in the Church, the prohibited can not only be realized, but further developed into a means of reinforcing the ideology of belonging, of uniqueness, of a vital similarity and affinity within the group through this transgression. Effectively, the group disidentifies itself in one way in order to strengthen another process of identification. As a result, this creates the structure of an ascendant settler-colonial subject, the petitie-bourgeoisie developing itself into landlords of a new sort. These process are repeated over and over: from westward expansion to white flight to gentrification of cities developed as concentration points for those necessary to maintain a comfortable lifestyle for the petite-bourgeoisie, the shifting of identities is necessary to the continual maintenance of these structures of power.

Sakai also discusses the importance of slavery to the creation of an American antiblackness which is reflected in the very structure of the American city. Cities in the south such as Atlanta, in the west such as Oakland, even in the north such as the New York that Sakai describes, one finds that the structures of maintaining slavery, of creating a structure whereby slave labor could be realized within a larger economic structure that denied its own identity, that rejected its connection to slavery even as it become more and more evident that the displacement of white supremacy as such would eventually occur given the necessity of slavery to American colonial economies. The eventual development of an economy that has superficially moved on from slavery is aesthetic: the specific structures are rejected but moreover their rejection only comes through a reappropriation, an act wherein slavery is restructured and made systemic, is retained through the enacting of a specific Oedipal trauma that originates in the repetition of structures originating in slavery, the ideology of America as a nation for the European even if it is not itself white or European in character and population. The creation of black communities, even thriving ones, within cities such as these is met with a sort of rejection by structures of capitalism: as the ideology of capitalism would have it, that this prosperity is proof of the way in which race has become obsolete, has been disavowed. Instead, by specifically silencing the means through which race is realized and making it such that its articulation is in fact a rearticulation, a rabattement, it becomes so that the realization of race as a structure is in fact understood as its initial evocation, as the means by which it is first realized in the colonial gaze. 

Popular culture has become one of the main structures of spreading notions of American hegemony: even in rejection there is an articulation of it. The continuation of notions around American identity and its formation through structures that are paradigmatically, culturally, linked to a process of settling is itself part of the process of justification which leads to the process of settling as a process of creating the self. Contrasting this with the rejected creations of self, one finds oppositions between Gatsby and Gucci Mane, the way in which the differance of settler identity as linked to continuing a colonial heritage, a colonial identity, is vital to the means by which colonizers are reckoned. Even those outside the structure of American identity as a descendant European identity can occupy, can become colonial, through processes such as joining the American military: the means by which American military bases act as globalizing forces, act to restructure an act of extending the settler beyond even American shores, the creation of a settlement that in turn can structure the hyperreality of American colonialism.

Sakai’s work in Settlers as a history is not to be understood in terms of strict historical materialism as it will eventually be found lacking on these very grounds. Conversely, as a means of reckoning the metahistorical character of American imperialism, of dealing with the metaphysics that are proscribed by colonial arbitration and offering a critique of these structures, it acts phenomenally in that it specifically creates an alternate means of realizing the history of America as an ideological structure, the mythology of America. That Sakai’s historicism is lacking does not take away from his poeticism, and even if that poeticism would be rejected as an assessment by Sakai, it still stands as an important reading of his work. 

[bellebenhamma]

Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Hass-Cohen, N. and Carr, R. (2008). Art therapy and clinical neuroscience. London; Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

This book is absolutely crucial in understanding how Art Therapy works on a physiological level and how that relates and affects practice. Through developments in neuroscience the enormous benefits for Art Therapy can be explicated in a scientific way. It is particularly clear in elucidating how chronic stress affects an individual and how Art therapy can shift an individual away from primarily engaging a limbic-based instinctual reaction and move to re-engaging with their Cerebral cortex. The text also sheds new light on PTSD and C-PTSD and the major benefits that Art Psychotherapy can have in understanding the neurobiology of the stress response and how this might affect immune system, memory issues.

Hyland Moon, C. (2015). Materials & media in art therapy. Routledge.

