"Being without becoming [is] an ontological absurdity" says the Doctor in 'The Time Monster'.
He's talking about time, about the fact that time is - by definition - a process of change. Time is what entropy looks like to those of us in the midst of it. Entropy increases, thus time's arrow goes forward. 'Becoming' is just a way of saying 'change'. Everything is always in the process of becoming something else. Every apple is in the process of becoming a rotten apple, or an eaten apple, or seeds resown. 'Ontology' is the fancy name used by philosophers to mean the study of what it means for things to exist, to be real. The Doctor is saying: "the idea of things being frozen in time is inherently absurd because things that don't change effectively don't exist".
Though, of course, in 'The Time Monster', things and people do get frozen in time. The story shows us something happening which has already been established as impossible. It's almost as if we are being explicitly invited to read the story metaphorically.
This is something that doesn't quite happen in 'The Three Doctors'. As Phil Sandifer has said, the story should be set in the Land of Fiction. The moments when Omega materialises an ornate chair from nowhere, and when the Doctors make a normal door appear amidst all the bubbly orangely madness, are moments when we see how Omega's realm should have been done - as an openly metaphorical realm of familiar imagery surreally employed. We have a similar problem in 'The Trial of a Time Lord'. Clearly the entire trial should have occured in the Matrix, in the realm of metaphor, in the nest of sinister and surreal Victoriana, instead of in a bog-standard courtroom with some spangly bits stuck on because it's in space. Omega's realm should have been such a place. It should have been like the Land of Fiction, or Goth's Matrix, or the Valeyard's Matrix, or Heaven in A Matter of Life and Death. We are, after all, clearly engaged in a life and death metaphor here, with things disappearing from our world and being stranded in another, and then hauntingly returning to attack our world. However, as I say, 'The Three Doctors' attempts to foreclose on such readings by stubbornly insisting upon sciency-sounding jargon. Black holes, anti-matter, etc. The metaphorical possibilities of being transported from one realm of reality to another of unreality are shut-down (the attempt is at least made) by the technobabble about matter being processed so it can exist in a world of anti-matter.
Thing is, it never quite takes. Anti-matter is rarely used to mean anything scientific in sci-fi. The name itself is metaphor, expressing a scientific concept that is very hard to grasp in literal terms, especially for the layman. In sci-fi, 'anti-matter' is usually metaphorical. In 'Planet of Evil', anti-matter is straightforwardly hauntological! It is evil matter. Ghostly matter. Gothic matter. Hammer matter. It can infect our world, bringing ghosts with it, making jungles into haunted spaces, turning a sci-fi boffin from a Dr Jekyll into a shambling, simian Mr Hyde. In 'The Three Doctors', despite the attempt to shut down the metaphorical reading, anti-matter refers to the realm of ideas, and more particularly to the way of thinking about the world that sees ideas as primary, as more fundamentally real than material things.
As Engels pointed out, all philosophy can be divided into idealism and materialism. Idealism, in this context, refers to the notion that ideas are in some way more fundamental or more primary or more influential than matter, and that material things exist in some way 'after' ideas. Materialism, in this context, refers to the notion that material reality is more fundamental, more primary or more influential, and that ideas stem from matter rather than the other way round. In many ways, materialism has won this argument. Modern science is pretty unambiguous in its findings: ideas are products of brains, which are products of material processes. The material world existed long before anybody had any ideas about it, and would continue to exist if there were no ideas. However, it's interesting how many scientists harbour idealist conceptions in other areas. Take Richard Dawkins, for instance. In many ways, a classic example. His scientific viewpoint is decidely materialist. We don't even need to get into the old debate about whether his genes-eye-view of evolution is reductionist and determinist. We can take his own account of things at face value and declare, undoubtedly with his agreement, that his worldview is materialist rather than idealist. There is no mystical component. In the beginning there was not the word. However, in spite of himself, his ideas about memes are highly idealist. He tries to ground his view of culture in a hard-headedly materialist understanding modelled on his view of genetics, but his account flies off into the realm of idealism. Memes are themselves entirely notional units which exist only in poor-defined and fuzzy metaphorical accounts. Dawkins sees society and culture as made of such notional units (their size, complexity and nature fluctuates with the needs of his storytelling) which interact almost without human agency. They occupy human heads like germs in bodies. They replicate like bacteria in the gut. They spread like diseases. They self-organise and use people as hosts. And this dance of these selfish memes, these impersonal little idea-creatures, forms the basis of changes in human society and, ultimately, human history. They get transmitted in novels and films, etc, until they occupy enough heads to make sufficient numbers of people act in ways that change the "moral zeitgeist". It really is like computer viruses causing widespread changes in how computers work by replicating and transmitting across networks. It's an account that is as essentially mystical as it is incoherent, even as it models itself on a materialist account of biological evolution - a delicious irony coming from such a crusty so-called atheist and sceptic. Ironies pile on top of each other when Dawkins tries to use the memetic view of culture to explain the otherwise inexplicable (to him) popularity of supposedly irrational ideas... and falls directly into the most embarassingly vulgar and irrational kinds of idealist reductionism. The really interesting thing here is that Dawkins arrives at this thoroughly idealist view of society, culture and history via the route of vulgar materialism, the kind of vulgar materialism which insists upon a reductionist genes'-eye-view of evolution coupled with a reductionist view of brains as being like machines which run software. And this is where we can draw a distinction between vulgar materialism and dialectical materialism.
