the cyborgs have a plan

ohhh wow I just had an epiphany about my thing with Star Wars. I was rewatching ESB - it's cool if you start the movie at about the 50-minute mark, which is when Han and Leia are kissing and Vader is discovering that he has a son - and feeling even more impatient with Yoda than usual. Maybe because I'd just been reading afrofuturist theory, but for the first time his chastisement of Luke's looking toward the future rang hollow to me.

Here's the thing: the "philosophical" stuff the Jedi characters say? is what my fucking father is all about. even down to the memetic genealogy of it, the vague eastern spiritualism via white male 60s counterculture. It's what I was brought up to, what I still fundamentally believe but am intent on rebelling against. Daddy chastises me for including anger in my politics, coming from a white-buddhism valuation of peace and inner quiet - and I hear that, I do, but I also hear Audre Lorde enumerating the uses of anger, and her voice is louder to me and more beautiful. After all, dad's also always chastised me for my focus on women's issues; I know that I can't trust him to be my strong ally all the way down. He has his limits.

Why shouldn't Luke Skywalker look to the future? Yoda sounds like Owen Lars. We build a better future than our current shitty present by dreaming it first. And Leia pretty gloriously uses her anger to fuel her rebellion, and I have a problem with anyone who has a problem with that. (i mean tbh i agree with yoda's concern-trolling about luke being reckless, but on reflection i lack confidence that yoda shares my reasons: i worry about bb being a little suicidal, but yoda was planning on eventually sending luke off to commit patricide, i'm not sure his mental health is the guy's first priority.)

no subject

(cont'd from previous thought) I mean, it's my old beef with Virginia Woolf again, isn't it? Her insistence in Room of One's Own that the disruption of women's novels by their sociopolitical rage prevents them, rather than enables them, in reaching aesthetic incandescence. It's the place where I've never been able to get myself to agree with her - because everything she says about the way Charlotte's anger tears through the narrative fabric of Jane Eyre, about the way that Austen holds herself back and prevents the same, I'm on board with. Only, it makes me love Charlotte all the more, and is the major factor in my lack of passion for Austen. I love seeing Charlotte claw through the warp and weft of the literary tradition with the ferocity of her feminist rage, love it.

(there's something to do with Brecht in this thought-stream as well, though I'm not sure I quite have the connection down. It's that I know from long exposure that I respond with heightened affective intensity to the strategies of Brechtianism, the exposure of the mechanisms of the story and its conveyance. I trip hardest of all on that stuff, it makes me feel so much that sometimes it's too much to even deal with. Witness the way I feel about Into the Woods. But I confuse myself once I actually go into Brecht's theoretical writing, because he's talking about using disruption to create affective distance/ the V-effekt, and in me it doesn't work that way at all. Virginia seems to be distanced, alienated, and put-off by Charlotte's proto-Brechtian disruption of formal illusion, just as Brecht's theoretical writing would seem to anticipate. It only makes me fall harder in love.)