A Strange Taste to This Status Quo, Class: Brave-ish Heart, Reviews, 15/11/2016

The full series of my philosophical essays on Patrick Ness' Class. Sponsor the project (and a bunch of other upcoming projects) at Patreon.

1) For Tonight We Might Die
2) The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
3) Nightvisiting
4) Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart
• • •
As I set out to write this review, I realized that it will likely end up a bit shorter than the other posts in this series. For one thing, it stuck to the fundamental themes of its first part, so there isn’t a whole lot more for me to say about those.

It’s the same story, just the beats that close up the plot instead of advancing it and setting up the pieces. There are some aesthetic and ethical problems with the episode that are starting to appear in the show. Let’s talk aesthetic first, because those are easier to dispense with.

Sophie Hopkins and Fady Elsayed get some great scenes to stretch
their dramatic muscles, which unfortunately are largely hidden in
shadow. It's appropriate for their physical setting for most of the
episode, but it isn't the best for communicating actual drama.

Actors Love It When You Play to Their Faces

I have to praise the cast once again, especially Sophie Hopkins and Fady Elsayed. This is praise with faint damnation, because they delivered such hammy dialogue so well. Punchy dialogue about how neither of them wants to say they’ve fallen in love with each other can work great in a lot of contexts.

When you’re about to have a gladiatorial contest with the supervillain leader of a species full of literal ash demons on a planet that makes Io look like a Bermuda beachfront resort? Maybe you’re stretching it a little here.

The parents’ dialogue amounted to the same mess. Ram’s dad Varun mostly got a bunch of nervous babbling. And since this constitutes

SPOILERS

April’s dad Huw’s speech about his despair and how strong she’s become didn’t come off nearly as well as it could. The thing is, Doctor Who itself can do this kind of emotional confessor dialogue in the most ridiculous situations.

It seems as though the direction dropped the ball on this one. The Shadowkin’s planet is too dark a setting, and the camera holds back too much from closer shots on the actors’ faces. Huw’s speech seriously suffers from this, as he’s held almost entirely in wide shots when the camera should focus on the power of his face.

My discussion of the material nature of a creature's existence owes a
lot to the philosophical vocabulary of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, particularly their chapter on their concept of 'becoming-
intensity' in A Thousand Plateaus. If you're interested in a good
#longread open-access article, check out this piece by one of my
favourite Deleuze scholars (and quite a nice guy), Manuel
DeLanda.

Existence Itself as Plague

One success for the direction, however, was in making the carnivorous petals properly menacing. Indeed, director Philippa Langdale did a better job of displaying the petals’ agency than she did the emotional power of her human actors’ performances.

Not only do her cinematographic choices one-up M. Night Shayamalan’s pathetic attempts to make plants scary in The Happening. They also display the peculiar character of the carnivorous petals – they sweep across the screen, cluster and build their presence to take over more and more of the viewer’s field of vision.

The petals express their agency in their motion as a cluster that literally infests the sets, spreading across the visual fields of the viewer’s sight and the physical fields of the sets and actors’ movements. They’re a living infection of physical space, a plague of visual domination.

The parallels with the Shadowkin are clear, yet so are the differences. As Headmaster Dorothea says at the end of the episode, the petals likely only consisted of one soul – one centre of agency. The one-dimensional drive to infest.

The Shadowkin function as a plague in their attacks, especially in this episode, as they manifest as a literal smoke that consumes the petals entirely. But despite their telepathic links and strictly hierarchical society, each individual Shadowkin is a distinct subjectivity.

Although they seemed to move as one with the direction of their King in the first episode, “For Tonight We Might Die,” the Shadowkin are individuals. They have a society, and a morality that links an ontological conception of their nature with a religious perspective about their purpose in the universe. And they have political principles that organize the strict and brutal monarchy of their politics.

"Brave-ish Heart" also has a moral problem of April's healing her
mother's paralysis. Although it was born of violence, Jackie at least
tells her daughter than her act of healing was equally a form of
violence. She had accepted her wheelchair-bound condition, and
April overwrote her mother's agency to repair what she saw as an
injustice. I hope we'll see more of this conflict between them in
the future, as it makes for a burning paradox at the heart of
April's otherwise morally upright character. It's also potentially
very awkward, since the actress Shannon Murray is herself
wheelchair-bound in real life. So filming walking scenes will
get very weird, or just will not happen.

