The Doctor is confusing an angel to death.
Light came to our world to count and quantify all life, to create a set and definitive catalogue. Light sent its Survey out into the world to sample each form. But our world corrupted the Survey with the delicious possibilities of evolution. Light was locked away so the Survey could inherit the Earth. It became a Victorian gentleman, a man of property. It enacted a ruthless Darwinian takeover of the house above Light's ship. A colonizing mission. A merger and acquisition. This being Victorian England, the wife and daughter and maids came with the house like fixtures and fitting. The Survey locked its secrets away, just like any Victorian gentleman, and set about dreaming of empire. It adopted the cultural logic of its new society and new position: the ideology of 'the survival of the fittest'... meaning, supposedly, the dominance of the best. With its inbuilt assumptions about the place of 'lesser races' and 'lower orders' and women, Victorian social-Darwinism was perfect for the Survey's purposes, as it shed its insectile and reptilian skins and became Josiah, the pink of respectability.
But then the Doctor came and let Light out of the cellar. Just to see what would happen.
Light turned out to be the reductionist ghost in the bourgeois social machine.
To Light, we're merely walking bowls of "sugars, proteins and amino acids". Light killed and dismembered one of the maids, saying "I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it". That's just how reductionism works. To understand something, you take it to pieces. But what happens when you can't put the pieces back together again? Do you forget that the original thing was more than just the sum of its bits? Reductionism can do a lot of heavy lifting as an analytical tool, but it is the map not the territory... and mistaking it for the territory leads to vulgar materialism and determinism. A river cannot be understood as just an aggregation of water molecules. Aside from all the other natural and material processes involved, it is also a social phenomenon. It is something people experience, think about, wade in, swim in, sail upon, fish for food in, divert and ford and dam and befoul. It is something people name, and build towns around. Water can be used to quench thirst or drown people. It can be freely shared or owned and monopolised, or stolen. Likewise - more so - people are not just aggregations of limbs or genes (selfish or not). Looking at them that way makes it possible to inherit them and use them like property. Contrary to the assumptions of bourgeois political economy, societies are not just aggregations of individuals, all acting from their own self-interest. That's part of how you end up saying that some people just have to be left to starve, or be put in the workhouse, or be ruled by a Viceroy, all for the good of the economy and progress. It's partly how you end up with the idea that people starve or work or serve because they have failed to compete, or because it was their destiny as a unit of inherently inferior stock. Inspector Mackenzie has imbibed this view of things, sagely pronouncing on how "gypsy blood" makes for "lazy workers".
This view of the world depends upon snapshots of reality at best, all fixed in place like moths displayed behind glass, like catalogued specimens in the Natural History Museum. There is something about this static view that makes it tesselate perfectly with hierarchy, and thus work for whoever rules. That's why the classic depiction shows a lowly ape gradually growing up to be a white gentleman. It depends upon forgetting the revolutionary implications of Natural Selection, which shows us a world of variation in dialectical unity, everything effecting everything else in one great network of feedback loops, all species constantly on their way to being something else, all forms transitional, all races related to each other, no hierarchy of blood, no separation of individuals from each other, no dividing line between individuals and the rest of the world, every tiny alteration in quantity gradually leading to an alteration in quality, all negations ultimated negated, everything containing its own contradictions within it... just as every apple contains the potential to nourish or rot.
In truth, as Light realises to his horror...
"Everything is changing. All in flux. Nothing remains the same."
The mercurial Doctor has reminded Light that even he, Light, changes. Everything does. The catalogue can never be complete, by definition. The Doctor cruelly hammers home the word "change" at every opportunity. He bamboozles Light with a list of mythical and fictional creatures, human creations, inherently social things that can never be quantified as part of any static, reductionist system. Even the Gryphon gets a mention, that creature of Victorian lassitude and melancholy, yearning for the old days before everything changed.
Even Nimrod, whose people once worshipped Light, won't help him. Nimrod has dumped his allegiance to both Josiah and Light, both the new boss and the old. He can't be fixed in subservient place because he's a social creature who thinks and learns and makes his own history, if not in circumstances of his own choosing.
"I will not change," says Light. And he turns to stone rather than permit himself to become part of the great flow of fluctuation, contradiction and transformation. He's that reactionary.
"Subject for catalogue," announces the Doctor with weary contempt, "File under: Imagination, comma, lack of."
ideas are icepickproof
Sunday, 17 November 2013
17
Ms. Kizlet is using the wi-fi signal to control people in the coffee
shop.
“I do love showing off,” she says through a waitress she has made her puppet. “Just let me show you what control of the wi-fi can do for you,” she adds through the mouth of a young girl.
It’s a tech demo. Here’s what this latest version of the operating system can do. Upgrade now. The iconography is all ruthlessly current. Particularly fitting: Kizlet and her crew are playing around on iPads as they do their little Steve Jobs routine. You almost expect her to reveal that they’ve captured Clara with an “oh, and one more thing.”
Kizlet explains that they’ve “released thousands” of base stations into the world, blanketing the whole of humanity in their Worldwide Web of Fear.
Meanwhile, Clara’s on her laptop. She recognizes the vulnerability in every grand system: people. With just a bit of clicking around she’s figured out where Kizlet is transmitting from. The most obvious spot in London, really. Kizlet's client loves using grand projects for his own purposes. It’s what he did in the Underground, and it’s what he’s doing now. But it’s 2013 now, and London’s grand projects aren’t for the little people anymore. Now they’re for the elite.
