MIKAMI MEDITATIONS

My next mythcomics post will deal with a moderately obscure manga, GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (1991-99), and so part of this essay will be to explicate the manga's rationale and the background of its main characters. But I also want to use elements of this series to illustrate a special dynamic about epistemological patterns in fiction: that, unlike the patterns that human beings ascribe to aspects of reality, fictional patterns proceed not from cause to effect, but from effect to cause.

Every author who utilizes epistemological patterns in his fiction is naturally influenced by those found in reality. But whether the author is the organized type who plans out everything, or the type who flies by his pants-seat, authors in general first conceive of the effect they want to make with their characters/situations and then work backwards to justify the cause of the effects. The justification may not even be one that is currently validated by the dominant intellectual culture. Freudianism is not as validated today as in past eras. But when an author wants his story to invoke the psychological potentiality, Freud supplies the needed rationales for works ranging from MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA to "Superman's Return to Krypton."

Here's what I wrote about the manga series for my review of the anime TV show:             

Starring character Reiko Mikami is a "ghost sweeper" in her late twenties or early thirties, and she uses a variety of supernatural weapons to exorcise troublesome ghosts and demons who plague modern-day people and businesses. Mikami is as courageous and resourceful as the best heroes, but she's also extremely mercenary, taxing her customers with huge bills so that someday she can become a rich woman. She's also slightly larcenous-- one episode displays her knowledge of burglary techniques-- and she constantly underpays her male assistant, seventeen-year-old Tadao Yokoshima. She gets away with this because she's super-hot and knows that horndog Yokoshima will accept any wage just to scope her out. The fact that she's exploiting the youth, however, does not keep her from doling out brutal punishment to the teen any time he tries to feel her up, or even expresses a negative opinion of her. Yokoshima, for his part, is clearly meant to be the "goat" of the series, the one who has all the terrible things happen to him-- and because he's such an unregenerate perv, his sufferings are funny.

(NOTE 4-8-06: A closer reading of the manga indicates no support for the idea-- derived from both Wikipedia and Grokipedia-- that Mikami is 31 years old. In one specific story, she says she's 20 years old while Yokoshima is 17. I'll explore this facet of the series more thoroughly in a forthcoming Meditation.)  

Now, many long-running manga serials have exploited similar situations without imbuing their characters with anything like a psychology, and the first two years of SWEEPER seem like a lot of other comedy-oriented shonen manga: lots of high-powered action with some comedy relief in the form of a dumb guy getting clobbered. Reiko Mikami's first episode clearly shows her as a master of her ghostbusting craft, as well as her determination that anyone who needs her services must pay heavily for them. 

In contrast, she underpays assistant Yokoshima because he appears to be a subservient minion and even implies that she gives him fringe benefits whenever he peeps at her in the bath-- though when he goes so far as to touch her, or even to make lewd propositions, she beats the hell out of him. And yet, unlike similar serials like LOVE HINA and ZERO'S FAMILIAR, there's no internal rationale for keeping the fractious couple together. If Mikami is really repelled by Yokoshima's attentions, why doesn't she just fire him and find another cheap, horny teenager? 

 During the first two years of the feature, most of the stories were adapted to the aforementioned tv show-- though not the one entitled "Dad's Here." At the opening of the story, Mikami's second assistant Okinu, a naive young ghost, teases the sexy exorcist about being "gloomy" in Yokoshima's absence. Mikami asserts that she doesn't take the youth seriously because he's a lust-filled "brat" while she's a mature woman. Yet she hedges her bets by stating that if he ever did become a real man, she might reconsider her verdict. The rest of the story, however, just shows Yokoshima messing up as usual.      

Now, while the manga-artist Takashi Shiina doesn't expend a lot of time on a backstory for Yokoshima, the story "Love Needs Its Time" provides some basic info on how high-schooler Mikami became a superior ghostbuster by training under a Christian exorcist. In addition, Shiina is careful to show that the priest is too idealistic to ask for remuneration. Yet his student Mikami is nothing like her sensei, being exceptionally desirous of making lots of money once she sets up her own ghost-sweeping business. But Shiina doesn't tell the reader why she came to be this way: a fairly unique admixture of heroism and avarice. 

Shiina does bring up the subject intermittently, though. One story shows how an enemy de-ages Mikami into a little girl, after which even Mikami's sensei remarks on the differences between the cute munchkin and her money-hungry adult self. In my next post, I'll show how I think Shiina built up some of Mikami's psychology in order to render a partial answer, guiding his readers to get the effect he Shiina desired.

ADDENDUM: To relate the SWEEPER series to the "thymotic and epithymotic" categories I introduced in THYMOS BE THE PLACE PT. 4, Mikami's repeated clobberings of Yokoshima would be "epithymotic" if she were only concerned with defending herself. However, if she has, even on a subconscious level, started regarding Yokoshima as a potential mate-- in the event that he can become a "true man"-- then her assaults can be deemed "thymotic," in that she's trying to interact with him on a soul-to-soul level, even if she still wants to be "on top."

A newer meditation on a 1996 sequence, "Death Zone," provides the first direct testimony by Mikami as to why she hired Yokoshima, because he was "funny."

  

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 2

Continuing the conceptual thread from the previous essay, I reiterate that whenever I analyzed the phenomenality of a work that falls within the domain of the uncanny, I'm looking for phenomena which do not overtly violate causal coherence but nevertheless create a sense of "strangeness" through violating intelligibility: the reader's sense that regular causality can only yield a sense that the world is understandable and therefore intelligible. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate some examples by which authors use the three rationales I formulated in Part 1 to create that sense of strangeness.

The rationale of science is probably the most common one in the domain of the uncanny. Arthur Conan Doyle's novel THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES sports one of the most famous examples of a "phony ghost." Back in Doyle's time, the parameters of the mystery-genre would have suggested from the first that any intimation of a ghost, much less a spectral demon-hound, probably will not be validated. Yet for the greater part of the novel Doyle creates a strong sense of a supernatural threat before revealing that the titular hound is just an ordinary trained canine covered in phosphorescent paint. In contrast to many critics, I would say that the aura of strangeness is not entirely dispelled, because even if the hound is not a real demon, the person who orchestrates the Hound's existence is strange in its own uncanny right.

While HOUND uses a scientific principle to create an illusion, numerous heroes and villains utilize fairly simple scientific gadgets to give themselves an edge over their opponents. In contrast to the original Ian Fleming novel, the 1973 LIVE AND LET DIE includes a scene in which James Bond, suspended over a shark pool by ropes, cuts through his, er, bonds by unleashing a miniature rotary saw from his watch. Whether any gadget like this would work in the real world is as immaterial as whether one could build an actual FTL drive; the point is to create the sense of Bond having a special "ace in the hole."

