Toward a Genealogy of Standup Tragedy and Gallows Humor, Between Grief, Guilt and Masochism, Navigating climate change with grief… w/ author Andrew Boyd - Berlin
Tuesday, June 27th, Andrew Boyd dropped by for a reading from his new book, I want a better catastrophe, reflecting on climate change and existentialism. Looking at his book, I started to rethink those years we spent reimagining, rethinking a genealogy of "stand-up tragedy." It's a conversation we’ve all been a part of for years now.
“Come to this intimate, private gathering for what has been called ‘the most realistic yet least depressing end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it guide out there’” wrote Boyd, inviting folks to our place at the Shepard Momentum Residence on Prenzlauer allee. “We will read some passages, laugh some dark laughs, sign some books, gnash some teeth, explore some of our possible futures via oversized flowcharts....not necessarily in that order. The evening will NOT be a boring book reading. It will be interactive, participatory, fun; it'll be a chance to come together and -- aided by gallows humor and some unusual prompts -- reflect on some of the big questions before us. To tackle the climate emergency, we need each other; we need solidarity and laughter and all the rest. We hope to see you there. (Management not responsible for any side effects including existential dread, being galvanized into action, etc.)
Looking at the invite, “A night of stand up tragedy,” I found myself reflecting on Boyd’s approach to this complicated topic, trying to situate Boyd’s standup catastrophic approach, looking at a few distinct chapters in Boyd’s opus as a writer and prankster, philosopher and street activist, as well as founder of the NYC climate clock, ever reminding us, we have six years, five years left to act, left to get a better catastrophe. His book builds on some two and a half decades of pranks around issues related to income inequality, nuclear arms, war, global justice, and now climate justice. Some could interpret this ironic disposition as a sort of gallows humor of the climate movement. What's the source of such a sentiment? New Yorkers have a hard time playing it straight, although occasionally we do. Where does this sentiment originate from? Recalling Douglas Crimp’s humorous recollections of Vito Russo’s funeral of December 1990, I started thinking about this camp sensibility. The whole crowd in attendance had every reason to be devastated and many were. But they found reason to laugh and stay engaged in the movement to beat back the disease that had robbed Vito from them. It's hard to say if it was right to laugh, it's always been hard to say. Yet, we want to. We need to, if only to live and stay engaged.
Some two decades ago, I found myself in the my therapist's office, with a copy of Boyd’s Little Deconstruction Book, looking at the book jacket: “Portable Po-Mo, Disposable Derrida, Foucault-To-Go… a subversive satire, and a tribute to the love-hate relationship many of us have with fashionable ideas.”
My therapist saw it and asked to borrow it.
I told him Boyd was my friend.
He was impressed, every week, telling me how funny he thought it was, asking about him.
“That Andrew, he’s really quite funny and clever,” he said over and over again.
Boyd’s ideas about friendship and irony, philosophy and activism are source material for three of my books. From COP meetings in Paris and Glasgow to Billionaires arriving to ridicule efforts to save the public library, his pranks have made their way throughout my life in countless ways.
We were all trying to figure out how to keep it playful and quirky.
I’ve known for Boyd for I dare it to say, 24 years now.
From the Battle of Seattle global justice years to the Reclaim the Streets, convergences at the Spring 2000 IMF meetings. Dressed as lone sharks, singing mac the knife, that was the plan, but we had to hustle some tuxedos, that we swapped for a canoe from a squat in the bronx. We spent the next year and a half running around the world, from convergence to convergence, in our own “burlesque of diy protest” to borrow from Naomi Klein’s parlance. All fine and good until fall 2001 when we were planning another trip to DC and some planes collided into some tall buildings in NYC. I stumbled into Boyd and LAK at Union Square, with smoke in the distance. LAK said global justice would have to become a global peace and justice movement.
We quickly became an anti war group, with an antiwar sartorial splendor.
Boyd organized a sub affinity group, the International Authorities, who cozy up to Genocidal Dictators for Peace.org, our response to the mind numbingly stultifying International Answer.
Once the bombing started, Boyd organized the French bread block for peace, in homage to the French opposing the war. Wearing striped red shirts we carried baguettes chanting “eat your props, eat your props” at anti war marches.
Some thought it flippant.
Never easy to get it exactly right.
Throughout this period, our chants vacillated between outright silly, “four more wars,”
Orwellian, “war is peace,”
“Give war a chance,”
To deconstructive, “three word chant, four words are better.”
Boyd had been at it a long time, as he was always ready to tell us, sharing a story of his first big arrest.
