Or: “Superhero Sex: Skypeing With The Devil”
…
Everytime I think I’m out, I keep pulling me back in.
Best of the midwinter season to you, Bloggers — or as we call it for some reason, the beginning of winter — and though I should really be wrapping presents [EDIT: or returning them, it being a few days later now] [EDIT EDIT: or not even thinking about them at all, it now being the middle of February and thus well into the New Year], I find myself with (somehow) more to say about teh sex and teh superhero comics. But, I thought I’d covered it all already?
So, why is there suddenly more to say?
Perhaps because the topic is a more general one than I’d first thought. You see, it isn’t just about how one can write oneself into a story in many different ways, nor merely about how the value of an escapist fantasy is dependent on what one specifically wishes to escape to or from, but it’s also about the larger systems of the real world that give all escapist fantasies their general context: their general applicability to any potential reader who happens to be trapped in a world he never made. Thus all incoherent rambling about art as pedagogy must eventually find its other half (its secret identity?) in a clever Marxist analysis of art as industrial relations…and then together wind their way back to the Lawrentian root of art as psychotherapy…
Which brings us to Doctor Doom, and libertarianism. Not that I’m saying old Victor, everybody’s favourite metalhead, is himself a libertarian — heck no, he’s a monarchist! — though some libertarians, hmm, are also monarchists really if you peel away the bullshit — but to the extent that a deep seam of libertarianism runs through the political perspective of the comics cliffside in general, he is every day in more and more danger of becoming a libertarian icon. Which, I have to think, is not a very good look for him…
And perhaps more unfortunately, it isn’t a very good look for libertarianism, either. You see, the problem is that this word “libertarian” is a hotly-contested one in this current cultural moment: outside of conversation with the Noam Chomskys among us, it really has no functional definition beyond its feeling definition — is really just a convenient label for a bundle of feelings (“strength through feelings!”), an “-ism”ness that seems to put those feelings into an historical, perhaps even developmental perspective, while really taking them further and further away from any meaning at all save what happens to be found on the skin of the bubble of the present moment. Bertrand Russell’s dictum that all memory of the past is just the artificial construction of the present is here revealed as more than a mere observation: now becoming a politically-charged tool of the propagandist, who like Raymond de Seze seeks to tunnel through sophistry to an unassailably retroactive triumph of pure, implicit logic equal in effect to God saying “dude, it’s okay, I’ve got this”. And not to get too far off topic too fast, but if you want to think of this kind of thing in terms of mathematics then you wouldn’t exactly miss the target…because strange loops, as any time-traveller would tell you, can do anything at all, that’s possible to be imagined: they can make the only possible theological proofs of the existence of God, simply by invoking the paradoxical nature of His inarguable unprovability; they can stop the catalogue of total knowledge from ever being assembled, simply by reading it; they can make new things by making new words for things; they can cause even the deadest and driest list of facts to become infused with a sudden lively humour that cannot be predicted or accounted for. Heck, they can even write the plots of superhero comics, AND WHAT’S MORE…!!
…They can write computer code, too, but we’re not quite there yet. We’ll get there, but not yet! When for now all we’re dwelling on is the fact that “Mathematics” may not itself be the description of this deep principle of thought-orderliness, but mathematics is certainly the thing we’ve invented to describe it, and it describes it very well indeed…and thus even though math isn’t itself the thing it was created to describe, it is nonetheless uniquely situated within it as part of it, in such a manner as to be able to affect it in its own strange loop…the model changing the thing it models which in turn creates a model for itself…
And where we are going to get to — uh, in theory anyway! — is the place where that unique feedback is exposed as something whose specific efficiencies also are conditioned by a more general context that lies outside their ambit of comprehension…in “the real world”, as it were…
BUT!!
Thankfully, we’re not there yet. We’re just talking about the word “libertarian”, remember?
And about comics.