The Shadowkin’s swath of destruction throughout the universe isn’t a function of some autonomic plague nature, but of their morality and religion. Their ethics, their self-conception. What April learns through her link with Corakinus in “Brave-ish Heart” demonstrates that wiping them out would in fact be a genocide.

The Heart of Ethics

Fady Elsayed also gets one of the only philosophical monologues on the Shadowkin world that actually comes off well, despite a few clunker lines. That’s his discussion of the ethics that come with his Sikh heritage.

The outward signs of Sikhism – the five Ks of the long hair and turban, ceremonial comb, bracelet, dagger, and underpants* – are ethical signifiers to yourself and others.

* All these words start with the K sound in Punjabi, you know – Kesh, Kangha, Kara, Kirpan, and Kachera, respectively.

For Ram, they and his father’s more open embrace of them are the links to his heritage. But they’re also his ethical reminders that he must always act in the world so as to do what’s right and best. He wears the most ethically important sign of Sikhism, the Kara, the bracelet that is literally a reminder to yourself to let justice guide your actions.

Even non-consciously, justice and fidelity to the people you care about motivates Ram’s actions. He even jokes, after following April through the portal, that footballers are well-known for impulsively acting without thinking or understanding why. But his impulses aren’t the typical “acting without thinking” of selfishness and malice. Justice remains his motive force. His ethics is built into his subjectivity itself.

I'm quite hopeful for the potential of Matteusz, whose character isn't in
the main cast yet (and he should be, given his talents and role in the
show) in developing through his relationship with Charlie and Quill.

Ethics is, of course, the domain of philosophy about the creation of character, personality, and subjectivity. It contains the concepts that revolve around what and who a person is – the concepts that are the building blocks of a personality.

Those concepts could come from religion, ontology, morality, politics, and even the theory of knowledge or other sciences. What unifies these disparate concepts as ethics is their use – to answer or explore the questions of who you are and what your purpose can be.

If anyone needs that grounding, it’s Charlie, who is tortured by his conflicting loyalties to his murdered people, the traditions of his crown, and his new home on Earth. I’m quite impressed with how central Matteusz has become to this thread of the Class story, and I’d like to see his role expanded in the show’s next season.

Because it looks like Charlie’s ethical mooring will be an important element of the conflicts that define the rest of this season. And since a bottle episode is coming next week, all those conflicts are coming to the forefront.

I love bottle episodes. It’s the theatre nerd in me.

Who’s In Charge? I: A Tempting Pessimism, Research Time, 14/11/2016

Prepare for the worst, be aware that the worst could happen. Pre-deportation concentration camps whose tenures last for years. A deportation force recruited from the worst of Trump’s racist followers, the boys who gleefully beat Muslim women and screamed “White power!” in the halls of their schools.

Ethnic cleansing in the United States of America. A crackdown on dissent at the most intense level in the Western world. A wave of unplanned and uncontrollable violence against non-whites in everyday life.

It might not come down to that. Trump and his team are ridiculously underprepared for the Presidency, and the leaders of the Republican Party are taking a bigger leadership role than his public image suggested. He’s also walked back some of his crazier rhetoric like “Lock her up!”

So it might not be that bad. Yet there are profound ways that it could get extremely bad. Worse than it’s ever been since the Restoration and the institution of Jim Crow.

An insightful article from the Wall Street Journal shows just how
underprepared Donald Trump appears for the Presidency. That just
shows you how far American politics has fallen. The best case
scenario for the new President is that he's an incompetent, corrupt
fool from a family of kleptocrat's whose image encourages
nationwide hate crimes.

And there are deeper forms of pessimism than this. Pessimism about the unfolding disaster of the Donald Trump Administration is based on historical contingencies. Particular events that have happened to America’s democratic institutions.

You can read Jacques Rancière – as I haven’t been doing – as a profound pessimist about democracy and human freedom. All his analyses of how democratic institutions – transparent elected governments, political parties, bureaucracies, and so on – all point to their constructing an elite class.

