April is Poetry Month in the US and on the 2nd I decided on the spur of the moment to link to or post one of my poems on Mastodon every day and write a bit about what they mean to me and why I wrote them. I've always resisted introducing my poems but it does make them more readable. Here are the threads:
1) Signals
2) The Ones Who
3) some notes towards: four most overwritten subjects / inside and outside
4) untitled
The rest will be added throughout the month.
It's a "poem", everyone knows it, everyone is currently wallowing in it, it's bad. Why the scare quotes around "poem"? Although it is referred to in English as "First they came", it was not written to be or really intended to be a poem. It's a speech that he gave many times and was gradually transformed by him and others into what it now is. The history of how people wanted to read it has everything to do with its final form.
I should write at the outset that although Niemöller was an early supporter of Hitler, and an antisemite, I firmly believe in a separation of artist from art. It's possible for a bad person to make good art or a good person to make bad art. Criticism of who he was is not why it's bad art. There are so many reasons why it's bad that I'll have to put them into sections.
Aesthetic reasons
It's bad because it uses simple repetition for a sentimental effect.
Repetition is not in and of itself bad in poetry. There are plenty of good poems that use it. How is it used in this one? First they came for the X / And I did not speak out / Because I was not an X. For all of the variations of the English version of the poem (I'll get to the translation later) that is all the poem is for all of the verses but the last. You can see why people like it, it's very "accessible".
When a strong pattern is established by repetition, it's the repetition-breaking moment that establishes the effect. What's the last verse, which breaks the pattern? Then they came for me! No one left -- to speak out for me! The reader identification is strong, who has trouble identifying with a threat to -- me? (i.e. themselves).
I can't really bear to do a close reading of this, there is so little there. It wasn't intended as a poem and it barely functions as one. I will note that in what is referred to as the original German, the repetition is broken -- the first verse says "Nazis", and the others don't. This was taken out by whoever translated it for good aesthetic reasons -- to clean it up a little, making the repetition stronger, making the idea more general.
Textual variation
There's a well known part of criticism that goes through textual variations of works. For instance, Walt Whitman wrote different versions of various poems in _Leaves of Grass_, put them in different order etc. The textual variations abound here because it never was intended as a poem in the first place.
But we can learn something from them. First, the order in the initial speech was probably: Communists, disabled people, Jews, occupied countries. The first of these to get edited out were disabled people. Just not something people in a eugenics-influenced society reading it in English wanted to consider.
Then, of course, Communists out. Not very sympathetic especially for an American audience. Socialists and trade unionists in.
I should emphasize that I'm not sneaking biographical criticism back in this section, I have no idea how much of this was done by Niemöller modifying the poem himself to fit his audience and how much was other people. But it's actually changing the text of the poem, so it's important to the poem.
This is the worst kind of textual modification for this poem. Who will speak out for -- wait, that group got deleted.
Political reasons
Why is the poem bad politically? It is a political poem so this is a fair question to pose.
It's because it is written with an implicit protagonist who is an important person and who expects to be heard. The implicit protagonist in the poem (really Niemöller, but critics try to separate the person-in-the-poem from the author) evidently thinks that *speaking out* will do something. They came for the X -- but I did not speak out. What if the protagonist had spoken out?
Well you can try it now, in the current context of Trump. Trump is bad, he should not deport people, he should not try to eliminate disabled people or trans people, he should not suggest ethnic cleansing (in no particular order). Do not do that!
Did anything happen?
For the Iraq War, people didn't just speak -- they turned out in millions and peacefully protested.
Did anything happen?
What really causes political change, and what constitutes political resistance? The poem implicitly suggests a model that only powerful people can do, and that is probably ineffective for them even if they did it. That is a bad political model. It's a particularly bad model for anything like left or even centrist politics, which has to acknowledge that most people are not powerful and need to do more than speak out.
Moral reasons
Why is the poem morally bad? Again, it's a poem about morality so this seems like a fair area for criticism.
It's morally bad because it encourages reader identification that lets the reader see themselves as a basically good person who suffers from indifference and needs a reminder not to be indifferent *for their own good*. The morality in the poem is very pragmatic: who will be left to defend you?
