The Award of Cruelty

Diversity and social justice issues were creeping into the Hugo Awards, or rather into the cultural artifacts they celebrate, as such issues creep into the culture generally.  It happens because people are getting more and more interested in them, more open to them, and caring more about them.  This is, by the way, the product of material struggles for recognition and equal rights by people who are marginalised by mainstream culture in the West (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, bourgeois-hegemonic culture).  It must be stressed that such claims are not only valid on their face but also are represented, in artistic terms, by valuable work that deserves recognition.

The Puppies saw this trend and it infuriated them.  Just as they are doubtless infuriated by any such progress, by the increasing volume of the voices they used to be able to talk over and down to with impunity, by the increasing - and increasingly recognised - validity of these voices, not only in themselves but in their abilities.  The Hugos are, the Puppies think, their turf, just as the rabble of GamerGate, and the constituency they pander to, imagine that video games are their turf.  They took the gradual changes occuring in an institution that has always reflected a seam of progressivism in SF/Fantasy (just as it has always reflected other seams) and blew the phenomenon up out of all proportion.  (Seriously, I wish their distorted view of Hugos, and culture generally, were really true, and the voices they hate and fear really were as ascendant as they fantasize them to be.)

They saw this smidge of progress and imagined that it constituted some kind of attack upon their freedom.  They imagined it, and believed it, having chosen to imagine and believe it... because it's amazing how sincerely and passionately people can believe ridiculous things that further their interests, confirm their prejudices and pamper their privileges.  They did this because that's what reactionaries always do.  It's a classic maneuvre when you're rallying around the defence of established privilege and entrenched power relations (which is what reactionary politics always is, at base): paint yourself as the victim.  It's great camouflage.  And they love it too.  They love the smell of the victim paint on their bodies, drying on them, crusting and cracking, leaving a trail of victim flakes everywhere they go.  Conservatives and reactionaries and fascists and ressentimentalists are as fond of being the victim as the whingeing, entitled, self-pitying minorities that live in their imaginations.  (There is probably something psychological to be made of the right-wing love of victimhood, and the way they always portray themselves in much the same terms that they complain about in their confabulated enemies and hate-figures.  I remember how, at school, bullies would always howl "But he started it!" and "It wasn't my fault!" when caught, and then pout self-pityingly at the injustice of being told not to bully.)

But yeah, they interpret the struggles of the marginalised and mocked, their demands for justice, as an attack.  Moderate demands.  Not wanting to overturn the table.  Just wanting a seat.  A seat, moreover, that has been hard won and earned fair 'n' square.  That was what the Puppies were scared of.  Fewer seats for them to spread out on.  And here's the thing: in their stupid, crude, self-pitying, myopic way they have a point.  The less oppressed some people are, the less powerful are the people who used to benefit from their oppression.  Yeah.  True.  What they get wrong is the construction they put on this. 

The Puppies, and the ressentimental and truculent group they represent, then paint any unified resistance as totalitarian groupthink, as the effect of drones all obeying a single politicized agenda.  Because this is another classic maneuvre.  Efface your own deeply political motives (what could be more political than the aggressive defence of one's own privilege in the face of attempts by others to become less subject to you?) and then angrily ascribe political motives and agendas to the people combating you.  Your own motives are, by definition, pure.  Pure in the sense of being disinterested.  The spurious notion of impartiality as being a middle way between two extremes (i.e. the extreme of power and the extreme of powerlessness) is a fallacy often embraced by the right for the sake of argument.

Always, the oppressors and/or their useful idiots think of oppression as, and describe it as, the norm.  The baseline.  Zero on the meter, from which atypical readings diverge into the plus or minus.  The current state of things (or the current state of things as they imagine it, sometimes mapping nostalgia onto now) is, obviously, good because it benefits them.  Obviously normal because it benefits them.  Obviously the best way to do things beause it benefits them.  Obviously democratic and fair beause it benefits them.  "I love freedom," goes the thinking, "ergo when I get to dictate the terms of the debate, that's freedom.  When things are arranged to benefit and privilege and prioritise me, that's freedom."  This way of thinking, by the way, is hardly unique to the hard right.  It is characteristic of managerialist liberalism.  For liberal elites (see Noam Chomsky, not Rand Paul, for a definition of what this actually mean), this is pretty much what 'democracy' means: social arrangements dominated and managed by liberal technocrats and intellectuals, without too much interference from the people.  (Yes, I know, I sound like some of the 'radical' right here... and there are areas where such people will spout rhetoric that sounds like a radical analysis of liberal capitalism... but BEWARE, because that's just the cynical populism of the right, just evidence of their failure to understand the real problems of democracy even as they dumbly sense them.) 

The normalising of the current state of injustice means that entities like the Puppies can, once again, paint their angry, sclerotic, dudebroish, O'Reillyesque defence of their own privilege as a defence of liberty.  Ultimately, however, the liberty being defended is their liberty to run the place without anybody questioning it.  Their liberty to help themselves to the biggest slices of pie (anybody cries shennanigans when you take more than your share and you accuse them of wanting all the pie for themselves - it's as old as the hills).  Their liberty to dominate the culture and set the agenda, and patronize people different from them.  Their liberty to insist upon outdated cultural assumptions and definitions in the face of evidence and demands which refute them.  Other liberties mean nothing to them.  The liberty of people not in the privileged group to write and read what they like, to influence the wider culture, to unify to combat their own marginalisation, to be recognised not only for their humanity and rights but also for their achievements... entities like the Puppies are openly hostile to such liberties, because for all their libertarian bluster they are, essentially, doing nothing more than fighting a rearguard action against cultural trends which terrify them because they chip away at their old hegemonic position.

These generalisations are useful because they can be applied at other levels of our culture.  What I say above is generally true of right-wing movements anywhere and anywhen, I find.  To the extent that they are significant at all, I think the Puppies are significant as an example.  A vivid, close-to-home example for people in the SF/Fantasy community.  But then, as I say, the SF/Fantasy community is already expanding to include more and more people who already know exactly how people like this operate, either because they are increasingly politicised or because they have to cope with this kind of bullshit on a day-to-day level because of their own positionality.  Which is precisely the scary fact that glavanised first the Sad then the Rabid Puppies, much as they might try to hide their true fears under layers of code and dogwhistling, and faux-victimhood, and disingenuously apolitical nostalgia for simplicity, and more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger lamentation about the kids on their lawn.

The Puppies will claim to be champions of democracy.  But the kinds of gradual shifts that we see represented in the changing face of the Hugos are democracy.  To the extent that shifts in attitudes entails shifts in demands, and shifts in demands brings on shifts in what gets published, it may even be a legitimate instance of consumer democracy!  It's also a symptom of the fact that we're in a relatively small and marginal subculture here (i.e. the kinds of people who write and/or read SF novellas published by relatively small presses.)  In any case, the manifestation of such democratic changes in things like the Hugos is usually pretty weak and watery and late compared to the real thing.  Established and entrenched structures are slow to change, and slow to register change from without... as indeed are established and entrenched subcultures and their attitudes.  But the Hugos are voted for.  So the access of people to the levers of this structure, or this expression of the views of a subculture if you prefer, makes it a reasonable barometer (if you'll permit me to mix metaphors flagrantly).  Precisely why the Puppies attacked it.  And thus a minority tries to dominate artificially in order to stop a majority dominating organically... and, as always, the canny thing is for the reactionaries to claim persecution.  The standard reactionary technique.