Dawkins' materialism is vulgarly positivist because it is based upon treating reductionism as though it is more than a tool, as though it represents something true about how the world works. Reductionism is fine as a method - it has done some wonderful heavy-lifting in the history of science. It is, essentially, the procedure of studying things by taking them apart (either literally or metaphorically) into bits and pieces and then studying the pieces in isolation to see how they work on their own. And that's fine. You can learn a lot about rivers by studying water molecules. The great mistake made by so many people is the idea - which is impliclty held often by people who would explicitly reject it if it were offered to them - that you can understand everything you need to know about rivers from the study of water molecules because rivers are essentially nothing more than aggregations of lots of water molecules. A more dialectical view of materialism would see an interrelation of material at various levels, from the molecular to the social. It would remember that rivers are also things that people use socially.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label dialectical materialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dialectical materialism. Show all posts
Friday, 31 July 2015
Thursday, 27 March 2014
Piece of Cake
Someone nice on tumblr just asked me:
My answer got a bit long, so I decided - opportunistically - to post it here.
*
I think the terms of the question are worth investigating.
What do we mean by 'failings'?
What do we mean by 'culture around it'?
Failure is, of course, subjectively judged. Something I think is bad may be seen as good - or neutral, or normal, or inescapable - by others.
It is perfectly possible for something that is a 'failure' with regards to general human wellbeing to be a 'success' for a social system. (The wellbeing of the working class, in any class society, always being more universal than that of the minority loafing class.)
Indeed, I think that if you look at the vast majority of mainstream media culture as it has existed in modern capitalist society - including and perhaps even especially with reference to narrative culture - then you see that it pretty unambiguously touts and celebrates values and/or activities that are failures when it comes to promoting general human wellbeing but successes when it comes to propping up and reproducing a social order dominated by the class that owns and controls capital.
*phew* long sentence.
This is the 'culture around it'...
BUT...
I think it's really important to realise that art doesn't just sit there surrounded by culture. It is culture.
We would expect any product to bear the hallmarks of its production, or the materials from which it was produced. It's just common sense to expect a cultural product to bear such hallmarks... and that's without looking at any of the elaborate processes by which supply, demand, distribution, advertisement, hegemony, etc winnow cultural products out of circulation, or just prevent their production in the first place.
More deeply, just as the self is not a thing that exists in the world but is rather a dialectical process that we individuate from the wider set of processes that we call the world, so is art not a thing in the world but a chosen locus of relations, inter-relations and inter-reactions.
A cultural product is, from one standpoint, an individuated unit... but that standpoint is actually a form of commodity fetishism. The cultural product as an entity that lives in the world, that says things and thinks things. Thinking about cultural products that way is inescapable to a large extent, because it's impossible for us to step outside of culture and look in.
The very fetishising of commodities which leads us create cultural products as things, and treat them like entities, is also what makes them very hard to perceive as anything else.
You could say that the entire project of modern criticism has been concerned with attempts to find ways through this maze.
And yet... the analysis which allows us to see the cultural product as a fetishised commodity, produced by a cultural industry which actively perpetuates and reproduces itself, is also the analysis which can provide a way to see the cultural product relatively clearly... and a big part of the method for doing so is also suggested by the same analysis, at least when properly applied.
There's a vulgar Marxist approach which sees the circumstances of production as deterministic of the 'meaning' of a cultural product. This, ironically enough, fails because it entails a reiteration of the exact same fetishising of commodities, not to mention a fetishising of production at the expense of other sites on the circuit of capital.
This is not a true Marxist approach because true Marxism sees commodities - indeed, capital in general - as relations rather than things (albeit relations fundamentally grounded in the material, which is to say the social). This is really what is meant by - or is at least a good demonstration of - dialectical materialism (forget about vulgarised state religions).
