Grapevine

This page will hold G(l)oss(ary)ips shared during the XPUB 2026 SI29: Gossiping at the Intersection of Crafts and Resistances.

Single-A

In the game industry, the more “A”s in the labelling of a game, the greater the size of the company, corporation, or conglomerate behind it.

“AA” or Double-A games are mid-market video games that typically have some type of professional development though typically outside of the large first-party studios of the major developers; these may be from larger teams of indie developers or from smaller non-indie studios. Double-A studios tend to range from 50 to 100 people in size.

“AAA”, also known as triple-A, is a term used to classify video games produced or distributed by a mid-sized or major publisher, which typically have higher development and marketing budgets than other tiers of games.

Starting in 2020 leading up to the launch of the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, two studios started using the term AAAA (Quadruple-A) to describe upcoming games in development.

Let us foster an economy and an environment in which game development is single-A: both top quality and completely independent!

This entry was inspired by Tommi’s “mock” interview to Barbs.

Accelerationism

Speeding up the spreading of gossip, especially if venomous, to accelerate the collapse of hierarchical, unequal, unfair systems.

Negative connotations of gossiping can be weaponized against the very information infrastructure that discriminates it.

Aesthetics (in a political sense)

the semblance of fixity relies on constant repetition > Judith Butler

topics

political imagination as aesthetic experience

the role of media in it's mediation

ways to counter dominant ideologies

abstraction vs. embodied practice

the intersection of aesthetics / politics / technology

theoretic sources

SI28

Publics and Counterpublics - Michael Warner

The nature of a 'public'. Paradoxically, both constituted by it's imagination and it's direct adress, but never either one of those.

The Mature Politics of Jaques Ranciere - Oliver Davis

This text explains the political thought of Jaques Ranciere. I'm mainly interested in how he relates Aesthetics and Politics, saying they are intrinsically linked to each-other. In his term"Le Partage du Sensible", or "the Distribution of the Sensible", he's arguing how regimes of power influence what is seeable and hearable to it's subjects, who gets to speak and be heard, and how this defines what we can know about the world, which informs how we move through it, act in it. It is a notion of Aesthetics that has very little to do with the judgement of taste. Rather, aesthetics is taken way broader, to mean anything that is sensible.

His ideas are rooted in Marxist Structuralism, being taught by Luis Althusser, but parting ways with him as he developed his own philosophical framework. There's a huge emphasis on the opposition between the ruling class and the proletariat in his thinking, though he develops this further. But in doing so, he remains very abstract.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization

This is a book by Spivak, but I know it from a lecture on youtube.

In it, Spivak tackels a lot of complicated political philosophy.. But she is getting at the role of aesthetics in politics."The Aesthetic is anything that trains the imagination for epistemological performance." "The problem of knowledge is not what things to know, but how to know them."

Spivak has a similar understanding of the Aesthetic, though way more practical. "The Aesthetic is anything that trains the imagination for epistemological performance." "The problem of knowledge is not what things to know, but how to know them." She also focuses heavily on the distinction between globalization as instrumental knowledge systems and the one in the margins, the Subaltern, and goes further to say that established systems of knowledge, affected by globalization, can only exist in the abstract, in quantifiable data. That an experiencing being cannot sense this. She sees an aesthetic education as an embodied practice. "A deeper cultivation of the Imagination, reading, writing, understanding, dwelling in otherness, performing knowledge." And developing a capacity to deal with double-binds, tensions between ethical demands.

computing gender Within western context, referring to gender as an 'instrument of abstraction', sexualized in cultural practice. With 'computing' she means the abstraction of knowledge by computed data, algorythms, large language models, etc. the globalizing forces that process information into strings of numbers, basically. Something that is not sensible to the experiencing being. 'gender', she situates by saying it's the name for those forces applied to sexual differences, and were named 'gender' by feminist speakers of English. > as in, specifying that this is the meaning she gives to the word. Seeing gender as one of these instruments of abstraction, making distinctions, categories, that are then given social / cultural relevance.

Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson

Benedict Anderson traces the origins and spread of nationalism. The idea of imagination as an important aspect of thinking about our relation to each-other through common experience, is one of the central themes. And two of his three main arguments have to do with the presence of texts.

