EVERY REVELATION, STILL A SECRET

All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively.-- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Here we run into a dilemma, for what is truth and what is illusion? John Briggs, paraphrasing Martin Heidegger, has described truth as "the freedom of letting things reveal themselves as they are-- but... when anything is revealed, other things are concealed."-- DREAMS OF ISIS (1995), Normandi Ellis, p. 266.

These two quotes both appeared in separate sections of the Ellis book, which is that author's personal account of her experiences with examining Egyptian concepts of spirituality and/or occultism. It's an interesting book, and I've read a considerable number of similar accounts from dubious biographies like the Don Juan chronicles and theoretical studies like those of Colin Wilson. While I've had occasion to believe in the reality of certain so-called "psychic" events, I hold no firm opinion one way or the other on subjects like soul transmigration or the existence of archaic gods, even on something akin to the "astral plane." I suspect that much of my interest in the occult stems from my desire to know, as much as any individual can, the outward limits of the imagination. I have a dim memory of a Percy Shelley reminiscence, in which he claimed that in his youthful years he read a lot of mystical literature because he was seeking "metaphors for poetry." However, I haven't troubled to look for that particular quote.

As for the quotes above, I knew Bachelard by reputation but have not yet read POETICS OF SPACE or any other work by him. I have read a little Heidegger, though not enough to have any notion as to what he may've said that author John Briggs paraphrased, or the context Briggs had in mind when he made the comment in his book FIRE IN THE CRUCIBLE. Still, Briggs' purported ideas on aesthetics might prove interesting to my ongoing project. Bachelard's evaluations of science might draw some intriguing comparisons with the works of Whitehead on that subject.

Though about thirty years separate the quotes of Bachelard and Briggs, they seem to complement each other not a little in speaking of the difficulties of communication. Reading both quotes out of context naturally means that I don't know what general argument either writer was making, but I can respond to what the quotes suggest in themselves.

Starting with Bachelard, it's fascinating that he asserts that all one can communicate is something subjective, something that is explicitly not objective in nature, and that, even that "subjective something" is not the actual secret of the person transmitting it, but an "orientation" toward that secret. The opposition bears a structural similarity with Plato's synopsized view of Art: a "shadow of a shadow," the originary shadow being the phenomenal world, which is itself "cast" by the Eternal Forms. But for Plato, the Forms were objective reality. Centuries later, materialist philosophers would regard all the phenomena associated with "the real world" as the only measure of objectivity, while all things subjective were at best epiphenomenal. I would guess that when Bachelard says that the implied "we" cannot "tell the secret objectively," he's at least partly agreeing with the materialist idea that subjectively speaking every man is an island, and that every such island harbors secrets that cannot be communicated as such to any others. Yet Bachelard is perhaps more hopeful than the materialists in saying that though subjective secrets of a private mind cannot be communicated-- possibly because they stem from so many intertwined, personal factors-- "we" can communicate orientations, as one presumes, for example, Socrates did to Plato. Last month I touched on similar limitations with regard to literary experience, under the heading of "intersubjectivity:"

But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities. -- THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 1.

Of course, I don't know if Bachelard is using the word "secret" with any special connotation in mind, but for the present I view it as general subjectivity. "Orientation" would be the part of an individual's secret subjectivity that can be transmitted to others, though always with the likelihood of misprision of some kind, like, say, Plato recording those aspects of Socrates' philosophy that resonated best with Plato himself.

Now Briggs' quote sounds a little more pessimistic, a little more "one step forward, two steps back." Briggs doesn't confine himself to communications between human beings; for him, even "things" can reveal themselves-- and conceal themselves, too. I assume that "things" would include all phenomena, from human beings to all aspects of the environment in which humans live. Shamanistic accounts, such as those on which Carlos Castaneda probably based his books, would allow for human beings to receive communications from birds or insects or even stones. 

However, in the folklore we have on such subjects, such communicates reveal, but they don't also conceal. So I tend to think Briggs is, in the final analysis, still talking about human communication, just like Bachelard. 

How does one reveal and conceal at the same time? In OEDIPUS TYRANNUS the Delphic Oracle reveals what is destined to happen to Oedipus. But the Oracle conceals the relevant info that he is not related to the two people Oedipus thinks are his natural parents. Revealing that, of course, would spoil the story, which depends upon a reaction to limited knowledge.

 In the world of intersubjectivity, too, Reader A can feel that this or that work by Author B feels revelatory. But of course, Author B is only revealing what is important to him, and in communicating one thing he may conceal a hundred others, both from himself and from others. Percy Shelley's incantatory poetry reveals his superabundant talent for versification. But nothing in the poetry will reveal many other aspects of Shelley, aspects that might distract from his poetry. In a somewhat more intentional concealment, Karl Marx enthralled countless believers into a sincere belief in his myth of the proletariat, but he omitted anything that might hinder that revelation.  And often there's no intent to conceal. If one chooses to follow one philosophy, it will always remain concealed as to what another path might have revealed.

And possibly the greatest concealment is that I have found both quotes to have revelatory content, though since I haven't read them in context, I might be "concealing" some or all of their "real" meanings.

HETERO FORMATIVE

The idea that sex functions to provide variation for natural selection to act upon was first advocated by August Weismann and it has dominated much discussion on the evolution of sex and recombination since then...  In summary, although Weismann's hypothesis must be considered the leading candidate for the function of sex and recombination, nevertheless, many additional principles are needed to fully account for their evolution.-- NIH abstract.

All normal human beings have soi-distant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not. --Robert Heinlein, FRIDAY, 1982.

I haven't written as much as I used to about the excesses of academic "queer theory" since the Hooded Utilitarian site closed down. But HU's demise was not an indicator of a general trend. This is confirmed by a recent jeremiad from London's School of African and Oriental Studies regarding philosophers who were too "white" and "heteronormative."

SOAS, perhaps after thinking deeply about this for the past seven years, is now reviving the debate. It has issued a “toolkit” for secondary schools and universities who wish to teach philosophy (although you’d hope that other universities would have ideas of their own)... The toolkit sets out its position from the start. “Much academic philosophy in the UK, US, Australasia and continental Europe masks its structural antagonism to everything that is not white, bourgeois, male, heteronormative and able-bodied,” it begins. The document continues along very much the same lines for 27 pages.-- Roland White, THE TELEGRAPH, 2024.

The only possible defense for anyone to use a term as stupid as "heteronormative" is that they've allowed their minds to be polluted with Mickey Marx bullshit, and the knee-jerk inclusion of the word "bourgeois" confirms as much. And this narrow-minded, neo-chauvinist screed is rendered even more fatuous than usual when one views "normative sex" through the lens of evolutionary theory.

On a slight tangent, I read a lot of academic film criticism in the eighties and nineties. I'm not sure when I realized that almost all of the critics worshipped at the altars of either Marx, Freud, or some syncretic combination of the two, possibly to be named "Marfreud." Film critic Richard Grenier was a welcome exception. While I didn't agree with every essay in Grenier's 1990 collection CAPTURING THE CULTURE, he made clear how much the academic world had been influenced by Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used the phrase "capture the culture" to describe the devious social conditioning of the bourgeoise. Grenier wittily pointed out that modern Leftist academics were just following the same program Gramsci projected upon "normative" culture, by undermining everything that "normals" valued. An example, from some book whose title I forgot long ago, was the assertion that the "romantic clinch" seen at the conclusion of countless Hollywood movies was merely a social construction designed to please the bourgeoise-- which was stupid even if the forgotten author didn't use the word "heteronormative."

