14 March 2010: "I am a grassroots marketing representative for an energy drink."

This post is about the body without organs. Carles examines the contemporary phenomenon of energy drinks as a specific species of marketing, which is, after all, the "energy drink" of capitalism, artificially spurring it to greater, altogether unnatural heights of circulation and capital accumulation. "You won’t feel the same ‘crash’ that you feel when you consume other energy drinks," Carles promises with deep irony, considering the ongoing crisis of capital that has afflicted capitalist economies across the Western hemisphere. The crash is precisely predicated on the artificial stimulants -- not the fiscalization of the economy that has been introduced in many nations since the latter months of 2008 but the lax consumer credit practices of the mid-2000s. These promotional efforts on the behalf of indebtedness are homologous to the physiological debt that energy drinks, overtaxing our equilibrious metabolism, inevitably incur.

This stands in contrast to the coming regime of immaterial labor transmitted through computer networks and existing outside the hydraulic economy dictated by manipulations of wages and the money supply. Carles notes of his energy-drink hawkers: "We are real marketers. We don’t just sit back and pray that something goes viral on the internet." This hearkens back to a hand-on model of exploitation and expropriation, capitalism in its more rigorous and energetic form. The lamentation for the "viral" mode of accumulation signals the tension within the capitalist order. The epidemiology model for labor expropriation stands in stark contrast to the face-to-face modes of confrontation espoused by the marketing team Carles lampoons, who believe that "To really promote a brand, we have to take it to the people." Carles means that in every possible sense.

But beyond the critique of marketing lies a deeper critique of the use of energy as a metaphor for human agency. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the quest for the body without organs, a body that defies the organic restrictions seemingly imposed by biology: "Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and a larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breath with your belly..." Carles asks a similar question: "Are energy drinks ‘for ass holes’?"

Deleuze and Guattari continue that a body without organs is "populated only by intensities" but it makes no claim to incorporating them. "Matter equals energy," they insist. "Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero." Carles attacks this same notional concept through the vector of the "free": "I am not sure if people are excited about our brand, or if they are just excited to get something for free," he has his naive marketing team report. But the underlying argument should be clear: excitations, or intensities, can not be spoken of as a possession, but only as a circulating flow, a fluid, or an energy drink of sorts. Remember: "The body without organs is the field of immanence of desire." Bodies are branded by desire, by the experience of freedom, of "free", rendering the condition of subjectivity fundamentally indeterminate. That is why the degree of excitation contingent on freedom can never be made "sure," as Carles points out.

Carles then has his marketers miminc the voice of hegemonic power: "We want to give you a sample, but we are not looking to give you a 1 month’s supply of energy drink." You can have a taste of subjective autonomy, but that is only to assure your further discipline. This echoes an axiom D&G articulate: "Destroy the instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces" (italics in original). In this way we all dissolve in the caustic solvent of energy drinks into one giant pool of flows of intensities, channeled and monitored by the state, that is unless we can coagulate. "Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life?" Carles has his innocent oppressors ask. But Carles forces them to acknowledge that "The road goes on forever and the demand for energy in a can never ends." A stark admission of how the marketing-inspired stimulation of desire ends by making us all into desiring machines starved for fuel, emptied of our organs, on a masochistic death march down the plane of undifferentiated experience.

Hence Carles's grasp for the Levinasian moment of recognition and ethical transcendence: "Show a little bit of respect. Not just for me, but for urself." See the Face. Honor its demand. Surrender the pursuit of energy in the assumption of infinite responsibility to the Other. These are the conditions. As Carles says, "This is the good life."