Red Kangs Are Best

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

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

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

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

I worry that people with, perhaps, no other exposure to Marxism than me, might take me as a meaningful representative.  Ye gods, I hope not.  I am an amateur and, despite having gone to University, I consider myself effectively an autodidact.  One of my purposes here (beyond simply amusing myself and indulging my vanity) has been, via the conduit of a popular TV show, to maybe bring a bit of Marxism (or just critical leftiness generally) into the thinking and reading of people who might otherwise not encounter it in our barren age.  I worry that someone out there might read me and then think they know what 'Marxist criticism' is.  I may be vain, but I know my limitations, and I hate the idea of doing my own beliefs a disservice, even in a very small way.

I've reacted to 'Paradise Towers' in a way that is actually a bit more properly Marxist than I usually manage.  In this post, I at least gesture towards a proper Marxist contextualising of the story (i.e. I mention the dawning neoliberalism of 1987 as a context for the production of the story, for the way it references modernism, which I also historicise very briefly.)  Even so, I'd hesitate to claim the status of a 'Marxist analysis' for that post.

And I wouldn't want to claim that I always even do as well as I do in that piece.  My 'essay' about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, for instance, has been called a 'Marxist reading' or 'Marxist analysis'.  I'm really not sure it qualifies.  It gestures in that direction towards the end, but I think of it as a personal reaction which has a background in my Marxist convictions - something quite distinct.

Going back to 'Paradise Towers', and addressing some of the things said in the podcast...  Jane doesn't actually say that the Rezzies represent capitalists or capitalism, but she nevertheless uses the word 'bourgeois' to describe them.  Now, that's right - I agree.  They clearly (through their aesthetic representation - something Jane is very hot on) signify a certain stereotypical middle-class, middle-brow social position which is deeply associated - and not inaccurately - with a strata of people in bourgeois society who combine the passive, the complacent, the ressentimental, the reactionary and the aspiring.  But we should remember to separate the 'bourgeois' from the 'bourgeoisie'.  The Rezzies are not capitalists.  (To be clear: Jane doesn't say they are.)

Similarly, neither are the Caretakers.  Here I have a more serious quibble with Jane, because she says they are the proletarians in Paradise Towers.  I don't think that's right... or rather, I think it needs nuancing.  Jane mentions elsewhere in the podcast that the Caretakers are costumed in military style... but they are explicitly not the military, because the military took all the rest of the males away to war.  The Caretakers are the police.  And the police are not proletarians.  In capitalism, the police are ultimately aligned with the class interests of the capitalist class.  They are, essentially, defenders of private property (and of the peace of the system which normalises and legitimises private property) against people who don't own anything.  (This is one big reason why the end of 'Paradise Towers' clangs for me, at least politically.  If you wait for the police to align themselves with anybody other than their masters, you will wait forever.)

Jane goes on to say interesting things about how, if viewed as proletarians who have achieved positions of authority, the Caretakers can be seen as an illustration of how power corrupts any class.  And that's true too (as long as we expand a bit on what we mean by 'power').  Jane takes this observation on to see a polemic against Stalinism lurking within the story, with the Caretakers as being a kind of nomenklatura, and the Chief Caretaker as a General Secretary.  I think it'd be dangerous to generalise that into any kind of ahistorically-detached model, but it isn't inaccurate as a description of what happened in the Soviet Union.  A segment of the working class achieved political power and then, detached from the rest of the class (owing to historical circumstances that 'Paradise Towers' almost acknowledges via the business of the male population disappearing into a war), they become a bureaucratic tyranny.  (Jane also stresses - in an almost neo-Trot way - that the Stalinists are merely posturing as being in charge while capitalism still runs the show in a hidden form below the surface.  All lovely stuff, and music to the ears of someone like me who accepts the argument that Stalinism is the political expression of authoritarian, bureaucratic state capitalism.)  But I don't think you need to go as far as post-Civil War Soviet Russia to see what the Caretakers represent.  In capitalist society, the police are just what Jane describes: a layer of the working class that is detached from the class position (and therefore the class interests) of the rest of the workers.  Even in openly capitalist society, the Caretakers are there.

Kroagnon, by the way, doesn't really convince me as a manifestation of capitalism... though, as a representation of the authoritarian inner-core of some variants of modernism, he obviously reflects capitalism because modernism is part of the cultural logic of early-C20th Euro-American capitalist culture.

For me, 'Paradise Towers' is not really a picture of a capitalist dystopia so much as a picture of a post-industrial one.  The theory of the post-industrial is about to be massively in vogue in Britain as 'Paradise Towers' appears.  It's an idea that is aloft on the postmodernist wind.  It ties in with certain non-Marxist or pseudo-Marxist Left impulses to declare that capitalism is changing beyond the ken of classical Marxism.  And it also ties in with impulses within the burgeoning neoliberal Right to claim that capitalism is changing beyond the ken of even old-style social democracy.  The response of the anti-Thatcher Left is to point to post-industrialism as a kind of social dysfunction.  An understandable (if ultimately unsatisfactory) position which, I think, we see mirrored in 'Paradise Towers'.  None of this makes 'Paradise Towers' any less angry and wonderful (I adore it, by the way), but it marks the circumstances of its production as being within the cultural context of early-neoliberal Left thinking.  It also allows us to loop back a tad and join this ramble up in a notional loop of logic... because it illustrates the distance between finding a Marx-friendly allegory within a narrative, and actually analysing said narrative using a material-dialectic method (not that I'm claiming to have done more than gesture vaguely towards that here.)

Oh, one more thing.  During the podcast, Jane asks James if he thinks Mel has changed at all during the course of the story.  James says she's learned a Moral of the Week.  I agree, and I've been trying to think how to formulate the Moral of the Week that she learns.  I've decided that it would be best expressed as: 'a monomaniacal obsession with swimming pools can be fatal under certain extremely specific circumstances'.

No Name

Triggers


Apparently, they've found out who Jack the Ripper was.  Maybe.  At least, so says the Daily Mail, and a bloke who's written a book about the case, and who owns a business selling 'Ripper' tours.  So, reliable and unbiased sources.

Turns out, Jack the Ripper was... some guy.

Who'd have thunk it?

So, will this put a stop to the lucrative Ripper industry?  The books, movies, walks, etc?

No, of course not.  Like all previous unmaskings, it'll just fuel the fire, even if this unmasking turns out to rest on marginally better evidence that some hack's ability to create anagrams, or an evidently untrue story told by a publicity hound, or the baseless hunch of a crime writer, or an obviously forged diary, or the manufactured bad reputation of a dead one-time heir to the throne.

Because, contrary to what everyone ever has always said about Jack the Ripper, interest in the case doesn't stem from the fact that the murderer was never caught.  It stems from the appeal of the degradation, humiliation, punishment and silencing of women... and from the way revelling in this (with whatever spurious self justification) can distract us from other stuff about the lives those women led, and the world they lived in.

Our misogynistic culture is obsessed with the murder of women.  It is possibly the main subject of the present-day Western narrative culture industry, aside from the sexual/romantic conquest of women.

It could be objected that there are so many stories about the murder of women because so many women are murdered... but that doesn't explain, say, the lack of a similar number of stories about the rape of women (as Alan Moore pointed out), or about the political and social subjugation of women, or about any number of other things that are more common.

The prevalence of the actual murder of women is intimately connected with the prevalence of depictions of the murder of women, but in ways that are far more complex than the merely causal (whichever way you want to imagine the causation runs).  It's all part and parcel of a cultural misogyny which stems from sexism and patriarchy, generated by class society all the way back to what Engels called "the world historic defeat of the female sex" with the start of social hierarchy.  (None of which is to excuse our present cultural practice by appeal to the influence of older structures.)

The women murdered (as is supposed) by the man dubbed Jack the Ripper are objects of morbid fascination because they shared a fate which made them only slightly unusual for women of their class and time.  Lots of these women were raped, abused, beaten and/or murdered (by men - let's not efface that vital part of the story).  It just so happens that some of these women were murdered in particularly vicious and gruesome ways, with their bodies mutilated and insultingly displayed afterwards.  (It's by no means clear how many women were the victim of the one escalating killer who ended up reaching a crescendo of perverse cruelty in the killing of Mary Kelley and then vanished, but it does seem likely that at least four were part of his distinct sequence.)

There is a degree of pity attached to the fascination.  Certainly, at the time, many common people in similar walks of life were motivated by fury at the fate of people who they knew, or might have known.  But also at the time, part of the fascination was to do with a kind of furtively aroused moralism about 'unfortunates' (as women who were driven to prostitute themselves by poverty were daintily called).  Such patronising and contemptuous pity is a mixture of fear and loathing of the poor, and of women.  And it puts the focus on sex, safely away from other scarier stuff.

