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Dec. 9th, 2015 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionThe Walking Dead 4.1-4.8
Completed my Gimple/Dead rewatch.
No clue how much of this I've said before in entries left public:
4.1-4.3: Basically adapt "Plato's Pharmacy" - seriously, this is a fully conscious use of Derrida on a tv action show. Recap of its relevant set of metaphors: ancient city states became constituted on us/them principles symbolized by their walls (inside, outside), but since slavery, trade, genetic mixing etc. meant that the group inside the walls inevitably included outsiders this distinction was unstable. When a threat from out was perceived two things would tend to happen that became as momentous as that threat: the distinction between "them" and "us" would be insisted on more strongly, leading to purity tests or purges (e.g. McCarthyism); and, shortly after, "our" ability to defend ourselves from the threat (usually made worse by the distraction from and/or radicalization of the outgroupers caused by the purification panic) would become so compromised by our inability to clearly see what was threat and what not that we'd NOTICE a change was needed and have to import back in some of what we'd excluded. Inoculation, basically. But for Derrida the point is that words, which are created by distinctions (walls), cannot be stable, as we'll always be trying to protect their meanings from the influence of neighboring words and that purification will always leave out what we later realize is necessary to that original meaning. Words will never fit actual conceptual contours neatly, the way walls will never be stable against weather, aggression, neglect/decay etc. unless fixed, changed, exchanged. The "pharmakon" is the aspect of the excluded word or world that one fears to be toxic (hence the distinction in the first place) but that one eventually turns to as the needed medicine for the illness insularity's causing - the ancient Greek word for medication and poison is the same, basically, much like how the Drug War caused a split in our sense of that word. And given how iffy medicine would have been for the ancient Greeks one sees their point. But Derrida of course loves how the word is both things, because it seems to prove his point: meanings shift in crazy ways based on shifting needs, so distinctions are forever being undermined. Main counterargument to which is that not every term can be proven to change significantly in meaning over a middle-term segment of time, thus flux is tendency and not rule, in which case not everything is deconstructible (i.e. based on an unjustifiable distinction on some level). If the instability of the universe is itself unstable in ways creating patches of stability - which is the take of (e.g.) Lucretius, Shelley, Stevens - this is a viewpoint with no particular problem with representation and empiricism, and one where even the limits of both need to be representable/experienceable in order to BE limits for us. But though Derrida hasn't given us a new diagnosis or new drug his allegory lures us in by how freaking familiar it sounds - this isn't how things have to go wrong all over, but it sure is the main way they go wrong when they do. Some words are more logocentric (having their own perceived authority as sole basis of their maning, rather than some independently verifiable fact they innocently gesture at) than others, and some *situations* can lead us to desire/hallucinate such self-proving authority to exist in certain words rather than in others (e.g. confusion, pain, fear of death empowering the words of the stabilizing, soothing, immortalizing language of the Bible, Koran, whatever). To the extent Derrida's just saying WATCH OUT, ANY WORDS CAN BECOME LOGOCENTRIZED YO then fine, sure, but he fell down the rabbit hole of our inability to talk about just which ones might or might not be without using, like, words. Whereas calling attention to what might make us stop carefully comparing representations to realities (at least, you know, now and then) seems pretty useful, if less clearly an original notion (Hi Orwell; What up, Borges; Hey Blake). And other aspects of the setup are really suggestive - he ties this in to scapegoats and to banishment, favorite and Socratically relevant Greek pastimes. When the volcano acts up you toss the more volcanic (unpredictably menstrual) members of your group (your virgins) into the volcano - it clearly wants them back, or anyway they're attracting its damn attention. And the introjective move is as familiar-sounding as the projective one: uh oh, a bunch of men are coming toward us and they're assaulting, raping, and taking all our food - so let's set up a standing army! What could go wrong?