It’s a more fluid elite than has typically existed in most human societies. But it still makes democracy amount to an oligarchy with a collective delusion (or really good marketing). There’s the class of people who hold powerful positions in business and government, and there’s the governed.

If the ideal of democracy is, as Rancière says, “the power of anyone and everyone,” then its institutions eat away at it.

So you’d be left with the pessimism that human freedom could ever be achieved. If the very institutions we need to run a decently large society – even if we design them to be free and democratic – turn out to be oligarchies anyway? What’s the point?

But that conclusion would misunderstand the nature of what an ideal really is. It’s the vision of perfection that we strive toward, doing the tough work of making our stubborn material world approach closer and closer to that ideal. So we can design and tweak our institutions so that they approach “the power of anyone and everyone.”

Rancière drops a few ideas as to how. Strict limits on electoral mandates for office-holders can provide a steady churn of the oligarchy’s membership, as well as prevent corruption. And the only people with control over writing and discussing what the laws of the country will be, should be elected office-holders.

There’d be a total ban on government employees or lobbyists crossing the doors of state power to become legislators. Campaigns would be cheap or subsidized to open elected offices to as many independent candidates as possible. And the financially powerful would be barred from interfering in elections.

Now, you’ll notice that this doesn’t describe the government of pretty much any country. My country Canada is, as far as state government goes, a relatively accountable oligarchy of the financially powerful, whose power is limited by popular sovereignty written in the state constitution, as well as conventions of the rule of law.

It's not the best we can do, and definitely not the best we can imagine. The question for political philosophers, activists, or anybody who gives much of a crap about the institutions that shape their society is this – If we can’t do as good as we imagine, why bother? . . . To Be Continued

Too Much Democracy, Research Time, 11/11/2016

It’s been difficult for me to keep my thoughts in one place yesterday. There’s been quite a lot of terrible news coming out of the United States today, as the Trump transition team begins its descent into autocracy. His administration will be dominated by white nationalists, prolific architects of voter suppression, and religious fanatics.

But the most emotionally destabilizing news I’ve been reading today are accounts of the hate crimes.

The face of American autocracy. Violence is already sweeping the
country on its own power and we're still months away from the
inauguration. He doesn't even have the keys to the security state yet.

Muslim women beaten and robbed in the streets. Black and Hispanic schoolchildren are taunted, insulted, and beaten in openly racist violence. A man screams and threatens a woman in a coffeeshop for having a Skype conversation in sign language.

We were only on the second day after Trump’s election and the worst is already happening. Everyone in America’s orbit has a lot of work to do to overcome the oppression and violence that’s coming. And it is coming.

I’m going to try to do my part from Canada. One part of that will be opposing the growth of white nationalism in my own country, which many elements of Canada’s conservative party are embracing. The most visible proponent is Kellie Leitch, frontrunner for leadership of the federal Conservatives.

I’m also floating some activist ideas with my colleagues in the local New Democratic Party – fundraising for women’s rights groups who’ll come under attack from the Trump government, coming up with some videography and social media projects about Toronto’s multicultural communities.

And call me naïve, but theory is important too. Even something at the small (but growing, little by little) scale of this blog can keep democratic ideas in the culture. Getting unashamedly strange, ambitious, idealistic. The book will be called Utopias, after all. And I plan on touring it.

The last couple of weeks of posts have been riffs on different ideas in Jacques Rancière’s short, dense book Hatred of Democracy. One core idea that he turns over and over in that book is the conception of freedom as essentially limitless.

Theorist of radical democracy Jacques Rancière. If there's ever a time
when we need radical democracy, it's now.

He considers two ways to think about this limitlessness. One is the way that a lot of establishment liberals in Rancière’s country France have spoken about democracy’s limitlessness since the turn of our century.

The limitless desires of the ignorant masses to consume. The gauche gluttony of capitalist consumption plus the unrestrained lechery and extremism of total cultural freedom. It’s a foundational concept for the hatred of democracy in the West today, the idea that all people want from freedom is more stuff.