Luckily, this kind of vulgar Marxism is more honoured in the breach than the observance, at least outside of phone box cults or rump Stalinist states (their big cousins).
I'd argue for a dialectical-materialist way of looking at texts. That's the analysis which remembers that the text is a social relation, produced by social relations, and viewed by social relations.
This would involve such basics as:
i) always remembering that they are social products, produced for material reasons,
ii) always remembering that, in a system of generalised commodity production, such cultural products are going to be overwhelmingly produced as commodities, or subject to commodification, etc.
iii) always remembering that, "in any epoch, the dominant ideas will be the ideas of the ruling class" [approximate quote from Marx, from memory]
And:
iv) always remembering that we cannot step outside the current social relations, ideological relations or dominant hierarchies in order to, as it were, see the text and its culture from the outside, from a disengaged and impartial standpoint,
v) that we must, therefore, take sides. We must take a side simply in order to see the text anything like 'square on'. Not from an impartial standpoint, but from a standpoint which recognises that no such asocial view is even possible.
Before we can even start judging the cultural product itself, we need to accept that it exists in and as part of a matrix of social relations which are hierarchical, self-perpetuating, fetishised, but also inescapably social. We need to have a standpoint from which to judge what constitutes a 'failure'.
This, I think, is an especially pronounced need when we're talking about anything with a story. Because stories are almost always, on some fundamental level, implicitly posing issues of justice and injustice. Even if only by negation. That may not be trans-historically true, but it's at least largely true in the bourgeois West in the modern era (which is understandable when you consider the cultural revolution brought about by the bourgeois revolutions and the subsequent rise of 'morality' as an ideological prop of bourgeois culture - which is always double-edged because of its partly revolutionary and emancipatory origins).
I think the idea of judging a work of art aside from the values of the culture around it is just impossible in real terms. It's like trying to judge a slice of cake aside from the taste of the rest of the cake. The slice is something you make, by violence, not a property of the cake itself. The work of art is like this. We make it a slice by viewing it out of context. But we can't then judge it alone. To taste it and evaluate its flavour is to evaluate the flavour of the entire cake. Try and do otherwise and you'll fail. Having said that, rummaging around in the rest of the cake is vital. The slice you tasted may happen to be the bit with no arsenic in it. That doesn't put you in a very good position to judge the whole cake. On the other hand, the slice you cut may happen to have failed to intersect with the file hidden inside the cake... the file which might just contribute (as something that was originally an innocuous commodity, but which your friend on the outside has socially repurposed) to your escape.
Remember, to you, the file is a success. To the Warden, the file is a failure.
To say that art - or texts, or cultural products, or whatever - are an integral part of bourgeois culture is not necessarily to say that they are useless. They may have emancipatory promise, much as Duchamp's readymades had promises beyond their origins as commodities, once he assisted them into new contexts.
They may be relations rather than things, but then so are we.
See. Piece of cake.
ADDENDA:
1. I don't use Marx's term 'fetishism' with reference to commodification without an awareness that the whole concept of fetishism is Eurocentric and racist. Marx, I'd argue, utilised the concept and turned it against bourgeois culture, thus making it fight against such Eurocentrism and racism. See David McNally for a nice little parenthetical discussion of this.
2. Nothing above is particularly original. I just can't be bothered to go looking for sources and quotes. Read the usual suspects.
3. This post shows me up, because I very often fail to bother with anything like this level of theoretical thinking when I actually tap something about some TV show/film/book I've just consumed into Facebook/twitter/tumblr/Shabgraff.
4. I'd agree with China Mieville that sometimes there just isn't anything very much to say about a particular cultural product, precisely because its a commodity. We get over invested in our commodities (this blog is evidence of that) and forget that they sometimes lack even a semblance of semiotic density. Even when a text can be interpreted against the dominant culture, subjected to detournement, or mined for abuse of bourgeois values, that doesn't always make it significant enough to be worth picking on.
Do you think that it's fair to criticize a work of art for the failings of the culture around it? This is a question I've been mulling over the past few days and I'm sure you have an interesting response.
My answer got a bit long, so I decided - opportunistically - to post it here.
*
I think the terms of the question are worth investigating.
What do we mean by 'failings'?
What do we mean by 'culture around it'?
Failure is, of course, subjectively judged. Something I think is bad may be seen as good - or neutral, or normal, or inescapable - by others.
It is perfectly possible for something that is a 'failure' with regards to general human wellbeing to be a 'success' for a social system. (The wellbeing of the working class, in any class society, always being more universal than that of the minority loafing class.)
