Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. (1947) Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA. 2002.
It took me a while to get used to the way that H&A wrote this book, in staccato sentences, all abstract declarations without much evidence. The first ten pages were very slow going, especially after Jameson, who was almost the opposite, torturous, tangled sentences that constantly double-back on themselves. The lack of evidence was pretty common to the two of them, though.
The philosophical bedrock of Dialectic is, essentially, that the rationalism of the Enlightenment ‘reduced’ the perceptible world to indistinguishable “specimens” that demonstrate universal laws, rather than as particulars from which we might grasp the abstract tendencies of the world around us. The use of Aristotelian terms, universal/particular, is entirely on purpose, by the way. They don’t tend to bring it up, but Aristotle floats around behind the text much as Plato, Saussure, and Marx do. They’re not named directly all that much, and when they are, it’s usually after they’re concepts have already been used.
Enlightenment is “the disenchantment of the world”(1). The ‘enchanted’ world is the pre-Modern, a ‘mana’ system, that is based on equivalence and balance, as in the scales of justice or wheel of fortune (12). It’s also in religious systems in which “sign and image coincided” (12). I’m reminded of the (probably legendary) discussion in which Tolkien explained Christianity to C.S. Lewis. He reportedly said that the Christian narrative is a myth that happens to also be true; it’s a story that, like most stories, contains some measure of ‘truth’ about the universe and humanity’s place in it, but the details simply happen to have actually happened.
As a non-Christian, Tolkien’s is the only explanation of religion that’s ever made any sense to me (though I’m not as convinced by it as Lewis clearly was) and I suspect it’s very close to the idea that A&H are trying to get at, a view of the universe in which “sign and image coincided,” and “art constantly reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared as something spiritual, a manifestation of mana. That constitutes its aura” (14). ‘Aura,’ by the way is the “appearance of the whole in the particular” (14) meaning, essentially, that the subject and the object are not separate, in scientific (observer/observed), political (dominant/dominated), or even grammatical terms (subject/object of a sentence).
The opposing idea is exactly what dominates modern thought in literary study, if not the Humanities as a whole, the idea of representation, and of faulty representation at that. They don’t actually get on to invoking it until much later in the book, but Saussurean linguistics is a major culprit in all of this, not only severing the signified from the signifier, but in its more subtle facets, arguing that the signifier only ever refers to an abstract concept and never the actual object. In Classical philosophical terms, the signifier points to the Form or the Universal, never the Particular. In modern psychological terms, Forms and Universals are only ever inside our heads. That ‘enlightened’ way of looking at language severs it from the world it’s supposed to describe. “The so-called leading idea [of Enlightenment] is a filing compartment which creates order, not connections” (99).
On the scientific side, A&H charge that rationalism attempts to measure the world in the most abstract units ever devised, numbers. That process is the “reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus” (20), which removes anything and everything individual about the things the world is filled with. “The manifold affinities between existing things are supplanted by the single relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the meaningless object, between rational significance and its accidental bearers” (7). We, the ‘subjects who confer meaning,’ render the universe into ‘meaningless terms’ (i.e., numbers). Similarly, “the economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the behavior of people” (21). The scientific principle of observable, replicable phenomena states that if you can’t measure something, then it doesn’t exist (and it’s a useful principle, if you ask me). If we transfer that thinking to economics, however, anything that can’t be evaluated in terms of monetary value effectively doesn’t exist.
Enlightenment, rationalism, positivism, and economics, all subtle shades of basically the same idea, are totalizing systems in that they see the world in terms of only one kind of measurement, and anything that can’t be measured by their single rubric is not acknowledged as part of reality. At the very least, things that can’t be measured are dismissed as unimportant; they simply don’t matter (note the double-meaning of ‘matter,’ here; they’re not material, they have no substance). Alternatively, we might attempt to redefine those unmeasurable (not the same as immeasurable) things into measurable terms so that we can make them ‘real’ again, so that we measure art in terms of how much it costs to produce it or to purchase it, or how many people experience it (ticket sales, readership, attendance, etc.).
But there is yet another alternative: “As long as art does not insist on being treated as knowledge, and thus exclude itself from praxis, it is tolerated by social praxis” (25). Essentially, art can embrace exclusion from the totalizing system and proudly claim that it doesn’t have a demonstrable utilitarian value (a concept that is equated with being measured in money) and that its purpose is, quite specifically, to be useless. This alternative attempts to escape the totalizing view, but “the use that is made of the work of art […] is largely that of confirming the very existence of the useless” (128). Such a stance manages to create a space for art, but that space is pre-defined as that which is without meaning or purpose or value. It’s an entirely impotent position.