So it's the perfect place for Kizlet’s operation. The prestigious tallest building in London, to be filled with high-paying businesses. The metaphor is straightforward: the grand prestige project, like the Olympics and the Jubilee from the same year, is literally eating people alive. Construction is consumption. It even consumes and annexes the protests against it. Its name comes from the complaints about its design - the fear that it would be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London.” Of course, the objection, like the vision itself, is concerned with the abstract form of London, as opposed to with the lives of those within it. Heritage London or the modern corporate state. It’s all the same: an aesthetic to show off. A system for control.
And yet, architecturally, the building is designed to be invisible - to blend into the clouds around it. Control is always supposed to be invisible, after all. Just something in the air, like the wi-fi signal itself. The spectacle is always showing off and remaining invisible at the same time. As with any demo, it’s not just technology being shown off. It’s ideology. Dressed up, inevitably, in the rhetoric of upper middle class consumption. The Great Intelligence wants “healthy, free-range, human minds.”
“The farmer tends his flock like a loving parent,” Kizlet says.
“The abbatoir is not a contradiction,” she insists.
“No one loves cattle more than Burger King.”
So the Doctor smashes into the side of the building and tears it all down.
“I do love showing off,” she says through a waitress she has made her puppet. “Just let me show you what control of the wi-fi can do for you,” she adds through the mouth of a young girl.
It’s a tech demo. Here’s what this latest version of the operating system can do. Upgrade now. The iconography is all ruthlessly current. Particularly fitting: Kizlet and her crew are playing around on iPads as they do their little Steve Jobs routine. You almost expect her to reveal that they’ve captured Clara with an “oh, and one more thing.”
Kizlet explains that they’ve “released thousands” of base stations into the world, blanketing the whole of humanity in their Worldwide Web of Fear.
Meanwhile, Clara’s on her laptop. She recognizes the vulnerability in every grand system: people. With just a bit of clicking around she’s figured out where Kizlet is transmitting from. The most obvious spot in London, really. Kizlet's client loves using grand projects for his own purposes. It’s what he did in the Underground, and it’s what he’s doing now. But it’s 2013 now, and London’s grand projects aren’t for the little people anymore. Now they’re for the elite.
So it's the perfect place for Kizlet’s operation. The prestigious tallest building in London, to be filled with high-paying businesses. The metaphor is straightforward: the grand prestige project, like the Olympics and the Jubilee from the same year, is literally eating people alive. Construction is consumption. It even consumes and annexes the protests against it. Its name comes from the complaints about its design - the fear that it would be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London.” Of course, the objection, like the vision itself, is concerned with the abstract form of London, as opposed to with the lives of those within it. Heritage London or the modern corporate state. It’s all the same: an aesthetic to show off. A system for control.
And yet, architecturally, the building is designed to be invisible - to blend into the clouds around it. Control is always supposed to be invisible, after all. Just something in the air, like the wi-fi signal itself. The spectacle is always showing off and remaining invisible at the same time. As with any demo, it’s not just technology being shown off. It’s ideology. Dressed up, inevitably, in the rhetoric of upper middle class consumption. The Great Intelligence wants “healthy, free-range, human minds.”
“The farmer tends his flock like a loving parent,” Kizlet says.
“The abbatoir is not a contradiction,” she insists.
“No one loves cattle more than Burger King.”
So the Doctor smashes into the side of the building and tears it all down.
18
Everyone is down a mine.
(Incidentally, it's funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines. I'm sure it's nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners' unions and their industry by the Tory government. Oh ho no.)
Anyway. As I say, everyone - the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato - is down a mine. And things are coming to a head. (Head. Pit-head. Geddit? Never mind. It doesn't really work anyway.)
Yes, so anyway... Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.
"Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement," says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk. "Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals...."
There's an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.
"...the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll," the Doctor continues, "Large quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there's a superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so..."
"So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!" finishes Romana.
"Right. But who was the first person he met?"
"The person who held the monopoly of metal here," supplies Organon in response to the Doctor's rhetorical question.
He means Adrasta, by the way.
"Right," agrees the Doctor, "And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him."
If you don't know what that last bit means, well I'm sorry... I have limited space and no inclination to explain. What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you're not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?
What Erato didn't reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism... By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.
The funny thing is... this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history. Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged). Revolutions happen when the existing social relationships become a drag factor holding back the development of the productive forces.
To give a very crude illustration:
An opportunity comes along for a society short on metal to get lots more metal (I mean LOTS more) by entering into a trading agreement with someone who has lots of metal. If that metal-short society gets lots more metal, it can have more of the things it needs to produce stuff (like, say, farming implements... and perhaps even more complex machinery). But the society is dominated by a powerful person or layer of people - say, a feudal ruling class - whose power depends upon their near-monopoly on metal, i.e upon their ownership of the only mine. That person - let's imagine it's one person and she's a woman - is, as stated, very powerful, and is thus in a position to stymie the deal. Sometimes such a person will actually retard their own economic interests in order to cling on to older social structures that benefit them.
Adrasta - and, by extension, the whole of feudal system on Chloris - is caught in such a contradiction. The 'free trade monster' comes to develop the productive forces and she has to lock him away in her mine. This is like the decadent feudal aristocracy fighting the oncoming revolution to a bourgeois mode of production. Look also at how the story associates the downfall of Adrasta with the end of the "dark ages". Everyone will be happier once the new social order changes the economic base!
