If you don't know who Tony Robbins is this means you're probably not a American, or you've probably never looked at the self-help section in a book shop. But in brief summary, Tony Robbins is the highest paid and most successful personal development guru in the world. His whole thing is that he can help you re-engineer yourself for 'ultimate success' by changing how your mind works (by 're-programming your neural pathways'). Particularly, he helps you by teaching you how to do this thing called 'modelling', where you copy the exact heuristics of a 'highly successful' person as they succeed at the thing you want to succeed at. Which is... pretty much what Adam does.
Adam is a frankenstein style big bad on Btvs, who goes around cutting people and demons up to understand how they work, so that he can eventually execute his plan of piecing together people/demons to make super soldiers free of weakness, just like him. Tools of his trade: he has a knack for being able to motivate people (monsters) towards his mission. Like many problems Btvs aims to explore, this is a literal interpretation of the Tony Robbin's mission in life, put in a monster fighting context.
The question is: why does Tony Robbins make such a good villain? On the surface, you might think that a guy who devotes himself to helping others get the 'life they deserve' is no one to associate with evil.
Well, the reason Adam made a good villain for Buffy season 4, was because the season was devoted to the idea of being young and independent for the first time in your life, and having to learn how to deal with the 'greys' and uncertainties in life (pure existentialist-style) and *not* rely on having all the answers. Therefore Buffy fought villains that wanted certainty to fight their weaknesses, so as to contrast with her own journey and that of her friends. She fought soldiers who lived by all the moral certainties that soldiers live by, and she fought a Tony Robbins monster set on removing weakness.
In one form or another the 'Tony Robbins as a bad guy' idea usually comes down to a suspicion of how he's conning people. He promises so much... if you just hand over your money. But the above is an interesting variant, where the con isn't a promise he won't deliver, but a promise he couldn't and shouldn't deliver.
So what's so good about 'the grey'?
It can be tiring to see pain romanised. Pain isn't romantic, it's just painful. But if one can learn to find some peace, maybe even enjoyment, from the complexities and uncertainties they will deal with in their life, they're putting themselves in a much more powerful position to be able to error correct. And error correction of ideas is needed to learn anything about how to live. To seek the perfect cure of weakness, then, might sound pragmatic, but it's really explaining away part of the methodology needed to enjoy life.
The principle is exactly the same in any other area of knowledge creation. If one attempts to create knowledge by avoiding or explaining away problems, one only ends up with dogmas. To actually 'problem solve', one needs to be on friendly terms with the idea that there are problems.
Fantastically interesting blog, lots to ruminate.
ReplyDelete‘It can be tiring to see pain romanised. Pain isn't romantic, it's just painful.’
The problem with the latter claim is hinted in the correct verbification in the former. Nothing is Romantic per se, which is a category error; just to illustrate, take ruins as example par excellence. In writings from before Romanticism, like the Renaissance travel journals of Montaigne, all interest is confined to how they evidence a glorified past or retain enough of their former grandeur. Then the episteme changes; follies are adored, buildings admired qua ruins.
That is, a whole new field of aesthetics is birthed by a new way of looking, not by an alteration of what’s looked at. Those challengers to the Enlightenment—particularly the later gothic proponents—assumed the cult of melancholy and, eschewing symbolic convention, played with that space between imagination and reality where pain was romanticised and remains so. Stoker, Sade, Shelley, Le Fanu, Goethe, Jünger, Lovecraft, Carter, du Maurier, Mansfield would be surprised to lean that pain cannot be elevated. Moreover the claim is reductionist; there are varieties with complex interactions both with other forms of pain and other experience.
This is relevant to Adam since he is a, I might say 'the', gothic monster; that is, Frankenstein’s monster. The tragedy of the original, an attack on a failure to nurture one’s living creations and even the hubris of natalism as allegory for the hubris of science, is precisely that the creature is not given aesthetic significance. Dignity is denied to what is deemed a real folly. Note Adam is also a eugenicist and his creator is a poor parent. His parroting self-help rhetoric is a symptom of an internal vacuity; without the depth provided by authentic affection he can only imitate it in hedonist soundbites, which never help any of his followers flourish.
Jordan Chase is simpler; he’s so exactly the oedipal father I believe the writers are at least thinking about Freud, but probably also Lacan. The key dynamic here is jousianance, the excess of pleasure that is then pain. He is a monster not because he lies about fulfilling your fantasy, but because fulfilled fantasy is an inarticulate nightmare. From Placebo’s ‘Protect me from What I Want’ to Blake’s ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. Dexter’s dark passenger is pure pleasure principle freed from its counterpart, the reality principle; and Chase threatens Dexter with psychosis.
‘To actually "problem solve", one needs to be on friendly terms with the idea that there are problems.’
I like that, but I would make an addendum; in order to problem solve, one also needs to do what Wittgenstein, Marx, Nietzsche &c. all in their different ways at least attempted and avoid faux-problems that come about because of the way we talk about or interpret the extralinguistic, presymbolic Real.
~Rowan
Thank you :)
ReplyDeleteAll interesting points.
>>It can be tiring to see pain romanised. Pain isn't romantic, it's just painful.
>The problem with the latter claim is hinted in the correct verbification in the former. Nothing is Romantic per se, which is a category error
Yes, you're quite right.
My point was to attempt to separate on the one hand embracing 'the grey' and on the other hand melancholy, which I tend to find get mish-mashed together in the minds of 'jon optimists' like the kind of people who are into Tony Robbins. I was also only talking at this point about life, rather than art. Pain is a wonderful subject for 'R'omanticim, one might say the natural subject (in some form or another).
>>To actually "problem solve", one needs to be on friendly terms with the idea that there are problems.
>I like that, but I would make an addendum; in order to problem solve, one also needs to do what Wittgenstein, Marx, Nietzsche &c. all in their different ways at least attempted and avoid faux-problems that come about because of the way we talk about or interpret the extralinguistic, presymbolic Real.
Yeah, again good point.
Though it's interesting you refer to them as 'faux-problems' presumably to distinguish them from 'problems', while talking from a context of ideas where it could be argued, and has been argued, that everything is a 'faux-problem'. I mean I think a distinction can be clearly made between problems that come from interpretation of problems and problems themselves. But you can get into slightly tricky territory it seems if you want to argue, as I would want to, that a problem does have some value corresponding to truth, but an interpretation of a problem is entirely metaphysically free. It's much easier to argue: on the condition that you want to solve problems, you need to avoid X interpretation of problems.
Probably this is just more evidence that I need to think about this subject matter a lot more, tho.
Points well taken vis-à-vis separating the grey from melancholy and correspondence, interpretation, &c. but as with the Romantics I am unsure about neat delineations between life and art. I.e. ethically e.g. Nietzsche’s injunction to live life qua art, and descriptively e.g. Wilde’s satirical interfolding in Dorian Grey.
ReplyDelete~Rowan