My impending wedding and a recent post from my cohort Stan got me thinking about the revolutionary power of love. Call me a romantic, but hey, consider the context.
Stan's concerned that creeping capitalism is creating a "totalitarian semiosis" whereby nobody can imagine revolutionary ideas. He says
...ideas concerning what a life might be like where I didn’t pay rent or concerning a life-long romantic partnership that was not a state-sanctioned marriage are difficult to express if only because we lack both the literal vocabulary but also the emotional vocabulary to allow such feelings to transfer between one another.
Difficult, maybe. But as one who is about to seek approval of my heterosexual relationship from the state, I can tell you that there's a certain soothing quality to this particular act of semiotic conformity.
And the hundreds of same-sex couples that lined up at city hall last year might agree with me. But it's hard to say that these love-birds were co-opted by the state. Many would claim just the opposite. To many, these illicit nuptials were classic civil disobedience--an effort to reform state injustice.
So here's an interesting dilemma. Were these wedding-seekers submissive state subjects, or active revolutionaries? Both? What about AnneMarie and I?
While I agree that many of our modern institutions are re-shaping our imaginary landscape (for better and for worse) I'm not convinced that it's shrinking.
I'm thinking of
Ananya Roy's Commencement Address at AnneMarie's recent graduation from Berkeley. She described "locations of hope" that emerge within the new intellectual geography of corporate globalization.
Her CV describes the topic of an upcoming book on microcredit:
The book examines how authoritative development knowledge is produced in Washington D.C. and how from this node of power best practices, models, conditionalities, and ideas are disseminated and applied worldwide through "global policy chains." At the same time, the book pays careful attention to how this "Washington consensus" is challenged by alternative paradigms, many of them originating in the global South. To this end, the book is located not only in Washington D.C. but also in Bangladesh, the original site of microcredit, home to some of the world’s largest NGOs like the Grameen Bank. Most recently, the project has expanded to include the Middle East where the American war on terror has subsumed within it a war on poverty.
So, even as global financial institutions creep into the populist space of micro-credit, it opens a discursive and imaginary space--in multiple locations--that would not otherwise exist.
In my mind, the same goes for marriage. Even as the state creeps into the most intimate of personal relationships, it exposes itself--in multiple locations--at the margins. Think San Francisco City Hall.
From this view, my marriage need not be imaginative self-censorship, it can be a revolutionary space! Love shall overcome!
Thank god. Now, back to making truffles.
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