Idiot Joy Showland

Paul Joseph Watson stares through the tiny weeping mole-eyes half-buried in his face, and is afraid. You would be too. He lives on the prison planet, encased in a thick concrete shield twenty miles above sea level: you think it’s night and it’s always been night, but those stars are just a fluorescent buzz through the gaps in the barbed wire, each constellation has its tangled wiring and a strange cloudy liquid that slowly drips from one corner, and you’ve confused the moon with a searchlight your entire life. You think the clouds are gathering, but tear gas is leaking through the mildewed firmament to disperse the population. You think it’s God you’re praying to, but the guards have their snitches everywhere.

Holed up in Battersea, Paul Joseph Watson sees the prison planet slowly crumbling under its concrete shell. The rioters outside, for instance; they’re everywhere now, crowds of pinch-faced foreigners sweeping over Europe like starlings in its dusk. They burn everything in sight. The prisoners crisp in their cells, body fat dripping liquid through the fissures in their scoriated skin, because the media told them that none of it was real. Those are the living dead, trundling inauthentically from the prison canteen to the commissary to the rec room, they are the rubble that is torn up and rearranged into new cells for the rubble that follows them, more prisons of stretched-out flesh and fingernails linked in rippling fish-scale walls, still hair, still bleeding. They do strange experiments here; human beings are turned into something else, their hair brutishly thick, their balls mournfully gone. And above it all, suspended between the fires and the concrete shell that some unknown species placed around the Earth some time in the last century: the cultural Marxists, the feminazis, the SJWs, the thugs, the false flags, the weather-control stations, the mind rays, all arranged in some great chain of power that leads up from the fanatical mob outside and its flaming bottles that smash against the shutters of the Battersea swank pad all the way through the concrete shell and out the other side. Paul Joseph Watson is afraid, but he knows that this prison was only really built to contain one person. He stands between the camera and his map of the world and stares out terrified through his half-closed eyes and says: Gary Linker is the absolute epitome of the virtue-signalling social justice warrior cunt, and he needs to put up, or shut dah fuck up.

I hate Paul Joseph Watson.

I used to enjoy the Alex Jones show, back before Donald Trump’s victory – before it turned into just another piece of glib boosterism for political power, as neutered as any other eunuch in the bureaucracy. Jones would puff out his head into a greasy sphere and yell, or detail the Satanic imagery in cereal boxes and the patterns in the clouds, or bare his nipples at the New World Order, and it was fun. A sadistic sort of fun, watching an adult human maddening himself with conspiracies that don’t really exist, but fun. The only problem is that you could never tell when they would cut to Paul Joseph Watson – oh god, not this tiresome prick again, the gimpy Yorkshireman with his suit slightly too large, standing in front of his big important map, with his tiny eyes, and his awful moist red lips, and his unbearable rants of a thirteen-year-old sagely informing the YouTube community that while most people his age listen to crap he prefers good music, and his oppressive pedantic pompous droning hectoring honking plodding nasal clammy mucous flattened choked-up gurgle dipshit arsehole nightmare of a voice.

English speech tends to resolve into iambs, but when Paul Joseph Watson speaks the banal rhythm of it all becomes unbearable; he talks like a teacher demonstrating the concept to a class of bored GCSE students, the deathly tick-tock of her tapping pencil, ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM. He talks with the rushing dismal clarity of those mid-morning TV adverts: if you’ve SUFfered an INjury that WASn’t your FAULT, come to LAWyers 4 YOU. He talks like an automated call informing you that you’ve been missold PPI and could stand to receive a substantial cash settlement. He talks in stops and starts, water dripping from a rusted old tap, a fractured desert in quartz and sand, a late capitalism so exhausted by its own failure to imagine that it’s reduced to openly announcing each new shabby con as it arrives by the tortured mendacity of its speech. He doesn’t talk at all. He yaps.

All the usual tedium of the right-wing fringe is present in Watson’s work. There’s the racism and sexism and transmisogyny and anticommunism and other assorted foundational isms, of course, the conspiracy theories about white genocide and the globalist master-plan, the scattershot insults, ‘virtue-signalling’ and ‘politically correct’ blanketed about until they lose all meaning beyond that of a sourceless, careless sneer. But there’s also what really distinguishes the whole project: the idiot’s joy in being smugly wrong about stuff, complete with triumphantly feeble Twitter putdowns and the absolute assurance that everyone who makes fun of him is actually a snowflake who’s just been triggered.

In between it all, though, there are flashes of an almost mournful, almost sympathetic idiocy. Take his New Year’s video, about how you’ve achieved nothing in the past year and don’t deserve to celebrate at its end, about how it’s only ‘the most twattish insufferable losers’ who get wasted in preparation to snog some other nobody come midnight; you can hear, buried in his hectoring, the echoes of the precocious but shy teenager who didn’t get invited to any parties and decided that it made him a better person. Take his interview with the dyslogical student rag The Tab, marketed to all those same twattish insufferable losers, in which he says that the thing he misses most about living in Sheffield – a thriving and multicultural university city home to over sixty-five thousand fun loving students – is ‘the ability to isolate yourself and truly be alone.’ You can see how it started, how a lonely boy ended up flying far off across the galaxies to isolate himself on a prison planet built especially for him, where a strange cloudy liquid drips from the stars, where the Islamic mob spreads from his door to the furthest reaches of the world, where the human being in its cage slowly shrinks into something sleeker and stupider and more absurd.

Paul Joseph Watson believes that conservatism is the new counterculture and the new punk rock. Years of puritan liberal censoriousness have exhausted a population that just wants to be able to say ‘gay’ pejoratively, and all the gleeful busting of self-serious taboos is coming from the right – but it’s hard to square this pose with the fact that Watson thinks having fun is insufferable and sex is best avoided. It’s impossible to see the fearless discursive titan Paul Joseph Watson wants to be, because Paul Joseph Watson sentenced himself to life on the prison planet, where he stares through the tiny weeping mole-eyes half-buried in his face, and is afraid.

The punk rock countercultural hero lives in fear of absolutely everything under the heavy concrete shell where the sky used to be. In particular, he’s afraid of the Swedish city of Malmö, a quiet and faintly boring town whose struggling economy has been revitalised by an influx in migrants from Africa and the Middle East. After Donald Trump – pointlessly filtering the previous night’s TV through the loose sieve of his brain before barfing it all back onto TV again – declared in shock that something terrible had happened in Sweden the previous night, Paul Joseph Watson undertook a personal mission to prove that Sweden really was that bad. The place is a warzone: constant riots, killings on the streets, brutality in the homes, a bubbling hive of miniature Islamic emirates, cultural genocide erupting in thousands of maggots from the heart of old Scandinavia. His challenge to the journalists – who had gone through the usual smug liberal chuckling, tragedy in Ikea, the great fika massacre, as if terrible things aren’t happening in Sweden and everywhere else every second of the day – was this: if you think Sweden is so safe, I’ll pay for you to go there and see. And some journalists, who sometimes happen to go to actual warzones, took him up on it. (Myself included.) His wording was clear: any journalist who disagrees with him gets a free ride on the PJW Öresund Express. Needless to say, he wimped out.

Whether Sweden is a good place to be or not (it’s not, but where is?) isn’t really the issue; what was strange was exactly why Watson thought we should all reconsider our nice Northern jolly. Frantically trying to stem the tide of bankruptcy-inducing holidays he’d had to pay for, Watson showed us why everyone should be scared of Malmö, posting pictures of an apartment building, some punks, and a group of well-dressed teenagers wearing Christian crosses around their necks, and then a video of some other teenagers letting off fireworks on New Year’s Eve. (That last one, incidentally, was not an immigrant riot but a celebration that takes place in cities across the region; that year saw no injuries and no arrests. In his terror of foreign violence, Watson ended up condemning exactly the kind of cherished local European traditions the right claims to want to protect.) Paul Joseph Watson isn’t just constantly afraid, hidden away from everything in a Battersea apartment whose walls grow thicker and denser and arc out from his little hollow of a home until they sweep over the sky and encase the entire planet in a concrete shell dotted with fake stars that thrum with a weak failing electric glow. His fears aren’t even human fears; he lives in terror of big scary buildings, people he doesn’t know, crowds of drunk people, and fireworks – in other words, the things that are frightening to a dog.

They do strange experiments here on the prison planet; human beings are turned into something else, their hair brutishly thick, their balls mournfully gone. The chimera Paul Joseph Watson yaps and whines in front of a camera and behind his map of the world, all of it perfectly positioned to hide his disgrace, the shuddering dog’s body with its fur and its claws and its endlessly shitting arsehole that trails off behind the suit just slightly too big for it. He howls at the searchlight that was his moon; he barks at the strangers outside his door; he has lost all interest in any part of a human woman except her leg; he is ashamed of what he’s become. He kennelled himself in Battersea, because where else do lost dogs go? The reactionary right scream for a rugged and manly authenticity because they are the most domesticated people in existence. They wilt in horror at a few kids in hoodies or a few students who don’t approve of what they have to say because a lifetime of bourgeois morality and the comforts of a life built on imperial superprofits have made them biddable, tail-wagging, snarling but tamed. The lonely boy from South Yorkshire has travelled a long way in search of something, and he’s not found it yet: a scratch behind his ears, and a few comforting words. Good boy. Good boy. Goodnight.

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November 26, 2016

Melancholia after Fidel

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The world is a poorer place; a sterile promontory. The earth is dried up, its surface drifts away in tiny whirlwinds, and there’s nothing underneath. Every year it shrinks, weaker and worse, stripped away by a thousand chattering stupidities; everywhere the desert is growing and the ice caps melting into the sea, two vast blanknesses gorging themselves on what remains. How could a famished world like this continue to sustain someone like Fidel Castro? All the great national leaders are going. Kwame Nkrumah is dead. Salvador Allende is dead. Thomas Sankara is dead. Hugo Chávez is dead. Fidel Castro is dead. Socialismo o muerte: are the terms becoming indistinguishable? What remains is stunted, compromised, and ruthlessly eradicated: Dilma Rousseff is shunted from office by an authoritarian coup in everything but name; Venezuela is torn apart; and already the sarcophages are burrowing into Cuba, swarming to eat it alive. Something has passed away, most likely for good: perhaps not the future, but something. Where are our Fidels? We’ve fallen from the madness and frenzy of the twentieth century to an age more bureaucratised and banal than anything that preceded it, a vast system identical to its own crisis, a soil utterly incapable of supporting the kind of grand socialism – epic, mythic, heroic – that died with Fidel Castro. Which might be for the best: epic socialism had its excesses; maybe it no longer makes sense to have our movements led by grand cigar-chewers. Wherever there is injustice there will be resistance. But it doesn’t diminish what’s been lost: not one frail nonogenarian in a two-storey house, but the knowledge that we can not only fight but win, that we can not only defeat the reactionaries but build socialism, that we not only have to do something, but that we know how to do it.