I probably read that lunkheaded judgment sometime in the nineties, long before anyone thought of using four-or-more letters to mainstream the idea of "homonormative" pride. But even then, the judgment struck me as amazingly presumptuous. If there was no heterosexuality, there would be no human race to give birth to new offspring of any sexual proclivity. Heterosexuality was not something that existed to shore up non-Marxist values, as one might argue with some logic regarding racism. Nevertheless, some thirty years later, Marxists are still whining that if most of the world still trends boy-girl, it's a terrible sin against the Marxist ideal of totally capturing the culture so that homosexuality of one kind or another becomes "the norm."

Now, had evolution not chosen the path of heterosexual conjugation as August Weismann theorized, asexual reproduction might have continued, but there's little if any reason to suppose those life-forms would have arisen to their current level of complexity. Thus heteronormativity, which gets such massive disrespect, is the factor that promoted the immense variety of life-forms on this planet.

Now stating that fact in no way supports real bigotry against any of the many paraphilias-- which includes LGBT etcetera in my book-- that also evolved alongside vanilla old hetero sex. Contrarian conservative Robert Heinlein was certainly being facetious when he had the fictional characters of his novel speak of "mixed up glands." I largely included the quote because I happened to read FRIDAY for the first time while planning this essay. Yet even back in the early 1970s, Heinlein somewhat charted the course for many non-Marxists, who simply looked upon "gay rights advocates" as justified in their rhetoric, striking back against a chauvinism that often made the homosexual paraphilia illegal. This aspect of history should always be acknowledged, not least for the many abuses perpetrated by various types of heteronormative chauvinism. But the answer to one chauvinism is not another chauvinism, and statements like those of the SAOS are nothing but a chauvinism that exaggerates the significance of homonormative behavior at the expense of the entire range of human sexual behavior.

I feel sure, for example, that there exist other persons with non-homosexual paraphilias who view their sexual persuasions as being just as opposed to "the normal" as are homosexual paraphilias-- but some if not all of these may be able to produce offspring. For instance, a macrophiliac who's stimulated only by very tall women may not have a large range of potential mates, but mating and producing offspring is not impossible. But if he (and it's usually a "he") only gets stimulated by literal giants, then he will probably contribute no more to the gene pool than anyone confined to purely homosexual hookups.

 But paraphilias like macrophilia will never get courses devoted to their kink as universities, partly because most of them keep a much lower profile than LGBT. A truly liberal philosophy would embrace all sexual variations-- with the obvious exception of the one that will and should remain illegal-- without regard to who's given the most attention by lunkheaded academics.

AN UNCANNY DIGRESSION

In my review of Jack Zipes's THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, I left out one oddball detail that didn't seem pertinent to the main review. I mentioned that Zipes was trying to co-opt the tropes of fantasy for his own concerns:

Much in the same vein as a similar Marxist work, Rosemary Jackson's FANTASY: THE LITERATURE OF SUBVERSION, Zipes' survey celebrates fantasy for purely utilitarian purposes, in line with the Marxist project of restructuring corrupt society. 

But the strange thing is that Zipes tries to enlist Sigmund Freud's category, "the uncanny," to validate his end-- yet only uses the term on three pages in the whole book. Freud himself only gets cited on four pages, so Zipes certainly wasn't trying to bring ENCHANTED SCREEN into line with Freudian concepts. If anything, it's the opposite. Freud came up with his term "the uncanny" in order to distinguish the questionable nature of a story like Hoffman's "The Sandman" from, say, the world of fairy tales, in which Freud says that "the world of reality is left behind" by a constant stream of marvelous things and beings.

I suspect that the only reason Zipes "comes to bury Freud, not to praise him," is that he Zipes wants above all to convince his readers that the marvelous fantasies of fairy tales are not irrelevant to "the world of reality." In this, of course, his principal references are the usual Marxist suspects, and so Zipes doesn't really attempt to grapple with what Freud was trying to say to his contemporaries, least of all with Freud's belief that the marvelous content of the fairy tales could be traced to "animistic" societies.

Rather than trying to reclaim "the uncanny" for his explicitly Marxist uses, Zipes would have done better to follow the example of Rosemary Jackson, who at least was clear on the point that fantasy could be used equally well for a conservative ethos (Tolkien) or some more liberating one (Carroll).

However, Zipes's bad usage of the term "uncanny" did move me to research the genesis of Freud's concept a bit more, and will probably give rise to an essay on the topic here in near future.

THE READING RHEUM: THE ENCHANTED SCREEN (2011)

I'd read one or two works by Jack Zipes before sampling THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, and to say the least his heavily Marxist interpretations of fairy tales were not to my taste. Still, SCREEN was touted as the first extensive survey of cinematic fairy-tale adaptations, so I couldn't resist giving it a try.

Although the book's subtitle is "the unknown history of fairy-tale films," my word "survey" applies better than "history," which implies a tracing, whether synchonic or diachronic, of developments over a timespan. Zipes' first chapter sets forth his theoretical preferences. Then, in the next four chapters, he (1) excoriates all of the fairy-tale works of the Walt Disney company, (2) champions the greatness of George Melies, and (3) provides quasi-histories of short fairy-tale cartoons and of feature-length animated fairy tale films. Live-action fairy-tale films are discussed in later chapters, but they don't get this summary treatment. The rest of the book is somewhat in the diachronic mode, as Zipes devotes whole chapters to cinematic treatments of particular fairy tales, such as "Cinderella" and "Snow White," or to general topics of academic interest, such as the lugubriously titled "Between Slave Language and Utopian Optimism." In a prologue Zipes admits that he simply didn't have room for some subjects, such as adaptations of the Arabian Nights.

What Zipes finds plenty of room for-- over and over and over again-- are his aesthetically hollow validations of only those works that conform to his Marxist dialectic. On the first page of the book proper, Zipes describes his priorities.

Fairy tales hint of happiness. This hint, what the German philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, has called the anticipatory illumination, has constituted their utopian appeal that has a strong moral component to it.

Much in the same vein as a similar Marxist work, Rosemary Jackson's FANTASY: THE LITERATURE OF SUBVERSION, Zipes' survey celebrates fantasy for purely utilitarian purposes, in line with the Marxist project of restructuring corrupt society. Thus, a fairy-tale story that has "a strong moral component" gets the Zipes stamp of approval, but if it in any way supports the bad old bourgeoisie, it gets condemned to commodification hell.

Here's Zipes clarifying that what he doesn't like about the bad fairy-tale films, i.e. almost everything done by Disney, because they're not "carnivalesque" in the sense of the word coined by Mikhail Bakhtin:

Fun is cotton-candy, fluffy, sweet, and without nutrients. It is the staple of all banal products of the culture industry up through the present. Fun has nothing to do with carnivalesque laughter... for the carnivalesque fairy tale ridicules fun and provokes reflection and self-reflection-- p. 56.

The idea that one should divorce "fun" from any concept related to carnivals-- which are, by the bye, a great source of cotton candy-- is not redeemed by such Marxist moralizing as "a questioning of the hierarchical arrangements of society" and so forth.

