February | 2015 | Idiot Joy Showland

February 24, 2015

A short note on racism

The other night, millions of TV viewers were treated to the grand spectacle of a woman being racist on camera. The woman was former Ukip councillor Rozanne Duncan, and the programme itself, Meet the Ukippers, was the usual paternalistic BBC fare – one long sneer at those dreadful tacky ukips, with their mobility scooters and their purple ties and their collections of almost two thousand porcelain clowns (although, to be fair, they do have a collection of almost two thousand porcelain clowns). I live in Seaside Ukipville myself: a damp, ugly trough of barely drained bog and shoddy housing hemmed in by barren bag-strewn hills, a geological latrine that curves out from the less fashionable end of Brighton; I know how it goes. My neighbour flies a huge British flag in his back garden, visible above the low roofline, the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a Third World border town; behind my house there’s a tattered cross of St George, and across the street someone’s decked out the front of their home in both English and British flags. The local shop sells tabloids and tinned peas, all the cheese comes in individually wrapped slices, the aisles are filled with hoarse grandmothers roaring impotent fury at kids with sticky fingers and feral, darting eyes, and you simply can’t get decent bruschetta or even a bottle of wine that didn’t roll flat-bottomed off a conglomerate assembly line somewhere south of the Equator. The whole area was purpose-built after the First World War as part of the Homes for Heroes programme, but these are less homes than filing cabinets for human beings. These places are easy to hate because, well, they’re utterly hateable: dismal, depressing, and shot through with a kind of existential meanness, in both senses – the miserliness of low ceilings and crumbling plaster, the general atmospheric sense of a total hostility to human life. The one thing they have going for them is that they tend to be cheap. That’s why, up to a point, it’s generally best to blame the hideousness of these places on the landlords, the speculators, the ones who left people with no other choice, rather than the people who actually live there.

Up to a point. That point was nicely identified by Ms Duncan, who delivered a long racist rant in front of a clearly horrified Ukip press officer (aghast, no doubt, that someone was actually saying what everyone’s thinking) and – unbelievably – an entire BBC camera team. She ticked just about every box: not just ominously referring to people with Negroid features but directly and openly voicing a specific, personal, visceral dislike for such people, and even recounting an instance in which she had discriminated against them (by pushing for Negro children to be excluded from sheltered housing). And she just kept on going, a bubbling sewer-sluice of the stuff, idiocy after idiocy. What’s strange is that she also insisted, and continues to insist, that she is not a racist. In an interview filmed after she had been fired from Ukip, she seemed to believe that her offence wasn’t a clearly voiced animus towards black people, but the anachronistic use of the word Negro. It’s a description, not an insult, she said. Like how Jews have bent noses. (Mine, I should add, is beaky and protruding but ramrod-straight.) But of course she didn’t think she was saying anything wrong – otherwise she wouldn’t have said it in front of a BBC camera crew, all of them surely trying to stifle their grins and hoping the word paydirt wasn’t visibly flashing across the whites of their eyes.

It’s strange. For a long time anti-racists have been trying to show that racism isn’t just an overt expression of hatred towards one racialised group or another, that it’s an unvoiced hierarchy structurally embedded in the fabric of society, that the construction of race itself is mutually inextricable from racism – and yet after all that, when someone performs the most basic, crude, open expression of racism, she’s unable to recognise it as such. In a way we’re the victims of our own success. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine a slightly more literate racist-apologist defence of Ms Duncan: of course, what she said was unacceptable, but it wasn’t really racist; after all, racism is a structural relation, and what’s one person’s simple prejudice next to the large-scale bigotry of an impersonal system?

