47 Comments

1. Dan:

   Thanks for posting this!

   So to continue: “The industrial technomass cannot subsist by itself, drawing negentropy directly from nature, but depends on the existence of non-industrial sectors, where the price of negentropy (fuels, raw materials, and the labor to extract them) is so much lower…the notion of a transmissible technological capacity is founded on the fetishized view of machines as dcontextualized from the flows that re-produce them… Industrial technology depends on its existencenot being accessible to everyone.” (also from Chapter 7)

   Stan, is the conclusion that the lesson of rocks is just the beginning? That after intifada comes a deconstruction of the western industrial base?

   Just before I saw this post, I was reading in Chapter 11 (for a final paper in a Philosophy class, in which I’m mixing Hornborg with the rest of the stuff on the syllabus) about concentric rings of reciprocity: “The innermost space is the ‘pure gift,’ for which ‘an open stipulation of return would be unthinkable and unsociable.’… With increasing social distance, generalized reciprocity yields to balanced reciprocity, which involves a conscious reckoning with return, and finally negative reciprocity (’the unsociable extreme’), which means ‘trying to get something for nothing.’ ” What struck me about this was not only the idea that group membership (or identifying oneself as a member of a group) is critical; but also that there’s a sense in which the “gift” level recognizes not only that the gift is a part of the giver, but that the physical item, whatever it might be, is of extremely low (or no) value EXCEPT as a way to communicate that act. The giver of the gift has a different relationship to material possessions and their value, which needs to be explored. I need to think of a better way to put this, but I think it points to an issue with the valuing of THINGS outside of the context of ACTS.

   Ciao! –Dan

   10 May 2005, 1:12 pm

2. Stan:

   I don’t count myself equal to philosophy in many senses, and not just because I don’t know the canon. Sometimes, it feels like the stretch that burdens you when you’re playing a hard game of chess (and I play chess badly becuse I’m so easily distracted).

   My own reference to the lesson of the rocks is not meant to be literal, as you obviously know, but as a metaphor for transgression… well, maybe more than a metaphor. When the time, comes there will be rocks, won’t there. (-:

   Hornborg discalims at the first of the book about the audaciousness of the attempt to paradigm shift (much as my skin crawls at that phrase… I like ‘epistemology’), saying he is only making some suggestions about how to break out of the postmodern impasse of endless categorical leveling and at the same time break out of the Marxian impasse of industrialism. For me, his notion of machine fetishism was the most revelatory thing about the book. Semiotics makes my head hurt, even though I know it is important.

   His reference to Luxemburg’s thesis on non-capitalist sectors is after my own heart, and I only wish he’d have included women more prominently in Chapter 11. In his triad of person, nature, society, I keep seeing the naturalized women — a free good, somewhere between nature and person. But Maria Mies does a good job of taking Luxemburg down the field on the gender questions… maybe I’ll post her as the next excerpt.

   I’m rambling, and you were refering first to deconstruction of the industrial base… and my own reaction is, yes. In light of Hornborg’s (and Georgescu-Roegen’s) point about the entropy inhering in the disembeddedness of industrial exchange, how can we be the least bit serious about anything called ’sustainability’ if this is not our aim? That’s why I get so impatient with leftists who don’t recognize this… and impatient with myself as I was ten minutes before my non-scientific ass went aha! at the apprehension of the 2nd Law for the first time. Once entropy — the real thing, not the figurative one — insinuated itself in my brain, I became asstonished that people weren’t walking up and down the street in animated conversations about it all the time. Then I realized that I was almost fifty before I stumbled (via Marx btw) off the ideological reservation to encounter it myself.

   Not sure if I completely follow your riff on THINGS, but if I do, this all goes back to the question of embeddedness and disembeddedness… and how the pure disembedded thinglessness of general purpose money gives it the capacity to act as a solvent dissolving the bonds of community… a very Marxist notion… also a feminist one. “Money allows people to exchange Coca-Cola for rain forests,” is how Horborg put it (paraphrased, I don’t have that quote at hand). Hornborg said that money is a semiotic phenomenon, but that it was like music with only one note. Marx called it concrete quality to abstract quantity… use to value.

   Perhaps I’m misreading you, but I’m delighted that there is another Hornborg reader out there.

   Cheers.

   10 May 2005, 1:54 pm

3. Dan:

   I’ve been getting rid of THINGS lately. It’s amazing how much lighter life can be once you cut loose some of the ballast. I have my new wife to thank for this. She’s an artist. So my riff was on the state of mind that I think the “gift-giver” Hornborg was describing lives in; where it’s a world of people and actions, not things. The point of the gift isn’t the thing, it’s the giving.

   I agree that the thermodynamic idea is the missing link, and I think Hornborg is onto something when he says that the original Marxist formulation missed the point that technology couldn’t just be transferred to the workers as if it was just another resource.

   I had a long conversation (at a “Humanist Happy Hour”) yesterday with a Marxist. I tried to present Hornborg’s idea; he tried to convince me that it’s all “in there” in the Marxist canon, if I’d just read more of that. Another guy at the table tried to argue the standard “human ingenuity beats Malthus” theme, without much success. Maybe just because we were louder, in this case But it got me thinking about that — there IS a case to be made that something (I hesitate to call it technology now, but we need a word for it) coming from human creativity can keep us out of caves. At least I hope so, or we’re all just looking forward to Mad Max. Which circles back around to your other thread about arming the working class. I’ve also been thinking about peasant life (my people, a couple of generations ago), and group identity and the peasant suspicion of any group loyalty but blood. That’s pretty local, pretty embedded. Don’t think I can go all the way back there, but it informs the discussion…

   10 May 2005, 5:14 pm

4. Ethan:

   hi, coming in on this conversation late…

   I don’t get the sense that the technology of industry itself (as distinguished from industrialization) is a bad thing, but it is more of a problem of how industrialization factors into the distribution and concentration of technology.

   Another thing I’ve gotten from the book–albeit indirectly–is that we (of the [post?]modern industrial societies) have a very narrow definition of technology, based on the mistaken notion that we can “create” and “make” things–thus machines (however rudimentary, like a hammer) constitute our flagship definition of technology. However, when one realizes that we are acting within the laws of thermodynamics, it becomes apparent that we can only modify things by a) assembling them or b) disassembling them, and that no matter what, we lose parts in the process.

   Thus, technology in itself isn’t necessarily doomed, but I do think we will see a downsizing of the role of machines into the future, and we will (hopefully) (re?)emphasize the importance of developing other technologies instead. I’m thinking social (e.g., linguistic), ecological (e.g., agricultural), biological (e.g. photosynthesis), etc, and seeing more integration between them. I.e., pioneering ways to improve our ability to interact with our surrounding ecosystems–being able to dialogue (draw meaning from sustained interaction) with our wider contexts. Let’s call it “ecological socialization.”

   18 July 2006, 9:01 pm

5. Dan:

   The narrowness or wide-ness of the definition is an interesting thing, though. In the truly universal sense, the laws of thermodynamics cannot be broken. From the local and short-term point of view, everything that matters is a reversal of entropy. Life itself is a temporary swimming against the current of thermodynamics. Photosynthesis, which you mention Ethan, is a life-process in which energy and organization are concentrated. But this is a natural process. Does it achieve this orgnization without requiring an increase of entropy in a peripheral zone?

   A plant extracts carbon from the atmosphere, water and nutrients from the ground, and light from the sun. The sunlight is clearly “free” as far as we mortals are concerned — it will be a billion years before the “cost” of sunlight to the sun becomes apparent. But the extraction of the other components of sugar do come from the local environment, and do measurably reduce the presence of these components in the environment. So why is this okay?

