Skulltopus 8: Society of the Tentacle

The quasi-tentacular returns in 'The Claws of Axos'.  Big time.

What's more, this story is an orgy of strange flesh... to the extent of looking like a precursor to John Carpenter's The Thing.

Now, if my idea is right - that, in the 70s, Doctor Who starts invoking Weird tentacles as a kind of evasion/signification of capitalism when it veers too close to potential systemic critique - then this really, really should show up in 'The Claws of Axos'.

Not to keep you in suspense: it does.


Taking it on the Chinn

Now don't get me wrong.  I'd hate you to get the idea that I was claiming that 'Claws' is 'subversive' or anything.  I'm not.  It isn't.  As political critique goes, objectively, 'Claws' is feeble.  Yes, it is very cynical about the government, but that in itself doesn't amount to subversion.  After all, Clear and Present Danger  (to take an example more or less at random) features a secret plot by the President, the White House Chief of Staff and high-ranking CIA people to launch a covert war in South America - but Clear and Present Danger isn't remotely subversive... indeed, it is a highly reactionary film that entirely supports the specious ideological assumptions of the American empire.  This is slightly unfair to 'Claws', since it has, well, sharper claws than Tom Clancy via Hollywood ('Claws' is cynical about establishment power, while CaPD depicts the cynicism of powerful people as a danger to a fundamentally well-meaning establishment), but it does illustrate the point that simply depicting the wrongdoing of the state does not necessarily or automatically amount to a radical critique.

With its bourgeois patrician hero, its stiff-upper-lipped and self-sacrificing scientist/peer, its bog-standard sexist representation of Jo as dollybird-in-need-of-saving, its depiction of the American lawman (FBI?  CIA?  ...something like that) as a square-jawed straight-arrow, the comic neutralisation of the issue of poverty, the implication that people starve because there is a lack of food rather than a lack of profit in feeding them, and many other such representations, 'Claws' is as well integrated into capitalist ideology, and as likely to 'manufacture consent', as any other Doctor Who story, the vast majority of which are straightforwardly and entirely unthreatening to the status quo.  What political critique there is consists, for the most part, of moralistic liberal finger-wagging about greed, nationalism and xenophobia, which is itself compromised by the Axons turning out to be evil, shifty, bogus asylum seekers (that sort of thing didn't start with Gatiss, sadly).  Such moralistic liberal finger-wagging is inherently non-subversive and non-radical because it is inherently reformist rather than revolutionary, i.e. vote out the reactionaries, and get the common herd to be less materialistic, and capitalism will be fine and dandy.

However, everything is relative and context changes things.

The fact is, 'Claws' has probably the most straightforwardly, explicitly, non-metaphorical depiction of the British state as cynical and machiavellian of all Pertwee stories (though the impact is softened by Chinn's comic incompetence).  In 'Claws', the problem isn't one slimey bureaucrat, one idiotic authority figure, one cowardly warmongering parliamentary private secretary... the problem is Chinn and his boss and the government they work for.  They're not just arse-covering or being unimaginative or showing prejudice.  They're actively and covertly colluding in what is described (by Jo, the character that we - the audience - are meant to identify with most directly) as a "contemptible, underhanded deal".  Only the bias in the Cabinet Room in favour of Global Chemicals in 'Green Death' comes close to the level of systemic cynicism shown by Chinn and his Minister.  It's impossible to imagine that Chinn's Minister is acting without the sanction of the rest of the government, or at least the expectation of approval.  Indeed, his worry seems to be about public, worldwide perception.

Whatever Ministry Chinn represents (nominally he's MoD, but the very lack of specificity about his job gives it a general character that suggests a systemic problem), the nature of the "contemptible, underhanded deal" that he's trying to cut is clearly implied to be aimed at cornering economic and military power.  Chinn's behaviour is very deliberately linked to xenophobia and nationalism, via his (offscreen) remark about "England for the English".  The lack of any genuine commitment to isolationism is shown by his willingness to snuggle up to the Axons when he thinks there's advantage to be had from them.  However true to life this may or may not be, the British government is shown to be at loggerheads with the U.N., with the British state depicted as self-serving while the U.N. is implied to be universalist in its desire to spread Axonite around the world... free.  This last detail is raised so briefly that its easy to miss, but it clearly implies that the British government's plan was to capture the sole right to sell Axonite.

This may be liberal moralism (isolationism? profiteering? tut tut!), and it may be unrealistic (the U.N. isn't generally prone to demanding free, worldwide distribution of valuable substances)... but it at least raises the issue of nation states trying to corner and capture resources, and of control over global supplies of such resources conferring economic power.  And it doesn't depict the British state as either morally impeccable or morally neutral in the face of such opportunities.  On the contrary, it depicts the British state as cynically (if shambolically) conspiratorial in its efforts to seize and hold such an opportunity.  The aim of the state is to exploit the commercial advantages and economic power conferred by a valuable commodity (a commodity, moreover, that seems to represent capital itself - see below).  Edge of Darkness, this ain't... but it may actually be the most overtly negative portrayal of the British state in Doctor Who until 'Turn Left'.

This, by itself, is nowhere near enough to invoke the tentacles.  But there's more.


Get on Your Bike and Find Work

'Claws' raises the issue of poverty, by implication and explicitly.  Famine is mentioned several times.  The idea mooted by some of the characters is that Axonite will help to feed the starving millions by vastly increasing food stocks.  Of course, it's also strongly implied that this will come at a price - if it happens at all - if Chinn and his bunch manage to grab Axonite for the exclusive control of the British state.  When Chinn gives the Axons his assurance that Axonite will spread around the globe, he's betting that the globe will pay to get it.  (We'll come back to this.)  This all bubbles along beneath the surface of the story, but there is a shot in Episode One that threatens - albeit very faintly - to raise it to the surface along with some very awkward questions.  It's this one:

Let's take stock of this image.  A homeless man, clearly implied to be mentally ill, who has just been seen rummaging around in a rubbish dump, is out in the cold... next to a nuclear power station.  Winser's reactor alone is later said to have cost £50 Million.  So, the British state can afford to spend that kind of money on nuclear power, but it can't stop the kind of poverty that puts someone like Josh outside, without shelter, in freezing "freak weather conditions".  Ah, but the reactor is supplying energy to vast swathes of Britain!  Yeah... but if you haven't got a home, you haven't got any way of enjoying any of that energy, have you?  Josh has to create his own energy with his own generator: pedals.  But even his bike is useless.  The problem with Josh is that he is worth nothing to anyone powerful.  He's unprofitable.  Axos doesn't even get much sustenance out of consuming him.  The Axons say it themselves when they analyse him: "this specimen is valueless".

Later, of course, Axonite meshes itself with the reactor to the point where they seem to merge.  It is a miracle power-source that hides the deadly potential for mass destruction.  Later still, the Nuton Power Complex explodes.  There is clearly some queasiness about nuclear power submerged in Axonite.

Once again, don't misunderstand me.  I'm not saying any of this constitutes angry political comment.  It does not.

The lead characters casually saunter back - unprotected - into the wreckage of the reactor plant after it has exploded, which takes the edge off any anxieties the story might seem to have about nuclear power, even nullifying the effect of the Master's dry remarks about "sticky tape on the windows", which parody the farcical advice people used to get given about What to Do in the Event of a Nuclear Holocaust.

Meanwhile, Josh is depicted as a comedy character.  He jabbers unintelligible 'yokel' gibberish and puts up his fists at Axos.  He's a comedy nutter, backed by cutesy Steptoe & Son-esque music.  We're evidently supposed to find him funny.  (Oh yeah, homelessness - what a giggle.)  He's a parodic figure.  He serves to neutralise and naturalize poverty, to make it seem like something amusing that only happens to crazy old drunks.  Such people (whisper it) have brought it on themselves and (whisper it) prefer being homeless, which is a kind of freedom.  And all that bollocks.