What A&H never quite say, but if we’re generous we might say that they imply it by negative example, is that the way to actually get out of the totality is to claim that there are useful things that can’t be measured in the terms set by Enlightenment philosophy, and therefore that perhaps the terms themselves are at fault. Enlightenment assumes “the trial is prejudged” (18), that all things can be expressed in numbers, and if we go along with that assumption, we’re already part of the totality. We can easily argue that evaluation in numbers alone is inappropriate to many tasks.
So far, I actually like the sound of Dialectic. I do believe that science and rationalism are damned useful for a lot of things. Dental medicine and contraception are very near and dear to my heart. I also believe, though, that they’re not designed to do a whole lot of other things, like writing a novel, interpreting a painting, or running a marriage. There are things in the universe that can’t be rendered in hard numbers and can’t be evaluated on the basis of money alone. Sure, the price of an apartment might go up an average of $150 for a really good view of the city, but that doesn’t mean that that view just is worth $150. It merely means that people are willing to pay that much. The ‘charge what the market will bear’ theory of economics demonstrates that monetary evaluation isn’t an objective measure of anything other than ‘what the market will bear.’ There’s more to that view of the city than how much someone will pay for it, and there are elements of it that defy quantification. Placing that particular city-scape into its architectural context, historically, culturally, stylistically, isn’t something you can do with numbers. But Enlightenment rationalism, as A&H describe it, would insist that if you can’t quantify it, it’s essentially meaningless, not worth expending effort to understand.
However, the book makes a fatal leap of reasoning that I just can’t approve of. In their opening chapter, A&H convince me that Enlightenment is a totalizing system based on ‘Reason.’ However, in their chapter on mass culture, they claim that it’s a successful totalizing system, that nothing, indeed, does exist outside of it, ideologically speaking. Essentially, A&H argue that as science reduces the universe to numbers, and economics reduces it to currency, mass culture/entertainment reduces its content to mere generic structures, and its audience to generic subjects, specimens of humanity, as opposed to people in their own right. The process requires a few stages, and I should point out that it would be unfair to insist that these stages are causal or chronological and thus hold them to inconsistencies in their causation or history. What A&H describe is an abstract rendering of the totality of mass culture, not a chronology.
They start with the idea of faulty realism, or realism as a contrived genre, on which point they’re in agreement with Todorov’s concept of verisimilitude. Realism isn’t actually the replication of reality in art. It’s merely another set of generic rules to obey, but a set of rules that developed/were designed to create the false appearance of reality (101), which is basically the same as Barthes’ concept of myth as “depoliticized speech” (which I quote all the time because I think it’s the most succinct explanation of that phenomenon). Film, specifically sound film, and jazz are the major culprits. Their descriptions of the evils of jazz are either too vague or too musically technical for me to understand, but in regards to film they’re more specific.
For A&H, sound in film seems to have introduced a level of ‘empirical objectivity’ (99)—i.e., the technical replication of reality—so powerful that it “creates the illusion that the world outside is a seamless extension of the one which has been revealed in the cinema” (99). This complaint is, by the way, exactly the same as the complaint that violent video games have become ‘too immersive’ for players to be able to tell the difference between the game and the real world, and is extremely similar to the 18th-century complaint that novels were so emotionally powerful that they would overwhelm their readers (who were usually dismissed as soft-skulled women). As such, the complaint would seem to be yet another in a long line of ‘cranky old man’ reactions to artistic innovation, something that A&H claim doesn’t exist post-Enlightenment. At any rate, the wording in that last quotation is quite precise: the world outside the theatre is an extension of the world inside the theatre, not the other way around. Films, in this interpretation, impose their own logic onto the minds of their audience members, who then carry that logic over to the real world.
Film and a few other media use technology to establish themselves as arbiters of reality. That technology can include the capitalist economy itself: “In America it [radio] levies no duty from the public. It thereby takes on the deceptive form of a disinterested, impartial authority, which fits fascism like a glove” (129). Only through the mechanism of the advertising industry can radio be broadcast for ‘free,’ which thus makes it seem neutral and transparent, a mere reflection of reality. Of course, it’s not free, as A&H point out. You pay for the radios themselves, and you pay with your time by listening to advertising. Television wasn’t prevalent enough at the time (1947) for A&H to commit an extensive commentary on it, but the exact same model applies to broadcast TV. Radio broadcasters moved very smoothly into television, and took the whole material and economic structure with them.
By assuming the appearance of reality, by constructing a generic style that is a false replication of reality, the culture industry dispels the notion that it has any generic style at all. It’s not a ‘genre’ if it’s real. Thus, the “style of the culture industry […] is at the same time the negation of style” (102).
