Eruditorum Press

Less organic intellectuals than morbid symptoms

culture industry

Secret Reality

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Spoilers

The last episode of The Blacklist was hilarious.  Red describes an international cabal – comprised of people in government and the private sector – who run the world behind the scenes, start wars, control the media, kill to protect their power, etc.  It’s supposed to be so edgy.  Dark, terrifying conspiracy.  He has to get loads of investigate journos to attend his briefing in secret.  They’re all stunned by what he says.  But… he’s just describing the ruling class!  Seriously, the ‘Cabal’ is just the capitalist military-industrial-media-government complex.  But we’re supposed to be shocked by the existence of this group.  Once informed about it, the Washington Post runs a front page story telling everyone of the breaking news.  SHOCK NEW REVELATION: SMALL NUMBER OF POWERFUL PEOPLE ARE POWERFUL AND GET UP TO STUFF FURTHERING THEIR OWN POWER WITHOUT TELLING US!  The evil director of the CIA looks at the paper in horror, like he’s thinking “oh no, now everyone knows!”  It’s like structuring the big, dramatic denouement of a drama series around the astonishing revelation that water is wet, and having all your characters suddenly back away in terror from any rivers or taps they happen to be standing next to.

On the other hand, I can’t help thinking this is still more charged than a story in which such facts of life are ignored.  Even presented as an outlandish, shocking revelation, it’s still presented.  Even framed as a surprise, it’s still there.  

Reminds me of the best Bond film ever, Quantum of Solace, in which a bunch of corporations, eco-businesses, military hardmen and Western politicians are presented as members of a secret criminal cartel who are trying to take over Bolivia’s water reserves.  Now this basically happened in the real world.  The film depicts it as an evil secret conspiracy that MI6 wants to stop.  It also depicts Quantum as sneakily damming up loads of water to create an artificial shortage.  But it basically connects with the real world, albeit distantly.  It’s far more connected to the real world than anything in the follow-up movie Skyfall (which is total shit, by the way, both politically and as entertainment).  Quantum of Solace also connects with the idea that powerful Western interests are behind politically-motivated Right-wing coups in South America… which is just one of those things that any sensible person takes for granted as an established historical truth, but which the mainstream media treats as a bizarre revelation.  But Quantum of Solace at least acknowledges it.  The movie puts the evil secret conspiratorial organisation behind such things rather than, y’know, the CIA and the US government… though it does have the CIA complicit in Quantum’s machinations, even if it is because one CIA guy is a rotten apple.

Is this subversive?  Of course not.  It’s gatekeeping.  It acknowledges things about the real world that people either know about or strongly suspect.  It then packages them in the classic methods of containment of such incendiary truths.  Bad Apple Theory. …

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Powerlessness Corrupts

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More curated tumblr jottings, which some people seemed to like.  Rewritten and expanded.

There is, in fandom, an impulse to denounce which is very congruent with a similar impulse that exists in some iterations of right-on politics.  It comes from a similar place: helplessness.  We’re always told that power corrupts, and it certainly does.  But powerlessness corrupts too.  People in fandom get accustomed to worshipping that which is handed down to them.  They can then discover the opposite but equal pleasure of execrating that which is handed down to them.  What both have in common is the idea of passively accepting what you’re given.  And yes, hating on something is a form of passivity quite distinct from the activity of criticism.  Passive acceptance of texts is, contrary to myth (a myth largely put around by fans, amazingly enough) far more common within fandom/s than in the general television viewing public. 

Jane Q Citizen puts Doctor Who (or whatever) on her telly, doesn’t like it, and so switches over to hunt for something she does like… or she likes it (having no long-cherished internal needs that she has trained herself to expect to be met by it), so she watches it, and then she forgets about it.  John Z. Fan puts Doctor Who on his telly, doesn’t like it, but cannot switch it off because he is a fan (and yes, this can apply to me too in some ways).  So, passive and powerless to influence the show that he loves but finds disappointing, he rages.  He isn’t writing it or producing it himself, and he doesn’t even have (because he’s chosen to abnegate it) the basic and paltry consumer freedom that capitalism grants us and lauds so much: the freedom to hunt for another product that will satisfy us where one product has failed.

Meanwhile, in many sections of right-on politics, splittery and sectarianism and denunciation rule the day because the right-on either have no real mechanism by which they can actually change any of the stuff they don’t like (clicktivism being such a dead end, and most branches of direct action and protest being dead ends too when taken by themselves) or they despair of the one thing that really can change things – mass, working class action – because we’re in a long-term trench of neoliberal downturn.

