Clues, Signs, Traces, Imperatives III: Care, Composing, 24/01/2018

So the detective.

There were four qualities of thought in that tentative description I gave of that persona, the conceptual persona of philosopher as detective. Care, attention to detail, commitment to ideals, understanding causes and conditions

Care. In several senses of the word, but I first want to talk about the sense of carefulness. You’re aware of the power of your own words, actions, and thinking. You don’t dismiss what you’re doing at any time as being inconsequential.

A wonderful spin on the detective myth in the last couple of decades
is when the detective's ideals are rooted in the life of her family,
friends, and community. Where she acts to bring justice to her own
world, even when it's the inconsequential scale of a little town.

This is because you understand that any action – no matter how trivial, ordinary, or small it might be – can have wide and massive consequences. Not just any intentional action, but any event at all. Any minor flux in the development of the universe.

As a proverb, it’s the butterfly’s wings that cause a hurricane. “For want of a nail.”

People who act with care are attentive to chaos, mindful of the power that a small difference, a small change, can make in a massively wide web of processes, bodies, and networks. A few poorly stamped punchcards can change the course of human civilization.

Attention to detail. Why do I emphasize this when I’ve already talked about carefulness? Because I don’t want to refer to detail in the world, as you investigate it and discover new aspects of existence. No, I mean attention to detail in your own thinking.

If you’ve ever taken an intro-ish level philosophy course, you probably heard a lot of talk about rigour in writing. Way too many teachers – from the lowliest marking assistant to full professor – think this amounts to meticulous disputation. Argue over every detail, hunt for every flaw, for every suspected flaw, and interrogate it ruthlessly.

That attitude makes it very easy to think you’re a brilliant philosophical debater when you’re in fact a gaslighter. Listen to an argument, think of a way to spin some self-defeating interpretation.

Talking about Sherlock Holmes is almost inevitable when you talk
about detective myths in contemporary culture. His massive
gravity in the development of the myth makes him impossible to
ignore. I liked the stories as a boy, but today, I find the character so
limited. Sherlock has an ethical detachment – no matter how the
portrayal depicts his friendships, Sherlock remains inescapably
a detective who investigates for the joy of puzzle-solving. The
consequences – the ethical heart of the case – are important to
him, but remain in the shadow of his perverse joy of the case as
an intellectual game.

“Couldn't you say that . . .” is a phrase I’ve heard pronounced with the most poisonous smugness, dribbling milky vomit from a mouth onto a seminar table.

Philosophical writing, done best, means that you make every word count. You write with such precision that even your ambiguities are a perfect balance of provocation and befuddlement. Create the space for your readers to finish your argument themselves – the same message each in their own way.

It’s what you should at least aim for, even if you never quite achieve it.

Commitment to ideals. See the paragraph above. You rarely, if ever, achieve the best that you’re capable of – a perfect push to your limits. But if you always try for it, you’ll avoid your very worst and do better than if you’d lived and thought without ambition.

I don’t just mean your character, though I certainly am talking about your character. I’m also talking about all your values, everything you want for society. Fail if there’s no other way out, but you’ll fail with dignity.

Better than nothing, I guess?

Understanding. Accountability to yourself. Always know what you’re doing. Not just in its potential consequences in the chaos of life, though there is that. Not just in living with integrity, the dignity that manifests in commitment to ideals, though there’s definitely that.

There must always be a pathos to the detective – caring about the
world because he's part of the world, the fundamental
interconnectedness of all things, including himself. A union of
knowledge and chaos that inspires joy and love.

Develop a sense of personal gravity – always be aware that there’s a very serious dimension to your actions. Consequences of chaotic actions – losing your spare horseshoe nails, poor maintenance on an election punchcard machine in Florida – are not a matter of games.

You don’t just look down on the Earth like some kind of immature god, where we’re all just playthings you watch for entertainment. Destruction has to elicit sympathy if you’re going to avoid becoming a callous, deranged, psychopath.

So I’m coming back to care. A full walkthrough of each of the four domains of philosophical thinking – existence, knowledge, character, and society. If I can get technical – ontology, epistemology, ethics, and morality (or politics, when the crowds get big).

Care now in the typical sense – I care for you, your life and well-being concerns me. I will suffer if you’re harmed or if you become a worse person than you are now. Strength and joy empower you, no matter where they occur and what expresses them. That there is more such strength and joy in the world, the better that world is.

The danger of a life in chaos (existence), the detailed attention of concern (knowledge), which reveals the gravity of your actions (morality), becoming a ground for your commitment to reshaping the world for the better (ethics, character).

The detective whose careful attention to the seemingly inconsequential details of the world reveals a terrible injustice that she cannot ignore without correcting. As an image, it’s a cultural myth. As a concept, it’s a comprehensive philosophy.

Clues, Signs, Traces, Imperatives II: Seekers, Research Time, 23/01/2018

After the last near-rant,* I actually don’t have much more to say. A list of conditions and ideas. In a way, I think that’s for the best.

* Who am I kidding? That was a rant.

One of the most important aspects of Gilles Deleuze’s conceptions of political revolution is what he never said. He described in great detail – in political and ontological contexts – what it means to transform radically.

In a human context, it means transforming your character completely. He and Guattari described that process, but never an end product. Even in their most political works, they never gave a prescription for what kind of person they thought would be the best to emerge.

I always enjoyed the character of the Doctor when s/he was being
something of a detective. Exploring some complex sci-fi setting,
the relationships among characters, their interests and conflicts. To
discover the mystery of what horrible event is happening.

Of course, that defeats the whole structure of what they were doing – an ontological description of how a process can only move freely when it moves without adopting a plan from some other source, when it acts, thinks, and plans immanently.

To give orders and expect them to be followed is overcoding – that’s what despotic societies do. So if you’re going to live by your convictions, you won’t give a prescription for what kind of person you want to emerge from the revolution.

At most, you can say what that revolution would have to satisfy to repair or escape what caused the metamorphosis in the first place. Conditions for success, but whatever you do to meet them is your business.

You don’t even know what the revolution will be anyway. In the 1970s of Paris, when Deleuze and Guattari were composing A Thousand Plateaus, you’d be pretty perceptive for thinking a new communist revolution was brewing.** By the 2010s, I could write a book about what conditions an ecological revolution in thought would have to satisfy.

** Whatever its prospects for immediate success. I’ve read interpretations of Paris’ May 1968 revolution as having lost the battle and the war, but won the culture. You want to call that victory? I’m not sure if I do.

