7

The Doctor has refused Enlightenment.  Turlough is nonchalantly (rather too nonchalantly) picking at his fingernails when the White Guardian offers him a share.

"It's a diamond," he says, staring at the massive, glowing crystal, "The size!  It could buy a galaxy. I can have that?"

The White Guardian tells him he can.

"I would point out," interjects the Black Guardian, "that under the terms of our agreement, it is mine... unless, of course, you wish to surrender something else in its place. The Doctor is in your debt for his life. Give me the Doctor, and you can have this," he indicates the crystal, "the TARDIS, whatever you wish."

Turlough is evidently extremely tempted.  He has to struggle with himself.  When he shoves it towards the Black Guardian, it couldn't be more obvious that he is angry and disappointed with the choice he feels have has to make.

"Here," he shouts petulantly, burying his face, "take it!"

Even so, he does make that choice.

The Black Guardian bursts into flames and vanishes, gurgling and screaming.

"Light destroys the dark," comments the White Guardian.  "I think you will find your contract terminated," he tells Turlough.

Turlough takes a smaller crystal from his trouser pocket.  It's the one the Black Guardian gave him to seal their bargain.  It has turned back, charred by the same flames that consumed the Black Guardian.  Turlough drops it.

"I never wanted the agreement in the first place," he mutters.

Tegan is sceptical.

"You believe him because he gave up Enlightenment for your sake," she tells the Doctor.

"You're missing the point," the Doctor says, "Enlightenment was not the diamond. Enlightenment was the choice."

Well, isn't that twee.

Except that it's a bit more grounded that it sounds.

Listen to the words everyone's been using.  Diamond.  Buy.  Terms.  Agreement.  Contract.  Mine.  Debt.  This is the language of trade, of commerce, of business, of employment, of property, of value and wealth and commodification.  Turlough has been desperately trying to wriggle out of a contract, a job.  He was basically coerced into it and given a misleading description of what it entailed.  He responded by slacking off, dragging his feet, working to rule, fobbing off the boss with endless excuses.  The boss got sick of this and tried to sack him.  Then, Turlough was presented with an opportunity to take up an altogether more alluring contract.  This time, it was a straightforward deal: a dirty great jewel of immense value (Turlough immediately conceives of it in monetary terms) in exchange for a crude hit.  No illusions.  No lies.  Just kill this guy you know to be pretty decent in return for a big pay-off.

He started the story leaning over a chessboard, moving pieces around, deciding which pawn to sacrifice in the cause of winning the game.  He ends the story leaning over a table, staring at a prize, given the option to pick it up in exchange for sacrificing one piece.   And he can't do it.

This refers to more than just Good vs. Evil.  In the cultural landscape of Thatcher's Britain, this is obviously about the morality of being a 'rational actor', a self-interested utility-maximiser, an unsentimental go-getter, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum. 

But it's also about much older iterations of similar ideas.  It's about hierarchy and class and the nightmare of history.  The whole story has been a race to the finish, a ruthless competition for a prize.  The contestants were bored, amoral exploiters; users of those they call 'Ephemerals', i.e. the short-lived and tiny-brained little people who are only good for labouring to make ships work.  The Eternals are always there, fixed and unchangeable, always maximising the utility of the humans that they obtain to work for them (in contracts as coercive and dishonest as the one the Black Guardian foisted on Turlough).  They "feed on" them, as the Doctor says.  They are hollow and utterly self-involved things, empty without the value they extract from the thoughts and muscles and culture of the 'Ephemerals'.  They think of them as worthless, yet obtain everything they have from them.  They look like Edwardian officers, ancient Greek warlords, Spanish imperialists... or buccaneering pirates who have entirely embraced the ethic of ruthless, no-holds-barred competition.  These are all iterations of the same thing: the top layer, the rulers... to use a more current phrase, the 1%.

They are the 'masters of sail'.  Ruling classes from all the way through history, clubbed together and amusing themselves, a band of warring brothers (and sisters), keeping the 'Ephemerals' fooled with doctored grog.

