The BIG FAT THEORY of BIG FAT FANTASY

[Gary Wassner]

So, No Dog, we don't question authority or the status quo because Tolkein and all of us who have followed in his bourgeois footsteps by writing Epic Fantasy that stops us from thinking, have anesthestized the brains of all the would be revolutionaries?

 

[Archren]

If I'm not mistaken, No-Dog, I think they've been using the words "Marxist" and "neo-Marxist" to mean theories of evaluating history and culture, as opposed to the political systems that lead to various brands of Communism.

My understanding is, you can be as anti-communist as you please, and still be a Marxist historian, am I right?

 

[Larry]

Wow. Things have been hopping around here! Arch is pissed, and Mono has developed several new ways to say epic fantasy is crap... The world does turn on greased grooves!

Very interesting article, Aldarion - and on a topic close to my heart. Regarding



my guess would be that most everyone mentioned subscribes to the principle of interpretative underdetermination, which is just to say they would likely agree with you.

Istvan's central argument, I take it, is that the traditional Marxist commitment to materialism denies it the theoretical resources it needs to generate an adequate theory of fantasy. Of course he assumes that 'adequacy' here involves a positive evaluative component.

Some fantasy is good. Marxism says all fantasy is bad. Therefore, Marxism has a problem.

What's cooking my bean is the sense in which classical or vulgar Marxism can be read as a theoretical version of epic fantasy. It gives one a place in a (albeit historicized) cosmic order, and it promises perpetual apocalypse (revolution); two key generic markers of epic fantasy.

Perhaps the antipathy has as much do with this: in epic fantasy, Freedman et al see their theoretical vulnerabilities writ large.

Interesting connection that I hadn't fully realized before, although in retrospect I seem to have working my way toward that conclusion. It might also explain why Marxism has made for such an attractive alternative to religious eschatological theories, one that is infinitely more positive than Calvinist theology for example.

Definitely something worth considering.

 

[Larry]

Okay, Aldarion, I'll bite. What the heck is neo-marxism?

I know that 'ol Karl's stuff kind of sounded good on the surface of it -- what, with the equality and all. But you have to admit, so far it doesn't have a very good track record in the real world.

We all remember how the Soviets took the idea of dialectical materialism and then 'equalized' the people by taking all their stuff.... and then keeping it for their top brass.

Then China showed everyone how you could have a government that wasn't really greedy (at least not in the monetary sense). They did their people the colosal favor of ridding them of that "opiate of the people"... you know... the religion thing, and then replacing it with a government that looked very suspiciously like a religious organization. Instead of church, we have state functions (oh, and you're gonna be there). Instead of God we have Mao.... You know the drill.

So I'm just wondering, when you say 'neo' are you actually saying that somebody has come up with a way around all the totalitarian stuff? I mean it seems like the problem with 'equality' is that no one really sees themself as being equal to other people. Human nature usually worms it way into the mix and they think of themselves as... you know... more equal. Now Aldarion, you might look at the people around you and say, "they may not be as educated, or have the same means of self-expression, but they are my equals, my brothers and sisters." But let me tell you. Your brothers and sisters are looking back at you and saying, "bookworm! Fancy-talking, good-for-nothing...."

That's why I've kind of always had a thing for capitalism. And I'm not real worried about perpetual revolution either. You see, putting on a coup is hard work. And since much of our 'future leaders' are having a little trouble putting down the Nintendos long enough to get jobs... I'm just not sure that they've got what it takes to cross the Delaware and form a more perfect union.

I don't know. Maybe it's just me. And as for all the talk about Tolkien and seeing whether or not his stuff fits into Marxist doctrine, LoTRs just never struck me that way. Calling Tolkien a closet Marxist just seems a little revisionist.

Neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism is a theoretical model which tries to explain the conflicts, struggles, and interdependent relationships between patricians (or bourgeois) and plebian (or proletarian) cultures over time. It is a synthesis of the old Hegelian/Marxist model of history as being a series of upward conflicts between the two groups with more current research into cultural identity, sociology, and customs and traditions. Neo-Marxists are more likely to focus on the mitigating factors that have eased class tension/warfare, such as the "moral economy" (a combination of paternalistic economic practices, particularly dealing with food distribution, and the interactions between the plebs and pats (via laws, regulations, protests, food riots - which actually were often controlled and symbolic means of demonstration) in fields other than just the workplace and politics.

Be careful of equating Marxism with Leninism or Stalinism or anything from the Soviet/Maoist political models. Many would just simply point out that there is very little correlation between what Marx was discussing (a view of history that would lead to an egalitarian society) and what Lenin and crew put in place (enforced collectivization when the populace wasn't "ready" for socialism).

Also, a neo-Marxist might just look at those hypothetical comments and see if they could place it within a framework of protest and symbolized dissent and see if these hypothetical modern plebs might have their own cosmological model in place, dealing with the frustrations and pains of their lives.

And finally, I seriously doubt anyone is calling Tolkien a closet Marxist. I believe the thrust of that article was to note that there are elements in his story that do support a more ambiguous view toward capitalist bourgeois society than what many, Marxists and non-Marxist alike, had previously thought.

 

[Larry]

If I'm not mistaken, No-Dog, I think they've been using the words "Marxist" and "neo-Marxist" to mean theories of evaluating history and culture, as opposed to the political systems that lead to various brands of Communism.

My understanding is, you can be as anti-communist as you please, and still be a Marxist historian, am I right?

Yes, you can be anti-Communist and still be a Marxist historian, although there are very few "classic" or "vulgar" Marxists still around.

 

[Firebrand]

All right here is my first theory.

i think people read fantasy because they see a world that is full of shades of grey, and they want a simpler world where good and evil are more clear cut, but as those who are looking for that make something popular, those who crave something above and beyond their dreary everyday lives. (the other reason why people read fantasy) those who read for that reason want a more believable, more realistic world, hence the gritty HARD varieties of sci-fi and fantasy literature.

thats my thoughts on it, I know kinda simplistic, so sue me!

 

[Gary Wassner]

Simplicity often rings more true than much else we have to muddle throughin life. You are echoing the sentiments about Epic Fantasy that many people seem to have.

 

[Scott Bakker]

So, No Dog, we don't question authority or the status quo because Tolkein and all of us who have followed in his bourgeois footsteps by writing Epic Fantasy that stops us from thinking, have anesthestized the brains of all the would be revolutionaries?

Here's a juicy quote from Minima Moralia: "In pursuing yonder what they have lost, they encounter only the nothing they have. In order not to lose touch with the everyday dreariness in which, as irremediable realists, they are at home, they adapt the meaning they revel in to the meaninglessness they flee. The worthless magic is nothing other than the worthless existence it lights up."

This is extreme, I know, but can anyone in this day and age claim to KNOW the meaning of their life?

 

[Gary Wassner]

God, that's depressing! But it is just a perspective, and I won't succumb to it.
We may not know the meaning of our lives, but it does not logically follow that therefor our lives have no meaning.

 

[ironchef texmex]

This is extreme, I know, but can anyone in this day and age claim to KNOW the meaning of their life?

I can. I do. But then I might just be self-deluded. Maybe I should take a page from your author's book and spend more time pouting.

NAAH!

 

[Larry]

Here's a juicy quote from Minima Moralia: "In pursuing yonder what they have lost, they encounter only the nothing they have. In order not to lose touch with the everyday dreariness in which, as irremediable realists, they are at home, they adapt the meaning they revel in to the meaninglessness they flee. The worthless magic is nothing other than the worthless existence it lights up."

This is extreme, I know, but can anyone in this day and age claim to KNOW the meaning of their life?

But isn't the point implicit in a great many philosophies/religions that we cannot know beyond a specific point? For myself, I'm interested in learning what it is that has been "lost," which I suspect is a world-view in which there is a time and place for everything under the sun, which all sorts of inferred meanings.

