Shabcast 3 was supposed to be the second part of my discussion with Josh Marsfelder. (Here's part 1 of that discussion.) But events have intervened. Now, Josh and I will carry on our talk in Shabcast 4 (hopefully out quite soon... so you'll probably get two Shabcasts this month, you lucky blighters). Shabcast 3, meanwhile, has been devoted to an emergency, hastily-convened discussion between myself, Phil Sandifer and Andrew Hickey on the subject of the recent right-wing incursion upon the Hugo Awards.
Download Shabcast 3 here (thanks once again to the Pex Lives guys for donating their bandwidth). We do a fair bit of fash-lambasting, and Andrew especially gives lots of background to this particular issue, but we also find time to roam and rove a bit around some related topics, such as modernism and postmodernism and geek privilege and GamerGate and "what is SFF anyway???".
Andrew and Phil have both blogged about the Hugos issue (which is why I asked them to speak to me about it), and here are some more links...
Here's Charlie Jane Anders at io9.
One of the movers behind this business is the utterly reprehensible fascist shithead and 'fantasy author' Theodore Beale (AKA 'Vox Day'). Here's his entry at Rational Wiki. And here is every post ever about him (there's lots of them) at David Futrelle's excellent MRA-watch blog We Hunted the Mammoth, cataloguing the man's career of saying vile, nazi things. This is the guy who created a slate that swept the nominations at the Hugos, thanks to him organising his tiny gaggle of reactionary scumfuck fans. Read, boggle and weep.
(Once again, here is the link to download or listen to our shabcast. Special thanks to Phil and Andrew for joining me to do it at such short notice.)
NOTE 7/4/15: I originally included a link to a Bibliodaze article about last years' Hugos. Thanks to Phil Sandifer for pointing out my stupid mistake.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Monday, 6 April 2015
Friday, 13 February 2015
Do You Ever Just Feel Tired?
In the wake of the Chapel Hill murders, people of Left-wing persuasion have been doing a lot of talking about the double standards which are applied to murder when it's Muslims being murdered by non-Muslims rather than the other way round. All very true. If a Muslim had been the murderer in Chapel Hill, and his victims had been non-Muslim, we'd now be hearing the mainstream media (let alone the conservative media) talking about 'terrorism', the pundits would be giving us their standard reheated 'clash of civilisations' rhetoric, pontificating about the inherently violent nature of Islam, asking Muslim 'community leaders' to address the cancer of extremism in their midst, etc etc etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. Hell, Charles Windsor might even open his empty head again to release some more racist platitudes about the need for Muslims to 'conform' to 'our values' (there is no 'us' or 'we' or 'our', Mr Windsor. Please fuck off). There certainly wouldn't be anybody desperately trying to spin the murders as nothing more than a dispute over a parking space, or the product of the singular demons of a lone nut.
But we don't actually need to theorise what might have happened if the skin colours and/or religions of the victims and killer in Chapel Hill were transposed. We've seen it demonstrated for us in the real world, time and time again. You'll have heard of Lee Rigby, the young British soldier horribly murdered by two Muslim men in May 2013. If you were living in the UK at the time, you will hardly have been able to miss it. I think people were actually obliged by law to mention it on TV at least once every half hour. You may not have heard of Mohammed Saleem however, an 82 year old Muslim man who was stabbed to death by a Ukrainian student in Birmingham (I didn't know non-Muslims were even allowed in Birmingham!). It happened the month before Lee Rigby was killed. To put it mildly... it wasn't quite the media sensation that the Rigby murder became, despite the fact that Saleem's killer was later convicted of planting bombs in three Mosques in the Midlands (so it probably wasn't about a parking space). The Rigby murder (which was utterly horrible and senseless, let's be in no doubt about that) unleashed an upsurge of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the UK, despite being roundly and publicly condemned by just about every prominent Muslim, and every major Muslim organisation, in Britain. Needless to say, the wave of violent, anti-Muslim bigotry was not covered in depth by the media.
But I mustn't talk about this stuff. Jonathan Freedland will accuse me of starting a who's-the-most-picked-on 'arms race'. I mean, surely there are higher priorities than the frequent violent Islamophobia in Britain.
Some people still criticise Israel, for instance.
By the way, I do just want to make one observation about the Left reaction to Chapel Hill. If you're on the Left, or a liberal, and you're condemning the Chapel Hill murders, and decrying the double standards of the media, and you're not also at least occasionally speaking out against the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Arabs by Western governments (chiefly but by no means only the USA), and the support given by Western governments to regimes that violently oppress Muslims (i.e. Saudi Arabia, Israel), and the double standards of the media on these subjects, then guess what... you're a fucking hypocrite! Congratulations!
But we don't actually need to theorise what might have happened if the skin colours and/or religions of the victims and killer in Chapel Hill were transposed. We've seen it demonstrated for us in the real world, time and time again. You'll have heard of Lee Rigby, the young British soldier horribly murdered by two Muslim men in May 2013. If you were living in the UK at the time, you will hardly have been able to miss it. I think people were actually obliged by law to mention it on TV at least once every half hour. You may not have heard of Mohammed Saleem however, an 82 year old Muslim man who was stabbed to death by a Ukrainian student in Birmingham (I didn't know non-Muslims were even allowed in Birmingham!). It happened the month before Lee Rigby was killed. To put it mildly... it wasn't quite the media sensation that the Rigby murder became, despite the fact that Saleem's killer was later convicted of planting bombs in three Mosques in the Midlands (so it probably wasn't about a parking space). The Rigby murder (which was utterly horrible and senseless, let's be in no doubt about that) unleashed an upsurge of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the UK, despite being roundly and publicly condemned by just about every prominent Muslim, and every major Muslim organisation, in Britain. Needless to say, the wave of violent, anti-Muslim bigotry was not covered in depth by the media.
But I mustn't talk about this stuff. Jonathan Freedland will accuse me of starting a who's-the-most-picked-on 'arms race'. I mean, surely there are higher priorities than the frequent violent Islamophobia in Britain.
Some people still criticise Israel, for instance.
By the way, I do just want to make one observation about the Left reaction to Chapel Hill. If you're on the Left, or a liberal, and you're condemning the Chapel Hill murders, and decrying the double standards of the media, and you're not also at least occasionally speaking out against the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Arabs by Western governments (chiefly but by no means only the USA), and the support given by Western governments to regimes that violently oppress Muslims (i.e. Saudi Arabia, Israel), and the double standards of the media on these subjects, then guess what... you're a fucking hypocrite! Congratulations!
Wednesday, 9 July 2014
Déjà bloody vu
I was going to do this post all over again... (this is what we do with Palestine: say the same bloody things over and over again, because the same bloody things keep happening over and over again)... but Richard Seymour has already done it for me, very succintly.
(EDIT: I originally posted a screencap of Seymour's tweet of a screencap. But Seymour has now posted the original screencap itself on his blog. So it seems only fair to remove my screencap of his tweet and just link to him. Not that he needs hits from me.)
(EDIT: I originally posted a screencap of Seymour's tweet of a screencap. But Seymour has now posted the original screencap itself on his blog. So it seems only fair to remove my screencap of his tweet and just link to him. Not that he needs hits from me.)
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
The aliens... They're just so... alien
J.K. Rowling recently reignited the Potterite shipping-wars by saying that she should never have coupled Ron with Hermione.
Among the things she apparently doesn't regret putting into the world's most widely-read/seen Fantasy franchise of recent decades are the following:
Lest it be thought that I'm singling Rowling out for special snark, let me broaden this out immediately. The SF/Fantasy genre, as a whole, contains a discourse of race that represents a peculiarly insidious reflection of racial ideology. Race pervades these genres as a category. Tolkien's Middle Earth is full of different 'races'. The world of Star Trek is full of different 'races'. The world of Doctor Who is full of different 'races'. Just think how often we are assailed with 'races' in Fantasy that can be told apart by both physical characteristics (the blonde hair of the Thals, the crinkly noses of the Bajorans, etc.) and apparently inborn social characteristics. The Doctor pronounces the Jaggaroth "a vicious, callous, warlike race" (my emphasis). A social trait (the tendency to make war) is thus ascribed a racial origin. And the ones I've mentioned are just some of the best known and most mainstream.
