Showing posts with label Caitlin La Vine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Caitlin La Vine. Show all posts

Monday, April 11, 2011

The gaze

Angel is a vampire. Buffy is the vampire slayer. When Angel has a soul, Buffy is able to see the subject, Angel himself, within the object, the vampire. When he loses his soul, Buffy is forced to ignore the subject she once knew and see Angel as only an object, a vampire who must be killed.

The same is true of Spike. As a vampire he objectifies himself; he identifies entirely with being frightening, being ruthless, being a vampire. As a vampire who cannot kill, however, he becomes a subject--he protects Buffy's sister and falls in love with Buffy.

The same is true of Oz, the werewolf. Oz is a subject, a friend and individual, on every day and night except the full moon. Once a month he becomes an object, an animal who hunts and kills, but those who know him continue to see the subject he was and will be again at dawn.

What can a TV show say about being a subject in a world of subjects? Looking for hints to the good life in Simone de Beauvoir's ideas of the subject, the object, and the gaze, I see the importance of recognizing both the subject and object in yourself. Only by recognizing both in yourself can you transcend, know yourself and really be who you are.

However, without also working to recognize both the subject and the object in others, kindness, compassion, and an unprejudiced life are not possible. I don't think transcendence is limited to our private lives and inner selves, but that a sort of social transcendence is also possible. By recognizing the object in those that would make objects of us, we are better able to maintain our own subjectivity. By recognizing the subject in those that we would make into objects, we give them a fair chance to make objects of us and establish a foundation of respect upon which to meet them. If the gaze is inevitable, its only right that it should go two ways.

We must be aware of each other's and our own faciticity without losing sight of the fact that each of us has a private mind.

Learning Nietzsche in a Riot

A couple weeks ago, Dr. Layne made an offhand comment about protest kids with their faces covered, throwing rocks and reading Nietzsche. Protests around the country and world have always caught my attention, and I've thought a lot about what can be gained in a riot.

I was just starting to think about life outside of my hometown when the WTO riots in Seattle happened. These were followed by FTAA protests in Florida, in which the police chief publicly spoke of "war" between his forces and the protestors, and used violent military tactics that have received lasting criticism in independent media. Later, when the protests in San Francisco happened the day war was declared on Iraq, I got it. I met old Black Panthers and others who were in Los Angeles and the Bay Area when rioting was almost commonplace. I was in a sort of political fugue, throwing all of my angst and teenage restlessness into a political identity against what we called "business as usual."

I've never encountered a nihilist protestor. I'm not sure one exists, and I'm inclined to say that any protestor who claims nihilism is confused about the meaning of the word, interpreting it as its opposite. On the contrary, I think many protests form as the last gasp of a drive against nihilism. Nietzsche described the flaws of nihilism and the conditions of a nihilist world; protestors demand that nihilism be driven out, that passive acceptance and the absence of conviction be unacceptable in the face of power that is being abused. The driving force in a protest is a feeling that things have gotten so bad, so unforgivable, that drastic changes must be made. Without faith in a change, why bother to go out your door and yell with all the others? Without a belief in some foundation upon which a better world can be built, why get beaten, gassed, shoved along, arrested?

Of course, there is adrenaline and a companionship that come naturally from the crisis of a riot. However, these things don't detract from the meaning, and the search for truth and right action, that are all inherent in the act of attempting to halt the culture of power. This thrill and company are in fact the life-affirming things we identify with. We take action against those we see as doing wrong, those who are creating the culture and system that is life-destroying, and we identify entirely with the action, in the moment.

Protest, even destructive protest, is a demonstration of conviction, regardless of debates about its ethics and effectiveness. If anything, protestors may be faulted for convincing themselves that there is a truth beyond illusion, and leaving no middle-ground for the inevitability of becoming a construct in a world of constructs. Then again, I've never been in a successful protest, seen a tyrant dethroned or a city changed. Maybe protestors who win also eventually forget what they were fighting for; then again, maybe some roads still lead toward belief in a truth that is worth demanding.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Buffy and Alienation

Although it may seem like a simple equation to be born a vampire slayer, and to fulfill your role by slaying vampires, several different bodies appear Buffy with different ideas about the meaning of the slayer's role.