The argument's not extended to language per se, in The Walking Dead, except to our overreliance, when fearful, on dubious distinctions enabled or reinforced by certain socially sanctioned language. The sanction is the main problem: precedents set by others tend to be the worst trouble, on the show. And it's not just language, of course, but action precedents. Slogans advance the process but aren't of a separate order from actual walls, are like them artifices maintained only through the belief they're effective. Derrida is misread this way often enough, and why not? It makes more sense than what he's actually saying, at least if we take the problem as a tendency rather than a universal truth. We need to revisit our distinctions whenever they're being acted on in ways where people could get hurt, not because all distinctions may be wrong but because fear and conformity can reinforce one another in ways that stop language (and behavioral contagion) from being examined. Late Derrida himself seems more interested in this sort of misreading than in what he actually meant, in fact. Meek's Cutoff is the only previous dramatization of these ideas I'm aware of, but Walking Dead can go deeper into the specifics because there it features actual walls - of a prison, no less. I guess you could say it has to strain a point by showing the mossy zombie sticking out of the ground right by the elderberries, whereas the Obamaesque new guide in Cutoff is a more properly ambiguous pharmakon. But the association allows zombies to be redefined in a fruitful way, which I'll maybe explain later. And the faltering wall, standing army, scapegoat/sacrifice/exile paradigms lead to more inspired images and happenings.
4.4-4.5: 4.4 is about that irony of exile - Carol has become too much like the callous outer world, so Rick tosses her out into it, which makes him as callous as the outer world. 4.5 is great because it admits what Derrida never can, that yes, there's a point where distinctions/exclusions do need to be made so that we can act, and more importantly they CAN be made fairly, and language helps us make them. Representation isn't the problem, but instead how we fall back to a simpler sort of language when we go fight-or-flight too soon, and then double down on that simplistic crap we'd been saying when that fear comes back or is sustained. So, yes, a counterterrorism allegory, but kept vague enough that it fits war, racism, every other damn politics-entangled problem ever.
4.6, 4.7, 4.8 extends the wall thing to distinctions one makes about self-definition - the Governor tries to exclude the good part his own past, his family, because it led to his overprotectiveness, atrocities and downfall, preventing him from seeing he's still the kind of person who needs to love and protect a family hence will as soon as one's available. And once one is and he knows he can't leave it he tries to exclude the bad part his past, his dictator self, so strenuously that he's led into violence, which makes him figure that's his real self after all so why not be dictator again. Or thereabouts - I'm mischaracterizing it a bit for brevity. Then in 4.8 his view that once you've gone bad you have to stay bad (since he feels like he tried to be good and failed) gets put up against Hershel's that assessment of reality rather than the lean imparted by your baggage can dictate what path to choose, once you realize you've talked yourself into a view of yourself that's mostly just talk. But sunk cost fallacy wins the day, as it often does. Worse, Rick gets converted from Hershel's view, which he himself preaches at the Governor, because it doesn't work at that crucial moment - the choice of another has blocked his own, leading to his doubting choice itself in the very way the younger Governor had. You have to do what you can do to survive (and survive in order to keep those you love alive), so where others might choose in favor of themselves and against you, like the Governor had, you need to choose in favor of yourself and yours preemptively, like the Governor had. Assuming zero sum when the sum ain't zero, on the grounds that you'll lose everything if you're wrong that the sum isn't zero. So instead lose everything more certainly, if gradually, by wrongly assuming it always is zero, since the Governor's is the path to hell on earth - no trust, no sleep, constant replacing of your last record ethical low with a lower, since you keep shifting your personal Overton window of what's normal. Anyway, Rick's antihero arc starts here. Well, back with Carol. Given Gimple's later practice I wonder if the Carol decision somehow affects how the Governor encounter goes - was there hesitation in Rick's saying that one can always change, when he's just previously exiled Carol on the assumption she can't? Maybe I should rewatch the scene. I do recall him not sounding entirely sure of himself, perhaps echoed in the Governor's murder-cut not being clean. Neither is entirely with or entirely against the head of Hershel, as it were. Is it that Rick holds back from giving something? Some proof? Risking himself instead? Can't remember to what extent he does. Later episodes and especially 6.4 will confirm that hesitation in any way from the faith that other lives are as real and meaningful as your own (and that your own is real and meaningful, relatedly) will have bad consequences sooner or later.