We’re not supposed to think like this; revolutionary socialism has faith in the people and hope for the future or it has nothing. But sometimes we do, and there’s no point pretending otherwise.

I first came to Latin American socialism through the music. It was the mid-2000s, a far darker and more terrifying time than anyone will admit; I was a teenager, and it was easy to confuse a genuine political commitment with being a fan. There was a hopelessness to the whole movement, and had been ever since 2003: you line up to protest the latest war, scream until you’re hoarse, raise the anti-fascist salute, be baton-charged by the police, and then it would happen anyway. We were always anti, trying to put the brakes to capitalism and imperialism, trying to fight with thousands of weak bodies against a machinery too enormous to really contemplate, and it wasn’t working. I listened to the Clash, and then the people they namedropped, and then their comrades. That loud, stomping, strident chant of Venceremos was something completely different: the voice of a socialism that knew it could win and had no doubt on its claim to the future, the joyousness of a new and better world coming closer every day. After centuries of rot, the sunshine, cold and bright and devastating, pouring over the Andes. It wasn’t some economic doctrine, it wasn’t an initial in the acronym shouting at us through a loudspeaker in another rainy slog through Westminster, it was alive. Todos juntos haremos la historia, a cumplir, a cumplir, a cumplir! I played it loud in my room and stomped around restless. There was so much to be done. Mil cadenas habrá que romper, la miseria sabremos vencer! But then at the same time I always knew what had happened. I knew that Victor Jara sang Venceremos in the stadium on the day he was murdered. He was herded there with thousands of others for the crime of making music that the people loved; he never left. Pinochet’s soldiers tortured him for days, breaking his ribs, mangling his hands, shattering his teeth, and then threw him out in front of the other prisoners. ‘Sing now if you can, you bastard!’ And he sang: ‘We will triumph, we will triumph.’ Then the soldiers dragged him away again and shot him.

It was impossible to hear those songs without remembering this. All those glorious rousing songs formed the chorus to a tragedy, the singers just didn’t know it.That horror lurking at the end of the story seeped back in time to colour everything, to turn that ever-incoming future into a nostalgic past, to fossilise it in history. It happens everywhere now: socialism is haunted by its own ghost, the failure that is still to come. It’s so much harder now to say that we will triumph – even if Victor could sing it surrounded by the bodies of his comrades, that sense of historical certainty has been lost. You can inveigh against this tendency, but that won’t stop it happening; cheery and voluntaristic false optimism is not what inspires hope. We know that we’re doomed, and we fight anyway, against it all. But not in Cuba. In Cuba we survived. For decades Cuba was a light to Latin America and the world, a sign that it was not all futile, that however many times they tried to kill us we could still carry on living. In Fidel Castro we mourn something else; not our defeat, but our victory.

Communists don’t like melancholia; it’s indulgent, verging on the aristocratic, sedentary, acquiescent, and fatalistic. We’re meant to take the manic posture, to ‘be staunch and active.’ Don’t mourn, organise! Walter Benjamin quotes a unnamed critic of the melancholics; the ‘agents or hacks who make a great display out of their poverty, and a banquet out of yawning emptiness;’ as he notes elsewhere, the melancholic hero of the Trauerspiel is almost always a monarch or a prince. Marxists know that nothing simply vanishes, that negation is determinate, that everything is preserved in the dialectic. This is why we continue to shout Fidel vive, just as we insisted that Lenin lived long after he was embalmed in Red Square: these names don’t refer to a person but to a struggle, the desperate fight against immiseration and despair; they stand for victories that an be overturned but never annihilated. The mistake comes in thinking that this determination is always opposed to melancholia or to the tragic. Melancholia is a dialectical procedure. In Freud’s account, the melancholic subject introjects the lost object; it’s a refusal to abandon the object-cathexes, a refusal to simply mourn, to let all the scars of past struggles simply heal over; melancholia is, as he puts it, ‘like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies from all directions.’ There is a work of mourning, a process by which subject and object gradually and painfully disentangle themselves, and the latter is consigned to the grave. It is, Derrida writes, ‘not one kind of work among others’ but ‘work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production.’ Marxists should recognise this kind of work: it’s alienated labour, the production of an object divorced from us entirely. But melancholia resists any principle of economy; as soon as Freud thinks he’s found one in its complex he is forced into an abzubrechen, a breaking-off of his inquiry, a further loss reproduced within his text. In melancholia object and subject endlessly produce each other; what’s been lost is never alienated from ourselves. We preserve it even as it falls away: socialism has the keen sense of its own defeat because it is a movement of the defeated. Socialismo o muerte: socialism or lethe, the dead object, the void. Benjamin: ‘The past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity.’ There is much that we’ve lost, but until then we will not let it go.

Don’t mourn, melancholise. Hasta la victoria, siempre.

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November 9, 2016

How you lost the world

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I think I’m still in shock. When the sun rose this morning it was blistered with the face of Donald Trump, bronze and smirking hideous, and all I can think about is Hillary Clinton. It’s what I know. Throughout the entire election, one slow-motion clip of a clown car ramming into a crowd of pedestrians, I’d assumed that the danger of Trump and the danger of Clinton were of two different orders. Trump was dangerous because of what he said and what he represented, the waves of fascism and violence that rippled out from the dead plopping weight of his speeches. Clinton was dangerous because of what she would actually do, because Clinton was going to win the election. I was a sucker, the kind who gets duped precisely by believing himself to be too smart for any kind of con. I thought I saw through it all, the whole stupid charade, a coronation disguised as a battlefield. I was wrong. This was exactly what Hillary Clinton wanted people like me to think; she wanted to be an inevitability. And this is why Trump won: the presidency was Clinton’s to lose, from the moment she announced her candidacy, and she lost it. She was the only person who could. People don’t like taking part in someone else’s inevitability.

Why did Hillary Clinton run for President? The most gruesome spectacle of Election Day was her short speech outside the polling station in Chappaqua, New York. ‘It’s the most humbling feeling,’ she said, of voting for herself to control an enormous nuclear arsenal. All electoral politics are predicated on this kind of bullshit, the debates, the campaign ads, the phony acceptance speeches, the highminded types trying to focus on the ‘issues,’ as if there’s any issue at play beyond a pair of hungry-eyed megalomaniacs deciding that they want power. Someone like Trump might have been stupid enough to convince himself that he at least had some kind of grand vision for the country, or the will and dedication to really get things done, but Clinton had no such illusions. She’s been in government for a long time; she knew that the powers of the presidency can be competently exercised by any grey and dismal middle manager, she knew that she had nothing particularly unique to offer. She was running not because there was anything in particular she wanted to get done – look how slippery her positions have been on just about every issue – but because she wanted it, the big chair and the big desk and the first female President; she decided that it was her turn, that it was hers by right. She knew that she was electoral poison, that vast swathes of the country hated her and for good reason, that she was compromised by a miserable record spotted with sleaze and criminality, that she alienated the left, inflamed the right, and appealed mostly to a small coterie of sexually repressed and pathologically centrist think-tank nerds, that her entire constituency was made of limp cardboard and backlogged semen, that her candidacy raised the serious possibility of a Republican victory when anyone else would have beaten that divided and frothing party into insignificance with one hand tied behind their back – but she ran anyway.

And then she lost. Despite it all, the vast monumental horror of a Trump presidency, it’s hard not to feel a little twinge of satisfaction as Hillary Clinton is denied the only thing she ever wanted and which she never deserved. Trump has promised to send her to prison. Good. It’d be for all the wrong reasons, but her crimes are many, and losing a general election to an overgrown baby should absolutely carry a long minimum sentence. Let her rot.

Clinton’s media foot-rubbers are presenting this result as a victory for prejudice: Trump won on a platform of racism, sexism, ableism, misogynoir, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia; the American people are hateful beyond reason, and they elected a knight of the kyriarchy to turn their roiling incoherent psychopathologies into government policy. Of course these people are right; it would be incredibly stupid to discount the role of outright bigotry, especially in a country that has fuelled itself on bigotry for three hundred years. But it’s not enough; if the only problem was too many bigots the whole elections collapses into a question of tribes and demographics, and you don’t have to think about why Clinton lost. Trump won among voters who ticked the box for Obama in 2008 and 2012, he won decisively among white women, he picked up a far bigger share of ethnic minority voters than anyone would have reasonably expected, he won because the standard formula of American liberalism – eternal war abroad coupled with rationally administered dispossession at home and an ethics centred on where people should be allowed to piss and shit – is a toxic and unlovable ideology, and his candidacy turned it from an invisible consensus to one option among others.

Hillary Clinton had nothing to offer people; all she could give them was fear and herself. Her campaign was the most cack-handed and disastrous in recent decades, managed by a gang of simpering imbeciles pretending to be Machiavellian strategists; it was all on the flimsy depthless level of TV. Now watch her whip, now watch her nae nae. Yaas kween, slay kween, slay. Clinton was to be carried through her path to the White House on the shoulders of irritating media celebrities; Lena Dunham’s Instagram feed, Beyoncé’s stage shows, Robert De Niro’s menacing monologues. Clinton strategists actively and deliberately abetted Trump at every stage of his rise through the Republican primaries, dignifying his candidacy with every statement of disapproval, because they thought that he was the enemy she had the best chance of beating. Clinton spent the final weeks of her campaign against a parody toddler obsessing over weird conspiracy theories, painting her opponent as a secret Russian agent. Clinton decided, as a vast country fumed bitterly for something different, anything, that she would actively court the approval of a few hundred policy wonks. Clinton all but outrightly told vast swathes of the American working classes that they were irrelevant, that she didn’t need them and they would be left behind by history, and then expected them to vote for her anyway. Clinton was playing at politics; it was a big and important game, but it could be fun too; it was entertainment, it was a play of personalities. Her campaign tried to reproduce the broad 500-channel swathe of TV: an intrigue-riddled prestige drama and a music video and the 24-hour news; they forgot that trashy reality shows always get the highest ratings.