The final proof that this story is about the rise of capitalism can be found in the fact that everyone on Chloris is deperate to get their hands on metal... and yet, it doesn't seem to be valuable to them in itself. Presumably, they want to trade the metal to those who have none. Metal has become a commodity, the ur-commodity, the commodity that signifies all others and realises their value. The universal equivalent. It has become, in short, capitalist money.
Of course, as I say, this is also a story from and about the rise of neoliberalism. So it's about the road out of serfdom in two senses: the sense of the original historical transition to capitalism and the rising ideology of neoliberalism. Hayekian class war, in the form of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, was (in rhetoric if not always in practice) about supposedly liberating money and trade from the protectionism and monopoly of an old system.
From that semi-rational but increasingly hegemonic standpoint, Adrasta isn't a fedual seigneur... she's Jim Callaghan.
(Incidentally, it's funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines. I'm sure it's nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners' unions and their industry by the Tory government. Oh ho no.)
Anyway. As I say, everyone - the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato - is down a mine. And things are coming to a head. (Head. Pit-head. Geddit? Never mind. It doesn't really work anyway.)
Yes, so anyway... Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.
"Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement," says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk. "Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals...."
There's an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.
"...the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll," the Doctor continues, "Large quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there's a superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so..."
"So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!" finishes Romana.
"Right. But who was the first person he met?"
"The person who held the monopoly of metal here," supplies Organon in response to the Doctor's rhetorical question.
He means Adrasta, by the way.
"Right," agrees the Doctor, "And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him."
If you don't know what that last bit means, well I'm sorry... I have limited space and no inclination to explain. What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you're not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?
What Erato didn't reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism... By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.
The funny thing is... this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history. Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged). Revolutions happen when the existing social relationships become a drag factor holding back the development of the productive forces.
To give a very crude illustration:
An opportunity comes along for a society short on metal to get lots more metal (I mean LOTS more) by entering into a trading agreement with someone who has lots of metal. If that metal-short society gets lots more metal, it can have more of the things it needs to produce stuff (like, say, farming implements... and perhaps even more complex machinery). But the society is dominated by a powerful person or layer of people - say, a feudal ruling class - whose power depends upon their near-monopoly on metal, i.e upon their ownership of the only mine. That person - let's imagine it's one person and she's a woman - is, as stated, very powerful, and is thus in a position to stymie the deal. Sometimes such a person will actually retard their own economic interests in order to cling on to older social structures that benefit them.
Adrasta - and, by extension, the whole of feudal system on Chloris - is caught in such a contradiction. The 'free trade monster' comes to develop the productive forces and she has to lock him away in her mine. This is like the decadent feudal aristocracy fighting the oncoming revolution to a bourgeois mode of production. Look also at how the story associates the downfall of Adrasta with the end of the "dark ages". Everyone will be happier once the new social order changes the economic base!
The final proof that this story is about the rise of capitalism can be found in the fact that everyone on Chloris is deperate to get their hands on metal... and yet, it doesn't seem to be valuable to them in itself. Presumably, they want to trade the metal to those who have none. Metal has become a commodity, the ur-commodity, the commodity that signifies all others and realises their value. The universal equivalent. It has become, in short, capitalist money.
Of course, as I say, this is also a story from and about the rise of neoliberalism. So it's about the road out of serfdom in two senses: the sense of the original historical transition to capitalism and the rising ideology of neoliberalism. Hayekian class war, in the form of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, was (in rhetoric if not always in practice) about supposedly liberating money and trade from the protectionism and monopoly of an old system.
From that semi-rational but increasingly hegemonic standpoint, Adrasta isn't a fedual seigneur... she's Jim Callaghan.
Saturday, 16 November 2013
19
LIN'n'DA has allowed 'Mr Kennedy' into their little circle of friends. His determination to find the Doctor is the opposite of their desire to socialise & laugh while sharing their ideas & obsessions & histories. Even if much of what we know about LIN'n'DA is just Elton's garbled wish-fulfillment, it's still a nice story. Until Kennedy arrives. It's never the same again. Hierarchy is introduced, along with work schedules & targets & orders & timetables & a drive for objective 'results'.
"Though we had to admit," recalls Elton, "he was right. His methods were much more rigorous. It felt like we were getting closer & closer to the Doctor."
As if that had ever been the point.
"Umm, Mr Kennedy?" says Elton cautiously, raising his hand as though he's a kid at school trying to attract the attention of his teacher... & actually, LI'n'DA's headquarters now looks like a school room. The friends are sat at desks, toilng away individually & silently at private work. Mr Kennedy is every inch the teacher. He sits at the head of the room, behind a desk, surrounded by the paraphernalia of pedagogy.
"We were wondering..." Elton continues, "...no sign of Bliss. Do you know where she is?"
Bless Bliss.
"Yes," replies Kennedy irritibly, "didn't she tell you? She's getting married. She left a message. It'll never last, stupid girl. Come on, back to work."
Yes, back to work kids...
Thing is though, LI'n'DA doesn't just look like a school room now. It also looks like an open plan office, or a call centre. The friends are now workers, arriving on time & working on projects according to the dictats of their new boss. He watches to make sure they don't slack. He assesses their results. He expects to profit from their work. That's what he's in this for. LI'n'DA has become a Doctor-finding factory. LI'n'DA has been enclosed. Accumulation by dispossession. The relentless absorbtion of everything into itself: the essence of neoliberalism.
It's no coincidence that the school room also looks like the workplace. The school system in capitalism is a way of training the future workforce to arrive on time five days a week, to savour the weekend, to obey orders, to work towards output targets, to have your work judged & tracked, & discipline oneself for a lifetime of showing up.
