Epilogues, Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time, Reviews, 01/01/2018

You can understand Twice Upon a Time as a profound disappointment. I don’t want to, but you can make a very clear case that it is.

An adventure that wasn’t really an adventure, fighting a threat that was actually unthreatening, shoehorning such an obtuse level of fanwank as material from a missing* episode and the most stealth cosplay of Mark Gatiss’ life.

Multi-Doctor stories happening at Xmas provokes very particular
expectations today, all of which should be overcome and outgrown
if Doctor Who is going to progress and continue. Staleness is
something the show can never let itself accept, or it'll be dead in
the water even if the ratings are incredible.

* Albiet fucking legendary.

Turning Expectations Around

By about the end of Twice Upon a Time, I realized that Stephen Moffat had written the anti Xmas Special. I like to think of it as one last, light-hearted experiment in Doctor Who writing before Moffat moves on from the show after nearly 15 years.

So what, judging by each year’s Xmas Special in 21st century Doctor Who, are the typical expectations? Primarily, I’d have to say an epic scale. They’re usually massive in scale or intensity. Sometimes, they contain major narrative developments for the show – regenerations, companion introductions, companion departures, companion re-introductions.

The Xmas Special model – huge, exciting battles against intense evils, and all the drama and pathos that implies – was a creation of Russell T Davies. Drama and pathos is what he does.

By the end of the relatively short Davies years, his pathos was overpowering to the point of frustration. The 20 minute outro to The End of Time, where David Tennant’s Doctor mysteriously appears to all his old companions as he holds off regeneration, remains excruciating to watch without poking fun at it.

Moffat has dialled down the reliance on pathos in Doctor Who. He’s done it with narrative and continuity events like restoring Gallifrey so the Doctor can breathe as a character again. He’s also done it with a new approach to the show.

In the book version of this essay, I think I'll expand on what Twice
Upon a Time has to say about the nature of memory, and integrate
that more smoothly with the ideas in the rest of the essay. Not yet
sure how that will work, but I'll figure something out this year.

A Complex, Strange Brain

Moffat’s Doctor Who is more cerebral – It's still a family sci-fi anthology adventure show, of course. Its stories tend to conceptual complexity, more dense continuity, and pushing what Doctor Who stories can do.

Cerebral approaches to narrative have their advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that the show has engaged in more complicated narratives in individual episodes and over whole seasons or more.

A terrible disadvantage is that the show has engaged in more complicated narratives in individual episodes and over whole seasons or more. For every triumph like Silence in the Library, The Impossible Astronaut, or Extremis, there are shit-shows like Let’s Kill Hitler or The Lie of the Land** where all the conceptual, character, and narrative elements collapse.

** Yes, I know Toby Whithouse wrote this episode, not Moffat. But I mention this because the production schedule of the 2017 season meant that Whithouse got the call to finish Moffat’s story – and it was obvious from his episode that he understood none of it.

Moffat’s ideals for building Doctor Who stories and narratives take advantage of the possibilities for more dense, detailed engagements with television in the 2010s. Fans of the show benefit from easy repeat viewing, returns to the show on DVD and streaming platforms.

I did truly love Capaldi's Doctor – the GF liked his take on the character
much better than Matt Smith's. When Capaldi's Doctor is at his best, I
do agree. Even though we've come to expect a change in Doctors to
accompany a change of creative producers, there's nothing necessary
to that, and we shouldn't expect it as a matter of course. But it warmed
my heart a little when Capaldi announced his departure after hearing
of Chibnall's preference for Jodie Whittaker to play the next Doctor.

Doctor Who is no longer something broadcast once or twice and forgotten.*** It’s something that can be studied.

*** Or erased.

I think this might be why – in addition to inconsistent scheduling and the 2016 gap year – Doctor Who’s domestic broadcast ratings have fallen so sharply this season. It’s tougher to follow the show as a casual viewer. You’re now going to understand the full depth of what’s happening if you watch Doctor Who in the same way that you watch Strictly Come Dancing.

It’s why I actually have high hopes for the Chris Chibnall years – Broadchurch showed his skills at keeping a tight narrative together, as well as how much he’s grown as a writer and producer since his early years on the sometimes brilliant sometimes horrid Torchwood.

Twisting Conventions Until They Explode

Yes, Moffat has shifted Doctor Who’s tone, for the most part, away from overt pathos to a more multifaceted emotional storytelling. But the Xmas Special has resisted this most powerfully.

An Xmas Special is, by its nature, event television, as I said. Moffat’s best Xmas episodes have been big event stories – regenerations like Time of the Doctor or major character events like The Snowmen or The Husbands of River Song. When he’s done an Xmas Special simply because it’s Xmas – Last Christmas or The Return of Doctor Mysterio – they stink.

I want to clear something up. Yes, Moffat established that Gallifreyans
consider gender to be totally fluid, so it's weird to find Bradley's Doctor
making such old-fashioned comments about gender. But that's where
Moffat's humour gets meta-fictional. Moffat's multi-Doctor stories
involve as much commentary on different eras of Doctor Who the
television series as commentary on the characters themselves.

So what made Twice Upon a Time an anti Xmas Special? Two things. Each of which constitutes

SPOILERS

It openly turned the epic expectations of Xmas Specials, regeneration stories, and multi-Doctor stories upside down. First, look at the storyline.

We have Doctors meeting through crossed wires of time tracks or some other temporal technobabble. The first major escalation of the adventure is Capaldi’s confrontational speech to Testimony – it’s exactly as we expect from such an adventure up against creepy CGI glass.

But all those expectations of epic battles are deflated when the Doctor discovers the central motive of Testimony – they really are just time-jumping archivist historians. Their intentions are good and they’re no threat to anyone.