However, the only thing that makes Josh so 'safe' is the tone the story takes with him.  Changing the incidental music alone could easily transform him from a figure of fun to one of pathos.  Then, the sight of him freezing his nuts off in an icy lake, a few miles away from a colossally expensive nuclear power plant (which later explodes), while the British government connives to gain exclusive control and profits from an even more deadly source of power, would have an altogether different effect.  We might even be tempted to connect Josh's condition with that of all those hungry people who haunt this story at the extreme edges.


Planet of Gold

At his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, Philip Sandifer identifies 'Claws' as utilising... well... the horror of Glam rock (as someone else once put it).

Glam rock... is in part about taking the opulence of conspicuous consumption and rearranging it into the wrong aesthetic. It's all the over the top excess of the luxury associated with power and authority, except it's all put together pointlessly and haphazardly. It revels in decadence and consumption while denying the systems that ostensibly justify that behavior in society.

Does The Claws of Axos follow this approach? Largely, yes. On the one level, the pleasure of The Claws of Axos is a revelry in spectacle and glitz. We are meant to enjoy its images for their own sake. On the other hand, look at its ostensible plot, which is a straightforward anti-consumerist parable. The Axons are beautiful creatures of gold who offer untold wealth and then drain the world of its resources. But look, these two things don't go together at all. The story is simultaneously reveling in superficial images and warning of their malign influence.

But this isn't a contradiction or a case of sloppy and incoherent execution. This is what concern about the rise of a purely image-based culture of spectacle (which was one of the major concerns of the Situationalist International in France in '68) looked like in 1971. The critique of images was phrased in an image-based, superficial form. The Claws of Axos is designed to make the viewer feel uncomfortable about the pleasure they are taking in the object. It's constantly reveling in images that are not fun but rather lurid and unnerving - images that are over the top and unlike what things should look like - while simultaneously cautioning us about the very pleasure it is taking.

He goes on to say other interesting things about Pertwee as playing a Hero, a fundamentally consumerist role where the male lead is commodified for the audience's enjoyment... except that, in 'Claws', he is a grotesque amidst a cast of unchanging and functional stock characters who always react the same way.  Thus Pertwee ends up unwittingly playing a joke version of this Hero.  His Doctor becomes a kind of Glam subversion, revelling in outrageous behaviour, flouncy togs and bourgeois ostentation while simultaneously losing the legitimacy that makes such things work they way they're superficially supposed to.

But the bit I'm interested in is Sandifer's reference to Guy Debord's idea about the Society of the Spectacle.  I wont linger over this here (how it relates to Doctor Who - and film/TV SF/fantasy generally - is a whole separate series of posts in itself).  Here's the book itself; here's [PDF] the best intro to it I've ever read.

However, I think Debord can lead us to something fundamental about what Axonite/Axos is.

Early on in Society of the Spectacle, Debord delivers this crucial disclaimer: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation between people, mediated by images."  Debord locates the spectacle in commodity fetishism.  The spectacle is "the main production of present-day society" and "is the image of the ruling economy".  It "subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them."  It is "the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers."  Just as Marx wrote that capital is the material expression of social relationships of production, so Debord says that the spectacle is the expression in images of material relationships of production.  For Debord, the spectacle is the way modern society expresses the concentration of capital.

Now, Sandifer's interest is in how the story itself uses spectacle strategically.  I'm more interested in how, within the frame of the story, Axos uses/is spectacle.  When the Axons offer the humans their most tempting aspect, they personate as images that embody various seductive elements of Western heritage and capitalist ideology.  They represent themselves as a patriarchal nuclear family (post-nuclear, more like... as someone once said).  According to Miles and Wood, the script described the Axons who greet the humans as looking like "the adman's dream Coca-Cola family".  They are commodifying themselves and their image for the humans' consumption, drawing on ideals of consumer culture.  These ideals are themselves drawn from older - sometimes classic or neoclassical - tropes about beauty, health, normalcy, etc.  The Axons actively employ classical motifs: their slender bodies, sculpted hair and blank eyes make them look like Greek or Roman statues.  They use the spectacle to dazzle the humans.  Most of all, they appear - spectacularly - to be made of gold.

Gold is the ultimate symbol of wealth.  Even with the days of the Gold Standard long gone, gold prices still have a great effect upon the world economy, heavily influencing currency rates, especially in Asia and Australasia.  Its symbolic weight is enormous.  It is associated with plenty, wealth, power, pleasure, conspicuous consumption, health, purity... but it is also tarnished with the dirt of history, of the Gold Rush and other such examples of acquisitiveness which devastated native peoples and raised cities full of miners and brothels and gambling houses, etc.  It speaks of unreasoning temptation, of a rush to gain.

Gold also stands for money, the 'universal equivalent', the commodity that stands for and realises the respective values of all others.  Gold is not money, not anymore... but it does imply money like little else.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that, aside from deliberately using glam and glitter to ensare humans, Axos is also expressing something true about itself.  Axonite is offered as, "a gift, a payment" (in accordance with our customs).  Note that "gift" and "payment" are incompatible, even mutually exclusive terms.  It's as though the Axons do not fully understand the meaning of the word "gift", even as they go on to ask for and suggest charity.  But they are clearly offering Axonite as a payment, in return for shelter (as they claim).  Actually, they are buying human cooperation.  The spectacle of the glittering golden people expresses the fact that their entire nature is essentially monetary, commodified, capitalistic.

Axonite is inherently spectacular.  It transforms things, engorges things, shrinks things, foams, blasts, crackles and seethes.  Given that Axonite, the Axons and the Axon ship are all, essentially, the same thing, that means that everything we see inside Axos (see the pictures above) is also Axonite.  That unnerving glam rock orgy of strange flesh is all performance, spectacle... all of it, Axonite in change and motion.

In the world of Axos, everything is spectacular and everything is a commodity.  After encountering Axonite as a payment (exchange value), we are immediately shown its qualities (use value).  It can "absorb, convert, transmit and program all forms of energy".  Essentially, it can do anything.  It is omniuseful.  It is, say the Axons, "the source of all our growth technology".  Well, that sounds a helluva lot like the commodity form to me.

In our world too, everything is commodified.  Commodities can be anything and everything.  The commodity can take any form.  It can be huge or small; it can be a single bolt or an entire warship.  Commodities can absorb each other's value.  The value in the automated machinery of the production line (itself a commodity - made to be sold and bought) transfers value into the commodities produced on the production line.  (I'll have mercy on you and skip any further discussion of 'the organic constituion of capital'... except to note how interesting it is, in respect to this story, that Marx speaks of capital as being 'organic' and 'variable'.)  Commodities can transfer value.  They can be used to ship other commodities from place to place.  Commodities can transmit value.  The cable or satellite (themselves commodities) can transmit the drama (commodity) and/or the advert (the commodity that sells commodities) to the television (a commodity).  Watching the television is a person who sells their labour (commodity), gets a wage (which she uses to buy commodities) and forms part of a market based on her personal details (these markets being sold to advertisers in the form of ad space between appropriate programmes).  And so on and so on.  In a system like ours, one of generalised commodity production, the commodity can do all the things Axonite can do.  It can even engorge frogs, if you want.  Even before genetic engineering (itself heavily commodified, with patented genes, etc), the market would have found a way to breed monstrously large frogs if there'd been a way of selling them.

The humans immediately see the possible applications... which is understandable.  The Axons have offered something that humans in capitalist society understand very well.  They call Axonite "growth technology"... they mean it literally, but the humans see another kind of growth.  Economic growth.  Axonite is a new development of the productive forces, waiting to be applied to the system of commodity production.  "Unlimited food!" says Hardiman.  Now, putting aside the child-logic that assumes people starve because there's a world shortage of food, what is Hardiman really saying?  He's saying that Axonite can increase human capacity to produce... and what do humans produce in capitalism?  Commodities.  Axonite will mean that humans will produce more, bigger, better, faster, with less outlay, etc.  Even if Hardiman doesn't see this, the Doctor and Chinn certainly do... at least, in their different ways.  The Doctor doesn't usually talk about economics, so he sees the issue as one of Axonite conferring "unlimited power" of a kind he doesn't specify.  Chinn, however, immediately reacts acquisitively, nationalistically and in terms of the British state.  "We must have it," says he.  By "we" he means 'Britain'... which, of course, to him, means the British state.  Economic power is implicitly what he's thinking about.  He immediately begins trying to cut a deal for "sole distribution rights to all Axonite materials" to be "vested in the British government".  By "materials" he probably means literal materials, i.e. the stuff itself... but that doesn't stop his words sounding, nowadays, like part of an intellectual property rights contract.

