1

What can I do but cheat?

Three moments, not in chronological order.


1

Barbara Wright is in a junkyard.  She walks into a Police Box.  She's in a large, brightly lit control room.

This can happen on screen because of the cut.  The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible.  We have "discovered television".  We can put huge buildings inside small boxes.  We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole.  The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids - the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces - can be made visual.

Doctor Who's very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production.  So much so that living on that limit became its raison d'etre.  Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done.  And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next.  As I've said elsewhere, 'The Space Museum' pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking... and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show - which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production - crunch up against an allegory about empire.  This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room.  The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production.  Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told.  The dialectic starts here.

This is analogous (I'll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works.  The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It's fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history.  It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from 'historicals' and into SF.  Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian.  And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children's literature upon which the show is so reliant.  In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures.  Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.


2

The Doctor picks up a sharp rock.  Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it.  The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.

Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool.  Given that this story is about 'cavemen' who are dying out because they've forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.

The use of tools played a crucial role in the evolution of humanity, making us the creature with a 'species-being' bound up with conscious labour.  Fear played a crucial role too.  'An Unearthly Child' is obsessed with fear, both as a poison and as a source of solidarity.  "Fear makes companions of us all," says the Doctor when he comes to Barbara's aid.  Fear melds society together.

In a talk I linked to here, China Mieville spoke about octopuses that have been observed picking up weapons just in case they need to use them later.  That looks like the beginnings of conscious foresight.  Maybe something like that happened to our ancient ancestors.  Maybe the avoidable 'dreaded outcome' sparked the dialectic that began the transformation of the hand and brain.  This is a vital part of a Marxist defence of the value of scaring kids.  (That's irony on the square, by the way.)

This is particularly ironic in terms of 'An Unearthly Child' if you suspect, as I do, that the bickering and jockeying cavemen are not our ancestors, but the descendants of the survivors of the nuclear holocaust that people in 1963 expected at any time.

The tool helped bring us into being... but it was always both map and club.  Its progress was always towards television and nukes.  It isn't a popular insight, but that tragic doubleness is just what progress is.


3

Susan looks through a book about the French Revoution.

This revolution was probably the event most foundational to the modern world.  It was a process which drastically marked the beginning of the end for feudalism in Europe.  It was a popular revolt which heralded the beginning of the great dialectic of class struggle that would mark all bourgeois society and history.

She looks through a schoolbook account, doubtless a safe and sanitised version, the way such books usually are.  She, one of those unpredictable and scary 'teenager' things that they have nowadays, one of those people who is puzzlingly neither child nor adult, one of those unearthly children, one of those youngsters listening to the Common Men, a member of a generation who would soon lead a worldwide political and cultural revolt... she reads a book about revolution that her teachers have given her, and she says to herself, in a whisper of surprised outrage...

"That's not right!"

Fifty years later, it still isn't right.  But, for better or worse, the show goes on.


*

Finally, an invitation to speculate.  Given that Doctor Who was so much better under social democracy than under neoliberalism, imagine how wonderful Doctor Who would be under socialism.

Admittedly, it would have to find new things to talk about...

Out of Eden

From the October 2011 issue of Panic Moon.  As ever, lightly edited and titivated... 'cos I just can't help tinkering.

When Doctor Who talks about evolution, it doesn’t usually bother getting the facts right.  'Evolution of the Daleks', for instance, seems to think species change when genes mutate morally because of lightning bolts.  Such ideas go right back to 'The Daleks', in which the two races on Skaro have changed totally in mere “hundreds of years” of mutation, with the warrior Thals becoming natural pacifists in the process.  (Incidentally, it’s ironic that this supposedly anti-Nazi parable speaks of blonde, blue-eyed, athletic specimens as “refined” and “perfect”.)

Real evolution does involve mutations, but they’re not sudden and drastic as depicted in, to pick another example, 'The Mutants'.  Instead we’re talking about tiny replication errors in genetic code which are preserved or rejected by natural selection, leading to big changes over very long periods.  This creates staggering variety on our planet alone.  However, most aliens in the Doctor Who universe look like British actors, which (accidentally) implies that the humanoid shape is a universal pinnacle or goal of evolution.  Again, real evolution teaches us the opposite.  There’s nothing “perfect” about humans.  We’re no ‘better evolved’ than worms.  Species succeed when they fit their niches.  'Full Circle' alone understands this.  The Alzarians are humanoid only because they evolved to fit inside the Starliner.

Doctor Who has sometimes been sceptical of such human hubris.  In 'Doctor Who and the Silurians', humans encounter ‘advanced’ reptiles who see them as errant apes.  'Inferno' implies that snarling beasts lurk beneath the lab coat or uniform.  'The Invisible Enemy' equates the “Great Break Out” of humanity with a viral epidemic.  In 'The Ark in Space', the Doctor praises humans as “indomitable”, but the Wirrn confront humanity with a lethal reflection of the same evolutionary urge to survive and inherit the Earth.

'The Ark in Space' retells the Old Testament myth of the flood.  'Genesis of the Daleks' also adapts the book of… well, Genesis.  Both stories are about species changing, about them subsuming and defeating other species.  But 'Genesis of the Daleks' is also fundamentally about creations disobeying their creator.  Hence the lack of scientific accuracy: the science isn’t the real interest of the storytellers.  Instead, evolution takes on religious connotations.  This is understandable.  Evolution, as a scientific origin story, thrives in the gap in the cultural ecology left by the decline of religion.  And, like much science-fiction, Doctor Who uses scientific and technological idioms to retell myths and legends.

'Genesis of the Daleks' also reiterates original sin: the Daleks are cursed by their genes to be bad.  Mutations of morality again!  This sort of thing mirrors tabloid stories about ‘genes for crime’, but Doctor Who has also tackled reactionary appropriations of evolution.  'Survival' critiqued Thatcherism by exploring what happens when the values of ruthless Darwinian competition are applied to society.  The term ‘survival of the fittest’ was coined by Herbert Spencer, a 19th century pioneer of libertarianism.  Natural selection was taken up by such philosophers of Victorian free market capitalism and made into a ‘natural’ explanation of inequality (though the much-traduced Spencer himself was actually a fair bit subtler than that).  This is partly what 'Ghost Light' is about.  As well as satirising “homo victorianus ineptus” who rails against Darwin on religious grounds, the story also swipes at Josiah, the newly-rising “man of property” who climbs the social ladder (explicitly linked with the “evolutionary ladder”) and keeps the deprived locked in squalor.

