Static 08 Editorial

Christien Garcia and Alice Gavin

Static: General stemmed from a desire to investigate the possibilities of a potent but unplumbed category. We might think of the general – the general picture, a general claim, general studies, even the military general, whose command combines his soldiers into an incorporated force – as a form of meaning that in blurring the detail of its components generates a larger, more sweeping utterance. As something ‘opposed to partial or particular’ (OED), the general may not be that distinct from the universal. Indeed, the first definition of general in the OED reads closely to that of the latter. Both invoke notions of inclusion; but whilst the universal extends, comprehends or includes the whole of something specified or implied (OED), the general is less definite. Often accused of vagueness, the general is implicitly imprecise, but it is also, as such, open to suggestion. The general affects not all, but ‘nearly all’: an element of proximity as opposed to precise completion is registered. Might the general then sustain a meaningfully different kind of community to the comprehensive inclusion commanded by universality? In biological taxonomy, the genus - the Latin root of ‘general’ - fragments into an assortment of various species. The general in this sense is less a category than the lapsing of categorisation, the ground upon which specificities and differences are held – and are what holds us – in common. As one T. Wilson put it way back in 1551, ‘Genus is a general word, the which is spoken of many that differ in their kind’ (OED). Or, on the contrary, does that which is general slip all too easily into the generic, a phase that has the potential to condense generalisation into a bland, monotonous sameness? The contributors of Static8 address these questions in different ways and to different ends, but each invests in the notion that there is a critical and creative lining to the general – that there is a generative capacity to the general.

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Editors:

Alice Gavin is a Phd Candidate at the London Consortium. Her research focuses on the space of subjectivity in modernism, utilizing architectural theory and readings and with an additional emphasis on the implications of "free indirect style" in both literature and film. She has published articles in Critical Quarterly and Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. 

Christien Garcia is a recent graduate of the London Consortium. His MRes dissertation focused on notions of subject negativity, or what he called “figuring absence,” as theorized productively in the context of queer theory. He obtained his BA in Sociology and Art History from the University of Alberta. Christien likes to swim once in a while, adores Italian Greyhounds and dreams he might have been a dance artist.