Great topic!
I am not sure why one needs to believe in agency or free will to be considered leftist. There have been a host of (post-)structuralists (e.g., Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Poulantzas, Balibar, etc.) who are radically leftist, but never believed in agency. It is certainly possible to perform a structural reading of Marx that is devoid of agency. There is no reason why an awareness of structure leads to a loss of human freedom, unless the only way to understand freedom is through the lens of enlightenment liberalism. It may in fact be liberating to understand how we are constructed and interpellated; it may make it easier to fight a system that one knows is on the verge of collapsing. Conversely, I am not sure why a belief in human freedom would imply being leftist. There is that whole nasty triumph of the will rhetoric from the Nazi era after all.
As for George Lucas, I think he does believe in a liberal enlightenment conception of freedom. The central concern of his body of work in sci-fi is the dynamic between technology and spirit. Lucas' final film project at UCLA, "THX 1138 - The Electronic Labyrinth" (later made into a major motion picture), was strongly influenced by Godard's "Alphaville". Both Godard and Lucas attempted to show the ways in which technology can be deeply dehumanizing. THX ends dramatically with a triumphal scene that seems to reaffirm human agency. I believe that Star Wars takes up similar issues through the attempt by Luke Skywalker to recover the spirit within his android like father/nemesis. I think that corny/gory scene where Luke takes off his father's mask is meant to show us that even though technology warped his father, there was still a little bit of the kind human spirit underneath the mask. The human spirit is liberated to the extent that it defies or exists apart from technology.
Unfortunately, I predict the new Star Wars will probably destroy the human spirit no what its content, because Lucas sold his soul long ago. It was painful enough to watch Episode I: The Marketing Menace, I am not sure I can suffer through another episode.
Best,
Vikash Yadav
-----Original Message----- From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Thomas Seay Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 03:58 PM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Is Star Wars (the movie) Reactionary?
[...] That said, I am going to go off on a tangent here and bring up an aspect of the movie that might very well go unnoticed. Lucas has admitted his debt to the jungian mythologist, Joseph Campbell, in particular Campbell's "Hero With a Thousdand Faces",which he claims inspired "Star Wars". In fact we can identify several jungian archetypes in the movie, Darth Vader (shadow), Princess Lea (the anima), etc. Now the reactionary aspect of all of this is that it sees human life sort of as an epiphemomenon of these cosmic, transcendental forces inherent in our psyche and by extension in the world. A life is just an instance of the perennial dance of these archetypes.
This view of the world diminishes to some extent the realm of human freedom. As part and partial of that,it also can lead to a sort of passive acceptance towards what is wrong in the world: since evil in the world is a result of humanity's failure to integrate its dark side, the best thing we could do to make the world a better place would be to put ourselves in jungian therapy. That's how the thinking goes, only it would be interesting to ask a Jungian what the chances would be of everyone doing that, since such a thing falls outside of the financial possibilities of 99 percent of humanity. Anyway, this response to life is sort of a modern reworking of the Book of Job.
Anyway, I think it is important to bring up this aspect of Star Wars which appeared on the scene about the time the "New Age" scene was starting to spawn. The New Age crowd is very aware of this aspect of the movie. Anyway, this touting of transcendentalism is what I find most reactionary in the movie. [...]