Euthyphro: Piety or holiness, Socrates, appears to me to be that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to men."-- Plato's EUTHYPHRO, trans. Benjamin Jowett.
In the above section Socrates, who as he says is about to be tried for impiety in an Athens court, attemtps to get alleged religious expert Euthyprho to define impiety for him. As in most other Socratic dialogues the poor chump Euthyphro is outmatched from the first, but though he isn't able to parse his argument finely enough for Socrates' liking, in the section above he does come close to formulating a sound answer regarding the ways that "justice" can encompass both duties to the gods and duties to men. The formulation carries a significant resonance with Jesus' famous "render unto Caesar" pronouncement from Mark 12:17, even if in that dialogue it's the religious guy rather than the skeptic who wins the argument.
One of Charles Reeces' responses on the comments-thread to SHADOWS AND FOGGY NOTIONS PART 2 brought up a concept that I've always thought seemed partial and poorly conceived: that of "commodification." I asserted that I thought that I thought that what Marxists call "commodification" was better seen as a wider process I term "adaptation," by which I mean the sum total of all actions taken by artists-- or those making artistic works available to any audiences-- that in any way alter or slant the works to make them acceptable to those audiences.
Reece brings up an example of what he calls commodification, but as I told him, I found it suspect, and so won't consider it here. I think I have a substitute example with which he should logically agree, though, since it concerns an injustice done in the name of conservative interests. This example is the story of how representatives of DC Comics squelched an attempt to create the company's first black superhero in TEEN TITANS #20.
The story's told in great detail here, and of course various interviews have come out in the fan press in which no one named seems to want to take the heat for the decision to de-blackify the character of "Joshua." Here's Len Wein's summation of the controversy:
"At the last minute Carmine got gun-shy and was afraid that we wouldn't be able to sell the book in the South and that all these terrible things would happen. So he just pulled the issue and said, 'Nope, we're not going to do it.' This was less than a week before the book was supposed to ship to the printer."
Now, I don't see how any Marxist in his right mind would not consider this an act of reducing a work to what Reece calls a "homogenous substance." Whether Infantino's actions were exactly what Wein said they were is not my concern here: I wasn't there. But someone made it necessary that a character intended to be a black man was made into a Caucasian, and that person was probably motivated by fears of economic retaliation by buyers in the southern United States.
Marxist rhetoric is replete with many, many examples of such hypothetical commodification, a few as worthwhile as the one above, though most are drivel, like Theodor Adorno's ravings against Donald Duck.
However, let us flashforward to 1993, and a different medium. Much racial rhetoric has gone down the pike, and now the company of Walt Disney-- not exactly a stranger to questions of racial impropriety-- puts out a film version of Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN, directed by Stephen Sommers.
There was of course no question that the novel's major black character would be played by a black actor, one Courtney B. Vance. No replacements by a Caucasian pinch-hitter here. But how does Vance play the character?
Does he play the runaway slave Jim with the same authentic "Negro" dialect given him by author Mark Twain?
HELL NO he does not. There's not a "massa" or "whuffo" to be heard in the Sommers adaptation of the Twain novel, which is also illustrative of a different type of "adaptational" process. Just as Carmine Infantino may have feared reprisals if he published a black superhero in 1969, in 1993 Walt Disney most likely feared another sort of economic reprisals if they came out with a film with a black man talking in dialectic, no matter how accurate to the times that dialectic would have been.
So my question to Euthyphro Reece is as follows:
Is the latter example also commodification?
Or is it not a greater part of a process of adaptation to a hypothetical audience, even as service to the gods is a portion of the category of just actions?
7 comments:
"Is the latter example also commodification?"
Yes.
And I'm picky enough to make it clear that I used 'homogeneous.'
And commodification is, if anything, a more specific form of adaptation, so substituting the latter term only adds vagueness.
I knew that you would SAY that.
But now SHOW me how the argument about homogeneity applies when it is responding not to the supposed will of a majority, but that of a comparative minority interest.
If the company Walt Disney is responding to a minority interest, how can anyone deem that homogeneity?
If an experimental director put Jim in a daishiki, would that also be homogeneity?
Is it homogeneity for the 1999 WILD WILD WEST film to represent Will Smith as an empowered black hero that would have been impossible in the real history of late 1800s America?
I don't know that Disney is responding to a minority interest. It's a pretty successful company, after all. But, regardless, minority vs. majority doesn't much matter here: if such a company requires that all of its product conform to certain house rules, allowing for little deviation, then there's going to be a good deal of homogeneity. And I can't imagine anyone seriously arguing that Disney's cartoons are all that diverse. They manage to turn just about every story they've adapted into the same one.
And realize that this isn't the same argument as different materials becoming the same when treated as commodities. If a Picasso is valued at $150 million, then it can be exchanged for anything else valued at that price.
From Marx's The Power of Money:
He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.
"I don't know that Disney is responding to a minority interest."
To the extent that the producers of the HUCK FINN film are anticipating the objections of modern blacks, and perhaps some liberal whites, to "Negro dialect," the HUCK FINN film is responding to a minority interest. The producers' perhaps overly-PC response to the challenge of filming HUCK FINN makes interesting contrast to Disney's Uncle Remus film of the 1960s, where Disney did attempt a few adaptational strategies but still chose to view slavery through a haze of sentiment.
The Sommers film doesn't necessarily become a good film for having taken the PC path, but the producers' position is understandable. I've seen a handful of black activists take exception to the black dialect of the crows in DUMBO, which I find pretty harmless and bereft of ideological manipulation.
Some Disney cartoons are more imitative than others, but even if they were all as homogeneous as you claim, I don't see that proving the Marxist conspiracy. Said homogeneity could just as easily prove that exceptional talent is a rare thing and that most people who want to keep working in the entertainment industry repeat whatever's been successful.
Now, based on your quote, Marx might think that one's making money on art without being oneself a great artist involves some soulless use of the exchange value. I tend to think that a lot of these soulless workers had more concern for feeding their kids than for the abstractions of artistic excellence. That, too, might be deemed a kind of love, outside the world of Marxist rhetoric.
Parenthetically, I'm working on a post dealing with Martin Buber that refutes Marx's position.
What? That's not an attack on workers, but a critique of the mediating effects of money on our social concepts.
If a worker simply takes a paycheck for a job he doesn't necessarily care about-- irrespective of whether he's "alienated" in Marx's sense or not-- is that an "impotent" relationship?
Post a Comment