Then you have to leave it up to people to figure their own way there. You live in your world, with your concerns. You can’t just give people a generation or two away, in a world that could be totally different from your own a set of direct orders and expect them to apply. We all have to work out the details as the world changes.

It may not be religious – per se – but I think the myths of human
cultures in the 21st century are the most narratively advanced
they've ever been. We're able to record them and watch exactly
the same story over and over again – so we can search through
it and discover more of what's happening. That's how we can
make myths that critique and take apart themselves.

I’ll put it to you this way. Someone who died in 2010 would have considered Donald Trump nothing but a billionaire asshole game show host.

So on your way to become a revolutionary new person, you have two main concerns. 1) Take the process as far as you can to leave as little of your old, shitty self and world behind. 2) Don’t mess up and become a disastrous failure who aimed for more than you could reach and broke apart.

Yeah, those two don’t exactly fit. Revolutionize your ass! But watch yourself!

Being serious again. What would make the detective a fitting persona for a revolutionary? A combination of care, attention to detail, commitment to ideals, understanding causes and conditions.

Obviously, I’m not talking about real police detectives. I’m talking about the cultural image of the detective, the detective ideal that we see on television – the myth.

I’m going to spell out those detective myths tomorrow. Here’s one last concept I’m developing about myth. It’s only in note form right now.

Semiotics made us mistake our myths for symbols – we now understand the images and narratives that materially function as myths, as if they were symbols. All the detectives in our televisions, movies, games, and books are different iterations of a myth. A narrative icon of a cultural ideal.

So the detective.

Social Matter as Memory, Research Time, 16/10/2017

This weekend turned into a longer gap than I thought. I didn’t expect Friday to be so mental, but it ended up so full of stuff and so generally stressful that I couldn’t get much thinking done at all.

And while the weekend itself has been pretty packed full of stuff to do – catching up on marking, attending a conference on refugee integration, getting a bunch of work done for SERRC, and a pile of personal correspondence – I did at least manage to relax while doing all that.

Humanity's tendency to clear forests, I sometimes think, is rooted in
how bloody scary they are in the middle of the night. We've fought
against the prospect of our fragility with such success that we could
very well end up killing ourselves in the next few generations.

Thinking at least needs a moment. Just a moment.
• • •
The Polis was more than a city. It was more than the first democracy in the West, whatever democracy must mean if it includes modern parliaments, presidents, and these strange town assemblies.

Talking about the Polis as a primordial democracy is very inadequate to the deeper meanings of how Polis-era Greeks lived. That is, how they understood their lives, the nature of their society, their place in the world, and their relationship to time and history as individuals and societies.

The metaphysics of their societies, in other words.

A Polis Greek person’s relationship to nature. It’s about fear, really. People knew how fragile humans were compared to the power of natural forces, the forces of the Earth.

Powerful storms could wash away their homes. A few too many dry seasons, and your whole community starves. Even just getting lost in the woods would be enough to kill someone – dying of exposure, fatal injury, drowning, or even attack by predators.

All of this is still true, but the development and omnipresence of our industrial civilization has complicated our relationship with the Earth. And made it much more violent.

Most of our record keeping about history is totally unreliable. Danny
DeVito's character in Hoffa, a movie I loved as a teenager, never
existed. Bobby Ciaro was an amalgam of two different people
who couldn't work separately in the narrative.

Leave that to the side. Think about that relationship. The Greeks conceived of nature as immortal, cyclical as the entire universe. Even individual plants and animals were thought of as immortal because they understood such non-human organisms as interchangeable. Individually unremarkable, both in their existence and how they understood themselves.

Only humans were mortal – we had distinct, singular, unique identities and we knew we were going to die one day. That’s the condition of mortality.

The Polis was an institutional means to fight our mortality. The continuity of the Polis itself maintained the records and famous stories of debates, speeches, and displays in the assembly. The leaders of the community – those who were able to leave the hard labour of maintaining their lives and households to families and servants – had a shot at immortality.

Glory and fame in your community – the display of virtue in debate, speech, and leadership – was how a mortal could survive their own death.

How real can our modern myths ever really be?

The social institution itself was a form of memory, a way of making memory collective. Societies have always had oral histories, tales of the community’s past and remarkable leaders. The stories mutate over time, though, and become mythical. Real people morph and blend into different characters.

Hell, most Hollywood studios can’t even make a biopic without merging real-life characters and smoothing out their subjects’ messy lives into straightforward narratives. That’s just a matter of a few years of production. Think about the kind of mutation that happens to a society’s narrative memory over centuries of retelling.

Achilles wasn’t simply “brave and bold.” He was a person, with all the complications involved. But by the time he got into the song, brave and bold was all he was.

The Polis was an institution that kept the histories of its leaders – their remarkable speeches, their thundering arguments, their theatrical acts in the public square – rooted. The gathering of Polis leaders was a place of governance, but most people wanted to go there for the chance of mythmaking.

Myths that would preserve their memory without transforming them. Their great acts in public leadership would be preserved as the acts of men, not becoming literature or image. The stone of the city and the square made their memory material.

That Is One Messed Up Freudian Nightmarescape, Doctor Who: Knock Knock, Reviews, 07/05/2017

The title says it all, honestly. This post is going to explore some images and concepts from different bits of philosophy. Think of it as a little experiment for how I’m going to write some historical riffing passages in Utopias. As well, it’s a good way to makes sense of what is in many ways a well-made but fairly ordinary Doctor Who story.

Doctor Who is built from nightmares, after all. And expert at inspiring them too. “Knock Knock” makes Doctor Who’s relationship with your nightmares very explicit and extremely squirmy.

Hidden Secrets in Twisting Corridors

Another good touch in this episode is how the script combines
terrifying psychologically grotesque narratives with some silly
comedy. Especially seeing Peter Capaldi's run through the classic
routine of the Doctor trying and sort of succeeding at being cool.

In Phil Sandifer’s review of this episode, he was right in many ways. The setting of the haunted house is getting a little old in Doctor Who. It’s played a major or minor role in several stories over the last decade since the release of Steven Moffat’s masterpiece “Blink.”

He’s right that it’s getting tired. You can’t really depend on the trope of the haunted house alone to deliver scares. But I do think Mike Bartlett – in his first contribution to Doctor Who – has written an episode that fits his reputation as one of the better television and theatre writers in Britain today.

