Everyone is down a mine.
(Incidentally, it's funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines. I'm sure it's nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners' unions and their industry by the Tory government. Oh ho no.)
Anyway. As I say, everyone - the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato - is down a mine. And things are coming to a head. (Head. Pit-head. Geddit? Never mind. It doesn't really work anyway.)
Yes, so anyway... Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.
"Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement," says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk.
"Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals...."
There's an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.
"...the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll," the Doctor continues, "Large
quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there's a
superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so..."
"So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!" finishes Romana.
"Right. But who was the first person he met?"
"The person who held the monopoly of metal here," supplies Organon in response to the Doctor's rhetorical question.
He means Adrasta, by the way.
"Right," agrees the Doctor, "And did she put the welfare of her struggling
people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador
into a pit and threw astrologers at him."
If you don't know what that last bit means, well I'm sorry... I have limited space and no inclination to explain. What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you're not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?
What Erato didn't reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism... By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.
The funny thing is... this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history. Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged). Revolutions happen when the existing social relationships become a drag factor holding back the development of the productive forces.
To give a very crude illustration:
An opportunity comes along for a society short on metal to get lots more metal (I mean LOTS more) by entering into a trading agreement with someone who has lots of metal. If that metal-short society gets lots more metal, it can have more of the things it needs to produce stuff (like, say, farming implements... and perhaps even more complex machinery). But the society is dominated by a powerful person or layer of people - say, a feudal ruling class - whose power depends upon their near-monopoly on metal, i.e upon their ownership of the only mine. That person - let's imagine it's one person and she's a woman - is, as stated, very powerful, and is thus in a position to stymie the deal. Sometimes such a person will actually retard their own economic interests in order to cling on to older social structures that benefit them.
Adrasta - and,
by extension, the whole of feudal system on Chloris - is caught in such a
contradiction. The 'free trade monster' comes to develop the productive
forces and she has to lock him away in her mine. This is like the decadent feudal aristocracy fighting the oncoming
revolution to a bourgeois mode of production. Look also at how the story
associates the downfall of Adrasta with the end of the "dark ages".
Everyone will be happier once the new social order changes the economic
base!
The final proof that this story is about the rise of capitalism can be found in the fact that everyone on Chloris is deperate to get their hands on metal... and yet, it doesn't seem to be valuable to them in itself. Presumably, they want to trade the metal to those who have none. Metal has become a commodity, the ur-commodity, the commodity that signifies all others and realises their value. The universal equivalent. It has become, in short, capitalist money.
Of course, as I say, this is also a story from and about the rise of neoliberalism. So it's about the road out of serfdom in two senses: the sense of the original historical transition to capitalism and the rising ideology of neoliberalism. Hayekian class war, in the form of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, was (in rhetoric if not always in practice) about supposedly liberating money and trade from the protectionism and monopoly of an old system.
From that semi-rational but increasingly hegemonic standpoint, Adrasta isn't a fedual seigneur... she's Jim Callaghan.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label creature from the pit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creature from the pit. Show all posts
Sunday, 17 November 2013
Friday, 27 January 2012
Skulltopus 7: Tentacle, Plastic and Bone
The first fully-fledged tentacular monster in Doctor Who - in the senses of being both properly cephalopodic and of being a central monstrous antagonist of the Doctor's - is the Nestene entity at the end of 'Spearhead from Space'. That's seven years in before the show does a proper tentacular monster with real plot significance.
Apart from 'Image of the Fendahl' (which we'll get to one day) and the Cyber-head in 'The Pandorica Opens', 'Spearhead from Space' is also the closest Doctor Who has ever come to merging or (horrid word coming up, but needs must...) juxtaposing the skull and the tentacle. If you don't know why I think that's significant, please go back and read my other Skulltopus posts, starting here.
The Nestenes manifest as a tank full of tentacles...
...inside which we can see a pulsing, vaguely obscene-looking anus/oesophagus/lung thing. Meanwhile, the same story's main images of the monstrous are unfinished-looking plastic replicas of human beings. There is something faintly but definitely skull-like about their faces, especially when they're not wearing wigs.
If I were writing an Auton story now, my first priority would be the creation of a way for the tentacles and the plastic to co-reside in the same entity. This never happens in 'Spearhead', but the Autons do stand and wait in the room where the Nestene tentacled thing hides. At the end of the story, Channing reverts to a cruder Auton-form (once again making the Auton face skull-like, in that its appearance is linked to death in the more sophisticated Nestene replicas). A line of green matter is spattered on the dead and reverted Channing's plastic face.
This is the closest that the plastic gets to merging with the alien flesh. The proximity of the plastic skull and the green organic squidgy creature is tantalising.
It Adds Up
Doctor Who - because of its (spurious) materialist/empiricist/educational remit - has a set of internal rules that generally make the explicitly supernatural off-limits. The show tends to have been made with the intention of at least outwardly championing the Enlightenment values and certainties. As I argued here, this self-imposed attempt to foreclose upon the supernatural guides the show towards material (and materialist) monsters.
However, owing to the converging influences of children's fiction, mythological narrative (to which both SF and kid's adventure fiction are much indebted) and the gothic (usually mediated through 20th century popular horror, most especially Universal and Hammer monster flicks), the show simultaneously inherits an underlying magical conception of reality and a tendency to make its monsters metaphorical and hauntological (if not usually spectral in the full sense), i.e. haunting us with the 'repressed'.
Add the influence of 'soft' social SF literature, the prevailing 'lefty liberal' ethos among BBC creative types (which Barry Letts has spoken about) and the social context of pre-Thatcher Britain (in which there prevailed a broad 'liberal' socio-economic consensus), and you get a show that ends up representing this or that material nightmare of modernity in a great, mostly-liberal, allegorical morality play for kids.
We end up with loads of stories about hi-tech war, totalitarianism, industrial genocide, biological racism, commercial slavery, etc. Yet these are all modern phenomena, products of the industrial age, thus - in the analysis that I accept - products of capitalism... and that's without going into how capitalism actively generates and even needs them.
The show keeps harping on about issues that, in the end, trace back to the capitalist system... but this issue is usually not noticed and certainly should not be acknowledged, even when it becomes - as it sometimes does - imminent.
The show is, ultimately, a product of capitalism, even if, for decades, it was relatively independent of the stifling atmosphere of commodification produced by the system, owing to its being produced by a relatively independent 'public service broadcaster' with a social remit other than profit. (By the way... this was always partial and compromised. The Daleks saw to it that the show survived because they were an instant hit and were thus instantly marketable. We all know that merchandise has been produced off the back of Who by the truckload. The BBC was never any kind of pure, totally non-commercial attempt at a functionalist, benevolent, state-run industry. Only people ill-informed enough to think 'socialism' means state control of society could imagine that such a creature had, for good or ill, ever once existed at Broadcasting House.)
