CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 1

Though I've discussed Bataille's concept of transgression frequently on this blog, Dudley Young's idea of "lawlines" affords me with an apt metaphor for both the physical and the cultural matrices that are being transgressed-- a word that means "stepped over."

In LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION, I considered only the physical effects of the kinetic elements of sex and violence, because I wanted to illustrate how the two elements were distinct but could shade into one another. Thus I wrote:

If even "right" sexual relations are a transgression, as Bataille clearly *does* argue in his 1957 book EROTISM, then what is being transgressed against? Clearly, although there have many marriages in which one or both of the spouses were coerced into marital bliss, many were not so coerced and so did not transgress against either the will of the spouses or the will of the community.
I may be taking Bataille into something more like the territory of object relations with my own answer, but it seems evident to me that the only constant transgression is that of one body interacting with at least one other body so as to violate the integrity of both...

So it's in the physical sense that "right" sexual relations can be transgressive. But generally speaking, "wrong" sexual relations tend to be transgressive in terms of cultural matrices.

Consider, as a starting-point, one of the most transgressive sexual acts in the history of culture, the one that Big Sigmund Freud made the centerpiece of his theory of interpersonal relations.

Now, it's often a source of amusement for some people to say, "Hah, Freud named his complex after Oedipus, and Oedipus didn't even know he was sleeping with his own mother!" But that ignores the deeper reason that the Oedipus myth attracted Freud. What Freud must have liked about the Oedipus myth was that the hero, upon receiving the cryptic prophecy, was properly disgusted at the idea of marrying his own mother-- whom he believed to be his adoptive mom Merope-- and so he took measures to avoid doing so.  Yet the prophecy is fulfilled precisely because Oedipus took that precipitate action-- an action which is are especially ironic in Sophocles' version, since the hero recounts that some of the nobles in his adopted city of Corinth had questioned his background. Freud often represented his complex as being just as insuperable as a Delphic oracle; no matter how one might try to avoid marrying one's mother, one would always do so, at least in a metaphorical sense.

For moderns, Oedipus' transgression may be more cultural than physical. Yes, Jocasta is his true mother, but neither of them knows that, either during their sexual relations or when they bear children. Greek religion, being focused on the physical, viewed the sex between unknowing parents as a source of pollution, though Sophocles emphasizes the killing of Laius above all else. Yet had Oedipus had sex with Merope, who was the adoptive mother who raised him, in one sense this would have a much more "physical" transgression, since Oedipus had grown up believing that he'd come from Merope's womb.  However, had he possessed from childhood full knowledge of Merope's identity and had done the deed with her when he became old enough to do so, that would have been a purely cultural transgression.

So OEDIPUS REX is a transgression against both physical, personal boundaries and against cultural boundaries. Do we see the same types of transgressiveness in my other example from THE WORK AND PLAY MIX-A-LOT?

I argued in the above essay that in the backstory of the Fantastic Four, one can find a "taboo-and-transgression" pattern akin to that of Oedipus, even though this particular FF story has nothing to do with the incest-taboo.  Obviously I could have chosen other examples of the trope "two male friends fighting over the same woman," ranging from Shakespeare's TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA to late-night movie fare like WHAT PRICE GLORY? The conflict in FANTASTIC FOUR is particularly interesting, though, because Lee and Kirby step around it as if it were a literal taboo.  In the above scene Ben Grimm only agrees to fly Reed's plane to counter Sue's disparaging view of him, and the only other clue that Ben fancies Sue appears a few pages later, when he starts a fight with Reed later, claiming that Sue "loves the wrong man." There are no other references to unrequited love in the rest of the issue, and the conflict is only referenced indirectly from then on-- most significantly with the introduction of the character Alicia, clearly a "consolation prize" for Ben Grimm in that she looks a lot like Sue but cannot see the Thing's ugliness.

