The crucial mechanism in this process is the “tracking system,” the func-tion of the school in general, with its various levels of scholarship, toreprocess its subjects along various class tracks such that they emerge intothe appropriate class positions.

the problem of “general ideology” and“aesthetic ideology” in an unexpected place: the class character of discourseis here located not in its content but rather structurally, in the relationalposition of one kind of discourse to other possible forms of discourse, whichinclude “literariness,” as we will see in a moment, so that her position returnsto the institutional challenge to such social institutions as Literature but in anew way, and from within the text.

The crucial contribution to this theory is the achievement of RenéeBalibar, whose important 1974 bookLes français fictifs(by which she means“fictive languages,” “fictive forms of the French language”) goes well beyondthe usual affirmation of the ideological influence of the school system andtraces this influence concretely into the very forms of the sentence itself

some of his followers have in fact been able to propose ingenious andat least provisionally satisfying ways of functionally reuniting these twodimensions by way of the relationship between sentence structure or “levels”of linguistic competency and that obviously key ISA which is the schoolsystem.

As we have seen above, Althusser’s programmatic essay on ideologyhad the merit of dramatizing the problem and the dilemma of this ultimateform of mediation by its problematical and peremptory separation of the“two halves that don’t add up,” namely the theory of institutions andthe theory of subject-positions.

Habermas’s own conceptions of ideal or Utopian communica-tion and its alienation by way of deformations of the public sphere generateweak visions of social democracy without offering any instruments forconcrete textual analysis.

Another way ofputting this is that neither semiotics nor structural anthropology is inter-ested in the problem of ideology as such—the problem of mediationparexcellence—which they decree resolved in advance.

Paradoxically, although the newer forms of ideological analysis spring fromwhat we have called the “break,” which consisted in the discovery of the cen-trality of the Symbolic and of representation and language itself,

it is more concretelythat this dualism, and the very split between public and private itself, is anideological projection of capitalism, and would therefore as such seem pecu-liarly unsuited as a conceptual instrument with which to study this last.

The concrete read-ings and analyses made possible by such a hermeneutic (particularly inSennett’s book) suggest that the thematics of the public and private offermuch more revealing interpretive codes in the study of contemporarysociety than do the thematics of symbolic analysis (based, as we have seen,on forms of power and domination).

annah Arendt’s central development of thesethemes makes its descendency from the Aristotelian tradition explicit: heringenious theory, that the eclipse of the public in contemporary life is to beaccounted for by an unparalleled expansion of the private and of privatiza-tion, can thus be seen to be dependent on the historically exceptionalstructure of the ancientpolis, in which a unique kind of public sphere andpublic space was secured by demographic circumstances and by the exclu-sion of women and slaves.

e must finally note a rather different tendency in the general turn towardsthe analysis of practices (and daily life) from that of symbolic analysis. Thisis a reflection on the opposition between public and private life, or thepublic and the private spheres (Jürgen Habermas’s term),

Sartrean existentialism reworked this figure in a powerful model, inwhich it is the “look” which mediates between two individuals or twogroups struggling for primacy.

Elsewhere, however, Foucault stresses the linguistic character of exclu-sion, suggesting that its fundamental form is the appropriation of otherpeople’s speech. Either they are repressed from speaking, or we speak forthem, as we do for those marginals called children, insane people, sickpeople, inferior races and so forth. This conception of the repressive charac-ter of language and speaking itself anticipates issues of linguistic alienationwhich will be raised in a different way in our final section.

As withour earlier theories of reification, the repressing subject (whether master,colonist or ruling class) has virtually disappeared and we have instead themodel of a quasi-objective process which seems virtually irrevocable. Thisprocess of control extends to the experience of the body itself, henceFoucault’s description of his current work as “the political technology of thebody.”

now focuses on a gradual penetrationof life and society in general by a gridwork of control (Sartre’s “look” herebecomes surveillance and measurement of a quasi-impersonal kind)

Note that in the Frankfurt School also,with the influence of Nietzsche, there had already been a certain stress ondomination—science and Enlightenment as the domination of nature,leading to Auschwitz.

It is clear, however, that the politics of de-centering, ofcontesting the center, of violently achieving recognition, are quite differentin character from the traditional Marxist aim of destroying the commodityform and transforming social life by the invention of new social forms.

namely, theagonor antagonistic confrontation between the twopersons of master and slave, who struggle for recognition and dominanceover each other

Meanwhile, it is also clear that the Marxist tradition encompasses reflectionson a number of elements and features central to the symbolic analysis ofpower and domination, which cast a somewhat different light on thosethemes.

to the grid of power relationships in everyday life andthe various forms of “repression.”

as the term also suggests, everything is henceforth at leastsymbolicallypoliti-cal; all forms of social practice and cultural production can therefore beconsidered ideological in some larger sense yet to be defined

The fundamental contribution to ideological analysis ofthis newer tendency can be described as the dissolution of one such bound-ary, namely that which distinguished between outright political phenomena(and officially political texts) and other forms of social life and practice, con-sidered to be somehow non-political.