Where does this chiasmic structure come from? What Duncan’s insistence on her non-racism demonstrates is that the word ‘racism’ has been emptied of all content. The formation I’m not racist but… is rightly mocked, but it needs to be taken very seriously: it’s the master-signifier of modern racial discourse. After decades of work we’ve finally hammered in the message that Racism Is Bad to the extent that almost nobody will now admit to actually being a racist (with the exception of Chelsea fans abroad); in fact, the word racist has come to mean nothing more than the thing that one is not. There are no longer any racist signifiers; racism exists only on the level of the signified, and when the signifier is entirely overdetermined, something like racism becomes a strange, scuttling, hermit-crab thing. It’s a nomad language, a subterraneous seepage that gloops beneath the solid structures of words and concepts. Like the wet rot that plagues houses in my malarial pit of a neighbourhood, it seeps up into a phrase from beneath and carries out its work beneath paint and plaster. Even the most egregious examples of racism – the string of police killings of unarmed black people in the United States, for instance, or the exclusionary jeering of European secularists – never allow themselves to appear as such, and any attempt to properly fumigate them leaves itself open to the perverse accusation of racialisation.

Some anti-racists seem to be labouring under a strange illusion, the idea that once you identify something as being racist (or sexist, or homophobic, or ableist, or transphobic, or otherwise oppressive) you’ve in some way done away with it. In a way this is true: overt racism really isn’t allowed in the general discourse any more. But racism stubbornly continues to exist; in fact, we seem to be doing more work correctly identifying it than ever. It’s the same with Ukip: the party is routinely mocked on social and traditional media; it’s become a handy byword for stuffy, ugly incompetence; it’s been so utterly annihilated by every stand-up comedian on the circuit that by now there surely shouldn’t be anything left – but for some reason they just keep winning elections. The problem is that simply identifying something or someone as racist, however correctly, has become semantically empty. What’s being said is that the thing is that which it is impossible for anything to be, an obvious nonsense. If the subject is embedded in a discourse of the signifier, and racist is an absolute negation, then it’s structurally impossible for anyone to actually be a racist. (In a way racist is the perfect signifier; it does all the things that Saussure and Derrida and so on say such things should – defining itself negatively, relating to signs rather than things – while most other words still operate according to some kind of magical thinking.) A funhouse mirror version of Hegel’s was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig: what is real is not racist.

What can be done? It’s always possible to invent new words, but while logodaedaly is generally a good in and of itself it’s always very hard to put a slithering oizytic evil back in the box. I don’t have too much objection to the idea of really engaging with the meat of the matter, the intercranial signified, with fists if necessary. But in the end what might be most needed is the continued insistence on a simple truth, as trite as it might seem: racist ideas aren’t wrong because they’re racist; they’re wrong because they’re wrong.

(This is probably a separate discussion, but the fact that Duncan appeared to believe that her racism is a punishment for misdeeds in a past life, and that it could possibly be cured by regression therapy, merits further analysis. The Nazis had grand and stupid alternate cosmologies; their shitty contemporary iteration appears to have an appropriately banalised myth-structure. When Ukip inevitably enter into a governing coalition with Labour this year, will drowning asylum seekers be told that they’re the reincarnations of ungrateful Englishmen? Will Farage claim the quiddity of King Arthur? The future is a terrible place.)

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February 21, 2015

The grey scale

The architectonic structure of the Kantian system, like the gymnastic pyramids of Sade’s orgies and the schematised principles of the early bourgeois freemasonry, reveals an organisation of life as a whole which is deprived of any substantial goal.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

