ALTERING STATES

Cassirer's last major work was The Myth of the State. The book was published posthumously in 1946 after Cassirer's sudden death. Cassirer argues that the idea of a totalitarian state evolved from ideas advanced by Plato, Dante, Machiavelli, Gobineau, Carlyle and Hegel. He concludes that the Fascist regimes of the 20th century were symbolised by a myth of destiny and the promotion of irrationality."-- from the anonymous Wikipedia entry on Ernst Cassirer.

I've used Wikipedia as much as anyone else for quick reference but whenever I see a short writeup on a complex subject (such as neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer) my alarm bells go off. But no bells rang for a certain messboard opponent who quoted the above section of the writeup to me, as proof that Cassirer believed that Plato and the rest were responsible, however indirectly, for the rise of fascism.

To say the least, this is not an accurate reading of THE MYTH OF THE STATE. The book does attempt to portray the historical background against which the ideas of the totalitarian state arose (including not just "right-wing" forms like fascism proper but also "lefty" manifestations like "Bolshevism," as Cassirer calls it.) However, the anonymous author's word "evolved" is extremely misleading, for colloquially it implies a natural progression, when in truth Cassirer's book shows the many ways in which totalitarian states actively distorted even those philosophers from whom they directly borrowed.

In short, MYTH OF THE STATE is first and foremost a history of how said myths come into being. It should be understood that by "myth" Cassirer does not mean something false or illusory, though the ways in which men deal with myth may be misguided. According to Cassirer's system, the very attempt one makes to justify the ways of a given state can be deemed a "myth," albeit not precisely the same sort of myth one encounters in the most primitive societies.

Cassirer devotes his first four chapters to defining myth as compactly as his theme will allow, so it's to be expected that he skips over many of the nuances of myth-definition found in the 1925 book MYTHICAL THOUGHT. Probably the best definition he offers of primitive myth is that "myth is an objectification of man's social experience," but immediately after that definition he labels the constructions of Plato as myths, albeit myths that, unlike their earlier kindred, serve "the purposes of dialectical and ethical thought." Cassirer is a bit vague as to how the earlier type of myths manage to become so encoded in society as to become the Old Order that dialectical thinkers seek to overthrow, but throughout the book this is his basic theme: that the primary type of myth is the first human activity to begin leading man "far from his unconscious and instinctive life," but that afterward new and more rational forms of myth must supersede those that are based largely on "feelings."

Plato, far from being a proponent of fascism, is seen as not only one of the first philosophers to discourse on the subject of the state, but also the first to propose making a choice between "an ethical and a mythical conception of the state. In the Legal State, the state of justice, there is no room left for the conceptions of mythology, for the gods of Homer and Hesiod." Cassirer also notes that Plato is no ally to fascism:

"Justice" and the "will to power" are the opposite poles of Plato's ethical and political philosophy.

Most of the thinkers covered here are given similar readings by Cassirer. With the exception of racial theorist Gobineau, whose real contributions to fascism are obvious, Cassirer shows the thinkers involved in analyzing the nature of the state's power, not stumping for the rise of totalitarianism. The closest Cassirer ever comes to doing what the Wiki essay claims he does is within his chapter on Hegel. I can see why the anonymous writer might have misapprehended Cassirer's theme if all he read was this:

But it was the most tragic fate of Hegel that he unconsciously unchained the most irrational powers that have ever appeared in man's social and political life. No other philosophical system has done so much for the preparation of fascism and imperialism as Hegel's doctine of the state-- this "divine Idea as it exists on earth."

Sounds damning. However, Cassirer points out that Hegel also said:

The highest aim that the state can attain is that art and science are cultivated and come to a height corresponding to the spirit of the people. That is the principal end of the state-- but an end that it must not bring about as an external work but that must arise from itself.

Clearly, neither the Left nor Right versions of totalitarianism had any serious intentions of imitating Hegel's ideal of the "divine Idea." Their political myths are, Cassirer says, "artificial things fabricated by very skillful and cunning artisans." As such, no reasoning being could regard the swastika or the hammer-and-sickle as the natural evolutions from their source material, or think that Cassirer thought so.

