top of page

Updated: Mar 12, 2024


Apparently, the Netflix series 'Wednesday' has had over 1billion hits. That's INSANE. I mean, I loved it, but the sheer numbers of views, tik-toks, tweets, and instas referencing it is astronomical. So what is it about 'Wednesday'? The Addams family has been recreated a number of times over since its first appearance as a cartoon published in the New Yorker in 1938 - a time when mass scale death was about to seize the imagination of half the world when WWII broke out in 1939.


Now Tim Burton, a director who's quirky morbidity has been exciting film audiences for decades, has had his greatest hit ever in his new adaptation which focusses on the character Wednesday, the Addams Family's teenage daughter. So what is it about Wednesday? The series addresses all sorts of complex issues about high school education in America, the teaching of CRT, and notions of haunting and hauntology in post-pandemic and post-humanist education strategies. But here, I just want to focus on one tiny area of the massive sweep of social critique you can find in Wednesday: the way the character 'Thing' (pictured above) gets us to understand entanglement in ways that reframe Western notions of death and dying. (After all it's a Tim Burton, so let's get morbid!)


According to Thomas Nail, 1st century BCE philosopher, Lucretius, claimed that the source of all unethical action is the fear of death. Nail goes on to state that "fear of death (necrophobia) is also a fear of matter (hylephobia) and a fear of motion (kinophobia). In brief, it's our desire to hold things still, to stop matter from moving on, unfolding towards entropy, or basically breaking down / breaking into something new, that makes us get involved in all sorts of unethical actions.


Why? Because we try to freeze things in place, to seek immortality (which is a 'stop' in motion - ie the body can't move on to death), to capture, to incarcerate, to stop interruptions, differencings, and all other matters of entropic change. We create an immoveable 'normal' and erase anything that threatens to change that norm as if it might ultimately kill us or cause us harm. We cut ourselves off from the entanglement of all things that exist in endless motion and assert a separate and undying 'self' that must endure, untouched, untainted, pure. We resist the endless flow, create sets of norms that police all sorts of forms of motion and whose rigidity ends up becoming stifling and even violent - thus even creating the very death we started out fearing in the first place. The series Wednesday sets this up as the spine of its storyline - 'normies' and 'outcasts' are endlessly fighting, where 'outcasts' are the excluded kids and 'normies' are the kids in town who go to 'normal' schools.


Wednesday has been sent to Nevermore, a school for freaks and outcasts and throughout the series demonstrates a serious committement to ethics. But I want to focus here on her side-kick, 'Thing'. What is so funny and so clever about the character 'Thing' in the Addams family, but specifically so in Burton's recreation is that 'it' is a lively member of the family with a clear, rough-and-tumble attitude, and yet is just a hand. Whenever anyone asks about Thing - what happened? what is it? , Addams family characters describe it as a strange story that no one really knows or that 'we don't talk about'. Was Thing ever fully human? It doesn't really matter because Thing has more of a strong personality than most of the other characters depicted in the series!


The fact that Thing is a lively part of a full (missing) body is key here. Thing has thing-power, which according to political scientist and philosopher Jane Bennett is "the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle". A hand by itself should be inanimate. Severed from the body, it should go from being animate to inanimate. But here it doesn't. Thing is constantly drawing us to the fact that as a separate entity he should be dead. But paradoxically he isn't. So what is animacy really? Are all things in different states of animacy? Where do we draw the line between things?


Whenever I loosely introduce the idea of entanglement to my students, I hold up my two fists and ask, can you see the difference? My students always say 'yeah,' or my favourite 'yeah, duh, Annouchka!' I then ask them if the hands belong to different bodies. Usually they respond 'no, they belong to the same body, yours'. 'But you can see the difference?' 'Yes'. Then I pump one hand, leaving the other at rest and draw their attention to the fact that the actions of this hand over here are influencing the state of the other hand (through the blood circulation). It's much the same with the idea of entanglement and what it allows us to do with our thinking if we take it seriously (although of course there's a lot more going on in the science than this little metaphor describes!) If the entire universe is a flow of matter, rather than a container inside which separate objects collide, then all matter effects all matter. Like the fists that belong to one body, they seem different, and they ARE different, but they're also intrinsically part of the same body, differencing in all sorts of ways, but also intimately entangled.


