This post is about the tutelary complex. In The Policing of Families, French sociologist Jacques Donzelot uses the term tutelary complex to describe the strata of social workers that have emerged in 20th century states to facilitate the socialization of working-class children along mandated lines determined politically. The system effected "a redistribution of the market in maladjustment," Donzelot notes.
Carles, in his expression of concern for teenagers in this missive, illustrates not only how the composition of the minions of the tutelary complex has shifted -- to well-meaning members from within the family and members of peer group ("the Ranoff community"), prone to a more naked use of coercison ("Should I ‘beat the shit’ out of my brother/sister 4 being an ‘inauthentic piece of shit’?") -- but also how the stakes have changed: What is feared now is that youth will empty the meaning from the poses adopted by their elders, draining the earlier generations of their sense of self while in the process of finding their own. Maladjustment is now a matter of staking a positionality in regard to the current matrix of trends imposed by the consumer-goods industry. Identity (i.e. "authenticity") becomes a zero-sum game. "Are old ppl ‘naturally alt’?" Carles worries, or do they merely become strange, estranged, losers in that struggle, doomed to alienation? Are they inauthenticated by the aggressive moves onto the territory they have staked out by up-and-coming "alts"?
A deeper problem is the ways in which the tutelary complex is no longer preoccupied with forestalling delinquincy but instead focuses its interventions on guiding the development of a marketing-oriented subjectivity, a self-as-brand. Carles, imagining himself as such a social worker, complains, "I feel like I could help him become an authentic alt, but I don’t know if there is a ‘roadmap’ towards altdom that he could follow." He reveals how the consciences of those intervening are reconciled: "I guess I should just be happy that they are searching 4 meaning, attempting 2 be alt… attempting to express themselves… I guess ‘alt blood’ sorta runs in the family." Family bonds justify an intrusive prescription of identity, ironically in the name of enabling creativity and self-expression. But self-expression is the mere alibi for conformity to a more entrenched set of mores.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
29 September 2009: "RAVE OR DIE: 2K9 Edition"
This post is about ecstasy. Carles is concerned about the politics of ecstasy, the class divisions that regulate it and perhaps provide the conditions for its spontaneous irruption. In particular, Carles, in his ethnographer modality, analyzes the popular youth gatherings known as raves to tease out and define the field of ecstasy, its contemporary social milieu, and draw some anthropological analogues that can perhaps guide his readers toward disruptive strategies to upset the parameters that close off large segments of excluded, demonized populations (the Agambenian exceptions?) from the possibility of pleasure in the unrestricted sense. "sometimes it is good to experience ‘lower class’ events," Carles jests drily.
As Carles frames his investigation: "Who are these ppl/teens/Mexicalts in Southern California who attend raves? What do they want out of life? What personal brand are these ‘ravers’ attempting to implement?" Is their pleasure contingent on their assumption of marketing prerogatives inculcated by their culture, or is their adoption of infantilizing tropes ("It seems like ppl are trying to ‘return to their childhoodz’ by utilizing images+products from youth [via bracelets, necklaces, other trinkets, and even backpacks]") an effort to reclaim lalangue, the primitive prelingual expressions of a pleasure unco-opted by sociocultural aims and other hegemonic appropriations?
Ecstasy, in rave circles, refers to the psychoactive drug MDMA, but Carles also deploys it in a metaphoric sense, as any deliberate instrumental means for inducing states of euphoria on command and also as the potential for jouissance. It allows the forbidden to remain protected even while it is performed: Carles ascribes this thought to a inebriated youth: "Got rlly ‘fucked up’ on E and gave DJ 420 a ‘beej.’ Regret it kinda." That "kinda" performs a great deal of semiological work -- regret is help in suspension as the forbidden, possibly homosexual pleasure is remembered, enjoyed and relished. Carles adds, "But srsly… have u ever fucked while on ecstasy? (they say u can never have an orgasm without it 4 the rest of ur life)" -- the concern here is the ideological conditioning that makes for pleasure, that enables it. Without certain constructs, crutches or props, pleasure itself becomes impossible -- there can be no release, orgasmic or otherwise. Carles means to warn us: Once you accept the pleasure that capitalist society offers, your capacity for pleasure is permanently altered by it. "I feel happy knowing that society is getting better and every1 is able to celebrate and be free," Carles notes sardonically, as it is precisely unfreedom that enables celebratory ardor.