In reality, the reader is probably not a good person. Societies don't go fascist with the majority of people remaining pure and good. Moral tracts that encourage people to see themselves as good are not themselves good.
This is really why Niemöller-as-Nazi keeps being discovered and undiscovered. It's not that he concealed his history from the people he started telling this to. They knew who he was. If anything, the poem is *stronger* in certain ways if you read it as from an early Nazi supporter.
But people don''t want to read the poem that way because that calls their own current goodness into question. They want to read it as: they are a good person, they have a choice of whether or not to speak out for people coming up, if they speak out they are good.
But they aren't if it's a Nazi sympathizer describing how he was a Nazi sympathizer. That puts the reader in as as a bad person and the speaking out part maybe only the beginning of clawing your way back.
Historical usage and reading
Why is the historical usage or reading of this poem bad? I'm going to get some overlap with sections above here, but I think it's worth looking at this as a separate question.
Poems accumulate preferred interpretations as part of the history of the poem. Robert Frost for instance wrote a poem for his friend who over-agonized about his personal decisions telling him those decisions didn't matter that much, and his friend took it the wrong way and decided to prove his bravery and got himself killed in a war.
This is a Cold War poem. It's all about the time when Germany had to consider its history, confront it and cry some tears, be welcomed as a bulwark of the West, and in general we had to congratulate ourselves as part of a bloc where we could speak out and that this freedom and the other freedoms guarded by a free people meant we should be on guard but basically this was never going to happen for us. So the historical usage or preferred reading was not to prepare against the return of fascism, it was more subtly one of reassurance.
How do you read the poem as a Jew, or as a Communist (oops -- socialist), or as a disabled person (wait they were deleted)? In that case I guess you are supposed to be reassured that people are being told to speak out for you in an ineffective way in their own self interest. But the poem is not for you.
Biographical criticism
I've concluded that I have to do some biographical criticism after all, because it's crucial to understanding the poem. Niemöller was not exactly a Nazi. He was a WW I U-boat captain who became a religious leader. He supported the Nazis early but differed from them exactly when they started to attack Jews who had converted to Lutheranism and joined his church. He was put in a concentration camp for 8 years as a VIP prisoner and later parlayed his fame into world-wide tours as a pacifist and human rights campaigner. He was someone who could declare "Hitler betrayed me" and mean that Hitler had a personal conversation with him in which Hitler made a promise to him that he later broke.
The mystique of this constellation of biographical events is part of the enduring popularity of the poem. The theme of "first they come for the despised, but they never stop there" is reinforced and proved by this leader-y quality.
I don't like, as a person and a critic, this idea of the exaltation of the ex doer of bad deeds who repents. It's a Christian cliche, and personally I find it disagreeable.
The current Palestinian genocide is going to produce, decades later, many Israelis who speak movingly about the horrors they inflicted as if they didn't know at the time or were carried away. I preemptively wish that they would shut up and not try to become celebrities: they knew, and they were not carried away.
Conclusion
It's an aesthetically, politically, and morally bad poem that has been altered textually in bad ways, read in bad ways, and has been badly interpreted.
It's not good.
It is nearly evenly divided into chapters about commodities (oil, bananas) and wildlife (otters, whales) and thus avoids being one of the "history of a manufactured item" books that were once popular. I think that it succeeds in being a useful look at infrastructure and ecological aspects of its politics through the lens of one of the largest ports in the US.
The above is as much of a book review as I usually write: the rest of this is going to be about some ideas that I examined through the book -- not an exhaustive look at what the book is about, but where it contributed to my particular interests in ecology and infrastructure.
The Infrastructure of Delay
The book contains a description of one of the archetypal industry/wildlife interactions in American media: seabirds covered in oil and cleaned by professionals or volunteers, with uncertain results. Chapter I: "Precariously Perched in a Port", is largely about this interaction, with bird rescuers funded by Chevron or Proctor & Gamble, descriptions of "slow violence" done to the local ecology, declining populations of birds and action taken as reaction to incidents, and (throughout the book) the general idea that ecological protection exists only insofar as it will not impede trade or military use of the port. What should people make of a building labelled the Los Angeles Oiled Bird Care and Education Center, designed to treat up to a thousand birds in a spill and run by a nonprofit with ties to both government and industry?
