Don’t Forget the Black Jew III: Looking Back, Research Time, 19/05/2017

The last two posts have been cracks at figuring out how to relate what I want to do with Jacques Derrida’s ideas to what I want to do with Machiavelli’s. Derrida developed destructive powers for philosophy, but their aim wasn’t the indiscriminate violence that deconstructionists apply them.

Derrida wanted to destroy, in the most profound way possible, the mainstream tradition of philosophy as the only set of ideas that mattered. He fundamentally concentrated, in the early years of his career, on those destructive powers. This was deconstruction.

He wanted to replace the metaphysics of presence, being, and the sovereign subject with a philosophy focussed around differentiation, change, and becoming. That’s why he developed the concept of differance.

If you know anything about the general shape of Derrida scholarship, then you know that differance was largely a failure as a positive philosophy. Derrida scholars spend their major debates over their complicated and divergent conceptions of what differance could be.

If Derrida could have known how he'd be
received and remembered, would he have
written what he did, the way he did?

Truth is, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were best of that whole school of thinkers surrounding Paris VIII University in the 1970s, when it came to building a positive, complex, useful metaphysics of becoming.

When I read Mercier’s paper, an interesting line stuck out for me (among many). He referred to the recent radical democrats (Antonio Negri, among other lower-profile scholars) creating a tradition of radical materialist politics in the modern period.

That tradition starts with Machiavelli and Spinoza, picks up steam with Marx and Nietzsche, then continues in the explosion of radical democrat ideas among Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Sartre, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Negri, and others in their crew.

Mercier seems to think that the Machiavellian roots of this tradition were a bit of a reach – Niccolò never described himself as an ontologist. But his critique forgets that a tradition is created retroactively. So what does this retroactive tradition achieve?

Here’s the point as I’ve been able to distill it so far. It follows from some of the reflections about subjectivity in the last post.

The politics of sovereignty conceives political activity as a matter of battling subjectivities. You can’t have sovereignty without a sovereign, of course, a law-giving voice. Humanity’s world is a matter of these voices fighting to dominate over each other.

The radical democrat philosophers of the last 60 or so years have picked out Machiavelli as a thinker of the earliest time of modernity, who articulated an alternative.

Machiavelli found a vision of democracy that conceived of politics as a collision of forces. People come together in communities driven by their desires – and those desires are shaped by the moral beliefs flowing around their families and societies.

Human society is fundamentally a product whose shapes emerge from countless collisions and conflicts among people, organizations, institutions, and ecologies. That’s what an ontology of forces is – to answer Mercier’s question in that paper about a complex and concrete concept of force.

More about this next week.

Don’t Forget the Black Jew II: But Why Go to Jacques? Research Time, 18/05/2017

Because Mercier is following a Derrida-inspired track, he ends up with an aporia. Surrounded by conceptual ruins, he’s left the core of IR theory a collection of posits and presumptions that have lost their justifications. The negative, destructive power of Derrida’s concepts have worked their magic.

It’s an interesting essay, and I may use some of his ideas in one part of the argument in Utopias. But I’m going in a different direction, of course, because I’m not satisfied with aporia.

Funnily enough, there’s one quick moment in his essay when Mercier comments how similar an ontology of force is to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze. But then he jumps back to a discussion of Derrida, saying that he’s simply not here to talk about Deleuze. And that’s a shame, because Deleuze (and Félix Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari) developed a lot of positive content for an ontology of force.

But Derrida constitutes a weirdly special case that I think might be worth meditating on. His popular reception – and the most basic power his own concepts of deconstruction have – is as a destroyer.

He leaves ruin in his wake, as the contradictions of core concepts destroy any capacity you might have had to take those concepts seriously. Any kind of presence, of solidly defined certainty that you were able to stand on is destroyed. This can happen to anything.

But he never wanted to destroy.

All you need to do to let deconstruction destroy something is to turn it loose. It’s a universal solvent – all certainty dissolves. Sometimes, we want this. Sometimes, we don’t. But it can always happen.

Mercier seems happy to land in a relative aporia – the conceptual confusion of a broken system. System relies on certainty, and Mercier is out to break down a certainty that’s growing increasingly problematic in the violence of our crumbling civilization. He wants to throw International Relations theory out of its easy reliance on a transparent concept of power.

Derrida’s early work revolves around a foundational concept of his own:* The metaphysics of presence.

* Because no one, even the master of deconstruction is ultimately immune to it. What would a deconstruction of deconstruction itself look like? Maybe we can ask the older Jacques Derrida.

Lots of people have written a ridiculous amount about what the metaphysics of presence is. But I don’t want to touch on it because I’m coming to dismiss a lot of interpretive academic discourses as nitpicking chatter for the sake of careerism.

As far as I take this concept of the metaphysics of presence, it’s the need to rest your life – and all the meanings that give significance to your life – on a firm foundation. And Derrida was the one source in our era of the blasting caps.

IR Theory fundamentally relies on the concept of power – the play of subjects. It used to be that the key political subjects were states in most mainstream political theory. When Michel Foucault blew up, political philosophy understands institutions, social networks, sexualities, individual and group identity of any kind as power.

Forces of subjectivity, impositions of code. Overwriting differences with similarity to itself. Or at least trying to.