Am I not overstating?  Isn't Axonite just another of those fantasy materials, like zyton-7, trisilicate, duralinium, argonite, spectrox...  well, yes and no.  You see, they are all examples of a commodity and some of them are shown to cause people and/or companies to do terrible things because they are commodities... but, with the possible exception of spectrox, none of them seem to stand for the commodity, for the commodity form itself. Axonite, however, does this through its omniusefulness, its ultra-utility, through its apparently protean nature, through its ability to be and to copy anything, through its hyper-desirability, through its resistance to analysis, and through its nature as spectacle. Like Nestene plastic (which is also spectacular and also stands for the commodity, for capital... hence the tentacles) it is autonomous, it can mass produce and re-produce, it attacks.  In one sense, it is less sharp a signifier than Auton plastic because it is not made by humans, but on the other hand there is the matter of its cyclical nature.  Auton Plastic does not circulate; Axonite does.  The Nutrition Cycle sounds very much like the circulation of capital.  The commodity dazzles, it is distributed in return for payment, it moves from hand to hand, it is shipped, it reaches every corner of the globe, increases yields and develops production, confers power and growth, achieves saturation and monopoly... and the end result is a massive collection of energy (profit) at the centre, achieved through the absorption of resources, with all the profit feeding back into the system, engorging it, enabling it to reproduce itself and start the cycle again.  Not for nothing do the Axons refer to the Nutrition Cycle also as a cycle of reproduction.  Axonite is like the commodity in that it is one aspect of an all-encompassing system, an aspect that circulates globally and 'returns with' the profit, reproducing the system in the process.

Nestene plastic is capital: labour alienated from humans, commodified and fetishized to the point of hostile autonomy.  Inside the Autons there lurk the Nestenes... i.e. within the alien/ated human images, 'Spearhead' finds capital, which manifests as incoherent tentacles.  Axos too is constituted of alien/ated human images within which there hide masses of tentacles.  Axos takes up the clues in 'Spearhead' and uses the incoherent tentacular as a spectacle in itself, but a spectacle that behaves like the commodity synthesized to the point of abstraction, which is what the commodity form is anyway: an abstraction.

Axos is capital.


Nice Tentacles, Shame About the Skull

Axos is described and depicted in many ways during this story, many of them incompatible and incoherent.  Their 'ship' (which is, of course, not actually a vessel for occupants so much as a bag of skin around a single entity) looks like a leech or a tapeworm, its opening resembling a scolex.  The thing that reaches out to grab Josh and Filer is partly a tentacle, partly a tongue, partly a stamen, with a spider on the end of it.  The interior has tendrils, eyes, fronds, membranes, claws, mouths, hard dribbles that look like scabs or dried pus, ganglions, foreskins, you name it.  Axos is an incoherent chimera.  It's a bag of bits and pieces, randomly stuck together and constantly reshuffling.  It's an obscene body landscape.  Being inside it is like being a morsel of food being digested through the internal organs of a monstrous, scrambled creature.

However, according to Miles and Wood, the original idea for the story was about "a giant skull landing in Hyde Park and offering to fulfill people's desires, for a price, by making its human-sized nerve-cells become whatever anybody wanted".

Now, I've never read that first script, but surely, inevitably, somebody would ask the Skull to use one of those "human-sized" cells to recreate a dead loved one.  Which probably wouldn't work out, I'm guessing.

This sounds like a straightforward gothic parable about the return of the repressed.  The wishes that are granted and which then prove undesirable, as in the ghost story 'The Monkey's Paw' by W. W. Jacobs.

We all know that, right up to the last minute, the story was called 'The Vampire from Space'.  The vampire being a thoroughly gothic monster.  Barry Letts changed it at the eleventh hour... apparently feeling it necessary to insert the dialogue likening Axos to a vulture in order to justify the new title.

This is almost too good to be true, from my point of view.

I've been working with China Miéville's fascinating and original thesis (see my account, here, which links to his essay) about the tentacle and skull being in "non-dialectical superposition".  They represent two conflicting ways of expressing the horrors of modernity, the gothic (hauntological) and the Weird.  The gothic is about that knowledge which haunts us even as we try to deny it; the Weird is about the lack of comprehension, the terrifyingly unknowable.  These modes do not interpenetrate, rather they oscillate back and forth.  As a result, you never get monsters that merge the skull and the octopus - skulltopuses... a combination that would otherwise seem quite obvious, given that octopuses have central bodies that are almost skull-like in shape.

In the production history of 'The Claws of Axos' we can almost see this very process of oscillation at work!

The skull is pushed out by the incoherent tentacular.

But... this isn't quite what's happening.  In his thesis, Miéville is talking about large-scale oscillations which take place across Western culture, graphics, political art and, most especially, literature.  He's talking, for the most part, about fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Moreover, 'Claws' is not a case of hauntology being outright rejected in favour of Weird opacity.  In its broadcast form, 'Claws' retains a hauntological charge.  Putting aside any possible Freudian interpretations (off the top of my head... the death wish, anybody?), Axos clearly haunts us (in that material way Who has of doing hauntology) with repressed social/political/cultural anxieties about greed, materialism, acquisitiveness, hunger, starvation, foreigners and refugees, our own prosperity, etc.  Axos even becomes semi-spectral at times, i.e. the floating disembodied heads.

While it may be a very strange, almost unprecedented creature - it really is quite hard to think where any TV viewers in 1971 would've seen anything quite like it before - Axos is still, in many ways, a vampire.  Vampire is actually a much more apposite description than Letts' implied carrion bird.  Vampires drain the life from the living.  Axos wouldn't be about to feed on a "carcass".  Axos is gothic to that extent.  It even chimes with a brilliant Marxist reading of Dracula by a guy called Moretti, who saw the fanged Count as a monster of monopoly capital, trying to takeover the world and integrate all humanity into his dominating system, opposed by the British middle classes and a professor from Holland (the home of free trade).  Marx himself was fond of comparing capital to a vampire.  Axos is also, as I've suggested above, capital.  It is a single system that wishes to circulate units of itself, in commodity form, around the world, in search of a total, global monopoly of all power and profit.

This, I think, is the key.  'Claws of Axos' uses Doctor Who's materialist method of doing the gothic and the hauntological to create a gothic monster... but finds its intended critique of greed and consumerism sliding inexorably into a gothic-style critique of capitalism... of capitalism as a destructive and vampiric system (the unitary nature of Axos makes it systemic, all its parts being aspects of itself) of commodity circulation, aided by a cynical British state.

Doctor Who, under the right-on stewardship of Barry Letts, is happier with this idea than ever before... such things were hardly even dreamt of in the 60s show until the last few seasons... but still can't fully commit to a systemic critique on this level, what with its place in the capitalist culture industry, tasked with educating the nation's goggle-eyed chidlers in the virtues of mainstream Enlightenment values and liberal bourgeois morality.  As this conflict - between ideological position and implied critique - develops, the most overt trappings of the gothic are shed and, in their place, comes a processed, stylistic, creatively misunderstood version of the Weird.  Out goes the skull that offers the barbed wishes... in come the tentacles, the claws and the strange flesh.  As with 'The Macra Terror' and 'Spearhead from Space', the themes of the story have been converging upon a point that needs to be obscured, scrambled, covered, Weirdified into incoherence... so in comes the radically incoherent monster, purloined from the Weird, the apparent opposite and antithesis of the gothic.

The connection between these two modes is never entirely severed, however.  This is not the process described by Miéville in its full sense but rather an echo if it.  The remaining connection between the gothic and the Weird is most visible in the look of the Axon 'ship'.  It looks like a leech.  It looks like a bloodsucker.  The story has found its resting point at the place where the gothic and the Weird almost meet before they repel.

