text by Estelle Hoy
I’d thrown myself at Berlin apartments for years to get something rent-controlled, but so far, my attempts had been dampened by estate agents hired by a family of Nietzschean Draculas. There was plenty of life in Berlin before people decided to squeeze cash from it, but the narcoleptic desuetude of downtown Kreuzberg had made way for trust-fund bohemians with their clean rap sheets and the determination/time to take on Berghain’s manic-depressive door policy. They’d turned each Kiez, every apartment, into abona fide albino art scene with their general panache, cash, and good breeding. Enough for artists like me to lag behind upbeat rental hikes and develop a depression brought on by malnutrition while whack-a-moling a hemorrhoid every other day—there’s onlyso many two-euro shawarmas a person can eat. I was vegan every now and then, so I didn’t really mind. Fortunately, I caught a break via the usual friend of a friend of a friend who’d outgrown fifty-four square meters at the same rate he collected paternity payments. All I’d need is a month’s rent and a month's bond upfront. Oy vey.
I remember the day clearly. It was almost three o’clock and I was going home to stream dubbed Polish Sci-Fi, strolling down Sonnenallee, trying not to move for other people (which never lasted very long), listening to some woman wailing about their kid’s jaundiced skin or something equally unmemorable. Can’t wait to not meet her. I wasn’t registering all the hoopla down Sonnenallee because, by comparison to the madhouse where I lived, the street wasn’t very hoopla, at least not in the way I knew, but why I felt proud of that I couldn’t really tell you.
As I said, I was walking down Sonnenallee amid my attack of dissociation, counting ways of dying, making nearly profound points to myself under my breath. I’d rather not talk about the pathetic extremes I took to get home to apply for the apartment, but I got there with mere moments to spare. The drop-down options for my work field and gender didn’t work, so my final application reads like a queer Renaissance masterpiece from the Quattrocento. I identify as male (not entirely untrue) and a fisherman. (Are there bona fide fishermen in Berlin? Hmm.) Cemeteries of remorse kick in, realizing I’ll have to qualify my jazzy fisherman career with faux payslips and use trawler jargon at the Hausverwaltung... in Deutsche. I don’t pick up languages, I’m still learning German after about a decade. I’m no essentialist, but my permanent state appears to be annoying or annoyed. What’s the opposite ofa well-rounded individual? Never mind. After I flogged myself for a while, I surrendered to a bottle of orange Schnapps, feeling hypocritical, exploited, defeated, squatting in the crotch of the gutter like I was too evolved to use a chair. I’d join a gang or a cult for the Botoxed affect and financial security, but I’m not really a team player. My precariat homeboys and I, in the end, are just involuntary spermatids for capital, propping up the captains of Club Med.
What did a well-adjusted William S. Burroughs say of artists? “People like us are lucky because every shitty thing that happens to us is just more material.” But he didn’t live upstairs from a Nazi with a second-rate buzz cut clipping his toenails and all the other unfortunate truths about Berlin. I jump on my prepaid phone and start Googling: cost of living comparison Berlin versus Dakar.
Meanwhile, at Difendo Haus Gmb headquarters, a gathering of white men with white teeth and expensive-looking hair plugs shifted their weight from one leg to another, like morticians preparing the dead. Our lead protagonist’s apartment is no longer a subject, but an object: a thing, a public image, a deceitful and splendid effigy. A commodity soaked with desire, iron-poor blood, and three brands of hemorrhoid cream. The exciting totalitarianism of ownership had them licking their chops, tripling their image, collapsing the possibility of an imagination that is self-determined. Life is debilitating; why anyone would transfer $60k to extend their lifespan at the Cryonics Institute is beyond me. Not to get all semantic about it, it’s hardly the point, but there’s even a sly winking cryright out in the open any fool could see. Pointing out stupidity never really did sit right with me —something I could stand to workon.