1. Fifty Shades of Grey is a 2014 direct-to-DVD dystopian action film directed by Curtis Lumpus with a screenplay by Jott Prittsteck. In this terrifying vision of the year 2146, the United States of America has collapsed, to be replaced by a totalitarian state called Canesco, one ruled over by the secretive tyrant Christian Grey. Canesco enjoys a high standard of living and is entirely free from crime; however, citizens are subjected to constant surveillance, and all colours are banned. Grey’s belief that the unknown Cataclysm that destroyed the old world was caused by the blasphemy of colour has led him to create a barren concrete wasteland, in which chemical defoliants are used to extinguish all chlorophyll-producing life, except the crops grown in vast underground gruel farms. Drones on round-the-clock cloud-seeding flights maintain a dense layer of cloud over the entire North American continent. Only Grey can now remember that the sky was once blue. Female citizens of Canesco are required to sign a personal contract with Grey on reaching puberty in which they promise to keep the existence of the colour red a secret, in a ceremony known as the Initiationing. However, one plucky young girl called Anastasia STE-313, who always felt that she was somehow different from the conformist society that surrounds her, refuses to sign. Soon she finds herself on the run from the brutal government agents in an epic flight across three identical warehouses and one nondescript desert. Her desperate fight to survive against all odds pits her against the powers of the Grey Castle, but, as a hunky resistance fighter in head-to-toe tie-dye teaches her, it’s also a fight for the future of humanity. In the dramatic final scene, Anastasia hijacks Christian Grey’s personal helicopter, binds and gags him, and blows it up in midair. The explosion opens up a rift in the layer of permanent cloud, and as strings swell the people of Canesco see the sky for the first time. The film received mixed to negative reviews from critics, with many criticising its drab visual style, derivative plot, and clunky CGI. The casting of teen icon and YouTube pencil vlogger Jophia Splutt as Anastasia STE-313 was met with mockery from partisans of high culture and officially denounced by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Commentators have also noted that the regulation grey boiler suits worn by all citizens of Canesco are clearly several sizes too large for many of the actors, and that as a result everyone in the film appears to have a tiny head. In a 2015 interview, the director insisted that this was deliberate.

2. Fifty Shades of Grey is a 2012 British romantic comedy film set in a retirement community in the Cotswolds. It was directed by Tom Flan with a screenplay by Polandria and Chimera Hugankiss. Herb is a mild-mannered former accountant whose life has settled into a comforting routine: morning walks, crosswords, cups of tea, and a slow, resigned wait for it all to be finally over. But his life is turned upside down by the arrival of Dorothy, an outgoing and vivacious dame with an idiosyncratic haircut and one very saucy secret. As Dorothy tries to entice Herb out of his own head and into a pair of furry pink handcuffs, their romance grows from the pace of a zimmer-frame stroll into a full-blown bingo-hall Bacchanalia. But when his three large and prudish sons turn up on an unannounced visit to find Herb scrubbing his floor, wearing nothing but a pair of assless chaps, his old and new lives find themselves in a hilarious head-on collision. Can Herb’s weak heart cope with the demands of a late-blooming love? Can arthritic hands train themselves to perform Japanese rope bondage? One thing’s for certain: life at Bumpy Acres will never be the same.

3. Fifty Shades of Grey is an unfinished novel by D H Lawrence, intended as a further sequel to 1915’s The Rainbow. The story follows the lives of the Brangwen sisters after the end of Women in Love. Gudrun leaves Dresden for Paris and, unable to rid herself of the coldness that had come over her ever since being strangled half to death by Gerald, finds herself falling into an algedonic underworld of sadistic sexual violence. Her sister visits from England, husband in tow, but Ursula is appalled to discover that Birkin sees an aesthetic authenticity in Gudrun’s new lifestyle. After watching a performance in a secret theatre in which Gudrun, dressed as a voodoo witch, simultaneously anally penetrates three nervous, hogtied young poets with a trident-shaped strap-on, Birkin declares his passion for her. As they make love he tightens a collar firm around her neck, and she feels the kindling of a fire in her breast long thought extinguished. The two declare themselves to be the Dictator and Dictatrix of Earth, and lead a violent mob to the Palais de l’Élysée, promising them the domination and servitude that the lower orders secretly crave.

4. Fifty Shades of Grey is a patented proprietary colour matching system devised by Pantone. Launched in 2004, it has been one of the company’s most successful products, used to design magazines and decorate apartments for boring people the world over.

