Jack Graham

The comedian Richard Herring has a Christmas story he tells about a thirsty cat in a bathroom. He was sitting on the toilet and reached across to turn the bath tap on for the cat, which then lapped enthusiastically at the water. He says he found the sight hilarious, but imagines that the cat also had quite an amusing view… though, as he goes on to observe, Jesus had the funniest view, getting the combined sights of the drinking cat and the “fat, defecating man”. Because, as Christianity teaches us, Jesus is always watching.

Now, I’m not sure I agree with Herring’s interpretation of Christian doctrine. He’s similarly dodgy in his representations of most religions, in his New-Atheisty way. He tends, as such people do, to take the worst and/or silliest possible interpretations of religious ideas and then generalise them, and to essentialise the religion he’s attacking along the lines of such thick-end-of-the-wedge strawmen. However, it’s also true that a) he’s unambiguously joking, what with saying most of this stuff as part of an open project of, y’know, being funny for a living, and b) he’s deliberately using his own infantile interpretation of religious ideas as part of his usual method of deriving irony from weaponised childishness.

(One day, when I write my massive series about Lee & Herring – comedians who fascinate me both as a team and as individuals – I’ll mean-spiritedly itemise Richard Herring’s many embarrassing forays into simplistic, Dawkinsian, secularist liberalism.)

More pertinently to this essay, there’s something on point about his combining of the concepts of Christmas and of surveillance… because, rather surprisingly, they turn out to be inextricably linked.

As we know, you’d better not pout, you’d better not cry, you’d better be good. I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town. He knows when you are sleeping, he knows if you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.

It’s a perfect example of shit we’re told as kids that we take for granted, and which the world as a whole winks at or takes as fun, but which is actually bloodcurdling when you stop to really think about it. All over the world, children – including almost all the ones you know, and are at school with, and are friends with – are gearing up to receive presents from a magic, benevolent man… but you might not get any if you fail to obey the rules set for your behaviour by the unaccountable authorities above you, including those who claim to love you. If you disappoint or anger those authorities by infringing their laws, even in your deportment, you might find yourself deprived and excluded from a massive fun game that literally everyone else is getting to play. Of course, you could argue that very few kids these days genuinely believe they’re likely to wake up on Christmas morning to a stocking full of coal. I’m honestly not sure, looking back, if I believed stuff like that or not.…

Continue Reading

Just a quick reminder that I was recently a guest on the fabulous Oi!Spaceman podcast hosted by Daniel Harper and Shana Wolstein.  They had me on to talk about ‘Planet of the Ood’, and you can listen and/or download here.

1. Omega, Mirrors, Jargon

Omega was originally going to be called OHM. ‘WHO’ upside down. He was always conceived of as a negation of the Doctor, while also being in a unity with him: the unity of opposites. Formally similar (a lone, exiled, renegade Time Lord)… but then mirror images are similar, and eternally linked, but are also inversions of each other. Mirrors, by the way, are a key thing in this story. It is a mirror which enables Omega to see himself… or rather to not see himself.   The shadow of his sorrow has destroyed the shadow of his face.

Omega wants the Doctor to stay and take his place. To keep his universe ready for him. He sees the Doctor as fitting into the hole he will leave when he goes. He assumes only one set of ideas and thus only one way his universe could be, even with someone else in charge. He reaches out with his ‘organism thing’, which is itself a unification of contradictions. Alive (organism) and not alive (thing). Material (matter) and yet ideal (anti-matter). There (visible to the characters, visible on screen) and yet not there (blatantly Chromakeyed in). The way these oppositions are unified is why the effect and the plot point work: most crudely, it works because it is soooooo amazingly 70s, that fetishistic insistence upon using and flaunting tatty, flagrant video effects.

Omega is destroyed (or negated) by a contradiction: his will creates him but destroys him in the process. This negation is then negated by the recorder which creates a new unity (or synthesis): the supernova. The symbol of suction – the black hole – is replaced by the symbol of production – the supernova. The cosmological jargon is scientifically dodgy but expresses a deep dialectical view of reality as created materially. It also works on the level of individual personalities and on the level of societies.

Omega is asocial. Expelled and disavowed, his complaint against the Time Lords is a just one – at least in principle (so, to that extent, he has my sympathy). But he is also atomised and alone… which wouldn’t be a problem as such except that his loneliness is that of a king, a despot. He’s Universal Will, God, King and atomised individual, creating personal reality without recourse to others. He brings a society in microcosm to his universe and it rebels against him. He’s not just anti-matter, he’s anti-social.

