empty signifiers

(Part one of this series dealt with the nature of apocalypticism and its ability to create an insular secondary culture.)

A population can be insular without necessarily demonizing cultures peripheral (or, as insular derives from the Latin for island, external) to itself. Insularity is, in the case of the oppressed secondary culture experiencing apocalypticism, cautious self-identification only with those who share cultural competencies. It is a survival mechanism in a time where political subversion or the appearance of subversion brings drastic consequences.

It is a short psychological step, however, between what seems like the pleasure of joint identification--the thrill of rebelling against one's derided secondary status by creating an underground where, by virtue of being secondary, a culture has in fact become dominant--and the creation of a gestalt where the members of the oppressor primary culture are investments of the other.

The other as used here is a psychological term to describe the basic taxonomy of human experience. Following Jacques Lacan's discussion of the mirror stage of human development, the assumption of language by a speaking individual requires a recognition of the boundaries of the self and everything else. Prior to the infant's ability to grasp language, there is no division, there is no separation between itself and the environment. As the infant begins to understand that its reflection in the mirror is both self and not-self, it formulates a theory of the world that underpins the entirety of human consciousness. That theory is the basic expression of the dichotomy between Self and Other.

Self is what we know, what we recognize as identical or similar to ourselves. At its most basic level the Self is that ephemeral presence we name I. As socialized persons, however, we extend the category of Self to include those who possess the same cultural competencies--and thus are more likely to experience the world in a similar fashion--as ourselves. Thus our family, village, clan, ethnic group, or nationality becomes an extension of the Self.

The insularity first encouraged by apocalypticism can be seen as a celebration of the Self in an atmosphere of repression. The secondary culture is on the verge of being swallowed, of being resocialized, by the dominant oppressor. Because the oppressed is not allowed to express the characteristics that have until now defined him as Self, he seeks another outlet to do so. Thus the secondary culture becomes more strongly bonded by virtue of their threatened extinction or assimilation at the hands of the primary culture. This is the foundation of the drive for insularity, of identifying most strongly with those already recognized as Self.

It is only in societies where the minority position is protected that the resocialization process can be perceived as nonthreatening. If there is no danger to the secondary culture's identity--that is, if there is no process of conversion to the mores of the primary culture--then the insularity can lead to something of a peaceful coexistence. The emergence of ethnic neighborhoods during the great immigrations into the United States in the mid-1800s and early 1900s are somewhat representative of this phenomenon. There were conclaves of Irish, Polish, Catholic, Romanian, Chinese, Japanese, and various other ethnicities that functioned both in the primary British colonial-informed culture as well as maintaining an insular identity among similar immigrants: the neighborhood itself, having chosen to exist as a unified entity of one particular group, can be seen as an insular secondary culture.

It was never likely that this type of coexistence would ever occur prior to the development of legal protection and recognition of the secondary against the primary. (The Constitution's protection of minorities against the "tyranny of the majority" is what makes this possible in United States society.) The imperialism of Rome, Babylon, Assyria, and the other great empires of the early world was not a matter of coexistence, but geared more toward assimilation in the name of ensuring loyalty. While there are exceptions to every pronouncement, the requirements for secondary cultures to perform in the identifications of the primary, at the expense of their own identifications, is strong evidence for this conjecture. That is, while the Jewish population existed as both subjects of the Roman empire and as Jews, there were legal, social, and religious ordinances in place that prioritized loyalty to Rome over Jewishness. The worship performance at checkpoints in Meiji-era Japan to screen for covert Christians is another example of the dominance of the primary.

One of the strongest reasons for assimilating--for denying one's prior identity and resocializing as a member of the oppressive primary culture--is survival. It was the case with Roman and Babylonian empires that the punishment for indulging in dual identifications, for sustaining ties to the secondary culture, was torture, imprisonment, or death. It would seem this would automatically generate the conditions necessary to begin to conceive of the dominant culture as the Other.

This is not the case. Loyalty to the dominant culture will never last long if it is only legislated, and the enmity produced by tormenting people will eventually overpower the ruler's grasp. The emperors were shrewd leaders, and had an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of power. (They may not have dressed it in psychological terms, but they understood what they were doing.) The only way to convince people to embrace their servitude, to celebrate the nature of their oppression, is to convince them that their identification in the secondary culture is wrong.