Josiah may be evil but at least he’s changing, unlike the archangel of stasis in his cellar.  Evolution keeps bringing the show back to angels and demons, as in 'Image of the Fendahl'.  But 'Image', unusually, really is about evolution.  Instead of using evolution to talk about myth, this tale uses myth to talk about evolution.  It shows the theory seemingly undermined by anomalous evidence and superstition, but the problem isn’t that evolution is untrue, leaving us at the mercy of the demonic.  The problem, rather, is that evolution is demonic.  As metaphor, this hits on something true: natural selection works by predation and extinction, i.e. by death.  The Fendahl is death, so the Fendahl is evolution.  And so are we, hence the "dark side of Man's nature" (those moral mutations again).  That's why the story has all those references to human paleontology, its central motif being an ancient human skull.  That's why the story has its rather oblique title: because, like God, the Fendahl shaped us.  It created us in its own image.  That’s probably also why Colby’s Christian name is Adam.

Monkey Business

On 'Ghost Light'.


Let's leave aside the aesthetic beauty of the production, with its pattern of oppositions - light and dark, day and night, madness and sanity, stone and wood, feminine and masculine, dead and alive - which alternate until they start to bleed into each other and mingle until we are left with no certainties.

Let's leave aside the willfully abstruse script; the wonderful way it is deliberately constructed as a jewelled puzzle box; something to be studied and pondered and interpreted rather than just passively enjoyed.

Let's leave aside the scrumptious bevy of literary references, sly self-referencing jokes, puns, double meanings, allusions... all of which show an intense and highly self-conscious (though not glib) awareness and playfulness with language, text, genre and storytelling tradition.  You want an example?  How about the use of the word "wicked", which - with wonderful irony - appears in both the Victorian usage and as 80s teenspeak.  It's the last word of the story - the last word spoken by the Doctor in the last-filmed story of the classic series.  And when the Doctor uses it to describe Ace, he sounds like a Victorian moralist (of times past or present) scolding a disobedient child... but, by Ace's usage, and by his own sly wink, he's giving his approval to her pyromaniacal aversion to the house haunted by evil Victoriana.

Let's look instead at what this story says about evolution.

Firstly, it gets things technically wrong by depicting evolution as working teleologically, so that the human is the 'final' stage when the process is finished.

Or does it?

Secondly, it's about homo victorianus ineptus (and his spiritual descendants) railing against a theory they don't understand because it offends their bigoted prejudices. It's about Soapy Sam Wilberforce and our latter day creationists, terrified by the theological and cultural and social and political ramifications of a scientific discourse which emphasizes mutability and materialism.

Or is it?

Let me suggest that, while there's some truth in the above, there's also a lot more to it than that.

I don't think it gets evolution wrong so much as it gets people's ideas of evolution right. It understands that a certain kind of vulgar, reactionary, bourgeois idea of evolution pictures a ladder with the strongest, most ruthless at the top... and the weak at the bottom. It seems to depict evolution as a succession of 'rungs' which are climbed through mutation, achieving progress and reaching a final goal embodied in a human male... but, in its strategy as a text, it represents this as the process (progress?) of exactly the kind of reactionary, bourgeois mind that would view the Victorian gentleman as the pinnacle of evolutionary ascent.

That's why the ultimate punishment for Josiah seems to come from within him. It's his own idea of successive stages that makes it possible for him to fall back down through them; it's his own idea of the superior keeping the inferior as pets that makes it possible for Control to put him on a leash.


"The Ever-Changing Moral Zeitgeist"

I referred to the reactionary 'ladder' version of Darwinism as "vulgar" just now, but this is not quite right.  It is not really a vulgarisation, in the sense of being a popular misstatement overlaid upon the ideas of the original Darwinians.  Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Galton... these were respectable, wealthy, middle-class Victorian gentlemen. Progressive for their time, they were also products of their time, as were their ideas.

Hey, have some quotes.

Here's the young Darwin, in his Beagle diary:

Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian -- of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? -- men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal: and part of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa.

This next one is from The Descent of Man, Chapter 6:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Here's Darwin, writing to the philosopher and economist William Graham in 1881:

Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

Here's Darwin on gender, from The Descent of Man, Chapter 19:

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman- whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work on Hereditary Genius, that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman. 

This next one is from T.H. Huxley ('Darwin's Bulldog'), writing in an essay called 'Emancipation, Black and White' in 1865:

It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.

Here's Francis Galton - Darwin's polymath cousin - in his Preface to the 1892 edition of his book Hereditary Genius:

The natural ability of which this book mainly treats ['genius'], is such as a modern European possesses in a much greater average share than men of the lower races. There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed, who shall be as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races.

Even today, the wackier fringes of sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology and other forms of biological reductionism continue to lend support to reactionary views on race, gender and economics.

Richard Dawkins' idea of natural selection working mostly at the level of individual genes (which get into cartels) lends itself implicitly to concord with bourgeois ideology. Dawkins is no biological racist (though his animus towards Islam has now tipped over into culturalist racism) but his outlook implicitly supports our economic status quo. Each individual gene becomes a utility maximiser engaged in rational self-interest, each genome is a genetic economy in equilibrium. It's quite a startling resonance. Dawkins himself even uses free market metaphors in his descriptions, explicitly saying that genomes are not "command economies". These are metaphors, but they also turn upon him and start to power his logic.

It's tempting to say that there's a connection between this and his liberalism, which is individual-centred and worries about memetic cartels that threaten the equilibrium in which all the individuals supposedly live, i.e. scary old Islam. Memes may be the connective skein here. They provide an idealist cultural logic (of a very unoriginal kind, actually...) that makes human society work in an analogous way to the gene's-eye-view of biology. Individual people get themselves into cartels via the natural selection of memes. Memes, like genes, are amoral. They succeed if they work. Religion 'works' in some ways that Dawkins attempts to delineate in The God Delusion, hence it reproduces. I think, by the meme logic, religions would be seen as predators. We can see the Darwinian logic whereby their fearsome features accreted, but we still have to defend ourselves from them when they attack.

So Dawkins, like so many liberals before him, ends up enmeshed (albeit by a more circuitous route than many) in the kind of idealist, culturalist thinking that has always made liberalism into the perfect... well, the perfect 'meme' for bourgeois ideology. Herbert Spencer's notions of inherited genius tesselated perfectly with his libertarianism. The individual must be at liberty to succeed and rise according to his inborn talents and his own capacity to advance himself. Charity is fine, as long as it doesn't hinder the gifted or artificially raise the useless. This is where social Darwinism and libertarianism meet, and provide a perfect cultural logic for capitalism.


Evolving to Fit a Niche

This shouldn't surprise us.  Ideas have a social basis.  It's only to be expected that ideas generated by the enormous industrial, technical, scientific and social revolutions of capitalism should bear traces of it, should fit the niches of the social ecosystem.