However, the idea that the proper response to the Holocaust should be a total refusal of all myths has become itself a myth that has been advocated by others beyond anonymous Wikipedia writers, or even anti-comics pundits like Wertham and Legman. Andrew Von Hendy's MODERN CONSTRUCTION OF MYTH is an academic survey that has some fair criticisms to make of the many scholars who have written on the subject of myth, but von Hendy's chapter on Cassirer subscribes to the "refusal myth" unashamedly.

Without going into all of von Hendy's criticisms of Cassirer here, suffice to say that after the author finishes his pronouncements on Cassirer's philosophical magnum opus, THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, von Hendy tells us that MYTH OF THE STATE is "the passionate palinode of a refugee from Hitler's Germany." But any retraction is purely in von Hendy's mind. At no point does Cassirer renounce his belief in the idea that mythical thought remains the foundation for all later developments of human art. philosophy and culture: at most he is more vehement about the necessity for controlling the irrational side of primal myth with its more rational kindred. At the book's conclusion, what I call primal myth-- perhaps comparable to Joseph Henderson's conception of "Moira"-- is made the literal foundation of culture, albeit in the manner that the Sumerian goddess Tiamat's slain body is made the fundament of the Sumerian cosmos.

And yet this is not Cassirer foreswearing the necessity of myth: he merely recognizes, just as he did in pre-fascist Germany, that the symbolic forms often come into conflict. In the aforementioned MYTHICAL THOUGHT, written prior to the rise of Nazi power in Germany, Cassirer again notes how a philosopher like Plato opposed mythical paradigms:

Plato as a dialectician draws the sharp dividing line that can be drawn neither by myth nor mysticism.-- p. 251.

Von Hendy's dividedness of mind is evident. In one sentence alone he praises Cassirer for his "brilliant" defense of the philosophers whom many were then attacking for advocacy of fascism, yet implies that Cassirer "exoneration" is special pleading without citing any of Cassirer's actual defenses. Given that von Hendy shows in the book a marked preference for Paul Ricoeur-- whom I personally tend to consider a second-rate Cassirer-- I suspect von Hendy was not that interested in an honest appraisal of the philosopher. Ironically, von Hendy ends his chapter by remarking on the perils of "romantic affectivity," but I submit that he, like the anonymous Wiki-writer, is guilty of an anti-romantic affectivity, which can be no less deceptive than its opposite.

ECO LOCATION

Is there such a thing as a "good elitist?"

Having resisting the obvious old joke re: "the only good Indian," I'll admit that it's true that, in contrast to superficial intellectuals like Roland Barthes and Theodor Adorno, there exist scholars whose basic program seems elitist in nature but who are broadminded enough that their observations prove useful to pluralist aesthetics. Of course, some concepts may require a lot of reworking.

I've not read a biography of Umberto Eco, but he seems beholden to many of the same reductive intellectual influences-- Marx, Saussure, Levi-Strauss-- that helped make Barthes whatever he was. In contrast to Barthes, however, Eco shows a phenomenal ability to think outside the reductionist's box; an ability seen to impressive effect in his 1962 essay, "The Myth of Superman."

Thus roughly three years before Dial Press commissioned Jules Feiffer to sum up his remembrances of his GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES of the Golden Age, Eco devotes an essay, in part, to the study of the then-current Superman comics of the early Silver Age.

I say "in part" because contrary to the title Superman is not the real focus of "Myth of Superman." Eco's essay is largely about his semantic take on the phenomenon of serial fiction, of which Superman is one example, and not even the only one pursued at length in the space of the essay. Eco's readings of serial fiction are complex and not amenable to being summarized in a blogpost, so I'll address just one aspect of the essay.

Eco is remarkably accurate about the mythos of Silver Age Superman-- Lois Lane, Mxyzptlk, "imaginary stories"-- given that in the early 1960s almost no one was writing about comic books. However, about the other half of his title, "myth," he's not much more accurate than his predecessor Barthes. I don't know if in other works Eco offered a working definition for his usage of the term "myth," but here he does not, and his few defintions-by-example are severely flawed. Whether they undermine the logic of the essay is a question I won't try to answer here.

Among Eco's first pronoucements on traditional archaic religious myth-figures, he writes:

The traditional figure of religion was a character of human or divine origin, whose figure had immutable characteristics and an irreversible destiny... a Greek statue could represent Hercules or a scene of Hercules' labors; in both cases, but more so in the latter, Hercules would be seen as someone who has a story... Hercules has been made real through a development of temporal events.

