A Theory of Justice

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I won’t pretend to have read this cover to cover or have been able to follow every winding turn of the argumentation, not least because it doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion in the way something like Hobbes’s Leviathan does. Rawls helpfully points out the most salient bits in his introduction, and this does feel like a treasure trove that is to be dipped into repeatedly.

There is a lot going on here. The principles themselves are more radical than Rawls’s reputation as an establishment figure would suggest, and are the most valuable and influential bit to get your head around. The justification underlying them (the famous original position and veil of ignorance) is quite mad when you get into the analytical weeds, but as a thought experiment is interesting, and shares with the utilitarian dispassionate “view of the universe” an attempt to reason from a perspective beyond personal interests and biases. It is something we should all consider at least a little in our attempts to figure out these big questions of justice, fairness and what’s right. The idea of reflective equilibrium seems to me to be an invitation to engage in circular thinking, but I fully accept that I just might not understand it.

I do know a little bit about David Hume and Adam Smith’s ideas, and have to say Rawls’s depiction of them as utilitarians is deeply strange. But he’s a philosopher, not a historian. The way prior thinkers are twisted to prefigure his theory is amusing, but ultimately endearing. At one point he says that the original position is such a basic concept that loads of other people would have thought it up before, which is laughable . In this dense book you find your entertainment where you can.

View all my reviews

Capitalist Realism

It’s an audacious rhetorical move to blame the failure to conceive of a realistic alternative to capitalism on capitalism itself, although in fairness Mark Fisher doesn’t absolve the anti-capitalist movement of blame either. Fisher’s aim here is to give an account of how the spectrum of political possibility shrunk in the 80s and 90s to exclude alternatives to capitalism, and also identify areas where the workings of capitalism become absurd and unrealistic, as a way to wedge open new possibilities. The second effort is less successful than the first, mainly because there is already a well-established understanding of what “market failure” is and the need for regulation and state provision to correct it, which Fisher doesn’t engage with at all. The problem may be that in adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s expansive definition of capitalism as this all-encompassing and mutable system, the problem becomes so ill-defined as to be impossible to convincingly argue against. Capitalism becomes the evil animating all other evils, and if you don’t already subscribe to this demonology, this book will not persuade you.

Which is a shame, because the two issues Fisher investigates are important. His account of mental health, and particularly the role of social media in making it worse, is prescient. And the distortions created by targets in public services is now well accepted. But politics can confront these problems without demanding the end of capitalism (or to put it in Fisher’s terms, capitalism can metabolise these critiques and neuter them).

It is very telling to me that at the end of the book, Fisher argues for the resuscitation of the concept of the “general will” – as if the conflicts in society can all be resolved if such a thing can be found. In fact, Rousseau, who first suggested the idea, thought it could only be realised in very small republics where everyone knew each other personally, and large states would have to settle for Hobbesian oppression to crush the clashing interests of individuals. In the very last pages Fisher proposes that the question of collective management is to be resolved “practically and experimentally”, when arguably the failure of collective management in the 20th century is the single greatest cause for alternatives to capitalism to appear so unrealistic in the 21st. With that short aside, Fisher skips over the main issue, which is that anti-capitalists have failed to come up with practical way to collectively manage our resources that can convince a large enough majority to try the experiment again.

44 Books for 2018

Until October this year I was able to borrow books from Senate House Library, which is one of my favourite buildings in London and a superb academic library. I tried to make the most of it, although apart from a few more accessible history and politics tomes I mostly gravitated towards my usual nerdy interests (Tolkien, anime etc). That accounts for the sheer amount of non-fiction I got through this year – stuff I read in the hope it would make me wiser but then almost immediately forgot. I've determined to read more novels in 2019 – at least the texture of a story stays with you a little bit more, even if the content evaporates.

I tried to think of intelligent things to say about comics this year, and although I managed three columns for the London Graphic Novel Network, I'm not convinced I succeeded. It's a bit of a struggle at the moment to find creators to get excited about, but perhaps that's just a failure on my part to be more curious. I'm hoping that re-reading some of the books that got me into the medium in the first place will kick-start my interest in the new year.

