Becoming Is the Alchemical Ontology, Jamming, 05/07/2018

The other day, I was revisiting a short book by my colleague Elizabeth Sandifer. Recursive Occlusion is a little book about the mysticism of Kabbalah and Tarot, in a framework of exploring the Doctor Who story Logopolis.

Her work has always been a bit strange, which is one of the reasons I like her work.

Anyway, it reminded me of one of the original thematic images of her ongoing epic work of commentary, TARDIS Eruditorum – the solution to alchemy as material social progress.

The vision of progress we’re talking about here is fundamentally rooted in freedom – overcoming the bullying authoritarian attitude of social, political, and moral conservatism. Fundamentally, it’s the freedom to transform – to live differently than others, experiment with different kinds of relationships and identities. A constructively queer identity – opposed to nothing but the refusal to accept difference.

Against the Day is a beautiful book. It
depicts, a tad fancifully, a time in human
history that amounted to a technological
and ethical crossroads. The years between
the 1889 World's Fair and the outbreak of
the First World War was a moment where,
but for a few contingencies, we could
have ended up living in a very different
world. Would it have been better? I
have no idea, and I don't think Pynchon
does either. But given where we've
ended up, any possibility is worth
trying. Or at least imagining.

To jump from this to ontological thinking seems utterly barmy, but it can be done. Jussi Parikka gives it a very good shot when he weaves his concepts for a geological philosophy using, among other tools, artistic criticism and commentary.

Alchemical thinking is an attitude of awe, fascination, and love for the powers of substances to transform into one another.

Parikka illustrates this with images from Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which is one of my favourite novels. He chooses images that show a transition in society that’s ethical at its core, but also political, moral, economic, and ecological. It’s the transformation of alchemy as our attitude to the world, into chemistry.

He interprets these images to mourn how contemporary attitudes that embrace industrial technology refuse the need for magic. The transformation of one substance into another now requires no mysticism, no ethical consideration at all. You routinize it, regularize it, and industrialize it.

The shorthand that’s often used for this is the transition to full capitalism. But that’s not quite accurate. Parikka describes a transition that I think has already changed by now.

Alchemy was a research discipline that included mysticism and ontological philosophy alongside its empirical studies of how to transform substances. Chemistry – and the capitalist economics that fuelled the institutions of industrial chemistry – stripped the divine and philosophical from its research discipline, replacing it with a techno-industrial framework of understanding and practice.

Parikka gives us a quick description that offers a shade of Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt. As work became labour, alchemy became chemistry, and a practice of mysticism becomes an assembly line.

Yet care wasn’t entirely stripped from chemistry. You could argue that ethics was transformed, but that the ethical still emerged from the practice. We were offered “Better living through chemistry,” after all. The goal of industrial chemistry was to build a better life for people, to build some kind of material social progress.

There are different capitalist economics in place now. Ask the folks who used to work at Dupont Labs, until a few years ago. We might need other concepts.

Creative Miscellany: Reading Writing Replying Networking, Jamming, 14/07/2016

Just a general update today, since today turned out to be pretty eventful – in both a good and a less good way. Some projects have had some wonderful boosts, new opportunities for smaller works have come up, and one big project got a setback that I think could ultimately be for the best.

• • •

My first “LEAPing Beyond” workshop for the New Democratic Party went quite well, as you could probably tell from the last two posts. This weekend, I’ll be writing an official update on the first workshop to go up on official channels of Toronto’s NDP. 

I like the aesthetic of holding these workshops in parks,
islands in concrete that pretend to be wilderness. It
provokes the kind of juxtaposed thoughts that I want
to encourage with my words as well.

I’ll also make contact with riding associations presidents in the heart of Toronto, to promote the next workshop in early to mid August. I think Christie Pits park will probably be the best location. 

It’s less mainstream than Trinity-Bellwoods, and so offers a little more peace and quiet. I also like that Christie Pits is always within reach of road traffic – I think the urban oasis nature of most smaller city parks reminds us of the delicate relationship that a city must maintain with its green spaces.

• • •

I finished my first read of Sandifer’s Neoreaction: A Basilisk, and secured a slot for a review of the book at the Reply Collective. I’ve already brought Sandifer to the hard drives of the Collective, as he was a significant interview for “Beyond the Academy.”

But this is the first time my American colleague’s work will have been brought for a review. Part of my mandate from the Collective’s Review’s editor – my old friend SD Card – is to keep the social epistemological parts of the book at the forefront.

That won't be hard. As I collect my thoughts and notes for the first pass at the review, quite a lot of what I’m thinking about revolves around ways of knowing. The book is, from the start, a critique of the traditional concept of rationalism from a variety of angles.