Thing seems totally separate and it has adapted to 'missing' a body by turning fingers into legs by which it can move, but also into a vast communication system via which it signs.



Thing has turned its wrist into a 'head' although we have no idea how it 'sees'. Thing anthropomorphises itself to be readable to others and participate in society. But whenever we see it, we are likely to be reminded that it is part of a whole, a body that is missing. And this is what I think is so amazing - when we come to Thing's attempted murder in the series 'Wednesday' we are thrown into all sorts of confusion. How can anyone murder a hand that has been severed from its body? When Wednesday stumbles across Thing, stabbed in her room, the scene is shot like a tragic murder scene and subsequent resuscitation scene when she brings Thing to Uncle Fester who revives it via a tiny defibrillation. But I caught myself howling with laughter because it throws the audience back on their suspension of disbelief: How can a hand die? You can watch the utterly hilarious scene here:




I think what's so unique here is the scene allows us to explore the notion of what's at stake in hanging on to the belief in a non-entangled notion of separate self. This points back to Lucretius' notion of fear of death being a fear of matter and motion. What dies? Nail's translation and critique of Lucretius states: 'When we think or feel that our bodies are something radically distinct, separate or cut off from nature, we worry that death will destroy them.' Shifting the lens from separate self or classic Western, Cartesian dualism, to entanglement, we can see that, like holding up two hands and asking if they are separate or if they are part of one entangled body, our separate self does exist, but it also doesn't exist. Both things are true. Thing's continual liveliness undoes Cartesian separation in a 'horror' like way. It confounds life/death conditions that exist under the law of fear of death as a total end of self, and instead indicates a much larger notion of matter and meaning, life and liveliness.


Wednesday, trying to revive Thing says plainly, 'Thing, if you die, I will kill you' underlining again that death is never one or final, but a series of endless movements taking place inside matter in its unendending, Lucretian flow.


Wednesday as a character is consistently showing her lack of fear of death. She describes her best childhood birthday party in a series of flash backs including a pinata full of tarantulas that terrorises all the children but which she takes delight in, and presents like a tiny guillotine to decapitate her dolls with. When she hides in the freezer in the morgue in episode 4, we se the coroner pull out Wednesday in the mortuary cabinet, poke her face and exclaim 'oooh full rigour!' This suggests that Wednesday herself is in fact already dead. Not a zombie, but simultaneously dead and alive - a paradox that inverts time and again, points us to question the life/death binary. Stuck inside the freezer when the coroner closes the door, we see Thing running down a model skeleton, racing to open up the door before Wednesday dies. When he opens it she simply says 'five more minutes, I was just getting comfortable.' Such paradoxes are wildly funny if like me you like that sort of dead-pan humour. But they also point to a deep Lucretian approach to disturbing our tired old ways of understanding life, death, and everything in between. From the perspective of entanglement, and the endless motion of matter, the state of 'death' has a very relative value.


"All of nature is in continuous motion. Death therefore cannot possibly be a static, passive non-existence. There simply is no such state in nature. Death is, as the epic tradition describes it, like a river (Acheron) that flows continually with the rest of nature - in constant transfomation" - Thomas Nail, Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion.




drannouchkabayley

Updated: Oct 9, 2023


Ever got really, really wound up as your phone, tablet or computer glitches, freezes or goes all weird for second? Waiting as those round circles cycle once, twice, three times or for an hour can be an absolute nightmare. It's like everything gets stopped in its tracks. the system breaks down. It 'glitches' and when it returns it's either lost your data, file, place in the game, place in the film etc, or it's simply interrupted the everyday flow of life. This is what a 'glitch' is. And it's more powerful than you think.


