Month: July 2021

Nostalgia and the metastasis of regret in Masters of the Universe: Revelation

/ Simon
Masters of the Universe: Revelation Debuts Killer New Poster
(Ok you had to know there was a non-zero chance I’d do this.)

Here be spoilers if you care about that sort of thing.

I was honestly and pleasantly surprised by Masters of the Universe: Revelation. I didn’t have high expectations for a He-Man cartoon run by Kevin Smith. In general I’m not a huge fan of Smith. I quite liked Dogma but haven’t had anything positive to say about his work in the 22 years (oh god it’s been 22 years since Dogma) since. I suppose his autobiographical stand-up routine was alright.

And the truth is that this cartoon series contains some of the hallmarks of Smith’s worse tendencies. The script is prurient. It assaults viewers with atrocious accumulations of arbitrary alliteration. What isn’t composed in this strangely (and unpleasantly) poetic recall of 1980s cartoon writing is either straight up call-backs to the cartoon (protective bubble) or just clangs.

The voice actors do their best. Mark Hamill is, as always, an absolute delight and casting him as Skeletor was the right call. Sarah Michelle Gellar also accomplishes the astounding feat of elevating Teela above the clunky script and injecting actual pathos into her portrayal. Her pairing with Leena Headley as the principals in the show was another strong choice, as Headley has been on a roll of moving from strength to strength for years, and Evil-Lyn conjures so many of the morally dubious schemers that have become her bread and butter. However good voice acting alone is not enough to elevate a script as truly and fundamentally atrocious as those in the five episodes Netflix released. But, despite the acutely painful dialog and over-abundant call-backs to a 40 year-old toy commerial, Smith’s Masters of the Universe series actually accomplishes quite a lot, and manages to utilize its own weaknesses to create something actually worth watching.

Now I should note that I am not talking exclusively about the way this series sidelines He-Man in favour of concentrating on Teela and Evil-Lyn. Of course this, alone, is what has led to the coordinated campaign of typical online CHUDS to review-bomb the show. As fun as it is to point and laugh at people like Jeremy Hambly exclaiming that the show is, “a WORSE betrayal than The Last Jedi,” the attempt by the show to admit that Teela was poorly treated as a character in the original cartoon wouldn’t, in and of itself, be particularly remarkable. After all, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power already dug into what would happen if one were to invert many of the gendered assumptions of these stories. It would hardly be new ground. But instead, remarkably by keeping the story within the continuity (such as it is) of the original Masters of the Universe cartoon, Smith has managed to dig into a heartfelt and remarkable dissection of nostalgia and how it connects to regret.

Magic and childhood

The first episode of Masters of the Universe: Revelation opens the series as Skeletor takes advantage of a court ceremony to commemorate Teela’s promotion to the to the position of Man-at-Arms to raid Castle Grayskull. Using disguise and decoy he is able to slip through the outer defenses and then uses superior numbers to overwhelm the sorceress and achieve access to a hidden inner sanctum.

However an alarm is raised and the forces of the Eternian monarchy rally to the castle. Once inside things proceed largely like a particularly well-animated episode of the older show right until the moment that, during the fight with Skeletor in the inner sanctum, Sleketor brutally murders He-Man’s ally Moss Man. This understandably upsets He-Man, who until then seems to live in the sort of magical child’s world where the people always jump off the floating tank before it explodes and nobody ever dies.

So he runs Skeletor through with his sword, pinning him to the obelisk in the center of the sanctum. Skeletor’s last words are to congratulate him on finally using his sword as it was intended – as a key to said obelisk – and it opens revealing an orb containing all the magic in the universe. However the orb explodes and the only thing that prevents the immediate destruction of the universe is He-Man channeling the power through his sword. This act splits the sword into two constituent blades and kills He-Man. The swords vanish, returning to Subternia and Preternia – which the show reveals are afterlives analogous to heaven and hell, and are the wellsprings of magic.

Randor is so distraught over the death of his son that he banishes Man-At-Arms from court and orders him executed if he ever does man-at-arms type things again. This show is generally not kind to monarchy, which is refreshing in a fantasy landscape that so often wants to treat royals as somehow redeemable. Teela, grieving the death of her friend and ally and suddenly discovering that said friend deceived her for their whole lives together, resigns from the Eternian court and takes up work as a mercenary.

