Back in 1988 when I was working on the manuscript of my first book on Foucault, living in a bedsit in inner city Melbourne, I had the original cult 1967 series of The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan playing on an endless loop whenever I was having a break from writing. (The local video shop had various volumes of the series on VHS for $1 a week rental.) Some of the same elements that fascinated me about Foucault’s work also fascinated me in The Prisoner.
Just a quick plot summary for those who came late. The central character resigns from an unspecified job, returns to his London flat to pack, is gassed and wakes up in a replica of his flat in a kitsch resort only known as ‘the village’. He is only ever referred to as ‘number 6’ and in each episode a bureaucrat known only as number 2 tries ‘by hook and by crook’ to find out why number 6 resigned. Each episode sees the failure of number 2 and the appointment of a new person to fill that position in the next episode.
But this is not a review of the original 1967 series, it is the beginnings of a review of the 2009 ‘re-imagining’ of the original. I have watched 3 episodes so far and am determined to watch the rest. I was thoroughly expecting to be outraged by the new series but not to be simply bored. Beyond the fact that the characters in the series are given numbers rather than names and the central character, number 6, is ‘imprisoned’ in a place called ‘the village’ and that a bigger and better rover (a big white ball) makes its presence felt, this is where any resemblance between the two series ends. Whereas for all its weird surrealism, the first series made sense and one always had the sense of a strong agenda of social critique, the 2009 series is a confused mess. Any social critique it offers is so contrived as to ring utterly hollow. It is also fairly violent in a way that the original series never was. In the original series the relative lack of overt violence created the effect of a society so sophisticated in its techniques of social control that it rarely had to resort to the end game of blood letting.
I have no doubt that Inception will prove a bonanza for all those analytic philosophers churning out edited collections on analytic philosophy and popular culture over at Open Court. Let me propose a workable alternative title for the film to start them off: Descartes and Freud. The Final Showdown. Or, for those of a Foucauldian persuasion working with other publishers, I might suggest Dream and Existence: The Movie, or even My Body, This Paper, This Fire, Redux. But before anybody gets too enthusiastic, we are talking strictly Freud and Descartes 101 here, for beginners. Thus we have Descartes’ famous meditation on dreaming, madness and doubt and some rather unsophisticated references to repression, guilt and the unconscious id – with a nod to Jung thrown in.
But for all that, Inception is a highly watchable action film with an intellectual edge in the same vein as The Matrix. The premise is that a vaguely defined technology allows people to visit the dreams of others in order to discover their secrets. A much more difficult process allows dream visitors to plant a new idea in the head of the dreamer. The technology and those who use it are deliberately left rather vague which allows the focus to be placed firmly on the more interesting end result of the process rather than in the techniques of getting there.
It is quite a novel experience watching a mainstream Hollywood action thriller that requires concentration to focus on all the simultaneous levels of action taking place – dreams within dreams within dreams. But it is the sort of intellectual concentration that one brings to solving puzzles – puzzles such as labyrinths which feature quite heavily in the film. And of course the character in the film who designs the labyrinths is named Ariadne. But we are not talking Borgesian complexities here. If it is a welcome change to have something to think about in an action thriller it is not the sort of intellectual focus that is associated with altering one’s experience of the world.
If in The Matrix, the question is how we distinguish between ‘reality’ and the illusion of ‘virtual reality’ (Plato’s cave), Inception gets back to classic Cartesian roots. How do I know that I am not dreaming? Just for the record here is Descartes’ classic passage on dreaming from his Meditations 1
How often have I dreamt that I was in these familiar circumstances, that I was dressed, and occupied this place by the fire, when I was lying undressed in bed? At the present moment, however, I certainly look upon this paper with eyes wide awake; the head which I now move is not asleep; I extend this hand consciously and with express purpose, and I perceive it; the occurrences in sleep are not so distinct as all this. But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.
As he notes, there is actually no way of distinguishing between the waking and sleeping states when one is experiencing them, yet the premise in Inception is that it is possible to carry around a small physical object of one’s choice which allows one somehow to distinguish between dream and wakefulness. It is hard to see how this can work as one can dream anything at all – there are no external guarantees (apart from God, according to Descartes at least). The other problem in the film is that the dreams in the film, even if they are designed to some extent for the dreamer by the visitors, unfurl in a fairly logical fashion, which as most people know is not how dreams work. There are also various other plot difficulties – but perhaps these have been planted deliberately to provoke the viewer – I certainly hope so.
Attempts are made to give the film an emotional core along lines that evoke The Forbidden Planet and even Solaris. There are also some resonances with Vincent Ward’s 1998 film What Dreams May Come which I won’t reveal in the interests of not including spoilers. But unfortunately the film is badly let down by the casting and performance of Leonardo diCaprio as the central character. Where the writing indicates a complex, intelligent, grief stricken individual struggling with his own demons, what we get instead is bland and self assured. The right casting and direction (intense closeups) would have made the difference between a spectacular action film which poses interesting intellectual puzzles, and a film which went to the next level with a real emotional punch. An opportunity sadly missed.
But quibbles aside, the set action pieces in this film are impeccable with some fabulous special effects and good acting from the supporting cast. The soundscapes and music – particularly in a dream which takes place around a snowy fortress – are very effective as well.
In any case I will look forward to seeing an Open Court publication appearing some time in the near future…
Not much later… (15th August).
