Le pari(s) de BKK
François Roche
(English interpreter Camille Lacadée)
(… betting on BKK/)
Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) is a transactional transitory zone, a transdoorI opening to a parallel, simultaneous, negotiable universe… The escape it offers may be narrow, it’s wonderful anyway... just right for a native emigrant.
Every other week, at a minimum, over the last ten years, to extricate myself from the museum city, frozen, transfixed in its smothering conservatism and pedantic degradation… CDG Airport Terminal 1…
“Beam me up, Scotty.”
Complaint/
Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport, Terminal 1, vanishing point... to escape this sick body... go far from the necrotic petit bourgeois city, capital of voluntary hostages huddling themselves up in sleepy ideals, where alienation is considered as good as a union contract… flee this accretion of corrupt sycophantic institutions... of state clerks amassing in Colbert’s shadows, with their moral stench, vomiting their universalism to mask their pettiness...
Bataille’s Paris was a wager, a city where you came willingly to get robbed, where people traveling across town knew they risked falling into a trap. II The danger of that Paris was intrinsic to its nature. There was no line between its heterotopia and its display case.
Haussmann was the first to perceive the danger of that tangled city planning. And in 1871, it was traveling down the avenues he cut through the city - to allow for parades and military repression - that the Versailles troops drowned the Paris Commune in blood.
Today’s “urban displays”III to revisit La Boétie,IV and their mechanisms of circus and enslavement, have put an end once and for all to the popular and transgressive nature of the city. The alienation they produce among its inhabitants are far longer lasting than the substances of the previous kind. They lull people to sleep while giving them the illusion of existence.
What was once a paranoid urban area has been replaced by the stench of a hygienic, moral, passive city life punctuated by ecstatic celebrations (such as La Fête à Neu-Neu”),v each one spreading contamination a little more into the suburbs (as Le Grand Paris),VI disguising the coming servitude as territorial equality.
Line of escape/
Yet BKK this time, it seems to last longer… It can neither simply be this rejection… this repulsion turned pathological… nor a stop-over, nor a quarantine, nor transience… nor a sort of “Interzone,” the improbable grounds of which, made of experimentation and subversion, have already been tread by BurroughsVII … fundamental although dated and complaisant… It cannot feed on renunciation seasoned with tropical Buddhism dressing… subcutaneous afflictions, compassionate knickknacks included… Even less excused by the immersion in a humid and sweaty biotope, here at the heart of this entirely made up colonialist polyethnic neologism: “Indochina”… with the affective, sexual, and economic transactional corollary of the aging man, performing a Platformof exchanges, to borrow from Michel HouellebecqVIII … or at last but not least to escape the French tax for RussiaIX !
All these are possibilities, true and false simultaneously, yet which cannot entirely account for the sacrifice of the bar-tabac on the other side of the street,X of this daily ritornello on Paname’s ground… Unless one develops an irrational and pathological masochism… one cannot free oneself from the addiction to a black coffee, early morning, served by a sleepy, moody, not-yet-showered waiter… last islet of resistance…
Le pari(s) de BKK is precisely here, in the blackness of this coffee… the ghost of its future anterior… a time-machine for the price of a one way ticket… to rejoin… to rejoice in this Pari(s)… the one of Bataille… dirty, smelly, a swarm of men, women, rats, and cockroaches, of interloped mores, the Pari(s) of society men and of “Il est cinq heures”XI… Whenever it rains, Alpha Ville’sXII macadam is covered with gray seeping soot, in daytime rasping the lungs, blackening the slightest apparition… at night coating the stooped grounds. Le pari(s) de BKK would mean to embrace the street theatre, human and machinist, erotic and tragic… the self-contradictory, never-ending messy interlacement; the polyphony of beings and encounters, protected and/or exhibited, in filth and noise, and yet freed from time and space, “unplugged,” in a mute, blind, and deafzoneXIII … creating simultaneously and in parallel the conditions for a city open to the world, to its species… disrupting, challenging its transactional modes… day after day.