Remember how Mitt Romney, in those innocent days of 2012, used to talk about free stuff? That people let the government take control over their welfare because they were lazy and wanted Barack Obama to give them free stuff?

The vocabulary is definitely different when you leave erudite, pretentious France for in-your-face America. But the idea is the same.

It's all a red herring, though. The real limitlessness of democracy is the limitlessness of freedom itself. You create new ways of living, new identities, affiliations. Freedom is the proliferation of difference. What I called the asymptotic approach along multiplying vectors of liberation.

To reduce this expansion of the multiplicity of human life to a desire for more and better consumer goods is to make the most profound dimension of human desire into an image of lazy gluttony. Contempt for the desire that is freedom itself.

That contempt is also a way to drum up support for social homogeneity. Bringing people back in line with old-fashioned socially conservative values carves away the differences that constitute freedom itself.

In America today, it’s the popular call for the domination of white, male, straight identity, and the silence of all other ways of existence. The imagination of an ideal of perfect uniformity and conformity.

It’s going to be a rough four years.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites IV: The Exclusion of Imprisonment, Research Time, 10/11/2016

Continued from last post . . . When I say the fundamental anti-democratic force in society is the police, I'm not necessarily referring to actual police institutions. Though most of them these days aren't exactly all that impressive in their commitment to the rights of the people.

When I say the word 'police' in this context, it helps to think of this as a verb. When police forces solve crimes, help prosecute violent offenders, and actually protect the people of their communities, they’re public servants. They aren’t policing in this sense.

Policing as the enforcement of rules is a brutal means of social control. It's the social control of direct violent intimidation and fear. The spectacle of the tank driving down the street, the line of riot police armoured so heavily as they walk through what was once a thriving market district looking more like robot soldiers than people.

I don't remember ever thinking that guy with the cameo in Home Alone II
is going to be President of the United States one day. Even though I
wasn't even in puberty yet. Definitely not.

One very dark bright light in the victory of Donald Trump for the American Presidency is that I doubt he'd build a secret police institution. His moves to crush dissent will be as blatant and visibly in-your-face as Trump’s entire personality and campaign.

Quite a few of my good friends in Toronto are Syrian immigrants, people who've grown up in a state that controlled its population with secret police. So at least the Trump Administration will likely not embrace this essential institution of totalitarianism.

So in a philosophical sense, policing is control by the explicit and open threat of violence. That violence can take many forms, like actual physical beatings, the insidious buzzing of a surveillance state, or the institutionalized destruction of lives through imprisonment and the social exclusion of former convicts.

Policing is the biggest and most bruising stick of all the ways to exclude people from a legitimate place in a society, for the reason that a person doesn’t follow as they should a set of detailed substantive rules of propriety. As a process and a social force, policing in this sense is the essential anti-democratic activity.

If the nature of democracy as a process – the ontology of democracy – is as the struggle for freedom, then in what does that freedom consist? It’s more substantive than the libertarian sense of freedom, which is the mere absence of state coercion (though that’s incredibly important).

And it isn’t the communitarian sense of freedom either. I’ve been reading some very good critical writing on this concept in a collection of essays by Chantal Mouffe that I picked up from my shelves a while ago.

Communitarian conceptions of democratic inclusion requires such a thick, detailed, and essentially static shared morality in a community that they paradoxically end up embracing policing in the name of freedom. Communitarian conceptions of freedom reduce to a strict and detailed set of social rules that are defined as the proper way to be free. And conformity to these rules means you’ve got to start some heavy policing.

No, real democracy is neither of these. It’s the struggle for greater freedom – developing new vectors for liberation and the movement along those directions.

Seen here is a related – but sadly much more literal – example of the
heavy policing we're likely to see over the next four years. Some of
the Trump apologist trolls I've seen in the last while have mocked
progressives' fears of his impulsive, violent tendencies when in
charge of the American state. When I say Trump will likely go to
war, I don't mean war against a foreign country. I mean war on the
people of America.

This is only possible in a society, a network of complex relations between people that, when everything is working as it should, empowers us to develop and progress along liberation vectors. It sounds like the movement toward freedom should tear a community apart if liberation means everyone is creating new ways of life all the time.