You wouldn’t think that was necessary anymore. But if you thought that, it was a sign that you’ve been reading too many progressive epistemology journals, and not enough neo-fascist pro-slavery blogs or anti-feminist Reddit or 4chan forums.

I'm also waiting for the supplementary material (thanks
to a ridiculously successful Kickstarter campaign),
especially Theses on Trump.

Now, I don't blame you for not reading these things. Part of what I find awe-inspiring about Phil and his work is his level of commitment. This man – with his deeply held political, moral, and ethical beliefs – sat down and read the neo-fascist pro-slavery rambling tangents of Mencius Moldbug. 

Tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of words written by the most vile, self-absorbed, and unrestrained avatar of the genuinely neo-fascist pro-slavery software engineer Curtis Yarvin.

Phil has dived into something that most of us who thought that traditional conceptions of reason and rationality had been thrown on the dust-heap have ignored to our peril. This religion of pure reason exploding through right-wing online forums has become the dominant ideology of North America’s newest and most prominent reactionary social movement.

From Gamergate to the shock troops of the Trump campaign, the rank and file of American reaction in the 21st century have made a vision of purely objective rationality their sole epistemic yardstick. We have to grapple with this ideology, and that’s what I see Phil’s book as doing.

More details in a few weeks when the review actually goes up.

• • •

I’m working on another piece for the Reply Collective. This one is a reply to a recent piece by my favourite dialogue partner in the group, Steve Fuller. In this case, I want to write a response to his account of the Brexit phenomenon.

And Boris Johnson still won't go away.

Now, Steve has a few advantages over me on this. For one thing, he actually lives in Britain, and can see the media landscape daily through direct experience. I only see snippets and flashes from North America. So I don’t want to get into too many of the details.

Basically, I plan on responding to Steve’s perspective on the role of elites in political life, and whether the British constitution of parliamentary sovereignty has passed its sell-by date. It will come from the Negri-Foucault trajectory.

In short form, elite management of politics always risks disenfranchising or generally separating people from the institutions that hold incredible power over them. But contemporary communications technology and the political organizing it enables can bring that power to the people. Our era – thanks to our communications abilities – can open the most true and thorough democracy of all.

• • •

Finally, the partner I’d been working with on the development of You Were My Friend and I parted ways professionally yesterday. She’s still a fantastic actress, and I’ll probably still cast her in the same role she played in the theatre version. 

But I think our aesthetic instincts and priorities were a little too different for us to keep on the same page. Each of us had different ideas of what we thought were the most promising aspects of this story. I didn’t communicate my own such ideas clearly enough. And I still don’t quite understand what her own such ideas were.

So now I’m looking for a new director. And it has to be a woman. I need a female director so that the entire production can understand that You Were My Friend is a women’s story – with all that entails.

Were There Ever Really Any Great Atheists? A History Boy, 11/07/2016

There's a longer series about the nature of history in the works, but that will start tomorrow, because I've had a very tiring weekend. Today, I want to write something a little more personal. Just a small topic like my relationship with God in a few hundred words.

In particular, there’s a passage in Neoreaction: A Basilisk* that got me thinking about this part of my life. He talks about a typically long, rambling post by Mencius Moldbug, one of the intellectual leaders of the American neoreactionary movement – called “How Dawkins Got Pwned.”

* I've written about Phil Sandifer’s latest book before, and I may see if I can write a review later on this summer for the Reply Collective. It may also include some other parts of my interview with Phil from this Winter. And I may also try to sell other versions of it up the chain to different publications. Anyway . . . 

Anyone who refuses to bow to such a cruel,
authoritarian God, no matter the suffering
that refusal would cause yourself, will
necessarily be a hero.

Now, I'm not about to start parroting the ramblings of Mencius Moldbug. You know a little bit too much about my actual political beliefs to think I’m very vulnerable to his ideas. But Curtis Yarvin is still a smart person who, at least when filtered through someone else’s analysis, can make a fascinating insight or three.

In this case, it’s about Richard Dawkins, and the aggressive, contemptuous, rage-aholic New Atheist movement where he sits at the head. Now that Chris Hitchens is dead, anyway. 

As a younger man, I’d meet quite a few friends who were atheists in this loud, frothing sense. Religious belief, goes the convert’s intensity, was a delusion and a disease. A mental and social sickness. A profound stupidity of sincere belief that a magic invisible man who lives in the sky is your perfect authority to be followed.

I don't need to go into any great detail about why this kind of argument is flawed. Essentially, it’s just a big straw man. Taking millennia of philosophical development about what divinity’s nature could be, and casting it as a childish failure of people still dazzled by an adult-targeted version of the “Where’s the Ball?” game for infants.

I don't think I’ve ever been able to accept that massive reduction of intellectual history. To say that there were no valuable ideas or concepts in all this philosophy? To accuse them of stupidity? 