It’s a pretty shameful day when investors incubate on a phenomenology of panic and desperation, reproducing “organic” housing growth off the insecurity of bioluminescent plankton and other bottom feeders. It’s all very Fassbinder. The ideology is a trompe l’oeil, but it’s a damn sight better than our suspected and feared alternative: demise. Real estate invertebrates create just enough of an illusion of “easier times” if we simply accept the delirium —which, we’re told, is totally, totally rational. Their authenticity is hanging by a couple of threads. When delirium meets interest you create a life force, documented beautifully in dreamy diary entries all over Berlin:
December 11th, 2023
Once I arrive on the edge of the sea, from my three-square-meterbalcony, there’ll be orange swans, free lunch, and a winning hand of solitaire. Baggy proletariat clothing will make way for pearly mermaid scales, sweetened condensed milk, and fish-shaped pillows. Lungs will inflate in coral clusters of resolve and the vibrant neon colors of arrival. A land Pocahontas would return to, Slavs and Tatars would retire in, and my mother, my Other, would approve.
If January were a drink, it’d be bong water.
In the capitalistic market, things are not considered according to their usefulness, but rather in terms of their exchangeability, their performability—crackerjack used-car salesmen setting up the sunshine and noir dialectic. It’s the perfect ruse. Not an unfamiliar predicament: hard-up people who can’t afford to be long-sighted. We cooperate because we’re desperate for apartments, delirious and confused, but the exchange ultimately fertilizes the market economy and its deep pockets. An unwilling gamete. The upshot is that nature is artificial, suspect, and ultimately corrupt.
But the ejaculate doesn’t stop there. Our entire precarious life is submitted to this one imperative: competition. It’s the cul-de-sac of democracy. Once you convince people they need to fight one another to survive, it ultimately leads to panic. And panicking people aren’t galloping to the Badlands of revolt; they’re not anchored enough to execute a political metempsychosis. If you’re spooked and paranoid, you’re too occupied to think about howyou’rebeing occupied. Self-determination is rented out, ouragency is on time-share, imagination is floated in a stock market in which we have no stock. Economic phenomena are saturated with psychopathological terms: depression, slump, supply, projection, withdrawal, excoriation, ups and downs—it’s hardly surprising we’re wards of the state. And whilst they’re busy valorizing real estate capital and playing some epic heroism, we’re close to terminal collapse.
The final analysis: we miscalculate where the power actually lies.
False histories are made daily.
Hidden deep, deep down is the potency of our collective unconscious and the pimped-up potential of our social brains. This real estate collapse could mark the start of an insurrection. This is really a crisis of imagination about what our future can be. There are beefed-up high priests in the Central Bank, stockbrokers, and financial powers with their dogmas and algorithms on steroid compounds, compounding their interest whilst serving their interests. Powers built on exploiting precarious cognitive labor whilst promoting a “happy ending.” Pun definitely intended.
I’m straddling the chasm between Gen X and Gen Y, trying to figure out what restoring democracy could look like, rectum burning. We keep flipping the pages of capitalism to find nourishment, but it’s just a book full of dog-ears marking time and not much else. Through force of habit we persevere, but when daily interactions are ill at ease, the whole soul is sick.
For two days in a row, I bumped into people dressed exactly the same as me. First, a giant pink outfit, head to toe, like a fairy-floss blimp. The second, a striped San Quentin prison-PJ get-up—hers by Gucci, mine by Humana. One outfit of abandon, the other of totalitarianism, in dialectical prefiguration. I’m trying to continue being a nuisance torealtors, small hiccups of revolt vis-à-vis the computer screen that does my bidding. Our apartment building rations the commons —shared toilet paper here, split sardines there, planting some organic vegetables. We start the odd Avaaz petition and house the untouchables, joining forces in cosmic murmuration. Small signals of community are great and all, but we need something bigger here, something dismantling. Power isn’t about making things easier. I’m open to big ideas. I want to merge with others. I’m behind people, really, I am. I don’t know what I want exactly, but it’s not the crummy, plastic folding chairs they’ve been giving us.
I just want more for the people at the bottom. Which probably includes you.