Four-Colour Commentary

Huyssen and the Problem of Subversion

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Huyssen comes 'back' to an idea found in Adorno/Horkheimer and in Benjamin, the call for art for art's sake, and he does it from within the context of a discussion of the avantgarde (which he spells as one word presumably in deference to German grammatical rules) and its forceful separation from politics.

A&H contend that art for art's sake is a position of powerlessness.
I've already discussed their position, but as a brief reminder:

“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.

Huyssen is somewhat in agreement with this stance, but with the kinds of Möbius-shaped caveats that only a 'dialectician' can create. "During the 19th century the increasingly categorical separation of art from reality and the insistence on the autonomy of art, which had once freed art from the fetters of church and state, had worked to push art and artists to the margins of society. In the art for art's sake movement, the break with society―the society of imperialism―had led into a dead end […]" (7). As A&H said before him, and whom he quotes at length, 'art for art's sake' is an attempt at freeing art from institutional controls, either governmental or religious.

However, this move for freedom backfires. Instead of creating a space from which art can comment on the world free from censorship, it creates a space in which art cannot say anything about anything other than itself; if it exists only for its own sake, then, logically, it cannot function as social or political commentary.

However, a different possibility exists that Huyssen doesn't quite state directly, but which is contained within his dialectical reading of the art/life cultural split, which Huyssen sets in parallel with the more commonly perceived high/low culture split. 'High' art becomes that which is separate from 'reality'; it exists 'for its own sake,' as I've already said. The "failure of the avantgarde to reorganize a new life praxis through art and politics resulted in precisely those historical phenomena which make any revival of the avantgarde's project today highly problematic, if not impossible: namely, the false sublations of the art/life dichotomy in fascism with its aesthetiziation of politics, in Western mass culture with its fictionalisation of reality, and in socialist realism with its claim of reality status for its fictions" (8).

In these examples, Huyssen argues, the avantgarde's original mission was "to reorganize a new life praxis," which is to say, to intervene in life and art in order to resist hegemonic institutions, such as government, church, and corporation. Instead, that resistance turned into different kinds of hegemony. Fascism tried to turn the very tools of domination into art-as-beauty, claiming that 'war is beautiful,' for example. Mass culture presents fiction as if it were reality, and thus imposes its version of reality in the minds of the mass audience, which Adorno and Horkheimer describe in detail. Finally, Socialism, in a move very similar to post-colonialism, insists that its fictions must be realistic, and thus blocks from them the transformative possibilities of fantasy, among other things. In all three cases, 'art' is perceived as existing in an inherently different space than 'life,' much as 'high-philosophical' quandaries are dismissed in professional politics as inapplicable to 'real-world' situations.

Two things call this analysis into question, however. First, from a dialectical perspective, the high/low relationship isn't a 'split': "More often than not it [the high/low, art/life relationship] has appeared in the guise of an irreconcilable opposition. […] Yet this opposition […] has proven to be amazingly resilient. Such resilience may lead one to conclude that perhaps neither of the two combatants can do without the other, that their much heralded mutual exclusiveness is really a sign of their secret interdependence" (16). Like many oppositional forces that appear to battle each other, they actually define each other. They are part of the same social continuum. Even if you choose up sides, you're still playing the same game. There is still the very real, very important question as to who has more power in that relationship, though, which leads to the second argument against the idea that art for art's sake is inherently impotent.

Huyssen, following Adorno and Horkheimer, argues that "art's aspirations to autonomy, its uncoupling from church and state, became possible only when literature, painting and music were first organized according to the principles of market economy" (17); therefore "It was the culture industry, not the avantgarde, which succeeded in transforming everyday life in the 20th century" (15). Hidden within that cultural analysis is the (ostensible) fact that art, as implemented by the culture industry in the form of popular music, film, and eventually television, did "reorganize a new life praxis." It simply didn't institute the praxis that the avantgardists wanted. If that analysis is accurate (I'm willing to at least provisionally accept it), then art absolutely can intervene in everyday life, and what we're talking about is strategy, not possibility. So, how did the culture industry manage to intervene where the avantgarde didn't?

I've already mentioned that "according to Fisk, Barthes points out that the readerly text will always be more popular because the writerly text, the avant garde, requires that the reader learn a whole new set of 'givens' in order to get anything out of it. The corollary is that the readerly text [I.e., the culture industry's text] will always be popular because it is the 'givens' that popular readers already know" [new emphasis]. However, that doesn't quite address the idea that the culture industry didn't just maintain the givens, but actively changed them in order to create a consumer society, as opposed to producer society (see Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen's Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness for more historical information on that transformation).

An extremely partisan position would be to claim that industry wants uniformity while the avantgarde wants freedom of choice, and it just so happens that it's easier to engineer a society of near-mindless drones than it is to engineer one of free-thinkers. Therefore, in a head-to-head competition, industry won. But as much as I have little-to-no respect for advertising, marketing, and public-relations as professions, I would never call those jobs easy, exactly. Also, such an argument fails to acknowledge the strong motivations of priviledge and money. Which is to say that industry was building, and now maintains, a power base made of wealth, while the avantgarde cut itself off from such material concerns, in no small part because it detached itself from institutions that had pre-existing power-bases (government through law, and religion through social mores, for example). It's not just a battle of ideas, but a battle of who can shout the loudest, and money will buy you a big megaphone.

The relativist position might be to point out that questioning whose 'givens' won out is an empty gesture, even a fallacious teleology. If the avantgarde had 'won,' we would simply have a different hegemonic order, ruled by a different set of signifiers, and because those 'givens' happen to be our givens, we wouldn't know the difference, much like characters in time-travel stories can't tell when history has been 'changed.' But that kind of 'everything is really the same as it ever could be' argument ignores the very real injustices that occur within our present social order. Unless we abandon a moral position entirely, we must occasionally admit that some cultural orders are more humane than others. The relativistic position also has to ignore the very real social change that has happened, and consistently happens, throughout known history. No culture has maintained total social stasis without eventually bumping into some kind of revolution. Like an Earthquake, the longer you put off that revolution, the bigger it is. The relativist position can, ironically, paint the world as 'uniformly different,' and thus eliminate the very idea of difference.

To get back to Huyssen, his original, highly dialectical, answer to this question would probably be that not only are these forces interdependent, but the style of their existence dictates which one is the more powerful tool through which to institute large-scale social change. The avantgarde occupies a small, seemingly weak position because that is how it defines itself, as an oppositional force, as a specifically anti-authoritarian force. In fact, that very position is what gives it the power that it has. If it were to become an authoritarian force, its entire ideology would become inconsistent, like 'The Party' in Nineteen Eighty-Four referring to its actions as 'revolutionary' thirty years after the revolution ended. This is not an impossible outcome, but it's a lot less likely. Similarly, the mainstream, the readerly text, and the culture industry, all gain their strength from alligning themselves with 'that which we already know to be true,' and, in a metaphorical sense, ride that current to get where they're going.

If this reasoning is at all an accurate portrayal of the world as it exists, then the most powerful source of revolutionary thought lies in subversion, in using the tools of the culture industry against itself, in hiding anti-authoritarian content in the products of that industry, in using it as a mere delivery mechanism. Only by assuming the role of the powerful side of the dialectic can we have its power.

But to execute that strategy, we would have to be the producers, and not the consumers, and the vast majority of us are consumers. That mistake, assuming we're in the writer's position, is as common as history students studying the Medieval period and assuming that they live in parallel with the nobility, and not the commoners. As a consumer, an audience member, my power lies in reinterpretation, in taking advantage of the excess, in Fisk's terms, or 'deliberately mis-reading,' in Diana Rilke's terms.

To bring this home to comics and the general culture of sci-fi/fantasy, the two positions come together in fan fiction, and in the so-permeable-it-might-as-well-not-exist barrier between 'readers' and 'artists.' The difference between the fan fiction writer and/or the fan-turned-creator, as I’m using those ad hoc categories, is that the latter works for the official institution of publication or production. As such his or her work is legally, and also socially, sanctioned. It becomes 'canon' in the universe of whatever characters or properties are in question. In fact, that is the word, with all its religious implications, that fans and creators use for stories that 'officially' or 'really' happen. In the 1950s and 60s, DC referred to a whole line of its stories as 'imaginary,' as if the others weren't (something that Alan Moore has a little fun with in his introduction to "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" the last 'official' Silver-Age Superman comic book).

The fan fiction writer's work differs stylistically; it can include content that the official institution would never approve of, for example the pornography that dominates so-called 'slash' fiction (which gets its name from stories written in the late 60s about Captain James T. Kirk and Commander Spock as lovers. The stories were called "Kirk/Spock," hence the 'slash'). By the same token, though, analogue characters, 'not quite Superman' (Moore's Supreme) or 'nearly James Bond' (Ellis' Agent John Stone in Planetary) are both officially sanctioned by a publisher and function like fan fic, reinterpreting a pre-existing character by its very existence. Analogues are a middle-ground between fan-fic and official narrative. Again, though, the fluidity of movement between fans and writers means that anyone hired to write Batman, or for that matter a new Star Trek show, is essentially a writer of fan-fic.

But the question remains: if we want to deconstruct the very economic basis of the hegemony we happen to live under, how can we possibly hope to do so by taking part in that economy? In the film The Corporation, Michael Moore claims that the profit motive is the loop-hole in the middle of corporate America. 'They will sell you the rope to hang them with' (paraphrase from memory). But if the only way to deliver your ideological 'payload' is through pre-existing economic channels, then we're back to square one, and an interdependant relationship that we can neither deconstruct nor even merely invert.

Methodology 2: Primary Material Comes First

Hence the name. When reading theory, one has the occasional misfortune to read a critic who seems to think that literary criticism merely consists of demonstrating how culture and art demonstrate the fabulousness of that critic's pet theory.

The easiest place to find this kind of thing is in the shallow, main-stream religious publications that try to shoe-horn Hollywood movies into a religious perspective. At last year's Comics Arts Conference, I heard a congenial, polite Catholic priest speak on the Spider-man and Daredevil films, claiming that because both films were about the 'battle between good and evil,' they were automatically Catholic. The reasoning (and I flatter it by calling it that) is that all morality derives from God, and Catholicism is, of course, the only religion that's accurate about God's law; therefore, anything to do with morality is Catholic.

Žižeck's analysis of The Matrix attempts to do essentially the same thing, except with Lacan. In fact, the whole book, Enjoy Your Symptom!, consists of either Žižeck praising films that 'demonstrate' Lacan, or condemning films that 'fail' to demonstrate Lacan. He even alters the facts, the events and depictions in the film, to make his praise/condemnation more dramatic. The book makes the elementary mistake of trying to make the evidence demonstrate the theory, which might prompt one to ask where, exactly, the theory came from.

The irony is that most theorists absolutely understand this principle. I've been reading Williams and Huyssen this week, with a side order of Todorov, and they all make their evidence plain. They even, often, go out of their way to point out that appealing to undemonstrated truths is precisely the definition of internalised ideology. Unfortunately, many junior academics (a group in which I include myself!) take the words of theorists to be like unto gospel, and merely look at the world as a convenient way to confirm those words. This problem is closely linked to the zealotry problem I discussed in Methodology 1.