Just look at the media's reaction to the clamour of those alienated from a right-wing Labour party to rejoin and vote for a 'left-wing' leadership candidate, an MP who has the temerity to be a moderate social-democrat instead of hugging the extreme neoliberalism that the media likes to call the 'centre'.  In many ways, this is an instructive comparison because it's almost an mirror image of what happened with the Puppies and the Hugos.  Instead of an institution that more-or-less accurately acts as a barometer for the views and tastes of the community it concerns, Labour is a party utterly alienated from those it claims to represent.  Instead of mass-reactionary entryism in an effort to distort results rightwards, Labour is being rejoined by people who want to reclaim it for those it was historically supposed to serve.  The bass-ackwards view of events concerning the Hugos which is peddled by the Puppies is mirrored in the bass-ackwards view of Labour's leadership election by the right-wing UK media.  (How long, by the way, before the Puppies nominate the Mail's dystopian sci-fi about an apocalyptic Corbyn premiereship for next year's Hugos?  Purely on artistic merit, natch.)

There is not even a grain of truth to the Puppie's performative bloviating about democracy, anymore than there is in the UK media's bloviating about 'responsible, adult politics'.  It might be argued that if reactionaries want to join and pay their membership fee so they can vote in the Hugos, then that's fair enough.  The Hugos are a barometer because they have some responsiveness to public opinion, which itself is a function of the fact that, unlike the Oscars and Baftas and so on, they are voted on by anyone who cares enough to pay a minimal sum for the pleasure of doing so.  And are the Puppies not members of the public, and paid-up voters?  This falls flat, and is revealed as mere sophistry, because they are - in true fascist style - taking advantage of democratic structures in order to countermand democratic results.  They artificially dominated the proceedings and squidged out genuinely representative nominations.  But, ultimately, I'm just not that fussed about the legitimacy or good standing of an awards ceremony.  What it represents on the other hand... or rather what is represented by the changing face of the nominations and nominees... that's rather more important.

The issue here is that the various Puppy-endorsed nonentities had no business being on the nominations if the nominations are supposed to represent an organic and democratic reflection of the state of fan culture.  The Puppies warped the Hugos out of recognition and usefulness as a result of their ballot-stuffing antics.  They actively, deliberately and effectively excluded people who would've been on the ballots otherwise, and in so doing markedly reduced diversity.  Their argument would doubtless be that diversity is not something we have the right to expect.  It can't be enforced.  No 'positive discrimination'.  But, as usual, they are operating in bad faith to the point of dishonesty; distorting reality to the point of inverting it.  Diversity was, as can clearly see, going to occur naturally and organically and democratically.  They, the Puppies, set about artificially stifling it.  They have the right to their say, of course, but not to dominate proceedings dishonestly and artificially in the name of rebalancing something that was never out of balance in the first place.  Again, balance seems to them, naturally, to be the state of affairs where they get what they want.  It really is incredible how the people sat at the top of a pyramid (or strangely invested, for peculiar psychological reasons of their own, in the ideology of the people at the top of a pyramid) can look down and see it as a level playing field, and thus resent it when anyone tries to flatten it.  "Democracy!" hollers the self-righteous and outraged minority from above at the crowd below trying pull stones out of the base of the structure.  "If you can't climb then you don't deserve to get this high!" they say, forgetting that they were just lifted and plonked on top.

They'd love us to get sidetracked on the issue of the legitimacy of political voting (which, in any case, has now been addressed by the Hugos with their 'E Pluribus Hugo' amendment to the nomination process), because they have an easy retort to anyone who says they voted on a political agenda.  They have the time-honoured playground response, the "I know you are but what am I?" response.  Moreover, they have the claim that they only did what they did because 'we' did it first.  And when we respond with our counter attack, they can then do the obvious and say "ahhhh look, you voted based on politics not on the quality of the text!  You did exactly what we accused you of doing!  By fighting us you have proved our point!  Ahhhh!".  I know that this is how they think because twitter is currently infested with Puppy-supporters and GamerGate-types doing and saying precisely these things, making precisely these 'arguments'.

But Lee & Herring fans will know what I mean when I say "this is not an 'ahhhh' situation".  Again, their argument is two-faced sophistry.  The Hugos were changing all by themselves (as it were), without 'us' having to consciously organise any sort of SJW conspiracy.  This doesn't make them wonder if 'our' movement might actually be organic and democratic rather than a bullying minority... or at least, if they do wonder such things, they don't admit it.  Again, if it strays from what the think is 'normal' (i.e. the set of arrangements that privileges them and their preferences) then obviously someone is conspiring against normality.

In the service of this 'argument', they elide voting politically and voting for things you genuinely like because of (or partly because of) your politics.  But - and it really is embarrassing to have to point out simplicities like this to adults - there's a difference.  

Of course you are likely to like things you agree with.  Part of why I like China Mieville is because he has a very similar worldview to me (admittedly, this is partly because I've taken a lot of my worldview from his).  He writes interestingly about things that interest me.  He writes inspiringly about things that inspire me (there's no point denying that I love Iron Council partly because it engages favourably with revolutionary politics - I find that thrilling).  He writes with horror about things that horrify me.  I don't have to stop and look away in revulsion when he makes racist observations about people of colour, as I do when I'm reading (the equally fascinating) Lovecraft, or whoever.   Vox Day said, in his interview with Phil Sandifer, that China Mieville is one of his favourite writers.  I choose to believe that, because I can understand how Lovecraft is one of Mieville's favourite writers.  Let's give Day the benefit of the doubt and assume he's telling the truth, simply because we know from our own experience how such things are possible.  Day, on the other hand, champions the piffling work of John C. Wright, with its mechanical and lumpen Christian allegory and metaphor, presumably because it pushes a worldview (the inherent value and moral supremacy of Christian civilisation) that he finds salutary and inspiring, as inspiring as I find Mieville's depiction of revolution from below. For the sake of argument: Mieville is to me as Wright is to Day.  Lovecraft is to me as Mieville is to Day.  All we've done here is point out the obvious fact that Day and I are on opposite sides.  Well, we knew that.  I'm happy to concede that taste is politically-invested.  They vote for the stuff they like partly because it represents their politics.  We vote for the stuff we like partly because it represents our politics.  (They'd probably want to talk about positive discrimination or reverse racism or misandry or something... some variation on the idea that by prioritising things like diversity we're squeezing out the rights of the neutral, non-political fan/reader... because, for them, the neutral/vanilla human is a white straight guy and the non-political or apolitical is that which hugs his perspective.  This is exactly the underlying meaning of the kind of laments for the loss of good old-fashioned adventure stories about robots and space battles that you get from 'moderate' Sad Puppies like Torgersen and Correia.)

But it's their tactic to accuse us of a totalising insistence upon ideological consistency, manifested in a determination to vote politically in the Hugos.  On a superficial level, this is (or should be) easy for anyone to see through.  The sheer hypocrisy and bad faith of the argument advertises itself.  "You voted 'No Award' so you want politics to dominate the awards!" they say, in response to our response to their attempt to politically dominate the awards.  I mean, fuck.  Bad faith and hypocrisy that blatant and brazen is usually only seen in Western mainstream media reports about Israel.