Completed my Gimple/Dead rewatch.
No clue how much of this I've said before in entries left public:
4.1-4.3: Basically adapt "Plato's Pharmacy" - seriously, this is a fully conscious use of Derrida on a tv action show. Recap of its relevant set of metaphors: ancient city states became constituted on us/them principles symbolized by their walls (inside, outside), but since slavery, trade, genetic mixing etc. meant that the group inside the walls inevitably included outsiders this distinction was unstable. When a threat from out was perceived two things would tend to happen that became as momentous as that threat: the distinction between "them" and "us" would be insisted on more strongly, leading to purity tests or purges (e.g. McCarthyism); and, shortly after, "our" ability to defend ourselves from the threat (usually made worse by the distraction from and/or radicalization of the outgroupers caused by the purification panic) would become so compromised by our inability to clearly see what was threat and what not that we'd NOTICE a change was needed and have to import back in some of what we'd excluded. Inoculation, basically. But for Derrida the point is that words, which are created by distinctions (walls), cannot be stable, as we'll always be trying to protect their meanings from the influence of neighboring words and that purification will always leave out what we later realize is necessary to that original meaning. Words will never fit actual conceptual contours neatly, the way walls will never be stable against weather, aggression, neglect/decay etc. unless fixed, changed, exchanged. The "pharmakon" is the aspect of the excluded word or world that one fears to be toxic (hence the distinction in the first place) but that one eventually turns to as the needed medicine for the illness insularity's causing - the ancient Greek word for medication and poison is the same, basically, much like how the Drug War caused a split in our sense of that word. And given how iffy medicine would have been for the ancient Greeks one sees their point. But Derrida of course loves how the word is both things, because it seems to prove his point: meanings shift in crazy ways based on shifting needs, so distinctions are forever being undermined. Main counterargument to which is that not every term can be proven to change significantly in meaning over a middle-term segment of time, thus flux is tendency and not rule, in which case not everything is deconstructible (i.e. based on an unjustifiable distinction on some level). If the instability of the universe is itself unstable in ways creating patches of stability - which is the take of (e.g.) Lucretius, Shelley, Stevens - this is a viewpoint with no particular problem with representation and empiricism, and one where even the limits of both need to be representable/experienceable in order to BE limits for us. But though Derrida hasn't given us a new diagnosis or new drug his allegory lures us in by how freaking familiar it sounds - this isn't how things have to go wrong all over, but it sure is the main way they go wrong when they do. Some words are more logocentric (having their own perceived authority as sole basis of their maning, rather than some independently verifiable fact they innocently gesture at) than others, and some *situations* can lead us to desire/hallucinate such self-proving authority to exist in certain words rather than in others (e.g. confusion, pain, fear of death empowering the words of the stabilizing, soothing, immortalizing language of the Bible, Koran, whatever). To the extent Derrida's just saying WATCH OUT, ANY WORDS CAN BECOME LOGOCENTRIZED YO then fine, sure, but he fell down the rabbit hole of our inability to talk about just which ones might or might not be without using, like, words. Whereas calling attention to what might make us stop carefully comparing representations to realities (at least, you know, now and then) seems pretty useful, if less clearly an original notion (Hi Orwell; What up, Borges; Hey Blake). And other aspects of the setup are really suggestive - he ties this in to scapegoats and to banishment, favorite and Socratically relevant Greek pastimes. When the volcano acts up you toss the more volcanic (unpredictably menstrual) members of your group (your virgins) into the volcano - it clearly wants them back, or anyway they're attracting its damn attention. And the introjective move is as familiar-sounding as the projective one: uh oh, a bunch of men are coming toward us and they're assaulting, raping, and taking all our food - so let's set up a standing army! What could go wrong?
