A short comment on present-day "Star Wars"
You can go to YouTube, view the commentary on Star Wars (and especially "Star Wars Celebration 2023"), and come to one conclusion: Star Wars is interesting because it's a microcosm of capitalist America in decline. Star Wars, like capitalist America, is now big money production costs, rushed production facing deadlines, and the complete absence of imagination. (This is at least what you see in your politicians, though the saving-grace for the politicians is that they can command the coding of new money, whereas Disney execs cannot do that.) The original premise was entertaining if hokey, the prequels were permissible, and Dave Filoni's contributions (e.g. "The Clone Wars," "Star Wars Rebels," "The Mandalorian") were and are sometimes meaningful. But what you see with the rest of Star Wars, as with capitalist America in general, is a short-circuiting of the commodity cycle. They are in such a hurry to produce that they are jumping right from raw materials to trash, and avoiding commodities altogether. And they are now promising us more great loads of trash in the future! Thus what you have with the Disney version of Star Wars, as with capitalist America, is a failed business model.
Certainly you are familiar with the commodity cycle. The capitalists view the world as "nature," which is a shorthand for "natural resources." Natural resources are not in fact the whole world. The world is altogether something amazing, and capitalism is a far less interesting aspect of it: a perversion of "making a living" that might have worked for awhile. Rather, natural resources are instrumental reason, capitalist strategy applied to the world. Thus the capitalists cycle the world from natural resources to unrefined raw materials to refined raw materials to commodities to waste. Thinking of the world this way is so natural, so thoroughly shoved into the collective unconscious, that people only think about it when there's waste. Our world is filled with pollution, waste, and planned obsolescence. Whaddaya know.
Now and then, attempts to rectify the commodity cycle are made through the recycling of trash. Similarly, much of what counts as new Star Wars content is the recycling of old Star Wars content. Awhile back, the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) wrote an essay called "Postmodernism as Generalized Conformism," in which he characterized our era of history as one of conformism and the death of any sort of divergent imagination. Nearly all of Star Wars new content today exists to prove Castoriadis right. And of course the point being made here is not just to critique Star Wars; Star Wars is typical of corporate entertainment. See the Critical Drinker's series on "Why Modern Movies Suck."
You will hear of attempts to save Star Wars with good content, many of them led by a sympathetic character named Dave Filoni. Filoni is fighting the system while conforming to its premises. Eventually the deadlines will get to him.
Comments
Very excellent piece, thanks very much
But definitely a buzzkill.
There are many of us who lived the decline, embedded in the systems which were lost.
Later today I'll move the pdf that I believe is the essay and downloaded into my kindle. If this isn't the essay you had in mind, please correct my mistake.
Of course the footnote points me to a new document. Something else to find, perhaps in library genesis.
Yep, that's the essay!
It's a real classic. He puts some effort into discussing definitions of "modernity" that a lot of readers aren't going to recognize -- that's pages 19 and 20 of the text you've linked. But from page 21 onward it should all be pretty clear, especially the periodization he's recommending. There are of course omissions from his discussion, so for instance in the middle of his first period ("the emergence of the West") you have the invention of capitalism, which relied (and relies) upon bloody conquest but was of a different order than the Crusades, which also relied upon bloody conquest.
What's especially true today, however, is the notion that "we live in a period of appalling ideological regression among the literati." This generalization was really quite meaningful in the Eighties and Nineties when Castoriadis was alive to defend it -- it serves to describe Star Wars well too. One would think that the collapse of "Communism" would have meant a freeing-up of creative energies -- that is, anyway, what the writers of the Socialist Workers' Party (or SWP) in the UK thought at the beginning of the Nineties. (I can't remember their names right now for some reason -- my brain is an attic.) But that didn't happen.
Also, this passage rings true, at least for the United States:
Politics has become reduced to voting, and voting to voting for the "lesser of two evils." One would hope that the general strike participants in France could revive lost traditions of politics toward the end of a general and ongoing resistance to neoliberalism.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Star Wars is becoming a newer theme
in military terminology. First, Musk saturated the skies with his satellite coverage.
