Enjoy!

The Box of Bad Nightmares

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Welcome to the sixth edition of Comics are Magic (click link for the archives). This is just a short one because its been a while. It concerns the magical influence of classic Silver Age story The Flash Stakes His Life On You! from The Flash#54 by way of two modern magicians and comics creators.

The first, Alejandro Jodorowsky is probably best known for his films, the alchemical allegories El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre. For those unfamiliar with his work here’s the trailer for  his masterpiece The Holy Mountain. That’s subjective of course, and they are all stunning, mind-warping films, but The Holy Mountain is I think clearest in its alchemical intent.

Jodorowsky started out as in theatre, co-founding the Panic Movement in 1962 which drew on Antoin Artaud’s Theatre of  Cruelty and staged violent and surreal performance pieces. From wikipedia:

The movement’s violent theatrical events were designed to be shocking,[2] and to release destructive energies in search of peace and beauty. One four-hour performance known as Sacramental Melodrama was staged in May 1965 at the Paris Festival of Free Expression. The “happening” starred Jodorowsky dressed in motorcyclist leather and featured him slitting the throats of two geese, taping two snakes to his chest and having himself stripped and whipped. Other scenes included “naked women covered in honey, a crucified chicken, the staged murder of a rabbi, a giant vagina, the throwing of live turtles into the audience, and canned apricots.”

In his excellent memoir The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky he describes how he moved to Mexico to undergo initiation with a number of female shamans. Like Alan Moore, Jodorowsky views art and magic as inseparable. He later combined theatre, magic and psychotherapy in his practice of psychomagic where the patient’s personality and family tree are studied to come up with symbolic performances to be acted out, based on the principle that the unconscious mind accepts symbolic acts as fact. Here is one example of many from his book on the subject (page 132):

A young Chantal, at four years old, found herself placed in a school directed by the sister of the mother of her mother…The great-aunt sadistically tyrannized the child. In working with me, Chantal discovered all the hate she held towards to this woman. She could not forgive her, and she had no way to avenge her because the torturer was no longer in this world. So I advised her to go to the grave of this woman and, once there, give free rein to this hate: that she kick, scream, piss, and defecate on the tomb, but provided that she dedicate herself to paying close attention to her subsequent reactions to her demonstrations of vengeance. She followed my advice, and after letting off some steam atop the sepulcher, she felt a deep desire to clean it up and cover it with flowers. And, little by little, she couldn’t help but surrender to the evidence that she, in fact, felt love for her great-aunt.

A true polymath, Jodorowsky has also developed his own reconstruction of the Tarot of Marseilles, which he summarises in the video below:

Jodorowsky has worked regularly in the comics medium. His earliest comics work included the strip Fabulas Panicas, which debuted in 1967 (and ran to 1973) in the Mexican newspaper El Heraldo de México. Below is one of these strips. There are many, many more over at fabulaspanicas.blogspot.co.uk, dedicated entirely to reproducing the strip and well worth your time. Even if  like me you don’t speak Spanish.

Fabulas panicas

Jodorowsky would go on to produce a series of comic books, often in collaboration with late, great Mobius. (Incidentally the two creators met when Moebius produced concept art for Jodorowsky’s unfilmed adaptation of Dune. More intriguing detail and art from the Dune-that-could-have-been here.) The most famous of these collaborations is perhaps  The Incal and its spin-offs spinoffs The Metabarons and The Technopriests. Laura Hudson at comicsalliance notes the high praise other comics creators have for it and describes the series this way:

The Incal is not only a marvel of intricate visuals, but also of ideas, set in a vast galactic empire where luminescent aristocrats hiding ugly secrets cavort with dog-headed men deep in the depraved bacchanalia of the Red Ring, technorats roam the garbage plains in terrible swarms that multiply in proportion to your fear, and enormous floating citadels open like flowers into mechanical spiders the size of skyscrapers.

It is a strange, dazzling world that Moebius and Jodorowsky launch us into at breakneck speed, and never let up as they keep laying down new innovations, characters, dangers, plot twists and stunning, perfectly framed visual spectacles like men with hands full of infinite trump cards. In one small corner of this universe, a lowly private detective named John Difool — based on The Fool Tarot card — finds himself in possession of a tiny, mysterious pyramid called the Incal, an object of such power that it inspires a galaxy-wide manhunt and transforms him into an unlikely (and unwitting) messiah.

The Incal-Words: Jodorowsky Art-Moebius

Extracting the various occult references and tart symbolism in these comics would require a fair amount of study and take us on a diversion from the actual focus of this post so I leave that to others and, as always, would love to hear of any such investigations. What can be said for now is that the polymath Jodorowsky sits within a tradition of comics creators as magical practitioners that has been highlighted repeatedly throughout this series of posts. In an interesting interview for The Comics Journal,  Joe McCulloch asks Jodorowsky if he considers himself a ‘magician of comics’”

MCCULLOCH: Once, when asked if you were a magician of cinema, you replied that you had made very few films, and that film-making is like karate, where you must punch and punch and punch to achieve magic. Do you feel you are a magician of comics?

JODOROWSKY: I feel myself like a genius and a sacred whore.

MCCULLOCH: Do you read many new comics, and are there any you’ve particularly enjoyed?

JODOROWSKY: Prince Valiant, graphic novels of Will Eisner, [Katsuhiro] Otomo’s Akira.

MCCULLOCH: Finally, is there a message you would like to give to artists making comics today?

JODOROWSKY: Kill Superheroes !!! Tell your own dreams.

Many readers are very happy to dream of superheroes instead of course, but Jodorowky’s provocation can be left for now.  What interests us here is an article he wrote in 1968 for the Spanish science-fiction magazine Neuva Dimension. Maxwell Yezpitelok  at comcibulletin.com posted a translation of the article, which concerns issue 54 of The Flash, containing the story The Flash Stakes His Life On You!

Jodorowsky describes it as, “the most important literary argument of recent months…worthy of being placed beside works like The White Dominican by Gustav Meyrink or Mount Analogue by René Daumal”. For a synopsis, here’s Grant Morrison, from his book Supergods:

One day The Flash fell afoul of a bad bastard who’d invented a new weapon that caused people to forget about anyone caught in the path of its ray. He tested the device by turning it on his pet cat Jessica, whom everyone promptly forgot, causing the animal to vanish forever like a tree not falling in a nonexistent forest…It wasn’t long before the weapon was turned on the Flash himself. With no one to remember or recognize him, he began to dissolve like a smoke ring…

The Flash “dissolves like a smoke ring”

how could our hero get out of this ultimate trap? One little girl, whose dolly he’d rescued from the river that day, still somehow remembered the Flash, and through her he began to reassemble his ontological status-just in case you were wondering. (Supergods, page 80)

And back to Jodorowsky for the conclusion:

After approaching her Flash solidifies and becomes his old self. But when he moves away he weakens again. He depends entirely on the girl’s presence. He adopts her as his helper and, thanks to the superspeed he acquires in her proximity, writes thousands and thousands of letters explaining what’s happening to him. These letters he distributes among the citizens. Upon reading the letters they are convinced and decide to believe in the hero again. He goes back to normal and captures the strange gentleman, who is an international thief.

For Jodorowsky, the villains words to the Flash regarding his predicament are key to the story working as a ‘parable’ (“we can’t avoid calling it that” he states):

The unique device that I perfected [. . .] spread a certain radiation over this city! [. . .] It erased all memory of you from the minds of the people here! And since our own belief in ourselves is based on how others feel about us — you began at once to lose your own identity! Your contact with reality was shattered! Right now there’s only one thing that’s keeping you from disappearing altogether — the fact that only one person still believes in you — namely me! [. . .] When I turn the radiation on myself, Flash, the last person in this city will have ceased to believe in you — and a short while afterward you’ll vanish completely and forever!“

Jodorowsky is struck by the villain’s physical resemblance to the Russian mystic G. I Gurdjieff but also the manner in which “the content of the parable could very well belong to the philosophy of this enigmatic being.” (Coincidentally, one of Jodorowsky’s female spiritual teachers on his search for illumination was Reyna D’Assia, the daughter of Gurdjieff)

Gurdjieffs system, as explained by nthmind hero Robert Anton Wilson:

holds that human beings are evolving from mammalhood to immortality. Almost all of us, he says repeatedly (and with evident joy in annoying our self-esteem), are still on the mammalian level—robots controlled by conditioning. We think we are conscious, but we aren’t. We are asleep, hypnotized, sleep-walking—the metaphors vary, but they all mean that we can’t see outside our conditioned reality-tunnel. When we begin to awaken, we perceive that the world is nothing at all like the myths and superstitions our society has imposed on us.

Jodorowsky has more to the say on the matter of The Flash #54 as Gurdjieffian parable, and makes reference to Zen buddhism on the way. I highly recommend reading the full article at comicsbulletin. For our purpose however the following paragraphs will suffice:

The teacher, wanting the character to be conscious of his inner emptiness, proves that his existence, by being so “from the skin outwards,” depends on others. If the others stop paying attention to him, he does not exist, the reason being that all his values are based on the opinions of the rest. Flash lives not for himself, but for others. He exists in those who see him…By no longer being seen and admired, the artificial self behind which he hides evaporates. By becoming naked, depending on his own values, he realizes that he is nothing. Gurdjieff says that man is born without a soul and that through huge and systematic efforts he must create it for himself. Flash never made an effort to create himself. 

In fact The Flash Stakes His Life On You appears to be some kind of strange attractor. Whether they were familiar with Gurdjieff or not writer John Broome and artist Carmine Infantino created a story that played a significant role in Grant Morrison’s creative visions and magical worldview. Morrison has written that, ” it’s one of the first stories I remember as having a profound impact on my young mind. I can trace many of my own obsessions and concerns as a writer back to this particular root” (Supergods, page 84). These thematic concerns are crystallised on the cover above: “this was the first time a superhero looked out from the flat picture frame into a theoretical higher dimensional space” (page 85). There’s more on Morrison, magic and comic book dimensionality in previous installments of Comics are Magic so I won’t elaborate on that here.

Instead we can close with Morrison’s reading of The Flash#54′s parable, a more optimistic reading than Jodorowosky’s that takes the psychedelic experience rather than Gurdjieff as its explanatory model:

An adult eye may judge the simple morality, the unlikely motivations, and find Broome’s story light. It’s true that there’s all too often an airy, affectless tone to Broome’s work, but this one has deep resonance. It showed in precise detail the breakdown of the superheroic hard body that was occurring everywhere in the Silver Age. It depicted the end of the trip, the spacey, terrifying loss of self and volition that would be experienced by so many young people unprepared for the psychoanalytical effects of Albert Hoffman’s chemical child in a time of war. And it showed them that the only way back was through kindness, connection, and community. (Supergods, page 86)

So there we have it. For one magician The Flash Stakes His Life On You! is a Gurdjieffian parable about the Flash’s inability to attain full consciousness of himself because his reliance on others memories of him serves only to recreate his old, mechanical, artificial self.  For another the story is a psychedelic allegory about the importance of connection and a primer in comic-book metaphysics.

At any rate The Flash Stakes His Life On You! remains a great example of Phillip K. Dick’s observation that “the symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum”, seemingly ripe for mystical interpretations. If anyone has evidence of Alan Moore reading this issue then we’ll have a magician/comics writer hat-trick!

 If the rhizomatic cultural history was suggested as a theoretical corrective to the limitations of ideological analyses then it was also important to address the implied reader at the mercy of ideology in these approaches. As such my thesis involved another strand in which I interviewed comic book readers about their views on the superhero and posthumanism more generally. This was seen as a methodological corrective to the problems outlined in Part Two.

In this section then I intend to familiarise the reader with historical approaches to the question of texts and reader/audiences. Having done this I next offer a model of text-reader relations that draws on the concept of assemblages outlined in Part One. Because of the ethical issues involved and the fact it’s not officially complete yet I will not be presenting the data from my interviews here on the blog at this time. Instead this review presents a brief history of audience studies, highlighting some of the dualities that have informed scholarly understanding of reader/text relations, and how these dualities follow on from the same historically established philosophical dualities that critical Post/Humanism is generally engaged in critiquing. As such I offer a model of reader-text relations as an assemblage, illustrated by a brief overview of historically situated comic-reader assemblages in the Golden, Silver, Dark and Modern Ages of comics.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUDIENCE STUDIES

Concerns about the effects of media content on viewers, readers and listeners are as least as old as Classical Greece. Plato’s worries about the insidious effects of storytelling on young minds led him to call for supervising, “…the makings of fables and legends” (quoted in Ruddock, 2001:125). In brief, it can be stated that audience research begins with the ‘effects tradition’. Sometimes known as the ‘hypodermic needle model’, this paradigm presumes that the media is capable of injecting ideas directly into audience’s minds (Ruddock, 2001: 40). If this notion seems overly simplistic it should be remembered that the impetus for much of this early research was provided by what appeared to be the very concrete persuasive effects of propaganda (by all sides) during the First and Second World Wars. Compounding this view still further were related contemporary concerns with (or vested interests in) the power of advertising (Bratich, 2005:254).

Despite the effects tradition apparently viewing audiences as passive receptors, Bratich points out that the ‘problem’ lay not with their passivity so much as their potential activity. Bratich suggests that the ‘moral panic’ framework, “…signifies the most conspicuous of problematizations [of the audience]” (ibid: 256). In this model, audiences are painted as “potential H-bombs” (Ruddock, 2001:129) primed to explode into violence and salaciousness by exposure to representations of the same. The comic book scare of the 1950s remains an archetypal example of this.

For many the media effects model was considered psychologically reductive. The positivist reliance on laboratory experiment and causal inference were viewed as an over-simplification of a complex issue, and one that was largely driven by a public rather than academic agenda (Livingstone, 1996), particularly evident in the case of moral panics. One of the major problems with effects research had been its emphasis on what the media does to people, misunderstanding, so it was argued, “…the relationship between media and society…[ by wrongly suggesting] that the media stand apart from other social institutions, trends and forces” (Barker and Brooks, 1999:39). A fallacy compounded by, “…a reliance on methods that were incapable of dealing with the morphology of social reality…artificial settings, removing reception from the contexts that made it meaningful” (Ruddock, 2001:175). The media effects model later mutated into a highly theoretical position in certain structuralist and psychoanalytic ideas about the ‘spectator’ in film and literary theory. Several commentators (e.g. Brown, 1997, Murphy, 2004, Moores, 1993) agree that the film studies journal Screen was the most influential and vocal promulgator of this theoretical perspective.

SCREEN THEORY AND TEXTUAL DETERMINISM

Put crudely, the position adopted by the most important Screen theorists was that, “…one could assess the social impact of a text simply by looking at its structure” (Ruddock, 2001:125). Utilising various admixtures (“a heady theoretical cocktail” (Moores, 1993:6)) of Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic concepts (Creed, 1998), Althusser’s notions of ‘interpellation’ and ‘Ideological State Apparatus’, and Foucauldian notions of how (cinematic) discourses construct subjectivity (Barker and Brooks, 1999:113) the scholarly analysis of cinema shifted:

From considering only the political content of individual films to the function of the cinema itself as a vehicle for disseminating the ideology of the dominant culture…seeking to uncover the cinematic mechanisms that bestow the illusion of subjectivity upon viewers by suturing them into the narrative through identification with the fictional subjects on the screen                (Brown, 1997:23)

In effect taking a position of ‘textual determinism’ (Moores, 1993: 6) in which the ‘spectator’ became a ‘function of the text’ (Barker, 2005: 360), unknowingly fixed in a textually inscribed ‘subject positions’, “…a viewing subject with no alternative but to ‘make the meanings the film makes for it’” (Brown, 1997:24). For Barker, “…the concepts of ‘spectatorship’, of ‘interpellation’ and of the ‘gaze’ simply reproduced in abstracted language” the same claims expressed by the media-effects tradition (2005:359). Staiger has also highlighted this criticism, accusing the Screen theorists of effectively implying:

That film audiences (and Hollywood cinema) were effectively homogenous, asocial and trans-historical… In conceptualising the spectator as essentially an effect of textual processes occupying a single position fixed by a films formal characteristics, these totalising models implied a uniformity of viewer response and meaning production, regardless of who was watching the film or the conditions under which it was being viewed            (quoted in Murphy, 2004:123)

Stuart Hall and the CCCS to develop the next important model of audience-text relations, that of ‘encoding and decoding’. In common with Screen and earlier theories of mass communication, Hall (1973) also argued that the mass media, “…play a crucial role in defining, disseminating, popularizing and protecting the beliefs and values of a social mainstream, dominated by a narrow social elite” (Ruddock, 2001: 120). That is, that a text could indeed be ‘encoded’ with an ideological message. However, Hall’s theory parted ways with earlier theories in two key respects. Firstly, he emphasised that texts are polysemic-if not quite pluralist. Hence, certain alternative readings (‘decodings’) were possible of a text even though certain ideological forces foreshortened the range of available meanings, encouraging viewers to instead accept the ‘preferred’ or ‘encoded’ reading. Secondly, and related to this, Hall emphasized that, “…the social subjects who decode a media message are not the same as the text’s implied readers” (Moores, 1993: 18). In other words, even if we accept, as the Screen theorists did, that the structure of a text serves to convey a preferred message, and that such messages are often indicative of the social values of the ruling elite, it does not follow that the message can be transmitted directly into viewers’ minds and hearts. Rather, the message must first be decoded by the receiver.

This interpretive act inevitably introduces a certain amount of white noise into the signal, opening the possibility for alternative decodings. The receiver’s ability to decode a textual signal ‘correctly’ is dependent on their own standpoints. It is worth emphasizing that Hall was keen to stress that certain preferred readings were intended by producers i.e. that the semiotic structure of a text limited the amount of readings that were possible. In terms of genre for instance, one could not easily decode a western for a sci-fi movies based on the visual cues presented by the film- horses and hats would signify cowboys and not astronauts to most viewers most of the time. However, this is not the same as the textual determinism of the Screen theorists, for in the encoding/decoding model, the meaning does not lie only in the text but in the interaction between text and viewer. The cultural critic cannot say what a film means per se, only what its preferred meaning might be. And even then, it does not follow that all viewers decode it this way.

This being so, the reader/viewer/decoder, while able to engage in, “…some free play within any conative sign” (ibid), is, if not constrained, then at least encouraged to read it in a certain way and within certain limits. Hall postulated three hypothetical positions from which readers might decode texts:

They could accept the preferred reading; they could accept parts of the text while rejecting others, constructing what he called a negotiated reading; or they could reject what the text was trying to make them think in an oppositional reading.                                                             (Ruddock, 2001:126)

Following the discussion thus far it is possible to identify an historical trajectory in cultural studies, “…from a focus on texts to one on audiences” (Bratich, 2005:243). The first major step in this direction,“…was characterized by the method of audience ethnography, which displaced the controlled settings for investigating the variety of encodings” (ibid). The theoretical impetus for this turn was the concept of ‘active audiences’. What is of interest at this juncture is merely the insight that audiences engage in dialogues, or meaning-making processes, with media texts, and are not just passively coerced into – crudely – white, male, bourgeois subject positions by them. The audience was now ‘active’.

This allowed later scholars such as Fiske to theorises that audiences may engage in ‘resistive readings’ (1987), “…an interpretation of a text which changes its encoded meaning at the point of reception” (Ruddock, 2001:126). Sometimes called ‘reading against the grain’, this process is said to involve not a rejection of the encoded values of the text, as in Hall’s oppositional reading, but a subversive interpretation of it. Ruddock presents the film Top Gun as an example. While an oppositional reading might decode the film’s semiotic elements as furthering a jingoistic, militaristic American ideology, and reject the film on those grounds, a resistive reading might position Top Gun as a homosexual fantasy. As a special blog bonus this can be illustrated with a video clip of Quentin Tarantino’s cameo in Sleep With Me (1994):

Such a reading only be done by working within a film’s textual elements rather than rejecting them:

Since the signifier is always potentially ambiguous, it follows that the preferred meaning of a text might be unclear, or might be open to subversion (Ruddock, 2001:126)

Fiske describes what he calls ‘activated texts’; “texts that are effectively produced primarily through the audience’s appropriation of meaning rather than the producer’s attempted positioning of the subject” (Brown, 1997:43). Indeed, he has suggested elsewhere that this is what makes a text pleasurable for the reader- that, “texts must be ‘producerly’, that is serve to as a basis for some form of creativity on the part of the audience” (Ruddock, 2001:154). The idea of active audiences has had significant impact on cultural studies. In a methodological parallel, much work in this area has taken an ‘ethnographic turn’ (Moores, 1993:1) in investigating, “…the media’s varied uses and meanings for particular social subjects in particular cultural contexts” (ibid).

For instance, Jenkins’s ‘textual poachers’ seek to defend the practices of people whom, from his perspective, can be claimed as a subaltern group in as much as their tastes and desires are not sanctioned by the official culture, arguing that fans are not simply obsessive consumers but active producers he takes his central concept of ‘textual poaching’ from Michel Dc Certeau. Brown (1997) summarises De Certeau’s argument:

De Certeau characterized culture as an ongoing struggle between textual producers and consumers…a battle for possession of the text and its meanings… [And] saw consumers as metaphorical poachers, making guerrilla raids into hegemonically controlled spaces                                                                   (Brown, 1997:44)

In Jenkins adaptation of these ideas, “…fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media” (Jenkins, 1992:23). This identity building often incorporates material practices such as the creation of literature and video featuring favourite characters. This network of inter and extra-textual practices extends to the creation of fanzines, discussion groups and websites, the organising of conventions and the process of collecting. For Jenkins, this often places fans in opposition to the producers and owners of the copyrighted texts they are poaching from and repurposing.

Understanding popular culture, “…in terms of productivity, not of reception”, Fiske provides three modes of semiotic productivity- audience activity that, “…occurs at the interface between the industrially produced cultural commodity (narrative, music, star, etc.) and the everyday life of the fan” (1992: 37). These are semiotic, enunciative and textual productivity. Semiotic productivity, “…consists of making meanings of social identity and social experiences from the semiotic resources of the cultural economy” (ibid). Fiske remarks that this type of productivity is not just the province of fans but relates to audiences generally. Semiotic productivity is interior. Enunciative productivity, on the other hand, is when, “…meanings made are spoken and are shared within a face to face or oral culture” (ibid). Clothing and collecting are also forms of enunciative productivity. Textual productivity, finally, is the creation of written texts, films, illustrations and songs that draw upon the object of fan attention.

While theorists in the Screen mould might be accused of seeing ideological, “…conspiracy at every turn, Fiske [and others] seems to find cause for celebration on behalf of the subaltern in their every meeting with mass culture” (Brown, 1997:45). Never the less, active audience theory has not quite exorcised the spectre of ideology and the question of power. Barker and Brooks (1999:124) note that in making room for concepts of agency and opposition such theories still leave notions of

‘Ideology’ exactly as they were. They still involve a notion of ‘positioning’, that is, that if there isn’t ‘critique’ or ‘opposition’, then ‘discourses’ and ‘ideologies’ are like viruses which invade the brain. But for resistance, texts get you.

