76 Ibid., 218.
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about bringing forth “the new people and earth in the future.” The
first passage is explicitly in the context of discussing Heidegger: “He got the wrong people…the race summoned forth by art or philosophy
is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race…”77 The
second passage reads: “The artist or the philosopher is quite incapable of creating a people, each can only summon it with all his strength.
A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot
be concerned with art or philosophy. But books of philosophy and
works of art also contain their sum of unimaginable sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people.”78 Later, when he discusses the
twists and turns of language employed by the writer to wrest percepts
from perceptions and sensation from opinion, Deleuze hopes that
this attempt to make language vibrate is being made “in view…of
that still-missing people.”79
In a passage on conceptual personae and aesthetic figures,
Deleuze admits that, “the two entities do… often pass into each other,”
because sometimes the “plane of composition of art and the plane of
immanence of philosophy can slip into each other.”80 As examples he
cites how the literary figure of Don Juan becomes a conceptual persona for Kierkegaard, and how the Zarathustra figure that was already a
mythical-religious figure (of the Persians) and a musical-theatrical
figure for Mozart (Sarastro in The Magic Flute), is transformed into a conceptual persona by Nietzsche, only to once again become a great
musical figure in the composition of Richard Strauss.81
Furthermore, Deleuze uses a definitively aesthetic term, actual y
the definitive term of aesthetic judgment, namely “taste”, to describe the faculty of co-adaptation that unifies the three basic functions
of philosophy: Reason’s laying out of the plane, the Imagination
of conceptual personae, and the manner in which Understanding
77 Ibid., 109. My emphasis.
78 Ibid., 110. My emphasis.
79 Ibid., 176.
80 Ibid., 66.
81 Ibid.
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grasps Chaos through the creation of concepts.82 This is to subsume
reason and rational understanding under the imaginative faculty
that cannot properly be distinguished from taste. Deleuze explicitly
says: “Taste is this power, this being-potential of the concept: it is certainly not for ‘rational or reasonable’ reasons that a particular
concept is created…”83
In a later passage Deleuze cal s into question the endowment of
concepts “with the prestige of reason” and the association of aesthetic figures with “the night of the irrational and its symbols” and the
“spiritual life”, remarking that “disturbing affinities appear” between them that elude such a clear cut distinction.84 So again we see that
conceptual personae are not on a level with the diagrammatic features
of the plane or the intensive features of concepts, but as they emerge out of a creative act of aesthetic judgment they are determinative of these features at a point when the latter are still incohate – determinative in the sense of endowing them with their aesthetic coherence.
Deleuze himself says of this type of aesthetic judgment: “It is as
in painting: there is a taste according to which even monsters and
dwarves must be well made… that their irregular contours are in
keeping with a skin texture or with a background of the earth as
germinal substance with which they seem to fit.”85 If there were
any doubt, shortly thereafter he repeats: “The same goes for the
taste for concepts.”86 Deleuze further elaborates on the aesthetic
character of the criteria of judgment in Philosophy when he claims
that a philosophical work should not be rejected as “false” (as it is by scholastics or analysts) but only as uninteresting or unremarkable
and therefore unimportant.87 Flimsy concepts and those that are too
rigidly reduced to a framework are both uninteresting.88
82 Ibid., 77.
83 Ibid., 78.
84 Ibid., 91.
85 Ibid., 78.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., 82-83.
88 Ibid., 83.
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Taken on his own terms, there is real y no ground on which
Deleuze can maintain that the creation of concepts involves
a “specifical y philosophical taste” as opposed to aesthetic
judgment. He is mistaken to conclude that profoundly disturbing
“correspondences [between aesthetic figures and conceptual
personae] do not rule out there being a boundary, however difficult
it is to make out.”89 There is no boundary.
89 Ibid., 91.
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GOTHAM GUARDIAN
Among the neo-pagan American Pantheon of the Justice
League, Batman has always had a unique place. He hails
neither from a crystalline alien planet of supermen, nor
from an equal y exotic hidden island utopia. He certainly
was not raised in Kansas, like Clark Kent, and he does not work in
the hallowed hal s of Washington, like Diana Prince. Bruce Wayne
is a native son of the grittiest, most powerful and most corrupt city-
state on Earth, Gotham – the archetypal image of New York City, a modern Babylon or Rome. He was not endowed by birth with the
magical powers of a cryptic super-race that render him virtual y
invulnerable. His extraordinary abilities are born of long hard
training and self-discipline, and many confrontations with an all too
palpable mortality. Final y, Batman is not a star-spangled, heaven-
sent Apollonian emissary of Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
He is of one cloth with the benighted world in the shadows of which
he stealthily works. His work often pits him against the authorities
as an elusive bane of those who have proclaimed themselves officers
of Law and Order. The atmosphere of his world is that of our own
– a milieu where the difference between organized crime and legal
order is rarely clear, so that even the noblest man must resort to
mass deception and terrorism in his thankless task of protecting the
decent.
