Double Major Program of Cheap T-Shirts and One-Upmanhood

In my first semester of PhD work at George Mason University, part of my grant was to teach in the Global Affairs Program. The coursework were globalization, market efficiencies, outsourcing, offshoring, cost-minimizing and profit maximizing etc. Students were mostly from the United States and there were a few international students. More or less an American-majority class. The year after the 2016 elections.

In the first weeks, one of the students asked about a textile product that Clinton used after losing the elections. A t-shirt saying “A woman’s place is not the House but the Senate.” My response to the student was that the t-shirt might have been produced with less cost and the slogan was “cheap”, without having any non-economic idea about the cultural meanings of the word. Having caught me saying something “bad”, the student and a few others complained about me to the program director Lisa Breglia. The student was probably there to keep an eye on how I teach.

The American-Vietnamese scholar Kim Hong Nguyen’s 2024 book Mean Girl Feminism, named after the movies, offers a thought-provoking critique of this troubling trend in complaints and requests. Nguyen claims that a strand of modern feminists adopted an exclusionary, elitist, and often downright cruel approach that weakens the core ideals of the movement, and even pretends to be the “racial other” when they are not.

Instead of women’s solidarity and power, Nguyen says, “mean girl” feminists deploy a form of arguably the nietzschean “one-upmanhood”, shaming and belittling those who don’t meet their rigid standards of ideological “righteousness”. She points to the proliferation of online “call-out culture,” where self-appointed feminism “gatekeepers” ruthlessly attack and humiliate those they deem insufficiently woke, even over minor infractions. Nguyen’s critique examines how predominantly white feminism appropriates expressions of resistance from minority groups, especially Black women, to present white women’s aggression as “feminist and inclusive”.

Natalie Portman has been framed as “a pseudo-kaballistic kitten of the Woke” in the “meta-fictions” of alternative media, ending up with curious, unbelievably unreal narratives. A number of fringe media outlets have sought to cast her in fictions propagated by conspiracy-minded sources, which weave a complex tapestry of occult symbolism and esoteric references. Portman, known for her lately low-profiled and nuanced performances and intellectual adverts, is reframed within this conspiratorial worldview as a kind of “New Age Avatar”, a vessel for hidden, arcane knowledge that undoes the mainstream. Her support for progressive causes is interpreted as evidence of her religious indoctrination into a shadowy performance of ideologies with mystical tones. In this way, Portman becomes a kind of lightning rod for the paranoiac fantasies, her career and public personae distorted to fit the fictions of these scientific frauds.

Nguyen’s insight depicts how “white feminists” often ignore their own role in perpetuating injustice while exploiting and erasing the contributions of marginalized groups to social movements.

The other student who was supposed to teach the same course was Landon Wilkins from Canada. He disappeared after the first semester. It turns out that he failed in the teaching method of the course and his students also complained. Prof. Breglia told me that “Landon got an idea of doing a ‘forum’” from me as a “teaching method”. In other words, she blamed Wilkins’ “fault” on me. I didn’t know what he had in mind concerning the method, and never told him to do a forum. It turns out that he made it up before preparing to leaving the program, and both blamed “it” on me. To my mind, I have no further politically correct explanation for the “it” in quotation.

As far as I remember, Wilkins wasn’t that experienced, so making a forum might have been an easier idea than lecturing a curriculum. I was lecturing, and forum and lecture are two of the various ways of teaching a course. A forum is like a seminar, a lecture might include seminar-like sessions in the form of Q&A sessions in the last ten minutes of the course. No, not QAnon sessions, though the spirit of such theories were spreading on the news at that time.

Now, having learned the traditional, cultural and scientific meanings and connotations of the word “cheap,” it still doesn’t sound like a feminist slogan. More like a reversal of feminist slogans. Do you want to be placed in the house? What’s the rhetoric there? Turning feminist spirit upside down is cheaper than the slogan itself. Please read some Écriture Féminine writings from feminists, Mrs. Clinton. Agnès Varda adopted these writings to her films as cinécriture, for instance. Kim Hong Nguyen reads the similar cases of “cheap” as not honest to feminism’s true aims, creating an environment that discourages open dialogue and the exchange of diverse opinions.

