{"id":9711,"date":"2012-11-08T12:35:45","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T17:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9711"},"modified":"2012-11-08T18:12:34","modified_gmt":"2012-11-08T23:12:34","slug":"western-and-star-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/08\/western-and-star-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Western and Star Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Another example from cinema history is provided by one of its great mysteries: the sudden eclipse of the Western in the mid-1950s. Part of the answer lies in the fact that, at the same moment, space opera emerged as a genre\u2015so one can venture the hypothesis that space opera took the place of the Western in the late 1950s. <span style=\"color: red; font-weight: bold;\">The dialectical point here is that the Western and space opera are not two subspecies of the genre \u201cadventure.\u201d<\/span> Rather, we should shift the perspective and start only with the Western\u2015in the course of its development, <span style=\"color: blue; font-weight: bold;\">the Western then encounters a deadlock and, in order to survive, has to \u201creinvent\u201d itself as space opera <\/span> \u2015space opera is thus structurally a subspecies of the Western, in the same way that, for Kieslowski, fiction is a subspecies of documentary.<\/p>\n<p><strong>A and B are not parts (species) of their encompassing universality; A cannot fully become A, actualize its notion, without passing into B, which is formally its subspecies, but a subspecies which undermines the very species under which it is formally subsumed.<\/strong> 363<\/p>\n<p>Every species contains a subspecies which, precisely insofar as it effectively realizes the notion of this species, explodes its frame: the space opera is \u201ca Western at the level of its notion\u201d and, for that very reason, no longer a Western. Instead of a universality subdivided into two species, we thus get a particular species which<strong> generates another species as its own subspecies<\/strong>, and<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-size: 12pt;\">true (\u201cconcrete\u201d) universality is nothing but this movement in the course of which a species engenders a subspecies which negates its own species.<\/span> 364<\/p>\n<p>This is why the idealist approach always demands a multitude of examples \u2015 since no single example really fits, one has to enumerate a great many of them in order to indicate the transcendent wealth of the Idea they exemplify, <strong>the Idea being the fixed point of reference for the floating examples.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A materialist, on the contrary, tends to return obsessively to one and the same example: it is the particular example which remains the same in all symbolic universes, while the universal notion it is supposed to exemplify continually changes its shape, so that we get a multitude of universal notions circulating around a single example.<\/p>\n<p>Is this not what Lacan does, returning to the same exemplary cases (the guessing-game with five hats, the dream of Irma\u2019s injection, etc.), each time providing a new interpretation? The materialist example is thus a <span style=\"color: red; font-weight: bold;\">universal Singular<\/span>: <span style=\"color: blue; font-weight: bold;\">a singular entity which persists as the universal through the multitude of its interpretations.<\/span>l<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another example from cinema history is provided by one of its great mysteries: the sudden eclipse of the Western in the mid-1950s. Part of the answer lies in the fact that, at the same moment, space opera emerged as a genre\u2015so one can venture the hypothesis that space opera took the place of the Western &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/08\/western-and-star-wars\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Western and Star Wars&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concrete_universal","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9711"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9714,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9711\/revisions\/9714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}