It has come to my notice (thanks Stuart!) that Blackwell has already put out a call for abstracts on Inception and Philosophy to be edited by David Kyle Johnson in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series. If you are interested, Dr. Johnson’s contact details are on his webpage.
There is already some interesting reflection around the film. For a Deleuzian interpretation of Inception see the Cineosis blog. There is also a most interesting article by Ian Alan Paul in Senses of Cinema on the indetermincy of both subject and object in Inception. This article also makes passing reference to Deleuze.
I first saw this Jim Henson directed film a couple of years ago and for all its faults I loved it. The acting from the two non puppet principles – David Bowie and Jennifer Connolly is a little stiff and wooden (ironically far more so than the puppets who are excellent!) – but the dialogue they have to work with is pretty stilted. The plot, which is a standard quest plot, is also paper thin.
But David Bowie in the full glory of his 80s glam rock outfits looks superb and is suitably ambiguous as an almost evil goblin king. He also composed all the songs (but not the incidental music) for the film and there are a couple of really good ones. ‘Magic Dance’, in which he dances in the middle of dozens of puppets and costumed little people, is wonderful. The puppets and little people bring an anarchic and highly enjoyable energy to proceedings and towards the end of the song a human baby (obviously a dummy in long shot) is tossed high into the air by the goblin king (Bowie) and is caught by an adjacent goblin little person.
The puppets and costumed little people are definitely the best actors in this film with the best lines and are wonderfully inventive in their appearance and performance. The excellent ‘making of’ documentary included in the extras on the DVD release details the technical problems in achieving the desired effects with the puppetry and the sheer inventiveness of the designers and puppeteers. It is good to see special effects that rely on models and mechanics rather than the ubiquitous contemporary CGI. It adds a solidity and refinement to the outcome, born of dealing with the limitations of actual physical objects rather than pixels.
Also of note is that if the story of the film was devised by Jim Henson, it was scripted by ex Python Terry Jones.
In relation to phenomenology, rather than making a somewhat internal description of lived experience, shouldn’t one, couldn’t one instead analyze a number of collective and social experiences?
Michel Foucault. (1996) [1988]. ‘What our present is’. In Sylvère Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984). Tr. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. 2nd edition. New York: Semiotext(e), p.408.
I particularly like this comment. Often philosophy is characterised as being about the description and analysis of purely interior experience or abstract forms of knowledge which are somehow removed from external locations in history and in a society. In other words, philosophy is a form of knowledge which is about the interior and the eternal or about finding the essences of those things underneath the banalities of lived experience. Why shouldn’t philosophy be about our engagement with history, the present with each other and our limitations in very specific -rather than abstract – instances?
It seems to me that the philosophical choice confronting us today is the following. We have to opt either for a critical philosophy which appears as an analytical philosophy of truth in general, or for a critical thought which takes the form of an ontology of ourselves, of present reality. It is this latter form of philosophy which from Hegel to the Frankfurt School, passing through Nietzsche, Max Weber and so on, which has founded a form of reflection to which, of course, I link myself insofar as I can.
Michel Foucault, (2010) [2008]. The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982- 1983. Tr. Graham Burchell. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 21
Random thoughts in response
This links in with my discussion of last month’s quote. Here Foucault is advocating a form of philosophy which has firm links with history and social existence. He is not interested in abstract sets of quasi mathematical problems or conceptual ordering in a vacuum as we see in analytic philosophy or systems of metaphysics. What is happening in time and human existence is what forms the primary fodder for the philosophical lineage in which Foucault situates himself.
It is less about establishing a rigid set of rules about how to conduct an ‘inquiry’, than about actively seeking to change our relation with ourselves and others in order to improve social existence as well as to have a particular ‘experience’ of the world.
I have just received The Government of Self and Others and have not as yet read it, but note there are extended discussions in it about various historical definitions (mainly from Classical Antiquity and the early Christian era) of philosophy. I will look forward to seeing what Foucault has to say on this question.
I would like to add some further – admittedly highly partisan – comments about ‘analytic philosophy’. A cursory look around the net for definitions of this movement offered the following findings. First of all a couple of American dictionary definitions:
A 20th-cent. philosophic movement characterized by its method of analyzing concepts and statements in the light of common experience and ordinary language so as to eliminate confusions of thought and resolve many traditional philosophical problems.
(Webster’s New World College Dictionary Cleveland, Ohio: Wiley, 2010 )
1. A cluster of philosophical traditions holding that argumentation and clarity are vital to productive philosophical inquiry.
2. A philosophical school of the 20th century whose central methodology is the analysis of concepts or language. Leading practitioners have included Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, Rudolf Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
3. Philosophy as professionally practiced in the United States and Great Britain in the 20th century. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
There are a number of interesting things about these definitions. First of all, there is the clear connection to the Cartesian notion of ‘clear and distinct ideas’, a notion which is one of the foundational principles of the scientific and rationalist movement. Arguably analytic philosophy is, and remains, essentially an application of these principles to the discipline of philosophy – seeking to render the ancient discipline of philosophy ‘scientific’. Similar makeovers were applied to other fields of knowledge and disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries – such as history and of course there has been the creation of that whole area of disciplinary knowledge described as the social sciences which include, of course, sociology and psychology.