It shows how capitalism, bureaucracy and industrial print layed the foundation for the 'imagining' of a collectivity based on nation-ness. A common nationality. It is also a detailed analysis of the shifts in power structures going from feudal society into modernity, and how print was used as a tool of control. How it shaped languages into 'official print languages', and organised people into 'monoglot reading publics' changing the perception of time, common experience, the relevance of religion as a frame to understand the world through.

And from there, it shows how those same tactics were used to change social organizations in colonialism.

Its one of the most canonical theoretic works in the social sciences. During the political philosophy course I did it was referenced many times, and I know in Middle Eastern Studies and History it is part of the curriculum as well.

On wikipedia:

Benedict Anderson arrived at his theory because he felt neither Marxist nor liberal theory adequately explained nationalism.

I just read this: [Anderson] was born in a Western missionary family inside China. Which is very interesting.. given the SIL research..

From the introduction

"What made the new communities imaginable was an interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.

Particular languages can die or be wiped out, but there was and is no possibility of humankind's general linguistic unification. Yet, this mutual incomprehensibility was historically of only slight importance until capitalism and print created monoglot mass reading publics.

In pre-print Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in the world, the diversity of spoken languages, those languages that for their speakers were (and are) the warp and woof of their lives, was immense; so immense, indeed, that had print-capitalism sought to exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions. But these varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definitive limits, into print-languages far fewer in number. The very arbitrariness of any system of signs for sounds facilitated the assembling process.

(At the same time, the more ideographic the signs, the vaster the potential assembling zone.) Nothing served to 'assemble' related vernaculars more than capitalism, which, within the limits imposed by grammars and syntaxes, created mechanically reproducible print-languages capable of dissemination through the market.

These print-languages laid the base for national consciousness in three distinct ways:

> they created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars.

Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes or Spanishes, who might fond it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. They became aware of the hundreds of thousands of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.

> print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation. the printed book kept a permanent form, capable of virtually infinite reproduction, temporally and spatially. For three centuries now these stabilized print-languages have been gathering a darkening varnish; the words of our seventeenth-century forebears are accessible to us in a way that to Villon his twelfth-century ancestors were not.

> print-capitalism created languages-of-power if a kind different from the older administrative vernaculars. Certain dialects inevitably were 'closer' to each print-language and dominated their fatal forms.Their disadvantaged cousins, still assimilable to the emerging print-language, lost caste, above all because they were unsuccessful in insisting on their own print-form. once there, they could become formal models to be imitated, and, where expedient, consciously exploited in a Machiavellian spirit. !!! Today, the Thai government actively discourages attempts by foreign missionaries to provide its hill-tribe minorities with their own transcription-systems and to develop publications in their won languages: the same government is largely indifferent to what these minorities speak. !!!

--> that's interesting... foreign missionaries are here being used as an example of a national government holding on to their influence through communication technology by refusing to let them in and study minority tribes within their territory. SIL's efforts have probably been instrumentalized in both directions. If the point is to illustrate why national governments would suppress language technology development for minority languages, this makes sense, only to the extend that we leave out the fact that the 'foreign' to these missionaries is an even more dominant power that the thai national government (if we are talking about european / american missionaries here, but I'm willing to bet on it) In the end, there would not be much incentive for a foreign entity to come in to offer these kinds of developments to a community but to exert some kind of influence over it. The national government could then be both protecting their own interests and the sovereignty of these communities in the process (as side-effect, not with intention probably) and still impose their own grip on this community by denying access to those tools.

The Book - Amaranth Borsuk

SI29

Imitation and Gender Insubordination - Judith Butler

"How come I can both be a lesbian and act like one at the same time?"

Queerness imagined from a hetero-normative point-of-view as a 'cheap copy of the original'. Straightness implied as the 'natural' the 'original'.

The visibility of queerness depended on it's positioning as derivative of straightness. That position subordinates the queer body since it can never exist separately from or independent of an imagining of straightness. Had an idea of straightness never be conceived in the first place, queerness would not have to exist as a separate category. Yet, since it has, it is a reality by the fact of this dynamic, presented as 'natural fact' being reproduced over and over again.