It is a masterstroke. To convince someone that their servitude is not a thing to rebel against, you must force them to accept not only the dominance of the primary culture, but its justness, its righteousness. And the easiest way of doing so is to subvert their secondary identities as being the Other. In the American South, prior to the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, this is clearly evident in the construction of white/black.

Specifically, in the texts and accounts we have of that time, there is a very active construction of blackness, as inferior, as mentally weak, as bestial. But there is never any real question of the construction of whiteness--whiteness is at most the background against which blackness becomes apparently wrong. The terms used to describe ethnicity and racial division bear this out. Slaves were colored, and their Caucasian oppressors were white. The implicit suggestion is that coloredness exists as an aberrance, whereas whiteness is the proper state of being. White folk were not white folk, they were folk.

So at last we have a reasonable answer to the question of the investment of Otherness. The primary culture in a strongly imperialistic society becomes a receptacle for the oppressed culture's notion of the Other as a kind of reflexive act of survival. Faced with the prospect that their cultural heritage--their preexisting socialization--will become unfamiliar, the secondary culture both closes ranks and begins to reaffirm its own self-identification by reversing the terms of the activity. The dominant people seek to define their slaves as Other; in response, the slaves ever more strongly identify with each other as Self, and begin to recast the dominators as Other.

Is apocalypticism a necessary condition for this maneuver? No. But is this maneuver in secondary cultures a byproduct of the emergence of apocalyptic traditions? Yes. The cultural competencies that allow for members of the secondary to identify each other also serve to strongly define those who do not possess those competencies as outsiders. And with apocalyptic literature's strong emphasis on the coming social change as the end result of revelation or catastrophe, it is easier still to allow oneself to refuse to identify with the members of the primary at all.

The next piece of this essay will begin to examine the specifics of American Christian evangelical apocalypticism and its ramifications for a democratic society.

09:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

One of the more enduring myths we tell ourselves as participants in American culture is the quintessential deception of the "American Dream": that no matter who you are, or how dispirited you have become, it is possible to achieve anything simply by working hard enough.

There are two problems with the myth of the American Dream. The first is the simplest: It isn't true.

The second becomes evident in light of the first: It produces an attitude that is openly hostile to the less-fortunate. And I use "fortunate" deliberately. The strength of your determination is no guarantee to success or failure. Most will when reading that sentence consider it a truism, and yet as a cultural whole we still pander to the idea that hard work or dedication is the only fuel necessary for achievement. We hold these conflicting ideas in our heads almost without effort. And why?

For one, it is a strong boost to our self-confidence that we can imagine a world where everything we have achieved has been achieved solely through our work. That's insane, but it makes us feel better. Not only must you possess the discipline to try hard, but you must also possess the sheer lucky opportunity to even get that far. All your determination is for naught if you can never get through the company door--or if you aren't even aware of that company's existence.

It also helps to distance us from our social consciences. By crafting the illusion of the American Dream, our fates are matters of personal responsibility. We have no obligation to help others, because after all they're in the gutter because they're lazy. They don't work hard enough. They didn't try. It's their fault they're homeless, or poor, or about to get fired.

Opportunity defines our potential for success, that much is true; but the American Dream is a fallacy for other reasons. It requires an even playing field--hard work becomes the sole delineator of deserved success only if all receive the same opportunity and all work product is comparable and considered equally. Based as it is on differentiation and taxonomy, I sincerely doubt our culture, or humanity in general, will ever be able to escape our aggravating tendencies to invest those different from us with our fears of the Other (in psychological terms).

As current social trends have established, we are incapable of divorcing ourselves from judgment on irrelevant personal concerns. Budding sociopsychological research and functional MRI mapping of the brain indicates we make up our minds about situations and people within the first few milliseconds of encountering them.

There is a deeper problem still: in the name of rationality and objectivity, we have attempted to enshrine authority in certain metrics. Intelligence quotient is one of these metrics--it is supposedly a tool to indicate the ability to function intellectually in society. But it is a flawed test. Upper-middle-class white males will perform better on the IQ test not because there is something more capable about them as a class, but because the language of the test reflects assumptions favorable to upper-middle-class white males. Consider that children in lower-class families perform poorer on IQ tests than siblings in upper-class families (NY Times article, registration might be required; or visit BugMeNot for a generic username and password; link via Kottke).