In response to a photograph of two youths who appear to have ingested the drug, Carles notes, "I think that it means some1 is ‘mad fucked up’ when their pupils are dilated" -- a deceptively dialogic statement, as fucked up refers both to the state of intoxication and to the ideological conditions that transform intoxication into a phenomenon to be pejoratively dismissed with a ribald reference to coitus.
As Carles frames his investigation: "Who are these ppl/teens/Mexicalts in Southern California who attend raves? What do they want out of life? What personal brand are these ‘ravers’ attempting to implement?" Is their pleasure contingent on their assumption of marketing prerogatives inculcated by their culture, or is their adoption of infantilizing tropes ("It seems like ppl are trying to ‘return to their childhoodz’ by utilizing images+products from youth [via bracelets, necklaces, other trinkets, and even backpacks]") an effort to reclaim lalangue, the primitive prelingual expressions of a pleasure unco-opted by sociocultural aims and other hegemonic appropriations?
Ecstasy, in rave circles, refers to the psychoactive drug MDMA, but Carles also deploys it in a metaphoric sense, as any deliberate instrumental means for inducing states of euphoria on command and also as the potential for jouissance. It allows the forbidden to remain protected even while it is performed: Carles ascribes this thought to a inebriated youth: "Got rlly ‘fucked up’ on E and gave DJ 420 a ‘beej.’ Regret it kinda." That "kinda" performs a great deal of semiological work -- regret is help in suspension as the forbidden, possibly homosexual pleasure is remembered, enjoyed and relished. Carles adds, "But srsly… have u ever fucked while on ecstasy? (they say u can never have an orgasm without it 4 the rest of ur life)" -- the concern here is the ideological conditioning that makes for pleasure, that enables it. Without certain constructs, crutches or props, pleasure itself becomes impossible -- there can be no release, orgasmic or otherwise. Carles means to warn us: Once you accept the pleasure that capitalist society offers, your capacity for pleasure is permanently altered by it. "I feel happy knowing that society is getting better and every1 is able to celebrate and be free," Carles notes sardonically, as it is precisely unfreedom that enables celebratory ardor.
In response to a photograph of two youths who appear to have ingested the drug, Carles notes, "I think that it means some1 is ‘mad fucked up’ when their pupils are dilated" -- a deceptively dialogic statement, as fucked up refers both to the state of intoxication and to the ideological conditions that transform intoxication into a phenomenon to be pejoratively dismissed with a ribald reference to coitus.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
12 September 2009: "Authentic Alt Worth Blogging About."
This post is about legitimation crisis. Crisis, of course, in the social-scientific sense, as a normative concept implying an inherent destablilizing force in the structure of ordered concepts themselves. The definition of "authentic", of "alt", the oppositions used to secure their meanings as the gale-force winds of dialectical change gust through the superstructure. Social integration is the chip on the table as the roulette wheel of semiotics spins. As Carles declares, "as internet-centric humans, we are in a neverending search for ‘the best way 2 express ourselves’ via the internet." The quest is never-ending because the socially ratified meanings are always in the process of simplifying themselves, encrusting meanings around a kernel concept that becomes loaded with ambiguous and contradictory implications. The introduction of social networking capacity through mass reciprocal electronic communications has only accelerated this process of continual change. In the process, Einlösbarkeit is forfeited.
In such conditions, individual identity is provisional and the desire to end that provisionality perpetual: Some, Carles, notes, will search for an escape through a return to the sensual, to the body:
In the freedom of movement and the rituals of vanity is an abortive effort at self-legitimation, though the paradox is that the mirror can never recognize you. All efforts at vanity imply the Other who threatens always with psychic annihilation.
Alternatively, one can fall back on the traditional mode of legitimation in capitalist society: money: "Do u plan on making ‘tons of ad revenue’ via Google Adsense Ads?" Carles asks, neatly knitting the pervasiveness of marketing, the machinations of the world's largest corporation, and the aspirations of millions of atomized individuals lost in anomie. Under capitalism, authenticity is ultimately married to the cash nexus.
