Ambivalent Post-Saturn Queers Seek Derridean Surf Instructor

Boots and Addy compose fan mail to their favorite postmodern astrologer and discuss the meaning of woo in our times.

How would you describe who our pomo astrologer is and and what she does?

Boots: A lesbian witch who wears a pirate jacket.

Addy: Yes, all of that and also the person who talked to us about how the Gemini twins are bowlegged and sassy booted, and that this is a critical refounding of butch/femme, and that actually, one of the belly buttons of the universe is where the gemini twin’s sassy boot sits in the sky.

[Our astrologer] is here to help us figure out how to be around for the turning of the ages in the right kind of way. I also think I’ve maybe described her as post-structuralist. The way she talked about the 'dude standardization project' and the foundation of the zodiac as a very relevant way of understanding the lives of people living in a world that would divide up the sky in such a way...It’s not only weird pomo times, it is the speech of someone who is invested in the political.

Boots: That is what was so fun about it, though, is that she was so clearly invested in the political and speaking on all of these different registers about astronomy and astrology and these different ways of seeing the sky, and that she seemed invested in all of them, and also the project of the universe beyond the sky. It was all about not needing those to fit together in any tidy kind of way.

Addy: Defying disciplinarity. It was as though until I heard her speak I had never thought of the zodiac as a structuralist framework. Of course, duh, but we don’t have to just choose between woo and air sign, academic woo. No, we can be discerning, critical with our woo. I felt like she was really speaking to this crew of wayward, thirty-something slash Saturn returns-ish ambivalent post-punk queers.

Boots: She really had her finger on the pulse. Is that what is happening in [the northern coastal counties]? Who else is employing her services.

Addy: Maybe we should open the post-university [up north].

Boots: Her number of registers of politicization of the zodiac and where we are traveling in life and where all of the planets have been situated in different historical eras. The ways we can politicize the looking of the sky.

Addy: It’s the idea of historicizing, but on a totally different register of time. It was this woo materialist, or woo historical materialist, understanding that is so how we need to talk about it right now. Women, the original Marxists. Witches, the original Foucauldians. There was also a real commitment to the terrestrial.

Boots: There is something key about that teaching us how to be in time, and teaching us to engage multiple planes of existence and attention. There is something about the way that I’ve engaged with metaphysics that feels like a bracketing, we are either uncritical or critical in a way that is flip. I detach from the level of criticism I use in the way I engage the rest of the world. I don’t engage with it as something to be interrogated, which would allow it to show itself in more interesting and generative ways.

Addy: Like a conservative interpretation of lesbian feminism's 'nationalist' impulses, the ways that woo is engaged with non-critically, that we treat it too tenderly. We are scared. We were closed off from it or it still marks a loss. But that is the kind of conservative 'decolonial' imaginary. To not engage with a critical refounding of what woo is and what we need woo to do. What is woo in our times, really? I think [our astrologer] opened up that it is possible to have a different relationship to time and magic and material and being than the one we usually get to engage with that still draws on skills we’ve been honing by being in the fucked up world that we are being in. Why are we tentative with woo?

Boots: It’s not that I’m tentative with the critique. It’s more about this feeling that I’m slightly uncommitted to the nationalism. Interested in the potential of such, but skeptical about the border-making practices, or the aesthetics or the way it’s configured etc. but I’m interested in the effects such nationalism might have the resources I or others might draw from it, such that I am side-stepping into the practices that I find intriguing, without being able to commit to the full-on political project. I am dabbling. I don’t feel the need to critique because I don’t take it seriously as something to critique, even though I do take it seriously.

Addy: We want a post-nationalist feminist world-making project that we are not just 'dabbling' in. What would it look like to embrace? Braid it into the strands we are pulling on to make meaning in the world. What would a relationship to woo that wasn’t handling it--relating to it with some kind of generational deference or over-carefulness? How could we wield it more meaningfully?

