Eruditorum Press

That is not dead which can eternally hit the snooze button

marxism

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.

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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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Everyone is down a mine.

(Incidentally, it’s funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines.  I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners’ unions and their industry by the Tory government.  Oh ho no.)

Anyway.  As I say, everyone – the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato – is down a mine.  And things are coming to a head.  (Head.  Pit-head.  Geddit?  Never mind.  It doesn’t really work anyway.)

Yes, so anyway…  Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.

“Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement,” says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk. “Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals….”

There’s an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.

“…the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll,” the Doctor continues, “Large quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there’s a superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so…”

“So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!” finishes Romana.

“Right. But who was the first person he met?”

“The person who held the monopoly of metal here,” supplies Organon in response to the Doctor’s rhetorical question.

He means Adrasta, by the way.

“Right,” agrees the Doctor, “And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him.”

If you don’t know what that last bit means, well I’m sorry… I have limited space and no inclination to explain.  What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you’re not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?

What Erato didn’t reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism…  By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.

The funny thing is… this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history.  Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged).…

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Gothic Marxism

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For Hallowe’en, here are some talks to enjoy.

Here‘s David McNally, talking about the ideas in his book Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, which I mentioned (and cribbed from shamelessly) in this recent post.

Here‘s Silvia Federici, talking about her book Caliban and the Witch, which links the witchhunt craze to the rise of capitalism.

And here‘s China Mieville, giving a Marxist view of Hallowe’en (which is more fun than it sounds).

Monsters of the world, unite!

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ADDITION 01/11/13:

I didn’t know this, but there’s a video of the China Mieville talk I linked to above:

…

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Dreams About Unicorns

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On ‘The Mind Robber’.  A regurgitation of something originally buried in the middle of an old post.

1. The Review

Just one of the best things ever, this story is a gloriously trippy metafictional journey into Doctor Who‘s own status as a text.

‘Robber’ picks up the Troughton era handbook for writers, stamps on it, scrawls insulting and anarchistic slogans upon its pages, rips it up and sets fire to the pieces. There is no isolated base, no croaky computer, no catalgue of disposable characters who are laser-beamed to death, no unstable authority figure, no creeping infiltration, no standard fight sequence for Jamie, no scene where someone goes into a bonkers tirade and storms out of a control centre… instead we have a deeply trippy ride through sheer weirdness; a totally unpredictable variation of content, style and pace from episode to episode; an intelligently created elllision of symbolism and literalism; a classic surreal quest narrative drawing on Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland yet beholden to neither.

The Doctor and his friends leave their universe and enter a non-spatial, non-temporal buffer zone… and this buffer zone is a world of fiction. An empty nothingness until imagination works upon it, it soon fills with robots and unicorns and princesses and forests of words.

They’ve landed in a metaphysical space instead of a physical one, and the threats they encounter are metaphysical too – they run the risk of being translated into other identities, of losing their faces, of being turned into bit players in other people’s stories, of being made into fiction themselves (which, as this story constantly reminds us by constantly saying the opposite, they already are).

They are stalked by the ultimate variety of faceless, functional, baddie goons: toy soldiers. As if to swipe at the mechanical nature of so much scriptwriting, these goons have got dirty great wind-up keys sticking out of their backs. In this story, the ultimate threat is to become the functional plaything of the desperate hack writer. The soldiers not only hunt our heroes, they also represent what our heroes are threatened with (both literally and figuratively): being clockwork cyphers who just ‘go’ when the lazy writer winds them up and sets them off.

And this is the central threat, even of the somewhat contrived Earth-invasion plot that surfaces towards the end. Mankind would become fiction. Ironically enough, via the creative imagination, we’d all be stripped of our free will. We’d be crushed inside the pages of a book by a domineering Master Brain that controls even the writer with a stentorian bark that is channelled through his own mouth. That’s what it would be like to be a character in someone else’s book, or a fact pushed around by someone else’s editor, or a mortal pushed around by a god (which is exactly what a writer looks like from the point-of-view of a character).

This is Doctor Who investigating its own nature as part imagineering stream-of-consciousness fantasy, part lumbering and mechanical genre hack-work.…

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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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Monkey Business

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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.…

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Grinding Engines

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The mechanical sciences attained to a degree of perfection which,  though obscurely foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted madness  to have prophesied in a preceding age.  Commerce was pursued with a  perpetually increasing vigour, and the same area of the Earth was  perpetually compelled to furnish  more and more subsistence. The means  and sources of knowledge were thus increased  together with knowledge  itself, and the instruments of knowledge. The benefit of  this increase  of the powers of man became, in consequence of the inartificial forms  into  which mankind was distributed, an instrument of his additional  evil. The capabilities of  happiness were increased, and applied to the  augmentation of misery. Modern society is  thus an engine assumed to be  for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle  mechanism  augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or  raising  water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or  breaking to pieces the wheels  of which it is composed. 


–  Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819-1820 






Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won. 


He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin.  Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room atone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.


– Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?


Entropy is a concern of science-fiction as a whole.…

			    
		    
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Skulltopus 8: Society of the Tentacle

							

											
					
					
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The quasi-tentacular returns in ‘The Claws of Axos’.  Big time.












What’s more, this story is an orgy of strange flesh… to the extent of looking like a precursor to John Carpenter’s The Thing.



































