Moments Of Excess Research Articles

The Fontanelle

‘The Fontanelle’ suggests that a consideration of the everyday architectural detail, not as ornament but as action, may increase the range of what architectural theory sees and thus may increase the richness of what we can imagine. Using a menu format, this essay takes its structure and lead from the address offered by Jennifer Bloomer on the occasion of the 1992 RIBA Annual Discourse. This feature (along with other moments of notional excess) was redacted from the abridged and published version of the Discourse. Seeking to redress these oversights, the essay returns them to the canon, using associated matters — personal, political, and professional — to explore a particular architectural interface — the architrave. Though recognising and celebrating the multiplicity of this technical detail, the essay shows how moments of notional mediocrity can open out into larger socio-political and ecological questions. The work of this essay, revisiting Bloomer, insists on the relevance of such technicalities, not simply as formalities to be endured, but lifeworlds within which to grow.

Storying with plastic excess: relations with plastic in early childhood education

ABSTRACT The earth is drowning in plastic waste. Yet, as the plastic waste crisis grows exponentially, responses to excess waste remain stuck around containment and management processes. These approaches fail to notice that plastics know no boundaries. We now encounter plastic rocks, plastic water, plastic bodies, plastic worlds spilling into oceans and rivers and across landscapes. Responding to the complexity of plastic’s unruly presence demands careful attention both globally and within situated local contexts. This article explores how the queer synthetic curriculum takes up the concept of excess through common worlding waste pedagogies to attend to children’s relations with plastic waste. We speculate with the idea of excess by making large amounts of plastic the main protagonist in an early childhood classroom. Disrupting waste management’s metaphors of distance, we exaggerate plastic’s presence: a plastic whale stomach is stuffed with plastic bottles, dozens of bottles hang from the ceiling, hundreds of bottles are strewn across the classroom floor, and crochet hooks turn out plastic yarn balls. Without claiming to develop children’s understanding of the problematic nature of waste, this article stories moments of excess that might provoke subjective transformations as children encounter excess in their daily lives.

With and Beyond Los Angeles’s Daddy Tank: Gender, Confinement, and Queer Desire

ABSTRACT This article outlines a carceral history of Los Angeles through the policing of gender, and in particular, the policing of queer brown masculinity. It traces the twinned regimes of gender and prison in Los Angeles to Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 16th century colonial fiction about the capture of a gender nonconforming warrior queen Calafia, who ruled the mythical island of California. The violent logics of Calafia’s capture persist in the city’s carceral expansion and continue to impact gender nonconforming people today. Through an engagement with community histories that document spaces for gender confinement, such as the Daddy Tank, a cellblock used for masculine expressed people and lesbians at the Sybil Brand Institute in the 1970s, this paper centres moments of queer excess that counter such spaces. I follow Nancy Valverde, a Chicana butch elder, whose stories of detention for ‘masquerading’ in Los Angeles in the 1950s have much to teach us about gender nonconformity – from its policing to the liberatory possibilities of queer resistance.

Communicating with Georges Bataille in the Mixed Martial Arts Gym

In this article I turn to the theorist Georges Bataille to explore how the transgressive elements of training in mixed martial arts (MMA) facilitate a sense of intimacy and feeling of community among the participants. To build this argument, I draw on ten years spent alongside the hobbyists and competitors who spend their free hours in mixed martial arts gyms punching, kicking, choking, and hurting each other. Taking inspiration from Bataille, along with new engagements with materialism within studies of sport, I make central the exchange of sweat, touch, scent, germs, hair, saliva, blood, and pain. Through combining core elements of Bataille's writings with stories from the MMA gym, I direct attention to the allure of fleshy moments of excess, vulnerability, transgression, and communication. I conclude with a reflection on the gendered expectations that proliferate the gym, the challenges presented by the commodification of the practice, and the radical potentials of play and care.