This text provides a much needed analysis of the, largely ignored, function of materials in Art Therapy. Hyland explores the meanings implicit in materials but also why certain materials have maintained a privileged position within Art Therapy. Hyland asks the pertinent question: why, when most Art Therapists work with a mainly marginalised client base, do they utilise such self consciously ‘high art’ materials in their work? Hyland’s exploration of the innate intersectional issues in materials themselves is and adept reading of how these seemingly inanimate objects become full of nuanced symbolism and significance. Hyland wishes there to be a more ‘critically engaged’ relationship between the practice and materials. This text reflects my own concern with the power and a need for a more prescient panorama on the importance of materials in the practice of Art Therapy. Hyland also illuminates the importance of the intersection between Art Therapy and contemporary Art practices. Hyland cites Sara Bennett Steele’s work as an exemplary example of an Art Therapist exploiting a range of materials and techniques including the olfactory senses and a more joyful exploration of materialities including feathers.

Hogan, Susan & Cornish, Shelagh (2014) Unpacking gender in art therapy: The elephant at the art therapy easel, International Journal of Art Therapy, 19:3, 122-134, DOI: 10.1080/17454832.2014.961494

This journal article is part of a national survey conducted around Art Therapists to gain an understanding of how the intersectionalities of gender, race, class (and other factors such as religion) impact on the therapeutic relationship. This was incredibly useful for me in considering my own potential biases and how they may have the potential to impact on the relationship with my future clients. From the Art therapists surveyed it was concluded that generally Art Therapists consider gender at the point of referral and throughout. However, this idea is developed into a subtler postmodern understanding of gender as instead being labelled ‘sex’ which is obviously influenced by Feminist writers such as Judith Butler. The impact of this research is profound for Art Therapy training courses as the authors make it clear how important it may be for courses to offer more work on how gender is actually constructed and why.

Johnstone, L. and Boyle, M. (2018). The Power Threat Meaning Framework: An Alternative Nondiagnostic Conceptual System. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, p.002216781879328.

This journal article and progressive framework is probably one of the most innovative, pioneering and momentous ponderings of the problematic medicalisation of people’s mental wellbeing. The central tenet of Johnstone’s theory is that the current psychiatric model is not fit for purpose due to it’s reliance on theoretical models designed for understanding bodies-not minds. Johnstone calls on an abandonment of the ‘DSM mindset’ that has plagued the field of therapeutic work in lieu of a more integrated, holistic and perspicacious model. Johnstone does not negate positivism’s influence and advances but expertly persuades us of the need for a complete paradigm shift if we are to adequately work with an individual and their own sense of their wellbeing. Johnstone expertly demonstrates how a whole plethora of relational and social ‘adversities’ impact on an individual’s mental health. Assuming pathology is no longer fit for purpose within Johnstone’s groundbreaking structure.

Kuri E. Toward an Ethical Application of Intersectionality in Art Therapy. Art Therapy. 2017;34(3):118-122 DOI: 10.1080/07421656.2017.1358023

Kuri challenges a profession with a large majority of white, middle class women to challenge a tokenistic and shallow understanding and practice of intersectionality. Kuri argues the consequences of globalization and neo-?.≤liberalism have been disastrous and profound: resulting in models which favour ‘market compliance’ above a client’s needs. I value Kuri’s approach as I wish to practice in a way where I firmly identify my own social ‘location’. Intersectionality provides a non-polarising position with a myriad of different perspectives from which to work from. Practicing in an intersectional way requires an ability to be critical of pre-existing structures and an understanding of the colonialist epistemology and ontology surrounding Art Therapy rooted in ‘whiteness’ and being European. Kuri urges white professionals to not coopt intersectionality as merely a piece of ‘political and moral capital’. I too wish to use a framework which capacitates a client to achieving social justice.

Learmonth, M. (2009). The evolution of theory, the theory of evolution: Towards new rationales for art therapy. International Journal of Art Therapy, 14(1), pp.2–10.