'Drag is what reveals all gender to be a copy of which there is no original.' Rather than being the imitation of a gender that supposedly properly belongs to some other group, it is revealing that gender expressions were never fixed or 'naturally' belonging to a certain group in the first place.

It's a sort of re-shuffling of the meanings of these categories that reveals the reproduction of that dominant story to be one copy among many.

White Innocence, Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race - Gloria Wekker

A study into the particular flavor of racism within the Dutch context. Where racism paradoxically manifests itself in the white self-conscious as non-existent, a 'we are above this' attitude, together with a presumed objective stance on the subject making it hard to have a truly open conversation about the real effects and experiences of race-thinking.

In one of the chapters, the author tells about Mati work, or Mati culture in Suriname, as an example of the intersection between race and gender in a non-western context. She wants to illustrate how western self-descriptive terms fail in important ways to capture the lived experiences in different contexts. Mati work is a practice of sexual relations between women, but as she says, it would not be an accurate description to call these 'lesbian' relations. Not because sexual relations between women are not recognized as valid, but because they are not distinguished from sexual relations between men and women or men and men in the same way as is done here. (different distinctions between gender expressions are not discussed) And they were never legitimized within the institution of marriage or the nuclear family in the same way. She sums it up quite well by saying that outside the west, the idea that you 'have' or 'are' a sexuality, rather than sexuality being something you do is a strange idea.

I read this book quite a few years back already, and reading Butler reminded me of this example. I noticed how differently I read this chapter now. Back then, I realized for the first time that these words, like lesbian, queer, etc. were also products of the western thought-models. I wasn't able to realize, to the extend I do now, how deeply this changes your perception of the world. It is also strange to realize, what kind of clashes in thinking this can cause. It's like living in two separate thought-systems at the same time. Constantly switching registers depending on how a given situation requires you to think about yourself. Where in one, terms might be lacking to express your experience with. In the other, they might be completely absent, because the distinctions they are trying to convey were never meaningful in the first place. Or, if they do exist, they might be incomprehensible to someone that did not grow up in this thought-system before.

Situated Knowledges, The Science Question in Feminism And the Privilege of Partial Perspective

The text deals with the idea of Objectivity and how to approach it from a feminist angle.

The Persistence of Vision

'The Gaze that inscribes all marked bodies. That makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not to be seen. To represent while escaping representation.'

Vision being artificially enhanced by technology.

How to see from below? The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibilities of webs of connections called solidarity in politics, shared conversations in epistemologies.

From such a viewpoint the 'unmarked' category would really disappear. Quite different form simply repeating a disappearing act.

The imaginary and the rational, the visionary and objective vision hover close together.

Vision is always a question of the power to see.

Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies.

The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable. The one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history.

La Gaye Panique

A political history of homosexuality

-> relates a lot to butler (ofc)

phylactere no.3

introduction on lavender languages. Examples of queer colloquial languages. Specific uses of these langauges, making it possible for the 'ingroup' to communicate a shared experience, while remaining hidden from oppressive forces.

social organizations around print practices

Since the book is not just an object, but a political agent in it's own right, I wanted to collect some examples I could think off of different practices of learning and networking involving print/books. Since we tend to take for granted that reading a book is an individual experience, and the communication between it's author and the reader one-sided. I hope this will illustrate how diverse social organisations around print can be.

Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain - James Michael Yeoman

This book is an account of the role of print in the organisation of the Anarchist Movement in Splain in the early 19th century. A network of anarchist papers and periodicals were the backbone of the communication network of the movement, being completely de-centralised, these papers didn't only communicate the thought of the movement, but also actively shaped it, facilitating debate about the movements ideals without any mediation coming from above. > Jaques Ranciere

Ambiguous

Not having one particular meaning but a more different sometiomes opposing understanding of a word, happening, situation. A synonym would be something like debatable, or ambivalent, or undecided. Having different feelings about it, sentences that start as: on one hand, … on the other hand. or on one side… on the otherside. Some keywords associated with: altough, however, on one hand, undecided, ambivalent debatable, confusing.

Backronym

occurs in: the etymology and usage section of the Wikipedia article about Rapping

Backronym is a blend of “back” and “acronym”. It describes an existing word that is treated as an acronym and expands its letters into the words of a phrase, even though this phrase does not represent the etymology of the word.

