AAB about a bicycle

Coast Salish Territory | issue 2 | spring 2013

And I Didn’t Even Call the Police!

To overcome this crisis without questioning the meaning of consumption, production, and investment is to reproduce the preconditions of financial capitalism, the violence of its ups and downs, the philosophy according to which “time is everything, man is nothing.” For man to be everything, we need to reclaim the time of his existence.

From Christian Marazzi’s The Violence of Financial Capitalism

AAB issue 2, And I Didn’t Even Call the Police!Edited by Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali RadThis book was set in Garamond Pro and Helvetica NeueCoast Salish Territory, Spring 2013

Contents

Preface

nikki reimerfollow the plot to the ideal candidate

danielle lafranceGet Fucked

anahita jamali radMoney Knows

danielle lafranceCapital: A Short-Lived Lie OR MY NAME IS HELENE DEMUTH

kaylin pearcefrom the boardroom table

nikki reimermaterality 2

milena varzonovtseva Circle of places, life, and futurisms

penelope hetheringtonKey Concepts Exercise

Unsigned Contributions by: Megan Hepburn, Andrea Demers, and Jeunesse LaFrance

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Preface

Round Two, Fight! About a Bicycle hosted a series on economics this winter 2012-13 entitled

Capital Labour/Capital Life, with a focus on how Capitalism functions (or doesn’t) now. We

explored texts that address capital’s transmutation during the 2008 (and on-going) global

economic crisis, the precarious conditions of labour and life, economic principles that situate

capitalism’s avant-gardes and the avant-gardes of its opposition, and the current state of

financialization and its “obscene superego” that floods public and cognitive values, and how

(beginning with the introduction of standardized time) the machinery of Capital becomes

internalized as a moral imperative.

Like a line from Waiting for Godot, “there is no outside” from Empire, from a world system

that is a totalizing and affective reality, and often debilitates social subjects from pushing beyond

postmodern impasse (capitalism breeds impassiveness), a space in which the social is fluid

(anything goes!), while the economic beats the subject in line to the rhythm of surplus-value

production. Keeping in mind the relevance of Marxian economics (and the factories that still

operate in those conditions), we began this session with an intensive 3-week reading of Christian

Marazzi’s The Violence of Financial Capitalism, which has acted as a departure from what we know

and a necessary blueprint for interpreting the financial crisis as a fluctuating, yet stable vortex of

capital accumulation. In order to confront cultural predispositions to success and failure within

the Market, we thought about the procedural creation of scarcity and how it dictates the Market’s

preference for rarity.

A few questions that percolated from the outset and still has relevance to this issue: How

do we avert our attentions from an idealized future while still imagining a post-utopian social

reality? When so much of our relationships are based upon competition and the desire for more,

how do we (emotionally) educate ourselves out of this paradox? Can we cannibalize the “esoteric

neolanguage” of finance and ideology and transfigure it into a more recognizable beast? How do

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we reconcile precarious privilege with the exploitation of precarious labour? How do we theorize

precarity not only as a form of labour, but also as a new form of being: an all-encompassing

anxiety resulting from the instability of the free markets and how it affects what we eat, where we

live, and if we are paid.  From Gill, “How might we make links between macro-organization and

institutional practices on the one hand, and experience and affective states on the other, and open

up an exploration of the ways in which these may be gendered, racialized and classed?”

AAB Issue 2, And I Didn’t Even Call the Police! is a response to these questions and quandaries,

it raises new ones, and calls our attention to the omnipresence of fictitious money flows,

postmodern panopticons, and internal and external policing. These fleshed out apparatuses of

control also herald the scrutiny of what is affectively valorized in the aftermath of this irreversible

global crisis.

We maintain that AAB, as a collective, is a meeting place between women who offer not

just critical and argumentative prowess, but insight into how capital affects our daily routine,

perspectives, and identities. We maintain a critical attitude about all co-constitutive aspects of our

lives: our jobs, our consumption, our unpaid labour, and our personal relationships, recognising

ourselves as a part of the aforementioned beast. In connection with a passage from Silvia Frederci’s

interview Feminism, Finance and the Future of #Occupy:

Finance capitalism is not different in nature from capitalism in general. The idea that there is

something more wholesome about production-based capitalism is an illusion we must abandon. It

ignores the fact that finance capitalism is also based on production and unequal and exploitative class

relations, although in a more circuitous way. A feminist critique of financial capitalism, then, cannot

be substantially different from a critique of capitalism in every other form. Nevertheless, looking at

finance capitalism from the viewpoint of women, we can gain an insight into some of the ways in

which our everyday reproduction and the relation between women and capital have changed.

