NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 4

At the end of Part 3 I wrote:

When I finish the book, it may be interesting to mount a comparison between Kauffman's two models, "classical" and "quantum," and Kant's two species of imagination, "productive" and "reproductive." We-- or maybe just I-- shall see.

Now that I've finished Kauffman's REINVEINTING THE SACRED, I'm still only able to offer such a comparison in theory, though I won't do so here.  Kauffman offers some general models for his "classic/quantum" synthesis, but he admits that his theory at present remains in a speculative phase:

...well-known facts about cells and recent quantum chemical theory raise the possibility that vast webs of quantum coherent or partially coherent degrees of freedom may span large volumes of a cell... What I describe now is partially known, and partially my own scientific speculation. (p. 216)

Though Kauffman cautions the reader to remember that as yet there has not been adequate experimental proof to support his speculation, he asserts that the reductionist paradigms have already proven fallacious: not only in respect to the early paradigm I mentioned-- Weinberg's idea that all biology reduces down to particle physics--  but also to the paradigm of the "mind-brain identity theory, in which first person experiences are identical with specific brain states."  Chapter 13 is devoted to demonstrating the problems with this "classical" reductionist schema, and suggesting, in keeping with his earlier remarks on "partial causality," that the human mind may mirror the nature of biological creativity as a whole:

The idea that the human mind is non-algorithmic raises the possibility that it might be acausal, rather than a causal "machine," and the only acausal theory we have is quantum mechanics. Therefore the mind may be partially quantum mechanical.

I remarked in Part 2 that I observed parallels between the attitudes of reductionists in physics with those in literary criticism.  By way of supporting this observation, I'll focus on just one of the philosophical problems Kauffman analyzes in the book; that of "free will."

If every event, mental or physical, has sufficient antecedent causes, then as Aristotle said, there can be no "unmoved mover."  But free will is supposed to be just such an unmoved mover, free to do what it chooses, hence an "uncaused mental cause" of our actions. This led the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza, and others since him, to conclude that free will is an illusion.

Obviously a history of the concept of "free will" is impossible on this blog, but I have found this online essay, CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ON FREE WILL.  Among the essay's many capsule descriptions of philosophical stances, I found this one most representative of the attitude I myself see in literary reductionism:

Harriet Martineau, translator of the works of Auguste Comte and herself a founder of sociology, was another who struggled mightily with the free will meme. In the end, in spite of the alternatives provided by the philosophers of her time, she rejected the notion altogether. "In a practical sense," she wrote, "all the world is determined. All human action proceeds on the supposition that the workings of nature are governed by laws that cannot be broken by human will... The very smallest amount of science is enough to enable any rational person to see that the constitution and action of the human faculty of Will are determined by influences beyond the control of that faculty".#10 She referred to the notion of free will as "that monstrous remnant of old superstition". Here Martineau was expressing the logical implications of a Newtonian causality as applied to the type of radical monistic philosophical stance then being developed by Ernst Haeckel #11. In so doing, she was repudiating the dualistic Kantian world view which had prevailed for almost a century.

 I draw attention to Martineau's remark that "the very smallest amount of science is enough to enable any rational person" to see that everything is "determined" by contingent causes and that therefore free will is a "monstrous remnant of old superstition."  I find this language to be highly elitist in that it posits a radical difference between "rational persons" and those who lack such rationality-- a division no less absolute that the division made by one such "old superstition" between "the sheep and the goats." 

The Christian religion, though it may have formulated the basic outlines of the debate on free will, certainly did not originate its dynamic.  Most if not all religions are grounded in some sense of causal consequence.  Choose X and you are saved or illuminated; choose Y and you are damned or condemned to meaninglessness.  The idea that "free will" was not a gift given to mortals to guide them on their path was tantamount to saying that it did not matter what men chose; their choices were determined by the factors of their experiences and their fundamental natures.

