Sunday, December 14, 2014

Study Notes: Dec 7-13, 2014: "How Steampunk Screws with Victorian Gender Norms"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

Also check out: 

Homework for next week: 
"Queer Cogs"
  • "I often get the sense that they wonder why a 'serious' academic like myself is interested in steampunk culture and literature-- that I have crossed some sort of academic nerd line in the sand and may be slightly strange for doing so." 
  • "Because so many of these cultural ideas and institutions [homosexuality as an identity, drag, &C] are being hashed out during this time [the 1800s], they're often a bit untidy, giving us the ability to see the inner workings and motivations of why these concepts became what they are today." 
  • "Much like a seamstress ripping out stitches on a garment and putting it all back together again with a few key additions that entirely alter the effect of the item, steampunk takes apart the nineteenth century to see what makes it tick and then, turning it just so, gives us a transformed and newly unfamiliar past and present."


"Aesthetic/sensual attraction and sexual attraction"
  • It's basically this. That sums it all up. 

"How Steampunk Screws with Victorian Gender Norms"
  • "In that period [the nineteenth century], for example, scholars began to study human sexuality, drag became popular, and the new technology of photography moved pornography toward the forms we know today. The women's movement also exploded. In Hager's view, steampunk imaginatively visits a time when now-ossified concepts around sex and identity were new and messy, offering a 'deliciously flexible space for sexual and gender identities.'"
  • "Stock worries about the neo-Victorian aesthetic serving as an excuse for twenty-first-century sexism. She describes a 'retrosexual' nostalgia for the manly men and ladylike women who supposedly thrived before feminism ruined everything."
  •  "At a deeper level, steampunk unsettles. It's not just that 'masculine' and 'feminine' categories are often mixed or violated. It's also that the very ideas of masculinity, femininity, and normalcy draw attention to themselves in steampunk contexts and invite people to think, hmm, maybe that's not an absolute."

"Blooms of Banjeli"
  • "The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa have produced iron and fashioned it into tools, weapons and ornaments for more than 2000 years."
  • "This knowledge [ironworking and blacksmithing] has been carefully guarded by particular sub-groups of metallurgist-smelters and smiths-- whose skills have made them the right hand of kings and their products the cornerstone of African economies and social structures."
  • "The scale of the industry [in the Bassar region] led to a high degree of specialization, so that individual villages specialized in different metallurgical processes: smelting, refining, smithing, mining, and charcoal making. Bassari iron was traded in the form of blooms, that is, raw iron in the characteristic horseshoe shape... As elsewhere in Africa, iron circulated not only as a raw material but also as a currency."
  • "Locally produced iron was widely believed to make stronger and more durable hoes and axes than metal from abroad, a belief common to many African peoples."
  • "Although iron has not been regularly smelted since the 1920s, a few of the elders, now in their seventies and eighties, had observed or assisted smelters in their youth. When they die, the knowledge will disappear completely since no young men are learning the craft; already, they have lost the skills that come with constant practice."
  • "A reconstruction, arranged and paid for by outsiders, will always be an exercise in artificiality, and one can never be sure what may have been forgotten or what may be deliberately withheld. The same is true of information obtained through interviews." 
