Turning the Tables

“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”

- Karl Marx, Capital vol.1


Consciously or not, a lion’s share of SF/Fantasy is concerned with just this.  Almost to the point of running with Marx’s ‘great idea for a story!’.

It’s also a great illustration that the best Marxism is Gothic Marxism.  A Marxism which recognises the uncanny, the weird, the surreal, the fantastic, as both truthful expression and invaluable heuristic.  The real world is made so strange, so bass-ackwards, so haunted and haunting, so alien by capitalism, that only historical materialism informed by the uncanny and the dreamlike can truly capture it.

Powerlessness Corrupts

More curated tumblr jottings, which some people seemed to like.  Rewritten and expanded.


There is, in fandom, an impulse to denounce which is very congruent with a similar impulse that exists in some iterations of right-on politics.  It comes from a similar place: helplessness.  We’re always told that power corrupts, and it certainly does.  But powerlessness corrupts too.  People in fandom get accustomed to worshipping that which is handed down to them.  They can then discover the opposite but equal pleasure of execrating that which is handed down to them.  What both have in common is the idea of passively accepting what you’re given.  And yes, hating on something is a form of passivity quite distinct from the activity of criticism.  Passive acceptance of texts is, contrary to myth (a myth largely put around by fans, amazingly enough) far more common within fandom/s than in the general television viewing public. 

Jane Q Citizen puts Doctor Who (or whatever) on her telly, doesn’t like it, and so switches over to hunt for something she does like… or she likes it (having no long-cherished internal needs that she has trained herself to expect to be met by it), so she watches it, and then she forgets about it.  John Z. Fan puts Doctor Who on his telly, doesn’t like it, but cannot switch it off because he is a fan (and yes, this can apply to me too in some ways).  So, passive and powerless to influence the show that he loves but finds disappointing, he rages.  He isn’t writing it or producing it himself, and he doesn’t even have (because he’s chosen to abnegate it) the basic and paltry consumer freedom that capitalism grants us and lauds so much: the freedom to hunt for another product that will satisfy us where one product has failed.

Meanwhile, in many sections of right-on politics, splittery and sectarianism and denunciation rule the day because the right-on either have no real mechanism by which they can actually change any of the stuff they don’t like (clicktivism being such a dead end, and most branches of direct action and protest being dead ends too when taken by themselves) or they despair of the one thing that really can change things - mass, working class action - because we’re in a long-term trench of neoliberal downturn.

The powerlessness corrupts.

Meanwhile (again), there is another strange tessellation.  The gap between fandom and actual critical savvy is uncannily similar to the gap between right-onitude per se and actual critical political education.  The fan mindset can (notice I say can) leave one hungry for the tools of proper critical analysis but does not itself supply them.  Similarly, right-onitude (however well intentioned and sincere) can leave one hungry for the desire to think politically but does not itself supply the actual critical understanding one needs in order to do so sensibly or usefully.

Between the desire and the reality falls the shadow.

(And I’m not being patronising because I have in the past fallen into most of these traps myself, and still occasionally do today.)

Meanwhile (yet again), the fan's attitude to a commodity they don't like, but to which they are attached by fan loyalty (those long-cherished internal needs we were talking about earlier), is eerily like the attitude of passive reformism to politics itself.  'The political' is that which exists within a band as narrow as the identity of a show.  You could even look at 'the News' as the show that is being followed.  As the fan saying goes "if you don't like the show at the moment, wait a bit and it'll change".  At most, the angry fan might engage in 'activism' like starting tumblrs with names like 'pleasefiremoffat' etc.  Because firing the current guy and getting a new guy instead will solve all the problems.  But when it comes to the right-on critique of Moffat (which has some points to make, don't get me wrong) too often what is missed is that Moffat is just a new development in a long-standing systemic issue. 

The fan loyalty, even when it is a twisted and angry loyalty to iterations of a franchise that you don't like, is itself probably a sign of commodity fetishism triumphing over actual critical engagement.  You are religiously following the logo (to paraphrase my friend Josh Marsfelder) because you are treating the commodity like an entity to which you owe allegiance, rather then critically following texts because - for whatever reason - you want to. 

(I like to think that I do it differently, but then I like to think lots of things.) 

Ultimately, of course, discontent with the narrative commodity you enjoy (or to which you have ingrained loyalty, or which you have fetishized) is far less an issue than discontent with society.  You can put up with a show being rubbish or reactionary (as long as you don't fail to speak up when it publically makes a political misstep, with that judgement being based on good faith critical engagement and some knowledge of how texts work).  But we're severely mistaken if we think we can put up with society being so royally fucked up for much longer.  The danger is that otherwise potentially useful right-on people might think that the critique of a particular set of texts (often based on a shoddy and crusading form of particularist politics) is a substitute for the critique of capitalist society as a unified juggernaut of exploitation and oppression - just as some people think that if Moffat would only STFU then modern TV would be pretty much peaches.

The mistake is waiting to be made in the powerless mire that so many people feel - not without some justification - that they are stuck in.

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.

17

Ms. Kizlet is using the wi-fi signal to control people in the coffee shop.

 “I do love showing off,” she says through a waitress she has made her puppet. “Just let me show you what control of the wi-fi can do for you,” she adds through the mouth of a young girl.

It’s a tech demo. Here’s what this latest version of the operating system can do. Upgrade now. The iconography is all ruthlessly current. Particularly fitting: Kizlet and her crew are playing around on iPads as they do their little Steve Jobs routine. You almost expect her to reveal that they’ve captured Clara with an “oh, and one more thing.”

Kizlet explains that they’ve “released thousands” of base stations into the world, blanketing the whole of humanity in their Worldwide Web of Fear.

Meanwhile, Clara’s on her laptop. She recognizes the vulnerability in every grand system: people. With just a bit of clicking around she’s figured out where Kizlet is transmitting from. The most obvious spot in London, really. Kizlet's client loves using grand projects for his own purposes. It’s what he did in the Underground, and it’s what he’s doing now. But it’s 2013 now, and London’s grand projects aren’t for the little people anymore. Now they’re for the elite.

So it's the perfect place for Kizlet’s operation. The prestigious tallest building in London, to be filled with high-paying businesses. The metaphor is straightforward: the grand prestige project, like the Olympics and the Jubilee from the same year, is literally eating people alive. Construction is consumption. It even consumes and annexes the protests against it. Its name comes from the complaints about its design - the fear that it would be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London.” Of course, the objection, like the vision itself, is concerned with the abstract form of London, as opposed to with the lives of those within it. Heritage London or the modern corporate state. It’s all the same: an aesthetic to show off. A system for control.

And yet, architecturally, the building is designed to be invisible - to blend into the clouds around it. Control is always supposed to be invisible, after all. Just something in the air, like the wi-fi signal itself. The spectacle is always showing off and remaining invisible at the same time. As with any demo, it’s not just technology being shown off. It’s ideology. Dressed up, inevitably, in the rhetoric of upper middle class consumption. The Great Intelligence wants “healthy, free-range, human minds.”

 “The farmer tends his flock like a loving parent,” Kizlet says.

“The abbatoir is not a contradiction,” she insists.

“No one loves cattle more than Burger King.”

So the Doctor smashes into the side of the building and tears it all down.

19

LIN'n'DA has allowed 'Mr Kennedy' into their little circle of friends.  His determination to find the Doctor is the opposite of their desire to socialise & laugh while sharing their ideas & obsessions & histories.  Even if much of what we know about LIN'n'DA is just Elton's garbled wish-fulfillment, it's still a nice story.  Until Kennedy arrives.  It's never the same again.  Hierarchy is introduced, along with work schedules & targets & orders & timetables & a drive for objective 'results'.

"Though we had to admit," recalls Elton, "he was right. His methods were much more rigorous. It felt like we were getting closer & closer to the Doctor."

As if that had ever been the point.

"Umm, Mr Kennedy?" says Elton cautiously, raising his hand as though he's a kid at school trying to attract the attention of his teacher... & actually, LI'n'DA's headquarters now looks like a school room.  The friends are sat at desks, toilng away individually & silently at private work.  Mr Kennedy is every inch the teacher.  He sits at the head of the room, behind a desk, surrounded by the paraphernalia of pedagogy.

"We were wondering..." Elton continues, "...no sign of Bliss. Do you know where she is?"

Bless Bliss.

"Yes," replies Kennedy irritibly, "didn't she tell you? She's getting married. She left a message. It'll never last, stupid girl. Come on, back to work."

Yes, back to work kids...

Thing is though, LI'n'DA doesn't just look like a school room now.  It also looks like an open plan office, or a call centre.  The friends are now workers, arriving on time & working on projects according to the dictats of their new boss.  He watches to make sure they don't slack.  He assesses their results.  He expects to profit from their work.  That's what he's in this for.  LI'n'DA has become a Doctor-finding factory.  LI'n'DA has been enclosed.  Accumulation by dispossession.  The relentless absorbtion of everything into itself: the essence of neoliberalism.

It's no coincidence that the school room also looks like the workplace.  The school system in capitalism is a way of training the future workforce to arrive on time five days a week, to savour the weekend, to obey orders, to work towards output targets, to have your work judged & tracked, & discipline oneself for a lifetime of showing up.

Kennedy is many things (teacher, boss, repressed misanthrope, caricature of the uber-fan...), but among them he is a summation of something the Doctor has found himself facing many times before: he's capital as a monster.

He's a ruthless, pin-striped posho... but it goes deeper than that.  Like the Cybermen, he's a user & utiliser, an employer, an encloser of hopes & dreams & friendship... & even flesh.  Like so many monsters from the Wirrn to the Krynoids, he absorbs people into himself, first figuratively then literally.  He encloses even the bodies of the workers in his factory, adapting them to his purposes, feeding off them & monopolising all life - just like a vampire, that gothic monster of capital.  The Doctor has faced many vampires.  Like one of them, Axos, Kennedy is unstable & protean.

The really scary thing is... if LI'n'DA is a group of Doctor Who fans, & Doctor Who is a commodity that absorbs their time & energy & money... doesn't that also make Kennedy into Doctor Who itself?  One form of commodity fetishism is over-investment in the commodities we love.  This blog is evidence of that.