Donald Trump is a fascist. We shouldn’t be afraid of the word: it’s simple and accurate, and his fascism is hardly unique; it’s just a suppurating outgrowth of the fascism that was already there. Still, this time it’s different. The fascisms of Europe in the 1920s and 30s, or east Asia in the 50s and 60s, or Latin America in the 70s and 80s were all the response of a capitalist order to the terrifying potency of an organised working class. Fascism is what capitalism does when it’s under threat, something always latent but extending in claws when it’s time to fight; it imitates mass movements while never really having the support of the masses. (In Germany, for instance, support for the Nazis was highest among the industrial haute bourgeoisie, and declined through every social stratum; look at Trump’s share of the voter per income band and see the same pattern. The workers didn’t vote for Trump, they just didn’t vote for Clinton either.) But today the organised working class is nowhere to be found. There’s no coherent left-wing movement actively endangering capitalism; the crisis facing the liberal-capitalist order is entirely internal. It’s grinding against its own contradictions, circling the globe to turn back against itself, smashing through its biological and ecological limits and finding nothing on the other side. This is the death spasm, a truly nihilist fascism, the fascism of a global system prickling for enemies to destroy but charging only against itself. There’s no silence in the final and total victory, just an endless war with only one side. It’s not entirely the case, as the slogan puts it, that the only thing capable of defeating the radical right is a radical left. The radical right will defeat itself, sooner or later, even if it’s at the cost of a few tens of millions of lives. We need a radical left so there can be any kind of fight at all.

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October 5, 2016

A creepy clown manifesto

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We only wanted to entertain. We only wanted to make you laugh. We only wanted to see happiness, smiling children in the dizzy whirl of the circus tent; we only wanted to pull on our masks, as thin as a the image on your TV screens, and make you glad. Watch us tumble, watch us fall down ladders, watch us blow kisses and balloons: we only ever wanted to entertain.

Autumn is here, and you will have seen us at the edge of the woods. We live at the edge of the woods; like all the rest of your litter the damp winds have blown us to the edge of the woods. We haunt the fringes. Small-town America, brand-new and broken-down. The forests have been strip-logged and grown back again worse, and the trees are just weeds now, white and narrow, branching out like pale spindly fingers: the rustling of trees outside your window at night is how you know that there’s someone in your house. These woods are all hollow inside, forests too young and splintered to hold anything like folklore, where nature looks like a cheap film set, where the nymphs and sprites would get trapped in Coke cans and starve, where every animal is mud-splattered, pre-butchered, and desperate. Since you stopped leaving pornography out here you have no use for these woods, and they have become a home for the clowns. They suit us fine. Our evil is not ancient; we are depthless and outside of history. Hallowe’en is coming: leaves are starting to clog the dirt now, piling up in the gas station forecourt, deformed and organic against the square rows of toilet cleaner and laxatives. Leaves drift against the church, where God lives between plywood walls. Sooner or later someone will need to come along with a big noisy machine to blow all the leaves back to the edge of the woods. And then he’ll go back home, and not have to worry about what the clowns in the woods could possibly eat. He’s the lucky one. There aren’t any jobs or much hope either; some people are on heroin and most are on Netflix, staring through hours of entertainment standardised especially for you, plugging into Americanywhere. You don’t go to see the travelling circus any more. The travelling circus has pitched its tent right there in your house, and it’s come to whisk you away.

The first person to spot us this year was a young boy in Greenville, South Carolina. Standing in the scrub-patches between Greenville and whatever surrounds it, he saw two figures at the edge of the woods, one in a bright red wig, the other with a black star painted over his face, silent, motionless. He ran to tell his mother. He wasn’t the last. In the same town another clown appeared in the woods behind an apartment block, and another was seen staring impassively outside a laundrette. This was late August, when the nights are too hot for too many clowns to squelch out from the soil; our face-paint runs in sweaty drips, we wilt. In September, we started to spread. Across the state, then to South Carolina, then to Georgia and Virginia, until we could stalk from coast to coast, leering over the border at Canada, tumbling slapstick to Europe. An epidemic of creepy clowns, panic across the nation, and nobody knows why. Clowns were seen holding knives in Kistler, Pennsylvania; machetes in Tchula, Mississippi; a pistol in Monroe, New Jersey. Clowns started to appear outside schools. Clowns started to leer at the side of the freeway, watching you buzz about from one place to another, rooted among the wet exhaust-stained trees. People have been fired from their jobs for wearing ordinary non-creepy clown costumes in social media pictures; it’s become the sign of an obscure and undefinable criminality. Every genuine sighting brings a dozen phantasmic ones; schools close, mobs form, ordinary citizens buy themselves a gun. These clowns hunt a very particular demographic: white, prim, conservative young families, away from the big cities, once comfortable but declining, the moribund lower bourgeoisie. People who despite themselves feel that subtle tug coming from the edge of the woods, the call of rot and decay, the bliss that comes when everything sprouts mushrooms and melts into the trash-strewn ground. People who are afraid of clowns, and people whose fears are listened to. We are by nature indifferent to the state, but it’s been amusing to watch its antics and pratfalls: the armed police establishing their perimeter around a school in Flomaton, Alabama, sweeping the classrooms for signs of clown-related mischief; the men charged with terrorism for wearing clown costumes; the helicopters on standby and the military bases on constant alert; the tension as a vast engine readies itself for war against its own clowns, and finds that when the missile silos are opened there’s only the wet smack of a custard pie against the ground.

It’s so boring of you to make this about politics, when you could just as well blame rising global temperatures giving us a glut of worms to feed on, or astral alignments poking pores in the fabric of your universe. Why clowns? Why now? Isn’t a big sad-faced clown about to reach out for the Presidency? Aren’t you all afraid, safer than you’ve ever been in your homes surrounded by three lines of cops with military-grade weapons, but terrified of the refugees, of the terrorists, of the criminals, of whatever it is that’s lurking in the dark by the edge of the woods? It’s even worse when you psychologise. The horror of the clown is the sad man behind the painted smile, that desperate need, going back to old Grimaldi, for the unhappiest ones to make other people laugh. Learn the truth: we are not unhappy. There is nothing behind our masks. Note how in so many media reports, the clowns are not a he or a she but an it. Why are you afraid of clowns? Don’t you love to be entertained? Weren’t wars fought, cities basted to rubble, children burned alive, all to defend a free society in which you could live without fear and be entertained? But there’s something restless: a vague sense, as credits roll for episode eight and you know without thinking that however much you might want to do something else episode nine is as inevitable as the setting sun, that you’re wasting your life; that it may as well be over already. And at that very moment, a clown lurches out of the edge of the woods behind your house, a big plastic grin on his face, and a knife in his hand.

We don’t mean to frighten you. We don’t mean to cause you any harm. We carry weapons, but you love to look at weapons; you put them in our hands. This is what we will do. We will stand at the edge of the woods and not say a word. We will wait patiently until you put down your guns, call off the police, and end all this senseless panic. We will wait until, of your own free will, you follow us into the woods, those grey shallow woods where everything new falls to rot. We will take you into the woods, and then we will put on a little show for you. And you will laugh.

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September 19, 2016

Why I put PZ Myers in a hot air balloon

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I don’t blame PZ Myers for not liking me; if I were him I wouldn’t like me either. Myers is a grown adult and an associate professor of biology at UM Morris, best known for not believing in God, for refusing to condemn bestiality, and for a 2008 stunt in which he desecrated a Communion host along with some pages from the Qu’ran. He runs a blog, Pharyngula, which he disconcertingly describes as ‘random ejaculations from a godless liberal.’ (It’s not inaccurate – his daily rants do elicit that same combination of pity and disgust as the sight of someone rubbing one out in public.) If I’m honest, Myers first came to my attention when he wrote a brief response to my unfair and uncharitable hitpiece on Neil deGrasse Tyson, describing me as ‘an anti-intellectual reverse-snob — he thinks he should be proud of being so blatantly pro-mystery and anti-science,’ an epithet so apt I had to put it on my masthead. More recently, he’s taken exception to my essay on the general intellectual tenor of the atheist movement in the Baffler, writing a counterblast titled ‘Sam Kriss, master of projection.’ I’m not surprised; I struck first. The essay itself isn’t really original; nothing ever is: the core argument is for the most part a recapitulation of Max Horkheimer’s critique in Theism and Atheism, inflected with Kierkegaard, my own non-invidious alethiology, and vitriol. It’s the vitriol that Myers seems to be most upset by – which is strange, as he’s certainly capable of dishing it out. In my introductory paragraph I run through a couple of atheism’s leading lights, and the sheer strangeness of their behaviour. Richard Dawkins, for instance, is ‘a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism.’ Chris Hitchens, ‘blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.’ And Myers I describe as ‘psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon.’

‘Well, actually…’ he writes. His whole ideology can be contained in that ‘well, actually.’ I’m not really all that interested here in defending the substance of my essay from Myers’s counterarguments, such as they are; it can stand for itself. His invocation of projection, pointing out that I ascribe various degrees of madness to all these prominent atheists while at the same time coming across a little unhinged myself, mostly just shows that he doesn’t really get it. I’ll only note that it’s interesting to see, after having routinely criticised atheism for being dismally pedantic – blind to metaphor and nuance, relentlessly fixated on the stupid binary of true and false, seized with the monstrous idea that the best statement is one which blithely repeats an existing state of affairs and does no more – that both Myers and his readership are utterly baffled by my comment on Hitchens. ‘It wasn’t a fug that killed him,’ Myers writes, ‘or even his own rhetoric, but cancer.’ Well, shit. One Owlmirror speculates: ‘Did Hitchens at some point literally fall in the Euphrates? I mean, he was a journalist in the right area… Or could it be a convoluted reference to Hitchens’ fondness for whiskey?’ Another wonders if I’m ‘somehow referring to Euphrates the Stoic.’ I’ll leave them to work it out; what I really want to zero in on is Myers’s response to my characterisation of himself. He writes: ‘Again, “screeching death” is also terribly inapt, and why has he put me in a hot air balloon?’