“Knock Knock” seems disappointingly straightforward at first glance, but Bartlett has put some thought into just how creepy his scenario is. The haunted house is a good place to put shadows, dank corners, musty cellars, and other corners, alcoves, and cracks that disturb and unsettle a person.

But what is a haunted house? It’s most profoundly a place of secrets – repressed memories, facts, phenomena, and processes. They’re the twisting catacombs of the subconscious articulated as a building where our protagonists live, explore, and risk death trying to understand a terrible mystery.

Of course, I can’t discuss that mystery without warning you of the obvious

SPOILERS!!!

In case you couldn't tell from the section title, I'm totally going there.

“Mother? Mother! Oh God, Mother!!”

The haunted house is part of what the literary theorists call our cultural imaginary. It’s one of the mythic images that gets trotted out because of its signifiers. The haunted house is more than just its TV Tropes list, but is the image common in contemporary global culture for a story of the return of the repressed.

Our myths of a return of ghosts long thought buried take the form of haunted houses. Stephen King’s The Shining depicted the inner spirals and caverns of the haunted house as the repository of echoing energy that centuries of human evil have generated.

The catacombs of the hotel represented in one scene with a hornet’s nest. Not long on subtlety. I hate that book.

But the point here is the sheer ickiness of the Landlord’s nature. The trauma of his mother’s illness and pending death becomes a focus for his entire life, fixating on her to the point of erasing her personality. He speaks of her as his daughter, to justify his aged body.

The Landlord's bargaining in the throes of his trauma began the
process that annihilated any individual subjectivity he could have had.

As well, he communicates with her and the creatures animating her through the mansion itself. The old stone house has merged with his mother and with the creatures. All of it is one entity, which he thinks of only as mother, the duty and love on which he fixed his entire personality and life.

The Landlord needs no name because he’s given it up. He exists only for the sake of his mother, the house.

The son gives himself entirely over to his mother. He sleeps deep inside her every night, rarely leaving the grounds except to find food for her.

I’m just making the sexual nature of the Landlord’s relationship with his mother* as explicit as I can make it. I’m going full Sigmund Freud on this analysis, almost as a riff. On one hand, it’s because I’m not very well-practiced in psychoanalytic writing. On the other hand, I don’t think I need to.

* Who is also a house and who is also a gigantic swarm of alien dryad insects, just so we’ve got all this at the forefront of our minds.

Everything I write in this review, I mean in a very literal sense.
Eaten alive. Eaten and still alive.

To Be Eaten Alive

My own introduction to psychoanalytic thinking largely began with my studies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work. So I learned about it by watching its core ideas being utterly broken apart. Not broken apart, so much as shown to be inadequate.

Even though you can understand a lot about human trauma using the familial Oedipal dynamic that Freud described and popularized, Freudian imagery isn’t a universal set of human psychological laws.

It was one set of images that could help us make sense of some common situations. They didn’t fit all situations, and they weren’t the only images to describe what they were about. So we ran up the wrong way on that tree for a while.

“Knock Knock,” however, is about as Freudian as you can get, clearly. The Landlord is a child Oedipus whose trauma crafted a fixation on his mother to the point where even he erased his own identity in favour of his mission. When his mother became the house, he became the house’s protector, just as he was hers as a human. Landlord.

They are a pure force of becoming, and that's the centre of their horror.

Yet the force animating the House Mother isn’t Freudian at all. It’s a swarm, millions of dryad alien insects that move as one to animate the wood of the house, and feed when they’re hungry. They’re swarms that obey the concentrated power of a self-conscious subject giving them an order.

The dryads are a pure force, remaking the territories they pervade. A wall becomes a mouth. A woman becomes a creaking tree. They wipe the world of one nature and remake it in their own.

That transformation is hidden. The dryads’ reterritorialization of the house and the House Mother is the ontological mystery of “Knock Knock.” That’s the suppressed secret of the house, as to its nature.

Most hauntings are a matter of a ghost, what China Miéville literally called hauntological, in his analysis of horror. It’s the repressed evil that echoes from the past into the present. Morally speaking, it’s the call for justice. That’s the typical image of haunting, the most morally uplifting.

Or else it’s a mutated call, an evil so intense that it’s been perverted into a purely malevolent, hungry energy. That’s the sublimation of genocide and murder of Stephen King’s original Overlook hotel.

"The Rats in the Walls" was the first Lovecraft story I ever read,
and it struck me as I read more of his work how much it stood
out. It was a brilliant story, and a terror that hit me more viscerally
than the more cerebral notes of the Weird for which he's known
best. My own science-fiction work published so far explores
more of what deterritorializing horror can do.

The Dryads in the Walls

The dryads are a more Lovecraftian creature. I don’t mean this in the sense of the Weird, Miéville’s abyssal twin to the comforting humanity of ghosts. There’s another kind of nightmare in Lovecraft that he never really pursued, as he did his eruptions of the Weird, the Absolute Other.

I’m talking about the rats in the walls. It’s a nightmare of deterritorialization. The invasion of a force that consumes you by eradicating your shape – what was once solid is now a gas. What was once a personality becomes a yearning hunger with no sense of selfhood or reflection at all.

That’s what the dryads have done to the house. They’ve turned the mansion and its grounds from an ordinary, if ostentatious, dwelling, into a humming vibration of breathing hunger.

The Oedipal sickness of the Landlord and the House Mother have kept a shred of personality left in that deterritorialization. The child-mother fixation remains as a single thread of self-consciousness, of subjecthood, in what should have been the eradication of human personality in the architecture and the organisms in its rooms.

The House Mother was the only one who could hold her body’s shape after the dryads consumed her into wood. And it was because of the incredible force of the Landlord’s grotesque fixation, his parody of love and devotion, with his mother.

If you think about it long enough, this is one of the more unsettling stories Doctor Who has done in some time.
• • •
My other philosophical reviews in this season, Peter Capaldi's last.
The Pilot / The Girl With a Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice

May the Myth Free the Mythmaker, Jamming, 14/08/2016

I have high expectations for the power and weirdness
of this film.

I’m planning on seeing Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation when it comes to Toronto. The reason is simple – because I think it looks like one of the greatest movies of the 21st century. 

Some preview images alone evoke surrealist masterpieces like El Topo, but with a political consciousness and philosophical knife to fit our current revolutionary era. I also love what a full-bore assault it is on the racist history of Hollywood – down to the title, it overwrites D. W. Griffith’s masterpiece of hate with a genuine story of America’s greatest spirit.