The life work of the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, on carnival (but also onthe dialogical and the polyphonic), has only more recently and belatedlyjoined this constellation of references, models and authorities.

n the humanities and social sciences today, which share a“family likeness” by way of their attention to the political and ideologicalmeaning of concrete practices which range from the rituals of traditionalsocieties to the more secular routines and behavioral patterns of everyday lifein late capitalism.

No one has ever seen a social institution—such as alaw or a kind of power or authority—so it is already a “reification” whensocial scientists give us a picture of these as things

so-called “freedom of the city.” One may compare this positive evaluationof the absence of law to Durkheim’s concept ofanomie—lawlessness—which literally means the same thing but designates the pathology of theindividual in the great agglomeration, and indeed, as a concept, emergedfrom Durkheim’s study of suicide.

The reference to the city, however, suggests that the first form in whichthinkers began to approximate a conception of daily life was in the preoccu-pation with the city as such. Indeed, the great novelists and poets—mostnotably Baudelaire and Flaubert, but also Dickens, and later Zola andDreiser—may be said to have launched the study of daily life in the moderncity, which then culminates in the theoretical work of people like GeorgSimmel (and later Walter Benjamin, writing about Baudelaire)

What intervenes in this process to endow it with structure is very pre-cisely the Symbolic Order, that is, the relationship to an absolute Other(capital A in the French notation), a very different relationship from themultiple alter egos of the mirror stage and one which includes the relation-ship to the adults or parents (and their language) and to language itself, asthat which is addressed to the Other, or better still, which responds to whatis felt to be the Other’s wish, address, desire, or expectation of us.

ere we toundertake a thought experiment in which a species were fully embodied in asingle individual—as for example in the sentient ocean of Stanislaw Lem’sSolaris—

absolutizes the gap we have designated and makesit difficult to see how one could ever work one’s way back from questions of“écriture” to questions of “petty bourgeois ideology.”

seemed to solve this conceptual dilemma a little too rapidly, prevent-ing the mediatory institution from emerging in all its historical specificityand density; such older dialectical language also seemed to abridge themoment of existential scandal that gives the newer institutional research itsmaterialistic edge—the scandal of the “extrinsic,” the shock of the determi-nation of the “spiritual” by institutional realities of another order, whichhave their own laws and dynamics and their own inertia, as well as their spe-cific forms of struggle and contested terrain.

In some obvious senses, these kinds of inves-tigations may be said to reflect precisely that “semi-autonomy” of sociallevels addressed by Althusser’s earlier work, or if you prefer, may be seen tospring from the multiple concrete realities and structural complexitieswhich that earlier work itself registered as a new theoretical problem

ierreBourdieu’s influential and paradigmatic studies of the educational system,the museum, and photography,

Marxiantheories of ideology in terms of the realism/modernism/postmodernismparadigm, then it would not seem altogether incorrect to stage it as a shiftof emphases from the social and class function of culture, through anautonomization of the problems of culture and the unconscious, to someheightened but more fragmentary sense of the autonomy of language andsymbolic systems as suc

Herbert Marcuse indeed raises the crucial issue ofthe historical destiny of repressed impulses and their force in a whole newworld in which, by way of what he called “repressive desublimation,” the oldforce of taboo and repression no longer seems necessary.

need belimited to the works of high culture and have no relevance at all to the“degraded” products of media entertainment.

he stress on thecommodification of culture, for example, which finds its slogan in theiridentification of the nascent media structures as the Culture Industry,9points ahead to what we will call institutional analysis. The essentialproblem with such analysis—the difficulty of passing from a study ofcommodified forms to the infrastructural dynamics of this or that industryor technology—is however not solved; meanwhile it is also in this specificarea that the limits of a conception of ideology as false consciousness taketheir toll. For the tendency to dismiss all of manipulated mass culture as falseconsciousness then leaves unused and deprives of their very reason for beingthe very rich instruments of formal analysis also developed by Adorno,which in his work only come to find their fullest application in the decipher-ment and deconcealment of the formal contradictions at work in themonuments of high culture.

destructivecriticism which, attentive to the social and class functions of its objects,nonetheless in its range and penetration goes a great deal beyond the per-functory identification of this or that class affiliation which passes for agarden variety ideological critique.

bviously depends on thepreservation, as an ideal value, of what is thereby lost: namely the aestheticin its most authentic form, which hindsight allows us to identify as the aes-thetics of high modernism.