Let's look at another extreme example, which shows a particular kind of Fantasy worry about race:
This is particularly interesting because the story is about 'race-mixing', expressing Lovecraft's bigoted horror of 'miscegenation'. But he wasn't writing in a vacuum. He was a product of the late-19th and early-20th centuries... and, indeed, being a man stolidly stuck to the past, he was also a distillation of much of the American 19th century.
The American 19th century was a period of intense construction of race and 'races' as a social category (which is what 'race' is with reference to human ethnicity; as a biological idea it's essentially meaningless). To quote Richard Seymour:
Look at this positively Lovecraftian bit of racial pseudo-science:
Could almost be a quote from Innsmouth. But Bartholow was talking about the Mormons. The idea that the Mormons represented, or were giving rise to, a 'new race' arose from the social practice of 'race-making' and was justified with reference to the ostensibly degenerate breeding practices involved with polygamy. Note how Mormons are no longer considered a racial category. Instead of remaining isolationist, the Mormon Church integrated itself into American capitalism.
This is how such acceptance tends to be achieved in SF/Fantasy too. The Doctor accepts the Thals as people because they prove to share 'our' moral concerns. The return of the king entails the alliance, by marriage, of humans and elves... though, of course, such inherently evil races as the goblins and orcs remain outside this integration. In Rowling's last Potter novel, her lumpen Potterdammerung, the house elves are integrated into the fight against Voldemort, with Kreacher becoming acceptable when he leads the other house elves against Voldemort, crying loyalty to his former master.
Notice, also, that Rowling links race-mixing to social integration. On the surface, this is the exact reverse of any fear about 'mixed blood'. Hagrid is the product of a union between human and giant that would've horrified Lovecraft (and probably have given Martin Freeman an excuse to make another rape joke). On the other hand, Hagrid's acceptance as a 'human' (despite his 'mixed-ancestry') is both nowhere near as important within the novels as the acceptance of muggleborns or half-blood humans, and is also linked to his utter passivity and subservience... his integration into the social order.
Among the things she apparently doesn't regret putting into the world's most widely-read/seen Fantasy franchise of recent decades are the following:
- Gold-obsessed Goblin bankers with big noses and a nigh-communistic inability to comprehend or respect 'human' notions of private property.
- A race of willing slaves with brown skin, huge rolling eyes and 'pickaninny' speech patterns.
- Giants who are born savage and thick, and who live in 'primitive' tribes.
Lest it be thought that I'm singling Rowling out for special snark, let me broaden this out immediately. The SF/Fantasy genre, as a whole, contains a discourse of race that represents a peculiarly insidious reflection of racial ideology. Race pervades these genres as a category. Tolkien's Middle Earth is full of different 'races'. The world of Star Trek is full of different 'races'. The world of Doctor Who is full of different 'races'. Just think how often we are assailed with 'races' in Fantasy that can be told apart by both physical characteristics (the blonde hair of the Thals, the crinkly noses of the Bajorans, etc.) and apparently inborn social characteristics. The Doctor pronounces the Jaggaroth "a vicious, callous, warlike race" (my emphasis). A social trait (the tendency to make war) is thus ascribed a racial origin. And the ones I've mentioned are just some of the best known and most mainstream.
Let's look at another extreme example, which shows a particular kind of Fantasy worry about race:
There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst—fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em—they used to have lots of horse trouble before autos came in.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth, written in 1931.
This is particularly interesting because the story is about 'race-mixing', expressing Lovecraft's bigoted horror of 'miscegenation'. But he wasn't writing in a vacuum. He was a product of the late-19th and early-20th centuries... and, indeed, being a man stolidly stuck to the past, he was also a distillation of much of the American 19th century.
The American 19th century was a period of intense construction of race and 'races' as a social category (which is what 'race' is with reference to human ethnicity; as a biological idea it's essentially meaningless). To quote Richard Seymour:
Historically, the act of oppression that produced the category of race preceded the systematic pseudo-scientific classification of human variation along racial lines. This was true, according to Theodore Allen, in Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy, and it was true in colonial America. What happened first was that a group would be singled out on the basis of some characteristic or other, and excluded from the normal citizenship rights enjoyed by the rest of society no matter how poor. Then, that group would be racialised – a process known as ‘race-making’. As David Roediger points out, this was a very efficient way of stratifying labour markets – colour-coding them, dividing them, making them politically more manageable, and increasing the rate at which it is possible to exploit them. In the history of US industrial relations, ‘race management’ is thus a prominent strategy.
And once this process begins, it doesn’t simply stop and ossify. It transforms in response to new political developments. So, new immigrant groups to America such as European Jews, Italians, the Irish, Poles, Hungarians, etc., would always be initially racialised. But as they consolidated their position in civil society, improved their bargaining power as labourers, and achieved political representation, they became ‘white’.
Look at this positively Lovecraftian bit of racial pseudo-science:
The yellow, sunken, cadaverous visage; the greenish-colored eyes; the thick, protuberant lips; the low forehead; the light, yellowish hair; and the lank, angular person, constitute an appearance so characteristic of the new race, the production of polygamy, as to distinguish them at a glance.
U.S. Army Surgeon Robert Bartholow, 1858.
Could almost be a quote from Innsmouth. But Bartholow was talking about the Mormons. The idea that the Mormons represented, or were giving rise to, a 'new race' arose from the social practice of 'race-making' and was justified with reference to the ostensibly degenerate breeding practices involved with polygamy. Note how Mormons are no longer considered a racial category. Instead of remaining isolationist, the Mormon Church integrated itself into American capitalism.
This is how such acceptance tends to be achieved in SF/Fantasy too. The Doctor accepts the Thals as people because they prove to share 'our' moral concerns. The return of the king entails the alliance, by marriage, of humans and elves... though, of course, such inherently evil races as the goblins and orcs remain outside this integration. In Rowling's last Potter novel, her lumpen Potterdammerung, the house elves are integrated into the fight against Voldemort, with Kreacher becoming acceptable when he leads the other house elves against Voldemort, crying loyalty to his former master.
Notice, also, that Rowling links race-mixing to social integration. On the surface, this is the exact reverse of any fear about 'mixed blood'. Hagrid is the product of a union between human and giant that would've horrified Lovecraft (and probably have given Martin Freeman an excuse to make another rape joke). On the other hand, Hagrid's acceptance as a 'human' (despite his 'mixed-ancestry') is both nowhere near as important within the novels as the acceptance of muggleborns or half-blood humans, and is also linked to his utter passivity and subservience... his integration into the social order.
Sunday, 29 December 2013
Snow Job
To me, the most striking thing about the racist Christmas card circulated by the British National Party (or the Keystone Stormtroopers, as I like to call them), is how utterly mainstream it looks.
There is clearly a racist message here because
a) it's being circulated by a racist party of fascist Nazi racist racists,
and
b) because of the oh-so-clever hidden subtext of the phrase 'white Christmas' that Cyclops/Fuhrer Dickibegyourpardonnick Griffin's reichschancellory full of political geniuses have cryptically woven into it.
But, as Metro have pointed out, it's an altered stock image, also used by thoroughly mainstream publications.
The Aryan child - pale and blonde and blue-eyed - is still the vanilla standard of beauty and innocence in the aesthetic system that capitalism calls Christmas. Mainstream adverts and cards will engage in tokenism so as to simperingly hook in with sentimenal one-world platitudes, and sell to more than just white people, but non-white faces are still the variety sprinkled around the white standard.
It's not the young model's fault, of course. She's just peddled her own image in a system of bodily commodification (as we all must peddle ourselves, one way or another, in order to get by) only to find her image purchased and used by a bunch of evil, twisted, shambolic fascist pisswizards.