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In part, this issue brings into consideration the threats to daily life, to affective social and

domesticated bonds, in an age of heightened alienation, and how to navigate our bonds so as to

meet together and interfere with the logic of co-production and self-control.

— D&A

fictitious

money flows

2

Dear AAB,

i’m still working on my submission to issue 2. it’s kind of hilarious timing, just as my employer commits bla-tant fraud, bouncing 80% of my total pay for the 4 months of working for this non-profit organization, put-ting my colleagues and I into credit hell. At the same time, my rent goes directly to my employer because my living arrangement here has been organized by them. the house is heated with oil, which has run out as of 2 days ago, putting me in -10 tempera-tures - indoors, without access to any method of transportation to the nearest village or town, should my pile of blankets prove not enough. as per the rent agreement with my employer, the fuel is paid for by the non-profit (minus my rent), so I am instructed not to hire the fuel company to come in this emergency, as my employer will not pay the $70 emergency fill-up fee. it would make a pertinent anecdote.

3

nikki reimer follow the plot to the ideal candidate

physical demands: pine needles, blood in the snow wolves drag the body

managing continuous, repetitive arm, hand, and finger movements

reaching, bending, carrying the father home

extensive walking and stair climbing but the boy is already dead in his bed

dust, fumes, gases, odor, animal dander and changes in the actor’s own life

expose liam neeson’s character’s wife

to occasional lifting, pushing, and pulling the heart still beating in the cavity

adequate visual acuity is required a six inch cut

the little girl’s parents hire thugs to terrorize and kidnap someone who strives to obtain the correct information

the doctor whom they hold responsible for her death has the ability to influence direction

the sister dies of a cocaine overdose in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment

the parents are devastated on a part-time, volunteer basis

all positions originate from the thought that he died fighting for freedom

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accountable the brother tries to take down the drug lord

the loyalist makes up the email address he enters below

a story of a son tragically killed by a bomb will allow our staff to correspond with him

in a bid for sympathy concerning his interest in employment

in order to update the resistance fighters who have him captive

he will need to provide no children

he also needs to define the brothers’ loyalty to each other

to broker deals with demons at a later date or submit the same profile

the woman’s mental illness will only become active after entering a valid email address

provide monthly statistics triggered by her baby’s crib death

the siblings are linked via a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 30 characters

please adhere to the following in order to gain custody of their baby

when creating a new password keep the dead baby’s room undisturbed

in order to save humanity from her evil brother in the email address field, click the password form box

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password does not match the mad-scientist father

the defined login kills her neighbours

passwords’ length must have a magical bond

the sister commits at least one upper case character

drags an effective office horticulture program

highly organized with excellent suicide

the alternate-reality son into successful onboarding and timely offboarding of staff

a lightbulb is screwed into his open chest accordingly, only serious applicants need apply

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danielle lafrance Get Fucked

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8

what we eat, where

we live, and if we are paid

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I hear this phrase all the time: work to live, and live to work. Which one means I’m a slave to my job? Having been raised on the North Shore, I wore a backpack of opportunity. It felt like possibilities were reachable. With high housing rates and the current state of the economy, I’ve come to realize that I can’t afford to live in this city. I hear the headline: Vancouver is the most liveable city in the world. But for whom? We have been forced to cohabitate with others to save on rent. I wonder if it’s forcing us to fall in love over and over again. This can be both a positive and negative way of living – we learn how to share and deal with people, make long lasting relationships, but it also constrains them. I always dreamt the American dream of owning a house, and now I struggle for the bare essentials: food, water, and shelter. Where did this dream come from and where can I get a refund?

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anahita jamali rad Money Knows

The medieval proverb nulle terre sans seigneur [there is no land without its lord] is thereby replaced by that other proverb, l’argent n’a pas de maître [money knows no master], wherein is expressed the complete domination of dead matter over mankind.

From Karl Marx’s “Rent of Land”

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Money Knows No Master

It is necessary to invent the bodies of toxic assets.

A reproduction of living-making made easy

(available on the market)

in order to infect the limbs of global capital into easy-money

into these . . . affective embodied experiences.

Assets with anxiety, shame, aggression with little or no liquidity.

Assets with desires, assets conditioned with the American Dream, assets that would do anything, conceal their poor upbringing and shoddy precarious conditions, just to get a foot in the game.

We’ll make a living out of you.

No futures, no futures, no futures for me ...

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The Categorical Imperative of Profit at Any Cost

Capital consumes the possible.

Invent strategies to reduce risk.