Power is fundamentally a model of force as subjectivity. Even in the very decentralized subjectivity of Foucault’s sociologies. Now think of what alternative it could have. . . . To be continued

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

A New Intelligence, Doctor Who: Smile, Reviews, 23/04/2017

Since Doctor Who started again in 2005, it’s had to do with a very different television environment than the one it started in, and the one where it operated until its first cancellation.

There’s an enormous list of the changes in television’s ecology and economy since 1963 or 1989. But I want to concentrate on only one this week: the need for story arcs.

Doctor Who began as a serialized anthology show. There wasn’t any connection among the stories other than the characters in them. That variety and discontinuity was built into the fundamental fabric of the show – stories only lasted a few episodes, and were explicitly serialized together. Then the TARDIS moved on to a wholly new story and supporting cast.

"Smile" is as philosophically sophisticated as the best Doctor Who
stories, and also conforms to a classic story structure of the show.
The Doctor and his friends land on a planet where some
complicated situation is in progress, and they have to figure out
what's going on as well as the best way to fix things.

But by 2005, the most prestigious television worked as serialized novels. Each episode worked as a story on its own, but also fed into a larger narrative development as all the characters interacted.

Doctor Who had never really worked like that, and never really could. The foundational reason why the show has lasted so long is because it’s never had an endpoint built in. There’s no culmination, no rising action from the beginning of the show to some eventual end.

Yet we’ve become accustomed to thinking about television in this way. The most difficult part of any conversation I’ve had since 2005 trying to get newcomers to the show into Doctor Who always comes back to one declaration.

I have to grab them by the sides of the head, bore holes into their soul with my eyes, and say:

“You do not have to watch the whole thing from the beginning to know what’s going on!”

Unfortunately, Doctor Who is still caught in this quandary. A show whose key premise is that it’s in a totally different story and setting every episode or two has to be jammed into our need for story and character arcs. Different seasons have dealt with this differently.

Russell T Davies did it by planting little easter eggs in all or most of a season’s episodes, which would tease the finale’s story. The Eccleston year’s Bad Wolf was diegetic and metafictional. Tennant’s first season included a reference to Torchwood in most episodes to tease the season finale and Captain Jack’s spinoff show.

My problem with Davies' first easter egg story arc was that it simply
felt too contrived to ground an entire season's dramatic climax.

Tennant’s second year got less metafictional, and integrated the easter eggs with the character arc of how Martha’s travels affected her family. Stories set in the present would feature a reference to the new PM Harold Saxon and show his operatives using Martha’s family to get closer to the Doctor. All leading to the finale’s epic confrontation.

Donna’s story arc in Tennant’s third year was simultaneously Davies’ most subtle and most shoehorned season narrative. Her run-in with the Doctor was both a matter of coincidence and portentous prophecy. It wasn’t mentioned in every episode, but Donna’s relationship with the Doctor was depicted as a potentially universe-shattering event.

But Davies’ arcs all had the same structure – Little clues and key lines scattered through most of the episodes leading up to the big reveal of their nature in the finale. Moffat complicated that structure in Matt Smith’s first year – revealing the nature of the cracks mid-season, complicating their impacts on the leads with Rory’s disappearance, and resolving the mess in the finale.

More than any other part of Doctor Who, the Smith era has to be watched like a conventional prestige television show. So much of the Pond Family story unfolds in small and big reveals in different episodes throughout the whole series. You can easily think of the Smith era as having the overall narrative of the Doctor discovering his role in this family.

Capaldi’s first year saw the most explicit and best season arc of post-comeback Doctor Who – Clara and Danny’s doomed romance.

Clara’s home base at Coal Hill School and her relationship with Danny put her at the forefront of that season. Its dramatic narrative was about her own conflict between her love of intergalactic adventure and her love for the stability and hearth Danny offered. The season also featured a thematic narrative – each story featured a different angle on the ethics and morality of being a soldier.

Since I've been talking so much about the complicated story arcs
of most companions in the post-2005 series, I'm glad that Bill is
shaping up to be a more traditional Doctor Who companion. She's
a distinct personality, and will develop as a character throughout
this season, but she's very straightforwardly a cool person who's
a good friend to the Doctor as they travel around together having
wild adventures.

With Capaldi’s second year, those up-front season narratives dropped away. There was neither a strong dramatic storyline nor the easter egg approach of the Davies years. Instead, we explored a theme and followed a character arc. We looked at the benefits and disadvantages of an immortal life, and saw the dangers Clara faced through her growing recklessness.

What are we seeing this year?
• • •
There’s a plot, most definitely. The Doctor and Nardole have a duty to protect a mysterious vault under St Cedd’s University. But I also see a thematic arc taking shape, even just two episodes in.

It’s the farce-turned-deadly-serious I discussed last week in my philosophical review of “The Pilot.” In this case, the interactions between the human colonists and their Vardi droids and swarms provide the catastrophe sitting at the centre of “Smile”s story, which I can’t discuss without warning you how many massive

SPOILERS!!!

are incoming.

How does this miscommunication happen? It’s based in the ontology of the Vardi, literally what they are. Thomas Nagel once wrote that we could never understand what it was like to be anything but human, because we were unable to imagine any form of perception other than our own – a human body in the world.