There is a time-jump and after that we discover that magic is dying in Eternia. Without the orb and the sword all the magic is returning to its sources in the afterlives. And this is killing Eternia. What’s more, should Eternia die, it will herald the extinction of every world in the universe. Eternia, the oldest planet, is critical to universal wellbeing and Eternia cannot survive without magic.

Now it’s important to note how magic is mapped onto childhood by the series. The sorceress ages dramatically when the magic fades and aside from her the most magical creatures, notably Orko, Cringer / Battle Cat and Adam / He-Man are all the most childish (or at least child-like) characters in the show. When Adam is encountered in Preternia he remains in his “young prince” form – something which is quite textually a choice he made and one that amuses the small cadre of heroes who also occupy this Elysium. And the Smith rendering of Adam vs He-Man makes Adam look all the more like a child with the over-sized stature that He-Man has even compared to the other hulks in this muscle-bound show. Orko and Cringer are the most unchanged characters in this new version. And, while we see little of the cat, it becomes readily clear that the loss of magic from the world is killing Orko far quicker than anyone else. He cannot live without magic. The moment that magic is banished from the world is also one that is inaugurated by the introduction of death with the killing of Moss Man, of Skeletor and the heroic sacrifice of He-Man. This awareness of mortality entering into Eternia, the effective end of eternity, also indicates a crossing of a threshold from childhood into maturity. This show is not the first one to forge these bonds between death, magic and the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Famously Hogfather by Terry Pratchett was built entirely on the premise of a child-place being one where death could not go, and of the belief of children being a particularly potent magic.

Perhaps this is where the sense of betrayal from childish Jeremys arises more than even their unexamined misogyny. Smith’s He-Man understands that you have to grow up. Staying a child forever is stunting. We see this in a coarse fashion through Orko’s arc in which he comes to terms with his sense that he’s failed to fulfil the expectations his parents put on him. We see it with more nuance in Teela’s arc, in which she discovers that living in the shadow of He-Man has limited her from achieving all that she otherwise could. Teela starts the show being given the mantle of adulthood but she never really assumes it. A monarch asks her to, as her first act, remove her own father. (How very Oedipal.) And she refuses this call and instead goes galavanting off to make her own way in the world. But this isn’t maturity; rather maturity arises when she’s forced to confront that people who she loved dearly and who loved her hid parts of themselves from her. It comes from her recognition of her own capacity for growth and her ability to forge an identity not built around following in her father’s footsteps or running after He-Man but rather of doing her own things in her own way.

Modernity and techno-cults

One of the odder insertions into this show is Triklops and his technocult. In Skeletor’s absence Triclops has taken control of Snake Mountain and staffed it with only the most cybernetic members of the former cadre (such as Lockjaw). He’s established a cult devoted to the Motherboard and is feeding dronification potions to apparently willing supplicants who are thus transformed into technological monstrosities. Triklops is trying to destroy any remnants of magic that remain. He hates magic because he believes Skeletor’s reliance on magic is the reason for their repeated failures in the past. This is largely to serve as a foil to Teela who also detests magic at this point in the story for what it did to her and the people she cares about. So we get this sense that if magic is tied to childhood then technology, cold and practical but unable to nourish, is bonded to adulthood and the putting away of childish things.

Of course this loss of magic is also killing the world. And so we see this delicate balance that Smith attempts to pull off between knowing the magical world of kings and heroes is a childish fantasy to grow beyond but also recognizing that the alienated modern sense of adulthood is sterile and ultimately deadening. Triklops can’t be allowed to win because his focus on technology is literally toxic; he is hastening the end of the world with his acts. And this is before the show gets all cosmological.

Subternia and Preternia

The afterlife depicted in this show is wild. This is, in part, because of how sparsely populated it is. Subternia is really just where Scare Glow hangs out alone despite characters repeatedly calling it “hell” and while Preternia gets called “heaven” on multiple occasions it is, as I alluded above, far much more akin to Elysium: a reward where select heroes, blessed with immortality, engage in athletic feats that would have been remarkably legible to Pindar. Rather than punishment and reward, Subternia and Preternia represent fear and happiness respectively. The grinning and contesting heroes of Preternia want for nothing while Scare Glow feeds on the fear of the unlucky who stumble into his chthonic domain.