Boots: I think it’s about looking at what resonated for us listening to [our astrologer]. These ways of approaching woo in non-fundamentalist ways--in ways where there are multiple registers, not simply bracketed lines. I’ve been thinking a lot about irony and the general disappointment/dissatisfaction with hipster irony in the world. I read this thing that was a challenge to take irony seriously, at this level of reading things multiply, rather than that creating distance necessarily, to think about things as being more than what they say they are. That there is a relationship with meaning and intention and multiplicity that allows us to access ironic readings not as distance-making or emotionally distanced. I’m interested in a multiplicity of readings for woo that don’t demand distance, such that one can encounter the project not as nationalist nor anti-nationalist. Because I think that’s the thing about dabbling. You are allowed to read things multiply such that 'this is how I’m reading it, this is how it really is.' 'This is what I’m going to say I think about it, but this is what I really think about it.' All those different ways of reading and narration.

What I got out of [our astrologer's] talk was this ability to not create distance in multiple readings, but to take all of those readings seriously. When she was describing how the zodiac was more of a spiral..these suggestions of other ways to imagine beyond the terrain that we are given. We can reimagine borders and still take seriously the work that they do. Take seriously the terrain they set out and how they demarcate themselves, how they are in relation with other models and structures. What they give to us, and what they don’t give to us. All these ways of taking things at their word, even though it’s not the final word. What would that model of relating to woo be? Rather than, ‘I’ll take it, but I’m going to be skeptical about x, y, and z.’ Or to be really devoted to x, y, and z but to say I’m really skeptical about it because I’m afraid of how it might come across. But that involves not taking it seriously or not responding to the demands that it makes.

Addy: I think about camp as this way of really loving things and putting yourselves in them and also totally not taking them seriously, so I think gay people are good at this. Being back in school and witnessing some of the cultural break downs between the gays and the people who don’t have much context for the gays has made me appreciate that difference. It’s one of the things I think is sad about taking everything so seriously. I wonder what it’s like to make stake in the world and also re-think stake. To be open to a constant and incoming remaking of the idea of self-interest and what it is. I think gays are good at that, as a world-making practice, and I don’t know what that means in relation to the woo, but as people trying to embrace a piece or idea of our own 'history' in that, there is something a little bit more tender about how people handle that than just through irony. There is something very bittersweet about it.

Boots: I’m with you, I think that gets at something with the lesbian nationalism. The woo provides a reimagining of worlds while still acknowledging its roots in, and it’s being a product of, the world in ways that are similar to gay camp. The sort of unicorn-ing of the world.

Addy: You just turned 'unicorn' into a verb.

Boots: That particular tenor of camp...its the tendency of kinds of humor and marginalization to come together in ways that are bittersweet, and hilarious and tragic and that reimagining worlds becomes possible through an against a hopelessness of the constrained world. And that the structures or the ways things are held in and confined, precluded, becomes visible because of that..and the magic is created in response to that.

Addy: That is some thin air shit! People just folded meaning back in on itself a couple times and then invented a world.

Boots: Absolutely. I mean, they did. And that’s not always obvious. It makes it extra fascinating and extra hard, because we see how tenuous and accidental and specific those sorts of makings were and how solid they are in their remakings of themselves and how hard it is to create resistances to those..whatever they are, I’m not quite ready to call them ‘accidents,’ but that set of possibilities that then became solidified. So other world-making practices are both tragic and hopeful in that way which I think is part of what’s going on in irony and gay camp--and I hope part of what’s going on in the woo. 

Addy: I feel like I’m seeing a shape right now but I don’t know what it is. I feel like its made out of soap.

Boots: When you said that, I immediately imagine that Dial cheese soap. Because the moon is made of cheese.

Addy: That’s what I’m saying man, just bringing it back around.

Boots: Are you imagining a giant moon made of dial?

Addy: It was a little more umbilical than that.

Boots: Umbilical dial. Or cheese.

Addy: Something about umbilical and cheese go badly together.

Boots: A lot about umbilical and cheese go badly together.

What are [our astrologer's] three best qualities?

Addy: Pomo-wisdom and Hilarious re-naming of things. Her aesthetic. She's got swag.

Boots: Her coat is amazing. And she has an amazing demeanor! She talked for 2.5 hours straight with utter charisma. She was so chill and so on. A hard note to hit.

Addy: Yes. Discerning and also chill-axed. We are all striving.

Boots: But I want to back to re-naming, because it’s actually super important to these questions around what is woo in our time? (Talks about collective tarot making process) That question of categories--that questions need to be asked of categories, and some need to be hung onto, or at least we can hang our hat on them. And that’s what [our astrologer] got into. She offered another way to think about the universe, another way to think about the constellations.