Or the mathematical equivalent of ethical conduct.

This toxicity will infect all of your securities. This toxicity will infect . . .

We can do better than this. What we need

is better, faster, cheaper medicine. Or to rely on the old adage, ‘feed the banks, starve the rest.’

What feeds coffins makes profits.

You can have it all . . .

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You Will Be Subject to Fare Inspection at Any Time

Nothing is untouched. The crisis continues

deteriorating bodies of populations scarred by the Neoliberal Oath.

No need to worry, though. The post-industrial wasteland is filled with discarded bodies.

The body is obsolete.

Whereas the pre-industrial severed limbs as punishment for resistance, the post-industrial produces a mode of life severed from limbs, precluding resistance.

The work that embodies the worker makes labour without limbs.

There are no mouths to feed in the virtual. Here, work is immaterial, a labour whose main purpose is to consume to no end, to consume itself into negative existence (positive debt), to consume in the face of nothing left to consume, naturalized.

Here, one needs nothing beyond

the nurturing touch of mother austerity.

No futures, no futures, no futures for you . . .

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The System that Suppresses Noise thereby Amplifies Noise

This is a definition of a biological organism.

The blood and toil of machines of finance

transmit into

market dreams.

In order to support the energy consumption of tenement blocks built for

rapid market response

cut the energy consumption of the working bodies.

Here, we swim in the primordial soup of that other developing life form:

the zeros and ones that formulate numbers on a screen that formulate dollars left to autonomously reproduce on the market.

This is life after crisis.

No futures, no futures, no futures for us . . .

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Removed from Time

Hedge the transmit of monetary post-monetary futures funds.

Give it all you’ve unsecured

floating

money

bags . . .

The circulatory flows, pumping blood and toil of the machines, breathing life into the trans-atlantic monetary system

floating free.

You can have it, you can have it, have it all, have it all . . .

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danielle lafrance Capital: A Short-Lived Lie OR MY NAME IS

HELENE DEMUTH

Work is never really present and life has no gravity in advertising: objects have no weight, the link between the cause and effect of gestures is governed by pure fantasy. The dreams engendered by Capitalism are the most disquieting of its products, their specific visual language is also the source of the misunderstanding between the inhabitants of the poorly developed countries and the Westerners. These dreams are conceived as devices of subjectivization, scenes from the life of the toxic community of human beings and things. Where the commodity is absent, bodies are tragically different

From Claire Fontaine’s “Human strike within the field of libidinal economy”

PM: Would you tell me about that dream you had last night?

DL: What was the dream you think I had?

PM: The one about blisters on your legs upon coming home from work.

DL: Yes, I look at them with utter disregard. I’m not concerned with oozing pus or the fervent

itch. It’s merely there on the surface of someone’s skin . . . sometimes depressed people think

everyone is watching them or know something about them that they don’t already know. I

always think about times of vanity that hide hysterical scars. Is this a body defeated by capital

or defeating capital? I think that’s why I like going sans make-up these days or without my hair

blown dry. I’m tired of making myself up for myself or finding myself thinking or advising you

deserve it.

PM: Yeah, maybe you should stop asking me to get a hair cut on top of that.

DL: I wonder if I dream more when I’m grinding my teeth, like to a click track or a metronome.

It creates a melodious rhythm to accustom rapid eye movement and reveals a mysterious spell for

deranged reoccurrences in my sleeping mind. Sleep is an important component to anyone’s quality

of life. Some choose not to sleep and some have no choice.

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PM: I said last night over dinner that your contribution to work, your personal significance, is not

intrinsic to the place of work itself. Work allows for security for yourself and there’s some financial

reward at the end of endless nights . . . I don’t like any type of labour where I have authority

over someone else or, more so, where I am only put in this authoritative position because I am

designated as the one capable of minding the shop. Bookkeeping is done in a particular order. It’s

law, like the good book.

DL: Resist the more negative constrictions on thought; beware of identity monikers, especially

those that say they are changing the world, like the Beats. We bring up the Great Male Minds

of the post-war only because their visibility works contra to the marginal bodies who make

appearances due to their street entrenchment. Those who do not have access to the page or the

canvas, the computer, that do not refer to their work as “my work is about . . .” Blank nothing

stares, chains equipt for fortitude, gregarious fleeting moments to arrest time from liberated time.

If capital is appropriating and driving time . . . it’s immeasurable and you can go tell your friends

down South I said so.

