THE FACTORY OF COLLECTIVE NEUROSIS

"Strange! So infinitesimally narrow is the threshold between the two realms, and yet no one raises their foot to cross it! The other reality borders on our skin, yet we do not feel it! Our imagination stops here, where it could create new land." --Gustav Meyrink (1921)

Schmutz … He called the hot, sticky weather ‘schmutz’ -- saying it was pidgin Yiddish; that the pigeons spoke Yiddish, and that you could hear this word on their wings as they flew off into the urban doom and gloom. They said that he was crazy and didn’t believe in anything. But he didn’t believe them. (He was, then, impressed one day to see an iconic, Hasidic jew strolling down First Avenue in black hat, long black coat, long brown side locks, unfazed, knowing the difference was the internal difference -- an elective not caring.)

The doormen waved a collective ‘surrender’ with white cloths, wiping the greasy handprints of the haute-bourgeoisie (the plutocracy) off of the plate-glass doors of the High Street boutiques.

Summer settled in with a vengeance as July rolled onward; the late-capitalist machine gnawed, burped and growled at passersby. And yet, stepping off the unrelenting grid of the urban, Cartesian factory of collective neurosis (the City Itself), into The Park, the temperature dropped, the eyes focussed (one upon the other), and so-called irreversible time backed off.

Once inside the park, Time Itself became mise en scène itself (subject elided as object and vice versa, or subject-object as one thing). The trees, green swathes, boulder-fields, lakes, pond, statuary, and architectural fabrique (debris, really) took on a mesmeric otherworldliness. (He recalled, en passant, in passing himself on the paths, that the southern portion of the park is often called, by the cognoscenti, ‘Central Park Memorial Cemetery’.) The spell-binding irreality (a Real/Irreal thing/not-thing) suspended (voided) the machinic, diabolical thrust and parry of the monstrous city, momentarily, offering a view to the Real; a ‘Real’ outside the sinister-splendid charms of the concrete and steel nemesis, Mannahatta, premier prison-house (address) of World Capital (capital of Capital). While trapped here, he often thought of Dostoievski’s less-than-flattering opinion of Paris, and of, of course, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’ hidden under the bed of Georges Bataille, in Paris, as Benjamin headed for his rendezvous with God-Knows-What at the Franco-Spanish border.

Once or twice a day something else sounded an alarm (in-between the car alarms, the wailing sirens, and the incessant bleat of the cell-phone chewing public). In the cafes, cinemas, galleries, and in books (dangerous, small things filled with dangerous, small things; that is, words) another possible-impossible world called; a world that persistently, maniacally remains, out of Necessity Itself, just beyond this world. This other world falls in and out of time-space as supplement only insofar as this other world is perpetually driven off, marginalized, scandalized, and appropriated by the other of this other world -- as ‘economic activity’, then (and always); a spectral dybbuk haunting and hunting all things purely given (the world that rises each day with the sun). Thus, he was fond of misquoting Thoreau’s “The sun is also a morning star”, a phrase expropriated/torn from Walden, and a phrase that seems to mark the transit of the paradoxical, synchronic ‘moment’ when things purely given are seized and turned, again and again (ad nauseum, and as artifactual museum of affects) into the all-consuming, disembodied thing known as Capitalism Triumphant. The residual (the remainder that sticks out of this so-called economy of affects, as an unassimilable surplus) is the secret desire of the demonic machine/city (its daemon, and its self-undoing).

The capitalist beast, in its half-conscious ‘nature’ (its endlessly vacated, ‘unnatural’ nothingness) wants this other (this maiden/daemon), this excess, a something unobtainable, out of reach, and beyond its scope (tentacles), always lost to it in the curves (legs and breasts, length and breadth) of reversible time; that other time of which it can only dream of conquering (subduing and ‘owning’) in its very own twilight, or after its ceremonial, catastrophic self-renunciation.

Thus, his main concern (even while happy in his misery, stuck in the swelter of the City in July) remained the Anti-Capitalist Sublime; that is to say, protecting ‘the maiden’ (to which he often conjoined the mental image of a primordial/archaic ‘maiden voyage’, a self-disclosing voyage into the interior of time and things and on through the archaic aether to the other side, outside the outside -- recalling Wittgenstein’s aperçu that to improve the world one must improve oneself).

Thus, too (then), began the almost-Arthurian, insane (deranged and doomed) quest for ‘The Philosophy of the Real’ -- on the fast-approaching 200th anniversary of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) -- a quest for the ur-formal Thing Itself, the Absolute-in-the-Contingent, the phonemic territory of affects beyond the machinic demi-monde of a world gone endlessly awry. It was this land of affects that seemed slaughtered every day, though he knew that it was -- ultimately -- beyond the reach of the beast. It remained to chase down and subdue this territory, and in doing so denote, delimit, and declaim the impossible-possible Way Out.

GK (7/20/05)

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