DOI: 10.1080/17454830903006075

This journal article reflects some of my own interests in how evolutionary biology can elucidate our understanding of how and why art making is so crucial to us as human beings. Learmouth states “the arts are ubiquitous”; the suggestion is we are inextricably linked to art making and this could only be possible if it gave us a distinct evolutionary advantage as a species. This reflects my own belief that we are all innately creative and therefore my trust in the practice of Art Psychotherapy to provide a space and context in which to unlock this primal archetype present in our collective human unconscious. Learmouth tell us “Art…is so laden with fantasies of cultural superiority and inferiority that..(it) has become…something I can’t do”. We are reminded that for children play and creativity are woven tightly together. Play and the metaphors abundant in creativity are distinctly human traits to be celebrated.

Moon, C. (2000). Art Therapy, Profession or Idea? A Feminist Aesthetic Perspective. Art Therapy, 17(1), pp.7–10. DOI: 10.1080/07421656.2000.10129437

Moon expertly balances the need for an understanding of Art Therapy as a collection of ever changing ideas receptive to it’s continually transitioning environment but also a professional identity. Moon identifies that Art Therapy may always be in the process of defining and re-defining itself. This level of reflexivity and responsiveness to changing contexts and intersections showcases Art Therapies dynamic practice. Moon is not without critique of the ‘profession’ however, citing covert oppression which acts in a biased gatekeeping functionality affecting for example the amount of people who identify as BAME. Moon highlights the predominance of the female within Art Therapy as harnessing a different kind of aesthetic paradigm: creativity, flexibility an understanding of inclusion. I am personally drawn to Moon’s analysis of Art Therapy as a Profession and an Idea because I am passionate about Art Therapy as both an evolving and valid discipline.

Walker, M. (2010). What's a Feminist Therapist to Do? Engaging the Relational Paradox in a Post-Feminist Culture, Women & Therapy, 34:1-2, 38-58, DOI: 10.1080/02703149.2011.532689

This journal article clearly and efficiently interrogates a burgeoning landscape of the ‘language of post-feminism’. Walker is concerned with challenging intrinsic biases we have regarding gender (and also race). How a client might chastise the ‘imperfect’ mother instead of the absent father. That such biases are possible to unfurl safely with a client. Walker heralds the use of Relational Cultural Theory and its ability to challenge the ‘power over paradigm’ shift in society. At the foundation of RCT is the notion that people are innately drawn to connect and it is this connection that provides a therapeutic sustenance. Walker challenges the ‘discrepant’ images we create about women and around race. These ‘well camouflaged mechanisms’ of power can create therapeutic and existential issues for clients well coached in these powerful institutional and societal ‘isms’.

Winnicott, D. (1968). The child, the family, and the outside world. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books.

Although this text is an older tome the central themes echo through contemporary literature in the book’s innate intertextuality. Much of Winnicott’s central themes around context, early attachments and the transitional object abound in authors writing now. Winnicott’s lack of didacticism feels refreshing even with a prevailing modern eye. “By playing, the baby showed…something in himself that could be called …an inner world of imaginative liveliness” (p.79). Winnicott’s important investigations of what it is to be the mother/other are just as relevant today and are used by Beth Hoyes, Helen Omand and Deba Anna Salim. When Winnicott says ‘Destruction is important’, it makes me reflect on the challenge of putting that kind of patient reflexiveness into practice around un-making and non-making in sessions. To be able to embrace the wish to destroy as well as create, the need to sit in stillness as make an object or mark is a challenge for any practitioner. Winnicott clearly shows us that this is the necessity for any true empathic insight.

Stace, S.M. (2014) Therapeutic Doll Making in Art Psychotherapy for Complex Trauma, Art Therapy, 31:1, 12-20, DOI: 10.1080/07421656.2014.873689

This journal article is a precise analysis of how the ‘plasticity’ of materials and human-like qualities of dolls can provide a tangible object to explore the difficult dynamics that C-PTSD often conceals. Stace offers a broad range for references to support and elucidate the main body of her text which is in an in-depth case study of a client who found the use of making dolls incredibly transformative in her own art therapy. Stace asserts that is the creation of ‘meaning that can be crucial in alleviating symptoms of C-PTSD. The externalization of internal states through the doll is perceived as being one of the most emancipating parts of this work. I have a keen interest in trauma and complex trauma and this article provided a platform for me to delve into a particular area of ‘meaning making’. The autonomy the client experiences through realizing her internal struggle in a series of supposedly inanimate objects clearly shows the power of doll and figure making as a means of supporting those who have experienced C-PTSD.

