I. Sweet Dreams are Made of These
the colitis of the american body politic
Disclaimer: this is a draft-zero idea, not fleshed out, a textual anal probe, and it’s designed to incorporate profane/vulgar content as experimental writing, queer writing, and campy social critique (think Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker, John Waters, Sigmund Freud, David Sedaris). So basically, I’m giving you, reader, a blueprint of how to swallow this turd. Consume at your own risk with the understanding that this is play, and play is human; to err is human, and ego ludere cum cacas ergo homo ludens sum. If you are not into this shit, do not read it. If you wanna get your panties in a twist, enjoy your wedgie and leave me out of it.
A post goes viral on twitter. Discourse flowing through digital veins, algorithmic capillaries, filtering into the single-cell metaphor of me, this writer, writing this thing, probably stupidly, too self-consciously for it to be worth anything.
Because there is a certain amount of insanity that I carry with me while writing, especially when writing to think out some ideas (honestly, Schopenhauer would’ve hated my guts—not only am I the kind of puny XX who can’t rub enough brain cells together to get it, I also sit down and write just to see which ideas will plop out and let the language pick where to pinch ‘em off) for some fucking reason I guess I’ve got that classic by the Eurythmics in my head and this is what it’s remixing into. I’m so fucking sorry, but also, fuck you lol.
Let’s get back to the blood and guts of where I started. Atomized, single-cell-in-an-extended-brain me: the unit of American political life. Right?
The body politic is made of these.
That’s how America’s current neoliberal regime puts it. Sure, there’s systemic forces that influence the way we act and behave: social codes, norms we have to dance to, or dance around, negotiate rigidly or fluidly with room for error. But at the end of the day, it’s down to personal responsibility. That’s it. The individual citizen is the fundamental unit of American politics.
Who am I to disagree?
This is an easy proposition to accept: after all, it’s the individual voter who goes to the polls, gets their tax refund, takes on or discharges their debts, posts, protests or screams into the void of the digital/physical commons. In the court system, it’s the individual who stands to defend their conduct or writhe miserably in the radiant light of truly fair justice, in which we are judged by a jury of our peers—individuals each, vested with the power to make their own decisions, form a consensus, and rule. I know this is some Thomas Paine, rights of man kind of shit. Undeniable and all that.
Everybody’s looking for something
Each individual is imbued with individual desire; wants, needs, aspirations, all emanating from that singular individual human political unit. We come together and get what we want through this process. Desire motivates us and easy gratification is something we sink into like a warm bath. Call hot tubs amnion as you go relax in a salty soup of sweat, secretions and chlorine, pick your fellows wisely or not at all. The more it smells bleachy, the more pee is in it. If everyone sinks into the piss, and by consensus we decide this (or hot tub diarrhea) is okay, well—that’s it, it is, isn’t it? It’s your fault for smelling like shit when you come out of the diarrhea tub.
Some of them want to use you.
I make no apologies for the scatological; isn’t it, after all, my individual right to paint the pages of my own writing with as much absolute shit as I want? More power to the shitposters, I say. Sure, shitposting can demean you; sure, shitposting is pretty improper; sure, shit-smearing is something you end up getting sent to an institution for. When you begin to pen writing on serious topics in excreta, you lose your ability to be taken seriously. Because in humanities we should be taken seriously. What if we push the edges of that? What if it reduces the utility of the work? It hurts credibility, makes you get railed into a froth of santorum by the discourse set, etcetera. But maybe there’s something interesting in pushing the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable. And no, I don’t mean by posting nazi shit or pictures of your dick. Put that away. I don’t want to see it.
Some of them want to be used by you
What I’m trying to get to here, bear with me, is that in the present conception of the body politic based around the atomized indivdual, is that maybe this isn’t the best way to conceptualize ourselves or our information ecosystems. After all, we are inextricably, utterly, tied to the histories of our ancestors, and their ancestors before them (again, some Paine shit, context is/was different, I dig, hold on, let me use this) and that attempts to sever out present from our past has led us, in our mediated modernity into some deep doo-doo. Our languages carry complicated histories; our movements, our social chorea, our panic—there is a mix of our biological reaction to social phenomena, social conditioning, inheritance, and the structures through which allll this shit flows on its way back into the carbon cycle.