PM: And where do limitations come from? There are logistical turns that take place when you’re

high off the ground, when the mind knows the body will plummet to its death, yet you keep on

lifting and carrying your unruly weight. The face of the mountain has several ‘problems,’ they are

called, where the climber sacrifices the logic of self-defeat in order to cross the line. Even when

sliding scale of rocks procede to be mythic tricks played on the climber, the movement to correct

the problem is not chance or slight of hand. Your fingers belong in that crack at that given time,

and when they feel like they don’t (like when your muscles went slack a few weekends ago) they

still fit. Rocks are only rocks and I believe in their realism.

DL: Still juggling whether my fear of falling is actually about the desire to fall, risky foundering

in the wake of the underlying dynamic of Western culture. You looked so happy this morning

before you left for the climb in Squamish. Meanwhile, back at base camp, I’m so fucking tired of

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sentiment and sincerity. I want to fucking hit someone or something. I fucking hate the amount

of energy and time spent on free floating before a consecrated experience at work. I wonder if the

neurosis concerning time is in fact a response to a possible rupture of dilatory exchanges (we have

a privileged amount of time to concede the problem of capital) or the debilitation of introducing

yourself over and over again to some dimwitted fuck. Yesterday, I went through my track record

with you – the vertiginous experience of excusing myself from work in order to feel life (forms-of-

life). In order to write the page that breaks the camels back.

PM: I only looked happy because I was going climbing. You should want me to go. It’s when I not

only sense haecceity but embody it. It brings me closer to dying in the most reverent way it could

be experienced. Insofar as adventure sports offer perspective, I wrote (quoted) once to you:

“I’ve been sea kayaking on and off for a few years (kayaking Cape Wrath was my Eiger north

face), and find the sea the closest thing to going on a big climb. The only difference is that often I

find a tussle with the sea feels like an expedition in itself, a single day like a whole trip to Patagonia

condensed down. Out on the water in the big swell, in your wobbly boat, you experience the

full gamut of climbing highs and lows - the prime ones being utter terror (“I’m going to fucking

die!”), utter boredom (“I wish I was dead”) and utter commitment (“I hope my partner dies - not

me!”). In the sea I’ve never been so aware of my place in nature (I have no place), my ability to

ask my body to give (50km day in a boat is like running a marathon on your arms) or so cold

(when you’re swimming in the North Sea it’s colder than Alaska in March). As I said – the sea is a

great way to sooth a restless soul, a way to re-balance that selfish immature ‘western’ adventurous

streak in us, were we stamp our feet and demand some base excitement and ‘one-ness’ with nature

– a blow job for the spirit. Twenty minutes in the sea is like a whack to the head – and all such

thoughts are washed away (Andy Kirkpatrick).

It’s you who feels this fortitude with great bodies of water – why can’t you realize this is something I

truly enjoy.

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DL: There’s a certain comfort people find in all-encompassing depression. It’s an ironic thing to

say, but I struggle with the sinking flood and maintaining vigilant attentiveness, like a Young

Girl. Saying everyone is so unhappy these days is an understatement. It’s a gentle massage through

real madness. Just as the blue pearl planet from Lars Van Trier’s Melancholia is misunderstood

as a fly-by but is indeed targeting our blue pearl planet Earth, so to are the pounding fists of

totalizing capital, in all its formations. The scientist-husband, John, is the first to commit suicide

when he realizes the end is near, while the depressed sisters, one clinical one getting by, remain

calm. It’s not a comfort, like I mentioned, it’s the insight that depressed people can remain calm

in apocalyptic situations. Perhaps, a temporal strategy is to seize anxiety as a weapon rather

than an agoraphobic blanket to hide under . . . I find myself absorbing other’s characteristics

and compensating for the missing link in their psychosis. The same way this discursive “I” of

“conversational theory” is a way to breathe theory through osmosis . . . at Banff I used this term,

osmosis (theoretical extraction through living life), during a conflict of whether to read primary

texts or not. I found myself saying, “there’s not enough time to read if you’re working all night

and crazy in the morning.” Meanwhile, I read and eat primary texts all the time. I find myself

compensating . . . is the new devil’s advocate. On the opposite end, she recalled the history of Riot

Grrrls, where they read primary sources for breakfast. I wanted to shout out an iteration of a new

name we frequent that cultivates rage. I couldn’t quite understand why there was a conflictual

tone between us. I didn’t know what we were trying to accomplish, as communication ease was

confused with niceties.

* * *

PM: Remember Tofino? You kept on asking me, demanding of me, for something new.

DL: Don’t you ever get tired of habit? Like my nail biting or a network of tendencies towards

a nostalgic situation? The brigade of capital that keeps me from lusciously advertised gel nails .

