24 February 2009: "Is Bud Light the next Big Alternative Alcoholic Beverage?"

This post is about jouissance. Carles reproduces a photo depicting libidinous oral pleasure and links it to two of the questions that persistently haunt late-capitalist culture. The first is the same question that troubled Freud and his followers: What do women want? The second, related question: What allows brands to successfully cathect identity, particularly an identity that feels subjectively unique even as it manifests complacent conformity? As Carles succinctly sums up in describing the image: "Think this picture is a ‘metaphor’ for a ‘thirst 4 something new.’"

Of course, novelty is always a powerful motive force in both branding and the construction of feminine desire, though in the case of the latter, it is often experienced as an objective force, something that must be exhibited rather than pursued. Carles notes, "Life is a never ending quest for the best brands 2 align urself with," suggesting that this is the aim toward which libidinous energy has been sublimated in a culture that reserves its most stirring rhetoric for the process of manufacturing and distributing branded products. But is there the possibility as well for jouissance -- for the dissolution of identity in a blissful awareness of the unity of all things or, if you prefer, the purity of our ultimate nothingness -- in the pursuit of corporatist totems? Having identified the woman consuming Bud Light in the image with a desire to find a more meaningful cathexis, Carles then shifts registers into a discussion of polymorphous perversity and accessing a semimystical state of ecstasy through rituals of intoxication: The image now signals not merely an effort of self-actualization through self-branding but also, "It is her desire to ‘get f*ckt up!’ and ‘get her partie on.’" The implication is that we can transcend the limits of consumerism by confronting them directly, by doubling down on them, as it were, consuming twice as much as we're expected to and find through that excess the keys to the gates of paradise. He concludes by punning somewhat lewdly on the concept of "double fisting" and asking "is it still authentic to ‘get fuckt up’?" As always the question of authenticity haunts postmodern desire; it is both the substance of the Other as well as the shadow that haunts the means of pursuing it. We want to possess authenticity and pursue it in an authentic fashion. But these cancel each other out, as the authentic is negated once it becomes anything other than a spontaneous object of desire. We are left trapped in a fatal spiral of self-consciousness; the double fist has become an inescapable double bind.