It may therefore be presumed that they will continue to be relevant for usbeyond the structuralist “break”

All of these developments, however—the critique of false consciousnessas well as the conception of commodification as the production of an imageculture—pre-structuralist,

The originality of this third model of ideology lies in the way in which itlocates the ideological, not in opinions or errors, worldviews or conceptualsystems, but in the very process by which daily life is systematically reorga-nized on all its levels (the body and the senses, the mind, time, space, workprocess, and leisure) by that total quasi-programming process that is ratio-nalization, commodification, instrumentalization, and the like.

a powerful counterimage ofpsychic reunification, of a psyche in which all these now disparate and spe-cialized functions will be somehow reintegrated (an ideal that for Marxrequires collective rather than individual transformation)

he innovation of Lukács was to have extrapolated Weber’sdescription of social processes and tendencies (in the external object) to thesubject itself.

It can also beextended to time, and, in particular, to the introduction of quantifiablemeasurable clock time.7The point would be to see these and analogousrationalizing processes, not as scientific discoveries about the measurabilityof, for example, forces of the scientific worldview, but rather as a total social“great transformation” in which all the qualitative and multifold dimen-sions of the precapitalist world are systematically reorganized by the newcapitalist rationality on all levels, from those of sense perception to those ofscience and thought.

Clearly, Henry Ford’s inventionof the assembly line is little more than a genial extrapolation of Taylor’smethod.

on rationalization, in which the emergence of the modern world isseen essentially as a process whereby traditional activities (particularly inprecapitalist societies) are reorganized in terms of efficiency, measurability,and means-ends rationality

Theprocess of rationalization is perhaps most strikingly exemplified in modernfactory management, and, in particular, in what is called “Taylorization,”after its inventor Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose researches dictatedwidespread industrial reform and transformation of the labor process.Taylorization means the thoroughgoing fragmentation and atomization ofproductive activity, the breaking of each operation down into its smallestquantifiable segments,

Brecht’s conception ofthe estrangement effect: the point of the latter, and for Brecht the task of apolitical culture, was essentially to estrange and distance people’s experienceof daily life, which they have been trained (precisely by the bourgeois ideol-ogy of nature) to think of as natural and eternal. The estrangement effect is away of drawing back from “immediate” experiences, from the illusions ofdaily life in the market system, and seeing them as something peculiar, quiteunnatural, odd and inhuman—in other words, as Brecht put it, a way ofrevealing that what has been thought to be natural (human emotions, suchas competitiveness and aggressiveness, fully as much as human institutions)is in reality something quite different, namely,historical. In that case, if oursocial system is not eternal and natural but the result of historical develop-ment, if people once lived differently, then they can do so again, and to saythat a thing is historical is also to suggest that it can be changed by humanaction. The Brechtian assault on the concept of nature is thus a revolution-ary act.

hey thus, as he says,strategically project thehomo economicusof capitalism back onto all othersocial formations and modes of production, either in the past or in thefuture.

The notion of equivalence thus functioned to discredit, in advance andby anticipation, the Marxian idea of social classes as well as the practicalexperience of class realities by individuals: in the market system, we areostensibly faced, not with the dialectical relations of social classes, but ratherwith the “atomized” competition of a host of equivalent individuals ormonads. Belief in nature and human nature will therefore now serve thelegitimizing function of forestalling collective or class consciousness.

In this context, it is clear that toassert a universal human nature, a genuine equality between all humanbeings, is to perform a subversive and profoundly revolutionary act and togenerate an ideology for which people will be willing to fight passionatelyand, if necessary, to die.But when the bourgeoisie comes to social and political power, the ideol-ogy of nature begins to change its function. Now it has a new socialantagonist, no longer the aristocracy

Now the idea of nature andof an equal human nature comes to mean something rather different,namely, the equivalence of human beings in the market system, their equiv-alence as exchange value and commodified labor power, their “freedom” tosell their labor on the market.5

bove all, Edmund Burke, in hisReflections on the French Revolu-tion, who undertook the critique of Enlightenment rationalism and stressedsome of those other nonrational forces, most notably tradition and organicsocial cohesion.

by ideology, that is,the value system and hegemonic cultural institutions that ensure socialcontrol and the social reproduction of the system from one generation toanother.

Next a word on the dialectic itself may be in order. Briefly, the dialecticmay be said to be thinking that is both situational (situation-specific) andreflexive (or conscious of its own thought processes). That is, it follows fromwhat we have said above about history and about ideology, that (1) notranshistorical or absolute thinking or understanding is possible, so thatthought must somehow attempt to approximate its own concrete historicalsituation, and (2) that as we are ourselves always involved in ideology, ourthinking must include the attempt to reckon ourselves as observers into theprocess.