So here's point #2: theory must be derived from evidence, not vice-versa.

In criticism of art, we must derive our methods from the experience of the art itself, which includes the social and political context, the genre formations, the industries that create the art, the history of the development of the medium, etc..

Methodology 1: Social Affiliation

I don't like the idea of being yoked to just one theory. Each one is a particular perspective, and particular perspectives hide as much information as they reveal. You simply can't understand the universe's complexities and contradictions if you look at it from only one (metaphorical) angle.

But the question remains: what is my method, then, if I'm not picking a theory to use? I want to say that I simply select whatever theoretical perspective seems to be appropriate to the subject at hand, but that merely (as Williams pointed out just yesterday) implies a sub-theory of "appropriateness" that is conveniently invisible, and therefore ostensibly shielded from criticism. It would supposely "just make sense," which is a code phrase for "it would be based on deep-seated intuitions within myself, the nature of which I don't fully understand."

So here's my first thought: I have quite consciously attempted to maintain a certain affiliation with the popular audiences of the art I study, which is to say, geeks and nerds. I've steadfastly insisted on calling the form 'comics' because that's the word most commonly used in English, and for all its faults, it reveals the bumpy history of the medium in the Anglo-American tradition, rather than papering over it with a shift in terminology. I am very much interested in mapping popular reactions to literature and actively comparing them to what critics think, to what academics, educators, librarians, politicians, clergy, and even parents of young audiences think. The popular reaction, the reaction exhibited by the most people, is more influential, more important, but it exists within a network of reactions, all of which feed into each other. There is no monolithic 'mass'; to study the reactions of the most people is to study something inherently heterogeneous, even if there are very large-scale trends.

Now, the nature of that reaction could, very well, be the result of manipulation by other forces (government propaganda, the profit motive of the culture industry, the ideological dictates of religion, etc.), but in studying the popular reaction I hope that we can discover what its origins might be. Rather than setting out to 'reveal' that propaganda controls us all, I'd like to 'discover' where our relationship with the art form comes from. [It is ironic that 'reveal' and 'discover' mean essentially the same thing, but have very different connotations in this context.]

So that's point #1 of my method: retain the perspective of the fan, the popular audience, in my case, the geek.

Raymond Williams pt2, guest-starring Tzvetan Todorov

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. "An Introduction to the Verisimilitude." (1967) Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1977.

We have, in these two writers, to very different takes on realism, so different, in fact, that comparing them might lead us in interesting directions.

Williams is rooted in 'the real,' though he certainly has no illusions that art merely replicates reality. He traces the shifting definition of the term from the 18th century to the present, showing how it reflects first one, then another, then another aspect of the "ordinary, everyday, contemporary reality" (274) in which its readers are situated. Todorov's paper, however, is not about realism alone but the manner in which all texts create the appearance of reality on the page. He calls that appearance 'verisimilitude,' and quotes Corax, an Ancient Greek philosopher, who points out that it is not reality but "what most people believe to be reality" (82), which is to say that discourse doesn't need to be consistent with the external, objective world, but that "discourse must be consistent with another (anonymous, impersonal) discourse" (82).

To look at those same ideas from another perspective, Williams demonstrates that what constitutes 'the real' in literature is, in fact, a selection and interpretation of an external world based on the subject positions of particular people with particular vested interests in the world. Realism in the 18th century was the 'reality' of the middle class, but later became the 'reality' of the destitute and the excluded. Both match the external world, but reflect entirely different parts of it. By the 20th century, the novel is prised for its psychological realism, the construction of believable 'inner lives' for its characters. This point implies, and even anticipates, the application of psychological realism within otherwise fantastic narratives, like Moore's Watchmen, for example, or the updated Battlestar Galactica. Reality, in this construction, is perceived from a particular point of view. As the point of view shifts, from group to group or from era to era. 'reality' shifts with it.

Todorov, on the other hand, replaces realism entirely with verisimilitude, a construction based, not on the unique combination of external reality and one's particular view of it, but mostly by the formal concerns of a medium of expression (he discusses literature exclusively, but the concepts have multiple applications) and the necessities of the reader/writer relationship. Verisimilitude is when generic expectations are rendered invisible; when we no longer recognise that the reality in literature (or, indeed, in television and film) is distinctly different from the reality we physically live in. However, if we ever attempt to institute 'more' or 'better' verisimilitude, we can only ever achieve yet another kind of verisimilitude. To insist on a more realistic crime drama is, actually, to insist on a crime drama that more effectively hides its own construction. In art, more technique and technology can hide the very presence of technique and technology. 'The real,' for Todorov, is a successively more distant set of literary rules. In philosophy, this is a Third Man argument. To judge a narrative 'unrealistic,' we need another set of definitions of reality, which themselves are always the product of utterance and narrativisation, which are themselves unrealistic, and 'round and 'round she goes.

Both of these models demonstrate that reality itself is a construction. Both imply cultural affiliation as a definer of reality, Williams with his 'structure of feeling' and Todorov through "what most people believe." The difference is that while Williams takes the external world as a given, something against which we react, Todorov illustrates a conceptual loop whereby discourse begets discourse, and seems uninterested in whether there is or isn't a thing called 'reality' because we have no access to it. So the question is, how can we know, one way or another, if we have access to reality? And, even more importantly, what would we do differently if we did know one way or the other?

Heroes (NBC)

I just watched a leaked copy of a new show coming this falll called Heroes. I have to say, it was quite fun. Light spoilers ahead.

There's definitely a bit of a Lost feel to it. Wierd things happening with no apparent explanation. Large chunks of screen time dedicated to dialogue in an Asian language (more about that in a moment). It reminds me of the beginning of Midnight Nation and a little of Supreme Power, both by J. Michael Straczinski. The premise is fairly simple. People are getting what can, and should, only be described as superheroes, all at once. They don't know it yet, and since they live in something like the real world, it either scares the hell out of them, or nobody believes them. It's your basic 'what if superheroes were real?' story. Nothing Earth-shatteringly new for comics, but pretty much the first time anyone's taken it seriously on TV, aside from light, action/adventure stuff like (dear lords) Mutant X.

But this show looks like it's trying to have somewhat deep characters, and there aren't likely to be any tights. The powers can be somewhat flashy, the cheerleader who regenderates like Wolverine for example, but it looks like they're trying to keep the visuals subtle. No heat vision or fancy super-speed effects. Downplaying the special effects will help keep it looking like a regular drama show, despite the content. It's a smart choice, I think.

As for the rest of the powers, it's a mixture of superhero 101 and some fairly creative stuff. There's a guy who can fly, a possibly super-intelligent kid, for example, and the previews show us a cop who get telepathy. There's also an artist who paints the future, but only when he's high, and, easily my favourite character, a starry-eye Japenese saliryman who's read comics and watched Star Trek all his life, and seems to have some fairly far-reaching potential abilities to violate the space/time continuum. So far, he can move time forward and backward, and he's mastered teleportation. Finally, there's a woman in Las Vegas who has some kind of mysterious power to do with mirrors. There might be something in the mirror, for her, that shouldn't be let out. I smell angst!

So far, it looks clever, it looks like it'll contain interesting twists and turns, and it's at least making an attempt to be international (read: there are two guys from Asia who, of course, end up in New York. Can you believe it? Asian people! In New York!). There are some implications crazy government conspiracy, too, and some yammering about 'the next evolutionary step,' which of course pisses me off for reasons I don't need to explain again, but the main plot looks compelling. I doubt it'll have any of the depth of similar stories that have already been done in comics, but the fact that NBC is producing a show with this premise makes me just happy to be alive right now. It is truly the Time of the Geek.

In Villainy Veritas?

I've been pondering something ever since I saw Superman Returns.

Last year, I wrote a conference paper on Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, a wonderful little mini-series that basically tells the old Superman vs. Luthor story, but from Luthor's point of view and in such a way that you can't help but agree with Luthor for most of the story.

But that's just it. In the last issue, predictably, Luthor's arguments, which were extremely convincing for most of the series, are dismissed with a whim. Luthor explains himself to Superman, who simply says "You're wrong," and then flies away. Luthor's whole, meticulous explanation falls away in the face of Our Hero's bald assertion. To make a long essay short, I argued that villainous justifications are presented in heroic narratives as case studies in 'bad' reasoning. We, as readers, know this inherently, as a matter of genre expectation. Therefore, whatever the villain says, we are to believe the opposite.

Also, in terms of form rather than content, villains employ complex, academic rhetoric to make their points and heroes employ bald assertions of essential 'truth.' Therefore, such stories are a symbolic denouncement of complex rhetoric and a valorisation of simplistic deference to status quo ethics. In the Superman dynamic, brawn and 'family values' trump brains and complex thinking, so complex thinking must be inherently evil.

However, something happened in Superman Returns that took me a second or third viewing to acknowledge. In the yacht library, Luthor rambles on about technology's relationship to Empires. I'm paraphrasing from memory, so I might be wrong on the details, but he says something like "The Roman has roads. The British had ships. America had the atomic bomb..."

What was that? Did someone just lump America in with the two most famous empires in Western history? Did an American movie just tacitly state that the U.S. is an imperial regime? As someone who reads Chomsky on a regular basis, this is not a new thought to me, so I didn't realise the significance of it until the second time I saw it (that scene was in an on-line preview; I can't find it, but I'm sure I saw it more than once).

So that got me thinking. Are villains afforded a capacity for truth telling, for social and political criticism, that is much wider than heroes because it's always assumed that they're 'wrong'? Is that where popular writers and film-makers vent their feelings about the social order?

Perhaps I'm a little slow on the uptake, but I find this notion exhilarating. It does bring up a whole host of questions, though. We can't just assume that all villains are the covert voice of social commentary, of course, but we also can't assume that they're merely pure evil given voice, either.

So what are the tell-tale indicators of truth in the mouth of villainy in action/adventure storytelling? Lex Luthor is supposed to be an unparalleled genius, which might make us more apt to take his statements more seriously than, say, the mad ramblings of Green Goblin or the Joker (leaving aside the possibility that in lunacy veritas). Would we take more seriously the words of villains who belong to marginalised social groups, like people of colour, women, gay people, the poor, etc.?

I've noticed that villains in action/adventure stories are rarely allowed to be anything other than white males, though some racialising is permitted, most commonly English or German. The Galactic Empire is clearly raced English, for example, while the Rebels are very American. It seems clear that movie studios avoid 'minority' villains for fear of offending the groups to which they might belong (anyone remember the protests against Basic Instinct for its depiction of bisexual people?). Is there a side benefit, though, that a white, straight, male villain also doesn't have the same capacity for truth telling?

Raymond Williams' Long Revolution

Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London, UK: Chatto and Windus, 1961.

Raymond Williams builds a model of cultural interaction in this book, and despite its language of moral judgement, the 'success' and 'failure' of art to do certain things he perceives as 'good,' the argument itself is fairly convincing. He starts with the demonstrable fact that human learn to see, learn to perceive our senses, and ends with 'structures of feeling,' the totality of lived culture as perceived from within a certain culture at a certain time.