Skulltopus 7: Tentacle, Plastic and Bone

The first fully-fledged tentacular monster in Doctor Who - in the senses of being both properly cephalopodic and of being a central monstrous antagonist of the Doctor's - is the Nestene entity at the end of 'Spearhead from Space'.  That's seven years in before the show does a proper tentacular monster with real plot significance.

Apart from 'Image of the Fendahl' (which we'll get to one day) and the Cyber-head in 'The Pandorica Opens', 'Spearhead from Space' is also the closest Doctor Who has ever come to merging or (horrid word coming up, but needs must...) juxtaposing the skull and the tentacle.  If you don't know why I think that's significant, please go back and read my other Skulltopus posts, starting here.

The Nestenes manifest as a tank full of tentacles...

Yes Jon, pull a comedy face and go cross-eyed.
That's the perfect way to express mortal terror.

...inside which we can see a pulsing, vaguely obscene-looking anus/oesophagus/lung thing.  Meanwhile, the same story's main images of the monstrous are unfinished-looking plastic replicas of human beings.  There is something faintly but definitely skull-like about their faces, especially when they're not wearing wigs.

Note especially the empty eye-holes,
a detail lost in subsequent appearances.

If I were writing an Auton story now, my first priority would be the creation of a way for the tentacles and the plastic to co-reside in the same entity.  This never happens in 'Spearhead', but the Autons do stand and wait in the room where the Nestene tentacled thing hides.  At the end of the story, Channing reverts to a cruder Auton-form (once again making the Auton face skull-like, in that its appearance is linked to death in the more sophisticated Nestene replicas).  A line of green matter is spattered on the dead and reverted Channing's plastic face.

Bless you.

This is the closest that the plastic gets to merging with the alien flesh.  The proximity of the plastic skull and the green organic squidgy creature is tantalising.


It Adds Up

Doctor Who - because of its (spurious) materialist/empiricist/educational remit - has a set of internal rules that generally make the explicitly supernatural off-limits.  The show tends to have been made with the intention of at least outwardly championing the Enlightenment values and certainties.  As I argued here, this self-imposed attempt to foreclose upon the supernatural guides the show towards material (and materialist) monsters.

However, owing to the converging influences of children's fiction, mythological narrative (to which both SF and kid's adventure fiction are much indebted) and the gothic (usually mediated through 20th century popular horror, most especially Universal and Hammer monster flicks), the show simultaneously inherits an underlying magical conception of reality and a tendency to make its monsters metaphorical and hauntological (if not usually spectral in the full sense), i.e. haunting us with the 'repressed'.

Add the influence of 'soft' social SF literature, the prevailing 'lefty liberal' ethos among BBC creative types (which Barry Letts has spoken about) and the social context of pre-Thatcher Britain (in which there prevailed a broad 'liberal' socio-economic consensus), and you get a show that ends up representing this or that material nightmare of modernity in a great, mostly-liberal, allegorical morality play for kids.

We end up with loads of stories about hi-tech war, totalitarianism, industrial genocide, biological racism, commercial slavery, etc.  Yet these are all modern phenomena, products of the industrial age, thus - in the analysis that I accept - products of capitalism... and that's without going into how capitalism actively generates and even needs them.

The show keeps harping on about issues that, in the end, trace back to the capitalist system... but this issue is usually not noticed and certainly should not be acknowledged, even when it becomes - as it sometimes does - imminent.

The show is, ultimately, a product of capitalism, even if, for decades, it was relatively  independent of the stifling atmosphere of commodification produced by the system, owing to its being produced by a relatively independent 'public service broadcaster' with a social remit other than profit.  (By the way... this was always partial and compromised.  The Daleks saw to it that the show survived because they were an instant hit and were thus instantly marketable.  We all know that merchandise has been produced off the back of Who by the truckload.  The BBC was never any kind of pure, totally non-commercial attempt at a functionalist, benevolent, state-run industry.  Only people ill-informed enough to think 'socialism' means state control of society could imagine that such a creature had, for good or ill, ever once existed at Broadcasting House.)   

Doctor Who is part of the capitalist culture industry, with a very distinct niche within it.  Moreover, no amount of 'liberal' socio-economic consensus or 'lefty liberal' internal ethos can, on their own, amount to a deliberate, radical, structural critique of capitalism.  However, there can come a point where the liberal complaints and anxieties stack up in such a way that capitalism becomes the elephant... or perhaps, the giant squid... in the room.


Vernacular Tentacular

I think that, starting with 'Spearhead from Space', Doctor Who starts bringing the tentacular into play when it can no longer entirely put off a confrontation with something that it usually avoids and omits, something that it doesn't want to face but to which it keeps being lead back... namely, capitalism.  Not greedy individual capitalists, not evil businessmen, not corrupt businesses, not evil corporations... but capitalism as an exploitative social system.  70s Doctor Who, uses the tentacular monster as a way of semiotically evading - and, in a dialectical / paradoxical way, also meaning - capitalism as a system which links and/or causes different forms of oppression.

In a children's adventure series, one which fulfills a very distinct role in the culture industry and in mainstream mass popular culture, there are certain things which cannot be talked about... capitalism as a systemic whole, with exploitation, racism and imperialism woven inextricably into its essential structure, is untouchable and unmentionable. And yet, obsessed as it is with the mightmares of modernity, how can Doctor Who always manage to leave it unmentioned?  It frequently finds itself sliding towards this danger zone.  In the 70s especially, when this happens, tentacles usually appear.

According to China Miéville (see my account here), tentacles entered the Western tradition - ushered in by that style / affect / trend known as the Weird - as a deliberately incoherent, unprecedented and unfreighted 'novum', a scream of meaningless horror and incomprehension at the oncoming collapse of enlightenment certainties brought by the crises of late 19th / early 20th century modernity.  Doctor Who somehow misappropriates the tentacle.  The Weird use of the tentacular is, by Miéville's account, as a signifier for the meaningless, the indescribable, the incoherent, the incomprehensible, the unrecognisable.  Who creatively misunderstands it, pressing it into service as a way of obfuscating capitalism whenever it starts to notice that it is a systemic generator of modern nightmares, whenever its own metaphorical and hauntological style threatens to produce metaphors that are too penetrating about where modern nightmares come from.

Tentacles and capitalism become temporarily linked in the internal language of signifiers which constitute Doctor Who.  This continues as a fully-fledged semiotic connection throughout the 70s, dying out somewhat but occasionally recurring in a reduced form during the 80s and onwards.  I've looked at 'The Creature from the Pit', suggesting ways in which it can be seen as terminating the semiotic connection, here.


Pre-History

I've looked at some of the early history of the octopoidal in Who here, suggesting that Terry Nation may have been responsible for laying the groundwork for a connection between tentacles and capitalism, partly by using the tentacular in something akin to its Weird 'blank' mode, partly by invoking tentacles at narrative moments where people are being exploited for labour and/or commodities.  (The Animus in 'The Web Planet' is a whole different kettle of ballgames which I'll get around to one of these days.)

As times changed, protest and class struggle erupted and the swinging 60s became turbulent and, at times, revolutionary.  In 1967, Doctor Who tries for the first time to engage with some of the new notions that are rocking Western society.  The result is 'The Macra Terror', which features monsters which seem to genuinely experiment with merging the gothic and the Weird (see here) and which seem to express some unease with British capitalism (see here).  This is the prelude.

In the high-point of the show's engagement with the radical 60s, 'The War Games' puts forward an anti-imperialist message... however, it falters into a weak reformism at the end and, crucially, fails to bring in capitalism in any way. 


Automatic for the Products

And then came 'Spearhead from Space' by Robert Holmes.  Holmes had already shown anti-authoritarianism of 'The Krotons' and done some riffs on mining corporations and piracy in 'The Space Pirates'.  'Spearhead' is more radical than both put together - possibly even more radical (in the sense of getting to the root of things) than 'The War Games' - even though the radical implications are almost certainly unconscious and show through very obliquely and elliptically.

