The Great Circle of Life
No, I have not seen Avatar yet, but even now I applaud these sentiments by James Delingpole even now:
The highlight of my Christmas holidays was taking the family to see Avatar… 'How can you bear the politics?' Ah yes. The politics… the space marines have arrived from Earth, and they're, like, totally evil. Already they have reduced their home planet to a grey, polluted husk, and now they've come to do the same to Pandora… The great Paul [Johnson] I'm sure could give me … a list of all the writers, film-makers, playwrights, painters, poets, sculptors, actors, directors, musicians and so on from history who weren't incorrigible libtards.
This list, I imagine, would be very short…. If we conservatives were to spend our lives vetoing works of art on the grounds that we disagreed with their creators' ludicrously misguided politics, then we'd scarcely be able to look at a painting or read a poem, let alone listen to a pop record…
Certainly there is a kind of conservative who needs to be shaken by the shoulders (or, perhaps, beaten about the head) and ordered to like more stuff. Nonetheless, we cannot overlook the fact that certain popular-culture themes must in the long run be culturally and politically debilitating.
Just the other night I saw The Simpsons Movie (which came out in 2007; you see how long it takes for me to see a film). It was about as long as four weekly Simpsons episodes and as funny as three, which is what you would expect for a film adaptation of a television series. The problem was the premise of the film.
It seems that the Environmental Protection Agency was trying to exterminate the town of Springfield and all its people because of excessive pollution of the municipal lake by Homer. The president was in on the extermination plot (on a plausible deniability basis). The Army was in on it. A huge but clandestine federal listening agency that eavesdrops on every telephone call made in the United States was in on it. May I suggest that it's one thing if the oratorical skills of the vice president are a laugh line, but quite another if the malice and incompetence of the federal government are so widely assumed that they need not even be established by the screenplay? The Simpsons Movie is, of course, a parody of motion pictures that are predicated on those assumptions, but so much the worse: an idea that is well enough established for The Simpsons to use has become part of the national psychic furniture.
I must emphasize that this furniture is not found only in the head of James Delingpole's libtards. Precisely the same assumptions of malice and incompetence are now almost universal on all points of the Right of the spectrum. This may be the most alarming mutation in American political culture in the past ten years, more alarming even than the normalization of Alinskyism. No political culture can function indefinitely on the premise of the inherent incapacity of public institutions.
The name for this attitude of contempt is subversion. It is a very bad thing that must be derided and shamed.
* * *
No doubt I am exposing the gaps in my education by raising this point, but I found very obscure this explanation for why Haiti is so poor. It was part of a longer list whose other items I found easier to understand:
5. Hegel was correct that the "voodoo religion,"
with its intransitive power relations among the gods, was prone to producing political intransitivity as well. (Isn't that a startling insight for a guy who didn't travel the broader world much?)
If you look for definitions of "
transitive"
and "
intransitive"
on the Web outside of mathematics and linguistics, you will find that these terms enter frequently into game design. Transitive characters, it seems, are those that occupy some points on a spectrum (from tallest to shortest, or strongest to weakest), whereas the properties of intransitive characters cannot be assessed in a one-dimensional way: wizards beat elves and elves beat warriors, but warriors beat wizards; rock-paper-scissors, in other words.
That's clear enough. Unfortunately, the use of "intransitive power relations" in social theory is not, if we may from judge Robert Paul Resch's 1992 book,
Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory:
Since all social relations are overdetermined by the matrix effect of the dominant mode of production, all power is indirectly class power. The classic Weberian definition of power is thus redefined by Poulantzas as "the capacity of a social class to realize its specific objective interests" (Poulantzas 1973, 104). Economic class relations are relations of power, Poulantzas argues, not in the sense that one is the foundation of the other but in the sense that they are constituted in a "homogeneous field," the field of social relations or simply the class struggle. Moreover, as the specific effectivity of each instance is organized by the matrix effect of the mode of production that gives it a place and a function, so power is, in the last instance, an effect of the intransitive complex whole of the social formation and not of the transitive effectivity of any particular instance intervening in the field of another.
Well, yes. To the extent I can make this out, I think that "transitive" relations are supposed to be logical and predictable, the sort of police or bureaucratic structures that Weber used to go on about. The term "intransitive relations" seems to me to be supposed to mean something Burkean, the tangled network of influence and coercion that make up societies with a history.
Getting back to Haiti, then, the voodoo explanation for its poverty would then be that the country's animist-ancestor-worship supernatural order did not make a lick of sense, and so the political order did not either. Well, maybe. In any case, I tried to track down just what Hegel did say that would give rise to this "intransitive business." This from Stuart Barnett's Hegel after Derrida seems relevant:
Hegel's treatment of African fetishes is best approached by observing its modification of de Brosses's theory. The fetish was always approached as the "first object" encountered to emphasize the arbitrary nature of the choice (VPH 222; LPH 180). This was an aspect insisted upon by Bosman and after him by de Brosses. Hegel also emphasized that if the fetish failed, its owner would discard it and select another (VPW 222, LPW 181). This supported his thesis that Africans retained power over what they imagined held power over them: "
The substance always remains in the power of the subject"
(VPW 223; LPW 182).
This "remaining in the power of the subject" apparently implies a failure of objective thinking: there is no sense of an external divine, or of right and the state.
This analysis would be interesting, were it not for the fact that sacred kingship is by no means an institution foreign to sub-Saharan Africa. An immanent spirituality is by no means incompatible with the development of state structures. We may note that there is a fair amount of animism in Chinese culture from first to last, but that has been compatible with the sort of grand-narrative history that interested Hegel, even if Hegel himself did not quite grasp the point.
A genuinely interesting point is that, if we may believe my brief researches, Hegel's anthropology informs Avatar. As all the world know, the blue people live in a state of collective consciousness with their ecology. No doubt that is why they never invented a civil service.
And so we come back to the beginning.
Rock-paper-scissors.