2. Anti-Matter, Authority, Revolution

Omega exists in a universe of anti-matter. In SF, particularly in pulp-SF, the term ‘anti-matter’ rarely refers to the actual scientific concept. ‘The Three Doctors’ stands in this grand and noble tradition of flagrantly utilising the term without any concern for scientific realism… except that ‘The Three Doctors’ does not just use it as technobabble.…

Continue Reading

1. Chickens, Eggs, Context

Remember the Bird Sanctuary in ‘The Three Doctors’? Makes me think of eggs and chickens. The solution to that riddle is that neither came first because both emerged dialectically, as the negations of previous forms, through the transformation of quantity into quality. The incremental changes of evolution.  Just as the chick is the negation of the egg, so they are one. Just as the egg/chick unity is the negation of older forms, so they are one with older forms, part of a sequence. Evolution is the natural Dialectic in action. Every form is transitional.

Dialectical materialism is one way of saying ‘Marxism’, but there is also the Dialectic of Hegel. Marx gets the dialectic from Hegel but, famously, he has to turn it upside down in order to set it on its feet.  Marx makes the dialectic material.  The dialectic of Hegel is thoroughly, even perversely, ideal.  (To clarify, ‘ideal’ or ‘idealist’ in the philosophical sense, in the sense of meaning something like ‘the realm of ideas or thoughts, or at least of ‘the immaterial’.)

Tell you what, let’s try to explain this in terms of ‘The Three Doctors’.

For some reason, ‘The Three Doctors’ strikes me as a story particularly suited to ruminations on the Dialectic. I could speculate as to why this is. Baker and Martin are, by accident or design, habitual dialecticians. The ‘weapon’ that will end the Atrios-Zeos war forever is peace (’Armageddon factor’); Axonite is mutable and spectacular capital and even has a ‘cycle’ (’Claws of Axos’); the Solonians have a natural lifecycle which is inimical to colonialism (’The Mutants’); there is a cycle of Edenic life into fallen drugs and fake euphoria (‘Nightmare of Eden’); there is an interrelated unity of contradictory micro and macrocosms (’Invisible Enemy’); Eldrad is a nightmare from (of) history and goes through a process of change from fossil to woman to tyrant (’Hand of Fear’). And there is wider context. The end of the 60s and the dawn of neoliberalism, for instance. There is the apparent failure of revolution and dialectical materialism in favour of antinomies of bourgeois thought – positivism/mysticism, reformism/conservatism. The producer of this story is a Buddhist and a Lefty, but also a BBC type. You can see where that all links together, I’m sure.

So lets dive in to this silly project. We might be able to explicate the Dialectic. We might manage the considerably more complex and challenging feat of explicating ‘The Three Doctors’. At the very least, it might be a giggle.

For me, anyway.

2. Theses, Assertions, Gnosis

Central to the Dialectic are the categories of totality, contradiction, change, negation, and mediation.

Also central is the concept of unity.

Unity is, in fact, the meta-category when it comes to the Dialectic. Within unity, the other categories spin.

Unity is closely related to totality, but not identical with it. The totality cannot always be a unity, and the unity is not a totality, though the totality may be comprised of unities.…

Continue Reading

 The BBC’s Moscow Correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, recently tweeted this:

Now, despite the air of handbag-clutching sanctimony, I agree with the implied criticism here.  If true, it’s wicked that Russian kids are having their history censored.  However, the other implication – that ‘we’ would never censor history for ‘our’ kids – is trickier to agree with.  Media Lens promptly responded to Rosenberg with: “Try reading a British or US kids’ history book on the Vietnam war (for example)”. 

I myself, monomaniac that I am, was instantly reminded of ‘Victory of the Daleks’, in which Winston Churchill is presented to the kiddies as the Doctor’s bezzie mate; a naughty, fallible, but essentially heroic fighter against evil.  Nothing in that episode about, say, the Bengal famine, or the Black and Tans in Ireland, or the conspiracy to unseat Mossadegh, or the pointless firebombing of Dresden.  Sticking with Russia, Churchill was the leading British politician behind Allied ‘intervention’ (i.e. aiding the counter-revolutionary Whites) against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War… a war that (arguably) indirectly helped bring Stalin to power.  You might well argue that there is no place for such things in an episode of Doctor Who.  You could be right.  But don’t then tell me that there is a place for presenting someone like Winston Churchill, sans context, as a jolly and fiercely moral pal.

