dialectical materialism

July 31, 2015

“Being without becoming” – Disjointed Thoughts on Dialectics and the Third Doctor, Part 1

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“Being without becoming [is] an ontological absurdity” says the Doctor in ‘The Time Monster’.

He’s talking about time, about the fact that time is – by definition – a process of change. Time is what entropy looks like to those of us in the midst of it. Entropy increases, thus time’s arrow goes forward. ‘Becoming’ is just a way of saying ‘change’. Everything is always in the process of becoming something else. Every apple is in the process of becoming a rotten apple, or an eaten apple, or seeds resown. ‘Ontology’ is the fancy name used by philosophers to mean the study of what it means for things to exist, to be real. The Doctor is saying: “the idea of things being frozen in time is inherently absurd because things that don’t change effectively don’t exist”.

Though, of course, in ‘The Time Monster’, things and people do get frozen in time. The story shows us something happening which has already been established as impossible. It’s almost as if we are being explicitly invited to read the story metaphorically.

This is something that doesn’t quite happen in ‘The Three Doctors’. As Phil Sandifer has said, the story should be set in the Land of Fiction. The moments when Omega materialises an ornate chair from nowhere, and when the Doctors make a normal door appear amidst all the bubbly orangely madness, are moments when we see how Omega’s realm should have been done – as an openly metaphorical realm of familiar imagery surreally employed. We have a similar problem in ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’. Clearly the entire trial should have occured in the Matrix, in the realm of metaphor, in the nest of sinister and surreal Victoriana, instead of in a bog-standard courtroom with some spangly bits stuck on because it’s in space. Omega’s realm should have been such a place. It should have been like the Land of Fiction, or Goth’s Matrix, or the Valeyard’s Matrix, or Heaven in A Matter of Life and Death. We are, after all, clearly engaged in a life and death metaphor here, with things disappearing from our world and being stranded in another, and then hauntingly returning to attack our world. However, as I say, ‘The Three Doctors’ attempts to foreclose on such readings by stubbornly insisting upon sciency-sounding jargon. Black holes, anti-matter, etc. The metaphorical possibilities of being transported from one realm of reality to another of unreality are shut-down (the attempt is at least made) by the technobabble about matter being processed so it can exist in a world of anti-matter.

Thing is, it never quite takes. Anti-matter is rarely used to mean anything scientific in sci-fi. The name itself is metaphor, expressing a scientific concept that is very hard to grasp in literal terms, especially for the layman. In sci-fi, ‘anti-matter’ is usually metaphorical. In ‘Planet of Evil’, anti-matter is straightforwardly hauntological! It is evil matter. Ghostly matter. Gothic matter. Hammer matter. It can infect our world, bringing ghosts with it, making jungles into haunted spaces, turning a sci-fi boffin from a Dr Jekyll into a shambling, simian Mr Hyde. …

February 7, 2015

Red Kangs Are Best

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I very much enjoyed the latest episode of the Pex Lives? Podcast, which looks at ‘Paradise Towers’. During it, Kevin and James’ guest Jane (of achairforjane? and many fascinating comments – and an amazing guest post on Lost – at Phil Sandifer’s blog) suggests a Marxist reading of the story in which the Rezzies are the consumerist bourgeois who ascend a few levels via the system which later consumes them. Totally valid and satisfying reading. (And I’m grateful for the lovely shout-out, as always.)

I think, however, that it illuminates a certain interesting ambiguity about what constitutes a ‘Marxist reading’ or a ‘Marxist analysis’. I know Jane and the Pex Lives boys already know this, so this isn’t in any way meant as a criticism of any of them, but I think a ‘Marxist analysis’ would really have to constitute more than finding some way in which aspects of the narrative function as an allegory of some aspect of the class struggle. I hold my hands up: that’s often what I do here, and it doesn’t really cut the mustard.

To do that is to bring Marxist categories to a text, but still to treat a text as something that exists somehow outside its own origins and function within the forces of production. A more proper sense of the term ‘Marxist analysis’ would be to critically evaluate the story in the light of the circumstances of its production – in individual terms, in terms of material/technical circumstances, in terms of the overall system of capitalist cultural production, and then also in terms of broader Marxist categories like ‘the culture industries’ or ‘ideology’ or ‘hegemony’ (with different Marxists probably stressing this or that aspect over another). I personally would want to argue that a proper Marxist analysis of a text, or any artifact of cultural production, would also focus at least as much upon the social circumstances of its consumption, circulation, distribution, exchange, commodification and financialisation. For my money, too many Marxist critics (of lots of things including – but also beyond – texts) have overstressed the node of production, which is only one node in the circuit of capital.

I’m often said (by people who kindly link to me on social media, for instance) to have written a ‘Marxist reading’ or ‘Marxist analysis’ of this or that. This makes me more than a little uneasy, to be honest, because I’m not usually anything like as rigorous and scholarly as I would need to be to meet even my own standards for such a thing. Generally I just react to texts in a very individual way, with my Marxist views inevitably forming the backbone of my response.