BKK/
The dust enshrouds the city and its biotope, modifies its climate… Within this fog of specs and particles,XIV Bangkok turns into a melting pot of hypertrophic human activity, of convulsive exchanges of energy. At the antipode of the canons of modern urbanism
and its panoply of instruments of prediction, planning, determinism, the city of BangkokXV, ectoplasmic, is conceived in between aleatory rhizomes where the arborescent growth is at the same time a factor of its transformation and its operational mode… an urban environment made of protuberances and emergences, where capitalist merchandise flows in through a profusion of gigantic, aseptic, cold, and de-territorialized malls, immersed in an intoxicating urban chaos.
Le pari(s) de BKK is a mixture of dirtiness and beauty, of metabolism and verticality, of traffic jams and flat-smashed motorcycles swiftly finding their way through, of fly-over concrete-bridge-networks snaking their trajectories through a stochastic urbanism, with a permanent confusion, in-distinction, de-identification between publicness and privacy, exhibitionism and intimacy, ugliness, repulsion and magnetism… It’s a multiple apparatus (and not display) of which the emergences do not pretend to be long-lasting or eternal… Surviving, dying, resurrecting, dying again in a logic of contingency and vitalism, the logic of a palpitating organism stuttering between death and life drives, Eros and Tanatos… a second nature where the urban tissue is alive, and where the city is not limited and framed by its “representation,” not frozen in a normative and panoptical system of survey and representation…
Le pari(s) de BKK is an inter-zone where the possible is uncertain, and the impossible plausible… an ad hoc principle of urban (un)planning…
Stuttering/
In the hotchpotch entanglement of flux, friction, trifle, and cum, a few spots sparkle, ingrain, identify as the temples of normalized shopping malls exchange: Terminal 21, Siam Paragon, MBK, Emporium, Gateway, Future Town, Central World, RobinsonXVI… plus a handful always under-construction, as so many Samaritaine, Galerie Lafayette, BHV-Bazar Napoléon or Bon MarchéXVII… These 19th-century temples of commerce work under ritualized transactional modes, as the first penitentiary worlds of exchange, socialized and hierarchical biospheres, from the cashier to the department head, where the customer, machine subject and object of desire, is able to exercise the fiction of his/her power, of his/her supposed jouissance where the climate as well as the ambulatory and relational social modes are codified, formatted, artificialized, as the counterpoint to the swarming and untameable city blighting its accesses… However in Paris these capitalized zones have malevolently reversed inside out, and the city itself is now confused with their merchandized display (see footnote 26), originally limited, contained and recognizable within geographic (id)entities…
Paris and BKK, two points on the planet, two asymmetrical evolutions, as if following two divergent, contingent space-time cynosures… one confusing the client with the citizen, the other still relying on the original contradiction between the object and the “subject” of capitalism. XVIII
Let us not be mistaken… this is not as much an opposition between two cities, as an opposition between several temporalities: Le pari(s) de BKK is the Paris of a future anterior eviscerated of all nostalgia, projecting a time when the city was not (yet) conditioned by the subordination of the little bourgeois ecolo plugged into his/her Moby-Björk iPod mini, on a Velib ride,whatever his/her origins, education, salary and gender, to a standardization of appearances… free-willingly becoming the symptom of a global intellectual fraud.
Psycho transfer and Digression/
This apparently ideal “Parisian way of life” increases the schizoid negotiation of double belonging and double membership… framed by local reactionary injunctions on “living together” and, simultaneously, by the need to escape, to go anywhere, like a ‘transdoor’ opening a two-way window between the “here, but…” and the “but elsewhere”… On one side the local forces of permanency and immobility seeking to conserve a supposed “authenticity” regulated by rules and policies… a revived Puritanism driven by society-friendly standards for “good behavior” and phony friendly attitudes, moralistic totalizing scrutiny, recipes for organic health food and hyper-moisturizing soap for a perfect body in the idealized Truman Show village… Or in escaping all this, fulfilling irreducible needs such as reaching, touching the forbidden, jumping through the only window authorizing objectionable behavior in the multiple infra-zones of electronic machinery doors (socializing, virtualizing, fictionalizing, pornoizing, criminalizing… and playing the game)… the legitimate need to be somebody else, the recognition of a contradictory, Siamese dualism… a symmetrical antagonism between the physical hoax of sedentary statements and the illusion of dematerialized nomadism… a permanent schizoid contingency, naturally intertwined.