. The psycho-social-cognitive afflictions are in all ways related to capitalistic accumulation and

not distinctively contained in either a control or discipline state of society. A discipline society is

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a rock-skipping receptacle with similar outcomes: a place for us to pay attention to authority and

to our failures. A control society is a non-phasing landscape. With the advent of you’s popularity

(TIME magazine, 2006), the reign of personal authority over autonomy is not a mute point.

The problem is the co-existing states, dominant and control. I can imagine the public solace of

such grandiose institutions if only for tangibility and impossible missives. It’s for the safety of

society–for public safety–that we contain disobedient bodies in private prisons. I read that new

parole conditions, under Harper’s vision of law and order, will have prisoners having to explain

why they deserve to be released at the two-thirds point. The U.S. prison boom was the result of a

major crack down on drug offenders. In 2004, of all drug arrests, almost half were imprisoned for

marijuana possession. We can put a price on oil spills and contaminated water tables.

PM: You really do look like Marc Emery’s wife.

DL: The electric shock would be better; it calls for an immediate solution to an immediate threat.

(PAUSES) Drinking the Kool-Aid is the allegorical form of frontal lobe lobotomies. And how the

Master disciplines his followers . . . Sorry I gave you such a hard time while you were unemployed

and sorry I tricked you concerning a non-existent drug habit . . .

* * *

PM: I hope your day is going all right.

DL: It’s going shitty, thanks for asking . . . Just read this: according to Maclean’s there are 45% of

library, archival and information positions unfilled. But to answer your question about Tofino, it

was November and we walked along the beach at dusk and talked about how our utopic ideal was

to have control over the means of production. Seemed so radical again, even though it’s nothing

new.

PM: Can we apply it to the growing neurosis of living in Vancouver. I think we’re both on

the same page when it comes to a discontent for certain cultural makers in the city who brand

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themselves with a capital C. (Neo-cunts.) This is why I have less of a problem with culture-

less living; living in the middle of nowhere, far away from the West Coast urban corridor, is not

a concern. Not that we should neglect the city, but there are impediments, like the privilege of

exiting and entering the square, non-profits quelling the rage in order to made proper citizens.

We can choose to implement the language of Marxism as a way to talk about conditions, or we

can not. Capital’s affects can go unnoticed, but the disavowal is a short-lived lie. A Bay Area

poet-anarchist-scholar-white-male calls this liberal pacifism; those who have notions of labour, or

materiality, going in one ear and out the other care that no one hits them . . . All of these cultural

markers, the desire to make cultural spaces, are co-optations of the means of production. It’s

always a matter of hot real estate. In the previous issue of About a Bicycle, you referenced temporal

organization as playing the game of the state, a recognition of time frequency and keeping up

with time (to infrastructural changes, to non-consumable objects, to non-signatures, to not wage

equaling money over time) that makes it impossible to stop for a moment and recuperate lost

opportunity cost. It’s strategic up until the point the Neo-cunts look themselves in the mirror,

and catch a glimpse of Bob Rennie’s neon installed face, not their own. everything is not

going to be alright.

DL: Maybe they just shouldn’t be invited to the party. There’s nothing worse than a boring cunt

than a boring cunt who can’t answer questions directly related to their copout, like a Young Girl.

These days, I’m really drawn by lines and breaks that sum up the problem with the cultural class.

Andrew O’Herir’s critique of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers says it all: Is making something

that is pointless and incoherent as an aesthetic choice somehow superior to doing so because you

don’t know better? And Chris Krauss in an essay from Video Green pissed in the mouths of self-

affirmationists by calling them out on their propensity for masking banality with choice. The new

age dream believer is up there with the artist who can’t answer the question: what if you’re not

born into it? If you want money you only need to dream harder.

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PM: If you grind your teeth in your dreams anymore you won’t have any left. precious

commodities, those pearls of wisdom.

DL: But I’ll have so much economic capital . . . I’ve mentioned the state of control-and-discipline-

societies are not transitory, from one to the next, but are rather sentimental towards the other,

resonant, in tune. There exists in tandem analog and digital languages, only the digital acts as

semblance to analog (small slices). There is an affective turning in control societies, where there’s

sympathy for the banker, for the police officer, for the schizophrenic sycophant–well deserved for

their services rendered (beyond the call, even). All in the name of a sense of community or a brutal

conceit towards working in immanence . . . I’m drained.