(BTW, my derision may reflect the current state of the BNP, but I don't mean to dismiss them as an archaic or dormant threat. They're still Nazi filth and they still hurt people.)
There is clearly a racist message here because
a) it's being circulated by a racist party of fascist Nazi racist racists,
and
b) because of the oh-so-clever hidden subtext of the phrase 'white Christmas' that Cyclops/Fuhrer Dickibegyourpardonnick Griffin's reichschancellory full of political geniuses have cryptically woven into it.
But, as Metro have pointed out, it's an altered stock image, also used by thoroughly mainstream publications.
The Aryan child - pale and blonde and blue-eyed - is still the vanilla standard of beauty and innocence in the aesthetic system that capitalism calls Christmas. Mainstream adverts and cards will engage in tokenism so as to simperingly hook in with sentimenal one-world platitudes, and sell to more than just white people, but non-white faces are still the variety sprinkled around the white standard.
It's not the young model's fault, of course. She's just peddled her own image in a system of bodily commodification (as we all must peddle ourselves, one way or another, in order to get by) only to find her image purchased and used by a bunch of evil, twisted, shambolic fascist pisswizards.
(BTW, my derision may reflect the current state of the BNP, but I don't mean to dismiss them as an archaic or dormant threat. They're still Nazi filth and they still hurt people.)
Monday, 16 December 2013
Footstamping
Rich, white, male kid. Drunk driving. Killed and maimed people. Got off with probation because he suffers from "affluenza". Essentially, he couldn't help doing it because he was too privileged to know better.
It's so obvious, really, isn't it? Shouldn't even need saying. But. Imagine a black person, a poor person, in the same position. Would they be gently treated because society deprived them? I'm not saying I want a 16 year old kid to be sent to one of those privatised totalitarian hellhole gulags that America calls 'prisons' for 20 years (though it would be a sharp lesson for him in what it feels like to be an ethnic minority, since those prisons are mostly stuffed with poor people, who are mostly people of colour). I'm just pointing out the disparity.
Compare with the treatment of Glenn Broadnax. Compare what happened to Zimmerman with what happened to Marissa Alexander (she is at least getting a new trial).
Things like that happen in their thousands every day. I could fill up all the free memory Blogger has given me just describing, in the barest terms, things like that which happened in the last week. And these are just anecdotes which illustrate the structural violence that underlies capitalism.
I've been told, on occasion, that my politics are "childish". I decide to take that as a compliment. Look at what passes for serious, mature, adult opinion and then tell me that childish ideas don't have anything to recommend them. Besides, it's true. At the root of all my political engagement is a boiling fury at injustice. That's not a boast; it's something I can't help. I read the news every day and 'that's not fair' tolls in my brain again and again. That's the ultimate childish feeling: that rage at injustice, at unfairness, at double standards. And it's righteous. When you're a kid, you're too young to have learned all the lessons of life that sophisticated adults take for granted: that the world isn't fair and that's just the way it is and there's nothing you can do about it. You're still naive enough to think life could and should be fair, and to be overcome by anger when it flagrantly isn't. Like so many childish things, that gets beaten out of most of us, much to our detriment. We could do worse than try to reconnect with that feeling that makes you want to stamp your feet and throw your toys around.
The great advantage of adulthood is that it brings the opportunity to focus that kind of anger at injustice in the right directions, away from oneself and one's own thwarted whims, towards the people most ill-treated, towards the most egregious double standards.
Of course, I don't always manage it. I spend a lot of time on my own thwarted whims.
It's so obvious, really, isn't it? Shouldn't even need saying. But. Imagine a black person, a poor person, in the same position. Would they be gently treated because society deprived them? I'm not saying I want a 16 year old kid to be sent to one of those privatised totalitarian hellhole gulags that America calls 'prisons' for 20 years (though it would be a sharp lesson for him in what it feels like to be an ethnic minority, since those prisons are mostly stuffed with poor people, who are mostly people of colour). I'm just pointing out the disparity.
Compare with the treatment of Glenn Broadnax. Compare what happened to Zimmerman with what happened to Marissa Alexander (she is at least getting a new trial).
Things like that happen in their thousands every day. I could fill up all the free memory Blogger has given me just describing, in the barest terms, things like that which happened in the last week. And these are just anecdotes which illustrate the structural violence that underlies capitalism.
I've been told, on occasion, that my politics are "childish". I decide to take that as a compliment. Look at what passes for serious, mature, adult opinion and then tell me that childish ideas don't have anything to recommend them. Besides, it's true. At the root of all my political engagement is a boiling fury at injustice. That's not a boast; it's something I can't help. I read the news every day and 'that's not fair' tolls in my brain again and again. That's the ultimate childish feeling: that rage at injustice, at unfairness, at double standards. And it's righteous. When you're a kid, you're too young to have learned all the lessons of life that sophisticated adults take for granted: that the world isn't fair and that's just the way it is and there's nothing you can do about it. You're still naive enough to think life could and should be fair, and to be overcome by anger when it flagrantly isn't. Like so many childish things, that gets beaten out of most of us, much to our detriment. We could do worse than try to reconnect with that feeling that makes you want to stamp your feet and throw your toys around.
The great advantage of adulthood is that it brings the opportunity to focus that kind of anger at injustice in the right directions, away from oneself and one's own thwarted whims, towards the people most ill-treated, towards the most egregious double standards.
Of course, I don't always manage it. I spend a lot of time on my own thwarted whims.
Thursday, 21 November 2013
5
"I know it sounds mad," says Martha, "but when the Doctor became human, he took the
alien part of himself and he stored it inside the watch. It's not
really a watch, it just looks like a watch."
"And 'alien' means 'not from abroad', I take it," enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.
"The man you call John Smith... he was born on another world."
"A different species."
"Yeah."
Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she's not having any of this nonsense.
"Then tell me," she presses, "in this fairy tale, who are you?"
"Just a friend. I'm not... I mean, you haven't got a rival, as much as I might... Just his friend."
"And human, I take it?"
She humouring the deranged girl. As John said earlier, it must be culture shock. Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher... an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.
"Human," confirms Martha, "Don't worry. And more than that: I just don't follow him around. I'm training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine."
This is too much. Aliens... that's one thing. But this? Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation. This is more than just silly, this is... indecent.
"Well that certainly is nonsense," she snaps, "Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour."
Martha stops.
"Oh, do you think?" She holds up her hand. "Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row...." she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, "Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal."
She is as irritated as Joan. The two face each other across a chasm.
"You read that in a book," says Joan weakly.
"Yes," snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, "to pass my exams!"
I have issues with this story. There's the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start. Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire. The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England. Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something). It shows most directly in the Doctor's donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as 'respect for the fallen' and 'help for heroes' and all that dishonest guff. It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he's on the right side, the side of assumptions that 'we' supposedly all agree on. There's also what I call (rather facetiously) the Nice-But-Then syndrome, where characters in costume dramas are there to espouse anachronistic values which rewrite history in the image of modern liberal assumptions, thus robbing real history of context, and comforting our assessment of our own present-day moral elevation by projecting it back onto 'progressives' in the past, etc.
But the scene above is great because it actually bucks that very trend. Unlike several Who stories of recent years that are set in the past, in 'Human Nature' / 'Family of Blood' the issues of racism and sexism are not just totally effaced so that we can all get on with having fun. Joan is a Nice-But-Then character in many ways, but she's also allowed to evince sexist, 'classist' (not a term I'm fond of, but it'll do for now) and racist attitudes. And this isn't just done so that we self-satisfied modern liberals can feel superior to all those backward numpties in the past. Joan's attitudes are shown to be contested within the same period by other contemporary characters, most especially Martha's friend and fellow-maid Jenny. (Though, of course, that does tend to make Jenny a bit of a Nice-But-Then character herself... it's a fine line because, if you label every character in a costume drama as a NBT if they happen to have progressive values, you efface the existence of people in the past who really did contest widespread prejudices of their time, and thus end up back where you started, with the "condescension of posterity".)
