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GOATReads: Literature

“The Door’s Still Locked”: Fiction after Fascism

What unites Jordan Peele’s Us, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (remade into a Hulu series), and the most recently viral Severance? We might call this a new genre: Labor-as-Horror, given rise, perhaps, by how much “labor” has been in the headlines. There are varying interpretations: It can be a horrible thing (i.e. migrant or child labor); it can be a necessary thing under horrible attack (i.e. Trump’s labor cuts; AI’s replacement of humans); or it can itself be “horror” (i.e. Severance as an indictment of American work culture). “Labor” forces us to ask: Who has power? “Horror” forces us to ask: Who is the monster? And the combination of the two, “Labor-as-Horror,” tells us to beware the uncomfortable fractures in our otherwise ordinary work. What if, in fact, labor is a horror? Might the uncomfortable be a euphemism for the horrific? And might the fractures be bellwethers of actual collapse—of society, or safety, or everything we think we know? Or, perhaps, are we already living in that collapse? In 2024, shortly before the US collapsed into its own panic of federal layoffs, job cuts, and halted funding—what CNN called a labor “bloodbath”—two novels were translated into English. Alia Trabucco Zerán’s Clean and Michele Mari’s Verdigris offer Chilean and Italian examples of Labor-as-Horror. And no wonder, set as they are in modern-day Santiago and 1969’s Nasca, respectively. More specifically, Clean and Verdigris are set in the states of Chile and Italy after the collapse of their fascist governments. As their characters move through their everyday work, this history of fascism is simply fact, air, breath. Clean centers around the testimony of the housemaid Estela, assumed to be a murderer, while Verdigris is about the declining memory of the old groundskeeper “Felice: a true monster.” It is within the details of Estela and Felice’s work—as domestic workers—that the horror emerges: “Stiff, forced smile[s] which are really ‘grimace[s] of terror,’” a laundry of “shirts with bloodstains,” the “mass slaughter” of slugs in the garden, and lettuce heads with “voices chattering in French.” The novels move toward revelations of death, destruction, and injustices obscured. In this way, the features of their work become structural and emotional fractures, and these fractures become horrific reflections of the persisting “social fissures” of the Pinochet and Mussolini regimes. For Estela and Felice—as for Chile and Italy—fascism is in the past. And yet its horrors endure. Clean is narrated by a housemaid, Estela; throughout the novel, she is being interrogated for the death of her employer’s daughter. It’s written in choppy, beguiling prose, akin to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and mirroring Scheherazade’s storytelling in Arabian Nights. Estela’s narration is filled with macabre reflections on life and death, imbued with visceral descriptions of bodily or emotional violation and, always, dread. One gets the feeling that Estela’s life is on the line: She wants to tell a good story; she wants to say something meaningful about death, society, and the family that employed her; she wants to be listened to; and she keeps asking, “Can you hear me?” Estela states at the beginning of the novel, “I’m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you’re going to let me out of here.” But this promise, by the novel’s end, collapses. “Hello?” Estela asks after she has finished her story. “I’m in here. The door’s still locked.” The entire project of Clean is, in fact, a rumination on collapse. The novel begins with an epigraph from Albert Camus’s The Fall, and Estela’s recounting ends with a rock being thrown into the air. She laments, “I didn’t hear it fall.” For the entirety of the novel, readers are likewise waiting for the moment to “drop”—for the little girl, Julia, to die. Although written like a mystery, Clean holds no surprises, only the anxious and uncomfortable fractures that crop up in Estela’s daily, monotonous work: the hiding of a stray dog, who Estela is later forced to kill; Julia’s father’s strange confession one night, which Estela is forced to listen to; Julia’s mother, toasting “cheers” to her guests immediately after mistreating Estela. These events don’t serve a specific plot, as much as they build malaise and the terrifying realization that we are all trapped, alongside Estela, in the story, the interrogation room, and the social system of labor. Indeed, if there is any surprise in Clean at all, it is that neither the “how” nor the “why” of Julia’s death—the entire reason for Estela’s confession—are ever fully revealed. “What did the cause matter?” Estela asks. The point is the collapse. (Of safety, the promise of freedom, and the previous conviction that we might “get used to life there.”) “The damage was already done,” Estela says, “It’s important you understand. Spilled blood can’t return to its source. Just as a lifeless body will eventually sink underwater. Just as the crack that opened up that day would be impossible to mend.” This impossibility might have been top of mind for Trabucco Zerán, who belongs to “a generation of writers who were children during the Pinochet era but largely came of age after the democratic transition,” explains Caroline A. Miranda. “Even as they have tasted political freedom, the legacy of the dictatorship has followed them into adulthood: the missing who never returned, as well as an economic system and a constitution molded by the military regime that is still used to govern the country.” How, then, could one not connect Estela’s warning to Chile’s fascist past? It is a distinctive and perhaps incriminating time, then, for Trabucco Zerán’s Clean to come to English-speaking audiences, and especially to the United States, where fascism is on the rise. There are obvious resonances between Pinochet and Trump: their carefully constructed legal immunity; their use of propaganda and conspiracy; their refusal to accept any election results not in their favor. Most blatantly, Trump is now echoing Pinochet’s “disappearings”: the one-thousand-plus people who Pinochet’s dictatorship kidnapped and killed, leaving no record of their fate. Now, only two years after Chile began uncovering what it could of these disappeared people, the US government kidnapped and disappeared a green-card holder, pro-Palestinian organizer and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil’s case was the first out of a series of many attempts to deport, detain, and disappear not only pro-Palestinian activists but also migrants, dissenters, and people of color. The use of the word “disappear” as a verb with a passive object is vital: not just “Khalil disappeared” but “the Trump administration disappeared Khalil,” or “Khalil was disappeared (by the government).” Khalil is turned into the passive object that is disappeared, rather than the sentence’s subject. He is stripped of grammatical agency, just as he is stripped of his political agency and legal rights. The horror, of course, is that what happens merely grammatically is, then, what happens in real life. This use of “disappear” is often credited to Pinochet and threatens not just death or detainment but the literal quashing of one’s existence, voice, and memory. It is consequential and oppressive: an act of terror. In Chile (and in Spanish) it identifies victims of the Pinochet regime, known as “Los Desaparecidos” (The Disappeared). And in Clean, it is the apparatus upon which the novel’s thriller/horror element depends. Estela is afraid of disappearing. “Can you hear me?” she asks in the second sentence of the novel. “Can you hear me?” she asks again in the second-to-last sentence. Estela is constantly concerned with disappearance: She is haunted by the concept of being forgotten, erased, and, indeed, “disappeared” in the passive form. When she is ordered to wash a dress, Estela notes that it “was so soft that at any moment it seemed it might disappear, and I with it.” When asked to clean the fallen figs from the yard, Estela remarks, “I cleaned until every last trace of death had disappeared. The tree would never recover, it had found its cause. After a few months they cut it down.” When Estela muses about the child Julia’s death, she says, “Of course the girl wouldn’t remember me. But maybe, had she lived, she’d have remembered my hands.” And when she thinks of herself and her past, Estela confesses, “It’s a strange coincidence, because it’s like my childhood memories all mounted up until my seventh birthday and then, poof, disappeared.” Estela’s fear of disappearance is the reason she is invested in her storytelling, the reason she is haunted by Julia’s death, and the reason she cannot forget her own mother. The mundanities of her work threaten violence. She notices bloodstains in her employers’ dental guards, laundered shirts, and chewed fingernails. She sees death in the trees, the box of rat poison, the dustbin. She shoots a dog between its eyes. How is it that something can suddenly, “poof, [be] disappeared,” even oneself? Clean ends with three questions: “Hello? Can you hear me? Is anybody there?” The following white space, marking the end of the novel, marks also Estela’s final disappearance. This move is foreshadowed in all the preceding chapters, themselves split up into small written chunks and divided by tense, white space. These breaks are themselves disappearances—time jumps, words unspoken, unvoiced grievances—over and over again. That is, until the very last one, in which Estela is vanished. Such disappearances are “places like the hidden storage room behind the dismantled bed at the side of the hayloft, places like the rich earth that lay under the lawn,” explains Michele Mari in his gothic horror novel Verdigris. “In both cases,” he writes, “these places and memories housed bodies: was it possible that this was all the past granted us, dead people or ghosts? The executed or the disappeared?” Mari’s characters—much like Trabucco Zerán’s—live in the ruins of a collapse they have yet to recognize, or, perhaps, even remember. Indeed, disappearance in Verdigris is directly tied to memory, and in particular the deteriorating memory of Felice, the delirious groundskeeper of a northern Italian estate. In the summer of 1969, Felice strikes an unlikely friendship with his employer’s grandson, the 13-year-old Michelino. Michelino is entranced by Felice’s Otherness: his “lumpy and spongelike nose,” his rural dialect (which itself “seems to present a break from reality,” as Brian Robert Moore writes in his translator’s note), and, most of all, the fact that Felice’s memories are “disappearing at a devastating rate, because for every erasure that he noticed there must have been many others that, by the very virtue of the memory having vanished, left no sign and inspired no suspicion.” Michelino and Felice’s friendship is precarious, and readers are unsure who might hurt the other. Felice is older, menacing, physically grotesque, with a mysterious history; but Michelino is smart and a member of the social elite, indeed the grandson of Felice’s employer. Their friendship is not only unlikely but laden itself with the unease of the horror genre. It is also reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein’s relationship to his monster. Throughout the novel, indeed, Michelino refers to Felice as his “monster,” and he extracts a frightening glee from this relationship. “While I felt disheartened by the impossibility of helping [Felice] to put his unsettled mind back in order,” Michelino confesses, “there now crept in the joy of being able to confirm that my monster truly was a monster.” Michelino makes it his mission to recover the memory of “ugly,” “monstrous,” “poor” Felice. He quizzes his grandfather’s groundskeeper on facts, interviews him about his past, and devises a game of mnemonic devices (“fleece” for “Felice,” “NASCAR” for the town “Nasca,” et cetera). But what begins as an assumption of a biological disorder—“senile dementia,” Michelino suspects—has more sinister roots. In fact, Felice is traumatized by his past, and in particular, the historical violences brought on by a fascist state. He was abandoned as a child and a witness to murder. He does not have a last name. The historical records do not account for his employment at the summer estate: “The local officials at the time made a clean sweep of the preexisting documentation.” And Felice’s memory, Verdigris insinuates, is overwritten by further trauma, such that he is constantly “in contact with something frightening and unhuman … with the dead, essentially.” In this way, the novel draws direct conclusions between oppressive political systems and the act of disappearing memories, histories, and people. “And what about no one knowing who owned this house before the Fascist era? Do things like that happen too?” Michelino asks his grandfather. “They can happen,” his grandfather responds. “And a Fascist prefect randomly making up a new name for a municipality, that can happen too, and with not a single inhabitant remembering the previous name?” “That’s life, tout passe…” Michelino is horrified by his grandfather’s shrugging acceptance of historical revisionism: “The same old crap they teach you in school to get the better of you,” he exclaims. “Everything flows and nothing stays, you convinced yourself that things were a certain way when, upsy-daisy, they’ve changed.” This collapse is the horror in Verdigris, just as it is in Clean. Michelino goes on to discover wine bottles filled with blood, hidden barrels of meat-eating slugs, and the skeletal remains of Nazi soldiers: all hidden in his grandparents’ otherwise beautiful estate. “Why did the people who knew keep quiet?” Michelino asks. And why did Felice continue to “liv[e] permanently among the house’s mysteries … sleep[ing] in his little room, work[ing] in our garden and orchard”? The question is similar to the ones Estela poses: By now you’re probably wondering why I stayed. … Why do you stay in your jobs? In your poky offices, in the factories, in the shops on the other side of this wall? I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals—open your eyes, close them, chew, swallow, brush your hair, brush your teeth—each one an attempt to gain mastery over time. A month, a week, the length and breadth of a life. Both Clean and Verdigris ask us what we would do in the face of collapse. What we would do if we lived in “a place where we city dwellers … slowly yet meticulously progressed toward its own destruction”? In both novels, labor is laden with horror precisely because its mundanities so easily mask inequality, structural oppression, and even the tyrannies of fascism. The ease with which we can continue in our respective daily tasks is one of the most obvious and horrendous ways we surrender our own freedom, agency, and remembrance. What would we do in the face of an active disappearance—of people, memory, history? Would we keep quiet? Would we allow the mechanical repetition of labor, silence, or routine to pacify us? What would we do, if we were to be in that place? As Anna Aslanyan writes, Verdigris can be read as a “a commentary on collective amnesia, a condition affecting not just contemporary Italy, where fascism is becoming a real threat again, but also societies all over the globe”—especially in the United States, which just welcomed the novel’s English translation. The same concern with amnesia, of course, can be found in Clean. “From now on you can no longer say that you didn’t know,” Estela tells us, before she disappears forever. “That you didn’t hear or see. That you were oblivious to the truth, to reality.” This is the double horror of both novels. We live in that place now.  Source of the article

