We Rise By San Holo

[Browning Winters]

Thesehigh rise corset shorts are made with a stretch silver holo material and are slightly looser than our jean material corset shorts. This allows for thiccer girls like Adyka or DDdy to wear them too =)

Still, making a hologram sell Las Vegas venues and entertaining people singing 16 songs in total is quite a feat of sci-fi-reminiscent entertainment. The whole thing is a partnership between The Estate of Whitney E. Houston and BASE Entertainment with GFour Productions.

Even with our cutting edge technology at your fingertips, the path to the perfect hologram is still sprinkled with challenges, so here are some golden nuggets of wisdom to perfect your holographic dreams!

Often, issues come from just subtle shifts in the setup during exposure that can hurt your result. It is even said that a hologram of a living plant would be too much movement because the plant would grow too much during exposure! Those are tiny movements that can affect your hologram.

A mounted butterfly is another great object, especially in color. Though, because its wings can move a bit in air, I imagine it is important to let the air settle first after you disturb the air with your movement and even your body heat.

Hi, my first hologram dates 1980 and it was done with Agfa plates and very toxic bleaches. The self-developing plates by Lithiholo revived my dream of making holograms. I bought plates and the kit for transmission and reflection and at the end I went back to my initial setup for reflections, based on a container with sand and a support to keep the plate suspended over the objects.

I forgot to mention that because I do reflection holograms, my last step is to use black acrylic spray paint to paint black the back of the plate. In this way they become much easier to see in any condition.

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There is much tectonic shifting taking place in the humanities today. Goods that once sold well seem to have a shorter shelf life; they are either being discarded altogether or they are being salvaged for scraps in the remainder bin. The high-priests of yesteryear's so-called "pomo" theory--aporia, slippage, diff=rence, textual intervention, and resistance--have flipped their cards and shown a losing hand. The conference on theory held at the University of Chicago on April 11, 2003, says it all. New York Times reporter Emily Eakin began her piece: "These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the twentieth century--psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism--have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating."[1] That the question of theory's role in and outside humanities departments today did not get much air-time suggests that theorizing the slippage of signifier and signified has done little to make good on its promise: to resist, intervene, and transform a world increasingly marked by barbaric acts. Theorizing has done little to curtail the rapid rise of unemployment and homelessness, incarcerations without due process, the collapse of public schooling systems, and genocidal warfare worldwide. Perhaps it is time to take pause and really reflect on the role of theory, the teaching of literary interpretation, and the role of literature in the world more generally.

Literary scholars and critics today are reflecting more and more on the role of theory in and out of the classroom. Such scholars are skeptical of pomo's confusion of those facts that make up everyday reality (res) and the words (verba) and structures that make up literature. They question the "pomo" doxa: that verba magically suffices to radically change human res. Of course, there have been other, earlier scholars that have leveled critiques at "pomo" doxa such as Robert Alter, John Searle (linguist), John Ellis, and Frederick Crews, to name a few. Already a decade ago, for example, Crews expressed skepticism at the ability of the "discourse radicals" (his term) to resist, intervene, and transform real centers of power. Moreover, Crews identified pomo's allergic reaction to positivism as well as its aversion to clear thinking and writing, declaring it of little service to those oppressed groups with which it claimed an affiliation.[2] And there have been other voices of dissent more squarely situated within the scholarly Left. I think here of the sharp bites and barks Terry Eagleton began making in his essays that began appearing regularly in the late 1990s. (Now collected and published by Verso as Figures of Dissent.) In these essays he holds little back, identifying pomo theory as an "offshoot of science fiction" (Figures of Dissent, p. 1) and its so-called "dialectical thinking" as an anything-goes-eclecticism that, in the name of social transformation, only ever served up a "restrained, reformist sort of politics."[3] Eagleton and others identified the dangers of the apriorism that permeates pomo theory especially when tied to a political agenda. When such scholars expressed criticism, however, they were shrugged off as either a too old-school Left, reactionary, and/or apolitical. Today, those who question the pomo doxa seem to be received with less of a knee-jerk. I think here of Patrick Colm Hogan, Robert Storey, Nancy Easterlin, Porter Abbott, Paul Hernadi, and Lisa Zunshine, to name a few, who employ the tools learned from narratology and the knowledge gained from cognitive science and evolutionary biology, for example, to understand better how literature works for the reader, for the writer, and within the world at large. Others have approached pomo theory with the idea of sifting the fine from the coarse in an attempt to salvage what might be of use. (I think readily of Satya Mohanty's "postpositivist realism" and Gayatri Spivak's "strategic essentialism.") John McGowan is one such scholar who seeks to question, critique, then salvage anew pomo theory. In his book Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics, he continues work he first began over a decade ago in Postmodernism and Its Critics (1991). Long skeptical of pomo's formulations--in the latter book he identifies Derrida's diff=rence as a "tragic impasse"--McGowan explores problems pomo theory raised but did not answer. Several such questions include: what is the role of intellectual work in and outside the classroom? Can work in the classroom become a model of social democracy? What is the function of literary interpretation? Can it transform minds and therefore direct political action?