The claim that rap is an acronym for Rhythm And Poetry is a backronym. Similarly, Extraterrestrial Publishing is a backronym for XPUB!

Brittle

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 8

Brittle is a synonym for fragile. It is often used to describe something—a material object such as a vase or a tooth, or a concept such as friendship or language—(being on the verge of) breaking, and doing so without prior stress or stretching. In my mind it therefore has a mostly negative connotation.

Interestingly, the authors of Keywords for Radicals use the word in a positive way. Language is especially brittle in “periods of change” (cf. Introduction to Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams), and this is an opportunity to reflect on understandings and contradictions of words, and to mold language into new and possibly better forms.

For context, this is the full quote by Williams from the introduction to Keywords:

When a particular history is completed, we can all be clear and relaxed about it. But literature, aesthetic, representative, empirical, unconscious, liberal: these and many other words which seem to me to raise problems will, in the right circles, seem mere transparencies, their correct use a matter only of education. Or class, democracy, equality, evolution, materialism: these we know we must argue about, but we can assign particular uses to sects, and call all sects but our own sectarian. Language depends, it can be said, on this kind of confidence, but in any major language, and especially in periods of change, a necessary confidence and concern for clarity can quickly become brittle, if the questions involved are not faced.

Cancel

How does the definition of “cancelling” and “deleting” change in a distributed, decentralized, nonhierarchical knowledge infrastructure?

For example, in peer-to-peer protocols the most that can be done is requesting to delete something from a node/peer, but there can be no way to ensure that any cached version of that something is still stored.

Especially to counter authoritarianism, this becomes a powerful resistance to censorship, as it becomes virtually impossible to erase all sources of some specific information.

In VCSs like git, removing something from a repository means adding a removal operation, yet the file is (almost) irreversibly engraved in the history of the repository, thus impossible to erase.

Capricious

caprious

Chatter

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 9

Chatter is mentioned in Keywords for Radicals as a form of horizontal communication among workers (manifested in countless calls or in a never-ending stream of messages). The authors state that the service-orientated economy of today revolves mostly—if not entirely (see Paolo Virno)—around communicative work. Later in the text (p. 20), they use chatter in a sense more close to a definition by the book: talking idly and on trivial subjects. Can then be concluded that modern labour is babbling and therefore is obsolete?:)

Chatter can include gossip.

Cipayo

Early Meanings

Coming from the persian word Sipâhi, it meant a soldier. In the Ottoman Empire, the Sipâhi where elite members with land possesions, tracing parallels to the figure of the knight in Feudal Europe.

Colonial Meanings

In occupied India under British Rule, the word Sepoy was firstly employed to Muslim or Hindu soldiers without formal training. in the 18th century, the word settled its meaning to determine indigenous soldiers employed by the occupying force. It is estimated that nearly 96% of British Easy India Company was composed by Sepoys. There were also Sepoys employed by French, Spanish and Portuguese colonial forces.

Contemporary Meanings

In the aftermath of the kidnapping of Venezuelan Ex-president Nicolás Maduro, it was reported in several media channels that the Venezuelan Diaspora was celebrating the fall of the dictator and thanking the invasion of their own country by US Army forces. Certain comments on social media channels called this portion of the population Cipayos.

In a latin american neo-colonial context, Cipayo took the connotation of someone whose political inclinations support foreign countries in detriment of national interests. It is used as a derrogatory term - although not ethnical - in response to latinos supporting US-american and European imperialist policies. It is a synonym of "boot-licker", or "vendepatria" (country-seller, in spanish).

Curiosity

In methods class, we conducted interviews with each other in other in groups of three.

In the interviews Sibyl, Youjung and Lea did, the term curiosity came up a lot. While all three of us are struggling to see a perspective of scale in our practice, we are very motivated to stay curious. Having many different influences—that can be personal topics of interests, or other people and communities—is crucial to "growing" our practices and stay engaged in what we are working on.

Curiosity is very strong (almost magical) and is a driving factor in a lot of the things we are doing daily. Even though it is difficult and time consuming, Youjung is leaning how to code—because she is curious!

Curiosity connects strongly to childhood. Playing around and experimenting (as a child does when it learns to get around in this world) is useful in doing research and art. When you're growing older it becomes harder to stay curious but it is still of big value.