In such conditions, individual identity is provisional and the desire to end that provisionality perpetual: Some, Carles, notes, will search for an escape through a return to the sensual, to the body:
Just want 2 put on my most authentic outfits
show the world who I am
free spirited, open 2 new ideas and life experiences
and get my dance on
In the freedom of movement and the rituals of vanity is an abortive effort at self-legitimation, though the paradox is that the mirror can never recognize you. All efforts at vanity imply the Other who threatens always with psychic annihilation.
Alternatively, one can fall back on the traditional mode of legitimation in capitalist society: money: "Do u plan on making ‘tons of ad revenue’ via Google Adsense Ads?" Carles asks, neatly knitting the pervasiveness of marketing, the machinations of the world's largest corporation, and the aspirations of millions of atomized individuals lost in anomie. Under capitalism, authenticity is ultimately married to the cash nexus.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
10 September 2009: "Does my life ‘make more sense’ now that PitchforkMedia.coms have reviewed the Beatles?"
This post is about convertible securities. Contemplating the purpose of rating the reissues of the long-playing albums by the pop-music group the Beatles, Carles notes that these ratings create a vertiginous comparability among otherwise unlike items from different cultural periods. The numeric rating for the records as imposed by the self-appointed critics (a will to power Carles impishly mocks: "My mind is free / I am a music critic / I honestly believe that my ‘taste in music’ is a direct reflection of the ‘best music’ in the world") renders a false exchangability akin to the way money functions in the world of commodities. The ratings, in a sense, begin to function as currency, as prices, and the value of a rating point, like currencies, float between publications and time periods. A "9" in Pitchfork in 2007 is quite different from a "9" in Spin or even a "9" in 2009. The problem is that points are inconvertible; ratings are not liquid. The records do not circulate to make the value of the ratings realizable. Carles notes that this means a kind of Bretton Woods for ratings systems is required:
Such an international governing body might in theory establish rates of conversion for the various aesthetic quantification modes.
But until then, we are in the dark, blindly wandering in search of comprehensible standards. The ratings have putative value but are in effect and in practice worthless. Carles is caustically sarcastic about this state of affairs: "My perception of the world finally makes sense. Like I finally ‘get’ music history since I can compare the Beatles to modern indie hits." In fact the attempt to compare these objets d'art in terms of inscrutable numbers makes the task of criticism Sisyphian.
As Marx writes of money in Capital, "the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value ... is inherent in the price-form itself." This creates an ambiguity where the number was a critic's attempt to fix a value. Carles draws the inevitable conclusion about how the attempt to complete the item being rated with its rating only makes the item more uncertain: "Just searching 4 perfection. Not all albums were created equally." The false equivalence implied by ratings prevents any thorough understanding of a given work's value. It merely adds another symbolic layer to decode, another occasion for méconnaissance.
it is our duty as ‘die hard music fans’
who are the most ‘culturally connected’ ppl in the world
to find out which albums are better than others
and create a forum for like-minded people to rally around them
Such an international governing body might in theory establish rates of conversion for the various aesthetic quantification modes.
But until then, we are in the dark, blindly wandering in search of comprehensible standards. The ratings have putative value but are in effect and in practice worthless. Carles is caustically sarcastic about this state of affairs: "My perception of the world finally makes sense. Like I finally ‘get’ music history since I can compare the Beatles to modern indie hits." In fact the attempt to compare these objets d'art in terms of inscrutable numbers makes the task of criticism Sisyphian.
As Marx writes of money in Capital, "the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value ... is inherent in the price-form itself." This creates an ambiguity where the number was a critic's attempt to fix a value. Carles draws the inevitable conclusion about how the attempt to complete the item being rated with its rating only makes the item more uncertain: "Just searching 4 perfection. Not all albums were created equally." The false equivalence implied by ratings prevents any thorough understanding of a given work's value. It merely adds another symbolic layer to decode, another occasion for méconnaissance.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
9 September 2009: "Hope and Homelessness–Never give up on Personal Branding."
This post is about the punctum. The punctum, of course, is the great theorist Roland Barthes's term for the compelling and often unintentional detail in a photograph which seizes our attention and has metonymic force. It works in opposition to what the photo seems to want to be about. Describing a photo taken at an institution, he writes, "I, in the photograph of two retarded children, hardly see the monstrous heads and pathetic profiles; ... what I see ... is the off-center detail, the little boy's huge Danton collar, the girl's finger bandage; I am a primitive, a child -- or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own."