I keep track of the things I read on Goodreads, although I've yet to find the will to do more than assign stars to reviews there. Apart from the comics, the links below are just to snippets I thought were interesting and worth reproducing on the blog, or pretty pics I've taken of the covers to put on Instagram.

Tim Shipman - Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
Tim Bale - The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron [link]
Harriet Harman - A Woman's Work [link]
Philip Cowley, Rob Ford (eds.) - Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box: 50 Things You Need to Know About British Elections [link]
Simone de Beauvoir - The Ethics of Ambiguity [link]
Sarah Bakewell - At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Anthony Gottlieb - The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy [link]
Declan Kiberd - Ulysses And Us: The Art Of Everyday Living [link]
Dennis C. Rasmussen - The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought [link]
Tom Shippey - J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
Susan J. Napier - Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation [link]
Adam Roberts - Science Fiction
Mark Fisher - The Weird and the Eerie [link]
Pauline Kael - The Age of Movies: Selected Writings [link]
John Mullan - How Novels Work
Paul Addison - Churchill: The Unexpected Hero [link]

Peter Clarke - Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist

Maggie Nelson - The Argonauts [link]
Harold Bloom - The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry [link]
Sigmund Freud - Civilisation and its Discontents

M. John Harrison - Viriconium
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - The Key [link]

Raymond Chandler - Farewell, My Lovely
Anaïs Nin - Little Birds

J.M. Coetzee - Disgrace
Margaret Atwood - Surfacing

Yasunari Kawabata - House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

John le Carré - The Constant Gardener
Norman Mailer - An American Dream
Chris Mullin - A Very British Coup [link]
Various - Inside And Other Short Fiction: Japanese Women By Japanese Women

Harvey Pekar - American Splendour [link]
Edward Ross - Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film [link]
Meg-John Barker,  Julia Scheele - Queer: A Graphic History [link]
Pat Mills / Greg Staples / Clint Langley - Slaine: Lord of Misrule
Garth Ennis / Facundo Percio - Caliban [link]
David Lapham / German Nobile - Caligula vol. 1 [link]
Billy Tucci - Shi: The Way of the Warrior
Randy Queen - Darkchylde
David Wohl / David Finch - Aphrodite IX: Time Out of Mind
Brandon Choi / Jim Lee / J. Scott Campbell – Gen¹³
Fabien Nury / Mathieu Lauffray / Mario Alberti / Zhang Xiaoyu / Tirso - The Chronicles of Legion vols 1-4
Hiroaki Samura - Blade of the Immortal Omnibus 1
D.J. Bryant - Unreal City

"Fatally estranged from the transcendental difference that grounds human identity, the transgendered subject is barely human, condemned forever to "idiotic masturbatory enjoyment" in lieu of the "true love" that renders us human. For, as Žižek holds – in homage to Baidou – "it is love, the encounter of the Two, which 'transubstantiates' the idiotic masturbatory enjoyment into an event proper."

These are the voices that pass for radicality in our times. Let us leave them to their love, their event proper." – Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

"Just as the infinity spread out before my gaze contracts above my head into a blue ceiling, so my transcendence heaps up in the distance the opaque thickness of the future; but between sky and earth there is a perceptual field with its forms and colours; and it is in the interval which separates me today from an unforeseeable future that there are meanings and ends toward which to direct my acts." - Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

"There is no authentic human essence to be realised, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organic wholeness to be achieved. Alienation is a mode of enablement, and humanity is an incomplete vector of transformation. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time [...] This is a project of self-realisation, but one without a pre-established endpoint. It is only through undergoing the process of revision and construction that humanity can come to know itself." - Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

46 books for 2016

My annual list of things I've read grows longer again this year, partly because I continue to abjure television and get my fill of visual storytelling through comics. The reason for the preference is mundane – I spend too much of my day in front of a screen and prefer to avoid it in my free time. I may well be missing out. Given the stranglehold superheroes have on the comics medium, and how everyone keeps talking about a golden age of television, my guess is that comics in aggregate may well be less innovative or interesting.