But the fascination with the women is marginal to the wider cultural obsession with Jack the Ripper.  The women are props in his story, used as background detail and as titilation (particularly since the women involved worked as prostitutes, with all the sordid arousal this brings to some).

Generally, the obsession is with the man.  The killer has been fetishized, celebrated, glamourised and bigged up beyond belief.  He has been transformed from a skulking trick into a top-hatted, cloaked, evening-dress-wearing toff with a sinister gladstone bag, riding around in a coach with a royal crest on the side.  Gentleman Jack, the genteel and aristocratic killer.  There's no doubt that part of this - alongside the various attempts to make him a royal, a freemason or a posh establishment figure covering up for Queen, Country and Lodge - is the submerged horror of a system in which the poor, especially poor women, were the playthings of the rich, material to be used when needed and then allowed to sink back into the slum.  But the effect is to transform the killer himself, and his vacuously misogynistic crimes, into a meaningful figure, a powerful figure, a figure of purpose and steely determination, or of glamourous and tortured Jekyll-and-Hydean complexity, an artisan with a philosophy and a moral agenda of his own (however twisted), etc.  In this, the Ripper is the prototypical serial killer of the present-day culture industries, of Seven, Messiah, The Tunnel, etc.  The killer as intellectual, as the isolated thinker with lessons to teach us in blood, as the sinister harbinger of well-thought out rebukes (which shows simultaneously how much 'we' supposedly all need rebuke for 'our' sins, and how evil the opinionated outcasts bringing the rebukes usually are).

(I used to quite like the Gull/Masons theory... but it's only a story, and only a good one when told by Alan Moore.)

The bullshit and the obsession started at the time, with most of the mythmaking about the case being spun by the contemporary newspapers, eager to mop up the profits along with the blood.  The case could be moralised about from every angle except actual, practical sympathy with oppressed women (after all, the only place to go with that was to stop blaming the women and start saying they should be allowed to be safe... which was self-evidently unpublishable radical lunacy).  The case was a litmus test on the moral state of society (the killer brings the rebuke that 'we' all need, in his mad way).  The case was about swarthy Jews and their sacrificial religion, or about all the foreigners (no wonder the Mail loves this latest story - the guy supposedly identified as the killer was a Polish immigrant).  The case was about the degradation of the criminal classes (Punch Magazine, as usual, took the opportunity at the time to define satire as consisting of kicking downwards).  The case was a big joke, jolly London lore.  Hence the newspapers' invention of the name 'Jack the Ripper' when they hit upon the lucrative idea of sending themselves letters written in red ink, purporting to be from the murderer, invoking 'Springheel Jack' in their fabricated signatures, and sniggering about the whole thing in words that were painstakingly badly spelled (because, of course, 'Jack' couldn't be an educated man).

By the way - notice the contempt for the women integral to the name.  He's not murdering people, he's ripping things.  In the name, the women become nothing more than sacks or sheets or dresses.  Remember, when 'Jack' drones on in his letters about how he hates 'whores', he's actually a journalist speaking with the contempt of the respectable for the 'unfortunate'.

All this is a massive distraction.  Was then, is now.  Talk about anything, but don't admit that most serial killers - 'Jack' included - are just squalid, pathetic, inadequate little men who hate women because they take the furious feelings of thwarted entitlement inculcated in so many men by patriarchy, and actually act on them.  We don't want to have that conversation, or miss out on the latest thriller.

And don't admit that hugely more women died in the East End as a result of preventable disease, despair, drink, hunger, domestic violence... in a word: poverty... than died because of 'Jack'.

And don't admit that, as now, the London of 1888, the hub of an empire, harboured bigger mass murderers in the corridors of power than on the streets where the poor lived, worked their lives away, drank, hit each other, stabbed each other, laughed, joked, prayed, fucked for farthings and huddled together for warmth.  And those mass murderers in the corridors of power didn't need to sneak out at night to commit their murders.  They oversaw a system of murder every day, from within those very corridors, from behind their eminent Victorian respectability.  And they still do.

And don't damage the Ripper industry by admitting that there was never any such person as Jack the Ripper.  There was a pathetic and revolting misogynist who probably killed four or five women with escalating hatred and contempt.  And then there was a marketing opportunity.  And - in a society that still runs on drastic inequality, and on the disciplining, punishing and controlling women and their bodies - the market is still there.

Random Thing #3

And one more.  Please bear in mind, this is a fragment.


Marx saw creativity as essential to human nature.  He famously once said that “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature”.  The difference is that Marx saw such creativity as a potential in all people, and believed that class society stunted such potentials in the majority by forcing them to do work that was alien to their natures. 

Yet there is some truth to the idea of progress in the history of class society.  Marx is quite comfortable – sometimes a little too comfortable – with the idea that the accumulation of capital can also be the accumulation of progress, that even the imperialistic development of class society can push people ‘forwards’.  It’s just that he also sees horror in the process, eventually calling the ‘progress’ that British imperialism and capitalism brought to India as resembling a “hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”  This is far from an unproblematic way of putting it, but the point stands. 

It is a point later taken up by Walter Benjamin in On the Concept of History, in which he describes history as both a triumphal procession and a great piling up of wreckage and horror. 

Moral progress is only found when the increase of power and knowledge is used to make life fairer or better for common people (i.e. the majority), and this is the exception rather than the rule.  And when it does happen, it isn’t a trickle-down effect.  It is the result of struggle from below.  And even the accumulation of power and knowledge in the hands of the rulers can only come from the unrequited labour of the masses.  Even when a genius makes an individual discovery, he usually sits on top of a great pyramid of unacknowledged workers.  Charles Darwin was only able to spend years in his study working and thinking and writing because he had servants, inherited wealth, and a wife who was related to the Wedgewoods.  And that’s the history of class society at its prettiest.  At other times it looks like Alexander, invading and slaughtering.  Alexander was one of those potentates who poured the fruits of human labour into makewaste vanity projects like wars and great opulent buildings for the top people.  Contrary to the assertions of classicists (who tend to assume that they would be reincarnated in the past as fellow aristocrats) Alexander achieved little to better mankind, even if he was taught by Aristotle, one of the undoubted ‘great men’ of history.  But then Aristotle himself defended slavery in his Politics, as he had to, given that his leisure to sit around all day thinking depended on it.

Terry Eagleton has frequently pointed out that the Marxist view of history as simultaneously progressive and barbaric is a Tragic one, as Tragic (with a capital T) as Othello.  He asks (rhetorically) if even communism (as Marx envisaged it) would justify the necessary slog through class society.  Would it all have been worth it, to get us there?

3

"Not so much of that oatmeal, girl," says Meg to one of the kitchen drudges, "It's only pikemen we're feeding, not horses."

They're in Irongron's castle, somewhere in the century or so following the Norman Conquest.  Sarah is undercover, cooking Irongron's stew.

"Don't the guards on the gate get stew?" she asks, wanting to know in which pots to drop the Doctor's knock-out potion.

"What, meat for those common creatures? I should say not. They'll have oatmeal the same as the rest of us, and lusty enough they are on that. So you watch yourself if ever you take out that skillet."

So class is, perhaps, a more fundamental division than gender, but gender oppression brings its own particular problems.

"I'm not afraid of men. They don't own the world."

Well, they kind-of do... but Sarah isn't discussing actual property relations.  She's talking about the way the world should work, with no one group 'owning' it.

"Why should women always have to cook and carry for them?" she demands.

"What else should we do?" asks Meg.

"Stand up for ourselves. Tell the men you're tired of working for them like slaves."

"We are slaves," says Meg.

Wow.  No mincing words there.

"Then you should set yourselves free," says Sarah.

None there either.

"Oh? And how should we do that?"

That's a trickier question.  It always is.  But surely the first hurdle, before the plan, has to be the will.

"Don't you want to be free?" she demands.  Essentially, this has become workplace agitation.

"Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl," says Meg, "We have our place."

You still hear stuff like that today, albeit filtered through layers of code.

"What subservient poppycock!  You're still living in the Middle Ages!"

Yeah.  We are, in many ways.  We're meant to laugh at this outburst, but there's no question in my mind that we're also meant to be on Sarah's side.

There are all sorts of problems with this story.  Sarah is - at least in conception - a stereotypical 'wimmin's libber', all touchiness and naivety.  The Doctor is deliberately (more) sexist (than usual) in her presence, and we're meant to think this is funny.  She's made the butt of much sexist behaviour, apparently for our amusement.  For instance, there's the bit quoted above about the "lusty" guards... it's obviously supposed to be cute, even as it acknowledges the particular dangers faced by women in a class hierarchy.  And so on.  Someone wants to say this story is irredeemably broken by sexism?  I'm not going to argue.