Now, if my idea is right – that, in the 70s, Doctor Who starts invoking Weird tentacles as a kind of evasion/signification of capitalism when it veers too close to potential systemic critique – then this really, really should show up in ‘The Claws of Axos’.


Not to keep you in suspense: it does.


Taking it on the Chinn


Now don’t get me wrong.  I’d hate you to get the idea that I was claiming that ‘Claws’ is ‘subversive’ or anything.  I’m not.  It isn’t.  As political critique goes, objectively, ‘Claws’ is feeble.  Yes, it is very cynical about the government, but that in itself doesn’t amount to subversion.  After all, Clear and Present Danger  (to take an example more or less at random) features a secret plot by the President, the White House Chief of Staff and high-ranking CIA people to launch a covert war in South America – but Clear and Present Danger isn’t remotely subversive… indeed, it is a highly reactionary film that entirely supports the specious ideological assumptions of the American empire.  This is slightly unfair to ‘Claws’, since it has, well, sharper claws than Tom Clancy via Hollywood (‘Claws’ is cynical about establishment power, while CaPD depicts the cynicism of powerful people as a danger to a fundamentally well-meaning establishment), but it does illustrate the point that simply depicting the wrongdoing of the state does not necessarily or automatically amount to a radical critique.


With its bourgeois patrician hero, its stiff-upper-lipped and self-sacrificing scientist/peer, its bog-standard sexist representation of Jo as dollybird-in-need-of-saving, its depiction of the American lawman (FBI?  CIA?  …something like that) as a square-jawed straight-arrow, the comic neutralisation of the issue of poverty, the implication that people starve because there is a lack of food rather than a lack of profit in feeding them, and many other such representations, ‘Claws’ is as well integrated into capitalist ideology, and as likely to ‘manufacture consent’, as any other Doctor Who story, the vast majority of which are straightforwardly and entirely unthreatening to the status quo.  What political critique there is consists, for the most part, of moralistic liberal finger-wagging about greed, nationalism and xenophobia, which is itself compromised by the Axons turning out to be evil, shifty, bogus asylum seekers (that sort of thing didn’t start with Gatiss, sadly).  Such moralistic liberal finger-wagging is inherently non-subversive and non-radical because it is inherently reformist rather than revolutionary, i.e. vote out the reactionaries, and get the common herd to be less materialistic, and capitalism will be fine and dandy.


However, everything is relative and context changes things. 


The fact is, ‘Claws’ has probably the most straightforwardly, explicitly, non-metaphorical depiction of the British state as cynical and machiavellian of all Pertwee stories (though the impact is softened by Chinn’s comic incompetence).  In ‘Claws’, the problem isn’t one slimey bureaucrat, one idiotic authority figure, one cowardly warmongering parliamentary private secretary… the problem is Chinn and his boss and the government they work for. …

			    
		    
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The Empire of Vanilla

							

											
					
					
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Some things I’ve noticed about ‘Spearhead from Space’


There’s a lot of wood in this story.




                              




                                                         




This   suggests a contrast, a conflict even, between older forms of  production  – the appearance of the hospital, and the Seeleys’ cottage,  suggest  artisanship – and newer industrial technology and mass  production,  represented by the factory and the evil plastic which  creeps out of it.




There are lots of workers in this story.  There’s a Nurse.




There’s Mullins.













Mullins, one of the many wage labourers in this story… 
seen here in the act of labouring for his wage.  		








There’s   a workman in the street, talking to the copper before he investigates   the (off-screen) breaking of shop windows (implying the role of the   police as protectors of private property and business).  There’s the   guard at the front gate of UNIT HQ.  There’s the guide at Madame   Tussauds.


There are the workers in the plastics factory.











I don’t know, but I’d guess that these women – together with the male worker
seen earlier in the episode, operating heavy machinery – are actual workers
in the factory where these scenes were filmed.  One of the women is Asian,
which is a pretty big clue that she’s a ‘real person’ rather than an extra.		






Some of the workers are ‘fake’.  There are   Auton Porters who help kidnap the Doctor.  There’s an Auton secretary   at the factory.  Note how the Nestenes still employ a young woman in a   short skirt as a secretary, even if she is made of plastic… but then   such women are usually treated like mannequins in practice anyway.


These   waxen-faced, blank, zombified workers strongly suggest an extreme form   of alienation: line hypnosis, a psychological condition where people  are  lulled into passive, unresponsive fugue states by constant  repetition  of the same mechanical tasks – found most famously in people  who perform  extremely simple tasks at conveyor belts.  More broadly,  it suggests  the deadened, flattened affect of people who find their  Fordist jobs  dull beyond belief. 


Think this is a stretch?  But the story makes a point of commenting upon automation.  The monsters are called   Autons.  We see, as noted above, faceless factory workers at their   tedious, repetitive, assembly-line jobs.  And General Scobie, the   swaggering old reactionary establishment figure par excellence,   upon hearing that the plastics factory has become largely automated   (which means a load of people have lost their jobs), makes a crack about  automation being a splendid idea because “you don’t find machines going  on  strike!”  In other words, workers should be treated like and behave  like  machines…. and replacing them with machines is the next best  thing.


There is much literal commodification – often of  people – in this story.  Ransome is paid off… even his name suggests a  payment for a person.  Seeley tries to sell his “thunderball” and  nearly gets his wife killed.  Mullins sells the Doctor to the journos.











“I understand you pay for stories?”






But ‘Spearhead’ really harps on about life  being commodified… most particularly by its concentration upon  production.…

			    
		    
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