Like any tale that taps into symbols and themes of archetypal
power and significance, the Batman mythos has developed a life
of its own. In my view, however, its many iterations culminated in
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the masterpiece trilogy of Christopher Nolan. During my doctoral
studies a Marxist colleague of mine who dressed up as Bane for
Halloween claimed that Nolan’s “Batman is a fascist.” I immediately
understood what he meant and replied that he was paying a great
compliment to fascism. Perhaps he will think otherwise of Ben
Affleck’s rendition of Batman, given that the actor’s stance on Islam
is closer to Bane’s than to that of the Dark Knight. The release of
Dawn of Justice is an opportunity for those of us who have protested that “Ben Affleck is not our Batman” to reflect on the ethos of an
übermensch willing to be hated because he is something more than
a hero.
When Bruce Wayne, still in his Chinese prison cel , first hears
of the League of Shadows from Ducard and dismissively identifies
them as vigilantes, Ducard replies: “No, no. A vigilante is a man lost in his quest for gratification. He can be destroyed or locked up. But
if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself
to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely.” Later, during the final test in Bruce’s training, Ducard says: “You have to become a terrible thought. A wraith. You have to become an idea! ” What Nolan is referring to here is “Justice” – with a capital J – as a Platonic ideal or idea (Greek eidos) above or beyond the plane of transient worldly manifestations.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman films sketch out the broad contours
of a multi-tiered organized crime syndicate that has effectively
become a de-facto world government. At the lowest level are old-time mafia bosses like Carmine Falcone and Salvatore Moroni and a
variety of new wave gang leaders and drug dealers who each manage
their own territories and are grouped in some cases according
to race or ethnicity. Lacking any real economic expertise, the first
tier of organized criminals must turn to experts in high finance in
order to manage their collective investments. Mr. Lau of Hong Kong
represents this financier class, and it is significant that he is, in turn, trying to invest in Wayne Enterprises on their behalf. If a CEO like
Earl had still been running Wayne Enterprises, Lau’s business deal
with the corporation would probably have gone through. While
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Earl was at the helm of Wayne Enterprises he had departed radical y
from Thomas Wayne’s philanthropic vision for the corporation by
becoming involved in heavy arms manufacture, as represented by
the microwave emitter chemical agent dispersal unit designed for
desert warfare. At the same time, Earl tried to take the company
public so as to raise capital from big investors in the arms industry.
Bruce ultimately saves his family business from taking this course,
but only after Nolan has given us an idea of the second tier of
organized crime: the military-industrial corporation, who views the first tier of organized criminals as legitimate ‘no questions asked’
investors.
These first two tiers consist of weak-minded people who lack
a fearless commitment to principles that they would not violate at
any cost. Their ultimate aim is lining their wallets. Most organized
criminals hatch their plots to gain something, but this also means
that they live in fear of all they have to lose. Both the gangsters and the military-industrial corporatists are glorified thieves. Consequently,
more disciplined and intelligent men with well-considered plans
and long-term projects find them easy to manipulate. Among
this third class of organized criminals are experts in mind control
and psychological warfare, such as Dr. Crane (Scarecrow) and his
handler Henri Ducard, as well as Ras Al Ghul’s daughter, the disciple
who was her protector, Bane, and the Islamists that he recruits as his
‘liberation army.’
Crane, an unethical scientist, manipulates the drug dealing
activities of the first level of criminals in order to carry out nefarious psychological experiments. Crane is, in turn, Ducard’s pawn.
Ducard controls at least part of the international trafficking that
brings various illicit substances from Asia to Gotham. Meanwhile,
the infrastructure of Gotham has been so badly corrupted that
Ducard’s men can infiltrate every level of it, to the point of stealthily acquiring classified special weapons designed and manufactured
by the military-industrial corporatists. The League of Shadows
is not merely after profit. In fact, Bane’s rabble-rousing leadership
of the Occupy Wall Street movement in The Dark Knight Rises
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demonstrates the essential y anti-Capitalist character of the cult.
Although it skillful y makes use of mobsters, militarist corporatists, and unethical scientists and technocrats, it is ultimately a cult of
‘true believers’ who reject materialism and creature comforts. That is also what lies behind its thinly veiled association with radical Islam.