The 'big idea' at the heart of this book is mutual determinism. Any time there is a relationship between two things (or potentially more, but he just does binaries), there is no question of which caused the other. Instead, they are described as one whole made up of different parts that do different things and defining each other's nature in the process. This theme starts with the human need to learn to perceive our own senses, a fact that has been verified by biologists and psychologists. Therefore, the world around us, as we receive it through our senses, defines how we see it, but how we see it is also determined by the unique sensory apparatus we happen to have, and idea that the posthumanists take up extensively. There is neither one, determinate, objective universe, nor a plurality of indeterminate, subjective perspectives. There is, however, an zone of understanding where groups of the latter try to make sense of the former, literally make sense, construct logical models for what our sense tell us.

Here, we get into some of the communication theory of the Birmingham School. Stuart Hall says some very similar things, and I can't imagine that's a coincidence. We're all looking at the same 'object' (the universe) with the same senses, and it's no surprise, then, that we arrive at a lot of the same conclusions. However, there is variation and texture, so each of us is still an individual, with an individual perspective, but it largely matches the perspectives of those around us. Williams works very hard to create a model of society that is both collective and initial, and if nothing else, I'd like to think that that's what humans are like.

By the same reasoning, different historical periods have different, mutually agreed-upon, basic perceptions of the universe. Each generation responds to the world differently because it's a slightly different world, and there are several generations alive at once, so perfect agreement on what the world is 'really' like is impossible, though we largely agree on the basics, which are themselves perceptual constructs, but constructs based on a way of seeing the external world.

The totality of a person's impressions of, and responses to, his or her own contemporary culture constitutes a "structure of feeling" (48), Williams explains, which is both highly subjective and systematic, as the word 'structure' implies. Because structures of feeling are culturally determined, there is hierarchy and form, there are rules, if only dimly understood, much like generic expectations. You don't have to be able to name them to be aware of them. However, those rules and expectations are of a decidedly subjective nature. They can be 'felt' primarily in reaction to that which is 'alien,' the slight accent of a long-since-assimilated immigrant, for example. It's at once almost impossible to define in tangible terms, and also quite obviously there. That we perceive it as 'obvious,' despite a lack of verifiable (can we say scientific?) evidence is precisely what Williams is talking about.

By the same reasoning, the structures of feeling of cultures that have passed into history are inaccessible. We can only try to understand them, to 'feel' them, via the artefacts they leave behind. "Once the carriers of such a structure [of feeling] die, the nearest we can get to this vital element is in the documentary culture, from poems to buildings and dress fashions" (49). And this, Williams explains, is where academia steps in, documenting past cultures, attempting to access their structures of feeling in case some aspect of a previous culture might 'ring true' for us, now. But herein lies precisely the danger of such a study.

Because we live within our own structure of feeling, our organisation, documentation, and perception of previous periods will always and unavoidably be in our culture's terms. "The survival [of a dead structure of feeling] is governed not by the period itself, but by new periods, which gradually compose a tradition" (50). These "selective traditions" are attempts to 'select' representative examples of a period's cultural artefacts, novels for example, made by people who do not live in that period. Their criteria for selection are, therefore, based on the values of their own period. The study of history is really a study of ourselves, whomever 'we' happen to be. Certainly, we can understand a great deal of a previous period's structure of feeling by studying their artefacts. Williams does not argue that we are so locked into our own culture that we can't think out outside of it at all, but we are unable to fully perceive that culture. We are always working backwards, from artefact to culture, and we can never expect to have the same immersion in that culture as it was lived.

But this brings up a real problem that Williams only tangentially addresses. Structures of feeling are not universal, according to Williams. They "can fail to be fully understood by living people in close contact with it" (49), but they are still "very deep and very wide" (48). They are, by definition, the perceptions and ways of perceiving that are at the very roots of our consciousness, and they are held by a majority of people in a given culture. I'd venture to say that, within Williams' construction, we would define cultural affiliation by the congruence of structures of feeling, which summons up the possibility that people can live in a given period and a given location, the 'present' in both temporal and spatial terms, and not share the same structures of feeling.

I, as white, de facto middle-class, graduate student demonstrably do not have the same structures of feeling as a Cree, working class, truck driver, living in the same city at the same time. Williams' push towards totality and interpenetration, it seems to me, occasionally deflects attention away from the dominance of one structure of feeling by another, in this example, those located within class and race. We must not mistake large-scale agreement for unity. I am limited by the fact that this is all the Williams I have read. I suspect he takes up the issue in some other place, and I assume someone else has already noticed it, but by focusing on temporal culture, periods in history, Williams seems to lose sight of contemporary culture and the possibilities of both intra- and inter-cultural power struggle.

Here's an example of the kind of scenario that Williams doesn't address, but which his theories lead to. Because one contemporary culture can, demonstrably, have a lot more influence than another--influence on media, art, politics, economics, etc.--it is possible to become alienated from one's own structure of feeling. Because this is such a subjective set of ideas, I will speak only from personal experience. As a child, I didn't understand that the television and movies I watched were predominantly from another country. I didn't perceive a break between my own culture and that which was presented to me in the entertainment I consumed. Somewhere around 6 or 7 years old, I was informed of the difference between 'us' and 'them,' Canada and America, but by then I had already formed a structure of feeling based on American media. Eventually, I came to identify America as both intuitively 'my culture' and, politically, very much 'not my culture.'

I grew up in Vancouver, and there are at least a dozen TV shows and movies filming around that city at a time. In the late 90s, one of them was Da Vinci's Inquest. It was only the second show to be both filmed and set in Vancouver. The first was Cold Squad, and the less said about it the better. Da Vinci made an effort to make the city a member of the cast, using its local culture, its geography, even its weather, as part of the narrative. It also wrote to the way that West-Coast Canadians speak. Apparently, we run our words together in unsegmented torrents, not leaving time for others to speak, just assuming that they'll jump in when they feel like it. Obviously, that's not a universal. It's a tendency that linguists have noticed. It's not an accent, per se, but it's fairly distinct. The first time I watched that show, I heard my own speech patterns for the first time on television, as opposed to the vaguely Californian accent that most Hollywood actors end up taking on, or the various Big City accents of the Eastern U.S., like Chicago, Boston, and most of all New York.

Da Vinci's dialogue welcomed me into one particular aspect of a structure feeling, but simultaneously alienated me. It forced me to recognise that I had taken as 'normal' the accents and speech of places and cultures that are technically 'foreign' to me. I had internalised that aspect of American culture to the point where my own culture was rendered alien, but only in the media, of course, because I actually talked and listened to West-Coast Canadians every day. On a screen, I had unconsciously attenuated myself to one kind of speech, and in person, a subtly different kind. I could shift between the two with ease, but I was unaware of the difference on a conscious level. Realising that I had been doing this unconsciously forced me to recognise that I was alien to both American culture and Canadian culture, all at once. I'm not American. I have spent almost no time there. However, I have interpellated large chunks of American culture, which is a disavowal of a distinctly Canadian structure of feeling.

This is a small, banal, pathetic example of the kind internal alienation that I suspect happens in much more disturbing ways for, as an example, black people living in America. They are both not American, because the norm in that country is whiteness, and not African, because they grew up in America. Collectively, they are a distinct subculture within the United States, but a subculture that is continuously disavowed and denigrated by the dominant culture, but also absorbed and metaphorically harvested for mainstream culture. Very similar things can be said about gay communities. Williams' theory forces us to ask what happens when a person or a community's structure of feeling just is alienation from the very norms that that structure maintains.

RPGs as Genre Theory

I've written already about the intersections of role-playing games (RPGs) and action/adventure genres, and I think I've finally cracked the Big Question that inspired those entries.

RPGs are a rule-bound, highly mathematical, and in one sense completely intentional, reification of specific genre expectations. Which is to say, the Dungeons and Dragons rule system is a form of genre theory; it models the action/fantasy story. Shadowrun models the science-fiction subgenre called 'cyberpunk.'

There are important differences between those two systems that match up perfectly with some of the differences between their respective genres. As an example, D&D uses Hit Points. As you gain levels, you get more hit points, which means that high-level characters are a lot harder to kill. Shadowrun, however, uses a damage bar that never changes. You can increase certain physical attributes that keep you from getting hurt as badly, but your basic capacity to take damage is about the same as any other human being. Hit points create mythic heroes who endure ridiculous hardships, like Beowulf's swimming contest, while the damage bar creates a more 'realistic' action setting, one in which people can die at any time from a stray bullet.

In trying to recreate the experience of reading or watching these kinds of adventure genres, RPG systems just are trying to replicate the rules of the genres, the 'logic of the text,' as it were. Though I'm sure Gary Gygax and Steve Jackson never thought about it in terms of genre theory, it should come as no surprise that the attempt at replication worked. D&D is thirty years old. They've had time to refine the system.

And there's the exception that proves the rule, by the way; D&D has gone through four major iterations, the original 'Basic' set, and three editions that involved major rule changes. The Basic set was essentially a 'zoomed in' version of Chainmail, a medieval fantasy combat game. Instead of commanding armies, suddenly you were playing just one 'soldier.' First and Second editions, also called the 'Advanced' sets, expanded this basic model, adding far more subtleties to the classes and races of the game, and expanding options for playing the characters as people, with things like non-weapon proficiencies and a more complex alignment system. They also made the combat rules, and the mathematics for them, far more complex.

The Third edition did not, however, continue the move towards more and more complex rules. It simplified the physical attributes from literally dozens of stats down to six. It reduced the combat system from a rather complex formula down to a single number. It turned complicated math, born of years of 'tweaking' the First edition, into predictable, reliable, consistent math, born of the desire for 'user friendliness.' Instead of abstract combat in which you could at least try to do anything, "I slide across the floor between the monster's legs," Third edition gave us a rule-bound grid to move on, and a very limited number of optional things to do.

From one point of view, these changes could be seen to reduce the genre complexity of the game. The first three iterations consistently increased the sheer number of options, officially telling players to try to do anything they could think of. The Third edition seems to reduce those options down to a 'closed room' system. But therein lies both the exception and the rule. Third edition wasn't an attempt to emulate the myriad possibilities of fantasy literature, as First and Second were, but it was an attempt to emulate a genre, just a different genre than the literary. D&D 3.5, the most recent version of the game, replicates the predictability of a video game. Even the name emulates the numbering of a piece of software, and the Open Gaming License that governs its use is a direct application of the concepts of the Open Source software movement onto RPGs.

If we want to study how action/adventure genres work, we would do well to look at how RPG designers have attempted to emulate them.

Fiske and 'Producerly' Art

Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. New York, NY: Rutledge, 1989.

Fiske builds a new concept on top of Barthes' idea of readerly and writerly texts. The former is the jigsaw-puzzle view of literature. There is one meaning to a text. That meaning is bound up in the author's intent. It is the reader's job to simply decipher that meaning. It is called the 'readerly' because it is merely reactive. It's passive reception.

The latter places the responsibility of making meaning on the reader, turning her into a writer of sorts. It is not bound up in authorial/authoritative intent, and therefore it's 'free' of hegemonic ideology. However, according to Fisk, Barthes points out that the readerly text will always be more popular because the writerly text, the avant garde, requires that the reader learn a whole new set of 'givens' in order to get anything out of it. The corolary is that the readerly text will always be popular because it is the 'givens' that popular readers already know.