That's the quest for justice for the downtrodden that accompanies every great crime of the country's history. America as a culture knows what freedom is, even if so many of its people fight real freedom to their cores.

Then, weeks before its official release, information about Nate Parker’s rape trial resurfaced. The narrative of events make what really happened pretty clear. It describes exactly the kind of situation that happens all-too-frequently on college campuses today – alcohol, questionable consciousness, and a lack of consent. 

It’s exactly the sort of situation that we know to be rape – but exactly the sort of rape that our criminal justice system is completely incapable of convicting anyone for. We know this is a terrible problem in the legal system today. 

Parker is in many ways a good person, doing wonderful
things like funding a film studies scholarship for
black youth. Good works don't erase evil acts.

All it took was a years-long social movement of feminist activism by a new generation of young campaigners driven by the immense media equalization of the digital-social era. But in 1999? This would never have gotten on anyone’s radar. 

It makes perfect sense that Parker and his roommate (and eventual Birth of a Nation co-story developer Jean Celestin) did rape a woman. The trial itself exonerated them, but only because our legal system can’t handle most rape trials justly. Parker having to move from prestigious Penn State to Oklahoma shows that everyone accepted the truth of the rape that he couldn’t remain in that community.

Given his youthful crimes, I also find it quite plausible and believable that he believes or has believed many of the homophobic things he’s said. He did once say, and I believe that he believed at the time, that his taking on roles as gay men or less masculine characters did harm to black culture. That it would contribute to black men becoming less manly.

That is a horrible, stupid, disgusting belief. And I think Nate Parker has believed that (at least he did in the past, though he seems to have learned better). Just as I believe that Parker did rape someone.

So why am I still seeing his film? Why would I still endorse the work of someone who I know has committed terrible crimes?

Have you ever seen El Topo? It is some seriously weird
mythical crazy shit.

Because I know that an artistic achievement can transcend the person who made it. The social, symbolic, cinematic, and artistic power of Birth of a Nation, if it achieves everything that those who saw it at Sundance say it does, will be literally mythological. Parker's achievement will have overcome the man who made it.

Perhaps he regrets his violent actions as a youth. Perhaps he no longer holds the homophobic beliefs that he once proudly professed. Maybe he had to learn the hard way, after years of career stagnation typecast in exactly those meatheaded roles he once praised.

In an industry where so many major players have always been gay, publicly expressing those kinds of attitudes would have rightfully earned him some retribution from producers and studios. Nate Parker as a person deserves that and more.

So criticize him for his violent past, keep him on the proper path to eradicate the last of his homophobic feeling. Making Birth of a Nation makes you part of the struggle for freedom, and freedom will never be achieved if a single oppression vector remains. 

That means: Don’t criticize him for being some kind of weird race traitor because of his interracial marriage. Because a community that endorses that kind of ethnic nationalism can never free itself from the ethnic nationalisms that oppress them. All must be free together.

The masterpiece is bigger than Nate Parker, how art becomes our civilization’s living myth. More than what it was as just Parker’s idea. Let it push Nate Parker to become more than the man he was, and is.

True/False & What Else? V: Thought Conditions Life, Research Time, 11/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . If you'll grant me a little interpretive leeway, the notion that Louis Althusser’s personality could have influenced his philosophical thinking is a twisted mirror-image of his own theory of ideology.

The external and global – society’s ideological-ethical-moral structures – appear from inside an individual personality as psychosis, neurosis, horror, and utter madness. It’s very Freudian in a way, but not the bad kind of Freudian that reduces every psychological problem to Œdipal family dynamics. 

The external and global express themselves internally and psychologically. Also very Jungian, but not the bad kind of Jungian that gets tripped up on making a set of recurring mythological symbols into a mystical collective unconscious. 

Despite the strongly deterministic nature of his structuralist framework for thinking about reality, there’s a path to make our world better as individual actors. At different points in those essays of For Marx, Althusser discusses how ideology can change.

Because it does change. Societies change radically over time – just contrast how different human society is today from three centuries ago. Even fifty centuries ago, social and ethical values and discourses could change. The engine of that change is the interaction of life’s material reality and practice with how we think and speak about that practice.

We can act to tweak that interaction, shift it in some directions over others. This is the pragmatic radicalism I’ve been discussing – shifting the limits and boundaries of what society considers possible. Pushing more and more people to think what was previously inconceivable.

Maybe we can have a government without a king – Democracy. Morality without the underwriting authority of a god – Kindness. A conception of our nationhood that excludes no one – Brotherhood. 

Yet beyond this idea that I’ve already pretty much figured out, there is more in Althusser that I can pilfer for my own philosophical work. For example, there’s a grid.

Well, he doesn’t actually lay it out as a grid. Althusser’s For Marx is the produce of a French academic writing essays about marxist theory in the early 1960s. So he lays it out in immensely long and over-wordy arguments with sentences more than seven lines long.

But you can make a grid. It has four squares. It lays out the concrete and the abstract versions of thought and material or life.

Theory is thought that keeps its focus on understanding the concrete, concepts that have real, worldly power to change lives and social structures. They can be as elaborate and derive into all kinds of wild structures if the problem in view demands it. But its focus is always thought that increases and augments your power.

Practice is concrete material, the lived reality of daily life in all its drudgery and majesty. This is the tough work of getting shit done. This doesn’t reduce to the dusty old dualism of theory vs practice, airy-fairy thoughts and real work. Too often, that dichotomy is just used as a tool or a trick to denigrate intelligence or critical thought. 

Speaking of tricks to denigrate critical thought and protest, ideology. Ideology is, on Althusser’s thinking, abstract thought. It’s speculation without an interest or focus on our powers. Thinking disconnected from what we can do, distractions from developing our real potentials to focus on imaginary dream worlds instead. 

We can still act on the principles derived from ideology. But it makes no sense to. Quite literally. When we examine any of the moral principles that are based in thought entirely abstracted from our real powers, their logic falls apart. There’s no reason to believe in any of these principles beyond the fact that you believe in them. 

“It’s always been done this way.” “That’s just not right!” “Why would anyone do anything different?”

That’s why Althusser calls those principles dogma. Dogma – material life made abstract. So if I’ve learned anything from reading this very flawed thinker, it’s this quite useful way of distinguishing productive from self-destructive thinking. Thanks, Louis, you mad old commie murderer.

