The Worldly Power of Fear, Doctor Who: Listen, Reviews, 14/09/2014

This opening scene is the most explicit of several suggestions
throughout this season emphasizing the Doctor's mysticism.
But more on that later.

One thing that immediately struck my girlfriend and I on watching Listen, which we both agreed was brilliant, is that Peter Capaldi can sometimes play the Doctor as if he is completely unstable. I don’t mean this in the sense of his being ethically unstable or unreliable, as I considered in my discussion of Deep Breath. I mean it in the sense that Capaldi’s Doctor, in this episode, at times appears mentally unstable.

This can be a very good thing, because Capaldi plays a brilliantly unstable Doctor. It also means that it’s incredibly useful as a narrative device. Steven Moffat, when discussing this episode in promotional press appearances, said this episode started from wondering what the Doctor ever did on a normal day when nothing happened. He’d go looking for trouble.

In this case, he goes looking to investigate a hypothesis, like the scientist that he is. Given that evolutionary processes can result in creatures that are optimally suited to their ecological niches and cycles, such as hunting and defense, there must also be creatures optimally suited to hiding. If, like humans and Gallifreyans, there are creatures capable of surviving optimally in a diverse number of environments, then the hiders must likewise be capable of an equivalent flexibility.

Is it a monster? For the first time, really, in Doctor Who, it
doesn't actually matter.

SPOILERS

That’s what Listen, as an episode, does. The narrative and the cinematography never settle on whether there is ever actually a creature that satisfies the Doctor’s hypothesis. There’s only ever that one moment in little Rupert Pink’s bedroom in the children’s home* when we see a strange, blurry figure behind the cast as the blanket falls to the floor. The climactic confrontation in Orson Pink’s timeship at the end of the universe could just as easily be a hull pressure breach as an actual attack.

* Children’s homes are sensitive subjects in Britain right now, given the Rotherham sexual molestation scandal currently rocking Britain with what I have long considered an obvious truth: that children isolated in orphanages are subject to exploitation by the people with institutional power over them. I was a child in St. John’s when the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal came to light. This is an old, obvious truth to me.

Listen ultimately isn’t about a traditional monster in the Doctor Who sense. If you’re familiar with the history of the show, you understand how reliance on traditional monsters can more often cripple the program, despite their place at the show’s heart. Just think of the Quarks and have some whiskey. This is a meditation on the mental instability that can arise when you’re restless and afraid.

Further parallels between Clara and Danny: Samuel Anderson,
like Jenna Coleman, has now played a reiterated version of
himself in the show.

In every circumstance where the mysterious Ultimate Hider appears, it could just as easily be fear playing tricks on a character’s mind. Rupert is alone and orphaned in a group home. Orson is isolated, wrecked in a distant corner of the universe of space and time for six months, trapped on a lifeless world. The Doctor, as we discover, has lived constantly with fear since childhood.

That fear would seem to be the root of a nihilism that has appeared in Capaldi’s Doctor since Deep Breath, where he told the lead clockwork robot point blank, “There is no promised land.” He’d been looking for it himself, but it doesn’t exist. Similarly in Listen, his attempt to comfort Rupert is emotionally ineffective, telling him only that fear will always be a part of one’s life until Clara orders him to shut it.** There is a bluntness to how the Doctor expresses life’s danger and apparent ultimate emptiness that is often mistaken for nihilism.

** This is another interesting part of the Doctor-Clara screwball comedy relationship. Their barbs are never hurtful until the situation gets serious, and I (and I’m not the only one) get the feeling that if Clara leaves the show this season, it will lie in both of their mouths running off a little bit too much at each other, just as Clara and Danny almost mess up their budding romance here.

But there is no nihilism to the Doctor’s belief in the universality of fear and the non-existence of a promised land or paradise that transcends material existence. Clara is the voice of affirmation here, in the flashback sentence to the Doctor’s own childhood, but the choice and the worldview is the Doctor’s own. And it’s just as I discussed in my essay in the volume Doctor Who and Philosophy, about the Doctor’s nature as a kind of Overman.

Anthony Coburn first wrote that "Fear makes companions of
us all," which inspires the young Doctor in Listen, making a
temporal circle around the first truly inspiring lines in the
history of Doctor Who.

The Doctor never stops being afraid. “Fear doesn’t have to make you cruel or cowardly,” calling back to a line about the ethical nature of the Doctor in the novelizations of Terrance Dicks. That notion recurs continually in the work of Moffat and of Paul Cornell, who wrote fantastic novels for the Virgin Publishing era and two brilliant television stories in the Davies era. Fear is, instead, a form of armour and inspiration, an energy to encourage you to fight a frightening world.