In between these two, Fiske places what he calls the 'producerly' text (and I will now stop using the word 'text' because I don't want to support the notion that all art, and indeed all perception, can be collapsed into language; I will now simply refer to 'art'). Audiences of producerly art can make meaning outside of the art's authoritative intention, like the avant garde, but also remains accessible to the 'masses' but it communicates using the 'givens' of dominant culture. Producerly art is not just a theoretical construct, a name with some features attached. It is the result of a few factors, and has a methodological underpinning.

Producerly art is intentionally conformist, but escapes mere conformity through excess. "Excessiveness is meaning out of control, meaning that exceeds the norms of ideological control of the requirements of any specific text" (114). Excessiveness is an integral part of the eye-catching, attention-grabbing, bright-colours-and-loud-noises-making media machine. It needs us to watch to generate revenue, so it goes out of its way to be obnoxious, impossible to ignore. In desperately throwing as much stuff as us as is humanly, or technologically, possible, it hits us with extra concepts--words, images, ideas--that we can then use any way we like, in new combinations unimagined by its creators.

Fiske argues that producerly art forces us to use a "double focus" (105) to analyse popular culture. First, "deep structure" analysis, methods like psychoanalysis and semiotics, attempts to "reveal just how insistently and insidiously the ideological forces of domination are at work in all the products of patriarchal consumer capitalism" (105). Second, the "producerly" (105) focus on "how people cope with system, how they read its texts, how they make popular culture out of its resources" (105) helps to reveal the deliberate misreadings of popular art .

We cannot use just the first alone because it usually assumes that the populace is powerless to resist the dominant culture, thus characterising them as, to use Zizeck's word, idiots. It also leaves us without any options for dissent other than total revolution, usually in the form of Marxism. From Jameson, we know that this is an almost untenable situation. If the revolution will happen at its own pace, then there's nothing to be done about it now. We cannot do just the second, either, because to do so would be to totally ignore the actual power and influence of the corporate culture that has slowly come to dominate most of the world. We cannot leap to some kind of post-Marxism that assumes that the populace is so powerful and smart that everything's fair now, as post-feminism is sometimes accused of doing with gender. In fact, the assumption that the consumer is 'really' in charge of the economy is part of the cover story of capitalism. Acknowledging the producerly 'text,' or at least something like it, forces us to see both actions in operation: the attempt at total, ideological domination, and the inevitable resistance to that attempt through creative reinterpretation.

And this leads me to a couple of other 'something like it' examples of concepts parallel to the producerly. In Drones, Clones, and Alpha Babes: Retrofitting Star Trek's Humanism, Post-9/11, Diana Rilke makes a fascinating critical move that mirrors the producerly approach. She extensively details the imperialistic and patriarchal overtones of Star Trek: the United Federation of Planets is a thinly disguised empire, neither Kirk nor Riker can keep it in their pants, etc. The arguments are easy to make and, to be fair, hard to disprove. Despite the wonderfully positive ideas and intentions behind everything Gene Roddenberry touched, it still contains a great deal of hegemonic ideology. To its credit, the show did improve over time, ditching the extremely sexist costumes of the 60s in favour of unisex uniforms, but for every two steps forward, there tended to be one step back, for example the tailor-made, padded bras that all members of the Next Generation cast wore (did you think all those actresses not only had D-cups but the same D-cups?).

However, Rilke then takes an abrupt turn by pointing out that the fans of the show, despite being ridiculed and dismissed as mindless mouth-breathers, already know that. They're perfectly aware of the occasionally insidious nature of the Federation and Kirk's cosmic wang. They also have the ability to, in Rilke's words "deliberately misread" the show. She specifically discusses the pro-feminist readings female fans of Voyager constructed around Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine, either as a pair or separately. Despite the anti-feminist implications that we can certainly tease out of those shows, fans chose to read the characters as positive representations of femininity, taking the good parts and simply ignoring the bad. Which is to say, they took advantage of the excess, the 80 episodes, dozens of writers, and hundreds of cast members, and built their own version of Voyager in their minds. What Rilke has done would seem to be exactly what Fiske recommends.

There is an interesting counter-example, too. In "Holy Homosexuality Batman!" Freya Johnson argues that Warner Brothers' Batman Forever presents strong images of queerness but avoids a homophobic Backlash by "turning the queer subtext hidden beneath the surface of many Batman representations into an overtly queer supratext that goes right over the head of the mainstream viewing audience" (par. 3). The film throws excessively queer imagery at the audience--loving close-ups of Batman's rubber nipples, Jim Carrey in spandex yelling "Spank me!"--such that a large portion of that audience assumes that the movie couldn't possibly mean that, thereby constructing a reading of the movie that, despite the evidence, is 'free' of homosexual implications. This would seem to be the example that proves the rule, though. Johnson argues that the source material contains overt homosexuality, but it has so much of it, such an excess, that the audience can cherry pick the evidence to filter out the unwanted content.

There's a basic irony to Fiske's approach. He reveals that producerly art provides an opportunity to analyse it against its apparent intentions or its unintentional implications. However, that means, as Johson demonstrates, that we can also read against the radical content. Fiske's examples of reading against intent tend to psychoanalyse the popular audience, reasoning that they like some content more than the other because of their dominated position in the social, economic, and political spheres. They like imagery in which the powerless become powerful, and vice-versa, for example. By the exact same reasoning, however, if that popular audience likes hegemonic readings, they can filter out anything rebelious or radical. Once we put that power in the hands of the audience, we then have to contend with what that audience actually does and what it really wants. Producerly art cuts both ways.

Gaiman, Ellis, Moore, and History

History and storytelling are a complicated pairing with all three of these writers, and I'm glad you pointed that out. I see a few different things going on at once...

There's the obvious 'theory' comment, sort of Jamesonian, that history as we know it is a constructed narrative anyway, the whole hiSTORY thing, so by telling histories like stories we both cloak them in drama and, possibly, reveal how constructed they are. That's the bare-bones approach.

The genre approach is to ignore 'real' history for a moment, and look at G, M, and E's retellings of fictional histories, rewriting the high-fantasy universes of superhero comics. They've all done it, in direct and indirect ways. Gaiman does a fantastical trip through the DC universe in the prequel to Books of Magic that tells the fantastic history IN TERMS OF its metaphorical power, not its concrete detail. His retellings are critical interpretations, maybe even analyses, of narratives.

Moore's work on this has been more indirect, in analogue heroes mostly. Almost all of his superhero work does it. In order: Marvelman, Watchmen, 1963, Supreme, and Promethea. Interestingly, he seems to work backward, stylistically, from Marvelman to Supreme, starting with so-called revisionism (Marvelman, Watchmen), in which heroes are placed into not the 'neverwhen' version of the present, but the actual present world, as much as possible. Then 1963 does the Marvel age (with really charming results), and then Supreme revisits the whole history of Superman, from end to end. Promethea does something similar, come to think of it, but with Wonder Woman, creating a version of her in the present and then slowly revealing her whole history.

The extra thing in Promethea, the conceptual payload if you will, is its demonstration of a subjective/sensory model of reality as we know it. The ending (can't recall if you've read it, so I'll only speak of it in abstract terms) shows us that the world just is perception, that so-called objectively provable facts are, themselves, merely the results of more perception. To change perception, to change subjectivity, just is to change the world. That, as far as I can tell, is Moore's theory of what 'magic' actually is, manipulating perception, usually with words (spells, grimoires, the bastardization of Latin in 'hocus pocus' and 'abra kadabra,' etc.), but just as easily, maybe more so, with pictures.

If reality just is perception, then history is another technology of perception, of memory. Every new version of a moment in history, fictional not, is just another perception. Equally 'real,' perhaps, but not equally powerful, and that's where the heavy lifting comes in. I can't just wake up one morning and decide the world is different than everyone else sees it, and then expect everyone to come there with me to that new world. Shifting perception is extremely difficult with entrenches ideas, entrenched perceptions and subjective beliefs, especially when they pretend to be objective beliefs and facts, but actually doing that work, actually shifting perceptions, is what Moore calls 'magic,' and it's the work of the historian as much as the storyteller, as well as scores of others, of course.

Then there's Ellis, whose stories very strongly advocate truth, objective and verifiable. Transmet and Planetary are all about revealing truth that has been obscured by rhetoric. The Beast is an honest monster, but the Smiler hides the teeth of a predator in plain sight, in an expression of friendship (if I may get a little poetic, for a moment). The Planetary manuals, history texts, are set up in diametrical opposition to The Four who (it will be revealed later, spoilers!) have been screwing with the path of commerce and technology for quite some time in the Wildstorm universe, creating a new world based on their own perceptions, perhaps? Their version of Reed Richards (The Four are The Fantastic Four, of course) lays mental eggs inside people's brains and controls their perceptions. He wipes Elijah Snow's memories because he gets too close to 'the truth,' and Elijah has to reconstruct it through evidence and his own Planetary books. In both series, text is trustworthy, verifiable, objective, whether in digital form or not (Spider's live column at the end of Back on the Streets, for example, is just letters from 'the feed'). Pictures are granted the respectability of journalistic truth, too; Spider constantly snaps pictures with his glasses, and the pics that accompany his live column at the Transient riot are easily as inflammatory as the text.

Transmet, unlike Planetary, reveals something of the slipperiness of perception in its narrative ploy of displaying the horrifying in order to reveal its beauty, thus demonstrating primarily our own preconceived notions of morality, but secondarily that perceptions rule morality, not eternal, concrete rules. Of course, there is still at least one, big, rule-based ethic at the core of both books, Truth itself. I think Transmet is similar to the post-colonial call for materiality that often positions itself in opposition to post-modernism and post-structuralism. "Fuck all of this fucking around with ideas and perceptions and pay attention to what's right in front of your fuckin' eyes, the atrocities, the indignities, the bleeding babies scorched Earth." Such an argument cannot afford to get caught up in epistemological questions like 'How do you know what the truth is?' or 'By what criteria can you verify it?'

Lastly, I have another idea that might apply to Moore and Gaiman only, that by injecting history with a healthy dose of fantasy, they do what fantasy usually does, they literalise metaphors and reveal/produce the conceptual meanings; essentially, they turn history into the kind of poetry that has to lie to the tell the truth. Gaiman and Moore paint pictures of drab, mundane worlds that have hidden fantastic ones sitting above or underneath them, as in Sandman and Promethea (the high-tech world that Sophie/Promethea lives in is, nevertheless, played up as a regular American city in the late 90s), and quite literally so in Neverwhere. The fantasy of London Below, for example, contains metaphors that 'read' London like a text, showing us an actual Angel of Islington, and Black Friar's populated with actual friars who actually wear black. Moore has a wonderful spoken-word piece where he does a conceptual walking tour of London, moving from place to place, revealing the city's history that is all around Londoners all the time, but which has disappeared because it's always in plain sight.

That got a little poetical. What I mean is that fantasy and science fiction present literal metaphors of human life in order to comment on it, wittingly or not. By placing such metaphors next to realistic depictions of the real world, they can work quite directly, as in Buffy, in which a teenager's feelings of fear and wonder at growing up are presented as actual monsters and saviours. That effect is distinctly different when there's a real world right next to a fantasy world. Come to think of it, that's a major part of the power of the superhero genre, which is almost always set in a contemporary world that is basically the same as our own, accept with added superheroes, like a prize in a box of otherwise boring cereal flakes.