The powerlessness corrupts.

Meanwhile (again), there is another strange tessellation.  The gap between fandom and actual critical savvy is uncannily similar to the gap between right-onitude per se and actual critical political education.  The fan mindset can (notice I say can) leave one hungry for the tools of proper critical analysis but does not itself supply them.  Similarly, right-onitude (however well intentioned and sincere) can leave one hungry for the desire to think politically but does not itself supply the actual critical understanding one needs in order to do so sensibly or usefully.

Between the desire and the reality falls the shadow.

(And I’m not being patronising because I have in the past fallen into most of these traps myself, and still occasionally do today.)…

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Pyramids of London (‘Deep Breath’ 1)

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I’ve realised who Strax reminds me of: the policeman from ‘Allo ‘Allo.  But not as good.  That’s a cheap shot, but I do have a serious point to make.

Strax, you see, is essentially a funny foreigner.  You know, with his allegedly hilarious misunderstandings and all that stuff.  Moffat evidently imagines that Strax’s misunderstandings are a rich and continuing source of humour, since he stops the plot of ‘Deep Breath’ for a few minutes so that he can (once again) run through all the same Strax jokes he’s already done several hundred times in other episodes.  (This, by the way, is another way in which Strax resembles a character from ‘Allo ‘Allo – he is the same joke, repeated endlessly, over and over again, with the laugh demanded – upon recitation of a well-known catchphrase – from an audience supposedly trained via pavlovian technique.  If you object to my singling out ‘Allo ‘Allo here then, really, I agree with you.  How about we use Little Britain as our example instead?)

Of course, the funny foreigner – with all the imperial contempt and jingoistic chauvinism that is built in to it – is a very old, traditional, endlessly recurring character in British comedy.  Shakespeare, for instance, relied upon it heavily, with his nebbishy Welshmen Fluellen and Dr Evans, his amusingly touchy Irishman MacMorris, and his randy preening French vanitycase Dr Caius, etc etc etc.  So we can’t be too hard on Moffat here.  He is, after all, simply doing (yet again) something very old, venerable and respected, despite it being unfunny and based in national chauvinism.  Can’t really blame him, can you?

As I say, however, Strax isn’t as good as the policeman in ‘Allo ‘Allo… because the policeman in ‘Allo ‘Allo (you remember, he used to come in and mispronounce his words – it was terribly amusing) is actually a jab at the English, at the English habit of imagining that, rather than bother to learn foreign languages, all you have to do is speak English at foreigners, but with an attempt at their accent, and in a loud voice, and they’ll get it… because English is the only proper language, and people who don’t speak it are thus functionally the same as the mentally disabled, and everyone knows that people with mental illness just need to try harder.

I don’t mean to attribute attitudes like that to Moffat.  But its a shame that he falls back on a comedy trope that is so incredibly dodgy.  Though, in fairness, the employment of dodgy foreigner stereotypes (comic or otherwise) is not exactly unknown to pre-Moffat Doctor Who.  And Strax isn’t overtly supposed to represent any particular non-British nationality.  He’s supposed to be an alien.  And here we stumble across another complicating factor: the alien in Doctor Who has always been based on a kind of racial essentialism, a fear of the other, etc etc etc.  Strax could arguably be said to be considerably less dodgy than, say, Linx, because he represents a condition of mutual acceptance. …

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Koba the Ape

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Post-Spoilerocalyptic.

I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  Banalities first:  A well-crafted film.  Cogent and coherent in terms of aesthetics and plot (though there is a pleasingly bathetic moment when, following lots of atmospheric shots of apes engaged in social interaction, one ape suddenly addresses another in sign language as “Maurice”).  Nicely acted by the principles. 

Now.

In The Dark Ape Rises, the ‘good’ ape leader is Caesar and the ‘bad’ ape leader is Koba.

Caesar is the reasonable one, the compromiser, who wants peace with the humans.  Koba is the nasty one who can’t let go of his resentment of humans, who doesn’t trust them, who betrays Caesar and launches an all-out war against the humans.

Thing is, Koba is fucking awesome.  Because, unlike Caesar, he understands that when you have the oppressor on the floor, you don’t help him up and dust him down.  No.  You stand on his neck.

Here’s Koba, riding straight at the enemy (who are armed with rocket launchers by this point) while simultaneously holding (and firing) two machine guns instead of the reins of his horse.  Caesar never does anything this fucking spectacularly brave and principled in the entire course of the movie.