It's not quite as easy to use the magical rationale to generate uncanny strangeness, but it can be employed in relatively mundane worlds. Wilkie Collins' 1868 mystery-novel THE MOONSTONE is built around the crime of an Englishman who steals a sacred jewel from an Indian cult , flees with his booty to England and secures the gem in a bank deposit box. The cultists follow, seeking to recover the jewel and kill the thief, but they have no way to break into the bank. Collins thus set up a situation in which the cultists, who don't precisely look like your average Englishmen, must find some way to monitor the thief's movements. Therefore, they use their own knowledge of a simple magical procedure, which Collins does not name but is usually called "scrying." The cultists buy the services of an English boy who has a talent one might call "psychic" or "magical" as one pleases, but Collins' description has more of a "magical" vibe in my view. Eventually the thief checks the gem out of the bank with the idea of escaping, and when he does, the cultists pounce and recover their property.

In the previous essay I gave an example of a marvelous "just because" rationale taken from a magical realism novel, so for this essay, I will invoke another magic-realism work for this category. China Mieville's novel THE CITY IN THE CITY supposes an unspecified locale on "our" Earth where two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupy the exact same physical space, with the buildings of one city cheek-to-jowl with those of the other. Further, Mieville posits  that the inhabitants of one city willfully pretend not to be aware of the citizens of the co-existing city. The author does not provide any rigorous backstory as to how this state of affairs came about, and so its underlying rationale is that of "just because." Ironically, though its parameters in no way resemble either mainstream fantasy or mainstream SF, Mieville's CITY was welcomed by various awards-committees associated with those movements, since the novel won a 2010 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was also nominated (but did not win) a award named for the famed SF-editor John W. Campbell. 

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 1

 My posts on the NUM theory have gone into great detail as to how literary metaphenomena, whether uncanny or marvelous, are created through the use of story-tropes. In both cases, the author of a fictional world seeks to diverge from the world of the naturalistic, the domain in which all phenomena are unified (and therefore are termed "isophenomenal.") In the essay LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE, I said:

The domain of “the naturalistic” emphasizes conformity with whatever idea of “natural law” an audience may expouse, whereas the domain of “the marvelous” conforms to whatever concepts are seen as transcending natural law, be it through Christian miracles or futuristic inventions. The domain of “the uncanny,” though, endeavors to perform a high-wire balancing act between these two literary phenomenalities. 

My general metaphor for the difference between the two metaphenomenal domains has been the difference between breaking down normal causality or simply bending it.  However, I have not supplied a list of rationales that authors use to justify the tropes that either bend or break causality. The three rationales are as follows:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."

Most of what fans view as "mainstream" fantasy and science fiction deals with phenomena that breaks down the viewer's sense of causality, or, in my system, "causal coherence," by evoking either the fictional logic-systems of either science or magic. There is no limit as to the extensiveness of the tropes open to either the magic-rationale of mainstream fantasy or the science-rationale of mainstream science fiction. Fantasy has elves, SF has aliens. Fantasy has doors into fairyland; SF has faster-than-light space travel. Fantasy has Doctor Strange; SF has Iron Man. The distinction is not between any hypothetical limit upon either rationale, for in effect there is no limit. Rather, the distinction is between the ideas attributed IN FICTION to the system of magic as opposed to the system of science. 

Both magic and science operate to manipulate commonplace causality. In science, the logical ideal is that the scientist produces causality-breaking miracles by discovering new principles that underlie those phenomena, and he manipulates those principles to explain FTL travel or transistor-powered armor. In magic, however, the logical idea is that the magician transcends the overt principles underlying commonplace phenomena in order to create faery-doors and magical spells. Human will of some type, whether for good or ill, directly impinges upon reality within the magical rationale, while in the scientific rationale, the will acts indirectly, creating re-arrangements of phenomena.   

Now, whether or not a reader subscribes to the rational explanations as to how a fictional faery-door or a fictional FTL drive exists, the reader should perceive that both explanations appeal to a system of logic regarding potential change of phenomena. The third rationale, "just because," ceases to appeal to any system of logic, and it's possible that this is why its use far more fiction-categories than either of the other two. "Just because" is used to justify everything from a magical-realist premise like that of Jose Saramago's 1994 THE STONE RAFT, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European continent and starts floating into the Atlantic, to an animated cartoon in which Bugs Bunny can pull a hammer out of nowhere to crown Elmer Fudd. 

I conceived the idea of the three rationales some time back, but I recently realized that all of them were configured with respect to the phenomenality of the marvelous, the one that breaks causality. In my second essay, I will deal with how the same such rationales appear within the domain of the uncanny.

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT

                    

 In my 2013 essay AFFECTIVITY, MEET EFFICACY, I focused upon Ernst Cassirer distinction between “causality” and “efficacy.” Causality, the philosopher said, represented humanity’s ability to think about cause and effect in a rational, discursive manner, and from this we get the first stirrings of early philosophy, and later, the developments of science. Efficacy, however, belonged to the language of myth: it depends on a blurring of the distinctions between the objective and subjective worlds.

…the world of mythical ideas… appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical worldview… which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.

One mythical idea to which Cassirer refers occasionally is myth’s view of the origins of the world. Some mythical tales hold the world comes into being only because some giant being—Ymir in Norse stories, Purusha in Hindu stories—is torn apart, so that the different parts of the giant’s body become the earth, the seas, the moon, etc. Within the scope of these narratives, there is no attempt to provide a rationale as to why the world had to made from the flesh and bones of a giant. It is true purely because it confers the aura of human associations upon the whole of creation, even those aspects of creation that may seem entirely alien to human experience. This is what I’ve called “affective freedom,” humankind’s ability to imagine almost anything, whether it accords with experience or not.

Rational conceptions of causal relations, of course, could not care less about the aura of subjective emotions and drives: the desire is to extrapolate a closed system of relations that depend entirely on physical force: CAUSE A exerts FORCE B upon OBJECT C, resulting in RESULT Z. This tendency to rely exclusively upon material experience is one that I’m now terming “cognitive restraint.” Just as in psychology “the affective” and “the cognitive” describe complementary aspects of human mentality, “cognitive restraint” exists in a complementary relationship with “affective freedom.” In other words, human beings are entirely defined by neither: we need both the ability to imagine what seems impossible and to discourse about what we believe to be immediately possible.

I’ve written a lot on my blog about the concept of freedom, and it’s a major reason as to why I’ve devoted so much blog-space to such obscure concepts as “the combative mode” and the various forms of phenomenality, sublimity, and so on. But freedom without a complementary form of internal restraint is, as Janis Joplin sang, “just another word for nothing left to lose.”  Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

Human beings, we may fairly deduce, relate to the world in different ways than other animals. We cannot know what goes on in the head of a lion when it stalks a bird, and then fails to catch the bird because the latter flaps its wings and flies away, We can fairly guess that the lion is frustrated, and possibly with its limited mentality it might entertain the wish to continue chasing the bird into the air. But that would seem to be as far as a lion’s imagination could go.

We also cannot really know what thoughts may have passed through the mind of a Neanderthal hunter in the same situation. Maybe our caveman stalker had no thoughts at all when his prey escaped. Yet we can at least reasonably suspect that the primitive fellow may have entertained the idea of what it would like to be a bird: to sprout wings and chase the bird into its own territory. And once he had this thought—say, for argument’s sake, that no one had entertained the thought before him—he might not be limited to thinking only about filling his belly with bird-flesh. He nay have started to think about what it would feel like to fly, to be a bird; to soar above the limits of other cavemen. At this point he probably doesn’t  think about imitating the bird by designing his own pair of wings, but he may decide to translate this vagrant imaginings into a mythic form. The caves at Lascaux attest to some sort of mental alchemy that combined man and bird, even if today we can only look at drawings of bird-man hybrids and label them “portraits of shamans.”  They may have been just that, but their original context may matter less than their role in determining humankind’s affective freedom.