The basic conclusion, I think, is that Gaiman and Moore are primarily interested in metaphorical perceptions, including perceptions of history, whereas Ellis generally sides with imperialism (though rationalism is rarely invoked, come to think of it), though Ellis has his hand in metaphorical perception, too, being a storyteller, after all.

Superman Returns: the discussion continues

Read these comments on my Superman Returns post. I think it's interesting that Hector's thoughts hinge on whether we take Superman as an iconic character who stands for things, is a living symbol or signifier, or someone capable of having an individual, psychologically-realistic personality.

I've read a lot of Superman comics, and I think the character is at his best when both the icon and the individual operate at once. Miller's Red Son is the best recent example, although Morrison's All-Star Superman has managed to do some of the same work. When doing both, the icon and the individual, the thoughts expressed by the individual can stand in for experiences many have had (orphanhood, unrequited love, crushing responsibilities, etc.), and thus achieve at least wide-spread identification and empathy, which is a lot like being an icon. Inversely, the iconic power can come through the personality in the form of ideology and rhetoric; when Superman objects to the war in Iraq (which he did!) for personal reasons, he can't help but stand for a particular ideological and political view of the world. The character 'goes both ways'; the icon can be expressed through the individual, and vice-versa.

I agree that the movie is much more psychological than iconic. The iconic representation seems to serve to express the psychology of the character. Leaving Earth for five years stands for not seeing Lois for that time (notice how little he misses anyone else). It's time away from an old lover, basically. The God/Jesus thing that plays out between him and Jor El is a way to explode the basic father/son dynamic, make it cosmically important, so that his relationship with Jason can function as the emotional climax of the film. That's why, like I said, I don't really buy the Jesus reading, not that it's "not there," but that this is not Superman being used to tell the story of the Christian messiah; it's the Christian messiah being used to tell a story about Superman.

The Nietzschean reading is tough to deal with it. It's both unavoidable and uncalled for, at the same time. On the one hand, the 'text' doesn't ever explicitly invoke Nietzsche, other than the coincidence of the name 'superman' with the word 'ubermensch.' There are comics that invoke that double meaning on purpose; Alan Moore did it in Watchmen and Marvelman/Miracleman. But Superman comics generally steer clear of Neitzsche. So on the one hand, I want to say that critiquing Superman for 'failing' to adhere to the personality trait of Neitzsche's ubermensch is like blaming a period drama for it's lack of kung fu fighting. It's kinda your fault for expecting it when it was never promised.

On the other hand, Neitzsche's ubermensch does do something that is implicitly expected of all saviour-heroes. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with 1,000 Faces, invokes the idea of the 'solar hero,' the hero of the sun, the protector and bringing of enlightenment, and he argues (somewhat convincingly) that almost all mythic heroes, but primarily the ones who are the bases for religions (Jesus, Mohamed, Buddha, Krishna, etc.), follow the same basic path through life. The specifics of that journey aren't pertinent to this discussion, but the one thing that they all must do is come back from the void, the afterlife, the underworld, etc., and give their wisdom to the community, returning to the social sphere in the process.

Jesus has to rise from the dead and have his wisdom distributed through the New Testament. Buddha has to come back from his trip through Nirvana and teach us how to achieve that state ourselves. The ubermensch, if my limited reading of Neitzsche is at all accurate, is supposed to turn around and teach what he's learned to the rest of us, the untermenschen ('undermen').

Most superheroes can't do that. Their abilities are almost always random, in the form of either accidental superpowers, or a unique personal origin, or both (usually the superpowers come first, forming the 'hook' of the character, and then we find out that this particular person was psychologically cut out for the role, think of Spider-man or The Flash). The only option for a character like Superman is to have a child. That's as close as he can get to actually giving others, human, access to his abilities. In doing that, he becomes the solar hero, the ubermensch, or as close to it as he can get, anyway, and thereby embraces the icon again.

Mitchell, Picture Theory

Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Mitchell moves from the 'metapicture' to the 'imagetext' (sometimes 'image/text') and, oddly, only just skims over the comic book. The imagetext is his recommended approach to handling metapictures, and indeed any art that mixes pictures and text.

Metapictures are images that, like any 'meta-' art, call attention to their material and formal nature. The famouse duck/rabbit and Magritte's "Treason of Images", for example, both force the viewer to contemplate how pictures work. In the first case, the image refuses to be either a duck or a rabbit, but it also refuses to be both simultaneously. Its nature requires that the viewer acknowledge that the picture is a two-dimensional representation, and therefore can be contrived in two dimensions to defy the laws that objects in three dimensions have to obey. Most optical illusions do that, in fact.

"Treason of Images" explicitly informs the viewer that representation and reality are not the same thing. That is not a pipe at all. It's a realistic drawing of a pipe. In fact, what you've looked at is a scanned image of a realistic drawing of a pipe. The painting forces us to recognise that we treat images as transparent signifiers. The image just is what it stands for. We mistake analogy (this thing is both like and unlike that thing, and the differences are just as important as the similarities) with allegory (this thing is that thing). This process, forcing a viewer to see representation for what it is, contrivance, is almost always what we mean when we talk about metafiction or metacinema or meta- anything. It looks you in the eye and says "I'm not real."

The imagetext is a tougher concept. Mitchell's concerned with how to analyse those moments in art when text and picture are invoked in the same context. He charges that the most common method up to then (1994) was interdisciplinary, largely consisting of people from English dabbling in visual theory (hi!), though something similar happened on the Art History side of things in which text is used as the ultimate explicatory medium for pictures.

The real problem, as Mitchell sees it, is that such an approach is "grounded in the sense that art history provides a 'visual analogue' to the study of literature" (84) and "that verbal and visual media are to be seen as distinct, separate, and parallel spheres that converge only at some higher level of abstraction" (85). For example, this approach leads us to the conclusion that Romantic painting and poetry were attempting to do essentially the same things, one in text and other in pigments, and that the 'real' relationship between them is conceptual. The result of that kind of study is that we place anything new into old categories, merely confirming what we think we already know. Like any categorical approach, it means that if we encounter something radically new, we have to either construct yet another category, or pretend that it doesn't exist, and our first instinct is usually to do the latter.

He breaks his objection down to three specific things. First, the interdisciplinary approach presumes "the unifying, homogeneous concept," that everything follows a set of master rules that we contrived before having seen all the examples. Second, it "ignores other forms of relationship" than comparison, failing to see not just difference and contradiction, but totally different things like metonymic relations or even the recognition that the relationship is entirely unmediated or non-negotiable. Finally, it enacts "ritualistic historicism," the tendency to merely confirm the pre-existing historical categories, slotting new things into old boxes, which I explained above, a move that also tends to towards committing the fallacy of teleology.

The imagetext, as he explains it, is his alternative to the above analytical practise, one that grounds itself in the "heterogeneity of represetantional structures within the field of the visible and the readable" (88), and to "engage with vernacular form of representation" (88-89). By the 'vernacular,' he means looking at art forms in their historical and conceptual context, deriving conclusions from them, rather than imposing theory on them (and anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that that's music to my ears). As he says, the "best preventative to comparative methods is an insistence on literalness and materiality" (90), meaning that we ought to locate our analysese in the primary material, how it actually functions, in its concrete time and place. In a sense, he's talking about studying those things that Benjamin calls the aura, the time/space position occupied by the art itself. (Of course, the aura is a concept, not a thing, so either that comparison isn't all that apt, or Mitchell's call to pay attention to the material isn't as concrete as he'd have us believe.)

The last bit of his argument is a little harder to swallow, and even he admits he hasn't exactly 'proved' that his premise is true in a 'literal and material' sense, but it's an interesting place to start. He argues, put simply, that all art is mixed-media, specifically that it's all enmeshed in the picture/text interpenetration. He never quite demonstrates that this is true of paintings. He points out that text is often illustrated in visual arts, that even paintings titled "Untitled" have titles, and that the institution of art history is inherently textual. However, that doesn't convince me that pictures always contain text, or require text for their mediation. Animals, creatures without speech as we know it, can relate to pictures in observable ways.

The flip side, though, that text is an inherently visual medium is absolutely correct, and a point that most people overlook on a regular basis. "Writing, in its physical, graphic form, is an inseperable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the 'imagetext' incarnate." It "deconstructs the possibility of a pure image or a pure text" (95), because text is a kind of image. Proving this claim is as easy as writing the same words, any words, in two radically different fonts. The stylistic (pictorial) aspect of the text on the page does make a difference to how we read it. Three years of marking hand-written exams has taught me that neat, clean handwriting can make an essay seem more intelligent than it is, and vice-versa. In the opening scene of Great Expectations, Pip reads his parents' names on their tombstones. Having never met them, the narration explains, he builds a perception of what the look like based on the shapes of the letters.

The imagetext approach is one that requires looking at the specifics of any given piece (not just a 'text' anymore) and how it deploys and employs, invokes and evokes the visual and the textual. It pushes us to look at not just similarity and difference, but different kinds of relationships, including antagonism, dissonance, division, tension, juxtaposition, contradiction, and the previously mentioned possibility that there is no relationship we can describe (which itself a kind relationship), that they are incommensurable.

As a final note, out of interest, Mitchell identifies a feature of comics that has been on my mind lately. In his words, most explicitly mixed-media arts follow "traditional formulas involving the clear subordination and suturing of one medium to the other, often with a straightforward division of labor. In the typical comic strip, word is to image as speech (or thought) is to action and bodies. Language appears in a speech-balloon emanating from the speaker's mouth, or a thought-cloud emerging from the thinker's head. […] Narrative diegesis [I.e., narration] (cp, Prince Valiant's "Our Story…") is generally located in the margins of the image, in a position understood to be 'outside' the present moment of depicted action, scenes, and bodies" (91-92).

What Mitchell claims here is generally true. For the most part, text and picture do not exist on the same plane in comics. In fact, in the industry-standard construction of American comics, the pencillor illustrates the panels without word balloons or text boxes, and the letterer adds those after the fact, covering the art. The text is literally a different image on the page, another layer on top of the picture. Somewhere, for every American comic book, there are art pages that don't have word balloons at all.

There are instances, many of them, of the mixing of text and picture, though. The separation isn't quite as stark as Mitchell implies. The title page of an issue, for example, is traditionally a splash page with the title of the story, the list of creators, and the hero's name and/or title of the series written in visually arresting letters. Think of the familiar three-dimensional 'Superman' text, for an example (that example is a cover page, not a title page). Those words simply hang in the air, though they're still not part of the image, they're not separated by thick lines and boxes.

For a truly radical approach, however, you need to look at the comics of David Mack. Though his website seems to consist of nothing but links that do nothing and potraits of his characters [damn you, David Mack's web master!], in his mini-arc "Echo" for Marvel's ongoing Daredevil (volume III), he created a series of stream-of-consciousness images that travel through the memories of a deaf girl who takes the name 'Echo.' The narrative content is fascinating in the context of the series, but the form of the story is stunning. It does precisely what Mitchell claims comics don't do. It places text and image on the same plane most of the time, relenting to a narrator box only occasionally. Echo's words and feelings are rendered in pigments and textures that are the same as those of the surrounding images and directly interact with them.