I always had a hard time remembering constellations, but now, all of the sudden, I remember the sassy booted twin. And the whole thing of making the body into that shape, so it’s not only a renaming and reimagining of the things we are seeing, but a demand to collapse the space between them, to rethink constellations as bodily, which was a connection to the historical stargazers she conjured up at the beginning. Making it a non-intellectual exercise to look and create a relationship to the cosmos.

Addy: And the way she described looking as a way of making stories about their lives. Could we just do that too?

Boots: I think we are!

What do we need that [our astrologer] might be able to support us with?

Boots: This is [back to] the relevance question.

Addy: I need other ideas of time, or of ‘victory’ to sustain work for justice. Kind of like we were talking about earlier [in a previous conversation]. Not what is right or legitimate in this exchange, but what are responses that open up the conversation, that open space to imagine other ways of responding to one another? I think those are questions I have in relation to our movements. What are ways of noticing space for intervention on speech or discourse? How do we recognize the openings when our concepts of justice and the future are not fixed? What are the tools we use to frame and reframe and negotiate with one another our shared values with respect for difference, and--I hate the word ‘innovation’ because we live in the Bay Area--but on some level, innovation? And I just don’t feel like we have that.

I think the spaces where people often went to think about those things, as imperfect and often disappointing as they were, are increasingly diminishing. So far we mostly have reactive responses to that. What is a response to neoliberalism and to everything we need to be learning right now in terms of the spaces we used to labor and make meaning in our lives that are no longer open or available--what are the openings within that? What is a response to that that is not about being like, ‘look I told you so?’ but a response that fundamentally continues to open up more spaces for being with one another in ways that are just and possible?

I don’t know. I mean, I feel bitter. I really do. I don’t want to lose the powers of discernment. I don’t want to be just a surfer, but that’s why I’m learning to surf because discernment comes easier for me. It’s so easy, living in places that make themselves over so quickly and that are so expensive, to just roll around and think ‘it’s not like it used to be.’ It’s kind of like our earlier conversation about radical queer politics which is running on 70% nostalgia for a time that a politics of transgression was more meaningful and this idea of a perfect queer left that never ever existed and so now people are just busy being bitter, and talking shit, and that’s kind of what it is, you know? What’s on the other side of that?

Boots: I’m curious though, what do you think is under the bitter, if anything?

Addy: It’s that these fuckers don’t even enjoy themselves. They have miserable lives. It is like getting a big fucking tick. What do you think?

Boots: My question to myself when I’m feeling bitter is: 'Is that a feeling of loss? mourning? disappointment? disconnection?' I think that there is, more often than not--it’s a feeling of subsumed rage. Just really tired rage. I need to have a bit more energy if I’m going to stick with this game of living and resisting. I guess that’s why I ask myself, where is the bitterness coming from? What is that? I’m clear that it doesn’t serve me or anyone else or building another world. I want to understand it’s origins better and it’s trajectory better to figure out other ways to be in relationship with it. Maybe that is too therapeutic sounding.

Addy: Well, I don’t think it’s only therapeutic because it doesn’t sound like you are just trying to fix it, but to ask what it should do. I think, for me, it is mourning more than anything. And moving through a world in which so many people refuse to mourn. Where the spaces we built to figure out how to do that together are being systematically destroyed. Spaces of being where we could imagine responses together no longer exist and we are supposed to file out into the world as individuals who are all self-calculating, like, ‘What do I need to do?’ And that’s supposed to be progress! It just feels like there is a fundamental social contract that has been violated. The idea of what surplus and progress are supposed to be and be used for. It just really gets to me.

Boots: So what we need [our astrologer] to do is provide us with a restored social contract! Or space for restoration beyond the bitter, or at least a space for mourning...

Addy: mourning the displacements of neoliberalism. Okay, well, concisely, leftists need a critical astrologer.

Boots: I think a critical astrologer who has a warm relationship with the cosmos and its cruelties.

Addy: A Nietzchean astrologer?