Kennedy is many things (teacher, boss, repressed misanthrope, caricature of the uber-fan...), but among them he is a summation of something the Doctor has found himself facing many times before: he's capital as a monster.
He's a ruthless, pin-striped posho... but it goes deeper than that. Like the Cybermen, he's a user & utiliser, an employer, an encloser of hopes & dreams & friendship... & even flesh. Like so many monsters from the Wirrn to the Krynoids, he absorbs people into himself, first figuratively then literally. He encloses even the bodies of the workers in his factory, adapting them to his purposes, feeding off them & monopolising all life - just like a vampire, that gothic monster of capital. The Doctor has faced many vampires. Like one of them, Axos, Kennedy is unstable & protean.
The really scary thing is... if LI'n'DA is a group of Doctor Who fans, & Doctor Who is a commodity that absorbs their time & energy & money... doesn't that also make Kennedy into Doctor Who itself? One form of commodity fetishism is over-investment in the commodities we love. This blog is evidence of that.
"Though we had to admit," recalls Elton, "he was right. His methods were much more rigorous. It felt like we were getting closer & closer to the Doctor."
As if that had ever been the point.
"Umm, Mr Kennedy?" says Elton cautiously, raising his hand as though he's a kid at school trying to attract the attention of his teacher... & actually, LI'n'DA's headquarters now looks like a school room. The friends are sat at desks, toilng away individually & silently at private work. Mr Kennedy is every inch the teacher. He sits at the head of the room, behind a desk, surrounded by the paraphernalia of pedagogy.
"We were wondering..." Elton continues, "...no sign of Bliss. Do you know where she is?"
Bless Bliss.
"Yes," replies Kennedy irritibly, "didn't she tell you? She's getting married. She left a message. It'll never last, stupid girl. Come on, back to work."
Yes, back to work kids...
Thing is though, LI'n'DA doesn't just look like a school room now. It also looks like an open plan office, or a call centre. The friends are now workers, arriving on time & working on projects according to the dictats of their new boss. He watches to make sure they don't slack. He assesses their results. He expects to profit from their work. That's what he's in this for. LI'n'DA has become a Doctor-finding factory. LI'n'DA has been enclosed. Accumulation by dispossession. The relentless absorbtion of everything into itself: the essence of neoliberalism.
It's no coincidence that the school room also looks like the workplace. The school system in capitalism is a way of training the future workforce to arrive on time five days a week, to savour the weekend, to obey orders, to work towards output targets, to have your work judged & tracked, & discipline oneself for a lifetime of showing up.
Kennedy is many things (teacher, boss, repressed misanthrope, caricature of the uber-fan...), but among them he is a summation of something the Doctor has found himself facing many times before: he's capital as a monster.
He's a ruthless, pin-striped posho... but it goes deeper than that. Like the Cybermen, he's a user & utiliser, an employer, an encloser of hopes & dreams & friendship... & even flesh. Like so many monsters from the Wirrn to the Krynoids, he absorbs people into himself, first figuratively then literally. He encloses even the bodies of the workers in his factory, adapting them to his purposes, feeding off them & monopolising all life - just like a vampire, that gothic monster of capital. The Doctor has faced many vampires. Like one of them, Axos, Kennedy is unstable & protean.
The really scary thing is... if LI'n'DA is a group of Doctor Who fans, & Doctor Who is a commodity that absorbs their time & energy & money... doesn't that also make Kennedy into Doctor Who itself? One form of commodity fetishism is over-investment in the commodities we love. This blog is evidence of that.
20
For March Against the Mainstream Media Day
The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki's true identity. Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she's actually...
"Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?" His tone is patronising. Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.
"The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five's transmissions," says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, "We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people."
"Ooo, I love it," he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he's listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, "Say it again."
"This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?"
The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he's a slave himself.
"I answer to the Editor in Chief.... If you don't mind, I'm going to have to refer this upwards."
Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.
"What is that?" she asks.
"Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born."
Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.
"I don't know anything," she says proudly.
"Don't you even ask?"
"Why would I?"
"You're a journalist."
"What's that got to do with anything?"
She genuinely doesn't understand him. She doesn't know what is on the floors above her... except that on the executive level, the place she's been trained to yearn for, "the walls are made of gold". She doesn't know why "immigration has tightened up". Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random 'shit happens' model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures. And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by 'News', in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains. For all the 'news' and 'information', they don't know what's going on or why.
"This society's the wrong shape..." says the Doctor.
When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren't made of gold, they're made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies - including Suki.
"I think she's dead," says the Doctor.
"She's working," says Rose.
In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead... or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.
"It may interest you to know," smarms the Editor, "that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it's not actually human at all. It's merely a place where humans happen to live..."
There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.
"...yeah, sorry..." the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, "It's a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client."
His client (he's a banker) is a gigantic slab of meat. The whole system of Satellite 5 is set up to keep it cool and fresh, to stop it turning and rotting. The Empire is system of air conditioning; designed to stop zombie meat from spoiling. But the creature is also a huge, roaring, slavering mouth. At the centre of the Empire, yet again, there is consumption, insatiable hunger... but this mouth also speaks. It speaks its version of truth directly into the brains of the human race.
"Create a climate of fear and it's easy to keep the borders closed,"explains the Editor, "It's just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast repeated often enough can destabilise an economy, invent an enemy..." (it seems redundant, but I'll mention the word: Iraq) "... or change a vote."