Then, Russia announced they were going to put up 13,000 similar space probes.
US invents The Space Defense Agency, another black hole in the military budget.
Lasers and EMP enabled low orbit weapons are now the most popular launch
payloads. There will be no peace in our stratosphere. Celestial Competition.
Know this to be a bit off course from your essay, but just what appears when I
think of the unfriendly skies. Meanwhile, China is establishing moon bases.
Everything America does is top secret. And the ISS is falling apart. Oh well.
question everything
So would you say that the proxy war in Ukraine --
-- is the US military equivalent of The Rise of Skywalker?
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
And meanwhile, Amazon is hard at work trashing Tolkien
with their abysmal "Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" series. Every flaw noted in the deterioration of the Star Wars franchise has shown up there from the get-go - there's nowhere to go but farther down.
The sickest joke is the title - it took them until Episode 8 of the first (and so far only) season to get around to making any "Rings of Power" - and they rushed through the making of the Three Elven Rings (and ONLY those, even though there were 16 major and an unknown number of minor rings made first) in a few minutes flat!!!!!
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
So many great series are being destroyed by the woke crap
Robert Jordan's epic books got derailed from the beginning by changing the character’s story and putting different sexes for the main characters. I couldn’t watch even 10 minutes of the Mayfair witches because the main character again was a spineless clown and the ghost was too visible. I don’t remember the other series that are unwatchable because of the changes that only detract from the story, but I’m very pissed at what is happening. But the biggest disappointment was how game of thrones season 8 was rushed to end and compacted and it looked like they just got bored doing it. Many people were outraged by the ending and wanted it redone. Maybe some day someone will do just that and give it the proper ending it deserved. I read the books long before they decided to make it a show and was very invested in it. But for some reason Martin also gave up on it and the last 2 books went nowhere and I think he will never end it. I listened to them and even the narrator gave up on reading it because he gave people different sounding names and voices and made Danni sound like an Irish serving wench.
Aargh!
Here is the hilarious Critical Drinker --
discussing The Rings of Power... here's the critique of the finale...
Oh and as for the creators of such stuff, well...
I went to the theaters to see each of the Peter Jackson movies, and sat in judgment upon each of them for the major diversions-from-the-original-text Jackson pulled off. I mean, it's fine, if you like having your expectations consistently lowered through, what, six hours of viewing "pleasure."
And as for the alibi that this stuff is "Tolkien-inspired fantasy"? That's fine, though it must be said that Tolkien invented thirty different imaginary languages, taught Beowulf at university, and could create crossword puzzles in Gothic. This language ability was essential to Tolkien's ability to create his universe. Can the "Tolkien-inspired fantasy" people do even a fraction of that? I had enough trouble with Chaucer myself, and I was reading the Donaldson edition.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Jackson at least was a competent filmmaker
and genuinely cared about what he was doing, even when his decisions were questionable.
Both sets of trilogies follow the same pattern: First movie reasonably good and not too far off from the source material; second movie rambling away in several different and mostly unnecessary directions; third and final movie a mad scramble to get the story back on track, with some serious WTFery thrown in.
As for the TV show, it just rambles and scrambles all the time, and goes from WTF to WTF to WTF.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
It was nice to read of Jackson's loyalty to the texts
and it was fun to see his renditions of Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn and so on.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
EXTRA CREDIT:
Here's Ryan Kinel having fun with Disney Celebration:
Though I should say that Disney's version of "wokeness" appears to me as one species of vacuity among many. Disney is marketing a product it thinks will sell. It's not a particularly smart move, but, hey, Elon Musk lost $200 billion last year..
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
I managed to listen through the Cringe.
I was totally, you know, reminded of Valley Girls.
Who could have imagined that things could become even more superficial?