Boots: Not quite that bad. I don’t think [our astrologer] did it in a way that was so direct, now listening and talking to you after and our conversations about our need for spaciousness. There’s a way that how she frames the cosmos was a metaphor for that. And that didn’t involve some fictional perfectionism of the universe. Not this sort of importing of the other-worldly as a pinnacle of us. It wasn’t an idealization of the universe. Nor was it an idea that we can in some fundamental way universally represent the universe, but this idea that in this grappling with the grandness and potentially deadliness and the weight of the temporality that it presents in this very hopeful and very disappointing way, that that is part of what gives us the space. To use that understanding as a resource to imagine specificity and generality at once. History and future at once. Or historic and present-future at once. As a tool, as a metaphor, as a muse in a way--being able to engage in the sky or the cosmos gives us a kind of concrete and abstract metaphor for space. For an opening that we are asking for.

Addy: So, maybe more like a Derridean-surf-instructor-astrologer for leftists?
...

How I Became A Houseboy Hiring Agent (Or A Brief History Of Some Of My More Bizarre Jobs)

For those who lived in Portland during the early 2000's, there was a special skill set involved in making enough money to pay for a two hundred dollar moldy basement room in a collective house while in a city that was: a) experiencing the highest unemployment rate in the country b) is a giant tea bag that is secretly geographically larger than all but a handful of U.S. cities and hence, where no one wants to leave their houses for nine consecutive months c) where despite aforementioned hardships, is known as a city where people go to underachieve in peace and so, d) is home to more than its fair share of culturally hip weirdoes who comprise a market wherein other, cheaper weirdoes can potentially make enough money to pay for their moldy basements.

I did have an on call job, as a drawbridge operator, that I had to quit when I had recurring nightmares of grain ships crashing into the Broadway bridge, probably on account of sleeping with a beeper (yes, a beeper) next to my head for three years. Thereafter, and during the low water months of the bridge job when no ships needed beep me for my services, I spent a lot of time dreaming up strange means for making extra money. Mira and I had long dreamed of an urban history scavenger hunt picnic dating service, which could have proved lucrative with my insider status on the city’s lift spans, but like most Portland ideas involving too much effort, it never got off the ground.

I did work special holidays at an area florist, snapping thorns off rose stems. I had a Summer job with Parks and Rec starting water fights, and I sometimes took on work repairing tent poles with a friend of my parents. Occasionally, my elaborate conceptual cake-making services were subsidized; until Portland’s art-cake market became oversaturated with the appearance of a team of inedible cake-maker girls who filled theirs with things like broken mirrors and road kill. I cleaned houses in Northwest Portland with green cleaning products and played gay nanny for a while, but I really got my break when I began working for a local company producing raw foods.

I worked in a small industrial kitchen managed by an ultra-conservative dessert-maker named Cortland, who had been raised in an ashram in the West Hills. We’d jockey over whether Fleetwood Mac or republican talk radio should be played in the kitchen, but either way, he always left behind for us the edges of his flourless brownies on our shelf in the walk-in. It was likely because of the brownies (as well as my general commitment to cooked food) that the owner of the raw hummus company found me to be far more dependable and grounded that the raw foodists who usually came around to help him.

I took well to the rhythm of the work and there was something about the aesthetics of the kitchen that suited me: massive mason jars of soaking garbanzos, lined in multiples of three and the way the hummus rolled in on itself forming strange hummus-labia whenever it was stirred. I became a regular and quickly began picking up work for other raw foods companies, beginning to distribute for several. The hummus kitchen became something of a center of revolving-door queer punk non-raw-foodist employment as more friends and acquaintances picked up work there and I always had enough leftover raw hummus to trade for things like homemade tinctures or fresh caught fish.

I lasted at Livin’ Spoonfuls until I was taken down by a pickup truck on my bicycle one day in 2005 on my happy way home from an annual pap smear. I returned to the kitchen, minimally, even before I could walk. But finding myself in more medical debt than I would like to put a number to, and feeling disillusioned with lifestyle anarchism and the lack of disability analysis surrounding me, I knew it was time to move on. I also understood that move meant going somewhere where some people, maybe, possibly, had health insurance. A harm-reduction-oriented herb school program in Oakland seemed a good excuse to skip town once I was healed.

When I arrived in the Bay Area, my rent doubled and I held onto this idea of wanting a job with a regular schedule (no beepers, no seasons) and maybe some health insurance. I wasn't quite sure how to make it happen, or how to relate to getting it, knowing most work in the world was paid by the piece, pound, freelanced, contracted, or just plain stolen.