My first impulse would have been to describe all of this as a public relations exercise, but it is not quite that. There is an actual building with actual full-time employees doing ongoing care of actual birds. This building is part of the infrastructure of the port -- a kind of infrastructure that manages public permission for the activities of the port to go on as usual. Thinking about this was probably the most useful part of the book for my particular concerns.
What does it actually do? The answer isn't nothing, and the answer is also not "it protects birds". Actually protecting them would require taking more expensive measures to reduce oil spills and other stressors before they happen. I think that it's best thought of as an infrastructure of ecological delay. The various interventions for birds, otters, and whales are not exactly adequate, but they do make it so that populations slowly are reduced rather than vanishing all at once. It's possible that they even may work and have populations recover, which would be all to the good as far as the port is concerned -- as long as trade and industry are not interfered with. This infrastructure of delay handles an important constraint on the port: charismatic megafauna and its accompanying public involvement in politics.
"Infrastructural Vitalism": Alive or Dead?
One of the concepts that the book coins as a phrase is "infrastructural vitalism": how managers treat ports, pipelines, and freeways as alive and as living systems that must be protected. Illustrative phrases mentioned are like "the health of the nation depends on the flow of commercial goods" or "the freeway is the spine of the region." It consists of:
"[...] heavily managed, industrial infrastructure which, I argue, is stuctured by industrial logics and possesses a 'life force' of its own. I do not mean that this infrastructure literally is alive, but an animistic belief in infrastructure's life force motivates its creators and maintainers. This belief does real work in the world -- and, ironically, is often deadly for biological life." [pg. 5]
Infrastructural vitalism is an interesting concept, but I do not agree with it as described. Is it really a belief, or is it a metaphor (economic activity is full of metaphors), or an excuse? How could we prove that creators and maintainers of core industrial capacity have an animistic belief, as opposed to someone figuring out that this is a good turn of phrase to put in a newspaper article? How would the managers, if interviewed, even know whether this is an actual belief that they hold or a rationalization, not much thought about, that they heard once and adopted because they like to feel good about what they do when questioned?
But that is a negative objection and I will lay out an alternative positive model: that of a basic difference between what the public thinks of as the purpose of a profession and what that profession or role institutionally does. The classic example is policing. People think that police forces are there to catch criminals and protect the public, but in terms of both policy and actual behavior they are not: they are there to enforce public order (including "racial order") and protect wealthy people's property. Critically, you could not find this view of the police by interviewing cops, who would either actually believe in protecting the public / catching criminals or would at least say that they do.
In a similar way, the purpose of local politicians is to sell their area to capital. People think that politicians do something else, but the important parts of cities like roads and sewers and electricity are run by technocratic managers: politicians and rare appointed high-level managers handle the interface between the area and business. If selling the area to business is helped along by propounding infrastructural vitalism, that may be done, but if the public's favored metaphors change the justifications will also change, because the activity itself can not change. The port presents itself as a part of America's bloodstream, the place where software design happens presents itself as a cyberpunk landscape ("Silicon Valley"), and the Southern states dependent on cheap labor reject metaphor altogether and put up signs on the roadways telling businesses that unions are discouraged in their state, but it is all to the same end. Politicians may have to try to attract new business but an area with an already paid for infrastructural sunk cost offers a steadier line of work which generally is only given up due to some catastrophic market change.
A minor observation -- perhaps the book included this somewhere, I'm sorry if I'm only repeating it -- I think it's instructive that in this case the infrastructural vitalism is coming from the Port of Long Beach, which is administered by the City of Long Beach. The nearby port of Los Angeles is larger, but the book does not focus on it because its records are not as easy to obtain. So the Port of Long Beach is a centrally managed important piece of infrastructure which is not one of the grandfathered in Federal ones, but instead is run by a local public entity. It is therefore in the strictest sense un-American. They may have need of organic metaphors about how the place grew and demands life on its own in order to disguise this.
Infrastructuralism
The book raises the question of whether ports could become managed in a different way, under a different system, in order to actually protect ecosystems and as a kind of measurement and enforcement point for communal decisions about how we will treat products coming from elsewhere (how labor is treated where the products are from, for instance). My political commitments don't lead me to examine this idea strongly as a possible element of our system, and if our system is ever replaced I have no idea what might happen.
