ETST

chapter 9

Air Shaft, Rent Party

I’m here to announce that the formation of a new po liti cal party is serially

announced.1

Harlem Air- Shaft

This party is new because it’s not po liti cal. This is the new po liti cal party

to end all po liti cal parties. Like most genuinely new things, the new party is old. It’s not the grand old party. It’s not grand, just elegant, and nasty. It could be called the house party but don’t let that mislead you into thinking

that house implies owner ship; this house party is of and for the dispossessed, the ones who disavow possession, the ones who, in having been possessed

of the spirit of dispossession, disrupt themselves. They’re preoccupied with disowning, with unowning, with homeless anti- and ante- ownership, and this is their party because they’re always trying to give it away, like a bird in

hand, hand in hand, hand to hand.

The party I’m announcing is serially announced. It serially announces itself, throwing off irruptions of itself that sound like somebody saying “Party over here,” each instance of which sets off reverberations of itself all over the party. This party crusts and sugars over itself like that all the time. It

keeps burning like that to be constantly driven by that burning, which re- sults in this constant scarring. Party over here, party over here, party over

here, this party is riotously other than itself. In constantly telling us that there’s a party going on, the party is constantly showing us that there’s a riot going on, which is how it gets itself smiling, like an antinuclear family affair. This riotous being- beside- itself of the party is kinda like this guy during the

second great Los Angeles rebellion who was coming out of a Sears in South Central with a massive box of Huggies. The tele vi sion news reporters, who were reporting on the riot as if it were a party, as if it were the violent birth or

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birth announcement of the last po liti cal party, put a mic in his face, because they couldn’t put a mic in his hand because his hands were full, which meant that he couldn’t try to take the mic, not because he was too small but because

he was rocking the party he was in, which meant that he only had time to look into the camera, and say into the mic, “I’m not like this.” He was rock- ing the party of the ones who are not like themselves, the ones who like one another, and who are like one another, because they are not like themselves.

He was rocking the party of inseparable, unregulatable differences, the party that contracts the destruction and rebuilding of cities, and he rocked it so hard that the news reporter could no longer report. It was as if he’d slammed the mic when he was done to make sure it broke.

Now this whole slamming thing, indeed much of the activity that makes

up the party, can rightly be taken as a sign of anger. The anger prob ably de- rives from the fact that even though the party is, and takes place in, and takes place as, a kind of refuge, refuge still indicates that those who take it are refu-

gees and people tend not to want to have to live like that. It’s all messed up though because tremendous amounts of love are circulated in refuge so you

can’t leave ’cause your heart is there. But insofar as you’re always dreaming about leaving, which is to say that insofar as you’re always leaving, you can’t stay ’cause you been somewhere else. This is the party of the ones who are in

more + less than one place at the same time all the time, the ones who are be- side themselves, not like themselves, other than themselves, having inside-

outed themselves in airy, fluid, black- and- blue solidarities. This is the party of the ones who are not self- possessed, the non- self- possessive anindividuals. This is the party of the ones in whom the trace of having been possessed

keeps turning into this obsessive- compulsive drive for the total disorder that is continually given in continually giving themselves away. This is the party

of the ones who continually say to one another, “I, who have nothing, I who

have no one, adore you and want you so; I’m just a no one, with nothing, to give you, but o, I love you,” so you see what I mean when I say that this new po liti cal party is not a po liti cal party, that it is the old- new, extrapo liti cal party of the ones who are none. This is that other thing, that other assembly, that other gathering, that other log os, that other set, that other party, the

beforeandafterparty. The party I’m talking about is the rent party and I am

here to announce it and also to call for the formation of a study group so we can study it. On the other hand, now that I think about it, there’s no need for that since the rent party is a study group, where the theory of life is the theory of style, which emerges in a style of theory in which convolution, in the interest

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of revolution, is mobilized as the celebratory echo of the plain, the contra- puntal, the fugal, the fantastic. Actually, if you wanted to be academic about it you could say that the rent party is the Rent Party Department, Richard Iton, Chair Emeritus.

Of course, the Rent Party Department isn’t really in the acad emy. I mean it’s there, perhaps even insofar as we are here, but it’s not really there. It’s not really anywhere, which is cool because then it can actually be here, there,

and everywhere as a kind of dislocation. Nowhere is usually a dissed loca- tion but not here. Professor Iton teaches us that musical announcements of this extrapo liti cal renunciation are often the most precise, bearing the way it

belongs without belonging, that sharp, sped-up multiple weave of elongated essays and overpopulated pauses and hallways on what it is to always be longing. This animated urbanity in the cracks of the polis, this community sing whose improvised head reveals a tendency to get cracked in the head by

the police, up here under the ground where falling feels like flying because it

is and because we all fly when we fall like that, feeling each other in the space where we feel— because we bear— each other as differences, is where the

fleshly thing you might have wanted to call a body, moving in and with and through each other in the open field we used to call every body, populated by those abstract equivalences we call anybody, is given in its most essential

form, which is nothing other than that ongoing giving of form that we call the informal, refuge for the no- ones, the not ones, the more + less than ones, the

nones who are, in their constantly novitiate, base communitarian devotion, no- bodies. Even more than urban planning, this emergence of form in and from the informal, is the city we’re always making, the city of plans, the city

of terms, the city of terminals, the city of passage, the centrifugal refuge of the eternal middle, moved and moving, margined, monthly, weekly, daily, over here, over here, over here, the city of stateless practice.2

Rentals

Duke Ellington calls his design, encryption, and inhabitation of this city “Harlem Air- Shaft.” Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd update and reemphasize its

antinational internationalism in “Rentals.” For our fallen comrade Richard,

who has ascended into the underground he prophetically described, this em- brace of insurgent digging, and our ongoing and necessary embrace of that embrace, is the search for the black fantastic.

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