teenagers

January 28, 2015

An Ageing System

Jack Graham austerity, capitalism, conservatism, corey robin, crisis, europe, evolution, french revolution, neoliberalism, production, SF, teenagers 0

It’s always puzzled me, this thing about people getting right-wing as they get older. You’d think that the opposite would happen.

I mean, as you get older, you notice that the world keeps having the same problems, and that they tend to have the same underlying causes, and that nothing is ever done about them. You notice more and more of the same kinds of scandals reoccurring over the years, time and again, and always based upon imbalances of power, and upon powerful people being unaccountable. You’re more likely to have a mortgage and debts, the older you are. You’re more likely to owe lots of money to banks and credit agencies, and to be crippled by these debts. You’re more likely to have health problems, and thus to need medical care, and thus to see that the Health Service is underfunded and overstretched. You’re more likely to realise that your investments and savings (if you have any) don’t pay off in anything like the way you’re told they will when you’re younger. You’re more likely to worry about how you will look after yourself and your partner in old age. You’re more likely to notice your retirement receding into the distance. You’re more likely to find yourself paying through the nose for medications that go with age, medications your parents didn’t have to pay through the nose for. You’re more likely to meet more and more people of different ‘races’ and nationalities, and thus to notice that they’re not too different to you. You’re more likely to have been mistreated at work, or sacked, or been forced to find second jobs or third jobs. You’re more likely to have seen talentless people around you rising while you stay still, simply because they were born with advantages you never had. You’re more likely to have lived through several wars and recessions instead of just one or two. You’re more likely to have observed the way the world’s weather systems have catastrophically changed even in the last few decades. You’re more likely to have seen friends’ lives ruined by discrimination or depression or stress. You’re more likely to have seen your parents face an uncertain and neglected old age. And you’re more likely to have kids and grandkids, and to see all the challenges they face. A restricted job market, more and more pressure on them to work harder to have a chance of being employed one day, the escalating cost of further and higher education, more debt earlier in life, less chance of being able to afford to buy a house or even move out of their parents’ home, spiraling costs of living, less social safety nets, a squeezed education system. And on and on it goes.

Decades of life means decades of observing the world getting worse, and the so-called solutions never working, and the so-called progressive parties always selling people out, and the persistence of poverty and corruption never being addressed, and inequality and injustice always being at the root of the problems.…

November 22, 2013

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Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, 60s, apartheid, dialectics, evolution, french revolution, historical materialism, history, into the dalek, liberalism, machiavelli, naomi klein, nelson mandela, production, reaganism, revolution, SF, south africa, syriza, teenagers, tool use, TV, twitterverse, unearthly child 6

What can I do but cheat?

Three moments, not in chronological order.

Barbara Wright is in a junkyard. She walks into a Police Box. She’s in a large, brightly lit control room.

This can happen on screen because of the cut. The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible. We have “discovered television”. We can put huge buildings inside small boxes. We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole. The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids – the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces – can be made visual.

Doctor Who‘s very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production. So much so that living on that limit became its raison d’etre. Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done. And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next. As I’ve said elsewhere, ‘The Space Museum’ pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking… and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show – which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production – crunch up against an allegory about empire. This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room. The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production. Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told. The dialectic starts here.

This is analogous (I’ll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works. The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It’s fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history. It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from ‘historicals’ and into SF. Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian. And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children’s literature upon which the show is so reliant. In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures. Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.

The Doctor picks up a sharp rock. Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it. The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.

Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool. Given that this story is about ‘cavemen’ who are dying out because they’ve forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.…