Natural selection was born from studying Malthus - who worried about the limits to human progress, since, as he saw it, the poor were reproducing faster than society could feed them, whereas the more continent upper classes were allowing themselves to be outbred.

Natural selection - with its niches into which species have to fit - comes from an awareness of things like specialised tasks and the division of labour: products of the new, industrial, factory society.  As Marx wrote:

It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’.

 
This, to generalise, is why natural selection is an idea that popped into the heads of two guys, roughly simultaneously, both of whom were from the middle-to-upper classes of mid-Victorian Britain... and not to, say, Democritus.  Darwin and Wallace both lived in a society that was the product of the Industrial Revolution (roughly a century old by the time On the Origin of Species was published), a society where all the manifestations of capitalism adumbrated by Marx above had arisen and changed life radically.  Darwin and Wallace both read Malthus, both explicitly naming his Essay on Population as providing them with eureka moments.  Like most educated men of his time, Darwin was highly influenced by Political Economists like Adam Smith, who provided the theoretical basis of laissez-faire capitalism (though to associate Smith simplistically with today's ultra-free-marketeers - who fatuously profess to venerate him - is to do him a great disservice).

On this matter, it's worth quoting (at length) from Darwin's finest biographers, Adrian Desmond and James Moore.  Writing about Darwin's thinking in the late 1830s, they say:

Malthus had rarely been more topical. In the depth of the depression, with unprecedented distress, the poor law and pauper riots were on everybody's lips. Workhouses were still being attacked, commissioners still being pelted. Malthus had denounced charity, and the rioters abominated anything Malthusian that propped up the New Poor Law. By now the dissident groups had come together under an umbrella organization known as Chartism: they supported the People's Charter, a list of demands for universal suffrage, annual elections, and salaried MPs. This was a countrywide mass movement, and the New Poor Law was one of its prime targets. Christian Chartists denounced a system that would deny 'the distressed poor their God-given right to a dignified support on their native soil.’ They were marching under banners in September that proclaimed with the Psalmist, 'Dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.’ Chartist speeches, lambasting the 'cruel and detestable doctrines of the Malthusians,' were heard by tens of thousands in the manufacturing towns, and reported in The Times. Love him or loathe him. Malthus could not be ignored.

Darwin knew the theory. With Martineau his dinner guest, how could he not? Getting the poor off welfare increased competition among working men and reduced taxes. Competition was paramount, making Malthus a Whig free trader's godsend in the 1830s. But it was Malthus's statistics that struck Darwin with a vengeance in his primed state. Malthus calculated that, with the brakes off, humanity could double in a mere twenty-five years. But it did not double; if it did the planet would be overrun. A struggle for resources slowed growth, and a horrifying catalogue of death, disease, wars, and famine checked the population. Darwin saw that an identical struggle took place throughout nature, and he realized that it could be turned into a truly creative force.

He had thought that only enough individuals were born to keep a species stable. Now he accepted that wild populations, too, bred beyond their means. Like the architects of the poor law, nature showed no charity; individuals had to scrimp and struggle, like the growing gangs of scavengers on London's refuse heaps, with starvation staring them in the face. Darwin gained a unique understanding from Malthus.

...

In Darwin's nature, the many fall that the few might progress. Death acquired a new meaning, and there was enough of it around: with rising joblessness and homelessness, medical statisticians were compiling their 'ledgers of death' (mortality statistics) among the slum dwellers. Nature's ledgers were always open; the Reaper sat, draped in black, with scratch pen permanently in hand. Progress was not so much a hymn to divine beneficence as a dirge accompanying the savage struggle. Both Darwinian science and poor law society were now reformed along competitive Malthusian lines. Ruthless competition was the norm; it guaranteed the progress of life and a low-wage, high-profit capitalist society.

...

Emigration might solve the pauper problem at home, but others saw these boatloads of rejects wreaking havoc abroad. Dire predictions accompanied this tidal wave of flotsam. European settlers had always been 'harbingers of extermination to the native tribes,' and it was prophesied that all the 'aboriginal nations' would be wiped out within a century. At every outpost the Beagle crew had witnessed the destruction: the Tasmanians were all but exterminated, the aborigines were dying from European diseases, General Rosas's policy was deliberate genocide. But Darwin believed that colonial warfare was necessary 'to make the destroyers vary' and adapt to the new terrain. Destruction was becoming integral to his Malthusian view of humanity:

When two races of men meet, they act precisely like two species of animals. — they fight, eat each other, bring diseases to each other &c, but then comes the more deadly struggle, namely which have the best fitted organization, or instincts (ie intellect in man) to gain the day.

The 'stronger [are] always extirpating the weaker,' and the British were beating the lot. This imperial expansion ended the isolation of the indigenous races, and thwarted their development in other ways. As whites spread out from the Cape, the black tribes were pushed together in the interior, blending races and ending their species-making isolation. Had this not happened, Darwin speculated, 'in 10,000 years [the] Negro [would] probably [have become] a distinct species.'

With emigration in the headlines, Lyell was convinced that animals too are driven by overpopulation to migrate. He agreed with Darwin that burgeoning species become colonizers, invading new terrain and defeating the natives. But Darwin's population pressure was pushing species to the limit in other ways. The crush was a creative force. The overcrowding that sent boatloads to the colonies meant that only animals with a competitive edge survived.

Darwin's biological initiative matched advanced Whig social thinking. This is what made it compelling. At last he had a mechanism that was compatible with the competitive, free-trading ideals of the ultra-Whigs. The transmutation at the base of his theory would still be loathed by many. But the Malthusian superstructure struck an emotionally satisfying chord; an open struggle with no hand-outs to the losers was the Whig way, and no poor-law commissioner could have bettered Darwin's view. He had broken with the radical hooligans who loathed Malthus. Like the Whig grandees - safe, immune, their own world characterized by noblesse oblige — Darwin was living on a family fortune, and thrusting a bitter competition on a starving world for its own good. From now on he could appeal to a better class of audience — to the rising industrialists, free-traders, and Dissenting professionals.

So you see, nothing I'm saying is original or controversial. Moreover, none of this casts any doubt upon the empirical truths of Natural Selection. To locate the intellectual roots of a scientific theory in the political and economic context of its time... or, indeed, in the Political Economy of its time... is not necessarily to cast the slightest doubt upon its truth value (nor do I). Furthermore, a theory that arises even in the direct context of another theory need not be permanently bound to it. As Engels wrathfully wrote, defending Darwin from idiot reproaches:

However great the blunder made by Darwin in accepting the Malthusian theory so naively and uncritically, nevertheless anyone can see at the first glance that no Malthusian spectacles are required to perceive the struggle for existence in nature...

