SHADOWS AND FOGGY NOTIONS, PART 2

Picking up right where I left off:

The insubstantiality of shadows in Plato is his metaphor for the fundamental unreality of the phenomenal world.

For Charles Reece their insubstantiality is the metaphor for the unreality of commodified art.

In real life, however, though shadows are insubstantial, they are not unreal, any more than they correlate only with the bodies whose images they replicate.

In real life, there are no shadows without bodies to cast them--

And there are also no shadows if there is no light. Darkness, yes, but not shadows as such.

What Plato's cave-prisoners see when they behold a shadow is the result of these two real-world phenomena, as it is for anyone else. Plato represents the light's presence as a given, but of course it is not. Every shadow ever formed of the phenomenal world is the result of the interaction between a thing we can see, which blocks the passage of light, and an event we cannot see: the deflection of perhaps millions of light-particles rebounding from the seen thing, thus creating the rough outline of the seen thing.

The shadow thus is what I choose to call an indirect indicator of both the seen thing and the light being blocked by the seen thing.

Does this neglect of a second correlate for shadow-phenomena affect Plato's argument? Not really. From my brief research of the subject it seems Plato had a theory of the visual not entirely removed from ours, though of course he would not been responsible for associating the phenomenon of light with anything like Democritus' particles.

Charles Reece, however, knows of the association, and so he unquestionably knows that any shadow is the product of both light and a body blocking the light. So, whether he would call a shadow an "indirect indicator" or not, he knows that a shadow isn't technically "unreal." He would be on solid ground if he claimed that it was only a poetic metaphor, that he *feels* that commodified artforms are unreal. But given that he's locating the etiology of these artforms as stemming from a "socio-epistemlogical" phenomenon of material "market forces," poetry doesn't solve the problem.

I said earlier that I would rewrite Charles' rewriting, and for that I'll draw on my essay GATE OF THE GODS 4, where I quoted Richard Slotkin's quotation of J.L. Henderson:

"..Henderson (developing a Jungian thesis) characterizes the basic psychological tension [of archetypal myths] as a conflict between "Moira" and "Themis"-- between the unconscious and the conscious, the dream or impulse and the rational idea, the inchoate desire and the knowledge of responsibility"

For Plato and Reece, the things they compare with shadows-- a range of phenomena, a range of artworks-- are rated as insubstantial reflections of something with substance. The irony of the comparison in Reece's case is that one of the two factors necessary for a shadow-- that of light's operations at the particle level-- is itself invisible and insubstantial to common human perception.

I suggest, going along Jungian lines, that what he calls "commodified art," and what I call simply "popular art," only appears as insubstantial as a shadow from the standpoint of "rational ideas," of "Themis." The truth is that for humanity there would be no "rational ideas" without the world of "dream and impulse," the world of Moira, no more easily tracked than the naked eye can track the rebounding of light particles, or, for that matter, see the hurricane wind that bends or breaks the tree.

I suppose I can see some of the appeal of an ideology like that of Marx and his kindred. Marxism gives one the structure that all "rational ideas" seem to impart, but doesn't seem to be dependent on metaempirical entities or principles.

Unfortunately, just as Plato's rational principles undermined his intutions of art, the same applies to Marxism, metaempirical entities or no.

And both, in thinking they have triumphed over shadows, simply become lost in a self-referential fog.

MY THIRD LIST O' LOST QUESTIONS (AND COMMENTS)

So Widmore found his way back to the island after three years of searching. The writers may not bother with many explanations here, knowing that the Lamppost is a convenient enough explanation. The more important question is, what does he want?

Ben tossed out a cock-and-bull story about Widmore wanting to use the island for profit. But everything Widmore himself has said speaks to a real passion to be back on the island again, presumably as ruler of the Others. By coming back after roughly fifteen years since his exile, does he plan to be judged by "the Monster?" Or is that sort of thing a ritual that has come to an end now that Smokey's making plans to be free? Widmore may be part of those plans, though when Jacob first says, "They're coming" in the Season 5 closer, Nemesis doesn't exactly look thrilled. But was that "they" the same "they" he mentions to Hurley later? (Just to prove the writers are really screwing with us, sometimes Jacob says "he" is coming, sometimes "they.")

One poster on a certain LOST board said he didn't think Ben could reform due to the malign influence of the rebirth pool. I can't prove it but I think Ben is capable of reforming despite the pool's influence, for which we only have Richard's word-- and he may have been going on faulty info given him by Jacob. It's an interesting mirroring: Sayyid, who wants to believe he's a good man but is fairly easily sucked back into the assassination game by Ben, finally gives up and surrenders to Darkness, implicitly for his heart's desire. But Ben, whose protestations of being a "good guy" always have an ironic tinge, may be the one capable of reform. The fate of "Doctor Linus" would imply as much. Also, if Timeline-A Ben is beyond redemption, why did Jacob (according to Miles) hope that Ben wouldn't be corrupted by Nemesis?

