13 November 2009: "What should I get my alternative son for Christmas?"

This post is about component instincts and erotogenic zones. Carles begins by turning Lacanian theory on its head: "I love my son. He truly is the mirror image of me." One might interpret that as a restatement of classical Freudian superego theory, that the child internalizes a "mirror image" of the bad father as an internal check on the raging incontinence of the id. Naturally, the father's implicit threatening of castration would be expressed as "love", and the demand for obedience as a kind of mimetic desire, the father's wish for the son to restore his lost youth is misrecognized as the child's desire to emulate the father. The superfluous "truly" underscores the false consciousness that is not quite unconsciousness. The father who speaks here knows that his son has already escaped the web of signifiers with which he hoped to snare him, that his entry into the prison-house of language still comes with occasional furloughs.

Carles proceeds to install this querulous father-son dialectic into the heart of consumer capitalist relations.

It’s kinda weird how kids are so impressionable… sorta reminds me of consumers… Maybe kids and consumers have the same kind of brain… all of us have so many wants and needs, and maybe products really can fulfill us/make us happy.

Thus the mimetic demands the father places on the son, to mirror him as he fades into irrelevance, is itself mirrored by the relation of corporation and consumer. The corporation hopes the consumer will internalize its demands for a passive, easily swayed subjectivity, a childlike sense of wonder at whatever new commoditized geegaw is foisted upon them. Wants and needs will be harmlessly and profitably cathected on to branded products, which will instill a false consciousness of happiness, a degraded sense of pseudo-fulfillment about as sturdy as a crepe-paper ladder. We shall not climb too far toward enlightenment here. And as Carles suggests, the entire ideological ediface rests on the presumption of "impressionablility" -- that one can literally stamp the minds of subjects with the desired embossment, to produce the desired behaviors. Impressionability, though, must itself be produced; the human subject must be perverted, its instinctual libidinous drives redirected against itself. (As Freud defined it, an instinct may be regarded as "the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuoulsy flowing source of stimulation .... The immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic stimulus.") Thus each retail encounter is a petite suicide, an abrogation of the source of sensation which within consumerist culture animates consciousness.

Carles imagines a pure alterity, though, may still be possible in this crucible of annhilating phenomenology -- "a pure alternative spirit" may emerge by administering arcane birthing rituals, by eschewing mass culture for its niches, by ceaselessly interrogating the "traditional." But it is a difficult road, fraught with the pressures of achieving something "truly unique" -- an oxymoron? A transcendent lie? An impossible possiblity ...