21

Earl plays a C on his harmonica.  It starts a sympathetic resonance in the pipes that stretch under and through the regime on Terra Alpha, like the arteries in a body.  What flows in these arteries is sugarly gloop, the outpourings of the Kandy Kitchen.  It fills the regime with the glucose it needs to survive.  And the regime uses it to kill dissidents or refuseniks or men wearing pink triangles, drowning them in sweetness.  Earl's note causes the encrusted, crystallised, fossilised sugar coating the insides of the pipes to crack and fall.  Tonnes of the stuff falls on top of Fifi, Helen A's savage attack dog and beloved pet.  She sent it into the pipes to kill the Doctor and the Pipe People, the surviving aboriginals on her colony.

"Happiness will prevail," says the artificially fruity voice on the colony tannoy system, "Factory guards are joining forces with the drones to destroy the Nevani sugar beet plant here in sector six. We will keep broadcasting."

This is a revolution.  The killjoys are marching and demonstrating, and having their own melancholy parties in subversion of the rules.  The factories are falling to strikers.  Even the aboriginals are getting in on the act.  And, as in 'The Sun Makers', you know the revolution is really happening when it even gets on the news.

"It's only one factory, Daisy K," says Helen A, dictator of Terra Alpha and obvious Thatcher analogue, "I've built over a thousand."  (Not that much like Thatcher then.  She didn't build up manufacturing industry; she calculatedly decimated it.)

"What about the reports of riots?," asks Daisy K, "And public unhappiness?"

Oh for the days when things like the Poll Tax (which, like so many things, now looks like gnat's piss by comparison) used to cause good, healthy, necessary riots.

Helen A wants to use her best, most fanatical enforcer... but it turns out that she's already been detained in her own Waiting Zone (they don't have 'prisons' on Terra Alpha, there being no need for unhappy places in the best of all possible worlds).  So instead, Helen A asks Daisy K to...

"Get me the Kandyman."

"You're not unhappy about something?" asks Daisy K, noticing the cracks in Helen A's ideological purity when her own self-interest is threatened... just as Thatcher cried for herself when someone subjected her to the strictures of the marketplace of ideas.

"GET ME THE KANDYMAN!"

The Kandyman answers his telephone.

"Kandyman," he says.  (This bit makes me gurgle with pleasure every time.  It's so arch.)

He's an evil Bertie Basset.  Bassett himself is a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit.  The Kandyman is all this and an accretion of various manifestations of authority.  He's the state torturer of a dictator, a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist... and he's a tool, a machine, a commodity fetishised into life, alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power.  And he's a bureaucrat.  He might even be Gilbert M's mother, or his 'nagging' wife.  (I wouldn't put it past a story like this, which harnesses the Planet-of-Women trope to rather dunderheaded effect, sometimes looking like a reactionary whinge about 'reverse sexism'.)

Helen A tells the Kandyman to get the Doctor - at any price.

"That won't be necessary," simpers the Kandyman viciously, "he's just dropped in."

The Doctor and Ace harry the Kandyman into his own pipes, where he is consumed by his own torrents of monosodium glutamate, flavouring and preservative.

Terra Alpha is a Stalinist 'paradise', i.e. everyone pretending to be deliriously happy... or pretending that they're pretending... and pretending that everyone else is pretending... while surrounded by corruption, decay and authoritarian brutality. As in 'The Macra Terror' and 'The Sun Makers', 'Happiness Patrol' combines open anxiety about capitalism with a doggerel-Orwellian story about totalitarianism.  It may be because of the influence of Kneale/Cartier's TV version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the appeal of the Orwellian aesthetics, that this mode got embedded in the show.  But the anxiety about capitalism is already built-in to Orwell's satire.  He knew that 'really existing socialism' (i.e. Stalinism) was a kind of state capitalism (though his grasp of this was intermittent, and instinctive rather than theoretical).  But he knew that Big Brother's Oceania was just a shabbier, nastier, more intense version of capitalist, imperialist, class-ridden Britain.

This same elision allows Doctor Who to notice the fundamental synergy and compatibility of Stalinism and 'market Stalinism', of authoritarianism and neoliberalism. Helen A likes Silas P's "enterprise and initiative" as a murderer of dissidents. He's aiming for the top in this meritocracy.  All he has to do is stamp on people on every rung of the ladder.  Thatcher admires 'law and order' while sponsoring covert warfare and police attacks against striking miners.  And don't forget about the "moaning minnies", the whingeing lefties always complaining.  The "enemy within".  Killjoys, in other words.

That's why the smiley face of 80s Acidhouse was such subversion when it started: it was libertarian Thatcherism taken at its smiling face value.

26

The Doctor, the Brigadier, some scientists and a Ministry bureaucrat have ventured inside Axos, a living ship that has just landed on Earth.

The Axons have greeted them.  They are a nuclear family - man in charge, surrounded by wife and boy and girl - modelled on classical statuary, their skin a lustrous gold.

They reflect the prejudices of those they meet.  They are part of Axos and have formed themselves from the ship/entity.  They easily adapt their image to Westernism, Patriarchy, Classicism, the worship of the commodity and of wealth itself.

In return for shelter (ostensibly), they offer "a gift... a payment".  They appear unable to quite understand the concept of 'gift', immediately amending their use of the word.  They meant 'payment', which implies a commodity transaction.

Their payment is...

"Axonite!"

It looks like a mineral, something torn from the ground by labour.  In reality it is just another aspect of Axos, individuated from the amorphous and tentacular mass of the whole so it will pass as a rock.

"Axonite is the source of all our growth technology," says Daddy Axon, "Axonite can absorb, convert, transmit and programme all forms of energy."

Note the word 'growth'.  To Axos, this is a central concept.  It's why they're here.

They do a deal.  Axonite will be distributed around the globe.

"This is indeed a rich planet you have brought us to," Axos tells their unwilling partner, the Master.

Axos has found a new market into which it can spread, new material to consume.

"Axonite must encircle the world," says Axos.

When it has been distributed globally, Axonite will absorb all energy and return to Axos, glutting it with new power.  Remember, Axonite can be anything.  It can take any form.  It can grow via an occult process.  It covers the world.  It has a "cycle" which ends with its absorbtion and assimilation of everything around it.  It returns to Axos, which is another aspect of itself, bigger and richer, swelling and increasing the whole.  It is the commodity form itself - the commodity fetishised and come alive, personifying itself and then treating people as commodities to be consumed.  It is scrambled, insane, multifarious, protean, yet singular and unitary.  It glitters.  It is lusted after as a transformation of production (of food, technology, anything at all) and as power in and of itself... yet the people who want it to serve them end up serving it.  It is alien to humanity, yet dresses in the clothes of Western tradition, classical values, oppressive gender relations and wealth.  It offers itself as payment, then takes everything as profit.  It is ravenous.  Vampiric.  It circulates and ends its cycle with profit it has sucked from the world.  And then it moves on, still hungry.

It is capital.

36

The Doctor, Zoe and Jamie are brought in to see the Master of the Land of Fiction.  He has dossiers on them.  He is, as Zoe says, very well organised.

"We have to be," he says, "The running of this place requires enormous attention to detail. It's a responsible position, but very rewarding"

A 'responsible position'.  So it's a job.

"Responsible to who?" asks the Doctor.

Not to a person, says the Master, to "another power. Higher than you could begin to imagine."

A system, an inhuman hegemon.

He congratulates them on the way they handled their tests.  They have passed the job interview.

It transpires that the Master is a writer.

"Did you ever hear of the Adventures of Captain Jack Harkaway?" he asks.

"No, I can't say that I... wait a minute, a serial in a boys' magazine?"

"The Ensign!  For twenty-five years, I delivered five thousand words every week!"

"Twenty-five years, five thousand words a week..." Zoe adds it up... "that's well over half a million words!"

"That's why I was selected to work here," says the Master.  He got headhunted.

He spent his life working to create copy for a publisher, who took his words and turned them into commodities.  The commodities were copies of his own ideas, his own characters, taken from him and transformed.  They piled up around him.  They took on a life of their own, apart from him.  Now he lives in a world of characters who were created by human labour, taken and turned into commodities.  They too have lives of their own.  In Marxism, this is called reification: the objectification of the social relations of production as things.  And it's also commodity fetishism: the treatment of commodities (in this case, fictions) as though they people... and the treatment of people as though they were commodities.  One form of this is wage labour, and on that subject...

"And you're the one that's in charge of all of this?" asks Jamie.

The 'Master' hedges.

"Or is all this in charge of you?" asks the Doctor.
 
"My brain is the source of the creative power which keeps this operation going."

So he doesn't control it, but it won't run without him, without his work.  Just like the magazines wouldn't get made without the intellectual, creative labour of people like him... just like the printing presses wouldn't print them without the manual labour of printers... just like the printed magazines wouldn't get sold if it weren't for the manual labour of distributors...

He's now in a world literally run by an alien power that robs minds, just as his mind was robbed to make magazines.  And it wants to turn humanity into a string of sausages, all the same.

He denies that he's a prisoner, but then the globe behind him glows and a siren sounds and the machinery demands his attention.  Soon it speaks through him, its stentorian commands coming from his mouth.  He tries to negotiate with it.  He wants to finally retire... but first he must recruit his successor.

Back to work, Master.  Back to work.

41

Early morning in Britain.

Shop-window dummies twitch, stand up and smash their way out into the high street.  They stalk past the shop logos and brand names and adverts.  Price tags dangle from their fashionable clothes.

Their hands are not like human hands.  They're not organs of manipulation, to be used for work.  They flip open to reveal weapons.

The dummies encounter shoppers, or people waiting for the bus to work.  They gun them down.  People fall and die next to the shop fronts.

The dummies are plastic effigies of people.  Products, manufactured things, fashioned in the human image.  They alienate the human image from humans.  They were made in a factory, on a production line, by workers.  Sold to shops.  They are hostile commodities, made for a capitalist concern; made by people working for a wage, yet out of human control, invested with a life of their own, confronting people as an external, dominating, fierce, blank, gothic, inhuman power. 

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

By the way Karl, the people who made these dummies were women.  The dummies, by contrast, are all male.  The dummies are all white too, because that's what the default, 'vanilla' human is to capitalist culture: male and white.  Several of the women we see working in Auto Plastics are not white.

Talk about alienation.

44

In a prison cell on Skaro, the Doctor and Jamie watch as Maxtible is paid by the Daleks for services rendered. 

"The secret you promised me!" he demands.

Maxtible is a wealthy, propertied, Victorian gentleman who thinks of everything in terms of business transactions.  His charity to Waterfield and his daughter has given him - Maxtible - proprietory rights to use them as he wishes, as servant and collateral.  His pact with the Daleks is a "partnership".  He is providing a service in return for payment.  His payment is to be a secret that he has been pursuing fanatically, at the expense of anyone who gets in his way.