While in Portland, I had discovered that scouring the shelves of health food stores for items with shoddy labels or biodegradable packaging was a great way to find out which companies were operating locally and might need a hand. Of course this search yielded the added benefit of being able to stake out the parking lot after hours for the dregs of their agave syrup or olive oil, not to mention food-grade five gallon buckets. I did the same sort of research in Oakland and after sending out about a dozen unsolicited resumes, the only reply I received was from a woman named Leila, who ran a small company making aromatherapy sexual lubricants in the East Bay saying she needed a production assistant.

I was charmed, if a little put off, by her website which hosted hokey names for glycerin-filled lubes and lots of pictures of her lounging on plush couches wrapped in pink feather boas. I was new to the Bay area, and didn’t really have an understanding of the vast number of eccentric thirty and forty-somethings that form the yearly base for burning man, nor had Portland prepared me to understand the amount of wealth potentially at the disposal of eccentrics like Leila. I simply assumed she was part of the Bay Area culture of white women who act like the project of their public sexual liberation might save the world, particularly if they make a business out of it (I would learn more about this when I went on to work at Good Vibrations).

When I pulled up outside Leila’s West Oakland loft (she insisted it was Emeryville) on my first day, I buzzed upstairs and was ready to leave for lack of reply when she hung her towel-wrapped head out the window, asking me if I didn’t mind waiting just a little longer, darling. A little longer dragged into twenty minutes before I was ushered into Leila’s palatial top floor loft. Literally, the ceilings and windows may have been twenty five feet high, as I would later discover teetering atop many a ladder for her. The vast interior was broken into various sitting areas of chaise lounges, massage tables, and other plush surfaces. A quick survey of the space suggested there were about thirty different places to have sex with scarcely a wall between them. The only separated spaces were her loft where she kept special things like her collection of Chanel heels and her tiny kitchen. “I mostly order in,” she said as she bypassed the kitchen on our tour of the space.

When I asked to see the production space, she led me to a separate apartment in the same building, which seemed to function as something of a glorified craft space. The production area was generally limited to a tiny kitchen nook where about forty kinds of essential oils were stored, but not much else. Business was not booming, but Leila did not seem especially concerned.

As she led me back upstairs, Leila handed me a notebook, suggesting I keep it at hand to take notes of her ideas throughout the day. Immediately she began rattling off things to be done: shirts to return to anthropologie, movies to be made (she was not a filmmaker), the best places to buy orchids, her weekly shopping list, new ways of decorating her loft, themes for her holiday party (it was October), and thoughts about astral projection. She could use me about six hours a day, to start, she said, and if we got along well and she found me a good creative influence, maybe more. She eyed my outfit and haircut, surmising, I guessed, that I had enough potential to keep around while also being pathetic enough to be a fun project. Immediately, she led me up to her loft to help her sort through older clothes (she was expecting a large order from BCBG arriving with UPS that day)and suggesting items for me to try on.

It was clear that Leila did not need a production assistant, and the only thing that had thus far kept her from having a personal assistant was that no one had yet suggested it to her. I spent most of the first week praying for my life and taking notes as Leila drove us recklessly about town blaming all of our near traffic accidents on the position of this or that planet and showing me off at the shops and cafes she frequented.

While at the loft, Leila’s bidding required constant attention. She frequently expected me to read her mind, and would chastise me and my astrological chart for messiness when I left behind one pointless activity to tend to whatever random whim she might have. Leila had an irrational fear of having her name be readable on any mail that was being thrown out, so on my tenth day, as I cut up the addresses printed on her eighteen magazine subscriptions and countless catalogs (Leila despised the sound of tearing paper and thought me crude for not agreeing) she began to get a read on me for making too much a mess as I processed the mountain of catalogs.

Looking over the utter pointlessness of my task, I realized that Leila was genuinely enjoying having something of a protégé and a submissive in me, and that the primary problem at hand (besides the independent wealth, her fake company, and her underpaying me) was just that she had simply chosen the wrong person for the job. I stood up and began to explain that I couldn’t work for her anymore because she was cruel and bossy and seemed to enjoy demeaning me, and that I really didn’t like it, BUT that I thought she had some special talent in being cruel and demeaning. I assured her there was someone out there who would like it and that she was really just barking up the wrong tree with the personal assistant thing.