(My italics.)

Darwin delayed publishing his thesis partly because he dreaded the prospect of bolstering the radical sectors of society who might use evolution as ammunition against church and state. He was a thoroughly respectable gentleman, terrified of the mob and of radicals.

Galton pioneered eugenics, and ideas about hereditary genius or greatness.  He considered 'greatness' to be a heritable trait, advocating financial incentives to 'great' people to marry and procreate.

Spencer, often unfairly maligned as a "social-Darwinist" was actually more a pioneer of what we today would call libertarianism... which, in the hands of the ideologues of capitalism, has become an ideology of free market freedom at all costs.

Of course, all these progressive, liberal, forward-thinking, modern-minded men were pioneers of the new world that was coming to replace the old, the new world of free trade and mass capitalism.


Victorian Veneer

That's what Josiah is. He's the new man. He's the forward-thinking, liberal, progressive, modern Victorian scientist. He's the guy who wants to "restore the blighted British Empire to its former power and vigour" by doing away with the obsolete old aristocratic figurehead (the Crowned Saxe-Coburg) and replace it with himself, the ultimate self-made "man of property"... whose advancement is built on keeping the poor down and helpless, locked away in the darkness.

He manifests a seemingly sincere horror and terror of Control.  He calls her "a depraved monstrosity", "quintessence of wickdness, corruption incarnate", "a foul and base creature pitted against me".

Like the men of progress who herded workers into the new urban hell holes of industrialisation, crammed them into infested hovels so they could slave in factories, sweated their children on production lines, etc., Josiah must neutralise the reality of this oppression - to himself as much as to anyone else - by demonising the people he is oppressing.  If the person you've consigned to a dark hole is evil and threatening, then why be ashamed of cheating them of their lives, of their chance to progress and advance?

Of course, like Josiah, the men who built wealth and power on the factory system and the slum were also terrified of the people they crammed into those factories and slums.  Their ideology was that of enterprise, of ruthless competition, of the Malthusian struggle, of the rightful victory of the most effective self-seeker and self-maker... and they were only too aware that these ideas cut both ways.

Remember that Control tries to rise through social mobility. She also becomes a ruthless self-seeking dealer and eventually becomes Josiah's mirror image and even takes over from him. Fashioned by Josiah's system, educated by reading The Times, she is a product of the hierarchy she was trapped under. Control was left behind, but she became integrated into the power structure by being dominated by it. She taught herself using the imperial paper of record, learning to aspire to upward social mobility, wanting to "be a ladylike", wanting to steal Josiah's power and take his place.

The people in the dark holes could just as easily seek for themselves and ruthlessly compete.  Most avenues to escape were closed to them by poverty and prejudice and religion, or thwarted by drink and oblivion... but, lurking at the corner of the eye, there was always the escape offered by the mob, the riot, the rebellion, the revolution.

Those modern, progressive, liberal, forward thinking Josiahs were all perpetually haunted by spectral tumbrils and baskets, by the downward whooshing sounds of slanted blades. The English had achieved their bourgeois revolution without any unfortunate eruptions as in France... but they all knew how close they'd come.  They all remembered Tom Paine.  Hell, like Sir Leicester Dedlock, they all remembered Wat Tyler.  They trembled and sobbed (literally, in the case of Spencer Walpole) when the Chartists took over Hyde Park.  And, much as they resented the aristocracy and the relics of the old ways, they hated the common people more.  Even as they sympathized over poverty, they hated the idea of the poor unifying to remedy their own situation.  The memory of the guillotine was, for the respectable Victorian gentlemen, a symbol of the mob slaughtering their proper rulers.  The new men of the Victorian industrial era didn't want that kind of thing happening again, any more than did the old aristos. They wanted the poor to stay poor (maybe less poor but still poor) and the workers to stay acquiescent as they - the new men - gently ousted the old landowners and Lords and Tories from the top spot. At best, there would be some reforms and alleviation of the worst suffering... but it should come from above or not at all.

Darwin, for instance, wanted Tories to die out. He wanted slavery done away with. But he wanted these remnants replaced with the Liberal 'poor laws' and 'reform acts': measures to squash the poor still further into industrial servitude, to create a kind of charitable penal system for paupers and placate the Chartists with compromises that simply extended the property qualification for the franchise. These were the modern ideas of the modern men. Meanwhile, the people were to be protected from dangerous ideas that might chip away at the ideological power of church and state... while the modern men used these dangerous ideas as the ideology of ruthless competition, free trade and industrial exploitation.

Josiah is a great reformer. A modern, Whiggish, propertied imperialist. He is the Survey and he has taken such good stock of the world he was sent to assimilate and copy that he has become a part of it. He is Victorian England, with all his rotten hypocrisy, his callous disregard, his arrogant self-promotion. He poses as an enemy of the stuffy, out-of-touch clerical backwardness of the old order. The natural laws of evolution are turned, by him, into an ideology of ruthless self-advancement. If Darwin's scientific inquiries lead him to understand that natural selection worked as 'reproduction of the best adaptation' then the society which quickly embraced his ideas comprehended them as an ideology of 'survival of the fittest', with fittest always meaning strongest and richest and harshest. Darwin himself was not, as we've seen, averse to seeing the hierarchies of his own time and place as being buttressed by the theory he had developed. That's Josiah. He's the man who still uses evolution as apologia or acceptance of the unjust, imperial, neoliberal status quo (either in crude ways like every market raider or in superficially more sophisticated ways like the sociobiologists).


Fitter, Happier, More Productive

'Ghost Light' shows the society mirrored in the system set up by an entity that has shaped itself according to this society and its new ideology.

The commercial nature of the society that has perverted this alien experiment into a miniaturised and essentialised portrait of Victorian bourgeois society shows in the way the Doctor is offered money to be an assassin, and how he eventually has to make a "deal" with Control.

The racist nature of this society shows in the imperialist ramblings of the Rider-Haggardian lunatic Redvers... in the bigotry of Inspector Mackenzie, whose diatribe about gypsies also refers to the essential idea of social-Darwinism, that it's "in the blood".

The sexist nature of this society shows in the way Josiah is served by a houseful of women, including the wife and daughter of the man he murdered, two women that he has simply inherited or appropriated in a ruthlessly Darwinian property takeover. They are literally part of the household, they come with it like the fixtures and fittings.