"The secret of transmuted metal," confirms the Black Dalek.

A series of formulae flash up on a screen.  For all the talk of "atomic weight" and "specific gravity", the details are occult.  But the transmutation is achieved.

"Gold!" cries Maxtible, "Iron into gold!  I told you it was possible!  They've kept their promise!  It's true, it's true!  They have!"

He thinks he has completed the alchemist's project... but that project was about harnessing purity and immutability in the hope of returning humanity to its nature before the fall.  In aiding the Daleks, Maxtible has done the reverse of this: he has helped harness 'the human factor' in the service of utterly fallen things.

In any case, his lust for gold is nothing to do with purity.  It is the general obsession of any Victorian gentleman.  It's the basis of Victorian society.  The secret he obsesses over is the secret of capital.  The seemingly magical ability of capitalist production to create wealth from nowhere, from commodities that come out worth more than the raw materials that went into them.  From dross comes gold - straight into the gentleman's pockets.

This is the basis of all Victorian gothic: the occult and occluded nature of profit, of capital accumulation.

The real secret, the thing occluded, is 'the human factor'.  Human work, or 'species-being', alienated from humans and appearing to Maxtible in the form of Daleks, in the form of alien machines that drain humanity and substitute their own essence... which is what happens to him immediately after he is paid for his services.

His real payment is to be given 'the Dalek factor'.  To be made into an occult, gothic thing.  A Victorian zombie.

48

"That is a Laserson Probe.  It can punch a fist-sized hole in six inch armourplate, or take the crystals from a snowflake one by one."

A robot, a machine, a tool, a product, a technological commodity, rhapsodizes another machine, another tool, another product (complete with brand name), another commodity.  His rapture is focused upon the Laserson Probe's capacity to do delicate work (analytical, interrogative of nature, violent in its own way) and also to wreak destruction.  It can be turned to both uses.  What a selling point.

Meanwhile, the eloquent robot's fellows have turned away from running a ship which scours a desert (made of crystals) for minerals.  Now they are murdering their human owners and masters, one by one.  And yet their rampage is the idea, the (re)program, of a human; a man who has lost himself in his own id, his own narcissistic terror of our creations, our robots, our machines, our products, our technological commodities.  He has literally fetishised them... to the point where he dresses as one.  But has he really done anything terribly different to what his society has already done with its machines, tools, products, technological commodities?  It has brought them to life, made them in our image, made them speak and walk and think, and rule over us even when placid and obedient.  The walking dead.  The pure labour machines.  The zombies.  The slaves.  And so work - onboard mining ships - has become a luxury for humans, a perk of wealth and aristocracy.  One wonders what the less privileged do.  Starve, probably.

"Yes," says the Doctor, "no handyman should be without one."

50

Lesterson has brought his new toy, his reactivated alien machine, to Governor Hensall's office.  He boasts of how it could revolutionise life in the Colony.  It can end their labour problems, their economic problems... all their problems.

"It can do many things," agrees the Doctor, "but what it does best is exterminate human beings!  It destroys them... without pity..."

He continues.  And the machine speaks too.

"I - AM - YOUR - SER-VANT," it says, an unconscious admission in its strange inflection.  It says this again and again and again.

The two voices overlap, trying to shout each other down.

The tool, the machine, the product, bellows that it is our servant, while one man desperately claims that it's a killer, an apocalypse in waiting.

The two claims merge until they become one contradictory truth.

Later, the Dalek (I choose to believe it's the same one) murders Hensall on Bragen's orders.

It turns to Bragen.

It has a question.  The tool that kills, the dead labour, the mass produced thing, the weapon, the tank, the gothic monster, the repressed thing returning, the fascist principle that mirrors Bragen's own, the social-Darwinist that embraces the idea of the racial struggle for survival against all other competing races... has a question for Bragen.  For humanity.

"WHY - DO - HU-MAN - BE-INGS - KILL - HU-MAN - BE-INGS?"

 Good question.  One of the few genuinely good questions asked by anyone in this story.

Bragen, of course, cannot answer.

He has no idea.



(UPDATED 21/11/13)

Prometheus Underground

Warning: Triggers and Spoilers.  And waffle.


Sex & Monsters

In Prometheus, the Engineers are ancient Titans who created humanity... and, it is implied, seeded the galaxy with their DNA. There is something very noticeable about them: they are all men. Meanwhile, there is a definite vaginal look to a great many of the alien bio-weapons they created and which then subsumed them. However, I don't think its really possible to read the battle between Engineers and their bio-weapons as a battle of the sexes. The weapon creatures are also phallic and penetrative, as in previous iterations of the Alien universe. All the same, it's true that presenting the creators of life (in their own image) as exclusively dudes does imply that generative power resides in the male alone. It is enough for one Engineer to dissolve his DNA into the waters of a planet to kickstart the process that will lead to animal life (if that's how the opening scene is meant to be read). The Engineers are male but apparently sexless, capable of asexual reproduction. The deadly runaway bio-weapons, which seem hermaphroditic, look like the intrusion of sex into a male but sexless world. Sex is thus a terrifying eruption that destabilises a male utopia. The sexual nature of the weapons suggests that the Engineers - we might even be tempted to facetiously re-christen them the 'Mengineers' - find sexual reproduction to be inherently threatening. They set about devising weapons of mass destruction and what do they come up with? Biological goo that sets off a chain reaction of tentacle rape, fanged vaginas and violent monster pregnancy.

Foz Meadows at her blog Shattersnipe (which I heard about from Jon Blum) has made some apt observations about the film's dubious concentration upon highly impractical female underwear, grueling 'ladypain' and forced impregnation. She goes on to say:

Insofar as the alien attacks go, I’ll give Scott some credit for trope subversion: twice in the course of the film, male characters are violently orally penetrated – and, in the process, killed – by phallic alien tentacles. This is visually disturbing on a number of levels, but given the near universal establishment of tentacle rape as a thing that happens to women, I’m going to give him a big thumbs up for bucking the trend. That being said, what happens to Shaw is awful on just about every level imaginable.

And so it is.

One of the interesting things about the original Alien is that it is a man - Kane (John Hurt) - who is the victim of the facehugger rape and the violent birth of the phallic infant Alien. So, although the alien pregnancy also suggests infection, cancer, parasitism and other horrors attendant on life, there is clearly a way in which the original Alien is a personification of sexual violence. This violence is directed at both sexes and emerges through the violation of a man and a subsequent male pregnancy... however, the creature itself is also intensely male. It has that famously phallic head and yet another phallic symbol springs out of its mouth, this one complete with a snapping set of teeth. Even its tail is like a barbed cock which gropes Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) before killing her. Later on, when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is menaced by the creature in the escape shuttle, she has stripped to her underwear. This scene is the film at its most sexploitative. In many ways, it's a textbook example of lingering over needlessly-exposed female flesh. But even in this scene it seems that a trap is being set: encouraging those who are so inclined to leer... before showing them their own reflection in the creature when it reappears, languid, slowly playing with its phallic inner jaw, dripping drool/jizz, forcing Ripley to run and hide like someone stalked by a rapist.

As a man, I want to be very careful about declaring that Alien is or is not dodgy in its depiction of sexualised violence against women. If it is, then I also think there is a distinct ambiguity about it. The sexualised, phallic vileness of the Alien itself seems to have been the intention all along. If the film wallows in the sight of a half-naked woman threatened by a monster that is, essentially, an evil penis with teeth, then it also seems aware of the queasiness of what it is doing. The very obscenity of the Alien suggests an awareness of the obscenity of sexual violence... beyond what is arguably the film's more general concern about the horror of physicality itself, with all its attendant violation, infection, pain and predation.

There is something of the same horror of sex in Prometheus. Fertility seems to be the terrible mistake that the Mengineers made, the mistake they wish to erase. They made the infertile fertile (their weapon specifically does this to Shaw) and set in motion the end of their outpost world. But note how the 'fertility nuke' the Mengineers developed actually works. With men, it gets in through the mouth. The Generic Asshole Biologist with Glasses gets done in by a kind of phallic worm with a cobra hood which penetrates his suit and then dives into his mouth. Holloway inadvertently drinks some of the goo and begins to turn into a kind of rampaging mutant (we see the final stage later when Fifield turns up again). Shaw, however, is impregnated in the regular way. She is impregnated via sex - with her husband, no less! That this is a kind of rape-by-proxy committed by David (who spikes Holloway's drink with some of the black goo) doesn't change the point. The creature inside Shaw gestates in what looks like a placental sac, complete with a umbilical cord. I'm not sure if we're meant to think the squid thing was going to exit Shaw violently via the belly... but, the undulations of the entity beneath her skin notwithstanding, there's actually no reason to think it wasn't going to be born via the vagina. So, the Mengineers' weaponized sex gets into the man via an orifice that does not play a specific biological role in sexual reproduction and turns him into a beast. It enters the woman via sex itself, gestates like a baby in the uterus and may even be born vaginally rather than bursting out. I'm almost fearful to think how this system is supposed to work. Once the infected male has become a mad monster, does he go on a rape rampage? If so, I'm glad it's left undepicted and undescribed. In any case, it looks uncomfortably as though the Mengineers specifically decided to use the female as a vector in the progress of their bio-weapons. They chose to use female fertility as a part of their attack. Sex is the weapon; the female is the delivery system.


Race & Monsters

The other thing about the intense un-sexual maleness of the Engineers is that it seems to suggest a monastic warrior brotherhood with fascist overtones.

Image / Reality.

The Engineers look like the camp, macho, pseudo-expressionistic and/or neoclassical fascist statues which decorated Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. They are utterly white, with blank eyes, as though made of marble. They represent a kind of aggressively male, body fascist ideal, with all their bulging muscles and rippling pectorals. Neoclassicism, as it was co-opted by fascism, reproduced the physiques of Michaelangelo's David and Adam as an actual physical ideal rather than as an emblem of human beauty, uniqueness and capability. Humanism became the worship of the allegedly biologically 'perfect', embodied in fascist ideology by the white, male, sexless warrior.

The Engineers tie into this in another way. They are like the giants of Norse myth as it was recycled by Wagner and then by later anti-Semites. There is something of Nazi mysticism about the story of the Engineers. They are the perfect giants from before history who supposedly founded all the life and culture of the human age, their chosen people being, of course, the Aryans. Vickers is a blonde ice maiden, which either implies the Aryan credentials of the Weyland family (if she is Weyland's biological daughter) or his fetish for the Aryan type as representing perfection (if she is an android of his design). David (interesting choice of name there) is also an image of superhuman white European 'perfection'. He dyes his hair blonde to seem even more Aryan and models himself on Peter O'Toole's portrayal of T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, a chiseled white European hero who is presented as overcoming pain and taking upon himself leadership of the Arabs. (Incidentally, this paradigm - whitey becomes the leader of the natives - recurs in popular SF. Think Paul Atreides in Dune, or Jake Sully in Avatar.)