Sometimes, I wonder if we're just coming around to that belief that all is indeed Vanity, with dual implied meanings. Self-awareness, or even the illusion of it, is a dangerous thing without some sense of meaning and most dangerous with a belief in certainty, it seems. I feel like sometimes humans are stuck trying to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis - either we drift too near to absolute blind certainty on matters, leading to errors of thought and action, or we sail down the straits leading to despair and the belief that no matter what we do, it's okay one way or the other, because in a few scant years, bam!, we're dead and then we're only fit to feed the worms.

So I would propose this - while we should not have absolute certainty, we should endeavor to create our own meanings, ones that are not just limited to one's own self, but more universal, with the understanding that these meanings can be limited and uncertain. I believe that's what we've done over the millenia. Sometimes, we just get too full of ourselves and then presume certainty. Then we tend to do such elementary errors such as placing the effects before the causes, with all the attendent errors that befall such switching of priorities.

But maybe I should just stop now and await critiquing - this should be interesting, to say the least

 

[Scott Bakker]

We may not know the meaning of our lives, but it does not logically follow that therefor our lives have no meaning.

Exactly. What it does mean, though, is that we live in a day and age where meaningfulness of our lives is a problem. Since we no longer possess the resources to draw definitive conclusions regarding the meaningfulness of our lives (particularly in any collective sense), we're forced to fall back on the imperatives we happen share as a species: our animal appetites. As a result, we live in a society devoted to appetite - to consumption - more and more so as the traditional imperatives lose their relevance and credibility. You can see this with Christian holidays such as Easter, Halloween, or Christmas, where the traditional meaning has largely evaporated in favour of bald consumption. Anytime anyone complains about the 'commercialization' of this or that, you could say they're alluding to the crisis of meaning.

I can. I do. But then I might just be self-deluded. Maybe I should take a page from your author's book and spend more time pouting.

Faith isn't knowledge, Texmex - which is why we use a different word to refer to it. Whatever knowledge is, it certainly seems to be public. Unlike faith, opinion, or guesswork, knowledge compels consent. Faith is simply conviction without compelling justification. Conviction is cheap (everyone has it); compelling justification, on the other hand, is hard to come by. The only institution we possess that's capable of reliably producing knowledge in this sense is science, and if anything, it seems antithetical to meaning. In fact, it's what's put us in this dilemma in the first place, by discrediting all our prior 'meaning-friendly' world-views.

By making them fantastic.

This is really scarey stuff when you think about it, and pretty much as far from pouting as you could get.

It's also why I think epic fantasy - particularly in its commercially dominant form - is so important to understand. I truly believe it's a cipher of some kind.

 

[Scott Bakker]

So I would propose this - while we should not have absolute certainty, we should endeavor to create our own meanings, ones that are not just limited to one's own self, but more universal, with the understanding that these meanings can be limited and uncertain.

This strikes me as the existentialist answer (albeit with a healthy skeptical spin ). For Adorno, this is simply a form of humanistic quietism, another way to render real critical engagement with the social conditions that produced this dilemma impossible - a kind of la-de-da meaningfulness which, by embracing its own subjectivity, simply pushes the more pressing concern of social meaningfulness beyond our critical grasp.

The best we can do, he would say, is sketch and test the boundaries of our nihilistic prison (Weber's 'iron cage'), and show those breaks and disruptions that point to the possibility of 'something more.' In other words, practice what he calls 'negative dialectics.'

 

[Larry]

Exactly. What it does mean, though, is that we live in a day and age where meaningfulness of our lives is a problem. Since we no longer possess the resources to draw definitive conclusions regarding the meaningfulness of our lives (particularly in any collective sense), we're forced to fall back on the imperatives we happen share as a species: our animal appetites. As a result, we live in a society devoted to appetite - to consumption - more and more so as the traditional imperatives lose their relevance and credibility. You can see this with Christian holidays such as Easter, Halloween, or Christmas, where the traditional meaning has largely evaporated in favour of bald consumption. Anytime anyone complains about the 'commercialization' of this or that, you could say they're alluding to the crisis of meaning.

