reification

August 20, 2015

Turning the Tables

Jack Graham alienation, capital, commodity fetishism, Fantasy, gothic marxism, marx, marxism, reification, SF 0

“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”

– Karl Marx, Capital vol.1

Consciously or not, a lion’s share of SF/Fantasy is concerned with just this. Almost to the point of running with Marx’s ‘great idea for a story!’.

It’s also a great illustration that the best Marxism is Gothic Marxism. A Marxism which recognises the uncanny, the weird, the surreal, the fantastic, as both truthful expression and invaluable heuristic. The real world is made so strange, so bass-ackwards, so haunted and haunting, so alien by capitalism, that only historical materialism informed by the uncanny and the dreamlike can truly capture it.…

November 10, 2013

36

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, alienation, capitalism, commodity fetishism, exploitation, reification, the mind robber, wage labour 0

The Doctor, Zoe and Jamie are brought in to see the Master of the Land of Fiction. He has dossiers on them. He is, as Zoe says, very well organised.

“We have to be,” he says, “The running of this place requires enormous attention to detail. It’s a responsible position, but very rewarding”

A ‘responsible position’. So it’s a job.

“Responsible to who?” asks the Doctor.

Not to a person, says the Master, to “another power. Higher than you could begin to imagine.”

A system, an inhuman hegemon.

He congratulates them on the way they handled their tests. They have passed the job interview.

It transpires that the Master is a writer.

“Did you ever hear of the Adventures of Captain Jack Harkaway?” he asks.

“No, I can’t say that I… wait a minute, a serial in a boys’ magazine?”

“The Ensign! For twenty-five years, I delivered five thousand words every week!”

“Twenty-five years, five thousand words a week…” Zoe adds it up… “that’s well over half a million words!”

“That’s why I was selected to work here,” says the Master. He got headhunted.

He spent his life working to create copy for a publisher, who took his words and turned them into commodities. The commodities were copies of his own ideas, his own characters, taken from him and transformed. They piled up around him. They took on a life of their own, apart from him. Now he lives in a world of characters who were created by human labour, taken and turned into commodities. They too have lives of their own. In Marxism, this is called reification: the objectification of the social relations of production as things. And it’s also commodity fetishism: the treatment of commodities (in this case, fictions) as though they people… and the treatment of people as though they were commodities. One form of this is wage labour, and on that subject…

“And you’re the one that’s in charge of all of this?” asks Jamie.

The ‘Master’ hedges.

“Or is all this in charge of you?” asks the Doctor.

“My brain is the source of the creative power which keeps this operation going.”

So he doesn’t control it, but it won’t run without him, without his work. Just like the magazines wouldn’t get made without the intellectual, creative labour of people like him… just like the printing presses wouldn’t print them without the manual labour of printers… just like the printed magazines wouldn’t get sold if it weren’t for the manual labour of distributors…

He’s now in a world literally run by an alien power that robs minds, just as his mind was robbed to make magazines. And it wants to turn humanity into a string of sausages, all the same.

He denies that he’s a prisoner, but then the globe behind him glows and a siren sounds and the machinery demands his attention. Soon it speaks through him, its stentorian commands coming from his mouth. He tries to negotiate with it. …

June 12, 2013

Dreams About Unicorns

Jack Graham 60s, alienation, marxism, mind robber, reification, reviews, troughton 1

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.…