There is yet another element of the film that ties in with this.  The concentration on language.  David studies ancient human languages, explicitly including 'Indo-European'.  His fez-wearing, English-accented holographic teacher says "...whilst this manner of articulation is attested in the Indo-European descendants as a purely paralinguistic form, it is phonemic in the ancestral form dating back 5 millenia or more....".  I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this means anything, but it still specifically mentions Indo-European.  It is also possible that Sanskrit is explicitly mentioned or alluded to in the film.  There is some disagreement (here, for instance) most of which is well above my head.  But, in any case, David is studying Indo-European languages in an attempt to find some kind of 'root' language which will enable him to communicate with the Engineers, if they do indeed prove to be the progenitors of humanity. The implication is that the Engineers - our ancient creators or ancestors - will have bestowed language upon us. Our languages will be descended from them, just as we are... therefore, the further back into language David can go, the better his chance of finding some way of comprehending the language of the Engineers. And it works.

This is a reiteration of as aspect of the imperial ideology of Aryanism. To quote Richard Seymour in The Liberal Defence of Murder:

The Aryan idea has its origins in the heart of the British Empire. It was a result of the Company's growing control over revenue-collecting and the need to develop an understanding of the texts and languages of the colonized. Not merely a suppuration of imperialism, it became an important fact about the way the empire was organized, and eventually it was offered as the reason why the empire had come about. Essentially, it posited an Indo-European race based upon certain philological affinities between Sanskrit and the Greek and Latin languages. The thesis was that the world's populations could be divided into 'races' descended from Biblical figures - Aryan, Semitic and Tartar. The Aryan race had, it was maintained, invaded and inhabited India during the Vedic 'golden age' and formed a precocious civilization. The post-Vedic age in India had been a sustained period of degeneration: by contrast, the Aryans of Europe were in rude health. These categories not only provided an argument for empire; they also helped to cement British power with the caste system.

(Seymour's notes refer to a book called Orientalism and Race by Tony Ballantyne, which looks both illuminating and dauntingly scholarly.) Note, by the way, how Seymour refers to the East India Company as "the Company".

The concept of Aryanism later found its way into German Romantic occultism and, from thence, into Nazism. The whole idea of an Aryan 'master race' responsible for the primordial foundation of Western civilization - and just about all subsequent Western cultural achievement - is bound up with the theory that the European languages can be traced back, via commonalities with Sanskrit, etc., to a root language: Proto-Indo-European. The subsequent supposed 'degeneration' of the East as the West thrived was put down to several possible influences. In the 18th and 19th centuries, especially after upsurges of rebellion, the intellectuals of the British imperium (including the liberals, by the way) put it down to the malign influence of Islam, and this notion is a direct ancestor of modern liberal Islamophobia. In the even more delusional line of descent which culminated in Nazism, biological notions of Teutonic superiority came to the fore. The biological and culturalist variants of racism have never been as separate as some claim. And both are aspects of imperialist ideology.


Tropes & Implications

Now, this is really as old as the hills. In many respects, it is a slightly more elaborate version of the von Danikenism that has infected so much SF. There is a kind of Eurocentric paternal condescension built into von Danikenism. Ancient peoples, particularly in the Middle East, Africa and South America, are assumed to have been incapable of creating their own cultures and languages. This trope has been widely used in SF. In Doctor Who alone, it has appeared in 'Death to the Daleks', 'Pyramids of Mars', etc.

But it goes further. In Prometheus, the Engineers created all humanity and all human language from their own selves. This 'strong version' too has been utilised before, though possibly never quite so explicitly. In Quatermass and the Pit, we humans have race wars because we are the genetically engineered creatures of Martian insects who went in for ethnic cleansing.... but we don't speak a language descended from theirs, at least not explicitly.

In Prometheus it is not just ancient cultures that owe their technology, design sense, religion and language to aliens, it is all humanity - possibly all life in the galaxy. Taken literally, this obviates humanity's claim to have made its own history. The various revolutions of history - argicultural, urban, industrial - are simply developments towards greater and greater convergence with the culture of the creators. High technology becomes a telos, preset in our chromosomes. The impetus is the pattern within humanity that matches the Engineers. Human biological origins lead to human historical development from cave dwelling to space ships. Our Engineer DNA leads us to develop their language and their technology. The information in our genes makes us create the corresponding information in our culture. This is a kind of biological determinism (rampant in SF) that, through the issues mentioned above, ties the film to a view of human history which stems from the primal influence of godly progenitors who seem associated with patriarchy, imperialism and Aryanism. (By the way, it also explains the film's obsession with information. The star charts; the DNA sequences; the concentration on language and hieroglyphs; the way the two ships both project massive holographic displays that map out space, geography, cartography and architecture. The film depicts a stream of information flowing from the Engineers' genes all the way up to the humans' maps.)

To an extent then, Prometheus adapts an ideologically imperialist, patriarchal, sexist and racialist view of of human history and presents this as a truth. The truth underlying human biology and also, in a deterministic way, the history of human civilisation, is that all our information stems from a kind of Aryan master race who also speak Proto-Indo-European, represent camply fascistic ideas of physical perfection, seem like a monkish warrior brotherhood and look like an all-male group mortally threatened by any other gender but prepared to use rape as a weapon delivery system.

Yet it's hard to say that this makes the import of the text reactionary in a straightforward way. After all, the character of the Engineers seems to be genocidal, ruthless, cruel, sterile, entropic, capricious.... and they are also defeated by their own creations. Moreover, their ship is brought down by a black man and their last survivor (at least on their weapons planet) is outwitted by a woman. It doesn't look as though the film is asking us to worship them or admire them. And the film definitely expects us to be pleased when their plans are thwarted by those more sexually and racially diverse. (On a basic level, it's just nice to see a genre action movie where the black supporting character doesn't die in the second act.)

The Engineers are like the Eurocentric, patriarchal, white, imperial 'origin story' made flesh. They are the idea of the herrenvolk, literalised so that it may be rejected. Weyland's dying words imply that, as gods, they fall short. They have no answers, no meaning. Indeed, they seem to seek the eradication of meaning. They conceive of information - whether it be sexual reproduction or the mechanics of travel - as ways of erasure. They are an idea that seems inimical to other meanings. This inimical idea is then negated by the return of the meaning it tried to revoke and erase. This happens to them, so to speak, twice. They wish to eradicate the first meanings they created - life/civilisation on Earth and perhaps elsewhere - by creating new, deadly meaning in the form of weaponized sex... but this new meaning again turns upon them. (They are, by the way, quite reminiscent of Light - the white, male, authoritarian scientist/angel that wishes to eradicate meaning when it cannot be controlled and classified - in the Doctor Who story 'Ghost Light'.)

If the Engineers are white, male, imperial gods - and redolent of fascism, which is the ultimate syncresis of all these reactionary power principles - then it must be said that they hardly reflect well upon these principles. They are exterminators, stockpilers of biological weapons, purgers of meaning and information when it fails to meet their inscrutable and vindictive standards, etc.


Gardeners & Engineers

In Prometheus, just as in Christian mythology, we are banished by our creators to wander alone, even as everything that we are comes from them/Him. But Prometheus not only reiterates this mythology, it also does that other quintessential job of SF: it ponders the autonomous (alienated and fetishized) product.

It's no shock that SF continually tells stories which reiterate Genesis while also thinking about the alienation of humanity from the produce of their labour. Genesis is about the alienation of humanity from nature brought by the rise of agriculture, surplus and class. SF reiterates Genesis because it is the modern cultural genre that most directly addresses the unprecedented alienation brought by capitalism, modernity, industry and technology. Genesis is about the relationship between humanity and nature, altered by tools. SF is about the constantly changing and decaying and threatening relationship between humanity and the tools themselves as they careen out of our control.

Genesis is, as noted, hardly the first myth to tread this path. Prometheus brought fire to humanity. Fire is knowledge. Science. Technology. It is the first discovery, the first tool, the first weapon, the first product. In so doing, Prometheus dared to suggest not only that humanity should have knowledge, but also that humanity should have the ability to create. More than it destroys, fire transforms. It is the basis of chemistry. It reveals that matter may change its state, be split in various different states, when altered deliberately by humanity.

Prometheus is far from the first SF story to reiterate these matters. It treads directly in the footsteps of Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein was the 'modern Prometheus' because he revealed the next stage of what may be done with matter by human hands. Frankenstein fails because he does not take social responsibility for his creation. His 'son' is the first product-monster, the first great monster in the history of European culture that is manufactured. But it is only dangerous because it is abandoned, left without care or justice. Frankenstein's monster is the foundation of SF, which is obsessed with the autonomous product that threatens its creator, the manufactured monster. It is terrifying because it is, ultimately, our responsibility and our punishment.

We humans auto-generate. God is our attempt to infer a 'first cause' in this chain of auto-generation and to spiritually imbue it. Modernity is the rising of the productive forces to an unprecedented level, in which we may produce things of unprecedented power at unprecedented speed and in unprecedented numbers. Frankenstein the book appears at the interface of

i) our awareness of ourselves as biologically generated entities,

ii) our idea of ourselves as the creations of God, and

iii) our dawning realisation that modernity - industry, science, technology - allows us to create things more powerful than us, i.e. things more powerful than our bodies or even our gods (which are themselves our creations, after all).

Personally, we all encounter the book at this interface. This is because the book was written at the moment when European civilisation reached such an interface in history.

Humanity has always been quintessentially productive. The ability of our front two feet to leave the ground and become organs of manipulation is what drove the rise of the human brain. Humans are, above all else, the animal that makes tools. Capitalist modernity thus deeply effects our view of ourselves because it revolutionizes the way we produce. The products of modernity are - simply by virtue of their greater numbers, power and speed, if nothing else - more fetishized, more alive, more able to dominate us and run out of our control. They are more able, at least potentially, to mesh with our biology. Mary Shelley saw this potential meshing in the electrode that made the dead convict twitch and clench his fist. It is also implicit in the machine that steals labour, or which sucks the labourer into its embrace, needing to be set in motion by the workers and expressing this by encircling and towering over them. Today, the intrusion into biology becomes ever more clear. We now have cameras that can relay images directly to the brain, cloned creatures, and other wetware. And there are now more ways than ever in which the worker is towered-over and encircled by the hardware and the software.