In Jacques Rancière’s analysis of this problem, he describes he democratic process as the struggles for including all these proliferating differences in a society’s morality.

People are caught between two possibilities if the choice comes down to liberal or communitarian visions of a free society. Yet each of those two possibilities seem to be parallel visions of the other.

Liberalism leaves us disconnected individuals, little more than a bare life bouncing off other such isolates. Our best hopes for life would be to escape being crushed by our institutions or eaten by our neighbours.

Communitarian conceptions of citizenship and freedom position themselves as the antidote to liberal poverty of the subject’s morality. They are correct that rights can only exist with the real support of a whole community. But bearing rights that a community respects doesn’t require comprehensive moral conformity.

In other words, I don’t have to be the same kind of person as you to respect you, and welcome you to my community. Common identity isn’t the reason to respect someone – it’s simply being a person.

That’s the foundation of democracy.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites III: A Full Human Life, Research Time, 09/11/2016

Continued from previous post . . . So a quick recap that will actually be quick. Representative democracy lies to us in its ideology in a lot of ways. The most profound is the notion that the act of election constitutes some magical transformation of the will of individuals into the will of the nation speaking through the parliament’s assembly.

But representative democratic institutions fall short of democracy’s ideal in a more ordinary – and no less important – way. The huge amounts of organization and money required to contest an election to a representative assembly restricts those positions to people who run and network with political parties.

Nothing says "Salt of the Earth American people" like these folks.

There are usually norms that party officials shouldn’t jump too easily from their bureaucratic jobs to running for election. But those are mostly vague feelings of squishiness. A decent public relations job usually overcomes those.

And really, the problem is that political parties are big organizations of well-connected people. It’s difficult for folks who haven’t become prominent in their communities to gain power in these organizations. And that cuts off a lot of ordinary people from the actual corridors of state power.

Democratic institutions in industrial civilizations have to be run by elite groups and elite organizations. Even if you lay aside a lot of the usual conceptions of elitism associated with wealth, they constitute an elite stratum of their own – the networks of people connected with political parties and parliamentary institutions.

It's enough to make democracy seem futile. But democracy is an ethical ideal. It’s the sort of thing that motivates your action, not a concrete goal that you can actually achieve, instantiate, make real.

The completely free society is an asymptotic approach. Would the democratic revolutionaries of the founding of the United States – to pick a noteworthy example this week – have anticipated the huge number of freedoms people advocate for today?

Consider the freedoms that only become necessary in an industrialized civilization like ours? Freedom of financial security. Freedom of information flows through decentralized internet media. Or the social and subjective freedoms that are needed today for non-cis, non-straight, non-binary sexual and gender identities?

You bet your ass Ben Franklin would have loved partying in the
craziest gay bars in America. That's what freedom is all about.

Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t have understood any of the many new vectors of freedom that have arisen in the last few decades. But once he got up to speed, he probably would have been loving every minute of it.

The different demands for freedom and the different vectors upon which people can liberate themselves have grown and grown. And this growing freedom is what democracy is. Just as the ideal of the comprehensively free society is the ethical being of democracy, the ontological being of democracy is the real-world growth of liberation vectors and the social and individual struggles to develop and move along these vectors.

The ontology of democracy is literally the social struggle to free ourselves.

So in that sense, while parliamentary institutions have a tendency to build new elite groups, they aren’t truly the enemy of freedom because they can still encourage the growth and development of liberation vectors throughout society.

Only someone who conceives of politics only as civic engagement and the contest for state power would consider institutions themselves inherently anti-democratic or anti-freedom. I’ve met some very smart people who still have this blinkered view of politics, and I think in a lot of ways that’s a failure of education.

So what kind of society and institutions can encourage these liberation vectors to proliferate? It helps to consider what the opposite of such social structures and institutions would be.

They would be institutions that constrain people, sometimes literally. Social structures that encourage strict moralities. We’re used to thinking of such strict moralities as religious, and most of them are.

Police arresting protestors in Baton Rouge earlier this year. Because
you know what to do with the police.

