Eruditorum Press

Anarchist spank inferno

corporations

17

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Ms. Kizlet is using the wi-fi signal to control people in the coffee shop.

 “I do love showing off,” she says through a waitress she has made her puppet. “Just let me show you what control of the wi-fi can do for you,” she adds through the mouth of a young girl.

It’s a tech demo. Here’s what this latest version of the operating system can do. Upgrade now. The iconography is all ruthlessly current. Particularly fitting: Kizlet and her crew are playing around on iPads as they do their little Steve Jobs routine. You almost expect her to reveal that they’ve captured Clara with an “oh, and one more thing.”

Kizlet explains that they’ve “released thousands” of base stations into the world, blanketing the whole of humanity in their Worldwide Web of Fear.

Meanwhile, Clara’s on her laptop. She recognizes the vulnerability in every grand system: people. With just a bit of clicking around she’s figured out where Kizlet is transmitting from. The most obvious spot in London, really. Kizlet’s client loves using grand projects for his own purposes. It’s what he did in the Underground, and it’s what he’s doing now. But it’s 2013 now, and London’s grand projects aren’t for the little people anymore. Now they’re for the elite.

So it’s the perfect place for Kizlet’s operation. The prestigious tallest building in London, to be filled with high-paying businesses. The metaphor is straightforward: the grand prestige project, like the Olympics and the Jubilee from the same year, is literally eating people alive. Construction is consumption. It even consumes and annexes the protests against it. Its name comes from the complaints about its design – the fear that it would be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London.” Of course, the objection, like the vision itself, is concerned with the abstract form of London, as opposed to with the lives of those within it. Heritage London or the modern corporate state. It’s all the same: an aesthetic to show off. A system for control.

And yet, architecturally, the building is designed to be invisible – to blend into the clouds around it. Control is always supposed to be invisible, after all. Just something in the air, like the wi-fi signal itself. The spectacle is always showing off and remaining invisible at the same time. As with any demo, it’s not just technology being shown off. It’s ideology. Dressed up, inevitably, in the rhetoric of upper middle class consumption. The Great Intelligence wants “healthy, free-range, human minds.”

 “The farmer tends his flock like a loving parent,” Kizlet says.

“The abbatoir is not a contradiction,” she insists.

“No one loves cattle more than Burger King.”

So the Doctor smashes into the side of the building and tears it all down.…

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24

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“The colonists shouldn’t be here,” says Dent. “My Corporation has been assigned the mineral rights on this planet. Our preliminary survey indicates a very rich concentration of duralinium. You know how the Earth needs that mineral.”

“Earth, or your corporation’s profits?” asks the Doctor.

Dent and his mining corporation will go on to prove that they will do literally anything, including mass murder, to obtain the duralinium they want.

“What’s good for IMC is good for Earth,” says Dent, echoing a famous statement once made in the real world.  “There are one hundred thousand million people back on Earth and they desperately need all the minerals we can find.”

“What those people need, my dear sir,” asserts the Doctor, “are new worlds to live in like this one. Worlds where they can live like human beings, not battery hens.”

What nobody mentions during this conversation, or during any of the conversations anybody has about the controversy, is the notion that no non-Uxarians might have the right to appropriate Uxarius.  There are people already living there, you see.  But those people don’t count.  They’re “primitives”.

This story is a reiteration of Western tropes, in both the sense of the genre ‘the Western’ and in the sense of the culture of Western civilisation.  IMC are the cynical railroad men; the colonists are settlers being expropriated by them.  The Uxarian natives are ‘Indians’.  They conform to the stereotypes.  They’re silent and sullen and irrational, scrabbling around in the dirt and waggling staffs aggressively.

But…

In a way, this complete failure to acknowledge the claims of the aboriginal Uxarians adds to the suffocating nastiness of what’s going on.  In the real world, aboriginals were displaced by settlers who then complained when big powers or big companies came to displace them in turn… and the settlers often remained blissfully unaware of their own hypocrisy.  The original inhabitants of settler-colonial states usually ended up enslaved, massacred, and/or crowded into ghettos or bantustans or the Gaza Strip, like battery hens.  Nobody in ‘Colony in Space’ seems aware of this; but then, as I said, that’s only realistic.

It’s a bit like the way Conrad’s Heart of Darkness manages to be both an appallingly racist tract of loathing and contempt for black Africans and a searing indictment of imperialism.  It does this by, as China Mieville observed, allowing no hope within the text that the Africans will liberate themselves.  ‘Colony in Space’ isn’t a visionary, feverish masterpiece… and yet, it does have something of the sublime and terrifying wasteland about it, mirroring Conrad’s nasty view of Africa as a soulless jungle.  ‘Colony’ has the people of the future replaying ancient mistakes (and all for the same reasons) amidst a bleak, hard-scrabble wilderness of grey, dull, flat, featureless rocks and mud.  There’s a protracted fight in a mud pool that is almost nihilistic, like that Goya painting where two guys are still trying to club each other to death while both sinking into the same quicksand.