And the Victorian science which runs rampant and insane within Gabriel Chase is the perfect picture of a bourgeois society... a discourse of totalising taxonomy that wanted to collect, name, label, categorize, quantify every part of nature; arranging them all on hierarchical tables that mirrored its own conception of itself as a pyramid of power, desert and worth; anatomising specimens as though itemising the components of industrial machines; explaining the functioning of living things as though constructing them anew from cogs and pistons; killing and silencing and stilling and transfixing everything natural and chaotic with the pin of authority, displaying them all under the glass of respectability; crystallising knowledge of nature into the ideology of power; reserving such knowledge into cultural capital, to be distributed by gentlemen of largesse to the extent that they thought good for the multitude.


Cleansing Fire

Meanwhile, Light is a perversion and denial of both the Christian angel and the evolutionist scientist. He is the drag factor that pulls everything back. He is the worst aspect of the science that has to disrupt and destroy in order to understand things. He stands over the dead, dismembered body of a maid and says "I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it". If he's religion holding back science, he's also science taking things apart and being unable to reassemble them. Reductionism run mad.  Unable to cope with a barrage of change, flux, imagination, fiction and nonsense, he seizes up until he becomes a stone idol. A statue of an angel, or of one of the DWEMs that line the inside of the Nat Hist. Doesn't matter. He reveals their fundamental similarity. It is impossible for him to cope with reality as an immensely complex web of dialectical inter-reactions.  He can travel at the speed of thought but he can't think.

(The irony being that Natural Selection ultimately supports this - to use a risky phrase - 'dialectic of nature', at least to an extent, by revealing that all species are transitional, snapshots taken from an endless chain of change, isolatable only in theory from the relationships in which they nestle, always influencing and being influenced by their environment and their contact with each other. The little changes imperceptibly become massive alterations, thus transforming quantity into quality. The apparent opposites actually exist in unity. And so on.)

The Doctor, meanwhile, sides with the anarchy of teenage emotional and political anger. He can't be a scientist in the Josiah or Light sort of way. He loathes bus stations, with all their timetables and categories and delineated waiting areas... with their hierarchies and schedules and zones and order. He sides with those who want to blow up the Victorian edifice for what it shares with the kind of thinking that leads racists to firebomb the flats of Asian families.

(While we're on the subject, lets dispense with this notion that the line "white kids firebombed it" is an embarrassing clunker. I lived near Southall in the early-to-mid 80s. I remember, as a child, hearing discussions about what some of my fellow "white kids" were getting up to in the area often called "Little India". I remember the racism of the "white kids" in the dark blue uniforms, protecting National Front "white kids" while arresting Indian youths on the assumption that their bikes were stolen.  I was aware of the "white kid" coppers who'd killed anti-racist protesters with impunity. I found out, as an adult, about the riots and protests that were the inevitable result of such racism. So, basically, if you cringe at the line "white kids firebombed it" then I submit that you have missed the point.)

The Doctor sides with those who just want to explore the catalogue rather than fix everything into place and create a static tyranny of categories and labels and authority. That's why the story concentrates on the binaries that bleed into each other, on the transgression of categories. Ace and Gwendoline put on male clothes and it causes a hell of a stir, but it demonstrates that such fixed categories are just snapshots of evolution. And, of course, people can change because they exist in a social context rather than just a biological one. Humans self-create meaning. Meaning self-creates meaning. Dialectically.

This is what really bugs Light, I think, just as it bugs Josiah and Matthews in different ways.  Light, of course, is the apocalyptic intensification of their joint horror at the transgression of categories... particularly by those who had no part in drawing them up and making them law.  That's the deep reason for the apparently over-the-top description of Light and his Survey as "an evil older than time itself".  Light is evil in the senses that Terry Eagleton identified.  We ask in vain what his survey was supposed to achieve.  There was no purpose.  It had the "lethal purity" of pointlessness.  Light is against 'Being' because he doesn't understand that Being is all about change.  Ultimately this was always going to lead to an attempt at negation, at annihilation.  Meaningless in himself - because he does not change... or at least doesn't think that he does - Light wishes to expunge all meaning.  He's the angelic cleanser.  All information that is not him must be burned away.

As that eminent Victorian Gerard Manley Hopkins put it (quoted by Eagleton):  "Flaws, loose ends, and rough approximations are what evil cannot endure. This is one reason why it has an affinity with the bureaucratic mind. Goodness, by contrast, is in love with the dappled, unfinished nature of things."

The irony with which the Doctor defeats Light is that very "unfinished nature" of all 'Being', even his own.  Light ("Imagination, comma, lack of") cannot conceive that any information can be invented, reworked, recreated by people.  The very dialectic of change within himself is enough to ossify him from within.  He is literally out-evolved by himself.

Wicked.

Things Fall Apart

Here's a round-up of my Timelash II on Season 18.  I was holding this (and some of the stuff about Seasons 19-21) back because I was going to rework it into something bigger, but that isn't happening (too much else to do), so...


The Leisure Hive

Bidmead's script tinkerings somewhat dilute the essential idea of a leisure planet in favour of wannabe-big-conceptual stuff... which is pretty dull and lumbering, if we're honest.

The planet fails to convince as a leisure resort, which kind of undercuts all the lengths they go to to stress that the whole race have become employees of a going concern. All that boardroom stuff where they discuss investments suddenly looks redundant. What's it there to contextualise?

The stylistic overhaul is huge, ambitious and largely successful. There's a new willingness to try stuff out. They're happy to go all dark and quiet during the scene where Timson is stalked by the West Lodge Foamasi. I particularly like the slow, melancholy opening.

Mind you, the seeds of the later-80s problems are already visible. The Doctor is now wearing a uniform, etc.

The politics is weird. The war was about... what? Argolin militarism? So, their response to their catastrophic defeat was to become capitalists specialising in leisure? Umm, okay... And their enemies, who now want peace, are apparently statists who have outlawed "private enterprise"... apart from a kind of mafia faction... er...  Y'know, it's potentially good stuff but, somehow, it fails to fit together.

It's darn good as a first attempt at an overhaul of the basic dramatic and aesthetic values of a show in decline... but we'll have to wait until 'Full Circle' before they get it to work.

You wouldn't think this was the start of one of my absolute favourite seasons, would you?


Meglos

This is daft. But I have to confess to having a seriously soft spot for it.

There are some good ideas buried in there. The Dodecahedron makes me think of Kepler, and his obsession with the perfect shapes that he thought contained the secrets of the universe... which was a conflict within him between science and mysticism which he sought unsuccessfully to reconcile... the problem is that the nearest thing to such a character in the story is Zastor, who's hardly there at all.

Some of the music is great. The Screens have an impressive monumentalism to their design.  They suggest (to me anyway) some ruined statue of Ozymandias lying rusting in the silicon desert of the real.

Sadly we have a silly jungle planet too. And someone who wants to run the universe for no particular reason.