Instead I'm going to write a bit about my own most successful idea about the constraints of infrastructure, the clumsily named Infrastructuralism, which claims that people use whatever infrastructure is available and that infrastructural use can only be changed only by actually building-and-debuilding. This blog post predicted (at least to me) events such as the Yellow Vest protests taking down the French carbon tax, and the syndrome in the US where mothballed coal-burning power plants are bought and restarted by cryptocurrency miners. How would it apply to a port?
In many ways it's a statement about how we handle sunk costs. When an item of infrastructure is brought down by negative externalities, the business that ran it may go bankrupt, but the infrastructure often remains. Part of the system of capitalism is that these negative exernalities if they are taken into account at all are often applied to the business and are mysteriously set to zero again for a new purchaser. In addition, infrastructure that is brought down by economic forces only awaits a market upturn or a new use (see e.g. the Jevons paradox) to be turned back on again.
In this sense the sunk cost of investments made into the infrastructure of the port ensure that the port is going to continue to be used somehow, for as long as economic activity continues to increase. It will always be cheaper for someone doing some marginal use to turn things on again (the book, for example, explains how bananas were diverted back to less developed ports that had fewer investments in containerized cargo, because bananas don't use that and the less developed ports are cheaper / less crowded).
In this sense the current metaphors for infrastructure are Lovecraftian -- for instance, market as shoggoth. The port is not a living thing that must be cared for and that serves as a part of our communal body: it is the corpse-city of R'lyeh, and what has never lived can never truly die.
(second part of the series is here)
Synthesis
So there are two implicit referential strands in Delicious in Dungeon: Lovecraft and Tolkien. How are these brought together?
Before getting into this, one final side alley: to illuminate a better example of some popular genre, it's sometimes good to look at an absolutely bargain basement lowest common denominator one: I give you "The Strongest Tank’s Labyrinth Raids -A Tank with a Rare 9999 Resistance Skill Got Kicked from the Hero’s Party", an isekai title which looks like it was put together by randomly selecting tropes that are currently popular. The minor variation that minutely separates this from similar series is that the main character is a "tank" (as opposed to a healer, a tamer, a mage, a thief, or various forms of damage dealers all of which have had their own series) so it's the only one based around a big, burly, classically muscled guy, something which is not finally used to any really interesting purpose. I bring it up because the protagonist becomes both the leader of the local adventurer's guild *and* the master of the local dungeon, who creates monsters (huge gorillas, dinosaurs) who are sentient enough to fight on the people's side when commanded to do and who the adventurers hunt for their hides and other parts. So he is a kind of local magnate who runs an early-capitalism business: the adventurers sometimes get killed, the monsters are endlessly created and sacrificed, but presumably the little hell world of unending needless death and conflict is worth it for the economic benefits.
Since "The Strongest Tank" (etc) is a minor work this conflict is never resolved or even acknowledged. How is Delicious in Dungeon addressing it? After all, if Laios does become king it will involve control of the dungeon in some way: is he similarly going to have people hunting and dying in order to eat an endless stream of created sentient victims?
The first step in recognizing this as a conflict is by considering cooking itself. Cooking is a creative act, and one that transforms Thanatos (killing all those monsters, risking death) into Eros (creating the source of life for oneself and others). As I write about in Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds , a characteristic part of the isekai genre, and one that often applies to generic fantasy anime, is that they serve as hopeful fantasies based around Eros rather than Thanatos -- fantasies in which people have the power to create a better world -- and this includes "humble" arts such as cooking.
So Delicious in Dungeon is overtly interested in ecology and is in some fundamental sense about our ecological crisis. There is embedded in it a horror-world that we uneasily fear may be coming into being -- "Soylent Green is people!" and the whole mythos of things getting so bad that we are gradually acclimated into cannibalism. ("Do you have any better ideas?" Laios asks when proposing that they eat his sister.) There is also the hope of something else: the creation of a new ecology in which we all have enough to eat because we have changed what we eat. Giving up meat for climate purposes? Instead we can eat insects, protein grown from bacteria, or whatever and they are really delicious if prepared in the right way. The second story starts from Tolkien and his "reject technology to preserve bucolic England", but it can not really end there because we have passed the point where preservation could work: we need a new system.