Mack also dispenses with traditional panel structure much of the time. His pages are layered, image on top of image, but those images are often not separated by 'artificial' devices like lines and boxes, or if they are, the colours and textures of the art is used to demark the panels. If an image is all drawn in crayon, then the edge of the panel is also in crayon, for example. He, in one sense, 'flattens' his pages so that all the imagery, textual or pictorial, is made of the same stuff, the same colours and textures. When I read that arc, I realised that it is the logical extension of comic books as an art form. It gets quite close to fully integrating the pictorial and the textual such that it's almost impossible to say where one ends and another begins. Mack's work is the imagetext approach from the artist's position.

Superman Returns

There's been some negative feelings about this movie from people I've talked to, but I have to say that I was pretty thoroughly entertained the whole time, and I saw a certain thread of the story that absolutely grabbed my attention.

SPOILER ALERT. If you haven't seen the movie yet, I'm about to give away all the surprises. You have been warned.

One of the big complaints is that Lois has little, if anything, to do. She's blank, lacking in texture. Margot Kidder's Lois might have turned into a giggling teenager whenever Superman was around, but that was in contrast to how she acted around everyone else: tough, strong, in control, and professional. You got the sense that Kidder's Lois had grown up in the big city and didn't take crap from anybody. Kate Bosworth's Lois, to steal the words of a few friends of mine, was just angry and bitter. She didn't have the texture, the internal differences, that made Kidder's Lois more interesting.

But here's a reading that, I think, demonstrates why Bosworth's Lois is the way she is. It's not an excuse, mind you, but it might serve as an explanation of what they were going for. By the time Superman Returns happens, Lois has given up on ever seeing Superman again. She's written her "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman" article and it's her crowning achievement as a journalist (Pulitzer!), but she has lost her strength, the fire in her belly that, presumably, attracted Clark to her in the first place. Still in love with a man who left a long time ago and whom she's given up on ever seeing again, and in a relationship with a man whom she cares for but doesn't feel passionately about, she's moved to the 'burbs, symbolically and literally shedding her urban attitude in the process, and generally given up on her life. Without Superman around, she's barely alive at all. This reading doesn't redeem her character, and is not exactly music to the ears of a feminist like myself, but it at least explains her flatness.

Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why Clark is still so obsessed with her, but that, too, has a corresponding explanation in the script. If his love for her seems odd, misplaced even (why still feel so strongly about this empty woman?), it's because he's not in love with her so much as he's in search of a family, a secure place in a world that left him behind. He was so obsessed with finding an identity within the vastness of the universe that he travelled through space for five years to find Krypton, but when he got there it was a "graveyard." It completely failed to fulfil his desire for an identity. He's like an adopted child who goes to find his birth parents only to discover that they're dead, and that he was actually orphaned.

There's an interesting missed opportunity, there, to locate himself in the reality of the Kent farm. His mother assures him that he's not alone, that he has a family and a home, but he doesn't seem to take any solace in that. In fact, he immediately goes back to Metropolis even though he doesn't have anywhere to live there, literally no home, and Martha Kent[1] is symbolically cut out of his life when he lies in the hospital. She's forced to wait outside because she has no public relationship with 'Superman,' while Lois Lane is waved through because she's his 'girlfriend,' despite the boyfriend and the kid. The Superman identity overshadows the Clark Kent identity. But before all of that happens, Clark renews his quest for Lois after returning to Earth. He presumably expects, assumes even, that she'll be single and available, just like she always is (and has been since the 40s). Instead, she's built a family around herself, but one that leaves her dead inside.

So, Lois is empty because she has resigned herself to living in the absence of Superman, and 'Kal' is chasing an identity as Superman rather than finding one in Clark Kent. These two idiots would probably have kept running around in circles if not for Jason. Lois is still left empty, pining away for Superman despite her stable family life, so again, she's kinda flat. However, Superman has gained an identity, all of the sudden. He's a father. Because of his (ahem) 'god-like' Kryptonian father, and in no small part because of his dead human father, he takes on that paternal role with full gusto. It is the sense of placement in the universe that he was looking for, and we can tell because he stops chasing after Lois at that point. He doesn't go to their house to stalk her anymore. Instead, he goes to visit his son (or stalk his son, depending on how generous you are about it).

By that point, he's also symbolically rejected his Kryptonian heritage by tossing the crystal island into space, along with all the data shards of Jor El. The character has three names, Superman, Clark Kent, and Kal El. The first denotes the superhero, the saviour. The second denotes the human inside the suit, or alternatively, the disguise the superhero wears. The third, often forgotten one, denotes the alien. By the end of Superman Returns, he's chosen the Superman identity because in that identity, he is Jason's father. Clark Kent can't be paternal towards that child, but Superman can. It's his and Lois' (and presumably eventually Jason's) secret family. Meanwhile, he's allowed his Clark Kent identity to basically wither and die. He ignores his mother and more or less gives up on Clark's job or his chances with Lois (I'm assuming a little bit there, but I think it fits). Finally, the Kal El identity has been tossed into space (though he could go and retrieve those crystals if he worked fast).

The movie is, then about finding a new place in a world that left you behind. The life he had before, the stable but excruciating love triangle between Clark, Lois, and Superman, simply isn't an option anymore. Instead, he finds a new place in a new, weird kind of family. There are some threads left hanging, and it's not entirely healthy for Lois, who's still dead inside, and Clark, who has no life to speak of, but I think we can trust Brian Singer enough to believe that he'll return to them later.

There are two other thoughts I have to express, unrelated to the above. First, more than a few people have complained or otherwise rolled their eyes at the really heavy-handed religious over-tones of the film. Jor El's speeches, taken from the original Mario Puso script and read by Marlon Brando, are dripping with messianic implications. They're not quite Christian, there are saviours in almost every religion and if you believe Joseph Campbell they all act the same way, but in our ostensibly Christian culture, it's hard to read them any other way. This film's plot, as yet another friend pointed out, follows the basic cycle of the life of Jesus: coming from a kind of obscurity, he becomes a hero, saves everyone by sacrificing himself, and rises from the dead. We could even say that he spreads the knowledge he gains from his heroic journey if we see his having a son as symbolically passing his divine powers onto humanity by interbreeding with them (which is a little Neitzschean). Couple that with the explicit references to his being a saviour in the script, and his cruciform pose after lets go of the island in space and flapping, wing-like cape, and the implication is pretty hard to deny.

However, the overtness of the references to being a saviour transform a fairly simple bit of symbolism, 'Superman stands for Jesus,' into a kind of commentary. Although by the end of the movie, he's once again saved everybody, Lois still can't write her "Why the World Needs Superman" editorial, which is what she was originally trying to write but couldn't when she created her Pulitzer-prise winning "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman" piece. (That bit of business is explained in the four-issue prequel mini-series, plotted by Singer). Even Superman himself phrases it as a question during his trip into the sky with Lois: "If the world doesn't need a saviour, why do I hear them asking for one?" In terms of concrete plot details, the threat to the world that comes up in that film only exists because of Superman's presence on it; Lex builds his island out of Kryptonian crystal technology, so Superman only manages to save the world from a threat that he introduced into it (and then failed to contain by leaving in the arctic where, relatively speaking, and damn fool could find it). Finally, as I have argued, Superman does not find his identity as a specifically Christian saviour figure at all; he becomes the Father, not the Son. The religious overtones are most certainly there, but they're not nearly as cut-and-dry as 'Superman = Jesus.' The whole thing is generally left hanging or introduced as questions without answers. Is he a saviour? Isn't he? Do we really need one? The movie's plot elements don't provide us a ready-made answer.

And one last complaint that points out something interesting about this movie. There is no knock-down, drag-out fight at the end of this film. The airplane rescue is pulse-pounding fun, but that's about all you get for 'action.' The rest of Superman's appearances show him either stalking Lois (creepy!), or displaying his feats of strength, and that latter element is my real point. Superman in film isn't much of an action character. In the comics, he gets into serious fights all the time, as is true of the cartoons. The DC universe is populated with characters who have the sheer strength to take him on. In the films, though, his only supervillain is Lex Luthor, who meets Superman's brawn with brains, and usually obviates the fight in which he would undoubtedly lose. So if Superman can't be an 'action' hero in that setting, he becomes something else, something more like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, or Beowulf. His saving Metropolis and tossing the crystal island into space isn't 'action' in the contemporary sense. They are, instead, heroic deeds. They are awe-inspiring because they're big and even impossible. "Managed to outsmart the Cyclops," sounds a lot like "Won the swimming contest in sub-zero ocean while wearing full armour," which in turn sounds a lot like, "Lifted an entire island of kryptonite above his head and threw it into space." These kinds of events are not the spectacle of battle, as in the three-way fencing match in Pirates of the Caribbean: II, but the spectacle of awesome power, and mighty strength. Being disappointed at the lack of a Big Fight to end the film is actually (which I was!) is actually a misapprehension of how this film worked.

[1]Ever notice that Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent's mothers are both named 'Martha'? Was that just a stereotypically motherly name in the 50s, which is when those characters were given names? Is it just that 'Martha' kind of sounds like 'mother'? These things keep me up at night.

Letters and Missives

Over the last few weeks, I've had some really fascinating conversations with Professors Doug Barbour and Brad Bucknell, my supervisors for the dissertation. I've decided to cut out some of the good bits and paste them here. Enjoy!

Towards a Meta-Theoretical Thereography of Theoretical Deployment

I'm starting to see the intersection of the unconscious (psychoanalytic) and ideology (Marxist). The unconscious is, logically, where deep ideology lives, where we accept/refute/ignore the hails of ideology and 'texts' (a term I'm not altogether comfortable with).

So, Jameson, Althusser, etc. are trying to show, to some degree or another, either the fluidity of ideology (the ISA rather than state-controlled entertainment), its self-reflexivity or even homeostasis (base -> superstructure and superstructure -> base), or both. Should this remind me of medieval astronomers building orbits inside orbits inside orbits in order to reconcile the terracentric universe with observable phenomenon, because it kinda does? The broad strokes of the system are appealing, but the specifics get all tangled up in, well, specifics, situational problems, and the like. There's a methodological problem, here.

On the one hand, I'm loath to use any one over-arching ideology as the end-all, be-all key to the universe. Nothing sees the totality. Nothing is capable of answering every question because it has its own answers built it. That way is the path of zealotry. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

On the other hand, if I do as my gut tells me and use an ideology (Marxism in this case) only at those times that it feels appropriate--using it as a counter-narrative to capitalism, for example, or talking about alienation from labour/goods through money--then I'm still using something to decide when Marxism 'feels appropriate,' I'm trading an explicit, if flawed, ideological system for an implicit one that resides only in my unconscious (according to the logic above). This is the same problem. I've just tricked myself into not seeing it.

On yet another hand, if we work with the most basic notion of most ideologies, "I am ignorant of more things than I know, and therefore should think with humility," then I'm very much in danger of keeping myself from ever acting at all because I can always come up with a scenario in which I could be dead wrong; if ideology rules action, even in a material world, then when can I ever act with confidence?

