Copyright

by

Matthew Scott Archer

2004 The Dissertation Committee for Matthew Scott Archer certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Living the Master Plan

Committee:

______Kathleen Stewart, Supervisor

______Pauline Strong

______John Hartigan

______Kamran Ali

______Ronald Greene Living the Master Plan

by

Matthew Scott Archer, M.A., B.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

the University of Texas at Austin

in partial fulfillment

of the requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Texas at Austin

May 2004 Living the Master Plan

Publication No.______

Matthew Scott Archer, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2004

Supervisor: Kathleen Stewart

I think of Living the Master Plan as an experimental ethnography. It might be better to say, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, that it is a cartography.

Whichever you prefer to call it, it is certainly an attempt to write critically about contemporary trends in American culture. I use multiple sites and subjects, including myself, to chart out the lines and machines which give shape to our lives. My map will take us into emerging forms of belonging, where community and corporatism converge and capitalist modes of valorization become our ethical foundation. Besides simply describing these emerging entities, I hope to provide a new context in which to evaluate them. Homeowners’ Associations,

Master Planned Communities, and the property management firms specializing in their management are my privileged sites throughout. I map them out not only as new versions of community, but also as expressions of State desire. In

iv writing these sections I tried to present what goes on in a Homeowners’

Association in a way that the inherently intimate operation of the State becomes visible and isomorphic with all sorts of local and internal arrangements. The

Master Planned Community is also a place where matter seems charged with an affective agenda. This points toward a kind of cultural function and political practice that has received scant critical reflection.

v Table of Contents

How did it come to this? …………………………………………………………….. 1 Corporate Bodies Beyond Flesh …………………………………………………… 7 Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………………. 20 Writing Machine ………………………………………………………………………… 22 Fuzziness ………………………………………………………………………………….. 35 Freedom Games ………………………………………………………………………… 36 Self Destruction …………………………………………………………………………. 39 Fascist Democracy …………………………………………………………………….. 42 Ethical Difficulties ………………………………………………………………………. 48 Actively Passive …………………………………………………………………………. 50 Renters are Second Class Citizens ……………………………………………….. 64 Class Relativity ………………………………………………………………………….. 67 Submission Games …………………………………………………………………….. 69 Energy Crisis ……………………………………………………………………………… 70 Actively Passive …………………………………………………………………………. 79 Democratic Fascism …………………………………………………………………… 88 Racist Submission Games …………………………………………………………… 93 Capitalism as a Social Machine ……………………………………………………. 101 Ideology, Power and Affect ………………………………………………………… 103 Full-Serve Lifestyles …………………………………………………………………… 136 Seductive Architecture ……………………………………………………………….. 155 Body Beyond Flesh …………………………………………………………………….. 162 Complexity ……………………………………………………………………………….. 163 Machines ………………………………………………………………………………….. 164 Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………………. 166 Machines ………………………………………………………………………………….. 167 Grids of Existence ……………………………………………………………………… 172 Paranoia …………………………………………………………………………………… 177 The Intimate Physics of Space and Psyches …………………………………. 179 The Shit of Freedom and Submission …………………………………………… 188 Dreams of Security ……………………………………………………………………. 193 Light and Theft …………………………………………………………………………. 194 Seductive Architecture ……………………………………………………………….. 199 The Art of Existence …………………………………………………………………… 201 Art of Inhabiting ………………………………………………………………………… 207 Standardization …………………………………………………………………………. 213 Seductive Architecture ……………………………………………………………….. 215 The Habit of Daydreams …………………………………………………………….. 220 Taming Flows ……………………………………………………………………………. 223 Caring for Cracked Forms …………………………………………………………… 229 Faces and Landscapes ……………………………………………………………….. 233 Segments of Existence ……………………………………………………………….. 238

vi Arboreal Matters ……………………………………………………………………….. 242 Floral and Grass-Roots Matters ……………………………………………………. 245 A Layered Life of Abstraction ………………………………………………………. 248 Architectural Control and the State Form ……………………………………… 249 Reasonable Conduct …………………………………………………………………… 260 Despotic Democracy …………………………………………………………………… 265 State and Diagram …………………………………………………………………….. 269 Davis-Sterling Common Interest Development Act ………………………… 281 Desire and Training ……………………………………………………………………. 290 State/Society …………………………………………………………………………….. 291 Robert’s (Magical) Rules of Order ………………………………………………… 299 State Fantasy ……………………………………………………………………………. 306 Parking Ticket Bandit …………………………………………………………………. 312 State Desire ………………………………………………………………………………. 316 Before the Rules ………………………………………………………………………… 322 Energy Crisis ……………………………………………………………………………… 337 The Blood …………………………………………………………………………………. 338 Corporate Dreams ……………………………………………………………………… 339 The Tedious Life of a Request …………………………………………………….. 340 Machinic Landscapes ………………………………………………………………….. 368 Propelled by Offense ………………………………………………………………….. 371 Submission Games …………………………………………………………………….. 373 Propelled by Offense ………………………………………………………………….. 374 Following ………………………………………………………………………………….. 377 Submission Games …………………………………………………………………….. 378 Paranoia …………………………………………………………………………………… 380 The Parasite Model ……………………………………………………………………. 387 An Organic Life …………………………………………………………………………. 388 Therapeutic Submission ……………………………………………………………… 393 Coming Soon …………………………………………………………………………….. 394 Racist Submission Games …………………………………………………………… 396 Dealing with Drainage ………………………………………………………………… 403 State/Paranoia …………………………………………………………………………… 414 Combat …………………………………………………………………………………….. 415 Neighborhood War Machine ………………………………………………………… 417 Farcical Control and Ironic Resistance …………………………………………. 427 Trafficking in Community ……………………………………………………………. 431 Sheriff v. Gate Guard Showdown ………………………………………………… 435 Speed Bumps (a.k.a. “Sleeping Police”) ……………………………………………. 440 Debt Collection ………………………………………………………………………….. 444 Sound Control …………………………………………………………………………… 450 Light Sculptures ………………………………………………………………………… 457 Freemont Ranches …………………………………………………………………….. 462 Photo Enforced Traffic Lights ……………………………………………………… 463

vii Gates and Racism ……………………………………………………………………… 467 Permanent Social Rejection ………………………………………………………… 474 HOA v. The Developer ……………………………………………………………….. 475 Living with Trailer Park Fantasies ………………………………………………… 477 Profitable Non-Profit …………………………………………………………………… 484 “A Sense of Community” ………………………………………………………………… 488 Invasion of the Solicitors ……………………………………………………………. 490 Cost of Belonging ……………………………………………………………………… 493 The Productive Power of Belonging …………………………………………….. 495 Possession ……………………………………………………………………………….. 498 Company and Community ………………………………………………………….. 505 401k ………………………………………………………………………………………… 508 Company Towns ………………………………………………………………………… 516 Communitarianism …………………………………………………………………….. 522 Why I’m an Anarchist ………………………………………………………………… 524 References ………………………………………………………………………………… 562 Vita ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 583

viii How did it come to this?

With dreary eyes I looked down at my tie and pin striped dress shirt beneath it. I gazed across the top of my wide and broad desk at the organizer scribbled with deadlines, the stack of papers in my in-box and few sheets in my out-box. With a sigh my gaze met the plastic plant in the corner and then drifted towards the softly woven fabric that stretched over the bulging partition that was my office. My rolling chair creaked. I took it all in with a bifurcated reaction. Dread swarmed me from the banal and intensely pressured series of events that my life had become. And, at the same time, I puffed a subtle chuckle at its absurdity. In my mind I heard a question, words from elsewhere strung together between each seemingly inert agent: “How did it come to this?”

The answer, or at least the best answer that I can give, arced through me in the form of images and statements which I tried retroactively to weave into a narrative. I’m sitting in Dr. Polly Strong’s research methods course, wondering how to get access to the privileged and enclaved communities that my research project drew me toward. Someone mentions working as a security guard. I thought it was a great idea, a way to earn at least a meager living and do research at the same time. Polly said, “Then you might have to shoot someone.”

I gulp and the security guard in my mind says authoritatively, “Move along.

Nothing to see here. Move along.”

I’m sitting in my mother’s living room, a young man, trying to earn money to save up for a term at Santa Rosa Junior College in the fall. Frustrated by the

1 dearth and dismal jobs I seem qualified to work, I flip the paper over my shoulder and call one of my friends to go drink booze on the hill by my house.

Back then we were all possessed by a desire to party ourselves into a distracted state, and not much else. The next day my head and my mother’s front door almost split open as the hammer-like hands of our neighbor slammed against the front door. He was gruff, in manner and appearance, and almost before I had said hello he offered me a job as a laborer in his construction company. “Yes,” the words came out as quickly as I could say them and I nearly regretted them when he said he’d pick me up at 6 am.

“Anthropology,” my friend asked, “what the hell are you going to do with a degree in anthropology?” “I dunno,” I responded with my typical youthful naiveté, “I just like it.”

I'm standing in an office. Professor Mel Tapper looking at me with intensity added to the already intense expression every academic authority carried with them. Books from the shelves seemed like they were leaning over me, with shelves tilted as though they wanted a better look at this new graduate student. Bluntly, Mel said, “we don’t do that kind of thing in anthropology anymore.” And I had felt what he was talking about the five months before I arrived for graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. I had conducted

“research” among the Rastafarians in Jamaica. While I was there I lost focus on understanding the cultural mechanisms of community formation among the

Rastafarians as the endlessly fascinating dynamics between the first and the

2 third world played itself out in almost every encounter I had. My own power and privilege and the resentment and longing it conjured in almost everyone I met overwhelmed me. It became all I could see. I thought I had failed as a researcher.

“What the hell is this?” I said out loud and with squinted and scornful eyes as I stood before a gate and guard shack. The guard peeked his head from behind the reflective glass. He startled me. Usually there is no one in there.

“Can I help you?” “Yeah, I helped build one of the houses in there, you know, the Italian villa style home with the circular drive.” “Yeah, I know it,” and he looked at me with a bored so what expression. “Well, I went off to school just before the job was finished, I just wanted to see how it turned out.” The guard just puffed and shrugged. I took a step toward the gate, I had hiked all the way up the hill from the nearby state park and didn’t plan to take no for an answer.

Before my foot fell on the lumpy asphalt the guard was out of the booth standing in my path. Now it was my turn to puff and shrug. Then I turned and lurched back down the hill, kicking and throwing rocks at every man made structure I saw on my way down.

In my mother’s living room again, this time almost ten years and a heap of education behind me, yet I am still scouring the classifieds for a job to earn a living while I conduct my fieldwork on gated communities and homeowners associations. Then I see it, the ad that changed everything. It was a small box which requested applications for a position in a property management company

3 which specialized in managing Homeowner’s Associations. I leapt from the table and typed up an alternate version of my resume so fast my fingers were a blur and made a continuous clicking murmur. I turned in my application the next day, a bit frustrated to have to fill out a three page long written version from the company itself. I had no experience. I didn’t even get an interview. But, the idea was there and I spend the next month and a half looking through every

Yellow Pages in the entire San Francisco Bay Area and calling out of the blue to inquire about job openings.

Now I am back in Mel Tapper’s office, a few days after my academic life had been dismantled and I was at the verge of quitting so very early because I didn’t have a project like everyone else seemed to have. Mel says something about urban anthropology, about segregation and exclusion. I remember the emotional memory of running back down the hill and springing wildly into the state park after hitting a gazebo with my earthen projectile and seeing its owner lurch out of a parked car in the drive way to investigate the event. I didn’t get caught. And it felt good. “Elitist bastard,” I mumbled to myself as I slipped along the muddy trails. “Yes.” Mel said with a pleased tone, “gated communities. Yes, that would be an interesting project indeed.”

Another memory, this one is from only five minutes ago. You, my perceived reader, ask me what is so important about master planned communities that they deserve such rigorous investigation. I scoff at your question. You’ve seen them. You’ve probably seen many of them. Almost all

4 new hosing is master planned in one form or another, with gates, with

Homeowners’ Associations, intact with a whole pre-fabricated model of community and responsibility. I have no intention of boring you with the statistics. Just trust me, and trust your own instincts, that they are staggering.

So, they are a prolific mode of inhabitation, of community organization, of familial and personal relations, and they are most likely going to continue to proliferate. Master Planned Communities are an interesting and important phenomenon to understand in themselves. But stopping there is only slightly better than gazing at the exotic Rastafarian other. I am a part of these communities. So are you. They are informed by the same forces which grid all of our lives in this network society that we have so proudly become. These are the true objects of my study, the objectives, and that is something you should keep in mind since it colors every page herein.

“So, you are a doctorate student at the University of Texas at Austin, it says here on your resume.” “Yes,” I say confidently, “and my research is about

Homeowners’ Associations, about the new forms and ideas of community of which these structures are an expression.” The interviewer, who was also the vice-president of the company, raised her eyebrows in delight at my answer. I knew I had the job at that moment. Well, that plus the fact that I was dressed well and clean, spoke clearly and intelligently, seemed eager, which I was, and had computer skills made me an ideal candidate for the position. I was hired on the spot. The vice-president simply looked over to the supervising manager, she

5 nodded, and the words “you are hired” shot forth from her lips. I was on a tour of the office that afternoon and in my tie and pin stripes the next morning.

6 Corporate Bodies Beyond Flesh

Thank goodness the hallways were lined with red buffer stripes on the edges of the swirling Vegas casino carpet. They were my warning track. On my many mindless mornings, stumbling down the hallway with my vision fixed about a foot in front of my feet, the warning strip would save me from an embarrassing careen off the wall. It’s funny how often such simple lines keep things on track.

I remember when I was a kid how my energy propelled and repulsed by the threshold materialized between the curb and the fearful signals from my mother.

Bouncing between the tracks, my corporate life had rhythm. Desires flowed through me in oscillating measures, a wave factor. One moment I was agitated by the traps which ensured my life energy would serve. Then with a flash I was in the game, actively charging rituals with a masochistic desire to open myself mindfully to the maneuvers. Later, after being impaled by the intense pressure of the corporate affect, I became catatonic. My mind could not focus on any task that was not teetering on the present moment.

Now that I am reflecting on it, I wonder if this last state is not the corporate ideal. From the perspective of the bosses, agitation and flashing into the affects are both signs of insanity. When was the last time you saw someone attack imposed tasks with a furor? And, what did you think, or say, behind their back? Fatigue, on the other hand, draws thoughts away from bodies, what

Nietzsche called an active forgetting (Nietzsche and Kaufmann 1967). Plugging- in enters consciousness as little as possible while it’s happening. Thanks to the

7 corporate warning track of “action item lists” and standard operating procedure,

I could also just stumble along through my many mindless tasks. Life overfull with demarcated routes makes activity effortless.

The day in question was awash in catatonia. As my mid-level management existence shuffled along, my rhythm was increasingly stuck in this monotone manner. I knew this and knew I had to escape soon, but today a diversion would have to do. As I thought about walking anywhere, a memory grabbed me by association. The week before, I was pinned down by a senior manager and head of the training program during one of my extracurricular excursions. She saw me walk quickly past her open door. “Matt! Come in here!” The waves pulsed down the hall loud enough that I couldn’t pretend to not have heard.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?” Her desire to judge pranced all about her overwhelmingly broad and deep Mahogany desk-top.

“I’m on my way to see Carlos in accounting, about that thing we talked about.” It wasn’t true; luckily I’d prepared that statement to avoid stumbling on the spot.

“Why didn’t you just call him? Or email and stay at your workstation?”

The answer was that I was trying to avoid the workstation, to get unplugged for just a few minutes. She knew that also. “We talked about this just a few days ago, right Matt?” I continued to look dumbstruck. “You’re always walking

8 around, talking to people, not at your desk. That’s not the way we do things; it’s inefficient. So, stop it. This is your second warning.” To express that she was done with me for now, her attention fell to the items spread across her vast desk. I backed out of her office and slowly dragged my heavy feet back to my workstation.

A few moments later the senior manager’s secretary curled around the edges of my cubicle and said, “What’s up Matt.”

“Hey Dave,” I replied and noticed the dejection in my own voice.

“Don’t be upset Matt. It’s no big deal. She yells at me all the time.” He talked to me for a while like we were part of a corporate abuse survivors group.

Later on he said, “It’s funny. It’s like they want us to check our legs in at the door and insert a catheter under the desk. I can’t tell you how many times she’s broken me down just for not being there when she wants me to type up some ridiculous message or if the phone rings.”

As Dave talked, my legs became numb. I reached down to rub them and found little imaginary termination notices pinned all over them. One read, “You are obsolete.” A second notice said: “Your energy output is totally inadequate.”

Yet another read: “Your ambulatory services are no longer required. As a newly digitized worker, from now on technical effort will substitute for all impotent muscular effort” (Virilio 1995). Legs all over our digital world are being served similar retirement papers.

9 After Dave left my cubicle, I reluctantly returned to work. What was I doing? I forgot. But I was only paralyzed momentarily as I’d been well trained in the event of such a corporate emergency. I looked to my computerized action item list, updated every time the slightest partial task happened. Just before

Dave walked in I had typed “left message w/ Frank at Johnson construction” under the “get bids for replacing entry sign” bolded item. I entered it in the networked “word” document so my accomplishments and future efforts could be monitored throughout the office. But, that task was stalled, so I moved on to the next one. I didn’t even remember writing “call about replacing the dumpster near 555 Babbling Brook Lane” when I filled in the Action Item List template.

I guess my memory was fired also, but I just couldn’t remember. Or rather, it was reassigned from the unreliable domains of human mnemotechnics to the precise and predictable firings of computer circuits. My memory had a similar run in with a senior manager as my legs did. I was scalded a couple of times during performance review sessions for relying too heavily on my own faculties of memory rather than strictly adhering to company procedures. “We all forget things. If you just fill in the Action Item Lists and the desktop reminder programs and organizers right when you find out about projects and deadlines, then you don’t have to worry about remembering everything. It’s o.k., you’ll figure it out soon.” After almost boiling over several times from jumping erratically back and forth between whatever unfinished task just happened to catch my attention, I in fact figured it out. Once I let go, figures of remembering

10 happened beyond me. It happened in a flash on my computer screen. It happened in a routine. It found me on my desktop organizer. The desktop above my knees and on my computer became a central part of my own neurology. “Computer memory isn’t a metaphor,” I thought to myself as I seared things with deft keystrokes into ones and zeros. I even burned it onto sheets of paper, the blood of the office, with a prosthetic laser writing appendage or by scarring words on my reminder by hand and pen. Nietzsche

(1967) said, “if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.” Inhabiting the office became swallowing aspirin for memory’s pain. Our company body reached out beyond the epidermis in acts of ritualistic scarification. I had become comfortably numb. And it frightened me: “The worse man’s memory has been, the more fearful has been the appearance of his customs.”

It was getting close to lunch, so I rummaged through my memory for something easy to do, to perk myself up with some twisted sense of accomplishment. Before I could get started, I reminisced with painful longing of my graduate school days where work came in impassioned waves and I pressed lovingly on until I collapsed satisfied. Now my rhythms of life were tied to a much more potent temporality. The day before I left for home before I completed a major task I’d been consumed by that day. Time became down right visceral; its pressure turned my stomach and twisted my rhomboids. I had become a clock-watcher.

11 I left my cubicle as early for lunch as I could get away with. An underling muster at the back entrance was an informal ritual before branching out to the several local lunch places. It was also a way to pump in nicotine at the beginning and end of the break. I stumbled onto the concrete slab we referred to as a patio and was surrounded by smoke and words. “Sometimes,” I said so slowly it drew the conversation my direction, “sometimes I feel in a daze in there. I can’t focus on even the simplest task, and …” people waited politely for me to continue.

“Coffee is the answer!” I turned to see Anna, always arcing with energy, toasting with a company provided Styrofoam cup. “Coffee and nicotine!” and she snapped the cigarette out of her lips to toast again. Then she quickly broke down her daily substance intake, scheduled precisely to the rhythms of the office. I had a similar, although less defined, supra-organic body. My biological clock, my blood stream, my memories, came to me in these well machined rhythms.

Theresa had something to say. It took starting and stopping a few times before it interrupted Anna’s ramblings. “Coffee just doesn’t work for me. It keeps me awake, but I loose track of stuff easier. I space out also, but somehow I seem to get things done anyway.” She was right. My rigidly folded fantasy of corporate mechanical efficiency and spacing out were complementary rhythms. They required each other.

12 At lunch I wolfed down a couple of drive-thru burritos and drove a few extra blocks to fill up at a “pay at the pump” gas station. Time sped by like it never even happened. With a flash I unsettled back in to my workstation. Again and again I was propelled out of my office by a desire to escape, though more and more cautiously.

My loafers rubbed the carpet like I was circling the ward. I hoped no one noticed I was on my third trip to the bathroom in as many hours. The bathroom seemed like the only legitimate ambulatory destination in the whole office. Even spacing out at your desk was more risky. Someone could just peek around the corner and catch your daze. To escape sometimes I would just sit on the toilet to avoid the looming complaint calls and the tedious tasks piling up on my rather large desk. Of course, the work only piled up with my ass on the toilet instead of in the chair. But when the desire to flee hits, there is nothing left behind to resist. Gluteus Maximus, toilet bowl, sewer. Pictures possessed me and I was swept away like an inmate crawling through sewer pipes on a prison break.

Toward the bathroom I shuffled. I approached the senior manager’s office with caution. Before I got near I noticed the door was open, so I turned around and took the long way. I turned the corner and raised my eyes to see another senior manager stepping hastily in my direction. “Shit, the C.O.!” my prison fantasy enunciated. I didn’t want to look suspicious, to disclose my displeasure with the corporate lifestyle, so I sent out some plucky signals by springing in my step a bit and exaggerating my swinging of the document I had

13 in my right hand, calculated for just such an encounter. Try it sometime.

Carrying some prop can give any stroll the signals of official business.

Legitimacy is often performed through such tricks, through sacred objects or by something as simple as acting confident in your conduct. To make this performance happen, I strolled past the bathroom in the worn path to the accounting department of the company. He didn’t even notice me, and as he turned the corner I whirled back toward the bathroom.

I stepped into the bathroom and immediately sensed something new. It took me a few moments to figure it out, since my mind was busy twisting things around into daydreams. There were no longer light switches, and the lights came on in a flash as the door swung open. “Motion detectors?” I thought almost audibly. “How strange.” I became immediately frustrated. “I no longer have control of something as simple as turning on the lights,” I thought. I can still feel the intensity of this helpless affect. Depression was heaped on top when the automatic timer shut the lights off while I was meditating in my favorite stall. As if that were not enough, a few moments later someone triggered the lights. I was caught in the automatic light, shining signals that I had been sitting in a darkened stall. “Now what?” I said inaudibly. At leas he could only see my feet and he adhered to the unwritten code of bathroom silence. I waited until the room was clear to emerge from my stall.

Later that week I ran into the facilities manager washing his golf callous hands in the restroom and I commented on the high-tech developments. “Saves

14 money, with the energy crisis and all” he said. “Plus, one of our Board Members owns a lighting business and installed them for almost nothing.” Of course his intentions were as innocuous as that. There was clearly no sensitivity to the potential for trauma framed in the wires and plastic. Most normal workers would look upon the high-tech lights as signals of success. Those invested in the company might even sense some sort of stability. On one of my scheduled breaks a co-worker mentioned how cool he thought it was. I almost fumed as thick as the puff of nicotine and tar that didn’t get stuck in his lungs and tumbled over his lips. He took comfort in the sensation that the company would take care of such details for him. It’s funny how such a simple little twist of matter can make us feel more comfortable with the segments corralling our lives. I, on the other hand, was frustrated, ready to go to war over the fact that I was no longer trusted to turn off the lights after I left the bathroom, something my mother took care to discipline me about as a child. My neurons were all in a knot now that I had even less control of my environment. Well, I really never had much control anyway.

“I will not capitulate so easily,” I thought. As long as I worked there I kept my silent guerilla militia tucked behind the plastic palm frawns in the corner of my office. I stationed them there because they always seemed to get lost in my mental gravity wells and pulled along by an unconscious inertia. I would not let the enslavement be complete, especially in my unsanitary sanctuary. So, I

15 hatched a plan. Like all plans, attempts to shape things to come, mine was alive with fantastic matters.

I was determined to defeat the automatic lights. Suddenly a scene from the movie “Sneakers” sneaked into my mind. A band of security system testers had to break into a high security building to retrieve the ultimate code-breaking device that once fallen into the wrong hands became a global threat to organization. In order to break the device out of the secure area it was in, the team had to defeat a number of seemingly unsurpassable security apparatuses.

At the end, Robert Redford had to move through a room with motion detectors at such a slow pace that they could not interpret the vibrations caused by his subtle movements. In effect, he became invisible to the machines. “Yeah!” I said while sitting at my desk, “I could do that. Why not?” After all, my pirate fantasy has always been my own sort of riff off the corporate fantasy that such high tech devices endow cultural and economic capital. With a flash I shoved my wheeled chair across the plastic rolling-friendly floor mat and away from my desk.

Walking past the copy room I glanced left and witnessed Janet and the copier in a complex interface. Fingers danced with the glass control panel.

Lights pulsed between the plastic cracks and made linear flashes across flesh and flesh colored walls. Slapping plastic let her hands know when to lift the little lurching sorted, stacked and stapled packets out of the tray and into laser labeled envelopes. They thumped gracefully through the postage machine and

16 were flung into the outgoing mail carrier. The room was alive with humming, clicking and beating. Janet’s body rocked subtly and slowly to a rhythm beneath the whole scene. The office space turned both Janet and the copier into intelligent machines. The copier was programmed to perform a series of complex functions with just the press of a key. Janet was trained to perform a series of complex functions with just the right sequence of command words. I remember now that Janet got a raise at about the same time the new copier was wheeled into the copy room. The value of both lay in their “interactive user- friendliness.”

When I arrived at the bathroom I realized quickly that my task would not be as easy as I thought. Every time I began to slowly crack the door, I became intensely paranoid that someone would see me and attribute my actions, perhaps correctly, to a certain degree of insanity. “A normal person,” my guilt ridden psychiatric persona mumbled from beneath his gag, “would just follow the routes to productivity and profit. You know we have some serious issues with control and wealth. We should really work on this internally, through reflection and talking, instead of charging off with lance in arm to fight windmills.” I wouldn’t listen; the gag works great. But then the tricky bearded bastard would yell, “Look out! Someone’s coming!” The panic caused me to push the door too fast and snap, the lights would come on. “Damn!” There wasn’t even anyone there.

17 “This time I will really do it,” determination took me, “I don’t care if someone sees me. If they do I’ll just quickly push the door open and continue on my way. But what if there is someone already in the bathroom and he notices the door sliding ever so slowly open? It might really send their minds reeling. What would they think? What sort of excuse could I devise?” None came to mind.

I tried again. “Damn! Why can’t I just remain calm?” It started looking like a terrible defeat, so minor, but so significant if I couldn’t disarm this simple motion detector. The plan took on a whole new intensity, a tremendous weight, like a last stand. “If I can’t move undetected, the snares have won. Life will be crushed in their collective grip.”

I tried over and over again. Often my panic foiled the plan; sometimes I simply misjudged the speed. Once I got the door open wide enough to step through, but my foot betrayed me on its way to the checkered tiles. And then, finally, I was caught. It had to happen eventually, right? I had the door handle in my hand, pushing, no, willing the door to open unnoticeably. With wretched timing a co-worker emerged from the women’s bathroom. I didn’t notice her at first, so she had plenty of time to wonder what the hell I was doing. When our glances eventually met, I could see her eyebrows pushed down and her mouth sort of stuck before a statement. I thought she was baffled. I simply shrugged my shoulders and gave her a look that I hope said “I don’t know.” I glanced at

18 her quickly one last time and I swore she winked a conspiratorial wink before she slipped down the hall. I pushed my way into the bathroom.

I thought about defeating that damn motion detector the rest of the time

I worked there. But I never tried again. I guess I simply accepted my lot.

19 Analysis

“So, what do you think doc?”

“It’s a fascinating fantasy.”

“Yeah, but what does it mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I pay you for!”

Silence.

More silence.

“I think it has something to do with a deep fear of being controlled, of being trapped and consumed by your own desires. Remember all your dreams about being chased by some unidentifiable monster? Your fear of control and capture is really a type of paranoia, a fear of how you rigidly control yourself that is projected into the world. And this, of course, is really a fear that deep within you are out of control, and that someday something will happen to throw your world into chaos.”

“But I really am being controlled.”

“Of course. By yourself.”

The door bends with a heavy thump. Two thumps. We turn to look.

Three thumps and the door splinters into an eruption of debris. We put our hands up to shield our eyes.

“Alright you soft ass scoundrel! Put down the theory! I said put it down!

I’ve got deconstruction here and I’m not afraid to use it.”

20 Panic. Paralysis.

“I’ve only got one thing to say to you before I eradicate your sensible nonsense once and for all. Who gives a shit what this means or what that means. You spend all your time interpreting so you get yourself captured by thinking about being captured. I’ll give you one last chance to really think about what it does, not what it means.”

“The earlier comment is right, but only in a backwards way. This fantasy that you are living comes to you from the things you encounter. It is really in the light switch, the computer, the desk. These are our collective fantasies, the complementary capitalist fantasies of mechanized workers and of intelligent machines, for example. So, the fantasy of submission that you are living with is at the heart of who you are. But, that is because it is at the heart of all of us.

It’s not projected from deep within your subconscious, it’s right there in our real world, our collective subconscious. It’s easy to see this because of the way it’s expressed in all sorts of material objects. These fantasies give form to our psyches and our spaces at the same time.”

“That stuff you keep rambling about in these sections is damn real. It’s all real. Every little molecule of it. The question is what does it make you do, how does it organize your potential, and how can you escape to find new things to become.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Yeah, I’m with you.”

21 Writing Machine

There came a time in my study when I became paralyzed. I read diligently and intensely thinkers who rightly found fault in many of the ideas that are easy to take for granted about our world. Ideas, experience, knowledge, truth, justice, selves, thought, inside and outside, economy, politics, culture, society, subjects, power, language, information, communication, community, identity, gender, class, sex, meaning, space, time, … They all became partial and variable, imprecise and tenuous, constructed and multiple, problematic and invested. To speak one word was to open a nest of issues that can’t be resolved in a whole library section of authoritative texts. My tongue was ensnared in this tangle, along with my digits. Speaking and writing became arduous and painful; language was breaking me down. Communication seemed impossible, even with my friends, even with my wife.

I thought relentlessly about this issue. After all, I was setting out to write a dissertation, a whole collection of words which supposedly wrapped them together in a way that would make sense to someone. At first I thought I would simply write without those concepts, using other concepts or a chain of concepts in their place. I began this way, but the burden was too heavy. Even “concept” which I’ve used in the last few sentences is a tricky word. Deleuze and Guattari

(Deleuze and Guattari 1994) spend a couple chapters in What is Philosophy? trying to make it work for them. So, each sentence became two, like what just happened. And then those two became four. Then four became sixteen.

22 Eventually I became so lost in the initial idea that the mass of what I desired to say disintegrated into spent neural energy.

I started to realize more and more why Deleuze and Guattari made up words and concepts as they went along, why they changed usage without warning, why they discarded them at will and certainly never defined anything in any conventional way. Why? To me it seemed to open up their writing, something Mel commented to me about once. Now that I think about it, perhaps

I should tell you that story.

I remember peeking around the catacomb like book shelves in Mel

Tapper’s office one afternoon to find him scribbling notes in the margin of my master’s project.

“Hi Matt. Come in.” He said before I thought he could even see me.

I sat down with that strange graduate school nervousness that is not dissimilar from someone about to be sentenced by a judge. Now I’ve enfolded the academic machines so well that the judge presides over my own domain of interiority, and it wont be dethroned. It is a kind of paranoia that will surface often in this project, of stable determinations, of fixed points, of being what is expected rather than becoming in combat with a wild world. Feeling brave, however, I thought I might as well get right to the point. I said, “I see you are looking at my project. What do you think?”

“I think it’s good, but,” and I began to squirm around involuntarily in the office chair, “I think it is a bit too dense.” Mimicking the dropping feeling in my

23 chest, my body began to slide off the chair. “Too dense” sounded too close to stupid in my ears, and many might have simply accepted that interpretation. My face twisted up. Then I felt the surplus of emotion and an intensity of desire to reframe his comment. Mel saw it, so he continued, “I mean it is too tight …”

Mel continued to talk, but I’m not sure I even heard his words due the daze from the Muhammad Ali punch I just received. Graduate students, with bodies of indefinitely postponed sentences, are tuned into judgment. We feel it all about. And it is, just in the next room where grants or teaching assistantships or progress or projects or whatever are under discussion. But our inevitable offenses are what make us so darned attractive. I somehow understood what he was telling me. Of course he approved of it and thought the ideas were quiet good, which eventually I became proud of. It was simply that there was a problem with my writing machine. The way I wrote the project tied everything together in tight little authoritative points. I had a thesis and hammered evidence and explanation into a tight coherent picture of things like a unified representation or a static conceptual arrangement. I wrote like a scientist who knew how the world worked based upon the progressively more complete knowledge generated by all powerful science. Even in more recent scientific paradigms, there is the need to be looser with ones arguments, to be less certain, as the principles of Heisenberg demand.

So, I have abandoned the idea of a unified argument, of a theoretical framework, of a single voice. Rather, my arguments are fractured and build

24 upon each other through wild connections that the reader must work at. There is no theoretical apparatus which I bring with me to each situation in an attempt to prove its validity for understanding a wide array of events. Rather, like

Foucault suggested, I will use theory as a tool-kit. The criteria for using a concept to analyze a particular event are whether or not it works and what it does.

Back to Deleuze and Guattari and how they changed my writing machines.

I found reading the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series to be its own kind of encounter. Understanding isolated statements, paragraphs, sections, and then transforming everything over and over again as I made connections with other parts of their writing and other events beyond the covers seemed to open up reading. When I read the secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari it almost makes me laugh. There are some people out there saying, “when they said x,

Deleuze and Guattari were trying to tell us y…” But once someone says that, there are about ten other places someone can point to where they said something different. With their desire for the multiple, how could they not.

They were multiple. This made me, the reader, multiple, since I struggled and re-struggled and re-re-struggled to pull something useful out of their words.

Those useful thingies have always coalesced from my own desires. They are mine, or perhaps they are ours, created in the encounter or in the exposure as

Michael Serres would say (Serres 1997). Reading, thinking, combining, breaking down, they have come to inhabit my conceptual personae. When I stepped out

25 into the rhythms of a fieldworker, everything took on new life. I could not simply look at events through particular concepts, ideas, models, etc. That, I think, would have been something like a theory, something like hermeneutics. Rather, the concepts I wanted to use only worked when I plugged them into the event.

Events are machines, assemblages which change character based upon the components. I tried to give my ideas vitality in the events themselves, in posing questions, in encountering people, statements, events, desires. More than simply getting at the geography of lines that make up a people, I tried to become along those very lines. Often it was painful. Sometimes it was questionable. But I still feel strongly that research and writing is a kind of experimentation in contact with the real (Deleuze and Guttari 1987).

Have I reproduced this cartography for you here? I hope so. However, I don’t think I will be able to just hit and run your reading machine like I might want to. In certain places I will. Still, this is a dissertation and as such will probably only be read by a handful of people. My audience is therefore a few people whose job it is to judge my ability to represent a level of scholarship on par with their own and with the standard which has been set out for doctoral level work in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at

Austin. Despite the bureaucratic and disciplinary mandates which surely frustrate the many bright shining stars inconstellated (see, I already made up my own word) there, I am unequivocally proud to be affiliated with that place.

26 So, the celerity (Serres and Latour 1995) which I would likely throw upon paper will be punctuated with back-beats of depth and dwelling in a particular moment. Besides, no speed of writing is enough to fossilize the connections made in a human brain or in the world out there as they happen. Things get missed. Things get repeated. I keep coming back to ideas in different arrangements. I leave some key points beneath the surface, spread between several stories and commentaries. Because I leave them intentionally wanting, I hope that you will become active and pull something useful from them.

Celerity. Meditation. Perhaps there is a rhythm between the two. I wonder, and here I hope I am not being too bold, if this is not a better machine anyway. Even Deleuze and Guattari point to the potential fascism inherent in a line of flight, like becoming one of Tyler Derden’s space monkeys. There must be some sort of meditation on course, on evaluation, before you become right into a trap like the gravity well of a black hole. There must be some way to tame the difference between the celebrated becoming whale of Ahab and the becoming adrift in a coffin of Ishmael.

But reflection and meditation can hinder. Many times I just sit in front of my computer, waiting for inspiration. I wait for it to all come together. I wait to see it clearly. I wait for it to make sense. I wait instead of wading in to a bog of the unexpected. But it never comes, or at least when it does it sneaks in when I am not paying attention and no longer waiting. It seems vain to try to control this faculty anyway. Thought comes from the outside, in encounters. It resides

27 in transversal movements that might best be described as maddeningly random.

What we do is censor, reduce, and filter. This is what we are trained to do.

Thought happens as an encounter in a moment of exposure, which is a different model altogether than reflection. Or, it happens out of habit, in which case it is not really thought after all. Most of us have neurons shaped to trap energy in predictable patterns, like in an orbit of a super-massive object, a fixed point. I have many.

According to this model the best way to make things happen is to create space for encounters. And the best way to make this happen for me is to simply put pen or pencil to paper and move it. Thought also strikes as I am wading through the garbage collecting on the passenger side of my car. When that happens, I either make a mental signpost or jot down a note. As I do, encounters happen, encounters between concepts, stories, faces, memories, etc.

They don’t happen all the time mind you. Sometimes they trick me. In

Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (Deleuze 1994) says: “how else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow—or rather, to make it impossible.”

28 There must be a polysonorous rhythm of life which we can dance along with, out of step if you like, which can still imbibe life, writing, anything, with the possibility of artfulness. The “later” and perhaps less desired Foucault would argue just this when he labored his points about the technologies of the self.

Not only have I tried to write with this rhythm, but this rhythm is charted out in the longitude and latitude of the map I have tried to present you with here.

Really this is like saying the same thing over again over again. Now I will say something that you hopefully don’t tire of, since it is one of the several refrains in the tracks laid out here. This map is not a map of something or somewhere.

It is a map to something or somewhere. That is why the map works, because we use it. Is it a treasure map? I can’t tell you right now, if ever, since the treasure is mostly in the direction, in the exposure and encounters along the way than a destination.

This stepping out, you no doubt know, will not be entirely flighty. How could it be? After all if I want to invite you to my party you’d have to travel on sidewalks, streets, bus-lines, train tracks, currents, rivers, trails, airways. So I’ll draw you a map as such, using what we have in common to get somewhere new. Then it will be our map. My map and what some would call the map of the real must be interlaced. And that is because it is a map, now becoming a diagram, of what I want to become, what I want the world to become. This is another refrain you will hear throughout this dissertation: that taking the powerful points of postie thinkers to heart means writing with attention to

29 inscription rather than representation. But since I am multiple, since I am composed of the same lines of force that many other American’s are, this desire is not exclusively my own. It possesses me. In inhabits me from elsewhere, from something between us all. In any case, hopefully we can both find some place on this map where we can boogie down.

Since I am still on the topic of Deleuze and Guattari, or at least not far from it, I would like to say a few more words about the influence of their writing.

One thing that became particularly helpful for me was to see the way they took risks. In all of my previous writing and living I was afraid to be wrong. I think that is how many of us are made. You raise your hand in class only when you have the right answer or a good question. If you don’t, official condemnation or informal ridicule will follow. Eventually the mechanism becomes a part of you; you double over on yourself until you issue a standing gag order and a regime of self-punishment. A desire to connect with others becomes a conduit to sealing off desire in scheduled appearances. Anyway, Deleuze and Guattari did not seem to have this fear, or at least they bypassed it. How? Quite ingeniously by redefining what is important about speaking and writing. There is no point to fearing wrong statements, since that is not what writing is all about. Writing is about creating things. It is about effect and affect. It is about making something happen in me, the writer, and you, in a reader, in the world. And, really, no one has any sure bets on how all of that happens. Chaos theory meets the writing machine.

30 Another thing about Deleuze and Guattari is how they open up connections to places which may otherwise be thought out of bounds. Perhaps it is because they were writing within philosophy and those folks take on questions of the broadest sort, but Deleuze and Guattari used elements that came not only from philosophy but also from mathematics, physics, geology, biology, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, anthropology, psychiatry, medicine, architecture, sociology, environmentalism, political science, musicology, and I’m sure there are a bunch more I just can’t think of right now. By doing so they not only opened up their thought to more potential connections, they did so for me as well.

Being multi-disciplinary is buzzing about these days, but usually that means something very limited.

Cultural studies probably kicked it off, or at least kicked it into high gear.

Following what are a lot of truly dazzling moves in cultural studies, social scientists have begun borrowing from each other’s disciplines making a pastiche from sources as far out there as literary criticism, urban studies, philosophy, and many others. It’s the ideas that count, not what wing of campus they find their office in. Still, this is a very limited notion of the multiple. There are still places out of bounds where anthropologists quite simply don’t go. This sometimes gets broken down into science vs. humanism, like the 1996 American Anthropological

Conference theme, or some other preposterous carving up of thought. How can anthropology claim to be interdisciplinary when it can’t even share across sub- disciplinary lines? Those people who study monkeys can’t possibly connect with

31 those people who just sit around and talk to other people all day. And the people with chronic back pain and dirt in their fingernails surely don’t want to say anything to the people who will probably dissect their words, meanings, and gestures. The animosity is high, just think about what happened at Stanford.

Deleuze and Guattari have renewed my love of anthropology. Its strength, I think, is its breadth of questions and sources. What other “study of” can claim to be “the study of humans”? This should be celebrated. But for too long anthropology has differentiated into fields and sub-fields and specialties and areas. Is this because we all desire to be experts about something? Is it because we desire so badly to be right when we speak that crown ourselves a god-like entity with the power to determine what is right and wrong in a tight little ball of experience of our own making? I don’t know. But I am going to push myself into areas you may think I have no business writing about.

Complexity theory will be one. I think it should be a privileged one. To me, the ideas of complexity theory have the potential to open up a dialogue between the corners of our discipline which have only spoken to each other in nice hallway chat for many years. I am only recently, even in terms of how long I have been writing this blasted project, to embark on this trajectory. Somewhere along the line I hope to transform my ignorance into knowledge and spark some new directions for you as well.

I’ll tell you now, though you’ll find out shortly, this is not a master-planned dissertation. From what I’ve said in this weird kind of methodological section, it

32 should be obvious already. Still, I went back and forth on this issue. I thought that reproducing the aesthetic of master-planned living in the stylistic choices of my dissertation might be a good way to affect the reader beyond what the words

I was using meant. I still chose to do this in several sections. However, I decided to write this dissertation hoping it would affect the reader with the possibilities of an unplanned kind of community. That is what I am really after with this project anyway, arguing for the possibility of emergent and autopoetic organization. So, that is how I wrote it. I began with a story or an idea and I wrote until it was exhausted, at least for the time being. Then I saved the file, printed it and threw it into a file folder. I did this over and over again. The first stage of my dissertation I must have had over a thousand loose sheets of paper, some with essays that spanned several pages and others with just a sentence or two. Then I began to separate the stack of sheets into piles, and files on the computer, based on themes. Community, the politics of belonging, racism, class, generalized (an)aesthetics, mobility, state desire, combat, flows, my machines,

HOA governance, and discard were some of these early themes. I began to read, write comments and paperclip pages together where the connections worked to shoot out some wacky new idea or seemed to advance an argument I was working on. I edited most of them together into larger and larger documents. However, I realized early on that the connections were so many that if I tried to put them all into several large chapters, they would be an amazing tangle. Things just didn’t fit the linear organization I knew would have

33 made writing this dissertation much easier. So, I left separate many sections that could have been woven together. I hope that they will resonate with each other and establish a refrain where the ideas therein spark thinking in a non- linear way. In the end, what I had was an emergent organization

34 Fuzziness

It is interesting if you look at how we, as academics, write about things.

We are so locked into the production of our own authority that what we say vibrates from the tuning fork of certainty. We must be right. And to do so we inevitably simplify and reduce.

However, any chaos theorist or thinker of complexity will tell you that contradictions and complications are an operative element of any complex system. The goal of complexity theory is often to construct models which can be used to understand the behavior of those dynamic open systems. Now, I’m not sure how willing you are to accept the plausibility of mathematical logirhytms being used to map a social landscape. I know I’m not quite comfortable with it.

But within these attempts there is a need to let complexity reign and stability to emerge from it. It is a philosophy which sees active indetermination as a constituent element of our universe. So, the need to be right morphs into the need to be vague and fuzzy.

This is interestingly related to the call for fuzzy or vague concepts in cultural analysis (Massumi 2002). An attempt to tie things down in deterministic terms is similar in deed and sentiment to a simplified representation. When I do this in the writings that are collected herein, know that it is a mistake or that I simply did not have the skills, time or energy to return and edit it the way I wanted to. For the remainder of this paper, suspend certainty and think fuzzily.

35 Freedom Games

Charlie’s tactics of corporate survival were different from mine. He was indirect, drag racing for a lost rush. I was intrigued by his description of a shadowy organization of drag racing throughout the Bay Area, so I asked him about it occasionally. He told me about weekly races, hundreds of them. He tore into me with gruesome accidents. He riled me up with descriptions of police raids. But the intensity really poured from him when he talked about his car. He spent a huge proportion of his savings and administrative assistant salary to buy a new Camaro and “trick it out.”

He drove me to lunch a couple of times. From all my questions he must have got the impression that I was also a speed lover. Before I could snap the safety belt the tires howled against the asphalt and the headrest molded around the sides of my skull. Sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. He knew fear had gripped me and turned my attention to the rising speedometer. So he sped up. One hundred, one hundred and ten miles per hour. I couldn’t breathe; air was left swirling across the busy two-lane city street. We leaned back and forth with the

Camaro between blurs of colored metal and glass. I think he was testing my threshold, and found it when I gasped involuntarily. I felt beaten. Charlie seemed to swell up and almost pour out of the cockpit. Then he slowed down, just a little.

After not eating lunch, I was reluctant to plop back into the bucket seats for the return trip. A masculine drive to suppress fear and feign control gave me

36 the boost I needed. It took me the rest of the day to simmer down. Charlie could read my affect as I moved energetically but erratically through the company parking lot. He sort of snickered to himself when a co-worker asked me if I had a good lunch and I didn’t say a word. Still, somehow we started to talk. Most of the conversation was a blur. As clarity returned I heard him say, “I just love driving. Yeah, you snap into that seat and speed is at your feet. There is nothing like the thrill of driving too fast.”

The words “speed” and “too fast” tapped into my memory of reading

Speed and Politics (Virilio 1986). So I said in a rather choppy way, “the speed limit is there to be broken,” by which I meant to give that compensatory rush as a reward for abiding all sorts of other limits.

“Oh yeah!” His exuberance splashed all around my thoughts.

“And, it’s the answer to the cubicle.”

After our discussion I tried driving faster on my own. The artificial gravity, things moving together in a blur, intense vibrations, each gave a physical charge. And those charges are picked up in the pleasure of breaking the rules and joy of freedom. A speed limit sign signals to us in black and white that we quite naturally want to go too fast but must control ourselves. It gives us a wild desire and turns desire against itself at the same time. Speed limits turn roads, streets, highways and freeways into a series of ethical scenarios–regardless of how fast you go. Georges Bataille would say something like: “transgression does not negate an interdiction, it transcends and completes it” (Clifford 1988).

37 Even if we break this limit, even if we demand at all costs the control to be out of control, that little pleasure feeds back like a release valve upon the whole series of limits. We know our own limits. We calculate in advance, through repetition, how fast we can go before we “loose it” and shred the bonds of a whole social plane made manifest in asphalt routes and intersections. For most of us, direction and the desire to flee become comfy between curbs.

38 Self Destruction

Driving fast worked for a while. But the pleasure I got from not letting someone else calculate my own limits was limited by my machine itself. I couldn’t make myself go fast enough; neither could my auto. Plus, I kept feeling compelled to crash into stucco entry sculptures and company logos. It became clear that I needed my own regime of activity. Sedentariness was getting me down. Down also because gravity was acting cruelly upon my increasing mass.

I decided to start playing basketball again. I could get back into shape, I hoped, not only because of the exercise but also by counteracting the inertia of office life. Also, I could do some research. I noticed several basketball courts in communities I’d visited and in parks and gyms surrounded by some of the grandest MPCs in the Bay Area.

The pick-up games I found at those courts were brutally competitive, violent. That first evening I came home with a deep bruise on my right arm and a long fingernail trace down my neck and shoulder. Somehow they felt satisfying and painful at the same time. After the first few weeks of wounds,

Mahala, my wife, began to worry. “Are you playing basketball or going to fight clubs?” she teased.

I laughed, but later I was struck by the sensitivity of the comment. There was clearly a similarity, something arcing between the movie images and my damaged body. It was an affect, one that moved beyond my fleshy boundary and the shimmering boundary of the cinematic experience. It’s a compulsion to

39 flee. It has something to do with being overwhelmed by feelings of capture, of being trapped by credit and work and the limits at the heart of my self. We desire this inertia and at the same time desire to escape at all costs, literally mutilating the body and the self in a desperate disintegration of that most useful capitalist agent. Having to do the same thing over and over again, hunched at my desk, made me feel like lashing out at something. So I did. Giving someone a hard foul or an elbow at the playground did the trick. Receiving them was even better. Pain was stimulation and made life feel good, or at least tolerable.

One day I reached for a ball and instead met an elbow across my brow.

Blood exploded into the palm of my hand as I contracted involuntarily toward the sensation. Walking through the community center parking lot I projected joy into the expressions of horror of the passers-by who looked even though they tried not to. I received seven stitches and a rippling hematoma. At the office no one even asked what happened. They seemed more horrified by the eruption of my private life into plain view more than the mutilated flesh I left gruesomely exposed on purpose. Health spent destructively, instead of caught in some material nightmare of productivity, felt good. But it made the whole office nervous. And that’s only because self-destruction is a complementary desire to socially useful self-control in the service of production and the production of service.

Both my violent basketball and Tyler Derden’s basement boxing demonstrate how easy it is for things to get snatched up in a fascist frenzy of

40 masculinity. Although the furor shapes most games, the organized nature of sport captures much of it within the rules, the habits of the game, a structure and routinized movements. So at this point the two stories diverge. Tyler

Derden was willing to let his flights of fancy spiral into a suicidal implosion. My fanciful flights were picked right back up into productive circuits.

41 Fascist Democracy

Not long after I began my basketball regime, I came across an interesting pamphlet in the management company’s files. I copied it while no one was watching and sneaked it from the building in my backpack. It was a few pages of excerpts from a HOA list-serv discussion entitled “Homeowners’ Associations and Democracy.” The pamphlet was printed and mailed to board members and homeowners in several different communities with “food for thought” reasoning.

One of the sections read:

I’m reminded of a ‘My Turn’ piece in Newsweek some years ago. ‘My Turn’ is a one-page opinion piece filled by a *wide* variety of folks, offering opinions on a *wide* variety of topics. The one I remember concerned Little League and its effect on society. The writer spoke of how, when he was a kid, kids played baseball without Little League. This taught them not only to hit, run and field, but that playing fields needed to be maintained. And that they could do that. It also taught them to deal with their peers. For example, to decide among themselves whether a runner was safe or out. And that they could do that, too, most of the time; thought they also learned that there are sometimes situations that call for the ‘do over’ rule—an absolute decision may be impossible and the only option is to try again. They also learned to make rules for themselves. For instance, when there weren’t exactly 18 players for two teams. And that they could make rules that would work for them. Parents, wanting the best for their kids, and having learned that they could do these things, organized Little League. Now their kids learn not only that they ‘need’ a coach to learn to hit, run and field, but that playing fields are maintained by professionals. And they can’t do that. They also learn that an umpire will decide whether a runner is safe or out. And they can’t do that. But they also learn that, with an attorney, a new rule may be formulated in situations where the umpire has made a bad call. They learn that someone else makes the rules. Someone older, more experienced. Not them.

42 As time has passed since I read this piece, I’ve come to believe more and more that it describes an actual and wide-spread effect of not only Little League, but of our society’s tendency to organize our children (and those adults and corporations less well off) for their benefit. Unfortunately, I don’t have any solution to this problem in mind. Those of us who are willing to actually *do* the work, whether coaching, umpiring, taking seats on boards, PTAs, and as city, state and federal legislators obviously provide a valuable service. But, the hardest part of my job has been to convince my constituents that what they want is beyond my authority. That there are things *they* will have to do for themselves. It seems it is also the hardest part of those other jobs at city, state and federal levels; it’s *much* easier to promise something than to deny the right of the voter to whatever is requested. Again, I don’t have any ‘solution’ to this problem—we’ll all just have to work it out amongst ourselves. In the case of ‘trailer man,’ I suppose that means someone will have to accept the responsibility to file a complaint of violation and that the board will have to accept the responsibility to hear the complaint and the response of the accused and make a guilty/not guilty decision. And enforce a penalty in the case of a guilty verdict. And I’ve learned that *we* can do that. We can decide whether someone has violated the rules or not. And we can decide what the rules should be. Within the HOA it seems to me that just as form follows function, so function will follow form: if you stick firmly to the form of the bylaws and rules, the function of justice will follow. It’s not easy. Someone has to maintain the field (and the roofs, sidewalks, laws, etc.). And someone has to call the runner safe or out. But we *can* do it.

This is a fantastic comment. For as long as I can remember, I have been an ‘athlete.’ Many are, although academic and athletic personas aren’t supposed to mix. Let me oedipalize my mix for you. My father, who left the family when I was five, was a college basketball player, a 110 meter high-hurdler in the 1964

Olympic trials, and the athletic director for the City of Santa Rosa during those early years. I suppose I have always sought his recognition this way, and have

43 always tried to kill him with deadly intellectual moves. Perhaps if I excelled sufficiently he would either recognize me or be gone.

When I got to graduate school, things changed for me. Advanced anthropological theory was drawn to reflexivity, and likewise drew me to reflexivity like a moth to a flame. But for a while I stored away my athletic desires instead of confronting them. We had a basketball evening for graduate students, faculty and others. We never even thought to conceptualize our own activity and what it did for us and our relationships. Meanwhile, in anthropology texts (by Richard Robbins for example) in the classes for which I was a t.a., symbolic analyses of football or other American sports abounded. You could read the key symbols of our culture written right into the games: linear time, masculine dominance, capitalist competition, and such. Some, like Doug Foley ingeniously did in his discussion of small town football in Texas, went even further to talk about the modes of subjectivation alive in these practices. Sports and their surrounding hoopla (like cheerleading) are certainly a prime site where normalized masculine and feminine subjects are generated or at least reinforced, where a desire for competition and the joy of domination is written into our neurons, where we are further enraptured by a linear world (Foley 1990). It took me a while to take these criticisms to heart. Still, I can’t stop playing.

The comments in the pamphlet add something. The point that I take from the words is that organizations tend to take away the creativity of human encounters by authoritatively establishing codes of conduct and limits of

44 interaction. The genius is that I can now really feel how sports have helped hard wire my brain into an acceptance, no really a reliance, on an authoritative agent who conducts things from above the action. This is one port on the docking ring of my state desire. We learn to want and expect someone to take care of things for us. All you have to do is pay the league entry fee.

Where the comments go slightly awry from my perspective is towards the end. I don’t see the HOA as an entity where *we* can regain a sense of immanent community. Opening space for autonomous communities would do the trick, but HOA communities seem to have similar problems as little league, namely too much organization or too much planning. There will be plenty of discussion on this in this section. For now I’d like to think about how HOAs set up little domains where participation means playing the rules.

Think about the example, the ‘trailer man’. I don’t know the details, but that is not the point. Someone has a trailer parked in their driveway or side yard or somewhere visible. A neighbor thinks it makes the community look like a trailer park and a jealous desire to desire the way ‘white trash’ folks do creeps up in him or her (Zizek 1993). Think about how much we could really enjoy our property if we actually used it instead of killing it under gallery glass. The signs of white trash are just signs of use, of enjoyment, of doing other things than sweating the yard, of paying someone to sweat in your yard. And those signs have no place in a MPC, except an other’s sweat. Besides that, years of self- mutilating discipline has taught this individual that such desires are bad and

45 intolerable, so the only course of action is to project such wretchedness onto the neighbor. She or he complains to the board, what else would you do? It’s not likely that the neighbors ever discussed the issue. Even if they did, the point is made more strongly. You see, they can’t reach a decision on whether or not it is o.k. for the trailer to be there. They are both steadfast in their ways. For one the runner is safe. For the other the runner is out. But they can’t have a do over, I’m not sure what that would mean in this case anyway, and they can’t resolve the conflict.

Or, is it that they really don’t want to resolve the conflict? Is it really even a conflict at all? You see, the neighbor who is pissed off about the trailer finds out easily that it is against the association’s rules and regulations to park a trailer in the community. Neither neighbor had any voice in these codes. They were voted into being gradually by several successions of boards. Voted is even generous, since most rules and regulations circulate in industry publications and managerial clinics. Now they are like laws, interpreted and enforced. Rarely are they even re-thought let alone re-written. Actually, it’s not even against the rules and regulations, it is in the CC&Rs, the founding legal documents. So really the code was established when the developer’s CC&R specialist attorney wrote it down in the same form as about a million other association’s CC&Rs and submitted it to the county, just like little leaguers playing by the same rule book all over the country. So things are even less accessible. When the neighbor finds all this out, there is no way he or she will budge on the issue. The conflict

46 was already resolved before it even began. The issue is about mobilizing the

HOA towards retributive measures that will bring the ‘trailer man’ in alignment with his neighbor’s desires and the generally accepted modes of subjectivation.

People participate in HOA communities, but they participate with the rules. In some sense the activity generated as sparks in the turbines runs counter to democratic values. Frankly, this is how the whole HOA apparatus is set up. To wield the rules, to impose your desires on someone else, is not unlike throwing an elbow. There is a similar pleasure in submission and in pain.

Perhaps it is how our super-egos displace our own desires that are too intimately anti-social to be expressed openly and too intense to be simply repressed.

47 Ethical Difficulties

There is much difficulty associated with writing an ethically minded dissertation. I don’t just mean the issues with funding, particularly since I received none (at least partly due to my own hubris). Nor do I mean the ethics involved in conducting undisruptive interviews. What being ethical means to me is to be vigilant about what kind of world you are creating with your statements and actions, with even your fantasies and conceptual machinery. This is the ethical-aesthetic paradigm Guattari writes brilliantly about in the book

Chaosmosis (Guattari 1995). This is how Guattari, with Deleuze, write against the oedipal complex. This is not to say that it doesn’t exist. Rather, to see it as constitutive of selves and desires. Then to ask whether or not it should be the architectural model of our selves and what potential alternatives can be thought.

From this perspective, which also follows from Foucault’s (Foucault 1980) points about power/knowledge, there is really no point to writing about American communities unless you are going to project positive models, if only in a ghostly force. To do this I will draw upon Michael Serres’ notion of sensitivity (Serres

1997), Foucault and his arts of the self (Foucault 1988), Guattari’s concept of autopoesis (Guattari 1995), new thinking in the biological sciences which goes under the heading of complexity theory and Brennan and her notion of energetics. All of these concepts will emerge in what is to come. For now I will just say that each of these approaches contain a related ethical kernel, a kernel of creativity. Ethics can no longer come from on high; can no longer be unified

48 or universal. It must be personal and partial and emerge in a tangle of competing and cooperating motivations. Like Derrida says of justice, it doesn’t exist except in the struggle to bring it into existence (Derrida 1990). Something similar can be said here. To be just and ethical is to always be at work in the world, to encounter things and continually bring force to bear against those arrangements which mutilate life.

49 Actively Passive

With stitches still holding my face together for less than a week, I was back on the court. All of this, mind you, happened years after I had screws and borrowed tissues bestow a new cyborg life to my right knee. That destruction/reconstruction came from basketball as well. Bob had the same cyborg badge in the vertical ridges of scar tissue beneath his right knee-cap. We had both just spent an hour and a half pushing, elbowing, and shouldering each other like rams defending territory. Now we were both limp on the ground, mustering energy to go home. I mentioned his scar and we shared details of our cyborg nature. When I found out he lived in the nearby Canyon View community, with no canyon view by the way, our encounter transformed itself.

We were no longer craving combatants; we immediately became researcher and informant. I let him know this incorporeal morphing happened by telling him about my project and asking to converse about his community. He didn’t have the time then, but he left me with his contact information.

I was nervous approaching Bob and Claire’s home. Somehow I felt pressure to perform. I should be entertaining. I should be intelligent. Stepping over the threshold, I transitioned to being a guest. A whole new arrangement came alive through me, as it always does. Years of guest training became triggered in one step onto the ceramic entryway tiles. Just one moment before,

Claire and Bob were also transformed in my presence. They became hosts, and were quite adroit at it. They led me in and Bob introduced his wife Claire. They

50 both shook my hand and looked me in the eye when they said how nice it was for me to have come. They asked me if I wanted something to drink as they led me into the living room where we could sit and talk comfortably. My guest machinery politely declined the offering. Stepping around the corner to the living room, my attention reached out for something to compliment and establish my pleasant guest persona. “What a lovely family portrait!” Two young women and a younger man accompanied Bob and Claire, all dressed in white, as they sat on and leaned against an oak branch that shot out low and swooped a few feet above the dried golden wild grass and splatters of wild color. It really was a lovely composition.

“Thank you. We took that a couple of years ago on the hill right behind the golf course.”

“It’s a perfect setting. Is it a photograph or a painting?”

“Oh, it’s a painting, but done from a picture.”

“Wow! It’s quite good,” by which I meant the representation was nearly transparent, yet visible enough to demand attention to the skillfulness of the painter. That was the whole point, I think.

After I complimented them on their lovely home we settled in to talk. We had been talking for a while, when the spirit of service began to possess our encounter. Flashes of Mike, who I met previously but you will not meet for a few pages yet, shot between my brain and my notepad. Between us, writer and reader, I started the conversation without the notepad, thinking I would be able

51 to pay closer attention. But I pulled out a small spiral bound notepad after Bob asked me three times about not taking notes. Honestly, the conversation was going poorly anyway. I had trouble asking really probing questions. My researcher’s prop, however, compelled me to shed some of my guest-ness and get down to business, so to speak. I think it also helped Claire and Bob in their genuine desire to become good research subjects.

Bob said with more than a hint of pride, “Our community is great because of the open space and all the trees. Nature is important in clustered housing.”

“Yeah. I noticed how lush your community is. Much more than most of the communities I’ve visited.” I’m a flatterer; I admit it. “Cleaning up the leaves must be difficult though.”

“They just do it with a leaf blower.” I could tell in Claire’s tone that she was bored by talk of landscaping. There was a silence. I felt pressure to come up with something relevant. Luckily my conversation with Mike gave me some clear trajectories.

“So, your community is so lush,” repeating myself was irritating, but I stammered on. “How much time do you spend in the community?”

“Well, we don’t really use the common areas at all. It’s just nice that they are there.” I glanced out the window and saw a tumble weed scurrying in front of the wood facades in a swirl of dust. No one does yard-work. No one works on the house. No one fixes cars; that’s forbidden. There seems to be many blocked connections as people are propelled from the car door to the house

52 door. Actually, since many communities require that people park in the garage, many communities are ghost towns with occasional specters jogging by in shimmering sweat suits.

“The community has amenities for socializing like walking trails, a community center, clubs and organizations. There are exercise classes and courses you can take for hobbies and things,” Claire said, sensing my direction.

But just a statement or two later they agreed that “the neighborhood is more isolating. You don’t really meet people or talk to those living nearby. We never meet people outside.”

In most of the developments I visited the work of community seems to be done by others. The house painting, grass mowing, and security patrols are just a part of this. Later on we would talk about security. They were satisfied with the security service. There were two burglaries a couple of years before. About that time a neighborhood watch group was formed. The signs warning would-be criminals of this watchfulness were still screwed onto the private light poles. But something changed. A desire for neighborhood watch morphed into a desire for security patrols. This tells a broader story. A sense of civic duty is activated in different ways. You can either become responsible for community surveillance or use community funds to make someone else responsible. Money exchanging hands makes things more tangible, makes security feel more real. The fantasy of security becomes written in circling blue uniforms with black shinny belts

53 dangling tools of the trade. And if something goes wrong, blame is easier to concretize in the contractual words of business and law, breach and neglect.

At an annual meeting, one of the most attended I remember, a cop stood up to speak out against security patrols. He said, “In my experience, and in all the literature, getting to know your neighbors, a sense of community, and community watch is the best defense against crime. We don’t need a security patrol, we need block parties.” They voted for security patrols anyway.

I asked Bob, “So, do you feel like you live an active lifestyle?” I used the marketing points purposively.

“Yes, we do.”

“What about your neighbors?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask them,” Bob’s voice called out before words could slide from Claire’s open lips. “The community center is usually deserted though.” I could sense him measuring his level of activity against a perceived lack, not necessarily his own lack, but a pervasive lack.

“I thought you didn’t meet people at the community center?” I asked rather recklessly.

“We don’t. We use the work out room, the weights and treadmills.”

The blinding connections between this conversation and my encounter with Mike were intense. I could only think to ask questions I fantasized asking

Mike after we parted. I wanted to know about desires that compel an “active lifestyle” and at the same time to sit idly while weeds are whacked and leaves

54 are blown. My mouth took me by surprise. I heard myself saying something like, “wouldn’t yard work and maintenance be a fulfilling source of exercise? I mean, since so many of us just sit behind our desks all day?”

“I get more out of weightlifting.”

Then Claire added, “And we get cardio from the treadmill.”

None of them saw things the way I did. There were different visions of activity passing between us. Claire’s, Bob’s and Mike’s, I believe, are more pervasive. To me it seems at least slightly ironic that the desire to sell most of our precious days away in a cubicle intensifies to afford services that could easily be done with a little time and effort.

“It seems to me that all of the services, not working at all in the community, might block activity instead of foster it. What do you think?”

“You have to buy a shelter anyway, so why not make it a full service one.”

He even said “full service,” I couldn’t believe it. “It’s like one of those all inclusive resorts but one that you live in. Kind of.”

Claire added again, “Some people are just lazy and won’t do anything no mater how easy you make it for them. For them it is just more time to watch

TV. But it gives us more time to do other things we really want to do.” Even as she said this I didn’t agree with Claire’s analysis. Passivity doesn’t seem so easily contained within an individual. It oozes across everything in the HOA arrangement.

55 Looking back, I’m fantasizing again about asking other questions.

Questions about the irony looping through the ways we become active. “Why not do the work themselves, communally even, and spend less time working for someone else?” Then I envision some embodied capitalist valorization saying,

“The economic calculations don’t add up. Most of us can sell our labor for much higher than some poor landscaper. So we actually earn time and save money in the trade.” Ah, the joys of exploitation. “Yeah,” sarcasm grips me, “then we can actually use that time and money to work and pay for a sweat at the community center or the 24-hour corporate gyms. Hell, maybe we can even buy an ab- machine from some infomercial that comes on late at night when we can’t sleep because the murmuring white noise vibrating around the million things we have to do at work tomorrow washes over every moment with a sense of panic. Then the fitness machine just sits in the closet or garage.” For me the calculations don’t add up. What can’t be calculated is the autonomy and self-artistry that is either embraced or sold out. Alienated labor is the handmaiden of alienated modes of subjectivation. In this sense, I think I’ll always be a Marxist.

Bob said something about being a CPA, about being stuck at a desk and the drive to exercise that that generates in him. “I’ve had a lot of desk jobs,” I responded sympathetically. “There was a while I was just working and coming home to lounge on the couch in front of the TV. It didn’t take long before I was a total wreck. I mean like stressed or permanently agitated or something.”

56 “I know that feeling. That’s why I try to get to the gym as much as possible, to alleviate the tension that comes with being so sedentary.”

Earlier that week I started reading Paul Virilio’s book The Art of the Motor

(Virilio 1995). Kevin Kuswa, a friend of mine in graduate school, turned me on to Virilio. I kind of missed Kevin as I pulled the book off the Border’s shelf and pranced to the front to have it scanned as my own. I read the last chapter first.

I don’t know why. But that chapter discharged statements right into this issue that came up with Claire and Bob. The ideas and statements infected me, I could feel them turning just beneath my surfaces until they erupted through me into this encounter. “That sedentariness, as you say,” I channeled, “is spreading. It is a part of the digital connectivity and teleaction that supplants immediate action. Digital environments have become our places of connection, where we literalize connectivity through the rituals of plugging in, dialing up, signing on. Our energy is whisked away as we sit still at our desks, our couches, our autos. Our inertia, our passivity at work and now at home, is also bound to a kind of stimulation. We need a surplus of excitement through athletics and other habitual activities” (Virilio 1995). I love this Virilio analysis because it shows how athletic machines are a tangible element of our lives. It is more than just conveying meanings; they plug affect and desire into bodies in particular ways.

Bob and Claire looked completely blank. I felt I had no choice but to continue. “It’s like we have to continually stay in shape,” the words forced

57 though, “to stay healthy, because it is our health which we sell out day after day.” But Nietzsche couldn’t rescue the conversation (Nietzsche and Kaufmann

1967).

They didn’t like me anymore, but I continued anyway. Everything kind of warped out of shape. We all knew that the researcher’s extraction mission, much like a psychiatrist’s, meant listening more than talking. So why was I telling them my thoughts about their community rather than the other way around? They wanted me to shut up, but I couldn’t. I needed them to understand and react to my ideas. I forced my thoughts upon them. I admit I got a bit carried away when I said, “You know, I saw this television show the other day that was talking about how gyms and physical education programs started off as a German national program in the early 20th century. Interesting, huh?”

Claire looked shocked as Bob abruptly unfolded from the dented couch.

His feet fell heavy on the living room carpet and then the kitchen tiles. Passing my station he didn’t even look at me. But I noticed his fingers rolled up in pink and white clusters that dangled like wrecking balls from his shoulders. He was insulted and wanted to throw me out or strike me or both. It’s hard to tolerate being called a fascist. Our feelings of being good and just are wrapped up in safely locating evil fascism in that Other place. But I still think the comparison throws an interesting glow on the issue. The Germans knew that certain exercises help bodies feel equipped in a superior fashion, feelings of

58 accomplishment which move between bodies and collective fantasies of economic and social progress. These forms of collective desire in our heads and everyday behavior make it easier to love power and to desire the very thing that dominates us.

In our beloved country the work of a group ‘super-ego’ isn’t done so fervently at a national level; we have micro-fascisms. How else could keeping

“company” be locked into our places of work? Companies have become concerned with our health also. Through the diffusion of healthy desires longevity has increased dramatically, our working lives have been quantitatively improved. Likewise our energy output in our revved up states is harnessed more effectively. I was working out at 24 Hour Fitness just the other day and a loud- spoken voice from the raised ceiling called down to the sculpted bodies about the benefits of company health club memberships. Reduced health care costs, increased productivity, a better outlook, lower turnover were the selling points.

Living matter is treated as a motor, a machine that needs constant care as well as constant stimulation.

I sat silently until Bob returned from the kitchen with a glass of water. He sat the glass down on the glass covered coffee table and never took a sip from it. When he finally looked up at me I said, “You know Bob, I spend probably just as much time at the gym as you do. Basketball is my bag. And to be honest, it’s an obsession, an addiction. The more physical, the higher the level of competition, the more aggressive it is, the more I get all revved up. You

59 probably know that. Sometimes I really feel possessed. I’m just trying to become mindful of these desires that express themselves through me, and you, a lot of us.”

I looked at Bob’s physique. He noticed. I didn’t care. He seemed to get all puffed up with manly pride. He must have read my gaze as a fellow man measuring my masculinity against his musculature. As I looked I confirmed right away that Mike was a weightlifter. He had broad and rounded shoulders that sat next to the rounded edges of the couch and the tree beyond the window like a series of concentric circles. His biceps arced from beneath his short sleeve and mirrored the archway between the living room and the entryway and on the community’s entrance sculpture. I could see the outline of his pectorals in the fabric of his shirt like two walls folded open and lay flat. It was a particular type of body, a sculpted body. The rounded and swollen tissue of the weightlifter’s muscles stand in contrast to the tense and sinewy muscles of the manual laborer. In the gym there are particular machines and exercises, you see everyone doing the same ones that isolate muscles in certain ways. They create bodies with large shoulder, pectoral, bicep, latisimus dorsi, muscles that are thought to give the male body a pleasing shape. So the sculpted body is like the manicured landscape, concerned with the aesthetics of the surface. The body is a communal matter. But it is not a total aesthetics of the body, which would integrate the expenditure of energy with the project of creative subjectivation.

60 Not only that, do these work out machines throw out notions that physical labor is only productive and valued in a limited sense? I mean, we sit there and see a stack of weights slide up and down. Nothing is made, created, built through our efforts. Nothing is made except, of course, muscles that only emerge if you are diligent and only after significant frequency. So, it requires a certain faith in the deferred profits of labor. But what are these muscles good for? Lifting weights? Looking good? There is a whole geometry of getting into shape. It is a matter of drawing connections between images and movements, attaching habits between bodies. It’s the type of work that emphasizes structure. It is also the same type of work that passes for community these days.

There is something about class desire here, I’m sure you noticed.

Perhaps the self improvement that HOA resident’s like Mike are trying to accomplish actually comes in having Others improve some places for them. Isn’t it aggrandizing, after all, to have other bodies serve us? When we exchange money for these services, it seems to crystallize into a relation of superiority.

This is taken even further when the service relationship is abstracted and removed from the care of the HOA member. The HOA takes care of all services and services all of its members equally. All it requires is a tribute, a tax, an assessment. Through this tax service providers become a sort of second class population, equally crucial for the working community, yet forced outside. There is no direct interaction between the served and the servers, so the relationship is

61 taken for granted. This is not exploitation as ideology but as a tangible effect of a particular arrangement.

And since our days are filled with selling ourselves to others, pleasure can pour out of this reversal. Submission is a two-way addiction that seems impossible to kick alone. I think it is this double movement of submission that makes class matter. The more we serve without being served, the lower we feel on the maps of class relativity. The more we are served without serving, the higher. In the middle, being both at the same time, of course, is where the mainstream finds its conflicting grooves.

The diffuse desire for instant gratification, witnessed in the rituals of drive thru consumption and auto pay gas stations, is tied to the way we construct ourselves as active subjects. By buying things and having objects come to us, by reducing the delay between desire for an object and the joy of acquiring it, we can express our desires for mastery over an objective world. This temporal term is also a part of class production and determines spatial proximity to others with similar pull on commodities. Brennan (2000) says, “class position will appear more substantial if you can afford to have commodities come to you.” HOA communities are privileged class producers in the way that they bring labor, as consumed and commodified human energy, to members automatically. And the more services provided, the higher the assessment, the higher class people feel, and the community is located in the new post-suburban areas.

62 The shaping of bodies that happens in HOA communities, are also tied into the production of class. The production of class bodies maps onto the desire to be served. I get these ideas from Bourdieu, even though his approach tends towards economic reductionism (Bourdieu 1984). For example, on page 101 he says “one must return to the practice-unifying and practice-generating principle, i.e., class habitus, the internalized form of class condition and of the conditioning it entails. One must therefore construct the objective class, the set of agents who are placed in homogeneous conditions of existence imposing homogeneous conditionings and producing homogeneous systems of dispositions capable of generating similar practices; and who possess a set of common properties, objectified properties, sometimes legally guaranteed (as possession of goods and power) or properties embodied as class habitus (and, in particular, systems of classificatory schemes).” Bourdieu seems to be taking class as a natural extension of economic categories. That troubles me. At the same time, however,

I think that Bourdieu is more complex than that, or at least we can read him this way. Conditions of production, at some level, do shape conditions of existence.

People who sit and type all day have fingers and forearms with certain dispositions written into the very matter of their ligaments and muscle tissue.

People who work in the service industry–and that seems to be most

Americans–perhaps share, as I’m arguing, a certain disposition to demand service themselves.

63 Renters are Second Class Citizens

In a HOA, renters are second-class citizens. All of the CC&Rs I’ve read preclude a renter from serving on the Board of Directors. They don’t vote. The can attend meetings but basically have no voice in HOA decisions. They are a population outside of the demo in democracy.

Once a real estate agent called me to ask some questions about a unit before a prospective buyer committed to the sale. She wanted to know the percentage of renters in a particular condo complex. The calculations were easy, since the numbers are all broken down for each community and posted and stored in several locations fro easy reference. 61% of the residents at that condo community were renters. The real estate agent told me that was too high, that she would never be able to close escrow under those conditions.

Living in an area with too many renters is undesirable.

I’ve heard a few different expressions of a similar underlying logic to the above anti-renter sentiment. Renters feel less of a connection to the community.

They therefore do not do the right things to keep up their units. They don’t take care of yards. They don’t care for the common areas. So, the logic goes, the more renters there are, the more quickly a housing development can deteriorate.

What they also mean is that a renter is less connected to the community in other ways as well. In terms of violations and fines and the like, the

Association really has no direct recourse with the renter. They only have leverage against the property owner and the human body attached to it through

64 ownership. So, when dealing with renters, the HOA will address the owner who must deal with their tenant. The owners, of course, do have legalistic means to compel their tenants to obey Association commands and extract funds from them if fines are to be paid. Still, many Associations are uncomfortable with this more distant form of leverage. Many don’t even allow rental units. Others discourage it, in newsletters, in meetings and in street-side conversations.