This reluctance on the part of the creators is especially strange in that in other contemporaneous features, the "two guys fighting over the same woman" trope is played for all it's worth: Tony Stark vs. Happy Hogan, Peter Parker vs. Ned Leeds (though the two of them are never really friends), and Thor vs. Balder (though once again, the latter's brief passion for Sif is forgotten when Balder takes up with another "consolation prize" figure, albeit one very unlike his original love-object.) It's possible than one or both of them felt queasy about introducing too much heavy drama in the feature-- for though they seem to have taken pains to keep it from looking like a standard superhero comic of the period, they must have known that their only probable audience was that of preteen boys. Since no one up to that point had incorporated "heavy drama" in a superhero-like feature, Lee and Kirby probably decided that bringing up Ben's unrequited love would be too disruptive to group unity on a regular basis. It was easier to have him or Johnny simply storm off about this or that perceived slight, so that the family-like dynamics could be perpetuated. Later, in fact, Ben and Johnny become comparable to quarreling children whose squabbles Sue and Reed must break up, making Sue into a symbolic mother-figure to both of them.

Now, this example of transgression is not physical in the least: Sue is certainly not related to Ben, nor have they even had a sibling-like relationship. If anything, Reed fits that profile better, since he's eventually given a backstory that suggests a sibling-like closeness, in that Reed and Sue are said to have been neighbors. So the transgression must be cultural. But what lawlines are being transgressed?

Of course there's no cultural consensus that an Old Suitor is automatically to be preferred to a New one, or vice versa. It's not difficult to call to mind multiple examples of Hollywood movies in which it's right and proper that a New Suitor should displace an Old Suitor, as well as examples that support the verdict of Lee and Kirby's setup: that Reed and Sue alone are "right" for each other.  So in this case the "lawlines" are entirely contingent on the internal logic of the series: the lawlines exist because the authors say that they exist, at least within the cosmos of FANTASTIC FOUR. In contrast, in the cosmos of IRON MAN, the contention of Tony Stark and Happy Hogan lasts only so long as the authors can get some mileage out of it. Finally the authors end up giving the girl to the supporting character, at least partly because there was no future in matching up Tony with his secretary-- in marked contrast to the current movies.

In a future essay in this series, I'll enlarge on some of the other ways in which implied lawlines can be just as arbitrary, if not more, than the real laws that govern society.

EGO, MEET OBJECT

In this June 2013 essay I ruminated for a while on the way in which the focal presences of various works might be considered "ego-oriented" or "affect-oriented," using two Rider Haggard novels as my examples. I derived these terms from Carl Jung, but I've only used them a few times on my various blogs-- in contrast to my other principal use of the term "affect."  Also in 2013 I formulated the concept of "sympathetic affects" and "antipathetic affects" as a logical extension of Rudolf Otto's incomplete (in my opinion) schema.


Thus I'm retiring the term "affect-oriented."  The Jung quotes cited in the above essay don't consistently use "affect" as the only counterpoint, but also provide use the words "ego" and "object" as the consuming passions, respectively, of the introvert and the extrovert.

the idea of the ego [for the introvert] is the continuous and dominant note of consciousness, and its antithesis for him is relatedness or proneness to affect.

For the extravert, on the contrary, the accent lies more on the continuity of his relation to the object and less on the idea of the ego.

My substitute term, "object-oriented," is a little dicey simply because the focal presence it describes may be, more often than not, not a thing but a character: a "Dracula" rather than a "Wonderland." But it should signify only the basic fact behind object relations theory: that everything that is outside the intrapsychic world of the ego is experienced as an "object," regardless of its level of intentionality.

I've re-styled this terminology for the next essay in line. In passing I'll note that Stephen King has some inkling of the same distinction in his 1982 book DANSE MACABRE, where he distinguishes between "inside horror" and "outside horror."

NUM-INOUS CONFRONTATIONS, VIOLENT SUBLIMITY

Though Kant remains the go-to person for this basic definition of the beautiful and the sublime, as per this oft-quoted-by-me passage...

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness..."-- Section 245.

...one must admit that Kant requires some retooling for a post-psychological age.  Kant's ideas of boundedness and unboundedness probably owe much to Classical philosophers like Plato and Anaximander, but as Kant presents them, they don't have any apparent links to human psychology.