No. Anyone with respect for philosophical history at all must accept the legitimacy of thought and writing about the nature of God and the divine more broadly.

Yet I am an atheist. I was raised an atheist, and that’s always been my default way of thinking about divinity. Even though I believe in divinity and have embraced a relationship with Judaism as part of my family and identity. As an atheist, wouldn’t that seem incompatible.

You might think that no matter what reason I’ll give in the last few paragraphs of this post, I’m an idiot for saying so. That’s frankly your problem. 

He's just a very angry man.

It lies in this key idea that Sandifer dug out of Mencius Moldbug – that Richard Dawkins isn't just a straight-up atheist. He’s an Anglican-Calvinist atheist.

In other words, the self-declared neoreactionary spotted a fellow traveller. He correctly pegged Dawkins’ own beliefs about the nature of the divine as a product of reaction. Angrily turning against the Anglican and Calvinist traditions and beliefs in which he was raised.

This is why Dawkins’ period of peak cultural influence found his religious attitudes so aggressive, oversimplifying, shrill, and dismissive. They weren’t attitudes of a positive, productive identity – they were reactions, pure negations of beliefs.

Because I was raised atheist, my atheism has never needed that aggression. Or that strident refusal to bend, to make what would even risk appearing to anyone else as a compromise.

It’s not an issue for me to say that the material world itself has some divinity, some majesty to it. It’s not an issue for me to say that divinity can arise from profane sources. Like – in the Jewish philosophical tradition – the divine manifesting in ethical principles and good actions themselves. 

A reactionary’s God is the authority figure that sits above us all, judging, punishing, and commanding us. An atheist’s God can be the divinity that arises when people are kind to each other, in each act that treats each other with dignity. That God is no authority, but the grace that emerges from our own nature and the world.

Eternal Stories, A History Boy, 24/12/2015

One of my favourite childhood movies was Hook. I fell in love with that movie when I was eight years old, and around age 14 I never watched my copy again. I wasn’t going to watch a movie that silly. I was 14. I knew better than to watch stupid kids’ stories.

Then I watched it again last night because gf wanted to scroll through Netflix’s holiday film list and we both loved that movie when we were kids. So what the hell. Happy Festivus.

I felt as if I was seeing it for the first time. This wasn't a matter of nostalgia, some simple reawakening of the child in me as a very tough, stressful year ends in a more hopeful position. 

We understand how good a piece of art is because of what we see playing before us, which is a matter of our own vision as much as what's on the screen. 

When I was eight years old, I was enthralled by movies more than I understood them, but I was beginning to develop a sense of how to analyze them, learning about how films were made. To me as a kid, that was just as magical as the stories movies told themselves. 

But when I was a teenager, I wanted films to be serious. Explicitly so. My comedies would be ridiculous stories, but they’d still be about real people. My dramas would deal with heavy, powerful, weighty topics. My action movies would be violent spectacle. And my sci-fi films would be about austere, challenging intellectual ideas. 

Quite a self-serious little shit I was. When I think about how I acted and thought about art when I was 14, I realize that I sound a lot like Larry Correia asking for simple, straightforward stories that are explicitly what they say on the cover. 

I’m reading Phil Sandifer’s Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, his essay collection about and inspired by the Hugo Awards fiasco of 2015 and the neo-fascists who led it. Reading again Correia’s and Brad Torgersen’s declare how much they love simple art with no complex ideas, I shudder at what might have been.

Because I didn't think exactly like Correia and Torgersen when I was 14, but I see how I could have gotten to a point of view like theirs, from how I thought then. I’m very glad I had better influences, and more ethical people around me. But if I hadn't . . . 

That’s part of what drew me to Beauty of Their Weapons as an unfolding essay project on Phil’s website, and now as a collection. That juvenile love of weaponry and violence for its sheer spectacle alone is a place my self-serious attitude could have taken me. Because it’s an attitude that permits only one way of seeing the world: my own.

Now that I’m more accustomed to understanding the world in terms of stories and styles of narrative, whole new dimensions of Steven Spielberg's beautiful work of whimsy open up.

Hook is the story of a man from a movie about Wall Street workaholism destroying his family discovering that he used to be from a neo-Victorian boy’s own adventure story. He has to remember the rules of his world if he's going to act properly in it.

But he isn't going to be as he was before he left, precisely because he left and spent so much time in a social realist drama. He’s going to take the idealism of the beautiful (if problematic*) world of his adventure stories and apply it to his own life in a realist world, and he’ll be a better, more ethical person for it. 