But there’s a third emotion that lurks in both of these afterlives and it’s the thing that ultimately binds all this strangeness together: regret.

Regret is, in fact, the thread that ties everyone together in this show. Teela regrets so much. She regrets the secrets kept from her and she regrets the fight she had with her father. She regrets ever getting mixed up with He-Man in the first place and she regrets that he’s gone. Man-At-Arms is regretful too, regretting his failure to protect Adam and his banishment. Orko regrets failing his parents. Evil-Lyn regrets living in Skeletor’s shadow and Triklops regrets this too, though his regret manifests differently. After Adam is encountered in Preternia he regrets his enjoyment of his elysian reward and chooses to follow Teela back to Eternia even with the repeated warning that he will not be granted entry to the garden a second time. And this is where we finally find the meat of the theme here: Smith takes all the trappings of nostalgia – a deliberately anachronistic script, a childish view of life and death, and a yearning for an inaccessible past – and he demonstrates how it is all rooted in regret.

Nostalgia as a Haunting

Regret is one of the most hauntological emotions. It conjures a state of searching for an absent agent in that you are looking back at the choices you made and considering what you might have done differently. Of course the past is inaccessible to us. There is no returning to childhood. We can allow the strata of our childhood development to rupture to the surface but this is no more the childhood we had than Mount Everest is the floor of the ocean.

Nostalgia is what happens when we allow regret to boil over into a sickness. The nostalgic is like Orko wasting away in his bed for lack of magic to sustain him. This nostalgia drives Triklops to his world-destroying actions. After all, “A Nihilist is the man who says of the world as it is, that it ought not to exist, and of the world as it ought to be, that it does not exist.”1 Triklops’s technocultic nihilism is thus rendered intelligible by the desire to reconcile the world as it is with the world he believes ought to be. And bringing about this world fundamentally requires the destruction of the world that is. These characters regret that they made this choice or that in the past. They regret that they served Skeletor or that they allowed Adam to deceive them. They yearn to return to the simple world of magic but they know they can’t. A nostalgic cannot possibly recover what is lost. There are only two courses out of the sickness of nostalgia: to lean into their nihilism and obliterate themselves or their world or to let go of their regret and move forward into the future.

Honestly it should come as no surprise that the most nostalgic of fans felt betrayed in a fundamental way by Smith’s interpretation of this material. They were promised a return to childhood and the fulfillment of their nostalgic urge. But as nostalgia is rooted in regret for the irretrievable this would never be possible. As much as the toxic fans of the world would like to return to a kind of palingenetic childhood they never will. Even if their childhood passions rupture forth into the present in their spasmodic reactions to a cartoon, they are still unable to retrieve their childhood. This is why they so often believe that reimaginings of childhood media are destroying their childhood – these reiterations put the fan into direct contact with the irretrievable nature of his own past. He reaches for his childhood but it slips through his fingers like the Power Sword falling from Adam’s grasp in the fifth episode.

Smith leaves off the five-episode run with a warning. The Eternal Return lurks over the proceedings and raises the risk that, even in attempts to move to the future, we might find ourselves falling into atavistic patterns. Evil-Lyn serves an excellent foil for Teela in this. Teela still hasn’t fully moved into her future at the end of episode five. The sorceress has already told her that she is the one who has to wield the Power Sword but instead she gives it back to Adam. And by opening the door to the return of old patterns, Skeletor is able to re-emerge too, and drag Evil-Lyn away from her own confrontation with the limiting impact of her nostalgic affect. The victory of nostalgia is the victory of Skeletor. He can only be vanquished by moving forward into an uncertain future. We are, of course, not at the end of the first season. We have seen only the first act of this story. However in establishing both that these characters all feel nostalgia and that nostalgia is harmful to their development and growth, Smith has established a clear and explicit thematic message that belies the childishness of the premise. In 2019, Smith said, “Used to be happy, now I’m vegan.” But, of course, he is also still alive and able to grow because of his lifestyle changes – changes necessitated by a heart attack that could have killed him.