Team X architect Aldo van Eyck, when, in 1966, he issued his version of the death of modernism thesis: "We know nothing of vast multiplicity-we cannot come to terms with it-not as architects or planners or anybody else." To which he added, and the sequel can easily be extrapolated from architecture to social change itself: "But if society has no form-how can architects build its counterform?"3

You are certainly welcome to believe this prognosis, provided you understand that in such a case any socialist politics is strictly a mirage and a waste of time, which one might better spend adjusting and reforming an eternal capitalist landscape as far as the eye can see.

The conception of cognitive mapping proposed here therefore involves an extrapolation of Lynch's spa­tial analysis to the realm of social structure, that is to say, in our historical moment, to the totality of class relations on a global (or should I say mul­tinational) scale. The secondary premise is also maintained, namely, that\ the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in this sense is an integral part of any socialist political project.

I have always been struck by the way in which Lynch's conception '. of city experience-the dialectic between the here and now of immediate) : perception and the imaginative or imaginary sense of the city as an absent : totality-presents something like a spatial analogue of Althusser's great for-I mulation ofideology itself, as ··the Imaginary representation ofthe subject's. I relationship to his or her Real conditions ofexistence." W

the model of this complex spatial dialecti

, Teochimus, came and took her beautiful body,and bore and brought it again into the city of Antiochwith immeasurable joy, and placed it in a stone coffin inthe house of her grandmother, who was called Clete. Iought to know all this well, for I, when she was sufferingin prison, supplied her with sustenance and fed her bodywith food, and I saw where she fought with the terriblefiend, and I wrote on parchment the prayers that sheprayed, and put down the story of her life on the pages,and sent what I had truthfully written throughout theworld.

“No,”he said, “I will not, for I have heard howGod’s dear mouth has spoken to you.”“You must,” said the maiden, “do it of necessity, forif you do not, you shall not have a share with me in thekingdom of heaven.”And with that he lifted up the cruelest of all weap-ons, and smote smartly down, so that the stroke sank in,and the body sagged, and the sharp sword cut her at theshoulders, and her body fell to the ground. And at onceher spirit joyfully ascended to that starry bower, uptowards heaven.Then he who had given the blow cried out at that,“God, have mercy and compassion on me for this deed;Lord, see to it that I am cured of this sin.” And he felldown out of fear on her right side.

And the dove came and touched her and raised her upwith the cross, and said to her gently, with the sweetestof voices:

I entreat and beseech you, who are my prosper-ity and my joy, that whoever writes of my life in a book,or obtains it in written form, or holds it often in hand,or whoever reads it or listens to it joyfully when read,may all have their sins forgiven at once, ruler of heaven.Whoever establishes a chapel or church in my name, orprovides one with a light or lamp, give him and granthim, Lord, the light of heaven. In the house where awoman is in labor with a child, as soon as she calls tomind my name and my suffering, Lord, quickly help herand hear her prayer, and do not let any deformed childbe born in that house, neither lame nor humpbacked,neither dumb nor deaf nor afflicted by the devil. Andwhoever calls aloud on my name, beloved Lord, at theday of judgment save him from death.

he condemned her to death, and with a burningheart ordered that her head be severed from her bodywith a shimmering, sharp sword, with a bright andbiting blade.

t that same time five thousand men were convertedto our Lord, and this not counting women and children;and all were straightaway, as the ruler commanded,beheaded in Christ’s royal name, in a city of Armeniacalled Caplimet, all honoring god with uplifted voices,and all ascended as martyrs joyfully to heaven

She had only just said this when all the earth beganto quake and tremble, and a dove came bearing a goldencrown so bright that it seemed to burn, and set it on thehead of the blessed maiden.

The wretched drudges soon did so, so that her snow-white skin blackened as it grew scorched, and burst intoblisters as it swelled on all sides; and her lovely bodycrackled in the flame, so that everyone wept who sawthat pitiful thing done to her soft sides. And she beganto pray David’s prayer: “Great savior God, inflame myheart with the sanctifying fire of the Holy Ghost,mankind’s helper, and let the fire of your love blaze inmy loins.”

But you, witless creature, worshipall you are worthy to worship, bloodless, boneless, deaf,dumb things; and yet you do even worse, for invisibledemons live within them, and you love and exalt themas your lords.”

n the morning, the wicked Olibrius sent his men tobring her before him, and she blessed herself and cameforth boldly. People came that way from every street, toseethe pains that would be done to her lovely body ifshe did not bend and submit to the ruler’s counsel.

