7 February 2010: "What is the functional use of the perfect alternative breasts?"

This post is about the event. Carles, having tried to call into being an epistemic shift through the sheer force of nominalism in an earlier post, renaming the era into which his subjectivity has been interpolated to attempt to force a historical rupture, finds himself suddenly confronted with the inadequacy of such an approach to ordering subjective experience, to seizing at least the illusion of autonomy: "Ultimately feeling lost in the ternative era. Floating around aimlessly in the blogosphere as tons of indie memes and newsbits fly every where." Instead of the feeling of control, there is drift, there is an out-of-controlness manifest in the appearance of determinate points of data appearing to be random, unmotivated, inexplicable, unjustifiable from an ontological or epistemological standpoint. The momentum of information is experienced not as telelogical stream flowing toward a certain historical destiny, but a chaotic explosion of multiplicity, of histories overwriting histories, of alternative (pun intended) histories and counterfactuals as simultaneous facts, of contradictions resolved in the impossible unmanageability of information surplus and surfeit.

The subject, unmoored in such a shifting and tumultuous field of social production, tends to steer toward the comfort of seeming absolutes: in this case, as Carles points out, the sexual impulse and the nurturing instinct, the unstiflable feeding cries of the infantile, all of which is reducible to Carles's parting interrogatory: "If u had access to a pair of perfect alternative breasts, what would u do with them?"

The breast as event. That which cannot be contained yet which cannot be nullified, whose existence both transcends representation and anchors it. Carles is not surprised that breasts, standing at the critical juncture of dasein and nullity, would incite violence, a manifestation of the thanatopic drive: "Part of me wonders if breasts are called ‘fun bags’ because you are supposed to take out your stress on them."

As the apodictic metonym for the maternal as humanity faces its possible extinction or dissolution into posthuman forms (consciousness as digitized superbrain; bionic hybrid forms of life extension and so on), the breast represents the forms of dependency that can't be repressed or negated, the threat of eternal dependence of want, and the seductive drug-liek nature of that need that defines us as it subordinates. It is no accident that Carles links the breast explicitly with recreational drugs, forcing us to acknowledge their shared problematic. "Does cocaine ‘get u more effed up’ if you snort it off a breast/vagina/relevant CD jewel case?" Carles asks pointedly. In other words, can sexual union liberate the subject from itself as disassociative drugs purport to, or is the conditionality of sexual pleasure too reminiscent of the scene of birth and hence the scene of death, the ultimate loss of subjectivity. Death is the event as filtered through subjective consciousness, Carles seems to insist. No amount of "bags of love" can mitigate that harsh truth.