It seems that our times have invited two demons to the same cozy dinner party, thus provoking a divorce between the next door and the door after the next… a permanent schizophrenia.
This basic and symptomatic opposition imposes itself like a cliché… even stronger than a cliché, a new standard of “life,” a two-way caricature showing both the petrification of the local and the artificialized eroticism of the illusory-but-necessary objective of freedom, as a natural compensation for the stone-aged statement of the former.
For example, we could easily spend time in the bricolage-DIY-village-mall-BHV to buy the perpetuation of what already exists, to maintain the sclerosis of the environment by adding two screws on the little ringlet of our personal Haussmannian set… white, obviously white… We could also easily buy a condo in any downtown to simulate the happiness of 1950s urbanism transposed into a Peyton Place, or Pleasantville, vertical village, with swimming pool, sports center, healthy food shop and security cameras… self-adapting to your shape for the ultimate comfort in sleeping equipment, with trendy “flagshit” design, featured in the latest issue of Wallpaper magazine… including the newest ice-cube crushing fridge to keep your imported 20-year-old Island Scotch at the right temperature… the setting of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, all psycho-human dimension eviscerated…
Both above cases studies meaning to compensate for the amount of repressed emotion and sensation by providing a kind of discharging catharsis via the other window, keying in the depths of the network infra-zone… enjoying the keyboard intimacy in Paris, or in the street of Le pari(s) de BKK, and the endless possibilities of personal and collective neurosis-psychosis that renegotiate human pathologies, the multiple identities syndrome, the temptation of insurrection through “inappropriate language and attitudes” no longer tolerated in the physical petit-bourgeois global village.
This predictable, Manichaean yo-yoing between the next door and another door beyond poses as the opposite of post puritanical capitalism by simultaneously marketing the local and the global. This Siamese business plan traps our free will in a new double mass production of products and desires, from moralistic values of “living together” to eschatological, scatological, compulsive, and pathological gimmicks meant to serve as compensation for missing bodies.
Paris is becoming, with sublime effort and talent, the “sinthome”XIX of this capital(ism) city evolution; urbanism as a regressive knot, a a format of constraints, rules, policies… smart speeches, small talks, flirts, merchandises, and all the “online” inhibited pathologies, on psychoactive antidepressants, on compulsive gambling officially organized by the French national lottery, ‘ La Française des Jeux’.In opposition, Le pari(s) de BKK could run as an experiment in which the “village” is a matrix across multiple doors, articulating the immanent conflict of living together, without denying the unpredictable nature of this very conflict, directly revealing the sophistication or the lack of social contract, of neighborhood protocols, adjusted in real time, articulating phantasms and realities, obstacles and possibilities, garbage and fresh blooms, threats and various forms of protection, technical prowess and forces of nature… interlocked… in keeping with the vitality of the species inhabiting them.
The “restoration” of the notion of democracy has to extend its potential of re-fabrication to the tooling and procedures that structurally produce city planning. Western democracy through the legitimate delegation of power, developed such a high level of control, as described and analyzed by Michel Foucault, that the energies of the multitude are framed, ghettoized in a predictable determinist master planning agenda opposite to the notion of heterotopic agenda, first stones of urban contract emerging from the Multitudes …
In this sense, BKK, simultaneously “tragicable” and “expectanciable,” could be considered as the pursuit of Rimbaud’s poetry,XX “La communeétait une fête,” including its (un)predictable fragility and failureXXI … not in terms of the political structure of the system, but in terms of the logic of a city (un)planning, through flux and reflux between “top-down” and “bottom-up” “top-down” and “bottom-up”… … reconditioning the Loophole between the looseness of an administration and the individual dynamic innovation able to infiltrate this tolerance… in a succession of extension, entropy, graft… permanent mutation of the “tissue” (neither constrained by the ideology of tabula rasa… nor by archeological preservation).