I worry that people with, perhaps, no other exposure to Marxism than me, might take me as a meaningful representative. Ye gods, I hope not. I am an amateur and, despite having gone to University, I consider myself effectively an autodidact. One of my purposes here (beyond simply amusing myself and indulging my vanity) has been, via the conduit of a popular TV show, to maybe bring a bit of Marxism (or just critical leftiness generally) into the thinking and reading of people who might otherwise not encounter it in our barren age.…

March 27, 2014

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.…

November 18, 2013

12

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There’s so much I love about ‘Planet of the Ood’. Picking a moment will be hard.

I love some of the things other people hate.

Unlike Lawrence Miles, I love that Donna ticks the Doctor off for his “Who do you think made your clothes?” crack. Why the hell should Donna put up with smuggery like that from a guy wearing Converse trainers? Who makes your clothes, Doctor? (Apart from anything else, one answer is probably ‘women’.) Okay, he apologises for making her feel uncomfortable, which is problematic… but it isn’t as if the episode lets the matter rest there.

Unlike many people, I love that the Ood thank DoctorDonna for, essentially, doing nothing. I love that they free themselves without any help from the Doctor. I like him better as an ally than as a messiah. The Ood don’t suffer the fate of the N’avi: they don’t get Whitey leading them to freedom. The DoctorDonna doesn’t interfere. DoctorDonna renounces any claim they might think they have to judge the oppressed, to moralise when the oppressed free themselves by any means necessary.

I love that the episode is nevertheless unambiguous about the right of the oppressed to use violence against their oppressors. There are no patronising sermons which hold the oppressed to a higher moral standard of forgiveness and forebearance. Violence is horrible, but the violence of the oppressed in revolt is fundamentally morally different to the violence – individual and structural – of the oppressors.

I love that the Solana doesn’t have a change of heart.

I love the vacuous marketing slime in the PR lounge, tittering at the accessories they can add to their living merchandise. Just as lobotomised, in their way, as their commodity.

I love that Halpen flatters himself by being kind to his personal Ood servant while contemplating genocide against the entire race.

It’s not perfect.

I have a problem with the racial politics. By making so many of the human oppressors into people of colour, the episode effaces the particularity of race as an axis of oppression. It seems to say that capitalism is colour blind and all it cares about is the colour of money. This is true to an extent, and I believe that economic factors are ultimately causal, but race is a specific category of oppression within capitalism, and slavery of all things is a colour issue.

And it is, basically, another orientalist fantasy for assuaging white guilt (though considerably better than most).

But it’s time to pick a moment… so here goes:

The Doctor and Donna, handcuffed, are being harangued by Mr Halpen.

“The Ood were nothing without us,” he blusters, “just animals roaming around on the ice!”

Yes, yes, that’s what they always say. The [insert name of ethnic group being enslaved here] were just slightly-more sophisticated ruminants until the civilised people came along to put them and their land to good use. That’s the essence of the liberal justification for Western colonialism going back to forever. We’re doing them a favour. …

November 17, 2013

16

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The Doctor is confusing an angel to death.

Light came to our world to count and quantify all life, to create a set and definitive catalogue. Light sent its Survey out into the world to sample each form. But our world corrupted the Survey with the delicious possibilities of evolution. Light was locked away so the Survey could inherit the Earth. It became a Victorian gentleman, a man of property. It enacted a ruthless Darwinian takeover of the house above Light’s ship. A colonizing mission. A merger and acquisition. This being Victorian England, the wife and daughter and maids came with the house like fixtures and fitting. The Survey locked its secrets away, just like any Victorian gentleman, and set about dreaming of empire. It adopted the cultural logic of its new society and new position: the ideology of ‘the survival of the fittest’… meaning, supposedly, the dominance of the best. With its inbuilt assumptions about the place of ‘lesser races’ and ‘lower orders’ and women, Victorian social-Darwinism was perfect for the Survey’s purposes, as it shed its insectile and reptilian skins and became Josiah, the pink of respectability.

But then the Doctor came and let Light out of the cellar. Just to see what would happen.

Light turned out to be the reductionist ghost in the bourgeois social machine.

To Light, we’re merely walking bowls of “sugars, proteins and amino acids”. Light killed and dismembered one of the maids, saying “I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it”. That’s just how reductionism works. To understand something, you take it to pieces. But what happens when you can’t put the pieces back together again? Do you forget that the original thing was more than just the sum of its bits? Reductionism can do a lot of heavy lifting as an analytical tool, but it is the map not the territory… and mistaking it for the territory leads to vulgar materialism and determinism. A river cannot be understood as just an aggregation of water molecules. Aside from all the other natural and material processes involved, it is also a social phenomenon. It is something people experience, think about, wade in, swim in, sail upon, fish for food in, divert and ford and dam and befoul. It is something people name, and build towns around. Water can be used to quench thirst or drown people. It can be freely shared or owned and monopolised, or stolen. Likewise – more so – people are not just aggregations of limbs or genes (selfish or not). Looking at them that way makes it possible to inherit them and use them like property. Contrary to the assumptions of bourgeois political economy, societies are not just aggregations of individuals, all acting from their own self-interest. That’s part of how you end up saying that some people just have to be left to starve, or be put in the workhouse, or be ruled by a Viceroy, all for the good of the economy and progress. It’s partly how you end up with the idea that people starve or work or serve because they have failed to compete, or because it was their destiny as a unit of inherently inferior stock. …