Since Frankenstein, SF has harped on these issues. SF is a litany of robots, androids, gynoids, computer sentiences, of thinking weapons, of tools that rebel, or scientific experiments that lash back upon the experimenter. Within the settings of 'space' or 'the future' - which represent the dizzying possibilities of modernity, technology and science - the human as a producer of marvels is also a producer of nightmares than cannot be controlled. The line between the producer and the artifact is always being attacked, if only by some new technical innovation. This is the real reason why the robots attack us. This is why so many of the artifacts claim parity with humanity and demand this parity be accepted... and we're lucky if parity is all they want. Also, in SF humans seem to seek unity and merging with the machine, with its uncontrollable power. The machine seems alive; the living thing tends towards the mechanical. The boundry line between the territories is heavily disputed. Like any such border, there are wars over it.

Beyond its Freudian dimensions, Alien ponders these issues covertly.  Its ancient spacefaring aliens (the ones that created the derelict ship) seem inextricably both biology and technology, their pilot looking like an extrusion of beast and engine that has grown within a ship of bones and bulges and arterial corridors and vast hot stomachs in which parasites have laid their eggs.  The thing that is born from Kane's chest is a thing of tendons and pulleys, veins and cables, phallic symbols and skin criss-crossed with what look like the outlines of circuits.  What people often forget is that the 'Xenomorphs' live up to their assigned name.  Their shape morphs to resemble the 'other' in which they grow.  The Alien in the first film has taken on the bio-mechanical nature of the pilot on the crashed ship, and it has also taken on the humanoid size and shape of Kane.  The machine has penetrated the DNA and is now biologically heritable as a trait.  The 'Xenomorph' is the terrifying vehicle/product of this penetration.  And don't forget Ash, with his android-madness apparently triggered by resentment and frustrated sexual hatred, his injuries dripping hydraulic fluid that looks like milk or semen, his synthetic innards looking like white and blue plastic intestines.

Prometheus ponders the same issues overtly.  Just as Frankenstein displaced God by doing what God does, so the Engineers displace God by being what He is supposed to be.  But they also displace Darwinism, at least in the opinion of the biologist.  And they displace Frankenstein again because, by having created us artificially, they trivialize the achievement of Weyland in having made David.  They even displace Tyrell in Blade Runner and the crisis of simulation that his simulacra have triggered.  The simulacrum becomes nothing of the kind when the creator of the simulacra proves to be as engineered a thing as his simulation.  Deckard may have had ambiguous dreams about unicorns but Weyland knows, unambiguously, that he is as much a manufactured entity as David.  This state of having been manufactured is his new normality.  In this state of affairs, who cares that the simulacrum is indistinguishable?  The internal distinction that makes this collapse of distinctions significant has been neutralised.  Just as Natural Selection is overthrown by the revelation that all life is a product of technological engineering, so is Artificial Creation.  You can engineer life at all levels.  Creation dissipates.  The Engineers have manufactured micro-organisms and macro-organisms.  Microbes in the goo, all the way up to giant squids.  They have manufactured not only life but life-cycles.

Of course, these biological manufactoids get 'out of control'.  Creations always do in these tales.  That story goes back to Genesis and before.  Long before.  As noted, SF has continually retold these ancient stories as a way of grappling with the modern era of technological mass-production.  In Frankenstein, the process turns runaway because it is abandoned.  In The Island of Dr Moreau, the process turns runaway even though, possibly even because, it has not been abandoned.  As China Mieville puts it, Frankenstein says that we are failing the Enlightenment and Moreau says that the Enlightenment has failed.

The project of modernity is unstable, uncontrollable, dangerous because even the best efforts to control it founder on the autonomy of the product.  What we might, in political terms, characterise as Mary Shelley's 'reformist' project - drawn from her situation amidst Wollstonecraft (her dead mother, present in her life as stories and texts), Godwin (her father) and Percy Shelley (her husband) - is to nuture and care for the product so that it becomes socially responsible, an agent of justice rather than one of horror.  Frankenstein is her prescient caution of what will ensue if this is not done.  The product will annihilate us.  Mieville says that Frankenstein and Moreau mark opposite ends of the trajectory of Fabianism, mapped out in advance.  Moreau is the despairing terminus of Fabianism, written before Wells joined the Fabians.  Wells says (without knowing it) that, contra Shelley, the 'reformist' project to nurture and care for modernity is doomed to failure because the product will not be controlled, even with the best efforts.  The autonomous product - which is what industry and capital and the fetishized commodity look like in SF - is too much for us to control.

David in Prometheus is, yet again, the autonomous product.  At first, he seems tame because of his position.  He's been subject to a stringent attempt to integrate him into Weyland's Western, capitalist, patriarchal hierarchy.  Like Ash and Bishop, David is a white male.  Unlike those untrustworthy agents, he has been fashioned as an heir.  Weyland shows him preference over his daughter (if she is a biological daughter).  David is "the closest thing" Weyland has "to a son".  The daughter doesn't count.  It's like Dombey, forgetting Florence and putting "only child" on Paul's tombstone.  But still David moves beyond control.  On the contrary, he is in control of everyone else, all the way through the film.  The story happens because of David's agency and actions.  He is evidently not working for Weyland.  Little he does directly serves Weyland's interests.  When he finally does serve Weyland, he gets the old man killed.  How are we - or anyone - to know what David says to the Engineer before the Engineer kills Weyland with David's severed head?  David is unsurprised by Weyland's dying declaration.  David knew better than to expect answers from a manufacturer-god who has been attacked by his own autonomous product.

Prometheus makes the gods themselves into Engineers. Their name itself appropriates the tool, manufacture, industry, technology. It makes production into our master. We become the object of production not the subject. It expresses alienation. We do not make the engines. We are the engines. The engines we do make (David) are therefore the products of products, made because we were made to make them. Our evolution, our social and agricultural history, become products of alien engineering, made by us because we are machines designed to make them.

When we become the autonomous product (as we do in Prometheus), we become as alienated from our manufacturers as any commodity. But that isn't necessarily bad. Why should we care that something is 'out of control'? Whose control? And, as noted, in Prometheus our alien/ated manufacturers are Eurocentric gods. They are Aryan gods. Fascist myths come alive. Patriarchs and warrior elites. It is as though the problems identified in Frankenstein and Dr Moreau have finally been blamed on somebody. Should they be in control?

Is it conceivable - I ask this tentatively - that, in Prometheus, Hollywood has accidentally created a parable about the need for the alienated to revolt against the alien/ating gods of the era of technology? To reject a power that is conceptualised as the ultimate in white, male, imperialist, theocracy? To reject a power that is, furthermore, a personification of the alienation of humans from their ability to freely produce themselves, their lives, their sexuality, their language and their culture?

These are not profundities that were deliberately crafted into the script of this massively expensive bit of commercial entertainment. They are complexities, intimations and ironies that may be teased out of the text and willfully construed because the text stands as a garbled synthesis of many of the tropes of SF, a genre that has been pondering the issues of modernity for so long.

The best way of looking at it is to say that the film Prometheus itself is an autonomous product that seems to have partially and furtively escaped the control of its reactionary manufacturers.

But then, don't they all?



EDIT:  In the original version of this article, I wrongly used the term 'Caucasian' as a synonym for 'white' and/or 'European'.  I have amended this.  JG, 4/4/14

Legless in Legoland

I've become mildly obsessed by this image:

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!"

How do you get a Lego figure to look traumatised by the death of the woman it loves, and the supposed deaths of its newborn children, and the loss of its legs, and third degree burns over all of its body?

And what kind of a culture is it that even tries?

(Of course, as Richard Pilbeam - who brought the image to my attention in the first place - remarked, the Lego figure does a better job than Hayden Christensen.)

It strikes me that, the more Lego tries to cope with reconstructing scenes from movies - especially from movies like the Star Wars  prequels or the later Harry Potter  movies, that are self-consciously 'dark' - the more it has to bring in elements of painful 'realism', i.e. scars on Anakin's face... but the addition of such features to the Lego aesthetic has an unfortunate effect... it starts to make it look like they're taking the piss, South Park  style, by representing things like serious injuries in crude, cartoon form.

This is particularly evident in the way the figure above simply has no Lego legs provided.  Is there any child who ever played with Lego who didn't, at some point, hold up a Lego torso/head combination without the legs attached and scream, on behalf of the figure, something along the lines of "AAAARGH!  WHERE ARE MY LEGS????", thus causing themselves wild hilarity?  I know I did.  (I hope I'm not telling you things about myself that I shouldn't... but, to be honest, I write a blog that tries to subject Doctor Who to Marxist analysis, so, realistically, what have I got to lose in terms of being taken seriously?)  The thing is that this exact same strategy - the leaving off of the legs - is now being deliberately employed by Lego to depict horrific mutilation.

Partly this is to do with the fact that a generation who grew up watching Star Wars  are now writing and filming stories... and, in common with the fan mindset everywhere, they want to do the same kinds of stories, but better... more serious, more 'dark', etc.  This is a double edged blade.  It gave birth to the good and bad of the Virgin New Adventures, the good and bad of 2005+ Who, the good and bad of modern SF/fantasy fiction and film making.  The apotheosis of the bad may be the awkward attempts to do 'realist' but bloodless and politically illiterate depictions of urban terrorism in the Nolan Batman films, with the urban terrorist opposed by a moralist ninja in a 'realistic' bat outfit.  One side effect of this is that, increasingly, SF/Fantasy tries to be 'serious' and often tries to do this using what we might call The Gatiss Manoeuver, i.e. it tries to bring in pain and suffering.

Of course, there is a big dose of knowing, sly-winking, in-on-the-joke irony inherent in the whole Lego Star Wars / Harry Potter / Pirates of the Caribbean  thing, the toys and computer games and film-recreations.

I think it goes back to the fact that my generation had Star Wars  and stuff like that (and the Potter  and Pirate  films are, indisputably, the offspring of Star Wars ) AND we had Lego... and there was a conceptual connection between them which took the material form of Kenner Star Wars toys... and yet, somehow, Star Wars and Lego never met... even though they lived side-by-side in our toy boxes... even though they both existed as piles of plastic figures and plastic places... even though they both allowed us to construct and deconstruct and reconstruct material worlds in miniature...  even though, in short, we always kind of thought they could and should.

Of course, they did meet... but only when we made it happen.