In the last twenty to thirty years, most of these disciplines at an institutional level have grudgingly had to accommodate the post war critiques emerging from Europe of the rational modernist model – but analytic philosophy in the English language world has somehow managed to maintain its power in terms of the practice of the discipline of philosophy within institutions. It would be interesting to speculate as to how this has happened meaning that divergent forms of philosophical practice have been forced to set up shop under other names in other disciplines.
Another interesting point is the overwhelmingly technical focus of analytic philosophy – the idea that a certain methodology (that ghastly term ‘philosophical inquiry’) can solve all problems – which again is an assumption which lies at the basis of scientific thought and practice and other modernist thought (including the social sciences). If one could just find the right method one can solve previously intractable problems.
Also of interest is the characterisation of this form of philosophy as a ‘method of analyzing concepts and statements in the light of common experience and ordinary language’. One is led to ask whose experience and whose ordinary language? Many of the writings in the field of analytical philosophy are highly technical to the point of being impenetrable to outsiders but the examples that are used are extraordinarily banal and often reflective of a ‘common experience’ and ‘ordinary language’ which are perhaps more familiar to particular sorts of middle class academic males of a particular ethnicity, rather than other sectors of the community.
I am reminded here of a comment Foucault made about the dominance of phenomenology as a philosophy in universities in France in the 1950s:
[It was] a style of analysis that claimed to analyze concrete things as one of its fundamental tasks. It is quite certain that from this point of view, one could have remained a bit dissatisfied in that the kind of concrete phenomenology referred to was a bit academic and university-oriented. You had privileged objects of phenomenological analysis, lived experiences or the perception of a tree through an office window. I am a little harsh but the object field that phenomenology explored was somewhat predetermined by an academic philosophical tradition…
Michel Foucault. (1996) [1988]. ‘What our present is’. In Sylvère Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984). Tr. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. 2nd edition. New York: Semiotext(e), p.408.
Aaron Preston in an article on Analytic Philosophy on the (peer reviewed) Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy also makes the following telling remark:
Even in its earlier phases, analytic philosophy was difficult to define in terms of its intrinsic features or fundamental philosophical commitments. Consequently, it has always relied on contrasts with other approaches to philosophy—especially approaches to which it found itself fundamentally opposed—to help clarify its own nature. Initially, it was opposed to British Idealism, and then to “traditional philosophy” at large. Later, it found itself opposed both to classical Phenomenology (for example, Husserl) and its offspring, such as Existentialism (Sartre, Camus, and so forth) and also “Continental”’ or “Postmodern” philosophy (Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida).
This instructive statement would certainly bear further analysis and I will add to these notes as I come up with further ideas down the track. Analytic philosophy certainly has a very particular flavour, and as an outsider, my own perception is one of a highly gendered form of scientific modernism. Even the attempts to apply this stream of philosophy to popular culture and film fail to discard these elements and it offers a highly technical and dry reading experience no matter how exciting the original material to which this style of analysis is being applied (eg The Matrix, Buffy The Vampire Slayer).
What is philosophy if not a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth? … The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules – that is philosophy.
Michel Foucault. (1997) [1980]. ‘The Masked Philosopher’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume One. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, Allen Lane, p. 327. Translation modified.
Random thoughts in response
‘What is philosophy?’ This is a question that Foucault raises on numerous occasions in various forms throughout his work. For all the variations in his response to this question, he always insisted that philosophy operated firmly within a historical context and could only manifest itself through quite specific historical practices and events and the way we engage historically with ourselves and others.
Philosophy, for Foucault, is not a question of stripping away historical accidents so that we can discover what is absolutely true for all time, rather it is a way of examining the ways in which people and systems of knowledge have made a division between the true and the false in very specific historical contexts. These divisions directly impact on the ways people conduct themselves in relation to themselves and others. Philosophy should also, in Foucault’s view, deal with the question of what is happening right now and with what our responsibilities are in relation to this very specific conjuncture.
And speaking of the current conjuncture specifically as it relates to the discipline of philosophy… Like other humanities disciplines, philosophy is under threat in that it is unable to produce the kind of ‘outcomes’ that are valued by neo-liberal systems of thought. Neo-liberalism (for those who came in late) is a form of thought which reduces all social relations to economic relations. As Foucault remarks: ‘It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society’. [1]
Much ink has flowed on the pernicious and all pervasive effects of neo-liberalism with, it seems, only a limited success in stemming its diffusion through all areas of social and cultural existence. The crisis over the announcement of the closure of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and undergraduate programs in philosophy at Middlesex University in London on 26 April 2010 raises the problem of neo-liberal management culture yet again with particular acuteness. The suspension of staff and students and disciplinary hearings in reaction to their protests at the closure also have worrying implications for the continued existence of necessary social spaces for intellectual dissent and academic freedom. [2]
Academic culture and corporate culture are two very different entities and attempts to meld the two over the last twenty years in particular have had disastrous effects in terms of the maintenance of a healthy academic culture which can only make a worthwhile contribution to the social body precisely because it has different goals from the business, government and service sectors. A healthy society requires a balance between all four sectors. The university cannot be conveniently assimilated into the service sector, a currently popular strategy which seeks to reshape it primarily as an institution which ultimately focuses on providing ‘education services’.
