#everyday analysis

We have a Christmas tree. This might not sound special, but in Shenzhen, a city of 15 million, we might even be the only ones who do.

Okay. It’s not really a tree.It’s two steel rods fitted together, covered by branches and needles of green plastic. But it gets the job done.

Our plastic companion is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, he’s a hybrid, a hyper-Christmas-tree – he has both fir and pine tree branches, as if his creators tried to squeeze the essence of all possible Christmas conifers into his tiny 1.50 meter frame. Second, he is covered in everything you could possibly think of as Christmasy – bells, baubles, pinecones (the only thing organic about the whole contraption), snowflakes, a star of Bethlehem, even a snowman. And finally, he doesn’t just glow, but glints, radiates (as if emanating Chistmas), twinkling in a whole range of colours, evoking inappropriate associations ranging from Red Alert over E.T. to Star Wars in its attempt to be Christmas itself.

What this all points to is that Christmas and its symbols function as a fetishized ‘essence’(think of phrases such as ‘the Christmas spirit’ for example). This is not a particularly controversial thing to say: it is not the tree that we love but what it signifies: an elusive, imprecise and ultimately undefinable set of family and social (originally religious) values, feelings, atmospheres and impressions. What is more important is the class politics of this Christmas ‘spirit’ contained within the tree.

In terms of what we might call German Christmas tree prestige (or GCTP), I have to admit that this year we’ve hit rock bottom. We Germans like it subdued and low-key. Hence, a prestige-pregnant (to borrow a German expression) Christmas tree should be:

1. Real. This is the most important point. And I mean “real” as in “alive and kicking until I came by the other day and chopped it down with a logging axe”

2. Modestly decorated. We’re talking five to eight baubles plus eight to ten real candles plus a select few angels and other figurines, made of cloth or straw. Okay, and a star on top is also fine. But no things plastic, God forbid!

3. Tall. If it doesn’t leave a stain on the ceiling, there’s definitely something wrong with it.

We don’t usually say it out loud, but in Germany there exists a hushed-up hierarchy only brought into visibility at Christmas but clearly hidden under the surface of society all year round, a complex class system into the slots of which all members of society can be conveniently fitted: Let’s call it the GCTP pecking order.

On top, we find the true traditionalist Christmas aficionado’s dream, a proud, majestic Caucasian fir, hand-logged, sparsely decorated with real candles and family heirlooms going back five generations. From their noble perch, these kings of Christmas look down upon the next level, who do have a real tree of sorts, possibly a dwarf pine or lowly spruce. They did not chop it down themselves, though, but bought it in a freezing lot off someone more manly than themselves. Also, they do not have the means or aesthetic sensibility to go for real candles – fairy lights will have to do for them. They know it’s not cool, but what can they do? Despise those even lowlier than themselves, that’s what! At the very bottom of the pile writhe the dregs of Christmas – the PVC tree, smothered by a mountain of cheap plastic trinkets, choked by tinsel, strangulated by Christmas lights glowing in various garish colours. In other words: Our tree.

Here we see that the richer you are, the closer you get to the apparently ‘authentic’ experience of Christmas, with its natural furs and traditional roots. At the bottom end of the financial ladder is a copy of a tree with no roots at all, which those with a ‘real’ tree see as a false imitation of what they have. At Christmas, ostensibly a time of equality, the deep prejudice of our social world makes is presence felt in the essence of our trees.

There are currently three main remedies for outbreaks of the herpes simplex virus, or cold sore, available over the counter: the lotion, the protective patch, and the “invisible light treatment machine”. Whatever their relative merits as palliative treatments, what allows three so different products to simultaneously claim to achieve the same thing is the radically different rhetorical – and we can say ideological – strategies they employ. As Roland Barthes puts it in his classic 1957 discussion of different brands of washing powder, “the relations between the evil and the cure, between dirt and a given product, are very different in each case”.

