ghost light

November 17, 2013

16

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, capitalism, colonialism, darwinism, determinism, dialectical materialism, dialectics, ghost light, ideology, imperialism, reductionism, social darwinism, sociobiology, victoriana 0

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. …

January 28, 2013

Out of Eden

Jack Graham borgias, christianity, daleks, darwinism, evolution, genesis, genetic determinism, ghost light, image of the fendahl, outside in, publishing, snakedance, the ark in space, the borgias 1

From the October 2011 issue of Panic Moon. As ever, lightly edited and titivated… ‘cos I just can’t help tinkering.

When Doctor Who talks about evolution, it doesn’t usually bother getting the facts right. ‘Evolution of the Daleks’, for instance, seems to think species change when genes mutate morally because of lightning bolts. Such ideas go right back to ‘The Daleks’, in which the two races on Skaro have changed totally in mere “hundreds of years” of mutation, with the warrior Thals becoming natural pacifists in the process. (Incidentally, it’s ironic that this supposedly anti-Nazi parable speaks of blonde, blue-eyed, athletic specimens as “refined” and “perfect”.)

Real evolution does involve mutations, but they’re not sudden and drastic as depicted in, to pick another example, ‘The Mutants’. Instead we’re talking about tiny replication errors in genetic code which are preserved or rejected by natural selection, leading to big changes over very long periods. This creates staggering variety on our planet alone. However, most aliens in the Doctor Who universe look like British actors, which (accidentally) implies that the humanoid shape is a universal pinnacle or goal of evolution. Again, real evolution teaches us the opposite. There’s nothing “perfect” about humans. We’re no ‘better evolved’ than worms. Species succeed when they fit their niches. ‘Full Circle’ alone understands this. The Alzarians are humanoid only because they evolved to fit inside the Starliner.

Doctor Who has sometimes been sceptical of such human hubris. In ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’, humans encounter ‘advanced’ reptiles who see them as errant apes. ‘Inferno‘ implies that snarling beasts lurk beneath the lab coat or uniform. ‘The Invisible Enemy’ equates the “Great Break Out” of humanity with a viral epidemic. In ‘The Ark in Space’, the Doctor praises humans as “indomitable”, but the Wirrn confront humanity with a lethal reflection of the same evolutionary urge to survive and inherit the Earth.

‘The Ark in Space’ retells the Old Testament myth of the flood. ‘Genesis of the Daleks‘ also adapts the book of… well, Genesis. Both stories are about species changing, about them subsuming and defeating other species. But ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ is also fundamentally about creations disobeying their creator. Hence the lack of scientific accuracy: the science isn’t the real interest of the storytellers. Instead, evolution takes on religious connotations. This is understandable. Evolution, as a scientific origin story, thrives in the gap in the cultural ecology left by the decline of religion. And, like much science-fiction, Doctor Who uses scientific and technological idioms to retell myths and legends.

‘Genesis of the Daleks’ also reiterates original sin: the Daleks are cursed by their genes to be bad. Mutations of morality again! This sort of thing mirrors tabloid stories about ‘genes for crime’, but Doctor Who has also tackled reactionary appropriations of evolution. ‘Survival’ critiqued Thatcherism by exploring what happens when the values of ruthless Darwinian competition are applied to society. The term ‘survival of the fittest’ was coined by Herbert Spencer, a 19th century pioneer of libertarianism. …

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.…