13 April 2009: "Might not find girls who wear Am Appy to be ‘hot’ n e more."

This post is about empirical fallacies. Biological determinists and other tyrants of empiricism make the mistake of equating physiological reactions with unimpeachable truths, as though sensual experience made up the only stratum of experience, was reality in sum total. Carles dismisses this cleverly. Note how he brackets the physiological response in quotation marks to force us to interrogate the preconceived naturalness of this stimulus-response paradigm. "Yall. I remember the days when I would totally ‘get a hard on’ when I saw a girl wearing Am Appy." That erection was not a straightforward biological response but instead a conditioned response evoked by cultural means, in this case the sexualized marketing campaign of a contemporary clothes retailer. The mistaken, naive, empiricist presumption that the "hard on" was unmediated, or constituted a simple fact, leads to the embedding of historically determinant marketing techniques at the level of physiology.

Carles then illustrates the conundrums that derive from this, having his persona castigate himself for his sexualized response, which he has been prompted to regard as natural, as incontrovertible proof of desire that he can't control but must subject himself to, even as its awakening grants him subjectivity. His confusion about the source of his desire -- is it inherent in the phallic erection which is its sign; is it inherent in the women objectified in the marketing materials; is it inherent in the brand itself -- leads to a more profound existential confusion of ends and means, of how to achieve meaning in terms of a world view that denies transcendental metaphysics and insists on the cold, hard facts of images and biological responses.

All I want 2 do
is live in 1 of the cities on the Am Appy bag
Settle down
Start a family
Be the person I want 2 be
and grow old without feeling old
Getting more meaningful with each passing day

How to be old with "feeling" old? Naive empiricism denies the possibility out of hand. How do reconcile family with sexual impulsiveness? How to be "the person I want 2 be" once the sexual desires used to define subjectivity have been set in psychological parentheses?

The problem -- paradoxically empirco-symbolic sexual desire and its relation to self hood ("Kinda sad. Not even sure what I think it ‘hot’ any more.") -- then exacerbates itself into ritualized misogyny, as Carles warns in this disturbing conclusion, where he traces this thread of tangled and contested subjectivity to its bitter, contemptuous knot.

Might just start looking at ‘a ton of porn’
because it’s good 2 know that some girls ‘just want 2 get pounded’
and only consider themselves’ to be ‘lil fuck holes’

If empirical desire is the only basis for male subjectivity, what promise does that hold for female subjectivity, set into a dialectically subordinate position and degraded into a mere functionalism? Women's subjectivity evaporates into the aporia of pornography, the ecstasy of mechanistic male desire, with all its empirical proof sprayed, as it were, on the glossy pages or grimly stark verite images on the computer screen. The pornography of the real itself, once the real is understood as physiology as experienced by and between men.

But whose fragile identity can carry the weight of a "ton of porn" on its shoulders? In the last analysis, the burden of objectified desire ultimately breaks down even those it served to constitute as subjects. The would-be "pounder" finds himself "getting pounded" as well. The empirical data on which the self is vested itself continues to multiply until it becomes an indifferent and undifferentiated mass of ones and zeros (or: phalluses and vulvas), signifying the on and off of techno-rationalized desire. At this stage there is no protection in the distanciation of desire to brands that might contain them and make them organizable, compliant to taxonomy. There can be no escape to "the cities on the Am Appy bag" -- empiricism has made them enormous red-light districts of the self, and the price is going up all the time.