Out with the old

Apparently Hogmanay got going as a result of the Calvinist Kirk having a downer on the celebration of Christmas, which smacked of both popery and fun. It is fair to say that these days the festivities don't wear their puritanical origins on their sleeve. Your host is, alas, prevented by reasons of health from participating in the occasion with full dionysian vigour this year. It's probable, however, that I'll be spending midnight with Mr Jools Holland and his orchestra. So I'll offer you my reflections now. You're on the edge of your collective seat; I can sense it.

When I say 'my reflections', I don't mean my reflection on the state of things in 2014. When viewed with sufficient generality, the situation is perfectly clear already: things are shit, but could get better if enough of us do something about them. We make history, as Marx reminded us, but not in conditions of our own choosing. The mere fact that our present unchosen conditions are to history as Coldplay are to the avant-garde is no good reason not to make some more history.

I want to blog instead about New Year celebrations themselves. There is a increasing tendency for people to adopt a cynical distance from these: "we're only celebrating a arbitrary unit of time passing", "we might have chosen some other measure of time, how can the fact that we didn't be important, or worth celebrating?" It's not that people who say these sort of things don't go on to celebrate the New Year; it's just that they do so in knowing detachment from the whole meaningless affair, presumably smugly fancying that their co-revellers suppose that the gods have decreed that it is 2015, or something. One word for this state of mind is "nihilism".

The arbitrary, you see, matters. Signification is arbitrary, that is to say, meaning is arbitrary. Yet we are language using creatures, we succeed in meaning things. We do this with times and seasons just as readily as we do with words. The randomly chosen measure of time, the festival that so easily could have been elsewhen (or not occured at all), the anniversary, the birthday - all of these serve as landmarks, fixed points around which we structure the narratives of our lives. They lend a life-giving rhythm to our reality, rather like a healthy heart-beat as contrasted with the morbid tremor of fibrillation. The relentless forward march of capital lends to our time the features of the latter: it is not that things are still, after all capital cannot be accumulated without constantly revolutionising the means of production. But the movement we experience is, in the main, unstructured, chaotic. It cares not tuppence for us, our loves and our observances. One moment of time is no more or less important than any other - each moment is abstractly equivalent, equally apt for production and consumption. It's unsurprising, then, that this society finds itself wondering whether the arbitrariness of its new year celebration negates its meaningfulness.

It's similar with Christmas itself. The bonanza of consumption for which this provides the opportunity has become indispensable to the process of circulation in Western capitalism. And yet the cultural logic of the system itself cannot make any sense of the feast. The problem isn't particularly the widespread disbelief in the religious basis of Christmas; we can still just about appreciate a good story. The same kind of worry that we have about the arbitrariness of New Year reappears, of course. There is always some pub bore who can relied upon to tell us, perfectly truthfully, that we don't know the day of Jesus' birth.

The real problem late capitalism has with Christmas lies not with the foundations but with the actuality of the feast in its classical form. Think about it: a significant period of time, twelve days, set apart, marked with special observances and the absence of productive labour, and, in pre-modern times, prepared for by Advent, a period of abstinence. This is hardly the stuff that brings a smile to the face of the bourgeoisie, whose unobtainable fantasy is of constant production alongside constant consumption (this latter somehow obtained without undue encroachment on the wages bill). And so Christmas collapses into an amorphous blob of a Christmas season, starting in October, when the shops lose the Halloween decorations and the restaurants introduce their Christmas menu. It is mostly over by Boxing Day. For all but the statutory bank holidays, business continues as usual, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word 'business', only with a backing soundtrack of Jingle Bells and the occasional offer of a mince pie. Even attempts to re-sanctify Christmas don't re-establish the fine structure of the liturgical year. Carol services can be attended any time from mid-November onwards. The year is flattened at the behest of capital.

Left stranded, as we are, in a time without landmarks, there is a temptation to recover the past, with its organic ebb and flow of the seasons. This dream of a restored temporality is the natural pairing of a vision of a restored order, that is of the politics of conservatism, even fascism. Yet the need for structure and narrative, for history rather than an encounter with time as an alien presence, is real and pressing. It's just that the cure proffered for our lost condition is worse than the disease. Adorno once wrote,

As long as the face of the earth keeps being ravished by utilitarian pseudo-progress, it will turn out to be impossible to disabuse human intelligence of the notion that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the pre-modern world was better and more humane, its backwardness nothwithstanding.

So there's one excellent reason to be a socialist in 2015, to safeguard the future from both chaos and the death-dealing power of the past.