Second, look at the relationship between David Bradley’s Doctor and the current cast. There’s a little meta-fictional joking – the “smacked bottom” joke, Bradley’s horrified reaction to Capaldi’s cyber-goth TARDIS interior, his and Captain LS’ stunned reaction to Bill’s homosexuality. All as we expect from Moffat going meta.

But the point of Bradley’s appearance, thematically, is emotional and ethical. It has nothing to do with plot or transformation of continuity, like the last multi-Doctor story Day of the Doctor.

Essentially, Twice Upon a Time is an hour-long epilogue to The Doctor
Falls. Think about how you'd engage with Capaldi's last season on a
rewatch – Twice Upon a Time would follow The Doctor Falls within
minutes or at least a day or so. With the stories separated by months,
it's tough to see the connections between the stories. It's one way that
Moffat's method of writing Doctor Who has alienated the casual
audience that dominates its domestic viewership.

Capaldi’s Doctor wants to give up on regeneration because he’s weary, and sees his life as futile. That was the crushing conclusion to The Doctor Falls. He’d spent nearly a thousand years guiding the Master to become at least a joyful traveller instead of a super-villain. But he saw only betrayal.

The Master’s redemption in that story fit with the theme, established in Extremis, that the most profound good is unwitnessed and never remembered. We saw the Master’s redemption on those terms, but the Doctor never did. So he kept trying to refuse regeneration, feeling that all his effort in the world was wasted.

Bradley’s Doctor offered Capaldi’s a contrast that showed him what his nihilism amounted to – fear. Bradley’s Doctor was refusing to regenerate because he’d never transformed before – he was afraid of remixing his personality. It was an immature fear, the fear of a very young, almost childish man – I don’t want to grow up.

It contributed to showing Capaldi’s Doctor what it meant to regenerate – to grow, transform, and change. This time, more radically than he had ever before.

Memoriam

Testimony’s mission demonstrated the importance of memory and knowledge, while the story also made a problem of whether memory was all you really needed to constitute a person. Was this story’s Bill really Bill because she was made from her memories?

Mark Gatiss leaves Doctor Who having achieved all of what his inner
fan-child has wanted for most of his life, probably. He got to write an
epochal Ice Warriors story, and playing Captain Archibald was the
closest he could get himself to playing Brigadier Lethbridge-
Stewart in the main show itself.

For the sake of the story, it ultimately didn’t matter, because Testimony’s role in Twice Upon a Time was to provide Capaldi’s Doctor with some closure as he departed. They restored his memories of Clara, gave him a chance to say something like a real goodbye to his friends, and ultimately made what could have been the most irritating piece of obscurantist fanwank in Moffat’s entire tenure meaningful.

That last moment was – as Testimony and the two Doctors both accomplished – giving Captain Archibald Lethbridge-Stewart enough of a sense of hope that he wasn’t really to shoot the wounded German soldier facing him in the crater.

There was a telltale shot in that last Ypres sequence, a closeup of Mark Gatiss’ thumb refusing to pull back the safety catch of his pistol. It lasted just long enough for him to hear the carols of the Christmas Truce – the one moment of hope in all the terror of the First World War.

As Bradley’s Doctor said, the Christmas Truce was a moment that demonstrated what it truly means to be a “Doctor of war.” Someone whose influence can replace nihilism with hope. Thanks to this feeling of hope that shattered Captain Lethbridge-Stewart’s, the Doctor’s old friend Alastair would have grown up with his grandfather.

Celebrating that hope – a feeling that we definitely need to motivate us through what will be more coming terror and violence in 2018 – is what Doctor Who is ultimately about, at its best. By overturning the expectations of an Xmas Special of epic battles and pathos, Stephen Moffat gave us one last moment of Doctor Who at its most inspirational before the new stories begin.

See you in the Autumn.

Tainted Left IV: History Without Logic, Research Time, 22/07/2016

Today is a late post simply because I came home from work so tired yesterday that I could only watch some TV with GF and go to sleep. Today, I’m feeling a little better, but I still woke up in the middle of a dream.

I was wandering around a huge bookstore looking for their sci-fi section. But all they had were rack on rack of too-mainstream pablum, enormous technical cartography books (one of which was written by Ernob Bal, a name too similar to an old friend), and expensive history hardcovers whose texts were scrapbooked handwritten notes recollecting the events themselves. Even from hundreds or thousands of years ago.

And the bookstore’s mascot was a two-foot-tall yellow slug with the personality of a puppy. I have weird dreams. Anyway, what about history?

Could any coherent law of historical development have
predicted any of this? Really?

Continued from last post . . . So what is the antidote to this too-simple version of history as having a necessary logic? The appeal of that philosophy is that it offers us a simple science of human history. 

The logic of contradiction and progressive reconciliation gives us a basic law by which we can understand humanity’s development. The problem is that the real events of history develop differently than that simple law would show. History is contingent, the world a cobbled-together assemblage of conflict, peace, and general confusion.

Given last night’s formal ascension of Donald Trump to the top of America’s Republican Presidential ticket, I don’t think anyone in our age can have any doubt that history has no fundamental or predictable order. I think no one would have said 20 years ago that America would seriously face the possibility of a spectacular dictatorship within a generation. But here we are.

When you read Althusser as a theorist about the contingent nature of history, he draws on different examples than I can, of course. He was writing in the early 1960s from the position of a French Communist activist and researcher. He also died in 1990.

So he was speaking to what was, at the time, the primary historical event for the position of Communist Party members in Western Europe – the Russian Revolution. Because according to all the simple laws of history’s logic that marxist activists embraced at the time, it shouldn’t have happened.