"So all the people on Earth are like, slaves," says Rose, cutting straight to the quick as usual.
"Well, now, there's an interesting point..." returns the Editor, "Is a slave a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?"
"Yes," says the Doctor simply. He won't debate the issue, despite the Editor's more-grown-up-than-thou goading. If you just concede that it's even up for debate, the Editors of this world have already won. It becomes Question Time. It becomes safe.
Perhaps a slave is even more a slave if he just takes it for granted that he's free.
The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki's true identity. Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she's actually...
"Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?" His tone is patronising. Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.
"The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five's transmissions," says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, "We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people."
"Ooo, I love it," he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he's listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, "Say it again."
"This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?"
The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he's a slave himself.
"I answer to the Editor in Chief.... If you don't mind, I'm going to have to refer this upwards."
Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.
"What is that?" she asks.
"Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born."
Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.
"I don't know anything," she says proudly.
"Don't you even ask?"
"Why would I?"
"You're a journalist."
"What's that got to do with anything?"
She genuinely doesn't understand him. She doesn't know what is on the floors above her... except that on the executive level, the place she's been trained to yearn for, "the walls are made of gold". She doesn't know why "immigration has tightened up". Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random 'shit happens' model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures. And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by 'News', in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains. For all the 'news' and 'information', they don't know what's going on or why.
"This society's the wrong shape..." says the Doctor.
When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren't made of gold, they're made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies - including Suki.
"I think she's dead," says the Doctor.
"She's working," says Rose.
In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead... or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.
"It may interest you to know," smarms the Editor, "that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it's not actually human at all. It's merely a place where humans happen to live..."
There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.
"...yeah, sorry..." the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, "It's a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client."
His client (he's a banker) is a gigantic slab of meat. The whole system of Satellite 5 is set up to keep it cool and fresh, to stop it turning and rotting. The Empire is system of air conditioning; designed to stop zombie meat from spoiling. But the creature is also a huge, roaring, slavering mouth. At the centre of the Empire, yet again, there is consumption, insatiable hunger... but this mouth also speaks. It speaks its version of truth directly into the brains of the human race.
"Create a climate of fear and it's easy to keep the borders closed,"explains the Editor, "It's just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast repeated often enough can destabilise an economy, invent an enemy..." (it seems redundant, but I'll mention the word: Iraq) "... or change a vote."
"So all the people on Earth are like, slaves," says Rose, cutting straight to the quick as usual.
"Well, now, there's an interesting point..." returns the Editor, "Is a slave a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?"
"Yes," says the Doctor simply. He won't debate the issue, despite the Editor's more-grown-up-than-thou goading. If you just concede that it's even up for debate, the Editors of this world have already won. It becomes Question Time. It becomes safe.
Perhaps a slave is even more a slave if he just takes it for granted that he's free.
21
Earl plays a C on his harmonica. It starts a sympathetic resonance in the pipes that stretch under and through the regime on Terra Alpha, like the arteries in a body. What flows in these arteries is sugarly gloop, the outpourings of the Kandy Kitchen. It fills the regime with the glucose it needs to survive. And the regime uses it to kill dissidents or refuseniks or men wearing pink triangles, drowning them in sweetness. Earl's note causes the encrusted, crystallised, fossilised sugar coating the insides of the pipes to crack and fall. Tonnes of the stuff falls on top of Fifi, Helen A's savage attack dog and beloved pet. She sent it into the pipes to kill the Doctor and the Pipe People, the surviving aboriginals on her colony.
"Happiness will prevail," says the artificially fruity voice on the colony tannoy system, "Factory guards are joining forces with the drones to destroy the Nevani sugar beet plant here in sector six. We will keep broadcasting."
This is a revolution. The killjoys are marching and demonstrating, and having their own melancholy parties in subversion of the rules. The factories are falling to strikers. Even the aboriginals are getting in on the act. And, as in 'The Sun Makers', you know the revolution is really happening when it even gets on the news.
"It's only one factory, Daisy K," says Helen A, dictator of Terra Alpha and obvious Thatcher analogue, "I've built over a thousand." (Not that much like Thatcher then. She didn't build up manufacturing industry; she calculatedly decimated it.)
"What about the reports of riots?," asks Daisy K, "And public unhappiness?"
Oh for the days when things like the Poll Tax (which, like so many things, now looks like gnat's piss by comparison) used to cause good, healthy, necessary riots.
Helen A wants to use her best, most fanatical enforcer... but it turns out that she's already been detained in her own Waiting Zone (they don't have 'prisons' on Terra Alpha, there being no need for unhappy places in the best of all possible worlds). So instead, Helen A asks Daisy K to...
"Get me the Kandyman."
"You're not unhappy about something?" asks Daisy K, noticing the cracks in Helen A's ideological purity when her own self-interest is threatened... just as Thatcher cried for herself when someone subjected her to the strictures of the marketplace of ideas.
"GET ME THE KANDYMAN!"
The Kandyman answers his telephone.
"Kandyman," he says. (This bit makes me gurgle with pleasure every time. It's so arch.)
He's an evil Bertie Basset. Bassett himself is a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit. The Kandyman is all this and an accretion of various manifestations of authority. He's the state torturer of a dictator, a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist... and he's a tool, a machine, a commodity fetishised into life, alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power. And he's a bureaucrat. He might even be Gilbert M's mother, or his 'nagging' wife. (I wouldn't put it past a story like this, which harnesses the Planet-of-Women trope to rather dunderheaded effect, sometimes looking like a reactionary whinge about 'reverse sexism'.)