One of the startling themes found in this story is the way renters become a subordinate population. We have no voice in the community. We are preconfigured as a problem. We are often unwanted. The HOA really considers us renters as secondary entities, under the control of the true members, citizens, property owners. There is a glaring connection here to early forms of

“democracy.” The citizen as property owner is a democratic trope that runs through an ancient Greek social formation and early American institutions. Now the rights of a local citizen, an owner, are linked to the ethics of capitalism.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, renters are dangerous. They are a new class of urban/suburban semi-nomads who are not attached to their place.

As such we have an anti-Association war machine at our disposal. Since falling property values really means nothing to us, we can pour oil in the terraced beds at the entry, and purposefully disfigure our lots, can wreak havoc upon the social ties.

There is a clear class drama being played out here between owners and renters. But it is more complicated than to say that the owners are upper class

65 and the renters lower, more complicated than to say that the owners are the capitalists and the renters the workers. Class in the US is much more convoluted than that. For one thing, renters and owners are both workers, sometimes with not much income disparity between them.

The conflict between renters and owners is one of the many territories where the dynamics of class are played out in an intimate way. It is an arrangement whereby class sentiments are produced and performed. Class is given a psychological and spatial existence through the same machines.

66 Class Relativity

The idea of class has troubled me for a long time. Well, more than just me. Marx’s definition of a group of individuals who share a similar relationship to the means of production is not really, or no longer, a useful one. There are only a few people who own enough resources to not work. The rest of us, because we can’t, or think we can’t, feed and house and clothe ourselves, are forced to sell our labor in trade for these things. Sure, you are right, it is mostly our serial desire for the newest new commodity instead of ‘needs’ that serves as a trap and compensation for a life of laboring for someone else’s profit. Still, the point is that most of us are workers. And, most of us are bosses at the same time. This is the service economy critique of the Marxist theory of class (Frow 1995).

If you want to talk about class in America you must also deal with the popular conception of that idea. If discourse is active in the production of the world it supposedly represents, then we must consider what kind of real classes we Americans are making for ourselves. We have upper, middle and lower classes. These categories are set by fuzzy and arbitrary lines of yearly income.

As simple and frustrating as this usage of class may be, there is still something right on about this notion.

I’ve written about class explicitly and implicitly at numerous points in this dissertation. What I want to suggest here is that class is relative. I mean relative not in the culturally relative sense of judging from within a particular class’ own criteria. I mean relative in the way Einstein meant relative. Relative

67 in the sense of the constitution and characteristics of affective class belongings are dependent upon how the relationship between them is established. What

I’m trying to say is that class doesn’t exist for-itself or even in-itself but in a relative evaluation of social position and movement. So we must talk about class machines that throw out different positions that must be occupied in relation to each other. This is what capitalism does. This is even more the case in a social formation which talks adoringly about the mechanisms of the free market. I only feel my class belonging when I come in contact with something or someone other that I can read as lower or higher than myself. Something to keep in mind, which will come up again in numerous places, is how the other is not an objective individual. That individual is objectified within the matrix of class desires.

I don’t loose my addiction to Frow here, to the notion of class belonging being produced through all sorts of objects and technologies such as specialty coffees (Roseberry 1996) or micro-brew beer. It just gets twisted a bit. Now when you talk about class productions, it becomes necessary to see the multiple positions and relationships between them being produced through typically micro-physical machinery. Bordieu was onto something in this regard. These class or relativity machines are wired into the matter we come in contact with.

They are also charged by the stories and fantasies we create about ourselves and others. These stories are told to one’s self or similarly affiliated individuals.

Belonging is about exclusion and ridicule.

68 Submission Games

Hopefully my main point for this section is beginning to take shape. I am trying to argue that the diffuse regimes of activity associated with a capitalist life of labor and a stylish life of communal leisure are together at odds with governmental technologies of democracy. People participate in HOAs similar to the way they play sports. They play the community by the rules. This means turning in their neighbors to the HOA. This means complaining about imperfections. In those well traveled grooves, other types of community participation are blocked. We play with the rules not because they work, they are just, or they are necessary, but simply because they are the rules (Zizek

1989; Derrida 1990; Kafka and Mitchell 1998). Paradoxically, this gives the community power at the same time it makes a mockery of itself. When we take things too seriously, we give them an aura of self-parody. In this way, participating in the HOA submission game doubly plays a complementary role to our corporately captured lives. We can feel compensated for submitting all day long by turning the submission machine loose on a neighbor. And, at the same time, we poke fun at our collective late-capitalist existence by exaggerating the importance of having the right window covering color. In the ironic community, we can feel and react to the absurdity of such mechanisms of social control.

Here is another way to think about it.

69 Energy Crisis

For the last week or so I spilled into my living room, sucked exhaustively of vitality, and crawled to the couch before I could even remove my tie. When I could muster the energy to roll a joint, I did so, and drifted off into the television or the novel Dune. I tried to watch “edutainment” as much as possible to alleviate the guilt of being too weak to fight the fatigue. So I’d watch nature shows, astronomy programs, and those sorts of slightly productive distractions.

One of my favorites came on late usually, on the Community College Network.

The program is called “Introduction to Philosophy” and starred the likes of

Richard Rorty, Benjamin Lee, Hubert Dreyfus, John Searle and a host of others talking about philosophy from Plato to the post-modernists. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I knew nothing substantial about Socrates until one

Tuesday night. I had no idea he was such a radical, that he was imprisoned for his ideas, that he eventually chose death over renouncing his methodology. The funny thing is, as I was watching the program I thought to myself that Socrates would be a radical philosopher even today, many so called progressive years later. What struck me the most about Socrates was his respect for the encounter, his desire to create ideas through combat.

I took in this drive-thru persona of Socrates, rented it a space in my neurons somewhere. I liked the idea of leaving the desk and library and classroom, the routine places of knowledge, to wander around and develop a mind in encounters with others. Come to think of it, the Socratic Method has a

70 lot in common with anthropological research. There are crucial differences, of course. Socrates, as far as I understand it, engaged in conversations with people and questioned their concepts and precepts. He challenged them instead of trying to interpret and represent. He wanted to learn from his exposure to others instead of sealing off exposure behind the attempt to find out what people know. Knowledge emerged in the combat rather than trying to apply theories or deduce the secrets of a way of life. Socrates encountered people, and made life happen. Anthropologists tend to be passive.

Please keep in mind here that I am no authority on Socrates, and see him in a Deleuzian way. I mean, as Deleuze once said of his own schooling, by

“conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). This is why I love

Deleuze and Guattari so desperately. They allow me to say backed by a French postie posse: who cares if what I’m saying is true of Socrates, it works for me and that’s all that matters.

So, there I was wandering around some master planned community while the persona of a perversely pregnant balding bearded man in a toga was wandering around my thoughts. “Wouldn’t a toga feel down-right comfy about now?” Socrates asked me. A moment later, you know how experience just cruises from one moment to the next, I saw someone. I was on a “site

71 inspection” of the community, so my presence was legitimate, official even. I think I lost the artificial aura of legitimacy, however, when I pulled a bit of

Socrates out of my hat and double-timed it over to the unsuspecting pedestrian.

She was walking her dog, a shimmering silver Weimeraner, and I saw my “in.”

Weimeraner owners typically love their dogs. They are a rare breed, expensive, with distinct personalities. How do I know this? That’s funny. I was in office hours with Professor Anna Simons at UCLA, talking to her and a few other students from our honors seminar in research methodology. One of the students mentioned the photo of her dog tacked to the office wall. The conversation was trivial and annoying at the time. I sat like a dormant robot waiting to spring into scribbling action upon hearing some key insight about research methods. Still, somehow I remember her dog, I remember things about Weimeraners (except how to spell it) more than I remember the key insights about methodology she undoubtedly tossed my drooling direction. So, now I’m approaching this Wiemeraner and its owner, and the irony hits me. Dr.

Simon’s dog will be a perfectly perverse research ploy.

“Beautiful Weimeraner!” I say proudly and present the back of my hand to the silver snout. I didn’t even have to look at her face to feel the surprise and appreciation, but I looked anyway. When the Weimeraner got comfortable with me, I gently stroked the top of its head and began to ask its owner the customary dog questions like “what’s her name?” and “how old is she?” We talked about Weimeraners for a few minutes. I told her about Dr. Simon’s dog

72 and added that I’ve wanted one ever since. I didn’t tell her this, but, really when it comes to canines bred and used as manhunt weapons I prefer the Rhodesian

Ridgeback.

After the dog talk began to fizzle, and right when it seemed like the tethered pair would proudly prance on, I whipped out my toga. “This whole energy crisis thing is making me a little nervous.” It was on everyone’s mind lately. If you turned on the television or opened a newspaper there was some headliner about the PG&E rip off and the price gouging that was only bound to get worse. Then there were the blackouts. They really brought the shadow of crisis into our living rooms and offices.

“I know what you mean,” she said with avoiding intentions. But I pressed my best longing look upon her, to let her know I truly wanted to hear her thoughts on the matter. Probably I just looked crazy; it’s surprising she didn’t sick her dog on me. I thought the encounter had failed but she slowly began to speak. “One of those rolling blackouts hit our office just yesterday. It was so weird. I’ve been through blackouts before, of course, but only because of an accident or something. This one just seemed heavier. Not to mention that the a.c. went off and the office started to feel like a sauna. After a while, they sent us home early. I couldn’t work anyway.”

“So, they sent you home because you were exhausted and weren’t really working anyway? That sounds like a sound business decision.”

73 “Yes. I guess that’s it. They told us the other day how hard it is to just turn the lights on in the morning.”

“That’s understandable, what with the cost of power these days and all.”

I could tell the whole issue had crept into her mind as well, because now the conversation moved in a new direction. She said, “It’s hard enough at home.

My energy bill went up, but if it keeps going like they say. I don’t know. It will be hard, but I guess I can work a bit more,” and she finished with a subtle scowl on her face.

The fog began to clear into a direction. I said, “Do you have more to give? I know I don’t. I’m having my own little energy crisis.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Well, then, how could you work more?”

She didn’t expect such a blunt statement by a simple stranger. At least that is what the new patterns of wrinkles on her face signaled to me. “I don’t know. If I had to, I mean. I wouldn’t like it but I make more money than my husband. And, the bills have to get paid somehow.”

“True. But where does the energy come from? It’s not boundless, you know.”

“Some say oil and natural gas is getting scarce. But there’s enough for a while. Besides, there is always nuclear power, which is getting safer.”

“What about your energy, I mean?” I received a puzzled look instead of words. “What I mean is that you seem willing to sell your energy away to the

74 highest bidder in exchange for money which you need to pay for energy.

Doesn’t that seem strange? Some corporation in cahoots with some government agency makes a claim on a natural resource on public lands somewhere and somehow we are locked into someone else’s profit machine. Then the same corporation, because of deregulation and all, and because we have no choice in the matter, some corporation realizes it can make as much money as it wants by raising the prices just so far as we all don’t get too pissed off and become communists or something. Then, to pay for the gouged prices, we have to turn around and sell even more of our life energy away like a pack of crazed workaholics. And that’s only because we can’t imagine a world without shopping binges at the local mall and an endless parade of possessions all of which devour the earth’s natural energy to make and distribute.”

“I’m not sure about that,” she paused to gather some polite momentum.

“But you remind me of something I heard recently about how Americans are spending more and more time at work. I can’t remember, but it is some ridiculously high average, especially compared to the rest of the world. And then

I realized that I’m putting in pretty much the same time.”

“I heard the same report, I think. Or, it was something similar. Aren’t you exhausted? Aren’t you tired of working so hard?” Any minute now I expected the community’s security patrol, who I had just harped on the week before about calls of suspect characters moving about, to screech onto the sidewalk in chase of the reported conversationalist at large in the community.

75 “Of course. But I’ve got a family to feed, bills to pay, and all that.” She sounded like a mother explaining things to a child.

“Exactly. And now were smack in the middle of our circular energy crisis.

The energy crisis everyone is talking about, I think, is not only about energy produced through natural resources and what not.”

I was about to ramble on when she interrupted me. “You mean our energy, man power, right? You’re sort of making a weird kind of sense now. I work for a pretty big security company, and we’ve had all kinds of problems finding security guards lately. We can’t hire anyone because there is a labor shortage in the Bay Area. They want higher wages, benefits and all. What can we do? We pay it and then we turn around and bump up our fee the 5% allowed by contract. Then the company or association bumps up its prices to cover it. Before you know it, there’s inflation all over the place.”

“Good point. It reminds me of a couple of philosophers I read something about, Benjamin and Spinoza (Benjamin 1969; Spinoza and Curley 1994). They both argue that there is no absolute barrier between the energy of a people and that of the world. So, we are all in an energy crisis, us and the fossils. We and our world are tired from our energy being transformed and plugged into machines for producing things for our amusement and instant gratification!

We’re exhausted from serving people in ways they can serve themselves and from turning the matter and energy of our world into dead objects that sit on shelves and in hall closets!”

76 “Yeah, that’s nice. Look I should keep walking my dog. I’ve got to get home soon.”

“Obviously she doesn’t like Socrates,” I thought to myself. Despite my dismissal, I politely responded with one of the many available customary parting gestures. Then I turned back towards the other side of the street to continue checking the community for work to be done.

The embodied panic of the California energy crisis was unavoidable. It gave the media something to bank on during the spring of 2000.

Advertisements taught lessons in energy conservation. Rolling blackouts left us powerless and with little blinking clock lights that we had to keep resetting. You could feel it in the sweat dribbling down under your shirt, or see it in the dimmed lights of just about every store. There was a plea, repeated over and over, to conserve energy. It’s interesting that this plea seemed at odds with the national economy discourse of consumerism as patriotism. I mean, conserving energy would mean not making things, not keeping the malls air conditioned, etc. But this is only an apparent conflict. The real trick is to get people working more. It is a way to utilize the world’s most renewable energy source, human beings, and at the same time keep that wild energy on exhausting tracks. The movie The

Matrix uses a brilliant metaphor for this. Human beings are plugged into machines and used like batteries. It is a metaphor for the way our collective capitalist machines indeed use us as batteries. Capitalism is not only about economics. It’s about energetics (Brennan 2000). It is a mode of social control.

77 Also, the capitalist solution to the time and energy crisis is to buy more goods and services to save time and energy doing all sorts of other tasks. So we use an egg slicer instead of chopping them by hand. We have automatic coffee machines. We buy seven minute ab work-out programs. We get rebates from

PG&E when we buy a new energy efficient appliance.

We are dealing now with such an obvious aspect of control that it often gets overlooked. But Kafka was right on top of the power of fatigue. We relinquish much to others simply because we are too tired. Or, we give in because of the energy we calculate it will take to really get what we want. And, once we give in, belief will follow (Zizek 1989; Zizek 1991; Zizek 1997).

78 Actively Passive

Here are five different stories about exhaustion and apathy. First story:

One of my early interviews took this tired shape. A round curly haired woman said, “I like that I have a say in what happens around here.”

“So you go to the meetings and participate on committees and that kind of stuff?”

“Well, not really,” she said as her chin swooped toward her shoulder.

“Why not?”

“I don’t have the time. There is hardly enough time for my own family, let alone hundreds of others. Still, I like knowing that if I don’t like what is going on I can go and be heard.”

“So, does your HOA community feel… well, how do you feel about the way HOAs are run?”

“HOAs I think are more participatory, more democratic. Like the time the community got some sort of plant fungus or disease and had to be totally re- landscaped. The HOA took volunteers for a landscape committee and hired a landscape artist to draw up a preliminary plan. The plans were sent out to the homeowners and we had a meeting to get everyone’s feedback. Well, no one showed up really. So they just went with the initial plans. And even though I felt part of the process, I was really disappointed with the outcome.”

Second story:

79 Later during my manager job I asked a question to which I knew the answer. But Al was already revved up about this issue, so I thought some interesting words would spew forth if I could only hit the right trigger words. I asked him, “How is your homeowner turnout at these meetings?”

“Low. Non-existent. Bleak. Dismal.”

“Really? That bad?”

“Yeah. I mean we get a homeowner now and then who wants to complain about something, but usually we are here by ourselves.”

“Wow. That must be frustrating?”

“Absolutely. The apathy is really disheartening. And since no one shows up or pays any attention, we just get taken for granted. Here we are putting in all this time and effort–this isn’t an easy job you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And the only time anyone shows up is to complain. Well, I guess it is a good thing we don’t have anyone show up at the meeting. It sort of says we are doing our job right.” The irony is chewy. He, and other Board members, really wants apathy, even though they complain about it like it is the scourge of the community. Many Board members start off trying to get community involvement, and then they just give up. They start to just go along with it and do the Board work wanting no-one to bother them about it. They come to believe that the community works better when there is less homeowner involvement. Especially because people don’t show up if they feel good about

80 their community. It is a backwards system of valorization where less participation means a better community.

Story three:

At another Association, even the Board members had a hard time bringing themselves to meetings. They’d missed quorum often, four times of the six meetings that year. That means the meetings were canceled and association business was put on hold. My boss was quite upset about it. He wanted to drop the Association from our client list, afraid that some accusations of mismanagement would fall on our shoulders. Like she was on cue, a homeowner called that afternoon to do just that. She started off in a rage.

“This place is falling apart. You’re the management company, right? Do something about it!”

I tried to explain that as the management company we are the agents of the Board of Directors and mostly do what the Board directs us to. Basically I shifted the blame from the management company to the Board members. I’m sure my boss smirked as his virtual personality tapped into the surveillance friendly phone network. He may have been pleased, but the caller became even more frustrated. “Well, make them show up. I don’t know how, but do it. Or, get in touch with some state agency that will take over or come and disband the whole operation.”

I spoke frankly, “Ma’am, like I said, we are the agent of the Board. We do what they say and protect them as much as possible. Besides, they pay us, with

81 your money, even if they don’t show up to give us work to do. So, why would we want to get rid off them?”

Shock gasped through the little plastic holes in my hand. “And, really, ma’am, it’s your community. So I should be asking you why you don’t do something about it.” I learned this redirecting blame tactic during my training sessions with one of the most experienced and ruthless managers in the office.

“You know, one of the reasons the Board has trouble making quorum is that there is an empty spot that everyone we asked refused to fill. Making a difference, as you seem to want to, would be as easy as volunteering.”

Silence.

“Well, what do you say?”

“I served on the Board at my last residence,” she said like an ex-con talking about how she paid her debt to society. “I told myself then that I would never do that again. Besides, I’m much busier at work now. I don’t think I could do it even if I wanted to.”

Story four:

Moving on to another time and place, I asked someone who showed up a bit early to an annual meeting “Are you thinking of running?”

“Running?”

“For a spot on the Board of Directors,” I said like the prestige and import were nearly overwhelming.

“No.”

82 “Why not? There are a couple of vacancies this term.”

“Who has the time for that sort of stuff?”

Story five:

I attended several annual meetings. Six to be exact. The whole point of the annual meeting is to include the entire membership in the Association’s activities and to give the membership a chance to vote on Board member elections and other important issues. The interest, however, was always very low. Board members and managers talked about it in the halls. It became such an established fact in our daily conversations that homeowner apathy just slipped into the unspoken codes of association conduct. Instead of attending even the annual meetings, most members just sent in proxies which authorized another entity, usually the Board of Directors, to cast their votes however they see fit. The annual meeting is required by the U.S. Corporations Code and is required to have a specific quorum. Between the attendees and the mailed in proxies, seventy-five percent of the Association’s membership must be accounted for. It was usually an arduous task to attain quorum. Directors sometimes took proxies from door to door. Proxies were mailed to each homeowner four or five times. It was a scramble and often quorum was not reached.

Not reaching quorum will drive a Board crazy, since it casts a menacing shadow over the sense of community. If quorum is not reached an interesting thing happens. They just do it all over again. Except this time the percentage required for quorum drops from seventy-five to fifty percent. That’s it. There

83 are no other ramifications, except the cost required to reprint proxies and mail them multiple times.

At one annual meeting I was involved in there was additional dread heaped onto the missed quorum. One of the Board members, Janet, told me how “sick and tired” she was of being on the Board. She was quite upset to find out she had to serve on the Board another month or two because her “stupid community couldn’t even make muster.” She meant quorum. She continued to berate her constituency, “How hard is it to just write your name on a piece of paper and shove it in the self-addressed postage paid envelope? It’s pathetic.

No one cares, so why should I? I’m tired of it. I give up.”

“Don’t quit Janet. The Board needs you.”

“Yeah, of course they need me because they can’t get anyone else.”

Then words slid from off her cuff to deep in her throat. I could feel the determination when she said, “Just tell the rest of the Board that I quit. There is no way I am getting talked into re-election. Election, how can they even call it that? I’m done.”

“I’m sure everyone will miss you,” I said trying to be diplomatic, “but I will certainly convey your message.” She just hung up, and I sent an e-mail to the rest of the Board.

So there I was at the annual meeting which barely made the second attempt at fifty percent quorum and there were only about 15 people present.

This was a community with one hundred and thirty units, so the turnout was

84 obviously meager. Comparatively, however, the numbers were quite high.

Business was conducted quickly, as it usually is at these meetings, until it came time to elect of Board members. There were two vacancies on a five person

Board. The positions are for two years, that way the terms alternate and either three or two Board positions are voted on each year. As you will see shortly, to have all five come up in one year would likely spell disaster.

“We have two positions available,” the Board President beckoned to the so-called audience. “Are there any nominations?” Silence. “Come on people, show some support for your community!” His sincerity seemed confused with begging. Another long silence spread through the room.

A voice from the edge of the set apart panel of Board members answered.

It said, “Yeah,” then a weighty hesitation, “I nominate Rick Nelson for re- election.”

The President turned towards Rick and said, “What about it Rick? You up for another go?”

Rick swayed. His head bent. I heard from another Board member that

Rick was done also, but the pressure was too great. You could read the capitulation in his spine, still the words, the official signs, were not given.

“Look Rick,” the President leaned in and lowered his voice, “if you don’t do it I don’t think anyone will. And then, well, there won’t be enough Board members to have a Board and everything will fall apart.”

85 Rick didn’t speak much during the meetings, but the intensity when he simply spoke “o.k.” filled the room like a fervent sermon.

“Alright,” the President said and sat up with a spring, “now we only need one more nomination.”

“Democracy in action?” I thought to myself. All they need is two nominees who will run unopposed for two positions. And they can’t even find them. Clearly the whole voting process is more humorous than functional.

But now back to the resumed sunken silence. The whole room seemed like a high-school class after the teacher asked a difficult question. No one spoke for fear of being volunteered.

“I nominate Janet,” Rick attempted to extend the same treatment.

“But Janet isn’t even here,” one of the other Board members answered.

“Does she need to be?” the President turned and looked at me.

“No. Nothing says she has to be here for the vote,” I said. In my head I continued to think how pathetic, to use Janet’s word, it would be to desperately vote someone into office who doesn’t even bother to show up. My supervisor acknowledged my lucky guess by nodding to the Board president. My words alone meant very little.

“But, you got my e-mail, right?” I added, trying to subtly remind everyone of Janet’s firm intentions to quit the Board.

“Yes.” He quickly inserted between my statement and my next statement that could have potentially exposed the issue to the membership. Then he

86 added, with volume calculated so only the privileged few at the Board’s panel could hear, “But she could have changed her mind.” Tacked onto the end was the word “right” which became a demand rather than a question.

I gave a doubtful look.

“Absolutely,” my supervisor said in a brilliantly deceptive move. She and the President now leaned in towards each other and I could hear her whisper,

“we can always re-elect her now and then replace her later. But if we don’t find someone now, we’ll have to do this all over again. We’ll actually have to have another meeting to vote on the new appointment.”

87 Democratic Fascism

Returning to the HOAs and Democracy pamphlet, there is another section that relates to this issue. First I’d just like to comment on how telling it is that

Board members and some residents of HOAs across the country are turning to digital communities to get their fix. Of course they are, Virilio might say. Really they are more in line with the sort of teleaction that is coming to dominate human at work and at home. But back to the pamphlet, it reads:

Writer Francis Fukuyama says that ‘the revival of once- strong community institutions as civic clubs, *neighborhood associations* and churches holds the key to invigorating the nation’s spirits and economy.’ Fukuyama is quoted in a page one story in Monday’s (8/28/95) Wall Street Journal analyzing the mood of the electorate—described as disillusioned and cynical—several months after the start of the so called ‘Republican Revolution.’ Another observer quoted in the article, Rutgers University political scientist Benjamin Barber, opines that Americans are beginning to doubt their ability to make an elected democracy work effectively. ‘The underlying fear is that we can’t make it … that we’re not good enough to make democracy work.’ Barber’s comments reminded me of the view that people today are too busy with their work and family lives to participate in elected government—an observation I’ve often heard used to explain apathy and lack of interest in HOA government. Are Newt Gingrich and the other Congressional revolutionaries spending their efforts at the wrong end of government (federal), when they should be more focused on the local level in a bottom-up revolution? One could conclude that the community association level is the first place to begin working to reinvigorate the practice of American democracy, not inside the Beltway. The HOA is where American democratic and constitutional ideals are put to the test in the most basic, personal and right-next- door manner possible. In other words, if there’s trouble with the practice of democracy in America, it will be most apparent at the most local level of government, the HOA, since there’s very little bureaucracy in which to hide or cast blame.

88 I agree with much of this opinion which can be found in many places, including industry reports, political theorizing and government documents. It is an especially important idea because it points to what is at stake in my dissertation as an analysis of what is going on with American democracy. How can association living be called democratic when there is very little participation or activity?

However, there is an assumption implicit in this revitalization of American democracy argument that is troubling. It has to do with the understanding that apathy, which is conceptualized as a lack of active citizen participation in governmental affairs, is an effect of the impersonal and removed character of democratic institutions. From this model, people don’t vote or pay attention to political events, etc., because they don’t feel that they can make an impact. The solution is HOAs and other local grass-roots democratic organization. There people can participate and feel the intimate effects upon the “community” of belonging. But as many of the stories in this section document, apathy is well high in the HOA community also. To me, this signals that apathy, as an active force, is not cured by turning micro; apathy is already there, in the rhythms of our daily lives.

A board president, more infused with democratic fantasies than any other board member I met, wanted to get people’s opinions about speed bumps, a security gate and security patrol. He didn’t want the board to just make this decision without finding out what the whole membership thought. He was

89 bound by representative desires. He sent out letters to everyone, asking them to attend the next board meeting to voice their opinions. He expected democracy.

Only about forty-five members out of 249 attended. That is a very good turn out mind you. But the President didn’t think that was a good enough sample. His desire for representation could not give up. Next he sent a survey to each member that only required a check in one box or the other. They even included self-addressed postage paid envelopes, which by the way were quite costly. Still, only about 10% returned them. That’s even 20% lower than turn out for our nation’s presidential election.

When I was working through the governmentality literature in my masters, I looked at these technologies as means to generate active citizens, bringing forms responsibility to more intimate areas of our lives. Reading this section and then returning to my rather stale approach back then you would likely realize as I did that the governmentality approach misses a lot of crucial elements. One of the main problems is the reliance on the rational operation of government, that things make sense and work like they are designed to.

Things, as they say, are not always what they seem. Everyone cares about voting, even if they don’t vote. We want to be democratic. We want to live in communities that are revitalizing our spirits and economy. So little rituals of participation are set up for us. We can go to meetings. We can write our

Directors. We can call the management company. And sometimes we can feel like we actually changed something. For most people, however, the rituals are

90 community hearsay which give a sense of grass roots participation, even for those who dissociate themselves from official community activity. The rituals allow us to feel democratic, even if we don’t participate. They allow us to feel democratic especially when we don’t participate; because participation is so circumscribed it is not really desired or needed. The vote exists to make us feel good about not having a voice, even in our local issues. In a HOA there are fantasies of choice all about which make us feel better about choosing within narrow limits. The issue isn’t one of being forced to choose within a limited range, but of wanting to. It makes decisions much easier. It makes common interest possible. This desire for direction also materializes in the sense of freedom from having to do chores, yard work, etc. Similarly, feelings of community are enjoyed through the very lack of interaction and corralling into standard channels of communication. Democratic desires are in the service of some other program.

Giving people a model of democracy and a standard for communal activity has counter-effects. It is simply too easy to follow the model and become passive. It points to the way members want others to shape their community experience for them. The funny thing is that when the board went ahead and put in a couple of test speed bumps, the calls and letters poured in about how annoying it was, and what right does the board have to do such things.

Is this a pervasive laziness? Are the masses distracted or duped? I don’t think this is the right way to approach the issue. It is not a passive submission.

91 It isn’t a masochistic hysteria. Neither is it an ideological snare. There is no illusion or ignorance. It is a matter of desire. At some level, HOA residents, and

Americans in general, desire apathy. Too many of us want our choices to be directed by others. Apathy is already local. It is about microformations, microphysics, attractors and desires, microtextures of our daily lives. This is the way all of us actively exploit the third world with our precious sweat shop sneakers and with our polluting wastefulness and with our arming of dictators.

It is also the way we exploit hierarchical categories, such as race and gender and class, within our national borders.

Members seem to want others to take care of the community for them, perhaps the same way they let themselves be swept into the hands of others.

However, they also want the ability to participate if they choose to. Most of the time they simply choose to relinquish this ability. But they get all puffed up when the speed bump is in or the violation letter arrives or when they want to use the HOA to get even with some ‘unruly’ neighbor. Perhaps they want the pressure of the group (Durkheim), through the HOA, to give their own desires and interests force enough to smelt others around them. The fantasy of a democratic community gives intensity to this group belonging. This, it seems to me, is why the HOA community is crossed by democratic desire, because it makes fascist desire possible.

92 Racist Submission Games

I have heard many, particularly symphonic in the various forms of media, sing a popular refrain against sweat shops and their horrible labor conditions. J.

C. Penny’s was just in the news about their sweat shop clothing. Such things should not exist, they seem to be saying. Still, many of us are selectively blind to the way we wear such exploitation every day. We certainly enjoy the reduced cost afforded by exploitative labor, a phrase that seems redundant, and are frightened by the possibility of inflation.

It makes me think of Baudriallard’s point about Watergate, that the publicity of such a scandal gave credibility to a system of government that can police itself. Baudrillard talks about “scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress” (Baudrillard and Poster 1988: 172-3). When talking about sweat shops, the reality principle in distress is perhaps the privilege of white

Americans. It is in distress precisely because globalized capital is slowly bringing others into the middle fold. But our privilege is at the same time committing murder all around the world, causing suffering without even a thought. We don’t bother caring because we are too wrapped up in the economy of our own lives.

The distributions of capital, we make ourselves feel better, are not an accident.

There is a right deep within our privilege. We’ve earned it. This is the moral principle we must regenerate in order to live with ourselves. It is the tautology of merit: those who have deserve it, for one reason or another. So it is

93 interesting that our collective and scandalous fantasies about sweat shops, where people work too hard, for too long, for too little, are exactly where we make ourselves feel better about working hard to get where we are.

Baudriallard again, “capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public morality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the order of capital …” (173).

We like to hear stories about uncovered sweat shops and scandals with

Kathy Lee Gifford because it lowers the threshold of evil and makes us think that the system against exploitative labor is in place and working. Remember on

April 29th, 1996, how Charles Kernaghm, a labor lobbyist, told a congressional committee that five year old girls earn only thirty-one cents an hour and work seventy-five hours a week making Kathy Lee sportswear. On her morning show,

Kathy Lee Gifford held back tears and denied the accusations. She called it a

“vicious attack.” People seemed concerned with Kathy Lee’s feelings. Then it was reported that Kathy Lee clothing line was made in a New York City sweat shop, right under our noses on 38th street. With this evidence, and so close to home, Kathy Lee began to accept the allegations. She then pledged to speak out against unethical labor practices and shut down her sweat shop in NYC. But not the one in China. And not the more recent El Salvador operation.

Thanks to Kathy Lee’s embarrassment, her recuperating image, we can all feel a little better about deadly exploitation. The problem is being discussed.

94 Sweat shops are being exposed and eradicated. Now we can flip to another news story as we slip into our “Made in China” loafers or flats. And now we can look elsewhere for evil while our own desires and effects are overlooked. When

I think I’d look good in that silk shirt, I don’t have to trouble myself with the guilt of women being raped and workers being beaten to make it. We do not need to be sensitive (Serres 1997) to such things, there are people on the job.

Now finally to the story I’m dying to tell you. So there I am, right, sitting in an Annual meeting of some association or another and this homeowner stands up to make a comment. There were a few other members present, but they didn’t even outnumber the seven Board members who looked crooked at him as he took possession of the floor. Somehow I just knew he was going to say something important. I think it was his strong posture and the subtle nervousness I read in the repetitious movement of his fingers. “I have a problem with the landscaping company.”

“Join the club,” one of the board members said, expecting, perhaps willing him to have the usual concerns about performance and efficiency. A few others nodded or puffed or laughed a bit.

“Well, I’m upset about the labor practices.” Believe me, people’s faces got noticeably tauter. “I’ve talked to a lot of the workers on the landscape crew,” the Presidents brow pushed down as if to say “why would anyone do such a thing.” “And, I’ve discovered that they are being paid well under minimum wage and are not receiving benefits for full-time work!” I was riveted to his

95 words and his face. I’d talked to many workers all around the Bay Area and was similarly pissed off. For example, the landscaping contract for this company broke down the charges by category. They charge thirty-three dollars per hour of labor for each landscaper. That outrageous figure is what propelled me into communities to find out how much of this the workers actually see. It’s not even close. When I asked my boss about it, he joked that the increased cost is for getting new truck loads of immigrants. What an asshole.

The courageous homeowner continued, “I think the Association should only do business with reputable companies, who offer their employees fair wages and benefits. It’s only right. And if we don’t do something about it, we’re just encouraging people to continue exploiting Mexican workers.” He stopped under the pressure of the stone faces of the Board.

Diplomatically, which is the usual means of dismissal, the President said,

“thanks for brining your concerns to us. We’ll look into those issues in our executive session, which follows this meeting. But I’d just like to assure you that the landscaping company we use is licensed and insured.”

“Yeah but …”

“We have a lot of business to get to tonight, so we need to move on. I’m sure you understand.”

“Why can’t you address the issue now? What are you trying to hide?”

96 “Look Joe! We got your letter about this a few months ago and we talked about it during one of our meetings. You know we decided to stay with the same landscape company, so what are you trying to accomplish here, huh?”

In a much less hostile tone, one of the other Board members grabbed a conversational space with a flash, “It’s just that we have to think about the whole community. You know people find it hard as it is to pay the assessment.

Now we have this major street repair coming up. We just can’t afford to go shopping for a new landscaper. They were the cheapest when we hired them and we got a low rate even for them. Were just after what’s in the best interest of the community Joe. It’s not like were racist or anything.”

“It’s still not right. We’re taking advantage of a desperate situation. We should be willing to pay more to do the right thing. And if you don’t,” his changed pronouns assaulted everyone in the room, “then you are being racist, whether or not you admit it.”

I watched his accusation hit the target with rippling indignation. Some

Board members averted their faces, others wrinkled their brows, one slapped the table and the one guy in the corner who always sat away from the group and never said a word just sat there like he was daydreaming about palm trees and piña coladas. The funny thing was he was the only white guy on the whole board. There was a white woman, who was squirming in her chair during the whole conversation. The rest of the Board was comprised of two Asian gentlemen, a black woman, a Latina, and the Board President himself was

97 Latino. At least that is how I did my epistemic violence upon them by heaping them into categories. You don’t have to be white to take advantage of racist machines, to become accustomed to the benefits of racially coded chains of submission.

“You don’t know what your talking about Joe,” the Board president started to yell. “You’re too busy looking after your little brown circus that you can’t even get behind your own community.”

“They are my community!”

“Yeah, well that’s exactly the problem. You’re just like everyone else around here. You just expect the Association to take care of you, but you don’t give anything in return. If you think this job is so easy, why don’t you try to do it? No, you’re too busy looking after your own.”

Needless to say, the encounter ended badly. The Board talked later how lucky they were that the off-duty cop they hired as community security was there. He took charge when violence threatened to move out of the realm of sound waves and escorted Joe out of the meeting.

Later at the executive session, Board members helped each other cope with some undoubtedly confusing feelings. Several were silent, but most of them supported the President and thanked him for defending the group like that.

For a few minutes statements of incredulity were passed around: “I can’t believe

…” and “Did you see how he …” They blew the whole thing into surrealism, and that was just the point. It was the preface to the ridiculing he would soon

98 receive. They denounced him with laughter. They threw a little jester hat on him in their memories, as he danced around joking about justice. Approving laughter congealed around the President’s “little brown circus.” It became the name of the event. Whenever anyone talked about what happened, they said,

“Oh, you mean the little brown circus.” Or, anytime Joe was mentioned someone added “the little brown circus.” It became his shadow, darkening the blinding issue now carried in even the mention of his name.

They denounced him; of course they did. “He’s Mexican.” That made him put the interests of other Mexicans before the interests of the community. That’s the logic of culture and community doing the work of racism in local interactions.

A Mexican could never truly belong because culture sets them apart, bestows a different set of beliefs and desires. The model minorities who served on the

Board and were good members, they seemed to be saying, were those who locked those things away when they leave the house.

There was a sweat-shop right there in their front yards, and they tucked it awkwardly away. Racism and class exploitation were rationalized, their reality principles secured for days to come. Immoral morality was regenerated. For the workers, that’s just their lot in life. For some, their lot is just to serve others in economic desperation. And here this lot takes literal force in bodies being drained to maintain the formalized matter of another’s lot. Property, of course, is worked by the propertyless. Real property, particularly in a full service

99 community, is a crucial status marker, a sign of service, a display of superiority.

Race is a function, but a micro-function, alive in the whims of everyday desires.

100 Capitalism as a Social Machine

In the Fall of 2002 I was invited to speak at the colloquium lecture series at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Of course I snatched up the offer, probably seeming over eager. It was an extraordinary honor for me, and just writing about it here makes my head swell will joyful feelings of grandeur. After I gave my talk, which was composed of several sections from this project which you have or will read, a moderator spoke about my work. Bregje van Eeklan was constructive with criticism and praise on a number of key points. One that struck me, and that flashed across my neurons this morning while I was reviewing a few sections, was that she not so subtly accused me of being a not so subtle economic reductionist. Well, you probably know how these things go, questions and comments stacked up on each other like a pile up on a foggy superhighway. I couldn’t recover that tread in the discussion. But since some of you reading this will likely react in a similar way—hey, sometimes I even react to myself this way—I figure addressing this issue here is crucial.

Here is my answer: “well maybe” but also “no way!” I say “well maybe” because I just can’t get past the notion that capitalism has an overwhelming determining force in our world. Surely you have seen this in the sections you have been exposed to thus far. Surely you will continue to see it. But, I also answer “no way!” because I am not an economic reductionist. You see, for me capitalism is much more than an economic structure, much more than a set of

101 social and material devices designed for the extraction of profit. To me, the mechanisms, procedures, techniques of capitalism, which give such intense shape to our lives and are so tight upon our heads, can be read with equal productiveness in the context of social control. When you read this paper, keep this point in mind. Capitalism is a social machine.

102 Ideology, Power and Affect

How does one compare paradigms of power? It’s dangerous; there are pit traps underfoot. In a previous draft I put my gooey ink pen to compacted pulp and let the classic approach take hold. Homage was paid to the great thinkers, those pillars which give shape to our conceptual territory, the compass points of our thinking. My pen furiously affected spectral traces upon the paper, like a medium waving about and banging a knee on the bottom of a tabletop.

Pages are written; a chain of ideas develop along a different vector. I write a historicized narrative of how Deleuze and Guattari advanced upon Foucault who advanced upon Althusser who advanced upon Gramsci and Lacan who advanced upon Marx and Freud who sit at the start like little old ladies who swallowed flies.

That’s probably what you’re expecting, minus the lady and fly of course. I added other insights, and personae, and high stepped in front of it all to try to bring this parade boisterously before your bleachers. I would have, I sort of still want to, but that damn Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari as well. They just won’t behave.

When it was Foucault’s turn to march on by, which for me didn’t take long, he gave me a “tsk tsk tsk” from his seat on the curb and hollered at me:

“Think man! Don’t you remember anything I said about the author?” I do remember, although it’s natural to forget how thought and voice emerge beyond the author in the forceful sway of a historically situated social formation

103 (Foucault and Blanchot 1987). It is easy to be dazzled by the author who is really just the voice box, just a body prepared for possession (Foucault 1984).

Then Deleuze and Guattari, with some words of encouragement from

Bhaktin (1984) and Kristeva (1986), thought it was all a carnival, not a parade.

Every time I tried to put them in line they hurled slogans at me and cursed me for getting waylaid in a history of ideas. “And, you know damn well that kind of linear progression is bunk!” Thomas Kuhn (1976) nodded his consent to this dissent, at least with the last part about paradigms not advancing up the avenue but rather rupturing and recuperating.

Crumbled papers linked folds into a theoretical sculpture on my floor. I want to give up before I have really even begun. But that is just because a desire to dazzle, to be loved, is often overwhelming. More than be loved, I want to change the world. I want to be one of those authors who channel the emergent rather than heave another post onto the walls of the corral. This reminds me of Marx’s famous call to change the world rather than simply interpret it (Marx and Engels 1998). And in a different way brings me to the point that I’m really trying to get at with all of this. That point is that writing is about inscription rather than, or at the very least in addition to, representation.

Theories, after all, tend to make their models come to life (Deleuze and Parnet

1987). “Remember,” Mel Tapper told me while we were coasting down the slope in the E.P. Schoch Hall, “a notion of poverty as an economic category, rather

104 than a moral one, is something Marx’s writings brought into existence. It wasn’t something he simply described” (for a similar point see Cvetkovich 1992).

Another way to get to this point is to ask: by what criteria can one paradigm prove better than another? Thinking about this question in terms of the previous paragraph, empirical criteria makes only a kind of twisted sense. I mean, it’s really not good enough to say, as I often outrageously did in graduate seminars and other spaces of academic enunciation, that Foucault got it right and Marx or Gamsci or Habermas didn’t—na na na na na—because Foucault’s ideas of power corresponds more accurately to the reality of the modern situation. That might be part of it, but it surely misses the crucial insights of the powerfully productive relationship between knowledge and society (Foucault

1977; Foucault 1980; Hindess 1996). More important for me are considerations about what is being produced (Rabinow 1986).

This is my theoretical legacy, handed to me by Foucault and Deleuze and

Guattari. The reason why I am spending so much time up front with it is that such a perspective—that knowledge and discourse are productive of selves, bodies, cultures—is the foundation upon which my conceptual choices must be made. As Felix Guattari (1995: 11) says in the context of psychoanalytic theory,

“it is no longer a question of determining whether the Freudian Unconscious or the Lacanian Unconscious provide scientific answers to the problems of the psyche. From now on these models, along with others, will only be considered in terms of the production of subjectivity …” Writing is a production rather than a

105 representation or an interpretation. As such it is a part of the real, it is incarnated in the multiple and interconnected systems which form many domains of organization, rather than a part of some parallel plane of representation.

They form networks, not layered structures (Castells 1996; Taylor 2001). From this approach, concepts should be evaluated based on what they can do. What do they enable to exist? What do they help to persist? What emerges? What is being blocked, scattered or condensed? Brian Massumi (1988), who will shortly emerge as the key figure in this essay on affect, says “the question is not: is it true? But, does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think?

What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in a body?”

You might think I’ve lost it, if only in the sense that this section is going on six paragraphs old and the idea of power or ideology or affect seems yet to arrive. This is no attempt to be fashionably late. They are already there, camouflaged a bit perhaps, but they’re there none the less. In fact, what I’ve been talking about is not only how to compare theories, paradigms and concepts. What I’m really talking about is affect. Because affect, the way that

Massumi (2002) uses it, has a number of distinct and crucial correlations. Affect is about dispositions and the potential that exists in excess of any event. It is the hinge between ideas and matter. It is the name given to the stuff of connective syntheses and is a point at which distinctions between nature and culture make no sense.

106 What Massumi was talking about in that last quote is affect. In this context, what is important about affect is how it is a concern with the ethics of creativity. That is, affect is about the capacity to release force and submit to force. It is about seeing and engaging in the world as a “hand to hand combat of energies” (Deleuze and Guattari in Massumi 1992). There will be more, of course, much more. But what would be the point of using affect as an object of analysis to describe such influences but pay no attention to my own affect?

Well, if this isn’t clear now, the end will loop back to the beginning and probably muddle it up all over again.

What is affect? After perusing several pulpable and digital dictionaries, I came across three key ways to define affect. I’m not sure about you, but dictionaries scare. I use them grudgingly because I always find out that there is more to what I am saying than I think I’m saying. Then I feel stupid. Hey, that’s affect! It is one of the most common notions of affect anyway, one of the ways to use the word most of us don’t need a dictionary for. As a noun, like above, affect refers to the “conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes.” These connections also float over to affect used as a verb, meaning to cause a strong emotion. That is another prominent usage.

Another way to use affect I think most people use, although I certainly confuse it with effect now and then, is as a transitive verb. As such affect means “to produce a material influence upon or alteration in (paralysis affected his limbs)” or “to act upon (as a person or a person’s mind or feelings) so as to effect a

107 response: influence.” In this use, the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary goes on to suggest that “affect implies the action of a stimulus that can produce a response or reaction.” That’s a fine addition, just slipping stimulus in there. I hope such a link will become a useful step in the path I’m hiking here. There are two less visited ways to use the word affect as a verb. Soap bubbles affect roundness. That is, affect can mean “to tend toward.” It can also be used to describe a performance in the sense of making a display or pretending to feel or think something. I often affected attentiveness when spoken at by the bosses just like clever students sometimes affect a state of fascination while listening to my lectures.

For the most part, when someone takes time to conceptualize affect, to argue for its place in social analysis, it becomes a matter of feelings and emotions, like our first two definitions. To take just one example from anthropology, when Margaret Trawick (1990) deftly argues for an approach to kinship that is more affective, she means we should adopt feelings, emotions and desires as key units of analysis. She tries “to show that kinship organization is as much a matter of feeling as it is of thinking, or, to use more scholarly words, that kinship is a matter of affect and free form aesthetics as it is a matter of cognition and social regulation” (pg. 118). Obviously this is just one party guest, more will arrive shortly. At this point, however, I want to avoid leaving you with the impression that there is something wrong with that approach. I agree

108 wholeheartedly that emotions and feelings are crucial. In fact, I want to get there as well, but through a different version of affect.

I feel that cultural anthropology has multiply authored at leas one semi- systematic approach to culture and affect. Interestingly, it took a while and much struggle by various writers before such questions of emotion and sentiment were put on the anthropological and ethnographic map. In my mind it is bound intimately to the emergence of the cultural constructivist paradigm and concern with the cultural construction of the self (Lutz and White 1986; Epstein

1992). Against the emotional universalism of psychoanalysis and less thoughtful versions of Eurocentric abstraction—where European particulars come to stand in for the universal—some anthropology heavyweights did battle. Roy D’Andrade

(1984), for example, brings a developing anthropological approach to symbols and meanings into the fold of his “cultural meaning systems” which direct actions and evoke feelings. “Ideas, feelings and intentions are all activated by symbols and are thus part of the meanings of symbols” which are directed by cultural systems of meaning. The signifying force of culture is active in the affective; culture constructs emotion (Lutz and White 1986). Geertz (1975) argues similarly, that Balinese passions are as much culturally shaped as the symbolic forms used to manipulate those passions for political ends. In a kind of symbolic interactionist way (Blumer 1969), or a revamped psychoanalytic interpretive move, symbols which are overfull with cultural meanings provide our mental and emotional foundation.

109 Please allow me to continue rambling a bit and in the process spell out this nearly canonic position in cultural anthropology. Emotions are a set of communicative symbols (Gerber 1985). Michele Rosaldo (1980) then tells us that “affects […] are no less cultural and no more private than beliefs (c.f. Lutz and White 1986). If cultural anthropologists are right, it would mean that the human brain is malleable enough to be configured through culture in such locally particular ways that there can be said to be no universal psychology. With this in mind, we are directed to map out indigenous psychologies (Heelas and Lock

1981) or ethnopsychologies (White and Kirkpatrick 1985). Others have called into question the opposition of emotion and cognition as two separate domains of experience, which emerges from the contingencies of western history rather than some human property (Lutz 1988; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). Here the constructivist approach begins to focus on the discourse of emotion itself, examining the domain of emotion in situated speech acts (See Searle 1969).

With the hoards of perpetually encroaching universalists, such as evolutionary psychologists, who want to read emotion as adaptive strategies in the evolutionary sense (Wright 1994; Workman and Reader 2004), it is no wonder that cultural anthropologists must continue to defend cultural territory in volumes like Identity and Affect (Campbell and Rew 1999).

However, as I like to talk about in my Introduction to Cultural

Anthropology courses, there are many versions of the relationship of productive culture and the self, psychology and emotion. One seems to use ideology as its

110 constructive force. Another draws from Bordieu’s habitus such at Tarawick. A third perspective is rooted in a Foucauldian take on power and affect. In the end, none of these versions of affect will do what I want it to do. I’ll explain why as I hack through each and recycle the bits into a new foundation. At this point

I’d simply like to add an organizational comment. What I am really trying to do in this section is to use this limited notion of affect I have been setting up thus far to trace out the different conceptual positions with regard to power which this essay begun by asking. This is not only an author’s craftiness, however, but is based in a firm conviction that power and affect are conceptually entwined, if in some topsy-turvy ways.

In my limited reading, Marx never discussed in a systematic way the relationship between ideology and affect. Still, recognizing Marx’s notion of the individual as subject to ideologies, certain extrapolations I think can be made. In the Marxist approach, ideology is the answer to the question of why the working classes would continue to live alienated and exploited lives wrenched from the means of production (Marx, Engels et al. 1978). That is, we are duped, are cuckolded into a now famous “false consciousness.” So, by extension, it can be said that ideology can also bring us to a state of false sentiment. Affect is personal and individual. It is pre-ideological, which is why there is something there to be truly liberated from the grasp of ideological mechanisms. Ideology reroutes affect, forces displacement, makes false associations, and distracts. In fact, this has to be at the root of Marx’s idea, for it is in the act of tricking the

111 working classes to accept or actually want their lot in life that individuals are encouraged to attach themselves to a certain vision of reality or the order of things. But a natural and untainted affect still exists clawing for expression beneath our confused surfaces. This is similar to the way people feel about expressing the real you. It is also similar to the Freudian notion of drives which are repressed by reality checks in a harsh world (Rycroft 1995).

It works the other way as well. Marxist politics, as I alluded above and as

Tony Bennet (1990) argued, relies upon the idea that as ideologies are exposed, as the falseness of peoples thinking of the world is lifted, outrage will surge in them and force attachments to the struggle against the forces of oppression.

So, ideology is necessarily linked to affect as emotion. This can be seen in

Marx’s writing style itself which uses dramatic language and often eloquent rhetoric to affect his readers (Cvetkovich 1992). Cvetcovitch points out that

Marx was clearly aware of the political potential in the way affect can be mobilized to direct the energies of a people.

It isn’t until Althusser and his brilliant essay on Ideology and Ideological

State Apparatuses, I think, that some of the above formulations begin to take an explicit form (Althusser 1972). For me, the sort of post-structuralist critique of the autonomous individual takes off with Althusser. First of all, Althusser goes some way in unshackling ideology from the mode of production. Although it is still determined by capitalist economics in the last instance (also see Poulantzas

1973; Poulantzas 1978), ideology takes on a more material force. It has a

112 “relative autonomy” and can influence material and social conditions. But what is more interesting for this essay is the way that Althusser tries to bring some of

Lacan’s (1977) ideas into relationship with Marxist ones. Here is where

Althusser’s contribution to the study of ideology is golden. For he takes the

Lacanian idea that the “unconscious is structured like a language” and merges it with the manipulative force of ideological language (Althusser 1984). So,

Althusser comes up with a notion of the subject who is touched by ideology. In other words, it works not only on the conscious level of ones beliefs about reality, but shapes us all at the subconscious level, at the depths of our most intimate motivations and proclivities.

In this at least partly psychoanalytic approach, the unconscious is a combination of raw biological instincts and mental representations attached to instincts. Grosz (1994) suggests that even Freud is open to an interpretation where “the body, its drives and affects, are caught up in a complex web of psychosexual, cultural and symbolic processes that ‘re-write’ or ‘re-inscribe’ the physical body in social terms.” One of the things to notice about this quote by

Grosz is the way she attributes Freud with giving a sort of material force to culture. This is similarly true of Althusser’s notion of ideology, since it exists conceptually right at the brackets of what is physical, biological, instinctual, material and what is symbolic and ideational. This something to hold onto with regards to ideology and affect, something I want actually to push further. That

113 will come shortly. For now I’d like to talk about one reason why this approach to ideology and affect can be appealing.

One reason is that it seems to me to stand between two opposing approaches and balances the two. It acknowledges the influence of biological functions, presented as pre-discursive and universal, while not giving these forces a strictly determining force. At the same time, it acknowledges the constitutive force of ideas. They meet where symbols, ideas, etc. draw that natural stuff into culturally proscribed patterns. Medical anthropologists

Klienman and Good (1985), for example, write about the interactionist nature of affect. They say that “affect (feeling) is integral to human nature. But even though we may all ‘feel’ the same psycho-biologically produced patterns of autonomic arousal and neuroendochrine dysregulation, our unique biography and interpersonal context and the particular collective representations of our culture lead to divergent social productions and cultural constructions of specific affects.

Even when each of us feels depressed, the perception, interpretation, and labeling (the construction) of experience are distinctive, and in that sense what we actually ‘feel’ is different” (pg. 476; see pg. 114 also). It is the interactionist nature of affect, of the outward and inward movement between public and private, which determines human experience (Also see Averill 1980; Averill 1980;

Ekman 1980). “We can regard universal psychological and social (loss, powerlessness, failure) processes as providing the substrate with which cultural norms react to create affect as a public and private form of experience” (477).

114 What I like about the last quote is that the interaction between public and private, culture and nature, becomes the substrate for human experience.

Neither biology or culture come to occupy a privileged position in that regards

(Also see Epstein 1992).

It is hard to ignore the compelling nature of this position. Many like this middle ground. Heck, even I like it despite it cutting against my Foucauldian patterning. But I’ll try to have my cake and eat it too in a moment when I re- arrange these concepts and present this interaction in another light.

I can’t leave this discussion of ideology behind without talking at least briefly about Fredrick Jameson (Jameson 1981; Jameson 1991). He provides an exemplary bit of dazzling theorizing and writing in The Political Unconscious and

Postmodernism. For Jameson, a text, ideology, carries with it an affective charge. At the same time, and because of this, such ideological texts are the means through which affect can be managed (Cvetkovich 1992 makes similar points here). Here is where Jameson gets clever. For in Jameson’s vision of postmodernism, where surface and disjuncture rule the day, contemporary ideologies do not have the unifying gravity to draw us into an affective relationship with our world. Instead, the fractured and flat postmodern subject enacts the liberation of anxiety and other feelings, but because they are free- floating and impersonal. Thus, an emotionally vague existence is a crucial element in the reproduction of the late capitalist social formation (Jameson 1991:

72).

115 One of the useful things about Jameson’s ideology is that it begins to push us beyond the problematic of the subject. What I mean is that Jameson sees the relationship between ideology and affect in postmodernism to be wrenched from the terrain of individual psychology and more akin to what Lyotard calls

“intensities” (Lyotard, Readings et al. 1993). Well, so what? So what is that

Jameson is in a way directly addressing one of the Foucauldian challenges to the concept of ideology. In Power/Knowledge, Foucault (Foucault 1980: 118) says:

The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. For these three reasons, I think that this is a notion that cannot b used without circumspection. Beginning with the criticism that ideology refers to a subject, there are three ways that I read this. First is that ideology assumes a subject in the sense of a calculating and coordinating agent behind the messages. This puts a model of power in an interest based framework, which Foucault criticizes in The History of

Sexuality. And, as will hopefully become clear shortly, this formula contains a classic conceptual paradox that ultimately I hope to use affect in a sidestepping dance. Second is very similar, and strikes me every time I use the concept of ideology. With ideology it always seems that there is an agent, a subject behind the power. Speaking with recourse to a “dominant ideology” creates some sort

116 of transcendent subject, a soul or subjective essence of a social form (Massumi

1992: 113). Third is that it assumes a subject of ideology that is at least to a large extent pre-constituted with respect to the ideological event.

So, going back to the criteria of evaluation, what is the benefit of moving past ideology in this way? This is a tough one, which will get sorted out a bit more as we go along, but in brief it has to do with reconceptualizing the locus of desire and affect and by doing so freeing creativity from the minds of individuals who are paradoxically subject to ideology. In other words, in versions of power that rely upon the individual actor and draw upon notions of interest, as ideology ultimately does, the programs of power transfer themselves from words to thought and the formation of sentimental attachments. Then they move back and forth across this circuit. The potential source of resistance or difference lies outside it all in the magical domain of consciousness. Or, an individual is so enmeshed in ideologies that one becomes a relay station for its message and point of operation.

A crucial problem is that flux and creativity are missing from the picture.

This is partly the persistent issue of structure and agency. Although he doesn’t really make it there, what Jameson seems to be after is a way to understand culture and power without relying upon a notion of ideology that works through statements and interpretation as the way to visualize the relationship between the individual and society as well as between agency and structures of power.

Well, at least that is what I want him to be after.

117 For Foucault, those deep and mysterious elements of autonomous subjectivity which drive our unique and potentially radical readings, interpretations, reactions are also produced within a set of social techniques

(Foucault 1977; Foucault 1980; Foucault 1982). This doesn’t make the problem disappear. Rather I think it intensifies it. In as much as Foucault holds onto the subject, which even though produced and shaped to the core is still a primary object of analysis and privileged locus of social activity, he can be read in this pessimistic way. Although it is not my reading, many have done so (Dreyfus and

Rabinow 1982; Copjec 1994; Kelly, Foucault et al. 1994; McCumber 2000). What

Jameson’s move, within which he draws upon Lyotard and to me is very reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari, allows us to do is to make the stuff between an object of analysis rather than relegating it to a non-place where what is between is taken for granted. What I mean by this is that for so long we, as anthropologists and social scientists, have been in an interpretive paradigm that perhaps we have come to assume we know how things mean, that meaning is the key to culture and power. This, I think, makes us overlook the technical aspects of linguistic influence. It makes us overlook the ways power, organization and control work beyond the linguistic. This is a major contribution of Foucault, which is again pushed even further by the likes of

Deleuze and Guattari. Entrenched in our academic minds is the idea that power and ideology works because it means something. What we are asking now is whether or not it means something because it does the tangible work of power.

118 Another point made in the earlier quote, and one that Foucault and

Foucauldians make repeatedly about ideology, has to do with the idea that ideology always seems contrasted to something like truth. Now, you can already tell from my opening few paragraphs that this won’t fly with me. In the classic

Marxist sense, ideology is false, thus producing false consciousness, because they are misrepresentations or distortions or distractions from the real workings of a capitalist world. Its machinations in this way derive from the drive of capitalists, and in a more abstract way, from capitalism itself, to reproduce the system of privileges and flow of power in a particularly inequitable way. This is what Foucault means by his third problem with ideology, by the way, that it almost always seems to stand in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure. Althusser and Poulantzas and other neo-

Marxists move to the edge of this, but not beyond this, as they see capitalism as the driving social force, determining things in the last instance. It isn’t until

Hindess and Hirst (1977) and Foucault that ideology can become autonomous, a more chaotic, complex and less unified determining force. It isn’t until then that ideology and other cultural forms are released from being expressions of some deep structure.

Trying to get back to the question of truth, what this also allows us to see is that ideology isn’t only on the side of the capitalists and the reproduction of capitalist economy. The counterpoints become their own sort of ideology. It is no longer a question of false representations being smashed by true ones and

119 liberating the true and interested revolutionary subject. When ideology is freed from the economic base, we can see that the attempts to lure the workers into a revolutionary fury are ideological as well. This, I think, is one of the crucial contributions of Gramsci (1992) and the group of scholars who try to think politically with the notion of hegemony (Williams 1977; Laclau and Mouffe 1985;

Hall 1988). Hegemony must be enacted, even if it is a counter-hegemony with the arousal of a revolutionary subject as its goal. So, it is not juxtaposition of false and true representations and consciousness, but of different ideas and subject positions which exist side by side in conceptual and political tension. The concept of hegemony is compelling for this and other reasons. Still, I choose not to use it for its intimacy with ideology as a privileged form of linguistically organized power, its seeming reliance upon the interests of a subjective agent, and a unifying tendency are too unsavory for me.

This relates to Foucault’s critique of the true/false trap of ideology because, to use rather un-Foucauldian language, the positions of true and false are themselves established in ideology. Statements about the world don’t simply throw fog or illusion on top of it, they actively construct the world as they are spoken and as people learn to see the world this way. This is why in the

Foucauldian paradigm one pays attention to what counts as true statements or god knowledge and seeks to discern the processes by which such qualities are generated. This is one place where government happens, as subjects enfold knowledge and act in the world according to its precepts. We come to govern

120 ourselves based on a particular vision of reality. This is also why power is productive and not repressive. It creates things, knowledge, statements, and sentiments. It does not operate, at least not exclusively, through censoring and prohibition (Foucault 1978; Foucault 1980; Foucault 1982).

This brings me to say a few words about the repressive hypothesis. Many of the fundamental points of this hypothesis have already been laid out. In essence, Foucault’s position is that for too long we have seen power, culture, ideology, as keeping at bay, displacing or channeling what are deep drives and motivations that would emerge pure if such mechanisms of power could be purged or assuaged. It is Foucault’s radical suggestion that we are at these very depths also the products of power. This amounts to historicizing the psychological forms and processes of a universalizing psychological discourse.

So, castration anxiety, for example, would be revealed as produced within psychoanalytic discourse and social technologies which give it felt presence in our lives.

In the context of affect, what this means is that unlike the earlier positions where culture through symbols and meanings re-routes an innate affective system, for Foucauldians, affect is itself a social construct, linked to micropractices and technologies of power. This approach to affect can be found in Probyn (Probyn 1992) and Stoler (Stoler 1997), Michelle and Renalto Rosaldo

(Rosaldo 1980; Rosaldo 1993), Abu-Lughod (1986), Feld (1990), Patricia

Williams (1991) and Benedict Anderson (1983), to name only a few. One

121 particularly strong elaboration on this position comes from Ann Cvetkovich

(1992). I’m hesitant to quote at such length, but this is a particularly seminal passage from the book Mixed Feelings. Cvetkovich says (28):

I want to argue that contemporary theories of mass culture often depend on the problematic assumption that culture merely reroutes affect rather than actively constructing it. The claim that mass culture displaces or transforms affect rests on the assumption that affect is a natural or prediscursive entity, which exists independently of the cultural forms that structure and produce it. Furthermore, this model does not account for the fact that mass culture actually creates affect, by representing complex social issues in simpler emotionally engaging terms, that is, by sensationalizing them. To put it another way, attempts to grant mass culture a positive or transformational potential depend on a version of what Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis. By assuming that mass culture thwarts the fulfillment of desires and affects that exist independently of it, theorists can propose that mass culture is libratory because it enables repressed or forbidden impulses to be unleashed or expressed. Now I do have several problems with Cvetkovich’s affect. Many will become apparent later, but for now I want to talk about a tendency to focus on texts and ideas. Just to be clear, however, this is not a critique of Cvetkovich so much as it is a tendency I see in readings and applications of Foucault’s ideas. Cvetkovich can’t be blamed for focusing on language and text, after all her area is literary criticism and English. But I can blame a tendency in Foucauldian studies to make discourse look like ideology. What I mean is that discourse seems linguistic in nature but goes well beyond language. Brian Massumi says it better than I do. He says (1992: 51), “Power can be conceived as language-driven but not language-based. Its functioning cannot fully be explained by recourse to a concept of ideology as a formative agent of speech and belief. Ideologies do exist, but their rules of formation are not coextensive with those of language or

122 power: they are end results of processes at work on other levels, structure of meaning in the sense of evaporative end effect.”

Let me back up a bit to the part where I said that statements about the world actively construct the world as they are enacted and as people learn to se the world this way. This learning is not a simple act of communication of ideas, of reading and interpretation, not just about consenting to beliefs and worldviews. It is about training (Nietzsche and Kaufmann 1967). Training is a physical thing. Whole institutions are set up with spatial arrangements and distribution of people and minute devices through which people’s conduct can be conducted. This is, of course, another of the crucial contributions of Foucault, particularly Discipline and Punish. Discourse enters into relation with these apparatuses of power, and this is where the true force of ideas lay.

Ian Hunter’s (1988) work Culture and Government is good to talk about here I think because it shows another level of the Foucauldian discourse analysis.

Cvetcovich draws upon Foucault’s idea that representations create what is being represented, and uses this to understand the meanings and statements within literary works. Hunter focuses on literature as well, but instead of keying into the text, its meanings and how people can be affected in the reading process, he tries to deal with the literary work in its disciplinary educational context. Hunter looks at the physical micro-systems, like the arrangement of a classroom, desks, the institutional practice of instruction, as technologies by which reading practices can be trained into students. This creates the psychological space of

123 the student as a terrain to be managed, both by the student and in relationship to the instructor. So, these technologies include establishing a sort of relationship with the novel that helps shape the form of interiority we modern subjects have come to take as natural and universal. It is this produced form that is filled-up with content by the moral exemplars who stand at the head of the class. Bennett proceeds in a similar trajectory in his analysis of the museum

(Bennett 1995; Bennett 1996). This focus on the interplay between discourse and technology in the shaping of subjects is a theme found in the governmentality authors (See the chapters in Foucault, Burchell et al. 1991;

Barry, Osborne et al. 1996).

So, going back to juxtapose to a position earlier, this is a radically different view of human nature than that of Klienman, Good and Epstein, and the

Marxists as well. For them, cultural processes come to fill in the content of our universal form. For them, we all have a similar composition, like a mass produced chest of drawers that gets filled with historically and culturally specific stuff. For Foucauldians everything is in the play of power.

In the Marxist view, power and the organization of the workers into a stable and useful economic unit happens primarily through language. Foucault revises this by making the production of these docile personae an effect of micro-practices , material technologies which become woven together with discourses to form a social formation. As I’ve mentioned, Deleuze and Guattari

(1987) will brilliantly take this further still by showing how language itself can be

124 thought physically. This is present in Discipline and Punish as well. One of my favorite ideas in that book, one that gets little or no air time is “signalization” as a substitute for a communicative model of the translation of force between bodies. This gives signs a more palpable operation. Sound is waves moving through particles, after all. These letters are burned onto the page and pass through your lens to your retina where their photonic form is translated through a miraculous biochemical reaction into electrical impulses. It is all physical.

Words act, and only mean because they do so. I’ll return to the significance of this shortly.

For all his effort, Foucault doesn’t get much further than ideology thinkers on certain points. The position of resistance and difference in Foucault’s conceptual apparatus has been long and furiously debated. If discipline and biopower and governmentality reach into our very affective being, shape us at the core of our selves, then is there no possibility for a truly revolutionary position to emerge? Or, even better, where could it possibly emerge from? If affect is historically constructed, then can it really be the mechanism of liberation of the self, or is its construction ultimately in the hands of discipline and control?

Joan Copjec (1994) offers two possible answers to these questions. The first is that the interactivity of complex and possibly contradictory training regimes and discourses hiccup unexpected subject positions. This is where she thinks the Foucauldian source of subjective novelty must lie. The second is that the application of force contains within its own counter desire. I think Foucault

125 wouldn’t argue against this, since in “Subject and Power” he explicitly states that there is no power without resistance (Foucault 1982). Still, I agree with Copjec that this idea isn’t sufficiently established in any of Foucault’s work.

As a Foucauldian, Cvetcovich runs into the same problem. Like Copjec, her solution is to turn to psychoanalysis. Ultimately what this does is bring back the semi-pristine unconscious as the bricolage (Levi-Strauss 1963) mechanism of novelty and agency. In my mind this isn’t altogether different from the move

Foucault makes in volumes two and three of The History of Sexuality (Foucault

1978; Foucault 1985; Foucault 1986). There, and several other places, he begins to argue for the importance of an aesthetics of existence. I love this part of Foucault, but mostly because it runs my thinking right up against the brick wall of a question mentioned above. That’s because the argument seems to deny many of the radical contributions to thinking about power that he established earlier. In other words, how can a self act artfully upon itself except in the ways it has been patterned and trained in years of rigorous mechanisms of control? One way to answer this is to say that once a subject is created, endowed with a certain kind of disciplined autonomy, then it has the capacity to act counter to such controlling mechanisms. But that doesn’t get us anywhere, as the initial problem persists.

Foucault’s problem, it seems to me, is at least two fold and crucial. First, he is still stuck in the paradigm of the subject, as it is a self who is expected to act upon itself. Second, he sees power and organization as the primary force of

126 our universe, thus leaving resistance as a conceptual problem perpetually in need of investigation.

The reason why I find Deleuze and Guattari so compelling is that they tackle exactly these issues. Or, perhaps I found these issues once I was exposed to the sometimes convoluted and always arduous logic of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series (Deleuze and Guattari 1983; Deleuze and Guttari 1987).

I can’t remember. In either case, there are precious threads of thinking in there which lead me toward ways to rethink this troubled problematic.

What I want to suggest is that the human body is comprised of many different open systems. Genes and the enzymes and proteins which emerge into a kind of genetic system within each cell opens up to the qualities and dispositions of the entire cell in which it resides. With retroviruses, symbiogenisis, mutations, and other hardly understood vectors of genetic mutability, even our genetic systems open up to a variety of other systems.

Together they form another system, one at a next level of abstraction, which is also open to the other cells around it. All of those cells weave together into an organ, which has a specific function and a kind of identity but nonetheless is open to organ systems and a whole host of other organs and their systems that comprise the next organismic level of abstraction. Bodies open onto other bodies and spaces and words that, like in the body, form many interwoven arrangements that take on lives of their own while at the same time being emergent from the components of which they are composed and enter into

127 connections with other arrangements to become the components of other more aggregate and abstract entities. This is not as clear as I’d like it to be. I’ve thought and thought about how to make it so and I think it is hardly possible at this time and place from which I write. Why? Because to describe such things I am forced to use words like layers and levels which are absolutely not what I’m trying to say. Those are structural concepts. They are not network concepts.

If you think about things in this machinic and open systems way, you see them differently. A person getting a drink of water now becomes a thirst-hand- handle-tap water complex. It is a complex interconnection that makes human bodies, pipes, filters, and a whole bureaucratic organization overseeing water distribution into one complex machine. Really it is many machines whose flows are linked together in a complex web. But from different vantages of abstraction, all machines are aggregate and aggregating.

It would be interesting to read or write a whole genealogy of the contingent conditions which prompted the emergence and transformations of such a centralized water distribution system. I have a draft of that essay lying around somewhere. But more interesting to me is to look at it in a more affective matrix, where what is really being scrutinized is the potential embedded in such arrangements by tracing connections that from the genealogical perspective might seem frivolous. This is a call to see things on the model of the rhizome rather than the tree. And it is no coincidence, I think, that the tree is a figure of genealogy.

128 The first principle of the rhizome is connectivity. Seeing things on the model of rhizome means focusing on the machinic connections between and within what might otherwise be thought of as discrete entities. So, as I sit here writing the draft of this section on a red painted park bench, I am not an individual sitting at a table wielding a pen and contemplating philosophical issues. Rather, as a rhizome, we are a paint-bench-body-pen-writing trained muscle and nerve complex-concept network whose interactivity creates the complex potential of the event. The human subject is not the agent. The agency comes in the distribution of forces between elements in a network. This is what complexity theory is on about with regard to ecosystems and distributed intelligence. Thought, desire, creativity come from elsewhere, from outside, in the tangle between mapped neurons, objects and forces. Thinking with the rhizome means mapping connections, which, because it ultimately an unbounded exercise is an act of experimentation.

So, what does this have to do with affect? Well, think about affect in its transitive use. What would happen if there was no table-top, or I was writing with a pencil, or it began to rain, or a new concept shot wildly into my mind?

The whole assemblage would change. Adding, subtracting, blocking, opening, modifying the connection between components in the arrangement will have an affect on the overall system. It will change what that complex is able to do, what forces it can emit and what forces it is susceptible to. Affect is a transition from one experiential state of a body to another (Massumi 2002). And thinking

129 machinically, thinking like a rhizome, this change is tied to the types of relations that a body is constituted from. One thing to point out is that a body should be seen beyond what we normally see as a body. A body is any entity capable of affecting and being affected.

This means from many angles, we are parts of bodies, partial objects if you will. When we flip on the water faucet—or perhaps better said, when our domestic water machine turns on—our human forms have just become one translation point in a flow of water that goes from river to dam to processing station to pipes to faucets to mouth to stomach to arteries to cells to veins to bladder to toilets to pipes to processing station to river to ocean to vapor to clouds to rain and back to the river. This is alongside the whole arrangement of other drinking bodies who populate this system and whose energy is also being organized through complex bureaucratic regimes to maintain the pipes and dams and ensure the operation of the processing station. So, throw in an idea, say a perception that someone wants to blow up a dam or drop poison into the water supply. This changes the system. It changes each components relationship with the others. People are sent on a whole line of flight to the supermarket to stock up on jugs of distilled water. People look at the faucet with a kind of spectral dread. Water comes to taste differently, either a paranoid twinge or a relieved purity.

Affect is a crucial concept as it is the current flowing through and between. It is the connective. It is a way to see beyond the division of a body

130 and an environment (Morse 1990; Buck-Morss 1993; Grosz 1995; Morris 1996;

Rose 1996). It is a way to see beyond inside and outside, to understand that thought, desire, emotions are all arranged from a network of systems that pay attention to the boundaries of flesh and biological matter only as relays for their operations (Grosz 1992; Grosz 1995). It is a way to look beyond the division of the subject and object, to see them as mutually constituted in an encounter.

Michael Taussig’s (Taussig 1991; Taussig 1993) notion of tactility supports this perspective also. Drawing from Benjamin (1969; Benjamin and Demetz 1986),

Taussig talks about the “unstoppable merging of the object of perception with the body of the perceiver and not just with the mind’s eye” (25). There is a

“palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived. […] seeing something or hearing something is to be in contact with that something” (21). This brings us back to the post-ideological perspective on language. Words achieve a kind of tactility. They are components within an organization, not above or alongside on a parallel plane of representation

(Grossberg 1992; Grossberg 1993). Words and images are affective in a- signifying ways.

A statement can affect, it has intensity, but one that doesn’t correspond with what it means. Meaning exists on another plane, a plane of organization or of quality (Massumi 2002). It is an indexing of signs, a series of routes for affect to be filtered into. Emotion is on this plane as well. Emotion is the fixing of affect and intensity around certain well established, well trained, points which

131 organize experience. “Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning” (Massumi 2002: 28).

Meaning and emotion are the capture of affect. But it should not be seen as the capture of natural forces by cultural ones as some of the earlier authors argued. For those authors affect emerged as naturally determined reactions to experience. The way I am using it, affect emerges prior to experience, it is the raw sensation that will eventually become experience. Affect is always more than experience. It is not located within an individual, a consciousness or anything like that. This, I hope it will become clear, is crucial for reconfiguring the sources of novelty within a post-structuralist model of culture and power.

Think of affect as pure sensation. It is pre-personal. By this I mean that it does its work before being registered by a consciousness. In fact, consciousness and will exist in the wake of affect, in the ways a brain deals with its firings. These things, will and consciousness, to which we usually give such a privileged locus and attribute our creative energies are really subtractive procedures. We don’t exert our influence, exercise our will, by acting on our intentions. Rather we veto and censor after impulses arise (Taylor 2001;

Massumi 2002).

A body is affected from moment to moment by much more than it can make sense of. Affect is always wild, a surplus. Through trained and habitual

132 neuronal connections, these affects become filtered and funneled into ideas, thoughts, emotions, desires, etc. There are a few crucial ramifications of this.

This means that cognition is in the brain, yet outside of consciousness. “It is the brain that thinks and not the man—the latter being only a cerebral crystallization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). But cognition isn’t only in the brain.

Because of the force of the affective, mental activity emerges in the sensory contemplations with the world. Relationality is already there (James 1884). It is already a part of our material and tactile connections before we even realize the connection. Thus, thoughts emerge without any centralized agency or directing agent. The system organizes itself, but there is no one, no self doing the organizing (Deleuze and Guattari 1983; Deleuze and Guttari 1987; Guattari 1995;

Kelso 1995; Taylor 2001; Massumi 2002). This is very similar to William James’ empiricist notion of emotion. In a famous quote, James (1884) says:

Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affectation called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry.

133 Grossberg begins with a similar perspective on affect. His idea of political analysis is to contemplate the way these pre-personal intensities or affects are organized according to mattering maps, physical and conceptual devices which direct peoples investments in and into the world (Grossberg 1992: 82). This is one key for the politics of affect, to understand the maps which our affects get drawn into, what they enable us to think, feel and do. But, the politics of affect is about something different as well. As I mentioned earlier, one thing I am after in this section is a source of creativity in the world. Affect is this source of creativity. It is a part of the indeterminant nature of things. Affect is always censored, filtered, funneled, and vetoed. This means that there is always something in excess, some remainder, some force that escapes, some force which must always escape. This is why Deleuze argues that the lines of flight are primary. Here he contrasts himself directly with Foucault (Deleuze 1997).