History Has No End, Composing, 29/02/2016

The last third of Utopias will deal explicitly with political philosophy. I don’t aim to have some kind of comprehensive view of the overall state of political philosophy as its generated all over the academy. 

Ronald Reagan is loved not because of his real-world
achievements, which are as checkered as the career of
any great state power's leader. He's loved because of
the myths he built around himself and America.

From a purely practical point of view, I don’t have access to a lot of that material. And summarizing all the ongoing trends in – even just North American – political theory in all the major research journals is beyond the scope of the project. 

I’m not aiming to demonstrate some superlative level of comprehensiveness. I want to build and build on a specific tradition within political philosophy to make an important point explicit about the nature of our human society in the early 21st century. 

To me, that’s always been more important for philosophical creativity than simply tracking trends in a sub-discipline’s major research journals. Even when I was in the academy – maybe that played a part in why I found myself marginalized out of the academy once my doctorate was finished.

But since I’m still writing, I wanted to explain how I now write. When I was writing the original draft of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I gave lip service to the demand for comprehensiveness of an established research field by peppering my writing with extraneous footnotes. 

Now that I don’t have to do that, my writing will be much more explicitly focussed on explaining and exploring concepts. Friday’s post explained that method a little bit. But today I want to focus on a specific example.

Last year, I wrote several posts about Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, where he talked about exactly that. Antonio Negri talks about the central ideas of Fukuyama's book in one section of Empire, and he’s quite rightly contemptuous of it, even though there are parts of the concept that are truly insightful about the world.

Reagan never took down the Berlin Wall single-handedly.
The most he did was make a speech and have a tourist
moment taking a brick after unification.

The central concept of The End of History is an attitude of faith in America. In Fukuyama’s writing, America as a real country in the world merges with the ethical ideal of America as the embodiment of freedom. 

Fukuyama works in the conceptual context of his funny, over-literal Hegelianism, where a society and nation actually does find its highest expression in its state. And the highest expression of such a state is as a regime to safeguard the freedom of the nation – each individual who constitutes the nation lives their liberty to the fullest.

So when America won the Cold War, it was literally the victory of freedom in a profound and plodding sense. Plodding because it didn’t take much. As Negri points out, America and Americans as a nation didn’t actually do anything to bring down the Soviet Union, despite the mythmaking of contemporary Republicans’ belief that Ronald Reagan’s speech alone brought down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Communist Party.

No, the Soviet Union collapsed because its state-controlled bureaucratic command economy couldn't adapt to technological and labour changes to the global market. Economic recession combined with the government’s weakening power to control its people, and the Communist states of Europe collapsed.

America happened to be the only globally dominant state whose economy and society was still vibrant and creative. This was a contingent fact – no great achievement, just a situation in the global economy's development that made the Soviet Union catastrophically maladapted.

Material reality popped Fukuyama’s mythical balloon* of America’s having not only become the culmination of human freedom in history, but to have actually made itself the culmination of human freedom in history.

When you believe that your nation once had a mythic
greatness, the contingency of real life burns extra hot.
That fire is easily channelled in dangerous directions.

* And, as he was their philosophical voice, the mythical ballon of conservative American nationalists at all levels of society from state leaders, business magnates, movers, and shakers, working people, and rural militiamen.

That argument will appear in the final Utopias manuscript in some form, as I work through my arguments that libertarian conservatism is not only a false, violent utopia, but is also a destructive self-delusion. Here’s the central concept of the argument.

The messy contingency of reality trumps mythmaking, every time. Mythmaking has enormous social power to mobilize people, but a myth is always false. It’s a distortion of the real development of the world that most often has many terrible consequences in the long term. 

In this case, nationalism, American triumphalism, the attitude that America is the culmination of the world, the victor of history itself. 

And to someone who thinks this way, the victor deserves the spoils of war. In real life, this concept is the voice of Candidate Trump.

“You Remembered Being Me Watching You Doing That!” Doctor Who: Before the Flood, Reviews, 12/10/2015

Quite a lot going on in Before the Flood. There’s a common issue, but you have to consider things separately to see it. Consider a few questions.

The Doctor's empty ghost is a beautiful and haunting
image. But I could guess how the Doctor survived his
apparent death easily. That's short-hand for the
problems of this story, Toby Whithouse's whole
approach to narrative, and why he isn't really suited to
write contemporary Doctor Who.

1) Is Toby Whithouse a very original writer? 

2) Who is this War Minister?

3) What sort of crime is violating the boundary between life and death?

4) Did we need a lesson in time paradoxes?

SPOILERS

first, then answers.

1) Not really. Let's look at the different ways he's unoriginal.

A) I’ve already mentioned that his stories tend to conform to old, worn-out or wearing-out conventions. Like The Game, Whithouse’s underwhelming Cold War action drama, one more tired old story of angsty male anti-heroes brooding through their moral compromises. 

I mean, you can make a story about that kind of character if you really want to, but our culture's Frank Miller phase is over, and Whithouse (as well as the fans of Sin City) has yet to realize this.

Now, Before the Flood wasn't particularly angsty in that sense. There was one scene where Cass asked Clara if the Doctor taught her to be so callous with risking others' lives, and where Bennett asks the Doctor whether he used O'Donnell's killing merely to test a theory. But those scenes don’t sit at the heart of Before the Flood’s narrative.

Maybe they would have if Steven Moffat wasn't the script editor.

Given where Capaldi’s Doctor is as a character, he's already dealt with that level of angst. It could be acceptable, if tired, in The God Complex, since all except a small part of the Matt Smith era carried the weight of the Time War. 

However striking the Fisher King's design is, it hasn't
really grown beyond the shadow of H. R. Giger. This
story's second Alien reference.

The Doctor had reason to be in an angst-driven character narrative, but Whithouse’s story was proof that Doctor Who could take this concept no farther. With Before the Flood, Whithouse has given us another red flag for Doctor Who's narratives. 

B) I’ll have to take back my endorsement after last week. Whithouse in the second half returns to the worst tendencies of the base-under-siege story, after spending the first half doing wonderful and interesting new things with that setup. He just returns to the worst features of generic monster suspense stories.

The Fisher King is a terribly generic monster, nothing but murders and bombastic dreams of conquest. Only his abilities to make electromagnetic echoes of the dead make him at all remarkable. But that distinction belongs to the ghosts themselves. 