Of course hierarchical societies, which depend upon ideology to manufacture public acceptance or quietitude, are going to lie to their people, and they’re going to start early.  What’s interesting here is not the obvious fact that Russian kids’ history books and British kids’ TV shows are going to mislead them about the histories of their domestic ruling classes.  What’s interesting is the way the educated, orthodox, democratic, freedom-loving mind can notice – and be outraged by – this obfuscation when practiced by Russia, while completely failing to notice it when it is practiced by the BBC. 

You have to wonder how automatic it is, versus how deliberate. 

In Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Orwell has Party members practicing this very double standard openly and proudly, using it as a badge of honour.  It can be viewed as such because ‘we’ are good by definition, so any contortion of truth or good sense which benefits ‘our’ side is also good by definition.  Like many psychological habits, there’s no clear cause and effect, but rather a rabbit hole made of mutually-reflecting mirrors.  And I don’t think we need go to Oceania to see it.

The orthodox view of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it’s a satire of Russian totalitarianism… and yet Orwell sets it in Britain (as was).  He’s also having a go at British Communists who willingly and happily parroted the nonsense dictated to them from Moscow.  But familiarity with his wider corpus shows us that Orwell was quite aware of the same technique in the capitalist media.  The Ministry of Truth is at least partly drawn from his experiences within the BBC.

It would be unthinkable to do a Doctor Who story featuring Stalin without portraying him as evil. …

Continue Reading

On ‘The Ark in Space’.

 

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” – Genesis, 3:7, KJV

“…a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” – Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars…” – Charles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray, 22nd May 1860

As I’ve said before, I think SF is fundamentally the reiteration of mythology in the idioms of modernity, particularly the age of science and technology brought in by the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and their legacies. Christian stories of creation and apocalypse are probably the most important mythological narratives reiterated by SF because the genre originated in the West, and is fundamentally concerned with the implications of the modern epoch which began in Western Europe. But there’s more to it than that. There is a deep link between Christianity and the experience of the rise of technological modernity. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.  You don’t need to buy Weber’s bass-ackwards, cart-before-horse notion of capitalism born from Protestantism to see the connections.

The Eden story is about the end of one way of life and the start of a new one.  It is about the expulsion of humanity from pre-History into History. It tells this tale twice, on two tracks.

Contained in Genesis, right at the start, there is the garden.  The garden we had to leave because we acquired knowledge.  In the book, the knowledge is of good and evil, and consequently of pain and death.  It is the moment of our emergence from the animal world of sensation into the human world of consciousness.  Animals, after all, do not ‘know’ that they will die.  That is the curse of the conscious.  Here, in the first book of the Bible that the literalists so abuse by their crass slavishness, is a Darwinian acknowledgement of the emergence of the human mind from the blurry thoughtworld of the beasts.  The near-immediate legacy of Adam and Eve’s little picnic is the creation of the tool.

It is almost as though Genesis contains an ancestral memory of how the use of tools drove the rise of the big brain, which in turn powered the biological emergence of humanity.  It also seems to ‘remember’ the role of language in the creation of consciousness, and the role of consciousness in the adaptation of the environment to our needs.

In Genesis, the deadly tools, the tools that see us kicked out of our idyllic biological pre-History, are the words with which to conceptualise ourselves, with which to become self-conscious and conscious of the other human selves outside us.…

Continue Reading

Join Jack (i.e. me) and my buddy, actor Elliot Chapman (Big Finish’s new Ben Jackson, and recent Pex Lives guest), for our very belated Hallowe’en Shabcast, in which we chat Dracula. 

Elliot’s company have recently performed Liz Lochhead’s acclaimed theatrical version of Bram Stoker’s novel, and we use that as a subject in itself and as a springboard for a wider discussion… during which I think I can safely say that we touch upon every single piece of Dracula-related media ever created, and thoroughly cover each and every one of them.

You should know: this is the first Shabcast to experiment with a new process… Glorious Immersive Scenariosoundarama™.

Please download here.  And listen at night, in a large room lit only by candles. 

Cheers me dears.…

Continue Reading

or ‘Young Men Are Dying For It’

or ‘Don’t Mention the Chasms’

When I complain about the ideological message of this or that text, am I not tacitly admitting that Mary Whitehouse had a point?  After all, isn’t the worry ultimately about the effect it will have?

