August | 2016 | Idiot Joy Showland

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.

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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?

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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.

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Month: August, 2016

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