Meaning of subterraneanity | Babel Free

Definitions

The quality of being subterranean.

rare, uncountable

Examples

“General social movements, such as those for mental health, peace, or Women’s Liberation, seek to bring about changes in people’s values, both of their members and the public at large. Such movements are often marked by an absence of (1) established leadership, (2) a recognized membership, and (3) clear structural forms for guidance and control. Informality, inconspicuousness, and subterraneanity prevail.”

“to write is to resurface the traumatic subterraneanity of mind.”

“[Steve] Chimombo’s poetry is characterised by the practice of geological subterraneanity, a conception of poetic political agency as a constant movement between the terrestrial world of dominant political discourse and the multiple locations provided by the labyrinthine space of pre-colonial myth.”

“For example, in / Encyclopedias are gold mines / [David] Rumelhart suggests that the process of comprehension involves applying the schema suggested by the predicate term to the subject term (the term predication itself, as standardly used, implies that characteristic properties of the predicate concept are to be applied to the subject concept). In the present example, there is only a partial fit of those characteristic properties (e.g., “containing hidden riches” fits encyclopedias, “subterraneanity” does not); indeed, such “unevenness of fit” is a key ingredient of metaphoricality, Rumelhart suggests: […]”

“The proposed addition is 425,000 square feet, 175,000 square feet in the west side and 250,000 square feet on the east. The west building will be the equivalent of six stories high and eight stories high on the east. These are very, very big buildings and their sheer massiveness will, in my opinion, overwhelm the existing structure. For people inside the stadium, in the seats, the sun will not shine very much, if at all, taking away part of the joy of a beautiful, autumn day in Ann Arbor. Also, as Professor Louis Guenin writes in opposing this plan, the stadium’s architectural greatness is based on its “simplicity, understatement, symmetry, subterraneanity, smoothness, openness, and vastness.” This plan is the antithesis of all of that.”

“It is quite plausible to hypothesize that Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, with its history of marginalization, represents the cultural attempt of the nascent bourgeois class to homogenize and «regulate» anything that could disturb the security and balance of the world. In fact, this hypothesis consists in an attempt to recognize, isolate and catalogue the phenomena of diversity, disquieting «subterraneanity» and transgression which began to worry the emerging middle class that was destined to consolidate itself over the course of the Twentieth century – an attempt carried out in the precise cultural space of gothic and horror literature.”

“Underscoring this point, the materiality of the book, which is after all a physical object, signals its unwieldiness in regard to notions of Blackness, sociality, and subjectivity that, often implicitly, foreground dominant societal acts of misrecognition and nonrecognition, such as [Kevin] Quashie’s interiority, Jared Sexton’s subterraneanity, Sarah Jane Cervanak^([sic – meaning Cervenak])’s articulation of outside, and Candace Williamson’s analysis of sociality as another form of interiority.”

“I propose that in transposing anarchism’s subterranean fire to [John] Claggart’s tumultuous subjectivity, [Herman] Melville indexes the beginning of the underground’s transformation into “an inside narrative,” in the words of Billy Budd’s subtitle—a figure for interiority that would reach its fullest expression in emerging theories of the unconscious. This is not to say that the expression of the unconscious as subterraneanity was new at the end of the nineteenth century; almost half a century before writing Billy Budd, in Moby-Dick, Melville himself had analogized the workings of “unconscious understandings” to the untraceable shafts dug by “the subterranean miner that works in us all.””

CEFR level