5. Fifty Shades of Grey is a handbook distributed to medical workers from 1978 to be used in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It identifies the causes, symptoms, and treatments for radiation poisoning, and included the notorious ‘grey-scale test’, in which it was asserted that patients whose skin had become discoloured beyond a certain shade of grey were beyond saving and should be left to die.

6. I saw Fifty Shades of Grey on Valentine’s Day in rural Somerset. It was disappointing. The cinema – if it could be called a cinema – was a rickety lean-to crumbling against the side of an ancient and pungent ciderworks. In this dense, hot room, sharp with the aphrodisiac tang of rotting apples, surrounded by the cacklings and fumblings of drunken locals, I felt almost immediately disoriented. At first I thought the cidery fog had Vaselined my vision: the screen wasn’t the prim white square I was used to but an indistinct shape, rippling and whorling, almost organic, almost alive. It took a while before I fully realised what I was seeing. Behind me, above the entrance of the shack, the projector was flickering, and the film was being projected onto a cow. Huge, almost entirely white, and clearly in pain. The poor beast had been chained up by its front and hind legs; a leather strap connected its nose-ring to the far wall, and a farmer in a Venetian mask and three-piece suit was flogging the creature with a riding crop whenever its laboured breathing or feeble attempts to escape interfered with the performance. Following the plot was hampered by the cow’s plaintive mooing and shifting, but from what I could make out it was about a woman who I assumed to be the tambourine player in an indie-folk band, who falls in love with an extremely powerful twelve-year-old boy. Sadly I didn’t get much further than that. As the first sex scene began, the imprisoned cow gave an almighty grunt and began to thrash around wildly, kicking up angry sprays of hay and manure. The timber of the shack, already weakened by several centuries of super-strength fumes, gave way. The cow was free. As I watched in mute horror, Christian Grey’s tight-lipped mid-coital face seemed to bulge and stretch, as if he were about to pop; I wondered would kind of fluid would seep out. Just before the beast burst through the image, I was dragged away by my viewing companion. We fled across sodden fields as the local folk took their revenge on the creature, but before we reached the safety of a nearby pub I could hear the cow’s desperate lowing and the sadistic yelps of its torturers turn into something else, a cold, seething reptile hiss that I thought had not been heard on this planet for sixty-five million years.

7. I saw Fifty Shades of Grey as part of a programme organised by the London Institute for Studies in Psychoanalysis, a subversive radical organisation I had been ordered to infiltrate. I didn’t understand much of it – all this stylised, highly sexed foreign cinema is frankly beyond me – but for the sake of appearances I jotted down a few observations. Typical Left propaganda: an industrialist billionaire and handcuff-happy sexual sadist seduces a young woman; what he doesn’t know is that she’s part of a revolutionary cell trying to take him down. For the most part, though, the film seems to be about contract law. The plutocrat tries to force his prey to sign a legal document waiving all her human rights protections, including the right to life; in this he’s thwarted by a series of increasingly abstract legal manoeuvres – by the end she’s stalling for time by demanding the contract include definitions for perfectly ordinary terms such as ‘and’, ‘but’, and ‘buttplug’. Procrastination seems to be her favourite tactic. At another point the capitalist, on discovering that she’s a student of English literature, asks if it was Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy that made her fall in love with the written word. None of them, she says, before launching into a lengthy exegesis on contemporary literary theory before a man at first visibly aroused but who rapidly goes limp once it becomes apparent that poststructuralism isn’t just the text meaning whatever you want it to mean. So much for the film. Making idle small talk at the post-screening drinks reception (or about as small as talk can be among these self-important charlatans), I learned that for the LISP screening all the actual pornographic scenes had been cut from the film – this because of some Freudian dictum about sex never just being about sex, apparently. It was a shame, but it was also all I needed. Tampering with the film violated the terms of its rental from the distributors: finally, I had them on tape admitting to criminal activity. As soon as I could I pushed the button on my secret radio receiver. Most of the Institute were arrested alive; a few hid out in the building’s toilets and, regrettably, had to be shot by police snipers.