Speaking of which…
Some comics people on the Internet have this real serious thing about Doctor Doom, have you noticed? That great, iconic villain with the puffed-up ego…they identify with him a little more strongly, these days, than perhaps can be accounted for by his beautiful design and long history of character development. Doctor Doom is a putz, of course: a walking inferiority complex wedded to a sad genius, a tragedy of lost human potential. Everyone is better than him, largely because he wants to know if they are…but he avoids changing by living in a fantasy world in which none of that matters, in which he isn’t like that and doesn’t have that flaw, and so doesn’t have to admit a thing about a thing. A quote from Simone Weil comes to mind here, courtesy of our old pal Harvey Jerkwater:
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating. Imaginative literature, therefore, is either boring or immoral or a mixture of both.”
And perhaps that may be a bit harsh for lovers of imaginative literature like you and me, but it certainly describes the problem of the supervillains: never satisfied because never satisfiable, more than anything else in the world they need their heroic antagonists to keep their illusions of proper and dignified selfhood afloat. EXCEPT!
Doctor Doom has gone beyond this, into a fugue state so complete that every action of his at once composes its own justification. Absolutely and permanently enveloped by his brilliant armour, everything he touches turns to totalitarianism, that -ism so wonderfully enabled by technocracy…but, he doesn’t see it. Because he doesn’t have to. Because he doesn’t need honesty as his credential, all he needs is his “personal code of honour”. Doctor Doom reeks of malevolence and evil, petty vindictiveness and disgusting Satanic pride…but, he’s got that “honour” thing going for him, and you have to give him that.
Don’t you?
Well…I dunno about that, frankly. The thing prevalent among young men in my culture that I call Bullshit Honour is just so damned cheap, so ephemeral and so filled with hypocrisy, that it kills thousands on the roads each year…bearing the same relation to the real thing “honour” as the false repute of “celebrity” does to actual fame, and oh wow how vain, without the merit, is the name! So many lines in so much sand, so hurriedly drawn with whatever stick happens to be most handy! Honestly, dude, you should not drive home, you should crash on the couch instead…
But to those who have nothing else, Bullshit Honour is the most precious thing in the world, even as the positions it produces are the most precarious: I am respectable, I am good, observe me as I don the armour of my character, see how it gleams. And don’t judge me by the things I do or say…!
But judge me fairly, by my history.
Though of course history is always in flux, as any time-traveller would tell you. So, the intersection of Doctor Doom with the libertarian ideal of modern times and antiquated thoughts: a self-interested actor who can call himself good by his own lights simply because he possesses motivations, that perhaps are really not much different in nature from those the good people possess too…smart, superbly capable in his own milieu, and terribly misunderstood by the sheep around him because they can’t fathom the superior poignancy of his struggle, he is the romance of imaginary evil personified. Who is better and finer? Who could possibly have more just cause, for taking any given action? The thing proves itself, at every instant: Doom is the best.
Doom is the best.
But…we didn’t used to think that, did we?
Didn’t we used to think of Doom as the worst?
Wasn’t that, in fact, what was so great about him?
Here’s that quote again, from Blue Box #1:
“Bulliet has a theory that posits comic books as keenly accurate depictions of the inner lives and imaginations of the teenage boys of that particular era. “What distinguished the comic book industry of the 1960s and ’70s from the book publishing industry was that it was more demand-driven than supply-driven,” he says. “Stores were very cautious about what they stocked. Owners knew their stock very well, and they paid attention to what boys were buying.” The output of the industry became totally reflective of the desires, fears, and dreams of the boys who were fueling it. “You can watch, in the comics of the era, the evolution of a sensibility that is specific to a demographic,” continues Bulliet. In Bulliet’s view, comics provide a window onto an otherwise undocumented history.”
