Jasper’s Wardrobe

This is my favorite Burning Man outfit. Burning Man is the one place where my creativity is my only limit on my public persona. As males we get to take a page from the girls' and Queens' books. We collapse the dichotomies of gender through action and publicity rather than through words.

I went to to the Playa with three basic fashion ideas which applied sexy women's fashion memes to an unapologetically male body:
1) Penis Pride - I was raised to feel shame for my penis, and to hide even its outline. This leads to baggy shorts. I was inspired by all of the penis-centric fashion I saw this year at San Francisco Gayboy events. The leopard pants are one result.
2) Long Socks - Long socks/ boots/ leg warmers. combines with short shorts, a thong or leggings is a fashion meme that women employ all of the time. It has the paradoxical effect of looking more clothed and being more scandalous at the same time. Less is more!
3) Strategically bared chest/belly/shoulder - This is again inspired by the Fashion of Femininity. Framing a square of furry chest or belly has a stronger effect than going shirtless. Feminine fashion memes play with this fact all of the time.

Is this still crossdressing? it certainly is not transgender anymore. It violates norms of masculine fashion without aspiring to female anatomy. It is post (trans) gender fashion.

Roughly 25,000 males attended this event. A majority of them probably wore a skirt, tutu, tights, or booty pants during the event. Most outfits were a variation of femme. Both Men and Women played with the virgin/whore dicotomy. Burning Man is the laboratory where we all go to push fashion and gender edges away from default society.

History Of Capitalism In Early Modern Europe

Fernand Braudel & The Annales School of History. Braudel create world systems history by minimizing national boundaries and looking at multi century timescales. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 Volume II formed a main component of Deleuze and Guatarri's A Thousand Plateaus. Braudel looks at history as an economic system. It is a historical materialism which left behind the dogmas of institutionalized marxism, and instead focuses on extrapolating patterns from Economic Data and its changes through time. Much like the Geo-Temporal Data Art of 2010 (see Stamen Design Blog here and here). Braudel sees Early Modern History as a series of City-State monopolies on Commerce, each lasting a century or two. Giovanni Arrighi updated Braudel in The long twentieth century: money, power, and the origins of our times 1994 This formed a major pillar of Hardt & Negri's Empire 2001.

In this this fantastic UC Berkeley History of Europe Podcast (2006) Anderson posits that the distinguishing feature of Early Modern Europe was the contest for sovereignty between the Roman Church and a variety of state actors who only had incomplete sovereignty. This allowed the Free Merchant City States to arise in Northern Italy, The Southern Netherlands and Germany, where literacy commerce, science, heresy and Republicanism flourished Miracle Mirrored (1995), and where the power of Church and state were held in check during the high middle ages and the renaissance. Most schools teach national boundary histories which valorise strong centralized imperial states like Spain and France and make these early Merchant Oligarchies unrepresentable. England was a backwater in 1700 but Anglo-Centric History prefers to see England as the birthplace of the Enlightenment, the Public Sphere, Science, Capitalism and Civilization. Christopher Bayly's groundbreaking Birth Of The Modern World (2004) shows what Global history might look like when we set aside the perspectives of the Nation State.

Capitalist Superpower City States

• Venice, Genoa, Florence, Milan (1250-1500?): First capitalist states emerge in the anarchy of the Medieval System. The Mongol unification of the Arab, Chinese and Indian economic systems led to a huge period of Globalization, which benefitted Venice and Genoa as intermediaries. (Abu-Loghod (1989))
  • Venice controls of the spice trade with the Arabs. Organized as a multi-national, before the rise of the nation. conquered territory from the Greeks and used entire islands as factory depots.
  • Genoa was hugely influential in this period. They imported Hindu Numerals and double entry bookkeeping from the Arabs, which formed the basis of capitalist organization. Genoa became rich from its control of the silk trade with the Mongols, until the destruction of the Mongol Globalization, when the mongol expansion into southwest China gave the local Black Death a global vector.
• Spanish Empire (1500-1600)- Spain's economy was too unsophisticated to benefit from the loot acquired first from the Moors and then from the new world. The benefits flowed to Genoa and Antwerp
  • Antwerp: The Low Countries (today's Belgium) were the most economically and financially advanced territory in The Emergent Spanish empire in the 1500's. The High Finance of the Empire occurred here.
  • Genoa: Genoese banking families formed an early financial empire in the Spanish territories. Genoese Merchant families invested in Northern Europe. They provided the Capital and Financial instruments which led to the rise of the Southern Netherlands as textile manufacturing centers. They were in a position to benefit the most from the Spanish trade with the new world. They also made a fortune lending to the Spanish Monarchs.
• Amsterdam (1600-1750)- The Northern Netherlands went from a fishing backwater to the economic superpower of Europe after the Protestant Southern Netherlands rebelled against the Spanish King. The Northern Netherlands were settled by protestant and jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. Amsterdam like New York later is a city of refugees. A huge portion of Antwerp, especially the skilled protestant Bourgeoisie and Merchants moved north in the largest mass migration. The Spanish and Portugese Jews brought their trading connections and later Wave of French Protestant refugees further reinforced the Mercantile, educated middle class character of The Dutch Republic. Seven Merchant City states banded together in an extremely loose confederation and became a Laboratory, The first Merchant Ruled Assemblage of City States. The Dutch state had no centralized sovereignty. It was de facto a form of anarchist or libertarian state in which Markets, Science and Fashion were allowed to transform society because no power was strong enough to exercise a veto.
• London (1750-1900)- London turned from a backwater to a Capitalist Superpower after the Dutch Republican Invasion (Glorious Revolution) of 1688 permanently reduced the Sovereignty of the Monarchy in favor of the Parliament. A series of reforms introduced a free press, religious tolerance, and the Bank of England. In this space the Literate Commoner Classes and the Print-Mediated Public Sphere gradually gained sovereignty at the expense of the Nobility. London became the center of science and commerce until the Rise of the United States in the 1900's.
• New York - 1900-1970 - This is the period of Fordist Manufacturing and the Rise of the Mass Mediated Faux Public Sphere
• Silicon Valley/ San Francisco / Black Rock City - The Italian Postfordist Christian Marazzi (2008) points to Silicon Valley and San Francisco as a kind of new Center, which is transforming work practice and social structure. His book The Violence of Financial Capitalism (2010) is an important reading of the collapse of the financial system in 2008, but is NOT a stand alone book read Capital and Language (2008) first.