This comment deserves a song
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
I read the essay by Castoriadis and he makes good points
but I disagree with his findings. I can't call them conclusions because I believe his death interrupted the study. That timing was also in the beginning phase of a "work" in progress, the cannibalism of our societal institutions, our commons. 1997 was moderately choppy waters, class III rapids and nowhere compared to our current class V rapids.
To continue the analogy, I fear we are in for even more difficult times. And I believe the scariest part of that is that we have no one entity which can navigate this river. The competent leaders were thrown out.
I like Einstein's version of Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice." In our case, not malice in terms of evil but more in terms of indifference.
Which brings me to Star Wars. I have decided that just about every good idea for a product is really good the first episode or season, the second mostly manages to continue the thought, the third is in the struggling phase.
At that point the thing goes into personality phase. Relies on gossipy stuff and gadgetry. At that point the series can only hang on based upon a personal connection with the characters in the performance.
I've given up on our domestic garbage. I don't even bother looking anymore, try not to throw up on the opening page of an IMDB search. It seems they don't even try, just jump straight into phase 3.
BTW, I don't have cable TV for that reason. I can't even stomach the regular snooze where even the weather reporting is in the personality phase. Their whole schtick is who rather than what and why.
To get more contemporary presentations I lean toward Hoopla. Some of the foreign series are good but they also follow the perversion model, like the Capitaine Marleau series. Good in first season, declining in the second, then I lost interest.
Ahh, I've wasted enough of your time... please try to find some calm waters on your raft ride.
Castoriadis' concern wasn't with stupidity per se
because, in his view, the primary attribute distinguishing people from other animals (and Karl Marx said this as well, in Capital) was imagination. Now, the first thing we think of when we think deeply about imagination is creativity -- the ability to come up with original ideas and artistic works. But for Castoriadis, most of our imaginative faculties were conformist ones, thus his notion of the social imaginary, the collective imagining of the world which persists over time and is common to societies.
The social imaginary, for Castoriadis, can often be static, thus most societies are characterized by heteronomy -- in such societies people do not choose the laws under which they must live, but rather are externally directed by one or more numinous agencies -- God, often, but also money or social custom or the will of an all-powerful leader among other things. The problem with heteronomy, then, is not that it is stupid, but rather that it is uncreative. Its imagination is entirely conformist and its creativity leads to more of the same. Heteronomy is overwhelmingly normal. It dominates the preponderance of societies both historical and present-day.
The opposite of heteronomy, characterizing a few historical societies and especially the period two of Castoriadis' history (between 1750 and 1950), is autonomy. Autonomy is when we do choose the laws under which we live. Autonomy is connected to collective acts of creativity -- it involves the ability to imagine society differently (which is to say, participatory democracy), the ability to create works of art which are not mere copies of previous ones, and an employment of the imagination to gain control over the social order.
As for Star Wars, there's something in its concepts of the "evil empire" and the "rebellion" that suggest that we would do best not to be satisfied with heteronomy, that we ought to (in word and deed) dissent from that which is bad. That is its bright spot. Disney appears to be clogging the Star Wars universe with "features" which offer an endless repetitions of the same, and which evoke nothing so much as applications of money in hopes of box office returns.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Oops, posted in wrong spot. My bad.
I think I see the difficulty I'm having here.
It has to do more with terminology. When the term autonomy is used, is the intent to mean independence? If so, then we have to look for the reason for the lack of independence. Is it internal, ie, within the individual, or external in the form of mores and customs? Or is it external in terms of laws and chains?
The other term is conformity. Is the intent of conformity to be lockstep? Or is it to mean compliance? The choice of connotation points to the causation.
I agree that we have had a very serious lack of innovation over the last 40 years. I most definitely do not blame that on the people. We have to look to the underlying cause.
The failures of the entertainment industry must be laid at the feet of the investors and profiteers. Their ilk are the ones who destroy our education system which should produce independent thinking. At the medical system which must provide the health of those who would innovate. At the housing system which must provide the roof and garage to allow for independent creations. And so on.
