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April 14, 2012

How Curses Work 3.5: Mythoimperialismo

Jack Graham colonialism, conrad, fanaticism, how curses work, imperialism, myth, patriarchy, sexism, you're not actually reading this are you? 3

Imperialism lies not just in the physical violence of invasion, domination, exploitation and subjugation, but also in the cultural violence of the appropriation and representation of the subjugated.

This is how exploitation and domination always works. Patriarchy’s domination of women is expressed in the marginalization, infantilization and suffocating sexualization of the female image in culture, the relentless portrayal of the woman as secondary, as an adjunct, as a commodity, as a servant or helpmate, as a source of male pleasure and satisfaction. So the violence of imperialism is also expressed in the representation of the subjugated peoples as inferior and/or dangerous, by the plundering of their stories, histories, images, ideas, practices, customs, languages, discourses, art, architecture, etc., and their transformation into aspects of the dominant culture of the imperialist.

The subject culture is usually thus shown to be inherently deserving of domination, inherently savage, childlike, irrational and sinister. If the subject culture is not demonized, it is usually infantilized, fanaticized (even their bravery is not real bravery but rather fanatical zeal from savages who do not feel pain or fear death the way we civilized people do), or shown as shambolic, idiotic and comic. Needless to say, any resistance to imperial domination, or violent reaction against it, is generalised and used as evidence of the fanaticism and savagery of the dominated.

The imperialism of the modern age – beyond the brutal reality of bullets and plunder, and beyond the underlying system of states competing globally when their geopolitical priorities converge with those of their national concentrations of capital – is a system of myths. It is as important to promulgate myths among the people of the imperial nation as it is to foist them on the victims. One of the most enduring myths of imperialism is that the victims are to blame for their own plight. This, together with a whole raft of inferiority complexes, is internalized by colonized people. But it is also internalized by the colonizing nation. This manifests itself in various versions. There is, for instance, the ‘it’s for their own good’ version, which says that the colonized benefit from colonialism, because colonialism brings them the benefits of ‘civilization’ (i.e. white Anglo-Saxon Christianity or modern secular liberal democracy, depending on which era the ideology comes from) to people who desperately need it. This is closely related to the demonizing of the colonized. The dual nature of the ‘native’ in all colonialist ideology is that they are “half-devil and half-child”.

Our imperialism needs its ideological myths, just as much as the imperialism of the past… the really scary thing is that we keep coming up with the same myths about the same people… probably because we keep needing those myths as a cultural blindfold to stop ourselves seeing imperialism for what it is.

These are the merest banalities.

…

April 3, 2012

How Curses Work 3: That Whole Rabbits/Tennis Connection There

Jack Graham city of death, david aaronovitch, death to the daleks, eurocentrism, how curses work, Mars, NASA, nigel kneale, pyramids of mars, robert holmes, von daniken, you're not actually reading this are you? 4

I always dimly assumed that Stephen Harris – whatever combination of real people he may pseudonymically represent – got the idea for a story about pyramids on Mars from all that guff about there supposedly being pyramids and giant monkey faces on Mars.

However, I learn that the ‘face’ and ‘pyramids’ on Mars were not ‘discovered’ until the NASA Viking missions, which didn’t snap pictures of the region of Mars known as Cydonia (where all the pyramids, town squares and giant useless chimp portraits are said to be) until after ‘Pyramids of Mars’ was broadcast.

The whole pyramids / Mars thing is alive and well today, beyond Who-dom. Viz, this species of utter balls:

This kind of drivel has not been stopped – or even slowed – by better and more detailed images taken by NASA since.

Here, for instance is an image of the ‘pyramid’, taken by Mars Global Surveyor in 2001:

Self-evidently NOT an artificial, architectural structure, I’m sure you’ll agree. (If you don’t, you have no business reading this blog. Go away immediately.)

Here, is the spooky ‘simian’ ‘face’ on Mars, imaged by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007:

Looks exactly like Roddy McDowell in Planet of Apes, doesn’t it?

And yet, despite the fact that we now have very detailed images of this LUMP OF ROCK clearly showing it to NOT be a sculpted face, a brief (and depressing) googling session will turn up wonders such as this…

Sometimes, scientists must wonder why they bloody bloody bloody-well bloody bother.