According to A&H, we have a population of viewers who think that what’s outside the theatre should follow the same rules as what appears on their screens, including themselves. The creators of mass culture are similarly trapped because the “ability to conform punctiliously to the obligation of the idiom of naturalness [the genre] in all branches of the culture industry becomes the measure of expertise” (102). If you can’t conform to ‘this style which is not one,’ you are by definition unskilled in the ways of the culture industry. “Anyone who does not conform is condemned to an economic impotence which is prolonged in the intellectual powerlessness of the eccentric loner” (106). ‘Those crazy artists’ are actually just people who don’t conform to the style that won’t admit that it is a style.
Viewers then come to identify the people on the screen or on the radio as real, as representations of what it means to be a functional person (notice how ‘functional’ and ‘real’ come to signify the same thing), and thus “agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one” (21). Because the characters up on the big screen are empty, generic vessels, however, they become, like everything else in Enlightenment, mere specimens cut off that which they signify. They are the artistic equivalent of numbers and dollars, internally meaningless units of measurement. They’re abstract examples that cannot exist because, for example, nobody actually has 2.2 children. Having been evacuated of content, mass culture becomes an advertisement for itself. Like fast food, it feels like it fills you up, but it contains no vitamins, no nutrients, nothing that can actually sustain you. “Every film is a preview of the next” and “Every close-up of a film actress is an advert for her name” (132-133). What’s on screen isn’t real, but because it presents itself as such, neither are the people in the audience, so as a result, they continuously chase that false reality and flee from actual reality. [Aside: this would seem to be the exact opposite of Žižeck’s presentation of Lacanian desire: pursuing the real but never being able to accept it. Interesting.]
There are several major problems with this formulation, as complex and fascinating as it is. First, it assumes, as I said earlier, that the totalization worked without much by way of proof. If you’re going to make claims about the world around us, you need some empirical evidence. I realize that the book is about the hegemony of empiricism and rationalism, but I’m not asking for statistics and numbers. In my lived experience, people don’t identify with fictional characters to the degree that the book implies. We are also not nearly as seemingly ignorant of the way the system works as the book implies. There are, for example, a variety of genres in film. Granted, they’re dominated by character-based narrative, but even within that range, there are varying degrees of conformation to ‘the world outside the theatre.’ If our generic expectations can slide up and down the realism scale, then we do have the power to conceive of entertainment as something that isn’t real.
This last point leads me to another fundamental objection: A&H insist upon a social model in which people can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality because their perceptions are totally controlled by the ideology of false objectivity, but if that’s the case, then where is the reality that must exist past the mass culture? They occasionally refer to avant garde art as ‘true’ where the culture industry is a lie, but they never explain what the real world is like, other than to describe the ideological system that supposedly dominates our reality. If reality just is a product of our ideology, then there’s no way ‘out’ of it, and our goal must be to pick the ideology that is the most ‘good’ (by whatever means we define that last term), and not the rejection of ideology as inherently ‘bad.’ A&H have failed to explain exactly why Enlightenment ideology is ‘bad,’ and what alternative there might be.
The book also manages to do exactly what it accuses Enlightenment of doing, reducing people to a sub-human state. In A&H’s estimation, people seem to be unthinking, ignorant, and extremely malleable, an undifferentiated, monolithic ‘mass’ that behaves not unlike a very large school of fish. Explaining the process by which (they claim) people are stripped of their individuality strips people of their individuality, and the only cure that they speak of seems to be returning to a social system in which art is commissioned by the wealthy and created by artists, which would remove ‘the masses’ from the equation entirely, and cut them off from the artistic process entirely. Though A&H admit that the patronage system has its own major flaws, they don’t seem to provide an alternative to the Enlightened mass-market.
As a matter of history, their claims about how the market functions often do not match up to the events that followed their book. I’m not trying to blame them for failing to predict the future, but if the part of the problem with the culture industry is centralization, “technological antithesis between few production centers and widely dispersed reception necessitates organization and planning by those in control” (95), then the dispersed and de-centered nature of the internet and even of the economy in general, should have cancelled out the hegemony, but it doesn’t seem to have done so. Basically, all the things they say are horrifying and disgusting about technology have turned out to be exactly the opposite of what really came to be, so the analysis would seem to be faulty, given the hindsight that today’s reader is privileged to have.
Finally, on a very basic level, A&H make a major oversight when they claim that audience members whole-heartedly identify with film stars. The book fails to recognise that there are a great number of people in the audience who can’t do that. Anyone who’s not white in the West is constantly reminded that the people on screen are not like him- or herself, which seriously weakens the process of identification that the book sketches out. Non-Christians (Jews, Muslims, agnostics/atheists), have similarly few identifiable representations on-screen, as do gay people. Make no mistake, A&H argue a totalizing kind of identification; totalization is the name of the Enlightenment game. The presence of people who can’t identify totally would seem to dismantle their whole theory at a stroke. Their’s is an all-or-nothing analysis. If they’d tempered the book with some nods towards what most people might do, or explained their view as that which is most likely, it could be quite coherent, but they’ve argued in totalizing terms, therefore their argument falls flat. The irony is not lost on me.
