Rarity and Plenitude: Rancière/Sadmalls/Love/Secret Culture.

“A morning without coffee is like something without something else” —Spencer’s Gifts.

February

Malls make for clear thinking. Especially sadmalls. Northgate, in Durham: I walk the tiles, properly sodafied, inhaling the JCPenney aroma of belts. I size up phone accessories and dwell, taking in the great scenes of rarity and plenitude playing out before me.

Here— center food court— I find a weird plasticky table and spread out a heap of xeroxes and pdfs to peruse with lunch. Around me, voices bubble. Unseen objects ding. To my left, a gay couple— of identical haircut, height, and Northface jackets— sit together and form an absolute mirror of each other. They’re bickering but barely moving and their mouths are aligned so perfectly you could hang a curtain rod on them.

Northgate is definitely a sadmall, a commercial center deserving of pity, with more stores than customers, and a decidedly unrobust merchandising sensibility. A near-empty displaycase for eczema and psoriasis medication has been discerningly posted beside the food court. Signs hang by fishing wire and a hatstore billboard reads Got Hat? Down the hall, the merry-go-round spins for no one.

 

 

Every one of us is a warring bundle of democratic and aristocratic impulses, some of us more aggravated than others. Battle lines many times depend on your own desires and hobbies, or on where you stand to gain or lose power. We might for example fervently believe in political, legal, or even economic democracy, but only because we’re seduced by different, weirder scarcities.

The big question is whether we’d be willing to go all the way and push for a radical democratization in every corridor of society— in every avenue of culture-making, every form of knowledge-production, every form of prestige, recognition, beauty— every scarcity and every possible sphere of power and privileging— even in places where we have a distinct competitive advantage.  Reading lots of Rancière has made me understand how torn I am myself; torn between a pretty intense— though ludic— will-to-power and a wide, Whitmanesque embrace of the everybody.

From all appearances, Rancière does appear to be willing to go all the way, even though he’s not thinking in terms of power or loss. He’s pushing a very polemical egalitarianism— in politics, in pedagogy, in literature— that does not so much demand as assume an equality that has been previously denied or muzzled by some social order or some distribution of the sensible. But even for someone as presumably magnanimous as Rancière, or for anyone in their nicer Whitmanesque moments, doubts persist. We might genuinely pull for the demos, but are we really counting ourselves among them or just getting our kicks from some imagined Promethean role?— A clever powergrab in which we get to satisfy our wills-to-power and Whitmanesque embraces simultaneously.

 

 

The sadder a mall is, the more likely it is to smell like Chinese take-out. By this measure, Northgate could be sadder. It may lack the smell-infusion technologies used by Southpoint to pump the place full of perfume and cookie dough aromas, but the Chinese is only detectable from inside the food court, in close proximity to the Cajun Cafe Grill. Unlike blandmalls like Southpoint that are totalitarian in their use of beige, sadmalls prefer backgrounds of cool colors— snow white, blue, and silver— highlit by bright, warm colors for their signage; the better to draw you in from the chill of the mall’s intermediate spaces. In red I see: Greek Cuisine, The Golden Wok, The Cookie Store, Jay’s Wayback Burgers. As stores go under, the signs turn off, and the mall just grows colder, and sadder still.

This afternoon, however, the food court burps and waddles with a real variety of life, an overwhelming sense of the demos that gives you the impression of sitting in one of the Star Wars movies. The metaphor is unmissable. The creature working at Cajun Cafe Grill has a brusque, extraterrestrial vibe and haircut. Beautiful in her own way, her earlobes are higher than her eyebrows, making her, by all measures, an ewok. On the other side of the court sits a retired jedi, with a greybeard and plush red cardigan. He now passes his days watching his stomach, reminiscing about his adventures on other planets, and enjoying his frozen yogurt in an undignified manner. Northgate’s really got the knack for blending paradise and nightmare. I strobe between love and scorn. Ahead, a kid shovels noodles into his mouth in a way that makes them look like worms. They fall out as fast as he forks them in. I watch for ten minutes, puzzled, transfixed, and disgusted, before I break down and order some worms for myself, from the ewok.

