George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. "Anything," he thinks, "any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose." He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom...
-pages 120-1

Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.
-page 168

It is taken for granted that a beggar does not "earn" his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic "earns" his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a high-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideals, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice no one cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it?" Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately.
-pages 173-4

Another tramp told the story of Gilderoy, the Scottish robber. Gilderoy was the man who was condemned to be hanged, escaped, captured the judge who had sentenced him, and (splendid fellow!) hanged him.
-page 189

A wonderful metaphor

This is Richard Wilson speaking about Paul Burwell, as quoted in a Wire article about the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, the music and performance group Burwell and Wilson founded with Anne Bean in 1983. Emphasis is mine.

He was acutely aware that a violin or a drum kit has a history. Someone might tell you that you aren't playing it properly. If you are playing an arc welder no one can tell you that you're doing it wrong. If you go to a scrapyard and find what is deemed detritus you can act freely with it.

Opting out

The plot of William Gibson's latest, Zero History, is driven by a "secret brand" of clothes called Gabriel Hounds (after one of those crazy things that happens when local religious traditions get overlaid with trappings of invading Christianity). Gabriel Hounds doesn't advertise, doesn't seem to care if people know about it, except perhaps insofar as it may prefer that people don't. More importantly, it very deliberately is made not to be tied to the "style" of any given time, and, as one character who knows a bit about the Hounds explains, they don't have seasons in the traditional sense of the fashion world:

When they remake the jackets, if they ever do, they'll be exactly the same, cut from exactly the same pattern. The fabric might be different, but only an otaku could tell....It's about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty.

The Baronette picked up the September issue of Wire and I've been slowly picking through it. The cover story is called "Retro-Activity," and is made up of a bunch of shorter stories about different ways that contemporary musicians or music scenes are using the music of the past, not simply as revivalism, but in creatively interesting ways. In the first section, Nick Richardson writes about the new coldwave and minimal synth scenes as a "radical revivalism," arguing that their

retro-resistance is more ideological. They resist the mass media's belief in novelty-as-quality, resist the forced "progress" of neo-liberal capitalism--where "progress" means a drive for efficiency at the expense of human interaction. So their material does sound new, even if its sound isn't new. That is to say, it's the sound of something it wasn't before: a radical dissent that's as much a product of its time as Marquis De Sade [one of the original post-punk era coldwave bands] were of theirs. A stubborn stride backwards in a culture driven forwards at the end of a whip.

I'm not personally familiar with any of the new music Richardson's discussing, and not much more familiar with the original batch from the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s, but regardless of whether I would agree with the assessment were I better acquainted with the material, it appears that there is Something In The Air.

Gibson's story is about the attempt to turn the methods of the Hounds to the advantage of the global capital machine, which is appropriate considering that the figure driving the action of all three of his latest novels, the hilariously-named advertising magnate Hubertus Bigend, is explicitly--and excellently--portrayed as turning the methods and theories of the Situationist International to this same advantage (which is in itself perhaps the greatest, and most despicable, example of détournement imaginable). In fact, a constant theme throughout the books--and possibly their entire Deeper Meaning--is that, regardless of your relationship with this machine (both as personified in Bigend and in its myriad other forms), regardless of the relationship you desire to have with it, you are always benefiting it. Even if you come up with what seems like a foolproof method of defying it, of fighting against it, you're still complicit, and it will simply find a way to twist your methods to its needs. That Gibson is, to all appearances, merely ambivalent to all this (when surely the only sane reaction, on becoming aware of it, is Lovecraftian horror), ends up actually adding to the impact of the books for me: they show all this in action, they show how it all works, and still they can't find a way to just straight-up condemn it.

I doubt that either Nick Richardson or the members of the scene he writes about are naive enough to not realize all of this. And, for the moment, their system seems to be working, at least on a minuscule level. It's not a revolution, but it is resistance.

I have my doubts about the specifics--a revival of a specific period will always have a flavor of "going back to before it all went wrong and starting over," and in this way I think perhaps the atemporality of the Hounds is more effective (though of course there it's still just another way of pushing consumer goods). And the music of the post-punk era, in addition to being aesthetically appealing to me, also has the very strong virtue of having happened right on the cusp of the Thatcher/Reagan era. But while Thatcher and Reagan are among the best examples of what's wrong with everything in this world of ours, I worry that a revival of this era can send the erroneous message that they were the cause or the beginning of it. Though on the other hand perhaps we could see this more as a revival of resistance to the wrongs that they exemplified, a resistance that went wrong the first time.