We know that cultural artifacts influence people enormously. Moreover, most of us (and I definitely include myself in this) get most of our most deeply embedded ideas and assumptions about the world from fictional media rather than non-fiction. The News has a great influence on our ideas about the world… but, as Aristotle said, Tragedy is a great deal more philosophical than History because History treats of what happened whereas Tragedy treats of the kinds of things that happen, or that we think happen. Fiction is largely about representing our ideas about how people work and act in our society, about how they function in the world, and make the world, and interact with it. It is inherently social because to partake of fiction is to interact with all sorts of other people and social processes, and to take away from fiction an understanding of the world which then changes our interactions with it. This is one reason why unjust representations are such a big deal.

Fiction, I would argue, thus has a moral aspect baked into it. News, of course, partakes of all sorts of moral assumptions, and transmits all sorts of moral notions – often unconsciously to both journalist and consumer – but its essential claim is to represent fact, even if this is often spurious. Part of the appeal of fiction is that it bypasses fact and addresses itself to the socially ontological, to our notions of how the world is rather than the specific things which happen in it. Moreover, it directly addresses itself to morality, to our notions of justice and injustice. All fiction does this, whatever its content, because the act of reading or watching fiction is the act of imaginative empathy, of questioning oneself about how one would act if placed in the same position as the characters. (It’s important to note, in passing, that this is a great deal more complex than any platitude about ‘identification’.) This is partly why fiction is a great deal more popular than non-fiction.

Fiction is also crafted to appeal directly at a pre-rational, emotional level which by-passes intellectual judgements, at least as a first move (which is why you can be moved by utter trash). This is why its so immensely pleasurable, and also therefore so incredibly formative and influential. We’re also socialised to learn the art of reading (book or visual narrative) much earlier than we are taught to learn critical thinking or engagement with non-fiction. Stories are, after all, a form of play, and the role of play and games – experimentation ideally without fear of failure – in child socialisation is huge. So yeah, fiction has a terrific influence on how we think, how we view the world, society, other people, etc, on our normative assumptions about it, and on our moral judgements about it.…

Continue Reading

The recent Zygon two-parter (which I shall, from now on, refer to as ‘The Zygon Inv’ for convenience’s sake) by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat was an extremely well-crafted piece of television in almost every respect. Aesthetic considerations aside, it was a politically committed piece of drama which engaged with vital and loaded current issues.   In many ways, it answered a call that I have repeatedly made in recent years for Doctor Who to re-engage with social and political issues, and to position the Doctor as a social actor in struggles. Moreover, it was clearly and unambiguously intended as a liberal statement of tolerance and opposition to war – a surprisingly forthright one, given the current political climate, and the current predicament of the BBC, surrounded on all sides by reactionary hounds baying for its blood.

In many ways, this story shoots for picking up the baton dropped by Malcolm Hulke long ago. Malcolm Hulke was, of course, only the most open and conscious of the many Doctor Who writers to infuse their stories with liberal politics. Yes, I said liberal. In his writing, he reveals himself to be a liberal rather than a communist. Only in ‘The War Games’, in which he and Dicks are pushed leftwards by the cresting wave of the struggles of the 60s, does he look even a bit like a communist. The rest of the time (by the end of ‘The War Games’ actually) he is writing from what is recognisably a liberal perspective. The backbone of his (if you’ll pardon me) whoeuvre is formed by ruminations on racism, bigotry, war, colonialism, corporations, environmentalism, conservatism, authoritarianism, utopianism, etc… and all from a liberal perspective, with all the strengths and weaknesses that this implies. The recent Zygon two-parter succeeds in inheriting the mantle of Malcolm Hulke, and those same structural strengths and weaknesses of liberal politics are still hitching a ride.

Good Liberal Points

I love that the genocide gas which would (ostensibly) turn all the Zygons inside-out was designed by Harry Sullivan. An acute bit of writing. Harry was a bit of a duffer but a jolly fine chap. The product, no doubt, of the English public school system. Rugger, school cups – maybe even a Prefect. No spectacular academic achievements, but he came out with a solid character. And then a medical degree and into the British Navy, where he doubtless served Queen and Country with distinction. Old fashioned and simple hearted. Fine and true. A tribute to the playing fields, old colleges, and institutions of Great Britain. The kind of thoroughly decent sort who was the bread and butter of two world wars.  Exactly the sort of person, in other words, to happily exterminate an entire race of inconvenient people for his government.

Then there’s the drone-strike operative at the UNIT base who refuses to press the button and bomb the people in the town because some of them look like her family. Would she press the button without a qualm if they didn’t?…

Continue Reading