Schizoid apparatuses/
What perhaps is most relevant in Le pari(s) de BKK is the potential confrontation between the antagonistic forces of two urban models, in a permanent union and divorce of the “Commune and the Capital,” intrinsically intertwining to generate a systemic live output.
The first model is made of the sound of the human swarm, musical and terrestrial, on the city’s ground, and includes permissiveness of transformation, adaptation, graft, and necrosis, on its three, four first floors strata… where one can erect, destroy, alter, gangrene, and nest one’s familial, commercial, or amicable system without having to report to public authority, as if in the midst of a judicial vacuum… The other is looking down on the first, appearing as a skyline, a vertical succession of malls, condos, and hybridsXXII … emerging without creating any centralized downtown, subject to opportunities, speculations and resistances… themselves subject to strict rules of materiality, normality, and global representational aesthetics.
Le pari(s) de BKK is this caress, rustle, friction territory… making possible the encounter between the one who only exercises his/her power through the compulsive merchandize of turnkey life models, and the one who, oppositely, is in synchronicity with the animal pleasure of things and beings, smells and sounds, illusions and ripe fruits… One makes a skyline, the other humming asphalt …. One is capitalizing his/her economy by freezing it in the standardization of an imaginary vertical home, (a condo 70% unoccupied, as so many financial products where habitability is a fiction), a producer but not consumer of a horizontal urban line, a financial transfer zone (see new footnote 14) … in the homogenization of desires and satisfaction, which allows for the flow of merchandises and the circulation of the currency storytellingXXIII (the city has turned into a transactional economic vector)… which disincarnates in the construction of pseudo-luxurious, pseudo-comfortable, pseudo-designed, pseudo-inhabited, speculated, and volatile products in a skylinization process… before the bursting of the financial bubble into a myriad of collateral effects, junk bonds, and fatal contingencies… The predictable de-organization of profits…
… and the other having nothing to capitalize except its daily ritornello of “difference and repetition,” to quote Deleuze,XXIV in an erotic pornographic rustle conditioning “the epidermal contact, complete, total, between the body and a world itself open and quivering . . . from a touch, and at the horizon, a lifestyle of which the poet shows the way and the direction.”XXV
Le pari(s) de BKK stutters on two models of jouissance, between the city-as-product-of-the-capital and the city that doesn’t give a shit, busy as it is getting pleasure from it, in the superimposition of two strata, two morphologies, two mechanics of nonlinear exchanges… While Paris only has one model left: the human bourgeois, or bourgeois-becoming,XXVI insulated in his/her soundproofed home, listening for the least untimely noise that might get through the partition-walls to immediately denounce it, confusing life with its representation… with its corollary of sadness, and its dependency on the display organized by the central system of power delegation, the political, social, monarchical operator: la Mairie de Paris.
On the other side, BKK, where two stories of time are still plausible… like an urbanism for Schrödinger’s Cat, simultaneously dead and alive… a contingency … a place of parallel stories… exuding the possibility to navigate in their frictions, the crib of their folds and of the generated possibilities… without subscribing to the one or to the other as the unique mode of existence…
The jump has been made… one year ago… Le pari(s) de BKK... could it only be a 14 hour flight without a stopover, a glass of whisky, three meals, two movies, some writing, half a drawing… a normalized distance… linear… almost disappointing… inasmuch as one carries one’s psyche in one’s baggage… and the distance travelled will not metabolize its dependencies….
