parental Realpolitik

En route to school today: According to my second grader, the worst thing about the president is that he puts his name prominently on buildings and "wants to name all the streets with his name."

"He doesn't know," she continues, "that everyone dies."
"Or at least," I offer, "he doesn't seem to care about anyone but himself."
A pause, then: "I can't wait until Donald Trump dies," she says, not without animosity.

Friends, I did not try to chasten her sentiment or provide some platitude about ill will. I honored the feeling of an other – her – made space for it in the morning air. Fight me.

Ein Berliner

We could not have lived in Berlin as well or as cozily without the help of our Tagesmutter / neighbor / fixer / friend who, for no discernible reason except kindness, made our little family part of her world.

Her bio-family might not have been from Berlin originally. They might have been from somewhere boring and not-Berlin. She is the youngest. After some out of control years in the city ("Oh, Seth, if I tell you that some times I did not think I would live to the next day"), she had children of her own and settled with them in Kreuzberg.

Her father was born in 1923 and died in 1989. When he was eighteen he had a "Yiddish girlfriend." His brother made some kind of official report about her, and she was deported to a camp. Father then served as a military courier for three years of the war, at the end of which he returned on foot to the family, from a great distance.

Her father gave her and all of her siblings "Hebräischen Namen." She did the same for her three kids (who are – she struggles to translate – "mixed caste": their papas are west African immigrants)...oh, except for the middle child, named after the title character of a popular U.S. sitcom about a black teenager. "I love that show when I was growing up."

Her father was outlived by his brother, who died in 1995. "We never had contact with him. Nimmer. My father would not have contact with him."

She related these stories to me in parcels, at pick up or drop off, and then our house affairs would draw us hence.

the ring of _____, and the sting of it

Can the fish resist the water? Does it?

It is very clear that the extreme reduction of the family unit is a necessary development in late capitalist economy. The extended family, which functions so well in agrarian-based economies, becomes an anachronism in an economy with a capacity for industrial farming. The situation becomes worse when the extended family is placed in the context of national/global economy; then it actually stops functioning efficiently from the perspective of power vectors, and becomes a detriment to corporate goals. Allowing the extended family to continue offers individuals participating in that institution a social and economic power base which gives them the opportunity to refuse corporate culture. In addition, it creates a social process that has the potential to be more satisfying than participation in consumption processes. Individual loyalty to an institution (i.e., the extended family) that potentially contradicts or negates capitalist imperatives of production and consumption is simply not a possibility that can be allowed to continue. In an effort to eliminate this social possibility, capitalist economy has configured itself to make entrance to or maintenance of middle-class status dependent upon accepting the nuclear family as the model of choice. People are financially rewarded for showing an allegiance to participation in the production and consumption processes, over and above participation in extended family processes.

The process of socializing individuals into nuclear units begins with the education process. Children are immediately taught that “success” in life depends on a division of labor, and on separation from other family members; i.e., the adults work, while the children train in school to enter the workforce. At the end of secondary education, they are fully adjusted to the idea that it is time to leave home to join the workforce, or to attend university. In the US, this process of separation begins almost immediately, because over the past 30 years, production rates have increasingly intensified, while real wages have decreased, thus requiring both parents to work if they want to maintain middle-class status. Children are placed in daycare until it is time for them to attend school. Hence, domestic togetherness in the middle-class family has nearly ceased, and children spend more time with their socializers — education services and mass media — than with “significant others.”

The reward for power vectors in promoting this variety of family structure is twofold: First, since people are generally denied social possibilities outside of rationalized contexts, a profound alienation emerges. The only cures offered by capitalist society for this condition are “satisfaction” through success at work, or through acquisition of consumer goods. Second, the geographic mobility necessary for the efficient deployment of the upper echelons of the workforce is assured. People go where their employers send them without a second thought. Whether individuals are near their family or friends is of secondary importance; maintaining class rank (and more and more, simply to remain employed) is of primary importance.

The nuclear family guarantees both the physical and the ideological replication of the workforce; however, in terms of eugenic development, it offers even more. The nuclear family offers a specific set of concerns that complement voluntary eugenics. Since the middle-class nuclear family is generally small, thereby increasing the chances of total familial erasure, its members express a profound concern for reproduction. The extended family is also just as concerned with familial reproduction; the difference between the two, however, is that while the extended family is content with the quantity reproduced as a safeguard of familial survival, the nuclear family is concerned with the “quality” of reproduction. Quality, in this case, is dictated by capitalist demands. Quality means the extent to which a child will be successful, i.e., will be able to obtain a good job in order to maintain or heighten class rank. What nuclear family parents lose in nonrational association with their child, they gain in rationalized association. They can send the child to good schools. They can provide the child with health care. They can offer the child a safe and secure environment in which to mature. The reason parents want to provide their children with these “advantages” is so the child will give society he/r best economic performance. In this thoroughly rationalized situation, quality of life is equated with economic performance. The perception is that the better the child performs economically in later life, the better s/he will be able to satisfy he/rself within the structures of production and consumption, and the greater the probability that s/he will be upwardly mobile.