The modern philosopher Georges Bataille, however, took no small influence from early Freudianism.  In my recent reading of a Bataille biography I can find no indication that he was definitely aware of that Freudian offshoot "object relations," spun off from doctrinaire Freudianism by Ferenczi and Rank in the 1920s. However, whether by accident or influence, his theories of transgression suggest a basic understanding of what it means to violate the borders of the human body, particulary in EROTISM (p. 106):

The [sexual] urge is first of all a natural one but it cannot be given free rein without barriers being torn down ... Demolished barriers are not the same as death but just as the violence of death overturns - irrevocably - the structure of life so temporarily and partially does sexual violence...

This in turn bears interesting implications for my revisions of sublimity as covalent with Huxley's concept of "vertical transcendence," as a radical ascent from or descent into the imagined nature of the body.

I've addressed elsewhere my disputation with Bataille with respect to his tendency to regard sexuality as an aspect of violence.  From that argument it should be clear that many forms of narrative violence are not notably sexual in nature, but despite that disagreement with Bataille I believe that his concept of "demolished barriers" shows how sublimity can arise from violent encounters in fictional narratives.  As noted earlier this does not mean that ALL violent encounters, any more than all sexual encounters, will possess the intensity needed to convey the sublime.  The potential is always there, however.

I've chosen three examples of cinematic heroism which are so well celebrated that I believe their violence goes beyond mere functionality; that it becomes an aspect of transpersonal myth for audiences.  Each of these examples focuses on a hero whose violent action becomes sublime, though each with its own phenomenal character.  In addition each focuses upon a climactic part of the narrative, when a given hero has a deciding impact on the narrative's conclusion, and each narrative appears in the decade of the 1970s, which would prove a critical period for the rennovation of heroic narratives in that medium.

First, as an example of the naturalistic phenomenality, I offer DIRTY HARRY (1971):

As most movie-mavens will know, this shot capsulizes the violent final encounter that will soon take place between the protagonist Harry Callahan and his maniacal enemy Scorpio.  Despite the criminal's "supervillain" name and the dastardly act he undertakes at the film's climax-- i.e., kidnapping a busful of children for ransom-- both villain and hero are entirely mundane in nature.  Diegetically Harry is an ordinary man with no special abilities beyond those conveyed by police department training.  However, at this climactic moment Harry becomes, in symbolic terms at least, an avatar of "the wrath of God" that will soon be visited, to the audience's implicit delight, upon the heinous antagonist. 

At this point, if no other, Dirty Harry takes on a transcendent quality.  I would call this particular quality (revised since I last wrote of it here) as the "atypical-sublime."  In a naturalistic world, even the most extreme actions by hero and villain can never be more than atypical occurences in a world dominated by typical events.

As an example of the uncanny phenomenality, I offer ENTER THE DRAGON (1973):

DRAGON, which I've not yet examined in depth on my film-blog, is one of many action-films that could be entirely naturalistic in nature with the removal of certain content within the film.  For instance, had Bruce Lee's character (also named Lee) simply battled the villainous Han in a more mundane setting, that would have removed one metaphenomenal element from the film.  However, the idea of a villain trapping a hero in a "hall of mirrors" goes quite a bit beyond the habits of even the most inventive of the naturalistic villains, such as the aforementioned Scorpio.  A hall of mirrors certainly does not violate our ideas of causality, so it is not metaphenomenal in any cognitive sense, but because it does suggest the metaphenomenal in an affective sense-- pushing Han more toward the domain of the supervillain proper-- this scene in particular captures violent sublimity in one of its two metaphenomenal modes, both of which I still designate as "the strange-sublime."