I've gone into all this here, and suggested that the eruption of the tentacular at the end of 'Spearhead from Space' might be a sign of the show in flight, as it were, from a thematic convergence towards a critique of capitalism as systemically alienating, soaked in commodity fetishism, exploitative, oppressive, racist and imperialist.  (If you now think I've gone mad, click the above link and see my reasoning.)

This use of the radically incoherent tentacular at the end of 'Spearhead' is reinforced (though only just) by the sequel.  'Terror of the Autons' simultaneously develops and softens much of the unease about capitalism that is submerged in the original Auton story.  The implied critique of mass produced consumer culture and a representation of alienation through hostile commodities is carried over. The death in this story emanates from mass produced products, from consumer goods. 'Terror' lacks the immensely potent and oneiric spectacle of the shop-window dummies springing to life, smashing out of their windows and, bedecked in finery and price tags, strolling down the consumerist high street, surrounded by shop signs and brand names, slaughtering workers and shoppers...

...but it generalises the same nightmare.  If the attack in the high street was the spearhead, this is the reign of terror.  Everything plastic, everything produced, every commodity, is now out to get you.  Even the promotional gifts are now likely to kill you.  'Spearhead' didn't suggest that the baby dolls made at Auto Plastics were literally dangerous.  In 'Terror', the toy will spring to life and lunge at your jugular, the novelty inflatable chair will eat you alive... even your phone will strangle you.  To the Master, all this death is just his way of "trying out a new product".

Where was the director, that's what I want to know.

While wider in scope, the threat in 'Terror' seems almost comic in its clutter.

As in ‘Spearhead’, the evil nestles and coils in the factory and the businessman's office. As in ‘Spearhead’, the factory owner / manager is enslaved by mind control and colludes with the Nestenes as they mesh with his means of production.  The Nestenes want to mass produce themselves and takeover the market. They also find a way in under our noses by disguising themselves within the context of policemen and police cars. Ask these bobbies where they’re taking you and you’ll find blank-faced, eyeless horrors lurking under their latex masks. They’re there to stop you opposing the immanent ascendency of the evil commodities.  Even more than in 'Spearhead', uniformed officers are protectors of property.

However, the Master takes the edge off them as villains.  And the way the Autons speak like robots makes them less sinister and more comprehensible.

As in 'Spearhead' hierarchy and class show themselves.  The Master disguises himself as a workman; he asserts power over Rossini by pointing out that he is really Lew Russell; he hypnotises people all over the place (a new detail at this point).  Rex Farrell is dominated by his father.  McDermot is murdered by the Master (the title itself shows that Holmes associates evil with hierarchy) when he will not keep to his place in the company pyramid.  Farrell interprets his slaughter as "termination of employment".  Waged work is again much in evidence.  The scientists take tea breaks and have packed lunches.  The Doctor mistakes Jo for the tea lady and so treats her contemptuously, meanwhile he uses his supposedly greater intimacy with "Tubby Rowlands" to intimidate Brownrose (!).  "Wrong sort of chap getting into your department these days".  We all know what this is supposed to mean.  Red brick oiks infiltrating the corridors that should rightly be the province of those who drifted down from the dreaming spires.  (You don't have to share Paul Cornell's assessment that this makes the Third Doctor a Tory... though, in some respects...)  And, of course, this kind of British class hierarchy is very much to the fore when the Doctor is visited by the Time Lord.  He is dressed "incognito" as a stereotypical Threadneedle St / Whitehall toff and needles the Doctor by referring to his degree.

There are even, once again, hints that the story has noticed the racial order of capitalism.  Whitey runs the factory, the radio telescope... even the circus!  Meanwhile, Roy Stewart is asked back to play essentially the same racist stereotype he played in 'Tomb of the Cybermen' but this time the character - Tony - is almost a parodic version of Toberman: he is written as a circus 'Strong Man' who "don't say much"!

However, this very comic mode makes it hard for the character to have the same uneasy impact as the Asian workers making white plastic babies at the factory in 'Spearhead'.

In fact, the over-the-top, grotesque, gaudy, comedic air of the whole piece tends to soften the impact of much in the story.  The Autons still look like products of human labour confronting humans as something hostile and alien, but the potential for them to form part of a systemic critique is diluted even as it is generalised.  At the end of 'Spearhead', a story that seemed so quietly and unconsciously preoccupied with alienated labour, hierarchy and consumerism - and which even hinted at imperialism, and at racial and gender hierarchies - the Nestenes manifest as an incoherent but undeniably substantial mad box of tentacles.  When the Nestene entity arrives and hovers over the radio telescope dish at the end of 'Terror', it retains the outline of the squid but lacks solidity and sharpness.  It is less needed, so it is kept as unfocused as the rest of the story.

The fact that they couldn't afford to do this onscreen

 may also have had something to do with it.

But then along came 'The Claws of Axos'... but that's for another time.


Dem Bones
As I've said, I think the tentacles that appear at the end of 'Spearhead' mark the moment when Doctor Who tries to obfuscate a conclusion that is haunting it.  Just as they haunt us with their submerged associations, so the Autons haunt the show through which they stalk with the same associations.  With their skull-like faces, they are very gothic, very hauntological (in that material way that Who does hauntology).  Yet the end up serving the quasi-Weird, the incoherent tentacular.  They get close to their octopoidal master but never merge with it.  As China Miéville predicts, the skull (gothic) and the tentacle (Weird) cannot merge, even when they try.  The tentacle rejects the haunting message of the skull.  And yet, tentacles keep turning up in 70s Who when the show notices capitalism.  I've written elsewhere about how 'The Creature from the Pit' terminates this connection.  Well, there's something else to note about that: there are skulls in that story.  Indeed, they litter the pit in which the creature is kept.  Organon uses as skull as a candle holder.

Maybe he was just pleased to see them.

It's almost like the gothic is reasserting itself even as the quasi-Weird is shown the door.

Skulltopus 6: Macra Revisited

According to China Miéville, the classic, early 20th century haute Weird of Lovecraft and Hodgson is the nebulous, meaningless, reactionary scream of incomprehension that greets the onrushing horror of modernity.

I think that, for 70s Doctor Who, a resurrected and processed form of the Weird is what the show draws upon when it finds itself haunted by repressed knowledge that it cannot face: the knowledge that the modern nightmares upon which it dwells are generated by capitalism.  When the themes of a 70s Doctor Who story suggest the possibility that capitalism could be noticed and indicted in systemic terms - particularly in terms of the exploitation of the worker, race and/or imperialism - the show tries to jettison the hauntological (realising that it is itself being haunted... nay, stalked) in favour of the Weird.

I intend to justify these outrageous claims in a forthcoming post.

In my last post - here - I casually asserted that the Weirdish ab-crabs in 'The Macra Terror' are a "prelude" to the connection the show will make in the 70s between the tentacle and capitalism.  It occurs to me that I need to expand a bit on my Skulltopus post about the Macra - here - in order to make myself clear on this point.

I think that the Colony in 'The Macra Terror' is a picture of mainstream Britain in denial during the radical late 60s, of a prosperous capitalist world that runs on repression, oppression, obedience, media conditioning, hierarchy.  The Colony strongly hints at being capitalist in various ways, not least the Butlins vibe that everyone talks about, the Pilot's sitcom businessman manner, Barney's salon and spa, etc.

Most explicitly, the story concentrates on the mining of gas... and Britain in 1967 was right in the middle of switching over to North Sea Gas.  In the story, the gas (a toxic substance that humans don't need and which actively endangers workers) is mined for the benefit of other, hidden, possibly insane reasons/persons - in this case, the Macra.

The Macra, as I noted elsewhere, are extremely hauntological (in that material/pseudo-materialist way that things are hauntological in Who) in that they actively and literally haunt the Colony while clearly representing something that the characters all know must be denied.  In the January 2012 issue of Panic Moon, I hint that this repressed knowledge is the knowledge that they are exploited - specifically and explicitly as workers - by an irrational tyranny, and that this ties into the way that the radical currents in the late 60s were popularizing a critique of Western consumerist capitalism as tyrannical and alienating.