This book falls into the same mistakes as The American Monomyth did, and many others, as well. It assumes that there is no escape from dominant ideology, that there is no such thing as subversion, and essentially that there is no such thing as free-thinking members of mass culture. It enacts precisely what it claims to fight against.
Žižeck, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. (1991) Revised Edition. New York, NY: Rutledge, 2001.
I think I have to start by saying that on a fundamental level I don’t buy the Freudian premise, and therefore Lacan isn’t particularly appealing to me. When the basic ‘givens’ of a theoretical perspective aren’t things that I accept at face value, the pronouncements they arrive at aren’t of much interest to me. That’s not Žižeck’s failing as a critic, but my position as a reader. I suppose his work simply fails to interpellate me, if you want to look at it that way.
I’m also fundamentally uninterested in the psychoanalytic perspective in literature. Who, exactly, are we to psychoanalyze? The author? I can’t say I particularly care about that, as a critic. As a fan, a casual reader, and a would-be writer, I’m fascinated. I’d love to know the process by which creators arrive at their creations, but as a critic, I’m much more interested in what happens after the work leaves the artist’s hands. Are we to psychoanalyse the reader/viewer? If so, which one, and why would I want to focus on just one? Are we to merely psychoanalyse ourselves as critics? Seems like self-absorbed wanking to me, philostrobation, as a colleague at Queen’s put it.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I don’t get much out of Žižeck’s commentary on Hollywood film. I don’t buy his premises and his methodological goal seems pointless, to me. So sit back and watch while I presumptuously attack a respected, published theorist whose name holds almost infinitely more weight than my own. With any luck, the exercise will as quaint and cute as a kitten attacking the sock-covered foot of a grown man.
In the revised edition of Enjoy Your Symptom!, there is a new last chapter on The Matrix in which Žižeck makes the unforgivably arrogant mistake of analysing not the movie that the Wachowskis did make, but the one that ‘failed’ to make. You know the one. It resides solely in Žižeck’s mind, and is therefore immune to outside criticism. Its pseudo existence is based on the fact that we can never open the box to see if the cat is dead. He insists, in a moment of fantastic ignorance of the simplest plot points of the film, that no one who dies in the matrix should die in reality because if the subject “does […] know or at least suspect the actual state of things” (227), that he is in a fake world, “then a simple withdrawal into a prelapsarian Adamic state of distance would render us immortal in VR” (227).
I have two objections to this blithely moronic claim. First, IT DOESN’T. The film explicitly demonstrates, through the dialogue of trusted characters and through events in the plot, that dying in the matrix kills your body. It just does. Second-guessing plot points based on foisting an outside ideology onto a film is a cheap parlour game that any idiot can play. If I go to watch Superman Returns and object that people can’t fly, then that’s my problem. I’m the wanker. It is not the movie’s fault that I’ve failed to understand the premise of the film.
Second, as an example, Žižeck insists that “Neo who is already liberated from the full immersion in the VR should survive the struggle with the agent Smith that takes place within the VR controlled by the matrix (in the same way he is able to stop bullets, he should also have been able to derealize blows that wound his body)” (227). I am astonished and astounded by how little attention Žižeck must have paid to this film for him to make such an utterly foolish statement.
First, he ignores the chronology of the plot. Neo doesn’t become “liberated from the full immersion in the VR” until after he gets shot. The resurrection image is central to the themes of the film. How could anyone possible miss that? Second, Neo just can do the things Žižeck seems to insist are missing. This claim is a simple factual error. Finally, to say that everybody ‘should’ be able to perform the same feats as Neo is nonsensical to the logic of this narrative. The One simply is ‘he who can break the laws of the matrix,’ whereas everyone else can merely bend them. Morpheus specifically says so in the dojo fight and in the jump program. Did he even watch the movie?
Žižeck also repeatedly comments on perceive inconsistencies in the film that only exist because he’s insists upon them. He points out (accurately!) that Morpheus and Agent Smith give opposing explanations for the matrix’s existence (226). Morpheus claims that the matrix is “That feeling that something is wrong with the world,” while Smith explains that “the first matrix was designed to be a perfect human world [… but] No one would accept the program […] Which is why the matrix was redesigned […]” Like any zealot, Žižeck attempts to shoe-horn this apparent inconsistency into his pre-existing view of the world, Lacanian psychoanalysis. For him, the desire for a perfect reality combined with the inability to accept it, represents the ever-unreachable but ever-desirable Lacanian ‘real.’
Hogwash.