• strong motivation

• happy vs comfortable

Dichotomy

As a logical manoeuvrer which splits into two categories that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. For instance the kingdom of plants are not the same as the kingdom of animals, mushrooms, or the eukaryotes but these different categories together exhausts the category of all living beings. However this is not a classic dichotomy because it is split into 5 categories therefore it would be something like a pentachotomy.

Dichotomy of Digital Commons

A more XPUB related example that came up recently about the F/LOSS movement and its embeddedness in capitalist economy. On hand there are creative groups who believe in the values of sharing, studying, modifying software source code and through the circulation of source code there is added value. On the other hand when commercial market adopts these values with the undeniable goal to extract those added values and put software on the market as quickly as possible, these values cease into becoming a business strategy and not a collaborative effort to create. This is a sketch for the dichotomy of digital commons.

Soource: Digital Collective Ownership

The yin-yang infinity signage

"Yin and Yang" as a dichotomy：A shorthand explanation often describes yin and yang as woman and man, and all the other dualistic pairs, as mentioned in Jacques Lacan’s seminars: je ne parle pas du Yin et du Yang, comme tout le monde vous savez cela : le mâle et le femelle. ​ Although Mladen Dolar, quoted earlier, deems Chinese to be incomprehensible, he nevertheless spends a long paragraph explaining yin-yang as two (and only two) poles of masculine and feminine. He concludes there is a “strong thesis” in the “Taoist” symbol: “there is a relation. There is a sexual relation. Every relation is sexual.”

The short capitulation “yin and yang” or more “yin-yang” written together, showing an unconventional order of words, perhaps already hints at something different: the masculine habit of appearing first is at least reversed on the lexical level. Since one would never say yang-yin or yang and yin, one might at least pause for a moment before rushing into turning yin-yang into another symbol of the myth of a crosscultural, universal, and ahistorical patriarchy.

Efficacy VS Efficiency

Not to be mistaken for efficiency. Efficacy means being able to produce the desired result. While efficiency means producing with the least waste of time. Two terms I'm completely incapable of.

Elitist

“Elitist” is probably the most abused word in the women’s liberation movement. It is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as “pinko” was used in the fifties. It is rarely used correctly. Within the movement it commonly refers to individuals, though the personal characteristics and activities of those to whom it is directed may differ widely: An individual, as an individual can never be an elitist, because the only proper application of the term “elite” is to groups. Any individual, regardless of how well-known that person may be, can never be an elite.

- Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness

"..thus, there must not be any great problem with capitalist elites, political elites or international elites, unless there really are groups of friends involved “who also happen [my emphasis] to participate in the same political activities.” And this stupidity was written by a then future political scientist! Talk about blowing “smokescreens” to hide hegemony!"

- Jason McQuinn, A Review of The “Tyranny of Structurelessness”: An organizationalist repudiation of anarchism

Cultural Hegemony

There is an interesting connection between elitism, as Jo Freeman interprets it, and cultural hegemony as theorized by Antonio Gramsci.

How intentional or how spontaneous is the formation of such groups? Cultural hegemony is based on the accruing and gatekeeping of cultural and social awareness by an elitist few.

Cultural hegemony is only one of the representations and enactions of hegemony enforced by elites who take advantage of their position of power to perpetuate and reinforce the security of their position.

Grapevine

When you hear something through informal exchange, such as gossip, you 'heard it on the grapevine'. The word stems from black communities during the time of slavery in the US, an:

"illicit 'grapevine telegraph'—a network spreading news and correspondence between enslaved communities maintained by mobile bondpeople. Through this system of communication, enslaved men exchanged subversive ideas as well as daily news". (Lussana, 2016)

The first recorded use is from April 17, 1852:

"The following important dispatch was recived [sic] by the ‘Grape Vine’ telegraph—It came to hand just in time for this week’s ‘issoo,’ and the attentive ‘operator’ at Tiffin city has our thanks for his invaluable favor.” (O’Conner and Kellerman)

This statement is followed by an anonymous, satirical letter to the editor, "full of outlandish misinformation about an election for township offices". (O’Conner and Kellerman) From then on, the grapevine cut ties with its revolutionary origins and started to symbolise unreliable and informally shared information.