Curator and writer Legacy Russell says, "Herein lies a paradox: glitch moves, but glitch also blocks. It incites movement while simultaneously creating an obstacle. Glitch prompts and glitch prevents. With this, glitch becomes a catalyst, opening up new pathways, allowing us to seize on new directions. On the internet we explore new publics, engage with new audiences, and, above all, glitschen between new conceptions of bodies and selves. Thus, glitch is something that extends beyond the most literal technological mechanics: it helps us to celebrate failure as a generative force, a new way to take on the world."


What I love about this idea is that is forces us to rethink a couple of things:


1- that the internet is this all powerful monolith. To be sure, it's extremely powerful and extremely dangerous too. But like all great systems of coding and cataloguing people (from the famous Doomsday Book onwards), it's subject to failure and error, to glitch, and that glitch provides us with a strategy to undermine the parts of the internet that replicate things that are oppressive or that we keep us up at night worrying about where things are really going. As famous philosophers Deleuze and Guattari say, every territory - every monolith - has packed inside it it's own deterritorialsation. In other words - the architecture of every system has its own undoing written inside it as a matter of course. You don't need to look to the outside of any system to find its failure, you can find how to unravel it from the very mechanics it's built on - if you look hard enough. This kind of unraveling doesn't have to be all gloom and doom. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari call these 'lines of flight' and they are as exciting and full of the possibilities of change as the title imagines them.


2- that glitching is all about the digital platform and nothing to do with the body. Scholar Nathan Jurgenson suggets that instead of the acronym IRL (which means 'in real life') we use AFK (away from keyboard). This allows to to understand that 'the self' is a continuous progression of relationships that don't end but impact us wherever we go, whether those worlds are digital or analogue. Why is this important? Because it allows us to take a more integrated approach to daily life and examine ourselves - especially the differences of how we navigate our worlds online and how we navigate our worlds face2face. How do these differences manifest? And most importantly, instead of just cataloguing the differences (like a good coding machine ourselves!) what do the ways these differences differ tell us about ourselves and our relationships with the world. In the context of this post on glitch as rebel strategy, it also allows us to take rebel glitching strategies with us across digital and analogue terrains. Who said it has to flow one way? The digital isn't just a rendition of the 'real world' online, it also impacts us, our bodies, the way we think, live, love - everything. In other words it is performative - the digital changes the analogue as much as it tries to represent it.


Check out this amazing dance video from Urban Theory who take the glitching body to a whole different level!:


This one is quite interesting too, not least because of how the power relationship continually changes from 'puppetmaster' to co-creator, to puppet. Very interesting when viewed in light of the idea of the shifting performativities inherent in subject/object relations...





In 2022, I started on three pieces that investigate digital/analogue divides and their political impact on our everyday lives. The first one looks at culture and digital decoloniality in education, and has recently come out in a fantastic collection on media cultures and digital practice edited by Flynn & Marotta. You can access it here:


The other two are forthcoming, one is called Ghosts in the Machine and is on how to teach critical digital practice by investigating the difference between 'space' on zoom (waiting rooms, boxed windows etc) and 'space' in universities. The 'glitch' between these two offers us moments of change, if we look closely enough. How can we teach this? This article is out in Carrigan and Robertson's The Postpandemic University. Incidently, Carrigan hosts a blog with the same name which is superb and well worth the read. You can check it out here: The last article in my 'mini' series is called The End of the Seance and is all about the politics of teaching and learning in a world with/out the senses (or a least: how can we better understand how the sense operate in a digital platform), and is out in an Special Issue with Critical Studies <=> Critical Methodologies


The purpose of all of this is simple: how can we explore the territory of everyday digital systems as new sites of resistance, protest, change, love or imagination? The radical politics embedded in 'glitching' is a start. What about finding a few more lines of flight while we're at it?