Best of all is the fact that Martha answers back angrily, displaying her annoyance unashamedly and eloquently making mincemeat of Joan's thoughtless assumptions. Okay, Martha could be seen as accepting the onus of having to 'prove herself' to the white woman, which would be problematic... but that isn't how Agyeman and Hynes play it. Their version of the scene is more like Joan getting a deserved ritual humiliation. Okay, Martha has the advantage of a middle class background and an education in modern Britain, so she's not really in the same situation as a real black, working class woman in the England of 1913, but even so... if the Doctor buggered off and left her there, she'd effectively be in the same situation, her education notwithstanding.
The scene depicts intersectional prejudice, and from an otherwise deeply sympathetic character, thus nixing the simplistic idea (surprisingly prevalent today, in the wake of partial and piecemeal social changes) that racism and sexism are Big Bad Bogeys that only Bad People do. It tacitly recognises intersectionality, along with prejudice as structural and socially constructed - something surprisingly rare in pop-culture. And it also depicts the only way prejudices ever get addressed: by those on the sharp end - the women, people of colour, the 'skivvies' - getting seriously pissed off and talking back.
"And 'alien' means 'not from abroad', I take it," enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.
"The man you call John Smith... he was born on another world."
"A different species."
"Yeah."
Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she's not having any of this nonsense.
"Then tell me," she presses, "in this fairy tale, who are you?"
"Just a friend. I'm not... I mean, you haven't got a rival, as much as I might... Just his friend."
"And human, I take it?"
She humouring the deranged girl. As John said earlier, it must be culture shock. Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher... an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.
"Human," confirms Martha, "Don't worry. And more than that: I just don't follow him around. I'm training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine."
This is too much. Aliens... that's one thing. But this? Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation. This is more than just silly, this is... indecent.
"Well that certainly is nonsense," she snaps, "Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour."
Martha stops.
"Oh, do you think?" She holds up her hand. "Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row...." she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, "Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal."
She is as irritated as Joan. The two face each other across a chasm.
"You read that in a book," says Joan weakly.
"Yes," snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, "to pass my exams!"
I have issues with this story. There's the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start. Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire. The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England. Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something). It shows most directly in the Doctor's donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as 'respect for the fallen' and 'help for heroes' and all that dishonest guff. It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he's on the right side, the side of assumptions that 'we' supposedly all agree on. There's also what I call (rather facetiously) the Nice-But-Then syndrome, where characters in costume dramas are there to espouse anachronistic values which rewrite history in the image of modern liberal assumptions, thus robbing real history of context, and comforting our assessment of our own present-day moral elevation by projecting it back onto 'progressives' in the past, etc.
But the scene above is great because it actually bucks that very trend. Unlike several Who stories of recent years that are set in the past, in 'Human Nature' / 'Family of Blood' the issues of racism and sexism are not just totally effaced so that we can all get on with having fun. Joan is a Nice-But-Then character in many ways, but she's also allowed to evince sexist, 'classist' (not a term I'm fond of, but it'll do for now) and racist attitudes. And this isn't just done so that we self-satisfied modern liberals can feel superior to all those backward numpties in the past. Joan's attitudes are shown to be contested within the same period by other contemporary characters, most especially Martha's friend and fellow-maid Jenny. (Though, of course, that does tend to make Jenny a bit of a Nice-But-Then character herself... it's a fine line because, if you label every character in a costume drama as a NBT if they happen to have progressive values, you efface the existence of people in the past who really did contest widespread prejudices of their time, and thus end up back where you started, with the "condescension of posterity".)
Best of all is the fact that Martha answers back angrily, displaying her annoyance unashamedly and eloquently making mincemeat of Joan's thoughtless assumptions. Okay, Martha could be seen as accepting the onus of having to 'prove herself' to the white woman, which would be problematic... but that isn't how Agyeman and Hynes play it. Their version of the scene is more like Joan getting a deserved ritual humiliation. Okay, Martha has the advantage of a middle class background and an education in modern Britain, so she's not really in the same situation as a real black, working class woman in the England of 1913, but even so... if the Doctor buggered off and left her there, she'd effectively be in the same situation, her education notwithstanding.
The scene depicts intersectional prejudice, and from an otherwise deeply sympathetic character, thus nixing the simplistic idea (surprisingly prevalent today, in the wake of partial and piecemeal social changes) that racism and sexism are Big Bad Bogeys that only Bad People do. It tacitly recognises intersectionality, along with prejudice as structural and socially constructed - something surprisingly rare in pop-culture. And it also depicts the only way prejudices ever get addressed: by those on the sharp end - the women, people of colour, the 'skivvies' - getting seriously pissed off and talking back.
Thursday, 14 November 2013
24
"The colonists shouldn't be here," says Dent. "My Corporation has been assigned the
mineral rights on this planet. Our preliminary survey indicates
a very rich concentration of duralinium. You know how the Earth needs
that mineral."
"Earth, or your corporation's profits?" asks the Doctor.
Dent and his mining corporation will go on to prove that they will do literally anything, including mass murder, to obtain the duralinium they want.
"What's good for IMC is good for Earth," says Dent, echoing a famous statement once made in the real world. "There are one hundred thousand million people back on Earth and they desperately need all the minerals we can find."
"What those people need, my dear sir," asserts the Doctor, "are new worlds to live in like this one. Worlds where they can live like human beings, not battery hens."
What nobody mentions during this conversation, or during any of the conversations anybody has about the controversy, is the notion that no non-Uxarians might have the right to appropriate Uxarius. There are people already living there, you see. But those people don't count. They're "primitives".
This story is a reiteration of Western tropes, in both the sense of the genre 'the Western' and in the sense of the culture of Western civilisation. IMC are the cynical railroad men; the colonists are settlers being expropriated by them. The Uxarian natives are 'Indians'. They conform to the stereotypes. They're silent and sullen and irrational, scrabbling around in the dirt and waggling staffs aggressively.
But...
In a way, this complete failure to acknowledge the claims of the aboriginal Uxarians adds to the suffocating nastiness of what's going on. In the real world, aboriginals were displaced by settlers who then complained when big powers or big companies came to displace them in turn... and the settlers often remained blissfully unaware of their own hypocrisy. The original inhabitants of settler-colonial states usually ended up enslaved, massacred, and/or crowded into ghettos or bantustans or the Gaza Strip, like battery hens. Nobody in 'Colony in Space' seems aware of this; but then, as I said, that's only realistic.
It's a bit like the way Conrad's Heart of Darkness manages to be both an appallingly racist tract of loathing and contempt for black Africans and a searing indictment of imperialism. It does this by, as China Mieville observed, allowing no hope within the text that the Africans will liberate themselves. 'Colony in Space' isn't a visionary, feverish masterpiece... and yet, it does have something of the sublime and terrifying wasteland about it, mirroring Conrad's nasty view of Africa as a soulless jungle. 'Colony' has the people of the future replaying ancient mistakes (and all for the same reasons) amidst a bleak, hard-scrabble wilderness of grey, dull, flat, featureless rocks and mud. There's a protracted fight in a mud pool that is almost nihilistic, like that Goya painting where two guys are still trying to club each other to death while both sinking into the same quicksand.
Uxarius is, of course, a world ravaged by its own technological triumphs, by its trajectory towards total weaponization. The Uxarians aren't really 'primitives', no matter what the colonists think. They're actually more 'advanced' than the humans. If the story has a blind spot about the "primitives", it sees clearly enough the true nature of 'advancement'.
"Earth, or your corporation's profits?" asks the Doctor.
Dent and his mining corporation will go on to prove that they will do literally anything, including mass murder, to obtain the duralinium they want.
"What's good for IMC is good for Earth," says Dent, echoing a famous statement once made in the real world. "There are one hundred thousand million people back on Earth and they desperately need all the minerals we can find."
"What those people need, my dear sir," asserts the Doctor, "are new worlds to live in like this one. Worlds where they can live like human beings, not battery hens."