Also, we have casual racism in the casting: the Gaztaks are multi-racial because they're a band of criminals.  Of course, I realise this happens because they're pirates... and pirates were supposedly (I know next to nothing about the actual history of pirates) a multi-racial bunch... but this also explains why there are no black Tigellans... which underlines the fact that, in this story, normality is civil society and civil society (i.e. scientists, religious people, police, politicians... all inside the city, within the community, under the state) is exclusively white.  A multi-ethnic mix becomes a sign of the external, the motley, the threatening, the lawless, the anti-social, the nomadic, the uncontrolled and uncivillised outside force.  It's an implication, nothing more.  And quite mild by any standards.  Nothing to get worked up about.  But it's still there, all the same.


Full Circle

Season 18 finally comes together.

Okay, we get pretty much the first 80s-style soapy domestic scenes aboard the TARDIS... but in their melancholy nature, they're still rather lovely and a far cry from all the bickering that would later clog up 80s tales. No Tegan with bad US-sitcom style insults. Just two people who are rather fond of each other, quietly beginning to face the need to part.

The story itself is steeped in irony of a particularly caustic kind. The Doctor's barely-concealed contempt for the initiative-free Alzarians contrasts nicely with his rage at Dexeter and at what he takes to be the cynicism of the Deciders... but it turns out to be less cynicism than just more ineptitude (intellectual and moral), which stops the story from being a simplistic morality tale about shifty leaders. Instead we get a story in which everybody seems to be doing everything more or less wrong without meaning to, in which the best intentions are obscured and hindered by incompetence, prejudice and/or fear. Even the kid rebels (who prove themselves more gutsy and intelligent than the adults) are blundering around in ignorance.

In a story which seems so concentrated on the process of maturation, it can hardly be an accident that we get one of the few depictions of an alien/monster that is also a child. Of course, the child dies. Partly through the workings of science (which this story depicts as intrusive and violating as much as enlightening), partly through the hamfisted glory-seeking of Dexeter, partly through its own ignorance of technology, partly through its trust in the only kind face it has ever seen. True pathos (as opposed to sentimentality) leads to the Doctor's glorious tirade against the Deciders, but he has the maturity to calm down when forced to admit that he doesn't have a monopoly on understanding... and he leaves the Deciders with the choice whether to press the button or not.

The themes of the story are highlighted and enriched by the notion that the Alzarians can't pilot their own ship. They must travel aimlessly, like evolution... if they have the guts to travel at all. This final revelation heaps on the absurdity and irony whereas a more straightforward and less interesting story would just have left the Deciders as cynical procrastinators. Social entropy resulting in the loss of knowledge. Class and hierarchy based not on the rottenness of rulers but on control over surplus (the technology and the ship and the books, which are cultural capital when the Deciders can decipher them and just the baubles of authority when they can’t).

Of course, it gets evolution wrong in all sorts of ways... though it's better than I've previously given it credit for (when I said that it depicted evolution working by "a kind of teleological lamarckism") because, as I recently realised, the Alzarians are only humanoid because they evolved to fit inside the Starliner.

Ultimately, you can forgive the technical errors because the story expresses (with careful irony) some essential truths about our kinship with the beasts: we bear the lowly stamp of our origins, we look on our ancestors with a kind of existential horror, we have insight that they lack, but in our technocratic comfort we've lost the spark of ruthless initiative that must have helped them survive until they became us.


State of Decay

...depicts feudalism as literal blood-sucking. It offers a luridly symbolic picture of how such a society works. To be flippant and theoretically inexact (in the extreme), the Great Vampire is the base and the tower is the superstructure. The architecture of tyrannical hierarchy is constructed on the basis of absolute exploitation. But the structure is tottering. The reversion from the high-technological civilisation of the astronauts backwards to feudalism is ‘the wasting’, the loss of social traction upon the forces of production that leads to the wasting of lives and thoughts and machines and methods and people, that leads to rooms full of rusting computers and unused rocket ships masquerading as castles. The forces exist to provide a better life for all, but they are outlawed and neglected into entropic disintegration by a system that refuses to relinquish its power.

Also, it’s also got vampire bats in it, which is kewwwwl.


I looked at Warriors' Gate, here.


The Keeper of Traken

Fourth masterpiece in a row.

The ancient man in the throne. The statue in the decaying grove. These are images that are hardwired into my brain. I saw them as a small child and they have stuck with me, the way that ideas from myths and fairytales do. The rest of the story may not always live up to the amazing aesthetic impact of these two elements (it all gets a tad twee and art nouveau for my taste...) but still, there's no denying that this is a richly drawn world... richly drawn in story too... because this is a "real" world... with living rooms and safes, cloisters and private offices, groves and public streets, bribeable petty officials and weddings and step-mothers and kings and... ahh, we're back to fairytales now, aren't we? But that's okay... fairytales have their origins in real times and places, in real fears and social conditions.

This tension between the 'realistic' social complexity of the world and its alternate nature as fairytale may well be what makes this story so interesting... as well as the usual (consistent is a less perjorative way of putting it) Season 18 emphasis on entropy and history.

The idea of a place so good that evil beings are immediately paralysed and calcified seems too simplistic... but, as we see more of Traken society, the more we realise that their ideas of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are more to do with order and disorder... actually with stasis and change... than anything truly ethical. Maybe it isn’t “infinite evil” that gets turned to stone but, rather, anything that tries to bring disruption and disorder… or just change. Is there social perfection here or mass lazy acquiescence? There certainly doesn't seem to be any democracy; more like a relatively benevolent oligarchy… of course, an oligarchy can afford to be relatively benevolent in times of plenty. But there is still talk of summary executions. There is still greed, ambition, class snobbery, distrust, superstition. A smothering complacency... that the Master is waiting to exploit.

This is one of the best manifestations of the old bastard. He isn’t calcified, he is hidden inside a pretence of being calcified. He complains of his immobility… but that seems more like a self-inflicted side-effect of waiting so long for his chance at grabbing the Source. He's playing a waiting game with Kassia and her whole world, without ever daring to venture out into it… just in case. He plays upon and uses the original sins of the Trakenites, fuelling his jealousy and resentment. He is, almost literally, the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Again, the tension between the fairytale and the social complexity.

What does the Serpent do? He lurks in a garden and misleads a woman with temptations and false promises, leading to her causing the downfall of a utopian mode of life. Well, obviously, the Melkur/Master chimes with this. But it's more complex than this. Genesis is an immensely powerful text because it says deeper things than that. It's an attempt to understand where the world of work and pain and alienation came from, when we all feel, deep down, that we were meant for a better life. It places the deeper blame - rightly in some ways, wrongly in others, I'd argue - on history itself. Change and decay.