In one conversation I mentioned that humankind’s advancements in powered flight would have been impossible without this sort of internal, subjective appreciation for the possible thrill of flying. My opponent simply said something along the lines, “Yeah, but powered flight wouldn’t have been possible without science and logical thinking.”  Quite true; as far as achieving an effect in the physical world, wishing never makes it so. But my opponent in my opinion missed the point: the wish makes everything else thinkable. To the earthbound human who can only run and jump and swim, the idea of flying cannot be imagined as having some practical applications—not even just that of catching birds—until *after * it has been re-imagined as something that the earthbound human can imagine bringing into his own “sensuous, objective experience.” 

One of the greatest “myths” propounded by empiricist-types has been that of the “caveman-engineer:” the primitive who instantly sees some practical advantage in making a new type of spear or a rooftop, because he’s so much more attuned to the scientific principles in the physical world, even if he doesn’t have a scientific system as such. This very selective conception of the early scientist was of course an anachronism: an imagining of some 18^th-century scientist born before his time; one who would be in no way influenced by the myths and religion of his time. This was one of many verbal strategies used by empiricists to tout the supreme importance of cognitive restraint, of valuing only practical cause and effect, and to consign myth to the dust-bin of “failed science.”

The mistake of utilitarianism—that the only things that matter are those which have a defined use—is one that depends upon the formulations of cognitive restraint. A utilitarian might allow some niggling truth to my “flying caveman” example, but he would view the caveman’s “fancy of flight” to be relevant to the human condition only because it did lead to a useful development. In contrast, the utilitarian would not be impressed by, say, Tolkien’s example of “arresting strangeness:” of imaging a world with a green sun. Even in the world of fiction, the world of the green sun would have no relevance unless it illustrated the restraints on physical life expressed through scientific fact. Thus, if autrhor Hal Clement devoted a book to explaining the makeup of a fictional world that happened to have a green sun for some scientific reason, then that, and that alone, would have relevance to utilitarianism.

What I’ve repeatedly emphasized that the world of affective freedom is a whole package: that the ability to imagine impossible things is crucial to human nature, whether it leads to specific inventions or not. Depicting a shaman as a bird-human hybrid may not have led directly to any fantasies of personal flight, and thus the shaman-dream might have no relevance at all to the development of powered flight. I argue, rather, that whether the subjective outpourings of myth and fiction do or don't lead to useful developments, all of them are equally important in determining the meaning of human freedom.

TAKING A SHOT AT SIMPLIFICATION

Earlier today I tried to boil down my ideas re: Bhaskar on a forum, more than anything else to challenge myself and see if I could simplify my views for general consumption.  I don't think that I succeeded, but I'm reprinting it here for my own possible future use.

____________________

I've recently finished reading a book on philosophical views relating to science, Roy Bhaskar's A REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE.  Bhaskar is only concerned with science, but as I read it I wondered if his ideas could have some application to my literary theory.


As I said above, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why some tropes belong to "horror" and some don't. To repeat three of my earlier examples, some persons might not feel that Victor Hugo's HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME qualifies as horror, or anything else remotely belonging to "fantasy."  But almost everyone would agree that THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA is horror and MASK is not, even though all three deal with physically deformed characters.

Roy Bhaskar argues for his view of science against two other prominent views.  According to him, the main way that empirical science judges the nature of the world is in terms of "regularity determinism;" i.e., phenomena can be judged by their regular, repeatable nature.  According to him, Kant and the neo-Kantians judged the nature of the world in terms of "intelligibility determinism," which is to say phenomena can be judged by their accessibility to human understanding.


I see the paradigm of empirical science differently from Bhaskar. I agree that when humans begin to look at physical phenomena in terms of their regularity, and then find empirical reasons for the regularity in terms, of, say, the movements of heavenly bodies, this gives rise to a concentration on regularity.  But at the same time, this generates its own form of "intelligibility determinism," because the budding young empiricists believe that the world is fully intelligible-- that is, things need not be explained by supernatural forces-- because humans can understand the world's regularity aspects.

Now, my arguments from all this goes like this:

Whenever authors create a fictional world, they draw on the idea that the empiricist idea that the world is both regular and intelligible.  


If they create a naturalistic world, then it's like the world of MASK: nothing in that world violates the regular functions of the cosmos, and all things are basically intelligible as well.


If they create a marvelous world, even if it just has one marvelous item in it, like a deformed killer who rises from the dead (paging JASON VOORHEES), then it is a world that is no longer regular in the empiricist sense, and so also cannot be intelligible to empiricist reason.


But some worlds are "uncanny" in that even though there is nothing in them that violates the laws of a regular cosmos-- like PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and EYES OF A STRANGER, for two-- there remains something "unintelligible" about them.  Even the killer of EYES OF A STRANGER, who is in no way as bizarre in his appearance as the Phantom, conjures up a similar emotion of "dread" and so is not easily reducible to natural forces, which should conjure primarily "fear."


Hmm, I started this post, like the last one, with the idea of avoiding "proposition-based language," but I gave up halfway through.  Oh well.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 3

Part 1 provided a grounding in theory for my "bifurcated fictive causality," and Part 2 applied the two aspects to the naturalistic and uncanny phenomenalities.  In this essay I'll address the necessity for this system in terms of exploring certain radically opposed, yet intersubjective, authorial approaches to defining that domain which I call "the metaphenomenal."

In my first review of a Tarzan film on my film-review blog, I compared the divergent ways in which two authors viewed the Tarzan character:

Many fantasy-film reference works are divided as to whether or not Tarzan films belong under their rubric. I believe R.G. Young includes them all, but John Stanley's CREATURE FEATURES guide only mentions those that have some strong fantasy-content. But in my view Tarzan by himself is a metaphenomenal figure, even putting aside the facts that the "great apes" that raise him in Burroughs don't exist in the real world and that Burroughs' common language for all his creatures does not exist either. Tarzan is a fantasy-figure who may appear at times to conform to the demands of real-world causality, particularly in the more "realistic" films like TARZAN'S GREATEST ADVENTURE (1959). But affectively he is a fantasy no matter how cognitively realistic he may appear to be, though 1984's GREYSTOKE comes pretty close to banishing most of the fantastic affects of the original concept.

Tarzan, as I asserted in Part 2, is a prime example of a character whose adventures do not seem to challenge the "regularity aspect" of fictive causality,  except in those cases when he encounters tropes out of fantasy or science fiction, such as ant-sized humans, man-eating plants, or John Carter of Mars. 

 I can't precisely use the encyclopedia-author R.G. Young as support for my theory of the uncanny phenomenality, for I've noted that he also includes many works that I deem "naturalistic," such as CUTTHROAT ISLAND.  Nevertheless, though Young includes such genres as swashbucklers and what he calls "heavy melodramas," he never includes anything that smacks of down-to-earth "reality."  Thus he includes certain crime melodramas, possibly because crime suggests mystery and mystery suggests horror.  But he does not include anything comparable to a melodrama about union politics (NORMA RAE) or environmental pollution (ERIN BROCKOVICH), even though certain types of "crime" do appear in these films as well.

