Mediocrity is one of the things that occupy much of my time – on the blog and otherwise. We’re surrounded by mediocrity, and there are clear, simple reasons for this, which I’ll talk about in this post. More importantly, for the topics of the blog, what concerns me is mediocre fiction.
The whole concept is somewhat tricky. After all, I’ve claimed that:
So, if literature is very hard to approach objectively, how can we speak of mediocre fiction? To put it another way, what makes mediocre fiction… mediocre?
Other arts, like sculpture, have a much higher technical threshold to separate inability from ability. Writing doesn’t, which leads to mediocre fiction(more…)
Many of us think they’re individually the center of the universe. The irony is, they might be right, but that’s a discussion for another day. The same concept in a wider context is called anthropocentrism. In simple terms, anthropocentrism is the assumption that humans are the most important entities in the universe.
The problem is not so much the belief itself. After all, many of us would likely consider the possibility that other life forms exist in the universe. Probably many of us would also consider the possibility that alien life forms not only exist but are as or even more intelligent than we are.
So, is anthropocentrism “a thing”? Does it really exist?
The question is yes, indirectly. And that’s what makes it insidious. In other words, the true danger of anthropocentrism arises from the fact that it’s subconscious: We’re often not aware we express anthropocentric behavior. That is, we might state we don’t think humans are the center of the universe, we might really believe it, too, yet we act and think as if we were.
So let’s take a look at what anthropocentrism really is, together with examples of anthropocentric behavior. We’ll see what kind of problems such behavior produces, and what some possible solutions could be.
The problem with anthropocentrism is not so much the belief we’re truly the center of the universe – or any context; such as our own planet – but that we act as if we were(more…)
Note: the following article on Vampire Capital and Social Classes in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 127-131) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the list on the main website.
The emergence of the Gothic – particularly the Victorian Gothic – can be traced to the development of the market. The mid-nineteenth century also coincides with one of the most important theoreticians on capital, Karl Marx, who used numerous Gothic metaphors for his references to capitalism:
Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist (342).
Additionally, there is an association between, on the one hand, ghosts and specters, and, on the other, the transcendent nature of commodities and the invisibility of wealth. The association is facilitated through the introduction of economic devices such as the stock market and the prevalence of paper money (Smith, 149–150).
Andrew Smith claims that such an element can also be found in A Christmas Carol, as Scrooge’s wealth “is both there (hoarded) and not there (not in circulation)”, with a parallel formed between the “spectrality” of money and that of ghosts (150). Scrooge becomes a prime example – if not an actual personification – of this very invisibility of wealth.
For Marx, vampire capital was an apt metaphor of how capitalism becomes engorged by parasitically sucking life out of labor(more…)