Miles seemed to have become less self-interested in earlier episodes, but it may be that we saw his better side because he was working with a guy whose leadership he respected (i.e., Sawyer), but he's still no angel. As with many LOST characters, he has a humongous revelation (hey, my dad was a noble soul and not just an uncaring deadbeat) but you'd never know it. If the Brits invented stiff upper lips, I think LOST has one-uppered them.

I definitely approve of both "crazy Zen Jack" and the notion of Ilana strangely gravitating toward the killer of her surrogate father, insofar as he is forgiveable due to the manipulations of "evil incarnate."

it's almost guaranteed that in the next episode or so we'll finally tie up the last loose end of Season 5, wherein the Locke-Sawyer group of 2004 come across the deserted camp, find an Ajira bottle (Ilana's), steal an outrigger and get pursued and shot at by the group in the other outrigger (Ilana's people).

Wonder who in that group gets shot by Juliet?

SHADOWS AND FOGGY NOTIONS, PART 1

"...nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole."-- Marcus Aurelius.

"Nothing unreal exists."-- Mister Spock (among others).

As I've always considered the term "realistic literature" to be an oxymoron, I've naturally taken exception to Charles Reece's overly-simple opposition of the real and the image. I critiqued that GHOST WORLD essay here, and now here's the next (and probably last) sentence from the essay with which I'll concern myself.

"There are plenty who’ve given up the fight, claiming that the shadows on Plato’s cave are reality."

In this sentence Reece rewrites Plato's famous "cave metaphor" in order to illustrate the condundrum of anyone finding "real" meaning in a commodified and hence "unreal" world, and how this paradox leads GHOST WORLD's central characters to affect a pose of ironic detachment. It's unclear from the essay as to whether Reece is criticizing Dan Clowes' characters for purportedly giving up the fight to know Reality from Unreality, but I'm less interested in his interpretation of Clowes than in his rewriting of Plato for the purpose of Marxist dialectics.

There's a certain irony (though not a hypocrisy) in Reece rewriting Plato, particularly part of a Platonic dialogue focused on demonstrating the logically-deduced existence of Archetypal Forms. Whatever Reece's take on Plato generally, his postings on that infamous messboard GoneDowntheTubes.com make clear that he rejects Plato's concept of the Forms, such as this post, where he explicitly claims that the early structuralists "solved Plato's problem" by translating hypothetical metaphysical structures into structures within a "socio-epistemological realm." In short, Charlie don't play those Plato Forms.

The reason this rewriting *isn't* a hypocrisy is simple: every philosopher good or bad rewrites his forbears, and Plato himself was no exception to that rule. However, that rule means Reece's rewrite is equally open to further re-inscription, to wit:

Shadows-- though perfectly workable as a metaphor for "illusion" in poetry-- make a poor metaphor when used in concert with that bloated mass of preconceptions known as Marxist dialectic. According to Stoics like Marcus Aurelius (and possibly Mister Spock as well), one should be open to examining "methodicially and truly" every object one meets in reality, even that which may seem to be an insubstantial phenomenon, like a shadow.

For the fact of the matter comes down to this: shadows exist, and therefore are not unreal.

Certainly one can *feel* that shadows are unreal (within the context of poetry) because shadows are liminal phenomena that have not one but two correlates in the world of consensual experience: one correlate that is easily seen and one that is not. I'll address the one that is not easily seen after analyzing how Reece, following Plato, sticks to a one-correlate system.

In THE REPUBLIC Plato's cave-shadows-- created when creatures or objects pass in front of a fire outside the sightlines of some chained-up prisoners-- have but one correlate: those selfsame creatures or objects. In Plato's schema these shadows align with the ordinary consensual phenomena which all humans experience, while the objects/creatures that create the shadows are a deeper reality behind that apparent reality. That "deeper reality" comes down to Plato's theory of Archetypal Forms.

How does Charles Reece rewrite this metaphor to support his earlier notion that modern society has become a "Society of the Spectacle?" First off, Reece's essay is not concerned with philosophy or phenomenology, but with art. But what kinds of art? Well, "commodified art" is the only kind about which Reece theorizes in this essay, and he directly compares its works to "the shadows on Plato's cave." Again, it's a short essay, so there's not going to be any attempt to define whatever art is contrary to the commodified kind, though the existence of such non-commodified art is certainly implied. Still, even in the absence of such a definition, I feel justified in assuming a parallel:

For Plato, the shadows are the apparently real "things" with which all humans live, and the bodies that cast the shadows are the Archetypal Forms behind those things.