But the fact remains, Sarah responds to a woman who is by demonstrably smarter than the men she serves -  and aware of the fact that she's a slave - by saying "set yourselves free".

It shines out amidst the crap.

4

"Don't get any ambitious ideas," says Castellan Spandrell to his prisoner.

"I just wanted to check it was the same staser," says the Doctor, examing the weapon used to assassinate the President of the High Council of Time Lords. "You see that symbol at the end of the corridor?"

The Doctor indicates a huge Seal of Rassilon.

"What about it?" asks Spandrell.

"You try and hit it," says the Doctor, handing Spandrell the staser.

"That's the kind of vandalism we're always running the Shabogans in for," grumbles Spandrell.

Spandrell is, basically, the Chief of Police in the Time Lord Capitol.  As such, the Doctor is his prisoner, having been caught holding a rifle in a gallery near the spot where the President was gunned down.

We never see any Shabogans.   The reference is never explained.  It just seems to be part of a Gallifreyan policeman's job to arrest people called 'Shabogans' for vandalism.  But let's not pass over this too quickly.  There is regular crime here?  There are hooligans running around the corridors of the Capitol of the Time Lords of Gallifrey? 

Well, yes, of course.

The Time Lords are not just 'aliens'.  They're explicitly potrayed as the ruling class.  They have sycophantic TV presenters who interview them creepily (about process and personalities... just like Andrew Marr outside Number 10) when they congregate at elaborate government ceremonies.  They wear traditional robes and ornate, arcane bling at these state events.  They have the poshest of posh accents, like a great club of old Etonians and Oxbridge alumni... or like Oxbridge dons.  They have Academies and Colleges in the Capitol, populated by fussy, blithering, crusty old farts who reminisce about how many of these ceremones they've attended over the centuries.  They have Chancellors.  They have Cardinals and Chapters too.  One of them creates a nightmarescape for the Doctor which references Western colonialism (there is a khaki-wearing hunter who goes on safari and tracks the Doctor like big game) and the First World War.  They have a 'Panopticon', named after the surveillance-heavy prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of Liberalism.  They have a kind of police force, run by the Castellan, whose uniforms make them vaguely reminiscent of Swiss Guards.  They also have a President.  Their Presidents have names like kings or popes (Pandak III, for instance) and are chosen by a tiny electorate (just the other Time Lords, presumably) from a tiny pool of thoroughly respectable establishment types.  They also have a shadowy government organisation, complete with secret agents, called the CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency - yuk yuk).

Police.  Media commentators, edcuated at the same Academy as the other Time Lords, taught by the people they end up talking about on TV.  Great White Hunters.  Popes.  Kings.  Presidents.  Colleges.  Chapters.  Cardinals.  Chancellors.  The Time Lords are a concentrated synthesis of various Western power structures.  Oxbridge.  The Vatican.  Prisons.  Liberalism.  Conservatism.  The House of Lords.  The CIA.  Washington.

So, of course there are 'Shabogans'.  There must be 'Proles' so that the rulers have someone to rule, so that the dirty jobs get done, so that the Time Toilets get cleaned.

By the way... the origin of the word 'shabogan' is obscure to me.  The nearest thing I can find is a reference in V. Gordon Childe to 'Shub-lugals', cadres of labourers who were not slaves but who were paid with subsistence rations by the kings of early urban Mesopotamia.  Proto-proletarians from the dawn of civilisation.  Gallifrey is elsewhere (but by the same writer) said to be "the oldest civilisation".  Which is partly why I choose to believe that the Shabogans of Gallifrey are not the posh drop-outs we see in a later story, or drunken students, but rather an invisible group of workers who do everything for the Time Lords... but who sometimes get pissed off and riot, and then get arrested by Spandrell's Time Police.  I'd hate to think there were no rowdy Time Proles to give the Time Lords a bloody nose from time to time.  If the Time Lords are a trans-historical ruling class, an accretion of Western power principles - oligarchy, gerontocracy, white power (they're all white), patriarchy (they are all men), established religion, police, media, public school, Oxbridge, British government, US government - then I like the idea that their unseen drudges are related to one of the earliest forms of urban worker in the history of civilisation.

Spandrell takes his shot.

"Miles away," he says ruefully.

"The sights," says the Doctor, nodding at the weapon,  "So you see, I couldn't have shot the President if I tried. And equally, I couldn't hit the assassin. That's why they were fixed."

"The assassin, according to you, being one of the High Council," observes Spandrell sceptically.

"Yes, he was in the party surrounding the President. I saw him draw a staser and step forward. I aimed a bolt at him, but at that time I didn't know the sights had been fixed."

"One of the High Council. It's getting better and better."

"What is?"

"Your story. But still a story. Where's the evidence, Doctor?"

"I'll tell you where the evidence is... in the Public Register camera. I was standing right beside it."

This is all so 70s it hurts.  The era of paranoia about government conspiracies in pop-culture (well, one of the eras of that... there was another one in the 90s).  This story is riffing on familiar motifs from the conspiratorial account of the Kennedy assassination.  The supposed lone assassin is actually a patsy.  He was a CIA agent.  His supposed weapon couldn't have performed the feat attributed to it.  The assassination was captured on film, and analysis of this recording will reveal the truth.  The real assassin comes from the highest circle of power and is engaged in a cover-up.

It doesn't really matter if Robert Holmes, the writer of this story, believed that the CIA (the American CIA, that is) killed Kennedy.  In the real world, there doesn't seem to be much reason to think so, though it's the kind of thing one gets from people like Holmes, who might be best described, at least as far as we can judge him from his work, as a 'romantic anti-establishment libertarian'.  He's often called 'cynical', but he's cynical about power.

(Parenthetically... I don't find it implausible that governments conspire to kill people.  On the contrary, that's almost a definition of government.  Nor do I find it implausible that the US government would conspire to assassinate a world leader.  We know, for instance, that Kennedy himself was deeply involved in several covert conspiracies to assassinate world leaders.  That's pretty much business as usual for American presidents... except that Kennedy had to keep quiet about his 'kill list' whereas Obama boasts about his.  I don't even find it all that implausible (in basic principle) that the US government might conspire to kill the US president... but he'd have to be a whole lot more threatening to them than Kennedy was (which was not at all).  It's actually difficult to see how anyone potentially dangerous enough to need rubbing out could possibly make it through the immense number of filters and baffles which stand between the Oval Office and anyone who wants to get into it.  The really interesting thing about the endless 'debate' about the Kennedy assassination is that it almost totally obscures - at least in mainstream culture - any discussion of what the man was actually like as a politcian.  It obscures his reckless belligerence that helped bring on the Cuban Missile Crisis about a year before 'An Unearthly Child' aired, a confrontation that nearly destroyed the entire world.  It obscures his vital role in kicking off the Vietnam war, an imperialist attack upon a practically defenceless country that ultimately claimed the lives of something like two million people.  There's a case to be made that Kennedy helped conspire to bring about the assassination of an entire society.  Compared to that, the question of who, if anyone, was on the Grassy Knoll somewhat recedes, at least as far as I'm concerned.)

Relatedly, it doesn't really matter who killed the President of the Time Lords.  What matters is that Holmes puts that kind of paranoid unease - about arcane, decadent, self-involved, self-perpetuating structures that seethe with an undertow of secrecy and violence - into a fictional space synthesised from just about every signifier he could come up with for the established centres of Western power... and which he also signified as being a representation of ruling classes throughout history.

It's a sign of the times (those conspiratorial 70s) that the obsession is with occult government structures rather than with business or capital.

*

NOTE 4/12/13:
Dunno why I said the Cuban Missile Crisis was "a few weeks" prior to 'An Unearthly Child'.  I've amended that above.

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.

8

"Is there anything the servants can get you Doctor?" asks Edward Grove over the deep, low tolling of the clock.  "It is such fun giving them little chores to do!" he chortles, using the voice of the butler, Mr Shaughnessy.

"No thank you," says the Doctor icily.

"Very well," says Edward, vocally turning to the servants, "You may leave, all of you.  Return to your duties.  I shall chime if I need anything."

The clock is central to the organisation of time in capitalist society.  It regulates work.  Since work is life, it regulates life.  The chiming of the clock, like the jangling of the bell, is a summons to the servant, just as the factory worker must clock in and clock out at the right times.  The industrial revolution fundamentally changed how people perceived time, not only by drastically changing how long it took to do certain things, but also by subjecting the workforce to new schedules.  The organisation of labour in capitalist production centres also made time seem repetitious, on a permanent loop.  The same set tasks, over and over again, for hour after hour.  The clock is a heavily freighted symbol in any discussion of class.  The class war will centre upon the organisation and reorganisation of time.  Eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours play - this was a demand of the workers' union struggle... though, of course, this is a gendered issue.  For women, both integrated into the workforce and expected to perform unpaid domestic labour, it was always something of a joke.  In the life of a domestic servant, especially a female domestic servant, the idea of time separated from the demands of 'the household' was almost an oxymoron.

