Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Part Two
From Formalism and Ethnomethodology to Ethics
Chapter 11
Closing Off Openings
I now want to examine a case of another community - readers of Batman comics - who, like musical comedy fans, frequently look for and expect semiotic multiplicities in comic texts. However, in this case my question will be: where, in a practical sense, does this polyvalency actually come to an end? For, after an historical investigation of how these multiple possibilities have emerged, we will see that there are limits to the "openness" of such readings; there are points where Batman followers can go so far (in terms of semiosic indeterminacy) and no further. This does not mean that they could (physically, cognitively, and so on) not read "beyond" such points - only that, were they to do so, their community membership would shift. The point here is to see that what a community is is highly imbricated in the methods it has available for making texts intelligible.
Turning to a slightly different comic genre, William Gibson writes in the Introduction to the "graphic novel" version of his cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer:
Translation is a peculiar business, particularly for monoglot novelists who find themselves in print in languages they know they'll never learn to read.... The edition in front of you is something else: it's been translated into a language I can read, one I've known for a long time. Walt Kelly taught me to read. I was having trouble, in school, with reading; my mother, for some reason, decided the thing to do was to read to me from I Go Pogo. It worked. Soon I was reading myself to sleep with Albert and Pogo, unaware that I was simultaneously absorbing mega-doses of Mr Kelly's gently savage political satire. It probably had something to do with the pictures.1
Gibson's idea of the comic as a "translation" is a very interesting metaphor since it assumes there to be a (visual/verbal) language of comics into which, for example, a text originally composed in another language can be shifted. It suggests a specific community which writes and reads this language - yet one for whom any description of that community would be relatively "transparent" to it.2 That is, the very general community of comic readers is open to anyone with eyesight, a dollar and a local newsagent (or various substitutes for these). Unlike some other communities (footballers, for example) it does not make interactive contact with other members obligatory - though it does provide for interaction via readers' pages, comic conventions, fanzine exchanges and so forth. The comic-reading community is, for itself and to itself, non-topographic and non-coeval, to repeat Fabian's terms.3 To this extent, under certain circumstances, it could allow any member a relatively unconstrained range of possible readings - readings which need not be "checked" against any community consensus. However, when readers do engage in exchanges of this kind, more concrete community competences may form, in order to check, extend, or even constrain the range of possible readings. Such membership-repair and gatekeeping functions make reading technologies a matter of public record.4 So while not just any reading of a particular comic will count as competent within a community of comic readers, the range of methodic activities for the production and consumption of readable text within that community can be quite massively "open," or indeterminate.
It is possible to identify, in certain New Wave comics, a definite recipient design towards this indeterminacy - starting with the "underground" comics of the 1970s - many of which have now been bought by the big comic stables, particularly Marvel.5 A case in point is Groo: The Wanderer where narratorial voices and narrator-characters (as well as the writers in "Groo-grams," the almost obligatory letters page) practically compete to be more uncertain than each other as to what may or may not be happening within the non-standardly-arranged frames, and also within the community of readers itself. Thus, from "Groo-grams":
A few months ago I was captured by a small group of Iranian terrorists, and forced to write a letter to Groo (God bless him). In it I praised Groo (may he rest in Peace), saying really odd things like "Make me Groo." I actually think it was a quite humorous letter. This is why I knew it would not see print. I don't believe a funny letter has ever appeared in Groo (as a matter of fact, nothing funny has). Now that I have been released, I can write of my own free will, and correct the wrongs of the Iranians. (Make me Groo.) Groo is not funny, he is stupid. He doesn't wear pants. Do you find a cat on Groo's head, on the cover of issue #20 funny? I don't. Mulch is stupid too. Note I asked my brother to write this for me (that's me), so he'll probably stick parentheses all over the place, in places they should not be (make me Groo). So until my brother actually writes a real letter to Groo (may he rest in peace), instead of putting little messages all through this Groo letter (make me Groo). Hasta Luego.