Doctor Who is part of the capitalist culture industry, with a very distinct niche within it. Moreover, no amount of 'liberal' socio-economic consensus or 'lefty liberal' internal ethos can, on their own, amount to a deliberate, radical, structural critique of capitalism. However, there can come a point where the liberal complaints and anxieties stack up in such a way that capitalism becomes the elephant... or perhaps, the giant squid... in the room.
Vernacular Tentacular
I think that, starting with 'Spearhead from Space', Doctor Who starts bringing the tentacular into play when it can no longer entirely put off a confrontation with something that it usually avoids and omits, something that it doesn't want to face but to which it keeps being lead back... namely, capitalism. Not greedy individual capitalists, not evil businessmen, not corrupt businesses, not evil corporations... but capitalism as an exploitative social system. 70s Doctor Who, uses the tentacular monster as a way of semiotically evading - and, in a dialectical / paradoxical way, also meaning - capitalism as a system which links and/or causes different forms of oppression.
In a children's adventure series, one which fulfills a very distinct role in the culture industry and in mainstream mass popular culture, there are certain things which cannot be talked about... capitalism as a systemic whole, with exploitation, racism and imperialism woven inextricably into its essential structure, is untouchable and unmentionable. And yet, obsessed as it is with the mightmares of modernity, how can Doctor Who always manage to leave it unmentioned? It frequently finds itself sliding towards this danger zone. In the 70s especially, when this happens, tentacles usually appear.
According to China Miéville (see my account here), tentacles entered the Western tradition - ushered in by that style / affect / trend known as the Weird - as a deliberately incoherent, unprecedented and unfreighted 'novum', a scream of meaningless horror and incomprehension at the oncoming collapse of enlightenment certainties brought by the crises of late 19th / early 20th century modernity. Doctor Who somehow misappropriates the tentacle. The Weird use of the tentacular is, by Miéville's account, as a signifier for the meaningless, the indescribable, the incoherent, the incomprehensible, the unrecognisable. Who creatively misunderstands it, pressing it into service as a way of obfuscating capitalism whenever it starts to notice that it is a systemic generator of modern nightmares, whenever its own metaphorical and hauntological style threatens to produce metaphors that are too penetrating about where modern nightmares come from.
Tentacles and capitalism become temporarily linked in the internal language of signifiers which constitute Doctor Who. This continues as a fully-fledged semiotic connection throughout the 70s, dying out somewhat but occasionally recurring in a reduced form during the 80s and onwards. I've looked at 'The Creature from the Pit', suggesting ways in which it can be seen as terminating the semiotic connection, here.
Pre-History
I've looked at some of the early history of the octopoidal in Who here, suggesting that Terry Nation may have been responsible for laying the groundwork for a connection between tentacles and capitalism, partly by using the tentacular in something akin to its Weird 'blank' mode, partly by invoking tentacles at narrative moments where people are being exploited for labour and/or commodities. (The Animus in 'The Web Planet' is a whole different kettle of ballgames which I'll get around to one of these days.)
As times changed, protest and class struggle erupted and the swinging 60s became turbulent and, at times, revolutionary. In 1967, Doctor Who tries for the first time to engage with some of the new notions that are rocking Western society. The result is 'The Macra Terror', which features monsters which seem to genuinely experiment with merging the gothic and the Weird (see here) and which seem to express some unease with British capitalism (see here). This is the prelude.
In the high-point of the show's engagement with the radical 60s, 'The War Games' puts forward an anti-imperialist message... however, it falters into a weak reformism at the end and, crucially, fails to bring in capitalism in any way.
Automatic for the Products
And then came 'Spearhead from Space' by Robert Holmes. Holmes had already shown anti-authoritarianism of 'The Krotons' and done some riffs on mining corporations and piracy in 'The Space Pirates'. 'Spearhead' is more radical than both put together - possibly even more radical (in the sense of getting to the root of things) than 'The War Games' - even though the radical implications are almost certainly unconscious and show through very obliquely and elliptically.
I've gone into all this here, and suggested that the eruption of the tentacular at the end of 'Spearhead from Space' might be a sign of the show in flight, as it were, from a thematic convergence towards a critique of capitalism as systemically alienating, soaked in commodity fetishism, exploitative, oppressive, racist and imperialist. (If you now think I've gone mad, click the above link and see my reasoning.)
This use of the radically incoherent tentacular at the end of 'Spearhead' is reinforced (though only just) by the sequel. 'Terror of the Autons' simultaneously develops and softens much of the unease about capitalism that is submerged in the original Auton story. The implied critique of mass produced consumer culture and a representation of alienation through hostile commodities is carried over. The death in this story emanates from mass produced products, from consumer goods. 'Terror' lacks the immensely potent and oneiric spectacle of the shop-window dummies springing to life, smashing out of their windows and, bedecked in finery and price tags, strolling down the consumerist high street, surrounded by shop signs and brand names, slaughtering workers and shoppers...
...but it generalises the same nightmare. If the attack in the high street was the spearhead, this is the reign of terror. Everything plastic, everything produced, every commodity, is now out to get you. Even the promotional gifts are now likely to kill you. 'Spearhead' didn't suggest that the baby dolls made at Auto Plastics were literally dangerous. In 'Terror', the toy will spring to life and lunge at your jugular, the novelty inflatable chair will eat you alive... even your phone will strangle you. To the Master, all this death is just his way of "trying out a new product".
While wider in scope, the threat in 'Terror' seems almost comic in its clutter.
As in ‘Spearhead’, the evil nestles and coils in the factory and the businessman's office. As in ‘Spearhead’, the factory owner / manager is enslaved by mind control and colludes with the Nestenes as they mesh with his means of production. The Nestenes want to mass produce themselves and takeover the market. They also find a way in under our noses by disguising themselves within the context of policemen and police cars. Ask these bobbies where they’re taking you and you’ll find blank-faced, eyeless horrors lurking under their latex masks. They’re there to stop you opposing the immanent ascendency of the evil commodities. Even more than in 'Spearhead', uniformed officers are protectors of property.
However, the Master takes the edge off them as villains. And the way the Autons speak like robots makes them less sinister and more comprehensible.