The university is not simply about teaching and training people to engage in the work force and be compliant economic citizens or to serve the interests of industry and the maintenance of a healthy population with ‘useful’ forms of research. In addition to this, theoretical research aimed at pushing the boundaries of knowledge or questioning the structures of received knowledge serves the general community in other ways than the maintenance of economic relations. Criticism and analysis of social practices also keep repressive and questionable systems which seek to micromanage populations ‘for their own good’ in check. Philosophy sits (or ought to sit) squarely within this area of social critique and intellectual insight into the human experience.
But neo-liberalism is not the only problem that is faced by the discipline of philosophy in the current conjuncture. There are struggles over the definitions of what constitutes philosophy. Such definitional struggles as Pierre Bourdieu points out are struggles for power ‘over a vision of the natural and social world’[3] One of the most salient struggles in the English language world is the struggle between analytic philosophy and its ‘other’ which it describes as ‘continental’ philosophy.
To all appearances, analytic philosophy has over a long period of time and long before the current crisis, completely colonised the term ‘philosophy’ in university and other educational settings in the English language world. Philosophy departments in the UK, North America and Australia are almost unilaterally dedicated to this form of the discipline and any academics practising so-called ‘continental philosophy’ within those institutional settings are usually there as a grudging token concession to a style of thought that, it has to be recognised, has found immense popularity elsewhere. The very term ‘continental philosophy’ is constructed as the obverse of analytic philosophy. Even those using the term to describe their own practice do so by referring to analytic philosophy as the norm. (I will leave aside for the moment the question of non-analytic and non European practices of philosophy, which are usually relegated to departments of religion.)
Those who have disputed analytic definitions of philosophy have been forced to work in any other department except philosophy or have been forced to secede and create new departments. The scandalous split in philosophy at the University of Sydney into General Philosophy and Traditional Philosophy in the 1970s is a case in point, as is Eugene Kamenka’s secession from Philosophy at the Australian National University in the late 1960s to create the now sadly defunct History of Ideas unit. Middlesex was one of the very few departments labelled ‘philosophy’ which practised almost exclusively European style philosophy which makes its fragmentation and semi-demise even more of a loss.
‘Continental philosophy’ is something that clearly can only be treated with suspicion by ‘more rigorous’, ‘more scientific’ and less ‘politicised’ practices of analytic philosophy. In general, given this unfriendly reception, practitioners of post-War European styles of philosophy are more commonly found outside of philosophy departments in the English language world.
In a recent work, eminent analytic philosopher Michael Dummett while recognising this important and destructive fracture in the discipline of philosophy and calling for reconciliation, does nothing but add further fuel to the fire with the blurb on his book declaring that ‘Philosophy is a discipline that makes no observations, conducts no experiments, and needs no input from experience. It is an armchair subject, requiring only thought.’[3] It is a statement guaranteed to outrage the socially and historically oriented philosophers working in the wake of post War structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy.
This definition, if nothing else, draws attention to fundamental disagreements over what constitutes the proper subject matter and method of philosophy. In the analytic tradition, the categorisation of language practices and their rigorous logical deployment are paramount. Statements and concepts are rigidly sorted into a variety of categories – eg ethical statements, metaphysical statements, epistemological statements, mind versus body debates and so on and so forth. One then examines how chains of reasoning operate within these categories (often by reducing them to quasi-mathematical formulae). The ultimate goal is to arrive at an orderly system untainted by historical and political concerns which allows one to get to the ‘truth’. Only then after one has carefully ordered one’s categories can one make rigorous interventions from this elevated platform into matters of political and social concern. Analytic philosophy allows for difference in how truth might be interpreted in typical fashion by grouping activity in this area into different categories, for example: ‘the correspondence theory of truth’ or ‘the perspectivist notion of truth’. This fits in perfectly with the post Enlightenment model of science with its rigorous and rational methods (superior to all other methods) of uncovering a knowledge and truth independent of historical circumstance.
The methods of analytic philosophy also bear remarkable similarities to the eighteenth century project (as described by Foucault in The Order of Things) which sought to classify all knowledge into tables and to find a way to transparently match representations and things. If one could just get those tables right – then we could have true knowledge about and a true representation of things. These methods also resonate with the bureaucratic ideal of everything placed in an orderly manner in its right place, in the correct drawer of the filing cabinet.
Analytic philosophers criticise ‘Continental philosophy’ for its adulation of ‘great names’ and close textual studies of a variety of philosophers but it is unclear how far this differs from obligatory references to the ‘great names’ and the employment of ‘methods’ developed by thinkers in the analytical tradition. These great figures include the Greek philosophers of course, selected other European philosophers such as Descartes and Kant, Wittgenstein, Frege, Locke, Quine, Moore, Ryle, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Dennett as well as others.
Further, analytic philosophy arguably divorces the notion of philosophy from what is popularly and commonly understood by the term. Undergraduate students embarking hopefully on courses in philosophy departments are all too often disappointed by the rigidity and decontextualised nature of the offerings – with pre-prescribed and highly contrived set pieces for reflection operating somewhat like mathematical formulae. It is small wonder that students have turned en masse to psychology to provide them with the forms of reflection they crave, thereby regrettably further feeding into the power that psychology exerts in the direction of the pathologisation of all human experience and the reinforcement of mechanisms of social control. This is not to say, however, that there are not notable efforts by philosophers working within the analytic tradition, such as Alain de Botton, to try and make philosophy more publicly accessible. But I would argue that de Botton is the exception rather than the rule.