Bullshit Honour is on occasion the best honour, because unlike its non-bullshit other half it doesn’t actually require principle, or hardship. It certainly generates hardship, by using principle…! But it doesn’t require these, if you see what I mean. All it requires is a certain amount of very specific cleverness, which is good news indeed if such cleverness is the only stock you’ve really got to trade. Romance? This is not the mid-twentieth century, when everything seemed pretty well on the upswing after an unimaginable disaster had finally been gotten through, so we bloody well need romance…the strange families that dotted the television dial throughout the postwar era, and filled the pulps and the comics as well, were born from the ruin of chaos and the abyss of lost time — all those sitcoms are about survivors, people! — but they also live in a time of mass reinvention because of that, a time of (if I may say so) “mass possibility”. But not so, the survivor-fictions of today! In which the only loss figured is the loss of reputation…
But mind you, that’s not an unserious type of loss either. It’s more abstract, sure; but it also hits at the heart of human social sensitivity. We’re pretty robust creatures, and can thrive even under tremendous environmental variations and enormous physical setbacks, but there are still a few problems we have no answers for. Wars and storms, we can sometimes get out from under; but endocrine imbalances and loss of public respect drive us to our knees every time. And it’s that second one that’s the kicker currently under review, of course: peacetime anxiety, that admits of no solution but medication. Even if that medication is a bar fight. Or, on the other hand…
…You can cheat. Libertarianism. In its current feeling-form, it’s a kind of ethical fugue — these problems are too hard, so we must make them less hard. These responsibilities weigh too heavily, we must make them lighter. When Rousseau did it, it was called “conjectural history”, but today we just call it Glenn Beck’s America. And comics people love it, in an odd conjunction with dotcom billionaires who somehow managed to fail up more spectacularly than any other people who have ever lived…comics people and software billionaires both, they feel the access of a greater and cleaner world banging shutters in back rooms in their heads, calling out to them down the back hallways, promising to break through the dimensional barriers into reality, through the wardrobe’s doors and into real life, bigger on the inside, the glove simply turned inside-out. All we have to do is fix it, all we have to do is do this thing, all we have to believe is a belief without seams and flaws…a better belief, a perfect belief. All we have to accomplish is perfection.
Hey, how hard could it be?
It’s a curious age, this early part of the twenty-first century. It has a lot of uncertainty in it, bubbling away beneath the surface. So it shouldn’t be too surprising if smart people, superb in their metier, whose personal poignancy is subjectively superior to the poignancy of others around them, find themselves going Frank Miller one better: and not wanting to use identification with the villain to interfere the more strongly with the hero, and through the hero the text, but instead wanting to identify with the villain as the actual mirror of the reader, and frankly the text can get lost. I mean, Brian Bendis and Mark Millar were fine for the early oughts, but their beats seem a bit tired now, you know? Be the villain you want to see fucking the hero in this world, and all that…in 2012, it’s almost naive. Heck, even rape has gotten passe; even anthropophagic sex is still, y’know, sex. And we’re running up against the limits of how to sublimate it. Oh novelty, novelty, all is novelty! So make a bonfire of all your novelties. Once upon a time, in the superhero world, jolly and harmless violence tapped the root of libido, and by marvellous chemical transformations (aqua regia!) accomplished remarkable alchemical ends: mercury vapour transmuted into mere steam, exiting the reaction harmlessly. Even: fruitfully. Then, later, the sordid and grim sexual escapades of the superheroes reversed the equation: where once all violence coded for sex, now all sex coded for violence, and it was all very far from “harmless escapism”, like finding a way to mix milk and eggs and chocolate and sugar in such a way as to produce plutonium. I won’t say it wasn’t fascinating at first! Since it delivered a unique frisson: in the wake of postmodern appropriation of everyday instructional texts, and even more everyday para-instructional texts, superhero comics discovered a novelty that like magic itself only worked within the bounds of the fantasy kingdom, the Narnia map — as they appropriated themselves, “by their bootstraps” as it were. And, I consider it an open question…
Was this truly a “postmodern” exercise?
Well, it could’ve been, obviously: pedagogical plutonium porn, a handbook for misery that reverses the aspirational quality of existentialism. How to torture, how to sicken, how to cheat, why the superheroes have never faced a menace like this before…! And indeed I think one could argue that this has occasionally been tried on, and that it’s even worked pretty well from time to time. Er…
While literature was giving us “Tintin And The Real World”, superhero comics were giving us “The Filth”?