It's a comforting thought to recognize that yes, I have succeeded because I worked hard. But at the same time, I have to recognize--and be humbled by--the reality that I was damn lucky to get that far in the first place.

11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence, from the Onion.

A concise description of Wikipedia from the New Yorker. Link via Kottke.

11:05 AM | Permalink

There is a spot-on analysis of the political conservative movement over in Design Observer, in a guest column by Rick Perlstein. He suggests that at the heart of the conservative movement, its primary code and self-identification, is the narrative of persecution. The conservatives define themselves as being "hemmed in" on all sides, and this is the underlying cause for the unified front the conservatives present.

Perlstein has beaten me to the punch when it comes to a dissection of the primary narrative of conservatism, as I have been struggling to articulate what I have been observing on the national stage. The recent legislation against stem cells, the production of the "culture of death" terminology, the movement against equality for homosexuals all seem rooted in the solidarity of Christian conservatives and evangelicals. Perlstein does not neglect the intertwined trajectories of modern conservatives (perhaps they call themselves "neoconservatives" these days) and the fundamentalist Christian movement, but I do not believe he goes far enough in attributing the narrative of persecution to the nature of evangelicism.

The heart of the evangelical and conservative Christian cultures is apocalypticism. Despite disagreement and attempts at disambiguation, apocalypticism is primarily a critical technique employed by sociopolitical commentators that shrouds its analysis and subversion in the language of the eschaton (the "end times").

The idea of the apocalyptic as a critical school is a descendent from Biblical form criticism (that analyzes the Bible and other theological texts as exactly that--texts). In a culture of suppression and persecution, it does the militant or the rebel no favors to be easily identified. The only way to spread and communicate the messages of solidarity, perseverance, and imminent revolution, the emotional and psychological tools necessary to maintain a single cultural identity in the face of an overwhelming aggressor, is through secrecy, symbol, and misdirection.

To use an example relevant to American neoconservatism, consider the apocalyptic literature canonized in the Christian Bible. The Book of Revelation was most likely written by John of Patmos, as a screed against the decadence and imperialism of contemporary (at the earliest, during the reign of either Emperor Nero, at 65 A.D., or the Emperor Domitian, at A.D. 95) Rome. Part of the Christian gestalt was inherited from the Jewish concept of the Hebrew peoples as God's Chosen, and thus the Christians who were at this point merely an offshoot of the Jewish and Hebraic traditions would have considered their martyrdom and status as social pariahs as tests of faith.

As a digression, the metal fish on the rear of many evangelicals' cars is not a reference to the "fishers of men" quotation. Rather, the Greek word icthys ("fish" in English) is acronymic of the Greek words for Jesus the christ, son of God. The drawing of the fish served as coded self-identification, both declaring and protecting the association of the artist. This symbolic, coded self-identification is fundamentally similar to the process of encoding found in apocalyptic literature. The dream-logic and intense imagery can be assimilated by those outside the context of the authors, but that mainstream audience lacks the competencies to interpret the symbols as calls for social reform and group solidarity.

I continue referring to apocalypticism as calling for "solidarity," and for good reason. The secondary culture, the "oppressed" culture, risks being assimilated by the dominant mostly through what we might call force of will. As the dominant culture, imperial Rome could enforce their own sets of mores by enacting law or by realigning social pressure. The Christian minority lacked the political capital to maintain their own identity through force, and had to rely on guile. It becomes necessary to reinforce the belief that one's cultural identity both has meaning and has value, that the sole purpose of self-identifying as secondary is not to incur pain and wrath.

The Revelation to John describes a world where a united Christianity ultimately defeats its animalistic, bestial aggressors and ushers in peace and deliverance to its chosen people. In this manner, Christian apocalyptic literature is both revolutionary and anti-revolutionary. "Our dominance is coming," Revelation says, "but our deliverance will indeed be delivered to us." It displaces the violent desire for revolution onto the religious father-figure, the Messiah, and so absolves the body politic of the duty of actually engaging a revolution. As the Jewish Revolt in Rome occurred in 66 A.D., the effect of attempting to wage revolutionary war on imperial Rome would not have been lost on John.

