23 March 2010: "I am the modern ice cream man."

This post is about hypercapitalism. What is modernity, or should we ask, what was modernity? Carles takes an unconventional approach to the question by viewing epistemic change through the lens of the delivery of iced-cream products.

I am not the man
driving a truck thru the poor part of town
selling ice treats to children
I am the modern ice cream man.

Modernity, Carles suggests, is the era in which subjects could dare to articulate a post-class social formation operating in the modality of a consumer-capitalist economy. The "poor part" of town has been abolished. There is no class hierarchy in play if all children have equal access to iced cream. (Note: It is no accident that "cream" has often served as an effulgent metaphor for the social surplus, as well as for what may be called the gross libidinal product, i.e. the male ejaculate. Carles notes, "So weird how u can make a metaphor about n e 1 with ice cream." As a signfier, it is polymorphously promiscuous.)

Of course, an alternative explanation is that modernity is precisely that epoch in which the demands and needs of the "poor part" of society would be explicitly ignored. "I am not that man," Carles declares in the guise of the modernist, evoking the notoriously hermetic aesthetic of refusal of the 1920s literary intelligentsia. The modernists arguably rejected political engagement in favor formalist pedantry and acrobatic hermeneutics of inscrutability. But Carles seems to reject explicitly an association of modernity with obscurantism: "Still want to be as approachable as the mainstream ice cream man."

But a willingness to service mass culture portends a possibly more distressing conception of the modern, in which Reisman-esque outer-directed functionaries guided by a neurotic eagerness to please administer a basically paternalistic state and a repressive culture of permissiveness. We all eat iced cream in a regime of anxious, compulsory "fun." Yes, iced cream can also serve as a metaphor for tolerance -- "Ice cream. So many flavors," Carles notes. But this same tolerance can masquerade as positive liberty when in fact it merely signifies the free choice from a limited palette of options. We may have whatever iced-cream we'd like, but nothing more nourishing. Free to choose -- our favorite form of pabulum. "Maybe ice cream
is what will set us free" Carles mocks.

This commitment to superficial choice leads to a multiplicitous quasi-dialogic self that is less the sum of its possibilities. Though "we are all our unique flavor," we are also all reduced to product, something that might be turned out by one of the "trusted franchises" Carles links to the iced cream and frozen yoghurt phenomenon. Iced cream, as Carles, notes, "Kinda represents how many different personal brands u can have." But brand here functions as a pun -- the different identities we "choose" are actually impressed upon us, turning us into chattel for the global corporate plutocracy. At the same time, our ego becomes insatiable, having transubstantiated the id under the blessing of a state committed to hedonistic consumption as a means of stifling domestic dissent: Hence Carles warns of the dangerously unsustainable and psychically unassimilatable business model of "encouraging people to get crazy serving sizes with even crazier topping selections." This is the freedom to choose gone amok; freedom as madness, or insanity. Inevitably, this will become regressive, abject, and such toppings as "weird azn shit" and "human hair" must be resorted to in order to create the necessary striations of identity within such an economic matrix. Iced cream captialism is haunted by the shadow of desperation, the impulse to cannibalistic self-annihilation.

Best we say "Laters" to the "ice cream bro," Carles suggests, and reject the repressive iced-cream freedom.