Just consider how stifling it is to grow up in a harshly strict religious community. There are only a few ways to live, you face ostracism or worse punishments for breaking the rules, and those rules can sometimes regard intimate practices like hairstyle, sexual practice, or clothing choices.

But such strict enforcement of moral rules can come from secular cultures just as much as religious ones. We’re accustomed to thinking of headscarves and body covering as signposts of religious oppression – largely because of pervasive racist ideas in our society about Muslims and Jews.

But the police officer forcing a woman to strip on the beach is just as much an oppression as a police officer forcing a woman to cover her face on a city street.

Those images expose the essence of what opposes democracy, when we conceive of it as a social morality that encourage the growth of liberation vectors.

The police. . . . . To Be Continued

A Villainous Rage, Class: Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart, Reviews, 08/11/2016

Previous philosophical reviews of Patrick Ness' Class:
Episode One: For Tonight We Might Die
Episode Two: The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
Episode Three: Nightvisiting
• • •
Some critical notes to start my thoughts on this episode of Class. I think it’s a wonderful story, with seamless transitions in tone and style between over-the-top sci-fi spectacle, melodrama, and awkward comedy.

Even when they're disturbed by Cronenbergian alien incursions into
her own body, April and Ram are still pretty adorable. Casting
probably tested all the actors in the top ranks of auditions for
these roles for chemistry with each other.

Patrick Ness sometimes has a tendency to write some very cheesy, clunky dialogue. But he’s also very aware of this limitation of his, and is actually very good at lampshading his dialogue problems. The romantic dialogue between April and Ram is the best example of this I’ve seen in the show so far.

And if we’re going to take all of contemporary Doctor Who into account, he’s far from the worst offender in occasionally clunky writing.

Regarding the philosophical themes of the story, grappling with grief remains a significant part of the Class tapestry. Though it isn’t nearly as important here as in “Nightvisiting.” Actually, the scene where grief as a theme appears, Charlie’s conversation with Matteusz and Tanya about the Cabinet of Light, brings a much more interesting idea to the show.

Of course, I won't even be able to introduce the title of my section about this idea without warning you of some pretty significant

SPOILERS!!

No Royal Wants a Person’s Freedom

I’m not talking about something as ordinary as Prince William being a dick to chauffeurs or anything like that. No, “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart” introduces a character dynamic to Class that has a transformative potential for the show.

Quill's storyline in this episode is fascinating in its own right. As plot,
it largely feeds into the following episode, but it's of a piece with the
subtlest trick of the Class storyline – How Ness makes you forget over
the intervening episode from the premiere to this week that Quill is a
freedom fighter forced to become an indentured slave.

The first episode “For Tonight We Might Die” introduced the strange dynamic of Charlie and Ms Quill – Charlie is the monarch of the kingdom that defeated Quill’s rebellion. As I said in my analysis of that episode, if the Doctor had appeared on their homeworld during Quill’s campaign, he more than likely would have been on her side.

Charlie would have been the sympathetic villain. Perhaps a villain who comes to see a path to peace instead of violence, defeat, and reconquest. But he’d be a villain nonetheless, the dictator of a government that oppresses and disenfranchises Quill’s ethnic minority.

And let’s be honest with ourselves – a monarch is a dictator. It’s just a dictator that we Westerners feel has a little more legitimacy than a military ruler or a totalitarian party-state. That nasty little concept of the king’s divine mandate can take a long time to wiggle out of our cultural imaginary.

See what Charlie does in this episode – acting more like a dictator than he ever has before. Faced with the potential awkwardness of their parent-teacher night, Charlie gruffly orders Quill to come up with some bluff.

Phil Sandifer’s brief review of this episode spent a moment lamenting Tanya’s relatively small role in this episode. But although she didn’t have too many lines, Tanya and Matteusz are the perfect characters to force Charlie’s darker nature into the open.

The most important aspect of Charlie's character that makes him
different from his friends isn't that he's an alien, it's that he's a monarch.

Matteusz comes from a Polish family, an immigrant community in Britain who until only a few decades ago lived under a police state. Matteusz’s parents would have been born and grown up at least into their teenage years under a communist dictatorship whose government included a powerful secret police institution.