The real-world history of applied Marxism does not exactly suggest that it can deliver on its "utopian" anticipations. At best, Marxism has provided critiques of particular manifestations of social corruption, but so far its perfect society, like More's original utopia, exists in "no place." Thus, for someone who advocates fairy-tale works that are "reflective," Zipes is pretty unreflective about his discriminations. For instance, he validates most of the Fleischer Brothers' fairy-tale works, particularly those starring Betty Boop, since Betty is the picture of a harried working-girl. But for paltry reasons he dismisses three long Popeye cartoons of the late 1930s-- wherein the sailor-man encounters such entities as Sinbad, Aladdin's genie and the Forty Thieves-- largely because Zipes thinks the Fleischers were trying to emulate the works of Disney, that evil emissary of the culture industry. I would say that there's nothing in the Fleisher history more "carnivalesque" than one scene in POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA'S FORTY THIEVES. Popeye, facing off against the nasty Abu Hassan (Bluto in Arabesque gear), somehow steals the villain's longjohns off his fully clothed body, and then remarks:

"Abu Hassan got 'em any more."


Clearly, Zipes only likes moral arguments he agrees with. Of other non-Disney works that he faults is Jacques Demy's 1970 DONKEY SKIN, because "it is unclear at the end of the film whether Demy winks at the serious nature of incest." Demy's film might have some problems, but I find it ironic that Zipes dismisses it, simply for not being overtly serious about the subject of incest, given that many of the actual oral stories in the "Donkey Skin" tradition don't supply a pellucid moral. Thus, in Zipes's world, the foremost requirement of the carnivalesque is-- seriousness.

The most that I can say for THE ENCHANTED SCREEN is that it should introduce readers to many, many fairy-tale adaptations that aren't well known to Americans. But the tired recitation of nearly every Marxist cliche-- from "culture industry" to "commodification" to "appropriation"-- renders most of Zipes' observations less than illuminating.

ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT. 1

I've finally read ROBINSON CRUSOE and its lesser-known follow-up, THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE.

I noted in A SHORT HISTORY OF FANTASY-ADVENTURE how the days of the epic romance were followed by a dearth of adventure in fantasy literature, and that even those novels that had adventure-elements, such as Defoe's CAPTAIN SINGLETON, tended to lack fantastic elements. 

Defoe's best-known novel, ROBINSON CRUSOE, is another novel following in the cultural wake of the epic romances with their “knights of old.” Perhaps appropriately, given the way Defoe's century had turned against the ideals of the aristocracy, Defoe comes up with a protagonist who could not be further from the ideal of the knight. 

Crusoe has some dim ideas of glory when he defies the wishes of her merchant-father and goes to sea. Yet for the rest of the novels, he expresses nothing but pious regrets for his act of defiance, even though in the long run he becomes a rich man as the result of his travels. His first tour of duty at sea doesn’t exactly cover him with glory, and his captain frankly tells Crusoe that he was never meant to sail the seas. Nevertheless, he tries again. But everyone aboard his ship is taken prisoner by Ottoman pirates, and Crusoe becomes a slave. Though he’s treated reasonably well at a lord’s home in Morocco-- indeed, there are no badly-treated slaves depicted in the novels—Crusoe does show some guts by figuring out a way to escape his captors. A young boy named Xury—apparently also a slave, though Defoe does not say so outright—elects to go with Crusoe. Xury is only with the protagonist long enough to show the increase of Crusoe’s fortunes in two ways. The first is that, once Crusoe gets hold of a modern rifle, he uses it to flagrantly kill a lion minding its own business on the coast of Africa—one of many cavalier slayings by the Englishman. The second is that when Crusoe and Xury encounter a Portuguese captain, Crusoe actually sells Xury as a slave to the captain—and Xury is totally fine with it, accepting the provision that he’ll be freed in two years if he serves the captain well.

Since the captain’s port of call is Brazil, Crusoe uses his newfound wealth to buy a plantation there. Defoe doesn’t want this part of Crusoe’s life to become important, so despite being on the plantation for years, Crusoe does not marry or make any friends, and is in a sense almost as isolated as he will be following the third nautical voyage. This one, of course, goes down with all hands except for stranding Robinson Crusoe on a deserted Caribbean island.

This is of course the part of the novel that everyone knows by heart. Crusoe scavenges what he can from the wrecked ship, bewails his isolation for a time, and then slowly makes the island over into his own personal resort. The ship gives him ample firearms and ammunition, as well as a dog and some cats for minor companionship (none of whom he ever names). He soon finds that with patience, he can make by hand anything he really needs. He has any number of “Job moments,” where he wonders what he did to bring his creator’s wrath down upon him. But because he’s pious, eventually he decides to agree with Job, that the creator can do anything he likes with his creation.

Crusoe spends eighteen years on the island before he comes across the famous “footprint in the sand.” He’s freaked out by the lone footprint, surmising—correctly—that it was left by a Caribbean Indian, whose tribe is likely to practice the despicable rite of cannibalism. Some time later, some of the Indians begin landing their canoes on the island, explicitly to devour their captives, and Crusoe finds the gory remains. He entertains fantasies about using his guns to devastate their ranks, though prudence—the realization that some might get away and alert their fellow tribesmen—puts the brake on this resolve. (Again, he frames his prudence in religious terms: it’s not for him to punish the godless tribesmen if God doesn’t. etc.) But he does build up his ego by imagining his puissance—“I was a formidable fellow to look at when I went abroad”—though it’s significant that his ego depends principally on his many weapons.

Shortly before encountering the other best-known character in the novel, Crusoe presciently dreams of befriending one of the natives for a companion. He makes the dream come true days later, rescuing a native from his cannibal captors and killing them before they know what’s happening. He dubs the native Friday after the day on which he was rescued, and proceeds to instruct the willing native in the superiority of a Christian, non-cannibalistic outlook. Friday proves an easy convert, despite wondering why God doesn’t just kill the troublemaking Satan. After a short period of convivial life with Friday, Defoe gives Crusoe an almost anti-climactic out. Mutineers come to the island to get rid of the ship’s loyal sailors, but Crusoe prevents the murder of the crewmen. However, he also takes pity on the mutineers and leaves them on the island with assorted supplies, in lieu of their being hanged for mutiny. Then Cruose and Friday journey back to civilization. The rest of the novel is then devoted to sorting out Crusoe’s finances—his holdings have made him a rich man, even in his long absence—except for one last sortie with Friday.

While Crusoe is blissfully careless about wiping out any life-form that gets in his way, Defoe does play fair in showing Friday’s people to be just as anti-PETA. In the novel’s last chapter, Crusoe, Friday, and some companions have gone out into the wild, where they encounter various animals, including a bear. The bear seems willing to leave the humans alone, but Friday goes out of his way to antagonize the creature, and then shoot it through the head. Friday then justifies his actions by stating that his people killed bears in similar fashion back on their island, which would suggest that Defoe considered it a mark of manhood to slaughter animals, whether one worshipped the True God or not.

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE picks up with Crusoe when he’s a comfortable sixty years old, married and settled in England. Yet he can’t let go of adventure, and leaves his wife behind to go to sea on a ship captained by his (never-named) nephew. Crusoe returns to his old island, and many chapters are devoted to conflicts between the lowlife English mutineers and industrious Spanish colonizers. There are also some more attempts at conversion, as one of the mutineers tries to explain Christianity to his Carib Indian wife. There’s a big fight when several canoes invade the island to attack the new arrivals, and the cannibals are outgunned and defeated. Crusoe then leaves the island for good.