If you are unfamiliar with the Jewish Revolt of 66 A.D., it is best described as a cataclysmic disaster. David and Goliath works well as allegory, but rarely does David emerge victorious in a historical context.

So apocalyptic literature performs at least one function--to encourage the believing masses to maintain belief, for salvation is around the corner. In the next part of this series, we'll discuss the second function of apocalyptic literature: the investiture of the other in dominant culture.

10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (2)

Popped into my head during work today, and in light of anything more substantive, I'll post this. Feel free to finish it out in the comments with your own terminal couplet.

"When your better days are dead and gone
You learn to sing sadder songs."

04:45 PM | Permalink

I’ve been experiencing sharp pain in my wrists and fingers that recently crawled to my elbows in both arms. Equipped now with hard splints for my wrists, I finally have a modicum of relief. But as much typing as I do at work—both at the 9 to 5 and for my own entrepreneurial ventures—it leaves me little room to write the kind of articles I enjoy writing for empty signifiers.

Expect a few new articles after I’ve recuperated.

02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns is a film that is reverent to its source almost to a fault. From its incorporation of Marlon Brando’s performance as Superman’s Kryptonian father to Lex Luthor’s entire evil scheme, we are not seeing a sequel in the Superman franchise so much as Superman 1.5, the film Singer wished the first movie had been.

While revisions and remakes are in vogue, and some are ultimately the best expressions of their characters and storylines (see Batman Begins, for even though I love Tim Burton’s original, Nolan’s film is the Batman that was always meant to be), there is a slight feeling of the unnecessary hanging around Superman’s neck. Though I haven’t seen the original films, even I, an ignorant outsider to its cinematic history, left the theater thinking, “That was good… but it didn’t really seem new.”

Of course most of the thematic expressions are ultimately the same as in earlier Superman films and source material, but what we have with this movie that we did not get with earlier work is a polish to a mirror shine. Christopher Reeve’s wire-work cannot possibly compare to the lifelike CGI illusion we see flying, diving, and crashing to earth from space. No technology from the 1970s could have given us the puzzlingly creepy impression of a bullet striking Superman’s impenetrable eye.

What I’m not qualified to comment upon is whether Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane is in any sense better or reminiscent of Margot Kidder’s performance in the original Superman, but with that qualifier, I’ll bet that Kidder had to have been better. Bosworth is lifeless and unconvincing. Though her child (yes, we’re supposed to believe Bosworth has an attachment to perpetually sticky child her fiancé drags along) doesn’t fall into the too-precious-by-half movie child cliché, he does come pretty close.

The Superman played by Brandon Routh is more golem than Moses; instead of a charismatic leader we have an indestructible servant, silent and solemn, sacrificing for a world that readily embraces his absence (Lane has even received a Pulitzer for the article “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman”). Though we are battered by the notion that such seflessness is an act of leadership, this Superman rarely speaks, rarely gives any context to his action other than to stand as a beacon of simple opposition. He is an immovable object, a force of nature, not a figurehead or a messiah.

I’m somewhat surprised by the negative tone I have struck here in this review—I did enjoy the film, and it’s nice to see Superman get a modernized treatment. But with the quality of Singer’s prior work, it’s upsetting to see him settle for a mere updating, rather than a true revitalization.

04:55 PM | Permalink

Naruto is, like many anime, based on a popular Japanese manga. It currently airs on Cartoon Network, marketed to children, rather than its late-night big brother Adult Swim.

Unlike any of its American counterparts—the utterly noxious cultural misconception Xiaolin Showdown chief among its thematic rivals—the subtext beneath Naruto’s glossily animated surface and big, expressive eyes is a story about the corrosive effects of child abuse.

This is a show about the abused, about how the traumas visited upon us in childhood build our worlds in bruises and blood.

Our protagonist is Naruto, an orphan, a blonde boy with more energy than self-control. He is a social outcast, growing up alone and despised, and he desires more than anything the respect of his fellow villagers. His goal is to become hokage, the most exalted ninja of the clan, the leader of a culture of warriors.

There is Sasuke, the last surviving member of the Uchiha clan, a self-proclaimed "avenger." The talent in his bloodline is the sharingan, an ability that lets him learn and mimic any other ninja’s learned abilities merely by witnessing it once. He is often proclaimed the strongest, the fastest, the best of the new class of ninja by his teachers, and he is something of a romantic idol for the girls in the school.