He can recognize in Charlie’s talk of duty and a higher morality for kings and leaders the justifications of state violence that killed many thousands of Poles at the hands of the SB.

And Tanya, as a black woman whose parents are Nigerian and Jamaican, stands in the prime positionality to tell Charlie that his forced servitude of Quill constitutes slavery. His appeals to the different morality of Rhodia can’t stand up to their arguments.

It’s not so much that Rhodia’s morality is irrelevant given the total genocide of that society, though that is what Matteusz and Tanya mention. What carries the real power are their universal ethical objections – that Charlie’s stewardship over a weapon of mass destruction and keeping of Quill in servitude is a stand against freedom.

Once the democratic principle exists in any society, its force drives a universalizing impulse. Democratic inclusion will never stop expanding until there are no exceptions to the freedoms it lets you understand and demand. And his central scene in “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart” shows that Charlie fundamentally stands against that democratic will to freedom.

Quite a big revelation about someone that’s been set up as a hero since the first few minutes of the show.

The words the Shadowkin often have to say make them seem like
they're made of burnt ham. But they also provide some of the
biggest laughs of an otherwise very serious episode precisely
because they're so cartoonishly evil.

Who Is April? A Regicide

At first glance, it might seem that Charlie’s conversation about his kingly ideas appear like a separate storyline from the main plot this week about April. But it’s actually an important thematic parallelism to April’s plot.

So on the surface, April’s storyline is a return to her conflict with Corakinus the leader of the Shadowkin – he wants his heart to stop phasing in and out of her plane of reality so he can regain his full health. His chief scientist’s shadow-technobabble shenanigans help strengthen the link between him and April.

That causes some entertaining and embarrassing fluctuations in both their personalities. April goes on a rant about the glory and necessity of dying foolishly in battle in the middle of a history class. Corakinus the king of the fearsome and hideous Shadowkin gets an urge to cuddle after the brutal, weird, violent sex of his kind.

But what’s really intriguing about April’s story is that so much of her rage doesn’t originate with Corakinus. Aside from the cartoonish anger of her rant about the Dunkirk evacuation, all April’s anger is rooted in the shit-storm of her father’s return.

Huw is a man whose alcohol abuse and mental illness literally destroyed his family, paralyzing his wife and almost killing them all. He was in prison, and is still subject to a restraining order. All the rage that April has bottled up for years to keep herself and her mother in a sane state spills out.

The fundamental trauma of April's family is entirely in the open this
episode. I think the most illuminating moment comes in Jackie's
supremely awkward conversation just after catching her daughter in
the afterglow of losing her virginity to the former captain of the
football team. She's horrified that April would form any romantic
attachment to anyone at all. When April exclaims that Ram isn't
like her father, Jackie responds that her father wasn't like her
father when they met either. Jackie represents that fatalism that
any emotional openness or vulnerability will end in betrayal and
violence.

She's a better vessel for the anger of Corakinus than you expect when you look at her. And I think that’s an extra element of what frightens her about what she’s becoming in this episode.

And the parallel to Charlie’s subtly brutal morality of punishment, power, and entitlement? In the climactic moment of the episode, April is raging at her father, and about to kill him with the Shadowkin scimitars she manifests when she’s channelling Corakinus’ rage. Her rampage is played opposite Corakinus’ own anger at the apparent failure of his new scientist/lover’s plan.

As she’s about to kill her father, Ram appears and says another of Patrick Ness’ clunky phrases – that she’s April and wouldn’t do this. At the same time, Corakinus is spouting dialogue in the Shadow world that’s barely one degree removed in pompous cartoon villainy from “You have faired me for the rast time, Arrec Barrdwin!”

So April uses some Shadow techno-magic to heal her mother’s spinal column and refuses to slice her father in half. Her giving gesture is a strong contrast with Corakinus slashing another subordinate’s torso to bits. You’d think, based on this, that April is fundamentally not an angry person. That she’s not violent, but a healer. And that’s true.

But she is also actually, genuinely violent. She’s not going to sit back and wait for another attack from Corakinus, especially now that she knows he’s coming for her and the Earth again. April is still enraged, filled with anger. But she’s not channelling her rage into killing the pathetic idiot that’s her father.