It seems as if this brush with death has provided Smith with the impetus not just to change his diet but to re-examine his life-long connection to childhood media. It’s not enough to be Silent Bob larping Batman in a mall anymore. The past may come around again in some form or another but when it does, it is something that must be resisted. Preternia is an empty heaven. Growth occurs in Subternia, where we confront fear and the specter of death. Death always lurks in the future but clinging to the past just draws it closer via sickness. We must imagine a Prince Adam who must not be He-Man any longer. We must imagine a Teela who has grown beyond the soft sisterly figure of the 80s cartoon or the sassy girlfriend of the 2002 revival, a Teela who has a life and regrets of her own but the will to rise above those regrets. We have to consider the idea that the past is gone and we must grow and change into the future.

1: Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 585

“Cat Person” in the uncanny valley

/ Simon / 1 Comment

I swear I read “Cat Person” when it first came out although I found it so tedious an affair that everything about it is a void in my mind. However I’ve been open about how the period of 2016-18 was not the best for my mental health and it’s possible my inability to remember a single detail of the story was less about the craft of it and more about my own depression. With that in mind, when this story became the focal point of the Twitter discourse cycle, I decided to re-read it.

And in less than a minute I encountered this absolute clunker of a paragraph:

After the movie, he came back to her. “Concession-stand girl, give me your phone number,” he said, and, surprising herself, she did.

It doesn’t get better. Margot is an incredibly tedious subject. Her internal monolog is a mixture of vaguely bourgeois relationship anxiety and badly timed Whedonesque quippery. Of course it’s hard to generate much sympathy for a protagonist when her thoughts are narrated like this, “Looking at him like that, so awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled. ” It’s not even the casual disgust at fat bodies that bothers me as much as how pedestrian this psychodrama is. Oh no. The protagonist is feeling regret at the sex she’s about to have because the man is a bit fat. Having re-read “Cat Person” in the cold light of 2021 reiterates my initial view of it. That it’s a dull story about two very dull people whose dull tryst leads to a dull revelation about pain and misogyny that undercuts itself at every turn by how little agency it assigns its protagonist.

But then someone came forward and said she was the subject and it set off a discourse cycle about authors using the people they know in their writing. Two principal camps emerged: 1) that this is just how writers go about building out their worlds and 2) that this was an intrusion into the privacy of a person even if it was lamp-shaded with a fiction.

One commentator from the second camp even went so far as to describe it as a theft, that the author of “Cat Person” had stolen a bit of this woman’s life to use as the basis for her story. In this I must be a yes-sayer. This is a theft. And that’s fine. Because artists should be criminals and outlaws. The problem here is not that Kristen Roupenian is a thief of another’s life. The problem is that she’s not a particularly talented thief and what she has created is not Alexis Nowicki but is rather a weak simulacrum imbued with just enough of the latter’s personality to make it recognizable while still being little more than a paper doll to dress up in the clothes of her attempt to explore the frustrations of dating.

Let’s be honest, authors talk about people as part of their art. I’m talking about Roupenian and Nowicki directly in this article because, as a critic, I don’t have the luxury of putting a fictive screen in front of my subject but, consciously or not, an author will draw from their experience of the mannerisms, cadences and motivations of the people around them in the construction of a fictional character. We might like to imagine the author alone in an off-grid shed, entirely disconnected from the world, and giving birth to their creations like they are Zeus birthing Athena but this is hardly the case.

The Creative Process

Art is created in a social field and an artist is first and foremost someone communicating within that social field. Characters do not arise ex-nihilo but rather through a process of creative destruction wherein an author’s sense of a subject is disassembled and used as the ground from which their creative objects arise. An artist, like it or not, has something to say about the world and if they’re talking about people that implies they have something to say about real, material, people.

But bad art doesn’t necessarily accomplish this well. And this, I think, is where the discomfort so many people feel with “Cat Person” arises. Margot is hardly a person. She’s a hollow shell of a person – mannerisms, jobs, ages and easily identified quirks but there’s nothing there beyond this. Her terribly banal inner monolog is almost precisely the same “professor has a mid-life crisis and dates his student” sort of story that detractors of “lit-fic” like to point to about What Is Wrong With The Genre and it’s not made better by having the point of view inverted to the student rather than the older man. The character is dragged through her own story by Robert and Tamara. Her monolog is an endless litany of banal and common-place complaints. Regrets over mistakes, things not said, a kind of Freudian reaction to dating and life that is buried behind the metaphoric screen memory of neo-passéist realism. When that inane internality is stripped away from the character, what we’re left with is just what you could find out about anybody through a facebook crawl: brands liked, photos of pets, nights at specific bars. This story wants you to know these are New York daters but the setting is flat. What is created isn’t a living breathing city, it isn’t even a flat sound-stage reproduction. It’s empty boxes with names attached.