   Maybe from a very extreme “purist” position, you’d say this is not “okay,” because there is a cost we can’t calculate, in the other uses those elements might have been put to. But since this is the natural world we’ve been born into, we take photosynthesis as a given and don’t worry about those possible alternate universes.

   So maybe the real question is how do we make our technology “play nice” with the environment, like photosynthesis? We need to first of all figure out how to account for the displacement of entropy and keep it down to a level the environment can accomodate. That’s going to create a lot of friction. What if we find that the maximum reasonable lifetime energy expenditure per person (for a planet of say eight billion) is equivalent to that used by a Bolivian peasant? Seems “norteamericanos” would have two choices then. Change or go to war. But it also seems the choice has already been made.

   18 July 2006, 10:19 pm

6. Ethan:

   I disagree with you on the labeling of the growth of biomass as “extractive”–as that’s only the beginning part of a slightly larger picture. It is not how things are used, per se, as much as what happens to them after they are done being used (when I say “used” I mean by a particular species–to that end I’m interested in microbial ecology of garbage dumps).

   Look at a tropical rain-forest for an extreme example: the soil of a rainforest is very poor in terms of a storage of potential productive matter for the reason that it’s almost all in use–and the stuff that gets “freed” after use gets used again almost immediately.

   The stuff that doesn’t get cycled locally generally gets cycled non-locally, i.e., replaced by other matter inputs. The tendency toward entropy in the process of cycling is minimized by the constant solar energetic inputs.

   To this end, we can ask questions like, “Well, isn’t the process of desertification/global warming simply a part of the cycling of matter on a larger spatial and timescale?” And that’s when we have to become anthropocentric again talk about things in terms of rational self-interest: How do we use and dispose of our industrial resources in a way that facilitates as much of it as possible becoming available for us to use again as soon as possible? Thus, it’s not necessarily how much matter/energy one uses over the lifetime so much as a combination of that and how efficiently new sources of energy can be used and how quickly the used matter can be recovered via cycling.

   That is where biomass in general (I’m sure there are exceptions) has the clear edge over machine-technomass. However, if you look at stuff like Discover Magazines “Anything into Oil” series, there is some hope that we can continue to optimize industrial ecology. To this end, I worry more about “sustainable global inequalities” than “sustainability” or lack thereof. I think microbes will outlive us all on an evolutionary/geologic timescale.

   This is actually one area where I think much scientific discourse is naive: being conscious of whether something is being described in anthropocentric terms or in relation to various time/spatial/meta(complexity/emergence) scales. Anthropocentrically, industrial throughput is linear. Objectively, it is a cycle, albeit an uneven one (where extraction and use throughput is high, but recycling throughput is low, causing the illusion of linearity). I think is is a very useful distinction and would like to see it prevail in the future.

   19 July 2006, 4:05 pm

7. DeAnander:

   Humans are afaik unique among terrestrial life forms in producing a waste stream which is not an input (nourishment) stream for some other organism(s). I’m not talking about our biotic excreta, which can be utilised by plants, worms, beetles, larvae etc — but the waste from our industrial and technological activities. Much of this waste — unlike the waste byproducts from all biotic activity — is actually contrabiotic (since the word ‘antibiotic’ is already in use for a specific pharmaceutical strategy/product) — either it is lethal to life in general (nothing can eat it or survive in it, it is toxic, etc) or it presents such a gross imbalance of nutrient content that only a very low-level near-monoculture can subsist in the highly specialised/simplified environment. An example of the first type of contrabiotic waste is, say, severe organophosphate contamination, severe acidification of watercourses, contamination of watercourses with heavy metals, etc. An example of the second type would be nitrogen plumes which promote the overgrowth of near-monocultures of algal or other relatively simple life forms, but poison more complex life forms such as fish and birds or the longer-lived sea plants.

   Before industrialism, the worst humans could manage was mine tailings and desertification. Even when we fought bloody wars, the corpses of men, horses, oxen and heaps of civilians were biotic waste: they subsided into the soil, fed scavenging animals and flies, etc. After the wars of the industrial era the residuum includes neurotoxins (poison gas), radioactivity (in lethal aerosol form in the case of exploded DU munitions), refined petroleum distillates, particulate contamination from the combustion of petroleum distillates and from vehicle tyres, heavy metals, plastics, and other cr*p which no terrestrial organism can digest — either it has zero food value or it’s actively harmful. Almost all modern wars consist, de facto, of sowing salt on the fields (the most terrible vengeance known to the classical era); and so does modern commerce and technology even in the absence of war.

   Sometimes it seems to me that the single most relevant and destructive way in which human technology deviates from biotic reality is this production of a waste stream that cannot be recycled by normal biotic means… hell, we even have a tradition of trying to withhold our own bodies from the nutrient cycle, sealing them up hermetically in toxic lead-lined boxes and burying them, or burning them, or trying to preserve them for aeons with complex pickling methods. We seem to want to separate ourselves from the virtuous cycle of nutrients, to declare that We Are Not Food, that our substance is somehow other and superior to all other life on Earth, and must be kept separate….

   Anyway there really is a linearity — a much greater degree of linearity, anyway, on the short time scale of human generations and polities — in the extraction of resources (at a great expenditure of energy), the consumption of more energy in converting them to high-entropy forms, and then the discarding of inert, dead matter which cannot be converted by biotic activity into life/complexity/replication. To get very specific about it, how a living system works:

   Thomas Reimchen sums up his findings: “If you start with an egg that hatches here in a stream, it’s just less than a gram, right? And then very quickly that little fry consumes plankton, zooplankton in the stream; it moves slowly out to the estuary. But many of the salmon on our coast at about five grams gradually move offshore and out into the open ocean. And over two years for the pink salmon or three to four years for the other species, they grow and sequester nitrogen, phosphorus and calcium, from the open ocean. And these tiny fry grow into these large beautiful fish. So nutrients that are being sequestered from this distant ecosystem, these salmon then return in a mass migration like the wildebeest of the Serengeti, move back along our coast, bringing these nutrients, that have come from the open ocean, into the estuaries where they’re now taken by seals, by sea lions, often by Orcas, before they get to the estuary, and by many species of birds that are foraging, like eagles. These salmon then move slowly into the stream with this, again this tremendous concentration of nutrients, the nitrogen, into the stream.

   “They spawn and those salmon carcasses are then taken by the bear, which is the major vector, not the only vector, there are wolves, there’s otter, all these others are important locally. But [in] the overall effect throughout the North Pacific, bears are the most significant factor. Over an eight-week spawning period, it was found that each bear was feeding on about 700 salmon or 13 to 20 salmon per day.”

   “They take these salmon into the forest, because they like to feed undisturbed by other bears, and the nitrogen that’s present in the salmon, derived from the open ocean, then … directly now feeds and supports the bear, like 70 percent of the yearly consumption of protein by bears comes from these salmon. So much of the nitrogen in their bodies is derived ultimately from that salmon. That nitrogen is from the middle of the ocean. It’s not from the stream; it’s from the middle of the ocean. When the bear leave their droppings, when they urinate, that nitrogen is now taken up by the vegetation. That vegetation is now consumed by insects or by birds. And again this nitrogen derived from the middle of the ocean is gradually cycled through these many species and into a greater and greater wider area. So indeed, the open ocean and the insects at the top of these trees and the birds that are sitting on top of those trees are linked in a series of [an]incredibly beautiful set of interactions in which there’s no separation at all between the community of the open ocean and the community of the forest canopy.”

   Thomas Reimchen on finding remnants of salmon on the forest floor: “But then you’re drawn further and further into the forest and finding more and more remnants, salmon remnants, from carcasses that the bears have abandoned. And then I actually learned how to find the bears by listening to the crows because crows would follow the salmon deep into the forest and wait for the bear to finish parts of the salmon, and then as soon as the bear would leave, they would go and consume. And so you quickly sort of were drawn great distances away from the stream.”