Students no doubt, also cannot help but notice a gender landscape that is overwhelmingly male in the delivery and practice of any kind of philosophy. Women are all too often relegated to the feminist ghetto away from the ‘serious’ work. One could further usefully embark on a discussion of the specific forms of masculinity that are represented in philosophy – and this applies to all forms of philosophy of whatever persuasion. Plato’s vision of the practice of philosophy as being the province of bearded males over 50 remains well and truly alive today.
I hasten to add, of course, that for all its pretensions to occupy the whole of the territory, analytic philosophy and the university departments which support its dissemination are under serious threat everywhere in the English language world. Departments have been merged with other humanities schools or have disappeared altogether. I welcome Dummett’s call for disciplinary reconciliation in order to make philosophy once again an institutional and intellectual force to be reckoned with. On the other hand, given the definitions he offers, it is more than clear that there remains much work to be done in persuading certain sectors (not all of them analytical) to adopt a far broader and more inclusive notion of the territory philosophy might cover. [5]
To be continued…
[1] Michel Foucault, (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. Course at the Collège de France. 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 148.
One of the users on amazon.com reviewing the 2007 TV series The Dresden Files bemoans the fact that her shelves are littered with DVD sets of prematurely cancelled series and suggests that cancelling some of the endlessly tedious reality shows might free up some funds for the continuation of more interesting television. It doesn’t pay to be a non-mainstream viewer of science-fiction fantasy. One is constantly being lured in by a few tantalising episodes and then left high and dry without a resolution. Odyssey 5 was a particularly fine example of this kind of lack respect for audiences by television producers. It couldn’t even be argued that the ratings were bad on this particular series – they were in fact extremely high, but the American cable channel Showtime, which commissioned the series, underwent a change of management and the usual problem –namely an administrator who doesn’t like science fiction – nipped it in the bud.
Fan campaigns to petition against cancellation have now become an obligatory part of the televisual landscape and I was entirely unsurprised to see that The Dresden Files was not exempt from this routine ritual. Even if fans know the exercise to be largely futile, they can find no other outlet for their frustration. These campaigns only work in rare cases and often sadly to the detriment of the series. The extra half seasons that were granted series such as Remington Steele and La Femme Nikita actually betrayed their viewerships, and fans of the characters and storylines were left with a sour taste in their mouth which forevermore impacted on their enjoyment of the earlier seasons. One exception to this is the 2006 series Jericho, which after garnering a second season as the result of fan campaigning, managed to produce a season which, amazingly, was far superior to the first and actually provided some resolution.
At least the writers of The Dresden Files play fair with the audience and provide a decent ending in the last episode of the season which alleviates some of the frustration of having yet another cancelled series on one’s hands.
The enormous number of user reviews on amazon.com of the DVD release of The Dresden Files would seem to indicate that the Sci-Fi network was perhaps hasty – even on its own economic rationalist terms (if in fact that’s what was at issue) – in cancelling the series. Numbers of these reviews, of course, quibble with the way the television series had adapted the original books by Jim Butcher, but again such controversy is ritual. For myself, enjoying a TV series is no guarantee that I will like the source material. As a case in point, I found the television version of Wire in the Blood far more interesting than the novels by Val McDermid on which it is loosely based. Similarly I found the first Jim Butcher book mildly enjoyable but much preferred the approach and charaterisations in the television series.
But onto the actual subject matter of the series.
The Dresden Files is, I think, the first TV series made post 2001 – apart from Wire in the Blood – which I have actually wanted to view more than once with frequent pauses and repeats of scenes. It is a fairly unique and successful blend of the private eye genre and fantasy – the protagonist, Harry Dresden, for all his genre conventional trappings as a Chicago private eye is actually a wizard and sports the appellation, ‘Harry Dresden Wizard’ on his office door and business cards. As I was watching the series I was struck by its curiously old-fashioned feel. I felt as though I was almost back on comfortable cultural territory – a territory which has been replaced since the beginning of the millennium, in American television at least, by something which I experience as alienating.
There are a number of things I like about the central character, in particular his knowledge of his own weakness and his constant and considered efforts to resist the directions in which this weakness takes him. He continually and deliberately resists the temptation to use his magical powers either as an opportunity to manipulate others or to occupy the high moral ground. Any inclinations he might have in these directions are kept in check by his first hand knowledge of the disastrous and tragic extremes (the almost, but not quite, inadvertent murder of his uncle by black magic) to which such hubris can lead. He is constantly reminded of his crime by members from both sides of the fence in the magical community either to cast continual suspicion over his intentions or to incite him further down the path of dark magic. In choosing to save others by using his unique abilities he is doing no more than saving himself.
The English actor Paul Blackthorpe who plays Dresden (with a somewhat eccentric American accent) says that what attracted him to the role was the fact that Dresden was a reluctant hero, engaged in a difficult struggle with his own past and family background. Dresden is a marginal figure who exists in an uneasy truce with both his own magical community and with the mainstream forces of law and order. (He often acts as a consultant to the police – mainly in for the form of a female detective, Murphy, – whenever anything ‘weird’ surfaces.) Both camps remain deeply suspicious of him for different reasons, but this does not deter Dresden from an often thankless and painful quest with frequent errors of judgement on his own part, to lend assistance to others. All of this is, of course, in the best hard-boiled post War private eye tradition.
