Eruditorum Press

Our business actually is to reason and compare

Kerblam! Review

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Back in my TARDIS Eruditorum post on The Caretaker, I mused on what Gareth Roberts might have written if he’d been allowed to write Doctor Who that reflected his politics of English middle class supremacism as opposed to being constantly pigeonholed into writing comedy romps, suggesting this would have been preferable and interesting. With Kerblam! we finally test that, and the results are as fascinating and infuriating as you’d expect.

On one level, this is the biggest political fuckup of an episode in recent memory. I mean, it’s a satire of Amazon that comes down firmly on the side of Amazon. It’s consciously pitched as a critique of labor activists in favor of exploitative corporations—one that is overtly hostile to younger generations and that treats concerns about the effects of automation on individual workers as contemptuous. It is overtly in favor of of corporations that aggressively micromanage workers’ exploitation in favor of efficiency, of bullying and abusive bosses, and of automated systems that kill people to make a point. It’s like the Cartmel and Davies eras as rewritten by Nick Land.

The thing is, that’s actually a hell of a pitch. And the first part of it is key—this episode is technically steeped in what made those eras work. It’s full of good ideas that are intelligently put together. Warehouses are a brilliantly achievable setting for Doctor Who. The Kerblam! bots are a delightful mix of creepy and charming. It does a great job of satisfyingly leaning on Doctor Who tropes while still feeling fresh and weird. And I mean, it has killer bubble wrap. I’m ridiculously and overwhelmingly there for killer bubble wrap. The mixture of bright and colorful with spookiness and action sequences is a balance that almost always works for Doctor Who, and it works here. And, in common with scripts that haven’t had Chibnall’s name on them, there’s a sense of focus to this. It knows what it’s about and has the intelligence to focus on the theme. Indeed, it even uses its politics to good effect, trusting in the standard morality of Doctor Who to do the work of setting up red herrings without it having to actually comment on anything so that, for instance, the audience is suspicious of Kerblam! because of its labor practices even when the Doctor doesn’t actually say anything about them. It’s a perfectly good episode of Doctor Who that just happens to be, you know… evil.

In terms of judging its quality, that’s easy enough. Contrary to my detractors who accuse me of exclusively judging Doctor Who by its politics, I’ve been consistent in my view that well-done conservative science fiction is worth doing. This qualifies. I am fascinated by its pathologies—by what it does and doesn’t let itself notice about the world it’s set up, and by how it manages to make this completely and utterly fucked ethical and political assessment work in the context of Doctor Who. In one sense, the detail at the end of closing the plant for a month but only giving the workers two week’s pay is as fantastically perverse as the detail of Cordo’s father’s body being worth more than his life savings in The Sunmakers.…

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Demons and Silences

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The historian Yasmin Khan, who wrote a book about the Partition of India that Vinay Patel, the writer of ‘Demons of the Punjab’, has tweeted about having read as research, wrote that the Partition is “a history layered with absence and silences”.

Yes, her name is Yasmin Khan.   

What does that mean?  Does it mean anything?  We must simply add this to the list of questions ‘Demons of the Punjab’ raises, or almost raises, and then remains silent about. 

‘Demons of the Punjab’ is an episode haunted by silences.  Pregnant, eloquent silences. I don’t know if this is deliberate, in the sense of being a conscious strategy on the part of the people who made it.  Whether this matters is itself a question to consider.

The first pregnant, eloquent silence comes very near the start, when the elderly Umbreen remarks that she was “the first Muslim woman to work in a textile mill in South Yorkshire”.  This follows her remark, itself news to Yaz, that she was the first woman married in Pakistan. Umbreen has been very silent for a long time.

Contrary to myth and apologia, India before the British came was a wealthy, thriving country.  According to Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire, “At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per  cent, as large as all of Europe put together”.

As he goes on to say:

Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries. Textiles were an emblematic case in point: the British systematically set about destroying India’s textile manufacturing and exports, substituting Indian textiles by British ones manufactured in England. Ironically, the British used Indian raw material and exported the finished products back to India and the rest of the world, the industrial equivalent of adding insult to injury.

The British destruction of textile competition from India led to the first great deindustrialization of the modern world.

It is tempting to quote Tharoor’s devastating description of the cynical and violent methods by which this was achieved at length… but it would be hard to know where to begin or stop.  People who want the grisly details can read his book. (I highly recommend it. I have nitpicks with Tharoor, but overall his book is a brilliant and accessible introduction to the forgotten horrors of the British Empire in India, as well as a demolition of the more popular apologias.)