Updated: Mar 12, 2024




Truth be told, I'm a total Stranger Things fan. Yes there's lure of the colours, the clothes and the overall aesthetic that pulls all the nostalgia-strings of someone who was a kid in the 80s. And too much has already been said about the dangers of nostalgia. Nostalgia is like a drug. It can numb us out to reality, as we pine for the 'good old days' when everything was rosy and simple and less complex. Nostalgia can set us on a path that's quite hard to climb out of and that certainly fears the new and strange things of the world. But what I love about Stranger Things - particularly season 4 - is that is really leans into teen anxieties and obsessions, offering strategies to deal with these. The world is a stranger thing that is full of unexplainables, and these can genuinely appear monstrous. In schools, when we tell young people to stop being silly, or grow up, that's just the way the world works, or marvel at the level of drama, we inadvertently erase the actual lived reality of teen experience.


I'm a fan of Donna Haraway, and when it comes to teen experience in schools and colleges, I like to quote her when speaking to other teachers and education researchers: 'we need to learn to stay with the trouble'. Then we all gulp, because the drama is often overwhelming at the best of times! In one particular scene (you can watch below) Max is experiencing grief at the death of her step brother Billy. The experience of shame, guilt, rage and fear is so overwhelming to her growing body that she finds herself leaving it behind in what psychologists might call moments of dissociation and derealisation. But that's academic. Max's experience goes something like this: a monster from another world attacks me in my world and each time I see him I step into his. I can't break out. I'm right here, but here is not quite the same 'here' any more. My consciousness is split off and I am both here and there at the same time.


I've always wanted to create an approach to psychology that factors in quantum physics, because this sounds like 'spooky action at a distance' if ever I heard it! What I love about this scene is that we get to actually feel the reality of her experience. And so we can create strategies that are consistent with that reality. In artistic research we call this 'situated knowledge'. It's taking the reality described as it is rather than translating it into something abstract that (ironically) dissociates it from the lived experience. There are a lot of ways this approach can be used - not least in decolonial practices that trouble the problem of translating all ways of living into white western ways of living, creating a blueprint where we explain all experiences according to one culture's particular way of being in the world at the expense of the other's (a scholar called Savransky discusses this nicely in his book 'Around the Day in 80 Worlds').


Watch Max's scene here:






In 2019 before all the lockdowns, I had the honour of chairing a talk with artists who experienced what the DSM calls 'derealisation'. https://london.sciencegallery.com/blog/new-season-explores-living-in-an-age-of-anxiety

The artworks were fascinating because so many of them were split objects - not unlike the split objects we see in the Upside Down in Max's scene. Consciousness is all over the place. The body exists in a stranger kind of distribution. And its equal parts beautiful and terrifying (to me at least) because as I always say - we get to do different things with our thinking when we examine the felt sense of experience and how rich it shows us the actual world really is. Here the strategy put forth in the scene is listening to music. Max's friends see her disappear/dissociate and they bring her back not with words or hugs or calls to snap out of it, but with her favourite song (of course the lyrics are really clever and speak directly to dissociation, but that's the joy of film making, you get to layer storytelling with so much meaning!). They've cottoned on to the fact that music does something differently to the brain, speaking to different parts of us that are more powerful than we might imagine.



Music is an exceptionally powerful tool in managing the affective, sensorial, emotional landscape we live our lives inside of everyday. In this scene the template for recovery is told like this:

  • music (your favourite song),

  • memories (good ones that remind you of moments of safety and goodness),

  • friendship (the desire to touch, be in contact or proximity with those we love - another form of distribution, but that's for another blogpost!).

  • most importantly: telling the monster it's not real does not work

In 2019 I wrote an article on Stranger Things for the Journal Performance Research https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13528165.2020.1868844

where I examined the previous seasons' strategies of touch to explore Nobel prize winner Richard Feymann's discoveries about the electron. But what season 4 does is work mostly with music as a strategy for everyday life. And it does it so well! We get to feel the reality of teen experience in Western schooling as well as attend to strategies to deal with its traumas. Making contact from a very real position of situated knowledge, listening to teens who are developing their own wise strategies and helping them with this, is I think a very vital part of working with young people, let alone a strategy for us all in all the world's wild complexity.

bottom of page