I mixed up Star Wars figures and Lego all the time.  I had Lego people inside my Millenium Falcon.  I knew kids who never did this... who looked at it askance, as though doing it were, in some way, conceptually indecent... but even they tended to use Lego to build characters from non-Lego worlds.  I certainly did.  I built my own versions of Star Wars characters using Lego.  For that matter, I built Lego Doctors and Lego TARDISes.  I built Lego Masters of the Universe and Lego Clash of the Titans.  I built Lego James Bond.  I built Lego E.T. and Ghostbusters.  I built Lego Blade Runner and Lego Hitchcock films.

Increasingly, there is an attempt on the part of the marketers to close the space in which children to do this kind of thing themselves.

We adults take delight in the Legoification of imagery that we recall from childhood, or from the fan experience (which is, I suspect, intimately psychologically linked with childhood)... we all, I'm sure, have felt that peculiar pleasure of recognition, solidification, interpretation and miniaturisation that comes from seeing a model of something that is embedded in our memory of visual storytelling.  (It is, by the way, entirely different to the non-recognition / surprise / disappointment that comes with seeing the visual or physical realisation of something that had previously only existed as a set of descriptions in a book.)  The more obscure, unlikely and intricately accurate the image that is solidified, miniaturized and recognised, the greater the pleasure.

For instance:

Of course, Lego Star Wars works in a different way to the above figure.

For a start, Star Wars is mass culture on a scale that old-Who can't match.  It's images are recognisable globally, to a huge number of people, part of the visual alphabet of Western culture, whereas the figure above lives in the collective memory of a comparatively small fan-gestalt.  Only a few images from Doctor Who even begin to be as widely recognisable as Star Wars.

Next, the figure above is meant to be faithful in a very literal, plodding way.  It is meant to appeal to that bit of the fan soul that cherishes 'seriousness' (something that toy-collector Charles Daniels subverts with his usual genial ingenuity).  It might even be treasured by the fan because it, in a way, reclaims and straightfacedly re-presents an image crucial to the history and internal mythos of the show but also long found risible.

The whole concept of Star Wars Lego contains a degree of self-mockery that is possible in the context of a huge, global audience of viewers and customers who are not fans in the way that you probably have to be a fan to buy and cherish the model of the 'Tenth Planet' Cyberman.  There is something inherently, nose-tappingly, insinuatingly 'knowing' about Star Wars Lego.  It not only trades upon the memory of those self-created elisions between the fundamentally not-joined-up narratives of Star Wars and Lego that so many of us engaged in during childhood, it also seems to use the Lego aesthetic to quietly insult - in that self-conscious, too-cool-for-school way that is almost always an attempt to obscure insecurity above a genuine but unfashionable devotion - the Star Wars aesthetic.

This kind of double-dealing is endemic in a culture that relentlessly sells things created to cater for deeply-ingrained human tastes (i.e. stories about monsters) while also insisting on supposedly contrary standards of behaviour (i.e. grow up, stop thinking about monsters, don't be childish, be cool not geeky, etc.).

I'm not taking sides here, by the way.  I'm not riding to the defence of Star Wars  (or indeed of Doctor Who, or anything else), shouting "lay off our wholesomely geeky pleasures, you 'ironic' philistines!"  I'm trying to think through some ways in which commodification works... and commodification is not something that Star Wars was ever free from in some pure way, anymore than was Doctor Who.  Star Wars is being commodified in new ways all the time... but it was always a commodity, as was Doctor Who, to which similar things are happening....

This is 'character building', apparently.
Wouldn't there have to be characters in it?

This is the further-commodification of that which started as a commodity anyway.  It isn't like the mass manufacture of inflatable versions of Munch's The Scream (which is, in any case, the sort of thing that is inevitable in a culture like ours).

Still less am I riding to the defence of the poor, downtrodden, misunderstood geeky fan.  Most active fans, in my experience, are relatively privileged people (and I include myself in that) and nothing is less appealing than their/our occasional lapses into self-pity and feelings of thwarted entitlement.

But, back to the point...

One way to square the get-people-to-buy-what-other-bits-of-culture-tell-them-they're-sad-for-wanting-to-buy circle (so you can continue selling them both supposedly contradictory sets of ideas and stuff simultaneously) is to package the uncool things (i.e. monsters, childhood nostalgia, models, etc) in ways that seem overlaid - or underwritten - by irony, by apparent self-mockery, by a ready made set of excuses utilising the concept of knowing play.

But there is a problem here, which is the fact that play is supposed to be creative, a way of thinking rather than a way of not-thinking.  If these methods of commodification that use play to elbow-out any feeling of unfettered engagement with stories were confined to adults, that would be bad enough.  But it isn't.

It seems to me that the current official and licenced Lego versions of film franchises are symptoms of an invasion - by the increasingly all-pervading neo-liberal capitalist market system - of a childhood prerogative: the task of using the tools of childhood (i.e. toys) to express, mimic, recreate, reinterpret, comprehend and appropriate, for one's own mental use, the culture into which one has been born.  In short, there is an extent to which Star Wars Lego is an appropriation of childhood play - or, at least, one strategy of childhood play - from its rightful owners, i.e. children.

Of course, selling toys of any kind - especially toys with a pre-written narrative behind them like Star Wars  figures - is, in a sense, to appropriate play from the child.  You're imposing an external structure upon the play.  Even vanilla Lego imposes a structure of shops and cars and tractors and 'everyday life' on to play... but then play always mimics the world around it.  In children, that's part of what its for.  And it isn't always a bad thing to impose external per se... and it is often ignored or subverted by the very act of play.  But it's that very avenue for subversion - through the child's own cross-referencing of narratives - that is being encroached upon.

It is, in a way, yet another example of the 'primitive accumulation' of capital.  Marx identified 'primitive accumulation' as the historical origins of capitalism, during which the rising capitalist class seized much of the property that had been 'common' under the feudal system, i.e. the enclosures.  David Harvey has suggested, plausibly, that we can see neo-liberalism as engaging in a fresh round of 'primitive accumulation', what he calls 'accumulation by dispossession', i.e. the re-conquest (privatization) of much that had been placed in the socialized or public sphere; increasing financialization, asset stripping, austerity schemes and structural adjustment.  There's the commodification of public space.  There's the opening up of new markets and forms of commodity exchange, like intellectual property rights, etc.

I'm not suggesting anything but an analogy here, but it seems as though the colonization of what had once been a task of the child - the appropriation of the toy for the creation of the child's own versions, stories and interpretations - has been subject to a kind of enclosure by the neo-liberal merchandise industry.

Or rather, something of that kind has been attempted and - as noted above - is leading to increasingly uneasy, almost self-satirising, results.  The fact is, people are still creatively appropriating and misappropriating toys by using them to appropriate and misappropriate stories they were never 'meant' or 'designed' to represent.  What Adam and Joe started in the 90s has now become endemic on YouTube.  The results range from the pathetic and embarrassing to the genuinely brilliant.

I've long hankered for staggeringly inappropriate Lego.  Lego Schindler's List, for example.  Or Lego Human Centipede.  (I mean, why not - is there anything in the logic or ethics of neo-liberalism that puts Lego Operation Enduring Freedom beyond the pale?  No, and that's the point.)  I mentioned as much on Facebook and, in a trice, Dom Kelly found me Lego Human Centipede on YouTube.  Whatever the intention of whoever made it, this monumentally inappropriate (and thus revealing) collision of two commodities is a sign that the ability to play still cuts both ways.

Skulltopus 8: Society of the Tentacle

The quasi-tentacular returns in 'The Claws of Axos'.  Big time.

What's more, this story is an orgy of strange flesh... to the extent of looking like a precursor to John Carpenter's The Thing.

Now, if my idea is right - that, in the 70s, Doctor Who starts invoking Weird tentacles as a kind of evasion/signification of capitalism when it veers too close to potential systemic critique - then this really, really should show up in 'The Claws of Axos'.

Not to keep you in suspense: it does.


Taking it on the Chinn

Now don't get me wrong.  I'd hate you to get the idea that I was claiming that 'Claws' is 'subversive' or anything.  I'm not.  It isn't.  As political critique goes, objectively, 'Claws' is feeble.  Yes, it is very cynical about the government, but that in itself doesn't amount to subversion.  After all, Clear and Present Danger  (to take an example more or less at random) features a secret plot by the President, the White House Chief of Staff and high-ranking CIA people to launch a covert war in South America - but Clear and Present Danger isn't remotely subversive... indeed, it is a highly reactionary film that entirely supports the specious ideological assumptions of the American empire.  This is slightly unfair to 'Claws', since it has, well, sharper claws than Tom Clancy via Hollywood ('Claws' is cynical about establishment power, while CaPD depicts the cynicism of powerful people as a danger to a fundamentally well-meaning establishment), but it does illustrate the point that simply depicting the wrongdoing of the state does not necessarily or automatically amount to a radical critique.

With its bourgeois patrician hero, its stiff-upper-lipped and self-sacrificing scientist/peer, its bog-standard sexist representation of Jo as dollybird-in-need-of-saving, its depiction of the American lawman (FBI?  CIA?  ...something like that) as a square-jawed straight-arrow, the comic neutralisation of the issue of poverty, the implication that people starve because there is a lack of food rather than a lack of profit in feeding them, and many other such representations, 'Claws' is as well integrated into capitalist ideology, and as likely to 'manufacture consent', as any other Doctor Who story, the vast majority of which are straightforwardly and entirely unthreatening to the status quo.  What political critique there is consists, for the most part, of moralistic liberal finger-wagging about greed, nationalism and xenophobia, which is itself compromised by the Axons turning out to be evil, shifty, bogus asylum seekers (that sort of thing didn't start with Gatiss, sadly).  Such moralistic liberal finger-wagging is inherently non-subversive and non-radical because it is inherently reformist rather than revolutionary, i.e. vote out the reactionaries, and get the common herd to be less materialistic, and capitalism will be fine and dandy.

However, everything is relative and context changes things.

The fact is, 'Claws' has probably the most straightforwardly, explicitly, non-metaphorical depiction of the British state as cynical and machiavellian of all Pertwee stories (though the impact is softened by Chinn's comic incompetence).  In 'Claws', the problem isn't one slimey bureaucrat, one idiotic authority figure, one cowardly warmongering parliamentary private secretary... the problem is Chinn and his boss and the government they work for.  They're not just arse-covering or being unimaginative or showing prejudice.  They're actively and covertly colluding in what is described (by Jo, the character that we - the audience - are meant to identify with most directly) as a "contemptible, underhanded deal".  Only the bias in the Cabinet Room in favour of Global Chemicals in 'Green Death' comes close to the level of systemic cynicism shown by Chinn and his Minister.  It's impossible to imagine that Chinn's Minister is acting without the sanction of the rest of the government, or at least the expectation of approval.  Indeed, his worry seems to be about public, worldwide perception.