Joel Pierce
N.K., Rhode Island
P.S. Please print this letter twice6
The letter is printed twice. The limits, in Groo, are paradoxically thus: for readers, everything is allowed except a literal reading.7
Clearly, then, some comic forms can involve a textual and disseminatory economy which, at one extreme, can be highly laissez-faire. Subversive readings abound, are encouraged, even required. Thus, for cultural theorist Tony Bennett: "Batman 1989 was, above all, a self-consciously double-leveled Batman calling for a similarly double-leveled reading response."8 But this polymorphous hermeneutic can, if extended into a general principle, be quite problematic. A case in point would be the developments in the Batman texts of the late 1980s and early 1990s; developments which are perhaps more subtle and convoluted than Bennett's term, "double-leveled," can adequately capture.
Batman changed a good deal during the 1980s - some readers even dating the point of change to the early 1970s.9 It barely resembles the simplistic mock-warfare between the outrageously wooden Batman-and-Robin (on the side of good) and a variety of comic crims (Catwoman, Riddler, Joker, and so on) which was so successfully satirized in the 1966 Batman TV series (with Adam West and Burt Ward), complete with "Holy this" and "Holy that" from Robin and plenty of ZAPs and POWs. In a move which influenced, and was later influenced by, the 1989 Batman movie,10 the Batman character ceased to be the Caped Crusader and became The Dark Knight. Eventually this diversified into a number of different forms. Among these are the three perennials: the traditional Detective Comics series (but now allowing a slightly weirder set of possibilities to prevail); a highly adult spooker called Legends of the Dark Knight; as well as the "standard format" Batman comics themselves.11
There exist massive intra-generic differences between these various formats - itself, an instance of semiosic dispersal. This difference and dispersal suggests quite distinct readership trajectories, both within (some) formats and between them. Here it should be remembered that comic books can be historically traced to the daily newspaper comic strips; that they were initially aimed at quite adult audiences; that the heyday of comics was during and after the Second World War, with comics designed for the "sex and heroics" market of troops on active service who took easily to the portable, disposal and quickly-consumed comic artform; that it was only in the 1950s that comics came to be thought of as a kids' product (largely under the direct influence and intervention of social psychology and its interest in "juvenile delinquency"); so that, since the seventies, it has been an uphill battle for comic writers and publishers to re-establish the "original" adult market. In this sense, the use of the epithet "kidult" is only appropriate to comics as one (perhaps minor) possibility among many.
DC Comics, for example, used to include (inside the front covers) a catalogue entitled "DC List This Week," with each publication followed by a code showing its "quality" and its "audience." The legend to the list included the following types: "Standard Format," "New Format," "Deluxe Format," "Available at Select Outlets," "Prestige Format," "Graphic Novel," "Collected Edition," and "Suggested for Mature Readers."12
In the process of this shift in markets and genre-alteration, Batman worked alone, without Robin, for quite a few issues - Dick Grayson having graduated to superhero status in his own right, as Nightwing, and Jason Todd having been savagely murdered by the Joker - though, throughout 1990, each issue worked through a long process of grooming an indecisive Tim Drake for Robin-hood.13 This move towards the lone individual has brought with it a new brooding and existentially self-doubting Batman - a "new man" unsure of his position in the world, reflecting on his own possible cowardice in hiding behind a mask, considering his closeness to the underworld, even coming to think from time to time that he is responsible for the very existence of certain criminals by virtue of being the paradigmatic agent of law enforcement, and thus constituting a space of opposition, a challenge to he or she who would be the equal and opposite ultimate criminal. Accordingly the graphics have changed from the earlier schematic comic-book heroics and towards a graphically "realist" representation of "unreal" Gothic horror. The paradigm is less the detective and more the Dostoyevskian existential protagonist, contemplating good and evil as abstract concepts.14 At the same time, the official cultural "level" of the stories has been upgraded from a situation in which practically no intertextual references were required to one almost teeming with external points of contact, literary, cultural and political.15
But for all of this latitude, there's a bottom line, a point where the reinterpretation closes off, a limit beyond which any reader who is to remain competent is effectively reduced to a single line of interpretive choice. We can see a critical example of this by looking at the interpretability of the relations between the figure of Batman and his adversaries. Here it's important to remember that there's always a set of possible confusions and reidentifications: Batman today rarely involves a mapping of hero and villain on to a black and white morality. From the start, Batman's originator, Bob Kane, deliberately cast his hero in the form of a villain (from the 1926 movie, The Bat). But how far can this go? Is there a point at which Batman simply does have to be read as "the good" in the face of an utterly unequivocal villain?
