Living in the Period of Objects: Black Friday, Fixed Gear Bikes, and You
“Black Friday” has an ominous sound to it. Despite the cheery dub-overs on commercials exhorting the fantastic savings and mind-blowing deals awaiting us after our tryptophan come-downs, I can’t help but feel a little freaked out by this secular consumerist ritual.
Bear in mind, I own a retail business. “For-profit”- at least that what the state corporate filing says- and the idea behind this massive push for coordinated consumption is that it will provide a burst of income to get we business owners through the tough winter months ahead. This is all fine and good as long as we take at face value the apparently self-evident axioms of our era’s particular form of late capitalism. Things only get tricky when we look past the 65% off DSLRs and the Goldman Sachs bailout. Insofar as I’m participating in the melee by being a capitalist, I feel that the least I can do is be somewhat transparent and autocritical about it.
Everyone remembers the blip of generalized consumer soul-searching that occurred following the death of Jdimytai Damour. Damour, a 34 year old Wal-Mart employee, was fatally trampled a year ago when some of the over 2000 deal-seekers awaiting the early morning opening of a New York franchise broke the doors down and proceeded to rush the store for first pick of Roll-Back-priced products. When police arrived on the scene, shoppers refused to leave the store, complained, and attempted to keep shopping.
In the following weeks, many pundits and theorists tried to explain the incident. We Americans, it turns out, are exposed, on average, to 5000 advertisements a day. Is this sort of asocial behavior due to the materialistic condition we are subject to? Are the shareholder-driven multinational corporations at fault for their relentless simplification of our existences and manipulation of our desires? Or are we simply boorish automatons with simple and programmable brains; our inhuman capitalistic auto-organization serving as the most expeditious route to self-extermination? (insert Dr. Strangelove image here…)
These are the sort of questions that most of us let Continental theorists turn themselves inside out over. “What,” might you ask, “does this have anything to do with sick fixxxxxies and such?” It may seem round-about, but I defer to those that lived through the May ‘68 almost-revolution to provide the connection here…
If you are unfamiliar with the events that occurred in France 41 years ago, the Wikipedia page isn’t a bad place to start. Suffice it to say here, it represented the most successful effort to date of the populus of an industrialized democratic country attempting to make a radical change to the form and means of its societal structure. In a certain sense, I feel that the contemporary momentum and organization of urban cyclists represents a similar movement, if somewhat demure, as it seeks to re-organize the agendas and infrastructures of our metropolitan environments.
“Well duh,” you say. “Every pedal stroke is my own contribution to revolution,” and etc. What we are missing, I feel, is a focused, cognizant, and measured approach to our reforms and ideals. Discussions and serious commitment must follow Utopian fantasy. Do we accept progressivist compromise and baby-steps? Do we stage Situationist protest and force our issues by throwing paving stones? No one really knows, because no one has really attempted to bring our diverse and wide-ranging (read: strong and capable) community together to do so.
The current consumerist backlash (or bandwagon-ing) within the urban cycling community simultaneously puts a roof over my head and keeps me up at night. Perhaps, concerning the former, not for long… one can hit up the Urban Outfitters website and order a custom color-coordinated fixed gear (built, of course, of shitty Pacific Rim components made by wage-slaves) for short money.
And what is more American that getting a deal? In a sense, Black Friday represents the potent distillation of our contemporary moment in this global experiment (or subjugation to) post-industrial capitalism- we are offered, at unobjectionable costs, objects that amend, and ultimately describe, our sense of self and social position. Moreover, we are urged to “give” these objects as gifts- thus allowing them to act as both personal and interpersonal social status attributors.
When I was younger and less picky in regard to the ways in which I paid rent, I was employed by a man of unspecific Indian Subcontinental decent who owned several large buildings in downtown Minneapolis. I was hired, for not modest wage, to keep a graveyard shift watch over a structure comprised largely of air-conditioned suites full of buzzing network servers. Owned by eager startups backed by the shrewdest VCs, these unremarkable arrays were generating ludicrous amounts of money- virtually fabricating it out of virtual air. My boss had entrusted me with a set of master keys, so I could, from time to time, check in on the hyper-cooled rooms and ensure the encrypted profitability of the clients. I liked to sit in the vacuous ambient hum in the bigger offices, smoking cigarettes amidst the HEPA filters and wondering if I was causing client-side errors in Asia. In time, the dot-com bubble burst, I had exhausted the ways in which I could steal Frito-Lay products from the vending machines, and I was laid off, but not before reading, on the clock, countless tomes of cultural theory and post-structuralist philosophy that my roommate at the time had declared necessary for my personal development.
Whether this left me better or worse for the wear is up for discussion, but one of the books that ended up in my regular pre-sunrise rotation was Mark Poster’s translation of Baudrillard’s Selected Writings. Renowned for his general unintelligibility, amorphous conclusions, and bullshit footnotes, I instantly felt a kinship with this old Frenchman with absurd eyewear. Who else could, post-posthumously, detail for me the motivations behind Knog’s omni-sexual adverts, catalog the advances and failures, past and future, of subcultures at odds with the predominant productive forces (see: bike peoples), and give, in a single sentence, the fundamental pretense of the phenomenon of Black Friday? In a 1970 essay entitled “Consumer Society,” Baudrillard diagnoses the outcome of the substitution of object-relationships for our historically important and ritualized social and interpersonal relationships as analogous to the somatic response of a body to an indeterminable illness- “The world of objects and of needs would thus be a world of general hysteria.”
This doesn’t sit well with me, and I don’t think that we denizens of an imagined future bike-opolis have anything to gain by skitching along the intoxicate-maneuvered import sedan of Progress. OPEN will have no Black Friday sale that will set your pulse a-racing, nor will we try to sell you junky schlock that will bolster your self-esteem and make you momentarily more attractive to the opposite sex. I considered participating in Buy Nothing Day, but in the end I feel that these sorts of broadly-defined enterprises miss the point. We’ll be there today, perhaps a little late for having stayed up too late lambasting consumerism; wrench in hand, ready to assess the ravages of time and use upon your ferrite steeds, to offer assurance and bits of sarcasm meant to inspire, and to fix, the best we can, what is broken.
Armando had the eve’s fastest time- 300m in 
Clark is Ohio’s most accomplished dancer.
Heather hitting the rollers.
Jon & JT running logistics.
Tristan channeling Sean Kelly.
In Vienna, as well as many other cities with well-developed networks of bike lanes and paths – those lanes and paths are mandatory: In areas where such infrastructure exists, cyclists must use them and are not permitted to travel on the roads with motor vehicles. The problem I experienced with this was two-fold: When using the paths (which are built on the sidewalks and are segregated from motorised traffic, à la Vassar Street in Cambidge), it is impossible to pick up speed due to the meandering pedestrians, strollers, dogs, and other obstacles. Slow cycling can be nice, but not when one is late for work, and these paths give you no other option.
My point here is not to deride the idea of cycling infrastructure, but simply to suggest that we must understand what we are asking for before we ask for it. I am not certain whether most Americans – when praising European systems with well developed networks of paths – realise that these systems do not permit vehicular cycling. Cycling in Boston may seem more chaotic and “dangerous” at first glance, but my personal conclusion is that it is actually overall safer than Vienna, because it does not continuously force the cyclist into accident-prone situations. I am interested in what others think of this subject – though please be courteous and polite in your comments.