At first Leila seemed shocked and offended but immediately was overtaken by the prospect that there was some territory of decadence, opulence, and eccentricity that she had yet explore and that I was about to reveal to her (these ideas were, after all, a part of why she had hired me). As soon as I said the word “houseboy” she lowered herself to the couch saying, “tell me more.” No sooner had I given her the rough wikipedia-style description of having a household submissive and Leila was telling me she wanted to have one for every day of the week. I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t just free labor, that she would have to interact with them, negotiate a dynamic—but that if her treatment of me as a personal assistant had been any indication, that I really thought she had what it would take. I spent the rest of my last day as Leila’s personal assistant pulling up and reading aloud how-to articles for her and negotiating the terms of my employment as her houseboy hiring agent.

The craigslist ad I posted got forty replies on the first day. Leila was an attractive, single woman who basically lived alone in a mansion, plus she had a young female assistant to play middle man, which I’m sure added an air of mystery and intrigue. I responded to about twelve replies and dressed up smartly one day for a round of rotating interviews at a local coffee shop. It became immediately clear to me that the more experienced subs would not get what they wanted from an arrangement with Leila and I was about to give up when Ted showed up.

Ted was handsome, but awkward. He was a massage therapist and had discovered his love of service as one of he main organizers of the yearly “hookah dome” at burning man, though he had no formal experience as a houseboy. Thinking it couldn’t get much better, I put him in touch with Leila and later set him up with a date to visit her loft.

As soon as Ted arrived at the loft, Leila immediately sent him to her hairstylist to get his rugged mane under control. He seemed neither annoyed nor amused by this, and I spent the duration of his appointment trying to think about how to construct the most hookah-dome like experience possible for Ted. It really didn’t seem like it would be hard in the plush ballroom of Leila’s home, considering it may have already resembled the interior of a uterus.

When Ted returned, Leila seemed to have less interest in taking out her ways with him than continuing to do so with me and then having me act as something of a middle management domme. It seemed that after all she really did want a lady in waiting more than a houseboy. So I played middle manager. Ted, for his purposes seemed to have fun with all of this. As for me, it kept me interested for a minute, but ultimately I decided it wasn’t much different than being her personal assistant had been, that I was still getting underpaid, and that if I wanted to be someone’s Mistress, I could be getting my own apartment cleaned.

I did finally get a job with health insurance. Ted and I did go back and work some seasonal events for Leila. It was my job, for instance, to choose a yuletide g-string for Ted which he could wear while feeding and offering massages to her guests. I also negotiated a much higher payment for myself and a few other friends to serve drinks, but ended up uncomfortable when the lady partygoers would lose their shit exoticizing the young queers holding the hor'dourve plates. When Leila asked me to hire and train a team of boys to dress as sexy cupids for her Valentines bash, I gave her a copy of the Topping book I picked up at my new place of work and bid her farewell.

Being Abundance: Some Critiques, Concerns, and Loose Predictions for Norcals Woo-Woo Industry

woo: concerned with emotions, mysticism, or spiritualism; other than rational or scientific; mysterious; new agey.

Northern California's Woo Industry

For those looking to make a living by means involving the use of crystals, offering office feng shui consulting, selling fleur de sel and raw cacao marijuana truffles, serving food prepped so as to not violate the energetic lifelines of onions, hanging business executives upside down over a ravine until they confess their deepest fears and desires, or teaching owner-pet partner yoga, Northern California is the spot to be. An enormous excess of wealth combined with a larger-than-usual consumer base that places higher-than-usual stock in lifestyle values around holistic health, “green” products and services, “alternative” spirituality, “human potential,” and general new-ageyness make Norcal ground zero for the Woo Industrial Complex (WOOIC).

Much as I would like to be your first source for the best-of-the-best in woo-witchy Marxist political economics, I lack some assessment-making skills for really summing up the role of the WOOIC within the political economy of the Bay Area. What I can say is this: a lot of people here are making and spending their money in some woo-ass ways and it is a far bigger part of the economy here than actually gets talked about.

I’m hardly in a spot to draw hard and fast lines. Recent schemes for making extra cash dreamed up by myself and friends have included things like adult baby-burping for somatic release, agave-sweetened lavender lemonade and advice stands in Dolores Park, and you-tube video DJing at area cannabis clubs. And I’m not about to say that I don’t live here in part because I can eat food grown within 100 miles or say public health and holistic health care in the same sentence.