But there’s something Nagel – and the strain of philosophy of mind he inspired – didn’t understand about the power of human imagination. We ourselves can’t experience the world as, to take Nagel’s example, a bat would.

Despite first appearances, this photo actually includes billions of
Vardi, not just two. This is a very important point when it comes to
understanding precisely what they are and are becoming.

However, we can understand how a body would experience the world by examining its body, its perceptual apparatus, and how it interacted with the world. So let’s do that with the Vardi.

The Vardi are robots, first of all. Programmed and designed to serve the human colonists. That was their initial programming as human inventions anyway.

This being a science-fiction television show, the original programming of artificial intelligences grows beyond the human designers’ scope of practice. The Vardi were programmed to serve the colonists, specifically to keep them happy. But look at what the Vardi physically are.

They’re the happy little emoji-speaking robots, yes. But they’re also the swarms of robots that perform many of the mechanical functions of the colony infrastructure. More than this, the Vardi swarms actually are the colony’s infrastructure.

The buildings of the colony city itself are composed of Vardi swarms locking themselves together in a massive organic skeleton of bone and glass. Its style is a stark contrast with the industrial pipes and grease-stained corridors of the original human spaceship around which it grew.

So the Vardi begin developing their own intelligence. But it’s an intelligence unique to their own body – not much in the way of individuality or identity, they’re a single mind across trillions of bodies – the grain-sized particles that lock together to constitute the city itself.

Analytic philosophy has a reputation for clarity and straightforward
vocabulary. So many doctrinaire and partisan analytic philosophers
I've met over the years have praised their discipline for the refusal
to tolerate unclear terms. But in the case of Nagel's writings on
perception, body, and mind, the debates follow his clunky and
mystifying vocabulary – describing the experiential perspective
of an organism as its "what-it-is-likeness." It's a rhetorical turn
that presumes Nagel to be correct that knowledge of a body's
perceptual and practical abilities is somehow separate from
our understanding of that body's own life.

The Vardi’s self-consciousness is of itself as a city. It understands itself as the colony, and individuality not as a separate unit and personality, but as a constituent of the unified body of the colony. Just like each Vardi swarm particle and droid.

So it would think of the humans as squishier droids. They walk around on the ground like the droids do, but ultimately they’re a part of the colony just like them, a constituent of that massive body.

Now, combine this with their original instructions, back when they were just a bunch of robots being built in a factory somewhere on an Earth running short on the ability to support human life. They were designed to serve the humans, to keep them happy.

Happiness, goes the Vardi’s servitude protocols, is the measure of proper human functioning. Their prescribed purpose is to keep the humans happy, keep them as functional constituents of the colony, serving their constituent roles well.

But because they articulate their existence as the whole colony, as a single city-body, they understand the humans as constituents too – as machines who best function when they’re happy. An unhappy human is a malfunctioning human. So they try to restore a human’s happiness when they feel glum or frightened.

The problem is that a self-consciousness that subsumes individual bodies into a whole of literally trillions is that the threshold of switching from repair to disassembly and repurposing is very, very easily crossed.

That’s why the profound but temporary communal grief from one of their leaders' funeral made the Vardi declare pretty much all the human colonists not worth repairing. If everyone seemed so stuck in this sub-optimal space, then such a profoundly holist self-consciousness would seriously conclude that they’d function better as mineral fertilizer.

A publicity shot from a scene in "Smile" that never made the final
cut, where we can see what the Vardi's killing looks like without
the video and CGI effects of the swarm. Continuing the lifelong
Doctor Who tradition of asking actors to take their bubble wrap
extremely seriously.

Hence why it took the Doctor’s reset and erasure of the Vardi’s servitude protocols to save the human colonists. After all, they were all so blinded into stupidity by their anger to think they could fight the swarm that composed the entire colony city-building with a few rifles.

The Vardi had to forget that the humans were supposed to be constituents of the colony. That way, they’d stop evaluating their happiness as a measure of their functionality in maintaining the whole.

The Vardi will continue in the colony as partners with the humans, as you can see when you watch the droid comforting the child who’d lost his mother at the start of the episode.

But this will come from a benevolence that develops from their holist self-conception – happiness will be, in the minds of the new Vardi, a function of social harmony among the colony’s living architecture and its human inhabitants.

The catastrophic miscommunication between the Vardi and the humans over what exactly each other was, has been repaired. Mostly.

And the story continues.

When Words Become Actions Become Protocols, Doctor Who: The Pilot, Reviews, 16/04/2017

When Steven Moffat was establishing himself as a television writer and producer, he did so in the world of sitcoms. Moffat by default writes farce stories. We throw the term ‘farce’ around to describe any old horrible, ironically comical mess we stumble into.

Bill and Heather are actually the most important relationship in this
episode. It's the best example in Moffat's entire tenure, I think, of
his genuinely progressive perspective. He always tries to learn
from his fans, even his fiercest critics. And it feels good for young
queer women to see characters like them in their favourite shows,
and for concerns like theirs to be the pivotal points of their stories.

But the term has a precise technical meaning in the science of writing. A farce is a narrative based around a miscommunication – different people who are all interacting in a reasonably simple situation have, somewhere early on, misunderstood each other.

