lacan

New Year, New You

by Guy Walker

It’s a new year, you remind yourself. New beginnings, not just for you, but for the country, the world, the hapless gentry of mediocrity that weighs down on you every second of the day. A Democrat is going to be president again, you tell yourself, and although he’s not perfect, and his brain may be rotting like a cauldron of ferment, and he’s maniacally supported every war and measure of incarceration imaginable, he and his historic pick for Vice President are going to get us back to the sweeping indifference of normalcy. There were historic fires last year, as there were the year before that, and the year before that; but we’ll be rejoining the Paris Agreement, so all will soon be well again. And Covid happened, sending us all scurrying back into our dwellings, like meerkats who just saw a hawk pass overhead, huddling behind rotting drywall and crumbling brick, letting the Netflix’s autoplay feature run its numbing course as we simultaneously scroll through this eternal pixelated flip book of tweets and memes and tiktoks and snaps, our necks slouched into these sickly double chins. But the vaccine is on its way.

Let the wet markets continue, as long as we have a vaccine. A 2012 New York Times article, entitled The Ecology of Disease disposed that everything from AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, and Lyme disease haven’t happened on their own accord—they happen as a result of our tampering with nature. What will come in the following years will be left to the sanguinary gore of our imaginations. There’ll be another vaccine for that. Then the George Floyd killing happened, amongst countless others that have since been swept away from our memories. But we protested for those following days and weeks, and posted black squares on Instagram. There’s mass unemployment. Countless small businesses are closing their doors for good. And we’ve only delayed the inevitable looming tragedy of the economic fallout from the pandemic. And Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a race to rocket themselves to the stars, like an ejaculatory falling star of impossible wealth. Soon we’ll all be living in tents, under the freeway overpass, selling baggies of brake dust to drunken foreign tourists to get high. None of it is going to get better. But still, the general consensus is that 2020 was an awful year.

Everywhere you look you’re reminded that 2020 was the worst year in recent history, as if a year were a real thing, a measurable unit of a calendar’s inventory. It seems obligatory to mention in conversation that 2020 was dreadful, as if this mention were part of the usual ailing phlegm of smalltalk, filling the beautiful emptiness with our saliva and noise, blaring through the chorus of trees and tall grasses with our cruel and coarse stanzas about how everything sucked. Can we take a year, like a ball of useless clay, and make something of it? Can we take our events of the year, and improve that, through resolutions and commitments to good habits? Can we be good again, and bathe with frank decency under the quiet stars? I went for a long run on Christmas Day through these remote mountain trails near where my parents live, and sat for awhile somewhere amongst the wild sage covered in frozen dew as it thawed with the eager bits of sun that passed through the soft green pastels of its thicket, and watched the chickadees and towhees flutter purposefully amongst its copses of old growth. This will always be here in a million corners, I assured myself, the unfathomable beneficence of nature in bloom wherever it is. Don’t complicate the serene, because it’s already there. Because once we’re all gone, they will just carry on as normal, in bigger and better numbers, tilting their heads back as they drink single droplets, dragging each side of their miniature beaks across the thin and heavy branches. Commit more time to this sort of thing, I told myself. Spend all our time purposefully, because we’ll be dead soon. Make love on the thick beds of moss, and feel something familiar in each other. But then on New Years Eve night, I was at a repulsively overwrought resort in Mexico, without the woman I should have been with, drinking a bottle of $400 lukewarm and flat champagne alone in the bathtub, jacking off into the squalid froth of a contaminated bubblebath, my own ego-dystonicity at the crossroads of some vague and formless heartache. This was the beginning of a new year, a new me—at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be, that’s the common sentiment anyways. What is the triumph of the stars, that this is what we’ve made? Jacking off alone to an image on a glowing screen. 

