time monster

July 31, 2015

“Being without becoming” – Disjointed Thoughts on Dialectics and the Third Doctor, Part 1

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“Being without becoming [is] an ontological absurdity” says the Doctor in ‘The Time Monster’.

He’s talking about time, about the fact that time is – by definition – a process of change. Time is what entropy looks like to those of us in the midst of it. Entropy increases, thus time’s arrow goes forward. ‘Becoming’ is just a way of saying ‘change’. Everything is always in the process of becoming something else. Every apple is in the process of becoming a rotten apple, or an eaten apple, or seeds resown. ‘Ontology’ is the fancy name used by philosophers to mean the study of what it means for things to exist, to be real. The Doctor is saying: “the idea of things being frozen in time is inherently absurd because things that don’t change effectively don’t exist”.

Though, of course, in ‘The Time Monster’, things and people do get frozen in time. The story shows us something happening which has already been established as impossible. It’s almost as if we are being explicitly invited to read the story metaphorically.

This is something that doesn’t quite happen in ‘The Three Doctors’. As Phil Sandifer has said, the story should be set in the Land of Fiction. The moments when Omega materialises an ornate chair from nowhere, and when the Doctors make a normal door appear amidst all the bubbly orangely madness, are moments when we see how Omega’s realm should have been done – as an openly metaphorical realm of familiar imagery surreally employed. We have a similar problem in ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’. Clearly the entire trial should have occured in the Matrix, in the realm of metaphor, in the nest of sinister and surreal Victoriana, instead of in a bog-standard courtroom with some spangly bits stuck on because it’s in space. Omega’s realm should have been such a place. It should have been like the Land of Fiction, or Goth’s Matrix, or the Valeyard’s Matrix, or Heaven in A Matter of Life and Death. We are, after all, clearly engaged in a life and death metaphor here, with things disappearing from our world and being stranded in another, and then hauntingly returning to attack our world. However, as I say, ‘The Three Doctors’ attempts to foreclose on such readings by stubbornly insisting upon sciency-sounding jargon. Black holes, anti-matter, etc. The metaphorical possibilities of being transported from one realm of reality to another of unreality are shut-down (the attempt is at least made) by the technobabble about matter being processed so it can exist in a world of anti-matter.

Thing is, it never quite takes. Anti-matter is rarely used to mean anything scientific in sci-fi. The name itself is metaphor, expressing a scientific concept that is very hard to grasp in literal terms, especially for the layman. In sci-fi, ‘anti-matter’ is usually metaphorical. In ‘Planet of Evil’, anti-matter is straightforwardly hauntological! It is evil matter. Ghostly matter. Gothic matter. Hammer matter. It can infect our world, bringing ghosts with it, making jungles into haunted spaces, turning a sci-fi boffin from a Dr Jekyll into a shambling, simian Mr Hyde. …

February 7, 2015

Red Kangs Are Best

Jack Graham 80s, class, criticism, dialectical materialism, dialectics, jane, josh marsfelder, land of fiction, marxism, Me Elsewhere, middle classes, neoliberalism, paradise towers, pex lives podcast, philosophy, police, post-industrialism, postmodernism, reductionism, stalinism, state capitalism, thatcherism, time monster, too many tags? 2

I very much enjoyed the latest episode of the Pex Lives? Podcast, which looks at ‘Paradise Towers’. During it, Kevin and James’ guest Jane (of achairforjane? and many fascinating comments – and an amazing guest post on Lost – at Phil Sandifer’s blog) suggests a Marxist reading of the story in which the Rezzies are the consumerist bourgeois who ascend a few levels via the system which later consumes them. Totally valid and satisfying reading. (And I’m grateful for the lovely shout-out, as always.)

I think, however, that it illuminates a certain interesting ambiguity about what constitutes a ‘Marxist reading’ or a ‘Marxist analysis’. I know Jane and the Pex Lives boys already know this, so this isn’t in any way meant as a criticism of any of them, but I think a ‘Marxist analysis’ would really have to constitute more than finding some way in which aspects of the narrative function as an allegory of some aspect of the class struggle. I hold my hands up: that’s often what I do here, and it doesn’t really cut the mustard.

To do that is to bring Marxist categories to a text, but still to treat a text as something that exists somehow outside its own origins and function within the forces of production. A more proper sense of the term ‘Marxist analysis’ would be to critically evaluate the story in the light of the circumstances of its production – in individual terms, in terms of material/technical circumstances, in terms of the overall system of capitalist cultural production, and then also in terms of broader Marxist categories like ‘the culture industries’ or ‘ideology’ or ‘hegemony’ (with different Marxists probably stressing this or that aspect over another). I personally would want to argue that a proper Marxist analysis of a text, or any artifact of cultural production, would also focus at least as much upon the social circumstances of its consumption, circulation, distribution, exchange, commodification and financialisation. For my money, too many Marxist critics (of lots of things including – but also beyond – texts) have overstressed the node of production, which is only one node in the circuit of capital.

I’m often said (by people who kindly link to me on social media, for instance) to have written a ‘Marxist reading’ or ‘Marxist analysis’ of this or that. This makes me more than a little uneasy, to be honest, because I’m not usually anything like as rigorous and scholarly as I would need to be to meet even my own standards for such a thing. Generally I just react to texts in a very individual way, with my Marxist views inevitably forming the backbone of my response.

I worry that people with, perhaps, no other exposure to Marxism than me, might take me as a meaningful representative. Ye gods, I hope not. I am an amateur and, despite having gone to University, I consider myself effectively an autodidact. One of my purposes here (beyond simply amusing myself and indulging my vanity) has been, via the conduit of a popular TV show, to maybe bring a bit of Marxism (or just critical leftiness generally) into the thinking and reading of people who might otherwise not encounter it in our barren age.…