In over three decades since their 1993 debut, the hip-hop artists known as RZA and Wu-Tang Clan created a world whose significance (for them) transcends the local contingencies of time, place, race, and religion. Whether it is by their creating a world based on filmic myths, by their conquering the world via hip-hop and finding their destiny in a Chinese sacred landscape, by their making themselves symbolic of a perennial worldview, or by their reimagining of their possibilities against the historical terrors of racism, in each case we find an ongoing quest for transcendence that at least for their leader, RZA, demonstrates the meaning of the Wu-Tang Clan. This study sets out to demonstrate this latter point. Framing its discussion in terms of world and worldmaking, I argue that the fundamental thread of significance that ties together the mythical world of the Wu, especially from the perspective of RZA, is a quest for transcendence, a project that is replete with stylistic, spiritual, existential, cross-cultural, and racial implications. While this is no biography of the Wu-Tang Clan, each chapter, starting with Chapter 2, asks how and why this quest takes shape in a sequentially ordered discussion of Wu’s worldmaking career. In arguing my point, I mainly take a phenomenological approach to RZA and the Wu-Tang Clan’s cultural productions, describing and interpreting various forms of Wu-associated media (songs, compact discs, album concepts and graphic designs, films, books, and more) from 1993 to the early 2020s. Between the practices of cultural criticism and interpretation, the study also draws from and contributes to Afro-Asian studies and Religious Studies. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This is a study of the Wu-Tang Clan, a hip-hop group from Staten Island, New York. It argues that for over two decades since their 1993 debut, the Wu-Tang Clan has come to produce not only a long resume of music and other media but a mythic world. Furthermore, for the purpose of maintaining this world across time, Wu’s leader, RZA (pronounced “Rizah’), has aimed to make the Wu-Tang Clan symbolic of a universal worldview that transcends their local culture, history, place of origin, religion, and race.

[pt] Esta tese é um estudo sobre a teoria dos símbolos de Nelson Goodman. Abordamos o tema da relação entre mundo e linguagem a partir da teoria da arte deste autor. O principal objetivo da tese é mostrar como Goodman concilia uma teoria referencial das linguagens da arte com a tese da construção de mundos através do uso de sí­mbolos. Em primeiro lugar buscamos explicitar como essa teoria da linguagem permite pensar a representação sem os compromissos metafí­sicos tradicionalmente associados à  ela - quer dizer sem a implicação de espelhamento da realidade pela linguagem. Em segundo lugar, dentro do quadro nominalista da filosofia de Goodman, procuramos apresentar a referência - em seus vários modos - como uma relação entre objetos reais. Por último, mostramos como os mundos da linguagem tornam-se mundos reais pelo processo de instauração destes mundos dentro da cultura. Ao serem instaurados os sí­mbolos tornam-se passí­veis de serem experimentados e é essa experiência que constitui aquilo que chamamos mundo real. / [en] This thesis is a study of Nelson Goodman s theory of symbols. We approach the question of the relationship between world and language starting from Goodman s theory of art. The main objective of the thesis is to show how Goodman reconciles a referencial theory of the languages of art with the thesis of the construction of worlds through the use of symbols. First, we try to make explicit how this theory of language allows us to treat the notion of representation without the metaphysical commitments traditionally associated with it - that is, without the implication of mirroring of reality by language. Secondly, within the nominalistic framework of Goodman s philosophy, we discuss reference - in its many aspects - as a relation among real objects. Finally, we show how the worlds of language become real worlds by the process of implementation of these worlds within the culture. Symbols can be experienced by being implemented, and it is this experience that constitutes what we call the real world.

This is the story of how four people invented a whole new world and way of life - and how they attempted to establish it across the globe. Copass, a Parisian startup consisting of four cofounders, aimed to connect hundreds of the world's shared workspaces under their new global federation. But the main objective of this startup, in contrast to most, was not to build capital. It was to build a universe: a future where white-collar workers would be liberated from the shackles of office life to work anywhere in the world, to meet exciting people and to have amazing experiences. Here, workdays were permanently mixed with holidays. Work was fun, workplaces were play-places and workers were adventurers. The ambition of these four cofounders was to turn the way they wanted things to be for them into the way things ought to be for everyone else. To turn their desired lifestyle into a global social movement that enrolled, as they saw it, hundreds of cities and thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of people. In short, they created a company to fulfil a dream. This is an ethnography of that one startup's dream, analysed at length to demonstrate innovative ways of worldmaking employed by an ambitious tech company seeking success. A company dissatisfied with the world that, instead of changing it, decided to create a new one.

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Dans ce mémoire, je présente le réseautage de trois ouvrages textuels : Manières de faire des mondes du philosophe Nelson Goodman, A Brave New World du romancier et essayiste Aldous Huxley, et Envisioning Information du théoricien en design d'information Edward Tufte. Ce travail me sert de base théorique à la réalisation de mon projet de maîtrise qui consiste à réorganiser la structure d'une oeuvre de création littéraire de façon visuelle et spatiale. Pour ce faire, je recours à certains principes de visualisation de l'information relevant du design d'information. Le passage du roman en sa structure réorganisée se décline en quatre versions qui correspondent à l'exploration de formes artistiques distinctes : la base de données et le livre d'artiste, l'affiche et l'installation. Il en résulte la transformation du roman en une traduction expérimentale schématisée, dans une pratique se situant entre le design d'édition et le design d'information de recherche.