As in 'Spearhead' hierarchy and class show themselves. The Master disguises himself as a workman; he asserts power over Rossini by pointing out that he is really Lew Russell; he hypnotises people all over the place (a new detail at this point). Rex Farrell is dominated by his father. McDermot is murdered by the Master (the title itself shows that Holmes associates evil with hierarchy) when he will not keep to his place in the company pyramid. Farrell interprets his slaughter as "termination of employment". Waged work is again much in evidence. The scientists take tea breaks and have packed lunches. The Doctor mistakes Jo for the tea lady and so treats her contemptuously, meanwhile he uses his supposedly greater intimacy with "Tubby Rowlands" to intimidate Brownrose (!). "Wrong sort of chap getting into your department these days". We all know what this is supposed to mean. Red brick oiks infiltrating the corridors that should rightly be the province of those who drifted down from the dreaming spires. (You don't have to share Paul Cornell's assessment that this makes the Third Doctor a Tory... though, in some respects...) And, of course, this kind of British class hierarchy is very much to the fore when the Doctor is visited by the Time Lord. He is dressed "incognito" as a stereotypical Threadneedle St / Whitehall toff and needles the Doctor by referring to his degree.
There are even, once again, hints that the story has noticed the racial order of capitalism. Whitey runs the factory, the radio telescope... even the circus! Meanwhile, Roy Stewart is asked back to play essentially the same racist stereotype he played in 'Tomb of the Cybermen' but this time the character - Tony - is almost a parodic version of Toberman: he is written as a circus 'Strong Man' who "don't say much"!
However, this very comic mode makes it hard for the character to have the same uneasy impact as the Asian workers making white plastic babies at the factory in 'Spearhead'.
In fact, the over-the-top, grotesque, gaudy, comedic air of the whole piece tends to soften the impact of much in the story. The Autons still look like products of human labour confronting humans as something hostile and alien, but the potential for them to form part of a systemic critique is diluted even as it is generalised. At the end of 'Spearhead', a story that seemed so quietly and unconsciously preoccupied with alienated labour, hierarchy and consumerism - and which even hinted at imperialism, and at racial and gender hierarchies - the Nestenes manifest as an incoherent but undeniably substantial mad box of tentacles. When the Nestene entity arrives and hovers over the radio telescope dish at the end of 'Terror', it retains the outline of the squid but lacks solidity and sharpness. It is less needed, so it is kept as unfocused as the rest of the story.
But then along came 'The Claws of Axos'... but that's for another time.
Dem Bones
As I've said, I think the tentacles that appear at the end of 'Spearhead' mark the moment when Doctor Who tries to obfuscate a conclusion that is haunting it. Just as they haunt us with their submerged associations, so the Autons haunt the show through which they stalk with the same associations. With their skull-like faces, they are very gothic, very hauntological (in that material way that Who does hauntology). Yet the end up serving the quasi-Weird, the incoherent tentacular. They get close to their octopoidal master but never merge with it. As China Miéville predicts, the skull (gothic) and the tentacle (Weird) cannot merge, even when they try. The tentacle rejects the haunting message of the skull. And yet, tentacles keep turning up in 70s Who when the show notices capitalism. I've written elsewhere about how 'The Creature from the Pit' terminates this connection. Well, there's something else to note about that: there are skulls in that story. Indeed, they litter the pit in which the creature is kept. Organon uses as skull as a candle holder.
It's almost like the gothic is reasserting itself even as the quasi-Weird is shown the door.
Apart from 'Image of the Fendahl' (which we'll get to one day) and the Cyber-head in 'The Pandorica Opens', 'Spearhead from Space' is also the closest Doctor Who has ever come to merging or (horrid word coming up, but needs must...) juxtaposing the skull and the tentacle. If you don't know why I think that's significant, please go back and read my other Skulltopus posts, starting here.
The Nestenes manifest as a tank full of tentacles...
 |
| Yes Jon, pull a comedy face and go cross-eyed. That's the perfect way to express mortal terror. |
...inside which we can see a pulsing, vaguely obscene-looking anus/oesophagus/lung thing. Meanwhile, the same story's main images of the monstrous are unfinished-looking plastic replicas of human beings. There is something faintly but definitely skull-like about their faces, especially when they're not wearing wigs.
 |
| Note especially the empty eye-holes, a detail lost in subsequent appearances. |
If I were writing an Auton story now, my first priority would be the creation of a way for the tentacles and the plastic to co-reside in the same entity. This never happens in 'Spearhead', but the Autons do stand and wait in the room where the Nestene tentacled thing hides. At the end of the story, Channing reverts to a cruder Auton-form (once again making the Auton face skull-like, in that its appearance is linked to death in the more sophisticated Nestene replicas). A line of green matter is spattered on the dead and reverted Channing's plastic face.
 |
| Bless you. |
This is the closest that the plastic gets to merging with the alien flesh. The proximity of the plastic skull and the green organic squidgy creature is tantalising.
It Adds Up
Doctor Who - because of its (spurious) materialist/empiricist/educational remit - has a set of internal rules that generally make the explicitly supernatural off-limits. The show tends to have been made with the intention of at least outwardly championing the Enlightenment values and certainties. As I argued here, this self-imposed attempt to foreclose upon the supernatural guides the show towards material (and materialist) monsters.
However, owing to the converging influences of children's fiction, mythological narrative (to which both SF and kid's adventure fiction are much indebted) and the gothic (usually mediated through 20th century popular horror, most especially Universal and Hammer monster flicks), the show simultaneously inherits an underlying magical conception of reality and a tendency to make its monsters metaphorical and hauntological (if not usually spectral in the full sense), i.e. haunting us with the 'repressed'.
Add the influence of 'soft' social SF literature, the prevailing 'lefty liberal' ethos among BBC creative types (which Barry Letts has spoken about) and the social context of pre-Thatcher Britain (in which there prevailed a broad 'liberal' socio-economic consensus), and you get a show that ends up representing this or that material nightmare of modernity in a great, mostly-liberal, allegorical morality play for kids.
We end up with loads of stories about hi-tech war, totalitarianism, industrial genocide, biological racism, commercial slavery, etc. Yet these are all modern phenomena, products of the industrial age, thus - in the analysis that I accept - products of capitalism... and that's without going into how capitalism actively generates and even needs them.
The show keeps harping on about issues that, in the end, trace back to the capitalist system... but this issue is usually not noticed and certainly should not be acknowledged, even when it becomes - as it sometimes does - imminent.
The show is, ultimately, a product of capitalism, even if, for decades, it was relatively independent of the stifling atmosphere of commodification produced by the system, owing to its being produced by a relatively independent 'public service broadcaster' with a social remit other than profit. (By the way... this was always partial and compromised. The Daleks saw to it that the show survived because they were an instant hit and were thus instantly marketable. We all know that merchandise has been produced off the back of Who by the truckload. The BBC was never any kind of pure, totally non-commercial attempt at a functionalist, benevolent, state-run industry. Only people ill-informed enough to think 'socialism' means state control of society could imagine that such a creature had, for good or ill, ever once existed at Broadcasting House.)