For Reece, the shadows are the insubstantial artworks that support "mass culture," and the bodies that cast the shadows are what Adorno calls "serious art."

More on shadows and the second correlate in Part 2.

METAPHENOMENAL MUSINGS

Thanks to this post by Sean Collins, I was made aware of two recent online essays on the subject of Jewish fantasy, one by Michael Weingrad at the Jewish Review of Books, where he asks "Why There is No Jewish Narnia," and another by Spencer Ackerman, who replies that "Jewish Narnia is called Marvel Comics."

Sean then asks for responses from critics knowledgeable in fantasy. As most comics-critics try to remain ignorant of the complex histories of the metaphenomenal genres for fear of being labelled nerds or geeks, I guess it falls to me.

Short answer: Weingrad's mostly right, Ackerman's mostly wrong.

As some of Ackerman's respondents do point out in his comments-thread, Weingrad never says that Jews don't write any fantasies at all. He gives ample evidence of other areas of metaphenomenal fiction in which Jewish creators have excelled, not least science fiction, but he stresses that until fairly recently there have not been many who were known for doing so-called "high-fantasy" after the fashion of Lewis, Tolkien, or even (though Weingrad doesn't mention this one) Robert E. Howard.

I would fault Weingrad for not defining his terms for "fantasy" a little more closely, though. Basically "high fantasy" is defined by what J.R.R. Tolkien termed the presence of a "secondary world" which is necessarily based on the author's experience of the "primary world" but which allows greater access to magical phenomena and numinous presences. Secondary-world works fall into three categories:

TYPE 1: the secondary world exists within the remote vestiges of the primary world. This is the type one sees in most ancient epic and romance, ranging from the Gilgamesh Epic to the Arabian Nights to the Morte D'Arthur.

TYPE 2: the secondary world exists completely apart from the author's primary world, having its own independent history and never coming into contact with the primary world. This is the domain of Tolkien and Howard.

TYPE 3: the secondary world has its own history that is independent of the primary world but exists alongside the primary world, and it's possible for characters in one world to 'cross over' into the other. This is the domain of Lewis' Narnia.

Now, even a quick comparison between the generic domain of the superhero-- whether the spawn of the Golden Age or of today-- shows no real points of comparison. Then and now, most costumed superhero stories take place firmly within the primary world shared by authors and readers. Further, though a fair percentage of superheroes invoke magic and numinous beings as sources of power, even magicians like Doctor Strange don't hang their hats in the otherworlds full-time. If Doctor Strange is like any of the high-fantasy types mentioned above, he probably most resembles Type 3. But the wild fever-dream worlds of Doctor Strange are really not secondary worlds with their own histories, as Narnia is.

Science-fictional superheroes like Superman, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, whom Akerman invokes, are even less related to the high fantasy genre. They take their chief inspiration from American SF's articulation of the concept of the mutant or freak given super-powers by science, and have no more relation to any secondary world than does Wells' INVISIBLE MAN.

Comic books in turn took this sci-fi trope and melded it strongly with the trope of the crimefighting crusader as exemplified by earlier ancestors like the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet, the Phantom, the Shadow, et al. However, Golden Age heroes dominantly keep their adventures confined to the readers' primary world. Ironically, only one creator of a major superhero figure has his hero come from a Type 1 secondary world, a world he imbued with some consistency of thought like that of the prose authors mentioned, and that creator happens to be a goy: William Moulton Marston of WONDER WOMAN fame!

Further, given that the model for most superheroes was one most strongly influenced by the pulp crusaders and related types, I find it hard to give sole credit for the superhero's development to that small collection of unquestionably talented Jewish writers and artists of the Golden Age. I don't dispute that it's *significant* that these Jewish creators expressed themselves through the genre of the heroic crimefighter. But one cannot see that expression in its own little "pocket universe," so to speak. Unless one can demonstrate that every significant creator of the pulp crusaders was also secretly Jewish-- that means Fran Striker, Kenneth Robeson, Lee Falk, and many many others-- then the genesis of the superhero has to be seen less as a unique Jewish creation and rather as an adaptation of an ongoing pulp aesthetic. Perhaps one can see the comics-superhero world as having been born from the death-throes of the pulp-world, as the antediluvian world is born from the one that God destroys in that other Genesis.

Offhand I can't think of any superhero fantasies that have taken place in Type 2 secondary worlds. The Marvel adaptation of CONAN is almost certainly the first one to have sold well, but most attempts to do original high fantasies in the comics have had at best marginal success.