* All the usual terrifying tropes of Victorian children’s adventure literature appear. Peter’s leaving Neverland is explicitly linked with awakening sexuality, and he imprints on a girl who was raised as his sister, who actually becomes his wife and mother to his children. Tinkerbell is reduced to a literal manic pixie dream-girl in love with Peter Pan. 

That idealism will let him overcome the inevitable tragedy of his family falling apart through his own self-centred behaviour and stressed attitudes. It’ll let him deal with life, not as a problem, but as an adventure. You’re simply able to have fun in your life.

Yeah, it's an idealism that comes from a world where you can fend off sword-wielding bearded, smelly men with egg cannons and slapstick comedy. That's because Robin Williams is in a boy’s own adventure novel and not an actual 18th century pirate attack.

Robin Williams. He’s another one of those elements from childhood that have a special place in my thoughts. He was in so many fantastic, creative, and weird films during my childhood and teenage years that I have a visceral emotional attachment to many of his performances, and his character.

And in a movie so meticulously constructed as Hook,
Spielberg still couldn't use a take where Peter's son
actually looked in the right direction.

I used to read about how distraught people were when Rudolph Valentino died. They had become so attached to his persona through his charismatic cinema performances that some even killed themselves in grief. 

We don't respond to cinema with such obsessive investment anymore (at least not most of us). We’ve learned to distance ourselves from our cinematic experiences. For our own good. But cinema still has this power, even though it doesn’t swamp us anymore.

I wondered if I could enjoy Williams' performances without being haunted by the terrible circumstances of his death. Thankfully, that story held its own, and I could see Robin in the present of that wondrous film.

You can grow old, but the movies will preserve you in time. Neverland is a cinema screen.

Alienating Labour II: What Else Should We Expect If We Teach Like This? Jamming, 21/08/2015

Continued from last post . . . I think the humanities suffered the most from the inflationary expansion of class sizes in universities. In the sciences (and this includes the social sciences) early undergraduate classes teach you about the basic concepts and the history of the discipline. 

But they also teach you mathematical, statistical, laboratory, and real-world research techniques that very clearly require years of practice and expertise before you can do them properly. In the humanities, we only teach concepts as simple, technical terms (usually ending in -ism and defined in two sentences) designed to be easily memorized by rote and spewed back on the exam and in papers we expect to be written at 1.30am the day before deadline. 

Deep, nuanced education is tough in classes this huge.

It’s a function of the time crunch. As classes get bigger, professors have less and less time to spend with more and more students. So depth of analysis has to be sacrificed to maintain the breadth to give students the sense that they’ve learned any content at all. This approach is so widespread, it's become an institutionalized norm. I used to get funny looks from colleagues and superiors for even suggesting that there should be better ways to teach our material.

“Why would you bother? They’re just first-years!”

I saw so many undergrad textbooks when I taught philosophy that included, for example, introductions to Descartes as three-page excerpts from the Meditations that were meant to be taught in a single hour. Expertise in humanities disciplines requires throwing out these simple definitions to examine the ideas, the entire books that developed them, and their histories. 

Humanities disciplines don’t teach our research techniques at low-intensity undergrad levels because they don't have agreed-upon pablum definitions like Dualism or Utilitarianism. So someone who only gets a basic training in the humanities never gets the opportunity to examine the disciplines’ content in detail, or even the suggestion that there’s more detail to the tradition. 

When desperate humanities professors defend their departments from budget-slashing administrators as teachers of critical thinking skills and how to understand the complexity of society, their own course content for first and second year often stand against them.

Humanities educators’ condescending approach to humanities education* results in many people understanding complex concepts, thinkers, and traditional superficially at best and completely arse-backwards at worst. A wonderful example appeared in a Twitter fight between two major figures in the online Doctor Who community on one side, and a right-wing Gamergater type on the other.

* Not all of them, of course. I was lucky enough to have encountered many professors in my education who treated students with the respect that their intelligence deserved. I was especially fortunate that my first philosophy teacher, Jim Bradley, and my doctoral supervisor, Barry Allen, were this type of teacher. I was also fortunate to observe many examples of the worse. 

Whatever is valuable in Karl Marx's
writings and research, the atrocities of
the Soviet Union and People's Republic
of China (combined with the popularity
of Friedrich Hayek's powerful anti-
socialist writing in Road to Serfdom)
has made the philosophy irredeemable
in popular North American culture.

Basically, a sarcastic comment about a technical detail in the writings of Georg Hegel** was taken totally seriously. Then @ThalesLives wrote a completely serious post about why Hegel and everything he wrote – and therefore Marx, Marxists, and everything they wrote – was stupid and wrong. Please take a moment, click the link, read it, skip his invective if you want, then come back.