Regardless, in superhero comics at any rate the prime directive is that the Neovore must be fed, so quite-exactly-postmodern or not the feeding bloody well got done, and for a while the beast was satiated. But then like a Risen Doomsday it got hungry again, and not for the same old crap it had last time. So? When postmodern sex doesn’t work anymore? Doesn’t give up the same thrills? The answer was, as Grant Morrison might well have predicted, highly ritualized masturbation. Not that I’m saying that’s the kind of comics that he writes! Though I’m not not saying it, either, but the point is…
Sometimes it’s magic — partaking of the freedom of magic! — and sometimes it’s just more organized religion.
And therefore, partaking of the organization of organized religion.
You know?
Through the looking-glass, I suppose we are through the looking-glass here people…this is going to be a digressive one, almost as digressive as a Universe one, hell I should make it a Universe one, why this bloody well will be James Bond! Because magic and theology share a root, or perhaps more accurately I might say they share an intersection…and have you not noticed how the unique genius of Christianity is that it stubbornly makes every connotation a denotation? Jesus went up, up in the sky…hell, not even Levy-Bruhl’s “primitive” people believed shit like that, eh? And in fact not even Christians believe, not even the flippin’ Pope believes, in the literal Ascension, yet…
…There it is, and we can’t seem to get rid of it. So let’s return to time-travel, which is a fancy way of saying let’s return to mathematics…and the age-old problem of whether God can make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it, and then can he lift it anyway. Ask a rabbi and you’ll get sighed at: “so, you want to tell God what to do, eh? So why ask me, how is it my business that you disapprove of God’s lifestyle?” Judaism, like most religions, is “realistic”, you see: connotations and denotations maintain separate residences until marriage, because otherwise the cousins get confused. And to be fair to the Catholic Church, on the level of the ground troops it does a most square-jawed and manful job of keeping the latrine separate from the mess hall, for such individual parishioners as may be (understandably) perplexed from time to time. Because there still are wider principles that master the incestuous possibility created by rogue axioms, you see, and in mathematics as in nuclear chemistry there are “forbidden” transactions, that are forbidden mostly because they’re just plain forbidden, but also which are forbidden because they’re, as my old Phil. of Sci. teacher had it, “scientifically possible but philosophically absurd”. Just so de Seze’s argument, that if there is no divine right but the sufferance of the People, then it goes against democracy itself to remove Louis…is a valid theorem anyway, but one that even Hobbes might balk at, not for its callback to Leviathan but for the way it outrages what he himself described as the essential character of science: “the dependence of one fact upon another.” All these centuries later, it’s still the one thing Hobbes said that’s the hardest to argue with, and perhaps as good a description of science as any we will ever have — since it neatly encapsulates the nature of science that we continue to struggle with today: that knowledge has limits which can’t be broadened just because we stand there and wish at them to be broadened, yet those limits can’t be made any narrower by any amount of wishing either. Don’t expect us to stop being puzzled anytime soon, by how the social construction of science manages to coexist with science’s goal of objective truth-seeking! Because it might be a relief of a sort if we could figure out how to say that even facts are socially-constructed, but they still are not; and yet if we attempt to cure the problem the other way, by saying that science has no social dimension to it, then we go against the findings of science itself, and look like damn fools into the bargain. Science is done in communities, and done imperfectly because of that: politics and presumption begging every question they can get their hands on, because there are wishes and wishes, and they all act together untraceably to produce the indispensible context of facts that is called theory. Yet every theory still has to deal with the reality of the world as it is somewhere along the line, and that reality is fairly wish-impervious; a thrilling argument can be made for anything, and perhaps it thrills even more when it’s so radical as to argue specifically against the need for reconciliation with reality, but in the end there is still Fact’s windowpane, that Wish’s nose must contend with one way or another, or you don’t have a model of anything but your model. Every fact is dependent on some other fact, and in the end even a “perfect” belief is no more than a belief…
…Even if it’s essential to divining what the facts are, or may be, and of course this is one of the things we use time-travel stories to explore: what are the limits, that lie outside logic? Can God make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it? The rabbi would perhaps say “You mean might he make such a stone, and so I’m here to tell you: no, he won’t.” Can anything go faster than the speed of light? Sure, lots of things can do that; they just don’t.
