“Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.”
—José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 1.
As recession once again threatens a larger-than-usual proportion of us with precarity and uncertainty, many of us are confronted with the sudden untenability of our normal lives. Recessions offer moments to re-evaluate needs, desires, and the sources of our joy. Often, in periods of economic contraction, people—with less money so spend—rediscover simpler, and more abundant sources of joy. Entire cultures built around the “cheap and cheerful” (as they call affordable recreation here in the UK) generally emerge. As I’ve documented elsewhere, during the Great Depression, there was an explosion of interest in urban miniature golf, as struggling and unemployed city-dwellers turned abandoned construction sites, rooftops, and even vacant restaurants into peewee golf courses.
It is subversive to take pleasure in plentiful things. The economists tell us that scarcity tends to make things valuable. Consequently, if something is plentiful, its value will be low. This is as true, we’re told, of clothing and food as it is for entertainment and sex. We’re told that as incomes rise, desires expand.
If this is true, how can humans ever hope to achieve a felt sense of abundance? Are endless growth, inequality, toil, and the endless accumulation of wealth just an inevitable product of our human nature? —essentially a justification of status hierarchy competition and the treadmill of perpetual work. Did these economists make a pact with bankers, investors and consumer retail companies? The basic idea is that you cannot have real satisfaction because human beings are never satiated. Once something becomes available to us, we no longer want it. People will always want more—thus, the poor may as well remain poor (because an increase in income wouldn’t make them any happier), and rich people are justified in continuing to enrich themselves (for they are subject to the same iron laws of desire). The result is a world where we use more and more resources to do less and less of consequence. We spend all of our time in pursuit of scarce pleasures that don’t even make us happy.
In an interview, Michel Foucault spoke of the way that architectures and infrastructures “canalize” people’s circulation and “code” their social relations. In other words, our environment channels choices and desires into predictable, exploitable, ever-flowing streams that might serve as a driving energy source for industrial and political processes. In the current cult of scarcity worship, human desires and relations circulate in predictable, controllable and exploitable ways because people are encouraged to always be striving for bigger, better, rarer and more expensive things. We’ve been tricked into buying big-ass houses; expensive-ass cars; pursuing high follower-to-following ratio sexual partners; trendy foods; the latest and greatest style of clothing; to visit the latest destination hotspots, etc. These desires keep us on the treadmill of infinite work, and in the pyramid scheme of status competition, where a hierarchy of goods and experiences—ranked by their scarcity-value—stands as a monumental and ever-growing peak that can never be surmounted.
Against this regime of self-imposed scarcity-desiring with its disciplining and disappointing results, a cadre of artists and queer theorists have sought to imagine a better orientation(s) that facilitates more joy and abundance with less cost and effort. What follows is a series of strategies for finding joy in the everyday and the plentiful, and for extending plenty to others.
Cheap pleasures, rather than expensive “taste”
I would like to argue against having “good taste.“ Good taste is a means by which many of us are exploited by many parallel fashion industries which are all in a race to shorten the aesthetic shelf life of the things we appreciate. The latest and greatest is always expensive, and always in short supply. How long will we continue sprinting on this treadmill? José Esteban Muñoz, in Cruising Utopia, seeks a “quotidian” version of utopia that does not demand extreme effort or expenditure to access. Pointing to Andy Warhol’s appreciation of everyday objects and the valorization of everyday experiences in Frank O’Hara’s poetry, Muñoz tracks down “utopian potentiality” in common and inexpensive pleasures, such as drinking a soft drink with a friend. O’Hara’s prose mused that “Having a Coke with You—is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne,” and Muñoz quotes Andy Warhol as saying that “All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” As someone who always preferred taquerias and donut shops to haute cuisine and upscale bars, I must say that this intuitively makes sense to me. Muñoz’s celebration of the “campy fascination” with everyday objects and experiences is his attempt to sketch out a world in which we allow ourselves to experience abundance. Perhaps there is a paradise buried in the cheap and easy, convenience-oriented humble pleasures, little treats and vivid colors of low-end consumption in the presence of friends.
Further insight on this idea can be gleaned from the French sociologist Pierre Bordieu, who in his book criticizing bourgeois aesthetic and cultural tastes Distinction, points out that dominant elements within our culture encourage people to feel a visceral disgust at what he calls the “facile”—”facile music, or facile stylistic effect, but also ‘easy virtue‘ or an ‘easy lay‘. The refusal of what is easy in the sense of simple, and therefore shallow, and ‘cheap‘, because it is easily decoded and culturally ‘undemanding‘, naturally leads to the refusal of what is facile in the ethical or aesthetic sense, of everything which offers pleasures that are too immediately accessible and so discredited as ‘childish’ or ‘primitive’.” (Bordieu, 488)
Creativity, rather than conspicuous consumption
What if, rather than consuming more, and chasing faster, bigger, finer, and rarer commodities as a way of orienting the meaning of our lives, we instead strived for creative execution? The status of having the latest-and-greatest could easily be replaced by the satisfaction of making strange, unexpected and challenging art, design, experiences, literature, music, etc. For too long, consumption has served as a stand-in for creativity and excitement; it bills itself as a way to express your individuality, and to access who you really are. Yet it is a poor replacement with diminishing returns, whereas creative production is a much richer means of self-expression and subjective exploration. Commodities are marketed by making them the center of a world or a scene that of course cannot accompany the product when you buy it. This is the aspirational trickery of marketing. Too often, we buy things in an attempt to satiate a craving that we have for worlds or settings that are not within our grasp. Creative production, on the other hand, creates worlds that you can inhabit and invite others into—bypassing or else merely incidentally making use of products along the way. If you haven’t made a world recently (this could just be a maze drawn on a piece of paper, or a blanket fort, or a piece of atmospheric music, or an aquarium or an underground rave with some friends), you are missing out on one of life’s deep joys. Louis Vuitton be damned.