Indeed, I think that if you look at the vast majority of mainstream media culture as it has existed in modern capitalist society - including and perhaps even especially with reference to narrative culture - then you see that it pretty unambiguously touts and celebrates values and/or activities that are failures when it comes to promoting general human wellbeing but successes when it comes to propping up and reproducing a social order dominated by the class that owns and controls capital.
*phew* long sentence.
This is the 'culture around it'...
BUT...
I think it's really important to realise that art doesn't just sit there surrounded by culture. It is culture.
We would expect any product to bear the hallmarks of its production, or the materials from which it was produced. It's just common sense to expect a cultural product to bear such hallmarks... and that's without looking at any of the elaborate processes by which supply, demand, distribution, advertisement, hegemony, etc winnow cultural products out of circulation, or just prevent their production in the first place.
More deeply, just as the self is not a thing that exists in the world but is rather a dialectical process that we individuate from the wider set of processes that we call the world, so is art not a thing in the world but a chosen locus of relations, inter-relations and inter-reactions.
A cultural product is, from one standpoint, an individuated unit... but that standpoint is actually a form of commodity fetishism. The cultural product as an entity that lives in the world, that says things and thinks things. Thinking about cultural products that way is inescapable to a large extent, because it's impossible for us to step outside of culture and look in.
The very fetishising of commodities which leads us create cultural products as things, and treat them like entities, is also what makes them very hard to perceive as anything else.
You could say that the entire project of modern criticism has been concerned with attempts to find ways through this maze.
And yet... the analysis which allows us to see the cultural product as a fetishised commodity, produced by a cultural industry which actively perpetuates and reproduces itself, is also the analysis which can provide a way to see the cultural product relatively clearly... and a big part of the method for doing so is also suggested by the same analysis, at least when properly applied.
There's a vulgar Marxist approach which sees the circumstances of production as deterministic of the 'meaning' of a cultural product. This, ironically enough, fails because it entails a reiteration of the exact same fetishising of commodities, not to mention a fetishising of production at the expense of other sites on the circuit of capital.
This is not a true Marxist approach because true Marxism sees commodities - indeed, capital in general - as relations rather than things (albeit relations fundamentally grounded in the material, which is to say the social). This is really what is meant by - or is at least a good demonstration of - dialectical materialism (forget about vulgarised state religions).
Luckily, this kind of vulgar Marxism is more honoured in the breach than the observance, at least outside of phone box cults or rump Stalinist states (their big cousins).
I'd argue for a dialectical-materialist way of looking at texts. That's the analysis which remembers that the text is a social relation, produced by social relations, and viewed by social relations.
This would involve such basics as:
i) always remembering that they are social products, produced for material reasons,
ii) always remembering that, in a system of generalised commodity production, such cultural products are going to be overwhelmingly produced as commodities, or subject to commodification, etc.
iii) always remembering that, "in any epoch, the dominant ideas will be the ideas of the ruling class" [approximate quote from Marx, from memory]
And:
iv) always remembering that we cannot step outside the current social relations, ideological relations or dominant hierarchies in order to, as it were, see the text and its culture from the outside, from a disengaged and impartial standpoint,
v) that we must, therefore, take sides. We must take a side simply in order to see the text anything like 'square on'. Not from an impartial standpoint, but from a standpoint which recognises that no such asocial view is even possible.
Before we can even start judging the cultural product itself, we need to accept that it exists in and as part of a matrix of social relations which are hierarchical, self-perpetuating, fetishised, but also inescapably social. We need to have a standpoint from which to judge what constitutes a 'failure'.
This, I think, is an especially pronounced need when we're talking about anything with a story. Because stories are almost always, on some fundamental level, implicitly posing issues of justice and injustice. Even if only by negation. That may not be trans-historically true, but it's at least largely true in the bourgeois West in the modern era (which is understandable when you consider the cultural revolution brought about by the bourgeois revolutions and the subsequent rise of 'morality' as an ideological prop of bourgeois culture - which is always double-edged because of its partly revolutionary and emancipatory origins).
I think the idea of judging a work of art aside from the values of the culture around it is just impossible in real terms. It's like trying to judge a slice of cake aside from the taste of the rest of the cake. The slice is something you make, by violence, not a property of the cake itself. The work of art is like this. We make it a slice by viewing it out of context. But we can't then judge it alone. To taste it and evaluate its flavour is to evaluate the flavour of the entire cake. Try and do otherwise and you'll fail. Having said that, rummaging around in the rest of the cake is vital. The slice you tasted may happen to be the bit with no arsenic in it. That doesn't put you in a very good position to judge the whole cake. On the other hand, the slice you cut may happen to have failed to intersect with the file hidden inside the cake... the file which might just contribute (as something that was originally an innocuous commodity, but which your friend on the outside has socially repurposed) to your escape.
