Finding aid/50 terms

Glossary

Working definitions for the vocabulary of the archive, written to be understood rather than admired.

Filter terms 50 terms shown

AbjectionTheory: The reaction of horror and disgust provoked by things that blur the boundary of the self, such as the corpse, the wound and bodily waste. The theory holds that the self is defined by what it expels, and that the expelled material keeps its power to fascinate as well as to repel.
AccelerationismTheory: The position that the processes transforming society, especially technological and economic ones, should be intensified rather than resisted, on the wager that speed will break what reform cannot. The term covers incompatible politics and is used more often as an accusation than a self-description.
AnomieTheory: A condition in which shared norms have weakened to the point that people no longer know what is expected of them or what they may reasonably hope for. It names a social state, not a personal mood, though it is usually felt as one.
AntinomianismEsoterica: The belief that those who have attained a certain spiritual state are released from ordinary moral law. In esoteric contexts it also describes the deliberate breaking of taboo as a method of liberation, a defining feature of what is called the left-hand path.
ApocalypseTheory: From a Greek word meaning unveiling or revelation. Originally a literary genre in which hidden truths about history and its end are disclosed to a seer; only later a synonym for catastrophe. The older sense survives whenever a disaster is said to reveal what a society really is.
ApopheniaTheory: The perception of meaningful patterns or connections in random or unrelated data. It is a normal feature of human cognition rather than a disorder, and it lies behind experiences as different as faces seen in clouds, voices heard in static and the more elaborate conspiracy theories.
ArchonEsoterica: In Gnostic myth, one of the rulers who govern the material cosmos on behalf of its flawed creator and obstruct the soul's ascent. The archons are often associated with the seven classical planets.
Bone musicUnderground print: Bootleg gramophone records cut onto discarded X-ray film, made and sold in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and early 1960s to circulate music that could not be bought legally. Each copy carried the image of a stranger's skeleton and survived only a few plays.
Book curseUnderground print: A formula written into a manuscript threatening anyone who steals or damages it with misfortune, disease, excommunication or damnation. Common in medieval libraries, where a book was costly and had no other protection.
CorrespondenceEsoterica: The doctrine that the levels of reality mirror one another, so that planets, metals, plants, organs and hours are linked by hidden sympathy. Summarized in the Hermetic phrase as above, so below, it is the working assumption behind astrology, alchemy and most ceremonial magic.
DemiurgeEsoterica: Literally craftsman. In Platonic philosophy, the benevolent maker who shapes the cosmos after eternal models. In Gnostic systems the figure is recast as an ignorant or hostile lesser god who fashions the material world and mistakes himself for the highest power.
DetournementTheory: The reuse of existing images, slogans or texts in a new arrangement that turns their meaning against their source. A staple technique of the radical avant-gardes of the mid twentieth century and, later, of zine and collage culture.
EgregoreEsoterica: In modern occult usage, a collective thought-form: an entity held to be generated and sustained by the shared attention of a group. Skeptical readers use the word as a metaphor for the way institutions seem to acquire wills of their own.
Electronic voice phenomenaEsoterica: Sounds resembling speech found on recordings of silence, static or radio noise, and interpreted by some listeners as messages from the dead. Interest dates from the late 1950s. The usual explanation is the ear's readiness to hear words in noise.
EschatologyTheory: The part of a religious or philosophical system concerned with last things: death, judgment and the end of the world. Secular ideologies have eschatologies too, wherever history is said to be heading toward a final state.
ExpenditureTheory: In the theory of the general economy, the spending of surplus energy or wealth without return: in luxury, festival and sacrifice or, failing those, catastrophe. The theory holds that every society produces more than it can usefully absorb and is shaped by how it disposes of the excess.
GnosisEsoterica: Knowledge in the sense of direct acquaintance rather than information. In Gnostic and Hermetic writings it means a saving insight into the divine origin of the self, which cannot be taught but only awakened.
Grand narrativeTheory: A comprehensive story that claims to explain history and legitimate knowledge, such as inevitable progress or universal emancipation. Postmodern thought is often defined as incredulity toward narratives of this kind.
GrimoireEsoterica: A book of magic, typically containing instructions for consecrating tools, constructing circles and calling upon spirits. Most grimoires claim an ancient author they did not have, a practice known as pseudepigraphy.
GrotesqueCuriosities: An artistic mode that fuses the comic and the monstrous, often through distorted or hybrid bodies. The word derives from decorations found in buried Roman rooms, the grottoes, in which human, animal and plant forms merged.
HauntologyTheory: A term for the persistence of elements from the past, and especially of futures that failed to arrive, within the present. Used in cultural criticism to describe art preoccupied with obsolete media and abandoned promises.
HermeticismEsoterica: A religious and philosophical tradition based on writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, composed in Greek in the first centuries of the common era. It teaches the divinity of mind, the unity of the cosmos and the possibility of spiritual rebirth.
HyperrealityTheory: A state in which representations no longer refer to a reality behind them but only to other representations, so that the distinction between the real and its simulation loses its force.
InitiationEsoterica: A ritual passage that confers a new status and, it is claimed, a transformed understanding. Esoteric orders typically arrange their teachings in grades, each entered by initiation.