The Fisher King is a beautifully intricate, grotesque, haunting monster suit. But there's simply no personality other than “Send signal, summon invasion fleet, destroy Earth, enslave humans.” 

Similarly wasted is Prentice the Tivolian, who gets a single scene of irritating all the characters before being shot in the face. David Walliams in The God Complex at least got a whole story's worth of dialogue to explore the character. Though I think the only reason he was so interesting was because David Walliams played him. 

Tivolian culture has a lot of potential for storytelling and character development. I could tell some wonderful stories about a people for whom cowardice, surrender, and betrayal to the stronger power is a virtue. I could tell a wonderful story about a monster who resurrects ghosts from a traumatizing death, weaving together elements from the Fisher King myth.

As Jane Campbell says at the Eruditorum Press review of
this story, it would have been much more interesting if
Bennett had died in a botched attempt to chase the
monster away from his Unspoken Love™ O'Donnell,
giving in to his alpha-male idealism at the cost of his
own life. We would have had more time to follow
through on its tension and plot fallout if Whithouse
hadn't chopped 4 minutes off the front of the episode
with a lecture about the Bootstrap Paradox.

C) Then for the generally unnecessary detail of the two nerdy introvert men having unspoken loves for the women with which they work closely, and one of them being eventually and blatantly reciprocated. 

Bennett’s lost chance with O’Donnell, her not surviving the story, works as a good moment for his character, and for Clara’s. It lets her express how she moved on from Danny's death at the end of last season. Her and Bennett's brief conversation lets the details of his relationship with O’Donnell stay silent, so we can fill in the blanks as we prefer.

Because after talking to Clara, Bennett tells Lunn to express his own feelings for Cass, whose last act in the story is passionately kissing Lunn. This narrative of a man’s passionate unspoken love for a woman he can’t bear to approach about it used to be a central model for a romantic story. 

It isn't anymore. That’s the story of a man who does a great harm to the woman he loves. Because it isn't love: it's blind, single-minded obsession. Unspoken love isn't a paragon of romance anymore because from the perspective of the woman, it’s a creepy, hovering attachment. 

It’s only in the last few years (much too late, by any margin) that I've fully understood that the Unspoken Love story isn't romantic, but a stalker narrative. And I don't think Whithouse has at all. Given the importance of a critical female audience for Doctor Who today, this isn't the direction for the show to travel.

Oh yes, and O’Donnell – the most interesting and charismatic character among the base crew – is fridged so her bland, nebbishy, unspoken lover can brood over her. There's actually a very nice scene between Bennett and O'Donnell just after they arrive in the past, which let me imagine that perhaps they really were an open couple. That way, O'Donnell's death would have had some proper narrative punch, instead of the distasteful scenario Whithouse actually gives us.

2) After more than a decade of carefully seeded clues for the hidden villain of the finale nearly every season, O’Donnell’s brief mention of the War Minister is a clear flag. 

One brief line of Prentice's sketches another interesting
element of Tivolian culture that the story has no space
to follow through on. They're so wheedling to the
invading armies who conquer them, that the empires
eventually get sick of dealing with them and leave.
Their apparent submission is actually a strategy of
resistance. Not passive resistance, but passive-
aggressive resistance.

But it could just as easily be a false flag. It’s mentioned in a list of continuity points, including previous season flag Harold Saxon. The Doctor even says he expects he’ll meet him eventually. 

We in the audience know that this is a standard Doctor Who trick (Bad Wolf, Torchwood, Saxon, “You are not alone,” disappearing bees, the crack in time, Lake Silencio, Clara’s echoes, the soldier theme). We expect it. 

One thing Steven Moffat said about his plan for this season is that he wanted to change Doctor Who around, run against expectations. Part of this meant returning to multi-part stories and cliffhangers, as one-episode 45-minute stories were becoming ordinary. 

But the Doctor dismisses the mention of this War Minister, saying he's sure he'll run into him eventually. Capaldi’s Doctor is more openly meta-fictional than any previous one, so I’ll take his dismissal as a sign that this is just a red herring, playing with the expectations of the audience.

3) It’s an ethical wound in this case. A violation of a person’s whole existence. Terrible enough, and more terrible than breaking the coherence of your own history. 

Not in its effects, of course. Whole timelines are erased, as in the last time the Doctor crossed over a piece of his own timeline in Father's Day, which Whithouse obviously evokes without doing anything new with. More unoriginality there.

It’s not so much that the Fisher King's desecrations of people’s deaths has a larger importance to the fabric of the universe than the integrity of your own timeline. The Time Lords probably wouldn't care. But the Doctor lives by the principle of trying to make the universe a more ethical place, so he’s much more invested in righting this violation.

The whole thing turns out to be a bluff to trick the Fisher King into standing outside so he can die when the town floods and the Doctor can hide in his suspension capsule. I totally knew that was how the Doctor would create a ghost projection and survive, by the way.

4) The opening sequence was a good primer. But it was totally unnecessary to the resolution of the story. It’s a cool narrative framework, but a footnote to the narrative itself. It served to take a few minutes off a story that was running low on plot and made for some more meta-fictional commentary from the Doctor.

I can imagine Steven Moffat being so disappointed on
receiving Whithouse's script for Before the Flood,
spending so much time pedantically explaining the
Bootstrap Paradox when he'd written a better story
about it nearly a decade ago. And it was only
seven minutes long.

Bootstrap paradoxes do play with our expectations of how reality works, however, which is nice. The Doctor didn't know what words his future ghost would say to Clara before he saw them through her phone. Having simply remembered the words, he never thought of them himself. So who did?

Bootstrap paradoxes only appear to be problems because we often think that ideas are generated only through people’s conscious thought. But the story had been playing with that since the beginning. The words that turn a person into a ghost on their death act as active creatures themselves, ideas that exist independently of conscious thought.

So the solution to the bootstrap paradox is to throw away our presumption that all ideas must have a thinker to exist. Accept the notion that a thought can arise from a situation itself – the narrative itself invented the sequence of words that the Doctor’s ghost said. He remembered having heard them, so he spoke them from the suspension chamber. 

It’s the same as the central problem in the plot of Moffat’s Time Crash. You can watch the whole thing at the link. It only takes seven minutes. The Doctor never needed to figure out how to fix the TARDIS malfunction that threatened to blow a hole in the fabric of spacetime and brought Peter Davison’s and David Tennant’s Doctors together. 