But, if we imagine that they sometimes do…then Elsewhere becomes available to us in our time machine, and so we can try a great many arguments out, just to see — hypothetically — what they would look like if they didn’t already happen to be impossible. What would they look like, and what would they imply, and what structural necessities (if any) would obtain once the question has been freed from the uselessness of being asked? What new or more basic reality would remain, in the hypothetical crucible that has burned the old arbitrary reality of “forbidden” things away? As it turns out, what this looks like, and what is left, is a thing not 100% divorced from what’s left in similar stories one finds in different cultures; yet at the same time there is some novelty here too, that’s quite suitable for bonfire-making, for on some deep level the modern exercise of science is bound up with a Christian worldview that tolerates the manufacture of paradox — the multiplication of entities! — as other worldviews do not, and thus it is one in which only a paradox can adequately answer another paradox, the crucial dependence of facts one upon the other still remaining even when factuality itself has been insulted, and emptied-out as a category. Consider Doctor Doom, for example, and his attempt to get his hands on the magic jewels of Blackbeard by sending the Fantastic Four back in time to steal the pirate’s chest. Well, we already know it won’t work out for him, not just because Reed Richards is smarter than he is, but because (as it turns out) no time-travel story that takes this form of argument ever survives its own arguing….in whatever culture it is found, however the unique “Western” accent here is one wherein you’re not simply barred from plundering the past because the superior mathematics of Zeus will stop you, but the reason you can’t plunder the past is that by entering it you make it as active a place as the present, indeed you can’t enter it with plunder in mind without making it active actually as the present…and thus open to the fresh sting of Necessity that can only occur where multiple outcomes are possible. And so the Fates no longer have anything to do with it; there simply becomes here, and here there, as the line of cause and effect becomes unstuck from its customary placement. So it isn’t like visiting Ajax in the Underworld! But instead the tale has rather a different moral than simply “the monkey’s paw will claw you in the end”, for that matter has a different one even than “the infinitesimal calculus has demonstrated why it is that Xeno’s arrow will indeed hit its target”: as it reminds us instead that this is not, can never be, the best of all possible worlds even in potential, no not even with time machines and magic jewels and everything…!
Which is surely, I think you’ll agree, a moral befitting the unspeakable niftiness of modernity…
But it doesn’t even stop there, you see. Because, moral or not, as long as you continue to have a time machine in this story…
…Then you can even flee that nifty modern moral in search of a niftier and even more modern one, and then flee that one too, and the next one, and the next after that, and essentially you may keep on fighting Necessity as you like pretty much “forever”, because when present and past are this sheerly promiscuous then the future matters so little that it barely exists at all. And therefore it can’t be better, as it can where there aren’t any time machines: where things in the past stay where they’re put.
And of course that’s not the only moral philosophy we farm via time-travel story in the West. But as for Doctor Doom, he’s never tried anything else but fixating on the past’s putative changeability, so…we should pity the guy, perhaps, almost. He can’t see what’s in front of his face…but he might. There’s something wrong in him, but it could be fixed; he doesn’t have to be this way! However in his distinctly Onanistic (yes!) pride, he also won’t be anything else. Why should he ever change his mind? Why should he ever condescend to acquiesce to the world, when it’s never done the same for him? Who does that damn Reed Richards think he is, the blasted boy scout? Second-rater, when did he ever invent a time machine…?!