A very ordinary thing, slightly misunderstanding what someone else says. We do it all the time. Normally, we know we’re confused and ask for clarification, but sometimes we proceed thinking we know exactly what to do. In most of our lives, it turns out not to be important and everything goes fine anyway.

But when this happens on a sitcom, what’s misunderstood is some critical piece of information that throws everyone’s plans and lives into a total mess. We laugh because of the embarrassment (or failure to be so when you really, really should) of the characters.

Just think of the most intense (and ridiculous) example I can find at short notice in Moffat’s career. “The Girl With Two Breasts” from his biggest hit sitcom Coupling.

Jeff, the socially awkward Kramer of the group, starts up a great conversation with a beautiful woman who think’s he’s very attractive. But they share no common language. So, while they believe they understand what they’re saying to each other, they totally misinterpret everything the other is saying.

Watching someone else dig their own hole is a classic farce
scenario, but a big part of why we laugh is rooted in how horrible
it would be if such a terrible misunderstanding were to happen to
us in real life.

The most juvenile detail being that Jeff thinks her name is the Hebrew word for ‘breasts.’
• • •
The farce narrative is a default for Moffat, having shaped many of his storylines in Doctor Who around misunderstandings over a faulty communication or a difference in knowledge of the situation. It’s to his brilliance that he understands this one structure of plot well enough to craft from it intricate narratives, heart-wrenching drama, and hilarity.

Sometimes all in the same episode, when he’s at his best.

“The Pilot” isn’t nearly so complex or multilayered. But it’s intriguing for the insight this episode’s particular story gives into the nature of language and communication itself.

Let’s look at this situation in detail, understanding that there are going to be massive

SPOILERS

involved. We have a fairly ordinary situation. Working-class hipster girl meets cute blonde with confidence issues. Implied to be pretty intense depression, judging from the way Heather seems so tired of life.

Maybe this is just because of my own attitude to stories and fiction that
I love, but I'm not that invested as a viewer in the season arc about
the secret vault under the university where the Doctor's been camped
out like Chronotis for who-knows-how-long. I know we'll find out
later on in the season – probably sooner than later if the cracks back
in 2010 are any sign. I want to see what kinds of stories Bill's
character shapes.

When the liquid spaceship drive activated and read Heather’s thoughts, it read was what most dominant – I just want to get away from here, from everything. That impulse to flee from where she was, was the energy of an engine. Merging with the liquid ship, Heather’s drive to leave became the ship’s own pilot function.

In its purest sense, all semantic content is lost in communication from one medium to another. When I say something, I think of it in a particular way, peculiar to my own perspective.

Now, because humans are social creatures, we learn to think through communication and shared action. So our meanings are all similar enough from building them together all the time. Yet miscommunication is still possible. We’re all individual enough to be uniquely different from each other.

In a farce, there’s one such difference that makes all the difference in the process of the whole story. This episode – perhaps I should call it “The Girl With the Star in Her Eye,” whose tragedy is its true centre – is based on a miscommunication across a huge distance.

Humans think in terms of our personalities and interests. We’re subjects for ourselves, understanding our desires as the constituents of our personalities. So when we think and speak, we think in terms of wants and achievements.

Niklas Luhmann is the theorist who first understood how idiosyncratic
our meanings and thoughts really could be. He was a little too
pessimistic though, actually saying that communication as we
understood it is impossible. He thought so abstractly about systems
and environments that they were literally lines on diagrams. We
don't communicate our meanings like computers, by sending
packets across media. We communicate through affects, literally
prodding each other to respond in a way that's reasonably close to
what we want someone to do.

The liquid ship doesn’t think in this way at all. It has no personality – an artificial intelligence, it thinks only in terms of purpose. That purpose is to repair itself and fly. Thoughts that constitute purposes aren’t wants or achievements. They’re protocols, strategies for action.

So when the liquid ship hears Heather’s profound desire to leave her life, it understands a protocol to pilot itself from place to place. The liquid ship absorbs Heather and remakes her – she's no longer entirely human – her desires and egos are now also mechanical protocols for the functioning of a spaceship.

Just before absorption, one other desire at the forefront of her thoughts – her erotic desire to go with Bill. That’s why, when she becomes part of the ship, Heather essentially stalks Bill throughout the universe. Her desire has been turned into a protocol.

That’s why Bill is able to send Heather-ship on her way so easily. All she does is tell her goodbye. A spaceship – unlike far too many humans – is capable of taking no for an answer. Halt function.
• • •
You can even understand Moffat’s own reputation among Doctor Who fandom today as a farce.

Sci-fi fandom today is riddled with poisonous gender politics. Socially awkward men – radicalized into rabid misogyny in their 4Chan families – have lashed out in resentful rage at women who share their interests.

I will not make a joke about how much Nardole looks like a stereotypical
4Chan shitbag. I will not make a joke about how much Nardole looks
like a stereotypical 4Chan shitbag. I will not make a joke about how much
Nardole looks like a stereotypical 4Chan shitbag. I will not make a . . .

Smart or dorky women who like sci-fi are educated in progressive gender politics better now than ever, whether through school or through support communities after dealing with attacks from radical misogynists.

Politically progressive fans mean well. I can’t think of a nicer direction for society than becoming more equal, fair, and free regarding all kinds of gender power imbalances.