It’s usually bad form to explain your own metaphors; as well as resolving the meaning of a text back to boring old authorial intention, it strips away all the indeterminacy that makes a metaphor interesting in the first place. If you can cut through the metaphor and explain what you mean without any damage to that meaning, you should have just said what you meant in the first place. But this is a special case; the object of the metaphor is himself demanding to know why he’s in a hot air balloon, and it wouldn’t be fair to trap someone in a basket high above the earth without at least telling them why. So I’ll give PZ Myers the explanation I owe him. This is why I put him in a hot air balloon.

It’s funny. No man is more ridiculous than the one trapped in a gently listing hot air balloon, and PZ Myers has been trapped in a gently listing hot air balloon all his life. The man has a fairly round head, its taper towards the chin smoothed out by that odobenine beard; his body seems to dangle from the rising roundness of his head. All I did was put him next to a mirror of himself. As I cut the ropes and the hot air balloon started to wobble towards the heavens his big round head wobbled too, poking out from over the lip of the basket, demanding that I let him down at once. But it was too late. Even if I’d wanted to, there was nothing I could do to save him: PZ Myers and his balloon were already high above me, diminishing into the sky’s glittering haze, bloating upwards to a higher truth, to punch the face of God.
Atheism, of the type I describe in the Baffler piece, could be considered as a form of helplessness before the facts. The highest endeavour of humanity is to catalogue all the stupid details of our physical universe, to ingest them and then barf them out again; the human being is just a mechanism by which the universe repeats itself, for no good reason. We are not active, we do not form our own world; any attempt to do so is denounced as superstition and untruth. Atheists always love to present their interventions as being exceptionally brave, personal conscience against the follies of society, but in fact it’s hard to conceive of an ideology that’s more thoroughly passive. To give him his due, Myers distinguishes himself from some of his contemporaries with a stated commitment to social change; he’s broadly pro-feminist, he supports LGBT+ struggles, and so on, like so many social liberals he is at least opposed to the more morbid symptoms of the disease – but all this, as his response shows, remains in the context of that same godawful pedantry. His arguments for egalitarianism are epistemological arguments; like so many liberal Aufklärer he considers social justice to follow from the brute facts, rather than as something that seeks to abolish them. In other words, we are in the hot air balloon, knocked about by the winds, unable to steer our own course; all we can do is embrace the jetstreams as they knock our big blobby heads across the skies, because if nothing else they are at least factually true. Myers roars his power and indignation, and all the while his balloon tilts onwards to nowhere.
Consider the loneliness of the man in the hot air balloon. Up on his lonely rootless perch all other figures slowly melt into their backdrop. Houses fade into cities, cities fade into a fuzzy urban smudge; above a certain height, even the birds will no longer visit him. The gaze of scientific rationality is abstract and disembodied; it sees the world of facts spread out beneath it, and knows that it can never come back down. PZ Myers is a monad. Like all dogmas atheism has its schisms and its cleavages, but Myers has managed to utterly alienate himself from his co-religionists: he’s disliked by the bigoted, bellicose contingent because of his attempts to disown the nerd misogyny and the general unpleasantness that surrounds organised atheism; he’s disliked by the social-justice contingent for his furious outbursts, his bloodthirstiness, his malice, his badly cloaked self-regard, his bellicose bigotry. PZ Myers fell into the sky. You can see him sometimes, on a clear day; a tiny dot hovering by the edge of a faded afternoon moon, his screams unheard, the ruler of his pelagic isolation.
In 2008, the Brazilian priest Adelir Antônio de Carli died in a cluster ballooning accident. De Carli was a champion of the poor and destitute in his city of Paranaguá, defending beggars against police violence; he regularly carried out similar stunts to raise money for local charities. On his last balloon flight, de Carli found himself floating out over the ocean, where he lost contact with his ground team; months later, his body was found near an offshore oil rig. PZ Myer’s response was sheer gruesome delight; his only concern was that more priests weren’t dying thousands of miles from the ground. ‘I am imagining a day,’ he wrote, ‘when every priest in the world stands smiling beneath a great happy bobbing collection of many-colored balloons, and they all joyously loft themselves up, up into the sky, joyfully drifting away before the winds until they are just a tiny speck and then … gone.’ (This is a minor quibble, next to the sheer monstrosity of his fantasies, but nobody who uses ‘joyously’ and ‘joyfully’ in the same sentence should ever think of criticising someone else’s writing.) PZ Myers dreams of massacring Latin American Catholic priests, shooting them down with ‘an ultralight aircraft and a BB gun’; he dreams with the Escuadrón de la Muerte; it was only right that someone should put him in a balloon all for himself.
He was rude to Tami, which is unforgivable.
PZ Myers struggled at first, when I put him in the hot air balloon. All the usual complaints: no, I don’t want to go, don’t put me in there, I don’t like it. But he settled down once it started to rise; whatever the indignity, it’s fun to go on a hot air balloon ride – even if you are alone, even if you can never come back down. I put him there because I could, and he stayed there because that hot air balloon is where he’s always belonged.

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September 13, 2016

JK Rowling and the Cauldron of Discourse

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Please understand that I’m not making any kind of criticism of her when I say that JK Rowling has abandoned the real world. When you have one billion dollars, it’s not really something you need any more; there’s no real need to explain why she chooses to live with magic instead. If nothing else, she inhabits herself. In Edinburgh’s rain-splattered streets familiar beings are at work. The troll in chains, for instance, grunting behind the wheel of the bus, pressed into its dreary service shuttling endlessly from Hanover Street to Holyrood and back by a simple first-year spell, Instrumentio, for the manipulation of hyponoiacs – because why else would the Lothian number 6 have ploughed so carelessly into that puddle just as she was walking past? You might think that Ocado being out of smoked salmon for three weeks running is a supply-chain problem, another of those market inefficiencies that together determine the course of our lives, but she knows better: when she scans down her receipt to see it replaced by mackerel again, she knows it’s an infestation of nifflers, scurrying rapacious all along the warehouse floor, snuffling up anything that looks like it might be valuable, cramming thick slices of translucent rippling salmon into their always-hungry bellies. When helicopters thrum overhead to ruin her sleep at three in the morning, JK Rowling knows that a werewolf’s on the loose; when politically engaged young people mass in front of Parliament she sees the crowded hoods of the Dementors, and shivers.

Things continue to work after their usual fashion; it’s house-elves in their willing legions that stitched all her clothes together, and worryingly megarhinic goblins judiciously sliding banknotes to her through the cash machine. She’s grateful for the advice of Hagrid and Dumbledore and all the others as they follow her around this greyed-out half-world, she’s glad that she’s not like all the boring and stupid people, that she has an active imagination and a rich inner life. Of course she knows that all these wizards and griffins are just stuff that she made up, that none of it is really real, that she prefers living with them because she can control it all to the last detail, while even one billion dollars won’t let you rearrange the universe at will. But things aren’t always so clear. She’s sure, occasionally, that Harry had always been there, telling her what to do. He told her to write the book. Then she went back into the house and wrote, It was nearly midnight, and Harry Potter was lying on his stomach in bed. It was not nearly midnight. Harry Potter was not lying on his stomach in bed.

This is about JK Rowling’s political interventions, of course, her pathological tendency to justify vague and insipid reaction by pointing out that some fictional wizards she thought up inside her own head also share her views, her apparent inability to think about the real world without first mapping it onto the one she invented. JK Rowling has variously pissed off Scottish nationalists and the Palestine solidarity movement and the Labour left, wielding a Dumbledore hand puppet that repeats everything she says in a slightly lower voice, but she’s also pissed off a significant number of her own fans, and that’s where you have to start.

In 2007, Rowling was widely celebrated for announcing that her character Dumbledore was gay, despite the fact that there’s nothing to suggest this in the text itself, where she had an opportunity to actually advocate for queer issues; this year, when she told her fans that their personal theories were all incorrect and another character, Sirius Black, was not gay, they were outraged. We grew up with these characters, they insisted, we decide how to read them. JK Rowling is over, they declared, as if she hadn’t already been dead since Barthes. (Or longer: there’s a reason every testament is final, why God never actively intervenes in the world once His holy book is set down, why the medieval Kabbalists had to invent reader-response theory and the Catholic Church headcanons.) What’s clear is that absolutely nobody involved has ever read a word of Derrida.

There are many definitions of deconstruction, none of them particularly good, but you could do worse than to describe it as a mode of reading that refuses to forget the textuality of the text, the fact that it’s a series of marks on a material substrate that were written and which can be read, copied, misunderstood, ignored, or destroyed, that before it conjures up a private universe it exists as a shared object in this one. As a sop to her LGBT+ critics, Rowling shortly afterwards revealed that in her books lycanthropy is actually a metaphor for AIDS. Her position on all this is clear: she came up with these stories, she owns them, and long after they’ve slipped into the wider discourse they still remain essentially hers, essentially private. On Twitter, her header image was briefly two lines of text reading ‘I know what Dumbledore would do. Deal with it.’ The true text of Harry Potter is not on the printed page, but between her ears, to be altered whenever she wants; in her Platonist cosmology fictional events have a shining reality that is all their own, which emanates from out her mouth. She’s following the fandom-headcanon model of literary theory, but here hers is the largest, most bloated head, and the only one that counts. It’s impossible to read this denial of the text anything other than an abrogation of her rights and duties as an author. Sometimes dedicated fans whip themselves up into such a frenzy over their favourite culture-commodities that they act as if the stories were real, centring themselves in a private world that does not belong to them, and JK Rowling does the exact same thing. As soon as she moves to keep hold of her creation, it gains a terrifying, spectral autonomy. JK Rowling is not the author of the Harry Potter books; she is their biggest fan.