Unless I'm missing something--?

KNOWING THE DYNAMIS FROM THE DYNAMIC

DYNAMIC (noun): An interactive system or process, especially one involving competing or conflicting forces.

"The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place."-- Aristotle, POETICS.

The "interactive system" of conflicting forces I'll discuss here are "plot" and "character," which Aristotle deems the two most important elements of "tragedy." Certain sections of the POETICS imply that the dynamic between the two applies to other forms of art as well, so I see no barrier to the idea of applying the dynamic to all narrative art, with the caveat that plot may not *always* be more significant than character: just that it is dominantly so because the plot is so often the structure within which the characters' acts are determined, rather than the characters imposing "their" will upon the structure.

In keeping with Aristotle's privileging of plot, Frye's formulation of literary categories is dominantly based upon plot-elements shared by works in the same category. At the same time, it should be noted that one of Aristotle's earliest points in the Poetics-- one which Frye reiterates and reformulates-- is that characters act within the plot according to expectations set up by their power of action, which connotes whether they are average, better than average, or worse than average. So even within Aristotelian theory it's easy to see plot and character joined in an interdependent pas de deux. Thus, despite the natural inclination toward plot-evaluation, the evaluation of character has unquestionable relevance if one desires to separate the dancers and see what each contributes to the dance.

In BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER, my argument was largely plot-based. I focused on the plot dynamics of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER TV series as a means of demonstrating why I believed that it was best placed in the category of the "adventure" mythos, even though the series also demonstrated that it contained substantial elements of the other three *mythoi*: of drama, irony, and comedy. I also made brief mentions of three other serial works which each represented one of the other three *mythoi*, and compared some of their plot-functions to those of BUFFY. These, too, I discussed in terms of how the protagonists functioned within plots typical of those *mythoi.*

However, after I examined the concept I term "myth-radicals" in SUBCATEGORIAL IMPERATIVES, and discerned that there were certain subcategories within these four divisions, it further occured to me that many of the irregularities could be explained as irregularites of either plot or character with respect to the dominant dynamic of a given mythos. As mentioned earlier I chose to focus upon the adventure mythos because (as I can't stress too much) so little of worth has been written about it, but I think my mediations on categories and subcategories apply across the board to all four mythoi.

Explanatory preamble done, I move on to two specific examples of works that seem to belong to the adventure genre but which I label "subagonistic" because they have what I called a "less agonistic value." Here for the first time I'm explicating why the difference may be one either of plot or of character.

My example for character is DOCTOR WHO, as portrayed in his initial 1963-89 series and in the current BBC version. (I disinclude the American-made TV-movie because I just don't remember much about it.) Clearly, in terms of the general range of plots used on both serials, one would tend to believe that it falls within the category of adventure. Like BUFFY, DOCTOR WHO borrows liberally from other *mythoi," most obviously from that of the comedy. But since the generic WHO plot would probably boil down to something like "Those Damn Dirty Colonial Alien Overlords," it's obvious that elements of physical peril take precedence over the dynamizations of the other three *mythoi.*

Yet against the galaxy-spanning might of Sontarans, Cybermen and Daleks we get...

THIS GUY.

In DOMINANCE, SUBMISSION I concluded with another comparison of Haggard's SHE and KING SOLOMON'S MINES, with the verdict that KSM was a true agonistic work due to its focus on the heroes' winning their battle through armed combat and perservance, while the heroes of SHE, despite a certain formidable nature, basically "get lucky" because their opponent destroys herself. The Doctor is typically portrayed by a male actor who is, for one reason or another, not meant to resemble the typical he-man of adventure-fiction, which is one element that signals the serial's intent to avoid the pattern of dynamization set by those more typical stories. The Doctor, though, does not triumph over his many foes solely by luck-- though on many occasions he is considerably outgunned, and luck is at times invoked as a force that keeps him from being vaporized. But typically, the Doctor fights his foes with the centuries-spanning knowledge of a Time Lord, not with martial abilities. His doctrine is *froda,* not *forza.* This puts him very close to the territory of the typical dramatic protagonist of mainstream science fiction, but in the end DOCTOR WHO is still about external peril rather than internal instabilities, and so it still falls within the category of the adventure mythos, for all that its protagonist lacks the *dynamis* of an adventure protagonist.