I disagree with his findings, correlation does not equal causation.
Autonomy does not mean independence.
(Though autonomy and independence are not exclusive of each other.) Both autonomy and heteronomy are attributes. Think of autonomy as an attribute of some democracies, first showing itself (according to Castoriadis) in classical Athens, and of heteronomy as (to begin with) the "traditional" part of what they used to call "traditional" societies. Here is Suzi Adams, from her book on Castoriadis, from the chapter on "Autonomy":
We might immediately conclude that US society is autonomous because society elects those who create the laws, that laws (and indeed parts of the Constitution) can be amended, and that there is no set-in-stone realm outside of some form of human decision-making. But, really, US society is heteronomous because the important decisions in it are made by those with enormous quantities of money and thus in reality money is the imagined external source of power controlling US society.
We might also look to the political powers controlling the elections -- the "major parties" -- as being an external source of power over American democracy. When popular choice is reduced to voting for the perceived lesser of two evils in any particular election -- vote for the (D) or vote for the (R) -- it amounts to nothing as popular choice. When the "major parties" are controlled by money and do not admit of outside interference, as indeed they are, we are back to money as the agency with which the whole social collective forces itself into heteronomy.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
I can see I haven't answered the question about conformity.
Here's from the chapter on heteronomy in the Suzi Adams edited volume:
Thus conformity is there to insure the belief of the masses in those "stronger foundations." Let's go back to my example of money. Money may appear as a reflection of individual will, and this reflection is what my society calls "consumer choice." Yet money and consumer choice are themselves mere reflections of society's conformity to the order set forth by the owners of capital. Ultimately, this means our lifelong contributions to the mechanisms of domination, all ultimately cemented into the system through monetary purchases -- "the market" (i.e. the circuits of capital, from the sugar market of the 15th century to the cotton market of the early 19th century to present-day globalization), the technologies of consumer society (most prominently the large-scale power planet and the automobile, both invented in the 1880s), and by nation-states, which is to say conformity attained through the use of guns. In Marx's Capital, capital is defined as money -- capital is money designed to make more money.
Money is not a real thing in the sense in which a rock is a real thing. Money is a social relationship -- a relationship, primarily, between different sellers/ buyers, and thus between different social classes. Historically, money has been a physical thing, but today money is primarily a set of computer codes. The physical thing is now more visibly a stand-in for the social relationship than it ever has been in previous history.
It may appear natural, then, that we would spend the whole of our adult lives like good conformists, pursuing money. But, whether we are rich or poor, our pursuit will still leave us without any control over the institution (money) to which we donate our lives, or for that matter without any control over ourselves, to the extent to which we are the reflections of the social classes to which we conform.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Not sure we're 100% there yet
If you've seen the original "Star Wars Holiday Special" you can see a true capitalist $tar War$ production. Then there's Marvel.
Do we have to be 100% there?
would 95% suffice?
If you are a hardcore "Star Wars" fan, you are being put in the position of those benighted people who comb through the city dumps of major Third World cities, from Manila to Sao Paulo to Mumbai to Karachi to Lagos and so on, looking for shards of glass or anything that can possibly be resold to someone else for a bite to eat. The big difference between you and them is that you are paying $11/mo. for a subscription service.
Here is Yellow Flash 2, who finds an interview with Kathleen Kennedy. The interview receives about 1,200 uprates and 8,200 downrates, and those are the dedicated, hardcore fans -- who else would look for this interview?
I'm sure they were all looking for saving graces when George Lucas looked at the sequel trilogy and said "It's no longer my decision to make," or when Mark Hamill looked at what he'd been asked to do in the sequels and said, "a Jedi would never do that." But we're starting to see stuff like what you see when NFL teams go 0-17, with fans attending the games with lunch bags over their heads.