However, the fate of the cannibals is a light one, compared to what happens to the natives of Madagascar when Crusoe’s ship makes landfall there. One of the sailors kidnaps a local woman, and while the word “rape” is never voiced, it’s fairly evident that this is what happens. The culprit is captured by the tribesmen, and Crusoe joins a party of sailors to investigate what happened to him. (FWIW, an innocent member of the crew is slain when the natives take the offender.) When the sailors find the rapist dead and mutilated, they lose all control and slaughter at least a hundred of the natives, though supposedly leaving most of the women and children unharmed. Crusoe himself does not take part in the killings, though he doesn’t endanger himself to stop them either. Back on the ship, he often voices his condemnation of the slaughter, to the extent that the sailors demand that the captain leave Crusoe behind in the port of Bengal. This is the closest Crusoe comes to being isolated again, though this time he has money and is able to link up with a trade-caravan on its way to China. The caravan suffers a few attacks by Tartar bandits, who are again vanquished by European weaponry. However, the remainder of the novel emphasizes Crusoe’s righteous scorn for the pagan Chines. There's an extremely chauvinistic chapter in which Crusoe leads a group in destroying a village idol that for some reason irritates the hell out of the pious Englishman. He again returns to England, richer than before, but resolved never to travel forth again, except for the ultimate voyage to meet his Maker.

I’ve often disagreed with the Mickey Marxists who want to see imperialism in every story that stars a straight white male, or fails to portray people of color as they want to see themselves. But I must admit that the CRUSOE novels exhibit a chauvinism so extreme that authors like Haggard, Doyle and Kipling look like models of liberalism by comparison. Defoe allows Crusoe a few moments of cultural relativism—he admits that the Spanish committed many atrocities against the natives of the New World—but at base, the author wants to give his audience a picture of the world as one where nothing, not even a mass slaughter, seriously challenges any preconceptions.

PATTERN COGNITION

In THE DOMAIN GAME PT. 2 I wrote:

The three phenomenal domains of my NUM-theory operate in what I deem an archetypal sense. Different artists are drawn toward images and tropes that promise, or at least suggest, different types of freedom. What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns. Yet both, as much as "heavy thinkers" like Gaster and Schopenhauer, are alike in searching for the formula that gives them a sense of transpersonal fulfillment-- which, in the last analysis, is what all persons, of all races and creeds, desire when they speak of their need for freedom. Yet it is a freedom that is only possible in terms of perspectivism and pluralism-- and any creed that takes a different stance is merely seeking the fulfillment of some favored group or groups.

The same "sense of transpersonal fulfillment" applies not just to "phenomenal domains," but also to any conceivable pattern of human belief or behavior.

For instance, I gain a sense of fulfillment from the patterns discussed by Northrop Frye in his critical work ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, wherein he schematized the whole of literature in terms of four mythoi, which he in turn based on the four seasons. My fascination for the wide applicability of this system does not necessarily make me think that it can necessarily explain everything, but for a critic of my inclinations, it's a damned good starting-point. Ditto the above-referenced insights of Theodor Gaster, a strong influence upon Frye, who also favored a quaternary pattern, though he was oriented on understanding the different emotional affects brought forth by different religious rituals:

First the rites of mortification, symbolizing the temporary eclipse of the community. Next the rites of purgation, by which all noxious elements that might impair the community's future welfare are eliminated. Then the rites of invigoration, aimed at stimulating the growth of crops, the fecundity of humans and beasts, and the supply of needed sunshine and rainfall throughout the year. Finally, when the new lease is assured, come the rites of jubilation; there is a communal meal at which the members of the community recement their bonds of kinship by breaking bread together, and at which their gods are present.

I've been wondering whether or not modern-day critics are even capable of thinking in these terms, however; of seeing emotional expression at the heart of all literature. As I'm sure I've said on many occasions, the only patterns recognized by most pop-culture critics is one of political ideology. Marx is the primary instigator of this pattern, and indirectly led to most of the common tropes of Marxist thought: appropriation, "the culture industry," and so on. These are, in contrast to the pluralism I advocate, positions of elitism, in part because they favor a view of art that depends on ideological correctness, and that such a view is dispensed by an educated elite that seeks to control the emotional expressivity of human beings.

Nevertheless, I don't doubt that the elitists have currently won the day, for most pop-culture criticism is unable to think outside the box of ideology. While one can find online references that give popular characters the status of "myths," there's no serious conversation about the intersection of religious myth and any kind of fiction. I can easily imagine that, for an ideological elitist, the elegant patterns observed by Frye and Gaster would seem mere arbitrary categories. I freely admit that my appreciation of the myth-critical patterns stems from my own subjective preferences, though I think that in the long run myth-criticism offers a broader perspective of art than ideological criticism. Yet I can't deny that the ideologues are also motivated by a "sense of transpersonal fulfillment" when they get the chance to point the finger at the latest sinner against ultraliberal politics. Most recently I discussed this pattern in SKINNY BUTTS AND ALL, where I observed how the cited critic's response to perceived racism was to do noting more than indulge in racist slights against the supposed oppressors.

At the same time, it may be that the ideologue's sense of fulfillment is confined to what Aldous Huxley called "horizontal transcendence," as I discussed in TRANSECENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME. Here's Huxley on defining this pattern of transcendence:

In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds.

Huxley only mentions political activities as one example, but I think it's inarguable that all such activities represent a "cause wider than [one's] immediate interests." Marxist critics would of course have little interest in Huxley's concepts of "upward transcendence" and "downward transcendence," since these would, like the works of Frye and Gaster, involve some validation of religion as an essential aspect of humankind's expressivity. It would be interesting, then, to explore the works of an ideologue like Noah Berlatsky, or one of his myrmidons, for the purpose of seeing how they represent proper human fulfillment as it's represented in fiction, since those expressed ideals would probably present a mirror-image of their own ideas of transcendent fulfillment.  Maybe in a Part 2--

NOTHING NEW HERE: MORE COMMENT-PRESERVATION

A response to the usual cant on THE SUPERHERO HYPE FORUM.

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You say "white patriarchal SYSTEM" and my response is that the cultural response of POC has been to propound yet another SYSTEM, one in which both whiteness and patriarchy are eternally demonized. Marxist thinkers like Sartre and Barthes are arguably two of the main proponents of this outlook, and they produced this idea of a system with no intention of suggesting any way to bring about a rapprochement between white culture and the various forms of POC culture. They wanted a demon that could be ceaselessly attacked on all fronts, and in this they are unconsciously aping the ways in which white cultures of the 1800s demonized blacks, Asians, and even unacceptable Caucasians like Slavs, for the crime of not being Anglo-Saxon.

Your idea of "benefit" casts too wide and tries to take in too many forms of injustice. There is no immediate "benefit" to me or any other white person if a black guy is chary about coming in contact with a white child {note: my opponent cited an episode of BLACK-ISH featuring this scenario].. It can only be a benefit to specific groups who like to feel like they still hold a club over the heads of colored peoples.

It *would* be a benefit to me if I was seeking the same job that a black person was, and I got the job because the employer had some racially based reason for hiring me over the other guy. I would get the benefit, but I would still not be responsible for the employer's motivations, nor do I necessarily agree that those motivations would be systemic in nature.

Suppose then that the reverse were true, and the black guy got the job in order to fill a quota, or even because the employer personally felt that black people deserved a break. That would be a benefit to the black guy, but he too would not be responsible for the employer's motivations. The other way either of us would bear responsibility is if either had threatened the employer with repercussions for not hiring one of us-- sort of like the way the "Oscar So White" people decided that the only reason more black people weren't getting nominated for the awards was racism. That was a club held over the heads of the Academy, aimed at making the industry fear a possible monetary boycott. Thus so everyone who sought to force diversity upon the Academy is culpable in a form of extortion, just as *I* would be, *if* I had told the employer that he'd get in trouble with the Klan if he hired a black guy.