Doctor Who is part of the capitalist culture industry, with a very distinct niche within it. Moreover, no amount of 'liberal' socio-economic consensus or 'lefty liberal' internal ethos can, on their own, amount to a deliberate, radical, structural critique of capitalism. However, there can come a point where the liberal complaints and anxieties stack up in such a way that capitalism becomes the elephant... or perhaps, the giant squid... in the room.
Vernacular Tentacular
I think that, starting with 'Spearhead from Space', Doctor Who starts bringing the tentacular into play when it can no longer entirely put off a confrontation with something that it usually avoids and omits, something that it doesn't want to face but to which it keeps being lead back... namely, capitalism. Not greedy individual capitalists, not evil businessmen, not corrupt businesses, not evil corporations... but capitalism as an exploitative social system. 70s Doctor Who, uses the tentacular monster as a way of semiotically evading - and, in a dialectical / paradoxical way, also meaning - capitalism as a system which links and/or causes different forms of oppression.
In a children's adventure series, one which fulfills a very distinct role in the culture industry and in mainstream mass popular culture, there are certain things which cannot be talked about... capitalism as a systemic whole, with exploitation, racism and imperialism woven inextricably into its essential structure, is untouchable and unmentionable. And yet, obsessed as it is with the mightmares of modernity, how can Doctor Who always manage to leave it unmentioned? It frequently finds itself sliding towards this danger zone. In the 70s especially, when this happens, tentacles usually appear.
According to China Miéville (see my account here), tentacles entered the Western tradition - ushered in by that style / affect / trend known as the Weird - as a deliberately incoherent, unprecedented and unfreighted 'novum', a scream of meaningless horror and incomprehension at the oncoming collapse of enlightenment certainties brought by the crises of late 19th / early 20th century modernity. Doctor Who somehow misappropriates the tentacle. The Weird use of the tentacular is, by Miéville's account, as a signifier for the meaningless, the indescribable, the incoherent, the incomprehensible, the unrecognisable. Who creatively misunderstands it, pressing it into service as a way of obfuscating capitalism whenever it starts to notice that it is a systemic generator of modern nightmares, whenever its own metaphorical and hauntological style threatens to produce metaphors that are too penetrating about where modern nightmares come from.
Tentacles and capitalism become temporarily linked in the internal language of signifiers which constitute Doctor Who. This continues as a fully-fledged semiotic connection throughout the 70s, dying out somewhat but occasionally recurring in a reduced form during the 80s and onwards. I've looked at 'The Creature from the Pit', suggesting ways in which it can be seen as terminating the semiotic connection, here.
Pre-History
I've looked at some of the early history of the octopoidal in Who here, suggesting that Terry Nation may have been responsible for laying the groundwork for a connection between tentacles and capitalism, partly by using the tentacular in something akin to its Weird 'blank' mode, partly by invoking tentacles at narrative moments where people are being exploited for labour and/or commodities. (The Animus in 'The Web Planet' is a whole different kettle of ballgames which I'll get around to one of these days.)
As times changed, protest and class struggle erupted and the swinging 60s became turbulent and, at times, revolutionary. In 1967, Doctor Who tries for the first time to engage with some of the new notions that are rocking Western society. The result is 'The Macra Terror', which features monsters which seem to genuinely experiment with merging the gothic and the Weird (see here) and which seem to express some unease with British capitalism (see here). This is the prelude.
In the high-point of the show's engagement with the radical 60s, 'The War Games' puts forward an anti-imperialist message... however, it falters into a weak reformism at the end and, crucially, fails to bring in capitalism in any way.
Automatic for the Products
And then came 'Spearhead from Space' by Robert Holmes. Holmes had already shown anti-authoritarianism of 'The Krotons' and done some riffs on mining corporations and piracy in 'The Space Pirates'. 'Spearhead' is more radical than both put together - possibly even more radical (in the sense of getting to the root of things) than 'The War Games' - even though the radical implications are almost certainly unconscious and show through very obliquely and elliptically.
I've gone into all this here, and suggested that the eruption of the tentacular at the end of 'Spearhead from Space' might be a sign of the show in flight, as it were, from a thematic convergence towards a critique of capitalism as systemically alienating, soaked in commodity fetishism, exploitative, oppressive, racist and imperialist. (If you now think I've gone mad, click the above link and see my reasoning.)
This use of the radically incoherent tentacular at the end of 'Spearhead' is reinforced (though only just) by the sequel. 'Terror of the Autons' simultaneously develops and softens much of the unease about capitalism that is submerged in the original Auton story. The implied critique of mass produced consumer culture and a representation of alienation through hostile commodities is carried over. The death in this story emanates from mass produced products, from consumer goods. 'Terror' lacks the immensely potent and oneiric spectacle of the shop-window dummies springing to life, smashing out of their windows and, bedecked in finery and price tags, strolling down the consumerist high street, surrounded by shop signs and brand names, slaughtering workers and shoppers...
...but it generalises the same nightmare. If the attack in the high street was the spearhead, this is the reign of terror. Everything plastic, everything produced, every commodity, is now out to get you. Even the promotional gifts are now likely to kill you. 'Spearhead' didn't suggest that the baby dolls made at Auto Plastics were literally dangerous. In 'Terror', the toy will spring to life and lunge at your jugular, the novelty inflatable chair will eat you alive... even your phone will strangle you. To the Master, all this death is just his way of "trying out a new product".
 |
| Where was the director, that's what I want to know. |
While wider in scope, the threat in 'Terror' seems almost comic in its clutter.
As in ‘Spearhead’, the evil nestles and coils in the factory and the businessman's office. As in ‘Spearhead’, the factory owner / manager is enslaved by mind control and colludes with the Nestenes as they mesh with his means of production. The Nestenes want to mass produce themselves and takeover the market. They also find a way in under our noses by disguising themselves within the context of policemen and police cars. Ask these bobbies where they’re taking you and you’ll find blank-faced, eyeless horrors lurking under their latex masks. They’re there to stop you opposing the immanent ascendency of the evil commodities. Even more than in 'Spearhead', uniformed officers are protectors of property.
However, the Master takes the edge off them as villains. And the way the Autons speak like robots makes them less sinister and more comprehensible.