   Thomas Reimchen on the fallacy of seeing the nutrient cycle as uni-directional: “We often think of nutrients as flowing in a direction, i.e. from the soil to the plants to the animals that eat the plants to the animals that eat the other animals. A kind of a food chain. In the 1970s, conservation officers used to shoot bears that would feed on the salmon migrations up the estuaries and rivers of British Columbia to compensate for what was believed at the time to be an inbalance in the food chain, thinking that by killing some of the bears off, the numbers of fish would actually be protected.” (This government policy didn’t work. The numbers of fish continued to fall.)

   Thomas Reimchen on the isotope that proves the link: “The interesting thing about salmon is that they have elevated levels of the heavy isotope of nitrogen, N-15. And it became clear that one could look at the nitrogen from these trees, from the shrubs, from the herbs, from the mosses and determine what proportion of the nitrogen from the DNA and the proteins have come from the salmon.”

   Thomas Reimchen on the benefit the forest derives from the salmon: “The salmon in effect are actually feeding the forest, contributing a vital nutrient that it would otherwise not possess. It turns out that of all the nitrogen found in the trees in these watershed areas, commonly over 100 metres from the rivers edge, 30 to 40 percent comes directly from these salmon carcasses or from different species that have utilized the salmon and have cycled the nutrients into the vegetation directly or indirectly. In areas where the salmon are found in high numbers (sometimes up to 100,000 salmon per two kilometre of river) up to 80 to 85 percent of all of the nitrogen in these giant trees in fact is derived from salmon carcasses.”

   Thomas Reimchen on the interconnectedness of the forest, the river, and the ocean habitat of the salmon: “There is no separation between these ecosystems. These areas exist as part of a continuum; they cannot be dealt with as separate units because the nutrients cycling the flow of energy between them is part of this continuous process.”

   (footnote)

   Now let’s consider the operation of an automobile. We extract aeons’ worth of ancient animal and vegetable matter, compressed into petroleum, from the ground. In doing so we pollute the surrounding soil and the water table. We use more energy to refine the crude oil into various grades of liquid fuel. In doing so we produce toxic vapours, particulates, and fluid leaks which destroy biota. We transport the fuel to a network of filling stations, burning more fuel to do so and spilling more contrabiotic material along the way; we put the fuel into the tank of an automobile (whose manufacture already generated, e.g. 30 percent of the GHG that it will emit in its working life). We burn the fuel, in the process emitting contrabiotic gases and particulates, toxic dust from tyre wear, etc. No part of this process produces a byproduct which can be used to renew this process. We can’t grow, from the tailpipe emissions of a car, a new dinosaur we can’t even grow a new tree that provides tyres. We can’t even grow, in the oily sludge around a well, plants that would feed the workers who maintain the well, let alone anything that would power the well or enable us to build another one.

   The only thing we get back at the end of the day is the metal in the car, and that takes either a lot of machine or human energy to bend, flatten, cut, perforate and generally re-form into new useful things, or a great deal of energy in the form of heat and machine tooling to re-smelt and re-pour or re-roll into new ingots or sheet metal. Nothing simply recycles itself, is eaten by biotic communities which in turn nourish other communities which in turn nourish communities which nourish us. Indeed, our manufacture and use of this automobile, and the extension of the road network that serves it, is more likely to destroy biotic communities at the base of the pyramid that nourishes us.

   Even in order to “recycle” our dead, non-nutritious industrial droppings, we have to bring to bear enormous additional energy inputs.

   I note especially Reimchen’s remark above: There is no separation between ecosystems: the ocean and the forest, the salmon and the bear, are part of one living system. This is the direct contradiction of the Cartesian reductionism that has been the basis of our natural science for a couple of centuries and more. I’m not knocking Cartesian reductionism as a taxonomic tool — or even as analytical training wheels — but for full understanding of complex dynamic systems it’s hopelessly inadequate. It takes the metaphor of the machine as definitive and redefines all life as mechanical; but the machine is, if anything, a grotesquely crude, clumsy, and inferior attempt to copy the far more sophisticated and effective systems of self-organising life…

   19 July 2006, 10:09 pm

8. Dan:

   I’m not sure I disagree with you, but then I’m not sure you disagreed with me, Ethan. I didn’t label ecological processes as extractive, in the sense that you’re using the word, I think. What I said was that in thermodynamic terms, biological processes concentrate energy and organization. This is what is generally called “negentropy,” I think.

   The reason I brought this up is that Hornborg (as I understood him) describes the industrial process as the creation of negentropy at the center, financed if you will by the acceleration of entropy at the periphery. So in a sense, the process is similar to biological processes, except that natural processes tend to insure that the “organizational” process of the biotic industry (say, the virus) does not overwhelm the environment. If the virus kills the host, the game is over, right?

   So my question was, is there a way to see the “game” from a wide enough (and, I agree, non-anthropocentric enough) viewpoint? Wide enough to allow us to assess environmental impact for real, and not just in some silly lip-service way as we do now?

   My suggestion was that there’s a soft edge between nature and technology. We’ve relied for a long time on the assertion that technological processes are different in KIND from biological processes. I think this approach has failed. The people who sense it, sense it, and the ones who don’t, don’t. There’s a communication disconnect, or maybe a paradigm incompatibility. So MAYBE if we thought how these processes are different in DEGREE, we’d get farther.

   Another observation that I didn’t make before: I think Hornborg suggests (and I agree) that the machine is a metaphor that we objectify and believe in as a thing in itself. As such, it becomes the focus of our frustration, and hides elements of the thermodynamic problem that MIGHT be subject to change.

   Gotta go to class now…Ciao! –Dan

   20 July 2006, 11:22 am

9. Josiah:

   Brilliant post, De. Your comment about the high ratio of waste to reusable elements in cars and petro-products makes me think of Marx’s observation that the founders of modern political economy were (in contrast to the ancients) myopically concerned with exchange value, not use-value:

   “Political economy, which first emerged as an independent science during the period of manufacture, is only able to view the social division of labor in terms of the division found in manufacture, i.e. as a means of producing more commodities with a given quantity of labor, and consequently of cheapening commodities and accelerating the accumulation of capital. In most striking contrast with this accentuation of quantity and exchange value is the attitude of the writers of classical antiquity, who are exclusively concerned with quality and use-value.” (1976: 486)

   There is a sense (as you have pointed out in many of your posts) in which the actual, qualitative physical aspect of the world cannot be accounted for in neo-classical economic models. It makes me wonder what an energy-conscious model of socialism, for example, that centralized the equal exchange of use-value and energy as opposed to exchange-value and revenues, would look like. For instance, if we measure the impact of mining activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo under Mobutu in terms of cash transfers, we will see a massive outflow into Belgian, Swiss, French, American etc. coffers, diluted by $5 billion or so salted away by Mobutu and his underlings. But if we measure it in terms of energy and the use-values of the DRC’s vast mineral resources (and Walter Rodney gestured at such a measurement regarding Africa back in the 1970s), the real nature of the relationship between “outsiders” and “insiders” would be much, much clearer. The same is true everywhere else, but the shacks of Kinshasa and the diamond houses of Antwerp constitute as disgustingly unfair a contrast as I can imagine on this planet. Just one example.

   20 July 2006, 1:18 pm

10. Dan:

    Use-value, like exchange value, is sujbective. It will vary widely based on many criteria which are not strictly economic.

    I think Marx tried to get past this by basing his economics on costs rather than prices. Had he been writing now, he might have included resource scarcity and environmental damage along with labor. Or maybe he would have continued to view labor as the most important factor. If so, I think we would still be forced to deconstruct the metaphor of the machine and account for the labor value of technology, and of exporting our “externalities” to the periphery.