The idea that all POC are just helpless individuals constantly being preyed upon by the Big Bad System is also a favorite theme in Barthes, BTW.

HOW TO HANDLE A TOXIC MALE

I already trashed DICK GRAYSON VS. TOXIC MASCULINITY in this essay,  but thought I ought to examine this particular absurdity in greater depth:

Even as Dick aged out of the Robin role, these elements remained: youth, feminization, subtextual queerness and campiness, passivity in romantic relationships. 

Author Plummer is by no means unusual in pursuing the idea that male characters can be "feminized" by being threatened (he calls Robin a "damsel in distress"), by being inferior to a stronger woman (Robin's relationship to super-powered girlfriend Starfire), or even by being killed. I'm not sure when this trope became popular, but I would assume it grew with the proliferation of "queer studies." While I myself have devoted no small amount of time to analyzing the overlaps between the fictional phenomena of sex and of violence, devotees of queer studies play a one-sided game. They don't mind seeing the image of masculinity torn down, but what happens when feminine characters are subjected to humiliation, violence, and death? Are any of these characters "feminized," or are they just--

WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS????

Since Kraft-Ebing codified the phenomena of sadism and masochism in the late 1800s, it's been impossible to doubt that certain men and women have mentally translated violence-- whether real or imagined-- into sexual stimulation. What modern ideologues want, however, is not a careful consideration of the ways both men and women think and feel. They want to find ways to ennoble marginalized women by placing them outside the bounds of violence, while degrading that horror of horrors, the straight white male, by "feminizing" him.

Those titans of tedium, Gershom Legman and Frederic Wertham, represent early attitudes of the "Freudian Marxist" to the threat of the macho male, whose epitome was that of the costumed superhero. Even though organized fascism had been defeated on the stage of world affairs by the time both men wrote their respective screeds, both men evinced extreme fear that Neo-Nazis lurked behind every fictional depiction of violence. Yet the closest that either one came to suggesting a feminized male appears in Legman's LOVE AND DEATH. The author suggested that in comic strips like BLONDIE and THE KATZENJAMMER KIDS, "father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated, and degraded daily." However, I don't think he was suggesting that this was a way of "queering" the paternal targets of this degradation. It was simply a means of allowing female and juvenile readers of the strips to indulge in fantasies of hostility. It's a limited rebellion, though, since Legman specifies that paternal authority will remain despite these escapist notions-- which just shows that he didn't read BLONDIE very carefully. While "the Captain," the main male antagonist of "the Kids," usually re-asserted his power by paddling the Kids' butts, Dagwood is rarely if ever able to reclaim any dignity, especially not against his quietly domineering wife.

Finally, I find it odd that Plummer is arguing that queerness should be associated with passivity.
I think most gays would find that rather offensive, not to mention impractical, as it would force them all to be "bottoms with no tops."

ANOTHER QUICKLY BEATEN POST

The melodies of Mickey Marx do linger on and on and on...

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 Blue Saint said:

"All this “geekery” we surround ourselves in are aspects of commercial enterprise. "

I realize this banal line of Marxist thought has yet to shuffle off the mortal coil, that it continues to drag itself from Internet essay to Internet essay like a legless mummy.

But the fact is that no matter how one may try to define Captain America as an "aspect of commercial enterprise," this is an invalid "outside definition," proposed by someone who wants to reduce a given franchise to something predictable and determined by market forces and all that crap. None of this "culture industry" junk offers the slightest insight as to why people put down hard money for Captain America, or, for that matter, Love and Rockets, which is no less a ":commercial enterprise"-- or anything that was ever sold for money.

NOTE: The poster in question denied being an advocate of what I later caleld "Marx/Adorno 101," so I retracted the specific accusation, though it still applies across the board to other critics.

SECOND NOTE: Ripped off this cool quote from the discussion, possibly for later use:

“This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought.

“For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. …

“Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

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As for the essence of the current kerfluffle about Captain America turning out to be a Hydra agent, I covered all this in my 2008 essay EARTH-SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE.


Also, I appreciate the comment by a poster named George, who points out that death-threats from aggrieved fans predate the Internet. He mentions that both Claremont and Miller received such threats for knocking off fan-favorite characters.

Frankly, I really don't think that the Cap-Hydra schtick can be critiqued in terms of "diversity" until it's actually appeared. Whoever started the "anti-Semitism" angle was plainly trying to stir shit without having facts on which to base an argument-- not to mention the fact that Nazism, of which Hydra is a fantasy-analogue, is not defined ONLY by anti-Semitism.

NIETZSCHE VS. THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES PT. 2

The "Neopuritan nannies" referenced in Part 1 were pretty much the Usual Gang of Bloody Comic Book Elitists, but I've never meant to suggest that they were the worst of the lot. Such elitists are pikers next to some of the philosophers who have been guilty of creating false expectations for the world as a whole.

Marx may be the biggest Nanny of all time, given that he fostered the idea of controlling human destiny through the manipulation of economic factors. But one of the seminal "fathers of science fiction" had similar nanny-ish proclivities, as I find after my having given one of his works-- H.G. Wells' THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME-- a quick though not superficial read-through.

By the time SHAPE was published in 1933, Wells was no longer writing "scientific romances" very much. His key works were all the flowers of his youth, and in his later years he often sought to use non-fiction as a means to express his passion for Socialism. SHAPE is what we now call an "alternative history," in which Wells narrates his understanding of world affairs up until 1933, and then imagines the future events that will lead to the formation of a beneficent world state.

I find myself regarding this as a "nanny-ish" proposition because Wells' world state is, despite all his protests as to the continued value of a "sublimated" individuality, remains a place that values safety above all else:

What has happened during the past three and a half centuries to the human consciousness has been a sublimation of individuality. That phase is the quintessence of modern history. A large part of the commonplace life of man, the food-hunt, the shelter-hunt, the safety-hunt, has been lifted out of the individual sphere and socialized for ever. To that the human egotism has given its assent perforce. It has abandoned gambling and profit-seeking and all the wilder claims of property. It has ceased altogether to snatch, scramble and oust for material ends. And the common man has also been deprived of any weapons for his ready combativeness and of any liberty in its release. Nowadays even children do not fight each other. Gentleness in difference has become our second nature.

Now Nietzsche was no less aware that every society practiced this same ritual that he calls "self-overcoming," by which individual selfish tendencies are conquered in order to promote each society's "table of values." But the German philosopher was extremely leery that any civilization could reach a point of such advancement that it would not grow stagnant, so that it needed men of "courage" who would overturn the established values. This is why THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA so frequently has its interlocutor rage against "the good and the just:" not because society's rules aren't based in real needs-- to prevent theft, adultery, etc.-- but because such rules become the people's reason for living in itself, rather than serving as a means to an end. The idea that Wells proposes above-- of a mankind where "even children do not fight each other"-- with extreme suspicion. To my ear it sounds like an old man's vision of paradise: a place where no one raises voices or has any arguments-- and of course Wells was over sixty when he wrote SHAPE.

I also find Wells guilty of a Pollyanna attitude in Chapter 8, where he tries to use biological double-talk in order to make it seem as if the human propensity for cruelty is an aberration:

The older psychologists were disposed to classify cruelty as a form of sexual aberration — in ordinary speech we still use their old word Sadistic — but this attribution is no longer respected by contemporary authorities. Cruelty goes far beyond the sexual field. Just as hate is now understood to be a combative fear compound, the stiffening up of a faltering challenge, which may become infectious, so cruelty is regarded as a natural development of effort against resistance, so soon as the apprehension of frustration exceeds a certain limit. It is a transformation of our attempt to subdue something, usually a living thing, to our will, under the exasperation of actual or anticipated obduracy.