Once the structural conditions of the economy of desire and the nuclear family are in place, which in turn lead to equating quality of life (perhaps even social survival) with economic performance by parents obsessed with their own genetic and/or cultural replication, the environment is ripe for voluntary eugenics — a situation which [Frederick] Osborn was certain would come to pass. If parents are offered goods and services which will give their few offspring a greater opportunity for success, would they not purchase them? Osborn thought that they would, and he believed that these goods and services would include services which would genetically engineer the child to insure he/r better economic performance. He predicted that parents would want to participate in the design of their children to help them to adapt economically and socially — eugenic participation would be a sign of benevolence. To be sure, once eugenics is perceived as a means to empower the child and the parent, it loses its monstrous overtones, and becomes another part of everyday life medical procedure. Capitalism will achieve its goals of genetic ideological inscription, while at the same time realizing tremendous profits for providing the service.*

* Critical Art Ensemble, "Eugenics: The Second Wave," Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, Eugenic Consciousness (NY: Autonomedia, 1998) 122-25. I added the link inline above to the Frederick Henry Osborn Papers.

sprung

In honor of a newborn niece, I am freeing up some fragments that concern my own baby (my own baby and ears, apparently, both the things and what you do with them), i.e. liberating them from FB and bringing them over here:

objet petit a

Adapted from an email to DA, October 9, 2012:

Here is where my OCD and my hoarder-ish tendencies combine to make being un-free seem preferable to...whatever being free is. The hoarding is a family trait, via one parent, the procrastination (a.k.a. perfectionism) also, via the other. Are we not the synthesis of our parents' worst characteristics? I see it in my own Kind:

Parenting isn’t so much passing along positive traits as attempting to minimize the transfer of negative ones. If you’re lucky, you might be able to break even, but you’ll never be in the black. In this sense, children raise us because they make our flaws visible and more vivid than our virtues and force us to focus upon and mitigate them.

This reminds me that, as a child, I used to play a game with the neighbors that involved hiding one’s action figures around the yard; I buried my original Princess Leia in a hole at the edge of the lawn by the bulkhead. I’ve probably already told you this story, which should give you a sense of how the burial and permanent loss of Princess Leia continues to be a discussed event among my family. For a long time my father would look for her while mowing the lawn, thinking that she would turn up someday, if only in pieces, thanks to the mower. Many years later, a girlfriend came upon an original Princess Leia at a flea market and gifted it to me. I have hoarded that one still, I think, unless it found a new owner when I left Cambridge...perhaps it was finally passed down to someone else?

'a shaped romance'

On the walk this morning from The New Apartment to the Tagesmutter's house, the sidewalk was even more covered in fresh dog shit and buzzing with flies – RJKY weaving her Laufrad around the piles like flags on a sunny slalom course.

We kept passing people carrying household supplies: a giant sack of packages of toilet paper, armfuls of sponges, a jug of Allzweckreiniger. We are nearly run down by a woman on a bicycle loaded with four or five industrial-sized boxes of powdered laundry detergent. As we round the corner onto Kottbusser Damm, ach so: the Schlecker there is having some kind of going-out-of-business sale. There is a crowd of people waiting to enter – a thick line winds through the entire store from door to Kasse. People are cleaning this place out.

An old man sitting outside makes an apparently humorous observation about RJKY and her papa. We smile uncomprehendingly into the sun.

In the courtyard of the Tagesmutter's building, there is a man – in mask and apron – welding a grocery cart. The courtyard is shared with a cafe, movie theater, and Turkish grocery store. He seems to be working for the store. Is he simply repairing the cart? Or is he reinforcing it for some unique task? It goes without saying, I think, that we do not always see people welding grocery carts on our way to daycare.

A workman enters the building behind us and then, with smiles and mumbles of encouragement, patiently allows RJKY to go first up the stairs. She reaches the door and knocks. He stops. Ah: he is also going to the Tagesmutter's. Something about the plumbing.

RJKY's friend N has worms.

While receiving this news, a phone call (and somewhere, a star fall, I suppose). My telephone never rings. I am not at home. It's the company installing a faster Net connection in The New Apartment. The call is dropped. They are kind enough to call back. I forget to collect the Laufrad from the courtyard and have to recross Kottbusser Damm.

Other workmen have left a trailer full of dirt blocking the door.

I squint into the sun as I pass an already bustling La Femme.

offsprings

The following first appeared on Facebook, October 14, 2011.

when, after our midday nap, rjky and i are sitting on our respective potties, facing one another with a basket of magazines between us, rjky always insists on taking Der Spiegel and The Economist for herself, as she pushes Elle été and old issues of Brigitte into my hands...

The following first appeared on Facebook, February 18, 2012.

rjky has added the word "tower" to her vocabulary -- usually in reference to the massive spires that have become her stock in trade when we're playing legos. so i'm teaching her the chorus...a perfect song from a perfect album (an album, what's more, that often dominated my late night, high school joy rides of alienation and boredom): indeed,



"radio waves curve and cross / I stand below them / lost // 
above me is a black obelisk / and the dangers that I risk // here gather the ghosts of the mind / that tear my heart and here I find / all the traps that have been set / everything I would forget beneath / The Tower The Tower The Tower The Tower The Tower The Tower The Tower The Tower"

archipelago

If the cognitive map of The City that grew in me, in my 20s, consisted of a dynamic network of places/spaces in which to drink and smoke, then my image of this city, Berlin, now, is an expanding archipelago of Kinderspielplatzen Kinderspielplätze: Rüdesheimer Platz, Hohenstaufenplatz, Bolzplatz Böckhstraße, Hasenheide, Tempelhof, Grimmstraße ("Grimmi"), Hobrechtstraße at Pflügerstraße (what do people call that one?), Victoriapark, etc. The beer garden next to the Spielplatz in Victoriapark represents a possible, personal sort of point de capiton...