** A standard go-to when you want to crack a joke about over-complicated philosophy.

If my friends B.Rad and Bull Market, two of the biggest Hegel fans I know, read this, I don't blame you for being upset or for laughing so hard that you start hiccuping. @ThalesLives describes Hegel's thinking as entirely and simply defined by the old stereotype of thesis+antithesis=synthesis. 

It's a gross oversimplification of Hegel’s actual concepts and logical ideas, and he cites the authority of a single professor for the rightness of his argument.

Now, he does point out a solid problem with Hegel’s legacy as a thinker, which is that he designed his system of logic to be the philosophical framework of the entire historical and conceptual development of all human science. And it never bloody worked. 

That’s a problem that a lot of philosophy researchers have grappled with in a lot of books that, given what I currently know about him, I don't think @ThalesLives has read. Now, I haven’t read them either, but that problem isn't really what I'm interested in for my own work. And if I've sounded unfairly dismissive about this in the past, well, I’m sorry and I’ve learned my lesson.

So we have here, at least so it appears from his post and his dialogue with Phil and Jack, a textbook*** case of someone who has taken an oversimplified (mis)understanding of an incredibly complex thinker and tradition as a clear and obvious truth. It illustrates very well how humanities education has institutionally fallen down on the job, teaching dogmatic misconceptions instead of how to think.

*** Hehe.

Because the truth is, humanities education has it backwards. The discipline teaches simplified versions of its content at lower levels, which makes people believe that they understand some of history's most complex thinkers with a few definitions, a three-page excerpt, and a chat with a prof.

Humanities education should concentrate on its content as examples to teach critical thinking, argumentation, and interpretation. How, for example, to juxtapose and relate an idea or a subtle hint from one text with an explicit argument from the same author to see what strange new ideas we can generate. How to expand that idea into other ideas and practical implications, understanding what a concept permits us to think and what it obscures.

So we can end up, even with a thinker like Marx who's been the subject of forests worth of books and articles, like Jameson building an interesting use of his ideas that had never quite been discussed in his context before. What that idea is will come tomorrow or Monday.

That’s how we’d understand humanities expertise if it were taught properly in the first place. . . . To be continued.

Into the Mystic I: I Will Follow, Research Time, 13/06/2015

My last few posts should just be called ‘riffing on things Phil Sandifer exposed me to.’ I consider him a pioneer in the new progressive direction in philosophy and critical writing to escape the compromised and moribund networks of the university system, so I don’t mind admitting that I think he does valuable work worth talking about.

In this case, I’m referring to an interview he did with Vox Day, whose birth name is Theodore Beale. Phil and Vox got into a dust-up this Winter over Vox’s organized hijacking of the Hugo Award nomination procedures, in which Vox became the leader of a group of sci-fi fans who wanted to use an organizing campaign to force works that expressed socially progressive values and ideas out of the awards’ limelight.

That mess having passed, Phil and Vox decided to sit down and talk with each other, perhaps as an act of anthropological entertainment. They have very different political, artistic, and religious beliefs, and this meeting of brutally opposed minds was just as entertaining as I thought it would be. Though I haven’t yet had time to listen to the after-show podcast. 

They had a discussion about a book of the other’s choosing: Phil had Vox read Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, and Vox had Phil read John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them. Wright’s book is a riff on Narnia with what would appear to be blatantly transparent Christian imagery – for example, the protagonist’s character arc is his grappling with doubt, and his name is Tommy, literally a doubting Thomas.

I should warn you, though, that discussing the books will involve

SPOILERS

for each of them. Both books, in their narratives, involve the protagonists taking violent actions for no reason other than a talking cat tells them to. The Wasp Factory’s Frank turns out to have experienced a mental breakdown and a series of complicated delusions about a magical system that he had access to. Frank’s mental breakdown was premised on a lie, so the cat that told him to kill people was a hallucination or some more subtle expression of mental instability and derangement. 

Wright’s book featured a talking cat that is literally the voice of God. Just like Aslan in the Narnia books, Tybalt the cat orders Tommy to kill him because his death is the only way to transform Tommy’s sword into the superweapon of fire necessary to defeat the Satanic cultists who are the villains of One Bright Star. 

Phil and Vox pushed each other on the reliability of mystic visions: How can we be sure that our talking cats are saying the right thing, when they keep telling us to do terrible violent actions?

Vox gives the disappointing reply that seems depressingly common in fundamentalist Christian discourse: the cat talks with the voice of God, so we do what it says because the proper, moral role of humans is to submit to God and follow His orders. His and many others’ Christianity is about following the orders of God, that to be a Christian is to become an instrument of God.

It’s a very totalitarian take on religion. God as Leader.

This is the problem of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: when we hear voices ordering us to do horrible things like murder your only son, if you truly believe that this is the voice of God, then you do it without question. Phil can’t get behind this intensity of submissive faith, neither can Banks, and neither can I. Prophecy is not possible.