When you close your eyes and imagine the theatre Margot works at, all that’s summoned to mind is a pack of twizzlers and a pudgy man. The Seven-Eleven is just what could be said about it anywhere: a harsh white-yellow light inside, a garish orange and green sign without. Brand markers stand in for any viceral sense of place.

With this flat and empty prose it’s not surprising that Nowicki and her friends are unnerved. I think I’d be equally unnerved to find out that somebody was using a photograph of my head to construct amateurish paper dolls. But the problem isn’t, in fact, that the Roupenian used Nowicki’s life in her work but rather that she did so with such ham-fisted disregard for the person she was observing. She created a world made entirely of flat surfaces and the flattest surface of all is Margot’s affect. Who wants to look at that and see themselves?

Art is theft. And art isn’t nice. Authors hardly have a choice but to use the people around them as grist for the creative mill; even if the author wants to lie to themself and say that they create like Zeus created Athena, they are forgetting that Zeus only gave birth in this startling way because he swallowed Metis whole. Metis, the Titaness who stands for creative ingenuity was a person taken in by Zeus in the process of his creation, and through the deconstruction of Metis, Athena was born. Fictive creation depends on the materiality of the world for it to be produced. There will always be a violence to art, a destructive one. The challenge is to make it loving.

And the absence of love is, I think, where the failure of “Cat Person” arises most clearly. There’s no sense in the story that Margot is an object of love. “Whore,” Robert calls her at the end. And while it is made painfully evident that Robert has no idea who Margot is, there’s no self-love in Margot to balance against the ways Robert objectifies her. Inside and out, Margot remains not much more than an object, navigated by a seemingly disinterested author through empty rooms full of brand markers and empty thoughts full of anxiety and ennui. Effort is made to fully realize the revulsion Robert conjures but no effort is made to elevate Margot beyond the flat affect with which Robert views her.

I think the discourse that surrounds this story and its camps is in part a failure of criticism. “Cat Person” is not a good short story. It’s tedious and passé. It attempts to dig at misogyny but does so with all the grace of a decade-old “manspreading” article. It is a story so revulsed by materiality that the meat of the story lies entirely within the heart of the protagonist, unfortunately it is a story whose protagonist has a heart as real as a child’s paper cut-out of the same. To point to this and say, “see! Thief!” is almost embarrassing because it is such a poor grade of theft. Artists who think creation of character is possible without reference to real people lack self-examination on the matter. Readers who think this are naïve at best. Even Athena was born from an artist’s deconstruction of another. Zeus destroyed Metis to create Athena. Artists must be thieves. There is no real choice in that. But this is neither an indication of good or bad art. And ultimately, when the discourse and the camps are stripped away, what we are left with in the case of “Cat Person” is a bad portrait and a subject whose friends said, “this portrait sucks.”

Complex Systems, bees, lobster and Kitchen Cabinets

/ Simon

As I’ve worked through a lot of materialist thought for the aesthetics project I keep coming back to complex systems. Complex systems theory is an interdisciplinary area of study centered around ecology but with significant impacts for philosophy, economics, sociology, mathematics, physics and other realms of study. It’s a method of looking at non-closed systems. This is largely a response of the failure of ecological and economic systems to behave according to theoretical models predicated around good careful scientifically contained defined systems. We can see systems at work but they’re messy. They have an unlimited number of externalities. Complex systems theory is one of my principal objections to the application of game theory to economics. A game is not a complex system. It is, in fact, a carefully bounded and parsimonious system. Effectively the problem is the board. All games have a board, whether that’s the boundaries of permutations within a deck of cards, an actual physical gameboard or a field of play. The board delineates the boundary of play where, barring unexpected and chaotic factors (say for instance if a swarm of bees invades a football pitch) all that is the game exists within the boundaries of the board. Externalities such as bee swarms are excluded from play. The game will be paused, and resumed when the chaotic element is removed. But of course economies and ecologies don’t work as a game. An economy can’t be paused while a pandemic is cleared away. And that moves it out of the bounds of a game. If economies are games then they are games with infinitely expansive boards in which externalities don’t exist.