Moving on to STARGATE, the comparison of the two strikes me as felicitious, since when I first saw the 1994 feature films I thought of its "colonist alien overlords" plot as being "Doctor Who without the humor." And its plot, too, seems to belong to the category of adventure by virtue of the emphasis on physical peril, while its characters, unlike Doctor Who, are definitely typical agents of *forza:* gun-toting American soldiers and their alien allies who are out to clean up the territories dominated by various overlords-in-gods'-clothing. Indeed, one of the articles in the essay-collection SUPER/HEROES:FROM HERCULES TO SUPERMAN even refers to the star of the first TV series, the Richard Dean Anderson character, as a "superhero."

Yet I find it hard to see these rather unremarkable soldier-boys (and girls) as belonging to the idiom of the superhero.
I considered that this might simply be a matter of taste-- the fact that I didn't care that much for the movie and less for the TV show(s)-- but I dismissed that idea. I'm aware of many, many unremarkable protagonists whom I do see as belonging to that idiom, who possess roughly the same *dynamis* as the STARGATE soldier-boys. To use two othe SYFY-channel serials as counterexamples, I'm not hugely fond of the characters on either SANCTUARY or WAREHOUSE 13. But I can see both of them as having stronger ties to the superhero idiom, even if the heroes are not superheroes per se.

My final verdict, then, is that there's something about the execution of the generic STARGATE plot that edges a little too far out of the bounds of the adventure-story and into those of the dramatic story with adventure-elements. Over time the first serial and its epigoni took on an increasing resemblance to the "starship melodramas" of the STAR TREK franchise. I don't think STARGATE was ever as much about what Faulkner called "the human heart in conflict with itself," as all of the TREKshows have arguably been. But in the STARGATE franchise the adventure-mythos became somewhat dennatured. I view this as a lack of heroic *dynamis* within the overall plot-structure, rather than within the concept of the characters, as it is for DOCTOR WHO.

As I've said before, this basic rule of character-irregularities and plot-irregularities would apply across the board to the other three categories and their subcategories. At present I don't think it's possible for *both* plot and character(s) to be irregular and still deserve to be labeled a part of the regular mythos. For instance, a DOCTOR WHO without the adventurous plot-elements would probably look something more like HITCHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, and so would be more properly termed a comedy.

SPECTACULARLY WRONG

In this comments-section Charles Reece declined to respond to my criticisms of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, but mentioned that he had done an essay adapting some of Adorno's thought for an essay. Certainly I've no reason to respond to his essay if he doesn't respond to mine, but I will review one sentence from his brief meditation on GHOST WORLD here:

'Just like the rest of us, Enid was born into the media-saturated “Society of the Spectacle,” which makes it damn hard to distinguish the real from its image (“spectacle”).'

Shortest possible response:

Speak for yourself, Charlie.

Elitist critics to the contrary, the "Society of the Spectacle"-- in large part just another take on the term "mass culture," which Reece also uses in the essay-- has always been coterminous with human society. The real elitist objection to this supposed "society" is that because of the rise of a marketplace for popular culture, "spectacle" becomes more central to culture as a whole once the less educated classes are able to choose what cultural artifacts they will support. This is why Adorno and his fellow travelers sought to marginalize the contemporary articulation of popular culture into a "mass culture" supposedly forced upon the masses from above.

And yet, even though Aristotle's POETICS rated "spectacle" as a marginal element of narrative art, scarcely any famed author of the pre-industrial periods-- when aristocratic patronage usually filled in for the mass market-- really scorned the use of spectacle. An author like Jonathan Swift, whom I assume Reece would find agree antedates the rise of Adorno's mass culture, certainly earned his greatest fame by channeling his satire into spectacular forms.

If it can be demonstrated that all of the societies which predate mass culture have no less a hunger for spectacle than the society that lives with a multitude of saturating media, then one must conclude that the hunger for spectacle is not something foisted upon humanity by mass media-- no matter what separate verdict one may render upon the producers of that media.

In raising once more this insubstantial spectre of mass culture's supposed effects upon one's perception of reality, Reece is certainly correct in thinking that this is what Daniel Clowes is trying to get across to his readers. What I object to, of course, is not that Reece is incorrect about Clowes' agenda but that Reece validates it as philosophically substantive.

Clowes' GHOST WORLD is certainly more readable than many of his often-overrated artcomics works, and his theme, even though it's one with which I have no sympathy, is much better expressed than one finds in the labored surrealism of DAVID BORING. But whereas a High Modernist poet like T.S. Eliot had well-articulated reasons for feeling that civilization was sliding into chaos, Clowes is all about shadows. He gives up on the quest for reality and then claims that mass culture made him do it. He's the one who's given up the "fight" that Reece mentions in his next sentence.

Damn, I just indirectly reviewed another sentence. For that I may need a second article re: caves and shadows.

To be continued, probably.

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.