The argument's not extended to language per se, in The Walking Dead, except to our overreliance, when fearful, on dubious distinctions enabled or reinforced by certain socially sanctioned language. The sanction is the main problem: precedents set by others tend to be the worst trouble, on the show. And it's not just language, of course, but action precedents. Slogans advance the process but aren't of a separate order from actual walls, are like them artifices maintained only through the belief they're effective. Derrida is misread this way often enough, and why not? It makes more sense than what he's actually saying, at least if we take the problem as a tendency rather than a universal truth. We need to revisit our distinctions whenever they're being acted on in ways where people could get hurt, not because all distinctions may be wrong but because fear and conformity can reinforce one another in ways that stop language (and behavioral contagion) from being examined. Late Derrida himself seems more interested in this sort of misreading than in what he actually meant, in fact. Meek's Cutoff is the only previous dramatization of these ideas I'm aware of, but Walking Dead can go deeper into the specifics because there it features actual walls - of a prison, no less. I guess you could say it has to strain a point by showing the mossy zombie sticking out of the ground right by the elderberries, whereas the Obamaesque new guide in Cutoff is a more properly ambiguous pharmakon. But the association allows zombies to be redefined in a fruitful way, which I'll maybe explain later. And the faltering wall, standing army, scapegoat/sacrifice/exile paradigms lead to more inspired images and happenings.
4.4-4.5: 4.4 is about that irony of exile - Carol has become too much like the callous outer world, so Rick tosses her out into it, which makes him as callous as the outer world. 4.5 is great because it admits what Derrida never can, that yes, there's a point where distinctions/exclusions do need to be made so that we can act, and more importantly they CAN be made fairly, and language helps us make them. Representation isn't the problem, but instead how we fall back to a simpler sort of language when we go fight-or-flight too soon, and then double down on that simplistic crap we'd been saying when that fear comes back or is sustained. So, yes, a counterterrorism allegory, but kept vague enough that it fits war, racism, every other damn politics-entangled problem ever.
4.6, 4.7, 4.8 extends the wall thing to distinctions one makes about self-definition - the Governor tries to exclude the good part his own past, his family, because it led to his overprotectiveness, atrocities and downfall, preventing him from seeing he's still the kind of person who needs to love and protect a family hence will as soon as one's available. And once one is and he knows he can't leave it he tries to exclude the bad part his past, his dictator self, so strenuously that he's led into violence, which makes him figure that's his real self after all so why not be dictator again. Or thereabouts - I'm mischaracterizing it a bit for brevity. Then in 4.8 his view that once you've gone bad you have to stay bad (since he feels like he tried to be good and failed) gets put up against Hershel's that assessment of reality rather than the lean imparted by your baggage can dictate what path to choose, once you realize you've talked yourself into a view of yourself that's mostly just talk. But sunk cost fallacy wins the day, as it often does. Worse, Rick gets converted from Hershel's view, which he himself preaches at the Governor, because it doesn't work at that crucial moment - the choice of another has blocked his own, leading to his doubting choice itself in the very way the younger Governor had. You have to do what you can do to survive (and survive in order to keep those you love alive), so where others might choose in favor of themselves and against you, like the Governor had, you need to choose in favor of yourself and yours preemptively, like the Governor had. Assuming zero sum when the sum ain't zero, on the grounds that you'll lose everything if you're wrong that the sum isn't zero. So instead lose everything more certainly, if gradually, by wrongly assuming it always is zero, since the Governor's is the path to hell on earth - no trust, no sleep, constant replacing of your last record ethical low with a lower, since you keep shifting your personal Overton window of what's normal. Anyway, Rick's antihero arc starts here. Well, back with Carol. Given Gimple's later practice I wonder if the Carol decision somehow affects how the Governor encounter goes - was there hesitation in Rick's saying that one can always change, when he's just previously exiled Carol on the assumption she can't? Maybe I should rewatch the scene. I do recall him not sounding entirely sure of himself, perhaps echoed in the Governor's murder-cut not being clean. Neither is entirely with or entirely against the head of Hershel, as it were. Is it that Rick holds back from giving something? Some proof? Risking himself instead? Can't remember to what extent he does. Later episodes and especially 6.4 will confirm that hesitation in any way from the faith that other lives are as real and meaningful as your own (and that your own is real and meaningful, relatedly) will have bad consequences sooner or later.
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Date: 2015-12-09 07:36 pm (UTC)