In June, after the indecent film climax induced by Spider-Man: The Universe, The Flash was released in the mainland only four days, and the box office has exceeded 100 million. Marvel, DC movies often become the invention of new records of the box office harvester, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Batman, Doctor Strange these super heroes almost become known to survive. Even some of the villains in the super British movies, such as Doctor Octopus, The Joker, The Riddler, Thanos, and Loki, are already familiar characters.
When we’re floating around in a super-heroic novel, we rarely think about what the message is. What’s the relationship between the superheroes and the villains they’re trying to take down? What price are these novels, which seem to be different but follow a similar logic, informing ordinary indecent people?
In his book The Paradox of Rules, anthropologist David Graeber observes that people often say, “Isn’t that cheap entertainment?” They don’t learn anything about our animal nature, politics or society. It’s like a Ferris wheel.” This is true at some level, popular civilizations don’t exist to obey anyone and believe anything, they exist to delight. But “if you look closely, you will find that most popular civilizations do tend to incorporate this pleasure into some kind of argument.”
Graeber sees a basic plot pattern in a superEnglish novel: a good guy — a criminal outlaw, or more often a powerful supervillain — sets out on a plot to tame, defend, steal, fight or revenge. Yinghao found the danger and got to the bottom of it. Experienced the test and adversity, Yinghao in the final key to defeat the villain’s plan. Everything goes back to normal until the next episode, when the exact same event is repeated.
In his eyes, these superheroes are just not reacting to events, not planning for themselves as heroes, and even seem to lack mental powers altogether – superheroes almost never create, invent, or build anything physical. The villains, by contrast, are relentlessly inventive, with a constant stream of plans, names, and pronouncements. All this means, of course, that “the logic of the superhero plot is highly conservative.”
Spider-Man
On Batman and the Achievement of Constitutional Power (Excerpt)
| Translated by David Graeber | Ni Qianqian
A superhero comic might seem harmful. In many ways it is. If cartoons were simply telling a group of adolescent boys that we all have a certain hope for turmoil and chaos, but that we ultimately need to master this hope, then it wouldn’t seem to be doing particularly bad politics. Not least because the message still retains a healthy dose of ambivalence, like that of contemporary film heroes who seem to spend most of their time trashing suburban shopping malls and the like. Most of us are happy to make a bad bank or shopping trip once in our lives. To paraphrase Bajunin, “The impulse to maintain is also the impulse to invent.”
Still, I think it’s hard to believe that, at least in the case of most superheroes comics, the turmoil did remove a very strong conservative political role. In order to understand why, I have to briefly run a question about the achievements of constitutional power.
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Superheroes in disguise attack criminals essentially in the name of law enforcement, even if they themselves often operate outside the strict framework of law enforcement. But in the modern state, the position of law enforcement is an achievement in itself. This is due to a basic logical paradox: no system can possibly be self-born. Any right that might build a system of law enforcement is itself bound by that system. So law enforcement has to come from somewhere. In the Middle Ages, the point was simple: the order of law enforcement was created by God, and the Old Testament has written at length that God himself is not bound by law enforcement or even by any system of undiscerning morality (again, this makes sense: if you invented morality, then by definition you cannot be bound by it). Or, if not directly from God, then from God-given kingship. The British, American, and French reactionaries transformed all this by inventing the concept of non-popular sovereignty – declaring that power once held by Kings was now held by entities they called “the people.”
This negates an immediate logical result, because according to the definition, the “people” are actually a group of individuals bound together by a specific set of law enforcement constraints. So, in what sense did they invent the absence of law enforcement? When this achievement was first denied after the British, American, and French reactions, the answer seemed clear: through reaction itself.
But this led to a further achievement. Reaction is law-abiding action. An armed uprising, the overthrow of the authorities and the establishment of a new order of affairs are totally illegal. Cromwell, Jefferson, and Danton were all clearly guilty of treason under their native circumstances; For example, in another 20 years, if they try to do the same thing under the new regime they create, it will be considered treason.