But in a way, and naturally enough…he doesn’t have to invent one, because he already lives inside one. Because in a way, a superhero comic book is like a time machine, or anyway it can be. The planes of story, neatly-clippable into squares and rectangles, form just the sort of universe that can be ably presided-over by puzzle-piecing Intellect, by story-building Narrative, yet there’s more to this as well; for to read a comic book is to be once again catapulted into the time when one first read a comic book: the endlessly-serial storylines, the endlessly-reconfigurable postures of characters. What if, the imagination says, the Silver Surfer fought the Son of Satan? Then those scenes might be these ones. What if, the Original X-Men fought The Invaders? Or what if red fought blue, or green fought white. Part of the jouissance of superhero comics is in imagining what other set-pieces might lie behind the ones one is currently considering: what does the Thor vs. Hulk fight imply for all the other fights? What does it imply for me? The mind of the comics reader is deeply embroiled with the card-values of each of the characters confined inside the square and rectangular arenas of his seeing, rolling out the fabric of the present moment as the values multiply, and providing a pleasing alter-reality analogous to the past while still not being at one with it: eternally re-livable and re-playable, and as a consequence not binding on the reader but instead freeing. What if, Julius Caesar fought Hannibal? There’s a transgressive air to the putting-together of conflict here, a weird untethering of cause, to produce ever-more thrilling effect. Call it trash culture, not to say rap-battle, not to say promiscuous imagining: what if, Napoleon fought Einstein? Or what if the Jack of Spades fought the Jack of Hearts. In the square or rectangular windows to a time not here and a place not now, these infinitely-stackable symbolic wagers are our news bulletins and weather reports, these are our personality quizzes and Rorschach tests, this is all polymorphous eventuation not yet cemented, an alternative historicity waiting to be born…but, the significant point for our purposes is that it is nevertheless not born. Limitless potential values in the hand, tales shuffled into being at random out of the deck! But it’s all, ultimately…
…Solitaire, as the reader writes and reads his own readings and writings. Immersion in the comic book is thrilling because it is a private experience, somewhat illicit as it’s temporarily rule-free. We sport with possible fates! Things we might do! Or not do. But for the ordinary reader in the ordinary pedagogical scheme, this is primarily rehearsal — “what kind of hero do you want to be, when you join the larger social game?” — rather than advanced retrospective. The time machine that is the comic book isn’t a tool for fixing what’s gone wrong, because although it obeys its own internal logic it is not compelled to obey the larger logic of the outside world: “realistic” details of cause and effect within a comic book are confined by authorial intention instead of Fate, and possibilities and necessities external to authorial intention do not in truth “exist” to be speculated upon. Even the time machine within the story can only do so much! And of course this is just as it should be, because one is not supposed to get stuck in the comic book’s balancing act of force vs. force; one is not supposed to become attached to its re-enactments for the power they quite plainly don’t have. That the hero wins, by expressing himself or herself openly, is the only way the arrow of time gets printed on the pages, because it’s the only arrow of time that matters; it isn’t about Dr. Doom.
Except that, strangely at the current time, for some people, it sort of is.
And that’s a most curious development, don’t you think?
Well, I blame irresponsible storytelling, but I did say we were going to get back to mathematics, so let’s get back to it. What is it, that encourages so many people who work with it all day to embrace the nouveau-libertarianism of the American right wing? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of prolonged exposure to conceptual shorthand: from inside mathematics (as from inside Science in general), it’s a time-saver to concentrate on the romantic rather than the real…to treat the romance as though it were real. Terms and operations become objects and relationships, and it all works on its own level: understanding is the same thing as doing, and doing is understanding. The mysteries of the really-real world — the substrate, you could call it — do not answer very readily to the powers of logic, having no particular allegiance to it: even time and space are abstractions, and the nature of matter especially is a prey hunted eternally but never caught. Don’t expect us to stop being puzzled anytime soon, by how the abstractions of our thought relate to the objects of truth we aim to find in the world! For the whole business falls into the gap between reality and romance, between model and thing-being-modelled. And, on some level that’s just getting way too complicated, isn’t it?
Because: can’t the thing just be itself?
All very well to insist that the past is merely the product of the skin of the present’s bubble, but how are we supposed to operate that way? It definitely ain’t easy, to be stuck asking questions that aren’t even proper questions, all to get answers that cannot be proper answers, and it’s all made even harder by the fact that there just isn’t any alternative…
…Unless, that is, you cheat. Because who’s to say there is a reality outside the romance? Mathematics lets you make fortunes and atomic bombs with equal facility, seems to be the only useful handle one can get on the world anyway, so what possible logical reason is there to conclude any “substrate” exists at all, except a simpler and more elegantly abstracted one that more closely adheres to the approved method of looking at it? Why can’t mathematics, indeed, just be “Mathematics”, if indeed it looks and walks and quacks like Mathematics, eh? And who cares about when Newton said that no mathematical description could every quite match the evanescent curve of reality?