Britain’s industrial revolution was funded by the deindustrialisation of India, and textiles were a big part of how and why it worked.  (As we know, the British textile business was also dependant upon cotton produced by slaves in the Americas.)

By the way, another industry at which the pre-colonial Indians excelled as steel production.  The British hijacked that too, having destroyed the Indian industry. Sheffield became best known as a British centre of steel production, becoming known as ‘the steel city’.  Lest we imagine that ‘the British’ benefited from this as an abstract category, it’s worth remembering how “extraordinarily injurious” the work of being a steel-grinder in the Sheffield cutlery industry was, as Engels put it in his 1844 book The Condition of the Working Class in England.…

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Eruditorum Presscast: Demons of the Punjab

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We here at Eruditorum Press are unrepentant SJWs, and so we care about diversity. Accordingly, we decided it wouldn’t do to have an entirely homogenous lineup of podcast guests, and so have made a token diversity hire this week to bring you an actual cishet male to comment on Doctor Who. We would like to assure you that Jack was hired with no consideration whatsoever to his merits, and his entire existence is simply an act of crass virtue signalling. 

Anyway, here’s Demons of the Punjab.…

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Guest Post: Alternate Histories, Part 2b: I Still Have No Idea What I’m Talking About

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Here’s Part 2 (well, part “2b”) of Ben Knaak’s Alternate Histories project exploring how to model a materialist conception of history through video games. Be sure to follow along on his blog and YouTube Channel!

 

Hot Take: Stone Age Teddy Roosevelt would be fucking dead before he turned 25. Motherfucker would get straight up trampled by a mammoth after running out of breath.

Shit I Don’t Know, Entry #2: Who’s Playing This Game?

 

In most 4X games in which the player controls a nation, that nation’s identity, attributes, and associated play style remain static and constant. Rather than a contingent cultural and political reality that arises from particular circumstances, the nation is an eternal reality. It will often have a set of statistical bonuses or accompanying debuffs, or a unique unit or building it can construct once the correct technology has been researched, simply by virtue of being itself. The nation exists at the beginning of the game, and barring conquest by another nation it will exist at the end. Every player who chooses “America” begins history with the founding of Washington in the year 4000 B.C. Where did these people come from? Are they white? Patawomeck? Who is this Washington they named their settlement after? It’s not important; welcome to the United Neolithic States.

 

This works fine for a Civilization game, but for grand strategy, it just won’t do. And it especially won’t do for a game like Victoria II, which attempts to draw from a more sophisticated, materialist version of Video Game History™. This is a game in which the names, flags, and borders of its states must necessarily change with astonishing regularity, and in ways that are historically contingent without being pre-ordained. Prussia, or perhaps Austria, becomes Germany. Sardinia-Piedmont, or perhaps the Two Sicilies, or perhaps the Papal States, becomes Italy. Or perhaps neither of those states comes into being. New countries are carved from the carcasses of moribund empires, imposed from without and from within.

 

What, then, are the in-game forces that govern these processes? As you would expect, nationalist movements are partially determined by the POP system. Every POP group has an associated culture group. In Ethiopia, for instance, one might have a POP group of Oromo craftsmen working with a group of Tigrayan clerks in a factory owned by Amhara capitalists. Each country, in turn, has at least one culture designated as its primary culture, and may have one or more accepted cultures. Status in one of these groups has a significant effect on POPs’ beliefs and behaviors. Primary culture POPs are more likely to support residency for non-primary culture POPs, while accepted culture POPs are more likely to support limited citizenship (which, for instance, allows accepted culture POPs to vote if your country allows elections). Primary culture POPs are also much more likely to promote to capitalists and other upper-class strata. Non-accepted POPs with high literacy, good living conditions, and few reasons to complain will tend to assimilate to an accepted culture, unless there exists a nation with their culture as its primary culture which holds cores on that province. Meanwhile, literate, high-consciousness POPs of a non-accepted culture are likely to see their militancy increase if their rights are not granted.…

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Demons of the Punjab Review

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In any previous season, this would have been a minor gem; in this context, it feels like a cool drink of water in the desert. After five episodes that repeatedly struggled at the task of being about things where the one that seemed to know what it was doing had its own deep problems, here we get an episode of admirable clarity and focus that deftly balances the broad historical and intimate personal scales. There’s nothing save for the agonizingly overdue engagement with India that makes the story extraordinary, but there’s also a refreshing lack of any significant flaws, and all in all this feels like the most developed idea of what Doctor Who should be in 2018 that we’ve had to date.