How did this anti-will position translate into literary criticism?  A literary critic, as much as a religious pundit or a philosopher, wants to have some way to convince others of the rightness of his path.  I propose that for many critics the validation  they sought was that of a perceived greater rationality.  One might know, intellectually, that one's rationality was as predetermined by contingent circumstances as another man's irrationality.  I submit, however, that just as religious proselytizers insisted that the "right choice" reflected adherence to some higher supersensual reality, literary and philosophical proselytizers insisted that people who "saw the light" with regard to the contingency of human existence were a cut above those who did not. 

It should be easy to find any number of critics, professional or amateur, who support this elitist "sheep and goats" attitude.  I know that I can find, and have found, this attitude in many of my favored targets-- Gary Groth, Noah Berlatsky, Chicken Colin.  But I hate to keep falling back on these "old reliables."  Ideally I would like to find and refute some critic, whether in the comics-game or not, who evinces this specific blend of reductive pessimism and covert self-glorification.

If all else fails, I suppose I could always go back to kicking at Theodor Adorno.

THE TASTE OF SEX

Here's a quick quote, courtesy of a BEAT poster, that exemplifies one form of the sexual-superiority rhetoric to which I alluded here. I have read SUPERGODS but have not yet checked the quote for context.

Grant Morrison wrote in “Supergods” that he’s met many bright women who read the better superhero comics as part of their regular pop culture diet. But he admitted that the people who are OBSESSED with superheroes, and who amass huge collections of superhero comic books, tend to be male.

In my response, I pointed out that there was no objective means by which one could prove any group of comics, superhero or otherwise, to be universally "better."  The only objective fact is that if many people like a thing, that liking is objective purely in an *intersubjective* sense, as an agreement of tastes between discrete individuals.  Putting that aside, the more important aspect of the Grant Morrison observation is that it throws some light on the different ways men and women respond to the same fictional entertainments.  I said:

 My takeaway from this admitted generalization is not necessarily that women have better taste than men (not that such a thing can be definitively proven or disproven anyway), but that the former are less concerned with getting “the Big Picture.” Guys will tolerate a lot of crappy MARVEL TEAM-UPS just to keep track of how many times Spidey fought the Sandman in all his appearances. In comparison with this perhaps-obsessive habit, women might fairly be viewed as “more discriminating.”

Though neither Morrison nor the BEAT poster is complaining about "fanboys" after the fashion of the bloody comic book elitists, there's no shortage of such complaints on various forums.  One of the most common complaints speaks to the notion of being "discriminating," in that the elitists cavil against the "fanboy" for continuing to buy comics-titles which he does not even enjoy.

Now, one logical response to the apparent perversity of the diehard fan is to say that the elitists may take his bitching about this or that grievance too seriously.   I deem it impossible to imagine that even the most diehard fan gets no pleasure out of collecting whatever he collects.  Even if he consciously loathes a given run of stories, he's at least getting a degree of validation from "being in the know," from being able to say, "Wow, Frank Miller's new project really bit big-time!" 

Another response is that because the elitist is stumping for the joys of being "discriminating," the elitist cannot possibly understand this desire to know the "Big Picture" with regard to a given feature or features.  Yet often the elitist has his own share of obsessions.  I can far better understand a devotion to MARVEL TEAM-UP, despite all of its faults, over a devotion to the dire, faux-literary works of Daniel Clowes.  But that's just my intersubjective response.

Now, even if there's some statistical truth in Morrison's statement, it should be noted that one reason female readers might be more discriminating is if the idiom is not one which their gender tends to favor.  In THE GENRE-GENDER WARS I noted:

... it isn't that women are incapable of going "yeah!" when they see some nasty bastard (or bitch) blown away by hero or heroine. But their reaction to such purgative scenarios is generally less immediate than a male's, and has to be justified more by appeals to character and situation than a man's does.

And the converse is true: I've certainly heard stories of female readers who devoured romance-paperbacks obsessively, which may have a great deal to do with these statistics from the Romance Writers of America site:

 

Romance fiction generated $1.438 billion in sales in 2012.

Romance was the top-performing category on the best-seller lists in 2012 (across the NYT, USA Today, and PW best-seller lists).

Romance fiction sales are estimated at $1.350 billion for 2013.

