11 May 2011: "Is Osama Bin Laden's son Omar an 'alt Arab'?"

This post is about lateral surveillance. Carles adopts as a problematic the subjectivity of the abject, the unassimilatable content that conditions the contours of the possible. What are the alternatives to biological identity, and what instantiates them? What are the necessary preconditions to posit an identity beyond identity, a "personal brand" that trades in the interlocking circuits of global networks and whose intersubjective nature is bound up with the constituitive properties of markers and capitalist imperatives? Does this constitute a true collective subjectivity or is this an introjection into disciplinary networks of flows and intensities that preclude the possibility of autonomy? As Carles frames his concerns at the conclusion (as always it is imperative to investigate Carles's texts with many synchronic approaches): "Without 'American ideas', can u form any sort of relevant iteration of 'alternative' and apply it 2 ur personal brand?" Has American-style neoliberalism precluded the formation of difference except as it is determined and contained by the networked systems of mediation it has fomented and inculcated subjects with? Or is there a relevant iteration that cracks the real abstraction of "alternative" and reopens the category to reconfiguration along the lines of a newly emerging political formation? If we make the effort to reconceive relevant alternatives, will they be identified as such or will they merely be indexed to our budding projects of self-valorization within neoliberalism?

In short Carles is concerned with the epistemological category of the individual as it has been developed within Judeo-Christian society and capitalism as an ecumenical form, which is why he focuses in this essay on Omar Binladen, the son of Osama bin Laden, who, until his assassination, was an outspoken foe of "weak" forms of Western subjectivity and favored a fundamentalist strain of Islam as a mode of mediating and controlling knowledge of the self and presenting "relevant alternatives" outside the American paradigm. But as Carles is quick to point out, his father's views did not protect Omar from being interpellated as a Western subject of brand-driven fashion and entertainment consumerism. Carles asks, "Will Omar ever be able 2 build his own personal brand instead of just being 'Osama's son'?" That is, can the formation of a personal brand exist outside the context of global terrorism? Is the "personal" always already terroristic?

Carles theorizes that this overdetermined subjectivation was driven in part by paternal absence:

Omar probably developed an alternative point-of-view to help him deal with his father being so absent in his life. He had to resort to 'consumerism' 2 buy his needs with terrorist-network money that his dad left in his bank account to buy Calvin Klein t-shirts and go on 'sick benders' in Qatar.

Carles chooses his words carefully in this passage. First, he qualifies the absent father with the intensifier "so", highlighting that absent/present is not experienced by the psyche in formative flux as a simple dichotomy but as a condition inflected by temporality. The void has degrees; the disordered subject measures the unmeasurable, posits impossible meliorations, justifies by these same degrees the evacuation that the id cannot forgive but that the ego must.

Also, Carles invokes a phenomenology that permits alternating "points-of-view" to coexist within consciousness, suggesting that sense perceptions are always already dual, or twinned, contextualized by emotionality as they are apprehended, preformatted as it were by psychic requirements, which must not be mistaken for "needs." Carles reminds us that the problematized subject must "buy his needs" rather than the means to gratify them; that is, needs follow the means of satisfaction and are posited retroactively as having been necessary, in accordance with what has been objectively accessible and normalized according to a given sociocultural positionality. Needs are not biological or physiological, as Baudrillard long ago taught us. They are structural and appear as an effect of being interpolated into the system of signification, not as an autonomous compass for directing the evolution of said system.

Lastly Carles implicit accuses Osama Bin Laden, notorious for developing terrorism on the basis of a globalized network organized by the principles of cellular automata, of a kind of psychic filicide, or at least a filial terrorism by supplying funds to his son to facilitate his insertion into the very system of consumerism he vilified and sought to disrupt. Consumerism and terrorism are revealed as co-existent on the same axis (as Carles's use of the verb "resort" archly reinforces), as a "sick bender" of overindulgence, of being engorged with fantasies of mass signification, of unignorable signaling through bodily praxis, through manipulation of the signs and resources made available by the operations of Western capitalism. Funds speny on consumerism to buy branded goods is no different, Carles suggests, from money spent on more overtly terroristic actions, only the medium through which the terror is disseminated is inflected in such a case by reflexive self-consciousness -- spread not through depictions of explosions on mass-media channels but in moments of self-doubt triggered by invidious comparisons within the ordinary course of everyday life, which through consumerism becomes a protracted slow-motion terrorist event. Osama bin Laden used his own son to spread this particular psycho-active poison, employing him against his conscious wishes as an epidemiological agent spreading the virus of brand consumerism, which reinscribes the weakness Osama bin Laden located at the heart of the Western liberal project, and its goals of replacing obedience with individual liberty in the service of self-determination.