It’s in this context that Rowling’s bizarre forays into politics, her marshalling of the powers of literary enchantment for the most banal and miserable of mundane causes, start to make a kind of sense. When she stridently opposed the academic boycott of Israel called for by Palestinian civil society, she did so through a lengthy exegesis on the moral message of her own books, eventually concluding that BDS is wrong because the magical wizards wouldn’t like it. (To be fair, she admits that Harry might have started out with natural pro-Palestine sympathies, but maintains that by the end of the last book he would have grown up and learned to accept that Israel has a right to exist.) When Britain voted to leave the European Union, her public response was that she’d ‘never wanted magic more,’ presumably so she could cast a spoiling spell on millions of ballots. Her opposition to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn seems to be based on the usual confused half-ideas about electability, as if the party’s right wing and its generic brand of watered-down Toryism hadn’t shown itself to be a losing proposition twice in the last decade, but it’s mostly supported by the fact that, as she insisted, ‘Corbyn. Is. Not. Dumbledore.’ Which is true: Jeremy Corbyn simply isn’t as good as the wise old magician who doesn’t exist, having shown himself to be entirely incapable of casting even the most basic of spells, and utterly failed to function as a universally adored avatar of infallible good; he’s capable of occasionally holding views contrary to those of JK Rowling even when she doesn’t want him to, and he didn’t even have the good grace to give her one billion dollars. None of this is, strictly speaking, analogy; in almost every case she’s responding to other, lesser fans to say that their analogies are inadmissible. In analogy a fictional scenario acts as a map for real events; something intersubjective and mutually agreed upon can explicate (or, if you know how to do it right, confuse) an objective situation. For Rowling, the situation is reversed: real events are trespassing on her characters, the real world is only an imperfect map for Harry Potter.

Rowling’s politics didn’t create those of the Harry Potter fantasy – she is, remember, not an author but a fan. Instead, the books themselves distilled all the latent fascism out of the political mainstream, boiling the discourse into a heavy green slime, and she drank it all down in one gulp. People sometimes try to play a fun game in which they match the Hogwarts houses to political ideologies, usually ending up with a ranked list of what ideas they like and don’t like (Gryffindors are nice social liberals like me! Donald Trump is a Voldemort!). This is the wrong way of looking at it; any division into types must itself exemplify a particular type, so that the four together express a single Weltanschauung. Gryffindor are fascists according to fascist ideology itself, the ideal-ego of the fascist subject: a natural elite, strong, noble, honourable, yellow-haired, and respectful of difference, but only within strict limits. Slytherin is the same figure as she appears to the outside world, her negative aspects projected onto a despised other. Hufflepuff is the fascist’s ideal ordinary political subject, dull and stolid, but essentially good-hearted; Ravenclaw is the indeterminate other that resists assimilation into this conceptual matrix, the thing that constitutes the order through its exclusion, the figure that in the early twentieth century was identified with the body of the Jew.

Harry Potter is a profoundly reactionary fable; its fantasy isn’t really about dragons and broomsticks but the tired old fantasy of the British class system. Harry Potter is the petit-bourgeois boy who goes to a magical Eton (one that, incidentally, runs on actual slave-labour), faces a few tribulations along his way, but eventually finds himself admitted to the ranks of the aristocracy. The central moral dilemma is one of inequality – what do you do when you have one class of people who, by dint of their extraordinary powers, are innately superior to the society surrounding them? (This goes some way to explaining its popularity: Harry Potter is a book for people who are very pleased with themselves because they love books and love to read, without any judgements on what’s being read; it was never for children and always for the bored 29-year-old human resources workers they would grow into. To read Harry Potter uncritically is to adopt the posture of a Hufflepuff.) The crude, cartoon fascism of Voldemort and the Death Eaters answers that they must rule, killing and enslaving the lesser races. The good characters, meanwhile, want the wizarding world to coil up into its own superiority and seethe in its own ressentiment; every adult is seemingly employed by a government bureaucracy whose sole purpose is to maintain a system of magical apartheid. But remember that these are not actually opposing factions, only varying perspectives of a single ideological object; the difference between Dumbledore and Voldemort is as illusory as that between white nationalism and white supremacism. When JK Rowling announces what Dumbledore would do, she’s announcing the politics of the entire work, its good and evil figures all rolled into one. This is what fandom-hermeneutics fails to understand: you can’t introject a single character sliced off from its text; you can only swallow the whole thing. When JK Rowling ventriloquises her friendly wizard to say that Palestine solidarity or socialism make the Hogwarts man feel very sad, watch her head spin round to reveal the pale leering mouth of the Dark Lord.

31 Comments

August 30, 2016

What to do when you’ve been cucked

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So you came home to find your wife fucking another man, someone you’d never even met before, right there on the living-room sofa. Your own response surprised you; you were surprised by just how unsurprised you were. Your wife and her lover were steadily shuffling the cushions off that sofa you’d bought, and all the while she was making noises you’d never heard before, not pantomime screaming but breathy fluttering moans of a genuine pleasure you could never possibly give her, and you asked the two of them to keep it down a bit maybe as there was some work you had to get one with, and then you left. You’d always wondered, dimly, what someone like your wife could ever see in someone like you, and as it turned out the answer was that she didn’t. Almost reassuring. There’s something to be said for not being seen. So you went up into the little study you’d made for yourself in the spare room, and put on some nice mid-2000s indie music to drown out the noises still coming from downstairs. It wasn’t as if you’d not been warned. Everyone is tired now of the identification of the sexual with the political, the fact that you can hardly bring up Marx now without Freud trotting along smartly on his heels; you are an enlightened man, and feel vaguely that statecraft should be about bigger and grander things than the policing of which bits of which bodies are allowed to go where, but you were warned. For months now strange men had been pestering you online whenever you offered up one of your sensible and well thought-out takes on the day’s news, and all of them had been calling you a cuck. Your wife, they’d been telling you, is fucking another man. And they weren’t wrong.

For most people aware of the phenomenon, it seems strange or ridiculous that the online far-right should be adopting accusations of cuckoldry as its insult of choice. Of all possible slurs, cuck is pretty much unique in that the only person it ever really diminishes is the person saying it. The people most fond of it are young, pyogenic, leeringly antifeminist men who spend far too much time online, and for whom cuckoldry is an object of terror and fascination in equal measure, despite the fact that – let’s be frank – they don’t tend to fuck very much; men who are deeply anxious that someone else might have sex with the wives that they don’t have. It’s not even hidden: all the cuck-sayers are doing is universalising their lack of phallus. On their various websites (4chan, the manosphere, there’s no point indulging in the usual nonsense about the ‘dark corners of the internet’ when the whole panoptic prison is floodlit at all times) the idea of female inconstancy dominates. One notion, tied to the principle of a universal hypergamy, is that 80% of women are having sex with 20% of men, with the remaining men either being double-timed or left entirely celibate; another holds that up to a third of all fathers are unwittingly raising a child that is not theirs. To even be capable of processing the insult you need to be aware of all this stupid shit; that’s the only sense in which it’s effective: if someone calls you a cuck and you know what they mean, you should probably sort your life out. So why use it?

These things always coil in on themselves: the men with their dripping fear of being cuckolded inevitably tend to be the same ones who get off on watching it happen. In cuck porn a (white) husband squirms, crestfallen and ineffectual, while his (white) wife is fucked by another (usually black) man. Most of the work on this phenomenon, much of it very good, still tends to focus on its unpleasant racial politics – which are absolutely present, but hardly new; Frantz Fanon could have told you all about it – while passing over what’s really novel in cuckold porn. Here, the figure of viewer identification is not one of the participants, but the cuckolded husband; the viewer is not just watching, but watching the process of watching. The husband is forced to observe, sometimes masturbating, always ashamed of himself: cuckold porn is a metapornography, in which the viewer of the traditional pornographic film is himself inserted into the mise-en-scène to become the cathected object, a pornography at once narcissistic and utterly castrated. But power reproduces itself here: the wife and her lover are only spectacle, mute amusement, while the husband is spectator, or in other words subject. Cuckoldry is the real embodiment of the universal white male subject, the sourceless gaze that sees everything and desires everything and categorises everything while touching nothing; far from representing the crisis of white masculine dominance, it’s the agony of its realisation.

Which might be why it lends itself so easily to politics. (Those most often accused of being cucks are, after all, the followers of the dominant liberal-democratic ideology, something deeply ineffectual but which asserts itself everywhere with a terrifying violence.) In the mythology of the far-right, nations are cucked by welfare and migration, politicians are cucked by business interests, the average male is cucked by every bureaucratic indignity that’s keeping him from being an untamed creature of the forests like his notional ancestors (and usually, sooner or later, by the horrifying, cystic, priapic figure of the Jew). You could say, on a certain level, that they’re not wrong: doesn’t being forced to live under capitalism induce a profound psychic mutilation of the individual, their alienation from their species-being? Are we not weak? Isn’t your wife fucking another man right now as you read this?

It’s not so easy. The figure of the cuck maintains a certain hostility to Marxist categories. In classical cuckoldry, the cuck is not just the man whose wife is having an affair, but one who is raising her lover’s child as his own. There is nothing here of exploitation, the expropriation of surplus value – capitalism functions by partialities, always giving, coiling vast streams of plenitude and desire around a wretched and miserly core: what you get out is less that what you worked for, wealth is indissociable from scarcity, you have been short-changed. That little skimmed-off portion of surplus value is a void, formed by rational and autonomous processes, and in a void there’s nothing for the tendrils of cathexis to grab hold of. The cuck inhabits a very different universe: double-timed rather than short-changed, nothing has been taken away from him; instead, a shadowy, nebulous something has been added. He isn’t diminished by being cuckolded in the sense of the worker diminished by wage-labour; he was always ontologically insufficient. His partiality seeks not completion but the sequential introduction of further partial objects, of which there can never be enough. In medieval Europe – still today, in some places – the cuckold was said to wear horns, the sign of a demonically rich nature. The cuck desires his own cuckoldry. His world groans under its own weight, overstuffed, seeping surplus everything in a trillion lines of forbidden sweat; the form of appearance of the living world within a dead one. He is the coddled, declining bourgeois; postindustrial, atomised, and observant; incapable of overcoming his condition by collective action, shut off not from his own full self-realisation but from the manic overproduction that surrounds and supports his twitching form. You are in your own house, nothing has changed, except the strange man vigorously fucking your wife downstairs, the immenseness of a pleasure that no single body can contain. A vast unknown dimension opens up in front of you, as the cuck trembles on the precipice of infinity.