But, yet again it seems, good old Who may claim to have ‘got there first’. Hinchcliffe and Holmes did the pyramids / Mars thing before anybody thought there were any Martian pyramids. That’s almost as good as predicting a woman Prime Minister and the existence of Jim’ll Fix It… and it tops Bob Holmes’ previous best of satirising Star Trek: The Next Generation before most British people had even seen Kirk and Spock.

Back before Viking, if Mars had structures (an idea which the Mariner missions had already dented), they were supposed to be canals… even though the guy who first talked about Martian canals was being metaphorical. In Italian.

Of course, most of ‘Pyramids of Mars’ is a concentrated rip-off of Hammer’s The Mummy with some von Daniken-esque seasoning… but still, it seems to have done something original. ”Egyptology and Mars”, as Lawrence Scarman put it, before such a connection had appeared elsewhere.

(If anyone knows of previous connections, please do let me know.)

Even some of those who take the pyramid/face stuff seriously seem happily aware of Doctor Who‘s prior claim:

So – without wanting to become like one of those pompous bumholes like David Aaronovitch (yes, a relation) who write smug, chin-scratchy things about conspiracy theorists and homeopaths – what does this all mean?

After a cursory glance at many of the sites where people pick over photos of Mars looking for evidence of alien buildings, I’m very tempted to wonder about the readiness of our culture to associate Mars with the motifs of the ancient East.…

February 19, 2012

A New Hope?

Jack Graham oh god I'm so bored, star wars, you're not actually reading this are you? 2

Rewatching Star Wars is an odd experience.

It’s surprisingly dirty, grimey and grotty.

It doesn’t introduce the hero until about 15 minutes in.

Loads of the first reel is one-sided bickering, followed by silent wandering around in the desert.

Han is really very seedy… and a murderer.

Leia is a sarcastic, bossy, combative dominatrix; a far cry from the sexual-harassment-victim / soppy-girlfriend she later became.

The tone suddenly veers from deadly serious to comic/quippy as soon as the Falcon arrives at the Death Star.

The Stormtroopers hang around and chat.

The Rebels are an unprepossessing bunch – skinny, scrawny, tubby, greasy-haired, snaggletoothed, etc.

The droids are CLEARLY slaves to the humans.

The Sandpeople are CLEARLY evil Arabs.

The backstory as explained by Ben is much better than anything in the sequels, let alone the prequels: Ben and Annakin go and become Jedis, their protege Darth kills Annakin, Ben buggers off home. Clear, simple and emotionally resonant.

Darth is clearly a first name and is clearly NOT Luke’s dad, no more than Leia is Luke’s sister. Luke and Leia clearly fancy each other.

The funny thing is that, if we take the prequel canon as applying to the original film (which can be done without inflicting emotional damage upon oneself as long as its only a temporary thought experiment) then the lovechild of Luke and Leia would be absolutely LOADED with midichlorians… thus making it, in all probably, the most powerful Jedi in history. The only problem is that a lightsabre would probably be harder to wield effectively with webbed fingers.

Darth Vader, by the way, is a henchman to Tarkin… and god only knows how he comes out of the whole let-Leia-escape-with-the-plans clusterfuck with a PROMOTION!

Also… isn’t destroying an entire planet, just to make a point, a bit of a fucking waste? Did Alderaan have no resources, no wealth, no strategic value, no military, industrial or economic significance to the Empire? None at all? It’s a bit like Hitler saying: “just to prove how powerful I am, I’m going to completely destroy Belgium”.

And ponder Luke’s lack of concern over the slaughter of his adoptive parents – “ah, fuck ’em, they made me do farm work” – not to mention Leia’s brusque dismissal of the destruction of her entire planet.

Weird.…

January 10, 2012

Strange Matters

Jack Graham androids, gothic, hauntology, magic, materialism, sci-fi, vampires, you're not actually reading this are you? 0

There is something very gothic about Doctor Who, in the hauntological sense. I mean that the show keeps on doing monsters that represent, in various ways, ‘the return of the repressed’, monsters that represent buried anxieties, or anxieties that we have attempted to bury. But the monsters tend to be steadfastly material in quite straightforward ways… and to embody material, social, historical nightmares (fascism is a big one that immediately suggests itself).

It’s important to stress that this isn’t a contradiction, as such. Indeed, in many ways, it’s ‘business as usual’ for the gothic. You can’t get more hauntological than vampires, but they tend to be interpreted as representing deeply materialist concerns, from veneral disease to monopoly capitalism (and, these days, teen romance… which is about as materialist as anything gets). However, while they may represent material, social, historical anxieties, vampires are not straightforwardly material. They are, like most classic gothic/hauntological monsters, profoundly spectral – or at least ab-physical. They dissolve in sunlight, cast no reflection, can appear and disappear at will, can physically transform into bats or wolves, can reverse physical time by becoming young again after feasting, can defy gravity by crawling down sheer walls, etc. And vampires are at the more solid end of the hauntological spectrum.

