On crapness and Christmas
If there's a general cultural mode to contemporary existence in Britain, it's an overwhelming and pervasive sense of the crap. This crapness – this New British Coprotopia – isn't quite the same as postimperial decay. Decay is the riotous and unrestrained explosion of new life over the shrinking territory of the corpse, while crap is a zombie: dead matter assuming the warmth and the trajectory of something living. Crapness isn't a slow entropic dissolution, it's something that's deliberately created. Everywhere there's a distinctly faecal seediness, but above all crapness is the seediness of efficiency. In the UK our new professional apartments in their crap-Modernist blocks tend to have smaller floor sizes than the old social housing units; our government's plan to ease the recession is to make the country competitive by systematically depressing wages through the introduction of slave-labour workfare; our scopophilic security services, our system of control orders, and our fungally breeding network of security cameras together make up the pillars of a uniquely crap police state. Once again, Britain leads the world; we're the new vanguard of humanity's foetid future, and nowhere are the machinations of this New Turd Order more in evidence than in the phenomenon of the crappy winter theme park.
This year's defining crap Christmas experience is the Winter Wonderland in Milton Keynes. Visitors were told to expect a 'fabulous, enchanted woodland with magical creatures.' Here, vast and otherworldly powers far beyond the comprehension of we mere mortals – beings made all the more unfathomable by their infinite and frankly undeserved beneficence towards mankind – would place one small patch of the South Midlands 'under a captivating spell, to come alive and be transformed into an enchanting Winter Wonderland.' Instead, those initiates of the cosmic mysteries who made the pilgrimage to Buckinghamshire found themselves in a muddy field with only two miserable huskies and an emaciated hornless reindeer to give a sense of the non-human world through their sad, trapped, uncomprehending eyes. Meanwhile, the ice rink had no ice and Santa was unacceptably skinny, his street clothes plainly visible under his flimsy red cloak. Previous failed Christmas parks such as 2008's Lapland New Forest attracted similar complaints: the Enchanted Walk Through The Woods was a plywood shack with fake pine branches and cheap stuffed toys scattered on the floor; the advertised polar bear was plastic; the snow came from a spraycan; the animatronic Rudolf's nose gave visitors radiation sickness; the Santa's Chimney Experience was just an open-pit toilet, the Good-Or-Bad-O-Meter rated every child as 'bad' while explaining that 'wrong life cannot be lived rightly,' and so on. Occasionally these places are bad enough that someone has to go to court to make up for all the loss of childhood innocence; mostly, though, they're just dull enough to go unnoticed. Generally they make pretty good money.
These things aren't aberrations; they're part of a wider system. The War on Christmas is over (it never really began); now Christmas itself is staged as a kind of proxy warfare. As the economy still struggles to break out of recession, fourth-quarter retail spending is now gravely important. Forget the potlatch, forget your heartfelt and home-crafted expressions of affection; Christmas is a matter of national security. If it doesn't go precisely according to plan, the cuts will lacerate deeper. Every high-priced gadget you don't buy is another meal torn from the hands of the impoverished and another bullet out the armoury of our brave boys battling it out in Afghanistan. It's not hard to imagine the Tory Trotskyites in charge having to impose their own version of War Communism: the establishment of large and well-disciplined labour armies of consumerism with George Osborne valiantly marching at their helm, buying gift after gift on increasingly shaky credit and pressing them into the hands of ever more distant acquaintances, knowing full well that their generosity will have to be reciprocated, enjoying Christmas to the point of penury, starvation and death.
This is the mechanism of crapness: something efficient and regimented and dead following the course of something alive, following it so closely that it's not always entirely possible to tell that anything's changed. There's only the lingering feculent whiff of an essential insufficiency. Delve deep enough into the history of the winter festival and you'll find a scene not unlike the Milton Keynes Winter Wonderland. A cold and muddy field somewhere in England, a small circle of primitive buildings, a pile of soggy logs on which a few feeble flames tremble, the tears of children, the haunted stares of animals, the ritual exchange of gifts, everywhere skinniness and emaciation, everywhere magic. Real magic, the kind that requires a blood sacrifice or an orgy or, ideally, both. When the disappointing winter wonderlands offer us an escape into the wonderful world of seasonal Christmas magic, we should keep in mind that seasonal magic is an ancient and agricultural magic – in other words, one of brutal and immediate violence. These winter wonderland parks are so popular – and despite the near-riots they provoke they are popular; thousands pour in every year and millions more giggle over them in newspapers – because they're a comforting reminder that the living fire, horror, and beauty of Christmas has been replaced by a dead mechanical crapness. (New Year's is admittedly different; by the time midnight rolls around, most people on the streets are crying, fighting, or being arrested. Linear time is a terrible thing to do to people.) It's a similar phenomenon to that of the Christkindlmarkten sprouting up everywhere across the country: plywood huts decorated with fake holly and Gothic lettering, beer halls hosting oompah bands who don't speak a word of German, something somehow intrinsically less than it is. (It's important to note that the UK's cutesy German Christmas markets are mostly franchises of the one in Frankfurt, that notably non-rustic centre of European finance capital.) Crapness is everywhere at all times, but it's at Christmas that the gap it opens yawns the widest.