Regardless, though, I'm getting caught up in the specifics of an example, when I meant to be examining the broader concept. I'm not sure I have much more to say about it. But: resistance to novelty as resistance to capitalism. Nice. Like it. That's all.

Choose your own adventure

One thing that my friend Melissa McEwan is actually pretty good about is the fluidity of sexuality. She frames her essay as a critique of an episode of The View, which is kind of annoying (though I guess it's not much different from the way I frequently frame my own essays as critiques of McEwan, so I shouldn't complain), and her critique is myopic in the way it tends to be, but she gets at some good things here:

I don't particularly love the idea that women who come out as lesbians late in life were necessarily closeted all along. I'm sure that's true for many women, but why is it so hard to conceive of a woman (or a man, for that matter) whose attractions, or choices, change over hir lifetime?

We're always so desperate to talk about sexuality as if it isn't a choice, ever, for anyone, lest we create a crack into which homobigots can insert their argument that it's an American-wrecking lifestyle choice that makes the Baby Jesus cry buttplug-shaped tears or whatever, but, you know, maybe we should be talking about sexuality in a way that says even if it is a choice, people who love and fuck and live with and parent with and grow old with or have one-night stands with people of the same sex are deserving of equal rights because it's no one else's goddamned business and MREWYB.

(MREWYB is an acronym for my rights end where yours begin; it's a nice enough thought if we must remain within the conceptual framework of "rights," which I wish we wouldn't. Jack has a nice essay on some of the problems with this framework.)

The whole "it's not a choice" concept is muddled on a number of levels. There's what McEwan mentions, which at a more fundamental level is that this rigid interpretation of sexuality devalues choice in favor of genetic (or whatever) destiny. It sets up a context of unavoidable circumstances and says we're all helpless victims to them--while simultaneously insisting that being thus victimized ain't half bad! Sounds a lot like capitalism when you put it that way, actually.

Another problem with "it's not a choice" is that even if we say that sexual preference or orientation or whatever isn't a choice, sexual behavior always is. The capital-L Lesbians of second wave feminism, for example, could tell you that. It may or may not be personally healthy for any given individual to choose one sexual behavior over another, but it is still possible to choose. Acknowledging this does not lead logically only to the "choose monogamous heterosexuality within marriage!" argument, though if you have a case for it, by all means make it. Accepting that sexual behavior is a choice can lead equally to any number of other arguments, from "do whatever you feel like but try not to hurt anyone" (my favorite) to others just as specific (and potentially harmful) as the fundamentalist line, like "have sex only with people matrilineally related to you" or "never get consent" or "stick with nonhumans." Out of the whole range of options opened up by admitting that there is a choice here, it shouldn't be difficult to argue in favor of doing whatever we feel like short of hurting people, and yet we still seem to be terrified of making this argument.

Another problem I have with the "it's not a choice" crowd, and this is more anecdotal, is that at least among people I personally have known, there is a high correlation between promoting the choiceless concept and promoting the static, often binary (on/off, straight/gay) model of sexuality that McEwan critiques in her original post, the model that doesn't seem to be questioned by anyone on The View for instance.

I tend to identify my sexuality, when called upon to do so, as "gay," for a bunch of reasons. It's a simple shorthand. It is the single word that most accurately reflects my actual sexual behavior as it has occurred in the real world (though "infrequent" also comes close on that front). It has the force of habit behind it, as it's the identification I came to back when I first realized there was something to identify, more than half my lifetime ago now, back when my still-developing brain and still-strong (despite my parents' best efforts!) cultural indoctrination led me to simple answers rather than accurate ones. Because, yes--"gay" is a simple answer, and a decent approximation, but it's not accurate, in a multitude of ways that I'm not going to go into here (partly because some of them are entirely private, partly because it's complex enough that it would extend the length of this essay a thousandfold, and partly because a huge chunk of it is things I haven't even figured out how to articulate externally). I don't know what a more accurate description would be--I guess "queer" would do it, though I have an aversion both to the sound of the word and to the specific people who used it most frequently when I first became aware of it as a legitimate descriptor, and anyway I'm not sure how I feel about using such an enormous blanket term that nevertheless separates all of humanity into the distinct categories of "queer" and "straight," which I reject as invalid.