My comics consumption has been further encouraged by my agreeing to contribute columns to the London Graphic Novel Network, an initiative designed to get people to take advantage of the great selection of comics offered by London libraries. I owe my comics enthusiasm entirely to libraries (they are otherwise a very expensive form of entertainment), so this was a no-brainer for me. Links to my bits for the site are collected here.

I've also read quite a lot of Japanese fiction this year – my partner is Japanese, so it has been a way of getting to know the culture in which she grew up. It's a bit of a turnaround for me, as I'd previously avoided reading literature in translation, assuming that too much of the author's technique was lost in the process. I still think that's the case, but what you gain is still a pretty direct insight into a foreign society and history, which is hugely valuable in itself.

A lot of the non-fiction is drawn from recommendations at work (Haidt, Moretti), or following up things from the MA I did six years ago (Ryan, Tully, Geuss).

Ordered (sort of) by subject then preference. Links in the comics section go to things I've written (mostly for the LGGN), otherwise they are quotes I've posted here as I've been reading. I keep track of all this stuff on Goodreads here.

Richard Ellmann - James Joyce [link]
Alan Ryan - On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present [link] [link]
Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Ian Buruma - The Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture
James Tully - An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Richard Vinen - Thatcher's Britain: The politics and social upheaval of the 1980s
Enrico Moretti - The New Geography of Jobs
Gareth Stedman Jones - Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
Michel Foucault - Interviews & Other Writings 1977-84 [link] [link]
Simon Parker - Taking Power Back: Putting people in charge of politics
Hugh Kennedy - The Great Arab Conquests [link]

Ben Thompson - Seven Years of Plenty: A Handbook of Irrefutable Pop Greatness, 1991-1998
J. Hoberman - Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?
Jessica Hopper - The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
Raymond Geuss - History and Illusion in Politics [link]

James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ryū Murakami - Almost Transparent Blue
Yasunari Kawabata - Thousand Cranes
Mari Akasaka - Vibrator

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - Seven Japanese Tales
Ryū Murakami - Piercing
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - Some Prefer Nettles [link]
Yōko Ogawa - Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales

Kieron Gillen / Jamie McKelvie - Phonogram [link]
Grant Morrison / Chris Weston / Gary Erskine - The Filth [link]
Warren Ellis / Jason Howard - Trees, Vol. 1: In Shadow [link]
Hayao Miyazaki - Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Greg Rucka / Michael Lark / Santi Arcas - Lazarus
Matt Fraction / Christian Ward - Ody-C vols. 1 & 2 [link]
Gail Simone / Walter Geovani - Red Sonja [link]
Kazuo Koike / Ryōichi Ikegami - Offered
Magnus - The 100 Pills
Paul Pope - 100% / Heavy Liquid [link]
Jonathan Hickman / Ryan Bodenheim - Red Mass for Mars
Jonathan Luna / Sarah Vaughn - Alex + Ada [link]
Kieron Gillen / Ryan Kelly / Jordie Bellaire - Three [link]
Matt Fraction / Howard Chaykin - Satellite Sam vols. 1 & 2 [link]
Ben Gijsemans - Hubert [link]

Kentaro Miura - Berserk vol. 1

Sean McKeever / Brian Fraim - The Waiting Place vol. 1

Kelly Sue DeConnick / Emma Ríos - Pretty Deadly, Vol. 1: The Shrike

Rick Remender / Wes Craig / Lee Loughridge - Deadly Class, Vol. 1: Reagan Youth

Mark Waid / Minck Oosterveer - The Unknown

Grant Morrison / Yanick Paquette / Nathan Fairbairn - Wonder Woman: Earth One

Bryan Lee O'Malley - Seconds

"One difficulty in understanding just what Marx thought a society based on rational cooperation might look like is his insistence that there would be no sacrifice of individuality when we all contributed as we should to the productive efforts of us all. The thought seems to be that we so internalize the desire to do what we rationally must do for the benefit of the whole community that we feel no tension between our desires and the community's needs. This is either implausible or alarming; it is at least very hard to believe that work as the free expression of our creative natures will always coincide with work as our optimal contribution to the rationally organised productive mechanism that underpins our society.