As in 'Spearhead' hierarchy and class show themselves. The Master disguises himself as a workman; he asserts power over Rossini by pointing out that he is really Lew Russell; he hypnotises people all over the place (a new detail at this point). Rex Farrell is dominated by his father. McDermot is murdered by the Master (the title itself shows that Holmes associates evil with hierarchy) when he will not keep to his place in the company pyramid. Farrell interprets his slaughter as "termination of employment". Waged work is again much in evidence. The scientists take tea breaks and have packed lunches. The Doctor mistakes Jo for the tea lady and so treats her contemptuously, meanwhile he uses his supposedly greater intimacy with "Tubby Rowlands" to intimidate Brownrose (!). "Wrong sort of chap getting into your department these days". We all know what this is supposed to mean. Red brick oiks infiltrating the corridors that should rightly be the province of those who drifted down from the dreaming spires. (You don't have to share Paul Cornell's assessment that this makes the Third Doctor a Tory... though, in some respects...) And, of course, this kind of British class hierarchy is very much to the fore when the Doctor is visited by the Time Lord. He is dressed "incognito" as a stereotypical Threadneedle St / Whitehall toff and needles the Doctor by referring to his degree.
There are even, once again, hints that the story has noticed the racial order of capitalism. Whitey runs the factory, the radio telescope... even the circus! Meanwhile, Roy Stewart is asked back to play essentially the same racist stereotype he played in 'Tomb of the Cybermen' but this time the character - Tony - is almost a parodic version of Toberman: he is written as a circus 'Strong Man' who "don't say much"!
However, this very comic mode makes it hard for the character to have the same uneasy impact as the Asian workers making white plastic babies at the factory in 'Spearhead'.
In fact, the over-the-top, grotesque, gaudy, comedic air of the whole piece tends to soften the impact of much in the story. The Autons still look like products of human labour confronting humans as something hostile and alien, but the potential for them to form part of a systemic critique is diluted even as it is generalised. At the end of 'Spearhead', a story that seemed so quietly and unconsciously preoccupied with alienated labour, hierarchy and consumerism - and which even hinted at imperialism, and at racial and gender hierarchies - the Nestenes manifest as an incoherent but undeniably substantial mad box of tentacles. When the Nestene entity arrives and hovers over the radio telescope dish at the end of 'Terror', it retains the outline of the squid but lacks solidity and sharpness. It is less needed, so it is kept as unfocused as the rest of the story.
 | |
| The fact that they couldn't afford to do this onscreen | may also have had something to do with it. |
But then along came 'The Claws of Axos'... but that's for another time.
Dem Bones
As I've said, I think the tentacles that appear at the end of 'Spearhead' mark the moment when Doctor Who tries to obfuscate a conclusion that is haunting it. Just as they haunt us with their submerged associations, so the Autons haunt the show through which they stalk with the same associations. With their skull-like faces, they are very gothic, very hauntological (in that material way that Who does hauntology). Yet the end up serving the quasi-Weird, the incoherent tentacular. They get close to their octopoidal master but never merge with it. As China Miéville predicts, the skull (gothic) and the tentacle (Weird) cannot merge, even when they try. The tentacle rejects the haunting message of the skull. And yet, tentacles keep turning up in 70s Who when the show notices capitalism. I've written elsewhere about how 'The Creature from the Pit' terminates this connection. Well, there's something else to note about that: there are skulls in that story. Indeed, they litter the pit in which the creature is kept. Organon uses as skull as a candle holder.
 |
| Maybe he was just pleased to see them. |
It's almost like the gothic is reasserting itself even as the quasi-Weird is shown the door.
Monday, 23 January 2012
Skulltopus 5: Fair Exchange, No Robbery
Erato the Tythonian in 'The Creature from the Pit' doesn't much resemble an octopus, but nevertheless he/it is a shapeless, amorphous creature that extends a probe which is (briefly) a bit tentacular... though this tends to be obscured by the fact that it also supposedly resembles a cock:
Neither seems to have been the writer's intention. Indeed, in the novelisation, it is specifically stated that "you couldn't call it a tentacle". The probe is repeatedly described in terms of hands, fingers and fists. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Erato is meant to be a kind of giant, disembodied brain.
However, the probe is a long, flexible, green, non-humanoid limb... so let's not fear to call it a quasi-tentacle, whatever Fisher says.
In any case, the Tythonian is - at least until it starts talking - reminiscent of the Weird... if only via its unstable and amorphous blobbiness.
In this post, I suggested that 'Spearhead from Space' erupts into tentacles at the end partly as a way of obscuring something else that is going on in the story, namely a convergence of various themes towards a potential critique of modern British capitalism as a system of hierarchy, racism, imperialism, sexism and exploitation. (Click the link and read it if you think I've gone mad.)
I'm planning, in forthcoming posts, to suggest that Doctor Who in the 70s adopts the tentacular as a recurring way of simultaneously fleeing from and signifying capitalism. There is a prelude to this: the Weirdish ab-crabs in 'The Macra Terror'. There's also a transitional story at the other end, just before the semiotic connection largely dies out in the 80s. This transitional story is the final story of the 70s to feature the tentacular even as a suggestion.
Transitional Form
Philip Sandifer, at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, has described 'The Creature from the Pit' as "a proper anti-capitalist screed". He describes Adrasta as "a selfish arch capitalist who is perfectly happy to thrive while everyone else suffers" and notes that Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles are wrong to write off as anachronistic the idea that Adrasta could've been intended as a Thatcher figure (the story was written during the election that she went on to win). However, his argument is considerably more sophisticated than this and rests more especially on something he identifies in the script: the subversion of the (by now) standard Doctor Who 'evil ruling class vs. rebels' trope. Sandifer identifies this story as coinciding with the great shift in the 'centre ground' of British politics that more-or-less coincided with the advent of Thatcherism.
As Sandifer develops it (ruing all the time the way that the production team managed to miss it) this relates to the way that Adrasta (evil ruling class) and Torvin (rebels) are both obsessed with getting and keeping metal. Their priorities are the same, despite their other drastic differences. Sandifer also raises the issue that, once it becomes clear that Erato isn't a 'monster', the audience might immediately suspect that the story will turn out to be about a failure of communication... but, as it turns out, Adrasta and Erato's initial communication went just fine. She didn't fail to understand him because he was a scary, huge, green blob. On the contrary, she understood him perfectly. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that his message was unwelcome to her because, as Sandifer puts it, she "was only willing to look at the world from her own capitalist perspective... Adrasta did misunderstand, but not because she didn’t recognize Erato’s individual subjectivity, but rather because she didn’t recognize that there was another way for the world to be".
