Cottage Industry vs. the Spectacular Tentacular Draculas

According to Miles and Wood, Barry Letts' eco views were very much influnced (as were many people's) by a text called Blueprint for Survival, co-written by Edward Goldsmith (now deceased) and published in the magazine he founded, The Ecologist, in 1972.  It was supported by many scientists and was subsequently released in book form to became a best-seller.  Miles and Wood identify it as the real-world model for Sir Charles Grover's Last Chance for Man in 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs'.  There is indeed something of Goldsmith's politics (small-c conservative; anti-industrial society) in the fictional Grover, who is simultaneously an eco-radical and an establishment elitist who wishes to turn the clock back (literally) to a kind of enlightened feudalism.  George Monbiot has described Goldsmith's politics as "a curious mixture of radical and reactionary", saying that he "has advocated the enforced separation of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, on the grounds that they constitute 'distinct ethnic groups' and are thus culturally incapable of co-habitation".  According to Monbiot, Goldsmith

assumes that culture is a rigid, immutable thing: that different communities can live only within the boxes nature has assigned to them. Confusing, for example, Protestantism and unionism, he fails to understand the political forces which cause splits within communities and associations between them. He fails too to see the external manipulation which first defines ethnicity inflexibly, then drives the newly separated peoples to fight.

Now, I'm not attributing similar views to Barry Letts or Robert Sloman.  However, there is something of Goldsmith's hankerings for the regional and the anti-industrial in 'The Green Death'.  The very separateness of Wales and the Welsh tells us something.  The resolutely English characters - even the Doctor is English really, and this has never been plainer than in 'Green Death' - become strangers in a strange land.

Making the workers Welsh seems like a way of quaintifying them, since quaintness was the deadly stigma that mainstream British (i.e. metropolitan English) media culture foisted upon Wales... at least before substituting constant nasty jokes about shagging sheep and Splott (i.e. standard jokes based on stereotypes about rural people and working class communities).  Welshness is a way of 'othering' them, of segregating them, of making them a separate community.  The Welsh working class is depicted as a subculture within British society, rather than, say, one of the most significant layers of the majority class in the country... which Welsh mineworkers certainly were at the time.

There's no reason for 'The Green Death' to take place in Wales but that Letts and Sloman want the story to centre on a mine (and going to Wales is cheaper than going further north).  But why do they want the story to centre on a mine?  They're not interested in miners.  It seems as though they feel the need to situate industry and industrial disputes somewhere regional, somewhere definitely apart from the 'middle England' that aliens are always invading in the Letts version of the late 20th century... but why give the story a backdrop of industry and industrial disputes anyway?  Because it's all industry's fault, all this "muck" and "devastation" and "death".

The story certainly notices capitalism as being 'behind' industry - hence the story's Weird inflection - but it also seems to think that the real problem is that certain kinds of capitalism have predominated over other, better kinds.  The Nuthutch, crucially, has a sign advertising the sale of healthy, hippy, veggie foods.  Enterprise, when stemming from a liberal education, scientific enlightenment, social conscience, etc - can save the world with soya.  It's the Linda McCartney theory of progressive capitalism.  (Of course, Linda McCartney and Anita Roddick are all big business really, not little rural cottage industries, notwithstanding the anti-industrial fantasies of a particular breed of right-on bourgeois liberal.)  'Industry' on a big scale is BAD... but little islands of bourgeois right-onitude can correct this, especially when they are powered by a nice version of enterprising individualism (i.e. all that self-actualizing that goes on at the Nuthutch) and especially when also assisted by the UN and government grants, etc.  I'm glossing and simplifying like crazy, but the model embodied in the Nuthutch is hardy a billion miles away from the small-scale, regional economies proposed to supplant 'industrial society' by the Goldsmithian ecologists.

As I said elsewhere, the 'critique' of capitalism in 'Green Death' is decidely diffident.  Most egregiously, by representing the miners as clueless fossils and making them into the dupes of Stevens, Letts and Sloman obfuscate the class struggle and implicate the ex-miners in the crimes of 'Industry'.  (This, again, is hardly a billion miles away from the problems in Goldsmithian eco-politics.)

Also, and perhaps most obviously and crudely, the story shows us casual, routine, pro-corporate bias in the Cabinet Room... but also postulates a 'Minister of Ecology' who, in the long run, seems to represent a government that can, when needed and persuaded, put aside loyalty to business and genuinely care more about the environment.  Which is Panglossian, to say the least.

It'd be easy to overstate all this, however.  Much of the interest of 'The Green Death' is in its manifest failure to offer anything approaching a unified and coherent set of underlying ideas.  It is one of those stories that manages to be fascinating because it tries to pull in lots of different directions at once, fails and falls apart.

Firsly, the world in which Letts and Sloman situate their critique of 'industry' is oddly post-industrial.  The miners are all sacked.  The mine is closed.  There are extended sequences set amidst the abandoned ruins of industry.  The chemical plant is oddly empty, except for security guards and a very few executives.  The maggots wriggle out across a featureless, entropic, post-industrial landscape of slag.

The pollution that we should really worry about comes not from the mine, not from old-fashioned manufacturing industry, but from the Stevens Process, the magical juggling with chemicals in labs, seemingly accomplished by a skeleton crew of middle-class professionals.  Stevens, moreover, is not an old-fashioned capitalist.  He's no pit owner of yore, no more than he is a Coal Board official.  He's an administrator, a manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated tasks, etc.  This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward features of neoliberalism... which was, after all, just getting started roundabout 1973.