Implicit within fan studies insistence on activity, productivity and poaching of mass produced texts is the suggestion that, “but for audiences’ ‘activity’ or ‘resistance’ an unsullied text might influence them” (Barker, 2010: 6).

STUDYING COMIC BOOK READERS

How do these debates relate to superhero comics? Part Two highlighted several analyses of superhero comics that implied a readers (or readers) at the mercy of ideological manipulation, but none of them incorporated the views of actual readers into their work, speaking about them instead. Putsz writes, “…inside interpretations of this culture may be problematic and subjective, but the few outsider perspectives on comic books…are perhaps even more flawed by denying the consumers the power to explain how they use their favoured texts” (1999:202). Maigret (1999) and Brown (2001) both concur with this, and further call into question the notion of ideology In comics being a “univocal process of inculcation” (Maigret, 1999). Brown finds that, “…fans demonstrate that they do not just passively accept dominant messages” (2001:200).

However, these recent studies of comic book fans are not the first flowering of interest in their activities. As has been seen the comics scare of the 1950s flamed by Werthem’s Seduction of the Innocent encapsulated the media effects model, whereby innocent children are converted into sex-crazed, murderous, fascists by their comic book reading. But even as early as that dissenting voices could be heard. For instance, Ruddock cites a 1949 study that utilized open-ended, qualitative interviews to investigate the role of comic books in young male readers’ lives: “they did not find a moronic, uniform sample seduced into sin by these lurid rags, but instead found readers displaying different preferences and levels of media literacy who derived a range of pleasures from comics” (2001:69). Comics history and the mediums social standing may have been very different if this study, and not Werthem’s had proved the most influential.

Putsz (1999) draws on historical research, interviews, fanzines and other publications in order to document the history of comics fandom. He highlights that comics fandom consists of a spectrum of what he, adopting the idiom of his subjects, calls ‘fan-boys’ and ‘true believers’- mainstream comic book fans (of corporate superhero narratives) and ‘alternative’ interests (in underground and independent comics, often autobiographical).  While Putsz’s emphasis is on explicating comics fandom generally, Brown’s (1997 a, b; 2001) approach addresses issues of race and masculinity specifically. Drawing upon ideas of cultural capital and utilizing participant observation and interviews, Brown argues that Milestone Comics provided alternative models of black masculinity for their readers.  Martin Barker’s (1984) A Haunt of Fears investigated the horror comics scare in Britain while his next study centred upon the short-lived British weekly Action, itself a victim of a moral panic in the late 1970s. Barker analysed questionnaires (containing both quantitative and qualitative elements) from 135 former readers of the comic. By asking respondents to rate themselves as ‘casual’, ‘regular’ or ‘committed’ readers of the comic Barker discovered an interesting trend that contradicted the claims of media effects theorists: “it appeared that the closer the connection, and the greater the ‘influence’ of the comic, the more readers were made to think and reflect and argue” (Barker and Brooks, 1999:14). This research was followed by a (1993) study of readers of another British comic, 2000AD.

This time utilizing a “questionnaire incorporating a range of quantitative indicators, a Semantic Differential test, and opportunities for open-ended responses” (ibid), Barker analysed 250 responses. Again, for readers who took the comic ‘seriously’ and allowed it, “to cross into other parts of their thinking”, the apparent violence and horror of 2000AD’s (often post-apocalyptic) stories:

Constituted it as a source of hope for the future. The explanation seemed to be that in the context of the lived experience of these readers, ‘bleakness’ represented a kind of realism which allowed them to ‘keep their imagination alive’. The significance, of course, is that this finding is the exact inverse of the frequently claims relationship, that the contents of a mass medium tend to reproduce themselves, in the same form, in the heads of audiences, ‘violence’ breeding violence…and so on. (ibid: 15)

My thesis takes the position that the simple categorization of passive versus active readers will not suffice since it, “…does no justice to kaleidoscopic reactions to the media” (Ruddock, 2001:177), and fails to account for “emotional and physical [embodied] pleasures” (ibid: 152; cf Barker and Brooks, 1999; Williams, 1991). As such, it is suspicious of the conspiratorial claim that the producers of media texts have intentionally mounted ideological pressures on the reader, and suggest instead that, as Brown puts it, “it would seem that ideology, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder” (28).

SOME NOTES ON CONTINUITY AS RHIZOME

Much of what I want to discuss in this section has been cut from the thesis for the sake of space and remains to be written up properly. Some of these ideas were presented under the title “Fans and Fiction Networks: A Rhizomatic Approach To Superhero Comics and Their Readers” which I presented at 2011’s Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Bandes dessinees and Comics. As I still intend to write this up as a separate article I will just offer the abstract here and a few notes to clarify:

Accepting that Comics Studies is still an expanding field, and arguing that one of its current strengths lies in its lack of a precise disciplinary boundary, this paper begins by noting that despite Barker’s thorough deconstruction of ideological readings of comic books, such approaches remain a regular feature of  such work, particularly superhero comics. Going on to discuss how the rise of audience studies, and fan studies in particular, presented something of a riposte (to greater or lesser degrees) to such textually deterministic readings in the study of film, television and literature, the paper acknowledges the strengths but also the drawbacks of audience studies and notes the relative lack of literature of this sort on comics fans with irony, given that, perhaps more than any medium, the relationship between comic books and fans can be seen as ‘symbiotic’ (Barker, 1989). It goes on to discuss the concept of the ‘rhizome’ finding it particularly useful in overcoming deterministic theories of ideology but also in providing a model for describing the interaction between text and reader. Furthermore, it provides a model for understanding the complexities of continuity, those growing and convoluted ‘fiction networks’ that many superhero comics take place in, making particular reference to the origin story of Captain America , DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths  and All Star Superman to illustrate these complexities.  The paper concludes by showing how these ideas have affected the author’s research thus far, what this can contribute to existing research, and what further questions this poses.

Rather than address the idea of continuity as rhizome (more on the complexities and metaphysics of continuity elsewhere on the blog if you want it though) this section focuses instead on the way that the rhizome of continuity includes readers within it. First of all we must establish what more arboreal understandings of continuity have concluded.

Perhaps the most famous analysis of this kind is Eco’s (1972) Myth of Superman, which argued that Superman’s failure to fight injustice on the macro level implies, “…an implicit acceptance and defence on the hero’s part of the tenets of capitalism and bureaucracy” (Peaslee, 2007:37).  Indeed, several such formalist critiques have centred on the serial nature of superhero narratives. Andrae elaborates upon Umberto Eco’s influential essay on the myth of Superman by claiming that the lack of continuity between issues, “…reveals a fixed core that is impervious to substantial change , thereby becoming a vehicle for the stable reproduction of social relations” (Andrae, 1980:136), and that furthermore, “…the disintegration of time in Superman stories has ominous psychosocial implications” (137). Both Eco and Andrae’s pieces fail to fully grasp the nature of comic book continuity, which was building as they were writing. Dittmer (2007) speaks of ‘the tyranny of the serial’, claiming that the serialized narrative and continuity of superhero comics enforces a ‘structural limitation’ on comic book discourse. Wolf-Meyer (2003) and Hughes (2006) make similar points to Dittmer, and all use Moore and Gibbon’s Watchmen to illustrate their arguments, comparing the  12 issue limited story with its conclusive ending to on-going superhero narratives, whose ending is always indefinitely delayed in a ‘continuous present’ as Eco called it (or ‘floating timeline’ as the comics community refers to it (Wolk, 2007)). Wolf-Meyer argues that:

Because superhero comics are predicated on preserving the status quo, they expect of their readership a conservative reading strategy that translates into desire for conservative narratives-utopia achieved would be a radical narrative, whereas utopia attempted and failed retains the conservative status quo while appeasing the conservative ideology of readers                                        (2007: 2003)

Dittmer, Eco, Andrae, Wolf-Meyer and Hughes all argue for the conservative ideological effects of continuity and serialisation, and charge it with conservative ideology, and it is possible to argue that such a theoretical position has something in common with the sort of structuralist/ideological analysis exemplified by the screen theorists of the 1970s, many of whom exhibited a ‘textual determinism’ (Moores, 1993: 6) in which the ‘spectator’ became a ‘function of the text’ (Barker, 2005:360), unknowingly fixed in a textually inscribed ‘subject position’. Returning from film to comics we might take, for example, Andrae’s claim that, “…one could argue that the destruction of time [in comic book continuity] undermines the individuals capacity to become a self-constituted subject” (177), as applying much the same logic to superhero comics and their readers.

By contrast, considering the reader-comic relationship as a rhizome, a singular multiplicity that contains readers and texts rather than a singular text and a multiplicity of readers, would abandon any such ontological hierarchy, instead considering readers AND texts AND creators AND publishers AND characters as existing on the same plane. At the very least it is obvious that there can be no comic book culture without comic book readers.

Comics’ fandom grew out of science fiction fandom. Indeed, the creators of Superman were highly active this already thriving subculture during the 1930s, as was Julius Schwartz, the highly respected DC comics’ editor who oversaw Superman’s comics adventures in the 1950s (Jones, 2004). During the Golden Age of comics publishers sponsored and controlled their own fan-groups. Hence, young readers during World War 2 were invited to join Captain America’s Sentinels of Liberty, for example. In 1947 the first issue of Comics Collectors News was published (Schlesinger, 2010). This fanzine addressed those nascent collectors and admirers of the form that cartoonist Jules Fieffer (2003) writes of in his memoir of that time.

EC Comics was the first comics company to seriously engage with their readers. Editor William Gaines encouraged his ‘EC addicts’ to write in letters that were published in the back pages of titles such as Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science. The letters were printed with names and addresses, encouraging postal correspondence between fans (a feature of early sci-fi fandom) and providing the building blocks for a growing fan community. EC Comics would feel he brunt of the comics controversy of the 1950s (Williams, 1994) but ironically the comics controversy and the advent of the Comics Code helped, in a sense, to foster a sense of community among comics fan still further by stigmatising them (Lopes, 2009) and thus making the need for legitimation, or conversely, pride in their outsider status, more pressing. But it was during the Silver Age of the 1960s and the second coming of superhero comics that comics fan culture really began to consolidate itself.

Marvel Comics picked up where EC had left off. Marvel’s editor-in chief and main writer Stan Lee cultivated a convivial mood of conspiratorial agreement with readers by using his editorials to flatter their intelligence for choosing Marvel, and encouraging readers to write in. Regular dialogues took place within the letters pages both between the Marvel group and other readers.  Readers were introduced to the “Marvel Bullpen” as Lee called it in his editorials, “Bullpen Bulletins”. Herein, Stan Lee would write about the small group of writers and artists that worked in the Marvel offices.  He introduced a policy of naming the artist, inker and letterer in each comic, more often than not with nicknames like “Jolly Jack Kirby” or “Swinging Steve Ditko”. The writer was usually Stan Lee himself.  The precedent for this was EC, who had always credited writers and artists. Marvel also introduced continuity to comic books. Not only did stories run over several issues but events that happened in one book could have repercussions in another. Characters from different tilte existed within a shared universe where they could meet each other, fight, marry, leave school or have children. Lee encouraged Marvel Maniacs to write in with suggestions for stories and team-ups. He also introduced the ‘No-Prize’, awarded to correspondents who highlighted continuity flaws in the then still young Marvel Universe and could come up with imaginative ways of accounting for them. Many of these practices were still being continued by Marvel into the late eighties and early nineties.

The Silver Age saw a growth in fanzines and the first comic book conventions where fans could gather with like-minded people to buy, sell and discuss comics. In a related development, this period also witnessed the birth of underground ‘comix’, independently published comics that dealt, often explicitly, with the concerns of the emerging countercultures without having to obey the censorious strictures of the Comic Book Code. Underground, or alternative comix, “… were interested in self-expression above all” (Wolk, 2007:39). Influenced as much by EC’s Mad Magazine and the funny animal books of the Golden Age as by LSD and rock and roll, the comics of the underground displayed a level of sex, violence and drug use unimaginable within the pages of a Comics Code approved mainstream comic. Although some have argued that comix represented an oppositional culture to the mainstream publishers (Williams, 1994, Wolk, 2007) it was the underground comix that helped pave the way for the consolidation of mainstream comic culture. The fact that many independent publishers that sprang up to take advantage of the, “… Informal network of head shops and record stores that were prime outlets for selling underground “comix”” (Wolk, 2007:39) also led to the system that would replace the traditional outlets.

This alternative system led to the opening of outlets, “… devoted primarily or exclusively to the sale of comic books and commonly operated by proprietors who were also comic book fans” (Wright, 2003:260). Soon publishers began to distribute comics directly to these stores. This had several advantages as Wolk illustrate, “…since the direct market meant that publishers got orders before they had to print their comics, they could print exactly as many copies of each issue as the market demanded…without having to worry about paying for copies they would never sell or losing their shirt on returns. That meant that stranger, artier projects that wouldn’t have stood a chance on the newsstands could at least break even” (ibid: 41). Wright elaborates further… “the specialty retailer placed unsold comic books in plastic bags, boxed them, and retailed them-often with higher price tag-as collectible items” (Ibid:261). Pustz (1999) highlights how this an interest in comic book continuity to develop still further as older comics became more readily available.

The annual Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide debuted around the beginning of this stage in 1970 and, “… fan culture became a cottage industry in and of itself” (ibid: 253). At the same time fans were taking control within the industry. Coogan writes, “… adult fans began moving into the industry as professionals…fans offered the comics companies a chance to fill the [creative] vacuum with employees who specifically wanted to write comics and were young enough not to worry about benefits” (Coogan, 2006: 218). Moreover, it has always been true that any given comic book lives or dies by fan interest in it. This is purely economic in most instances, but a notable crystallization of this effect occurred in 1988 when DC invited readers themselves to vote on whether Tim Drake-recently appointed as Batman’s newest Robin, but increasingly unpopular with fans- should be killed by the Joker or not. Over 10, 000 phone votes were cast and Robin’s death was decreed by a narrow margin. The direct market had proved profitable for the comic book industry, but it also had a side effect on the content of comic books, in that the continuities of the Marvel and DC Universes became increasingly complex.  This has led to what Wolk calls “superhero metacomics” aimed at, “… ‘super readers’: readers familiar enough with enormous numbers of old comics that they’ll

Craft reminds us that although comics universes are produced by corporate interests it is never the less, “…overly reductive to think of the corporation as a unitary agent, or to think that its power is absolute” (Craft, 2004:138). In fact, they must respond to, “…coherent and vehement reader communities, which can coalesce around Internet communications and publishing technologies to organize those desires and to make them known” (ibid).  Moreover, the lines between producer and consumer in comic book culture have always been permeable. Comic book fans moved quickly into the comic book industry towards the end of the Silver Age.

Nor is this just one continuity. As seen above comic book universes are in fact a series of connected multiverses and readers have become accustomed to holding these multiple timelines in their head (Jenkins, 2009:20). Collins (1991) calls this a kind of hyper-consciousness’ As Wolk points out, the Marvel and DC Universes have grown so complex that they have led to what he calls “superhero meta-comics” aimed at, “…‘super readers’: readers familiar enough with enormous numbers of old comics that they’ll understand what’s really being discussed in the story” (2007, 105). Kaveney suggests that these two seventy year old continuities (the Marvel and DC ‘Universes’) are, “the largest narrative constructions in human culture…and that learning to navigate them was a skill-set all of its own” (2008:25).  Putsz, too, describes the importance of continuity to long term readers, noting that for some fans there is even pleasure in the difficulty non-fans have in comprehending continuity (1999:130). As such, any study of committed comic book readers has of necessity to take their unique fiction-network into account if a fuller understanding of the pleasures of reading superhero comics is to be achieved.

As Ndalianis observes, reader’s memories serve, “…as a databank of complex, interconnected, and retrievable chunks of information” (2009: 282), arguing that committed consumers of superhero narratives,

Become engrossed in a more conventional sense, with the story and themes unravelling along syntagmatic lines; but they’re also encouraged to participate with the work on the paradigmatic level through the multi-layered, intertextul references…the reader is an intergral part of the superhero genre. Through their immediate experience and, later, their memory of the experience of reading a comic book, the reader becomes as embedded in the hyper-timelines of a superhero story…[superhero comic book readers] actively participate in a game-like convention that’s about the construction of the rules of the superhero genre across media: its various points of origin, its points of divergence, and its radical transformations (Ndalianis, 2009: 285-285)

Without going into more detail here it can at least be suggested that in this model of the text-reader relationship readers, texts and producers atre not in opposition with one another but part of a singular process. In short, readers of superhero comics are part of the rhizome of comic book continuity. This notion leads us a little closer to overcoming the dualities that have previously characterised audience studies.

OVERCOMING DUALITIES

As we have seen investigations into supposed ‘media effects’ have resulted in the development of a number of competing paradigms but has generally been marked by what Brown succinctly describes as an opposition, “…between theories of the producers hegemonic power and the audience’s ability to construct active, critical and oppositional interpretations” (Brown, 1997:20). While theorists in the Screen mould might be accused of seeing ideological, “…conspiracy at every turn, Fiske [and others] seems to find cause for celebration on behalf of the subaltern in their every meeting with mass culture” (Brown, 1997:45). As Moores notes, studies of audiences since the 1970s articulate

A productive tension between those cultural analysts who are primarily concerned with the structural patterns of distinction, segmentation and social reproduction-and those preferring to acknowledge the creative practices of ‘poaching’, bricolage and social resistance (Moores, 1993:138)

A theoretical tension, in other words, between constraint and creativity, or pessimism and optimism as regard text-reader relations (ibid). Never the less, active audience theory has not quite exorcised the spectre of ideology and the question of power. Barker and Brooks note that in making room for concepts of agency and opposition such theories still leave notions of

‘Ideology’ exactly as they were. They still involve a notion of ‘positioning’, that is, that if there isn’t ‘critique’ or ‘opposition’, then ‘discourses’ and ‘ideologies’ are like viruses which invade the brain. But for resistance, texts get you. (1999:124)

Implicit within fan studies insistence on activity, productivity and poaching of mass produced texts is the suggestion that, “but for audiences’ ‘activity’ or ‘resistance’ an unsullied text might influence them” (Barker, 2010: 6). These dichotomies-between text/reader, reader/producer, activity/passivity, ideology/resistance-r and the question of how they might be overcome, return us to Post/Humanism.

A POST/HUMAN MODEL OF TEXT-READER RELATIONS

A posthuman perspective on text-audience relations suggests itself. Theories of audience-text relations frequently hinge on a binary opposition between audience and text. Other authors argue that this dichotomy was simplistic and that the comics industry, for example, should instead be seen as engaging in a dialogic encounter with readers. Brown suggests that this a sympathetic rather than “a struggle for power and meaning” (1997:21). For Barker there is a ‘symbiotic relationship’ between producers of formulaic narratives (such as superhero comics) and their consumers:

A symbiote is an organism which lives in a relationship of mutual dependence with another. Although it is possible to study it separately, any full account of its structure and its behaviour depends upon studying it as an organism-in-relation. (1989:129)

Barker’s organic metaphor of the symbiote could be reframed in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms as an assemblage (see Part One for more detail).  An assemblage is any amount ‘things’ or bits of ‘things’ gathered into a single context. A comic book is an assemblage, as is the superhero.  While the metaphor of the symbiote presents producer and consumer as a mostly harmonious whole when considered as assemblage the relationship between these two parts is itself constantly forming new assemblages: reader AND text AND creator AND history AND science AND so on.

Film theorist Patricia MacCormack has elaborated upon this idea, writing that it is a fiction to think that “cinema is a version of actual sexuality simply repeated on screen…What happens when there is sexuality without the possibility of heterosexual or homosexual union? What happens to gender if sexuality is not based on oppositional terms?” The viewing-assemblage formed between certain horror films and viewer then is capable of opening new pathways of desire. MacCormack writes that watching such images, submitting to ‘cinemasochism’ can be a catalyst towards new forms of becoming.  MacCormack writes that:

Spectator and screen form a machinic assemblage. Machinic should not be confused with mechanical. ‘Machinic configurations do not recognise distinctions between persons, organs, material flows, and semiotic flows.’ (1996:46) The spectator and screen machine is a ‘composition of deterritorialising intensities’ (1992: 38). It is an arrangement of a body and a surface, but the machine is independent of the materiality of its parts according to Guattari. It describes the system of connection by which the components perturb and affect each other as they are perturbed and affected. Each perturbation shifts points of intensification and changes the direction of flows, making some areas dense and others dissipate. The territory is remapped, deteritorialisation leading to a re-composition. But the machine structure itself, the act of watching, remains the same (MacCormack, 2005: 7).

A reader’s body is an assemblage which, “…retains its own impetus…for forming assemblages which allow desire to flow in different directions, producing new possibilities and potentials… towards a disarticulated body whose organs (and their movements and potentials) are no longer structured in the same way, or structured at all (Maslin, 2004:88). Even so, a body’s becoming remains always transitional: “A body-in becoming soon re-stratifies: either captured by or lured by the socius… and these territorialisations are also never fully complete: a living desiring body will always form new assemblages that have the potential to transform it and its territories” (ibid). Maslin argues that these ideas allows us, in his example, to conceptualise drug addiction as a process: “…as a verb: a doing word, not a descriptive noun…not reduced a priori to a single process” (Maslin, 2004: 89), thus moving drug discourse away from pejorative moral judgements about right and wrong to an ethico-aesthetic approach that takes, “…thought (and ethics) away from internal meanings, causes and essences, and toward surface effects, intensities and flows” (ibid:85). I want to apply these same ideas to comics and their readers.

As assemblages the “…function or potential or ‘meaning’” of a comic book or a reader, “becomes entirely dependent on which other bodies or machines it forms an assemblage with” (Malins, 2004; 85). So we are moved away from “internal meanings, causes and essences”. If ideology is found in a comic book it is only because an ideology-assemblage connected up with the comic book assemblage, each altering the function of the other in the process. A different theoretical assemblage would produce a different ‘meaning’, uncover a different ‘essence’. At the level of textual analysis then the concept of assemblages moves analysis away from what the superhero ‘IS’ to what the superhero can do.

As already discussed, ideological readings imply an audience at the mercy of ideology or, at best, engaged in a battle for meaning with creators and producers. Reconfigured as a reading-assemblages instead the focus shifts to how reader’s bodies connect up with the machinic assemblage of the book, forming a new assemblage which in turn connects up with other bodies and machines, “…people, substances, knowledge, institutions-any of which may redirect or block its flows of desire” (ibid). Being a fan becomes a process: a verb and not a noun. Comics and readers form a rhizome with one another, an assemblage of an assemblage. Assemblages allows desire to flow in different directions it produces, “…new possibilities and potentials…brief lines of movement away from organization and stratification” (Malins, 2004:88). While the concept of active audiences often places the practices of textual poaching and productivity as ways of resisting cultural hegemony the concept of reader-text assemblages instead views such activity as forms of becoming, born of desire rather than resistance.