Laios is a monstrous figure because he stands at the juncture of these two stories. No one can understand him or why he is so focused on eating monsters. The new system has not yet come into being and might never do so: he might end as a monster, or he might prefigure the time when we have eaten our monsters and something that can sustain us into the future can arise.
(end of the series)
(first part is here)
Can you eat Ents?
The reason why a Lovecraftian reading of Delicious in Dungeon is incomplete is because the series is also very interested in ecology, something that Lovecraft had no feeling for. Before I can try to describe how these interact I have to go back to: where do these characters come from? What more or less stock setting are they drawing on?
For a lot of this I'm going to be relying on analysis of the isekai subgenre that I wrote up as Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: if you like reading this you may want to read that at some point. Delicious in Dungeon is not an isekai (none of the characters are from other worlds) but there are similarities between isekai and generic fantasy anime. In particular, isekai are almost universally done as a type of fantasy world that uses conventions from after the transition from tabletop RPGs to computer game RPGs.
Delicious in Dungeon notably leaves out the computer game RPG conventions entirely. There are no status windows through which characters can see their stats, no hyper-focus on numerical ratings and lists of skills. In addition, although there clearly is some influence from tabletop RPGs (the concept of "dungeoning", "parties", some of the monsters) the characters are not really operating within a tabletop RPG system. No one has a "level" as far as I can remember. No one really has a "character class": Laios the fighter can be taught how to use basic magic if anyone bothers to teach him. The combat system fundamentally does not use hit points: there is a scene where a burly fighter has a water spirit shoot a sort of spear of water through her skull and she is instantly dead in a way that no hit point based system would really allow. The combat is generally brutal and people are killed when a vital spot is hit.
What the characters do have is Tolkien-similar races, filtered through Tolkien's influence on the tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons. Thus Chilchuck is a "half-foot" because Tolkein's hobbits were renamed to halflings in D&D because of copyright concerns. In short, they are a party whose composition is somewhat like that of the Fellowship of the Ring: Laios the human future king is Aragorn, Chilchuck the trap expert (note: not a "thief") is a mixture of the various hobbits, Marcille the mage elf combines Legolas and Gandalf, and Senshi is Gimli. The core party in Delicious in Dungeon has various members that were part of the group earlier or who joined later, and I could push the analogy further, but this is far enough for my purposes.
Are they really similar to these Tolkien models? They are sort of reverse caricatures or jokes about them, distancing devices:
* Laios is one of the least classifiable characters in recent anime: anime has many doofus character stock types (the doofus who is OK because they are incredibly powerful, the one who makes bad decisions but always lucks out, the one driven by incredible horniness, the one who is just comic relief) and he isn't any of them. He's socially awkward but not to the extent of being classifiable as having what people currently think of as a disability. Mostly he is someone who just does not fit in: his backstory has him doing a number of combat-related jobs all of which he left without some precipitating crisis and without particularly learning anything from them.
* Marcille might be the closest to a Tolkien original type because Tolkien's elves notably sometimes had their magical creations go bad. But she's a lesbian and Tolkien is probably the least lesbian fantasy writer imaginable. She could conceivably be bi or pan or something -- it's not like we know her exact preference -- but the anime makes it as clear as it can without her saying "Hi, I'm a lesbian" that she's attracted to Falin (the scene where they rescue Falin and suddenly Marcille is all flirty and "sleep next to me") and probably in love with her (the scene where Marcille starts crying, thinking about a difficult part of Falin's life.) By the way, what is it about anime fans even in the current day that made me encounter "Do Laios and Marcille end up getting married?" as a recurring question when looking up basic facts about the series? Of course they don't.
* Chilchuck is almost a reverse hobbit: a good person on the inside to his friends, but close-mouthed, secretive (his long-term party doesn't even know he's married), cynical, not notably interested in food, an adult who has children. Tolkien hobbits would have thought it was the greatest thing ever to eat all these tasty monsters. There have been other Tolkien-derived halfling characters who were members of thieves guilds and the like -- Regis from the R.A. Salvatore Drizzt books, for instance -- but they tend to maintain outward good nature as a kind of racial trait.