Secondly, the story may seem to set out to absolve capitalism of its intrinsic sins - by, for instance, representing pollution as an atavistic regression amidst a general march of progress - but it then shifts gears and produces BOSS, who is an expression of alienation.  BOSS is not only, like so many Who villains, a material thing that has been produced by human labour and then turned upon his creators, he is also an expression of Stevens' own divided and alienated self.

(This, by the way, is why BOSS taunts Stevens good-humouredly about being a "superman" and a "good little Nietzschean".  Nietzsche's notion of the 'superman' or 'overman' would hardly seem credible to BOSS - who openly expresses his exasperation at human inefficiency and his belief that humans need his leadership... and yet BOSS is himself an extension of that part of Stevens which sets aside qualms and goes about trying to be the 'superman'.  The irony is that BOSS, in his/Stevens quest for efficiency and profit (note that they are assumed to be the same thing), must accept his own programming to be inefficient, even eccentric.  BOSS and Stevens go round and round in circles, just like a divided self.)

Thirdly, BOSS - and, by extension, Global Chemicals - is an expression of the drive towards monopoly.  Note how, even here, Doctor Who seems to return to the old association of monopoly with the vampiric, an association often noted by commentators upon horror and the gothic.  BOSS is vampiric in that he feeds on the mental energy and obedience of his executives (though not, you'll notice, on any working class labourers) and his maggots are vampiric in that they bite, infect and convert.  (They even bite the neck.)  This is another reason why capital gets associated with the vampire... capital doesn't just exploit (suck blood), it also converts everything into itself (I'll get back to this when I eventually finish my big post about the Borg and the Cybermen).

There's no doubt, by the way, that part of the horror of the Nestenes and Axos - those spectacular, tentacular Draculas - is in their drive towards utter monopoly.

Skulltopus 10: How Green Was My Death?

'The Green Death' is a ghost story.  Doctor Who itself may actually be best described, from one standpoint, as an anthology of ghost stories.


Okay, let's go back a bit.

Firstly, let me defend my notion about 70s Doctor Who sprouting Weird tentacles when it notices (and thus needs to evade and/or signify) capitalism.  'The Green Death' is clearly aware of capitalism and, sure enough, shows signs of Weird inflection.  (I'm aware, by the way, that I keep talking about the show as though its alive... a form of commodity fetishism that I'll address some day.)

Apart from anything else, there's a dirty great tentacle in 'The Green Death'.  It's only in it for a few seconds, during the Doctor's abortive trip to Metebelis III, but still...

As in 'Curse of Peladon', this is the tentacular riding in on past associations... however, it can't be said to work quite the same way as previous tentacles in the Pertwee era.  This tentacle is clearly not obscuring any potential thematic convergence upon the subject of capitalism, as in 'Spearhead from Space' and 'Claws of Axos'.  Nor is it standing in for implied capitalism, as in 'Curse of Peladon'.  Capitalism is something that 'The Green Death' is aware of openly.  It doesn't need to be either obscured or implied... especially since the 'critique' of capitalism the story offers is actually quite diffident, to the extent of dehumanizing the working class.  And this tentacle is only a momentarily glimpsed feature of a side-trip, taking place literally light years away from Global Chemicals.  However, it's in 'The Green Death' rather than, say, 'The Time Warrior'.  It's in a story about an evil corporation rather than one about a feudal warlord.  So, the association is still evident and active.

There is also a distinct Weird inflection to the maggots.  Their multiplicitous tubular wriggliness is hardly a million miles from being tentacular.  They have some of that quintessentially Weird incoherence.  

However, like 'Spearhead from Space', 'The Claws of Axos' and 'Curse of Peladon' before it, 'Green Death' retains a hauntological charge.  

The maggots themselves are steeped in gothic, in associations to do with death.  Real maggots breed in corpses or bad meat.  They are of putrefaction.  This suggests skulls and bones and graveyards, and it suggests them in the gothic mode: as signalling extremes and transgressions, and the haunting presence of that which has been denied and repressed.  Biological corruption is here aesthetically linked with the corruption of the environment by big business.  The maggots appear in the mine because they are generated by the toxic waste from the Stevens Process, which is secretly dumped underground.  Eventually, they erupt out of the mine into the world above, like zombies out of graves.  They make a typical gothic move.  They do it almost too literally.  They have been repressed and then they return.  They have been buried out of sight but wriggle out of their subterranean hiding-place.  Moreover, this is gothic very much in the Who mode.  It's outward form is non-spectral, material/ist, haunting us with social and political and industrial terrors (i.e. industrial pollution).

Partial mergings or co-existences of the gothic and the Weird are not unfamiliar.  China Miéville writes [PDF] of M.R. James, the 'father of the ghost story' (who, it is commonplace to observe, seldom actually wrote about ghosts as such), that the "adversaries" in his stories are

disproportionately and emphatically Weird.

