🛕✨The Nexialist #0125

beat diaspora | plantations, computers, industrial control | vernacular architecture | kulturindustrie | reworking, referencing, releasing | gender theory | body neutrality | measuring manhood

Jun 15, 2023

welcome to yet another week of cyber-flaneuring, the nexialist

hey! i hope this e-mail finds you ~~well~~ festive, because today it’s my 34th birthday! last weekend i had the opportunity to deejay at tropikali festival, which was part of my celebration, and next weekend i get to see beyoncé live in amsterdam. so i guess there are a lot of reasons/occasions to celebrate. i’ll carry on the celebration for the whole next month, as usual. today i would like to thank you for reading, interacting, sharing, giving feedback and supporting this project and the man who writes it. this week, expect some content about culture, gender, nudity and bodies: videos, long reads, threads and some sincere words. enjoy! 🫀

—Rodrigo Turra

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🌍the beat diaspora

kondzilla is one of the most followed music channels on youtube in the world. needless to say, they are at the forefront of brazilian and latin-american musical and visual culture. last year they released the beat diaspora, this six-episode, extremely well-produced docuseries that taught me more than some history classes (and i only watched the first episode), using music as the red thread. they have subtitles in english, spanish and portuguese.

i’ve been bringing brazilian music to the tropikali festival for a few years, and of course, some of these rhythms were the core of my setlist (which you can listen here). the beat diaspora honors the story of these rhythms that are in the mainstream today and are conquering the world, but they were marginalized and their origins even criminalized at some point. still today, they carry resistance.

The Beat Diaspora is a documentary series that portrays the diaspora from the perspective of peripheral electronic music and presents music as a powerful platform for social transformation; a tool that gives young people a sense of belonging and enables them to make their dreams come true.
With its first season divided into six episodes, the project dives into different electronic scenes - São Paulo (Paulista funk), Recife (brega funk), San Juan (reggaeton), Kingston (dancehall), Salvador (electronic Bahia) and Lagos (afrobeats) — and investigates not only its origins, development and unfolding, but mainly its geographical and cultural surroundings, its strong connection with the local community, its relationships with ancestry and its constant influence on the pop music industry.
To build intimacy with the theme, hosts from each of the scenes and cities portrayed were invited to lead the narratives, talking to pioneering artists, music stars, young talents, researchers and journalists, in addition to investigating behavior and lifestyle, context political-social (racial issues, gender dynamics, media prejudice and economic elites), dance movements, fashion, street parties such as ‘fluxos’ and sound systems, traditional manifestations, economy, market and visual aesthetics.
Created by Coy Freitas, the original production of Youtube, it is a realization of MyMama Entertainment in co-production with KondZilla, executive produced by Mayra Faour Auad, Konrad Dantas and Coy Freitas and curated by Chico Dub and Dago Donato. The Beat Diaspora is an unprecedented musical and cultural journey that seeks to understand how the drum beats born in Africa spread across the diaspora, modernized themselves technologically and live in constant feedback between different Afro-diasporic communities.

🏭plantations, computers, and industrial control

“Disciplining workers was at the heart of his calculating engines, which drew on ideas that were themselves first developed to control enslaved and racialized people.” talking about origin stories, meredith whittaker makes this mindblowing connection, that makes me wonder: how come i did not see this before?

From inception, the engines—“the principles on which all modern computing machines are based”—were envisioned as tools for automating and disciplining labor. Their architectures directly encoded economist Adam Smith’s theories of labor division and borrowed core functionality from technologies of labor control already in use. The engines were themselves tools for labor control, automating and disciplining not manual but mental labor. Babbage didn’t invent the theories that shaped his engines, nor did Smith. They were prefigured on the plantation, developed first as technologies to control enslaved people. Issues alive in the present—like worker surveillance, workplace automation, and the computationally mediated restructuring of traditional employment as “gig work”—echo the way that computational thinking historically emerges as a mode of control during the “age of abolition,” in the early nineteenth century. Britain officially abolished West Indian slavery in 1833, and Babbage was very aware of the debate on abolition. He was also aware of the questions that were roiling the British elite as they sought alternatives to enslaved Black labor—particularly the question of how to control white industrial workers who persistently rebelled against industrialization, such that they could produce at the pace required to maintain the British empire. Both Babbage’s influential labor theories and his engines can be read as attempts to answer these questions—ones that, knowingly or not, rearticulated technologies of control developed on the plantation.

via the syllabus

🛕vernacular architecture

thomas klaffke’s latest rabbit holes reminded me of this brainsparking thread from the cultural tutor’s twitter. it is definitely a new term for me, which i’ll be mentioning the next time i’m in a bar.

Before industrial mass-production, rigorous town planning, bureaucratised building regulations, architecture schools, and engineering degrees things were built according to local needs and constraints and traditions, using locally available materials. So vernacular is a *way* of building. And it's how most things were built for most of history, all around the world. Whether Shibam in Yemen or Dinan in France, both were built without architects and engineers who were "professional" in the modern sense.

🎪kulturindustrie

i’m (still) not a paying subscriber of ana andjelic’s newsletter, the sociology of business, but i love her content, as you might have noticed. in this 2x2 matrix, which she calls kulturindustrie, she “aims to capture and structure what’s happening in our culture right now, from brand products to places to art and design.”