This means that even these Assassins can be manipulated. Only The
Joker cannot be.
The Joker is not after money, or for that matter any other
logical y comprehensible advantage or material y definable gain.
In The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan shows us this through
both Alfred’s anecdote about the bandit he chased in the forests of
Burma and The Joker’s own dramatic decision to burn his half of the
laundered money. The former clearly foreshadows the latter. Alfred
explains to Bruce that Batman hammered the underworld “to the
point of desperation, and in their desperation they turned to a man
they didn’t ful y understand.” Bruce then echoes what Ducard said
about criminals in Batman Begins, namely that: “Criminals aren’t complicated.” Bruce thinks that they are all after something and
they just need to figure out what The Joker wants. Alfred disagrees:
“With respect Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man you don’t ful y understand either.” He then tel s the story about the Bandit. Bruce
asks Alfred why the Bandit would have stolen the stones just to
throw them away. Alfred replies: “Wel , because he thought it was
good sport, because some men [Nolan focuses the camera on The
Joker’s face on TV] aren’t looking for anything logical like money.
They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some
men just want to watch the world burn.” Later, when in the predawn
hours Bruce, still half dressed as Batman, is sitting by the window of his apartment overlooking Gotham and contemplating whether he
is responsible for Rachel’s death, he asks Alfred: “That bandit, in the forest in Burma, did you catch him?” Alfred replies “Yes.” Bruce asks
“How?” Alfred’s ominous response once again references fire: “We
burned the forest down.”
The two references to the Bandit who wanted to watch the
world burn and who forces his pursuers to burn a forest down to
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apprehend him, frame the scene where The Joker sets fire to the
money he’s extorted from the mobsters and gangsters that he has
turned into his playthings. As he burns the mountain of cash The
Joker says to one of the gangsters: “All you care about is money, this town deserves a better class of criminal. I’m gonna give it to them.
Tell your men they work for me now. This is my city.” The gangster retorts that his men “won’t work for a freak”, whereupon The Joker delivers one of his most revealing lines in The Dark Knight: “Why don’t we cut you up and feed you to your pooches. Then we’ll find
out how loyal everybody real y is. It’s not about money, it’s about sending a message: EVERYTHING BURNS! ”
The word “mob” has a dual meaning in Nolan’s Batman films. It
is not only a reference to the organized crime syndicate that rules
Gotham, but also to the masses who allow it to do so. As The Joker
recognizes, the people of Gotham are utterly hypocritical. Even
though they want law enforcement to hunt
down Batman as an
outlaw vigilante, and are ready to put him in prison once he turns
himself in, they are happy to use him when they real y need him.
Most of them view him as just as freakish and “crazy” as The Joker, and moreover as the catalyst for the “craziness” that has come over
Gotham. They share the mob’s wish to just go back to the way things
were in the old days. Harvey Dent’s impassioned plea at the press
conference, to the effect that while things are indeed “worse than
ever” it is “always darkest just before the dawn” has no effect on
them. They do not appreciate him reminding them that although the
Batman is an outlaw, the people of Gotham, who have so far been
happy to let Batman clean up their streets, are real y demanding that
he turn himself in because they are scared of a terrorist madman.
The Joker’s “social experiment” with the two ferries rigged with
explosives is an attempt to demonstrate the validity of his thesis that
“when the chips are down, these uh, these ‘civilized’ people, they’l eat each other. ” Although this appears to fail, The Joker still makes his point through his “ace in the hole.” Both Gordon and Batman
agree that The Joker was right to think that if the people of Gotham
were to find out what he had turned Harvey into, their spirit would
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break and they would give up all hope in the good. The only way
they can avert this outcome is to cover up the truth that the public
cannot handle. This shows that even Harvey Dent’s criticism of
Democracy is too weak. Recall the exchange between Bruce, his
Russian ballerina date, Rachel, and Harvey in a restaurant towards
the beginning of The Dark Knight:
Natascha (prima Russian ballerina): How could you want to
raise children in a city like this.
Bruce: Wel , I was raised here, I turned out ok.
Dent: Is Wayne Manor even in the city limits.
Bruce: The pallisades, sure. You know, as our new DA you might
want to figure out, uh, where your jurisdiction ends.
Natascha: I’m talking about the kind of city that idolizes a
masked vigilante.
Dent: Gotham city is proud of an ordinary citizen standing up
for what’s right.
Natascha: Gotham needs heroes like you, elected officials, not a
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