Super heroes cosplay
Therefore, law enforcement is eliminated from illegal movements. This makes the modern concept of authority inherently inconsistent, because it assumes that the state holds the legitimate application of violence (only police officers, prison guards, or officially authorized private security guards have the legal right to beat you). Police officers are justified in using force because they are enforcing the law; Law enforcement is justified because it is rooted in the Constitution; The Constitution is right because it comes from the people; The people created the constitution through illegal acts of violence. So, the results go: how to distinguish between “common people” and gangsters?
There is no obvious answer.
The secondary, decent answer is to spread the results as far as possible. The common path is: the period of reaction is over (outside of places like Gabon or Syria), and do we now amend the constitution or law enforcement by means of law enforcement? This of course means that the basic structure will never change. The result is not to see the United States, which has been the backbone of the national structure of the cheerleaders and the bipartisan establishment, although this was much improved in 1789, but now we are seen as the political Amish, and ride around in horse-drawn carts. It also means that we are basing the legitimacy of the entire system on the will of the people, despite the fact that the only people who were truly accepted in this way were 200 years ago. In America, at least, the “people” are long dead.
Since then, the right to establish the order of justice has changed from being from God to being from armed reaction to being rooted in pure conservatism – “These are the customs of our ancestors, and who are we to question their wisdom?” (Of course, many American politicians have made it clear that they really want to give power back to God.)
This is how the tributaries of my Way look at these achievements. For both the radical right and the authoritarian right, constitution-making is a fairly secular achievement, but they deal with the basic achievement of punishing violence in very similar ways. After the baptism of the disasters of the 20th century, the rightists have largely abandoned their previous emphasis on reactionary violence and prefer non-violent forms of struggle. Those people are able to act above law enforcement precisely because they don’t act like gangsters. On the right (as it has been since the rise of fascism in the 1920s), reactionary violence is distinct from mere criminal violence.
That kind of indecency is self-righteous bullshit. Violence is violence. But this does not mean that gangsters cannot be “people,” because in any case, violence is the real source of law enforcement and political order. Any successful application of violence is its own constitutional power of a situation. That’s why Walter Benjamin says we can’t help but admire the “great criminal” : because, as many movie posters have said over the years, “he made his own law enforcement.” After all, any criminal structure is bound to create its own set of internal regulations, often quite detailed. They have to master the violence in return, to prevent it from appearing in a completely random state. But from the left, this is what law enforcement has always been all about. It is the hand of violence, violence makes it live, and it is finally fulfilled through violence.
This makes it easier to understand the often surprisingly close contacts between criminals, criminal groups, left-wing political movements and representatives of the armed forces of the State. After all, they all speak the same way. They make their own rules based on force. As a result, such people usually share a broad sense of politics. Giussolini may have wiped out the Mafia, but Italian mafiosi still admire him. In Athens today, there is a dreary mutuality between outlaws, fascist gangs and police officers in poor immigrant communities. In reality, this example clearly shows a political strategy: In the expectation that the masses would rise up in support of the left-wing authorities, the police first withdrew harm from the communities surrounding the immigrant gangs, and then began to covertly support the fascists (as a result, an openly Nazi party quickly emerged). It is reported that about half of the Greek police voted for the Nazi party in the most recent election. But this is exactly how far-left politics works. For him, several different violent forces operating outside the order of law enforcement (or, in the case of police officers, sometimes just in the margins of law enforcement) interact with each other in a space in which a new power situation can be eliminated, leading to a new order of power.