Change of any kind is inimical to the Trakenites. They live in a cloying “web of harmony” that stifles nature and all the chaotic and entropic things that nature needs. But they also seem to live outside history. They've reached the 'End of History', a bland millenium of bourgeois order. The Master reintroduces the Trakenites to death and disorder and change… and, however nasty his motives (petty spite and small-minded imperialist delusions), he actually may have done them a kind of favour. Like the serpent, he’s kick-started history by destroying bland perfection and offering dangerous knowledge. He’s brought them back into history by bringing them back into the nightmare of conquest and expansion and political innovation. This is 'progress' and we don't have to like it to see that, sometimes, it needs to happen.

He has restarted the clock, albeit briefly… of course he will soon stop their clocks forever.


Logopolis

'Logopolis' (literally, "City of Words") brings Season 18's preoccupation with entropy to a culmination. Entropy has been a preoccupation of Doctor Who from the very beginning. What is 'An Unearthly Child' about if not social entropy... it's even about the loss of heat for Godel's sake! What is 'Gridlock' about if not the breakdown of a social system, with chaos infiltrating the layers where the energy has drained away, with human physical and social energy uselessly pooled in a cul-de-sac?

Funny thing is, in 'Logopolis' entropy behaves more like a corruption of information. Entropy has of course been adapted to information theory... especially with regards to transmission which, interestingly enough, is a key concept in 'Logopolis'. The story seems to think that reality is made of information and, indeed, this is one way of interpreting the trend of the physical sciences. Oddly, this chimes with many ancient religious ideas.

'Logopolis' is much more myth and legend... theology even... than it is science. The Logopolitans may be superficially mathematicians, but as sages who "mutter, intone" reality into existence (or transformation) they are much more like wizards uttering spells or priests reciting the scripture. They're like monks... and monks, historically, were the people who created and preserved all the texts, all the history and philosophy. They created their world - and much of what we know of their world comes from their words - by means of language. Moreover, the idea that reality is made of words - implicit in 'Logopolis' - is one that has resonated through many religious conceptions, from the Jewish Kabbalah to the Christian Genesis ("In the beginning was the word") in which God literally speaks the universe into existence and need only utter a decree for new structure to arise.

In keeping with the idea that entropy is more a corruption of information than a measure of uselessly pooled energy within a system, the cosmic apocalypse in this curious tale is as much a silencing or darkening as it is a crumbling. The pages of the book of the world are being erased, leaving only terminal blankness and silence. Time ends, history stops, silence engulfs all reality and all structure unravels... all because the Master imposes silence upon the speaking, muttering, chanting, thinking world. His callous, self-seeking philistinism is the antithesis of all speech and all language, hence of all physical and social reality, of all history and all future.

Parenthetically... it's interesting how the work of a science-minded guy like Bidmead, who is probably a materialist or physicalist of some kind, instead relies upon such an idealist conception of reality... but then this does often happen.  Look at Dawkins.  He presents himself as the arch-materialist... yet memes are pure idealism.

Back with 'Logopolis', we also have Tom's final turn as a man who has lost his old friends but must soon change to fit his new ones, a man warned by his own future (by his own immortal soul?) that he will soon have to watch the universe shudder and totter, and then that he himself will die. He's quiet, heavy, sad... and wonderful.

Okay, it looks very cheap. But this is Doctor Who after all, and such things go with the territory. How can you really complain about the aesthetics of a story that serves up so many dazzling and haunting images. The TARDIS inside itself like Russian Dolls; the TARDIS as a sinister labyrinth; the TARDIS as a cloistered thinking-space made from crumbling masonry and overrun with vines; the TARDIS as a puzzle box rather than a spaceship. Then you have the dish, emblematic of transmission and information, glowering over a city of monastic cells that also look like the crenulations of a massive brain.

Much of the plot is... odd, to say the least. And Episode One is seriously clogged up by the unnecessary saga of Tegan's journey to work, complete with her monomaniacal wittering about planes and the "hilarious" business of silly females who, natch, are hopeless with machines. And then there's the Master. He just manages to stand for the silencing of thought and knowledge... but he does it inspite of his inherent feebleness as a character. Really, a story like ‘Logopolis’ needs more than a bog-standard, black-clad, moustache-twirling, megalomaniac Dick Dastardly.

But, in the end, I think you have to applaud 'Logopolis' with all its flaws. It's a unique piece of television: mythic, erudite, heartfelt and thoughtful. The inconsistencies of the plot, the weakness of some of the characterisation, a few moments of horrible dialogue and the presence of Tegan make it impossible for me to quite rate this as highly as the four masterpieces that preceded it... but it's a close run thing.

Anxiety Satellite

The indefatigable Mr. Oliver Wake has put together and released the latest issue of the print fanzine Panic Moon.  It can be ordered here.

It contains (amongst other things) a judicious appraisal of the 'Day of the Daleks' Special Edition, a look at the way Hartnell's shade has taken to haunting the recent series, a clever thing about the way Daleks always seem to get some new physical ability in first episodes, an interesting look at the pre-Who 60s Pathfinders serials which are now out on DVD and an excellent analysis of 'The Sun Makers' which identifies some of its roots, going beyond the usual stuff about Bob Holmes being annoyed by a tax bill.

Once again, I've contributed two articles.  In one, I identify a blind spot in the lefty-liberal creds of 'Colony in Space' and try to tease out some of implications of this, leading me to briefly consider something badly amiss with liberalism itself.  In another article, I have a good old ramble about the various ways Doctor Who has creatively misrepresented evolution, often using it was a way of re-encoding mythic themes or addressing political concerns... though there is, I argue, one story that really is about evolution itself.

It's good, so... umm... buy it.  Please?

(No career in advertising awaits me, I know.)

Gonzo Marx

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


Battle for the Planet of the Apes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


I, Product

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

We end up buried. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Genesis of the Dialects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is, literally, the alienation machine.

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


The War Machines

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

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

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

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


Vengeance in Venice

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

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

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

On the grander scale, usury was recast as banking.

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

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

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

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


The End of Time

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

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

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

Flat Earth Society

The greatness and uniqueness of 'Image of the Fendahl' is shown in the scene where the Doctor "explains" what's going on to Adam Colby. Of course, he doesn't actually do any such thing. He suggests two possible explanations. He favours the first but his listener is sceptical so the Doctor offers an alternative which his listener finds more plausible. The Doctor also says that it might all be a coincidence. His tone is flippant but there is no real reason to suppose that he isn't being serious. It is clear that the Doctor is theorising and that he doesn't have the final answer.

This is fascinating and, as far as I can recall, unique in classic Doctor Who.