8. I saw Fifty Shades of Grey with my parents.

9. You ever feel like you’re living on the point of a knife? I really did want to write a review of Fifty Shades of Grey. But there’s that feeling of a knife at your stomach, just pricking the surface of your skin, so you know that if you take just one step forward your guts will pour out like slimy confetti. When people talk about their plans for the future, careers, families, don’t you want to stare at them with crazy eyes, ranting, breathing in manic gasps, and hiss: but it won’t happen! Don’t you understand? We’ll all be dead by then! Melting ice caps! Russian bombers off the coast of Cornwall! Everything’s fucked! Life in the crumbling, developed West isn’t great (people are starving to death, even here), but it still has the sense of an incredible precariousness, a bubble waiting to be popped. Fifty Shades of Grey is not a good film. But will sneering at that fact make it better? Will it save us from the coming bombs? Without God or communism we’ve been told that the point of life is to collect meaningful experiences, happy memories, and interesting opinions; to be entertained; to carve out some kind of expression of individuality that will, in its uniqueness and initerability, last forever. History suggests something different. Mostly people are destroyed, in their thousands, for no good reason. Why wouldn’t it happen to us? How many shiningly unique individuals were burned up in Dresden? When the Mongols came to Baghdad – a big urban cosmopolis, full of self-regarding educated types who, in the end, probably didn’t live too differently from you – they killed everyone. Like a nuclear bomb in slow motion. Scholars who’d spent most of their lives airily abstracting about the finer points of poetic technique and the exact arrangement of the heavenly spheres ended up with their heads suddenly piled up in a sloppy pyramid outside the city walls. (The scholars are remembered; more than, say, the women. Massacres of the educated are an affront to humanity, while men killing women is business as usual.) And why? The Mongol warlord Hulagu attacked the Abbasid caliphate on the advice of the usual gang of viziers and astrologists, but the loudest voice for war came from Nasir al-Din Tusi – a scholar and poet who’d become enraged after the Caliph, apparently disdaining its metrical and lexical subtleties, had lazily tossed one of his poems into the Tigris. One million people died, arrow-shafts through their bodies, knives through their necks, coughing up blood. Cultural critics beware.

10. I loved the book of Fifty Shades of Grey; I really loved it, with that total and unquestioning love you can only have for the utterly deformed. I loved its alternate psychoanalytic triad of the Subconscious, the Psyche and the Inner Goddess. I loved the catastrophically unsexy cor-blimey interior monologue. I loved the relentless commodity porn. It’s a universal story, an utterly bleak one: the story of power and its essential idiocy, and the tendency to read it as a wide-eyed paean to the titular pervert only demonstrates a critical failure of imagination. Yes, it started as fanfiction, but then so did the Aeneid. Yes, the relationship it depicts is fundamentally abusive, but safety, sanity and consent weren’t a major concern for de Sade, Bataille, Réage, or any of the other icons of literary sadomasochism either. With all its obtrusively terrible language it’s a book that constantly calls attention to its own writerly, textual quality, that’s constantly returning to its own meta- and inter-textual fabric. Fifty Shades had an overwhelming, effortless literariness, in a way that far outstripped the squalid grunting efforts of this century’s self-appointed guardians of high prose. Karl Ove Knausgård, Haruki Murakami, God help us, Jonathan fucking Franzen. They’re all squalid hacks, sad clowns, overinflated, overserious; it’s hard to imagine them keeping a straight face as they make their vague bromidic pronouncements on the Human Condition, shitting out watery insights as if anyone actually asked them, but somehow they do, and the same reading public that dismisses Fifty Shades as mere pornography nod wisely as they lap happily from the putrid trough. I’ll take bondage over coprophagy. Reviews of the Fifty Shades film have grudgingly commended it for turning a terrible book into something vaguely tolerable, competently produced if not exactly groundbreaking. As if descending from the mad and terrible stratospheres into Franzen-lite mediocrity is somehow an achievement. In fact, the film’s made a category error. A proper film adaptation should be pornography: ill-fitting suits, wobbly handheld cameras, and queasy lighting that makes the rippling flesh look like so much offcut meat, bright pink, churning out of an industrial mincer. Or it should resurrect not just the Inner Goddess and the Psyche but all the screaming others that crowd the mind of the modern schizophrenic; have the superego as a pale disappointed father, the id as a ravenous twelve-headed beast, doubt as a constant looming shroud, all watching every vaguely kinky sex session with drawn, horrified faces. Or it should delve deeper into the discourse of force and power and punishment, really take these concepts seriously. Every shot and every line of dialogue could remain exactly the same; it could be fixed in post-production. Black-clad jihadis parade hostages past the window of Ana’s hardware store. Christian’s helicopter is buzzed by Syrian MiG-23s, and as he flies over the city we see a dazzling constellation of explosions flashing in the streets below. Sniper rounds ping off the windscreen as the new Audi blithely swooshes past a rebel checkpoint. And as the couple stand naked before the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city beyond rises up to meet them: Aleppo, the final truth of our era, a thicket of gaunt ruins, concrete crags as lifeless and inhuman as a stranger’s face, drenched in the dust billowing from mortar strikes, coating the world in fifty thousand shades of grey.