It reminds me of what Philomena Cunk once said in reference to the revolution advocated by Russell Brand.  She worried about it until she realised that it was a revolution in the mind… which is safer than a real revolution because nothing actually changes.

Revolutionaries are all very well, you see, until they actually start doing anything, or – horror of horrors – winning.  You’re allowed to be a radical or a rebel or a firebrand, as long as you are a noble failure.  That’s why Rosa Luxemburg – through no fault of her own, may I stress – is sentimentalised, whereas Lenin is the epitome of evil.

There’s been much comment from the critiots that this film is good because there are no fully good or bad characters, and everyone means well.  Bollocks.  Koba might be portrayed as doing what he thinks best, at least part of the time, but he clearly becomes the bad guy.  He even dies the traditionally spectacular/poetically-just villain death.

Koba is certainly a bastard.  You see, he immediately turns into a psycho when he becomes a political rebel from Caesar’s benevolent dictatorship.  As usual, inhabiting a zone outside moderate compromise with the status quo and the oppressors is an instant ticket into psychological instability and evil.  The radical is, by definition, an ‘extremist’, and the extremist is, by definition, both a fanatic and a nihilist, a dangerous utopian and a cynic, a zealot and a self-interested machiavel, a demogogue and an autocrat.

Caesar isn’t the only ape in the film with a name that recalls a famous political figure from human history. …

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Piece of Cake

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Someone nice on tumblr just asked me:

Do you think that it’s fair to criticize a work of art for the failings of the culture around it? This is a question I’ve been mulling over the past few days and I’m sure you have an interesting response.

My answer got a bit long, so I decided – opportunistically – to post it here.

*

I think the terms of the question are worth investigating.

What do we mean by ‘failings’?

What do we mean by ‘culture around it’?

Failure is, of course, subjectively judged.  Something I think is bad may be seen as good – or neutral, or normal, or inescapable – by others.

It is perfectly possible for something that is a ‘failure’ with regards to general human wellbeing to be a ‘success’ for a social system.  (The wellbeing of the working class, in any class society, always being more universal than that of the minority loafing class.)

Indeed, I think that if you look at the vast majority of mainstream media culture as it has existed in modern capitalist society – including and perhaps even especially with reference to narrative culture – then you see that it pretty unambiguously touts and celebrates values and/or activities that are failures when it comes to promoting general human wellbeing but successes when it comes to propping up and reproducing a social order dominated by the class that owns and controls capital.

*phew* long sentence.

This is the ‘culture around it’…

BUT…

I think it’s really important to realise that art doesn’t just sit there surrounded by culture.  It is culture.

We would expect any product to bear the hallmarks of its production, or the materials from which it was produced.  It’s just common sense to expect a cultural product to bear such hallmarks… and that’s without looking at any of the elaborate processes by which supply, demand, distribution, advertisement, hegemony, etc winnow cultural products out of circulation, or just prevent their production in the first place.

More deeply, just as the self is not a thing that exists in the world but is rather a dialectical process that we individuate from the wider set of processes that we call the world, so is art not a thing in the world but a chosen locus of relations, inter-relations and inter-reactions.

A cultural product is, from one standpoint, an individuated unit… but that standpoint is actually a form of commodity fetishism.  The cultural product as an entity that lives in the world, that says things and thinks things.  Thinking about cultural products that way is inescapable to a large extent, because it’s impossible for us to step outside of culture and look in.

The very fetishising of commodities which leads us create cultural products as things, and treat them like entities, is also what makes them very hard to perceive as anything else.

You could say that the entire project of modern criticism has been concerned with attempts to find ways through this maze.…

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“Go on, tell them,” says Jacko to Sean. 

“Tell them what? I’ll tell them nothing. They’re not people like us, they’re just a bunch of sardines.”

The fish people in the water below do not like this.

“You heard me,” jeers Sean, “Cold-blooded fishes. You haven’t got a drop of good red blood in your body.”

They don’t like that either.  They’ve been surgically altered by the regime of Professor Zaroff, an old Nazi scientist who was employed by the Western powers before he disappeared (it’s implicit) and who is now running the underwater city of Atlantis (the Nazis were obsessed with Atlantis).  He has forcibly turned an army of his workers into fish, complete with gills and fins and big round eyes, so that they can do the underwater jobs.  (They just don’t make mad scientists like Zaroff any more.)

“A flatfish from Galway would have more guts in them than that bunch!” Sean continues.  Oh yeah, I forgot to say… Sean’s Irish, hence his “gift of the gab” (sigh).