Interesting. Consumption certainly is a problem, especially in the patterns that have developed in conspicuous consumption. In regards to the holidays, I have to agree - it is so damn irritating when I want to observe my religious beliefs and have people hound me about "what do I want for Christmas?" Besides thinking to myself, "Joy, Peace, and Understanding to the World, and a foot to the ass for all who interrupt me while I'm contemplating these things," I've found such crass commercialization to be like an acid poured on these traditions. Sad.

Faith isn't knowledge, Texmex - which is why we use a different word to refer to it. Whatever knowledge is, it certainly seems to be public. Unlike faith, opinion, or guesswork, knowledge compels consent. Faith is simply conviction without compelling justification. Conviction is cheap (everyone has it); compelling justification, on the other hand, is hard to come by. The only institution we possess that's capable of reliably producing knowledge in this sense is science, and if anything, it seems antithetical to meaning. In fact, it's what's put us in this dilemma in the first place, by discrediting all our prior 'meaning-friendly' world-views.

By making them fantastic.

This is really scarey stuff when you think about it, and pretty much as far from pouting as you could get.

It's also why I think epic fantasy - particularly in its commercially dominant form - is so important to understand. I truly believe it's a cipher of some kind.

And that cypher is what's been puzzling us for a month now at least, hasn't it No-Dog? You know I'm leaning more toward a historicist position on that, with its implicit divisions and warfares of meaning between the Pats and Plebs, but there just seems to be something else, something contemplative in nature, that needs to be added. Does this make any sense to you?

 

[Larry]

This strikes me as the existentialist answer (albeit with a healthy skeptical spin ). For Adorno, this is simply a form of humanistic quietism, another way to render real critical engagement with the social conditions that produced this dilemma impossible - a kind of la-de-da meaningfulness which, by embracing its own subjectivity, simply pushes the more pressing concern of social meaningfulness beyond our critical grasp.

The best we can do, he would say, is sketch and test the boundaries of our nihilistic prison (Weber's 'iron cage'), and show those breaks and disruptions that point to the possibility of 'something more.' In other words, practice what he calls 'negative dialectics.'

Yes, I guess I could be as much of a skeptical existentialist as I am a skeptical historicist and a skeptical cultural materialist Seriously though, there does seem to be the possibility that social meaningfulness might indeed be beyond our critical grasp. I'm uncertain as to whether or not I can believe it to be so, but I certainly must keep that in mind, yes?

The prison analogy is interesting. I wonder if we'll ever discover (or have discovered) a way to transcend that. It's certainly a dilemna worth probing and prodding, regardless of the paucity of "answers" churned out. All I know is that I don't think an exploration into Language and its deconstruction is the answer. From what I've seen, the post-structuralists have just stirred up more questions, some of which seem to alter the nature of the probe in the first place. But neither are historicist nor pyschoanalytical models conclusive. Somehow, I think the best approach hasn't yet been developed yet.

 

[ironchef texmex]

Sometimes, I wonder if we're just coming around to that belief that all is indeed Vanity, with dual implied meanings. Self-awareness, or even the illusion of it, is a dangerous thing without some sense of meaning and most dangerous with a belief in certainty, it seems.

First off, there was no duality when the writer of "meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless." wrote his book on vanity. "A time for all things" excluded just as much when we talk about "having it all". All? Really? Everything? Every single strain of venereal disease? No, of course not. We just mean that we want everything desirable: money, sucess, love, all that stuff. The point of the book -- all that desirable stuff... it's not that great.

But the part that has me really curious is the line about how dangerous certainty makes any measure of self-awareness. I'm lost. What kind of dangers are we talking about? The most pervasive "absolutist" belief on the planet is the one about "loving thy neighbor". So what is it exactly that I'm supposed to be afraid of? Getting spoiled on too much affection? Getting hugged so hard I slip a disk?