• Touch and touchability is central. James’s is the horror of the physical universe (a trauma that would trace into the obsessive materiality/-ism of Lovecraft’s horror). It is the cloth-ness of the notorious face ‘of crumpled linen’ in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ that makes it so terrible. James even names one of his late stories ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’. The touchability of his ‘ghosts’ is not a return to that of their 18th-century cousins: this is a new (Weird) haptos, with little to do with human somaticism, and everything to do with the horror of matter. The most grotesque moment in ‘The Ash Tree’ is the ‘soft plump, like a kitten’, with which a just-glimpsed giant spider drops off the bed.  

•  James’s repeated insistence that he is an ‘antiquary’ is not convincing. He is acutely conscious of capitalist modernity, and a surprising number of his ‘ghosts’ manifest through it. The demon in ‘Casting the Runes’ bizarrely announces its intent by means of an advertisement in a railway carriage. The attack which the
runes occasion is brought down quite amorally on whoever took them last, according to the depersonalised passings-on of bits of paper. The horror is of the universal equivalent in mass commodification: the runes are Bad Money. Most astonishingly, in ‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’, what is haunted is not a scrap of fabric nor the materials with which it is made but the design upon it: it is the copied design, reprinted with explicitly cutting-edge modern techniques, that is the locus for the apparition. This is the work of hauntology in the age of mechanical reproduction. 

. . . 

• Most important, of his non-ghost ‘ghosts’, a disproportionate number have appurtenances of the Weird, and read now as startlingly teratologically ahead of their time. His apparitions are hairy (‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’), chitinous (‘The Ash-Tree’), slimy and/or amphibious (‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’), totally bizarre (‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book’), and more than once,  tentacled (‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Count Magnus’).

Now, it seems to me that the giant maggots in 'The Green Death' fit in with this description of James's "adversaries".  They may not be "startlingly teratologically ahead of their time" (quite the contrary) but they are - clearly - all about "the horror of matter", "capitalist modernity", "cutting-edge techniques", etc.  They are aggressively "bizarre", "slimey" and "chitinous" (never mind that Pertwee doesn't know how to pronounce this word).

So, there is an extent to which the gothic and the Weird co-exist in 'The Green Death'.  Even the title combines the gothic 'Death' with the slimey, icky, biological 'Green'.

If the maggots are (relatively straightforwardly) the dark, gothic secrets of corporate irresponsibility - the 'externalities', the pollutants of corporate power - breaking up out of their post-industrial tomb to haunt us, then they are also quasi-Weirdified.  The maggots may, by their very garbled and arbitrary irrelevance, express the horror of the unforseen and unintended effect, the by-product, the runaway process.  In any case, there are precedents for hauntological adversaries of this kind - of the Weird, material, slimey, chitinous, capitalist kind - right at the start of the modern ghost story: the material/ist non-ghosts of James.  These are, I think, the very kinds of adversaries that 70s Doctor Who summons up when it notices capitalist relations... and this is itself consistent with the Jamesean ghost story.  As noted by Miéville, James's ghosts are often linked to or emergent from capitalism.  In very much the same way, Doctor Who's material/ist gothic slips into the quasi-Weird when it slides close to an awareness (of a positive or negative kind) of capitalist relations.

That's why 'The Green Death'... and, indeed, many other Doctor Who stories... could be said to be a ghost story.

But, I hear you scream, how can 'The Green Death' be said to be a 'ghost story' when there are no ghosts in it?  How can Doctor Who, with its outer shell of pro-Enlightenment bluster (inherited from an original remit to be 'educational'), be said to be a collection of ghost stories, especially when it keeps telling us that "spooks and ghosts" "don't exist"?  The answer is: by being more true to the roots of the modern tradition.  Stories of ghosts may date from the emergence of stories themselves, but 'ghost stories', in the sense that we usually talk about them today, date from the 19th century.  They're quite different to what we see in, say, the Renaissance, when ghosts simply appeared as and when needed in tragedy or comedy.  Hamlet  is the classic example.  It has a ghost in it, but it is not a 'ghost story' in our terms, no more than it is a 'crime thriller' or a 'whodunnit', despite having murders in it.  In many ways, the earliest modern 'ghost stories' are far less spectral than Shakespeare's spirits... and far less easily comprehensible.  It is in the very physicality and incoherence of the hauntings in 'The Green Death' that we see this. The maggots haunt, but they do it physically and materially.  They even do it Weirdly... as did some of the haunting things of M.R. James.

Now... a distinction must be made.  The classic late-19th century / early-20th century 'haute Weird' was prefigured in James, combined with the hauntological.  This, however, is clearly not what's going on in 'The Green Death', which was crafted and broadcast long after the Weird proper had burst onto the scene and then declined.  Rather, the Weird or quasi-Weird that we see in 'Green Death' is not the true-Weird but an echo of the Weird, a processed and recalled version if it... a spectre of the Weird, if you like.  This is broadly true of all the quasi-weird that surfaces in Doctor Who.  This 'Who-Weird' is an ancestral trait from the evolutionary history of monsterology, cropping up in outer form only, like a throwback.

This, by the way, illuminates another way in which 'The Green Death' uses a material/ist hauntology: it invokes the concept of atavism.  The maggots are said to be "atavistic mutations".  Atavism is the reappearance of ancestral traits.