Here’s an extended example of the complexity intrinsic to complex systems:

One of the frustrating and long-term unexpected side effects of the pandemic is a disruption of the kitchen fixtures manufacturing sector. It’s very hard to get cabinets installed right now. This is a result of multiple interfacing systems: Let’s start with Alberta paying skilled tradespeople far more than PEI means many carpenters move out west to work. This reduces the overall available pool of carpenters within the province. Add to that the fact that PEI is the fastest growing province in Canada and that the new-construction housing market has a resource bottle neck and the challenge of resourcing people for resale market renovations becomes even more challenging. So you might ask, why doesn’t PEI offer incentives to bring home all those expatriated carpenters from the oil patch? The answer points to even more interlocking systems.

1) Developers in PEI operate on lower margins than oil companies out west. They don’t want to increase pay. Because they’re quite profitable now and the backlog of work just means they have a consistent funnel. They COULD surge hiring by raising pay but that would reduce their overall profitability.

2) PEI effectively doesn’t build public housing. There are two political parties that have traditionally formed power: The Liberals and the Conservatives. Despite the names, the provincial liberals are probably very slightly to the right of the provincial Conservatives though the divide is more a historic town/country split. 

Neither the property-developer beholden Liberals nor the fiscally anxious Conservatives want to spend PEI’s limited budget on affordable housing if they can instead just offer tax cuts to developers in exchange for commitments to lease purpose-built rental units back to the province. This means the province doesn’t need to hire any project managers, carpenters, concrete layers, electricians, etc. It also allows the province to privatize the capital acquisition costs of construction equipment. With the arrival of COVID-19 the attention of the government turned sharply to disease management. And to their credit they have done a commendable job. PEI has had some of the lowest spread of COVID-19 per capita around at 132 cases per 100k people. This puts us on roughly the same footing as Australia. For reference, Canada, overall, is at 3,792 cases per 100k people. To situate this overall, Vietnam, which was widely seen as being the gold standard, sits at 22/100k. South Korea, another stand-out for COVID response is at 312/100k. The best European response is probably Finland at 1753/100k. The world mean is 2396/100k. But the PEI government somewhat notoriously managed this feat by deprioritizing everything else.

This is something that the governing Conservatives, the official opposition Green party and the recently deposed Liberals all aligned on. So despite the pre-existing rental availability crisis there has been very little action on housing in the last two years. 

Now another important system at play here is short-term rental. PEI has four principal industries: Agriculture, Fisheries, IT and tourism. And in Charlottetown, where over half of the population of the whole island lives, Tourism reigns supreme. In particular, Charlottetown has a huge short-term rentals market with something like 1/3 of all downtown homes on the rental market being for short-term rentals specifically. Prior to COVID-19 there was discussion in Charlottetown of addressing this issue. Rental availability rates were lower than those of Toronto and, if you could get a mortgage, it was rapidly becoming substantially cheaper to buy a house than to rent. But this was driving rapid increases in home prices, particularly in the capital region. 

Charlottetown was planning consultations on bylaws that would impose restrictions on short-term rental operators who were not either A) renting rooms or grandparent suites of their own principal residences or B) properly registered tourism operators ie: those who run their businesses through the traditional B&B model rather than unofficial AirBnB premises. However between lockdowns, COVID measures taking bandwidth and the lobbying of the tourism industry to protect it in a general sense against the ravages COVID visited upon the industry, this particular file laid in abeyance until very recently. There was a public consultation that became heated enough that the Charlottetown city council actually shut it down early. I have not heard about subsequent consultations or action on the file since. 

As an aside, the rise in home purchase prices in PEI accelerated significantly during COVID as Ontario and Quebec residents relocated to the Maritimes in record numbers to escape the plague. Anyone who bought a home before 2019 stood to make an exceptional windfall. This is, in fact, how we came to be in a position to need new cabinets as we were able to realize a long-time dream of buying a hobby farm but the farmhouse doesn’t currently have a very functional kitchen. Exacerbating this further, much of the kitchen fixture manufacturing for North America occurs in Texas and the industrial capacity of the state has been impacted not just by Coronavirus but also by the impact of climate disasters, further disrupting delicate supply chains.