I’m far from too crudely materialist or insufficiently woo to appreciate woo’s appeal (as if the blog does not stand as proof). A quick look at my own woo resume would turn up that: My roommate and I own a special cape to wear while dancing to Stevie Nicks. I attend a school where people may be able to get master’s degrees in transpersonal psychology and drumming. I have full moon rituals and a google calendar track for my menstrual cycle. I pretend to be gluten free, went to herbal medicine school, and keep Pema Chodron books in my bathroom. I consult with an astrologer. Probably worst of all, I worked at a restaurant where all of the menu items were named after affirmations and did not quit within the first week.

Woo and I are well acquainted.

So what's the bone to pick with the WOOIC?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how poorly positioned the people pushing the Woo Industrial Complex are to make much useful meaning out of this economic moment. I’m noticing how profoundly depoliticizing and generally lacking in a materialist analysis woo-world is, and it’s time to try to actually break that down.

It’s hard to know where to start.

A short list of problems associated with the WOOIC and woo itself might include:

• Rampant white supremacist cultural appropriation and a problematic propensity for buffet-style spirituality.
• New and more sophisticated ways of fucking over workers using bizarre spiritual bypassing.
• Phony and weird anti-technology beliefs.
• Reductionism of feminist critiques and analysis into essentialist versions of the sacred feminine.
• A creepy Protestant-esque sense that things are right and people with economic privilege deserve their wealth because of right-consciousness or good acts.
• Bizarre and baseless progress narratives.
• False beliefs in notions of sustainability.
• Problematic beliefs that the world is a story we tell ourselves so we can “choose” to disengage from un-cute economic realities.
• Finally, shock, dismay, or even denial at the fact that the WOOIC is bound up with the same problems associated with capital accumulation that it sought to avoid.

Foreriders of the apocalypse bring message of human transformation from afar

As an industry, the WOOIC concerns itself with offering lifestyle and consumer choices that are meant to help people heal from the harm, emptiness, and unsustainability associated with living during late capitalism, but it does so without offering any useful materialist analysis or critique of capitalism. In this respect, it has a potentially profoundly depoliticizing effect by concerning people with envisioning desired worlds through consumer choices without connecting those visions to a respect for the work of making serious bids for power.

Frequently this “visioning” involves a fetishistic romanticization of pre-capitalist and indigenous societies and cultures. Indigenous peoples are framed as the unself-interested victims of colonial domination, too lacking in deceit to have conceived of the unfortunate and brutal fate that would befall them—let alone pose any meaningful or lasting threat to empire. Much of new-agey culture treats indigenous and non-Western spiritual traditions as artifacts of dead-and-gone or good-as dead-and-gone peoples that there is no ongoing need to have accountability to—rather than cultures that are alive, struggling, or possessed of their own internal contentions.

By these calculations, it is now up to Western new-agey folk to resurrect these “forgotten knowledges” which likely contain overlooked details capable of ushering in new evolutions in human “consciousness.” This set of beliefs is prone to naturalizing capitalism and empire—seeing them as completed projects, rather than ongoing processes—and thus, releasing new-agey folk from the need to assess complicity in the destruction of the cultures they romanticize, or have any meaningful critique of the mechanisms of empire. Certainly, it does not equip people with a sense of solidarity with ongoing struggles for indigenous sovereignty.

Despite the distrust of capitalistic and “scarcity-based” modes of consciousness, the WOOIC at once naturalizes capitalism and believes that the ills of capitalist domination that have befallen the planet will be ended through evolutions in “consciousness” rather than redistributions of wealth or power. In this model, “conscious” capitalism and “sacred commerce” become possible proselytizing forces for this proposed evolutionary shift in human consciousness. We’re working with global capitalism here, people.

Gratitude-speak and class-contortionism

This consciousness “shift” obviously must begin first at an individual level. The path for the “shift” most compatible with the bottom line of the WOOIC is for an individual to stop “telling themselves a story of scarcity.” In this model,nobody needs to be especially critical of their wealth or economic privilege if they believe they are deserving and live with gratitude.

I received one such a loving lecture while lying in savasana last week. It was not met with a chorus of criticism when delivered to a room of people who had mostly paid seventeen dollars for their am yoga class.