GOATReads:Politics

See Me like a State

The “world’s most advanced surveillance technologies,” explains political scientist Minxin Pei, are to be found today in China. These domestic spying initiatives boast powerful data-collection capabilities, as well as ostentatious, science fiction–inflected names: Skynet, Sharp Eyes, Golden Shield. What’s important to Pei’s The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, though, is that none of this technology turns out to work particularly well. True, Skynet may collect license plates and facial-recognition matches and camera feeds from all across the country; but videos must be watched, images cross-checked, and automated decisions second-guessed. In Wuhan, as Skynet’s output increased, the city was forced to hire over 2,700 employees to comb through the videos it produced; in Shenzhen, Skynet’s demands for 24-hour coverage required a district-level public security bureau to set up more than 170 new surveillance centers employing some 760 full-time police staff. The pitfalls of individual programs vary somewhat, but the broader story remains largely the same: again and again, Pei details the vast human infrastructure needed to support widespread technological surveillance at the scale of a country as large as China. This ballooning of personnel to support technological surveillance programs mirrors the growth of a decades-old and millions-strong human informant network that has embedded itself deep into Chinese civil society. In The Sentinel State’s telling, many Chinese civic organizations are infiltrated to the hilt and heavily monitored by a panoply of state security forces. In just a single city, informants successfully sabotage more than one hundred potential protests in a year; security agents attempt to ply a civil-society activist with gifts for her child; a lawyer in Beijing is tailed by uniformed police officers during politically sensitive anniversaries. Chinese academia, too, is rife with informants. Less elite schools, Pei observes, can sometimes get by with only a single tipster stationed in each department—not so at the prestigious Beijing Foreign Studies University, where the rate jumps to as high as one per classroom. This resemblance between the ubiquity of the camera operator and the ubiquity of the informant demonstrates that the atmosphere of paranoia and restraint that sustains China’s dictatorship needs little in the way of advanced technology. “Simply knowing that secret police and their informants may be watching can lead one to curtail one’s anti-regime activities,” Pei laments. “Herein lies the true power of the Chinese surveillance state, [made] possible [by] millions of ordinary citizens watching and listening in the course of their daily lives.” Only one part of this story typically gets told. In recent years, coverage of China has settled on describing a sort of mythical authoritarianism without authoritarians—the Chinese regime, we are told, endures and will endure because of unprecedented advances in technology that allow for never-before-seen forms of intrusion into citizens’ lives. Josh Chin and Liza Lin’s book Surveillance State alternates between descriptions of “digital utopia” and a “dystopian police state … armed with AI.” Elsewhere, Kai Strittmatter’s We Have Been Harmonized paints a picture of “digital totalitarianism,” according to the publisher’s description, where “facial and voice recognition, GPS tracking, supercomputer databases, and millions of high-resolution security cameras make it nearly impossible for a Chinese citizen to hide anything from authorities.” It is against this discourse that Pei’s The Sentinel State positions itself. Pei’s argument is quite digestible: He contends that the endurance of autocracy in China is less a function of technology than it is of human labor in the form of informant networks, labor-intensive domestic spying, and heavy policing. Pei is not a denialist when it comes to Chinese authoritarianism, nor is he interested in downplaying the extent of China’s surveillance state. But he is keenly aware of the ways in which today’s Chinese autocracy looks more like the past than not, and he is wary of the extent to which this story of technological tyranny obscures important realities of the situation on the ground in China. Though Pei does not make this case forcefully in his book—instead choosing to focus on the empirical details of China’s surveillance apparatus—The Sentinel State helps shine a light on how the idea of techno-authoritarianism serves as a kind of totalizing narrative: one which has pernicious effects on our ability to understand the political situation in China. As stories about flashy new technologies eclipse more measured coverage, it becomes easy for foreign audiences, particularly those in America, to lose track of the actual harms inflicted by China’s surveillance state. Put more simply, this narrative of techno-authoritarianism takes a difficult-to-summarize situation filled with diverging interests and mundane realities and flattens it into the language of the American cultural imagination, inflected with lurid Cold War fantasy and as contemptuous of complexity as it can be. Why has it taken so long for a book like The Sentinel State to emerge? If human surveillance explains the persistence of dictatorship in China, what explains the persistence of the techno-dystopian canard which keeps us from seeing this? For starters, the myth of a techno-authoritarian China is deeply rooted in America’s cultural discourse. And this isn’t helped by the fact that the lines between futurist prediction and science fiction have become increasingly blurred. For example: Taiwanese computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee has sounded the alarm about an AI arms race between the United States and China in his 2018 book AI Superpowers. But he has also coauthored a 2021 English-language short story collection called AI 2041 with the science fiction author Chen Qiufan, another veteran of the Chinese tech industry. Like Chen’s 2013 novel Waste Tide—which features a high-tech Chinese system called Compound Eyes keeping watch over “every street, every corner, [and] every expression on every person”—AI 2041 gives us a flashy and entertaining view of a future digital dystopia. Unsurprisingly, AI 2041 was a bestseller in the United States, with rave reviews in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. This is not to fault Lee and Chen for writing a quite compelling work of literature. But it is worth noting that quasi-fantastic narratives of this type have found an eager audience in Americans, whose view of the reality of Chinese surveillance differs little from the fiction they read. After all, “the world consumes much of its imagery of East Asia”—including China—“through pop cultural forms [in which] the region is largely depicted as a collection of high-tech, productive societies” with a “natural proclivity to master technologies of the West, from sedans to silicon chips,” according to historian Andrew Liu (leaning on the work of literary critic Colleen Lye). It is this imagined proclivity that “is precisely what makes Asia so dangerous” in the minds of Americans. And it is this idea—that China has taken the technologies of the West, and turned them authoritarian and malignant—that animates much of the narrative of digital dictatorship, which The Sentinel State works so hard to complicate. This fascination with the role of technology in Chinese politics is continuous, in Liu’s view, with a broader cultural tendency in which “East Asia is either a hypermodern civilization that reflects the degradation of [the] US … or, conversely, [a] threat that will one day overtake Euro-America, subsuming it within itself.” Liu and other scholars dub this tendency “techno-Orientalism,” a trend that runs most obviously through the ubiquity of Asian megacorporations in genre-defining science fiction works like Blade Runner (1982) and Neuromancer (1984), and appears more subtly in The Matrix (1999), Ex Machina (2014), and other cultural products set in and around imaginary East Asias. But techno-Orientalism is not just a problem of media representation, or even just of putative racism. Rather, it serves to obscure the true stakes of the debate over Chinese surveillance: subjecting the complexities of Chinese oppression to a sort of homogenizing American anxiety. In the techno-Orientalist frame, the problem is less about the danger the Chinese regime poses to its own people and more about the danger it poses to the West. For the techno-Orientalists, Liu observes, “decades of industrialization and accumulation in the Asia-Pacific region have brought to life [new] fantasies of an exceptionally dominant China [as] dystopian threat.” This story also serves convenient political purposes. Putting technology at the center of the narrative about Chinese unfreedom allows American security hawks to frame China as a high-tech threat