Assemblages are capable of bringing about any number of effects, and of containing assemblages within itself and forming new assemblages with readers, libraries, church hall jumble sales, bonfires and so on. Section Two demonstrated how the superhuman bodies of the Golden, Silver and Modern age were assemblages. The Perfect Body of the Golden Age comprised bodybuilding AND eugenics AND Nietzsche AND Darwin AND new printing technologies AND Fascism AND readers AND so on. The reading assemblages formed with the Perfect Body allowed desire to flow in particular directions. Consider the hundreds of thousands of copies of Captain America shipped to US troops each month to boost patriotic morale, or the thousands of readers who sent off for Charles Atlas’s bodybuilding program.

In Part Two I wrote that the posthuman Military-Industrial body deterritorialised the Perfect Body. This act of detrritorialisation extends to the assemblage formed by reader and Military-Industrial body. Between 1969 and 1971 the letters pages of Captain America featured

Extended debates occurred between readers discussing the meaning of patriotism and antiwar protests, the morality of political apathy, the role of violence in conflict resolution, nationalism versus global community, and the Vietnam War…several argues that he needed to be fighting in Vietnam. Others argued that he was an agent of the establishment and needed to be shown rethinking his position (Costello)

While in the letters pages of Iron Man one reader

Warned that as a munitions manufacturer, Iron Man was “going to have to do some pretty big restructuring of his life to avoid being classified as an enemy of the people. One reader simply condemned the superhero as a “profiteering, capitalist, war-mongering pig”…published letters from liberals far outnumbered those from conservatives, who complained that the series had already moved too far to the left (Wright, 2001:241)

In a different register Maigret describes how some stories allowed readers to analyse their own experiences and memories, citing a reader who was prompted by an issue of Daredevil dealing with drugs to, “…express his emotions after his cousin had died of an overdoes” (Maigret, 1999:14). Such examples demonstrate how the comics-assemblage which has frequently opened up “new possibilities and potentials” by way of political debate for instance or motional release.

The reading-assemblage formed with the Silver Age Cosmic Body was known to form further assemblages, as in this unpublished letter to Marvel Comics describing a reader+marijuana+music+comic book assemblage:

I like to smoke a bowl, put on ELO or Pink Floyd and read the latest issue of Doctor Strange                                                                                (quoted in Howe, 2012)

We can only imagine what interesting becomings this particular assemblage engendered (for a great deal more on the Cosmic Body-assemblage see my essay The Silver Age Superhero as psychedelic Shaman).

CONCLUSION

Understandings of audience-text relations have too often rested on a binary understanding of reader and text, text and creator, and creator and reader as separate. I argue for understanding reader-text relations in machinic terms as assemblages or rhizomes. This moves analysis of the superhero’s posthuman body away from theories of ideology (and inherent assumptions about implied readers) towards an ethico-aesthtetics of the superhuman posthuman body, asking not what it is, or what it ‘means’ but what it can do, what new becomings does it allow?

In the conclusion of this thesis review I want to pull all of these strands from Parts One, Two and Three together and answer the most pressing question that can be asked of any thesis: why should anyone give a shit? Or, to put it in less colourful terms, what is to be gained from understanding the posthuman body as rhizome? What are the advantages of considering readers and superhero comics as an assemblage, theoretically and philosophically? I hope to show that these are not simply abstract concerns, theoretical masturbation or a waste of taxpayer’s money. I hope instead to demonstrate that any consideration of the posthuman is always a corporeal concern. As such it is also a subject of political concern and a question of social policy-what kind of bodies do we want to create, and who gets to do the creating? What new assemblages does it form?

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In an interesting rumination at transhumanblog the author muses that:

As the imminent emergence of a transhuman society begins to take to shape and moves increasingly from the realm of theory to fact, transhumanists and futurists are going to have to start asking some hard questions. No longer can we focus simply on the technological challenges of creating such a future, but we must also consider what those technologies imply for society and the international community. Much has been written and said about the threat of uneven distribution of these technologies…Little has been done to address these concerns though, and what has been done tends to focus on inequality within the developed nations that most futurists are from.

This is an interesting point and worth elaborating upon. Hence this post. The author above is right to raise the point that such critiques “focus on inequality within the developed nations that most futurists are from“. Given that the libertarian technological utopia espoused by some transhumanists is only made possible by a globalised economy we would do well to address the question of global disparities. As the author above goes on to write:

it is of paramount importance that we focus strong attention on the technological and infrastructural gap that exists been post-industrial and developing nations. Unless we take strong, positive action to address these issues, transhumanism will not be the global revolution we hope it to be, and we will instead take the form of the techno-oligarchs that we fear.

In a similar register Joshua Ellis has noted that:

There are nearly a billion Facebook users in the world, and half a billion Twitter users (though of course there’s probably nearly a 90% overlap between those two). Those are indeed astonishing numbers, but the problem is that sometime around March 12, 2012, we passed seven billion people living on Earth. That means that the vast majority of humans aren’t on Facebook or Twitter. The majority of people have mobile phones, but there are more people still who don’t have mobile phones than use Facebook.

Most of us never see these people, of course, except as faces briefly glimpsed in the background of news footage. They are outside our Big Room. Not because we’re intentionally keeping them out, you understand; at least, not really on any overt institutional level. Basically. We don’t do that any more, and we feel good about it.

It’s just that living in the Big Room is expensive, you see…and, well, these people can’t afford it. They don’t have Facebook because they can’t afford the technological artifacts that would allow them to be on Facebook. They don’t tweet about how much the new version of iOS sucks, because they don’t have any way to tweet and they damn sure don’t have a device that will run iOS, because these devices cost more than these people often make in a year.

For all the utopian dreaming of  transhumanist philosophers it remains the case that much of it remains rooted in a Western libertarian tradition. Elsewhere on this blog I wrote that:

So it’s important to remember that Transhumanism’s Utopian dreaming of personal freedom and belief in self-improvement are rooted, as Sobchack has noted, “…in privilege and the status quo: male privilege, white privilege, economic privilege, educational privilege, first world privilege” (1994:25)….As a recent European Parliament report on converging technologies describes it, the emergence of Transhumanism as a political-philosophical movement, “…has its roots in Californian libertarianism…faith in small entrepreneurs, technology and the minimum of government intervention are its characteristics”. In short, “…its dreams are grounded in the freedom to buy  and- especially-  freedom to sell”. It is necessary then to address questions of power and social divisions if such technologies are not to rapidly exacerbate already existing social divides, such as the creation of technologically enhanced ‘upper class’ and a ‘merely human’ lower class.

Moreover as James Hughes has noted there remains a glaring lack of ”cross-pollination between the left-wing academic cyborgologists and the transhumanists”. Transhumanism’s combined emphasis on neo-liberal economics and rationalisation, its unwillingness to engage with the more complex issues raise by critical-theoretical Post/Humanism and its Western-centric world-view present a number of troubling issues. Joshua Ellis addresses some of these in his brilliant essay on the looming possibility of a ’grim meat hook future’.

Bemoaning the fact that, as it stands, “technological innovation is driven by Silicon Valley-style venture capitalism”, he writes:

I hate these people [venture capitalists and entrepreneurs]  and wouldn’t piss on most of them if they were on fire, but that’s fine; I hate bankers and lawyers too, like every other blowhard bohemian iconoclast does, and I doubt any of them are losing any sleep over it. What bothers me is that we’ve effectively put these walking hard-ons in charge of building that capital-F Future, in every sector of the innovation industry, from genetically grown food to biotechnology to communications to spaceship-building.

And none of them, not a single one, is interested in any Future if they can’t sell it for a serious profit. Nor do they care if the process of selling and profiting leaves a swath of collateral damage the size of a Gulf Coast oil spill in its wake.

The real Grim Meathook Future… is the future where a relatively small slice of our species lives in a sort of Edenic Eloi reality where the only problems are what we laughingly refer to as White People Problems, like being able to get four bars’ worth of 4G signal at that incredible pho joint that @ironicguy69 recommended on Twitter, or finding new ways to lifehack all the shit we own into our massive closets…while the rest of the world is reduced to maintaining our lifestyles via a complex process of economically-positioned indentured servitude and clinging with the very tips of their fingernails onto the ragged edge of our consumer leavings, like the dorky dude who shows up the first day of school with the cheap K-Mart knockoffs of the pumped-up kicks the cool kids are wearing this year. In other words, the Grim Meathook Future is the one that looks like the present, the one where nothing changes.

That’s the Grim Meathook Future I see lying before us, a long game of technological determinism where the only people who get their jetpacks or their self-driving cars or their anti-aging nanotech are the ones who can afford it, and everyone else can simply go fuck themselves and rot in whatever Third World toilet they were unlucky enough to be born into.

For James F.  at transhumanblog, writing about his deployment in Afghanisatn “one of the world’s least developed and poorest countries”:

The thing that I have found possibly the most intriguing in developmental terms, is the average Afghan’s eagerness to embrace technology even ahead of more basic concerns. The district that I spent most of my deployment in just recently had its first cell tower erected. In a district with no running waters, electricity, or even a bazaar, everyone (including our enemies) still considers cellular service a priority. That might seem strange, but when you consider the other things that the locals clamor for – improved roads, schools, and more radios – a trend quickly becomes apparent. What they really want is a link to the outside world; they want to feel like they are a part of the times and not being left behind.

There are all kinds of theoretical arguments you might make of the above concerning the desire to ‘link with the outside world’ and feel ‘part of the times’ and not ‘left behind’ as loaded with ideological assumptions and why should developing nations embrace transhumanism if it is a libertarian philosophy and all the jazz. In this instance though I suggest the meaning lies on the surface: technologies, perhaps especially communication technologies, open up realities. Provide access points to new ideas and new ways of being. And one interesting trend in this regard is the different ways that social media have been utilised in the West and Middle Eastern countries such as Libya and Egypt. It’s true that the question of what exact role social media played in those revolutions remains disputed but at the very least we can suggest that the question of transhumanism’s impact outside of Western liberal economies is not simply a matter of global economic disparities i.e. not just an international extension of national economic and technological divides. There remains a further question surrounding the specific cultural contexts that transhuman technologies might be plugged into. There is no reason to assume that they will be used and/or related to in the same way. Consider, for instance, the disturbing news that in Saudi Arabia, where women are still not allowed to drive or vote, has begun “rolling out an SMS electronic tracking system that alerts male “guardians” by text message whenever women under their protection leave the country.” (via io9.com). Here potentially liberating new technologies have instead been channeled in the service of Saudi Arabia’s particular misogynistic ideology.

Even in the West transhumanism is not entirely a homogeneous movement and the question of who controls and creates enhancement technologies remains up for grabs. While venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and sundry other free-market proselytisers greedily circle enhancement technologies William Gibson’s famous suggestion that “the street finds its own uses for things” holds true. There already exists a trend for DIY Transhumanism. Lepht Anonym self-described as ”a faceless, genderless British wetware hacker. it lacks both gods and money, and likes people, science and practical transhumanism” and has been known to say that all it needs is a potato peeler and a bottle of vodka to perform its own ‘body hacks’. I recommend watching the videos from Lepht Anonym’s talk on body-hacking delivered at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress for more information. The important point for now is that Lepht and the other bio-hackers are interested in bringing taking Transhuman enhancement technologies out of the laboratories and price-range of academic and economic elites and to the masses. Naturally because most doctors will not hack your body on your behalf a certain amount fo self-surgery is involved in these procedures.

One popular enhancement among  ’grinders’ or ‘body hackers’ is the insertion of neodymium magnets in the finger-tip. Ben Popper at The Verge describes how:

On its own, the implant allows a person to feel electromagnetic fields: a microwave oven in their kitchen, a subway passing beneath the ground, or high-tension power lines overhead.While this added perception is interesting, it has little utility. But the magnet, explains [body hacker] Cannon, is more of a stepping stone toward bigger things. “It can be done cheaply, with minimally invasive surgery. You get used to the idea of having something alien in your body, and kinda begin to see how much more the human body could do with a little help. Sure, feeling other magnets around you is fucking cool, but the real key is, you’re giving the human body a simple, digital input.”

Popper goes on to explain how Cannon and his collaborators then created a device they called the Bottlenose:

Named after the echolocation used by dolphins, it sends out an electromagnetic pulse and measures the time it takes to bounce back. Cannon slips it over his finger and closes his eyes. “I can kind of sweep the room and get this picture of where things are.” He twirls around the half-empty basement, eyes closed, then stops, pointing directly at my chest. “The magnet in my finger is extremely sensitive to these waves. So the Bottlenose can tell me the shape of things around me and how far away they are.”

The grinder movement shares some commonalities with an increased emphasis on hacking technologies and the body. Into this amorphous movement we could also include the Rep Rap project, “an initiative to develop a 3D printer that can print most of its own components…As an open design, all of the designs produced by the project are released under a free software license, the GNU General Public License…Due to the self-replicating ability of the machine, authors envision the possibility to cheaply distribute RepRap units to people and communities, enabling them to create (or download from the Internet) complex products without the need for expensive industrial infrastructure including scientific equipment.”  There is also the growing subculture of ‘Makers’, DIY technology enthusiasts closely associated with rise of Hackerspaces, “open community labs incorporating elements of machine shops, workshops and/or studios where hackers can come together to share resources and knowledge to build and make things. Many hackerspaces participate in the use and development of free software, open hardware, and alternative media“. There has even been a movement dedicated to bio-hacking:

The movement is getting much of its steam from synthetic biology, a field of science that seeks to make working with cells and genes more like building circuits by creating standardized biological parts. The dream, already playing out in the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition at MIT, is that biology novices could browse a catalog of ready-made biological parts and use them to create customized organisms. Technological advances have made it quite simple to insert genes into bacteria to give them the ability to, for example, detect arsenic or produce vitamins.

(Find out more about DIYbio here)

Joshua Ellis concludes his vision of the “grim meathook future” by writing that

I’m afraid that avoiding the Grim Meathook Future might require the dismantling of American-style corporate capitalism. I’m not a Communist or anything, but it seems to me that corporate capitalism as it’s played in my country is a lot like throwing a hundred sharks and a hundred minnows into a small tank. Sharks are machines that eat minnows: they’re incapable of doing anything else, even of keeping a few minnows around to make more minnows to eat later. So they’ll eat and eat until there’s nothing to do except eat each other, and the last one left alive in the tank isn’t the winner: he’s just the shark who gets to die slowly and horribly of starvation. People can only buy so much shit until they run out of money or space to put it in, and then what?

I hope that we’ll wise up and take the sharks out of the pool, or at least muzzle them for a while. If we do — if we stop thinking entirely about the Benjamins and start thinking about the survival of our species as a whole — I think things will change, and some other future will open up, an even more radical future than any Singularity of social networks that might occur.

I hope so. I’d love to see a future I couldn’t predict.

Wouldn’t we all? As Nietzsche once wrote, “I love not knowing the future”. There are a million good reasons to be concerned about global economic disparities and their impact on the use human enhancement technologies. But perhaps the grinders, biohackers and makers point us towards something more anarchically utopian. As an indicator if this consider the recent story about three teenage African girls who invented a urine powered generator, which produces 6 hours of electricity for every litre of urine. While this is not strictly an instance of transhumanism it still points to a DIY aesthetic and instinct for making do with limited resources that suggests there is no reason to think that majority world nations won’t also develop their own forms of DIY transhumanism if they are denied easy access to Western enhancement technologies. Indeed the generator was unveiled at 2012′s Maker Faire Africa.

In the best of all possible worlds we would avoid the grim meathook future altogether. But even in the worst of all possible worlds power will always met with resistance, and technologies of control hacked by those they seek to subjugate.

Freaked (1993)

Watching the documentary Fantastic Flesh The Art of Make-Up FX an idea came to me. When  auteur theory was being developed by film theorists and critics way back when in the 20th century its aim was to have film directors recognised as the true authors of a film even though film production was both a collective and industrial process. Despite these factors the true auteurs voice, style and thematic concerns could, so the argument went,  be discerned in any of their works. I had the idea that this article would present a complex theory of the special effects artist as auteur but on reflection thought it would be more fun to celebrate the work of Screaming Mad George, and watch a bunch of videos of cool special-effects on the way.

Some context wouldn’t hurt though. So it is interesting to consider which special effects artists have become more well-known to the public than others. Certainly other effects artists could recognise certain work. In  Fantastic Flesh Tom Savini (see below) describes going to see films featuring the work of favoured effects artists as, “the lastest exhibit from your favourite artist”. A potted history might start with Jack Pierce (featured in this 1933 issue of Modern Mechanics!). Pierce was in the fortunate position of being head of Universal’s make-up department when that studio inaugurated the first horror film boom of the 1930s. Counting Boris Karloff’s instantly iconic make-up as Frankenstein’s monster and Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Wolf Man (both below) among his creations, Jack Pierce could arguably be said to be the granddaddy of special effects auteurs. In the Fanatstci Flesh documentary dire ctor Frank Darabont describes Pierce’s Frankenstein make-up as, “as iconic as the Empire State Building”. Difficult to argue with that really.

Jack Pierce working on his Wolfman

And working on the Monster

Here I’ve already muddied the waters though. Because Pierce was make-up artist on what perhaps remain the most famous iterations of these monsters, but does this make him a ‘special effects’ artist? Ought we to lump Pierce’s special make-up effects in the same category as, say,  Douglas Trumbull‘s effects for 2001: a Space Odyssey or Close Encounters of the Thrid Kind? And even if we broaden our definition whose Frankenstein are we really talking about? Jack Pierce’s because he designed it? Boris Karloff’s because he performed it? Or is James Whale our classic auteur by dint of directing it? If Pierce is not quite the special effects auteur we are looking for he still possessed the hallmarks of a true artist. According to Fantastic Flesh Pierce was fired from Universal for taking too long to perfect his work.

These questions will have to wait. For now let’s continue our consideration of the ‘star’ special effects artists. Up next, and also coming to prominence in the golden age of the studio system we might highlight the stop-motion brilliance Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. Willis O’Brien followed up his groundbreaking work on the stop-motion dinosaurs of The Lost World (1925) with the legendary King Kong (1933), not to mention Son of Kong (1933) (a youthful favourite of mine despite apparently being much-maligned) and the glory of Mighty Joe Young (1949). Here’s a brief clip of King Kong fighting a T-Rex because, well, because it’s KING KONG FIGHTING A T-REX!!!

Wonderful stuff.

Ray Harryhausen was a protegé of O’Brien, working with him on 1949′s Might Joe Young and going on to animate a number of beautiful monsters in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953); It Came from beneath the Sea (1954) and, later, Jason and the Argonauts (1963); and Clash of the Titans (1981) among many others. I could choose a clip from any of these but the skeleton fight from Jason and the Argonauts was too good not to include. Saying that, I could not resist using this classic bit of policeman-eating from 20, 000 Fathoms first.

From the stop-motion brilliance of O’Brien and Harryhausen we move to the special make-up effects of Dick Smith, possibly most famous for his indelible work on The Exorcist. Could we call Smith an auteur? In Fantastic Flesh he suggests otherwise, pointing out that “your make-up is worthless if the actor doesn’t use it“. In other words, Smith’s make-up effects, are not the star of the show but in service to the story.

The Exorcist

Outside of horror Smith also did the impressive old age make-up for films as varied as Little Big Man (1969), The Godfather (1971), Amadeus (1984). But for the purposes of this post it is better to highlight his horror work. As well as the Exorcist, Smith did effects for Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1977), special make-up effects on Ken Russell’s goofball psychedelic sci-fi Altered States (1980) and the make-up effects for the finale of David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981), which I’ve included below, because it’s ace: “brothers should be close, don’t you think?!”:

Despite a talent for horror, Dick Smith has a pretty respectable (in the ‘oscar-worthy’ sense) CV. It is by no means intended as an insult when I suggest that the genius for viscera of Tom Savini appears less respectable. Savini’s work on the original Friday the 13th and Maniac showcased his knack for gory death scenes and earne dhim the title the ‘King of Splatter’ but it is perhaps regular collaboration with George A Romero on Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Monkey Shines and Creepshow that showcase some of his most inventive effects. Again, there is an embarrassment of riches in terms of scenes to choose so I’m just going to go for this clip of a swarm of bugs bursting out of a dead guy’s body (are you being entertained yet?):

Now some viewers might have found that special-effect a bit naff after years of suckling at the bitter teet of CGI but I for one (and perhaps this is just age and a pitiable nostalgia) miss real effects such as that. At any rate I cannot currently name any special-effects auteurs who deal exclusively in CGI. That’s not an ideological position however, and if any reader can p0int me in the right direction that would be great. In lieu of such direction however I want to highlight three other famous monster-makers and their contributions to special effects.

Stan Winston did the visual effects for James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) not to mention the first two Predator movies. In the 1990s he also worked on Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, muddying my earlier assertion about real-effects versus CGI as these two films integrate both forms. Never the less I’m going to illustrate his work with this (edited) clip from the original Terminator so as to highlight a stop-motion genealogy that can be traced back to Harryhausen and O’Brien (and further if we want to go all the way back to Georges Melies). Here it is in al its endoskeletonic glory.

Meanwhile, Rick Baker’s genealogical debt was paid of intertextually in his effects work on the otherwise little-loved 1978 remake of King Kong. The interested and studious reader can check out Empire magazine’s neat history of Baker’s work here and enjoy the stills from Men in Black, Micheal Jackson’s Thriller video, Harry and the Hendersons (you heard me) and others. But for our purposes why not enjoy the transformation scene from the always-enjoyable An American Werewolf in London, for which Baker won his first Oscar? See you in two minutes. Altogether now, “bluuue moooon…”

Finally, before turning to the good Mr. George, a nod to Rob Bottin, made famous by his very different werwolf transformations in Joe Dante’s The Howling (which, incidentally, Rick Baker began work before leaving to do American Werewolf). It’s worth watching to better notice the differences in style (we are working towards some idea of the effects artist as auteur after all):

Bottin would do great work again with Joe Dante on Innerspace and Explorers and also had a fruitful (which is to say, gooey and bloody) collaboration with Paul Verhoeven on Robocop and Total Recall. No doubt readers of a certain age are weeping over their computers with nostalgic joy at this point. So to push us all over the edge here’s a clip of Bottin’s magnificent and much-loved effects from John Carpenter’s The Thing. Defibrillators ready everyone!

That just never, ever gets old does it? For anyone wanting to follow up there’s a neat artcile on Bottin and his mysterious disappearance from the world of special effects in the 2000s over at Popmatters.