The most unnerving of these is known as the Initiative, operating out of a secret facility below Sunnydale. The Initiative is a secret government organization formed to capture, study, and kill demons and vampires. Formed under the impression that the slayer is a myth, those in power in the Initiative have a hard time reconciling Buffy's self-determination with their tightly-regimented operation. Distrustful of Buffy's autonomy, the head official at the Initiative eventually attempts (unsuccessfully) to have Buffy killed.

The attempts made by the Initiative to enlist Buffy, but only on their own terms, reflect Marx's portrayal of the bourgeoisie. In the same way that Buffy has skills that are useful to the Initiative, the work and skills of the proletariat are useful to the bourgeois. However, as in Buffy's case, the bourgeois are operating in their own interest, and those who work for them are seen as mere automatons. Where Marx calls out religion as the opiate of the masses, the Initiative in fact drugs their soldiers to avoid questions and rebellion regarding the end goal their labor contributes to. Although the soldiers in the Initiative are not under any more pressure than any other member of the proletariat to work for wages, they are alienated from their labor by the extra measure of the unspoken goals of their superiors. These goals alienate the soldiers, and seek to alienate Buffy, from the labor of protecting the populace. This work becomes a commodity produced for wages and advances in wages, rather than an ethical imperative with inherent rewards.

Buffy, as a free agent, is a threat to the Initiative's leaders in the same way Marx sees communism as a threat to capitalism. She works fro herself, and the satisfaction she finds in her work is for those whose lives she saves, and for herself. Throughout the show, she shirks impositions from others on how her work should she be done, seeking instead an identity defined by doing her work well and finding personal growth and fulfillment through it.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Class Synopsis for Friday 3/19

On Friday, we began the class by playing Jeopardy. When the game was over, we began discussing political philosophy, and the question, "What is justice?" In Book II of The Republic, Socrates asserts that the just person is happier than the unjust, marking the just person as virtuous. This opinion can be compared to those of other thinkers by looking at different kinds of good. For Kant, good exists for itself, and not for its consequences, resting on autonomous law. For Socrates, good exists for itself and for its consequences, a view he shares with Marx. For Rousseau and Mill, good exists not for itself, and only for its consequences.
In Socrates' view, justice is defined as "doing one's own." In Socrates' hypothetical city, each person would have one task that they performed well. By focusing on this task, their skills would improve, and each person would rely on others on work in area that differed from their own. For example, the shoemaker would make shoes for the farmer, and the farmer would keep the shoemaker fed. No one would pursue more than one task.
Although a political reading of the Republic presents similarities to Marx, we talked about cautions against a political reading. The Republic is the story of a city that parallels the individual. We talked about the Three Waves of Paradox: philosophers should be kings; men and women should be equal; and eugenics, or that philosopher kings should selectively breed. The idea of the philosopher kings, read psychologically, is the idea that the mind should rule the stomach and the heart. This point brought up two allegories. The first, the Ship of State, describes the helm of a boat as the arena of politics, governed by the most persuasive rather than the star-gazing philosopher who is actually involved in attempts to chart the course of the ship. The second, the allegory of The Cave, describes a part within the soul that only stares at images, and a part within the soul that escapes and is able to see reality. The part that knows the truth returns to the cave and attempts to free the rest of the soul from the cave. This creates a continued tension between the urge to be free of the cave and the urge to fall back into its slumber.
The second wave of paradox, that men and women should be equal, rested on the belief that there is no essential difference between the two. In modern times, we see a growing trend to promote an idea of essential difference, based in material and sensible components such as genetics and hormones. For Plato, anything material and sensible didn't matter.
We ended class before we could really talk about eugenics, the third Wave of Paradox.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Waiting

What if Jon didn't have Garfield?

