“Realist representation minimizes contradiction. The conventional narrative structure introduces disruptions in the social order, and then through plot and character development—a development that elicits audience identification—the play or text arrives at a narrative closure that re-establishes order.”
—Dorinne Kondo
Existence is language, and language is always a matter of politics.
“Many scientists and ecologists have recently taken the lead in trying to persuade us, by an appeal to the facts, of [a] lethal threat to the natural world. It remains to be seen whether merely to know the facts is enough, or whether it will take a revival and dissemination of some equivalent to the Romantic vision of nature to enable us, in Shelley’s great phrase, ‘to imagine that which we know.’ It seems likely that only such a motive power—such an emotive power—will suffice to release the energies, the invention, and the will to make the sacrifices that are needed if we are to salvage this no-longer-quite-so-green earth while it is still fit to live on.”
—M. H. Abrams, from the essay “This Green Earth: The Vision of Nature in the Romantic Poets” from The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays.
Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.
Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.
Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats
“It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
“It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires’ doormats. I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.”
“Electoral photography is therefore above all the acknowledgment of something deep and irrational co-extensive with politics. What is transmitted through the photograph of the candidate are not his plans, but his deep motives, all his family, mental, even erotic circumstances, all this style of life of which he is at once the product, the exemplar, and the habit. It is obvious that what most of our candidates offer us through their likeness is a type of social setting, the spectacular comfort of the family, legal and religious norms, the suggestion of innately owning such items of bourgeois property as Sunday Mass, xenophobia, steak and chips, cuckold jokes, in short, what we call an ideology. Needless to say the use of electoral photography presupposes a kind of complicity: a photograph is a mirror, what we are asked to read is the familiar, the known; it offers to the voter his own likeness, but clarified, exalted, superbly elevated into a type. This glorification is in fact the very definition of the photogenic: the voter is at once expressed and heroized, he is invited to elect himself.”
From Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, 1957
Source: motherjones
“Acts themselves alone are history and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon, nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutach, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish! all that is not action is not worth reading. Tell me the What; I do not want you to tell me the Why, and the How; I can find that out myself, as well as you can, and I will not be fooled by you into opinions, that you please to impose, to disbelieve what you think improbable or impossible.”
William Blake, Descriptive Catalogue, E543-44.
The UB faculty specializations range from satanic practice, black magic and cultural monstrosities (like serial killers) to “real” and imagined vampires and zombies, as well as the bizarre Spanish gothic period in which our fascination with the utterly horrible is grounded. One expert includes greedy bankers and environmentally destructive corporations among the monsters of our time.
All of these experts, described below, can discuss not only what frightens us, but how and why we create monsters to help us cope with cultural anxiety.
John Edgar Browning is an Arthur A. Schomburg Fellow and PhD candidate in American Studies at UB. He has written several books and conducts research on the vampire. He specializes in the Dracula figure in film, literature, television and popular culture.
“Vampires and monsters — they’re just us,” Browning says. “They’re what we aspire to be, what we’re told to hate most about ourselves, what we secretly yearn for, but shouldn’t.”
David Castillo, PhD, associate professor and chair of the UB Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, specializes in an era that produced unusually grotesque, terrifying and fantastic literature.
Castillo can discuss the historical roots of supernatural visitation, terrifying visions, haunted houses and man-made horrors not unlike those we read about online or in the tabloid press today. Castillo can describe why we love this stuff, what it means “really,” and how old and creepy our fascination actually is.
His latest book, “Baroque Horrors” presents tales of mutilation, mutation, monstrosity, murder and mayhem that, he says, “offer a way for us to understand our own modern fears and their monstrous offspring, and new ways to think about broad questions of political history and relate them to the modern age.”
David Schmid, PhD, professor of English, focuses on cultural monstrosities — those among us whom we perceive as “monsters” and the role they play in our self-perception as individual and social beings. Although his initial work in this field focused on the serial killer as an American popular-culture figure, he also studies how our society safely represents and addresses the anxieties of our time through the use of other monsters, such as zombies and vampires.
“The monsters I’m most interested in are the ones that exist in plain sight,” Schmid says. “Sure, I write about the traditional Halloween and pop culture fare — zombies, vampires and so on — but I never want to lose sight of the fact that the most distinctive and numerous monsters in any culture are the ones that we don’t immediately recognize.
“I conduct research on killers and their place in our cultural imagination but I also want to extend that focus to other monstrous figures and institutions: those whose apparent normality makes them no less destructive and murderous: the abusers at Abu Ghraib, the banks that are destroying lives while reaping record profits and the corporations who are poisoning the planet for their bottom line.”