So here is an example of how complex systems interlock. Canada subsidizes oil production and makes it part of “the national interest” and so oil companies pay attractive wages pulling carpenters out of the province. The province is politically uninterested in increasing wages for skilled trades. AirBnB pulls rental homes out of the market and drives the start of a home price bubble accelerated further by internal immigration from other provinces. A global pandemic disrupts manufacturing and shipping abroad while climate crisis and the just-in-time delivery model further weaken supply chains. Pandemic response prioritizes public health and the protection of a key provincial industry over resolving pre-existing crises. Home owners are sitting on money to invest back into their homes and further driving demand. But rather than raising prices were seeing, instead, raising wait times. It’s not a matter of some open market bidding because carpenters are employed by specific employers in specific sectors who don’t want their costs to rise. And of course home owners with money in their pockets and lot of time at home are willing to invest in quality. So what ends up buckling is time, making the wait for cabinetry long. This isn’t a game but rather the overlap of several complicated economic systems and it doesn’t map cleanly onto a demand curve. Demand is a factor, but the externalities far outweigh the simple requirement of “people want cabinets.”

All these things: oil barons and floods in Texas, disease and government ideology, rising demand and supply chain fragility, it’s all part of the field of play. In his later work on acid communism and post-capitalist desire, Mark Fisher pointed toward a concept of consciousness raising and I do think that this is a necessary activity. However I think it needs to be directed specifically toward those ontological tools that allow for an understanding of complex systems. What’s more, it isn’t sufficient to leave this in the ivory tower as the domain of ecologists and mathematicians. We can see some understanding of the scope of the problem there, of course. In The Integrative Analysis of Economic Ecosystems: Reviewing labour market policies with new insights from permaculture and systems theory Michael Schlauch addresses the challenges facing economics in adopting a complex systems approch, saying, “Systems are then referred to as “purposeful activity systems”, i.e. systems that consist of human actors that take purposeful actions. These are not taken as real, but as continually changing perceptions from different points of view. Models are “working models” not claiming any “permanent ontological status” (Checkland, 2000, p. 20). Resulting solutions are valid for the observed situation and may not be purported as universal laws.” Referring back, himself, to Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year Retrospective. This is academically interesting but not particularly helpful. It’s good for economists to admit that models should not claim a permanent ontological status but it doesn’t really propose clearly what ontology would be preferred nor how to achieve such an ontological position. On the other hand, there’s a risk in over-mystifying complex systems. The Biggest Little Farm takes great care to show how complex systems interact but tends to reduce them either to a “circle of life” implementation of the eternal return or to become even more mystical, assigning some sort of special ontological position to the blue eyes of an aging dog. While this is entertaining (and it is a masterfully shot documentary which will likely entertain people interested in sustainable agriculture) it is also not particularly useful as part of a consciousness raising program.

We can however find some tools for handling complex systems. The ecological tools of permaculture provide a good framework. A permaculture expert at the University of Western Ontario, Rebecca Ellis (in collaboration with Weis, Suryanarayanan and Bailin) says, regarding bees, “Despite growing attention, there is cause for concern that much of the coverage of bee declines pivot around narrowly defined technical evidence (especially in relation to the harm caused by a specific class of pesticides) in a way that can obscure the more fundamental roots of the problems, along with the need for much bigger changes… while conditions affecting bee health and threats to survival are well studied, and evidence is proliferating, too often the problems facing bees are assessed and presented in isolation, with insufficient attention given to the range of ways that industrial agriculture bears on them and how these interrelate.” Complex systems study within agriculture and ecology has its strength both in maturity and in the materiality of its subject matter. Unlike philosophers or economists, who are largely working with abstractions, ecologists and agriculturalists are fully grounded in the material conditions of the world and treat the complexity of these systems as matters of material reality: crop health, biodiversity and systems equilibria in lived environments. Ellis et. al get at the necessity of looking at interrelating systems as relationships rather than as isolated subjects.

This is, of course, not a new idea. From the Denma Translation Group Sunzi: 

A state's impoverishment from its soldiers --
When they are distant, there is distant transport. 
When they are distant and there is distant transport the hundred clans are impoverished. 
When soldiers are near, things sell dearly.
When things sell dearly, wealth is exhausted. 
When wealth is exhausted, people are hard-pressed by local taxes.