* Senshi is a driven, complex personality without being in any way concerned with any of the things that Tolkien dwarves are concerned about. He doesn't care about his clan. He doesn't care about treasure: there's an amusing scene where they are cooking and eating bugs that look like coins and he throws some gold coins that were mixed with them away because gold is useless. He doesn't care about his axe and his prized implements are his cooking tools.
So the series has made it very clear that although this may look like Tolkien it is not. Why go this far for the look and then spend so much effort playing against type? I suspect that it has something to do with the Ring (as in the the temptation to use power that works out badly), the Ents, and the Scouring of the Shire, these last not standing for a real ecological consciousness but at least a preservationist one. The world of Delicious in Dungeon is one where the ancient elves and dwarves had rather modern technology, steampunk level if not contemporary, and gave it up.
Because there are many overt references to ecology in the series. Marcille is interested in dungeons and how to create them because she is interested in magical self-sustaining systems. Senshi purposefully does not destroy golems on a particular dungeon floor because to do so would throw off the dungeon's ecological balance, and he sees himself as a maintainer of that balance. The dungeon is kept in repair not merely by "magic" but by actual creatures that mimic the walls when they are damaged and secrete new shells to replace them. (Laios, of course, tries to eat these creatures because he must eat everything.)
To make a long story short, I think that the series is fundamentally about our contemporary ecological crises, and these have to take off from Tolkien in this context because that's the last branch of the series Tolkien -> tabletop RPG -> computer RPG where they really appear. More about that in the next part.
(the second part is here )
"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."
This is an extended critical piece about the amine Delicious in Dungeon, sometimes called Dungeon Meshi by people who want to call it by something that is like its Japanese name (transliterated as "Danjon Meshi") . The direct translation would be "Dungeon Meal". I've based it on the first 24 episodes and have lazily not looked up anything about the writer, the artist(s), or the (completed) manga that it's based on. There will be spoilers for these episodes and this piece assumes familiarity with them.
How, exactly, is Laios monstrous? I suggest that he is because, as in the Gramsci quote above, he stands in an old world while a new one is uncertainly coming into being around him. This leads him to greater and greater acts of cannibalism, culminating in a plan to save his sister from being bodily merged with a dragon by killing her, cutting off her "dragon parts" (the anime shows an envisioned neat and bloodless sectioning, like parts of a cow separated in an illustration at a butcher's shop) and calling in everyone he knows for a great feast where they eat all of the parts of his sister that they want to dispose of before resurrecting her. Laios is (clearly, in my opinion) slated to become king, and this is going to be a central story for his kingdom.
What kind of story is this? At first it seems something like the stories from Joseph Campbell's book _Primitive Mythology_ about ceremonial kings who had the best of everything the community could provide and then were ritually sacrificed and eaten to ensure the turning of the seasons and continued fertility. But Campbell is increasingly out of favor and this usage of "primitive" as a stage that humanity went through is no longer held. More to the point, this is not a story about natural cycles, but about an incredible *un*naturalness. Here is the voice over at the end of the 24th episode: "Dungeon food. To eat or be eaten. There is no hierarchy here. Only the simple concept that eating is a privilege of the living." But the series has already made it clear that this dungeon has the unusual property that people killed here do not really die: their souls stay attached to their bodies and they may be brought back to life at any time if part of their body still exists. For the monsters' part, they are created by magic. So the dungeon is a hell world where creatures live to eat the dead, then die and are eaten, then are returned to life again to kill and eat. Un-nature red in tooth and claw.
Descent to the Dungeons of Madness
It is possible to interpret the series as an often sought after contemporary mashup, the cheery, cutesy Lovecraftian horror story. It would go something like this. A party is forced to descend into a dungeon without supplies in order to save and resurrect one of their party members who has been eaten by a dragon. The party leader, Laios, has always been fascinated by the idea of eating monsters, and even has a sort of cookbook for doing so, but it seems like he's never really tried it. Luckily they meet a dwarf, Senshi, who is an expert cook specializing in the use of monster parts. They descend the dungeon and are forced to subsist on Senshi's cooking: some party members are repulsed by the idea of eating monsters but they all agree that the meals are delicious.