Too often, we humans are quite pudding-brained in our motivations for moral and ethical behaviour, believing that we need to have a transcendent power to reward us for good actions, or at least to punish us for our bad ones, to maintain good behaviour at all. One of the central messages of Doctor Who, in this episode and in many others, is that goodness comes from our own worldly desires and powers. It’s satisfied not in the decisions of a transcendent force that is sometimes called God, but in the practical motives and results in our actions to make the world a better place, even though we may only be able to do a little bit at a time.

Political Philosophy’s Curiously Necessary Balancing Act, Research Time, 11/09/2013

Most of my time Tuesday was spent working on applications (or fussing over applications) and finishing the edits on the sixth chapter of the ecophilosophy project on the constitution of subjectivity as a field of physical affects generated by an organism’s movements and perceptions in relation with its environment. I read a little Sartre before bed, and thought of a curious problem political philosophy faces: the slipperyness of its domain.

Of course, ordinary political philosophy doesn’t deal with this alone. By ordinary, I mean basically interesting, but mostly interested only in small concerns. Is some particular principle in the philosophy of some political thinker — substitute John Rawls, Seyla Benhabib, Gerry Cohen, Michael Sandel, or anyone else you think is worth writing secondary material on — correct? Or compatible with some other principle? 

I’m thinking of what, in Kuhn-style language, you could call revolutionary political philosophy. The works that reconsider the basic foundations of how humans interact with each other and their institutions. The works that are remembered. A couple of passages in the chapter of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason casually aim for this kind of scope. That the aim and achievement is so casual indicates the virtuosity with which Sartre wrote this enormous book, and shows how much it deserves to be remembered.

At heart, Deleuze was a conceptual engineer, for whom
politics was never an important element of philosophy
itself. I think this is often forgotten because of where and
when he lived, Paris of the 1960s.

Here’s one example. I may write about the other one tomorrow or this weekend. Over the last few years, my friend B was working on a project on deriving political principles from the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze is an important thinker for both of us, and B is very dedicated to his own political visions. But he didn’t exactly have the best time of it, and this quirky piece of Sartre’s analysis may point to why. 

The motives of politically meaningful action, says Sartre, is precariously balanced between transcendence and immanence. When motives are transcendent to an action, one’s motivations are made too abstract. One has a general political principle that makes sense in understanding, but it’s difficult for a generality like this to motivate concrete action in the world. A transcendent principle has no real affiliation with reality, and exists only in the context of pure thought.

Deleuze would have agreed with this evaluation of transcendence, just as I suspect there was a lot more in Sartre’s thinking about which he agreed. I may talk one day about the nature of Deleuze’s influence by Sartre, but for now, I’ll simply point you to an essay called “He Was My Teacher” in the Desert Islands collection of Deleuze’s essays and move on. Deleuze identified himself as a philosopher of pure immanence. His focus was understanding what it meant to be absolutely singular, how to understand a body or a concept insofar as it was a uniqueness in the universe, and how to understand the nature of that uniqueness. If transcendence was too abstract from the world, then a perspective of immanence seems like the perfect antidote, diving into the world with an eye on the singular uniqueness of everything in it. 

But if you think immanence is an inherently political concept, as far as Sartre is concerned, you’re mistaken. And I think he’s right. A major focus of the Critique of Dialectical Reason is understanding the formation of groups, and the constitution of solidarity among individuals to build groups that can move with purposeful action. Much of his analysis so far in my reading has focussed on achieving this solidarity through individuals seeing common cause with each other, usually in threats so far.* Immanence fails in this regard because it focusses so much on the singularity of bodies that notions of commonality among them never even occurs to a thinker. 

* In another tenuous link to the late medieval/modern period of political thinking, Sartre seems to have much in common with Thomas Hobbes in this regard. I’ll say no more about that. 

So Sartre concludes that political thinking must be balanced between transcendence and immanence, and we can understand the entire project of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (all 1400 pages of the thing) as an attempt to identify that perfect balance. The only way in which politically active groups of individuals can form, remain unified, and flexible enough to make for practically effective action is that their motivating principles must be immanent enough to the world to connect with the daily concerns with people, but transcendent enough from the world to permit the required gestures to universality and commonality for group solidarity to form in the first place.

Thoughts on Hannah Arendt 17: Self-Absorbed, Jamming, 25/08/2013

I may have complained yesterday about Stranger From Abroad being pitched as a Heidegger book as much as an Arendt book, but a complete biography of Hannah Arendt really has to include her relationship with Heidegger anyway. My only real problem with the book is that she has to share billing with him.

