engels

March 21, 2014

Anti-Moffat

Jack Graham engels, philip sandifer, steven moffat 5

News from Elsewhere II: This Time It’s Polemical

I’ve done another guest post for Phil Sandifer’s site, here. He wanted someone to put a case against the Moffat era before he proceeded to post his own thoughts about it. He asked me to provide and, despite the obvious dangers, I bravely agreed… to attack someone who can’t answer back without looking like a massive prick. Still, I’ve done it before. Just never on a site with an actual readership. The scarier thing is how Phil’s own subsequent posts will stamp all over me.

I’ve steered well clear of having a go at the man personally, which means I’ve not engaged with any of his troubling public statements. I’ve tried to argue from the texts.

Phil has called my post ‘A Case for the Prosecution’. I’m glad he put “A” rather than “The”, because – inevitably – my attempt will disappoint some of the many people who care about this issue, not least because I didn’t have time to do much more than cobble together a (relatively) brief overview.

To me, this bit of writing will always be called the ‘Anti-Moffat’. Not that I compare myself to Engels. In his Anti-Dühring, Engels not only wrote a blistering polemic, he also did the one thing that genuinely makes polemic valuable: he explained his own, alternative view. It became one of the most brilliant and inspiring elaborations of Marxism ever written. I, by contrast, have failed to even come away with something positive to say about what my favourite TV show should be like. I also failed – apart from the odd hint – to find space to put the Moffat era in its historical and political context, as the Who of late neoliberalism, ongoing crisis, backlash and austerity. (Maybe I’ll put all that in the book.)

So, basically, it’s just a whinge. But an entertaining one, I hope.

Engels. Some people say Marxism wasn’t as good after he took over.

ADDITIONAL, 23/03/14: Richard Cooper, over at his blog ‘Finger-Steepling and Sharks’, also has an excellent essay about the issue of Moffat and sexism, here, which pre-dates mine.…

July 13, 2012

Monkey Business

Jack Graham darwin, darwinism, dialectics, engels, evil, evolution, ghost light, liberalism, marc platt, marx, marxism, natural selection, race, racism, science, social darwinism, spencer, t.h. huxley, terry eagleton 1

On ‘Ghost Light’.

Let’s leave aside the aesthetic beauty of the production, with its pattern of oppositions – light and dark, day and night, madness and sanity, stone and wood, feminine and masculine, dead and alive – which alternate until they start to bleed into each other and mingle until we are left with no certainties.

Let’s leave aside the willfully abstruse script; the wonderful way it is deliberately constructed as a jewelled puzzle box; something to be studied and pondered and interpreted rather than just passively enjoyed.

Let’s leave aside the scrumptious bevy of literary references, sly self-referencing jokes, puns, double meanings, allusions… all of which show an intense and highly self-conscious (though not glib) awareness and playfulness with language, text, genre and storytelling tradition. You want an example? How about the use of the word “wicked”, which – with wonderful irony – appears in both the Victorian usage and as 80s teenspeak. It’s the last word of the story – the last word spoken by the Doctor in the last-filmed story of the classic series. And when the Doctor uses it to describe Ace, he sounds like a Victorian moralist (of times past or present) scolding a disobedient child… but, by Ace’s usage, and by his own sly wink, he’s giving his approval to her pyromaniacal aversion to the house haunted by evil Victoriana.

Let’s look instead at what this story says about evolution.

Firstly, it gets things technically wrong by depicting evolution as working teleologically, so that the human is the ‘final’ stage when the process is finished.

Or does it?

Secondly, it’s about homo victorianus ineptus (and his spiritual descendants) railing against a theory they don’t understand because it offends their bigoted prejudices. It’s about Soapy Sam Wilberforce and our latter day creationists, terrified by the theological and cultural and social and political ramifications of a scientific discourse which emphasizes mutability and materialism.

Or is it?

Let me suggest that, while there’s some truth in the above, there’s also a lot more to it than that.

I don’t think it gets evolution wrong so much as it gets people’s ideas of evolution right. It understands that a certain kind of vulgar, reactionary, bourgeois idea of evolution pictures a ladder with the strongest, most ruthless at the top… and the weak at the bottom. It seems to depict evolution as a succession of ‘rungs’ which are climbed through mutation, achieving progress and reaching a final goal embodied in a human male… but, in its strategy as a text, it represents this as the process (progress?) of exactly the kind of reactionary, bourgeois mind that would view the Victorian gentleman as the pinnacle of evolutionary ascent.

That’s why the ultimate punishment for Josiah seems to come from within him. It’s his own idea of successive stages that makes it possible for him to fall back down through them; it’s his own idea of the superior keeping the inferior as pets that makes it possible for Control to put him on a leash.…