As they go on and the initial resistance of the party members to eating monsters fades, there is a new controversy: some of the monsters are partially humanoid and eating pieces of them is uncomfortably like eating human parts. Some party members object: it is agreed that there will be some restrictions on this kind of food but this partial agreement is subverted, especially when food gets short. They find and kill the dragon that ate their missing party member, Laios' sister Falin, and eat meat from the dragon even though it ate and mostly digested Falin. Falin is resurrected and then lost when she is partially transformed into the dragon that ate her.
Then there is an absolutely critical bit of back story for this interpretation. Senshi, as a young dwarf, was part of a dwarven expedition to this dungeon that went wrong, and he was the sole survivor. To save his life, the leader of the expedition gave him a mysterious bowl of bad tasting meat, which Senshi devoured to avoid starvation. Senshi has since then always suspected that he was cannibalistically fed the meat of another dwarf, and it is implied that a major reason why he took up cooking monsters was to taste them and find out whether it was a monster he ate or another person. This lifelong trauma underlies the series.
Then, at episode 24, there is a suggestion of how the rest of the series will go: the dungeon, presided over by "the mad mage", has slowly changed the party into monsters, although they are physically no different from how they once were. Laios enthusiastically proposes that they can separate their missing party member from the dragon she has been partly transformed into by calling in everyone they know to a great feast where they will all eat his sister Falin. This will dispose of her "monstrous parts", but of course the monstrosity will have gone into the feasters as they insensibly enjoy themselves, their jaws dripping with dragon/human blood.
Lovecraft wrote more than one short story about cannibalism, I believe, and not cannibalism as a "primitive rite" -- there is at least one where a New England settler gains everlasting life for at long as he can kill and eat other people. This reading is part of the series, but only a part. This particular anime rehearses certain kinds on contemporary social tension, and the Lovecraftian reading functions as one of its component levels. In future parts of this series I hope to look at how this horror is the base of a larger horror of our time and the hope of its eventual resolution.
Next part is here.
This is a very good book about the politics of our contemporary moment, but I'm mostly going to write about where I disagree with it, since agreement amounts to a 200 character post on social media and it takes some element of disagreement to make a work worth writing about at length. I'll generally assume that people reading this have read the book or are at least familiar with its premise: Naomi Klein writes about the ongoing popular confusion between her and Naomi Wolf as if Wolf is her doppelganger, using that as a springboard to write about the whole current right-wing movement and the way that it mirrors elements of leftism.
I. Doppelgangers by Genre
Naomi Klein tries dutifully throughout the book to see the similarities between herself and Wolf in order to examine what lessons her shadow self or doppelganger might reveal. She has to overcome her natural feelings of difference to do so -- Klein prides herself on careful analysis and fact checking, while Wolf is notoriously not careful and a fabulist -- but I don't think that she really seems able to do this well.
_Doppelganger_ is cultural criticism that makes extensive use of the most blighted staple of contemporary writing, the personal anecdote. Reporters and writers never seem to grasp the difference between a scientist writing something as science and what they write, but this is a book that tries to give people a story through which they can think about current events, not some kind of social science description of them. As a poet I appreciate the use of sense words to make anecdotes memorable: there is a scene in which someone gasps that they can smell the sandalwood after meeting a far-out person who one presumably expects to be a sort of hippie but who wants unfit people to die. Is this person representative of a wider trend? People who share vaguely left values certainly feel that this person is representative. Due to the mirrored nature of our society, I could come up with a similar anecdote about how some member of any group wants all members of some other group to die. (I think that this involves Freudian death drive and its rise in our society, but that is going far from the point.)
The point is that Wolf writes books that want to convince readers about societal narratives based on flimsy evidence: so does Klein. It's possible to do this well or badly: Klein's description of why anti-vaxxing as a gateway to rightism became prevalent among "body people" (people who work on individual body improvement such as trainers, supplement providers etc.) is a brilliant set of observations that combine cultural and material analysis in a way that a pro forma "petit bourgeois are right wing" would not. But doing it well is not in some ways a large difference from doing it badly.