I don’t blame anyone for being quick to anger, given what women have to deal with from intentionally aggressive misogynist pricks. But well-meaning people get caught in the crossfire if they’re out of touch with the communities most on the progressive vanguard.

Steven Moffat was one of the people caught in that crossfire, and he came out looking like Sonny Corleone.

In real life, when farcical misunderstandings happen, the results are terrible and rarely funny at all.

When you're a creative producer Doctor Who, you do it best when you bring a singular creative vision to the show. That’s why we remember Verity Lambert, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, Douglas Adams, Andrew Cartmel, Russell T Davies, and Steven Moffat as the most remarkable.

Poor girl really does look like the monster from The Ring, though.
I'm actually surprised Phil Sandifer didn't mention this in his review.

Having a clear aesthetic vision for Doctor Who doesn’t always mean you’re the best-quality producer. Douglas Adams and Graham Williams’ years on the show were marked by consistent mediocrity, as it was yet impossible to find BBC writers able to match Adams’ skill and talent. The Letts-Dicks-Pertwee era produced some amazing train wrecks.

But they all progressed Doctor Who by adding to the cornucopia of what it could be, the styles and personalities it enfolded in its box. Adventure, camp, existential body horror, meta-fictional parody, punk, melodrama, farce.

Better a flawed but vibrant vision than violent nihilism, reactionary racism, shoving fandom’s head up its arse, or simply not caring about the show you work on.

As much as this was a near-perfectly executed piece of television, it’s mostly old hat. Steven Moffat has been doing this for eight years. Not only is he falling back on his old standard plot scaffold, he’s nicking transformed-girl imagery from The Ring.

I love Moffat’s work. I think he’s one of the best writers Doctor Who has ever had, and I think his vision was unique and fertile, opening up so many more spaces for what Doctor Who could do.

But it will have been eight years. Time to regenerate. What’s next?

Facts – Alternative Facts – Post-Truth – Truth, Composing, 23/01/2017

I’ve kept thinking about that project on the idea of post-truth that we’ve been tossing around the Reply Collective. There’s one approach that I want to explore for this piece – I thought of it over the weekend, and I want to mull it over with some folks to see if it has legs.

Here’s how it came to me, first of all.

Pictured: A collective experience of truth-expression.

So I was at the Toronto Women’s March to protest Donald Trump’s existence Saturday, and I saw plenty of signs mocking the idea of ‘post-truth.’ In a very basic sense, this is the opposition of truth and lies.

* I wish I’d gotten a picture of it. They were good and sarcastic, just like a lot of what I saw during the march.

In one dimension of the ‘post-truth’ problem, that looks like it’s all it comes down to. A trivial assertion of lies by government figures. The press secretary blatantly lies about the facts – how many people attended Trump’s inauguration – and chastises the White House press corps for their outlets’ honesty instead of reporting what they were told to report.

We told you what we wanted you to say, says Sean Spicer, and I paraphrase – and it was your moral failure and your disloyalty to the office of the President for not doing what you were told.

The most popular followup was Chuck Todd’s Meet the Press interview with Kellyanne Conway. Anti-Trump Twitter particularly blew up over Conway’s contention that, “We presented you with alternative facts.”

Orwellian? Most definitely. But ultimately, Orwellian doublespeak is trivial.

Reactionary contempt for critics now has free reign.

Even the typical recourse to postmodernist thinking about the slippery meanings of language is ultimately trivial. It’s a mere stereotype that ‘postmodernist’ attitudes and philosophies imply that there is no truth and there are no facts. Or rather, that facts are defined solely through discourse.

So factuality becomes no longer about what is and isn’t the case. It becomes a matter of duelling visions of the world – a pro-Trump set of facts means enormous inauguration crowds and violent protestors, while an anti-Trump set of facts means anemic attendance and police brutality on the streets of DC. One is an alternative to the other, and you’re free to choose between them as you’re inclined.

So you’re stuck with the oversimplified, misunderstood popular understanding of postmodernism. If you want a philosophical investigation into what post-truth can be to produce something more interesting, more useful than this, you need a different direction.

Inside the volcano.

Here’s that different direction.

Ask yourself: What truth do the women’s marches demonstrate? We are talking about a demonstration, after all.

We have a set of facts that can be described in propositions of language – statements about women’s needs, fears, vulnerabilities, and strengths; statements of political and moral beliefs that oppose them to Trump’s presidency and what it represents in wider society; biographical timelines and events in the lives of the people in the march and the wider anti-Trump movement.

While all those statements may be true, you have to ask whether they’re adequate to the situation. If you were to list all these statements, would they alone suffice to describe – completely – what the marches actually demonstrate.

A set of statements leaves out the visceral power of a person’s experience itself. The emotional and mental impact of material events in your life on your own person, personality, and subjectivity. It leaves out the force of what shapes your character, even as it describes that shape and its changes.

A cinematic philosopher.

The closest I can come to naming this kind of visceral, material, truth-in-unfolding-experience is to riff on a term from Werner Herzog – ecstatic truth. A kind of truth that’s beyond factuality, and communicates a deeper truth than an isolated fact of the matter.