    20 July 2006, 2:25 pm

11. Ethan:

    Dan–do the extent I agree w/your assertion that there is a “soft border” between the biological and technological, I disagree w/DeAnander’s assertion that “humans are…unique among terrestrial life forms in producing a waste stream which is not an input (nourishment) stream for some other organism(s).”

    If evolution has existed before us, and it exists after us, I believe we will be neither the first nor last to produce “contrabiotic toxins”

    Here’s a story to clarify: A biology student at my university completed an experiment where he “trained” the evolution of bacteria through a process
    1) Initial dieout from penicillin exposure
    2) Development of resistence to exposure in subsequent generations
    3) Usage of (formerly antibiotic) penicillin as a food source in the last generations of the experiment

    “Toxicity” in the context of evolution is an interactive combination of nascent exposure and concentration. Our bodies have evolved to tolerate (maybe even use) a certain level of mercury. To label something as outright “toxic” might be accurate in terms of our contemporary reaction to how we are exposed to it, but it is a misnomer in an absolute sense: It doesn’t take into account the evolutionary phenomenon of adapting to whatever materials are available as nutrient sources *as long as energy is still flowing through the system.* I think the same might be said with energy sources.

    Again, what’s missing from the discourse, IMO, is an awareness of scales (of various factors), anthropocentricity, and processes through time (process-based thought) vs static image-based thought

    From an anthropocentric standpoint, we are changing our environment–what I would like to call our dependency context–too fast and too drastically (in terms of magnitude–and if the interruption of the functioning of our dependency context is too great, the lifeforms at higher trophic levels (humans; but especially human technomass) will suffer catastrophic dieoff or even extinction.

    But outside the narrow frame of anthropocentricity (???aaaahh!!) it’s all a part of evolution–a grand experiment whose success is constantly under test. If the “human” experiment fails, others on earth might succeed (relative…i.e., for longer)…if the earth experiment fails…if the universe experiment fails…etc etc

    Consequently, this is why I end up referring to myself as a “spiritual materialist” FWIW

    As for technology as an evolutionary species…well, it is one of the youngest species on earth. Again another anecdote to clarify: parasites are (often) simply nascent commensalists or even mutualists who haven’t had the time to adapt. I can’t provide a specific example, but over time, the “oldest” parasites on an evolutionary scale are often the least harmful, or even most beneficial. From this vantage point, technology (as an extension of exchange) and its harmful effects on both “human society” and “the environment” isn’t all that surprising. We might say that everything, initially, starts out like a parasite. Either it ends like a parasite, or it becomes something less harmful. Heck, look at the relationship between mammalian females and their natal offspring…it is very parasitic eventually…though maybe if it’s a girl she will have a statistically greater tendency to care for her parents in their old age Not exactly “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” but close…

    So, my inclination, Dan, is that we might be on the same page (I’m just getting all wordy about it). I would rather machines evolve or die (without taking us down with them), rather than continue to parasitically drain their environmental hosts (both human and non-human). I’m not sure if there’s a way to “speed up” that process.

    Which brings us to the determinism/free will “debate”, and the confusion of Marx’s own writings…i.e., it is often difficult to tell whether he is writing as a historian, as an activist, and/or as a prophet…it’s not exactly original to point out how closely Marx’s concept of history parallels the narrative of evolution.

    Lastly, long live the Gaia Hypothesis, and Lynn Margulis kicks ass (originator of the endosymbiotic theory of evolution: two symbiotic organisms over enough time can merge into a new organism)!

    21 July 2006, 5:23 pm

12. Ethan:

    PS–I love that salmon story, thanks for bringing that in…I think everyone who lives in the Pacific Northwest should know it…it does such a great job of teaching so many aspects of environmental sciences…yeah, “flow” is not necessarily unidirectional, even in the context of a “cycle” inasmuch as there is opportunistic use of “waste” and even parasitic siphoning, and still yet more that “doubles back” to an “earlier stage” in the cycle

    i.e., the difference between a chain and a web

    21 July 2006, 5:26 pm

13. Dan:

    I agree, Lynn Margulis kicks ass!

    This train of thought reminds me of Ray Kurzweil’s assertion that humanity and machine intelligence will soon merge. I always thought that was not only incredibly elitist (whose intelligence in addition to Ray’s gets to merge with the immortal machine?), but incredibly narrow with respect to energy. I really like the term “dependency context” you used. Although I appreciate the romanticism of the Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) apocalyptic vision (romantic for the survivors — “You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space
    Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle.” etc.), I’d prefer to see us learn to identify the real energy economics of the system, and rework our technology to work within a sustainable web.

    21 July 2006, 9:39 pm

14. Ethan:

    I love Fight Club, too, but definitely the romanticism is yet another case of “a bad solution from a good analysis”–something that Hornborg himself mentions I believe in frustration…i.e, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. But it certainly is cathartic to see those buildings tumble to the ground in the end.

    I have no idea what Kurzweil means by that, especially if he means it in a positive light. I always considered “The Borg” to be a cautionary aside in the pursuit of progress–one of the extremes which we should seek to avoid in that it’s another metaphorical representation of the trajectory of industrial processes that Hornborg describes (like The Matrix). It sounds like one of those rediculous statements in the vein of Julian Simon…that guy annoys me to no end. The first time I read him, I thought he was doing satire, i.e., Steven Colbert-style!

    How I conceptualize it is that the process of urbanization is one of building a “technological caccoon” between ourselves and our dependency context, causing us to immediately rely more and more on technomass in the form of “technological intermediaries”–creating a pyschological filter where inhabitants of urban centers view the world as it is shaped by those intermediaries to reflect positively upon them. More intermediaries also mean more demand for resources.

    Put this positive feedback loop in the context of the driving forces of other positive feedback loops such as population growth, and the fact that urban centers are rapidly pulling away from rural peripheries as the main type of human habitat (thus psychologically shaping an ever-increasing proportion in both relative and absolute terms of the world’s human population to accept and submit to the role of technological intermediaries)…and things look dire.

    22 July 2006, 6:29 pm

15. Dan:

    I only know Kuezweil from reading a couple of pages of his book on spiritual machines, and then what Bill Joy says about him in his 2000 article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” which I would recommend as an interesting view inside the head of a guy who feels somewhat responsible for the things computers have done in our world (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html), and a snapshot of his nightmares.

    But yeah, Chuck’s fiction is interesting in its “lets try to take these fragmented, atomized points of view — all these weirdos — and see if they can form some type of personal connection/community” …it’s a little different from the movie, which IS cathartic when the clock is reset on the credit card empire.

    One of the interesting things, if we’re going to branch out and talk about movies and books (which I’d love to do), is what happened to apocalyptic fiction AFTER the fall of the iron curtain. Mad Max’s post-nuclear-holocaust scenario was suddenly off limits. So what did we get? Among other things, the Matrix. And 12 Monkeys. But then again, maybe we only THOUGHT Mad Max’s disaster was nuclear. Maybe it was really peak oil. Remember the Road Warriors?

    22 July 2006, 10:53 pm

16. Ethan:

    I read through that article a few pages…rediculous how people think they could still be themselves without their body…an outgrowth of that cartesian mind/matter duality that has wreaked so much havoc on our society, sciences, and world…speaking of which, we’re heading into territory now that Christian de Quincey covers in his book “Radical Nature”…it’s on my reading list. He argues that all matter can on some level “think” and “feel” and the only reason we can think and feel is because we are also made of that matter. I’m interested to read and see whether and how he addresses complexity/emergence in the context of his argument

    it’s the basis on which I can finally reason why I’ve been calling myself a spiritual materialist

    I never thought about the correlation between the apocalyptic fiction genre and the iron curtain…actually I never even knew there was one

    3 August 2006, 3:02 am

17. Dan:

    I just saw “V for Vendetta” last night. Interesting Wachowski Brothers answer to 1984, has some of the same emotional appeal as the Fight Club. And John Hurt (WC Smith in the 1984 they made around 1984) is “big brother” this time.