This is the primary dichotomy of the series: the outcast and the favorite, the reject and the popular kid. The fire inside Sasuke is the desire to mete out vengeance on those who have wronged him, those who have deprived him of his parents. This is his goal, and the entirety of his experience at school is secondary to becoming strong enough to kill his enemies.

The mystery of Naruto’s orphaning explains the odd facial marks he wears: three equal length lines radiating out in 45-degree increments on his cheeks, what I first mistook to be tattoos of cat whiskers or scars. They are the only external evidence of Naruto’s birth: The Village Hidden in the Leaves was terrorized by the Nine-Tailed Fox, a demon made of fire that destroyed and consumed. The ninja lords that rule the village have sealed the demon inside Naruto, a foundling, and it seems as if this is the source of his boundless energy and the irrepressible mischief he is compelled to get himself into.

The idea of a school of warrior children, of lethal boys and girls training against each other in a struggle to out-kill and outlast, performs a striking allegorical function as we learn the background of each student. Almost without fail, these children have been attacked, tormented, beaten, traumatized, victimized, or made to sacrifice without compensation or consent. Naruto holds the demon inside of him, is watched by the ninja elders for any sign that the demon will break free—and at the first hint of recklessness they will kill him. Sasuke lives to assimilate the power and the means of destruction, driven to relive the circumstances of his raising.

Even the side characters we might easily forget bear the scars of early abuse. There is Shino, son of a clan of "beastmasters," who in a spectacularly gruesome fight, defeats his opponent with a flood of parasitic beetles that live inside him. The birthright of the clans is a blood pact with these beetles: the child is infected with a colony, and in return for letting these insects feast off his or her spiritual energy, he can command them in battle. But the host has no say in whether or not the infection takes place; and it is a crapshoot whether the host may even survive the initial infection.

Shino’s opponent, Zaku, lived on the streets as a beggar and a thief. In a flashback we see him ruthlessly beaten for stealing a loaf of bread, his arms battered and broken, and in a particularly cruel turn of the narrative, an enraged Sasuke twists Zaku’s arms behind his back and snaps them in half with a mad cackle. The acquisition of power is inadequate to prevent Zaku from being abused again, and the lesson is clear: only the strongest can prevent themselves from becoming victims.

All these children have traumatic pasts, and they wind up enrolled in a school that trains them to harness violence and use it in controlled bursts. They are institutionalized in such a way that their self-worth is tied to recreating the circumstances of their abuse, only—and this is key—with themselves as the abusers.

It is because of this utterly perverse incarnation of the bildungsroman that I suggest the point of Naruto is not escapism or entertainment: it is the literalization of the cycle of abuse. These children are abused, and because the abuse shapes their formative years, because the abuse is in a very real sense their only socialization, they grow up knowing only violence and fighting. Childhood abuse has configured their mental landscapes so that their only outlook is on the world as a war, as a continuing struggle between potential abusers and potential victims.

A fighting school for beaten children is possibly the most apt and the most agonizing description of the potential fate of abused children that I can think of.

How odd we market this toward children ourselves...

11:31 AM | Permalink

Monday, July 3rd, found me at La Zona Rosa, a club in downtown Austin, where in the hundred-degree heat I waited to listen to the clever, dark work of Brand New. A band from the Jersey shore, their most recent album was Deja Entendu, which found their sharp lyrics married to Smiths-inflected guitar work and harder, harsher riffs, without relying on the new punk formula of their first record, Your Favorite Weapon.

The first track off Deja was the first song they played--more an atmospheric dabbling than a true song. "Tautou" drifts in on gentle guitar and a crash of cymbal, with Jesse Lacey's keen voice whispering "I'm sinking like a stone in the sea / I'm burning like a bridge for your body," and this couplet is repeated, first at a whisper, then a keening wail, as the lights pulsed. The crowd, mostly people younger than I, threatened to overwhelm the low vocals with their insistent yelling. As "Tautou" faded out into distortion, the band members waved, and a new guitar line broke out.

I've listened to Deja more than a few times, and know each of its songs--instrumentation and lyrics--like well-worn paths in the back yard, comfortable to tread, welcoming your presence. This guitar line was reminiscent of several but specifically none, and as such I can only presume it's off their upcoming record, which (if the t-shirts are accurate) called Fight Off Your Demons. It was darker, its verses sung tensely, building, only to erupt into screams and shouts.