And so, whether it be cause or effect, we get Weirdish monsters.

They are giant crabs, as in some classic Weird fiction... except that, when you listen to the story (especially since you have to listen to it) they are also categorically indeterminate, big/small, crab/non-crab, insect/spider/bacteria things that people have trouble perceiving clearly, even - especially - when they see them.

Moreover, the Macra's own mentalities are extremely contradictory, incoherent, self-denying... to the point of bordering on psychosis. They are so desperate to deny that the Colony's happy and prosperous capitalist world of makeovers and mining (i.e. of productive industry and leisure industry) exists to serve their needs that they end up frantically denying their own existence!

The hysteria of the Macra's screams of "Macra do not exist!  THERE ARE NO MACRA!!!!" (over a TV screen, lets not forget) sounds, to me, very much like the way that mainstream media in capitalist society will go round the houses - sometimes to farcical degrees - to steer conversations, debates, discourse and criticism away from the central economic facts of our society (on the rare occasion that anyone liable to raise them in the first place ever gets on the media).  The Macra deny their own existence, just as capitalist media culture tries to make capitalism vanish into 'democracy' and 'the West' and 'free trade' and 'the economy' and many other euphemisms.  Capitalism tries to make itself invisible, and to make its exploitative core invisible, via its hegemony over culture (back to Gramsci we go) and through the obscuring of class consciousness by various forms of alienation and commodity fetishism (back to Lukacs we go).

Once again, the social wound in which the Macra breed is all to do with hierarchy and exploitation, it operates through productive work for the benefits of people other than the workers, it guards itself using a leisure industry and a hegemonic system of ideas that touts notions of social cohesion, cheerfulness, pulling together, altruism, team spirit, the state as honest broker, enjoy your time off, etc... and all this, not in a totalitarian state (when people say that the Colony is totalitarian they are totally missing the point) but in a society that strongly hints that it is capitalistic even while it uses methods of thought control and repression.

Of course, the production draws heavily upon the semiotics of totalitarianism - most particularly the Cartier/Kneale TV adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four - but it also subverts them and... well... de-Sovietizes them to a large extent.  There's a makeover salon and a version of Miss World for Polly to enter.  The holiday camp thing has been noted many times... but the really important thing about that is that holiday camps look like (to use Miles and Wood's phrase) "a little bit of Eastern Europe just outside Cromer".  The regimentation, the smiling authoritarianism, the moral puritanism, and the solidly working class background of most guests, makes the holiday camp an ideal - almost inevitable - way of commenting on the way capitalist Britain and communist dictatorships had certain eerie similarities.  In the late 60s, when people like Herbert Marcuse were suddenly selling lots of books, this was a notion whose time had come.  People were starting to see tyranny on both sides of the iron curtain.  This is why 'The Macra Terror' prefigures The Prisoner.  In that show, Number 6 is never sure which side is holding him.  The unspoken horror of it is that it could be either or both.  It doesn't really matter.  As one of the Number 2s says, both sides will one day regard each other and realise that they are "looking into a mirror".

That's why 'The Macra Terror' (which came before The Prisoner, let's not forget) was near-the-knuckle stuff.  I know this sounds like a strange thing to say about Doctor Who at the best of times... but all the same, this was about as close as mainstream popular TV could get to noticing that capitalism was pretty bloody horrible, not as an exception but as a rule.

The way in which the Macra are radically obscured (Weirdified) is the camouflage, the misdirection.  They - and many of the other Weirdish monsters in Who - arrive when the show itself is being haunted by repressed knowledge that it cannot notice or accept without ceasing to be what Doctor Who is (that is, a staple aspect of the culture industry catering for children in capitalist Britain, existing within that cultural hegemony).  The show, via its materialist or pseudo-materialist gothic dynamic, is constantly drawn to the nightmarish effects of capitalism, often unable and always reluctant to notice that they are capitalist effects, occasionally drawing on the fundamentally non-gothic monster (while still, paradoxically, using the non-gothic in a hauntological way) as a method of escaping from or fudging the conclusions it is edging towards, the conclusion... or perhaps realisation would be a better word... that industrial war, modern imperialism, modern slavery, fascism (all repeatedly addressed by the show) all have their roots in the same system.

Skulltopus 5: Fair Exchange, No Robbery

Erato the Tythonian in 'The Creature from the Pit' doesn't much resemble an octopus, but nevertheless he/it is a shapeless, amorphous creature that extends a probe which is (briefly) a bit tentacular... though this tends to be obscured by the fact that it also supposedly resembles a cock:

If this picture reminds you of your genitals,
seek immediate medical advice.

Neither seems to have been the writer's intention.  Indeed, in the novelisation, it is specifically stated that "you couldn't call it a tentacle".  The probe is repeatedly described in terms of hands, fingers and fists.  As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Erato is meant to be a kind of giant, disembodied brain.

However, the probe is a long, flexible, green, non-humanoid limb... so let's not fear to call it a quasi-tentacle, whatever Fisher says.

In any case, the Tythonian is - at least until it starts talking - reminiscent of the Weird... if only via its unstable and amorphous blobbiness.

In this post, I suggested that 'Spearhead from Space' erupts into tentacles at the end partly as a way of obscuring something else that is going on in the story, namely a convergence of various themes towards a potential critique of modern British capitalism as a system of hierarchy, racism, imperialism, sexism and exploitation.  (Click the link and read it if you think I've gone mad.)

I'm planning, in forthcoming posts, to suggest that Doctor Who in the 70s adopts the tentacular as a recurring way of simultaneously fleeing from and signifying capitalism.  There is a prelude to this: the Weirdish ab-crabs in 'The Macra Terror'.  There's also a transitional story at the other end, just before the semiotic connection largely dies out in the 80s.  This transitional story is the final story of the 70s to feature the tentacular even as a suggestion.


Transitional Form

Philip Sandifer, at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, has described 'The Creature from the Pit' as "a proper anti-capitalist screed".  He describes Adrasta as "a selfish arch capitalist who is perfectly happy to thrive while everyone else suffers" and notes that Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles are wrong to write off as anachronistic the idea that Adrasta could've been intended as a Thatcher figure (the story was written during the election that she went on to win).  However, his argument is considerably more sophisticated than this and rests more especially on something he identifies in the script: the subversion of the (by now) standard Doctor Who 'evil ruling class vs. rebels' trope.  Sandifer identifies this story as coinciding with the great shift in the 'centre ground' of British politics that more-or-less coincided with the advent of Thatcherism.

The key thing is… the way in which both sides of an apparent political debate were in one sense indistinguishable because they both adhered to the same premise... [For example] the way in which the trade unions, Callaghan, and Thatcher all took for granted that maximizing profit was the right thing to do. The idea that they were opposing sides in many key ways serves more to cut other perspectives out of the debate entirely than it does to actually describe a fundamental philosophical difference between them. And this sort of false opposition is exactly what Fisher is trying to do with the culture of Chloris...

As Sandifer develops it (ruing all the time the way that the production team managed to miss it) this relates to the way that Adrasta (evil ruling class) and Torvin (rebels) are both obsessed with getting and keeping metal.  Their priorities are the same, despite their other drastic differences.  Sandifer also raises the issue that, once it becomes clear that Erato isn't a 'monster', the audience might immediately suspect that the story will turn out to be about a failure of communication... but, as it turns out, Adrasta and Erato's initial communication went just fine.  She didn't fail to understand him because he was a scary, huge, green blob.  On the contrary, she understood him perfectly.  That wasn't the problem.  The problem was that his message was unwelcome to her because, as Sandifer puts it, she "was only willing to look at the world from her own capitalist perspective...  Adrasta did misunderstand, but not because she didn’t recognize Erato’s individual subjectivity, but rather because she didn’t recognize that there was another way for the world to be".

