Semantron 20 Summer 2020

Semantron 20 Summer 2020 Semantron was founded in 1992 by Dr. Jan Piggott (Head of English, and then Archivist at the College) together with one of his students, Richard Scholar (now Senior Tutor at Oriel College, Oxford and Professor of French and Comparative Literature). The photographs on the front and back covers, and those which start each section, are by Ed Brilliant. Editor’s introduction: ex umbris Neil Croally Summer 2020 Torn between the war against cliché and the rhetoric of praeteritio In late March, purely for entertainment’s sake, I had recourse to the guilty pleasure of watching some episodes of Spooks.1 Soon this turned into an obsessive need to watch the episodes of all ten series. Yes, that is nearly 100 hours of television – for someone who does not own a television. But what was the attraction? At first, I merely indulged a love for representations of the secret world, however inane or fantastic. Co-incidentally and (I suppose) remarkably, there were the Dulwich connections: not only of two of the starring actors, Rupert Penry-Jones and Raza Jaffrey, but also of the use of Sydenham Hill station and the nearby woods as the site of a secret assignation away from the febrile atmosphere of the ‘grid’, and of Crystal Palace Sports Centre as the place where a jihadi cell met under cover of a weekly five-a-side knockabout. But moving through the series, I began to marvel at two apparently incompatible features of the show. The first was the wish, unsurprising in a series about the security services, to dive boldly into ethical dilemmas, more specifically into an examination of Utilitarianism.2 One can only admire the direct, no-nonsense way in which centuries of philosophical reflection are cast aside, as the spies come down without fail in favour of the majoritarian position, whatever the cost to individuals and to themselves. Of the many examples of this unsubtle philosophizing, my favourite was in the episode when a dastardly plot to blow up the House of Commons with bomb-laden submersibles ordinarily used by Colombian drug cartels is foiled by MI-5’s use of a weapon of last resort, namely, an electro-magnetic pulse that stops all electrical equipment from working. Contemplating the horror of what he has done (as always, this is from the balcony of Thames House, overlooking the flickering night-time city), the head of D-Section (Harry Pearce, played by Peter Firth) is consoled by Ruth Evershed, the analyst played by Nicola Walker. She reminds him that, while a small number of people on life-support machines and the like may have died – nine, it turns out, because St. Thomas’ emergency generator has fortunately kicked in –, his actions have saved thousands. Pearce, battered, unhappy, resigned, fragile, asks: ‘Is it always about the Maths, Ruth?’ ‘I think’, she replies, ‘sometimes it is.’3 There you are: problem solved; no more thinking required. A reader may object: crude utilitarians are not necessarily bad people, and they may, after all, be right. Furthermore, TV drama has neither the time, inclination nor expertise to engage in high-level philosophical reflection. This is true. However, it is noticeable – easier, this, when 1 Spooks. BBC TV, 2002 – 2011: 10 series, 86 episodes. I note that, in the USA, the series was titled MI-5. I don’t know the reason for this change but the word ‘spooks’ sets off Philip Roth’s representation of some of the USA’s problems with race in The Human Stain. 2 Please see Aiken Furlong’s piece in this volume (p. 87 – 114), which thoroughly analyses the ethical issues and which also, independently, refers to Spooks. 3 Series 9, episode 1. The exchange takes place near the end of the episode (53.28 – 53.58). Available on BBC IPlayer. i you watch at least an episode each day – how less and less time is given over in the series to the necessary agonizing over these sorts of difficult moral decisions. Speed of (non) thought can become a habit. Lack of attention to nuance can become a propensity not just to decisiveness but also to rude calculation, to carelessness, to sociopathic judgement. At the same time as this rather conventional philistinism, Spooks displays a gleeful, postmodern abandon in its representation of self. Set up as a drama about people who are always pretending to be other people in order to discover the truth about other people, who are also often pretending to be other people, the characters become less and less sure about their own identities, about identity itself, as well as about whom to trust. This hall-of-mirrors, multiple-personality, fractured-identity feature of the show reaches its apogee in the character of Lucas North, played by Richard Armitage. When he first appears in the show, North, arrested while on operation, has been (tortured) in a Russian prison for 8 years. He is returned to the UK as part of a swap. This is pretty generic so far. And, as we need to root for a new hero, North is a good operator: tough, resilient, and resourceful. But it begins to emerge that he is not who he says he is. He has in fact murdered another young Englishman (the real Lucas North) while working abroad in Senegal. The real Lucas North had already been selected for MI5, in which our hero seamlessly takes his place, incredible though it may seem that a security service dedicated to identifying people by ransacking and playing with identities cannot identify someone it has itself selected. But what we now have is not only an actor playing a character who plays other people, but an actor who plays a character who is playing another person playing other people. As representative realists,4 we may be used to the idea that what we experience is not the external world, but only an image or a representation. But the spooks, the spectres, or the ghosts, seem to be mounting up in this increasingly crazed scenario.5 The show – in its representations of the blurrings and overlappings between actors, spies and ordinary people, in its depiction of betrayal, deception and ambiguity as the common currency of social exchange – is a smorgasbord of self-referentiality, that jewel in the crown of postmodernist literary theory. Of course, committed postmodernists will relish noting that we are watching actors playing people who are acting in a drama where their job is to play a part (as well as, out of duty, their part). Further, as new actors are brought in for maternity cover, to bring fresh blood, or to allow a departing actor’s career move, those actors are very clearly trying to prove themselves. Has their ‘performance’ been good enough to warrant a ‘run’ in the team? Has their audition for MI-5, or ‘MI-5’, been successful? But perhaps Spooks does display and play with these postmodern insights: the self is multiple; the common observation about some actors – that they seem not to have their own personality at all – is actually true of all of us.6 Or, to put it another way, we delve 4 A respected colleague once asked me (rhetorically, of course): ‘Surely we are all representative realists?’ For a good introduction to John Locke and representative realism, see Dunn 2003. 5 In his book Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida, in his typically punning way, introduced the concept of ‘hauntology’ (which, in French, sounds very much like ontology). Ghosts of the past, neither quite absent nor present, haunt our present. Aren’t characters on TV or film always sorts of ghost? For Derrida on spectres and screens, see 1993: 100—1: ‘The spectre is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects — on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that it is, a structure of disappearing apparition.’ 6 Thomson 2015, mainly concentrating on the differences between Olivier and Brando, is an excellent investigation of this topic. ii into our wardrobe of masks for each role we play; we search for something to make (our) voice(s) heard, something to make sound(s) through (a persona). We are not grounded, and have no depth. Spooks, two-dimensional as it necessarily is, also has no depth. It represents MI-5 not so much as a security service as a security surface. As it happens, while I binge-watched Spooks, I was reading John Farrell’s biography of Richard Nixon, and Sue Prideaux’s of Friedrich Nietzsche. Both books require as much a commitment of time as Spooks and, while apparently different both to each other as well as to the TV show, they both betray an interest in the varieties and compromises of power, in the multiplicity of self-presentation, in the distortions of history and the unreliability of narrators.7 So, in the shadows of disease and political turbulence, I have chanced upon an ad hoc trinity of reflections on power, and on the limits and possibilities of the self. A few words about this year’s issue. I am very happy that I have been able to include the arresting and evocative photographs taken by Ed Brilliant. The writing has been organized under headings taken from Ancient Greek (translations are given below). This has allowed previously unforeseen groupings of essays: drone technology sits next to Chaucer, for instance, and quantum theory is tied up with law and morality.

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