to the entire “free world.” And this, in turn, allows them to fold seemingly humanitarian concerns about surveillance into their broader project: China containment. The logic of the so-called US-China tech war shifts the conversation away from questions of human rights and toward questions of national-security policy, lumping the problem of the surveillance state in with debates about sanctions, semiconductor export controls, trade protectionism against Chinese electric cars, and the forced divestment of Chinese investors from apps like TikTok. It doesn’t hurt, either, that this narrative places American commentators on the same footing as Chinese dissidents and activists, for whom the PRC’s surveillance state is a genuine threat. As China’s access to technology becomes the object of focus, it becomes easy to conflate the danger posed by specific technologies to victims of the Chinese regime with a vague notion of a tech-enabled global China threat, creating a narrative that both inflames nationalist paranoia in Americans and flatters the self-importance of America’s China hawks. China threatens me just as China threatens you, the story goes—so what’s good for me, an American defense analyst, must also be good for you, an exiled Chinese human-rights lawyer. One of the most important observations in The Sentinel State comes near the middle of the book, when Pei remarks that “a society shot through with informants will be riven by distrust, eroding the foundations of democracy [and] social trust.” Pei is a political scientist and his book a recognizably social-scientific work of scholarship. Still, this observation about the long-term social effects of surveillance connects The Sentinel State to a long history of writing in the Chinese humanities, one which runs through the history of the People’s Republic, and perhaps even extends backward into imperial China. Such a history can be seen in the Nobel Prize–nominated Chinese writer Can Xue, whose writing often returns to the subject of how Chinese society is structured by pervasive surveillance.2 Can Xue’s writing is deeply interested in how the basic form of Chinese social life begins to resemble the state’s apparatuses of supervision and control as trust erodes and suspicion proliferates. Can Xue’s characters live in a world of perpetual monitoring from which no one can escape, literary critic Jianguo Chen points out, but this monitoring comes not just from the “dictatorial party [but] the hateful masses as well.” Take Can Xue’s novella Old Floating Cloud. Here, the line is blurred between state and social surveillance, between being watched by an informant and being watched by an inquisitive neighbor, or between watching someone and being watched. This blurring occurs as a character flits between observing and avoiding observation, gripped by a fear that his thoughts and feelings are as visible to his coworkers’ prying eyes as his neighbor’s actions are to his.   At home after work, he pretended to trim his beard. … With the mirror in his hand, he observed his neighbor’s movements behind him. He felt a little relaxed after assuring himself nothing suspicious was going on. Maybe his erratic heartbeat gave him away? … He thought everyone could hear the noise. That was why everyone at the office stared at him. … To prevent people from hearing his heartbeat, he sneaked into [the] office and looked out the window for hours [but] today, stretching his head out the window, he noticed heads at the other two windows [and] realized they were colleagues in the same room. Conversely, in Can Xue’s Five Spice Street, we see echoes of The Sentinel State’s overwhelmed Skynet staff. Here, members of a neighborhood voluntarily, and with minimal coordination, create an atmosphere of “extensive surveillance,” in an incompetent attempt to catch what they believe to be sexual transgression. These neighbors thoroughly ruin the quality of life on their street. Yet, in the end, these self-appointed watchers cannot even agree on the appearance or age—let alone the behavior—of their target. It is not by coincidence that one of the most incisive depictions of state and society in China comes from a literary figure. As noted by the critic and social theorist Nan Z. Da, close reading and other techniques of linguistic and literary analysis have long been key tools of Chinese surveillance. Such techniques date back to at least the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which Mao invited intellectuals to candidly express their views of his regime before subjecting their writings to careful inspection for signs of punishable dissent. Chinese writers, Da observes, therefore have an understanding that surveillance can often take the form of “technical hairsplitting” or the “combing [of] text for minor, semantic transgressions.” Coverage of Chinese civil society often applauds clever efforts to evade censorship using technological countermeasures, usually by way of coded phrases that censors cannot detect or encrypted messaging apps and video filters that allow Chinese netizens to avoid the attention of social media monitors. But if coded phrases and secure apps exist to evade digital censors, then an entire infrastructure of textual and cultural analysis—powered by humans and trained on a tradition of politically motivated close reading—exists as a sort of backstop for Chinese censorship. And, as Da notes, it has done so for at least decades. In Hong Kong, for example, Chinese national-security authorities clamped down on protests since 2020. Consequently, cultural products—from novels to songs to children’s picture books—were scrutinized for signs of prodemocracy sympathies, in what the Hong Kong legislator Dennis Kwok decried as a “literary inquisition.” This is all to say that—as both Chinese literature and The Sentinel State can tell us—there are specific harms perpetuated by China’s society of surveillance that cannot be seen clearly if we take something like “digital totalitarianism” as our lens of analysis. In a country where informants permeate every layer of social interaction, the solution is not as simple as outsmarting an algorithm or evading capture on a video feed. Rather, the threat of being watched by both state and stranger—of your writings and thoughts being turned over for dissent—shapes intellectual life in ways that technological surveillance by itself cannot. Techno-authoritarianism may pit the dissident against the security camera. But an informant society pits the dissident against everyone, at least in their mind. These are somewhat counterintuitive observations for many China watchers, but such insights about surveillance and social trust are by no means unique to Minxin Pei nor the writers and critics who can see them from the world of Chinese-language letters. They are simply reflections of the ugly realities of Chinese authoritarianism that a story of technological dystopia elides. Attempts to frame China’s surveillance state as a product of dastardly Oriental adaptation or a downstream effect of the wrong side winning the tech war obscure the true difficulty of the situation faced by Chinese citizens and human-rights advocates–—that the surveillance state cannot be sanctioned into nonexistence or tricked into irrelevance, because it lives in the heart of the country’s civil society and is inextricably tied to the form of its social relations. The Sentinel State goes a long way to pointing us toward the above argument, because it recognizes that Chinese authoritarianism is fundamentally not a technical problem. And the book is useful because it not only reveals that the system does not rely on technology, but also that the harms it creates cannot be avoided by technical means. Pei’s ability to articulate this remains the strongest quality of his latest book: The Sentinel State returns us to the premise that politics is a human affair, and surveillance a human phenomenon. Early in The Sentinel State’s description of the popular myth of Chinese techno-authoritarianism, Pei references George Orwell’s 1984, perhaps to lightly mock the most tired of all dystopian clichés. But whatever his intentions, Pei’s invocation of Orwell remains worth examining. Though 1984 gave us many of the images that still define tyranny for Western audiences—TVs watching their viewers chief among them—it ultimately isn’t these technological tricks that undo Orwell’s protagonist. Instead, it’s Winston’s misplaced faith in individuals who turn out to be part of a carefully oriented network of informants and secret police, the reveal of which undercuts his belief in the basic premises of social trust and destroys the last meaningful relationships in his life. Even the most cited-to-death work of literary dystopia knows that technology can only do so much. At the end of the day, dictatorships are made up of people, their harms human-sized and their fortunes rising and falling with the currents of social life. Source of the article