Whatever Ministry Chinn represents (nominally he's MoD, but the very lack of specificity about his job gives it a general character that suggests a systemic problem), the nature of the "contemptible, underhanded deal" that he's trying to cut is clearly implied to be aimed at cornering economic and military power.  Chinn's behaviour is very deliberately linked to xenophobia and nationalism, via his (offscreen) remark about "England for the English".  The lack of any genuine commitment to isolationism is shown by his willingness to snuggle up to the Axons when he thinks there's advantage to be had from them.  However true to life this may or may not be, the British government is shown to be at loggerheads with the U.N., with the British state depicted as self-serving while the U.N. is implied to be universalist in its desire to spread Axonite around the world... free.  This last detail is raised so briefly that its easy to miss, but it clearly implies that the British government's plan was to capture the sole right to sell Axonite.

This may be liberal moralism (isolationism? profiteering? tut tut!), and it may be unrealistic (the U.N. isn't generally prone to demanding free, worldwide distribution of valuable substances)... but it at least raises the issue of nation states trying to corner and capture resources, and of control over global supplies of such resources conferring economic power.  And it doesn't depict the British state as either morally impeccable or morally neutral in the face of such opportunities.  On the contrary, it depicts the British state as cynically (if shambolically) conspiratorial in its efforts to seize and hold such an opportunity.  The aim of the state is to exploit the commercial advantages and economic power conferred by a valuable commodity (a commodity, moreover, that seems to represent capital itself - see below).  Edge of Darkness, this ain't... but it may actually be the most overtly negative portrayal of the British state in Doctor Who until 'Turn Left'.

This, by itself, is nowhere near enough to invoke the tentacles.  But there's more.


Get on Your Bike and Find Work

'Claws' raises the issue of poverty, by implication and explicitly.  Famine is mentioned several times.  The idea mooted by some of the characters is that Axonite will help to feed the starving millions by vastly increasing food stocks.  Of course, it's also strongly implied that this will come at a price - if it happens at all - if Chinn and his bunch manage to grab Axonite for the exclusive control of the British state.  When Chinn gives the Axons his assurance that Axonite will spread around the globe, he's betting that the globe will pay to get it.  (We'll come back to this.)  This all bubbles along beneath the surface of the story, but there is a shot in Episode One that threatens - albeit very faintly - to raise it to the surface along with some very awkward questions.  It's this one:

Let's take stock of this image.  A homeless man, clearly implied to be mentally ill, who has just been seen rummaging around in a rubbish dump, is out in the cold... next to a nuclear power station.  Winser's reactor alone is later said to have cost £50 Million.  So, the British state can afford to spend that kind of money on nuclear power, but it can't stop the kind of poverty that puts someone like Josh outside, without shelter, in freezing "freak weather conditions".  Ah, but the reactor is supplying energy to vast swathes of Britain!  Yeah... but if you haven't got a home, you haven't got any way of enjoying any of that energy, have you?  Josh has to create his own energy with his own generator: pedals.  But even his bike is useless.  The problem with Josh is that he is worth nothing to anyone powerful.  He's unprofitable.  Axos doesn't even get much sustenance out of consuming him.  The Axons say it themselves when they analyse him: "this specimen is valueless".

Later, of course, Axonite meshes itself with the reactor to the point where they seem to merge.  It is a miracle power-source that hides the deadly potential for mass destruction.  Later still, the Nuton Power Complex explodes.  There is clearly some queasiness about nuclear power submerged in Axonite.

Once again, don't misunderstand me.  I'm not saying any of this constitutes angry political comment.  It does not.

The lead characters casually saunter back - unprotected - into the wreckage of the reactor plant after it has exploded, which takes the edge off any anxieties the story might seem to have about nuclear power, even nullifying the effect of the Master's dry remarks about "sticky tape on the windows", which parody the farcical advice people used to get given about What to Do in the Event of a Nuclear Holocaust.

Meanwhile, Josh is depicted as a comedy character.  He jabbers unintelligible 'yokel' gibberish and puts up his fists at Axos.  He's a comedy nutter, backed by cutesy Steptoe & Son-esque music.  We're evidently supposed to find him funny.  (Oh yeah, homelessness - what a giggle.)  He's a parodic figure.  He serves to neutralise and naturalize poverty, to make it seem like something amusing that only happens to crazy old drunks.  Such people (whisper it) have brought it on themselves and (whisper it) prefer being homeless, which is a kind of freedom.  And all that bollocks.

However, the only thing that makes Josh so 'safe' is the tone the story takes with him.  Changing the incidental music alone could easily transform him from a figure of fun to one of pathos.  Then, the sight of him freezing his nuts off in an icy lake, a few miles away from a colossally expensive nuclear power plant (which later explodes), while the British government connives to gain exclusive control and profits from an even more deadly source of power, would have an altogether different effect.  We might even be tempted to connect Josh's condition with that of all those hungry people who haunt this story at the extreme edges.


Planet of Gold

At his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, Philip Sandifer identifies 'Claws' as utilising... well... the horror of Glam rock (as someone else once put it).

Glam rock... is in part about taking the opulence of conspicuous consumption and rearranging it into the wrong aesthetic. It's all the over the top excess of the luxury associated with power and authority, except it's all put together pointlessly and haphazardly. It revels in decadence and consumption while denying the systems that ostensibly justify that behavior in society.

Does The Claws of Axos follow this approach? Largely, yes. On the one level, the pleasure of The Claws of Axos is a revelry in spectacle and glitz. We are meant to enjoy its images for their own sake. On the other hand, look at its ostensible plot, which is a straightforward anti-consumerist parable. The Axons are beautiful creatures of gold who offer untold wealth and then drain the world of its resources. But look, these two things don't go together at all. The story is simultaneously reveling in superficial images and warning of their malign influence.

But this isn't a contradiction or a case of sloppy and incoherent execution. This is what concern about the rise of a purely image-based culture of spectacle (which was one of the major concerns of the Situationalist International in France in '68) looked like in 1971. The critique of images was phrased in an image-based, superficial form. The Claws of Axos is designed to make the viewer feel uncomfortable about the pleasure they are taking in the object. It's constantly reveling in images that are not fun but rather lurid and unnerving - images that are over the top and unlike what things should look like - while simultaneously cautioning us about the very pleasure it is taking.

He goes on to say other interesting things about Pertwee as playing a Hero, a fundamentally consumerist role where the male lead is commodified for the audience's enjoyment... except that, in 'Claws', he is a grotesque amidst a cast of unchanging and functional stock characters who always react the same way.  Thus Pertwee ends up unwittingly playing a joke version of this Hero.  His Doctor becomes a kind of Glam subversion, revelling in outrageous behaviour, flouncy togs and bourgeois ostentation while simultaneously losing the legitimacy that makes such things work they way they're superficially supposed to.

But the bit I'm interested in is Sandifer's reference to Guy Debord's idea about the Society of the Spectacle.  I wont linger over this here (how it relates to Doctor Who - and film/TV SF/fantasy generally - is a whole separate series of posts in itself).  Here's the book itself; here's [PDF] the best intro to it I've ever read.

However, I think Debord can lead us to something fundamental about what Axonite/Axos is.

Early on in Society of the Spectacle, Debord delivers this crucial disclaimer: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation between people, mediated by images."  Debord locates the spectacle in commodity fetishism.  The spectacle is "the main production of present-day society" and "is the image of the ruling economy".  It "subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them."  It is "the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers."  Just as Marx wrote that capital is the material expression of social relationships of production, so Debord says that the spectacle is the expression in images of material relationships of production.  For Debord, the spectacle is the way modern society expresses the concentration of capital.

Now, Sandifer's interest is in how the story itself uses spectacle strategically.  I'm more interested in how, within the frame of the story, Axos uses/is spectacle.  When the Axons offer the humans their most tempting aspect, they personate as images that embody various seductive elements of Western heritage and capitalist ideology.  They represent themselves as a patriarchal nuclear family (post-nuclear, more like... as someone once said).  According to Miles and Wood, the script described the Axons who greet the humans as looking like "the adman's dream Coca-Cola family".  They are commodifying themselves and their image for the humans' consumption, drawing on ideals of consumer culture.  These ideals are themselves drawn from older - sometimes classic or neoclassical - tropes about beauty, health, normalcy, etc.  The Axons actively employ classical motifs: their slender bodies, sculpted hair and blank eyes make them look like Greek or Roman statues.  They use the spectacle to dazzle the humans.  Most of all, they appear - spectacularly - to be made of gold.

Gold is the ultimate symbol of wealth.  Even with the days of the Gold Standard long gone, gold prices still have a great effect upon the world economy, heavily influencing currency rates, especially in Asia and Australasia.  Its symbolic weight is enormous.  It is associated with plenty, wealth, power, pleasure, conspicuous consumption, health, purity... but it is also tarnished with the dirt of history, of the Gold Rush and other such examples of acquisitiveness which devastated native peoples and raised cities full of miners and brothels and gambling houses, etc.  It speaks of unreasoning temptation, of a rush to gain.

Gold also stands for money, the 'universal equivalent', the commodity that stands for and realises the respective values of all others.  Gold is not money, not anymore... but it does imply money like little else.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that, aside from deliberately using glam and glitter to ensare humans, Axos is also expressing something true about itself.  Axonite is offered as, "a gift, a payment" (in accordance with our customs).  Note that "gift" and "payment" are incompatible, even mutually exclusive terms.  It's as though the Axons do not fully understand the meaning of the word "gift", even as they go on to ask for and suggest charity.  But they are clearly offering Axonite as a payment, in return for shelter (as they claim).  Actually, they are buying human cooperation.  The spectacle of the glittering golden people expresses the fact that their entire nature is essentially monetary, commodified, capitalistic.

Axonite is inherently spectacular.  It transforms things, engorges things, shrinks things, foams, blasts, crackles and seethes.  Given that Axonite, the Axons and the Axon ship are all, essentially, the same thing, that means that everything we see inside Axos (see the pictures above) is also Axonite.  That unnerving glam rock orgy of strange flesh is all performance, spectacle... all of it, Axonite in change and motion.

