Found a really nice polemic from 2005 about Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a product of bourgeois-settler media and imperialism. If any combination of these topics interest you, I recommend checking it out.
Feel free to share your thoughts below!
It's Only A TV Show
How much is Buffy to blame for the revival of the fascist mood in the US? How much credit can Buffy take for the ease with which the regime carried out the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans and continues to carry out the conquest and destruction of Iraq and Haiti, with the consent of the Buffy-consuming young media clerks?
Buffy and Orientalism: what we the audience, and ’we’ the audience’s representatives within the fiction(the slayer’s human constituency or race/species flock), know about vampires comes from the slayers and the vampirists. There is no hint of hesitation about this ‘science’, and science in Buffy is openly coterminous with occult knowledge, that is, with the priestly religion of the elect race/species. The ideology of the slayer's clerks is inherently virtuous and divine. There is no scepticism, no suspicion that the scholarship could be fraudulent or flawed, and might indeed be ideology presenting the reality of vampires distortedly or on its head. There is no suspicion that we are being lied to about the slayers and their 'people,' that they are telling us their self-justifying myths, when what really happened is they came, conquered and exterminated the vampires who were just living there, minding their own business, in Massachusettes or Palestine or South Africa; there is no hint that this may be the heroic fable of the cleansing of the vampires being told a hundred years from now by the descendants of the victorious slayers. Although the narrative fits that model and genre more perfectly than any other.
The vampire-scholar, whose job is to assist the vampire killer - just as the Orientalists job at the end of the 18th century was to assist Napoleon’s campaign of conquest, and as Bernard Lewis' job today is to assist in the conquest and domination of the whole 'Arab world' - enjoys an unreflecting cognitive control of the enemy species, which is total and self evidently righteous, just and ‘scientifically neutral.’ The vampire scholars data and his interpretation is always accurate and a tool of power over the object of the science. ‘Knowledge’ of vampires is a precondition of the slaughter of vampires, and indeed scholarship has no other purpose than to facilitate that slaughter; the domination the science of vampires allows is the indispensable weapon deployed against the vampires; the stacked deck of fiction delivers a perfect, flawless and morally unquestionable knowledge - a self justifying symbolic domination, unchallenged because always accurate and always promoting the survival of the threatened human species - self evidently virtuous and justified by the concocted total submission and coherence of the ‘evidence’ and data of vampire existence to the symbolic control of the vampire killers. The latter, the killers, of course conceive themselves, like all genocidaires, as the vampires’ victims, exterminating only in self defence and for their own survival. The authority behind the curtain assures us this perception of the war with the vampires is true.
We may sympathize with and enjoy vampires, in that Orientalist way monsters are made to be enjoyed; we may even occasionally identify with certain conditions they experience, but they remain Other, studied, objectified, defined by their killers as inassimilable to humanity and incompatible with the survival of humanity; the threat they pose to us and to the slayer - our leader and representative and protector - is always intolerable. At the end of the day, genocide is the only practical solution, though it is carried out, as are all genocides, with a heavy heart beneath the gushing, joyful ecstasies of bloodshed, domination and conquest.
Afterthought:
The vampires are the perfect placeholder for current genocidal ideology's needs, which require the entirety of humanity be potentially the objects of genocide. The group requiring extermnation has no constraints with regard to its identification: members don't have to be born into it, or live in a specific place or think a certain way or practise a certain profession. All the enemies of the state can fit into the model - bolsheviks, anarchists, racial inferiors, national enemies. The enemy is freely defined, given new traits and identifying characteristics, at the will of the slayer-scholars. Today, chimères, zarkawians, Sunnis, and 'Chavez loyalists,' yesterday 'Serbs,' tommorrow gays, altermondialistes; the construct is endlessly serviceable specifically for being the maximally flexible 'enemy race' conception possible. Nazis stretched the boundaries of existing 'race' conceptions they inherited; their 'Jews' and 'Bolsheviks' were conceived as a category of a different order from the 'race' concepts inherited from a) 19th century nationalism and b) 19th century colonialism. Buffy's vampires represent a further development in that direction, from which 'liberal discourse' of the political sort takes a step back while the ideology of its phantasy-fiction proceeds forward in the dehumanization of all humanity and the concurrent anthropomorphization of the master race of capital and corporations.