Atavism was associated with the concept of the 'throwback' in the sense of the return of primitivism, hence Lombroso and his idea that criminals were 'primitives' walking in the clothes of modern men.  Inherent in this was the notion that the modern (i.e. more evolved) man was less likely to be a criminal... but that Man might slip backwards.  Progress marches on but inevitably brings the occasional lapse into regress.  Indeed, the regress illumines the progress.  This idea seems inherent in 'The Green Death'.  The whole raison d'etre of Global Chemicals is a bourgeois notion of progress: efficiency and profit.  Yet their progress brings also the atavism that produces throwbacks to an age of monsters (actual science aside).

If the maggots are atavistic, this makes them the genetic gothic.  They are a kind of bio-hauntology.  Once again, they are ghosts in slimey, hairy, wriggling, chitinous form.

It's interesting, in light of all this, that there is a character in 'The Green Death' called 'Mr James'.

Boo!

BBC Wales

The patronizing use of Welsh stereotypes in 'The Green Death' is evidence of the employment of centuries-old imperial condecenscion.  However, Welshness alone does not straightforwardly equal idiocy in this story.  Rather, it is the conjunction of Welshness with membership of the proletariat which produces characters who don't really have a clue what's going and need everything explained to them.

Clifford Jones and 'Nancy' (note how she doesn't need a surname) are allowed to be efficient and useful only because their Welshness (which entails them using cute provincialisms galore) is offset by their educated, middle-class boffinity and right-onitude.  Meanwhile, Jo marvels openly at her own foolishness in caring so much about the death of a "funny little Welshman" (who kept her alive).  The difference between these Welsh characters - i.e. between the ones who qualify as people and those who don't - is down to class.

The workers in this story are belittled, peripheral figures.  They are profoundly out of touch and their Welshness is but a conduit by which they can be further quaintified.  They miss the big picture, even when the hippy scientists try to explain everything to them. They side with Stevens when he tries to bribe them with promises of the trickle-down effect... indeed, the validity of Stevens's claims that profits for Global will also mean prosperity for the workers is never challenged, only qualified by the criticism that pollution will be a side-effect.  There is hardly a hint of class struggle here, besides the opening scene... and even here the struggle is portrayed as over.  The mine is closed, the miners all but absent.  Their status seems unclear... some of them seem to still have access to the mine despite its apparent closure.  The mine itself seems not to be owned by the government but by Global Chemicals.

Now, in its haphazard and accidental way, some of this is actually prescient.  The UNIT stories were supposed to be 'five minutes into the future' (we're not getting into UNIT dating controversies - I couldn't care less) and, of course, by the late-90s, British mining - together with so much manufacturing industry - had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories.  Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs had been annihilated.  Working class communities were wrecked in the process.  In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism (which, of course, had already begun under Heath, albeit in a less aggressive form).

Thing is, viewed in the context of the times in which it was made, this is as puzzlingly skewiff as it is prescient.  'Anachronistic' is the only way to properly describe it.

You see... miners were powerful in 1973, having struck in 1972 for the first time since the 20s - and won!  Miners all over the country came out over piffling proposed pay rises, proposed by the Tory government in the midst of declining living standards and working conditions.  Miners in South Wales made a particularly good showing in the nationwide strike.  135 pits were shut down by industrial action in South Wales alone (the national total was 285), with dockers in Cardiff and Newport refusing to unload imported coal from ships in solidarity.  Miners picketed power stations of all kinds and shut down transport of fuel supplies.  Welsh miners joined a picket outside the Saltley works in Brimingham, which had been undermining the strike by continuing to send out coke.  The miners alone were unable to force the gates of the depot to close, so Arthur Scargill - the trade unionist and activist leading the picketing - appealed for help to the shop stewards of the huge engineering industries in Birmingham.  At least thirty thousand workers walked out of factories in the Birmingham area, with at least a third marching to help the miners at Saltley.

I got this image from the BBC site.  You can tell.  They chose it because
it's taken from such a distance that you can't make out what's happening.

In one of the greatest working class victories of the post-war period (the 40th anniversary has just been celebrated), thousands of workers forced police to close the gates of the depot.  A rattled Tory administration instituted a 'state of emergency' and a three day week in an effort to conserve energy supplies.  The miners returned to work, after much negotiation and a ballot, as the highest paid industrial workers in the country - and the strongest and most unified.  Their achievements were chipped-away in the context of the Middle East oil crisis and soon their pay began to slip back down the scale, so they struck again in 1974.  This time, hapless Heath called a general election and appealed to the country to decide: who runs Britain, the miners or the Tory government?  The country made its choice and the Tories were booted from office, to seethe and fester over their resounding defeat at the hands of the unionized and militant miners.

(It's worth noting that the current state of affairs I described earlier - with the British mining industry, like so many other manufacturing industries, lying in wrecked ruins alongside the devastated working class communities that revolved around it - came about as a result of the policies of the Thatcher government.  Thatcher - recently portrayed as an inspirational force for change in that movie - came to power in 1979, sworn to inflict ruinous vengeance upon the miners for daring to bring down Heath.  Her gang of class-warriors were, as Arthur Scargill rightly asserted, planning to shut down pit after pit, thus punishing and breaking the most militant and class conscious section of the British working class.  The Tories made it necessary and unavoidable for the miners to fight to protect their livelihoods and communities.  Meanwhile, they (the Tories) plotted and schemed to ensure that they could hold out against the strike they were deliberately provoking.  Scargill - a courageous and incorruptible fighter for the working class, whatever his flaws - was not the cause of the miners' defeat in 1984-5.  Indeed, he is to be credited with bringing the strike closer to victory than anyone could have expected, given the level of government premeditation, preparation, conspiracy, dishonesty, violence and spite.  Crushing defeat though it eventually was, the great miner's strike of 1984-5 is also a heroic page in working class history... and the dire results of government victory would have happened anyway, even if there'd been no Scargill and no strike.  The only difference would have been that, had the miners acquiesced without a struggle, the subsequent demoralization would have been even worse and would have left the working class with no inspiring memory of resistance.  Just thought I'd mention all this.)

