I see empire everywhere. Reading Jan Morris’s amazing three-volume Pax Britannica, Morris, a trans writer and historian, I felt the brain virus. How we play, learn, work, dress - all empire, and really the British empire. We cannot think any other beyond the British empire, it is like the transcendental category of empire.
For example… Going to a Liberty nWNBA basketball game at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, which I have never done, but Rachel and one of my children did on Sunday, we enter a center of queer female athleticism. Even here, we are colonized, cell by cell, by the sport, sports in general, the uniforms, the arena, the half-time show.
So colonized is my own mind, doubly and triply so: by empire and patriarchy, by race and the other categories imposed by imperial epistemologies. It feels hard to think clearly, but easy to think straight.
Let’s think queerly.
Mapping for Action / Da(i)mology
I gave a talk recently called Mapping for Action. Rachel, my beloved, came up with the title.
“What am I doing with all my work these days?” I asked her.
“Mapping,” she said. “You are mapping for action.”
Here is the PDF of the presentation.
I don’t like the word map, or the gerund mapping, a colonized part of speech that comes to me through Latin, cartography, neoclassicism, Roman roads, and ultimately, the British empire.
I may not like mapping, but I am actually mapping, and have been for years. I connect concepts together and see what happens.
Excess
Mapping is excess. I think of Lacan’s lamella, an organ of pure life and etxcess, that cannot be contained by the body. I had a dream of the lamella, on my navel, my omphalos, my origin. It was an impossibly thin part of my body, attached to my belly button and with little flaps of skin, scales if you will, and when I rubbed my hands over the flaps, they became impossibly large. Excess!
Like the lamella, the map is outside the body, generating excess: Relations, histories, bodies, meanings. Each new relation generates others.
Trivia
The map is a crossroads, the place where the roads meet and exchange happens. The trivium, where three roads meet, is my favorite place, and the place of Diana and Hekate, and of the Sphinx. The place where strangers, goods, languages, gods, stories, and concepts encounter each other.
The crossroads has no body. Its existence is relational. It exists because things arrive there from elsewhere, and then the encounter changes them.
Is this the da(i)mologue? Is the map the omphalos, the naval, of da(i)mons? The neural network (map) is the omphalos of AI agents, themselves daemons/da(i)mons.
Reading Anthologies, An exercise in excess
Committed, as I am, to reducing my material possessions and living daily with whatever comes to greet me, like the beautiful calendula that is still blooming, I have been reading, or finally finishing, books I own but have never completed. Then I give them away.
One bookis Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, the 2017 edition, also available for free on Archive.org.
Reading it is like reading an encyclopedia, but less useful.
I am skipping all the sections that discuss Alice Munro, for reasons of personal politics. I wish I could skip all the sections about King Lear, but then I would miss half the book.
While reading this anthology, I experience moments of genius, a shining shell or pebble in the sand and waves. Sara Ahmed on affect; Tobin Siebers on quality and disqualification; Jennifer McDonell on dogs in literature and the animal turn. I experience the return of old favorites, and understand why they are still favorites: Althusser on interpellation; Foucault on the safeguard.
Badiou and Levinas are redeemed. Lacan makes no sense. I wish there was more transness, women and queerness, but I am still in the middle of the queer section - I saved it for last.
How is all this related to mapping? I don’t know. I would need a map to tell me. And to be honest, the reading does feel decolonizing but recolonizing! Such is the practice of ever increasing awareness.
None the less, I enjoyed this exercise and found it generative, in a mapping sort of way, and plan to continue the experiment with Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen’s Film Theory and Criticism, the 7th Edition, hopefully on this harvest moon Sept 26, 2026.