Helen A tells the Kandyman to get the Doctor - at any price.
"That won't be necessary," simpers the Kandyman viciously, "he's just dropped in."
The Doctor and Ace harry the Kandyman into his own pipes, where he is consumed by his own torrents of monosodium glutamate, flavouring and preservative.
Terra Alpha is a Stalinist 'paradise', i.e. everyone pretending to be deliriously happy... or pretending that they're pretending... and pretending that everyone else is pretending... while surrounded by corruption, decay and authoritarian brutality. As in 'The Macra Terror' and 'The Sun Makers', 'Happiness Patrol' combines open anxiety about capitalism with a doggerel-Orwellian story about totalitarianism. It may be because of the influence of Kneale/Cartier's TV version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the appeal of the Orwellian aesthetics, that this mode got embedded in the show. But the anxiety about capitalism is already built-in to Orwell's satire. He knew that 'really existing socialism' (i.e. Stalinism) was a kind of state capitalism (though his grasp of this was intermittent, and instinctive rather than theoretical). But he knew that Big Brother's Oceania was just a shabbier, nastier, more intense version of capitalist, imperialist, class-ridden Britain.
This same elision allows Doctor Who to notice the fundamental synergy and compatibility of Stalinism and 'market Stalinism', of authoritarianism and neoliberalism. Helen A likes Silas P's "enterprise and initiative" as a murderer of dissidents. He's aiming for the top in this meritocracy. All he has to do is stamp on people on every rung of the ladder. Thatcher admires 'law and order' while sponsoring covert warfare and police attacks against striking miners. And don't forget about the "moaning minnies", the whingeing lefties always complaining. The "enemy within". Killjoys, in other words.
That's why the smiley face of 80s Acidhouse was such subversion when it started: it was libertarian Thatcherism taken at its smiling face value.
"Happiness will prevail," says the artificially fruity voice on the colony tannoy system, "Factory guards are joining forces with the drones to destroy the Nevani sugar beet plant here in sector six. We will keep broadcasting."
This is a revolution. The killjoys are marching and demonstrating, and having their own melancholy parties in subversion of the rules. The factories are falling to strikers. Even the aboriginals are getting in on the act. And, as in 'The Sun Makers', you know the revolution is really happening when it even gets on the news.
"It's only one factory, Daisy K," says Helen A, dictator of Terra Alpha and obvious Thatcher analogue, "I've built over a thousand." (Not that much like Thatcher then. She didn't build up manufacturing industry; she calculatedly decimated it.)
"What about the reports of riots?," asks Daisy K, "And public unhappiness?"
Oh for the days when things like the Poll Tax (which, like so many things, now looks like gnat's piss by comparison) used to cause good, healthy, necessary riots.
Helen A wants to use her best, most fanatical enforcer... but it turns out that she's already been detained in her own Waiting Zone (they don't have 'prisons' on Terra Alpha, there being no need for unhappy places in the best of all possible worlds). So instead, Helen A asks Daisy K to...
"Get me the Kandyman."
"You're not unhappy about something?" asks Daisy K, noticing the cracks in Helen A's ideological purity when her own self-interest is threatened... just as Thatcher cried for herself when someone subjected her to the strictures of the marketplace of ideas.
"GET ME THE KANDYMAN!"
The Kandyman answers his telephone.
"Kandyman," he says. (This bit makes me gurgle with pleasure every time. It's so arch.)
He's an evil Bertie Basset. Bassett himself is a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit. The Kandyman is all this and an accretion of various manifestations of authority. He's the state torturer of a dictator, a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist... and he's a tool, a machine, a commodity fetishised into life, alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power. And he's a bureaucrat. He might even be Gilbert M's mother, or his 'nagging' wife. (I wouldn't put it past a story like this, which harnesses the Planet-of-Women trope to rather dunderheaded effect, sometimes looking like a reactionary whinge about 'reverse sexism'.)
Helen A tells the Kandyman to get the Doctor - at any price.
"That won't be necessary," simpers the Kandyman viciously, "he's just dropped in."
The Doctor and Ace harry the Kandyman into his own pipes, where he is consumed by his own torrents of monosodium glutamate, flavouring and preservative.
Terra Alpha is a Stalinist 'paradise', i.e. everyone pretending to be deliriously happy... or pretending that they're pretending... and pretending that everyone else is pretending... while surrounded by corruption, decay and authoritarian brutality. As in 'The Macra Terror' and 'The Sun Makers', 'Happiness Patrol' combines open anxiety about capitalism with a doggerel-Orwellian story about totalitarianism. It may be because of the influence of Kneale/Cartier's TV version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the appeal of the Orwellian aesthetics, that this mode got embedded in the show. But the anxiety about capitalism is already built-in to Orwell's satire. He knew that 'really existing socialism' (i.e. Stalinism) was a kind of state capitalism (though his grasp of this was intermittent, and instinctive rather than theoretical). But he knew that Big Brother's Oceania was just a shabbier, nastier, more intense version of capitalist, imperialist, class-ridden Britain.
This same elision allows Doctor Who to notice the fundamental synergy and compatibility of Stalinism and 'market Stalinism', of authoritarianism and neoliberalism. Helen A likes Silas P's "enterprise and initiative" as a murderer of dissidents. He's aiming for the top in this meritocracy. All he has to do is stamp on people on every rung of the ladder. Thatcher admires 'law and order' while sponsoring covert warfare and police attacks against striking miners. And don't forget about the "moaning minnies", the whingeing lefties always complaining. The "enemy within". Killjoys, in other words.
