Deconstruction of a Mounting
Deconstruction of a Mounting
by Travis Hedge Coke
“I had serious thoughts of suicide, which as Nietzsche says, helped me get past many a night and many a day,” wrote in one of his diaries, which, for purposes, many will call, instead, “daybooks.”
What is a daybook?
A diary.
Why is a daybook different than a diary?
It seems so.
Most of the things to follow here, either you know, in which case you may likely have a different opinion than me, even when we run in parallel or bike in tandem, or you are in place to take me and mine on faith or remain faithless and rebuff me without even approaching.
Kind of our point.
“For repairs and historic rehab projects”
- Who is Deconstruction For Specifically?
<https://raleighnc.gov/planning/services/deconstruction>
One of the unintentionally lessons many a role-play module or bible hath wrought, is the tendency to write, “Rogue,” instead of, “rogue,” or, even rarer, “a rogue.” “Paladin.” “Chaotic Evil.” “Neutral Good.”
Fuck is “neutral good,” much less, “Neutral Good”? A placatory phrase for right-leaning centrists and catalogists. Hence, the swearing at the beginning the previous sentence. Much is all about seeming. The seams of a thing hold it together but also help distinguish it from what which it does not take part.
Roleplaying Games, in their handbook, catalogic nature, rank and number anything they can, presumably solely as guidelines, as prompts, but a bible tends to become a Bible.
Even the best of visual artists represent Michael Moorcock’s Elric with rippling muscle or with stark clothing, in pastels or armored layers. Elric, a deconstruction and inversion of the Tolkienesque high fantasy hero, is everything those heroes are, in a wrong way, with their most charming trappings (the sternness, the handsome armor and leather, the austere do-what-have-to ethos, the blessing from a true god) strained through the cheesecloth of the 18th Century macaroni.
Elric is not human, not blessed by any human god, disdainful and prissy, prone to moaning gesture and gestural moaning, in colorful, garish kit. A constantly high, self-indulgent, disabled, regressive, classist, snobbish, backbiting murderer. The latter aspects are often true of Kings Conan or Aragorn, or Jirel of Joiry, but they are human, and they are blessed by human gods (or owed dues by human devils).
Elric is a deconstruction of class tropes, of literary anticipations, of aesthetics and moral judgments.
The revision of this revision into classical or marketable tendencies of the Aragornesque or Conanic manner, are not “reconstruction” or intentional further deconstruction, just falling back. A priori regress by an omission of pertinent details being filled in by learned psychology, learned expectations.
Conan, himself, as a character, is most frequently nigh unrecognizable in adaptations, even those adaptations which are text or which rewrite or repurpose Robert E Howard’s original work. We see an increasing removal of color and instrumentation from Tolkien’s Middle Earth as filmic and televisual adaptations continue. Bright reds or blues shall not be seen. The music is strings, horns, woodwinds and drums in elegiac measures.
Deconstruction? Consideration? Reconsideration?
Mostly just pomp.
David and Leigh Eddings used their “deconstructions” of fantasy literature to promote ideas of how the world works, which fair, that is an effort at deconstruction, parallel or in the same vein as Moorcock and Elric. But, the Eddings efforts are structured around the good of authority, the need of royalism, the truth of racial characteristics and racial psychology, the reality of children as brutal things to be knocked into form, and the inherent BDSM dynamics in men/women or girl/boy scenarios.
Deconstruction may be “justice,” as Derrida said somewhere; somewhere. But, an individual or a groups’ effort at deconstruction cannot be the end of the deconstruction. For one, deconstruction does not end. At the same time, the efforts are, by our nature, or at least our tendency, limited and fall short.
David and Leigh were convicted of, and then deliberately obscured the nature or existence of, crimes against children. This, in their real, lived lives, appears to inform their deconstruction of already patriarchal and classistly rigid fantasy fiction, coupled with the RPG-tendency, newer then, to break everything into measures and checklists, from politics to trauma to lifting strength and lineage.
The Leigh and David Eddings novels are a mix of applied eugenics, social phrenology, perverse prodding, and an under-layer of disgruntled repair to the world.
When a general audience approaches the Eddings’ work or Moorcock’s, though, they all wash out into the soft gold and silver hues of a Lord of the Rings adaptation. Eighties covers with charming, warm ruddy-cheeked scenes and more recent covers staunch and geometric and bone-white or polished ash.
“I’m interested in the idea of reconstruction as well. After you’ve knocked something down what do you replace it with?”
- Wayne Wise in Call for Comments: How to Reconstruct Deconstructed Superhero Media
Christopher “Mav” Maverick and Wayne Wise
The latest Friday the 13th movie – so far, the last – has been called a reconstruction of the franchise. Ostensibly a remake, and a reboot, and possibly a requel, Friday the 13th, as it is called, retells itself and its franchise in a succession of stories, first those told in-world by characters, then, as they become enmeshed in the stories they are telling, in stories presented to us both as retellings and as something really happening.