GOATReads:Sociology

The Art We Do Together: “Art Worlds” 40th Anniversary

In the latest installment of our partnership with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Fernando Domínguez Rubio revisits Howard Becker’s “Art Worlds” on the occasion of the book’s 40th anniversary. One way to think about intellectual life is as a musical composition where each new book adds to the chorus by bringing in the rhythms, tonalities, and hooks that give shape to the overall melody. Every now and then, however, a book comes that changes the tune altogether. Howard Becker’s Art Worlds, which now celebrates its 40th birthday, is one of those books. It is hardly an overstatement to say that the publication of Art Worlds in 1982 changed forever how sociologists study art. Art Worlds created a seismic change. It demonstrated that the sociological study of art need not be engulfed in trying to solve highfalutin aesthetic questions (e.g., What is art? How do we distinguish it from non-art? What is an author?) and could instead focus on studying the collective practices through which artworks are realized. Art Worlds offered a sharp contrast to the scholarship that had dominated the study of art up to that point. The two decades before its publication had been characterized by an all-out assault on the central ideas of modern aesthetics. In France, for example, the idea of the author had been demolished by poststructuralist authors like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (there’s an irony somewhere there). Meanwhile, in Italy, Umberto Eco celebrated the iconoclastic emergence of popular culture and how it upended the old hierarchies that thinkers of an earlier generation, most notably Theodor Adorno, had sought to defend. In England, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, along with the rest of the Birmingham School, laid bare the inner workings of cultural hegemony, while John Berger introduced British public television’s mass audiences to a new way of seeing art as an apparatus of symbolic domination. Even the heavily fortified citadels of art history and aesthetics were not immune; schools of thought such as the institutional theory of art, feminist art history, and Marxist aesthetics mounted internal rebellions against long-held ideals about the purity and universality of art. Meanwhile, art itself was going through similar convulsions, with movements like pop art, land art, performance art, Fluxus, feminist art, and institutional criticism, not to mention the myriad of art collectives in Latin American and Eastern Europe, defying the modern canon and institutions that had defined art up to that point. Sociology, Becker’s intellectual home, was “all in” in the mutiny against modern aesthetics. The 1960s and ’70s were a time in which trenchant critique, bordering on philistinism, dominated the sociology of art. Text after text adopted what we might call a Scooby-Doo research model: taking a seemingly good character (art) and proceeding to unmask it as the bad guy (ideology). Thus, while authors such as Arnold Hauser and Pierre Francastel sought to expose seemingly inert, formal elements of artworks as projections propelled by “real social forces,” others like Raymonde Moulin revealed that art was not a pure and autonomous field of activity but an activity guided by market forces. Still others, like Pierre Bourdieu, revealed that love for art was little more than a bourgeois conceit for social reproduction. In a time in which doing a sociology of art seemed to require deploying sociology against art, the genius of Art Worlds was radically simple: it just studied art as something that people do together. In so doing, Becker took a potentially controversial idea—that art is a form of collective action—and presented it in a disarmingly common-sense way. If we study how art is produced, Becker argued, we soon realize that this process is rarely, if ever, an individual one. Artists always depend on others to obtain materials to produce their works, as well as to exhibit, play, publish, and distribute them. Art, it follows, is a process that requires collaboration and coordination among different people. In this sense, it is no different from any other social activity, which means that we need to study it as we do any other type of social process: by focusing on what people do. This meant studying not only artists but also critics, curators, editors, art materials suppliers, administrators, and audiences, to name just a few, along with the standards, conventions, and technologies that allowed them to coordinate their actions and produce an artwork. Becker opened an entirely different empirical research program in the sociological study of art, one that moved the attention from ontological and epistemological questions that had dominated traditional aesthetics, such as “What is art?” and “How do we know and experience art?”, to the pragmatic question “How is art done?” Thus, facing a painting like, say, Picasso’s Guernica, Becker invited us not simply to focus on decoding its symbolism and formal composition or on trying to decipher Picasso’s artistic intent and reveal its underlying meaning, but to ask ourselves how such an artwork could be done. This approach employed a new arsenal of empirical queries, such as: What were the networks of collaboration and cooperation that helped Picasso paint this work? What materials did he use, where did he get them, who provided them? What conventions did he follow (or break)? What institutions supported him? In short, what kind of “world” and collective effort had to be in place so that Picasso could create and display this masterpiece? As I was preparing this short essay, I was curious to see what contemporary readers make of this now 40-year-old book. So I indulged in that most peculiar ritual of our age: reading online reviews. The overwhelming majority were positive, effusively praising the clarity and richness of Becker’s descriptions. The negative were almost unanimous in their criticism: Art Worlds lacks any “real” theory and is filled with trivially obvious observations about how the art world works. Such criticisms did not surprise me, as they mirror those I have heard leveled in graduate seminars over the years. Students in search of a “theory fix” typically fault Art Worlds for being a perfect example of why sociology has a bad press as a “science of the obvious.” These types of critiques forget that the obvious is often what is most easily missed—and dismissed. If Art Worlds was and remains important, it is precisely because it reminds us of the obvious: that art is a collective practice. Somehow, this seemingly platitudinous observation had been missing from most art analysis, thereby reducing art history to a narrative about individuals and their heroic feats of creativity. By inviting us to remember that art is always a form of collective action, Art Worlds widened our attention to include all those agents, practices, and technologies that had typically remained invisible and barely made it into the hegemonic narratives of art, but without which art would be simply impossible. In so doing, Art Worlds reminded those studying art to be humble in their descriptions and pay attention to the perfectly banal, yet crucial facts that compose the social worlds we inhabit. Photography needs film, digital files, and cameras; consequently, you really cannot understand the transformation of photography without understanding the corporations that produce photographic material that shapes what artists can and cannot do. Sometimes the absence of an artist’s work in a museum is not necessarily for ideological or aesthetic reasons, but simply because the artworks were “too big to go through the museum’s doors and too heavy for its floors to support.” But unlike the mad king in Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” story, who sought to create a map that was a perfect representation of his empire, Becker offered in Art Worlds an incomplete map. This inconclusiveness was not a bug but a carefully designed feature of the sociological tradition he had inherited from his mentor, Everett Hughes. The tradition was firmly anchored in the belief that any attempt at providing a definitive account, let alone a conclusive theoretical model, of any social world is fated to fail because these worlds are continually changing. This is why Art Worlds, to the desperation of some, does not offer any theoretical model. It is also why Art Worlds contains no pretensions to having provided a final account of what art worlds are or how they work. Instead, the book is constructed around carefully curated, open-ended, and inconclusive lists. Paragraph after paragraph, we are told that “sometimes” artists do this, while “other times” they do that, and yet “other times” they do something else. The result is a book that reads not as a closed treatise or model but as a compendium of researchable empirical questions that invite the reader to continue exploring them. If there is something that defines Art Worlds, it is this dogmatic antidogmatism—a complete refusal to have the last word. This antidogmatism and open-endedness are precisely what make Art Worlds a fresh and necessary read even today. Unlike classics now sunk by the weight of their theoretical models, Art Worlds still reads as an object lesson for anyone writing in academesque for a living. At a moment in which oppositional and antagonistic writing seems to dominate the conversation, Art Worlds never tries to convince, demonstrate, or conclude, just to invite us to a conversation. The book does not require anything from the reader, such as prior knowledge of controversies in some subfield or being well-versed in concepts, theories, or debates. Art Worlds offers a leveled playing field on which the author never imposes himself upon the reader, because there is no battle to be won, just a conversation to be had. This is, for me, the indelible value of this book as a perennial reminder that writing can take the form of an open-ended invitation to think together. Source of the article

GOATReads: Science

Why Have Birds Never Gotten as Big as T. Rex?