Carles's apprehension of a photo of a homeless man prompts a similar response:
In this case, the punctum is the "pee pee accident," which undermines the composition's solemnity yet testifies to the power of the image.
But Carles pushes further than Barthes, ruminating on the disappearance of the authentic punctum in the miasma of images on which we now suffocate. He can't escape the positied role is is supposed to adopt as consumer of this image, can't "dismiss all culture". Instead he is positioned into responding in a mediated way, a way already captured by the form in which our aesthetic responses now must take -- reproduction of the image online in a social network along with our anticipated commentary, which falls into one of a number of certified genres -- snark, LOL, etc.
Once an image could prompt us into recognition of the way reality escapes media capture, the meaning always exceeding our attempt to record and fix reality. But now images and the hermeneutical apparatus that attends them threaten a total preformed interpretation of all reality, a foreclosed phenomenology, and encourages us to package ourselves in likewise fashion, as predigested image, with no punctum for a perceiver to seize upon to undermine our smooth self-presentation. No more can we "dismiss all culture" in a spontaneous response to a detail; instead there is a rigid certainty that there was no "accident" -- pee pee or otherwise -- in any image we consume. The consumption itself is so patterned as to make use only of what has be predestined for our conditioned appetites.
Carles compares the "pee pee" photo with a photograph purportedly taken spontaneously by a fashion blogger, who went on to pontificate about the punctum he allegedly discovered in his image, the manner in which a homeless man managed to match his shoes with his socks. The lesson the fashion blogger draws, naturally, is that human beings' need to be stylish trumps our need for shelter. This, in his opinion, should make us "hopeful". While it is readily understandable why the fashion industry might derive hope from this -- it's ceaseless bombardment of advertising is having its effect on 21st century subjectivity -- Carles, with unmistakable sarcasm, does the service of explaining why the message for the rest of us is somewhat less optimistic: "Never give up. Every day, u have the opportunity to brand yourself–you have the opportunity to let the world know that you are a person, and within this person is a brand which the whole world can consume."
There is no longer a meaningful distinction to make between the homeless man and his photographic image -- both are manifestations of the underlying brand to which we now habitually and solely respond. And in our current socio-historical formation, we are expected to seize upon this as an "opportunity" rather than an evisceration of our species being. When Carles sardonically labels the homeless as "a group of people living in some demented reality" it hardly takes a sophisticated analysis to recognize that he is referring to ourselves, not the indigent.
Carles then condenses the message with which we are daily interpolated by the current ideological regime:
Can we escape from this net without sacrificing our knowledge of self as subject? Can we have subjectivity in such a society as ours without adopting these "demented" standards and responsibilities? If we can, Carles is not prepared to theorize it with his current set of concepts. Instead, we have the grim sense that language itself has been corrupted, and the vocabulary to express such an idea is beyond him. He concludes, with acid irony masking a deconstructionist despair: "This is a blog post about hope."
Carles's apprehension of a photo of a homeless man prompts a similar response:
I saw this picture portraying a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. Unfortunately, he had a pee pee accident as his dark yellow urine streamed down towards the star of a celebrity. I felt tons of emotions as my brain processed this digital image. Shame. Guilt. LOLability. Snarkfactor. Sadness. AmericanBeauty. Happiness. Loneliness. Fucksocietivity. Bloggy. Alive. Dead on the inside. Alone. Without a home. Metaphorical. This is the power of photography.
In this case, the punctum is the "pee pee accident," which undermines the composition's solemnity yet testifies to the power of the image.