However, Doctor Who has tended to (rather spuriously) consider itself a champion of an empiricist, scientific approach rather than one which has any truck with the supernatural, making vampires into alien races or mutations created by pollution, for example. (This is, as I say, rather spurious, partly because the writers of the show have usually been less interested in scientific accuracy and more interested in telling stories, often reiterations of myth – and quite right too.) But the thing to notice here is that, despite the very gothic/hauntological method of many of the show’s monsters (haunting us with our repressed anxieties), the show does not usually represent them as spectral or phantasmic or undead in the full supernatural sense. They may appear and disappear, but its because they’ve got transmats, not because they’re immaterial, undead things that flit in and out of tombs.

In other words, the show wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants to have hauntological monsters that are alive, that are physical, that are hard and material things, that are organisms or robots. This is not a denial of the hauntological-as-supernatural, but a recoding of it. Like much SF, Doctor Who is immensely concerned with myth-reiteration, with retelling legends in the idioms of the age of science and technology and industrialisation. I’m not here going to go into the various ways that Doctor Who‘s conception of reality is fundamentally magical. What I’m trying to tease out is the way that, despite its repression of magical thinking, magical thinking keeps returning to the show and sneaking its way in. It does this (if I may briefly anthropomorphise a concept) by disguising itself in a materialist form, and by inserting the hauntological method into narratives that are fundamentally about materialist concerns.…

October 20, 2010

Eyepatch on the Left?

Jack Graham axonite, capitalism, communism, fascism, inferno, nazis, primords, state capitalism, you're not actually reading this are you? 1

Perhaps the most interesting thing about ‘Inferno’ (interesting to me anyway) is the way that the fascist world of the Brigade Leader is distinguished by only a very few differences – mainly in terms of attitude and levels of state violence – from the ‘democratic’ capitalist world of the Brigadier and 70s Britain. There are more similarities than differences. There’s very little to distinguish a state-funded project in a ‘democratic’ world and one in a fascist world; very little distance between the basic jobs of a Brigade Leader and a Brigadier. The people behave differently but the essential structure of society is the same, albeit with very different levels of official repression. This reflects – probably accidentally, if we’re honest – the fact that fascism is not a fundamentally different form of economic system but a different way of running a capitalist state.

Actually, I’ve been calling them “fascists”… but the casual reference to the execution of the royal family, the fact that the Brigade Leader is a member of something called the “Republican Security Force” (the Nazis planned to reinstall Edward VIII as their puppet monarch when they took over Britain, not set up a ‘republic’), the Orwellian poster and the fact that a government official can happily go by the name of Sir Keith Gold, all tends to suggest that this might be a ‘communist’ tyranny rather than a ‘Nazi’ one. (By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that Jews always had a lovely time of it in Stalinist dictatorships, merely that anti-Semitism wasn’t a central part of ‘communist’ doctrine the way it was with the Nazis.)

There are indications that work for either a fascist or ‘communist’ world… and that was probably the idea: the notion that both are essentially the same, or very similar. Okay, so does that work? Well, the idea that Nazism and ‘communism’ (and other similar systems, like Baathism in Iraq) are all akin to each other and best described as ‘totalitarian’ is still a very common and popular one. The concept of ‘totalitarianism’ is certainly useful to an extent, as it expresses a fundamental difference between a repressive state that attempts to simply force obedience and one that also attempts to impose orthodoxy in all aspects of life. Ultimately, however, it’s probably a bit of a millstone. It allows people like the ‘anti-totalitarian’ left and the French ‘New Philosophers’ to argue for imperialist wars waged by America, the UK and NATO, on the grounds that their opponents are ‘totalitarian’ and are therefore akin to the powerful states that created the Gulag and the death camps. It’s arguable how many societies have really that closely resembled the totalitarian model as represented by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (which, in popular consciousness, is a bit like the Platonic ‘form’ of totalitarianism). We should never forget that Orwell’s book is a satire, and as such contains a great deal of exaggeration… and that the representative of Oceanian ideology in the book specifically states that the world of Big Brother has gone further than the Nazis or communists did.…

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