And another thing: 'we' know full well when 'we' are producing or reading or praising material which has a political valence or agenda, precisely because from 'our' side such political valences and agendas are oppositional.  When a person of colour, or a trans person, or a woman writes a book, she knows she is doing something political and oppositional (whether she wants to be so categorised or not) just by doing so.  When a writer creates a trans or gay protagonist for their novel, they know that is an oppositional political act.  How could it not be, even if the writer wanted it to not be, given the climate in which such choices are made?  Remember, the privileged take their own position as neutral.  The oppressed and marginalised have no such luxury... which is precisely why it wouldn't even be illegitimate to deliberately stack the Hugos in favour of diversity!  The political actions of the right and left (for want of a better term for the broad church of opinion behind more diversity in SF) are not morally equivalent.  Positive discrimination is not as bad as the discrimination it aims to counteract.  Climbing is climbing, but climbing up and climbing down are different.  You can't shit up a pyramid, as Stavvers said.  The interminable whinges of the right about "reverse racism" and "misandry" have been adequately covered elsewhere so I won't reiterate them.  Suffice it to say that we can demonstrate, materially and empirically, that there is such a thing as oppression and such people as the marginalised.  So the Puppies' claim to moral equivalence breaks down, even more so any claim they make to moral superiority.  There is a certain point at which "yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man" breaks down and facts intrude.  It having been established that there is such a thing as oppression, and such people as the marginalised, there is a clear moral superiority to those making political/artistic moves from below, political/artistic moves which tend to combat the objectively provable injustice.

This isn't to say that I'm claiming, by fiat, to have right on our side, and that we can thus dictate what is or is not published, reviewed, awarded, etc.  That is their caricature of us, and also their disguised (even from themselves, it seems) self-portrait.  If Vox wants to caricature people like me as doing something authoritarian with my reading habits, well, let him.  C'est la guerre.  Only to be expected from a reactionary who cloaks his fascist bullshit in rhetoric about liberty from the authoritarian left, etc.  But it's also a case of c'est la guerre when I, and others like me, fight back against his politically motivated maneuvres.  I'm happy to admit political motivation when it comes to art, especially when it comes to fascism.  You can't launch a blatantly political attack upon art and then cry "Politics!" when someone responds... or rather you can, but not without making yourself look like the dishonest dickwad you are.

The truth is that there is no such thing as politically neutral fiction, or as the politically value-neutral judgement of fiction.  Same goes for visual art.  Same goes for criticism and most forms of non-fiction.  It's hypocritical bullshit to argue, as the Puppies do, that you can and should make judgements free of political evaluations, and that you're an ideological zealot if you don't.  In any case, the Puppies usually make this argument performatively and in bad faith.  Even when they sincerely think they're being apolitical, praising things that seem (to them) to be neutral, you have to remember that for them a neutral and normal world is precisely one where their own prejudices and privileges are taken for granted.  For them, their choices are apolitical by definition.  No matter how ideologically they choose, they must always perform the role of the ingenuous, blinking naif who just likes what he likes and doesn't get why some people are 'offended' by it (if in fact they are).

And, more fundamentally, even if you are consciously and scrupulously apolitical (some hope), that itself is a political choice.  In the face of manifest injustice, particularly within your own camp, neutrality is the same as siding with the powerful.  Not allowing your politics to dominate your own, let alone anyone else's, taste in art, is obviously the right way to go, as long as you don't fool yourself (or try to pretend that) your politics has no effect on what you like or don't like.  This has nothing to do with whether or not we should let fascists dominate a high-profile award.  Some people have said to me, both before and after the results: "isn't it unfair to penalise nominees because of a political tactic of voting 'No Award'?"  This is really just the liberal version of the fascist "ahhhh!".  And my response was and is: at this point, the issue of the merit or otherwise of the works under consideration has become secondary.  Of primary importance now is fighting a fascist incursion.  This isn't to say that those works should be judged by their politics.  This is to say that judging them in any way at all has now become a matter for another time, another place, another arena.  An arena uncompromised by fascism.

Fascism is a dealbreaker.  Normally I'd be happy to sit back and let awards be won by all manner of stuff I dislike and disagree with.  Moffat's Doctor Who has won loads of Hugos in recent years.  The Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) category has seen some politically atrocious films nominated in recent years.  The Dark Knight, Iron Man, District 9, Avatar, Captain America, Iron Man 3.  All ghastly to one extent or another.  Generally, as it happens, the Hugos have dodged the worst of these bullets (with only Inception being an outright ghastly winner).  The point is, I didn't care.  Of course the Hugo Award for movies is going to films that push bourgeois ideology, imperialist values, sexism, the worship of corporate billionaires, the war on terror, the dehumanization of Arabs, etc.  That's the kind of world we live in, a world where extremely repulsive ideas like these are normal and normalised (and thus taken as neutral by people who aren't on the sharp edge of their effects).  "In any epoch the ruling ideas will be the ideas of the ruling class", as Marx said.  I don't even have that much of a problem with Guardians of the Galaxy, except that it became the chosen candidate of the Puppies.

[That's reason enough for a little diversion actually.  Why did they favour Guardians of the Galaxy?  Possibly because their other main options - the other films that ended up on the nominations list, for example - were potentially queasy from a Puppy perspective.  Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which was partly a resurrection of the 70s conspiracy thriller, was interpreted by many as containing some kind of suspicion or critique of American government institutions.  You can't expect blinkered, philistine, textually-myopic idiots like the Puppies to notice that actually it goes out of its way to provide Western power structures with even more alibis than your average film of it's type.  Like some liberal commentators, the right probably found the film to be an astonishing explosion of left-wing radicalism.  Similarly, The Lego Movie, which was claimed by some (including, dismayingly, some on the left) to be a critique of capitalism... a bizarre idea.  As for Interstellar, I expect many of the Puppies or Puppyish were infuriated by the assertion that a girl might become a scientist.  Some can quote tracts of sociobiologistic psuedo-sociology at you to prove that women don't make good scientists.  Other just assume there aren't any women scientists to speak of, take their own assumption as obvious fact, and then ask rhetorical questions about "who invented everything, eh?"]

But back to the point.  Much as I hated every last one of the movies on this year's Hugo nominations, I have no particular political issue with people voting for them.  I suddenly do have a problem, however, when one of them gets recommended by a fascist to other fascists, and/or fascist sympathisers and fellow travellers.  I'd have an issue with my own favourite film this year winning awards if they were awarded by fascists.  It wouldn't make me like it any less, but I'd oppose the award.  Because fascism isn't just another viewpoint amongst viewpoints.  Fascism is the seed of the destruction of all other viewpoints.  Moreover, it is the amorphous, pilfered, cobbled-together scavenger ideology which represents counter-revolution.  It is explicitly the politics of division of people who should be united.  It is the antithesis of human liberation.  It is a program for protecting the bourgeois order from attacks economic, political or cultural.  No matter what revolutionary verbiage it may use, fascism is always on the side of the bourgeois status quo... but the bourgeois status quo with a vengeance, with its most savage instincts let loose.  And make no mistake: 'Vox Day' is a fascist, or near enough to being one as makes no odds.  Whatever his piffling self-justifications and triangulations, whatever his double-talk and sophistry and barely comprehensible evasions, his views run the gamut of fascist obsessions both classical and current, from the civilisational rhetoric, the Breivikian Islamophobia, the crypto-Christian triumphalism, the sexism, the cultural racism and pseudo-scientific contempt for the humanity of people of colour.  He can backtrack on his description of N.K. Jeminsin as a "half savage" all he likes.  He can try to efface it by insisting on his asserted Native American heritage (would it really change anything it Hitler turned out to have been a bit Jewish?), by claiming that he based it on some psuedo-philosophical bit of bullshit instead of some pseudo-scientific bit of bullshit, by claiming he only did it to troll her into calling him a racist (nifty strategy: con someone into calling you a racist by being flagrantly racist towards them, then claim they're a hysterical SJW because they accurately characterised your comments!)... none of this exculpates him.  This is routine, bog-standard, drearily predictable flim-flam that you get from every tuppeny-ha'penny fascist these days.  Retreat from the almost-universally frowned-upon biologistic claims of classic fascists to half-baked culturalist assertions, then angrily respond "Islam ain't a race - duh!" (or equivalent, according to circumstance) to anyone who calls you out.  This is precisely what Mr Day does in a recent interview in which he makes some scarcely-intelligible distinction between 'real Africans' you get in Europe and 'African Americans', going on to imply that Europe is now plagued by culturally-backward African immigrants (it's okay for him to be a migrant, of course... see what I was saying above about their idea of 'normal' being synonymous with their own positionality) who don't know how to use toilets properly.