74.8 million people read at least one romance novel in 2008. (source: RWA Reader Survey)

 Call me crazy, but somehow I don't think that, where we're dealing with a genre that conforms to gender expectations, you're likely to see nearly as much "discrimination."

RETURN OF THE MASTERY MASTER PT. 4

While there are ways in which sexual partners can attempt to "assault" one another-- ways which include, but are not confined to, rape-- sex is dominantly isothymic, in that sex usually requires some modicum of cooperation. Violence, then, dominantly conforms to Fukuyma's megalothymic mode insofar as it usually involves a struggle of at least two opponents in which one will prove superior to the other, though in rare cases fighters may simply spar with no intent of proving thymotic superiority.-- VIOLENCE *AIN'T* NUTHIN' BUT SEX MISSPELLED, PART 2.

 "Movies were shown to eight- and nine-year-old boys and girls. At moments of tension, when terrible things were about to happen on screen, the little boys jumped up in agitation and thrust their arms out as if to fend off the disaster.  The little girls sank quietly back into their chairs, grew very still, and waited.  From the beginning, the female, being of the base-line genetic structuring of life, is able to flow with, bide her time, and survive.  From the beginning, the male is anxious, tries to fight against, dominate, fight against the odds. He seems born functionally separated from the life force that somehow underlies the female in unbroken flow.   As such, he cannot survive, at least not well, without the female."-- Joseph Chilton Pearce, MAGICAL CHILD, 1977, P. 256.

For sake of argument I'm going to assume that Pearce's recounting of the above experiment is accurate in all respects; that it correctly describes the responses of male and female children along the lines one would stereotypically expect of the respective genders.  The boys seek to fight, to prevail, so that their dominant response is active, and thus characteristic of competition and *megalothymia.*  The girls seek to accommodate, to endure, so that their dominant response is passive,  and thus characteristic of cooperation and *isothymia.*

Should one then assume that since I've said that the kinetic phenomena of sex and violence also line up with *isothymia* and *megalothymia* respectively, that women are all about "sex" and men are all about "violence?"

Not quite.  One should remember this incisive quote from that little old "19th-century syphilitic" Friedrich Nietzsche:

The same emotions in man and woman are, however, different in tempo: therefore man and woman never cease to misunderstand one another.-- Friedrich Nietzsche, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Aphorism 85.

In contrast Joseph Chilton Pearce really does incline toward the essentialist distinction of the sexes, declaring that men are "separated from the life force" while women are in touch with that force in an "unbroken flow."  Pearce devotes several pages to anecdotes which demonstrate the superiority of "endurance/persistence" as against "prevalence/glory." For instance, in Chapter 23 he relates a tale of an unnamed woman who managed to talk herself out of being raped and killed by two assailants.  She did so by showing no resistance and empathizing with the assailants' private torments, with the result that they did not injure her and even loaned her money to go home via the subway!

I am not denying that exceptional events like the above story may have happened, and that there may well be many other circumstances where women-- or men, for that matter-- can avoid violence by a show of passive endurance.

However, I believe Pearce is wrong to suggest that fighting back is an aberrational response, a manifestation of masculine *yang* that should always be avoided.  Consider as a corrective to Pearce the story of Corazon Amurao and Richard Speck.

Monday-morning quarterbacking remains a fatuous pursuit, so I am in no way critiquing the decision of the nine nurses-- eight of whom Speck killed, while Amurao escaped only by good fortune-- not to fight an armed man.  However, I suggest that Speck might not have been capable of reacting as charitably as the two assailants in Pearce's story.  Given knowledge of the ghastly crimes Speck committed when he received no resistance, it's fair to say that *in that instance,* the nine women would have been better off if they had attacked Speck en masse.  One cannot be sure that some of the nurses would have been able to "man up" (sorry) and successfully overpower the murderer even if one or two of them were shot.  But in that otherwise untenable situation, a response of *yang* might have worked better than all the *yin* in the world.

Pearce also overlooks the internal response of the females in the above experiment.  I can hypothetically believe that the girls responded to the fictive dangers in a culturally stereotypical manner: if you can't fight the danger, endure and wait for it to pass.  But did the girls involved actually *like* being put in that position? Culture, biology, or both together may have predisposed them to that response.  But does anyone of either gender really enjoy being helpless?