I'm sympathetic to the idea that Fisher's story might, in its reduction of the obligatory 'rebels' to a bunch of thieves every bit as greedy as their planet's evil ruler, be mirroring cultural shifts in the Britain of its day. These were, after all, the early years of neoliberalism. Monetarism was on the rise (with Thatcher only its most aggressive mainstream standard bearer rather than an innovator). Keynesian certainties had dissolved. Thatcher would prove to be the gravedigger of a 'social democratic consensus' that was, by this point, already wounded and tottering. This was the broader symptom of a big downturn in working class struggle and resistance (the Miner's Strike of a few years hence would be a last roll of the dice). If post-war liberal ideas seemed a long time dead, the radicalism of 1968 seemed (paradoxically) even deader. Thatcher would go on to acquire the nickname 'Tina' for her habit of proclaiming that "There is no alternative!" She meant that there was no alternative to her Hayekian brand of class war. More broadly, the consensus seemed to be that there was no alternative to capitalism anymore. This 'capitalist realism' (as Mark Fisher has ringingly called it) is with us still... though, thankfully, in these days of Occupy Wall St., it seems to be much less hegemonic.
However, I have issues with the rest of Sandifer's account.
At the most basic level: in what way is Adrasta a capitalist? She doesn't pay any wages, produce anything, market anything, sell anything, pocket any surplus value, invest in production, etc. Meanwhile, she has serfs! Adrasta seems much more like a feudal seigneur (lots of seigneuries were run by women, especially inFrance
Adrasta used to own a viable mine (plenty of mining went on in feudal Europe) but she purposefully shuts down that operation by shutting Erato up in it, thus preserving her monopoly on metal by retarding her own ability to produce any. This is interesting, given that one factor which went into the transition from fedualism to capitalism inEurope was to do with mining. As in other fields, the technology available to miners in feudal Europe (i.e. the development of the productive forces) became a barrier or drag factor on further development. This story might just covertly acknowledge an assumption of Marxist history: that the conflict or contradiction between the forces of production and the social superstructure is part of what drives historical change. Adrasta - and, by extension, the whole of feudal system on Chloris - is caught in such a contradiction. The 'free trade monster' comes to develop the productive forces and she has to lock him away in her mine (which she has left unused and undeveloped in order to keep hold of her social power)... this is like the decadent feudal aristocracy fighting the oncoming revolution to a bourgeois mode of production. Look also at how the story associates the downfall of Adrasta with the end of the "dark ages". Everyone will be happier once the new social order changes the economic base!
I posted the above (pretty much) at Sandifer's blog and he took issue with me (and Alex Wilcock, who'd already raised similar points) on the grounds that, without money being involved, there seems to be no 'exchange value'. Rather, there is just exchange. The trade between Chloris and Tythonis seems more like barter. Ergo, this looks more like socialism (i.e. co-operative, planned production and distribution on the basis of mutual satisfaction of need) rather than 'free trade'.
These are good points. However, I think they rest upon the idea that exchange has always been as central to human societies as it is under capitalism, which isn't right. Exchange has always gone on, but was relatively peripheral to feudalism and previous modes of production. Capitalism, by contrast, is by definition a system of generalised commodity production. In other words, it is only under capitalism that most things are produced to be exchanged. The very notion of trade, intruding into the 'closed system' of feudal Chloris, carries with it the inevitable suggestion of capitalism.
What is also lacking in Sandifer's account (and, to be fair, it's almost entirely lacking from the story) is the matter of labour. Someone, somewhere, at some time, will have to work to cultivate, harvest, refine, package and ship the chlorophyll.
It's inevitably going to be the erstwhile serfs who end up doing this... and none of them are to be seen at the end, let alone in power. Even Torvin's band has disappeared. We're left with the Guardmaster and Organon apparently running things. Socialism isn't on the agenda. There is no sense in the story that class has disappeared. There's no cooperative society of free producers in evidence, or even on the cards. Even if we ignore all other considerations, and imagine the trade between Tythonis and Chloris is pure barter on the basis of mutual satisfaction of need, the idea that this would constitute anything like socialism is still inadequate, because socialism is the collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production, and so no such social condition obtains on Chloris when the Doctor leaves.
For the Chlorisians, the process of production will radically change. It will cease to be mainly about subsistence and payment of tributes to the landowner. It will become production for exchange. This is irresistibly suggestive of the whole process of 'enclosures' and what Marx called the "primitive accumulation of capital", i.e. the historical moment when feudal property relations are forcibly destroyed, common property is appropriated, the peasant is expropriated, the concentration of property into the hands of a rising bourgeois class begins and a new proletarian class begins to form.
There is also the matter of the status of metal. In Adrasta's feudal set up, the metal was valuable because it was mined and used to make useful things (i.e. blades for holding back the jungle, plough bits for cultivating the land). But this old system is changing. Crucially, there is no hint in the story that Adrasta has been producing metal for trade before the arrival of Erato. She's been producing it for agriculture, horticulture, military uses and the luxuries of the seigneur. By putting a stopper in her own mine she manages to confine Erato (and the new economic order he represents) but also sets her own system on the road to decline. When the Doctor arrives on Chloris, metal has become valuable regardless of what kind of metal it is, regardless of what shape its in, regardless of what it's used for. Everyone wants it, from Adrasta to Torvin. But why? Presumably it is being used to buy things... increasingly scarce food, perhaps, from people who need metal in order to scratch some rump agriculture and/or farming together. Metal has thus acquired not just use value but also exchange value. It has become, in effect, a modern bourgeois commodity, arising from the decline of the feudal mode of production! Moreover, it has (or so I deduce) started to behave like money, the 'universal equivalent', the commodity the equals all others. Erato's new economic order will fit into and develop these nascent tendencies. He will buy chlorophyll with metal. If the new trading arrangement leads to a surplus of metal on Chloris, the value of metal will become increasingly detached from scarcity and take on even more of the features of the currency as commodity.
All this, by itself, isn't capitalism... but it all looks highly reminiscent of the historical transition between feudal and bourgeois modes of production. Adrasta's efforts to prop up her old system involve an attempt to retard the emergence of a new set of economic arrangements based on commodity production and exchange rather than on the feudal cultivation of land by serfs. So we end up back where we started. With the Tythonian as heralding the break up of feudalism and the onrush of capitalism.
Of course, much of the above is improvisation on the basis of scant information in the text and, as such, cannot really be used to work out what the text itself is 'saying'.
There is so little extraneous information in the text itself that we must fall back onto essentials. Let's quote Sandifer again. This story is about
But isn't that the liberal capitalist argument to a tee? Free trade is a natural, harmonious, optimal way of addressing natural imbalances and ensuring the maximum happiness (and utility) for all... once obstacles like obstinate, reactionary local elites have been swept aside. That 'The Creature from the Pit' fails to see the flaws and hypocrisies in this way of looking at things only shows that this is a story in which the basic ideological arguments of free trade are taken as the central moral truth of things.