[His racism against Africans seems - if some of these recent statements are taken into account - to be curiously faecally-fixated.  Racism, particularly racism against black people, has always been libidinously inflected, full of obsession about black people's imagined bodily functions, cleanliness (or supposed lack thereof), dicks, sex drives, etc.  Vox Day seems no exception.  There is evidently something curiously exciting to him about the idea of Africans spreading poo around Christendom.  I detect a perverse pleasure in seeing Christendom defiled by the bodily fluids of the desirable/terrifying Other.  It's tempting to just say that he gets reverse pleasure from seeing (or rather fantasizing about) such things because the scenario of a culturally backward "half savage" making a dirty protest out of Western civilisation is gloriously confirming of his prejudices... but I'm tempted to think that he may find it gloriously exciting in other ways (which is fine with me, I'm not judgemental... not about peccadiloes anyway).  I'm also tempted to bring in Freud's concept of the anal fixation.  There is some evidence for a correlation between anal personality types and political conservatism, in particular race prejudice.  Disturbingly, Vox seems to display personality traits associated with both anal retentiveness and anal expulsiveness!  Was Mummy strict and Daddy lenient?  Daddy's a jailed tax protestor isn't he... I suspect he was probably the strict (retentive) one, now I come to think about it.  Perhaps Vox just doesn't mind, as long as it's anal.  You can certainly see the expulsive type in his apparent desire to fling his shit around and imagine he's doing us all a favour by so doing, though he lacks the material generosity Freud associated with the expulsive.  He also lacks the rebelliousness, though I'm sure he imagines himself to be a rebel.  I dare any fan of Vox to be offended by the above.]

So there we have it: however compromised and messy they may be, the Hugos reflect something organic about the changing state of fan culture precisely because they are, at least to some extent, democratically controlled.  The priority isn't to rescue the Hugos or their voting system from manipulation just for their sake, no more than the priority for someone like me is to rescue the bourgeois parliamentary democratic system from the encroachments of the BNP and UKIP because I love the bourgeois parliamentary democratic system.  The point is to oppose the Puppies because I oppose their ideology and the stuff they do with it.  Because their ideology is crass and selfish and reactionary, because it fails the empirical test, because it's a defence of privilege against a movement of the oppressed, because in its extreme form (Vox Day et al) it's crypto-fascist and racist and sexist and Islamophobic, and because its effect is to attack progress towards greater recognition for the marginalised.  That doesn't just hurt the marginalised; as someone invested in real democracy, it hurts me to.  Even in the little pocket universe of SF/Fantasy awards, this matters.   SF/Fantasy punches above its weight, culturally speaking.  Aside from any personal investment in the 'scene', this is reason enough to care.

46

The committee want to know about Vorg and Shirna's 'ritual'. 

Shirna tries to explain.  "We're entertainers."  She does a little dance.  "Understand?"

Pletrac regards her, his face blank.

"No," he says.

Vorg jumps in.

"Our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse... nothing serious, nothing political."

Who is he talking to?  The committee?  The BBC?  Us?

In any case, the commitee retire - scandalised - into secret session.

"Amusement is prohibited," gabbles Kailk in cold panic, "it's purposeless."

"Zarb is considering lifting that restriction," says Pletrac.  Zarb is their leader.  "The latest thinking is that the latest outbreak of violence among the functionaries is caused by lack of amusement."

The 'functionaries' are their slaves.  (Sadly, they are portrayed as rudimentary and stupid.)

The committee members are caught between two possible choices, both of them extremely attractive to any ruling class: stop the 'functionaries' thinking about anything but their function, or amuse the 'functionaries' and thus keep their mind off the fact that they are slaves.

So it turns out that amusement is pretty serious and political after all.

Meanwhile, inside Vorg's silly, apolitical machine, white English imperialists complain about the idleness of the "madrasis".

"Won't have 'em on the plantation," says Major Daley.

The Cut

On 'The Space Museum'

Recently, while tracking some hits this blog received, I discovered a new Doctor Who podcast called Pex Lives.  It's great stuff, well worth listening to... and I'm not just saying that because the guys who make it - Kevin Burns and James Murphy - kindly linked to me and mentioned me in one of the episodes.  Their third and latest podcast is just out, and centres upon 'The Krotons'.  Their second podcast is about 'The Space Museum' and they delve into the piece with lots of wit (in both senses of the word) alongside anarchism, Tolstoy, progress and political change.  Not many Who podcasts touch on stuff like this.  My favourite quote: "we're both ambivalent about violent revolution".  (For the record, so am I.)   It also helps that they both have likeable voices.  Kevin sounds like Terry Gilliam (i.e. he has one of those American voices that sounds as though it is filtered through a permanent grin of enthusiasm) and James sounds like a gigantic, sentient, wryly raised eyebrow that has somehow gained the ability to talk with the voice of a hip-hop DJ.  Even so, I kept on wanting to interrupt them... which I mean as a compliment.  So I made some notes instead, and they turned into this:


1. Freeze Frame

The Doctor, Vicki, Barbara and Ian spend episode one wandering around the museum unseen and unheard, unable to interact with events and apparently seeing glimpses of their own future, culminating in their encountering themselves as exhibits. The explanation for this is that they’ve “jumped a time track” and arrived before their arrival, so to speak. Vicki ponders what this means in a speech that, as the Pexcasters remark, is as poetic as it is scientifically meaningless:

Time, like space, although a dimension in itself, also has dimensions of its own.

However, I think that “time”, as used here, really refers to narrative, particularly TV narrative. One of those inner dimensions of narrative is, of course, metaphor. So when Vicki uses the word “time” metaphorically to refer to TV narrative (hereafter TVN), and thus says that narrative has dimensions of its own, she identifies one of those dimensions by using it.

But let’s look at the moment when the ‘time track’ is ‘jumped’. This happens at the very beginning of part one, which is also a reprise of the cliffhanger at the end of ‘The Crusade’.  This cliffhanger was a sudden and uncanny 'freezing' of the characters.  The Doctor & Co. are still frozen in their medieval duds at the beginning of 'Space Museum'.  They then unfreeze in their regular clothes (Ian in suave catalogue menswear, Vicki in teenybopper pop-socks, Barbara in her oh-so-practical cardigan, and the Doctor in his usual quasi-Edwardian proto-Adam Adamant gear). The Doctor, upon being questioned about this by the baffled Ian, says that the answer is “time and relativity, dear boy”.

