on feeling mastered by inflatable Santa Claus
cri de coeur on Silly Season, and preamble for Baudrillard's Twelve Days of Christmas
I’m writing to you from a place near spiritual exhaustion. I’ve had the good fortune of a great and worthwhile year, in my bubble. Three chunks of the world are in garbage time while several growing regions are under aerial bombardment, or on fire. In the Mallee on Monday it will be 46 degrees. But ‘in here’ and ‘for now’, everything is hunky dory. In global relative terms, I am undeniably ‘winning at life’, ‘living my best life’, ‘me doing me’, and whatever other platform-resonant platitudes are also, yep, true.
Then Silly Season hit me. Suddenly, the state of the world, so undeniably parlous and undressed, is impinging on me – from a comfortable distance. This is combining with the seasonal, predictable pile up of prosaic demands and obligations. It all happened – snap – in the final week of November. Ostensibly, I just hit the wall because of one-too-many work tasks: ordinary, cumulative exhaustion and fed up-ness. Above and beyond this, there I this madness of a banal and trivial yet completely mastering collective social fact – its huge and undeniable gravitational pull and vortex – that has taken me past what I can usually cope with, after a good sleep. Now I feel like this.
The Silly Season is far beyond silly now. Season stands to reason: if 2024 is 3S, as I feel it is, why should the ‘most’ 3S part of the year be exempt? I can only suppose that, once upon a time, maybe even until the late twentieth century, people looked forward to getting together at the end of the year. Did we use to miss one another; did people used to like Christmas parties? I do remember bush dances and carols; I remember a Santa Claus arriving on the back of a brown HQ Kingswood ute. Now, like nearly everyone I talk to, I feel an almost complete depletion, triggering a strong wish to lock my front gate and door and laptop. Yet, as of writing, my existence, which feels like the above wind dancer, is dominated by fields of inflatable Santa Claus-es.
‘What is going on is too much; it is simply not possible to master the demands of the world; we are all beaten by December; it would be so humane if we would collectively acknowledge one another’s cumulative strain, and call off the dogs of circulation.’
Instead, we invite each other to things, serve cakes and alcohol, rack up bills on gifts and meals and taxis we would all have preferred not to have taken – and inflate our personal Santa Claus some more. Why are we doing this? This isn’t fun, it isn’t good. Why do we persist? We are defenceless; it intensifies. While garbage time continues, while the world gets bombed or burns, the inflatable Santa Clauses, they proliferate, they expand, they enlarge, grow turgid, detumesce in the heat.
There’s an implicit acknowledgement, surely: just as the id, that ‘seething cauldron of excitations’ is much bigger and more forceful than the ego and super ego, so the system of objects, the global imperative to secure our places in the goods life by expanding and entrenching circulation, and the cultural imperative to show we love and care for one another by trading the signs conveyed by objects – it masters us. The world around us that impinges on us until we’re strained and wrung out, it is much bigger and more powerful than any wish, preference or agency we might mount against it. Social forces are nothing personal; the gifts under the tree are ‘for us’, in a sense, yet in another, they’re avatars or tokens of a terrifyingly impersonal force that transcends our every effort. Against one million inflatable Santa Claus-es, resistance is useless. Santa’s collective plastic erection, and his struggle to remain enlarged, is the quintessence of my personal powerlessness and alienation.
The hermit’s impulse only shows that, for most of us, most of the time, that we are mastered by the world we live in, in the same way that ‘we are lived’ by the id. The world is unstoppable: we can no more stop Inflatable Santa than we can stop Trump from being president or climate change from being catastrophic. All the same time, should we not be remonstrating with one another to ramp it down a bit? Chill; rest; silent night? Instead, like the towering Dodge RAM trucks being made socially acceptable by their bulbous profusion, everything seems to be headed in the ‘max it out’ direction of further inflation. Everything is getting big and getting hard, the culture pulling toward a world of high hard grotesque Tonka toys. Yet I hear hissing.
And yet, less than half a century ago, we got through this season together, somehow, without having to exchange ecologically catastrophic and redundant amounts of plastic. The inflatable plasticity of Christmas is a novel social fact, and, like Christmas catering and the Silly Season demands that preceded it, it dominates nearly all of us with plumped efficiency. Inflatable Santa is popping off. Or if we are outside of it, like someone who happened to be living alone during 2020-1: we feel lonely, and pine for someone to breathe life into us, Inflatable Santa vs Anoxia.
~
Past the curmudgeonry and the fetishist disavowal of how bad conventional first world Silly Season and Christmas has become, I personally get a lot of comfort from how Baudrillard helps me understand what might be going on here. Merry Christmas. If this is the inflatable plastic shit we’re in, what’s driving it, why is it so powerful, how come I have so little agency, how come – above all – what seems completely obvious to me about December these days is socially unacceptable to mention among friends and family?
Next week, I hope to offer some quotes and riffs from Baudrillard’s Consumer Society. For me, they have given me the reparative ‘tidings of comfort and joy’ that Jesus’ birth was meant to, but doesn’t for me. Baudrillard is now the only thing standing between me and total domination by inflatable Santa. Hopefully, then, I can give the gift of Baudrillard this Christmas. Stay tuned (but here’s a preview).
Consumed: as in
(Baudrillard’s Twelve Days of Christmas)
1) as potlatch, in excess, beyond need
2) in piles, as profusion
3) as miracle
4) ‘in fire’
5) consummated
6) consommé
7) as sign (not symbol)
8) as system (of objects)
9) as growth of destruction
10) as waste
11) as Santa’s sack of cockaigne
12) as differentiation of self from other by sign