Of all things, even religions, Science is the best at making reactionaries. Strange loops, you see? They produce results — they’re the only things we know of, that produce them so damned efficiently! – and the results all have a certain soothing quality of self-similarity to them, fractal patterns pointed all the way down, fractal pattern pointed all the way up, and Man is the measure…and, look, here’s the thing about the libertarian comics people and the libertarian tech billionaires, okay? They are flip sides of the same coin largely because of what the coin is made of. Peter Thiel and his damaged Randian ilk imagine impossible moments of triumph brought about by the manipulation of belief, in the standard Doctor-Doom-sized package of pure engineering…the Singularity calls to them with its promise of ultimate convergence, all knowledge joined into one point of infinite computability, a portal to Elsewhere that leads away from the necessitous confinements of ordinary time and space. But, as I think I’ve mentioned before, the Singularity is really just a fictional inversion of where the world is really heading…i.e. not to the ideational Big Bang but to the ideational heat-death, the dissolution of Theory in the ionizing light of constantly-improving technical prowess. The more we find out, the less we know! The more we observe, the less we understand! At least for now, for now…and sure, we’ll catch up eventually…
But that’s the really-real reality that the Singularity indicates to us: something not the Singularity, something antithetical to it, where instead of things self-organizing themselves until they fall right into our hands, we get them in our hands first and find it’s all too damn much to organize and hold at the same time. I mentioned before, too, that science fiction is our most ironic literature? Well, we’ll get back to that too, but Not Today…for today I’ll just point out another instance of SF’s ironic inversions (as, again, I think I’ve done before) in the 90s SF tales of genetic superbabies conceived of CEOs and oil barons, better than your own progeny in every way, because you of the underclass can’t afford the services of the high-powered neo-natal engineers they employ. Because of course this is just a dream as well, isn’t it? There aren’t any genetic superbabies, and there aren’t gonna be any, because biology doesn’t answer to politics: we don’t know what a “super” baby would even look like, we wouldn’t know how to “make” one if we did, our polarized and self-satisfying opinions about what qualities people have are ones that nature has never heard of, doesn’t understand, and thinks are too silly to waste any time on. A “better” person…well what’s that? A “smart” person, a “superior” person…
Who’s ever heard of such a thing?
But just because the idea of genetic superbabies is irrelevant, doesn’t mean the tales of genetic superbabies were (or are) similarly irrelevant…because that same technology the story uses to do its impossible neo-natal engineering, in the real world we use for neo-natal testing, and neo-natal testing on a large scale promises social upheaval and moral confusion far more profound than what a handful of upper-crust superpeople could possibly generate. It’s genetic engineering, all right, but it’s pointed down toward the bottom of the feedback loop; hey, we won’t make superbabies, but we’ll sure be able to weed out un-super ones…!
And that’s the reality that such SF tales inversely indicate, which is the reality we all must live in. Unless, that is…
…We cheat, and find reasons to believe in the inversion rather than the thing it indicates. And people who work in Silicon Valley, whose failures make fortunes, excel at this…as do comics folk whose successes make no changes to the world at all but symbolic ones, and even those more utterly fleeting than just about any other symbolic changes that can be imagined. The comics industry in North America, at least the superhero stuff and its accessory products, is dying faster-than-fast, and the wagons are all circling…and Ayn Rand is not gonna ride over the ridge with her libertarian cavalry. It’s a pretty brutal reality, for a field of such light and reassuring fantasy! Wherever the heroes are, they’re not here…!
And down in Silicon Valley, is it so very different? At some point the realization must become unavoidable, that all this is the product of merest chance…that you aren’t better and smarter than those around you, nor even (if we put down the bank statement for a minute) more successful, and all your victories go only as deep as the skin on the bubble of time-travelling memory. Well, naturally enough! After all, do we really expect billionaire twentysomethings who eat ramen over the sink to discover new social realities by anything but accident? In the Marvel Universe where Doctor Doom lives, even anthropologists can build giant self-aware robots…but that doesn’t mean the real world supports software engineers who can do world-class anthropology! We’ve had bubbles before, and they’ve burst, but all we need is another carefully-narrativized illusion to conveniently forget it…hey, for that matter, remember when the Dow was just going to keep climbing and climbing forever, after having passed through some veil of possibility that ensured scarcity was left behind in another, smaller dimension? The Financial Singularity, how well I remember it! We were like angels then!