Vampires are in fact 'humanity.' And it is Buffy and posse, who continue to appear human, whose forms conceal their secret identity as references to inhuman, non-human, anti-human powers of the corporate-state.
We can't forget who is bringing the audience the 'message' that is Buffy. Bringing that message to an entranced audience whose critical faculties have been disabled and which is thus ready to imbibe as truth the corporation's image of 'the monstrous,' (your neighbors) and more importantly of the 'human,' that species of thing the survival of which is self-justifying ('Buffy,' a cuddly despot, a brand, a trademark, an industry, an oracular television programme, vehicle for advertising messages as mystical apodictic truths, a seductive lure offering initiation into wisdom/fashion/the illusion of participation in power, high priestess of a genocidal cult, a divinely ordained executioner, and those who serve her).
It is hardly uncommon for Masters to portray themselves as the surpreme ideal versions of those whom they dominate - as demigods say, beautiful human beings but even better - and to portray their slaves as fiends and savages requiring control or extermination.
The bedazzlement effected by the spectacle creates the disoriented condition in which the audience is vulnerable to even the most preposterous propositions regarding itself, regarding humanity; the vampire supernaturalism is so distracting it confuses the audience into supposing the vampire fictions possess a greater fictionality - a greater 'undecidability'- than the 'human' fictions. But a creature with divinely ordained powers and a divinely ordained mission to slaughter vampires with a magic weapon, a thing with the ability to be resurrected from death, is obviously as much a fantastic figment, a mythic beast, a supernatural fiction, as a 'vampire.' Television's endless confusion of plausible and implausible, the pliability of the 'experience of the world' to which the television audience is subjected, the fictionalizing of history and the faux-historicizing of fiction that advertising and newsproduct involves, allows for the successful propagation of the illusion of a hierarchy of mimesis in the Buffyworld which serves an essential propaganda function.
(This is also relying on the Orientalist assumption of the world of clarity and science in which Buffy-like beings dwell, and the mysterious murkiness of the sphere from which threats to that world emerge.)
Thus the flaunted and openly proclaimed fictionality and metaphoric nature of vampires (Other) successfully distracts from and disguises the insidious and deceitful fictionality and metaphoric nature of slayers, ('Us'), of Buffy herself.
But what is 'Buffy'? She is a corporate state masquerading as a petit bourgeois teenager, an 'ordinary teenage girl' (among the weakest figures in the privileged class, but as consumer an essential figure in the maintenance of the status quo); she is a form of domination, authority and power over humanity, anthropomorphized.
Buffy is the monster in Buffy. This is the con which takes in the dupes of the corporate message - again and again, in every advertisement. Falling in love with Buffy is falling in love with, idenitfying with, the self-righteous control and sadism of capital, admiring and desiring to share its prerogative of definition of the other, its power of life and death over the other, the exclusivity of its own right to thrive and survive, the limitless lawlessness and liberty with which it obliterates all that is not useful to it and which does not serve its quest for increased power and the satisfaction of its hunger for 'creative destruction.'
The vampires are, as is traditional in the ideology of the Masters, the corporation's perverted portrait of us. Vampires are beings whose very existence is criminal, that is, larger and larger portions of humanity - 'humanity' as such, with fewer and fewer, more arduously earned exceptions - as portrayed increasingly by Masters and their obedient clerks (Thomas Friedman or Christopher Hitchens for example.) Vampires are humanity from the point of view of capitalists who wish to persuade their collaborators - the minority granted indulgence in exchange for assistance - that humanity has no inalienable right to survive, but indeed must earn its survival through various forms of obedience and usefulness to capital. Opportunities to do so are conceived of as the exercise of magnanimity on the part of capital, which like Buffianity alone enjoys a self-evident, inalienable right to existence and satisfaction.