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February 10, 2015

Taylor Swift swallows the world

And he was casting out a devil, and it was dumb. And it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake; and the people wondered.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

Here’s a strange and ugly question: what does Taylor Swift actually look like? It’s strange. There are things that look like Taylor Swift – penguins, kettles, the Rapa Nui moai of Easter Island, teacups – but it’s always a one-way resemblance. They follow her, while Taylor Swift is one of those dangerous rarities: a person that doesn’t look like anything. Not strange-looking, exactly, not amorphous or indistinct, but vast: a trackless and uncharted infinity. Something hungry. Taylor Swift has always resisted the crude general categories that female recording artists are usually shunted into: never quite succumbing to the coruscatingly coquettish malice of the teen icon, or steatopygous sexual auto-objectification, or modish androgyny. She started her career in a universe of dusty country backroads, sternly Protestant plantation houses, glittered acoustic guitars; moved through bowler-hatted Instagram-filtered hipsterdom (“Who’s Taylor Swift anyway, ew?” Good question) into tragic, vampish kink-tinged opulence – but it’s not like she ever really changed; she’s always been eternally, irreducibly Taylor Swift. All these worlds were assimilated into her – and she could contain them, because she doesn’t look like anything. Her lyrics are, very deliberately, relateable. They’re a language through which we can express our own experiences, but a language can never describe the world without also reconstructing it in its own image. When a fan sings we are never ever getting back together to herself, is it because she and Taylor Swift have shared similar experiences, or because her experiences take place on a terrain where Taylor Swift rules alone, queen of all she surveys, in the dark and many-turreted castle of the signifier?

Look at the picture above. Which one is Taylor Swift? The blonde in the middle, right? Wrong. It’s a symbol. The civilisations of antiquity had the Muses, the medieval era had the Virtues, we have Taylor Swift and the Haim sisters. They represent (like Anna and Elsa in Frozen, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, or the various sides in the Syrian civil war) the opposing aspects of a single psyche. Hers? No, of course not. Yours.