These are not new questions, of course, and the only answer would seem to be "make yourself as informed as you can given your material constraints and then do your best." There is no certainty. There is not perfect determination. We must rely on cogency because it's all we have.

But very few people like the "oh well, I guess we just have to muddle through" answer to life's big questions (except for old people; they get it right away). My question is, why not? Why the search for absolute surety (i.e., determinism), and then the flight from it (i.e., quest for freedom of choice)? What's at stake in this ping-pong match of totalization versus anarchy? Who benefits from one answer, the other, or, more importantly, the debate itself? Why do we keep asking this same old question?

I don't know the answer yet, and I may be repeating myself, but I can't help thinking that the determinist question is meaningless at this point, but asking about the question could be more fruitful.

Critical Tourism in Science Fiction

On the subject of The Matrix, I don't have a problem with a paper that argues that it fails to do something, but it seems to me that such an argument should demonstrate how and when the film assumed the responsibility to have done that thing to begin with. When I say that we ought to critique the movie that they made, not the one they failed to make, I don't mean that we're not allowed to force them to take responsibility for the content.

For example, a movie might implicitly promise to do something, by virtue of genre, and then not do so, an action movie that 'fails' to have a big, violent climax. It might evoke a certain philosophical perspective and never follow up on it, as The Matrix does with Baudrillard, or get it utterly wrong, as Fritz Lang's Metropolis does with Marxism (although we could also argue that Metropolis is quite specifically an argument against Marxism, but that's a side issue).

This is a thought in process, so forgive me for its roughness, but it seems to me that there we're talking about two different critical operations, the presence critique versus the absence critique (I'm entirely making up these terms, by the way).

In the presence critique, we might say (random example) that The Matrix aligns one clothing aesthetic (goth-like club wear) with rebellion and individualism (in the film, it's labelled 'good'), and another (the IBM uniform: black suit + white shirt) with conformity and institutional power ('bad'). That, to me, is an evaluation of something the movie does, and we can site evidence to back up the claim.

In the absence critique, we might say the film fails to deconstruct the interplay of fashion and morality. In so doing, we'd probably end up making several of the same points, what clothing is aligned with what social values, as above, but we'd be doing so with the running assumption that the film ought to have deconstructed that intersection of aesthetics and ethics.

My response to that absence critique is: at what point did that film in any way claim it would deconstruct its aesthetic/ethical representation? How can we reasonably expect it to have done so? In a more methodological sense, how can we claim to perceive an absence without the promise of a presence?

If I were to analyze the methodology of the absence critique, I'd say that the critic takes a theoretical position (and therefore a political and moral one), but then expects the art she encounters to conform to that theoretical position. She could perceive a 'lack' or a 'failure' only if she were to pin a set of expectations onto the
art, which seems unreasonable to me. It's the equivalent of going to a Merchant Ivory period piece set in the Edwardian period and complaining about the lack of a kung fu battle at the end. The movie never implied it would have one, therefore logically it can't 'lack' one.

Zizeck does the same thing when claims that the Zionites ought not to die in reality when they die in the matrix. He's imposing his own, essentially made up, expectations onto the film even though it explicitly states and clearly demonstrates that they simply do. That fact is an element of the plot. Claiming that it ought not to be one is an empty complaint. Instead, tell me what it means that it's present.

That, and he gets the chronology totally wrong at the end of the movie. How you could possibly miss that Neo doesn't become The One until after Smith shoots him is beyond me. The point isn't that I think he's done some horrible disservice to the film, but that screwing up the order of events is a sign of, if you'll pardon me, bad scholarship.

It's also very common amongst critics who attempt to dabble in sci-fi and fantasy. If I had to guess, I'd say that they have so little respect for the primary material that getting the details wrong just doesn't bother them. It doesn't deserve that kind of close attention. Zizeck specifically says that "the ideal audience member [is] an
idiot." He's a tourist at best; someone who's just arrived in a new country and has decided that he understands it better than the locals. At worst, he's slumming it, checking out what these poor 'idiotic' sci-fi people think they're up to, and then telling them what they're 'really' up to.

Teleogy

The teleological thing is something I perceive clearly (or believe I perceive clearly), but have trouble describing. I first encountered the idea in regards to discussions of the origin of life on Earth in a vaguely Creation vs. Evolution sense. Whenever someone says "It is amazing that, against all odds, there is life on this planet!" my response is that the statement itself is empty of meaning. Regardless of the odds, we are here, therefore we are the long shot that came through.

The statement almost takes on an implied objectivity, as if we were looking at the universe from the outside and remarking on the fact that this one, lone planet managed to create intelligent life, but it at the same time implies that there must be some fantastically wonderful about 'us,' so it's also terribly ego maniacal. Self-absorption via false objectivity is a common feature of Enlightenment thinking, specifically in the scientific method.

It's much the same as people who say "Aren't we lucky to have been born in Canada." It's a meaningless statement. If "we" were born in Azerbaijan, we might very well say the same thing about Azerbaijan. History doesn't conspire to create "us," we're the nigh accidental result of history. We are special, even unique, because of the randomness of it all, not because we are destined to be whoever we turned out to be

(Which is the exact opposite of Dr. Manhattan's realization of the miracle of human life, by the by, and also the exact opposite of the 'strong anthropic principle' that Promethea invokes, so I differ with Moore on this point, though I also acknowledge that it's somewhat of a matter of perspective.).

Zizeck uses a joke to explain the idea: "My mother is from Bristol. My father is from Birmingham. I'm from London. How fantastic that we all met!" His explanation for why 'the letter always arrives' is that once anyone reads it, it has arrived, regardless of whether, in a literal sense, it was sent to that recipient. He momentarily explains the idea in Althusserian terms, too. From this point of view, we're 'always already' interpellated because at some point *something* interpellated us. In order to even have an identity, we must have answered a hail of some kind at some point in our lives.

Jim Collins' Uncommon Cultures has a very different interpretation of interpellation that I like. He utterly dismisses the 'always already' part and describes a process by which we move through the world answering some hails, ignoring others, and even answering some in the negative, refusing identities, and thereby assuming the perceived opposite of that identity.

20th Century Pop Art and Rapid Growth

There's a fairly short list of genres and/or art media that were either invented or reified in the 20th century. It would include, for example, what we call 'pop' music (jazz, blues, rock & roll, rap, etc.), cinema and its cousin television, radio, comics (including manga, bandes desinée, etc.), and others. Those media/genres seem to undergo rapid growth, expansion, development, all the things we erroneously call 'evolution' in the arts. They do so a lot faster than older art forms seem to. Instead of entire centuries of similar poetics, we have mere decades. I have a few ideas as to why that is and how it works.

First and most obvious, we have communications technology and what Benjamin calls reproduction. More and more people have access to these arts than ever before (if they pay the right price or find the right bootlegging source). That's a big statement, of course, but I simply can't think of another period in which literally hundreds of millions of people could witness the same artistic performance or artifact at practically the same time, whereas in the 20th century, that happens with movies, television, music, video games, even old fashioned book publishing. It's simultaneous and as wide-spread as humanly (or technologically!) possible.[1]

The corollary is, of course, that that same technology allows audience feedback on a massive scale and, again, almost right away. Within hours of the sneak previews for a popular movie, there are already literally hundreds of on-line reviews, and the people at WB would be fools if they failed to read those reviews and respond to them.

And that audience feedback leads to the second kind of technology at work, capitalism[2]. For all its covert and over manipulation, capitalism is pretty good at giving us what we desire, providing of course that it's already molded our desires in the first place. All the communications technology in the world wouldn't matter if the producers of popular art didn't have vested interest selling us the next product. In this way, we're back to that wonderful moment in _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ when A&H claim that every movie is an advertisement for the next movie. It's another kick at the can, another attempt to make larger and larger profits by putting more bums in seats, selling more Happy Meals, or whatever.

Because of that rapid turnaround--simultaneous and wide-spread release of the art, simultaneous and widespread response to the art--there are simply a lot more kicks at the can now than a few hundred years ago. Just to emphasise, the sheer size of the audience has a lot to do with
it, since popular art is aimed at the populace, rather than 'high' art, which is traditionally aimed at the social elites. It's very similar to how bacteria rapidly become immune to disinfectant precisely because we use too much disinfectant. The difference, and it's a big difference, is that art is not an organism, and neither is the populace or the industries that produce the art. There is conscious judgement involved in the process, no matter how controlled by ideology. The desires of the artists, the industrial producers, and the audience members must all be taken into account to map the development of the art.

So what we have is an economic-industrial-artistic feedback loop. Everybody's desires are fed by everyone else's, and because that's the case, any one agent in the loop can conceivably manipulate other members of the loop. They do not have equal power, of course, and it's very easy to actually create hegemony (the appearance of equal influence masking true dominance). If the audience's desires are manipulated before the fact, then the "we're just giving them what
they want" argument from the industry holds about as much water as "we were just following orders" It's actually a really eerie parallel, now that I think of it.

One other possibility, mind you, is that most of the 20th centuries arts, the ones I mentioned, are actually new versions of old forms, and therefore they develop quickly because they're standing on the backs of giants. Film, television, and radio all had thousands of years of drama to build on. Modern musical forms, like jazz, might have worked their way through centuries of musical variation simply because there *was* centuries worth of it to work with. Comics are, of course, built on thousands of years visual arts, including basic composition, visual languages of sequential imagery (Egyptian tomb decoration, tapestries, etc.), and a few hundred years of advances in print technology. Modern arts can do that because they are aware of their history, so perhaps historiography--another technology/ideology--is what creates the opportunity for rapid growth.

But then there's the other possibility, that this whole perception of our present is a trick of perspective, that our era seems to develop more rapidly than any other simply because we live in it and feel its subtle changes much more acutely than we would if we were to study the 17th century. I've always had the nagging suspicion that people who lived then thought they were in just as much of a period of growth and transition as we do now, and that the same is true of any era. So while our 'rapid' growth might have specific, unique causes and explanations that are different than 17th-century 'rapid' growth, the growth itself is at about the same speed and with the same alarming variety, just for different reasons. It's our job as critics and historians, then, to study the unique causes and effects.

[1] I'm finding I'm bringing in more and more cyber culture/posthumanist ideas as we keep talking about comics and mass culture theory. So far, it's just been stuff I remember from Hayles, Harraway, and Harvey Quamen's classes, but I think I'm going to bring it in in a real way later on, during the writing phase.

[2] Capitalism as technology is sort of a 'wave and particle' thing. It's an ideology, certainly, but by some definitions all ideologies are a kind of technology. Any tool or concept we use to understand, navigate, and manipulate the universe is a technology. By the same token, every technology is based on some kind of ideology; there was an initial idea that spurred someone(s) to create it in the first place. This can seem like a chicken/egg thing, a causal loop, but if we think of ideology and technology as different aspects of the same thing, depending on how we observe them, then we bypass the loop, much like how photons are waves when we measure them like waves, and particles when we measure them like particles.

The Aura of the Comic Book

Comics are generally treated like collectibles these days, not like consumable vessels of art, which is how they were treated by their mostly adolescent readers in the 40s, 50s, and 60s when the value of a comic book was in no small part the ability to trade it for other comic books, and thereby read as many of them as possible.