François Roche
I In Dan Simmons novel Hyperion, the transdoor is a vector of physical translation.
II The Bataille’ Paris is a kind of “portmanteau-word”, the Battle of Paris, the bet of Bataille, including the unlimited disorder as a pre-condition of the order of the discourse, coming from the notion of Heterology developed by Georges Bataille, without to omit first the legacy of his transgressive thinking and writing; mixture of murky, occultism, “accursed share” and flamboyances, and secondly his violent pamphlet “la chiourme architecturale” (Documents #2, 1929); a text battling the monumental and the totemic architecture production as the expression of a urban-human domination. (Against Architecture : The Writings of Georges Bataille, Denis Holier, MIT Press, 1989).
Georges Bataille is a proteiform French philosopher and writer, involved in many domains as Economy, Anthorpology, History of Art and Erotism. Disqualified by André Breton and by J.P.Sartre in 1943, as a “psychastenic trapped in his , senile, rancid, filthy, lewd personal pathology”, he was rehabilitated by the preface of Michel Foucault in 1970 for the publication of his complete works. (Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes, Publisher Gallimard.)
III Public festivals such as Paris Plage, Paris Nuit Blanche, Paris Marché des Fiertés, Paris Fêtes des Tuileries, Paris Carnaval Tropical, Paris Famillathion, Paris Quartier d’été, Paris Techno Parade, Paris Fête de la musique, Paris Future en Seine, Paris…, Paris of boredom and tourists in shorts, etc., etc., the city as a display…
IV Etienne de la Boétie, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, 1550
V La Fête à Neu-Neu is an annual celebration in the Bois de Boulogne established by Napoléon I in 1815, as the first drug-display for “Valium-ing” citizens.
VI Le Grand Paris (Greater Paris project) is an initiative launched by former French President Nicolas Sarkozy for “a new global plan for the Paris metropolitan region.”
VII See William S. Burroughs, Interzone (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989).
VIII Plateforme is a novel by Michel Houellebecq published in 2001 by Flammarion, the theme of which is Thailand’s prostitution, with its affective and economic transactions
IX Referring to the Russian passport of Gerard Depardieu (French actor)
X “Bureau de Tabac,” a poem by Fernando Pessoa. “I am nothing. I will never be anything. I can not want to be anything. That being said, I carry with me all the dreams of the world. […] Esteve turned and saw me. He waved at me, I shouted: ‘Hi Esteve,’ and the universe rebuilt itself for me without ideal or hope, and the Bureau de Tabac patron smiled.”
XII Alpha Ville, a 1965 science fiction film by Jean-Luc Godard shot in the natural setting of Paris.
XIII The three wise monkeys are a pictorial maxim well-known throughout Asia. Each one is depicted covering a different part of its face (ears, eyes, and mouth) with its hands to embody the proverbial saying “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.”
XIV The city is covered by CO+CO2 particules which filter the light only through gray spectral frequencies, creating a glossy, luminous, vaporous, pheromonal, hideous, shaded, transpiring, cottony, rugged, dirty, hazy, suffocating, hairy grey atmosphere and appearances which both reveal the degree of pollution and cover the city with an extreme sophisticated wrapping coat, as the witness of ambivalences of the situation
XV On the one hand, the bottom-up, under the freeway… a self-organized, “messy”, excessively rustling human zone, where frictions and encounters are intrinsically implemented, embedded; … - a potential of adaptability, transformability, tolerance and indeterminism… from the shapelessness of the city to human pathologies and improvisations… - where everything is dedicated to the logic and illogic of the swarm… in the exchanges’ dynamism, in the smelled, swallowed, digested, shitted substances, in the confusion between the taste of stir-fried food, the flagrance of rain on the asphalt… the dirtiness and the beauty in the hell of human energies and vitalism…
On the other hand, the top-down, over the freeway … a disseminated down-town dedicated to its own representation, its self-satisfaction with its emergence in the sky and which embodies the running of the financial ideology, through multiple condominiums of personal social “successes”, stacked and disconnected from each other… both alive and dead; alive through the endlessness upward-high-rising of the city, with numerous sites under-construction, symbolizing the activity, working potential, and efficiency of the economic model, and simultaneously dead for the same reasons, and especially when the condos are completed... then working as a financial products more than as actual living places.