So now then…

So far we’ve introduced and seen a some sample clips from the effects and make-up work of artists Jack Pierce, Willis O’Brien  Ray Harryhausen, Dick Smith, Tom Savini, Stan Winston, Rick Baker and Rob Bottin. A question arises. Clearly it is possible to discern a difference in styles but to what extent are those differences a product of the directors choices rather than the effects artist? Stan Winston directed two effects-heavy films, 1988′s creature-feature Pumpkinhead and A Gnome Called Gnorm in 1990, the same year Tom Savini directed a generally well-recieved remake of Night of the Libing Dead. Would studying these films give us a handle on their special effects aesthetic?

It would require a more diligent film scholar than myself to systematically work their way through these effects artists oeuvres to see if it were possible to make  distinctions. But there is one effects artist whose style and personal touch is unmistakable. And that man is Screaming Mad George.

Tempting as it is to provide an introduction, it might be more interesting to watch a clip of Screaming Mad George’s work and see how it compares to the ones we’ve already seen. keeping with the established theme of transformations let’s see Luke Skywalker (oh fine, Mark Hamill then) mutate into a giant cockroach in 1991′s The Guyver (which George also directed):

It might be possible to argue that as a special effects artist Screaming Mad George’s work is so instantly recognisable that he might be considered an auteur. Whereas the other artists discussed here utilise effects and make-up in the service of the directors vision (or do they?) Screaming Mad George’s cartoonish work threatens to unbalance entire films. Cartoonish seems the right adjective here, in the best possible way. There are (perhaps deliberate) echoes of Basil Wolverton‘s grotesques (see illustration below) and the anarchy of imagination of Chuck Jones in George’s work.

Basil Wolverton

The credits for Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 list him under ‘surrealistic visual design and effects’, as if to make a point of how unusual they are. If Dick Smith or Ray Harryhausen or Stan Winston strive to create something that, however outlandish, seems real, Screaming Mad George abandons all pretence of reality. Witness, as an example, the trailer for Children of the Corn 3: Urban Harvest. Though the film appears to be a wierd-child-supernatural-corn-based-cult-moves-to-the-city-leading-to-violent-clash-of-cultures piece- (which would be odd enough) George’s effects don’t seem to have any relation to the internal reality of the film. Why is that guy’s neck able to be stretched so far when he is apparently killed by a whole corn field? What the fuck is that thing at the end? is it a monster of just a gigantic, roaring hunk of mottled flesh? it looks amazing either way, but it also looks entirely different in tone to the rest of the film.

iwant over at hardcoregaming reveals that Screaming Mad George uses

a method he calls “Anti-Realism”. Indeed, there is no trace of digital editing in his works: everything is hand-made, precisely giving it this unsettling feeling of grotesque “irreality”. Here he explains why he chose to create these surrealistic figures: “I don’t like real violence, but I like created violence. [...] You can enjoy fake violence even if it’s a really, really horrible thing. But I don’t like violence when it’s real. I don’t like anything that is real.

In 1988′s Nightmare on Elm Street 4 George created the cockroach death scene. Again, even in a film where deaths take place in dreams, thus allowing for a little ingenuity, the Screaming Madness, in all its sticky, gooey, cartoonishness is unmistakable:

For these reasons Screaming Mad George seems to produce his best work for directors who share his visions. In the forgotten-classic absurdist comedy Freaked (1993) (written and directed by Alex Winters from Bill and Ted!) George goes all-out with his designs, as seen in the trailer:

Brian Yuzna, who worked with George on Faust:Love of the Damned (2000), Re-Animator’s 2 and 3 (1989 and 2003), clearly values the carnivalesque imagination he brings to those films. In fact, George’s most well-known work might be in 1988′s Society, also directed by Yuzna. I’ve written about Society elsewhere in a piece on posthuman sexuality  but its still worth soaking in this handily edited clip of the “Top 10 Messed Up Society Moments”:

Screaming Mad George also counts Big Trouble in Little China (1986), the sequence ’The Cold’ in Necronomicon: book of the Dead (1993) amongst them (imdb pages here). below are a few of his creations. Is it pushing it to suggest that even though images below come from separate movies they all display the same bonkers artistic vision?

Big Trouble in Little China

Big Trouble in Little China

Necronomicon: Book of the Dead

Faust: Love of the Damned

Beyond Re-Animator

The Dentist 2

Screaming Mad George’s unique vision has also been used in other mediums. Screaming Mad George’s video game Paranoiascape was released exclusively in Japan on the playstation in 1998. 

Paranoiascape

Paranoiscape

iwant over at hardcoregaming writes that what amkes the game worth playing is its universe:

 There’s no need to point out that it’s one of the most fucked up video games in existence; it’s pretty obvious from the screenshots. Screaming Mad George indulged himself, and his distinct “Anti-Realist” style is easily noticable even wihtout having seen any of the films he worked on. Trying to go into details regarding the game’s monster design is futile if not entirely impossible; it’s just so weird, you really have to see it to understand what it’s like. These monstrosities just don’t fit in simplistic “zombie” or “ghost” categories, they’re something else. But the world these horrible creatures inhabits looks even more disgusting: you’ll travel through organic halls with giant syringes nailed in the blood-red ground, infected intestines plagued with deformed parasites, absurd cities overflowing with human cockroaches, and so on. It’s both gory and ridiculous, disgusting and funny, repulsive and curious and that’s what makes it feel like an idiotic nightmare. This nonsensical atmosphere of plain weirdness is amplified by the unusual gameplay, pinball rarely being the genre of choice when it comes to this kind of aesthetics (you’re smashing a brain-ball with skeleton-flippers after all) as well as by the punk soundtrack, sometimes agressive and sometimes displaying darkwave or industrial influences. The final sequence is completely otherwordly, and the game closes on a dirty FMV featuring the bestiary.

Clearly a polymath George performs with the band Psychosis. Here’s the video for their appropriately titled Transmutation:

So where are we now? Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen and Stan Winston are no longer with us. Dick Smith, now in his nineties, received an honorary and still appears to be involved with the amazing looking Dick Smith Special Make-up Effects Training school. Rob Bottin, according to Wikipedia anyway, signed on in the late 1990s to make his directorial debut with Freddy vs. Jason, based on his own 30-page story outline. The project fell apart in 1998, and Bottin’s work did not feature in the film that eventually emerged: “Still reeling from the collapse of his work on Freddy vs. Jason and finding fewer job opportunities that would utilize his talents with practical make up effects, Bottin turned his back on the film industry and retired in 2002. Today, he lives in seclusion in Southern California, refusing to take part in any industry events or press interviews.” Rick Baker continues to work, notching up a record breaking ten nominations for the Best Makeup Oscar and winning on seven occasions. Screaming Mad George appears to have dropped off the effects scene since 2003′s Beyond Re-Animator (another Brian Yuzna joint).

Have we witnessed the end of the great masters of practical effects? In an age of CGI such work is presumably viewed as too expensive, time-consuming or unreliable. The recent prequel to The Thing exemplified this clash, using practical as well as CGI effects to approximate the feel of John carpenter’s classic. But the CGI, for all its technical proficiency, for all one can admire its skill and impressive verisimilitude, lacks the weight and the tactile fleshiness and gooeyness of the best practical effects which, by contrast to CGI, often lacked verisimilitude but made up for this in their inescapable reality as physical objects. It ought to be possible to replicate in CGI anyone of the films mentioned in this post, just as it ought to be possible that their might be CGI auteurs. But let’s be honest, if we’re going to watch a man having his guts torn out by a horde of zombies, isn’t it more satisfying to know the actors were gagging and the stench of rotten offal? That if we had been there we would not have seen a green screen but instead be able to plunge our hands into their torso and eviscerate them ourselves?

Perhaps the best way to answer that question, and to end, is with this montage of the alien appearances in the 2011 prequel to The Thing. Decide for yourselves…

That is all. Goodbye!

My thesis began with two broad questions: what could the development of the superhero tell us about posthumanism, and how did readers of superhero comics relate to the posthuman? In Part One of this thesis review I pointed out that answering those questions first required clarifying the epistemological and ontological assumptions underlying them. So it was that Part One introduced several concepts borrowed from Delueze and Guattari that served as the theoretical guide for undertaking this research project. In this part I want to re-introduce Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome (touched on briefly in part one) and how it differs from traditional models of thought and culture.

 These ideas will then be illustrated through a discussion of the filed of Comics Studies as rhizome, and also how many scholars approaching the superhero have relied on structuralist analyse (often accompanied by an ideological critique). Such approaches, whether positive or negative in their final reading of the ‘meaning’ of the superhero, are presented as arboreal or tree-like. I argue that such approaches can be characterised as Humanist. The rhizome is then offered as an alternative, Post/Humanist model for thinking about superheroes.

The article then goes on discuss how Foucault’s notion of discourse operates within a rhizome. Several theoretical (and occasionally methodological) objections are raised to move comics analysis away from questions of representation and identity politics, and an argument put forth for the production of a rhizomatic cultural history of the posthuman superhero body.

THEORY

The rhizome describes a certain way of thinking. Since the Greek philosophers the dominant Western model of thought is that of the tree: “The image of roots and shoots emerging from a horizontal stem…is causal, hierarchical, and structured by binaries (one/many, us/them, man/woman, etc.) “ (Sutton and Jones, 2008:3). This model of thought creates one, single version of the truth, “from which the ‘Other’ is then defined-the space around the tree, or that which is ‘not tree’”. The rhizome is not the opposite of the tree, however, but more an invitation to reconsider how we think. Sutton and Jones (ibid) are worth quoting at length here to clarify:

This difference is perhaps easiest to understand if we consider the image of the tree in the context of a forest. In the forest there is no single truth, no singular cause and effect, no one ‘true’ tree. Rather, the forest is a single entity made up of numerous trees, or, numerous ‘truths’. It is also impossible to posit one origin to a forest, and not simply because you cannot tell which tree came first. Any one tree is a product of an assemblage, of water, sunlight and soil, without which there would be no trees at all, regardless of whether a seed exists or not. To consider a tree in isolation, then, Is erroneous, because everything is in fact the product of an assemblage with various different elements, and is not simply attributable to one cause. Everything is, in this sense, rhizomatic, and to think in the manner of the tree is only to use one aspect of the rhizome…For this reason they attempted to discard the hierarchical image of thought of the tree as somewhat illusory, and replace it with the horizontal image of the rhizome. Instead of tree, rhizome. Instead of one, one as many. Not one and its multiple  Others, but a singular multiplicity…[which] ‘has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills’

The rhizome has the potential to deterritorialise. To cause change. But there is also always a complementary movement that attempts to restore order.  To reterritorialise. As such

the rhizome is constantly creating a new ‘line of flight’ along which it has the potential to move into (and onto) new territories:

Lines of flight are created at the edge of the rhizomatic formation, where the multiplicity experiences an outside, and transforms and changes. At this border there is a double becoming that changes both the rhizome and that which it encounters (which is always, in fact, the edge of another rhizome)…Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialisation of one term and the reterritorialisation of the other.’ As with all such encounters there is an assemblage created, and a double becoming between both aspects of the assemblage. (ibid: 11)

The remainder of the essay discusses the ways in which the rhizome can be useful to the field of Comics Studies generally and the superhero specifically.

COMICS STUDIES AS RHIZOME

Although ‘comics’ have existed for over a century, and the comic book proper for just less than  that, the academic study of comics can be said to be, in what Beaty (2004) calls a “generous reading”, a “state of infancy” (2004: Para 1). Indeed, Beaty (2010:2) has suggested that, “…one could argue that comics studies in 2009 exists in a state comparable to film studies in 1959”. In film it was the mutually reinforcing relationship between the auteur-driven cinema of the French New Wave and critical writing about them that, “…served to bolster both the growing international ‘art film’ movement and the critical and theoretical apparatus that would be mobilized around it” (ibid). Beaty sees the success of works such Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize winning Maus (1986/1991) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000) as potentially having the same effect on Comics Studies.

In fact, the last decade two decades have witnessed a substantial growth in comics studies. The International Journal of Comic Art  began publication in 1999 and has since been joined by the online journal ImageText (2004-), and in print, European Comic Art (2008-), The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2009-)and Studies in Comics (2010-). The first Comics Studies Reader (Heer and Worcester, 2009) emerged at the end of the last decade and the growing number of academic studies of sequential narratives might suggest that the question comics scholar Thierry Groensteen asked at the beginning of the decade, “Why are comics still in search of cultural legitimization?” (2000), has become one of historical rather than contemporary interest. Never the less, Comics Studies is still young and has yet to be defined as clearly bounded discipline. This lack of definition is so acute that in much scholarly work on comics “…the attempt at definition,… by now constitutes a distinct rhetorical convention-a formula or strategy for, in essence, the initial framing of comics as an object of study” (Hatfield, 2010:5). The act of naming and identifying has been something of a recurring theme, with haggling over nomenclature plaguing both the subject (“what is Comics Studies?”) and its object (“what are comics?”).  In the meantime however both remain somewhat amorphous in both form and content.

This lack of disciplinary boundaries means that comics scholars are always reliant to some extent on the work of fans or fan scholars when compiling, say, historical or autobiographical material. Indeed, Hatfield has noted, “…academic comics study derives from a vast, heterogenous tradition of popular writing about comics” (2006: 368). For Smith (2011:140), such non-academic work remains useful because as fans and writer-artists, “…they pay close attention to the production, distribution and circulation contexts”.  As such, any

                  Academic study draws from, and to a degree depends on, this enormous fund of             fan material…yet, as it consolidates and…repurposes such fan scholarship,       academic study offers opportunities for greater methodological rigor, a new kind          of critical attention, and a wider relevance (Hatfield, 2006:368)

This paper would suggest that this lack of disciplinary boundaries can potentially be one of the great strengths of comics studies, facilitating the same sort of generic and even stylistic promiscuity displayed by the medium itself. Rather than fuzzy disciplinary borders making comics studies a ‘critical backwater”, comics studies:

Might take part in the ongoing and essential reexamination of how, by whom, and under what                auspices knowledge is produced in academe…. [with a] commitment not simply to multi- but to interdisciplinarity (Hatfield, 2010:14)

As such, this paper promotes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome (and their ideas generally) for use in comics studies. Deleuze is deeply sympathetic to the notion of interdisciplinarity, and speaks of a, “…fundamental rapport between the arts, sciences and philosophy. There is no privilege of one discipline over the other. Each is creative” (cited in Perry, 1993: 181 n17). The concept of the rhizome is but one way of expressing this. As Ramier and Varshney point out in their edited volume of essays on the rhizome and interdisciplinarity-

just as a rhizomatic plant grows multiple roots and offshoots extending in all directions, interdisciplinary work is constantly redefining its structure and proposes new and original ways of carrying out research…’multidisciplinaroty’ and ‘interdisciplinaroty’…signal an important and tangible evolution of the way that academic research is undertaken in the new millennium: dominant disciplinary organization is challenged as issues falling across several disciplines become the focus of interest (Ramiere and Varshney2006: vii-viii)

Such a structure may be a result of the fact that most comics scholars, as Fischer points out, are actually “labourers in other fields” such as film and literature studies. As well as a conceptual model of interdisciplinarity the rhizome may also prove useful to comics studies as a paradigm for the inevitable “cross hybridization” between the spheres of fan appreciation, essayistic criticism and academic criticism endemic to comics studies (Fischer, 2010:25-28). Adopting the rhizome as a model of thought and research could encourage such boundary hopping without posing an existential threat to the identity of comics studies.

STUDYING SUPERHEROES

The earliest moments of sociological interest in comics were not of a positive bent, as evidenced most clearly in the ‘comics controversy’ of the 1950s, which has itself been the subject of much scholalry attention (Nyberg, 1998; Lent, 1999; Hadju, 2008; Beaty, 2005).  Fuelled by the 1954 publication of The Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredric Werthem, who alleged links between comic books and juvenile delinquency, this moral panic spread as far as the comics themselves, manifesting not only in America but also Britain and Australia (Barker, 1984).   In an effort to protect their industry from the ensuing moral panic the various publishers decided to regulate themselves through a self imposed, and stringent, Comics Code.  The imposition of the code can be seen to have ghettoised comics as children’s literature, and the ensuing to have impeded the medium’s development as an art form (McCallister, 1990; Lopes, 2006) and, by extension, as object worthy of academic attention.

One result has been a dichotomy in the study of comics between arguments that comics are ideological products of socio-economic hegemony and, in contrast to this, scholarship that, “…celebrates the diversity and complexity of issues raised in comic books” (McAllister, 1990: 55). The latter position has resulted in various attempts to form a recognisable canon. A number of the works fit creators of superhero comics into an aueterist mould. As Smith (2011:139) points out, book length ‘auteur studies’ are a “time-honoured scholarly tradition to uplift a popular object”.  Such works focus on key creators such as Alan Moore (Di Liddo, 2009), Jack Kirby (Ro, 2005; Hatfield, 2012) and Stan Lee (Raphael and Spurgeon, 2004) or Grant Morrison (Singer, 2012). Meanwhile, Klock draws on the literary theories of Harold Bloom to explicitly create a “superhero mini-canon” (2002:16). Such works are invaluable but Smith’s (2011:) criticism of Klock’s theoretical structure as too far removed from sociohistoric and psychological contexts in favour of presumed ‘literary’ features can be applied to many of them.

Bongco (2000) and Kaveney (2008)  deal specifically with the genre’s development. Several authors focus on specific charcetrs from a variety of popular and critical perspectives. Superman is the subject of DC-sanctioned histories (Daniels, 2008) as well a collected book of scholalry essays (Yeffeth, ed. 2006). Captain America (Weiner, ed. 2009), the X-Men (Wein, ed. 2005) have also been the subject  of  essay collection while Batman has inspired popular histories (Daniels, 2004), essay collections (Pearson and Uricchio, 1991;O’Neill, ed. 2008) and book length studies (Brooker, 2001). More generally, Fieffer (2003) and Simon and Simon (2003) both give some insight into the ‘Golden Age of Comics’, while Jones and Jacobs (??) and Schumer (2003) focus on the Silver Age of the 60s/70s. Voger (2006) offers an interesting, if not theoretical, overview of the 1990s and the “Dark Age’ of superhero comics. Meanwhile Coogan’s (2006) history of the genre usefully situates the superhero in an evolutionary line that takes in earlier characters such as The Shadow and Tarzan.

One recurring approach to superhero comics has been to emphasize their apparent mythological aspects. Hardly surprising given that, “…heroic narratives have a history that’s as old as that of the establishment of human socialization” (Ndalianis, 2009:3). Reynolds (1994) seminal work was the first book-length argument for considering superhero comics as a modern mythology, an idea since expanded upon by others (see Ndalianis et al. Eds., 2007). Perhaps this explains why some  have linked the superhero comic with the history of magic and religion. Kripal (2012), Wright (2007) and Knowles (2007) have drawn attention to the “surprisingly intimate ties” superhero comics have to, “…the histories of occultism, psychical research, and related paranormal phenomena” (Kripal, 2010:6). Others have found in superheroes a more generally religious symbolism.

Jewett and Lawrence (2002) describe superheroes as a modern mythology, claiming that superheroes fall within the remit of what they term ‘the American mono-myth’ (1977), a localized variant on Joseph Campbell’s cocept of the universal monomyth, a basic story pattern found in many tales throughout the world that for Campbell indicates a unity of human consciousness. They summarize the American mono-myth as  involving a community in a harmonious paradise being threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero then emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task, restoring the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity. For Jewett and Lawrence mythology is ideological, and the prevalence of the American monomyth informs not just American popular culture but also its foreign policy-vigilante superheroes justify a vigilante superpower.

The superhero comic remains a target of such analysis. For Kahan and Stewart, “…the very idea of the superhero presupposes racial purity and ethnic inequality” (2006:7). Beaty makes an explicit link between Superheroes and ‘fascist wish-fulfilment’ (2004: 4), a position also taken by George Orwell (Jones, 2004). Art Speigelman has argued that the work of Jack Kirby, and arguably the single most influential artist in the history of superhero comics, is fundamentally fascistic in its, “…celebration of the physicality of the human body at the expense of the intellect” (in Knowles, 2007:192). Phillips and Strobl (2006) conclude that superhero comics express, “…fantasies about violent revenge” (328), while for Vollum and Adkinson (2003) superheroes are defenders of the dominant hegemony. Another, related strand in the diaspora of articles relating to superhero comics addresses the politics of identity and representation. Portrayals of race, for example, have been addressed frequently (Brown, 2001; Singer, 2002; Early, 2006) and feminist approaches to superhero comics are common. Peora (1992) finds that superhero comics present a ‘fundamentally patriarchal view’.  Frail (2004), Chenault (2007), Sievers (2003), D’Amore (2008) and Young (2006) all find superhero comics guilty of sexism to a greater or lesser degree. Other ideological critiques focus on the formal convention of continuity in superhero comics. These are addressed in Part Three. At this point we can note that as with the general discussion of comics studies above, the specific study of superhero comics also tends to fall into a criticism/legitimation dichotomy.

Thus, running counter to the works cited above are studies such as Palmer-Mehta and Hay (2005) who explored representations of homosexuality in Green Lantern and found, “… an example of a counter-hegemonic text created by a network of gay and straight allies” (401). An unsurprising finding if one concurs with Taylor’s suggestion that, “…the explicit eroticism in both superhero and super heroine points to a bisexual reader subjectivity” (2007:346). Despite her misgivings about continuity even Robson feels, “…Wonder Woman did pioneer  a kind of feminist questioning, however commercially packaged and conceptually limited, at a time when few other voices in American society were raising such questions” (2004:23). Singer, praises the superhero convention of the secret identity:

a convention that perfectly mimics the dialectical, existential or differential split which…[some] ascribe to racial and other categories of minority identity. The secret identity provides the perfect means for exploring these real-life split identities” (2002: 114).

Nor do formalist approaches necessarily have to imply that superhero comics are ideological suspect. For Reynolds (1992) the structure of the genre is such that minority characters are subsumed into the superhero narrative and its generic ideology. In short, there can be no exotic outsiders in a fictional world populated with exotic outsiders. A similar argument to that proposed by Barker (1989: 127) whose draws on the formalist ideas of Vladimir Propp to suggest that, “…a wondertale [Propps term for the folk tale genre] takes over elements that enter it and converts them into elements-in-a-wondertale”, as such, representations can only be understood within the “transforming lens and structure” of the genre they appear in and can “reinforce nothing”. Others point out that holding up comics like Watchmen as artistically and ideologically superior to serialized superhero narratives involves certain assumption about mainstream comics. As Jenkins writes of the so-called ‘deconstructive’ or ‘revisionist’ take on superheroes in Watchmen: “…calling such works revisionist makes no sense because there is not a moment in the history of the genre when the superhero is not under active revision” (2009:29). In short, the superhero comic book was, “…always intertextual, hypertextual and drew its power from the instability and ambiguity of word and image interactions” (Murray, 2007:15).