This 'jump' occurs at the junction of two stories, one ending and the other starting.  At the start of the new TVN, the characters are still, so to speak, stuck at the end of the last TVN.  They're frozen, despite the fact that a new TVN has begun without them. This is, of course, just a literalization of what always happens: the characters freeze for a week.  But this time we actually see the freezing at the end of one story, continuing into the start of the next.  Indeed, as noted, the freezing was the cliffhanger.  The extra-diegetic business of the freezing of the characters has become a diegetic occurence.  It is an in-narrative effect of which the characters are conscious. 

But boil it down: what have we actually seen? 

We’ve seen a cut.

(Pause to recall the momentous, primal importance of the cut in Doctor Who up to this point… the fact that a cut makes it possible for ‘An Unearthly Child’ - in a moment of pure television amidst what would otherwise look very much like televised theatre - to put the TARDIS console room inside a police box, to move Barbara and us instantly from the junkyard to the alien ship via an apparently instantaneous physical movement through impossible space, to put the latter inside the former, to do something that is possible now that we’ve “discovered television”, i.e. to put the massive building inside a small box.)

The jumping of the time track in ‘Space Museum’ is a cut. Moreover, it is the kind of cut that indicates a temporal gap, the skipping over of a movement through time. It is the moment when the narrative jumps forward, using the grammar of television; snipping out the boring and non-dramatic bits that are not relevant to the audience, slicing away the mundane ‘dead time’ of the characters which we don’t need to see and can happily take on trust. It is the kind of cut (between the reprise of a cliffhanger at the end of one story and the first scene proper of the new story) that represents a movement not only through time but also from one unit of TVN to another. It’s the kind of cut that signifies a dramatic/televisual moment, thus unifying dramatic time and TVN. The break in time is, in this kind of case, also simultaneously a break between stories. Just as the break in time sews together two discrete but separate dramatic moments, so it sews together two narratives.  (In so doing it also undermines the rather dodgy premise that there really is such discreteness in the separation of narratives - a premise that fails to hold up when you delve into the actual behind-the-scenes business of writing and script-editing.)  Thus it is, strangely, both a moment of progress and of stasis.

The cut signifies not only an implied/annihilated fictional half-hour of cleaning-up, wardrobe diving and changing, but also a handover - at least in broad terms - from one story/writer to a new one.  The difference here is that the characters notice it. Or rather, they notice the absence/break that it signifies. They notice the stitching along the join. They notice that this hypothetical half-hour never existed for them. They have moved and not moved.  They notice that strange unity of progress and stasis.  They have not inherited the obliviousness to this that should come with a cut. They notice that their clothes changed in an instant. That isn’t supposed to happen… at least, not in drama. Such moments of meta-awareness are a staple of comedy (and have been long before the 60s when they started to become the vogue in TV comedy) which may be why the moment of awareness in ‘The Space Museum’ is marked by a comedic moment (the “Doctor we’ve got our clothes on!” bit).

In noticing the cut, the characters have noticed the syntax and grammar of TVN which ought to just underly their actions as structure. Just as sentences become nonsensical when you concentrate on their arrangement, or on the brute fact of the arrangement of letters, so a fissure opens up in the story by the characters’ awareness of narrative structure. This single glitch is enough to put them out of proper contact with the story into which they have just hurtled. It is enough to leave them stranded, skewiff in relation to the narrative. Out of phase, out of synch, out of time. The Doctor’s casual dismissal of the moment may be persiflage, but it also gets right to the root of the problem. His words make sense, as long as we take “time” to mean TVN (and, if you think about it, how could “time” possibly mean anything else within a story on TV?).

The Doctor and his friends have been propelled into one of the other interior dimensions of narrative: the relative distance between the characters and the narrative. Their freak moment of awareness of the functioning of the TVN (in which they are trapped like ball-bearings inside a mechanism) has allowed a distance to open up between them and the symbolic order that makes narrative function... and so, because narrative essentially is this symbolic order, the distance is between them and the narrative itself. This is how they can arrive and not arrive… and, really, this is just an extrapolation of what Doctor Who always does by its very nature: it unglues characters within TVN from the conventional causal rules of TVN, allowing them to see the future and the past, allowing them to move freely (more or less) within the interior, relative dimensions of narrative.


2. Empire Hears the Sound of Doctors Toppling

So, thus freed, they see a possible future, a possible - as yet unsettled - narrative conclusion, to which they would not otherwise have advance access... and what they see is their own possible, nay probable, defeat.  I don't buy that they've arrived before themselves.  That doesn't work.  They have arrived on Xeros after themselves, after their probable defeat.  They find the TARDIS and their own frozen selves in the Museum.  They have already arrived, wandered in, been captured and frozen and exhibited.  What they see is the aftermath of this, of the whole trajectory of a Doctor Who story going wrong and being aborted.  And it's not just this story that goes wrong... it's a whole new kind of trajectory for Doctor Who (the Doctor/show with an anti-imperialist and revolutionary energy) being truncated before it can get going.

The skewiff time travellers, detached from their own assigned dimension within the TVN and stuck in a subsidiary one, walk around in the remains of a story after it has ended, in the aftermath of an alternate story, a story that is literally impossible within Doctor Who but which nevertheless seems to have tried to transpire. The version of the museum they wander through in episode one is itself an exhibit of a long-settled past. Like museum exhibits, it is a mute testament to a deactivated, finished, concluded story. In the case of the desynchronised world of episode one, it is a frozen exhibit of the concluded story of the Doctor and his friends being defeated. This story is already over. In that story, Our Heroes were captured and frozen and turned into exhibits, never to travel again, never again to jump from one narrative to a new one.

The great consequence of the Doctor's capture and pickling is that the Xeron revolution never happened.  Vicki never got the chance to bully the Xerons into it.  So, in the version of the last episode that the TARDIS crew get to spectate at during episode one, the Xerons are still slaves and the Moroks are still masters.  The museum endures.  And Doctor Who is over.

You want proof?  There is a Dalek, dead and hollow, displayed as a harmless exhibit, a thing of the past.  Already, by this point, the Dalek was the other part of the dyad that made Doctor Who into itself.  If its dead, so is the show.  (The final proof that the Doctor has won comes at the very end, when a new cliffhanger brings a new TVN... and it features reactivated, reanimated, resurgent Daleks.)

What the travellers see as they wander around the museum in their disconnected state is nothing less than post-Doctor Who.  It is the Doctor Who universe continuing after the character and his show have been destroyed.  It is the universe without the Doctor.  And it manifests not only as a universe of eternally preserved blandness and futurelessness, a universe of frozen entropy (and thus of frozen time and frozen narrative), but also as a universe of eternal empire.  Tyranny will last forever now that the Doctor is just an exhibit in a museum.  The Doctor's failure to foment revolution (by proxy... because we're still feeling our way cautiously into this new energy) is what destroys him and his show.  Empire gets him before he can escape it or topple it.  This is not a connection that the show would ever have made before.

This is new.


3. Strange Matter

All this can happen only because of the material practices of TV production, because of their recursive re-entry into the narrative as a creatively distorting force.  Just as the console room can only be within the Police Box because of the material reality of the cut influencing what is physically possible for the characters within the story, so the time track can only be jumped through use of the same technique. When they walk out onto the surface of Xeros, the time travellers leave no footprints and, when they don’t speak, there is nothing but silence. In being detached from the plot (and TVN and diegetic time) they have become materially detached... or, to look at it from the other side, re-attached to the material reality of production.  They have become diegetically aware of another inner dimension of TVN: the material dimension, i.e. the setness of the set, the studioness of the studio... all this as a follow-on from their awareness of the cuttedness of a cut. I’m surprised they don’t notice their own shadows cast upon the supposedly distant mountains. This is an astonishing intrusion of the material reality of TV production into the diegesis, into the ‘consciousness’ of characters within a television story. Without actually breaking the fourth wall (which is always rather glib and obvious and bathetic whenever it actually happens) there’s very little more that can be done to make material production intrude deliberately into the narrative it produces.