Remember, to you, the file is a success. To the Warden, the file is a failure.
To say that art - or texts, or cultural products, or whatever - are an integral part of bourgeois culture is not necessarily to say that they are useless. They may have emancipatory promise, much as Duchamp's readymades had promises beyond their origins as commodities, once he assisted them into new contexts.
They may be relations rather than things, but then so are we.
See. Piece of cake.
ADDENDA:
1. I don't use Marx's term 'fetishism' with reference to commodification without an awareness that the whole concept of fetishism is Eurocentric and racist. Marx, I'd argue, utilised the concept and turned it against bourgeois culture, thus making it fight against such Eurocentrism and racism. See David McNally for a nice little parenthetical discussion of this.
2. Nothing above is particularly original. I just can't be bothered to go looking for sources and quotes. Read the usual suspects.
3. This post shows me up, because I very often fail to bother with anything like this level of theoretical thinking when I actually tap something about some TV show/film/book I've just consumed into Facebook/twitter/tumblr/Shabgraff.
4. I'd agree with China Mieville that sometimes there just isn't anything very much to say about a particular cultural product, precisely because its a commodity. We get over invested in our commodities (this blog is evidence of that) and forget that they sometimes lack even a semblance of semiotic density. Even when a text can be interpreted against the dominant culture, subjected to detournement, or mined for abuse of bourgeois values, that doesn't always make it significant enough to be worth picking on.
Tuesday, 19 November 2013
12
There's so much I love about 'Planet of the Ood'. Picking a moment will be hard.
I love some of the things other people hate.
Unlike Lawrence Miles, I love that Donna ticks the Doctor off for his "Who do you think made your clothes?" crack. Why the hell should Donna put up with smuggery like that from a guy wearing Converse trainers? Who makes your clothes, Doctor? (Apart from anything else, one answer is probably 'women'.) Okay, he apologises for making her feel uncomfortable, which is problematic... but it isn't as if the episode lets the matter rest there.
Unlike many people, I love that the Ood thank DoctorDonna for, essentially, doing nothing. I love that they free themselves without any help from the Doctor. I like him better as an ally than as a messiah. The Ood don't suffer the fate of the N'avi: they don't get Whitey leading them to freedom. The DoctorDonna doesn't interfere. DoctorDonna renounces any claim they might think they have to judge the oppressed, to moralise when the oppressed free themselves by any means necessary.
I love that the episode is nevertheless unambiguous about the right of the oppressed to use violence against their oppressors. There are no patronising sermons which hold the oppressed to a higher moral standard of forgiveness and forebearance. Violence is horrible, but the violence of the oppressed in revolt is fundamentally morally different to the violence - individual and structural - of the oppressors.
I love that the Solana doesn't have a change of heart.
I love the vacuous marketing slime in the PR lounge, tittering at the accessories they can add to their living merchandise. Just as lobotomised, in their way, as their commodity.
I love that Halpen flatters himself by being kind to his personal Ood servant while contemplating genocide against the entire race.
It's not perfect.
I have a problem with the racial politics. By making so many of the human oppressors into people of colour, the episode effaces the particularity of race as an axis of oppression. It seems to say that capitalism is colour blind and all it cares about is the colour of money. This is true to an extent, and I believe that economic factors are ultimately causal, but race is a specific category of oppression within capitalism, and slavery of all things is a colour issue.
And it is, basically, another orientalist fantasy for assuaging white guilt (though considerably better than most).
But it's time to pick a moment... so here goes:
The Doctor and Donna, handcuffed, are being harangued by Mr Halpen.
"The Ood were nothing without us," he blusters, "just animals roaming around on the ice!"
Yes, yes, that's what they always say. The [insert name of ethnic group being enslaved here] were just slightly-more sophisticated ruminants until the civilised people came along to put them and their land to good use. That's the essence of the liberal justification for Western colonialism going back to forever. We're doing them a favour. Without us, they were just animals. Today the same justification is used, but in liberal code. Isn't it great that we bombed and invaded - now the poor little chaps can have elections and feminism!
"That's because you can't hear them," says the Doctor. Essentially: you don't understand their language so you think they don't have one.
Readers of this blog will already be able to guess all the stuff about capital expanding into new markets and utilising all the resources it can commodify and assimilate into itself, about commodity fetishism being when people are treated as commodities and commodities are treated as people, about slavery being fundamental to the rise of the capitalist system and its imperial expansion, about capital cutting into the body of the worker, etc., etc.
"They welcomed it," says Halpen, "It's not as if they put up a fight."
Can't win, can they? They don't act violently = permission to enslave them. They do act violently = gas the savage monsters. It's almost as if there's a massive great big double standard at work.