Look at your own resolutions: drink less, read more, learn how to say no, exercise dutifully and joyfully, write longhand, spend less time on social media, finally get your career started now that you’re in your mid-thirties, find love and don’t fuck it up as you have all the others. Because the older you get, the more a dizzying fury it becomes, as the weight of gravity and disappointment and the mulish insensibility of yourself becomes as obvious as the enormous tits of an old lady who never wore a bra in her life. At this point, if you’re old enough to still be reading a blog on the internet, you’re already rotting with the suddenness of each passing day, trying to hold it together a little longer, moisturizing your glaring shortcomings with whatever feckless new ritual you hear about. Our habits are now engrained as the permanent highways we now travel. I never fully ridded myself of my childhood stutter, and now say ‘uh’ and ‘fuck’ between difficult words to try to mask an embarrassing stumble. I’m likely never going to fix this, because it’s too much work after thirty-three years of hammering this habit into its callow perfection. Lacan’s insistence that there was a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle is the hallmark of why we’ll go nowhere—we’re seeking miniature degrees of orgasm everywhere we go—whether it’s the bright colors on our phones, music and televisions series in the background in order to drown out the hauntingly true thoughts that arise in silence, or the tyranny of our cocks and cunts wiggling between our legs. We’re all alcoholics in some or other way, passively stumbling in and out of AA meetings, dumping several heaping spoonfuls of sugar into your coffee, wiping the reeking perspiration from your forehead with the same old handkerchief you’ve been using during Covid. A couple tumbles off the wagon and you walk off the road for good. A few inevitable mishaps, and your list of resolutions is discarded into the heap of others from every previous year, your notions of self-betterment now just swept up in the gutters of wet confetti from last week’s New Years party, your own soggy nightmare is now a hallmark of masticated glee you wear with enthusiasm. Are we so fortunate to play chess with death?

What will this year bring? And the next. And every year after that until you give up and lay down to die, perhaps thinking your last pointless thoughts about how you spent all that precious time. Most of us try to get through the day so we can just go to bed again, letting a movie or tv show rock us back to sleep. And so collectively, most of us just spend our lives getting by so we can die without much consequence. What do the days’ wordless screams really mean? We are unavoidably and wisely solipsistic beings, and so we think in ways of our year, and how to improve our routines of attention and immersion. The gratifying mirth of spectacle is sometimes all we give ourselves—a few grunts of self-improvement perhaps, a deluded crawl up some nondescript Everest of career and achievement. But mostly just binging and gorging our way through the ephemeral jubilance of youth and old age. This was a bad year for everyone, even if it wasn’t. But it is the best year compared to every year ahead of us. This is a real life tragedy of the absurd—no writer, not even Beckett, could write such a sadly absurd tale as the one we are all living.

Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht—they all saw enough worth in the absurd that perhaps a Theodore Adorno or a Nietzsche would not have. Congenitally, by the works they committed themselves to, they glorified the sometimes awful and mundane, transcending the nihilistic tendency that catapults us to the callous phlegm of apathy. So there is worth in that. Bob Dylan said something about life not being a mission to find yourself, but rather one of creating yourself. So amidst the glamorous torture of last year, and what this year and every following year will bring, we’ll have to create ourselves into each one, the collective years compiling into an archival book of our private selves that will fill the library of our united madness. We are stammering at the brink of collapse; we are somewhere between the midnight rave of unbridled joy and the reality show of our undiagnosed rabies.

I am tired and hungry. We all are. I’m hungover, and my heart still aches from nothing in particular. But the chimera of gardens shining in their morning dew is like the lost archipelagos I read about when I was young. If last year is any indicator whatsoever, we are all losing this race together. And there’s no end in sight. I flew on a loaded plane last evening back to Los Angeles, and as I returned to my seat from the bathroom in the very back, I saw every single person’s screen was turned on to some forgettable dithering thing, some movie that made no sense, some actor in a costume saving the world. At the same time, Trump supporters were storming the Capitol building; a man dressed as Conan the Barbarian and red, white, and blue face paint was trying to take over the capitol of our nation. Because we are a Miltonian tragedy, an epic failure that is somehow still surviving in our torrential wake of waste. 