Some of us like our Jason Voorhees, the primary slasher killer of the Friday franchise, to be a kind of sympathetic storm god. There is no in-world explanation for why Jason has aged to an adult form, given he ostensibly died as a child, starting off the reasons for murder in the first movie, wherein Jason the killer is only a bluff by another murderer. There is no in-world explanation that holds up, for why or how Jason can come back to life, can survive nearly anything, is eternally and perpetually resurrectable. But, we know he frequently comes with the rain.
Storm god.
Jason comes when you act up in his woods, by his lake, at his campground, and he arrives with rain and he fucks up your windows and he kills the annoying, the villainous, the corrupt, the cruel, the callous, and sometimes the hapless and the happenstance.
2009’s Friday the 13th, similar in results and different in fashion from the Nightmare on Elm Street sequel/remake/reboot, New Nightmare, turns its primary slasher killer ((in Nightmare, naturally, the dream demon, Freddy Krueger) into a living story. Jason of that movie and Freddy of New Nightmare are retold things. The retelling is the resurrection.
Reconstruction? That is deconstruction!
Deconstruction is not destruction. It is not “taking apart.” It is not “tearing down.”
“We should begun by looking at the impetus for deconstruction – waste.”
- Deconstruction and Design for Disassembly
Allen Barkkume
Destruction is fundamentally impossible, but also wasteful. If it cannot be exhaustive it is still exhausting.
Deconstruction does not even destroy the myths or assumptions it counters. Deconstruction makes those assumptions malleable.
The mythic “reconstruction,” a genre or technique proposed by frequently by genre fans, is the anticipation that any encounter with feelings, today, similar to feelings had in childhood or youth, are a case of the media, itself, being progressively regressive. As though enjoying a peach cobbler today means that that peach cobbler was made and served by people who actively rejected the “deconstructive” preparation of modern peach cobbler to have recaptured a glory that is peach cobbler when you were seven.
“Nu Trek is shit (except the stuff I like, which is reconstructive).” “Evil Dead Rises is a reconstruction after the failed deconstruction into comedy and tv drama.” Arguments over whether the newest kaiju, slasher, romcom, science fiction adventure movie are reconstructive or deconstructive come to no conclusive end because the reconstruction is deconstruction but it is so taboo to say it that coming close to the utterance is enough to drive some believers in reconstruction to fly off the handle.
As much as reconstruction is stretched on a frame of “without that woke shit,” you might think that some who believe it to be a moral or ethical righting of something deconstruction did to their genre, medium, or franchise, might reconsider. The only strength, the only permanence that reconstruction has, though, like the dream demon in New Nightmare, is in the retelling. The retelling is the thing.
The Belgariad stories of the Eddings or the Lord of the Rings of JRR Tolkien are no longer thought of as especially academic or socially radical, but purely as old guard, as proper fantasy, proper stuff. They are, now, the aim of reconstruction, if anyone makes and could achieve that aim.
The old guard who decried Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or the reboot movies of Star Trek now exist in the voice of another old guard who enshrine some or one of those while distinguishing Strange New Worlds or Lower Decks as unworthy of canonization, a violation of prime aesthetics and principle ethics of real Star Trek.
What was disagreeably “deconstructed” or questioned or presented or highlighted might be different, and the mouths and hands doing the denouncing may belong to different people, yet that voice remains, the retelling remains. Sustains. Cries out for reconstruction and applies it to anything that tastes right in the right moment.
The logic that presented 1997 comics by Scott Lobdell or Walt Simonson using Marvel supereheroes, were bad and deconstructive and damaging, while 1998 comics by Scott Lobdell and George Perez were reconstructive and good and affirming. Simonson’s late ’97 Avengers is probably the only Walt Simonson comics which you can outright badmouth or decry to “reconstruction” believers, because it has to exist as a badness/deconstruction to justify the existence of a reconstruction occurring a few months later. A reconstruction that, again, involved several of the same divers hands making the comics it was supposed to be righting.
DC Comics could do this, as well, with their occasional bid in the past two decades, for “rebirth” and righting of their shared universe’s internal ethic-aesthetic.
You just put a golden hue over the superheroes and you put in slogans like, “We need heroes more than ever” and “When we need them!” Need. There is not really a need, but telling it, retelling it, makes it seem to exist enough that it exists. The retelling of the need is the retelling which makes reconstruction ephemerally real.
Every radical and every radical action of the past become a classicist’s reaffirmation of classicism, given enough time and enough retells.
“The reconstruction, revealing that after all this, heroes are still heroes no matter what.”