    I just rec’d a book (interlibrary loan is so great!) called “Enter Economism, Exit Politics” by Teivo Teivainen. I’m getting ready to write a paper on Latin American responses to Neo-Liberlism this fall. I’ll post something from the book if it’s good… on ONE of these threads…

    3 August 2006, 10:11 am

18. skol:

    Dan: Just want to butt in here and point out what V for Vendetta is an adaption of a comic book (it isn’t serial, you can buy/check-out the whole thing, it’s rather short) by the same name. Worth a read/look, imo.

    And speaking of post-apocalypse, Time of the Wolf is a French film from ‘03. The apocalypse in question is never mentioned (I have my suspicions). It’s a little more grounded in present reality than others of it’s genre (in this case, post-apocalyptic survival).

    3 August 2006, 2:29 pm

19. Ethan:

    I’m buying V for Vendetta, and adding it to my “catharsis” collection. It’s a cool movie, eh? (apart from the right-wing nutjobs) I loved the serious reviews that were criticizing the lines that were written for V…I was thinking, “It’s a freakin’ revolution fantasy!”

    This is starting to get tangential, but have any of you seen the documentary “The Revolution will not be Televised” re: the attempted coup in Venezuela? Does a great job of demonstrating how easily and effectively the media, when used as a foundational frame of reference, can serve to turn reality on its head and convince masses of people to support something to which they would otherwise likely be opposed…

    We (can) talk about “framing” an issue so much in the abstract, about how words are used, etc etc, but that film is a cutting portrayal of how frames exist in a much more concrete, tangible manner and then can be used to build support for pre-existing ideological bents.

    Another good example is Public Broadcasting’s airing of the documentary “The Dark Side” which goes through painstaking detail of how the Bush Administration bent and manufactured evidence to fit its war policy while ignoring any evidence to the contrary and using unprecedented intimidation techniques.

    14 August 2006, 3:26 pm

20. Dan:

    Criticizing lines like “People should not be afraid of their Government, the Government should be afraid of the People”? Silly bastards. I loved the fact that the most sympathetic, thoughtful, and human characters in the movie were gay.

    I’d like to see “The Revolution Will not be Televised,” but Netflix does not seem to know when it is coming out on DVD. I guess I’ll order the book (Chavez: Venezuela and the New Latin America by Hugo Chavez, David Deutschmann, and Javier Salado) from my college interlibrary loan. I’m definitely getting on somebody’s list…

    One of the things that irks me about the so-called liberal media is that they still avoid telling the truth if they think it will offend their corporate sponsers. Example: watched a Frontline episode on Meth. They discussed the pharma lobby’s success in blocking legislation to try to control or monitor the sale sale of ephedrine and psuedo-e, which was good. BUT, they went out of their way to describe the problem as “THE INDIAN CONNECTION,” when the pharma company they were investigating was KREBS, based in Germany. Okay, so they have a factory in India. But didn’t the fact that the ephedrine was shipped from Germany on Lufthansa register with them at all??? Also, they sort of conveniently failed to mention that the pharma industry makes about 4 times as much of the stuff as the demand of the legal trade can sustain. Hmmm. Oops, wait a minute, can’t say that… and this is public television?

    I suspect the investigators and writiers of that piece were very frustrated with what got on the air. At least, I hope they were.

    14 August 2006, 7:08 pm

21. DeAnander:

    I thought V for Vendetta was rather godawfully sexist. think I posted something about this on some earlier thead — the extremely disturbing plot mechanism in which the (only) main female character’s heroic endurance of detainment and torture turns out to be a sham, all staged and orchestrated by the mysterious “V” himself — in an unpleasant mirror of the “seasoning” of a new girl by a pimp, or some extended SM scene. after this extended abuse, of course, she loves him even more. feh. it was a superficially attractive film, with moments of real comedy and real pathos, but the durable dickhead tropes (helpless clueless female saved from Bad Men by Tall Dark Mysterious Scary Male Stranger, falls in love, endures mistreatment/torture by TDMS, proves her loyalty and love — stands by her man — etc) really turned me off.

    14 August 2006, 7:15 pm

22. R.S. Morris:

    +1 on the “V for Vendetta” review. “Catharsis” is EXACTLY the right word to file that film under. It will keep a permanent place in my persoanl video library.

    Randy

    14 August 2006, 7:17 pm

23. Stan:

    A sogn of how desperate the left can feel at times is what we are willing to latch onto. I had exactly the same reaction that De did, and moreover it was a karate movie (I hate karate movies).

    There are plenty of decent political films out there that we can use without chasing after macho Blanquist comic book saviors.

    Matewan
    Born in Flames (-:
    Once Were Warriors
    North Country
    Dirty Pretty Things
    Biko
    Silkwood
    Syriana
    The Constant Gardener
    Salt of the Earth
    The Accused
    Chutney Popcorn
    Boycott
    The Motorcycle Diaries
    Cry Freedom
    Music Box

    This is a rip-through list off the top of my head.

    I’ll admit I didn’t see any martial arts in any of them.

    For feminist film reviews, there is a long, alphabetical index of reviews at http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/FilmReviews/

    14 August 2006, 8:28 pm

24. DeAnander:

    Men With Guns

    Winstanley

    A Very British Coup

    Broken Mirrors

    Brother from Another Planet

    Amandla

    Classified X

    14 August 2006, 9:05 pm

25. DeAnander:

    actually I kinda like martial arts movies but I prefer the ones that actually come out of japan and hong kong as opposed to the occidentalised copycat genre.

    ‘Wing Chun’ is a charmer, for example, ultra lightweight but with a little subversive feminist content.

    14 August 2006, 9:09 pm

26. Dan:

    I liked V. I also liked Dirty Pretty Things and The Motorcycle Diaries. And Kung Fu Hustle. Just watched Spike Lee’s Inside Man, which had a few good plot twists. Also saw The Devil’s Miner recently (about kids working in the Bolivian silver mines at Potosi), which was very good.

    15 August 2006, 11:48 am

27. elaina:

    I’ve gotten to a wierd point in my life where friends ask me to “go to the movies” and I kinda instinctively recoil. I’ve talked to Stan some about this- and yes, I’m planning on watching “Dirty Pretty Things.”

    The last 2 times I went to the movies was out of sheer desperation for social bonding and distraction. A couple weeks ago I went out with some folks and got drunk and saw “Talladega Nights.”

    ‘Cause I live under a rock, dontcha know.

    16 August 2006, 6:12 am

28. Ethan:

    I don’t ever remember anyone claiming something along the lines of “V… represents in particular the radical feminist revolutionary ideal”–it was cathartic for me personally precisely because it was A radicalization of mainstream entertainment media. So was the movie “Fight Club.” I consider myself a feminist, but that’s not ALL I am. A great feminist film doesn’t necessarily automatically rigorously concern itself w/my other radical interests, and vice-versa. (thanks for the list, folks)

    Just because a narrative falls short of some sort of all-inclusive utopian revolutionary process doesn’t mean that the narrative subtext isn’t heading in the right (and by that, I mean “left”) direction i.e., it seems to me that’s throwing the baby out w/the bath water

    Also, liking V and Fight Club doesn’t automatically make me a misogynist, although I bet more than a few probably do like those movies. Likewise, I bet more than a few people who like good feminist movies are also mired in the annoying and self-destructive hubris of anthropocentricity

    We could do a lot better to avoid socializing patriarchy by, for example, structural education reform in our schools (”doing to” vs “doing with”), and providing them alternative things to “do” other than TV (if one can say that “watching tv” is in fact “doing something” vs “having something done to you”)

    (relevant music video)
    http://www.aperfectcircle.com/bodies.html
    (/relevant music video)

    Now that we’re kind of talking about martial arts movies, have any of you seen the movie, “Hero”??? Now THAT is a freaking awesome movie on just about every level–fun to watch, beautiful, fun to analyze/thought-provoking, amazingly complex non-linear narrative structure, etc etc

    Here’s a bizarre twist: We had a (extremely rich, spoiled, bratty) exchange student from Thailand who was “educated” to be a self-unaware modern literalist. He didn’t like the movie because the wire-cable work was “obvious” (i.e., not like “The Matrix” CGI-style movement), and it was “old style” and “boring.” I felt awkward trying to explain that connection to folk heritage back to him–like he should’ve been able to explain it to me better simply b/c he was from East Asia.

