Category: Personal

Iron Man (proposal)

Here’s a brief abstract I wrote for a prospective paper (to be submitted in several places) about Iron Man.

IRON MAN AS SOCIAL/CORPORATE FANTASY

Iron Man stands apart from other comic book superheroes in several striking ways. His superpowers do not come from an alien origin or a spider bite; rather, they are products of postindustrial technology. There are other superheroes whose powers are technologically based, such as Batman; but Iron Man’s cutting-edge engineering could not be further removed from Batman’s artisanal use of technology. It is also noteworthy that where most superhero costumes are disguises used to preserve anonymity and strike terror into foes, Iron Man’s suit is actually the literal source of his powers. In addition, although Tony Stark/Iron Man is a millionaire-turned-crimefighter just like Bruce Wayne/Batman, there’s a sharp contrast between Batman’s vengeful, almost sociopathic, outsider status, and Stark’s highly networked public persona, who stands at the center of corporate and military power.

For all these reasons, Iron Man is a fairly unique figure. Many American superhero stories of the last fifty years can be diagnosed as male-adolescent compensation fantasies: the nerd is empowered to strike back at his tormentors, and achieve the glory of saving the world. But Iron Man puts a strange twist on this scenario. For in his case, the redemption- and power-fantasy is also a fantasy of the military-industrial-technoscience complex, and ultimately of Capital itself. Corporations are recognized as “persons” under the law, and Tony Stark is very much the personification of a corporate entity. Iron Man’s technological triumphs, his ambivalent relations with the US military and intelligence communities, and his vulnerabilities as well (the shrapnel that threatens to enter his heart, and the alcoholism that is his constant temptation), all cross the line that separates individualist psychodramas from allegories of the ways that libidinal forces directly invest the socius (as Deleuze and Guattari would put it).

For this essay, I look beyond the recent Iron Man hit movie to consider a wide range of Iron Man’s incarnations in Marvel comics. I will pay some attention to Stan Lee’s invention of the character as a Cold War figure in the early 1960s, and to the depiction of Tony Stark’s corporate struggles and problems with alcohol in the comics of the 1970s and 1980s; but my main focus will be on Mark Millar’s, Warren Ellis’, and Matt Fraction’s radical reinterpretations of the character in the last several years. My aim is neither to critique the ideology of Iron Man comics, nor to claim that the book is somehow deeply subversive; but rather to use this comic book series in order to develop some ideas about how social fantasy works in our era of neoliberal globalized capitalism and of post-Cold War, post-9/11 paranoia and surveillance.

Whitehead’s God

It took me much longer than I had hoped, but I have finally finished a first draft of my chapter on Whitehead’s notion of God. It’s longer than it should be, and a bit all over the place (digressive) — and yet touches too briefly on a number of things that it would be good to flesh out in greater detail. And I didn’t quite manage to explain how and why Whitehead’s God might be preferable even to Spinoza’s God (its only competitor) for the role of the philosophers’ God, or the atheists’ God. In any case, the God I discern in Whitehead is (as far as I can tell) rather different from the one found in process theology.

For what it’s worth, the article is here (pdf).

Deleuze’s Aesthetics

I have been in Chicago the last few days, attending the annual meeting of SPEP (The Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy). I gave a paper this afternoon as part of a panel on “Deleuze’s Aesthetics.” The talk will probably never be published as an article, since it is basically a patchwork, cobbled together from various passages taken from several chapters of my in-progress book on Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze. But for what it’s worth, I am posting it here (pdf).

Copyright matters.

I have found myself recently wondering about the copyright terms for academic publications. Whenever an article of mine has been accepted for publication either in a journal, or in a book of essays by various authors, I have to sign a contract, or perhaps just an agreement on the assignment of copyright (I am a bit hazy on the legal distinctions here, which is one of the problems). I used to just sign these things without really paying attention to what they said — since “publish or perish” was the overriding concern. But recently, I have started to pay attention to such things. Partly because, having tenure, I don’t really need to worry about the “perish” possibility. And partly because, thanks to the Net, I can get my work out there where people can read it anyway — it is no longer the case that, without official publication, what I wrote would just languish on my hard drive.