- Media Notes / The Iron Age of Comic Books
<https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MediaNotes/TheIronAgeOfComicBooks>
Why superheroes, slasher killers, and high fantasy true kings?
I suppose they are divine in our heads, divine in our culture in a bizarrely sardonic way. A comfortably sardonic way, which might make it even more pernicious, or is that tenacious? They are unquestionable in a way because they are acknowledged to be untrue. They are tenacious because they can be so easily retold, reformatted to new tellings, retailed, retailed, resold, and cast in the golden, sepia hues.
A deeply human aesthetic-ethic governs all three (sub-)genres. They can always be righted by telling them again, like romantic comedy or lovers’ tragedy. Deconstructing them can reaffirm parts and make other elements malleable and exchangeable, but we have been told of a need enough that we recreate the need before even a thing that would need or a reason to need, and that begets the fairytale reconstruction.
Reconstruction is when we forget or forgo what we are perceiving. Reconstruction is us identifying what we expect to see, what we anticipate is, what we enshrine as holy real, above what is before and around and in and obvious to us.
The most common rebuttals of “woke shit” is not that the “woke” is wrong or wrongly put, but variations of, “Yes, but.”
“Yes, but,” is a way to shield our eyes from a horror scene too anxious-making to see. But, we peek. “Yes, but,” is a way to close our eyes but still know and perversely embrace a love scene. The voices against sex or sexuality in media are not especially against sex or the presentation in media, in entertainment, of sexual matters or practices, but they are against how those scenes or scenarios make them feel, be that angry, horny, scared, confused, or bored.
This is why there is the consistently recreated myth that bad/deconstruction feminists, leftists, pro-queer proponents, are “anti-sex” or “frigid” or “hate sexiness,” a position which has never been borne out by observed history or society. The retelling is a reconstruction of a challenged understanding which is gone. The people arguing that all feminists (or what they used to call, “feminazis,” until Nazis became mainstream again) are anti-sex, do not fail to understand that this is untrue, they do not fail to understand that what feminism is criticizing in the portrayal of sexuality or the eroticization in media is not the existence of sexiness, but handling and erasure of kinds of eroticization, kinds of sexiness and sexuality.
Marvel Comics could put Twin Peaks low on their “coolometer” for a month, in 1991, and people on Twitter/X can claim that the original Twin Peaks was always terrible, but there will also be attempts to reconstruct the televisual Twin Peaks over the prose or theatrical Twin Peaks, and vice versa, and so on.
Marvel Comics once ranked “pregnant women on magazine covers” and some of their own in-print characters as “uncool.” Rankings are a generation of conflict, not a sorting of material.
Which Mad Max movies truly capture Mad Max or which ones destroy or degrade that mythic, unencapsulated Mad Max will roll along like a snowball down a hill gaining snow, gaining twigs and dirt, gaining someone’s little brother in his starfish-like snowsuit in cartoonish fashion as it is argued which Mad Max movies present a clear timeline or how to clear the timeline, how to streamline the seams of the franchise and sing the morality, the aesthetic-ethic captured by when the franchise hit one of us individually or a group of us generationally. And, none of it makes any of the deconstruction into reconstruction, it is simply saying so.
A Christmas Story. The Wizard of Oz. It’s a Wonderful Life. Three adaptations which did not do so well as theatrical releases, but which aired and re-aired so often, so clockwork regular, they became reaffirmed lessons, they became their retellings and their retellings became as much a sign of a season as the longer nights or the breaks from school. All three have moral lessons, in some degree, and an ironic distance from their own moralizing; they rebuff nostalgia or nationalism or their era’s anticipatory social mores. But, in the retellings and through the retellings, they do not. Retelling of the dream demon.
In the Evil Dead franchise, as much as they say that reading from a book causes the evil to come, the evil is almost always already active and there. The reading, the telling is not creating or calling the deadites, as they are called. They are there because we anticipate them. Like the prodding engineered in Cabin in the Woods or Death House, the circumstances which strand the Hallmark heroine in the small town for the holiday, the deadites can be seen to represent our desire, our belief. It is in what we retell ourselves.
Every telling is a deconstruction. Every telling is a brick by brick building. A broken clock tells a story every hour, but only a right one twice. Unless, it is not that kind of clock.
If a digital clock is stopped or dead, is there really a time in isolation? Depends on what you tell yourself or what you are told and retell to you. But, none of it is going to retake you to a golden era that never was. No reconstruction will do more than deconstruct. Ever After or Friday the 13th or the newest or last before newest Iron Man comic will deconstruct and build. Mistaking the mounting for a reconstruction is as doom as the Confederate lauding of American Reconstruction, from which it might as well have derived its name.
And, with that: Goodnight.