Almost all of the new Batman adversaries are seen to have morally positive characteristics, and this is also true of the revamps. The Riddler is now highly intelligent, if psychopathic; the Joker is subtly witty, even though his jokes bear a strong relation to his bizarre unconscious, and so on. To this extent they exist as colorful (if repulsive) constituents of an imaginary American society. But the rarely-seen adversaries of America itself have no positive features. In this sense, the bottom line in interpreting Batman comes when its version of American self-identity is threatened. The reader, whoever he or she may be in any other sense, is always and without fail "interpellated" as an imaginary American - if only for the duration of the reading.16 But, in an important sense, that américanité - since it is supposed to be distributed across the whole social body of at least one nation - can only get its self-understanding from the outside, from another imaginary which is specifically not American. Hence a totally deheroicized other has to emerge, diegetically, from time to time - one with all the marks of the alien, the outside. Perhaps since Gorbachev, America (and even more so Batman's America) has had a cultural crisis in this respect: no clear, legitimate and strongly-marked other from which American self-identity can emerge. In its place: only a string of smaller others, a loose thread for that identity to hang on to - South Africa for a while (Lethal Weapon II), Japanese trading markets (Punisher comic), Saddam Hussein for another few months (Fires of Kuwait) and so on.
A three part serial in March, April and May of 1990 (Batman #445-447), "When the Earth Dies," took the unusual (but precedented) step of removing Batman from Gotham City and from America altogether.17 This is unusual in the sense that Batman lore in the early 1990s attempted to establish the hero as an extension of the city.18 In the "Dark Knight/Dark City" sequence (##451-454), particularly, Batman's brooding and doubtful interior was directly and explicitly mapped on to Gotham's own deep and murky history. Indeed, and perhaps to mark the continuity of theme, "When the Earth Dies" opens with Batman - back in Gotham - fighting the Slasher, a serial killer who uses powertools to carve up his victims:19
[Batman] knows this city. He knows every street, every intersection, every back alley, every sewer, every tunnel. All of Gotham is his city. Not just the Upper East Side Park Row brownstones, or the midtown business district, or the downtown financial areas. The Black and Spanish ghettos, the parks filled with transients, the Bowery with its addicts, they are part of his city too. And they are also his to protect. (#445, 1)
Hence the scene is set for connections and relations between Batman, hence Gotham, hence America, and its other - so that there's a complex set of associations, allowing multiplicities and diversities and the overlaying of "personal" characteristics on to "local urban" and "national" characteristics, and vice versa. As wealthy capitalist, Bruce Wayne, Batman flies to the USSR, ostensibly to aid the ailing economy by starting a branch of Wayne Enterprises there. His real but secret mission, however, is as Batman. The conceit is that any enemy of Glasnost is an enemy not just of the then-USSR ("Russia" throughout this pre-Yeltsin comic) but Bush's new world order.
The enemy, in this case, has a previous connection with Batman. In an earlier sequence, "Ten Nights of the Beast," America had been threatened by a secret agent - the KGBeast - trying to assassinate the US President. Naturally Batman gets to sort him out. Early on in "When the Earth Dies," a Soviet official explains to Commissioner Gordon that the Beast was (or has perhaps now been officially reinterpreted as) a "renegade" (#445, 5). It turns out that the Beast had a protégé, the NKVDemon, whose mission is to kill the top ten men in the Gorbachev régime because of their pro-Western crimes against true Marxism (sometimes called "Stalinism" in the comic - though the Demon mostly seems to idolize Lenin).