In the time period / narrative dimension that Our Heroes get temporarily stuck in, their feet make no impression on the sand… because it’s a studio floor. The diegetic rationale is opaque. What matters is that the in-narrative consciousness of the material reality of TV production allows the proliferation of TVN’s interior dimensions. That’s also how Vicki’s glass can break and reform: the material reality of film (wind forward, wind backwards) can increase and decrease entropy for the characters (remember, entropy cannot decrease in our universe, which is why we can’t really travel backwards in time… but in the interior dimensions of TVN, it can… hence the possibility of time travel within TVN).  The material reality of TV production is how the characters can inhabit the strange zone of skewiffness in which they spend episode one, even when inside the museum.  This is how Vicki can wave her hand through the exhibits.  It's how the TARDIS can be transparent and insubstantial. 


4.  No Future

Entropy is, of course, a perennial obsession of SF, and decidedly of Doctor Who. Who has an ambivalent relationship with the concept. The ethical value attached to order and disorder swings back and forth, and this oscillation is inherently political in its implications. There is an enormous difference between the imposition of order and stability at the end of ‘The Web Planet’ and the gleeful abandon with which disorder and instability reign at the end of ‘Power of the Daleks’. On Vortis, the Animus (a communist cancer) is defeated, the proper lords of the planet return to rule again and the formerly “militant” beasts of burden resume their due subservience. On Vulcan, various competing forms of political domination are allowed to annihilate each other while the Doctor chuckles. Arguably, the Hartnell era up to this point (’Space Museum’) has the Doctor largely playing the role of a force for entropy-minimisation. He either escapes historical narratives in which disorder is depicted as political ferment (’The Reign of Terror’) or ‘primitivism’ (too numerous to need adumbration, but...), or re-establishes order by catalysing some bourgeois political settlement (’The Sensorites’). Despite his debut as a force of anarchic interruption of bland, post-war, liberal normality in ‘An Unearthly Child’, he soon settles into the role of Guardian of Order in past and future. You can’t rewrite History: not one line. Etc.

However, in ‘The Space Museum’ something changes. Not totally, not for all time and in all instances. But the balance shifts, or begins to. The centre of gravity of the series/character starts to change. At the very least, the potentialities become wider, more open, more radical. (James and Kevin note that, in this story, Hartnell's character becomes, for the first time, something like the Doctor as we know him.)  The threat which catalyses this shift is the threat of the utter foreclosure of potentialities, the loss of future, the doom of becoming an exhibit in a museum.

A museum is, of course, a place built to house objects with no future, objects upon which all potentialities have foreclosed, objects for which all possible destinies (apart from eternal static preservation and display) have collapsed. The threat of the Morok museum is of freezing, of the complete minimisation of entropy, and hence of future time… and hence, as we’ve seen, of the future dimension of TVN. The threat is of No More Stories. To Doctor Who, an anthology series to end all anthology series, this is an existential threat in both senses, i.e. a threat to its meaning and to its continuance. (See section 2, above.)  Such a thing has already been hinted at in the previous story, ‘The Crusade’, in which Saladin interprets Barbara as a member of a troupe of travelling players, casts her in the role of Scheherezade, and tells her that if she runs out of stories to tell, she dies. In ‘The Space Museum’, this threat stems directly from the political project of a declining empire. It goes beyond narrative collapse.  It looks more like narrative annihilation. It is a directly political threat.


5. When the Sky Falls / When it Crumbles / We Will Stand Tall / Face it All Together*

In ‘The Space Museum’, the threat to the Morok’s declining empire is directly the threat of entropy. They fight entropy with stasis.  That the emblem of their empire is a museum is telling.  A museum is, as noted, the place where the future is frozen and stasis eternally preserved.  In order to preserve the exhibits, the Moroks have to literally freeze them, which seems to also freeze them in time, thus arresting entropy (which is, of course, both waste heat and time's arrow).  On Xeros, their colony which they have overwritten with their own history in the form of their museum, all is silence and stillness.  Morok anti-entropy has leaked out and freeze-dried the planet.  The Xerons themselves have been reduced to a race of children.  Nobody seems bothered by the idea that they might grow up.  If they prove to be capable of it, they can always be exterminated - that's Lobos' stated plan.  Meanwhile, frozen at the point of adolescence (a curiously bland and placid adolescence, but with all the essential impotence of that part of life), they hang around doing nothing.  The Moroks hang around doing nothing too.  The exhibits hang around doing nothing. Nobody visits the museum. The Moroks can’t wait to get home. Boredom reigns. It prefigures Doctor Who’s great fixation upon eternal, existential boredom in the 80s. And for the same reason.  Like those 80s episodes, which came during Thatcher's great quest to freeze social progress while dressing her project up as a resurgence of national/imperial status, 'Space Museum' dramatises the calculated and cynical freezing of imperial decay.  As in the 80s stories, in 'Space Museum' it leads to the stunting of progress, the dawn of a bland circularity, a smothering silence and stiltedness, the feeling in everyone that they're rolling a boulder eternally up a hill without ever getting nearer the top.  Just think of Vicki's irritation at the way the Xerons just sit around indulging in melancholy dreaming.  (Vicki, of course - as Kevin and James recognize - is the emblem of a hopeful, Moddish, 60s optimism about the future and about youngsters.)

As the Pexcasters also point out, the Morok empire is, of course, the British empire in decline. But the metaphor actually does the Morok/Brits some favours, depicting them as pitiably bored and mostly-passive, all assuming that their glories are in the past, doing little that is proactive to defend their standing and influence, sitting around bemoaning the way their own people seem uninterested in past glories. They have, the odd bit of half-hearted repression aside, apparently accepted that their empire is over. This at a time when the British (under Harold Wilson) were still fighting a rearguard action to shore up their influence by getting militarily involved in Malaysia (a country pretty much created to serve British tactical interests in that region), and assisting General Suharto’s bloody coup in Indonesia, which entailed displacing the neutralist Sukarno and massacring leftists, and paving the way for Suharto’s genocidal invasion of East Timor. The Moroks are part-and-parcel of the widespread idea that Britain dismantled her empire largely peaceably… forgetting about the bloody rampages against the Mau Mau, and plenty of other sanguinary attempts at holding back the tide of anti-colonial resistance. If Britain sometimes yielded to the the inevitable a bit more easily than other European colonial powers, the underlying reasons were economic rather than moral.