Let’s start with the politics. There are obvious fallings short; the clangingly bad line about the Doctor forwarding Prem’s complaints on to Mountbatten next time she sees him being the worst. And more broadly, there’s a milquetoast tendency throughout to place responsibility for the violence of partition on the masses instead of on the British empire, which finds itself blamed more for the carelessness of partition than for the exploitation that preceded it. None of this was sufficient to spoil my enjoyment; I suspect Jack will feel differently. Indeed, in some ways I hope that he does, because the show should be held to account for things like this. But as an American who learned a lot about partition from this episode, I’ll merely flag it as a concern and return to it in the podcast.

Instead, let’s turn to the story’s notion of what history is. Unlike with Rosa, what we have here is much more consistently a Whtitakerian “not one line” to history’s permanence. As with most of the Hartnell era (The Aztecs, ironically, excepted) this is not presented as a moral point so much as a pragmatic one. The TARDIS team is simply not put in a position to make changes to history. This isn’t a celebrity historical where the Doctor meets Mountbatten (which is part of why that line rankles so badly); it’s a story where she’s on a farm in a remote part of the border outside the Welshest forest in India. Changing history isn’t a concern in the first place. Even the inevitable death of Prem is largely taken out of the Doctor’s hands, positioned outside of morality by the fact that any other outcome would eliminate Yaz from history. The same sense of passivity that pervades Rosa is in play here, but it’s justified as something other than moral duty, and finds itself working, much as it did in 1964.

Indeed, this is in many ways the closest to a pure historical the new series has yet come. Rosa may have been low on sci-fi trappings, but the plot was still fundamentally science fiction: two time travellers fighting over history. There’s no way to rewrite it as a pure historical without losing the central plot. But there’s no real reason the Vajarian need to be here.…

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Real Gone

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Sections of this piece are drawn from conversations with Niki Haringsma, whose forthcoming Black Archive on ‘Love & Monsters’ is really good.  Don’t blame her for this though, for god’s sake.

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The style/substance dichotomy is, of course, false.  Most dichotomies are, when you dig deeply enough. The thing is: dichotomies are also real.  Even false dichotomies are real. Our world – bourgeois society, the capitalist epoch – is made of ‘real false dichotomies’.  The most fundamental dichotomies in our society – capitalist and worker; use value and exchange value – are both real, in the sense of having real material effects, and also unreal, insane, hallucinatory.  Capitalism is the rule of abstraction. It is concrete human existence tyrannised by the slippery, the spectral, the notional.

For Marx, when things are produced as commodities they are no longer just ‘use values’ but now have the divided nature of also being ‘exchange values’.  Use values are useful, sensual, material, human. Exchange value is abstract, useless outside the profit system, and has no use beyond the self-expansion of value. That’s capitalism.  That’s the root of ‘profit for profit’s sake’. Marx sees labour, and thus production, as fundamental to human life and society (our conscious, constructive, creative, social activity is what marks us out among animals).  So production that is geared towards exchange value is inhuman. Self-expansion of value (capitalism) thus perverts human creative and social powers into perpetuating an alien system, which expands by feeding on those powers.  This is alienation.

This is actually at the root of Marx’s critique of capitalism: that it subjects real and sensuous human life to the domination of phantasmic things like exchange value, the force that renders all actual human effort nothing more than abstract and homogeneous labour.  Exchange value – loosely, price – is determined by ‘socially necessary labour time’, i.e. the average amount of time it takes to make things, or perform services, etc, given the average level of productivity in society. This is because capitalism organises production for profit, and labour that falls outside ‘socially necessary labour time’ is unprofitable – because it costs money but does not make money.  This is because the worker whose low productivity meant that their work fell outside the ‘socially necessary labour time’ would – by definition – be being paid for time above the average amount of time necessary, and hence the price of her labour is raised, and hence the profits when her work is sold are reduced. This is why no ordinary worker is allowed to get away with such things. This is why the supervisor times your bathroom breaks.  In capitalism, labour that is ‘particular’ or ‘specific’ has no value in itself, because it produces only use-values (i.e. useful things), and they are not profitable in themselves – not to capitalism anyway. A table is useless to capitalism unless it is a profitable table. (This is why capitalism doesn’t make things that are not directly profitable except when forced to, or when it realises that it is in its longer term interest so to do – in which case it generally gets the state, i.e.…

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Eruditorum Presscast: The Tsuranga Connundrum

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This week I’m joined by Beth Axford of Doctor Who Magazine‘s Time Team and the delightful blog The Time Ladies to talk about The Tsuranga Conundrum, which we gradually find is very hard to say out loud and decide to rename. To what? Listen and find out.

