rubbish

November 19, 2013

11

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, capitalism, commodification, crisis, entropy, imperialism, logopolis, modernity, rubbish, SF, war 1

Adric has found the Doctor sulking in the TARDIS cloisters. The Doctor has lost Romana and K9. He’s feeling his age. His ship seems to be falling apart too. The stone pillars, overrun with vines, crumble under his fingers. And, to cap it off, Adric wants to be taken back to Gallifrey.

“I sometimes think I should be running a tighter ship,” he says sadly.

“A tighter ship?” gasps Adric, as though this is a threatening notion.

“Yes. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is taking its toll on the old thing. Entropy increases.”

“Entropy increases?”

“Yes, daily. The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart. That’s the essence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken.”

It’s only fitting that the Doctor should fight one of his most elemental battles against omnipresent entropy. The Doctor has encountered entropy many times on his travels. The Tribe of Gum were dangerous because their world was dying in the cold, all heat drained away. The Moroks froze entropy in an attempt to freeze their own declining imperial history. Skaro was a petrified jungle, everything “turned to sand and ashes”. Later, the same planet was depicted as a wasteland, with technology evolving in reverse as the Thals and Kaleds fought a backwards war of attrition. The Exxilons built a city that sucked all life and vitality out of their civilisation. Skagra tried to fight entropy by subjecting all life to his will, thus turning the universe into a machine for constructing more and more structure. The Argolin were sterile, living on a desolated world. The Melkur came to the Keeper’s walled garden and started breeding blights and weeds. The Doctor even comes from a world that has stalled entropy forever, only to find itself socially entropic. Entropy has always been implicitly unbiquitous in the Doctor’s universe. Just as he notices it nibbling away at the TARDIS, it becomes explicitly unbiquitous.

SF is obsessed with entropy because SF is one of the cultural products most peculiar to modernity. Modernity is, essentially, the condition of the rise and triumph of capitalism. Capitalism is entropic. Like the Master, it ‘generates’ entropy.

SF expresses the dizzying possibilities of modernity in terms of space travel and time travel. It is not ‘scientific’ but it would be unthinkable without science. The language of science is the language it uses to reiterate the old myths and legends of death and decay and eternity. It is, perhaps, the quintessential genre of modernity. It is how fiction tackles the “relationship of man to his tools” in a modern, capitalist age when the tools have become powerful enough to destroy worlds and (seemingly) think for themselves. SF keeps coming back to the hyper-destructive violence of high-tech war. It keeps coming back to the end of the world, the post-apocalyptic wasteland. It keeps coming back to stalled and tottering dystopias. It keeps coming back to the malfunctioning of technology, its unintended by-products, the machines that kill and ruin.…

May 4, 2013

Tygers & Horses

Jack Graham jack's pathetic vanity, oh god I'm so bored, rubbish, tenuous thematic connections, the slow death of western civilisation, umm... er..., you're not actually reading this are you? 0

“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” said William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and on lots of European walls in the 60s, and under the cover of an Eighth Doctor Adventure by Kate Orman.

I disagree. I think you need the horses of instruction just as much as you need the tygers of wrath. The thing about the tygers is that they chase you. The thing about the horses is that you have to chase them. If you’ve got a horse ahead of you and a tyger behind… well, that’s not comfortable, but it’s the better way round. It gives you both a strong impetus and a goal.

Of course, horses can be wild and tygers can be calm.

I’ll stop there. All analogies can be pushed to breaking point. Even the ones invented by geniuses.…

April 12, 2012

Grinding Engines

Jack Graham capitalism, crisis, entropy, marx, marxism, modernity, myth, philip k dick, rubbish, sci-fi, science, shelley 1

The mechanical sciences attained to a degree of perfection which, though obscurely foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted madness to have prophesied in a preceding age. Commerce was pursued with a perpetually increasing vigour, and the same area of the Earth was perpetually compelled to furnish more and more subsistence. The means and sources of knowledge were thus increased together with knowledge itself, and the instruments of knowledge. The benefit of this increase of the powers of man became, in consequence of the inartificial forms into which mankind was distributed, an instrument of his additional evil. The capabilities of happiness were increased, and applied to the augmentation of misery. Modern society is thus an engine assumed to be for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle mechanism augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or raising water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or breaking to pieces the wheels of which it is composed.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819-1820

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room atone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.

– Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Entropy is a concern of science-fiction as a whole.…