April 10, 2004
a nomadic existence
It seems as if the temporary life of being single between leaving the parental home and getting married is becoming a permanent mode of urban existence.
In the 1970s and 1980s this single living used to be temporary. It was a period where those in their 20s and early 30s acquired a good university education, lived off crates and second-hand furniture in a rented cottage in the inner city, and enjoyed being unattached, and celebrated sexual freedom and being childless. After that romantic period of liberty one shuffled off the suburbs to raise kids, forever yearning for the time when the kids had left home. They consoled themselves about the loss of their nomadic life by playing the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street; and imagining they were on the road listening to a world weary juke-joint band playing their rough material at a seedy and dirty highway bar.
When the kids had left home to live their own lives, the suburban home was sold. The aged couple either returned to the inner city for an experiment in apartment living; or they went to the place of the endless summer on the coast, played Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. They visited regional galleries full of comfortable abstract expressionism and marvelled at works of John Olsen
John Olsen,
that they were not able to make sense of 40 years earlier. They could now converse easily about the landscape and Australian identity, the imagined space somewhere between dream and reality and a rich aesthetic vocabulary.
Being a 20's something single today is quiet different. It is a mode of living in the postmodern city where kinship ties fracture and fray whilst friendship ties strengthen.
It is a nomadic mode of life or existence in which the economic pressures bite hard. The urban wandering does not appear to be a live of creative transformation, in which free floating individuals are transformed into something different to what they were before through a patchwork life of creative mutation and change. There is little whimsical fantasy of 'exotic primitivism' here; little nomadic ethics apart from self-interest; little to the nomadic mobile existence than the journey between two points in an open-ended social space.
What we do have with this social nomadism is a deviation from then majority or standard that is the bearer of the dominant social code and the possibility for a deterritorializing of the dominant social code of family. Within this process there may be new forms of subjectivity and new forms of connection in an open social space.
They intuitively understood the Deleuze and Guattari's phrase in Anti-Oedipus that 'Capitalism...decodes and deterritorializes with all its might.' It would appear that the capitalist assemblage pierces the nomadic body from any direction it desires, and that the nomadic defense against the massive plateau of global capital, which constantly constitutes and colonizes new territory, are few and far between.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 10, 2004 11:09 PM | TrackBack