MAPPING AND TRACING SUPERHEROES

As has been shown above the specific study of superhero comics often tends to fall into a criticism/legitimation dichotomy. Here we can introduce Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between tracing (which is arboreal) and mapping (which takes the form of a rhizome). To take an example from outside comics studies, Mercieica and Mercieca (2010) demonstrate how the influential model of emancipatory research has become dominant in disability research, “…but without the negotiation and questioning that brought about their initial development” (2010:85). As a result:

The researcher accepts or inherits the emancipatory paradigm as the correct way, thereby settling discussion rather than provoking it….terms such as the social model, emancipatory research, empowerment, medical model…have become fixed structures, which shape how we know and think about disability….the researcher is, therefore, tracing over structures that are pre-determined (ibid: emphasis added)

As a result of this, they argue, disability researcher is closed off to things that its current form would consider ‘side issues’ (ibid).  This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean by ‘tracing’. In the example above, “…this amounts to a tracing of disability, an understanding that perpetuates how we understood it before” (ibid: 87). Although this example is taken from disability research it can just as well be applied to other schools of ideological analysis. Consider those works that applied ideological analyses to superheroes. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms these researchers reduced the rhizome to an arboreal model with a central explanatory trunk. As such:

The tracing has already translated the map into an image: it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it. It has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself” (1987:13)

A rhizo-analysis, or mapping, of the superhero would, by contrast, imply“…not a different kind of reading but a transformation” (O’Sullivan, 2002:86). A rhizomatic approach to Cultural Studies becomes, “…a ‘voyage of discovery’, a journey which produces the terrain it maps” (ibid:84). Deleuze and Guattari urge the researcher to, “…Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous point on it, find potential movements of deterritorialisation, possible lines of flight, experience them” (quoted in ibid: 90). This involves a move away from the ‘interpretation of culture’ and towards what O’Sullivan calls, “…a pragmatics which allows for a mapping of connections between different objects and practices, events and assemblages” (ibid:81). As Deleuze and Guattari themselves put it, “…a rhizome ceaselessly establish connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relevant to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:7). The posthuman body then can be understood as a rhizome, made up of discursive plateaus, or assemblages formed between art, science and society.

WHITHER IDEOLOGY?

Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome as made of plateaus, which they describe as any “multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome”. Honan elaborates on this concept, helpfully suggesting that each plateau composing the rhizome be considered as discursive plateaus. To fully clarify this it is first worth clarifying what is meant by discourse and how this too differs from the concept of ideology. Graham (2002) describes how Foucault’s

Models of ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’ privilege representation, language and imagery and recognize the importance of popular and scientific discourses in the formulation of hegemonic notions of what it means to be human. Foucault argues that’ human nature’ is historically conceived and emphasizes the symbiosis between the centre and peripheries of cultural discourse in constituting what counts as authoritative ‘truth’ about identity. (2002:39)

Furthermore,

Foucault method consists of trying to identify the specific interstices of discourse and social organization and how these fuse to create particular technologies of the self…Foucault’s analysis sets out to subdue ‘the kind of history that is concerned with the already given, commonly recognized ‘facts’ or dated events…in favour of a critical approach that defies a totalizing or authoritative telos… to question what is ‘natural’ and, particularly in later work as the genealogical replaces the archeological, to esquire into the actual mechanisms by which ‘knowledge’ produces ‘normality’. (Ibid: 43)

In short, “…there is no ‘natural’ or a historical self awaiting liberation from oppressive social structures, or a subject who exists independent of constitutive discourses” (Graham, 2002:42).  For Foucault’s critics, “…his resistance to any kind of normative principles regarding human nature is ultimately an invitation to nihilism” (ibid: 55). Graham suggests, however, that Foucault’s work is in fact ‘a form of ideological critique’, because, “…in order to act differently, it was necessary to think differently” (ibid). Thus, unlike structuralist ideological readings, post-structuralist or post-modern theories tend to emphasise how discourses privileged certain modes of knowing and being while oppressing others and, “…underlining the existence of plural narratives, identities and cultures in any given society” (ibid: 42). In contrast to the structural Grand Narratives of positivist social research, society was instead, “…not presented as a fixed and unchanging entity, ‘out there’ somewhere and external to the person, but is a shifting, changing entity that is constructed or reconstructed by people themselves” (ibid: 211), and not by external and universal laws. In other words, while structuralist textual analyses aimed to uncover the true meaning of representations-and by extension the illusory subject positions they offered- post-structural approaches do not assume:

that there are real interests that are concealed: that women, say, really want to be liberated but are duped by ideology. Ideology also has to assume some normative form of the individual who awaits liberation from the imposed illusions of culture… [But] we cannot assume real interests, nor some pre-social and essential individual that we might discover underneath power and images” (Colebrook, 2002:91)

This has particular implications for the research undertaken in this thesis.  As Barker has noted the last 30 years have produced a ‘motley domain’ of sometimes-conflicting theories and approaches yoked under the rubric of ‘discourse analysis’. Barker warns that this sometimes amounts to a reiteration of ideological analysis, but termed ‘discourse analysis’: “it is possible to find repeated instances of words assuming specific kinds of causal relations at work within culture: people are apparently ‘constructed’, ‘impelled’, constituted’, ‘interpellated’, and so on” (2008: 155). The result of this is the generation of ‘images of the audience’ that remain untested, and are not dissimilar to the image of the passive receiver of media discussed in greater detail in Part Three.

Hall writes of discourses taking shape at particular periods, arguing that, “they leave traces of their connections, long after the social relations to which they referred have disappeared…[furthermore] these traces can be re-activated at a later stage, even when the discourses have fragmented as coherent or organic ideologies” (1985: 111). Thus, for Hall, such a discursive ‘chain’ becomes the site of ideological struggle:

A particular ideological chain becomes a site of struggle, not only when people try to displace, rupture or contest it by supplanting it with some wholly new alternative set of terms, but also when they interrupt the ideological field and try to transform its meanings by changing or re-articulating its associations, for example, from negative to positive (ibid: 112)

However, discourse should not be understood as the same thing as ideology. As Hall (1985:94) points out, “…the classical formulations of base/superstructure which have dominated Marxist theories of ideology represent ways of thinking about determination which are essentially based on the idea of a necessary correspondence between one level of a social formation and another”. Discourse theory, by contrast, does not recognize any ‘necessary correspondence’: “…the notion essential to discourse- [is] that nothing really connects with anything else” (ibid). So that, “even when the analysis of particular discursive formations constantly reveals the overlay or the sliding of one set of discourses over another, everything seems to hang on the polemical reiteration of the principle that there is, of necessity, no correspondence” (ibid). In the rhizome, by contrast, everything is connected to everything else, but these connections are multiple and shifting, but not necessarily corresponding with the ‘superstructure’. Not reducible to a central trunk. A rhizo-analysis draws attention to just such “overlays or the sliding of one set of discourses over another”, viewing these instances as forms of re and de-territorialisation.

In Part One it was said that the rhizome cosnists of plateaus. It is possible to consider the plateaus that make up the rhizome as discursive realms. As Honan and Sellers point out:

rhizomatic research points to new understandings of the interaction between discursive systems within any rhizome. Discourses do not operate as straight lines through a text: rather, they merge, connect, and cross over each other. We, as rhizo-analysts, can map discursive journeys through a text and such mappings can illuminate the moments of convergence, when connections allow reason(able) readings of contradictory and conflicting discourses. This provides a constructive and transformative approach discourse analysis, perhaps replacing that kind of analysis that has previously focused on the deconstruction rather than transformative possibilities that are produced through a re-construction. (Sellers and Honan, 2007 emphasis added)

Utilising discourse analysis this thesis then understands these discourses as functioning rhizomatically, not existing in a vacuum but merging, connecting and crossing over with each other. In some sense this is what the history of the comic book posthuman offers. An unbroken chain of posthuman representations put to very different uses and given different meanings at certain times and by certain authors. Yet ‘traces’ remain, hence the comic book posthuman body still regularly manifests itself as a white, male, muscular body. For Deleuze, as for Foucault, there is no underlying power behind texts/images waiting to be discovered using these texts to mislead us. Rather:

Desire itself is power; a power to become and produce images. Desire also has the power to produce images that enslave it: images of a moral ‘man’ obeying his social duty. But the task is not to get away from images so much as to reveal and intensify their production: why limit ourselves to the image of man and woman as social citizens, why not become other? Deleuze’s political critique does not begin from a power that opposes desire but from one single univocal flow of desire that produces the very terms that enslave it…power does not oppress us; it produces us. Cultural forms, like literature, do not deceive us; they are ways in which desire organises and extends its investments (Colebrook, 2002:94)

Obviously, a rhizo-analysis of superhero texts and readers does not involve forming structuralist arguments about the ‘truth’ or ideological ‘meaning’ of them. It is not a ‘tracing’ but a mapping. Such an analysis does not start out knowing what it is looking for, or even knowing how to look for it. As O’Sullivan reminds us, “…the rhizome is anti-hierarchical and a-centred”, therefore, “…no single organising principle predetermines the consistencies and compatibilities between the network of its elements” (O’Sullivan, 2002:84). As such, contra ideology, we cannot assume:

That there are real interests [organising principles] that are concealed: that women, say, really want to be liberated but are duped by ideology. Ideology also has to assume some normative form of the individual who awaits liberation from the imposed illusions of culture…we cannot assume real interests, nor some pre-social and essential individual that we might discover underneath power and images (Colebrook, 2002:92)

I want to suggest ideological readings of the posthuman body, which usually, as has been shown, tend to rely on a tree-like model of thought can be broadly considered as Humanist (they don’t call them the Humanities for nothing). The explanatory trunk of the tree and the rational, unified, autonomous subject of Humanism are interchangeable. After all, there has to be a unified, rational self in the first place to uncover, through rational analysis, the hidden ideological meanings of a text. Adopting the rhizome in my research was an attempt to apply Post/Humanist ideas to the figure of the posthuman. Having already highlighted a number of structuralist and ideological interpretations of the superhero earlier, we are now able to consider how the question of posthumanism has been raised in relation to superhero comics.

SUPERHEROES AND POSTHUMANISM

Given Haraway’s assertion that “the cyborg is a creature of social reality as well as creature of fiction” the genre of science fiction, whether in cinematic, televisual or literary form has been the subject of much scrutiny from the posthuman gaze and the quest for, “…positive social and cultural representations of hybrid, monstrous, abject and alien others in such a way as to subvert the construction and consumption of pejorative differences” (Braidotti, 2006:11). This postmodern blurring of theory and fictions is indicative of the way in which, as Miah puts it, “…the philosophical and the cultural are interwoven within the history of posthumanism” (Miah, 2007:9). McCracken summarises why the cyborg metaphor is useful to the study of popular culture and its difference from earlier approaches to the study of mass culture noting:

A tendency in mass culture theory to conceive of the subject as powerless in the face of a great wave of pap. It denies the crucial role of fantasy in the formation of critical subjectivity…the transformative metaphors of the cyborg permits a different, more complex understanding of the relationship between reader and text than that provided by mass culture theory                                        (McCracken, 1997:297-298)

McCracken’s insists that mass culture should not be seen as a ‘total system’ but a ‘contested terrain’ (ibid). He goes on to suggest that cyborg fictions actually provide, “…the kinds of transformative metaphors through which…cultural conflicts…are mediated”, and that, “it is through such forms that new kinds of consciousness (both empowering and disempowering) arise” (ibid: 289). Klugman makes a similar point when he suggests that cyborg fictions “…motivate the reader to consider the social and ethical implications of new technologies” (2001:40).

I suggest that the corpus of superhero narratives provides many such avenues for investigation. As Locke writes, “…super-hero comics deal with questions about the social and cultural meaning of science that are constituted out of the same basic stuff as academic concern-that is, available cultural resources that provide the means of thinking” (2005: 26). While the genre of superheroes deals with posthuman bodies, the medium itself might be said to embody some of the qualities exhibited by Post/Humanist thought, especially e blurring of categorical distinctions. For instance, Groensteen (2000) suggests that comics suffer from their ‘hybrid’ status as neither art nor literature. This ‘hybrid’ status extends further, blurring the distinction between fan and consumer. Brown (1997) and Barker (1989) and Jenkins (2009) all concur that the relationship between fans and their corporate comics is to some degree interactive and collaborative rather than an antagonistic power struggle.  The question of readers will be addressed in greater detail in Part Three.      For the remainder of this section I want to highlight those few works that have already viewed superhero comics through the lens of posthumanism.

Nowhere is the posthuman body (and indeed the ethical dilemmas that come with it) more often represented than in the superhero comic book. Indeed, in the universe of Wildstorm Comics, superheroes are designated by the term ‘Posthuman’ (DC comics use the term ‘Metahuman’, while Marvel uses the designation ‘Superhuman’). More specifically, Taylor suggests that although:

Superheroes were probably the last thing Haraway had on her mind while composing her manifesto […]  their polymorphous perversity and androgynous bodies are well suited to her utopian ideals. They are strange farragoes of science and the arcane, individual will and artistic invention, subject to authorial whimsy and socio-political inconstancy (Taylor, 2007: 358)

Never the less, perhaps because the study of both comics and the posthuman remain relatively specialized (though growing) academic concerns, there have been surprisingly few investigations of this sort, and no sustained studies as yet. A sample of the few studies that do exist goes some way to illustrating the potential superhero comics have in contributing to the discourse of the posthuman body.

For Bukatman (2003) the spectacle of the superhero body is a means by which “the fear of instability induced by urban modernity” can be converted, “…into the thrill of topsy-turveydom” (Bukatman, 2003:3). Thus the superhero makes his first appearance in the modern, industrial age because: “only the Man of Steel has the constitution, organs and abilities equal to the rigors of the Machine Age” (Bukatman, 1994: 99). Similarly, Thurtle and Mitchell (2007:286) argue that superheroes, “…embody industrial-sized bodily capacities without sacrificing embodied human perceptions…[providing] readers with a means for exploring the forces and potential of industrial society” (ibid: 286).  Oehlert (2000) marks an early attempt to categorize the cyborg types in superhero comics.  More (2006) delivers a more prosaic version of this in his elaboration of how many of the X-Men’s abilities may be made available if Transhuman technologies continue t be developed. Heggs (1999) goes into greater depth in his analysis, stating that superheroes, despite their transgressive potential, remain, “…open to naturalization, for example, around the thematic of masculinity” (1999:185), and are therefor poor examplars of Haraway’s cyborg.

Conversely, Taylor (2007:358) suggests that superheroes offer a, “…culturally produced body that could potentially defy all traditional and normalizing readings” (ibid: 245). Rivera (2007) provides a positive step in this direction by reading the Marvel comic Deathlok (the story of an African-American man whose body is enhanced with robotic parts by a corrupt corporation), as an intervention, “in a medium with a troubling hegemonic past by appropriating a white cyborg narrative to dramatize the diasporic dimensions of black subjectivity” (2007:105).

Emad (2006) explores related ideas in her analysis of how the shifting depictions of Wonder Woman’s body over time articulate cultural mythologies about nationhood. In fact, capes and spandex form the semiotic function as military uniform-“power must display itself on the surface of the body” (Armitage, 2005: 82). Meanwhile, Gray (2003) has described the use of human-machine weaponry as a key feature of (post) modern warfare. Moreover, their origins in the Second World War mean that superhero comics were adopted for propaganda purposes very early on (Murray, 2000), a practice which continues in different forms today.

For instance, Milburn has detailed the ‘nonlocal cultural mythologies that frame both military technoscience and comic books’ (2005:80). Milburn’s article uses the case of an MIT grant proposal to the US Army that utilized copyrighted images of a comic book super-soldier to illustrate the advances in military nanotechnology that it proposed to develop. The proposal was awarded $50 million to set up the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN). Milburn suggests that the drawing served as, “a conceptual bridge between the actual and the possible within the area of nanotechnology” (ibid: 79), the understanding of which was facilitated by a shared understanding by military and scientific personnel of the tropes of comic books. The science-fictional status of nanotechnology and militaristic visions of the supersoldier have come to, “…rely on cultural familiarity with comic book myths…to suggest that nanotechnology, in replicating or materializing these myths at the site of the soldier’s body, can create “real” superheroes” (ibid: 85). Milburn’s fascinating article demonstrates brilliantly the contention in my thesis that the superhero is best viewed as a rhizome or assemblage: collectivity that is historically situated, alive, decentralized, and constituted of the human and non-human, the material and immaterial.

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE POSTHUMAN BODY

I wanted to treat the posthuman body as a rhizome in my thesis. A rhizome is made up of discursive plateaus. As such, I argued for utilising many of the techniques of discourse analysis but within the framework of the rhizome. I wanted demonstrate how the posthuman body emerges from the relations between forces. The seventy plus year history of superhero comics provides a unique opportunity to consider how the how the superhero body has been deterritorialised and reterritorialised. As stated already though, the rhizome of the posthuman body consist of overlapping discursive plateaus, of which the superhero comic is just one, I suggest that the posthuman body can also be found in the discursive realms of Transhumanism and Post/Humanism. Deleuze and Guttari urge the researcher to:

 Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flows of conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times

 Using the plateau of the Superhuman as my initial ‘small plot of land’ I wanted to understand how these three discursive realms interacted-were the territorialisations apparent in the Superhuman also happening in Transhumanism and Post/Humanism? Where did they connect and where did they diverge? As rhizomatic research is necessarily experimental I used it as a framework through which to use and present two more recognisable methodologies-cultural history and discourse analysis.

I felt that one advantage of the cultural historic approach is its ability to highlight posthuman discourse (that is, discourse as a system of representation) as a matter of both language and practice:

Discourse…constructs the topic. It defines the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked about and reasoned about. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of others (Hall, 1997: 72).

In the case of the discourse of posthumanism, this involves highlighting not just its linguistic representations, its semantic and semiotic forms, but also material practices. For example, the Holocaust of World war 2 provides a stark example of a form of posthuman discourse (eugenics, notion of a ‘Master Race’) manifested as a material practice, discourse written upon the body.

Mixing a discourse analysis with a cultural historic approach is not a radical move. As Hall points out, discourse is already ‘historicized’ by Foucault. So for example:

Mental illness was not an objective fact, which remained the same in all historical periods, and meant the same thing in all cultures. It was only within a definite discursive formation that the object, ‘madness’, could appear at all as a meaningful or intelligible construct…and it was only after a certain definition of ‘madness’ was put into practice, that the appropriate subject-‘the madman’ as current medical and psychiatric knowledge defined ‘him’-could appear (ibid: 74)

For ‘mental illness’ and ‘madness’ we could replace ‘posthumanism’. A cultural-historic approach then, informed by rhizomatic thinking, would trace the discourse of the posthuman body across seventy years of superhero comics, placing these discourses within wider discursive formations of posthumanism.

In writing a cultural history, the emphasis is shifted from trying to determine the meaning of text as if it, “…existed as an entity which has already been formulated within the text” (Murphy, 124), but rather to, “…reveal the conditions that bring about its various possible effects” (Iser, cited in ibid). Secondly, taking the moderate view that, “…not all interpretation is over-interpretation” (ibid: 131) this cultural history proposes to ‘read’ representations of the superhero body in terms of their socio-historic and industrial context and without recourse to presumptions about their ideological or psychological effects on the reader. This does not mean that no reference will be made to critical works that do make these claims. Rather, any such works will also be considered as part of the same socio-historic moment and posthuman discourse-part of the same rhizome- as the texts they critique. To quote Iser once more, “…the interpreter’s task should be to elucidate the potential meanings of a text, and not restrict himself [sic] to just one” (quoted in ibid: 133). This thesis understands other critical interpretations of texts as just such ‘potential meanings’, or ‘entryways’, in the language of the rhizome.

‘Cultural history’ is said by its supporters to, “…best combine the disciplinary strengths in writing history with the ferment of ideas associated with what might be loosely termed Critical Theory” (Luckhurst, 2005:1) and stresses the, “…importance of situating texts in a variety of historically informed contexts” (ibid: 2). For this project, that involves not just general social and political contexts, but also an attention to how the posthuman manifested at these times. As with Luckhurst’s cultural history of science fiction:

This necessitates an ambitious stretch of contextual material, ranging from the history of science and technology, via the softer social sciences, to the rarified world of aesthetic and critical theory. This will not, then, be a literary history as such, an exhaustive genre survey that visits every significant text for a brief outline…Instead I want to investigate… [Comics] that are rich and over determined objects because they speak to the concerns of their specific moment in history. (Ibid: 3)

A cultural historic approach to superheroes, then, would situate them within an always-shifting network of forces with, “…different emphasis at different times” (ibid: 6). This ‘always-shifting networks of forces’ can be reformulated in the terminology of this thesis as assemblages. The final section of this thesis review demonstrates how the assemblages that make up the rhizome of the posthuman body have exhibited ‘different emphasis at different times by considering the transformations undergone by the superhero in the Golden, Silver, Dark and Modern ages of comics. For the purposes of this essay the discussion will be brief. For a more detailed overview of the superhero and posthumanism see my article Producing and Consuming the Posthuman Body in Superhero Narratives.

COMICS ASSEMBL-AGES

The first comic book expression of posthumanity, manifested in the form of what I ironically dub the Perfect Body. The Perfect Body is an assemblage formed by several socio-historic and cultural trends, drawing together patriotism, Nietzsche, eugenics, physical culture, militarism into a particular form. The posthuman as Perfect Body is merely one particular assemblage within this rhizome. Rather than the essence of the posthuman body, the Perfect Body is the emergent result of particular links being formed, an assemblage of the posthuman AND eugenics AND Nietzsche AND Nationalism AND militarism AND so on. The meaning and practice of the posthuman body emerges from the assemblages it forms with wider social and cultural trends. The posthuman is a becoming, not a being.  Grant Morrison’s character Flex Mentallo embodies this idea. Ironically poaching Flex’s look and origin from the old Charles Atlas ads, Morrison has Flex reveal that there was more to learn from the Muscle Mystery book than simply strength. Flex discovers that his becoming posthuman requires

Techniques that I can’t even begin to hint at. Muscle power, developed to such a degree it could be used to read minds, see into the future, into other dimensions even.

The development of the Perfect Body for Flex, as for the genre, leads the body to other minds, futures and dimensions. In order to do this though the posthuman body would have to form new assemblages. It is interesting to note that following the war superheroes soon fell out of fashion and were replaced with other genres. Perhaps the knowledge of the Nazi concentration camps, the awful reality of the eugenicist vision, returned the Superhuman to its position as menace. At any rate, it would be almost fifteen years before the superhero comic regained prominence, and when it did, in what has become known as comics’ Silver Age, a new assemblage was introduced: a Cosmic Body.