Huet, Val (1997) ‘Ageing: another tyranny? Art therapy with older women, Hogan, S. 1997. (Ed). Feminist approaches to art therapy. London: Routledge p125-139.

I am a feminist and this whole edition is a thorough and wide ranging exposition of how Art Therapy practice can support these approaches. Huet’s article explores aging and the menopause through the lens of one of her groups for older women. Huet expertly navigates through the multitudinous issues that aging can bring up for women including their own mortality, sexuality and self esteem. This text is also a lesson in transference and counter transference that Huet herself experienced whilst running this group. Huet explores how the menopause is reflected in society: a less than favourable experience for most menopausal women. Regularly dismissed and ignored as their perceived sexual ‘potency’ has dissipated in a society obsessed by youth. Huet highlights the lack of research and evidence around aging by women for women. The group that Huet worked with find their individual and collective voice through experimentation with materials.

Rosen, M., Pitre, R. and Johnson, D.R. (2016). Developmental Transformations Art Therapy: An Embodied, Interactional Approach. Art Therapy, 33(4), pp.195–202.

This article cleverly explicates the transformative model of working directly with a client in an interactional way where joint art-making is encouraged. Zierer’s work is heavily referenced, including her use of the ‘push test’. The text explores how this intrusion/intervention can be safely managed between the client and therapist. It explores the notion that an Art Therapist can be a ‘challenger’ as well as empathetic. However, upon reading this text I felt I would utilise this method rather more intuitively instead of in a ‘take it turns’ model. The article illustrates how this receptive and reflexive technique of making art more symbiotically can elucidate surprising therapeutic results. This level of ‘heightened engagement’ initiates an intimacy between the client and therapist.

Der Kolk, V. (2015). The body keeps the score: mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma. London: Penguin Books

This book has been profoundly important to me personally and also in regards to my training to be an Art Therapist. It is an authoritative study in how to transform trauma into something more manageable for the person who has experienced it. It includes Van De Kolk’s own inimitable career in psychology alongside other research and clinical discoveries in the field of trauma. He highlights the importance of art therapy and Polyvagal theory is discussed and the importance of neuroscience shedding new light on how trauma operates and how it might be salved. However, Van De Kolk particularly highlights the importance of whole body interventions: yoga, meditation and EMDR are all cited as crucial tools. Crucially he never cites one modality of approach as he acknowledges everyone’s journey through trauma is individual. The transformative perspective he adopts shows that it is often through great fragility that we find great strength.    

[gododdinman-blog]

Sir John Kirk and the Resonance of Slavery

Slavery as a tangible fact is not something one would particularly associate with Angus, more than any other part of the British Isles, though the county of course had its connections with that trade. Interesting and little-known material about the decent and doubtless God-fearing lairds who quietly owned slaves far away, back in the day, can be unearthed through web sites like Legacies of British Slave Ownership, and though it may seem churlish to name and shame those associated with that business after all these years (people who in themselves doubtless led complex and rich lives), it can still be instructive as an eye-opener.

  Among the interesting data is that concerning former slave owners who claimed compensation from the British government when slavery in the British Empire was abolished and they were financially disadvantaged. A cursory search through the records reveals the follows Angus folk as former slave owners:  David Langlands of Balkemmock, Tealing, Alexander Erskine of Balhall, David Lyon of Balintore Castle, George Ogilvie of Langley Park, James Alexander Pierson of The Guynd, Thomas Renny Strachan of Seaton House, St Vigeans,  Mary Russell of Bellevue Cottage, David McEwan and James Gray of Dundee, the 7th Earl of Airlie.

