REDEFINING THE RACIAL OTHER PT. 3

In the second section of REDEFINING THE RACIAL OTHER, I made reference to my concept of racial markers, speaking of a given subject's "conscious or subconscious responses to persons who do or do not share the overt physical markers" of the people he considers to be his ingroup. I'll elaborate this first.

Not long ago, I had a long discussion with some relatives regarding the current concept that "race does not exist." Most of the rhetoric for this position is based in biological studies that demonstrate the genetic unity of humankind-- which I do not dispute--and the supposedly concomitant idea that therefore the only reason the concept of race came about was as a strategy to tout one or more races over others in a superior/inferior relationship. This online essay is an adequate summation of this position. The author asserts that "biologists have set a minimal threshold for the amount of genetic differentiation that is required to recognize subspecies." Because so-called human "races" do not possess this level of differentiation, race does not exist.

In my debate I argued that this is an oversimplification, devised to combat all intellectual justifications of racial superiority-- to which, incidentally, I am also opposed. In the debate I used the term "markers" as a makeshift term to describe the outward features by which members of ingroups define themselves, even in times and climes that predate the spread of institutionalized racism. Such physical manifestations of a tribe's shared history heritage are far from the only way in which human beings define those ingroups. Still, while those associations are socially constructed, this is not quite the same as deeming race to be nothing more than a social construct. More on that later.

The linked essay also quotes Ashley Montagu as stating that "there are no races, only clines." Since Montagu's term means the same thing as my own makeshift term, I will henceforth use the word "cline" in place of "marker," as defined here.

Now what do I mean by saying that those clines that can be recognized by any ingroup are socially constructed, yet are not social constructs as such? My argument is based in my position that any ingroup forms its own inevitable aesthetic preferences regarding facial and body types, but that these are not rooted in any mechanism of social control. If these preferences are are any sort of construct, they would be psychological in nature, and then only socially constructed after the fact of their existence. In the 19th century many anthropologists, particularly Durkheim. chose to view every facet of tribal life to be reducible to some function by which order and the status quo was maintained. Malinowski, who coined the term "functionalism," seems to have been among the few anthropologists who believed that society strove to accommodate the individual rather than making the individual fit society's needs, but I confess that I've not read Malinowski in the original.

In any case, I'd argue that the aesthetics of any ingroup "just grow, like Topsy," and that even any ingroup-members with a mind to social control are influenced by those aesthetics whether they wish to be or not. No scheming priest or dictatorial ruler created the desire of parents and grandparents to see their own physical characteristics reflected in the parents' offspring. Admittedly, most if not all societies require some degree of exogamy to avoid inbreeding-- but most societies will be chauvinistic toward outgroups that possess a pronounced difference with respect to the outgroup-member's outward physical clines. While a given tribe may have elaborated social rules to prevent outsiders from joining the tribe, I suggest that these rules reflect the aesthetic preferences of the ingroup, which values visual solidarity, much as do many members of the animal kingdom.

At the same time, though the initial reaction to "the other" may be one of competitiveness and/or fear, I believe Sartre was wrong to believe it dominated all affects. Curiosity about "the other" who looks like your people, but isn't one of them, is attested throughout both mythic and historical narratives. In addition, though two tribes may initially compete over resources even as animals do, animals do not, to the best of our knowledge, feel pleasure at having a good fight against an equal from another species. Human myth and history, however, attest to the excessive joy that humans take in seeing their "home team" come to grips with the representatives of an outgroup.

Nietzsche caught the uniquely human contradictions of this desire for validation in this quote:


Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. Ye must be proud of your enemies; then, the successes of your enemies are also your successes.

Keeping in mind this prioritizing of the aesthetics of physical clines, I shall next try to demonstrate that the apparent stigmatization of the outgroup's representative-- particularly in the form of the "racial other"-- does not necessarily signify only fear or conservatism, even when "the other" is given dominantly negative traits. Those negative traits also function less as a means of social control, as many many Marxists have averred, than as an excuse to mount a challenge between two groups. I do not deny that many of these fictional challenges result in simplistic "racist myths," but there also exists the distinct possibility that they may result in the more benign "racial myths," which reveal a more complex level of meaning-- as I will next demonstrate with one of the best-known racial myths, that of Fu Manchu.

THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD OF VIOLENCE

In the series JOINED AT THE TRIP, beginning here, I refined some of my earlier statements about the nature of fictional sex and violence. My interpretation of these categories through the lens of Francis Fukuyama's thymotic system goes something like this: violence and sex in their "pure states" represent *megalothymia* and *isothymia* respectively. However, there are "impure states" in which sex can assume a function of dominance, and in which violence can assume a function of egalitarianism.

If you ask the average person what most separates sex and violence, the most likely response-- assuming you can get a coherent one on such a volatile subject-- would be that sex can produce progeny, and violence cannot, except through the medium of sex.

But, in the words of Yoda, "there is another."  In both activities human beings in their identity of *Homo habilis* have evolved dozens of artificial tools and devices that can be used either to enhance the activity (all manner of offensive weapons, sexual enhancement devices) or to curtail some aspect of that activity (all manner of defensive weapons, such as shields and armor, and pregnancy prevention devices).

Yet, when one enters the sphere of art and religion, one finds that both activities may be validated through both gods of war and gods of love, the tools don't receive equal representation.

Archaic culture is rife with the veneration of great weapons. King Arthur wields the most famous sword, Excalibur. Odin wields the spear Gungnir, Thor wields the hammer Mjolnir. In some cases an ancient culture has become so remote from us that it's sometimes unclear as to what Cuchullain's "gae bolga" was, or what it could do, but there's little question that it had some supernormal status.

In contrast, archaic culture invests a lot of items with sexual significance, but most of these are things that do not actually function as aids to sexual performance-- the Holy Grail, the Paschal candle. Some cults involved with sexual ritual, such as the Tantrics, have specialized names for emissions, so they may have names for sexual tools as well. But it seems more typical in most archaic cultures to invest sexual charisma not to objects that enhance sexual activity, but to objects that aren't usually involved in the matter.

Jumping ahead to contemporary popular culture-- in many ways the inheritor of archaic folklore's modes of communication-- we see that outside of fantasy-works that explicitly imitate archaic stories, most heroes don't name their weapons. Still, a cult of charisma still enfolds many weapons, usually referring to them not with cultic cognomens but by brand-names. Wild West heroes are often identified with their "Colts" and "Winchesters." Dirty Harry is so identified with his Magnum firearm that the second movie in the film-series is entitled "Magnum Force," as if to suggest an equivalence between the hero's power and that of his weapon-- roughly in the same way Arthur and Excalibur become mythically covalent.

In contrast, sex tools, many of which are by their nature disposable, don't receive special names. The only notable exception is a comic one; that of the sexually neglected woman who gives a man's name to her favorite dildo. But wherever this trope appears, it's invariably done As a Joke, and so even dildos with names like "Bruce" or even "Mjolnir" are comic exceptions that prove the rule.

This, then, is one side of the double-edged blade of violence. Weapons, perhaps because they allow human beings to extend their spheres of influence over other ingroups and territories, are venerated. Sex, despite being important to the furtherance of the species, is in some ways regarded as merely personal, and so the tools that extend pleasure to two or more participants "don't get no respect." The correlation between Durkheim's definitions of "the sacred" and "the profane," as explained in this essay,  should be obvious.

However, although modern pop culture sometimes evinces great respect for weapons, they can also be viewed as tools that are inferior to the primary means by which humans extend their power: the body itself. This, then, is the other side of the double-edged blade.

If there are many Wild West sagas in which a Colt .45 or a Winchester rifle are invested with positive significance, there are also many instances in which weapons register as negative markers. Whenever a narrative wants to show a character as villainous, one of the easiest ways is to have him resort to using a weapon, often-- though not always-- when his sympathetic opponent is unarmed. When the sympathetic character is a hero, rather than a victim, he usually wins out over the armed villain by the demonstration of such a high level of hand-to-hand skill that it negates the supposed advantage of the weapon.