I've established in my own posts that I don't consider cruelty, or anything associated with violence, to be entirely derived from sexuality. But clearly Wells is trying to divorce human nature from cruelty by making it seem as if cruel action is simply an adventitious reflex. Thus, if a "nanny-state" takes away anything that people might fight over, then there will be no "transformation of [an] attempt to subdue something."

Contrast this with Nietzsche's psychological insight from ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS:

"To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival."

One may disagree with Nietzsche about the degree to which human nature is dependent upon cruelty in its most objectionable forms. But who, aside from a nanny, could doubt that a part of what makes us human is our competitiveness, our desire to excel? Since I've quoted Francis Fukuyama's verdict on these matters at least three times now, I suppose I need not repeat myself on this subject.

Though SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME is no fun to read-- it often seems like the author merely repeating himself: "See, I was right about this, and this, and this"-- it does show that the ideal of the overprotected society is far from a new one.

Since modern-day nannies so frequently worry about how susceptible minds will be driven to orgies of fascist violence by superheroes, I find myself wondering if Nietzsche might not have viewed them as more in the vein of Wells than of his "overmen." After all, most superheroes are devoted to maintaining the values of the society, rather than overturning values. So maybe had Friedrich N., been given the chance to behold the spawn of Siegel and Shuster, he would have found superheroes as repressive to spirit as I find Wells' "nanny-state."

PLENITUDE: IT'S NOT JUST FOR THE END-TIMES ANYMORE

I'm going to try like heck to make this my absolute last essay that owes anything to the HOODED UTILITARIAN post to which I first alluded here. But I have the usual excuse: Noah Berlatsky has a way of bringing into focus exactly the issues that distinguish elitist critics from pluralist critics.

NB, in response to a comment by me about what I termed Sigmund Freud's reductive nature, made an odd comment about something he called "plenitude:"

I don’t see that tradition as particularly reductionist. It tends to argue that authors mean more than they say (and/or say more than they mean.) It’s a criticism of plenitude. People resist it because they dislike the implications of excess, in my experience. 

I won't repeat the thread's discussion regarding the definition of "reductionism," except to say, of course, that I was right. I quizzed NB on the provenance of his term "plenitude" and he said he wasn't "quoting anyone re: Freud." NB's syntax is jumbled, but he seems to be associating Freud's investigatory process as revealing the unvarnished truth beneath what they say or even think they mean, and thus he concludes that anyone who objects to Freud "dislikes the implications of excess." 

I have to assume, then, that "plenitude" and "excess" are linked in NB's mind. A quick Google search confirms that NB is at least familiar with Georges Bataille's use of the term "excess," though if NB is associating that idea with anything in Freud, he's certainly seeing a very different Bataille than I do. I quoted this Bataille passage a couple of months ago, from his 1957 EROTISM:

In the domain of our life [the principle of] excess manifests in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ratio with productive efficiency. It demands rational behavior where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome [these impulses] a reward later on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment.

Freud, of course, would never have countenanced this extreme liberalism. Freud believed explicitly in the sublimation of "the pleasure principle" in favor of the "reality principle." Again, it's hard to tell because NB bobs and weaves so much, but I think he's got the idea that "excess and/or plenitude" are not just "wild impulses" that everyone shares. I suspect that he's reading Freud through an ultraliberal lens: plenitude is everything that Straight White Males have traditionally renounced as inferior to their superior existence.

I have a much less ideologically oriented view of plenitude. expressed in this 2009 essay:

Ideological concepts are always spun off from what Northrop Frye terms "secondary concerns," which are no more than the assorted mental strategies humankind devises whereby they get or secure the "primary concerns," which are humankind's primary conduit to both sustenance and its concomitant pleasures. I suggested that the "primary concerns" come down to what some pagans termed the "four F's"-- flags (housing), flax (clothing), fodder and frig. 

Frye's assertion of the primacy of the sensuous is, I believe, much closer to Bataille's meaning than anything written by Freud. It also relates strongly to what the word "plenitude" means to me personally, though with a slightly more Jungian air. Jung regarded the human capacities for "sensation" and "intuition" as "mutually compensating functions." Plenitude for me is the interdependence of the senses with the mind's first attempts to understand them through symbolic action.

If as I believe NB has conflated plenitude with The Things Straight White Males Don't Want to Think About, then the only way this plenitude will ever be realized is in some distant future, a Marxist "end-times" when all the old fictions of Capitalism and Imperialism will be overthrown for good.

If that's the truth NB wants to embrace, that's his business. But as I've said in A BEDROCK OF CHAUVINISM,  I think the sins that elitist critics like to attribute only to Straight White Males are implicated in all peoples in all cultures and at all times. 

To rephrase Luke 17-21:

Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, plenitude is within you!

WORKING VACATIONS

I recently posted this simplified summation of my work/play concept on a forum-thread dealing with the question of whether or not superheroes were intrinsically juvenile.

"Escapism" is an important concept here, because on occasion (not necessarily on this thread) people sometimes conflate it with all things juvenile, which is not the case.

On my blog I've frequently contrasted two modes of literature which can be constructed for both juvenile and adult audiences. There's "escapism," which I consider "the literature of play," and "realism," which is "the literature of work."

Playing games means accepting a prescribed set of rules and limitations that aren't based on real-world means and ends, even if they might be loosely patterned after them (RISK, STRATEGO). But there's no real-world benefit from playing games. In a way, the player accept the game's fictional limits as a means of escaping the real world of limitations like inconvenient death, romantic loss, etc.

Work is all about means and ends, and the literature of work, "realism," is all about getting its audience to come to terms with mortal limitations. We may think of juvenile works as being only about escapism. But if someone writes a book for kids, aimed at coming to terms with the loss of loved ones, then that's both a "realist" work and a juvenile work.

Not that one has to be only within a naturalistic world in order to be "realistic." Lewis's Narnia books are aimed at kids, but their intent is to give the young audience a simplified grounding in the author's ideas of Christian philosophy. That's aimed at achieving a particular end by a particular means, and so I consider Narnia "realistic" in its thematic sense, even though it's a fantasy-- just as I do WATCHMEN and a handful of other "mature superheroes."

I've also occasionally asserted that the literature of thematic escapism functions as a "vacation from morals," moral prescriptions being the primary cultural manifestation of limitation: of what a member of a society must or must not do to remain a viable member of that society.

Early in THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Northrop Frye discusses the ways in which types of melodrama-- he mainly references the detective story and the "thriller"-- can invoke in their audiences feelings of moral indignation, which might under different circumstances might involve the ideal of work in its sense of "means and ends."

In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. 

Frye was IMO completely correct in assuming that the violent aspects of these "thrillers" is insulated by "a wall of play." However, he was wrong is assuming that it was "not possible" for critics to take violent melodramas "seriously" enough to believe that they were indeed "advance propaganda for the police state." About thirteen years prior to the publication of Frye's ANATOMY, Marxist Theodor Adorno attacked all products of the so-called "culture industry" as manifestations of a new fascism, though his analysis of the relation of violence to its audience may sound more Freudian than Marxist:


In the very first sequence [of a story] a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organized amusement changes into the quality of organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction [until] the day of the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.