...

"Full socialism imagines a form of collective economic rationality that makes sense only with an omniscient and omnipotent directing intelligence at the heart of the economy, and imagines that intelligence replacing the coercive apparatus of law and government; that comes close to self-contradiction, and if it did not, it would still presuppose an unlikely degree of spontaneous consensus on the merits of a central plan" - Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present

"...whereas Aristotle thought man was a political animal intended by nature to live in a polis, Hobbes was a thoroughly modern thinker who repudiated the idea that nature had any purposes for us whatever, and emphasised that we were driven into political society. The consequence is that for Hobbes it is no loss if we live wholly private lives and take no interest in politics, while for Aristotle it would be a truncated existence suited to women and slaves but not to citizens" - Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present

"The real difficulty with anarchism is not with its philosophical, but with its real-life form. It is not that people are convinced of the philosophical validity of arguments for the obligation to obey the state, but rather that no one really believes we can now do without something like the state structure. Or rather people imagine that the attempt to do away with the state would lead in one of two directions. The first possibility would be a form of society that would be highly dangerous, unpredictable, and insecure, and would lack many of the economic advantages developed industrial societies have. The only alternative would be a society that would be highly repressive because organised into claustrophobic small groups, and in which one would have the unpleasant sense of living in the unventilated atmosphere of a Jane Austen novel all the time." - Reymond Geuss, 'The Legitimacy of the State', History and Illusion in Politics

"Actually, I think I have real difficulty in experiencing pleasure. I think that pleasure is a very difficult behaviour. It's not as simple as that [Laughter] to enjoy one's self. And I must say that's my dream. I would like and I hope I'll die of an overdose [Laughter] of pleasure of any kind. Because I think it's really difficult and I always have the feeling that I do not feel the pleasure, the complete total pleasure and, for me, it's related to death.

"...I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn't survive it. I would die. I'll give you a clearer and simpler example. Once I was struck by a car in the street. I was walking. And for maybe two seconds I had the impression that I was dying and it was really a very, very intense pleasure. The weather was wonderful. It was 7 o'clock during the summer. The sun was descending. The sky was very wonderful and blue and so on. It was, it still is now, one of my best memories. [Laughter]

"There is also the fact that some drugs are really important for me because they are the mediation to those incredibly intense joys that I am looking for and that I am not able to experience, to afford by myself. It's true that a glass of wine, of good wine, old and so on, may be enjoyable but it's not for me. A pleasure must be something incredibly intense." - Michel Foucault, 'The Minimalist Self', Interviews and other writings 1977-1984

Enigma

Although it's much loved by people like Grant Morrison and Kieron Gillen, I found Enigma a bit underwhelming when I finally got around to reading it. It's grouped alongside Watchmen as a superhero deconstruction job, but whereas Alan Moore was channeling Nietzsche to destabilise the ethical certainties underpinning the genre, Milligan takes an existentialist approach. The Enigma's all-powerful consciousness develops in a universe he finds absurd and meaningless. His response is to meet absurdity with absurdity, girding his environment with the plot structures gleaned from an obscure, hastily written superhero comic. But the plan backfires – the violence he unleashes fuels a supervillain that he will be unable to defeat. He has to change tack, writing over the mind of a regular shmoe called Michael Smith to make him love a real person as much as he loved superheroes as a child. Milligan ends the book before the final showdown, so we don't know whether the ploy succeeds. Instead the focus is on the act of narration itself, and indirectly on the role of culture in shaping our (moral) selves – if only we'd listen.