Glyn Jones was, of course, an exile from South Africa, and ‘The Space Museum’ clearly swipes at colonialism… but you have to wonder if he was thinking of British colonialism against the Boers, forgetting that the South African state was built on the bloody, racist colonialist repression of native Africans by the Dutch settlers. The Xerons are often observed to be “kids” but they are also definitely “white kids” (as Ace might put it). In some ways, this is preferable to the attempts at implying ethnic and/or racial difference in the ‘oppressed natives’ in other stories. The Swampies are bad enough (though their portrayal as characters could have been a lot worse, as Avatar proved) but even the Kinda - characters in a much more complex and politically sophisticated story - are problematic, being an example of Whitey taking it upon himself to represent a version of conquered peoples. Even so, the Xerons are white kids displacing, in true settler style, the real victims of Western imperialism and colonialism. They are an echo of very old imperialist stereotypes of ‘natives’ (who were, according to Kipling, “half child”) as helpless, clueless, passive and foolish, while also being a negation of the whole existence of people of colour as victims of colonialism. It might be observed here that programme makers can’t win. They either leave people of colour out completely, thus negating their existence, or put them in and thus practice the inherently imperialistic project of appropriating their experience and representing their stories for them. And it’s true: they can’t win. The necessary response to this isn’t to look harder for ways to square the various vicious circles of liberal media in imperialist, white-dominated societies… the necessary response is to stop society being imperialist and white-dominated. (If pointing out the impossibility of squaring such circles on a little-read blog contributes towards this aim, then I’m doing my part. /irony/)

Of course, the 60s had Vicki as a possibility because, even as it was the era of British imperial decline (often resisted with great savagery) it was also the era of burgeoning social and political struggle, resistance and cultural insurrection.  The link was there between the liberation struggles of the colonised peoples and the struggles of Western students and workers (which is, of course, why the Xerons are both colonised 'natives' and dissatisfied youngsters).  Even outside or before the realms of radicalism, there was a widespread feeling that progress was, if not inevitable, certainly hard to resist.  In the 80s, what radicalism there was was reactive and defensive... and 80s Doctor Who (the odd bit of mordant satire notwithstanding) doesn't really start engaging with this until Cartmel comes along.  Hence the fixation of the pre-Cartmel 80s upon entropy and decline and tedium.

'The Space Museum' is when the show really begins any attempt to engage with these syndromes.  When you start looking for it, the whole of 'The Space Museum' is about entropy stalled and/or reversed, with this minimisation being the central threat and the imperial project. The intersection between the narrative manifestations of this (the jumped time track, the empty museum) and the thematic/political manifestations (The Decline and Fall of the Morok Empire, artificially paused) is what makes this story tick… or rather, not tick.

This is key.  The big threat to our heroes, to their and our presumed values, to the show itself, is not entropy (or its effect/appearance: time).  The threat is no entropy.  The threat is the restriction of entropy, the stopping of the clocks, the freezing of decay.  We want the Morok empire to decay.  The Xerons and the TARDIS crew need entropy in order to liberate themselves via the continued crumbling of Morok power.  The effect of the Morok effort to preserve their tyranny in amber is the creation of a massive system of freezing, of stalling, of pickling, of preserving, of exhibiting.  Their museum is more than just a standard way of imposing imperial power and knowledge over the conquered, using their world as a palimpsest.  Their museum is the ultimate symbol of their attempt to arrest entropy - and thus time, and thus progress (as an anti-imperialist would define it) - itself.

Now, given that we've already established entropy as synonymous with time, and time in a TVN as essentially synonymous with narrative, and narrative as essentially synonymous with the symbolic order that makes it work, so we can now see how and why that time track got jumped.  When the TARDIS - the device that unglues characters from the conventional rules of narrative and allows them to travel within its interior relative dimensions - got too near to Xeros, a world overwritten by the Morok museum - and thus soaked in the toxic by-product of the Moroks' cold, anti-entropy juice - it juddered, stuttered, stammered, faltered and froze along a vulnerable fault-line of TVN - that cut we were talking about earlier, that unity of stasis and progress - thus throwing the characters off at an angle.

The material reality of TV production is the machine, the dimensions of TVN are the product, and the anti-entropic politics becomes a spanner in the works.  The machine lurches and the ball-bearings inside get to see a glimpse of its destruction.

The end of Doctor Who nearly comes about because the machine nearly chokes on the way post-imperial decline and resistance to progress effects it.  Why is it so effected?  Because it's a series so open to radical possibilities.  And why is it so open?  By virtue of all those interior narrative dimensions which proliferate because of the unique way the show harnesses the material methods of TV production!

To stop his entropy being minimised - and thus his future ended - the Doctor must become different… or rather, his show must.  Hence Vicki’s revolution and the story's frank embrace of the idea of revolt, insurrection, violent overthrow, etc.  The show has reached the moment when it must move forward or freeze. 1965. The crux of the 60s.  In many ways, Doctor Who instinctively wants to sit on the fence (it is, after all, the product of a patriarchal, authoritarian, elitest corporation), and this causes it to judder to a halt, to stumble.  It is hardly the first or last institution to trip over such social contradictions.  It falls over the tricky, trippy moment when the narrative dimensions generated by the material conditions of its production bump up against the figure of an entropic empire.  The moment itself demands that the show make a decision.  It's clear - so clear that I might even be tempted to invoke some kind of dialectical law of history - that the show’s survival depends upon the anti-imperial, progressive choice.  Otherwise there is nothing but the freezing, the minimisation of entropy, the defeated embrace of changlessness.  No more history.  No more story.  That's why, for all its faults and failures and compromises, this is the first revolutionary Doctor Who story. To go forward, the show must embrace revolution. This choice unfreezes time, history, progress, narrative, etc.  Like us - then and now - the show must accept the necessity of pulling the communication cord of revolution (as Walter Benjamin put it) to avoid the train crash of history. 

The cut that makes the TARDIS jump a time track is, ultimately, a cut between the show's past and its future. This is, in a way, a conflict that the show - especially the 60s show - goes over again and again and again. Entropy must be released. Time restarted. Progress made possible. Future stories depend upon it.  The battle needs to be constantly repeated.  The superb Vicki becomes the wretched Victoria just a few years later... but then Zoe arrives.  It is partial and imperfect and imprecise and compromised.  It repeatedly fails.  But the process, the dialectic, starts here.  And it opens up the future of the show.  In their podcast, Kevin and James call it "the beating heart of Doctor Who".  This is just a tad romantic and exculpatory for a cynical, Frankfurt School-influenced grump like me... but I know what they mean.  We all do.  And if we don't, we should.

The moral of this story?

Feel free to touch the exhibits.

Come on.

You know you want to.




ADDITION #1:
It can't be insignificant that the Doctor's souvenir of this adventure is a massive television that interprets the entire universe and all of history as TV programming.

ADDITION #2:
In London we have a Science Museum and a War Museum.  As though they're separate things.  Walk around the Imperial War Museum.  It's a museum of science and technology.

10/10/13




*I fucking hate this song.  It is an anthem of British imperial/capitalist values in the face of crisis.  Just like the wretched film it accompanies, it is the heroization of the fallen hero Capital/Empire/Country climbing and clawing its way back to potency and moral authority after a near-fatal collapse/fall/wound/recession.  We're all in this together, etc.  Yeah.  Fuck off.

It Came From Uranus

I finished reading Stephen Baxter's Doctor Who novel The Wheel of Ice today.  The novel had its moments.  There is one description of an attack upon Zoe by a group of 'blue dolls' - fabricated avatars of an ancient artificial intelligence - that is rather well done.  The blank black eyes and needle teeth are fairly routine but there is something oddly disturbing about the descriptions of their paddle-like hands.

On the whole, however, I found the book rather uninspired.  The phrase I just used - "ancient artificial intelligence" - says a lot about the book's use of somewhat familiar tropes.  There seems to have been an attempt to evoke the 'base under siege' / 'humans in the future' formula so often said to be typical of the Troughton era... but with the 'siege' coming from within the colony.  However, Baxter is perhaps a little too interested in the technical details of the solar system.  We get an awful lot of scenes where the action stops dead so the characters can explain neutrinos to each other, or describe the chemical composition of Titan's atmosphere.  There's also a lot of stuff about how a space colony would actuallly work in technical terms, but it's not terribly relevant to the story.  So, once again, the action tends to pause so that people can talk about waste recycling.