The Motown song 'I heard it through the grapevine' by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, uses the word as a central motif, symbolizing the spread of information and secrets within a community. In the case of the song, the information is heartbreaking.

At XPUB the expression is interpreted in a visual way, as people overhearing and discussing things because they are in close proximity to each other, like in a vineyard. (de Haan and Arrrigoni, 2026).

References Lussana, S. A. (2016). Enslaved Men, the Grapevine Telegraph, and the Underground Railroad', My Brother Slaves: "Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South" (Lexington, KY, 2016; online edn, Kentucky Scholarship Online, 22 Sept. 2016), https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813166940.003.0006

O’Conner, P. and Kellerman, S. (2018). Roots of the grapevine. Grammarphobia. Available at: https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2018/05/grapevine-2.html

de Haan, R. and Arrigoni E. (2026). Personal communication.

Hegemony

Appeared in The Tyranny of Structurelessness in FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES.

This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones.

Hegemony is the political, economic, and military predominance of one state over other states, either regional or global.

Cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who shape the culture of that society so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm. As the universal dominant ideology, the ruling-class worldview misrepresents the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, and that it perpetuates social conditions that benefit every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

When the social control is carried out by another society, it is known as cultural imperialism.

Difference between Hegemony and Imperialism Hegemony is more commonly used when it exerts overwhelming economic, military, and cultural influence. Iimperialism emphasizes visible direct domination and expansion such as territorial occupation or colonial rule.

Hip

occurs in: The Tyranny of Structurelessness, p. 5

What is hip is constantly changing. Sometimes it might be hip to say hip, and sometimes not.

Jo Freeman claims that “being 'hip'”, but “not being too 'hip'” is one criterion of many to effectively participate in political movement groups.

The term was recorded already in the early 1900s, and by the 1940s, it had become a common slang word in the American jazz scene. The etymology of the word is unknown. Theories include that it is derived from the west African Wolof language word hepicat, which means “one who has his eyes open”; or that the origins go back to—socially influential, or hip—opium users that would lay on their hips while smoking. Both claims sound far-fetched, but entertaining still.

You went an' found you a guru
In an effort to find you a new you
And maybe even raise your conscious level
While you're striving to find the right road
There's one thing you should know
What's hip today, might become passé

(Tower Of Power, 1973)

The true wisdom of toilet quotes. From the leftmost toilet in the restroom of the fourth floor of the Wijnhaven building. "In the post-Fordist classroom, the reflexive impotence of the students is mirrored by reflexive impotence of the teachers. De Angelis and Harvie report that 'practices and requirements of standardisation and surveillance obviously impose a huge burden of work on academics and few are happy about it. There have been a number of responses. Managers have frequently suggested there is no alternative (TINA) and have perhaps suggested that what we need to do is 'work smarter, not harder'. This seductive slogan, introduced to dampen staff resistance to further change which in their (our) experience has a devastating effects on working conditions, attempts to couple the need for 'change' (restructuring and innovation) in order to meet the budget pressure and increase 'competitiveness', with staff's resistance not only to worsening of their condition of work, but also to the educational and academic 'meaninglessness' of the 'changes'.' The invocation of the idea that 'there is no alternative', and the recommendation to 'work smarter, not harder', shows how capitalist realism sets the tone for labor disputes in post- Fordism. Ending the inspection regime, one lecturer sardonically remarked, seems more impossible than ending slavery was. Such fatalism can only be challenged if a new (collective) political subject emerges." (Fisher, 2009)

References

Freeman, J. (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. The Second Wave vol. 2, no. 1. Available at: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books.

Interaction

From Soda's interview

Investigatory is not one method but and attitude towards reasearch. Can stem from one word or a text, event, a memory, or anything that triggers curiousity and associationS to the topic of the research. It is not exactly a set steps to follow but more of an exploration of possible meaningS, possibiliteS, directionS, conclusionS even. It is tough a step back from THE dictionary definition of a word/expression which allows for discoveries by folowing clues, threads, traces. It is indeed that feeling of discovering something which the researcher/ interpreter of the traces could not foreseen in the beginning of the investigatory process. It is highly biased by the investigators previously adopted pattern recognition.