  • "Behind particular practices are patterns of universality."
  • "We were under the same sexual interdictions as the men taking part, that is, we were forbidden to have sexual relations until the smelts were completed. In a sense this gave us the status of provisional males, since women were otherwise excluded from the smelting site." 
  • "Bassari iron-making, like iron-making elsewhere in Africa, was family-based. A man-- and it was exclusively a male occupation-- became a smelter by being born into a smelting lineage and then by lengthy apprenticeship under a master smelter. His training consisted of learning the practical details of the craft plus the rituals and medicines that were essential to the process. Formerly the entire team building and operating a furnace would have been smelters; the head of the team would customarily have been the oldest member of the family using the furnace. Mining and charcoal making were also family affairs." 
  • Consecration of the ground and the furnace would be made with drops of millet beer, beside a pile of fragments of old furnaces. 
  • "The enterprise would involve not just spirits but also the owners and metallurgists of pre-existing furnaces on this site. Indeed, bis of old furnace were incorporated into the new one. Like a living being, the furnace would have a genealogical connection with earlier ones." 
  • "The incorporation of plants, trees and animals into the furnace-- the incorporation of the living world-- reflects a holistic view of the unity of creation and a complex understanding of correspondences between domains of living matter. As the furnace was transformed into a living being it would assume some of the characteristics of the materials embedded into it."
  • "Nudity is often associated with key undertakings in Africa, representing unmediated contact between man and the powers and spirits that control the world, as well as an identification with the first ancestors. Formerly Bassari smelters were required to work bare-chested and to wear only a leather loin cloth and a hide apron; elsewhere they might be required to work entirely naked." 
  • "The furnace was constructed of clay mixed with grass (n'som), formed into flattened loaves and placed vertically next to each other in courses, an extremely common building technique in West Africa. The exterior and interior were then smoothed over with additional clay and the outside dusted with dry earth."
  • As the furnace took shape, it was regarded more and more as a human being... The mastersmelter was regarded as the 'father' of the furnace; he and his assistants would also become its husbands as the furnace became more explicitly a female being who would deliver the iron bloom from her womb." 
  • "Technologies of radical transformation, of which iron-making is a prime example, involve not only complex skills but a necessary framework of explanation. In pre-industrial societies a constant point of reference is the human, the lived world of the body. And because that body is genderized, gender becomes a means by which the world is experienced and categorized." 
  • "The view that sexual activity on the part of anyone coming into contact with the furnace can ruin the smelt seems to be intimately related to the notion that the furnace is analogous to a pregnant woman. Sexual relations on the part of those who are her symbolic husbands would be equivalent to adultery, and adultery during pregnancy is widely believed to cause a difficult birth or a malformed child, in this case an aborted smelt." Setting where smiths have to remain unmarried and celibate. 
  • "It might be argued, too, that the exclusion of wives and daughters helps maintains proprietary and industrial secrets, functioning much like a patent system for the protection of valuable technical information from lose [sic] to outside groups via exogamous marriage or kinship ties." 