'The Green Death' was broadcast almost right smack inbetween the two massive and inspiring demonstrations of working class power by the miners in 1972 and 1974.  It was aired at a time when the miners were by far the most advanced and powerful section of the British working class.  And yet, the story depicts miners as sacked, powerless, disunited, grumbling, incompetent, reactionary yokels in the background, to be patronized at best.  They play no part in resolving the issues or jeopardy in the story.  Indeed, they just get in the way.  The only political demo or march in the story is the one organized and attended by the nice, middle-class, hippy boffins.

The workers don't demonstrate, they just stand around outside the gates and grumble before they disperse back to the pub.  They are implied to be politically shortsighted and selfish.  They don't notice or care much about the environmental destruction, which is implicitly assumed to be a more important problem than their jobs and lives and livings. They are gormless, horny-handed, provincial nincompoops.  Some are nice enough but others are openly depicted as rash and violent or nosey and insinuating.  The Doctor openly becomes an authority figure when ordering flat-cap-wearing miners around (who need him to tell them how to operate the machinery in their own workplace).  Moreover, the Doctor twice assumes disguises in which he plays at being comedy working-class stereotypes.

The working class identity becomes a shell of parody, cliche and ridicule, to be used by the plummy scientist hero before being thrown off.

It seems only fair to admit that I've altered this image a tad.

By contrast, all the suited businessmen inside Global - including Stevens, the main human villain - get to have their moments of conscience or indecision or remorse or redemption.  No working class character gets anything like that much flesh on their bones.  The death of Fell is implicitly meant to be more of a big deal than the deaths of either of the miners.  Indeed, even inside Global Chemicals, the workers continue to be depicted as less human than the corporate suits.  While Stevens is shown to be conflicted, his driver/henchman is just a glib, brutal thug.

In its terribly liberal-moralistic way, this attempt at an angry, political story misses the chance to engage with what unscrupulous businesses do to ordinary, working people, and also misses a chance to depict those people as a force for change.  It completely fails to notice that miners in South Wales are, at the time the story was written, powerful and successful fighters for their own interests and the interests of their class.  More, it largely misses the chance to depict working people as fully human.

White as Snowy

I'm sure I'm giving you all the impression that I'm a kind of obsessed stalker when it comes to China Miéville, but everyone should read his latest blog post.  It's about the recent decision by the Belgian Supreme Court to reject the application by Bienvenue Mbutu Mondondo...

to have Tintin in the Congo declared unacceptable under the Belgian race relations law.  However, he had made clear for years that he would be satisfied if, as in Britain, the book was published with a visible warning, a reminder of the context in which it was written (maybe even of the toxic ideology enshrined within). What Mondondo wanted was an official recognition that this text was a spitting in his face. That it came down to what was always clearly a nuclear option was due to the steadfast refusal of the publishers to countenance this - and thereby take responsibility for what they publish. The Belgian establishment went to cultural war, & it did so not for free speech, but for their right not to apologise for racist slander.

When human rights lawyer David Enright asks for the book to be sold as an adult work, while explicitly, repeatedly, stressing that he does not advocate banning it, nonetheless, cometh the resentment-spewing dissemblers in the comments insisting that he is supporting ‘censorship’. This is a degree of point-missing so great it is hard to believe it is not performative.

(Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments ‘for free speech’ & ‘against censorship’ or ‘banning’ are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It’s really not very fucking complicated. Cry Free Speech in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about & criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy? This assertive & idiotic failure to understand that juridical permissibility backed up by the state is not the horizon of politics or morality is absurdly resilient.)

In case you don't know the book, here's a link (provided by Miéville in his blog post) that will fill you in.

Had a look?

Delightful, isn't it?

I'm not quoting it or putting any of the pictures on here.  It makes me feel ill.

Herge (real name Georges Remi) was, by the way, a Nazi collaborator who featured anti-semitic stereotype villains (hook-nosed, cigar-chomping financier called Blumenstein, for instance) in his cartoons.  Nice company for Spielberg and Moffat.

Aside from picking over the Tintin issue forensically, Miéville's blog post is of relevance to this blog because he goes over the various weasely excuses always wheeled out by people who want to sleaze their way out of confronting the racism often blatant in cherished old stories.

Please read the whole thing.  I am, however, going to take the liberty of quoting at length and snipping a bit in order to hone in on the points that I'm keen to stress here:

i) One may admit that aspects are unfortunate, but simply refuse to engage with the question of racism.

...Guy Staggs in the Telegraph ... segues blithely to allowing, questions of race ignored, that the book is not ‘a good read’.