Critiques view Agnès Varda like a Greek “goddess”, though she was more a photographer and invested in photographic storytelling in her fictions and non-fictions. Even when she is not even slightly interested in identity politics than feminism and male-female tensions, Greek references are unavoidable in her films and her father was indeed of Anatolian Greek origin, and she also had quite a number of references to the Greek legacies in Turkey.

I mean Hillary Clinton was more or less a candidate for the “male establishment” tradition in the United States. I do not mean her gender identity is confused, though it’s been a while since the traditional understanding of gender as biologically determined was replaced by the concept of “gender identity”. Both Clinton and Trump were not that brightthough they may politically weigh more in the Arctics of sexuality: in the midst of American religiosity, I realized the illusions concealed behind truly breathtaking, prescribed fictions represented as reality. Trans ideology is by no means one of the invisible determinants of these fictions.

Capitol, Washington DC

For the Irish journalist Helen Joyce, the writer of the book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021), trans ideology holds that a person’s gender should be defined by how they subjectively feel and what they subjectively declare, rather than their biological sex, where there are no intermediaries of sex binary. For Joyce, the increasing prominence and influence of LGBT activism and obviously identity politics have been a driving force for this transition from an objective, anatomical definition of gender to a more subjective one, prioritizing gender identity over biological sex in law, policy, lobbying and cultural norms. Though there are waves of feminisms that would hold and confirm trans ideology, sex is undeniably binary without intermediates.

Unavoidably, the biological determinants of sex would be variables of what is described as “gender identity”. In my opinion, for instance, when Landon Wilkins blamed his failure on me, that was a lot about the discrepancies of the sexual and the gender identity, not to mention how Prof. Lisa Breglia communicated this to me. On the one hand, a trans individual with what Jacques Lacan would probably frame as “internalized lack” of a fully confirmed “male sex” and the lies and denials built around this lack, on the other hand, a screaming girlboss with an inflated ego of what Kim Hong Nguyen called “one-upmanhood”. Wilkins vs. Breglia. The prevailing “spirit” in the year after the Trump vs. Clinton Election.

*Bonus: “Capercaillie” is a Eurasian bird breed, a member of the grouse family. The females remind the “hen” for their cryptic colouration. “Capparis spinosa”, however, is a plant that bears rounded leaves and purple&white flowers. Scientific research doesn’t show any significant correlation to test the hypothesis if the capercaillie birds feed and grow on caparis plants.

Natalie Portman - Blinded By Love

Tindersticks - Marbles

The Platters - Only You - Lyrics

A Pancake Theory of Intelligent Design

Intelligent design is the buzzword of creationists in the 2000s. It is what might be conceived as a version of superficial vis-à-vis scientific discourses. The mindsets that are superficially concerned in seeing and conceiving technologies fictionalize the machine with a messianic mix- mash. Science at the service of the machinery of religion, selecting the traditional notions of demons and spirits and matching with fuzzy notions of the good and the evil.

For the critique of the prescribed religious allusions and resemblances, the intelligent design debates borrow from the non-corporeal data for projecting fictional incorporations to data. It presumes possible mental forms of similitude, if not exactitude, that might yield a prescribed religious outcome.

These turn out to be allegories of the design theory, which I’d satirize as the “Pancake Theory”, which lacks the analysis that may be hypothesized scientifically, but pretends to be “objective” another messianic miscognition at best. The theoretical vice of the intelligent design mindsets must be renounced due to the cognizance question in these structures.