The Culture Industry map has four quadrants, created by two axes. The horizontal axe spans from reality to fantasy, depending on the level of deployed imagination. The vertical axe goes from positive to negative culture, marking the mood, energy and the heat around a product, place or an idea. Culture means that the time, place and the collective mood is perfect for product, place or an idea. In combination, the two axes explain popularity of something.

i have admitted before, but i love it when something can be explained in 2x2 matrixes. i was already sold on the axis (culture x imagination) and it just did something to my brain seeing the labels of each quadrant. reality + positive culture = kitsch (yes!), fantasy + positive culture = hyperbole (yes!), reality + negative vibes = literalness, fantasy + negative vibes = advertising (ouch…). can you see the reason for the age of reachantement report? (tn#123)

💪🏼reworking, referencing, releasing

Ardoise, chemin Saint-Claude, Val-des-sources, by Mériol Lehmann.

this text of the sentiers’ newsletter hit so close to home. patrick tanguay writes about venkatesh rao’s 2011 piece about the “calculus of grit.” you can find the original quote in the latest sentiers’ newsletter.

before introducing it, he talks about generalists (as he is one himself), which is a cozy term that i definitely feel contemplated in. it resonated so much with me: whenever looking for a job opportunity, i don’t feel like any job description contemplates my experience/how i see myself. it made me think how nexialism, which i would say in the generalism realm, is different by one detail: it emphasises the connection between areas and ideas. it operates in this in-between place (which is in the intersection, which he mentions). it made me think of winnicot’s transitional space (tn#78).

now, back to rao’s work:

He proposes that disciplines form an extrinsic map that one navigates through their career, a generalist would be threading that map in a new way perhaps, but still following the map. I’ve often mentioned Ito’s compass over maps, here Rao argues that one can operate using an intrinsic gyroscope, making up your own path, basically. Replacing the compass with the grit gyroscope of reworking, referencing, and releasing. Reworking (thinking through writing and rewriting), copious referencing of your own writing to construct and advance your own ideas, and releasing it public, which helps to connect with others and to take a place in the discussions you are interested in.

i was reading this thinking it was written for me, so it was super validating and encouraging. reworking, referencing and releasing is what i do here on a weekly basis, and i can attest to how it really has been working for me an “intrinsic gyroscope.”

⚧️gender theory

a must-watch from big-think with professor/writer/philospher judith butler (in brazil she has even been called the antichrist…). gender theory is one of these themes that has been appropriated and weaponized in the culture wars. if you still have doubts (or not) about gender theory, do yourself a favor this pride-month and watch this. then rewatch it. i would just quote the whole thing here, but it’s only a few minutes of your day (and much better spent than scrolling). my eyes kept tearing up and i even got goosebumps watching it.

Freedom is a struggle because there's so much in our world that's telling us not to be free with our bodies. And if we are seeking to love in a free way, to live, and move in a free way, we actually have to struggle to claim that freedom.

in my mind, it connected perfectly with pleasure activism (tn#123).

🦵🏼embracing body neutrality

if you have known me for a while, you know how much nudity is an important matter for me (tn#79 was all about that). i’ve had a paradoxical relationship with nakedness: growing up in a pretty naked household while hiding my body for no apparent reason (now i know i felt insecure due to bullying from being the only one in that generation with a bit more weight). then in my 20s, an awakening happened: i was naked in photographic projects from friends, zines, magazines, websites, beaches and parties—i’ve even deejayed naked. i learned that nudity could be an empowerment tool, to know yourself better, get used to your body just as it is, to normalize the nude body. i found freedom there.

this, however, has again become some kind of inner struggle filled with paradoxes. as i age (i know, i’m young and in my 30s, but still), things are changing, including my priorities, my body, my weight (and my belly). of course, this puts me in a confronting position of what i have learned, believed and preached, how i feel, what society has ingrained in our minds as “attractive,” perpetuated by algorithms in the shape of “ideal bodies.” some will say that i’m overreacting, and they might be right, but still they are very real feelings for me, and i bet for a lot of people. some days are better than others.

this post about body neutrality from natural pursuits, a project that promotes nudist events, content and activities in the US, served as a great reminder of how amazing our bodies are. i know this discourse has been around for a while as women have (as always) been leading the conversation, but i think men are quite behind in that. for me, it serves as a reminder to be kinder to myself in this new year and explore more nudity as a tool of self-love.

In embracing body neutrality, we shift our attention from scrutinizing every imperfection to appreciating what our bodies allow us to experience and achieve. It’s an invitation to let go of the constant mental chatter surrounding our appearance and redirect that energy elsewhere. By adopting this approach, we create space for a more balanced and compassionate relationship with our bodies, free from the pressure to constantly seek validation and unwavering self-love. With body neutrality we can acknowledge our insecurities while nurturing an environment of acceptance and kindness towards ourselves and others.

🍆measuring manhood

another taboo that i have a great deal of curiosity about are… penises (hence my slow-moving project flaccid zine). so, of course, i loved this video from jubilee. it seems like clickbait, but i think the discussions they bring and their maturity/honesty/respect when doing this make it an educational video. they talk about stereotypes, big d*ck energy, boyfriend d*ck, etc. they then did a podcast interview with the CEO on the reasons why they did it and have a candid conversion about their own experiences with nudity, insecurities, etc. it’s just a fun way to talk about a taboo for many men.

see you next week, generalists 🫀

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