This post is about the supplement. Has postindustrial culture exhausted its alibis, its excuses for existence? Has the surplus repression it necessarily generates for its own reproduction transgressed its own boundaries and tipped the scale in favor of chaos rather than anomie? Carles surveys the psychic landscape and imagines the dilemma facing subjects at this critical junction in the late capitalist episteme: "I feel like I want to try a new drug."
But can this feeling be trusted? And hasn't consumerism exhausted the novelty of novelty itself, a endless repetition of sameness that reduces variety to monotonous variation? Whence pleasure in a society that has transformed pleasure into its most assured mode of domination? The libidinal economy has been thoroughly subsumed, such that even sexual gratification now takes the form of instrumentalized brutalization and self-harm, typically involving branded products, as depicted in the images Carles includes with his tentative hypothesis. "Want to feel the temporary buzz of nitrous oxide from Whip Cream containers, then reward myself with the sweet taste of cream," he suggests. He refers to "scissoring," a sexual practice the violence of which is encoded in its very name. Carles, having processed and rejected Bataille's position on expenditure, sees too well that extremes of sexuality it will yield only despair: "Might sit in my van, and ‘waste away’ my life after high school." Such are the fruits of pseudo-transgressive gratifications.
The new drug he seeks is of course the drug of consciousness. Conscience as altered consciousness. Truth serum. Carles promotes the negative dialectics of confrontational critique, urges himself, and by extension, his loyal readers, "to get serious about using this drug." He seems to be paraphrasing Derrida, who argues in "...That Dangerous Supplement..." that "since the sense of being is never produced as history outside if its determination as presence, has it not always already been caught within the history of metaphysics as the epoch of presence?" Carles notes that the "new drug" must be "Something more ‘light hearted’ and more readily accessible" -- that is, it can't be as ineffable as the traditional metaphysical account of human spirituality, which has proved insufficient for countering the material depredations of life under post-scarcity. What can be added when every addition is an overabundance? The supplement is a surfeit. Contra Derrida who argues that it "adds only to replace." It adds only to disappear in the preexisting superfluity.
What could be so "light-hearted"? The famous Derridean dictum of seeking free play of the signifier? Can Carles trace the movement of the trace of the movement of the trace of the movement of the ...
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