* * *

PM: Today, personal time has been taken advantage by the spirit of the coproduction model of

business. Our vehement retort against cultural production is that it has become free labour that

motivates the cycle of capital to continue on, with no mind. The vanguard on the streets adorning

an original Vito Acconci umbrella encasement that has found an Out and an In? The burka is her

balaclava and every Western woman’s nightmare. I get by on my looks first and my marks second.

The more personal time we have is only allotted to us because the working week says so. Today

you are producing work for a journal that is of your own making. You’re your own boss.

DL: So where’s the mark? Control societies are not the new monster and capital-life is not

a new Attila (Species Branding 2010). The precaritization of work is nothing new but the

conceptualization of it in the last decade is something else. The old is not a new remaking nor a

new original . . . I was asked multiple times at the Banff Centre by the literary programmer: What

does it [an anarchist world] look like? It was a debased way of asking, but it was much like your

question to David Harvey: How do avant-garde modes of valuation serve to produce use-values

necessary in and for a future, decapitalized society? You were asking him what something looks

like. You were asking him to use his imagination.

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* * *

PM: A techno-poetic metaphor of conceit:

“In order for struggles to form a cycle there must be a spatial proximity of the bodies of labour

and an existential temporal continuity. Without this proximate and this continuity. No wave can

be created, because the workers do not share their existence in time, and behaviours can only

become a wave when there is a continuous proximity in time that info-labour no longer allows”

(Franco Berardi).

Rhizomes, cycles, choices in capital. So what does that say about visible precarious bodies who

do share their existence in time but are axiomatized by state control perpetuated, and abhorred

at times, by social workers and front line health workers. The cycle is a linguistic trapping like

commons, community, free culture . . .

DL: In Fearless Speech, Foucault developed the concept of parrahesia, a type of speech act that

does not rely on rhetorical logic or manipulation (without political ventriloquism) but speaks the

truth through frankness that runs the risk of life. If everyone can be a physicist, as you mention

in your thesis, and only some of them run with it, what does this say about the type of personality

and body valorized by a capitalist society? Who chooses to run with it? And how can we start at

solidarity when partisanship runs amok in the private house of broken bread. The reason why I am

sympathetic is because of the flat plane of possibility – it’s a means to circumlocute our experiences

with the knowledge there is some shared language. This is why social media platforms really gets

my goat, your signature stands for multiple interpretations but it’s an isolated exchange between

free floating signifiers. There are people I trust who know me, and there are people who can assign

what they will. It’s the glory of capitalism, we can fill so many roles and people can fill them for

us. The democratic idea behind the social network was that you could invent yourself. I demand

the soapbox only be thought of as a viral weapon in social war. It should never stand for a dialogue

amongst comrades. Is situational significance exorcized from language when the commodity is

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made present? Your habits will no longer be habits . . . a speech-act is filtered even at its most

penetrative. I find this notion of parrahesia powerful and conflating, as it becomes a product of

paranoia in a capitalist society. Is a natural way to booster depleting serotonin levels to click like,

like, like? Nothing is of our own (do we own the property of ideas when things are spaced and

justified?) and nothing should be of our own. To think for oneself is not something I never want

to do. A voice that transforms life is more of interest.

* * *

PM: On the verge of action and inaction we sit across feet to feet and wait for our cat to get better

DL: You always said he was our property . . .

PM: And I’d say, he’s just a cat. (PAUSES) Don’t you get tired of the delirium induced by

thinking about the same thing? It’s about capital-labour, it’s about capital-life. Or is it about the

right concepts that fit the madness of capital-life? If you say anxiety, I say delirium, if you say I

owe you, I say let’s make dinner. Married couples fight about money rather than having sex all the

time (Louis C.K.). Let’s make a baby and keep it under cover.

DL: The mystical rite of being accepted at my former place of employment looked like this: cocky

cocks, sexualized innuendos (with no fucking as a reward for playing!), gestures of security and

profiling, keep that bevel on an angel, contempt for the loudest woman’s voice, getting to know

you all over again every single shift . . .

PM: Isolated as a condition of the mode of production, precarious labour is a continuation of

domestication and total control of the labouring reproductive body. It is the problematic that

arises when time is mobilized but the insecurity and constraints on the social subject are that

much more prenounced. “The worker has the possibility of joining a union . . . the mothers

are isolated, locked in their houses” (Adrienne Rich). Angela Wesselman-Pierce was the true

protagonist of Catfish, because she lacked the disengagement from her real life in real life and

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therefore sought the comfort of neighbouring avatars to ease the difficulty of her class-based

domestic existence (struggle). She painted pictures of herself as a glorious goddess, but called

them her daughter’s making, in order to establish a relationship with a young man she met on

Facebook. Poor cultural class fooled by this woman from Ishpeming, Michigan; and then ABC

news runs wild and picks up the byline of deceit and trickery. This is what I mean by there being

real affective bonds produced online, they are just that much more susceptible to surveillance

technologies that monitor and moralize upon the interactions. This is about a right-to-speak that

biopower conditions (Claire Fontaine) and allocates a pseudo-freedom outside of the market

and circulation of capital. At the end of the day and at the end of the film, Nev returns to

photographing ballerinas and she returns to economic and social deprivation.