Kali YugaEsoterica: In Hindu cosmology, the fourth and last of the four ages of the world, an era of strife and moral decline in which righteousness has dwindled to a quarter of its original strength. It is widely held to be the present age, and is followed by a return to the first.
Left-hand pathEsoterica: A label for traditions that pursue spiritual aims through transgression, the embrace of what is conventionally forbidden, and the strengthening rather than dissolution of the individual self. The term is borrowed from Indian tantra and was repurposed by Western occultists.
LiminalityTheory: The condition of being on a threshold, between one status and the next. First used of the middle phase of rites of passage, it now describes any place or period that is neither one thing nor another: waiting rooms, closed factories, the week between a prophecy and its failure.
Mail artUnderground print: An international practice, flourishing from the 1960s, in which artists exchange small works through the post. It values the network over the object and has no juries, fees or returns.
Memento moriCuriosities: Latin for remember that you must die. An object or image kept as a reminder of mortality, typically a skull, an hourglass or a guttering candle. It is an ancestor of much grotesque art and of the cabinet of curiosities.
MetamodernismTheory: A proposed name for the cultural sensibility after postmodernism, marked by oscillation between irony and sincerity, doubt and commitment. It describes a mood that knows the arguments against hope and hopes regardless.
Midnight movieCuriosities: A film screened repeatedly at midnight to a returning audience, a practice that began in American cities around 1970. The format turned certain films into occasions, with regular attendance, costume and spoken responses, and gave the phrase cult film its literal sense.
MillenarianismEsoterica: The expectation of an imminent, total transformation of the world, usually collective, usually this-worldly, and usually accomplished by supernatural agency. The word comes from the thousand-year reign of peace expected in some Christian traditions.
NigredoEsoterica: The blackening: the first stage of the alchemical work, in which matter is dissolved and putrefied before it can be purified. Psychological readers take it as an image of necessary breakdown.
NihilismTheory: The position that nothing has value or meaning. The word has covered the radical rejection of inherited authority, the diagnosis that the highest values have lost their foundation, the view of the universe as indifferent and a longing for dissolution. These are distinct claims and are frequently confused.
OuroborosEsoterica: The serpent that swallows its own tail, an emblem found in Egyptian, Greek and alchemical sources. It stands for cyclical time, self-sufficiency and the unity of beginning and end.
PessimismTheory: In philosophy, not a temperament but a thesis: that suffering outweighs satisfaction in existence, or that life has no purpose that would redeem its pains. Its defenders tend to be drier and funnier than their reputation.
PotlatchTheory: A ceremonial feast of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast at which hosts gave away, and sometimes destroyed, wealth to mark names, deaths and rank. Banned in Canada from 1885 to 1951, it became a central example in theories of the gift and of expenditure, often at some distance from what participants understood by it.
PseudepigraphyEsoterica: The attribution of a text to an author who did not write it, usually a figure of great antiquity or authority. Common throughout esoteric literature, where a book by a legendary king or sage was thought more trustworthy than one by its actual compiler.
SamizdatUnderground print: Self-published writing copied and passed from hand to hand in order to evade censorship. By extension, any text whose circulation depends on readers willing to retype or photocopy it.
SigilEsoterica: A sign held to embody a spirit, a planetary force or, in modern practice, a personal intention. Contemporary sigil methods reduce a written wish to an abstract glyph that is then deliberately forgotten.
SimulacrumTheory: A copy that has no original, or that has displaced its original so thoroughly that the question of fidelity no longer applies. Plural simulacra.
SovereigntyTheory: In political theory, supreme authority over a territory. In the theory of expenditure it means something quite different: a moment lived for its own sake and subordinated to no future purpose, as in laughter, ecstasy or play.
SpiritualismEsoterica: A religious movement founded on the belief that the dead survive and can communicate with the living, usually through a medium. It began in New York State in 1848, spread rapidly through the English-speaking world and survives as an organized religion.
SublimeTheory: An aesthetic experience of awe mixed with terror before something vast or powerful. Later theorists speak of a technological or postmodern sublime, provoked by networks and systems too large for any one mind to picture.
TheosophyEsoterica: A movement founded in New York in 1875 that taught the existence of an ancient wisdom underlying all religions, preserved by hidden adepts. It combined Western esotericism with Hindu and Buddhist ideas and had a large influence on modern art and on what was later called the New Age.
TheurgyEsoterica: Ritual practice aimed at union with the divine rather than at practical results. Late antique philosophers distinguished it sharply from sorcery, though the two used many of the same tools.
TransgressionTheory: The crossing of a limit set by law, custom or taste. In transgressive philosophy the act matters less for what it breaks than for what it reveals: that the limit was there, and that it was made.
UncannyTheory: The unsettling feeling produced when something familiar becomes strange, or something strange seems familiar: the doll that may be alive, the double, the home that is not quite home. A classic essay of 1919 traced it to the return of something once known and since repressed.
WunderkammerCuriosities: German for chamber of wonders. A room or cabinet in which early modern collectors assembled natural and artificial rarities as a model of the whole world. Many public museums began as one.
ZineUnderground print: A self-published, small-circulation booklet, usually photocopied and distributed by hand or post. The form is defined less by its content than by its economy: no advertisers, no editors to please and no expectation of profit.