What nobody mentions during this conversation, or during any of the conversations anybody has about the controversy, is the notion that no non-Uxarians might have the right to appropriate Uxarius. There are people already living there, you see. But those people don't count. They're "primitives".
This story is a reiteration of Western tropes, in both the sense of the genre 'the Western' and in the sense of the culture of Western civilisation. IMC are the cynical railroad men; the colonists are settlers being expropriated by them. The Uxarian natives are 'Indians'. They conform to the stereotypes. They're silent and sullen and irrational, scrabbling around in the dirt and waggling staffs aggressively.
But...
In a way, this complete failure to acknowledge the claims of the aboriginal Uxarians adds to the suffocating nastiness of what's going on. In the real world, aboriginals were displaced by settlers who then complained when big powers or big companies came to displace them in turn... and the settlers often remained blissfully unaware of their own hypocrisy. The original inhabitants of settler-colonial states usually ended up enslaved, massacred, and/or crowded into ghettos or bantustans or the Gaza Strip, like battery hens. Nobody in 'Colony in Space' seems aware of this; but then, as I said, that's only realistic.
It's a bit like the way Conrad's Heart of Darkness manages to be both an appallingly racist tract of loathing and contempt for black Africans and a searing indictment of imperialism. It does this by, as China Mieville observed, allowing no hope within the text that the Africans will liberate themselves. 'Colony in Space' isn't a visionary, feverish masterpiece... and yet, it does have something of the sublime and terrifying wasteland about it, mirroring Conrad's nasty view of Africa as a soulless jungle. 'Colony' has the people of the future replaying ancient mistakes (and all for the same reasons) amidst a bleak, hard-scrabble wilderness of grey, dull, flat, featureless rocks and mud. There's a protracted fight in a mud pool that is almost nihilistic, like that Goya painting where two guys are still trying to club each other to death while both sinking into the same quicksand.
Uxarius is, of course, a world ravaged by its own technological triumphs, by its trajectory towards total weaponization. The Uxarians aren't really 'primitives', no matter what the colonists think. They're actually more 'advanced' than the humans. If the story has a blind spot about the "primitives", it sees clearly enough the true nature of 'advancement'.
Wednesday, 13 November 2013
25
"Come in, won’t you?" calls the Doctor, "I’ve been waiting to talk to you."
Koquillion answers the invitation.
"This used to be the Peoples’ Hall of Judgement," remarks the Doctor, regarding the empty chamber sadly, "Fitting, in the present circumstances don’t you think? Mr Bennett, may I remind you that masks and robes such as you are wearing are only used on absolutely ceremonial occasions, hmm?"
Koquillion removes his face. Bennett is beneath.
He explains that he is a murderer.
"I killed a crewmember on the spaceship to Astra. I was arrested. The ship crashed. My crime hadn’t been radioed to Earth. I knew if I could get rid of the other crewmembers..."
"Get rid of the other crewmembers and blame their deaths on the Dido people, hmm?"
"When we crash landed, the inhabitants invited us all to a grand meeting. It was simple. I just arranged an explosive, using the ships armaments. The whole thing went up. All the inhabitants, the crew, the whole race."
"You destroyed a whole planet to save your own skin. You’re insane."
"The girl didn’t know I’d been arrested. When we get back to Earth, she’d support my story. I dressed up as Koquillion to show her how terrible the people here were."
According to the Doctor they were actually hospitable and sociable people, the few hundred that used to live there anyway. The ones that survived Bennett's explosion, and who turn up to get him, are pretty pissed off however. Understandably. But Bennet never had a moment's doubt that his fable of their murderous fierceness would be believed.
Implicit in the very fabric of the story is the assumption that 'Earth' or 'humanity' means Whitey. Caucasians. Westerners. This is something that is far from unproblematic, and it occurs again and again, even - perhaps especially - in SF satires of colonialism. And, when the "Dido people" appear, they're not represented as people of colour, which tends to rub people of colour out of their own story. And yet, as ever, there's a double bind here. To represent them as people of colour would be for the culture industries Western imperialism to take it upon themselves to represent the kinds of people their own societies decimated. The solution isn't to be found within the culture industries, or within the creation of TV texts. The necessary solution is a dialectical and political one that changes society, not just the attitudes of society, or the way society makes television.
And yet, all that being said... also implicit in this particular story is the assumption that Bennett would be believed without question when he dishonestly blamed the aboriginal inhabitants of an uncolonised 'New World' for a senseless massacre of his fellow passengers and crew. Also implicit is the assumption on the part of Bennett that the culture and sophistication of the Didoans counts for nothing, that their People's Hall of Judgement is just another place that he can use and abuse them without being judged.
They key figure here is the mask. In ceremonies, masks are objects of immense social significance and complexity. Bennett takes it upon himself to use the Didoan masks as a fetish outfit to scare a teenager; as a monster costume. He sees their culture and sees menace and horror in its otherness. He expects Vicki to be terrified of the mask... but isn't it the cruel and abusive behaviour of the man behind the mask that frightens Vicki? After all, the mask depicts an insect... presumably an insect native to Dido. Sandy the Sandbeast, who resembles the insect (being part of the same evolutionary pattern... as well as also being designed by Ray Cusick) is her friend. There's a whole subplot about how Barbara kills Sandy, not realising what Vicki realises: that he is not something to be feared simply because of his otherness, his 'Didoanness'.
The cermonial animal mask suggests West African and Sub-Saharan tribal cultures: the very regions among those decimated by Western encroachment and violence. These masks are one of the aspects of African culture that the West has adopted... but they still carry a sinister charge in our imperialist fantasies. Even in great art, such as that of Picasso, the mask-like faces suggest and imply something terrifying. Think of the accusing stares of the Demoiselles. The story uses the idea of the frightening mask, uses the fact of its being frightening to some... but seemingly with an awareness that the greater threat is usually the white colonialist who has appropriated it and worn it.
Without Bennett behind it, the Koquillion mask actually looks rather beautiful.
Koquillion answers the invitation.
"This used to be the Peoples’ Hall of Judgement," remarks the Doctor, regarding the empty chamber sadly, "Fitting, in the present circumstances don’t you think? Mr Bennett, may I remind you that masks and robes such as you are wearing are only used on absolutely ceremonial occasions, hmm?"
Koquillion removes his face. Bennett is beneath.
He explains that he is a murderer.
"I killed a crewmember on the spaceship to Astra. I was arrested. The ship crashed. My crime hadn’t been radioed to Earth. I knew if I could get rid of the other crewmembers..."
"Get rid of the other crewmembers and blame their deaths on the Dido people, hmm?"
"When we crash landed, the inhabitants invited us all to a grand meeting. It was simple. I just arranged an explosive, using the ships armaments. The whole thing went up. All the inhabitants, the crew, the whole race."
"You destroyed a whole planet to save your own skin. You’re insane."
"The girl didn’t know I’d been arrested. When we get back to Earth, she’d support my story. I dressed up as Koquillion to show her how terrible the people here were."
According to the Doctor they were actually hospitable and sociable people, the few hundred that used to live there anyway. The ones that survived Bennett's explosion, and who turn up to get him, are pretty pissed off however. Understandably. But Bennet never had a moment's doubt that his fable of their murderous fierceness would be believed.
Implicit in the very fabric of the story is the assumption that 'Earth' or 'humanity' means Whitey. Caucasians. Westerners. This is something that is far from unproblematic, and it occurs again and again, even - perhaps especially - in SF satires of colonialism. And, when the "Dido people" appear, they're not represented as people of colour, which tends to rub people of colour out of their own story. And yet, as ever, there's a double bind here. To represent them as people of colour would be for the culture industries Western imperialism to take it upon themselves to represent the kinds of people their own societies decimated. The solution isn't to be found within the culture industries, or within the creation of TV texts. The necessary solution is a dialectical and political one that changes society, not just the attitudes of society, or the way society makes television.