"Monopoly is Theft"
  • The origins of Monopoly date not to 1933 in an "unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker" Charles Darrow, but to 1903 in the Georgist actress Lizzie Magie. 
  • "Magie called her invention The Landlord's Game, and when it was released in 1906 it looked remarkably similar to what we know today as Monopoly."
  • "The Landlord Game's chief entertainment was the same as in Monopoly: competitors were to be saddled with debt and ultimately reduced to financial ruin, and only one person, the supermonopolist, would stand tall in the end. The players could, however, vote to do something not officially allowed in Monopoly: cooperate. Under this alternative rule set, they would pay land rent not to a property's title holder but into a common pot-- the rest effectively socialized so that, as Magie later wrote, 'Prosperity is achieved.'"
  • "Shared freely as an invention in the public domain, as much a part of the cultural commons as chess or checkers, The Landlord's Game was, in effect, the property of anyone who learned how to play it." 
  • "Richard Marinaccio: "Monopoly players around the kitchen table think the game is all about accumulation. You know, making a lot of money. But the real object is to bankrupt your opponents as quickly as possible. To have just enough so that everybody else has nothing." 
  • "In this view, Monopoly is not about unleashing creativity and innovation among many competing parties, nor is it about opening markets and expanding trade or creating wealth through hard work and enlightened self-interest... It's about shutting down the marketplace.... The initial phase of competition in Monopoly, the free-trade phase that happens to be the most exciting part of the game to watch, is really about ending free trade and nixing competition in order to replace it with rent-seeking." 
  • Andrew Carnegie: "The greatest astonishment of my life was the discovery that the man who does the work is not the man who gets rich." 
  • Henry George: "It is the riddle which the Spinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress goes but to build up great fortunes... progress is not real and cannot be permanent." 
  • His book, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth-- The Remedy, "provided a sweeping answer to the riddle: land monopoly was the reason progress brought greater poverty. As American civilization advanced, as populations grew and aggregated in and around cities, land became scarce, prices soared, and the majority who had to live and work on the land paid those prices to the minority who owned it. For the laboring classes, rent slavery was the result."
  • "Private property in land... was the original sin of Western civilization." Henry George: "In California our land titles go back to the Supreme Government of Mexico, who took from the Spanish King, who took from the Pope, when he by a stroke of the pen divided lands yet to be discovered between the Spanish or Portuguese-- or if you please they rest upon conquest. In the eastern states they go back to treaties with Indians and grants from English kings; in Louisiana to the government of France; in Florida to the government of Spain; while in England they go back to the Norman conquerors. Everywhere, not a right which obliges, but to a force which compels." 
  • This phenomenon could not simply be undone, however. "Land seizure and nationalization, he [George] believed, would lead to tyranny." Confiscating rent was the way to go. 
  • "In line with classical economics from the time of Adam Smith, George defined rent as the unearned income owners derived from the rising value of land, meaning it was distinct from the labor that went into property in the form of improvements, the construction of homes and offices and factories, and the cultivation of fields."
  • Henry George was lauded by Mark Twain, John Dewey, and Leo Tolstoy. 
  • Leo Tolstoy: "The method of solving the land problem has been elaborated by Henry George to such a degree of perfection that, under the existing State organization and compulsory taxation, it is impossible to invent any other better, more just, practical, and peaceful solution." 
  • "Arden had been founded as a Georgist experiment in 1900, four years after a failed attempt to implement the single-tax system across the state [of Delaware]. It was envisioned as a self-sufficient utopia on 160 acres of woodland, and it soon attracted artists, poets, actors, anarchists, and freethinkers. Upton Sinclair had a cottage there, dubbed the Jungalow. Ardenites were barred from 'owning' their plots, instead purchasing ninety-nine-year leases on cooperatively held land. It didn't matter whether the residents built mansions or shacks: they were taxed only on the underlying value of the land, often at very high rates. This revenue paid for roads, parks, a commons, playgrounds, and utilities." 
  • A dense history of the game's transformation from The Landlord's Game to modern Monopoly is here. 
  • The irony was not lost on Anspach. Before being monopolized by a single person working in tandem with a corporation, Monopoly had in fact been 'invented' by many people-- not just Magie and the Raifords but also the unknown player who gave the name its moniker and the unsung Ardenite who had perhaps aided Magie in advancing its rules. The game that today stresses the ruthlessness of the individual and defines victory as the impoverishment of others was the product of communal labor." 
  • "University of Missouri-Kansas economics professor Michael Hudson has noted that property tax today functions in exactly the opposite fashion from George's proposed single tax. The Federal Reserve Board is responsible for assessing the total market value of real estate in the United States, Hudson says, yet it routinely produces 'nonsensical undervaluations of land.' In fact, the FRB mostly ignores land itself; instead it considers buildings and capital improvements as the chief markers of value, basing its calculations on the historical cost of original construction and the replacement cost of structures. Land value is an afterthought... Hudson has conducted some of the few authoritative analyses of the FRB's sleight of hand, the tax losses that result, and how it benefits the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors, which together have lobbied the FRB to maintain its approach."
  • "Curtis also didn't think much of Arden's Georgist experiment, saying it had degenerated into something of a failure. The leaseholders, he told me, had learned to game the system by electing land assessors who based their assessments on the town's budget needs rather than the land's real market value, and so they avoided paying taxes at appropriate rates. 'To be frank,' he said, 'the people in Arden today don't give a damn about Henry George.'"  

Miscellany
  • G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. "We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive, it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post." 
  • Robin Hanson: "The space of possible values is vast, with most points far from us." 
  • Adam Harvey: "I would like to introduce this idea to people, that surveillance is not bulletproof. That there are ways to interact with it and there are ways to aestheticize it." 
  • Reverend Billy Sunday: "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn out prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent." For context, Sunday was speaking in reference to the Prohibition. We all see how well that went, and this quote-- and the truth of the Prohibition-- serves well as a cautionary tale for others that might seek to legislate morality. 
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