So you have been cucked – now what? Are you going to divorce your wife? Of course not, you don’t have the balls. The strange lonely men with their anime avatars and their antisemitism like to proudly declare themselves uncucked, which is an obvious nonsense; there is no end to cuckoldry, whose schema is that of limitlessness. The cuck-sayers, with their constant whining about other people being allowed enjoyment, are the most cucked of all – next to their idealised heroic image of the noble and independent man, a pathetic animal cucked every day by the scarcities of blind nature. There’s nothing else to do: you will wait for your wife’s lover to leave, and then you will make a dinner of grilled salmon, brown rice, and broccoli, which you and your wife will share with half a bottle of supermarket red, and you will talk about – what else? – politics, and then you will go to sleep. You miserable, pathetic cuck.

There’s always more, no end to the monstrous things crawling out the chasm between sex and politics. The cuck-sayers are all tremendous fans of Donald Trump, despite the fact that, as everyone knows, he’s only running as part of a secret deal with Hillary Clinton, in which the two old friends agreed that Trump would present himself as the most unpalatable candidate possible to make sure that Clinton would, finally, get everything she ever wanted. The two of them share the same dream. Clinton deploying her big prosthetic Donald, long and rubbery, charging to victory on the engorged Donald that she carries between her legs; and Trump, daring to imagine what could happen if he actually won, his eyes rolling as he fantasises about birthing a new, cruel, strange America, hot streams of life and death flowing endlessly from out his broad and fertile cunt.

19 Comments

August 23, 2016

David Miliband isn’t real

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It is the bleak, chilly summer of 1978, and Primrose Hill is under siege. A fortified citadel of flowerbox houses aches with quiet fret, while down in Chalk Farm and Camden Town a crude Amoco Cadiz-tide of punk is lapping bitumen-black against their toes. The kids these days – they’re spitting on each other to say hello, they eat live rats, they swap VD like Panini cards, and there’s no love any more, only leather and swastikas, they’re all getting off on the mutual infliction of pain. And then the worriers look at their own children, jelly-eyed and milk-happy, and think: what will happen to them? We’re at the end of something. The winter about to arrive is already seeping into its past; icicles claw into the heart of July, and everyone somehow knows that when the sun starts to sink this year it might not rise again for two long decades.

Ralph Miliband is reading in the garden, tapping cigarette-ash into patio puddles that glitter with a dying age’s sickly-grey sky. He’s hardly had time to register the strange young men in mohawks gobbing phlegm on passers-by, he’s already accepted that however informed his analysis of the political situation London will always baffle him, that his adopted home still grunts danger whenever he shuttles back from lecture tours in the cloistered sycamore-shade of New England. But even in this politico-prepubescent tumult it’s impossible to ignore the facts: something is clearly wrong with eight-year-old Ed, his firstborn and only son.

Marion, for her part, is worried to bits. It’s normal for children to have imaginary friends, even at Edward’s age, but he’s doing it all wrong. For a start, David is older, and all Marion’s research at the LSE library informs her that this shouldn’t be the case. Edward doesn’t blame his made-up brother for pranks and mishaps, because there aren’t any; Ed is such a docile boy, quiet and conscientious, eating his vegetables and eagerly sitting down to do all his homework (which also worries her, a little; she remembers what happened to good and obedient people not so long ago) – and when he gets his praise, because regular affirmation is so important for a growing boy, he always says the same thing. Oh, it wasn’t me, I’m no good at school, David did it for me. It was David who helped with the dishes, it was David who drew that nice picture, it was David who tidied my room, David David David. She’s had to tease out little details about this son she never knew she had, piece by piece – Edward realises that nobody else can see his brother, but that’s why David does so much helpful work around the house; he wants to be recognised, he wants them all to be a family. But David bullies him too, David tugs on his ears and calls him stupid, weak, useless, and Edward can only agree. All through the spring she relayed this to Ralph in those long late night transatlantic phone calls, and he’d always said not to worry, it’s normal for children to have imaginary friends. And then one night, curled up safe and warm on the trembling balance between storytime and sleep, Edward had muttered: goodnight David. David does everything. One day I’ll kill him.

Ralph always tried to be a kind father, even an indulgent father; he loved his son, he’d dedicated Marxism and Politics to him, and he could hardly wait until the little fidgeting creature in front of him was old enough to disagree with it. But he was also a good Leninist, of a sort, and he knew that sometimes one had to be harsh; some brief, scientifically applied harshness now might just be able to remove any need for all the kindness and patience of psychiatrists and clinicians for decades to come. So he calls Edward out into the garden and sits there, one leg folded over the other, a book splayed open over his knee, the pose of a man who has better things to do, and says: Edward, it’s time we had a chat about this David character. The change is immediate. Edward stops twitching, he sits bolt upright as a flash of utter terror floods his big brown eyes with black. And it’s strange; the air outside is dead and perfectly still, but shadows seem to be moving across the walls of the house. Yes? says David, and for a moment Ralph forgets what he was supposed to say. Young Edward still seems out of sorts, but thirteen-year-old David is perched nonchalant on the edge of his chair, picking at his toenails. It’s the fifteenth of July, his birthday, and tonight the whole family is going to Marine Ices to celebrate. They’d planned it for weeks. Could Ralph really have forgotten that he has two sons, that he’s always had two sons?

One thousand years ago the people that lived on this hill would scatter salt on their doorsteps as a barrier against the ælfe, but Ralph Miliband knows that all history is only class struggle. Thunder bellows over Primrose Hill, and in the park the cuckoos in their trees scream their victory in hideous unison.

* * *

The early twenty-first century was a time of incredible ethnological fecundity; perched on the far edge of the great era of demicentennial revolutions and counter-revolutions that started in the late eighteenth century and would come to end in the grand catastrophe that it had always predicted for itself, the years between 2010 and 2020 saw an immense flowering of chiliastic prophecy, cults of personality, interpretative schemata, fantastical creatures, and hero-figures. In this study I wish to focus on one particular such myth, which was briefly present among a small and largely unremembered tribe calling itself the Parliamentary Labour Party (rough translation: ‘the council of chieftains of those who till the soil’). The hero-cult of David Miliband is remarkably developed for its time, a period in which most myths were provisional, intended to be of use to a singular instant, and speaking to neither future nor past, perhaps indicating exogenous origin or a refracted version of narratives from earlier, more sophisticated eras.

The story of David Miliband describes a struggle between two cosmic brothers, one good and one evil; the evil, younger brother seduces the people of the tribe, and convinces them to band with him to defeat his older sibling, who is forced into exile, journeying across the seas to the West. As he departs, the good brother curses those who have betrayed him; thereafter they enter a fallen state, the earth does not yield up its fruits freely, the land is beset by natural and human catastrophe, and the tribe will be persecuted wherever they go. Redemption can come only when they have purged their tribe and their souls of this original wickedness; at this point the vanquished brother will return from across the sea to lead them once again to victory. Crucially, this return was not placed in some far-flung future, but was expected (despite the presumable antiquity of the mythic events) to be perpetually imminent and eternally immanent; any moment could bring salvation from evil.

This narrative has a number of important antecedent: the theme of an antagonistic duality out of balance with itself could be considered as a continuation of the Zoroastrian and Yezidi traditions of the Near West; a Levantine heritage is also manifest in its figuration of a returning saviour, although this is of a type more similar to myths of the Far Western Americas. (Some scholars have attempted to draw a parallel to the Biblical narratives of Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, hunter and agriculturalist – note the identification of David with a banana and his brother with a bacon sandwich – however. it should be noted that here the scriptural principle of ultimogeniture is reversed, with the younger trickster-brother a figure to be despised.) My general contention is that the David Miliband myth is, at root, a solar myth, in which the westerly setting of the Sun and its eventual reappearance is cast as a metaphorical vehicle for redemptive, apocalyptic hope.

As always with this kind of study, we must be on guard against any kind of reductive literalism. It may be comforting to ascribe a kind of primitive credulity to group such as the Parliamentary Labour Party, but such tribes often have a sophisticated oral culture and a remarkable level of self-awareness about the social function of their mythic apparatuses. It’s very likely that none of the people who told the David Miliband story, or who publicly wished for the hero’s return, would have actually believed in his physical existence.

* * *

David Miliband ruined his chances of taking the Labour leadership when he was photographed holding a banana outside the party’s 2008 conference. Suddenly he looked ridiculous, a clown cartoon, the banana-man, a figure as waxy and as primary-coloured as the fruit in his hand. We would be in error to not consider the deliberate responsibility of the banana in all this, the possibility of a vegetable intervention in human political affairs, the expression of a long musaceous plot.

It’s well known that the banana plant is incapable of reproducing by itself: centuries of selective breeding have made its fruit entirely seedless, a long sugary appendage the blind, crazed, wordless organism endlessly extrudes without ever being able to know why. Only human labour, cutting and splicing, can reproduce the banana, and even then its vast genetic uniformity leaves it vulnerable to every kind of parasitic disease. The banana, mushily phallic, the great agricultural desideratum, the object of salivating desire who totemic presence crushed Latin American social democracy again and again over the twentieth century, is entirely sterile. A synthetic monster, a fruit tending towards the apocalypse. When the human species finally goes extinct, we’re taking the bananas with us. Most other forms of life are horrifying insofar as they present a potency alien to all human understanding; the banana is horrifying in that its weakness is all our own.

Bananas rot fast; they love decomposition, they love to fall apart. The banana-phallus, the thing that everyone wants but which you don’t have, your dick shrinking and liquefying and blackening into a putrid stump throwing up clouds of tiny burrowing flies. That moment with the banana was a visual gaffe, but how would a banana proceed except by failing at every turn? Examine the connections. The CIA overthrows democratic governments to protect banana plantations; David Miliband quits British politics to become president of the International Rescue Committee, a charity founded by Trotskyites but occasionally accused of operating as a CIA front organisation. The stink of rotting bananas hangs in the air long after you’ve thrown the things out, and Westminster still can’t seem to scrub a Miliband-y whiff out of its crumbling halls. David Miliband is long, and curved, and ever so slightly yellow. David Miliband has two adopted sons, which is commendable, but the fact remains that he was unable to produce children through ordinary sexual processes.

Is David Miliband a banana? What’s under that waxy-smooth skin, once you peel slowly and see? Did we domesticate the bananas, or have they been waiting for a very long time, ready to start ruling over us?