In contrast, though John Stanley cites many horror-themed films in his CREATURE FEATURES in which the regularity aspect of causality is not violated, like the 1960 PSYCHO, he wasn't willing to cite any Tarzan films except those that contain the aforesaid fantasy/science-fiction tropes, like the man-eating plant in TARZAN'S DESERT MYSTERY.

Now, from an absolutist POV, the divergent views of Young and Stanley re: Tarzan cannot be reconciled.  Either Tarzan is a "fantasy-hero" or he is not.  But I argue that the two authors may be responding to Tarzan in different ways. 

Stanley, though he is happy to include Norman Bates in CREATURE FEATURES, clearly would not include Tarzan at all if the ape-man had confined himself to fighting exotic native tribes or locating lost cities --that is, as long as the cities possessed no magical or super-technological people or objects.  This argues that in Tarzan's case, Stanley recognizes Tarzan as "fantasy" only when a Tarzan story violates "regularity causation."

Young, in contrast, lets in both Tarzan films and Boston Blackie films, but not Norma Rae. Why?

To the extent that any solution to the problem can be imagined when one is dealing with internal responses, it may be possible that Stanley is more influenced than Young by the appearance of genre-tropes.  Thus Stanley is willing to include many "psycho-films" in his compendium that I personally would not include, simply because there is a well-documented tradition to the effect that, "Psycho films are also horror films."  But there is no strong tradition that "heroes raised by animals" are either fantasy or science fiction, so that in the absence of such a tradition, Tarzan films enter his encyclopedia only if they have things like giant man-eating plants.

I theorize that in contrast Young's selection is more informed by the search for that quality I have called "violent sublimity."  Sublimity, as I have defined it in many essays on this blog, does not depend upon violence as such, only on a sensation of overwhelming forces.  Yet it's axiomatic that many if not all works predicated upon violent conflict should create a sublime affect. I have argued, in essays like this one, that sublimity is only clearly demonstrable with works that demonstrate "spectacular violence," and that in each phenomenality the sublime manifests in a specific manner given the nature of power in that domain. 

I have not observed any sublime levels of spectacular violence in the naturalistic "Boston Blackie" films, but I have in the Dirty Harry films.  Possibly Young does derive such a sublime affect from a less spectacular level of violence, but if so, that does not mean that either of us is wrong about the way in which we achieve that affect.  I advocate mine, and explore mine, purely because it is mine.

I argue, then, that many persons who have attempted to define the boundaries of "the fantastic" have in some way responded to the aspects of regularity and intelligibility.  To put it another way, the fans who don't want to view Batman as a superhero-- referenced here-- would be of the party that must have specific fantasy/SF tropes present before they can deem Batman a superhero.  In contrast, those who accept Batman-- and Zorro, and the Lone Ranger-- to be relevant to the superhero idiom are those who are willing to cross "genre-fences," and comprehend the way in which heroes with "realistic" powers may have "unrealistic" tonalities.


The confusion stems from the fact that what English-speakers call "horror, fantasy, and science fiction" have become the three most-referenced "super-genres" of the metaphenomenal, and from the fact that these super-genres have been ceaselessly interbred throughout the twentieth century-- principally, though not exclusively, by authors of popular fiction.  I may explore some of these combinations in a future essay.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 2

Empirical realism is underpinned by a metaphysical dogma, which I shall
call the epistemic fallacy, that statements about being can always be
transposed into statements about our knowledge of being. -- Bhaskar, p. 16.

 

Given that I have recently proposed the bifurcation of fictive causality into two intertwining but separable aspects, it behooves me to look back at some of the examples I've given in earlier essays to see if they support my conception of those aspects: "regularity" and "intelligibility."  I should note that of the two "regularity" is the primary aspect, given that the human conviction that the world is intelligible to cognition arises from the fact that some if not all phenomena demonstrate patterns of regularity, thus allowing human beings to create empirical hypotheses as to what forces make those phenomena act in a regular manner. Still, as Bhaskar points out above, it's a fallacy to assume that a statement about (physical) being can be transposed into a definitive statement about our knowledge.


In the INTERSECTING AXES essay, I pointed out that both the "naturalistic" and "marvelous" phenomenalities are unitary in terms of what I chose at that time to call the aspects of "body" and "non-body"-- also roughly comparable to Cassirer's "causality" and "efficacy." In contrast, the phenomenenality of "the uncanny" was one in which "body" was at odds with "non-body." I  surveyed examples of my "ten tropes" in search of the way that they could "reveal the uncanny affects in terms of the ambivalence between body and non-body." Now I would say that the ambivalence is one between the aspect of regularity-- that is, the statement that all physical aspects are regular and unchanging, at least in comparison to the irregularities found in the domain of the marvelous-- and the aspect of intelligibility.  In the sphere of the naturalistic it's impossible for anything to be truly unintelligible, but within the sphere of the uncanny it's quite possible to see the same forces of "regularity causation" at work, and yet to see them result in something mysterious; a.k.a. Rudolf Otto's "overplus."
Going trope by trope:

ASTOUNDING ANIMALS-- In the AXES essay I mentioned both Melville's Moby Dick and Steven Spielberg's Jaws as examples of this trope in its uncanny phase, but did not supply an example of the naturalistic phase. Since I've not read Peter Benchley's original JAWS novel, I've no idea whether or not he made his shark "astounding" in spite of the creature's naturalistic limitations. However, I have seen the 1956 film adaptation of MOBY DICK, and would say without question that its prime creators, John Huston and Ray Bradbury, were completely innocent of any intimation that the whale might be something other than a big dumb brute.  In contrast to Melville's leviathan, the whale is purely "intelligible." 

BIZARRE CRIMES-- I commented on three literary or cinematic examples of characters-- Sade's Juliette, Fleming's Blofeld, and Lew Landers' Doctor Vollin-- who committed crimes "for motives that go beyond the ordinary ends of 'acquisition,'" which was simply a very Bataillean way of speaking of the motives appropriate to naturalism.  I supplied no counter-examples in which "body" and "non-body" were in a naturalistic equilibrium, but in this essay I studied two Tod Slaughter films side by side. Whereas Slaughter's villain in CRIMES OF THE DARK HOUSE might be atypical in comparison to your run-of-the-mill naturalistic criminal, everything he does is characterized by nothing but simple "acquisition." In contrast, Sweeney Todd, like the three evildoers cited above, has become a pop-fiction boogieman, and his motives come down to "the psychopathic love of killing"-- which, being a very Sadean mindset, lines up with Bataille's concept of expenditure.