In 1949, Gershon Legman self-published his book of essays, LOVE AND DEATH, which in part assailed comic books as institutionalized fascism, virtually duplicating Adorno's argument about how it served the ends of an implied "police state" that wanted citizens to fantasize about venting violence on scapegoat victims so that said citizens would then accept any punishment the government dished out.

And of course, there's the debbil-doctor himself:

Superman (with the big S on his uniform—we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and "foreign-looking" people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasize themselves as supermen, with the attendant prejudices against the submen, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them—by force.


And, lest anyone reading think that these views no longer have currency, here's reliable Noah Berlatsky, from the comments-thread in which I recently participated, taking the POV that all superheroes are essentially cops, representatives of a police state:

 superheroes function as a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force; they’re doing the dirty work of justice that even the police can’t do. That’s a lineage that goes back to the KKK; I don’t think it gets out of the dynamic I discussed. I think that applies to a lot of the lone badass against the system narratives too. 


What all of these individuals have in common is that they have refused to give the melodramatic entertainments they attack the credit for being "play." Thrillers, comedy cartoons, and superheroes are all defined by the "work" that the culture industry wants them to do, whether it's to create admiration for the forces of law-and-order or to provide "bread and circuses" so that the citizens won't notice how beaten-down they are by the forces of authority. Escapist melodramas might provide vacations from whatever morality these elitists tout as superior, but since the melodramas are working for authority, they only supply "working vacations."

Clearly I'm with Frye in believing that the consumers of these fantasies, violent or not, have the awareness to know that they're engaging a playful activity that doesn't represent the way the real world works. It can be fairly stated that concerns of "realism" do appear in any work, no matter how "escapist," be it a story set in the audience's own world or in some "Dungeons and Dragons" universe. But the element of play generally takes precedence, though permutations do arise in both the escapist mode and the realistic mode, as discussed more fully here.

The biggest problem of the "heroes are fascist" argument is that it soon becomes entirely tautological, like Freud. In Freud's opinion the Oedipal theory was validated whether or not  a man did or didn't marry a woman like his mother. A man who married a woman like his mother confirmed Freud's theory directly; a man who married a woman completely unlike his mother was undergoing "displacement," which in some roundabout way still validated the Oedipal theory.

Similarly, most of the "heroic fascist" arguments fall into the same circular arguments seen above. Does the hero work directly for the government? Then he's a fascist. Does the hero work on his own, reporting to no authority? Then he's "a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force." Is the hero a badass fighting against the system, like (say) Snake Plissken? The argument will admit of no meaningful exceptions: the badass fighting the system is a fascist too. In other words, everything proves what the theory's proponent wants to prove, and the few exceptions the advocate may provide, if he provides any, simply happen to appeal to his or her particular moral system.

BLACK LIKE HIM (HE SAYS)

I try not to comment often if at all on the HOODED UTILITARIAN site. If I responded to everything said there, I'd never have time for my own stuff, and I'm almost certain my efforts to score points there would prove futile. Thus from my POV the site would be more appropriately named FUTILITARIAN.

Still, every once in a while I get the itch to argue. And on occasion, I happen across some post that illustrates the huge philosophical gulf between the speculative mode of philosophy (that's me) and the reflective mode (that's them), first discussed here in this 2013 essay.  As a result of my latest UTE-post, I gained new evidence for the theory that the biggest gulf between the two modes is that the former is based in a long-term investigation of human nature, while the latter is strictly concerned with the short-term effectiveness of rhetoric regarding current issues.

The remark that moved me to argument wasn't even by the author of the main essay, but by a commentator associated with the site (NB helpfully provides copious links for anyone who cares to investigate said history, but I'm not obliged to follow their careers any more than they are mine.) I choose not to comment on any other position taken by commentator J. Lamb, only upon what I consider the absurdity of Lamb's remark in the comments-section.

Noah and I participated in a Twitter discussion yesterday where fans of increased race diversity among superheroes lamented my idea that the superhero concept is inherently White, and therefore inappropriate for substantive, authentic non-White characterizations. The conversation reminded me that many superhero comic fans could care less about substantive, authentic Blackness when reading or watching superhero media — they just want someone who looks like them in the role of the Hero. They want to appropriate the fantasy, without questioning it’s logic.

Though I knew that it would be pointless to challenge someone so enchanted with his own empty rhetoric, I posted in response:

Alternately, they [these fans Lamb references, who are implicitly "people of color"] want to claim a fantasy that belongs to them as much as to white people, just as black hero-myths belonged to pre-European African tribes as much they did to Europeans.
But if you think, along with Barthes, that the only type of stories you think “people of color” can tell are about their being stigmatized as “people of color,” then I guess you’re welcome to that belief.

Not surprisingly, Lamb would not acknowledge that his essential argument was voiced by Barthes. That may be because he doesn't know Barthes but has picked up the same basic idea from another source, or it may be that he just didn't want to detract from his own rhetoric. Anyone who cares to delve into this farrago can read his three responses-- I'll deal with Noah Bertlatsky's in a separate essay-- but the closest Lamb gets to responding to my original point is this:

The appeal of the superhero concept is not relevant when discerning the racial nature of the superhero concept. People of color far and wide enjoy media that lampoons and denigrates them; corporate hip hop would not exist if rappers who used anti-Black racial epithets in their music faced boycotts from the Black community.

I note also in this post that he repeats his pet theory that "Superheroes require Whiteness to operate," which he might believe that he has justified elsewhere, but which remains little more than special pleading here.

I note in passing that in these posts Lamb consistently denigrates those who don't buy into his concept of Blackness. These fans, he tells us, "could care less about substantive, authentic Blackness" and are willing to "enjoy media that lampoons and denigrates them." In simpler terms, they are sell-outs for wanting to "appropriate the fantasy." To care about "substantive, authentic Blackness," then, would be signaled by a refusal to be implicated in White Fantasies, whatever one conceives them to be, in an act of cognitive albeit not literal separatism.

This line of reasoning perfectly illustrates the mode of short-term rhetorical orientation. If persons from your own ingroup aren't on board with your separatist "logic," then it's because they're "inauthentic." Lamb doesn't use the term "brainwashed," but he would entirely in line with related Marxist arguments about authenticity if he did.

Now, my view of Blackness is that it is secondary to Black People, much in the way that the Sabbath was made for Man, rather than the other way round. I define myself as a true Liberal, and for me the mark of a white Liberal is that if he has had any Black Friends, he'll never tell you about them-- unlike both Ultraliberals and Ultraconservatives, who can't shut up about their supposed racial validation. I will say that I have had Black Acquaintances, and that I don't think them "inauthentic" because they buy into the superhero fantasy-- which, as I copiously pointed out in the discussion, is not some sort of germ that can be isolated from other germs upon the plate of a microscope slide. The chance to have one's own race, religion or ethnicity represented within the sphere of popular entertainment should be deemed as much a fundamental right as the right to vote.

Lamb, like Berlatsky, chooses to define the superhero genre narrowly, not only by separating it from all other genres in a wholly artificial fashion, but as a White Fantasy. This must be why "the appeal of the superhero concept is not relevant when discerning the racial nature of the superhero concept." By implication this is because such discernment can only be done by someone who has accepted Lamb's "logic" on "racial nature," and those persons of color who find the concept appealing are inauthentic and illogical because they don't appreciate just how goddamned White their Fantasy is. If they did, they would presumably be as hip as Lamb about how the media "lampoons and denigrates them"-- a conclusion Lamb supports with a scattered selection of comics stories he didn't like, mostly involving Luke Cage. I'm tempted to explore the early 1970s run of the title to see if there's any justification for these complaints, but I feel sure that even if Cage were a more positive role model in those years, Lamb would not see that as a negation of all the lampoons and denigrations he perceives.


