If one was to ask how Los Angeles’ belief systems work one would have to note the incredibly high amount of tolerance for all sorts of ideological positions, the price of this is a decentralized, highly schizophrenic core, ripe with the production of capital and enjoyment inducing signifiers.
Go into the heart of Los Angeles’ gang neighborhoods and you will see the signifiers right away, spray painted in red and blue. The common knowledge is that Los Angeles gangs include the Crips and the Bloods, but this is only a dialectic mask for the accelerating reproduction of violence neighborhood by neighborhood, which always rhizomally recreates rivalry. The gangs are never called Crips and Bloods, but something more specific, more molecularized, custom tailored. You will never see an undisputed gang territory, because the enjoyment of gang activity rests in the lust for violence and breaking the law, which is held in check by a intertwining system of unity and unresolvable deadlocks. The unities involve a mutual distaste for law enforcement, so one can enjoy living beyond the letter of the law; the radical deadlocks are in place so one has someone to shoot who won’t utilize the law, allowing for extrajudicial warfare and the lusts of such warfare to accelerate throughout the population of Los Angeles.
Go to Hollywood and you will see a similar unity and deadlock. The deadlock is that you can never bring your fame to the level on your individual existence, as at that moment you are radically confronted by your personhood. Anthony Kiedes from the Red Hot Chili Peppers limps down the movie theater with his busted leg and gets snide remarks about his patronage at local 10 dollar juice capital accumulators. Anthony Hopkins asks you to call him Tony, allowing himself to look uncannily like Anthony Hopkins. Mel Gibson rides Space Mountain with my old roommate, and wanders around PCH looking for his wallet that flew all over the highway after he left it on his car. This is the most you can hope for out of this city as the fame signifying city, save the hikes of degeneracy.
Outside of these two extremes, there is the important part: these two aspects of background noise. The ability for Los Angeles to radically traverse itself and overcome itself. It has no national identity as Americans, only as progressive American. This is of course, only possible if there is somewhere, an America which insists it exists.
Dialectical Parasitism
You can experience America as the negative only through Los Angeles. If you go to small towns, you get a sense of them locating themselves within America. In Los Angeles, you aren’t in America, you’re in California. What’s more, is you’re in Los Angeles’ California, not San Francisco. Not analytic obsessive California, but schizophrenic Los Angeles.
Positively charged desert batteries of signifiers drive those mad who thought they were actually the thing itself, truly American, truly a– whatever. Every map has a hole, and America’s hole is Los Angeles. Allieviated from the responsibility of America, a singular Democratic voting block, the source material of the world’s entertainment signifiers circle around drains in their reactionary enclaves in Malibu, Palos Verdes, every other rich neighborhood which both is and is not Los Angeles. You can only experience Los Angeles after you experience that there is no Los Angeles, while surfing the negative.
What reason do we have to cuddle up to those who would love to parade themselves around as Actual? There is none. Someone from Oklahoma may fancy themselves an American. A positive (1) Angelino is a city council member. A negative (0) Angelino looks up the free activities in Calendar section, and decides they all suck, and goes to one. An accelerated Los Angeles member knows how to be 0, 1, and both and none simultaneously. A subject in quantum flux. If you want to be an astronaut, this isn’t the town for you. If you want to shoot cars into space, this might be the spot you were looking for. But just a warning, you can only shoot cars into space by delivering pizza, not by working for Elon Musk. Extreme poverty is possible, but accelerated deterritorialization and reterritorialization is guaranteed.
Holes in every map one tries to make are inevitable. Are these holes dialectical parasites, or the Absolute form of the initial attempt in the first place?
Is Los Angeles the only place to truly be American?
Mad Black Freud 