DL: You know this business is a business of relationships. And as it stands, America isn’t a country

it’s just a business. Now fucking pay me . . . If there is no business tomorrow, I want to be there.

* * *

DL: The sound of breaking croissants and strawberry jam smeared and chewing sitting next to me

is enough for me to fucking flip. The sign says no loud noises, and your insistent knife scraping

and picking up loose crumbs with your aging thumb makes me want to hurt you. Can I beat the

odds and not grow into you?

Woman: I love your shoes!

DL: Fuck, I’m such a cunt.

PM: The stratification of identity allows for capital to hide and attempts to strike against it means

striking against ourselves. It often looks like blows against friends and lovers. What is at stake

is the current incarnate and production of the human subject and its relationship to others, the

inexpressiveness of unknowing what moves to make and how to make them known.

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She said she was

ambitious so she

accepts the

process

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kaylin pearce from the boardroom table

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nikki reimer materiality 2

my monthly rent is 27% of my monthly household incomemy monthly phone bill is 5% of my monthly household incomemy monthly life insurance is 0.3% of my monthly household incomemy monthly household transportation costs are 5% of my monthly household income my monthly household medical bills are 12% of monthly household incomemy monthly household food expenses are 20% of my monthly household incomemy monthly household clothing expenditures are 5% of my monthly household income monthly care, food and health insurance for my animal companions is 3% of my monthly household incomemy average household monthly expenditure on books is 4% of my monthly household incomemonthly fitness expenditures for my household is 2% of my monthly household incomemonthly bank fees are 1% of my monthly household incomemy monthly debt repayment is 10% of my monthly household incomemy monthly savings are 6% of my monthly household incomemy total monthly household expenditures are 100.3% of my monthly household income

the average monthly rent for an apartment in all of Vancouver in 2010 was 36% of my monthly household incomethe average monthly rent for an apartment in downtown Vancouver in 2010 was 39% of my monthly household incomethe average monthly rent for an apartment in Vancouver in a building built in 2000 or later is 49% of my monthly household incomethe average monthly rent of a rental condo in Vancouver is 50% of my monthly household income

The rental affordability indicator is a gauge of how affordable a rental market is for renter households in that market. A generally accepted rule of thumb for affordability is that a household should spend less than 30 per cent of its gross income on housing.

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i live 8 steps below gradeVancouver generally has 166 days, or 45% of the year, with measurable precipitation on average

in order to look outside, i have to tilt my head upwards at an angle of 30-45%

the downpayment price of an average house in Metro Vancouver as at October 2011 is 6,363% of my monthly household incomethe mayor of Vancouver’s monthly taxable salary is 410% of my monthly household incomeVancouver city councillors earn 180% of my monthly household incomethe Vancouver deputy mayor earns 90% of my monthly household income per month served

The region’s stable, diversified economy and international gateway to AsiaPacific immigrants will continue to draw more than 40,000 new residents annuallycontributing to rental demand. Rental supplywill be mainly in the form of secondaryrental market stock as rising landand material costs make purpose built rental less feasible.

Only a moron would think that a housing market crashmeans no one is buying and everyoneloses their job. Someone’s always buying,They just don’t always pay the same price.

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to be heard

and not scenery

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Why, in a household of feminists (two men, one woman) is the woman the only one who cleans? Is it because the image of a woman, whose only role is to keep house, is such a joke to us? We all agree that women are intelligent creatures and should feel free to pursue whatever interests and work they like, without a societal expectation of their being tied to the domestic. Do we, as feminists, think that to laugh off housework is to show solidarity with women who have for years wished there was something else they could do besides that? We think of the liberated woman, “She is tidying in the context of her social and political freedom to also work outside the home, and housework does not enter into that equation of freedom.”

In my lived environment, objects are left on the coun-ter when they need to be put away or cleaned. Gar-bage is left out. That mess disrupts my ability to move through this space with clarity, and robs me of the chance to use it like they did. Our lives are still sep-arate, because they feel free to serve themselves, whereas before I can do so, I must tidy up the left-overs of their leisure.