“Stop the Bomb Where It Starts – Blockade Livermore Lab!”
Livermore lab direct action of 1982, three days in jail with Wavy Gravy and Daniel Ellsberg,
How do you have fun over three days in jail? In a no talent talent show with both the greatest yippie, alive, fresh off his nobody for president campaign. Gravy had made a career of seeing politics as absurd. His adage: “Laughter is the valve on the pressure cooker of life.”
Realizing we can act, we don't need perfect knowledge to act. We can be funny and ironic even in the face of large, dark obstacles.
Not always a conclusion guaranteed at University of Michigan, where only a dozen years prior Bill Ayers was busy hatching plans for an underground armed resistance to the war.
Still Boyds ever the organizer, getting us all, including myself, to bring parts for the climate clock to Glasgow to the COP meetings of 2021.
And the person who laughs watching the philosopher’s soccer game on New Years every year.
Earnest and funny at the same time.
Boyd also asks us to think together, the signature line on his email reminds of a challenge stated by Søren Kierkegaard: “be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.”
Can we see the other and learn from their subjectivity?
Clever, and smart, occasionally earnest, playing it straight, maybe it is time for a better catastrophe?
Could we engage the conflicts and contradictions of the movement to oppose climate change. Diani (1992) argues: “Social movements are defined as networks of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations, engaged in political or cultural conflicts, on the basis of shared collective identities.” Yet as a movement, identities were anything but coherent or ideologically sound.
And so the talk began in Berlin, standing in our living room.
In an almost Hegelian schema, he frames our contradictions and yearnings, old categories emerging, all that's solid melting. “Hope and hopelessness collide, paradox ensues, and Boyd offers us a broadside of gallows-humor life-advice — as well as a few surprisingly helpful flowcharts — about how to live knowing the worst is yet to come. No one, it turns out, is more beset by dread than those most familiar with the facts: the climate scientists and activists themselves. But if catastrophe is truly unavoidable, Boyd asks, what are we actually fighting for, and why?” It's for all of us. Some of us even laugh amidst the catharsis of climate grief gripping so many of us. “Maybe hopelessness can save the world? Maybe another end of the world is possible?” Boyd breaks the room into those who think the problem is Them, and those who think the problem is All of Us, asking us why we are standing where we stand, allowing everyone to speak.
Finishing the talk, Andrew led us in a chant:
“"What do we want?"
"A better catastrophe?”
“When do we want it?”
“As late in the century as possible!”
We all can do something to help.
We all can do something to help.
After all, sometimes happy coincidences happen, says Kai, a Berlin era climate scientist reminds me. No one can entirely predict the future. The conversation meanders throughout the room. Gentian talks with Andrew about his experience as a refugee from Kosovo. Nicolas shares some perspective from Georgia. “Stalin’s from there,” says Andrew, thanking him for helping out.
We talked and talked into the night. Some made their way to a stammtisch down the street. A few of us made our way to the Georgia Bar, in Mitte, for a mix of kink and techno. One of the hosts, Frank Künster, a legendary Berlin doorman, was vetting people. One of his colleagues turned away one of our friends. Why do you come to a kink party without dressing up, says one of the doorman?
I guess we didn’t read the fine print on the invite, but I still got in:
EXZESSBETREUUNG @Georgia Bar Berlin
Join the new TUESDAY Kinky Techno Event in Berlin Mitte.
The worship of excess is coming - Join the new TUESDAY Kinky Techno Event in Berlin Mitte…anyone who knows HeroinKids and Frank Künster knows what to expect.
/ / 27 JUNI / / Georgia Bar / / KINKY TECHNO / / SEXPOSITIV
Di / / 27.06.2023 / / 22:00
GEORGIA BAR x HEROINKIDS
CORINNA ENGEL / CHRISTIAN KAISER / FRANK KÜNSTER
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GENERAL ADMISSION 15€
ABENDKASSE 15€
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***DRESS CODE***
Hxrøinkxds, Rave, Techno, Kinky, Fetisch, Nackt, schicke Abendgarderobe, Lack, Leder, Kostüm, Extravagant, Kreativ
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***SPECIALS***
Wax and Impact Play by Ari Denaro {Kit Kat Club}
Electro Play by Lillylove Lotus
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Inspired by illegal rave parties, Berlin's underground techno club scene, and punk attitude, Corinna Engel and Christian Kaiser create a nihilistic vision of beauty, grace, decadence, and fragility. Their avant-garde kinky techno events have taken place at venues such as the Kantine at Berghain and the world-famous KitKat Club, as well as in other cities including Hamburg, Munich, and Prague. Frank Künster is a German bouncer, club owner, and actor, often referred to as the Godfather of Mitte. He is world-famous in Berlin-Mitte, where he was the man in front of "King Size" for years. In November 2022, he opened the Georgia Bar, a place known for wild nights and excessive parties.”