I'm sympathetic to the idea that Fisher's story might, in its reduction of the obligatory 'rebels' to a bunch of thieves every bit as greedy as their planet's evil ruler, be mirroring cultural shifts in the Britain of its day.  These were, after all, the early years of neoliberalism.  Monetarism was on the rise (with Thatcher only its most aggressive mainstream standard bearer rather than an innovator).  Keynesian certainties had dissolved.  Thatcher would prove to be the gravedigger of a 'social democratic consensus' that was, by this point, already wounded and tottering.  This was the broader symptom of a big downturn in working class struggle and resistance (the Miner's Strike of a few years hence would be a last roll of the dice).  If post-war liberal ideas seemed a long time dead, the radicalism of 1968 seemed (paradoxically) even deader.  Thatcher would go on to acquire the nickname 'Tina' for her habit of proclaiming that "There is no alternative!"  She meant that there was no alternative to her Hayekian brand of class war.  More broadly, the consensus seemed to be that there was no alternative to capitalism anymore.  This 'capitalist realism' (as Mark Fisher has ringingly called it) is with us still... though, thankfully, in these days of Occupy Wall St., it seems to be much less hegemonic.

However, I have issues with the rest of Sandifer's account.

At the most basic level: in what way is Adrasta a capitalist? She doesn't pay any wages, produce anything, market anything, sell anything, pocket any surplus value, invest in production, etc.  Meanwhile, she has serfs!  Adrasta seems much more like a feudal seigneur (lots of seigneuries were run by women, especially in France) who is desperately trying to contain the encroachment of capitalism, in the terrifyingly modern shape of the shapeless monster.

Adrasta used to own a viable mine (plenty of mining went on in feudal Europe) but she purposefully shuts down that operation by shutting Erato up in it, thus preserving her monopoly on metal by retarding her own ability to produce any. This is interesting, given that one factor which went into the transition from fedualism to capitalism in Europe was to do with mining. As in other fields, the technology available to miners in feudal Europe (i.e. the development of the productive forces) became a barrier or drag factor on further development. This story might just covertly acknowledge an assumption of Marxist history: that the conflict or contradiction between the forces of production and the social superstructure is part of what drives historical change. 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 (which she has left unused and undeveloped in order to keep hold of her social power)... 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!

I posted the above (pretty much) at Sandifer's blog and he took issue with me (and Alex Wilcock, who'd already raised similar points) on the grounds that, without money being involved, there seems to be no 'exchange value'.  Rather, there is just exchange.  The trade between Chloris and Tythonis seems more like barter.  Ergo, this looks more like socialism (i.e. co-operative, planned production and distribution on the basis of mutual satisfaction of need) rather than 'free trade'.

These are good points.  However, I think they rest upon the idea that exchange has always been as central to human societies as it is under capitalism, which isn't right.  Exchange has always gone on, but was relatively peripheral to feudalism and previous modes of production.  Capitalism, by contrast, is by definition a system of generalised commodity production.  In other words, it is only under capitalism that most things are produced to be exchanged.  The very notion of trade, intruding into the 'closed system' of feudal Chloris, carries with it the inevitable suggestion of capitalism.

What is also lacking in Sandifer's account (and, to be fair, it's almost entirely lacking from the story) is the matter of labour.  Someone, somewhere, at some time, will have to work to cultivate, harvest, refine, package and ship the chlorophyll.

It's inevitably going to be the erstwhile serfs who end up doing this... and none of them are to be seen at the end, let alone in power.  Even Torvin's band has disappeared.  We're left with the Guardmaster and Organon apparently running things.  Socialism isn't on the agenda.  There is no sense in the story that class has disappeared.  There's no cooperative society of free producers in evidence, or even on the cards.  Even if we ignore all other considerations, and imagine the trade between Tythonis and Chloris is pure barter on the basis of mutual satisfaction of need, the idea that this would constitute anything like socialism is still inadequate, because socialism is the collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production, and so no such social condition obtains on Chloris when the Doctor leaves.

For the Chlorisians, the process of production will radically change.  It will cease to be mainly about subsistence and payment of tributes to the landowner.  It will become production for exchange.  This is irresistibly suggestive of the whole process of 'enclosures' and what Marx called the "primitive accumulation of capital", i.e. the historical moment when feudal property relations are forcibly destroyed, common property is appropriated, the peasant is expropriated, the concentration of property into the hands of a rising bourgeois class begins and a new proletarian class begins to form.

There is also the matter of the status of metal.  In Adrasta's feudal set up, the metal was valuable because it was mined and used to make useful things (i.e. blades for holding back the jungle, plough bits for cultivating the land). But this old system is changing.  Crucially, there is no hint in the story that Adrasta has been producing metal for trade before the arrival of Erato.  She's been producing it for agriculture, horticulture, military uses and the luxuries of the seigneur.  By putting a stopper in her own mine she manages to confine Erato (and the new economic order he represents) but also sets her own system on the road to decline.  When the Doctor arrives on Chloris, metal has become valuable regardless of what kind of metal it is, regardless of what shape its in, regardless of what it's used for.  Everyone wants it, from Adrasta to Torvin.  But why?  Presumably it is being used to buy things... increasingly scarce food, perhaps, from people who need metal in order to scratch some rump agriculture and/or farming together.  Metal has thus acquired not just use value but also exchange value.  It has become, in effect, a modern bourgeois commodity, arising from the decline of the feudal mode of production!  Moreover, it has (or so I deduce) started to behave like money, the 'universal equivalent', the commodity the equals all others.  Erato's new economic order will fit into and develop these nascent tendencies.  He will buy chlorophyll with metal.  If the new trading arrangement leads to a surplus of metal on Chloris, the value of metal will become increasingly detached from scarcity and take on even more of the features of the currency as commodity.

All this, by itself, isn't capitalism... but it all looks highly reminiscent of the historical transition between feudal and bourgeois modes of production.  Adrasta's efforts to prop up her old system involve an attempt to retard the emergence of a new set of economic arrangements based on commodity production and exchange rather than on the feudal cultivation of land by serfs.  So we end up back where we started.  With the Tythonian as heralding the break up of feudalism and the onrush of capitalism.

Of course, much of the above is improvisation on the basis of scant information in the text and, as such, cannot really be used to work out what the text itself is 'saying'.

There is so little extraneous information in the text itself that we must fall back onto essentials.  Let's quote Sandifer again.  This story is about

two planets that have an imbalance of resources are rectifying the imbalance through cooperation. It's not just an economic arrangement, but an arrangement between two planets with the wrong populations for their resources to redress a natural balance.

But isn't that the liberal capitalist argument to a tee? Free trade is a natural, harmonious, optimal way of addressing natural imbalances and ensuring the maximum happiness (and utility) for all... once obstacles like obstinate, reactionary local elites have been swept aside. That 'The Creature from the Pit' fails to see the flaws and hypocrisies in this way of looking at things only shows that this is a story in which the basic ideological arguments of free trade are taken as the central moral truth of things.

This was an extremely fashionable delusion that was rising to a new status of cultural hegemony when 'Creature from the Pit' was made and aired.  The fetishizing of the market, of trade, of money... the pretence that free trade was the way to liberalize society, bring down old elites, end the 'dark ages'... the notion that the logic of the market applied to society was the way to bring harmony where there was discord, truth where there was error and hope where there was despair.


The Creature from Grantham

This story is where Doctor Who resolves and ends its association of the Weirdish and the tentacular with capitalism, an association that recurred several times throughout the 70s (and which I'll go into in further detail in a forthcoming post). 

In 'The Creature from the Pit', capitalism is not a systemic generator of modern nightmares.  It is not something that the show wants to flee from noticing or acknowledging.  It can be signfied without any evasion or danger of condemnation.  So, the quasi-tentacle resolves into something uniform, coherent, a jelly with a voice, a mind (it is a giant brain), a high-status personage with a prestigious official job that is represented as laudable and well-meaning.  The free trade monster starts out as apparently incomprehensible and becomes something comprehensible, loquacious, affable, helpful... something the heralds a new and better order based on an idealised view of commodity exchange.