Trump's style of spectacular leadership
actually has its closest precedents in the
post-communist dictatorships of
central Asia. Trump has a personality
quite likely to build a giant gold statue
of himself that rotates to face the sun.
Like this statue of Turkmenistan
dictator Saparmarat Niyazov.

The first communist revolution was supposed to have come in an advanced industrial state, where capitalism had advanced to such a point that its own logical contradictions couldn’t stand together anymore. Yet the first successful revolution was in Russia, a mostly rural country whose society in 1917 still operated more like feudalism.

Althusser derives his new theory of contingent history from this example, as the result of decades of reflection in the marxist community about its meaning. The first starts with Lenin himself, with his concept of “the weakest link.”

Basically, revolution happens not where logic says it must, but where circumstances say it can. A communist revolution isn’t a collision of logical premises, but of material conflicts. Communist revolution in the real world didn’t find its potential in any direct element of capitalist industry. Its key condition had to do with the world’s greatest conflict of imperialist politics: the First World War.

The war turned the social conflicts of the participating countries up to a terrifying intensity. The Russian situation was the most vulnerable, least able to handle such intense social destabilization.

The war fuelled democratic political pressure against the Czarist system – the Russian people were suffering terribly in the war, and everyone knew it was a battle of imperialism. 

With more knowledge about the wider world coming to people, even uneducated people, from the industrialized societies of Europe, they knew what they were missing out on. And people knew the imperial elite kept them from that kind of prosperity because it would mean giving up their immense wealth.

There was also a conspiracy of the Russian aristocracy against the monarchy at the same time, again exacerbated by the war. These anti-monarchist aristocrats saw the economic devastation the First World War was wreaking, and were turning against the Czar.

Lenin’s own revolutionary organization was also the best organized group of communists in Europe. There was also a lot of groundwork for revolutionary activity in Russia, thanks to the previous attempt in 1905 that failed. These are all contingent conditions that are rooted in the particular situation of that place and time. 

So what does a theory of history that embraces contingency completely even look like? . . . To be continued

Doom Prophets II: A Catalogue of Terror, Research Time, 18/02/2016

Continued from last post . . . Antonio Negri gives a list of apocalyptic prophets at the end of Empire. They may not be purely prophets of doom and death (at least not all of them), but they’re philosophers who articulate the sense that something is ending, and that the end will be terrible.

Why is it valuable for us to go back to the first prophets of modernity’s apocalypse? Because we’re still living through that apocalypse. And people are still driven to monstrous acts by apocalyptic visions. 

Too often I've seen the language of success
masking a dream of domination, that
you can only live well by forcing others
to suffer and die. So you should learn to
love the suffering, pain, and poverty of
others. This ideology of success on the
corpses of others will kill us all. It's
killing us already.

The end of modernity has come, and it was a kind of cultural apocalypse, because so much of Western culture was forged through the ideology of modernity. The secular values of our civilization have been adrift since the First World War, since we could no longer lie to ourselves seriously about the nature of empire.

Western culture needs a vision of peace, universal brotherhood, and the creative power of the people to replace modernity. Because in our century of scrambling, all we’ve done is fall back into old patterns of oligarchy, religious fundamentalism, the cutthroat values of new liberalism, the violent resentment of bullying culture, and a politics of global war.

Maybe if we start looking through the first prophets of modernity’s burnout, we’ll find a path forward. Negri made one list, and I’m modifying it with some additions of my own.

The obvious first one on the list is Friedrich Nietzsche. Most of the time, I concentrate on the productive aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The Nietzsche revival post-1960s. His conception of humanity and life as having as its highest power creativity. 

But Nietzsche was also a profound critic of modernity’s currents of nationalism. You can see this most clearly in his writings that critique the decadence of German culture in an increasingly violent nationalism and anti-Semitism. 

This is a core message of The Case of Wagner and Beyond Good and Evil. The rise of an aesthetics of bombastic, overpowering nationalism and imagery of racial pride started a process where the popular morality of German people eroded and destroyed all that was noble within it.

The irony is that Nietzsche’s notebooks were edited, after his final collapse in 1889, by his virulently nationalist sister Elisabeth to make him into a prophet of the nobility of racism. Which is why Nietzsche needed a revival in the first place.

But the value of his writings for understanding the end of modernity is immense. Nietzsche hits the most profound diagnosis of the self-immolation of modernity’s essential concepts, ideologies, and moral ideas. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, the most
profound philosopher-prophet
of the implosion of Western
modernity.

Where to go from the end gets even trickier than Nietzsche’s difficult and sometimes bizarre writings. Negri discusses Carl Schmitt as a major apocalyptic figure of modernity. And his concept of politics as total war between existentially threatening cultures, peoples, movements, and states is practically a blueprint for the destruction of humanity.

Hell, in the age of nuclear weaponry, it's a blueprint for the destruction of Earth. Still, you’ll probably see some posts about Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political later this year as I dive into the bloodbath. Most important is trying to understand why a person could believe that such a bloodbath would be the only sustainable way forward for Western society.

The experience of the First World War and the vision of human nature that its most insightful survivor expressed seems only to confirm terror and mass destruction as the only way forward after modernity’s promises collapse under their own hypocrisy. 

Ernst Jünger’s work will probably fill that role in the Utopias book, a vision of humanity’s future as blood-drenched machines whose individualities disappear in a mass-movement of violence. A vision that understands itself as noble, which is more terrifying than the vision itself. 