Interesting phenomena in this respect is the rise of Recursive Publics Kelty (2008) and Burning Man / Black Rock City as an impermanent city state & corporeal recursive public.

Introduction

Hyperlocative is a recursive public. It uses the wiki tools provided by the wikipedia foundation (mediwiki), in order to make a Post Identitarian Dictionary. It's first author is me, [JasperGregory]. Wiki's can be revolutionary technologies with the right social context. The starting point for this wiki is Jasper's Bibliography. I am putting together a hyperlinked bibliography of amazing social science and Historiography. This is my curation of the state of the art in Academic Knowledge. I take this knowledge out of the corrupting institutional setting of professional academia and bring it out into "The Public" This bibliography can form the kernel for a new recursive public, a new attempt to reboot the progressive enlightenment project.

Jasper's First Wiki: Queerpedia

From spring 2009-fall 2009 I built a wiki based queerpedia (offline in august 2010). I envisioned it as a Rhizome of infinitely footnoted text and media. I used Ruby On Rails-based wiki software called Instiki and hosted the software. I was the sole user. I wanted to publish a counter-public encyclopedia which also acted a blog stream. It was motivated by my experience blogging at jasper's wordpress. I wanted to link posts together in order to create more complex knowledge than the ephemeral stream of Blogging afforded me. My Model was the Original wiki c2.com. c2.com is an example of a Recursive Public which resulted in an online Public creating the the Wiki in order to manifest itself as a public. This wiki public had a huge role in spawning the Agile Programming movement in which individual Open Source programmers took the web out of the hands of Corporations (IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle), and empowered individual Geeks.

 

Hyperlocative Moral And Technical Order

These form the diagram for the next iteration of my "Post Identitarian Public" project.

1. as of august 2010, the Queerpedia has been offline for at least 6 months. This is due to the decision to build my own system using Ruby On Rails instead of using an "out of the box" software like Wikipedia's MediaWiki. Instead of writing wiki pages I found myself debugging, deploying and maintaining software. Hyperlocative uses Mediawiki hosted by Dreamhost.
2. Queerpedia went for a bottom up Rhizome network topology. I just branched and linked pages. At a certain point I realized that I had created a mess. Structure did not emerge without me doing a huge amount of refactoring work. Therefore the initial topology of Hyperlocative is a tree. I write things on the homepage and split them off as the page grows like polyps. They will be split into logically similar categories (in theory)
3. Queerpedia showed my that the Encylopedia/dictionary style of writing is immensely productive for me. Some structure is provided by at the meta leve l of the Dictionary. This allows the author to just dive right in, rather that using narrative techniques to bring an audience up to speed. In the bibliography I will give you the links to read the source, and I will speak to the public who has taken the trouble to read it.
4. Queerpedia mixed personal narrative with definitional notes. Hyperlocative will focus on a definitions and notes.
5. The power of Queerpedia is that it is a Repository of Radically Subjective knowledge. Rather than a Wikipedia-style striving for objectivity. Hyperlocative will strive instead for radical subjectivity plus transparency. I will strive for transparency by hyperlinking to my sources, and where appropriate, writing ethnographic field notes.
6. In Queerpedia the single-author wiki proved a powerful medium. To begin with Hyperlocative will be single author. If you feel called to get involved, then let me know. I am sure we can work something out.
7. I see Rational-Critical debate arising in a linking between personal wikis rather than in "edit debates" within one wiki a la Wikipedia. Wikipedia ends up homogenizing knowledge rather than pushing new frontiers.
8. The Bibliography will form an hubristic attempt to circumscribe what counts as knowledge for my Post-Identitarian Public. The Texts and thinker's that I list form a kind of canon, which will be referred to in order to synthesize and distribute new knowlege.

I am reviving my Photoblog on tumblr. I like how Tumblr builds Counter Publics based solely on shared Photos. I am starting out my re-publishing my Flickr Public’s favorites from the past two years. This stuff is NSFW, so watch out at work.
Jasper

Check it out at http://jaspergregory.tumblr.com. This Tumblr Zine will be irreverent, provocative and filled with eye candy. Posterous (http://jasperswardrobe.com) will be my curated "Public Portfolio." Tumblr is my Counter Public face.
I have been thinking about splitting my publics and the time has come. I will still tweet both streams.