"No doubt I'll need another death at some point," says Edward, "when I'm feeling hungry.  I'll let you know which one of you I'll choose nearer the time."

They thank him.  It is part of the sick joke of it all, this obligatory gratitude.

"You do need death, don't you," observes the Doctor.

Edward is a sentient house.  He is The Household (also the workplace, to servants) come alive.  He's a haunting that has become a mind, inhabiting a building.  He was created by the constant looping and re-looping of a paradox.  The Doctor has realised that the paradox which forms the foundation of his structure was created by a death.  He now needs to feed on the deaths of his servants, the workers trapped inside the paradox.  They each take a turn dying for him every time his two hour span replays itself.  For them, even being murdered has become a chore, a duty, part of their employment.  A task to be performed for the master, upon orders, and upon a fixed schedule.

Edward insists that he is alive, but the Doctor dismisses this.  Edward isn't a person, he is a pile of bricks and mortar, a loop of hours, a schedule.  He's an era.  Well, he's the Edwardian era.  He's a system that has come alive.  He's commodity fetishism, of course.  Just like the stock market is a man-made thing which is treated like a living beast, with belches and farts that 'just happen' like the weather.  He's one of those concentrations of capital that has become so concentrated that he assumes the contours of life.  But, as the Doctor points out, he has no existence except through the people that make him work.

"I can only communicate with you through Shaughnessy," points out the Doctor.  Edward has no voice except for a larynx he utilises.  Even Shaughnessy's throat has become capital to be used.

"I know," says Edward sadly, "I know I can only be a fraction of the simplest of my servants.  They will always be more than me."

This has all happened because Edith Thompson killed herself.  She was the cook in the house of the Doctor's friend Charley, when Charley was a little middle-class Edwardian girl.  Beaten down by a lifetime of class oppression and sexist and/or sexual abuse, Edith formed an attachment to the little girl, imagining her to be her only friend.  Charley was, as it turns out, only vaguely aware of the woman and, when she does finally remember her, thinks of her as someone who provided pudding.  She wasn't Edith's friend; she was a little middle-class Edwardian girl, the child of Edith's employers.  She was, to use Philip Sandifer's phrase "the nicest of her [Edith's] oppressors".  (This entry is heavily indebted to Sandifer's excellent essay about 'Chimes of Midnight'.)

Edith killed herself when Charley died... except that Charley didn't die.  The Doctor saved her.  He didn't save Edith, because the universe is unfair.  And it is predictably unfair upon certain pre-set lines.  Some people can cheat death and fate, and others get crushed by time.  You can usually tell which people will end up where by looking at where they start from.  Charley started upstairs, Edith downstairs.  Like Rafallo, Edith is one of those grease monkeys backstage who gets squashed instead of whisked off to see the universe.  The difference is that, in the case of Edith, there were consequences for the Doctor.  His failure to save one of the grease monkeys came back to bite him in the form of Edward Grove.  It's difficult not to accept Edward's assertion that the Doctor and Charley are his parents... and he takes after them.  He is a time traveller, and he grasps after experience.  He lives because Edith died.  He is fond of his servants.

In the end, the Doctor and Charley escape because they convince Edith to 'choose life' and then give her a little pat on the head as a reward.  But for Edith, choosing life means choosing that lifetime of class oppression and sexist and/or sexual abuse we mentioned earlier.  It still means being locked inside Edward Grove, dominated by the chiming of the clock.  It isn't much of an escape for her.  Charley escapes because of her privilege.  The Doctor likewise (he has spent the story being mistaken for a gentleman, understanndably enough).  The angriest thing about this angry story is that Doctor Who can comment on things like predatory capital and class oppression but can never change them... not just because it's only a TV show (or a series of audio dramas, or comics, or novels) but because it isn't in its interest to do so.  It needs settings and plots and morals and things to be angry about.

Doctor Who is, in the end, rather more like Edward Grove than anyone would like to admit.  A commodity that endlessly loops through time, feeding on the staged death tableux of its trapped playthings... but sometimes, as in this case, capable of self-awareness about it.

27

TW


Adelaide screams at the sight of Palmerdale's dead body.

Leela slaps her across the face, silencing her.

This is horrible.  It's one of the relatively few examples of serious, realistic, non-Fantastic, gendered violence in the show.  Companions are captured by monsters, etc., but this kind of thing happens rarely.  It is better in some places.  Worse in others.  In 'The Time Meddler', Edith's implied-rape is in there simply to tick a box of genre tropes.  Yeurch.  In 'Vengeance on Varos', Maldak slaps Peri across the face to assuage his bruised ego.  It's utterly gratuitous and revolting.

But this is a woman slapping another woman.  (That's not worse... except in the sense that the representation, authored by a man, alibis male involvement in violence against women by ostensibly disappearing its gendered dimension.)

More than that - it's Leela slapping another woman.  Wonderful Leela, who has never done anything like this before.  Okay, she's a ruthless killer in battle... but slapping a 'hysteric' like she's James Bond or something?  Normally, though she dreads weakness in herself because of her self-identification as a warrior, she is gentle and kind to the weak, to the scared.  This is part of her warriors' code.  She will be back to her real self in later stories.  She's even kind to Adelaide later in this story.

What has actually happened here?

Somewhere along the line, Leela - or perhaps I should say, the character of Leela - has internalized the male attitudes of the time in which she is a visitor: the Edwardian era.

None of the male characters from that period physically abuse Adelaide, but Adelaide is secondary to almost all of them.  To Palmerdale, she is a secretary and, probably, a mistress.  Harker has no doubt about that, dismissing her as "the owner's fancy woman".  Skinsale evidently desires her sexually, and also desires her esteem, yet finds her frustrating because she resolutely refuses to like him more than her boss.  His delight whenever she becomes dependant upon him is evident.  Vince Hawkins is the only person to whom she can feel comfortably superior, treating his bashful attentions as the services of a instrumentum vocale.

This story is all about class in many ways... but it is also about gender.  In many ways, it's quite good on the subject.  It depicts male attitudes in a non-exculpatory fashion.  Leela is a forceful presence, crossing gender boundaries by putting on "men's clothes... working clothes", etc.  Leela's actions and personality imply that Adelaide isn't just a dishrag because she's a woman; she's like that because she has been trained in a particular kind of social role owing to her gender and class... a role that involves men looking upon her with varying degrees of objectification and contempt, looks which they train at Leela but which bounce off her.  There are other hints at these themes.  Women as property.  Reuben keeps pornographic pictures under his bed, for example.

But there is still a problem with that slap... which is that it comes from someone outside the Edwardian class system (this is, by the way, a depiction of the dynamics of that system that easily outclasses Downton Abbey or 'Human Nature').  The slap comes from Leela, who transgresses Edwardian sensibilities in so many ways.

Using what is sometimes charmingly called a 'real world point of view', this is probably to do with the fact that some 'Edwardian attitudes' had been internalised by the author of the story.  (That this is going on in 1977 tells us a lot.)  Employing a strategy I'm usually wary of - the redemptive reading - Leela's slap can be seen as evidence that even she starts to absorb psychological/ideological aspects of a heavily gendered oppressive system simply by being surrounded by it, by being locked in with it in a cramped space.

That's hegemony for you: you don't have to agree with the ideology in order for it to work on you.

38

In the War Room of the War Lord's War Base, two of the War Lords are playing Risk... but with real people's lives.

"If my troops make a push here," says Smythe, an alien who has taken on the identity of a General in the British Army in 1917, gesturing across the game board, "what resistance can you put up?"

"Along here we shall have pillboxes, machine gun nests, landmines," replies Von Weich, an alien who has taken on the identity of a General in the German Army in 1917.

(Notice how nobody ever refers to these alien creatures as anything other than 'Smythe' and 'Von Weich'.  It isn't that they have real names beneath these identities; they are these identities.)

"You will have no chance," continues Von Weich from behind his monocle, "but it will be an excellent test of the morale of your humans. Your entire force will be wiped out."  This evidently amuses him.

They are standing over a game board, moving little pieces around.  Just like real Generals did, using real big boards and real little pieces, which really did represent real people, being slaughtered as they were moved across real people's lands and homes.  This little board represents the War Zone that Smythe and Von Weich are playing with, but the whole map of all the War Zones is a game board.  It's a map of the world, and of history.  On it, the War Lords are playing "the great game" of imperialism.