So, resistance and difference are not a problem for Deleuze and Guattari. What becomes the question is how matter and energy in our chaotic universe with infinite potential get drawn into systems of organization, some of which become so sedimented to be rigid and nearly inescapable. In this tangle of ideas is the key to Deleuze’s notion of “transcendental empiricism.” It “may then be said to be the experimental relation we have to that element in sensation that precedes the self as well as any ‘we,’ through what is attained, in the materiality of living, the powers of ‘a life’”(Deleuze and Boyman 2001).

134 The potential for such lines is amplified by the fact that a body, the way any body will submit to a force or generate a force, emerges from a set of connections and heterogeneous components. These components and connections necessarily change from moment to moment and thus can establish alternate flows and new forces. Perhaps a better way to think of this is that without a directing consciousness, with a distributed agency, there is endless potential for difference. What we need to explain are the concrete and neuronal superhighways that bring us all to travel similar trails, think similar thoughts and desire similar things.

This clearly changes the idea of agency or resistance or whatever you want to call it. I’ll follow Deleuze and call it difference. I’ll call it difference because agency implies a subject reading events, interpreting and then responding. Resistance implies something similar in that some agent is seeking out alternate forms of power. But when thinking about affect, it is clear that things come to us from elsewhere. Difference is about intensities and flows and force, rather than about subjects.

135 Full-Serve Lifestyles

A whole encounter started with a simple searching look. It drew Mike away from packing things from his trunk to the garage, hailing me up as I strolled past. “Hey there! Something I can do for you?” The words seemed both helpful and suspicious at the same time. I told him I was looking for a neighbor of his, that I had about 83% certainty in my trajectory, but I was lurking in his neighborhood to get a feel for the community. He was clearly intrigued–I hoped he would be–by such a statement. He asked, “You thinking of buying?”

I hesitated momentarily. I was tempted to lie. At open houses and sales offices I’d played that deceptive detective before. On my hidden recorder and camera I documented the evidence of marketed desires. They wanted, not desperately, for me to want “to own something lasting and be a part of something larger at the same time.” They’d pitch me about while my ordered daydreams curled around porches and completed manuscripts. Now, however, the deception was unwarranted. Mike had already engaged me and he seemed to have no fear of encounter. Plus, I was already under suspicion, which made me a bit nervous, and the mad scientist persona rattled uncomfortably around my gray matter. So, I responded academically. “No. I’m doing fieldwork for my doctoral project on American communities. I’m interviewing a neighbor of yours,” and I gave her name with no sign of recognition. The word “American” shot through my spine; I felt straight as a flag pole.

136 “Really? What is your thesis?” he asked with a slight hint of pride for engaging me with academically coded words. Or, perhaps he was emitting nervous quantum energy from the collision with the possibility of criticisms to come. Maybe I just got defensive about my authority and dominion.

I started, “Well, I’m still early in the research, but, I think, well.” I paused after this eloquence. Mike exuded a kind of churlish affability that pulled a desire for provocation right through me. My pause turned into a wiggle, my shoulders actually swayed subtly, as I began slip into a tight spot. “I don’t really see much community happening.”

“What do you mean?” Mike spoke in a receptive way, not at all the defensive reaction I expected. His response reminded me of my commitment to urgent sensitivity.

“Well, community is happening, I suppose, since I think that there is no true or singular essence to community. It’s a process. It’s a creation. So, real communities are whatever they are created as.”

The letters “o.k.” crept between his pursed lips, and took the place of his desire to “get to the point, would you!” It’s funny that I conduct the same ritual when the constructivists come looking for me.

“I’ve been here a few times now, and I’ve dealt with many communities which are quite similar, and I think there are troubling aspects of the ways these communities work.”

Mike said, “work?” Like a gangster expecting trouble getting paid.

137 I paused to re-attach myself to the notion. Images of leaf blowers and letters, piled up desks and expressionless faces, sidewalk slabs and dogs on leashes hit me from deep in the guts of this community. “Yeah, works: what it does; what it makes possible; how it shapes relationships.” To myself I wondered how it might actually shape relations and I answered aloud “In the

HOA communities I’ve looked into there is a tendency for the members to be passive, desensitized and alienated. Everything seems quite stagnant and blocked up.”

Looking at my notes I’m beginning to feel Jurgen Habermas beating against the floorboards under which I’ve hidden my modernist tendencies. A vision of sensitive collectivity is not at odds with Habermas’ vision of the public

(Habermas 1991). But for me it doesn’t begin with a universal capacity for reason and end with its performance in a public debate. Irrationality would do just fine, and is certainly no less communal. Evicting the “comm” from the center of collective models, I’d like to make room for things more tactile and pre- individual. Like Michael Serres (1997), I’m just looking for some sort of exposure. That means exploring our connections with people as well as with diffuse matters expressing intimate forms. It would demand paying attention to the affective states that move through and between us as well as paying attention to the subtle yet intense effects that comes with being in the world.

I think Mike understood my point, that there was no productive connectivity between the neighbors. It seemed like he agreed, but as he paused

138 and let me witness his tightening countenance, a different sense of community shot from his textured face. “Yeah. There is something to that,” he said rolling his glance just past my shoulder, “like I hardly ever talk to my neighbors. I mean, we say hi and are polite and all. Like if we see each other at the supermarket or on the way into the house.” I had a vision of Mike in a business suit grabbing a shopping cart out of the long metal stack, pausing between yanks to recognize a neighbor and exchange the proper pleasantries. In the vision I could see communal affect moving between the bodies, like radiation exposing itself on photo paper. Community can be easily found outside stucco perimeters, enacted through courteous gestures in store aisles and parking lots where we seek and fear acquaintances. Perhaps “segmentary lineage opposition” is still a working model of community (Evans-Pritchard 1940).

Mike continued talking about his neighbors, “But really I have no interest in knowing or spending time… most of them …” Something grabbed him and changed his trajectory. “And that guy that lives there,” he pointed with a snap of the wrist, “keeps giving me trouble about parking in my driveway, of all the stupid things. He even reported me to the Association.”

I wanted to slide between his words to let him know that I’ve heard similar things over and over. Somehow I thought it would console him. But he didn’t need consoling. Instead he lifted his whole torso and fanned out his broad shoulders and said, “But there are other things happening.” The word happening really leapt off his lips as he threw my ethnographic authority into a

139 wrestling hold beneath his experiential authority. “Community things.” Potential dangled. And for a moment my mind raced, almost too wild, like a greyhound running so fast and so far it can’t smell its way home. With all my panting I almost didn’t hear him say, “Like the amenities and services. It makes up for the other stuff.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah!” vibrated from his midsection like a tamed orgasm. “This place is loaded. It’s one of the most comprehensive around. That’s why I bought in here.”

I just responded “Interesting point.” I felt simple, inexcusably unprepared, so I added, “I noticed the community center on the way in. It looks impressive.”

“It is. I’m there all the time.”

“For the pool?” just sort of squirted out as I began to scrutinize his lean and muscular physique.

“Yeah, sometimes. And the weight room more than that. It’s as good as the gym I used to belong to even. They’ve got classes, racquetball, treadmills, everything.”

“Sounds cool. But couldn’t you just buy an unassociated house somewhere and get a gym membership.”

“I guess, but like I said, it’s all of the services put together. Like I never have to even worry about maintenance and yard-work.” As Mike spoke a desire

140 for service and community pride wrapped tightly together like a crazy man’s transference and glittered on the surface of the whole scene. Smooth hands of high-school cheerleaders began dancing to a fundraising rhythm on the surface of his gleaming steel-blue BMW. Scissors snapped steadily around his groomed head. Heat and chemicals from a dry clean machine jumped from the creases in his shirt and nearly seared my brow. Weeds screamed for dear life as metal blades tore them from sidewalk seams and hewed them from the even green uniform that stretched around the houses.

“Ahhh. Your HOA takes responsibility for your front yard landscaping,” I keyed into the later idea in his statement. “I wish someone would do my yard- work.” Those words came through me and stretched me between a desire to be served, the desire to be in control and the desire to be out of control which are all punching at the containers of my self.

“I know what you mean. The last place I lived I paid for it all out of my own pocket and I always seemed to be dealing with the workers.” As he said

“the workers” he looked to me like he said something he shouldn’t have.

Even though he is still paying for the services, volume discounted rates and shared costs through association assessments have bargaining power. They have distinct service economy advantages; now more of us can have butlers without living in mansions. And the automatic attachment of invisible brown laborers to the master planned life makes measured desires of racial destiny vibrate through everything, even the words “the worker.” It was there in a

141 whole trigger of unavoidable signs. Concerns about the safety in the blank faces of lurking landscapers and maintenance crews, about quality of “Mexican” labor, about the annoyance of having to hear Spanish, came up in several other conversations. I resisted the urge to transfer that guilt and anger into this driveway encounter. Instead I subtly nodded my practiced research nod that signals “I hear you and am interested.”

Mike continued to tell me about the house painting he doesn’t have to do, about the address lights the association takes care of for him, about the rain and street gutters that are magically cleaned. He was really swept away in the desire for his full service community.

Mike pointed to his house. His finger applauded the smooth tan surface, the darkest hue of tan for at least three houses either direction. “I didn’t have to worry about it at all. They looked in the books and knew when the paint would be getting old. On that day the painting crew was out here making things look like new. I didn’t have to pay them or supervise them or anything. The

Association did it all.” I scanned his façade. In the entryway was a plastic light bubble with the address stenciled on it. His was lit up, even though sunset was still thirty-nine minutes away. He noticed my snagged attention and felt compelled to explain, like a criminal caught in an interrogation with conflicting details. “Oh yeah. They come on automatically, a light sensor or something, and the community takes care of those too. I’ve got to remind myself to call to

142 have that fixed,” and he snapped his fingers and looked at them. Perhaps the next time he notices his extremities associations will order him to make the call.

The ingenious devices that measure light levels and turn on or off the lights are called photocells. That is exactly the same name of the cells in the back of the retina that process light. Now I’m looking at Mike’s house and thinking it has eyes. He has a “smart house,” like current lingo would state. It behaves similar to a simple organism that can move towards or away from light.

Can we extrapolate a vision of evolved houses? This is also a story about how biological knowledge shapes, like a feedback of biology, our environments.

We’re not just using tools here. We’re not just changing environments. We’re using biological knowledge of complex interactions to make our environments react to us.

Mike corralled my vision down the street to a ladder propped up against the tile roof of a two-story structure that looked stretched in sheep skin. On top of the ladder was a distance distorted body which swayed as it slowly leveraged a long tool into the gutters. “That too. And those gutters are hard to clean.

They did mine just the other day and moved on.”

The community seemed to be showing off for me; I felt swept away by full service desires. I looked around at the lots. Each unit had a lush lawn, a perfectly conical Liquid Amber tree and some other blooming tree I didn’t recognize. There were hedges, trimmed clean of shoots and gaps, which rested like upside-down eyebrows under the front windows of each house. Between

143 walls some succulent shot through holes cut into thick black plastic upon which a smooth layer of bark rested comfortably.

The whole scene stretched out of sight like one huge arrangement.

Individuality and belonging gave a palpable tension to the links, seams and slight variations. Some trees were in different locations. Lawns had geometric variations. The differences between yards were subtle. Pulling back with my privileged gaze, I could also see that the differences between the yards in this community and other communities I’d visited were subtle as well. I looked for the marks landscapers and developers might have left as they worked life forms into decorative objects. I saw none. The surface was smooth like a frying pan treated with glossy coats of beige, mocha, and light brown Teflon.

Images paraded before me. The geometry of displayed objects ensnared me in some sort of aesthetic web. I couldn’t focus on just one element.

Everything only made sense in some imposed collective and coherent vision, where each object was tied to another like parts of some more complex super- object. For some reason I looked down at my tattered shoes, and felt the inertia from object-paths that could lead me to the right department store display. My car would need to be washed, my hair too; I just didn’t feel right in this primary landscape of affluence.

It must be hard work keeping up this super-object force, I thought. “Are the vendors doing a good job?” was all I could think to ask, even though the work I wanted to witness was much more extensive.

144 “Yeah, I guess. They’re in and out. I hardly see them, don’t know they were even here. Like there are no cuttings or debris left behind. But everything keeps looking as good as new.”

“A timeless community,” I muttered.

“Right,” he said, stunned by a sense of the uncanny. “Just like the ad said.” I knew the one, even though I hadn’t seen it. Marketing strategies across the country did a bang up job subtly weaving maintenance free living into a lifestyle. Sun City says, “Looks like a resort. Feels like a home.”

After I gave a nasally laugh I said “Who is the landscaper anyway?”

“I’m not sure. But I think they are the same company we use at the office.” His attempt to recall a company name sounded familiar enough for me to extrapolate who it was. The management company I worked for had nothing to do with Mike’s community, and yet one of the landscape corporations I dealt with at another site was on the job in Mike’s community as well. I knew they were a big company, but I was just beginning to realize how big.

Another vision struck me. I saw a boy and a leathery man. They are pulling the lawnmower down from an old red pick-up. Defeat swallows each of their movements. No one called. No one needed yard-work. Now junior wont make money like his father once did. His father fears he won’t learn the values of work and the family business. I guess he should just get a job somewhere.

Next a memory comes. At a Board meeting, one of the members timidly approaches the community’s unified row of faces. He salutes by claiming his

145 address. His fingers are stained dark. The Board says that he can’t fulfill the community’s landscaping needs. Insurance and liability, size and equipment, corporate charter, a clear distinction between members and service throw stormy patterns of light and clouds into our eyes. “Besides, we can get services much cheaper that you can possibly offer. The way our homes and communities and corporate compounds are all set up with the same things these days, a professional crew can just breeze right through them.”1

I asked Mike if it bothered him at all that his community looked like a hundred others I’ve visited, like the stuff of non-place oozing all around us. He said “no” like it was a stupid question. Perhaps it was a stupid question, or at least not the right one.

I’d asked the same question before of my upper management landscaping corporation counterpart. We were walking from our guest parking spots through the smooth green starfish shaped common area between townhouse clusters.

I’m not sure if Jack misheard the question, but he started talking about the workers. “We’ve become such a big company, so many accounts, it’s kind of hard to make a name for yourself, so to speak. Workers come and go. A lot, if you know what I mean. There’s a lot of work and no training really, so the company keeps getting fresh transfusions.” I replied, “Aren’t you worried that as the company gets bigger, more conglomerated, workers will be increasingly

1 Mike made me think about the way HOA collective bargaining squeezes out small scale landscaping, maintenance, and other service providers. Bidders for community service have to be large complex agents, able to handle communities with well over a hundred units, sometimes thousands. It reminds me of the national corporate takeover of bookstores and restaurants. Vendors or service providers are riding the standard waves of community development right into the same concentrated shores. There are landscaping corporations that trim and plant in corporate compounds and residential developments from coast to coast.

146 subordinated?” He said, “They’re better off working for us, that’s why they come, right? Besides, there’s nothing they can really do about it.” “Too late,” I thought aloud, “they are already just an expendable part of the landscaping machine, the service economy, and the MPC lifestyle.” I knew well this feeling of capture; my own body became a part of this service function.

I inhaled and parted my lips to begin another lame question, when I noticed something strange on the light pole nearby. I took a subtle side shuffle to improve my viewing angle and saw a small bar code. My words were quickly reshaped. “Your community has a private security patrol, right?”

“Yeah. How did you know?” The words were muffled as he turned his head to open himself to the signs that just struck me. He only seemed more puzzled.

“The bar code on that light pole there gave it away.”

“Why?”

“It’s part of the ‘Guard Tour System’ or some other cleverly marketed name for the same thing.” Mike wanted more, so I obliged. “I work at a property management company. I’m a property manager. Not too long ago we had some trouble with one of our security companies. To make a long story short, it seemed like the guards were sleeping on the job, literally. At least that is what some of us thought. They were supposed to write parking violations and other little tasks that didn’t get done. Anyway, I complained to the security

147 company a couple of times until I began to threaten termination. At that point they hired a new manger and installed this ‘Guard Tour System.’”

“Well, what is it?”

“They give the patrol person a hand held laser scanner and he or she walks around the community scanning these bar codes. There is a specific pattern and a time limit to get from point to point. The device records the patrol person’s movements and the device links the information to a computer terminal at the company’s office. There are other buttons on the device also. Like if the patrol person sees something suspicious they press a certain button before they investigate. They can hit an emergency key to summon the cops quickly. At a community like this, they probably print out the report for the Board of

Directors.”

“Sounds cool.”

“I guess. It’s an efficient way of guarding space, of ensuring the movements of underpaid employees.” What I wanted to say, however, was

“Don’t be such an asshole. How would you like to be strapped into a schedule like that?” As for me, I wished it were just a terrible nightmare. Instead, my insomnia forced me to see life being shaped by the capitalist fantasy that would make human bodies an adjunct of the machine (Zizek 1997 would call this the fantasy support of reality). Bar codes and laser scanners, boxes of light more coherent than the hands wielding them, really make this exploitative vision manifest in community matter. But for Mike, and others, it was just cool, just

148 part of our instrumental reason (Weber 1978) or irrational rationality (Lukâacs,

Marcus et al. 1989). Even if we hate it, we continue doing it. And by doing it, we bring ourselves accept the necessity of humans forced into the position of objects, lacking the opportunity to exercise any sort of intentionality in our working life. And this is how we get cool with it (Zizek 1989: 36-43). The machine is not a metaphor.

Now I want to riff off Marx’s story of corporate exploitation. From my vantage, where I witness homeowners tumbling on and with workers through the same troubling arrangements, Marx’s point is not dispersed enough. Not only are workers increasingly subordinated to service corporations. Consumers, members, citizens are increasingly subordinated to the commodification of service.2 Quick pay for gas and you’ll feel this. It will hit you when you pull through the auto wash. Want a snack? Something quick and easy? How about day care for your children? A full-service community?

At work we accept the necessity of adopting the goals of the company as our own. Likewise, when we move into new homes, we accept the necessity of adopting the given rules of community life. We become the objects of community direction. Our desires are us, and if what we want are these things, for people and smart machines to serve us like things, then most of us are alienated from our selves.

2 Service and servants connects me back to a seminar with Dr. Greene. At the beginning of the course he said that the master / servant dialectic was the trope of the modern. With the twentieth century rush of the service economy and the victory of the middle class, most of us are both. This, as much as anything, contributes to the posts of our current situation.

149 I’d still prefer to reside in my community floor plan. Still, Mike was on to something. This contemporary communal precept took hold of me many times.

My property management job was all about actualizing this full-serve or instant gratification fantasy. It became my daily reality. Here, take a glance at a very short section of my corporate phone log:

Date Time Name/Assn Caller’s Issue Action 4/9 9:14 Janet Fuller / Landscapers left yard Called L/S 9:20 LOP trimmings behind 9:28 Frank Edelweis / Neighbor’s trash can Wrote vio 4/9 GCHA is left out 9:35 Hue Tran / NW Trash behind unit Called [trash removal vendor] 10:00 9:56 Jason Williams / Broken sprinkler head Faxed L/S 10:15 DUC

That was a busy morning. Still, looking back I wonder why I didn’t scrawl such ideas in my notes already. Perhaps I was reluctant to explore this desire to be served, to live like an invalid, because it is deeply infused with my own senses. I already know–and hate to admit–that I order food to be delivered too much. I used to anyway, before I went broke writing this dissertation. I don’t change the oil in my car. I take it to a service station so someone else can perform this relatively easy mechanical procedure. I don’t make my own clothing.

Bringing it back to our encounter–I mean my neurons, fingers, keyboard, and your eyes, neurons, fingers–you might think the last few ideas are somewhat loose. Not many people would seriously think that making our own clothes or not is a crucial issue to consider when talking about community and

150 creative living. Perhaps that is just the problem. Think about Gandhi for a moment. Much of his genius beamed in the way he channeled alternate modes of subjectivation as a way to combat British colonialism. One in particular was to spin his own cotton and make his own clothing. It was a way to combat the colonial chokehold on cotton growing, exporting and fabric manufacturing. He saw the enclosure and redirected flow of certain objects as a key to control. He changed the nature of the objects, the perception of them, their social and economic connections, all the way to the plant matter itself. I’m not saying we should all grow cotton and hit the loom. I’m just trying to spread a desire for autonomy, which Gandhi’s spinning wheel still signals. If only I could channel his strength to swim against the massive rush of well delineated desires.

Mike’s shared desire to be served got in a scrape with Gandhi’s desire for autonomy. Gandhi would see, quite clearly I think, the desire to control, to be a master, become a desire to serve and submit. These things seem to flow both ways like that. Desire for an object and pleasure of possession or consumption are only as far away as the dollar. Days come when we are asked with increasing frequency and expectation to make our selves into dollars and dollars to come. We learn instant gratification from commodities there to serve and we learn to labor a lifetime for this privilege of pleasure. Heck, we can even buy

Gandhi. His story is stamped into a video and shelved on an endless rack at

Blockbuster or you can buy a computer which promises to make you “think different” like he did. We learn that we are masterful subjects whose desires can

151 be met by manipulating objects, even, perhaps especially, other people.

Customer service is an exemplary commodity. It gives tactility to buying human energy, a purchase that is only abstracted in the labored artifact. And living association style we can get this capitalist kick right in our living room, looking out at the sweaty landscape crew.

It had been a while since Mike sat a box of stuff down at his feet. I took a look at it, for the first time I think. Picture frames, a tin canister, an electric juicer were some of its contents. I own an electric juicer also. It just sits on a shelf; I’m not sure where. When I want juice I usually just pull a carton out of the fridge and often don’t even bother with a glass. I glanced through the window of Mike’s car and saw that the back seat was crammed with similar boxes. The trunk was open too. I couldn’t see in since I was standing to the front of the car. “You’re not moving out, are you?”

“No, no, no. I’m just moving some of this stuff in the garage to storage.

So I can park in the garage like they are harping on me about. Now that you mention it, do you mind if I keep working while we talk?”

“Not at all. In fact, I’d love to help.”

“That’s alright. But thanks for the offer.”

I slowly stepped closer to the garage and watched Mike pull an old television off the garage floor and shuffle toward his trunk. I was beginning to think the conversation was over. I looked down the street like I would find something else to do. As I did I noticed a girl riding a shiny chrome bicycle

152 wavering toward me on the sidewalk. She had a purple helmet and purple elbow pads. She must have realized I was staring at her; we became transfixed in a glance. Just then her front tire swung too far toward the street and she yanked the handle-bars back toward Mike’s house. She fell. Her little body bounced from the corner of a hedge and flopped onto the grass with her legs tangled in the metal contraption. I felt pain. My feet moved toward her before I could convince them. I asked if she was hurt while I helped her legs straighten. I tried to console her. None of her scrapes were serious, but she looked at them like grave wounds. The one on her face looked the worst, almost as bad as the wounded expression it complimented, but I didn’t say a thing about it. She got up and sobbingly shot past me through Mike’s front door.

I walked back towards the garage. Mike was coming out of the garage with another large item, a box with a jutting lamp I discerned as I got closer. He was so busy packing stuff into his trunk that he missed the whole scene. He couldn’t even see past his old television set, let alone to the sidewalk, the street, and the world. I glanced back to confirm that the bike was actually there, that I hadn’t hallucinated. It was.

“This is our second storage space. I’m telling you, I wish I had got in to the storage business a few years ago. They must be making a killing.”

We are dealing with fixed points and their inertia (Brennan). They act like three dimensional anchors, giving economic and social and psychical domains points of intersection. They are points in space, conceptually and physically. I

153 mean, they are commodities on the shelf and in the closet, desires in our selves and trajectories for our orientation. They throw activities about in predictable clusters. They are what we think we deserve. They are formed in the physicality of our bodies and spaces. They are the points that grid our layered landscapes. We don’t build our selves with this stuff, but our selves are made through possessions.3 Things are thrown into creation through the constellations of matter around us.

I parted company with Mike, leaving him to tend to his things. My own things need tending; Mike’s packing and pacing made me nervous. The bill for our own storage space was overdue. Sometimes I agree with Freud that we really don’t make mistakes. I want to forget it all. At the same time I realize the value of all that stuff and scramble last minute to pay the bill before Public

Storage auctions off my music collection and my wife’s winter clothing. I keep playing this scene over and over. I’m at an impasse.

3 It is more than what Bourdieu argues in Distinctions. Who we are is not merely represented through our consumption patterns. Selves are created this way. Ewen and Ewen make this sort of an argument. Within that vein however, it is important to avoid a naïve notion where we are the sole agents of this architecture.

154 Seductive Architecture

Walking to my scheduled interview I lost track of where I was momentarily. I was disoriented by a sense of resemblance. Just the week before I was approaching a house that had the same overwhelming feature: a super-arched entryway. You’ve probably noticed the exaggerated archways and oversized doors that seem outfitted to invite King-Kong to dinner yet keep him in the jungle. It is a distinct style in contemporary architecture emphasizing the entryway. I see them in the new zones of every city I’ve toured. Usually they appear in clusters, as part of a master plan.

So there I was, cruising up to a home along stable slabs of cement and being hit with a palpable uncertainty as I was dwarfed by the entryway. The square columns were about three feet wide and deep, and I was not even close to touching them as I spread my arms to try. My eyes followed the fuzzy stucco surface, past the little bevel, about twenty-five feet up to the vaulted overhang above my head. I was seduced and intimidated at once by their excessive form.

From somewhere I heard Brian Massumi whispering something about affect.

Something about an intensity that works beyond language, beyond ideas expressed through forms. Gazing at the structure felt compelled, as routine as the search for the doorbell or reading the arrangement of personalized stuff sitting on the top step and decorating the final space before the door. And just the act of crooning my neck that way punctuated my regular routine of approaching a home. That gesture, tied to this place, drew out memories

155 written in a strained neck. My spine and neck muscles recalled a tour of the

Texas capitol building and the lofty dome with a lone star in the middle that, because of perspective, looked the same size as the smaller star inscribed on the granite floor. My back remembered walking into many churches with awe struck posture. I remembered changing into a laborer as I moved through the dramatic entrance at the office just that morning. I stopped looking up at the office a while ago, but the gesture still haunted the transition, especially as it was followed with a rhythmic dipping of my head as I reached my cubicle.

Encounters have many levels, even those that can’t be felt or read. As I paused in the archway I wished to myself that I had some high-tech equipment to measure my physiological reactions. I’d measure my heart rate. I’d measure my breathing. I’d measure my galvanic skin response. What a great study that would be: measuring affective responses to various architectures.

Things work beyond meaning and interpretation, but through them as well. Some of the sign chains are as predictable as the statistical correlations by the best niche marketing reports. Perhaps it is between the affective and the meaningful that such correlations gain intensity. One thing that seems clear to me is that their genealogy draws sanguine lines to prosperity. They were a nineties birth, a high-water mark. The Bay Area was in the throes of flagrant growth. A little capitalistic buzz gave the whole area the feel of a chain frozen drink bar with cover band grooves. The good vibes of economic security bubbled between the newspapers, TV. news reports, board room discussions, company

156 hallways and all sorts of little dramatic cues. Like when the boss bought a new range rover. Or, like overhearing the bustling mall food court conversations about bonuses and vacations. Somehow I just felt like the excessive architecture plugged into this chain of signals, like a temple to Dionysus. The high archways are desirable because surplus in general is desirable. So, Dionysus morphs into

Bill Gates, the god of financial freedom.

Alongside these stimulating levels of organization, my thoughts drew strange connections. “Are there giants living in these communities?” I asked straight off as a sarcastic defense against the forced gesture of smallness. I thought I was standing at an altar to family and privacy. I thought I had discovered a prop that helps enact the dramatic, even ritualistic, incorporeal transformation we make daily between our public and private selves. How else would we know and feel with certainty where we can “be ourselves” and when we have to don our game faces? Are our perpetually overlapping movements of self-interest and common interest, as HOA rhetoric proclaims it, given separate stables in the rituals of entry and exit? Lacan would call it a split subject, one that emerges as selves form from the “no” of the symbolic father. We learn we must become subjects by manipulating a world of symbols to meet our desires.

We also learn to repress our own desires which are given to us in the same moment. We learn self-control, and we learn to go to our rooms when we cannot control ourselves. We learn domains of differing levels of self-control and externalized control. And they are mapped onto our intimate territories. The

157 front door must play a key role in this social and psychic machinery. Again, things happen between the matter of our bodies and the matter of space and time. Or, said again, territories of existence are formed in matter of different magnitudes at the same time and as a part of the same machines.

Then again, most of us slip in and out through the garage.

These entryways are vaults: “an arched structure, usually of stone, brick, or concrete, forming the supporting structure of a ceiling or roof.” But vaults draw other connections, and a constellation of signs should never be casually made. A vault is also a room or compartment for safekeeping valuables. It is also leaping and by metaphorical extension accomplishing something as if by leaping suddenly or vigorously: “vaulted into a position of wealth.” In a literal way, perhaps the gesture of looking upward is tied to desires for upward mobility. That might be a logical leap, but the second definition is a much clearer path, I believe. It occurred to me twice, once while sitting at my desk reviewing my notes and once when I was approaching another excessive point of entry. The doors were huge. Each one was at least twice the size of the front door I grew up pushing and pulling, and here there were two of them. Matching another vaulted entry, this one with a lovely dark wood stain, the doors were also quite tall and designed with overlapping circles of dark wood and frosted glass. These actually belonged to friends of mine, so I was lucky to swing them several times myself. They were extraordinarily heavy, and swung like the

158 massive doors of a steel bank vault. I mean, you could feel the physical strain operating them.

I said operating them, but really anyone with double doors knows it is not quite right to work both at once. Unless you are moving large furniture, which could really fit through one open door anyway, it sort of seemed gaudy to open both doors at once. As a joke, I did it one time when my friends were arriving home. I slid both doors open in a gesture of greeting and somehow I felt compelled to bow a servant’s depth. They laughed instead of thinking me insane. The extravagance of opening two doors was indeed humorous. I think this was because everyone knows it is encouraged to accumulate possessions but only to display some of them.

So, is it just a coincidence that these similar structures are both called vaults? I obviously don’t think so. It seems to me that they point to the importance of accumulation. Hmmm, let me back up a bit. The other day I was looking over Judith Butler’s amazing arguments in The Psychic Life of Power

(1997). In the second chapter where she lays out and complexifies Hegel’s theory of the lord and the bondsman, she makes an interesting point about the accumulation of property. First of all she says that both the lord and the bondsman have an intimate relationship with formed objects. The bondsman achieves self-reflexivity through working on and creating objects that bear the marks of his being. The lord occupies a position of pure consumption. For both the objects are transitory, either in the act of production or in the act of

159 consumption. She says, “Both only and always experience the loss of the object and, with that loss, the experience of a fearful transience” (39). The accumulation of property, however, adds some stability to this mix. For, “only as property do objects retain their form and stave off fleetingness of desire and the absolute fear which accompanies subjective instability.” Both Susan Buck-Morss

(1999) and Teresa Brennan (2000) make similar points about the need to serially inscribe oneself into being through possessions.

Front doors, as the dramatic point of entry into our most intimate spaces, document this desire for accumulation. After all, where do we display most of our accumulated possessions, our property? Right, in our houses. Just past our front doors is where we display our collections. This is the first movement in the act of inhabiting, of fixing ourselves in place. Try living too long where you haven’t marked out some space with your things, your human spray. Then tell me how it went. It went badly for me. I became bewildered. Our collections are sacred elements in the rituals of differentiating space. Inside must be made miniature. It must be concrete and stand opposed to a vast and gigantic outside. Our little collections of things which is our little sample or constellation of the huge array of stuff out there accomplishes just this (Stewart 1993;

Bachelard 1994).

It is also important that the altar is formed in the matter of the dearest possession, the most real of all property, real estate. So, these massive front doors point to the rhythms of accumulation and absolute fear. Doors are about

160 fear, but in this case fear is sort of turned around. We worry about stolen goods because we fear the dissolution of our selves. Maybe that is part of the affect that embeds itself in burgled feelings of violation.

Vaulted entryways and the massive vault doors point to a vault like machinery of homes. This may be going a bit too far, but it seems to me that the home is not about family or intimacy as much as it is about storing possessions. And, through this capitalist model of selves, loving family and experiencing intimacy is framed as a prized possession, an objectified relationship.

161 Body Beyond Flesh

In the gated condo complex I rented from there was a boy who rode his bike back and forth on the sidewalk which curved around trees and grass and the scattered short stacks of shelters. I would watch him from my balcony swaying only slightly then suddenly swing his leg over and pop both feet onto the concrete when he reached the intersection that separated buildings. He would pedal back past my vantage to the other intersection and hop off and turn around again. The desire to move was given a linear geometry in the encounter between his developing body, the two-wheeler, and the stable slabs of concrete.

162 Complexity

There is a cotton plant. It sits in a field surrounded by hundreds of other cotton plants. They’re all satisfied with the accommodations, even though they don’t get to spread out and mix-up as they’d like. And then there are the caterpillars. Who cares if one day they’ll be butterflies, right now they’re a crawling caravan of leaf ravagers. Years of living with the infestation, the cotton plants have learned to turn catastrophe into irritation. You see, wasps love caterpillars. They do. But that isn't a symbiotic relationship. Wasps are the bad asses of the niche, snagging and injecting their larvae into caterpillars and other earth bound bugs. Cotton plants learned a long time ago how to take advantage of that swift and merciless hoard. Whenever a caterpillar decides to munch, a little chemical squirt flies off into wasp territory. It’s like the cotton plant’s version of hailing up a bodyguard to come smash some potential troublemaker.

Something about those chemicals drives a larvae carrying wasp crazy; it just feels compelled to buzz down to investigate. It goes right to the munch site.

When it gets there, waa-laa, there is a perfectly plump caterpillar waiting to get fucked like one of those poor space men in the movie Aliens.

163 Machines

You probably think I’ve lost it, that I’ve spent too many late night hours at the computer. But don’t skip ahead just yet. There is a connection between these stories and the main point of this section, even if it is a surrealist connection. So, as with other surrealist exhibits, it is necessary to suspend disbelief for the encounter. Do it. Then think back about the stories, all of them in the proximate sections, your connections right now, with a new outlook.

Think about everything existing only in parts that link up with other parts. Think about each part as depended on other parts, but not referring back to any closure or organic unity. You can think yourself into a tangle about that, as well you should. Now you are looking at everything as machines (Deleuze and

Guattari 1983). This will change a few things. You’ll think yourself into worlds between bodies and environments (Grosz 1995), moving past the filtering effects of insides and outsides. You’ll spin right through meaning models of communication into a world of signals, affects, desires (Grossberg 1992;

Massumi 2002). Things signify, to be sure, but things are also signs that work without making sense (Deleuze and Guttari 1987; Taussig 1993). Envision assemblages of things that burp up subjects and objects only as territorial afterthoughts (Deleuze and Guattari 1983; Rose 1996). Attachments are pre- individual, pre-personal, in the sense that they come before being processed consciously or even subconsciously. See complexity instead of organisms.

Witness an interaction of multiple open systems instead of closed ones

164 (Maturana and Varela 1992). See tactile matters (Benjamin 1969; Taussig

1991). Develop an energetics (Brennan 2000). “Why should our bodies end at our skin?” Harraway (Haraway 1991) ingeniously asks.

165 Analysis

Now back to the stories. The boy doesn’t ride his bike back and forth on the sidewalk. He is not the agent. Things happen in the contact between the boy, the bike, the sidewalk, and a certain territory written with signs into the intersection. It makes as much sense to say that the cotton plant hails up the wasp as it does to say that the boy rides the bike. Those two subjects, boy and cotton plant, like all subjects, are produced as residuum alongside machines.

The caterpillar’s digestive system, the cotton plant’s excretion, and the wasp’s reproductive system all open up to each other in the play of complexity. Vaults work this way as well.

166 Machines

Driving past million dollar homes is quite humbling. At least it is when you get caught up in that capitalist scheme of self worth. Turning off one of the main streets, there are only local signals that let you know that you’ve left the chic Los Gatos and drifted into the incorporated faction of Monte Sereño. I’ve never seen a sign that says “welcome to Monte Sereño.” If you are there, you’d better be invited. Even though I was invited, the first few times I drove between the displays of opulence I was struck with fear. I was on my way to meet my wife’s parents. Wanting badly to fit in with her family, to be accepted, the neighborly signs of exclusivity took on an even more menacing intensity.

Don’t worry, everything worked out fine. There were some awkward encounters at the beginning, but Mark and Lynne are wonderful and loving people. I felt at home with them quite easily, right about the time I adopted gated communities as my research subject. That’s interesting, right? At about the same time I developed a genuine attachment to that exclusive place I also developed a sort of defense against this intimacy. Mark is a Freudian psychoanalyst, so he’ll have fun with those last few statements when he reads this.

Seven or eight years down the road I was sitting in their newly remodeled living room reading some social theory. I started thinking about assemblages.

Sitting in Mark and Lynne’s living room rearranged everything, however slightly.

It is different than sitting at my desk, at the management company office for

167 sure, in graduate seminars. At the Snyder’s there is some jam between thoughts and statements; so quietness seems my natural state. Actions are resigned. But my surroundings always demand my attention in a sort of ambivalent way. Mark was also studying on the other end of the couch and was struck by my pensive expressions during a causal glance. So we started a conversation.

It sounds like the start of a bad academic joke, right? An anthropologist and a psychiatrist are sitting on a couch when a subject comes into the room.

They talk for hours about the subject but nothing is communicated. For the anthropologist every trait is acquired through experience, as though all social practices have their precise counterpart in internal mental practices. For the psychiatrist the world is cast from well-structured psyches, as though mental processes are projected upon social systems. “Introjection!” “Projection!”

“Introjection!” “Projection!” They yell back and forth. Finally the subject gets exhausted from being between two such powerful powers of transference and vanishes.

So when he asked me what I was thinking about I had trouble delivering the punch line. He didn’t think it was funny either. I put my words to double duty to paint desire and the social with the same brush. What I was really after, the same thing I’m after in this section, was a good way to describe desire always happening between things. I had trouble expressing, just like I am now, that desire flows in the connections between psychic and spatial physics. I knew it would be difficult, since I was really challenging oedipal motivation, universal

168 psychic structures, drives, projections and just about everything dear to the psychoanalytic apparatus. My stammering was annoying, but he seemed to understand. I think Mark had encountered similar “post-modern” arguments in some of his psychoanalytic seminars. He paused for a moment, and then came towards me with his analytic apparatus. “I see what you are getting at, but there’s got to be something more. There is something more to you.” He paused again, knowing he had my attention and that the moment was heavy. “Let’s not be so abstract. I know you pretty well by now. How could that be? Based on your ideas you should always be different, in flux, transient. But instead, you say and do things that are consistent with each other. You’re a cohesive character. Actually, now that I think about it, you’re very dependable. You’re unified, structured. There are certain things I can predict about you, regardless of where we are or what the context is.” And he laughed with his delightfully devilish laugh that bubbled with satisfaction.

I fumbled around some words for a while. Mark gave me all the time I needed, just sitting back in his chair listening with calculated poise. It didn’t take long before I just tipped my king over. Do you see his brilliance? Not only did he travel right to the fundamental difficulty of the debate, he used my own attachment to selfhood as an example. He effectively made my self seem out of joint with my ideas about selves and spaces. Well it is. I love my self; I want to destroy myself. I want to control the world; I want to disappear into the world.

169 I don’t think Mark would be convinced by the earlier stories. He probably won’t be convinced by what I’m about to write either. However, this more psychologically disciplined reasoning might create some productive encounters between our different conceptualizations of selves, subjects and identity. Our differences have something to do with structure. Psychoanalysts find inherent structures, whereas post-structuralists look for structures in de-centered places.

It comes down to a question of whether structures are powerful artifacts, effects of culture, or universal human properties, whole causes of culture. Whereas

Mark, I think, tends to see things as variations on an oedipal theme, I see things as differential modes of subjectivation. Oedipus is itself a key ingredient to the work of social control outsourced to the nuclear family. Really, I think it’s better to see these conceptual arrangements as competing forces of attraction which work simultaneously in any social formation. We collectively desire order, structure, and stability at the same time as chaos, flux and transience.

Entities, whether they are selves, subjects, bodies, organisms, whatever, are multiple. As an anthropologist, I am mainly concerned with Homo sapiens, so I’ll talk in those terms. We are all made from separate elements of various composition which are joined through some planned and some chance encounters. The act of joining creates enduring and apparently stable conglomerates. Quite often elements are incorporated through encounters with habit forming attractors which bodies become addicted to. This, of course, is only a preliminary statement. The real trick is to point out some ways that these

170 conglomerates are formed and shaped. Then we have to ask not only how were they formed but also what do they do, what do they make possible? As a place to begin writing about these questions I will start with the relationship between subdivision grids and identity grids.

171 Grids of Existence

It’s not just because I’m writing about master planned communities, suburbs, space and things like that that I think subdivision grids should be taken seriously. To me they point to a real connection between psychic and spatial physics. And this goes beyond just metaphorical connections. Speaking metaphorically would leave each function in its own parallel place or would lead to falling back into projection or introjection. No, these things work together, they are elements of larger functions.

If you ever look at a community map, the founding legal document that establishes the shape of things to come, you’ll notice immediately the care that goes into drawing lots. The whole thing is obsessed with lot lines and right of way lines. They are burned onto paper and filed away in county records storehouses. At the same time they are burned into the earth, like ritualistic scarification. The precision is astounding; it must be to overwhelm us with the sanctity of laser accurate inscriptions. For each corner and each straight edge you can read the hours, seconds and minutes of longitude and latitude for its intersecting companion. Any curved area demands even more precision, with multiple coordinates and radii of the projected circle. The geometrical perfection is remarkable. Dimensions are calculated down to hundredths of an inch.

Measurements and coordinates fill the huge blueprint paper in overwhelming fashion. And they usually approach the community in parts, by tracts. It is the seeming fulfillment of these impossible dreams that lend lots and the whole

172 institution of property an aura of invincible existence. To gain the status of legal entities, we require these rites of passage that make the earth ours. Now we even look to the heavens to give strength to our propertied convictions. Global

Positioning Satellite software and hand held field guides make lots even more indisputable. Let border disputes happen elsewhere; we know where we belong.

Most lots are square, with minor variations. Even when communities try to avoid it, the attraction of grids is hard to escape. The grid is just too effective a way of carving up property. It just makes sense. It is easy to calculate. It is easy to get things to fit together in an orderly way without gaps and unusable remainders. It may be the easiest but it certainly is our most cherished way of establishing order on the land. Order, however compelling it may be on its own, is meant to facilitate the recording of ownership and land transactions. But the inverse is probably the more interesting procedure. It is the best way to attach people to a territory.

Well measured lots make value measurements possible. Lots carve the whole earth into units of resemblance and universal equivalence. It is not that all lots are created equal. In fact it is crucial that they aren’t. But every lot can be compared. They may be bigger or smaller. They may have a good or bad location. They might be fertile or barren. They might be polluted or pristine. All of this translates into the fact that some are worth more money than others. It is the ability to compare lots that gives them value. The worst lot may have little

173 value, but it makes it so the other lots do bear value. They produce it in a comparative way (Marx 1976 Capital Volume 3, Part 6).

More than just making land values possible, lots also make judgments possible. There is a kind of correspondence between the lots bestowed upon bodies by the gods or social position, their lot in life, and the lots people live in.

The shared word is just a witness of this. First of all, your real estate is the primary signal by which one can boast their lot in life. The value of our property comes to stand in for the value of our lives. And we measure ourselves against the other lots out there. Existence and its affects are cut into lots, both conceptually and spatially. Then these lots are related to higher forms (Deleuze

1997: 129). We judge others and are judged in return quite often based upon an address and how the form of our lives relates to this lot.

With lines beamed down upon the earth from satellites or staked out with hands borrowed from the State on high, these earthly segments work well with the social categories that also traverse our lives. Together, they give us lives to lead, courses to steer, selves to become. Butler (1997: 20) says, “Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination.”

174 The lots that transect a community enact a desire to exist within pre- accomplished plans, to judge and be judged, the desire to measure one self against another. This is very similar to the normalizing technologies that

Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish (1977). The norm, for Foucault, is not simply an issue of good and bad. It is a statistical norm where bodies are distributed within a population. That’s why individualization and totalization are crucial to normalization: because the individual units must be differentiated and then referred back to the statistical distribution. This is how we come to understand the need and accept the techniques of self improvement. Or we simply accept our lots. So, lots resonate with desks in a class room or cells in a modern prison. They are units of differentiation. They are elements in the machine shop of individualism. They are crucial elements of normalization.

Interestingly, another crucial element of normalization is the family, as Foucault talks about in The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1978). Lots, their common sense status, their legal force, also naturalize the nuclear family, allow their work of social control to happen naturally.

One of the problems I am trying to combat here is the tendency to assume how space works. Like assumptions that language is all about meaning and communication. What I want to show is that generalized space is a part of generalized social and psychic operations. It is part of the stuff that works between the social and psychic. Stable arrangements, like selves, identities, real estate, do not reside solely within the boundaries. Stability is written through

175 the surface and beyond. Things are always between. In this case, families and identities are drawn between lot lines, computer drafting programs, GPS satellites, and fantasies of well measured and meshing sociality.

176 Paranoia

I’ll talk in detail about them shortly, but you will just have to trust me now that many complaints and conflicts in residential situations revolve around stimuli permeating boundaries. The boundaries of house or yard are sacred, wrapped up in fantasies of family and privacy. These are the units we carve our lives into.

As such they are segments which must be maintained at all costs.

The lot, private property drawn in matter, gives intensity to this kind of secure interiority. The other day I saw kids playing in a prefabbed front yard and I was possessed by a memory from my childhood. I remember doing the same things. “You can’t touch me! Now I’m on private property.” Then we’d argue about whether the sidewalk in front of each house was private property, the walkways and driveways, on and on until we had what we owned clearly mapped out in our early affective territories. Then, with the neighbor waiting to tag me, I would step onto the sidewalk, just long enough to tantalize the neighbor and smile devilishly as I slid my foot back. This kid’s game is a serious play of sealing off the world. It is a dream of ultimate control, to make the world disappear, to seal the world behind a protective shield of private property.

I’ve heard many stories of contamination. A neighbor is disturbed by hearing loud music next door or from the party across the street. The smell of dog feces lingers across the fence line. Cooking smells ooze also. Sometimes neighbors’ vision is stimulated by structures in backyards, clothes lines, or car parts in the driveway. Residents might bump their heads on satellite dishes

177 installed on party fences or struggle through the ivy planted by a neighbor.

Contamination works through the senses. And this contamination is a part of being alive, of being a conglomeration of open systems. It’s like William James says, “relationality is already in the world and [..] it registers materially in the activity of the body before it registers consciously” (quoted in Massumi 2002:

231).

From this perspective, it doesn’t really seem like contamination destabilizes our crucial segments. It does draw attention, like critical theorists have, that the subject is split (Lacan), is concocted (Foucault), is multiple

(Deleuze and Guattari). Perhaps it even draws attention to the idea that the family is a network or normalizing machine (Donzelot 1979). But, if these entities are shaken, the affect that comes from such unsettling is most often snatched back up in other means of drawing segments. Or, in a Derrida-like turn, the contamination is perhaps the only thing keeping the segments firm in the first place. Contamination incites a policing of affective territories.

This is our form of communitas. We desire connections with others. But this desire for connection plays itself out in the fervor for decontaminated lives.

178 The Intimate Physics of Space and Psyches

I’ve begun a sort of microphysics of the dwelling. But there is much work to be done. I think the next place to visit is behind closed doors and earlier in the stages of human development. The personal space of the bedroom is a perfect place to witness identity solidifying with the help of space. For example, differentiated space is a key aspect of oedipalizaiton. The triangle is designed into the very floor plan of the beloved track home. The master bedroom is often regally situated at the end of the hall with the kids bedrooms strategically placed on either side of the hall just before the masters’ door. This distribution seems to me to be a part of the process of oedipalization where the child becomes separated form its first love object, the mother. This separation allows the developing human to be positioned within the larger social environments (Grosz

1995: 81). Having a bedroom is crucial to this process. The door that closes between the mother and child is no mere representation of the process forming the child’s superego. It is an instrument in the generation of the superego, both fostering and repressing the forbidden desire. The room is the first place where we learn public and private, where we learn that we are isolated creatures expected to regulate our desires based on where we are. If we are out of control, desiring out of tolerable veins, we are sent to our rooms where we can rant and rave as we wish. With the help of the home’s differentiated space, oedipalization will ensure the production of a socially functional and sexually differentiated individual, whose behavior and desires are regulated by the

179 dictates of conscience and whose energies are directed to socially valued outlets

(Grosz 1995: 51).

Whereas the workings of the oedipal conflict have been talked over and over in many disciplines, the subject of toilet training is not.4 This is interesting to say the least, a signal of the extent of our anal taboos perhaps. Of all the psycho writers, Erik Erikson has the most to say about toilet training. At the same time he is the closest to seeing social and psychic production working in tandem. For Erikson, the psychic and the cultural constitute two parallel causative dimensions. They are two centers that exist in a complex dialectical relationship. This is a distinct improvement form strict psychoanalytic approaches which see drives based in natural human properties which are curtailed and tamed by the needs of socialization. That is why Foucault called this the repressive hypothesis, because the social is relegated to a realm of pure prohibition. Erikson makes some crucial moves out of that model, actually giving social events constitutive powers as well as repressive powers (Erikson 1964;

Erikson and Coles 2000).

This points, however subtly, to one of the reasons I think psychoanalysts play down the importance of toilet training. It is too social. It is a productive regime of training. It happens with material props and spatial attachments.

Toilet training is where we learn to draw our boundaries at our skins and

4 The issue of toilet training and its cultural importance came to me when reading Constance Perin’s wonderful ethnography entitled Belonging in America. With toilet training, Perin gives an interesting analysis of the production of gendered identity. Her approach was an inspiration and a great starting point for my few words about toilet training here. My own use of toilet training diverges from Perin since I want to see how toilet training plays out in terms of household machinics, the political technology of domestic matter.

180 ironically where we can see how we reach out beyond the flesh. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

The anus is an aggregate of nerve endings and musculature that, because of the central role it plays in toilet training, becomes an erogenous zone. The child has intense wishes to crap at its leisure, to maximize the pleasure of elimination, to manipulate and stimulate the anus, to mess, and to generate fecal odors. But these wishes are at odds with the desire for sociality and belonging.

Learning not to crap oneself, to hold back in inappropriate places and times is a defining characteristic of being human. Toilet training puts social desires at the heart of our selves; we are already a populous solitude.

A child learns to attach anxiety, a fear of parental rejection, to the sight, smell, touch and taste of feces and urine. Learns is really not strong enough.

The whole process is beyond meaning and understanding. The anxiety about bodily waste is an affect that, with the help of the trainer, usually the mother, becomes plugged into a whole series of triggers. We are disgusted with the smell of crap long before we even categorize the smell as such. The urge to relieve oneself triggers a desire to seek out a bathroom likewise in a preconscious way. Potty training establishes one of our earliest and most lasting machines. It is where we learn the affective nature of objects because it is where we learn to distinguish between what is us and what is not us. Crap, at first, is just part of the infant. As we become anxious about it, we learn to set crap apart as an object. And we come to desire methods to control these newly

181 thingified entities by attaching affects and connecting them with emotional states of disgust, guilt and shame.

Teaching alternating desires for retention and elimination is also teaching the difference and balance between self-determination and (m)other’s determination. As Erikson (Erikson 1968:109-10) says, “a sense of self-control without loss of self-esteem is the autogenetic source of a sense of free will.

From an unavoidable sense of loss of self-control and parental overcontrol comes a lasting propensity for doubt and shame.” This not only points to the ways that

“holding on” and “letting go” are infused in many situations throughout our lives.

It more importantly documents the “battle for autonomy” at play in toilet training. Importantly, this autonomy is somewhat of an objective illusion. We become autonomous individuals when we are sufficiently trained to want to do what we are supposed to do. Toilet training is about power, productive power.

It shows that, as Butler (1997: pg. 33) paraphrases Foucault, “the limits to liberation are to be understood as not merely self-imposed but, more fundamentally, as the precondition of the subjects formation.” Toilet training is one of the first forces that bend desire against itself. For fear of loosing mother’s love, for the absolute fear of loosing ones self, we become moral. We attach to morality, we adopt as our own the law of “thou shall not crap thyself.”

No, more than this. Absolute fear, mentioned above in the vaults section, is displaced by an absolute law. This paradoxically reconstitutes the fear as a fear of the law. As Butler says (1997), “prohibition becomes the displaced site of

182 satisfaction for the ‘instinct’ or desire that is prohibited.” This is how we become anal. This is also tied to our desires to hoard things behind our vaulted entries.

I’ll get to this shortly, first I’d like to digress even further for just a few lines.

This idea of ensnared autonomy generated in the training regime around toilets allows Erikson to say something interesting about democratic apathy. He says:

I would like to suggest in all seriousness that early bowel training and other arrangements invented to condition the child in advance of his ability to regulate himself may be a very questionable practice in the upbringing of individuals who later on are supposed to exert a vigorous and free choice as citizens. It is here that the machine ideal of ‘functioning without friction’ invaded the democratic milieu. Much political apathy may have its origin in a general feeling that, after all, matters of apparent choice have probably been fixed in advance–a state of affairs which becomes fact, indeed, if influential parts of the electorate acquiesce in it because they have learned to view the world as a place where grown-ups talk of choice, but ‘fix’ things so as to avoid overt friction. Erikson considers this a pathological aspect of toilet training, particularly relevant to the situation in the contemporary United States. Early government publications, like Infant Care in the first half of the twentieth century, recommended bowel training as early as three months and sometimes encouraged mothers to hold infants over the porcelain basin at birth (Perin

1988). This, of course, is not only a regime of infant training, but training mothers as well. Doctor Spock pushed back the effective age of toilet training to about a year and a half. Still, our collective neurosis about anal self-regulation is evident. It is evident, among other places, in national fantasies of individualism.

The Marlboro man shows his mastery sitting on top of his horse while little puffs

183 of rise effortlessly out of his mouth and huge clumps of untrained relief are pulled to the ground between the animal’s flanks. But he is saddled too. And choice for him is reduced to the brand he is addicted to smoke. It is also evident in public discourse of personal responsibility and the corporate dream of efficiency. Read this other quote from Erikson:

Our western civilization […] has chosen to take the matter [of toilet training] more seriously, the degree of pressure being dependent upon the spread of middle-class mores and the ideal image of a mechanized body. For it is assumed that early and rigorous training not only keeps the home atmosphere nicer but is absolutely necessary for the development of orderliness and punctuality. This gives a whole new interpretation to my earlier desire to waste company time by sitting on the toilet. The concern with keeping accurate time must be a diffuse condition in a capitalist society, where our lives are chopped up into exchangeable units, like lots. Anality is a diffuse set of social desires; we loose much of its usefulness when we isolate anality within personality or character.

Learning the limits of liberation is also where we get solid about seeing everything beyond our skins as objects. We objectify so we can control things.

And like I wrote earlier, the desire for control expresses itself through property.

But what I’m really after in this dirty little section is the way our autonomous selves, our anality and morality, are tied to material sites. Learning socially defined functions within generalized places become the key to self-control. We learn to inhabit bodies while we learn to inhabit our houses. We make ourselves at home in each, which basically means attaching habits to locations and objects like glue and nails in our assembled selves. Stability, structure, and grids of

184 identity are generated in the encounter between physiology, human development, regimes of training, and differentiated space. Affective territories traverse multiple layers of material reality: neuronal activity, architectural space, patterns of inhabiting.

Although toilet training is in some sense universal, it would be a mistake to overlook the political aspects. There are endless possibilities of how to approach this sensitive issue. The fact that we approach our bowels with standardized desires bears witness to the political technology of shit. In one of his many recent books, The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zizek backs me up on this. He says , “In everyday life, ideology is at work especially in the apparently innocent reference to pure utility […] even the most intimate attitude towards one’s body is used to make an ideological statement.” Zizek sees national character, brought to us as collective fantasies in our relations with material elements, expressed in toilets. Germans like the hole up front so that the shit is laid out for inspection. The French like the hole in the back, where it can facilitate a quick departure. English and American versions have the basin full of water so that the shit floats, visible but not to be scrutinized. These variations express three different existential attitudes (German reflective thoroughness,

French revolutionary radicalism and English moderate liberalism), political stances (German conservativism, French radicalism and English liberalism) and predominance of certain spheres of social life (German metaphysics and poetry,

French politics and English economics). This ideological expression through

185 things is what he calls, following Bergson, “material sincerity.” It gives a base element to what he calls elsewhere the fantasy support of reality. This is Zizek at his best, and it is down right pleasure to read. But there is a bit more and is somewhat different from the version of things I’m presenting here. Regimes of relating to our own excrement are written into the matter of things, but this goes beyond ideas and fantasies. Fantasy and ideas are expressions within complex social and psychic machinery. But matter, as I have been working my butt off to demonstrate, works in pre-ideological ways also. We attach to it through preconscious patterns of conduct. Our comportment is defined by everyday material like chairs and bucket seats. Our very notions of self are wrapped up in doorways and functionally differentiated material sites. But, hey, Zizek is talking about the production of the real, about the power of our everyday encounters.

So, really all this is somewhat nit picky.

Another way to think about the political technology of bathrooms is to consider the way it drives gender binaries down our throats and up our asses.

Toilet training is still done mostly by mothers. Perin convincingly presents the statistics. Mother is someone who cares for children, it is an ancient and embodied gender axiom. As infants, and as adults, we want to be cared for.

This desire for mother goes beyond the body and self of the one we call mother.

It is a diffuse identity. It always struck me as odd that Lacan would re-cast the

Freudian prohibitive father as the “symbolic father” (that which gets in the way of care and attention) and “the name of the father” (what we call whatever gets

186 in the way), and do nothing similar with dear old mom. At the moment of birth, when a fetus becomes a baby and a woman a mother, a whole complicated tangle bears down. Her body and spirit are possessed by the concept of motherhood. This concept, that most lovingly embrace as a natural identity, is a label given to the generative desire to be taken care of. Even if mom works, she’s still expected to do the housework, to be the caretaker of all things domestic. Here we can see the gender binary in the origins of a desire for control and domination. To have another serve us is an expression enamored of control. So the guilt and shame that Erikson talks about is a bit more complicated than that. We want to be taken care of, to have our asses wiped for us. Mothers want to take care as well, for feeling affiliation and appeasement in the act of care is a necessary rejoinder for being a slave to shit. It is a reciprocal servitude. This explains the persistence and diffuse nature of infantilism.

187 The Shit of Freedom and Submission

So where does the shit go when we finally let go and flush it away? Have you ever put much thought to that? I didn’t think so. That’s because flushing is like a little ritual of forgetting, for most of us hooked into the whole centralized waste processing system. If you have septic, you probably have shit on your mind and in your olfactory glands a bit more than your urban counterparts. With the collective post-bowels of the urban supraorganism, we really need to forget about that someone and somewhere else where our shit is dealt with.

Community works on a similar principle, where detritus and decaying matter like yard trimmings and excessive packaging is whisked away from bins and cans. Once the weekly ritual is finished in the residing grumble of the garbage truck, we can put trash out of our minds. It is so important in fact, that if you live in a common interest development and leave your trash can in plain view you can expect to get a notice in the mail about it. We need trash to become invisible, whether in disappearing trucks or subterranean pipes. Our limit attitude demands it, demands that we fill whatever we can and wait for the next cycle to start again. That way, as Americans, we can continue to produce the overwhelming majority of the worlds rubbish.

At one of the condo communities I helped to manage, there was a persistent trash problem. People would overfill the bins each week. They would throw large items like furniture and appliances right into the huge and liberally situated dumpsters. Trash would spill over the edges. It would collect in the

188 stalls and on the streets. The outsourced trash pick up company would remove all the trash, but would fine the community sixty dollars for each overflowing dumpster. The community sent out notices. The Board made announcements during meetings. But the situation continued. There would be as much as four citations each month, that’s two-hundred and forty wasted dollars. As the situation persisted, the fines rose to seventy-five dollars per incident.

These fines sort of trickled down. The City in which the community was built began cracking down on excessive waste. HOAs and other corporations, entities which could easily be held accountable through fines, became conduits for making waste a territory of management. But that’s only because The City had been fined from offices higher up for “generating too much waste” and because waste processing has become more and more costly, since we are running out of places to put it all. The governing logic here, I’m sure you’ve realized, is an economic one. The costs of waste processing necessitate mindfulness about trash. Well, I guess capitalistic valorization can have some beneficial side effects, even if they are only treatments of its own symptoms.

Excessive consumption and excessive elimination are complementary neuroses. But it gets even more neurotic. Avoiding confrontation with the destination of our own waste amounts to treating people, sanitation engineers and treatment workers, like objects made to serve our shitty little needs. It’s interesting that it was during our earliest encounters with crap that we really turned the world into a field of objects. Now we extend that objectifying desire

189 to serve us. It is again desires for control expressed in these relations. This control, rationalized by the trump of capitalist exchange, displaces the infantilism of having someone else clean up after us. We are afraid of no longer being able to live like an invalid. Tom Wolfe paraphrases the stoics when he writes about that in his book A Man in Full. The seeming independence from necessity–Bordieu’s class fantasy materialized in all sorts of things–is really just another type of dependence, even if it is a masterful one. This, as I’ve been arguing for far too long now, is a central element of the HOA machine.

Dependence, in the case of monopolized services, is also an inverted postulate of the desire for the State and its coordinating magic. We see ourselves as dirty little creatures. If there was no centralized waste processing and regulation we’d be tossing shit out of our front door and our windows. This is how awnings were spawned after all. But really this state desire is yet again part of the limited autonomy by which we are willingly tethered to choices which we were never really free to make.

The state monopoly on shit is perhaps foremost a guarantor of a certain mode of connectivity, of sociality. The complex network of waste processing ensures the service relationship. It ensures that shit flows downhill, down the imposed social hierarchy. Hey, maybe this putrid act of gravity is even the origin of our otherwise arbitrary vertical desires. Shipping waste out of our homes and communities to be processed elsewhere and by others is analogous to shipping our nation’s heaping waste to third world countries. In recent years we’ve seen

190 a whole escalation of international waste warfare that is tied to the inequalities in the global economy. Colonialism and imperialism and transnational capitalism make routes for the easy extraction of resources from around the world. When there is nothing left, we throw countries their own bones by using their land and people, now totally barren and destitute, as a dumping ground for the very byproducts of their own stolen and transformed wealth. Taking in American waste is a lucrative endeavor, and becomes desired by the elites of certain countries. How else will their poor make a dollar? On the national stage, waste is similarly a matter of class warfare. Medical waste incinerators, like the one in

Oakland, find themselves at home in low income areas where poor people are choked by poisoned fumes. Landfills, graveyards, junkyards, water treatment facilities all mark the depths of our desire for inequality, our desire for good and cheap service.

There are other ways to deal with shit. We could encourage communal and familial co-management in the way our intimate excretions are handled.

Many people have begun composting. In community gardens and co-housing projects, such efforts seem to establish some other, more sensitive, more energetic, more creative, type of community. It’s a strange thing to be cited for in a dissertation, but one of the many wonderful accomplishments of the

Professors in the Department of Anthropology at UT belongs to James Brow and his waste processing garden. Instead of a septic or a sewage hook up, his pipes flow into a stepped series of plant beds where nutrients are drawn from the

191 waste in a complex connected arrangement. At the bottom, clear and harmless water seeps out into the nearby lake.

192 Dreams of Security

Whether it is the closed circuit video monitors that pan back and forth and take in a whole common area. Whether it is the cleverly designed pylons that keep potentially dangerous vehicles at bay or the iron bars which swing open at the magical swipe of a microchipped key chain. Whether it is the infrared border scanners or the retina mapping devices or the panic rooms in our basements.

Security technology is cool. Interacting with it I get a sort of affective gadget rub off, and that is even when I am in my critical analyzing mode. I think

Foucault would see this tied to the modern places of disciplining movement, and through such micropractices enact the molding of bodies and souls. Grossberg will later call it “disciplined mobilization.” To follow along, I think it should also be mentioned how we come to desire surveillance in our lives. The proliferation of these technologies can only be seen as a matter of desire, a desire to see and to be seen, to pattern the movement of a population and to have our own movement directed for us.

193 Light and Theft

Date Time Name/Assn Caller’s Issue Action 11/1 2:10 Wendy Greene / There is a street light Called maintenance 5 CC out on her corner and company to one of the bollard investigate 2:30. lights near her unit is out.

Let me tell you a bit about this conversation. It seems innocuous enough, but the phone log doesn’t do justice to the sense of panic I felt engulfed Ms.

Greene and each of her statements. “It’s fall, you know, so it gets dark early.”

“Yes.”

“And I have to park my car under a burnt out street light and walk through a dark alley to get to my front door.” It wasn’t really an alley at all, more like a pathway with sculpted embankments and maturing Privet trees. But it probably shared a lot in common with an alley when it was dark and unlit. I could just see this young woman moving as fast as she could without looking frantic along the walkway, peering over the mounds of grass and around the shrubs. Suddenly I was possessed by a sense of masculine contempt and chivalry. How silly it was for a grown woman to be afraid of the dark. But I also desperately wanted to help.

“I’ll send maintenance crews to take care of the lights as soon as possible.”

“That’s good. But someone should really watch out for these things.

Having so many lights out is very dangerous.”

194 There was already someone who was supposed to be watching for these things. All of the communities I managed hired lighting companies to do monthly or twice monthly sweeps through the community to replace spent light bulbs. Some of these companies even periodically checked the photo cells.

Photo cells are ingenious devices which detect the ambient light levels and switch the lamps on and off when certain thresholds are met. In other words, the lights come on automatically at dusk and turn off automatically at dawn.

Automation is just dandy, and required, in a full service residence.

These companies were far from perfect, and they typically did not have the boom truck necessary to replace street lights. So I received many calls from homeowners about lights. I’d say I received three calls on average for every light that went out. So, why is light so important? Of course people want to see where they are going and are worried about tripping or turning into a bush. Still, there is more to it than just lighting someone’s way, keeping them on track.

Light is also about security. Crime happens in dark places, or so we think. It is easier to hide and sneak around. Who knows what people are possessed to do when no one can see them? So, we want to throw some light on things, to clear them up, to prevent people and things from creeping towards us.

Human eyesight is fragmented and incomplete. We see things as a series of quick snapshots. Our brains fill in the spaces, threads things together, thereby giving us a smooth world to interact with. This is why movies work; their frames move slightly faster than the snapshots of our vision. When we look

195 at a landscape, we also don’t see the whole thing at once. There are blind spots in our vision, especially in the area where our optic nerve emerges. It’s not sensitive to light, so we don’t see wherever it is directed. What is really interesting about this, is that “we do not see that we do not see” (Maturana and

Varela 1998). Another interesting thing about our vision is that the color we ascribe to objects is an affectation rather than a characteristic of the objects themselves. Like an orange. It is orange whether we look at it in sunlight or under fluorescent light. But fluorescent light has a great number of short blue wavelengths where the sun has long red ones. So, there can not be a correspondence between the color consistency of objects and the light that comes from them. According to Maturana and Varela (pg. 22), we should “stop thinking that the color of the objects we see is determined by the features of light we receive from the objects. Rather, we must concentrate on understanding that the experience of color corresponds to a specific pattern of states of activity in the nervous system which its structure determines.” This point has some interesting ramifications for thinking about the way we see things.

There is an interesting reversal to this firmly held commitment to light.

Things that are readily apparent are safe, they are what they are. So we don’t really scrutinize someone walking around in broad daylight, particularly if they are dressed as a maintenance person or simply look like they belong there.

Want to do a risky experiment? Get dressed up in some nice casual clothing and

196 go steal something from a local store, one without theft detectors at the door of course. While you are walking out just act casually and calmly. I bet no one will even think twice. Unless, of course, you are emitting other signals that make you suspicious (like being a person of color or having red hair or a lip ring or something). The point is that regimes of criminality are conjoined to this system of light. The idea of making things visible, like we see in our democratic discourse about government oversight and Foucault’s vision of discipline, is a modern notion. But at the same time, making things visible is an act of creation, of making things visible in a certain way. And we are also distracted from this creation by the very light that lets us see.

Perhaps the turn towards theme park architecture (Sorkin 1992) and phantasmagoria type environments like Las Vegas casinos and Disneyland attractions have effects further than we might think (Also see Venturi, Scott

Brown et al. 1977). The way to sell people on food, gambling, or simply dissolving into the built environment is to portray a consistent narrative, one with images, smells and sounds which all refer back to each other in a consistent way and conjure up some sort of overarching theme. If this is a popular mode to sell to people, then why not also a popular way to steal from them and con them out of their possessions. Hey, now that I’m thinking about it, perhaps Disney and the other phantasmagoria builders learned from the con-man. Why not? After all, Las Vegas is the capitol of family fun.

197 The thief himself or herself has become a critic of ideology. It is easier to steal in broad daylight, via distraction (In a Morse 1990 sense of the word). And this is exactly what development companies pull off on a regular basis, for example. We look at a house with a particular system of light, not noticing that the nails on the deck are two inches further apart than codes allow (and we all know that codes are themselves pushing the threshold of safety towards developer’s financial interests). Or that the stucco is a quarter inch too thin, or that the seam between the stairs and the wall is patched and painted over in a makeshift fashion that nevertheless looks good painted a muted green next to the new off white carpet. In fact, “new” might be one of the few things we see.

This amounts to an argument against the simplicity of shedding light on matters. It is never enough to make something visible. There is rather a whole system of light that determines what will be seen, what will be omitted, and what connections can and should be drawn. Habits of seeing create a sort of tactility to images, their affects, and their interpretations.

198 Seductive Architecture

So, back to Mark’s question. Undeniably, there is something consistent about subjects. For me, unlike for psychoanalysts, this doesn’t signal something natural or universal about that consistency. Space has a consistency as well.

Not only do concepts relate to each other, sites also imply other sites by their relationship with each other. If our neural pathways are given shape during events as certain developments in neuroscience have lead (See Kennepohl

1999), then those events are folded (Deleuze 1993) into our selves and remain there. As certain events occur with any frequency, patterns or habits begin to form. It is not the repetition of the experiences as much as it is the generalization of models that give standardization. Our mentalities are wired together with the regularity of streets, sidewalks, curbs, and crosswalks. Our thoughts inhabit us in territories behind doors, fences, and walls. They move between the physics of space and the brain to give particular desires, thoughts and actions specific locations. Desires know their places as we please our palates in the kitchen, lounge in the living room, relive ourselves in the bathroom

(even though we can’t call it what it is), and fuck behind our bedroom doors.

Other desires beyond have a twinge of transgression, like fucking on the kitchen table, eating on the toilet, urinating in a bush or on a hill, or falling asleep in the car. We all live with generalized functions through generalized spaces that pull desire together in particular arrangements. This is a collective unconscious.

Jung was on to something, but I think he was looking for the links in limited

199 territories of archetypes and myths. The things that move between us and give potential shape to our desires are more tangible than this.

200 The Art of Existence

If things like toilets, toilet training, waste processing, doors, rooms, entryways, vaults, light switches, computers, any and all of the material elements of our daily rituals, have such constitutive and directive force, then it behooves us to become sensitive about them. In Fear of Flying, Erica Jong gives us a warning of sorts about such things. She mockingly claims: “German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything” (quoted in Zizek 1997). This is funny, but there is a kernel of truth there.

After years of conceptualizing power, contemplating subjectification,

Foucault brings his politics together with this sort of ethics. Basically he asks: shouldn’t we try to engage the assembling together of our selves in an artful way? Shouldn’t we become active about the forces that constitute us? Shouldn’t we try to establish some sort of communal co-management in our modes of subjectivation? We can see these concerns laid out in practical ways in his work with prison reform. Similarly, they underpin Felix Guattari’s techniques while running the La Borde clinic. Foucault calls this the aesthetics of existence, the arts of the self, or technologies of the self. Guattari calls it autopoesis. The approaches have much in common, but also some fruitful divergences.

Technologies of the self are easy to understand. It is a specific practice that individuals use upon their own selves in order to transform themselves.

Diary writing is a good example. Exercise and diets are other examples. In each

201 case, the technological component is strapped to our bodies, our selves, our desires, and our habits. With tools and in particular settings we do work on ourselves like a piece of artwork always in progress. You can see that this concept is at the heart of this whole section. It explains my interest in gardening and house painting and just about everything. It is also a nice revision of

Marxist politics, I think. When production is unleashed from the economic sphere, the whole world, not just the factory, is awash in alienation, even our selves. Working on our selves, as all work is, with technologies simply imported or habitually adopted is a type of alienation from our selves.

Landscaping is an art, right? Think about the care that goes into arranging and caring for a botanical garden, for example. Understanding this powerful productivity, some communities, swimming against this current, make communal gardening a central organizing activity. In HOA communities, by contrast, this creative connection between different factions of growth is curtailed in the process of commodified services. For too many of us, our forms and materials of expression are given out in increasingly standardized and centralized ways. I think this dulls sensitivity to our multiplicitous and open character.

Not only that, the corporate landscaper is charged with maintaining the appearance, sacrificing dynamism and change to the altars of aesthetic consistency. Becoming is stymied. This becoming is stalled despite the fact that matter keeps changing. In the case of human beings, the matter that composes

202 us changes totally every seven years. Atoms and sub-atomic particles move in and out of our bodies which are congealed in stable arrangements. How is this possible? It’s baffling, that’s for sure. A HOA community shares this characteristic I think. The bushes are trimmed so frequently its matter is probably hauled off many times, more often than seven years. And this is not even considering the flows that move through its boundaries. The paint on a house is recycled in short periods. Roads are rebuilt. People move in and out regularly. Still, the community keeps the same structure. I think this is because the matter and energy of a community is all encoded. In fact, the whole community is just a code written in matter. It actualizes the desire to see things expressed in forms, a world of forms and contents. Building codes hold structures in certain shapes. Architectural committees tie matter into certain standards and regimes of taste. Human DNA holds our beings together? Rules and regulations give our common desires their standard directions. The desire for aesthetic consistency and continuity makes matter dance in stable structures and patterns.

Mike’s desire, which pulses like wireless communication waves through us all, for pre-planned and maintenance-free landscaping, blocks the potential of continually re-experiencing and re-creating a self through the artistry of plant care. Sounds silly? Well think for a minute about Zen gardening. Think for a minute about the Reclaim the Streets actions to rescue endangered community gardens in NYC. The issue of gardening, caring for plants, is more than just

203 expressing oneself through plants. It is a crucial way of establishing an ethic of care and sensitivity. It is a way to see the collective management of ourselves as a continuous process.

But there is a paradox in the Foucaldian approach to the arts of the self.

Perhaps you’ve noticed it. As the toilet training section points out, the self comes into existence because of an injurious and inevitable attachment to social existence (Brown 1995). We are let to embrace, in an “empty gesture” (Zizek

1991; Zizek 1992), the choices which are really not choices at all. To become autonomous, we must accept our limits, no, we must want them, as they are the very foundation of us. So, how can this fundamental unit of power be at the same time the fundamental tool in the ‘undefined work of freedom’? As if that weren’t challenging enough, to use the concept, the feminist critiques must also be addressed. Self-mastery has always had an “essentially masculine structure of active virility” (Diprose 1994), which gained its arty stature in the male body by subordinating the womanly characteristics of immoderation and lack of control

(Fraser 1997). This is part of the conceptual garbage that shackles the concept women together with wiping incontinent asses.

There are many responses. To begin with, Foucault pointed out a number of times that there can be no power without resistance (Foucault 1978; Foucault

1982). So, like Copjec argues, the self is riddled with paths to dissolution within the very making of its stability (Copjec 1994). We desire stability; we desire our own undoing. Selves must be perpetually remade, by ourselves and in relations

204 with others, so things can happen in this mix. Another way to get at this is to say that arrangements are only apparently stable. New elements are continually added and removed. These can be radical transformations. We are trained into loving our own delimited autonomous anatomy. The freedom of liberal democracies and the capitalist market have as their correlation those little psychic regimes of fascism and totalitarianism which keep autonomy within bounds while still fulfilling the requirements for ground level command centers

(Dean and Massumi 1992). But it is that very entity which provides the threshold of these social formations. Like the inherent capitalist tension between labor and capital, that is capitalism’s threshold. One little hiccup in the machines and selves can go awry. Autonomy is a shackle and a weapon. So I say lets have more of it.

The whole mess is still not entirely convincing. I like thinking of my critical desires as a colossal accident that can reproduce itself like a mutated virus. A “mind virus” perhaps (Dawkins 1989)? A meme? A living arrangement of signs that inhabits brains and reproduces itself between bodies? This idea of the meme, which has become popular in certain biological concepts of the social, resembles that of Spinoza’s definition of a body. A body is anything which can affect or be affected: “it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea”

(Deleuze in Frasier 1997). A body is defined by what it can do, not its form or function, not its genus or species. Saying that a group of signs is a body, that it is alive as much as we think we are, is a provocative statement. It is frightening,

205 since we are pulled out of the bright little center of the Universe and forced to see how what we think we are is given to us from elsewhere, in our association with other bodies. This is why Deleuze and Guattari’s machinics is a crucial complement to Foucault’s technologies of the self. It is crucial because we can see beyond our selves. I am not my thoughts. I am not my desires. I am not my habits. Or, I am these things because they move through me, make me, in their diffuse road trip. Identity goes beyond the self. The self goes beyond a body. The body goes beyond flesh. We are machines, endowed with the not so special capacity to feed back upon our selves. Seeing things this way will really trip your mind. However, it will also move us past the impasses in the technologies of the self.