That's why the smiley face of 80s Acidhouse was such subversion when it started: it was libertarian Thatcherism taken at its smiling face value.
Friday, 15 November 2013
22
The Doctor, Romana and Duggan have found a painting hidden behind a panel in the basement of Count Scarlioni's house in Paris.
"It's the Mona Lisa!" says the Doctor.
"Must be a fake," replies Duggan.
The Doctor says he doesn't know what's currently hanging in the Louvre, "but this is the genuine article".
Duggan's astonishment increases when the Doctor folds back yet more panelling to reveal yet another Mona Lisa. And another. And another. Eventually, six identical copies are revealed.
"They must be fakes," says Duggan again.
"The brushwork's Leonardo's," the Doctor asserts, "It's as characteristic as a signature. The pigment, too."
"What," blithers Duggan, "on all of them?"
"What I don't understand is why a man who's got six Mona Lisas wants to go to all the trouble of stealing a seventh." (The Count has been casing the Louvre, preparing to steal their Mona Lisa.)
This is Duggan's area. "Come on, Doctor, I've just told you. There are seven people who would buy the Mona Lisa in secret, but nobody's going to buy the Mona Lisa when it's hanging in the Louvre!"
"Of course," says Romana, "They'd each have to think they were buying the stolen one."
Because only 'the original' is valuable. These collectors wouldn't even want the Mona Lisa to sell or to display... they'd want it for - to use Duggan's phrase - the "expensive gloat".
But where does the value of the work of art lie? In its 'authenticity'? Huge amounts of time, effort, money and research are expended to establish the 'authenticity' of artworks; their provenance and history, tracing back to their origins. Experts compete over the 'authenticity' of various iterations of a single painting, fighting over which institution owns the 'real' one. Duggan, the private detective hired to investigate art as a catalyst of crime, responds to the Mona Lisas found by the Doctor with an instantaneous attempt to evaluate their 'authenticity', and hence their 'value'. (A set of assumptions that the Doctor explicitly rejects later in the show, when he mocks the idea that a painting needs to be x-rayed before its value can be ascertained.)
In the modern age, the 'age of mechanical reproduction' as Walter Benjamin put it, the artwork is viewed in a new and historically unique way. The camera destroyed the idea of timeless images arranged for a single spectator. The photographic representation cast painting adrift, since it usurped the painter's role as portrayer of the patron's property and ideology. Mass-reproduction of images destroyed the "aura" of a work of art (Benjamin's word for its unique and materially-intact history), making it seperable from its original time and place and locational context. The Mona Lisa, for instance, proliferated around the world. It is now no longer to be found in the Louvre. It is all over millions of greetings cards, the pages of magazines, the pages of books, posters, tourists' photos, the internet, the covers of execrable paperback novels. All this raises the fame of the painting while destroying its singular and unitary itselfness.
This very proliferation of copies is what makes the 'authenticity' of 'originals' so valuable as a commodity. The original is now just that: an original. It is something it never was before: the source of the millions of copies. As John Berger puts it: "the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction."
Scarlioni is really Scaroth: a ruthless and callous and self-involved warlord who found himself splintered into fragments across human history, manifesting in many different ruling classes over the centuries, as we see during his moments of trans-temporal communion. He is himself a system of copies, mass-reproduced, distributed across time and space, his uniqueness destroyed, each copy identical, none truly the 'original' because the 'original' Scaroth was destroyed... and all by technology.
He is a thoroughly modern man in some of his iterations, a man of power and property. He's a rich, titled, bourgeois art-thief in 1970s Paris, selling foundational objects of Western civilisation such as Gutenberg Bibles to fund his capers. He is one of the Borgias, or at least part of their coterie, acting as patron (i.e. employer and paymaster) to Leonardo, getting him to paint multiple copies of his portrait of Lisa Gheradini; copies which can then be hidden, so that his future self can unearth them. "A very nice piece of capital investment" as the Doctor puts it... a view that Scaroth can only take because he is part of modernity, from the Early Modern period which saw the rise of banking and commerce, to Late Capitalism which sees the commercialisation of absolutely everything. The irony which unites these eras along a single trajectory is the joke that, in this case, it was Leonardo himself who was payed/forced to begin the process of endless copying, reproduction and proliferation. All the copies are 'real', sharing an aura, made valuable by the same labour power of the same man... yet this wouldn't cut any ice with the collectors of the 1970s.
Scaroth's plan to reunite himself depends upon raising enough money to fund time experiments... and he plans to do this by selling the Mona Lisa seven times over, each to a buyer who thinks he's getting 'the original' (which, in a way, they would be!). But his scheme depends upon his ability to push humanity towards modernity - i.e. capitalism - because it is modernity that brings not only the necessary level of scientific and technical skill to make time travel possible, but also the rise of mass-reproduction, and thus the destruction of aura and the commodification of authenticity. Scaroth thinks of himself as pushing mankind on the path of progress... but his planned terminus of this progress is his reintegration at the cost of our annihilation.
Scaroth is a concentrated bundle of the nightmares of history. Borgia and bourgeois. Ruler, inscribing himself in the friezes telling the stories of the pharaohs. Warlord. "Insanely wealthy man." User and abuser of science via his ability to fund it. User and abuser of a wife who never really knew who he was underneath. Bringer of technological doom. Owner and destroyer of aura. A suave, handsome shell; a staring eye and a mass of writhing worms beneath.