DELIRIOUS DREAMS AND FALLACIOUS FRAGMENTS-- For this trope I supplied no examples at all in the AXES essay.  This one, though, seems unproblematic given that every sentient human being has experienced dreams, and rarely do people ever dream things comparable to Alice's extended dream of Wonderland, or the peripatetic dreams of this fictionalized version of Hans Christian Andersen. Within the sphere of the naturalistic, such highly constructed dream-voyages are very unlikely if not impossible; real dreams are too chaotic to produce such narratives.  Thus a film like 1952's HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN subscribes to a more "intelligible" view of the dreaming process, for this version of Hans does not dream his great fairy-tales.  Rather, they spring out of the function of half-conscious day-dreaming, which in this film is explainable by virtue of the Adlerian theory of compensation.

ENTHRALLING HYPNOTISM AND ILLUSIONISM-- Here I cited the famous hypnotist Svengali as an example of a hypnotist/illusionist whose abilities went beyond the intelligible limits of real practioners of this art.  The 2011 HUGO, with its fascination with showing how a particular form of illusionism works-- that of George Melies' early cinema-FX-- provides a decent enough counter-example. Whereas Svengali's masterful hypnotism can create a silk purse out of the sow's ear that is Trilby, the fictionalized Melies is a brilliant showman, but his talent is still fundamentally intelligible.

EXOTIC LANDS AND CUSTOMS-- Again I cited only an "uncanny" example of this trope, citing how the 1941 serial JUNGLE GIRL took the real-life African tribe of the Masai and created a fictional lion-worshipping tribe.  But a better contrast between "intelligible" and "anti-intelligible" versions of the same concept is featured in this review of two versions of Wilkie Collins' famous mystery novel THE MOONSTONE, which concerns an exotic clique of Hindus who come to England to recover a stolen sacred diamond.  The 1934 film is so uninterested in the exoticism of the Hindu characters that their role is reconfigured into just one Hindu servant, who is innocent of any crime.

FREAKISH FLESH-- In AXES I mentioned one of the most famous literary "freaks" in the Hunchback of Notre Dame as an example of an "uncanny" freak, while in this earlier essay I cited a counter-example: the fictionalized version of "the Elephant Man" in David Lynch's 1980 film. I also mentioned that "phenomena like twins or dwarves" could "convey a sense of supernatural 'strangeness' under the correct conditions," and on my film-blog gave an example of such a contrast with these two films about twinship.  These remarks I find illustrative of the ways in which a creator can suggest the nature of the "anti-intelligible" even while the forces of regularity are constant:

But even without this [prophetic] aspect of the film, Neill confers a sense of  "strangeness" to the proceedings.  It's certainly possible that another filmmakers might have taken the same plot-elements and rendered something more naturalistic, along the lines of Joseph Mankiewicz's DRAGONWYCK.  But in BLACK ROOM the twins by themselves make a very strange pair, at once (as the myth-quotation above has it)  capable of bestowing both beneficence and malevolence equally-- while in RINGER, both twins are just two eccentric human beings.

OUTRE OUTFITS SKILLS AND DEVICES-- In AXES I mention both Tarzan and the Lone Ranger as heroes possessed of, respectively, "outré skills" and "outré outfits."  I've mentioned elsewhere that in western films with masked crimefighters, those crimefighters are usually the only uncanny thing in those films, and certainly the Lone Ranger is one of the most anti-intelligible, given that a majority of the stories must deal with him explaining that his mask "represents justice" rather than connoting the more common (and intelligible) meaning of a face-mask. There aren't too many characters who parallel Tarzan's origins without delving into the realm of the uncanny, but one of the few is this serial-hero HAWK OF THE WILDERNESS.

PERILOUS PSYCHOS-- Again I mentioned only uncanny psycho-characters: Norman Bates, Jason Voorhees and Leatherface.  For a time I debated with myself as to whether Hannibal Lecter of the cinematic SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was truly "uncanny" in the tradition of Norman Bates, beginning here with a somewhat negative appraisal, but much later deciding here that Lecter's madness did possess the same "mysterioso" qualities I sought in the earlier essay. In contrast, the film with which I compare LAMBS in this essay, 1999's EYE OF THE BEHOLDER, is satisfied to stick with a very doctrinaire psychological program for its psycho's evolution.  Both Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter are subjected to psychological paradigms, but they exceed the limits of the intelligible, even though they are subject to the same forces of "regularity" as the character from BEHOLDER.

 PHANTASMAL FIGURATIONS-- In TEN DYNAMIC DEMONS I mentioned the Phantom of the Opera as an example of this trope, but in AXES I switched to Conan Doyle's novel HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES because there's far more suspense in that novel as to whether the titular beast is really a spectre or not.  Of the Hound I wrote: "even after it has been revealed to be a phosphorescent dog, one cannot claim that reality has entirely won the game."  Thus far the only counter-example I have offered on my film-blog is producer Val Lewton's 1943 LEOPARD MAN, because though it attempts a hoax even as HOUND does, the hoaxer draws not upon phantasms of spectres or even of madmen, but only of a mundane killer leopard-- in other words, an entirely intelligible menace.

WEIRD FAMILIES AND SOCIETIES-- My only example here was that another "uncanny" version, 1943's THE SEVENTH VICTIM, whose Satanist cult maintains an aura of the mysterious even when its members are revealed to be nothing more than jaded human beings.  Off the top of my head I don't know if it's possible to make a purely naturalistic work about a Satanist or occult society. The closest parallel that occurs to me is a society or family existing in a milieu that is potentially uncanny, but which works against those associations. For instance, the appeal of most "old dark house" films-- including the original 1932 OLD DARK HOUSE-- inheres in the viewpoint character(s) interacting with some weird family or society within that house. But 1945's HOUSE OF FEAR
avoids this approach entirely, as I observed in my review:

The "fear" conjured forth by this work is purely naturalistic in nature, as in the fear of an entirely human killer.  Even though FEAR centers upon events in an "old dark house," the film could almost stand as an example of how to make the least spooky "old dark house" film possible, since familiar Holmes director Roy William Neill eschews most of the usual ghostly goings-on.  Even a stern-faced housekeeper doesn't provide any spook-juice.

In closing, I'll note that since I over-emphasized the "uncanny" versions of each trope in AXES, this time I'll provide illustrations drawn only from the "naturalistic" domain.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 1

My reading of Bhaskar's REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE led me to advocate a bifurcated conception of fictive causality, characterized by "regularity" and "intelligibility." However, as it happens I had encountered a less persuasive use of the latter term, referenced in this 2012 essay.

But perhaps one should go a step farther than Barthes [in THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT] and say that the facts that lead him to propose these two views [of "joissance" and "plaisir"] indicate that we are dealing not so much with a historical process in which one kind of novel replaces another as with a kind of opposition which has always existed within the novel: a tension between the intelligible and the problematic.-- Jonathan Culler, STRUCTURALIST POETICS, p. 191.

I specified that Culler's dichotomy was "probably useless to my phenomenological project" because it arose "from a limited and hyper-literary classic novel/experimental novel comparison." But I did draw a limited parallel between Culler's terms and those of C.S. Lewis' reading of Rudolf Otto:

Thus, to invoke once again the C.S. Lewis trinity referenced here: the "tigers of fear" belong entirely the world of Cullers "intelligible," in that they may cause one to fear for one's physical safety but nothing more.  In contrast, both the "ghosts of dread" and the "gods of awe" belong in the world of the "problematic," if one defines the problematic as the human desire to exceed the limits of the merely intelligible.