But Carles pushes further than Barthes, ruminating on the disappearance of the authentic punctum in the miasma of images on which we now suffocate. He can't escape the positied role is is supposed to adopt as consumer of this image, can't "dismiss all culture". Instead he is positioned into responding in a mediated way, a way already captured by the form in which our aesthetic responses now must take -- reproduction of the image online in a social network along with our anticipated commentary, which falls into one of a number of certified genres -- snark, LOL, etc.
Once an image could prompt us into recognition of the way reality escapes media capture, the meaning always exceeding our attempt to record and fix reality. But now images and the hermeneutical apparatus that attends them threaten a total preformed interpretation of all reality, a foreclosed phenomenology, and encourages us to package ourselves in likewise fashion, as predigested image, with no punctum for a perceiver to seize upon to undermine our smooth self-presentation. No more can we "dismiss all culture" in a spontaneous response to a detail; instead there is a rigid certainty that there was no "accident" -- pee pee or otherwise -- in any image we consume. The consumption itself is so patterned as to make use only of what has be predestined for our conditioned appetites.
Carles compares the "pee pee" photo with a photograph purportedly taken spontaneously by a fashion blogger, who went on to pontificate about the punctum he allegedly discovered in his image, the manner in which a homeless man managed to match his shoes with his socks. The lesson the fashion blogger draws, naturally, is that human beings' need to be stylish trumps our need for shelter. This, in his opinion, should make us "hopeful". While it is readily understandable why the fashion industry might derive hope from this -- it's ceaseless bombardment of advertising is having its effect on 21st century subjectivity -- Carles, with unmistakable sarcasm, does the service of explaining why the message for the rest of us is somewhat less optimistic: "Never give up. Every day, u have the opportunity to brand yourself–you have the opportunity to let the world know that you are a person, and within this person is a brand which the whole world can consume."
There is no longer a meaningful distinction to make between the homeless man and his photographic image -- both are manifestations of the underlying brand to which we now habitually and solely respond. And in our current socio-historical formation, we are expected to seize upon this as an "opportunity" rather than an evisceration of our species being. When Carles sardonically labels the homeless as "a group of people living in some demented reality" it hardly takes a sophisticated analysis to recognize that he is referring to ourselves, not the indigent.
Carles then condenses the message with which we are daily interpolated by the current ideological regime:
Every day, you need to take pride in yourself. You need to realize that your personal brand is being interpreted by every1 who sees you. Do you want to depress your viewers? Or do you want to inspire them? Be a valuable person–not just to yourself, but also to society as a whole.
Can we escape from this net without sacrificing our knowledge of self as subject? Can we have subjectivity in such a society as ours without adopting these "demented" standards and responsibilities? If we can, Carles is not prepared to theorize it with his current set of concepts. Instead, we have the grim sense that language itself has been corrupted, and the vocabulary to express such an idea is beyond him. He concludes, with acid irony masking a deconstructionist despair: "This is a blog post about hope."
Thursday, September 3, 2009
2 September 2009: "Do teens RLLY ‘drink coffee’?"
This post is about phenomenonlogy. How do we know that our sensual perceptual phenomena reach the mind without distortion, or rather, how to track the modes of refraction that experience pass through before it reaches consciousness, let alone language, another level of refraction that far too often is mistaken for simple reflection. "I just saw a picture of a teen/tween drinking a Starbucks product, and it really confused me," Carles begins, establishing what will become a leitmotif in this masterful essay. Can the picture of reality formed in his head match the image upon which he gazes, let alone the moment of time-space the image purports to have "captured." Layers and levels of representation, a palimpsest....
The disconnect between the physiological bases for sensations and our mental representations of these sensations creates a node in which socioeconomic conjunctions can be laid like so many bear traps, forging links between potential stimuli and implications desirable to various commercial interests. Carles explains it with reference to the invention of the Starbucks brand, and its burgeoning resonance across various demographics that it helps fashion, solidify and exploit:
It is the nascent undeveloped state of the sensory organs that allows for their systematic development and exploitation. Starbucks and other lifestyle brands the purport to sell commodities are in fact in the business of strip-mining the senses of the young and building in the vacuum a perceptual machinery obedient to the triggers that the brands implant there. Taste buds that never learn to disguish sweet from sour from bitter but that only register abstractions like "fun" and the taste of pleasure. A tongue that tastes only emotions rather than physical properties of consumed substances. These physical properties become even more unknowable to the mind, the food-in-itself a lost dream to the consumer, who can only consume her own expectations. "What does coffee taste like?," Carles asks, "what does beer taste like?" We can never know. Our perceptions of these things are purely self-referential.