In his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger devotes nearly one hundred pages to the philosophical study of boredom. His paradigmatic example is the act of waiting in a rural train station: without distractions time starts to bear down on you; you have nothing but the raw experience of time and the raw experience of yourself. After a while it almost becomes a physical sensation, a slow sickening horror you'll do anything to escape. It's not hard to visualise Heidegger's train station: the stiflingly still air, the low and unchanging clouds, the pebble-dashed pillars, the flaking white paint, the single pigeon limping up and down the tarmac, the almost tangible lack of a train – in other words, a scene of arrested motion, of crapness. But it's precisely here, on this miserable platform, that the potential for a transformative phenomenology is opened. Heidegger identifies three modes or stages of boredom: gelangweilt sein von etwas, sich langweilen bei etwas, and es ist einem langweilig ('becoming bored by something,' 'being bored by something,' and 'it is boring for one'). The first appears when we encounter something concrete but existentially boring: someone very dull at a party, for instance, or an overly self-indulgent essay on the internet; it's achingly unfulfilling. The second form, meanwhile, isn't quite so direct: Heidegger uses the example of a dinner party where everything 'is not only very tasty, but tasteful as well;' you enjoy yourself immensely, and it's only after returning home that you realise the whole evening was utterly dull, a senseless waste of time. The third form, 'it is boring for one,' is also referred to as tiefen Langeweile: profound boredom. Here the self is fully detached from a world that comes to reveal itself as entirely dull, entirely pointless, and entirely without charms or interest. The very identification of Dasein as being-in-the-world comes to fall apart. Heidegger isn't proposing a nihilism: it's exactly at this point, when the world of objects seems to offer nothing of substantial interest, that the potential for transformation appears. Once you decide that all things are boring, the question of what a non-boring thing would actually look like emerges, and with it a sudden universe of possibilities. As Heidegger puts it (in a sadly untranslatable pun), alles Versagen ist in sich ein Sagen, dh Offenbarmachen – all withdrawing is a telling or a making-manifest.
If the question of boredom yields an ontological philosophy, the parallel problem of crapness is one of politics. Crap Christmases give rise to a limited, intrinsic, demoralising sense of the crappy; the slow enshittening of all experience forces us, urgently, to conceive of a less miserable world. Like every weapon in the arsenal of capital, crapness is also a weakness. The critique of the crappy winter wonderland isn't a grouchy bah-humbug; it's a call to action. The struggle for a non-crap Christmas is the struggle for a world defined by its possibilities rather than its restrictions; in the end, it's the struggle to reclaim life.
Maybe I'm not strong enough; I've fled Britain for the holidays. No Queen's speech, no schmaltzy Doctor Who special, no winter wonderlands. France has its own inchoate modality of crapness too; it might be that I'm more willing to forgive it because it's not mine. The big wide flat fields; the hypermarkets crouching, tense as spiders, by the motorways. Look at any French city and it's immediately clear that the empire never went away; it just changed its spatial logic. There's still colony and metropole, but now they're bound together in the same urban topology. Those in the medieval centre find themselves encircled by angry car-burning hordes; those in the concrete prison-suburbs that surround them are disenfranchised and dispossessed, their choice of clothing regulated by the state, their lives at the mercy of the police. A crap colonialism. Still, it's different. At night you can hear the slow determined creak of the avalanches as they roll down the mountainsides. They're set off by explosives, but at least the snow is real.
Sympathy for the antisemites
For all their faults – and they have plenty – it's undeniable that antisemites are incredibly productive. Other racists don't even come close: a slur, a darkly muttered comment, occasional eruptions of violence; they don't need to really say anything because their racism already forms the unvoiced content of society at large – the state does their job for them, groups like the EDL can even function as an auxiliary wing of the police and the border agency. People who hate Jews are different. They need to write it all down; each one of them has to produce their own personal account of exactly what it is that they think the Jewish hive-mind is up to. From Martin Luther's On the Jews and their Lies to Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Trifles for a Massacre to contemporary polemics on the Zionist Occupied Government, antisemities are driven to produce manifestos. It's hard to not feel sorry for them. They've been trapped, and it's not entirely their fault. The problem with all their constant literary production is that the ramblingly impassioned hate-screed is very much a Jewish art. Nobody hates the Jews quite like the Jews themselves; ordinary antisemites are grasping amateurs. In the Old Testament the Jews are so venal and wicked that God is required to periodically massacre them as they plod in circles through the desert. The prophets are full of bitter reproach. Jeremiah thunders: Hast thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done? she is gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played the harlot… This people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart; they are revolted and gone. Ezekiel seethes: They are impudent children and stiffhearted. Little's changed since. Every Jew-hating tract is an unwitting tribute to Portnoy's Complaint. In his study of the phenomenon Sartre writes that the antisemite depends on the Jew to maintain his status as an antisemite, that if there were no Jews the antisemites would have to create them. He came close, but as he wasn't a Jew or an antisemite, he couldn't see what was actually going on. The antisemite doesn't just depend on the Jew; consciously or not, antisemitism is an imitation, an attempt to capture and reproduce some of the Jew's unique talent for self-loathing.