This was an extremely fashionable delusion that was rising to a new status of cultural hegemony when 'Creature from the Pit' was made and aired. The fetishizing of the market, of trade, of money... the pretence that free trade was the way to liberalize society, bring down old elites, end the 'dark ages'... the notion that the logic of the market applied to society was the way to bring harmony where there was discord, truth where there was error and hope where there was despair.
The Creature from Grantham
This story is where Doctor Who resolves and ends its association of the Weirdish and the tentacular with capitalism, an association that recurred several times throughout the 70s (and which I'll go into in further detail in a forthcoming post).
In 'The Creature from the Pit', capitalism is not a systemic generator of modern nightmares. It is not something that the show wants to flee from noticing or acknowledging. It can be signfied without any evasion or danger of condemnation. So, the quasi-tentacle resolves into something uniform, coherent, a jelly with a voice, a mind (it is a giant brain), a high-status personage with a prestigious official job that is represented as laudable and well-meaning. The free trade monster starts out as apparently incomprehensible and becomes something comprehensible, loquacious, affable, helpful... something the heralds a new and better order based on an idealised view of commodity exchange.
This story is Doctor Who apparently making peace with capitalism in the form of a panglossian view of free trade vs. reactionary old forms of obsolete feudal elitism, with the market as the road away from serfdom. That this characterisation of Thatcherism is spurious (Thatcher was nothing if not a statist and a protector of ossified old privilege) makes no odds. It's a self-characterization that is an inherent aspect of Thatcherism as a brand of conservatism. Look at Murdoch, who characterized himself as anti-elites, attacking unions on the grounds of breaking up restricted practices. Look at nationalization promoted as a way of democratizing and increasing efficiency. All that bunk. 'The Creature from the Pit' is Who buying into that consensus that Sandifer was talking about, not critiqueing it.
The old tentacle connection is finally vanquished when the show, in tune with its times, starts to feel able to represent capitalism as a social good rather than a source of unease.
 |
| If this picture reminds you of your genitals, seek immediate medical advice. |
Neither seems to have been the writer's intention. Indeed, in the novelisation, it is specifically stated that "you couldn't call it a tentacle". The probe is repeatedly described in terms of hands, fingers and fists. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Erato is meant to be a kind of giant, disembodied brain.
However, the probe is a long, flexible, green, non-humanoid limb... so let's not fear to call it a quasi-tentacle, whatever Fisher says.
In any case, the Tythonian is - at least until it starts talking - reminiscent of the Weird... if only via its unstable and amorphous blobbiness.
In this post, I suggested that 'Spearhead from Space' erupts into tentacles at the end partly as a way of obscuring something else that is going on in the story, namely a convergence of various themes towards a potential critique of modern British capitalism as a system of hierarchy, racism, imperialism, sexism and exploitation. (Click the link and read it if you think I've gone mad.)
I'm planning, in forthcoming posts, to suggest that Doctor Who in the 70s adopts the tentacular as a recurring way of simultaneously fleeing from and signifying capitalism. There is a prelude to this: the Weirdish ab-crabs in 'The Macra Terror'. There's also a transitional story at the other end, just before the semiotic connection largely dies out in the 80s. This transitional story is the final story of the 70s to feature the tentacular even as a suggestion.
Transitional Form
Philip Sandifer, at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, has described 'The Creature from the Pit' as "a proper anti-capitalist screed". He describes Adrasta as "a selfish arch capitalist who is perfectly happy to thrive while everyone else suffers" and notes that Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles are wrong to write off as anachronistic the idea that Adrasta could've been intended as a Thatcher figure (the story was written during the election that she went on to win). However, his argument is considerably more sophisticated than this and rests more especially on something he identifies in the script: the subversion of the (by now) standard Doctor Who 'evil ruling class vs. rebels' trope. Sandifer identifies this story as coinciding with the great shift in the 'centre ground' of British politics that more-or-less coincided with the advent of Thatcherism.
The key thing is… the way in which both sides of an apparent political debate were in one sense indistinguishable because they both adhered to the same premise... [For example] the way in which the trade unions, Callaghan, and Thatcher all took for granted that maximizing profit was the right thing to do. The idea that they were opposing sides in many key ways serves more to cut other perspectives out of the debate entirely than it does to actually describe a fundamental philosophical difference between them. And this sort of false opposition is exactly what Fisher is trying to do with the culture of Chloris...
As Sandifer develops it (ruing all the time the way that the production team managed to miss it) this relates to the way that Adrasta (evil ruling class) and Torvin (rebels) are both obsessed with getting and keeping metal. Their priorities are the same, despite their other drastic differences. Sandifer also raises the issue that, once it becomes clear that Erato isn't a 'monster', the audience might immediately suspect that the story will turn out to be about a failure of communication... but, as it turns out, Adrasta and Erato's initial communication went just fine. She didn't fail to understand him because he was a scary, huge, green blob. On the contrary, she understood him perfectly. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that his message was unwelcome to her because, as Sandifer puts it, she "was only willing to look at the world from her own capitalist perspective... Adrasta did misunderstand, but not because she didn’t recognize Erato’s individual subjectivity, but rather because she didn’t recognize that there was another way for the world to be".
I'm sympathetic to the idea that Fisher's story might, in its reduction of the obligatory 'rebels' to a bunch of thieves every bit as greedy as their planet's evil ruler, be mirroring cultural shifts in the Britain of its day. These were, after all, the early years of neoliberalism. Monetarism was on the rise (with Thatcher only its most aggressive mainstream standard bearer rather than an innovator). Keynesian certainties had dissolved. Thatcher would prove to be the gravedigger of a 'social democratic consensus' that was, by this point, already wounded and tottering. This was the broader symptom of a big downturn in working class struggle and resistance (the Miner's Strike of a few years hence would be a last roll of the dice). If post-war liberal ideas seemed a long time dead, the radicalism of 1968 seemed (paradoxically) even deader. Thatcher would go on to acquire the nickname 'Tina' for her habit of proclaiming that "There is no alternative!" She meant that there was no alternative to her Hayekian brand of class war. More broadly, the consensus seemed to be that there was no alternative to capitalism anymore. This 'capitalist realism' (as Mark Fisher has ringingly called it) is with us still... though, thankfully, in these days of Occupy Wall St., it seems to be much less hegemonic.
However, I have issues with the rest of Sandifer's account.