The first Matrix film implies strongly, in Morpheus’ speech in the training program and Neo’s own path towards being ‘woken up,’ that only a small number of people are ready for the truth. The sequels (which Žižeck didn’t have access to at the time of the book, I admit!) make this explicitly clear during Neo’s audience with the Architect: 10% of the population of the matrix subconsciously rejects the illusion, while the other 90% accept it. It’s a major plot point. On a related note, Ken Mondschein’s Corporate Mofo Reloads the Matrix, points out that “Not coincidentally, most of the people in Zion seem to be black or Hispanic, which, besides adding a natty Rasta feel to the place, makes perfect sense: If you're a white suburban Matrix resident, driving your Matrix SUV to your Matrix golf club, why doubt the nature of reality?”
Herein lies my biggest beef with psychoanalytical criticism: it assumes all viewers are the same. Psychoanalysis is the study of the singular human mind; it’s specifically designed (and very good at!) analysing one mind at a time, but throw a group at it and ask it to analyse the group, and it’s useless. It becomes merely another false universal, projecting a particular kind of psychology at everyone, and it does so without knowing who is actually in that audience. It attempts to analyse a subject who isn’t there. One of the more interesting facets of the film is that it demonstrates, as Mondschein points out, that people have different points of view, that the disaffected and excluded have more reason to reject the reality that is presented to them. Žižeck doesn’t seem to want to grant that variation in either the audience or the characters in the film.
I realize this reads like grad student arrogance, the rejection of an ideological framework that I don’t as yet understand, and that may be true, but neither does Žižeck understand the film that he so arrogantly dismisses as something that only makes an interesting point by accident (229), and for whom “the ideal spectator [is] an idiot” (213). Theorists seem to think that they can wander into a genre―one that has its own unique language, shorthand, motifs, and implied methods of interpretation born of generations of cultural development―and make grand pronouncements about it from a position of obvious ignorance. Mr. Žižeck, I’m sure you’re quite insightful in your field, but you don’t know jack about science fiction. Leave it to those of us who do, okay?
Check out this blog.
It's as if the writers felt they could throw in any old depravity they wanted to; by definition, it couldn't be perverse because it's a Superman comic book. Sort of like, "It can't be illegal for me to break the law because I'm the President." Superman can snog his 15-year-old cousin because he's Superman. He's above that sort of thing, 'beyond good and evil,' and all that.
Ew.
If anybody out there wants to know the very essence of Jameson's theory of intellectual investigation, here it is: the whole thing is based on one extremely misleading metaphor.
I agree with Jameson's infamous call to "Always historicize!" in the forward to The Political Unconscious (even though I still have no idea what the political unconscious is), but the structure he builds around that call just doesn't hang together.
His reason why we must "Always historicize!" when we analyse art is ostensibly because history is that which gives rise to art. He implies that relationship almost continuously, but in the second chapter of Political Unconscious, he spells the relationship out in no uncertain terms. He even resorts to a chart, which always strikes me as a way to lend the appearance of mathematical irrefutability to often quite arbitrary assertions. The chapter, by the way, is supposedly about the conceptual transition from magic in Romance literature (Mediaeval) to realism in the novel (18th-century), but the chapter is actually about the formation of genres. He ends up saying very little about the novel, and it's clear even to me that he has very little working knowledge of Romances. But I digress.
The basic premise (that art comes from history) is still fine so far, but there are a couple of hitches. First, I've misquoted his terms. It's not 'history,' it's 'historicity,' and the difference is subtle but important. As far as I can tell, 'history' is the product of historicizing. It's the texts and knowledge we end up with after the fact. 'Historicity' is the process of historicizing, of making historical facts into an understandable narrative of some kind (I.e., narrativizing). It's what we do to arrive at the product, at history. Bear that in mind. There will be a test later.
Similarly, I've expanded to all art, whereas Jameson's claims are ostensibly about genres alone. I make that expansion, however, because Jameson claims that the real significance of art is its form, not its content, so when he refers to 'genre,' he is, in fact, referring to all art, or at least the parts that he considers important enough to talk about.
Therefore, it's not that history gives rise to art, it's that historicity gives rise to genre, which is different. But there is still a real conceptual problem, here. This arrangement derives directly from the relationship of base to superstructure in Marx, where the base is the raw materials around which an economic system developes, and the superstructure is the social system that arises out of the base. Jameson has imported the base/superstructure relationship and replaced the names with historicity/art. It's precisely the same relationship, and he says so explicitly in the chart.
Problem the first: if we're staying within Marxist theory, the superstructure is all of what we call 'culture' or 'society,' which includes art. It pretty much has to. From a Marxist perspective, we already know where art comes from, the base. If art is part of culture, and culture is the superstructure on top of the economic base, then in Jameson's arrangement, the superstructure begets the superstructure. One part of culture gives rise to another part of culture, but Marxism would seem to indicate that that's an illusion, and it all actually arises from the base. Jameson's discussion is superfluous.