    I hear you Elaina about the “let’s go to the movies and ’socialize’” awkwardness. So many people use “let’s watch something alone together” as a means of “social activity.” I also hate the drug/alcohol abuse that happens collectively in the name of socialization. In the end b/c so many of my peers do that stuff, my opposition to it ends up limiting my everyday social opportunities.

    19 August 2006, 1:45 am

29. Ethan:

    PS

    I’m trying to start a “Men Against Rape” (MAR) group at my institution before I leave–the campus Women’s Resource Center is in support and I’ve found a professor who has experience starting similar groups elsewhere.

    Below is something I’ve been kicking around just to start the debate–I’d love some commentary/input from all y’all, if you have any suggestions before I dig in and distribute flyers.
    ——————–
    Men Against Rape (MAR) comprised of feminists of all genders and sexualities who recognize that feminism is a liberation ideology that affects people of all types and therefore requires inter-gender and inter-sex solidarity, cooperation and collaboration. MAR makes its contribution to feminism in this context as a response to the atrocities of patriarchal rape culture. It has an initial goal of addressing local campus culture via education, outreach, as well as support of and partnership with other feminist organizations and activities on campus.

    Although anyone can be a victim or perpetrator of sexual violence, rape is predominantly a violent act committed by men against women. As such, it is especially important for men specifically to conduct themselves as actively opposed to individual acts of rape and rape culture. Masculine identity should not be expressed as 1) violent behaviors that seek to subjugate and hurt women and 2) A social context that affirms and rewards such behavior.

    One objective of MAR is to expand the “face of feminism” to include what one might traditionally perceive as “masculine identity,” recognizing that masculinity is not necessarily inherently antagonistic to feminism but can in fact be predicated in large part upon feminist ideals.

    It is the eventual intention of MAR to grow into a campus “Mens’ Resource Center” informed by feminist discourse as a counterpart to and in collaboration with the existing campus “Womens’ Resource Center.” The goal is to provide support, etc to a wider demographic group regarding issues of gender and sexual politics and identity.
    ————–
    Comments? Suggestions?

    thx
    Ethan

    19 August 2006, 1:52 am

30. Ethan:

    PSS
    while we’re on the topic of films, “Robert Newman’s History of Oil” (downloadable on Google videos) is both hilarious and provides a critical alternative to understanding the history of the wars of the industrial era, e.g.

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20060726&articleId=2824

    19 August 2006, 2:23 am

31. DeAnander:

    it ain’t so much that ‘V’ fails to be feminist, it’s that it’s actively antifeminist (my view). so it’s hard for me to sit through in the way that say, Gone With the Wind is hard to sit through (even though in many ways it’s a great, entertaining movie) because of its active racism. if I were Black I would probably not be able to sit through GWTW at all — it’s only my whiteness that protects me from feeling personally, directly insulted by it and enables me to see its racism as “a product of its era” and “a flaw in an otherwise entertaining film” blah blah. which may explain why male viewers with feminist sympathies can sit through V with a less negative reaction than I had — if you’re male the insult is not personal, it’s simply “well the movie is not about this issue”. [and this is an interesting question — why is it that a movie has to be “about feminism” in order to treat female characters decently? why is humiliation and abuse of female characters and their subservience to male hero-figures “normal”, instead of the signature of a genre called “male supremacy movies” clearly identified as such — Dick Lit?] anyway to me, the movie bloody well is all about this issue it’s about disappointing and insulting me, the viewer, personally, in my face.

    of course most media is about insulting women and feminists. so we get inured, or we give up on commercial media altogether… or (me) we oscillate, occasionally diving into the stream of corporate drek hoping to find some redeeming insight or entertainment value in between the routine humiliation, marginalisation, demonisation of female characters, then getting sick of it and refusing to expose our eyeballs and brains to any more of this stuff for a while…

    19 August 2006, 2:18 pm

32. DeAnander:

    of course GWTW is actually nastily antifeminist as well, at least in the one famous “romantic rape scene” (yuck).

    should probably have picked some other example, some flick with a good strong female character part but icky racism or Amurkan nationalism… can’t think of one off top of head but there must be several.

    admittedly no film can be all things to all people, but we certainly have very low standards for film-makers, script writers etc when it comes to their treatment of female characters.

    an example of an anti-establishment film that was not particularly feminist and yet did not insult or humiliate women (that I can remember) is the gently mythic “Brother from Another Planet” (Sayles classic). it did not throw in a dollop of misogyny and then excuse it by being “radical in other ways” or whatever. it was just a nice little film that didn’t insult the female viewer even though it was, of course, mostly a boy-story. I should probably watch it again — it’s been many years and who knows, I may have mercifully forgotten some swipe at women in the script, but Sayles is usually pretty good on this count.

    19 August 2006, 2:58 pm

33. skol:

    What about Buffy the vampire slayer, et al? Joss Whedon is writing/directing Wonder Woman (think what you will, but it could’ve been worse). He also did Serenity, if anyone’s seen it. Good sci-fi film in an age where they’re all horrible.
    Here’s the wikipedia article on Buffy.

    19 August 2006, 5:13 pm

34. DeAnander:

    Yeah, I would guess Buffy is an example of an entertaining series with a strong female lead, even lesbian-positive in the later episodes about Willow and her girlfriend — which nevertheless cleaves faithfully to the White American Middle Class Fantasy [wow, the luxurious houses these “normal” kids occupy, the luxuriously-appointed high school, the fancy cars their parents and peers drive, etc!] and the general America-rah-rah putdowns of foreign nationals (though a Brit becomes a best-loved character, his Britishness is still material for silly nationalist waggery throughout — and I seem to recall some anti-French silliness here and there). wouldn’t call it exactly anti-racist either… though my memory of the series is somewhat faded as I have not watched any of it for a couple of years. there were some mischievously feminist moments in Buffy — the one where Willow maliciously leads on an egotistical, misogynist creep to reveal his nasty personality, etc. … Joss showed quite a talent for soap opera in Buffy — managed to create endless emotional drama among the limited cast of characters, occasionally a genuinely pathetic moment. and I suspect Buffy was probably a Good Thing as far as media role models for girls — could be way better, of course, but it has been way worse…

    I haven’t seen Serenity. will look it up.

    speaking of strange media messages, did anyone ever see the video remake of R&H’s Cinderella with a very consciously mixed-race cast? pop starlet “Brandy” was Cinderella, Whitney Houston was the fairy godmother, Whoopi Goldberg was the Queen. evil stepmom was Bernadette Peters (camping it up and having a blast, kind of a recap of her Into the Woods role). I can’t recollect the rest of the cast offhand. it was kind of the Disney/corporate version of racial integration cool, in the sense that it would have caused overt racists to froth at the mouth 40 years ago, but at the same time I expected them to start singing “It’s a Small World After All” at any moment and as to feminism, ha ha. there was a semi-feminist revisionist Cinderella story with Anjelica Huston as wicked stepmom and ummm I think Jody Foster as Cinderella — in which Cinderella becomes a crusader for social justice and ends up rescuing her prince from robbers in the forest… amusing fluff.