Also worth mentioning is his relationship with his unusual offsider and mentor, Bob, played wonderfully by Broadway actor, Terrence Mann. Bob (aka Nrothbert of Bainbridge) is in fact the ghost of a medieval English sorcerer who has been condemned for all eternity to occupy his own skull as a ghost as a punishment for dark practices, notably using black magic to resurrect his lover – a female sorcerer. Bob, who has acted as Dresden’s tutor from a young age, provides both technical and moral guidance while also struggling with the complexities of his own past and his powerless condition as a ghost. As the series progresses, the bonds of real affection and friendship that tie these two men become apparent. The TV version of this character is far more interesting than his equivalent in the original books. In Butcher’s novels, Bob is no more than a skull, but for television the writers decided that more was needed.
These various elements are perhaps amongst the reasons why the series seems so oddly old fashioned in a contemporary American televisual landscape populated by an endless procession of series with flashy visual effects tightly focused on solving puzzles. Such series feature drearily one-note characters who are more interested in personal survival than in what they can do for others. One can cite as examples, Lost, Heroes, Flash Forward, House, The Fringe and any number of medical, police, forensic and acronymic series- CSI, NCIS and so on ad nauseum. If the characters in these series do engage nominally in ‘helping’ others it is because of their rigidly and institutionally defined status as doctors, FBI agents, police, assorted forensic and other scientists, members of family units and so on. Further to this, the assistance they offer others is all too often simply the almost inadvertent side product of their interest in solving puzzles, (crimes, mysterious occurrences, tricky illnesses and so on). Character ‘complexity’ is achieved by either granting the characters unpleasant ‘flaws’ which these characters do little to try and keep in check – but just experience as givens -, or by granting them irritatingly quirky and eccentric traits. These static character traits become no more than devices for keeping the puzzle based plots moving along. All the creative effort goes into solving puzzles, none into actually achieving anything as a human being making a willed and active contribution (as opposed to one determined in advance by institutional rules and personal past history) to collective social existence.
In other words, there is no sense that these characters are involved in projects to deliberately create themselves and to make choices about their self-construction in a positive sense. There is nothing there for the viewer to learn, no handy techniques one can appropriate in one’s own quest to actively form oneself. On the other hand, there is plenty about technical problem solving in relation to the physical world and the management of populations. There is nothing in relation to the social world – apart from ensuring individual survival at the most basic level.
Much of this is both a reflection of general social and cultural trends as well as a reflection of the writing and production processes involved in making these series. Writers, technicians and film makers churned out by various educational institutions have been taught sets of rules about technical processes but not provided with any social or cultural context or training beyond simplified demographic analysis and targetting. Sophisticated forms of historical, philosophical, political and related forms of cultural reflection are not on the study agenda. This leads to a very impoverished view of the human condition. It is interesting to note that some leading television writers (for example Anthony Horowitz of Foyle’s War) have in recent years started to advise young writers to get out and travel and to engage in cultural and artistic experiences to try and broaden their horizons so that they actually have something to write about.
Although I love all the trappings of science fiction, action adventure and crime fiction, the real interest in watching these genres and what will make me re-watch any given series is just one thing, and that is how people actively and deliberately construct their relationship with themselves and others. Science fiction and crime present extreme scenarios in which to observe human beings perform in limit situations. Watching solutions to abstract empirical puzzles palls after a while, but the kind of deliberate work people perform on themselves and their relations to other people is endlessly interesting. The outcome doesn’t need to be good but it does need to be the result of people making real decisions in relation to their actions and the consequences thereof. One can then perhaps borrow from some of these scenarios the ‘cultural tools’ Foucault talks about which one can use oneself to undertake the kind of work one wishes to undertake in relation to one’s own existence. Mind bogglingly tedious instructions on how to make institutions more efficient is – for me at least – less than riveting viewing, I want to see how other people solve the problem of personal and social existence through a willed process of difficult personal decision making.
I have limited interest in observing the strategic placement of static ‘character’ elements like pawns in games ultimately aimed at solving the puzzle of how the institutions can function most efficiently and to maximum profitability (in terms of both financial viability and placement in a well oiled social hierarchy).
For all their rejection of some of these contemporary themes the writers of The Dresden Files, still feel that it is constantly necessary to explain why Dresden would bother to help complete strangers given his marginal situation. At one point, Morgan a powerful wizard who is an enforcer for the magical oversight body The High Council asks Dresden why he persists in helping those ‘who don’t know him, don’t like him, and will never understand him’. Dresden’s reply is that somebody has to do it. Morgan counters contemptuously that he is doing nothing more than try to save himself and atone for his past crime.
I am reminded here of a comment Foucault made in his History of Madness about the medieval Christian view of charity. Both the recipient and the donor benefited – the former materially and the latter in terms of his or her eternal salvation.
This imperative to explain help offered to strangers has always been a theme in American television but to a far lesser degree perhaps before the current decade. A sense of a broad social contract has always been far weaker in American than in European culture. For example, the 1973 series The Magician with Bill Bixby elicits lengthy (and not entirely convincing) explanations from various characters as to why a stage magician would even consider wanting to help a variety of complete strangers. European and British television doesn’t generally feel under an obligation to justify attempts to be of assistance to one’s fellow human beings outside the rigid boundaries of institutional obligation.
