Scrawled in Wax

Tagline: “Where post-grad meets post-race”

The folks who brought and continue to bring you SiW fave Slaughterhouse 90210 have now started a new Tumlbr called – wait for it – Fetishizing the Other. The site consists of a variety of unannotated images of some kind of ‘other’ – a racial minority, ‘the poor’, or another kind of subjugated figure – and, well, nothing else.

Edit: I got so caught up with my usual “Tumblr=postmodernism” schtick, I forgot to talk about the actual site. So:

As I said in the comments, Tumblr is so often a place for a kind of distanced, aestheticised nostalgia – full of “hazy photography of models in sundresses; arty experiments in design and typefaces; literary quotes and other fragments” is how I once put it. This Tumblr takes that kind of nostalgia – that affection for the weird, the quirky etc. – and casts a critical light on it. It takes those same out-of-context images and, solely through the use of a site name, critiques that same post-ironic blankness – “we refuse to judge” – that has become so central to both the aesthetic and ideological underpinnings of Tumblr as ‘a culture’ (or cultural artefact).

So what is particularly interesting about this site is that challenges the aesthetic of what I often call ‘the hipster web’ – the Buzzfeed-y world of Tumblrs and ironic single-serving sites. If one of the tropes of Tumblr is collapsing past and present, this site not only looks at our racist past, but also suggests that it isn’t as far gone as we think – or gone at all.

Anyway, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I know I’ve endlessly yapped about Tumblr, but the thing that has always intrigued me about it is the way it crystallises how images in the contemporary (North American) context are ‘overdetermined’. I think the term stems from psychoanalysis, and regardless of what it ‘actually’ means, I’ve always used it to refer to an object or idea that is oversaturated with potential interpretations, simultaneously meaning more than one thing and remaining impossible to pin down to just one of the meanings. An overdetermined image constantly hovers in the potential of its semiotic multiplicity.

It’s for this reason that I’ve argued that few things are more endemic, or more a paragon of  ‘the present’ than Tumblr. Fetishing the Other, after all, simply presents a series of images devoid of context, explanation or an explicit editorial bent (other than the title, of course). Its authors, however, know that you’ll be able to produce a particular kind of interpretation – here, one critical of the way in which difference is made exotic – simply because you, like them, have spent your life being bombarded with both images and a slew of interpretations of those images. We live in a world where things mean multiply, all the time. And so Tumblr, as the stripped-down, context-less blog, simply functions on the interpretive saturation that, in my mind, defines ‘post-post-modernity’ – or whatever the fuck you want to call the current moment.

I feel like I’ve repeated this too often, but it just fascinates me. Hopefully though, this repetition means that a better, more intriguing idea is around the corner. That’s the way it works, right? You repeat one interpretation over and over again until it finally hits you how boring it is, and then you move on to a better, more nuanced one that, at least for a while, feels right.