For Jesus Christ, God’s Son, was born of amaiden; and through the power of maidenhood wasmankind redeemed, and all that we owned taken andbereft from us. Now you know, lady, what you wishedto know: where we mostly live, and why we most hateand harry maidens. Yet, if you wish to know why wemostly attack righteous people, I answer you: because ofthe envy that continually gnaws at our hearts.

This they must often call to mind for themselves: to think about how foul and how filthy is that sin; to think of heaven’s joys and the pains the damnedare in; to remember very often God’s death and their own,and the horror and the terror of the judgmentcoming soon

Gently, firstof all, with loving looks, with amorous gazing each atthe other; and with love-talk I incite them to more, somuch so that they flirt and wrestle playfully with oneanother. Then I foist on them thoughts of love, at firstagainst their wills. But that affliction so increases,because they allow it, that it seems good to them. Andso when they allow me and do not at all prevent me, norexert themselves, nor strongly resist, I lead them into thebog and loathsome swamp of that filthy sin

Ifollow most diligently those who try to be clean ofsexual sin and who flee the filths of the flesh, to see if Ican in any way cause them to fall and defile themselves.

While she was saying this to that horrible thing,there came down into the torture chamber a light fromheaven, and it seemed as though she saw in its glisteninggleam the precious cross reaching to heaven, and a dovesat upon it and said to her, “You are a blessed maiden,Margaret, for the gates of paradise are opened ready foryou now.

With this, she stamped strongly with her foot on thedemon, at every sentence:

When she had praised our Lord for so long, thatgrisly devil came creepingtowards her and grasped herby the feet, and in the most pitiful way said sorrowfully,“Margaret,maiden, you have done enough to me. Donot torture me any more with the blessed prayers thatyou pray so often, for indeed, they bind me mostseverely and make me so weak

and Iwas never as wretched as now I am happy.

and flung her in and swallowed herinto his broad belly—but to Christ’s honor, and to hisown destruction. For the sign of the cross with whichshe was armed speedily set her free, and became hisslayer straight away as his body burst in two down themiddle. And that blessed maiden, entirely unharmed,without even any mark on her, came out of his belly,praising aloud her savior in heaven

“Beloved Lord, though your judgments maybe hidden, they are all for the best.

but even the hardest-hearted hidtheir faces under their mantles, because of the tormentthey saw her suffering

nd you,horrible devil, you savage lion hateful to God, yourpower will diminish and melt to nothing, you will sufferforever in pain and injury when I rejoice with God, andam glad without end.”

What do you mean? If my body is torn apart, my soulshall rest with the righteous: injury and bodily pains arethe soul’s salvation

henthe accursed wretches so evilly belabored her lovely bodythat it was torn all over and lathered with blood.

nor can hisloveliness ever diminish or fade, for he never dies, butlives eternally in honor, and his great power lasts forev-ermore.

“Maiden, have mercy and compassion on yourself: takeheed of your youth and of your lovely form, of yourbeautiful face. Do my will and worship my idols, andyou shall be rewarded above those highest in my house-hold, with all that I have in my power in the world

I will have and hold her as my wife; and if sheis a servant, I choose her as a concubine, and will set herfree with treasure and with gold, and she shall benefitfrom all that I possess because of her lovely face.”

foster-mother’s sheep in the field

and I found all of herpassion and the painful death she died for the Lordwritten by the writers there

Good girls gone bad.

emphasizing the feeling of uncertainty in your skin.

Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” will forever be my song of choice, six vodka cranberries later, mic in hand. Cathartic screams will bounce off the bar walls as the crowd sings along with no other care in the world other than the responsibilities that await 5 minutes and 23 seconds later.

Embodying pure teen angst, Crow’s 1996 single charted number 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and received Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 1997 Grammy Awards.

s

If you haven’t already heard it, or you’re in the mood for a good cry, grab a box of tissues and check this song out. 

causes listeners to reflect on their own relationships and reevaluate what is important to them. 

Steinman originally intended for the song to be a duet, and despite performing this song alone, Celine Dion’s voice collaborates with the captivating instrumentals to tell two sides of the same story.

the traditions that are commonly associated with pop music.

The song evokes the same emotional response instrumentally as it does lyrically.

with instrumentals that are just as powerful and important to the message as the lyrics.

Dion

, and only becomes muted during the chorus

the piano

Accompanying the tear inducing lyrics, the instrumentals in the song contribute to the story.

,

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony bring attention to this continuing issue. Gun violence is still relevant today, almost 25 years after this song being released.

Still Can’t Stop the Reign, 1996

This track is the come up track, and right when that chorus comes around, Eugene commands the sound in light harmony to let you know, “You can’t stop the reign.” 

hat feels like a back lit alley with dry ice blanketing the ground in spooky neon tints.

“You Can’t Stop the Rain,” paired with Shaq’s deep bassy tones hit like an icy-hot pack after a long day of shooting commercials. 