    btw anyone but me seen van Peebles’ flick ‘Classified X’ about the history of racism in hollywood? great documentary I thought… I’d be interested in re-watching it and discussing…

    19 August 2006, 11:24 pm

35. skol:

    I agree completely with Buffy. I hadn’t really considered the Middle Class Fantasy, either, but it certainly rings true now that I think of it. On the other hand, Joss has said he’d rather make entertainment 100 people need to see instead of what 1000 people want to see. And your average middle-class family probably gets the WB, and like most cable television, their the audience. Maybe I’m digging too deep here to support my claim, but I always found an essential irony between evil vampires and demons infesting a little suburban town. I agree that it isn’t exactly anti-rascist, either: Token brit in Buffy, token black in angel (ugh…especially token, but not like “O look, black person!” token, more like “cast of white writers with no clue” token…kind of hard to judge the good-faith). Firefly/Serenity has a geisha character, which I can’t make heads or tails of (Complex context; also, I’m in a gray area). For pure entertainment, I can’t recommend it more.

    Total aside, but I recommend Koyaanisqatsi & (esp.) Powaqqatsi if you like art film. The qatsi’s are incomparably beautiful, imho. A kind of quiet, removed vicariousness (for me), beauty of life and earth. Therapy for the alienated. Just 2 cents.

    20 August 2006, 9:56 am

36. Ethan:

    I can’t comment on GWTW–never seen it and “frankly m’dear, I don’t give a damn” to

    But I know more than a few lay feminists–those who are vehemently for womens’ equal rights and social status but aren’t hip to the latest debates in feminist discourse–who just thought V was a good movie. I know they aren’t sheep in wolf clothing, because they are sharply keen to little things such as male vs female interruptions in conversation, etc (”equal opportunity interruptors” which I think is better than no interruptions at all…conversations get so stale that way)

    Given that plot, if Evey’s role had been male and V’s female, I could easily see the same dynamic going, and it points to a question that doesn’t have to do with gender identity, but with sacrifice and large-scale social vs personal committments: at some point, they do conflict, and when they do, where will you be? Our “society of entitlement” I would argue teaches us to go down the “personal road” where both Evey and V “ideally” would forget about this whole “revolution thing” and live happily ever after etc etc. Even going beyond that, V instead teaches us that we can use our personal committments to help fuel large-scale social efforts, but effectively destroying the former to acheive the latter. This is a common theme even in politics (e.g. US presidential races). The West Wing did a good job of portraying that dynamic: if you want to work on that level, expect your personal life to take on a radically different dynamic. Hell, even X-Men 2 had that theme, albeit w/genders reversed (Jean Gray willingly sacrificing herself and her relationship w/Scott in order to save the team w/Scott in opposition but effectively powerless to prevent it). I didn’t think of that as “anti-male” even though the general dynamic closely mirrored that of V and Evey.

    In V, an underlying theme was that everyone had been pushed too far, and everyone made sacrifices (to varying degrees) to commit to the revolution. Those sacrifices also differed qualitatively. There were plenty of “working women” although the regime in question was more than overtly patriarchal (reaching its epitome in the priest who “liked little girls”), and its overthrow is therefore anti-patriarchy. Moreover, the fact that the “perp in question” (V) is a) portrayed as a special case (genetic engineering) and b) self destructs is further evidence that this film neither intended to reflect an archetype nor reproduce anti-feminist sentiment.

    Not liking comic book movies is a different matter altogether

    I also think you were rather serruptitious about framing the question regarding “Dick Lit,” presuming again that V is an extension of and attempt to reproduce patriarchy simply because the plot and female lead do not fit a narrowly defined but chauvinistic feminist ideal. Moreover, the concern w/the movie also presumes that the movie is otherwise effective in doing so. I have yet to hear a case for either of these, and one would need to exist before the question about “Dick Lit” could be asked and discussed in relation to V unless we were to frame it differently…and it is an interesting question, one that was running through my mind in my last (big) post…

    I personally think some men are capable of feeling just as offended by anti-feminist acts, etc as any female.

    Let me give an example: During his undergraduate career a few years ago, my brother learned some rape statistics and became sufficiently outraged just knowing those those numbers (talk about empathetic capability!) that he became president of the campus Men Against Rape, started giving lectures to frat houses, etc.

    For me personally I knew about the statistics, was outraged, but what kicked me over the cliff was a series of friendships where perhaps the only consistent narrative was one of abuse at the hands of boyfriends (psychological, sexual, physical…).

    We both liked V, though…a lot, and we don’t consider liking it to be a “compromise” of our feminist bents. I know I may be risking the legitimacy of my “feminist” labeling by the above because much of any cliquish identity is embodied by collective, largely unquestioned feelings of “offense.” I believe I belong because I am personally offended by much that goes on in our culture and society that I believe is truly anti-woman, let alone anti-feminist. V isn’t one of them, nor do I think it worthy of offense.

    Equal opportunity critical theory…

    20 August 2006, 1:52 pm

37. Ethan:

    I have come to the conclusion that I use this emoticon waaay too much, and I apologize (whoops… :-P)

    well I just let another key element of my personality out of the bag, I guess (:-P)

    20 August 2006, 1:54 pm

38. Stan:

    Feminist chauvinism?

    Ethan, this simply supports exactly what De was saying. Some forms of myopia reside in social power.

    The reason critique is called critique is because it it critical. The reason ideology — a frame of reference shared across a culture that both reproduces and conceals power — is that it is NOT critical. I have no clue what the difference is between “lay feminists” and other “feminists” so for the sake of argument, let’s drop that term for the time being. Camille Paglia calls herslf a feminist, which is like me calling myself a capitalist. Someone calling him- or herself feminist does not constitute a critical analysis or deconstruction. Someone BEING a woman does not add or subtract anything to a critical argument about male power, unless the experience of being a woman is combined with a critical consciousness.

    Ideology is about putting the master inside the servant’s head… about the servant internalizing the master’s point of view. The dominant ideology in this society is male-supremacist, and it exiusts in a recursive and inseparable relation with male material power (economic, political, etc).

    MOST WOMEN have internalized a phallocentric ideology. It becomes part of getting by in a male dominated society. That women feel an attraction to V or to bodice-rippers or to fashion manipulations or to the fantasy of the perfect wedding does not serve as a counter-critque to what critical theorists have to say about the reproduciton of male power. That includes reproduction in the form of patriarchal cultural conventions… like those represented in V.

    Those of us who have taken up the cudgel on gender hereabouts are not talking about “equality.” That is a liberal and legalistic notion. We are talking about actually-existing, structural power…. the kind that makes notions like female chauvinism and reverse racism (very similar, in that these are both assignments of equal-signs bewtween two classes of people who are anything BUT equal) possible.

    Critical theory and cultural crit associated with it has to look further than this. One of the difficulties that several of us here (Elaina, De, Audrey, Yolanda, et al) have pointed to is that there are plenty of women out there who are involved in resistance politics, and will even call it like they see it when men interrupt in a meeting… but who still lose their bearings on gender because they haven’t connected the dots on the construction of sexuality and even desire.

    Citing these women (hypothetical or real) is not an argument, but an appeal to a kind of phenotypic authority.