"Ah," replies Smythe, his voice brimming with smug satisfaction at the idea of winning this little bit of the game, "but I will use my reinforcements to turn your flank.  Here!"

He shows Von Weich his move on the board.

"Then it will not be a fair battle!"

"Perhaps not, but it will be an excellent test of your morale!"

Despite their competition, these men are the same kind of creature; a kind of creature utterly alien to the men they move around on their board.  They both keep their alien communications devices behind portraits of their respective monarchs.  They both report to the same superiors, the same callous system of expansion and conquest.  The justification their system uses is that when it has conquered the universe, there will be no more war.  The motives are always humanitarian.  The current war is always "the war to end war".

The Generals and Chiefs and Lords on both sides certainly fight each other, for power and territory and resources... as do Smythe and Von Weich, as do the War Chief and the Security Chief.  But, ultimately, they always have more in common with each other than they do with the little people on their game board.

Ultimately, the war is always waged by the rulers against the people, by the dice-rollers against the pieces.

40

Rose is exploring the space station, waiting for the end of the world.  Suddenly she encounters a young woman with blue skin, wearing overalls and hard at work.

Rose asks if she's allowed to be where she is.  Her automatic response to officialdom of any kind is to question her own status.  For all her confidence, she's a girl who lives on an estate and worked in a shop.

The young woman in overalls looks awkward.

"You have to give us permission to talk," she says, nervously aware of the irony.

Rose is dumbfounded.  She realises that this woman looks upon her - Rose - as a high status person, someone before whom she must be humble.

"Er..." she says, embarassed, "you... have... permission?"  She inflects it as a question.  'Is that the right form of words that I'm using?'  There is embarassment in her voice, and a faint look of nausea on her face.  It makes me love her.

"Thank you," says the woman, who's name turns out to be Raffalo, "And, no, you're not in the way. Guests are allowed anywhere."

Rafallo turns out to be a plumber.  She addresses Rose respectfully as "Miss".  Rose probably feels like a teacher.

"They still have plumbers?" says Rose, stating it to herself as much as asking a question.  Five billion years in the future and there are still grease monkeys in boiler suits, running around backstage, making sure the swells have plenty of hot water.

"I hope so," says Rafallo, "else I'm out of a job."

Just like Rose is out of a job now that, between the Autons and the Doctor, the shop where she worked got blown up.  Rose knows what unemployment means.

Rose says goodbye and, as she leaves, Rafallo thanks her "for the permission".  

Rose has met one of the people in the background.  The people who make everything work.  One of the people the Doctor has never had much to do with until now.  But Rose would, because she was one of those people herself, until recently.  Now she's travelling.  Rafallo will not be as lucky, despite being Rose's mirror image.  Because the universe is shitty and unfair.  Still.  Rafallo is about to die because of the profiteering scheme of a rich, sociopathic bit of skin who also happens to be the last human being alive... if we allow that she's still human at all (and that Rafallo somehow isn't).

It's a shame that Cassandra is the show's first explicitly transgender character.  And it's also a shame that we, the people of the universe, are depicted as still ridden by class in the year 5 Billion.  As Slavoj Žižek said:

Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

He said that in 2005.

43

In an opulent throne room, the Doctor and Romana are being entertained by Zargo and Camilla, two of the Three Who Rule.  Plates are loaded with meat.  Glasses are filled with dark red wine.  The Lords are draped in fine fabrics and smeared in make-up to mask their strangely pallid faces.

"Well, you certainly do very well for yourselves here," observes the Doctor.

"We struggle to retain some remnants of civilisation," says Zargo, who evidently considers himself civilised.

"Well, you do better than the peasants," remarks the Doctor.  He and Romana have recently been in a peasant hovel, where the half-starved, over-worked, rag-clad people reacted in terror at their aristocratic confidence.

"The peasants are simple folk," observes Camilla drily, "Richer fare would only distress them."

"Quite right," says the Doctor.  (His pronunciation makes it sound more like 'Quite trite.')  "Probably give them indigestion," he continues, "There's nothing worse than a peasant with indigestion. Makes them quite rebellious. I hear you've been having trouble that way."

"There are always a few ungrateful ones who do not appreciate all that we do for them," agrees Camilla, without a trace of irony.

"And what do you do for them, apart from saving them from gluttony?" asks Romana, with more than a trace of irony.

The Lords claim to "protect" their people; they are unspecific about how, or from what.  It turns out that they protect their people from "the Wasting".  But the Lords - a gang of literal vampires - are the Wasting.  They are what sucks all opportunity for progress out of the system, making their world (in Romana's phrase) "a society that evolves backwards".  All wealth, all that is farmed and harvested, is appropriated by them from the people who farm and harvest it.  The lifeblood of society flows upwards to them where they consume it, wear it, sit comfortably upon it.  They store the literal blood of the peasants in their giant fuel tanks, like the stolen surplus that it is. 

There was nothing progressive about Roman aquaducts (the water went to the fountains of the rich) or pyramids (they were the tombs of kings, stuffed with the wealth they wanted to take with them), or any of the other monuments that ruling classes throughout history have built to themselves.  Such rulers have always claimed to be protecting the people they leech off.  But every last ruling class in history has been a great vampire, feeding upon a wasting disease of which they are themselves the primary symptom.

49

"Look, all I do is take a little from people who have too much and then I spread it around a bit.  I help to keep the economy in balance."

"But if that piece of jethryk is so valuable, why don't you just sell it?  Then you'd have plenty to give to those who need it."

"Oh, I don't think its worth that much."

But why doesn't he think it's "worth that much"?  His whole plan is predicated upon the idea that the Graff will want to buy Ribos because it possesses a rich seam of, in the Graff's words, "the rarest and most valuable mineral in the galaxy"!

There's only one explanation.  Differing conceptions of value.

The Graff wants the jethryk because he can sell it and buy ships, soldiers, weapons, etc (ie for its exchange value).  The Doctor and Romana want the jethryk because it's also the first segment of the Key to Time (ie it has an intrinsic use value).  Garron wants it because its a means to an end.  He could sell it and live off the proceeds... but then he'd die of boredom, and someone like the Graff would have the use of it.  And Garron wants to keep using it.  Like the Doctor, he thinks of it as a use value, not a commodity.

It's part of his con game, you see.  It's how he snares men like the Graff.  It's how he runs rings around them, fools them, bilks them, makes them look like the prannies he thinks they are.  This is a poor boy from Hackney Wick.  This is how he gets his revenge on the big shots.  This is how he brings them down to his level.

For all his flaws, he's a leveller.

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.

Beasts of England

In 'The Beast Below', you - as a subject of Liz 10 and a citizen of Starship UK - get to vote.  You get a choice of buttons.  You can 'Protest' or 'Forget'.

This is evidently an attempt to express something about electoral democracy.

Every time we are exposed to some unpleasant and uncomfortable fact about our society or our world, or even to a suspicion of some such thing, we are presented with an implicit option to protest or forget. Beyond voting booths, we have a set of these buttons inside our heads. When you hear, for instance, that thousands of dirt poor South Africans were forcibly evicted from their shanty towns and moved to settlements of corrugated iron shacks to get them away from the new $450 million World Cup football stadium, you have the option to kick up a stink or to sigh, mumble some platitude like "tsch, how awful" and then put it out of your head so you can comfortably sit back and enjoy watching teams of overpaid jocks play amidst the McDonalds adverts.

By the way, don't think I'm being holier-than-thou. I'm just as guilty of this kind of thing as anybody. God knows how many times I've found myself scrunching up a Kit-Kat wrapper and only at that point remembering that Nestlé are evil. This is normal human frailty at work, the understandable instinct to flee from guilt, as 'The Beast Below' indicates by showing Amy's reflexive, horrified pressing of the 'Forget' button and her subsequent remorse.

So, we are clearly banked upon the sharp and shaley shores of satire.

'The Beast Below' presents a picture of Britain as an island in space, a star-traversing city (after James Blish's fascinating 'Okie' novels, collected as Cities in Flight), with tower blocks representing counties... ah, we're already in trouble. So, everyone from Essex lives in the same tower block? Rich and poor side by side? Maybe there are luxury apartments up at the top, opulent penthouses above floor after floor of pokey little prole cupboards... but we don't see anything like that, unless we count the private apartments of Liz 10, but she's a problematic figure anyway (which I'll get to). You might argue that, in a lifeboat, rich and poor would have to budge in together... but a look at the stats for Titanic survivors might be salutary at this point:

Number of 1st class passengers: 325. Of whom survived: 202.
Number of 2nd class passengers: 285. Of whom survived: 118.
Number of 3rd class (steerage) passengers: 706. Of whom survived: 178.