Finally, as an example of the marvelous phenomenality, STAR WARS (1977) proves efficacious:

The climax of STAR WARS takes a different tack from the previous two films in that it deals with a much more monumental threat, the Death Star, and destroys it not in a *mano-a-mano* confrontation as in the other two films, but after the fashion of "David and Goliath," with the heroes defeating a superior enemy through an attack on a weak point.  The two heroes most involved, Solo and Skywalker, employ during the climax offensive weapons that are perhaps "natural" to the characters, but to the viewing audience remain as fundamentally marvelous as the spells of a wizard.  There is of course still a sense that the two heroes put their lives as much on the line as the other referenced characters, but once again the audience is given an ecstatic pleasure at the sight of seeing this particular body demolished, just as in the more down-to-earth films a particular villain must be destroyed.

More on this in part 2.

LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION

"In the structuralist paradigm as developed by Lévi-Strauss in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté--whose limitations are dissected by Bataille in one of the sharpest chapters of his book [Erotism]--"incest" is simply the violation of marriage rules. Implicit in this binarism is that what is not a violation is legitimate and therefore unproblematic. Durkheim’s ambiguous and never fully analyzed notion of the sacred is reduced to precisely what Durkheim insisted it could not be reduced to: the opposition between "right" and "wrong" sexual relations. But, as Bataille makes clear, sexual relations are always transgressive. Marriage as a rite of passage is not simply a permitted move in a game; it is the conferral of a right of transgression..."-- Eric Gans, Originary Thoughts on Sexuality, the online journal of ANTHROPOETICS.

If even "right" sexual relations are a transgression, as Bataille clearly *does* argue in his 1957 book EROTISM, then what is being transgressed against? Clearly, although there have many marriages in which one or both of the spouses were coerced into marital bliss, many were not so coerced and so did not transgress against either the will of the spouses or the will of the community.

I may be taking Bataille into something more like the territory of object relations with my own answer, but it seems evident to me that the only constant transgression is that of one body interacting with at least one other body so as to violate the integrity of both, as Bataille says here:

"In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation"-- Bataille, EROTISM, p. 16.

In this essay, I essentially agreed with this statement insofar as both sex and violence could both be broadly defined as transgressions of somatic boundaries. However, I also said Bataille was guilty of over-identifying the two modes of human action, and suggested that the Hegel-influenced theories of Francis Fukuyama could be used as a corrective. Bataille was strongly influenced by Hegel but I don't think he ever made any attempt to crossbreed his theories of transgression with Hegelian recognition. Such a cross-pollination might prove an interesting project but I won't pursue it here.

Now, while I critiqued Bataille for over-identifying sex with violence, I've also said that the two do intersect in literary narrative in a variety of ways. Thus I
don't have to draw a hypothetical dividing line between the phenomena as I did with the literary associations of juvenility and of adulthood. The domains of literary sex and violence are better seen as two intersecting circles, where some parts overlap and others do not. At the same time, while it may be a murky matter to sort out where the two modes disassociate themselves in the psyches of real people, in literature it's a good deal easier. In literature, when sexuality and violence do intersect, one tends to dominate over the other in a pure narrative sense. Thus, if one pairs these two classes of dominance with those in which there's no meaningful intersection at all, one gets four classifications of the two modes:

1) EROTIC VIOLENCE
2) NON-EROTIC VIOLENCE
3) NON-VIOLENT SEX
4) VIOLENT SEX

Each of the illustrations featured in the previous post illustrates one of these classes. In showing distinctions between these categories, I'll be relying on both narrative and significant values (see this essay for definitions) to support my distinctions. Hopefully, though all such interpretations are somewhat subjective, by looking at both I can avoid the sloppy one-on-one equivalences asserted by Freud-influenced elitists, who come up with howlers like, "Duh--hh, da supahhero's big muskles I think looks like some sorta toigid pinnis, so dat proves supahhero's is gayboys!"