A few paragraphs later Eco will contrast this notion of the traditional myth-hero's "irreversible destiny" with that of the modern serial-hero, whose tales lack "the possibility of any development." And many critics since Eco have followed up on his comments by decrying the static nature of a hero like Superman, whether in contrast to the myth-heroes of tradition or the protagonists of literature. However, though the comparison may be fair in the latter case, the former comparison fails.

First, myth-heroes are not possessed of "immutable characteristics." They have dominant characteristics, but even these are far from immutable. To take Eco's example, even in the culture of ancient Greece portraits of Hercules varied, ranging from the bumptious brawler revered by the common folk to the sort of hero favored by intellectuals, such as the "Hercules" of Euripides' ALCESTIS, whose courage has a more moral dimension than most of the stories of his Labors.

Second, although myth-heroes have their lives ringed by a birth and a death, even as mortal men do, "Mister In-Between" is not the same for a myth-hero as for a mortal. How can one speak of a "development of temporal events" in the life of Hercules if some stories claim that Hercules began his Labors to expiate his guilt for having slain his wife and children, while others (notably Euripides' own HERACLES) claim that he killed them after completing the Labors (which were presumably begun for some other reason)?

In truth, myth-heroes bear a strong resemblance to modern serial-heroes in that between the span of their births and deaths each hero has access to an infinitely-expanding "middle portion" of his life, in which he's always pretty much the same, with no commonplace causality to get in the way. It's true that there are some myth-heroes who don't accrete a lot of stories to add to their legends, as with the hero Roland, whom Eco also mentions in the essay. But these can be viewed as the "B-listers" of the myth-world, whereas the "A-list" features heroes about whom the populace just couldn't stop telling tales-- Hercules, Arthur, or even figures who possess numinous names that hop from identity to identity, as "Jack" hops from beanstalk-climber to giant-killer to vegetable deity.

Late in the essay Eco talks further of how a reader must lose "the notion of temporal progression" when faced with a "massive bombardment of events which are no longer tied together by any strand of logic." Unintentionally he has defined the true status of archaic myth-narrative quite as much as that of the serial-hero. Indeed, in the wake of Marvel's soap-operatic twist on the superhero, it's possible to say that the myth-hero may at times possess less "temporal progression" than the serial hero. One knows that Heracles' first Labor must be to kill the Nemean Lion, because the hero is so often pictured running around in the lionskin. But do the rest of the Labors possess "temporal progression?" Even by the time of the Silver Age, Superman's ongoing encounters with Luthor may have stayed closer to the concept of an "ongoing continuity" (though one easily abandoned whenever it might prove convenient for writers to do so).

Eco finally concludes that Superman lives in a universe where "causal chains are not open" to one another linkages, but are discontinuous. But again, this is as true of Hercules as Superman, as seen by the ease with which Euripides changes the traditional order of events in the hero's life. Other examples from other myth-systems could be multiplied so as to render the same verdict, for myth-cycles are generally cobbled together from many sources, and so must always betray the disunity of their sources.

On the whole Eco's essay remains interesting despite this flaw. His diverse writings on popular culture seem to defend it more often than they stigmatize it, which shows a certain pluralist leaning, even if some of the tools he uses are the products of elitist minds. (For all Eco's subtlety on other matters, "Myth of Superman" can't resist tossing in a de rigeur Marxist mention about "means of production.")

DUELING QUOTATIONS

I like to imagine that the second quote pretty much answers the question implied in the first.

First, Tom Spurgeon from this COMICS REPORTER piece back in May 2010:

The prism for talking about most comics, but particularly mainstream comics, is their monetary success, either relative to the industry in which those comics come out or for their value within the wider entertainment world. I'd like to see more discussions on what these comics are actually saying about the concepts they engage. One reason is I think the conversation would be deeply disturbing and thus somewhat hilarious to have. Forcing people used to justifying creativity through marketing language to actually discuss the ideas they're putting out there can be a fun ride. It's not that comics don't exist as items that are marketed; they do. But they also exist as a vehicle for ideas, for stories, and that almost never gets discussed except under a strange construction that relies on the notion of fan entitlement. That's too bad.