There is an attempt to adapt the characters of Zoe and Jamie to new situations that also causes a slowing-down of the action.  It would be okay if they had genuinely interesting things to do... but Zoe gets to tell bedtime stories about the Karkus to a toddler and Jamie falls in with a bunch of naff 'rebellious' young people who say excrutiating things like "Cowabunga, granddad!".  I shit you not.

There's a rather likeable Scottish robot called Mac who gets developed only so far before being sidelined and then brought back for a rather twee 'emotional' bit at the end.  It's characteristic of the novel that this cathartic final scene for Mac is bordered by lots of technical talk involving him being sent to Uranus to mine tarranium (it came from Uranus, I knew it did!).  There are lots of continuity references in the book, if that's the sort of thing that spreads your marmite.

The book also has a go at being political... and that's kind of what I wanted to talk about.  There is a nasty corporation called, rather amusingly, Bootstrap... as thought it was set up by Norman Tebbit or someone like that.  The representative of the corporation is a nasty woman who is nasty because she's nasty, and a woman because she's a woman.  She does nasty things in a brusque, rude manner, because she's nasty and brusque and rude.  Everybody else in the story seems to be well-meaning, if equally characterless.  Some are delineated by being Spanish or Welsh.  The rest blur into one indistinct melange even as you read.  (So quite like a mid-Troughton space base story in fact!)  The point is that there is one nasty corporate person who causes problems for a whole bunch of people who seem less real than her because she at least has a distinguishing feature, i.e her nastiness.  She's obsessed with efficiency and profit, which is presented as surprising, as though that isn't what corporations hire people to do.  In the end, the Doctor defeats her (while she rants in an overwrought style so stereotypically villainous that it frequently feels like the writer is taking the piss) and the people of the colony suddenly decide to declare independence from Earth (and from Bootstrap).  The 'Planetary Ethics Committee' looks set to help them, because they're an ethics committe and, as such, are ethical... like the Spanish character mentioned above who is also nice because he works for them.

To be honest, it's no surprise to me that Steven Baxter's story is simplistic and sketchy in its representation of politics.  The Time Ships, his sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, chose to eschew anything resembling Wells' approach, which was to use the device of time travel as a way of satirircally examining the class struggle through the prism of Darwinism.  Instead, Baxter mistakes the literary device, the time machine itself, for the crux of the matter... and delves into lots of stuff inspired by 20th century theoretical physics.  Alternate universes, etc. 

The stuff I want to mention comes later in the book.  The Doctor makes a series of political pronouncements.  In response to the evil ravings of the nasty corporate utilitarian (who is so evil she sends kids off to work early in the morning!), he announces that "there are ways of achieving economic progress without exploiting people!"  Later, when helping the human colonists begin to set up their new, independent republic, he tells them they don't need to invent a new political system because they can just adapt the best systems yet devised by humanity, namely the British parliamentary system and the Constitution of the USA.

Now, I'm not going to launch into a great diatribe about whether you can have non-exploitative capitalism (if you've ever read this blog before you can probably guess my position).  Nor am I going to be boring on the subject of what's wrong with the British parliamentary system and the Constitution of the USA.  Nor am I going to dwell on better ways of organising society that have, occasionally and briefly, appeared before being crushed by... well, often by people like British parliamentarians and American statesmen.  Nor am I going to do anything more than glancingly refer to what I see as the stuntedness and narrow-mindedness of this manifestation of 'capitalist realism' and liberal contentedness.  'What is, is right', etc.  Apart from anything else, this is far from unprecedented in Doctor Who novels.  Terrance Dicks had Benny suggest the two Houses of the British state as a model of workable democracy in his New Adventure Blood Harvest.  Nor am I going to do anything more than mention the fact that this inspiring revolution of the colonists in Baxter's novel, this declaration of independence clearly modelled on the American revolt against British rule (even down to them having a 'constitutional convention'), happens without any mass revolt, mass involvement, mass discontent... without any apparent movement of the people themselves whatever.  The nasty corporate lady is frozen in a block of ice and, hey presto, everyone decides to be an independent republic.  The resulting political ferment is organized, terribly politely and calmly, by the Mayor.  The Doctor then tells them that they are "free to sell their labour to Bootstrap, or not"... he doesn't say how they'll survive if they chose not to.  I guess the labour market is so self-evidently fair (once the one corporate tyrant who spoils it for everone is disposed of) that nothing more need be said.

What I am going to make a fuss about is the sheer cheek involved in inserting sweeping political statements into the mouth of the Doctor, especially when he is being used as Baxter uses him: as the barometer of wisdom in the story.  Somehow it seems especially egregious to put such things into the mouth of the second Doctor.  I don't recall him ever making any such politically particular statements during his tenure.  General statements of principle, sure... but explicit political judgements?  That's more the province of his successor.

Look, let's just consider a counter case.  Let's just imagine a writer trying to make the second Doctor say anything more radical than this kind of contented liberalism and pro-market democracy.  What if this hypothetical writer wanted the Doctor to suggest... oooh, I dunno... basing the organisation of the new colony on the Paris Commune, or the Soviet workers' democracy of 1917, or the workers' councils of Germany in 1918?  Let's imagine a writer who tried to make a text version of Patrick Troughton declare the advantages of the dictatorship of the proletariat.  I'm not necessarily saying the Doctor should be given such lines, or advocate such ideas.  I'm just asking what would happen if anybody tried to make him.  I don't expect it'd make it into print, and I daresay it would be the cause of astonishment if it did.

On one level, this is nothing but the observation that minority views are less frequently treated as acceptable by the mainstream.  And to an extent this is fair enough.  But my point - such as it is - is wider than that.  I'm not complaining that certain views are 'under-represented'.  I'm offering an illustration of how prevailing ideology insinuates itself, even into the most seemingly innocuous contexts, via its very usualness and apparent neutrality.

I'm not a regular reader of the spin-off novels, but I'd be fairly confident in betting that, by and large, they feature a Doctor whose moral and political ideas never stray too far from the magnetic pole of contented liberal 'capitalist realism'.  I think it's potentially instructive to ponder just how much the franchise remains a product of a prevailing ideological system, almost certainly closed - as a matter of course, to the point where any alternative seems inherently laughable to most people - to seriously dissenting perspectives.

As I say, this isn't a complaint... as such.  I don't long for a Doctor who speaks like an anti-capitalist or a socialist.  I don't know that such a thing would be helpful, let alone interesting.  The reinforcement of prevailing ideology is useful to an ideological system because it forms one more note in a symphony of cultural reinforcement, a symphony that drowns out any other music.  The proffering of a dissenting view in a cultural product like Doctor Who would merely be an oddity, of little persuasive power.  The point is that it doesn't happen... and, by and large, we don't notice that it doesn't happen.  Nor do we notice, by and large, that established and prevailing ideology does make itself felt everywhere.  It's in the nature of a prevailing ideology to seem invisible, precisely because it is prevailing.

That's why I always laugh when I hear that popular cant about how dangerous 'Isms' are.  The people who say stuff like that never seem to imagine, even for a moment, that they themselves might be thinking within an ideology, an ideology that we might even want to call 'anti-Ismism'.

It's merely an observation.