Tennant remembered being Davison, watching Tennant fix the TARDIS. They were both part of a narrative in which the narrative – not the people in it – was the active force. 

If the story had explored this idea in more detail – how to act when you’re passive before pre-destination – we’d have a second part of this story that could live up to the innovations of Under the Lake. As it is, all we have are blogs like mine – and any sci-fi stories I may write about bootstrap paradoxes down the road – to explore it.

Instead, Toby Whithouse has written another story with a lot of really interesting ideas, but which ignore their true potential. I don’t think I want him to write Doctor Who anymore.

Live in the Now II: To Find the Perfect Way (or Wu Wei), Research Time, 09/04/2015

Continued from last post . . . In the era of the foundational Confucians – Kongzi, Mengzi, and Xunzi – the origin of Chinese civilization was already more myth than history. The Xia Dynasty was treated as a union of both, a mythical time when the empire’s rulers had fantastic powers, an intuitive grasp of the ritual that channelled Qi, the fundamental force of material becoming, to lead a society and house souls of perfect harmony.

I’ll import my own engagement with the foundational Western myths to engage with this idea. One major concept in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a critique of what I (and a few others) call an Edenic way of thinking about nature. 

A scene from my personal favourite retelling of the
myth of Eden.

The Western myth of Eden conceives of the origin point of the world as a place of perfection, where humanity’s forebears lived in an intimate relationship with God. This is a time without history because genuine becoming is unnecessary. The Western myth conceives of the beginning of history as a fall (or rather a Fall, as it was a categorical transformation) from divine intimacy. 

Some interpretations of the myth of Eden conceive of the Fall as a product of rebellion against the order of God, and some specify this rebellion as the discovery or formulation of the knowledge required to rebel against God’s order (or God’s orders, depending on how authoritarian your conception of God might be). 

Aside from moronic Biblical literalists, no one really believes that Eden was a specific place in the world. It’s more often conceptualized precisely as a myth, a story to tell about humanity’s relationship with the divine. 

The Xia Dynasty is different. This was a real political epoch in the history of China, a real imperial line and government. Little direct record of it survives, but Xia is one of the foundational origin points for human civilization as it exists today. Xia ranks with Ur, Egypt, the Inca Empire, and the Abrahamic era of the tribes of Israel, to name just a few of the ancient genesis points of modern agricultural humanity.

Yet Barry’s book describes the foundational Confucian philosophers writing about the Xia Dynasty as if it had been a living Eden. Xia was an epoch when people were naturally in tune with the flow of the world’s generative energy, able to channel the productive forces of existence without resistance, producing a society in perfect harmony. Ritual emerged already perfected in the Xia era, humanity had since fallen from that perfection, and the task of Confucian philosophy was to restore the knowledge and practice of ritual to its perfect state.

So far, so Eden. But Barry raises an argument which, on the face of it, appears devastating for the conception of Xia as a harmonious society thanks to ritual’s perfect practice. It is a non-issue because Xunzi would conceive the problem of origins precisely as myth instead of history.

I can conceive of Eden as a perfect state of humanity because the Fall is a categorical transformation ontologically. The nature of humanity’s existence was different in the Edenic state of communion with God. But there was historical continuity between the period the Confucians idealized and their own time.

The Xia Dynasty was a historical forerunner to the era of Chinese civilization where Confucian philosophy developed. There is no ontological break between the people of the Xia era and that of the Warring States. Just a thousand years of history of which we, and the Confucians themselves, have sketchy knowledge.

The critique is, in essence, the question of who taught the people of Xia-era China the perfect rituals. The wisdom of a sage could not have developed spontaneously in a perfect form if the people of Xia were ontologically continuous with the people of Xunzi’s era or ours. Human nature, according to Xunzi, tends to pettiness and short-sighted selfishness. The last thing that could develop spontaneously among humanity is the wisdom of the sage. So the singularity of the Xia appears impossible.

Xunzi’s answer is literally as I described it at the beginning of this two-part post. The sketchy past of the Xia Dynasty provides a blank space in the popular sense of history into which you can throw in whatever you want. If you want to romanticize the Xia Dynasty as a period of perfect cultural and political harmony, you can. It’s not like there’s any evidence to contradict you.

The Western segregation of Eden from living humanity in its essence keeps us from conceiving of a genuine permanent solution to the Fall without the direct intervention of God on this plane of existence or another. 

You can imagine a historically and ontologically continuous culture with your own as having achieved the ideals that you want your own society to meet. Porting the ideals of perfect ritual and harmonious society to the Xia makes the goals of Confucian philosophy concrete. Because we can imagine this real society in our ancient past as having achieved such a difficult task, we understand the achievement as within our power.

So it doesn’t matter what the real circumstances of the Xia Dynasty were. The myth of the Xia is powerful because it’s a narrative of people who made themselves supermen. So the myth can guide our own work in our own era to build a better society.

The Reality of Stories, Doctor Who: Robot of Sherwood, Reviews, 07/09/2014

“We’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?” — The Doctor, The Big Bang.

In Robots of Sherwood, a sci-fi alien manipulates a local
warlord to repair his ship when it crashes in medieval
England. Wait, this isn't right, is it?

Phil Sandifer, my inspiration on this philosophical review project, started the TARDIS Eruditorum with the notion that Doctor Who is a figure about which we can always tell new stories. We don’t have to be concerned with whether each story is consistent in every detail with what has gone before. All we need to know is that the Doctor is a hero, both for our time and for however long the human future lasts. 

In just the same way, Robin Hood became a hero in British culture, and all the cultures around the world that the British influenced. Through their military empire, and then their creative media, that was the entire world. Mark Gatiss made the point clearly and explicitly, because he isn’t really a writer deft enough to make a philosophical point without stating it didactically. 

“That a man born of wealth and privilege could find the plight of the oppressed and weak too much to bear . . . until one night, he is moved to steal a TARDIS and fly among the stars.”

I cut the last phrase in that quotation because it’s such a cliché. The point is that the Doctor is the latest in a long tradition of British heroes who turn against a society where class hierarchy and the accumulation of unfair wealth and power cause terrible suffering. Like the Doctor, Robin Hood is such a mythical figure in British mythology. Unlike the Doctor, it is generally believed that he was also a real person. This is the conceit around which Gatiss structures his episode.

The story does play to Mark Gatiss' natural strengths as a
writer of comedic banter, however.