And now this quote from Grant Morrison during 2010's San Diego Comicon:

Batman is a mythical figure. I'm being funny, but I'm not being funny. They don't live in the real world. It's like this theory I've been developing – you know what they always say about kids? That kids can't distinguish between fantasy and reality. And that's actually bullshit. When a kid's watching 'The Little Mermaid,' the kids knows that those crabs that are singing and talking aren't really like the crabs on the beach that don't talk. A kid really knows the difference.

"Then you've got an adult, and adults can not tell the difference between fantasy and reality. You bring them fantasy, and the first thing they say is 'How did he get that way? Why does he dress like that? How did that happen?' It's not real. And beyond that, when you're dealing with characters, they exist on paper. They're real in that context. I always say they're much more real than we are because they have much longer lives and more people know about them. But we get people reading superhero comics and going, 'How does that power work? And why does Scott Summers shoot those beams? And what's the size of that?' It's not real! There is no science. The science is the science of 'Anything can happen in fiction and paper' and we can do anything.

"We've already got the real world. Why would you want fiction to be like the real world? Fiction can do anything, so why do people always want to say, 'Let's ground this' or 'Let's make this realistic.' You can't make it realistic because it's not. So basically Batman is 75 years old, and Robin is 74 years old. They don't grow old because they're different from us. They're paper people.

RAPT IN PLASTIC

In SUPERHUMAN ALL TOO SUPERHUMAN I used the William Moulton Marston WONDER WOMAN as my exemplar of the use of "dynamic violence," with attention to the fact that what makes the violence in WONDER WOMAN "dynamic" is that the characters possess some degree of interiority, of a capacity for transformation that has consequences for the way conflict and violence play out in the story's structure.

For my example of the opposite use of violence, the "static" kind, I offer up Jack Cole's Sadean PLASTIC MAN.

To say that the Cole PLASTIC MAN is esteemed over the Marston WONDER WOMAN would be putting it mildly. There are some good reasons for this, for though the art of H.G. Peter has been dismissed unfairly by many critics, there can be no doubt that Jack Cole was the more innovative of the two artists. Consequently, it's Cole's eyeball-stretching depictions of his "India Rubber Man" that caused a highbrow type like Art Spiegelman to co-author a book on Cole's creativity with collaborator Chip Kidd.

Nevertheless, the exceptional nature of Cole's artwork is of secondary consideration to this essay, which deals with the nature of violence in Cole's work.

Now when I say that I find Cole's work-- both on PLASTIC MAN and other creations-- to be "Sadean," I don't mean that I believe that Cole was literally turned on by his own images of death, torture and mayhem, as the Marquis de Sade reputedly was by his own autopornography. I do however think that Cole was personally fascinated by violent and transgressive materials. I'm sure that on one level he *may* have viewed the labor of grossing out the kiddies as just another aspect of a job, but even so Cole doesn't seem as distanced with such material as, say, his contemporaries Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Around the same time PLASTIC MAN got started, Simon and Kirby could ladle out bucketsfuls of juvenile-appropriate gore and grue in Timely's CAPTAIN AMERICA. And yet the two of them could, without muss or fuss, transition to a "clean" style of violence the moment they started working on features like NEWSBOY LEGION for DC Comics, while Cole continually pursued transgressive images throughout his 14 years in comic books and on into his work for PLAYBOY, in which Paul Tumey of COLE'S COMICS finds "themes of virility and impotence, wholeness and fragmentation."

In support of Tumey's analysis, one finds that even in the first year of PLASTIC MAN, when Cole was still finding his way with the new genre of the superhero, images of violence, death and grotesquerie abound, next to which even the grim BATMAN stories seem rather tame. Plastic Man's first major villain-- a very butch (and implicitly lesbian) woman named "Madame Brawn"-- appears first in PC #4 and makes her first and last comeback in #5, where she dies when she takes a fall and hits her head on a spike. PC #6 includes a victim whose hands are cut off and then used by evildoers for malicious mischief; PC #9 features a villain named "Hairy Arms," who appears to have a shrunken torso out of proportion with the rest of his body. And

then there's POLICE COMICS #11. The cover at left suggests playful fantasy-slapstick, but inside is neck-breaking, bodies blown apart, brain transplantation, and a giant who (a) walks on his hands because he can't walk on his useless legs, and (b) tries to eat Plastic Man alive.