"You idiot," hisses Donna, "They're born with their brains in their hands! Don't you see, that makes them peaceful! They've got to be, because a creature like that would have to trust anyone it meets!"
That's my favourite bit. It is a material explanation of consciousness. The Ood evolved to be communal, social, mutually-aiding. In packing crates they are pressed into rows but their natural pattern is a circle, a cornerless shape without top or bottom. They naturally see the social unity of people, to the point that they conceptualise the Doctor and Donna as 'DoctorDonna'. None of this is because they're saints or angels. It's because of their material nature and circumstances. Like humans in pre-class societies, they had to rely on each other.
But - and this is the really great thing - there is also, implicitly, a dialectical explanation of changing consciousness. The Ood have changed in response to their new social situation. They Ood have shown themselves to be intricately related to their social environment, yet they never lose their agency. Even when parts of their brains have been cut away, their agency is not entirely gone. As the Doctor later says, it takes many forms. Revenge, rage, and patience. And then, revolution.
Now that's a winning combination.
I love some of the things other people hate.
Unlike Lawrence Miles, I love that Donna ticks the Doctor off for his "Who do you think made your clothes?" crack. Why the hell should Donna put up with smuggery like that from a guy wearing Converse trainers? Who makes your clothes, Doctor? (Apart from anything else, one answer is probably 'women'.) Okay, he apologises for making her feel uncomfortable, which is problematic... but it isn't as if the episode lets the matter rest there.
Unlike many people, I love that the Ood thank DoctorDonna for, essentially, doing nothing. I love that they free themselves without any help from the Doctor. I like him better as an ally than as a messiah. The Ood don't suffer the fate of the N'avi: they don't get Whitey leading them to freedom. The DoctorDonna doesn't interfere. DoctorDonna renounces any claim they might think they have to judge the oppressed, to moralise when the oppressed free themselves by any means necessary.
I love that the episode is nevertheless unambiguous about the right of the oppressed to use violence against their oppressors. There are no patronising sermons which hold the oppressed to a higher moral standard of forgiveness and forebearance. Violence is horrible, but the violence of the oppressed in revolt is fundamentally morally different to the violence - individual and structural - of the oppressors.
I love that the Solana doesn't have a change of heart.
I love the vacuous marketing slime in the PR lounge, tittering at the accessories they can add to their living merchandise. Just as lobotomised, in their way, as their commodity.
I love that Halpen flatters himself by being kind to his personal Ood servant while contemplating genocide against the entire race.
It's not perfect.
I have a problem with the racial politics. By making so many of the human oppressors into people of colour, the episode effaces the particularity of race as an axis of oppression. It seems to say that capitalism is colour blind and all it cares about is the colour of money. This is true to an extent, and I believe that economic factors are ultimately causal, but race is a specific category of oppression within capitalism, and slavery of all things is a colour issue.
And it is, basically, another orientalist fantasy for assuaging white guilt (though considerably better than most).
But it's time to pick a moment... so here goes:
The Doctor and Donna, handcuffed, are being harangued by Mr Halpen.
"The Ood were nothing without us," he blusters, "just animals roaming around on the ice!"
Yes, yes, that's what they always say. The [insert name of ethnic group being enslaved here] were just slightly-more sophisticated ruminants until the civilised people came along to put them and their land to good use. That's the essence of the liberal justification for Western colonialism going back to forever. We're doing them a favour. Without us, they were just animals. Today the same justification is used, but in liberal code. Isn't it great that we bombed and invaded - now the poor little chaps can have elections and feminism!
"That's because you can't hear them," says the Doctor. Essentially: you don't understand their language so you think they don't have one.
Readers of this blog will already be able to guess all the stuff about capital expanding into new markets and utilising all the resources it can commodify and assimilate into itself, about commodity fetishism being when people are treated as commodities and commodities are treated as people, about slavery being fundamental to the rise of the capitalist system and its imperial expansion, about capital cutting into the body of the worker, etc., etc.
"They welcomed it," says Halpen, "It's not as if they put up a fight."
Can't win, can they? They don't act violently = permission to enslave them. They do act violently = gas the savage monsters. It's almost as if there's a massive great big double standard at work.
"You idiot," hisses Donna, "They're born with their brains in their hands! Don't you see, that makes them peaceful! They've got to be, because a creature like that would have to trust anyone it meets!"
That's my favourite bit. It is a material explanation of consciousness. The Ood evolved to be communal, social, mutually-aiding. In packing crates they are pressed into rows but their natural pattern is a circle, a cornerless shape without top or bottom. They naturally see the social unity of people, to the point that they conceptualise the Doctor and Donna as 'DoctorDonna'. None of this is because they're saints or angels. It's because of their material nature and circumstances. Like humans in pre-class societies, they had to rely on each other.