As if that is what we were talking about. (This - It’s Not Racist It’s Just Not Very Good - is a sort of evil-twin variant of the more common How Can Little Black Sambo Be Racist I Read It As A Child & I Loved It & What’s More I Understood Sambo Was The Hero (cf also How Can I Be A Sexist I Love Women In Fact I Prefer Them To Men aka How Is That Racist Having Natural Rhythm Is A Good Thing) position.)

ii) One can insist that the book’s attitudes ‘reflect its time’, as the court held.

There are two interesting points about this ultra-common defence for every undeniably racist (sexist, homophobic, &c) text in existence. The first is that it is historically bogus. Such ideas, like all ideas, were - are - contested. Certainly & obviously the mainstream shifts, the balance of forces alters, but the implicit or explicit claim that there were no dissident voices on supremacist agendas is a lie. To claim that everyone talked like Tintin about the Congo back in the day is (whatever other serious political arguments we may have with them) to slander, say, Felicien Challaye, Albert Londres, the French Socialist movement that declared at its 1907 conference that colonialism ‘relies on violent conquest and institutionalises the subjection of Asiatic and African peoples’.

The second point is that even if these attitudes do ‘reflect their time’ in the sense of reflecting a then-more-mainstream agenda, so the fuck what? The point about attitudes is that they change, in response to struggle, to a battle for ideas. The question here is whether or not Tintin au Congo is racist. Which it is. That may perhaps in part be because white supremacism was less contested back then - just as well we’re not back then, then, isn’t it? & that instead we live in now, when the resistance of those deemed unable to add 2 & 2 has forced the recognition that this kind of shit is shit. These days a ‘collective synapse’ should kick in ‘forged by mass movements … that have forced a lot of people, particularly white straight men, to have a clue.’

iii) Insist that Hergé was not racist.

Ah, intent. You unfalsifiable talisman of airy exoneration. This is the second twanging string to the Belgian court’s bow, the outraged insistence that the artist was no racist, had no intent to ‘create an intimidating, hostile, degrading or humiliating environment’.

The great advantage for its deployers of this defence is that it is completely unprovable either way. Which is why, whatever one’s opinions of their actual bona fides, it is generally strategic to focus on what a person said or wrote, rather than what they think or are.

Which is exactly what Mondondo & Enright do. Their claim is that this book is racist. Because it is. Intent shmintent: whatever Hergé intended, are these disgusting sub-minstrel figures ‘degrading’? Anyone who denies that the answer is yes is a fool or a knave.

There is the absurd hyperbole, to turn a victimiser’s culture into a victim. In his effort to derail the issue, Staggs insists that the ‘trump’ of racism is ‘used to blot out any part of our cultural heritage that might cause embarrassment.’ ‘Blot out’. Right. Who, after all, could forget the monstrous erasure performed by Stalin on Trotsky, by putting a warning sticker on him & refusing to shelve him alongside The Gruffalo? The Tintin Vanishes. Quick, conjure images of book burning! First they came for the Boy Reporter & shelved him alongside Persepolis & Sandman, & I did not speak out, because I was not a Boy Reporter, &c.

What I've quoted above should be read by everyone who's ever defended Toberman on the grounds that he's the hero / he's of his time / the makers weren't deliberately trying to be racist / whaddayawanndo, ban it??? / etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum...

It wouldn't do any good, of course, but least they'd have no way of claiming that nobody had ever pointed out the stupid irrelevance and bad faith of such 'arguments'.

A New Hope?

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.

Skulltopus 9: Signs of Progress and the Progress of the Sign

You can rifle the Pertwee era for tentacles and find relatively few.  They only crop up in stories in which capital looms.  They only fully-materialize as a major threat where capitalism is a systemic presence, threatening - even if only obliquely - to connect up various social and political nightmares.

That isn't to say that social and political nightmares are thin on the ground.  Far from it.  But it's only when those problems are connected to capital, commodification and trade as exploitative or destructive, that they sprout tentacles.


Evidence of Absence

The reason why 'Spearhead from Space' builds to an unexpectedly tentacular conclusion is because all sorts of things within it hint obliquely and elliptically at deep problems in the Britain of the late twentieth century, problems which seem to build towards a connection that must be occluded: namely the connection of all these problems at the economic base of society, the productive forces, the capitalist factory, the commodity form itself.  'Spearhead' is saturated in depictions of hierarchy, domination and class.  The story hints - albeit very quietly - at imperialism, and at racial and gender hierarchies.  The monsters are stalking emblems of alienation and commodity fetishism, manufactured things, products, hostile commodities in the estranged human form of consumerism.  The tentacles appear to obscure the hub of the story.  We don't even see the hub of the creature within the tank, only its flailing limbs.

'Spearhead' is, however, unusually potent, oneiric, suggestive and loaded.  That said, many of its preoccupations recur throughout the Pertween era... just not together, not in such a 'joined-up' way and not in stories that even notice capitalism, let alone suggest that evil emanates from capitalist alienation of labour.