 

 

To really, deeply, sincerely believe in democracy entails a willing renunciation of whatever undemocratic things we happen to be enjoying— which doesn’t sound all that appealing at first, but there might be greater rewards on the other side— and I don’t mean of the self-sacrificial, rewards-received-in-Heaven variety. I mean real treats for true narcissists. Gains that overcome scarcity itself.

Consider human beauty.  Beauty is a huge part of the formula for not only how we gain the romantic love of others, but also why we believe we deserve the love, affection, and access to sexual being. But beauty is not just an attribute; it’s also a social order. And like the other social orders that have since been tilted by sudden democratizations, human beauty is thought of, by most everybody, as the reflection of a natural order. Nature herself handed out our physical charms, and very few of us honestly feel she did so equitably. Some people are naturally goddesses and adonises, right, while others must have been waiting at the back of the line— but where are we getting this from? How fixed is this really and how much are we just reinforcing it for unannounced motives? Why, in our aesthetic horizon-widening, our continual attempts at seeing new beauty, do we rarely take the same attitude toward human forms and faces? Myself included. We think we’re so open, but won’t even leave behind or get beyond brute sexual economics.

Imagine, for a second, if we did— if the variety of human forms were to overwhelm the hierarchies of human beauty— if you, you personally, permitted your imagination and libido to stray. Imagine the sudden abundance. The excesses of democratized human beauty.  What, exactly, keeps you, me, and us from doing this? We have everything to gain but something we must at the same time believe we’re losing.

 

 

By now, twilight frequencies are creeping in through the windows above, with the pallor only accentuating the fact that everything within thirty meters of me is made out of formica, plastic, or flimsy metal— including the blue cloud shape dangling above my head. The strategy in all this appears to be: Make The Inside Feel Outside. There’re lilting streetlamps, for example. Plants. A structure vaguely resembling a fence. And despite its shabbiness, it still works on me. The columns even have metal bands hugging their mid-sections, much like suburban homes that are trying to keep squirrels from climbing onto their roof. Probably a coincidence.

A remote-control car whirs out into the walkway from the hobby-car store. Is that what they’re called: hobby cars? The name of the place is Ho-B Max, so. I went in the other day to inquire about their kit rockets. The employees kept everything sufficiently aloof so as not to lose the esteem of any ten-year-olds that might be walking by.

A Lebanese lady pushes a shopping cart down the promenade and it takes me a minute to realize what’s wrong with this picture: shopping carts are out of place in shopping malls. Everyone lugs their purchases. Hence the fatigued expressions. Except for on this next guy, who’s dressed in all bikergang black and pushing a pink stroller with a fresh DVD player still in the box. Talk about rarity and plenitude. Or better, let’s talk in terms of interestingness.

When I was younger, I used to say “people-watching” when what I really meant was “girl-watching.” Now, I genuinely do watch people. Or people, places, and things. Even in a place as managed and inventoried as a shopping mall, there is great mystery. Pan Pan Diner, behind me, advertises an All You Can Eat Breakfast with a large under-the-sea-themed poster. No one knows why. It isn’t seafood. Zero connection between fish and the breakfast special. It just is. A man walks by smiling so big it looks like he has a tumor in his cheek. And on closer inspection, it is a tumor in his cheek. A young mother flops her pink, fake-looking infant around as she fiddles with her phone. She’s interesting to watch but wearing a winter jacket and a bikini or halter top that presses her breasts together so tightly they almost touch her chin. I watch her surreptitiously, but women still always know. Her husband returns; I stop looking at his wife.

It’s not that without public hierarchies of human beauty, we are without valorizations, likes, dislikes, or ugly people. Everything does not become a field of greyish indifference. Differences would just be a suitably intimate, personal thing, free of public officiation— and weirdly enough, still universalizing in one sense. Think about love. True love. A good friend once told me something. He said: “When you are in love with someone, it’s not that they are or are not beautiful. It’s that they become the most beautiful person in the world.”  In love, we look upon someone as if they are the most universally beautiful thing. Love transforms.