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So what does all this have to do with superheroes in disguise? It’s too much. Because this is the space for superheroes and supervillains. A space with a fascist quality, in which there are only gangsters, dead dictators, policemen, gangsters, and the lines between each other become more and more blurred. Sometimes the police are disciplined, sometimes they are corrupt. Sometimes the police themselves have fallen into vigilantism. Sometimes they poison superheroes; As for the other superheroes who make them look at each other, they will provide assistance. Villains and heroes occasionally join forces. The pneumatic front is constantly shifting. If there is anything new that is not available, it must not be from this force of change. There is no other. Because in the DC (Detective Comics) and Marvel universe, there is no God or people.
In this way, the potential constitution-making power can only go to the loser by force. In reality, as long as supervillains and evil masterminds are not dreaming of perfect crimes or indulging in random acts of terror, they are always plotting some new world order. If Red Skull, Tamer Kang, or Doctor Doom really did take over the planet, they would soon be running out of new law enforcement. Those thoughts are not good law enforcement. And their inventors were certainly not constrained. But beyond that, we expect those enforcement to lose its rigor.
The Infinity glove of the Avengers villain Thanos
Superheroes resist this logic. They don’t want to tame the world – if only because they’re not paranoid or crazy. As a result, they become the parasitic predators of the villain, just as the police are the parasitic predators of the criminal: without the latter, the former have no reason to survive. They are fighting to defend a seemingly unexistent order of law enforcement and government that must be defended, however flawed or degraded, because the only alternative is far worse.
They’re not fascists. They are just ordinary, decent, supertalented people in a world where fascism is the only political impossibility.
Can we ask why a state of entertainment conditioned on such a peculiar conception of politics should be less so than in the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century, just as real fascism was rising in Europe? Is this some kind of American fantasy? Not really. Both fascism and superheroes are more likely to emerge from a similar historical adversity: what is the basis of social order when the reactionary ideal itself has been abandoned? Above all, what changes do politics seem to have eliminated?
No, from the focus of the super hero. They are predominantly adolescent or preadolescent white boys. That is, the Tao, whether these individuals, in their particular stage of life, can have both a maximum creative ideation and at least a little rebellion; But they are also being groomed to eventually take on the world’s most powerful positions: fathers, police chiefs, small business owners, mid-level managers, engineers. So what do they learn from these endless dramas? First of all, imagery and backwater invite violence; Second, violence is fun, just like imagery and rebellion; Finally, in the final analysis, the edge of violence must be directed against any number of ideas and waters in the past, lest everything be distorted. These things must be stopped! This is why superheroes do not exert their mental power at will, but this mental power can only be extended to their grooming plans, cars, homes or various accessories.
It is in this sense that the logic of the superhero plot is highly conservative. In the final analysis, the difference between the sentiments of the left and the left depends on the position of the individual regarding the image. For rightists, the power of thinking, of invention, and the consequent prolongation of productive forces, are forces that bring about new things and new social domination, and are always laudable. It is the source of all real costs in the world. To the right, it is dangerous; therefore, to the end, it is evil. The urge to invent is also the urge to maintain. This position was common in Freudian fashion at the time: the id was the driving force of speech and intelligence, but it was also immoral; If it is released, it will lead to an orgy of destruction. This is the difference between conservatives and fascists. Both are willing, and the release of ideational forces only invites violence and defensiveness. Conservatives hope to harm us by countering this impossibility. The fascists wanted it released anyway. They wanted to be great artists, like Hitler thought of himself, painting with human thoughts, blood and bones.
This means that not only the confusion, but the very fact of floating in an imaginary life becomes a guilty pleasure for the reader. It may seem odd that a category of art should ultimately serve as a warning about the dangers of imagery, but it does explain why, in the sober days of the 1940s and 1950s, there was a hint that these cartoons were bad reading. It also illustrates how comics suddenly became toxic in the ’60s, allowing for silly, Camp-style TV versions of superheroes, like Adam West’s Batman episodes or Saturday morning Spider-Man animations. If the message to be communicated after this is that the idea of opposing the water can not be accepted, as long as it does not involve politics but is limited to consuming choices (again, clothing, cars, accessories), then this message can easily be worn even to implement the production of films.