For instance, in 'The Silurians', social hierarchy is definitely in evidence but it doesn't reach deeply into everyday normal life as in 'Spearhead'.  Work is in evidence, but almost all of it takes place in a state-owned research centre and all the main characters are professionals who are, apparently, dedicated scientists rather than, say, factory drudges.  The monetary value of the facility is mentioned but not in terms of profitability.  There isn't any poverty to be seen, or much in the way of class.  There are certainly no drastic social divisions.  There is xenophobia and prejudice but these are treated as human traits - related, if anything, to our biology - rather than social phenomena.  Capitalism is hardly hinted at, economically or culturally.  There is simply the world as it stands, as a backdrop to events.  All of this broadly holds true for 'Ambassadors of Death' too.  There are no tentacles in either story, though there is some mildly Weird inflection detectable in 'Ambassadors', in the appearance of the aliens and their peculiar ship.  It's worth noting, in this connection, that an attempt is made to commodify the alien ambassadors, whereas this is not the case with the Silurians.

In 'Inferno', fascism (or some form of totalitarianism at any rate) is a major theme, but there's no hint in the text that it's linked to economics.  This is not fascism as a form of ultra-statist reactionary capitalism, nor is it communism in the economic sense either!  There are slaves in the alt world but slaves are not proletarians.  Hierarchy is in evidence, even in the non-totalitarian version of reality, but strict adherence to hierarchies is made a pathology of Stahlman's own.  Beyond the government's stated desire for a cheap new energy source, there's hardly a hint of economics.  No capitalism to speak of.  And no tentacles.

In 'Mind of Evil', people in prison are bad because they've got badness in their brains.  The implications are, on the face of it, as biologically determinist as those hinted at in 'The Silurians'.  Nuclear weapons are simply an expression of this badness in a generalized form.  In its concentrated form (i.e. in working class thugs) it manifests as violent crime.  Crime is disobedience to the 'law and order' of the apparently functionalist 'honest broker' state.  In its general form, as it lurks in the heart of man, this innate darkness takes the form of warheads, which seem to be emblems of human 'folly' rather than of imperialism.  Indeed, the American Ambassador is an innocent victim of the Red Menace and any mention of imperialism is mere Stalinist flim-flam for the Brigadier to smirk at knowingly.  No private companies, no profits, no interest in commodification.  And no tentacles.

In 'The Sea Devils', there's a cowardly, xenophobic and bellicose parliamentary private secretary (the show seems to find it particularly sinister that he eats toast as he orders bombardments) but he's clearly the exception to the rule.  Every other establishment figure in this is either a stiff-upper-lipped straight-arrow or a well-meaning dupe.  Hierarchy seems to function beautifully for everyone in this story.  There's hardly a whisper about imperialism or capitalism.  The Weird is often very maritime in its concerns (i.e. tentacles, crabs, etc.) but this story just looks like a Navy Recruitment film.  No tentacles.

'Day of the Daleks' is a densely political text that needs a lot of unpacking... which I'll probably get around to one of these days.  This is a story unusually aware of economics in the broad sense (i.e. how society is reproduced through production) and is certainly aware of the exploitation of labour... but the society of the future looks like Stalinism.  Now... I'm personally persuaded that Stalinism (or 'really existing socialism' or 'communism', whatever...) was actually a bureaucratic form of state capitalism (I'm not in the SWP but I'm convinced they're broadly right on this).  However, that idea was even less well known in 1972 than it is now, and a large majority of even the radical left at the time thought Russia and China were in some way socialist.  Pertwee's barbed comments - particularly "Then why do they need so many people to keep them under control?  Don't they like being happy and prosperous?" - seem to tally with the idea that this story is critiqueing 'communism', as does the concentration upon needing the cooperation of "the Chinese delegates".

Of course, we also have the guerillas who look like left-wing 'freedom fighters' - Shura seems to have deliberately styled himself after Che - and who are described as "fanatics" but who end up portrayed as (broadly) in the right.  Even their assassination plan is not fully disdained in principle.  But, the "third world war" seems to be something that nobody is responsible for, certainly not the well-meaning politicians.  Imperialism hardly registers (except as Dalek conquest and as a clash between rival communist states, i.e. "troops are massing along the Russian and Chinese frontiers") and neither does capitalism.  There are, you'll recall, no tentacles.  Indeed, the story explicitly talks the talk of the gothic and hauntological.  (All the stuff about ghosts.)

The Earth Empire in 'The Mutants' is only very distantly capitalist.  There is some talk about exploitation (of Solonians and their minerals) but there's no indication that this is anything but straightforward military theft, as in ancient Rome.  No tentacles.

And so on.  You get the idea, I'm sure.


What's Good For IMC...

"Ah ha!" I hear you cry, "there should be tentacles in 'Colony in Space', surely - if his bullshit theory is correct!"

Well, firstly, remember that I've never claimed that tentacles appear every time capitalism comes up, only that they tend to when the show veers towards potential systemic critique of capitalism.  But doesn't 'Colony in Space' qualify?  Not really, because the story is essentially a liberal complaint about corporations, not capitalism as a system.  IMC is strongly implied to be acting illegally and most of the colonists are surprised by their out-and-out gangsterism.  The law is also implied to be relatively impartial, with most of the colonists seemingly having realistic hopes that the state will act for the best and arbitrate between competing claims.

More broadly, 'Colony' embraces certain bourgeois ideas about individual freedom and the 'progress' of Western civilization.  It subjects the notion of technological and social progress to some sceptical questioning, but ultimately its qualms seem to be about 'technology' and warlike aims rather than capitalist industry per se.  The commodity sought by IMC - duralinium - has none of the qualities that marked out Nestene plastic or Axonite as representing the commodity form as a concept or as capital itself.