Much as I hate to give Ben Elton any credit, I tend to suspect that, if the world were threatened with imminent destruction, something along the lines of the scenario described in his novel Stark would be nearer to what happened than what we see in 'The Beast Below', i.e. the rich would set up their own escape into space and fuck the rest of us nobodies. Mind you, that would be very shortsighted of them, not simply as they'd be left with only each other to talk to (a grim fate, as Elton's novel implies) but also because they need us: they live off our labour. Their new world would be a world without a viable economy, incapable of progressing and supporting future generations. They would just have to live on the support systems and luxuries they'd provided for themselves, until those support systems ran down and the luxuries ran out. As soon as they needed anything fixed or produced, they'd need grease monkeys, all of whom they'd have left to die.

This is not the version of things that we see in 'The Beast Below'. Indeed, it seems essential (if Moffat is going to achieve what appears to be his goal, i.e. a political satire of Britain as a notional totality) that Starship UK should have taken everyone along.  The enclosed social spaces that we see appear very communal, a bit like the deck of a cruise liner.  Social normality seems exemplified by shopping and cafe society.  We don't see any homeless people slumped in corners.  Nobody is poor.  Nobody appears to be producing anything.  This is Britain as a matrix of complacent consumers.  This is the social optimum that the space whale is tortured to preserve.

Now.  In order for this to be a satire or a polemic or anything like that, the episode needs to be (so to speak) conscious of the fact that it has depicted Britain as a nostalgiac, consumerist blandnessdrome that only limps along because it is parasitic upon suffering.

Does it notice this?  Really, does it?

Does it bollocks.

The retro production design amounts to nothing more than decoration; it connects to nothing in the story that might suggest an indictment of the reality of Britain's 'good old days'.  The shopping is explicitly celebrated by the Doctor and, beyond suggesting that the pleasures of the mall might be an escape for us from our collective guilt, there is no critique of economic relationships.  The visual quotes from the past suggest only a strained attempt to hammer home a kind of quintessential Britishness.  The indoor high street is just there to represent the 'normality' beneath which there lurk dark secrets... when, in fact, the modern high street is a physical compendium of dark but open secrets about capitalism.

The episode fails to sort out exactly what kind of society Starship UK really is.  There's a great ballyhoo made of the fact that it's a "police state"... and yet, it seems to be one on the basis of the consent of the voters (but we'll get back to that).  Also, it isn't really clear why it needs to be a police state at all.  Why do the Smilers and half-human-half-Smilers bother to send children to be slowly digested for minor offences?  Particularly when they know full well that such naughty children will be rejected by the whale anyway.  Why would it be necessary for the police to terrify the population into fearing to display curiosity about sobbing children?  Why do the supposedly quelled and repressed populace look so entirely sanguine as they hang around in cafes?

The business with the buttons could have been used to express the way that electoral democracy limits our influence over the Powers That Be to a regular opportunity to push one of a few pre-set levers. Our choices are decided upon, circumscribed and laid out for us by others, by a state that - in practice - is largely impermeable to change stemming from ballot boxes.  You may be able to change the governmental management team so that it passes back and forth between the wings of a political class, all of whom are more-or-less open about the fact that they represent Property. Meanwhile, you don't get to elect the police, the army, the diplomats, the civil service, the intelligence officers, the judges, the royalty, the lords...  You get a say in one sphere, once every few years; the rest of the time, butt out. We all know the kind of contempt that the media reserve for ordinary people who try to influence their society outside the approved avenues of an occasional vote, support for a mainstream political party or charity. They get called pressure groups (as opposed to the more neutral term 'lobbyists', reserved for rich and powerful people when they try to influence politicians), eccentrics, extremists, zealots, conspiracy theorists, politically correct wackos, bleeding hearts, rent-a-mobs, tree huggers, feminazis, etc.

The nearest 'The Beast Below' comes to noticing the existence and efforts of dissidents and activists is in the person of Liz 10... and she's the fucking Queen.  So, royalty has usurped the role of the dissident and the activist.  Dissidence and activism has become the lone purview of courageous individuals.  And Liz 10 is eventually shown to be implicated in the abuse of the space whale, further emphasizing the liberal "we're all to blame" bleat at the heart of the story's half-hearted anger.

The story takes for granted such ideological chimeras as the national community, with communal interests, communal guilts and a state that exists to protect these communalities. Everyone budges in together.  The population is subdivided by county not class.  Beyond the existence of a mockney Queen and a caste of monk/dummy guards, there is no class in evidence at all.  Power seems to exist everywhere and nowhere.  It is at once localised in the form of the Smilers and diffused throughout the entire population of voters.  Even the Queen gets to forget and become a powerless citizen.  In the end, the regrettable excesses of this willow-the-wisp power structure are depicted as misguided attempts to safeguard the common good, with all the people (via their contemptible moral cowardice) equally implicated.  The police caste must shoulder the unpleasant but necessary tasks for the plebs so that they may go about their little lives untroubled by the dirty work that makes those lives possible.  The most conscious, snide and cynical ruling class mouthpiece could hardly have expressed this bourgeois ideology better than Moffat, who appears to have done so entirely unconsciously.

The crux of the problem is back in the voting booths.  The voter gets full disclosure.  The state explains its crime to the voter.

Yeah.  Right.  Because the state is constantly confessing to us that we live in a society that is based on ruthless and cruel exploitation, asking us whether we consent and then abiding by our decision.

The way the episode presents the issue of the relationship of the citizenry to the crimes of the state (and/or the exploitative base of society, depending on how you read the metaphor) distorts the way it really works, in my opinion, to the point of blaming the populace and excusing the state.

I've made this criticism before and been upbraided for taking the episode too literally.  Trouble is, it's the episode itself which is too literal.

The issue at stake is a contingent, complex one: i.e. how structures of power are able to secure widespread public consent - tacit or explicit - for brutal and/or undemocratic policies and actions, while also presenting themselves to that public as democratic, peaceful, diplomatic, communitarian, an 'honest broker', etc.

By representing what goes on as a literal choice made by a fully informed electorate, the story actively distorts the truth of society, which is subject to massive systems of state secrecy, ideological conditioning, doctrinal systems in the media, reproduction of ideology in schools, systemic buffers in the structure of 'democracy' to keep the electorate out of most zones of policy decision-making.

Representing the state in the story as labouring for the common good, and as abiding by the morally culpable decisions of the majority who make their decisions in full awareness of all the facts and ramifications, only adds huge insult to grievous injury.

The episode confusedly shows the state as tyrannical but also seeks to spuriously dissolve the divide between state and populace by showing the state as honestly seeking the best ends for the population, offering voters access to the darkest secrets, etc.

To put it in inflammatory language, the episode tries to implicate the ruled in the crimes of the rulers... which, in some ways, is valid... but not without enormous qualification and contextualisation, if any form of honesty is to be preserved.  Yes, 'we' need to take responsibility for what 'our' state does... but the state as it exists (and as it is poorly reflected in 'Beast') is not, in my view, 'ours' in any meaningful sense. Moreover, it exists precisely to protect those it really does represent (the miniscule minority of those who own the vast majority of the wealth and property) from 'us'.  It is this very elision of a whole range of antagonistic relationships within the spuriously inclusive 'us', 'we' and 'our' of 'Britain' that makes it impossible to take 'Beast' seriously as offering anything like an accurate appraisal of what's wrong with our society.

For all that, the story does place Britain as a parasitic growth upon pain and suffering.  But in order for this to mean anything, we need to have some idea whose suffering is being lamented.  For that, we need to know what the 'beast' of the title represents (remember that I'm not just imposing this necessity; the episode touts itself as a satire).

Alexander Hamilton (whose vision of America as a militarily-strong quasi-aristocracy run for the benefit of the propertied classes has turned out to be the operative one) once told Jefferson that 'the people' was "a great beast".  Burke called them "the swinish multitude".  Shakespeare's Coriolanus uses lots of animal epithets for the Roman plebs he holds in such contempt.  Walter Lippman called the public "the bewildered herd".  Animal metaphors for the common people have been very prevalent from reactionary and even liberal thinkers down the centuries.  It's tempting to read the whale as representing 'the people'.  But, in 'The Beast Below', the people (assuming we accept that classless category in the first place) are sitting at outdoor cafes and shopping happily, forgetting the tough choices they've had to make to preserve their way of life because they have a functionalist state that bravely shoulders the blame for them.

Could the whale be the conquered and colonised peoples whose suffering underwrites the profits of imperialism?  If so, the text of the episode is being very coy about it.