He makes an interesting foil, though, which is a key element for the biography’s point. I know what you’re thinking — a biography should be an accurate account of a person’s life. It shouldn’t have foils and characters, as if it was a fiction book, you could say.

Yes, you could say that, couldn’t you. But you’d be wrong. Those elements of narrative construction are what separates a brilliantly written biography from a collection of correspondence and lists of notes. In this book, Heidegger is set up as a foil so we understand a key aspect of what Arendt was trying to engage with throughout her work: how someone could unthinkingly be complicit in terrible acts, how we can blind ourselves to complicity.

The book’s author, Daniel Maier-Katkin, makes connections between the emphases of Heidegger’s philosophy and his blindness to inability to be open about his inaction and conformity during the Nazi era. I’m not about to get involved in the swirling hurricane of Heideggerian philosophical interpretation. But DMK’s narrative isn’t so much about getting Heidegger right (again, that’s for the specialty scholars on his work in the history of philosophy community), as it is using one interpretation of that thought to illustrate a broader philosophical point.

Plus, his interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy was based on Arendt’s own writings about him in professional journals, and to him in their personal correspondence, as well as discussions recorded and remembered by her friends. So you can’t exactly say that his ideas aren’t backed by a decent authority.

The key idea that the book emphasizes is that Heidegger was a profoundly self-absorbed man, and that he expressed this in his personal life, his public life, and his philosophical thought. At the heart of Heidegger’s philosophy, especially the emphases pre-WWII like Being and Time, is the alone-ness and isolation of individual people. Meditation on death leads one to disconnect from society, because of the simple truth that we always face death alone. 

The problem, of course, is when you find yourself in situations where your inclusion in society matters. Arendt’s rebuke to Heidegger, occasionally directly, but mostly indirectly through the emphases of her books, and her own life and character, was that our social relations — friendship, loves, community, interactions and associations — matter more to the meaning of human life than this existential problem. Indeed, there can be existential problems embedded in social life. Those existential issues are the very ethical questions of who I am, the full meaning and implications of my personality and how I live. If I want to get a little pretentious, I could call it virtu.

Heidegger’s thought, with its focus on ontological questions of nothingness and the empty — Why is there something rather than nothing? What is my relationship with death, my own inevitable nothingness? — isolates us within our own shells. The everyday interactions of humanity seem trivial compared to the weight of these problems. But the everyday is precisely where we live, and where who we are matters most.

Even Cyberspace Still Needs a Place, Research Time, 8/7/2013

Right now, I’m about halfway through reading N. Katherine Hayles’ My Mother Was a Computer as part of my research for my utopias project.* Chapter five of this book can practically be called “Lessons from Cryptonomicon.” One of the things I like about applying ideas from literary theory to philosophy (in this case, its political and technological dimensions) is blurring lines between philosophy and fiction. 

*More on the utopias project in one, or more likely several, History Boy posts.

My fiction projects are informed by my philosophical writings and explorations.** And Hayles reads Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon as a philosophical text about the nature of rebellion, authority, the bonds of friendship, and the complex connections that can run across the chaos of material history. What most interests me for this post, though, is a point she makes about one of the dreams of cyberspace: the internet as a place that exists on a different plane from physical reality.

**More on how my fiction is philosophical (and perhaps vice versa) in many, many future installments. 

This is an old stereotype about the internet: that cyberspace is on some kind of different plane from real space, that the connections you make on the internet aren’t bound by old-fashioned limitations like physical contiguity. But really, that’s a sad, sad lie. Because the internet can link us so quickly with a huge variety of different places around the world, this idea has become prevalent in our culture that it doesn’t really exist in space. I think we now know how naive this notion really is, but it’s still part of our conceptual heritage when it comes to the internet, and it’s true in part. One reason the Arab Spring happened was because the dictatorial/totalitarian governments of the revolting countries couldn’t control people’s communication on the internet. But this was only because the servers the revolutionaries were using were in different countries. 

Because the internet still has to have a place to be. Those files have to sit somewhere. It could be on a server farm in Sweden or Cupertino, or, as in Stephenson’s book, in an enormous cavern in an obscure Pacific Asian island sultanate. And those servers must still be physically linked to your computer through undersea cables and satellite signals. Physical places and physical connections, all of which are vulnerable to physical threats and accidents. Huge swaths of India lost internet access for days a few years ago because one ship was careless about where it dropped anchor and snapped a cable. No matter how idealistic and utopian we may feel sometimes about the potential of the internet when it’s at its best, we have to remember that it’s still a physical network of hard drives and wires. Our works are inescapably physical. Our knowledge never escapes media.

The problems that physical distances and locations can cause for communication and closeness are important for one of my fiction projects, but that’s for another time (and probably many more times after that).