Some of them want to abuse you
In order to understand the brain rot—the same brain rot that causes conservatives to wring their hands and bitch about losing the trad lifestyle, the same brain rot that is all to happy to paint every single marginalized individual with the same set of assumptions and pities and charities—it’s necessary to see the root causes of our current state of collective colitis. It’s either, there’s no individual responsibility any more and we’re stuck with a generation of diaper freaks, or if you emphasize the individual choice you’re completely ignoring historical oppression and probably want to just roll back to the tradlife.
Some of them want to be abused by you
I do not want either of those things, but rather a secret, third thing: imagining our politics beyond the nuclear individual or family level. What if it’s not about me and how I get rid of my own odor from this diarrhea tub, but about how I act with regard to both myself and the society I am a part of? What about bringing back responsibility to the collective, to the we that we aspire to be? How can we cultivate a sense of responsibility that goes beyond our individual mandate to try not to shit in the hot tub? What about those marginal situations? After all, shouldn’t you be able to try to sneak out a sly fart if you’re gassy and riiiiight by the bubble jet? Individual risk assessment?
some of them want to be abused
If we’re bound to the individual and individual desire as motivating factors for the atomized political unit in our body politic…that means we’re expecting to navigate life with only a vague whiff of the hot tub disaster. The farts that sneak out and explode into something more. The individual cannot exist without the community. Put someone into solitary and they’re not going to get any better at making good decisions for themselves. It kills us to be without others; we sink ourselves into a media that is carried through language which exists solely to communicate with the recognized other. We will all, always, be alone; only you can know when your tummy is bubbling. But when you run to the bathroom, you’re plopping your ass onto a network of tubes connected to every other ass in the city. No one poops alone.
But therin lies the… tub? Rub? No dude, put that away, seriously. Nobody asked you. Why are you doing that? Please stop.
movin’ on, movin’ on
When your creature knows that we need each other and our communities to survive, to thrive, to be—but your are motivated by your natural individual desire and you make those decisions based on that and that alone, your bowel and heart both holding their secrets—can you ever make the right decision? When you’re taught to conceptualize your very self as an individual, driven by individual desire and individual circumstance, out for individual benefit—how can you act with responsibility to others? And how can we understand collective responsibility when the model of the atomized human is so prominent in our media? The way address, communicate with each other, view our world? It’s built into the system, after all.
Because the collective is not a set of platitudes; the collective we must include those we like as well as those we do not like. There’s no shunning or shutting off society just because, as individuals, we’re prefer to associate or not associate with one another based on a set of politically polarizing principles when it’s the core of the body-politic concept that’s causing our cramps. I make my choices. I live my lifestyle. I spend on what I choose to spend on. I chose to take on debt. I chose to read the land acknowledgement. I want to live my tradlife. I want to be a tradwife.
hold your head
That I coming at the expense of any idea of what we are beyond an aggregate of I. Representation is reality mediated, not actuality; representation is a symbol being used to underline the same tired argument. But right now? Right now we need a we to survive. To return to the hot tub: those who have been able to fard and shid in the tub have now fouled the water so much that it’s undrinkable; fouled the air so much that our climate is changing and hot tubs are no longer comfortable; and now we keep trying to move past it by putting the onus on individuals not to fard or shid, when in reality it’s so much more complicated than that.
keep your head
What are the aggregations of interest really and how have they impacted us? How does interest aggregate in different forms—the corporation, the community activist group, the weird social media mob? Does this show that the ideals that entire American experiment was founded on are irredeemable? How does our history camoflauge the aggregation of desire, of interest, of personal gain leveraged into abstraction? What tactis can we use to explore that? To find something new? To figure out who we are, and how we can beat the crisis we’re confronted with?
movin’ on
How can we maximize individual freedom and happiness while maintaining responsibility to communities—near at hand, far away, and present-yet-unseen?
movin’ on
I don’t know. All that I know is that something stinks and everyone’s uncomfortable. All I know is that we’re unhappy, we’re hurting, and something is so deeply wrong with our body politic that it’s shitting itself to death, and we’ve been working our way towards this crisis for decades all based on the aggregate of individual self-interest and desire.
[but] who am i to disagree?