Now, pound for pound Marston's WONDER WOMAN may be no less violent, but as with my comparison of STAR WARS and ALIEN in this essay, WONDER WOMAN never seems as transgressive because the violence is of the *clean* variety. (And if anyone cares, with respect to the other category mentioned in said essay, both works belong to the "spectacular" rather than "functional" category in terms of whether the violence is a means or an end in the story.) But an additional reason as to why WONDER WOMAN might appear less transgressive is precisely because the feature so frequently focuses on the interiority of the characters, with their melodramatic miracles of personal transformation, their better living through the chains of lovingkindness.

There's nearly no interiority in the stories of Jack Cole. Cole gives Plastic Man a couple of stories where the hero expresses his guilt over his antisocial acts as Eel O'Brien, but those are soon forgotten, and, as Paul Tumey points out, the very identity of Eel O'Brien disappears in time as well. Both villains and victims know themselves but slenderly, and so have barely any rational motive for getting involved with criminal doings. The non-body aspect of symbolism only occasionally appears in Cole: often it seems like nothing but body, body, body. Bodies hit, bodies stab, bodies kill or get killed (though Plastic Man seems to stay above the carnage, his unique physique in its way as invulnerable as that of Superman).

Of course that invulnerability is certainly key to understanding the Sadean meaning of PLASTIC MAN. Physically the hero is as above the sufferings of victims and villains, loosely in the same way that a Sade protagonist's money and aristocratic standing put him above those he debauches. The curse of ordinary mortality is what Tumey calls "fragmentation:" only a fantasy-body can be absolutely above it.

Given the unique viewpoints of Marston and Cole respectively, it's not surprising that later iterations of their most famous characters have failed to duplicate the complex symbolisms at their heart. However, of the two WONDER WOMAN has been treated somewhat better. Even when latter-day raconteurs abjure following Marston's specific programs, often the essence of gender-conflict still informs their stories, and invariably some aspects of the Marston mythology are used, with whatever success.

Cole's PLASTIC MAN suffers a more peculiar form of erasure, for with that character latter-day raconteurs labor to imitate only the aforementioned formal aspects of the artwork-- how many crazy shapes can Plastic Man assume-- and the elements of goofy slapstick. It's almost as if they never read the actual Cole stories, but only looked at the pictures. It seems odd that in these days of superhero decadence and the dawning of adult pulp comics, even Kyle Baker's PLASTIC MAN should resemble LOONEY TUNES more than the violent and Sadean world of Jack Cole.

SUPERHUMAN, ALL TOO SUPERHUMAN

At the end of GENRE-GENDER WARS PART 3 I said I'd pursue my dichotomy between "static" Sadean cruelty and "dynamic" Nietzschean cruelty with respect to "contemporary comic books." However, I'm changing up two things:

First, henceforth I'll substitute "violence" for "cruelty," since even in fictional narratives violence of some sort (even of the mental kind, such as Nietzsche imagines his great artists using to torment their lesser natures) is the act through which the relevant emotion is expressed.

Second, my last essay on WONDER WOMAN persuades me that the original William Moulton Marston iteration makes a better example of transformative Nietzschean violence than almost any other work in the comic book medium. I'll do a separate essay on an example of static violence, focusing on one of Marston's contemporaries, but for this essay, I'll address only the narrative articulation of Nietzschean violence.

A further prelude a quick summary of GGW #3 seems worthwhile. In that essay, I contended that Camille Paglia was wrong to bracket the "amoralism" of Nietzsche with the different amoral outlooks of Sade and Freud. I didn't say much about Freud in that essay and still won't in this one, for the main thrust of the static/dynamic argument began with my comparison of Sade and Nietzsche quotes and so will continue with them.

(Parenthetically, the static characterizations of Freudianized violence would be better compared to the dynamic ones of his old nemesis Carl Jung. But I digress.)

The first works to which I applied my dichotomy were two of the works Paglia analyzed in SEXUAL PERSONAE: Spencer's FAERIE QUEENE and Shakespeare's TITUS ANDRONICUS. Belatedly I'll admit that while Paglia did devote a whole chapter to the works of Spenser, her analysis of ANDRONICUS is only a page or two. Still, given her knockabout approach to the Bard-works which she does analyze in greater detail-- AS YOU LIKE IT and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA-- I think a long analysis of ANDRONICUS would have still made the mistake the short one did, of applying a Sadean model to something closer to the Nietzchean idea of spiritualizing violence.