Something to note “Beautiful People” has a Canadian connection. It was filmed in the Goodenham and Worts distillery – better known as the Distillery District in Toronto, Canada. 

known as on

being

The drum pulses like an alien heartbeat, forcing your body to react to the music.

The song’s final lines end with a subtle question and warning to the listener, “what do you see, something beautiful or something free?”.

in the song “The Beautiful People”

he Beautiful People, 1996

r

Marilyn comes for the most iconic blond herself, and Manson is a nod to the most notorious serial killer in American history. 

celebrity

American

that they left behind the thematic and visual confines of black metal — there’s an absence of long unkempt hair, corpse paint, satanic references and even the color black on their album covers.

Bands such as Immortal, believing that the spirit of black metal lay in the lyrics, denied their music being black metal because their lyrics were about a fictional realm they created named ‘Blashyrkh’,

Simply put, these bands were rooted in black metal but they realized going around burning churches and murdering rival musicians were not their thing.

Dimmu Borgir, arguably the most commercially successful black metal band in history, added clean vocals and an operatic edge.

the commercialization of the genre, or as many people call it “selling out”.

Soon, metal scenes from Germany, France and the UK were embracing the trademarks of its sound. However, this was when the winds of black metal were changing direction.

Mayhem’s Dawn Of The Black Hearts. In 1991,

Some were horribly misguided enough to be completely taken in by the culture, expressing an explicit desire to spread hatred, sorrow and fear — thus explaining the over 50 arsons of Christian churches from ’92 to ’96 in Norway.

Then came the ‘second wave’ of black metal in the early 90’s, and Norway was the source of it all. Bands such as Mayhem, Darkthrone, Immortal, Gorgoroth, Burzum and more further developed the sound and culture of their forbearers into a distinct, legitimate subgenre.

corpse paint

omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

In these contexts, a false sense of mob superiority comes to replace popular empowerment. One can all but hear Rousseau’s despot calling those who attempt to shed light on the limited sources of his legitimacy “the enemy of the people” – targeting them to shore up his own support. Yet no amount of such targeting can transform the despot’s spectators into actors able to embark on a truly collective and autonomous project.

Canadian literature has not yet been mapped. Noah Richler wrote me a furious letter when I said this in the Globe and Mail. He misunderstood what I meant by “map.” There is a cosmology, a system of structure, theme, and image to any body of literature. It is not a literal map. I’m not interested in saying this person lives here or there. That has been the big mistake in our reading of Canadian literature. We are not geography. We’ve been told geography is everything, but there are far more unexplored factors in Canadian literature. We’re an immature literature because we have not mastered the art of expressing tragedy within our context. We have failed to recognize that our literature shifted from an external vision to an internal vision when Margaret Laurence published The Diviners in 1974 or Timothy Findley The Wars in 1977, or Michael Ondaatje The English Patient in 1992. We haven’t stood back and examined Canadian literature from arm’s length. Our critics talk about specific works or specific authors. One of these days, if I still have a publisher left, I want to write a Golden Thread for Canadian literature. Why did our trench literature go missing? What was it about us that impelled E.K. Brown (Frye’s teacher and the teacher of A.J.M. Smith and Roy Daniels to declare nothing of worth was written during the First World War? Heck, I found 50 trench authors [We Wasn’t Pals, Exile Editions, 2001 & 2014]. The writing is there. We said “no” to those authors because we embraced our illusions of what poetry and literature should be in the 1920s. We weren’t up for the language of horrific reality. Why? Because the way literature is discussed in Canada is juvenile. If we are to become a mature literature, we have to elevate our level of criticism and look at the whole picture, not the regional picture, but the reasons why we write what we write. I think James Reaney was on to something when he made attempts to connect Wacousta to Paradise Lost and the Gothic conventions, but he could never explain why. I think I know why. The problem is, however, that our literature is still very much a matter that is decided by agents and people at cocktail parties, and an astute critic has to get beyond all that with a terrible dispassion and a profound sense of objectivity. It would also help if we actually read our literature, but, alas, most Canadian literature is bound to the rock of conversation where its liver is gnawed by a giant eagle — something Earle Birney, a mentor of mine, pointed out in his poem “Vancouver Lights.” I believe we will eventually break our chains, but our literature is going to take a lot of sorting out before we can arrive at a place where it engages sensible discussion and not Caesar’s thumb reviews in shrinking book review sections.

The doctor was the one who sat up with me the night I was supposed to die at the age of three.