The WOOIC works first by obscuring consumer’s ambivalence about “conscious consumption” through astounding feats of class-consciousness contortionism. Using a protestant ethic of “good deeds,” consumers who choose to take care of themselves by eating organic food, supporting local businesses, or investing in their spirituality deserve the level of class and economic privilege they enjoy. Further the only way to keep deserving it is to keep consuming “consciously”—ie, supporting the WOOIC.

Capitalism gets sacred

Sacred commerce, is composed of the belief that the exchange of capital has the potential to be a sacred exchange of life-energy. Several business models currently exist that see themselves as having a “fourth bottom line”—the transformation of the spiritual lives and consciousnesses of their employees and customers. I had the displeasure of working for one such company. A few highlights of working at Café Gratitude included:

• Being told to stop telling myself a story of scarcity while working without health insurance and living with massive medical debt.
• Being required to attend unpaid new-age workshops.
• Experiencing a general attitude that I should be “grateful” that my employer would take an interest in my spiritual development (we aren’t even going to go down this historical road).
• A paternalistic idea of what that “development” should look like, so that they could be justified in forcing workers to ‘push through resistance’ and participate in types of emotional and spiritual engagement against their will.
• Watching other employees work for free or work unpaid overtime in service of the organism of the company. This is part of a larger technology of union-busting and undermining worker control utilized in the WOOIC. Another great example of this is the “Team Member” policy at Whole Foods which establishes a sophisticated system of worker-on-worker policing.
• Being told that the owners of the company were able to open several new locations and rapidly expand their business because of their spiritual enlightenment and not because of their access to capital or profit from workers’ labor.
• My personal favorite was being told that I could not be helped and was “choosing to tell myself a story of negativity” after threatening to call OSHA when the company repeatedly failed to cover up a drain hole in the kitchen floor and I became the fourth worker to twist my ankle by falling in it.

The WOOIC meets economic crisis

Because the WOOIC lacks any materialist analysis beyond where its own profit margins are concerned, my prediction is its adherents will have scarcely little idea what to do with the current period of economic crisis.

Here are a few observations and predictions for how the WOOIC is equipped to view capitalism's crisis:

• This period will be viewed or even romanticized as a time to reconsider what is really important (ie, our consciousness, not our consumer desires), without acknowledging the major suffering of working families or unemployed people. The period will not be viewed as one for either chipping away at capitalism or even supporting solid economic justice initiatives.
• New notions of alternative economies will be developed. Especially "gift economies" but these ideas won't include an analysis of who these new enclosures do and do not include or of expropriation in general. In this case, everyone in a new age gift economy can be rubbed raw by so many massage therapists, but not much else.
• There will be numerous suggestions of retreat into simplicity or sustainability without understanding the imperatives of accumulation and consolidation or the reality of globalization.

Obviously, these could rapidly shift if a lot of boug-a-tron woo-sters start to feel the burn in serious ways. I don't like to be such a Debbie downer, and wish I had more creative solutions for marrying lifestyle politics that make us want to be alive with anti-capitalist analysis. Tale as old as time. Let me know what you've got, folks.

And finally....

Some words on anti-woo

We did not get entirely deep with the problems with woo (future post), but I think it is important to say that obviously the idea of being entirely anti-woo has its own set of problems

Anti-woo leaves no space for nuanced relationships with woo. It leaves little space for curiosity about how people are making it through this bullshit. It assumes people all arrive at woo in the same way, and that they lack legitimate cultural claim to such ideas or practices—that they even relate to woo as woo.

Anti-woo forgets that many ideas or practices cast as woo have a legitimate cultural basis. Further, anti-woo fails to acknowledge that concepts like legitimacy and cultural purity are very complicated to begin with. In gens, all-out reactionary anti-woo runs the risk of upholding epistemological and cultural values that are all-around pretty nasty. Ones we've seen before.

To get out of this mess, we’re gonna need all the help we can get. We aren’t about to be saved alone by leftist men with bad haircuts who have no curiosity about who the supposed masses actually are. This may mean that if we weren't already, we may need to get woo about it, folks.

The case for woo needing a materialist analysis has been made loud and clear. But materialism can’t stand alone because we’ve got a mystery to build. Besides, does anyone else feel there's is a deep woo-ness--a dynamic and internal intelligence--to the material makeup of stuff and things anyway?

I'm not giving up on woo.

I want to hear from you.