He recalls another of Walter Benjamin's works: 'On the Concept of History', which is all about how the 'cultural heritage' is formed from the spoils of rulers who march onwards towards a future strewn with broken wreckage.
"It's the Mona Lisa!" says the Doctor.
"Must be a fake," replies Duggan.
The Doctor says he doesn't know what's currently hanging in the Louvre, "but this is the genuine article".
Duggan's astonishment increases when the Doctor folds back yet more panelling to reveal yet another Mona Lisa. And another. And another. Eventually, six identical copies are revealed.
"They must be fakes," says Duggan again.
"The brushwork's Leonardo's," the Doctor asserts, "It's as characteristic as a signature. The pigment, too."
"What," blithers Duggan, "on all of them?"
"What I don't understand is why a man who's got six Mona Lisas wants to go to all the trouble of stealing a seventh." (The Count has been casing the Louvre, preparing to steal their Mona Lisa.)
This is Duggan's area. "Come on, Doctor, I've just told you. There are seven people who would buy the Mona Lisa in secret, but nobody's going to buy the Mona Lisa when it's hanging in the Louvre!"
"Of course," says Romana, "They'd each have to think they were buying the stolen one."
Because only 'the original' is valuable. These collectors wouldn't even want the Mona Lisa to sell or to display... they'd want it for - to use Duggan's phrase - the "expensive gloat".
But where does the value of the work of art lie? In its 'authenticity'? Huge amounts of time, effort, money and research are expended to establish the 'authenticity' of artworks; their provenance and history, tracing back to their origins. Experts compete over the 'authenticity' of various iterations of a single painting, fighting over which institution owns the 'real' one. Duggan, the private detective hired to investigate art as a catalyst of crime, responds to the Mona Lisas found by the Doctor with an instantaneous attempt to evaluate their 'authenticity', and hence their 'value'. (A set of assumptions that the Doctor explicitly rejects later in the show, when he mocks the idea that a painting needs to be x-rayed before its value can be ascertained.)
In the modern age, the 'age of mechanical reproduction' as Walter Benjamin put it, the artwork is viewed in a new and historically unique way. The camera destroyed the idea of timeless images arranged for a single spectator. The photographic representation cast painting adrift, since it usurped the painter's role as portrayer of the patron's property and ideology. Mass-reproduction of images destroyed the "aura" of a work of art (Benjamin's word for its unique and materially-intact history), making it seperable from its original time and place and locational context. The Mona Lisa, for instance, proliferated around the world. It is now no longer to be found in the Louvre. It is all over millions of greetings cards, the pages of magazines, the pages of books, posters, tourists' photos, the internet, the covers of execrable paperback novels. All this raises the fame of the painting while destroying its singular and unitary itselfness.
This very proliferation of copies is what makes the 'authenticity' of 'originals' so valuable as a commodity. The original is now just that: an original. It is something it never was before: the source of the millions of copies. As John Berger puts it: "the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction."
Scarlioni is really Scaroth: a ruthless and callous and self-involved warlord who found himself splintered into fragments across human history, manifesting in many different ruling classes over the centuries, as we see during his moments of trans-temporal communion. He is himself a system of copies, mass-reproduced, distributed across time and space, his uniqueness destroyed, each copy identical, none truly the 'original' because the 'original' Scaroth was destroyed... and all by technology.
He is a thoroughly modern man in some of his iterations, a man of power and property. He's a rich, titled, bourgeois art-thief in 1970s Paris, selling foundational objects of Western civilisation such as Gutenberg Bibles to fund his capers. He is one of the Borgias, or at least part of their coterie, acting as patron (i.e. employer and paymaster) to Leonardo, getting him to paint multiple copies of his portrait of Lisa Gheradini; copies which can then be hidden, so that his future self can unearth them. "A very nice piece of capital investment" as the Doctor puts it... a view that Scaroth can only take because he is part of modernity, from the Early Modern period which saw the rise of banking and commerce, to Late Capitalism which sees the commercialisation of absolutely everything. The irony which unites these eras along a single trajectory is the joke that, in this case, it was Leonardo himself who was payed/forced to begin the process of endless copying, reproduction and proliferation. All the copies are 'real', sharing an aura, made valuable by the same labour power of the same man... yet this wouldn't cut any ice with the collectors of the 1970s.
Scaroth's plan to reunite himself depends upon raising enough money to fund time experiments... and he plans to do this by selling the Mona Lisa seven times over, each to a buyer who thinks he's getting 'the original' (which, in a way, they would be!). But his scheme depends upon his ability to push humanity towards modernity - i.e. capitalism - because it is modernity that brings not only the necessary level of scientific and technical skill to make time travel possible, but also the rise of mass-reproduction, and thus the destruction of aura and the commodification of authenticity. Scaroth thinks of himself as pushing mankind on the path of progress... but his planned terminus of this progress is his reintegration at the cost of our annihilation.
Scaroth is a concentrated bundle of the nightmares of history. Borgia and bourgeois. Ruler, inscribing himself in the friezes telling the stories of the pharaohs. Warlord. "Insanely wealthy man." User and abuser of science via his ability to fund it. User and abuser of a wife who never really knew who he was underneath. Bringer of technological doom. Owner and destroyer of aura. A suave, handsome shell; a staring eye and a mass of writhing worms beneath.
He recalls another of Walter Benjamin's works: 'On the Concept of History', which is all about how the 'cultural heritage' is formed from the spoils of rulers who march onwards towards a future strewn with broken wreckage.
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