Politics comes in the connectivity between desires, with things, spaces and concepts. That is why I keep writing about how things work. That is why I am hung up on writing about what bodies are made to do. I am trying to illuminate the processes which shape our propensities and potential. And, it is about escape from the categories which delimit us. I am trying to find ways to attach to desires for creativity, for expanding potential.

206 Art of Inhabiting

Profit is perhaps one of the nastiest little memes. It gives vitality to all sorts of matters. It shapes our brain matter. I can see right now a bunch of money grubbing neurons fixing people in the grooves of success. It pulls at our muscles and ligaments. It coats our landscapes. Because of the desire for profit, we get things like standardized houses. We get assembly line development of our domiciles. We are sold on community. Common space means increased density which in turn means more units sold per acre. So we get CIDs too and the HOAs which are needed to manage this dangerous territory of overlapping interests.

The average homebuyer, even above average, does not have the tools to beat back let alone escape this tangle. I know I can’t. But most people don’t really want to, no matter how hard I want them to want to. Pop-culture housing lays out models on glossy sheets of eight and a half by eleven like status pin ups. The whole industry becomes a monster of godly proportions and capabilities. We are funneled in increasingly delimited directions by the surge of choices we feel compelled to make between commodities.

Built forms give shape to our routines. We walk from the master bedroom, down the narrow hallway which takes us past the bathroom and kid’s rooms on either side. There is a guest or spare room we hardly ever enter, like it is haunted by the ghost of previous occupants. At the end of the hall we overlook the living room and lurch down the stairs that double back on

207 themselves until we arrive in the tiled or wood floored entryway. It is smooth to encourage gliding to some other destination; the entry is no place to loiter. We slouch through the archway to the kitchen where we stop briefly to consume daily signs and sustenance . Afterwards we slide out the door to the garage, click the garage door opener before we get into the car. As we drive out of the garage, we remember to click the remote in the car to shut the door behind.

And when we come home, the whole procedure is run in reverse, with perhaps added stops in the living room to plug into the television.

This rhythm is repeated daily, like the fade in and out of our own little song we sing during the transition from unconscious silence to the irracination with the world. It is a necessary social and psychological mechanism. The intense privacy of dreams, nightmares and the intimacy of bedroom relations must be buffered from the intense extraction of our lives in the encounter with other matters and bodies. Little rituals line these territories, it is how we learn to inhabit them, making the territories operative in space and in neurons. It is why standardized home building, although banal, is deeply affective. This whole act of natural human vitality is written into its form. We fill it as content, giving universal expression to particular desires. This is yet another way to make the alienation from the potential artistry of home building become painfully visible.

Concerns about homes are crucial in the way that we make our homes so we can take them with us as a little shelter in our encounters with the world.

The shape of our home is conjoined to the shape of our world. First it comforts

208 us by giving an image of soothing and stabilizing center in the heart of a chaotic out there. It is a song the lost child, scared of the dark, sings to find the way home. It is also a rhythm that creates the home we desire to return to when the fatigue of life sets in. It creates a place to inhabit. And, we take our home with us when we venture forth. The rhythm of inhabiting extends the secure interiority of the home into our encounters like a filter or buffer (See Deleuze and

Guattari 1987, particularly the chapter “On the Refrain”).

But then you get into the many debates over the popular. Is its power overrated as Fiske would say, because it is really the way each individual subjectively interacts with the pop that matters? Do popular productions take us nowhere, creating nothing, give us nothing new, are conformist and dull us into little lives of habit by their banality? Benjamin and Deleuze might argue this last point. Is the answer somewhere in the middle, between strategies and tactics, as DeCerteau (1984) might argue?

Maybe it’s all of them. I don’t know. Figure out what works for you. Still,

I plan to say a few words on the issue. First, I’d like to draw my attention to a curious problem. You see, of the scholars posted above, I clearly align with

Deleuze and Benjamin. But there seems to be something off here. Why is it that they see the popular not having the same status as “minor” cultural production, not capable of generating rifts in the heavy blanket of late capitalism and giving us radicalism or lines of flight?

209 I’m tempted to say that despite the generic forms of houses there are many ways to furnish a house. Fiske (1989), DeCerteau and Chambers (1991) might also. Furnishing is like a process of individualization; really it seems to me a production of individuals. It is like writing yourself into existence in a particular way. Interior decorating is an art of the self. But consider where the majority of home furnishings come from: Ikea, House to Home, Bed, Bath and Beyond,

Bombay Company, etc. It seems that there are fewer and more conglomerated sites for gathering tools for interior design expression. The whole home furnishing industry is a conversion of the war time assembly line apparatus left over from World War II. After the war, when planes and bombs were in less demand, and when suburbanization took off, factories that once made tanks and ships and artillery shifted their gears to make chairs and sofas and coffee tables

(See Easterling 1999).

There are also nation wide chains of art print stores. Of course the possible field of prints to choose from is quite limited, but at least art is made consumable for more and more individuals. One thing that disturbs me about this art industry is the way it helps nurture a division between art and life, the way it denies a connection between support and ornament. So we buy and hang art on our walls rather than being artful ourselves and transforming our worlds through an artistic process.

Walter Benjamin also had concerns about the mechanical reproduction of art. Benjamin suggests that mass production of art sacrifices its aura, degrades

210 the intensity of its presence and its affect. Mechanical reproduction removes art from ritual. This is similar to what I said above, since arts of the self would certainly be a type of ritualized conduct towards oneself. Benjamin’s vision, a nightmare really, is that the masses and reality are jointly given shape by a kind of fascist desire embedded in the logic of mechanical reproduction. “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”

When I first read the article in a graduate seminar I think I thought

Benjamin overlooked the consumption side of things. “People will undoubtedly receive the mechanically reproduced objects with variable effects,” I have written in my notes somewhere. We talked about it in Dr. Kapchan’s graduate seminar.

We were also uncomfortable with the condemnations implicit in Benjamin’s argument about how mechanical reproduction devalues popular culture and perhaps re-elevates high culture.

Now that I look back at this, I think I totally missed the point of

Benjamin’s essay. First of all, instead of trying to figure out every part of his argument and evaluating it as a whole theory of mass culture is quite frankly silly. Now I re-read everything and ask: what is useful about it? What I think is useful about Benjamin’s argument is that he sees “mass-production” creating gravity wells of experience, like black holes or singularities, where people come

211 to experience the same materials of expression. And beyond this, experience is locked into an expressive model. What is important is not figuring out how to express ourselves through what we buy, in their arrangement, in collections and displays. Benjamin is implicitly arguing, I think, about the importance of continually creating oneself by working artfully and ritualistically. This is the way we can move beyond our impasses that lock us into endless variations on a theme of resemblance.

212 Standardization

The phone boxes at Golden Heights are located in a closet whose unlocked door is right next to each garage door on the side of every unit. Once you know where one is, it is easy to find them all. That, it seems, is what one clever pirate, a swashbuckler of standardization, banked on to pull a minor scam.

She or he simply sneaked into someone’s closet and tapped into the phone line with a phone cord and a phone. Then, the telephone thief would make long distance and toll calls with leisure.

One resident caught on to the scam when he found toll charges on his bill.

He never used toll numbers and wondered what could have happened. After spending valiant hours trying to straighten things out with the phone company he turned to investigate the closet for some reason. When he peeked in he found a heap of snack wrappers, empty chip bags, coke cans, a folding lawn chair and an old beat up phone plugged into his phone box.

This good member called me soon after the discovery. He knew that if he were being ripped off in this way, everyone else in the community was susceptible to the same thing. So, we posted a notice in the newsletter. “All you have to do,” the letter suggested, “is to install a pad lock on your phone box.”

Soon thereafter I received two more phone calls from residents who found snack trash in their phone closet. They thanked me and anonymously thanked their neighbor for the preventative tip.

213 Why is this story interesting? I think for two reasons. First, it shows how standardization of living spaces also standardizes experiences. Second, the virtual event of a victimization to come created a kind of virtual intimacy between neighbors.

214 Seductive Architecture

I reached over to the glove box. With a snap it opened and unfolded with an overflowing of papers and things I didn’t know where else to put. I cautiously put my hand in and turned my fingers around a few times. The clicker wasn’t there. This was only my second time coming home to my new gated abode, and

I’d already lost track of the entry device. The car crept slowly toward the sliding gate with vertical green bars. I reached under the seats and along the floor.

Nothing. The car stopped right in front of the gate. I wanted to keep searching for my clicker, to feel the joy of remote control, but I noticed someone pulling up behind me. The guilt of being someone’s obstruction changed my course. I gave up on the clicker and reached out the window to press the sequential numbers into the key pad sticking up from a bushy island that separated the communal currents, coming and going. My finger searched for the correct numbers: 1, 7, 5, 9, 3. Something in me looked for a pattern, a geometry to the sequence, a “w”.

The next morning I fumbled around again to click myself out. I found it after waiting in front of the blockade for about a minute. I clicked and was off to work. Coming home again, there was a car moving through the gate right in front of me. I didn’t even bother with the clicker, I just sped right through with a subtle swerve to avoid the closing apparatus. On my right, between rows of cars parked just inside of the gate, a pregnant woman was sliding her keys into

215 the door of a blue Honda. She saw me tailgate and judged me. Or, I judged myself in her face.

Eventually I began to take my controlled access for granted. That is the whole point, to let community slide into a habitual rhythm of affects. After living in a gated condo complex for a few months the action felt down right instinctual.

Today, for example, I didn’t even notice my hand reaching out to hold my coded access chip up to the community’s scanner. I was working on a project that kept me moving in and out of a particular community, so for a while I had the access device sitting in my car. It was a simple ritual of entry deserving attention about as much as brushing my teeth in the morning. My actions seemed to skip ahead of my perception of them in their adherence to habit. It struck me as a certain rhythm of entry, like I was listening to the opening of the cash drawer and jingling coins in Pink Floyd’s song “Money.” There it is, slow down, slow down, slow down, code machine, code, pause, pause, access granted, gate sliding, gate sliding, gate sliding, pull forward, watch the edge, speed up, speed up, almost home now. Such habitual action seems to border on involuntary, certainly a passive sort of conduct. It is similar as when you space out for five minutes driving on the highway and realize you are at your exit. I think it is amazing how we can perform complex tasks without any active thought. The research and development of autopilot technology obfuscates the fantasy at the heart of matters that makes autopilot the condition of movement in our contemporary world.

216 Sometimes I would ride my bike or walk home from the BART (Bay Area

Rapid Transit) station just around the corner. I could flow right past the boundaries. There were endless points of ambulatory entry. But I felt like the only one who ever used them. Walking in I felt the windows peering at me beneath pressured brows. I looked around suspiciously, feeling under suspicion in my own community. Even where I lived I felt I did not belong when I walked.

The whole development was set up around automobility; rolling was well valued above strolling. Houses were arranged around streets, for the most parking and easiest relationship between house and car. The HOA community, it seemed, made the car an extension of the house, a little rolling bit of home.

I figured out early that the gate isn’t about exclusion. That’s a misconception. Exclusion presents an inadequate model of hierarchical differentiation in the U.S. Classes should not be separated. Neither should races. Otherwise, who would do the menial tasks that no middle-class person wants to do themselves? No, the gate presents us with a different issue. It’s like the advertisements say, “controlled access” is the plan. Sure we want to let all sorts of people into the community, but the ritual of the gate divides the flow of bodies into members and servants. Servants press the code into the box or are scrutinized by the gate guard. Members glide right through.

It is also a matter of directing the flow of bodies past one community orifice. This is crucial for establishing the thing-ness of the community itself.

The boundary is made, and felt, by having to drive along the outside wall around

217 to the front to get in. The hole and the boundary are part of the same machine.

If we could just move in and out wherever we pleased, there would be no boundary and no community. Most communities rely upon our automobility to establish this boundary. Curbs and streets direct everyone through the same point, up to the controlled access technology. This is necessary, I think, to make everyone feel like a part of something larger than themselves. Creating the mouth of the community is a way to give collectivity a sense of organic unity.

The controlled access technology also creates a site of interruption in the flow from office to home. This interruption is the key to affect (Massumi 2002). It is crucial to creating another entity between work and home. It is not enough for community to inhabit us as an idea, for us to inhabit it as a place; we must also feel it in our rhythms.

After a while I resigned myself to driving. This change wasn’t calculated or anything. It just sort of happened. It was easier and more enjoyable. The feeling of mobility is a rush. I felt freer to speed along demarcated routes than to walk slowly. Even though walking I had the dimension of direction to experiment with. The opening gate, I found, was more enjoyable also. Doors were opening for me, quite literally. Huge metal portals would swing open on their own, just with the slight press of my finger. I felt powerful. I wanted to find out how powerful I was, so I played little games. How far away could I press the button so that the gate would still open? Before the community drive?

No problem. Around the corner? Sometimes. What if I put new batteries into

218 the device? What doors could this little device open by mistake if I just happened to click at the right time and place?

Games of freedom and control are built right into the little hand held clicking device. Some are like garage door openers. Some are key chain devices that you simply hold up so their coded emissions can be decoded by the access device. I’ve done this routine several times. I always feel like a grocery being scanned for checkout, only I was being scanned for check in. Some communities have laser scanners and bar codes fixed to the cars. It is interesting that we are recognized as much by our cars, our devices, than our faces or words. It really points to the ways our bodies move recognizably beyond our flesh. Still, it is sad to me that getting “buzzed in” by a computer or a guard takes the place of being recognized by neighbors and other measures of belonging. In more classy places, where gate guards are hired, the face to face decoding is even more satisfying. This is not only because it is nice to have someone at task for you. It is also because the subjective gaze is a judgment. To be let in by the community’s employee is to be judged well, to be judged worthy of admittance in a St. Peter sort of way. Just passing the guard house can bestow a subtle sense of righteousness.

219 The Habit of Daydreams

A gentle breeze brushes through my front facing follicles. I hear it moving through the branches beside. I’m walking to an interview, trying to keep my thoughts focused on what questions I will ask and how I will generally conduct myself. As I do, I walk. I walk naturally. And what seems like just one moment later I notice that I’ve strolled past the house I’m looking for. “How did that happen?”

“We spaced out.” I hate to admit it, but I do talk to myself in my head.

This is my inner-voice that sometimes I wish Carlos Castaneda could teach me more about how to silence. The arguments are particularly difficult. Not only can I never seem to win, I always feel crazy affected.

“Yeah, but what does that mean?”

“I don’t know, I think maybe it is something we learn, like an active forgetting that gives us some time to ourselves. It happens a lot while I’m driving, particularly on the freeway. I hate missing the exit.”

“Time to ourselves? That doesn’t sound like my self.”

“Right! What about if I change it to think that generalized spaces and non-places are so taken for granted, so pedestrian, that daydreaming is inevitable.”

“Yeah. That’s a bit better. Then what is the work of daydreaming? And how do sidewalks do this in particular?”

220 My heel presses down onto the sidewalk and the ball of my foot follows.

My legs glide unerringly, unconsciously beneath my torso. “That’s it, isn’t it?

The ease of the body’s encounter with the generalized surface of the sidewalk, always flat. Leg muscles and ligaments know the encounter by heart. They relate to the sidewalk like a primary attachment that animates a kind of ambulatory archetype. This is a kind of cumulative memory of habit, of posture, of dexterity” (Massumi 2002). Through our passive motion we can actively create and populate an interior. Habit and conscience are like two parts of our intimate material.

“There are glossy patterned tiles beneath us in the mall. In hallways at the office and at home we glide over the tightly woven threads of carpets, faux wood or linoleum. We walk between building and street on fine-grained concrete surfaces. They all vibrate together. They give our movement regularity, direction, habit. They give us daydreams. They give us a naïve physical sensibility.”

“Maybe this is why I love to hike so. It’s a different trip. You actually have to think about walking, where you are going to place your next step, where it is safe to look about and gather in a beautiful vista. Sometimes you can’t find the path and have to make your own way. You get dirt and mud on your shoes.

The connection is labored, but with a labor of love for the ground. The joy is in the journey, the way, not the destination.”

“Am I a Taoist?”

221 “If so, I’m a Taoist in a world where being is locked into destinations, destiny. We charge from one point to the next, from one thing to another. It’s the norm.”

“I don’t know. But I know that my dissertation will have to say something about the different machines at work here, how they make different connections.”

“Just be honest with yourself, you don’t know what they are.”

I tripped. The front of my casual dress shoe wedged against the edge of a sidewalk section that was raised about two inches from the previous section.

Momentum propelled my torso forward while my foot was left behind. I recovered before I fell onto the concrete. It startled me and I paused for a moment to look back at what I tripped on. I also looked around to see if anyone noticed my clumsiness. “I’m sure people trip on that all the time,” I made my feet feel better. I needed re-integration since my feet were moving without me.

I reached down and reattached them with conscious exertion.

222 Taming Flows

As I started walking again, I continued to think about how the flows of the earth and living matter, such as tree roots, make the stability of sidewalks and other modern regular surfacing temporary at best. I get a kind of joy from the chronic failure of order. But, that joy turns right around into betrayal. Like the time I had to do a bunch of sidewalk replacements for one of the HOAs I was involved with. It started with a section of sidewalk that was pressed into the air by the flourishing roots of a nearby Trillip tree. One of the community members complained.

Date Time Name/Assn Issue Action 11/3 4:15 George McNally / Damaged sidewalk Told h/o to write the COG Board of Directors 11/4 2:00 Heidi March / Damaged sidewalk Told h/o about COG previous caller. Told h/o to also write the BOD 11/5 1:24 Jack Andrews / Damaged sidewalk Told h/o I would call COG Dangerous on site maintenance Tripping hazard to investigate Liability 11/5 2:10 Called Bob Check out sidewalk [maintenance at COG] 11/5 3:44 Bob Sidewalk is bad. It is I will advise Board a liability. President and request instructions 11/6 9:00 Called Josh Told him about the Perform site [Board Pres. at sidewalk. inspection and secure COG] proposals for repair.

223 As you can see, it took a few tries before the code words were used. You know, saying liability, tripping hazard, dangerous is the only way to get things moving. Once the magic words were spoken they shot from mouth to ear and mouth to ear until they reached my sensory apparatus. Their magic is a concoction of one part economic logic and one part liability fear. When the

Board President dragged me from my desk to look at the sidewalks and evaluate the situation I almost showered him with affection for the escape route.

When I reached the sidewalk site, the problem was readily apparent. The slab was intact but the slightly downhill end was lifted up about four inches from the top of the adjacent section. It was a tripping hazard to be sure. Particularly because people tend not to look where they are going. Why should they?

Walking is a habitual activity, not a reflective one. The HOA walker, usually in a rush between car and home or occasionally back and fort from the pool or community center, is the antithesis of the flaneûr. I think it’s interesting that the mechanisms of HOA common space are some of the best places to space out, to recede into the designs of our selves. Maybe it’s another definition of common, as that which is “occurring frequently or habitually”, usual, average, standard, second-rate, rather than shared which gives common space its function. Or, it is the relationship between them, shared habits, common denominators, that does the grinding work of community.

224 Date Time Name/Assn Issue Action 11/7 10:5 Called Josh Tree is definitely a Call for proposals. 5 tripping hazard. Josh said I should take care of it ASAP.

When I called the Director back I said, “No problem, I’ll take care of it right away.” I have a tendency to drive myself silly with naïveté. The task turned out to be quite complicated. I had to call a tree expert to evaluate the situation first, then coordinate with maintenance and make recommendations about how to mend the sidewalk and save the tree.

I love it when people get carried away with their work. The tree expert was certainly an example. When I met him at the community he threw words at me like lightning. “It’s funny, you know. People think that choosing trees is just as simple as what looks pretty. There are so many other considerations, and the good developers know it. This whole community, however, is a total mess.”

Current litigation about construction defects and oversights said this also. “Trillip trees for god sakes. Trillip trees. I can’t believe that anyone would use Trillip trees so close to concrete structures. Look there is even one over there right next to a building. And over there.”

“Why? What’s wrong with Trallut trees,” I asked.

“Trillip tree.”

“O.K., what’s wrong with Trillip trees?”

225 “They’re pretty and all, but they have notoriously extensive root systems and they tend to push up towards the surface. They’re strong roots too! They’ll undermine a foundation or crack a sidewalk. Just look at that.” I sensed admiration for the tree’s destructive power as I looked at one of the slabs on the other side of the tree across the common space. That section of sidewalk was cracked in the middle, forced up like a drawbridge with too large a boat underneath.

“That’s another tripping hazard.” I said with amazement at the ruthlessness of the Trillip roots.

“You better believe it!”

They say that three species go extinct everyday. I wonder how many plant species disappear because they are put on the master planning black list like the Trillip tree. With the global infestation of humans and the concomitant global infestation landscaping desires, natural selection has to become a whole new process. Survival of the fittest will be what fits best with human desires to plan. Here I see again a desire for control, of a controlled environment, of command over nature.

Roots pushing up through lush lawns and thrashing supposedly stable structures upsets the smooth inhabited surfaces. Surely the community wasn’t designed that way, so surfacing roots become symptoms or signals of an infirm organism. I wonder also what work the whole scene does. In that community there is a recurring drama of yellow plastic cordon strips, crane trucks and

226 sweating forearms digging to assuage the tension between ambulatory and arboreal routes. Passers by stop and look at the work being done. It’s not very often you get to see into the guts of a community. Not many check it out at board meetings either. Really it’s probably one of the few times residents even pay attention to the common area. It’s like Elaine Scarry (1985) says, you don’t really notice your body until it is in pain . That’s probably also why community managers talk about how all they ever hear is complaints.

I think it snaps right into place with a whole surface and depth machine that silently churns throughout all of these planned communities. It’s not hard to picture the community surgeon digging out some quirky roots shooting out of some resident’s head and sticking out through the pane glass window into common view. Just behind the window, window coverings that are not off white are equally deserving of an emergency procedure.

Offenses, as you have read–or will read–in the combat section, tend to be about a conflict of desires. The HOA tries to deal with this by making the common area a common denominator area. That is, there should be little or no marks of individuality in the community. Well, there is a range of variation, an expectation to express yourself through your choice of car and its color. But anything deviating from this system of resemblance must be confined behind the window coverings and closed doors. If you have complicated personalities, you should hope they run deep instead of getting tangled on the surface like a Trillip tree. The tree doctor and his operating crew are part of the continual re-

227 drawing and negotiation of the charged border between the public and private worked out daily in these new intimate spheres worked out daily in our ethical scenarios, our folds, our matters.

It’s not just that these ideas are expressed in material forms; they are the matter of the expression. I am trying to talk about the affects of a formed substance that is bordered on both sides by desire. The subconscious moves beyond minds and bodies, beyond symbols and language. The scenes of a community I’m putting together like the foggy memory of dream we awake from suddenly.

228 Caring for Cracked Forms

Sidewalks aren’t the only cracking substances in our lives. Cracks happen in many places in a master planned community. They creep their way across stucco walls, across sidewalks and streets. They can mar entry signs and work their way down the ‘crotch’ of carefully planted trees. Each type of crack brings nervousness. You might think, “How mundane to talk to me about cracks, it is such a simple idea.” Sure it is mundane, that is part of its intensity, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say cracks are simple. After all, the Grand Canyon was formed not just by the erosion of the Colorado River but also by a huge cracking chorus. Water within and between segments of the rocks freezes in the winter and forces the matter to either side, when it melts a crack has naturally appeared. Over time they widen and lengthen and huge boulders are sent to the bottom of the canyon. Although lower on the dramatic scale, cracks in asphalt similarly widen into potholes. Good thing the Grand Canyon doesn’t disrupt any

MPC avenues; otherwise it might get placed on the action item lists to be patched and resealed.

There are many other cracks. Like a crack in the door that either signals fantasies of stalkers and burglars lurking in should be sealed areas. Or the crack in the door that allows us to look beyond the boundary into areas we probably should not. Crack is also a nasty drug, reprocessed cocaine, which has become even more nastily racialized and over targeted by our shameless criminal justice industry. There is also of course the dirty butt-crack which should always be

229 concealed from view and not discussed except of course in jokes and insults.

You might say, “This Archer fellow is cracked, who else but a mad man would talk about butts in a dissertation.” Or, when you are done reading this section you might think that there is a crack in my logic.

So, there are many connections between the sign crack and other signs.

More than that, however, each of them seems to strum a little affective intensity.

One possible reason for this intensity is that a crack makes visible a substance or surface that might otherwise be unnoticed. You probably don’t even think about the stucco on the exterior surface of your home until you notice a crack in it.

And, that crack is the trace of forces that our senses are not geared to register.

In the case of stucco and concrete, the crack is a sign of the flow of the shifting and eroding earth. They point to stories beyond our spheres of influence and perception. They therefore open up affective domains drenched in fantasy.

Also, the crack punches a hole in a boundary between two supposedly exclusive domains. Cracks in walls allow moisture to seep imperceptibly into the walls, into the insulation and the wood studs.

Cracks are tangible, you can feel and see them. Well, not really. You can feel a jagged edge, a break, and then another jagged edge. So the crack is kind of a break in the substance, a hole if you will, an absent presence. But what if you turn it around and take the crack as the thing? Have you ever paused to look at a system of cracks pulling apart a road or a wall? The patterns can be

230 beautiful, like Hubble images of the Cygnus loop nebula, twisting ribbons of chaos and gravity dancing upon the headstone of stability.

Another thing about cracks, and our sensation of them, is the theatre of time illuminated by their flashes. Time is felt vicariously through cracks. Have you ever had a crack in your windshield that you refused to repair until the danger overwhelmed your procrastination? It starts off as a minute rift and glides with only cumulative discernment across the glass. Cracks in housing developments similarly prowl. Stucco walls, asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks inevitably crack. The earth shifts, roots creep, moisture seeps, making the emergence of cracks only a matter of time. However, with proper planning they can be contained. The HOA is an enemy of cracks. Crack studies have developed guidelines about when the diffusion of cracks typically reaches unacceptable levels. Streets must be resealed after seven years and repaved after fifteen. The battle with cracks, really more like a dance, is a drama of linear time.

In the Conditions of the Working Class in England, Engels (1969) talks about how residences are designed specifically to fall apart after a certain time.

This means workers have to keep returning to the market, and therefore the factory, to make sheltering deals. This creates more turnover for profits for capitalist home builders. Something similar is happening with computers. But in the Master Planned Community, if it is managed well, the whole arrangement could last indefinitely, in theory anyway. So, it is something different. I think it

231 is a physical testimonial to the benefits of wise financial planning and timely expenditure. Economics takes the place as a model of living. Economic governance of life is sought and worshipped as a fountain of youth.

232 Faces and Landscapes

Cracks are minor and tolerable, but no community wants potholes. They are painful, particularly on a vehicle’s shocks or vertebrate cartilage. They create aesthetic and conceptual discomfort as well, giving the impression that things are unkempt and in a state of disrepair. They resonate with faces with acne and the stimuli that accompany encounters with such inflictions. This makes a connection between a community and a face. Sounds frivolous right, but I think there is something important here. As a collectivity a community is supposed to be a higher level of organization. So it must have its unifying characteristics and distinguishing features.

Perhaps cracks work like wrinkles. They ensnare a surface in a web of age. Just watch commercials for an hour or two and you’ll get a sample of the energies waged in the war against this advancement of time. Age is an adversary, for individuals and their housing developments. Potholes and cracks are covered over whenever they are excessive and are dealt with by regular treatments. We smear creams and treatments over scars and wrinkles on our faces. Likewise, we trim our beards or shave to keep up a certain image. A HOA ensures that the hedges and grass is kept at the appropriate length. Long and scraggly hair, grass and bushes are all unruly. Maybe we would even expect a long hair to have long grass. You know, it is not that these things metaphorically call to each other. They are both the products of a similar valorization, an ethics of grooming that can be found just about everywhere you turn.

233 The way I’ve written this cracked up section so far is that the community, its landscape, its architecture, works like a face. But the faces of humans who move from car door to front door, or just appear behind shimmering windshields and disappear through dark garages, complete the landscape, complete the community. They provide an unforeseen complement for its lines and its traits.

And a “face amalgamates the landscapes it has completed.” The face and landscapes are correlates. They are composed, arranged and completed according to a complementary linking of landscapes to faces. (See Deleuze and

Guattari 1987, the chapter Year Zero: Faciality).

Faces, communal and individual, are not naturally given at birth. They are artifacts of active and passive processes of shaping. Where do we learn to smile but from our earliest attachment to faces? Then patterns of expression manifest in our complex webs of subterranean sinews. Perhaps we shape them actively, like a gambler practicing a poker face in the mirror. I remember standing in front of the mirror practicing Bob Marley’s fearless ripples and Steve Martin’s twists of idiotic innocence. But most of the time we seem to just let faces happen, not really serious or sensitive to the art. The musculature of the face is one of the most fascinating mechanisms of human physiology. So is the formed matter of the HOA community.

After several months working as a community association manager, my workload increased. Once I was deemed ready, the other managers lightened their load by hurling some of their accounts at me. I guess I had learned the

234 right faces, the ones that accompanied my words and works to give them some security. One of the first things I did, of course, was to introduce myself to the

Board members at my new communities. At one I even took the time to meet the Board President on site for a “walk through.” He thought it was a great idea and seemed excited about showing me around his community. When we met, we exchanged the usual empty greetings before we began to talk about the community. One of the first things I noticed on my way in was the narrowness of the streets. Two cars could hardly pass each other the curbs were so close together. I knew immediately that parking was a serious concern at this community. I showed the President my awareness by bringing up the issue.

“These streets look quite narrow to me. I’m sure you have some parking issues.”

His face snapped toward me like his neck was a swivel. Two puffs of air came from his nostrils and told me something before words moved through his mouth. “Yeah, it’s probably our biggest problem. The damn developers built the streets so narrow, to put in as many units as possible, cramming us in, that we can’t hardly drive through our own neighborhoods.” He continued to describe the situation to me. But more interesting than his words was his face. His face was so thin and long I didn’t think he even had cheeks until he began to talk about the narrow streets. His cheeks became flushed, emotion poured uncontrollably out of him in the pink signals his cheeks were emitting. They sort of captured the whole situation. I could see the whole community turning pink,

235 the streets, buildings and faces. Too many cars or two much blood trying to pass through the narrow capillaries and streets.

Middle class faces are lubed up with Oil-of-Olay and middle class communities are glossy with new paint jobs. Aging is even handed out with inequity. Life moves more slowly the more money you have. Perhaps that’s because things come to you quickly and easily. Money is the ultimate mass, drawing all matter and energy with a whim to its highest concentrations.

Actually, for those of us who want to occupy the middle classes, and that’s most of us, credit is more the issue than money. Not everyone has the same line of credit, not everyone’s future has the same gravitation. While I was in Jamaica, people had trouble conceptualizing that I didn’t have money, that I was traveling with credit cards (that I’m still paying off). Credit isn’t available to them. My gridded identity–American, white, male, educated, etc.–makes my life energy better collateral. I have the right fixed points, incorporated into my personal arrangement. It gives me more mass. I am more convincing. My desires are easier to assert. And it is easier to bring what I want to me.

It is important, and worth a lot of exchanged energy, to keep a face youthful. This is because of the expressiveness of the face. In a planned community, the univocity of expression demands diligent diagnostics. We can hear this univocity in the uniformity of appearance of a HOA community. In the

Condo Bluebook, where the federal and California State laws and codes that affect HOAs are spelled out for professionals and members, it lays out the

236 importance of this uniformity. It says, “Uniformity of appearance is one of the most important elements in a Common Interest Development.” There are cases, precedents, Clark vs. Rancho Santa Fe Association in 1989 for example, which establishes the right of the Association to make aesthetic judgments. It clearly states that even though the criteria are “subjective”, such judgments fall under the jurisdiction of the unifying association agency. Why is this uniformity of appearance so important? I think it has to do with the way the units of a community are related to each other. They share a logic of resemblance. They share a generalized form. They are a collection of shared habits. They are lots, like lots in life, which should only differ by slight degrees from a neighbor’s.

I think this is why a HOA community has trouble expressing itself, and why members have trouble expressing themselves in and through the built community. Because its form is laid out in advance and is diligently maintained, effectively making it a gorgeous corpse with the same words always stuck on its lips. It is unlike other communities that just seem to say something, many things, when we attach to their quirky constellations. At issue here is co- management in the production of expressive entities.

237 Segments of Existence

Resealing happens with plastic bags as well as streets. Resealing is crucial to keep asphalt and veggies fresh. If there is too much moisture damage can occur to either. Frost the destroyer. Also, dryness attacks. Resealing places a barrier on the surface of a substance that should be protected from contamination. Like mats which lay under bark to prevent weeds from popping up.

This makes me think of the difference between cracks and crevices. In environments of concrete and lumber, crevices are planned into planned environment. They are different than cracks that emerge between them. Many crevices are seams, like those between sections of sidewalks. They attempt to allow for the play between the sidewalk segments, so that the shifting earth can do so without tearing the sidewalk too dramatically. Crevices are preemptive strikes against time. The seams also give weeds a particular location to sprout and are easily weeded. Seams are now standard. Is this because somewhere there is a written rule that all residential areas must have them? No. They have simply become common practice, common sense. Our surface engineering coalesced that way and we have become comfortable with their predictability.

They make sense. They work to place a speed bump in the currents of time.

Seams in sidewalks. Seams between sidewalks and curbs. Seams between curbs and the street. Seams between sidewalks and driveways. Seams in driveways. Seams between driveways and foundations. Planter beds as seams

238 play a dual role of absorbing flux and of adding aesthetic uniformity to a development. Seams between lots. Seams between desires. Seams in a patchwork composing communities, demarcating the boundary between different territories and functions.

In the sometimes cramped world of HOA living, property lines can be a source of dispute. At one community I visited, the Board was researching the possibility of taking on the extra responsibility of fence repair and replacement.

They even went to the trouble to hire a lawyer to examine and re-write the governing documents. Assessments would be raised, of course, but the results would be worth it, we were all assured. So, what are the results they desired?

Standardization of the fences was the foremost concern. It was important that people did not put up various types, colors and sizes of fencing, making the community look like a bunch of bric-a-brac boundaries. Boundaries should be regular, standard, organized, and all that stuff. “Could you imagine if someone put up a chain link fence around their property?”

Constance Perin smartly suggests that fences are crucial in establishing, maintaining, and shaping certain kinds of relationships between neighbors.

Fences are the materialization of our psychic territories. After all, our home is one of our foremost attachments and an address is worn like a badge. With this in mind, standardizing fences comes to look like more than simply establishing aesthetic continuity. Standardizing fences is a material sensitivity to a desire to standardize human relationships. And this is the whole point of control. As

239 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 452) say, “In the rich domain of personal relations, what counts is not the capriciousness or variability of the individuals but the consistency of the relations, and the adequation between a subjectivity that can reach the point of delirium and qualified acts that are sources of rights and obligations.”

In dense HOA arrangements, personal relationships should be based on privacy (high fences with no space between the slats). Standard fences enforce the division of the general and the specific. They make clear the boundary between the common good and separate interests. And since relationships should be mediated by the HOA (fences are no longer shared property of neighbors but the domain of HOA maintenance), it also completes the abstraction of a small block of desire into the character of the community.

Asphalt, gutter, curb, sidewalk, planter, driveway, walkway, steps, porch, entryway, the segments proliferate into infinity. We are fascinated by, we desire is probably better, compartments. Go to your local Target or Wal-Mart or K-

Mart, there’s one or two or three almost everywhere now, and look at the different departments. Then look to the home organization commodities. It should be its own department. Therein you will find endless tools for separating things. Clothes should be stored near but not with the shoes. Forks not with knives. Soap in its place near the places for shampoo and washcloths. So on and so on, ad infinitum.

240 Look into your own refrigerator. Probably you will find a crisper, a meats section, shelves, compartments for butter and eggs. Next to the fridge you might find cabinets, drawers. Your canned goods are most likely kept in one place, separate from the perishables. Your cereal is probably kept separate from the pots and pans. We love partitioned space. We desire organization. The division between things must be based upon some logic, must be clearly established and maintained. Because we want maximal control, to manipulate our worlds of calculable and predictable objects. Categories, schemas, compartments make things easier to handle. Sort of like structuralism. The world is easier to grasp if it is divided into universal elements like politics, ideology and economics (Althusser 1971). Structuralism is right. But its force doesn’t come from a biological bi-cameralism and binary processing or anything like that. It is a desire burned into our collective memories. There is a proliferation of these segments across all sorts of materials: brains, bodies, rooms, houses, communities, states, countries, worlds, solar systems, galaxies, universes. They are a method of cartography, for mapping the world, for making mattering maps. This idea is similar to Bion’s notion of the “alpha function” by which our psyches develop through categorization and drawing sequential connections. It is different from Freud’s or Lacan’s notion of the psyche, since for Bion our brains come together through filtering experience and objects this way, like a complex filing system, rather than being underpinned by a wild area of purely symbolic connectivity.

241 Arboreal Matters

The alpha function and our segmented lives can also be seen in our neuronal matter. Neurobiologists call it synaptic arborization. Differentiation of cells and desires shoots through the brain like roots, stems and branches. It is a principle of dichotomy, a binary machine, with its perpetually divided and reproduced branchings. It is not a priori, although once given it parades around like it is. Arborization is not a metaphor. The tree is an “image of thought, a functioning, a whole apparatus that is planted in thought in order to make it go in a straight line and produce the famous correct ideas” (Deleuze and Parnet

1987: 25). Images are not ideological. They refer to an “organization which effectively trains thought to operate according to the norms of an established order or power, and moreover, installs in it an apparatus of power, sets it up as an apparatus of power itself” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 23). Trees are planted in our heads. We have our family trees. We have the trees of life. We have trees of knowledge. Everyone knows the importance of roots. The world demands them of us, that we come from our roots or that we put down roots. A community is a group of people who share roots or who put down roots in consonant ways. This, of course, is only one model of community. The seed, however, does not fall far from the tree, as they say. This brings us to another characteristic of the tree. It begins with a seed. It has a point of origin. Just like a planned community germinates in the mind of the abstracted planner, which is really an arrangement of industry and company specified parameters

242 and bottom line calculations. Then it is planted on earth and in minds. Then it grows in structured patterns and it organizes things in a circle around a center point.

One of the many things that HOA communities have in common with each other is the use of trees. They plant trees according to a master plan, one or two placed strategically in each yard for cumulative effect. Or they select trees to be removed and remain based upon a similar logic. Sadly, I’ve seen communities built where all of the trees and shrubs on site are stripped away to make room for other boxed and wrapped up tree commodities. Trees are part of the community in a number of ways. The first thing that comes to mind is the soothing shade they can provide. They are also aesthetically pleasing. They are also directly related to perceptions of prestige and therefore property values.

The larger the trees the more shade there is, but larger trees mean an older community or larger transplants. Trees become signals for measuring status. In a HOA community, trees are clearly there to do work for the community, to give pleasure to the members. In that way they are like pets. Like dogs estranged from roaming packs, trees are removed from the forest. Their collective nature is entirely suppressed. They can not encroach into new territory. They don’t have to worry about succession. They are not dependent upon climate shifts.

Trees seem to be ripped from their dependency on complex and open ecosystems and placed in a whole new relationship of dependency to human complexity and human desires. In this way we have mapped our some of our

243 deepest characteristics onto trees. We look at a tree as an organism, as an individual. We see it as dissociable from its natural collectivity just as we conceive ourselves as individual capable of controlling our connections. At the same time the tree gives material sincerity (Zizek 1997) to a desire to become part of something larger, a tree in a forest. The ethics of trees are the ethics of communities: how to manage the relationship between the individual and the collective.

244 Floral and Grass-Roots Matters

Trees are contrasted to flowers. For the most part, flowers are not welcome in a HOA. At least not in the ones I am familiar with.

Date Time Name/Assn Caller’s Issue Action 10/9 3:55 Janis Lupus / Neighbor has planted Told h/o to write a RHA flowers that “look letter to the Board. scraggly” all year except in the Spring. Wants them removed.

Minutes Ridgeview Homeowners’ Association 10/18/2000 Homeowner Concerns: The Board reviewed a letter from the homeowner at [address]. The Board agreed with the homeowner that wildflowers and seasonal species of flowers do not meet the standards for front yard landscaping as established by the rules and regulations of the Ridgeview Homeowner’s Association.

Checklist Ridgeview Homeowners’ Association Next meeting 11/22/2000 ______

Completed Send a landscaping violation letter to the resident at [address] informing them that they must change their front yard landscaping to more perennial species of plants.

Seasonal plants, it seems, inscribe the passage of time onto the landscape. To some wildflowers just look like weeds. It’s that whole wild image that keeps

245 them from fitting into precise and stable arrangements. Off-season flowers make an area look unkempt. For whatever reason, some flowers are just not community material.

Another interesting point emerges from this wildflower discussion. You can see that some, probably most HOAs, have yards designed and maintained by each unit. Does this blow my whole argument about landscaping and the self? I don’t think so. But it does change things a bit. In those communities, individuals are required to landscape their yards within a certain time period of moving in. Both front and back yards must be planned by each owner in advance and the plans submitted to the HOA for approval. Sometimes this is just a formality. Other times the HOA scrutinizes each plan. In either case, the ritual has dramatic effects. Homeowners are forced to inscribe something of their selves into the landscape. This expression excites the connectivity between space and selves. At the same time, each owner knows review is looming over their expressions and tastes. Either they will be censored or they will express themselves in a “common” manner, show that they have good taste. In this way, the HOA brings the distinction between common good and separate interests into intimate contact with each member. This is a HOA’s use of aesthetics. It does other work. The procedure acts like a conduit between these two territories, and a conduit establishing these territories in overlapping matters. Not only that, it gives performative force to the Board’s ability to give expression to the common good. It legitimizes the state-form. I’ll talk you to

246 boredom about that in another section. Before I move on, however, I just want to add one more point. Members will, and I have talked to many who do, censor their own plans in accordance with the “common interest.” This common interest is a projection of sorts, I mean it is composed of what they feel, at a conscious and unconscious level, is the common interest. It is here that the feelings of community are given life. The community, after all, only exists, and has real effects, because people believe in it. If people didn’t give a community life through their own intimate categories and desires, a housing development would just be a cluster of woods and minerals. But feeling community is really just believing that others feel it (Zizek 1991). If you’ve followed me this far, you will then see that the performances like landscaping approval are prime sites for the generation of this community feeling. See what a little flower can do for your ego.

But sod is better for the group super-ego. Sod, the instant yard, is perfect for suburban mass production and for rolling out a landscape quick and easy. It is perfect for giving yourself a little kick of instant gratification. Who wants to wait for something to grow? Just lay it down like a spectral carpet. Especially in a grass roots community. But now, we simply lay the model of community down like sod, and walk barefoot over its thickly woven surface. And we don’t even worry about it; the automatic timers on the sprinklers will keep us happy.

247 A Layered Life of Abstraction

Someone, perhaps you, will ask: “who cares? Why do you spend so much time and energy trifling over the details of a mundane existence, of petty quarrels, of miniscule matters?”

Really this is the question I continually ask myself, the question of significance, the question of ethics as Foucault wrote in the preface of Anti-

Oedipus. And the answer strikes me so forcefully each time I ask that I am propelled further into the molecular.

It is not because these levels are microcosms. Nor is it because they symbolize. They are. They are the stuff of life. They are the details which cement together the precious moments we recognize as our lives. As such they are the stuff of the local and the global, the glocal as Paul Virilio would say.

They are the atoms that comprise one level in a layered life of abstraction.

248 Architectural Control and the State Form

When I introduce my project as a study of Homeowners’ Associations, people often think of residents repressed in regimes of ridiculous rules. They tell me stories or ask for one of mine. Perhaps you’ve heard one? Possibly you’ve heard about someone getting busted for leaving their garage door open once too often. I know I busted a few. A friend might have ranted about a relentless harassment over an uncoiled garden hose or a lawn gone scraggly. I’ve sent letters like that. Or, have you received notices for a trash can you let sit in plain sight for a whole day after pick-up? That might have been me. I’ve read in the paper, perhaps you have also, about a family fighting to keep a banner flying or being forced to repaint their house because the new coat was off the standards by a hue or two. I was never involved with anything like that, but I can tell you about a gazebo we tore down.

“Has the resident at 4213 Gentlebreeze submitted an architectural request?” a stark voice, which the receptionist announced moments before as a

Board member, reverberated from my phone’s speaker and through the room.

“Oh, hi Ben.” I paused to switch bodies. From demanding a homeowner to clean their putrid pet soiled patio in procedural prose I became a vessel for

Board bidding. The movement between master and servant and master again was so fast we were virtually the same. “It’ll take me a few minutes to find out, do you want to hold.”

“Sure.”

249 I pulled out the manager’s binder and flapped my fingers to the tabbed section where the history report was snapped into its three ring place. The pages of rule infractions and complaints and requests rolled over and over as they’d done countless times before. “Gentlebreeze” street surfaced. I flipped back and forth a few times before realizing there were no entries for 4213.

There were no requests, no violations, no complaints, no landscaping work orders, nothing. “Huh.”

“No, nothing there!” I said after I popped the phone off its plastic perch.

“Really. Well, any trouble?”

“No, not a single incident.”

“And you’re saying that they did not submit an architectural request?”

“Well, according to the printout I have here. I guess something could have slipped by the data entry peo…”

“Look, can you check the files to be sure, to see if there’s something not on the list.”

“O.k., I’ll call you back later this afternoon.”

“Sounds good.”

There was nothing in the files either. It would have been simple to find; a whole stack of papers is not easily thumbed past. You see, anytime a resident makes “an improvement” to a unit they are supposed to submit a request to the

Architectural Control Committee.

250 My researching persona stepped to the fore as I encountered a properly submitted request from a neighbor near where I would have found something for 4213 Gentlebreeze. “Hey, I’m there anyway,” I said but was really dragging out my comfortable task of sitting in a swivel stool sifting through tasks long completed. I read the first page of the correspondence stack. It was from

Ronald Smith, clearly a conscientious HOA member who decided to plant trees along the fence so the neighbors couldn’t see into his living room and give some shade to his yard. He also wanted to change the color of his house and add a small gazebo to the rear corner of the yard. He knew how to ask. “Probably,” I thought, “he read the ACC procedures in the community newsletter.” They typically occupied the same spot in each distribution.

Mr. Smith’s letter was very polite and emitted a sense of acceptance of

Association authority. He was sure to be approved except his request was vague. Most are at first. The next letter in the bundle was the ACC’s reply. In this case the ACC is just one member of the Board of Directors. Sometimes residents are appointed to the committee by the Board. In other cases the

Board of Directors simply acts in parallel as the Architectural Control Committee.

The one bodied committee (it sort of sounds like HOAs have a handle on postmodern theories of the subject) sent a letter. It was short on niceties and most of the content was simply a list of information and documents required before the request could be processed.

1) Please list the types and sizes of the trees. 2) On a diagram of the yard, specify where each tree will be planted.

251 3) Provide a sample of the paint color to be used (include brand and name of color) 4) Include the blueprints for the gazebo. 5) On a diagram of the yard, specify where the gazebo will be situated. 6) Also include the names and license and insurance information from the landscaper, painter or contractor you plan to use. Depending on the committee, the omission or displeasing character of any of these elements could get the request denied. Denial especially loomed for any fool thinking improvements could be made on their own. Depending on the resident, such requirements could be a firm deterrent. The ACC received all of the necessary documentation, which comprised the next segment in the stack of papers I was handling. Also included was a standardized form to accompany the request. Then the ACC deliberated among its disassociated identity. The Davis-

Sterling Act, the California legislation directly effecting HOAs, specifies that the

ACC must give notice of their decision within thirty days of receipt of the request.

A standard conditional approval followed like clockwork.

4213 Gentlebreeze did not submit a request. So I called Ben on his cell phone; I knew from my Association contact sheet that that’s where I’d reach him. “Well Ben, there’s no request. What’d they do?”

“This morning I was walking around and I thought I could see the top of a gazebo over the fence line. You know, I’m at home right now, let me walk over there and check it out over the fence. You say they submitted nothing?”

“Nothing. Not even the original landscape plans.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

252 Each community has different procedures, but many of the ones I helped manage required a proposal and approval for the initial landscaping the first owner does to the yard. In planned communities the front yards are usually planned and actualized en mass well before the first transfer of ownership. It’s the back yards I’m talking about here. At this community each new home buyer had ninety days to submit plans and after approval get working on their backyards. Landscaping without approval was subject to disciplinary measures.

So was leaving it unimproved. Improvements slipped through the cracks of course. Members weren’t hounded on day ninety one. But one year after the last unit in the development at a comparable community was sold the Board

President used me as a clipboard while he peered over fences and between slats to see who had shirked and who had tried to smuggle improvement past the

Association. Afterwards we hung out at his house and small talked. I enjoyed his company. Later that week I cursed his name as I pumped out letter after letter demanding retroactive adherence to the community codes.

It took a minute or so for Ben to get where he was going. He didn’t even bother to talk to me while he was walking. Either he was swinging the phone down by his waist or he had very strange breathing patterns. “Yep, there’s a gazebo alright. A big one too. Painted a kind of orange color,” he said orange like he’d just smelled something tainted. “And there are saplings along the fence here. Bark. Sod. Man,” and with this last sound his breath drew out so that his frustrated word drifted on. The phone banged against the fence as he dropped

253 back down into, if I remember the layout correctly, a common area planter bed.

“Alright, here’s what were going to do.”

“O.k.” I said slowly and tried to conceal my apprehension.

“Take down the address.”

I wanted to seem competent so I said, “I already have.”

“And send them a letter saying they need to retroactively apply for ACC approval. Then we’ll talk more about it at the Board meeting next month.”

“Do we need to bring the whole Board in on this decision?”

“No.” He said with his words bouncing in jigsaw like shapes in my ears.

“This is a procedural issue. It’s not like were telling them to tear the damn thing down.”

“Shit,” my inner voice spoke to me and made my face grimace. “Stupid question! I should’ve known that.” And I heard a puff from what sounded like a third voice on the phone line. Was I paranoid or was I being “monitored for quality assurance purposes” like Ben’s neighbor?

At the Board meeting, when the properly scheduled moment arrived Ben asked about the letter. “I can see here from our packet that you sent it. Have you heard a reply?”

“No,” I said dipping and then raising my tone into a crescendo. Ben waited for me to add in the next procedural step, whether I’d done it or would do it.

254 “Well,” the senior manager present said and rescued me from what he felt was ignorance and I felt was recalcitrance. “Well, we’ll send a second letter.”

Then he turned to me and said, “And be sure they know what the consequences can be,” just loud enough so the Board would hear and think they were meant not to. Just loud enough, that is, to load up even more affect on the sign of consequence.

The consequences can be that the resident is forced to remove all the improvements, from the sod to the trees to the gazebo. The sod might be taking it too far, but the trees and the gazebo were certainly territory for the

Association to flex its force. A woman in another community I was involved with, for example, had a serious run in with the Board on a tree issue. A few years back, when the HOA was less vigilant, she planted a redwood tree in the corner of her yard. It was just a sapling then, so it escaped notice. As it began to puncture the line of sight, the Association sent letters. They skipped the whole retroactive application, and decided straight away that a redwood tree was not acceptable. In the letters, I read some from an earlier manager and some I was directed to write myself, showed a concern to be reasonable. The Board wanted the resident to understand why they were forcing her to remove the redwood tree. “Redwood trees have notoriously unpredictable roots which could do serious damage to the numerous nearby structures.” It was also a bad idea because “redwoods are an easily recognized species which will grow far above

255 the fence line,” and “there are no other redwoods planted in our community.”

Many Associations are trenchant for consistency.

The Homeowner responded with a firm, “I don’t really care what you think of my tree.” That letter came to me early in my property management career. I wanted to applaud when I read it, but I knew she was asking for war and I was the infantry.

The Board was calmly enraged that someone would confront their authority. Still, I think at some level it was enjoyable, that they had the opportunity to flex their collective might. The response was quick and merciless.

These things are automated anyway so there is hardly ever a hint of mercy. A second notice and a third notice were sent to follow legal procedures, even though no one expected a positive response. After a third letter, a hearing was arranged between the HOA and the resident. The resident didn’t attend. Many residents don’t. I’ve talked to a few. Each of them said they didn’t think the hearing was as official as the Association had made it out to be, that their performance of authority was just that, a performance. Well, it is. But it is also attached to other agencies, such as escrow agencies, a legal apparatus, credit report and collection agencies, and others who have the performance of authority on loan from the State.

When she skipped the hearing the Board both loved and hated it. It was a sign that this resident did not respect their position but it also allowed the

Association to press on levying full force against this homeowner as a drama for

256 all. Her challenge of authority set the stage for its very enactment. They decided to fine her $50 each month the tree was not taken down. Really, this was already decided in an Association policy established in advance and distributed annually to every resident with the yearly budget. It was a standard industry way for Associations to bring fiscal force upon any recalcitrant rule breaker. And, they added, if the tree was not removed within three months, they would hire a landscaper to remove the tree and she would be billed for the work. This is certainly within their range of actions. The woman again ignored the Association, thinking that such fines would not be a serious issue. She thought escape would be easy. Not here sister. When she called to complain about the fines and harassment, I could do nothing but advise her to remove the tree: that the fines were a serious issue, that if they weren’t paid a lien could be put on her property, that she could be forwarded to that they could go on her credit report, that the HOA almost always wins.

She removed the tree.

After the third letter to 4213 Gentlebreeze, the letter that announces a hearing date, I received a call from that owner as well. Actually, it wasn’t the owner; it was the owners’ son. He said that his parents didn’t speak or read

English well and that is why the letters went ignored. “If it wasn’t for the huge red print,” which said Final Notice, “they would never have showed it to me.”

“I see.”

“So, what do we have to do?”

257 “Well, there’s still time. Just submit an architectural approval form … there should be one attached to the letter. Then the Architectural Control

Committee will take a look at it to make sure everything is o.k.” Looking back I probably should have been more pessimistic, for things went badly. They sent the request right away and included the plans and diagrams as I had directed.

When I got the paperwork I redirected it to the ACC for approval. But the Board member who toppled the first domino in this situation wasn’t on the ACC. To the other Board member, who was by herself also the committee, the request looked just like any other, for a project to be done in the future. In no time the one person Committee sent me her notes to be processed and redirected to the homeowner. “Denied.”

“What?” I said aloud. “Why?” And the papers flipped and rustled in my hands searching to answer.

The paperwork answered in chunks and clauses: “resubmit with revisions,” “gazebo further from house,” “needs foundation,” “gazebo also too tall.” Elsewhere it said, “The trees are fine, just make sure not to alter the slope of the area which is crucial for healthy drainage.”

“Reapply?” I thought, “How can I send out some ludicrous paperwork like this when the structures have already been built?”

I snapped from my desk and took lunging strides towards the senior manager. “Denied huh?” he said with more curiosity than concern.

258 Agitation shot from my body in jagged words. “Actually she said to

‘reapply’! But they can’t reapply because the thing has already been built.”

“I see,” then a calculating pause. “Well, regardless of whether or not the thing is built, it doesn’t meet ACC approval, right?”

I just waited, hanging from logical connections.

“So, they should have never built the thing in the first place. They’ll have to take it down. Send a letter and bring me a draft.” With this final order he returned to systematically pulling binders from his floor to ceiling bookshelf.

Without looking at me he said “oh, and you really should wear ties more often.

You look older and more professional.”

The desire to call the residents to explain bobbed at the surface of my mind but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I hid behind my name printed at the bottom of the letter and my sloppy signature. Nothing was done about the gazebo for a few months. That meant I had to send follow up notices, reminding them to remove the gazebo and reapply for another one. One Board meeting Ben announced that “the issue with 4213 is closed.” Everyone, including myself, had to be reminded of the significance of those numbers. “The gazebo is down,” he simply said, “I heard ‘em out there smacking away at the thing just the other day.” He smiled. The meeting moved on.

259 Reasonable Conduct

I got all tangled up in emotions over this issue and many others like it.

With repetition the behavior incrementally rationalized its actions to my self. My fingers and vocal tract and brain—hell, my whole body—danced to HOA logic every time I wrote a letter or talked on the phone. I was the voice of the

Association, channeling its reasoning. I acted as if I believed. As habit set in I realized that belief did also (Zizek 1991). Eventually I felt like a steward of community and got just a taste of what some Board members feel. As a preview, the state like form of the Association animates a split between the governors and the governed and fuels this desire to administer and manage a community. This is crucial to the force of authority which will continue to surface. Looking back, perhaps this affective method is a good way to get at the governmental reasoning embedded in such seemingly procrustean practices.

Still, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

One such reason has to do with concern for the physical and aesthetic integrity of the community. Trees improperly planted or too close to structures will indeed do damage. They push up sidewalks; they throw off fence lines; they can undermine a house’s foundations. I’ve spent aggravated hours trying to capture and retroactively prevent these disruptive eruptions. That’s what a property manager does, since such signals of damage and decay can lower the value of any property. In a Common Interest Development, however, a common value rests in each lot. In other words, even one disheveled unit, an uneven

260 fence line, a pushed up driveway, a faulty foundation, an ugly paint job, can mar the value of the whole community. They become cracks in the community veneer (Dorst 1989). Property value rules. We functionaries, managers and

Boards of Directors, are its expressions.

The type of community built into a master planned development is in many ways an effect of a consistent aesthetic vision. You can see this in the community planning literature (Institute 1968; Nelson 1984; Nelessen 1994).

The sense of community is expressed in a textured landscape which makes everything in the development seem to vibrate at the same frequency. How else would a master plan? I’ve written about this elsewhere. For now I’d just like to bring this point into the context of Association governance. Boards and managers are possessed by a univocity of style which, in at least some small way, creates a nebulous sense of community. In a clean, well kept and organized arrangement of matter it seems easier to make it your place and feel comfy in it. This is what I’ve read and heard but never felt in my self. Also, this looks and feels good when shopping for community.

Another rationale I felt for restrictions had to do with reducing the conflict between neighbors. This way your neighbor can’t paint their house purple and you won’t be furious because you hate purple houses. “This is why anything visible from another lot or a common area is subject to ACC approval,” I remember explaining to a homeowner who was shocked into calling me by one of my letters. “Or, as in your case, some things can be permanently prohibited

261 behavior as laid out in the CC&Rs or Rules and Regulations as is the case with window coverings, items displayed in a window, and such.”

I couldn’t keep my pores from oozing the frustration I felt after spending a day embroiled in a conflict over an unleashed dog, a second conflict over a side yard trailer, and this window flag flyer. A secretary’s voice rolled over the partition like fog on a hillside, “Yep, we’re always dealing with the three p’s.”

“The three p’s?” I answered to the disembodied voice.

“Oh, you haven’t heard that yet,” and her grudgingly cheerful face peaked smoothly into my submission space. “It’s an industry saying. The three p’s of community association management … people, pets and parking.”

I knew what she meant. Those were indeed three of the key community territories we were supposed to manage. As you can see, people are the first p.

And, the other two p’s could really be considered sub-sets of the first p.

I think we take it for granted that conflict is the natural state of human interaction. “Good fences make good neighbors” after all. But in a community association, typically high density, supposedly a solution to contemporary atomism, the transcendent apparatus of the Association makes better neighbors than fences.

By centralizing the ability to make aesthetic decisions, the HOA tries to avoid any conflict between subjective forces. Among other things, this makes almost all negotiations between neighbors occur through the mediating form of the Association. Neighbors seem seldom to confront each other on any issue.

262 Perhaps it works since a majority of residents never get in scrapes with the association.

This view that Association works to mitigate resident conflict sounds a lot like the liberal philosophy of the State espoused by writers like Locke, Hobbes,

Rosseau, Mill. The individual is by nature the foundation of a social order, guaranteed rights and liberties by the State. But, by nature the man, and I mean man (Brown 1995), who is guaranteed such rights and liberties is bound to have individual aims, interests and conceptions of good. Civil society, in other words, is a terrain of conflict between the individuals it is composed of. One of the roles of the State, then, is to guarantee the social contract and to reconcile civil differences. Human interactions would be too chaotic, too divisive, without the State establishing stable territories within which its citizens can interact

(Barker, Locke et al. 1980; Mill and Gray 1991; Hobbes, Molesworth et al. 1992;

Rousseau and Gourevitch 1997; Locke 2002). There is much of this logic woven into Association practice. The “Right of Peaceful Enjoyment” is a catchphrase in every set of CC&Rs I’ve ever read that establishes the role of the Association to mediate the conflicting interests between individuals in a neighborhood setting.

The restrictions, rules and regulations expressed in community conduct are also called “reciprocal servitudes” which sounds a lot like the social contract guaranteed by the Liberal state.

One element of liberal philosophy that is not often active in association communities is guaranteeing the individual’s right to act against the excess

263 power of the State. I’ll present my critique of liberalism elsewhere. Besides, the contract theorists above are talking about the State with a big S. What does this have to do with an Association, big A?

Certainly there’s other reasoning than what what’s laid out above. But please let me briefly mention one more. Well, it’s sort of an unreasonable reasoning, which came to me often while playing these Association power games. It’s enjoyable. I know it is kind of rude to hit you with such a provocative idea and say “I’ll come back to this” … but I’ll come back to this.

264 Despotic Democracy

Twin headlines, like two sets of papers printed before the verdict is in:

Resident participation in Associations heralds revival of American democracy!

Associations are mini-despotisms! I’ve been dancing around this contradiction for a long time. Like others, who might be placed in a category called “the anthropology of democracy,” I realize now that this is not a contradiction at all.

Within that anthropological vein is a group of savvy scholars who are researching how the discourse of democracy can become a legitimizing force for a wide variety of authoritarian practices (Poole and Renique 1992; Taylor 1993;

Tambiah 1996; Coronil 1997; Schirmer 1998; Warren 2000). In an exemplary piece, Begona Aretxaga calls this the “fetishization of democracy.” Democracy, as an object of desire, detached the Spanish state from its Francois past in an act of fantastic forgetting which allowed it to keep right on with the practice of

State terror, particularly in Basque country (Aretxaga 2000). These articles and books discuss how the discourse and practices of democracy can actually recuperate State terror, military structures, and ethnonationalist violence.

Although clearly not as gruesome, there are perhaps some fruitful connections towards conceptualizing authoritarian neighborhoods. Similar to these studies, the idea of democracy, of participation, of the freedom to associate, of community as a new space for democratic practice, of the free-market as an expression of American freedom might also contribute to the possibility of this kind of authoritarianism. And, I almost feel trivial saying this, but aren’t the

265 Association stories above and the ones you’ve heard elsewhere reeking of violence? Is it a kind of aesthetic violence, which, if you agree with much of this dissertation, is also a kind of subjective violence?

But, “neighborhood authoritarianism?” you may ask. I’m certainly squirming around in my new desk chair with these two inconversant words crammed together in a sort of twisted fusion. But if this twisting isn’t entirely in my head and hands, and one of my major theoretical moves is that nothing is entirely inside, then it raises a whole bundle of questions, knotted in my mind around how and why? I think there are a lot of approaches to the ‘how’ question. For my part I’m going to throw a bunch of concepts borrowed from

Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and a few of the anthropologists mentioned above onto the next few pages and see if something useful emerges. The question of why, of the cause of such events will also teeter throughout. But it is more difficult to approach. For example, perhaps the discourse of associational democracy helps to make it possible, but it hardly explains its existence. When we talk about the State, perhaps we assume we know why. States are expected to have such issues with authority, for authority to be abused, and that is exactly why liberalism is supposed to have built in measures for individuals to criticize the State.

Marx and some of his followers seem to have had no problem with this question. Engels, in the introduction to The Civil War in France, for example wrote that “the State is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by

266 another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy”

(Marx 1948). But this isn’t because the bosses have control of the State, as a vulgar interpretation might suggest. Rather, as Hegel argued, the role of the

State is to strengthen and defend the foundations of modern nations (Hegel,

Wood et al. 1991). This foundation, the economic base, is capitalism, which has class domination as a functioning principle (Marx 1964). The State is only indirectly an agent of class domination. So democracy is really the ideal political structure for capitalism. The autonomy of the State from society allows the

State to appear in the general interest, when what is in the general interest is really the interests of the bourgeoisie. Authoritarianism, then, worked its way into mid-19th century France, for example, when working class struggle had upset the foundations so thoroughly that recuperation was only possible through the despotic (Marx 1964; Poulantzas 1978; Offe 1984).

Since Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst (1977) spread around a refusal to see such determinism even in the very last instance—Althusser, Gramsci, Poulanzas are key examples of last instance determinists—such explanations are baseless.

Well, they really wouldn’t have done me any good here anyway since class is rarely an intra-association issue. What might work is to see Associations as

“private governments” (McKenzie 1994) and the commodification of previously public services. This sets up a kind of enclosure, nicely materialized in stucco walls and rot iron gates, where we are forced to sell even more of our precious life energy to buy into these services. That’s a nifty reading where privatization

267 is exposed as a kind of class warfare. If you want to take this trail, and I think you’ll recognize it crossing this dissertation at certain points, then what is the relationship between the amenities and restrictions? Are they paired? Are the restrictions just a byproduct? Or do restrictions have their own constellation of exchange value and use value?

It is going to take me a while to get to the question of why Community

Associations can become mini-despotisms. By the time I get there it will have become another question. And just so you know, at different points and in different ways I’m going to pull a bunch of partial answers out of my bag. Some of them will add up to something I hope will be helpful. Others may just fizzle.

But I do have a course I am trying to steer here, and for me it is a crucial course. What I have gotten out of my research, thinking and writing about this question, and I hope you will also, is that in political analysis we need to reattach the head of the king. It will be a sort of monstrous vivisection, to be sure. In the end I think the State will come out as a kind of desire, spread within and between and constitutive of intimate territories, rather than just a kind of apparatus which acts from on high. Let me take you on a tour and lay out some posts so we can hopefully inhabit the same conceptual space.

268 State and Diagram

Before I came to the anthropology graduate program at UT I’d never heard of Michel Foucault. About half-way through the required and rigorous social core course Discipline and Punish was forced upon me. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I had a transformational experience. Until that point I had taken most of the reading and discussion as academic exercises. My competitive and well-trained self performed, Just like Foucault would have expected, but I never attached to the personal and political significance.

Reading Foucault, something changed. I could really feel the operation of modern power in every one of my sinews. Like everyone else I had been disciplined at school. The minutia of my movements were trained and retrained in the organized sports I grew up playing. The powerful micro-practices in a factory setting had an additive factor in my making. I’m still ashamed to mention it but I did make it through boot-camp before being discharged and spending time in a military jail and a military psychiatric facility. Discipline and

Punish strummed the affective territories I had picked up along the way. I became a body aware of its own docility. The freely choosing individual I thought I was forced to confront the procedures of power which were the latticework of my existence.

So I read the whole book rather than just the few assigned chapters. In the discussion portion of the class that week Dr. James Brow and Dr. Pauline

Strong had an exercise set up for us. They asked us, in a deceptively simple

269 way, “Which do you think is the best representation in this week's readings?” A few chose Geertz’s, a couple chose John and Jean Comaroff, but most of the class split between Dorinne Kondo’s Crafting Selves and Renato Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth. I can’t remember the exact count, but I do remember being the only tally for Discipline and Punish and getting queer looks and surprised comments.

I was embarrassed and proud of my newly dismembered self.

I read everything I could get my hands on by Foucault and about

Foucault. I was fascinated by sovereign power, emanating in tortured bodies and the ceremonies of sovereign might, and even more riveted to the discussion about how the impetus for its liberal morph neither came from humanitarian interventions nor from any other political dream as the liberal humanists celebrate. The dissolution of torture, the adoption of prison reform and liberal political theory were the effects of a technology of power being reworked in the face of internal limitations at the points of its application. This modern type of power, my modern society, emerged in the practical questions of how to manage people, how to get them to docilely do what’s expected, how to train bodies into regular lives. I found the local and micro-functional character of Foucault’s approach attractive. Distributing bodies in space, dividing groups into segment, scheduling and drilling things into habit as we’ve all come to know changed my perception of power. It’s not a mechanism wielded by one class, or one group, or the State over an other. It is an arrangement of practices and discourses permanently established between us all and expressed in countless points

270 throughout society. As such, the modern regime of power emerged in a multiplicity of connected sites: police, prisons, quarantined cities, schools, factories, families, bodies, selves and eventually the State.

The domain of politics proper was not the site of some totalizing shakedown of the sovereign. The disciplinary dream replaces the liberal one as the explanation for this “progress”. The emergence of liberalism is thus neither an act of pure reason nor a radical blow for human freedom as writers like

Habermas think. Productive rather than repressive, it is a new and more insidious regime of power. It makes power coextensive with society rather than located in the State. This is a critique of Marxist politics as well, for they assume an individual who once is freed from the psychological consequences of ideology will arise to destroy the State and its devices of class domination (see Lenin for example). For a Foucauldian this is wrong; there is no individual outside of power. Quite simply, you get what’s made.

Why am I telling you this story? Besides that my writing machine is set up to tell theory as stories (and stories as theory), I’m trying to show you how my project on gated and planned communities emerged conjoined to Foucault and his approach to liberal government. I began by thinking about these semi- autonomous communities as apparatuses that help constitute a self-regulating resident as another power center to further weave the fabric of a disciplinary society.

271 Because I was a Foucauldian and wore it gladly as my departmental mark, people often challenged me. Now that I reflect on it, it was like we were all possessed by positions out there in some kind of mass intellect. Many good questions and productive debates surfaced as we heaved our conceptual persona around the seminar tables. One of the most difficult for me had to do with

Foucault’s reluctance or inability to conceptualize the State and more “macro- political” formations. In seminars when we read Stuart Hall (1985) or during my personal readings of more Foucauldian scholars such as Hunt and Wickham

(1994) or Mitchell Dean (1994), attention was drawn around this glaring hole in my tool-kit. Poulantzas (1978) trampled Foucault on this issue as well. This was troubling for me because I needed a way to think about the State and governmental philosophies. I had already sensed the link between master planned communities and certain political philosophies like neoliberalism and communitarianism. I didn’t have to search long to find connections between these communities and state and federal policies, as well as publications from governmental agencies. So, I turned to governmentality to think through these articulations. Perhaps I took that turn because I bought into the idea of the author, even though Foucault himself criticized me in advance for this.

I think that framing the discussion of technologies of power in terms of liberalism and governmentality does something weird to Foucault. It could be the sheer velocity, but it seems to me that the practices I tried to present, and have tried to present elsewhere, become moments in the enactment of a kind of

272 political rationality. Homeowners’ Associations are tied to neo-liberal or advanced liberal governmentality, the connection seems clear to me. But are they thought up as ways to act on a population at even further distance from the centers of State power (Rose and Miller 1992)? Are neoliberal ideas of regulating individuals through the mechanisms of the market put into action by these communities? I’ll get into more of this shortly, but for now what I think is weird is the way that Foucault’s direction of analysis gets all turned around.

I think Foucault does leave room to conceptualize the State in a modern arrangement of political power. Actually, I think it is there in his writing and interviews. But I only saw it after reading Gilles Deleuze’s book Foucault.

Deleuze’s book is a “portrait of his philosophy” drawn with the care and passion you’d expect from a bereaving friend. The lines and touches of this portrait are

Deleuze’s more that Foucault’s who eventually does come to haunt the picture

(Deleuze 1995: 102). As such, Deleuze extracts something from Foucault’s writings that was there but only in ghostly glimpses. As I read it, Deleuze’s writes Foucault in a way that Foucault becomes what Deleuze desires him to be in order to move on with his own project. Thinking about the State is one of the best examples. What Deleuze writes about the State in that book brilliantly pulled me past my own impasse. I’ll tell you about it presently. Some might not be willing to take this trip. I’ve already booked passage.

I’ll begin by returning momentarily to discipline. It works by establishing a body-machine complex, what Foucault calls an apparatus or dispositif (Foucault 1977:

273 153) and an apparatus is a machine oriented towards generating useful bodies and therefore useful forces (Foucault 1977: 164). The use of "machine" here is complicated. As Deleuze would say, it moves imperceptibly between two poles, one abstract and one concrete (Deleuze 1988: 40) A machine is a 'concrete assemblage'

(such as the prison, the school, the factory, the army, etc.) which is a jumble of substances and functions through which a model of power relations can become manifest. At the same time, it is an abstract machine or diagram which "acts as a non-unifying immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field: the abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations between forces take place 'not above' but within the very tissue of the assemblages they produce" (Deleuze 1988: 40). Perhaps you’d like me to throw my own words around this conceptual tangle. In my words, an organization of power comes into existence as the elements of a social field interact with each other in a somewhat consistent way. A diagram is like drawing the flows and conversion of forces. But it is a machine as well as abstract. So things interact with each other in a somewhat organized way because the diagram of their relations feeds back into their local organization.

It’s because disciplinary machines, based upon the model of the panopticon, are both concrete and moments of this abstract social organization that the forces produced by the machines must have 'social' value. As Foucault says: "The

Panopticon [...] has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power

274 itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces -- to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply"

(Foucault 1977: 208). Another way to say this is that power relations and the apparatuses set up through and around them have social intentions. They work to shape bodies and selves into particular useful forces. But these intentions are not those of any subject, of a boss, of a teacher, of a policy maker or of a State (Foucault

1978). Intentions are the expressions of a complex arrangement of components and connections. Intentions are abstract. Abstract here means establishing the relationship between things the way relationships between organelles can be understood at the cellular level of organization or the dynamics of stars can be viewed abstractly as movements in the complex organization of galaxies.

But, how is it that the machines are coordinated with each other in the name of social progress? Well, first of all, they aren’t necessarily. Part of the answer lies in the character of the diagram or abstract machine which establishes technical associations and machinic connections between the various apparatuses. But, part of the answer is also the state (which as we will see shortly is crucial for effectuating the diagram).

The role of the modern state develops gradually, behind the sovereign scenes at first, but emerges at the moment when the disciplinary diagram regularizes

(Foucault 1980: 122). This is what Foucault elsewhere calls the "governmentalization of the state", a process which happens as techniques and micro-practices entwine.

275 "The 'invention' of [a] new political anatomy must not be seen as a sudden discovery.

It is rather a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered location, which overlap, repeat, or imitate one another, support one another, distinguish themselves from one another according to their domain of application, converge and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method" (Foucault 1977:

138). It is this blueprint for a general method which eventually comes to reshape the state. It does this in two ways. By disciplining its own practice (Foucault 1977: 141) and by reconfiguring its role to effectuate this new regime of power.

Once the modern State emerges it is set apart from society as a sort of transcendental apparatus and goes to work further sedimenting the lines which gave rise to its modern form. The modern state opens the necessary connections and seals others so that a particular technology of power will be made manifest (and continue manifesting itself) within and between the numerous apparatuses, so that the assemblages will be diagrammatic and that the diagram will retain its immanence within each concrete assemblage. This can be called "overcoding" for Deleuze and

Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). Or, as Foucault says elsewhere: "I would say that the State consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations which render its functioning possible" (Foucault 1980: 122, my emphasis). But, the state does not regulate the various concrete assemblages from above, nor does it incorporate every other sanctioned apparatus into its own, nor is it a centralized location where every other point melts together or condenses. Rather, it charts connections between various assemblages, coding them and establishing resonances

276 between distinct and diffuse "power centers", allowing them to enter into a regular and regulated relationship with each other. Here is a clear distinction between this take on the State I’m trying to establish here and the one put forth by Poulantzas.

For Poulantzas, the State is a kind of centralized structure which works toward the coherence of a formation of capitalist power (Poulantzas 1978). Rather than a mechanism for coherence, rather than a site of coordination, what I’m trying to say is that the State is a "resonance chamber" (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 224).

To visualize a resonance chamber use your vocal tract. The pharynx/throat, oral cavity, nasal cavity, sinuses and head work in a complex arrangement to shape and project sound. They will produce vibrations that will resonate with matter in your immediate environment. Better yet, think of a violin. A note bowed on the strings will vibrate and be amplified by the resonance chamber behind, then the whole body of the violin, the other strings, the body of the player, the air around the duo, the matter of the room and the bodies which are listening. The note will linger, inaudible to you or I, in diminishing waves for days or weeks. Vibrations will also vibrate other vibrations. Even in the case of the violin, the sound wave isn’t created solely by the string. What we hear as a musical note is contracted from all the vibrations in the surrounding space. Marx has the wrong impression of this process when he says,

“when you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?” (Marx 1964: 66). The state doesn’t play the fiddle and the state isn’t the fiddle being played by some other powerful actor. It is a point of amplification of many waves from many instruments interacting and thereby

277 contracting into a set of discernable notes. These notes then feed back upon the instruments and players from which they emanate. The resonance chamber filters out the noise, or rather helps to subordinate it to a noteworthy social force. The sounds and rhythms of dispersed power enter into an arrangement with each other and with the help of the state their cadence saturates a social field.