We have always been a mad species, devoted to self-immolation and torment. Beckett said, “That’s the mistake I made…to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” Maybe that’s the mistake all of us are making—because it’s part of our programming—in that, we’re trying to create some legacy or monument of ourselves that doesn’t need to be built. Maybe we’ve been worthy all along, and just lost sight of it for awhile. Maybe it’s just so hard to be human in an increasingly inhuman world. I don’t know. 

I don’t know what I want to achieve this year. I don’t know why that even matters. I can make things up for answers: I want to be in more high end art galleries this year. For reasons that are purely vain. I want to finish and publish all these incomplete stories and plays and poems I’ve only begun and never completed. I want to buy some land, and start building myself a house. I want to drink less, and study more, work on achieving these things now. But it’s ten in the morning now and I’m already working on my third White Russian, so who am I kidding. My fingers are so cold as I write out here in the garden. There are finches and woodpeckers hanging upside down from slender and bowed branches, eating seeds from bursted pomegranates. There is an old retired Indian chief who walks with a cane up the hundred stairs to his house above mine. We talk, and smile, and he tells me stories of Charlie Manson and those equally strange old days. There’s a cluster of huge coastal redwoods in front of his house that he planted from a small pot so many years ago. Is life not enough for them? Or did they all have to write their own story? Or are these trees and these birds and this old Indian chief already enough for themselves? I don’t know.

I’ll make myself some coffee, and hopefully turn things around, start moving in the right direction again. Maybe tidy up the garden, and plant some new things, even though it’s winter. It’ll be easy because things will be silent more. Yes. I’ll make sure there is more silence, and therefore more purposeful thought and action. I see honeybees land ceremoniously on the edges of lily pads in my miniature pond. They drink, and fly away, and others come again. And I sit up from my chair, take a sip from my water glass for the first time all morning, and water the garden for the first time in ten days. After all, it’s a new year.

From Barcelona to Mars: Gentrification of the Universe

“The hierarchy of the world of created things, which has its apex in the righteous man, reaches down into the abyss of the inanimate by many gradations. In this connection one particular has to be noted. This whole created world speaks not so much with the human voice as with what could be called ‘the voice of Nature.’” -Walter Benjamin (Illuminations)

cruiseship

by Guy Walker

Up along the bright cloistered avenues, where the dull pleadings of shopkeepers echo down the piss-drenched alleyways, where packs of British men dressed in uniformed khaki shorts roam like lost fat dogs, where the steaming farts of thousands of tourists choke the sparrows and limping pigeons, there is yet another enormous stained-glass church, another bar of florescent yellow blaring a song by The Offspring, and another hundred festering scabby boutiques selling jewelry and pink skirts, Hello Kitty lunch boxes, floor cleaner, toy trucks, and bottles of rum. I shove my way between a German family arguing over a dropped ice-cream cone—the dad figure wearing a paper crown from Burger King, the mother figure sobbing into a lace hankie, and the toddler squatting low and slapping the amorphous glob of vanilla with his open palm over and over again. Past the fruit vendors crammed in their narrow stores, dozens of crates of petrified fruits glaring up at me, the onions and glossy aubergines wriggling in their plastic cubbies—choose me, choose me! Past the Irish-themed pub, the right-o proper bloaks tripping over themselves. Past Tapas & Tikki. Past Subway. Starbucks. Rainbow Munchies. Porcupine Kebab. Corpse Cuisine. Soon the endless road of deli-striped canopies and air misters leave me soaked and anesthetized. I’ve walked for days, then months, and my legs are stiffening into leather-stitched tree trunks, my whole sense-experience melting into the flat eternal monotony of a cosmopolitan conveyor belt. For a moment I don’t know if I have to it takes to continue, but then I remember there still are so many more shops to see, so I lean forward and push on.