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milena varzonovtseva circle of places, life and futurism

I come from a post-socialist, or post-communist, or transitional, or whatever they choose to call

the countries of contemporary Eastern Europe. Socialism was twenty years ago and was when

everyone had jobs and everyone got paid the same. A jobless existence was not a possibility and

even if you were not able to find one, the Party would find one for you. Today, where I come

from, it doesn’t matter much if you are employed full-time or if you are part-time, self-employed,

free-lanced, etc. None of these forms of employment will make a huge difference, per se, in

that insecure part of the world where even if you are enrolled in a pension plan and have been

committed to a full-time position for thirty years, there is no guarantee, whatsoever, you will be

able to pay your bills when you are old, tired, lonely and helpless. Regardless, I perceived the desire

for a permanent job as a dinosaur type of anachronism and the whole thing about working 9 to

5 as a retrograde and offensive leftover from darker times. This was the general mood among my

free minded and free spirited friends too. We are people of arts and words - poets, writers, artists,

translators, musicians and so on. We don’t care about becoming permanent slaves. But that was

back then . . .

In Vancouver during the course of my studies and immigrant tribulations (with a quickly

disappearing savings and without a job), I realized that without a permanent job, especially in my

situation as a single breadwinner (for the most part) and with a little kid, I was going nowhere, or

rather, I was staying nowhere. I wouldn’t be able to pay the rent in the area that would be desirable

considering my daycare choices, I wouldn’t be able to buy healthy food and I wouldn’t have the

security and peace of mind needed to raise a kid. Therefore all my job seeking efforts focused on

finding the so-desirable full-time ongoing position, unionized, with a package of good benefits, a

good pension plan, etc. Honestly, I had no idea of all these highly desirable job aspects when I was

still living in Sofia and was working part-time as an administrative assistant (for the firmer part of

my income) and as a free-lanced translator (for the funnier part). I had a good life, I could afford a

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savings and travel Europe a couple of times a year and the paranoiac notion of perpetual security

was not even a thought for me.

When I analyze my Bulgarian self in comparison to my Canadian self, I realize that perpetual

security was never a dream for me not because I was so free-minded and cool, but because I had

the constant psychological security of being home, in the safe network of family and friends. Plus

being a homeowner, I never had to worry about paying such an enormous part of my income

towards rent. Of course, all these factors contributed to my happier kind of life in Sofia. I was far

more optimistic about the general future of humanity, but I am pretty sure it was due to my post-

communist naivety and ignorance for the global economic state of affairs or anything global for

that matter. Living in Vancouver, in Canada, in the West, is a sort of an eye-opener for me – I lost

my naivety, partly due to my personal circumstances, and partly because I gradually got more and

more familiar with a different kind of world, a different pace of things, a different past of things.

This made me see the general future of humanity differently, in more apocalyptic nuances.

I have reached the edge of the world. After all, this is one of the most “livable cities in the

world,” this is the best you can get in this world, isn’t it? So logically if you don’t feel good here,

you won’t feel good anywhere . . . though who looks for logic, aren’t we all looking for happiness?

(A curious detail – in Bulgaria, the poorest country of the EU, the home ownership rate (the ratio

of owner-occupied units to total residential units in a specified area) is the highest in the world –

97% as of 2011; Canada was 15th with 68.4% in 2006, still ahead most of the Western world.)

But then . . . about six months ago I got my permanent job. Slowly, with the perpetual

character of job-related things (like paycheques every two weeks and all sorts of benefits), I find

myself smiling again. I feel much better in terms of security, I am able to pay my rent in a place in

close proximity to work and daycare, in a nice neighbourhood, I can afford buying healthy food,

I can even afford travelling and vacations again. In short, I am a new person with a new life and

a new optimistic vision of the future – a future in which I become a happy Canado-Bulgarian or

Bulgaro-Canadian, a richer person in all senses.

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penelope hetherington Key Concepts Exercise

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Strolling the consumer metropolisThe atomized subjectImagines the post-utopian social reality.Precarity is the new black.

But the future is open.

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Acknowledgements

About a Bicycle would like to thank the women who contributed their time and energy to the

creation of this issue as well as to those who biked, walked, and bussed this dreary winter to our

reading group sessions: Gaye Bissett, Andrea Demers, Mercedes Eng, Megan Hepburn, Penelope

Hetherington, Fiona Jeffries, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Danna Vajda, Milena Varzonovtseva, and

our drunk therapists at the Narrow.

For more information about our projects check us out at aboutabicycle.wordpress.com or send us

an email at aboutabicycle@gmail.com.