Problem the second: it's not only superfluous, it's circular. Historicity is, at least partly, the act of narrativizing, therefore to historicize we need to already have some concept of narrative, and narrative is one of the most general categories of 'genre' that we have. So in Jameson's arrangement, genre must precede historicity, and yet historicity gives rise to genre. I am certain that this is a huge conceptual flaw because immediately after stating it, Jameson insists that we ignore it.
On literally the very next page after the ill-fated chart, he pleads with the reader to not read his arrangement causally, but I can't see any other way to read it. He doesn't use the language that might imply the paradox of self-reflexive production, language he is no doubt familiar with as a postmodern scholar. Instead, he uses seemingly 'common sensical' and literal language, which requires a metaphorical statement that I have saved to last because it’s the most entertaining part of this whole cock up.
Problem the third, and last: Jameson's chart, and the prose that surrounds it, calls historicity the "raw material" that gives rise to art (genre), but historicity is not a raw material. Coal is a raw material. Lumber is a raw material. Iron is a raw material. Historicity as "raw material" is a metaphorical statement, and as I explained a few days ago, metaphors are powerful things precisely because, even as we use them in full knowledge that they are metaphors, we tend to treat them literally, or at the very least like extremely simple allegories, transparent representations of 1:1 relationships.
Jameson's arrangement makes sense only if we treat his metaphor literally. If we acknowledge that it's a metaphor, and an inaccurate one at that, then the whole thing is at best useless, and at worst, both in violation of Marxist principles and logically self-contradictory. But what's really interesting about it is that it forced me to arrive at the topic of my last entry, which is one of the most important things I've ever said on this blog, and therefore one of the shortest.
We keep asking, in one form or another: are our actions predetermined or are they free? That question has been around pretty much forever. It seems to me that we have a lot invested in it. We ask it not because we actually want to know what the universe is 'really like,' but because we want the universe to be a certain way in order to satisfy a sense of identity that we already have. We want to be free, and yet we keep inventing conceptual systems in which we're not. I don't know that we have enough information, or even the mental capacity, to ever answer that question, and frankly I no longer really care about the answer. But our relationship with the question, how important it is to us, how much we want a certain answer but can't seem to find our way there, is fascinating.
The evolutionary metaphor is everywhere in common speach, and in literary criticism. We constantly hear about how genres 'evolve' over time, but of course, that doesn't match up with the scientific definition of evolution.
I am by no means a biologist, but I try to pay attention to the basics, and it seems to me that we rarely invoke evolution in its scientific form, which is worth reviewing for a discussion like this. Evolution is not a directed process. It is not teleological. There is no goal. There is no 'forwards' or 'upwards' in evolution. Species do not get 'better' or 'superior' or 'higher' (as in 'highly-evolved'). Evolution is merely the outcome of natural selection, in which some animals die because their random mutations, large and small, aren't suitable in a given environment, and vice-versa. It's a reactive process. If getting dumber and shedding opposable thumbs made us survive better in our environment, then that’s what would happen in the long term.
Most startlingly, evolution is not fixed on simply producing humans or human-like animals. In fact, in the forward to Noam Chomsky's last book, Hegemony or Survival, he mentions a theory that states that intelligence may in fact be an extremely bad evolutionary trait, because it has given rise to an animal that seems to be incapable of living homeostatically with its environment (I.e., us).
When I read accounts of evolution written by people who don't understand it, they tend to include a desire to inscribe essential differences between humans and 'animals' using evolutionary theory, and they can achieve that by assuming that evolution inexorably moves towards humanity, and that it will, by the same logic, continue to make us ‘better.’ In science-fiction, you see this with creatures who ‘evolve past’ their bodies, becoming pure energy, the pseudo-scientific equivalent of spirits, angels, or demons (see the Vorlon and the Shadows from JMS’s Babylon 5, so often evoked on this blog). From a Western (read: Christian) pre-evolutionary point of view, humans have souls and are made in God's image, and that makes us feel right good about ourselves. Losing that feeling of specialness is a real blow to the cultural ego, so we occasionally try to make the ‘new’ theory, evolution, do the same thing.
One of the most interesting things about evolution, though, is that it demonstrates that we aren't all that different from animals. To some, that means that humans can be 'reduced' to their biological imperatives, and there's no shortage of made-for-TV documentaries that work exclusively on that basis (most of them have titles like "The Science of Sex" or "Why We Like Shiny Things"). This point of view essentially sees culture as an emergent property of biology; our bodies and our environment are the cause of all our social habits. It’s kind of a base/superstructure thing. Sort of.