Uxarius is, of course, a world ravaged by its own technological triumphs, by its trajectory towards total weaponization. …

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27

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TW

Adelaide screams at the sight of Palmerdale’s dead body.

Leela slaps her across the face, silencing her.

This is horrible.  It’s one of the relatively few examples of serious, realistic, non-Fantastic, gendered violence in the show.  Companions are captured by monsters, etc., but this kind of thing happens rarely.  It is better in some places.  Worse in others.  In ‘The Time Meddler’, Edith’s implied-rape is in there simply to tick a box of genre tropes.  Yeurch.  In ‘Vengeance on Varos’, Maldak slaps Peri across the face to assuage his bruised ego.  It’s utterly gratuitous and revolting.

But this is a woman slapping another woman.  (That’s not worse… except in the sense that the representation, authored by a man, alibis male involvement in violence against women by ostensibly disappearing its gendered dimension.)

More than that – it’s Leela slapping another woman.  Wonderful Leela, who has never done anything like this before.  Okay, she’s a ruthless killer in battle… but slapping a ‘hysteric’ like she’s James Bond or something?  Normally, though she dreads weakness in herself because of her self-identification as a warrior, she is gentle and kind to the weak, to the scared.  This is part of her warriors’ code.  She will be back to her real self in later stories.  She’s even kind to Adelaide later in this story.

What has actually happened here?

Somewhere along the line, Leela – or perhaps I should say, the character of Leela – has internalized the male attitudes of the time in which she is a visitor: the Edwardian era.

None of the male characters from that period physically abuse Adelaide, but Adelaide is secondary to almost all of them.  To Palmerdale, she is a secretary and, probably, a mistress.  Harker has no doubt about that, dismissing her as “the owner’s fancy woman”.  Skinsale evidently desires her sexually, and also desires her esteem, yet finds her frustrating because she resolutely refuses to like him more than her boss.  His delight whenever she becomes dependant upon him is evident.  Vince Hawkins is the only person to whom she can feel comfortably superior, treating his bashful attentions as the services of a instrumentum vocale.

This story is all about class in many ways… but it is also about gender.  In many ways, it’s quite good on the subject.  It depicts male attitudes in a non-exculpatory fashion.  Leela is a forceful presence, crossing gender boundaries by putting on “men’s clothes… working clothes”, etc.  Leela’s actions and personality imply that Adelaide isn’t just a dishrag because she’s a woman; she’s like that because she has been trained in a particular kind of social role owing to her gender and class… a role that involves men looking upon her with varying degrees of objectification and contempt, looks which they train at Leela but which bounce off her.  There are other hints at these themes.  Women as property.  Reuben keeps pornographic pictures under his bed, for example.

But there is still a problem with that slap… which is that it comes from someone outside the Edwardian class system (this is, by the way, a depiction of the dynamics of that system that easily outclasses Downton Abbey or ‘Human Nature’). …

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Private Ownership of the Means of Inhumation

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or 

Sex, Death and Rock ‘n’ Roll – Part 2

(Part 1 can be found here.)

Some disjointed observations about ‘Revelation of the Daleks’; fragments of a larger and uncompleted essay that’s been in the draft drawer for ages… just so that I can say I’ve served up more this month than an off-the-cuff whinge about how much I hated P.E. lessons.

Hang the D.J.

He skulks in his private studio. He almost prefigures RTD’s quasi-fan characters. He’s a geek, a dweeby enthusiast. He sits alone, watches TV, greets a visitor very shyly and comes alive when given a chance to enthuse about his pet obsession: the old style D.J.s and music of America. When he learns that Peri is really American, he reacts like… well, like a Who fan meeting Nicola Bryant. You get the feeling that he might ask for her autograph. He’s almost a parody of the nerdacious loner. He has little or no direct contact with any of the other characters. Apart from Peri, he’s only ever seen with Jobel – and they don’t speak to each other. One gets the sense of someone asocial and detached, always watching the goings on around him but never getting personally involved. In a way, he’s like an anti-Davros. Both are holed up in their personal hideaways, watching everything via cameras, commenting on the action like choruses… but from different perspectives. Where Davros schemes and snarls and giggles at the suffering of others, the D.J. takes the piss out of his place of employment and plays around with words, songs and personas.