3 Comments

August 4, 2016

Dan Hodges, lost in reality

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Dan Hodges – formerly of the Telegraph, now at the Mail on Sunday, but always, from the very first instant, predestined for Hell – is not the most vicious man in British comment journalism. He’s vicious enough: a recent full-page spread springs to mind, published shortly after the murder of Jo Cox, in which Jeremy Corbyn appears in a coffin, with the headline ‘Labour MUST kill vampire Jezza.’ But the real monsters of the field, people like Katie Hopkins or Richard Littlejohn, have a kind of icy interstellar hatred for everything good and just in life, something poor plodding Dan could never really muster. He’s not the most obnoxious (Howard Jacobson), not the most outrightly racist (Rod Liddle), not the most blundering (Camilla Long), not the most credulous (George Eaton), he doesn’t have the most unpleasantly shaped head (a tossup between Stephen Pollard and David Aaronovitch) or the most lifeless prose (Simon Jenkins), he’s not even the most distantly removed from the concerns of any sane readership (Polly Toynbee). Dan Hodges’ honour is to be the absolute thickest person in the UK media.

Examples abound. There’s the time he seemed to seriously be wondering why nuclear war is a bad thing; there’s the time he insisted that Labour criticising abusive workplace conditions at Sports Direct was a bad idea because it’s ‘a company favoured by millions of Britons,’ there’s the thoughtless antisemitism shining through the empty-gesture (((echo))) in his handle, there’s his decision that a Tory front-bencher was actually a great guy because nobody he had dinner with could be an evil man, there’s his tendency to believe any weird old lie about Jeremy Corbyn (or indeed myself for that matter) as long as it’s passed to him by a trusted source, there’s the fact that he thought people would want a Falklands War-themed board game for only one lonely player, etc, etc, etc, world without end. Still, for the purposes of this essay I really just want to talk about one particular instance. In a Telegraph column last December, titled ‘Donald Trump is an outright fascist who should be banned from Britain today’ (always so brave), Hodges compared the ongoing American nightmare to a popular alternate-history Amazon TV show, in which the Nazis win the Second World War. ‘Donald Trump,’ he wrote, ‘wants to be the man in the high castle. Ban him. Ban him now.’ The Daily Telegraph used to pride itself on maintaining a desperate, fetishistic attachment to high culture against the common slop of TV and Hollywood; apparently not any more. As anyone who’s read Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle knows, the titular character isn’t some dictator; it’s Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of a novel within the novel, in which Hitler is defeated by the Allies. It’s a slip-up roughly on the level of saying that a visit to Buckingham Palace made him feel like Rebecca from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, or that he loves playing as Zelda in The Legend of Zelda, or that he likes to pick his pineapples right from the conifer forests where they grow. Dan Hodges, you must understand, is extremely thick.

But it’s not just him. Over the weekend, this space’s perpetual enemy Nick Cohen wrote another piece on the extremism of Donald Trump, in which he notes that ‘Anglo-Saxon democracies’ enjoy producing alternate histories, so that ‘audiences can flatter themselves that they would never have collaborated with Robert Harris’s Fatherland or Amazon’s Man in the High Castle.’ Call me a totalitarian or an old-fashioned culture-grouch, but I think anyone who refers to ‘Amazon’s Man in the High Castle‘ should have all their writing fingers snapped. The possibility these incidents raise is horrifying. We’re in a time of profound danger, and it seems that the people tasked with mediating political events to the population and structuring the national dialogue are morons and illiterates, people who have never read a word of Philip K Dick in their fucking lives.

The Man in the High Castle is not a dystopian novel; it’s a utopia, the only kind of utopia that it’s possible to write. Our heroes live in a world under ruthless fascist domination, but in secret they pass around a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a fantastical history in which Britain and America defeat the Axis. This still isn’t a much better world, and it certainly isn’t ours: after Hitler is tried and executed, a new cold war breaks out between the United States and an increasingly brutal and racist British Empire. But it’s not just a fantasy either. As Abendsen reveals at the novel’s end, he didn’t write the book at all; it was written by the oracle of the I Ching, and the oracle wrote it to let a world know that their reality is not truly real. ‘Germany and Japan lost the war.’ But Dick’s novel does not simply affirm our reality against the fictionality of the text – as Patricia Waugh points out in her study of metafiction, these ’embedded strata which contradict the pre-suppositions of the strata immediately above or below’ allow us to ‘explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary text,’ one which is ‘no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures.’ Mise en abyme, its depths bottomless. This is a recurring trope in Dick’s literature (see Ubik, see The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch) – the layering on of stratified realities until all ontologies, including those of the reader, break down. This is why he’s among the most important writers of the twentieth century. Metafiction is utopian, precisely because rather than presenting us with a shoddy image of the good life in its totality for us to contemplate while trapped across the border between dreams and waking life, it reveals that we were in dreams all along, that like Juliana Frink and Nobusuke Tagomi we are ourselves in a work of dystopian literature, a fiction that for all its crushing horror is still contingent. In Adorno’s formulation, from Negative Dialectics, ‘Woe speaks: Go.’ Within our woe the good life can only be a negation; utopia can only be a Becoming without programme, pointed towards the not-this, a voyage beyond the mapped domains of experience.

But Dan Hodges and Nick Cohen have never read Philip K Dick, even as they exist in his world. Instead, their call, and the call from pragmatic opinion writers the world over, is for people – and the left especially – to grow up and accept reality. ‘Labour won’t win an election until it stops believing in fairytales,’ wrote Hodges, in a frankly embarrassing article full of bradycardia-inducingly terrible sporting analogies. Jeremy Corbyn can never take power in this country; that’s the reality. Socialism is a doomed project; sorry, kid, but them’s the breaks. Life is wretched, and will continue in its wretchedness forever; it is what it is. But Dan Hodges and Nick Cohen have never read Philip K Dick.

Consider, for a moment, what this reality is. Hodges and Cohen have just inadvertently admitted to us that they spend an inordinate amount of time in front of the TV, powering through Amazon box sets until they arrive in a world where The Man in the High Castle was written by a room full of of corporate executives. And it’s just one hallucination among others: these are people who watch PMQs every week, who obsessively follow the minutiae of parliamentary gossip, who receive comfortable salaries from their newspapers – in other words, people who are comfortably insulated at every stage from life as it’s actually lived, who exist in something that almost anyone would recognise as among the most impermanent of all textual constructions. But this reality, concentrated in the doughy bodies of a few comment-pages philistines, is then transmitted outwards to their readership, through the deeply stupid articles they write. Tlön-like, it begins to code the phenomenal world. As far as they’re concerned, their soap-bubble is the truth. And in a sense it is, but the thing about reality is that it’s constantly capable of stratifying and reshaping itself. They don’t even know it, but by blotting out his name they’ve landed squarely in Philip K Dick’s kaleidoscope of universes. And then they talk to us about cold hard political reality.

As Tom Whyman writes, ‘the partisans of reality today are in truth complete fantasists.’ Political reality is not a given. From the standpoint of feudalism, our current society would be utterly inconceivable, as impossible to think as a fully liberated one is for us. Reality is contested and constituted within politics, not just something to be described but something that’s reshaped at every turn. If everyone believes that two plus two equals five nothing changes, but if everyone believes that I am the king of France, a new constitution will have to be written with me in it. This plasticity need not always be a positive – elsewhere, I’ve written that we live in a time when ‘loony minority propositions like leaving the European Union can suddenly surge to victory, when any monster can apparently wrench itself out of the imagination and into reality.’ But then we’ve always lived in such a time; the world becomes what it is by the successive formulation and attainment of impossibilities. This is not to uphold a false utopia, to say that we can stop worrying and a Corbyn premiership will fix everything – the impossible that creates itself tends, more often than not, to be the worst. It’s only to say that with so little that is solid, there are few things that can be said with certainty, except that there is no creature more stupid than Dan Hodges.

14 Comments

July 30, 2016

The Harambe variations

harambe

INTRODUCTION, or GORILLA ZERO, the META-APE OF UNDERSTANDING: Harambe in the chaos of the world

Harambe is the dead ape that will not die. It’s been months now since the Cincinnati Zoo ruthlessly dispatched its prize 440 lb Western lowland gorilla with a single deadly gunshot after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure, but his name lives. During the recent parliamentary elections in Australia, many voters wrote ‘Harambe’ over their ballot papers, with one telling an Independent journalist, who appeared to take it in full sincerity, that this was because ‘we Aussies feel our government should have done more to save Harambe and now we’re voting for his corpse.’ In Ohio, a street was renamed ‘Harambe Drive’ on Google Maps after multiple reports to the company from three local teenagers. ‘Bush did Harambe’ signs appeared at the Republican National Convention. ‘Dicks out for Harambe’ has become a global cri de cœur. Clearly something has happened, and is continuing to happen. Isn’t it natural to want to explain?

At the start of this month, an undergraduate student at the New School for Social Research called Alexander Fine wrote a short blog post about the enduring legacy of Harambe, noting that the people most fascinated by the gorilla tended to be on the political left, and attempting to draw some kind of relation between Harambe and its wider social and political context. ‘Harambe memes,’ he wrote, ‘reflected, and continue to reflect, the left’s disillusionment with our political reality and the media at large. The left keeps Harambe alive because we see ourselves in the dead ape. Harambe’s death was inevitable, and so too was the defeat of an ageing presidential candidate who identified as a socialist.’ It’s hard to remember what else he wrote, because the post was quickly deleted – it became the subject of a mass outburst of derision; there was something in this form of interpretation that was recognised as being fundamentally inappropriate. Fine’s essay was judged to carry an unacceptable excess of thinkpieceiness, to be uncomfortably commingling the weighty and the ludic, to deal with something inherently silly in far too serious a manner, even despite its evident playfulness. It was agreed to be a bad take. But why?