Plugging itself into the counterculture assemblage the superhero now drew on evolutionary mysticism and the idea of an expanded ‘cosmic consciousness’ awaiting mankind. While the Cosmic Body had existed as a virtual tendency in the Golden Age it took the generational and cultural shifts of the Silver Age to actualise it. Just as in superhero comics the Cosmic Body manifests in Transhumanism and Post/Humanism as a pre-human form of shamanic irrationality (Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘higher disorder of thinking’) in the latter and a desire for apotheosis in the former. Following the Silver Age a reterritorialisation occurs and the Perfect Body returned in a more problematized form in the Military-Industrial body of contemporary comics. For Heggs (1999), “…the cyborg and the superhero resist the consequences of boundary transgression, and that the political affinities, so often desired of cyborgs, are open to naturalization, for example, around the thematic of masculinity” (1999:185). It would be disingenuous to try and deny that, in the Dark Age in particular, an image of the posthuman as militarised ‘hard body’ were dominant. However, these representations were aesthetic-assemblages formed of social, political and economic climate, industry pressures and practices, an increased emphasis on creator over characters, and a struggle to come to terms with the impact of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns among other factors.

The contemporary Military-Industrial body has a relationship with the Perfect Body as an assemblage of am asseblage but cannot be reduced to it. They each take a different entryway into rhizome of the posthuman body. The patriotic militarism of the Perfect body is problematized and critiqued by the Military-Industrial body, as in the story Truth: Red, White and Black which ret-cons continuity to reveal the hidden history of experimentation on and murder of black soldiers in the race to develop the super soldier serum that created Captain America. Captain America’s origins presented him as the exemplar of the ‘perfect specimen’. The Military-Industrial bodies of Truth: Red, White and Black deterritorialise the Perfect body, altering its meaning and function within the network of comic book continuity.

CONCLUSION

In this part of the thesis review I outlined some of the approaches that have been taken to studying superheroes. I then went on to suggest that the concept of the rhizome provided a useful conceptual tool for overcoming some of the theoretical limitations imposed by the tree-like structure of such analyses.  I proposed a cultural-historic approach to the discourse of the posthuman body. Understanding the posthuman body to be a rhizome made up of discursive plateaus I argued that it was possible to map its discursive transformation through three overlapping plateaus-the comic book Superhuman, Transhumanism and Post/Humanism. Having discussed this in more detail elsewhere I ended this section of the review by briefly discussing the Superhuman posthuman body in terms of assemblages and territories.

As with Part One, having compiled all the information together and (re)presented here, a creeping doubt and paranoia sets in: what if i have entirely misunderstood all of this? With the first draft done, a polish underway, and the mechanisms for arranging examiners and viva underway I am now locked in. Time will tell, but any comments and criticisms are welcome.

Next time, in Part Three: we extend our discussion of representation and ideology to the implied readers alleged to be influenced by them. A brief history of audience research is put forward before extending the concepts of the rhizome and machinic assemblages to text-reader relations, reconceptualising it as a ‘reading-assemblage’.

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Here to introduce this post is Pinhead from Hellraiser:

In a throwaway aside in his review of Brian Yuzna’s From Beyond (1986) in this month’s Sight and Sound the ever-incisive Kim Newman writes:

From Beyond is worth revisiting for its ambitious themes-it takes the torch from Videodrome and passes it to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, prompting sociopsychological musings on why exactly cosmic horror in the 80s was always yoked to sadomasochistic dress-up.

Naturally I thought, “Somebody need to write about that! I’m going to do it right now!” Several thousand words later I never really pinpointed why the 80s were especially conducive to the conjunction of sadomasochism and cosmic horror, or even if that’s really the case upon closer inspection. However, I do think Kim Newman’s on the money in as much as there remains a good case to be made for establishing a connection between cosmic horror and S and M. Both, I want to argue, offer ‘limit experiences’ that mirror one another as in the alchemical rule that the microcosm (human body) is a mirror of the macrocosm (universe). The bondage practitioner and the protagonist in cosmic horror are both taken to extremes of experience that open up new forms of consciousness. The article concludes by arguing that such “limit experiences” need not always end in evisceration as they do in many horror films. There are also narratives in which the iconography of fetish clubs (if not the practice) is adopted as a form of liberation from threats to reality, as in The Matrix and Return of the Living Dead 3.

Before reaching that final destination though we must embark upon a strange journey that takes in H.P. Lovecraft, Michel Foucault, Hellraiser, Nietzsche, Alisteir Crowley, and the X-Men and more along the way. It is also a companion piece of sorts to my previous post Posthuman Ecstasy: Long Live the New Sex which also dealt with new forms of posthuman sexuality in horror films.

To begin it is necessary, as ever, to define our terms.  We’ll get to the politics of sadomasochism later (sorry, you’ll just have to wait), but first off  let’s consider what it means to speak of ‘Cosmic Horror’. In an interesting article on the cosmic horrors of John Carpenter’s ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ (The Thing (1982), Prince of Darkness (1987) and In the Mouth of Madness (1995)) Orrin Grey at Strange Horizons points out that:

Cosmic horror is mostly associated with H. P. Lovecraft, though his conception of it was in turn inspired by earlier writers like Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson, and can be summed up in a quote from his collected letters where he said, “Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.” In short, cosmic horror is less the horror of some specific bogeyman, and more the horror of a cold, uncaring universe, in which humans are of no importance.

For the sake of ease we’ll begin our investigation with Lovecraft rather than Blackwood and Hodgson. As Erik Davis describes them, in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft 

His protagonist is usually a reclusive bookish type, a scholar or artist who is or is known to the first-person narrator. Stumbling onto odd coincidences or beset with strange dreams, his intellectual curiosity drives him to pore through forbidden books or local folklore, his empirical turn of mind blinding him to the nightmarish scenario that the reader can see slowly building up around him. When the Mythos finally breaks through, it often shatters him, even though the invasion is generally more cognitive than physical.

More often than not this ‘shattering’ results from the protagonists inability to understand what they have uncovered. The terror of that which cannot be articulated. That which escapes language and representation and so cannot be known to us. These horrors are not supernatural and demonic but geometric and mathematical. It is the horror experienced when one is confronted with the unfathomable abyss that is infinity. As Heisenberg famously observed, “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” Lovecraft, and subsequent writers, simply gives this observation a genre twist. The universe can fill you with awe, certainly, but that feeling can be awful. Take the concept of hyperspace

… From the perspective of hyperspace, our normal, three-dimensional spaces are exhausted and insufficient constructs. But our incapacity to vividly imagine this new dimension in humanist terms creates a crisis of representation, a crisis which for Lovecraft calls up our most ancient fears of the unknown. “All the objects…were totally beyond description or even comprehension,” Lovecraft writes of Gilman’s seething nightmare before paradoxically proceeding to describe these horrible objects. In his descriptions, Lovecraft emphasizes the incommensurability of this space through almost non-sensical juxtapositions like “obscene angles” or “wrong” geometry

Perhaps the key to understanding cosmic horror is that there are really no heroes and villains. Protagonists and antagonists maybe but the idea that the human characters are ‘good’ people confronting some ‘evil’ alien intelligence or ancient demon at least provides a smidgen of comfort, of understanding.  Such a view does not hold sway in the realm of cosmic horror. Instead the human is faced with entities whose motivations cannot be understood in human terms, like the fragile concept of ‘good and evil’. The horrors of the cosmic are simply just there, implacable and immovable. As the wikipedia article on Cosmicism describes them:

These beings (the Great Old Ones, Outer Gods and others)—though dangerous to humankind—are neither good nor evil, and human notions of morality have no meaning for these beings. Indeed, they exist in cosmic realms beyond human understanding. As a symbol, they represent the kind of universe that Lovecraft believed in, a universe in which humanity is an insignificant blot, fated to come and go, its appearance unnoticed and its passing unmourned.

Cthulhu

NIETZSCHE’S UBERMENSCH AND THE GREAT OLD ONES

It is with this moral nihilism that our first links between philosophy, minoritarian sexual practices and the Outer Gods are found. The phrase ‘beyond good and evil’ was made famous (posthumously) by Nietzsche in his 1886 work of the same name. The wikipedia entry is as easy and concise a way to introduce this as possible:

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. Specifically, he accuses them of founding grand metaphysical systems upon the faith that the good man is the opposite of the evil man, rather than just a different expression of the same basic impulses that find more direct expression in the evil man. The work moves into the realm “beyond good and evil” in the sense of leaving behind the traditional morality which Nietzsche subjects to a destructive critique in favour of what he regards as an affirmative approach that fearlessly confronts the perspectival nature of knowledge and the perilous condition of the modern individual.

After critiquing the inadequate moral frameworks of previous philosophers Nietzsche goes on to identify

the qualities of the “new philosophers”: imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality, and the “creation of values”. He then contests some of the key presuppositions of the old philosophic tradition like “self-consciousness,” “knowledge,” “truth,” and “free will“, explaining them as inventions of the moral consciousness. In their place he offers the “will to power” as an explanation of all behavior; this ties into his “perspective of life”, which he regards as “beyond good and evil”, denying a universal morality for all human beings. Religion and the master and slave moralities feature prominently as Nietzsche re-evaluates deeply held humanistic beliefs, portraying even domination, appropriation and injury to the weak as not universally objectionable.

This new philosopher-poet is the Ubermensch/Overman/Superman introduced in Nietzsche’s previous book (and discussed in more detail here). The philosopher Michel Onfray has described the May 68 revolts as  ”a Nietzschean revolt in order to put an end to the ‘One’ truth, revealed, and to put in evidence the diversity of truths, in order to make disappear ascetic Christian ideas and to help arise new possibilities of existence“, and this post will address the legacy of the ‘Class of 1968′, or at least Foucault, in due course. At this point however we might consider how the Nietzschean superman, who has moved beyond good and evil, and self-asserts their own values resembles Lovecraft’s fearful visions. In Call of Cthulu Lovecraft describes the world that the Great Old Ones would one day reclaim:

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

For Lovecraft the emergence of the Ubermensch-”free and wild and beyond good and evil”-is linked to the return of the Great old Ones. Clearly, one man’s “Nietzschean revolt to put an end to the ‘One’ truth” is another man’s “holocaust of ecstasy and freedom”. It doesn’t concern us here what familiarity Lovecraft had with Nietzsche. More pressing are the underground root systems that link Nietzsche to Lovecraft to Alisteir Crowley and thus lead us to our first synthesis of sexuality and cosmicism.

ALISTEIR CROWLEY, LOVECRAFT AND NIETZSCHE

For those not in the know, the short version is that Crowley was the Citizen Kane of occultism, variously described as ‘the wickedest man in the world’, ‘the greatest magician of the 20th century’, ‘a charlatan’, a ‘junkie’, and a ‘sexual deviant’, depending on who you are reading. Crowley’s religion, such as it is, was named Thelema and its laws dictated to him by an entity calling itself Aiwass that was using his wife as a vessell. This prophecy of a new Aeon was subsequently published as The Book of the Law and its ethos may be summed up in the maxim “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. Again, we recognise Nietzsche’s Ubermensch existing beyond good and evil, and may also imagine, according to your disposition, “laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy”.

Unsurprisingly there have been attempts to link Crowley and Lovecraft (for a fair-minded and well-written overview of this area there is an excellent essay here). Crowley’s former secretary Kenneth Grant played a large role in this with his book Alisteir Crowley and the Hidden God  (quotes taken from Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger, pages 95-96):

Crowley was aware of the possibility of opening the spatial gateways and of admitting an extraterrestrial Current into the human life-wave . . . It is an occult tradition-and Lovecraft gave it persistent utterance in his writings—that some transfinite and superhuman power is marshalling its forces with intent to invade and take possession of this planet

Grant suggests that the arch-rationalist Lovecraft was subject to visions beyond his ken, but magical in origin, “The quality of evil with which Lovecraft invests the types of his Cthulu Cult and other mythoses is the result of a distortion in the subjective lense of his own awareness, and I have shown elsewhere how these images emerge when not so deformed, approximating sometimes to the point of actual identity with Crowley’s cult-types of Shaitan-Aiwass and The Book of the Law“. It’s important to remember that, despite the many who would like to dismiss old Uncle Alisteir as a pervy, druggy, selfish shit of a man (and not without reason)

Crowley dispels the aura of evil with which these authors (Lovecraft and Fort) invest the fact; he prefers to interpret it Thelemically, not as an attack upon human consciousness by an extra-terrestrial and alien entity but as an expansion of consciousness from within, to embrace other stars and to absorb their energies into a system that is thereby enriched and rendered truly cosmic by the process.

Sex Magick anyone?

Importantly, the rituals Crowley utlised to contact these impersonal intelligences were heavily reliant on sex magick- the use of sexual energies to bring about changes in consciousness (to put it in material terms). These changes in consciousness can, it is suggested, allow the magician to engage with realms and beings normally beyond human perception. Such practices also place the magician in a position of control. The magician is active participant, while the rationalists of Lovecraft’s tales are driven mad by their accidental, but inevitable, encounters with the cosmos. In this regard it hardly seems coincidental that Lovecraft’s protagonists, even the man himself, were strangely sexless beings. The same cannot be said for the protagonists of Clive Barker’s stories in which cosmic horror is entwined with sexuality.

For Clive Barker the genre of horror and sadomasochism are implicitly linked. Even when it is not explicit sadomasochism is “subtextually part of horror fiction, and all I did was make [it] text. I mean, when the vampire bites the woman on the neck, there is a moment where the expression on the victim’s face hovers between pleasure and pain. There is something, even in our response to horror movies in the audience, that smacks of S&M. We like it, but we don’t like it. It’s scary but it’s fun. It makes us look away and wince, but then we look back at the screen with smiles on our faces. What does that remind you of?” In this interview with Mark Dery Barker is very open about his own experiences with S and M:

MARK DERY: In an Advocate interview, you talked about your involvement with S&M have you “investigated it thoroughly?” If so, what have you brought back, into the light of day?

CLIVE BARKER: I’ve brought back ritual, I’ve brought back the notion that this is an area where you can examine the limits of what you find sexual and maybe expand those limits. One of the things that happens as we are educated in childhood and adolescence is the range of things that we are allowed to find sexual narrows. This is Freud’s notion, the idea that the child is polymorphously perverse, looking at the world and seeing sexual possibilities everywhere, and that the series of taboos which are inculcated into the child gradually limit the number of sexual possibilities. It’s to do with sensations, with what our eyes and skin tell us, and it seems to me that one of the things S&M sexuality does is say, “Well, now, wait a second, maybe that isn’t the whole story, maybe we don’t have to live with certain sexual possibilities sewed up and kept from us, maybe we can re-open these doors, maybe we can look again at pure sensation, at what is beautiful and what is arousing. De Sade said that the greatest pleasures are aversions overcome, and aversions are taught.”

De Sade remains the most prominent literary figure to deal with sadomasochism (indeed, the term takes its name from him). For De Sade, limits are not defined by religion, as God has been decentered by the emergence of Enlightenment “man,” who now becomes the ‘raison d’etre’ of the universe. It is thus ”man’s” most profound, and ultimately inexplicable, Dionysian experience–sex–which marks the borderline of rationality, where thought and language break down into white noise on the threshold of life and death.” (taken from ??). Note that once more we find ourselves at the limits of “thought and language”.

Mark Dery also links the novel and film Hellraiser to the work of George Bataille, noting that:

Bataille favorably compares present-day slaughterhouses to the temples of antiquity and scorns our “flabby world in which nothing fearful remains”; even the killing of meat animals must take place out of sight, out of mind. Pinhead likewise invokes the notion of a return to a pre-civilized “animality” (Bataille) in his obvious resonances with the scarred and safety-pinned punks of the ’70s and the pierced, branded, and ritually scarred “modem primitives” of the ’90s.

FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICS OF SADOMASOCHISM

So far we have touched upon Nietzsche, Sade, and Bataille in relation to cosmic horror. These authors lead us inexorably to Micheal Focuault who said of them that, “It is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a ‘limit-experience’ that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson I’ve learned from these authors” (cited in Walker). Locating, for instance, the initial stage of the transgressive movement in Sade’s total affirmation of nature as a Dionysian state of chaotic flux, a forever dissonant madness which affirms everything (and therefore nothing) at the same time. Again, we are not a million miles away from Lovecraft’s feared “holocaust of ecstasy and freedom”.

In his biography of Foucault, James Miller describes “all of Foucault’s work” as “an effort to issue a license for exploring…and also as a vehicle for expressing…this harrowing vision of a gnosis beyond good and evil, glimpsed at the limits of experience“ (459). Miller’s use of the term ‘gnosis’ is telling, as it positions Foucault’s philosophy (and praxis) within a context of mystical illumination or spiritual revelation. Walker takes this idea even further, arguing that

What we find, I believe, upon examination of some of Foucault’s key works, is that this “de-subjectifying” experience mirrors the processes of mystical schools such as Buddhism which pursue the breakdown of the ego through direct means such as meditation, resulting in the recognition that the material world and the ‘meanings’ we assume inhere within it (including the meaning of the “I,” the ego-self that operates within that world) are ‘maya’, or illusion. Foucault remarks in a 1978 interview that the whole problem of de-subjectification is directly related to the operations of “mysticism,”

The peculiar affinities between mysticism (I use that term broadly) and post-sturcturalist philosophy deserve an article of their own to be explored properly. Rest assured, dear reader, I will certainly write that some day. At this point however we only need to recognise that Focuault’s use of S and m in the pursuit of de-subjectification is not far removed from Crowley’s use of sex magick-the dissolution of the self. S and M, whether for the purposes of magick or de-subjectification, involves an encounter with what Camille Paglia calls ‘true nature’ or the ‘chthonian’. Cthonian is an adjective meaning “pertaining to deities dwelling under the earth”. As Walker elaborates“

“True nature, or the “chthonian,” is at base is nothing benign, but rather a “grueling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, reducing all matter to fluid, the thick primal soup from which new forces bob, gasping for life” (_Sexual_ 30). This residue from which humanity springs poses a constant threat for a people who confuse societally constructed identities, or %personae%, constructed in defence, with Dionysian human “nature”: “We speak of falling apart, having a breakdown .. . getting it all together” Paglia says. “Only in the West is there such conviction of the Apollonian unity of personality. . . . But I say that there is neither person, thought, thing, nor art in the brutal chthonian” (104, 73)

Foucault agrees: this search for “the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature” is burst asunder by the genealogist’s revelation that nature contains not “a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that (things) have no essence, or that their essence was fabricated . . .from alien forms” (78). For both Foucault and Paglia, it is this act of fabrication (the “ordering” process which becomes a Foucauldian buzzword: _The Order of Things_; “The Order of Discourse”) issuing forth not in an isomorphic relation, but in the line of defense and control versus the unknowable, which informs our problematic Western rationalism.

(Interestingly, the Chthonian has entered Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos by way of author Brian Lumley who introduced them as immense, burrowing squid-like creatures.)

What is the purpose of such de-subjectifying experiences though? For Crowley they were explicitly magickal, for others they are broadly political. As Paul Simpson writes  in his essay Michel Foucault on Freedom and the Politics of Experience, “the kind of S & M that holds Foucault’s interest is not one characterized by cruelty or harm. If anything, S & M comes across as a practice of justice and a “way in” to developing an ethics and subjectivity appropriate to a non-disciplinary society. One way Foucault sees S & M changing one’s subjectivity to a non-disciplinary orientation is the way it makes power relations transparent when in one’s daily lives they are all too well hidden.” For Simpson, “Foucault’s use of S & M as an opposition to centering sexual pleasure on the orgasm serves as a useful analogy to his refusal to center our political hopes on revolution.”

For Walker, Foucault’s work and sexual practices are concerned with the relation between the Appolonian and Dionysian sides of human experience:

The Apollonian, in contrast to the timeless, immanent realm of the Dionysian, is a *historical* force, embedded within our culture in a tangled network of conflicting paths “crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers” (“Space” 249). Characterised by the use of “reason” in the post-Enlightenment era, it actively de-limits the chaotic flux of the Dionysian and produces both society, on the macrocosmic level, and personality, or ”the subject,” on the level of the individual… Within our current Western ‘episteme’ (or historical period), one characterized by a post-Enlightenment faith in reason and concomitant loss of belief in God, Foucault locates sexual experience as the final borderline lying between Apollonian rationality and the Dionysian realm of the unknown.

This philosophical, and practical, search for the limit experience brings us back to Erik Davis’ observation that in the cosmic horror of Lovecraft:

Lovecraft has a habit of labeling his horrors “indescribable,” “nameless, “unseen,” “unutterable,” “unknown” and “formless.” Though superficially weak, this move can also be seen a kind of macabre via negativa. Like the apophatic oppositions of negative theologians like Pseudo-Dionysus or St. John of the Cross, Lovecraft marks the limits of language, limits which paradoxically point to the Beyond. For the mystics, this ultimate is the ineffable One, Pseudo-Dionysus’ “superluminous gloom” or the Ain Soph of the Kabbalists. But there is no unity in Lovecraft’s Beyond. It is the omnivorous Outside, the screaming multiplicity of cosmic hyperspace opened up by reason.

Here, I think, is the philosophical link between cosmic horror and S and M. The experience of cosmic horror ‘marks the limits of language’, of representation, in much the same way that sadomasochistic practices helped Foucault dissolve the self (as the representation we make of  and to ourselves):

You meet men [in fetish clubs] who are to you as you are to them: nothing but a body with which combinations and productions of pleasure are possible. You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity. ( Miller, 1993:264)

A theory that incorporates both Foucault’s ideas and horror fiction stirs in the shadows  much of horror relies on a fear of the unknown, cosmic horror in particular works on just such a confrontation between Appolonian rationality and the Dinonysian realm of the unknown. And so we return to Kim Newman’s observation with which this discussion began-the apparent link between cosmic horror and S and M.

PINHEAD MEETS FOUCAULT

Why resist? You love this as much as I. After all, you made me. There is a world out there, waiting to yield to us. So much flesh, so many different pleasures. (Pinhead in HELLRAISER3)

As touched upon above, these concerns bleed (and/or ejaculate) into Clive Barker’s fictions. Not for nothing was Barker’s original title for “Hellraiser”, his most well-known work,  ”Sadomasochists from Beyond the Grave”. Mark Dery’s pithy description of the Hellraiser mythos will suffice for now:

For those unfamiliar with the Hellraiser saga, the Cenobites are the heavily pierced sybarites from hell summoned, with the aid of a mysterious puzzle box called the Lament Configuration, by foolhardy humans. In an S&M rewrite of the Faust 1egend, they offer entree, for the usual fee of one mortal soul, to a realm of the senses where the envelope of sensation is pushed to the point where pleasure and torture meet. Punk-rock bondage freaks from the “outer darkness,” the Cenobites sport mutilated black leather and Boschian body modifications. Their leader, Pinhead, is an imposing vision in a black leather corset-cum-cassock, his pale, bald head studded with pins. He exudes seductive evil and glacial cool. De Sadean demigods for an age of extremes, the Cenobites are, in Pinhead’s words, “Explorers in the further regions of experience — demons to some, angels to others.” 