But there are more ambivalent responses to the end of modernity. . . . To Be Continued

Doom Prophets I: Modernity Is Over, Right? Research Time, 17/02/2016

Moe Syzslak called it “weird for the sake of weird.” But back in my academy days, whenever I’d interact with self-identified analytic philosophers, they’d often make fun of ‘post-modernism’ as an idea. Or else outright spit abuse at it.

This is one reason I never entirely warmed to the broad style of analytic philosophy – I could always sense a futile anger in that history of contempt for alternative approaches to writing and thinking. I’d think, “Really? You’re going to get that angry about this?”

I would genuinely like to know if this makes a good
metaphor to explain what postmodernism is. Please
let me know in the comments, or on Twitter.

But the term postmodern, in its very simplest conception, just means that modernity is over. There was once a thing called modernism, modernity, the modern. An approach to the world and life. A particular set of broad presumptions about how humanity and the universe worked.

So the word postmodern means that, whatever those presumptions are, they no longer hold. The world has changed, and it’s made modernity obsolete. 

Like all the traffic signs that remain visible over the waterline of a flooded city. You can see them, you know what they mean, but the roads they’re built to control are five feet below you and you're in a motorboat.

Antonio Negri refers a lot to the postmodern era in Empire and this is exactly what he means every time. Now, he often discusses different aspects of this transition and what’s changed. But if you understand this sense of the term as the most basic, always underlying the more specific explorations, you’ll never scratch your head in any discussion of postmodernism again.

Not as much, anyway.

That transition from modern to postmodern will be a central idea to analyze in my own book Utopias. One image of perfection and progress was shattered in the West. Another had to replace it, but it was going to be a tough battle to work out what that new image would be.

And modernity’s image of social progress was intrinsically corrupt: it depended on the ascendance of a state and a bureaucracy over all of society. More than that, the development of the state was seen in mainstream Western culture as the highest achievement of humanity.

The apologists of imperialism and the European conquest, genocide, and exploitation of foreign peoples weren’t aberrations. Most people excuse the evil actions of their society as grounded in a higher virtue. And they actually believe this higher virtue, because otherwise they’d have to admit that they’re justifying piracy and violence.

You can't turn away from or justify the violence of
your own society and politics when it starts to turn on
yourselves.

So you had John Stuart Mill – who is standard reading in introductory moral philosophy courses – arguing seriously that England had a moral duty to occupy and control India to rise their civilization up to the most advanced culture of the West. People used to believe genuinely in the White Man’s Burden as a real moral mission of Europe.

The First World War was the moment when that moral illusion had to shatter. Of course, no one realized it all at once. But this is what happens when a bunch of states who’ve defined their entire existence through the mission of conquering the world have run out of space.

They have nowhere left to invade but each other. The First World War was when the imperialist states of Europe brought their full military might on each other. Blackadder was right.* For the first time, the powerful industrialized nations of Europe were fighting enemies of comparable technological power.

* "Well, you see, George, I did like it, back in the old days when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns -- even spears made us think twice. The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dry grass."

Stalemate could be the only result. And stalemate with military technology powerful enough to conquer the world and kill millions of people from Africa to India and China had the actual results you'd expect.

Empires of conquest weren’t the leading edge of social progress. They were devastating military machines. The dream was gone because we realized that it masked a nightmare.

And some of the people with the deepest, most terrifying insight into that nightmare were the philosophers who lived in the period surrounding the First World War. They were prophets of modernity’s unmasking, conquest’s betrayal of itself to the conquerors themselves. 

They looked into the face of terror, and had to deal with the fact that it was their own faces. . . . To be continued

Know the Danger of Your Own Times, Research Time, 20/07/2015

You might wonder what exactly I find so interesting in Filippo Marinetti and the Italian Futurists, why I keep writing them, and why I decided that Marinetti’s ideas would make such an interesting focus point for my next book. There are a lot of ways I came to the decision, but here’s one aspect of that, based on what I was reading a little while ago.

Marinetti is describing the sickness of his culture, Italy in the years on either side of the First World War. The moneyed political classes spend most of their time accumulating wealth with little effort, or else arguing in parliament with an insomniac intensity about different versions of laws that all amount to the same oppressive foolishness.

I'm not the first person to say the economic pressures
working people face today are of similar calibre as
during the Great Depression. From a pro-unionization
protest among Walmart employees, December 2014.

The working classes, meanwhile, are put under deeper and heavier stress by an economy where the labour of most people is valued less and less every day. People can’t apply their intelligence to anything creative, socially valuable, or even mentally stimulating and interesting for very long. They have to spend all their energy hustling for enough income that barely covers their basic subsistence. 

His Italy’s mass cultural products are juvenile, pandering entertainment based on cheap jokes and tired stereotypes. So many people’s artistic tastes are decaying into idiocy, while it becomes increasingly difficult to produce and distribute genuinely progressive, radical art. This is despite an explosion of new forms and channels of media.

Described in these terms, the circumstances sound pretty familiar to most of us. Most of us in Western countries find an unstable work environment, where many have to hustle between internships, freelance work, and their actual jobs just to sustain enough income that we can live comfortably. It’s difficult to find the time to contribute to larger projects in society between all the work many of us have to do just to make a decent living.

Marinetti was talking about a society whose unemployment rate was skyrocketing, and where many war veterans returning from the Alpine front found themselves adrift.

Our own cultural products are increasingly fragmented, with many of the most popular things amounting to little more than humour at stereotypes, though I admit I’ve been falling behind some aspects of mainstream entertainment simply because I can’t be bothered to care. Is Duck Dynasty still on TV?

A modern Marinetti, pushing an avant-garde movement across the arts, would probably have a better shot at finding an audience, simply because of the extra reach of the internet. Where the Marinetti of the 1900s wrote plays and manifestos, a Marinetti of the 2010s could write and direct films or web series, and what else is a blog but a space for a constantly updating manifesto.