The rhetorical claim of the lotion, first, is that it assimilates the troubling difference of the cold sore’s arrival into the body’s ordinary running. We use lotions every day, and are used to thinking that different parts of our bodies – hands, face, lips, eyes, hair, feet – require different kinds of lotion to keep them at their best: why shouldn’t the same easygoing relativism be extended to, this, the body’s newest arrival? “From a tingle to a blister” is the advertising slogan of the market standard producer of cold sore lotion, which goes as far as to attribute to the cold sore its own narrative, independent of the body it has taken as its host. Ideologically, then, the lotion is a multiculturalist liberal, happy to play down tensions between the body’s communities, and to acknowledge that the “other” may have a story of its own to tell. But also in keeping with that ideology, the cold sore “other” can only be integrated in this way if it abandons its most characteristic cultural properties. The lotion’s habitual language of “cooling” and “reducing redness” demonstrates its double gesture: the cost to the cold sore of being blithely welcomed into the body’s daily beauty routine is the demand that it be subsumed into the homogeneity of that body.

The protective patch seems to employ the opposite gesture. Far from integrating the cold sore into daily life, sealing it with a transparent sticker suggests a compulsion to cover it over, pretend it never existed, to slowly suffocate it. In this treatment, contagion is the main factor, and the attempt at sealing it off works to delimit its spreading to other part’s of one’s body and to those of others. But the heavy-handed literalness of this rhetorical cure only barely disguises its logical contradiction. For the dangerous “other” being contained is being contained inside one’s own body. The protective patch’s knee-jerk nationalist impulse to close all borders and “send them back” comes with the resigned acknowledgement that pure national belonging is always only a fantasy, and that there are shards of the alienated immigrant within all of us.

The above is a familiar command, which immediately conjures up the subject positions involved: the well-meaning parent and the obstinate child. But what does this injunction entail, and how do we follow it? Does not the fact that the statement is a command already deconstruct it, pointing to the element within it that undoes its own claim? The intention of the phrase is to allow the child to ‘be itself’, to act away from the distractions of modern culture (video games, television, etc.). By issuing this as a command, we see that while we like to think that imagination is something which we must 'allow' the child to have, as if it were something that culture limits but which would otherwise naturally flourish, it is in fact something we demand that they have, a commandment that they have to follow.

In terms of commandments, it relates to the difference between ‘Thou shalt not’ and ‘Thou shalt’, which have long been part of discussions of the parent/child relationship in psychoanalysis. For Slavoj Žižek, the prohibitive superego formulated by Freud not only says ‘No!’ but also ‘Enjoy!’, forcing the subject to obey a cultural demand to enjoy itself in the terms prescribed by culture. The point is that the two, ‘do’ and ‘do not’, are not so different. Allowing something and prohibiting it are both productive gestures; they produce a desire to act in relation to the law. And here we have another superego command: whether we say ‘stop daydreaming’ (do not) or ‘use your imagination’ (do), we produce a desire for something, and produce that something at the same time. In short, we command our children to have imagination, and in doing so produce both ‘imagination’ and a desire for it. Imagination is not spontaneous. One has to learn an imagination and how to use it, as in this remarkable Disney-style step-by-step guide to using your imagination, ‘with pictures!’