The Doctor has often been seen to behave superficially like a scientist (mucking about with test tubes, talking about oscillators, etc.) but this is the first and only real occasion when he really acts like one (like an idealised, Baconian one, that is). The Doctor is admitting that he doesn’t know and doing his best to come up with workable explanations which fit the facts. Moreover, the person the Doctor is speaking to is a scientist who has demanded answers and is coming to his own conclusions about how plausible the Doctor's ideas are. No final decision is reached or stated as to which solution (if any) is correct. Fendleman's rant to Stael before his death tends to support the Doctor's idea about genetic manipulation (Colby's preferred option, possibly because he heard Fendleman speak) but the Doctor seems to prefer his first idea about a "biological transmutation field" which Colby might doubt simply because he doesn't know what one is.

This is all highly appropriate in a story that is preoccupied with the tensions between science, evidence, theory, supposition, superstition and belief.

The story opens with Colby fretting over a dissonance between established scientific facts (the age of the skull) and the apparent impossibility of their implications. (Someone once asked J.B.S. Haldane if any scientific finding could disprove evolution; "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian" was his gruff response.) Meanwhile, Fendleman spends much of the story trying to convince Adam of the validity of his theories. Wonderfully, Fendleman gets it partly right and partly wrong (something else that doesn’t usually happen in tales like this). His theory about the pentagram being a neural relay seems to be borne out, but his idea of the nature of the power it contains is woefully mistaken.  Nobody is really entirely Right or Wrong about anything in this story, which is very refreshing.

Stael is an interesting character. His employment of the occult ritual is self-consciously ironic and cynical. He rejects Colby's taunts about being a Satanist and claims to be unimpressed by "the grimoires". Nevertheless, he employs occult language and ceremonies... this might be meant as showing unconscious drives. Scott Fredericks (an actor with a lot of interiority) even seems to be working to endow Stael with a repressed sexual interest in Colby. Stael's ideas exist on that deeply-70s line of thinking along which the occult, paranormal phenomena and science intersect. This might be dated but it is perfectly appropriate with this story.

The story does a lot of that Nigel Kneale stuff. Apparently supernatural effects are revealed as side-effects of natural phenomena. Quatermass is usually mentioned but the story’s real debt is to Kneale’s masterpiece The Stone Tape, in which a team of practical scientists (!) who dig down in an old priory (!) discover that a haunting in the house is a kind of natural recording. The central female character in The Stone Tape has an unusual sympathy with the haunting/entity and ends up being absorbed by it… just like Thea Ransome. I don’t mean to accuse Boucher of plagiarism; there are as many differences as similarities and Boucher’s script, arguably, has more to say about the nature of belief that Kneale’s.

The Fendahl manifests itself in the manner of an all-out occult horror. Skulls, pentagrams, rituals, sacrifices. But the entity is clearly described as a horrible, one-off evolutionary snafu. It is suggested (the Doctor continues to offer suggestions rather than statements) that our human concepts of evil are influenced by the appearance and methods of the Fendahl... so human superstitions about evil come from our attempts to understand things like death and predation. The Fendahl is not stored inside a pentagram-embossed skull because it is diabolical, rather we have drawn our iconography of evil from a collective memory of the Fendahl, a creature so inimical to life that is it, effectively, a personification of death... but then, evolution is itself a kind of personification of death. It depends upon death as much as upon anything else.

Interestingly, the Fendahl never displays actual, conscious malice. I used to think that the core should have spoken up with sinister words. Watching the story now I am very glad that it stays silent and enigmatic. The closest it gets to expressing a malevolent personality is the little smile as it consumes human life force... but any creature might express satisfaction as it feeds. It is not really evil. It is just a supremely evolved predator.  It is Death, in the sense that it feeds on living things in the most fundamental way possible: it assimilates them into itself... but in biological terms, that's quite right.  To feed on something is to absorb those parts of it that can become part of you, excreting those bits that are unassimilable.

The key to understanding this story lies in the exchange between Ma Tyler and Jack about the nature of belief. “When most believe, that do make it true,” she asserts. “People used to think the world was flat,” Jack tells his grandma, “but it were still round.” “Ah,” she replies immediately, “but they behaved as though t’were flat!” This apparent gibberish is actually right to the point.

The story is full of people who behave as though their assumptions are correct and, in so doing, contribute to the situation in which the Fendahl reawakens. Fendleman and Stael, for their different reasons, have decided that the power within the skull should be released and so they set about it. Ted Moss clings to “the old ways” and thus takes part in Stael’s ceremony. Even Colby refuses to accept scientific facts when they contradict his assumptions and so brings Thea into contact with the skull. The Fendahl feeds on the life force, according to the Doctor, so it can be seen as a personification of death, more particularly as the dark side of evolution. But another subtext is also clear: it feeds on belief. Belief without reason. Belief against evidence.

How apt that it should have evolved as a result of natural selection turning back on itself.

The thing unfolds like a nightmare.  I mean that in the broad sense.  The story is dreamlike.  Its narrative logic is fairly strong (even the matter of who releases the Doctor is fathomable, given some deduction) but the nuts and bolts of the story are jumpy, dream-logical, figurative and alliterative.  The Doctor and Leela disappear into time for a brief period but return after what looks like a full day has passed for the other characters.  We are asked to interpret quite important parts of the action from the standpoint of thematic rhymes and resonances.  The fourth wall is broken.  Spoken numbers fail to match the number of fingers being held up.  We keep getting references to dreams.  And dream scenarios crop up: sudden, inexplicable imobility for example.  People have names that seem oddly appropriate.  "Thea Ransome" suggests sacrifice: she is the ransom paid to a theistic entity.  Even Ted Moss clings like a slow growth.  The idiosyncratic editing emphasizes the peculiarity of the proceedings.  We cut sharply away from scenes after highly pregnant remarks have been snapped out... and then the camera will linger longer than seems obviously necessary, in order to catch the expressions of a speaker or hearer.

The only cloud on the horizon (other than a certain painful tweeness in certain scenes) is the mooted notion that people might behave in certain specific ways because they've been genetically programmed to. But then, the Doctor only talks about "desires and instincts", which probably do have a genetic factor. Fendleman's interpretation is more extreme, and sounds like genetic destiny... but the Fendahl might've employed a scattershot effect, feeding in the right "desires and instincts" and hoping that eventually someone would be in a position to act upon them in the right way. Does it "explain the dark side of man's nature"? Well, if the Fendahl personifies evolution (through death and predation) then... maybe... but I don't think anything in the story reduces the picture to genetic-determinism.

Of course, either way, the meaning of the oblique title becomes clear. As does the significance of the name Adam.  Whether it personifies brutal evolution or a demonic puppetmaster that depends upon unreason, the Fendahl, it is implied, created us in its own image.