This whole problem is why I have such a closer bond with the ideas of Jewish thought about God. Humans should love God, and thank God for the nice things that happen to us, and also the difficult things that we go through because they’re opportunities to learn and grow stronger. 

But those terrible events in our lives – the death of parents, periods of poverty, the death of children – are also times where it’s legitimate to yell at God, and demand that God get his ass down here and explain himself. That’s the lesson of Jacob’s wrestling match with God. We don’t just meekly accept the will of God; we demand that God justify himself to us. 

Even though my next big philosophy writing project, Utopias, won’t involve any deep studies of religion and religious belief, parallels will be there, and I think they’re instructive. The mind-set of the prophet expresses the paradoxical nature of the ideologue: to act so that your actions express will universally. To be continued . . . 

Editor's Note – I just finished listening to the post-interview podcast post-game with Phil Sandifer, Jack Graham, James Murphy, and Kevin Burns, and it ended with a joke about Abraham and Isaac. Quite cheeky.

How Could Anyone Think Differently Than Me When I've Never Met One? Advocate, 23/04/2015

I created the Advocate category of post so I'd have a serious-sounding label when I discussed serious issues. These would be problems on the level of the Syrian-Iraqi war,* the politics of modern anti-Semitism, and the Ukrainian civil war. Now, I'm using this label to talk about a group of cultural conservative nerds who have organized a campaign to hijack the prestigious Hugo awards for science-fiction literature. 

* Can we just start calling it the Third World War? In terms of geographic area, it’s big enough to qualify, with utter chaos in Libya, along with the war’s major front, the collision of anti-Assad insurgents with his Iranian-backed government, alongside Kurdish and Iraqi government forces fighting Islamic State. As well, there’s the desperate and rather clueless American and Canadian involvement in the Syrian-Iraqi front as bombing forces. I think in future, I’ll just refer to this conflict as the Third World War. 

Someone has different morals that challenge the universal
validity of mine? Maybe I should call the Waaaah-mbulance.

I know it doesn’t have quite the same life-and-death, civilization-defining stakes, but it’s a grassroots organized expression of a political movement in my own culture to silence and destroy the social and personal voices of, basically, anyone who isn't a relatively wealthy white male Christian. It’s a political movement that controls much of the United States government, and which has a powerful hold on the Canadian state as well. Its violence is slow and creeping, and so more difficult to notice, but it’s still a war.

Phil Sandifer has already made the definitive statement on the Sad and Rabid Puppies’ hijacking of the Hugo Awards. You should definitely read that. But read it after you finish reading my post, because his essay is a good 20 minutes. 

Phil describes the Sad and Rabid Puppies as expressing a modern fascist ideology and aesthetic for the culture of early 21st century America. It's an analysis that speaks to my own concerns as I work on the Utopias project about the dangers of organizing a political movement to forge an ideal form of society. Any such movement is inherently authoritarian, its reach penetrating every aspect of every individual’s life to maintain each member’s perfect and total conformity to the ideal.

It’s the politics of the end of history, the final perfect form of humanity that, once achieved, must not change because any deviation would be a corruption. This describes the politics of Rabid Puppies leader Vox Day pretty decently.

The injustice of this category of ideology, and the singular horror of Vox Day’s eugenic Christian version, is addressed quite well in Phil’s essay. I want to discuss a side issue that came up in the comments to Phil’s essay, which has more to do with the generally conservative Sad Puppies.

Space battles are fun and war stories are interesting,
but sci-fi literature can accomplish much more than
war story after war story.

The Rabid Puppies are a group of virulent gamergaters that the radical feudalist and eugenicist Christian sci-fi author, editor, and publisher Vox Day organized this year, which successfully placed a slate of poorly written politically conservative military sci-fi in the bulk of the literary nomination categories of the Hugo Awards. This group only organized over 2014. The Sad Puppies are a group of less insane social conservatives led by Brad Torgerson and Larry Correia that has been trying and failing to organize sufficient numbers for their slate of poorly written right-wing military sci-fi for the last three years. 

The Puppies slates are essentially a group that had to organize to get their choices past the popular preferences of dedicated WorldCon members onto the nomination papers. Torgerson himself commented on Phil's essay that he can't believe that works with socially progressive themes would have dominated the Hugo nominations without an organized voting slate among progressive minded people and self-identified Social Justice Warriors™. It’s just that the leftists don’t admit it. Torgerson writes:

“Mr. Sandifer, if you truly believe that a book like ANCILLARY JUSTICE or a story like ‘The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere’ did not benefit from a tremendous groundswell of affirmative-action-mindedness, you're not paying attention. Please phone me when you're interesting in discussing diversity beyond a skin-deep level. Quote Larry Niven: there are minds which think as well as yours, just differently.”