Framing Our Story: Youthist and Queer Temporalities in Lopez's <em>The Inheritance</em>

Abstract This essay offers a temporal read of Lopez’s The Inheritance, a two part Broadway production, exploring questions about what gay men of differing ages can and might mean to one another. The article examines how systems of gay cultural youthism are negotiated through the play’s narrative structure, in particular considering the characters of Leo, Adam, Toby, and Eric. Next, the article interrogates the ways Henry, Walter, and Morgan are constructed through the narrative and in relation to younger characters, investigating the play’s articulation of aging and generativity. The next section looks at the temporal operations of the script, wherein straight temporal commitments are framed as more desirable, whereas narratives of gay suicide operate to constrain queer temporal imagination. Finally, the article considers the narrative framing of Toby and Eric, the centralized thirty-somethings, to negotiate the play’s articulation of proper or preferred gay male aging, maturation, and intergenerational relations. Within each section, the temporal criticism is troubled by key moments that complicate the critical reading, identifying potential moments of queer excess and disruption.

Problems with the treatment of Hong Kong cinema as camp

My favourite home video entertainment at the moment is Once Upon A Time In China 2, Tsui Hark’s 1992 Hong Kong martial arts picture. As a fan of this kind of film, I find it impossible to watch for ten minutes without compulsively reaching for the rewind button, the better to catch again those inventive moments of smile-inducing excess. I like the hyper-manly swagger and bounce of the catchy theme song, or the scene where the hero, Wong Fei Hung/Jet Lee, fights his adversaries armed with nothing but a rolled-up umbrella. And I am not alone in my appreciation. As any reasonably aware movie fan knows, popular Hong Kong films like this attract cult audiences in the West.

Building Beyond the Bypass Road: Urban Migration, Ritual Eating, and the Fate of the Joint Family in Patna, India

ABSTRACTThe anthropology of urban migration in South Asia has emphasized the plight of marginalized people and conflicts over public space. But the precarity of agriculture and inadequacy of basic state services has increasingly compelled rural middle‐class families in Bihar, India, to establish a foothold in the country's booming cities. Because they aim to remain located in both the urban and rural spheres, urban migration reconfigures kinship relations so that the joint family household becomes a non‐cohabitating entity. Constructing a house in the city depends on rural consumption practices that are distinct from the individual‐oriented consumerism of the urban middle class. The gr̥h praveś, the Hindu house consecration ceremony and feast, legitimizes this transition. The hosts negotiate their hybrid identity as urban migrants through the event's food practices. For instance, adulteration scandals have prompted concerns about provisioning milk in the city. The consumption of milk‐based specialty foods during the gr̥h praveś reflects the family's effort to deploy nourishing, familiar foods that reassert ties to their village community while also signaling aspirations to prosperity and a modern, cosmopolitan identity. Moments of ritual excess extend overflowing hospitality to guests human and divine, providing material proof of the family's unity and ambitions. [urban migration, feasting, house construction, ritual, kinship]

Living the Laughscream: Human Technology and Affective Maneuvers in the Iraq War

In a new contribution to contemporary scholarship on war, I explore the epistemological and affective labors outsourced to individuals I call human technologies: populations of local wartime intermediaries and cultural role-players employed by the U.S. military as embodied repositories of Middle East knowledge. Drawing on fieldwork across the United States, this study focuses on the largely unexamined ethnographic spaces of U.S. military predeployment simulations in mock Middle Eastern villages. I focus on Iraqis who first worked for the U.S. military in Iraq as interpreters and then as role-players within predeployment simulations in the United States. Through a close examination of the wartime labors of these individuals, this study illuminates how the intrinsic contradiction in the term human technology—the turning of person into machine for a singular use, foreclosing other forms of being and becoming—plays out on the ground. I demonstrate how the ironic disjuncture between military prescriptions for authenticity and role-players’ experiences of inauthenticity generates moments of affective rupture for those hired to embody their cultures. I argue that a charged tension manifests itself in the training apparatus: on an epistemological level, even as they experience excess, role-players work to make the simulations “look good” to retain their jobs. Meanwhile, that excess manifests itself in affective overflow—in particular, one form that a role-player called “the laughscream.” I contend that such moments of affective excess create a momentary reprieve for role-players, while typically not disturbing the military structure. The role-players’ laughter existentially negates the possibility that human beings can be tools, while permitting them, in practice, to be used as tools.