Also, the story completely fails to notice that the colonists are encroaching upon a world that is already inhabited.  In all the bickering between them and IMC, nobody stops to question that one or other group has the right to appropriate the planet and expropriate the 'primitives'.  This is a liberal whinge about unscrupulous corporations bullying petit bourgeois small-holding colonials.  It assumes the possibility of a just settlement between the claims of business and the rights of individuals.  Law and order can be achieved when the excesses of one rogue corporation are curtailed.  The right of colonists to impose colonialism upon natives is left unquestioned.

There is no more threat of a systemic critique of capitalism here than there is in your average Bond film.


The Quasi-Skulltopus and the Road Away from Serfdom (Not)

This is also true of  'The Curse of Peladon', and yet that has tentacles in it (sort of)... which demands explanation.

As in 'The Creature from the Pit' much later, the decidedly feudal nature of Peladon implies that the new system brought by the alien vistors is probably going to be, in some sense, capitalism.  Sure enough, the entry of Peladon into the Federation will entail Federation exploitation of Peladon for minerals... i.e. industrial exploitation, mining, refining, export, etc.  Arcturus makes a deal for Peladon's minerals with Hepesh because his own planet lacks them, and, in so doing, makes the minerals into commodities, although money is not mentioned (not even obliquely) so it's still only an implication.  Guess what... Arcturus is a bit tentacular.  Of course, so is Centauri... but then we all know the 'Federation' is meant to represent the Common Market.  To put it crudely: s/he's got the good tentacles of free trade and he (Arcturus) has the bad tentacles of restricted markets.

Thing is... Arcturus is also a bit like a skull.

He's actually very nearly a skulltopus.

I suppose this is allowed because, in 'Curse', the tentacular has lost all traces of its old Weird charge, its unprecedented, meaningless incomprehensibility.  It's become a sign detached from its previous associations outside Who.  Even Terry Nation's plot-device monster, the Mire Beast, is more related to the Weird via its incongruousness and arbitrariness.

What we're seeing in 'Curse' is the first evidence that the show has started to habitually associate tentacles with capitalism, even though it originally invoked them in order to obscure it.  What started as an evasion is becoming an established signifier, to be used even when capitalism is implied and characterized as bringing progress, cultural advancement, cosmopolitanism and liberalization.  In 'Curse', the tentacular is reappearing because capitalism is heralded, even if only by heavy implication.  Arcturus and Centauri represent the Federation, and the Federation is the onrush of trade and modernization and 'development' that is coming to disrupt the old ways and - we are asked to take this on faith - remake Peladon for the better.

There is no need to obfuscate the point at which the story's themes converge upon heavily-implied capitalism because capitalism is here heavily-implied to be the solution rather than the problem.  The whole point of the story is to point out that silly, old-fashioned, class-ridden Britain, littered with the relics of a feudal past, should and must embrace the free trade future.  The new system is better for all, except when it is hijacked by a corrupt, warlike, criminal reactionary like Arcturus.  This is essentially the exact same bourgeois liberal message offered by the sequel, 'Monster of Peladon': sort out the reactionary isolationist clock-stoppers and any conspiratorial protectionists (and, in 'Monster', the loony left who incite the idiotic workers) and capitalism works like a charm.

In the 'Peladon' stories, the tentacles straightforwardly ride in on the back of their past association with capitalism.  They do not obscure, they signify.  Arcturus has them because he is part of the system.  But he is also very-nearly a skull because, in 'Curse', the overtly gothic is being used to represent the old ways, and Arcturus is a drag factor - a protectionist, market-cornering, monopolist reactionary - who might threaten to pull Peladon back into hopeless feudalism.  Indeed, he is directly conspiring with Hepesh to achieve just this aim.  Arcturus and Hepesh want the same thing.  They want Peladon to stay an undeveloped backwater.  What Hepesh does not see - and Arcturus does - is that keeping Peladon out of the galactic Common Market is only possible by keeping it as a powerless and exploited client state to a foreign monopolist.

In the semiotic schema of the Peladon tales, the gothic is used to express everything that is abhorrent or pitiful under the liberal free-trade ideological assumptions.  Aggedor haunts a torch-lit castle because we are being asked to contemplate a society stuck in the past.  Arcturus is a quasi-skull because he too is a force of reaction, a block to progress.  He has tentacles because Doctor Who is starting to associate tentacles with what, in this story, is the system of the future.  This is not the Weird fused with the gothic.  This is the gothic, fused into Doctor Who's emergent internal system of signs, juggling different forms of capitalism.

Law & Order: Blame the Victims Unit

I bought my Mum a DVD Box set of Law & Order for Xmas. 

Sat with her today and watched a few episodes. 

The first disc had one of L&O's occasional 'race' episodes. Like every previous 'race' episode, this one portrayed black people as hysterical, touchy, unreasonable, and unjustifiably obsessed with racism. 

As always in L&O, the defence attorney was slimey, unscrupulous and cynically playing the race card. And, as always, there's a black politician who is a ruthless demagogue using the issue of race further his career. 

The only people in the story to be impartial, ethical and reasonable were the police and prosecutors.  Poor them, they spend the whole episode battling hysterical black people who fantasize non-existent racism everywhere and, by demanding special treatment, create racism themselves.

So, no disrespect to my Mum, fuck off Law & Order.