I think the problem is that the whole notion of "sexual identity" is a crock. It's a function entirely of our socialization in this insane, fucked up, unlivable society we have. It is, in fact, a form of the choiceless victimization I described early on in this essay. Don't get me wrong; there are clearly people who tend towards the behaviors we bundle under the "straight identity" and those who tend towards the behaviors we bundle under the "gay identity" and those who tend towards the behaviors we bundle under the "bisexual identity" and so on, but tendencies do not an identity make.

For a long time, the concept of fluid sexuality confused me; surely, I thought, if you're attracted only to members of the opposite sex, you're just straight, and if you're attracted only to members of the same sex, you're just gay, and if you're attracted to both, you're just bi. Why make it more complicated, more mysterious I thought, than that? Doesn't that cover everything? I eventually realized that the whole concept of "same" and "opposite" sexes is, at best, incomplete and inaccurate, that the "attraction" model isn't much better, and that there is a great deal more to sexuality than just which side of the artificial gender binary you most enjoy mingling genitals with.

Earlier, when I said "sounds a lot like capitalism!" it was more than a jokey throwaway. The late-period capitalism that we live in requires of us that we feel like we have options--but only the options provided to us by the system itself. Thus, with sexuality, we do have, in many ways, a greater openness than the generations that preceded us. It's OK to be gay, pretty much! But this openness has been channeled into tiny little boxes, easy to control, easy to market to. Gay? Buy the gay identity! Straight? Buy the straight one! Look at all these options we have for you. Anything you could possibly want to reflect and display your identity, we can sell you. And if you want to choose some other option--sorry, it's not a choice.

I've said it before--just as economic interests seek to control our movements, a control that can be fought with the Situationist concept of psychogeography, the same interests seek to control our sexualities. We need, again and always, to be sexual flâneurs--in, and this is important, whatever way best suits us.

Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren, several more excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

"Say, has this ever happened to you? You're walking along a street, or sitting in a room, or lying down on the leaves, or even talking to people, and suddenly the thought comes--and when it comes, it comes all through you like a stop-action film of a crystal forming or an opening bud: 'I am going to die.' Someday, somewhere, I will be dying, and five seconds after that, I will be dead. And when it comes it comes like--" he smashed cupped palms together in the air so sharply she jumped-- "that! And you know it, know your own death for a whole second, three seconds, maybe five or ten...before the thought goes and you only remember the words you were mumbling, like 'Someday I will die,' which isn't the thought at all, just its ashes."

"Yes...yes, that's happened to me."

"Well, I think all the buildings and the bridges and the planes and the books and the symphonies and the paintings and the spaceships and the submarines and...and the poems: they're just to keep people's minds occupied so it doesn't happen--again."
-page 218

"Do you think a city can control the way people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?"

"Of course it does," she said. "San Francisco and Rome are both built on hills. I've spent time in both and I'm sure the amount of energy you have to spend to get from one place to the other in either city has more to do with the tenor of life in each one than whoever happens to be mayor. New York and Istanbul are both cut through by large bodies of water, and even out of sight of it, the feel on the streets in either is more alike than either one is to, say, Paris or Munich, which are only crossed by swimmable rivers. And London, whose river is an entirely different width, has a different feel entirely." She waited.

So at last he said. "Yeah...But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?"

"Yes," she said, "that's crazy--in a word."
-pages 249-250

"After all, they were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice."
-page 260

Tracings and trajectories of consumerist boredom

If you're not reading Pruned, you should be. Take this post, whose subject is essentially the psychogeography of IKEA:

Next door, meanwhile, a fellow employee is also busy crunching numbers. This rogue among rogues has been tasked to weaponize the work of his colleagues, to design an IKEA store as simulant city in which one could trap would-be occupiers and confuse them with self-knotting streams of generic spaces, a labyrinth within labyrinths, until they can be neutralized.

I've often thought I could write whole shelves of books about IKEA, but aside from the bit about the sense of false accomplishment ("I made something!") conferred by putting together one of their prefab units, this short post by Alexander Trevi pretty much covers it all.

More on Playtime

Following up on the Baronette's typically brief post on Tati's Playtime, I wanted to be wordier about it.