Textural Poaching Twin Peaks: The Audrey Horne Sweater Girl GIFs

This article aims to widen the lens of analysis of participatory culture inspired by long-arc serials like Twin Peaks. It considers GIF creation as a form of textural poaching, a new reception practice involving skimming off and repurposing top-of-the-mind content: the most arresting elements of costuming, set design, and dialogue. This behavior has become more popular as more series rely on textural storytelling and are filled with moments of excess that feel separate from the story. After an introduction to GIFs and GIF creation, it contrasts the impression of the character and series conveyed by Audrey Horne GIFs and the actual dynamics in the “Audrey’s Dance” scene. It establishes that Audrey’s look is most visually aligned with the Sweater Girl type, but as an allusive characterization it creates excess and calls attention to itself. Part of the “cool pop” reputation of the series may stem from the wider circulation of iconic moments of excess especially given that the GIFs detach the images from the series’ uneven storytelling and its challenging surrealist sensibility.

Studying embodied encounters: autonomy of migration beyond its romanticization

This article forms part of the attempt to develop the concept of autonomy of migration as an approach that is no longer prone to critique of implicating a romanticisation of migration. Drawing on the example of biometric rebordering, it shows in the first part, that it becomes pertinent to address the two allegations that drive this major critique, as their warranty increases due to the technologisation of border controls. It then introduces a reading of autonomy, which emphasises that moments of uncontrollability and excess of migratory practices can not be thought in isolation of the conditions, in which they emerge. The second part introduces the notion of the embodied encounter as a transmission channel that mediates between the investigation of the situated practices of particular migrants and the assertion of an abstract autonomy of migration, thereby efficiently dissolving the two criticisms that have been raised against the concept of autonomy of migration. What the adoption of this analytical focus affords to acknowledge is, however, that neither migration, nor borders exist as such, but are brought into being in the innumerable encounters between people on the move and the actors, means and methods of mobility control.

Colour Consciousness and Design in Blanche Fury as Technicolor Melodrama

This article addresses colour and music as elements associated with the rhetoric and excesses of film melodrama through a case study of Blanche Fury (1947). Music is discussed as an analogy for thinking about colour composition and the moving image through the rhetoric and practices of Technicolor design and a theoretical context contemporary to the film’s making discerned in both production materials and film text. Colour takes on a musical value which serves a diegetic function by both situating characters in relation to the mise-en-scene and operating as a cue to instances of perception attributed specifically to the female protagonist. Drawing on theories of melodrama and colour I will argue that colour and music are integral to and offer material for further explorations of feminine desire and sexual difference as they can be seen to operate in this particular melodrama.1 For Laura Mulvey, the premise that film melodrama offers the illusion of a coherent image of the world indicates the potential of fractures for a progressive text (1989: 39). Melodrama stages scenarios that engage the spectator’s fascination by veiling mechanisms of representation and foregrounding moments of excess; within this system, elements that elide the unfolding narrative logic of the film touch upon unarticulated desire. The potential of a film which is dependent on the concealment of the marks of production, its material ground and technology (celluloid, dyes specific to threestrip Technicolor) to disturb the construction of an illusion operates through the interrelations of the film as process and text. The narrative of Blanche Fury traces a discourse of familial loyalty, dispossession and desire surrounding ownership of the Fury family name and estate at Clare Hall. The film’s disowned heroine, Blanche Fury, returns to Clare Hall at the invitation of her uncle, Simon Fuller,

A relational psychoanalysis perspective on the necessity of acknowledging failure in order to restore the facilitating and containing features of the intersubjective relationship (the shared third)