But actually, the most powerful development in the book is Michael's abandonment of a 'straight' – in every sense of the word – existence. The fact of his favourite superhero stepping out into the real world triggers a wholesale collapse in the parameters that have governed his life. Michael leaves his job, girlfriend and city. The Enigma transforms his sexuality. The most powerful moment in the book is when he is given the option of going back – of becoming a straight, regular ol' member of society again. And he doesn't capitulate: "It doesn't matter how or why I had those experiences, whether it was something within me or you changing me... This is how I am now. And I like myself this way."

This rather lovely interview with the creators highlights the loose feel of the book. The artist was learning on the job, and some of the early issues are extremely scratchy and impressionistic. Milligan also seems to be winging it – I wouldn't be surprised if the idea for the twist at the end only occurred to him mid-way through the series.* Rather than wanting more structure, I almost wished there were less. My fave Millian piece is probably Screemer, a comic that gets close to Bulletproof Coffin-levels of inscrutability. That vertigo-inducing (pun-intended) fall into the strange is tempered here by the need to comply with the strictures of the superhero genre.



* Rather embarrassingly, this blog was tweeted at the creators by a book group as a "review", and Milligan has made clear that this was not in fact the case: "no payoffs were made up half way through". Apologies for my suggestion to the contrary – I made it because the idea that the narrator was somehow embedded in the story is introduced half way through. In any case, it wasn't intended as a slur – I liked the loose feel of the book.

All-Star Superman

Realised I haven't written anything on the blog in a while. I have been participating in a few London Graphic Novel Network discussions, which have been a lot of fun. The convo on All-Star Superman was particularly interesting. My contribution is below – mainly fleshing out the stuff I wrote back in 2011, but interesting for spurring this take from David Allison over at the Mindless Ones...

Not sure if Morrison uses the analogy himself, but superheroes have been described as modern myths. Just realised while writing this that the Roger Lancelyn Green retellings of Robin Hood, King Arthur etc I read as a child rather nicely highlight the proto-superheroic nature of the source material – the same cast of characters in the same setting going off to have adventures and coming together in world-historical crossovers. My sense is that Morrison is in that myths and legends headspace. For example the second issue feels to me like a retelling of the Bluebeard fairy-tale (albeit with a benevolent twist). Likewise issue 5 seems to have a Dante's Inferno flex – Kent being shown around hell by a demented Virgil before being carted off by an scary S&M Beatrice (or maybe that's just me seeing things that aren't there).

The point of that simulation in issue 10 was to show that if Superman didn't exist we would have to invent him, and in fact have been inventing different versions of him (e.g. that panel of Nietzsche's Superman) throughout history. The premise being that people create their gods as symbols of what they themselves aspire to be (some more German philosophy about that here). My sense is that there's a religion to science move in the final issue – Lois believes that one day Superman will return, while Leo Quintum goes off to try and solve the problems of the universe on his own. Maybe Quintum isn't just Luthor (first time I've seen that theory and like it a lot!), but the Superman of the future. That is to say: the representation of our collective 21st century aspirations.

'The same poverty then extends over human life as extends over the countryside if the weather is overcast. Overcast weather, when the sun is filtered by the clouds and the play of light goes dim, appears to "reduce things to what they are". The error is obvious: What is before me is never anything less than the universe; the universe is not a thing and I am not at all mistaken when I see its brilliance in the sun. But if the sun is hidden I more clearly see the barn, the field, the hedgerow. I no longer see the splendor of the light that played over the barn; rather I see this barn or this hedgerow like a screen between the universe and me.' - Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share

Promethea

Reading Promethea, a slight narrative weighed down past breaking point by fantastically illustrated lectures, makes you realise how didactic a lot of Moore's work can be – from the treatise on anarchy in V for Vendetta to the coach-ride through history in From Hell. I don't have a problem with that necessarily. Part of my job involves thinking about how to express complex ideas visually, so I'm all for comics taking up the same challenge. My problem is with what Moore is saying.

Little of it is outright wrong, although some of the kookiest bits are hard to stomach. At one point Moore talks about our DNA somehow 'projecting' the idea of the double helix into our brains. He also gives serious credence to the notion that our consciousness developed as a result of taking psychedelic drugs. This is mad hippy uncle stuff, and it's difficult to forgive.