This podcast also features the “classic” version of the Eruditorum Presscast theme, because elections make me cranky. As usual, it’s by my good friend Alex via his band Seeming, which you can and should check out here.…

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Guest Post: Alternate Histories Part 2a: I Have No Idea What I’m Talking About

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Here’s Part 2 (well, part “2a”) of Ben Knaak’s Alternate Histories project exploring how to model a materialist conception of history through video games. Be sure to follow along on his blog and YouTube Channel!

 

King Solomon greets Queen Makeda of Sheba

Shit I Don’t Know Entry #1: Where Are We?

Here I must confess as to the greatest difficulty I face with a project that deals extensively with Ethiopian history: if you held a gun to my head, I would not be able to give you a concise, coherent definition of what Ethiopia even is.  The concept of the nation in general is a nebulous one that at even its most vivid doesn’t come close to approaching a science. National consciousness is therefore one which a historical materialist must regard with healthy skepticism, even when it accompanies a struggle for liberation against colonizers.  It certainly isn’t a sufficiently robust concept to be the sole basis for the authority of a state.

 

You will note that I have elected not to take the coward’s way out by appealing to a dictionary definition of the word “nation.”  There are two reasons for this: first, it’s a hacky, middle school essay-ass way to start off an article. Second, I can’t find a single definition of the word that cannot be disputed for some ideological reason or another.  Most center around the existence of linguistic, religious, cultural, or other historical commonalities by peoples within a contiguous area, but bright-line requirements that separate nations from mere states are hard to come by.  This is perhaps something I ought to have considered before I decided to make nationalism the second topic for this series, because Ethiopia’s history as a nation is a messy subject even by these standards.

 

There have, of course, been humans in Ethiopia for nearly as long as there have been humans, with the arrival of Homo sapiens proper dated to over 200,000 years ago.  Most of the population of the Horn of Africa today descend from toolmaking cultures who lived around 12,000 years ago.  These people likely spoke a proto-Afroasiatic language and indeed may have been the progenitors of that entire language family.

 

The Church of Saint George in Lalibela, one of many monolithic churches carved from hillsides during the Zagwe Dynasty.The earliest known state to emerge was the Kingdom of D’mt around the 10th century BCE.  The people of this kingdom spoke an early Ethio-Semitic language, and traded extensively with the Sabeans of the Southern Arabian peninsula.  (They were almost certainly not descended from Sabean migrants themselves – Ethiopia was, in fact, one of the first places Semitic languages were spoken).  This kingdom gave way to (or evolved into, or was incorporated into) the Kingdom of Axum, a prosperous superpower whose extent at its apex reached across the Red Sea into Yemen.  Notably, it was among the first states to adopt Christianity as an official religion. Axum collapsed under mysterious circumstances in the 10th century CE, even as the heart of its territory remained predominantly Christian.  This was succeeded by the Ethiopian Empire, ruled first by the Zagwe dynasty and then by the Solomonic dynasty – so named because it claimed descent from the first King of Axum, whom they claimed was the son of King Solomon by the Queen of Sheba.…

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The Tsuranga Conundrum Review

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If the Chibnall era is, as theorized last week, a latter-day Pertwee era, this is the equivalent of The Sea Devils. Not so much flawless as without any major issues, at several points veering into fascinating but still basically uninspiring, and an all around good showing for the period. As is clearly usual for Chibnall’s solo scripts, it is simply unconcerned with the idea that it should be “about” something. Instead it is a jumble of elements being juxtaposed purposelessly, with all the unexpected pleasures and awkward dissonance that implies, although at some point one has to admit that the consistency with which the balance trends towards the former implies some sort of underlying aesthetic sense.