Relational psychoanalysis has emphasized that the analyst’s awareness of her failures in recognition and hurtful re-opening of old wounds requires of her an internal struggle with self-regulation, with her own shame and guilt. This struggle takes place in the watchful presence of someone who is (sometimes hypervigilantly) listening to and monitoring the signs of the analyst’s internal state. If, in response to the patient’s hyper-arousal, the analyst retreats from the ‘music’ of mutual regulation (Knoblauch, 2000) into a dissociative use of observation in order to calm down, the patient can feel it. If, however, we are mindful of our failures, gradually we will learn together to recover from ruptures in attunement, and thus become sensitive to and use more effectively the inexplicable gaps created by the patient’s unintegrated or warring self-parts and the analyst’s failure to contain them. Thus moments of excess that fail to evoke a mirroring knowledge can serve instead to signal the unformulated, undifferentiated malaise, despair or fear. This perspective on ruptures represents an amplification of my original articulation of the process of mutual recognition as one of breakdown and restoration of intersubjective space (Benjamin, 1988). This expanded relational perspective includes the awareness of multiple self-parts that create different dyadic pairings within the same relationship and a view of intersubjectivity that emphasizes not just the fact of mutual influence (Stolorow and Atwood) but the consciousness that that there is a bi-directional dance between patient and analyst that each person registers differently – a cocreated dance governed by what we call the third (Ogden, 1994). In previous discussions of the intersubjective third I have distinguished between ‘a primordial third’, which refers to the musical or rhythmic exchange of gestures between caretaker and child as well as the procedural principles of lawful relating that underlie it, and a ‘symbolic third’, which makes use of more developed narrative elements and involves procedural rules based on consensus, negotiation, and recognition, especially recognition of the other’s separate subjectivity (Benjamin, 2004). Because of the inevitability that things will sometimes go wrong, that we will enact frightening and shameful aspects of our internal world that both Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90:441–450 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00163.x

Six Trophies and a Funeral: Performance and Football in the City of Valletta

This paper examines the elaborate celebrations organized by the fans of Valletta City football (soccer) club, Malta, when they win the Maltese football league. It argues that these celebrations constitute a continuation of the carnivalesque. Valletta fans have a reputation for their fanatical support, and are renowned as tough‐guys. Their celebrations are moments of drunken excess, which celebrate this “diamond‐in‐the‐rough” authenticity, and satirize their opponents, which they see as inauthentic “pretenders.” The celebrations use symbolism drawn from an earlier carnival tradition—particularly the symbolism of death, and the re‐enactment of funereal performance. The paper therefore argues that contemporary football celebration has replaced the carnival as a cultural form through which social antagonisms—of locality and social class—are manifest. The paper also examines the relationship between these spontaneous celebrations, and state‐sponsored pageants—including the modern carnival—which are primarily aimed at tourists. [Football Celebration, Valletta, Carnival, Nostalgia, Class].