The 'choice' the Doctor mentions is the choice to opt out, at least on a personal level, of that version of history.  It's the choice to break that very, very old contract.

11

Adric has found the Doctor sulking in the TARDIS cloisters.  The Doctor has lost Romana and K9.  He's feeling his age.  His ship seems to be falling apart too.  The stone pillars, overrun with vines, crumble under his fingers.   And, to cap it off, Adric wants to be taken back to Gallifrey.

"I sometimes think I should be running a tighter ship," he says sadly.

"A tighter ship?" gasps Adric, as though this is a threatening notion.

"Yes. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is taking its toll on the old thing. Entropy increases."

"Entropy increases?"

"Yes, daily.  The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart.  That's the essence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken."

It's only fitting that the Doctor should fight one of his most elemental battles against omnipresent entropy.  The Doctor has encountered entropy many times on his travels.  The Tribe of Gum were dangerous because their world was dying in the cold, all heat drained away.  The Moroks froze entropy in an attempt to freeze their own declining imperial history.  Skaro was a petrified jungle, everything "turned to sand and ashes".  Later, the same planet was depicted as a wasteland, with technology evolving in reverse as the Thals and Kaleds fought a backwards war of attrition.  The Exxilons built a city that sucked all life and vitality out of their civilisation.  Skagra tried to fight entropy by subjecting all life to his will, thus turning the universe into a machine for constructing more and more structure.  The Argolin were sterile, living on a desolated world.  The Melkur came to the Keeper's walled garden and started breeding blights and weeds.  The Doctor even comes from a world that has stalled entropy forever, only to find itself socially entropic.  Entropy has always been implicitly unbiquitous in the Doctor's universe.  Just as he notices it nibbling away at the TARDIS, it becomes explicitly unbiquitous.

SF is obsessed with entropy because SF is one of the cultural products most peculiar to modernity.  Modernity is, essentially, the condition of the rise and triumph of capitalism.  Capitalism is entropic.  Like the Master, it 'generates' entropy.

SF expresses the dizzying possibilities of modernity in terms of space travel and time travel.  It is not 'scientific' but it would be unthinkable without science.  The language of science is the language it uses to reiterate the old myths and legends of death and decay and eternity.  It is, perhaps, the quintessential genre of modernity.  It is how fiction tackles the "relationship of man to his tools" in a modern, capitalist age when the tools have become powerful enough to destroy worlds and (seemingly) think for themselves.  SF keeps coming back to the hyper-destructive violence of high-tech war.  It keeps coming back to the end of the world, the post-apocalyptic wasteland.  It keeps coming back to stalled and tottering dystopias.  It keeps coming back to the malfunctioning of technology, its unintended by-products, the machines that kill and ruin.

Capitalism invented the concept of entropy.  It is an insight from the Industrial Revolution, concerned with the functioning of engines.  Capitalism adapted entropy to information; Information Theory began in the Rand Corporation.  Capitalism creates more and more commodities, which depreciate in real terms or get superseded in relative terms.  They break and run down, or they get overtaken by new models.  Either way, capitalism creates wastelands of spent and useless commodities, junkyards, massive landfills, island-sized rubbish tips.  Capitalism surrounds us with broken machines and sputtering engines, and the packaging they come in, and the spent batteries that made them work.  Capitalism is a forest of belching chimneys.  Capitalism is a panorama of old cars with flat tyres, beached on great stretches of motorway covered in the grime of exhaust pipes.  Battered old police boxes by the side of the road, sat next to litter bins and abandoned bicycles.

Capitalist industry creates smoke that turns buildings black.  It creates awesome machines that end up rusting.  It creates warehouses that get boarded up.  It mass-produces chaos by making more and more things.  It does this by raising the productive forces to levels unprecedented in previous history.  The more you put things together...

Capitalism cannot help creating economic crises.  They are built into its structure.  It needs them.  These crises entail overproduction of things for profit, which will then be left unbought by people who can no longer afford them.  Bankruptcies and busts litter the land with empty shops and empty houses and people living in cardboard boxes.  Capitalism can only clamber out of such crises by destroying huge amounts of capital.