Even the most massive birds have never reached the sizes of their dinosaur relatives Evolution has a fondness for big birds. During the past 66 million years, repeated on different continents and islands all over the world, avian dinosaurs have reached prodigious sizes and even become apex predators in their ancient habitats. Ten-foot-tall elephant birds strutted across Madagascar until a thousand years ago. The sharp-beaked “terror birds” of prehistoric South America were formidable carnivores for tens of millions of years. And the nearly seven-foot-tall, nut-cracking Diatryma strutted through ancient forests of western North America in search of ripe fruit and nutritious seeds 45 million years ago. Such enormous birds almost seem like a return to the Mesozoic days of giant, feathery dinosaurs, which raises the question of whether such avians could ever reach Tyrannosaurus rex sizes. The repeated evolution of huge birds is part of the dinosaurian legacy. Beaked birds were the only dinosaurs to have survived the asteroid-triggered mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. Avians like the six-foot-tall Palaeeudyptes that waddled across ancient Antarctica about 30 million years ago and Titanis, a towering carnivore that was the only terror bird to live in North America between 1.8 million and 5 million years ago, underscore that prodigious dinosaurs were not only relegated to the times of Stegosaurus and Triceratops. The conditions that allowed birds to evolve to large size over and over again have varied from case to case, however, and the process has left a lingering question. If birds possess the traits that opened the possibility of truly giant, multi-ton statures for non-avian dinosaurs, why have we not seen a bird the size of a T. rex? Often framed as laboratories of evolution, islands can provide some insight into the aviary of big birds our planet continues to host. In a 2023 study, ornithologist Raquel Ponti of Portugal’s University of Porto and colleagues looked at the influence of the “island rule” in birds. The hypothesis contends that on relatively isolated island environments, large species often become smaller and small species become larger. The phenomenon is often attributed to a lack of large, hungry predators like big cats or dogs, allowing island species to evolve in different ways than if ever-hungry predators were influencing island ecology. Birds can get big, in other words, in the absence of predators eating eggs, chicks and even flightless adult birds that can’t simply fly off to escape. The varied moa species of ancient New Zealand, the enormous elephant birds of Madagascar and even the recently extinct dodo of Mauritius are all examples of what can happen when birds settle in on islands. “When a species colonizes a new environment where there are no predators or competitors, as well as new resources and food availability, the species is free to evolve toward optimal sizes and shapes,” Ponti says. One common trend she and her colleagues noticed is that island-dwelling birds not only tend to become larger than their mainland counterparts, but also evolve longer legs and rounder wings. Both traits are connected to spending more time on the ground and a shift away from migrating by flying, only possible because of the absence of predators eager to pick off birds that spend much of their time foraging, nesting and moving around on the ground. A landmass does not have to be entirely devoid of predatory animals to foster the evolution of big birds, however. “We know that in the past, large birds evolved alongside large avian predators,” says ornithologist Hanneke Meijer of the University of Bergen in Norway. The large, flightless moas of New Zealand evolved about 17 million years ago, but between 600 to a million years ago they lived alongside the huge Haast’s eagle, the abundance of the large birds perhaps even allowing such a predator to evolve. The important thing, Meijer notes, is that big birds tend to evolve in habitats with plenty of ecological possibility. Isolation on an island without large carnivores can open plenty of possibilities for birds, but so can living on larger landmasses where resources are abundant and predators are few. Big fossil birds such as Diatryma, for example, lived among vast forests around 50 million years ago when mammal carnivores were small and didn’t have as strong an influence on the prehistoric landscape. The fearsome “terror birds” of South America certainly benefited from such opportunity. The continent was a giant island between 2.7 million and 66 million years ago, where the biggest mammalian predators ranged from weasel-size to about as big as a leopard, around a hundred pounds. “Isolated in South America without competition from large mammalian carnivores, terror birds were able to evolve into a variety of predatory niches, including apex predators,” says Indiana University Bloomington paleontologist Thomas LaBarge. The carnivorous birds, like the mammals, evolved into a broad array of sizes among coexisting species, undoubtedly with different prey preferences and niches. Whether on islands today, or larger continents during prehistory, big birds evolved wherever such flightless giants could peck out a niche for themselves. Tall birds called mihirungs —nicknamed “demon ducks” by some—lived on the island continent of Australia between 30,000 and 25 million years ago. And even on ancient North America, which was more connected to Eurasia during the past 66 million years, large birds like Diatryma lived between 45 million and 55 million years ago. The pattern, Ponti notes, suggests that in habitats vacated by large, hungry predators, the easiest thing for some birds to do was get big and not fly. In each of these cases, it appears that birds grew to large sizes relatively quickly, during times that predatory mammals and birds of prey were either rare or absent. “We often look to islands where we see all this crazy experimentation happening due to islands being smaller and isolated, like an evolutionary pressure cooker, but it can happen on the mainland, too,” Meijer notes, “just less often and probably more slowly.” Despite how often big birds have evolved, however, none have reached the heights or masses of the non-avian dinosaurs that thrived between 66 million and 232 million years ago. For flying birds, the lack of airplane-sized birds like the monster in the 1957 creature feature The Giant Claw can be explained by constraints around flight. Flying is an energy-intensive behavior that requires more and more muscle power the bigger an organism gets, to the point that a flying creature can only become so massive before it’s grounded. Flightless birds, however, are another story. At least two factors have allowed dinosaurs, including birds, to evolve to a wide range of sizes. Paleontologists have proposed that air sacs emanating from the respiratory systems of many dinosaurs surrounded and invaded their bones, which allowed their skeletons to be lighter without sacrificing strength, with the bonus of helping the animals breathe more efficiently. Egg-laying, too, has been cited as a critical factor in gigantism. Laying eggs, rather than gestating offspring inside, freed dinosaurs from having to carry bigger and bigger babies for longer terms, as elephants and other large mammals do. Birds retain both these traits from their dinosaur ancestors, yet they have never equaled their largest extinct relatives in size. Even though air sacs and eggs are important contributing factors to giant dinosaur size, these biological quirks removed barriers rather than required bodies to get bigger. In a post-Cretaceous world, birds have likely never experienced sufficient evolutionary pressure to be as tall or as massive as T. rex. Perhaps predatory birds like terror birds could have grown larger, Meijer notes, as being bigger would have allowed them to catch, kill and consume a broader array of prey, but apparently no such evolutionary interaction took place to boost their size further. In fact, a 2023 study suggests that terror birds were stamping on and kicking prey smaller than themselves rather than going after large animals like giant sloths and armadillos of prehistoric South America, perhaps limiting how large they eventually became. Nevertheless, some impressively big birds roamed our planet. Based on recent finds in South America, LaBarge notes, paleontologists know that terror birds that were at least 10 percent larger than the giant, ten-foot-tall Kelenken lived on the continent. It’s unlikely that terror birds got much larger given that available prey were mostly small, LaBarge says, “but I will say that the largest terror birds absolutely ventured into the size and weight range of some non-avian theropods.” The largest terror birds may have even been the biggest birds of all time. If there is any possibility for tyrannosaur-size birds, the avians will have to evolve during some future time. With more than 11,000 species of living birds on Earth now, feathery creatures alive today will almost certainly give rise to future giants as our planet continues to change. The only question is how large they may become, a potential outcome in what birds remind us is a persistent and still-unfolding Age of Dinosaurs. Source of the article

GOATReads: Arts and Culture

Why the Ancient Craft of Dry Stone Walling Still Holds So Much Appeal in the 21st Century