The fish people start throwing things at him.

“All right, all right, all right,” laughs Sean, “Oh, calm down and listen. Listen, will you?”

The fish people decide to hear him out.  Presumably because he’s like them: a man captured and exploited by Zaroff’s regime.  He hasn’t been surgically mutilated, but he’s been put to work in the Atlantean mines.  (By now there should be no need for me to reiterate the connection between surgery and capital, the way the evisceration and infibulation of the human body expresses anxieties about life in capitalism, about how wage labour cuts into your bodily autonomy and your life and your physical freedom, dissecting your time and… oh look, I’m reiterating.)

“Look, you supply all the food for Atlantis, right?” asks Sean rhetorically, “It can’t be stored, right? It goes rotten in a couple of hours. That’s why Zaroff has you working like slaves night and day, right? Well, has it never occurred to your little fish brains to stop that supply of food? Feed yourselves but starve Atlantis, eh? What do you think would happen then? Well now is your chance. Will you do it, or will you stay fish slaves for the rest of your lives? You’re men, aren’t you? Well, start the blockade right now!”

Again, this is workplace agitation.  The jokes at the fish people’s expense are clearly rhetoric.  Sean whips them up.  But the power is theirs.

I won’t attempt to describe what comes next.  The fish people’s underwater strike is indescribable.  And that’s good.  It must be seen to be believed… and by that I don’t mean ‘believed’ in the sense of believing that there were actually fish people who actually swam around in Atlantis.  I mean ‘believed’ in the sense of believing that it ever actually got made and broadcast.  To us, now, it looks like a transmission from another planet.  Again, that’s good.  The planet we live on now is pretty boring compared this one.

It’s a relic of a lost time, when the spectacle could still express material relations of struggle, and express them materially. …

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“We waited here in the dark space,” booms the Dalek Emperor, “damaged but rebuilding. Centuries passed, and we quietly infiltrated the systems of Earth, harvesting the waste of humanity. The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed. They all came to us. The bodies were filtered, pulped, sifted. The seed of the human race is perverted. Only one cell in a billion was fit to be nurtured.”

So, In Russell’s rewrite of ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ (which would be a better title for this story than it was for Saward’s script), the Daleks are no longer harvesting the elite.  Brought to the brink of extinction, they have been forced to resurrect themselves from the ‘dregs’… which seems to be synonymous with the contestants who lose game shows.  The Daleks take the people who get knocked out before the finale.  Because the Daleks have become TV producers.  They’ve become the people who run Big Brother and Trinny & Susannah and The Weakest Link.  They’ve become the bosses of reality TV.  They’ve become Simon Cowell.  (Which is kind of an insult to the Daleks, if you ask me.)

Big Brother, in our polity, in our system of media signs, is no longer Orwell’s omniscient totalitarian leader; he’s now the eternal, ever-watching viewer.  He’s us.  Just like the Daleks are now us.

“So you created an army of Daleks out of the dead,” says the Doctor.

Again, the gothic, the monopoly, and the zombie labour.

“That makes them half human,” mutters Rose… as always, she is straight to the quick.

“Those words are blasphemy!” bellows the Dalek Emperor.

The Daleks chant in unison…

“Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!”

“Since when did the Daleks have a concept of blasphemy?” asks the Doctor.

“I reached into the dirt and made new life. I am the God of all Daleks!”

The Daleks chant in unison…

“Worship him!  Worship him!  Worship him!”

Bringing back the Daleks in 2005, four years after 9/11 and the start of the ‘War on Terror’, two years into the conquest and occupation of Iraq, Russell T. Davies makes them religious fundamentalists.  The world is in the middle of an apparent ‘clash of civilisations’, with religion as the supposed organising logic.  But are these new fundamentalist Daleks – ‘Fundamentaleks’ – supposed to be Osama and Al Qaeda?  Are they Bush and the neocon Christian crusaders?  Both?  Two sides of the same coin?

To me, they look more like another kind of fundamentalism, a more prevalent and destructive kind.

They run a massive media system based on ruthless competition.  The housemates who lose the battle for popularity get ejected into nothingness.  The Trinny & Susannah bots encourage people to carve into their own flesh in order to look right.  The weakest links get zapped, and the strongest link is the one who most effectively and ruthlessly competes, who must callously fucks over his competitors.  Society has become “a charnel house” in which people compete in competitions of spectacular triviality which are framed as epic battles. …

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For March Against the Mainstream Media Day

The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki’s true identity.  Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she’s actually…

“Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?”  His tone is patronising.  Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.