But - and this is the really great thing - there is also, implicitly, a dialectical explanation of changing consciousness. The Ood have changed in response to their new social situation. They Ood have shown themselves to be intricately related to their social environment, yet they never lose their agency. Even when parts of their brains have been cut away, their agency is not entirely gone. As the Doctor later says, it takes many forms. Revenge, rage, and patience. And then, revolution.
Now that's a winning combination.
Sunday, 17 November 2013
16
The Doctor is confusing an angel to death.
Light came to our world to count and quantify all life, to create a set and definitive catalogue. Light sent its Survey out into the world to sample each form. But our world corrupted the Survey with the delicious possibilities of evolution. Light was locked away so the Survey could inherit the Earth. It became a Victorian gentleman, a man of property. It enacted a ruthless Darwinian takeover of the house above Light's ship. A colonizing mission. A merger and acquisition. This being Victorian England, the wife and daughter and maids came with the house like fixtures and fitting. The Survey locked its secrets away, just like any Victorian gentleman, and set about dreaming of empire. It adopted the cultural logic of its new society and new position: the ideology of 'the survival of the fittest'... meaning, supposedly, the dominance of the best. With its inbuilt assumptions about the place of 'lesser races' and 'lower orders' and women, Victorian social-Darwinism was perfect for the Survey's purposes, as it shed its insectile and reptilian skins and became Josiah, the pink of respectability.
But then the Doctor came and let Light out of the cellar. Just to see what would happen.
Light turned out to be the reductionist ghost in the bourgeois social machine.
To Light, we're merely walking bowls of "sugars, proteins and amino acids". Light killed and dismembered one of the maids, saying "I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it". That's just how reductionism works. To understand something, you take it to pieces. But what happens when you can't put the pieces back together again? Do you forget that the original thing was more than just the sum of its bits? Reductionism can do a lot of heavy lifting as an analytical tool, but it is the map not the territory... and mistaking it for the territory leads to vulgar materialism and determinism. A river cannot be understood as just an aggregation of water molecules. Aside from all the other natural and material processes involved, it is also a social phenomenon. It is something people experience, think about, wade in, swim in, sail upon, fish for food in, divert and ford and dam and befoul. It is something people name, and build towns around. Water can be used to quench thirst or drown people. It can be freely shared or owned and monopolised, or stolen. Likewise - more so - people are not just aggregations of limbs or genes (selfish or not). Looking at them that way makes it possible to inherit them and use them like property. Contrary to the assumptions of bourgeois political economy, societies are not just aggregations of individuals, all acting from their own self-interest. That's part of how you end up saying that some people just have to be left to starve, or be put in the workhouse, or be ruled by a Viceroy, all for the good of the economy and progress. It's partly how you end up with the idea that people starve or work or serve because they have failed to compete, or because it was their destiny as a unit of inherently inferior stock. Inspector Mackenzie has imbibed this view of things, sagely pronouncing on how "gypsy blood" makes for "lazy workers".
This view of the world depends upon snapshots of reality at best, all fixed in place like moths displayed behind glass, like catalogued specimens in the Natural History Museum. There is something about this static view that makes it tesselate perfectly with hierarchy, and thus work for whoever rules. That's why the classic depiction shows a lowly ape gradually growing up to be a white gentleman. It depends upon forgetting the revolutionary implications of Natural Selection, which shows us a world of variation in dialectical unity, everything effecting everything else in one great network of feedback loops, all species constantly on their way to being something else, all forms transitional, all races related to each other, no hierarchy of blood, no separation of individuals from each other, no dividing line between individuals and the rest of the world, every tiny alteration in quantity gradually leading to an alteration in quality, all negations ultimated negated, everything containing its own contradictions within it... just as every apple contains the potential to nourish or rot.
In truth, as Light realises to his horror...
"Everything is changing. All in flux. Nothing remains the same."
The mercurial Doctor has reminded Light that even he, Light, changes. Everything does. The catalogue can never be complete, by definition. The Doctor cruelly hammers home the word "change" at every opportunity. He bamboozles Light with a list of mythical and fictional creatures, human creations, inherently social things that can never be quantified as part of any static, reductionist system. Even the Gryphon gets a mention, that creature of Victorian lassitude and melancholy, yearning for the old days before everything changed.
Even Nimrod, whose people once worshipped Light, won't help him. Nimrod has dumped his allegiance to both Josiah and Light, both the new boss and the old. He can't be fixed in subservient place because he's a social creature who thinks and learns and makes his own history, if not in circumstances of his own choosing.