Capitalism generates destruction anyway.  Capitalism generates imperialism and war.  It fuses with nation states, and these fused blocs then compete for resources.  It creates massive industries catering to war, mass-producing more and ever-greater machines of destruction... and then those machines either sit uselessly until they are replaced, or they are sent to pulverise the other side's machines into fragments, along with their people and buildings and roads...

This is the universe the Doctor lives in.  This is Argolis and Zolf-Thura and Skaro and Uxaerius; laid waste by high-tech warfare.  This is Karn, littered with crashed ships because apparently everyone on the planet is trying to fend off death using some kind of occult science.  This is the Tharil empire; a feudal world reduced to haunted ruins by a revolution in trade.  This is Paradise Towers; modernity (Modernism, even) in decay.  This is Frontios, with its failure proof technology that fails.  This is New New York, stuck in a social moebius loop by a runaway commodity.  This is, unquestionably, the Time War.

Things have always decayed, but the ubiquity of entropy that we now take for granted is a phenomenon of modernity. The condition of modernity is the condition of being surrounded by entropy.  It is the condition of living in a world in which entropy is kept barely in check.

It is the condition of constantly inflating a punctured tire.

12

There's so much I love about 'Planet of the Ood'.  Picking a moment will be hard.

I love some of the things other people hate.

Unlike Lawrence Miles, I love that Donna ticks the Doctor off for his "Who do you think made your clothes?" crack.  Why the hell should Donna put up with smuggery like that from a guy wearing Converse trainers?  Who makes your clothes, Doctor?  (Apart from anything else, one answer is probably 'women'.)  Okay, he apologises for making her feel uncomfortable, which is problematic... but it isn't as if the episode lets the matter rest there.

Unlike many people, I love that the Ood thank DoctorDonna for, essentially, doing nothing.  I love that they free themselves without any help from the Doctor.  I like him better as an ally than as a messiah.  The Ood don't suffer the fate of the N'avi: they don't get Whitey leading them to freedom.  The DoctorDonna doesn't interfere.  DoctorDonna renounces any claim they might think they have to judge the oppressed, to moralise when the oppressed free themselves by any means necessary.

I love that the episode is nevertheless unambiguous about the right of the oppressed to use violence against their oppressors.  There are no patronising sermons which hold the oppressed to a higher moral standard of forgiveness and forebearance.  Violence is horrible, but the violence of the oppressed in revolt is fundamentally morally different to the violence - individual and structural - of the oppressors.

I love that the Solana doesn't have a change of heart.

I love the vacuous marketing slime in the PR lounge, tittering at the accessories they can add to their living merchandise. Just as lobotomised, in their way, as their commodity.

I love that Halpen flatters himself by being kind to his personal Ood servant while contemplating genocide against the entire race.

It's not perfect.

I have a problem with the racial politics.  By making so many of the human oppressors into people of colour, the episode effaces the particularity of race as an axis of oppression.  It seems to say that capitalism is colour blind and all it cares about is the colour of money.  This is true to an extent, and I believe that economic factors are ultimately causal, but race is a specific category of oppression within capitalism, and slavery of all things is a colour issue.

And it is, basically, another orientalist fantasy for assuaging white guilt (though considerably better than most).

But it's time to pick a moment... so here goes:

The Doctor and Donna, handcuffed, are being harangued by Mr Halpen.

"The Ood were nothing without us," he blusters, "just animals roaming around on the ice!"

Yes, yes, that's what they always say.  The [insert name of ethnic group being enslaved here] were just slightly-more sophisticated ruminants until the civilised people came along to put them and their land to good use.  That's the essence of the liberal justification for Western colonialism going back to forever.  We're doing them a favour.  Without us, they were just animals.  Today the same justification is used, but in liberal code.  Isn't it great that we bombed and invaded - now the poor little chaps can have elections and feminism!
 
