7 June 2009: "I wish I could go back to high school and re-brand myself."

This post is about naive existentialism. Given that many of us exist in a culture that transmits a strong ideological bias toward possessive individualism, thanks to an economic system that demands the surrender of that individuality and generally offers instead a strong, well-defined identity only as the reward for performing work that has been microdivided into meaninglessness, we tend to reject reflexively the idea that our subjectivity is constituted through our social context. We prefer to believe that our consciousness is self-generated, that the Cartesian cogito is sufficient to explain everything about our ontology and our epistemology. We tend to imagine that a time existed when our consciousness was pure and untainted by cultural strictures and expectations; Carles suggests that for most of us, that time is adolescence, when we learn the painful art of compromise and confront the reality that we frequently don't subscribe to our own ideals, which in themselves often prove not to be our own but some else's idea of what constitutes the good.

Back in high school, there was no such thing as ‘authenticity’ because everything ‘just was.’ U could be bold, and u could ‘feel things.’ U could do drugs/drink for the first time, and be convinced that no1 had ever felt this way before.

Only with age do we recognize our own unique experience is actually second-hand, that our creative impulses and insights are hand-me-downs. The condition of postmodernity is such that these past feelings are suddenly invalidated by their lack of originality; we efface our own past when we deduce that it was not sui generis.

As Carles's performance as the wistful adult looking back indicates, the response to this grim recognition is often a futile nostalgia and a systematic program of misremembering one's own past. His videos from talent shows both capture the dream of nostalgia and, in the awkward ineptitude they reveal, its inevitable failure. But what is more interesting is the psychological motivation Carles assigns to this sad drama of the withering self: In his estimation, it derives from sexual anxiety. As a youth, in the full possession of the confidence of your unique genes, "U could take some1’s virginity, and tell urself that ur ‘making love’ 2 some1." One's presumed personal individuality seemed to provide the spark of attraction, seemed to fuel coital couplings in the absence of sexual technique. Carles associates the discovery of contingent identity with a loss of that sexual confidence, which is replaced by doubts and self-incriminations, the recognition that empathy with others is not a luxury but a constituitive aspect of our own mind.

Just want to go back in time.
and get an erection
back in my prime
before I became older
and realized the responsibility
and miscellaneous feelings
that go along with sexual relations

The immaturity of this fantasy of escaping from empathy, of regarding empathy as an impingement on our individuality, is given a ribald send-up in the final sexual fantasy Carles orchestrates. By having his character pine for a prepubescent girl, he exposes the manner in which these delusions of uniqueness, of existential self-creation, are actually atavistic regressions and counter to species survival.

Want to look at a tween ass
when we are both ‘illegal’ together
before she gains the freshman 15
and starts a life
with low metabolism
and expanding ass + beer bellie + thighs

Of course, if one is attracted only to prepubescent girls, one will never reproduce one's own genes. So Carles exposes existentialism as fundamentally sterile, an embarrassing and incompetent performance on the talent-show stage of life.