Foucault highlights the role of the state as "resonance chamber" when he says that "all other forms of power relation must refer to [the state]. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is rather because power relations have come more and more under state control" (Foucault 1982: 224). This seems paradoxical with earlier statements that liberal government is decentered. Well, it is paradoxical, but this is why it works. The state does not act like a sovereign; rather it makes actors refer to it. The spectral absent and present quality that Hall (1985) points out is part of the State’s functionality, not a flaw in the analysis.

The state resonates but also eventually conducts, reactualizing the forms in which it was incarnated. In other words, the state not only establishes overcoding resonances, it also has its own apparatuses, the law and the police, which exercises a power that must bear over everything (Foucault 1977: 213). And, this police apparatus is specific, not subordinate to the state. It is just one apparatus in a diagram like the state itself is just one apparatus in a diagram (Deleuze and Guattari

1988). Even though the field of application of these state and police apparatuses is the entire social body, this does not mean that they are "macro" level processes. I think it is crucial to remember that the state apparatuses themselves operate a micro-

278 physics of power (Foucault 1977: 26; Poulantzas makes this point as well), to regulate society by the "disposition of things" (Foucault 1991: 95).

The state doesn’t invent the diagram. The diagram invents the State. The

State effectuates the diagram, making it a rigid model, even though the disciplinary diagram emerges elsewhere. The function of the state apparatus "is to ensure that discipline reigns over society as a whole (the police)" (Foucault 1977: 216).

Whether or not it is framed as a macro move, the turn towards governmentality is a turn to analyzing the rationalities of government, the arts of government, or the mentalities of rule. Wrapped up in this is something I find unsavory about the governmentality approach. The governmentality literature tends to concentrate on texts and the ideas of programmers, painting a programmatic picture of power or government (O'Malley, Shearing et al. 1997). Beginning an analysis this way isn’t necessarily a problem. It becomes a problem when those plans, policies, agendas, and rationalities come to seem like a cause of power relations. That is, intentions are read in those public discourses. Well, they can be read there, but I don’t think that’s where they derive. I prefer to see them as intentions which have caught hold or possessed a body and through that body find an expression of its abstract organization. When power and government are located in the ideas of programmers and political theorists, analysis turns away from Foucault towards some sort of ideological critique. Various apparatuses become implementations of these programs and mentalities, these ideologies. This move seems to re-centralize power in the hands of the programmers. Approaching

279 government this way makes it look like the state and experts are generating a particular technology of power.

Another way to say this is that the State and planers and policy makers shouldn’t be a privileged site for analysis. This is exactly what Foucault (1980) means when he says that in political analysis “we’ve yet to cut off the head of the king.”

Trying to go macro-, thinking globally will get you nowhere. There is no other way to proceed than through "the local", a "functional microanalysis" (Deleuze 1988: 27).

"We will start," Foucault (1977: 98) says, "from what might be called 'local centers' of power-knowledge." Power can only be mapped or defined by its local manifestations,

"by the particular points through which it passes" (Deleuze 1988: 25). Deleuze

(1988: 26) says, "local has two very different meanings: power is local because it is never global, but it is not local or localized because it is diffuse." There is therefore no way to talk about power but through the local, but proceeding through the local can lead to the diagram. Can there be a local critique of the state? I hope to do just that. Here’s a taste.

280 Davis-Sterling Common Interest Development Act

The Community Associations Institute is a federally funded resource for policy makers, HOA Board Members, community managers, developers, basically anyone involved in Community Associations. They have local chapters and one of them was located in the Bay Area. It wasn’t a big organization by any means, but it did function as one of the nodes in the meshwork of actors in the local governance of HOAs. Much of what they did, it seemed, was to hold seminars and conferences for community managers on how to improve their management skills. Training people how to manage communities.

As a community manager I regularly received the regular publication by the CAI, Common Area Communicator: the Newsletter of the Bay Area and

Central California Chapter, even though I never subscribed to it. I thought it was kind of creepy at first that they knew that I wanted their newsletter before I even did. It seemed that their agenda went well beyond me and my interests to the state of community association governmentality. The newsletter, funded by

The State of California and the Federal Government, covers issues from how to develop good reserve funding policies to stories about how a particular association convinced its membership to vote 90% in favor of a special assessment of $8,000 per household. The newsletter, it seemed to me as it and my interest unfolded together, was attempting to establish some sort of link between the different cells of community management, to standardize practices

281 and unify objectives. As far as I could tell this was relatively new to the

Community Association industry.

In the issue I just picked up, the special millennium issue, there is an article about the “The State of the CID [Common Interest Development]

Industry.” The author, who has “been extensively involved in the community association industry for years, since 1984 actually,” notes that in the mid-1980s there was a dramatic peak in the HOA management industry. There were many

HOA communities and managers to go along with them, but something changed to bring about a “HOA industry.” Mr. Weil has some interesting thoughts on this point. He says:

“What changed? Many things, but I believe the biggest and seminal ‘event’ was the enactment of the Davis-Sterling Common Interest Development Act in 1986. With Davis-Sterling, the industry truly came of age. The act served notice that CIDs were ‘real’ and permanent fixtures on California’s housing landscape. It created new issues, challenges, problems and opportunities for all whose lives, jobs and careers touched CIDs in any way. The Act, directly and indirectly, created an arena that resulted in the way our industry conducts itself and its business today. In fact, it’s impossible to remember what the industry was like before Davis- Sterling.” To add a little background, the Davis-Sterling Act is the piece of California

Legislation which most directly affects community associations, and there’s one like it in almost every state. One thing it does right off the bat is define HOAs as non-profit corporations which accordingly have all the rights of a natural person.

So in this magical gesture it conjures these communities into existence. Well, not really. They were entities long before being legally recognized as such. And this corporate form emerged as a good way to manage these communities and

282 their private governments. So does this bureaucratic act of tracing over the live of community associations become a magical gesture to “entify” the State? The act gives official depth, entrenches this particular practice of community and folds it back upon the art of Association living. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call overcoding.

Beyond the definitional, Davis-Sterling covers issues ranging from a

Board’s right to establish rules, to the non-judicial foreclosure ability of a HOA to the requirement of association insurance policies and reserve account analysis.

This bill came into existence through the efforts of California Governor Gray

Davis, then a state assemblyman, and Larry Sterling, currently a judge in San

Diego. Davis and Sterling rode a wave of concern to formalize elements of

Association governance. So they employed the national director of the

Community Associations Institute, the trade group of vendors serving HOAs, and a slue of lawyers who worked for HOA management companies and legal firms dedicated to HOA law. Insurance companies also lobbied to have insurance requirements written into the Act. To me this is an excellent example of how the law overwrites or underwrites the codes of power figured forth the in the local and microphysical context of managing common interest developments. But, things are more abstract than this and more concrete than this at the same time.

Something that really caught my attention about the quote above is the way it demonstrates that the law is not necessarily about prohibition, or not completely, and even if it wants to be that is not the bag of its most crucial

283 effects (Foucault 1980; Deleuze and Guattari 1983; Deleuze and Guattari 1988).

Laws work as tactics. In this case, it routinizes codes for how to deal with specific HOA issues. More importantly it creates a new “problematization” and a new territory of knowledge. This generates new forms of specialization and expertise (Barry, Osborne et al. 1996). But these are intimate territories. They concern how selves are rendered. They draw repetitive community interactions into general models. It shaped my life.

If you take a look at the Act you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about.

It is only 50 to 70 pages long, depending on how it is reproduced, and is incredibly detailed and technical. The small print of the version I struggled through seemed to amplify the density of its impenetrable content. The legal writing style and jargon made it a horrible reading experience. This was beyond interpretation. I felt like I was mountain climbing. I couldn’t imagine being a

HOA Board Member not knowing where the hand holds were, groping to understand the details and devise strategies for all sorts of Association issues.

One of the sales pitches to new Associations and those considering managing themselves, my boss told me, was to hurl a copy of the Act at them and taunt them into figuring it out enough to be able to manage it on their own.

I imagined him shining more brightly than the suits he liked to wear as he performed the use-value of his expertise to a group of board members. “Do you know how to calculate a budget? Do you have the resources to closely monitor how well it is being followed, in accessible spreadsheets and graphs that tell you

284 where your money is being spent and what can be cut? What about filing tax forms for a non-profit corporation? And at the same time keep an eye on the landscape company and communicate homeowners’ concerns to the vendors so they can respond? Can you ensure the maintenance gets done right? And the light-bulbs aren’t out? Then what are the proper procedures to follow if you come across construction defects? Collecting assessments may seem easy. But we’ve got a handy coupon book and electronic funds transfer to make things even easier for you residents. And, what will you do when an account goes delinquent? Will you know how to act tough and stay within the laws? What are the requirements and liabilities of a Board of Directors? Do meetings have to be announced and when and what is the best way to do it? Then there is publishing newsletters and monitoring architectural reviews to be sure they stay on the mandated schedule. Also, the rules must be enforced. Will you personally take every homeowner complaint call and write letters? And what sort of penalties can you legally impose? How can you collect them?”

Then I was forced into a similar position. The management company was thoughtful like that. They had techniques. At one bi-monthly company meeting

I looked on the agenda to find that the managers were giving presentations on certain sections of the Davis-Sterling Act. They did this twice a month every year. “What do you do when you reach the end?” I asked as we walked out of the meeting room.

“We start over again.”

285 “Sort of like the Torah,” I said to myself as I slipped away and slung my blazer over my shoulder like a talit.

Oh, I forgot to mention, my name was up next week. It was section

§1363 which has to do with “Community Association Management; Access to

Association Records; Schedule of Monetary Penalties for Violations.” This was a crucial part of the act. My supervisor, looking down at his paper as he sped by me in the hall, reminded me and said, “Don’t screw it up.” I don’t think he thought I’d screw it up. He just wanted there to be sufficient pressure that I would take the practice seriously, to bring myself into the management fold so to speak.

I was confused by a couple areas of the section and I felt like I was presenting some complicated social theory all over again in some high pressure graduate school seminar. And this was just one section. Frustrated, I flopped the Act down on the table and realized that it was distributed by a local law firm.

In a nicely placed insert inside the front jacket was a business card and opposite a note encouraging us managers to contact the law offices if we have any questions. “Good idea,” I complimented to the book and picked up the phone.

“Sure, we get calls from your guys all the time. We do a lot of our business over there and were glad to help. Plus, I know it can be grueling at the start.” The paralegal, one of the many who work in an office of lawyers who do nothing but community association law, quickly pointed out the key elements of the section.

286 “So this is how the management company does it,” I thought to myself.

They’re experts, sure, but also experts at distributing the flow of service, information and money across a broad network of vendors. I courteously unplugged the legal connection and felt triumphant in the next meeting when the owner congratulated me like Sir Topham Hat does to one of his really useful engines.

Like Mr. Weir, and my fellow managers, I came to understand intimately that the law was a willing investment, a point at which we attach our desires to fixed points, to stable forms. I mentioned this after my performance review, well something like it anyway. The boss and two of the managers present seemed pleased that I understood this point so well. What I understood went beyond the law to a sort of self-valorization of the managing life.

“That’s right,” the boss beamed, “any community trying to manage itself is a huge liability. People need us.”

“Yep,” another manager present mentioned to me, “there is money to be made in community association management. It’s a booming industry. But it’s more than that. It’s about making people’s lives just a bit easier, a bit better.”

All you have to do is be willing to let yourself become this sort of an actor.

In other words, we were the industry. It is in this context, I think, that we should think about the connection between government and the market. The

State doesn’t direct the market, but certainly has opened up a whole new territory and has shaped the way in which this human industry has become

287 configured. As I read the CAI publication, and many others like it, I noticed the elements of it spread throughout my points of contact with the management company, the BODs, the developers, etc. I truly came to conceptualize my relationship with the residents I managed as a service. I was a servant, and I learned how to act like one in mock Board meetings, frequent tests, tutorials, seminars, conferences.

The law doesn’t prohibit so much as it promotes, produces, and brings community into a codified form. Beyond that, it resonates with the subjective machinery of management. In other words, it helps to overcode the value of

HOA management and in doing so turns the desire for a nice community into a standard form. This form of community centered upon the commodified exchange of services had already emerged from a complex arrangement of social forces which I can hardly get into here.

The expressions and intentions dramatized in the legalese of the Act are not a type of power being established from on high by the state. It is certainly tempting to see it in this miraculated or magical way. Miraculation happens when a complex and multiple process seems to emanate from a single surface upon which the process is recorded (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). To me this story is an example of how the law tries to establish ex post facto regulatory framings (Massumi 2002). A certain apparatus of control emerges and is followed by a codifying practice that folds back on the field of emergence to fame potential into repetitive spaces, rules and procedures.

288 The state is not the subject behind these regulatory expressions. Its reconfigured role in relation to CAs is an effect of an emergent diagram of power. Rather than give it a name like neoliberalism or advanced liberalism and draw attention to its philosophical and policy origins, rather than give it a name and block anything that might emerge in m attempt to draw it, I plan to let this diagram unfold.

289 Desire and Training

Shortly after Davis-Sterling was enacted other means of professionalizing

HOA management were devised. Certification programs with titles like

“Professional Community Association Manager” which was more prestigious than the “Certified Manager of Community Associations” began to emerge from non- governmental organizations dedicated to the improvement of HOA governance.

The whole office looked up to the senior manager after the day he passed into PCAM status. His degree marked a certain successful training, a successful enfolding of “good management” into his corporate persona. He was nails in a board room. I never saw him stumped on a question or frustrated by a situation which came up. Because of this, and even though I had an ambiguous attachment to our shared position, I still revered him. Really, though, what I felt was the whole weight of normalizing effects which such a distribution has. He was at the pinnacle of our group. I was the lowest. What else could I do but view myself as an object to be improved?

290 State/Society

Another important point implied in the last few pages has to do with the autonomy of the State from society. Basically, there is none. In a very practical way, when looking at political practice throughout a social formation, it is impossible to extricate a State from some other set of forms which can be called social. This is not something new. There is a whole tradition of Marxist analysis developing this point. I think this is what Althusser was trying to establish, among other things, in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.

What Althusser is dancing with is the Marxist problem of how to understand the way that the so-called private institutions of civil-society seem to continually reproduce the dominant ideology even though they are outside the State. For

Althusser, the answer is that private actors speak State lines because of the material and imaginary force of ideology, but also, in a Weberian move, through the State’s concentration of coercive force and vigilant supervision. He says,

“the State apparatus secures by repression (from the most brutal physical force, via mere administrative commands and interdictions, to open and tacit censorship) the political conditions for the action of the Ideological State

Apparatuses” (Althusser 1971: 150). Although Althusser refuses to distinguish between the State and civil society, this is ultimately because he sees the State tugging the strings of power over the whole of society for capitalist ends.

Poulantzas and Gramsci are moving this direction as they see social forces acting through the State rather than thinking of the State as a power on its own

291 or as a class instrument. Gramsci, in particular, turns attention away from the

State as an apparatus towards the idea of State power. State power is overdetermined by connections to institutions and forces in a broader political system and society as a whole. In the end, however, the State is still a central thing which acts as the anchor for hegemonic forces and armor for the ruling bloc (Gramsci and Buttigieg 1992).

Laclau and Mouffe adopt and alter this Gramscian idea of hegemony. We live in an unstable social system, always caught in the act of creation, which is brought together through hegemonic articulations. This means that political discourse is dispersed throughout a social field rather than being located in the

State or any one power center. There are multiple centers for hegemonic strategizing. Politics is alive wherever things are not so sedimented to be able to articulate in active ways rather than one of habitual repetition. The State, therefore, is not the focus for political activism. Laclau and Mouffe are clearly influenced by Foucault on their reading of hegemony. In this context, they seem to draw on the idea that modern power works through a multiplicity of power centers which exist between the boundary of State and society (Laclau and

Mouffe 1985). Unlike a Marxist or Statist approach, a Foucauldian or governmentality approach begins with the idea that government knows no boundary between the public and private sector (Foucault, Burchell et al. 1991;

Barry, Osborne et al. 1996). As such, the state has no unity, as in practice it is impossible to discern where state and society can be differentiated (Rose 1986;

292 Rose and Miller 1992). I think you can read in the examples above that planned communities and their community associations are a perfect example of this.

Even though there is no convincing way to extract the State from the state of the community associations industry, such a division is common sense. I remember sitting at my desk one afternoon preparing the proxy ballots for an upcoming annual meeting. Basically proxy ballots allow residents to sign away their voting power to another party who will attend the meeting. This is the way an association can make quorum even though hardly anyone shows up. Most people simply check the box that gives proxy power to the Board who then has hundreds of votes to do what they want, pass the budget they want, vote into office who they want. Anyway, I was working with a pre-existing template that corresponded perfectly to the legal requirements laid out in the California

Corporations Code and Davis-Sterling. For some reason at that moment I felt like a state functionary, a public official, a bureaucrat. Certainly I’d become some sort of content for the expression of this abstract community machine.

I wanted to not feel alone, or, in a more professional researching frame I wanted to see how some Board members felt about this. A Board meeting was scheduled for that night, so I felt opportunity moving toward me. One of the

Members of that Board was a particularly gregarious middle-aged man who every meeting wore flip-flops and his chest hair curled around the edges of an almost totally unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. Standing next to him in my rigid collar

293 and usually geometrical tie always gave me a jolt of necessary humor as it caricatured our conjoined situation.

“You know, most of the time I feel like a government employee, just without the benefits.”

“Well at least you get paid for it.”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t get paid. State workers do and you guys aren’t that much different.” His chin snapped my direction and he looked at me askew. I suddenly felt like I’d said something offensive. “There’s no way I’d want to be paid by the State. That’s just what some people’d like, to bring the

State in here and muck everything up. That’d be a nightmare Matt, the State running every detail of our lives, our community.”

He was right about the first part. There are citizen action groups out there who advocate redefining HOAs as governmental entities. Citizens Against

Private Government is an example. One of their platforms it that de- privatizatizing HOAs would create more restrictions on HOA action, particularly non-juridical foreclosure.

The second part I just couldn’t follow. The way I define government, bringing the state in wouldn’t increase the attention to detail of community governance. But here’s a glimpse of a point I’m trying to get to and get beyond.

Seeing government, or more exclusively repressive government, as a privileged activity of the State obfuscates the operation of government beyond the official.

294 Other Directors entering the church for the meeting deflected him towards cordial concerns. I tried to follow up later that week with another manager. I said some awkward words about the impossibility of distinguishing the State from the Association and about how I felt like a State agent. She simply chuckled and moved conversationally away. I did joke often. But I wonder if she thought I was acting silly again or if I made her uncomfortable.

These stories remind me of one Begona Aretxaga told about trying to

“demystify” the State in front of an audience of Leftist activists in the Basque country. Her “attempt at showing that the state as an autonomous subject did not exist was received with outmost puzzlement and resistance” (Aretxaga).

From a governmentality perspective it is difficult to deal with these stories.

Since the distinction of the state from society is not really a consideration. In terms of bureaucratic routines, rules, techniques, etc. it is fruitless to try to draw a line around the state. Juxtaposed to these stories, such an approach looks like ideology criticism, as it tries to “demystify” the illusory nature of the categories used to give shape to lives.

Instead of just asserting that the distinction between state and society is uncertain and that mechanisms for modern political order are never isolated in the state (Poulantzas 1973; Foucault 1977; Foucault 1978; Foucault 1980;

Miliband 1983; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Jessop 1990), we should focus our attention on the way that the state is produced as a reality, how it comes to occupy an autonomous position outside and above the social. This is a question

295 posed by Timothy Mitchell and one I consider to be a crucial addition to the approach I’m trying to lay out here. Mitchell begins where I’ve recently left off, that the state has no certain boundary from the social. It has no autonomy and therefore isn’t an instrument, an agent, an organization or structure located apart and opposed to society (Mitchell 1991: 95). However, “the distinction between State and society should nevertheless be taken seriously, as a defining characteristic of modern political order” (Mitchell 1991: 95). This division, in

Mitchell’s turn, doesn’t mark a real exterior but is drawn internally as a

“mechanism that generates resources of power” (Mitchell 1991: 90).

Community associations provide a wonderfully wicked example of what

Mitchell is talking about. The California courts, and courts all around the U.S., have ruled that the HOA is empowered as a result of a contract between the

Association and homeowner. Since these are private contracts entered into by free individuals who have the right to purchase what they will and associate as they please, the state has deemed it has no jurisdiction. Also, because they have been legally encoded as non-profit corporations with the legal protections offered natural persons, they stand definitionaly opposed to the State, particularly when reading from a liberal position.

HOAs and planned communities are non-state entities, a ‘truth’ which is the effect of these legal practices as well as more pedestrian ones. For some people I’ve talked to this non-political aspect of the association can be an attraction. They feel like private services are better than public ones. Municipal

296 governments seem removed, less accountable to their tax base. Whereas private vendors somehow seem more accountable to their clients. Because it stands opposed to the state, such a private community, as the posted signs often say, seems divorced from the kind of repressive power we’ve come to attach to the State. But Associations do govern. And because they are in the private realm, constitutional protections and other checks and balances on governmental authority don’t apply. So, HOAs are free to govern their private domains in ways that public entities never could (see Even McKenzie for an elaboration on this point).

Non-judicial foreclosure of real property is one clear example as it is only available to financial lending institutions and HOAs. Courts have upheld foreclosures on residents for failure to pay assessments as little as $5. This, by the way, is a story dripping with even more affect. It is a story about an elderly woman who was dragged from her foreclosed home while her husband was deathly ill. The Association said she paid $5 short one month. She refuted it.

The Association charged her late fees on the $5. She refuted them also. The

Association translated her insolvency into a lien and eventually foreclosure. It was all legal in the realm of private government.

In a kind of ironic reversal, the fact that something is definitionally and performatively non-state at the same time allows it to become a state-form.

After all, the Association shares much in common with the State. Most relevant to the current discussion is how the Association becomes separated from the

297 community, how it becomes its own sort of transcendent apparatus. Mitchell’s method now gets turned loose inside the community, where the Board of

Directors comes to possess relative autonomy from the community, where it seems as an agent, an instrument. How does the Association become this kind of transcendent apparatus, standing outside and above all communal relationships? To follow Mitchell’s procedure, the next step is to “examine the detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance which create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into” Association and community.

Of course there are many such processes by which this separation is achieved. Here is a discussion of one such process in which I participated.

Moving through it, I think both the usefulness and limitations of Mitchell’s approach will arise.

298 Robert’s (Magical) Rules of Order

In section 1363 (d) of the Davis-Sterling Common Interest Development

Act, it proscribes the procedures by which Association meetings must be conducted. It says that the “Meetings of the membership of the association shall be conducted in accordance with a recognized system of parliamentary procedure or any parliamentary procedures the association may adopt.”

Communities are therefore not enabled to organize themselves however they might like. If a Board decided to just wing it every meeting and rely upon informal rules of conduct, they are making themselves vulnerable to law suits from homeowners who might be unhappy with how they are governing the community. I wouldn’t put it past some of the irate homeowners I’ve dealt with.

Some of them have good reason.

All of the Associations I managed used Robert’s Rules of Order, probably the most familiar form of parliamentary procedure. You know how it goes: “I make a motion …”, “I second the motion …”, “Is there any further discussion on this issue?”, “All in favor …”, “All opposed …” Being a Community Association manager, I was required by my firm to memorize the rules. Actually, more than memorize them, I folded them onto my body as a habit with the help of corporate training devices. I had to be able to keep a room full of mock Board members, whose objective was to throw me off track, on track using those rules, by sticking to the agenda, by rigidly constructing the meeting space into a well organized interaction, and all the while taking accurate meeting minutes. The

299 more I thought about it the worse I did. It just took training and practice before the rules issued forth from the subtleties of my conduct and comportment.

The rules are not very complicated, unless you get a Board President who likes to stick to all of the details, but in order to employ them to a productive end each Board Member must internalize them. That means when the Board Meeting is called to order, the signal that the meeting has officially begun and the rules are activated, voices cannot be heard unless they follow particular codes and speak at the correct time. New Board Members are often silent for some time at the beginning of their appointment, that is, until they absorb these rules of enunciation.

When these conversational codes are absorbed something magical happens to the interaction. The one appears. Parliamentary procedure works to quell the multiplicity, to somehow funnel discourse into a single voice of the

Association. Starting simply, every idea must be seconded even before being discussed and especially before a vote. But I can’t remember ever hearing a motion that went without a second. Perhaps it is too embarrassing to be out on your own. Not getting a second is like hearing “what a crack-pot idea!” and feeling how tenuous the strings of belonging are. I got the distinct feeling that occasionally Board members would second a motion just to save the embarrassment of another member. Parliamentary procedure works as a ritual of friendship and alliance, a type of reciprocity. What happens most often, however, is that people block the ideas flowing through them because they are

300 afraid of a kind of social rejection. I feel this all the time in my conversations, classes, etc. But Robert’s Rules formalizes this mechanism by demanding a second to have your statement even be considered. So Board members only make motions that will be seconded. Perhaps it is not just that Robert’s Rules of order helps cast the illusion that the Board has a unified voice, but that it actually contracts a unified voice from the participants in a conversation.

Robert’s Rules seem to overcode the whole conversation. But equally important at this point is the way they work to set the Board apart from the rest of the community. “I call this meeting to order,” and an incorporeal transformation occurs. Homeowners become Board members. So, Robert’s

Rules accompany this transformation; they make it possible by helping to create a sort of sacred space of the Board meeting. The official becomes distinct from the everyday. Words take on new meanings, such as “table.” Time’s passing is punctuated with punctual passing.

Robert’s Rules are also used to distance the Board members from any homeowners in attendance. Besides the sheer formality of the event, these

Rules can be actively deployed to silence homeowners who attend meetings. I was actually taught this handy trick of how to bail out a Board in a difficult confrontation with a homeowner and was trained to use it in the mock meetings.

Occasionally a homeowner arrives and passionately tells the Board why they need to plant more trees or hire a new security company or get of her back about some violation she never did in the first place. “So what are you going to

301 do about it?” becomes the oft heard mantra. It can drive a board to distraction.

They feel like they aren’t accomplishing anything for their community or they get an acute feeling that they aren’t appreciated. Often the homeowner just pushes the issue and asks, perhaps even in some parliamentary mode, what decision the board will make on this issue. Clearly they want immediate resolution. Then I simply slide in between the combatants and earn my money by saying that such decisions can only be discussed under “New Business.” Then we simply hope that the resident will tire before the end when new business comes up. Or, either the Board or I can say that the New Business for the evening has been established and is full, so this issue will have to wait for the next meeting. Then they ask the homeowner to send a letter before the next meeting and the manager will put the issue on the agenda. This can be a nice kiss off when executed well since these letters seldom arrive. Or, if the homeowner gets into a rage in a later part in the meeting, I could say, “we can only discuss such issues in the Homeowners’ Concerns portion of the meeting, and we have already passed that for this evening!”

The point is that the formal mechanisms of Robert’s Rules can overcode a whole series of interactions with rigid procedures. It can also be used as a means to control homeowners in a meeting. In either case it is an effective technique for creating distance been the Board and the community. Robert’s

Rules help to establish a Board’s transcendental existence through formalized, ritualized proceedings where the board is miraculated into a transcendental

302 entity. Still, there is clearly more to it than this. There must be more to the establishment of such a State-form in a neighborhood complex, where all conflicts are enjoined by an ultimate arbiter, that people surrender desires in the face of HOA pressure. There must be more to the ability of the HOA to be the only rule maker in the community. Part of it, it seems to me, is in the very act of enunciation of the law itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Zizek 1989; Derrida

1990; Zizek 1991; Zizek 1997). Perhaps the magic that endows the rules and law with authoritative force is the fact that the law says so!

In practice, Boards don’t always stick to Robert’s Rules. Either they didn’t use the proper trigger words and instead used some less formal substitute. Or, they jumped around, discussing at the wrong time. But not when it came to seconding and voting on a decision. And, not when homeowners were present.

A phone call: “Are you Matthew Archer?”

“Yes I am.”

“So you’re the one whose name is on these newsletters and notices?”

“I am.”

“Who are you? What right do you have to make up these rules I’m supposedly violating.”

“I’m the community manager your Board of Directors hired to help manage your Association. And, I have no right to make up any rules.” I heard her draw breath like she saw an opening and began to charge towards it. I had just enough air left in my lungs to squeeze in “but the Board does!”

303 She recoiled, exhaled. “What seems to be the problem?” I filled in with my managerial persona, truly wanting to help.

“These parking rules are … well they … they’re just crazy. Why am I not allowed to park in front of my own house?”

I gave her my steward of community lecture, explaining that it was for the good of all that her potential jalopy not be an eyesore for all or that the common good of traffic flow supercedes all separate interests. When I was done I expected applause or an award.

“Well, who made up these rules?”

“The Board of Directors of your Association.”

“When?”

“I’m not exactly sure. I can check for you. Is that important?”

She adopted an incredulous tone and asked, “You mean the Board just pulled them out of thin air?” If not exact, that is right on target. It leads to an interesting aspect of HOA rule generation. Rules can be made by the Board at any meeting so long as they are deemed in the interest of the community. Most

CC&Rs, as well as the Davis-Sterling Act, establish this as a function of Boards.

“Why didn’t we have any say in this?”

In a collectively established and well practiced disingenuous way I told her, “You did. But you simply weren’t at the meeting where the rules were discussed.”

“Well, I want some sort of legal documentation on that.”

304 I was stunned. This was the first and only time a homeowner asked for proof. I wasn’t sure what to do. I took down her contact information and told her I’d be in touch. I brought the issue to the senior manager and he tossed the burden off in a flash with a puff of air, a turn of his head and a flap of his shoulders. “That’s really easy. Just send her a copy of the Associations’ Rules and Regulations and a copy of the meeting minutes where the rule she’s talking about was adopted. And just hope that the idiot manager who was here before you wrote the minutes right.”

It took me a while, digging through the pulp-net of that Association’s memory. Finally I found it, “Upon a motion by Herbert and seconded by Janice the proposal to adopt the parking rule stating that no homeowners can park on the street was approved by a unanimous vote.”

“Perfect!” I excitedly thought and rushed off to make a photocopy and hoist the mailing job on the support staff peons. Perfectly magical. The Board said they are the rules and so they are, and Robert’s Rules gives the decision a sacred aura.

305 State Fantasy

If you look back to the stories in this section, particularly the Gazebo story and this Robert’s Rules story, you can get a glimpse of how useful this fantastic approach to the law and the state can be. Sometimes the existence of autonomy, the authority of the state-form, can be brought into existence in a sort of absurd relation to the law. The division between Board and community happens in the performed force of authority itself (Derrida 1990). We know that the Board is just a group of residents, whose choice to be on the Board makes them suspect to begin with. We know that they are not all-powerful. But when confronted with the Board, with the rules and regulations, most people conduct themselves as if it were unified, as if they represented the community, as if they had boundless authority. I’ve been writing about the HOA conflicts because they draw dramatic attention to the work of Association statecraft. But those disturbers of the peace are in most communities exactly that, punctuations of angst in a well ordered neighborhood. In many ways that is the more interesting phenomenon. With the stories above, with acceptance of Board authority, the absurd character of the law shines through. We must obey not because it is good or just or beneficial. We obey simply because it is the law. The rules, restrictions, laws are grounded only in their own act of enunciation (Zizek 1991).

The more ridiculously repressive the rules are, the more likely they are to seem legitimate. Like a huge bluff, exaggerated demands must signal the right to

306 make demands. Using more productive analytical procedures, these exaggerated demands don’t signal but generate the right to make demands.

I hope I have been able to establish by now that the Association is a

State-form. This should make some Foucauldians shake their heads. Because alongside the argument that modern forms of political power operate beyond the

State, I’m proposing that de-centered power also conjures up a State. Yael

Navaro-Yashin calls this the “decentralization of statecraft.” There is political power beyond the State. Conversely, there are States beyond politics proper.

And the existence of one is conjoined with the existence of the other. All of this fits nicely with something Begona Aretxaga once wrote. She said: “I want to suggest that the State, whatever that is, materializes not only through the rules and bureaucratic routines (Foucault) but also through a world of fantasy thoroughly narrativized and imbued with affect, fear, desire, that make it, in fact, a plausible reality” (Aretxaga 2000).

I’m not sure that our terms are lining up perfectly, so I’ll use the transcendent apparatus of the author to help them hum along. First, however, I would like to mention that this approach to political power is intensely attractive to me if for no other reason than the way it opens lines of investigation beyond rational blinders. There is an assumption, carried through Weber, Habermas, and Foucault that the procedures of power are logic, arrangement, calculation, strategy, rules and routines (Weber 1965; Beetham 1973; Habermas 1991). Of course these are important mechanisms which give shape to our lives. But,

307 there is also an absurd, irrational, irreal aspect to power. Not just in interpreting it, in judging it, since it would be easy to say that a bureaucracy is absurd. But the absurd is more importantly an operating principle of bureaucratic routines as

Kafka portrays with brilliant intensity.

From what I’ve read in this fantastic ethnographic approach to political critique Michael Taussig and Begona Aretxaga stand out. Working in the Basque country, Aretxaga sees the narratives produced by the State and about State violence and terror as having a fictional character. These narratives share forms of “emplotment” which have the effect of animating the state with agency and feeling. In this way the state is imagined into existence as a subject. This fantastic state is a social fact and is at work in everyday daydreams at the center and periphery. Aretxaga says, “What is at stake is not only how people imagine the state—and thus produce it as a social fact—through a variety of discourses and practice, but also and equally important how state officials imagine the state and produce it through not only discourses and practices but arresting images and desires articulated in fantasy scenes.”

For Aretxaga, as for Mitchell, the state is an effect. The difference is that

Aretxaga’s effect is born, at least partly in conceptual design and mostly in presentation, in fantasy. Mitchell’s is a structural effect emerging from the particular disposition of things, partitioning of space, and surveillance. “For example,” Mitchell says, “the new military methods of the late eighteenth century produced the disciplined individual soldier and, simultaneously, the novel effect

308 of an armed unit as an artificial machine. This military apparatus appeared somehow greater than the sum of its parts, as though it were a structure with an existence independent of the men who composed it. […] It appeared to consist on the one hand of individual soldiers, and on the other of the machine they inhabited. Of course this apparatus has no independent existence. It is an effect produced by the organized partitioning of space, the regular distribution of bodies, exact timing, the coordination of movement, the combining of elements, and endless repetition, all of which are particular practices” (Mitchell 1991: 93-

4).

In a stark contrast, Aretxaga sees the haunting power of the State emerging, for example, from a sequence of articles in a major Spanish newspaper about government involvement in death squads which drew upon affective scenes, scenarios, plots, and all that powerfully intense stuff of fantasy.

“The stories were gripping. Coded in a genre across the confessional and the detective novel, they had the addictive quality of a soap-opera. They contained convoluted scenarios, secret conspiracies, spy connections and mercenary assassins, the unexpected involvement of public figures, briefcases filled with public money, stolen documents from the intelligence service that supposedly charted the dirty war, and iconic handwritten communiqués.” The affective states produced by this and other media and everyday stories became “the very frame within which the state was envisioned and indeed materialized. It became a fictional reality …”

309 I’ve quoted at length above to point out the oppositional flavor of these two very useful approaches to the State. Also, I think these quotes help to highlight a kind of comparative theoretical irony. Mitchell, the follower of

Foucault for whom power is about truth effects, finds the State to only “appear” or “seem” to exist autonomously. He says this once in the quote above, but his article is peppered with these qualifiers. I think this is because he starts with the position that there is no real State unity. Government exists between. Thus, the state effect must be an appearance, an illusory device thrown up in the workings of power. So, similar to Abrams, the State becomes a mask for the real work of power (Abrams 1988). Strangely, this makes Mitchell’s points only a slight divergence from Marx’s position on the state. That is, Marx is concerned with how the State appears impartial and autonomous and the way that enables the capitalist class to maintain a monopoly over its power. Politics then becomes the struggle to disable the State machinery by denying the State its independent role in the confused minds of the working class. Mitchell’s agenda is similar, subtracting the class politics and economic determinism. The foundation for criticism and disabling governmental operations is to demonstrate and thus defuse the structural effect of the State.

While Mitchell’s approach seems drawn back into the demystifying politics of ideology criticism, Aretxaga asserts the reality of the State effect. By using the concept of fantasy, traditionally internal and opposed to reality, more akin to the machinations of ideology, Taussig and Aretxaga give the state a real

310 existence. It is through this imaginary force that the State becomes an agent.

That is the second part of the irony. But in this approach I’m worried that the state has become too subjective. The state exists, is arranged the way it is, and has its haunting power because actors act with an idea of the State in mind.

When we talk about state fantasy is the reality effect of the state within subjective imaginaries?

311 Parking Ticket Bandit

A woman calls me. The tone of her voice made my shoulders scrunch up.

“Another one of these,” I thought to myself as I barely listened to her rant about receiving parking tickets for no apparent reason. I listened to her story with more than a bit of suspicion. Remember, everyone gets what they deserve in

HOA matters. It seems that a few weeks earlier a resident, we are not sure who, started leaving anonymous messages on her windshield saying that she is parking in the wrong place. Suddenly I empathized. I hate it when I come home to find someone parked in my assigned parking place. There is an intense attachment to that parking territory which goes far beyond the practical issues of short walks to the doorway. One time I sat on the rock by the parking lot for hours, reading a book and looking up every once in a while to catch the person who would dare impinge upon the spatial correlate of my self. I saw him looking around the lot and then slide into his car, gliding past the electronic sentry. But

I said nothing. I remained anonymous, like the notes Shelia had received.

Anonymous letters and phone calls seem to be a condition of possibility for neighborly interaction for many people. It is one function that the HOA provides quite well.

Shelia, the woman who called to complain, told me that she was assigned the spot in the corner under the awning thirteen years ago and has been parking there continuously. Now, suddenly, it seems someone else has staked a claim on her spot. The messages continued for about 8 days and she got one just

312 about every other day. We tried to find out who the message writer was, hoping to circumvent a confrontation that was obviously the result of a simple misunderstanding. However, the identity of the message writer could not be determined. Even the on site maintenance person and one of the board members who was retired and was “observing” the community all day could not catch anyone in the act. The funny part is that had he or she simply signed a name to the note, all of the problems could have been avoided.

Shelia called again, about ten days later, after the notes had stopped for a couple days. Someone had begun placing official HOA parking tickets on her car.

The only individuals who could have done such a thing, I thought, were myself, the community manager, or a board member. Those are the only individuals who are supposed to have access to the tickets, ensuring that the printed device and the conceptual persona weave together to make the whole HOA authority machine hum. Another way to make this conceptual point is to point out the difference between the two sheets of paper and the intensity each pulled from the actors involved. The HOA parking tickets have an official appearance. They have carbon sheets. They are printed and have the Association’s name printed on top. There is a standardized format. So, even though the tickets turned out to be bogus, as you will see shortly, they affected the intensity of the law. They did this through the signals that little slip of paper emitted as well as their connection to other devices: HOA letters, Board Meetings, Violations, Municipal

Parking Tickets, the affect of standardized forms in general, etc.

313 Shelia, who was frustrated with so many trips to her windshield and all the accusations, called several times requesting that we do something to end this conflict. She threatened a lawsuit for harassment if nothing was done and if the tickets did not stop. I wonder if she could have won.

It took me a day or two to contact each board member to ask them about it. Every board member denied having written any parking tickets in that time frame and knew nothing about the conflict over this parking spot. Switching into a Sherlock mode, I did begin to suspect one of the board members of knowing more than she led on. When I asked about tickets she said, “Why? Why do you want to know?” So I told her about the obvious mistake and the potential harassment suit and she responded by saying: “oh, no. I don’t know anything about those tickets. … You know, I bet someone got a hold of a bunch of tickets. So, they’re not ours. No, I don’t have anything to do with them. Just tell this woman, whoever she is, that someone got a hold of the tickets and there is nothing we can do about it now. So, just ignore them.”

“Right” I thought to myself in a sarcastic tone, but called Shelia back with this information. I said, “Someone has been impersonating an officer of the

Association.” The intensity of the parking tickets had been immediately diffused.

She breathed easier and thanked me for looking into the matter. She appreciated knowing that the tickets were not real, that they did not have the authority of the HOA behind them. I was struck by the drama being played out before and through me. It was a drama of authority. Once the official

314 connections were un-tethered, both the person and the ticket lost their spectral trace of Stately force. At the same time, the right channels by which we should turn our authoritative desires are made visible.

I talked to her a few weeks later at a board meeting that many members attended because a debate about the budget was hot in the community circuit of communication and on the agenda. When I asked her about the tickets, she said that they stopped the next day after I called with the ticket bandit story. I laughed audibly. She tilted her head wondering what I thought was so funny.

Just then I knew what happened. The note writer convinced a board member, the one I suspected, to write tickets because the woman was parking in his or her spot. Without checking the list, she was convinced and obliged with a barrage of tickets. So the Association saved its Stately face by disavowing the devices it had mistakenly used to assert its codes, its presence, into the life of this resident.

315 State Desire

In general I’m leery about the concept of fantasy. I’m uncomfortable with fantasy as it lies close to expressions of a submerged repository of feelings and images like it is in the Freudian model. I’m also uncomfortable with fantasy in the Lacanian vein as it becomes expressions of a subconscious structured like a language. The way I read Aretxaga, Taussig and Zizek, this isn’t the case. Or, it doesn’t have to be. Again, perhaps that’s because I’m reading fantasy, desire and affect in a particular way. First of all, to Lacan’s benefit, fantasy isn’t opposite reality (Lacan 1977). For Lacan, and for Zizek and Aretxaga, fantasy is the setting for the enactment of desire. As Laplanche and Pontalis say, there is fantasy-work in the production of desire (Laplanche and Pontalis 1989). In other words, I just don’t fantasize about an object I can have in reality because it is prohibited or isn’t available. Fantasy “provides a ‘schema’ according to which certain positive objects in reality can function as objects of desire” (Zizek 1997:

7). Fantasy teaches us how to desire. And to make a nice little logical connection, reality is an effect of desire and not just discourse. At least, that’s what Aretxaga skillfully argues. To put it in Zizek’s words, what we are talking about is the fantasy support of reality (Zizek 1989).

I have a semi-complimentary take on fantasy I take from Deleuze and

Guattari. Desire isn’t produced by fantasy. But it might be, as Laplanche and

Pontalis argue, a kind of scripting of desire. Fantasy can script desire if scripting means taking a multiplicity of elements and blocking and connecting them

316 together in pre-established ways. In other words, desire is always primary. It is productive. It isn’t about a lack. It isn’t primarily concerned with objects and positions but with movements and flows. In other words, desire isn’t housed within a subject, but flows between bodies, natural and cultural and artificial.

But desire can congeal around rigid patterns, fixed points, sedimented arrangements, and psychological impasses. And this is where fantasy comes in.

Fantasy is subjective, but is not born of a subject. In Lacan’s gaze, fantasy is radically intersubjective (Zizek 1997: 8-10). The desire which is scripted through fantasy is not the subject’s own. For Lacan it’s the other’s desire: “what do others want from me?” This Lacanian formula creatively contributes to thinking about the managerial persona. In Anti-Oedipus, this intersubjective character of fantasy is pulled even further. All fantasies are collective fantasies. It’s subjective only in the sense that an individual psyche is the node through which a more abstract agency is expressed. A fantasy circulates as common scenes, figures, images, plot elements, scenarios, narratives which emerge from a collective unconscious. Perhaps nonconscious is better. Either would consist of all of the neuronal activity, sensations, ideas, words, affect, that in the contraction to a consciousness get screened out and become noise. It is from this tangible transversal soup that fantasies emerge, like Calvino’s myths. So they aren’t from some deep structure. Fantasy goes beyond the intersubjective because the self and the other were already multiple to begin with.

317 It is partly fantasy scenarios that help formulate our identity by establishing points around which desire can whorl. With a protagonist always at the center of a fantastic scene (Laplanche and Pontalis 1989), we arrive at the organization of a stable psychological form. This is similar to the argument earlier about power being intentional yet non subjective. Both desire and intention are pre-subjective, in the sense that they are transpersonal flows which bodies become attached to and constituted through this attachment. We are contracted into an identity from a field of difference, a hyper-differentiated field.

So, states are contracted into their identity as well.

Fantasies codify desires. They thereby put identified subjects in relation to this thing called the state. Is all fantasy a kind of state fantasy? It seems that these transcendent apparatuses, one in the social plane and one in a psychological plane, are produced by similar desiring-machines. Without this kind of multi-tiered statecraft the state wouldn’t have the force to segment, wouldn’t have the power to regulate in an attempt to preserve a particular diagram.

Through fantasy selves are narrated into existence. But this is clearly not the only way we are assembled together (Rose 1996). Earlier I quoted Aretxaga on the two aspects of state power: bureaucracy and fantasy. Aretxaga and

Taussig end up on one side of the equation; Mitchell and Rose end up on the other side of the equation. As for Aretxaga and Taussig it is more understandable. After all they are trying to make visible this neglected aspect of

318 affective politics. So how can I bring them together? Is it as simple as cramming them into each other? Perhaps a little tape? A blender? I think through the diagram.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the state is distributed throughout a social formation. It is much more than a concrete assemblage. It is also an abstract principle of control and dominion, modeled on a transcendent form, separated from what it governs, always endeavoring to capture emergence in retroactive regulatory framings. The State is micro-physical; better yet it is intimate and supple, because it’s actualized in other forms and substances, depending on them to be the content of its expression. Matter of bodies, the sonorous substance of speech, the texture of a mundane object, the raw materials of a concrete apparatus such as paper, ink, halls, become the nodes through which the formalized function of the State can come alive. This perspective challenges the division between conceptual and empirical approaches, between the ideal and material. It isn’t a matter of seeing what things mean and how they are interpreted by a subject, how meanings are produced by a subject. It is about the way a form is lifted from one substance and incarnated in another. The capture, of which fantasy is one version, goes beyond ideas and narratives. It is material, about wave like forms rippling through various matters. It is a type of translation, or carrying across. Taussig might call this magic (Taussig 1997).

One way to advance this concept is to take Mitchell’s method even further, well beyond the boiling point. Remember, Mitchell’s approach is to see

319 the State as a structural effect, to investigate the procedures which create the effect and what sorts of power games it makes possible. The Association works in this way on two fronts, at the border between State and society and creating its own State-form within a community. Can we take this even farther? What about us unified subjects? Similar to a State, our consciousness seems to emerge from the local yet broadly dispersed connections in our neural network.

Identity, as it is contracted, and transcends a field of difference to fold back onto desire and sensation, is a State-form as well. The father and the family, the boss and the company, the teacher and the class and the principal and the school are all concentric lines which give shape to our lives. These multiple levels with different logics and temporal organizations are locked into resonance with each other. This resonation gives the State a super-massive attraction. It’s not a coincidence that the modern theory of the subject seems to hymn along with the liberal theory of the state (Hardt and Negri 2000). They are conjoined corollaries, both semi-autonomous centers for calculated conduct. The state apparatus is an effect of these innumerable machines organizing our social fabric into points of attraction towards these forms. The state resonates beyond the level of the institutional apparatus into machines of thought and desire.

The state is dispersed, it’s everywhere. It is written into the everyday lives of us all, Taussig argues, and it is there that the idea of the State finds its force (Taussig 1992). This isn’t because the State’s tentacle like apparatus stretches from on high down to each power center and into the depths of our

320 selves (as Poulantzas, Habermas or Weber might argue). It isn’t because the

State forcefully underwrites the ideologies which animate civil agents (as

Althusser or Gramsci might argue). Not because, as Marx said, the fiddle is played from above and the people dance. Rather, it is already there. Dancers dance, players play and the State conducts from within and between like a song form and a line dance. It is a composition which emerges in the movements and sounds of the constituent elements like the shapes and harmonics of a marching band witnessed from the stadium level.

This approach also brings back Nietzsche’s question of resentiment, or, framed in a Deleuze and Guattari way: how can desire come to desire its own repression? And this is fascism, as they define it. So, the neighborhoods I’ve been writing about are not authoritarian regimes in the sense that some autonomous agent controls the minutia of a community. Residents aren't repressed from above. Rather, the authoritarian community is possessed by the thrill of authority, the pleasure of both moments of submission. And this is not just the Board members. The residents and all of us live with this affective state.

This is not really an answer to the question about mini-despotisms.

Rather, it reframes the question in a way that makes the stories in the next section linger with intensity. They’ve helped me encounter my own intimate associations with authority. Perhaps we share them.

321 Before the Rules

I was in the hall, but not far enough away from my desk to disconnect the phone-ear-hand-speech trigger wired through habit into my self since youth. It buzzed twice. “No more than three rings,” was the policy. I was jerked back to the desk.

“Yeah, Mister Archer?” The contempt was palpable even through the phone line and so early in the conversation.

“Yes,” I responded apprehensively.

“I’m calling about a letter you sent me.” I tried to squeeze words into the tiny plastic holes, words that would transform this regular encounter, something about just doing the Board of Director’s bidding. But, the caller silenced me with a steady flow of sounds. That’s probably for the better. Like Deleuze and

Guattari (1977) say in Anti-Oedipus, “just following orders” doesn’t explain anything. We functionaries actually desire those moments, the charge that comes when control flows through us in an alternating enrapture of wielding and being victimized. For Association managers there was a therapeutic thrill in turning service against the master, to watch homeowners, something many of us could never be in the Bay Area, the very people to whom we lived lives of service, submit to the community machines.5

5 “One would be quite wrong to understand desire here as desire for power, a desire to repress or be repressed, a sadistic desire and a masochistic desire. Kafka’s idea has nothing to do with this. There isn’t a desire for power; it is power itself that is desire. Not a desire-lack, but desire as a plentitude, exercise, and functioning, even in the most subaltern of workers. Being an assemblage, desire is precisely one with the gears and the components of the machine, one with the power of the machine. And the desire that someone has for power is only his fascination for these gears, his desire to make certain that these gears go into

322 One of my senior managers was a model of this type of ruthless efficiency. He coupled an acerbic wit with an amazing breath and depth of knowledge of HOA laws and management strategies. He glided erect through the office, energized by the intensity of a forceful managerial persona. It radiated from him and gracefully filled the spaces between the alternating pulses of the neon ceiling lights. Still, he was only a manager, a servant, something

Board members reminded him of occasionally. He often made suggestions and sometimes they were not well received. The president would disagree. He would reassert the soundness of his idea. The president cut him off and halted the discussion with a summary decision. Affect spilled out of the manager’s sleeves and collars in the vibrations of his swiveling head and his pressing fingers. He would turn his crumpled brow at me, both to connect to an objective and illusory inter-subjective support and to let me know he would be stomping on me to restore his well machined self. Later in the meeting, after he had shut down his regular meeting control tactics and the Board became lost in a trial of convoluted issues, he smiled and joined in to save the day. Then he turned difficult questions toward me, questions about financial matters, or legal procedures regarding debt collection, or the community’s policy regarding pigeons nesting in a roof. I answered as best as I could, but neither in my manner of expression nor the material of my statements could I convey the

operation, to be himself one of these gears—or, for want of anything better, to be the material treated by these gears, a material that is a gear in its own way” . In Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986). Kafka : toward a minor literature. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

323 authority with which the senior manager spoke. He loved it. He felt soothed. I could read it in his shoulders as they slowly slid down just like when he took a draw from a cigarette after a long time between breaks. The game of power was coursing through us all. The president was compelled by his persona to assert himself over the manager, as if to say, “You’re here to serve me.” The senior manager was compelled by his persona to assert himself over me and the

Board, as if to say “you don’t know half as much as I do and even with another manager, like my pitiful assistant here, you’d be up shit creek.” And I, compelled by my persona to eat shit with a smile, just doodled down a couple of notes waiting to get to my keyboard to make these power-fools come mockingly to life for the world to see.

Back to the caller.

“You said I am required to respond or attend a hearing, something about not adhering to the Association’s rules.” He paused and I could hear papers rustling through the receiver, preparing to speak. “Right, on December 17th.”

My template letter spoke back to me saying, “For not adhering to the rules and regulations of the Rolling Hills Homeowners’ Association.” My fingers danced subtly and involuntarily. He changed voices again, “What’s the meaning of this?” and his voice cracked.

“Well,” the standard explanation began to glide right through me. I had the key words taped on my desk, transcribed from a training session where a senior manager patiently repeated the phrases like a schoolroom dictation. But

324 we were cut-off by the captured voice rumbling through the receiver. “I’m not surprised about this you know!” Trigger. The Trial. A desire for a little bit of absurd drama snuck its way into the event, Kafka’s machines found a port and went to work in my office. My persona changed. Slowly I rolled the sound waves past my lips, “not surprised?” and I paused. This is the point in the movie where I’d be scribbling notes, giving my official persona force beyond itself.

“Hmm,” I grumbled deeply to load the sound with a tone like an investigator who just found a clue. “No, I mean,” the caller struggled to respond to his own offering. “I mean, I’m surprised about the charges because they make no sense.

But, I’ve dealt with the Association before and I’ve heard stories. So, I guess, I guess I’ve become hardened to surprises.”

“I see.” I wanted to empathize and agitate together. “So,” the homeowner demanded, “what is this all about?”

“It’s written right there in your notice sir.” I was becoming the senior manager, actively folding his example into my own managerial persona.

“I know that. But why am I being singled out?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about sir. If you think the rules and regulations are being misapplied, then the proper course of action is to write a letter to the Association and the Board of Directors will discuss the issue at the next regularly scheduled board meeting.”

“O.k.,” the letters and periods drifted slowly, stalling for time to trace over the effortless chain of words he triggered in me. Thoughts glided over the

325 conversational space and I realized that I sounded like a salesman with a well- polished pitch. “I’ll do that,” he said, and brought us both back on track. “Still, I just don’t understand how I’m being called to a hearing all of a sudden.”

“Well, hearing notices are only sent out thirty days after the third notice has been mailed out and we receive no reply.” I expected a response to my procedural statement which only answered the question in a literal and formal sense. “Stick to the rules, the codes and the procedures and you’ll always be able to stand your ground,” trained words echoed in my cubicle.

My bureaucratic fundamentalism only affected a hissing white-noise in the receiver. “Let’s see,” and I rolled my chair toward the file containing violation notices written to that community. Hearing notices are infrequent and thus conspicuous. My eyelids and file drawer opened, and the letter drew itself out of a file right where it was supposed to be, propelled by our shared organizing force: alphabetizing, memory, laser labels, letterheads, the rolling chair and the rolling mat, tan file folders slid by threes into green hanging folders, sorting fingers, and a logic of association connecting it all. I grabbed the letter and thumbed through the three prior letters paper-clipped behind for just such an encounter. The corporate machine was already active. With no duration the authoritative force of pulmonary paperwork surged in me and threw me forward in my chair.

“On October 10th, I sent you a letter informing you that you were violating the Association’s rules and regulations. The letter said you had left your trash

326 out too long. That was your first notification.” Saying “you” and “your” was a trick my supervisor installed in me. Most letters were passive, written in the passive voice I mean, and usually with no subject undertaking the offensive behavior. They said stuff like: “it has been reported that the trash can at 1234

Gentle Meadow Lane was left out longer than allowed by the rules and regulations of the Rolling Hills Homeowners’ Association.” The passive voice seems to me to correspond to a type of “passive aggressiveness” which is the model of American power games. Saying you and your was reserved for more directly aggressive phone maneuvers.

“What does that have to do with anything? I remember the letter, but my trash can wasn’t left out.” He paused. I imagined that he moved to the window to look out at his curb. “Do you store your trash container out of sight?” I probed. He paused again. Was he looking again? “Of course I do,” he said in harmonic tones of moralistic warfare. “You know, I got that letter. But my trash was in the garage. I made sure that it was. What else was I supposed to do?

So, I just kept on…” Now it was my turn to interrupt. “The letter specifically asked for a response in writing or a phone call. You could have even attended a

Board meeting to clear it up.” My shoulders rolled back unconsciously and my torso almost overpowered my teetering chair. I heard a squeak from below and a sigh in my ear and felt that he was straining to support the added pressure of his now bending head. It’s funny how we just take neck muscles and our subtle gestures for granted.

327 I pressed on, impassioned by a disinterested position. I became the circuitry, making sure our machines went into motion by reading most of the second notice into the gaping plastic holes in the phone. Armed with details, dates, trained words, it was easy to sound official, even for a simple mid-level corporate manager. I read the third notice, heaping details upon him, repeating his offense over and over. When I finished there was a long silence.

“You mean all this is about a trash can?” he said using incredulity to slide beyond the capture. He barked, “That’s bullshit,” and we were both deluded with dissociation when he hung up on me. At least he had the last word. It didn’t matter; he paid for it at the hearing, literally.

A dial tone speaks also. Really, it has the last word. Or, perhaps I should say signal. Whichever, it certainly takes on a menacing force when it erupts from a furious shoulder. It spoke to me a few times in the ripples from the clash of romantic desires. But I became more familiar with it from my managerial station. It happened about four times, once even when I was charming, another even when I was patient and obliging. This dial tone draws me back in the series of incensed tones.

He hung up on me right after he told me he was selling his unit soon and wore the statement like a cloak of invincibility. There was no way in hell he was paying a fine to the damn Association. Before that I had told him that there was nothing I could do about the fine, he would have to attend a Board meeting or write a letter to the Board of Directors. “I know, I know it seems ridiculous,” I

328 said sincerely. He cursed the Association. He called the Board of Directors a bunch of idiots. “Do they really care that much about the three foot high swinging gate across my entryway?”

They did. The gate was an “improvement” to the exterior of the unit.

That was common area, and only the Association had the authority to make common decisions. But only the five residents who slip on the Board persona have the ability to speak the unified voice of the community. It’s a magical abstraction whereby an individual’s thoughts and desires morph into those of the next layer of organization, the super-organism. Aided by a template form laid down to standardize the procedures of abstracted authority. In this case, the proper Architectural Control Committee procedures were not followed, and therefore the structure was not approved. The homeowner encroached into the

Association’s territory, so the Board demanded it be removed.

I asked my supervisor what to do, fearful that the Community

Association’s authority was in jeopardy. “Just warn him and don’t worry about it,” the supervisor said. My appearance must have conveyed my puzzled state.

The manager continued, “He said he is selling right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he was bluffing?”

“No.”

“Then, just sit back and wait for the paperwork, then come and see me when you get it.” The way he kept me in suspense about the whole thing

329 illuminated the connection between the bureaucratic capture and a magic trick.

“We’ll get the money in the end.”

We did. When the property went up for sale, the Association was notified in order to stipulate any conditions to be met before the transfer of real estate.

When I brought the supervisor the letter he scanned it for a moment to trigger memory and said, “Ah yes” which at the time sounded a lot like “waalaa.” He said nothing else to me. Instead he stood up, and gesturing at me to follow, walked across the office to hand the document to the accountant assigned to that association. The accountant looked at the piece of paper, then at us, and placed it in a shiny plastic desk organizer. The senior manager locked glances with the accountant, nodded toward me and said, “Show him.” Within a few keystrokes the HOA wrote the costs of removing the gate and all of the fines into a condition of escrow. The community machine got what it wanted, what it wanted all of us to want: submission in the form of currency. Not only did the association get the money for the gate, it lowered the price he would get from selling the condo. “The HOA always wins,” he said stepping through the accounting threshold.

I could sympathize with the homeowner, agree that it sounded ridiculous, and more, but all that just provoked more frustration. The violation process had begun and could only end with submission, either a physical, verbal or monetary gesture. This submission flows upon the currency of stress, fatigue, ranting, lamenting, as well as dollars. An Association often receives them all.

330 But the earlier caller was right, it was bullshit. The trashcan and the swinging gate are just a part of the story, a convoluted story I can only tell now.

The phone rings again. “My neighbor is killing my flowers with the water from washing his car so damn often. My yard is drowning. Isn’t there anything you can do?” the homeowner pleaded. “Sure, you can send a letter and I’ll direct it to the Association and the Board of Directors will discuss your issue at the next regularly scheduled Board meeting.”

“Alright, but is there anything YOU can do? I mean, aren’t you supposed to be managing this community?”

“I can relay a message. I can arrange it so your letter is the first one read. When they start discussing homeowners’ concerns I can tell them you called.” My words were certainly not satisfying to either of us.

“By then I’ll need to build myself an ark. Come on, if you can’t do anything, what do I pay you for?”

“Ma’am, I don’t really have access to what you seek.”

“O.k., then transfer me to your supervisor.” My finger descended upon the button, a new tone, blinking lights, a smooth space, and then the standard greeting bounces down the cubicle row to my ears. In a few moments I hear,

“ma’am, if you think there is a problem with the application of the rules and regulations you need to write the Association a letter and the Board of Directors will discuss your concerns at the next regularly scheduled Board Meeting.”

Somehow our words had more force in the mouth of the supervisor. Later my

331 whole cubicle flexed with the pressure of the senior manager leaning against the entryway. “Don’t ever transfer a call like that to me again,” he said and whirled in unison with the recoiling partitions.

Another call. I was just about to depress the transfer button when my cubicle remembered the torsion and creaked. I stopped. “Actually, it won’t make any difference if I transfer you to my supervisor. She’ll just tell you to contact the Board, like I’m telling you. The only other thing you can do is attend a Board meeting,” I said knowing that in seven months time I only witnessed two or three such appearances. Each time it stretched the intensity. The Board listened to the neighborly agony they came to know all to well. This time it’s a neighbor’s shed, ugly and blocking the view from the patio next-door. Right when it seemed they would make a collective proclamation, a condemnation, a call to action, they slid into the sanctified speech of parliamentary procedure.

With an audience it was crucial to emit the magical signals of state-craft. “I make a motion to write a violation letter to the resident at 2727 Shining Star

Lane for erecting an unapproved tool shed.”

“I second the motion.”

“Is there any further discussion?” There was a pause to enable rustling papers to infuse the scene with gestures of thoughtfulness.

“Yes, do we even know if the structure has been approved or not?”

“Excellent question.”

332 They look at me. “I don’t know off the top of my head, but I can check the Association’s files back at the office.”

“Sounds good. I move that we postpone the current motion until we can determine if the structure in question is actually in violation of the Association’s architectural control regulations.”

“Second.”

“All in favor?”

“I.” “I.” “I.” “I.” “I.”

“Unanimous. Alright, moving on to the next order of business …”

The homeowner sits with jaw slightly agape, not sure what she just witnessed, not recognizing the monstrous re-birth of her own desire in a cascading dance of bureaucracy. She is told to wait for a notice in the mail. She waits for the neighbor to receive a violation, for the disturbing structure to be dismantled. She waits. She calls. She waits some more. No matter how it was wielded, this weapon worked slowly.

Meanwhile the accused would call and the game would begin again. He too would have to write a letter, would have to apply, and would have to wait.

The law, the rules and regulations, will always be removed one step, elsewhere, an endless series of doors and guardians. It will always be somewhere in between, in the procedures that speak motions through bodies which almost always receive a “second,” which are almost always approved unanimously.

Sometimes it was frustrating. Most of the time it was just how things worked.

333 Bodies could stay clean, shake hands and exchange ritualized niceties while somewhere beyond they were embroiled in a raging war between two family- states. Through these pre-established channels of transmission, residents would only ever know one neighbor, the Association, projected above the community and intimated into every association.

When you call I’ll say, “You think you can find justice in a phone call to the manager, in the boardroom, but you can’t find it at all. The irony is that while you stand before me as I guard access to the Association, what you seek is happening all around. You can find it everywhere. The stories and rumors and secret talks and side-room conversations point to the polyvocality of desire that is the law. The law happens, it comes to life, where and when people confront the real problems of how to live with their neighbors, of how to control their neighbors actions, of how to control themselves. A will to make desires bend sets the sidewalks, letters, telephone calls, fines, side chambers and such into motion” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986).

Another part of the story comes while I was burrowing into the company’s files. I looked busy and could escape into a safely limited researcher persona for a while. The amount of paper was overwhelming, but what else would I expect doing neuro-scientific studies into the memory of the community-company.

Prodding around, one sheet of paper peaked my interest, a word maybe. Maybe it called to me. It had its own force, and once I read it I knew why. It read:

O.k. I give up. I have removed the thermometer. I find it odd that the dumpster resembles a festering, toxic landfill most of the time, there is a

334 layer of dog crap on the grass and those things don’t matter. But my thermometer is so incredibly important you want to put a lien on my property. You didn’t even notice the damn thermometer for the first three years it was there. It is ridiculous. I plan to move as soon as possible and I will tell all the prospective buyers I can find how absurd this homeowners’ association is.

I noticed three other letters from the same homeowner, earlier responses to earlier violation letters. While I was kneeling obliviously in front of my paper maze, the senior manager on the account whose files I was fondling noticed me and moved to investigate. Somehow I sensed a presence and turned my head slightly to shift my peripheral vision. I saw loafers and knew immediately who it was. Without even turning I asked, “Why is a thermometer a violation and such an important issue?” I was early in my training, so such a random question might have merit through some stretchy connections.

I looked up to see his face twist and contract with irritation. “Why are you reading those letters?” After it seemed clear I would not answer, he added with a sing-song matter of fact-ness, “Because, the association’s rules and regulations prohibit any unapproved modifications to the exterior of the units.”

“Yeah, but why is a thermometer unapproved?”

“Because they put it up without getting prior proper approval from the

Board of Directors, they didn’t follow the proper architectural request procedure.

Come on, you know this?” The absurd circularity of bureaucratic rationality, of so much energy tossed at the issue of a thermometer tacked on a balcony somewhere made a chuckle bubble up. To make sense, I imagined a twelve-foot

335 high thermometer that forced people to take notice of how hot or cold it was when they just wanted to think about other things. That fascist, down with the thermometer!

As a social machine, bureaucratic technology is a converter. It converts human desire and energy into specific and predictable outcomes. The routes are established in advance, the points of entry, procedures, order-words that serve as triggers. They are arranged like watersheds and aqueducts, as if in the future, to capture in advance the inevitable eruptions of wild desire.

336 Energy Crisis

Associations also operate through fatigue. Members quite simply get tired of dealing with such “absurd” demands. The Association gets what it wants because it keeps at you through its somewhat automated machinery. Once an offense is processed there is a cascade from one action to another, involuntarily linked together through a system of dates and deadlines. Once a certain deadline is up it creates a stimulus that will trigger a letter, or a phone call to a lien specialist. The Association can keep at you because of its machinic arrangements, because of its stringent SOP organization, prosthetic memory devices, storehouses of pre-written letters, attachments to other companies like lien specialists. Once the offense is registered this whole apparatus will continue on until the Association owns your property or until the Board is satisfied with your submission.

Authority to enforce conformity and submission is conjured up through terror and exhaustion. This machine is terrifying and exhausting, even when you are looking out from within its cogs.

Everyday I returned home from work utterly spent. I mustered determination every morning just to get out of bed. I was a depleting resource.

337 The Blood

Paperwork is the blood of a corporate bureaucracy. Departments are organs. Standard operating procedures organize the flow of corporate vitality, assign each organ tasks and establish blueprints for converting one form of energy into another. The result is a super-organism of the corporation as an over-man. Bodies are enslaved as elements of larger entities.

Kafka wrote about the absurdity of such structures of authority. Modern organization looks irrational. Whereas for Weber, the key is the rationality of the bureaucratic machine. To me, it is really not a question of rational and irrational.

Since rational is simply a fantastic discourse employed to give a set of procedures a kind of intensity and coherence. Or is it that the attempt to attain rational desire through routinized activity and enslaved anti-creativity is inherently irrational? To deal with a chaotic world through standardized practices is illogical and creates situations of absurdity. Maybe. Maybe it is both the capture and the escape.

338 Corporate Dreams

If corporations are persons under the law, perhaps they have dreams as well. They do, I think, and I have lived one, the dream of efficiency, where human exist as components. If corporations are persons under the law, perhaps they have nightmares as well. They do, I think, and I have lived one, the nightmare of subjectivity and inefficiency.

339 The Tedious Life of a Request

This section will be tedious reading. It was tedious to write and it was even more tedious being a part of the machinery I will be writing about shortly.

That is the whole point. It’s the point both in how the machinery works and how this writing machine works. A tedious surrender is the point. So, stay focused.

Don’t skip to the end like I know you will want. Don’t skim. Don’t give up.

Don’t, because too much energy, human or otherwise, is caught in these sorts of devices. The energy I’m cryptically referring to here can’t just give up or skim through. Maybe you know first hand what I’m talking about. Still, I hope that facing this capture in such an absurd presentation might shock you into seeking a way out or through. Who knows, maybe there are even directions. So, like I said, the point is in the tedious reading and writing, the banal subject matter, the repetitions because I am hoping to generate affects along side the way machines of tedious capture do. This is an attempt at affective writing, where it works beyond signifying. You be the judge.

Today a desire became. It emerges as another constellation of matter and energy wanes. A tall and lush Liquid Amber tree is dying. Its leaves wilt up into brown crumples without passing through the resplendent rhythm it is celebrated for. The symptomatic wilting stands out among the backdrop of a yellow beaming transition of other Liquid Ambers strategically placed in every third front yard. It changes things. People notice. They notice down the street first. The human residing in this tree’s yard notices a change, but is not truly

340 sensitive to it until another member says a few words about the wilting tree.

They both read it as a symptom and a signal for help. Aesthetic concerns they picked up after years of living on these distinctively groomed grounds create an intense desire. The neighborhood, a few will later call themselves, wants the tree to live as much as the tree wants to live. But the responsibility to champion this desire clearly falls upon the resident of the closest house. So she plays her part and picks up the telephone to dial the number for the Association’s management service, thinking they will come to the rescue.

A receptionist answers. She thanks the caller for calling with a politely disgruntled tone and then asks, “How can I help you?” “Well, there is a beautiful

Liquid Amber tree in my front yard that seems to be dying,” the tree’s champion responds. “I’m not sure what is wrong with it but …” and the receptionist cuts her off. “What association do you live in?” She answers, but before she can even finish the last word of the Association’s name the receptionist balks “thank you. I’ll transfer you now.” A click. A buzz. A few moments of some easy listening station. Then another politely disgruntled voice clicks in. “Hello, my name is Daphne. Before I help you, please tell me what association you belong to.” “I just told the receptionist what association I belong to,” she quickly responded with a sing-song emphasis on the word belong. Before the customer service agent could react to such surprisingly swift frustration the caller added, “I am with the Meadow Vista Association.” “Right,” the customer service agent responds and flips to a new page in her note pad. After Daphne extracts more

341 biographical information, such as the identity markers of name and address, she says: “Now, how can I help you?” “Well, there is a Liquid Amber tree in my front yard that is dying. I’m not sure what is wrong with it but someone, maybe the landscapers, should come out and take a look at it.” The customer service agent, the newest entity to be swirled up in this request, does not really listen.

She only hears the signal words that tell her how to process this call. She hears tree, dying, landscape and has the order figured out. She has also become a master at writing notes and speaking the standard response words at the same time. She has already written the name, address and association in the appropriate boxes on the carbon paper form. Now she writes “RE: dead tree” and further down in a box labeled “action taken” writes “faxed landscaper,” as though the future happened in the past. Since it happens with habitual certainty, mechanistic grace, there is support for this prophetic view. As her hand twirls she says: “O.K. I’ll get the landscapers to take a look as soon as possible. We’ll call you to keep you apprised of the situation.” “O.K.” What else could the homeowner say? “Thanks for calling.” Click.

That sounds simple, right? Now everyone can become fulfilled, right?

Well that is what Eileen, the tree’s champion thought. But she couldn’t witness the way her request was captured in the corporate devices, turning this desire anything but simple and fulfilling. Once she got off the phone the customer service agent tears off the first sheet of her carbon copy notepad. The top copy goes to that association’s manager whose name she has just written in the

342 appropriate box. It doesn’t just get there on its own, however, there is a whole system of movement for these little slips. After tearing it down the perforated edge it gets placed in the basket with the respective manager’s name on it.

Then later in the day each pile gets bundled up and paper-clipped together.

Later still, they get placed in the “out-box.” A support service worker will come by with a cart to circulate the tree request, along with all the other little slips, to the appropriate “in-box.” That way, the manager can know what is transpiring in that community.

The carbon copy stays in the notebook for a couple of days. Finally the customer service agent has time away from nagging phone calls to grudgingly type this dying tree request, along with a bunch of other requests, into a computer program called the phone log. Each association has its own phone log, so Daphne is careful to enter the call into the correct one. She tries to update the phone log daily, otherwise she knows she will be slammed with processing when the regularly scheduled print out day arrives. A week later, when that day arrives, Daphne scrambles to type in a few more phone calls, prints out the phone log, and then paper-clips a support services work order to the front. This cover sheet tells support personnel what to do with the captured desires. After the cover sheet is secured, the whole package is placed in the customer service

“out-box.”

The cart wielding support person travels through the corridors, stopping to pick-up and drop-off items at almost every box. Today Janet is scheduled to

343 cart. The schedule is crucial to assuage, however little, the intense repetitiveness support personnel feel while copying, filing, mailing, and circulating documents for eight hours each day. The phone log, like the carbon copy of the tree request, sits in a bin labeled only “out” with a bin above labeled only “in”. There are no names or designations. In crowded areas it gets quite confusing to know which boxes are connected with which office. Experience, however, has made it like second nature. It gets picked up and sent back to the support services center of the office building where they copy it several times.

One copy is placed in a pile of items to be filed, and later will be added to the phone log file for the Meadow View Association. A second copy is put back on the cart and directed back to customer service to put in their permanent service record binders. A third and fourth copy are together placed in a different section of the cart and delivered to the manager. When the phone log gets there, one copy will be set aside to be included in the next mailing to the Board of Directors of the Meadow Vista Association and the other copy will be inserted into the particular association’s “manager’s binder.”

A fifth copy of the phone log is set in yet another section of the cart and delivered to another division of the support services department. There, an administrative assistant who specializes in rapid and accurate typing will re-enter the whole document into another computer program called the “unit report.”

The unit report is a record, listed by address and then chronologically, of all correspondence between the management company and the members of an

344 association. So, the “dying tree” request is immortalized here as well. This unit report is printed out on a schedule and distributed to support services for filing, to customer service, and twice to the manager.

Back at customer service and before anything happens to the call slips and phone logs, the customer service agent attempts to contact the landscaping company. Fax is the best way. It gives matter to the request. It makes desire palpable. It also saves time sitting on hold finding out that the person you need to talk to is not in the office anyway. Being a simple landscape issue, Daphne is undaunted. The procedures are easy. On her networked computer she pulls up the “landscape fax template” document for the particular association. It has all of the appropriate landscaper’s information already entered. All she has to do is type in that at a particular address there is a dying tree. The rest of the transmission’s body, “Please attend to this matter in accordance and compliance with your contract. Thank you, Daphne,” is already typed and ready to go. After adding the several words to the fax document, she prints it out and places it in the out box. On the top in huge font is the word “fax.” So when the support cart comes around to pick up the out boxes it will know to deliver this document to the designated faxer.

The faxer eventually checks her in box and slides the document into the fax machine. The fax number is right on the top so it is easy to process. Once the fax goes through the faxer stamps “faxed” in big red letters on the front of the fax sheet and writes the time and date. Once stamped, she places the sheet

345 of paper in her out box where it will circulate until it reaches the manager’s office and is filed away by the manager’s secretary.

The landscape company receives the fax and only after going through their whole internal procedure pages the site manager to investigate the situation. When he arrives he verifies that the tree is indeed sick. Not only that, he determines that the rest of the area surrounding the tree is also unhealthy.

In landscaping forensics that is a big clue. The site manager reads it as a soil or irrigation problem, since a diseased tree would not likely be encircled by other wilting species. The site manager for the landscape company works at several different HOA communities, so he knows how the system works. Because of this, he does two things. First he knocks on the front door nearest the tree in question. After determining that this homeowner is in fact the original caller, he breaks down his assessment of the situation to her. He tells her that the ground in this area is concave and is collecting too much water. There is also a dense canopy of Pyrus Bradford trees nearby. The heavy shade they generate blocks evaporation. He begins to loose her attention, but he continues to explain that the irrigation drainage system in this area also needs to be upgraded. What is important, however, is that he tells her what to do next. She, being a concerned member of the association, should call the association’s manager and attempt to expedite the work that will need to be done promptly in order to save this tree.

The second thing he does is to write notes to himself that he will later type on the company’s letterhead and send to the Association’s manager. He knows that

346 this document will be presented to the association’s board of directors, so to expedite things he includes a couple possible remedies and the costs for each.

The assessment and proposals arrive at the management company a few days later. The mail sorter opens the envelope with a special envelope opening device, then paper clips the envelope to the back of the assessment and proposals. He looks up the association and finds out which manager is assigned to that account. Then the mail sorter places the arrangement in the correct section of the office cart for distribution. Before he does this, of course he time and date stamps the document so the manager knows when it was received.

Eventually the manager will pull the landscaper’s correspondence out of the in box and glance at it. To process things quickly, the manager does not dally with actually reading or thinking about it. Signs are tallied. The manager sees the landscape company’s letterhead and later sees the word “proposal”.

That’s enough to know what to do with it. It immediately gets placed in the

“new business” folder for the appropriate association. The document now sits in that folder for a month and a half, until one week and a day before the next board meeting when the board packet must be processed.