At the most basic level: in what way is Adrasta a capitalist? She doesn't pay any wages, produce anything, market anything, sell anything, pocket any surplus value, invest in production, etc. Meanwhile, she has serfs! Adrasta seems much more like a feudal seigneur (lots of seigneuries were run by women, especially in
Adrasta used to own a viable mine (plenty of mining went on in feudal Europe) but she purposefully shuts down that operation by shutting Erato up in it, thus preserving her monopoly on metal by retarding her own ability to produce any. This is interesting, given that one factor which went into the transition from fedualism to capitalism in
I posted the above (pretty much) at Sandifer's blog and he took issue with me (and Alex Wilcock, who'd already raised similar points) on the grounds that, without money being involved, there seems to be no 'exchange value'. Rather, there is just exchange. The trade between Chloris and Tythonis seems more like barter. Ergo, this looks more like socialism (i.e. co-operative, planned production and distribution on the basis of mutual satisfaction of need) rather than 'free trade'.
These are good points. However, I think they rest upon the idea that exchange has always been as central to human societies as it is under capitalism, which isn't right. Exchange has always gone on, but was relatively peripheral to feudalism and previous modes of production. Capitalism, by contrast, is by definition a system of generalised commodity production. In other words, it is only under capitalism that most things are produced to be exchanged. The very notion of trade, intruding into the 'closed system' of feudal Chloris, carries with it the inevitable suggestion of capitalism.
What is also lacking in Sandifer's account (and, to be fair, it's almost entirely lacking from the story) is the matter of labour. Someone, somewhere, at some time, will have to work to cultivate, harvest, refine, package and ship the chlorophyll.
It's inevitably going to be the erstwhile serfs who end up doing this... and none of them are to be seen at the end, let alone in power. Even Torvin's band has disappeared. We're left with the Guardmaster and Organon apparently running things. Socialism isn't on the agenda. There is no sense in the story that class has disappeared. There's no cooperative society of free producers in evidence, or even on the cards. Even if we ignore all other considerations, and imagine the trade between Tythonis and Chloris is pure barter on the basis of mutual satisfaction of need, the idea that this would constitute anything like socialism is still inadequate, because socialism is the collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production, and so no such social condition obtains on Chloris when the Doctor leaves.
For the Chlorisians, the process of production will radically change. It will cease to be mainly about subsistence and payment of tributes to the landowner. It will become production for exchange. This is irresistibly suggestive of the whole process of 'enclosures' and what Marx called the "primitive accumulation of capital", i.e. the historical moment when feudal property relations are forcibly destroyed, common property is appropriated, the peasant is expropriated, the concentration of property into the hands of a rising bourgeois class begins and a new proletarian class begins to form.
There is also the matter of the status of metal. In Adrasta's feudal set up, the metal was valuable because it was mined and used to make useful things (i.e. blades for holding back the jungle, plough bits for cultivating the land). But this old system is changing. Crucially, there is no hint in the story that Adrasta has been producing metal for trade before the arrival of Erato. She's been producing it for agriculture, horticulture, military uses and the luxuries of the seigneur. By putting a stopper in her own mine she manages to confine Erato (and the new economic order he represents) but also sets her own system on the road to decline. When the Doctor arrives on Chloris, metal has become valuable regardless of what kind of metal it is, regardless of what shape its in, regardless of what it's used for. Everyone wants it, from Adrasta to Torvin. But why? Presumably it is being used to buy things... increasingly scarce food, perhaps, from people who need metal in order to scratch some rump agriculture and/or farming together. Metal has thus acquired not just use value but also exchange value. It has become, in effect, a modern bourgeois commodity, arising from the decline of the feudal mode of production! Moreover, it has (or so I deduce) started to behave like money, the 'universal equivalent', the commodity the equals all others. Erato's new economic order will fit into and develop these nascent tendencies. He will buy chlorophyll with metal. If the new trading arrangement leads to a surplus of metal on Chloris, the value of metal will become increasingly detached from scarcity and take on even more of the features of the currency as commodity.
All this, by itself, isn't capitalism... but it all looks highly reminiscent of the historical transition between feudal and bourgeois modes of production. Adrasta's efforts to prop up her old system involve an attempt to retard the emergence of a new set of economic arrangements based on commodity production and exchange rather than on the feudal cultivation of land by serfs. So we end up back where we started. With the Tythonian as heralding the break up of feudalism and the onrush of capitalism.
Of course, much of the above is improvisation on the basis of scant information in the text and, as such, cannot really be used to work out what the text itself is 'saying'.
There is so little extraneous information in the text itself that we must fall back onto essentials. Let's quote Sandifer again. This story is about
two planets that have an imbalance of resources are rectifying the imbalance through cooperation. It's not just an economic arrangement, but an arrangement between two planets with the wrong populations for their resources to redress a natural balance.
But isn't that the liberal capitalist argument to a tee? Free trade is a natural, harmonious, optimal way of addressing natural imbalances and ensuring the maximum happiness (and utility) for all... once obstacles like obstinate, reactionary local elites have been swept aside. That 'The Creature from the Pit' fails to see the flaws and hypocrisies in this way of looking at things only shows that this is a story in which the basic ideological arguments of free trade are taken as the central moral truth of things.
This was an extremely fashionable delusion that was rising to a new status of cultural hegemony when 'Creature from the Pit' was made and aired. The fetishizing of the market, of trade, of money... the pretence that free trade was the way to liberalize society, bring down old elites, end the 'dark ages'... the notion that the logic of the market applied to society was the way to bring harmony where there was discord, truth where there was error and hope where there was despair.
The Creature from Grantham
This story is where Doctor Who resolves and ends its association of the Weirdish and the tentacular with capitalism, an association that recurred several times throughout the 70s (and which I'll go into in further detail in a forthcoming post).
In 'The Creature from the Pit', capitalism is not a systemic generator of modern nightmares. It is not something that the show wants to flee from noticing or acknowledging. It can be signfied without any evasion or danger of condemnation. So, the quasi-tentacle resolves into something uniform, coherent, a jelly with a voice, a mind (it is a giant brain), a high-status personage with a prestigious official job that is represented as laudable and well-meaning. The free trade monster starts out as apparently incomprehensible and becomes something comprehensible, loquacious, affable, helpful... something the heralds a new and better order based on an idealised view of commodity exchange.
This story is Doctor Who apparently making peace with capitalism in the form of a panglossian view of free trade vs. reactionary old forms of obsolete feudal elitism, with the market as the road away from serfdom. That this characterisation of Thatcherism is spurious (Thatcher was nothing if not a statist and a protector of ossified old privilege) makes no odds. It's a self-characterization that is an inherent aspect of Thatcherism as a brand of conservatism. Look at Murdoch, who characterized himself as anti-elites, attacking unions on the grounds of breaking up restricted practices. Look at nationalization promoted as a way of democratizing and increasing efficiency. All that bunk. 'The Creature from the Pit' is Who buying into that consensus that Sandifer was talking about, not critiqueing it.
The old tentacle connection is finally vanquished when the show, in tune with its times, starts to feel able to represent capitalism as a social good rather than a source of unease.
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