So, continuing with my chosen Spenser/Shakespeare dyad, one may ask what separates, in a narratological sense, the characters of FAERIE QUEENE and ANDRONICUS. I said in GGW #3 that Nietzsche's concept of spiritualized cruelty "seems to involve a deeper mental transformation than anything a Sade protagonist might contemplate." This "deeper mental" propensity I will call *interiority.*

Now what does *interiority" mean? Not that the characters of that nature sit around pyschoanalyzing their problems a la Woody Allen's film INTERIORS, but only that the interior status of such a character plays a clear narrative purpose in the character's story. Again, this has nothing to do with a character's "depth." Shakespeare's Titus is not much if at all "deeper" than Spenser's best character Britomart. But Titus' internal workings are far more important to the story of ANDRONICUS than Britomart's are in her tale. To pursue the Sade/Nietzsche parallel again, Britomart largely stays as static as any Sadean protagonist in terms of internal reflections, while Titus must transform himself much as Nietzsche's ideal artists did, as Titus goes from blustering, bloody-handed general to a sly trickster whose "mad act" anticipates Shakespeare's later and more often-lauded Hamlet.

Of course, a new problem for judging the presence or absence of interiority is created when one turns to a character who, unlike Titus or Britomart, was conceived to be a serial character, one who never substantially changes. How can such a character express interiority, given that he or she cannot change her situation even to the extent that Spenser's Britomart does?

The answer is simple: interiority is projected onto "guest stars" who can be changed in line with the author's ideals, and can do so with as many variations as one can conceive, even though the main character remains essentially the same.

In conceiving this projection, William Marston wasn't precisely doing something no one had ever conceived before. Long before the comic book was launched anywhere, serial fiction had coped with this problem, notably with Sherlock Holmes, whose entire raison d'etre involved bringing order to London lives by detecting plots and villains. Superman and Batman simply adapted this pattern into a purely altruistic venture, as the heroes continually played Mary Worth to orphans and sweet young things. However, the closest these two heroes usually got to "transformation" was to get bad young boys back on the road to being good boys.

In keeping with his psychoanalytic training, Wertham further adapted this pattern to bring sinners back into a much more quixotic fold than anything Superman ever dreamed of. "Ya beat me, but hang me if I didn't like it!" says one bully-boy (quote approximate) after Wonder Woman outpowers him, but contrary to the Sadean paradigm, the victim of Wonder Woman's benevolent violence is having his eyes opened to intruiging new possibilities. Nor is Wonder Woman herself in a Sadeaian position of unquestioned power: in one sequence, being outpowered herself by a hyped-up Steve Trevor, she reflects that she finds the sensation of submission thrilling but still prefers being a "top" to a "bottom." However, throughout the Marston years the author's credo remained consistent. To rephrase the old Dean Martin song:

"Everybody's Someone's Bottom-- Sometime!"

What made all this dominance and violence transformative was the attitude with which Marston colored it, placing it all as much in the realm of "non-body" as "body." This attitude Marston called "lovingkindness," and even in the most slapsticky examples of violence-- the Holliday Girls and their butt-paddles come to mind-- Marston always projects this superheroic version of *agape.*

Now, Wertham may not converted any readers to his belief-system. It's quite possible that much of the readership supported the book, as Gerald Jones asserted, in order to ogle scantily-clad Amazons-- though to be sure, there were a lot of "good girl art" books that played more to that desire than did the art of H.G. Peter.

Nevertheless, Marston's WONDER WOMAN is probably one of the few serial works in any medium that manages to put across a psychically-dynamic concept of violence. Most serial works, including the aforementioned Sherlock, hew pretty closely to the static model, though not all of these, contrary to Gerson Legman, are especially sadistic in tone.

Being a work of static violence is, to be sure, in no way inferior to being a work of dynamic violence, or vice versa. In fact, the counter-example I'll address in my next essay is one of the Golden Age's most well-esteemed features-- though it does happen to be part of its charm that it IS pretty deep into a Sadean universe.