The sweating cretinous herds of tourists and vendors are multiplying by the minute, like the horrifying images of binary fission of bacterial growth, the asexual reproduction of human bodies, everyone packing in tighter and tighter, everyone shoving each other to buy paintings of sailboats, traditional döners wrapped in foil, fake Ray Bans—really, anything they can get their hands on. I’m in Barcelona. Or is it Madrid? Rome. Athens. Copenhagen. Chicago. I can’t remember. And the frank reality is that it doesn’t matter. There are no pungent visible signs that suggest where I actually am. Just one swelling body of humans, everyone white, everyone shopping, everyone so desperately content. This is Life. This is the apex of modernity, the post-Utopian shift of the culture industry. The entire world, wrapped all the way around from pole to pole is one tremendous glittering outdoor shopping mall, people extending their selfie-sticks in front of the swirling pillars of Gaudi, or the glass pyramid of the Louvre, or with Spiderman on Sunset Boulevard. Groups of young women jump up in the air, kicking their legs back as their friend takes the photo. And then they giggle. We dropped the A-bomb for endless rows of boutiques and Apple stores, to drink our foamy café crèmes under patio umbrellas. We are finally alive, finally happy, finally well-fed.

It didn’t used to be this way. Barcelona used to be very much Catalonian. Just ten years ago you could play football in every town square, drink from wine bottles in the parks, play guitar and skateboard and pick-pocket the handful of tourists with your longtime childhood friends with nose rings and black mullets. Today it’s a collection of gift shops where you can buy key chains with your name on it. Because tourism is essentially the same thing as gentrification. New York: prior to the 90’s, Manhattan was hookers, thieves, drug addicts, poverty-encrusted artists and poets, and the hunched flâneur with crooked fingers. You could pull back a door curtain while standing on the sidewalk and pay a dollar to touch a woman’s baby-gnawed tit. But Mayor Giuliani pushed everyone interesting out, and the wealthy and super wealthy decided it was cool to live where the poor people used to live and now there’s just rows of stammering neon signs and storefronts for mega-corporations, and now a 600 square foot flat is $4,000 a month. Venice Beach is self-explanatory. But everyone who grumbles about gentrification, day-dreaming and eulogizing about the glory days when you could get robbed by a heroin addict and it was somehow romantic, are your standard young upper-middle-class types. It’s why Venice Beach is so awfully boring these days—the kids who live there are good looking, but just extremely flat and uncomplicated. It’s why the art produced there consists of faces of Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin painted green—there’s an empty acheronian nostalgia for the glory days, a celibate-lust for the wandering eidolons of yesterday. I too am just another smug millennial leftist who will find an excuse to reference Kubrick films, The Brothers Karamazov, or discuss Kant’s transcendental normativity as I sip my Pinot Noir at an art opening of some linen canvases splattered in ink. We all know we’re part of the weeping cyst of our own banality. My poverty is not a real poverty, not the kind that creates anything wondrous and burning and necessary. It’s comfortable and amusing, and still somehow lets me fly to various centers of the world and get drunk over and over again, like some stammering lost version of Groundhog Day. The ever-expanding fog of global capitalism now blankets everything, and the systematized copulation of the bourgeois has conquered everything that was once naked, tragic, and beautiful.

The phenomenon of self-herding tourists is of course the result of warenfetischismus, which, as everyone knows, is German for ‘commodity fetishism,’ the theory Karl Marx proposed in Capital: Critique of Political Economy, describing the relationships of production not between people—between worker and capitalist and consumer—but rather between the money and the commodities exchanged in the market transaction. “[T]he commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this.” Marx was, in part, responding to Karl Heinrich Hermes’ religious justification of the Prussian state. Hermes (as with Hegel) argued that religion raises man “above sensuous appetites.” Wearing chainmail mittens will make you not want to masturbate, for example. Chastity belts will purify your crotch. But Marx contested that it was in fact fetishism itself—economic, political, industrial—that was “the religion of sensuous appetites.” In the same way that we stare at a screen all glazey-eyed, fantasizing that the humping naked woman is actually moaning for us, we view the inanimate object of commodity that is endlessly churning out from the capitalist machinery will somehow come to life, will somehow bring us life. It’s why shopping malls are so horrifying and manic—everyone is caught in the coma of commodity fetishism, their screamings on mute, trying to break free.

