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Eight: Asymptotic Encounters: Love Freed from Itself
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e i g h t Asymptotic Encounters: Love Freed from Itself Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other, without hating each other to death? — e . m . c i o r a n , History and Utopia It’s so hard to go into the city, because you wanna say ‘Hello’ to everybody. — c a t p o w e r , ‘‘Colors and the Kids’’ If this world were not endlessly crisscrossed by the convulsive movements of beings in search of each other . . . it would appear like an object of derision offered to those it gives birth to. — g e o r g e b a t a i l l e i n m a u r i c e b l a n c h o t , The Unavowable Community —But where do these nobodys live, and how? They live in the city, and they live in ‘‘everydayness.’’ — k a j a s i l v e r m a n , World Spectators In that particular genealogy linking Baudelaire to Michel de Certeau via Benjamin, Musil, and The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), the city is figured through a kind of semichoreographed ballet mécanique. While we may not be able to talk of harmony, there is certainly some kind of order in the to-ings and fro-ings of the city, especially when viewed from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center.1 Various patterns emerge, which may or may not be predictable but whose flux can be traced through the dynamic assemblages that comprise the condition of their movement. Specific strange attractors come into play, simultaneously within, around, and between the places and spaces of the urban system.2 To map this hypermobility, we can artificially subdivide these movements into two categories: the ‘‘macro-movements’’ of gentrification, deand reindustrialization, highways, private and public transport vectors, cur179 180 Love and Other Technologies fews, and official calendars; and the ‘‘micro-movements’’ of impromptu parades , buskings, burglaries, seductions, meetings, and meanderings.3 Such a distinction is ‘‘artificial’’ because, when pressed, there are no adequate criteria to judge the macro from the micro, since busking can be the direct result of deindustrialization, motivated by the rent inflation of gentrification and supported by the spaces of public transportation. As with all assemblages, these heterogeneous elements cut across each other, hold, twist, turn, and unravel, according to the currents and conditions of their own emergence. As Deleuze often reminds us, reterritorialization follows swiftly on the heels of deterritorialization—and so much so that it is too simplistic to view it as a chronological procedure. Rather, it is an immanent process, rarely grasped in flux but glimpsed through an uneasy marriage between systems theory and schizoanalysis. The difference between Baudelaire’s city and our own is that it makes less sense to begin with the subject, no matter how marginalized or alienated he or she may appear to themselves or others. Such a figure no longer has the critical distance or historical perspective to appreciate urban ironies, juxtapositions, and shocks. They simply are urban ironies, juxtapositions, and shocks—human pollen landing on concrete. Yet, as I have tried to demonstrate in the previous chapters, collectively, the populi are the site of a certain movement or tendency toward the coming community (a ‘‘multitude ’’ in the sense offered by Alliez, Hardt, Negri, and others in their journal of the same name). Our foremost poet of the postmodern flâneur is Wong Kar-wai.4 Those of his films set in the contemporary moment—most notably Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995)—are sublimely stylized homages to the asymptotic nature of modern love, in which the ‘‘protagonists’’ barely qualify for the term and drift past each other as if to explicitly enact the dictum ‘‘There is no sexual relationship,’’ or indeed, no relationship, period. Cultural critic Ackbar Abbas notes that in Wong’s universe, ‘‘all appointments are dis-appointments’’ (50). As a consequence, these films (set in Hong Kong) depict a particularly reified version of that ‘‘eroticism of disappointment ’’ which also preoccupied Musil, Broch, and Proust. The task of the viewer, however, is to avoid sentimentalizing these random, asymptotic encounters along the lines of ‘‘ships that pass in the night...