First up is an example of erotic violence: the cover of DETECTIVE COMICS #203, in which the villainous Catwoman has somehow trapped Batman and Robin into performing in a cage alongside a handful of big cats. Plainly both this comics-cover and the story it advertises-- originally marketed to juvenile readers-- is meant to emphasize the heroes' peril in this sticky situation, both from the big cats and from Catwoman's whip. It would certainly be possible to frame an alternate version of the cover in which there was only a violent threat: indeed, the cover of issue #9 of DC's 1970 JOKER title shows the Joker cracking a whip at Catwoman in a similar circus-y situation, but because the Joker isn't dominantly seen as a sexual icon, I'd argue that JOKER #9 is non-erotic violence (though not interesting enough to be my chosen example for same). But because the established mythology at the time of this 1954 comic continually emphasized a romantic tension between Batman and Catwoman-- that's the narrative value-- the scene (which isn't in the story) takes on a significant value of "battle of the sexes," which is certainly one motif within the story proper (a reformed Catwoman returns to crime because she wants to challenge Batman again). We cannot know if the adult raconteurs who crafted the story (Edmond Hamilton and a "Bob Kane" ghost) were aware of the S&M associations of the whip, particularly when it's wielded by one gender against the other, but if they did they may've assumed that the scene would "tease" readers into buying the comic even though, being 1954 juveniles, they might not know consciously why the scene seemed appealing. All of the violence in the cover and story is of course "clean" violence, but some "dirty" symbolism does find its way in.




In earlier posts I've assailed Dirk Deppey's attack on this comic for its supposed decadence, so I won't repeat my earlier arguments here. I've reread SUPERGIRL #14 (2007) a couple of times and still find that the narrative by Joe Kelly and Ian Churchill is purely about two super-chicks fighting each other, with Batgirl trying not to fuck Supergirl but to cut her bloody head off. Patently the argument that reads this scene sexually is one that ignores the narrative values of the story, and how they are expressed, in order to force the imagery into a Freudian lockbox that doesn't reflect what happens in the story. Perhaps if Batgirl were stabbing Supergirl with one sword, a Freudian could rejoice at seeing yet another confirmation of the female gender's secret desire for a phallus. But Batgirl's using two swords to cut off Supergirl's head doesn't make much sense as a displaced sex act. If Supergirl was a male, one might buy into the Freudianism "head=phallus" motif, but if the subject of the beheading doesn't even have a phallus, then maybe, just maybe, her head is just a head, and the only reason Batgirl has her legs locked around Supergirl's waist is to set her up for being sliced up by the magic crystals growing from Supergirl's back. Thus the significant value to be derived from the narrative has more to do with setting up Supergirl's X-MEN-style anxiety over her body's freakishness than with suggesting girl-on-girl sex.


SWAMP THING #34's story "Rites of Spring" (Moore/Bissette/Totelbein) features about the most non-violent sexual encounter one can imagine, since the sex act is abstracted into an interweaving of minds rather than bodies. The narrative concept is that because Swamp Thing doesn't have a penis, he uses one of the hallucinogenic fruits growing on his vegetable body to give his human love Abby an ecstatic ride into his enhanced consciousness. Thus the mind-sex scenes in ST #34 bear kinship with those Hollywood sex-scenes which depict the literal sex-act as a flurry of abstract movements, with lots of touching but no hint of one body actually entering another body. I imagine that a simplistic Freudian would read the significant value of this story as an instance of "castration anxiety." But since the sex-scene takes place in a story that hypothesizes that all living things possess energy-fields to which Swamp Thing and Abby are both attuned, it's more accurate to the narrative to see "Rites of Spring" as a celebration of Jungian energy/libido in all things. In addition, to the extent that Swampy does "put" his consciousness "into" Abby, he doesn't function as a castrated male in narrative or significant valuations.



Finally, from Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, we get an encounter of superheroes in which the "fighting" really is all about sex, as Superman and Wonder Woman have themselves a super-shag that shatters icebergs, knocks down airplanes, etc. Previous to this encounter Frank Miller seems to take great pleasure in overturning Wonder Woman's "porcelain saint" image, portraying her as a hard-bitten man-hater who continually busts Superman's balls (figuratively) because she realy, really wants them inside her. Whether Miller subscribes to the notion of female castration anxiety I don't know, though I wouldn't be surprised given some other Freudianisms in his past works. It's a little harder to talk about narrative or significant values in TDKSA because it's something of a jumble of Scenes Frank Miller Thought Would Be Really Cool. Still, all the violence-in-real-sex that we see elided in the SWAMP THING scene and its congeners comes roaring back with a vengeance here. Of course even rough sex is still sex first and violence second, and the super-shag does result in a super-kid who may or may not have a certain Oedipal relationship with her super-dad. Notably, her name is the same as Superman's mother, while Batman's female sidekick, "Catgirl," dons a costume plainly (to the reader) modeled on that of Catwoman, Batman's old flame.