In A Companion to Marx’s Capital, David Harvey details the concept of fetishism entirely dictating the norm of our desires, fantasies, wit, emotions, and so on: “we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism.” To withdraw from all ‘revolutionary possibilities’ is to submit from independence entirely, especially that of thinking. It’s why there is always soma available in Brave New World, for every occasion, every holiday and weekend and momentary lull of sobriety, soma allows us to quickly return to the gorgeous bloom of glee.

Of course there are many who are taking opiates and soma-like substances to numb the state of all this incredible madness, but it’s the culture industry itself that allows the entire world to quiet the naked roaring animality of real-life.

Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s theory of the culture industry is the present culmination of commodity fetishism, the ever-present zombie of stimulation that counterfeits our desires and fantasies to adapt to its own. Samo Tomšič says the same thing in The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, in that Lacan’s unconscious is not the realm of the private and the irrational, but rather a place where our political and social systems are most perfectly mirrored and reproduced. The capitalist construct is not a response to our inner private desires for more stuff; instead, our relentless libidinal appetites are a result of capitalism. We never wanted the shitty sailboat painting in the first place. We never wanted the Hello Kitty lunchbox. You may enjoy that açai berry smoothie, but you’re the same ugly thing as before. The culture industry is Life now. It is the first light after winter, the forever-flowing tit of humanity. It is the sun itself, the dreamy constellations we stare up at with gaping mouths. It is the first gurgling of microbes, the spark of cell growth, the whirlwind of neutrons creating matter from virtually completely empty space.

The first U.S. cruise ship has just docked into Cuba for the first time in fifty years. Buck-toothed children with runny noses ask their mothers with heaving muffin-tops what these strange brown people are doing on the island, or why everyone only drives old cars. There is no public advertising allowed in Cuba, but ships and planes full of white people are essentially the same waddling billboard for the fetishistic ideologies. I’m interested in what Cuba will look like in 5, 10, 30 years from now. Historically, when a ship full of white people arrives to a new virginal enigmatic landmass populated by exotic brown-skinned islanders, the events that follow are less than handsome. I don’t know what’s worse: the Santa Maria landing on your shores with conquistadors who want gold and slaves and wants to convert everybody to Christianity, or a cruise ship full of Americans in plaid polo shirts sucking on lollipops wanting to experience the so-called ‘preserved authenticity’ of your culture. I once hiked to Mount Everest Base Camp, and there is an inauthentic Starbucks on the way, in a quaint little village tucked away in the Himalayas. Neon clad mountain fanatics checking their wifi connections, ordering cappuccinos with extra foam.

But today is the age of space exploration, and now, finally, space colonization. Elon Musk has continued to repeat SpaceX’s plans to colonize Mars. Mars One, an organization based in the Netherlands, plans to begin colonizing Mars by 2027. We’re torpedoing our tepid flailing bodies into the empty cold blackness, the excrescent metal tube of humanity hurling to cover the universe. And don’t get me wrong, I am enthusiastically in support of colonizing other planets, and the indelible wealth of innovation that comes with it. Our curiosity for brighter horizons and frontiers is unrelenting. But this isn’t the same as before. Our prior horizons were drearily shoved along with priests and Puritanism and their death cults of banality, forcing tribes to swear off their practices that had worked for so long before. The United States government has long supported dictators all across the world, but at the same time attempted to force its neoliberal principles everywhere. But on Mars, there is no one to conquer, no one to convert. As far as we know, we are the only ones out here, the lonely dying match in the infinity of darkness. There is no one to overcome but ourselves. Where do we go from here?