I prefer, however, to take our kinship with the rest of the animals as an indication that maybe they have some of the things we've previously assumed were exclusive to us, like emotional complexity, intelligence, community, all of the things we tend to abbreviate into the word 'soul.' But of course, to admit that kinship (in that form) would require us to treat animals in a very different way because if they are 'like us' then our ethical systems (which say things like 'don't kill') ought to apply to them, too. Evolution can be a very strong basis for an argument in favour of radical environmentalism or something simple like vegetarianism/veganism. (For the record, I'm a fairly mild environmentalist by most standards, but others routinely try to ‘hail’ me, à la M. Althusser, as a radical because if they can make me look radical, then their own positions look reasonable by comparison. Basically, they'd like me to be their strawman. But I digress.)
The point of all of this is to show that evolution can lead us into places that are simultaneously revelatory and scary, all at the same time. The metaphorical version of evolution, however, carries very different implications. It's most often taken to mean 'change over time' or simply 'growth of some kind.' If I were to overcome my intense fear of spiders, for example, someone might say that I have 'evolved.' If a genre undergoes minute changes to fit new times and places, over the course of a century or so, we might say that it has 'evolved' to suit a new social and ideological environment. It’s important to remember that this is a metaphorical use of the concept of evolution, and as such, its accuracy ought to be immediately suspect.
That said, some of the parallels are there, or at least appear to be. The predominant cultural attitudes are likened to an ecosystem, and one that 'naturally selects' which genres and individual works 'live' or 'die.' Shakespeare 'lives' in our cultural context because we keep choosing to read his work (or even, gasp!, to watch it). This point of view is inherently related to a capitalist one, which treats the market (instead of the culture) like an ecosystem: self-correcting, and ruled by simple cause-and-effect rather than conscious choice.
But as the often dim-witted Neo so "adequately put it" in The Matrix: Reloaded, "The problem is choice." In order to characterize reader/viewer/consumer 'choice' as 'natural selection,' we have to first establish some kind of deterministic framework in which those choices can somehow be 'natural.' And by 'natural,' we usually mean 'determined by some mechanism other than free will.' The very definition of the word ‘natural’ is a thorny matter in and of itself, but I think I’m accurately describing how the word is most commonly used. This twin characterization, the market as ‘natural’ ecosystem and the individual as free-thinking, reveals a serious contradiction.
In addition to assuming that the market is an ecosystem, capitalism requires us to believe in rugged individualism, in which we are free to decide which products to buy, thus allowing them to 'live' or 'die.' From a pure-capitalist perspective, the exact same logic ought to apply to art, by the way. It's just another product, after all (to admit that there are things that can't be quantified in dollars would presumably cause the whole system to dissolve). But to make those choices the way that capitalists argue that we do, we have to, first, be fully informed and, second, have complete freedom of choice. Our information would come from media systems that would appear to ‘fill a market gap,’ satisfy our desire for knowledge, and we would have to be in a meritocratic social system. In the first place, our ‘media system’ is advertising, not the most accurate source of information, and in the second place, we can’t possibly live in a meritocracy that still contains prejudices regarding race, gender, and class, or one that tends to select for those who already have money, but that’s a bit of a side issue in this discussion. If our choices are at all curtailed by ideology or limited in scope, then the meritocracy that's ostensibly at the heart of the system is revealed to be a lie.
Capitalism, therefore, requires that billions of so-called 'free thinking' individuals 'naturally select' some products over others, and it concludes that we will consistently select for those products that are inherently superior. Actually, the logic is that whatever we select for will be by definition inherently superior. See the circular logic? It's a common tactic, to define something into existence rather than employing actual logic or empirical evidence. The over-all model rests on inherently contradictory metaphors of homeostatic biology and meritocratic free will. Which is to say, it can’t be a conveniently deterministic system and a rugged individualistic system at the same time.
The problem here isn’t necessarily that the system doesn’t ‘work’ in practise; I have said very little about how it functions in the real world. I don’t think it does, to be perfectly honest (assuming our goal is the fair and/or equal distribution of wealth), but that’s not what I’m talking about today. The problem today is that the chosen metaphors are inconsistent and contradictory. The solution, then, might be to find better metaphors, and thus we arrive back at my original thought: genre.
There is only a partial resemblance between genres and biological organisms. Genres can do things that animals can’t (and vice-versa, of course). Genres, for example, can be revived long after they’ve died. If you don’t believe me, ask the Renaissance. In fact, they don’t ‘die’ or ‘live’ in any literal sense. That biological reference is also a metaphor. Genres can, as another example, freely combine with other genres, unlike organisms. Once animals reach a certain level of difference from each other, their genes become incompatible and there is no opportunity for interbreeding anymore. Humans cannot have children with our closest genetic relatives, the primates. A house cat, good old felinus domesticus, could not impregnate a panther. Opera, however, can easily be combined with cyberpunk. The result might not be all that good, but it can exist.