And yet, all that being said... also implicit in this particular story is the assumption that Bennett would be believed without question when he dishonestly blamed the aboriginal inhabitants of an uncolonised 'New World' for a senseless massacre of his fellow passengers and crew. Also implicit is the assumption on the part of Bennett that the culture and sophistication of the Didoans counts for nothing, that their People's Hall of Judgement is just another place that he can use and abuse them without being judged.
They key figure here is the mask. In ceremonies, masks are objects of immense social significance and complexity. Bennett takes it upon himself to use the Didoan masks as a fetish outfit to scare a teenager; as a monster costume. He sees their culture and sees menace and horror in its otherness. He expects Vicki to be terrified of the mask... but isn't it the cruel and abusive behaviour of the man behind the mask that frightens Vicki? After all, the mask depicts an insect... presumably an insect native to Dido. Sandy the Sandbeast, who resembles the insect (being part of the same evolutionary pattern... as well as also being designed by Ray Cusick) is her friend. There's a whole subplot about how Barbara kills Sandy, not realising what Vicki realises: that he is not something to be feared simply because of his otherness, his 'Didoanness'.
The cermonial animal mask suggests West African and Sub-Saharan tribal cultures: the very regions among those decimated by Western encroachment and violence. These masks are one of the aspects of African culture that the West has adopted... but they still carry a sinister charge in our imperialist fantasies. Even in great art, such as that of Picasso, the mask-like faces suggest and imply something terrifying. Think of the accusing stares of the Demoiselles. The story uses the idea of the frightening mask, uses the fact of its being frightening to some... but seemingly with an awareness that the greater threat is usually the white colonialist who has appropriated it and worn it.
Without Bennett behind it, the Koquillion mask actually looks rather beautiful.
28
Having devoured Harg, giant green squid monster Kroll is off to the settlement of the People of the Lakes, known to Harg's compatriots by the derogatory name of 'Swampies'.
Constructed from tropes and white liberal guilt, these green space Indians are still better than the blue ones in Avatar. They don't get their world back in the end (neither did the Cherokee) and don't get a white man as a leader.
"The Swampies most certainly do have some problems," chuckles Thawn - Company man, racist and boss of the Refinery.
"You know," muses his second-in-command Fenner, a cynical and cowardly man, "I don't particularly like the Swampies... but I can't say that I really hate them." He is just decent enough to be faintly disturbed by Thawn's open callousness.
Suddenly serious, Thawn says "Oh, I don't hate them Fenner. I just want them permanently removed. I spent many years persuading the Company to back this project, and now that we're on the verge of success I'm not going to be stopped by lily-livered sentimentalists wailing about the fate of a few primitive savages."
Thawn is lying, of course. He hates them. He thinks they're inferior, worthless... but he never mentions the fact that they're skin is a different colour to his. In many ways, this story downplays race too much as an axis of oppression... and then, on the subject of axes of oppression being downplayed, there's the fact that there seem to be no women on the planet at all apart from Romana.
To Thawn, the worst thing about the Swampies is that they're in his way. They're bad for business. They sit on resources that Thawn claims, but which happen - irritatingly - to be buried in someone else's land. So, for the sake of Progress, you have to get rid of the 'savages'.
Thawn and Fenner hold these truths to be self-evident.
Constructed from tropes and white liberal guilt, these green space Indians are still better than the blue ones in Avatar. They don't get their world back in the end (neither did the Cherokee) and don't get a white man as a leader.
"The Swampies most certainly do have some problems," chuckles Thawn - Company man, racist and boss of the Refinery.
"You know," muses his second-in-command Fenner, a cynical and cowardly man, "I don't particularly like the Swampies... but I can't say that I really hate them." He is just decent enough to be faintly disturbed by Thawn's open callousness.
Suddenly serious, Thawn says "Oh, I don't hate them Fenner. I just want them permanently removed. I spent many years persuading the Company to back this project, and now that we're on the verge of success I'm not going to be stopped by lily-livered sentimentalists wailing about the fate of a few primitive savages."
Thawn is lying, of course. He hates them. He thinks they're inferior, worthless... but he never mentions the fact that they're skin is a different colour to his. In many ways, this story downplays race too much as an axis of oppression... and then, on the subject of axes of oppression being downplayed, there's the fact that there seem to be no women on the planet at all apart from Romana.
To Thawn, the worst thing about the Swampies is that they're in his way. They're bad for business. They sit on resources that Thawn claims, but which happen - irritatingly - to be buried in someone else's land. So, for the sake of Progress, you have to get rid of the 'savages'.
Thawn and Fenner hold these truths to be self-evident.
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
31
John offers the Doctor some sugar for his tea. John is a black man with a Caribbean accent.
"Ah," says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, "A decision. Would it make any difference?"
"It would make your tea sweet," says John, humouring this strange customer.
"Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?"
"Not really."
"But..."
John is suddenly strangely interested. "Yeah?" he prompts, wanting to hear more. (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the 'magical negro' stereotype... but actually he's just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman. As such he's one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people. Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)
"What if I could control people's tastebuds?" suggests the Doctor, "What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That'd make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane."
One person making a little decision doesn't change much. Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however...
"My father, he was a cane cutter," says John.
"Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn't have been a cane cutter, would he?"
"If this sugar thing had never started," says John, "my great-grandfather wouldn't have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I'd be a African."
In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal. Slaves were literally worked to death. The horrors of Caribbean slavery - virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries - equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans). The connection between these horrors - that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery - is still less often made.
John is lucky to exist at all. For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.
Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism. 'Race' is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct... and a relatively recent one in its current form. 'Races' were made socially. It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were 'white'. The idea that 'negroes' were an inferior 'race' arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the 'New World'. It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions. The American Declaration of Independence stated "all men are created equal". There needed to be footnotes to that so that the gentelmen who wrote and signed it could keep their wealth and privilege. But it was only with the rise of a new society that such footnotes become necessary. The Tsars never had to justify why some were serfs and some were not: that was just the way of the world. Skin-colour was a handy marker for the modern, bourgeois Tsars; the Tsars of Liberty. It was a justification. It divided some workers from others. It was an unremovable mark. Pigment became a serial number. The toxic effects of this still deform the world.
It's quite rare to see any connection made in popular culture between racism (which is what this story - with its racially warring Daleks and its 'No Coloureds' signs and its little group of British fascists - is about) and slavery. Still more rare to see slavery and racism talked about - even obliquely - as direct results of market forces. In this scene, slavery is something you consume. Do you want some slavery in your tea? Of course, there is also the question of where the tea comes from.
John doubtless gets stick from some white Londoners for being an immigrant, but he's descended from people who were given no choice but to be 'immigrants' to Jamaica. He probably came here to fill one of those situations vacant that Britain had after the war. As before, there was work that Whitey needed doing.
This scene is happening in November 1963. The previous year, the Conservative government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, restricting the right of Commonwealth people to move to Britain. Leader of the Opposition High Gaitskill called this "cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation". The following year, amidst a Labour General Election victory, the Tories ran a successful campaign in Smethwick for Peter Griffiths featuring the slogan (if you'll pardon my repeating it): "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour". Harold Wilson called for Griffiths to be treated as an untouchable in Parliament. Of course, by 1968, Wilson's Labour government was introducing (with Tory support) a new Act which further restricted the right of Commonwealth citizens to move to Britain. That's just what Labour does: talk the talk of moral outrage when in opposition, then out-racist the racists once in power.
Boulders. Lakes. Ripples.
"Ah," says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, "A decision. Would it make any difference?"
"It would make your tea sweet," says John, humouring this strange customer.
"Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?"
"Not really."
"But..."
John is suddenly strangely interested. "Yeah?" he prompts, wanting to hear more. (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the 'magical negro' stereotype... but actually he's just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman. As such he's one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people. Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)
"What if I could control people's tastebuds?" suggests the Doctor, "What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That'd make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane."
One person making a little decision doesn't change much. Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however...
"My father, he was a cane cutter," says John.
"Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn't have been a cane cutter, would he?"
"If this sugar thing had never started," says John, "my great-grandfather wouldn't have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I'd be a African."