But most of the lectures are about a way of looking at the world – one which I don't find particularly helpful. Moore divides reality into the material and the immaterial, the latter is the domain of the imagination and it bears some similarity to Plato's Realm of the Forms. Like Plato, Moore says that "the worlds inside and outside us have the same structure, the same pattern". This assumption underpins the Republic, and it is entirely groundless. There is no reason to suppose that the ordering of the virtuous mind somehow corresponds to the ordering of the virtuous polity.

Moore doesn't go that far. Instead he is at pains to explain how ideas can transform the 'real' world: "changing the world is like changing your mind. It's just that matter's thicker and more viscous than imagination, so it takes longer". But Moore's idea of a shared imagination is selective: there is "no tax, no property" in the Immateria, even though these things are ideas too. Likewise, war and conflict are the result of a failure of imagination, they are not a part of it. Moore's Realm of the Forms only contains those things Moore sees as virtuous. Nietzsche's notion of the inescapable conflict between human beings and their ethical systems, which powered the moral universe in Watchmen, is abandoned.

The cosmology in Promethea is very different. Moore sees the workings of 'magic' in the creation of the universe – noting (correctly) that the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity all appear finely tuned to support the development of habitable planets and intelligent life. This is a modern variant of the teleological argument popular at the turn of the 18th century and demolished by Hume in the Discourses on Natural Religion. Moore also insists that science can have nothing to say about human consciousness and the imagination, despite the efforts of cognitive science to do just that – an endeavour often self-consciously extending the 'science of man' project initiated by the Scottish Enlightenment (I am a partisan, if you can't already tell).

Moore's vaguely defined apocalypse involves abandoning the material plane entirely. This does not actually happen at the end of Promethea – humanity pretty much continues as before, conflicts and all. There is one interesting suggestion as to what this rapture might look like, but it's in a throwaway reference to "virtual space". If technology eventually allows us to abandon our bodies entirely, that would involve a radical transformation of our consciousness – a real end of history. But this is not a future Moore is interested in charting. Instead, his transfigured humanity is a little more open to the kinds of spiritual esoterica Moore finds attractive, but otherwise unchanged.

All of which is to say again what I said about From Hell: when it comes down to it, I would pick Nietzsche over Plato. But the damage caused by all this wooly thinking is so much more evident in Promethea, because the lectures are the only reason for reading. Plot and character are sacrificed in order to make room for Moore's philosophy, and if you can't buy his theories, important character beats like Sophie's reconciliation with her mother fall flat. There is little left to admire beyond the superhuman efforts of J. H. Williams III to illustrate Moore's musings. He does them far more justice than they deserve.

The Invisibles

I just checked and it's been five years since I read the first volume of The Invisibles. I picked up the rest of the series recently and started without going back to the beginning, and relaxed into it a lot easier this time around. It's a book you learn how to read, and I mostly did so by learning to let go of the need to make sense of everything. Having finished the series, I only have a vague idea of how the plot all fits together, and more importantly, no great desire to expend the mental energy to work it out. Warren Ellis, in his blurb for the final book, describes the series as like pop music: "about everything and nothing". The meaning is in the moment, and doesn't last much beyond it.

The series is built on an everlasting battle between order and chaos, and its evident which side Grant Morrison is on. Not being the impressionable undergrad the series is (overtly, judging by the end of the penultimate issue) aiming for, I found the anarchist politics in the book unmoving. To borrow John Gray borrowing Isaiah Berlin, liberty and security (more mundane terms for chaos and order) are both precious but also both incommensurable. They clash frequently, and the balance between them is the job of politics (rather than philosophy) to resolve. None of that subtlety is present in The Invisibles, but then Morrison's anarchy is less about the political and more about the personal.