Oh but we're not 100% there.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
OK
When I was younger and in school there were tons of kids who wanted to make movies, wanted to be the next Lucas or Spielberg or Bogdonovich. I don't think that's changed. There are still people in the business who believe. So, not 100%.
My comment was if you want to see Star Wars turned into capitalist dreck take a look at the original Star wars Holiday Special. Lucas sold out. Hammil took the money. Dylan and the Whos music are background jingles for cars and iphones. Capitalism does what it does best. It sucks out all the goodness, every drop, to turn it into garbage to extract cash. To a capitalist nothing is art, it's all commerce.
Indeed.
It seems there's a small core of not-selling-out, the not-100%-there-yet, which allows people to be fans. Before the sale to Disney, viewers had the original trilogy and the prequels as compensation for the commercial crap. Now, apparently, what they've got is Dave Filoni, who occasionally gives fans something worth watching. Dave, however, appears outnumbered and overpowered by Disney executives who view Star Wars as nothing more than a problem in managing capital.
In the Golden Age of Capitalism, and especially in the Sixties, entertainment industry executives readily admitted that they really didn't know what would sell. And so they trusted the artists, which is why the world was exposed to Frank Zappa. Now, entertainment industry executives are completely sure they know what sells, except of course that they don't know. It's easy to imagine that if Zappa had gotten into the music business at a different time in history he wouldn't have been a success at all.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Entertainment industry executives
know exactly what will sell. They control the artist, the production and distribution of media and live performance booking. So it's pretty much take it or leave it. They'll tell us whats good and how much it will cost. Remember Payola?
I don't think we're anywhere near the golden age of capitalism. We'll be close when there is a sort of Easypass for all transactions, linked to all our accounts. Maybe something retinal, where if you view or hear something you didn't directly pay for you will be charged for it, scanners everywhere. Pause to listen to 8 seconds of a moldy Elton John song, that will be 32 cents, plus tax. In a bar where the tv is on? There will be a line on the bill for that, watch it or not.
I am just too cynical and disheartened. The Egyptians have the pyramids, Rome the Colosseum. Our monuments are the pollution and garbage we will leave from turning the Earth into a briefly usable item to give an abstract illusion of wealth for a very few individuals.
I think that -- for the most part --
they're riding on the fumes of past successes. Every successful movie will have sequels until they finally get one that can't recoup costs.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
More sellout
Stranger Things is ending this year, but don’t have a sad cuz it’s going to continue through the cartoon series. Yay! It’s the only way that the characters can be young forever into the next millennium cuz those darn kids grow up so fast don’t they? P-U!
But I’ve enjoyed the show just as I’m enjoying Mandalorion and I’m especially enjoying Picard because they got the gang back together including Data who was schizophrenic for awhile until Lore tried to take over, but then DATA tricked him and rallied to be the only sentient being in the android… but then I’m a sucker for all things Star Trek. It’s the future I thought we were moving towards. Imagine spending those war trillions on making life better for us lowly peons. It seems that all futuristic projects have gone to killing people easier and without the trauma to humans. Drones, robot dawgs that will be armed and robotic tanks and submarines and such.
We should all be royally pissed at how our taxes were never spent on us!
I think my attitude toward the future changed
when I read Holly Sklar's book. And, funny that, it never changed back.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Why is it hard for people to accept that Rey is a “Mary Sue”?
https://www.reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/comments/eiphtk/why_is_it_hard...
Probably for the same reason people won’t accept
Gawd being gender neutral…or is that gender fluid? Or a they/them?
The Keizersgracht Church in Amsterdam often rewrites hymn lyrics
to present “G~d” as (also being) female and/or gender-neutral. (I regularly have the task of converting music and lyrics of songs used in their Sunday service into Braille for a friend of mine so that she can sing in the choir.)
https://www.keizersgrachtkerk.nl/
I enjoyed the
first two. Then I stopped caring.
I’m more about bread than circuses, I guess. YMMV…
Twice bitten, permanently shy.