PANTS THEISM

If one wants to go by certain recent remarks by Gloria Steinem, the cultural worship of men's pants is responsible for the replacement of somewhat more feminine attire on Wonder Woman. As others before me have remarked (given that I'm addressing this brouhaha rather belatedly), Steinem was mistaken in thinking that DC's premiere superheroine was wearing skirts prior to the changeover, but there is a sense in which DC Comics may well have reacted against negative characterizations of Wonder Woman's "objectified" femininity. This would not be because the company believed that "pants were powerful," but rather that pants were more down-to-earth and "realistic." The various tirades against Wonder Woman's superhero costume have practically become their own meme, ranging from the accusations of non-practicality ("why doesn't she fall out of that top?") to those involving cultural hegemony ("why is a warrior from an island of Greek immortal women wearing patriotic colors?")

Without a doubt, the costume's pretty ugly, but it'll probably be ditched the moment the sales of WONDER WOMAN take a dip (assuming they go up during this revisionary period), though it's anyone's guess whether DC will just go back to some version of the traditional costume or seek out some third alternative. As a note of irony, the more sedate costume still doesn't keep some pundits from making objections about objectification: Steinem mentions that the leggings look more like her legs painted blue, and Johanna Carlson mentions the prominence of the Wonder boobs despite the presence of the concealing jacket. Of course, should WW get heavier pants and a breast reduction, that too could signal yet another attack on DC's deletion of the character's femininity.

Alan Moore has recently given another interview in which he (ho hum) again takes responsibility for the "grittification" of comic books, which I've pointed out to be a delusion here. But his real sin in my eyes is his contribution to the belief that comics are better when they are more "realistic." It's a short step from WATCHMEN's simple-minded joke about superheroes catching their capes in doors to the notion that even mainstream superheroes would be better if they eschewed all the unrealistic aspects of their costumes.

All superhero costumes (and garments with similar iconic aspects) are designed to have what I call "kinetic" effects, which includes but is not limited to elements of sensationalized sexuality. Some, like the costumes of Superman and Wonder Woman, emphasize dynamic physicality, which inevitably conjures sex appeal (though not only sex appeal). Some costumes are meant to signal macabre or mystical aspects of the characters, such as the outfits of the Shadow and Doctor Strange. (Admittedly there aren't a huge number of heroines given such costuming, though Raven of THE NEW TEEN TITANS is generally portrayed more as Goth Weirdie than Mystic Hot Chick.) And some, like Batman, mix effects of sexy physicality with those of the macabre.

Kinetic effects are in varying degrees important to all four literary mythoi, but drama and irony can camoflague their dependence on them by seeming to focus on "ideas" rather than spectacle. Comedy does something similar when it emphasizes the subtle witticism over the pie in the face, but at base comedy's dynamizations are more intimately tied to the sensational. Even the driest Woody Allen comedies often revolve around who gets to sleep with whom. The adventure mythos, then, is the least esteemed because it often proves hard to overlay its sensationalistic elements with a culturally-pleasing patina of realism or social responsibility.

I have no current plans to see whether or not this task can be achieved by WONDER WOMAN's new writer, J.M. (Name-Harder-to-Spell-Than-Shyamalan). I had a mild interest in following his TV show BABYLON 5, but have never felt moved to revisit the series, while my only exposure to his comics-work was a reading of his unfinished multi-parter THE TWELVE. Significantly, I found this work a tedious by-the-numbers "realistic" treatment of various obscure Golden Age heroes, lacking any of the deeper thematic elements that Alan Moore brought to works like EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (though THE TWELVE is a little more accomplished than Moore's lesser work for Image Comics). Nevertheless, it's my conviction that an outsized concept like WONDER WOMAN needs to be made more outrageous, not less.

And I'll probably have more to say later about the general tone of the objectification accusation, apart from its latest manifestation in the pantsing of Wonder Woman.

SUGAR AND SPICE NEED NOT BE NICEY-NICE

In reaction to a review of Chris Claremont's X-WOMEN, Sean Collins remarks:

Calling Chris Claremont "one of the more notably feminist writers of superhero comics" is, uh, one way of characterizing the author of the Hellfire Club saga, I guess.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong-- but wasn't the Claremont X-MEN, particularly of the Byrne era that includes the Hellfire Club, a feature particularly popular with fangirls in that time-frame? Indeed, wasn't the Claremont X-MEN the first new creation of the 1970s to boast a substantial female fandom, including later fans-turned-pros such as the late Carol Kalish? Didn't that period of the feature provide the bedrock on which Marvel capitalized for its X-MEN cartoon, which Hope Larson notes was a "gateway drug" for female fans of the 1990s?