Lots of whipping and playing inside, dark corners and more dancing. A few couples are being gagged. A woman has laundry pins attached to her breasts. I find myself thinking of the Freud I was reading earlier in the day. “The true masochist always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow,” writes the master in his 1924 paper, “THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM OF MASOCHISM.”
There is guilt and there is death; there is pleasure and there is play and there is sublimation and death; there is catastrophe and war and collective suicide. And there is dancing. It all plays in front of our eyes, shaking into the night, reading into the morning. The pleasure principle ever duels with a death drive, their competing instincts pulling at us, sometimes expressed, often turning inward, raging inside in countless ways.
For Freud:
“The existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings may justly be described as mysterious from the economic point of view. For if mental processes are governed by the pleasure principle in such a way that their first aim is the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of pleasure, masochism is incomprehensible. If pain and unpleasure can be not simply warnings but actually aims, the pleasure principle is paralyzed - it is as though the watchman over our mental life were put out of action by a drug. Thus masochism appears to us in the light of a great danger, which is in no way true of its counterpart, sadism. We are tempted to call the pleasure principle the watchman over our life rather than merely over our mental life. But in that case we are faced with the task of investigating the relationship of the pleasure principle to the two classes of instincts which we have distinguished - the death instincts and the erotic (libidinal) life instincts; and we cannot proceed further in our consideration of the problem of masochism till we have accomplished that task.”
I wrote and read into the afternoon, before making it out for a final night with our Berlin psychoanalytic group, where we’ve met for months in a small bookstore in Wedding, reading about Freud and masochism, death drives and nirvana, nine months strong, chatting about Russia and the coup, suicide, and depression among the Russian refugees of Berlin. The group has drawn together lots of ideas from the year here. One of the members of the group saw me at Berghain panorama bar, and then at Ukraine solidarity protest, and then read about my impressions of our group, recalling the strange movement of history through this city. We spent the evening reading "pleasure and unpleasure, therefore, cannot be referred to an increase or decrease of a quantity (which we describe as ‘tension due to stimulus’), although they obviously have a great deal to do with that factor. It appears that they depend, not on this quantitative factor, but on some characteristic of it which we can only describe as a qualitative one. If we were able to say what this qualitative characteristic is..."
It all feels very dialectical, quantity into quality, water to gas, ever evaporating, solid into the air, like into death, and so forth.
As Freud writes:
“The Nirvana principle expresses the trend of the death instinct; the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido; and the modification of the latter principle, the reality principle, represents the influence of the external world. None of these three principles is actually put out of action by another. As a rule they are able to tolerate one another, although conflicts are bound to arise occasionally from the fact of the differing aims that are set for each - in one case a quantitative reduction of the load of the stimulus, in another a qualitative characteristic of the stimulus, and, lastly, a postponement of the discharge of the stimulus and a temporary acquiescence in the unpleasure due to tension…”
The fun and games continue, whips and chains, Freud suggests we all: “have sufficient acquaintance with this kind of masochism in men (to whom, owing to the material at my command, I shall restrict my remarks), derived from masochistic - and therefore often impotent - subjects whose phantasies either terminate in an act of masturbation or represent a sexual satisfaction in themselves. The real-life performances of masochistic perverts tally completely with these phantasies, whether the performances are carried out as an end in themselves or serve to induce potency and to lead to the sexual act. In both cases - for the performances are, after all, only a carrying-out of the phantasies in play - the manifest content is of being gagged, bound, painfully beaten, whipped, in some way maltreated, forced into unconditional obedience, dirtied and debased.”
Berlin is changing. So is our planet. So are our desires. Some of us are guilty about what we’ve done here, the ways we’ve added to the pollutants in the physical and mental environment in our own lives, in our homes. Others are ok with pleasure. Still, others “offer their cheek whenever [they have] a chance of receiving a blow.” Hopefully we can make our way to a better catastrophe. The clash between solid and melting, liquid into gas ever transforming our world reminds us. The journey to a better catastrophe takes countless expressions. This is the conflict of our time.
For some of us masochism, for others, such as Boyd, a lifelong channeling Milan Kundera’s ambition: “to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.”