It’s not as if other attempts haven’t been made to ask the same question, of why people remain so attached to Harambe, or why he’s still funny, without generating the same backlash. See, for instance, a recent essay by Brian Feldman in New York Magazine, which does much the same thing as Fine did, without attracting any of the same scorn. Feldman attempts to classify the Harambe memes (they ‘aren’t the topical equivalent of dead-baby jokes; they’re fairly standard internet non-sequitur nonsense humour’); he relates them to current events and to asymmetries in the discourse (noting, for instance, their echo of Cecil the Lion memes); he even situates his discussion within a broadly Marxist framework. If there is a central difference between the two interpretations it’s this: Fine situates the death of Harambe within the political order and sensuous reality; he relates the loss of an ape to the other senses of loss that dominate the experience of the twenty-first century; he approaches Harambe as an overdetermination, a sign that points to a phenomenal referent. Feldman, on the other hand, situates the death of Harambe within a network of other memes. In other words, to draw meaning from a sign is tacitly forbidden, to present the world as being explicable through signs is classed as a risible proposition. Signifiers relate only and always to other signifiers, and Harambe has become a metasignifier, taking on a Barthesian dimension of myth. To say that Harambe must be a symbol for something, that the fascination with Harambe points to something else, is a sacrilege.

This is not an essay about Harambe, the ape who died, but one about interpretation, the ways in which people take the raw material chaos of the world and fashion it into something meaningful. I’m not interested in denying the dominant position that Harambe can only be meaningfully related to other signs, only in testing it or situating it; all I want to say is that a silverback gorilla is a very large animal, and it can carry many things.

The NAÏVE, MAGICAL, or PRESIGNIFYING Harambe; the APE OF SIMILITUDE.
(Humour: Blood. Element: Air. Planet: Jupiter. Gemstone: Sand.)

The magical ape begins in curiosity and terror. The curiosity of the child, looking into the enclosure and unable to differentiate between the friendly monkeys of cards and cartoons and the brute sweating thing before him. The terror of the child, taking its first lesson in depth analysis as a creature beyond language drags him through the water by the legs. The curiosity of the ape, padding down to sniff at this tiny, fragile thing of a type he’d seen before, but only ever seen, as if through a television screen, now tumbling from image to object. The terror of the ape, rattled by the screams from outside his cage, puffing himself up, ready to deliver death or be dealt it. The terror of the parents, the terror of the zoo authorities, the terror of the marksman. And then the questions: was Harambe threatening the child, or protecting him? Is a gorilla’s life worth more than an infant’s? The body of a gorilla is strong, and any number of interpretative schemata can tense or flex under his skin.

The first ape is the visual ape. Under its regime symbols do not simply emerge through mimesis or signifiers through onomatopoeia; the ape beheld by the eye codes a world in which words and things endlessly refer back to one another. Prior to the initial phallic signification the snake is shaped after its own name, while the penis leaks poison in imitation of its zoological archetype; there’s no genitality in the Garden of Eden. Oedipalisation occurs only when the child crawls into that enclosure in the Cincinnati Zoo: now we’re faced by a dyad, the child and the gorilla, the child and the father. On the terrain of magic or similtude an ape is a visual intensification of the father, physically terrifying, hirsute, a potent castrator. Here the principles of Darwinian evolution are only a minor feature of Oedipus: the ape is the father of humanity. Remember the originary father in Freud, half-man, half-ape, pure threat and pride, who must be killed by his weaker, more glabrous sons. Only then is the father mourned, and his arbitrary law incorporated into the psyche.

But animals are also gods or totems, and God the Father is also the paternal superego. Pure identity, without representation, without one prior to the other. Christ on his cross cries out: eli, eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Was he not told the entire plan? The death of Harambe is a blasphemous inversion of the passion of the Christ; here it’s the father, and not the son, who dies for our sins. The name for this heresy is patripassianism, or Sabellian modalism, an immanent possibility in Christianity denounced since Tertullian, and endlessly produced in its denunciation. The Trinity, Sabellius declared, is only a mask, describing aspects of one person. He could not bring himself to say it, but the implication is unavoidable. The Godhead in its entirety suffered and perished on Golgotha. It’s easy to see why this doctrine prospered, and why it was so ruthlessly stamped out: this is the Oedipal fantasy, the cannibalistic feast of the first father. They killed the ape in Cincinnati, and as they did so they unleashed the vastness of a heretical third-century theology; we are fascinated by a dead gorilla, because something that started two thousand years ago on a hill outside Jerusalem is now finally complete.

The CRITICAL, PRODUCTIVE, or REVOLUTIONARY Harambe, the APE OF TUMULT.
(Humour: Melancholia. Affect: Embarrassment. Constellation: Pisces. Gemstone: Ruby.)

Six days before the death of Harambe, two lions were shot dead by a zoo in Santiago after a man climbed into their enclosure, intending to commit suicide. There was, briefly, an explosion of anger at the zoo. Why the ape? Why not the lions? Why Harambe?

For much of his life, Georges Bataille was obsessed with the anal scrags of great apes. In The Pineal Eye, he describes a tropical sacrifice ceremony: a gibbon is buried alive, head down, with only the ‘bald false skull’ of its anus protruding; a nude woman crouches over it and ‘the beautiful boil of red flesh is set ablaze with stinking brown flames.’ Later he declares that ‘the little girls who surround the animal cages in zoos cannot help but be stunned by the ever-so lubricious rear ends of apes.’ In The Jesuve, he notes that with a hint of sadness that ‘anal obscenity, pushed to such a point that the most representative apes even got rid of their tails (which hide the anuses of other mammals), completely disappeared from the fact of human evolution,’ but takes comfort from the fantasy of a new sexual organ located in the human forehead. (It could be added, after Deleuze and Guattari, that ‘the first organ to suffer privatisation, removal from the social field, was the anus… it is the anus that removes and sublimates the penis.’) The obsession with apes is an obsession with a brutal and a terrifying freedom we’ve lost long ago.

We have done terrible things to the animals: most of them are wiped out and gone for good; some are slaughtered by the billions, mulched up and turned into hundred-gram increments of edible slurry; a few still sulk in the furthest wildernesses and the deepest oceans, hunger-crazed and desperate. The unluckiest become objects of contemplation. Watch a pig in a pen and try to see that brutal and terrifying freedom; walk along the rows of cloistered cattle, each tagged and microchipped, each staring in dull incomprehension, a living thing in a hard shell of cruelty, its feed dispensed by computers, its milk sucked out by machines, its death decided by algorithms, and try to find an erotic thrill.

But at the same time, an ape hovers on the edge of meaning. There is another gorilla, Koko, which has been taught basic sign language; not only can it signify, it’s capable of the rudiments of abstract thought. This is the ape as metaphor; the political ape. Killing a lion represents the cruel mastery of animals by humans, a kind of heroic mastery, with all that implies – in many societies only the king could hunt a lion. The decision to shoot a gorilla with a sniper rifle, on the other hand, represents the subjection of rational beings to the principle of reason. There is no heroism, not even a transcendental subject; only system. Aren’t we all, in some way, trapped in an enclosure, with the marksman’s single shot – delivered, of course, for very good reasons – always a possible threat? As Baudrillard writes, ‘animals have preceded us on the path of liberal extermination. All the aspects of the modern treatment of animals retrace the vicissitudes of the manipulation of humans, from experimentation to industrial pressure in breeding.’ But when it happens to an ape – an ape with a name, no less – it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that we are not free. We say Harambe’s name because he is the hero we lack, because he is the sign of our own unfreedom. We say Harambe’s name because the new orifice Bataille imagined really has opened across our foreheads, plugged in to the internet, and that’s the name it screams.

The DESPOTIC or PARANOID Harambe, the APE OF FIXATION.
(Humour: Choler. Voltage: 240 V. Disposition: Agitated. Gemstone: Topaz.)

It’s possible to discern several stages in the general reaction to Harambe’s death. First, the non-ironised, the determinate, the unfunny. Was what the zoo did justified? Donald Trump said yes. Others said no. Many were furious, petitions were signed, there were calls for the child’s parents to face criminal charges. This first movement was also the last phase in which it was at all possible to talk about image and object. Next, hyperbolic descriptions of animal slaughter at the zoo. Instances overwhelm. ‘Zoo employs troop of insane hollering teen infantry to ride multiple M1 Abrams tanks through lemur enclosure, shooting them with the tanks.’ ‘Child Plays Calypso On Ancient Galapagos Tortoise’s Shell Before Zoo Crew Obliterates Beast With M-4s.’ ‘The gorilla was killed by a tungsten rod dropped from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the zoo.’ Then, rewording song lyrics to be about Harambe – but this intentionality is anaemic and ironised; the songs are not about Harambe so much as the word Harambe, and a set of other words that have come to coalesce around it. This advanced form marks Harambe in the purity of its irony: a signifier without any signified whatsoever.

The ape is simply not there; this is Feldman’s ape, the mythic meme-ape, the ape as empty signifier. Its differential nature is expressed not as a relation between signifiers but as one between ‘Harambe’ and the systematicity of the signifying system itself. As Laclau points out, however, the outside which is from within the system constituted as ‘pure negativity, pure threat to the system’ is in fact ‘the simple principle of positivity – pure being.’ Harambe therefore eventually comes to signify the immanent positivity of ironic superimposition; performatively, in its discursive rather than semiological meaning, it is invoked to signify the presence of an irony – itself an empty signifier. Something called irony occurs, but rather than being in the form of any kind of antiphrasis or anything that could be understood as a substitution of meanings, meaning itself is challenged by its other.

But then something unusual occurs. The current moment – dicks out, signs at protests, streets renamed – is marked by a return to veneration of the dead ape, a kind of dialectical recuperation of the first phase. The living and dying animal itself returns, but here no longer as an event to be coded by interpretation, but an interpretation by which to code other events. The moral question of whether his shooting was justified is no longer in effect; in fact, the zoo and the child and shooting have disappeared entirely. We are angry that Hillary Clinton refused to mention Harambe in her acceptance speech. We are worried that North Korea is testing new ballistic missiles, and Harambe is not here to protect us. We wonder, in times of crisis, what Harambe would do. Word and thing are reuinited. This is the point at which the Harambe thinkpieces proliferate, attempting to interpret the phenomenon. But all such attempts at a transcendental critique necessarily fail, because the dead body of Harambe has become isomorphic with the heuristic as such; we are in Harambe, we cannot hope to think outside our present Harambe.

The NIHILIST Harambe; the APE OF DISAPPEARANCE.
(Humour: Phlegm. Articulation: Multifoliate. Sex: I’ve. Gemstone: Space Junk.)

I love Harambe, the ape who died. I love the dead ape Harambe.

16 Comments

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The Harambe variations

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