Introduction to Focus: Noh Man's Land

Introduction to Focus: floh Man's Land K. Malcolm Richards, Focus Editor Aiaericai HBVlBW We Japanese do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping ofthe undefinable. —Martin Heidegger In "A Dialogue on Language," Heidegger stages a scene involving "an Inquirer" and, as it was translated into English in 1971, "a Japanese." This conversation, echoing a format most frequently associated with the dialogues of Plato, takes up a problem involving the translation not only of words, but of concepts between East and West. This dialogue is all the more strange, for, at one level, even if inspired partly by the visit of a Japanese scholar conversant in Heidegger's philosophy, it is a fiction taking place between two speakers, who are, at one and the same time, both voices of Heidegger. (Imagine the aging ex-Nazi philosopher alone in his Freiburg home, enacting this conversation with the help of two sock puppets.) This fictive dialogue necessitates a peculiar friction, a friction caused between the meeting of two cultures and the differences of their respective languages, as well as the resultant frictions produced through a conversation that takes place in German, in Heidegger's own language. Indeed, this meeting within a Western language becomes one of the facets to this strange essay that allows Heidegger to explore a difference within Japanese thought, as embodied in his questioning of the Japanese term iki,- a difference that is threatened by the translation of this concept into the language of Western metaphysics. I wish to counter Heidegger's aestheticization of iki with an aesthetics of Ichi. That is to say, the filmic work created by the director ofIchi the Killer (2001), Takashi Miike, seems to offer a way beyond the simple oppositions presumed by Heidegger's dialogue, oppositions between realism and antirealism , Western and Japanese (or, as Heidegger terms it, EastAsian). To put it briefly, Miike's work offers moments where realism and antirealism coexist, breaking down or, dare I say, deconstructing the opposition between realism and antirealism, and pointing to something lurking beneath the very concept of realism in representation, undoing a tradition ofmimesis, even while providing moments of excess that send some of his viewers toward the exit sign in disgust. One can regurgitate everything Derrida has to say on Kant, mimesis, and vomit, at this point. Still, it would be a mistake to homogenize this quality of Miike's work, giving it a stable identity, for if it manifests itself in one instance as a milklike substance spilling out of Ichi, while forming the kanji character for Ichi (simultaneously the film's title, protagonist's name, and the number "one," which is also the number that Ichi's costume bears), this milklike substance also appears in a more maternal form in Visitor Q (2001) or Gozu (2003), almost real, but not quite as real as real can get. In his refusal of a simple either/or logic, Miike pushes aside questions of realism and antirealism, embracing the fictive qualities of film, as well as how film can, at the same time, inscribe itself both within and without reality. Beyond these concerns of Western aesthetics , Miike's work also destabilizes the domestic Japanese, challenging a notion of the Japanese home that situates his work amongst themes from contemporary Japanese literature and culture. This can be seen not only through his collaboration with Japanese authors, as in his adaptation of RyQ Murakami's Audition (1999), but also in his use of Japanese popular culture, as in his adaptations of manga classics, such as Ichi or MPD Psycho (2000). In his engagement with the contemporary, his work flows into many of the cultural currents the reader will discover in this Focus, from the genre crossing to be found in the work of Haruki Murakami to the wealth of experimental music covered in Improvised Musicfrom Japan. The latter can be witnessed in the soundtrack to Ichi provided by Seiichi Yamamoto of the Boredoms or the dissonant acid-folk music of Kazuki Tomokawa in Izo (2004), while the former can be experienced in Miike's destructuring of the yakuza genre (nowhere more spectacularly...

Always Famous

Always Famous

The original WWW: Web lessons from the early days of radio

ow do you evaluate a technology which has completely captured the public’s imagination? One which has spawned thousands of articles in newspapers and magazines. A technology that has come to indicate innovativeness, where failure to appreciate it is taken as a sure sign of belonging to the wrong side of a generational divide. Which has led, almost overnight, to the creation of new companies, brands, industries, and fortunes. A technology which commentators claim will revolutionize not only public culture, but also education and commerce. And, in moments of excess, a technology which is hailed as the best new chance for creating a peaceful world.

Kissing Becky: Masculine Fears and Misogynist Moments in Science Fiction Films

����� ers (1956), Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982)—are all marked by a common element: the presence of at least one moment of startling misogyny. These moments are startling in part because they involve either a narrative digression or superfluity, a stylistic deviation, or a violation of their films' prior encodings of the female. More importantly, each of them expresses an unanticipated level of male fear of or violence towaid women, in response to a threat to men's powers of representation and control. What follows attempts to read in these moments of textual excess both the instability of male identity and the vulnerability of male hegemony. This reading is part of the stream of response to Laura Mulvey's watershed essay on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, with its crucial analysis of Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look. Since Mulvey, a good deal of writing on film and gender has focused on trying to undermine the seemingly monolithic structure of the classic pattiatchal Hollywood system, and paiticulatly on theorizing relation—and opposition—to a cinema that seems systematically to exclude them as subjects. Hence critics have taken up such matters as the return of the gaze on the part of the female image/object, the problem of women's cinema, and the positions of actual female spectatots, in vatious histotical moments, as they watch classic Hollywood

Convergence Rates and $r$-Quick Versions of the Strong Law for Stationary Mixing Sequences

In this paper we prove a theorem on the convergence rate in the Marcinkiewicz-Zygmund strong law for stationary mixing sequences. Our result gives the $r$-quick strong law and the finiteness of moments of the largest excess of boundary crossings for such sequences.