So I have started reading the copyright agreements that I am expected to sign — and I have been appalled by the terms. For instance: I received such a form just this week, from a publisher that I will only call “C”. The text of the agreement stated (among other things):

The Contributor hereby grants the Publishers during the legal term of the copyright the exclusive right and license to produce, publish, and perform his/her contribution to the Work or any abridgement or portion of it in all editions, languages, formats including film, microphotography, photocopying, electronic medium and any other form of transmission or reproduction throughout the world.

“Exclusive rights”: this means that I cannot publish or distribute the article in any other form than those the publisher approves. This includes the “electronic medium,” i.e. I cannot publish the article on my website without their explicit permission. I find this unacceptable. They are asking me to give up all control over my own work.

Now, the article that I gave publisher “C” is actually a part of my own book in progress, which I am currently trying to finish, and which hopefully will itself be published no more than six months after publisher “C”s anthology. However, the agreement “C” wants me to sign explicitly states:

The Contributor is quite free to reprint their contribution in a collection of their own work, provided that due acknowledgement is made to its first appearance and provided that its publication does not take place within a period of five years of its first publication.

In other words, I cannot publish my own book until five years after the anthology appears — which pretty much delays the publication of my own book from 2009 to 2013 or so.

Needless to say, I am refusing to sign the contract with publisher “C” unless the change the terms, and explicitly give me permission to a)make the article available on my own website, and b)publish the book of which the article is a fragment as soon as I can, rather than having to wait five years.

I am waiting to hear back from publisher “C”. If they don’t agree to my requests, I will simply remove my article from the collection of essays.

It’s been a busy week. I also received, this week, a similar contract or agreement from publisher “P”, regarding an article that is supposed to appear next year in one of their journals. This article, at least is stand-alone; it is not part of any of my books in progress. So, if I were to withdraw my text from them, it wouldn’t be “officially” published anywhere else. The issue about republication in a book I am currently writing doesn’t come up in this case. But still, I was taken aback by the language their agreement used:

You assign to us with full title guarantee all rights of copyright and related rights in your Article. So that there is no doubt, this assignment includes the assignment of the right to publish the Article in all forms, including electronic and digital forms, for the full legal term of the copyright and any extension or renewals. Electronic form shall include, but not be limited to, microfiche, CD-ROM and in a form accessible via on-line electronic networks. You shall retain the right to use the substance of the above work in future works, including lectures, press releases and reviews, provided that you acknowledge its prior publication in the journal.

The over-the-top language about inclduing electronic forms worries me a bit. Nonetheless, in this case, I signed. The reason was, that the language doesn’t use the word “exclusive,” as the contract from publisher “C” did. I am assuming, therefore, that what I am assigning to publisher “P” is non-exclusive rights to publish the article in all forms, etc. “Non-exclusive” means that I am not giving the rights only or exclusively to them. Which means that I can retain for myself the right to publish the article on my own website, for instance.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, so I may be mistaken in my interpretation of this contract. Maybe I oughtn’t to have signed the agreement from publisher “P” either. However, just to be sure of retaining my rights, I am making the article available here, several months prior to journal publication. Hopefully some people will find it of interest. It is basically a statement of why I so strongly dislike my 1993 book The Cinematic Body, even though it appears to be the work upon which my academic reputation, such as it is, is largely based. At this point, I would like to forget about The Cinematic Body altogether. Really, folks, I have written a lot of articles and books since then, nearly all of which I think are much better…

Anyway, my dealing with these copyright agreements has brought home to me how massively fucked up the whole publication and copyright system is in academic writing. (Of course, the same goes for all other sorts of writing, and of production of works in other media as well — what is of interest here is just the particular way in which it all works out in academic writing). And it demonstrates, yet again, that copyright does not generally benefit the author/producer; it has mostly to do with corporate profits and corporate arrangements. (Though the profits for academic writing are so meager that the whole set-up seems especially pathetic here. I don’t make my living from royalties on publications anyway; but rather, from the academic prestige that I am able to acquire on the basis of the non-financial prestige of those publications). In particular, it’s pathetic that acdemics in the “humanities” don’t have the sort of network for distributing their research online in the way that scientists and certain groups of social scientists do. Putting up pdfs on my own website will have to suffice for now.