But, you say, we now have technology that could potentially achieve both of these things. We can, in theory, clone an animal that died out centuries ago, and with the same technology, combine two animals that are otherwise genetically unrelated (the old ‘salmon genes in the tomatoes’ thing, which I am not making up). The problem, though, is that both of those things would be examples of organisms acting like genres, as opposed to the other way around. Animals don’t do those things spontaneously, by themselves. Humans, and our technology, would have to step in to do those jobs. Which is how genres actually function, as a product of human choices, regardless of whether those choices are determined or not.
I’m not here to argue against or for determinism, either biological, materialist, or cultural. That’s another argument for another day. I’m here to point that, instead of finding better metaphors, perhaps we should just stop using them. Perhaps we should treat genres like genres. They ‘behave’ (metaphor!) in their own ways, according to their own history and context. Instead of stuffing them into boxes in which they don’t fit, why don’t we just observe them as they are?
Metaphors are inherently manipulative. They imply, without overtly claiming it, that two things just are the same. I am aware, by the way, that I’m deliberately, almost obtusively, refusing to buy into even the simplest aspects of the metaphor of evolution in art, which might dictate, using my most recent example, that the cyberpunk/opera combination is akin to a foetal organism so malformed that it cannot survive in the womb. Thus the cyberpunk opera’s low quality is metaphorically the equivalent of being stillborn. But that’s just the point. The two things, genres and organisms, are not ‘the same,’ as metaphors always covertly imply, or to be more accurate, as we tend to treat them. We treat comparative representation (organisms/genres) as metaphors, as if they indicate equivalent identity, exact sameness. We ought to treat them like analogies, with all of the openness that that mode of representation implies. Analogies rely on active comparison of similarity and difference in order to be meaningful, whereas metaphors elide difference.
I'm not nearly as versed in the X-Men as other characters and teams (I was a DC guy in my youth; the only Marvel book I read in the 90s was Todd "Talentless" McFarlane, and I was turned off until about two years ago), but this last movie seemed to me to be more like an X-Men comic book than the other two.
There was a great number of deaths/depowerings that you *know* will be reversed as quickly as possible (no body = no death, and the Phoenix *always* comes back, she's a phoenix!).
The character work was slim to none, and mostly there to serve the main plot, as opposed to a plot built to display/work with characters themselves.
The action sequences, though eye-popping, weren't actually the draw of the final scenes of the film. Despite popular opinion, most superhero comics end with some kind of discussion or emotional resolution (though that's not a statement of universal quality, of course). Pure action climaxes are kinda boring, and since artists can create anything they can draw, there's no 'gee whizz' quality to the special effects. The big battles usually stand for some kind of basic ideological struggle or personal problem that is overcome.
Finally, the human/mutant relations thing. Magneto has, since at least the late 80s, referred to mutants as 'homo superior.' He believed that mutants were the 'next step in human evolution,' and mere humans were the neanderthals. That idea wasn't as pushed in the first two films. They were going for something a lot more akin to the gay rights movement in the first one ("Mutants could be your kid's teachers! You can't always tell!"), but in this one, they switched to a slavery narrative (Mystique "doesn't answer to [her] slave name"), which gave rise (probably coincidentally) to a kind of civil war between humans and mutants.
Your comparison to white supremacy is, I think, part of the irony of Magneto's character, since he was a victim of Nazi anti-Semitism (I believe that's still in-continuity in the comics, but I have no idea how they've handled his lack of aging since the 60s). From his perspective, the government is victimizing mutants, therefore they're the Nazis, and anyone who's every watched an movie with Nazis in it knows, you're "allowed" to kill them remorselessly. They're monsters, just like vampires or zombies. Once you see the world from that perspective, Magneto's position becomes oddly compelling (and he was right about the 'cure guns,' after all!).
But of course, a human perspective sees Magneto and the Brotherhood as oppressive and racist. So the interesting question, with whom does the real-world, human audience identify? I think we sympathize with the mutants; they're incredibly strong representatives of 'any marginalized group' that just about anyone can see the world from their point of view (even straight, white, male geeks, who tend to feel excluded from the social world). That said, when we watch the Brotherhood, I think we probably start thinking like humans who could, potentially, have to live with extremely dangerous people walking around all the time.
I suspect we identify, in the end with (surprise surprise) the heroes, who are: not interested in perpetuating racial superiority, and have the super-powers that we, the audience members, desire, and they're predominantly quite human-looking, and therefore not subjected to the same kind of discrimination as a lot of mutants, a point that Beast makes by his very presence, but that they emphasized with dialogue.
Superhero stories tend to want to have their cake and eat it too, and this one no less than most.