In the world of Axos, everything is spectacular and everything is a commodity.  After encountering Axonite as a payment (exchange value), we are immediately shown its qualities (use value).  It can "absorb, convert, transmit and program all forms of energy".  Essentially, it can do anything.  It is omniuseful.  It is, say the Axons, "the source of all our growth technology".  Well, that sounds a helluva lot like the commodity form to me.

In our world too, everything is commodified.  Commodities can be anything and everything.  The commodity can take any form.  It can be huge or small; it can be a single bolt or an entire warship.  Commodities can absorb each other's value.  The value in the automated machinery of the production line (itself a commodity - made to be sold and bought) transfers value into the commodities produced on the production line.  (I'll have mercy on you and skip any further discussion of 'the organic constituion of capital'... except to note how interesting it is, in respect to this story, that Marx speaks of capital as being 'organic' and 'variable'.)  Commodities can transfer value.  They can be used to ship other commodities from place to place.  Commodities can transmit value.  The cable or satellite (themselves commodities) can transmit the drama (commodity) and/or the advert (the commodity that sells commodities) to the television (a commodity).  Watching the television is a person who sells their labour (commodity), gets a wage (which she uses to buy commodities) and forms part of a market based on her personal details (these markets being sold to advertisers in the form of ad space between appropriate programmes).  And so on and so on.  In a system like ours, one of generalised commodity production, the commodity can do all the things Axonite can do.  It can even engorge frogs, if you want.  Even before genetic engineering (itself heavily commodified, with patented genes, etc), the market would have found a way to breed monstrously large frogs if there'd been a way of selling them.

The humans immediately see the possible applications... which is understandable.  The Axons have offered something that humans in capitalist society understand very well.  They call Axonite "growth technology"... they mean it literally, but the humans see another kind of growth.  Economic growth.  Axonite is a new development of the productive forces, waiting to be applied to the system of commodity production.  "Unlimited food!" says Hardiman.  Now, putting aside the child-logic that assumes people starve because there's a world shortage of food, what is Hardiman really saying?  He's saying that Axonite can increase human capacity to produce... and what do humans produce in capitalism?  Commodities.  Axonite will mean that humans will produce more, bigger, better, faster, with less outlay, etc.  Even if Hardiman doesn't see this, the Doctor and Chinn certainly do... at least, in their different ways.  The Doctor doesn't usually talk about economics, so he sees the issue as one of Axonite conferring "unlimited power" of a kind he doesn't specify.  Chinn, however, immediately reacts acquisitively, nationalistically and in terms of the British state.  "We must have it," says he.  By "we" he means 'Britain'... which, of course, to him, means the British state.  Economic power is implicitly what he's thinking about.  He immediately begins trying to cut a deal for "sole distribution rights to all Axonite materials" to be "vested in the British government".  By "materials" he probably means literal materials, i.e. the stuff itself... but that doesn't stop his words sounding, nowadays, like part of an intellectual property rights contract.

Am I not overstating?  Isn't Axonite just another of those fantasy materials, like zyton-7, trisilicate, duralinium, argonite, spectrox...  well, yes and no.  You see, they are all examples of a commodity and some of them are shown to cause people and/or companies to do terrible things because they are commodities... but, with the possible exception of spectrox, none of them seem to stand for the commodity, for the commodity form itself. Axonite, however, does this through its omniusefulness, its ultra-utility, through its apparently protean nature, through its ability to be and to copy anything, through its hyper-desirability, through its resistance to analysis, and through its nature as spectacle. Like Nestene plastic (which is also spectacular and also stands for the commodity, for capital... hence the tentacles) it is autonomous, it can mass produce and re-produce, it attacks.  In one sense, it is less sharp a signifier than Auton plastic because it is not made by humans, but on the other hand there is the matter of its cyclical nature.  Auton Plastic does not circulate; Axonite does.  The Nutrition Cycle sounds very much like the circulation of capital.  The commodity dazzles, it is distributed in return for payment, it moves from hand to hand, it is shipped, it reaches every corner of the globe, increases yields and develops production, confers power and growth, achieves saturation and monopoly... and the end result is a massive collection of energy (profit) at the centre, achieved through the absorption of resources, with all the profit feeding back into the system, engorging it, enabling it to reproduce itself and start the cycle again.  Not for nothing do the Axons refer to the Nutrition Cycle also as a cycle of reproduction.  Axonite is like the commodity in that it is one aspect of an all-encompassing system, an aspect that circulates globally and 'returns with' the profit, reproducing the system in the process.

Nestene plastic is capital: labour alienated from humans, commodified and fetishized to the point of hostile autonomy.  Inside the Autons there lurk the Nestenes... i.e. within the alien/ated human images, 'Spearhead' finds capital, which manifests as incoherent tentacles.  Axos too is constituted of alien/ated human images within which there hide masses of tentacles.  Axos takes up the clues in 'Spearhead' and uses the incoherent tentacular as a spectacle in itself, but a spectacle that behaves like the commodity synthesized to the point of abstraction, which is what the commodity form is anyway: an abstraction.

Axos is capital.


Nice Tentacles, Shame About the Skull

Axos is described and depicted in many ways during this story, many of them incompatible and incoherent.  Their 'ship' (which is, of course, not actually a vessel for occupants so much as a bag of skin around a single entity) looks like a leech or a tapeworm, its opening resembling a scolex.  The thing that reaches out to grab Josh and Filer is partly a tentacle, partly a tongue, partly a stamen, with a spider on the end of it.  The interior has tendrils, eyes, fronds, membranes, claws, mouths, hard dribbles that look like scabs or dried pus, ganglions, foreskins, you name it.  Axos is an incoherent chimera.  It's a bag of bits and pieces, randomly stuck together and constantly reshuffling.  It's an obscene body landscape.  Being inside it is like being a morsel of food being digested through the internal organs of a monstrous, scrambled creature.

However, according to Miles and Wood, the original idea for the story was about "a giant skull landing in Hyde Park and offering to fulfill people's desires, for a price, by making its human-sized nerve-cells become whatever anybody wanted".

Now, I've never read that first script, but surely, inevitably, somebody would ask the Skull to use one of those "human-sized" cells to recreate a dead loved one.  Which probably wouldn't work out, I'm guessing.

This sounds like a straightforward gothic parable about the return of the repressed.  The wishes that are granted and which then prove undesirable, as in the ghost story 'The Monkey's Paw' by W. W. Jacobs.

We all know that, right up to the last minute, the story was called 'The Vampire from Space'.  The vampire being a thoroughly gothic monster.  Barry Letts changed it at the eleventh hour... apparently feeling it necessary to insert the dialogue likening Axos to a vulture in order to justify the new title.

This is almost too good to be true, from my point of view.

I've been working with China Miéville's fascinating and original thesis (see my account, here, which links to his essay) about the tentacle and skull being in "non-dialectical superposition".  They represent two conflicting ways of expressing the horrors of modernity, the gothic (hauntological) and the Weird.  The gothic is about that knowledge which haunts us even as we try to deny it; the Weird is about the lack of comprehension, the terrifyingly unknowable.  These modes do not interpenetrate, rather they oscillate back and forth.  As a result, you never get monsters that merge the skull and the octopus - skulltopuses... a combination that would otherwise seem quite obvious, given that octopuses have central bodies that are almost skull-like in shape.

In the production history of 'The Claws of Axos' we can almost see this very process of oscillation at work!

The skull is pushed out by the incoherent tentacular.

But... this isn't quite what's happening.  In his thesis, Miéville is talking about large-scale oscillations which take place across Western culture, graphics, political art and, most especially, literature.  He's talking, for the most part, about fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Moreover, 'Claws' is not a case of hauntology being outright rejected in favour of Weird opacity.  In its broadcast form, 'Claws' retains a hauntological charge.  Putting aside any possible Freudian interpretations (off the top of my head... the death wish, anybody?), Axos clearly haunts us (in that material way Who has of doing hauntology) with repressed social/political/cultural anxieties about greed, materialism, acquisitiveness, hunger, starvation, foreigners and refugees, our own prosperity, etc.  Axos even becomes semi-spectral at times, i.e. the floating disembodied heads.

While it may be a very strange, almost unprecedented creature - it really is quite hard to think where any TV viewers in 1971 would've seen anything quite like it before - Axos is still, in many ways, a vampire.  Vampire is actually a much more apposite description than Letts' implied carrion bird.  Vampires drain the life from the living.  Axos wouldn't be about to feed on a "carcass".  Axos is gothic to that extent.  It even chimes with a brilliant Marxist reading of Dracula by a guy called Moretti, who saw the fanged Count as a monster of monopoly capital, trying to takeover the world and integrate all humanity into his dominating system, opposed by the British middle classes and a professor from Holland (the home of free trade).  Marx himself was fond of comparing capital to a vampire.  Axos is also, as I've suggested above, capital.  It is a single system that wishes to circulate units of itself, in commodity form, around the world, in search of a total, global monopoly of all power and profit.

This, I think, is the key.  'Claws of Axos' uses Doctor Who's materialist method of doing the gothic and the hauntological to create a gothic monster... but finds its intended critique of greed and consumerism sliding inexorably into a gothic-style critique of capitalism... of capitalism as a destructive and vampiric system (the unitary nature of Axos makes it systemic, all its parts being aspects of itself) of commodity circulation, aided by a cynical British state.

Doctor Who, under the right-on stewardship of Barry Letts, is happier with this idea than ever before... such things were hardly even dreamt of in the 60s show until the last few seasons... but still can't fully commit to a systemic critique on this level, what with its place in the capitalist culture industry, tasked with educating the nation's goggle-eyed chidlers in the virtues of mainstream Enlightenment values and liberal bourgeois morality.  As this conflict - between ideological position and implied critique - develops, the most overt trappings of the gothic are shed and, in their place, comes a processed, stylistic, creatively misunderstood version of the Weird.  Out goes the skull that offers the barbed wishes... in come the tentacles, the claws and the strange flesh.  As with 'The Macra Terror' and 'Spearhead from Space', the themes of the story have been converging upon a point that needs to be obscured, scrambled, covered, Weirdified into incoherence... so in comes the radically incoherent monster, purloined from the Weird, the apparent opposite and antithesis of the gothic.

The connection between these two modes is never entirely severed, however.  This is not the process described by Miéville in its full sense but rather an echo if it.  The remaining connection between the gothic and the Weird is most visible in the look of the Axon 'ship'.  It looks like a leech.  It looks like a bloodsucker.  The story has found its resting point at the place where the gothic and the Weird almost meet before they repel.