I'm not sure that the whale represents anything.  I think it just sits there, looking a lot like a symbol or a metaphor without actually managing to be one.

Moreover, if it does represent any particular set of victimised and oppressed people then it hardly does them any favours.  The putative referents to which the whale refers would thus be represented as noble victims, upon whom rests the duty to save their oppressor via a superhuman excess of generosity towards them.  And, when it comes down to it, there is no doubt, even in the mind of the Doctor, that the lives of the parasitic shoppers trump those of the tortured oppressed.

Mind you, I'd hate anybody to think I'm singling out this story as something unusual. Doctor Who, like most media culture in hierarchical societies, is inherently prone to reproducing the... well, what would be a good phrase... how about "the manufacture of consent"?

Who just has a better rep than most shows when it comes to bucking such tendencies.

At least, it used to.

Gonzo Marx

Ruminations on alienation, commodity fetishism, myth, etc.  Don't mind me.


Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Human beings have always made stuff.  Broadly, that's what humans are: the apes that make stuff.  Even before Darwin, Benjamin Franklin called man "the tool-making animal", a description apparently vindicated by our discoveries about early humanity, which seem to show the rise of the 'big brain' driven by the needs of the hand.

The flint tools and decorative beads of the hunter-gatherers.  The pyramids and ziggurats of the great slave empires.  The water wheels and ploughs of medieval Europe.

But the rise of capitalism brought the factory system.  The division of labour.  Specialisation without expertise.  Organisation of time.  The creation of new kinds of cities that worked as battery farms for thousands of corralled workers.  Mass production.  Heavy industry.  Conveyor belts.  Fordism.  Mechanisation.  Computer-run facilities. 

The ape that makes things started to make things faster than ever before, in greater numbers than ever before. And the things started to confront the thingmaker as alien, autonomous, controlling, dominating.  When you have to watch a clock to make sure you clock in and clock out at the right time, it's hard not to feel like you are answerable to the clocks, even if you work in a clock factory making clocks.

The rise of science and technology.  This was also part of the rise of capitalism.  Galileo, who pretty much invented what we would call modern science during the Renaissance (or the 'Early Modern Period', the period during which feudalism began to give way to the rise of mercantile trade, finance, private industry, markets, etc.), sold his inventions, made in his own workshop, to the Venetians who protected him.  His first telescope, based on Flemish spyglasses, were made to be sold to the traders on the Rialto (the Venetian stock market: centre and powerhouse of the thrusting, ultra-modern city republic), so that they could identify at long range which merchant's ships were returning safely, laden with goods.  Only later did it occur to Galileo that he could train his telescopes upon the moon and the stars and the planets.  When he did so, he published his explosive findings on the market and had a bestseller on his hands.

Later, but still as part of the same process of the rise of the new system, the concept of entropy, and with it pretty much the whole of modern applied physics, came from the need to better understand (and thus improve) how engines work, engines that powered the industrial revolution.

The things that the thing-making-ape made became increasingly wondrous.  The engines became bigger, faster, more powerful.  They took us all across the world (usually to pillage and enslave).  They created wars that devastated vast swathes of the globe.  They ferried people to industrial murder factories.  They allowed man to fly.  To drop bombs that killed hundreds of thousands in seconds.  They put apes on the moon. 

And they transformed inner space too.  "You've discovered television, haven't you?"  And here we are, on the glorious interweb.

Things change faster than ever before in human history.  The technology of the world in which Plato died was essentially the same as the technology of the world into which he was born.  The waterwheel and the hand axe lasted for millenia.  Capitalism brought tools and toys that become obsolete in weeks.

When I was born, analogue cassette tapes still seemed pretty cool to people.  I'm only 35 (nearly) and I'm currently listening to one of the thousands of digitalised songs on my mp3 player, a machine that fits into my pocket and has thousands of times the processing power and memory capacity of the state of the art of the mid 70s.

The things we make... the engines... the artefacts... they behave like this because they are the products of capitalism.  They are commodities.  Made to be sold as much as to be used.

Products breed and teem and change and mutate and multiply like bacteria.  They seem to have minds of their own.  They move without us, they talk without us, they do things and say things we don't understand, they assail us with cryptic error messages, they catch viruses.  They fly without pilots and destroy villages in Pakistan. 

Those last ones we call "drones", naming them after living things (with irony as mordant as it is unconscious, we call them after the mindless worker bees in the rigid insectile hierarchy).  This is commodity fetishism.

It's amazing, when you stop to think about it, just how CONSTANTLY we think and talk about inanimate stuff, about products, about commodities, as though they are alive... and powerful.

The stock market is a product.  It is something made by the apes.  Yet we report upon its twitches and tremours and undulations and ululations and sneezes and farts as though we are reporting the natural bodly processes and moods of some great beast, some kraken, some leviathan to which we owe homage, to who's whims we are subject. 

Meanwhile, apes make other apes into commodities.  Chattel slavery may be rarer than it once was, but wage slavery has never been more common.  Our labour - that is, ourselves... we are the ape that makes stuff, remember... our productive capabilities and inclinations are fundamental to our nature - are bought and sold on a job market.  We are speculated upon and traded in like junk bonds or pork futures.  Longpigs, simmering in the cannibal cauldron of employment.

The stuff breeds and teems as people die in swathes.  From hunger, from AIDS, from despair, from by-products, from environmental backlash, from sheer grinding poverty.  Much of this death is man-made, directly or indirectly.  Even the entirely natural disasters and natural plagues (if there are such things) find an accomplice in the man-made system that creates impoverished hemispheres of the planet, that results in coastal shanty towns, that corrals people into filthy prisons, that encourages mass prostitution, that loots and subjugates Africa to the West.

We in the rich world splurge at the shops, investing in things as though they are charms and icons and totems... sometimes literally.  Religion is bought and sold.  Give till it hurts.  The Lord wants your credit card number.

More broadly, the elision continues beyond the profaned and commodified sacred, which is only the most brazen manifestation of this syndrome.

We both lust over and worship the sleek, mass-produced things... like the audiences to those reverent but furtively sexualised icons of Jesus or the Madonna.  We expect these sexy things to change how we look, how we are percieved, how we feel, how we think, how we eat, how and who and when we fuck.  We expect deliverance and transfiguration in return for our money.  We've transferred our lust and hope from the foot to the shoe, like some poor pervert who forgets the beauty of the toes and can only get hard over PVC fetish boots.

As with religion, the ape bows down before the totem pole that she/he made and worships it as though it is a power outside her/himself... forgetting that she/he made it and that it represents her/his own powers.

In the capitalist world, this is exacerbated a thousand fold.


I, Product

The people who make everything do not do so under conditions of their own choosing.  They are on the job market, so they end up making stuff for the stuff market.  We make what we're told, as many as we're told, for purposes we don't choose.  Indeed, there is no purpose beyond the creation of commodities.  Things are made to be sold.  The iPad is not made in order to express human creativity.  The iPad is made by people whose creative lives have been yoked to the creation of iPads by people who think they can sell iPads in order to make profit that will keep their iPad-making racket going.

We end up buried. 

Stuff is made in order to be saleable in order to fund the making of saleable stuff.

That is human creativity slaved to a system of general commodity production.  That is not human self-expression.  This is alienation.

And the factories and shops and conveyor belts and automated production lines that make the system work are also made things, products of the same system.

The truncheons that thump us when we riot against the system, or even just some aspect of it, are made and sold things.

The newspapers that constantly tell us that THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE are made and sold things.

Not only is human creativity subverted into the production of commodities, human creativity is also subverted into the production of the materiel of the system of commodity production.  And this is a war too.  Because the people that own the factories and shops and conveyor belts and truncheons and newspapers are NOT the same people who actually make them, or the things that such things help to make.  The profits go to the owners, not the makers.  So the makers find themselves making the weapons of their enemies.

Indeed, we are all glowered-over and dominated by the stuff we and previous generations have made. This is old labour, petrified into threatening and ruling facts.  This dead labour, lording it over the living.

In some ways, it's always been so, and always had to be.


Genesis of the Dialects

Genesis (the book) is such a powerful and resonant text because it describes the moment when the ape became aware of... or perhaps invented... good and evil, guilt and shame.  Which is to say, empathy... which is to say, reflection.

The beasts of the field do not know they are naked.  It is the knowledge of nakedness that brings the abashedness of mutual desire (or the lack of desire), of mutual judgement.

The knowledge comes from reflection.  He looks at her; she looks at him; they become aware of each other's gazes; they see their own reflections in each other's eyes; they imagine their own desire mirrored in the mind of the other; they see themselves from the outside.