Of course, the reason we don't admit it is because there is no such organized voting block of progressives (Happy Kittens, perhaps?). A focus on more diverse characters and complex storylines and worlds creates more interesting artworks with more potential for artistic achievement. 

Even when I do think of war movies, anti-war movies
that shy away from the glorification of battle tend to be
better than enthusiastic revelling in the battlefield. I
always think of John Wayne's The Green Berets as the
worst offender of a movie that's so jingoistic that I
can't sit through it. Good art provokes thought and
critique, and reinforcing cultural prejudices gets in
the way of solid art.

Yet Torgerson, the aggrieved conservative, does not believe that a popular audience genuinely finds work with socially progressive themes superior. I wonder how much of this attitude is a result of simply not having anyone in his social circles with different political beliefs. If you don’t know anyone with different beliefs, then you'll have trouble understanding how people could hold those beliefs.

It is very easy for people to take their beliefs about how the world is to be self-evident. It’s how political extremism grows, through insularity and a lack of questioning. Being surrounded by people who mirror your own beliefs makes you think that there's no sensible alternative way to think or live. 

Such a social situation is horribly dangerous, because the reaction of such a sheltered person to meeting, at last, a different person is shocking and disturbing. You feel under threat by the existence of difference alone, which is a dangerous attitude to hold in a society where there is any political, cultural, or moral difference at all. 

Beyond this, when your own social world as a person contains such remarkable moral unity, you can easily come to believe that the larger world has the same character as your small world. Your small world seems the size of the whole world. So not only can you easily become afraid of difference, but you can’t even conceive of difference. 

The most reasonable explanation for the existence of widespread difference, if difference intrudes upon your insular small world, is not that the general population differs from your opinion and you’re actually a minority. It's that the different one is an insidious minority disturbing the self-evident truths that the majority, along with you, must know.

Torgerson accuses the left of being such a community, a small insular world whose members can't conceive of anyone different from them. Yet the conservatives are the ones who actually had to organize a hijack on their own behalf. 

The End of a Beautiful First Chapter, Jamming, 10/02/2015

I’ll take a day’s break from my talk about my theatre projects for a eulogy of a sort. Most of my readers probably know this already (because I got a lot of my readers through that community), but TARDIS Eruditorum finished yesterday.

It's August 23rd, 2014.

I’m happy to say that I was part of a relatively privileged group of people as we approached the end as well. Some context as to what this privilege is. TARDIS Eruditorum is a project of Phil Sandifer, a former university academic specializing in literature and media studies, and a massive Doctor Who fan. It’s the first notable exercise in popular culture studies of a psychochronography, a cultural and personal walk through the development of, in this case, Doctor Who.

TARDIS Eruditorum covered every broadcast television story of Doctor Who, most of the notable novels and major audio releases in the Wilderness Years that pushed Doctor Who’s overall narrative forward, various bits of ancillary material, and cultural touchstones, influences, and centres of gravity for each era. At an average of three posts per week, the entire project took four years to unfold, from mid-January 2011 to mid-February 2015. 

Phil also articulated some fascinating conceptual, political, and philosophical agendas through TARDIS Eruditorum. He understood Doctor Who literally as a quasi-sentient meta-fiction, a cultural body with something like a mind of its own, pushing itself forward to work through its flaws and adapt itself to the changing demands of its different times. 

Regeneration to solve current problems, the side effect of which is creating new problems that would require future regeneration.* Phil called this material social progress. He also called it alchemy, the transformation of the material world through conceptual work. In my understanding of my own discipline, this is also what philosophy itself is for.

* Phil never touched on this particular notion, but this is also the vision of social and philosophical progress that John Dewey developed, and that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari carried on and developed further. 

Phil's depiction of Katy Manning's Jo Grant, as played
by William Blake's Enitharmon.

Phil tried some strange experimental posts over the years when he felt the circumstances demanded it. TARDIS Eruditorum wasn’t a review blog in the conventional sense. It was about mining each given story for an idea that would illuminate what Doctor Who was at the time and what it could teach us about its time’s cultural material problems. 

His post on The Three Doctors was an extended poetic reflection of William Blake’s characters and mythical concepts through the characters and narrative beats of that story. His post on Logopolis was a choose-your-own adventure romp through allegorical images drawn from the Tarot and Kabbalah. His post on the Interference two-part novel was a multi-coloured cut-up. His post on Human Nature the television story by Paul Cornell played with strikeouts to show how the future and the past haunted each other. His post on the 1996 TV-movie was combined with a meditation on the inadequacy of our art to deal with the violence of the world, as its publication date fell only days after the Sandy Hook shooting, a culturally traumatizing event in Phil’s lifelong home of Newtown.