In the meantime, the Liquid Amber’s champion calls back to the management company. Unfortunately she starts off with a slight mistake. After the customary pseudo greeting she says, “I talked to Daphne a couple of days ago …” but before she can say who she wants to speak with this time she is transferred back to Daphne. Click. Buzz. Then some easy listening music that

347 lasts considerably longer this time since Daphne is processing another request on a different line. When Daphne clicks in, the caller says she was transferred here by mistake; she really wants to talk to the community manager. Daphne hesitates. She knows better than to just transfer the caller to the manager.

They get so damn quarrelsome when customer service agents transfer calls to them. “They have enough stuff to deal with,” she remembers from her standard operating procedure training, “that they can’t possibly deal with concerned homeowners. Except of course in special circumstances that you can not handle yourself.” At the same time she can’t just say that she can’t transfer her. That would seem like an overt blockage of service, something the caller and the Board might get upset about. “Perhaps I can help you?” “Well, we’ve already spoken, and I was told that I should contact the manager.” It takes several minutes of repetitive conversation before the caller can make the customer service agent remember the previous call. “Oh, yeah. So what can I do for you today?” “Well, my tree is still dying. The landscaper you sent to look at it said I should call the community manager about what should be done.” “If the landscaper already looked at it, then he will contact the Board and they will decide what to do at the next meeting. I can find out when and where that is if you’d like?” “He said he sent proposals. I think the Board should decide on them before the next meeting. The tree might die before then.” After a few more unproductive exchanges, the customer service agent says, “I think it would be best if you talk

348 to the manager about this” as though she just though of the idea. “I’ll transfer you now.”

Click. Buzz. Buzz. Then a calm and self-assured voice vibrates through the phone, “Chuck Andrews here. What can I do for you?” The caller takes a breath, preparing to start the whole story over again. This time she knows some of the protocol and begins there. “My name is Eileen Smith. I am a homeowner at Meadow Vista. There is a Liquid Amber tree in my front yard that is dying. I talked to Daphne in customer service a few days ago and she sent out a landscaper to look at it. He said it would die if something was not done and that he was sending something to you about it.” “O.k.,” Chuck slips in as he pauses, writing in his phone log, “if the landscaper is sending us something, then the

Board will get a chance to look it over and make any decisions about what is to be done at the next Board meeting.” “I know. I know all that. But the tree will die before the next meeting. The landscaper said so. He said I should call and see what can be done now.” The desperation in her voice caught Chuck’s attention and he stopped to think about what to do. Normally he would just continue to stress that the board will deal with the issue at the next meeting and to hell with these demanding complainers. However, this situation seemed volatile and he was already too frustrated that day to deal with another irate caller. Besides, the Board would probably not want the tree to die. Trees are expensive. “I’m not sure what I can do. Let me talk to the manager and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” “You’re not the manager?” “No, I’m her assistant.”

349 The phone bangs the standard tile covered pressboard counter in the caller’s unit, not out of anger but sheer exhaustion. “Maam? I’ll talk to the manager and call right back, O.K.?” “Yes. Please have the manager call.” Chuck wasn’t sure if she misheard him or was trying to force an issue. Either way he had no intention of enacting some Monty Python skit over the phone, so he just hung up. The caller did also.

The manager was busy. She was on the phone for about fifteen minutes and when she got off picked the phone right back up and continued to talk intensely for another fifteen minutes. Forty minutes later the assistant finally gets the opportunity to talk to the manager. He actually wants to help this homeowner, so he relays her desire to save the tree like it was his own. She listens to him tell an abridged version of the story without gesturing at all during the tale. She has been irritated with her assistant’s inefficiency lately. Letters get written late. Phone calls are not returned promptly. And, worst of all, he has been bothering her with the stupidest little tasks. “You know there is nothing we can really do. Do we even have the landscaper’s letter and proposals yet? Tell her that when we get them we will forward them to the Board and they will make a decision at the next Board meeting.” Everyone in the company repeated those last eighteen words like a phone receiver mantra. So the manager spoke them slowly, as though to a child, to twirl the words’ degrading edge deeper into the assistant’s ego. “I told her that. But the tree will die before then. Should we just let the tree die?” The manager heard the rebellious

350 tone in her assistant’s voice, so she set down the papers she was turning over in her hands.

“O.K.,” the manager began with a crooked smile, “when you get the proposals you can contact each Board member to let them know about the situation. Find out if they want to do something about it before the next meeting. If they do, then copy the proposals and send them out to each board member. Then call each of them back to find out what they want to do. If they all agree about what they want to do, then send them a unanimous consent form and have each of them sign it. Then we can get to work on this tree.” The assistant suddenly realized the flaw in his strategy. Leveraging the tree’s desire against the manager’s apathy would mean more work for him. By averting his gaze to look at nothing in particular in the corner of the manager’s office, he signaled the tree was not really that important to him. He tried to get out of it.

“You’re right. The Board will have to discuss the issue before they agree about anything.” “Probably, but you should try anyway. We don’t want the tree to die before the meeting, right?” Now the manager’s cheeks were puffed up by the full grin of some smug superiority and pushed back into her chair in a relaxed gesture. “So, go call you’re homeowner and let her know that you will contact the Board right away.” She picked up the papers from her desk again and rustled them slightly. “Oh, yeah, don’t forget I need that Board packet this afternoon and those letters you haven’t written yet need to be in it.” The assistant’s head shook slightly and then sank toward his chest. He left the office.

351 The assistant returns to his desk right outside of the manager’s office. He feels the manager staring at him through the walls. His daily organizer is turned open on his desk and he glances to see how pressured his time and energy is.

The outlook is bleak. So he picks up the phone to call the Liquid Amber champion. As with all calls, he then opens his phone log and begins the entry.

He writes her name, the date, the time, the number and then waits for the resolution of the dial tones. When he gets her on the phone he tells her that there is nothing “we” can do. “The issue,” he says sternly, “will just have to wait until the next Board meeting.” “That’s not good enough. My tree is going to die.

What are you going to do about it?” “Look, I talked to the manager. She said the Board will need to discuss what to do at the next meeting.” He paused and then more standard words poured out, “If you want, you can write a letter to the

Board expressing your opinion about what should be done.” This was not the call she hoped for, but probably the one she expected. “What good will that do?” “It will keep you involved and when the Board makes a decision you will be informed in writing shortly thereafter.” She puffed. “I’m going to do something about this. Your company is a condescending waste of time. I want to talk to the Board about finding new management.” Having been confronted with expressions of this overwhelming powerlessness many times before, the assistant remained poised. To the homeowner it only seemed smug, especially when he said, “You can certainly do that. All you have to do is write a letter to the Board of Directors and they will discuss your concerns at the next Board

352 meeting.” Then as he gave her the address, the same address he gave her earlier, the manager walked out of the office and gave a nasal puffing laugh as she passed the assistant’s desk. “You mean all of the mail goes to the management company, even complaints about the management company?”

There is no other way to contact “the Board.” Even if you creep up on one and force a conversation by the mail kiosk, for example, that will not officially be corresponding with the Board. She felt trapped and hung up the phone.

Once the homeowner hung up the phone, she snatched up a pen and a sheet of paper from a drawer near the wall mounted phone. The letter she quickly wrote spoke of the need to take care of her tree and the management company’s refusal to do anything. She addresses the envelope to the management company’s post office box and forcefully shoves it in the outgoing mail slot of her mailbox. After being carried by a couple of mail trucks and being shot through high-tech mail sorting machines, the letter eventually arrives at the post office box. The mail retriever picks up the mail from the post office box later that afternoon. He puts it in a mail carrier and drops the whole bundle off at the support office of the management company. The assigned mail sorter in the support services office opens, time stamps, paperclips the envelope to the back and sorts the mail according to each article’s ultimate destination. After all of the mail has been sorted, it gets placed on the mail cart and delivered to the intended office during the evening mail rounds.

353 The manager’s assistant receives the letter. He quickly processes it by noticing almost immediately that it is a homeowner complaint. Curiosity about the sender and the issue does not even creep into his mind. Once the

“homeowner concern” signal is acquired the letter is immediately put in the

“homeowners’ concerns” folder for the association’s board packet. There the letter will sit until the board packet is made a week and a day before the next board meeting.

A few days earlier, the assessment and proposal from the landscaper arrived. Again, the mail carrier dropped it off at the support office and he assigned mail sorter in the support services office opens, time stamps, paperclips the envelope to the back. Then she sorts the mail by destination and it gets carted around to the intended office during the evening mail rounds. When the manager’s assistant gets this letter, he quickly scans for the order words. It’s from the landscaper, so it’s not a homeowner letter. Ah, two pages back is a list of services and a dollar amount for each totaled up and then highlighted. It’s surely a proposal. But is it an “old business” proposal or a “new business” proposal? The only way to know is to check the minutes from the previous meetings to see if there is mention of any intended landscape work. He carefully steps into the manager’s office and pulls the association’s binder off his shelf.

The manager stares at him while she nods and repeatedly says “yes” on the phone. The assistant could just ask the manager if the proposal goes in the new or old business section, but he is leery of once again being “disciplined” by his

354 boss. He shields his eyes with the binder as he looks through the minutes for the last couple of meetings. He does not read any talk of landscape work to be done and at the same moment remembers the dying Liquid Amber tree. “Right,” he says audibly and reels towards the door away from the manager’s probing stare. When he gets to his desk he simply shoves the document in the “new business” folder for the Meadow Vista HOA and continues with his previous task.

Now the request lays dormant. One week goes by. Another week goes by. Since the Board of Directors meets quarterly, a whole month goes by before the next meeting is even in sight. It rained more in the second half of that quarter than in the first when the problem began. But the Board meets quarterly, so the tree must simply hold on. A week and two days before the

Board meeting, the assistant checks his planner. Well, he checks his planner every day, but on this day there is a note to prepare the cover sheets for the

Meadow Vista Association Board packet. The prosthetic memory device is standard operating procedure, a cartographic manifestation of the corporate fantasy to eliminate human error. The week and two day SOP marker seems trivial, but the assistant does it willingly. After printing the title sheets, which demarcate the homeowner concerns section from the new business section for example, the assistant carefully places them in the front of the Board packet accordion file.

The next day the assistant comes in to the office, with only cosmetic differences from the previous day, and plugs into his prosthetic memory device

355 again. As though there were no connection between the two events, as though he had no autonomous memory save remembering to check his planning device, the assistant reads that the Board packet must be mailed out today. A week and one day prior to any Board meeting the Board packets must be mailed out, that’s

SOP also. So the assistant complies. No, he doesn’t comply, the task simply happens through him. He pulls out the files and begins to arrange them. The two letters in the Homeowners’ Concerns section are organized by date, the tree letter second, and are paper clipped behind the title sheet. The envelopes, copies and superfluous papers are set aside. The landscaper’s proposal is put at the end of the New Business section. Then he double-clicks on the agenda icon on his computer and begins to fill in the blanks in the SOP agenda document. In the Homeowner’s Concerns section he writes “Letters from homeowners” and in the New Business section he writes “Landscape proposals.” When he thinks the packet is organized correctly he takes it to the manager. The manager looks at him like the packet arrived just in time, a look that betrays his desire to degrade the underling once again. The manager scoffs at the sloppy work. She hurriedly moves some papers from one section to another. Then she scoffs again, with a side glance for emphasis this time, when she notices the tree letter. She removes some papers and drops them in the trash. She crosses out some of the agenda entries and re-writes them on the saved document on the networked computer file. The assistant just looks on with a twisted face of bewilderment, knowing that he will receive no explanation for his mistakes.

356 When the packet has been edited and approved by the manager, it gets paper clipped together and a company routing sheet is attached to the front.

There is a box on the sheet that simply says “Board Packet.” Checking this box will let the support personnel know exactly how to process the bundle, since they are linked into the standard operating procedure as well. So, the assistant checks off the box and writes the name of the association on the top of the form.

It gets placed in the out box, then the office paper flow cart, then the support personnel to do pile until its turn. The support person whose turn it is to process copy request for that day brings the bundle into the copy room. She has prepared board packets many times and the procedure flows smoothly through her in the form of habitual movements. Her conduct is encoded. She copies the agenda first and lines them on a table. Next she stamps the whole packet with page numbers. Then she rapidly presses her finger on the copy machine interface and feeds each section into the machine. Now both she and the copy machine have been jointly encoded. This human machine connection efficiently generates the desired product, all precisely the same. Each section has a brightly colored title page for quick reference. Each section is three hole punched and stapled together. When the copying is done, she slides a copy of each section behind one of the agendas and attaches them with a brad. She works in a daze, in a blur, like a ghost, half there and half somewhere else. The energy moves through her with little resistance, and before she knows it the labels are printed out, cut and pasted from the association’s board member

357 sheet, and stuck to five packets in manila envelopes. She takes them to the company’s postage machine, weighs them, which at the same time calculates the postage for her, and runs them through the cogs to apply the red postage stamp. She is not done yet. Next she takes one of the extra copies and tosses it in the box which is the staging area for documents to be placed in the permanent files. Another copy is sent via the office mail cart back to the manager, along with the original bundle.

After tossing about in the postal service’s direction machines, the packets arrive at the Board member’s homes. Some of them will read it before the meeting. Some of them will try to bullshit their way through the meeting, others will try to read everything in the packet as it is happening, others still will just remain silent and agree with some other convincing Director. Some Boards have collectively realized that they don’t really read the packet ahead of time, so they read the whole thing during the meetings. Those meetings are excruciatingly long and boring.

Finally the evening of the meeting arrives. The manager and the assistant arrive early to prepare the meeting hall, a rented church banquet room. A couple of tables slide together. Chairs unfold and line up facing the tables.

Other chairs dance around the table in a horseshoe shape. “This,” the manager explains to the assistant after he tried to line five chairs along one side of the table, “is the right way to set up a meeting. This way the Board can address each other and still present themselves to any homeowners that show up.” Once

358 the space is arranged to shape the flow of interaction, the manager places extra copies of the agenda by the door for a potential audience. As she does this, the first Director arrives. She is customarily greeted by both the manager and assistant. She takes a seat and begins to flip through her board packet, which she opens first, when a second and third Director arrive. They are also customarily greeted by all present. Now the meeting begins, although it won’t officially start for a while yet. But they being to exchange small talk and gossip, in that order. A few sentences later they are already exchanging positions on the business which will be on the table shortly. After all the Directors are present, save one who informed the President that he would be unable to attend, the President calls the meeting to order. Immediately the manager and assistant both hear the command and begin to scribble notes, “pres. cto [called to order] 7:13,” and then they write down the names of everyone in attendance.

After the meeting is called to order, the agenda directs the Directors to homeowner concerns. No homeowners are at the meeting, so they move immediately to the letters. The manager informs them that the first letter is on page 3 and gives them a brief synopsis. They discuss a pet conflict for a few minutes and decide to move on quickly. “The second letter,” the manager jumps right in to keep things moving, “which you can find on page 4, is a request from a homeowner that something be done about a Liquid Amber tree in her yard that is dying.” She tries to slide past the other part of the letter by saying, “we have proposals from the landscaper to take care of the tree in new business, so I

359 recommend that we leave this issue until then.” “Sounds good,” the Board

President replies. But before the manager can direct the meeting to the next section, one of the Board members, usually silent at meetings, cuts her off.

“Wait. There is a complaint here about the management company also. What is that all about?” “The homeowner wanted us to take care of the situation immediately. I couldn’t approve any work myself, because all of the options exceeded my five hundred limit. There are several options as well, and it seemed necessary for the Board to discuss them. The homeowner thought this was unreasonable, and believe me, she let us know.” “Was there no way to deal with the situation sooner?” one of the directors asked. Another added, “By email or something?” Feeling trapped, the manager split the assistant with a sharp stare beneath her pressed brow. “We thought of that, but …” and the manager was saved from some feeble reasoning by the interrupting President.

“Well, whatever happened lets just not let that happen again, right? You have our emails and phone numbers, so use them. For now, we should just move on and discuss this later in new business. But, I we should write a letter to this homeowner letting her know what we are doing about the tree and what is going on? O.K.?” Upon hearing these verbal signs, these orders, both the manager and assistant scribble a note to write the letter and draw the company’s standard star by it. The SOP star signals an “Action List” item and must be drawn to ensure the processing of each order.

360 When the meeting reaches the new business stage, the Directors begin to discuss the proposals. They are perturbed about the cost, “are these figures reasonable?” one of them asks. After much discussion a motion is made to accept all of the proposals: to trim the surrounding trees, to install a new drainage system, to remove the tree, re-slope the area and then re-plant the tree. After being seconded by another Director, the Board votes unanimously to approve the motion. Upon hearing this, the manager and the assistant both write in their notes who made the motion, who seconded the motion and that it was approved unanimously. These sorts of details are the substance of the meeting’s minutes. They also draw the star to designate tasks to be fulfilled. A few arguments, a few discussions and a few conversations fill the remainder of the meeting. For the manager and her assistant the words are gathered in an a- signifying semiotic way; they are more attuned to the words as a series of triggers than as something of which to make sense.

The following day signals another series of triggers, of starts and stops to be followed with ridiculous precision. The first task, demanded by codes and habit and the inhabiting desires which accompany them, is to write the meeting minutes. This, of course, is the assigned task of the manager’s assistant. The minutes must follow the format of the meeting and be an accurate summary of the significant events. Some of the entries are informational, but those sections are so generalized they make sense making arduous. The assistant, for example, writes “the Board discussed a pet conflict between neighbors” in the

361 homeowner’s concerns section of the minutes. But when action is taken, when orders are given, language is forced into its most specific capabilities. “The

Board will write a letter to the homeowner at [address] informing her of the

Board’s decisions regarding the measures to be taken Liquid Amber tree in her front yard.” And later in the new business section, the assistant writes “Upon a motion by [board member’s name] and seconded by [another board member’s name], the motion to approve the landscape proposals to trim the trees surrounding the Liquid Amber at [address], to install a new drainage system at the above address, to remove the said tree, re-slope the area and then re-plant the tree was voted on and unanimously approved.” Writing minutes triggers a style of expression that enacts an authoritative order through a surplus of signs.

Since these are the official actions of the Association, they are presented by miming legalese. It is here that the initial desire attains its legitimacy. But, it still has a number of transformations to endure in this system of capture.

When the assistant is done writing the minutes, from both his own notes and the senior and more objective notes of the manager, he knows he is not done. The handoff to the manager will undoubtedly result in revisions. He places the minutes on the seat of the manager’s chair, an informal procedure of promptitude that sprung up along side the sometimes momentarily ignored in box. There are undoubtedly numerous documents filed away with the imprints of gluteus muscles. Once the manager edits them, with an obnoxious red pen, the assistant begins the minutes again. After working almost as long on the

362 changes as he did on the original document, he feels free to stop. Of course stopping means starting the next required sequence of serial actions. The digital document is sent to a nearby networked printer and, once printed, is attached to an office routing sheet. The “minutes” box is checked thereby ordering a wide dispersal throughout the office. One copy goes to customer service so the service representatives can inform homeowners of current association events.

Another copy goes to the support office for permanent filing. Finally, two more copies are sent back to the manager. One printed copy is placed in the

“Approval of Minutes” folder of the now empty Board packet accordion file. They will then be discussed and approved or edited by the Directors at the subsequent meeting. The second manager copy goes into the Board binder which the manager takes with her to all association events.

The desire to save the Liquid Amber is almost ready for fulfillment. But before that can happen the manager’s assistant must look through the meeting notes again and transcribe the orders, marked with a star in the notes, onto an official “Action Item List.” The arboreal desire finds its place on this list with an entry to write a letter to the homeowner and to inform the landscape company of the approved proposals. The second, of course, will begin the ultimate translation of this desire into material sensitivity. Still, the action item list must be processed correctly before any tasks contained thereupon can be undertaken.

Same as the minutes, it is printed and attached to an office routing sheet. The

“Action Item List” box is checked informing the office’s circulatory system how to

363 pump this sheet of paper through the office. One copy goes to the permanent file. Copies are also distributed to anyone who has tasks assigned on the list.

That typically includes the bookkeeping office, the support office, the manager and the manager’s assistant.

Usually any approved proposals are processed first, by calling the vendor and sending signed copies of the proposal for the vendor’s records. Of course the original signed proposals are filed away in the management company’s permanent filing. So, a few days after the meeting the manager’s assistant enters the office and pulls the Meadow Vista Association’s Action Item List off his cork-board. After plugging into the list he processes the proposal with perfectly generalized movements. After he hangs up the phone and mails and files the proposals, he types the word complete in front of the action items on the list.

He almost forgot to process an extra copy of the homeowner letter to go in the next Board packet as proof of orders followed.

Once the landscaping company gets the phone call, and later the signed proposals, they are now considered ordered and under contract to perform the directed labor. For the landscape company, the sense of the words is also less important than the a-signifying trigger to start the work. The next day the site manager and his site crew finally arrive to help the withering tree. The site manager, a reported tree expert, takes one look at the tree and winces, turning and tucking his head into his shoulder. “Shit,” he says to his crew, “this tree is beyond help. There’s nothing we can do for it now except to bring it down.” His

364 crew nods in deferential agreement. He pulls out his company issued cell phone and calls the management company. His eyes pop in surprise when it only takes one transfer to reach the community manger who is at her desk. The manager produces some sincere words of disappointment at the loss of the tree, not for the tree but for how it looks in terms of her ability to manage the community’s resources. The tree expert then adds that a strong wind could easily bring this tree down, possibly damaging the nearby fence, houses, parked car, or even causing bodily injury. “Anyway, now it’s a question of liability. And we all face exposure to that.” These are corporate order words of the highest intensity; exposure to liability should be avoided at all costs. So they bargain on a cost for the work. The manager says he can approve the tree removal if they can do it for less than five hundred dollars. After thinking about the proposition during a short silence, the landscaper accepts the terms. And as quickly as that the tree removal was approved over the phone.

Seeing that it was Friday afternoon, the landscaper decides to come back

Monday to start the work. On Saturday the homeowner receives the letter from the management company and is pleased to know that her tree will be saved.

She feels a sense of accomplishment. Monday morning she appreciatively greets the landscape crew as they cross her path on the way to the office. They decide not to tell her about the change of plans, “the management company should take care of that” says the foreman. When she gets home from work the tree is gone. The work called for the tree to be removed and then re-planted, so she is

365 only briefly shocked. When a few days pass without the tree’s return, however, she becomes suspicious. She grudgingly calls the management company.

She feels like an expert in negotiating the corporate labyrinth now, and it only takes a single transfer before she is on the phone with the managing assistant. He knows nothing and can only try to calm her down before transferring her to the manager. The manager tells her what happened, with not much sensitivity since she is recording the encounter in her phone log. Outrage bubbles up through the phone lines. “I loved that tree. I wanted to save it, not cut it down. You could have done something a long time ago, but you sat on your ass until the tree was so sick it had to be cut down. What bullshit!” The manager can say nothing. The caller realizes that the manager will not say anything without a direct confrontation. “You know, my yard is totally barren now because of you. What are you going to do about it?” She futilely tries to explain to her that there is nothing she can do, except lobby the Board of

Directors on her behalf. But in order to do so, the homeowner will have to submit a request in writing to plant a new tree in her yard.

The astonishment is overwhelming, swiftly anesthetizing. When she hangs up she begins to calculate if planting a new tree is worth the agony of dealing with the management company’s absurd entrapment. Her fatigue is so deeply felt that she might actually succumb to the capture. I’m not sure what I would do.

366 Ha! You skipped to the end didn’t you? I would have as well. Never underestimate the power of fatigue.

367 Machinic Landscapes

On a site inspection we walk through the community. We look for queer things. We come across colorful window coverings, an open garage door, and a car out of place. I say nothing; I just write them down as they are pointed out to me. I think to myself as I walk: “are these the signs of bad neighbors? Of anti-community desires?” And now that I am writing months and years later, I answer: “no, we don’t read them like that. They aren’t subjective. This landscape is machinic.” Signals trigger us. Pens start to glide on paper. Paper is peeled off bounded pads and tossed at secretaries. Secretaries make these signals digital with their deft digits. Later the signals, processed as action item lists spring to life on a computer screen. They trigger again. This time we write letters. Then when the allotted 30 day response period elapses without reply, it flashes on the computer screen; it emerges in red from the desk planner.

Another letter. Triggers frustration. Triggers accusations. Triggers talk in the

Board room and more letters.

Again the story continues, propelled through different bodies by the same machinics. Contaminating pets are persistent problems for many communities; at some it takes on a state of emergency. “We should rename this place shit village instead of Silver village,” I complained to myself as I clicked the mouse to have the support staff send out another pet violation. What was special about that letter was how its mechanical grace marked one of my many event horizons. Due to surreal deadline pressures, I turned to the standardized letter.

368 Before I had typed each letter individually with my own quirky statements. My letter writing was slow. I was made fun of for it in serious jokes by the next- level-ups. I was reprimanded also, for not following procedure. I don’t know if it was discipline and punishment, a test, a coincidence, but the bosses doubled my workload. A nightmare of panicked multi-tasking ensued. Exhausted, I slammed my forehead into the desk and said, “O.k., I give up! I give up! I give in!”

I capitulated to inert abandon not because I felt guilty about wasteful spending of company time, not even for fear of falling without a job, not because

I saw my individual performance stats well below the company norm. I simply ran out of energy.6 On a site inspection later that week, I realized that the thermometer was removed as well. “She really did give up,” bounced into thought as I stalked in front of her balcony. I was hoping so, hoping for one less task. And I was hoping not, looking for some heroic resistance to my possessed devices.

So, for the pet violation letter I pulled up a networked word document, typed the address in the blank box, added the name, and cut and pasted the wording for the particular offense from another networked document. In this case I inserted “it has been brought to our attention that a dog at your address has been barking and defecating in unapproved areas.” The letter was written, but not by me, written somewhere beyond me. That night I dreamt of a wolf and a pack of wolves. The pack moved on and a lone wolf howled wildly before

6 This point about the power of fatigue is one that Deleuze and Guattari make in their book on Kafka (pg. 33).

369 clamping its own teeth into fur and flesh just above the shining teeth of the steel trap. A hand reached down slowly.

370 Propelled by Offense

When a response arrived, I had to look at my recall lists to place the exchange. The familiar letter said, “I don’t think you should go around making unsubstantiated accusations. My dog does not bark. You must have my dog confused with the dog next door who barks all the time.” This type of response always gave me a charge. The indignation of being accused was often entwined with the desire to accuse others. Maybe members wanted to share this weird sort of enjoyment. Maybe someone had a beef with the neighbor for some time and the violation letter drew attention to this mode of warfare. Or, maybe just being forced into a subordinate position can spark a desire to wield the force of that desire upon another, any other.

The second paragraph of the letter crept in another set of cracks. It asked, “Where are the approved areas?” I laughed aloud when I read this. The formal wording, of the letter written yet not written by me, turned against itself.

In the semi-automated attempt to seem official the violation letter became a parody of itself, of the whole community concern with rules and regulations, of a shared life brimming with regulated desires. Of course there are no approved zones of dog defecation in the community, but the image is perversely pleasant, a cancerous joy. Knowing this, the dog owner wrote that she would take the dog out of the complex to relieve itself. I can just picture waves of dog owning

Village dwellers rushing out to drop foul smelling bombs on the neighboring sub-

371 division. Belonging and an inside/outside mentality made this poop campaign seem reasonable.

After another violation letter, I could feel the agitation as I picked up her next reply. Some of the letter read: “I don’t know who you are or precisely why the Association has chosen to harass me. If it continues I will take action to protect my interests which include the peace and joy of my property.” Later the letter read: “I said I would abide. Do you require a video of my dog defecating on the public street? Should I send you a stool sample in the mail?” That must have been a tempting idea. But instead of continuing the parody, she turned back towards the capture of becoming an incredulous informer. She accused a

“Black man with his black dog” of the same charges. She reported hearing his dog howling and relieving itself on the unit’s patio. “Because of this,” she said,

“the filthy patio is drawing flies and emitting a foul odor.” Then another neighbor suddenly became a music blaster. “Savages,” I yelled anthropologically at myself.

It doesn’t seem to be just a coincidence that the dog and its owner are black. They are black because their subordinate position in a racial system of differentiation and stacked system of economic differentiation is easily taken up in the submission machines. Signs of race become natural targets for these local games of power. I’ll come back to this idea in another section.

372 Submission Games

The story arcs again. “This is harassment. It’s obnoxious. These rules are so ridiculous, so trifling, I can’t believe you enforce them the way you do.” I said nothing. I usually just wait for the energy to climax and dissipate.

“Besides, my neighbor parks her car in the driveway. And, the guy across the street always leaves his trash can out for days at a time. What are you going to do about that?” The supra-individual overman was hard at work, to give all of us that double kick of the submission game.

The reason didn’t matter. The facts didn’t matter. I only needed orders to set things in motion. When I told Board members about a counter-accusation

I was almost always ordered to send violations as well as to continue monitoring the existing situation. Offenses ooze like that. Once submissive desire arcs onto the scene it jumps to every point it can reach.

373 Propelled by Offense

At the start of the Board Meeting stacks of papers were carefully arranged on the shiny whirling wood tabletop. The angles and edges cut through the smooth space of the table’s surface and gave faces trajectory, gave statements clear paths to follow to reach ears resting in the surrounding folding chairs. In the proper order, Roberts Rules, I presented a complaint letter to the Board members. Pages rustled in reference. As I reached the end of my presentation the papers were restacked on the table giving the room new angles and lines.

Were I a diviner, I could read the next few moments in that constellation. As I looked around, I thought the stacks seemed disheveled. I wanted to move around the table and straighten up, but settled for arranging my papers into a neat stack, aligning the edges parallel with the edges of the table, placing my pen directly in the middle and parallel to the long edges. My order was an illusion, yet an anchor. There was no way to know if the resident and her dirty little dog had truly changed their ways. The room seemed a lot more comfortable with this uncertainty than I.

I dreamt up a plan. Picture me hiding in the bushes with little Juniper branches sticking out of my hat, peering through binoculars to catch the resident in the act of letting her dog defecate in the common areas. “Caught ya!” I could yell as I spring out from behind the bushes. As fun as that would be, there were other community agents lurking about with just such fun in mind. I was paid to facilitate, to wait at my desk for reports.

374 There was one Board member in particular, and there was often one, who carried a clipboard and scavenged the development for signs of offense.

Sometimes it isn’t a board member, just a zealous resident. The clipboard, however, seems a universal prop, a material support of this fantasy persona.

How else could one set out to find and record offenses? So, this sweet little retired gentleman, who kept a pride of cats in his condo, was to many the scourge and savior of the community. He nosed around. He rummaged about.

He searched everywhere. Possessed by legalistic desires, he got down on his hands and knees to look underneath the cars for oil stains in each parking stall.

On regular tours of duty, he wrote down each address where window coverings were not off white, where clothes or towels or flower-pots hung from the balcony. He followed people to the trash bins to make sure their trash was bagged properly, that unapproved items were not being discarded. One day I crept up on him while he was teetering on the rim of a dumpster. The surprise almost sent him in, but surely sent him on a lengthy tirade about people throwing furniture, appliances and loose trash in there. He didn’t just look for violations. This guy loved the offense. It gave him purpose. It gave him pleasure. His love of the submission machine spread, airborne in the germ-like violation letters and accusations that are some of its cherished minions. (see

Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: A Minor Literature).

The whole community became propelled by offense, and everyone started nosing around. I’m not kidding. Almost every time I corresponded with a

375 resident about some rule breaking behavior they had a list of offenses and all the details to hurl at me.

376 Following

The snooping clipboard carrier is a prop in many communities for one simple reason I think. The Association, the State, any regulatory apparatus, follows along in the wake of that which it regulates. “Its applications are always retrospective, sniffing out and running after feral belongings it must attempt to recoup, to rechannel into State-friendly patterns,” into community friendly patterns (Massumi 2002: 83). Eventually the codification of the rules follows the following. Once they take hold, the rules effectively frame and regulate community conduct. They retrospectively capture. Then they establish grooves to precapture that which may emerge again (Massumi 2002: 71).

377 Submission Games

Another meeting, another city, another time, I was telling the Board about a resident’s promise to walk her dog outside the community and how she has stopped her dog from barking. “In short,” I say with more than a hint of indifference, “the resident promises to adhere to the rules and reg…” Before I can finish I hear an almost startling guffaw from the back of the room and a disturbing snicker from across the panel of Board members.

For some reason I could not decide which direction to look, so I dropped my head towards my notepad. I looked up when the laughter turned to words.

A slightly balding man with tremendously hairy arms arched and turned to open his posture to the room. Still laughing a bit he said, “I just saw that dog off the leash this afternoon and crapping right near the pool. It’s probably out there right now leaving a stinky present on someone’s walkway, that dirty little …”

“That’s good to know,” the snickering clipboard carrier responded. “I also know that her dog still barks,” he said, managing to smile and scowl at the same time. With his fingers gently pressing against the table he continued, “I hear it bark all the time, late at night, in the morning.”

I made my own space; the conversation rippled smoothly around me.

But it was like flicking our switch, the senior manager and I both snapped forward in our seats, snapped pen to paper, when the Board president motioned to send a hearing notice. To me, the only significant words spoken at a board meeting, maybe spoken at all, are not significant because of what they mean.

378 They only mean something and are significant because of the orders they convey. Buy this. Initiate this contract. Stop that behavior. Call somebody.

Send letters. Void that check. Complain to a vendor. Words shape things not because they have some mystical constructive force, but because they are inevitably the expression of desire, conveyors of order.

I am a relay station, an amplifier of orders. I receive them. I pass them on.

Indignation and incredulity at the pettiness of association desires commonly accompany the application of orders. Then they turn on each other to make orders of their own. “Yeah, well, the guy a few doors down is parking on the street. What are you going to do about that?”

“We’ll check into it. If he is indeed parking on the street we will send a violation letter to him as well.”

Submissive desire and desire that imposes submission are both part of the same assemblage. This desire has come to live with us, a “desire that is already submissive and searching to communicate its own submission” (Deleuze and

Guattari 1986: 10).

379 Paranoia

The landscape dripped with paranoia. I swear while I walked around a few of the developments I would turn my head to see blinds snap back together, window coverings spring back into shape. I keeled down. I turned my back. I stepped behind a truck. I moved smoothly but with abrupt and erratic whirls as

I attempted to link eyes with my counter-prowler. Ghostly glimpses teased every time.

A board member felt the same thing. She said she never saw her Asian neighbors, but they were always watching her through their front windows. We both felt it was creepy. After sharing this affect, we walked along the swaying paths while scrutinizing her community on one of our regular site inspections.

For the first few minutes we both kept looking over our shoulders.

We were enacting this paranoia, performing it for everyone. Not just in our will to catch someone in the act, to witness the regulation circuitry snap and churn out warning letters and repressive desire for repressed desire. Our primary objective was to keep things tidy, beyond the uncoiled garden hoses and un-closed garage doors. Our job was to assert the primacy of determination of position, of order. We played the roles even though, no, because the forces of indeterminacy, movement, chaos, are equally primary. As we look about, stable things parade before us. Edges of bushes are neatly trimmed, and where they aren’t we make a note and vow to take it up with the landscapers. Trees are sufficiently lush, not too bushy, not touching structures or mingling with other

380 elements. Roof tiles are intact, defying gravity through a diffuse temporal technology. Things are stable and decay according to anticipation. Our energy is written in them, but we work to see our selves distinct from them, from each other. We desire position, determination. That people seem paranoid about their neighbors, whose things and habits and yards and homes and families and jobs are dangerously similar, is another expression of this rhythm.

Often I tried to heal my schisms, another type of paranoia, by playing it straight with callers. I tell them how petty the offenses are and how obnoxiously they are pursued. I apologized and began sincerely searching for strategies to assuage the caller’s situation. During these calls, something like a conversation emerges, a double capture.

“You know why you keep sending me all these violation letters.” The reversal snatched up my attention.

“Why?”

“This community is anti-kid. Why else would I continue to get letters about something as stupid as parking backward in my parking space? And, my neighbors do the same thing, and worse.” She explained that the discrepancy in rule enforcement was related to the fact that she had a six-year old son, and for some reason the Board frowned upon that. She might have been right, but she was certainly ringing true by talking about the tendency that application of the rules is an expression of other desires. I sat still in my cushioned swivel chair while I thought about what she said.

381 “The rule of the community,” she said, “is be seen and not heard.”

“Well, there have been a lot of noise complaints in your development. I had to fine a guy for the third time just the other day.”

“Exactly.”

“Living so tightly, the sound waves of our daily rhythms ripple right through solid walls. Our private spaces get carved up like wakes. Then who knows what they do. Can they affect us? Can they make us start thinking about things, wanting things? I know when I sit down at night to read or write, the

TV. noise from next door unsettles me, coupling with lounging fantasies, memories or a desire to stare out the window. It’s like an invasion.”

“That’s a condition of our housing situation, increased density. You learn to live with it. But here, people get upset about the noise of children, like the private space of the family is spilling into plain view and into other private homes. I’m telling you, when I show up to the pool with my son and his friend the pool just clears out.”

“Hmm. I hope you can understand what I’m about to say,” and I paused nervously. “That might seem a little paranoid to some people.”

“Well it’s not paranoid if it’s true. Paranoia is in your head, right? So, if people really are out to get you, then you are not paranoid. But if it were all made up, if he just saw things that way, then he would be paranoid, right?”

“Yes, I think that’s right, in a psychoanalytic approach. A paranoid person sees the world as out to get them, as hateful, angry. But that’s because they are

382 themselves angry and hateful. It is a way to refuse love and positive emotional attachments. In that way it’s a fantasy base for building your own reality.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Yeah, its like Feud says, we block love, attachment. So, loving someone becomes hating someone. But, our super-egos will not allow us to hate unprovoked. That would cause some guilty trauma. So, we fantasize our love and hate into something else. ‘You hate me.’ That way my hate is only a response to the enmity you already bear towards me.”

“But, like I said, it is complicated in this case by the fact that there is something angry or hateful out there. The HOAs aggressive policies give paranoia a rational existence.”

“I agree. I think it is particularly important to deny the distinction between inside and outside which separates paranoia from a well-tested reality.

Fantasy isn’t about false-hoods. We all share the fantasy of being singled-out.

It moves between us and is a real production of desire in many HOA communities. It produces their reality. It finds expression in the coiled up garden hoses, a row of closed garage doors, well-trimmed lawns, and neat rows of trees. It courses though the documents. Its story is told repeatedly in an endless series of phone calls.”

“So, it’s a paranoid community.”

“A paranoia machine.”

383 “And the fear of being singled out might make an individual adhere to the rules, is part of the authority of the Association.”

“Well, perhaps it works through paranoia, not just making it. Or, re- making it in a kind of recursive operation.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the Association can utilize paranoia because it plugs into the points we sometimes unwillingly share with others. Like the sound waves we were talking about earlier. Like the physical proximity of our front doors. Like the way our houses all look the same. Like the way people can watch us doing personal things, like taking care of our children. I think these things already work in paranoid ways. I know when I am in public with my son and he starts howling like I just smacked him in the face I immediately look around out of fear of how people are looking at me. Then I see scowling faces, disapproving stares. Of course he will probably learn to take advantage of this, to get what he wants at the store for example.”

‘Yeah, I know that feeling. This isn’t a condo development, but look at how we are crammed in here. It’s a good thing the walls are insulated and the windows don’t face other units. That way we really don’t hear or see each other.

That would be horrible. Our previous home you could see into other homes and you could smell cooking and hear music.”

384 “Right, it is the sensory contamination that is troubling! Even though these things are paradoxically what community and culture should be all about.

Community, public sensibilities are a kind of sensitivity” (Serres 1997).

“So you’re saying that this paranoia has something to do with our public and private selves?”

“I guess you could say that. But I tend to look at it another way.

Paranoia is a type of fear of disintegration, of loosing parts of our self, of destabilizing our psychic machinery. No matter how hard we try to seal ourselves off from the world, we will always remain a ‘populous solitude’

(Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 377). This natural indeterminacy is perhaps the source of all our creativity. But it is also frightening, and this fear is bolstered and channeled into functions of position and determination that interlace our collective existence. So we hold onto things just as tight as we can. My lot.

Your lot. Our unit. Their unit. His room. Her room. When we are confronted with connectivity, with the fact that what we want, think and do in many circumstances comes to us from somewhere else, we close it off with judgment.

And this formula of judgment, someone judging me, is as much about securing the division between the self and the other. The fear of judgment is a displacement from the primal fear, and somewhat rational too, that the self never existed, or only ever existed coiled in this fear.”

385 “So, in a certain sense all these petty rules, all of this paranoia about difference, this seeming drive toward homogeneity really helps to create individuality.”

“Ha! Good turn! The rules don’t just repress desire, they actually create the desire they supposedly censor. It’s as if we didn’t know we wanted something until someone told us we can’t have it. So, what is this negative desire created in the ruling paranoia?”

“We can feel like individuals because the Association demands that we act homogenous. We can feel the joy of both but don’t have to act out either.”

386 The Parasite Model

Many people see community founded on a model of exchange. People I interviewed resonated on this point with liberal political theorists, economists and social scientists like Claude Levi-Strauss. Community is supposed to be a bounded domain of exchange of words, of gestures, of goods, of services, etc.

Michael Serres finds this idea revolting (1997). Exchange is not our model of communities. Rather, our communities are founded on the model of the parasite. They are domains of asymmetrical relations. Nietzsche, in The

Genealogy of Morals, would agree. For him, human relations are established through debt, not exchange.

A HOA community follows this model, I think. But, it does something

“democratic” to its debt and parasitic relations. People do not usually exercise force over a neighbor, to play out their asymmetrical relations in a direct game of power. They must take it to the Association, the state-form which resides above each unit. All are indebted to the community, embodied by the Association and the centralized abstraction of the Board of Directors. This means that there are no relations of domination between units, ideally anyway. A HOA community is a domain of “reciprocal servitudes” as the legal and professional documents state.

Power diffuses equally between units, making a free play of submissive desires possible

But how is this community debt miraculated into our lives?

387 An Organic Life

On a stream of statements sprayed into my vision, a homeowner accuses a neighbor of parking a Cadillac on the street. He said he talked to his neighbor about it. In my fantasy field, the conversation went something like this.

A body lopes across the rigid concrete segments, affecting a gradual transformation, one slab at a time, from a home-body into a commuting machine. Another body taps into the flow and springs past their distinctly similar threshold into a space of confrontation. He calculates his pace and trajectory to intersect his neighbor in a casual coincidental style. As a point of entry, he says

“hey, nice Caddy.”

“Thanks.”

Desires to speak courageously about how hard it is to back out of the driveway with a car narrowing the street, how the caddy blocks the view of the continuous community aesthetic, how I only drive an old Toyota, swirl about the event. The words come, “You know, you might be careful. The Association’s rules say no parking on the streets. And the woman down the block got a ticket just the other day.”

“Really? Thanks for the tip.”

More order-words; desires mapped officially. But the Caddy owner continues to park on the street. In the letter the homeowner writes, “Although I think towing should be the last resort, this blatant disregard for the HOA rules

388 decreases the quality of life for the rest of us.” Here is the hero of community, willing to sacrifice self and all for the greater good of the collective organism.

The company machines execute a standard thank you letter. Again, I feel like I’m watching things take over my self from the outside; it’s the opposite of an out of body experience, but perhaps feels similar. The simple “thank you for brining this issue to our attention” is a physical manifestation of the expectation of appreciation, a complementary signal. But it really isn’t necessary. On several occasions at Board meetings, when homeowners gave intelligence about community goings-on, gestures of gratitude are replied with gestures of “I’m just doing my part.” Still, the ‘thank you’ formalizes the arrangement, letting the organs know the brain is receiving and processing its impulses.

They are organs within an organism, organelles within a cell. This is partly why there is a tendency, beyond all individuals, to take the rules so seriously. People naturally want to belong, to feel like they are a part of something. Resistance is futile; a whole will be integrated and explained in the fantasy of the assimilated. This is no mere metaphor, not a desire lacking its object. All of these inventions are real. Corporations and HOAs, after all, are legally entitled persons. HOAs are legally entitled as nonprofit mutual benefit corporations according to section 1363(c) of the Davis-Sterling Common Interest

Development Act and for excess again in the Nonprofit Mutual Benefit

Corporations Law found in the California Corporations Code. And, corporations, you may already have been baffled by this one, are granted the rights and

389 powers of an individual; they are persons in the eyes of the law as much as you and I. If you look under the “General Provisions” section of the Corporations

Code and Legal Statutes, you’ll read, “… a corporation, in carrying out its activities, shall have all the powers of a natural person” (my emphasis).

A community is a natural person. But, you’re right, not just any community, only a corporate community, one with a board of directors, one circulating around the standards, legal codes and generalized forms: the chaos of collective life ensnared by community’s strange attraction. The forms and expressions of corporatism give life to a community in a strange moment of miraculation (Massumi 2002). With these abstracted levels becoming a plane of existence, where families, firms, schools, companies, associations, can act, are agents, have natural life, and are our works only natural in the service of the host? What is a healthy organ to do?

Roads enable circulation, pumping energy in the form of human potential in and out of the development. This human potential is absorbed by the community and transformed into work, into hedge trimming, house painting, and street repair. Or, spent bodies are absorbed and re-energized in the complex arrangement of TV, recliners and magic finger couches, booze and bedrooms, sleeping pills at night and Mr. Coffee at the crack of dawn. Digestion and respiration take place in each lot, a cell which sends agents into the world to transform their natural energy into a generalized current which can be transferred to the physical needs of the community, among other things. The

390 gridded paths of letters, phone calls, conversations, stares and glares, miscellaneous encounters, draw connections of thought and desire. This is the nervous system, which most often is focused around the central directing organ of the Board of Directors. There is the unifying stucco membrane. Irrigation lines circulate water to nourish the shared aesthetic. Valves erupt from the soil and ensure the flows don’t murmur. Codes and plans and rules, living everywhere like expressed structures, are filed away in County records’ ontogenetic storehouses. The supra-individual, the transpersonal organism is no mere metaphor.

In becoming organic we realize that “common interest” and “separate interest” are one in the same. Our separate interests are best served by the health of the organism we collectively comprise, diagnoses and prognoses which are spoken in the currency of exchange. Biology pumps a common good. For- profit corporations employ this logic to be sure. The inverse reasoning has fueled much contemporary business mentality which views the happiness of the employee, the health of an organ, as a crucial objective for a successful company-organism.

There are of course those who think the rules are ludicrous. They are the free-radicals, disavowing their organic dependence.

The squealer, the hero of the community, must know at some level it is his own interest being abstracted into a life in common. Perhaps he should have said, “You know, there can be no community if we don’t bend to each others

391 will, if the infinite debt is erased, if there are no longer reciprocal servitudes.”

He might fruitfully quote the Condo Bluebook that says, right up-front on page three, “Use restrictions are an inherent part of any common interest development and are crucial to the stable, planned environment of any shared ownership arrangement. The viability of shared ownership of improved real property rests on the existence of extensive reciprocal servitudes, together with the ability of each co-owner to prevent the property’s partition.” This is the relational terrain for the fuzzy actualization of community sensations.

He continues, “The good of the group, of our ‘little democratic sub-society’

(Condo Bluebook pg. 3), requires that you submit to my desires for you to park your car elsewhere. What do you say?” Fates must be bound together, organs within a supra-organism. Give it a name. Give it a well-landscaped face. Make it function and serve. But above all, give it a price. Assessing equity, property value, makes this body whole in their tangible diagnoses.

One last organic point, I’m not saying that the community is like an organism. I’m saying that the sign systems we use to think about organisms, particularly our own, plug into the way we plan and live our communities.

392 Therapeutic Submission

Through the state form, the state fantasies, the unifying miraculation, submissive desires become a generalized model. The Association becomes a rallying point for this kind of therapeutic submission. Members must submit to each other regarding parking and pets and yard work. That is all they ask. They demand this submission because they are themselves in submission at work and at home and there is no way out. We have all been captured; we are born pre- captured. The operation of the Association’s state-form between, not above, all and each is not just about the common good. It is also a psychic compensation in the currency of the joy of control which is the reward for a life sold out to control (Nietzsche and Kaufmann 1967). Also, it is the energy of community, where we confront it, where we feel it.

393 Coming Soon

Ironically, taking pleasure from ones own submission becomes a way to combat the mechanisms of submission. And, as some of the absurd stories herein demonstrate, applying submission machines with fervor is also a kind of ironic combat. This theme, although rippling through each story in this section, will burst into the foreground shortly.

Sitting in the audience, watching, listening to it all, the conceptual personae of Derrida, Kafka, Zizek, Deleuze and Guattari laugh their heads off at these bad jokes. Derrida takes a sip of his drink and says, “The very enunciation of the law creates its own compulsion to be followed. That is the force of authority.” Zizek coughs, then smiles and says, “If we obey the law because it is just or makes sense, then we are thinking ethically on our own and not obeying the law. The law is necessarily irrational. Power requires a sort of irrational submission where we are conscious of the fact that the Association, the State, is vacuous, but we prefer to go along with it anyway as if it were an almighty entity is our lives. We enjoy it, bind it to ourselves as habit, and thus make it real.”

Kafka laughs heartily, knowing his words underpin these approaches to our modern games. Deleuze and Guattari turn and speak together, “the law is about desire. Its application is like wedging desires against each other, using leverage to bend one desire in the direction of another! We are enamored with the games of power and the law, because perhaps if we can’t exert ourselves over a world of objects we fear we might not exist.”

394 I peep in and whisper my fuzzy ending. The HOA through the Board of

Directors may assume the role of the state and part of the performance is to make it seem like they act upon the community upon each other from above. To be a truly stately Board member, or a good community member, is to exalt ones opinions and actions as what is good for the group. But the performance of authority doesn’t end at the adjournment of a Board meeting. It is a dance, a

“willing investment” of each attached body. Perhaps this is taking a de-centered and ascending analysis too far. Perhaps, but for me the HOA “does not operate in a downward direction like an attribute of transcendent power, but is solicited by the most humble, by the relatives, neighbors and colleagues of a nasty little troublemaker who want to have him” punished. So they use the absolute HOA

“like an immanent public service that can settle disputes between members and neighbors” (Deleuze 1988: 28). This is what I call state desire. In those words crammed together I have Althusser’s interpellation written in reverse. It isn’t the cop on the corner who hails up the individual, but the individual who hails up the cop. We have all been seduced by authority, come to love it out of habit. We have all turned informer for a fix of belonging that dissipates too soon into the past. Too many of us rely on a state-form to alleviate the tension between competing desires, to wage clean wars, to finally fit in, and we never encounter a soul. As for me, I say let’s have more combat.

395 Racist Submission Games

“Another fine,” the words danced before me and within me as I ripped the fax out of my in-box . “That’s the third one in three months for that person.” I checked to see who the fax was from. “Yep, Janice again.” All of her previous letters were drenched in drama, this one was no different. The music was so loud this time that her knick-knacks danced and drifted off the edges of her counters. She couldn’t hear herself think. This is what she told me. She stomped on the floor to indicate to her downstairs neighbor that his music was too loud. The beats kept pulsing through her. She began jumping up and down on the floor. Eventually he turned the music volume down. Then he turned it back up. Then lower. Next higher. She accused him of knowing that she brings

Board members over to her condo to document the excessive noise, establishing the pounding sound as a clear violation of her right to peaceful enjoyment of her unit. “He turns the volume up and down to avoid being caught.”

Shortly after I picked up the fax I got a call from a Board member from that community. “Has Janice faxed you yet?” she said, after a nominal introduction.

“Yes.”

“Good. Well I was over at Janice’s place last night to watch a movie …” and she paused.

I thought she wanted me to fill in the details so she would be spared having to tell the story, so I obliged. After all, obliging was my wage bound

396 duty. I said, “I know. Janice’s letter said that her neighbor’s music was so loud that you couldn’t hear the movie.”

“Right.”

“So, you’re calling to verify and so I should process another fine.”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything else I can do to help?”

“Yes, actually. This guy is such a problem, I mean, so rude. The music was deafening. You wouldn’t believe. Anyway, I think since we’ve documented case after case, that from now on whenever Janice calls or writes you, you should no longer need to get corroboration from a Board member. Just go ahead and send a letter.”

“Are you sure we can do that?”

“Why not?”

“Well, shouldn’t the Board make those kinds of decisions collectively?”

But what I was really thinking was that it seemed totally absurd to give these two offense junkies an even easier way to deploy the Association for their submission game.

“We’ve all dealt with this situation many times in the past. All of us are tired of being called into the situation. So, just send out violations and fines whenever Janice tells you her neighbor has been a problem.” Then to let me know the conversation was over she added “o.k.” in a quick puff of air and told

397 me she had to get going. I wrote a note for myself to tactfully talk to the other

Board members to see if they would like a say in this issue.

The noisy neighbor called a few days later. After watching three violation letters and three fine letters drop from my hand into the outgoing mail box, I expected a reaction, some sort of confrontation, at least a conversation. When he called he was calm and reasonable, and quite smart regarding his approach.

He used both routes of resistance that had become visible during my time as a property manager. That is, he appealed to higher principles and he delved into the details.

Early in the conversation he said, “This is harassment.” There it was, an appeal to higher principles wrapped up in ten letters and a forceful context. It is a word lashed to a whole extra-community legal apparatus. And, it is one of the few laws that can supercede an Association as its violation machinery is called down upon a particular residence. What I mean is that an Association can be sued for harassment, but little else. Many law suits have tried to unclench an

Association’s grasp upon freedom of expression, for example, but have all been overruled in favor the Association’s right to aesthetic continuity and plan for property profit. If ironic resistance is one mode of negotiating the HOA machines, then this appeal to higher principles is another. Ask me for an effective third, and I’ll tell you to turn to the sections on combat.

“My music isn’t loud for one thing. I can’t believe what they think is too loud. Every time I turn it on, no matter how low I try to turn the volume, she

398 bangs on the ceiling. I really have tried to accommodate her. I moved my stereo to another room, turned the speakers another direction and only play it at low volumes now. But I keep getting notices.”

“Have you tried to talk to her,” I wondered more as a researcher than a manager trying to issue good advice.

“I tried to talk to her a few times, but she won’t even open the door to talk to me, won’t return my messages. The cops even showed up once, early on. And when they got here to tell me to turn down the music they couldn’t because it wasn’t loud at all. But not the Association. All she does is complain about my low music, and the notices start flowing.”

“It sounds like a difficult situation,” I said with a compassionate tone despite my totally useless and vague words.

“Yes, well, I think she really has something against me. Her and that

Board member who lets her get away with it.”

“Why do you think it is personal?”

“A while ago that Board member asked me to turn in one of my neighbors for some stupid violation. I can’t remember what it was, but I refused.”

“So you think she is upset enough about that to cause you all this torment?”

“Well, not really. To be honest I think it’s racially motivated.”

“Really.”

399 “Yes, I have a well paying job; I’m a young black man driving a nice car.

I just think my appearance marks me as already non-compliant. And the music I play, it’s not that it’s loud. It’s that she thinks she has the right to not have to hear it. Just the sound of my music must offend her.”

As John Hartigan writes, “race is a relentlessly local matter.” This means we should “pay attention to the local settings in which racial identities are actually articulated, reproduced, and contested.” From my perspective, this means race is deployed in the points of contact between affective bodies and their desires. Race is at work in the play of submission games. In fact, that is a nice way to sum up much of my thinking on race. One concept I have bound close to my heart is when Foucault talks about the various aspects of mechanisms of power in his article Subject and Power. There he mentions systems of differentiation. What is implied there, and I have taken quite seriously, is that such systems which group bodies into disparate populations are not only already acts of power, but are early stages in a whole cascade of technologies designed to shape the thoughts, desires and actions of all the groups involved. So, it is easy to see how racial thinking gets picked up in people’s daily lives, as we try to establish our own positions through our ability to act upon others and ourselves. We use race in our submission games. This is why so many of the stories I have heard seem to navigate through a nebula of racial meanings without ever connecting directly to the signs of race.

400 Another thing to think about is racially encoded soundscapes. Some sounds can stir affect in a white neighbor, perhaps because the vibrations are cacophonous with the modes of subjectivation normal Americans are constituted within and are comfy with. And the sound can be inescapable, a reminder of the un-tethered nature of our selves. So, submission to the “noise” can be met with expressions of compensatory superiority. Then the signs of race get taken up in the authoritative power games.

Later in the conversation Bill said, “Now I feel I have to resort to similar petty behavior to combat the neighbor’s persistent complaining. I’ve decided to write a letter complaining about the neighbor and the Board member and send it to the Board. Anything she does now that might be a violation, you can expect a letter from me. I don’t care how petty it is.” This is the second route of resistance, mentioned earlier, which I will only mention here and return to in detail in another section.

The week after Bill’s phone call the Board member in the story above called my office. She had some more violations for me to send out, a list of about six, a typical weekly amount, and wanted a report on my recent actions.

It was a perfect opportunity to talk to her about Bill’s call.

Her response was to ask, “Is he complaining because he is black?” I thought this was a telling way to phrase the question. The cause of the complaint is rooted in the essence of blackness itself. I’ve heard many comments like this one in my regular travels through exclusively white

401 gatherings. It is usually phrased more subtly, but I think people are looking for a way to dismiss someone’s issues before considering their validity. In other words, there is no validity to racism, but only because people actively choose not to see it. I withdrew into my thoughts, as defense, in shock, and the Board member continued to roll over me. “We have mostly nice black people in our community. But, he is one of those who think that because he’s that color he deserves special treatment.”

Any comment that tries to point out injustice or discrimination is labeled as “p.c.” and brushed aside as irrational and annoying. “I am not a racist.” “We are not racists.” So anyone who feels that race is an issue must be too sensitive or too focused on that issue to objectively interpret the circumstances. To me this seems like an efficient collective psychological machinery which allows us to avoid critically examining our own actions and thoughts. I think when we do confront these kinds of racial desires, we will find that we don’t have control over them like we may want to. The signs of race have power over us. We do not have the ability to read them as we want. In this way, race is a relentlessly transpersonal matter. This is particularly frustrating for anti-racists such as myself. So, perhaps it is easier for many of us to block any situation where we may be forced to confront our own racial desires in such a dismissive way.

402 Dealing with Drainage

It’s raining outside. Rain in Northern California isn’t like central Texas rain. In the “hill country” the slapping splatter of Texas sized rain drops cracks over the sonar horizon, covers the world in wetness and moves on. In northern

California rain lingers. I couldn’t even remember how long this storm had been working deep wrinkles into my clothes, spilling on me during my trips between car seat to desk chair. I almost never carry an umbrella. I almost always loose my thoughts in the slanting patterns of wind and water. Usually it felt like a meditation. But now the rain comforted and unsettled together.

I knew, because others knew and chattered their fearful vibes, that if the rain persisted any longer chaos and the desire to master it would erupt throughout the office. Really, it had already begun. A small mud-slide knocked down a backyard fence. Water was “ponding” in several of the communities’ common areas. At the Associations where roof repair was labored into a regular procedure, leaks did not spring. But they did elsewhere. Depending on where they sprung, in which part of which building of which community, we either fixed them or told residents to do it themselves. Decisions and directions were fixed long before any context.

I didn’t really spend much time reflecting on drainage, it really seemed so boring. But it is in fact a serious issue for every planned community. Actually, it is a serious issue for any residential arrangement that depends on fixity.

Actually, again, it is a serious issue for any dissipative structure, any open

403 system which lives on the flows of matter and energy. Even, perhaps especially, an open system dreaming of closure and the miraculation of thingness. Then, it is those very flowing sites, the rhythms of matter and energy, which become the substance and expression of anti-flow, steps in a dance of wholification (Taussig

1997).

Water has been showered upon our planet Earth by passing comets since gas became sediment and has continually reshaped the earth for as long as it has been solid. For modern man, with a sedentary soul and a world full of recalcitrant objects poised to test him, this flow is dangerous. It will unsettle prime hillside property. The earth will flood. Property is carried away. It’s a dance which can propel rooted bodies out of their productive rhythms. It will dig potholes into streets. It will suffocate beds of flowers. It will flow right between the usual safe meshing of rubber and road.

Water must be tamed. Bridges over relentless bodies of water and culverts under unyielding roads give testimony to this. Perhaps they are expressions of self-control, the desire to be in control of our own mostly moist physicality. Our routes take primacy. Every time I drive over an almost imperceptible culvert modernity asserts its agenda over the simple whims of some self-organizing network of water and life. It’s like a battle of conversion or connection between two disparate systems mashing together in space and time.

Gutters, drain pipes, washes, storm drains, watersheds assign water a more civilized organization.

404 We flow along with it. There is no clear division here between a natural system of water flows and a cultural system of human flows. They overlap, connect, interact and shape each other. They are ultimately part of one machine. Controlling water isn’t only crucial in terms of controlling erosion, controlling time. Water is also a fundamental aspect of life. Our modes of cosmopolitan living demand heroic feats of hydro-engineering. That water runs from our faucets with the simple turn of the knob is not just a privilege of the first world, not just a symbol of the power of planning. It is one more moment whereby the world is turned into a collage of stable things inhabitable by our knob turning and lever pulling selves.

Water flows in paths which are its own but also beyond: gravity, contours of the earth, nature of sediment and rock, the meddle of human beings. It dances to the universal rhythms of determination and indetermination. This is true at all of its levels, whether that be in a creek whose bed changes with each rain, a river which snakes and undulates in patterns that repeat but always bear a momentous difference or singularity. A damned lake, over-determined forever, will crack, leak, recede, over flow, and it will take forever’s worth of man-hours to retrospectively order and even pre-capture its movement. Channels and pipes, the pinnacle of water’s tamed existence, will spring leaks. With water, as with all matter and energy, there will always be the eruption of an active indetermination.

405 The phones rang madly that rainy afternoon, singing a ballad to the force of water. Mine buzzed with a sort of damp tone to it. If it wasn’t Rick calling this time, it would be him soon. If I lived in the office and all the windows were boarded up, I would still know every time it rained by Rick’s call. “Matt,” Rick would say like he was talking to a friend who irritated him beyond measure.

“Matt, I’m telling you the water is seeping in through my sliding glass door.”

“Again?”

“Yes, it’s going to be another disaster.”

“That’s terrible. But you know there is nothing I …”

“Please Matt, there’s got to be something you can do. I can’t just sit here bailing away in my living room, shelling out money for repairs every time it rains.”

“What can I do Rick? I talked to Ralph…”

“Ralph wont do shit and you know it!”

“Exactly, but neither will anyone on the Board. They all agree that each homeowner should take care of the V-ditch themselves.”

“That’s a load of crap too Matt and you know it. You know as well as I do that they are out to get me. This is about revenge. They want to punish me.”

As he said this, I knew he was right.

Before I get too far along describing why the Board really did have it out for Rick, I should fill in a few of the details. Rick lived in a town home complex in San Jose. Like many condos of the 50s and 60s, it was built with a V-ditch

406 system for water drainage. A V-ditch is basically a concrete dent in the ground that runs between yards and empties on the street at the bottom of a slight slope. This way water just runs with gravity down yards into the ditches and under fences into the city’s drainage system. The system works fine, until one of the downhill neighbors packs their yard with junk like old workout benches and yard waste, or lets it grow over with weedy sediment. In that case, the water just backs up.

Rick lived downhill, near the city street where all the water ran, but between him and the street lived someone who he referred to as a “fucking dirtball” and a “disgusting slob who won’t take care of his own yard.”

At least twice that I know of the water backed up just on his side of the fence, filled his backyard and worked its murk into his carpets and furniture. He called and demanded the Association take control of the situation. Basically, he demanded that his neighbor clean up the v-ditch, or that someone do it for him.

In one of the earliest replies the Board directed me to write that “V-ditches are the responsibility of each homeowner and clean up efforts should be coordinated between neighbors.” This seemed odd at the time since V-ditches were clearly common concern. The letter also confused Rick. He called at what by my calculations must have been right when he got the letter. “Are you asleep at the wheel or something man? I told you people that I already tried to contact my neighbor. I’m still trying. I write notes. I’ve left my number. I chased him

407 down in the parking lot once. He said he’d take care of it. But nothing. Now he’s totally avoiding me.”

I re-submitted his request thinking that this new information would change the Board’s response. It didn’t. They told me to just send another letter saying the same thing. Things were getting really weird. After all, damage was being done to one of their units, a homeowner was in distress, and they sat on their hands. It took asking around a bit to find out what was really going on. I came to find out, as Rick suggested, that this whole situation had little to do with enforcing the general rules of the Association and more to do with “bad blood” between Rick and the Board.

Rick was on the Board for a while until he dropped out of contact. “Well, that’s one way to put it,” my supervisor and self-chosen mentor said. “Out of nowhere, for no reason it seems, he simply stopped showing up to meetings and didn’t tell anyone what was going on. A couple of times the Board could not make quorum to even have a meeting. That really pissed people off.” A few of the Board members I talked to were upset about this as well. I didn’t ask them directly, mind you. But you could see their whole comportment shift when I brought up his name. When I brought up one of his complaints before a meeting a board member just muttered, “Rick, huh. What a whimpering fool,” and divorced himself from the topic.

“Why? What happened?”

408 “Not only did he drop off the Board at a critical time, right in the middle of a major project that stalled thanks to his not showing up ever, but he has the nerve to complain about all sorts of stuff afterwards. The landscaping, the painting, the parking, you name it and he has called up here to say something about it. I’ve talked to him more in the last few months than I ever did while he was serving on the Board. Not to mention, the jerk is in arrears! He owes us about twenty-five hundred dollars. We set him up on a payment plan and treated him as gentle as we could. Then, he went ahead and wrote a letter to the Better Business Bureau about both the association and the management company. I’m telling you, this guy is a piece of work.”

“Wow! I had no idea there was that much dirt on this guy!”

“Yeah! There’s probably even more I’m forgetting right now. So, what’s he calling about now, that damn V-ditch again?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, screw him! He’s having a problem with the V-ditch, let him figure it out. The Board is through helping him …”

“And so are we,” the senior manager threw over my shoulder as she stepped into the room on cue. Indeed the Law is about desire, I thought, I'm now thinking, and in this case is a desire for revenge. The Board and my senior manager wanted to extract pain from Rick as a payment for a past injury to selves and the community. It is partially through this pain that the community is lived, made tangible through its embodiment. Rick owed a debt to the

409 community, a double debt for both simply being a member and for letting down the whole community. And like many debts, the interest was designed to establish a perpetual incremental advance.

So, Rick suffered. That was the point. His suffering balanced the debt he owed to the community, to the Board who suffered under his devices. I was shocked to hear the senior manager talk like this. Her manner had always been so professional, so disinterested. Right beside the path of righteous collective best interest was the winding rhythms of more passionate matters. It seemed like she exposed HOA rules for what they were, tools for personal vendettas.

This was not a new theory. I had heard and read it many times while on the job. Some even accused me of such dealings. “How dare s/he,” I thought to myself each time, with more intensity the more reasonable I felt the statement to be.

Still, somehow I think this concept of revenge only shines upon a shimmering curtain, letting much of the play go on under the cover of distraction. That is, if the impurities of the law are based upon irrational motives for revenge, then the law can be just; it can be enforced in a good way. People complained that “the rules are not being enforced fairly.” Others who I talked to about their and their family members’ associations said often that “the problem isn’t the association, it’s who’s on the board that really matters.” They hope for a miraculous soul who can speak from all places at once, can desire through others rather than their self, and can administer tough love.

410 These kinds of statements were embedded in the expectations that the law can actually be disinterested, that there is a domain of pure justice beyond the tangle of humanity. The issue of revenge at the same time reveals and conceals that legalisms are about desire.

From my perspective, one borrowed from Foucault, legalisms pulse with intentions that flow beyond the subjective. The application of the law is personal, can be about revenge, but is transpersonal at the same time. It is also about an un-owned desire which traverses us all and fuels a thirst for the suffering of others (Nietzsche and Kaufmann 1967).

The association knows that coordination between units is difficult, that it ultimately runs counter to the modes of sociality encouraged by the Association itself. In his dealings, Rick could not get his neighbor to do what he wanted. He couldn’t govern him. That had a great deal to do with being locked into a governor/governed mentality. Such neighborly governing takes tact, tactics. But this, it seems, is a lost art. It’s just easier to write an anonymous letter.

This story isn’t over yet. Rick, abandoned by the Association, feeling beneath the whole community, is compelled to take matters into his own hands.

One day after it stopped raining, but before a huge storm that was sure to force him to swim to the kitchen to get a snack, he jumps the fence and digs out the ditch himself. My midsection twisted when I heard the story, feeling the affective sparks thrown out as desire grinds across segments. During his mad

411 digging Rick tears up some newly planted sod and re-arranged some of his neighbor’s “junk.”

The neighbor obviously noticed his re-landscaped yard and knows exactly what happened. So while Rick is sitting smugly on his seemingly safe sofa, the neighbor is stewing. He calls me. I can believe his story, but don’t want to. I listen attentively, but there is nothing I can do. Such violations are not a HOA issue. He expressed a desire to keep the cops out of it, and that made me more nervous than anything.

Both in canals engineered for the pre-capture of water flows and in canals engineered for the direction of human energy, things go awry. The more rigid the controlling segments, the more intense the escape will be. When human interaction is funneled or gridded through “official channels” there will inevitably blockages and bottlenecks. They emerge out of nowhere, somewhere between the actions of each semi-autonomous unit. Like a traffic jam that emerges from a slight tap on the brake pad. Then, the arrangement swells with chaotic desires, to get out of here, to slam down the accelerator, to drive on the shoulder or the center island, to honk, to scream, to do something. Order, by its nature sends things spiraling off in crazy directions. Tracking it looks like a photo of an atom-smasher.

When Rick calls back again the intensity of his story almost sends me out of my chair. “You know what he did?” he said like tears were on his tongue.

“Do you know what that bastard did?”

412 “Who did?”

“My neighbor.”

“No, I have no idea what he did.”

“He put a bunch of bricks and grass and mud in the V-ditch right on his side of the fence. The flooding is horrible.” My mandible swung in shock. It was raining right now harder than it had been all year. Rick was drowning in desperation as much as dirty water. And now we, the Board and us managers, were expected to direct the drainage, the drainage of affect as well as water.

We did neither.

This was war. It was a guerrilla war, waged beyond the usual channels of civilized repressed aggression. Affect spilled over the grooves of the state form, creeping beyond the proscribed routes, erupting wildly and subsiding. From a certain perspective the whole set up of the association, the state, is an arrangement to pre-capture these affects, just like the washes and gutters are set up to corral the streaming hydrogen and oxygen molecules. But every moment of determination carries with it the eruption of indetermination. Every desire to order comes from a pang of chaos and leaves chaos in its wake. This is why managerial assemblages will always work and never work. Bureaucracy will always work because it will never work. In this it can’t help being absurd. Kafka was a genius.

413 State/Paranoia

If some of the communities I have described seem jumpy with paranoia that is for many reasons. One I want to draw attention to in this short section is how the state form necessarily operates, at least in part, through paranoia.

I get nervous when the cops are near. Even when I am driving conservatively, the police car which suddenly appears in my rear view mirror sends me into a panic. I panic because I know that getting a ticket is as much an incantation of stately presence as it is a reproving measure. And I panic because

I fear my normalcy might be sacrificed in this ritual process. As they draw near they resonate intensely and give rise to the figure of the State in me. There is naturally a need to police the flows, of traffic, of mobile desire, to codify, to inscribe, to record, and ensure that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated. Being a good organ, I understand this. It is why being frightened by the police makes me feel so secure.

So, State desire is intimate with paranoia, not only because it enacts a watching, a singling out. But also because it is about fixity, position and identity.

It is this impossible yet stately desire for a stable self that is ultimately the fuel for paranoid fantasies.

414 Combat

“The words of Lawrence, Nietzsche and Heraclitus offer this precept: everything good is the result of combat.” Gilles Deleuze, To Have Done With Judgment, 133

Many of the stories are focused around conflict between various entities: a homeowner and the HOA, a homeowner and another homeowner, biodiversity and landscaping are just a few examples. So a question becomes: what is so interesting and important about combat? What does the above quote mean by suggesting that everything good comes from combat? To me it means that combat opens a field of strategy, opens a body to outside forces, to encounters, to thought. At the same time, conflict is highly organized, especially in a HOA.

HOAs are charged with maintaining a conflict free community. What this means is that the affects which stream out of particular events and bodies are precaptured, are funneled in advance by a whole bureaucratic technology back into certain machines where they can be rendered productive or fizzle with fatigue.

My first notion is to write about conflict as an intersection of desires.

Desire, remember my intersubjective position, is all collective and based in collectively circulating desiring machines. Looking at conflict is looking at the intersection of desiring machines where the transfer or coding of flows and components doesn’t go smoothly. The points at which we overlap not only highlight the way bodies are distributed around certain desiring machines. It is also both an affective and reflective time in a person’s routine, perhaps even sliding out of the routine. Conflict can make visible to anyone participating the

415 principles and models for acting “in” the world when the world does not simply roll over to our desires. These are the points where strategizing opens up, when agency is called upon. “The most intense part of our lives, the one where their energy is concentrated, is precisely where they clash with power, struggle with it, endeavor to utilize its forces or escape its traps” (Deleuze 1988: 94).

416 Neighborhood War Machine

Here is a story I know you will find interesting. I certainly found it interesting when it was told to me in stages by a couple of residents of a condo community, a Board member and the security patrolman. This is a story of how war erupts when desirous concatenations to controlling machines intensify.

Desire is leveraged against desire, mistaken as the self-contained territories of particular subjects or others to wage war against instead of waging war within and between.

One resident was running a day care out of her home. A neighbor felt that the common area near her residence was being “trampled” by the day care kids. To be honest, the common area was trampled, but as much by time and lack of attention as much as by little feet. There was a sloped area between the buildings which was covered with creeping ivy and a few privet trees. “Trample the ivy,” I thought to myself when she called, “good. Get rid of the stuff.” But there was something else happening here. The anger in the caller’s voice could’ve, I suppose, been because of the intense attachment he felt to the creeping ivy. However, it is more likely that some other desire was finding covert expression through the laws of the community. This, I came to discover, was very common. In fact, I think the desire to enact control over a neighbor’s desire is basically the essence of the law in HOA communities. Like Deleuze and

Guattari say, attributing the insight to Kafka, the law is desire. This caller’s concealed desire expressed itself in a sense of righteous wielding of the

417 community’s CC&Rs. The CC&Rs do explicitly state that residences cannot be used for business purposes, but who would really object to having the joyful energy of children around?

So, when the caller complained to the management company to report an offense, the caller’s desire basically triggered a whole series of clicks and whirs in the ruthless submission machine. The management company sent a violation.

That is standard procedure. The letters said that it was against the community’s

CC&Rs to conduct a business out of the home and that any damage done to the common area must be repaid to the Association. Then they sent a second and third violation letter. The latter letter actually made explicit the financially threatening nature of the HOA’s power. Legally binding financial terror was deployed to sway the resident from her chosen laboring life.

There are some interesting questions in the early part of this story about, well, late capitalism. One of the tricks capitalism pulled was to bring work out of the home, to make the home the realm of reproduction instead of production. I mean, at one point all sorts of craft production, clothing production, etc. found a place in the home. Marx and Engels termed this petty commodity production

(Brennan 2000: 145). Typically married women could convert their life energy into other necessary items. But, capitalism b(r)ought this production out of the home, thereby relegating women’s energy to the task of reproduction: reproducing the labor force both in the sense of birthing new laborers and expending energy to revitalize the masculine energy she became dependent

418 upon. So, the enforcement of the no businesses ran from home clause that finds its way into almost all CC&Rs fits right into this trend of stripping the household of any remnants of autonomous production. Of course the CC&Rs say nothing about the business of housework. That is a socially encouraged institution.

Perhaps the HOA is worried about shady businesses without licenses.

Perhaps they are worried about someone rebuilding engines in their driveway.

Perhaps they don’t want anyone doing telemarketing or internet conferencing from a home office. Wait, they don’t care about that last thing. In fact, a couple of Board Presidents I talked to ran business out of their home office, using accelerated connectivity to bust through the space barrier. The CC&Rs say “no businesses”, but the legalisms which circulate in American neural pathways rest on a valorization of intellectual as opposed to physical labor. As I type that I realize how fragile the distinction is. After all, punching computer keys and turning a wrench are both forms of human kinetic energy. But the binary is active in our class imagination. Intellectual labor is middle-class and is therefore good.

In any case, the HOA had no legal basis to shut down the day care.

Interestingly, Health and Safety Code Provision 1597.40 (b) makes it clear that a

HOA can not prohibit a family day care home from operating in a residential development. As long as the resident had the proper licenses, there is nothing they could do about it. This legislation, it seems, follows from a severe crisis in

419 day care. There are of course some interesting connections here between home, day care and women’s work.

When the day care resident received her letters, rage bubbled up. I’d like to think she was pissed off for all the reasons I was pissed off about the letters, even though I sent them anyway. She could have simply pointed out the federal code, drawing upon a mightier weapon than simple CC&Rs, and told the HOA to shove it. This would have been the rational thing to do, to research the legal basis for the HOA’s prohibitions, to defend herself within proscribed routes. Her enflamed desire, however, took a much less official line of flight. It is here where this story of conflict differs from other mediated and controlled conflicts that result in hearings, “Alternative Dispute Resolution” or other formal dispute resolution procedures.