To answer these necessary and important questions, McGowan attempts to yoke together a humanist belief in universals--to know those facts that make our world unjust and that are necessary for us to fight for true democracy--with a belief that reality is indeterminate and socially constructed. As such, he considers the intellectual a "cultural worker" who has the power to transform the minds of students through literary analysis and, therefore, ultimately to transform the psyche of the body politic. Yet the cultural worker must also acknowledge history's reminder of a material reality of the "people on the bottom" who know that "they are being screwed" and that "the people on top know they are screwing them" (p. 90). According to McGowan, the cultural worker, then, must realize that "resistance to change isn't psychological, a matter of false consciousness or subject formation; it is simply the power of the powerful to maintain arrangements that suit them" (p. 90). It is clear that McGowan believes that to level the socioeconomic playing field by making education and freedom of expression an equal right for all (his primary goals) requires the locating of real sites of power to make visible real targets for social transformation. (At one point even, he is overtly critical of a Foucault's anarchistic model of power.) He is weary of pomo theorists who consider the subject and world to be discursive constructs and so claim that decoding texts and symbols will radically alter our world; rather than this leading to active shaping of society, he sees this as leading to a place of absolute political apathy. However, in spite of his pomo skepticism, McGowan believes that if humans work in and through language, then decoding how we work and think within language will lead to new ways of interpreting and understanding the world and will augment the type of social transformation that takes place by real people. Yes, he acknowledges that real people en masse are what bring about social change, mentioning, for example, the civil rights movement. However, because social injustices continue to exist, McGowan believes that a kind of intellectual cultural work is necessary for the realization of "full racial equality and harmony" (p. 24). As such, his criticism of the irrational aspects of pomo theory--the indeterminacy of the sign coupled with a belief in a folkish model of talk-therapy--and his grounding of his own political pursuits in the tangible facts that make up reality, slide into a theorizing of social change only realized in the decoding of cultural processes of representation. Namely, he still considers verba as being able to alter res.

In his attempt to straddle what is fundamentally a humanist and a pomo theory position, he locates his own intellectual work within a model of "pragmatic pluralism." (This is something akin to the "postliberal democracy" that he proposed in Postmodernism and its Critics.) Accordingly, as a pragmatic pluralist, what the intellectual/professor does in the classroom has consequences in the world beyond its walls precisely because such classroom discussions articulate, he writes, "concepts, commitments, and visions that legitimate and/or contest the way we live now" (p. 3). Intentionally interdisciplinary and eclectic, his pragmatic pluralism aims to show how "relationships are contingent and hence to be understood as the product of human sense-making" (p. 140) and to understand that all human activities make sense through "performative articulations" (p. 141). To enact this bi-modal process is to subvert interpretive paradigms dictated by "elite groups," university officials, and gate-keeping theorists. As such, he aims to extend "democratic practices into social sites (the classroom, the workplace) where they are often deemed inappropriate" (p. 6). The classroom becomes a space of "dearticulation" par excellence that enables "negotiations, compromises, arguments, and procedural steps [that will lead to] collective decisions" (p. 267). McGowan's classroom, then, serves as the egalitarian and collective space where "differences and interdependencies" (p. 6) are valued and that will help pave the way for the making of a democratic nation-state.

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