Despite the provisional definition above, I didn't use "the problematic" as a literary term, since it was a little too-- problematic, and "the intelligible" wasn't much better in this context.  At one point I advocated viewing the two levels of the metaphenomenal as united by their common trait of their "strangeness," while the single level of the isophenomenal was characterized by what I called "oddity." I later moved away from this view in favor of one in which each phenomenality was characterized by the type of sublimity potentially possible in that phenomenality, detailed in this essay.

This tripartite concept of sublimity, though, was at the time dependent upon the traditional Thomist opposition of the "cognitive" and the "affective."  I tried to finesse these concepts with reference to the notions of probability derived from Aristotle and Lewis:

All three phenomenalities-- naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous-- are established by the ways in which the authors of works in each division choose to present "evidence" for the nature of their worlds.  For a critic like Tzvetan Todorov, this means establishing whether or not a "fantastic" event is "real" or "unreal."  But as I've demonstrated in my formulation of the NUM theory, even the most 'realistic' narrative merely reproduces gestures suggestive of a reality dominated by causality.

Now, in keeping with my readings of Bhaskar, I would revise this to read that a naturalistic narrative would be "suggestive of a reality dominated by both regularity and intelligibility." Roughly four months after writing PROBABILITY SHIFTS, I determined here that my usages of "probability" were no longer viable, drawing as they did on 'the now untenable, Aristotle-derived association of "the impossible and improbable."' 

Thus I rejected the idea of a "probability factor," which would fluctuate depending on the "evidence" presented by a given author regarding the world he portrays. I then returned to Cassirer's concept of magical efficacy as a counterpart to traditional causality in the three-part AFFECTIVE FREEDOM series, here, here, and here. Basically, I sought to unify Cassirer's opposition between causality and efficacy-- the latter representing a "free selection of causes" rather than classical "cause-and-effect"-- with the "affective freedom" I found in the literary phenomenalities of the uncanny and the marvelous.  Within these phenomenalities, a reader could experience the intertwined affects of either "dread/fascination" or "awe/exaltation" without necessarily believing them to be reducible to the affects that dominate the naturalistic: i.e., "fear/admiration." 

I don't reject Cassirer's concept of magical efficacy, in that I still believe what I said here:

Eventually I discerned that the “free selection of causes” Cassirer identified in archaic mythologies was identical in mode to the “fudge factors” writers use whenever they describe all manner of marvelous beings and devices.

But Cassirer was only interested in a dichotomy between the views of "theoretical thinking," represented by traditional causality, and "mythic thinking," represented by the multicausal nature of efficacy.  Ironically this allows for a conceptual divide between the two-- a divide suggestive of Tzvetan Todorov's dichotomy between "the real" and "the unreal," which I rejected in my earliest essays on his theory:

 It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.-- Todorov, THE FANTASTIC.

I believe "critical realist" Cassirer sought to avoid this sort of empiricist reduction, as did rationalists Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis.  I might have expected a post-Kantian, more than a rationalist, to have ferreted out the need for an interstitial category between traditional causality and multicausality.  But for whatever reasons, Otto and Lewis managed to supply the rationale for this category, as well as some of the clues as to its relationship to traditional causality. 

 It's a further irony that Roy Bhaskar, concerned in REALIST THEORY with the phenomenology of scientific investigation, should suggest my current-- and hopefully permanent-- solution to the problems of causal relations in fiction.  Prior to reading Bhaskar, I would have thought it no more possible to split causality's aspects than to follow King Solomon's advice about splitting a child down the middle to satisfy both of the child's putative parents.  Now I perceive that causality is not unitary, at least not in fiction.  Therefore the splitting of fictive causality is more comparable to a separation of conjoined twins-- twins who can live either together or apart, depending on what effects a given author wants to achieve.

OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT. 3

In CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN PT. 2 I wrote:

I'm now asserting that causality in a literary context-- which, contra Todorov, is not homologous with the causality human beings experience in life-- has both a cognitive aspect and an affective aspect, summed up as "regularity" and "intelligibility." 

And in the first installment of OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS I defined the uncanny aspect of the film as inherent in Sherlock Holmes' foe Jack the Ripper:

 ...in what qualities does Jack the Ripper's metaphenomenality inhere?  As his only qualification for the metaphenomenal is his status as a "perilous psycho," that metaphenomenality must inhere in a mental, "non-body" quality.  His madness is his method, and therefore his metaphenomenality.

I then debated whether or not Sherlock Holmes' "polymath" qualities might qualify him for as a "mental metaphenomenality," but decided that I would have to re-view STUDY IN TERROR to see whether or not Holmes showed such uncanny qualities himself.  However, in OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT. 2 I acknowledged that the Holmes of the 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES film definitely did use his special deductive powers in an "uncanny" fashion:

What I did not then note is that in this scene Holmes-- who is obviously less heavily muscled than his opponent-- is utilizing his deductive skills as Doyle never did and probably would not have: to suss out his opponent's weaknesses and to plan his attack with machine-like efficiency.  Thus this film, which I have not yet reviewed, would fit the uncanny version of my trope for "uncanny skills." The film's use of graphics to depict the way Holmes thinks-- projecting words or images onto the screen, to share diegetic space with the actors-- also imparts an aura of "strangeness" to Holmes' computer-like cogitations.

I have no problem in stating that this sort of mental acuity, while it does not violate the regularity aspect of causality, does defy its intelligibility aspect, even as does Jack the Ripper's madness. And though I explored a couple of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories briefly, I have not yet decided whether or not Holmes' unusual command of arcane knowledge can be termed "anti-intelligible." I am tending currently to think not.

Fictional reiterations of Jack the Ripper, though, do not show the same ambivalence. 

I do not render any final verdict here as to whether "the causality human beings experience in life" is entirely naturalistic or not.  But it is certainly of a different order than anything we experience through fiction, and so the two are not homologous.  That said, when I think of the historical figure of Jack the Ripper, I opt for the default characterization that almost everyone does: that he was a real human being who killed out of some lunacy and eluded the law.

I have yet to encounter a fictionalized Jack the Ripper, however, whose spectre does not suggest either "the uncanny" or "the marvelous."  This is in contrast to many other perilous psychos. 


In this essay I showed how Norman Bates, though his character was based on the real-life aberration Ed Gein, exceeded what I now call the intelligibility aspect of causality.  Despite attempts by writer Bloch and director Hitchcock to inject standardized psychological readings of Norman Bates, Norman is not reduced by these readings.  He remains a figure who dominantly suggests the antipathetic affect of dread, as signified by the famous shot of Anthony Perkins at the film's conclusion, which I like to call the "Mona Lisa Death's Head."

Ironically, the A&E BATES MOTEL teleseries manages to reduce Norman to the more mundane level of "fear"-- although to be sure, the opening episodes focus more on the fearful nature of his mother, Norma Bates, and softening Norman as the series works toward its "evolution of a psycho."


I admit that I have not seen or read every fictional portrayal of Jack the Ripper, which this Wikipedia list purports to cover.  There may be renditions of the Ripper that do to him what A&E did to Norman.  Yet because the real Ripper was never apprehended, his figure resists the naturalistic straight-jacket.  Of course, many "imitation Rippers" may fall into this category.