Again, the Demon has none of the positive characteristics of Batman's American adversaries. He's a monster of huge proportions, complete with a whole armory of weapons in his Hammer-and-Sickle utility belt, a red devil's mask with horns, over-sized incisors and a wicked line in over-done Boy-Meets-Tractor Marxism. At first meeting, as they fight, he continues to talk, drooling all the while:
The Beast trained me, American. He fed me special steroids, making me stronger than any man.... My skin was hardened, my nerves partially deadened so I cannot feel pain. I am virtually impervious to harm. (#445, 18)
This old USSR, incarnate in one who is barely a man, because it is much more than a man, fights dirty. It takes steroids to give it unfair advantage in competition; it has no real human sensations; its end is to destroy America (Batman) and any means will justify that end.20 At the same time, the Demon is shown to take a perverse pleasure in being and doing all this.
Batman (to the Demon): I don't fight for the thrill of battle. And I don't fight unless there's no recourse. (#445, 19)
However, the Demon gets away when Batman calls in Soviet police reinforcements. He gets away because, in a repetition of the issue's opening words, now applied to villain rather than hero, and to Moscow rather than Gotham, "He knows this city. He knows every street, every intersection, every back alley, every ...." In this sense, the repetition puts the Demon, more squarely than any other previous adversary, in direct opposition to Batman in "content," while sharing his structural position within an inverted America. It is to this extent that (at this point) a very narrow range of readings - perhaps even a single reading - is available. To read any aspect of the Demon positively, against the comic's recipient design, against the Batmanian semiotic, is to move beyond the community's threshold of readability. At this point, the methods of reading would become excessive to the kinds of activities which are "proper" to the community in question. Hence, according to our first level of meaning (given in chapter 6 as S =def ma), the text would become unintelligible. The Demon marks a clear limit - not to be transgressed by any Batfan or any "American." It tells, by negation, clearly where and who one must be. The only alternative is not to read; or - which is the same thing - to read from within another community.21 This is not to make a schoolmasterly stipulation but to make an empirical observation about a specific community's limits of intelligibility.
It is possible for someone to read the Demon's prayer before his portrait of Lenin (#447, 7-8) ironically, subversively and so forth, against the comic's clear designation of it as within the genres of madness:
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, you shaped our world which that ... that man [Gorbachev] seeks to ruin. You pointed out the truth which he corrupts into lies. You showed us the way which he seeks to change. I look at our world and ask if we are better today than we were, and my answer is no. Once we were a happy people, now we are depressed. Once we firmly held an empire in our mighty hands. Now we permit that empire to flee us and rush toward the decadent West. Now this, Vladimir, this is the new world they want to begin on your birthday - this world which will merge East and West. Which will force us to forsake our proud heritage. All the glory you sought for us, Vladimir, all the greatness you aspired to - all that makes us unique and strong, that pretender to your greatness seeks to destroy. I strike on your day, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, I strike in your name. And in your name we shall triumph.
To read it with irony is possible in principle - simply because of the truism that any text can be so read, because of the underlying (in-principle) indexicality of every expression or text, and perhaps because one must, according to one's ethical position. But it is inconceivable to read it this way and keep reading or following as a bona-fide Batman aficionado. One position likely to produce a subversive reading would be that of an "outsider," an expert in Cultural Studies, perhaps, who would then have to give up all pretensions to inside knowledge and to an emic approach to social practice (both of which are mainstays of contemporary Cultural Studies).22 It could be the case, for example, that there is evidence outside the comic text to the effect that, in 1990, a sizable section of the then-Soviet population wanted something other than traditional Marxism, Gorbachev or American capitalism. But there is no space for any such alternative in any competent reading of Batman.
That is, the text cannot tolerate any statement beyond a certain point in the chain of "reasonable" doubts, the chain of semiosic inference which is also the social-political range of the Batman language-game. The game's whole understanding of the world, its taken for granted foundations, cannot be taken beyond this point of not-doubting.23 It is not a paradox, in terms of this text, for Bruce Wayne to speak literally of "an ordinary citizen with incredible wealth" and, thus, to have it assumed that, post-Glasnost, with successful Americanization, any Soviet citizen could be one, and (presumably, human nature being what it is) "they'd get used to it" (#447, 9-10).