In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal. Slaves were literally worked to death. The horrors of Caribbean slavery - virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries - equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans). The connection between these horrors - that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery - is still less often made.
John is lucky to exist at all. For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.
Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism. 'Race' is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct... and a relatively recent one in its current form. 'Races' were made socially. It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were 'white'. The idea that 'negroes' were an inferior 'race' arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the 'New World'. It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions. The American Declaration of Independence stated "all men are created equal". There needed to be footnotes to that so that the gentelmen who wrote and signed it could keep their wealth and privilege. But it was only with the rise of a new society that such footnotes become necessary. The Tsars never had to justify why some were serfs and some were not: that was just the way of the world. Skin-colour was a handy marker for the modern, bourgeois Tsars; the Tsars of Liberty. It was a justification. It divided some workers from others. It was an unremovable mark. Pigment became a serial number. The toxic effects of this still deform the world.
It's quite rare to see any connection made in popular culture between racism (which is what this story - with its racially warring Daleks and its 'No Coloureds' signs and its little group of British fascists - is about) and slavery. Still more rare to see slavery and racism talked about - even obliquely - as direct results of market forces. In this scene, slavery is something you consume. Do you want some slavery in your tea? Of course, there is also the question of where the tea comes from.
John doubtless gets stick from some white Londoners for being an immigrant, but he's descended from people who were given no choice but to be 'immigrants' to Jamaica. He probably came here to fill one of those situations vacant that Britain had after the war. As before, there was work that Whitey needed doing.
This scene is happening in November 1963. The previous year, the Conservative government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, restricting the right of Commonwealth people to move to Britain. Leader of the Opposition High Gaitskill called this "cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation". The following year, amidst a Labour General Election victory, the Tories ran a successful campaign in Smethwick for Peter Griffiths featuring the slogan (if you'll pardon my repeating it): "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour". Harold Wilson called for Griffiths to be treated as an untouchable in Parliament. Of course, by 1968, Wilson's Labour government was introducing (with Tory support) a new Act which further restricted the right of Commonwealth citizens to move to Britain. That's just what Labour does: talk the talk of moral outrage when in opposition, then out-racist the racists once in power.
Boulders. Lakes. Ripples.
33
Enlightenment and Persuasion have walked in on the Doctor and his friends. They now look human. A man and a woman, created from a sketch Tegan drew. Pale, impassive, handsome, impeccably-groomed people in clothes that Tegan thought fashionable. They look like she modelled them on First Class passengers on Concorde. The Jet Set.
Persuasion hands round drinks. Nothing more persuasive than that.
Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess. She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.
"We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe," she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.
She was kissed by technology.
"The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear," says Persuasion suavely. Yes, that's always how the 'natives' look to the 'explorers'. Fearful little things. "When last we were there, our reception was hostile."
Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of 'natives' by 'explorers', is not fooled.
"Yeah, that doesn't surprise me," she sneers.
"Well, we must read your history books," says the Doctor. There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books. You can read a lot between the lines.
"You will be welcome to do so," says Enlightenment, "but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages."
There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.
"One couldn't wish for a more enchanting teacher," says the Doctor. He almost seems to be flirting with her.
"A very elevated one," adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.
"Enlightenment," says the Doctor.
"Minister of Enlightenment," Persuasion corrects him. Just so you know where you stand.
"Yes, of course," replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, "And you must be Minister of Persuasion."
Of course, every 'civilised' nation that ever set about conquering the 'primitives' always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their 'advancement', always said they were helping the child-races to grow... or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.
And such 'civilised' nations always aimed for 'hearts and minds', always brought their greater 'wisdom' with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved.
And they always needed - need - their Ministers of Enlightenment. And Persuasion.
Persuasion hands round drinks. Nothing more persuasive than that.
Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess. She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.
"We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe," she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.
She was kissed by technology.
"The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear," says Persuasion suavely. Yes, that's always how the 'natives' look to the 'explorers'. Fearful little things. "When last we were there, our reception was hostile."
Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of 'natives' by 'explorers', is not fooled.
"Yeah, that doesn't surprise me," she sneers.
"Well, we must read your history books," says the Doctor. There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books. You can read a lot between the lines.
"You will be welcome to do so," says Enlightenment, "but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages."
There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.
"One couldn't wish for a more enchanting teacher," says the Doctor. He almost seems to be flirting with her.
"A very elevated one," adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.
"Enlightenment," says the Doctor.
"Minister of Enlightenment," Persuasion corrects him. Just so you know where you stand.
"Yes, of course," replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, "And you must be Minister of Persuasion."
Of course, every 'civilised' nation that ever set about conquering the 'primitives' always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their 'advancement', always said they were helping the child-races to grow... or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.
And such 'civilised' nations always aimed for 'hearts and minds', always brought their greater 'wisdom' with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved.
And they always needed - need - their Ministers of Enlightenment. And Persuasion.
Friday, 8 November 2013
41
Early morning in Britain.
Shop-window dummies twitch, stand up and smash their way out into the high street. They stalk past the shop logos and brand names and adverts. Price tags dangle from their fashionable clothes.
Their hands are not like human hands. They're not organs of manipulation, to be used for work. They flip open to reveal weapons.
The dummies encounter shoppers, or people waiting for the bus to work. They gun them down. People fall and die next to the shop fronts.
The dummies are plastic effigies of people. Products, manufactured things, fashioned in the human image. They alienate the human image from humans. They were made in a factory, on a production line, by workers. Sold to shops. They are hostile commodities, made for a capitalist concern; made by people working for a wage, yet out of human control, invested with a life of their own, confronting people as an external, dominating, fierce, blank, gothic, inhuman power.
By the way Karl, the people who made these dummies were women. The dummies, by contrast, are all male. The dummies are all white too, because that's what the default, 'vanilla' human is to capitalist culture: male and white. Several of the women we see working in Auto Plastics are not white.
Talk about alienation.
Shop-window dummies twitch, stand up and smash their way out into the high street. They stalk past the shop logos and brand names and adverts. Price tags dangle from their fashionable clothes.
Their hands are not like human hands. They're not organs of manipulation, to be used for work. They flip open to reveal weapons.
The dummies encounter shoppers, or people waiting for the bus to work. They gun them down. People fall and die next to the shop fronts.
The dummies are plastic effigies of people. Products, manufactured things, fashioned in the human image. They alienate the human image from humans. They were made in a factory, on a production line, by workers. Sold to shops. They are hostile commodities, made for a capitalist concern; made by people working for a wage, yet out of human control, invested with a life of their own, confronting people as an external, dominating, fierce, blank, gothic, inhuman power.
The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
By the way Karl, the people who made these dummies were women. The dummies, by contrast, are all male. The dummies are all white too, because that's what the default, 'vanilla' human is to capitalist culture: male and white. Several of the women we see working in Auto Plastics are not white.
Talk about alienation.
Tuesday, 5 November 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, 12 October 2013
Nearly Silent
Simon Schama gets a huge slab of BBC money and airtime to obfuscate the truth in the service of Apartheid state Israel, taking official Israeli lies as the basis of his 'case'. See here.
Licence-fee money well spent there.
Best bit, on the wall:
“I want to say, nobody, including me, ultimately has the moral right to say that shouldn’t have happened, the wall shouldn’t have happened. Before the wall happened, hundreds of people were dying every year from terrorist attacks; after the wall happened very, very few...."
Actually, since the start of the wall, over 4,000 Palestinians have died... but they obviously don't come into the category of 'people' for Professor Schama, no more than the Haitian slaves who didn't get mentioned in his massive book on the French Revolution.
He continues:
"In some senses, if you don’t live in Israel — I don’t live in Israel — you are morally obliged to be nearly silent.”
So shouldn't that mean that Professor Schama should be "nearly silent" about it? No, of course not. He means that people who disapprove of the wall should be "nearly silent". That's the viewpoint that is invalid if it comes from a non-Israeli. Fascinating how clever people can talk circular, babyish drivel and think it profundity... while being totally unconscious of how they themselves are broadcasting - in this case literally - their own moral hypocrisy.