There is more information surrounding the Cruickshank family, who lived at Keithock House, Stracathro House and Langley Park.  Alexander Cruickshank of Keithock was born in 1800 and married his cousin, Mary Cruickshank of Langley Park (formerly Egilsjohn or - colloquially - Edzell's John).  In the middle of the 19th century Alexander unsuccessfully attempted to claim compensation for the loss of slaves owned on the Langley Park estate on the island of St Vincent.  The whole family's fortunes were inextricably linked with slavery.  Patrick jointly owned the estates of Richmond, Greenhill and Mirton in St Vincent with his brother James who was compensated £23,000 by the government following slavery abolition in 1833. The St Vincent estates had more than 800 slaves.  Originally from Wartle in Aberdeenshire, the money to buy the Egilsjohn estate in Angus came from a fortune made in the Caribbean; its name was even changed to commemorate the St Vincent estate name of Langley.  The Angus estates of Stracathro and Keithock followed.  But we are told (Baronage of Angus and Mearns, p. 64) that Alexander Cruickshank's 'affairs eventually got embarrassed - and he returned to Demerara, where he shortly afterwards made his demise, leaving a son and daughter.'

  Emigration to the colonies was by no means a passport of quick riches to those who went there with slender means to begin with.  John Landlands, son of a tenant farmer from Haughs of Finavon, went to Jamaica in 1749 and found that his promised employment did not exist, though he was helped to secure another post at the vividly named Treadways Maggoty estate.  In time he acquired his own coffee plantation, complete with valuable slaves.  On his death he provided for his mistress/housekeeper and his natural son born to her, but the estate of Roseberry was burdened by debt and had to be disposed of by his cousin back home in Angus.

  There was less known commercial speculation in the slave trade in Angus ports than in other places, though there are records held in Montrose Museum of a business deal from 1751 concerning the ship Potomack, whose master Thomas Gibson struck a deal with merchants Thomas Douglas and Co to travel with cargo to Holland and thence to west Africa and there pick up slaves for the North American market. Researchers reckon that some 31 Montrose vessels were engaged in human slave trafficking, though records survive for only four ships (the other three being the Success, the Delight, and the St George).

  One Montrose family of the 18th century who went on to great things financially were the Coutts family, ancestors of the private banking dynasty which migrated to London later and dealt with the fortunes of royals and the nobility.  John Coutts (born 1643) was Lord Provost of the Angus burgh five times between 1677 and 1688 (having been made a councillor in 1661).  the family were involved in the Virginia tobacco trade and doubtless incidentally involved to some extent in slave ownership.  John's third son Thomas went to London and was one of the promoters of the 'Company of Scotland, trading to Africa and the Indies', better known as the company who initiated the doomed Darien Scheme.  A grandson of the first John Coutts was another John (son of Patrick), among those in the family who left Montrose for business opportunities further south.

John Kirk - Doctor! Botanist! Knight! Our Man in Zanzibar!

  There were few places as strange to the intrepid foreigner in the mid 19th century as Zanzibar, even in an age when the whole continent of Africa held a jewel-like fascination for Europeans.  The island was just off the continental coast but was truly a place apart.  It had in effect been colonised and annexed before any Western interest in the place by an Arab dynasty from the north. The ruler of Oman, Seyyid Said, made the African island his capital in 1838 and brilliantly maintained his power through diplomacy with the British East India Company and a cannily managed business acumen.  The Arab management of African slaves more than matched the newer European-sponsored slave trade operating in west Africa.  Throughout Seyyid Said's rule it continued unabated and Zanzibar was its unashamed fulcrum, dispatching human cargo and attendant misery across the Indian Ocean.  Alastair Hazell states that the mid-19th century population of the island was possibly 100,000, or which around half were slaves.  Said had personally transformed his new centre of operations 'from a mere backwater, a slave market with a fort, to the largest and most prosperous trading city of the western Indian Ocean'.

