Ieldra2 wrote...
Not so. I deny the legitimacy of "sanctity" as a moral category. It is - or rather should be - an aesthetic category only, and as a corollary I also deny the validity of linking aesthetics and ethics. One of those tendencies rooted in our biology is to link the evil to the disgusting or the disfigured, and the good to the harmonious and graceful. I think this is a very dangerous delusion. Nonetheless it is ubiquitous in storytelling, and especially in Bioware's storytelling. See ME's Reaper minions and DA's darkspawn. The theme of "corruption" strengthens the delusion. I call it "abomination aesthetic", and I find it irresponsible to underscore evilness by physical disfiguration. It is actually the biggest issue I have with Bioware's storytelling in general.
Consequently, with regard to Thedas' mages, the most important issue is not practical politics, but aesthetics and ideology. Chantry ideology links the mages to one of the worlds greatest evils (setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether the mostly mindless darkspawn can reasonably be called evil). The real insult to the mages is not that they are kept at all - people have made reasonable arguments for the Circle system or something comparable - but that they are kept by an organization that institutionally dehumanizes them.
Awesome, we're getting into the politics of art. Not to sound like a broken record, but I largely agree with what you are saying, especially on the empirical level. But on the analytical level I do diverge slightly:
[1] aesthetics have been used to demonize and dehumanize certain individuals or collectives,
[2] the legitimation of such portrayal practices is contingent on our "natural" disgust of certain apperances
[3] by casting public disgust for monsterfied groups as "natural," public prejudice is seen as "blameless"
[4] the institutional distribution of dehumanizaton and blamelessness constitutes a political force
Now that would be my general frame; but I'd also harp on these addendums.
RE:
[1]: Can it be used to dehumanize only one person? I actually think this is impossible; I in fact contend that aesthetic dehumanization never attacks "just" an individual. Individuality, when put into its liberal humanist context, is a human trait. So a dehumanized subject cannot assume individuality. The subject becomes flattened into some force of nature, a symbol of something that the public fears (eg. plague). After such an act of abstraction, the symbol becomes added to a stock pool of panic-inducing signifiers that "tradition" can reuse at will.
[2]: I disagree that this disgust is always "natural." Instances of disgust that can only be expressed by a communicating and understandable subject becomes unclear in its origin: is the disgust natural, or was it conditioned and taught? We cannot know. As a disclaimer, I don't subscribe to the nature vs nurture dichotomy wholesale, for as long as nature is used to justify prejudice and nurture is used to enforce it, this dialectic as a whole is impotent in generating equity.
[3]: Natural is actually a word frequently used to disguise sanctitiy. To use nature as a form of sanctity is a common trick in the arena of prejudice. When you're culturally socialized to view nature and sanctity as opposite categories, bigots can disorient you by setting up their sanctity as nature, and then use some cultural link between nature and freedom to convince you that prejudice is free. Consider for a moment the husk motifs you alluded to - the device does not only play on "corruption," but specifically the "deviation from nature." What I am saying is that I do not even accept the link between disgust and true nature in the first place. Disgust comes from tradition and not nature, and when tradtions speak of nature, what they tend to speak of is the "mask of nature," where they set up themselves as embodiments of nature to procure legitimacy.
[4]: You may highly disagree with me here, but I say aesthetics is irredeemably political. Social harm does not just come from welding politics to aesthetics; the greater harm comes from insisting they are not welded when they actually are. What I am aginst is not Malefication in a vacuum, but how Institutional Malefications disguise themselves as documentaries.
Modifié par alexbing88, 16 juin 2013 - 11:26 .
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