If we bring this discussion back to the forms of neo-liberalism I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog, in an entrepreneurial world you would be ill advised to help somebody who could be a potential competitor and profit at your expense. In addition to this, anybody needing help beyond what is codified by various well-defined institutions only has their own gross mismanagement to blame and is not deserving of help. Assistance to others can only sensibly be attempted within the confines of the multiple judicial institutions and regulations which have been set up to ensure that human sociability doesn’t degenerate into a complete blood bath.
The Dresden Files ends with a nice touch with Harry Dresden destroying a powerful but evil object that he could use to his possible advantage down the track. One has come to expect characters to always hang onto such advantages – why throw away a potential plot device or opportunity for ambiguity?
I read this book to see what all the fuss was about, which has been further amplified by the appearance of the films. Twilight and its sequels have spawned a whole imitative sub industry in the form of other novels and television series. But for all the author’s claims of an original take on the vampire myth – it has all been done before and recently. One example is the True Blood novel series which appeared slightly before Twilight and which has been made into a currently airing television series. And of course there are the seminal late 90s TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel. All of these series feature adolescent females and their troubled relationships with male vampires some decades, if not hundreds of years, older than themselves. What is new perhaps is the complete and utter complicity of the female in her eventual destruction.
Unfortunately, try as I might, I can’t think of anything positive to say about Twilight. There is little to recommend it either in terms of style or content. As numbers of others have remarked, it reads like bad fan fiction which has by some stroke of luck been published by a mainstream publisher. A couple of decades ago, it is the sort of material that an adolescent writer would have kept firmly under lock and key in their bedroom drawer so as not to risk the extreme embarrassment of it finding any other readers apart from themselves. One can also remark on the similarities with porn fiction in the way it is structured and written, but it is porn without the sex. Indeed one notable critique describes it as ‘abstinence porn’.
The story focuses entirely on the obsessive relationship between a 16 year old girl, Bella, and a self described ‘monster’, Edward, a centenarian vampire who remains physically fixed at the point of his death at the age of 17. Numbers of critics – from a feminist standpoint in particular – have pointed to the abusive nature of Bella’s relationship with Edward, the latter not only engaging in classic emotionally manipulative behaviour but also fulfilling all the criteria of a bona fide stalker. Bella occupies the masochistic female victim role – Edward’s appalling behaviour proves nothing more than ‘how much he loves her’.
The author, Stephenie Meyer, claims that the books are all about ‘choice’ and in a perverse and limited way this is indeed true. But most of the choosing is done by the male protagonist, Edward, and it all involves stringent self-denial – both in relation to his predatory vampiric desire to kill Bella (and all those around her) by sucking their blood, and also in his much vaunted sexual abstinence, given the contact of his strong vampire body with a weak human one could prove potentially fatal to Bella. As for Bella herself, her choice merely involves the complete and utter self-indulgence of her fixation on Edward and the annihilation of any separate identity in the process. She has no hobbies, no friends (in spite of overtures from others), no career ambitions and no moral or physical sense of self-preservation.
As critics have pointed out – all the agency rests with Edward. If Bella is the first person narrator, it is Edward who acts as subject in these novels. He makes the decisions which keep Bella alive and provides her with the emotional focus which gives structure and meaning to her existence. The decisions he makes not only involve making sure that he doesn’t kill her himself but also involve continually ‘saving’ her from car accidents, potential sexual assault by muggers and being killed by other vampires. When Edward disappears in the second novel, Bella goes into a catatonic suicidal state which lasts for months. This is matched later by Edward’s own suicidal condition when he mistakenly believes Bella is dead.
In the final novel, Breaking Dawn, Edward’s ‘noble’ self-denial – denial of himself as a vampiric predator is finally overcome by Bella’s own will to self annihilation when in the fourth novel, they marry, engage in one night of rough sex, which following the Gone with the Wind model results in instant pregnancy and no further sex. The pregnancy destroys Bella’s body and she has to be transformed into a vampire in order to ‘save’ her. The loss of virginity and pregnancy becomes a violent loss of purity which can only lead to death and to transformation into a monster – a problematic model to say the least. But perhaps one might argue facetiously that this might merely be designed to provide a bracing warning about the dangers of teenage sex and teenage pregnancy to adolescent readers of the series.
Numbers of fans have strongly protested at this (inevitable) outcome – even sending petitions to the publisher. Thus it would appear that what attracted them to the series was the odd stand off between two forms of self-destructive subjectivity – one of a most stringent and painful self-denial, the other of a complete indulgence in the dubious pleasures of emotional, moral and physical self annihilation. Teenage pregnancy and being turned into a vampire were probably not what they had hoped for their heroine.
The series, due to its immense popularity has also been frequently described as the ‘new Harry Potter’, but for all its faults the Harry Potter series did at least engage with a wider external social and cultural world with some historical depth. It raised quite sophisticated (if somewhat conservative) questions about social structures and ethical responsibility to others, both in relation to friends and to the broader community. At a literary level it also entertained readers with basic Latin magic words and intriguing neologisms such as ‘pensieve’, a combination of the French word ‘penser’ (to think) and the English word ‘sieve’, to describe a magical device which allowed a person to store their memories for future use either by themselves or others. There is none of this engagement with the social and political world or with language invention in the Twilight series.