Complicate rather than expand
Relatedly, the pursuit of luxury could—and indeed should—be replaced with a pursuit of complexity. Today, growth is predicated on producing and consuming more today that we did yesterday. At the level of our everyday lives, this has meant getting a new car every few years; getting a bigger house (or adding on to an existing house); growing a business or an investment or a career to pay for these things, etc. Yet what if, instead of expanding outwards and upwards, we designed inwards? Rather than adding square footage, what if we increased the density of utility, functions and satisfactions and experiences available in the existing footprint? What if we enhanced, spruced up, and made increasingly unique the tools and transportation at our disposal, rather than replacing these constantly? This is a truly sustainable model of development: one where we add layers of details; small, refined features; intuitive skills and mastery; deep rituals and various recontextualizations of the familiar. Steward Brand wrote about architecture that learns; perhaps we need all features of our lives to learn; to saturate the mundane with new associations and new uses; to cultivate relations and entertain possibilities that defy our habitual expectations and user manuals. This is the logic of “adding in,” rather than adding on.
Ambulate rather than replace
We’ve all heard of planned obsolescence. In our culture we tend to use things until we are bored of them, and then throw them away. We see this with clothes; we see it with electronics; we see it with cars and houses among the affluent. Such renewal becomes urgent because we tend to hitch our identities on our belongings, and so when those belongings become dated or overplayed, it consequently poses a threat to our identities. We loathe to be old-fashioned, predictable or played out, and so we replace the props and scenery in order to perform a newer, fresher version of ourselves. But what if we approached props and scenery differently? What if we shared props and scenery with others? Rather than getting rid of an outfit when we get bored of it, why not trade with someone else? Why not drift and ambulate between spaces and settings, and appreciate and augment and enhance them while they’re in our care, and then drift on when we’re ready for new scenery? We’re totally un-creative when it comes to deploying changes in our affective and aesthetic presentation. There is a better way.
This is true of relationships too. In static relationships, we tend to treat our partners as all or nothing, and when the desire to stray overwhelms the desire to stay, the switch flips, and the relationship must be scrapped in order to find a better fit. How many perfectly nice connections have been ruined because we lacked the relationship agreements that would have allowed for us to explore and enjoy without threatening the original connection? Desire can be ambulatory, and renewed through drifting. Do you eat the same thing every day? Probably not! I enjoy ice cream because I eat so many other things. If I had nothing but ice cream all day, and then had some more ice cream, it wouldn’t be the delightful thing that it is. Those same economists who insist on the value of scarce resources would tell you that a good thing derives its goodness by being rare, with the implicit assumption that there is generally a scarcity of good things the rest of the time. But this is wrong. A good thing is good because of its contrast with the things around it—and those things around it don’t have to be bad; they just need to be different. Ice cream tastes amazing, whether you have been eating bad food all day, or whether you just have had normal, delicious savory food. Likewise with experiences and likewise with relationships. The thing that helps you to appreciate your partner, for example, could be that you’ve been lonely and sad for a month; or it could be that you’ve been having a nice time with other friends and partners, and it made you appreciate them all the more fore their idiosyncrasies and the uniqueness of the relationship that you have with them. Value derived from difference is much better than value derived from scarcity.
Easy lovers
“Don’t be easy,” half of us are instructed—whether the message is framed implicitly or explicitly. For the longest time, I wondered whether the taboo against promiscuity was a conspiracy against sexual abundance designed to keep everyone striving hard to become worthy of sex. Now I know this it is.
The “easy lover” has been stigmatized and devalued, as we are told that the more sexually available a person is, the less sexually desirable they are. This is the underlying logic that drives our mainstream “parasexual” culture, with its endless captivation, its competition for attention, its valorization of means and endless deferral of ends. Sexual allure has never been more visually abundant, yet sex itself remains scarce. Under a hybrid regime of hypersexualized self-expression and puritanical notions of self-respect, we’re all camgirls, nuns and incels at the same time.
Some blame the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s (or, more nefariously, that of the 1920s) for the torturous onslaught of temptation and what they see as a breakdown of social solidarity and the “utopia” of traditional love, but these periods of liberalizing behavioral standards never created a true revolution in the regime of desirability. They merely shifted the dominant regime of scarcity enforcement from a puritanical producer culture to a hedonistic consumer culture—with both being fundamentally predicated on a shortage of human connection. This is not an organic state of affairs; it is a world running on social capital and social relations modeled on exchange logic, where we make ourselves scarce in order to preserve our value.
An abundance of places
Some years ago, a group of friends pondered how it could possibly be that in a city like San Francisco, a night out could be of such low quality, and at the same time, cost so much money. An arm and a leg to get there; an arm and a leg to get in; an arm and a leg for drinks; an arm and a leg for food afterwards; an arm and a leg to get home. All to stand in a dark room and shout a slow-paced, half-understood conversation over the noise of some shitty EDM DJ. It’s not that there was a shortage of spaces to inhabit or experiences to be had; it’s that the process of legitimately converting space into authorized places to be at night had been so thoroughly constraining that there were, incredibly, no alternatives. At some point, the cultural practice of appropriating public, abandoned and interstitial urban spaces as leisure venues became very widespread within our milieu, and it was only after doing it for awhile that we all realized that this was our way of resisting the artificial, “canalizing” scarcity of the highly exploitative leisure industry of the city. When great things don’t exist—either out of complacency or out of designed scarcity/exploitation, the best thing to do is often to find a few allies and create the paradise that you crave. Abundance and joy are totally possible; they’ve just been regulated out of existence by profiteers, their servants in the state, and a gaggle of economists who constantly steady us with the lie that “we can’t have nice things.”