"That's because you can't hear them," says the Doctor.  Essentially: you don't understand their language so you think they don't have one.

Readers of this blog will already be able to guess all the stuff about capital expanding into new markets and utilising all the resources it can commodify and assimilate into itself, about commodity fetishism being when people are treated as commodities and commodities are treated as people, about slavery being fundamental to the rise of the capitalist system and its imperial expansion, about capital cutting into the body of the worker, etc., etc.

"They welcomed it," says Halpen, "It's not as if they put up a fight."

Can't win, can they?  They don't act violently = permission to enslave them.  They do act violently = gas the savage monsters.  It's almost as if there's a massive great big double standard at work.

"You idiot," hisses Donna, "They're born with their brains in their hands! Don't you see, that makes them peaceful!  They've got to be, because a creature like that would have to trust anyone it meets!"

That's my favourite bit.  It is a material explanation of consciousness.  The Ood evolved to be communal, social, mutually-aiding.  In packing crates they are pressed into rows but their natural pattern is a circle, a cornerless shape without top or bottom.  They naturally see the social unity of people, to the point that they conceptualise the Doctor and Donna as 'DoctorDonna'.  None of this is because they're saints or angels.  It's because of their material nature and circumstances. Like humans in pre-class societies, they had to rely on each other.

But - and this is the really great thing - there is also, implicitly, a dialectical explanation of changing consciousness.  The Ood have changed in response to their new social situation.  They Ood have shown themselves to be intricately related to their social environment, yet they never lose their agency.  Even when parts of their brains have been cut away, their agency is not entirely gone.  As the Doctor later says, it takes many forms.  Revenge, rage, and patience.  And then, revolution.

Now that's a winning combination.

13

"All the resting ones I have used were people of status, ambition," says Davros.

The quintessential 80s heroes.  They had themselves brought to his business, Tranquil Repose, when they wanted to pay to cheat the ultimate human frailty.  Death was a weakness they felt they had a right to buy off.  They paid to rest until they could be awoken and cured.  They would then resume their positions of power.  Money would conquer death.  Just as Timon and Marx knew, as the ultra-commodity in a system of total commodification, money has a fantastic and phantasmic power.  It can dissolve even the most drastic boundaries and oppositions.  It can even make the dead into the living.

Davros' clients had the same dream as all ruling classes.  Their ancient forebears had themselves buried in their finery, surrounded by their treasure, expecting to take it with them.  If they couldn't take it with them, they weren't going.  That was the logic behind the pyramids...  and those monuments to dead pharoahs helped bolster the power of the living ones.  They were a unified statement of divine and material power. 

When Jobel and Takis prepare the body of the President's wife, it looks as though they have put her in an Egyptian sarcophagus.  In the long shots of Tranquil Repose, the facility is made of pyramids.

But Davros has been harvesting the bodies of all these thrusting executives, billionaires and society ladies (the only people that are considered of any value by people like him) and turning them into Daleks. In this story, the Daleks have become Cybermen: zombies constructed from bodies eviscerated and infibulated by technology... except that Cybermen are labour power reduced to pure meat, whereas the Daleks are the rulers refined and rendered into fascist tanks.  Capital is still gothic.  'Dead labour' as Marx called it.  Zombie labour.  Undead labour.  The property created by past work, accreted and collected and owned, towering over the living labourer and sucking on his or her blood.  In Doctor Who, such dead labour, alienated from people until it becomes literally alien, fetishised until it comes alive, constantly meshes with the human body.  The Daleks are another expression of this.  In this story, this vampire capital feeds even on the bodies of the rich... but, for them, this is an opportunity for expansion.  It salvages them, the way fascism always salvages capitalism when it comes under existential threat.  It opens up new vistas and markets, the way imperialism always does.

Like Milo Minderbinder in the movie, Davros thinks the rich will get how this works.

"They would understand," he claims blithely, "especially as I have given them the opportunity to become masters of the universe!"