If all of these impressions are correct, then wouldn't it be fair to say that the fangirls who bought the feature did not deem the White Queen's bustier to be especially offensive (even though it played to the iniquitous desires of horny fanboys)? Indeed, bustiers seem to be fairly common in the genre that, from year to year, sells best in North America: ye olde romance genre.

So when Sean Collins expresses dubiousness over whether or not Chris Claremont ought to be styled a "feminist writer," I reply, "It depends on the type of feminist you mean."

For instance, this 2009 article by Rosalind Gill suggests that some branches of feminist have moved from "sexual objectification" to "sexual subjectification."

Gill sees the latter cultural movement as an outgrowth from the earlier one:

... the focus on 'harking back' may miss what is new about contemporary sexualised depictions of women. I want to suggest that what we are seeing is not just a harking back to a safe, bygone or mythical age when 'men were men and women were women', but rather the construction of a new femininity (or, better, new femininities) organized around sexual confidence and autonomy. Indeed, what is novel and striking about contemporary sexualised representations of women in popular culture is that they do not (as in the past) depict women as passive objects but as knowing, active and desiring sexual subjects. We are witnessing, I want to argue, a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification in constructions of femininity in the media and popular culture.

I for one would not hesitate to consider Claremont's depiction of his most heralded X-women of the 70s and 80s-- that is, Storm, Phoenix, Rogue and the bustier-clad White Queen-- as "knowing, active and desiring sexual subjects," within the bounds of their being fictional characters, of course. Over time this even extends somewhat to Kitty Pryde, the juvenile femme introduced in the Hellfire Club sequence, who as I remember eventually becomes an "active sexual subject" even without being a Hot Chick like the other four I've named.

Now, truth to tell, after Gill offers this interesting analysis she then critiques it in much the same terms used by early feminist critics of sexual objectification:

The figure of the autonomous, active, desiring subject has become -- I suggest -- the dominant figure for representing young women, part of the construction of the neo-liberal feminine subject. But sexual subjectification, I would argue, has turned out to be objectification in new and even more pernicious guise.

I don't share Gill's pessimism. The communication of one's sexual nature *as* a sexual object is a physical aspect of life that won't be put aside just because it offends moral standards of either liberal or conservative persuasions. I won't say that there can't be a shitload of problems with "subjectification" of the type Gill describes, most significantly young women who purchase T-shirts that come with the written admonition that onlookers should "squeeze here." But along with these missteps comes a greater awareness of self, not just one's cultural expectations.

I agree with Camille Paglia here: a hierarchy of perceived beauty, not "real" except in the consensual sense of one's cultural parameters, will always be with humanity. That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that the act of one's choosing to wear a tight T-shirt or a bustier is in itself a concession to some "phallocracy" (that's not from Gill). And as Gill observes, with this "subjectification" of femininity has come a greater consciousness of its application to masculinity. Such aspects of male sexual subjectification weren't precisely non-existent in popular culture prior to feminism, but said aspects were often obscured by other factors. (In comic books, this would relate to the "but it's not the same when guys wear tight costumes" meme.)

In addition, I feel that Gill is entirely wrong with one of her attempts to disprove the beneficence of subjectification:

...there is the problem of the exclusions of this representational practice. It is clear from looking at media representations that only some women are constructed as active desiring sexual subjects. Only women who desire sex with men -- except when lesbian women 'perform' for men -- but, equally crucially, only young, slim and beautiful women. As Myra MacDonald has pointed out, older women, bigger women, women with wrinkles, etc are never accorded sexual subjecthood and are still subject to offensive and sometimes vicious representations. Indeed the figure of the unattractive woman who wants a sexual partner remains one of the most vilified in a range of popular cultural forms.

I disagree with this quite as much as I disagree with Collins' implicit characterization of the Claremont X-MEN as no more than a haven for horny fanboys. Since the rise of subjectification there has been a consequent upsurge in which The Princess Is The Frog (and The Frog Ain't That Bad), most notably the animated cartoon SHREK, as well as my earlier example of the merely cute-but-not-hot Kitty Pryde. There will always be jokes involving men or women being mortified by the attentions of those they find unattractive, but current society is a long way from taking sadistic pleasure in the frustrations of a homely spinster a la Miss Hathaway of THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES.

Objectification of the kind Collins critiques hasn't vanished, of course. But IMO it's clearly fighting a losing battle.