(There are a lot of these chorus/voyeur characters in 80s Who, from Arak and Etta in ‘Varos’ up to the culmination of the trend in ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, which sees the Doctor himself become a member of the audience watching his own adventures on television!)

The other thing the D.J. does is play. He plays records, plays at disguise, plays at dressing up, plays at accents and attitudes and styles. This seems to be partly for his audience and partly for his own amusement. He comes over as a childman, an innocent. He’s not unaware of “the humanoid female form” but mentions it to “those of you who appreciate” it. He’s not personally interested, or his desire is submerged, or he’s too shy. His reaction to Peri is appreciative, but the oily, wandering-handed, heavy-breathing, harassing lust of Jobel is a counterpoint that throws the D.J.’s childish reaction into sharp relief.

Mind you, he’s not so innocent that he doesn’t know what’s going on and he clearly has no vociferous loyalty to his employers. He finds the notion of bodysnatchers making away with a cadaver rather funny and makes no effort to report them to his superiors. His off-mic comments to himself about George’s wife show that he’s savvy about the kinds of people his workplace caters for. To him, Tranquil Repose is a job. Okay, it’s a job that he has somehow managed to warp around his own personality and in which he plainly finds some pleasure, but essentially this guy is a working stiff.…

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Fear Them

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“Does this mean that the Olympic Dream is dead? 

“There’s a mystery man… he’s picked up the flame… we have no idea who he is… he’s carrying the flame!  Yes, he’s carrying the flame and no one wants to stop him. 

“It’s more than a flame now, Bob. It’s more than heat and light. It’s hope. And it’s courage. And it’s love.”

– From the script of ‘Fear Her’.

Heartwarming, I’m sure.  Absolutely certain to inculcate desirable attitudes in children.  Watching that will have them all full of hope and courage and love as they quaff their isotonic drinks and get exercising, hoping to one day be standing to attention as their national anthem is played and a bit of metal is draped around their necks, secure in the knowledge that all is for the best in the best of all possible social and political cultures.

On the other hand…

On 19 May, the Olympic torch will begin its journey, accompanied by 52 police officers, due to fears that the torch may be ‘targeted by radicalised protest groups’ or dissident Irish republicans, since according to the Telegraph ‘ experts on the IRA are warning the torch relay is vulnerable to attack.’

Other threats include ‘public disorder’ – a possibility that was identified as a risk after last August’s riots by assistant police commissioner, Chris Allison, the national Olympic security co-ordinator.

To eliminate these threats, the military/police ‘ring of steel’ around the Olympics will be buttressed by security infrastructure that includes an £80 million, 11-mile, 5,000-volt electric fence around the Olympic Zone, and a range of new surveillance and monitoring technologies in London itself.

The largest peacetime security operation in British history cannot be simply attributed to paranoia and an overzealous desire to protect the public. On the one hand it reflects an overlap between homeland security and corporate profiteering that has become a feature of the post 9/11 world.

As the urban geographer Stephen Graham has observed, the Olympics are ‘the ultimate global security shop window through which states and corporations can advertise their latest high-tech wares to burgeoning global markets while making massive profits’.

The Games also represent a more general marketing opportunity for their corporate sponsors. In 2006 Parliament passed the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, which upgraded the level of brand protection to Olympic sponsors and made any unauthorised marketing or commercialism connected to the Olympics a potentially criminal offence. 

And:

 This highly profitable, publicly subsidised, sporting event always attracts the major, and wannabe major, cities of the world, using any and all methods to entice an unaccountable Olympic committee, each flexing their political muscle to ensure theirs is the next chosen location. The Olympics take billions of pounds, yen, dollars of their host countries’ tax revenue to build magnificent stadiums and housing facilities, militarise the city, trample civil liberties and construct elaborate installations with shelf lives of a few weeks.

London 2012, originally expected to cost £2.4bn, is now projected at £24bn, with contracts going to some of the world’s most egregious employers and global human rights violators.

…

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Give Us This Day

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One of the first materialisations of the commodity was prayer.

Monasteries were the producers and vendors.  The monks were poor and humble, hence godly, hence their prayers were valuable, hence they became rich… and yet the prayers retained their exchange value after being emptied of their supposed theological use value, which was composed in the specious poverty of their producers.

The commodity has always been a fetish, its exchange value always immaterial, its use value always dependent partly on our subjectivities.  The idea of damnation made prayer a commodity, just as the reality of cold made wood a commodity.

And the putative virtue of the monastery foreshadows the self-asserted ethics of the corporation.

This is not idealism.  This is real materialism.

Just saying.…

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