These days there are very few Jews and even fewer antisemites, and both are furiously engaged in the invention of the other. I've always been fascinated by antisemitism, especially in its conspiracy-oriented strains. Part of it's pure narcissism: I'm a Communist and a Jew, someone whose face is turned to history as to a single catastrophe, and it's quite nice to hear that I'm not in a desperate struggle against existing conditions but actually part of a tiny cabal that secretly rules the world. At the same time this stuff has an incredible heuristic potential; it's not unlike Borges' First Encyclopedia of Tlön, a description of a totally different world that intends to slowly map itself onto our own. Read enough antisemitic literature and you'll learn that the chief architect of our alienated and commodified culture is none other than Theodor Adorno, otherwise known for his scathing critiques of alienated and commodified culture. You'll discover that Lenin's struggle against the bourgeoisie, the same revolution that prompted military intervention from the imperialist powers, was in fact a ploy by the Rothschild banking houses. You might even encounter something called 'sexual Bolshevism,' which for some unaccountable reason is held to be a bad thing. Antisemitism in the West has for the most part shed its appearance as mass or state violence; it's turned into a glitteringly inventive mythopoeia. That's why I'm unusually heartened by the news that the model and reality TV personality Tila Tequila has decided to launch a one-woman crusade against the international Jewish conspiracy.
Tila Tequila – born Thanh Thi Thien Nguyen – is one of those people that inhabits a strange shadow-zone on the borderlands of ontology. She exists (even if her reality is more virtual than actual), but unlike tables and mountains and other things that exist in the ordinary sense of the world she continually has to justify why. In this she's in pretty exclusive company, sharing her spectral realm with Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, and the State of Israel. Unlike Hilton or the Kardashians, whose rise to fame could be seen as a sensible old-fashioned reinvestment of already existing capital, Tila Tequila's emergence represents more of an autogenerative point of intensity in the swirling field of aleatory alienation that constitutes present-day existence. She was spotted by a Playboy scout in a Houston mall; by some quirk of chance (or eternal destiny, there's little difference) the music she put on MySpace snowballed into mass popularity and a record deal while other near-identical attempts didn't. Since attaining stardom Tequila has had a number of high-profile media gigs, including hosting duties on the televised striptease contest Pants-Off Dance-Off and cameos in The Cleveland Show, finally culminating in A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, her own reality dating programme. In early 2012, she announced that she was converting to Judaism. In late 2013, she set up a new (and very much non-anonymous) website called Anonymous Truth Blog, in which she announced, among other revelations, that a secret 'dark cabal' of Jews controls the world and that she is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.
Clearly Tila Tequila isn't at all well, but to simply state that fact out misses the point. Given that antisemitism is now primarily a literary phenomenon, are Tila Tequila's Jew-hating rants actually any good? Are we dealing with a Louis-Ferdinand Céline or a Mel Gibson?
