I really don’t want to be writing this right now as I’ve got other stuff to do, but I realised I made a terrible mistake. I left something off the drinks list.
Ouzo on Duct Tape as I couldn’t afford Gaffa Tape.
Ouzo. Product of southern Europe; The Great Latin Empire, as Agamben would wish upon us all. The Great thing about Melbourne is that it is full of wogs. It would take me to move to Tasmania before I’d fully appreciate this. Each moment of repressed Tasmanian politeness leaves me longing for someone to wind down their window and scream out, “Get fucked you fucking cunt!”. This music to my ears lost and replaced with the sad silence of roadkill.
Wogs make things less boring by being the borehole itself. And where I come from is the southern most point of that borehole, so my boredom threshold is as low as you can get.
I had to go to the supermarket today. I fucking hate the supermarket and I ensure I do not have to go there more than once a month. I don’t get Lost in the Supermarket, I refuse it that satisfaction. Instead, I plan my attack like a military coup, purchasing in bulk anything required that is on a half price special and get the fuck out of there asap. My sons are each well acquainted with the fact that anything that is not marked down by at least 30% off the original price, simply is not there. And they well understand the occasional supermarket tax of an Affinois pour maman that slips somewhere under the hessian shopping bags.
It’s difficult to find anything that remotely resembles food at the supermarket. Where my family comes from, we cook every meal from scratch – packaged or frozen foods simply don’t exist. I would not have a clue what the function of a microwave or thermomix is and cannot for the life of me comprehend why anyone would call “convenient” driving to a shop to purchase stuff that comes in masses of plastic, transported from the other side of the world and assembled by a slave. What is so difficult about grabbing an onion, chopping the fucking thing up as you think of your fave Dumb Ass Fuck representative of the Professional Management Class, frying it up in a bit of, a lot of, far too much olive oil, chucking some home grown tomatoes and whatever else you can find out there in the garden, Weeds will do just fine. Peasants! Blasphemers!
Ey’ves’ surplus of chives. Can’t even give em away.
But thanks to being a thrifty fucking peasant, I can exist without a wage without endlessly crying “Precarity!”. I’ve been a wage worker before, for a big slimy arts organisation, and of course I understand the terrible dramas of being paid eight hours for a job that takes 30 minutes to complete. It’s really tough to look busy for the rest of the day. I understand the stakes at play in having to arrange your desk with the latest gadget from the market in order to give your colleague something to oogle over and so that they, in turn, can waste some more time on consumer waste. But I couldn’t do it. I’d rather be busy for the whole eight hours and more, why not? And not take the filthy fucking money. As you know by now, if you are one of my devoted followers, I’m making my own.
Middle managers are experts in looking busy without doing any work. They don’t even see what is in front of their eyes.
Middle aged women, on the other invisible hand, are experts in being available for anyone and everyone when they’ve really got a shitload of work to do. They miss NOTHING.
But! What would a middle aged woman know about economics? Everyone knows middle aged women are dumb as fuck and completely obsolete – no longer even worthy of that slimy hand slipping up the skirt in the photocopier room of a slimy arts organisation #meneither
Capitalism wants you to believe women are dumb as fuck. As Sylvia Federici put it “the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land [fucking peasants], war and plunder on a world scale and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times.” Nowhere is that belief better reproduced than in philosophy. How many women shut up and quit philosophy because they have too much to say and because they think so fucking much that can’t shove it all into one sentence? I’m not giving up. I’m a persistent annoying little freak and I’ve been lucky that, at times, the philosophy boys pretend to tolerate me, at least before I wrote this. They know that I know that I, like them, know nothing. But my nothing goes way too far. It wants only to make nothing out of everything, a nothing that is in a sense, not-all. Like a little sister – a real pain in the arse.
In fact, I’ve always been a great oikonomos. I used to buy guitars from auctions and sell them at enormous profits in the Trading Post. Not because I was a filthy capitalist, but because I had to do something to put myself through school. Now that I’ve overdone school too, I can’t get a job as it wouldn’t be worth paying the tax on my university debt, when I’ve already got to pay Martini tax. Somehow though, giving it away all the time, makes it come back. I never once paid to get into a gig and was never without a drink card. If I didn’t already know someone who’d give me an access all areas pass, I’d just sneak in the back door, like I did at New Order at Festival Hall in 1980 something. I got caught by Peter Hook who took me out the back, not to shag me senseless, but to have dinner with the band and guess what we talked about? You got it, guitars. I got to leave my khaki trenchcoat in his locker with his Doc Martens. I’ve had a thing for shoes and boots ever since.
This is the problem. Everyone gets sex, love and economics all mixed up. This problem of the conflation of the birds, the bees and the economy is not new. Already in the 6th century BCE, Phocylides’ poem classified women by comparing them to different kinds of animals and advises his friends to marry a "bee-like" wife”, because she’d prove a good oikonomos who knows how to work. He seemed to forget about the sting bit, but let’s save that for another time as I’m trying to give evidence of my own capacity to be a good oikonomos, without at all being a wife so you don’t get it all mixed up.
Let’s think of another example. My housemates used to drag me out to a certain discothèque that took place on Wednesday nights. I would always have preferred to stay home and play my guitar, but they’d insist. So I’d stand there on the balcony with my drink card, terrifying boys – so they tell me now that I’m safely old and ugly – and think about what is to live? And what’s it all for? The melding of bodies in krasis on the dancefloor projected on the cave wall; the homophonic trashy thrash slamming each cell of my unbeknownst to me body, amped up with the accumulation of sweat and spew of every outer suburb of Melbourne. Then, after some hours, I’d turn to face the other side of the cave, and, fuck me, everyone had gone home (with someone else). So, I’d just walk back to our big asbestos clad shared home, stealing, for The People, The Age, three loaves of white bread and four litres of milk from outside the milkbar at 5.30am.
Then there was the time I was found, having a jolly old time, by myself, in the portable bandroom of a Very Famous Band at the Big Day Out, drinking the band’s rider and playing their guitars whilst they were onstage and everyone else was slam dancing in the moshpit. There’s something in this being set apart as a weird little (naughty) shit, that has given me a good perspective on the economy and the ties that bind us. I’ve written an entire thesis about this with 911 footnotes that you can read once it is in that repository and out of this one, the Sewer Rat-bin of Minerva.
So what’s with the weird table I showed you last time? It changed a little since then but the structure is the same. Does it say birds on one side and bees on the other? No you dumb ass fucks. That’s not at all what it means. The table of sexuation, found in Lacan’s seminar XX, is not a division in two. This division in two is precisely the logic capitalism wants you to believe in and everyone is just so busy perpetuating this logic with all this identity shit everyone loves to waste as much time on as buying new stuff to adorn their slave-space. Capitalism is a form of domination that can only sustain itself on division such that one half of the world enjoys Coca Cola to the hilt, whilst the other half is rendered invisible, totally without resources.
What is the table of sexuation then? I’ll tell you another time as surely I’ve got another job to do for free today. But first, like everything in psychoanalysis, we have to understand what it is not. And what it is not is a division in two. The metal scourer (remember the metal scourer?), fucks it up, makes everything filthy, especially your money.
SPOILER ALERT: Remember the rabbit skin glue metaphor in the post about love? Well it’s the same sticky shit that ties us to the economy. The economy is a completely imaginary construction. You just want to believe in it because it promises you love. Well, sorry, sucker, you’re just not going to get it. Have a sook, feel the pain, rub up against the metal scourer til it bleeds…and only then can we begin to talk about politics.