The picture is also notable – it kicked off a small panic on social media sites – for the fact that it shows Taylor Swift’s belly button. For years now, she’s made a point of never showing her navel, carefully engineering various crop tops and swimsuits to keep it hidden from paparazzi and their slobbering navel-crazed public. Fine: I don’t tend to make a point of parading around my naked umbilicus either. It’s a revolting hole, a foetid salty lint-clogged scar, a gaping absence that’s only a reminder of something irretrievably lost. With only that hole remaining the condition of humanity must always be one of absolute disconnection; we’ve been snipped apart from a primal unity, and it’s not coming back until the day we die. Our genitals tell us that we can bring ourselves together, and even create something new; our navels whisper bitterly that we will always be alone. In the enlightened society of the future, they will always be covered; the belly button more than deserves its share of the socially mandated shame that somehow bypasses it in its mad rush southwards from nipples to pudenda. But it’s not just that. The navel marks a person as a created being; by feigning for so long to be without one Taylor Swift is positioning herself as a human acheiropoieton, something outside the dreary chain of reproductive existence. A new Eve? Or something more? Something that exists now, and always has, and always will?

Another question. In mid-July of last year I found myself washing up like a sea-blanched Coke can against the Greyhound station near Miami airport, just in time to miss my bus. The sky was as hard and hot and metallic as the planes searing through it; its blue wasn’t that of a high firmament but an ecchymosis, low and virulent, and between its petrol-tinged fury and the baking concrete I knew I was in an evil place, somewhere absolutely opposed to all human life. Maybe once, when it was all still bubbling, toothy swamps, someone could have lived in South Florida at the brutal height of summer, just about. Now that it’s been paved over it’s the inferno; death expressed as an architectural form. I arrived sweating, with my face in a medically improbable shade of deep scarlet. I was on the point of collapse: the last hour had been spent swimming through the stifling airless air, phoneless and mapless, trying to find the bus station somewhere among the dusty buildings (all apparently abandoned), the screechingly indifferent freeways, and the constant overhead jet-engine roar surrounding me. When I got in, I found a large fan and just clung to it, pressing my grimy face against the grille, letting the cool air blast into my sodden armpits. I stank. As the sweat dried off my skin, I could see myself slowly desiccate into a tiny, wrinkled, malodorous raisin of a man. It was at this point – probably the lowest point in my life – that someone started talking to me.

A woman, etiolated but cheerfully spherical, asked me if I’d seen the news. I hadn’t. It was her: every TV station showed non-stop, round the clock footage of her, whenever she wasn’t watching it. Limbs throbbing with exhaustion, skin dangling in sheets, I must have gaped. All true, she explained. The same power that had made her the transcendental object for the entire culture industry had granted her other strange and incredible gifts. I can tell you what you’re thinking right now, she said. She told me. She was right. All this, she said, was the work of none other than the award-winning Latin pop artist Enrique Iglesias, in his manifestation as Cloud-Man, an empyrean figure she seemed to identify with the God of Abraham. In the beginning, Enrique Iglesias created the heavens and the earth. It’s not an uncommon belief; once you notice it you’ll find it everywhere. There’s the person who exhaustively livetweets her efforts to exterminate the black race with the unflagging assistance of Donald and Melinda Trump; or John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan at the unspoken behest of Jodie Foster; even the widely accepted axiom that Jay Z and Beyoncé are parents to the Antichrist. Nietzsche, going mad in his Turin apartment, believed himself to be violently forming a new world order in conspiracy with the French poet Catulle Mendès, very much the Enrique Iglesias of his day. The question: what’s the deal with madness and celebrity? Why do mad people, who generally have a far more unified and coherent conception of the world than the sane, require the interposition of a celebrity figure to tie everything together? And aren’t we all, without realising it, somehow doing the same thing?

Maybe she was right; she just chose the wrong celebrity. It’s recently been revealed that Taylor Swift has registered as trademarks several common phrases, including Nice to meet you, where you been; Party like it’s 1989, and This sick beat (the latter for use in, among other things, animal skins and hides, whips, harnesses, and saddlery). This doesn’t mean that her jackbooted trademark lawyers will start snatching gurning crater-eyed idiots from warehouse raves and ambulant combovers from awful office parties, imprisoning them in non-sexy torture dungeons for the crime of using these words without proper attribution. As ever, the law tends to just acknowledge the actual situation after the fact. Language as a means of intersubjective communication is increasingly becoming a property of Taylor Swift, in the same way that thought and extension are for Spinoza attributes of God. So much of all speech is already mediated by Taylor Swift (try it for yourself; at the next party you go to try to discern any conversation that isn’t in some way about her) that when she finally becomes the unquestioned universal signifier, all that will happen is that a small portion of the discussion of Taylor Swift will, somehow, have to also be about something other than Taylor Swift.