Artisans around the world are ditching the mortar and embracing an old method of building rock walls John Shaw-Rimmington started building dry stone walls after the stones themselves complained to him. It was the 1980s, and he was living in Ontario, working for clients who wanted decorative stone veneers affixed to the sides of concrete walls. “The stones were saying, ‘We are not decoration. Do you understand?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I get it.’” Shaw-Rimmington ditched the concrete and helped revive the ancient craft of dry stone walling. A dry stone wall is made of nothing but stones, carefully fitted together in such a way that the wall won’t fall down. Gluing the stones with mortar—a paste made of lime or cement mixed with sand and water—is simpler in the short term. But when a dry stone wall breaks, it’s easy to repair. You just have to fix one section, and the wall as a whole remains secure. When a mortared wall cracks, the entire wall is in peril. “We dry stone wallers call mortar ‘the devil’s glue,’” Shaw-Rimmington said. “It smears and it stains and it owns you. Can you make stone walling no fun at all? Yes, try and put mortar in it.”  Shiprock, an art installation at the Point Arena Lighthouse in Northern California, was created by dry stone builders from Canada. Nearby, the builders also constructed a Druid’s Circle of standing stones and a unique stone fence. Christie Hemm Klok People figured out how to make dry stone walls thousands of years ago. In Scotland, dry stone structures date back as far as 5,000 years, to the actual Stone Age. The Maya ruins in Lubaantun, Belize, built around the eighth or ninth century A.D., used dry stone construction. So did the Great Enclosure, an enormous complex in Zimbabwe, built between the 13th and 14th centuries. The Japanese dry stone craft of ano-zumi thrived in the 17th century. The very fact that these walls still stand in any form speaks to the strength of their construction. Dry stone walls appeared all over Britain after 1604, when so-called “inclosure acts” divided common lands among the elite. The tradition carried on from there. When photographer Christie Hemm Klok traveled to Scotland, she found dry stone boundary walls just down the road from ancient stone settlements like Clachtoll Broch. The building style was so common throughout the country that Scottish locals couldn’t understand why she found the walls so interesting: “I would pull over to photograph a wall, and people would ask me, ‘What are you taking a picture of? That’s just a wall that holds in sheep.’” But a dry stone wall doesn’t have to look like a sheep pen. An imaginative builder can put the stones together in all sorts of combinations. You start by digging a trench about three to six inches deep and filling it with gravel. Then you assemble each layer, one stone over two, two stones over one. You can shape the stones with a hammer and chisel as you see fit. Some of them, called “tie-through stones,” need to go all the way from one side to the other. Others, called “hearting stones,” are lemon-sized wedges that help keep the interior structure intact. As you build upward, the wall should get narrower. At the end, you set heavy “coping stones” along the top. As long as you stick to these and other basic principles, you can make all kinds of choices about colors, shapes and patterns. “I always tell my clients, ‘It doesn’t have to be these big, rustic walls,’” said Kristie de Garis, a dry stone waller in Scotland. “You can create really modern lines, a really neat structure. You can space the stones out evenly and create a nice visual flow. You can do pretty much anything with dry stone, actually.” De Garis also tells her clients that a dry stone wall is an investment in the future. “It’s a proper legacy thing. Mortared walls need to be redone roughly every 15 to 30 years. But there are dry stone walls still standing after thousands of years. What price do you put on forever?” You won’t find many dry stone walls in the western United States. When the country expanded, the easiest way to divide properties and fence in animals was with wood and wire. There was no need to build structures that would last, especially given how rapidly the boundaries were changing. But you can find them in New England. Farmers clearing the forests piled up the rocks partly to get them out of the way. The walls they made weren’t always meticulously constructed, as Robert Frost hints in his 1914 poem “Mending Wall”: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, / And spills the upper boulders in the sun; / And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.” He describes the process of mending the wall with his neighbor, picking up the rocks that have fallen to each side: “And some are loaves and some so nearly balls / We have to use a spell to make them balance: / ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’” Frost knew how to craft a poem, but it seems he didn’t quite understand how to put together a wall. “I would say some of my earlier work was kind of like that,” Daniel Peterson, a landscape designer and dry stone walling instructor in the Twin Cities, said with a chuckle. “In our workshops, we teach certain techniques for building with different shaped stones, including round stone. Ideally you don’t want to cross your fingers as you walk away and hope that it stays up.” Frost was also wrong about the frost: A well-built wall won’t fall down when the frozen ground swells underneath it. Peterson can attest to this, after years of living and working in Minnesota. “When you see a concrete wall, it’s very rigid and has no flexibility. Whereas when you’re building with dry stone, it’s like weaving a rope. It can move and shift as the ground freezes and thaws.”  Last summer, Peterson traveled to Northern California to teach a dry stone walling workshop there. Christa Moné, the local landscape designer who organized the event, had been struggling to find craftspeople who knew how to carry out her dry stone wall designs. So she reached out to the horticulture program at the nearby junior college, and to retired people and homeowners who wanted to build walls on their own property. Sixteen people showed up to learn from Peterson. “I’m really trying to mobilize our region and get people interested in these stone walls,” explained Moné, who first fell in love with the structures while she was living in France. “These walls can be firebreaks between vineyards and homes. If there’s a grass fire coming through, it will stop at the wall.” Well-built walls can also be stable during earthquakes, which may seem surprising, given that there’s nothing to hold them together. But while mortar cracks, well-fitted stones can nestle in even more tightly after the ground shakes. And when portions break, they’re easy to fix. “Remember, these walls have been built around the world forever,” Moné pointed out. “When you go to Japan, you see dry stone walls that have withstood giant earthquakes just fine.” When it comes to aesthetics, Moné has a different challenge than the one de Garis faces in Scotland. Moné’s California clients have no preconceived ideas about dry stone walls. They don’t feel particularly bound to any tradition—they can build a Japanese garden, an English garden, an Italian garden or anything else they choose—but they tend to be drawn to modern materials they see on Pinterest.  “I tell them that while synthetic materials like vinyl can look really good, there’s a loss of connection when we’re surrounded by them,” Moné said. “When we find ourselves surrounded by natural materials, I think there’s a feeling of relief. But it can be hard to explain to people why they’re going to enjoy that stone wall so much more than a stucco wall. You just have to feel it.” Dry stone walls can serve all kinds of functions, but they’re also beautiful just for their own sake. David F. Wilson, a waller from Dundee, Scotland, uses the medium for public art. In his creations, you can see distinct patterns of color, shape and size. “It’s a brilliant material for public spaces because it’s very robust,” said Wilson. “There’s basically no maintenance. And because it’s very textured, it tends not to attract graffiti or vandalism.” In 2016, Wilson received a Churchill Fellowship, a grant that sends British citizens abroad for four to eight weeks to study advancements in their fields. Wilson traveled to North America to learn about new developments in dry stone walling. “People there are finding their own way of working with stone, and that allows a degree more of personality to come into the-work,” he said. He was astonished when he traveled to New Windsor, New York, and saw Storm King Wall, an art installation by the English artist Andy Goldsworthy. The wall, which was built in the late 1990s and is 2,278 feet long, undulates instead of forming a rigid line. “It’s got this interesting dynamic movement,” said Wilson. “The wall is not a barrier. It weaves in and out of the trees in a way that makes spaces for the trees to shine.” A few years after Storm King Wall made its debut, Peter Mullins, a landowner in Mendocino, California, decided he wanted to invite stone artists to his ranch. He brought in craftspeople from far and wide, supplying catered meals and kegs of beer as they worked. The site became known as the Mendocino Stone Zone (later, the Mendocino Stone Ranch). At Mullins’ request, Shaw-Rimmington came down from Canada to build a dry stone stagecoach house. The project amused Shaw-Rimmington—he’d never seen an actual stagecoach house built in that way, and certainly not in California. “But this is fanciful history,” he said approvingly. “It’s iconic, because you walk through the forest and you come across this thing, and it is as if you’ve found something ancient. North America needs more of that.” Shaw-Rimmington and his crew went on to build other projects nearby, like a large stone fence at the Point Arena Lighthouse. As someone who communes with his materials, Shaw-Rimmington had to make some adjustments in California. Most of the stones at his disposal were left over from other projects and didn’t have a uniform aesthetic. A lot of the rock along the California coast was also less durable than the fieldstone he was used to working with back in Ontario. “The stones, it seemed, were inviting us to be counterintuitive,” he said.  Frost wrote about forces in nature that don’t love a wall. But to hear Shaw-Rimmington talk, the stones themselves delight in being fitted together by expert hands. “They’re so willing!” he said. “And if they’re not, there are so many lessons you’re learning. It could be you’re using them in the wrong place. Or it could be that you need to just be quiet for a while.”  Once a wall is complete, he said, the vibrant creative energy remains. “You can sit in front of a well-built dry stone wall and it’s like watching television. You can sit there and look all day, just enjoying the fits, enjoying the way the colors come together. It kind of pours out. It doesn’t get tiresome.” As he sees it, people who use recreational drugs are only trying to get at something like this natural high. He added with a mischievous laugh, “There’s a reason they call it getting stoned.” Source of the article