Materialize

1. Become actual fact; happen, appear or be present when expected.
2. (of a ghost, spirit, or similar entity) appear in bodily form. represent or cause to appear in bodily or physical form.

Language helps us to materialize ideas and thoughts. Once you address a lingering thought in mind the idea becomes tangible almost becomes a truth. When gossiping, something you say out loud becomes apparent and loud. It becomes difficult to erase it from your mind.

Pedagogy

The more technology becomes cryptic, seamless and alienating, the more pedagogy becomes a radical skill. Pedagogy skills aren't technical but social or cultural, it's another muscle to train to slowly bridge the gaps between our feelings of empowerment or alienations toward tech. Explaining what we know in simple way, or making space for other's concerns, can be really difficult. Anyone in HowSpot can exercice their abilities in collective learning.

- Doriane on the HowSpot website.

The word "pedagogy" originated from the Greek words for "boy" + "leader", literally translating to "a man having oversight of a child", which is a now-obsolete meaning.

The term's definition is often contested. Some define it as "The science of teaching", approaching it from an academic point of view. Others see it more as "The art or craft of teaching", which I think fits Doriane's interpretation better.

Pinko

A derrogatory term to define someone who is mildly left-wing, socialist or communist.

To differentiate from someone who is a left-extremist or radical, which would signify a saturated red in the political (color) spectrum. A pinko would sit in a pastel-like pink, a washed out red tone.

[Elitist]... is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as "pinko" was used in the fifties. - THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS, by Jo Freeman

Polysemic

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 18

The term polysemy comes from Ancient Greek: polys meaning “many” and sema meaning “sign”. An expression, for example a word, a phrase or a symbol, of polysemic character has several distinct but related meanings, and is therefore ambiguous.

In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams states that “[…] questions are not only about meaning; in most cases, inevitably, they are about meanings.” He goes on to explain that when writing a dictionary entry, the meaning of a word is usually strongly tied to a specific place and time. However, with words, especially those that describe ideas or values, we usually encounter a complexity of meanings that includes changes over time. In this sense, most words are polysemic and difficulties arise when one tries to squeeze them into a single definition.

Ironically, the first thing I did for this glossary entry was to write a definition. When I first read the word polysemic, I did not know the meaning and had to look up a definition myself to make sense of it. Looking back now—I could have translated it had I given it little more thought.

Practice

practice:

   1st sense: personal artistic practice

practice, as opposed to theoretical practice. 'embodiment', action, doing in the moment. vs. putting into practice, taking a theory and applying it. in the sense of a profession, a collection of activities that together should give some answer to the question 'what do you do?'

practice, as verb: repeating a task to get better at it.

To practice is putting things into action by a constant trial-and-error method. practice is something that executes overtime. it is not a one time only shot. in the context of the tiranny of structurlessness the author underlines how pratice is mostly a lacking factor. Freeman suggested 7 points to form principles that are essential to democratic structuring and are also politically effective. it can being regognized as putting things into practice but for some of them i won't say so! we can discuss on em. Practice makes perfect. it makes sense but it doesnt only mean repeating one exercise several times, it also hint that people would smmarize the experience in these practice. In the context of the article, I feel the examples provided for “practice” are insufficient and not precise to support the author's argument. Practice is something that people do but not only what people do but in what context they do. Where, when and how? Book : Publishing as Artistic Practice https://www.are.na/block/24649567

   is talking a  practice?
   to put things in practice
   repetition +3
   context +3

repetition over time, but in two senses: one as development of a skill. is grocery shopping a practice? A routine to sustain myself developing a skilll m has to put energy in it, intentional practicing ruynning ,

requires effort, something intentional actively

Proselytize

Converting someone to a specific group. Mostly to religious groups, but can also be to a political group. Can be seen as a synonym to coerce. It derives from the Greek word prosélytos meaning 'newcomer' Commonly it's done in public space, maybe with cardboard banners or by handing out pamphlets or books. In some countries it's illegal to proselytize.

Rap

occurs in: The Tyranny of Structurelessness, p. 1 (“structureless rap group”)

Del the Funky Homosapien similarly states that rap was used to refer to talking in a stylistic manner in the early 1970s: "I was born in '72 ... back then what rapping meant, basically, was you trying to convey something—you're trying to convince somebody. That's what rapping is, it's in the way you talk."