 This 1927 Hitchcock film departs from its source by renaming the serial killer "the Avenger." Further, though Hitchcock had wanted to keep some ambivalence as to the guilt or innocence of the man suspected of being the killer, he was overruled, with the result that the accused man is proved innocent and the real killer, though his capture is mentioned, is never seen on-screen.  Without question Hitchcock introduces visual motifs to suggest the dread associated with a serial-killer boogieman, but one may argue that these are overpowered by the film's naturalistic focus.

And of course, Hitchcock himself did a seventies-era version of this type of serial murderer in 1972's FRENZY, reviewed here.  I noted in the review that despite an early comparison between the film's "Necktie Killer" and the legendary "Jack the Ripper," there was no "strangeness" in Hitchcock's handling of FRENZY's strangler, in contrast to his handling of Norman Bates.

By contrasting Hitchcock's approach to the serial killer in this and a genuinely uncanny film like PSYCHO,  I find that Hitchcock's approach with FRENZY has more in common with his 1943 film SHADOW OF A DOUBT.  In my earlier essay I asserted that the psycho-killer of SHADOW lacked any of the "strange or unworldly aspects" I find in Norman Bates, and the same is true of the "Necktie Killer" in FRENZY, even though he's compared to Jack the Ripper in the film's first ten minutes.

To my knowledge, though, whenever a modern writer attempts to write of the actual Jack the Ripper-- the tendency is to see him through the lens of the uncanny affect of dread, whether he is seen as a man hiding a psychotic secret (A STUDY IN TERROR),  a delver into supernatural secrets (Moore and Campbell's FROM HELL), or even-- as in one novel I won't name to avoid giving away the "big reveal"-- Sherlock Holmes himself.  There are, as I said above, also versions in which Jack the Ripper is some marvelous being, as in Robert Bloch's short story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper." But more than any other famous madman of reality or fiction, the Ripper seems to work best as an image of dread--one that bends, but does not break, the normal configurations of the causal world.

 

CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN PT. 2

For this essay I'll just tie together the observations between the previous essay and my last general-theory essay on the NUM formula.

In the former essay, I'm now asserting that causality in a literary context-- which, contra Todorov, is not homologous with the causality human beings experience in life-- has both a cognitive aspect and an affective aspect, summed up as "regularity" and "intelligibility."  Though I have not stated it in so many words, the same would be true of the Cassirer-esque parallel to causality, "efficacy," whose cognitive and affective aspects would be "anti-" versions of both concepts above.

In THE INTERSECTING AXES essay, I was still regarding causality as unitary in this statement:

It occurs to me that with both my categories of "the naturalistic" and "the marvelous," all of the "intangible shit" is highly dependent on whether or not the diegetic world depicted is one in which causality can or cannot be disrupted.

Now, I would say that it is only the regularity aspect of causality that has been violated in the domain of the marvelous.  Works of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous" both violate the "intelligibility" aspect of causality, and the affects associated with the over-ruling quality of "strangeness"-- a quality Rudolf Otto insightfully termed an "overplus."  But many audience-members, when looking at works in the domain of the uncanny, tend to ally such works with the domain of the naturalistic simply because all they can see is that the author has not violated the cosmos' appearance of regularity.

For instance, take the case of the Batman, whom I used here as an example to demonstrate the problematic status of such an alliance:

Like the Todorov book I’ve recently critiqued, the naïve critic’s assertion, “Batman isn’t a superhero because he doesn’t have superpowers,” contains a fundamental insight despite being essentially wrong. The latter also takes a lot less time to refute. The naïve critic has chosen to view the adjective “super” in “superhero” as meaning one thing and one thing only: the possession of powers, giving one the ability to perform “super” feats that human heroes cannot perform. However, “super” clearly does not connote this, either in dictionaries or in the opinions of many readers who do consider Batman a superhero—usually for an equally simple reason, because he wears a costume.

It's clear to me that even if Batman never encountered any marvelous entities or used any marvelous weapons, he would have a stronger alliance with the domain of "the marvelous" than that of "the naturalistic." His case would be the same as Zorro, the Lone Ranger, and many other costumed types who had no powers and dominantly opposed only naturalistic menaces.

The only affects appropriate to the domain of the naturalistic, then, are those governed by what I have called "the atypical," which combines the regularity and intelligibility aspects of causality.  Those affects were described in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT. 1:

In a fictive world where affectivity is defined by the causal order, the dominant sympathetic affect is "admiration" of things characteristic of the causal order, particularly what Jung called Freud's "physiological factors," while the dominant antipathetic affect is "fear" of aspects of the causal/physical order.

Now, I have chosen in other essays to make clear distinctions between the two different types of "strangeness," types I labeled by the relation of their sublimity-potential to the depiction of "reality" in the narrative.  But though I still feel those distinctions are important to a discussion of how sublimity occurs across the three domains, those distinctions do not bear on analyzing the maintenance of fictive causality.

Thus, I would now revise this sentence from the AFFECTIVE FREEDOM essay:

the uncanny flourishes precisely in the contrast between the monocausal nature of cognitive reality in a given work, while affectivity "symbolically exceeds the cognitive order," taking the dominant forms of "fascination" for the sympathetic affect and "dread" for the antipathetic affect.

It is not a "cognitive order" that has been exceeded, but the "affective aspect" of fictive causality.

The statement I make in that essay regarding "the marvelous" regarding its affects also requires some revision:

Where affectivity exceeds the causal order in accordance with the multicausal nature of the world's cognitivity, the dominant sympathetic affect is "exaltation" toward the multicausal, and the dominant antipathetic affect is "awe" toward it.

The affectivity alluded to above is in effect the same "anti-intelligibility" that makes a more muted appearance in works of the uncanny, but now it is allied to an "anti-regularity" that dominates the causal order of works of the marvelous.

CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN

I've finished another book that I started back in December: Roy Bhaskar's A REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE, first mentioned here.  I'm not going to devote anything like the extensive coverage I gave to Edward Skidelsky's book, however.  Bhaskar's book started out well, but quickly became repetitious and devoted to Wittengenstein-like logic-chopping.  The most interesting section is this one:

Regularity determinism must be straightaway distinguished from two
other forms of determinism: which may be called 'ubiquity'
determinism and 'intelligibility" determinism. Ubiquity determinism
asserts that every event has *a* real *cause*; intelligibility
determinism that every event has *an* intelligible *cause*; regularity
determinism that the same (type of) event has the same (type of)
*cause*. The concepts of 'cause' involved in the three determinisms
are of course distinct. For the ubiquity determinist the *cause is
that thing, material or agent that is productive of an effect*; for
the intelligibility determinist it is simply that which renders an
event intelligible to men; for the regularity determinist
it is the total set of conditions that regularly proceeds or
accompanies an event.-- Bhaskar, ARTOS, p. 70.



It occurred to me that given how often I talk about "causality" with respect to the NUM formula, as I do in this essay, I might experiment by comparing Bhaskar's distinctions about the "concepts of cause" to the nature of causality in my Cassirer-indebted schema.