Once perception becomes a matter of interfacing with brands rather than our sensory organs, a trademark synesthesia ensues to the point where sound and taste are no different from one another, both are platforms for experiential design: "Is the Gogurt design a ‘more innovative’ design than the iPod?" Carles asks, highlighting this problematic. Whether we are squeezing pap into our mouths or into our ears is immaterial. All the matters is the industrial design of the device to which we are connected, and the brand with which that device is marked. Then the brand is written our our bodies, which are written and overwritten over and again like any other media storage device, which is that to which we have been reduced.
Carles suggests this transformation of the human into the digital processing device is the result of a conspiracy of the old against the young, implemented through the vector of celebrity: "Feel like tweens want to do what ‘famous people do’ and also appear to be ‘grown ups’ when they don’t realize that they already have the attention of grownups since it is so easy to resent them 4 having their whole lives’ ahead of them." By duping the young into emulating the famous, the worldweary convince youth to surrender its own perceptual faculties and have them replaced with a mimetic tendency, a duplicatability that mirrors the functionality of a copy machine. The youth don't realize the degree to which they are targeted, are under surveillance, precisely because of the way their perceptions slip through the social order's neural net. They have not yet been subsumed, subjected to the social order, fully socialized and absorbed. They still have a chance to escape. Thus the ideological cannons fire in their direction, and youth culture becomes an obsession for all -- and the poor fools, they think that youth culture is a celebration of youth rather than their imprisonment!
Carles, reasoning along these lines, mocks the young's innocence of marketing, how little they know about the strategems used to ensnare them: "I’ll nvr forget the time I stayed up all nite to study for marketing. Such a hard class, yall! Avoid it at all costs." They can't study marketing because they themselves are the subject of the course, the product that marketing has produced. They would be staring into the womb that contains them.
The disconnect between the physiological bases for sensations and our mental representations of these sensations creates a node in which socioeconomic conjunctions can be laid like so many bear traps, forging links between potential stimuli and implications desirable to various commercial interests. Carles explains it with reference to the invention of the Starbucks brand, and its burgeoning resonance across various demographics that it helps fashion, solidify and exploit:
It seems like the ‘Starbucks revolution’ really opened the doors for tweens and coffee. It seems like they branded ‘fun, sugary sweet drinks’ for ppl who didn’t ‘get’ coffee, or for ppl whose tastebuds weren’t developed enough for coffee
It is the nascent undeveloped state of the sensory organs that allows for their systematic development and exploitation. Starbucks and other lifestyle brands the purport to sell commodities are in fact in the business of strip-mining the senses of the young and building in the vacuum a perceptual machinery obedient to the triggers that the brands implant there. Taste buds that never learn to disguish sweet from sour from bitter but that only register abstractions like "fun" and the taste of pleasure. A tongue that tastes only emotions rather than physical properties of consumed substances. These physical properties become even more unknowable to the mind, the food-in-itself a lost dream to the consumer, who can only consume her own expectations. "What does coffee taste like?," Carles asks, "what does beer taste like?" We can never know. Our perceptions of these things are purely self-referential.
Once perception becomes a matter of interfacing with brands rather than our sensory organs, a trademark synesthesia ensues to the point where sound and taste are no different from one another, both are platforms for experiential design: "Is the Gogurt design a ‘more innovative’ design than the iPod?" Carles asks, highlighting this problematic. Whether we are squeezing pap into our mouths or into our ears is immaterial. All the matters is the industrial design of the device to which we are connected, and the brand with which that device is marked. Then the brand is written our our bodies, which are written and overwritten over and again like any other media storage device, which is that to which we have been reduced.