Political ideas that are not considered absolutely
horrifying were once totally mainstream, to the point
of becoming mundane, so boring that a Royal would
parrot their images.

It’s ridiculous to say that Marinetti’s world is the same as ours. Not only are the actual political systems of the world incredibly different, but even what’s politically conceivable is alien to a 2010s sensibility. I may write tomorrow about some of Marinetti’s Futurist proposals in economics that sound like walking contradictions to a modern ear. But his era and ours share a commonality in important ways.

His people and so many in the modern West face an impasse between a world of conflict, cultural fragmentation, and economic depression, and a world where we’re crawling out of these disasters. The problem is that we can’t tell which path will truly be successful, or which paths will require us to pay prices for our progress that are much too high. 

His was an era of genuine fascism and totalitarianism, after all. Those politics were so mainstream that even royals would play around with the imagery. But we have our own mainstream horrors. It could be the reach of violent religious ideologies so far that people will murder through these imageries in places as random as Chattanooga. Or it’s the sadly successful everyday racism and bigotry of Dylann Roof or the Trump campaign.

There’s a multi-front conflict the size of the First World War ongoing right now, only instead of Europe (for now), it’s across the Middle East. Instead of the French side of the Rhineland, the Italian Alps, the Russian Front, and the Bolshevik-Menshevik civil war, there’s instead the Syrian revolutionary war, the ISIS insurgency, the Houthi uprising, and the Libyan civil war. 

Marinetti is a spectre of that old era that serves as a warning to us. Reading him, you feel his punk spirit. However much he inveighs against his Europe’s radical left for their utopias of perfect equality and material abundance in communist paradise, he’s a utopian with a bizarre vision that can be eerily seductive. A society whose politics and education system are designed to build artistic geniuses who are also heroic warriors dedicated to expand their nation’s empire.

He’s the demonstration that even within the most admirable and exciting ideas, there’s a kernel of political poison that can destroy everything you loved.

Bringing the Brutality, Research Time, 02/06/2015

Storm of Steel had a curious finish. It’s the story of the First World War, of course, and I’ve read many historical accounts of that story. But most of them were historical accounts that focussed on the geopolitics, brief films that depicted the war through more conventional narratives, or through a lens of satire that eventually couldn’t maintain its bite in the light of the war’s final horror.

The best was the first. Ernst Jünger, and the pummelling repetitions of bomb after bomb, shell after shell, after shell after shell after shell.

The first lesson in how to survive a war is not to fight.

Jünger lived this pummelling for nearly four years, and his diaries, adapted into the loose narrative of Storm of Steel, best depict the terror and madness of the entire affair. So here are my thoughts, as I put the book down, of the most striking parts of the work itself and what may become its most important influences as my Utopias manuscript comes together over the following years. 

The last major sequence of Storm of Steel happens during the Ludendorff Offensive, the final German push of the war, a desperate attempt, in 1918, to turn the tide. It was an offensive based on stormtroopers, the most experienced infantry fighters leading a mass charge against British lines. 

The attack had to succeed absolutely in one gesture to avoid being rolled back as soon as the troops stopped moving, which Jünger’s unit did because the Germans’ own artillery wouldn’t stop pounding British positions, even after the German army had occupied them. Although these further details aren’t mentioned in the book, since it’s based only on Jünger’s diaries of the time and place, German supply deliveries couldn’t keep up with the troops’ advance, and mass strikes by merchant navy sailors in Germany itself were crippling the country’s ability to move material to the front.

The human toll from the mass movement of the Ludendorff Offensive was unsustainable if it hadn’t resulted in the immediate and total defeat of the Britain-led alliance. Enormous numbers of German soldiers died in one last, insane rush at all the encampments and artillery stations of the British lines. Jünger takes nearly two full lines of text to list all his friends and comrades who, despite having survived the last four years of brutal war, would be dead by the end of this offensive.

In 1935, General Erich Ludendorff
published Der Totale Krieg, whose genesis
you could see in the gruesome mass suicide
attacks of his army in the First World War.
He had long supported Hitler's nationalism,
having joined him in the 1923 Beer Hall
Putsch. Hitler would continue Ludendorff's
dream to annex almost all of eastern
Europe, expel the native populations,
and settle the land with Germans.

Jünger himself nearly died during the assault, taking his worst wound of the entire war. Over the last four years, he had been lacerated with shrapnel, shot in the leg, had his head grazed by bullets and shrapnel splinters, and shot in the chest already. As he’s jumping over a New Zealander trench, during the German retreat from its counter-attack, he gets his worst wound of the war.

Insanity doesn’t invalidate you from combat. If anything, you have to be crazy to go into this kind of combat, where your entire physical presence is dwarfed by explosions and artillery barrages beyond your control. Jünger describes, after what’s left of his unit reaches the British machine gun dugouts, a Lt. Breyer, calmly striding through the mud and flesh of the battlefield, swinging a riding crop, smoking his pipe, taking the occasional potshot at a retreating British soldier with the rifle he carries slung over his back. 

That’s the more colloquial definition of insanity: behaviour that’s utterly disconnected from your real-world circumstances. Jünger himself eventually embodies a different kind of insanity, the dissolution of his personality into a pure force of will through the trauma of that last push. The push toward enemy lines in which the infantry itself isn’t made of men, but is an organic wave. The soldiers are ground-based shells, a mass meant to overwhelm through their sheer weight and number.

Among the shouts and war cries of the German soldiers before this mass attack is the scream “I don’t care what happens to me anymore!” Individuality disappears from your own conception of who and what you are. 