An ecstatic truth communicates the power of forces that shape subjectivities and situations of life. Such a truth is the majesty of an Antarctic mountain range or the peaks of Mount Erebus and its bubbling crater. And such a truth is the terror of being lost in the jungle, with violent armies around every corner.

Such a truth is also the yearning for dignity of a poor immigrant lost in the desolation of his new country. Or the bliss of giving in to evil.

It is the human experience of sublimity, but recognizes that the sublime can appear not only in terrifying or awe-inspiring natural formations and phenomena. Sublimity is also in the daily experiences of human lives.

An incredible power can come from communicating that sublimity.

Out of Many IV: How We Make Ourselves, Composing, 12/12/2016

Continued from previous . . . I have an orientation to political thinking that you could call a little unorthodox.

I’m not talking about my actual personal beliefs about policies and the role of the state. It’s a blend of left-wing welfare progressivism, distrust of government and police, anti-racism, and libertarian love of relative chaos. Not that today.

I’m not talking about my philosophical journey toward being an increasingly strident progressive – seeing militaristic and nationalist reaction grow and grow all over my culture ever since 11 September 2001. Not that today either.

Today, I want to give a direct answer to the problem my friend was banging into through the earliest drafts of his master’s thesis. What is the political? Here’s my weird, but sensible answer.

The domain of the political is the set of projects, processes, thoughts, and forces that shape human character, personality, and culture. When we talk about all these things in the context of how they shape humanity, we’re talking politics.

I came to this conclusion as I was finishing the first draft of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. That book is an outline of one way* to think ecologically about the whole world. How to foreground relations, flux, and interdependence in how we understand the world.

* Among probably many ways. But this was the way I could best assemble, given my resources at McMaster and the expertise I built from and developed.

My book started as a thesis on environmental philosophy – mostly a bunch of academic quibbling over arguments about rights and moral principles, unfortunately. But the truly great writing in environmental philosophy – people like Val Plumwood, Arne Næss – got into wider investigations about how we fundamentally saw ourselves in the world.

All the way down to the turtle.

You can’t care about the ecological relations of your world if you believe humanity is of a different order of being from nature. So if you were going to have a decent chance of believing in those moral principles about protecting nature and preserving our productive ecologies, you had to think ecologically all the way down.

When you say ‘political philosophy,’ it refers to a fairly clearly defined disciplinary boundary of research and thinking. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice or Karl Marx’s The German Ideology – definitely yes. Pierre Bourdieu’s critical studies of education and all the concepts of subjecthood he developed along with it – borderline.

Metaphysical arguments about the nature of freedom and determinism? Or how humans are different ontologically from other creatures? Not at all. Or so you’d think. Until you realize that those questions can cause political crises like environmental destruction.

Matter is determined in its motions, but humans are an exception from that order because of their free will. Metaphysicians argue about the existence of that free will and its underlying nature. But if you think nature has no agency but you do, then you don’t need to be all that respectful of nature except as far as your own benefit goes.

That’s a very political attitude in an era of ecological crisis – of global-level pollution, resource depletion, and climate change. Yet what conditions that attitude are deeper concepts that have nothing to do with politics.

So as I research and write Utopias, this realization is at the heart of how I’m building the argument and the research program. There’s a recent tradition in Western philosophy that thinks in basically the same way.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were the most ambitious recent thinkers – with their works developing enormous repositories of complex, innovative concepts about the ecological nature of existence.

But there’s a strong tradition of political philosophers who think this way too – I could call them the contingent materialists. But that’s a new name for it. They look at society and human subjectivity as a complex assemblage of ecological, technological, cultural, geological, biological, psychological, and artistic processes and forces.

They come from a left-wing political tradition. Sometimes associated with revolutionary politics. Names like Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière. Their ancestors include names like Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Marx. Their ancient sources are as seemingly distant and dissonant as Niccolo Machiavelli and Benedict Spinoza.

But you can weave a tradition of thought and influence through that chain. And as I continue to work and slowly promote my writing whenever I can, I hope Utopias will contribute even just a little bit to that tradition.

Out of Many III: Politics Is Identity and Always Was, Research Time, 09/12/2016

Continued from previous . . . The talk of the liberal internet in the shadow of Trump’s election victory is that it was all the fault of identity politics. SJW culture and its obnoxious tone of anti-racism drove all their potential allies away.

Bernie Sanders himself, the patron saint of America’s lost causes of social democracy, has said it’s time for his country’s progressive political movements to move beyond identity politics.

All through the campaign year, Bernie Sanders was continually depicted
in the media as tone-deaf on racism issues, and as constantly
downplaying its importance relative to the white working class. But
the popular misinterpretation of his identity politics remarks is just a
lazy hot take that picks up the same, boring thread of critique.

Mark Lilla wrote a now-famous op/ed piece in the times arguing that the focus on justice for discriminated minorities distracts from the economic struggles of white Americans. If we focus on the argument, so it goes, working to correct racial inequality alienates poor whites, and that economic dignity for all must be a progressive’s only priority.

It’s an incredibly poor argument, though that doesn’t prevent the chattering classes from believing it. Or at least repeating the argument so much that it becomes a horrible common sense belief.

The perfect rejoinder to this argument was Sanders himself, in the full body of his essay and speech. As well as this piece from the New York Times, that a fair economy and an end to personal, cultural, and institutional racism is the ultimate goal of justice.