Masters of the Universe was a range of mega-successful toys in the 80s, one of the quintessential commodities of the decade.  Tom Wolfe would adapt the phrase to describe the new bucaneers of Wall Street in his satire The Bonfire of the Vanities.  Those people made money even more phantasmic, floating it around the world in clouds of information, making it a spirit... but one that still commanded material things and living bodies.

The Doctor wonders what will happen to those deemed unworthy of promotion to the top level of Davros' new corporate/fascist regime.  The non-Masters of the Universe; those bodies who fail in the marketplace of Dalek ideas.

"Will they be left to rot?"

No such luck.

"You should know me better than that, Doctor," says Davros, "I never waste a valuable commodity."

Again, human bodies as commodities.

"The humanoid form makes an excellent concentrated protein," he continues, "This part of the galaxy is developing quickly. Famine was one of its major problems."

Needless to say, this wasn't because there was not enough food.  Under global capitalism, famines are allowed to happen essentially because the market is a shitty way to distribute resources.  You can make more profit selling too much food to a few than you can selling enough food to a lot.

"You've turned them into food?" splutters the Doctor, "Did you bother to tell anyone they might be eating their own relatives?"

"Certainly not," replies Davros, "That would have created what I believe is termed consumer resistance."

He learns the rules of business fast, this parochial fascist scientist.  His background allows him to mesh himself seamlessly into the pyramidal structure of the corporation, with its absolute apex and its total lack of accountability.  Chomsky says that corporations are "pure tyrannies", among the most 'totalitarian' organisations ever devised.  I might quibble with his analysis here and there, but he describes something utterly real.  Davros knows how the propaganda model works too: the provenance of commodities, and the brute pragmatism of power, needs to stay behind closed doors.  Davros keeps himself hidden behind a decoy, in a cellar, at the centre of a labyrith, under the presentable foyer and the marble corridors of his going concern.  He hides himself and his name behind his connections and deals.

In his crude way, Davros has literalised something about the nature of capitalist relations in the age of consumerism.  Consumerism, in its material form as advertising and branding, is cannibalistic.  It feeds us back to ourselves as images.  We consume the human form - suitably treated and cooked-up and filled with unnatural additives - all the time, in advertising, fashion, celebrity culture, dolls in shop windows, TV, movies, pornography.  We consume media ideas about how to look, how to dress, how to eat, how to speak.  We eat ourselves all the time, every day, as a meal prepared for us by the hidden and the powerful

Davros has adapted to capitalism so well that he has realised one of its strategies into real, literal, material terms.  He has fed us to ourselves.

22

The Doctor, Romana and Duggan have found a painting hidden behind a panel in the basement of Count Scarlioni's house in Paris.

"It's the Mona Lisa!" says the Doctor.

"Must be a fake," replies Duggan.

The Doctor says he doesn't know what's currently hanging in the Louvre, "but this is the genuine article".

Duggan's astonishment increases when the Doctor folds back yet more panelling to reveal yet another Mona Lisa.  And another.  And another.  Eventually, six identical copies are revealed.

"They must be fakes," says Duggan again.

"The brushwork's Leonardo's," the Doctor asserts, "It's as characteristic as a signature. The pigment, too."

"What," blithers Duggan, "on all of them?"

"What I don't understand is why a man who's got six Mona Lisas wants to go to all the trouble of stealing a seventh."  (The Count has been casing the Louvre, preparing to steal their Mona Lisa.)

This is Duggan's area.  "Come on, Doctor, I've just told you. There are seven people who would buy the Mona Lisa in secret, but nobody's going to buy the Mona Lisa when it's hanging in the Louvre!"

"Of course," says Romana, "They'd each have to think they were buying the stolen one."

Because only 'the original' is valuable.  These collectors wouldn't even want the Mona Lisa to sell or to display... they'd want it for - to use Duggan's phrase - the "expensive gloat".