When people talk about Jacques Tati, they usually just talk kind of vaguely about the alienation of modern life and technology. Which, you know, sure. But Playtime is much much more than that. Most of the running time is, to be sure, about alienation in modern surroundings. And before I even get to my big but about that I want to point out the smaller but that even this alienation is presented with such a degree of playfulness and exhilaration that tells you that Tati's not wandering through this alienation anywhere near as helplessly as his Monsieur Hulot is. The characters in the movie might have emotions ranging from not-unhappy downwards, but the movie itself is filled with joy.

Towards the end of the film we find out explicitly where it comes from, and it's my big but. In an extended sequence, a brand-new ultra-modern nightclub starts getting customers before it's even done being constructed, and then people keep piling in in larger and larger numbers and before long they've literally torn the place to pieces. And as they destroy and remake the modern world they're in, they suddenly become absolutely, uproariously joyous, and dance and drink and laugh into the morning.

And then, here's the great part: the rest of the movie keeps that mood. They're back out into surroundings they haven't remade for themselves, surroundings that just yesterday (just about fifteen minutes ago in screen time) were harsh and alien, but the joy remains. These people have figured out how to take the surroundings they're given and use them for their own purposes, rather than how the places signal them to use them.

Or, as Jonathan Rosenbaum put it (as I see him quoted by Roger Ebert), Playtime

directs us to look around at the world we live in (the one we keep building), then at each other, and to see how funny that relationship is and how many brilliant possibilities we still have in a shopping-mall world that perpetually suggests otherwise; to look and see that there are many possibilities and that the play between them, activated by the dance of our gaze, can become a kind of comic ballet, one that we both observe and perform.

This is why the Baronette says it's nice to learn that Debord loved the movie. It could just as well have been called Psychogeography: The Movie. Except of course that that would take probably the single most wonderfully joyful movie I've ever seen and make it sound kind of dry and intellectual. Which it completely is not. I've seriously never had so much fun watching a movie, nor have I ever been so inspired to face the world differently by a movie.

you know it

good to know that guy debord was a fan of jacques tati's "Play Time". that would have been downright silly of him to think otherwise.

Vaneigem

jr over at ladypoverty has written two excellent pieces on the Spectacle. in response, i just wanted to post this (rather lengthy) quote from Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life:

The repressive unity of power is threefold: coercion, seduction and mediation. This is no more than the inversion and perversion of an equally threefold unitary project. The new society, as it develops underground, chaotically, is moving towards a total honesty - a transparency - between individuals: an honesty promoting the participation of each individual in the self-realisation of everyone else. Creativity, love and play stand in the same relation to true life as the need to eat and the need to find shelter stand in relation to survival. Attempts to realise oneself can only be based on creativity. Attempts to communicate can only be based on love. Attempts to participate can only be based on play. Separated from one another these three projects merely strengthen the repressive unity of power. Radical subjectivity is the presence - which can be seen in almost everyone - of the same desire to create a truly passionate life. The erotic is the spontaneous coherence fusing attempts to enrich lived experience.

if i have some time later on this month, i'll try and write more about this.

Back

Hiya, I'm back from my thrilling week of corporate indoctrination. I'll respond to comments soon, but first I just want to let you know that the Situationists were even more right than we knew when they said the guarantee of not dying of hunger would be paid for by the certainty of dying of boredom.

IS no. 11, 1967

over the past two months, i've been reading through Christopher Gray's Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International. i cannot stress how important this book is. granted, it is not the original SI publications, but it is a fantastic selection. last night, i was reading the entry entitled, "Nihilism" and was blown away by this statement:

"As a last-ditch effort, Power has produced the spectacle of nihilism - on the principle that the more we contemplate, as spectators, the degradation of all values, the less likely we are to get on with a little real destruction."

i know i fall victim to this when it comes to large matters, but i'd like to think that i've found ways out of it in small acts and gestures. is it enough to be quietly subversive? or does it just lead to more reform? i have a pretty good sense of an answer, but would like to hear someone else's thoughts on it.

Be a sexual flâneur

This article is of course completely ridiculous (and written by some sort of a John G. Miller wannabe, judging from the style). But even as it buys into all sorts of ludicrous societal programming (you have to be straight to have children, if you're gay you have to sashay all the fucking time, even in writing, only straight people like "manly" pursuits, gay people have to be promiscuous, women exist solely to bear children, etc.), it does bring up something that, coincidentally, my pretty-much-gay self and my father were talking about just the other day, on the occasion of the public lesbianization of a cousin of mine.

