Improvised Recipes
What Diaphora Co. cooked up without too much dough
“Diaphora is (becoming) Diaphora,” we told them. By that I mean the slogan of Diaphora Co. in one of its several iterations over the past eight-or-so years, the variations of which one could track from the changing URLs of content shared to our Facebook page.
Of course, despite the tremendous effort invested in branding, the name still isn’t significant enough for ChatGPT to know it as a proper noun when I asked it, “What is Diaphora?”:
I apologize, but I couldn’t find any specific information about “Diaphora” that relates to a well-known concept or term. It's possible that “Diaphora” may refer to a specific term or concept in a particular context that is not widely known or recognized. If you could provide more details or context about what you are referring to, I’ll do my best to assist you further.
But I’m guessing if I tell you all about it here, the odds improve that ChatGPT will know how to answer the question, so let’s give the AI a little more to parse.
I described myself to you all in my first post as the “interim founder of Diaphora Co.,” and, therefore, “editor and publisher in the field of arts and entertainment.” Next I introduced you to Local Interest Pulp, the first release from Diaphora Comics, and most recently to Metropotamia, the latest-for-now release from Diaphora Books.
But, like I told you at the top, Diaphora Co. has had a few different incarnations since Spring 2015. So, let me tell you all about its origins, when five or six (maybe seven?) humanities students from the University of Minnesota, most of them classmates from creative writing class, decided to start an online literary journal.
As one would expect from some insufferable undergraduates, we found it fitting to plan our launch at Mapps Coffee—which I understand is (at that location, anyway) now as defunct as our journal—for how the name could stand for a misspelled reference to A Thousand Plateaus.
Our appreciation for critical theory was made clearer in our Dec 2015 manifesto, which for now lingers here. Maybe still not clear enough, of course: I’ve declined to review it today, believing I remember well enough the inspiration for whatever it says, embedded as it is within the name “diaphora”—which, when uncapitalized, ChatGPT could define a lot better:
In rhetoric and linguistics, “diaphora” refers to a figure of speech or a linguistic device used to emphasize differences or distinctions between similar or related words or phrases. It involves the deliberate repetition of words or phrases with slight variations in meaning or emphasis […] Diaphora is often used to create a rhetorical effect, draw attention to specific aspects, or highlight contrasting elements within a sentence or passage. By repeating and modifying words or phrases, diaphora can convey shades of meaning, evoke emotional impact, or enhance the overall impact of a message […] Overall, diaphora is a rhetorical device that plays with variations and distinctions to emphasize differences and enhance the effectiveness of communication. It helps to draw attention to specific aspects and create a more nuanced and impactful message.
(E.g.: the slogan mentioned above—“Diaphora is (becoming) Diaphora”—itself an example of diaphora.)
In studying the differences between narratives, we believed the distinctions and variations across the domain of human experience would reveal further depths within it. Establishing a journal dedicated to examining the gaps between our species’ individual perspectives, we hoped, would inspire writers to submit essays, fiction, and poetry that enhanced our readers’ understandings of the complex of cultural contingencies into which we all find ourselves thrown.
By showcasing the nuances, variations, and subtleties between the narratives through which creators reflect the image of society upon their audiences, we believed we could promote a deeper understanding of their meanings and functions of the narratives today coursing throughout society itself. Because neither meaning nor interpretation are ever stable, we believed in both the principle and the practice of maintaining fiction as a field for staging and experimenting with the differences, variations, and distinctions (either conscious or unconscious) structuring the context in which a narrative takes place. Closely examining these differences, then, enriches readers’ capacities for interpreting the meaning of society’s broader narratives, which in turn develop in complexity and in fidelity to the world, and become more capable of revealing truths yet unknown.