The Denma Group tie this to Sunzi’s statement that “Taking a state whole is superior. Destroying it is inferior to this,” to transport the idea of taking whole out of the specific context of capturing a state without unneeded military destruction and instead to an ontological position. In the Taking Whole commentary, the Denma group reconcile Sunzi with the Confucian critic Xunzi claiming that the statement, “There is a plant in the Western Regions called a blackberry lily. Its stem is four inches long, but because it grows atop tall mountains, it looks down into a thousand-foot abyss,” rather than operating as a critique of Sunzi, demonstrates the sort of flexibility in perspective that defines Sunzi’s prescription for a sage commander. Ultimately, their interpretation of the ontology of Sunzi depends on a concept called Shih. “The rush of water to the point of tossing rock about. This is shih.” Shih represents the flow across a gradient that manifests as power. But it, and its companion concept node which is the moment of the event in which power is exercised, denote that the principal way Sunzi views circumstances is in their relationships. Much like in Xunzi’s example, power is intrinsically a matter of relationship. Xunzi expresses this relationship in the position of a distant perspective while Sunzi prefers to be enmeshed in the action but both come together to propose that an understanding of the moment of the event is not enough. One must understand rather how that event interrelates to every other event. You can’t just say rocks smashed but rather that they were pushed by the river. And the river, in its turn is water acted upon by gravity, channeled by the differential density of the same rock that it erodes and throws about. The system doesn’t have limits, it expands in every direction over the horizon. The Denma Translation group proposes that a sage must be both Sunzi, occupying the position of the drawn crossbow, the raging river, the boulder rolling down a hill and also that of Xunzi: a little plant at the precipice of a towering abyss. A general must know both the specificity of their supply chain and how it interacts with the local economy but also the terrain in which the army moves. They must live both in the mathematical specificity of the logbook and must stand upon high hills and survey the terrain.

This ontological superposition has been expanded upon greatly in recent years by Mi’kmaw Elder Abert Marshall as Two-Eyed Seeing. This concept has principally been applied to the conflict-laden topic of fisheries management in an attempt to bridge the gap between the Canadian colonial administration of fisheries and Mi’kmaw traditional fisheries stewardship. Marshall proposed that the value of European sciences should not be discarded as poison fruit of a poison tree but rather should be integrated with traditional understandings of fisheries management. The Mi’kmaw people have been fishing the Martime Atlantic for millennia and hold specific local knowledge of the ecological systems in their environment but a scientific understanding of epidemiology and population control is also useful for stewarding seafood populations. This must all be positioned within the context of the Marshall Decision, in which Donald Marshall Jr. (the son of then-Mi’kmaw Grand Chief Donald Marshall Sr.) successfully petitioned the Canadian Supreme Court over treaty obligations not to interfere with Mi’kmaw fisheries. Disputes, especially over lobster, have boiled over into violence directed against First Nations people in Nova Scotia as recently as last year over the decision of Mi’kmaw fishermen to fish lobster outside of the season prescribed by the department of fisheries.

The argument put forward by the Mi’kmaw nation is twofold: first that they know quite well what they are doing and second that Canada is not legally authorized to prohibit their activity. The latter position is best elaborated through the two Marshall decisions which remain the binding legal interpretation of the treaties upon Canada in the current time. The former is elaborated in part through this ontological framework.

Complex systems are open-ended networks of relationships. The analytic/scientific approach of excluding externalities and concentrating on increasingly atomized elements of the system have, as Ellis et. al. suggested, produced problems. People get hung up on glyphosphate and fail to consider how bee populations are impacted by monoculture, by climate change, by the breaking up of habitat, by the transportation of hives as a form of migrant worker or at least imported livestock and how that can create supply chain fragility when transportation or industry becomes disrupted. Attempts to put bees in the little box marked, “honey producing livestock” are as much a part of the problem facing bees as a general category as the use of pesticides which kill them. Not that this defends glyphosphate use; it is one of the inputs into the system. It is just that it is necessary to treat the complex system whole but it is also necessary, when a part of the system is breaking down to be able to manipulate that specific relationship before stepping back again to observe the holistic impact of that change upon the system.

We must learn to treat problems neither in isolation nor as mere movements within an holistic system but rather both at once. We should be enmeshed in systems sufficient to see their node but also be the little plant above the abyss.