The day care resident halted her “offensive” conduct. Her desire was captured. I think, however, that many of us react with more intense affect when our desire to simply live how we want is blocked. Like a wolf in a trap, we might even chew our leg off. The reaction of the former day care practitioner was to seek revenge, extracting pleasure to compensate for her own loss. She would get revenge, if not against the HOA then against the homeowner who turned her in. Somehow she found out who the informer was, or she thought she found out, and then went in search of ways to turn the machine back upon its previous wielder. Or, just someone else would do. To get over on someone, anyone, would be enjoyable. Perhaps that is why she was convinced she found the tattle

420 tale. Really, if they took a second to think about it, they were both being wielded by this non-subjective machine that was infusing fantasies of domination into the minds of them all. Both parties eventually made the mistake of directing fury towards a discrete body as the representative of fascist desires.

Attempting to turn the tables, I got a call from the former day care practitioner that one of her neighbors was using their open car port space to work on automobiles. She accused her neighbor of running an unlicensed auto shop out of the car port. This unconfirmed rumor was circulating prior to her call. The security patrolman, an off-duty San Jose Policeman, said he checked it out frequently but the cars were always gone before he could get there. They knew his schedule, he hinted. They saw him coming, he suggested. There was really no evidence that the resident was repairing cars or running a chop-shop out of the car-port, but that didn’t stop the Board from sending a violation letter anyway. Despite the letter and a warning from the security patrol, they continued to repair cars there. They simply avoided the regular patrol by working certain well timed blocks without power tools and the like. The former day care resident continued to call, issuing several complaints about the cars.

Since they had already been fined and were now successfully working a clandestine operation (although how this was possible is a bit shaky) from their garage, there was little the HOA and management company could do.

The seeming inequity must have infuriated the caller. She began to complain profusely. But, the HOA had no recourse and no longer took her

421 seriously. So, she decided to take matters into her own hands and operating outside the codes and procedures laid down by the HOA and its governing documents. With the grace of a subtle suburban terrorist she began to park cars in almost legitimate yet strategic fashion to block the cars being worked on into the parking spaces.

She would, for example, park a huge beige Cadillac, which it seemed she borrowed from someone else, in the unassigned parking spot just next to the pirate mechanic’s parking space. By leaving some space in the front of the spot and turning the behemoth in a slight angle she could block the driveway with the caddy’s rear panel. It didn’t totally block the repaired cars into the parking space, but it did make getting in and out a real burden. A fence came up quick to the rear of cars exiting the car port and a well timed turn was required to navigate the exit. I’d bet that the mechanic could have cared less about hitting the Caddy if it did not mean scraping their own vehicle in which so much energy had just been invested.

The conflict had already moved past the realm of HOA procedure, but it intensified even further. A couple of times, the former day care practitioner called to report that her car windows had been smashed in. Nothing was stolen.

The Security patrol told me about a rash of vandalism that began to occur, but one homeowner was the favorite target. Soon after the window breaking, she also called to report that the wheels had been removed from her car. She woke up one morning and strolled out to the car to take her kid to the park. In her

422 parking spot she discovered her Honda with all four inner wheels resting on four large cinder blocks.

The HOA seems to foster this type of frustration as much as it works to capture it. By being the hierarchical entity, the state form, the HOA becomes the official outlet for complaints. This does two things. It makes it easier for some individuals to voice their complaints. Some of which are handled easily and the homeowner leaves a satisfied customer. This drive through anti-neighbor sentiment seems to habituate this single focus for conflict. But just like any other state form, it is impossible for the HOA to manage the entire flow of communal outrage. Some situations simply slip through the cracks. So, other times it is simply beyond the HOAs power to resolve the situation. (As when a homeowner doesn’t understand that the fines will be attached to the property making them part of the re-sale agreement, or that a HOA can foreclose on a property for unpaid HOA dues and fines). This leaves the homeowner faced with an unruly neighbor to now face the unsavory choice of doing something against

HOA codes and procedures (thereby risking sanction or defacement) or forgetting the matter altogether. Being faced with this decision between illegality and capitulation I believe heightens the intensity of the conflict.

I heard similar stories many times. Stories about chopping tree limbs down and throwing them back over the fence. One story comes to mind in particular. The community was one of the newer ones I encountered; it was only a year old, plus or minus a month. As such, the improvement of back yards

423 was an issue. The community rules stated that a homeowner had six months to landscape their backyard, after receiving approval for their plans from the

Architectural Control Committee of course. When every unit in the community had been sold for about seven months, the issue percolated into the consciousness of the Board of Directors. As they stood in their community park,

I saw Board members actually brake from a huddle with a silent cheer and scatter to peer over their neighbor’s fences. They were hoping to discern which lots were not landscaped and which were landscaped without approval. Both offenses were met with a system of letters and threats. One of the recipients of these letters did not clearly understand the regulation. They couldn’t quite fathom why the Board would make it their business to direct the way their backyard would look. They simply ignored the three letters. They ignored them until the hearing notice came and eventually fines began accruing to their association account. A letter came for the Board shortly thereafter. It starkly read that the backyard had been “improved” as requested.

This was not good enough for the Board. Approval by the Board’s committee was required. I remember them discussing lenience and tolerance for someone who clearly didn’t understand the intricacies of the system they had recently inhabited. How could anyone, really, when the community was so young? The answer is surely related to the fact that this community was only different in slight degree from about a hundred others. This form of community was already an institution, a multi-sited abstract institution with many concrete

424 moments. So, yes, any credit card wielding, seeker of instant gratification, champion of commodified expression, any American would know how to behave in the face of a righteous community based authority. However, this resident was an outsider. The poor grammar in the letter was a clue. How could a family afford such a pricey Bay Area accommodation and write so poorly unless they were foreigners? This was a point of interest in one Board meeting, despite the fact that the Board President, who lived next door, already complained about not being able to talk to his “Chinese” neighbors.

A few days after reading the letter, the Board President peeked over his back yard fence to see what improvements his Chinese neighbor had really done.

He was shocked to see their common fence lined with ivy. There were other improvements, but he could not see past the ivy. It must have been there for some time, since it had grown enough to almost creep over the top. If you know anything about ivy, you know that it knows no sides. It will creep right through even the strongest fence, punch through slats, cover both sides and destabilize the posts. This is why the architectural control committee was conducting a war against this species. The Board President went right over and pounded on the front door. He used his Board position to leverage his anti-ivy desire. He aggressively told the neighbor that he had to remove it. The neighbor responded that it was his yard and he could do what he wanted to it. Why he said this, I don’t know. He should have known after the first set of letters and fines that the yard was not his to do with as he wished. Still, it took another set

425 of letters and another fine before the neighbor took action. Or, perhaps he was just waiting for a strategic moment to remove the ivy. One weekend when the

Board President was having a swim party for his son and family friends, the ivy onslaught began. Weed whackers, electric bush trimmers, spinning, grinding, hacking and slashing caused such a ruckus that it disrupted the party. Some ivy cuttings even found their way into the pool, the Board President told me. The worst part, however, was when the neighbor threw the trimmings onto his bar-b- que grill and lit them on fire. The thick and particularly pungent smoke from the torched ivy, coupled with the still air of a particularly hot south bay afternoon, sent the pool party reeling into the house for cover.

426 Farcical Control and Ironic Resistance

For all of us, our lives are latticed together with many different regimes of coded conduct. At home, at school, at work, with our friends, our lives are infused with the games of power. Homeowners’ Associations often exaggerate this to the point that it becomes a farce. Not just from my interpretive perspective, but for those living in the communities. Jokes about the clip-board carrying old man who has nothing better to do all day but write violations that somehow give him a sense of purpose abound. People laugh at me when I tell them that the violation letter for their uncoiled garden hose is a serious matter.

Many of my interviews produce deep belly laughs from people as they describe the way their community posts speed limits of 24.5 miles per hour and encourages people to monitor each other’s speed, “like we should take turns on the corner with a speed gun and mirrored sun glasses.” Yes, for many of us the

HOA is a farce. Think back about the many stories in this dissertation and you’ll be faced with it.

In this way I think the community becomes a castle, a castle like Franz

Kafka’s novel The Castle. Not only in the sense that the community is like

Kafka’s castle, but that it is like the novel as well. The arrangements which emerge between neighbors and the Association can be so absurd that they become a kind of criticism. We learn to laugh about the absurd system of torment we hear in stories about neighbors. And when we become the targeted protagonist, we sort of snort a weeping laugh.

427 We are all trapped in such a multiplicity of contraptions. At least in a HOA community the trap is so over the top that it is easier to recognize, feel, criticize and then be forced to devise tactics to get through the tedium. The Association is made over the top by a zealously transpersonal desire that takes the rules far too seriously. They are taken too seriously because many of us recognize that we can take up the machinery of the HOA and wield it, and play a little comedy of authority to compensate for a day overfull with submission.

In the fervor to see the rules enforced to their fullest exists the threshold where the law actually becomes absurd, where it is recognized as doused and stained in desire, where its force begins to dissipate. This is ironic resistance!

There is another related type of ironic resistance in Association living. It is a type of response to violations and accusations that glides right through the whole submission machine of the HOA. Here is an example.

One day I received a violation response letter directed to the Board, care of me. I didn’t even read the thing. I felt under the weight of multiple tasks so I just processed a standard response letter which thanked the homeowner for the reply and that the issue will be discussed at the next regularly scheduled Board meeting. I didn’t even read the letter when I put together the Board Packet which gets mailed to every Board member exactly one week before the meeting.

I wasn’t until the meeting, during the homeowners’ concerns section that I came to appreciate the letter. One of the Board members had read it in advance of

428 the meeting and during the homeowners’ concerns section demanded that the letter be read aloud. I followed along in the packet as he read:

Dear Board of Directors of the Sunny Meadow HOA: Thank you for your letter in which you point out the parking violation. I immediately talked to my son, who also read your letter, and he assured me that the situation has been remedied. I have reminded my son of the Association’s rules and regulations and that his privilege to live here is contingent upon his abiding by them. I have patrolled the property several times in the past few days to ensure that his car, and friend’s cars, have been parking according to the rules and regulations. I ensure you that I will continue to monitor the situation personally and encourage the security company to do likewise. I apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused by my son’s failure to follow the rules and regulations. Sincerely, Signature Name Address

These words seemed to strum the symphony of the HOA submission machine. “Well, that seems resolved,” one of the other Board Members said when the letter had been read. Nods circulated around the room.

“Should I continue to monitor the situation as usual or inform the security company?” I asked with an intended hint of ignorance.

“No. No. Everyone makes mistakes. Just send a letter closing the issue and then let’s just leave it alone.”

“Agreed.”

“Sounds good.”

“O.k.”

429 To me the issue is cloudier than simply “people make mistakes.”

Otherwise Associations wouldn’t really come down on anyone but the persistent offenders. And that is just not how it happens. People who make mistakes can only be forgiven when they confess their offenses and apologize, when they take the Association so seriously that it passes right through the authoritative strategies of the Association. Impassioned submission will get an Association off your back. Both Deleuze (1994) and Zizek (1997) consider this a type of ironic resistance.

430 Trafficking In Community

Many communities built in the last ten years, especially in the middle income areas of San Francisco Bay Area (which really would be high income areas anywhere else due to housing shortages and prices), are packed in like sardines. And I mean packed in. You’re lucky to get any yard at all. If you do, it is likely just room enough for a patio and a few trees. Also frustrating for members, and for the management companies, is the width of streets.

I made many trips to these communities, many I just happened across.

My hands grabbed tighter on the steering wheel, my vertebral column unfolding into alertness. The large houses crammed in and together and with large trees and cars and everything else. There was a kind of constriction there which strummed an almost claustrophobic affect with me. It reminds me of the feeling

I get when faced with representations of global population trends.

It is no less interesting a phenomenon than the two plus hour commuters.

I was shocked to hear Stockton was considered a commutable distance from the

Bay Area. “The commute isn’t that bad,” one of my coworkers said to me in a way that made me feel like my actions were dramatic. “It’s only an hour and forty-five minutes, or two hours.” That seemed like enough time in the car to curl a persons form and disposition. And all that so they could have a yard, a driveway, a more comfortably proportioned environment. “The houses are even larger,” she later said earnestly guiding me in the ways of stability.

431 It is curious that such a haphazard arrangement such as this serves some part in the function of arranging ourselves. We are forced, we accept, we come to love the way bodies are linked together in space. Such an odd territorial machine.

Since the developers keep the streets private, they are not held to city codes which specify the width of the streets. So, in order to get a few more lots in, community planners make the streets as narrow as they can get away with.

This sort of “get away with it” logic somehow seems a natural element of an avowedly capitalist society. It’s what happens when streets are bought and sold. This means that there is usually barely enough room for two cars to pass each other without running someone down on the sidewalk. They are narrow enough that the construction vehicles often damage the curbs. This makes their repair a final project. The main entryways are of course an exception, since first impressions and image are everything.

Because of this narrow street situation, most communities have adopted quirky parking regulations. In some you can only park on one side of the street.

Others you can only park in your garage, not even on the driveway since the driveway is too narrow and the car would jut out into the street. In HOA management, keeping up with the parking rules and regulations as well as their enforcement is a major task.

When streets are reconstituted as “private”, then, they are also typically deterritorialized. It becomes a major community infraction to park in the street.

432 The streets are designated as routes through the community, and the ease of passage is certainly considered one of the major indices of pleasure within the community environment. Any congestion at all, or hint of obstruction, will throw the members into turmoil. After a few complaints by homeowners, the problem becomes quickly defined. Numerous steps are taken to ensure the community flow. Security officers can be hired to cite illegally parked cars. A tow service can be established. Notices and fines can be sent to violators. Messages are delivered to members in newsletters. Board members survey the streets for frequent offenders.

In a community development there is common area dispersed throughout the community, and often the distribution is quite complicated and extensive.

Front yards may be “common area” or the area between homes might be and front yards not. In any case, because of the extensive nature of common area there are also extensive irrigation lines that travel throughout the community to make sure the landscape is kept lush. Maintaining the flow of water through these pipes is another major concern. Not only do the irrigation companies perform periodical pressure tests, but there are also yearly “back flow” tests required. This is to make sure that none of the pipes are sending pressure the wrong way towards municipal or special utility district water supplies. Flow is again a major concern.

Phone lines are also an issue. The DSL commercial with neighbors yelling at each other about being web hogs because the phone lines connect up to a

433 common junction box is a common situation. One community with over three hundred units had every phone line wired to one main box at the community entrance and then a main line out to the utility company. Yikes. The congestion in the flow of electronic communication and information (or orders) must have created a real crisis in many households. Again, flow is a major concern.

434 Sheriff v. Gate Guard Show Down

I heard a story once. It was a story told to me by an officer of the law of one of the many Bay Area counties. The setting was casual. He wanted to know what I was researching. I suspect he wanted to know my motivations for dedicating such expenditure upon some intangible notions. Hoping to sound confident I replied “… it has to do with homeowners’ associations and gated communities, about how their particular type of community works, and thinking about their democratic potential.”

“O.k.,” he said in a tone designed to draw more out of me. I felt flipped into the position of subject and realized how intimate the relationship between ethnography and interrogation must be. I didn’t reply in time so he asked, “so what do you think about these things. Are they good or bad?”

Perhaps it was the force behind his authoritative persona, but I tried to respond in earnest. “Well, I like the general principle, of increasing local autonomy, but ultimately that’s not what’s happening now.”

“So you don’t think these communities are for real?”

“Oh yeah I think they do form some sort of real community, an emotional connection even. But I just question the way they go about it. It seems like they’ve taken a beautiful natural instinct and tapped in with a distorted version of it to sell to people as whole packages.”

435 I’m not sure if I knew what I was saying at the time, but somehow it articulated with the officer. He felt compelled to tell me a story, even though he seemed unsettled by its telling.

He told me about how he showed up at one of the Bay Area’s most exclusive gated communities. He told me the name, but I’ll conceal it here and keep things as vague as possible. I’d been to the community a number of times.

In fact, I did some work through the management company there and interviewed a resident couple who happened to be acquaintances of acquaintances.

Homes in this community start, or started at the apex of the Bay Area real estate crunch, at about 3 million. They were mansions, each on 1 acre lots with no fences between them. The community center and country club, the community had one of each, were several stories and sloped with dramatic patios and open air ballrooms. They seemed to be modeled after a Hyatt

Regency or some other upscale vacation paradise architectural style. I expected opulence, but was startled still.

It seems, however, that even the rich have problems paying their bills or that every once in a while they fall from grace. In fact, the exclusive communities in the Bay Area have the most foreclosures, as people seem to stretch for the winner’s circle to find shortly thereafter that their feet have left the crumbling ground beneath them. Thinking about Barbara Ehernrich it would be fruitful to tie this back into processes of class belonging and the functionality

436 of fear. The officer showed up at the intimidating guard shack to serve foreclosure papers. I tried to piece together the context of the foreclosure but was forced to stop short before the last question which would have catapulted the officer into inoperable frustration at not being able to continue with his story.

It seemed that the homeowner was insolvent with regards to the mortgage. Or, the owner had either neglected or refused to pay the Association dues, which were well over three hundred dollars each month, and ignored the Association’s attempts to retrieve the funds peaceably. So, the HOA took a more ruthless approach.

“I come pulling up to the guard booth and tell the guard to let me in, I’m serving papers. He fumbles around in the booth a bit and then tells me that he’s not going to let me in. I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was joking.”

It seems that this gate guard felt that the community was so exclusive that agents of the state would not be admitted without the consent of an owner, and surely no owner would consent to being served papers. Not only was the gate guard wrong, he tempted the wrong officer.

Researching the issue further I found some “case law” on the issue. In

1992 in a California Apellate Court decision of Bein v. Brechtel-Jochim Group,

Inc., it was determined that any authorized person must be granted access to a gated community for a reasonable period of time to serve process. However, if the server is refused entry (perhaps because they are not a registered process

437 server, a representative of a county or simply did not have credentials) then the service may be made upon the gate guard.

“So I told him, ‘you are going to let me through or I’ll arrest you for obstructing justice.’ Then he told me he still didn’t think he could let me in. He said this was private property and I had no jurisdiction. I showed him something about jurisdiction. I opened the door, stepped out of the car and grabbed my cuffs from my belt. You should have seen his face.”

“He let me in pretty quick after that.”

The story was funny, especially the way he told it with a kind of sadistic pleasure. I think he really wanted to arrest the gate guard to highlight the difference between a real cop and a rent-a-cop. To me the story highlighted this difference as well, but in different ways I think.

Homeowners’ associations work on a different model than policing. When policing is the model of a society or a community, things are oriented around surveillance and normalization. Things are set up so that people can be corrected, brought into the fold. HOAs still operate on this model. But there is also a multiplicity of control, with overlapping territories and technologies. The private community with its private streets and parks and private police forces works on a model of access control. Who cares about the non-affiliated and incorporating them into the new American norm? We are now controlled by our desire to enter and the availability of the access codes. We must re-train ourselves in order to become worthy of access. It is in this way that

438 contemporary mentalities of control enact a sort of endless modulation, from one desired position to another.

In this showdown, the gate guard looses. So, the whole community becomes a content to the expression of the State. The development is denied its autonomous existence. The people, the landscape, the entryway, everything becomes rearticulated with the nation, with citizen-hood. The sheriff drove around the community leisurely and indirectly so more could see him and his affect could pulse from multiple epicenters. He said that people stared at him, they usually do, but this time he felt scrutinized. It made him linger even longer.

The gaze, it seems to me, could have been the expression of a double edged desire, both sharply enamored of the sheriff’s authority. As he rolled through the community he transformed it and gave the whole landscape a spectral trace of the state.

439 Speed Bumps (a.k.a. “sleeping police”)

Speed bumps and HOAs are another effective overlay of technologies.

Private speed bumps require some sort of “collective” decision making process before they can be installed. This is true in terms of civil code as well as ethically and financially. And, because potential speed bumps will have an impact upon a neighborhood or community, that unit of the American cultural landscape becomes the territory for this strategic deployment of “poliorectic” technologies (Virilio 1986). Erecting a speed bump is a form of privatized policing—the policing of speed and motion. Neighborhoods are activated towards these ends, they become implicitly official entities. I have heard of

Associations advocating for their members to call the cops and ask for traffic patrols. They post notices saying this in newsletters mailed to each unit. More often, I have heard Board members and residents talking about taking matters into their own hands. “The cops won’t come. Nothing will happen if we don’t get proactive about this problem.”

Typically the bump gives spatial life to obstacles between different territories in the community. Whether it be the older folks worried about teenagers driving recklessly, or community members worried about Asians who

“we all know drive like shit” and need speed bumps to keep them in check, or outsiders who cross through the community without regard for safety, the speed bump almost always demands a system of differentiation. Very rarely do members of a neighborhood realize that they all have a problem driving fast

440 occasionally and that speed bumps would be a good device for self-policing.

Speed bumps are for “others” who have difficulty regulating their own conduct.

Even in this case, the notion of policing is carried out through an ultimate authority in terms of the given territory. The bump requires private streets and a machinery of local collectivity. In our time this is primarily the HOA. The HOA steps in like the state to mediate the whole affair, to contemplate the good of the community and to enact polic(ies)(ing) to those ends. Sometimes they survey homeowners (using research techniques that make me think of Foucault’s comments about disciplinary apparatuses extracting knowledge from its subjects and objects) and other times they establish a formal voting procedure. Of the cases I have witnessed, however, the HOA, in its role as the representative of the members, feels that it can make the decision on its own or with little consultation and offers its judgment from on high.

Once again this is an example of how individuals’ relations with other members and with “outsiders” become mediated by the HOA. It actualizes itself as a state-form, similar to Marx’s analysis of money, by insinuating itself in every relation between individuals. Members no longer interact with each other.

Instead they follow procedures. They submit requests. They communicate through “homeowner concerns” time at board meetings, call for hearings, etc. to establish regular and protected communication. Whether a HOA sanctioned block or pool party, or a conflict between neighbors over noise or fence lines or whatever.

441 At a number of Board meetings and in the office I came across a nickname for speed bumps. Some people call them “sleeping police.” It’s cute, but relevant. It makes me ask myself what is the relationship between a speed bump and policing? What sort of policing is going on with speed bumps?

There are many associations which post speed limits and do their best to issue warnings and tickets to fast drivers. Rather than having a hired traffic cop to patrol their private streets, however, the Association pleads with the community to turn in those who drive to fast. They send out flyers and newsletters and post the information on speed limit signs. If you witness someone speeding you should report it to the Board, give them the license plate number which they will cross-reference with their database and issue a warning or a fine, depending on the number of infractions. I have talked to several people in the Sacramento area whose HOAs use this method. Not only this, they have the speed limit posted at 24.5 miles per hour, so that residents and visitors will know that going 25 miles per hour will earn you a fine.

Those communities are employing a model of policing they have clearly adopted from municipal police departments. Using the “sleeping police” seems to me to be something quite different, a different model of control. It is a

“polite” or preventative (a concept that is circulating with much intensity) policing that does not follow the model of “the law”. That is, rather than enforcing the Law with surveillance and putative measures (i.e. fines, tickets, and warning letters that many HOAs and city police employ), speed bumps

442 create circumstances that make it difficult to conduct oneself in certain undesirable ways. It is a type of affective policing. Let me explain what I mean a bit more.

A community wants to police speed, to manage the body/engine/street machine. But most communities don’t have the energy or tools to police this territory directly. They can’t pay for roving patrols. They can’t afford radar guns. So, alternate modes of policing speed are used. Some encourage self- policing in newsletters and meetings. Some encourage policing between neighbors. Others incorporate the desire to control the movement of bodies into the very design of the community, whether that is the shape of the streets, speed bumps, etc. This, it seems to me, is a different type of power. It is not discipline where we are distributed along a norm, where we see ourselves in relationship to a group and foster a desire for normalcy or a desire to understand and loath our abnormality.

This type of power is a direct shock to our senses. If you feel compelled to drive too fast too often these days you’ll require chiropractic work. Lurching over a speed bump sends shocks of pain, sounds of clashing metal, a bit of fear as the steering wheel slides momentarily out of control. Then I realize how stupid it was to go that fast over the speed bump. Out of habit I learn to avoid the jarring stimulus. I am trained.

It is in this way that they resemble Virilio’s “poliorectic” technologies for giving regularity of a particularly desirable sort to the movement of the hoards.

443 Debt Collection

How do Associations ensure that members pay their assessments and fines? First of all, many don’t. Arrears can be a serious issue for many communities. In one community that had an assessment of one hundred and fifty dollars each month there were twenty-five homeowners in arrears for a total of twenty thousand five hundred dollars. This is a serious issue for many

Boards, since without regular incoming funds the association can’t pay for budgeted items or budget accurately for future services.

It makes me feel better about my own finances that many of these responsible community members don’t always make their payments on time and that some of them shirk even longer than I do. Still, while I was helping to manage these communities such behavior was troublesome. If for no other reason than because I had to “turn them in.” I’ve been on the other side of this relationship a number of times, so I know well the emotions rushing in these currents. Rather than breaking legs and thumbs like a loan shark collector, the

HOAs I worked with outsourced their debt issues to a collection specialist. There are many of these specialists. In fact, there are a number of corporations which specialize in collecting assessments for HOAs. They are one of the many cottage industries which have sprung up around the booming planned-unit development industry.

So when we had problems collecting money from a member I simply dialed my connection to the collection agency contact for that Association and

444 opened that individual’s identity for them. A moment later I was off the phone.

It was that easy and I didn’t even have to think about the potential effect that action may have had on any one of the many individuals I dialed into the collection machine. What happens next?

You miss a payment. You don’t call or write. Your name gets put on a list of delinquent homeowners. If it takes longer than thirty days to send in the payment and late fee you will be sent to the collection agency and probably receive a letter. Some associations wait a bit longer than 30 days, to give each member a bit of slack. After all, collection agencies are a nasty business. Some

I was involved with sent your name in like clockwork after thirty days expired.

The first few paragraphs of the letter will tell you about the need to pay and the contract relationship between the collection corporation and the HOA.

About the third paragraph, if you can even stand to read that far, comes the real force of the letter. It resides in one sentence:

“If the full amount due is not physically received in our office on or before

5:00 p.m. on [a certain business day], a Notice of Delinquent Assessment

(“Lien”) with respect to you and the Property will be prepared and forwarded to the county recorder on the next working day without further notice.”

This is a legal threat. The Association’s collection heavy is threatening to begin a lien process which can end up with your house being sold in order to cover your unpaid assessments. Well, it’s not really a threat because the whole collection machine is set up to work in a semi-automated fashion. There are no threats.

445 There are only deadlines and triggers. When a deadline passes the machine triggers the next action from the network of incorporated elements. A computer, for example, simply crosses a threshold and changes your account to a new status. When you enter a new status, a new letter is sent. When a new letter is sent a new threshold is established. There are no direct threats. This machine is more terrifying than that.

Keep in mind that this is not the same thing as bank foreclosure. That seems to make more sense since almost all property is owned by the banks, mortgage companies, etc. and loaned out to us assuming we can continue with the payments. If we don’t, they repossess our possessions. With the HOA, it is different. We owe a debt of community which is established when we attach ourselves to a house. It is an endless debt we owe for simply being a member.

If you look a few paragraphs later you might notice that it costs you $120 for this “pre-Lien letter.” You are charged for the legal fees and processing fees that went into the letter. This is how debt collectors turn their profit. They don’t charge anything to their allies, the HOAs, but extract fees from those upon whom they are targeted. This is why it is an easy decision for a Board of

Directors to align with a specific debt collector. Debt collection is a hard job; no one wants to pressure a neighbor to pay up. With the debt collector the extraction is removed a step from the HOA and they cost the HOA nothing.

If they go the next step and file a lien it will cost you another $300, plus additional fees for processing the new letters. If you decide to set up a payment

446 plan it will cost you $100. If you can’t pay, you’ll be charged a fee for that as well. The collection company will provide you with the minimum payment you must make to stay out of a Lien, to keep your house. If you only pay that, you can expect an endless series of letters and fees. It is an endless extraction.

Debt collectors add processing fees wherever they can. It gets heaped upon what you already owe. So, you pay for the collection as though you asked for it. Surely members don’t want to pay for this service to the HOA assessment collection machine, but there is no choice. Your irresponsibility with regards to your bills means that another agency must step-in to take responsibility for you.

And, of course, you should pay for this takeover. So you pay for your own terrorization. This seems to me to be a new, or at least twisted, mode of profit creation than those laid out by Karl Marx in his analysis of capitalism.

Of course when your name is submitted to the debt collector, they “ding” your credit rating. And every time you don’t meet the requirements for rehabilitation, you get dinged again. Your credit rating is an extension of your corporeal body into digitized space. It is a digital body upon which ratios of financial risk are inscribed. We are ensnared in an abstract space, in a digitized web of measurement and inscription.

We are similar in ways to our own houses. Our houses are more than just the wood, nails, outlets, sinks, carpets, etc. A home may be a limited space, but all limits open up to an outside (What is Philosophy 120; Lost Dimension 17).

Sewage lines, connection to a power plant, routes to the garbage dump, pipes to

447 the water processing station, gas pipes, cable TV. lines, phone lines, DSL lines, satellite waves. The home is a fixed point, fixed for the intersection of pre- established linear flows.

For most of the services embedded in the house, we have no choice.

Utility companies are private, for-profit corporations, yet they have achieved monopolies over the utilities provided in particular areas. In the Bay Area, for example, just try to get your electricity from a company other than PG&E. Often cities establish special municipal utility districts and then outsource the services to private corporations. The Oro Loma Sanitation District which is serviced by the trash giant BFI is a prime example.

The stability of these services, their providers, and the stability of your insignificant cog-like relationship to them seems isomorphic to the character of machinic enslavement found in our contemporary society of control and the late capitalist mechanosphere.

These monopoly service companies are the guardians of the credit report.

They use the credit report as a way to mark souls as solvent or insolvent and a whole range between. The credit report has really become a crucially useful tool for measuring responsibility. Being a citizen, and of what sort, is measured now not so much by your adherence to laws and belief in national causes, but rather by your credit report. Credit reports become a way to motivate individuals to change their ways, to adopt self-improvement regimes, to get out of debt.

448 Credit reports are a key instrument in the control exerted in late capitalist

America. They belong to a different set of tools, I believe, than the panopticon or other instruments of disciplinary power. Credit report companies don’t watch you to catch you in the act of being fiscally irresponsible so that they can correct such undesirable behavior. The credit report doesn’t care about you as a subject and it does not work on your self. Its mode of operation is pre-individual and only serves to regulate access to particular modes of consumption, namely credit and loans.

Credit report corporations and collection agencies are isomorphic with the gate and coded access panel. To gain access you are required to modulate your encoded self to the correct frequency or to hell with you anyway. We live with the permanent possibility of social rejection.

449 Sound Control

While driving around the Bay Area I noticed a similar quirky phenomenon at a few different developments. Quirky is not a very academic concept, I know.

Perhaps I should say incongruous with the constellations of stuff which comprise a cityscape. They were walled developments, something to which my observations are particularly attuned, with exaggerated stucco walls on only one or two sides. There is nothing unusual about stucco walls. They are as pervasive as arteries and veins in a human body; stucco borders almost all neighborhoods and shapes most routes through the south east bay, the San

Ramon Valley, Roseville and Rocklin in the Sacramento area as well. The generalized wall typically gets up to about ten feet high. They are just high enough to not be scaled smoothly and high enough to block a direct view into a community’s backyards. Stucco is usually sprayed high enough to demarcate a boundary with an impression.

The walls I am now talking about are easily twenty feet high. What’s more, they are only along a few of the sides. At one of the developments, the high wall bordered a busy super-route, six lanes across with a wide median. The shorter, maybe six foot stucco wall, was adjacent to a church. Despite not facing the road, being swept along the super-route gave a clear view into the community. It looked like an easy place to get over. At a second development, there was a large wall facing a highway that streaked about two hundred yards

450 across an open field. One of the other boundaries, visible from the highway was a short white picket fence that faced a nursery.

At first it seems really odd, I mean incongruous, right? Walls are for security, marking a physical territory, controlling the movement of humans, displaying status, and other functions of this sort. But none of these functions could account for the change in materiality of the boundary. I thought to myself as I investigated more closely, like us born-again scientists want to do: could the proximity to such orderly and sacred sites relieve the invading pressures from those directions? A busy street is surely a less invited neighbor than a church or respectable place of business. An open field is a wild territory which must stand in contrast to the classified organization written by rows of flowers, cactuses, trees, and other potted plants. If so, then you can really feel how these walls are a tangle of function and fantasy. These fantastic boundaries triggered my own fantasies. I pictured a stealthy body dressed in dark colors moving in and out of private residences snatching precious objects along the way. There is a shining smirk as he swings a satchel of stolen goodies over his shoulder and slinks on to the next site. As he approaches he spots the short wall and immediately trots in that direction. But when he crosses into the sacred space of the church, his shoulders hunch over with guilt, his head bends towards his chest. So, he turns around and sulks home. Dream on.

I see now, and you probably caught on more quickly than I, that the walls were designed to shield the houses behind from the intense sound waves caused

451 by the rush of autos. So, I was about to move on in my notes, either because I was embarrassed about the whole silly fantasy thing or because I thought it was unremarkable, or both together.

Isn’t there something interesting, however, about designing space to counteract the unpleasantness of our cities, of a preferred mode of centralized habitation? Perhaps Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens would see these technologies as a sign of reflexive modernization (Beck 1992; Beck, Giddens et al. 1994). I mean, it points to the ways that our social formation, cross- pollinated by capitalism and modernity, reacts back on itself to tame its own inherent limits. How do we deal with nuclear waste and other dangers invented alongside our technological marvels? What do we do about industrial pollution and environmental degradation which are the results of unchecked production for the sake of production? And, what do we do about the real by-products of the metropolis, the sounds, the sights, the smells, and the affect which sprinkles its pungent funk over us at every turn? For the capitalist, the answer is simple: commodify a solution.

Homeowers’ Associations and gated communities can be linked to these sorts of reflexive strategies. They can be seen as package deals for assuaging urban angst, anomie, fear, which are all elements of our habitats. People buy in hoping to get a shot of community, a booster of political participation, a sense of belonging, a neighborhood watch or private police force.

452 Somehow capitalism makes wine of its own bile. New development techniques have transformed industrial wastelands and polluted zones into sites available for profit making ventures in a market with a soaring rate for space.

Cheap land because of the noise would make for profit if you could find a way to sell alleviation from the intensity of the urban audio wake. Why not use sound walls? Well, first you have to invent them. I don’t know how it happened, but they have ingeniously shielded millions along noisy highways and the like, reterritorializing derelict spaces, alleviating the hangover from the modern buzz.

They seem relatively new to me, but now almost every highway has a pair.

The noise of cars can be disturbing to nearby sleepers, but when I turn on my car in the morning the vibration and grumbling of the engine give a little joy.

I’m glad it started, seemingly miraculously. The tumbling pops and puffs of the engine signal my ability to maneuver, fast and free. We should embrace our noise. After all, most life on earth developed a tendency for receiving and emitting sound waves and translating them into biochemical electrical reactions.

There is not much chance that humans will suddenly stop desiring sound. As we travel, we will make noise. Our own sounds, amplified though our most prized possessions, is desirable. But there is something unsettling about the sounds of the mass. If enough of us move together, the stampede will be heard a long way off. I hear this through my windows and walls, I can feel the pulses almost every day as I sit in my living room or lay in bed to sleep. Now I think silence or rustling trees or chirping insects would keep me from a natural slumber now

453 more than my urban cacophony. As super-roads and super-highways display, routinized and congested movements are desirable. Of course it is a matter of density and proximity. Proximity of a dense arrangement of human energy, many places to convert it into commodities, lots of connections possible between now highly specialized productions.

So the walls really want to keep back the sounds of the daily commute shadowed in the hum of nightriders and joy seekers. They really desire to maintain a sound barrier between two territories that should be separated. Once we leave our places of inhabitation, our bodies make incorporeal transformations, maybe even corporeal ones, in our commute to work or the market. It is strange to talk about walls wanting and desiring, but why not. If it makes you feel better I can say that these walls are a materialization of these desires. But since our brains are probably just the materialization of desires in neurons and such, and we talk about individuals desiring, I don’t think it really hurts anything to talk about how walls desire. Or, how cities desire, or anything else for that matter. They do things, right? To do these things they are endowed with desire. The wall faces desire on both sides: it is produced to serve desires and to shape desire as an effect.

This sort of sound logic is built into the master plan of newer cities, the edge cities and post-suburbs, where HOAs and gated communities rule.

Freeways run at the base of ravines that gently unfold between the contours of the east bay hills. In the areas around the freeways are shopping centers where

454 the flow takes the optimum number of people right by their inviting signs. Noise from increased traffic in these areas is tolerable or not heard next to the squealing joy of endless consumption. Housing in those areas is zoned for apartments for the property-less tag-alongs and servants who really can’t afford it anyway. From the God’s-eye perspective of the plan, these domiciles are necessary to attract and maintain the low wage labor base to serve the gravity of such a massive shopping and service frenzy. Major streets run back between shopping centers following the curves of valleys and bluffs only where convenient. Developments in this area tend to be less exclusive, less classy.

Nestled between the gentle countenances of the Bay Area’s golden hills are the trickles lined with stucco and entrances to many exclusive developments. The routes that propel us within the post-urban environment are not only routes.

They establish the physicality of the territories (shopping centers which are more and more clustered, consolidated like the business parks and office campuses, and juxtaposed to the residential areas) and give rhythms to the movement between.

The 680 corridor, for example, plays itself out in a well coordinated dance.

Were the cities of the San Ramon valley and the 680 freeway designed together?

I don’t think so, nor does it matter. The area seems to have its own sort of

“retroactive manifesto” (Koolhaas 1994). The whole area was built with a radically diffuse base of intellectual and physical labor, yet they all came up with pretty much the same elements and organization. I think that is because we all

455 operate with a certain set of urban axioms. Think about it this way. If I had a starship Enterprise type transporter device and I would ask you to close your eyes and then send you to some random post-suburban location almost anywhere in the U.S. You would open your eyes and probably have no idea where you were or maybe even that you left your original city. I don’t really need the transporter because you know what I’m talking about. It is a perfect example of transversal desire. To me this is incredibly interesting, and horrifying. It seems like our environments are being washed out in a capitalist utopia that adheres to an implicit plan that moves between us all.

456 Light Sculptures

The dips and turns of the subtly rolling hills that spill into the San Ramon

Valley provide perfect nooks and peaks for well concealed and defended habitation. The flow of populations and goods overcode the flows of water and seeds, of more furry creatures, wind and sound. Life is carved up into an organized space. The desire for a master plan sweeps well beyond the stucco and gates of the avowedly master planned. This striated space is not static. It is propelled by the desire for parcels, lots, grids, property and the regular connectivity which pulses between. Along with this is a necessary desire for the road, for the street, the super-route and highway. With SUVs in every other post-suburban garage it is important to keep people on track. We are coaxed into a desire for the road, into a love of regular routes.

The super-roads that stretch back into the hills are not subtle at all. They are lined with bright displays that make the trip look like a stretched out version of Las Vegas. Venturi, Brown and Izenour (1977) would be proud, for the developers in this area have certainly learned from Las Vegas. As you drive along Bollinger Canyon Boulevard, for example, you are visually accosted by a huge sculpture that looks like an artificial stone wall with a square arched temple type do-dad on top. As if the thing weren’t gaudy as it is, the shimmering stucco is lit up with intense white lights that shoot out of covered bulbs sunk into the surrounding concrete.

457 These community monuments establish fixed paths. They are points which subordinate the way to the destination, subordinates an open space to the grid. They are a type of seductive architecture which helps draw attention away from the rolling hills and into line.

Are these rays of commercial attraction, designed to draw potential homebuyers to the development? It is seductive architecture (Rose 1996) indeed, but when the developer sells off the last few homes, the sculpture would loose this function. There must be more. Is it a signal of status? Certainly this must be a part of it. Just the amount of energy that goes into the perpetual image is a display of surplus.

Having lived behind such a monument for a short while, I felt a different function. It was a beacon, calling me home, calling me into a community. I could find my way home easy enough without the marker, but would have a much harder time finding a contemporary community without one. If you traveled straight home, community wouldn’t exist at all. It must be signaled to you upon entry. You must live it in the rhythms of your daily existence. There are certainly other ways to establish these common rhythms. Still, when you live in such an atomized environment, these beacons work like magic.

Down a short ways you encounter a community with under-lit palm trees whose dramatic frawns line the drive towards the entrance gate. Elaine Scarry

(1999) talks about palm trees in On Beauty and Being Just. A beautiful object, like palm frawns back light by the resplendence of the sun, seizes our attention

458 often without our volition. Facing the beautiful and our relationship to it shows us how our self is really pulled beyond our flesh; it is in the world, always outside. When we are struck by beauty, we become eligible to look at the things that seize our attention and to go on and be caring about other objects as well.

Scarry argues that caring about beauty leads to a diminution of injury. Beauty evokes a longing for fullness and creation, even in the form of duplication. The beautiful “acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction—to locate what is true.”

When we behold the beautiful, we learn to be attentive to the world, and when we are attentive to the world, we notice injustice. With entry sculptures do we become attentive to our world, our domestic island among the chaos of modern life? Is it one more way that our curtain of attachment is drawn closer to home, our concern for justice woven tighter around the private?

On just the other side of the row of lit up trees is a driving range that stays open late at night, shooting its spotlights across a green field scattered with shimmering white spots. I pulled over while I was driving past, I couldn’t help it. I had suddenly seen a message written in those shimmering white spots.

It read as a testament to the conviction of hitting a straight drive off the tee. A slice or a hook would be an injustice, a shameful defilement of the desire to go from tee to cup, from point to point in life as well. I drove back home and picked up my golf clubs which I bought for just such a researching occasion. I

459 figured I might meet some interesting people out at the driving range, on the course. It was getting late as I looped my car into one of the many open parking spaces. There were only two men hitting balls. Both of them had collared shirts which I imagined had fluorescent stained silhouettes of ties down their fronts. These men were focused on launching ball after ball into the crossing rays of artificial light. They would only glance up from the fake grass mats to watch the sparkles drift across the green turf and land somewhere off in the distance. I positioned myself between them, a few stalls away. I felt comfortable, like I was settling into my cubicle at work. It’s funny, but the next day at work I caught myself daydreaming about hitting golf balls. The first ball I swung at glanced off the club and hit the metal wall dividing my stall from the next with bursting metallic sound. They both looked at me. I was embarrassed.

I swung again and the ball missed the partition this time but shot out at an unbelievably perpendicular angle right across the stall of the business man in front of me. We exchanged a long gaze. Mine was fueled by shame, his by judgment. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but he picked up the three golf clubs he had leaning against the divider and began to walk to the parking lot. I buried myself back into the little white balls and shimmering trajectories. Right as I hit one that seemed to flow straight and long, the spotlights cut out across the range. I looked over at the last remaining golfer. He was staring off at the horizon. I turned to do the same. Just across the street I saw the row of palms that I was struck by earlier. Now they were even more resplendent, since the

460 golf spotlights had flooded the area with its photons. The palms grabbed me and I felt it was time to go home.

On Crow Canyon Boulevard, the same style persists. At the entrance to one community there is an overwhelmingly bright water fountain that looks like a twenty or thirty foot trumpet of light. At the entrance to the community on the opposite corner, not to be outdone, is a rippled brick wall with water that cascades down the front and spotlights that accent its gravitational dazzle.

There is certainly an ever present art of designing a landscape to overwhelm. Huge islands and well planted islands along streets and at the entrance to communities. The depth between the road and whatever lies behind, lost in the thick growth. With the premium on space in the Bay Area, such excess of spatial consumption reeks of opulence as much as anything else.

461 Freemont Ranches

In the City of Fremont, in the southern part of the East Bay, there are ranches. They are working ranches, with farm animals, crops and fields of hay, that line some of the East Bay’s most busy streets. They are like rustic islands in the middle of a suburban monotony. Watching the many farm animals on them and the way the farmers co-habitate with them reminds me of Nietzshce’s discussion of training and culture in The Genealogy of Morals. Training allows the animals to live closer to the ranch house, which is crucial on these small ranches. It is similar to how the city allows workers to live closer to their work.

We are all domesticated animals. Culture is that process of domestication or training. From this perspective, the perimeter walls of master planned communities, the freeway embankments and sound walls are like blinders for training suburban travelers. Directed movement and a sort of focused distraction is what these blinders are all about. They are tools in a regime of habitable circulation.

462 Photo Enforced Traffic Lights

Are you a speeder? I am. I get a little thrill from actually feeling the movement of my personal transportation device. My head pressed back into the seat. Leaning into a turn against the grasp of inertia. A subtle dizziness as the world streaks by. Speed affects me. But, this affect is also enraptured by the desire to move against wisdom of limits. Laws against speeding have shown me a little world beyond, one that I can get to as easy as pressing down on my gas pedal a bit harder. I love to speed because someone says I can’t, because I refuse to let someone determine for me when I am in control and when I am out of control. “Yeah, I’m a free spirit,” as I tear from the line at the drive-thru and head off in some direction that some planner decided is the best route to get to wherever. Even in its negativity, my desire is shackled to the law all the same.

I pulled cautiously into my assigned spot in the collective carport. After making a visit to the mailbox I began to flip through the envelopes on my way up the stairs to my rented condo. An envelope stamped with official patterns and statements and a return address of The City of San Jose caught my attention. I opened it to find several pictures of myself, taken from the front and rear. In the picture I am driving in the middle of an intersection with a glaring red light suspended over my head and slightly in the background. “Shit,” I said, with just the same passion as I do when the police siren clicks on behind me.

There are at least five of these “photo enforced traffic lights” near where I live.

463 Driving like I do I guess I expected such a letter. A friend at work got a similar photo in the mail for driving too fast in a photo enforced speed trap.

Policing has always focused on traffic control (Virilio 1986). Or, as the

San Jose Police Department says, “traffic calming” is a major civic concern.

Recently, municipal police departments have begun outsourcing such concerns to the private sector. Cities like Santa Rosa, San Jose, Roseville, Folsom, Fremont,

Danville, and so many more it is impossible to list, have turned to private corporations to police much of the city’s traffic flow. Lockheed-Martin has a successful division dedicated to privatized traffic control. Recently they merged with Municipal Services and the Photo Enforcement Group to become ACS State and Local Solutions Inc. This, it seems, is a booming area of economic growth.

There are other corporations like Redlight Camera Turnkey Services and

Automated Traffic Enforcement.

The City of San Jose’s “traffic calming” plan includes traditional traffic patrols, what they call violator funded enforcement and some design elements.

The design elements are similar to the “sleeping police” which are easy to find in many associated neighborhoods. They set up traffic islands in the center of certain busy residential streets so speeding straight through becomes impossible.

Sometimes they even erect concrete pylons to redirect flows at potentially destructive velocities. Again, they seem to me to be an attempt to act directly upon a body's potential for movement, not simply relying upon training and conscience as a disciplinary regime might.

464 There has also been a proliferation of radar carts which broadcast for all to see your speed in blazing lights right above the posted speed limit. On some of these carts there is photo equipment which can automatically process a speeding violation. Most of these mobile units, however, simply show you what you are doing. It strikes me as an attempt to externalize my conscience, to embed thought in my surroundings so that I am forced to confront it. When I come speeding down the slight hill on the way to my apartment complex I pay no attention to how fast I am really going, just how in control I feel behind the wheel. When I see my speed broadcast out there ahead of me I suddenly feel compelled to slow down. I don’t want a ticket. I don’t want my neighbors to think me reckless. I want the numbers to match.

Sometimes, however, I punch it and get a kick out of watching the numbers tumble higher and higher.

I was behind someone the other day who got nabbed by one of the photo enforced traffic signals. She sped through the yellow and bright flashes lit up the dimming evening. Within the box, mounted on one of the metal poles which hang our control panels overhead, energy pulsed and was routed through dizzying intersections of wires and circuits. The computer stores the photo.

Then it sends it along to another computer which scans the license plate and communicates directly with the databases at the police departments, state motor vehicle registries, court systems, and traffic engineers. The programs handle

465 everything from scanning the photos, to appending the motor vehicle data to printing and mailing the ticket.

So, how much does a city have to pay to use these private police services? Nothing. Lockheed-Martin or whichever company caught you collects a percentage for each ticket issued. That is, you pay directly for traffic calming.

That is sometimes referred to as “violator funded enforcement.” The photo light company doesn’t charge the city for their commodity. Instead, they extract their surplus from unwary passers-by. It seems like a modern and more official version of highway robbery. The flow of profit is mapped on top of the flow of populations. This is the corporate face of traffic control. And this changes our rituals of getting busted. It changes the performance of state authority, letting for-profit companies in on the show.

This “violator funded enforcement” is similar in form to the mode of profit generation in collection agencies. Further, they are both flow regulating machines in the sense that they attach to the production of desires and can curtail your ability to reach your objectives through fines which curtail your commercial power. Money is intimately linked to mobility, of course social and financial mobility, but spatial mobility as well. Just think about rising gas prices and the scrutiny a jalopy will get in a ritzy neighborhood. Photo enforced traffic signals literalize the functional connection between these forms of fiscal and spatial mobility.

466 Gates and Racism

I stood in the middle of a court, no more like a box. It was dark, for most community association board activity takes place in the evening, most starting at seven. The illuminated address numbers gave the squared off shrubs a golden glow and made the beige stucco seem slightly uneasy. I knew the surroundings.

I had been to this community at least three times. There was a water leak coming up from a manhole cover once, and I volleyed with the Water Company for a week or so until it got fixed.

On another occasion I was out here at this community, but much earlier in the afternoon. It was during a walkthrough, a site inspection, a dressing down of environmental stimuli. We came across a board member, whose house I was now looking for. We talked then about the installation of the gate at the back entrance to the community. Everyone was in a buzz about it.

Now I was heading to an emergency meeting. The company, a group of men dedicated to the production of controlled access devices, had just finished the long and arduous task of obtaining official permits from "the City". They were submitting change orders to the contract which the Board had to sign before the project could continue. The first for the extra man-hours necessary to process the city permits, and there was a lot more life energy allotted to that task than typical I was told. A second change was to add a pedestrian gate that the city required after a public hearing on the issue. Several board members pleaded their case before a planning council with the surveyed opinion of the

467 association membership. In the interests of neighborliness, the council decided that the gates must not be impermeable. That it is understandable to want to reduce the traffic through the community streets but excluding pedestrians would be going too far with exclusionary desires.

One thing to keep in mind is that this community is rather special. It was built on the site of a former strip mall, right in the middle of an already established neighborhood. The houses in the new development stood out. Their mocha and beige painted two-story stucco with sharp corners and tall entryways contrasted with the humble one story wood paneled and colorful string of houses on the neighboring streets. The manicured landscaping contrasted with the weedy and well-grown yard of homes as well as the apartment complex just outside the perimeter to the North. The illuminated address plates. The curved tile roofs. The newly poured and sealed streets. The community park, the only one within blocks and blocks. All of these things sent distinct signals of difference across the cityscape. And, the homes in the new development were selling for two to three hundred thousand dollars more than the neighboring homes. It was a bastion of a middle-class aesthetic in the middle of a “slummy”

Bay Area neighborhood.

The invasion from the apartment complexes on just the other side of the dream gate had provoked the community. It was in the best interest to keep their short-cutting jalopies from traveling through the, private anyway, streets.

And the city agreed, so long as they did not close totally off. This was taken by

468 the Board as a joke, which they planned to deal with by padlocking it after the city inspector slid into his car to drive off.

At a city hearing about the proposed gate, city officials sympathized with the invaded homeowners and approved a gate. However, they also required that an unlocked pedestrian gate accompany the gate that would span the section of road. The board thought this was a terrible nuisance. They asked the gate contractor to install a padlock hasp on the inside of a pedestrian gate so they could lock it up after the initial inspections.

The third change order was for the City's requirements on wind loading.

That area of town must get real gusty, since the posts for the gate now sank seven and one half feet. At a board meeting that did not make quorum just the week before, Jack made a joke about the new stability being excellent to prevent damage while a wild man from the neighboring lower income and clearly less white apartment buildings swung around from the iron bars of the cage. What animals! What a show! And we didn’t even have to throw scraps at them.

Clearly the desire to throw up a border between the community and the lower class apartment complex was driven by more than just practical concerns about the increased road wear and tear and the money the community would have to pay to resurface the streets. There was something more basic involved, a desire for superiority, pulsing through the whole development in waves of racist desires for exclusion.

469 There was yet another change, this time issued by the San Jose City Fire

Department. They stipulated that lock boxes should be placed on the exterior of the gate. This is necessary, they argued, to get access to the community in case of a fire. This was totally reasonable and no one seemed to have a problem with it. It did, however, provoke some rather fantastic notions on the part of a couple of the Board members.

One Board member said in an off-hand way that the fire department should think twice about bringing their equipment that way. While they were out of the fire truck trying to get the gate key out of the lock box and open the gate, the residents of the nearby condos might strip the truck down to a couple of sheets of metal. A second Board member tagged along on this racist fantasy.

She added that this might happen while the firemen were busy putting out fires in their own condo complex.

The desires of belonging also create contempt for outsiders. Really these two things are the dual products of belonging machines. At that same meeting the Board decided to hire security guards to stand watch over the gate during its construction. They all agreed that one of the unruly neighbors might knock over the gate-posts before the concrete sets. It sounded like a good idea to me: the knocking over, I mean, not the security.

In this story we see how race comes into the fantasy of power, the fantasy of control. It is expressed as a desire to control the movement of the other, which is seen as wild and needing of regulation. And this fantasy obtains

470 a kind of material sincerity in the figure of the gate. The gate gives material sincerity to the territory of communal belonging the way it is figured in the modality of cultural capitalism. But the gate isn’t the only issue. It is the machinics of community which prompt bodies to willingly and passively nest in enactments of exclusive existential territories, materialized in brick and neuron.

This, sadly, is a more generalized adversary. At least communities with gates are forthcoming with a desire for closure. For many other cartographies the closed-ness is at the same time denied.

And now I was standing in this court, in this European villa themed community, on my way to a meeting about the gate. It was nearly into the production stages. The Board was quite antsy to get through the meeting, as though they were going to rush out for the ground breaking ceremony that evening. "I can’t wait until we get that gate up," a board member told me. He was so elated to have the gates at least close to erected that he thought they might have a barbecue to celebrate. "That’s an idea," I said with detached words and tones in order to encourage more discussion. "Yeah," he said, "we'll have it right on our side of the gate." Perhaps you are picking up a certain degree of the active animosity I felt coming from this board member, other board members and residents of the community in general. They went after segregation with a passion.

Now that they were close to getting what they wanted, they were rubbing it in, celebrating their liberation of the white middle class aesthetic from the

471 surrounding contaminating slumminess. Does that mean that they won?

Certainly they had that perception of the situation. And it only cost them a collective 15k or about $18 a month. Once again centralized coordination "wins" the day. But I wonder how organized this particular community would be if they did not have such an "invading" issue, such racist fervor to rally around.

I attended the party. I was compelled as a researcher by my hatred of the event and my shameful connection. The singed animal flesh in the bar-b- que drums was a perfect compliment to the scenario. It read to me as a display of strength. It felt like a party in celebration of the victory of wealth, of rather forcibly extracted community wealth. It felt like a party for the lessons of consumerism; if you can afford it, it is ethical. The tantalizing smoke of the grill wafted between the iron bars. Some matter can pass. But other matter matters more. The meaty scent caught the attention of a few apartment residents, and people began to step onto their rot iron caged balconies. A few bodies were drawn across the weedy grass toward the segregating mechanism. It seemed to me that this was the first time they noticed the new obstruction, the new fortification. Gazes were heavy. I even saw a couple of cars turn toward the gate and take a long pause when they did not find their regular route.

On my next walkthrough, I walked through the pedestrian gate, to which

I and only a few others had the key. On the other side, the graffiti had increased. I only called the graffiti removal squad at the San Jose Police

Department once in four months. Now there were at least three designs, all by

472 different artists it seemed. Can the subaltern speak? Not really, since the writing is on the wrong side of the wall. It can only be read by outsiders and border crossers like me. This seems isomorphic with our American democracy.

The graffiti was mostly stylized names, what are called tags. Were they claims to the outside? Finding desire in the excluded? I’m not sure. But one of the designs was the name Jericho.

473 Permanent Social Rejection

Walls and gates are not about exclusion. Ask any burglar and they’ll tell you that they are only a minor inconvenience. Although only an information burglar, I’ve snuck into many communities by driving in at the right time, by tailgating, by simply walking around with my notes in my backpack. Walls and gates are not about exclusion; rather they set up a “permanent social rejection.”

There is a fear of rejection, a multiplicity of rejections that is inside communitas.

This fear finds an expression in gates, in the daily gestures of acceptance. It seems less about excluding others that about “othering.” That is, establishing ones own territory, physical in its psychic and spatial isomorphism, and denying certain desires as other.

474 HOA v. The Developer

One of the roles the HOA is expected to play in the lives of members is in lobbying their interest with the developer. The HOA can operate as a focal point for the rage many individuals might feel about shabby construction of the largest purchase they have ever made. I’ve never been a homeowner myself. But I can sympathize with the rage of finding out your house is deteriorating around you.

After all, if you buy some of my not so radical argument, the act of inhabiting a domicile, from shopping around to the credit check to stocking your closets and cupboards to the routines which grow more distilled with every comfy moment, is a crucial element in the creation and maintenance of selves. So when a home is poorly built, and bought into with a certain amount of deception, and the signs of decay begin to swarm about, what impact does that have upon the self, upon the psychology of the resident?

The people I talked to with defects in their house spoke about the issue with a real sense of injury. They were hurt. They were angry. They knew what they wanted now. As one woman talked I was reminded of Elaine Scarry’s

(1985) points about the injured body. She suggested that the only time we really pay attention to our bodies is when we feel pain. It is through these relationships of trauma that our bodies are constituted. Perhaps we also create our spatial persona through injury. That the deterioration of the places we dwell sparks a need to work on it, to pay attention to this relationship.

475 What I think is interesting about the HOA in this context, is that it provides a centralized conduit for these sentiments. In order to pursue a grievance with the developer, many homeowners must “hail up” the Association; they fill it with their desire and affect as they summon its centralized authority to amplify their voice. Again, this is Althusser’s (1971) formula of interpellation written in reverse. The State-form gives affect a well channeled outlet. It simplifies. It coordinates. And, it binds residents to the Association in an affective way.

476 Living with Trailer Park Fantasies

A woman in wire rimmed glasses stood up to speak during the homeowner concerns section of her Association’s board meeting. She began by saying, “I admit, I haven’t really read the rules and CC&Rs.” Not many residents did. But this was simply no way to begin a formal complaint to the Board, whose sole reason for being is couched in those documents. Or is it? In a sense, such confessions re-affirm the directing necessity of the Board of Directors. As she made her confession, the president glanced at another Board member with a slightly tilted head and a crooked smile.

“Well,” she continued, “about two weeks ago I got a notice on my windshield. I was parked in guest parking ant the notice said I couldn’t park there without a guest pass. Of course I moved my car right away. And then I called and got a guest pass.” At this point the smile on the president’s face straightened out and dropped sternly as he wiggled slightly in his padded folding chair.

“Even after I got the parking pass, I got a second notice.” I wondered if she was the homeowner I got a call about just a few weeks earlier. One of her neighbors saw her car in the guest parking area and was possessed to pick up the phone and dial her into the Association machines.

Slowly her words began to accelerate. When it seemed she couldn’t go any faster, affective sparks shot out of her body in crazy directions. “Then my car was towed. My neighbor saw what was going on and ran out of her house to

477 stop the tow. Was it the same guilty neighbor? “The tow company workers didn’t even listen to her. She tried to tell them I was a homeowner, that I lived nearby and that I was probably at home. They didn’t care.” She was talking so fast now I could barely stand it. Not only could I not make sense of much of what she was saying, I could neither sit comfortably in my padded chair. It seemed to me that no one else could either. The whole room vibrated with uncomfortable twitching and shifting. “They just laid in wait and didn’t stop. It seems spiteful to me. Totally unreasonable rule enforcement.” The story had an implicit point, a set of order words buried deep between the signs. She wanted reimbursement. And I felt sympathetic and somehow attached to this woman’s frustration.

“Let me stop you there,” a Board member at the edge of the authoritatively arranged panel said as he leaned to place his forearm on the board packet laid out in front of him. The gesture took me by surprise. It was totally out of synch with my own repressed gestures of sympathy. “First off, why are you parking in guest parking?

“Well, I own two cars and I was told not to park on the street and we’ve got notices for parking in our driveway. What are we supposed to do? Park outside the gates and walk home?”

“Frankly, yes.” She puffed as though she had held in a draw from a cigarette too long. “Let me try to explain to you the need for stringent parking rules. First off, there is very limited parking here for owners and guests. If

478 owners park in guest spots, there will be nowhere for guests to park.” The lecturing tone of the Board member made the homeowner seem like a child being scolded. During the lecture, the homeowner raised her eyebrows a few times, leaned back in her metal folding chair and began to look out of the clubhouse window.

The Board member stopped, sensing his words had lost effect, even though the rest of the Board seemed supportive of his effort. On cue with a bad cop persona, the Board member three chairs over hurled words in a loud and aggressive voice. “Look!” The homeowner jerked her face away from the window and immediately linked expressions with the bellowing face behind the row of folding tables. “It’s not o.k. for you to park in guest parking. You can’t just put a guest pass in an owner’s car. You are not a guest are you?” He paused for dramatic effect. The woman in wire rimmed glasses said noting. She looked stunned.

More words were piled onto the intensity by one of the Board members a few seats down the line. She said, “We’ve already decided not to be the kinder gentler Board anymore. We’ve got to get more serious about these infractions before they get out of hand and really disrupt the well being of our community.

Really it is already happening. People keep taking advantage of lax rule enforcement. Particularly parking. It is impossible to park around here.” She sighed. “Self interested behavior,” I thought I heard her say, “is giving our community congestion. And that is getting everyone’s blood boiling, tensions

479 between neighbors are high. People are angry at us. So, we’ve resolved to do something.”

“There is noting we can do for you except to tell you not to continue parking in the guest spots,” the president added. “We are just trying to keep our community from looking like a trailer park.”

“Fine,” is all she said in response.

Much later, after the meeting was over and the casual conversation found its spatiotemporal points of enunciation, the group began talking about the event. “It’s amazing what people think they can get away with.”

“Yeah, and how depressing is it that we had to tell her that what she was doing was wrong?”

“Well,” the other manager chimed in with sensitive and subtle words, “the thing about living in a subdivision is that everyone is isolated in their own place.

Every once in a while we just need a reminder that we live in a community.”

I expected the next sentence or two to be a quote from Durkheim. They weren’t. But I heard them anyway. Durkheim (1973: 81) whispers from his seat behind me: “In a general way, it is easy to understand why individuals will not be submissive except to a collective despotism, for the members of a society can be dominated only by a force which is superior to them, and there is only one which has this quality: that is the group. Any personality, as powerful as it might be, would be as nothing against a whole society; the latter can carry on in spite of it. That is why, as we have seen, the force of authoritarian governments

480 does not come from authorities themselves, but from the very constitution of society.”

But this quote by Durkheim seems out of date. At least that is what

Susan Buck-Morss (1999) brilliantly argues in her piece entitled “Envisioning

Capital.” She argues that the building intensity of capitalism has released us from this sort of organic domination since money exchange sets limits to mutual obligation. The social debt, once infinite and based upon the rights and obligations of being a member, becomes quantified within commodified interpersonal relationships.

A social body is composed of things, a web of commodities circulating in an exchange that connects people. The things we buy pulse along highways and streets like the blood of the social body. We individuals who are in the flow of stuff can’t see our position within this social body and our relationship to other parts. We can’t see the whole terrain. It extends beyond our ability to feel. So,

I “drop my sight at the horizon of self-interest.” My desire is freed from the duty of belonging. Further, “desire expresses itself as a pursuit for things [and] the pleasure of mutual sympathy is replaced by the pleasure of empathy with the commodity.” The lack of community we all feel is in this view a real byproduct of capitalism, brought to our senses in digital streams and slogans and abstracted faces.

Community machines work desperately to plug into a counter-desire to the quantification of the social debt. Think of the advertisements you see

481 alongside the freeways in the Bay Area. Many advertise friendship, neighborhoods, community. All of this and much much more is for sale now now now. With HOA communities, several things happen to the social debt. The quantified debt, in the form of assessments, which is the quantity of money each member must contribute to the collective, is pushed out to infinity. So, membership and attachment to the community is re-quantified and made infinite at the same time. Perhaps it is this infinite debt that helps promote a sense of being bound to the community, helps generate one of those senses of community we are all after.

Since the value of community is measured through property value, the quality of a community is also quantified. However, this quantification in the form of the potential exchange value bestowed upon each lot by its attachment to the community is also pushed out to infinity. Certainly there is no limit to this type of value desire. It is this potentially infinite value that authorizes and gives force to the HOA legalisms and rationalizes measures taken during neighborly squabbles.

As much as the HOA community envisions itself as the revival of communal belonging, of a real social debt, most often the forms of pleasure it offers are those that come from empathy with the commodity. This is why the

HOA community can operate on the model it does. Community is thingified. It is bought and sold. And somewhere down the line it is bought and sold again and again. So, neighborly sympathy, rather than being a real attachment to the

482 social relationships between those that live near each other, is resuscitated in the attachment to this thing, this commodity. Community becomes a collective mode to attaching to property. Other people can sometimes get in the way of enjoyment of the community. There is a clause in every CC&Rs I’ve ever read that defends each member’s right to peaceful enjoyment. How else could this be possible if the enjoyment was not felt in the attachment to the thing rather than the relationships themselves? In fact, as often as this clause is hurled at offensive neighbors, it seems that human interaction frequently becomes an obstacle to enjoying the community.

Society has become a realm of economic interdependence and a machine for fulfilling and carrying to infinity the desire for objects. It thereby intensifies self-interest. Community stands opposed to this. But, in the forms I am exploring here, it actualizes it again at the same time. Community becomes a domain of self-interest in common. It ensures a shared mode of valorization.

What we should all have in common, it seems, are our notions of exchange- value, our portfolio, our material attachments and an ethic of careful aesthetics.

483 Profitable Non-Profit

Common Interest Developments are non-profit communities under definition in the third sentence of the Davis-Sterling Act. What does it mean to be a non-profit community? I think what is being expressed is that the cost of the energy to maintain, to continually reproduce, the community is the same as the money invested in assessments by the residents. A for-profit community would be one where the cost of energy to maintain the community is cheaper than the value materialized in the product. Not-for-profit by any common sense definition must mean that a community invests in itself to only reproduce itself and add no value to the community as a collectively owned commodity.

This is clearly not a realistic objective. A more realistic objective, for all concerned, is to see the investments of human and natural energy into the community commodity adds to the value. In other words, community is ideally a source of profit. This does happen, often. But this surplus value is not called profit; it is called “owner’s equity” as it is embedded in the jointly held commodity itself. The surplus value, in other words, is in each lot or unit of real- property of the individual members.

This is true even of funds earned through interest bearing investments of reserve and operating accounts. Money in excess of the operating and reserve costs of the community is held in trust for each member by the Association.

Each member has a claim to a percentage. At the end of the year, this money is supposed to be returned to the membership by pay-outs or by “buying down”

484 the assessment cost of the next year. However, and this is the tricky part of

HOA finances, the wise Association with owners equity simply recalculates their operating and reserve budgets to re-invest this money into “improvements” in the community which ultimately means profit in the form of property value and potential rent value.

It always struck me as odd that a “stock cooperative” also fits under the definition of a Common Interest Development as laid out in Davis-Sterling. Here it begins to make sense. HOA communities are centers of collective profiteering, of communal experiments in the creation of surplus-value. This is why they are corporations.

These CIDs allow a group to make improvements to common property which individuals could not afford to make on individually owned private property. Through such improvements all involved hope and expect that returns increase. You might say, “Doesn’t this all depend on the whims of the real estate market?” Yes. But even if there is a drop in the cost of real estate in a particular area, the property values of the well improved community will still be higher than the un-improved community.

Real estate is also supposed to be “all about location.” But CIDs challenge that notion by making certain improvements such as walls, gates, security patrols, new and lusher trees, more reliable irrigation systems, new roads, etc. A gate, for example, will increase the property value of the lots within a community, particularly if it is thoughtfully and aesthetically designed. A number

485 of associations I worked with were drawn in by this argument of the sales representative of the engineering company that specialized in security apparatuses.

Time is also an issue in this communal capitalism. It allows an increased speed of investment into the property such that improvements can be made on an accelerated schedule. Then sell and move into a more expensive but unimproved unit and begin again. Of course the above logic only works if the community is enriched by the investment in improvements rather than diminished by it. And here is the crux. Community is about good business sense.

This is reflected in the “business judgment rule.” In August of 1999 the

California Supreme Court in Lamden v. La Jolla Shores Clubdominium

Homeowners’ Association made an important decision that protects the Board of

Directors and gives them increased autonomy. The state’s juridical apparatus basically bestowed authority to judge upon HOA directors. It sets up local centers of intimate authority, of unavoidable confrontation with a state form.

More than this, it also proscribes the criteria by which good community judgment should be made to avoid liability law suits. Good judgment is what is good for business. Board members must now use economic models to conceptualize relations with neighbors and the model of community. The only time Board members should fear law suits is when the Association is about to go bankrupt.

486 At that point it is open season on the Board and the management company, as residents will demand accountability.

What is important about this to me is the way it illuminates the capitalist logic underlying the associated community. Good community based judgment is good business judgment. Being a good neighbor means caring for the common investment. So a shared relationship to property and its value becomes the framework for much neighborly interaction. This is another type of profit based belonging machine, generating sentiments and attachments to the community thing.

It also links up with class and racist aesthetics. “We want our kind of people here,” I’ve heard expressed by many and in many ways. But based upon the above logic, this is a reasonable position, not elitist, not racist, at least in the minds of those possessed by it. Those that share the aesthetic vision of the community and will advance, not detract, from its value are welcome in any community. This is exactly why the “white trash” slogan is brandished so boldly.

It expresses the fears that are inherent in the structure of the community itself.

Also, I’ve heard people talk about “how too many people of color will bring down the value of a neighborhood.” This is yet another form that contemporary racism can take. One homeowner told me, “I’m not racist. Not at all. I like black people. It is other people who look at them and don’t want to live near them. So, I just want to protect my investment.” It seems that HOAs have circled around this issue for as long as they have been in existence.

487 “A Sense of Community”

“… it is sort of like a give and take,” the man with a yellow collared shirt and red glowing cheeks said.

“In what way,” I responded, hoping to squeeze some brilliant gem out of a tired cliché.

“Well, you have to give to the community, the neighborhood. Stuff like … well … you pay dues and you just can’t do whatever you want to, with your yard for example or the color of your house.” He stalled.

“And what is the take?”

“Oh, yeah,” then he paused and breathed in dramatically as he looked out over the shingled roofs. Then he spoke softly, “a sense of community. A feeling of belonging.” Then it was my turn to sigh.

To tell the truth, I got irritated when I heard this vague idea expressed yet again. “Another useless interview,” I thought to myself, “I suck at this!”

Then I turned the page in my notebook hoping to be caught by that idea that would sell my whole project.

Later, much later, while flipping through my notes, I realized that my take on this and my whole project had changed. I was no longer looking for that unifying idea, the one that would tie it all together and make it nice and tight.

Rather, I had become committed to multiplicity and vagueness. Not vagueness in the sense of being hasty and sloppy. But the sort of vagueness that is hard at work in some sort of authentic experience. Or, as Brian Massumi (2002) talks

488 about, it’s the kind of vagueness that comes as potential unfolds in the present, becomes actualized.

As I reflect back upon my interviews, community takes on a definite fuzziness. When some people are asked to define community, they can channel some statements from beyond to which their thought is tethered. But when they begin to talk about their community, their experience of community, most people falter. That’s because it is happening in each moment, coming to life in the conversation itself. It can only be felt, sensed, as we participate in it, are moved and affected by it. Then we can reflect upon it, if it has not dissipated first.

489 Invasion of the Solicitors

A homeowner walked into a meeting well after the call to order.

Homeowners had been voicing concerns for about fifteen minutes. The Board seemed uncomfortable. They had other business to attend to after the homeowners depart and wanted to get on with it. Hinting at this desire to escape behind closed doors the President said, “We need to get this meeting moving so we aren’t here all night.” Still, democratic pretense could not be usurped quite that easily, so she was possessed to say, “Quickly, are there any other homeowner concerns?”

Of course the gentleman who came in late stood up and said “yes.” He gave his address with a voice you would expect from someone who is proud to offer their papers to an inquisitor. Giving your address before you speak at a board meeting just seems like the right thing to do. It enacts a code which creates the appropriate enunciative space.

He continued, “Can we get some no soliciting signs put up at our entrance?”

The Board President looked down the standard set apart and authoritative panel both directions. However, no one showed any interest in fielding this question. So she began, “You must be new, huh?”

“I moved in two years ago last September,” the homeowner responded with a puzzled look.

490 “If you were paying attention to what’s been going on around here you’d know we’ve already dealt with this issue.” The condemnation stirred the homeowner. “Just this year we addressed this exact issue,” she repeated, “with the whole membership. We even sent out ballots and took a vote on it. You must’ve got one.”

No answer would have backed the homeowner out of the embarrassing position he had slipped into, so he gave none.

“Most people didn’t want to clutter up our entrance with more signs, or something like that. Anyway, they voted no,” and in her choice of words and tone gave the impression of her disagreement with the decision.

The painful experience of invasive solicitors swelled up in the room.

Everyone has dealt with this. Because of that the room spoke, “it’s just that the solicitors are so damn pushy.”

The homeowner felt validated and picked up his fumbled issue again.

“Yeah. And they are here so often.”

“I know,” the Board President responded in a frustrated voice that carried the subtext of “what the hell do you want me to do about it?”

The homeowner just pushed right through the attempted blockage by the

Board with an impassioned story. “Last weekend I saw this big van drive right up to the entrance. I watched and wondered what they were doing. They sat there for a while and then the door opened and dropped those people off. You know... the ones who push their damn magazines on you.”

491 The invading hordes of magazine pushers, I found out later, were a group of young mostly black students trying to raise money to build a community center somewhere on the Other side of the East Bay hills just over the 580 corridor. The way people spoke made it seem like an organized invasion, like a military operation, like they should up the alert level to red due to the constant pressure from this terrorist cell.

“Why can’t they get help from their own,” the homeowner continued, and seemed to fan out his shoulders and straighten his spine as the nods circled around the meeting room. “We have our own kids to take care of.”

Communities, he was clearly saying, should fund raise within, not between.

“Yeah,” another voice careened off the walls from the rear of the room,

“they really have no business coming out here.” They were also at fault, it seems, for not following the proscribed routes of racialized movement.

In this story is the nightmare potential of the increasing turn toward community and local level organizations.

492 Cost of Belonging

At many exclusive country club communities, golf, tennis, swim and social memberships are available to non-residents and residents alike. Exclusivity is maintained by cost. Believe me, the memberships are pricey. Membership is clearly designed for only those at the highest income levels, only for the

“successful.” This, in turn, is attached to a particular mode of subjectivation, particular aesthetics, sense of responsibility, forms of corporeality, patterns of speech, and all that. Cost ensures “our kind of people.” People told me this explicitly. It is the reason that privileges of insiders can be extended to a special few beyond the perimeter walls. Economic access control is a comforting device whereby bodies of resemblance will only be included. Price becomes a belonging machine.

Conflicts still arise. Homeowners, for example, are upset about people driving fast through the community. I didn’t do a survey of speeders or anything, but I bet that the speeders were homeowners as well as the non- resident members. Still, the consensus from the residents was that the non- residents were the speeders. They immediately blame the golf club members since they are the only ones without a clear interest in community safety. Sure, it is easy to understand. Golfers are pumped full of anticipation to feel the rush of smacking that little dimpled ball that they tend to be heavy footed. To combat this they want to begin issuing moving violations in the community.

493 They want to establish a new form of illegality to further leverage conduct in their community. Everyone’s license plate numbers were already on file.

Now that I think about it, such policing measures are not unlike the measures I take to keep myself from doing things. Like, if I’m watching movies too much instead of working on my dissertation project, one part of my persona will wrap some cord around the movie closet handles and tie a huge gallywampus of a knot. Then I am discouraged from acting in a certain way. To do this, however, I must separate the two parts of myself so that one can act upon the other. It is a kind of disjunctive synthesis (Deleuze and Guattari 1988).

In the case of the self policing community, the disjunctive synthesis occurs along the conceptual and affective lines of belonging and degrees of membership. It is more than simply an issue of generating an other, and through the other sedimenting the self. It is also a story of acting upon the self by acting upon an other.

I also heard several complaints that the development company’s contractors are parking their vehicles on both sides of the streets, clogging traffic, like arthrosclerosis leading to arterial sclerosis. These problems, I thought to myself, might only be significant in terms of its function to establish a distinction and unity of membership. In the context of the previous statements, perhaps these complaints can also be seen as the way a community comes to see its own super-organic body.

494 The Productive Power of Belonging

Homes in this community ranged from one to three million dollars. Wow!

The few residents I spoke with were all upper level managers in the Bay Area chapters of some of America’s most successful companies. They have to be in order to afford the mortgage. Their corporate managerial positions became evident during the meeting when discussions about community problems arose.