I’m no authority on romantic love, putting it mildly, but there’s something to this as-if  and as-though— something remarkably similar to Kant when he said: “Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne”— Act as though your Will could become Universal Law.  Kant didn’t intend it this way, but in this as-though, love becomes a powerplay rather than a powergrab, a kind of wonderful sublimation. In this reconfiguration of rarity and plenitude, we do somehow, someway, satisfy our wills-to-power and our totalizing givingness simultaneously. Instead of asking myself how I can acquire more beauties, more babeness, I look at someone— this Polish lady on the subway platform in Queens, this badass greaser motorcycle lesbian, this clerk working the register at Target— and ask myself: how would this person strike me if I were in love with them?

I look over my shoulder, at Subway SandwichesSubway apparently received a #1 recommendation from Zagat’s. Can’t imagine why— unless its editors considered wet bread to be some kind of fast food revolution. A shaky elderly woman leaves her cane wedged between two tables and hobbles up to Subway. She’s just barely tall enough to be noticed silently indicating a case of wheat rolls. She returns to the wrong table. I feel a slight compulsion to join her, to overcome modern alienation with a quick hello. Not my modern alienation, but hers presumably. But the look on her face doesn’t register as lonely. More like startled, and I couldn’t possibly help there. On the whole, the crowd is friendly, but the seating arrangement actually speaks more to unloneliness if anything. It says: I need rest. I’m on my lunchbreak. I need time and space and peoplelessness. Two or three tables of peoplelessness, if possible, thank you.

Sadmalls are great at giving you your space, that’s for sure. The problem with places like Northgate is that they don’t understand their own virtues. They work against them and fail trying to be be something they’re not, like Southpoint. Northgate should advertise the areas in which it excels. Like its roominess, or uncanniness. Its wide-open lanes for newly-retired powerwalkers. Or, the great ratio of old black men dressed impeccably in all white. Wait, what’s this? A brochure for Cosmic Blacklite Mini Golf? They may finally understand: actively court the weirdness. Do you think a place like this mall could ever become self-aware enough to get an edge? Looking over at the Hallmark store, I pause and think: probably not. It would be great if Hallmark had a section for the negative side of life: for threats, chastisements, etc.. Two female employees and a large stuffed Valentine’s bunny are staring at me from inside the store, which glows pink from its seasonal decor. What a great relief to be single on Valentine’s Day. It’s like a snow day for the emotionally distant. The girls continue to stare. So does the bunny. This unnerves me and my styrofoam squeaks. The mall is watching me back. Makes sense. I’m poured from the same mix of the rare and the plentiful.

 

 

This trick with human love and beauty spills over into culture, into culture-making. If we believe Schiller, a semi-Kantian himself, the basis of all culture can be found in play— in the Spieltrieb, the play-drive, that freely creates with all the urgency and purposiveness of necessity, but without its redtape, its fixity, its claims. We make bits and strips of culture, then share, then wait to be showered with love, likes, and accolades. And if we want the whole world involved, in a world of increasingly democratic, increasingly universal culture-making— if that’s what we’re into, which people like Rancière surely are— the ratios get all out of whack. More culture is made than accolades available. There’s a calculus of recognition— too many makers, not enough ears and eyes and dollars— and right away, a kind of conservatism and overlikability are put into motion. Is everything made only to be seen and easily loved?

Maybe instead we can and should vie for a strange kind of universality, a smaller, better, miniverse or microtopia, perhaps a secret world— full of secret “ways of doing and making”— that never fully translates into daylight. No culture contains everybody; all culture is subcultural. Nevertheless, a culture is still a totality of sorts, a “total way of life,” a mini- or micro-totality.  And we can imagine or recall plenty of secret cultures sufficiently weird and harsh to have just about an equal number of makers and takers. While making this culture and making for this culture (which become equivalent), you feel all the more readily that satisfying will-to-universality. Even when, for the super-idiosyncratic and highly “idiomatized,” it is a universality of one— when you’re making marks and motions and noises unto the Lord, as it were. There’s something so pure about this, that I love. I don’t know what I mean by purity, but I do know that the best things only happen when pure impulse finds its way out of the labyrinth. When all lesser claims are left at the door, and everyone thinks you’re homeless, and you— or you and your tribe— do and make enough to be an entire culture unto yourselves, which others can enjoy, of course, if they really want to. This pushes meaning-making beyond the claims of scarcity and into another gloss on the Socratic equation of knowledge and happiness: nothing the world can do will take this away from us.

 

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.