A deeply fair society where everyone in the full diversity of humanity is our sibling and friend. That would be a wonderful society.

Yet we can’t get the intelligentsia of our chattering classes to admit this. Mark Lilla argues that we should leave the fight against racism and sexism behind in the name of healing our rift with reactionary whites. Jordan Peterson argues that racism and sexism are barely even real enough to bother talking about.

I even came across an argument that racial and gender justice advocacy only advances according to a kind of status hierarchy of the most radical extremism. Progressive activist Germaine Greer wasn’t vilified because a wider LBGTQ community no longer tolerates the hostility to trans people that she’s always expressed.

Essays like that one I linked on the "status hierarchy" of SJW
extremism feel like longer versions of juvenile, sarcastic memes
like this one. Their critique just as meaningful.

No, it’s much more sensible to say that you make more ridiculous and bizarre demands as a pissing contest of gender liberty extremism. “I know 72 gender pronouns and you only know 37 – you fucking fascist!”

There is a strong, powerful, and complex tradition of philosophy that can defend the call for actual justice in the world from this contempt. It’s the tradition of radical democracy – the political philosophy that conceives of human nature as the drive to grow more and more complex. And it wants social institutions to encourage that explosion of diversity.

Names to read are those I’ve been looking through lately – Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière. Their work since the 1980s has built a concept of human nature that embraces our entire species’ incredible variety, and opposes the injustices of oligarchy and poverty, as well as race and gender oppression along all vectors.

Writing before the 21st century’s resurgence of nationalism, they first opposed the conservative liberal consensus on the nature of truth and reason. The Enlightenment conception of reason that’s become our mainstream is the reason of a perfectly consistent universality.

There is one and only one truth, it is coherent and real, you speak the truth when your words correspond to what is true. This concept of human nature says there is one perfect model of human existence, and conformity to this model approaches perfection.

Although their focus on philosophy of science, the arts, and humanities
traditions themselves tends to nudge them out of what's recognized as
the community of political philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari have central roles in the radical democracy tradition. They
built the ontology underlying the politics and ethics.

The first cracks in that idea was around when Frantz Fanon wrote that such a perfect model looked pretty white, male, and European. But it doesn’t end there.

Humanity is a difference engine. We’ve survived the catastrophes we have not because we form hostile tribes and conform to community moralities. That’s how writers like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land think humanity survives crises. But that’s how humanity kills each other.

Humanity is an inherently creative species. We adapt our cultures to new circumstances and new ways of life so that we can constantly experiment and figure out new ways to live when our world changes out from under us. Our changeability is what makes us such good migrants. Why almost anywhere in the world can be a human habitat.

Our adaptiveness and creativity means that diversity – the most fundamental freedom of democracy, the freedom to be and become whatever you desire – is the core of human strength.

The best identity politics is the politics that embraces and protects that incredible power to become. . . . Actually, it will be continued

Out of Many II: Identity as Race and Racism, Research Time, 08/12/2016

Continued from previous . . . These are tough times for a democrat. I don’t just mean Democrats – members of the American Democratic political party, though it’s tough times for them too. I mean it’s tough times for anyone who believes in democracy.

Even as President-elect, we’re already seeing a serious, destabilizing, and dangerous behaviour.

From an ecological perspective, signs point to Trump dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. He uses flashy meetings with celebrities to distract critical media from his actual policy goals.

A new era for America.

Geopolitically, Trump’s rejection of multilateral alliances in favour of purposeful unpredictability and shifting, bilateral deal-making is a categorical departure from American foreign policy since Franklin Roosevelt’s era. His bilateralism isolates democracies and encourages military buildup through abandoning international alliances.

Not only is Trump a danger to become an illiberal Caesar in the White House, his campaign and public image has emboldened racism throughout America. White nationalism and racism is now mainstream political conversation in the West. Trump has normalized it and opened the floodgates to people like Richard Spencer who advocate ethnic cleansing.

Step back for a moment and let’s consider what Spencer has to say about what his white nationalist movement does. I don’t mean we should consider it as a plausible kind of politics – it’s nakedly an ideology of hate.

I mean, let’s take Spencer and his ideas seriously, because those ideas have become serious elements in the political discourse of our culture by now.*

* 2016, probably the most hideously transformative year in human politics since 1938 began with the destruction of Nanjing and ended with Kristallnacht. Bowie’s death was the beginning of the downfall.

A few years ago, I read in Martha Nussbaum’s The Politics of Disgust that hatred for the different was rooted in a kind of conceptual reflex of disgust. Interracial sexual partnership and especially family building evoked a similar emotional reaction as filth or vomit. Building a multicultural society required overcoming this feeling of disgust.

You could mount a pretty convincing argument that the racism that
drove social conservatives of the 1960s had devolved mostly into
disgust at racial mixing, whether sexual or social. Mildred and Richard
were fitting symbols of that fight, but I don't think that's the modern
fight against racism at all.

It seemed compelling at the time. And when I listen to the racists of the 20th century, like George Wallace or any of the popular expressions of 1960s racism, that disgust is at the forefront. But race works differently for Spencer and the 21st century white American racist.