As I said in the comments, my mention of tribal myths was advanced only to provide a grounding for my hypothesis regarding universal right. Few persons, if any, would assert that Black Africans don't have the right to articulate their own myths at the tribal level, as much as do tribal Europeans.  It follows, then, that when a nation evolves into a plurality of ethnicities, then every ethnicity still has the right to elaborate hero-myths of a modern commercial nature, whether those myths take "literary" or "subliterary" forms. If such a nation evolves so that one ethnicity (narrowly defined though terms like "White" and "Black" may be) is numerically ascendant, creators can either seek to formulate heroes that speak only to their own ethnicity, and thus sacrifice any shot at the "appeal" Lamb scorns, or they can formulate heroes who appeal across racial and ethnic divides.  Either is a choice that may come with undesirable consequences.

Unlike J, Lamb, I won't claim that only one of the choices can be right.

YOUNGFUL TRANSGRESSIONS

At the end of JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 5 I tangentially touched on a concept I've not addressed before on the blog. The concept is that of "lawlines," introduced in Dudley Young's 1991 meditation on anthropology and mythology, ORIGINS OF THE SACRED: THE ECSTASIES OF LOVE AND WAR.


Young's project-- his only purely philosophical work, so far as I can tell-- is an attempt to analyze the ways in which ancient societies formulated their laws, taboos, and other codes of behavior. The author's express purpose in exploring the dynamics of archaic myths is to throw some light upon the ways that we as moderns have fallen away from our own heritage, with catastrophic consequences for our ability to know right from wrong. Though Young invokes many philosophers,poets and pundits of the past two centuries-- Sigmund Freud, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Buber, Mary Douglas, and Northrop Frye-- the bulk of the book deals with the ancient world, beginning with what we moderns know of paleolithic man and moving into the mythic universes of the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Greeks. Myths for Young are pre-eminently about defining the strictures of law and the powers that support it:

The myths that compose the religious and political structure of every culture are tales of power, how it is to be found and where it is to be used.-- Young, p. 22.

Young contends that there exist meaningful parallels between our own de-sacralized concepts of cultural authority with:

the measures taken by paleolithic man to live with the loss of his innocence, the cultural moves he made to protect himself from further exposure to that sacred monster that had originally tempted him ecstatically into cannibalism and worse. The word I use for these measures is 'lawlines,' and in the beginning this is literally what they are, lines drawn in the mind and on the dancing ground to regulate the flow of energies no longer governed by the codes of primate instinct.-- p. xx. 

Given these abstruse references to "the dancing ground" of hypothetical cave-dweller tribes and to a tempting "sacred monster" who is apparently both the serpent of Eden and Dionysus infecting his Maenads with murderous blood-lust, it should be evident that ORIGINS is not a simple read. I don't propose to review the book in full here, as I've not recently re-read it, though I have given it more than one reading in the past. I could just appropriate his term "lawlines" for my own use, but I felt it would be instructive to meditate on the some of the differences between Young's account of myth and my own.

First and foremost, though Young mentions Jung a few times in the book, his primary influence is Freud's  1913 TOTEM AND TABOO.  Young is not much concerned with the rest of Freud's theory, and he expressly distances himself from the Viennese psychologist's reductive tendencies, but he feels it is important to see Freud's concept within the greater sphere of current anthropological and mythographic knowledge.  Citing Robin Fox's book THE RED LAMP OF INCEST as well as Freud, Young argues that in prehistoric times bands of hominids followed the structural lead of certain anthropoids in that each tribe was dominated by the strongest alpha-male, who kept all the desirable females for himself. At some point a particular tribe (in Young's view, a number of tribes responding to the same internal conflicts) was rocked when the young men ganged up on the older alpha-male-- implicitly the father to at least some of them-- and killed him in order to have access to the women. Freud also asserts that the rebels cannibalized their victim, which is one manifestation of the "sacred monster" mentioned in the quote above. Since then, totemism continued to dominate humankind's development, and countless humans expiated their guilt over the killing of a father-figure, reinforced by the internal dynamic of the Oedipus Complex.

From this germ-idea Young spins a fascinating tapestry of mythic interrelationships that I cannot explore here, but he never strays from the idea that all myths are about forming the "lawlines" that separate order from chaos.  I esteemed ORIGINS OF THE SACRED highly when I first read it, and on a slight personal note, at an early 90s convention I recommended it to Dave Sim-- who had not yet gone public with his doctrinaire Christianity. I imagine that Sim, had he read the book, would have been repulsed by any suggestion that all religions might be traced back to primitive rituals of dance and exorcism.  Yet, Jungian that I am, I was more than a little iffy about that hypothesis from another angle. Though Young is not attempting to reduce all religion to base physical processes as Freud was, even locating the origins of religion exclusively within tribal exogamy-conflicts does have its reductive side.  Once again I cite a favorite Kant passage:

...though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.

Thus, as much as I admire Young's book, I reject the notion that all religion arises from totemism, or that totemism, however one defines it, arises explicitly from the sexual competition of males for females, even if this "primal scene" was one that occured in many parallel situations rather than out of one originary event. At base, I think Young used and transformed Freud in much the same way Bataille used and transformed Marx; extending and improving the mythic kernels within the ideological narratives, and then discarding the ideology.  (Parenthetically, Young only mentions Marx twice in ORIGINS.) Where Young focuses on an opposition between order and chaos, Bataille focuses on one between practical work and sensuous play. Here's Bataille's take, hopefully just One More Time:

In the domain of our life [the principle of] excess manifests in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ratio with productive efficiency. It demands rational behavior where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome [these impulses] a reward later on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment.

Bataille was neither Kantian nor Jungian. However, his schema allows for a much broader, much more pluralistic vision of religion's genesis than Young's does-- though I might critique Bataille for also seeing religion as dominantly repressive.  In primitive societies as in modern ones, religion has a double power, to liberate or to enslave-- as much as do any political systems, or artistic credos, or pretty much anything human beings can devise. As a quick example, what if early religions evolved not at attempts at societal control, but out of shamans' claims to be able to heal people and guide the tribes toward good game? One would not necessarily have to believe that such shamans had supernormal powers, but even the illusion of being able to manipulate good fortune might have proved more persuasive to hard-living, practical-minded primitives than an appeal to primeval guilt complexes.

Young's term "lawlines," though, works as an image that mediates between Bataille's concepts of "the taboo" and "the transgression." The Judeo-Christian mind tends to think of the "taboo thing" as something that must not be violated, but the primitive mind, Bataille claimed, knows that only through its violation does the taboo become significant for us.  Thus, one can imagine a "lawline" that is drawn from the initial presentation of a static, taboo situation, to the dynamic status that ensues after the taboo has been broken. Thus, the violation of the Tree in Eden results in the world of toil and labor, but also of the whole history of the Jewish people. Admittedly, some dynamic situations are more horrific than heroic. In THE BACCHAE King Pentheus tries to protect his kingdom from the ecstasies of Dionysus, and his hubris only leads him to be reduced to the status of a hunted animal, albeit not one consumed for his flesh, at least in the play.

I propose that any kind of literature, escapist or realistic, requires conflict, and that conflict springs from violating "lawlines" of one kind or another, though they may deal more with expectation than with matters of cultural jurisprudence.  In the next essay on this topic, I'll demonstrate this theory with reference to the same examples used in THE WORK AND PLAY MIX-A-LOT.