At its heart, of course, it’s a fairly unreconstructed base under siege. As is often the case with Chibnall, however, the reduction to influences doesn’t quite work as an explanation. The convention of base under sieges, especially in the modern era, is to use the support cast as a supply of potential deaths to be drawn from when things are getting a bit dry. There’s typically at least some effort to give them characterization so that these resulting deaths have some emotional resonance, but everyone’s point is still basically to die. But that’s not what’s going on here. There are only two deaths, and one of them is a heroic completion of an arc as opposed to a tension builder. Only Astos exists to die and advance the plot.

Instead we have an episode structured as a bunch of people getting on with their private dramas while an alien attacks their ship. The result is compelling in its weirdness, particularly around Yoss and his baby, a plot which ends up absorbing half the regular cast and contributing literally nothing whatsoever to the nominal focus of the episode. The resultant final sequence, where Yoss’s delivery is intercut with the defeat of the P’Ting, is possibly the most rawly batshit sequence we’ve seen in Doctor Who since The Zygon Inversion. It is not entirely unreasonable to judge the worth of a Doctor Who episode in terms of how completely insane its weirdest sequence would look to a channel surfer. By that measure, this is a thunderous tour de force. 

The plot around Eve is more straightforward: a character flagrantly marked for death dies. But it’s still handled competently, and keeps the cast doing things other than getting picked off by the P’Ting. Whittaker, meanwhile, is finding new ways to play figuring stuff out and being given new angles on the problem—her bit responding to the computer’s explanation of the P’Ting with an enthusiastic line about feeling really well-informed is a deft lampshading of kludgey exposition dump. The problem of dealing with the P’Ting feels well-sized and suitably vexing, and the resultant solution is a clever use of the gun that was carefully positioned on the mantelpiece. 

The whole is defiantly valued at the sum of its parts, but in this case the math checks out.

…

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Die Review

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Doctor Who review won’t be up until Tuesday at the earliest, as I spent most of Sunday running my Werewolf: The Apocalypse game and didn’t watch it until late. But speaking of my gaming habit, I got a chance to read the first issue of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’s forthcoming comic Die, so I can at least tell you all sorts of interesting stuff about that. Well, sort of. This is my first time in the weird realm of embargos and “spoiler-free” reviews. So I have to tell you how awesome this thing is without actually telling you anything about it that hasn’t already been spilled in interviews already.

Let’s start with the obvious. This thing is awesome. It’s a fascinating book that has all the signs of being a major statement on the nature of fantasy and escapism. You should definitely pre-order it; if you buy physical comics, call your local shop. If you’re into digital or haven’t really bought many comics and just want an easy way to do the thing, you can pre-order it on Comixology. Pre-ordering is massively important with comics because it is an insane industry where nothing is done in a remotely rational manner, so really, if the following sounds like your thing, please go do the thing.

Right. So Die. The premise is simple enough: in 1991, six kids sat down to play a roleplaying game. They disappeared. Two years later, five of them reappeared. When asked what happened and where they’d been, their only answer was “I can’t say.” Surprising nobody who’s consumed any contemporary fantasy media whatsoever, what happened is that they were transported into a magical realm. And now, twenty-five years later, they have to go back. 

The most interesting element here, for my money, is the twenty-five years later bit. This gives us middle-aged characters. This isn’t just interesting in terms of Kieron’s work, which has focused on teenagers and young adults to a degree that has been a defining bit of style for him. It’s also interesting as a lens on both roleplaying games and fantasy. I mean, the middle-aged geek is obviously a thing in popular culture, but it’s not actually a perspective represented within it very often, and when it is it tends to be in the Hook/Christopher Robin vein of “reawakening a lost sense of wonder.” Die has the same sense of melancholy implicit in that, but the emphasis is in completely different places; there’s no assumption that growing up involves losing some vital connection to the fantastic. The wounds being confronted are very different from just not being sixten anymore.

The other interesting thing is the suspicion of fantasy. I mean, it’s still the hook of the book, and you’ve got fantasy worlds rendered in lush glory by Stephanie Hans, who’s one of the great painter-artists working in comics right now. She gives the book a opulent, emotional moodiness that’s well worth drooling over. This is a book that relishes the iconography of fantasy. And yet it’s also a book that, in a typically Gillen-esque theme drop, proclaims the game they’re about to play in 1991 to be “fantasy for grown-ups,” then muses “we were sold.…

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