(no subject)

"The chimerical pursuit of perfection is always linked to some important deficiency, frequently the inability to love."
-- Bernard Grasset


I have been thinking about Georg Simmel a lot lately. He is sort of my theorist de jour, I suppose. In the last few months I have been going back to the classics, kind of like playing hopscotch in reverse with the goal of illuminating the ontogenesis. postmodern flux, for better or worse, with all of the ludic freedom and lack of accountability that comes with it, is in some way about rendering the origin insignificant. and what better way to do that to the past than to forget it, or rather, construct it as not worth remembering in any real sense--the signifiers play on the lips, but what they stand for is washed away by the waves of people with pomo personality proclivities, or "the end of history" American Empire style. at its most innocent, it is the illusion of Eden pre-fall recreated via reification of the synchronic. at its worst, it's winston smith reporting for another day of duty. so i've felt this moral impetus to go back to to
durkheim and Weber, at least; the origins of thinking about sociality in modernity lie with them (the Classics are another story, more deferred protoorigins, and Giorgio Agamben does better with them than I do).

so first today i was thinking about Simmel, and how, unlike Marx, he has no labor theory of value. his theory of value is rooted in desire, exchange, even sacrifice to some degree. exchange creates value, along the lines of "how badly do you want it?" model. Marx, of course, is all about value determined by labor. Then I started thinking about love. And Simmel's Metropolis. And Marx's alienation. And what their respective utopias would encompass and imply.

Simmel's Metropolis, as half of the binary tackled by everyone from Thomas Hardy to Raymond Williams to Paul Gaugen, was characterized by increased sophistication, monetary economy, reserve/aversion as m.o., a split between "head" and "heart," intensification of nervous stimuli, swift and uninterrupted changes, formal justice, exchange, division of labor and autonomy. It was neither his utopia, nor his dystopia; it was his modernity. Marx's modernity was dystopian, while encoding seeds of revolutionary transformation. His big meta-category was, obviously, alienation.

But what of love?

Both Simmel and Marx get conscripted into academic panels about alienation of modernity. Marx is usually, to be really reductionist about it, an "optimist" (I can't say idealist b/c of the whole priveleging Hegel implication that term carries in any discussion of Marx), because of his allowance and advocacy of agenda, agency, transformation. Whereas, as far as Simmel is concerned, that's just how things are; in that, he is more on par with Durkheim or "pessimistic" Weber.

The alienation Simmel describes is systemic; Marx focuses on alienation of the worker from his labor. Simmel's system, and the denizen of his metropolis is driven by exchange, rooted in (always dialectical) desire, but desire nonetheless. Love is possible because it can be achieved through mutual desire/mutual sacrifice/mutual exchange. In Marx's system, where human relationships are commodified, the implication, at least for me, is that for love to exist, it has to be deobjectified. Love is action; labor--and everyone is necessarily alienated from it, through false consciousness and objectified labor and whatnot. Obviously I know that Marx did not write about love, but I find applied theory interesting. And at the end of it, the implication, for me, is that in Marx's utopia, love is non-negotiable. And located within an individual, rather than social exchange, which necessarily objectified relationships, but also makes them possible. Simmel's tenuous negotiations at least map love as possibility on the face of Metropolis, imperfect as it is, imperfect as the social order is.

The quote I put in the beginning sums up for me why so many people dedicated to perfection on a global scale (read: revolutionaries) are so incapable of love, as commonly understood. They dispense with it or push it off to the margins in whatever terms are appropriate to their ideology, but it seems to me that they dream of a "perfect" society in which they could love. discourse about how love during status quo is bourgeouis, patriarchal, misleading, false consciousness b/c conducted under false premises or whatever is just "superstructure." just a way of externalizing some fear or deficiency, and appending it to a project that can take over an entire life & lifetime but yet is not in danger of ever fully manifesting.

