Barbelith Underground > Comic Books > The Invisible College and the Glass Ceiling

i can't do much more the express the same sentiment as haus, but my overwhelming angsty feeling of disagreement compells me.

lionheart, you've made that point at least once already in this thread. using the personal desire of writers to understand their work -- especially with such completion as you claim -- is the least interesting form of criticism. even if they are chaos magicians. does the phrase "intentional fallacy" ring any bells? whether or not the modernist critics got it wrong, they had a great point when they insisted that you pay attention only to the words on the page, and not the rambling, increasingly disconnected opinion of the guy who happened to spill them there.

"hypersigil criticism" might well have its own interesting spot of theoretical discourse along with the hakim bays and the baurdrillards, but the way you are using it here, repeatedly, is identical with "sexual wish fulfillment." in fact, since a sigil is "intention" + "masterbation" i'd be pretty careful when i'd use this system to defend a work of art. if we are debating whether or not the book is sexist and you're only, fanatically repeated, argument is "the writer wanted to be strong and healthy and fuck a hot redhead" it sort of closes the case, doesn't it? unless, of course, there is more to a work than the writer's intention.

what's much more interesting is to examine what actually happens in the work and the way it happens, ripped as it is away from the will of the author, and to understand how it plays into the various social construction we find ourselves wanting to engage in.

simply going through a work to claim it is or isn't sexist is not a great endpoint to criticism. somewhere in this criticism i believe someone has said or implied that the hidden racism or sexism in the book creates a contradiction to the theme of revolution; that ultimately the book is a panacea to the social class it most appeals to and is not a genuinely "revolutionary" text -- this is something we can sink our teeth into a bit more. it cn be argued that any work produced in a sexist culture will carry a sexist ideology even by accident, therefore its not an interesting argument to simply point it out -- UNLESS one is trying to prove this initial point. the argument about sexism has to have both a cause and an effect -- "the implicit sexism DOES xxx to the book's theme" or else we will all be a bit too diffuse in our ability to grapple with it.

addressing lionheart directly again, i would say that your analysis is doing much more harm than good -- if the best defense we can devise for the structure of the invisibles is that morrison wanted to get laid, and the best intention we can imagine for hypersigils is the same, than the invisibles is a fucking waste of time.