What if Vladimir did not have Estragon, or Pozzo did not have Lucky? What if Vladimir and Estragon did not have Godot? Everything in the play comes out of dialogue; there is no action outside of the characters, except for the vague implication that at some point another character is expected to join them. The characters only have each other.

The "together and waiting" plot device, for Buffy, leads to reconciliations between estranged characters when a demon traps a birthday party crowd in the house for two days. For Vladimir and Estragon, the relationship unfolds from the waiting. At the same time, the waiting justifies the relationship. Together and waiting, characters share frustrations and goals, and thus are not alone. Offstage, in human relationships, we are together and waiting for reasons that are sometimes as absurd as those that trap Buffy, Didi, and Gogo.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Buffy who slays Vampires but still mediates her base appetites with reason

When Dr. Layne first announced our weekly blog assignment, I decided to have as much fun with it as I could. I thought that choosing a theme would make the assignment a little more challenging, and choosing a theme like Buffy the Vampire Slayer would mean that I could live out every kid's dreams of college, and watch TV for my homework.

The show is smartly done, uses clever metaphors to make unexpected points without losing the amusing action, and rarely fits into the logic based philosophy of the Greeks. I started to worry that I had assigned myself an exercise in sophistry, and that I would only connect Buffy with the classical philosophers through daring feats of logic.

Then my girlfriend explained it all to me: Aristotle's ethics gave writers like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby the basis of the superhero character. Like Aristotle sought the essential function that distinguishes humanity, his ethics define the essential function of a superhero.

Heroism is more than strength and ability--villains have that. It's more than circumstance--the heroes go looking for their fights. It's more than winning--sometimes, even superheroes lose. In our ideal representations of heroes, these individuals use reason to reign in their desires and to harness powers beyond brute strength.

Once again, the works of famous philosophers are played out between characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Characters without superhuman strength still think ethically and do what is right. Buffy uses her ideas of what is right to mediate her desire to use her power impulsively. In season 6, when she loses her grip on the reasons behind her virtue, she becomes intensely unhappy. Only when she redirects her actions to again accord with her reason is her feeling of satisfaction restored.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Buff-aedo

(Spoiler alert!)

Plato portrays a touching death of Socrates, who spends his final hours assuring his students (or the fearful child within his students, as Cebes suggests) that death is not frightening. Once again, the scene is mirrored by Whedon in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the final episode of season 6.

Socrates' role, his identity, is that of "philosopher." As Plato characterizes him, this role pushes him not only to pursue the highest truth, but to push others to look beyond what is most obviously apparent in the world. We see this in his interactions with his students in Phaedo. He feels a responsibility to the knowledge he seeks, and this responsibility creates a bond between him and others. He is driven to pull others toward knowledge, just as he is driven toward knowledge himself.

Although Buffy has a very different role, that of the Slayer, she is subject to a similar responsibility. She is responsible to destiny, and her destiny is to be the people's protector. Like Socrates worked to defend the people from ignorance, Buffy worked to defend the people from vampires and other demons.

As Socrates explains, the lovers of knowledge are awarded the best position for their immortal souls after death. This is his role, and he has lived it well, so he approaches death without fear. As he drinks the hemlock and his body dies, he implies that he is being healed from the sickness of bodily imprisonment. He can now reside in pure knowledge.

Buffy expresses similar thoughts when she sacrifices her own life in the final episode of season 6, for her sister, Dawn's. "This is the work that I have to do," she tells Dawn. "I'm okay...You have to be strong. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me."

As Socrates accepts his coming death as an escape from the temptations and fallacies of the body, Buffy accepts her death as the ideal act of duty and protection. She encourages Dawn to use her memory to be brave, and to not shy away from the world when living is difficult. Socrates asks his students to serve his memory by living lives "for their own selves," to not be swayed by the ideas or criticisms of the masses. Both, as guides and friends, encourage those they leave behind to face the challenge of the conflict between internal and external worlds.