Carles suggests this transformation of the human into the digital processing device is the result of a conspiracy of the old against the young, implemented through the vector of celebrity: "Feel like tweens want to do what ‘famous people do’ and also appear to be ‘grown ups’ when they don’t realize that they already have the attention of grownups since it is so easy to resent them 4 having their whole lives’ ahead of them." By duping the young into emulating the famous, the worldweary convince youth to surrender its own perceptual faculties and have them replaced with a mimetic tendency, a duplicatability that mirrors the functionality of a copy machine. The youth don't realize the degree to which they are targeted, are under surveillance, precisely because of the way their perceptions slip through the social order's neural net. They have not yet been subsumed, subjected to the social order, fully socialized and absorbed. They still have a chance to escape. Thus the ideological cannons fire in their direction, and youth culture becomes an obsession for all -- and the poor fools, they think that youth culture is a celebration of youth rather than their imprisonment!
Carles, reasoning along these lines, mocks the young's innocence of marketing, how little they know about the strategems used to ensnare them: "I’ll nvr forget the time I stayed up all nite to study for marketing. Such a hard class, yall! Avoid it at all costs." They can't study marketing because they themselves are the subject of the course, the product that marketing has produced. They would be staring into the womb that contains them.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
31 August 2009: "Will alternative people stop ‘driving hybrids’/'riding bikes’ and start ‘horseback riding’?"
This post is about path dependency. Because of the massive amount of investment and coordination required, societies tend to lock into the transport systems they develop collectively regardless of their future inefficiency. Would a return to a prior paradigm -- the use of domesticated horses as a primary mode of transport -- be anything but atavism, Carles wonders. Can outdated technologies be relegitimated as fashion, can they serve a symbolic use when their material use is exhausted? "It seems like owning a horse might declare 2 the world that u r an individual who ‘truly understands’ that the world is an ecosystem, and we need to start relying more on other humans and animals." Or would this willed reliance be a disruptive contradiction, further confusing the destiny of the species in history. But since "Truly alternative people will find a way to break free from society" a purposeful return to prior modes of living that are no longer supported by infrastructure seems on the face of it a mode of escape, an instantiation of resistance. "Not sure what sort of facilities you need to own a horse, or if there are any ‘traffic laws’ for horseback riding within the city."
The move backward into history already passed does not allow for a blithe reenactment of moral dilemmas that seem to have been solved, making for a shelter from ethical quandaries necessarily generated by the contemporary order. Instead it fosters anarchy, as incompatible stages of development collide in real time. By forcing the base and the superstructure to misalign, "alts" would perform a radical intervention into the quotidian as such and elevate it to the level of a problematic. While this confrontational mise-en-scene would allow us to prevent the dangerous iteration in which commuting transmogrifies into communing, in which it "degenerates into a celebration of ‘being stuck in ur life,’" it does not solve the contradictions of positing ahistorical solutions to the problem of history, that is, the problem of social classes -- alts and mainstreamers, if you will -- and the dilectical progression of their struggles. Horses wouldn't be able to drag us back to a moment in time in which we are innocent of history, innocent of our own self-knowledge as belonging to a social stereotype.
In the end, Carles notes, the horse as transport mode will meet the same fate of the culture industry as beast of escapist burden: "Still kinda sad that Barbaro was executed. Miss him like I miss Heath."
The move backward into history already passed does not allow for a blithe reenactment of moral dilemmas that seem to have been solved, making for a shelter from ethical quandaries necessarily generated by the contemporary order. Instead it fosters anarchy, as incompatible stages of development collide in real time. By forcing the base and the superstructure to misalign, "alts" would perform a radical intervention into the quotidian as such and elevate it to the level of a problematic. While this confrontational mise-en-scene would allow us to prevent the dangerous iteration in which commuting transmogrifies into communing, in which it "degenerates into a celebration of ‘being stuck in ur life,’" it does not solve the contradictions of positing ahistorical solutions to the problem of history, that is, the problem of social classes -- alts and mainstreamers, if you will -- and the dilectical progression of their struggles. Horses wouldn't be able to drag us back to a moment in time in which we are innocent of history, innocent of our own self-knowledge as belonging to a social stereotype.
In the end, Carles notes, the horse as transport mode will meet the same fate of the culture industry as beast of escapist burden: "Still kinda sad that Barbaro was executed. Miss him like I miss Heath."
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