Or maybe Schama's programme constituted 'near silence'... it was, after all, of little substance.
If only the Palestinians were allowed to be as "nearly silent" on the 'objective' BBC as the Zionists.
 |
| Simon Schama, thinking profound thoughts about history 'n' stuff. |
Licence-fee money well spent there.
Best bit, on the wall:
“I want to say, nobody, including me, ultimately has the moral right to say that shouldn’t have happened, the wall shouldn’t have happened. Before the wall happened, hundreds of people were dying every year from terrorist attacks; after the wall happened very, very few...."
Actually, since the start of the wall, over 4,000 Palestinians have died... but they obviously don't come into the category of 'people' for Professor Schama, no more than the Haitian slaves who didn't get mentioned in his massive book on the French Revolution.
He continues:
"In some senses, if you don’t live in Israel — I don’t live in Israel — you are morally obliged to be nearly silent.”
So shouldn't that mean that Professor Schama should be "nearly silent" about it? No, of course not. He means that people who disapprove of the wall should be "nearly silent". That's the viewpoint that is invalid if it comes from a non-Israeli. Fascinating how clever people can talk circular, babyish drivel and think it profundity... while being totally unconscious of how they themselves are broadcasting - in this case literally - their own moral hypocrisy.
Or maybe Schama's programme constituted 'near silence'... it was, after all, of little substance.
If only the Palestinians were allowed to be as "nearly silent" on the 'objective' BBC as the Zionists.
Wednesday, 9 October 2013
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
Thursday, 8 August 2013
Nerd Evidence
Canon and continuity are not the point. Why not go ahead without precedents? After all, a foolish hobgoblin is the consistency of someone with a dictionary of quotations.
All the same...
All the same...
No, I don't kip
Godfrey Bloom, UKIP member of the European Parliament (there's a dialectical proposition if ever I heard one), has said how unhappy he is about so much foreign aid going to "Bongo Bongo Land".
He has subsequently expressed regret over the remark. As always, with the British, the crime is in getting caught.
But he shouldn't regret saying "Bongo Bongo Land". He really shouldn't. That was at least honest, even if it did sound like the kind of thing Richie from Bottom used to say. It was a sincere little window into the real heart of UKIP's tweedy fascism.
What Bloom should regret is being a fucking racist pillock.
He has subsequently expressed regret over the remark. As always, with the British, the crime is in getting caught.
 |
| Godfrey Bloom, MEP (UKIP): racist pillock |
But he shouldn't regret saying "Bongo Bongo Land". He really shouldn't. That was at least honest, even if it did sound like the kind of thing Richie from Bottom used to say. It was a sincere little window into the real heart of UKIP's tweedy fascism.
What Bloom should regret is being a fucking racist pillock.
Wednesday, 17 July 2013
A Clarification
If you think this...
...is what Chinese people actually look like, then guess what:
...is what Chinese people actually look like, then guess what:
YOU'RE A FUCKING RACIST!
ADDITIONAL:
An explanation is probably in order. This post is in response to an assertion made on the aforementioned 'Talons' thread, an assertion agreed with more-or-less by several other posters, that one might mistake John Bennett in his yellowface prosthetic make-up (see above) for an actual Chinese person. Yes, human beings - people with brains and opposable thumbs and everything - actually felt comfortable making that assertion in public... though, they do use pseudonyms on Gallifrey Base forum, so maybe that anonymity helped.
Some of the people in question have been engaged in inventive games of circumlocution and tactical point-missing around the subject of the racism in 'Talons of Weng-Chiang'. The usual disingenuous special pleading, most of it. 'There's a stupid white policeman - does that mean it's racist against white people?' and 'I've shown it to Asian friends and they weren't offended!'. Y'know, the sort of cretinous, spurious, trivial, entitled, privileged, desperate, dishonest bollocks always trotted out when these waaaah-waaaaahing manchildren feel that their untroubled viewing pleasure may be even slightly complicated by being implicated in the injustice visited upon people other than them.
However, the idea that it might be possible to mistake the above image - in all its Fu Manchu-y and rubbery and yellowy inglory - with an actual human being of Chinese descent... well, it's simply breathtaking. How is one to respond to people who evidently
a) base their notion of what Chinese people look like not upon the actual appearance of, y'know, actual chinese people, but rather upon racist stereotypes conjured into life by immobile, expressionless yellowface prosthetics, and
b) think that their own comfort with this racist elision is itself an alibi against charges of racism?
There's something often said by fans about 'Talons of Weng Chiang': "ignore the rat". It means, decide to see past the extremely unconvincing giant rat monster in the story (which looks like exactly what it is: a combination of a real rat in a bad model set and a fluffy puppet) so that you can see the quality of the story beneath. Well, 'Talons' is a good story in many ways... and no guilt need be felt by anyone who watches and enjoys it (another straw man set up by the point-missers club). But it's devastatingly revealing that any fan should be more worried by the unconvincing rat than by the unconvincing yellowface. It reveals priorities that are so insular and narrow-minded as to be... and I don't think this is too strong a word... inhuman.
However, it's yet another quantum leap to the point where you find the rat unconvincing but not the yellowface. And you're prepared to say so in public. This reveals a shameless thoughtlessness, a terrifying absence of self-examination, an arrogance born of privilege. And it also seems to reveal a willingness not simply to be unconcerned by the monstering of a whole race of people, not simply to delude yourself that its not happening in the text (because you've never bothered to avail yourself of the myriad opportunities now freely available to anyone with internet access to educate yourself about how representations of people work in the texts you consume) but to actually think that the representations (of, say, Chinese people as expressionless, rubberfaced bogeymen) are accurate and true to life. I know that isn't literally what is being said - and the people I'm talking about would doubtless clutch their handbags in offended and petulant injustice (they notice and care about injustice when they think they're the victims of it, natch) at what I'm implying about them. But it is what their attitude amounts to: that they care more about the travestying of a rat than the travestying of human beings of a different ethnic background.
I'm sick of being nice about this. Racism is not some abstract concept that people unaffected by it get to define so that they are always absolved of it. Furthermore, racism is what racists do and racists are those who do racism. So, if the above image fails to trouble you, especially if it fails to even strain your credulity, then, as I say, you're a fucking racist and, as far as I'm concerned, you can fuck the fucking fuck off you fucking fuck.
It's a whole other order of problem, but a guy was just acquitted of murdering a kid because a jury seemed unable to notice racial profiling when it lead to bullets being fired. We should be long past the point where we're prepared to tolerate this shit politely. It doesn't warrant politeness. Or quiet reasoning. Or patient explanation. It warrants anger and contempt. Even down at this low level. Even at the level of an old episode of Doctor Who... precisely because, as Dr Sandifer says, that old episode doesn't exist in 1976 anymore; it exists now. And it is now long past time that we all grew the fuck up.
Monday, 15 July 2013
The Dr Speaks
Against my better judgement, I allowed myself to get dragged into the latest "is 'Talons' racist?" debate at Gallifrey Base. (You'd think, wouldn't you, that this one would've been settled long ago and been filed away in the same drawer with "is the world a sphere?" and "is the Tomorrow People reboot bound to be shit?" but nope, apparently not.)
I won't rehearse it here, since everyone likely to read this blog is likely to be able to imagine exactly what has been (and remains to be) said.
I just wanted to post this...
...which occured during my (increasingly and pointlessly irate) involvement. Click to make it bigger.
You know, I disagree with Phil Sandifer about a lot... but the above just made me want to hug him.
I won't rehearse it here, since everyone likely to read this blog is likely to be able to imagine exactly what has been (and remains to be) said.
I just wanted to post this...
...which occured during my (increasingly and pointlessly irate) involvement. Click to make it bigger.
You know, I disagree with Phil Sandifer about a lot... but the above just made me want to hug him.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)