Jünger himself doesn’t engage in much philosophy throughout the book. The meaning of his images and descriptions comes from the reader trying to make sense of them. They aren’t philosophy themselves, as much as provocations for the reader to start thinking philosophically.

Soldiers throw themselves at the enemy until the enemy is overwhelmed or they can no longer move. After four years of faithful service, this is the culmination of Jünger’s life, and his book. The book was almost never written, because in his last moments as an active duty soldier, he’s almost killed.

Storm of Steel ends on a note of strange
validation: the honour of the Kaiser.

But the drive to destroy appears in his actions again. He doesn’t know how long he was unconscious after falling into the trench he was leaping over, a bullet having blasted into his chest and out through his lung. Each time a fellow soldier picks him up, whether on a stretcher or on his shoulders, he’s soon shot down, sprawling Jünger on the filthy earth again.

As he lies there, his position is surrounded by UK-allied troops. His entire regiment is surrendering around him. Yet he still gets up and gathers a few soldiers to attack a British machine gun nest. He isn’t shot again, though everyone around him falls dead. A German medical officer rolls him in tarpaulin and finally puts him on a horse-drawn cart bound for a field hospital.

He had become the will to destruction itself. And the end of the book comes with his reward. Invalidated for the next few months of hostilities thanks to his wounds, he receives official notice on 22 September 1918 that he’s received the Pour le Mérite medal, the highest honour in the Kaiser’s military.

He was one of its last recipients, and the last living holder of the military version of the award when he died in 1998 at the age of 102.

Scars Etched in History Itself III: The Many Is So Different From the One, Research Time, 27/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . I mean, I think I'm going to try. I’ll at least get some speculations off the ground, say what it isn’t. Even just entertaining to speculate whether it's right to call a civilization or culture traumatized is flirting with the boundary of a world of hurt. 

I say this in general, and as someone who’s also engaging the most influential philosopher of liberal individualism in the last hundred years, Friedrich Hayek. Yes, Hayek, the radical individualist who saw most activity of government that required scientific planning as inherently totalitarian.* 

American peace activists on the run from the soldiers
of their own country.

* I have a friend from my time at McMaster who would advocate for John Rawls, but Rawls never founded a network of think tanks that influenced the fundamental economic policies of almost every major Western political party. Rawls influenced a lot of political philosophers at elite university institutions, but universities have been under fire from the political elite since the 1960s (sometimes literally) for fostering political radicalism.

Hayek articulated what would become the genesis of the new liberal opposition to using the state as a tool for public service and the correction of injustice. The socialist thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries conceived of society as a unified organism, and the state as its driving force. 

This subsumed the good of each individual in a society to the good of society as a whole, and allowed the kind of callous utilitarianism that would, for example, starve a significant portion of a country’s population to feed some segment that was more productive, obedient, or somehow moved along the government’s Five Year Plan better than otherwise. Just as a doctor, with his scientific knowledge of medicine, would cut off a limb or remove a thyroid or a breast to save a life. 

It’s a clearly Stalinist move. And its fundamental justification was the presumption that a society was a whole that subsumed its individual parts, just as an organism is a whole that subsumes its individual parts. 

This isn’t actually how we think anymore because Hayek was right to oppose it – thinking of a society as an individual that subsumes all its citizens into the whole is not how society works at all. 

Sometimes, Bergson had an annoying influence
on his followers, as when Gilles Deleuze, a
major influence on Ecology, Ethics, and the
Future of Humanity, would draw these crude
yet amusing diagrams of massive systematic
machines. 

Scientific knowledge of complex systems now correctly understand them under ecological frameworks of thought, not organismic ones. Systems affect each other as they relate, integrate, and come to depend on each other. All these processes come together in a massive machine, but the machine doesn’t somehow overwrite the purposes of all the individual parts. If it did, the machine itself would break down, because the autonomy of the parts all acting together keep the machine running as it does. 

These machines, whether they’re an ecosystem or a society, have no primal unity in their identity. They’re massive, plural, complex systems. Any stability in them is a product not of carefully planned and regulated activity, but of dynamic tensions that keep a set of flows (they could be matter, energy, information, money, concepts, or some combination of any of them) within a threshold limit. If the threshold is broken – if any processes spin out of control, die out, or begin to overpower the others – then the system flies or falls apart. 

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity explains in more detail how this is the fundamental character of ecological relationships, and explores its implications for how we should understand the systems in which we all live. 

A society is one of these systems that emerge from the dynamic tension of its autonomous parts. So if I’m going to write about social and cultural traumas, they have to be very different in kind from traumas that happen to individual, those involuntary flashes of perception of a horrifying past event. A society has no mind, no self-consciousness, no self-identity.**

** These are, of course, different words for the same thing.

Is the trauma of a culture more terrifying than the
trauma of a single person? Not if we can see his face.

What could a trauma be for a culture? Cultures themselves don’t conceive of themselves as narratives built from our memories and knowledge. Cultures don’t think at all. Individuals do. 

Cultures are aggregates of affects, processes constantly in collision and tension. A radical change to these processes can destroy the entire system. But a system can also weather such a change, carrying on despite its scars deforming it from the best set of internal relations it could have to work smoothly. The system still functions, but the effects of the injury linger, and the affects of the injury spread throughout.

This is how we can understand trauma at the societal and cultural level. As a catastrophic event whose changes and effects drastically impair a system without allowing it to die. Unable to repair itself or completely break down in the hopes of forming some utterly new assemblage, it limps along as a twisted wreck.

Scars Etched in History Itself I: Figuring Out Ernst Jünger, Composing, 25/05/2015

What I’m about to write over the next two or three entries is going to get a little weird. But it’s also going to make a lot of sense. While also being weird. 