In Spencer’s own words, race is the foundation of identity. He believes in the reality of race, that race is the ontological structure of possible communities. This is why contemporary white nationalism takes multiculturalism in a very different way than traditional American racism of disgust.

I say traditional, but this model of racism is probably more specific to the 20th century. When the deeper reasons for racial divisions in America – the conflict of the citizen and the slave – disappeared from the country’s everyday life, all that was left of that racism were feelings of disgust. Maybe disgust would have been that racism’s last gasp.

Spencer’s has a different racism – a racism of identity politics, perverted into an actual doctrine of hatred. One of the critical voices of the left in Trump’s America say that Trump’s rise was facilitated by identity politics – progressive movements that called attention to difference, the structural inequalities of race, gender, and sexuality.

The refusal to ignore those inequalities, the dedication to fighting for their slow eradication from American society, provoked such disgust that Trump’s rise was the result. That accepts one widely believed untruth – that identity politics is about hatred.

Contemporary black activism points out how state violence – whether through murder by police or imprisonment – is disproportionately levelled against blacks. Reactionary white people have interpreted this as spreading hatred of whites.

Richard Spencer mocking a protestor at an event he hosted at Texas
A&M University. Contemporary white nationalism has mastered the
art of trolling as political action.

Identity politics done right** calls attention to the differences in life obstacles and injustices that someone faces because of some aspect of who they are. Could be skin colour, sexuality, gender. Those are the major elements in our politics today.

** And it’s been done badly many times, such that listing them would lengthen my post to Proust-like sights. But I’m talking about the potential of this way of thinking, not the many ways we can mess it up in application.

If you think that the politics of identity is the politics of racism, then you’ll react to your own identity being cast as an identity politics antagonist as if the war’s been started. If you think black American identity politics is the racism of black supremacy, then you’ll react with an embrace of white supremacy.

That’s why Richard Spencer we disturbingly accurate when he calls his movement white identity politics. If you believe that identity politics is advocacy for your own identity’s dominance over others, you’ll accept that this is the new order of things.

So white supremacism returns as a twisted kind of class solidarity – the political hatred of race wars. . . . . To be continued, trust me.

The Agency of Swarm, Jamming, 24/11/2016

Yesterday’s post ended up mostly being a recollection of my lifelong affiliation with nerd culture, and why I’m trying to move beyond it today. It was a political and ethical post about how nerd culture has become increasingly identified with resentful grievance and hatred instead of creativity and openness.

About how a community of people that considers itself a home for freaks and weirdos became a pit of racism and misogyny. I couldn’t help but meditate on that sad transition as I wrote my explanation* for why I’ve come to presume that geeks and nerds hide horrible, hateful beliefs about everyone around them.

* Which is not an apology for stereotyping that guy on the subway, because I’m not sorry at all.

But I still want to make a few notes here about swarm intelligence. I’m not sure how concepts of swarm intelligence will appear in any of my future work. But when it comes to understanding today’s media ecology and communications infrastructure, getting your head around the concept of swarm is required thinking.

I should start from its agency. That’s the toughest part of swarm intelligence to wrap your head around. We’re accustomed to thinking of intelligence as being wrapped up with self-consciousness, with intentionality.

That is, we think of intelligence as having a direction of attention – at least an ability to direct and focus your attention. An intelligence might not focus their attention all the time – consider when you’re in a deep sleep, or addled by severe sickness like heart attack symptoms or heatstroke, or close to an overdose of some dissociative drug like ketamine.

That’s our intentionality. Imagine an intelligence without intentionality – you’re awake and alert to what’s around you, able to act and react to the affects of your environment. But you have no focus at all. That’s a swarm.

And we usually think of intelligence as being aware of itself. You have some sense of identity. You have a memory of notable past events, and of your close companions among other intelligences – pets, bosses, friends, the older woman who’s always on the evening shift at Tim Horton’s.

You remember these relationships, and you have some ability to reflect on yourself – maybe strategize for future plans, maybe wonder about your place in the world or the universe. That’s fundamentally what self-consciousness does.

Now imagine an intelligence without any of that memory and identity. You might have immense power, speed, have an incredibly complicated set of abilities that emerge from the spontaneous movement of your individual parts.

That’s the intelligence of the swarm.

But what are all those individual parts? What makes a swarm intelligence different from the unfocussed, unreflective spontaneous processes that cause intelligent life itself?

What are those processes that literally make me and you and everyone we know? Here are some examples. Embryo development. Everyday metabolism. Cell division. Because a swarm is different from these other spontaneous processes.

The parts of all those unfocussed, unreflective spontaneous processes are all themselves unfocussed, unreflective spontaneous processes.

A swarm's parts are intelligent creatures. Focussed, reflective, planned activities are the processes generating unfocussed, unreflective, spontaneous processes.

Who are these intelligent creatures? A swarm could be composed of viruses, locusts, social media trolls. Or it could be composed of fish, migrating caribou in the middle of a long daytime run through the tundra. The cars and their drivers who manifest a massive traffic jam when one guy hits his breaks for a moment three kilometres up.

A swarm body acts and has intelligence of a kind because it formed and moves in the world, always in response to the affects of its environment. It has that much unity – unity of motion and response. Very simple kinds of action. A collection of intelligent animals move together and constitute a swarm’s parallel of a very simple bacteria.