Butterfly Hunt

Primary Passions: January 11, 2004 [On Blogging]

Today’s Ian Bogost’s post about the self-referentiality of blogging (and the humanities) made me remember this brief post of mine, published originally 8 years ago today on my now-deleted blog, Never Neutral. I wrote it when I was revising to defend my MA dissertation on Art Spiegelman and graphic narrative as a work of mourning, and at a time in which many colleagues and professors insisted blogging would damage my academic prospects. At that time I had been reading Derrida’s Résistances- de la psychanalyse (1996) and Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (1997) which had originally informed the last chapter of my MA thesis, “Postponing Suicide: A Means to an End”.

 I have reposted it below. 

[The strength of self-reflexivity] always stand in proportion to the capacity for communication of a human being (or animal), capacity for communication in turn in proportion to need for communication… Consciousness evolved at all only under the pressure of need for communication.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1974: 354). 

One could always say: this is pure repetition. Blogging, a form of narcissistic acting out. The blogger as the analysand who comes back to the analyst’s office, to say whatever comes into his/her mind, most of the times not looking at the listener’s (here, reader’s) face. What unconscious, repressed thoughts, behavior, are expressed through blogging as a form of acting out? Nowadays it is a common-place amongst bloggers to discuss the experience of reading one’s blog in retrospect.  Who dares to do that? Who, driven by what forces, could stand it? What common-places, what tropes, what topoi would we find, what traces, what shadows, what reappearing ghosts are we afraid of locating if we dared to read our past archives?

The immediacy, the real-time condition of electronic publishing implies a strange temporality, an “always-present” that allows almost unmediated utterance. The narcissistic nature of the blogger, then, poses interesting and highly complex questions in relation to writing, the subjectivation process through discourse production, the poetics of time and space, literature and art, autobiography and testimony, and, why not, trauma and pain and the role of language in processes of mourning and working-through. Blogging, as a form of meta-fiction, implies self-consciousness. Not unlike psychoanalysis and some forms of so-called postmodern fiction and art, blogging works within a double-bind: in the end, blogs may not be speaking about anything else but themselves. In other words, the only space to discuss the possibilities and consequences of blogging may be the blogs themselves. One should not forget the theoretical, political dangers this would imply.

So, a resistance to blogging would be called for. Not unlike a resistance, or shoud we say resistances to psychoanalysis. Has psychoanalysis, as a social practice, for instance, been able to exceed its own narcissism, its own self-narrative? Has its own self-consciousness been able to escape its own self-imposed limits to interact with a world, with a society trapped by injustice, lack of love, violence, intellectual and material poverty?

How will blogging (or has blogging even considered to) interact with a world that does not exist around the Internet, not even around computers? And, how will the writing and reading individual, the one who aspires to self-consciousness through communication –in this case blogging– will change? Will authors just leave behind a paralytic, handicapped form of self-reflexive, egotistical narcissism, or will it be something else?
 
 

August in London

[The second edition of Cross’s London Guide, originally published in 1837. 

 Copyright © British Library Board. Via Europeana.]

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The past two days I published two editorial pieces on the London/UK riots and a related instalment of my monthly column on London. It goes without saying they’re written from the perspective of a Mexican who lives in London.

They’re an attempt at making sense of the events, their possible causes and consequences, and at trying to offer an outsider-insider’s personal view for my readers in Mexico and Spanish-speaking countries, in their own language.

• “Disturbios en Londres”, Blog de la redacción, Nexos magazine, 09 August 2011
• “El incendio del palacio de cristal”, Replicante magazine, 10 August 2011
• “¿Quiénes participan en los disturbios en Inglaterra?” Blog de la redacción, Nexos magazine, 10 August 2011
• On 9th August I also posted this and this on #SinLugar, a blog I share with others to explore citizen engagement and participatory media in and for Mexico. 

The Dark Knight Redux

Given the recent tragic events in Norway, it becomes once again unavoidably urgent to critically (intelligently) reassess the political and ethical implications of dominant superhero narratives.  

The trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is online. A conversation with Allan Haverholm on Twitter inspired me to dig out this commentary I posted on 31 July 2008. 