Compare comics to the paperback trade and we see that one loses value once it's 'used' and the other gains value once it's a 'back issue.' Collectors do, in fact, project an aura onto individual comic books, mostly because of their historical significance (first issue of Wolverine, first time Superman kisses Lois, signed by artist, etc.), but notice that the history is both in terms of the publishing industry and in terms of the internal history of the narratives. Both form their own mythologies, in a sense.

This causes some problems, though, because the circulation of comics is limited to whomever they're sold to, as opposed to books, magazines, and newspapers, which get handed off, lent to friends, resold at a cheaper rate, etc. By clinging to an aura-based model of comics as art *objects*, the industry limits its popularity, and the art form in the American context remains within an isolated little sub-group. Hence the community stays small *because of* the reverence it pays towards the comic-book as an object.

The emergence of digital comics and the almost necessary move to a code- or signal-based concept of the aura (or to no aura at all, as Benjamin suggests) could change that. We don't know yet, though, so I can only cast educated guesses. I was trying to demonstrate a code-based understanding of art when I talked about the loss of my own digital collection, how quickly I collected it again, and how that didn't bother me on an emotional level because it's just data. That said, I have a powerful emotional bond with the data itself, the content, the actual stories that are told in the medium. That's as far as I can go with that, for now.

Comic-Book Continuity, 'Layering'

The internal continuity of comic-book 'universes' will come into my work in a couple of ways. First, through the concept of the analogue, because without established universes of characters, the analogues mean nothing. They're not just about replicating characters but also replicating their relationships with each other (the most common ones are the JLA and the Superman/Lois Lane/Clark Kent love triangle).

Second, possibly more interesting, is to compare the creation of comic-book universes to 'naturally' occurring fairy-tale and myth cycles. Thousands of artists over hundreds of years gradually build up strata of interpretation and nuance to, for example, the Arthurian legends, and the same thing happens with Superman or Spider-man over just a few decades. Hundreds of writers and artists offer their versions of the characters.

What that creates is, in lay terms, a richness and depth, a sense that everything has a meaning. In comic-book terms, that usually means that the present plot (whatever it might be) is inherently related, bound up logistically and causally, to something that happened last year, and something that happened two years ago, and something that happened ten years ago. This is one of the reasons why new readers have a hard time with mainstream comics. You have to know a decade of continuity in order to even start. But on the flip side is the depth you get as a result. (or possibly breadth, wideness, lots of events, as opposed to loads and loads of meaning attached to them?).

The really interesting up-shot of all those different versions of the characters (and I've talked about this before, so I won't belabour the point) is that readers then create an amalgam of all those presentations within their own heads. They have a custom-made version of the characters and situations that only exists internally. Ironically, that custom-made version is usually not made up of the 'primary texts' of the characters, the comics, but from cartoons, movies, video games, from the derivative presentations that are, nevertheless, literally more popular in that they've been read and watched by more people. The primary texts then become 'unreal' for the casual reader. That version of Spider-man is not the one that most people know, despite being the default 'real' version, the approved version. That confusion between versions is what DC/Marvel try to control when they tell their comics artists to make the comics versions match the TV shows or movies (I.e., Supergirl's costume changed after she appeared in the Superman animated series, Spider-man gained biological web-shooters around the time of the first Raimi
movies, etc.).

The 'lots of artists over a long time' practise also contributes to the timelessness, the 'neverwhen' by which mainstream comics continuously and incrementally change their core elements in order to appear as if they never change, which is itself a major part of their mythic quality. They seem eternal and unchanging. They seem to stand for values that are immutable. Inversely, in the Barthean sense, they don't seem particularly 'political' *because* they stand for ostensibly eternal values that transcend politics; they depoliticise themselves, just as Barthes says about most media.

So, yes, the layering has some fairly powerful implications

Horkheimer and Adorno on Jazz

The general premise of Adorno/Horkheimer's attack on Enlightenment thinking is actually quite fascinating, and in some ways very convincing.

The ostensibly logic-driven desire to reduce the universe first to identical constituent elements (molecules, dollars, subjects), and then, since they're identical, to further reduce the universe to just one thing (The Molecule, The Dollar, The Subject) as a way of achieving ultimate (and illusory) objectivity IS conceptual fascism. But, as you say, denouncing jazz is just too much. The irony is that jazz is one of the few examples of an art form in the 20th century that is championed by so many different identifiable social groups.

The intellectuals love it for its complexity, its self-reflexivity, and its tendency to blow the hell out of old, tired musical forms. The popular audience loves it for the sheer, untheorized pleasure of it, the beat, the melody, the fact that you can dance to it and possibly get lucky as a result of dancing to it well enough. Those who concern themselves with race, specifically in the US, raise it up as an example of the American Black community offering something to the world that is unlike anything we'd ever seen before.

Everybody likes jazz, and I suspect that's what A&H don't like. They seem to think that anything that has achieved popularity has to have done so only at the behest of the culture industry, and therefore it must be a part of the capitalist ideology. The conclusion, which is utterly anathema to how I understand communism, seems to be to cut the populace, anyone without money or intellectual authority, out of the production, consumption, and circulation of art. How in the world did that happen in the midst of an ostensibly Marxist book? Very weird.

Jameson on Science Fiction

I'm starting to rethink Jameson's take on SF after having read Political Unconscious. In the second chapter, he discusses what he alternatively calls 'magical' storytelling or 'the Romances' in comparison to the 18th-century novel. The argument, in its broad strokes, is that both 'opened' new possibilities of discussing the world in their time, but eventually were bogged-down by the sheer weight of their own generic necessities.

His analysis of P. K. Dick in Postmodernism: The Logic of Late Capitalism, he seems to say precisely the opposite of what he says in PC, which tells me I might have simply missed his point. Jameson is certainly fond of off-handedly mentioning Gibson and Neuromancer in Pomo, so I'm not sure what to think of him on SF at this point and I will have to get back to that.

The blinkered quality comes from my general pet peeve, using literature to 'prove' a theory or justify a political stance. It always seemed to me that we ought instead to derive our politics and our theories fromwhat we study (literature, culture, language, etc.). Perhaps I am naive in this?

Upon Considering Vampires

Funny thought occurred to me a few days ago. A lot of time, in vampire movies or TV shows, we're told that they don't breath and that their hearts don't beat. This comes up in Buffy as well as the LARPG Vampire: The Masquerade. They also usually can't be poisoned, because if your blood doesn't flow and you don't breath, what could poison do?

Logically, that must mean that all of a vampire's autonomic functions are 'dead.' They could, for example, swallow a whole meal and the food would just sit in their stomachs, undigested. But they must be able to consciously flex their muscles because they can move. And even though they can't breath, they can talk which requires consciously compressing your diaphragm.

Here's the problem, though. Vampires are often highly sexual creatures. Anne Rice, Blade, Underworld, even the original Dracula has a fair bit of vamp sex, either explicitly or implicitly. It's a highly eroticised legendary creature. The bite of the vampire is almost always characterised as a kind of rape combined with consumption. But without autonomic functions, a male vampire cannot achieve an erection, which is sort of required for most sex acts with men. These highly sexualised figures can't get it up.

Makes you wonder why he really chose the name 'Spike.'

Addendum: July 31st, 2006

Evidently, Anne Rice has already addressed this issue in one or several of her seventy-four vampire novels. Because they can't have sex, vampires fall back on 'other means of satisfaction,' mostly involving torture. The women can fake it, but even then, it's not particularly satisfying. Considering how sexualised vampires usually are, it's interesting to consider that their violence could be partially due to sexual frustration. It's an almost Freudian reading. The vampire represents repressed/unexpressed sexual desires coming out in the form of depraved violence.

Benjamin and Film

Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting." (1931) Illuminations. Trans Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." (1936) Illuminations. Trans Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955.

Taken holistically, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" quite accurately portrays some of the ways in which people interact with a few specific art forms, and even (wittingly or not) demonstrates how those interactions don't stand up against rigorous interrogation. They, like people and like art itself, are not logical, don't follow logical laws, and, to be fair, really don't have to. The big concept that everyone jumps on, here, is the so-called 'aura' of authenticity that surrounds and object or an art object (not the same thing!).

The aura is, essentially, the 'particularness' of an object, in Aristotelian terms. It is a thing or situation or sense impression as it was at a particular moment and in a particular place. We know that's what the aura is because it's what the reproduction doesn't have. "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence in the place it happens to be" (222). Once we extend that particularness through time, we have the history of the object, the spaces and times through which it has passed. According to Benjamin, there is simply no way to duplicate that unique path through the world, "authenticity is outside technical […] reproducibility (222). Logically, I cannot argue with him.

However, as he himself points out, the only way to verify an aura is to authenticate what that path has left behind on the object, the historical materials that produced it, the damage it might have incurred along its journey, and the stylistic elements of its content. Here's where things get a little tricky. The aura is, in the final analysis, all about what we attach to the object, not what the the object inherently contains. The only reason things can be said to have auras is because we project emotions at them based on what we know of their history. In material terms, the aura is a fiction.

Therefore, if we could convincingly fake the effects of having travelled through time and space (and forgers have spent generations perfecting that very art), then we would produce an aura in the minds of the viewers. The "Mona Lisa" that hangs in the Louvre is, according to urban legend, an extremely skilled copy. The 'real' "Mona Lisa" is in a temperature-controlled vault where it will last a few extra years, even though no one can see it. Nevertheles, the aura clings to the 'fake' "Mona Lisa" because we grant it that pride of place. We stream past it at the Louvre, we take pictures, we ask questions of our highly-informed tour guides. It is unique because we regard it as such, not because it is the only one of its kind. What we learn from Duchamp's "Fountain" is that context, having been hung in a gallery and near the name of a recognised 'artist,' grants art objects their auras just as much, if not more so, than actually having travelled through history.

There is also a new kind of aura that I can't legitimately blame Benjamin for not anticipating, the code. Technology theorists, like N. Katherine Hayles, point out that in the so-called post-humanist era, not unrelated to post-modernism and post-structuralism, everything is thought of as a particular 'hard copy' of some kind of code, signal, or pattern. From this point of view, a particular book is merely one arrangement of the real content, the text. A particular object is just an arrangement of the constituent elements, the atoms. A particular person is just the result of a particular permutation of the biological code, DNA. Everything is the manifestation of data. There is no original to speak of, which means we're back at the good old simulacra.

If that's the case, if we do live in a world in which people think that way, then a mechanically reproduced piece of art carries as much of an aura as anything else because everything is a mere hard copy of the data. The aura clings to the pattern, to the code, not to the incidental object that happens to carry the data. Substitute the word 'code' for 'spirit' or perhaps 'chi,' and we're in very familiar territory. Data's expression just is the material world, just as the temporal world is a pale copy of the eternal, a concept you'll find in most religions. The point is, though, that if the aura clings to the code, and the code is the artistic content, then the mechanically reproduced art does, in fact, have an aura. It's not the same kind of aura. It's not, however, attached to the object and its path through history. Instead, it surrounds the relationship that the viewer has with the content.

I don't care which encoded version of The Princess Bride I happen to be watching―an old tape, a new DVD, a