Sunday, July 24, 2005
(2:00 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Comic Books
I was recently reminded in a conversation with my mother how intensely "into" comic books I was as a child. She has also suggested that if there were Žižek comic books, I would be collecting them. These two comments prompt a question: Is there a structural homology[1] between avid comic book collecting and rigorous scholarship in the humanities, such as what I practice day in and day out?My answer is yes. First, there is the matter of comic books' "continuity." In essence, comic book writers, at least in my day, were bound by decisions made by the comic book writers of the 1970s and probably before, and their plotlines had to be understandable in light of those past decisions -- as well as all the decisions being made by the writers of the other comic books within the same "universe" (Marvel or DC, primarily). In many cases, footnotes were even deployed, making comic books arguably the most explicitly "scholarly" of pop cultural manifestations.
The upshot is that a child wishing to get "into" comic books has to wade in and become adept at figuring out what had happened 20 years before and in all intervening years. In fact, some of the most interesting plot twists are precisely those that dig out a loose end from issue #4 of a short-run comic book series devoted to some anti-hero who normally was a supporting character in a different comic book (but has since migrated through eight others) but was being tested out as an independent character in the summer of 1982. That is, innovation is often produced by going back to some neglected part of the scholarly tradition.
Also, in DC comics at least, there was a "reboot": Crisis on Infinite Earths. It was a massive tying up of loose ends and rewriting of the entire history of the DC universe, to some extent rendering moot everything that came before. Surely there is an analogy here with the great shifts in humanities scholarship, such as the transition from the New Criticism to "Theory" -- the perception being, rightly or wrongly, that preserving continuity was only going to hamper future creativity and a thorough-going restructuring was needed. A book like Theory's Empire, then, might be considered an attempt to provoke a Crisis in Infinite English Departments.
All this to say: sometimes I worry that I've literally been doing the same thing, over and over, from day one.
NOTES:
[1] A comment I wanted to make on that post and never did: Could we venture to say that there is a structural homology between the tendencies of American scholars to find structural homologies between mutually opposed conceptual formations in the work of foreign scholars and the great American concept of the "melting pot"? That is, could we say that the tendency to think that Foucault and Althusser are, at bottom, about "the same thing" somehow parallel to our ability to homogenize, say, mutually conflicting culinary traditions into something like "ethnic food" or "Asian food"? Thus, even the radical anti-American leftist fire-breathing non-armpit-shaving English professors would end up being quintessentially American! (See, I just did it!)
This would be a kind of meta-structural homology.