RAGE

i know, my dears, it's been a while since Slumlord update. In fact, the last encounter recorded in this medium for posterity dated back to early summer. The summer has been relatively uneventful, since the gate seems to be succesfully deterring break-ins (knocking on wood)--either that, or the persistent members of our local burglary outreach program have died as per the Slumlord's insane prediction; the ceiling seems to be holding, the Mexican standoff over replacing my room door with the much sturdier oak closet door that I took off the hinges expressedly for that purpose seemingly went the way of Cold War in the 1980s, with lost of bitching but no Cuban Missile Crises on the horizon, and constintina's and mine fabulous new roommated J. Mu (well, not so new anymore, she's been living here since may) quickly became the Slumlord's new favorite tenant/preferred object for low-grade sexual harassment, and thus my contact with the Slumlord has been, thankfully, minimized.

But, like Slim Shady, guess who's back.

So; previously, on "Altercations with the Slumlord": Slumlord came over to install my AC in the window; for reasons unbeknownest to me (aside from the fact that he is a grade-A prick) he refused to take his nasty, dirty, poop-colored street boots while installing the air conditioner. My room is set up in such a way that it is physically impossible to circumnavigate the bed to get to the window, and it is equally impossible to move the bed, since the parameters of my living space demand that it be boxed in by the window, the bookshelves and the shelves-and-linoleum contraption that is serving duty as my bedside-adjacent all-purpose shelves/storage unit. It, in turn, is blocked by the table. So yesterday Slumlord comes over to turn on the heat (a week later than he is legally obligated to, but who's counting?). This presupposes the removal of all AC units in the apartment (we had three going, because it was a hot July). As soon as I heard his footsteps, the world momentarily collapsed into an all-encompassing crimson canvass (like in the anime sequence of "Kill Bill") and my temples started throbbing like an early 90s Moby album. The footsteps continued, bringing doom, like the footsteps of the Comandor in "Don Giovanni." Then I had what can only be described as a preemtive deja-vu, and I am sure Nabokov would have (or did) come up with a much more poetic and astute description of that state, but it just made me want to seizure. And sure enough.

Slumlord: I have to take your AC out.

Me: Ok, but you have to take your boots off before you climb onto my bed.

Slumlord (loud and aggro): No. I have to keep my boots on. I am anal retentive like that.

Me: Your boots are dirty. I sleep here. Will you please take them off.

Slumlord: No can do, anthrochica, do you know anything about human psychology?

Me (internally): I know that you are a fucking prick

Me (out loud): I am not letting you walk all over my bed in your street boots.

Slumlord: Then I can't take out your AC.

Me: Then you can't take out my AC.

Slumlord: Sorry, anthrochica; I need a couple more sessions with my shrink before I can take off the boots.

I slam and lock my door.

My roommates point out that once the Slumlord's delayed primitive reasoning processes the events, he will return freaking out over the fact that THE HEAT IS ON AND IT CAN ESCAPE THROUGH THE AIR CONDITIONER and then he will torture us to death by asking repeatedly if we have seen his heating bill, or by freezing us. I respond that that I will remove the AC myself with the aid of someone, you know, sane, like totalvirility or J.

Overnight the heat goes up to eleventy thousand degrees. Everyone wakes up parched like Disney characters trapped in Disney deserts by contrivances of Disney plots. You know, cross-eyed and with tongue sticking out and afraid of Robin Williams because everyone is, or should be afraid of Robin Williams. I go to school to search for my missing zip disk; apparently while I am gone, J. Mu leaves me a long hysterical message, the gist of which that she called the Slumlord to complain that we are being fried alive like ants under magnifying glass of a cruel boy named Bobby, and he freaked the fuck out demanding to know why she did not call him before. She, logically enough, retorted that she was not going to call him in the middle of the night, and he screamed that yes she SHOULD HAVE called him in the middle of the night, and he would have dropped everything he was doing (for his wife's sake let's hope it was not her) and came right over. Right, because Slumlord and His Logorrhea is just what we are missing at three in the morning. He asked if she opened a window (duh! we open our windows all the time! cuz we like to breathe!) and she replied that she had to or she would have suffocated. There was much gnashing of the teeth and slamming of the phone receiver and a promise of "I'm comin' over right now" and I really hope that our Slumlord never suffocates on his own bile on the premises of our apartment because the only thing worse than his too-frequent visits now would be if his nasty, psycho ghost haunted our house forever.