The Matt Smith era offered an opportunity for an extended experiment. Since River Song’s life narrative appears in a mixed-up order on Doctor Who, Phil presented the posts on her stories similarly out of order. They weren’t in River’s own narrative order, but an order that reflected philosophical parallels between the substituted stories, or introducing framework concepts earlier than they appeared in their most refined form.

Instead of Silence in the Library, Phil posted The Name of the Doctor, whose meditation on death suited the strange tone of River’s narrative in her first story, which simultaneously looked forward to her future on the show while depicting her death. 

An old man with a twinkle in his eye.

For The Time of Angels, Phil posted The Time of the Doctor, which allowed him to explicitly introduce the central ethical concept of Steven Moffat’s take on Doctor Who: narrative substitution. With time travel, you can literally rewrite your past, overcome the constraints of established continuity or canon, turn an inevitable disaster into a lucky victory. Narrative substitution is how the Doctor makes the world better, and we can understand the entire Smith era’s use of it by examining it in its purest form in his last story.

For The Pandorica Opens, he posted A Good Man Goes to War, where Moffat used narrative substitution to tell an explicitly feminist story. The episode is set up to be a revenge story in the name of the refrigerated Amy, but River interrupts it to set up a tableau where the Pond family as a whole can know each other and heal together.**

** That healing happens entirely offscreen, because River as a character is composed almost entirely on the margins. She exists more through implications in our imaginations than on television itself. She’s designed to haunt the narrative.

The season six finale, The Wedding of River Song, replaced the premiere, The Impossible Astronaut, to show the weaknesses of designing a season where the epic scale of the finale occurs at the premiere, and showcase that episode’s central problem, concentrating on the minutiae of how the Doctor escapes his apparent death instead of the character development involved in the fakeout.

Pictured, the Pond family.

Let’s Kill Hitler filled the space of A Good Man Goes to War to complete Phil’s account of Moffat’s profoundly feminist story: his redemptive reading interpreted this deservedly-maligned episode as the story of a woman twisted by trauma and violence being healed through the intervention of a mother’s love and the female space of the TARDIS. The Impossible Astronaut replaced Let’s Kill Hitler’s place in the episode order as an endpoint to his redemptive reading of season six’s troubled production.

Angels Take Manhattan replaced the season six finale, forecasting the end of the Pond family’s story, since their five episodes in season seven served more as an epilogue to a narrative whose most important arc was in season six itself. 

The place in season seven where Amy and Rory left the show saw Phil post on The Time of Angels, an essay that concentrated on how all the core ideas of the Moffat era appear there in raw, shadowy, incomplete form. Only after going through the explicit developments of the Pond family’s arc could we see all that this haunting story suggested.

The Pandorica Opens post came in the place of The Name of the Doctor, a personal essay about how this story, with its intimate scale and metafictional core concepts, inspired Phil to start the TARDIS Eruditorum in the first place. An account of the project’s beginning as it came to an end. 

And the last post was Silence in the Library, possibly the weirdest post in the entire project. It didn’t discuss the story as much as it riffed on a single moment, when the Doctor tells the approaching carnivorous shadows that, as they’re in the galaxy’s biggest library, they should see who they’re dealing with by looking him up. They retreat.

Sydney Newman, the Canadian Jew who created
Doctor Who.

What they read is apparently Phil’s 100,000 word long book on the production history of Doctor Who, which I got to read one chapter at a time over the last six months as he finished rough drafts. It was my reward for giving him $40 during his Kickstarter project.

It was reward enough for me. I discovered TARDIS Eruditorum in mid-July 2011, through a link from the AV Club’s essay on The Mind Robber. He had reached Jon Pertwee’s first season. I was up until three am for the next week reading his back posts, enchanted with the power of his mind, the skill of his insights, and the depth and breadth of his scholarship.

Phil is, like me, an ex-academic forging a new path as a writer and professional. We’re both on very different courses, though we’re strangely similar in many ways. We’re both in love-of-our-lives relationships with health care workers who, it would seem, are more practical in a worldly sense than either of us would be. But Phil was an inspiration to me to find a new path in life when the one I had chosen (the one to which I had dedicated many of my best years so far) was breaking down.

He also showed me that a path outside the university didn’t mean abandoning my intellectual work. If anything, it could free you to produce work that was ultimately more innovative and valuable. Phil was my primary inspiration to start this blog, my most successful aesthetically and in readership. 

As well, he gave me a new way to engage with the hero who had inspired me since I was a small child to be the best person I could be, never ashamed of my intelligence or my strangeness. So for all that, I want to thank you Phil Sandifer, for the TARDIS Eruditorum, and for everything.