Allegory, for Fredric Jameson in Allegory and Ideology (2019), is initially “dramatized by the way in which synonymy, homophony, ambiguity, polysemy, association, puns, faux amis, and the like… offer the hinge on which local signifying systems (ideologeme) are constructed.” Notion of ideologeme, for the design theories, is the particular unit of religion that has a “dual structure”: an “opinion” and an “articulation”.

Political psychologists could never disentangle that double structure. For sure, Jameson would accept the “synthesis of opposites” without reservation. What would his allegory say about the illogically extreme dialectics in the design theories? “Design” theories have macro and micro versions. Micro version concerns the allegory if the primitive human who stumbles upon a ticking watch may not understand its purpose, he may tell that it is not a rock or a vegetable and that it has been manufactured -possibly for a specific purpose. Religious interpretations of the machine’s integrated knowledge serve as the macro version for similar opinions. Fish have fins, and birds have wings because of adaptation and selection, not because they are “avian” according to the technological lexicon. Attributing agencies to the machine and data have a messianic and exorcist span where the original illusions’ forces remain unquestionable. Unlike Al, however, humans are sensitive and mortal, and cannot be saved in portable flash disks, stored in hard drives or kept in remote servers.

Reality is structured upon the function of the Network contrivances, which is not exterior to the ideologies with various symbolizing mechanisms to register, diagnose, detect, decode the patterns or patternize the individual data for desire and need in the culture predominated by consumption and economy-politics.

Politics of Star Wars

Why Ordering a New Star Wars was Necessary?

In addition to launching the New Hollywood of blockbusters in the 1970s (with/after Steven Spielber’s Jaws in 1975), George Lucas’ early Star Wars (1977 – ) and the prequels at the end of the millennium have become the ideological myth of the Digital Epokhe of the 2000s –particularly the first two decades, the era of smartphones, the rise and fall of social media. It was therefore necessary to order another pack of Star Wars to see how the ideological function of fantasy in the saga incorporates the capitalist ideology globally.

When it first aired, Apple II was also showcased at a fair in San Francisco, and this was considered the birth of the PC industry. A year later, the Space Invaders game, then Atari’s Asteroids and Pac-Man came, and Nintendo saved the crisis of the eighties. The internetwork of unlimited connection, domains and fields is not far from the Force. The rebound of the neoliberal revolution in the Cold War’s “pissing race”, rather than a mythology. The US President of this period was Ronald Reagan — the co-founder of the global capitalism or neoliberalism — a Star Wars fan who initiated a Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the ‘Star Wars Initiative’.

Special effects are now a part of daily life, in the galactic empire of the internet, among various rebels and tyrannical/oligarch regimes, there are wars and climate crises at every corner where the Sith and the Jedi vary. The belief in the global law needs to be strengthened and maintained. Although no law, no judges, no lawyers, no courtrooms is seen in the saga, it is obvious that there is a law of the universe. The galactic senate, which is at the centre of political turmoil, the tyrannical emperor and the rebels, and the spread of international (intergalactic) trade (trade federations, guilds and galactic routes such as the silk and spice routes).

Western Buddhism has been referenced for having the best complementary ethic for the dominant ideology of the global capital, after the Protestant work ethic. For “the monk” Yoda advises Anakin: “Let your fears go, Anakin (let-it-go)”. Only then one would have the balance of the good and the evil (yin-yang) in the force. The ethical kernel of liberalism: “laissez-faire / let them do.” The core of the “let-go” motto.

The most interesting is rather describing the epokhe: the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. The “Winter is Coming” slogan from the Game of Thrones would be a good fit to caption the spirit. Isabelle Stengers’s response book In Catastrophic Times looked at gaia, the living planet, for which capitalism leads to the barbaric, incomprehensible to describe even with Big Data, the uncontrollable radical alterity of the planet.

It would not be absurd to think of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the UN as efforts to strengthen the belief in law in a way. For sure, humans forget the end of the world because of daily issues. At best, they may look for an “external force”. When a storm floods, the only criticism is limited to understanding the end of the human species through urbanization and profit.