La Zona Rosa is a small venue, walls around asphalt, and as such the acoustics left something to be desired, so I cannot say for certain if what I heard was really the literal content of the songs. But that chorus, that exploding guitar work, that crashing drums, the fluttering liquid bass, they were met with a throat-ripping wordless scream. A full-blooded furious scream that chilled the bone. Standing in a crowd of a thousand people watching the kaleidoscopic frenzy and the shattering lights onstage I felt the hairs on my arms stand on edge.

While Deja found more of its tracks played than their prior record, Brand New played their ode to teenage romance, "Soco Amaretto Lime," to the following cheers of the adolescent crowd. Having left high school and college behind me, the pathos and blatant youthful escapism were lost on me. The acoustic guitar graced Lacey's voice as the rest of the band left the stage.

But as with any concert, this was the false start before the encore, where the more violent, more insistent songs of their catalog came out to feed off the manic energy near midnight. It was here that the cognitive disconnect between the content of the songs and their audience was most readily apparent. "Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis," despite its non-sequitur title, is a story of a sexual predator, enticing and devouring the women in his path. The strumming guitar and the hushed vocals conjure the impression of quiet shadows and cold bedrooms, furtive encounters in the dark, strangers in the night trying to find what the empty winter sun cannot show them.

You laugh at every word, trying hard to be cute / I almost feel sorry for what I'm gonna do / And your hair smells of smoke / Who will cast the first stone? / You can sin or spend the night all alone.

The story of "Maradona" is that of an aggressive, deceitful male, of the posturing of these one-night stands, the futility of a meaningful encounter. Far from the male victimized by the loss of his virginity in "Sic Transit Gloria (Glory Fades)," the narrator of this song has found the most satisfying way of fulfilling his needs: Taking it from these girls, cultivating the impression of sensitivity, leaving behind him an abattoir bedroom of sweaty bodies and crying eyes.

You're using all your looks that you've thrown from the start / If you let me have my way, I swear I'll tear you apart / Cause it's all you can be / You're a drunk and you're scared / It's ladies night, all the girls drink for free

The girls in the audience, none older than 20, they cheered and they shouted, they screamed out the lines with Lacey, celebrating the story of their own exploitation. I listened, and waited for the coda's crashing noise, astounded by the song's warm reception.

I will lie awake, lie for fun / And fake the way I hold you / You'll fall for every empty word I say

The bitterness and the cynical aggression permeated their next song, "Seventy Times 7," a punkier, musically less ingenious concoction than most of their other work. But where the riffs fail to invent, the lyrics and their poison more than make up. "So have another drink and drive yourself home / I hope there's ice on all the roads / You can think of me when you forget your seatbelt / And again when your head goes through the windshield."

Appropriately their last song was "Play Crack the Sky," an extended metaphor of love as a ship sunk in the cold Atlantic, the narrator calling out "I am the one who haunts your dreams / Of mountains sunk below the sea / I spoke the words but never / Gave a thought to what they all could mean." Describing the end, eyes closed, Lacey lets the house lights die around him and with a wave and a thank-you left the stage.

Their live presence is strong, but there are still the hints of production work cleaning up their rougher edges on their albums. While a perfectly manicured appearance would no doubt seem stale and robotic, the intricate harmonies and the precise instrumentation is one of their strongest suits in their recorded work (excepting the freshman Weapon, which relies mostly on lyrical jabs to counteract its reliance on genre convention). But the vitality of the live scene is an unparalelled outlet, and theirs is a show not to be missed.

08:55 PM | Permalink

I have been working pretty diligently this week on creating my own template for Movable Type--this default (very blue) template is okay, but the typography and the colors are not what I would like. In the interest of carving out a space that's more my own, as well as helping ease readability, I've spent my time nose down in CSS and XHTML files. I'm also finding that Movable Type has a ridiculous amount of crap piled into those transitional XHTML files... Originally I'm sure the aim was to provide as much flexibility as possible by adding classes and ID tags to nearly every element, but the redundancy is astonishing.

So keep your eyes out for a new Empty Signifiers coming soon!

02:12 PM | Permalink