It seems they have a problem with vandalism. In a rather reflective moment, one voice from the audience bounced off the vaulted ceiling, “Come on now.

You know that it’s our kids doing the vandalism. That’s just the way it is with some young people.” Most in attendance visually agreed with this statement, even though they hated the thought. Strategies for addressing the problem came next. It was refreshing not to hear draconian suggestions about punishment and fines levied upon the families. They knew that rebellious kids would not react favorably to such measures. Instead they began talking about putting more money into the swim team and sports facilities. A board member then got up and gave a short presentation on the status of the teen center currently in construction. There will be billiards tournaments, dances, other social functions. Instead of laws and prohibitions strictly enforced this community was attempting to shape the desire of their children by drawing them into more acceptable pursuits. It was more than just a way to keep them busy.

It was more than a way to distract the easily distracted youth. This seems similar to offering employee gyms to reduce health care costs or giving 401k

495 matching to boost morale. A high level manager at one of many new corporations would have experience in such dealings. It is easier to avoid a problem by strumming desire than attempting to extinguish it. Foucault would probably nod his head if he were there at this board meeting. So I nodded mine for him. What we all recognized is that power is about being productive rather than repressive. So, this community sought to produce desire and the points at which that desire could be attached to community events. Drawing young bodies into the community events is a way to regularize desire and conduct.

Community, we already knew, is a prime site of enculturation. What we know now is that cultural planning in local communities is a key site for the generation of new types of citizens.

Things were quite different at a community on the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum in San Jose I spent some time at just a few days earlier.

They had a vandalism problem also. However, their response was to request more police presence from the City of San Jose, even though the police were swarming around the risky community already. They also increased the security patrol.

This contrast makes me think about how different populations are handled in particular ways. Do we become used to being handled in particular ways? So when it comes to problems in our own communities, we employ isomorphic functions to handle our own problems. Or, is it just that the lower class communities can’t afford their own teen centers? I don’t know, but security

496 patrol is quite expensive. Community based governance exacerbates the inequality of cultural resources, intensifies the schisms in subjectivation, and feeds back to make us feel wicked good about our selves and communities in the first place.

497 Possession

At the annual meeting the management company sent five employees.

This was our biggest account. The affluence of the community and the amazing number of units, there were over six hundred, made for a generous contract.

The five of us were standing in the clubhouse parking lot, of course well before the meeting was to start. We were told to show up at 6 pm to set up for the meeting which was scheduled to start at 7pm. I thought there would be more than enough time, but in the relay from boss to workers someone, maybe everyone, realized the intensity of the boss’s desire to satisfy these clients and drove to the clubhouse earlier than required. I was told to show up at 5:15, the earliest possible time I could get there without having to leave work early. Our hurry up and wait arrangement displayed the utmost servitude, I thought to myself. There was nothing to do. I was told by several co-workers not to go get a drink at the bar. I had no idea there was even such a place nearby. Of course

I went almost immediately. “Sorry, I can only serve members,” the bartender said to me with either a look of indifference or of deep disdain for his own channeled elitism.

The development was overwhelming. It was meant to be so. I have never seen its equal, even at the other prestigious communities of the Bay Area.

The building sat atop a bluff, overlooking the housing units below, which were a few hundred thousand dollars cheaper than the ones higher on the hills. Those units all had huge widows in the front that peered like lidless eyes across the

498 ravine and upon the prominent clubhouse. The castle in the middle of the walled town was also surrounded by a golf course, whose flowing mats made the common building seem to erupt into my helpless vision. Three stories shot from the undulating green and stretched toward the heavens with a tiled roof.

Columns lined the front and reached at least forty feet toward an expansive overhang. To say they dramatized the entrance would be an understatement.

The stairway, arched with broad platforms for your feet to fall, led to an excessive pair of wooden doors. By excessive I mean they were big enough to let two elephants in side by side. And I mean they had a surplus of affect which for me was belittling, which seemed energizing. I read that in the bounce of the

Board President’s gait and embrace of its huge woven iron handle. Once the door swung open, and it only seemed to do so because it wanted to, I stepped through into an overwhelmingly open lobby, with sunbeams striking my head and the leaves of the row of planted palm trees from the strips of glass on the ceiling. I was pulled through layers of the lobby toward a whole wall of glass doors which invited me onto a semi-circular stone deck with curved pillars beneath the hand rail. Leaning against the rail I could view the executive golf course and watch autos move along the main road that snakes from the entrance right past the community center complex. I retraced my route, finding myself lost in several backstage areas of this temple to service, and had to excuse myself in Spanish as I bumped into a young man exiting from swinging kitchen doors and then later as I peeked my head into the laundry room.

499 Eventually I found the group I was supposed to be with. And as I stood there with them, the whole pressure of the place came down on me. I felt like it pressed on my rib cage like and I emitted a little puff or snort. One of my coworkers heard me and gave a look like she was interested. I said half of what was on my mind. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many mansions like this in one place. And, I can’t believe this is a community center. I’ve only seen a few buildings like this in my life.” To my surprise she leaned toward me and whispered strongly, “I hate rich people.” Now maybe you can interpret both of our reactions as based in jealousy. These residents are clearly at the pinnacle of consumptive prowess, of near absolute freedom of mobility. Many are at the top of their own corporate hierarchy, as well as our general social hierarchy, which in many ways requires a performed aura of agency and bloated importance.

There is a more palpable frustration at work here. Standing in this place, out of place as it were, the alienation was intense, polarized by the servant/master relationship we had all sold ourselves into and were now playing out with such exaggerated roles. It must have been intense for this 39 year old secretary. It certainly was for me. She served a manager and many communities five days a week in order afford life for herself and her daughter in the nearly unaffordable bay area. At least she liked the manager. She could know her, a knowing which diffuses some of the alienation of servitude. I liked the manager also. But to have to serve these rich, and as she told me several times that evening, unappreciative masters was torture. She was purchased, her

500 daily energy spent in service to them. All because they had money and she did not. This impersonal purchasing of service seemed to intensify the affect of the servant subjectivity we were all drawn into.

However, my friend was only agitated for about 45 minutes while we were all diligently setting up for the meeting. Near the beginning of the actual meeting she seemed to relax a bit. She was moved by the generosity reported in the charity committee report. She turned to me and said, “Ooohh, that is so sweet” and I could read her facial expression and posture smooth over as she let herself be drawn in by such kindness. I felt a desire surge in me also, a desire to give meaning to my own servitude. “These are good people,” I thought to myself, “they deserve your …”

“Shut the hell up you fascist!” I then yelled at myself with more self loathing than I typically muster. Unlike my friend, I was unable to make the conversion into a willing investment as a servant of this benevolent community.

I was too angry. I read, encountered, was transformed by too much social criticism in graduate school to travel that path.

After about five minutes from my friend’s conversion to a willing investment, and after the newsletter report, a board member stood up awkwardly and compulsively. He shot up almost throwing himself off balance.

He looked to his left then down from his perched panel into the scattered audience. Affect shot from his pores like magnificent rays and washed over the expansive meeting area. Even the current speaker deferred the floor to this

501 gentle eruption. Finally he said in a nervous shout, “I am proud to a part of this community.” The sincere sentiment arced from point to point in the room.

People began to look at each other. No one looked at me. After the words jumped from his mouth applause and cheers swept over the vast chamber.

The whole performance reminded me of a Pentecostal church service I had the pleasure to attend a few years ago in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. When the lyrical intensity bubbled up, people began “catching the spirit” all around me.

One of the church regulars behind me actually pushed me out to the isle, up to the front banister where other possessed bodies were being thrown loudly about.

He began shaking me from the waist. I just went along with it, not wanting to offend the Holy Ghost or anything. Well, that’s not really it, since I’m not really haunted by the Holy Ghost. Who I didn’t want to offend were the group of people undoubtedly focused on my white foreign body.

Back to the annual meeting, the board member’s eruption felt like a similar kind of possession, like catching the community spirit. My companion and the whole room were swept away in this spirit of belonging. Even those of us who didn’t belong started wishing we did. Once again I felt the pressure to catch the spirit in some sort of drama of verification from an objective outsider.

I think we were all caught up in a sort of autopoesis, a community organizing itself around generosity and involvement. But it was quickly lassoed back to the legitimization of wealth and the righteousness of the successful.

502 Both performances were a type of possession. Possession, I think, is an interesting model to think about postie theories of identity. Bodies become snatched up in processes of identification, acting well beyond their flesh and subjective agency, so our identities are like spirits which we prepare ourselves to catch. Massumi calls this a collective individuation. It is a way to think about how we are possessed by ourselves. Community is one vector.

Both performances seemed to be about belonging as much as anything else. Sure, there is clearly a spiritual joy and release in being caught, but it also seems to work on a group level. In these events, community is dramatized, is performed, and becomes a felt presence in people’s lives. In Tarrying With the

Negative, Slavoj Zizek (Zizek 1993: 201) says “the element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relationship toward a

Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated.” By this formulation, community is a shared mode of enjoyment. But what is this mode of enjoyment? Many of the stories I have fabulated for you here attempt to expose some of this enjoyment, the mechanisms by which the affective strum can be plugged into the politics of belonging. In this case the enjoyment is surely tied to the good feelings that come from acting out the collective fantasy of philanthropy. It must also be tied to the collectively owned sites of pleasure which each member has contributed dearly towards. It is also embedded in the very performance of enjoyment itself.

Wherever you locate this enjoyment, it must also be grounded in a set of

503 practices, rituals, which become the experiential territory by which collective pleasure can emerge. In all of my research I have come to the conclusion that the primary means of accomplishing this shared enjoyment is through the enjoyment of property and its value. Remember that most of our contemporary modes of subjectivation (Guattari 1995) are locked into modes of desire as pursuit for things in the form of commodities (Zizek 1993; Buck-Morss 1999;

Brennan 2000). The community now becomes the thing itself, the aggregate property. Community becomes its own impossible force, both the cause and the effect. Perhaps this is one reason why people have such a hard time explaining community except in vague statements like “it’s just a feeling you get.”

504 Company and Community

One day out of the blue, Frankie quits. Because he is simply an admin, one who was regarded as less efficient as some others, no one seems to miss him. I ask several people and I get the same reaction. I liked Frankie.

This ability to not miss him, to just move on, makes me think of the corporation as a machine set up to minimize "human error". Especially when one considers turn over. Where does this phrase come from? Is it a military metaphor of turning over a post? In any case, it draws attention to the way bodies are often quite interchangeable with only slight modifications necessary.

There are all sorts of mechanisms in place so that new people only have to learn certain procedures and are ready to do the work themselves. Training is a kind of becoming machine, establishing the form of habit. After you have been doing certain tasks for a while, they become habitual and you begin to feel like a machine as one co worker expressed to me. I know the feeling well. In a corporate machine, positions occupy people, they are more stable, and are more respected.

Tami put her notice in via e-mail today. At least that is what she told me she was going to do as we departed at the end of lunch. She seemed determined and felt that she was on her way out anyway. Numerous times Tami had been "written up" for "disciplinary" problems. She talked too much with the customer service representative across the hall. She didn’t get work done on schedule. She had an uncooperative attitude. But I suspect that one of the

505 main reasons she wants to leave, is perhaps being harassed into leaving, has to do with her repeated complaints about the company Christmas party. The office is spending five thousand dollars on the party, and it seems they are doing so in lieu of Christmas bonuses. The admins and clerical workers I talked to would prefer to just have the bonus and forget the party. Especially since many of them have trouble getting by on what they get paid.

The office works hard to promote a sense of community, a sense of belonging. It is truly a diffuse technology. But it is even more interesting when you have a struggling office community in a company that is in the "business of community". Interestingly, the strategies overlap. In both cases, community is a management tool. The office uses lunches, meetings, social committee meetings, pumpkin carving contests, costume contests, employee of the quarter and year contests. They also employ 401k matching strategies that make workers feel it is best for them to make the company strong (“for the good of the group”).

Modern corporations employ various strategies to encourage individuals to identify with the company and therefore a dedication to the goals of the company. This is not control (Deleuze 1992). The effectiveness of theses strategies is ambiguous. Some employees bite. They come to love the office and think of it as a family (family and community relationship). Some feel other sorts of pressures, like Frankie and Tami above, the pressures to labor. They realize these strategies are there to placate them, to play to their sense of

506 belonging as an exploitation tool. I think this raises an interesting question about many of the “new school” corporations out there (i.e. Whole Foods and

Apple come to mind). Many feel that these companies are truly a new arrangement, dedicated to the well being of their employees. I agree that they are a new arrangement, but to what extent are they concerned with employee well being and feelings of equality so that a sense of belonging and commitment can become capitalistic tools?

507 401k

An investment expert gave a presentation to the employees one afternoon. I listened to him talk about a whole world of potential conduct which

I had been previously unconsciously avoiding. Investments, mutual funds, company matching, 401k, my head was dizzy with fiscal fuzziness. At one point

I thought to myself, and wrote down on one of the handouts, “are 401k plans taking the place of social security to provide for the costs of living after retirement?” It seems clear now that we are. Media foghorns are sounding in all directions that social security is no security at all. The same horn resonates in conversations with family and friends. Questions about how your mutual funds are doing take on a whole new intensity. Our middle-class selves live afraid of a possible fall (Ehrenreich 1989). We remind each other, just as the investment specialist is doing now, that responsible individuals must secure their own future.

Luckily our more intimate associations are there to lend assistance. The great corporation has accomplished a power takeover of the great society. The insecurity of the social (Rose 1996), the withering of civil society (Hardt and

Negri 1994), creates space for the corporate form to step in and gain a tighter grip on our sentiments. As 401ks are only available through corporations, they are a perfect tool to deterritorialize the future into individual courses and at the same time to reterritorialize around new and profitable points of belonging.

Of the companies I have worked for, several of them helped us workers prepare for our golden years by offering 401k matching. This is a common

508 corporate practice. It works well as a kind of community building strategy, creating visions that are good for the company is good for the employee. This community, the feeling one gets from being a part of it, is real. It is built in the graphs and columns of investment reports. It is in the overheads of company performance laid next to charts of company contribution to the 401k plans. It is felt in the comfort of a perceived comfortable future. As I mentioned, one of the tricks corporate agents did was to make the percentage of matching directly related to the company’s profit for that fiscal year. What they hoped to get out of this was increased efficiency through the desire for increased investments.

Belonging, a sense that “we are all in this together,” creates a qualitatively and quantitatively more desirable type of labor-power. It is an ingenious technique to draw desire and apprehension into fixed points of attachment. 401k plans thereby intensify our attachment and reliance upon corporations and seem to give these entities a sort of transcendent identity. This is the corporate mode of the politics of belonging. The people I worked with seemed delighted by such a prospect and considered it a great humanitarian effort by the company owners.

Those employees who opted not to enroll in 401k plans disappeared one after the other.

401ks are invested in mutual funds and other stock market investments.

They are a gamble. Everyone seemed to forget that. All the way until the stock market slouch of 2000 and 2001 it seemed like a sure win option, since everyone was striking gold in the never ending peaks of the stock market. But really what

509 sort of compensation is it when you spend your life laboring and then have to pay and gamble for your future security? In the U.S. we wouldn’t have it any other way.

After the investment meeting I remarked to a group of admins and bookkeepers, “so, anyone feel like going to Vegas?” I thought I was making a funny and clever connection between two seemingly remote yet resonant cultural beacons. To my chagrin, one of my co-workers responded, “yeah, Al and I are going this weekend!” I looked at Al and was slapped by the excitement and the “were-going-to-strike-it-rich” hopefulness beaming from his countenance.

The last job I had, the boss and I became quite friendly. He was an engaging spirit, fearing no encounter, and I loved traveling with him to witness the world stirred up in his wake. He said he was a descendent of European gypsies; his mother came to Cali from the old world not long ago. They gambled on the mystique of their gypsy belonging and made a fortune telling fortunes. I became overwhelmed when I tried to map the distribution of his family’s fortune telling empire in the Sonoma and Marin County areas.

One afternoon he invited me and a co-worker, a recently reacquainted childhood friend, to go gambling in Reno with him. I was strangely compelled to go, despite my aversion to such places. John just drew people out like that. We had talked about gambling before and I knew he gambled at the local card houses as often as he could slip away. His whole life seemed played in the

510 future. When we got to Reno he handed my friend and I two hundred dollars each and said, “Go have some fun!” I tucked the money in my wallet, not to emerge until the next day when I took a date to the movies, and just watched

John for the rest of the night. The pit boss behind one of the tables spoke in a pleasantly loud voice, “welcome back John,” and with a gesture slid him a cargo of gambling chips. He went through the chips faster than I could have imagined.

Then asked for another maker. Then another. And another.

Probability is a type of fetishized object. Through various inscription devices, probability and chance are brought into existence by the end of the 19th century. As Ian Hacking (Hacking 1991: 1985) says: “where in 1800 chance had been noting real, at the end of the century it was something real precisely because one had found the form of laws that were given to govern chance.”

Through these inscription devices, probability, chance and risk become social facts; they became “thingified.” Probability becomes a thing which can be known and manipulated through other objects, fetish objects. The attempt to

‘thingify’ and ‘entify’ chance so that it can be managed is what Ian Hacking

(1990) calls The Taming of Chance. And like the State which was made visible and tactile through the police, standard ticket forms, uniforms, ritualized language, and other fetishized objects, probability and chance become

‘materialized by inscription’ (232) into almost any and every object, drawing us into a relationship with it. Now any event could instantly be objectified through the logic and procedures of calculating chance.

511 The fetishiization of chance, risk and probability is a crucial technology within modern government and the State (Castel 1991; Defert 1991; Ewald

1991; Hacking 1991). In a regime of welfarism or social government, the

‘taming of chance’ was conducted within the guarded bureaucratic spaces of expertise. The State could act to manipulate chances and risks to promote the highest probability of happiness. Or, at least it could insulate citizens from the occasionally devastating chance blow. Here the State drew upon the existence of “chance’ and ‘probability’ to authorize its governing programs.

In the 60s the bureaucratic logics of expert decision making come under attack. The State’s attempts to manage risks and tame chance were argued to have been unsuccessful and in many cases have exacerbated our risks. The responsibility of the management of risk and taming of chance becomes thrown back onto the individual citizen. As a citizen, one must recognize their chances and with the help of privatized experts learn how to manipulate them. We therefore see the boom of private insurancial technologies as a means to manage risks. They in fact generate them. We must manage our chances of heart disease by drinking one glass of red wine everyday with that one aspirin as we sit down to eat our red meat-less meals and wake up early every morning to jog and focus all day long on reducing our stress levels. We must extend our life expectancies by doing all the above plus making sure we buy diet coke instead of regular and make sure we see a doctor regularly. We must play the stock market and hope our calculations are good enough to open up a broad

512 parachute to bring us comfortably into the earth as our days go down in the west. As well as we must manage our chances of being victims of crime by purchasing the club, mace, home security systems, car alarms, and gated communities. But these prophylactic tactics can only increase the probability of a healthy crime free life, and we are always in search of others of the one that will catapult us into “the sure thing.” This is why chance is supremely commodifiable. Like Virilio’s speed, there is no end to the chance taming technologies we can upgrade to.

Our lives have become games of chance. This is what came to my mind when I surged with jealousy and disdain in the face of my co-worker’s Vegas trip. In his fabulous article entitled “Insurance and Risk,” Francois Ewald (1991) says: “With insurance, gaming becomes the symbol of the world.”

Thinking after Ewald’s statement, Las Vegas all of a sudden becomes the symbol of neoliberal America. It seems clear to me that there is more going on with a gaming fetish than popular understandings seem to allow. Las Vegas is not just a hell of money fetishism, fatalism, and the release valve for the pressures of modern life. The very act of gaming seems to mimic, to resonate, with the technologies of chance which enable individuals to realize that our selves are subject to chance. We have come to recognize our lives as “games of chance” and perhaps find ourselves at home in casinos. If nothing else, houses of gambling are sites for the re-generation of risk subjects, another way we come to recognize ourselves as at risk and in the clutches of chance.

513 Chance is sublime. It is gigantic. But its objectification into probability makes the future manageable (Stewart 1993). Perhaps this is a process of miniaturization, a process by which the potential recklessness and disorder can be tamed and brought to reside in the logic of probability. In particular, insuriantial technologies enact this drama of an insecure future.

Similarly, gambling is the miniaturization of chance. Gambling may be one technical practice for the folding (Deleuze 1988) of probability into selves. It may be a meditation on destiny, the search for the ‘truth’ of the law which can be found hidden under the surface of any event. Consider Sting’s image of a gambler in the song “Shape of My Heart:”

He deals the cards as a meditation And those he plays never suspects He doesn’t play for the money he winds He doesn’t play for respect He deals the cards to find the answer The sacred geometry of chance The hidden law of a probable outcome The numbers lead a dance The art of gambling, which must be mapped onto almost every other significant aspect of our lives, is re-generating reality as governed by probability and us as subject to this reality.

Further, they are probabilities we must know and manipulate in order to be successful gamblers—which also means successful neoliberal citizens.

Gambling may be an attempt to empower oneself, to control chance. Like many spheres of our lives, we must know the probabilities of certain events and

514 manipulate them so that we can decrease risks and increase probability of happiness. And sometimes we may simply have to take risks.

This is perhaps why Las Vegas and family values can come together. Like everything else, managing a family is a matter of managing an unstable future.

Further, knowing the rates of divorce and successful marriages, knowing that marriage today is a gamble, of course so many people get married in Vegas. I did. I got lucky.

But also, we lose. When we sit down at the slot-machines, or the blackjack table, and try to take chance into our own hands, we lose. Perhaps here we learn that chance is too gigantic to miniaturize or tame on our own.

Losing re-instills the notion that you are doomed if you let yourself crash upon the waves of chance for too long. Learning good management skills is recognizing the need to manage chance through private insurance technologies—technologies which of course like up with the flows of capital and the operation of government.

Probability is thus a fetishized object. But it is also one which generates fetish objectifications in the materiality of the deck of cards, the slot machine, the roulette wheel, property value print outs, stock market performance reports, investment portfolios, etc. It is through these objects that our lives become further drawn into and under the spell of probability and personalized responsibility.

515 Company Towns

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault makes the point that the transformation to a modern disciplinary society does not take place in the heads of humanitarian planners, politicians or philosophers. Rather, it takes place in ascending steps from the need to redesign practical and local means of shaping peoples conduct, for example, in the prisons and schools. I would like to offer something similar about the transformation to a society of control (Deleuze 1992) or advanced liberal democracy (Rose 1993). Really, what I want to talk about is the way community has turned up as a crucial site of government. It did not emerge in the visions of communitarian politicians, planners and philosophers either.

Rather, it emerged between the sweat and gears on a factory floor. Let me explain.

Community planning, before it was called this, was thrown together in the erection of company towns. The history of company towns in the United States is traced quite well in Margaret Crawford’s (1995) book Building the

Workingman's Paradise. In this book, she makes it clear that the idea of the company town emerges as a means to harness a desire for belonging into the machinics of capitalist surplus extraction. With the fear of strikes, industrialists began their own campaign of corporate welfare by designing hospitals, showers, lockers, recreation rooms, libraries, profit-sharing, and other “improving” organizations into the productive apparatus itself. This is something new. We’ve all seen the “is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks” poster. It is similarly a type

516 of contemplation on working conditions which seems to emerge around the same time. The posters and amenities do not seem to me to represent a turn toward a humanitarian fix good hearted capitalists might get. Rather, it is a good way to oversee investment in variable capital. Capitalist valorization supercedes humanitarian values once again.

These were early experiments in shaping worker’s desire as a territory of management. Offering low cost housing, with a taut string of course, tied into this as well. Interestingly, these early company towns focused on aesthetics.

Pullman, an industrialist who pioneered the American business of company towns, constantly asserted “his faith in the educational influences of beauty and beautiful and harmonious surroundings” (38). The subjectifying aspects of these seductive architectures dovetailed nicely with the commercial value of beauty.

Themes were designed into the materiality of these communities. Why did the early designers of company towns key in on aesthetics? They seemed to understand the potential of seductive architecture, the capacity to strum and direct desire. And this is our legacy. Landscaping took off now that it had a whole new collective scale to work with. Shaping the earth according to a master plan was therefore born, or at least matured, in this capitalistic desiring machine which hoped to lure human energy willingly into the clutches of the vampire.

There was a problem with these early towns, it seemed, since strikes were not avoided. And after all, this was the primary objective, to pacify workers into

517 docile objects for energy extraction, like batteries. Even though many considered the early experiments in corporate community planning to be failures, the principles were still considered sound. What was wrong, Crawford exposes, was the concentration of community control in the person of the owner. It smacked of a patronizing paternalism. It hinted at supreme aspirations. From a

Foucauldian perspective, perhaps it was also an inefficient means of conducting conduct. Foucault made parallel points in his description of the shift from sovereignty to discipline.

In the early 20th century a new model of company towns emerged from the same desires to tap into the human desire for belonging. But this time they

“abandoned earlier models of paternalism in favor of modernized bureaucratic methods” (42). These new towns must have started working right. Well, at least they became popular. In 1939 there were almost five times as many company towns as there were in 1905. This shift to modern bureaucratic methods of community control makes me think of Weber’s thesis of the spread of bureaucratic rationality. Also, I think of Kafka’s grim picture of what that means. What these communities did different was to rely upon professionals or experts to design them. These experts became a buffer between labor and capitalist. This, it seems to me, is the context for the emergence of the community planner.

Because of these early experiments in corporate communities, the

American progressive movement was diverted in a distinct direction. They

518 turned away from social Darwinist notions and collective social responsibility.

Instead, their vision of social harmony rested on a new sense of identification and responsibility between employer and employee. Loyalty was the ticket to improved industrial conditions. Welfare capitalism became manifest in the machinery of industrial production, by creating company homes and a company as a home away from home. They even went as far as to produce company newsletters and magazines, to support company sports teams, to increase morale. Is this one of the reasons why corporations have nestled more snugly into American minds? Is this story about company towns one that we are all still living out? Is it a condition of our condition?

In Marx’s terms these considerations can be seen as tools for restoring vital energy or labor power of employed bodies. The costs of these restoration devices ultimately are less than the returns companies get in exchanging the commodities which are the materialization of this vital energy in the product.

The quality of energy is also an issue here. For more generous means of restoration creates a livelier work force, more lively and efficient expenditures of energy in employed bodies. Voluntary portability of labor power is crucial in surplus value extraction (Brennan 2000: 96). Voluntary modifies the extent of energy extracted, moving it more towards the potential. So, when people talk about corporate welfare, they are choosing to focus on only one part of this dance. Welfare is a by-product of a production strategy.

519 In these company towns, there were also no pubs, coffee houses, places to gather and discuss community and factory issues. The “public sphere” was designed out of the landscape. Community is instead encouraged to foster around more productive nodal points. Groups are supposed to form about specific goals like sports teams and competition with other towns, clearly resonating with broader mechanisms of profit creation. Like in Ray Bradbury’s

(1996) Farenheit 451, bodies are kept active and through their activity kept passive in the face of an oppressive social machinery.

Now, we have community corporations that work on this “welfare capitalism” model, which so many liberal minded individuals are drawn towards as fixed points to sacrifice their lives upon in a pursuit of endless production for the sake of production. And, we have our corporate communities which more and more of us are finding ourselves inhabiting. Although separate from the sites of capitalist production, they provide a specific corporate logic to the way recuperate for the endless daily grind. All of the elements of the controlled community are here, if nascent, in the company town. Landscaping slightly varied façades, community services, recreational facilities, strict control on use of the common area, seem like direct relatives of this technology.

Here is the rub, what I am really on about. In this section I hope that the connection between community and corporatism in the United States has grown even more entwined in your mind. I think this historical narrative is written in the ways we now think and enact community. Community, in many ways, is

520 about shaping the desires of workers. Our desires become a territory of management. And this works well beyond ideology, or, as Zizek might say, it is a kind of ideology given material sincerity. It therefore shows how cultural policy more generally emerges on the factory floor. And it is from this ascending constellation of materials and technologies that the community building industry gets its inspiration.

Also, perhaps because these companies develop these autonomous zones of governance, it becomes a factor in the reconceptualization of the role of the

State, communitarianism and the public management potential of community based organizations. From another angle, this also may be a factor in the emergence of new visions of capitalism. It creates a vision that the world can function well with capitalism at the reigns. It is a kind and gently capitalism, a socially sensitive capitalism, where surplus is linked to treating people well. A new capitalist ethic is born. So people get the idea that capitalism can work well as its own social machine. It is not long after the company town experiments that neoliberalism takes its well defined and monstrous form.

521 Communitarianism

Communitarianism is right on as far as it identifies a sort of degradation in the fabric of contemporary social solidarity and in the modes of psychical life.

Creative energy faces a similar threat as our contaminated environment. I think these “degradations” are the effects of capitalism. Brennan and Buck-Morss would certainly agree.

The next step communitarians take, also a good one, is to demand a re- invention of these threatened domains, a re-foundation of politics as a change in mentality and as an art of living in society. There are similarities here to

Guattari’s ethics of autopoesis. I also see a connection to Foucault’s ethics of an art of the self. That is, once I redefine culture as training, then the positive project of meta-culture is to collectively shape our ways of training bodies in open, creative ways with optimum autonomy.

Perhaps the celebration of community and the creative potential of cultural policy is a good idea also. It’s just that something goes awry. I think what happens is that community and cultural policy have been in the works for a long time, and are perhaps tied to the degrading forces in the first place.

I am suggesting that community, in America anyway, has for at least the past hundred years been the territory of fascist corporatism. Culture becomes a territory of management, a way to grease the flighty desires of various populations and cram them between the productive and reproductive gears.

522 Communitarianism, then, attaches unwittingly to this social machinery.

HOAs are touted as a revitalization of American community and stable systems of valuation. But I think they are part of the process which overcodes all local systems of valuation and bends them toward the devouring desire for exchange value. “Capital,” Felix Guattari (1995: 27) says, “smashes all other modes of valorization.” This mode of valorization which we cannot help but fold into our most precious places, conducts a crucial collective existential territory between us all. It is based upon the primacy of economic and monetary semiotics and corresponds to a sort of general implosion of all existential territories (Guattari

1995: 55). So, the problem with communitarianism isn’t communitarianism proper; the problem is capitalist expansion into the crevices of social and psychic life. That is, capitalist values overcode the value of community, making it a dead object to be bought and sold, maintained and enforced. Community, in the HOA model anyway, fits this capitalist groove. It is a service commodity, a property value extraction machine, a place to play master. It is these things and not a complex network of locally generated desires for shaping our social and psychic lives in creative and heterogeneously valuable ways. This happens, of course, the way supple transformations occur in even the most stable of segment and organizations. But they are contained, discouraged, drawn towards fixed points.

523 Why I’m an Anarchist

In the semester before I left Austin for fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay

Area I had a meeting with Dr. Charles Hale and Dr. Edmund Gordon. I was honored when they asked me to present a paper to their team taught seminar on cultural racism. I had taken the course the last time they offered it and I was talking with them about what I’d been doing with my project since then. I don’t remember much of the discussion; I can’t seem to forget a certain part of it.

After I flexed into the chair by the office door Charlie said, “I think both Ted and

I have a similar question, if you don’t mind me speaking for you Ted.” Ted gave a sort of graceful smile and a gesture which I wasn’t sure how to read. When students step in a professor’s office everything seems to hum with signs of evaluation. “You make some good points about community and how it is all wrapped up in power. But, I’m sure you know, even Foucault thought that power isn’t necessarily bad.”

“Right,” Ted leaned in off the back of his seat, “surely you’re not saying that all community is bad. But the way you write it almost seems like that at times. Maybe you should compare some other kinds of community to these gated communities and give us some kind of positive model.”

This encounter threw my brain and mouth into several divergent quantum universes. While I was thinking how important the question was, and somewhere beside that I was feeling stupid for having overlooked it, my mouth embarrassed me by blabbing something about how my problematic is really

524 more about the ways community is produced and its effects. I coughed up some words about how I was trying to understand the diffuse procedures which constitute the kinds of subjects that would feel at home in such exclusionary spaces. I laugh at myself when I remember the way I tried hard to sound

Foucauldian.

Somehow I did manage to write a note to myself and buried it in my pile of stuff to be looked at later, just about as deep as I tried to bury this minor trauma. But you know how trauma and notes are. They can haunt and pull memory right out of your head. The question has haunted me. Only the note remembered for me, but the problem swam all around and between my neurons the whole time I was in the field. What Ted and Charlie were essentially asking for is a set of criteria upon which to make evaluations of communities. I fell back on the postie political program that politics should have no program, should be specific and situational. That is obviously not the end.

With only a slight twinge I continued to plug away at my objects of analysis. I thought about what they are made of, how they are made, how they work and what they do. These are the questions I have come to love because of my affairs with Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. When I do this, however, I find that most thought that emerges is negative. That is, almost everything turns out to work in disturbing ways, ends up looking like that which mutilates life. My pessimistic attitude isn’t inherited from my theoretical figures as much as it is a by-product of my object of study.

525 Beyond that, the diagnostically critical perspective is important, I say to myself, because it lets us see what to avoid and what and how to escape. Sure.

But doesn’t this also imply something desirable? I mean, how can I really say that a certain practice of community is to be avoided without at least the shadow of something to be sought? Going even further, there is a real danger in this kind of politics. Foucault diagrammed power, got into the gritty details of its operation, but managed to portray an almost overwhelming critical force through his style. “The horrible descriptions which are lovingly rendered,” the “theatrical analyses in a vivid manner,” allowed a critical analysis and illustration to go hand in hand (Deleuze 1988: 24). It is easy to fall short of this mark, nearly impossible to live up to it. And when we do fall short, as much of the governmentality literature unfortunately seems to, in my reading anyway, we come off looking like uncritical diagnosticians of power, simply documenting government (Bouchindhomme 1992; O'Malley, Weir et al. 1997).

I’ve worked at this sort of politics here. But it’s not enough, for me anyway, to vainly state my politics lie in the force of a certain kind of affective writing style. So I, and actually a whole branch of Foucault inspired cultural studies, have taken to heart and labored lovingly to conceptualize some sort of political action. It may neither have been the best place to begin, nor a particularly good transition here, but I took it upon myself to understand some of the positions being rallied around by those interested in the relationship between democracy and associations. After all, associations are the hinge of this project.

526 Knowing this, the association literature, jumped off of the library stacks, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Shouldn’t you take our claims seriously.”

One thing I discovered is that there are liberalisms. The classical liberal position, recently espoused by John Rawls (1972), focuses on the individual possessed with freedom and guaranteed by the state the fair distribution of liberties and economic resources. In this vein, associations can only be seen as tests of democracy, as measures of the rights of individuals to freely associate

(Dahl 1989; Kateb 1998; Lomansky 2002).

Another perspective on liberal government and associations takes up the question of interest representation. Associations can congeal the interests and amplify the voice of people, allowing them to press their public concerns. This function of associations may be critical, as formal channels of recognition at the municipal, state and federal level seem serpentine to say the least. Associations are promoted as an alternate course for citizens to be heard (Cohen, Rogers et al. 1995; Warren 2001). Checking my experience, however, I don’t believe this is how HOAs operate. The City of San Leandro had a HOA list. But not because it wanted to hear each community’s opinion. It was simply a good way to disseminate information, such as notices for council meetings, permit procedures, upcoming events, through community newsletters and at board meetings.

Similarly, the police department of the City of Danville has a “community outreach officer.” I met him a few times. He was a nice man. I wondered if the

527 other cops teased him because his job was to work almost exclusively with the community associations in the city limits. “That’s not real police work,” I fantasized I heard them say. “Hey, it’s the wave of the future. Get on board or get out of the way.” At the few meetings we attended together he presented crime data, security tips and encouraged as well as assisted the creation of neighborhood watch programs. A good citizen, a safe citizen, a responsible citizen is an active citizen.

I also recall that a candidate for the California House of Representatives came to one of the larger communities for a “town hall” meeting. From what I heard from a fellow manager in attendance, he gave a speech and only fielded a couple of questions before moving on to the next event.

Rather than amplifying a community voice, which without some more developed spaces and procedures for communication would most likely be unified around common concerns of property anyway (like construction defect law-suits), these policies help establish conduits between the communities and the state. And the messages seem to flow one way. This reads like Jurgen

Habermas’ (1991) critique of the “refeudalization of the public sphere,” where democratic discourse is retarded by the invasion of bureaucratic rationality.

Habermas is just too useful to skip right here. I’m going to move on. But because of this nice fit here, and for reasons that will emerge throughout, I will return to discuss Habermas’ particular call to political action later in the paper.

528 Slightly more relevant, in terms of what this paper will become, is a kind of drifted liberalism which is concerned to conceptualize how associations affect the attitudes, skills and behaviors of the members in ways that support the democratic project. In this liberalism, associations inculcate civic virtues (Cohen,

Rogers et al. 1995; Verba, Schlozman et al. 1995; Warren 2001). After documenting and commenting on the shriveling public life of Americans, Robert

Putnam (2000), for example, argues that associations can cure this brand of apathy. One notable way is by promoting a civic virtue of generalized reciprocity.

I find this example to be particularly interesting since he clearly borrowed a concept from the anthropological tool-kit and redeployed it in a popular yet direct attempt to set a policy agenda. In my opinion it can hardly be argued that generalized reciprocity is a civic virtue distributed throughout the American population. Especially since in the anthropological literature communities which practice generalized reciprocity tend to stand romantically opposed to redistributive and market based economic systems (Sahlins 1972). In other words, there is something “progressive” about Putnam’s vision of the relationship between associations and democracy. Other writers in this vein accelerate off this vector. They argue that associations are a key element in a society set up to resist domination, totalitarian states and antidemocratic power (Diamond 1999).

Organized associations can act as a locus of counter-hegemonic force against a power bloc or against state authority. Perhaps at this point it seems like I’m

529 forcing the link to Gramsci (1992) here for rhetorical purposes. I hope, however, that as things spread around a bit more you’ll recognize it also. Many of the recent positions in this associationist vein key in on ‘foreign’ subjects, in the teachers and writers of the Czech underground (Ignatieff 1995), the civic associations in the South African revolution (Klug 1995).

I’d like to return momentarily to Putnam and other writers (See Kaufman

1999 for example) who follow Tocqueville (1990) in applauding the educative, skill-building and psychological benefits of participation in associations. They argue that associations are important for the way they establish sites for people to learn a system of meanings and knowledge, to learn norms, values, beliefs, and classifications. Sound familiar? It should. That is a fairly common definition of culture, easily found in many Cultural Anthropology text books. This turns the question of associations and democracy toward the politics of culture and community. In comes communitarianism.

This discussion of the relationship between associations and democracy is, to me anyway, indistinguishable from the Communitarian platform. It’s startling how Communitarianism seems to adopt a generalized cultural anthropological type of argumentation. For example, Bell (2000) argues cultural particularism against the notions of liberal universalism. Communitarians also advocate a cultural constructivist notion of the self (Sandel 1982; Taylor 1989).

Communitarians hone in on an anthropological notion of culture which leads to what they call the “encumbered subject.” Culture shapes people, gives them

530 their values, norms, beliefs. Culture is a mediating element between the liberal individual and the democratic state. So, because of this, we should pay attention to and foster the kinds of community which engender the values we want. In nearly countless publications, Amitai Etzioni, the leading communitarian, emphasizes social responsibility and the need to promote policies which would stem the erosion of communal life in an increasingly fragmented world (Etzioni

1993; Etzioni 1995; Etzioni 1995; Etzioni 1998). A think tank, called The

Institute of Communitarian Policy Studies, tries to make this happen by producing working papers and advising federal government policy makers

(William Galson, a co-editor of the journal The Responsive Community, was

President Clinton’s Domestic Policy Adviser and in 2001 President Bush unveiled a four-year Communities of Character project developed in consultation with

Etzioni).

For communitarians, community is the solution to crime prevention.

Community development is the solution to poverty. Community medical clinics are the solution to the health care crisis. Community is the solution to the decline in family values. Community is even a weapon against capitalism, at least against the way it extends the hours of labor into the sacred time of the family and community.

During this discussion a couple of interesting things happened regarding culture and community. You probably noticed. The first is the way that community gets linked with culture. Community is a mobilization of culture.

531 Ernest Gellner wrote about the intimate linkage of these two concepts, where

“community is a population which shares a culture” and culture can only be actualized through communities. Such a relationship is also visible in the ways ethnographic research, traditionally concerned to know something about a culture, finds its research sites embedded in communities (See Bohanan 1966;

Lee 1969; Chagnon 1983 for a short list of examples; Perin 1988; Dorst 1989;

Trawick 1990). The community becomes the microcosm for the culture, it is where culture happens and where anthropologists record and read it.

Community planning is also an explicit mobilization of culture, sort of working in reverse from the anthropologist. As community developer Jim Ife (2001) says,

“it is culture which gives people that critical sense of identity and belonging, so cultural development is of paramount importance for community.” Community is where culture becomes manifest.

Another important and related point is that culture and community and anthropology articulate with policy. Some of that connection has already been established in this paper. Another connection is evident in the way ethnographic studies keep popping up in the community planning discourse. Many of the manuals I looked at concerned themselves with ethnographies of what were once called "simple" societies as well as subcultures within more "complex" societies. What planners found useful, it seems, are studies that discuss the characteristics of informal mechanisms for establishing and maintaining social cohesion and order. Laura Nader's (1997) study of informal sanctions and

532 dispute resolution among Moslem and Zapotec communities is one example. Ulf

Hannerz’s (1969) discussion of gossip in a black American ghetto is another.

Also cited is Victor Turner's (1977) work on The Ritual Process in the formation of communitas. These are just 3 examples in a policy literature that draws, explicitly and implicitly, upon ethnographic knowledge to identify the components of strong communities.

The relationship between ethnography and planning is not limited to a technical advising role. From my perspective, one I borrow from Foucault, discourse is best understood as an inscription rather than representation of reality. As it became recognized as a legitimate and somewhat scientific method of producing statements about the world, ethnography helped incarnate community as knowable and calculable level of human organization. The inscription of community proposes a relation that appears less 'remote', more

'direct', one which occurs not in the 'artificial' political space of society, but in matrices of affinity that appear more natural. Such a distinction emerges in

Turner, and others, and is translated into policy language as informal versus formal mechanisms of social control. And, these mechanisms exist in an inverse relation. That is, the more a social organization involves the enforcement of codified norms through formal organizations like the police, the weaker norms based on informal processes like custom or common agreement will be.

Much ethnographic research in the middle of this century seemed aligned with such a project. Radical anthropologists mobilized the culture concept,

533 conducting research of and in communities to address the possibility of alternative models of social existence. Such discourse is drenched in democratic desire, a desire to discover a natural realm of face-to-face communication which ensures participation and the non-hierarchical generation of norms. Again, there is a danger behind this position.

These ideas also resonated with conservatives and neoliberals and communitarians, who, drawing on Toqueville and other democratic theorists, began to argue for the revival of value generating organizations which would buffer the individual against the boogey of "big government". It was in this context that federal loan programs and federally funded agencies began to promote Residential Community Associations and Community Action Agencies.

Community becomes governmentalized as a policy panacea. Rosenblum (1998) sees the proliferation of residential community associations a move in this direction. The U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (1989) agrees, calling this proliferation of planned communities a "silent revolution" towards the "privatization of government", and a new and under-utilized level of political organization with the potential to revitalize American democracy.

The ability to plan community, to manipulate an overall aesthetic, a coherent spatial arrangement, enables planned culture. Culture becomes a way of thinking about the practice of government, not with laws or direct precepts but as an attempt to build norms into the spatial, temporal and aesthetic organization of communities as well as the instituted relationships. For example,

534 community planners arrange space to promote "natural surveillability", which makes observing what your neighbors are doing at their front door, in the park, on the street, in fact everywhere, a matter of involuntary glances. Governing through culture is a logic of affective arrangement that has morals, manners and ways of life as its objects. That is, planning culture is an attempt to create subjects who desire to conduct themselves in certain prescribed ways. Planning culture through community establishes a morally managed environment as a means to endow individuals with the capacity of self-monitoring and self- regulation, to continually and progressively modify thoughts, feelings and behaviors. The inescapable presence of master planned communities epitomize a "will to plan", a modern desire to design daily life down to the last detail.

Perhaps one could say that this is a full blown rationalization of existence in the

Weberian and Habermasian sense. Still, I think this discussion will lead us to the conclusion that culture has always been about training, something Nietzsche

(1967) argued in the Genealogy of Morals.

By now you must be asking yourself what I’m trying to establish with all of this and where it is all going. What’s at stake is the link between culture, power and policy and the way that link will force us to rethink what it means to be political. This is exactly why Ted and Charlie’s question and my troubled response have stuck with me. It’s right in the middle of two different paradigms for thinking about culture and two different political agendas. In Cultural Studies this crevice is performed by the encampment of a Gramscian vision of cultural

535 critique and “cultural policy studies”. While I was in seminars and roaming the halls of the Anthropology building I felt it across my path.

Tony Bennett, the cultural studies scholar not the pop-singer, is one of the founding figures of a break away group of Foucauldain cultural studies scholars that have come to call themselves “cultural policy studies.” They begin from the perspective that in liberal democracies people are indeed afforded more freedom, are guaranteed more rights attached to their individuality. But this only works because our forms and possibilities of expressing individuality are also given to us in such a way that we are disposed to make the right choices and feel that they are our own. In other words, a liberal society strives to distribute the sites of government beyond the state, in the schools, factories, family.

Jacques Donzelot (1979) wrote a gravitational piece in this area which drew attention to the way “the social,” a category most of us just took for having empirical roots, was configured in policy discourses as governmental agents attempted to act upon a population. Tony Bennett wants to move the same questions beyond the institutions, past the social and into the discourse and practice of culture (Bennett 1990; Bennett 1990; Bennett 1992; Bennett 1995;

Bennett 1995; Bennett 1996; Bennett 1997; Bennett 1997; Bennett 2001).

This cultural policy studies approach is clearly reacting to a strong culturalist tradition in cultural studies and anthropology. That is, there are scholars who want to read culture as a representation of the value generating behaviors of the constituent individuals. To infuse politics here, this cps

536 approach to culture is addressed directly to another, and presumed inferior, form of cultural studies which studies popular culture and sub-culture groups as a source for counter-hegemonic consciousness. The work of John Fiske (1989) who read pop-culture practices as act of resistance is a good example.

This cultural critique version of cultural studies comes directly from

Raymond Williams. I’m sure I don’t need to bore you with the way Raymond

Williams breathed life into cultural studies by redefining culture away from its link with civilization, as exclusively “high” culture, and as superstructual (Williams

1960; Williams 1983). He focused instead on a particularly American notion of culture: culture as a way of life. From this starting point much of the early cultural studies literature focused on valorizing lived experience as it struggled against the hegemonic forms of interpretation being disseminated from ideologues and state agents.

Hegemony, I’m sure you know, is the way the ruling class gains authority to lead through consent. It is a coordination of interest through ideology, where individuals come to accept a set of interests that run counter to their own real interests which are actually still structurally determined by their class position. It is about negotiation, compromise, appropriation of values and beliefs. This makes popular culture a, if not the, key site for hegemonic struggle since it is the territory of contestation of various groups to manipulate ideas and meanings so that their interests get adopted as the general interest. Culture, through this definition, becomes a terrain of struggle over meaning in the contest for

537 hegemony. Culture is either the signs which help shape a hegemonic consciousness or a revolutionary one. So studies focused on new ways of reading, ways of consuming and sub-cultures which seemed to offer alternate systems of meaning from the dominant ideology. Or, studies focused on exposing the operation of hegemony, an exposure which would trigger new ways of reading the embedded ideologies and thereby raise a radical consciousness.

This utopic project can be found scattered on these pages, I admit. But, according to Bennet, this is not going far enough. To begin with, the standard

Foucauldian critique of Gramsci goes, power should be conceptualized as constituting subjects rather than vying for their consent. Power acts on bodies and through technical means rather than ideas and signs. Power does not work by ideology and false consciousness but through the production of truth and habits. Politics, thus, can’t be about revealing the true interest underlying the misguided interests.

This is particularly challenging when talking about culture. If culture can be linked to policy, then our cultural knowledge and its reality constructing force is to varying degrees pinned down around a governmental agenda. To establish this Tony Bennett convincingly demonstrates the historical emergence of policy concerns with culture. One link is between culture and policing. Policing, in the broad Foucauldian definition, relates to individuals “not only according to their juridical status but as men, as working, trading, living beings” (Foucault 1988:

156). Police is a positive technology for shaping the lives and conditions of

538 existence of individuals and populations. Culture, Bennett argues, was clearly thought of as integral to the function of policing. Bennet (1992) cites Delamar’s

Traite de la police (1705) to document how theater, literature and entertainment were as much a matter of concern as public health and safety. In Patrick

Colquhoun’s Traestie on the Police of the Metropolis (1806) is laid out a similar agenda for the regulation of recreation and all public conduct. Culture is thus a

“historically produced surface of social regulation” (Bennett 1992: 27)

Following Bennett’s strong lead many other scholars have begun to document the points of application between policy and culture. In anthropology there is a growing literature concerned to document the uptake of the culture concept in the modes of colonial administration (Asad 1973; Dirks 1992; Scott

1995; Ali 2002). In the ‘west’, the museum is not only a site for the transmission of hegemonic ideas embedded in art, but through the micropractices of the public museum a place for the production of citizens (Bennett 1992; Bennet

1995; Bennet 1997). Through the educational apparatus reading literature becomes a crucial site for the internalization of norms through the enfolding of a moral exemplar (Hunter 1988; Bennett 1990). Many have focused on the link between language and culture. However, less attention has been paid to the link between policy and concerns with language even though the emergence of linguistic orthodoxies, for example, are clearly tied to nationalist policies in India,

Norway, Israel, Spain, U.S. (Fisher 1992; Miller 1993; Phillipson 1994; Bolton and

Hutton 1995; Fisher 1997; Miller 1998; Urla 2001; Mazama 2002). Linguistic

539 policies have also aided imperial rule and neocolonial endeavors (Miller 1998).

McGuigan (1996) points out the ways that art funding and the news are infused with policy couched in morality. Often a sort of neoliberal strategy emerges when it suits to stop the funding of certain kind of art and can avoid the censorship logo by arguing that the artist should have to endure the test of market forces (McGuigan 1996). Tenure policy and academic funding can fit in here as well. Popular music (Grossberg 1992) and community arts projects

(Rose 1996) establish affective technologies for shaping selves. Notions of health (See the articles in Barry, Osborne et al. 1996; Tapper 1999) and community empowerment solutions in the war against poverty work to promote attachments to established forms of responsibility and regimes of care. City revitalization programs which draw upon cultural logics to create attachment with the concomitant economic as well as personal investment in urban areas

(Bianchini 1990; Bianchini and Parkinson 1993). Broad regimes of consumption have emerged as an overarching model for all sorts of modern relationships

(Ewick 1993; Rose 1996). The link between policy and cultural production in radio, T.V., film, sports, music, suburbs and malls has also been laid out in a new edited volume on cultural policy by Lewis and Miller (2003).

The policy claims of communitarianism and community planning discussed earlier dovetail nicely with Nikolas Rose's (Rose 1986; Rose 1996; Rose 1996) assertion that contemporary governmetality, what he calls "advanced liberalism", attempts to govern at increased distances by fostering the desire for and

540 attachment to micro-moral domains or communities. The privatization which allows communities the freedom to govern themselves is surely a type of

"empowerment", to use a popular slogan. But this empowerment is accompanied by the understanding that the community, and each member, is now solely accountable for the implementation and outcome of the duties which were previously the responsibility of a remote centralized government

(Cruikshank 1994; Burchell 1996). Community members are therefore required to conduct themselves according to appropriate or approved models of action.

So your neighbor's conduct is your business, as community upkeep means monitoring everyone, especially yourself. This is what Jaques Donzelot (Donzelot

1979) terms "contractual implication". Privatization, as a technology of government, not as a reduction of government, concerns individuals at the heart of themselves, for it makes rationality and responsibility the condition of their freedom. To be free, we must desire discipline. Weaving community into the

American social landscape adds a new and more affective level of normalization.

What's more, most communities are organized around some sort of centralized authority which can further corral the deviant few. The language of "informal social control" used by planners and policy makers is therefore disturbingly accurate.

RCAs and MPCs vividly demonstrate the kind of culture that emerges in the world of the grid. I’ve already tried to show a few of the ways that community is a cultural policy production. Other places to key in on this might

541 be to look at how municipalities tend to ease community site plans through the review process as they tend to contribute more tax revenue than they gobble up.

This is particularly true in communities which pay for their own street cleaning and repair, pay for their own street lights and maintenance, pay for their own parks and park services, and yet pay taxes like any other citizen (McKenzie 1994;

Low 2003). The meanings of everyday life in the suburbs (Silverstone 1997) are clearly wrapped up in the policies which have enabled their development

(Jackson 1985). So, also, white flight is as much a policy issue as it is an identity issue (Massey and Denton 1993). Community Associations and community planning exists at the intersection of a wide array of overlapping policies. Each is animated in the meshwork and tension between federal policies, state policies, municipal policies, company policies, and the discourse of planners, association thinkers and communitarians. These are the kinds of built communities that are swarming over our cultural landscape. So a culturalist politics in this context is downright silly. With such a coherent governmental weight on people can culture really be expected to reach beyond? Well, I’ll come back to that idea shortly. For now, let’s continue with the cultural policy studies political agenda

The Gramsci v. Foucault conceptual debate is stimulating of course but the real weight of the “cultural policy studies” critique comes in their vision of political action. If culture constructs reality, the self, and everything in between

(See Hacking 1999 for a discussion of this). And if policy is as much of a force in cultural production as is suggested above. Then to be political, at any level from

542 the personal to the national, is to engage with policy, to “get dirty” in the administrative sites where cultural policy is enacted. This is especially the case, as I mentioned earlier, because it would be folly to rely upon the critical force of our prose to ooze beyond the walls which separate the American popular from

American intellectuals and invoke some sort of widespread transformative desire.

To be political, the cultural policy scholars argue, we all have to become planners. The Institute for Cultural Policy Studies in Australia has taken on such a mission, wedding Foucauldian scholarship with governmental consultancy.

Besides consulting, ICPS also encourages participation with the state and non- governmental organizations where procedures of cultural knowledge are thought to originate. In my situation that would mean working with the CAI, municipal government, within development companies, management companies, with

BODs to help transform the nature of the Community Associations industry to unleash some sort of progressive potential. I admit to being ensnared by diagnostic rather than administrative desires, but in my encounters with these organizations I really didn’t see much use for me. Maybe I’m just too much of a romantic utopian or a closet cultural critic but I just couldn’t seem to take on the persona of the “grubby little incrementalist” (Miller 1998).

Perhaps politics should make gestures towards policy, but should it be entirely located there? Even if we accept that we must get involved with the sites of cultural policy, is that only a technical concern. I mean, aren’t I still left with the question of what sorts of communities to administer into existence?

543 What kind of person do we want? And here I am right back at Ted & Charlie’s question. But beyond all of that, how can we know that the plans we come up with for community will create the kind of communities and subjects we intend?

The last question opens up a number of trajectories. One thing that moves through me is that Foucault said that power and resistance are inseparable (Foucault 1982). It is around this point where a widespread criticism or debate about Foucault whorls.

Power and resistance are coupled together, but is this because modern power is about the production of a free individual who may feel compelled toward the proper course of action but can also choose not to. This is what he seems to suggest by forwarding arts of the self as a model of resistance

(Foucault 1986; Foucault 1988; Foucault 1996). What is special about it, however, is the way he locates resistance in establishing procedures, techniques, devices, that will allow someone to do work on their self. Perhaps the resistance comes from an intersection of incongruous power moves (Copjec 1994). Or is it, in a more Lacanian reading, an inherent counterforce of power moves themselves (Donald 1992)? Perhaps it is as the liberal humanists have suggested all along a nugget of transcendent subjectivity deep within each (See

Habermas 1984 and his notion of communicative rationality). For many of the governmentality scholars it has to do with ‘failure’ as a natural course of conducting conduct. Contestation, from this view, can only be viewed as an obstacle to rule (O’Malley, Weir and Shearing 1998). I’m not clear what they

544 think the source of this failure is which seems to get re-problematized and becomes part of the production of new forms of government. Resistance becomes another form of power.

A closely related issue, which for me is a major problem with the governmentality approach, is the almost exclusive focus on the plans and government texts. This is particularly unpalatable for an ethnographer. Doing fieldwork with the governmentality tool-kit I kept finding my thinking captured by a somewhat morphed ideal v. real dichotomy. Starting with political reason I was driven to see to what extent it became manifest in actual techniques, procedures. Then I became driven to see the application of these ideas in the contact with bodies and selves. That sounds like a descending analysis of power to me, something Foucault (1980) himself warned about. And, considering the way cultural policy studies has linked culture with the state it makes this endeavor seem more like an Althusserian look at “ideological state apparatuses” than any sort of genealogy (Althusser 1971).

Of course it would be possible to do an ethnography of the planners. By working with various Boards of Directors, that is one approach I’ve taken.

Another approach, suggested by O’Malley, Weir and Shearing, is to lend a more dynamic view the procedural conduits where technologies of power and the self fold and unfold into each other. Then government becomes a struggle over the realization and deployment of resources, tactics and strategies in the relations of

545 contest themselves (O’Malley, Weir and Shearing 1998: 510). Just shuffle around the pages of this dissertation to get an idea of what this might look like.

At this intimate level it feels to me that the cultural policy studies approach becomes more useful, but perhaps best as a starting point. I tried to get beyond the ideal/real dichotomy that haunts the writings where planning and policy literature is the focus. The earlier part of this paper is a prime example.

What materialized instead, I think, was a sense that the mentalities of conducting conduct emerge in interaction between multiple elements. At first it was hard to get at this. I kept turning to the plans and techniques when what was particularly interesting was the way that people were more than using, more than having such devices deployed on and through them. They wanted them. I wanted them.

This raises the possibility that plans don’t come from planners, that policies don’t come from policy makers or politicians. To me it seems that cultural governmentality, if we still want to call it that, is far more dispersed than the privileged sites of policy making. In Power/Knowledge, Foucault talks about an ascending analysis of power. This notion of ascending power has got to be one of the most difficult to grasp, but one that I take most seriously. Strange, I know, but I think it will help to turn to complexity theory, read through Deleuze and Guattari to help formulate this more ascending notion of culture and power.

Before I get to complexity theory and Deleuze and Guattari, along the way

I’d like to point out how nice it would be to be Habermasian. I hope this out of

546 the blue statement doesn’t undermine the genuine sentiment. In a somewhat convoluted movement I’m going to try to become one, or more like one.

Remember back to earlier in this section when I just couldn’t resist dragging in the conceptual persona of Habermas. Well, besides that one eruption, there have been many places where, if you know Habermas, you can probably feel him pushing up through the paper these words are printed on. Often I look at the bureaucratic arrangements of planned communities, of systematic landscapes and think how tragic it is for people’s creative capacities and relations with one another to be locked in such rigid arrangements. I can’t even count how many times the phone would ring at my property management cubicle and someone on the other end of the digital stream would be complaining about a neighbor.

When I asked if they spoke about it with the troublemaker they seemed nonplussed by the idea and typically skirted around the issue. Also telling, this was not a standard question, in fact it was discouraged, but I couldn’t help myself from asking.

I think Habermas would call this the imposition of the systems-world into the life-world (Habermas 1984). Our capacity to communicate rationally with each other becomes submerged behind an easy deployment of anonymous force.

The bureaucratic apparatus is set up to deal with conflicts, not letting them play out on a neighborly terrain. As such, the democratic potential locked deep within our innate ability of public debate and formation of public spheres are crushed in

547 a sort of perverted fascism that only dazzles us away from noticing the totalitarian control.

One really useful thing about Habermas is that he has clear criteria for evaluating communities. First, we should examine the degree to which the systems-world invades the life-world to quash democratic discourse which flows outside of power. Second, we should evaluate to what degree ‘partial publics’ interfere with or support a broader public place of communication. This clearly comes back to the association and communitarian literature I tried to review earlier, but in a practical way.

Even though the system v. life world idea seems very practical, it cuts in dissimilar directions from my current conceptual trajectory too forcefully to be simply plugged in. My intention is to tweak the hell out of Habermas, perhaps beyond the breaking point, and see if I can make his conceptual persona do the tricks I want it to do. It is hard to recount what brought me to this next connection, but I think Michel de Certeau (1984), and in particular his distinction between strategies and tactics, will make a good tool to apply first. A number of people suggested that I read de Certeau a while back. So I did. At the time, however, I either sped by him or I underestimated his usefulness. Back in 1997

I read him as saying that tactics were deployed by subjects, based on their transcendent qualities, to counter strategic power moves. I read him as trapped within a structure and agency mode of thinking about activity. Re-reading now in 2003, this doesn’t seem right.

548 For de Certeau, strategies seek to create places of conformity with abstract models. They produce, tabulate and impose an organized space. He tells us that a strategy “postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) an be managed. As in management, every ‘strategic’ rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its ‘own’ place, that is, the place of its own power and will, from a ‘environment’” (36). In my reading, an identity, a self or subject position is a place, if a corporeal and psychological one. As such they are on the side of strategies. And, then, will anything deployed by the self take the form of a strategy?

Tactics stand opposed to strategies. I don’t usually like to rely on such long quotes, but it is important to see the way deCerteau sets up his sentences to understand what he means by tactics. He says,

By contrast with a strategy […] a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection: it is a maneuver ‘within the enemy’s field of vision,’ as von Bulow put it, and within enemy territory. It does not, therefore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a district, visible, and objectifiable space. It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of ‘opportunities’ and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any

549 moment. It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse.” (37)

I am somewhat bothered by the essentially oppositional character of tactics, but what I find particularly interesting in my ‘new’ reading can be approached by asking a question. What are the subjects of most of the sentences in the quote above? It is not a person, not an individual. The subjects of the sentences are always the tactic, or a pronoun substituting for the tactic. I don't read him as saying that individual subjects wield tactics. Rather, they are a type of human performance. They come from calculating people who are looking for escape routes from strategies in which they find themselves entrapped. This makes sense in terms of how de Certeau defined the strategy, as that which constitutes a subject and its place. Then a tactic must be outside, other than the subject and its place.

So, if tactics are not of the strategic self, then where do they come from?

In a word, between. In The Uses of Literature, Italo Calvino (1986) comes up with a similar question and answer. Where does creative innovation in literature or myth or perhaps any kind of collective storytelling come from? And his answer is “combinatorial play.” But this is a kind of play that is not deliberate. It isn’t the result of creative individuals. It isn’t planned. It emerges.

Perhaps it is unconscious? If you mean in some Freudian way where unconscious drives lie deep beneath the self and surface unknowingly into our plans and actions, then hell no. If you take the unconscious in the way that

550 Deleuze and Guattari re-write it, then yes (Deleuze and Guattari 1977; Deleuze and Guattari 1983). This unconscious is not deep but broad, a meshwork, and is transpersonal. By transpersonal I mean that the connections which constitute a consciousness occur between brains and other brains as well as between brains and other matter in a so called environment. Recent writing by complexity theory and neuroscience support this idea. Where is the depth in a tangle of neurons? Consciousness, if it exists at all, exists between the neural elements in which it is composed. Much of the information and sensation which courses through our bodies and minds remains unprocessed. We are always overfull with sensation. Knowledge and meaning take shape when the dynamic flow of information through us is channeled through screening processes (Taylor 2001).

This is one way to think about Tor Norretranders’ (1998) point that the self exceeds itself . As Ray Kurzweil (1999) says, “intelligence is precisely this process of selecting relevant information carefully so that it can skillfully and purposefully destroy the rest.” Mental activity emerges from the interrelations of particular events without any centralized agency or directing agent. In other words, Kelso (1995) states, “the system organizes itself, but there is no ‘self’, no agent inside the system doing the organizing.”

Perhaps I’ve gone ahead of myself once again, talking about complexity without even introducing the idea. Complexity theory is a relatively new type of thinking that emerged from the biological sciences in the middle of the 20th century. Building off some of the ideas of chaos theory, these scholars of living

551 systems began to see forces of order in what should have been chaotic domains.

In other words, in a Darwinian world where structure is just chance determination between competitive living forms they saw networks which despite their highly dynamic nature seemed attracted to stable patterns. This is complexity. And, crucial for this paper, it is not limited to nature. It is radical, in the same way that Anti-Oedipus is radical, for dramatically undermining any distinction between nature and culture. Now I may be getting romantic again, but in this last point I can see some new territory on which to open the natural and humanistic sub-fields of anthropology to a fruitful encounter with each other.

Complex systems emerge when a large number of components can interact simultaneously in a wide range of ways (Depew and Weber 1995). The multiplicity of parts can interact in both serial (cause and effect) and non-linear ways to create sequences as well as simultaneous events and recursive effects.

In their interaction they self-organize into stable arrangements. This arrangement occurs within the connections and components, not from the intervention of any external force or agent. Interiority and exteriority are tangled together in such a way that it would be impossible to distinguish an external agent anyway. The entities which emerge do so from the interaction of the constituent elements but can’t be reduced to the mechanical relations between them. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

But, as Herbert Simon says, “not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of

552 their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole”

(Quoted in Taylor 2001: 141).

One of the key elements of complex systems is that they exist “at the edge of chaos.” Similar to “combinatorial play,” leading complexity theorist

Stuart Kauffman (1995) talks about “combinatorial optimization.” If the connections in a system are too few, they will be frozen and no change will occur

(Gell-Mann 1994; De Landa 1995; Kauffman 1995; De Landa 1997; Taylor 2001;

De Landa 2002). That is an important point to keep in mind. In the computer simulations, mathematical models and biological observations of complexity theorists, all significant change takes place between too much and too little order. With too much order systems are frozen, static. On the other hand, if the connections are too many, no stability will form and the network will dissolve into chaos. But in the space between order and chaos, between too much and too little connection, “the spontaneous emergence of self-sustaining webs” occur.

Stanley Kauffman calls this “order for free.” This means that in open systems poised on the edge of chaos, complex networks will resolve into advanced patterns of relations. Humans didn’t come up with the order. It’s not that it was wired into us as Levi-Strauss or Chomsky might argue. In cultural context, it is wired between us, and others, and our environment.

In a play of ordering points of attraction and chaotic movements and connections is where self-organization happens. What does that mean? Well the way I understand it is that when there are enough points of contact between

553 elements then an abstract entity can emerge. It is beyond the parts, in that it has its own dynamics, but exists nowhere but in the particular arrangement of its own components. This is what complexity scholars call emergence and what

Deleuze and Guattari call immanence (Deleuze and Guttari 1987; Deleuze 1997).

An order exists but not above or outside the plane of events. It is within, generated by a particular arrangement and at the same time folding back into this plane. These self-organized forms can be cells in a body, an organism, a species, an ecosystem, a subjectivity (self-organized without a self), a community, a society, a region, a global network.

Where there is connectivity between rigid fixture and wild fluctuation, weird things happen to causality. It can be nonlinear. It can be parallel so that an event in one region of a network can resonate with another with no apparent direct factor. There are feed back and feed forward loops. And through it all there is an unpredictable amplification of effects. A single event might have only a very slight, unnoticeable effect on the whole system. It could cause a small fluctuation. Or, it can produce a cascade that leads the whole system towards a bifurcation point, where the whole system sits poised between two alternate states. The experiment that complexity theorists often use to illustrate this is a pile of sand. If you keep adding grains to the pile you will reach a “tipping point” at which one more grain of sand can just sit on top like the others, can cause a minor slide, or can produce a major displacement of the whole pile. There is absolutely no way to foretell the effects that one little grain of sand will have.

554 Among other more mind-twisting things, this seriously calls into question the cultural policy studies program of incremental adjustment to a social system.

As I’ve pointed to, things can also get rigid. Rigid forms can emerge which fold back over onto the event space from which they have emerged and diverged (Massumi 2002: 82). They form segments, grids, fixed points of attraction which work like strategies to draw potential into a repetitive framework. “Control hierarchies” can emerge in which the creativity of the system is closed as points of connection are regularized and regulated. In such arrangements, self-organization is effectively curtailed and organization becomes directed by a transcendent entity. Such control hierarchies stand in conceptual contrast to “decentralized networks” in which fluid connectivity, a hint of chaos, promotes autopoesis.

Like tactics, chaos will always be a part of systems with multiple and heterogeneous parts and connections (this is what Deleuze and Guattari call a multiplicity). Tactics are therefore not necessarily oppositional to strategies, as de Certeau writes. Rather, strategies are an emergent quality of the tactics.

Positions emerge from movement (Massumi 2002). Identity emerges from difference (Deleuze and Guttari 1987; Deleuze 1994). This means that

“processual indeterminacy is primary in relation to social determination”

(Massumi 2002). Primary not in the sense that it comes before in a time sequence but in the sense that they constitute the field of emergence, while cultural determinations are what emerge. Such cultural determinations,

555 strategies, positions, attractors emerge and “back-form” their field of emergence.

They loop back like recursive operations into the process from which they arose.

This is a kind of capture through retrospective ordering, where the anticipation of a form that came before creates the opportunity to recondition its arrival upon the second and third and fourth etc. event. Determination and indetermination, order and chaos, strategy and tactic, weave together in a dance choreographed from step to step and within the movements themselves (Simondon 1994;

Massumi 2002).

Culture shapes people, of course. This is why it is silly to see culture primarily about difference. It is a way of generating similarity amongst a group of creatures. So, what is this shaping, what is being shaped? Subjects, yeah, but more abstractly it is a shaping of human potential. Human potential, which is infinite when you consider the array of neural configurations, genetic mutations, ability to move, feel, desire, etc, is drawn into stable relationships around attractors. Where do these attractors come from? Are they planned into a socius in order to capture bodies into stable relationships? Yes, but not planned by someone. The agency, or intelligence, if you will, exists at the level of the whole system. I think de Certeau was getting at this as well. This is also what Foucault says, I believe, when he says power is “intentional yet non- subjective.”

So, Habermas just went out the window, since for him communicative rationality is a property of individuals, buried deep beyond the reach of power.

556 Another problem with Habermas and the CPS is that the systems world should not be linked with the state or bureaucracy or such typically privileged sites of power. They are between as well. Institutions are immanent concrete assemblages. They are effects, instruments, concentrations of power. But a most abstract way Habermas just floated back in, in the sense that there is something outside of power. Creativity is potentially under attack in the way a life-world is accosted by the systems-world.

Foucault was wrong; power is repressive. Power is repressive not in the sense that it represses some deep personal or subconscious drives it won’t let surface as in the Freudian view. But it is repressive in the sense that it channels the whole range of potential human action into a delimited trajectory of possibility, a determined course or flow (Deleuze and Guttari 1987; Butler 1997).

Of course it is also productive in the sense that it actualizes into stable forms.

Decision is a cutting off. So any moment of decision is formed as some possibilities are realized and others get cut off. “As possibilities are actualized, new patterns, which both compose new constraints and new possibilities, emerge” (Taylor 2001).

Another way to say this is, addressed to my younger doctrinaire

Foucauldian self and my aging Deleuzian self, is that there are planes of organization (power) and there are planes of indeterminacy, of pure relation, of consistency. And everything is infused with both, pulled together in a struggle of conversion from one to the other. Like strategies and tactics, like systems world

557 and life world. They’re just radically anti-humanist ones where individuals and subjects are simply elements of an abstract entity, a distributed intelligence or agency existing beyond the individual and the community (Deleuze and Guttari

1987; Dennett 1991; Chialvo and Millonas 1995).

Culture, it seems to me, is all of this at once. It is the regulating determinations and the chaotic lines of flight and the supple cultural forms woven between. The cultural policies the first part of this section focused on are rigid segments which draw human potential around their fixed points. They try to establish places (de Certeau 1984) or stable points of attraction. I think about these “attractors” like funnels that gather mass until they become like massive black holes (Lewin 1992; Kauffman 1995). But as Stephen Hawking explains, even black holes shoot off particles and given enough time will also dissipate.

Things escape, things emerge, but not because individuals want them to.

Culture also has a supple side, caught between determination and indetermination.

Need complexity and Deleuze and Guattari to have autonomy. In a

Foucauldian framework, autonomy isn’t firm political ground, as autonomous agents are exactly where modern forms of power get enacted. But if desire and lines of flight and indetermination are primary, then there will always be the possibility of creativity of new forms springing forth from what was once overdetermined with power. Thus, with this notion of culture comes my idea of cultural politics. That is, to encourage arrangements which welcome a fair

558 degree of chaos. In this regard, decentralized networks are the key. For in any kind of centralized control hierarchy, the centralizing agent is envisioned as a transcendental form which can regulate the interactions between its components. This attempt to fix or grid things into place is an attempt to burry creativity. You can see this vision enacted in the planned community, in its generalized corporate form, in its static landscape, in its bureaucratic mediation of all relationships. This is exactly counter to the ideals of an autopoetic community.

In his fantastic book Chaosmosis, Felix Guattari (1995) takes up this kind of ethico-aesthetic politics as he calls it. At one point, around page 7, he begins to talk about the La Borde clinic where he had worked for many years. I always perk up when Guattari talks about La Borde, as I believe many of his best insights come when he is recalling the pragmatic criteria he helped design into the clinic. Guattari says:

Everything there is set up so that psychotic patients live in climate of activity and assume responsibility, not only with the goal of developing an ambience of communication, but also in order to create local centers for collective subjectivation. Thus it’s not simply a matter of remodeling a patient’s subjectivity—as it existed before a psychotic crisis—but of a production sui generic. For example, certain psychotic patients, coming from poor agricultural backgrounds, will be invited to take up plastic arts, drama, video, music, etc., whereas until then, these universes had been unknown to them. On the other hand, bureaucrats and intellectuals will find themselves attracted to material work, in the kitchen, garden, pottery, horse riding club. The important thing here is not only the confrontation with a new material of expression, but the constitution of complexes of subjectivation: multiple exchanges between individual- group-machine. These complexes actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularise

559 themselves. Grafts of transference operate in this way, not issuing from ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystalised into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm. One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palate. In such a context, the most heterogeneous components may work towards a patient’s positive evolution: relations with architectural space; economic relations; the co- management by patient and career of the different vectors of treatment; taking advantage of all occasions opening onto the outside world; a processual exploitation of event-centered ‘singularities’—everything which can contribute to the creation of an authentic relation with the other. To each of these components of the caring institution there corresponds a necessary practice. We are not confronted with a subjectivity given as in itself, but with processes of the realization of autonomy, or of autopoesis.

To me this is a positive model of community, positive in both the ethical and technical sense. In this type of politics, they become the same criteria.

Community should be arranged to maximize the heterogeneity of components and the possible connectivity between them. It should encourage activity and relationality. It should be open. It should encourage new materials of expression, not censor at every turn. It should create local complexes of subjectivation and not import generalized models of valorization. The disjunctive syntheses which block relationality should be avoided. The kind of pre- established forms by which people can just move in to a ready made political structure should be discouraged. Community should be autonomous. And in chaos that would ensue within a group of people left to figure things out on their own, something autopoetic might happen.

Do we need policy to do this? Absolutely. In fact, this type of autopoetic politics is not that far off from Paul Hirst’s (1994) vision of Associative

560 Democracy. Hirst argues that associations should play a more direct role in their own governance. To me this is attractive not because it sets people free to govern themselves, as a direct governance school of democratic theorizing contends, but because it will potentially create new forms of association, new types of community, and new complex organizations of the self. The state and the economy must be restructured in ways that give associations a greater role in social and economic production. Envisioning the transformation toward a society constituted by “voluntary self-governing associations,” Hirst lays out a possible agenda. The state should cede functions to associations and foster the sorts of financial mechanisms whereby associations can be viable. Associative governance will also require substantial policy interventions to foster a diverse and inclusive ecology of associations. A social system formed from volunteer grassroots associations with the autonomy and financial support to be self- governing is Hirst’s aspiration. Let’s just make sure that grass isn’t sod and the structures of governance so rigid to prevent the emergence of new social and subjective arrangements.

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582 VITA

Matthew Scott Archer was born in Santa Rosa, California and raised in a tract home subdivision in the now financially enclosed Rincon Valley. The same house was my home from birth all the way through my time at the local community college

(Santa Rosa Junior College). My mother, Linda Archer, guided and supported me throughout and beyond.

I left Santa Rosa in 1993 to attend UCLA. I graduated in 1995 with a B.A. in anthropology and left the very next semester to attend graduate school in the

Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. I loved every minute of it, despite my occasional grumbling. Gated Governmentality was the title of my master’s report, which earned me a M.A. degree in 1997.

When I completed the coursework required for the Ph.D. degree, I left for fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area, the one place I knew most intimately.

I’ve been in the Bay Area, and now the Sacramento region, for almost five years now. In that time I’ve spoken at several conferences, including the AAA and AES annual conferences. I also spoke in the anthropology department’s colloquium

583 series at UC Santa Cruz. That was a productive experience which I’m also quite proud of.

I did not receive any funding to conduct my doctoral research. So, while in the

Bay Area I’ve been working in educational and academic circles. For the past two years I’ve been teaching anthropology part-time at Sierra College, American

River College and Sacramento City College.

Permanent Address: 9 Yerba Place, Santa Rosa, CA 95409

This dissertation was typed by the author.

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