Perhaps you, today, are not a vampire from the point of view of Master Corporation 'Buffy,' but one issue of the NYTimes will reveal your concealed hideousness and demonic nature and turn you into a member of the menacing horde. The vampires are all of us who refuse to collaborate. Who refuse to worship Buffy, go to the mall, stare at the ads, and assist her genocidal adventures. Vampires are the audience, whose desires and needs and habits the corporation "studies" (market research) and creates (advertising and Buffy) simultaneously. Vampires are not insignificantly at their worst when they are human beings in a position to assert themselves against the annihilating force of 'Buffy' through institutions (legal, religious, political and economic). Vampires who are not yet entirely dispossessed are simply members of the demonic underclass horde who have infiltrated the upper spheres of the world over which Buffy must reign as divine, unchallenged dictator, arbiter of the survival rights of all beings. Without the permission of 'Buffy,' nothing and no one has a right to exist. Vampires are the audience and also the audience's future, as the excess population to which they will be reduced by 'Buffy,' a population criminalized, utterly powerless and propertyless, as in New Orleans - we've seen how well Buffy trained the television audience to believe there were actually rampaging vampires in New Orleans - as in Falluja, or anywhere. Vampires are humanity trying merely to survive and protect itself from 'Buffy', the corporate state, its clerks and its collaborator-consumers, the New World Order (sexy hip consumer/entrepreneur Clintonian version, mutating gradually into holy hell-harrower Bush version). Vampires are the literally demonized protagonists of humanity's desperate, doomed struggle to fend off 'Buffy's' righteous crusade of domination portrayed as liberation, invasion portrayed as the (pre-emptive) repulsion of invasion. 'Buffy' is the loveable action figure of capital, the divine death dealing tyrant imagined as life-giving champion of freedom, so adoreably human while possessing superhuman strength and supernatural gifts, so cutely flawed but virtuous at heart, a little selfish at times but always well meaning, burdened by her power, reluctantly living up to her celestially designated duty to massacre, vulnerable and sensitive and self-sacrificing even as she exercises her supremacy, inflicts unerringly the salubrious pain and death social renewal and survival requires, and unleashes her divine vengeance on those who oppose her.
Buffy is the destroyer of humanity (demanding the loyality of its select accomplices whom it poses as 'representing' rather than dominating) as it portrays itself, as always since the night of time, as Saviour.
So the corporation seduces humanity to love it and hate eachother, by playing on humanity's persistent need for human relations thwarted and poisoned by the imperatives of competition. The television consumer is trained to hate his/her fleshly, warm, living competitors and enjoy their pains and failures even more than he enjoys his own pleasures and success. Thus deprived (s)he is ripe for attachment, even passionate attachment, to 'Buffy,' the corporation in human clothing, the inanimate, heartless and destructive disguised as the living, affectionate and creative. Unable to love and admire one another, human beings crave the ersatz beloved, the cold, fake, empty thing that looks almost human; the craving for real fellows learns to satisfy itself with the fraudulent simulacra of emotions that cold thing inspires, and to accept and cherish, along with its imitation humanity, any sinister, perverse, inhuman and anti-human qualities with which the corporation, supplier of this dead substitute for living love object, endows it. 'Buffy's' disposition to domination, surveillance, pompous assumption of divine ordination, exclusion and expropriation without due process, and extrajudicial execution, must all be adored along with 'Buffy's commodity bazaar of faux emotional delights, of faux pleasures and faux sympathies, if the ersatz loyalty and ersatz love which 'Buffy' inspires is not to be lost, leaving the audience desolate. And the more attached humanity grows to 'Buffy,' the more contented and resigned to that relationship, the better prepared it is to dispense with any and all of its living fellows.
Edited by Pink_Bubble, 09 February 2017 - 05:59 PM.
