18 August 2009: "The Ruralt."

This post is about exurban soteriology. Here, in a sort of preemptive phenomenological strike, Carles simultaneously defines a redemptive archetype for a future age and dismantles it with ironic ridicule, perhaps hoping to prevent its emergence, which would perpetuate the city-country stereotypes at a time when our environmental crises call for a sublation of this shopworn and counterproductive dichotomy. The false conflict between those rurals with a purity of intention and jaded citified exploiters masks the actual sources of exploitation, in capital and property itself, regardless of where it is situated.

Carles's ploy here is to indicate that a different map for the dissemination of ideology is needed; no more does it filter out from cities only to return warped and denatured and disavowed in its rustic and bumpkinized iterations. "One day I will leave my home in rural America. I will move to the city. I would even be willing to move to suburbia if there are more people who ‘get’ me." But this figure is not trapped by geography. "Did you know that only 13% of ruralts escape from their rural community?' Carles writes mockingly, aware that freedom from travel restrictions doesn't guarantee mobility. He adds, "40% of ruralts end up settling for ‘being a homosexual who works at an outlet mall.’" That is to say, many of them invert the motivations that might naturally be attributed. The ruralt is not misunderstood but understood too well; he seeks a place to go where his capacity to baffle will have an appreciative audience. At the "outlet mall," where what is left over culturally goes to be repurposed and disseminated; where the urban and the exurban meet to facilitate retail exchange. The ruralt figure, it turns out, is not trying to escape so much as get imprisoned, locked behind the iron bars of the judging eyes of peers.

Instead of a cycles of escape and return, we must deconstruct that myth of personal transformation through flight by refiguring it as stark contradiction: "No 1 ever leaves this town (I will leave this town)." Situated synchronically rather than diachroncally, the idea of exurban redemption becomes impossible, absurd.

The absurdity of the rehabilitated rustic then can be used to discredit the escape fantasies of environmentally conscious urban types -- the localvores and home-school advocates who seek to elude the ideological system in which they are embedded (or even constituted or as Althusser would say interpellated) or find its interstices. When the exurbs are "alt" there are no margins to which to flee; instead the hipster flight from urbanity becomes a epidemiological phenomenon, spreading the virus of identity-mongering and vertiginous self-consciousness. Carles notes: "In the end, I think we learn that we are all human 2gether after all, and it doesn’t matter where u live/come from." Only now "being human" and self-aware has become "being hipster" and being self-involved.