The series champions individualism more than anything – the ability to author your sense of self, frequently against the prevailing culture you find yourself in. Conformity is a burden to be liberated from. The evil Archons are "only all the things you left outside when you were building your little house called me". This line could refer to the social norms cast off as you construct your subjectivity, but the representation of the Archons as Lovecraftian monsters adds a more interesting gloss. A self made without reference to the world around you ("don't believe nothing you hear, trust what you know") is in some way ungrounded, a void. And reality can come to bite you as a result.

These ambiguities are rarely dwelt on throughout the series. One of the most interesting developments is King Mob's growing discomfort with the way his strong character can dominate over others, undermining his anarchist principles. This is ripe territory for a book about anarchism to explore, since one of the basic criticisms of the idea is that human beings create informal hierarchies even when formal ones are stripped away – so that even radically equal communities often end up with the more vocal and assertive out on top. However, King Mob's struggles with this dilemma (and his dependence on violence) are only briefly dealt with.

Likewise, Ragged Robin's anarchist ideals are also shaken by her masochistic sexuality – the discovery that she enjoys being dominated by King Mob in bed. Again, this would have been fascinating to delve into. Is such a sexuality socially constructed by a patriarchal society and therefore to be repudiated, or is such repression incompatible with a liberated spirit? Can a moral defence of BDSM be developed (that it's about trust rather than power, for example) or is that unnecessary? Morrison chooses to deal with Robin's conflict through metaphor (a telepathic war with Mr Quimper) where much of the nuance of the issue is lost.

Morrison states at the end a conviction that "we made gods and jailers because we felt small and ashamed and alone". The line rings truer for gods than for jailers, which underlines the way Morrison's liberty is personal rather than political. As an aside, good luck trying to explain the origin of justice with reference to human psychology, I think you'll always get different answers. Adam Smith for example thought it was linked to a sense of resentment. David Hume probably had the right idea all along in seeing justice as established by convention and as a result of its utility.

But if Morrison commits to renouncing the moral and political institutions that structure our lives as members of society, he also cleverly undercuts himself with the final pun on "sentence". His book is another exhortation, another imposition on the reader's sense of self. And the reader is free to spurn its sentence.

Which is exactly what I plan to do.

Sandcastle

The artist of this French comic gives a good interview here, talking about the Twilight Zone / "cruel fairy tale" nature of the story and how the comic form allows you to represent sped-up time better than films (which require naturalism-undermining CGI) or prose (where the pacing is slower). Should be said that the artistic challenge of drawing rapidly-ageing bodies is met pretty well, although I didn't always like the cartoony artwork, which over-emphasised facial features in order to make the characters clearly distinguishable.

The interview didn't touch on the rather interesting cold open the story has: an aerial shot of the costal landscape, plunging deep into the sea water, through an underwater cave and up to reveal a placid shore. In a way quite cinematic, in that it's very much about the movement of "the camera". But if it's true that CGI is an imposition on live-action, then the effect would be (slightly) different if it was on film. I suspect CGI may be good (and ubiquitous) enough for audiences to not experience it as an imposition if it appeared in an otherwise quite naturalistic setting. But if I'm wrong, comics still do have a niche to fill in this area.

More interesting than that is the symbolism which accompanies the introduction to the geography of the story, particularly the underwater cave section where the reader undergoes a kind of birth: through the watery hole and up for air, the path of life stretching away on the shore. This is followed by a sequence in which a mysterious man on the cliffs notices a woman on the beach taking off her clothes and jumping into the sea: a kind of sexual awakening metaphor. He walks away, but the final sequence is of him turning back to see her floating on the seawater, and then looking down in resignation. Later we learn that the woman is dead. So we go through a kind of birth-life-death cycle right at the beginning of the story. The silence of the images also establishes the right eerie tone, setting up a nice contrast with the buzzing activity of the arriving holiday-makers who are thrown into this creepy setting and situation.