Let's shift the sense of the word 'reflection' in a way that is surely the result of a connection deep within the word itself.  Reflection is also cogitation.  It is also the turning of a gaze inwards.  This is possible because of language.

Language is an inner narration that externalises and an external communication that internalises.  To hear the external communication of another is to evesdrop upon their internal narrative.  It is to compare it to one's own inner narrative.  Again, words become another mirror in which we see ourselves reflected.

Adam and Eve begin with a language that is non-figurative.  Adam names the animals and the names he gives them are them.  The fall severs the sign from the signified, the referent from the referred-to.  That is the curse but also the release.  The transformation of words into metaphors is what makes figuration possible.  It brings the possibility of knowledge, because all knowledge is metaphor and analogy.

The most human analogy is the analogy we draw between ourselves and others.  Empathy.  Empathy is the parent of guilt.  Empathy is the parent of love.  Empathy is the mirror in which we regard ourselves.  All moral considerations are considerations of ourselves reflected in the eyes of another.

This nest of complementary meanings resolve themselves into the bittersweet but progressive tragedy whereby the apes achieve conception of their own reflections.

All of this is simply to pay the powerful myth the compliment of refusing to take it literally... which is to say, obey it.  The text itself instructs us not to take it literally.  To do so is not only the height of idiocy but is also to insult and abuse the text itself, more so than to dismiss it entirely (which is also very stupid).

The same moment - the moment of the fall, the apple moment - is also the moment when the people in the garden scoop up leaves to make their first clothes, to hide their erotic parts from each other.  This is an attempt to deintensify the sensations of desire, empathy, guilt.

It is also the fashioning of a tool, the cooptation of something in the natural environment to play an artificial purpose (literally, the role of an artifact) in the life of man and woman.

It is, in embryo, the birth of the product, even the commodity.  The apple moment.  The iFall, one might say.

But the moment when knowledge of nakedness brings knowledge of empathy, and thus desire and guilt and shame (it is pointless to deny that these are inherent parts of sexuality... because sexuality is inherently bound of up mutual revelation and subjection to each others' appetites... hence mutual judgement), is also the moment of defiance of God.  It is the moment when the smothering, protective blanket of the dictats of the undefiable FatherRulerKingComputerSky (nature, circumstance, Things As They Are, however you want to interpret Him) is torn apart by man and woman, by their new-found (as they percieve it) awareness.  If they know, they can choose.

But their choice is inextricably bound up with the tool, with the manual use of nature, with the fashioning of clothes, with the construction of the artifact, with the transformation of the word into a machine for analogy.

This is why the myth has Adam and Eve chased from the garden into a world of work and pain.  For too long, interpreters have concentrated on the appearance of Death on the scene.  But Death is the least of it.  It is the toil and grief of life which constitutes the really pertinent feature of the ex-Garden landscape.  Cain and Abel have to tend the land, which is what leads to the murder.

The myth merges the emergence of conscious, self-aware, empathic humanity from animal kind with the emergence of civillised (attaching no moral connotations to that word) humans from the gatherers and hunters of prehistory.

The elision is a powerful one, perhaps even an unavoidable one in a myth which arose before knowledge of our animal ancestry.

The tool brings settlement, agriculture, surplus and hence class.  Hierarchy arises to confiscate the surplus created by humanity in possession of powerful tools such as hoes and scythes and farming and settled villages.  Hierarchy manages, centralises, organises and hoardes.  Hierarchy alienates the mass of humanity from the fruits of their labour via confiscation.  Humans begin to channel their labour into social ends, which under hierarchy means into great, locked granaries controlled and administered by layers of priests and administrators and bureaucrats.  The farmer's labour feeds not him and his family and extended tribe, with the labour and the results in common.  The farmer's labour feeds the gaping maw of the settlement, the village, the city, the nation, etc.

This is the world of grinding toil and alienated products that humanity finds itself in after the expulsion from the rugged and dirty Eden of pre-class society, of hunting, of scavenging, of following herds of dairy animals, of nomadism.  This is why representations like this...

By Masaccio.  The most moving depiction of the expulsion in all art, in my opinion.

...show Adam and Eve chased out of the garden by an angel wielding a sword.  Swords are tools.  Weapons may be said to be the ur-tools.  The weapon to cleave the ground, or to cleave the skull of the food animal.  Cain and Abel work the land; Cain kills Abel as he might slaughter a sheep.  The tool is the sharp edge that pokes the humans out of their prelapsarian, pre-alienation world.

It is, literally, the alienation machine.

This is one reason why humans have always told stories about their tools, about how their tools seem to turn upon them, dominate them, attack them.


The War Machines

The walls of Jericho fell because they encircled a settlement that was coveted by outsiders.  The products of one side (the walls) are tumbled by the products of the other (in the story, trumpets).  Robbery with violence is the organising principle of imperialism, of all war... and it comes from the tool, from the surplus, from the class system that makes organised armies of expendable grunts.

The whole Old Testament is the story of the gradual, painful, war-torn transition of little nomadic bands of nations and tribes (really just peripatetic extended families) into settled, argicultural, hierarchical, alienated societies.  Or perhaps I should say more alienated... because the moment Adam and Eve really see each other and see the potential to make leaves into clothes and words into metaphors, they also become alienated from the natural world from which they sprung.

The beast's condition is not harmony with nature exactly, but alienation is the nature not of the beast but of the human.  It is what happens when we view everything outside ourselves through the mirror of language, of metaphor, of empathy, of judgement, and of the artifact.

It is possible that the myth of the iFall does not recognise the possibility of achievement, progress, ascent, science (to use the term broadly) - of escape from those cruelties, miseries and banalities before class - without the curses of alienated toil.  This is a limitation of the myth.


Vengeance in Venice

In the myth, work is post-fall man's curse and redemption.

This is the ideology of a settled, agricultural society with hierarchies comprising toiling masses at the base: people are told that toil is their lot in life, their just punishment, but also that it is their chance of redemption, their spiritual duty.  The higher layers, who toiled less if at all, had to be sanctified by other means: by making them warriors or priests.

Interestingly, for centuries, usurers were reviled for accumulating without labour.  But the rise of capital was also the rise of finance, so the taboo on usury had to change.  Usury was a necessary evil for trading societies, often displaced onto the Jews for that reason.  The Venetian merchant (who might have spied his goods-laden ships returning through a telescope manufactured and sold by Galileo... who was born in the same year as the merchant's creating author) hates Shylock because he needs him.

On the grander scale, usury was recast as banking.

Dante has usurers in the Seventh Circle of his Inferno, condemned to an eternity of never being able to still their fidgeting fingers as punishment for not turning those fingers to productive use during their lives.  The Devil finds work for idle hands, as they say.  But Dante, like many great and crucial figures in literature, was dramatising the contradictions of a time of deep social transition.  His Florence was that of the early-Renaissance, of the rise of bankers and moneylenders.  These people were aware of their taint.  But in a world where everything was becoming a commodity, even usurers, bankers and moneylenders could buy salvation, theological and social (if, indeed, there was a distinction).  If they were good enough at their sinful work to become rich, they could pay for expensive endowments to churches and chapels and monasteries.

One pre-Medici moneylender was able to pay for a huge fresco depicting Dante's Hell, complete with suffering moneylenders (his less successful competitors, presumably).

The Medicis themselves adopted the Magi as their mascots; the three wise men who had paid tribute to the infant Christ with gold and luxurious spices.

Cosima Medici built an entire monastery with his dirty money, in which he came to play at being a penitent.  His monastic cell was more opulent than the others, naturally.  He faced the same dilemma as Claudius in Hamlet: how does one meaningfully repent without sacrificing the gains for which one sinned?  Claudius, unlike Cosima, recognised the impossibility of squaring that particular vicious circle.


The End of Time

This is not to say that we are perpetually and inevitably doomed to the kind of escalating alienation that has been a feature of all civilisation up to now... (that's a different story).  Alienation is, I think, an inherent part of being human... of being sentient, with sentience bound up with the use of language.  How much alienation we suffer, how severe it is, and what form it takes... this is all up to us.  We don't need to live in societies which force us to confront the products of our labour as hostile, alien, outer Others.  We don't need to live in societies where the State confronts us as an enemy, where industry confronts us as exploitation, where production and consumption are so far outside our control that they seem to be the unpredictable boons of a mystical realm of markets.  We don't need to live in a word of private property and wages.  We don't essentially need, as humans, to live within stratifications of class and hierarchy.

For most of human history, before the rise of surplus and class, we lived as hunters and gatherers.  Whatever the considerable cruelties, miseries and banalities of such a life, there was no class as we would recognise it, no war as we would recognise it, no tyranny except the tyranny of predator and dearth.

In principle, at least, we can do better.  The history before the iFall proves that.