#The bleeding edge criticism code#

Scrapping linguistic convention is a political statement by way of refusal to be defined. X represents the unknown, and it represents infinite quantities and therefore occupies a point on the bleeding edge. Chic a describes a girl and chic o describes a boy un a chic a guap a describes a pretty girl, and un chic o guap odescribes a handsome boy. The female gender is marked by -a and the male gender by -o. Matos studies what she has named Graphic Alternatives to Grammatical Gender, or GAGG, which you may recognize as the -x in Latinx or in Chicanx, a mark that represents the rejection of binary grammatical gender in the Spanish language, where nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns all take gender, and when used together, must agree. “Within destruction there is also the possibility for building,” writes sociolinguist Mariel M. Language is the building blocks of thought, and the words we have access to define the limits of our imagination, so to imagine what the future might look like, we often have to make new words to describe it, and break rules in the process. “Straight edge kids were energized not just by disavowing the status quo, but by building something positive, a supportive DIY ecosystem.” “Straight edge was about being awake to the world-both its injustices and the many choices we get to make, if we’re lucky, to make it what we want it to be,” Aron writes. Though their paradox is acceptance through abstinence, the undercurrent of Straight Edge is a creative force.

“The X became a sign of defiance in the face of the self-destructive punk attitude and a more general culture of intoxication,” writes sociologist Ross Haenfler. Their rebellion is abstinence, a refusal to succumb.

Straight Edge kids “x up” by marking the backs of their hands with xs drawn in black magic marker, a practice that comes from the way clubs and music venues mark the hands of under-twenty-ones so they’re not served alcohol, and some Straight Edge subscribers x up long after they’re of-age to signal membership. “Some even viewed substance use as a political issue, seeing inebriation as a sad form of unwitting complicity in a capitalist system that sought to control them,” writes Nina Renata Aron, a self-identified 1990s riot grrrl. The group’s abstinence from alcohol, drugs, and nicotine made it a counterculture within a subculture-opposition to the substance abuse and recklessness common to “mainstream” hardcore punk. The hardcore punk subculture Straight Edge that was born in Washington, DC, in the 1980s and came into its own in the following ten years is now a global one with deep roots in Peru, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Indonesia, South Africa, and in Latinx and communities in the States. Wrapped into the modern story of x is this: The same symbol capable of erasure, prohibition, and restriction is equally as capable of identification, rebellion, and expansion. It is both presence and absence, the unknown given a name. It is a letter, a morpheme, a word, a symbol, a name, a mark, an action, an omission, and a warning. The presence of x always prompts questions of identity and has us peeking around the back side, asking, w hat does x stand for? “For more than 2,500 years,” writes Steven Strogatz in The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity, “mathematicians have been obsessed with solving for x.”

#The bleeding edge criticism code#

gesture or posture may well be traced back to the very core of some of our species’ most conspicuous abilities: resilient survival, analogic modeling systems and the evolution of language among them.Īll communication is code that must be interpreted, and few symbols are as varied, as antithetical in their meanings as the base symbol of x. An action that could be a warning or a celebration, a sign of power or vulnerability. The “radically embodied pattern” of “arms raised high, legs spread,” is a “paleo-gesture,” one that we’ve been making for millennia, “a figure of extremes and reversals.” You know it as the spread eagle. Jamin Pelkey argues in The Semiotics of X: Chiasmus, Cognition, and Extreme Body Memory that the form of x predates written language.

It is x that has stuck in our lexicon.īut the fame of x long predates Descartes and his new math. In his development of analytic geometry, Descartes chose the first three letters of the Roman alphabet- a, b, and c-to represent known values and the last three letters- x, y, and z-to represent unknown or variable values. It is fitting then, that Descartes contributed significantly to our modern understanding of the known and the unknown. Ultimately, Descartes’s prime obsession was this: What can be known? To existence there are two sides, he believed: the finite and the infinite. René Descartes was deeply concerned with the condition of existence.