26 February 2009: "Where have all the altbros gone?"

This post is about ego formation in the crucible of consumerism. Seizing upon the question that has haunted Freud's followers since the dawn of the 20th century, Carles asks, "Do yall know if u just maintain the same personality from ur formative years 4 the rest of ur life?" Do the reaction formations we improvise to bridge our way across the Oedipal crisis permanently structure the categories of our experience and our ability to process them, or are these cathexes subject to revision and therapeutic interventions?

Carles couches these psychological inquiries in the specific iteration of what he calls "altbros," a personality typology of his own devising. Implicitly he questions whether personality assessment suffers from the phenomenological paradox of nominalism, namely that the act of naming itself can reconstitute the properties of the subject that it intends to fix categorically. "Are altbros undefinable, since they are ‘always changing’ with culture?" Carles asks, intimating that his own "relevance" is contingent on the provisional definitions he himself has improvised, in his own impromptu waking traumarbeit to heal the rifts threatening his own ego. Generalizing from his experience, we can conclude that Carles regards the spurious invention of taxonomies as the only viable and safe strategy for an ego confronting contemporary consumerism, as these allow the fragile ego to transcend the categories itself and elude the recognition that it is always already circumscribed by the pigeonholing assumptions embedded in the gaze of the Other, as transmogrified and reified into the commodities with confront us in the marketplace and through which we attempt to give our identity "purchase" as it were. "Feel kinda like I still ‘have the same mindset’ from _ years ago," Carles admits, suggesting that no matter how much time passes, ego authenticity remains elusive, progress feels like stagnation.

He contrasts that with the evolution in personality he attributes in those to whom he has consigned to his own stereotype:

I think that altbros were generally post-tweens, about to grow into adulthood, while taking part in adult activities. Now that they have grown up a lil bit more and are becoming ‘men’, they have different needs, and are a little bit more comfortable with ‘who they are.’ They have started listening to music that is more authentic than electro, and even constructed a positive personality which helped them to ‘get girls.’

Here we see the conflation of adulthood with reproductive viability, which itself is indexed to social conformity through the proxy of consuming socially acceptable music, which Carles wryly labels "authentic" when he means that is anything but. In fact, it is authenticity stood on its head; the comfort these individuals feel with "who they are" is a direct measure of the degree to which they have conformed and become, in an important sense, no one.