The peculiar nature of Robot of Sherwood as a story creates problems for the episode,* which suffers from the tension of its pretensions to realism and both its science-fictional and mythical settings. I’m not going to post my SPOILERS heading yet, because what I’m about to discuss can be gleaned from such ordinary parts of public discourse as the trailers and press photos. 

* I should say, though, that this was actually a wonderfully entertaining episode to watch. As a straight adventure story, it’s one of Gatiss’ best, and he’s really quite good when he’s good, as he is here. Both my girlfriend and I got a huge kick out of Robots of Sherwood.

There are basically three layers to Robot of Sherwood’s story:

1) Sci-fi. The Sheriff of Nottingham has an army of robots, after all.

2) Heroic Myths. The legacy of Robin Hood as a cultural myth plays a significant role in the plot.

3) Realism. The narrative explicitly positions its Robin Hood as the real historical person.

The TARDIS lands at semi-random in Sherwood Forest after Clara requests that she meet Robin Hood, even though the Doctor doesn’t believe he exists. He’s a myth, just a bunch of stories. I like to imagine that the TARDIS likes Clara after she saved the Doctor’s timeline in The Name of the Doctor (she was able to snap her fingers to shut the door in the Anniversary Special), so materialized literally in front of Robin Hood. The Doctor spends the next few set pieces trying to figure out a science-fictional explanation for why a mythical figure that doesn’t exist is standing in front of him swashbuckling in archery contests and swordfighting on bridges across small streams. But eventually, he has to admit that Robin, Earl of Locksley, was a real person.

Despite their protests, these Merry Men are too Hollywood.

But the Robin that Gatiss presents us with has nothing to do with, historically speaking, who the real Robin Hood could have been in the actual 1100s. Gatiss has clearly done no historical research whatsoever to work out how actual 12th century English lived, aside from the usual two-story thatch-roof houses and castles. The Merry Men (though Clara baptizes them as such here, because you can’t not make that joke) are just as they’d appear in any contemporary Robin Hood adventure show. Tom Riley’s Robin is an Errol Flynn pastische, complete with banter and theatrical laughter. The Doctor even makes a reference to Errol Flynn during his ‘swordfight’ with Robin, lampshading the artificiality of the character.

The problem is, because you know the story is science-fictional, you know that someone is going to turn out to be the Robot of Sherwood. So, engaging with the episode, the Doctor’s doubts about Robin Hood’s authenticity are immediately going to ring true. The Robin Hood we see is the product of a century of cinematic and televisual storytelling. He’s Errol Flynn’s personality put through a filter of Jonas Armstrong's messier aesthetic. 

Yet the ultimate denouement of this theme is that the Robin we see is real, despite his obvious nature as the Robin of our popular culture, not one who could ever have lived in medieval England. And this Robin who fails to capture the character of medieval life has his allegedly real medieval world invaded by robots and spaceships. Most importantly, Robin’s world has been invaded by the Doctor, the TARDIS, and Clara Oswald. 

The Doctor has encountered British foundational myths
tempered with sci-fi concepts before. I strongly recommend
Battlefield, in which Sylvester McCoy's Doctor and Brigadier
Lethbridge-Stewart must stop Morgaine from hijacking a
nuclear weapon for her trans-dimensional spaceship to fight
King Arthur.

A Robin whose reality is schizzed with his Hollywood image maintains his reality. Yet he does so in a world where the Doctor is real. Their final conversation calls special attention to their reality. When the Doctor asserts that he’s no hero, Robin responds that he isn’t either, but that their stories can make them heroes, and encourage others to do heroic deeds in the conflicts of their own times. 

They are talking as real men, but we are watching them talk as real men in an episode of science-fiction television, an episode that is consciously about the collision of a modern myth of a hero who gives up a life of privilege to fight injustice with an ancient myth having the same ethical structure. The story intends to parallel Robin Hood and Doctor Who as myths, placing Doctor Who as the latest in a long line of such myths of just rebellion. The myths claim they’re real, but only myth appears.

• • •

SPOILERS

Quick review-like notes. I don’t think Gatiss is very good at compressed storytelling when it comes to introducing new characters to the main world of the show. The Crimson Horror was brilliant, but the only characters with any substantial screen time aside from the campy villain and her daughter (herself defined largely in terms of her torture and disability) were the regulars or already-established recurring characters, the Paternoster Gang. Cold War was similarly a story of stereotypes from other film traditions (Klingons and a comedy take on Das Boot, specifically). 

The episode also included an image of the first actor to play
Robin Hood on television, Patrick Troughton, whose
performance was unfortunately lost to the BBC's short-
sighted tape-wiping policy. A decade later, Troughton
would become Doctor Who's first engagement with the
Robin Hood mythos, albeit para-textually and
retro-actively.

I say this because his Marian was atrocious. She plays a key role in the margins of the story, first illustrating the oppressive apparatus of the Sheriff’s robot army, then helping the Doctor destroy most of that army in the slave quarters. But she is always marginal, barely present. Her final reveal as Marian isn’t even as a character, but blatantly (even in the Doctor’s own words) as a “present” to Robin. If I can put on my Anita Sarkeesian hat, this is atrocious, and Gatiss should either learn his lesson or retire his writing duties to Neil Cross.

And the beheading scene that was not. Originally, Robin was to have beheaded the Sheriff, much to Clara’s delight, only for the apparent corpse to begin talking, revealing that the robots’ spaceship originally landed on him, and they restored him with a cybernetic body. This would tie in more clearly with the theme of cyborgs taking shape this season, and better explain how he could have swum through molten gold before finally succumbing to his injuries as it hardened around him at the lip of the tank. Now that I know what the original story included, I think it suffered for the cut.

However, given the terrible timing of how many beheadings have been in the news lately, I can understand why Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin decided on the cut in the production office. Not only have American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley recently been beheaded by ISIS militants in Iraq, but there has been a rash of beheading murders among the civilian population of Britain recently, the most recent being the death of an 82 year old woman. 

There are no direct connections between the ISIS and British crimes, but it makes sense to avoid needless controversy, given the understandable public sensitivity about decapitation at the moment. Over-sensitive social conservatives among the British public have a special hatred for Doctor Who and a history of getting their way. The episode order for this and the following season was already cut from 14 to 13 for austerity’s sake. So any move to keep the show from coming under further fire is a good one.

Still, I hope we get an option to watch Robot of Sherwood with the beheading sequence on the DVD release. Then, we can at least see for certain who the robot of Sherwood is.