The modern martial arts film often evinces the same disdain for the armed villain. In my recent review of 1973's ENTER THE DRAGON, I drew attention to the film's depiction of the villain Han. Han is able to use one of his weapons-- a detachable metal hand-- to kill one heroic character, in part because the hero doesn't suspect the weapon's presence. However, when Han is defeated by the superior fighter Lee-- who does use weapons in other scenes, but not against Han-- it is as if Han is a "human beast" thwarted by "the morally superior Lee." 

The teleseries KUNG FU reflected this same anti-weapons tendency. Although it was clear that the protagonist Kwai Chang Caine had been trained in the use of weapons, it was a commonplace event during the series' run to see the hero snatch away a villain's weapon and then discard it, as if its use polluted the purity of his body's superlative fighting-skill. As with Lee, there were occasions on which Caine did use weapons in battle, but an "anti-weapons aesthetic" was clearly in place.  In these and similar narratives, it is the unarmed human body that is "sacred," and weapons are "profane."

SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE, PART 3

In the WHAT WOMEN WILL essay-series-- which I referenced in Part 2 of this series-- I chose to focus upon two cultural and fictional archetypes, the Compassionate Man and the Barbarous Woman. These archetypes, whose appeal derives from their reversal of default characterizations of males and females, were directly derived from the works of the two 19th-century philosophers most associated with the concept of "the will:" Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Here, though, I'm concerned with following through the logic established in Nietzsche's assignment of the attributes of males and females as "will" and "willingness"-- which I in turn translated to the statement that the dominant attribute of males is violence, while that of females is sex. The Barbarous Woman, as represented by myth-figures like Athena and Ishtar, still applies to this dichotomy. However, the Compassionate Man-- represented by wise, caregiver-males like Osiris and Ea-- does not epitomize the male as a sexual being, though arguably both this archetype, and the substitute I'll shortly discuss, both depend on what Frank Herbert called "the force that gives" (see the WOMEN WILL series for details).

The turnabout myth-figure here would be rather "man, the lover," but it would have to be a type distanced from the notion of man as a dispenser of violence. In other words, though mythic and fictional characters ranging from Gilgamesh, Heracles, Don Juan and James Bond are known for scoring in epic proportions, their success with women is strongly predicated on the males' ability to fight. "Man the lover" would be represented by types like Adonis, Paris (despised in THE ILIAD for being only a "warrior between the sheets," or words to that effect), and the title character of the 1977 French film THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN (but not the ghastly 1983 American remake of said film by Blake Edwards).

So, for the purpose of this discussion, the archetypes that most fundamentally reverse the standard attributes of males and females are "Adonis, Loving Man" and "Athena, Fighting Woman." Both archetypes, despite going against the expected grain, sustained religious roles in archaic Greece and indubitably appeared in many, if not all, human cultures to some degree. And since one can also say this of the default gender-roles, then all four types have been "sacred" at some time or other-- which is my way of finally working back to the title of this essay-series.

At the same time, they have all had "profane" manifestations as well, if one accepts Durkheim's concept of the sacred and profane: that the former is devoted to the concerns of the group while the latter revolves around the concerns of individuals. Of course when dealing with figures from fiction, where one does not assume the unquestioned reality of supernormal personages, "sacred" and "profane" would assume a different meaning.

It would not depend on the fictional figure being actually popular with a large group of people, any more than sacredness in religious myth depends on this factor. for as I pointed out here, some figures of religious myth are clearly directed at "small enclaves or sub-societies."

More promisingly, I would say that for fiction the closest parallel between "sacred" and "profane" is the dichotomy proposed by Susanne Langer, which I in my turn have tweaked for my own uses. In fiction, to be "sacred" is to be consummate, in that the narrative's symbolic discourse has succeeded in promulgating some discernible meaning. In contrast, narratives that do not succeed in promulgating meaning through symbolic discourse would be profane in that their potential meaning is not activated, and is thus both profane and inconsummate.

In Part 4 I'll explore the two "turnabout archetypes" in terms of their relevance to Bataille's concept of "narrative violence" as referenced in Part 1.