Tequila's writing isn't immediately accessible, but it's not necessarily bad either – in fact, it can be situated squarely within the tradition of continental Modernist literature. Her screeds are punctuated with *giggles* and *sighs*, conventions that have their origins in internet language but that also represent an attempt to break through the ossification of the written word and recover some of the immediacy of speech. Here Tequila pushes against the binds of the antisemitic pamphlet as literary form – one that is, of course, heavily indebted to the Jewish scriptural tradition. By advancing this logocentrism she attempts to claim back the primacy of the Greek system (abstract logic, vocal discourse, circular time) against that of Judaism (written polemic, scriptural law, linear time) – in other words, to undo both the Pauline and the Derridean critique of the logos. It fails, of course: in fighting the tainted written word she can't help but refer back to other literary works. There are strong traces of Céline, who perhaps succeeded most in stripping writing of its textual quality and dragging it into new forms. He's there in the breathless fury of her ellipses and interjections – Tequila writes: They literally are out to kill you and if they cannot kill you, they will find other means, anything dirty and corrupt they can think of to fuck with you! Céline shouts in agreement: So you want to cover me with garbage! I hear your tawdry surreptitions! your riflings-through! your screwings-over of your wastebaskets! How dimwitted and stupid you are! More flatulent! More cowardly! At the same time her habit of sneaking in unattributed lines from other sources recalls the poetic bricolage of TS Eliot, that other great literary antisemite, and her manic asyntactic switching between themes and topics – declaring Hitler a prophet in one sentence, making jokes about her name in the next – bears the stamp of Antonin Artaud's prose-poetry. (In fact, some of Artaud's Letter against the Kabbala could probably be slotted into the Anonymous Truth Blog without much notice: I think I have taken about as much shit as I'm going to from Kafka, his arsoterical allegorical symbolism, as well as this Judaism of his, which contains every last one of those chicken-livered suckaprickadickadildoes that have never ceased giving me a pain in the ass… What I especially abhor in Kafka is that return of the old kike spirit, that intolerable kike mentality.) On occasion, her reflections tend towards a stoic melancholy that could be called Beckettian. What the fuck is wrong with these people?? she complains. Oh man… it's just too bad because I think if they had a more open mind or if they weren't already dead… Beckett's Molloy utters a similar sentiment: Someone has drawn the blinds, you perhaps. Not the faintest sound. Where are the famous flies? Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others.
Despite her engagingly doomed contributions to the genre, there's no getting away from the content of what she writes. In between her exposés of the Jewish conspiracy, Tila Tequila claims to be a goddess, to be an avatar of Vishnu, and to have created two parallel universes. She's (probably) mad – and given the tragic difficulties in her life so far, it's not hard to see why – but the pathologisation of antisemitism is far less interesting than the pathology of that pathologisation. Why is it that antisemitism – which for an unacceptable prejudice has a fairly respectable intellectual pedigree – is now seen as a token of madness? Conversely, why is it that madness now manifests itself as an antipathy specifically towards Jews?
Unlike finance and entertainment, Jews don't in fact have a monopoly on the conspiracy racket. In Azerbaijan and Turkey there's some belief in the idea of a global Armenian conspiracy, one led by a secret cabal that fabricated the Armenian genocide and works tirelessly towards their goal of Armenian world dominance. For some reason, the Armenian conspiracy never reached the same heights as its Jewish counterpart. There's something about the Jews: we were the bad conscience of Europe, but at the same time we have projects.
Deleuze and Guattari discuss some of this in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. In their understanding, Jewish populations are not themselves minoritarian or in a state of absolute deterritorialistion, rather they're molar formations, 'an oppressive minority that speaks a language cut off from the masses.' However, they raise the potential for minority within the minority: a becoming-minor more defined by the trajectory of its Becoming than the phases through which it passes, something 'creating an interplay of similarity and difference that conspicuously resists reduction into identity.' There are Jews of the Jews: Jesus of Nazareth sent to the cross; St Paul torn between Jerusalem and Rome, Spinoza excommunicated by the Amsterdam community; Karl Marx baptised as an infant; Kafka writing in German. Through this operation minority is put in direct contact with the universal, whether it's as the undifferentiation of humanity in the body of Christ, the prior ontological substance, or emancipatory Communism. Along the way, you get all the other great Jewish inventions: linear time, literature, numerology, psychoanalysis. It's also precisely this Jewish renunciation of molar identity that has its distorted (and sometimes murderous) mirror-image in antisemitism. Tila Tequila doesn't want to be herself any more, so she starts hating Jews.
This quality is also precisely what's missing today. The reason that antisemitism turned into a literary and heuristic project is that there are no Jews any more. Sartre's prophecy has come to pass, and once antisemitism becomes fundamentally an invention of its own object there's no reason why it shouldn't also invent parallel universes, black magick, reborn Hindu deities. Antisemitism has become isomorphic with madness because of something cataclysmic that happened in the middle of the twentieth century. With the horrors of the Holocaust, the old antisemites almost managed to destroy themselves as antisemites by wiping out the Jews. With the realisation of the Zionist project, Jews have finally succeeded in destroying ourselves. Israelis aren't Jewish; all this messing about with states and armies and the systematic dispossession of other people is, in the end, something fundamentally very goyische. 1948 marks at once the culmination of Jewish universalism – finally we have a state, just like every other nation – and its extinction – finally we have a state, just like every other nation.
For all its crimes, perhaps the most startling thing about the State of Israel is just how boring it is. We've made the desert bloom, and now palm trees scar the Negev with their strict regimented grids. The settlements are as blandly pleasant as American suburbs, but they've been fully and murderously weaponised. For a country founded by the inheritors of one of the world's oldest literary traditions, it's astounding how few decent writers Israel has. Amos Oz is no Franz Kafka. AB Yehoshua is no Bruno Schulz. Meanwhile, across barbed wine and concrete walls, the Palestinian refugee camps are full of poets.