  Gold, ivory and gum copal were other products which flowed out of the continent via the island, but it was the process of the oldest institution on Zanzibar, the slave market outside the Customs House, which was the most outstanding element of that market place to outsiders; here described by the English traveller Sir Richard Burton.  It was a place, he said:

where millions of dollars annually change hands under the foulest of sheds, a long, low mat-roof, supported by two dozen tree-stems... It is conspicuous as the centre of circulation, the heart from and to which twin streams of blacks are ever ebbing and flowing, whilst the beach and waters opposite it are crowded with shore boats.

  The slave market was in the centre of town and here every year many thousands of bagham, untrained slaves, were tethered and publicly auctioned.  In the mid-1850s, Hazell tells us, able-bodied young men could be bought for $4-$12 - 'about the prince of a donkey'.  Girls and women were sold for sex, passed on many times  via different owner/abusers.  A premium was paid for 'exotics' from India or fair haired unfortunates from as far afield as the Caucasus.

                 The Boy from Barry

Step up John Kirk.  The latest biographer of John Kirk - Alastair Hazell - makes the fundamental mistake of stating that Kirk was born in Barry, in Fife!  This is a shame because his book, The Last Slave Market, is a well-researched account of this important figure who did much personally to end the intolerable anomaly of Zanzibar's slaving in a time when many cynically turned a blind eye to it. John was the third of his name in succession, following his grandfather (a baker) and father, who was born in St Andrews in 1795 (which perhaps explains Hazell's error).  The Rev. Kirk was appointed minister of Barry in June 1824 and transferred to nearby Arbirlot in 1837.  In the religious turmoil of the times he joined the Free Church and was minister of the Free Church in Barry from 1843 until his death in 1858.  The minister was 'a man of cultivated mind, of a deportment becoming his high calling, and of a conversation that savoured of the things of Christ'.  His wife was Christian Guthrie, daughter of the Rev. Alexander Carnegie, minister of Inverkeilor.

John Kirk as a young doctor.

  The youngest  John was he second of four children, born  19 December 1832  and must have inherited much of his iron-clad morality from his parents. The only other sibling who seems to have attained any prominence was his elder brother, Alexander Carnegie Kirk, born in 1830.  He became a noted naval engineer, but unlike John did not take part in any kind of public life, dying in Glasgow in 1892.

The explorer's eldest brother.

Early Career and Into Africa

  Kirk qualified as a doctor and went on to serve in the Crimea War in 1855.  (His interest in botany was  evident in Edinburgh, where he studied in the faculty of arts at first before switching to medicine.)  Learning Turkish, he travelled widely in the Middle East, mainly pursuing botanical interests. His most significant appointment was that of a naturalist accompanying the famous David Livingstone on an expedition to east Africa in 1858.  This second expedition of Livingstone's, exploring the Zambesi region, did not go entirely smoothly.  Livingstone was no great communicator and preferred either his own company or that of native Africans.  His brother Charles was also part of the party and was a more petty character than David, arguing with colleagues and dismissing some of them.  Kirk generally got on tolerably well with Livingstone - both were doctors and of course Scots - and also accepted his plans and decisions even when these looked ill-judged and even foolhardy.  But Livingstone, driven by instinct and his own demons, was at times looked upon as a madman by his younger colleague.  On 18 April 1874 he was one of the pall-bearers who carried Livingstone's coffin into a funeral ceremony in Westminster Abbey.  (This was despite the fact that Livingstone's chief mythologiser, Henry Morton Stanley, tried his damnedest to blacken's Kirk's name on the false basis that the doctor had not done all he could to assist the great man in his last expedition.)

  John Kirk returned to Britain in 1863, but three years later he was back in a different part of Africa, appointed as a medical officer in Zanzibar.  He soon became Assistant Consul and then Resident.  He had been appointed Consul in 1873, succeeding Henry Adrian Churchill, who had been actively working towards the abolition of the slave market on the island.  Churchill's health broke down to such an extent that Kirk advised him to return to the U.K. in 1870.