The fact that this supposedly implicit limit - the point at which any intelligible reading of Batman must approach zero degree - was actually displayed on the surface of an issue of the comic was an important problem for a number of Batman readers. Making the limit so clear, not defining it by negation, not leaving its exact co-ordinates in suspension, marking it with such an inelastic and "cheesy" villain; speaking and graphically displaying, perhaps, what all Batman fans knew but never needed to say - appears to have removed a degree of subtlety from a readership which has increasingly come to accept a degree of indeterminacy as a principle of reading - in fact as a principle of textual realism:24
I've just read BATMAN #446. I've always enjoyed Marv's stories [Marv Wolfman, writer], but I have a quibble. The NKVD doesn't exist anymore; it was a forerunner of the KGB (others included the Cheka, the GPU, the MVD, and the MGB) that existed as such from 1943 to 1946. I never got to read "Ten Nights of the Beast," so maybe I'm missing something important about the origin of the Beast and the Demon. Still, it seems like you've fallen victim to Cheesy Villain Name Syndrome (along with Horns on the Villain's Head Syndrome).... Of course, mine aren't the only tastes you're catering to, but I wish you'd avoid the temptation to have these ridiculous costumed super-villains. I prefer BATMAN to DETECTIVE partly for its greater realism, and the generally close correspondence between Bruce Wayne's world and ours....
Michael Boydston
Austin, TX.
(#451, 24)
Interestingly enough, the producers of Batman are being taken to task here for allowing the principles of (or the limits of) intelligibility to be made explicit. Boydston situates his complaint in terms of a community history as it relates to "actual" history. He expects there to be a nexus between the two (even if he has missed one of these crucial links). But not only have the "events" of both histories been transgressed, so has the history of expectable forms of reading within the community. To show the limits graphically is to transgress a tenet of realism: it turns the characters (or at least the villain) into stereotypes. It makes them wooden and uncomplicated - against the assumption that "Bruce Wayne's world and ours" should be related, practically the same, complex: worlds in which, precisely, one does not encounter the limits so much as live and read by them. The solution to the problem of explicitness is an insistence, finally, on "realism": this is where interpretations come to an end for Boydston and many other letter writers. And "realism," by this definition, is something which is to be shown but not said, something on which representations should be built but which should never be explicited as such. Its explication is its transgression. The producers have, then, produced a text which is a problem for its readers and its solution is an insistence on the tried-and-trusted historical forms of sense-making "proper" to Batman writers and readers.
"Realism" for the Batfan means the representation of everyday relativities, complexities and paradoxes. In this way, we can begin to see that neither "realist" nor "relativist" theories of meaning could hold universally, for all cases. In fact, the terms "realism" and "relativism" are over-generalized and theoreticist glosses for specific community methods and activities. In some communities, we can discern tendencies towards semiosic relativism in the form of established community methods for maximizing the indexical potential of its "proper" texts. In others, we can discern realist tendencies in the form of equally established methods for minimizing that potential. But it is also possible, as we have just seen, that even relativist methods have "realist" limit points - points where the continued expansion of intelligibility must come to a close. Too much explication of the principles of intelligibility generates obviousness, to which a return to "realism" becomes a solution.
In the next investigation, I will examine a highly "realist" community: mathematical physics. What is important in this case is that we can see how "realism" - as, ultimately, in the case of Batfans - is less a basis for a general semantics and more a particular community's defense strategy; how it is a set of means by which the community guards against its "proper" signs being reinterpreted either from within or elsewhere. Science and mathematics (along with a range of other communities) have a problem which arises from a paradox: they are expected to be "open," to be "publicly accountable." Their findings - according to many versions of what constitutes scientific method - have to be published in order to "count" as genuine findings. This is one "test" of their durability. At the same time, publication offers a space of semiosic vulnerability. It makes science's proper signs available to whoever might wish to read them. One solution to this problem is "rigorous definition": ensuring that scientific constants and values will be either quantitatively (empirically) or logically (theoretically) fixed in a variety of ways. So while, for example, humanities disciplines may "borrow" terms such as "entropy," "chaos," "equilibrium," "force" and so on, in doing so they can be shown to have transgressed the "proper" scientific meanings of these terms by analogically shifting them out of their quantitative definitions or their logical positionings within a range of other scientific concepts. Realism, therefore, can constitute a bulwark against these types of invasion; it can become a kind of theft detector by marking the sign with a further sign of propriety. How does this work in practice?
=> chapter 12
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