Then, in November 2016, I was in a car accident. We were broadsided about four blocks from our house, on my side, the passenger side. I don’t drive. I woke up in the ambulance with head, neck, and back injuries, and a very addled brain. I couldn’t read for almost four months. I had students read PowerPoint slides out loud in class so I could comment on them. For a teacher of writing and literature, that was a terrible experience. For three months I could not recall the name for the inside of a fountain pen — a reservoir. It was a nightmare. As the words returned, I needed a discipline that would enable me to hone and control language. That’s when I returned to writing flash fiction. Then, I started reading flash fiction. I love the idea of writing to length, of keeping ideas and language under contro

Poetry is far more complex because it requires a different part of the brain — the part of the brain that thinks of a million things happening at once, as Elizabeth Bishop put it. Anne Michaels, a good friend (I published her first poems in a student literary magazine I was editing) once asked me over lunch what the difference was, for me, between poetry and prose because she does both so incredibly well. I thought about it. Stories require that one keeps track of linear logic, of the details, of writing within a very tight budget of words. Poetry, on the other hand, requires imagistic logic, broad connections, sometimes links and leaps that would seem illogical or impossible but are the gold standard of poetry — surprise, not just the twists and turns of plot.

And the proviso on the question of how is that learning how doesn’t mean imitation. It means exploration, the need to extend or reinvent what has already been invented, but to never forget that on the other end of the words there is a reader.

The real purpose of writing, however, is the book. The book lasts. Horace, the Latin poet, has a great phrase, “Litera scripta manet.” The written word survives.

I love teaching

Writing is about how.

What mitigates the pain is constant reading, constant studying, reading to see what others have done and to do something new, not like them, but doing something new with the understanding that your work must be original.

Copying other people is not art. It is manufacturing. I don’t write like other people. I never have and never will.

I carried a quote by Thelonious Monk in my wallet. Monk said, “Play your own way. You play what you want, and let the public pick up on what you were doing, even if it takes fifteen, twenty years.”

Small correction. My first book was rejected 1000 times.

During that pre-publication era, how did you stay positive, focused, and gather the will to keep submitting?

I’m also never without my Moleskine notebook, my trusty leather satchel, and a pocket full of fountain pens (in case one runs out, I just go to the next pen).

I read at least two books of poetry a day or a book of short stories every two days.

Reading and writing are the most fundamental forms of independence. When I learned to read I no longer felt helpless.

write at least two poems or a short story per day. I type 100 words per minute and can sit down and write a ten page story in under an hour and before I set pen to paper or begin to type, I’ve seen the finished product in my mind. I know where the piece is going and am curious, on the redraft, about things I can do to make getting to the point of arrival more engaging and interesting, at least to me. My friends are all writers and they know that writing is an addiction and not writing is a form of living hell.

and his radio broadcasts with Michael Enright on CBC’s This Morning were recorded to become the network’s largest selling series.

Bruce Meyer describes himself as one of Canadian literature’s best kept secrets.

His first manuscript was rejected more than 1000 timesOne book was accepted then withdrawn when the publisher insisted on owning the copyright to the work One book was accepted but the publisher went out of business before the book was releasedFlights was burned in the publisher’s backyard following a dispute  The Presence was printed, then the entire shipment got left on a loading dock and buried in snow until spring Heroes had the wrong ISBN printed in the publisher’s catalogue making the book impossible to order or purchase 

Merely scratching the surface of his life reveals the legendary Northrop Frye served as Bruce’s mentor;

of God;

die.

meet,

To her, perpetual maidenhood,And unto me no second friend.

within

fool of loss

mind?

dying sun:

tears?

overworn.

A Carleton University study published in May found about 46 per cent of Canadians believed at least one of four baseless and unfounded COVID-19 theories.

“Freedom without a mask,” signs suggest a very perverse view of freedom. It is an assault upon society Thomas Hobbes saw as essential to avoid that “war of all against all.”

The emergence of armed citizens threatening state authorities is already raising serious questions along Hobbesian lines. If citizens feel they are empowered to challenge state authority with loaded weapons, they will only hasten a return to Hobbes’s state of nature.

According to Hobbes, the Leviathan’s foremost responsibility is “safety of the people, to which he is obliged by the law of nature.” If a sovereign is unable to provide that safety, the consequence is tumult and the unthinkable return to the state of nature, where people are threatened not only by a virus, in infectious times, but also by one another in the absence of effective governmental authority.

Hobbes begins with questions about mind and language, and works towards questions in political philosophy. How exactly the parts of the system are connected has long been debated. But Hobbes thinks at least that we will better understand how individuals interact in groups if we understand how individuals work.

He believed Florence had to adopt systemic administrative reforms to modernize its apparatus of government. It needed, he argued, a professional cadre to serve as permanent ambassadors to represent the republic’s interest abroad. It needed educated officials who could manage the complex financial interests of a modern city-state. It needed strong, independent institutions that ensured continuity of long-term policies between successive rulers and that could cement alliances that would outlast an individual’s whim.