Let me explain. 

One of the purposes of this blog, when it comes to my philosophy writing projects, is taking a first, exploratory, crack at making sense of some idea I’ve come across in my research. Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel is a seminal book in understanding the cultural legacy of the First World War: the mechanization of humanity. This is the vision of what humanity is that drives true totalitarianism. 

Yes, those are people in the distance. The cause of this
devastation was constant artillery bombardment. The
First World War was absolutely horrifying.

Storm of Steel is the diary of a veteran. A veteran who served four years on the front line of a war so cataclysmic that it fundamentally transformed European culture forever. I’ve described before how difficult I find it simply understanding the full power of these images – artillery bombardments so powerful that they’ve literally churned the earth over so that the shattered body parts of dead soldiers will stick through the walls of freshly dug trenches.

Jünger experienced these images every day. They were part of his ordinary existence for the same length of time that a lot of folks today spend in full time university. And it was at the same time in his own life that we’d spend in class, volunteering on campus, working part-time jobs, and partying. Jünger enlisted right at the start of the war in 1914. He was born in 1896.

He writes about, for example, seeing comrades from his unit lying dead in a field hospital with each of their mouths bloodily shot off. Even when his unit was out of combat duty and resting in a nearby French village, they’d live in constant fear of warheads flatting their houses and killing them while they slept, because the British artillery were constantly bombing the village to kill German soldiers while they slept. 

As I’ve said before, he uses the same kind of casual tone that we’d use to talk about a class we went to in college, or a story about playing pool in a bar with your old friend. Emotions are absent from a narrative describing four years of sustained horror. On the face of it, it seems incomprehensible.

Of course, I say things like “on the face of it” purely rhetorically, because it’s perfectly clear that Storm of Steel is an expression of soul-shattering trauma. In adapting his war diary into an autobiographical book within two years of the war’s end, Jünger is articulating the trauma of himself, all the veterans and other survivors of the war, his country, and the whole of Western civilization. 

People of my generation, those who are younger, and the fuzzy boundary of my own generation’s upper limit, have a deeper understanding of what trauma is and how it works than any older demographic. The generation that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s discovered the core concepts of trauma through the popularization of psychology and the political engagements of Vietnam veterans in the United States. 

Ernst Jünger
Deutsches Heer
Class of 1918

But my generation was immersed in the popular understanding of trauma as part of our social environment. This was Jeet Heer's point about what trigger warnings in educational environments really are. They aren't a resurgence of the political correctness driven by identity politics.* They’re an institutional way to take trauma seriously.

* This always bugged me about talk of trigger warnings, because no one was advocating that triggering classics be taken off the list. Reading Storm of Steel, I think the book should be taught to middle school children. Jünger's descriptions of life in the First World War is much more affecting and informative than any of the drier descriptions I ever got at school. The trigger warning is like a film rating, only with enough detail to identify what individuals might find the content especially disturbing.

The experience of severe trauma is when emotional torture and horrifying thoughts occur to someone with the most innocuous stimulus because a past event was so unsettling to her in deep and complex ways. In the popular knowledge of psychology, we know that this is a matter for individuals and small groups like families.

Even though my earlier comment about Jünger expressing the trauma of his entire community of veterans, Germany, and Western civilization was metaphorical, that metaphor also expressed a real aspect of how enormous events like the First World War affect a whole culture. It occurred to me that an account of civilizational trauma could be an element in understanding the political drive to perfect the world in a single vision that’s at the heart of my Utopias project.

Of course, I would never simply upscale talk of trauma at the individual level as functioning exactly the same as at the civilizational. These are incredibly different systems, even though one is an aggregate of millions of the other system. That's how aggregates work. But it could definitely help inform the overall narrative of the philosophy. . . . To be Continued.

An Alternate History of War Stories, Research Time, 19/05/2015

I thought I’d try one more time to get a coherent post about Ernst Jünger onto the blog. If the blog is the pilot testing zone for the core ideas of works that I want to develop in officially published projects, then tackling the greatest diarist of the First World War is necessary.

The story was ridiculous, but Flyboys looked fantastic.

What stands in the way of truly appreciating Jünger’s writing, because you are instead shocked into mute terror, is the ordinary, casual tone he takes with such events as artillery barrages so dense and terrifying that they churn the battlefields of the Somme into a melange, or perhaps a kugel, of dirt, rocks, plants, the fragmented body parts and flesh of soldiers, and unexploded munitions.

Jünger’s style has its advantages, aside from his understated ability to leave his readers frozen with trauma. One is that he overcomes cliché with ease, and this was well before most of those clichés were ever invented. Reading Storm of Steel reminded me of Flyboys, a film that I saw when it came out ten years ago as part of my work on a movie review radio show.

The film, an early James Franco starring vehicle, perhaps an attempt by his agent to turn him into a conventional thinking-folk’s movie star before his artistic projects, scholarly work, and Apatow franchise comedy, has a plot assembled from the most hackneyed war movie stereotypes. 

Of course, this wouldn’t have been stereotypes in Jünger’s day. The square-jawed American war hero, the band of mismatched enlistees who become brothers-in-arms through the alternating battle sequences, the grizzled veteran who meets a heroic end, the climactic battle avenging the inspiring hero’s death, the handsome lead’s romance with a generic brunette actress. 

Wings was the first Hollywood war movie, a film you
watch today to respect its historical innovations, not
for the VERY 1920s morality in the story.