However, that particular extrapolation of significant values leads me into a deeper delving than I can cover here. Possibly an essay on the aforementioned critique Bataille made of Freud's incest complex will allow for more attention to this type of transgression.

SLASHIN' MARX

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.

I've already taken one Wolverine-sized chunk out of Brother Karl Marx in this post. Here's my second swipe, courtesy of Martin Buber and his conception of the two fundamental human relations: the "I-it" relation and the "I-thou" relation.

Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually re-enter into the condition of things. In objective speech it would be said that every thing in the world, either before or after becoming a thing, is able to appear to an I as its Thou. But objective speech snatches only at a fringe of real life.

The It is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly — except that situations do not always follow one another in clear succession, but often there is a happening profoundly twofold, confusedly entangled.

I'm not nearly as much a Buberphile as I am a Cassirerphile, and I depart from Buber on an assortment of philosophical positions. Still, the above passage from I AND THOU strikes me as a cogent summation of the impossibility of altering human relations so that they are purely a matter of "love for love, trust for trust." I regard Marx's assertion as one grounded in naive idealism as to the nature of human relations. Further, even if human culture could be transformed so that all or even most people related to their fellow humans with Marx's "specific expression," I believe that it would take a lot more than a new economic system to effect such a transformation.

Buber's quote is the more profound of the two, for he admits that it's inevitable that humans will downgrade everything in their compass to the status of things. I believe that Marx and Buber would agree that every "I" possesses what Marx terms "a real individual life," but Marx does not perceive the fundamental dynamic that changes the "thou" to the "it." Rather, he implies in the passage above that to downgrade an item to the status of an "it" runs contrary to the nature of humanity. The "human relation" he describes above is a "Thou" relationship alone. What Buber would term the "it" relationship would therefore be in Marx less than fundamental, perhaps a manifestation of inhuman factors like "market forces" and "commodification," two of the ruling devils in Marx's Pandaemonium.

In the real world human interactions are not determined soley a matter of a given person's "specific expression" of his "real individual life" to another person. In terms of societal function it may be true that no man is an island, but experientially every man (and woman) must be so. Things like love and art break down the barriers between one human and another to some extent, but they can just as easily build up different barriers. Love can certainly go from chrysalis to butterfly and then back to chrysalis. That's why we have divorce lawyers. In the above passage Marx speaks of art as if one's experience of it were a one-way street navigable only once one has become an "artistically cultivated person." In truth "I" find in art what "I" seek or need to find. "I" cannot find it for "Thou," only for "I." "I" can appreciate intellectually that others have different priorities, but as that is merely an intellectual understanding, to some extent that appreciation is also an "I-it" relationship.

Relationships between artists of similar dispositions are not even capable of bridging the gap between "I" and "Thou." First comes what Herman Melville termed the "shock of recognition," as one recognizes that another cognitive being shares some of the same goals that "I" do. But after the shock wears off, one usually gets in its place "the anxiety of influence," as "I" recognize that the apparent "Thou" has separate thoughts or desires that may well reduce the "Thou" to an "It"-- which, if I recall correctly, was what basically happened with Melville and the fellow who inspired his recognition-shock, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Nine times out of ten, when I hear a Marxist rail against the evils of commodification or the culture industry, what he's railing against has nothing to do with evils arising demonstrably from economic causes. What the Marxist rails against is the perception that he's not finding what his "I" wants in all the "Its" out there in, say, popular culture. But it's possible that in many cases the butterflies are really there, hidden in chrysali, and that your Marxist has stuffed his head so full of economics that he doesn't know from basic biology.