Just: not angels on the winning side, as you might expect when our leaders are all people who read 1984 and came away thrilled with the utopian promise of really cool interactive TV; when what they took from Huxley was the joy of being able to scientize Plato’s Republic. So what of the bottomless concurcopia that is social media, what of the endless celestial procession of apps that all our phones-that-are-not-phones promise? Every time Doctor Doom makes a plan he is convinced that it is the best plan, but it turns out really to be the worst…then he makes another “best” plan and it fails too. But is he to be judged by this? Of course not; after all…
…His history’s not finished being written.
And he has his Personal Code Of Honour.
And, damn it, he thinks he’s going to win!
But, we might ask…why does he think he’s going to win? What makes him so sure? Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that he lives inside a universe that’s in a constant boil of possibilization, where the liberating power of magic’s ability to let Lesser affect Greater is always at hand. In a fictional world, to figure out a different way to say something is to make that something differently-actual, and so comic-book science always has an answer for everything. Mathematics! The lines between the model and the thing it’s modelling are so thoroughly, fatally blurred that mere genius becomes an Archimedean lever, sufficient to any task! Doctor Doom never repeats himself, so never learns from any of his mistakes; but then why would he, when all is novelty where he lives? Meanwhile up here, all is repetition…or so it must seem, to Weil’s “real” evil…and even the allure of magic becomes not so much about freedom but about order. Oh, if there was only a bit of order to our lives!
Oh, if only wonderful, marvellous ME could be set loose from these chaotic constraints imposed by the irrationality of others…!
And yet that isn’t the way the world works, as we continue to discover. The structure of spacetime masters all, establishes all basic symmetries, creates both Number and Relation and — yes — forbids the impossible, in some strange way that acts to drag us down from the lonely mountain of identity outside the world, into the messy archipelago of complexly-interpenetrated substances. Consciousness chops continua into antinomial categories, but the only thing that’s “natural” about such chopping is that it’s consciousness that does it…the categories themselves only tenuously bound to the substrate of the really-real world, and at constant risk of breaking loose and becoming conceptual flotsam, drifting aimlessly to-and-fro across…
What else?
The surface of the present moment.
So what “window onto an otherwise undocumented history” are comics providing us with today? In these swirling 21st century times, our escapist fantasies have become like counters in a public game, that we used to play alone…belief in what’s inside the pages has gained a peculiar resonance it never had before, even as the enterprise producing the pages spirals ever closer to the drain. Different notions of escape — who escapes, and from what, and into what — become more important as clues to the external factors that condition the “need” for escapist fantasy in the first place, and the morals of the stories become more weirdly transportable to the outside world as their kinds proliferate…it’s not about learning how to build a crystal radio set anymore! Nor is it about becoming acquainted with the general atmosphere of a technosocial culture, and (sadly) it isn’t even about how sex is the opposite of death. All that stuff’s been emptied out, it seems: its factuality insulted even as the abstract necessity of factual relations — let’s call ‘em pseudofactual relations, eh? — maintains its insistent force. So what’s left? Well, I guess when you take away the instructional aspect of these odd little four-colour dreams (did you know that we use dreams to rehearse waking actions that the brain figures are necessary to our survival?) (it’s true!) (but that’s Not For Today either), what you’re left with is an instructional format without any significant instructional content, and so…
The reader just has to supply that out of their own pocket. “Doctor Doom works in secret, and talks to no one!”, Steve Englehart once declared from second-person caption-space…
Doctor Doom, alone in his castle with the apparatus of masturbation all around him. Only faithful Boris to make sure he keeps his annual appointment with the Devil. And to the Devil, might not all these annual meetings seem as just one? The same meeting, over and over, in temporally-detached higher (or lower) space?
…
You know, I take it all back: maybe “libertarian icon” is a good look for him!