  The final defeat of the slave trade in the island was accomplished by Kirk's astonishing guile and nerve. While the years in which he served primarily as a doctor in the consulate were quiet and he took no active part in public life or against slavery, there was one incident which marked him out as a risk taker.  This was in 1866 when he joined in the successful attempt to smuggle the sultan's sister out of the territory.  Seyidda Salme had become pregnant by a German and was at risk of death if she had remained in Zanzibar.  For much of the time, Kirk pursued his own interests in Africa, collecting information about botany, trade, slavery, in an even handed and non-judgemental fashion.  More of a pragmatist than the strange visionary Livinstone, he was caught between the rock and hard place of the British government and the East India Company, which often had differing ideas about slavery and much else.  In 1873 he was put in an invidious position of receiving two contradictory instructions from London.  The first ordered him in no uncertain terms to give the Sultan the ultimatum that he should close the slave market and cease all trade in slaves, or else the British government would blockade the island.  The second order warned Kirk that no blockade was to be enforced, for fear that it would drive the territory to crave the protection of the French.  Kirk only showed the first communication to the Sultan, with the result that Barghash caved in within two weeks and the slave market was closed forever.

  Despite the best efforts of Kirk and his successors, slavery actually surreptitiously survived the closure of Zanzibar's public slave market. Special Commissioner Donald Mackenzie visited the island and its neighbour Pemba in the last decade of the 19th century and found that slavery was still flourishing in the agricultural estates:

In Zanzibar a good many people had been telling me how happy and

contented the Slaves were in the hands of the Arabs; in fact, they would

not desire their freedom. At Chaki Chaki I walked into a tumble-down

old prison. Here I found a number of prisoners, male and female,

heavily chained and fettered. I thought surely these men and women

must be dreadful criminals, or murderers, or they must have committed

similar crimes and are now awaiting their doom. I inquired of them all

why they were there. The only real criminal was one who had stolen a

little rice from his master. All the others I found were wearing those

ponderous chains and fetters because they had attempted to run away

from their cruel masters and gain their freedom— a very eloquent commentary on the happiness of the Slaves!

The British Consulate, Zanzibar.

Kirk's Later Years and Legacy

Kirk returned to Britain finally in 1886, settling in Kent. His awards included the K.C.M.G., G.C.M.G., K.C.B., plus the Patron's Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. The welfare of Africa still concerned him and in 1889-90 he attended the Brussels Africa Conference as British Plenipotentiary.    In later years John Kirk grew progressively blind but he maintained his interest in the natural world. He died at the age of 89 and was buried in St Nicholas's Churchyard in Sevenoaks.  Among the tributes paid to him was one by Frederick Lugard, Governor General of Nigeria:  'For Kirk I had a deep affection which I know was reciprocated.  He was to me the ideal of a wise and sympathetic administrator on whom I endeavoured to model my own actions and to whose inexhaustible fund of knowledge I constantly appealed.'

  Substantial records survive concerning Kirk, including the journals he kept on the expedition with Livingstone,  Apart from that there are his contributions and discoveries in zoology, biology, a substantial corpus of photographs(over 250).  He maintained close connection with Kew Gardens until his death. The Kirk Papers have been secured for the future in the National Library of Scotland.  As far as I know, there is no memorial to Sir John Kirk at Barry, but if not,  there definitely should be.

Sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Sir Barghash bin Sa'id (ruled 1870-1888).

Selected Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kirk_(explorer)

John Langlands: An Aberlemno Slave Owner

C. F. H., 'Obituary:  'Sir John Kirk,' Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygeine, volume 15, issue 5-6 (15 December 1921), p. 202.

Hazell, Alastair, The Last Slave Market:  Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to End the African Slave Trade (London, 2011).

Low, James L., Notes On The Coutts Family (Montrose, 1892).

MacGregor Peter, David, The Baronage of Angus and Mearns (Edinburgh, 1856).

Mackenzie, Donald, A Report on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Zanzibar, Pemba, and the Mainland Protectorates of East Africa (London, 1895).

McBain, J. M., Eminent Arbroathians (Arbroath, 1897).

Scott, Hew, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae (volume 5, new edition, Edinburgh, 1925).

Wild, H., 'Sir John Kirk,' Kirkia, volume 1 (1960-61), pp. 5-10.