i've been thinking about what it feels like to want things. people keep telling me they want the new phone that is an ipod and a phone and tv or something and it makes me feel sad.
the other day i had to go to a very rich person's house as part of my job. there was a hot tub that looked like it was just a rocky pool that happened to have naturally occured in the yard behind some other rocks and there was an enormous view of the ocean and really pretty trees and a giant kitchen and lots of other things. i had this strong feeling that just being there with my co-workers and having us all admire the place was really wrong. i don't think i want to be in situations where i admire things like that that can only exist because of global exploitation of other people in factories, mines, and fields. i felt how the things i was seeing there could only exist out of severe economic oppression--they wouldn't be the way they are, belonging to the person they belong to, located where they are located--were it not for extreme violence and oppression.
i feel like this kind of thing is what conversations about real estate in new york are about too--when people get to talking about the prices of apartments and houses. it's like this group process of placing value in certain ways, feeling certain kinds of emptiness and desire, that i want to find alternatives to. capitalism is all about having us look up at the things we want all the time, feel insecure and inadequate, and quest for more and more, never looking down at people who have less to see if we have more than enough.
i've been thinking about how we can more actively create communities of desire and pleasure using other values. we're already doing it in a lot of ways, through trans politics and feminism and fat politics and anti-racism, rejecting the values and standards provided to us and teaching ourselves and each other about valuing different things. i want to look at those processes more carefully, see how they work explicitly and implicitly, and think about generating more of them in more places.
in other news, i've been going to this seminar in irvine every day this week. its about the theological-political and my mind is racing and exhausted. i've been enjoying the readings that deconstruct the idea of a secular state, and also the conversations about how formation of modern forms of governnance require those constructions of secularity. we read an interesting book about different groups of people who have believed in and predicted different kinds of apocalypses which was also fun. i don't like having to get myself to irvine every day at all, though.
if you want to see what we're doing, go to http://flatiron.sdsc.edu/projects/sect/main.php?nav=sub&page_id=12