"I will not change," says Light. And he turns to stone rather than permit himself to become part of the great flow of fluctuation, contradiction and transformation. He's that reactionary.
"Subject for catalogue," announces the Doctor with weary contempt, "File under: Imagination, comma, lack of."
Light came to our world to count and quantify all life, to create a set and definitive catalogue. Light sent its Survey out into the world to sample each form. But our world corrupted the Survey with the delicious possibilities of evolution. Light was locked away so the Survey could inherit the Earth. It became a Victorian gentleman, a man of property. It enacted a ruthless Darwinian takeover of the house above Light's ship. A colonizing mission. A merger and acquisition. This being Victorian England, the wife and daughter and maids came with the house like fixtures and fitting. The Survey locked its secrets away, just like any Victorian gentleman, and set about dreaming of empire. It adopted the cultural logic of its new society and new position: the ideology of 'the survival of the fittest'... meaning, supposedly, the dominance of the best. With its inbuilt assumptions about the place of 'lesser races' and 'lower orders' and women, Victorian social-Darwinism was perfect for the Survey's purposes, as it shed its insectile and reptilian skins and became Josiah, the pink of respectability.
But then the Doctor came and let Light out of the cellar. Just to see what would happen.
Light turned out to be the reductionist ghost in the bourgeois social machine.
To Light, we're merely walking bowls of "sugars, proteins and amino acids". Light killed and dismembered one of the maids, saying "I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it". That's just how reductionism works. To understand something, you take it to pieces. But what happens when you can't put the pieces back together again? Do you forget that the original thing was more than just the sum of its bits? Reductionism can do a lot of heavy lifting as an analytical tool, but it is the map not the territory... and mistaking it for the territory leads to vulgar materialism and determinism. A river cannot be understood as just an aggregation of water molecules. Aside from all the other natural and material processes involved, it is also a social phenomenon. It is something people experience, think about, wade in, swim in, sail upon, fish for food in, divert and ford and dam and befoul. It is something people name, and build towns around. Water can be used to quench thirst or drown people. It can be freely shared or owned and monopolised, or stolen. Likewise - more so - people are not just aggregations of limbs or genes (selfish or not). Looking at them that way makes it possible to inherit them and use them like property. Contrary to the assumptions of bourgeois political economy, societies are not just aggregations of individuals, all acting from their own self-interest. That's part of how you end up saying that some people just have to be left to starve, or be put in the workhouse, or be ruled by a Viceroy, all for the good of the economy and progress. It's partly how you end up with the idea that people starve or work or serve because they have failed to compete, or because it was their destiny as a unit of inherently inferior stock. Inspector Mackenzie has imbibed this view of things, sagely pronouncing on how "gypsy blood" makes for "lazy workers".
This view of the world depends upon snapshots of reality at best, all fixed in place like moths displayed behind glass, like catalogued specimens in the Natural History Museum. There is something about this static view that makes it tesselate perfectly with hierarchy, and thus work for whoever rules. That's why the classic depiction shows a lowly ape gradually growing up to be a white gentleman. It depends upon forgetting the revolutionary implications of Natural Selection, which shows us a world of variation in dialectical unity, everything effecting everything else in one great network of feedback loops, all species constantly on their way to being something else, all forms transitional, all races related to each other, no hierarchy of blood, no separation of individuals from each other, no dividing line between individuals and the rest of the world, every tiny alteration in quantity gradually leading to an alteration in quality, all negations ultimated negated, everything containing its own contradictions within it... just as every apple contains the potential to nourish or rot.
In truth, as Light realises to his horror...
"Everything is changing. All in flux. Nothing remains the same."
The mercurial Doctor has reminded Light that even he, Light, changes. Everything does. The catalogue can never be complete, by definition. The Doctor cruelly hammers home the word "change" at every opportunity. He bamboozles Light with a list of mythical and fictional creatures, human creations, inherently social things that can never be quantified as part of any static, reductionist system. Even the Gryphon gets a mention, that creature of Victorian lassitude and melancholy, yearning for the old days before everything changed.
Even Nimrod, whose people once worshipped Light, won't help him. Nimrod has dumped his allegiance to both Josiah and Light, both the new boss and the old. He can't be fixed in subservient place because he's a social creature who thinks and learns and makes his own history, if not in circumstances of his own choosing.
"I will not change," says Light. And he turns to stone rather than permit himself to become part of the great flow of fluctuation, contradiction and transformation. He's that reactionary.
"Subject for catalogue," announces the Doctor with weary contempt, "File under: Imagination, comma, lack of."
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