Ram is the voice of a more pure mercy in this moment. April’s motive remains her anger. But it’s an anger directed at the proper place – at the figure of an autocrat who rules through violence and control. Corakinus is the brutal king of the Shadows, and April dives into the rift intent on a righteous regicide.

And earlier in this episode, our ostensible hero Charlie has been shown to have just the same brutal streak as any king. If Class is taking care of its Shadowkin plot for the mid-season two-parter, then maybe this last conflict will be the heart of the season’s real climax.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites II: Entitled Segregation, Research Time, 07/11/2016

Continued from previous post . . . It's a fundamental democratic concept of democracy – the leader of your government is not your master, but your servant. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s something we must accept if we’re to be thorough-going democrats.

Rulers and governments serve the people. And any obedience people give to governments, we do for pragmatic reasons or out of respect for our rulers humbly submitting to our ultimate authority.

Democratic philosophy, particularly following from Rousseau, thinks
of elections as expressing the will of the people in the actions of the
representative. But too often, elections are seen as ways to legitimate
an autocratic rule of law or justify the rule of a strongman, not to
point any fingers or post any pictures.

Having to run a country always creates tensions with the core concept of democracy. You need rule of law – popular obedience to rules – for any institution to run smoothly. Including civic and welfare institutions that manifest and guard the freedom and material dignity of a democratic society.

Yet it's always very easy for people who hold power from their positions in state institutions to gain a sense of entitlement – that their expertise in running the state justifies our obedience. Most dangerously, people in such positions can feel entitled to unquestioned obedience.

This is why we put extra obligations on those who hold power through democratic state institutions, in comparison to people who hold power in private institutions like large companies.

It’s difficult to do this with bureaucracies, but it often works through transparency. Like the Sunshine List in Ontario, that lists the name and salary of everyone on a government payroll who makes more than $100,000 per year.

Now, it's much easier to put obligations on our political leaders – we elect them, forcing them to reapply for their jobs to the votes of the populace ever few years.

I want to leave aside questions of representation. Representing the will of the people has been, throughout the history of democratic theory, the primary function of elections. But the metaphysics of how the whole process works is frankly a little shaky at best.

Ultimately, an elected official is one person who must channel the wills of thousands, millions, or billions of people if this metaphysics is to make sense. Ballot boxes, parliaments, and press conferences just don’t have this kind of power.

The presumption that citizens have an obligation to obey their
governments isn't a democratic principle, accourding to Jacques
Rancière, but the justification of a police state. One powerful film I saw
at SYFF about the terror of that principle is Suleima, an animated
short that dramatized the life of a real Syrian democracy activist.

No, elections are fundamentally about reminding an elite that their jobs depend on fealty to the wishes of the people. Because elected officials are an elite. They’re party activists, who are well-connected to all these institutions, and who have achieved enough success in their private careers to be tapped by a party apparatus to run for elected office.

Elections are the most intense methods we have of keeping institutionally powerful elites from getting too drunk on power, keeping them accountable to the public. Elections are the most effective means of enforcing accountability.

In most cases, of course. At least that’s the ideal. In all too many cases, elections are just seen as rubber stamps on the power of elites. An appearance of democracy and accountability so that an elite can continue to walk all over people’s rights and freedoms.

You can have elections in a police state. Even fair elections where the governing party stands a regularly decent chance of losing. Whether or not you have a secret police, you’re living under a police state if the bureaucratic and democratic office holders expect the people who obey them. And enforce that obedience.

Working with the Syria Film Festival has introduced me to a lot of good friends who have the real, lived experience of having grown up in a full-on police state. So while I’ve studied for a while that dynamic of enforced obedience in the abstract, my friendships over the last two years has taught me a lot about its visceral life.

Reading thinkers like Rancière, Mouffe, and Negri has given me a thicker understand of what democracy and freedom are fundamentally about – the relationship of power between a person and a government institution. And what the democratic impulse and idea does to the stability of that power relationship.

It blows that relationship to chaos. A chaos that we want. . . . To Be Continued