GOATReads: Philosophy

The Concept of Taste

The concept of the aesthetic descends from the concept of taste. Why the concept of taste commanded so much philosophical attention during the 18th century is a complicated matter, but this much is clear: the eighteenth-century theory of taste emerged, in part, as a corrective to the rise of rationalism, particularly as applied to beauty, and to the rise of egoism, particularly as applied to virtue. Against rationalism about beauty, the eighteenth-century theory of taste held the judgment of beauty to be immediate; against egoism about virtue, it held the pleasure of beauty to be disinterested. 1.1 Immediacy Rationalism about beauty is the view that judgments of beauty are judgments of reason, i.e., that we judge things to be beautiful by reasoning it out, where reasoning it out typically involves inferring from principles or applying concepts. At the beginning of the 18th century, rationalism about beauty had achieved dominance on the continent, and was being pushed to new extremes by “les géomètres,” a group of literary theorists who aimed to bring to literary criticism the mathematical rigor that Descartes had brought to physics. As one such theorist put it: The way to think about a literary problem is that pointed out by Descartes for problems of physical science. A critic who tries any other way is not worthy to be living in the present century. There is nothing better than mathematics as propaedeutic for literary criticism. (Terrasson 1715, Preface, 65; quoted in Wimsatt and Brooks 1957, 258) It was against this, and against more moderate forms of rationalism about beauty, that mainly British philosophers working mainly within an empiricist framework began to develop theories of taste. The fundamental idea behind any such theory—which we may call the immediacy thesis—is that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not canonically) mediated by inferences from principles or applications of concepts, but rather have all the immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments. It is the idea, in other words, that we do not reason to the conclusion that things are beautiful, but rather “sense” that they are. Here is an early expression of the thesis, from Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, which first appeared in 1719: Do we ever reason, in order to know whether a ragoo be good or bad; and has it ever entered into any body’s head, after having settled the geometrical principles of taste, and defined the qualities of each ingredient that enters into the composition of those messes, to examine into the proportion observed in their mixture, in order to decide whether it be good or bad? No, this is never practiced. We have a sense given us by nature to distinguish whether the cook acted according to the rules of his art. People taste the ragoo, and tho’ unacquainted with those rules, they are able to tell whether it be good or no. The same may be said in some respect of the productions of the mind, and of pictures made to please and move us. (Dubos 1748, vol. II, 238–239) And here is a late expression, from Kant’s 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment: If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end fails to please my taste, then he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce all the rules they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful… . I will stop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments, and would rather believe that those rules of the critics are false … than allow that my judgment should be determined by means of a priori grounds of proof, since it is supposed to be a judgment of taste and not of the understanding of reason. (Kant 1790, 165) But the theory of taste would not have enjoyed its eighteenth-century run, nor would it continue now to exert its influence, had it been without resources to counter an obvious rationalist objection. There is a wide difference—so goes the objection—between judging the excellence of a ragout and judging the excellence of a poem or a play. More often than not, poems and plays are objects of great complication. But taking in all that complication requires a lot of cognitive work, including the application of concepts and the drawing of inferences. Judging the beauty of poems and plays, then, is evidently not immediate and so evidently not a matter of taste. The chief way of meeting this objection was first to distinguish between the act of grasping the object preparatory to judging it and the act of judging the object once grasped, and then to allow the former, but not the latter, to be as concept- and inference-mediated as any rationalist might wish. Here is Hume, with characteristic clarity: [I]n order to pave the way for [a judgment of taste], and give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general facts fixed and ascertained. Some species of beauty, especially the natural kinds, on their first appearance command our affection and approbation; and where they fail of this effect, it is impossible for any reasoning to redress their influence, or adapt them better to our taste and sentiment. But in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the fine arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment. (Hume, 1751, Section I) Hume—like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson before him, and Reid after him (Cooper 1711, 17, 231; Hutcheson 1725, 16–24; Reid 1785, 760–761)—regarded the faculty of taste as a kind of “internal sense.” Unlike the five “external” or “direct” senses, an “internal” (or “reflex” or “secondary”) sense is one that depends for its objects on the antecedent operation of some other mental faculty or faculties. Reid characterizes internal sense as follows: Beauty or deformity in an object, results from its nature or structure. To perceive the beauty therefore, we must perceive the nature or structure from which it results. In this the internal sense differs from the external. Our external senses may discover qualities which do not depend upon any antecedent perception… . But it is impossible to perceive the beauty of an object, without perceiving the object, or at least conceiving it. (Reid 1785, 760–761) Because of the highly complex natures or structures of many beautiful objects, there will have to be a role for reason in their perception. But perceiving the nature or structure of an object is one thing. Perceiving its beauty is another. 1.2 Disinterest Egoism about virtue is the view that to judge an action or trait virtuous is to take pleasure in it because you believe it to serve some interest of yours. Its central instance is the Hobbesian view—still very much on early eighteenth-century minds—that to judge an action or trait virtuous is to take pleasure in it because you believe it to promote your safety. Against Hobbesian egoism a number of British moralists—preeminently Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume—argued that, while a judgment of virtue is a matter of taking pleasure in response to an action or trait, the pleasure is disinterested, by which they meant that it is not self-interested (Cooper 1711, 220–223; Hutcheson 1725, 9, 25–26; Hume 1751, 218–232, 295–302). One argument went roughly as follows. That we judge virtue by means of an immediate sensation of pleasure means that judgments of virtue are judgments of taste, no less than judgments of beauty. But pleasure in the beautiful is not self-interested: we judge objects to be beautiful whether or not we believe them to serve our interests. But if pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested, there is no reason to think that pleasure in the virtuous cannot also be (Hutcheson 1725, 9–10). The eighteenth-century view that judgments of virtue are judgments of taste highlights a difference between the eighteenth-century concept of taste and our concept of the aesthetic, since for us the concepts aesthetic and moral tend oppose one another such that a judgment’s falling under one typically precludes its falling under the other. Kant is chiefly responsible for introducing this difference. He brought the moral and the aesthetic into opposition by re-interpreting what we might call the disinterest thesis—the thesis that pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested (though see Cooper 1711, 222 and Home 2005, 36–38 for anticipations of Kant’s re-interpretation). According to Kant, to say that a pleasure is interested is not to say that it is self-interested in the Hobbesian sense, but rather that it stands in a certain relation to the faculty of desire. The pleasure involved in judging an action to be morally good is interested because such a judgment issues in a desire to bring the action into existence, i.e., to perform it. To judge an action to be morally good is to become aware that one has a duty to perform the action, and to become so aware is to gain a desire to perform it. By contrast, the pleasure involved in judging an object to be beautiful is disinterested because such a judgment issues in no desire to do anything in particular. If we can be said to have a duty with regard to beautiful things, it appears to be exhausted in our judging them aesthetically to be beautiful. That is what Kant means when he says that the judgment of taste is not practical but rather “merely contemplative” (Kant 1790, 95). By thus re-orienting the notion of disinterest, Kant brought the concept of taste into opposition with the concept of morality, and so into line, more or less, with the present concept of the aesthetic. But if the Kantian concept of taste is continuous, more or less, with the present-day concept of the aesthetic, why the terminological discontinuity? Why have we come to prefer the term ‘aesthetic’ to the term ‘taste’? The not very interesting answer appears to be that we have preferred an adjective to a noun. The term ‘aesthetic’ derives from the Greek term for sensory perception, and so preserves the implication of immediacy carried by the term ‘taste.’ Kant employed both terms, though not equivalently: according to his usage, ‘aesthetic’ is broader, picking out a class of judgments that includes both the normative judgment of taste and the non-normative, though equally immediate, judgment of the agreeable. Though Kant was not the first modern to use ‘aesthetic’ (Baumgarten had used it as early as 1735), the term became widespread only, though quickly, after his employment of it in the third Critique. Yet the employment that became widespread was not exactly Kant’s, but a narrower one according to which ‘aesthetic’ simply functions as an adjective corresponding to the noun “taste.” So for example we find Coleridge, in 1821, expressing the wish that he “could find a more familiar word than aesthetic for works of taste and criticism,” before going on to argue: As our language … contains no other useable adjective, to express coincidence of form, feeling, and intellect, that something, which, confirming the inner and the outward senses, becomes a new sense in itself … there is reason to hope, that the term aesthetic, will be brought into common use. (Coleridge 1821, 254) The availability of an adjective corresponding to “taste” has allowed for the retiring of a series of awkward expressions: the expressions “judgment of taste,” “emotion of taste” and “quality of taste” have given way to the arguably less offensive ‘aesthetic judgment,’ ‘aesthetic emotion,’ and ‘aesthetic quality.’ However, as the noun ‘taste’ phased out, we became saddled with other perhaps equally awkward expressions, including the one that names this entry. Source of the article

UG B-School Updates

All About JIPMAT 2025: Your Gateway to IIM Jammu & IIM Bodh Gaya’s 5-Year IPM Programs

The Joint Integrated Programme in Management Admission Test (JIPMAT) is a national-level entrance exam conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for admission into the prestigious 5-Year Integrated Programme in Management (IPM) offered by IIM Jammu and IIM Bodh Gaya. This program enables meritorious Class 12 students to directly begin their journey towards a management career with an integrated BBA+MBA degree. Let’s explore all the key details about JIPMAT 2025 — from eligibility to application, exam structure to selection process. JIPMAT 2025 Key Dates Application Period: February 11 – March 10, 2025 Fee Payment Deadline: March 11, 2025 Correction Window: March 13 – 15, 2025 Exam Date: April 26, 2025 Result Declaration: To be announced Eligibility Criteria for JIPMAT Educational Qualification: - Candidates must have passed Class 12 or equivalent in 2023, 2024, or be appearing in 2025. - Candidates must have passed Class 10 in 2021 or later. Minimum Marks: - General/OBC/EWS: Minimum 60% marks in both Class 10 and 12. - SC/ST/PwD: Minimum 55% marks in both Class 10 and 12. Age Limit: No age limit. Application Process 1. Register on the official portal: exams.nta.ac.in/JIPMAT 2. Fill the application form with academic and personal details. 3. Upload documents: - Photo (10–200 KB) - Signature (4–30 KB) - PwD certificate if applicable 4. Pay the application fee: - General/OBC/EWS: ₹2000 - SC/ST/PwD/Transgender: ₹1000 - Foreign candidates: ₹10,000 5. Download confirmation page for future reference. JIPMAT Exam Pattern 2025 Section No. of Questions Marks Quantitative Aptitude 33 132 Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning 33 132 Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension 34 136 Total 100 400 Duration: 150 minutes Medium: English Marking: +4 for correct, -1 for wrong JIPMAT Syllabus Overview Quantitative Aptitude: Numbers, Ratio & Proportion, Algebra, Averages, Percentage, Profit & Loss, Geometry, Mensuration, Time & Work Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning: Tables, Graphs, Venn Diagrams, Series, Coding-Decoding, Syllogisms, Blood Relations, Direction Sense Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension: Grammar, Para Jumbles, Sentence Completion, Reading Passages, Vocabulary, Synonyms & Antonyms Participating Institutes IIM Jammu – IPM Program Degree: BBA + MBA (Dual degree) Intake: 140 students Highlights: Modern campus infrastructure Industry partnerships & international exchange High ROI placements IIM Bodh Gaya – IPM Program Degree: BBM + MBA (Dual degree) Intake: 120 students Highlights: Global collaborations Emphasis on value-based education Academic rigour with personal mentorship Expected Cut-Offs (Indicative) Category IIM Jammu IIM Bodh Gaya General 310+ 300+ OBC/EWS 280+ 270+ SC/ST/PwD 220–250 210–230 Actual cutoffs may vary based on difficulty level and applicant pool. Reservation Policy Category Reservation GEN-EWS 10% OBC-NCL 27% SC 15% ST 7.5% PwD 5% Reservation is implemented as per Government of India norms. Documents Required During Admission Class 10 and 12 mark sheets JIPMAT scorecard Caste/Category certificate (if applicable) PwD certificate (if applicable) Identity proof (Aadhaar/PAN/Passport) Why Choose JIPMAT? Early entry into IIM ecosystem No separate UG and PG entrance — seamless transition Cost-effective alternative to multiple management exams Prestige and career value of an IIM tag from age 17 Focus on academics, leadership, and soft skills from Day 1 Conclusion JIPMAT 2025 is a golden opportunity for Class 12 students aspiring to join the elite IIM ecosystem. With two rapidly growing institutions — IIM Jammu and IIM Bodh Gaya — offering world-class infrastructure, faculty, and placement support, the IPM journey via JIPMAT is a strategic leap into the world of management education. If you are serious about building a career in business, management, consulting, or entrepreneurship — start early, start smart with JIPMAT.