    V does not have to “attempt” to reproduce patriarchy. It simply has to follow existing conventions that appeal to male writers, producers, and directors. The invisibility of systemic patriarchy inscribed on those conventions, and the commonly held (media-reproduced, white, petit-bougeoise) notion of feminism being synonymous with some semblance of abstract legal “equality,” is the reason even some putative feminists can see, for example, a film like “Sleeping with the Enemy” as “feminist,” when in fact it is distributing a deeply patriarchal message between the lines.

    You say. “Given that plot, if Evey’s role had been male and V’s female, I could easily see the same dynamic going, and it points to a question that doesn’t have to do with gender identity…”

    But that is precisely the point. These are not reversable roles, given the reality of male power, and to have reversed them would have been so self-conscious it would be ludicrous… as “GI Jane” was, wherein the achievement of equality by the protagonist required her to say to a vanquished foe, “Suck my dick!” and then send her abroad to kill Arabs as proof of her “equality.”

    You say that “V instead teaches us that we can use our personal committments to help fuel large-scale social efforts, but effectively destroying the former to acheive the latter.” No, what V “teaches” us is that even the notion of social revolution has been so utterly trivialized that we can still only stomache it as an individual male hero who has the maqsculine will and supreme intelligence to “catalyze” it. His torture of Evie as part of her training is not even the tiniest bit original. This kind of male sado-masochistic bullshit can be found anywhere.A real revolutionary like Vanadana Shiva, who spends her time not hectoring people to kill and die, but to reclaim land and acquire food self-suffiiency is so alien to our public imaginary that no one would htink of making a film about it.

    This is a boy’s fantasy. And the hero is not only archetypical, he is a character based on another character… a male who engaged in “revolutionary violence.”

    It IS Dick Lit. Consummately.

    You say: “I personally think some men are capable of feeling just as offended by anti-feminist acts, etc as any female.” While that may be truein come cases, I find it hard to believe that men can understand what it is to fear (outside of prison) the daily possibility of rape in a plethora of common social situations.

    The characterization of some detailed positions on gender here, that have been explicated with patience and rigor, as “cliquish” is an attempt to dismiss that won’t stand. No one is trying to form a clique.

    “I know,” you say, “I may be risking the legitimacy of my ‘feminist’ labeling by the above because much of any cliquish identity is embodied by collective, largely unquestioned feelings of ‘offense.’”

    Provide one example of this collective, largely unquestioned feeling of offense.

    20 August 2006, 4:54 pm

39. elaina:

    And it ain’t just me, is it, that gets all keyed up about men calling themselves “feminists?” Cause it bothers me. Stan posted a cute comment one time about how men calling themselves feminists is like white people calling themselves Black Nationalists.

    I have never watched “V” though I plan to, just for the sake of formulating my own critique of it.

    Another example, I’m not sure if the same super-model-lady stars in it as the one in V or if I’ve just got my celebrities all jumbled up, of what y’all are talking about is the Resident Evil series- I’ve heard folks praise and praise it ’cause the “hero” is a female who’s particularly bad-ass at killing zombies (and yeah. I have a bad-for-me thing for zombie movies). It’s completely ridiculous. At least the “shero” wears sensible shoes while she’s kicking zombie asses.

    Anyways.

    20 August 2006, 8:46 pm

40. elaina:

    Oh dear lord. Bless yer hearts. I just randomly scrolled through the discussion, and noticed the pro-buffy speak.

    *shakes head*

    I’ll have to get back to y’all about that later. I got to go out and hang with some womenfolks.

    20 August 2006, 8:52 pm

41. Dan:

    V does not have to “attempt” to reproduce patriarchy. It simply has to follow existing conventions that appeal to male writers, producers, and directors. The invisibility of systemic patriarchy inscribed on those conventions…

    Okay, I get this, I think. I can see Stan’s point, and it makes sense. So what do we do, then? Cuz I have to admit, I liked the part where Whitehall explodes and Big Ben falls down. Just as I liked the Matrix, where Neo (male teen hacker-geek superhero) stops the bullets. Yah, I like Trinity’s moves too. But the same logic quoted above makes HER ineligible to save the world. Like Clive Owen’s girlfriend with the handcuffs in Sin City, any strong woman has to be an outsider, tangential to the plot and unable to resolve the central conflict. Even if she is completely self-sufficient, she is always a supporting character. Or a prize, to be won.

    This is archetypal, and goes way back, as does patriarchy. So, that being the case, how do we engage with or enjoy any of these stories? Is it like GWTW? But, DAMN! In Hotel Rwanda, it’s Don Cheadle… In Syriana, it’s not only two guys who are the good guys, but two white Americans! Geez!! Was that just about making us white guys feel good about our raised consciousnesses??? (Yeah, I guess it was)

    Oh, try “Hop” by Dominique Standaert. Netflix has it. The protagonist is an african kid in Belgium (I think). That’s pretty good, and has a nice old anarchist with bomber with a guilty conscience in it. Really, it’s very good.

    But seriously. American cinema paints with a very limited pallette. Do we abandon it, as too far gone? Or do we use it to expose our hidden cultural assumptions, and enjoy the cathartic explosions and anti-establishment mayhem along the way? 12 Monkeys, anyone?

    20 August 2006, 10:04 pm

42. R:

    I’m glad someone brought up zombie movies because Romeros Dead trilogy does everything right for an action movie that V got wrong, IMO. The protagonists are all either womyn or black. The white guys in the movies are either villians(usually racist or misogynist cops or soldiers) or bumbling jackasses who nearly get the whole group killed. I don’t think Romero is a radical but he sure has a kind of east coast Italian-American perspective on class and the issues that accompany it. (Although i do gotta say, Land of the Dead really stunk. Not only did Romero succumb to using Hollywood cliches like scantily clad female leads, but he also added ethnic foil characters. I guess the studio was pandering to the adolescent boy set. Damn shame to see a good filmaker degenerate/sell out like that.)

    20 August 2006, 10:06 pm

43. peggy:

    Blazing Saddles

    20 August 2006, 10:38 pm

44. Audrey:

    I tried once in an email to convince Stan to watch Koyaanisqatsi. I can’t help thinking it’s on his list of favorite movies and he just doesn’t know it yet.

    21 August 2006, 12:19 am

45. Ben:

    “Those of us who have taken up the cudgel on gender hereabouts are not talking about “equality.” That is a liberal and legalistic notion. We are talking about actually-existing, structural power…. the kind that makes notions like female chauvinism and reverse racism (very similar, in that these are both assignments of equal-signs bewtween two classes of people who are anything BUT equal) possible.”

    Where should I look to find writings that explore this differance more thoroughly?

    21 August 2006, 12:41 am

46. Stan:

    MOVING THIS THREAD

    This is a very productive discussion in many ways, so I want to link it to here and move it henceforth closer tothe front page, ie, under “Film/Cultural Crit Discussion - continued“, where more drop-ins and lurkers are likely to see it in case they want to leap in.

    21 August 2006, 8:12 am

47. skol:

    >> I tried once in an email to convince Stan to watch Koyaanisqatsi. I can’t help thinking it’s on his list of favorite movies and he just doesn’t know it yet.

    
    Seconded.
    I like Powaqqatsi the most. It goes all around the planet, and I prefer the soundtrack (Philip Glass) over the others (Naqoyqatsi is a must too, albeit far more creepy and depressing).
    For the record, they’re all portmanteaus of Hopi words:
    Koyaanisqatsi - life out of balance
    Powaqqatsi - parasitic life (also why I recommend it more)
    Naqoyqatsi - life as war
    No dialogue. They can be watched by anyone (anyone with a TV). Some of the most powerful images I’ve ever seen on film.

    >> Blazing Saddles
    et al:
    Werewolf?
    There wolf…There castle
    (Sorry, I want to resist the urge to quote movies, but…I…can’t)

    Anyway. Can’t wait to hear Elaina’s response to Buffy.

    21 August 2006, 8:39 am

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