The freeways, organized as an a gigantic octopus-like network floating in the urban tissue, are the “horizontal” line separating and distinguishing these two types of human habitudesof self-representation, or social strata… enabling a myriad of connections, flirts, touches, caresses and collisions points between the two.
XVI Existing malls in BKK (their number, under-construction or already planned, is on the way to be multiplied)
XVII Parisian department stores of the mid 19th century.
XVIII “Subject” here refers to a subordinate, as in being a King’s subject.
XIX The sinthome (an archaic French spelling of the word symptom) is a concept introduced by Jacques Lacan, which redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his topology of the subject. “The synthome works as a substitution of phallic function…and by this way authorize the symbolic to operate in its play to perforate the real”. Moustapha Safouan, Lacaniana, les séminaires de Jacques Lacan, Publisher Fayard, 2001.
In this sense we could consider that Paris represent the synthome of its citizens.
XX “The Communards defending their revolutionary Paris against the government forces attacking from Versailles roam about the city like ants in Rimbaud’s poetry and their barricades bustle with activity like anthill. Why would Rimbaud describe the Communards whom he loves and admires as swarming ants? When we look more closely we can see that all of Rimbaud’s poetry is full of insects, particularly the sounds of insects, buzzing, swarming, and teeming. ‘Insect-verse’ is how one reader describes Rimbaud’s poetry, ‘music of the swarm.’ The reawakening and reinvention of the senses in the youthful body – the centerpiece of Rimbaud’s poetic world – takes place in the buzzing and swarming of the flesh. This is a new kind of intelligence, a collective intelligence, a swarm intelligence, that Rimbaud and the Communards anticipated.” Antonio Negri & Michael Multitude published in 2004, Publisher Penguin book, 2004
XXI The BKK riot in 2008-10 between the Red and the Yellow which are remembering the commune of Paris, 1871, and the revolt (trois glorieuses of Juillet 1930, and revolution of 1948), where the city was not only zones of consumation, works, plays and sleeping but the territory of the tension, where public space is the theatre of the antagonisms which stretched and pulled any human society. “The Paris Commune represented the only realization of revolutionary urbanism, attacking, on the ground, the petrified signs of the dominant organization of life, recognizing social space in political terms, never believing that a monument can be innocent... The whole space was occupied by the enemy... The dawn of an authentic urban planning, created in the areas left empty by that occupation. That’s where what was called construction then and which we call by the same name today began” Debord, Kotanyi, Vaneighen, La commune était une fête, par l’IS / librairie Arthème Fayard, tract 1962
XXII One hundred high-rise buildings are planned and/or currently under construction
XXIII « Capitalism is pretty much indifferent to the contents of the stories it enables the circulation. The “currency storytelling” is its canonical story because it brings together its two properties: it tells that you can tell anything, but that the stories’ benefit must return to their ‘alleged’ author», at least to those who convey their narratives (green washing, social washing, security washing), Jean-François Lyotard, " Instructions Païennes ", édition Galilée, 1977
XXIV See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
XXV Jacques Lacan, L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959-60 / In French « le contact epidermique, complet, total, entre le corps et un monde, lui-même ouvert et fremissant…d’un contact, et à l’horizon, d’un style de vie dont le poête nous montre la direction et la voie ».
XXVI Paris is used like a beta development zone for the luxury industry. International magazines often depict Paris as a place where people on the street look like fashion models, provoking the Paris Syndrome: a transient psychological disorder encountered by tourists visiting Paris and Japanese visitors in particular. It is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealisation, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others. See “Paris Syndrome,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome.
