25 February 2010: "Does it make more sense to start a shitty band that goes viral, as opposed 2 wanting 2 change the world with ‘good music’?

This post is about interpellation. Interpellation, of course, is French structural Marxist Louis Althusser's term for the way ideology constitutes individuals into subjectivity, forming the field in which they can recognize themselves as subjects. Carles likens this process to the distinctively contemporary problem of forming a musical group and disseminating its product. While individuals seem to choose the music they will play and the means by which they will promote it, those forms in fact chose the individuals and interpellate them as particular kinds of performers, and rendering hegemonic a specific kind of performativity suitable to the reproduction of social relations, which in the last analysis are co-determinative with the specific material relations of production, including ownership of the means of production, whether in the form of constant, organic, or fixed capital. (Althusser would later spend time in a French psychiatric hospital after inadvertently strangling his wife.)

In this partially comprehensive treatise, Carles, in the guise of exploring the potential goals a musical group may conceivably pursue, lays out a veritable digest of the subject positions available to the post-postmodern dividual, with some speculation on their relative strengths and weaknesses as well as their interrelation with the spiritual metaphysics of earlier eras that once anchored the self's sense of identity. Some say that music has lost its soul. Carles borrows that trope to investigate into the ecumenical concept of the soul, with the universality of music itself serving as an enabling homology.

The linchpin of Carles's analysis can be derived from his taxonomy of the typical subject's desires, as finding their ontogenesis in the existing material conditions of post-industrial social formations.

Just want 2 be in a band that is heard by 1-5 million ppl.
Just want 2 find music that I can discuss with my friends that makes it clear that I ‘get’ ‘it.’
Just want to share memes with the world.

In other words, the typical subject is interpolated into identity through these primary objectives -- the narcissistic pursuit of fame, or the mirror stage writ large on a global scale; the sublimation of infantile desires for domination over intimates into the subcultural formation of group identities clustered around aesthetic pretensions; and the illusion of ontological security derived from those selfsame aesthetic pretensions magnified into eternal, transcendent verities. We want to "get it" indeed, and as Carles intimates, the less precisely we articulate this "it", the more ineffable our consequent subjectivity appears to be.

Carles seizes upon an explicitly religious musical group that attempts to seize upon popular styles to leverage its theological messages as a piquant metaphor for the modes of interpollated subjectivity currently operative. Pointing out the group's "larger ramifications," he notes that it is possibly "‘the future’ of relevant music" -- in other words, the future of the curtailed subject positions under the hegemonic regimes of capitalist domination, if we don't interpose a critical intervention along the lines Carles exemplifies. "It seems like this new band has totally ‘transcended’ the internet, creating a new model by which bands can reach a mass market of listeners," Carles warns, adding that inciting observers mockery may only be playing into the hands of this powerful new form of subjectivity. This mode is "a convenient model, because you can also ‘forget about the band’ and not feel bad about it, as opposed to thinking u have to keep giving them another chance to ‘recapture the magic.’" That is, this form of subjectivity disavows itself to intensify its hold, to propel its own claims to naturalness. The metaphysical, "magic" bases for the soul, as Carles suggests, are ironically subordinated in this quasi-religious group, with the Christian overtones supplying a veil of traditionalist nostalgia over their incontestably radical aufhebung.

What the band's video demonstrates, for Carles, is the triumph of simulacra over the outdated notions of authenticity, that may have died along with God in the post-Vatican II era: "Maybe we need to ’shift’ our expectations 4 new music, and accept low quality products that are failed imitations of previous products, as opposed to ’searching for something new and exciting.’" In other words, the band he dissects is the harbinger of a new, degraded mode of subjectivity, in which we are interpellated not by appeals to our grandiose fantasies for ourselves but by a irrepressible wish to be received as derivative, an echo of an echo, a "failed imitation" whose very failure to perfect the copy of the model marks it with the desired signs of uniqueness. Failure rather than novelty, Carles impresses upon his readers, will be the new measure of identity in a post-networked age. "It seems more realistic to consume 20-30 new shitty meme bands per year, as opposed to thinking you will find 20-30 new albums/bands that make u feel more fulfilled than ‘having a good lil laugh.’" That is to say, the bands/brands/individuals/cyborgs that we interact with increasingly through various levels of digital mediation need no longer impress us with a Turing Test level of human spontaneity, but rather they (and we) need only qualify for humanity by meeting a decreed level of inadequacy or "shittiness," to use the profane term Carles employs to shock us from our stupor. We become subjects not via aspiration but via an embrace of limitation as the fundamental principle of our agency. This comes with an attendant abdication of responsibility. So a band that sets out to "spread the word of our Lord Savior Jesus Christ, the only Son of God" in fact serves to deny the relevance of religion to the promulgation of identity. Jesus is just another meme, Carles suggests.

Hence the new principle of the self that Carles cites: "Just want a remixable meme." We just want to be constituent parts in the transpersonal metaphysical mush, the cesspool of memes from which meaning bubbles up and pops, releasing its gaseous semiology to the cosmic void that has supplanted man's belief in a deity. We are "hella confused" indeed.