From here Dery proceeds naturally to Foucault (himself an acolyte of Bataille), finding that,

the gay subtext just beneath the surface of a movie such as Hellraiser is undeniable, and suggests one last interpretation of Pinhead, perhaps the most obvious of all: that of the lead Cenobite as a gay devotee of S&M, modeled, possibly on one of the leatherbound denizens of New York’s notorious Hellfire club in its heyday. Needless to say any series about a “religious community” (the Cenobites and their human acolytes) devoted to the pursuit of what Michel Foucault— himself a habitu of San Francisco’s S&M scene— called “limit experiences,” where ecstasy and agony melt into one, is transparently a metaphor for the S&M underground. Naturally, S&M isn’t gay by definition, although its association with the gay “leatherstream” culture celebrated in Mapplethorpe photos and Drummer magazine, not to mention Pinhead’s leather-bar get-up, invite us to interpret the lead Cenobite as a butch “top”, cruising for a bruising.

[snip]

Barker’s books and the best of his movies (Hellraiser, Nightbreed) can be seen as pop parallels to the Bataillean tradition that flowers in the post-structuralist philosophy of Foucault, who envisioned S&M as a means of “shattering the philosophical subject” – disintegrating the coherent, centered self of Western rationalism in an engulfing “animality.”

For Foucault, gay sadomasochism was a creative enterprise, the “real creation of new possibilities of pleasure” (Miller, 1993: 263). Certainly there is an affinity between Foucault’s statement that, “I think the kind of pleasure I would consider the real pleasure would be so deep, so overwhelming that I could not survive it”, and the words of Hellraiser’s Frank Cotton:

I thought I’d gone to the limits. I hadn’t. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits… pain and pleasure, indivisible. 

Max Renn, from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) is another 1980s horror protagonist taken beyond limits, although perhaps not quite as willingly as Hellriaser’s Frank Cotton. here’s a clip form the film:

In an earlier post I described Videodrome this way:

The film follows Max Renn (James Woods) the CEO of a small cable station who stumbles upon a broadcast signal featuring extreme violence and torture. Renn embarks on a sadomasochistic relationship with Debbie Harry, and their shared interest in sex and violence is facilitated by the videodrome transmissions. An apparent story about a mind-control conspiracy unfolds as Renn uncovers the signal’s source and loses touch with reality and begins suffering-or perhaps actually undergoing (?)- a series of increasingly bizarre and violent organic hallucinations/mutations. At one point developing a vaginal opening in his abdomen in which are placed a phallic gun but also videotapes which then take on a semblance of flesh. Traditional boundaries separating the organic from the technological become indistinct, giving way to the ‘new flesh’.

Videodrome’s cosmic horror is compounded by the film’s lack of center. It confounds linear interpretation. But strongly implied is the notion that Renn is drawn to s and M (despite his initial shock when lover Nickki Brand burns herself with a cigarette). This desire is what allows Max to become the ‘new flesh’, (as in the video above) and the film is ambiguous as to whether this transformation is positive or negative.

From Beyond (1988) is inspired by Lovecraft’s short story of the same name and tells the story of two scientists who build a ‘psychic resonator’; a kind of hyper-dimensional tuning fork that allows them to see creatures usually invisible to human eyes. Dr. Edward Pretorius appears to be killed by the creatures, leaving his assistant Dr. Crawford Tillinghast as a murder suspect. When the psychiatrist Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) suggests that Tillinghast return to the site and renew the experiments they discover not only that Pretorius had a predilection for sadomasochistic sex but also that he has not died. Instead his experience with the beyond has transformed into a grotesque monster. Again, experience of the cosmic results in ‘new flesh’ (the film is chockablock with satisfyingly sticky practical effects). Pretorious describes this metamorphosis in terms Foucault would surely have approved of:

Tillnghast: Edward, my god, what have you become?

Pretorius: Myself!

Tillinghast and Pretorius’s machine allows the human to see beyond our world by stimulating the pineal gland, or ‘third eye’. At one point McMichaels speculates that Pretorius’s S and M fetish may have been because the pineal gland controls sexual impulses. Certainly for Pretorius knowledge of the cosmic and corporeal pleasures are combined: “I have to see more! feel more!” Under the influence of Pretorius and the beings from beyond McMicheals finds herself drawn to the fetish wear kept in the scientists’s home. (There’s a French review of the film featuring a video of Dr. Katherine McMichaels  in S and M mode here if you need it. Ah, go ahead, who could blame you?)

Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) in From Beyond

Upon discovering her dressed up and astride a semi-conscious Tillinghast another character confronts her and forces her to look in a mirror, asking, “is that who you are?” To which McMicheals replies, “I don’t know. I don’t know who I am“. By the end of the film she, in typically Lovecraftian fashion, been driven quite mad by her confrontation with the cosmic forces that lie beyond and the sexual forces that lie within. Unlike Pretorius, she was unable to become herself.

Jean Grey/Black Queen

The link between cosmic beings (becomings?) and S and M as corrupting influence can also be discerned in the classic X-Men story The Dark Phoenix Saga. Taking place over several issue Jean Grey/Marvel Girl is possessed by the Phoenix Force, a cosmic entity whose power begins to corrupt Jean Grey. This cosmic corruption is facilitated by a simultaneous psychic corruption by the nefarious mutant hellfire Club, who psychically manipulate goody-goody Jean Grey into becoming the leather-bound Black Queen. As in from beyond, S and M garb is presented as a signifier of a more profound cosmic sickness.

Where  can we find meetings of sadomasochism and cosmicism that are transformative and positive rather than oppressive  As sympathetic as Hellraiser, or Videodrome might be to the new flesh they are hardly advertisements for it. On some level this may simply be a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff,  so to speak. Those with eyes to see, ears to listen, and arses to be paddled, will follow the invisible threads that lead beyond cosmic horror to cosmic consciousness. But there remain examples of a more positive representations sadomasochism.

In The Matrix the trappings of S and M are less explicit but no less important. As surely everyone knows by now, the protagonists in The Matrix have achieved gnosis and woken to the realisation that the 'real' world is simply a computer programme created by sentient machines (read higher-dimensional beings) as a virtual world for human minds while their bodies a are used as batteries in this higher reality. It is notable that in the visual language of the film those characters who have achieved this technological enlightenment choose to dress in fetishistic leather as a signifier of their expanded awareness. In contrast to X-Men or From Beyond where fetish-wear signified corruption by cosmic forces in The Matrix it signifies freedom from them. So too does the much-derided Zion rave scene from Matrix Revolutions express the same theme-freedom from cosmic control is expressed and experienced by and through the liberation of the body.

“S and M, by fuck…I ahve become immortal”

Moreover, the S and M=cosmic freedom equation is highlighted by the inclusion of the Marquis de Sade himself as a character in the story. When brought forward to modern day San Francisco de Sade visits the same S and M clubs that Foucault would have frequented. Astonished, the Marquis de Sade exclaims, “oh brave new world, that has such people in it”. Moreover it can be suggested that the recurring theme in The Invisibles of the self as memeplex or fiction, and the personal, spiritual and politically tactical advantages of multiple identities over a single dysfunctional one would have appealed to both de Sade and Foucault, who once mused that, “From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence–we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”

Hellraiser creator Clive Barker has himself warned against decadence for its own sake, ”If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure- because society has taught us that’s all we’re worth and were exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society- then we just become hedonists,” he told an interviewer. “Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there’s just purposelessness.” But does this mean we ought to retreat back to bourgeois moral values, family and work ethic? Hardly. It was these very sructures from which Foucault at least was trying to obliterate:

“I cannot give myself those middle range pleasures that make up everyday life.”

These middle-range pleasures are a good place to end, at least in as much as they point to a new reading of cosmic horror rooted not in transgressive sexual practices but in the grinding mundanity of the everyday. A possibility that one needn’t touch leather nor feel the lash of the whip to experience Paglia’s “brutal cthonian” or Lovecraftian terror at the abject futility of human endeavour in the face of an infinite, unmoved cosmos. As so many melodramas have correctly pointed out  the very Appolonian order we built to escape our Dionysian yearnings exerts its own inexorable pull towards the abyss of being.

So it is that we find ourselves not at the cosmic rim, the ocean depths or hyperspace, but in a forest in 1950s America with a frustrated suburban couple and a mentally disturbed acquaintance  in this clip from Revolutionary Road.

“Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

A new genre: the suburban drama as cosmic nightmare. Bourgeois couples behind lace curtains crossing the abyss of hopeless emptiness by way of a bridge constructed of chains and leather into a higher realm of self-creation. In lieu of such a text the final film I want to consider instead is Brian Yuzna’s Return of the Living Dead Part 3. Ostensibly a zombie-flick  rather than cosmic horror, Living Dead 3 still manages to allegorise several of the ideas discussed so far. The romantic of tale of teenagers lovers Curt and Julie, the film tells the story Curt’s effort to bring his girlfriend back to life after a motorcycle accident using the military’s experimental Trioxin gas (which has been developed in an attempt to create weaponized zombies). Needless to say, things don’t go smoothly. But among the zombie carnage is an interesting plot point concerning Julie’s desire to retain her humanity. In order to stave off her hunger for human flesh Julie begins mutilating herself instead. Not only does this make for some neat gore effects and striking visuals (see picture below) but it also ties in nicely with the idea of sadomasochism as an act of resistance.

Return of the Living Dead 3

In Lauro and Embry’s “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism” (2008)  the authors argue that contrary to Donna Haraway, it is the zombie and not the cyborg that provides the most appropriate metaphor for twenty-first century humanity:

“The zombie, we feel, is a more pessimistic but nonetheless more appropriate stand-in for our current moment, and specifically for America in the global economy, where we feed off the products of the rest of the planet, and, alienated from our humanity, stumble forward, groping for immortality even as we decompose. (ibid, p 93)…It consumes, and it makes more consumers.” (p 99).

Zombies then are those who have not escaped the “hopeless emptiness”, Foucault’s “middle range pleasures” of the bourgeois life. If zombies are metaphors for the contemporary subject then Return of the Living Dead 3 becomes a potent Foucauldian allegory (that’s right, I said it). Julie’s body is indeed inscribed with discourses of power/knowledge-state, technoscience, and military. This inscription fills her with the insatiable hunger of the capitalist consumer. But in the end it is her sadomasochistic practices-the self-laceration, the jagged piercings-that keep this hunger at bay, that allow her to (re)create herself.

So now then…

By way of conclusion, here is Holmes et al. (2006) offering one final definition of the limit experience:

The limit experience is an experience of the edge, of the margin, an experience that is actively involved in the becoming process (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). These edges or margins could be defined in numerous ways: the boundary separating life from death and the line dividing pleasure from pain are examples. Limit experience or edge work practices(Lyng, 2005) are often located in the uncivilized spaces where actors ‘resistthe imperatives of emotional control, rational calculation, routinization, and reason in Modern society’ (Lyng, 2005, p.6)…Foucault maintained that sadomasochistic (S&M) practices embody the limit experience. S&M practices are an attempt to break down the boundaries that contain the body through the use of non-conventional methods, which transform the traditional definition of an act (in this case, the sex act) intosomething new, that is, sex as pain. When viewed from this perspective, bareback sex is yet another example of this limit experience. In the latter case,sex becomes danger or death. The body is pushed to a new limit where it isforced to re-define itself; it is the limit experience that forces the redefinition of the Self (de-subjectification)

The limit experience is an encounter with the unknown, “…an accomplishment of the self (through self-creation and perhaps self-destruction) but also a political maneuver to subvert the omnipresent hierarchies that govern everyday life” (ibid). Limit experiences don’t have to involve sexuality of course, sleep deprivation, drug trips and self-harm can take explorer to the limits of the self as well. Notably, all of these methods have a long and illustrious use in the history of magic as well. The link between limit experience and the cosmic has been in place long before the authors and texts discussed in this article. Foucault’s quest for de-subjectification, though framed in the language of resistance against state power, is effectively a shamanic death/rebirth, an ancient and deep-rooted human proclivity for unmaking and remaking the self (though it is true that the modern state generally prohibits such encounters with the cosmic self).

In the genre of cosmic horror the limits of the mind and the limits of the body are the same thing. For the puritanical and repressed Lovecraft encounters with the limit resulted in madness and/or despair. Lovecraft, the rationalist, balked at the irrational. For Bataille, Sade and Foucault, each in their own way seeking to escape the ‘despotism of reason’, that same breakdown was actually a breakthrough. A gateway to new forms of being. In cosmic horror these new ways of being are literalised-new flesh is granted; strange, new bodies for strange, new minds. At least for those who are willing t0 give way to the irrational.

But resisting the irrational? Clinging on to the comfort blanket of reason? That way madness lies.

It’s been a long three years, and its not over yet. But with a full initial draft of my snappily titled thesis Producing and Consuming the Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics finally in the bag, now seems a good time to present some of the ideas from it on the blog. A ‘thesis review’ where the monster’s still dying corpse can be dissected and unimaginable, as-yet-unnamed organs extracted from its still-warm carcass and held up to the light: “Now look what we have here”, I will say, rubbing the ungodly creature’s black blood on my lab coat.  As ever, the reader is forewarned that this is the blog and not the thesis itself, so expect a potentially unpalatable mix of personal literary style and academic writing. Although to be fair if you are still with me after the whole monster autopsy thing then we’ll probably be okay. So lets begin.

In short I set out three and a bit years ago (or perhaps 34) to investigate two related questions. Firstly, how had the figure of the posthuman body developed in superhero comics? Or to put it more accurately, in what ways did the development of the superhero relate to a wider discourse of the posthuman body? A discussion of how the posthuman body of the superhero has developed can be found elsewhere on the blog (here and here) so will only be touched on occasionally in this piece

Secondly, I wanted to know what sense comic book readers made of the posthuman body. For example, did a familiarity with the superhero genre make one more or less amenable to the idea of human enhancement as espoused by Transhumanism? The question of reader-text relationships is addressed briefly below but the more elaborate discussion it requires will have to wait until Part Three of this series. Part Two takes the theoretical concepts presented below and demonstrates the advantages of applying them to the study of superhero comics.

In Part One of this ‘thesis review’ I instead want to present some of the philosophical concepts that informed the approach I took in my thesis to the posthuman body in terms of both theory and methodology. Or to put it another way, the following discussion is about what separates a ‘critical analysis’ or ‘cultural theory’ of superhero comics from, say, reviewing them. Long story short: the questions of how superheroes have developed and what readers get from them are not simple to answer. Or, rather, may lead to a multitude of, often potentially conflicting, answers to those questions depending on the assumptions the questioner starts out with. As such this article lays out my epistemological and ontological framework.

As Voltaire once said, “if you wish to converse with me, first define your terms”.

Ready to define some terms? Let’s go!

DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

I found the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari particularly compelling in thinking about the posthuman body. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the body questions the binaries that modernist thought has inherited from Cartesian mind/body dualism, in particular questions of the biological/social and agency/structure. Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with embodiment and their philosophy is a materialist one, albeit a “radical new materialism”, as Rivkin and Ryan (1998:345) (emphasis added) elaborate:

Thought no longer stands outside matter [is no longer disembodied along Cartesian lines]…thought is a move within matter itself. Rather than having a mind and a body we are all bodies that are part of a general ‘body without organs’ that is what used previously to be called ‘the world’ or ‘nature’ or ‘matter’. We are all part of this primordial substance that is unarticulated into identities or objects or selves, but that can be cut up in various ways by signification, which must be understood as practical action in/on the world

Instead it conceptualizes selves as, “distributive, both confined to individual bodies and simultaneously connected, overlapping with other bodies, nature and machines” (Gibson, 2006: 189). As such,

A ‘subject’ for Deleuze and Guattari is re-imagined as a continual ‘becoming’ neither encased by skin and organs nor defined by static concepts and categorizations…Becoming is identity-in-motion rather than fixed being. It is active, occupying an identity zone without becoming fixated with or fixed to any of its elements. This open system of assemblages-as opposed to closed and static subjects-can be torn down and reconfigured. (Ibid: 190).

Deleuze and Guattari understand the making of bodies, “…to occur on a ‘plane of immanence’ in which things-objects, beings- are understood not in terms of eternal and immutable essences, but in terms of relations and effects” (Braun, 2004:8).  Furthermore, “…Deleuze’s bodies are multiple…not simply human bodies…the human body is not, never was, and never can be, simply ‘itself’” (ibid: 9). As Deleuze himself puts it:

The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. A composition of speeds and slowness on a plane of immanence…it should be clear that the plane of immanence, the plane of Nature that distributes affects, does not make any distinction at all between things that might be called natural and things that might be called artificial. Artifice is fully a part of nature, since each thing, on the immanent plane of Nature, is defined by the arrangement of motions and affects into which it enters, whether these arrangements are artificial or a natural (cited in ibid: 8)

As such, Deleuze and Guattari position the body in a relational field quite different from the discursively passive body that is inscribed by environment and social context. Bodies are instead reformulated as contextual categories, offering a model of embodiment that focuses not on what a body ‘is’ but on what it can do.

Motivated by positive desire, human bodies have affected their environment through the creation of tools and technologies, organizations and institutions, and symbolic representations; all of which establish myriad new relations with other bodies. Deleuze and Guattari utilize the concept of the Body without Organs (rather than the organism known to medical science; the body-with-organs) to suggest the limits of what a body can do. The Body without Organs seeks to establish such new relations because the more relations a body has the more it becomes capable of doing. These relations can be both physical-with the biological realm -but also non-physical, deriving from a body’s psychology, cultural context, or the social world. These relations affect the body and how the body can affect other bodies.

ASSEMBLAGES

For Deleuze and Guattari bodies are ‘assemblages’ whose, “…function or potential or ‘meaning’ becomes entirely dependent on which other bodies or machines it forms an assemblage with” (Malins, 2004; 85).  It is not that a body’s relations and affects directly determine what it can do. Instead the body and its relations combine within assemblages. A drinking-assemblage might for instance comprise

Mouth-water-cup-thirst

Or a reading-assemblage (discussed in more detail below) might comprise of

Eyes-book-chair-coffee

The relations that make up an assemblage may be drawn from any domain, symbolic or actual, but the assemblage is always dynamic and vary from person to person, body to body, dependent on their own relations. For example some reading assemblages might comprise eyes-glasses-bed-book-and so on in a multiplicity of directions. An assemblage is a becoming rather than a being.

Assemblages link the body to the social and cultural environment, defining its capacities and limits. Never the less, the body always retains the possibility of forming new relations, new assemblages that offer the possibility of becoming otherwise. For as Malins describes it:

The body retains its own impetus…for forming assemblages which allow desire to flow in different directions, producing new possibilities and potentials…brief lines of movement away from organization and stratification and toward a Body without Organs (BwO); in other words, towards a disarticulated body whose organs (and their movements and potentials) are no longer structured in the same way, or structured at all (Malins, 2004:88)

READING-ASSEMBLAGES

While one stand of the thesis deals with how the posthuman body is represented in superhero comics the second strand addresses how readers make sense of these representations of the posthuman body. Here too Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts prove enlightening. Within this model comic books, too, are machinic-assemblages. A comic book is itself a body, a line of flight, and an act of territorialisation or deterritorialisation depending on its use or result. As Deleuze and Guattari themselves put it:

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation, segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movement and deterritorialisation and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage…a little machine…the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into in order to work…literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:3-4)

For Deleuze art is active; the work of art only has relations with forces. Rejecting the idea of the book as a representation of reality, Deleuze presents the book as a machine, as something which does things rather than signify things, an assemblage that, “…connect[s] bodies up with other bodies, affects, and social formations in many different directions” (Malins, 2004:95). Viewed as assemblages texts are a mix of discrete parts capable of producing any number of effects, as opposed to the organized, coherent whole that produces a single dominant reading.

At this point it would be useful to recall that body is an assemblage whose, “…function or potential or ‘meaning’ becomes entirely dependent on which other bodies or machines it forms an assemblage with” (Malins, 2004; 85). Bodies connect up with the machinic assemblage of the book, forming a new assemblage which in turn connects up with other bodies and machines, “…people, substances, knowledge, institutions-any of which may redirect or block its flows of desire” (ibid). When an assemblage allows desire to flow in different directions it produces, “…new possibilities and potentials…brief lines of movement away from organization and stratification” (Maslin, 2004:88). A longer discussion of the assemblage formed between text-reader-creator-corporation-and so on will be presented in a separate article.

BECOMING

The linking of one machinic assemblage with another results in what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘becomings’. To take and example from Carstens (2005:56), “in terms of the environmental crisis, the assemblage people might make while becoming-tree, or becoming-animal may expand our sense of interconnectivity with other beings ad the land”.  A becoming is, “…born of a machinic assemblage in which each term deterritorialises the other to become something else entirely” (Hainge, 2006:100). Becoming is “to affect and be affected” (Mercieca and Mercieca, 2010: 86), a process of change or movement within an assemblage. Discussing the terms ‘becoming-animal’ and ‘becoming-minoritarian’ Bruns clarifies how

Becoming-animal is a movement from major (the constant) to minor (the variable); it is a deterritorialisation in which a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability and identity but is instead folded imperceptibly into a movement or into an amorphous legion whose mode of existence is nomadic, or alternatively, whose ‘structure’ is rhizomatic (Bruns, 2007: 703)

For Malins, understanding how machinic assemblages prevent or facilitate (territorialising or deterritorialising) these becomings is an ethical one:

Such an ethics interrogate each event, assemblage or body for what it can be made to do rather than what it essentially is. Decisions must be made, but made in relation to each event and its affects rather than an underlying essence or overriding morality. An assemblage becomes ethical or unethical depending on the affects it enables and the potentials it opens up or blocks. It becomes ethical when it enables the body to differentiate from itself and go on becoming-other (Malins, 2004:102)

In discursive terms assemblages can be formed from a multiplicity of ideas, thoughts, pieces of data and discursive moments. Taken together these assemblages from ‘plateaus’. Deleuze and Guattari, “…call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities buy superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (1987:24).

TERRITORIES

At this point Rivkin and Ryan’s description of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas is worth quoting in full to remind ourselves of what it means to view bodies as ‘desiring machines’ or ‘machinic assemblages’:

We are all machines…and the institutions we make for ourselves such as the family and the state are also machines that take the desiring production of humanity and process it in useful ways for a particular social regime…in order to work functionally we have to desire efficiently. But the desire is innately reckless and inefficient; an energistics without bounds, and it should be understood as just one segment in larger flows of energy and matter that constitute the world as a mobile, varying, multiple flux with different strata that make up planes of consistency. We exist within such planes as lines of flight that can either escape or be captured and pinned down by signifying regimes, semantic orders that assign us meanings and identities…All such stabilizations or codings constitute territorialisations in that they establish boundaries of identity that restrain temporarily the movement of the flows and the lines of flight…but deterritorialisation is a more powerful force, and everything eventually breaks apart and flows anew, only once again to be recaptured and reterritorialised by another social regime of signification (1998:345)

As such, Deleuze and Guattari invite us to view history as a succession of “signifying regimes, ways of ordering the flows of matter and desiring productions”, not dissimilar to Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’ as regimes of power/knowledge.  The concept of territorialisation helps to elucidate how the social impinges upon the individual or how subjectivities such as ‘woman’, ‘deviant’ or ‘Fascist’ are created when one term territorializes another within an assemblage.