“The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five’s transmissions,” says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, “We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people.”

“Ooo, I love it,” he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he’s listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, “Say it again.”

“This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?”

The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he’s a slave himself.

“I answer to the Editor in Chief…. If you don’t mind, I’m going to have to refer this upwards.”

Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.

“What is that?” she asks.

“Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born.”

Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.

“I don’t know anything,” she says proudly.

“Don’t you even ask?”

“Why would I?”

“You’re a journalist.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

She genuinely doesn’t understand him.  She doesn’t know what is on the floors above her… except that on the executive level, the place she’s been trained to yearn for, “the walls are made of gold”.  She doesn’t know why “immigration has tightened up”.  Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random ‘shit happens’ model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures.  And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by ‘News’, in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains.  For all the ‘news’ and ‘information’, they don’t know what’s going on or why.

“This society’s the wrong shape…” says the Doctor.

When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren’t made of gold, they’re made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies – including Suki.

“I think she’s dead,” says the Doctor.

“She’s working,” says Rose.

In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead… or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.

“It may interest you to know,” smarms the Editor, “that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it’s not actually human at all. It’s merely a place where humans happen to live…”

There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.

“…yeah, sorry…” the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, “It’s a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client.”…

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The Doctor, Polly and Jamie have been condemned to the pits, to the ‘Danger Gang’, for the crime of proving to the Pilot that his world is run by secret things that constantly order him to not notice them. 

The trio are entering the pithead to begin their work as miners, mining the deadly gas that the Colony collects for its unseen masters.  One of the Colony’s jolly little work ditties plays in the background.  A loud, insanely chipper voice sings lyrics about how happy everyone should be to work and serve the Colony.

The Doctor groans as if in terrible pain.

“What’s the matter?” asks Polly.

“Ooooh, dreadful!” exclaims the Doctor, “Did you hear that rhyme? The man who wrote that ought to be sent to the Danger Gang, not us!”

Jamie laughs.

The Doctor’s concern isn’t for the danger of the mines.  It’s for the ugly, crass, aesthetic banality of tyranny; for its kitsch horrors; for its lack of imagination.  This might seem like a failure of proper priorities… until you remember that such crassness is a symptom of the infection in the social wound, the same wound in which the macra teem.

In a society that demands you work for hidden, secret, ineffable, insane masters that you never see and can’t control, the mass-produced art that surrounds you is always going to be so much slop.  Its function is to soothe, to reassure, to distract.  It may not be consciously crafted to do these things, but if it doesn’t do them it simply doesn’t get mass-produced in the first place.  In a world so riddled with secrecy and injustice that psychosis becomes a necessary feature of social life, the songs you hear on the radio are always going to hide repressed lunacies within their mindless platitudes.  When you are expected to never question and never stop smiling, what chance is there that culture will be anything other than bland, safe, comforting pap?

And shitty, rubbishy, worthless, careless songs hurt us.  Songs that side with power are injurious, especially if they’re dripped into your ears day after day after day.  Songs that are just ugly and dull, because they are made in the same way as spam, are just as bad.  They hurt our hearts and souls and guts.

The Doctor’s priorities are just fine.…

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The committee want to know about Vorg and Shirna’s ‘ritual’. 

Shirna tries to explain.  “We’re entertainers.”  She does a little dance.  “Understand?”

Pletrac regards her, his face blank.

“No,” he says.

Vorg jumps in.

“Our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse… nothing serious, nothing political.”

Who is he talking to?  The committee?  The BBC?  Us?

In any case, the commitee retire – scandalised – into secret session.

“Amusement is prohibited,” gabbles Kailk in cold panic, “it’s purposeless.”

“Zarb is considering lifting that restriction,” says Pletrac.  Zarb is their leader.  “The latest thinking is that the latest outbreak of violence among the functionaries is caused by lack of amusement.”

The ‘functionaries’ are their slaves.  (Sadly, they are portrayed as rudimentary and stupid.)

The committee members are caught between two possible choices, both of them extremely attractive to any ruling class: stop the ‘functionaries’ thinking about anything but their function, or amuse the ‘functionaries’ and thus keep their mind off the fact that they are slaves.

So it turns out that amusement is pretty serious and political after all.

Meanwhile, inside Vorg’s silly, apolitical machine, white English imperialists complain about the idleness of the “madrasis”.

“Won’t have ’em on the plantation,” says Major Daley.…

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