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IIM Sirmaur BMS Admissions Process 2025–29: A Comprehensive Guide to Admission Through IPMAT

The Indian Institute of Management Sirmaur (IIM Sirmaur) has introduced its four-year Bachelor of Management Studies (BMS) program, aligning with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. This program is designed to equip students with a robust foundation in management education, preparing them for leadership roles in various sectors. Admissions for the 2025–29 batch will be conducted through the Integrated Program in Management Aptitude Test (IPM AT) administered by IIM Indore. Important Dates for BMS Admissions 2025 IPM AT Registration Period: February 14 – April 1, 2025 IIM Sirmaur BMS Application Opens: April 2, 2025 IIM Sirmaur BMS Application Closes: April 25, 2025 IPMAT Exam Date: May 12, 2025 Personal Interviews: June/July 2025 Commencement of Classes: August 2025 Eligibility Criteria - Educational Qualification: Completion of Class 12 or equivalent from a recognized board. - Age Limit: Born on or after August 1, 2005 (5 years relaxation for SC/ST/PwD). - Minimum Marks:   • General and NC-OBC: At least 60% in Class 10 and Class 12   • SC/ST/PwD: At least 55% in Class 10 and Class 12 Admission Process Phase 1: Shortlisting Based on IPM AT Scores Candidates are shortlisted for the personal interview based on their Aptitude Test Scores (ATS) in the IPM AT exam conducted by IIM Indore. Phase 2: Personal Interview (PI) Shortlisted candidates undergo a personal interview to assess their suitability for the program. Phase 3: Final Selection The final selection is based on a composite score calculated as follows: - IPM AT Score: 55% - Personal Interview: 30% - Academic Performance: 10% - Gender Diversity: 5% Academic Performance and Gender Diversity Points Class 10:   • 80–90%: 3 points   • 90–95%: 4 points   • Above 95%: 5 points Class 12:   • 80–90%: 3 points   • 90–95%: 4 points   • Above 95%: 5 points Gender Diversity:   • Female/Transgender: 5 points   • Male: 0 points Program Structure and Exit Options The BMS program spans four years, divided into eight semesters. It offers multiple exit options: - After 1st Year: Certificate in Management Studies - After 2nd Year: Advanced Certificate in Management Studies - After 3rd Year: Bachelor's Degree in Management Studies - After 4th Year: Bachelor's (Honours) in Management Studies Students achieving a minimum CGPA of 8.0 upon completion of the BMS program are eligible for direct admission into IIM Sirmaur's MBA program. Why Choose IIM Sirmaur's BMS Program? - NEP 2020 Compliance: The program aligns with the National Education Policy, emphasizing flexibility and multidisciplinary learning. - International Exposure: Opportunities for international exchange programs and industry internships.

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IIM Shillong IPM 2025: Admission, Eligibility, Curriculum & Career Opportunities

The Indian Institute of Management Shillong (IIM Shillong) has officially announced the launch of its 5-year Integrated Programme in Management (IPM) for the academic session 2025-30. This program is designed for students who have completed their Class 12 and aspire to pursue a career in management. With this initiative, IIM Shillong becomes the seventh IIM in India to offer the IPM program, joining the ranks of IIM Indore, IIM Rohtak, and others. Program Overview - Degree Awarded: Dual degree comprising a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) and a Master of Business Administration (MBA). - Duration: 5 years (3 years of undergraduate studies followed by 2 years of postgraduate studies). - Objective: To develop young professionals with a holistic understanding of management, integrating academic knowledge with practical skills. Curriculum Highlights The IPM curriculum at IIM Shillong is structured to provide a multidisciplinary education, aligning with the National Education Policy (NEP). Key features include: - Liberal Arts Foundation: Courses in humanities, social sciences, and languages. - Management Core: Subjects such as marketing, finance, operations, and strategy. - Data Analytics and Decision Making: Modules on statistics, analytics, and data visualization. - Entrepreneurial Development: Access to IIM Shillong’s incubation center. - Global Exposure: Opportunities for learning foreign languages and global business practices. Eligibility Criteria - Educational Qualification: Class 12 or equivalent from a recognized board. - Entrance Examination: IPM AT conducted by IIM Indore. Admission Process 1. Application Submission through IIM Indore’s official website. 2. Appear for the IPMAT exam. 3. Shortlisting based on IPM AT scores. 4. Personal Interview. 5. Final Selection based on a composite score. Program Fees As of now, the detailed fee structure for the IPM program at IIM Shillong has not been officially released. Prospective candidates should check the official IIM Shillong website for updates. Career Opportunities Graduates of the IPM program can explore careers in consulting, finance, marketing, operations, and entrepreneurship. The curriculum, combined with practical exposure, prepares students for success across industries. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about IIM Shillong IPM 1. When will the IPM program at IIM Shillong commence? The inaugural batch of the IPM program will begin in the academic year 2025–30. 2. Which entrance exam is required for admission to the IPM program? Admission will be based on the IPM AT conducted by IIM Indore. 3. What degrees will be awarded upon completion of the program? Students will receive a dual degree — BBA and MBA. 4. Can a student exit the program after completing 3 years of BBA? IIM Shillong allows early exit after 3 years, subject to program norms. Students who exit at this stage will receive a BBA degree but will not proceed to the MBA phase unless they reapply separately. 5. Is there any information available about the program fees? The detailed fee structure has not been announced yet. Please check the official IIM Shillong website for updates.

PG B-School Updates

ISB's 2-Year MBA Program for Early Career Professionals: A Comprehensive Guide

The Indian School of Business (ISB) has introduced the Post Graduate Programme in Management for Young Leaders (PGPYL), a 20-month full-time residential MBA designed for fresh graduates and professionals with up to 24 months of work experience. Notably, ISB now accepts CAT scores for this program, expanding opportunities for a broader range of applicants. Program Overview • Duration: 20 months • Location: ISB Hyderabad Campus • Eligibility: Education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in any discipline Work Experience: 0–24 months of full-time experience as of June 15 of the admission year Test Scores: Valid CAT, GMAT, or GRE scores English Proficiency: TOEFL/IELTS required if undergraduate instruction was not in English Curriculum Highlights • Core Learning Areas: Analytical Foundations: Economics, Accounting, Statistics, Data Science Functional Expertise: Marketing, Finance, Operations, Strategy Leadership Development: Team management, Communication, Influencing skills • Experiential Learning: iDEAS Lab: Innovation through Design Exploration and Actionable Solutions Summer Internship: Mandatory internship at the end of Year 1 • Electives: Customization in areas like Finance, Marketing, Strategy, and Technology Career Support & Opportunities • Recruitment Partners: Access to 300+ top recruiters, including McKinsey & Company, BCG, Amazon, Google, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Deloitte • Career Advancement Services: Structured support for internships and final placements Fees & Scholarships • Total Program Cost: Approximately INR 29,99,200 (includes tuition, accommodation, and additional fees) • Scholarships: Merit-Based: For top-performing candidates Need-Cum-Merit: For candidates demonstrating financial need and academic excellence ISB Develop India Scholarship: For students committed to contributing to India’s growth Admissions Process 1. Application Submission: Includes academic records, test scores, essays, and recommendation letters 2. Shortlisting: Based on academic performance, achievements, test scores, and essays     Interviews: Conducted by ISB faculty, industry leaders, and alumni • Application Deadline: December 21, 2024 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about ISB's 2-Year MBA 1. Can fresh graduates apply for ISB's PGPYL program? Yes, the program is specifically designed for fresh graduates and early career professionals with up to 24 months of work experience. 2. Does ISB accept CAT scores for this program? Yes, ISB accepts valid CAT, GMAT, or GRE scores for admission to the PGPYL program. 3. What is the duration of the PGPYL program? The program spans 20 months, including a mandatory summer internship. 4. Are scholarships available for the PGPYL program? Yes, ISB offers various scholarships, including merit-based, need-cum-merit, and the ISB Develop India Scholarship. 5. What is the total cost of the program? The total cost is approximately INR 29,99,200, covering tuition, accommodation, and additional fees. 🔗 Useful Links ISB PGPYL Program Details ISB Admissions Page