Both died at peace, moving toward an ideal they had lived for.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Ethics and Nerd-dom

One of the most famous lines in the history of comics is spoken about Spider-Man in the golden age of Marvel: “In this world, with great power, there must also come great responsibility!” The line, penned by Stan Lee, has resurfaced again and again in the world of comics. It has become the emblem of many of the heroes, the mantra that, at root, separates heroes from villains. For Spider-Man, the line is a reminder of his Uncle Ben, who originally taught him right and wrong; Spider-Man’s ethics are fueled by his intuitive conscience and a desire to make his Uncle proud.

In the golden age of comics, the 1930s – 1950s, simple moral conflicts allow unrelenting absolutist ethics. The bad guys are bad, the good guys are good. For some heroes in the 90s and later, moral conflicts became more complicated, and heroes had to deal with challenges to their traditional morality.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the challenge presented to the heroine’s ethics comes to a head in the episode “Bad Girls” (Episode 14, season 3). A new slayer comes to town, and she is wild, reckless, and determined to shirk responsibility and destiny; she relentlessly tries to prove her own free will. Although Buffy occasionally tires of her responsibility, she hasn’t really questioned her acceptance of determinism before this point. She has accepted her role as protector and defender, and has enacted her moral duties with an assumption that things that are not evil must be good. When the new slayer, Faith, accidentally kills a man, she clings to her ethical egoism. She tries hard to shrug off the guilt she clearly feels, telling herself that she does she wants and accidents happen. She justifies the loss of a mortal life with the deaths of all the vampires she’s killed.

For Buffy, the knowledge that she has been involved in an act so far from her idea of good shakes her to the core. The knowledge that a slayer, a hero, could commit murder, a crime, and admit no remorse ruptures her conceptions of morality. Faith eventually becomes an anti-hero on the show--no longer posing as a good guy, but not entirely bad, either. The issues raised by her moral ambiguity are never entirely resolved. If someone is simultaneously pulled to ethically right and ethically wrong action, how much can be forgiven?

In the real world, these conflicts of ethics manifest in the role of police. Like Buffy and Faith, police are meant to be the defenders and protectors of the innocent. However, like Buffy and Faith, individual ethics can often define whether the stated moral code and intentions of a police force are upheld. With great power comes great responsibility; what recourse is there when power forgets this?

Friday, January 14, 2011

Epistomology in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

As a committed nerd, I've devoted myself to thoughtful consideration of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've found that Joss Whedon, the show's creator, has brought an unprecedented depth and reflection to the otherwise mirthful story of a teenage girl who hunts and slays vamps and demons with the help of her closest friends.

Whedon raises philosophical issues from the very first episode. When Buffy is told that, not only do vampires and demons exist, but it is her destiny to hunt and kill them, she is forced to go through the paces of epistomological development from the very beginning. Everything she thought she knew is thrown into question by the revelation of these beasties and her destiny, and she must ask herself many of the questions raised by epistomologists. Can she justify the belief that vampires are not real? Can she find a way to justify the belief that they are? She's never seen a vampire, but she does find that she has extraordinary strength. Does this validate the supposed authority of Rupert Giles and the Watchers' Council? If one of his assertions was true, does that mean they are all true? Even if the things he says are true, what are the limits of Giles' knowledge?

In answering these questions, Buffy must change some of the most basic assumptions her reality is based on. Eventually, Buffy faces what seems to be overwhelming evidence of the existence of vampires. Most convincingly, she fights one, giving her a posteriori knowledge, or knowledge through experience. However, she must figure out some way to make this new knowledge cohere with her previous assumptions about reality. She must explore the nature of knowledge and what she thinks she knows in order to integrate her previous knowledge with her new knowledge. The series reflects the difficulty of this task, by continuing to pose these questions to Buffy throughout the show's eight seasons. As in life, Buffy can't know for sure what she knows and what she doesn't, and is constantly torn between practicalities and the search for truth.