Am I mischaracterizing Klein's body of work? I should mention that this is the only book of hers that I've read. I heard about _No Logo_ a while after it was written and my response was an annoyed "read some Baudrillard or something, you can't escape branding by being conspicuously against branding" (something that Klein agrees with in _Doppelganger_) and when I heard about _This Changes Everything_ my response was that people who think that capitalism depends on a single commodity have had a bad run and that a green capitalism in which fossil fuels were eliminated and yet every renewable power plant and large battery array was mysteriously owned by investors so that energy was not free was perfectly possible. But I haven't read these books and I may be doing her general work a disservice.
II. What is a Usable Past?
Now I come to the more serious critique of this work. _Doppelganger_ references among much else a "usable past", an idea which I wish that leftism had never picked up on. What makes a usable past? Retelling past events in a different way to make a narrative that gives someone a foundational feeling that they can build on is something that can be done by any politics. The current right-wing narrative is full of obvious scientific and historical falsehoods such as vaccines having extreme bad effects, Great Replacement theory, and so on. Do these falsehoods make it not usable? No. A settler colonialist story has proven to be extremely usable throughout American history: people are not looking for scientific truth but instead something that justifies an elevated positional status in society.
What is Naomi Klein's politics? She doesn't forthrightly describe it at the beginning of the book, but it becomes clear that it's a fairly standard democratic socialism. That is not a usable past. Democratic socialism has died out everywhere: its advocates will of course say that it is far different from the authoritarian socialism of the USSR but others of course disagree. The USSR took over about a third of the world and then died the most ignominious death possible: not through war or civil war or even really revolution but mostly through a tired sense that no one actually supported it. State socialism survives as the authoritarian socialism of China (with its leader for life) and in various European social-democratic-influenced states whose policies are now neoliberal like any other Western state.
Klein references the core of why her politics is supposed to be preferable through the old "socialism of fools" idea. Playing on the similarity of the words conspiracy and capitalism, she writes that teaching people about capitalism gives people a real sense of how the world works, and without that they make up conspiracy theories to explain what is happening to them. I'm an anti-capitalist, so of course I'm inclined to agree, but really this doesn't reckon with the disaster that the left's attachment to Marxism and Marxist categories has been. The story of how Marxist change is supposed to happen has proven to be just as fake as the right wing conspiracist one.
Why is this? Again, I have my own ideas: surplus value has been defined by Marxists in a tautological way but in a general sense I think it's apparent that surplus value is ecological, always was, and that proles have no world historical role as such, so the whole "scientific" basis of scientific socialism is flatly wrong. Again, this is beside the point: the point is that people have been treating the "capitalism is a real, scientific description so our story is better" as an argument for leftism for a long time but the story has not worked.
III. Do the particular beliefs of leftism matter?
A strength of the book is that Klein agrees that people, even petit b, suffer in our society and seek reasons that explain their suffering and give them a potential way out. There was a very annoying recent moment on left social media where people would cite someone on the right saying or doing something racist and scornfully say that this disproved any suggestion that economic problems under liberalism led to fascism, which of course they do. The problem is that she calls on science -- a science that left usable pasts do not notably participate in -- as the measure of what makes some stories good and some not.
As an anarchist, I think that our stories are better because of moral or ethical reasons and have to be forthrightly presented that way. I see that some people find their deepest meaning in life, their greatest sense of joy and fulfillment, in being genocidaires. You can't really say that this is bad because genocide involves false beliefs, because all of our pasts involve false beliefs: it has to be because genocide is wrong.
Anarchism opposes hierarchy and therefore is more than leftist anti-capitalism: it also includes opposition to all of the failures of state socialism. In this opposition it includes racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and other forms that are only uneasily theorized as related to capitalism but that leftists reject in any case, as well as some things such as democratic elections of representatives or executives, which are used to justify capitalism in contemporary states but which leftists still generally like.
Klein includes a generic appeal to the left not to be sectarian and not to tear each other down towards the end of her book. All right. But this doesn't mean that we should adopt a belief in scientism that has failed us for a century. Moral consistency and clarity does not appeal to everyone but it is a better base for a path forwards than repeating the mistakes of the past.
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