If Twilight and its three sequels were not so overwhelmingly popular one could safely ignore them, but the question that has fascinated me is why have they become such a mass phenomenon? One reason perhaps is that they provide validation for the self-indulgences to which adolescence is prone, but I would like to suggest a further reason. Perhaps what attracts fans to the Twilight series is akin to the impulse that currently attracts people in such large numbers to forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. In a cultural conjuncture which has seen the crumbling of rigidly defined social structures and belief in universal and socially well-defined paths to salvation of various kinds, it is endlessly difficult taking emotional and ethical responsibility for one’s own life and subjectivity.
For all the rhetoric of romance, the relationship between Edward and Bella is one that Jean Baudrillard would no doubt approve of thoroughly – it is all about the pleasures of seduction, power and self-annihilation, not about love. Making somebody (or something) else responsible for how we exist in the world is a welcome relief from the relentless day-to-day uncertainties and responsibilities foisted on us by the human condition. One can then wallow in the emotional opium of self-abandonment – temporarily at least – until it eventually, as it always does, goes horribly wrong. There are no shortage of warnings on the dangers of such a path, warnings which have been insistently repeated over millennia by countless social commentators and philosophers.
Somewhat biased quick plot summary
A corporation supported by the military has its eye on a rare mineral called unobtanium which can be found in large quantities on a planet called Pandora. This planet is covered by primeval forest and inhabited by blue ‘noble savages’ with cultures reminiscent of those of indigenous North Americans. Scientists have also tagged along for the ride and have grown Pandoran bodies in vats to which they are able to transfer their human consciousnesses. The hero of the story, a disabled war veteran, is transferred into one of these bodies, is accepted into a tree tribe, falls in love with the daughter of the chief, ‘goes native’ and shows said natives how to rid themselves of evil Earth military industrial alliance.
Comments
I will take the opportunity to weigh in with the countless other comments on James Cameron’s new film Avatar. I will begin by saying that watching a film in 3D is a fun experience, blue is a lovely colour and plants that glow in the dark are great to look at. But all this graphical expertise is sadly let down by a story which is a rather pallid string of Disney cliches laced with highly questionnable social and political messages.
I always find American militarism in films extremely irritating. Militarism and nuking everything in sight is a common solution in American science fiction. As a variation on the theme, this film expresses moral outrage at these usual procedures and proposes another set of cliches in their place – a rather depressing set of cliches actually. Thus we are exhorted to all get back to nature and lose ourselves in the exotic Other, rather than trying to find a workable social solution to the situation in hand. Our science and knowledge is clearly useless and scientists are a bunch of effete intellectuals. The military industrial complex is populated by power and resource hungry psychopaths. It is far better to live in a dangerous jungle with no modern comforts, cinemas, libraries or modern medical science.
The protagonist completely loses himself in the Other, even to the extent of abandoning his clearly inferior and disabled human body, and the humans (described as ‘aliens’ at the end of the film) are sent packing, back to their ‘dying world’, after being defeated by some stroppy armoured dinosaurs and bows and arrows mobilised by the human outsider. This outsider, in the fine tradition of other American films such as A Gentleman’s Agreement, Tootsie, Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai , demonstrates that the white American male is the only one who can show less powerful groups (Jews, women, Native Americans, fading Japanese warrior elites etc.) the way to salvation.
I personally would have liked to have seen the planet (which is clearly modelled on Gaia principles) come up with some nifty science fiction method of ridding itself of the humans. Giant trees uprooting themselves and joining the battle like the ents in Lord of the Rings, or a strange energy immobilising all the technology. Alternately (or additionally!) I would have liked to have seen the humans come to some kind of realisation and engage in the beginnings of social change and discussion rather than just a blanket self-destruct and expression of self-hatred.
Ultimately the message of this film is conservative, reactivating hoary old myths of the noble savage, the great white saviour and the purity of nature versus civilisation.
What irritated me about this book was not so much the much fêted hilariously bad writing style, nor the erratic pacing which meant nothing much happened until the middle of this lengthy tome, but the presentation of fiction, myth and conspiracy theory as incontrovertibly true.
A friend recently sent me a link to a short series of most entertaining reviews in the New York Magazine of Dan Brown’s latest The Lost Symbol. One of the reviewers, Sam Anderson, makes the acute observation that perhaps one of the main attractions of Dan Brown’s novels is that readers feel as though they are learning interesting facts from his books. It is just somewhat unfortunate that a number of these facts aren’t – well – exactly true.
This same friend had also earlier sent me the links to linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum’s amusing blog posts here and here on Dan Brown’s writing style. As a result, I felt inspired to produce my own attempt at a Dan Brown opening sentence. As a bit of background here, over the last few years I have done rather a lot of housesitting.
Renowned housesitter, Clare, removed the bloodied claws of the ravening cats from her throat and kicked the snarling dog which had crushed her ankle between its hideous jaws across the room to join the writhing lizards she had plucked from her hair. Too late! With an awful groan the esteemed minder of houses, through the mists of galloping death, gazed longingly at the original Charles Blackman prints adorning the walls of the luxury mansion that was her latest and her last assignment. A last breath croaked from her torn throat as she helpless, turned to watch the silhouette of a brightly patterned and red eyed boa constrictor creep dangerously close from the distant end of the immense tree-lined drive.
Refracted Input 