[My friends] have seen little evidence of an interest in the opposite sex during my adult life, nor asked why. And that’s the clincher.

If there had been an interest, it became eclipsed by other more instant, carnal and deliciously taboo temptations, so it never gained light to grow. For 20 years, my life took a track that stifled the fragile stems...

etc, etc, etc, sexuality is like a jewel, made up of many facets, essentially.

Now, strip away all of the self-and-others-loathing here, and what you have left is this: without all of the programming that our society lays down on us from birth, our sexualities would most likely be quite a bit more fluid than they are now. Or, as my father put it the other night, "We'd be messing around with women, men, pumpkins, cows, everything." Now, I'm sure there's an extent to which this is not 100% true--devoid of programming, it seems likely that I'd still tend towards other men, while my father would still tend towards women, both of us tending towards humans--but to me there is a great deal of indisputable truth to it.

The Lettrists, and the Situationists after them, talk about how our physical environments, all of the geography through which we move every day, are shaped entirely out of economic factors. We go where we go in order to make or spend money, and those destinations, our homes, and every place we encounter between, look and interact with us in the way they do because they serve the specific economic purposes that they do. Trace out the path I take during any given day, and the shape you get will be entirely determined by my economic life, even if it's not a day I go to work. What Guy Debord called psychogeography was an attempt to combat this, to get us to redefine our own personal worlds as we, personally, want to define them. He wanted us to do as we desire in any given space, not to do as the space (and the powers behind the space) want; to move as we desire from space to space, not as demanded of us. It can be almost impossible to tell the difference, so a constant effort (both in intellectual reflection and in spontaneous action) is required. This is one of the most revolutionary acts available to us.

Just as much as we need psychogeography, we need...well, we need what I would call psychosexuality if the word weren't taken already by stupid Freud. We don't need Mr. Muirhead's version of it, though--in fact, we need pretty much the opposite. We need to be sexual flâneurs. Rather than basing our sexualities around a societal expectation of what those sexualities will be (which Muirhead is doing even as he scandalously "switches"), we need to stop making any assumptions whatsoever about our own gender and sexuality, and those of others. We need to constantly examine our thoughts about all forms of sexuality--including everything from the standard hetero-, homo- and bisexuality* to more controversial forms like incest, polyamory, pedophilia, bestiality, and so on, as well as various forms of non-sexuality, such as abstinence and asexuality**, not to mention the more fundamental question of the gender binary itself--and figure out why we think what we think about them, and whether or not that would be better off changing. I'm not suggesting any specific course of action here--to do so would be missing my own point. I only mean to say that we need to think about these things, and, more importantly, experiment, be spontaneous, and always, always, try to avoid doing things just because we feel a societal or economic pressure to do them. It's not always possible, but it should always be the goal.

*Despite Muirhead's apparent belief that bisexuality is The New Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
**And I should keep going, and expand that list to include forms that tend to be dismissed as ridiculous, like object sexuality or a predilection for yiff or yaoi. But goddamn, I'm already so fucking wordy and just this one hyphened-off sentence fragment already has several subclauses and now two footnotes. I gotta chill out.

It's a dastardly act

in viewing pornography, which is more alienating: being placed within the role of the voyeur or that of a participant? i believe it is the second option.

voyeurism leaves the viewer with no control over the situation, but it does not duplicate and then cleave the viewer's mind. the only severe frustration caused by the medium is not being able to change the camera's perspective. the voyeur is only an eye.

on the other hand, being placed in the role of the participant makes for a more convincing illusion - an illusion that aims to consume the viewer's identity.

the mechanics: as the viewer surrenders to the film, both the sense of immersion and paralysis increase. each gesture and movement is less and less one's own. and with the general dynamic of the format, the most urgent and captivating moments belong to someone else. the viewer kills to be something they are not and cannot be!

as i see it, it is the spectacle conquering the realm of sexual desire. situations are crafted that appeal in part to the viewer, but end up just constricting the spectrum of action and thought. this mechanic is not limited to pornography. i see a similiar type of fascism in the behavior of damien hirst. and all creators who can't seem to get over themselves and what they do.

now, i do not have a lot of background in media studies. and i think that many people probably consider the Situationist International (wiki) to be lost to the past. so, if...

• you know any works about this stuff
  
• or find that what i've said is amateurish (it is) and ill-informed
• or just want to say whatcha gonna say

the club is open