It's hard to probe into specifics when you make the statement so general. Are you talking about absolutists beliefs in general, or just certain models of belief?

 

[Larry]

First off, there was no duality when the writer of "meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless." wrote his book on vanity. "A time for all things" excluded just as much when we talk about "having it all". All? Really? Everything? Every single strain of venereal disease? No, of course not. We just mean that we want everything desirable: money, sucess, love, all that stuff. The point of the book -- all that desirable stuff... it's not that great.

But the part that has me really curious is the line about how dangerous certainty makes any measure of self-awareness. I'm lost. What kind of dangers are we talking about? The most pervasive "absolutist" belief on the planet is the one about "loving thy neighbor". So what is it exactly that I'm supposed to be afraid of? Getting spoiled on too much affection? Getting hugged so hard I slip a disk?

It's hard to probe into specifics when you make the statement so general. Are you talking about absolutists beliefs in general, or just certain models of belief?

The dual implied meanings of Vanity were simply "it's vain/hopeless" and "it's self-delusional to believe possessions/oneself are paramount in this world." Nothing more than that was I try to impart by using that phrase.

Certainty is dangerous in the sense that it can lead to harm in some of the following ways: Certain that one's cause is "right", one might come to the conclusion that he/she can do as she/he pleases, irrespective of the wishes of others. Certain that this belief is the "right" one, the individual can shut him/herself off from information that might invalidate all or part of that belief code. Certain that others are wrong without seeing evidence/proof of said wrongness, actions could be taken that are detrimental toward all.

It is good to have a bit of doubt about most everything. A little doubt can act as a brake on impulsive behavior. I'm not saying doubt to the point of paralyzing yourself or another, only that it's good to keep in mind that there's always room for error: Errare humanum est.

Besides, I'm not 100% certain that I even exist as an entity outside of a dreamer's illusion. I could be a disembodied brain floating in a jar, or delusioned in other matters. I could be. But while accepting those possibilities, I just choose to believe that I'm a 30 year old male typing methodically on a keyboard communicating doubts and ideas to other individuals across a spherical object we have labelled as Terra, Earth, Tierra, etc.

See what I'm saying about certainty? It's the consequences of acting without doubt that worry me, not whether or not something can or cannot be correct/incorrect or right/wrong.

 

[Scott Bakker]

Here's a great example (taken from Woodward's Plan of Attack):

Blair had also said he had received letters from those who had lost sons in the war who wrote that they hated him for what he did. I quoted Blair, "And don't believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that they don't suffer any doubt."

"Yeah," President Bush replied. "I haven't suffered doubt."

"Is that right?" I asked. "Not at all?"

"No. And I'm able to convey that to the people." To those who had lost sons or daughters, he said, "I hope I'm able to convey that in a humble way."


Pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Since we're hardwired to prefer certainty (typically flattering, implausibly simplistic certainties), doubt becomes something we 'suffer.' Even more troubling, however, is the way we tend to use faux certainty to make it easier to gamble with other people's lives. In this regard, Bush and bin Laden see eye to eye. Declarations of absolute certainty make it impossible to honestly examine one's assumptions and justifications.

Put it this way: Bush doesn't know, and yet he's absolutely certain. That just seems obviously wrong.

I sometimes think those people who blame religion for so many of the world's woes are actually talking about the faux-certainty that so much religion seems to inspire.

 

[Larry]

I remember hearing about that and having it confirm, yet once again, why I dislike the idea of people like that in such an important elected office. But I'll refrain from going into politics here, because that's the quickest way to derail most conversations at websites, I've noticed.

And I agree with that statement regarding why so many confuse a dislike for religion with a dislike for the faux-certainty that religion can inspire in many. Doctrinaires of all stripes worry me, for reasons such as the one you cited above.

 

[Bond]

"He who hesitates is lost"