For human bodies this can mean the masochist’s body’s breasts become for whipping or that the anorexic’s mouth becomes for emptying the stomach, or the skin becomes a canvass for the tattooed body. If a particular assemblage is repeated too often through habit however the components of that assemblage can become stratified and coded. A reterritorialisation occurs. Even so, a body’s becoming remains always transitional:

A body-in becoming soon re-stratifies: either captured by or lured by the socius…and although re-stratification usually occurs according to pre-existing categories (masochist, deviant; drug user, junkie), it can also…allow bodies to create their own entirely new (but most often abjected) categories…and these territorialisations are also never fully complete: a living desiring body will always form new assemblages that have the potential to transform it and its territories (ibid)

As concepts, desiring-machines and assemblages are analogous. The question is how they can block or allow desire to flow:

A desire which, following Deleuze and Guattari, is no longer tied to a psychoanalytic notions of lack and pleasure, but is the productive energy flow that moves between bodies in assemblages and enables them to momentarily alter their modes of composition… desiring assemblages can both revolutionise and sediment a body’s stratification…desire temporarily de-stratifies the body…brief lines of movement toward a disarticulated body, toward deterritorialisation (ibid)

Deleuze and Guattari suggest we can avoid territorilaisation through following ‘lines of flight’ from these territorialisations toward new embodiments. As Deleuze himself puts it, “…lines of flight are the same thing as movements of deterritorialization” (quoted in Tuck, 2010:644).  Of course, following this deterritorialising line of flight there follows a reterritorialisation, although perhaps one where a body can do different things than in its previous territorialisation.

THE POSTHUMAN BODY AS ASSEMBLAGE

The posthuman body is presented in my thesis as, “…an assemblage of socially coded affects” (Colebrook, 2002:93). The desire to become other, to become posthuman, is not singular, hence the different forms that the posthuman body took at specific historical junctures. For Deleuze it is not that some underlying power behind texts/images uses representations to mislead us. Rather.

Desire itself is power; a power to become and produce images. Desire also has the power to produce images that enslave it: images of a moral ‘man’ obeying his social duty. But the task is not to get away from images so much as to reveal and intensify their production: why limit ourselves to the image of man and woman as social citizens, why not become other? Deleuze’s political critique does not begin from a power that opposes desire but from one single univocal flow of desire that produces the very terms that enslave it…power does not oppress us; it produces us. Cultural forms, like literature, do not deceive us; they are ways in which desire organises and extends its investments (Colebrook, 2002:94)

In Deleuze’s thought

Desire-not knowledge, not power, but desire-is the centerpiece of their collaboration…For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is not an absence…not a lacking, but an exponentially growing assemblage…the components of desire are fragments, bits and pieces accumulated over a lifetime…imprinted by the social formation of democratic capitalism. (Tuck, 2010:639-640)

Deleuze and Guattari speak of bodies as ‘desiring-machines’. These desiring machines are productive. Because of this desire or ‘positive desire’ is much like Nietzsche’s will-to-power, and shares certain commonalities with the concept of ‘agency’. But if desire has the capacity to radically alter or disrupt existing social formations it is also capable of tripping us up. Desire is not an ideology against any particular social formation. For Deleuze, relegating desire to ideology is, “…a perfect way to ignore how desire works on the infrastructure, invests it, belongs to it, and how desire thereby organizes power: it organizes the system of oppression” (Deleuze, 2006:264, cited in Tuck, 2010:641). Thus, it is possible for people to desire their own oppression. Deleuze and Guattari cite the work of Wilhelm Reich in relation to fascism, writing that,

Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation for fascism…no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism (quoted in Tuck 2010: 642)

These points can now be illustrated with reference to the types of posthuman body I discuss in the thesis; the Perfect body of the Golden Age, the Cosmic Body of the Silver Age and the Military-Industrial Body of the ‘Modern Age’. It is not that the Perfect, Cosmic, or Military-Industrial body is the genuine article but each are manifestations of desiring production that have become coded and thus stratified into what Deleuze calls an ‘interest’. Interests are not an effect of our desire but a law that governs our desire and is always formed from specific and singular affects.

So it was that during the Golden Age both the Nazi visions of the Master Race and the comic book superhero were expressions of the same unruly desire for becoming posthuman but coded as an interest by the specific and singular affects of the time. Because of this, scholars have often linked the superhero to fascism based on these shared codes. But the desire to become posthuman is impersonal, no more fascistic than revolutionary. The posthuman body is always coded by the interests that have territorialised it; never a representation of the actual but an extension of the virtual tendencies of the given world. By highlighting these historically specific codings this thesis hoped to go some way to releasing the impersonality of desire from these interests. There are obviously political implications to this. The history of the posthuman body demonstrates the material effects that are brought about when the posthuman is coded as an interest. The eugenics movement, the Nazi Holocaust and the dispiriting contemporary emphasis on the search for cyborg super soldiers are testament to this.

For the purposes of my thesis I wanted to draw upon the concept of the posthuman, and combine it with Deluze and Guattari’s ideas in an effort to move away from structuralist and ideological readings of the superhero. The limitations of such approaches are discussed in greater detail in part two. To end this discussion however, I want to introduce one final concept from Deleuze and Guattari: the rhizome. The rhizome presented as a conceptual tool that brings the previous concepts of the assemblage, territories, lines of flight, and becomings together.

RHIZOME

A rhizome is made up of plateaus, and a plateau is made up of assemblages.  As such a rhizome becomes a figure for thinking. Deleuze and Guattari propose that the figure for thinking that has dominated Western rationalism is the image of the tree:

These arborescent structures, with their interlocking arrangements of symmetrical and polarized branches-either-or, thesis and antithesis, and division and analogy all serving equally this formalization-have dictated the limits and reductions built into an inherited mode of thinking. (Perry, 1993:174)

Look at this rhizome. Just look at it

Look at the arboreal structure of this tree. How very ordered.

Unlike trees with their roots and central trunk, rhizomes do not possess fixed origins; “they are tuberous-multiplicitous, adventitious-and connect nonlinear assemblages to other things” (Jackson, 2003:693). Rather than following in unproblematic linearity as in the branches of a tree any point within a rhizome can be connected to any other. A rhizome is non-hierarchical in structure, it has, “no roots, no starting place, no sequence, no ending place; only multiple sources, interruptions, interceptions, foldings, mergings, partings, multiple entry ways” (Tuck, 2010:638). Another key principle of the rhizome is ‘asignifying rupture’, the continual refiguration of aspects of the rhizome. If a line in the rhizome is shattered at any given spot it may start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines, or re-erupt on the same path as multiple lines.

The question, of course, is “what can a rhizome do”? How can this model of thought and culture be applied methodologically? Perhaps a simpler question is how can the rhizome be used to transform existing methodologies?  To answer this question I propose connecting the rhizome with a methodology that already has epistemological similarities to Deleuzian thought, namely Foucauldian discourse analysis.

RHIZOMATIC METHODS/METHODOLOGY

It is important to remember that representation is itself a body, a line of flight, an act of territorialisation or deterritorialisation depending on its use or result.  Academic research, of course, generally aims to represent a social reality. However, when a particular analytical model guides research then that model territorialises its object of enquiry. The object becomes’

Pinned down by signifying regimes, semantic orders that assign us meanings and identities…All such stabilizations or codings constitute territorialisations in that they establish boundaries of identity that restrain temporarily the movement of the flows and the lines of flight

Alternatively, thinking and research that is in a state of becoming would not be guided by in interpretation by a model or series that provides explanation. Mercieca and Mercieca describe ‘the series’ as the “IS as it produces particular understandings” (ibid: 86). On the other hand,

To engage with intensities and forces within the series is to see them as connected by AND…rather than following in unproblematic linearity. The shift is from research that only interprets, to an experience in which the researcher and the researched engage with each other ‘to affect and be affected’…the acknowledgement of and engagement with the multiplicity of forces and of movements, with becoming, is being closed down by…particular sense-making (bid)

Deleuze and Guattari call this ‘particular sense-making’ a tracing. Such tracings result from researchers emulating practices and analyses that are known and predictable (Mazzei and McCoy, 2010) which rely on “the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:12). These overcoding structures are the arboreal, tree-like structures of thought addressed earlier. Tracing is a form of what Scheuric calls ‘imperial validity’, “where the researcher attempts to control the researched, to spread his imperial tentacles across and over the research subject” (Honan, 2007:544). Tracing is distinct from, but not in opposition to, what Deleuze and Guattari term mapping, which, rather than rely on an overcoding structure, “is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real” (ibid). Never the less traces always remain and a such, “the tracing should always be put back on the map…What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration” (ibid 13-14). The model of thought that facilitates mappings and their nomadic ranging across fields is the rhizome, which is not a tracing mechanism but a map with multiple entry points. The use of this model for research can be termed ‘schizo-analysis’ or ‘rhizo-analysis’.

Honan and Sellers tried to develop rhizomatic methodologies for use in educational research. As a starting point for beginning rhizo-analysis their suggestions are most helpful. They describe several features that a rhizomatic methodology might exhibit:

• An approach to writing that is partial and tentative, that transgresses generic boundaries, and allows the inclusion of the researchers’ voice.
• Understanding that discourses operate within a text in rhizomatic ways-that is they are not linear, or separate. Any text includes a myriad of discursive systems and the discursive systems are connected to and across each other. A rhizomatic discourse analysis follows the lines of flight that connect these different systems in order to provide accounts of plausible (mis) readings
• Data…can be analysed rhizomatically to find connections between writing, artwork, video, interview transcripts, and textual artefacts. This kind of analysis allows (im) plausible readings of connections between and across and within various data.

In this methodology discursive systems become seen as plateaus, “particular assemblages of meaning that inform others and each other, that do not stand alone (do not stand in the immovable sense at all), and only make sense when read within and against each other” (Honan, 2007:536). A rhizo-textual analysis involves mapping these pathways, intersections and connections between discursive plateaus, identifying the moments where assemblages of discourses merge.

The posthuman body then can be understood as a rhizome, made up of discursive plateaus, or assemblages formed between art, science and society. A rhizo-analysis of the posthuman body is a marriage of form and content.  A Post/Humanist approach to the posthuman. An experiment in becoming informed by an epistemology that, “…does not fetishize completion, closed circuits, or discrete processes” (Tuck, 2010:641). As O’ Sullivan puts it, thinking about the study of culture as rhizome implies, “…not a different kind of reading but a transformation…a ‘voyage of discovery’, a journey which produces the terrain it maps” (2002: 84). Deleuze and Guattari urge the researcher to, “…Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous point on it, find potential movements of deterritorialisation, possible lines of flight, experience them” (quoted in ibid:90). For Honan and Sellers, following lines of flight in rhizomatic research means making connections between quite different thoughts, concepts, and data.

This involves a move away from the ‘interpretation of culture’ and towards what O’Sullivan calls, “…a pragmatics which allows for a mapping of connections between different objects and practices, events and assemblages” (2002:81). Because rhizomes lack easily identifiable beginnings and ends it is not possible to provide linear descriptions of journeys taken through and across a rhizome (Honan, 2007:533). If the presentation of my thesis follows the scholarly mandate of introduction, literature review, methodology, analysis and conclusion it never the less can be said that each chapter focuses on a different tuber, “a different middle, while still providing connections to other tubers, other parts of the rhizome” (ibid). As Deleuze and Guattari themselves put it, “…a rhizome ceaselessly establish connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relevant to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:7). With this in mind the thesis presents a cultural history of the posthuman in superhero comics, as it has been suggested that cultural historical approaches combine “the disciplinary strengths of writing history with the ferment of ideas associated with what might be loosely termed Critical Theory…[and situating] texts in a broad network of contexts and disciplinary knowledges” (Luckhurst, 2005:1-2). Such an interdisciplinary undertaking fits neatly with the idea of rhizo-analysis being proposed here. Interviews were then subject to a discourse analysis to examine how this data itself overlapped with, or ran contrary to, the discourses under examination in the cultural history. A discussion of how the concepts of the rhizome and assemblages related to the gathering of readers, interviewing and analysis of interview transcripts will be elaborated on in Part Three.

CONCLUSION

So that, very briefly, presents the philosophical underpinnings of my thesis. Writing it up for this ‘thesis review’™ I experience my usual, but not I suspect unusual, sensation of profound intellectual insecurity: “three years of this rubbish? Why did no-one step in and say, clearly, Scott, you have no grasp of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas whatsoever. Reading your ideas about them is akin to watching a Dog try to work an ipod”. Time, and a viva, will tell on that one. In the meantime any comments are welcome.

In Part Two I want to demonstrate how thinking rhizomatically moves the analysis of superhero comics away from questions of representation, identity politics and ideology. It will begin by outlining several of the limitations of such approaches, both theoretically and methodologically, before illustrating the ways in which the comic book superhero displays rhizomatic properties instead.

It’s all jolly exciting isn’t it? See you then, human.

BIBILOGRAPHY

Braun, B. (2004) “Querying Posthumanisms” Geoforum 35:3 pp. 269-273

Bruns, G. L. (2007) “Becoming-Animal (Some Simple Ways)” New Literary History 38:4 pp. 703-720

Carstens, J. P. (2005) Techno genetrix: shamanizing the new flesh – cyborgs, virtual interfaces and the vegetable matrix in SF Unpublished dissertation submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the subject of English at the University of South Africa available online at http://uir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/2126

Deleuze, G. and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateus (trans. Brian Massumi) Minneapolois: University of Minnesota Press

Gibson, B. E.  (2006) “Disability, Connectivity and Transgressing the Autonomous Body” in Journal of Medical Humanities, 27 pp. 187-196

Honan, E. (2007) “Writing a rhizome: an (im)plausible methodology” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education  20:5 pp. 531-546

Jackson, A.Y. (2003) “Rhizovocality” Qualitative Studies in Education, 16:5 pp.693-710

Luckhurst, R. (2005) Science Fiction Cambridge: Polity Press

Malins, P. (2004) “Machinic assemblages: Deleuze, Guattari and ethico-aesthetics of drug use” in Janus Head 7:1 pp. 84-104

Mazzei, L.A. and Kate McCoy (2010) “Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23:5 pp.503-509

O’Sullivan, S. (2002) “Cultural studies as rhizome-rhizomes in cultural studies” in Stefan Herbrechter (Ed.) Cultural Studies, Interdisciplinarity and Translation. Amsterdam/New York pp. 81-95

Perry, P. (1993) “Deleuze’s Nietzsche” Boundary 2:20 pp. 174-191

Rivkin, J and Micheal Ryan (eds) (1998) Literary Theory: An Anthology Oxford: Blackwell

Tuck, E. (2010) “Breaking up with Deleuze: desire and valuing the irreconcilable” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23:5, 635-650

On Friday the 15th of February, 2013 the world trembled as Laughter on the Outskirts made it’s world premier at the Leicester Comedy festival. A rough beast, slouching towards Edinburgh to be born. Over the course of an hour the charming enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in human flesh and skin Woodward and I said things with our mouth-holes and moved our meat-sacks around to entertain the audience. Paradigms were shattered, unthought ideas were thought, the falcon could not hear the falconer, and mere anarchy was loosed upon the world.

At the very least people chuckled and no-one died.

So that was good. I am excited to see how it develops over the course of the Edinburgh Festival in August. That’s right, I said it! Woodward and Jeffery: Laughter on the Outskirts will be playing there every day. More details to follow, but it can’t hurt to start spreading the word now can it? Come along, all of you! It will be free too!

In the meantime I wanted to use this post to talk about jokes. Specifically my joke about the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Not immediate comedy gold, granted. But I was pleased to see th joke finally work properly. or how I’d always imagined it would work in my head even though it never necessarily did.

Foucault if he was texting you

So this post will either be an interesting and entertaining consideration of the mechanics of comedy or painfully solipsistic self-examination. Potentially both. But, if you are still with me, I’ll continue. If you’re not with me then I can’t say I blame you, so instead here is a link to a youtube video of giant anconda regurgitating a  cow. It’s pretty amazing.

Anyway. Below is a video of the first time I tried the Foucault joke. I’m putting it there for illustration purposes rather than it being integral to this post. Advance warning: all of this material was new at the time so some of it is painful and doesn’t work at all and I occasionally draw attention to its newness in an irritating manner.

So the “Foucault bit” as I will henceforth call it, basically worked (I say ‘worked’, I really mean ‘seemed funny to me’) because it takes something profane, base, and childish-a story about the time my mum shat herself in front of me-and then at the end of the routine, after talking about Foucault’s notion that what society calls perverse or deviant is in fact political in nature, there’s a call-back to my Mum’s poo with the line, “and I realised that my mum didn’t just shit herself, she actually delivered a scathing critique of bourgeois morality”.

For the record, my mum is very proud of me.

Anyway, being convinced that this was somehow amusing I’ve been consistently proven other wise. Especially one particular Red Raw night at The Stand in Glasgow when around two minutes of a five minute spot were eaten up by me clumsily, and not very entertainingly, explaining Foucault so that by the time I got to the final minute and the callback it was too late and most of the crowd had, quite rightly, decided that they didn’t want a condensed lecture about a dead French, homosexual, post-structuralist at a comedy club. I also like to think that this is the reason The Stand have never invited me back as that is in fact the least paranoid of my  list of imaginary reasons why The Stand has never invited me back.

So now then…the Focuault bit didn’t work, despite my belief to the contrary. So I decided that maybe it did work but it was question of form. It didn’t work in a five or ten spot because the time it took to set up the Foucault bit, which it seemed to me had to be a) accurate (or what was the pint) b) because of that, just complex enough for the juxtaposition of philosophy and poo to be funny. But also c) funny because its accurate: Foucault was interested in that kind of thing.

The 20-25 minutes afforded by Laughter on the Outskirts turns out to be the best fit. I had a couple of minutes of material that followed the Foucault bit as a climax but since it worked as it was supposed to, (bizarrely getting a round of applause) it felt okay just to leave it there. two years of writing my five-minute bits as if they were all thematically connected in some way seems to have paid off in the form of twenty minutes that are both (usually/often/sometimes/never) funny but also tell a story that’s autobiographical and philosophical.

And if that sounds awfully wanky, and it surely does, then remember that it’s also mostly jokes about poo.

I like to think that Foucault, like my Mum, would be proud.

And with that we come to an end. I’m away to work on my Deleuze and Guattari routine.

See you in Edinburgh in August! In the meantime I will be here:

FEBRUARY

Wednesday, 27th-Laughing Horse New Act of the Year 1/4 Finals, The Beehive, Edinburgh

MARCH

Thursday, 21st- The Grosvenor, Glasgow, 5pm-7pm (Compere)

Friday, 22nd-The Grosvenor, Glasgow, 5pm-7pm (Compere)

Wednesday, 27th- Jam Jar Comedy Club, Shuttle Street, Paisley

Thursday, 28th- Ginger Ale Comedy, The Roxy, Great Western Road, Glasgow, 8.30

Sunday, 31st-The Tall Ship, Pointhouse Road, Glasgow, 6pm

Here’s what they have to say over at exquistecorpse.com:

Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution. The technique got its name from results obtained in initial playing, “Le cadavre / exquis / boira / le vin / nouveau” (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine). Other examples are: “The dormitory of friable little girls puts the odious box right” and “The Senegal oyster will eat the tricolor bread.” These poetic fragments were felt to reveal what Nicolas Calas characterized as the “unconscious reality in the personality of the group” resulting from a process of what Ernst called “mental contagion.” At the same time, they represented the transposition of Lautréamont’s classic verbal collage to a collective level, in effect fulfilling his injunction– frequently cited in Surrealist texts–that “poetry must be made by all and not by one.”

The ‘mystique of accident’ was of course explored in the previous post on cut-ups. In this post I want to apply the exquisite corpse technique to joke-writing. That’s just how I roll people. Deal with it!

METHODS

I posted on twitter and facebook for people to give me two nouns, two adjectives, and two verbs. No-one who replied had any idea of the purpose of this exercise. Some participants used the same two words for each category (e.g. crap and shit). Including these repeated words would have lessened the potential for chaos and real chance in the exercise so they were eliminated. All in all I ended up with the following terms 18 adjectives, 18 verbs and 18 nouns. I wrote these down on bits of paper, folded them and sorted them into piles. I then picked adjectives, nouns, and verbs from their respective piles at random and inserted them into the following four classic joke structures. Naturally it would be possible to take issue with or alter which nouns, verbs and adjectives could be replaced in each joke but really? People are starving in Africa you know. Let’s just crack on with this shall we? I decided on the following frameworks:

1.Knock, knock!

Who’s there?

NOUN

NOUN who?

NOUN VERB ADJECTIVE NOUN

2. Why did the NOUN cross the road?

To VERB the ADJECTIVE NOUN

3. How many NOUNS does it take to change a lightbulb?

Two. One to VERB it and one to VERB ADJECTIVE.

4. A NOUN and a NOUN walk into a bar.

The barman says, “VERB ADJECTIVE”.

RESULTS

Knock, knock!

Who’s there?

Mahogany.

Mahogany who?

Mahogany running fluffy dwarf.

……..

Knock, knock!

Who’s there?

Dog.

Dog who?

Dog rebuke pensive cat.

…………

Why did the mountain cross the road?

To cry to the mellifluous pig.

………

Why did the corpse cross the road?

To melt the abject raconteur.

………

Why did the apple cross the road?

To wash the scenic house.

……..

Why did the elbow cross the road?

To climax the exquisite door.

………

How many barrows does it take to change a lightbulb?

Two. One to boom it and one to exist wobbly.

………

How many crabs does it take to change a lightbulb?

Two. One to smile and one to rotundly calibrate.

……….

How many tables does it take to change a lightbulb?

Two. One to run and one to flip stinky.

……….

A conker and a music walk into a bar.

The barman says, “Read colourful”.

……….

A thalidomide and a book walk into a bar.

The barman says, “smelly sighing”.

………….

DISCUSSION

As I’m sure you agree, this experiment in surrealist joke writing techniques has resulted in the most hilarious jokes humankind has ever witnessed! Naturally I will now give up writing jokes the traditional linear single-author manner and begin writing all my material in this collaborative, non-linear manner. Next time I appear on stage these are the only jokes I will be telling. Maybe not though (although that might be an interesting follow-up experiment at some point). At the very least we’ve ended up with some interesting poetic non-sequiturs. Who amongst us has not wanted to witness a dog rebuke a pensive cat? Or “cry to the mellifluous pig”? If any comedians reading this are willing to risk it and use these punch lines please feel free. They are a group effort after all, products of the hive mind/nth mind rather than a single author. Personally I would be interested to hear how they went.

In the meantime, if anyone else has any suggestions for surrealist/automatic writing techniques we might apply to jokes then please get in touch. because clearly I have little else to do! Thanks for reading (and to everyone who offered their adjectives, nouns and verbs!) and see you on the other side.