This story is Doctor Who apparently making peace with capitalism in the form of a panglossian view of free trade vs. reactionary old forms of obsolete feudal elitism, with the market as the road away from serfdom.  That this characterisation of Thatcherism is spurious (Thatcher was nothing if not a statist and a protector of ossified old privilege) makes no odds.  It's a self-characterization that is an inherent aspect of Thatcherism as a brand of conservatism.  Look at Murdoch, who characterized himself as anti-elites, attacking unions on the grounds of breaking up restricted practices.  Look at nationalization promoted as a way of democratizing and increasing efficiency.  All that bunk.  'The Creature from the Pit' is Who buying into that consensus that Sandifer was talking about, not critiqueing it.

The old tentacle connection is finally vanquished when the show, in tune with its times, starts to feel able to represent capitalism as a social good rather than a source of unease.

Skulltopus 4: Attack of the Plot-Device Monster

The tentacle was already well established as a staple of monsterology long before Doctor Who was even a glint in Sydney Newman's eye.  When Who selected the tentacle as its semiotic method of evading/signifying capitalism  - as I'm going to argue that it did in the 70s - it selected it from a pre-existing toolbox full of potential signifiers.  But it didn't suddenly stumble upon the octopoidal.  It had encountered tentacles before, albeit only occasionally.

On the whole, the show's early years are pretty thin on tentacles... but there are quasi-tentacular manifestations in 'The Keys of Marinus' (the Brains of Morphoton have stubby little almost-tentacles), 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth' (the Slyther) and 'The Web Planet' (the Animus).  The only proper octopus monster in this era is the Mire Beast from 'The Chase'.  It lives underground and exists solely to provide a way for our heroes to escape from the Aridians without deliberately sentencing them all to Dalek-death.

Oh look... bar the Animus, those were all written by Terry Nation.  Hmmm...

By this point (the early 60s), the 'novum' of the tentacle had passed, but it had entrenched itself in the grammar of Western teratology.  In the process, it had been greatly sheared of its original strategic meaninglessness.  Even so, the Mire Beast doesn't even try to mean anything.  It's almost as though a plot device monster so arbitrary and irrelevant had to be an octopus because the octopus still carries the Weird connotations of meaning meaninglessness.  It means nothing, so what do we make it?  An octopus.  They mean nothing.  Perfect.

I'm simplifying.  And I'm making it sound conscious... which it almost certainly wasn't.  But I'm kind of thinking aloud here.  Give me a break, can't you?  These things become less conscious and more consistent the more deeply the semiotic connections bury themselves into culture.  They become like syntax.  We don't usually use syntax consciously.

Of course, 'meaning nothing' and 'having no meaning' are not necessarily the same thing.  The symbol '0' means nothing... but it doesn't have no meaning.  Indeed, it's meaning is nothing.  (This point is hard to get across in text... it's one of those occasions when, to be absolutely clear, you really need to use vocal inflection.)  This may be the same binary inherent in any sign that is adopted to evade meaning.  It may be inherent in the Weird use of the tentacular.  By trying to use the meaningless to mean meaninglessness, meaning is assigned.  This is as much a dialectic as it is a paradox.  The internal contradiction drives the change from the haute Weird tentacle to the tentacle as a standard monstrous limb-type throughout Western fiction.  The tentacle initially emerges as the perfect way for the Weird to express what it feels to be the incomprehensible and meaningless horror of modernity via its 'novum', its unprecedentedness in Western literature, its semiotic emptiness.  However, the meaninglessness of the tentacle becomes its meaning... or rather, it's most prominent feature.  Its very arbitrariness allows it unfettered entry into almost any context, sometimes even conferring an advantage upon it when someone like Terry Nation is looking for a default monster that will have nothing to do but get the writer out of a plot cul-de-sac, or look cool.

It sounds like I'm having a go at Nation... but, actually, I think his selection of the octopus, his insertion of it into such an inappropriate context (an octopus that lives underground on a desert planet... I mean, what the fuck?), and for such a menial narrative task, actually redounds to his credit.

Pastiche is essential to Nation's method (and to Who's in general).  Nation tends to get a bad rap these days and.... weeeeell, yeah, okay, he's a very inconsistent writer.  But, he could be very canny, especially about how exactly to mix 'n' match the stuff he... *ahem*... utilised. And he's by no means as constantly derivative as some might claim.  He can sometimes work magical feats of selection and synthesis. It shows in his selection of the octopus as a creature of incoherence and meaninglessness, fit to appear in such an inappropriate context and for such an empty reason.  Like the original Weird tentacles - H. G. Wells' giant squid monsters in The Sea Raiders... which just appear, wreak havoc and bugger off again without any explanation - Nation's Mire Beast just eats, shrieks and leaves... as does his Slyther.

'The Chase' features a section which parodies hauntology in the form of robot versions of Dracula and Frankenstein in an amusement park.  In that section of the story, Ian even perfectly expresses the essential nature of the hauntological: "it's uncanny, strange and weird... but it is familiar".  As noted, the tentacle is also pretty "familiar" in Western monsterology by the early 60s, but nowhere near as familiar as Dracula.  The tentacle still looks incoherent and evasive compared to the monsters in the haunted fun house, which are revealed to be nothing but exhibits.  The Doctor seems wedded to an old idea of the hauntological.  He thinks the fun house was a kind of materialised 'collective unconcious'.  Actually, it was a closed repository of dead and obsolete gothic figures.  Next to the craptastically 'old skool' gothic robots in the amusement park, even the Mire Beast looks vital, scary, menacing. I don't think the implicit comparison is insignificant.

The next thing that occurs to me - and I'm as surprised to find myself going this way as you probably are - is that maybe, when he was casting about for a plot-device monster, Terry Nation not only adroitly selected the tentacular (with its blank function inherited from Weird meaninglessness) but also laid the groundwork for the connection that I think Doctor Who (via Robert Holmes) made in the 70s: the tentacular as an evasion of - and, paradoxically/dialectically, a symbol of - capitalism as a system.  He found, in the tentacular, a kind of 'blank sign' which he could press into service... and then something else happened.  His (admittedly injudicious) semiotic literarcy started to lead him places...

Look... even I am not prepared to argue that 'The Chase' contains the basis for a systemic critique of capitalism, except perhaps as an illustration of the idiocy that capitalist culture can produce... however, it is interesting to note that the very first Doctor Who story to feature an actual octopus monster also features depictions of Western rulers (i.e. Elizabeth I and Abe Lincoln, who also appeared in Madame Tussauds in 'Spearhead from Space'), has a section set in New York (the financial hub of Western capitalism) and specifically atop the Empire State Building, and has another section aboard the Mary Celeste (a merchant ship carrying cargo for international trade).

We might also note the section in which we see mini-tentacles in 'The Keys of Marinus' also features a world of luxury and plenty which, seen without brainwashing, is a tatty world of exploitation and lies.  The gorgeous fabrics turn out to be "dirty rags", the amazing scientific instruments are actually chipped old cups, etc.  The very first intrusion of the weird tentacle, in only this very minor way, is conjoined with a story about people being mentally influenced (to live in luxury or to be handmaidens, etc.), about people being controlled by unseen forces, about people being tricked into viewing their austere world as a paradise of freedom, leisure and plenty, about a wealth of commodities (food, clothes, equipment) that is actually illusory.

Nation's noticeable personal lack of aversion to capitalism notwithstanding, it's extremely tempting to connect Morphoton to Western capitalism, given that, when this story was made, the long post-war boom was just starting to decline, the struggles of what would come to be called 'the 60s' were just beginning, etc.

Even the Slyther in 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth' turns up at the point in the story (geographical point and narrative point) where we start to see people's labour being exploited by Daleks who suddenly look like colonial masters of a subdued native population.  The Slyther appears at roughly the same time we encounter the two women in the shack and Ashton... all of whom are engaged in trade, exchange in commodities for profit.

*

The Animus in 'The Web Planet' is a little more complex.  This entity has looked very Lovecraftian to some, to the point that it has been identified as Llogior from the Cthulu Mythos in various New/Missing Adventures novels.  I'll (hopefully) be looking more closely at the Animus - as it relates to the Weird - in another post.