The most obvious disconnect is that I'm interested in a schema that takes in all of the "symbolic forms," while Bhaskar is interested only in a theory of science.  Further, as I noted here Bhaskar cites three philosophical approaches to science and allocates each of the "determinisms" above to one of the three.  But Bhaskar's three approaches are irrelevant to parallels to Cassirer's opposition of causality and efficacy, which I've also identified as the split between the *cognitive* and the *affective."

With such a comparison in mind, both "ubiquity determinism" and "regularity determinism" seem like two closely related statements about the nature of "real causes," which means that they could be subsumed under Aquinas' definition of the cognitive: "how we know the world." By contrast, "intelligibility determinism" makes a statement regarding humankind's perception of "real causes," which may be subsumed under Aquinas' definition of the affective: "how we understand the world." In so saying I assert that the conviction that all things should prove intelligible is an affective, not a cognitive, state of mind, which may well be at odds with Bhaskar's intention.

In this essay I attempted to reconfigure my older cognitive/affective schema with one more aligned to Cassirer's concepts:

NATURALISTIC-- cognitivity and affectivity are defined by the causal order; i.e. "one definite cause yields one definite effect"

UNCANNY-- cognitivity is defined by the causal order, but affectivity exceeds causal order and participates in the multicausal nature of "efficacy"

MARVELOUS-- both cognitivity and affectivity exceed the causal order and participate in the multicausal nature of "efficacy"

But as I said above, this configuration doesn't adequately define causality.

I hypothesize, then, that causality within the sphere of human art is reducible to two interrelated aspects: that of regularity (cognitive) and intelligibility (affective).  With that in mind, then:

In the NATURALISTIC category, all phenomena are both "regular" and "intelligible."

In the UNCANNY category, all phenomena are "regular" in that they do not exceed the cognitive//physical nature of causality, but some phenomena are not "intelligible" given that they may prove unintelligible by the standards of the NATURALISTIC.

In the MARVELOUS category, some phenomena may be neither "regular" nor "intelligible."

This breakdown would allow for both of the following definitions of fantasy to be true.  The first speaks primarily of causality's cognitive aspect:

“The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday reality.”—Roger Caillois, AU COEUR DU FANTASTIQUE.

While this one challenges causality's affective aspect:

“The fantastic in literature doesn’t exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle.”-- Lars Gustaffson, cited in Franz Rottensteiner's THE FANTASY BOOK.

I also note that Cassirer, in his comparison between the discursive mode of theoretical reason and the expressive mode of myth, essentially takes aim against the "regularity" aspect of causality:

Whereas empirical thinking is essentially directed toward establishing an unequivocal relation between specific "causes" and specific effects, mythical thinking, even where it raises the question of origins as such, has a free selection of causes at its disposal... Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.

And, a couple of pages later, he contrasts them on the principle I call intelligibility:

Here again it is not the concept of causality as such but the specific form of causal explanation which underlies the difference and contrast between the two spiritual worlds [of theoretical reason and myth]... Science is content if it succeeds in apprehending the individual event in space and time as a special instance of a general law... The mythical consciousness, on the other hand, applies its "why" precisely to the particular and the unique.  It "explains" the individual event by postulating individual acts of the will."

It's worth noting, too, that a page later Cassirer emphasizes that for myth-consciousness "all the forces of nature are... nothing other than expressions of a demonic or divine will."

Thus, when I experience "strangeness" in either an uncanny or marvelous work of art, I am feeling myself divorced by its violation of either the "regularity" or "intelligibility" aspects of causal law.

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT. 3

At the end of THREE PROBABILITIES  I said:

Some specific examples of the different intersections of probability and sublimity seems called for. I'll be drawing on my examples from TEN DYNAMIC DEMONS, since that's one of the essays in which I invoked the now untenable, Aristotle-derived association of "the impossible and improbable."

For the time being I'll supply just one of the ten: the trope I labeled "perilous pyschos."  For this trope I chose the literary-and-cinematic figure of Norman Bates.

I considered drawing a comparison between the fictional character of Norman-- whose film I reviewed here -- and a film based on the principal real-life model for Norman, ED GEIN.  I do find GEIN to be a film bereft of the subtler types of antipathetic effect, of dread and awe: it is first and foremost a film about fear, where physical peril is the dominant threat.  Though GEIN tells the true story of the real psycho's misdeeds, it takes the form of "fictionalized reality" rather than a pure documentary. The film begins with a few quotes from persons who knew Gein or persons involved in his murders, but following this preface-like section, the film depicts all real-life events in a fictionalized manner, portraying events that a pure documentary could not legitimately represent, as with a scene where Gein traipses around his yard in his "woman-suit." Yet, even though GEIN pursues the tropes of fiction, it seems inappropriate to draw comparisons between even a fictionalized version of a real person and a completely fictional figure.

But it is appropriate to compare one version of Norman with another.  Here's the Anthony Perkins version, whom I view as "uncanny" due to the nature of his madness.

And here's another version, from the recent A&E teleseries BATES MOTEL.

MOTEL shuffles a few of the basic configurations of the original PSYCHO-- the nervous young man (still in high school here), his domineering mother, and the titular motel.  However, MOTEL shows none of the intensity of the madness depicted either by Bloch or by Hitchcock.   The ten episodes thus far aired have dealt with assorted mundane menaces-- a crooked sheriff, a white-slavery ring, a rapist-- who makes the mistake of raping Norman's mother, who retaliates by knife-murdering him-- and Norma Bates herself, who may be narcissistically devoted to her son but falls very short of the sort of dreadful madness one sees in Bloch and Hitchcock.  If the teleseries lasts long enough to develop the character of Norman-- who is depicted as nothing more than a slightly geeky, but not repulsive, young fellow who captivates some of the local girls-- BATES will certainly have him doing some of the same sort of things that the Bloch-Hitchcock character does.  But in the predominantly naturalistic atmosphere of the series, it seems unlikely that it will conjure forth any of the uncanny atmosphere utilized by either Bloch or Hitchcock.

A side-point: at the end of AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT 1 I demonstrated the conditions under which a particular film-- in this case, the serial ACE DRUMMOND-- could have been naturalistic, uncanny or marvelous, depending on whether or not certain elements were present in the diegesis.  I viewed ACE as being dominated by the antipathetic affect of "awe" because I felt that this affect "trumped" those of "fear" and "dread," even though the other two were present and could have been dominant given the aforesaid alterations.  I want to add that it is feasible in some cases for the "subtler" affects to be "trumped" as well.  Hitchcock's suspense-drama SHADOW OF A DOUBT possesses a naturalistic phenomenality, for the monstrous "Merry Widow Killer" is principally a physical threat to anyone who discovers his identity, including his niece, "Young Charlie."  Yet though fear is the controlling affect, there are instances in which the film does depict moments of dread, a dread that stems from Young Charlie's anitpathy to her very relatedness to her insane relative.  This antipathy, at base a fear of psychological absorption by a threatening "Other," is not dwelled upon in SHADOW.  But roughly seventeen years later Hitchcock returned to a far more intense meditation upon that theme, thanks to his encounter with Robert Bloch's work.