But where does the value of the work of art lie?  In its 'authenticity'?  Huge amounts of time, effort, money and research are expended to establish the 'authenticity' of artworks; their provenance and history, tracing back to their origins.   Experts compete over the 'authenticity' of various iterations of a single painting, fighting over which institution owns the 'real' one.  Duggan, the private detective hired to investigate art as a catalyst of crime, responds to the Mona Lisas found by the Doctor with an instantaneous attempt to evaluate their 'authenticity', and hence their 'value'. (A set of assumptions that the Doctor explicitly rejects later in the show, when he mocks the idea that a painting needs to be x-rayed before its value can be ascertained.)

In the modern age, the 'age of mechanical reproduction' as Walter Benjamin put it, the artwork is viewed in a new and historically unique way.  The camera destroyed the idea of timeless images arranged for a single spectator.  The photographic representation cast painting adrift, since it usurped the painter's role as portrayer of the patron's property and ideology.  Mass-reproduction of images destroyed the "aura" of a work of art (Benjamin's word for its unique and materially-intact history), making it seperable from its original time and place and locational context.  The Mona Lisa, for instance, proliferated around the world.  It is now no longer to be found in the Louvre.  It is all over millions of greetings cards, the pages of magazines, the pages of books, posters, tourists' photos, the internet, the covers of execrable paperback novels.  All this raises the fame of the painting while destroying its singular and unitary itselfness. 

This very proliferation of copies is what makes the 'authenticity' of 'originals' so valuable as a commodity.  The original is now just that: an original.  It is something it never was before: the source of the millions of copies.  As John Berger puts it: "the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction."

Scarlioni is really Scaroth: a ruthless and callous and self-involved warlord who found himself splintered into fragments across human history, manifesting in many different ruling classes over the centuries, as we see during his moments of trans-temporal communion.  He is himself a system of copies, mass-reproduced, distributed across time and space, his uniqueness destroyed, each copy identical, none truly the 'original' because the 'original' Scaroth was destroyed... and all by technology.

He is a thoroughly modern man in some of his iterations, a man of power and property.  He's a rich, titled, bourgeois art-thief in 1970s Paris, selling foundational objects of Western civilisation such as Gutenberg Bibles to fund his capers.  He is one of the Borgias, or at least part of their coterie, acting as patron (i.e. employer and paymaster) to Leonardo, getting him to paint multiple copies of his portrait of Lisa Gheradini; copies which can then be hidden, so that his future self can unearth them.  "A very nice piece of capital investment" as the Doctor puts it... a view that Scaroth can only take because he is part of modernity, from the Early Modern period which saw the rise of banking and commerce, to Late Capitalism which sees the commercialisation of absolutely everything.  The irony which unites these eras along a single trajectory is the joke that, in this case, it was Leonardo himself who was payed/forced to begin the process of endless copying, reproduction and proliferation.  All the copies are 'real', sharing an aura, made valuable by the same labour power of the same man... yet this wouldn't cut any ice with the collectors of the 1970s.

Scaroth's plan to reunite himself depends upon raising enough money to fund time experiments... and he plans to do this by selling the Mona Lisa seven times over, each to a buyer who thinks he's getting 'the original' (which, in a way, they would be!).  But his scheme depends upon his ability to push humanity towards modernity - i.e. capitalism - because it is modernity that brings not only the necessary level of scientific and technical skill to make time travel possible, but also the rise of mass-reproduction, and thus the destruction of aura and the commodification of authenticity.  Scaroth thinks of himself as pushing mankind on the path of progress... but his planned terminus of this progress is his reintegration at the cost of our annihilation. 

Scaroth is a concentrated bundle of the nightmares of history.  Borgia and bourgeois.  Ruler, inscribing himself in the friezes telling the stories of the pharaohs.  Warlord.  "Insanely wealthy man."  User and abuser of science via his ability to fund it.  User and abuser of a wife who never really knew who he was underneath.  Bringer of technological doom.  Owner and destroyer of aura.  A suave, handsome shell; a staring eye and a mass of writhing worms beneath. 

He recalls another of Walter Benjamin's works: 'On the Concept of History', which is all about how the 'cultural heritage' is formed from the spoils of rulers who march onwards towards a future strewn with broken wreckage.