All these are the creations of the American film industry, the earnest dramatic plots of professional mythmakers created in an era before widespread advanced media literacy killed our bright-eyed capacity for inspiration at such stories. It’s just as true of early examples like Wings, patriotic John Wayne vehicles like The Longest Day, and even the acid-headed cynicism of Apocalypse Now. The drama of war is a tale of heroes, where the war is the backdrop for the inspiring play of these figures who are more icons than characters. The war movie is our epic poetry.

Jünger doesn’t give us epic, and he doesn’t give us drama. There’s a story of a sort, or at least a narrative, the succession of event after event and the slow accumulation of a transformation in the narrator. 

But only that kind of war story, the accumulation of bomb after bomb, death after death, horror after horror, the pounding repetition of the same hammer blows over and over again, actually approaches what is it to experience the First World War. The daily reality of the war has no conventional Aristotelian plot, as all life never does. 

The story structure of the small cast undergoing a clear plot whose intensity rises and falls at a set pace within the narrative’s duration, from beginning to end credits, has long been a feature of the mythical stories we tell ourselves. It’s part of the fundamental fabric of our culture, a core template for the entertaining story.

The Big Red One is a film I'd say captures the slogging
ordinariness of a soldier's life with a similar power as
Jünger did with his book.

I wonder if this is why we’re so tempted by the Great Man conception of history, to understand the entire past of the human race as if we only needed to know the highlight reel, that the power of one or a few people is really all we need to shape a civilization’s historical narrative. 

When you read Jünger, it’s clearly not the story of a Great Man who determined the historical path of the world, even though Storm of Steel would itself be so influential as to contribute to the national consciousness of a society. Its power is that it is the story of an ordinary man, and the extraordinary, unspeakable terrors he was lucky enough to live through.

There's one moment where the barest seed of a Great Man concept appears in the narrative. Jünger is walking down a road while the town is under bombardment,* when a friend from another unit calls out hello. As he walks over to his friend at the roadside, a shell lands in the middle of the intersection that he would otherwise have walked right into.

* The town is always under bombardment. 

At this one moment, he allows a brief belief that he’s somehow special in all of this. Well, he is special. None of those seven wounds he got in the war, and some were pretty severe, ever killed him. He lived.

Digressions for the Sake of My Sanity, Research Time, 12/05/2015

Reading Ernst Jünger’s biography of the First World War, Storm of Steel, is oddly bracing. His language is very straightforward and ordinary, but its precisely his ordinariness that makes what happens to him all the more terrifying. This is a book that chronicles the day to day life of a man who’s constantly surrounded by violent death on a casual basis.

Artillery warped the land into the surface of an alien
world on which humanity as it was could not survive.
It didn't.

I mean, this is the First World War we’re talking about here. But like I’ve said before, the First World War seems very distant to us today. We learn the most in school, and even just in popular culture, about the Second World War, and depending on how much time the curriculum allots you, discussion of the First World War is pretty cursory. The prelude to the Second, if anything.

Because Jünger seriously impresses me. I’ve been watching the Netflix years of Trailer Park Boys lately, so I’ll say it like this. Jünger impresses the fuck out of me. 

He writes Storm of Steel without a genuine narrative or argument. It’s a series of incidents, events that punctuate his memory when he thinks back to the war. Each event takes place over a period of time, but that’s what the book is: an assemblage of durations. You let them stack one on top of the other, and see what affects they produce.*

* Pretentiousness break. One other piece of writing that this aspect of Jünger’s work reminded me of: Gilles Deleuze’s description of the style of the Marquis de Sade. He describes how Sade’s work impacts you through a constant barrage of repetition, slamming into you again and again until you’re pulverized. Almost like artillery shells.

So here are a few impressions for now, arranged in the order I remember them. 

I love Jünger’s phrase “strenuous monotony.” This is how he describes life in the trenches in the first year or so of the war, before the mass offensives start. Ammunition is casually lobbed back and forth across trenches as people notice an opportunity. There is the occasional skirmish or battle. 

The ground is slowly worn away to mud. The mud walls of your trench erode away after the winter to reveal the remains of a soldier from your regiment, who had sunk deep underground through the churning of the land itself under artillery shells. 

Trauma makes people mechanistic. Maybe I should say instead that we should think of trauma as making people mechanistic, so that we can get some insight about how we should treat each other. A helpful metaphor to illustrate a moral and ethical point. That would be philosophy.

The trenches have been worn down into hills, tourist
attractions as ordinary as a field of grass. We forget
our collective trauma, even though we are all scarred.

But consider the phrase as poetry for a minute. A one line poem whose meaning I have only the barest idea of. Wonder if this is a brief little methodical breakdown that makes an author admirable in his fearless experimentation, or if he’s just being needlessly weird. If I wrote a poetry blog, where I just composed little poems and put them up for people to see, would I be considered weird? 

Some of the greatest poets were working professionals who wrote in their spare time. Wallace Stevens composed verse in his head during his walk to work. It makes me wonder why no commuter has dictated an epic the length of Paradise Lost into her phone in a traffic jam on the way home to Burlington from her office near Warden Station in Scarborough.

I’m getting self-consciously Torontonian. It’s obnoxious; I should stop. Forgive me.

This is what I do when I find myself unable to express the kind of weird horror that Jünger describes with such ordinary language. He speaks with a tone as workaday as you would describing running into a friend at the grocery store. This is what happens to a person when the daily horrors of the First World War are your daily life for nearly four years. 

Ernst Jünger impresses the fuck out of me. I don’t know how anyone to whom that kind of horror became ordinary could let himself live another year after it was over. He died in 1998 of being 102 years old. I was 15 that year. That’s how close the First World War is, although it gets farther away ever day.

That’s part of what the Utopias project will address. The First World War as an event in history, those four terrible years, and the shadow it still casts over our civilizations.