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I sat in the movie theatre with so many great expectations. But it was just one long, relentless, chase-and-explosions flick. There is nothing in the film that I liked that was not a reference to comic book visuals and dialogues. Even the best lines, the supposedly profound discussion of heroism, good and evil and chance are taken from the comic books. Gary Oldman’s fantastic performance as Gordon is, even more than Ledger’s Joker, the one that is more cartoony. The sequence when Gordon comes home after faking his death are direct translations from Year One:

Batman: Year One, page 30 (2005 trade paperback edition), art by David Mazzucchelli, script by Frank Miller

I found profoundly unsettling how single-handedly the Joker is called a “terrorist”. Out of the blue, he is not a criminal, not a psychopathic ex-inmate of the Arkham Asylum for the Mentally Insane, but a terrorist. No one can deny that the adjective cannot be used literally anymore. The film’s political message seems to be thus: we people of Gotham (we, America) are good people and will not tolerate terrorism, which is just a form of irrational madness. As exemplified by Alfred’s conversation with Bruce, the film justifies the destruction of a whole city just to get one man (sounds familiar?):

Bruce Wayne: That man in Burma, did you ever catch him?
Alfred Pennyworth: Oh yes.
Bruce Wayne: How?
Alfred Pennyworth: We burned the forest down.

There is no attempt to understand the Joker’s traumatic past or the reasons for his actions, and physical violence seems to be the only way to “negotiate” with him. The whole film reads like a justification of torture in order to obtain what the good guys want.

I loved the way Chicago and London are merged to offer a very realistic view of Gotham as a crime-infested city that, nevertheless, seems to be inhabited by cuddly carebear inhabitants who are forced to flee the city by one single dynamite-loving psycho. The notion that Two Face’s turn to the “dark side” is the Joker’s triumph (balanced by the failure of his “little social experiment” when both ferries do not blow each other) aptly illustrates Nolan’s humorless, grim view of Gotham: everything is so simply bi-polar that one side can very clearly become the other. Beware of those terrorists, because they want us to become like them.

I think that The Dark Knight is an excellent example of what I have called “the triumph of the Corporate over Individual talent”. There is no doubt about Nolan’s cinematic quality, but he is forced to come up with a pastiche of referents (from James Bond to Bourne to Heat to the Godfather to Ghost in the Shell to The Silence of the Lambs to previous Batmans (including his own). Especially towards the end, when the Batman’s eyes become an all-seeing sonar, the film becomes (annoyingly) a first-person shooter video game (the set not unlike Donkey Kong’s) but without the privilege of interactivity (through POV and conative angles, we become him without being able to control his actions). 

A non-stop, loud spectacle of an eternal chase defined by the glorification of violence: in Nolan’s world good and evil, reason and insanity, the terrorist and the good guys, the hero and the villain, the outcast and the politician are all on each side of a one-sided coin.

Unlike No Country for Old Men, The Dark Knight is contaminated with a masked morality that, once again, falls into the simplistic, Bush-era rhetoric of good and evil (and evil being terrorism, and terrorism being irrational and with no traceable cause). Where No Country presents a wasteland of the soul, the alienated, motivated, unstoppable and uncontrollable human evil incarnate that defies understanding, The Dark Knight works as an apology for the violence against the enemy, without any attempt of understanding its causes in order to stop a vicious circle of madness. Unlike the Joker of Elizabethan theatre, Ledger’s Joker says no painful truths, but the lies imposed by the powers-that-be. Like the Batman and Bruce Wayne himself, he is a puppet whose purpose is to allow the order that chaos has established. Left literally hanging from a rope, The Puppet-Joker says to the Batman:

“You just couldn’t let me go could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible aren’t you? You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won’t kill you, because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.”

This all could be very well if it were only fiction. Russian formalism works well for traditional fiction, but not for world politics. Whereas the Batman and the Joker may need to keep fighting each other eternally to allow a fictional universe to exist, this cannot and should not be transferred to the way the ‘good guys’ are dealing with ‘the terrorists’.

Whereas it could be argued that Nolan’s film is precisely pointing out that good and evil are not so different from each other, the conclusion is that we always know who the good guys are. In the world outside fiction, in the world of real men and women who die every day, there is no justification for terror on either “side”. Hollywood is becoming, again, the best strategy to subtly (and not so subtly) make violence seem not only justified, but, even more worryingly, “cool”.