But what have we produced, as an object of desire, in this strange thing called imagination? What do we want to convince ourselves that our children have when we say that they have ‘a great imagination’? What desire of our own are we locating in our children, and asking them to possess, which we lack?   A previous Everyday Analysis article has shown that the virtual and the real are counterparts of each other. It is the creation of the virtual, which allows a concept of the true reality to exist underneath – and it is this constructed ‘true reality’, allowed to come into being by the supplementary ‘falseness’, that is where ideological values are really imposed. This is part of what is in play here; it is no co-incidence that when we get our children away from the games console, they go off to play imaginary games in which the most banal traditional structures are rehearsed: ‘Mummies and Daddies’ perhaps, or even the exchange-based ‘Post Offices’. It is when we are telling them to be themselves that the figure of the parent is most dangerous, constructing and forming the child's ideology by telling them that they are being themselves when they are internalizing cultural expectations. But while imagination functions in this way – as a tool for constructing the unconscious of children – it also has another dimension. There is always something elusive about imagination, something we do not have access to. We use it to make our children ‘be themselves’ – by which we mean the selves we want them to be – but we also paradoxically hold something back from ourselves – and feel alienated from our children's imaginations, as if they have something we do not have. Their imagination contains their genius, and indeed that is one of the meanings of the word (as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘And as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/ Turns them to shapes’.)  Though we control imagination, we also want to believe that there is an unknown element to it. What do we imagine that imagination is? We can only imagine. But these are actually two sides of the same coin. We create imagination precisely as something unknown, so that it can appear to be the cause of the way our children are, their great imagination, their genius, that which is truly them; away from us and away from culture. We need to do this precisely in order to hide from the first point, that really we are responsible for the construction of what is ‘truly’ them. Thus the message from our-culture-as-parent to our children is: you must be what I ask you to be, and also something beyond that, which I am able to pretend is the cause of how I asked you to be.

Lily’s Allen’s ‘The Fear’ was released in 2009, winning two Ivor Novello song-writing awards in 2010. It remains, in the opinion of this contributor, one of the most significant pop songs of recent years, thanks to its portrayal of modern life. The key lyrics are in the chorus:

I don't know what's right and what's real anymore

And I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore

And when do you think it will all become clear?

'Cause I'm being taken over by the Fear

The question these lines invite us to ask is: what, exactly, is the Fear? Whatever it is, it appears to be peculiarly undirected. Lily Allen is not afraid of a particular object here (although The Sun and The Mirror come in for criticism), but seems to refer to a pervasive sense of unsettlement or rootlessness. To be taken over by the Fear is to lose a sense of what is ‘right’ and ‘real’; to be uncertain of your feelings; to lack clarity. It is, perhaps, to experience the modern (or postmodern) condition, modernity being understood as the period of ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’ (Baudelaire) when ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (Marx).

Such an answer, though, does not get us much closer to saying what the Fear actually is. On this point, Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety [Begrebet Angest] (1844) can help. Kierkegaard draws a fundamental distinction between fear and anxiety: for him, anxiety is ‘altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility’. What Lily Allen describes is not, in Kierkegaard’s terms, fear, since it does not relate to any specific object, but rather anxiety, which Kierkegaard defines as an experience of freedom manifesting itself as the ‘possibility of possibility’. The possibility of possibility is precisely the state which ‘The Fear’ describes, in which we do not know what is right or what is real. In such a state, there is no pre-determined sense of which way we should leap or which decision we should make. It is a form of freedom which uproots us from any sense of morality, teleology or pre-determination. This is, of course, unsettling. In Kierkegaard’s words: ‘Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down’. Anxiety is not something that comes from outside us, but neither is it purely internal. Rather, it is the precondition for the very existence of internal and external; that is, for human identity. For Kierkegaard: ‘That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything turns’. Anxiety is what constitutes us as subjects.

In this sense, there is no ‘before’ anxiety. In Kierkegaard’s genealogy, anxiety arises within Adam, the first man, even before he has eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Adam, he suggests, ‘must have had a knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it’. God’s prohibition against eating the fruit ‘induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility’. Any rule implies the possibility of disobedience, of acting differently. This is the possibility of possibility, and it inheres even within such apparently fixed moral systems as God’s law. In this respect, Kierkegaard differs from Lily Allen, whose song implicitly assumes a time before the Fear descended. Though we may not know what's right and what's real anymore, the song maintains a belief in a time when we did know, a kind of prelapsarian or pre-modern state when truth and falsity were fixed and clear. What Kierkegaard suggests, by contrast, is that anxiety is not a state into which we enter fully formed and which we might therefore one day escape, but that it is fundamentally bound up with our existence as human subjects, as the only state in which we can experience genuine autonomy.