Even masochists want to be abused according to their own desires, not someone else's.

Clearly men and women are capable of a range of both *isothymic* and *megalothymic* responses, and, as both genders lack omniscience, no one can ever be sure which responses are appropriate to a given situation. 

Further, as I've consistently argued on this blog, *isothymia*/persistence is not in any sense more "natural" than *megalothymia*/glory, as Pearce suggests.  In real life, both responses are attempts to manage one's environment, and to the extent that they succeed, they engender thymotic validation.  In fiction it should be even clearer that "feminine persistence" is not more attuned to reality than "male glory;" that both are just vehicles for validation.  However, judging by the frequency one can find pinheads on comics forums complaining about "dumb male superheroes," I gather that the virtues of *yin* have won the battle in comics fandom-- and in a manner one might consider stereotypically feminine: by bitching about how much awful shit these poor elitists must endure.

   

STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: DYNAMIZATION=VALIDATION

Note: I'll probably keep using the phrase "stalking the perfect term" over and over, world without end, until someone correctly identifies what book-title by a famed comic-strip author I'm punning upon.

I introduced my literary neologism "dynamization" way back in this 2008 essay.  It was already a real word coined as computer-science jargon:

"In computer science, Dynamization is the process of transforming a static data structure into a dynamic one"

I was seeking a value-neutral description of the process usually called "gratification," which has over the years acquired a negative value-connotation, despite the attempt of Leslie Fiedler to provide perspective with his distinction between "unearned gratification" and "earned gratification."

I don't renounce anything I've written thus far about the *process* of dynamization, but as I contemplate a new series of essays that explore why audiences have varying tolerances for *kenotic* as well as *plerotic* pleasures, I find that "dynamization" doesn't quite fit the bill.

I acknowledged a possible problem with the term the following year in DYNAMIZATION= SUPERIORITY DANCE, though I didn't follow up on it:

There's no reason that dynamization itself-- described here as a movement from a static to a dynamic state, at least as judged by the observer's set of parameters-- *must* connote that the latter is automatically superior to the former. Equally, the reverse would be no more true of any hypothetical "staticization." However, inasmuch as human society and culture is inherently hierarchical in one way or another, the dominant tendency is to say that what is perceived to be dynamic is usually assigned superior status to that which is perceived to be static, as was the case when Henri Bergson used the terms in his philosophy.

I didn't specify what works might be examples of the opposite movement, from relative dynamism to stasis.  But lately it occurs to me, as I contemplate Gaster's idea of kenosis, that a story like Franz Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS serves my purpose well.

I confess that I've read no biographies of Kafka except the one illustrated by Robert Crumb, but I find it hard to believe that another biographer could offer a significantly different picture of the writer.  While it might not be strictly correct to term Kafka a "masochist," his work shows an obsession with imagining his idealized self-- such as Gregor Samsa in the short story-- subjected to all manner of humiliations and self-denigrations.  In METAMORPHOSIS, one might regard the worst aspect of Samsa's unhappy cockroach-ification is that once he's dead every one in his family is seen to be better off without him.

What's the appeal of such a self-abnegation?  Whatever it is, "dynamization" doesn't describe it well enough, since the character actually descends into the stasis of an unimportant death.  And I certainly don't seriously contemplate using the term "staticization" at all.

Plainly, since the processes of plerosis and kenosis take so many different forms in art and literature, they must have a common appeal for humanity.  One could argue that even in a downbeat irony like this tale, both author and reader are to some extent "gratified" by descending into such kenotic depths, but again the accumulated connotations of the word work against its use in this manner.

Currently, though, I can see "validation" as working across the board, whether one is speaking of the kenotic or plerotic, the simple pleasures of "unearned gratification" or the more demanding ones of "earned gratification," and all of the Fryean mythoi with their varying types of *conviction* and *stature.*

In addition, since I use the terms *dynamis* and *dynamicity* quite a bit, "validation" has the advantage of avoiding yet another sound-alike.