THE FOOL KIDS' TABLE

Joseph W. Campbell claimed that he had once been approached by a Hindu scholar who had never been exposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition but was making an attempt to read the Bible. Claimed the Hindu scholar: "I can't find any religion in it."

This is more or less the way I wanted to respond to the seven favored critical pieces listed in this blogpost: "I can't find any criticism in it."

I say more or less because I can't quite discount all of the pieces that received the most votes from the five critics polled. Robert Alter's review of Crumb's GENESIS is a solid work, and so is Eddie Campbell's survey of the Will Eisner PS MAGAZINE military instruction manuals.

I couldn't judge the piece credited to Jog: apparently the link no longer works. And I couldn't finish Andrew Rilestone's wide-wandering meditation on WATCHMEN, though the categorizer in me wonders if this essay qualifies as what Frye calls an *anatomy,* given the essay's tendency to wander from topic to topic.

Tom Spurgeon's essay on re-reading comics was OK, but didn't lead to any meaningful conclusions. Dirk Deppey's criticism of Paul Levitz is just a standard JOURNAL harangue of an industry figure, which is *very* courageous insofar as telling someone else how he ought to have put his job on the line to Do the Right Thing-- or what Deppey thinks (but doesn't prove) to be the Right Thing.

All of which leaves us with Tom Crippen's "Age of Geeks."

There's not much one can say about an essay that boils down to one more sad little attack on nerds and geeks; one more attempt by TCJ reviewers to convince themselves that they're the only ones sitting at the cool kids' table. This essay's title about their real status won't disabuse them, of course, so in Rilestonian manner I may as well use Crippen's drivel as a jumping-off point to attack better targets.

Wikipedia attracts a lot of brickbats, some of which are justified, but here's a quote from a substantive piece on the Frankfurt School that throws new light on a question I raised in my Adorno essays about his astonishing lack of particular examples:

'The Frankfurt School cannot be fully comprehended without equally understanding the aims and objectives of critical theory. Initially defined by Max Horkheimer in his Traditional and Critical Theory (1937), critical theory refers to a social theory oriented towards critiquing and changing society as a whole. It is opposed to "traditional theory", which refers to theory in the positivistic, scientistic, or purely observational mode. While traditional theory can only describe how things presently are, critical theory takes into consideration whether social realities ought to be.'

This attempt to substitute an "ought" for an "is" says much about Adorno's rigid if often contradictory condemnations of popular culture, as well as his disdain for building a case through the use of the inductive "observational mode." THE COMICS JOURNAL probably is not so uniformly ranged against the "observational mode," but where geeks are concerned, it's always enough to say, "we know what THOSE people are like:"

"A computer expert or a health care expert can say she is a geek because the use for her knowledge isn’t right there in the room. A real geek can say he is a geek because he knows Jedi history or Klingon grammar. The two usages are joined at the back by the idea of pointlessness and disciplined mental activity. But I have to believe that health care data is not really pointless."

Buried amid Crippen's sloppy logic is the old "artists don't convey reality" schtick, which philosophers like Plato and St. Augustine did not stint to use against the artistic works of their respective eras. Proponents of canonical art naturally didn't favor this line of thought, but chose, like Adorno, to promote the notion that true art was beneficial for its "ideas" while trash art, which had no such ideas, deserved to become low man on the cultural totem pole. Given the commitment of critical theory to the project of "changing society as a whole," I suspect its proponents weren't simply committed to exploring the totality of human ideas a la John Stuart Mill, but wanted a specific sort of ideas for their own reformist project. The "critical theory" position may not be postivism but it certainly is utilitarianism.

Speaking of the Big U, I'm surprised Crippen didn't publish his essay on THE HOODED UTILITARIAN, as the piece fairly reeks of utilitarianism (among other things). Crippen does, however unintentionally, go much further than Adornite "defenders of high art" like Gary Groth. Nowhere in the essay does Crippen privilege "true art" against "trash art:" only real pointlessness (a love for trash art) and a discipline that merely appears arcane but actually has real usage, as the use of computer skills in collating "health care data." But given the extreme nature of this dichotomy, there's no reason one couldn't replace "SF/fantasy geeks" with "Shakespeare geeks" or "Beethoven geeks." Going by the Crippen dichotomy, Theodor Adorno himself was a geek, because what he prized and became obsessive about was something of no immediate utilitarian value.

Oscar Wilde said, "All art is useless." I doubt Wilde believed that pronouncement as a matter of faith: it's more likely he framed the aphorism to get people to think a little more deeply on the subject of what art was. As our culture becomes progressively more pluralist in nature, extreme dichotomies reveal themselves as relics of old, outworn creeds and faiths, or as manifestations of a nature far more juvenile than any adult's taste for reading superheroes.

And by the way, though it has nothing to do with dissecting the politics of the fool kids' table--

If anyone reading this blog happens to be on speaking-terms with Gary Groth--

Will you PLEASE tell him to stop representing Gil Kane's work on BLACKMARK and STAR HAWKS as hallmarks of his "independent spirit?" Coming from Groth, who has explicitly regarded Image Comics as an aesthetic waste despite the fact that the artists owned their own works, it's close to hypocritical to view BLACKMARK and STAR HAWKS as being anything but the same sort of formula work Gil Kane did for the big companies.

Thanks in advance.