Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Forget Second Life...

Here's the Fourth World.

It's been said that poststructuralism, considered in historical context, which is to say as a product of the euphoria and disillusionment that was 1968, wasn't merely a retreat from the straightforwardly emancipatory earlier forms of critical theory, but was an attempt to rethink emancipation itself. Exploding onto the intellectual scene in the late '60s and early '70s, poststructuralists rejected the (inherently oppressive) metanarratives of theories like Marxism and wanted instead to "open up a space" of plural, decentered, multiple, or constantly destabilized "subject-positions." During the Cold War, this is as close to utopian as most wised-up progressive intellectuals were willing to get.

OK, that sounds fine on paper -- but what would it look and feel like to be a non-self-identical subject? And what would this "space" be like? It's always a mistake to seek the answer to such quotidian questions in the groves of academe, or in highbrow literature or art. Usually, whenever such concepts are being debated by highbrows, simultaneously a lowbrow writer or artist (by which I don't mean an insensitive dolt, but rather a writer or artist who toils, often brilliantly, in a lowbrow, marginalized medium) is already giving the very same concepts a test-drive -- in a detective novel, for example, or a sci-fi movie.

In the case of poststructuralism, from 1970-71 the great Jack "King" Kirby -- the artist, when he was at Marvel Comics, for such titles as "The Fantastic Four," and "The X-Men" -- wrote and drew three wild new titles for DC that chronicled the struggle between the godlike inhabitants of a utopian planet, New Genesis, and the demonic denizens of a dystopian planet, Apokolips, over our own planet... and, at the same time, explored constantly destabilized "subject-positions" (not that he would have put it that way).

In "The New Gods," Kirby detailed the exploits of Orion, a New Genesis godling who doesn't realize he's actually a native of Apokolips; "Mister Miracle," meanwhile, concerned the adventures of Scott Free, an Apokolips refugee who doesn't realize he's a New Genesis godling. Kirby's "The Forever People" followed the efforts of a group of New Genesis youth who are able to summon/swap places with a hero, the Infinity-Man. Finally, Kirby also took over a lame DC title, "Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen," and sent Olsen to investigate a far-out island commune called Habitat -- a kind of midpoint between the Fourth World and Earth, and a quasi-utopian temporary autonomous zone in which non-self-identical subjects can rub shoulders.

Do you buy any of that? It doesn't matter, as long as you buy Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, volume 1, newly published by DC in glorious color. It will blow your poststructuralist mind.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:04 PM

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