He seems to have intuitively grasped that states were technologies that security communities could use to protect and advance their shared interests.

rhetoric as a disci-pline is justified philosophically insofar as it provides principles,concepts, and procedures by which we effect valuable changesin reality. Thus rhetoric is distinguished from the mere craft ofpersuasion which, although it is a legitimate object of scientificinvestigation, lacks philosophical warrant as a practical discipline.

hence the practicalneed for scientific inquiry and discourse; similarly, the worldpresents imperfections to be modified by means of discourse —hence the practical need for rhetorical investigation and dis-course.

the tradition itself tends tofunction as a constraint upon any new response in the form.

Some situations, on the other hand, persist; this is why it ispossible to have a body of truly rhetorical literature. The Gettys-burg Address, Burke's Speech to the Electors of Bristol, Socrates'Apology — these are more than historical documents, more thanspecimens for stylistic or logical analysis. They exist as rhetoricalresponses for us precisely because they speak to situations whichpersist — which are in some measure universal.

After this moment, most situations decay;we all have the experience of creating a rhetorical response whenit is too late to make it public.

This is enough to suggestthe sorts of things which weaken the structure of situations.

'^'^''illiam Lloyd Garrison preaching abolition from town to town.He is actually looking for an audience and for constraints; evenwhen he finds an audience, he does not know that it is a gen-uinely rhetorical audience — one able to be mediator of change

Rhetorical situations exhibit structures which are simple orcomplex, and more or less organized.

To say the situation isobjective, publicly observable, and historic means that it is feaTor genuine

If it makes sense to say that situation invites a "fitting"response, then situation must somehow prescribe the responsewhich fits.

Thus the second characteristicof rhetorical situation is that it invites a fitting response, a re-sponse that fits the situation. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address wasa most fitting response to the relevant features of the historiccontext which invited its existence and gave it rhetorical signi-ficance.

Aiso, we must recognizethat there came into existense countless eulogies to John F.Kennedy that never reached a public; they were filed, enteredin diaries, or created in thought

Rhetorical discourse is called into existence by situation;the situation which the rlietor perceives amounts to an. invita-tion to create and present discourse. The clearest instances ofrhetorical speaking and writing are strongly invited — oftenrequired.

These three constituents — exigence, audience, constraints —comprise everything relevant in a rhetorical situation. Whenthe orator, invited by situation, enters it and creates and pre-sents discourse, then both he and his speech are additionalconstituents

(1) those originated or managed by therhetor and Ms method (Aristotle called these "artistic proofs"),and (2) those other constraints, in the situation, which may beoperative (Aristotle's "inartistic proofs"). Both, classes must bedivided so as to separate those constraints that are proper fromthose that are improper

n any rhetorical situation there will be at least one con-trolling exigence which functions as the organizing principle: itspecifies the audience to be addressed and the change to beefiiected.

An ex-igence is rhet0rij3aXjKhea.it is x;apable of positive modification''ajiH"wIien"positive modification requires discourse or can be as-sisted by discourse.

An exigence whichcannot be modified is not rhetorical; thus, whatever comes aboutof necessity and cannot be changed — death, winter, and somenatural disasters, for instance — are exigences to be sure, butthey are not rhetorical.

Prior tothe creation and j)reserita1ioji..,o£_d^ there are threeconstituents of any rhetorical situation: the first is the exigence;the second and third are elements of the complex, namely theaudience to be constrained in decision and action, and theconstraints which influence the rhetor and can be brought tobear upon the audience.Any exigence is an i

Rhetorical situation maybe defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and rela-tions presenting an actual or potential exigence which can becompletely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into thesituation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bringabout the significant modification of the exigence

ence, to say that rhetoric is situational means: (1) rlietoricaldiscourse comes into e^xistence as a response to sitiKition, in thesame sense tliat an answer conies into existence in response to aquestion, or a solution in response to a problem; (2) a speech isgiven rJietorical significance by the situation, just as a unit ofdiscourse is given significance as answer or as solution by th

to command, to supply information, to praiseor blame

are clearly as functional and necessary as the physicial responses

Let us regard rhetorical situation as a natural con-||text of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which|istrongly invites utterance; this invited utterance participatesnaturally in the situation, is in many instances necessary to thecompletion of situational activity, and by means of its participa-tion with situation obtains its meaning and its rhetorical character.

It is aI mode of.,actioiL_aixd-^not an instrument of reflection.

BronislawMalinowski refers to just this sort of situation in his discussionof primitive language, which he finds to be essentially pragmaticand "embedded in situation."

Jn. short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, notby the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creationof discourse which changes reality through the mediation ofthought and action.