The mystery is never explained, although a science fiction author advances a couple of theories. It's a fable – something underlined by the bedtime story told at the end about a king who builds a fortress against death which only serves to cut him off from his family. A link is drawn with the obsessive sandcastle-building the doctor succumbs to. He forgets wife and children in the pursuit of transient and ephemeral life projects. However, some projects are more ephemeral than others. The bedtime story includes the king looking over to a distant mountain and realising that he has never touched a snowflake. Similarly, one of the children regrets that he did not try to escape by climbing the cliffs when he was younger and healthier. I think the creators are trying to valorise projects which seek an understanding of and settlement with the natural world. But this is motivated by the same impulses as the need to build castles of sand (those unphilosophical castles in the air castigated by the Scottish Enlightenment), a body of knowledge not secured to and tested by the experience of nature. The final scene is of the surviving member of the group tapping out the beginnings of another sandcastle – obviously not learning the mistakes of his forebears.

"It is not that we worship Aphrodite. If we did, we should fear these make-believes as a too probable cause of her wrath... The truth may rather be that these things reveal a society in which sexual passion has so far decayed as to have become no longer a god, as for the Greeks, or a devil, as for the early Christians, but a toy: a society where the instinctive desire to propagate has been weakened by a sense that life, as we have made it, is not worth living, and where our deepest wish is to have no posterity" - R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art

"O voluptuous young women, give us your bodies as much and as often as you please! Fuck, divert yourselves, but shy away from love. Amuse yourselves, sate your physical passions, but spurn the pursuit of love and loving. To languish in sighs and tears, to waste time writing billet douxs, is not the true way; fucking should be your god, to fuck as often and with as many men as you like, refusing enslavement by one person. Bound to one man, you would be prevented from giving yourself to others – a fatal deprivation. Nature created woman for all mankind. Mindful of this, let them surrender joyously to those who desire them: never mistresses, always whores; scorning love, worshipping pure pleasure. Then they will know only roses in life, and scatter only sweet flowers as they go." - The Marquis de Sade, Philosophy In The Boudoir

El Topo

Jodorowsky is full of bullshit, but that doesn't mean his work is worthless. I loved The Incal not because it made any kind of sense (because it totally doesn't). It's a journey over destination kinda deal. Seriously. That comic was inspired by the tarot, and it works as a tarot deck – a heap of symbolic images to which YOU supply the meaning. Similarly with this film – you don't watch it, it watches you. El Topo mashes together myth and pulp into these fantastical and allusive scenarios. And (very important, this) it's a compelling watch. Narrative drive is created not through a central mystery or problem, but by a long series of small set-ups and pay-offs confronted by the protagonist, one symbol, challenge or character replacing another.

The jumbled mess that spools out is gathered together at the beginning by the idea of 'The Mole' tunneling through the darkness and being blinded by the light: a version of Plato's allegory of the cave in which the form of the good remains inaccessible to humanity. The film is divided into two halves, like the Bible, and the first half is pretty Old Testament. The Mole and a naked boy (Abe and Isaac?) abandon childish things and walk into a violent world full of freaks and gangsters, where eyes are taken for eyes in silent inevitability. You can't rely on anyone in this state of nature, as the boy finds out. The Mole's superpowers keep his new girlfriend Mara alive, but she wants more – the best. The Mole cheats his way through the challenges and surpasses the master gunslingers, heart turning to metal in the process. Meanwhile, Mara's narcissism, rebuffed, turns into masochism, and The Mole is crucified and abandoned.

Like the New Testament, the second half of the film is more boring and easier to parse. Jodo's use of homosexuality / disability / cross-dressing to suggest deviance in the first half may look suspicious, but the mutant villagers in the second I think show that his attitude towards 'the Other' is one of sympathy and delight rather than disgust. Indeed, the romance between the re-born, resurrected El Topo and his new girlfriend is really quite sweet. The decadence of the village looks to me like shots taken at American culture – racism, religious enthusiasm, middle class hypocrisy. El Topo turns into an angel of death at the end ushering in the apocalypse. But rather than reaching an endpoint, the story starts again – its circularity calling attention to its artificiality. Mankind's spiritual yearnings satisfied by tales told over and over again.

Don't know how much of that was in Jodorowsky's head, but the point is: IT DOESN'T MATTER