[lazily copied from Wikipedia: Rapping]

Struggle / trouble

Lol, I seem to have mixed-up two terms.. well, anyway, maybe they're sysonyms: struggle / trouble. An attitude towards word usage and meaning / embodied practice. It has something to do with accepting that language is not a means to describe reality, but also actively produces it. Rejecting a fixity in reality, or seeing it as a pre-given. Understanding that reality is made through practice, action, embodiment, repetition. I guess the struggle is, then, to be aware / play around with how that active production is done. And finding ways to re-establish it over and over again.

Swindler (Charlatan)

Found in Keywords for Radicals: Introduction on page 3. Also referred to as 'charlatan'. A term used to characterize someone who tricks people for own financial gain or status. A person being dishonest to their own advantage. I'm thinking of real estate owners/agents, banks covering up investments, big tech progression facades. Presenting a tasty reality which is far from truth. Though my examples given before are much framed, I think every branch of work or community can have their own swindlers. A colleague, in a big artistic institution, opened up in a political discussion after the big PVV win that it might be the end for us artists. That we're often referred to by the far-right as losers, fakers, people who only talk and have no actual skillset, charlatans.

Other funny related words provided by dictionary.cambridge.org which I thought we're worth mentioning:

air guitar

phoney baloney

“star” system

· "star"/"spokespeople"

"The public is conditioned to look for spokespeople."

The development of social media has, to a certain extent, cemented the 'star' system. People are eager to categorise themselves into a group and then swiftly rally behind a spokesperson. ​

​

·"system"/"community"/"group"

Taking the well-known story of “Alice in Wonderland” as the starting point, Iskra Geshoska terms the "labyrinth with no way out" as a metaphor for the confrontational relationship between an increasingly self-serving and individualized neoliberal system and the declining collective community. Facing the difficulties of contemporary social life and productions, Geshoska’s challenging yet unapologetic text calls upon us to re-examine and learn a lesson from the crucial thoughts behind Democratic Socialism, in order to seek possible resolutions for our dilemma. ​

At present, we live in cruel times in which market parameters are also applied to practices of ontological exchange—of identities, thoughts, and feelings. The psycho-dynamics of this exchange determine the paths our lives take. And this journey goes by extremely fast. This speediness produces an even bigger emptiness, where we are losing exactly what we are trying to exchange. Enticed by the mystery of new individualisms, we have tripped and fallen down a rabbit hole. At this moment, a collective, or if you wish, cloned, Alice rules the roost. She is endlessly reflected in microscopic prisms that she hopes will clearly reveal all aspects of her journey. Hers is a quest to make distinctions between communities and mobs, between critical and creative resistance to the silently, democratically, and consensually accepted suppressive concepts of social order. She still proceeds, intent on creating maps of specific trajectories that will lead to a common space. Alice’s journey this time is not in Wonderland, but in the land where our longing and our bodies are thrown on the garbage heap of economic and political violence. Alice finds herself in the infinity of emptiness, in a hall of mirrors showing crooked images of reality instead of what she’d wished to see. In these reflections, reality is simulated through a false overcrowding of activities, actions, products, “projects,” “works”—all sorts of engaged acceleration. And the rabbit is always late and never manages to get to the most important tea party. And he is confused because the celebration is still going on, but without him. Fear has become the only consistent thing that can retrieve and construct the stories we tell about our wholeness, about the justification of our existence here and now—our avowals that we are not virtual, that our lives are not phantasms, that we are not writing them out by following certain commands. And nothing but the fear of our own impermanence feels more fitting to provoke our reflections on community. Nothing is more disturbing than the entropy of the idea that the community is property jointly owned by the subjects that join in it. ​

​

Eric Hobsbawm noted: “Never was the word ‘community’ used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life.” He proceeds to say that people look for groups to belong to, temporarily or permanently, in a world in which everything else moves and shifts and nothing else is certain. And at the very moment when the community collapses, identity is invented. The community is a home that, for the majority of people, is just a fairy tale rather than the reality of their personal experience. ​ ​

The Collective Alice, or, on Fear, Death, Multitudes, and Pain [Iskra Geshoska] ​

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