Our future won’t be too different. When you buy flatpack furniture, the little instruction booklet will, as a matter of course, show Taylor Swift (in a retro halterneck polka-dot dress) correctly assembling your crappy nightstand. You’ll soon get used to her constant presence in TV ads: loveable-loser-husband-Taylor Swift surprising bitchy-wife-Taylor Swift and the Taylor Swift kids with some surprisingly edible boil-in-the-bag rice; Taylor Swift finally plucking up the courage to ask Taylor Swift out on a date, once she’s gobbled up some extra-minty chewing gum; black and white footage of Taylor Swift falling off a ladder at work as dedicated-lawyer-Taylor Swift reads out the toll-free number. A few things might jar at first: North Korean Ambassador Taylor Swift’s furious speech at the United Nations, or the first blurry security footage of a greasy-haired and trenchcoated Taylor Swift carrying out grisly gun massacre in a Minneapolis mall – but after a while, you’ll find it hard to remember how things could ever have existed before. After all, it’s impossible to think outside of language.

Usually, this is where I’d rail against the coming Swiftopia, but here I don’t really see the point. Taylor Swift is a grown woman and a successful recording artist; if she wants to transform herself into the fundamental substance of the entire Symbolic order that’s her business, and I’m sure she’ll do a decent job of it. The signifier is essentially hollow; it doesn’t matter what it actually is as long as it performs its function. Taylor Swift might have to release a few less commercially-oriented albums to make all this fully possible – one to allow the translation of Hegel into the new language, another to make sure football commentaries don’t lose any of their immediate comprehensibility – but, based on current trends, the whole process shouldn’t take more than about a decade. The only question is why Taylor Swift is doing this; why she’s decided to swallow the world.

I think I know. It’s not for us. We’re collateral damage, that’s all. Taylor Swift first really came to global attention when her acceptance speech at the 2009 Video Music Awards was interrupted by Kanye West, who grabbed the microphone and explained to a shocked audience that the award should have gone to Beyoncé instead. Kanye is, of course, none other than a modern-day reincarnation of Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1889, Yeezy wrote that he was once the Buddha, Dionysus, Caesar, Bacon, Napoleon and Voltaire; it would be strange if he did not come down from the mountains once more to speak with us again. The man who declares himself to be a god and insists that he is the end and limit of all music is the same as the one who wrote chapter titles like Why I am so clever and Why I am a destiny. When Kanye called himself a proud non-reader of books it was with the same voice as when he wrote that early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that viciousness! Kanye doesn’t just repeat Nietzsche, or imitate him; like Pierre Menard with the Quixote he says it all again, for the first time. It can only go on forever.

Dionysus is always reborn, but first he must die: whenever he comes unto us, Nietzsche is always already doomed. There are vast opposing forces from beyond this world that keep him locked in a constant chiasmic dialectic. Apollo, Brutus, Wellington. This time it’s appeared in the form of Taylor Swift. Their two fates were forever linked the moment Kanye bounded onto the stage at the Radio City Music Hall to snatch the mic from her hands. From that day, Kanye would continue to create, to become madder and more brilliant with every passing year, sailing out across the cosmos, trying to escape her – and his destiny. But Taylor Swift entered the language. When she’s done, Kanye will never be able to interrupt her again. He’ll never be able to upstage her. He’ll never be able to speak, without speaking about Taylor Swift.

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Month: February, 2015

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