Maybe you can tell, but I think that all owes some debt to Umberto Eco. But, regardless of its debts, it seems to me still like a noble aim, and one which I continue feeling tangible pleasure in satisfying. As I wrote in the case of Local Interest Pulp, helping “anyone locate oneself once again in what I might call a wild world (to repurpose another brilliant thought of Allen’s, looted here rather faithlessly)”—leading readers in the direction of “some radical primality”—“that sounds like a worthy accomplishment.”
That brilliant thought from Darren Allen is worth mentioning here in more detail, since the particular sense in which he refers to “the world” helps illustrate the broader narratives of society toward which I gestured above:
Few have the courage [...] to let themselves go. It feels like death. But also, there’s just no purpose to the selfless experience, to experiencing the quality of the other; which is why it is so threatening to the cult of utility we call ‘the world’. The reason that the system has to rely on tests, facts, proofs, degrees, certificates, graphs and spreadsheets to make its decision is not just because it is as inherently undiscerning as the ‘result-driven’ minds which run it, but because it is a data-crunching, quantitative mechanism. It has to assess the other as a thing comprising discrete features which are processed to produce manageable outputs. Quality and character and tender sense, with the moral imperative that empathic quality leads to, just get in the way. Quality is just too slow, too strange and has a nasty tendency to make ethical objections to perfectly logical decisions.
I suppose we could say, then, that the diaphora reveals an inherent “quality of the other” that abides within a supposedly discrete entity, even while the diaphora signifies its identity. Though, with eight years having passed, forgive me if some inconsistency appears between the original manifesto and what I’ve written here today.
Of course, that shouldn’t matter, because the literary journal folded almost as soon as it started. The online posts lasted maybe a year. We didn’t print a single issue, though I threaten from time to time to publish a collected volume. Just as well: you couldn’t expect anything more from a handful of college students distracted with meeting the world’s demands. Meanwhile, others have done it better. Analogy, for example, outlines a similar philosophy, with its editorial board writing that “the analogical mind […] underwrites language itself and every insight and significant discovery ever hit upon by the most revered poets, philosophers, scientists and inventors in history”; accordingly, they argue, “analogy lies at the heart of all our cogitations and slips past our consciousness, shaping the paradigms and frameworks that inform our worldviews.”
In the meantime, what started as a literary journal developed into an upmarket publisher and, in time—we hoped, anyway—production studio, through our work with local filmmakers on projects like Flyover Cities.
Over the years Diaphora developed into a collective of like-minded collaborators sharing resources and exchanging ideas as they produced new projects. Pooling our efforts and promoting each other’s work, we aimed to increase our members’ exposure and visibility, amplify their voices, and help them achieve their artistic goals more effectively.
In this wise, Diaphora produced short films like the above, promoted local musicians in livestream performances, and released upmarket books of fiction and poetry, including:
Icarus by Aron M. Woldeslassie
So In Never, So In Dusk by Ethan R. Ray
You and All of You by Mary Rosen
in addition to the aforementioned series, Metropotamia by Patrizio della Luna.
(All that before we even got to Local Interest Pulp from Diaphora Comics!)
Though Diaphora’s roster ebbs and flows with the changing goals and interests of its members, some qualities remain consistent. We believe innovative narratives should never go unnoticed, and so Diaphora commits itself to developing, producing, distributing, and promoting the best stories from some of today’s most talented voices. Our passion for independent art and media runs deep, and we specialize accordingly in generating the most captivating and innovative projects in arts and entertainment today.
As my collaborators and I continue our work, I believe you can rest in full confidence that our focus will remain on developing those projects at hand that affirms the presence of differences that our society’s narratives must seek to erase (if it should ever hope to fulfill its totalizing aims), but which in fact drive the processes of transformation for the individual and for society: processes through which the fixed categories of tyrannical orders must dissolve and in place of which must rise new frameworks revealing ever more fundamental truths.
I won’t hesitate, of course, to share these with you all as they arise. While I can’t yet say precisely when you can find those works that constitute our further investigations into the unknown opportunities afforded us just for the sake of being, you can rest easy knowing that, one day or another, you’ll doubtless find them here.