This post is about thetic rupture. With the insistent sense of timing of a migratory bird, Carles always returns, with a metronomic periodicity, to the question of authentic expression. How to verify language from within language, if there is truly nothing outside of language, or if thought is in fact bounded by what can be thought in language as such. Carles often considers the possibility of signification that bears no relation to thought but instead expressed something more primal and primary, a kind of desire that exists not within language but in the prelingual mode of reflexive understanding that theoretically precedes it. As Kristeva notes, "language lacks a subject or tolerates one only as a transcendental ego (in Husserl's sense or in Benaviste's more specifically linguistic sense), and defers any interrogation of its (alwats already dialectical because translinguistic) 'externality.' "
Carles wrestles with the consequences of this powerful insight and its impactfulness on the pursuit of self-conscious subjectivity and identity that characterizes the rites of passage and the coming of age rituals of the youth subcultures Carles is primarily interested in analyzing ("alts"), conscious as he is of their critical role in both reproducing the existing relations of consumer capitalism and bearing its ideological precepts ("buzz" and "lifestyles") in an embodied form. The quest for authentic identity not contingent on the fluctuating intersubjective values of various cultural signifiers, Carles recognizes, is the primary philosophical concern of our postpostmodern epoch. The interrogation of linguistic expression and the subjectivities it posits and supports must not be deferred but subjected to the precise form of immanent critique of which Carles has demonstrated a mastery.
Kristeva writes that the "thetic gathers up these facilitations and instinctual semiotic stases within the positing of signifiers, then opens them out in the three-part cluster of referent, signified and signfier.... 'Art' does not relinquish the thetic even while pulverizing it through the negativity of transgression." Carles's examination of excitable urination is an elaboration of these hints.
Often Carles locates authentic expression in sexual desire; here he focuses on a broader category of affect and somatic excitation. The key epistemological concerns are laid out in his opening proposition: "Sometimes I get excited and I don’t really know what do with myself." The alienation of consumer-capitalist existence manifests as a bodily disjunction between thoughts, feelings, emotions, and the capacity for their expression. What emerges is a split self, aware of its excitation but at once removed from it, scrutinizing itself for irrefutable signs of its own condition, if not its conditionality itself. In Carles's nomenclature, the self is "overwhelmed," with the consequences that there is both a semantic and literal leakage of meaning: "I will piss my pants, not because I have a weak bladder, but because I have a great life." The qualitative nature of jouissance exceeds language, exceeds linguistic containment, and manifests as a liquid explusion, a micturation of affect that surfaces as a stain, an indelible blot on the surface of the real. Carles notes that "there are truly beautiful ‘piss ur pants’ moments that u can’t really put into words."
(An aside: Carles chooses not to explore the metaphor of liquidity as it relates to recurring financial crisis within capitalism and potentially connects the libidinal economy with the transnational financial one. One can only hope this thread will be picked up in later investigations.)
The "great life" Carles recognizes as expressed in this semiotic effluence points to the ways in which the somatic has been striated by the superstructural, and how the body itself serves simultaneously as an ideological sounding board and underwriter. Carles points out that consumerism's persistence derives from its ability to ground itself as the essence of the real: "So many people call it some sort of ‘hollow form of consumerism’, but they don’t realize that we are real people, living real moments." Those "real moments" secure their aura of reality via the body, via such events as excited urination that seems to confirm the semiological linkage of experience, subjectivity, and consumerist interpretations of causality. It is not the negation of the negation so much as it is, as Kristeva would say, "a transgression of position, a reversed reactivation of the contradiction that instituted this very position." In other words, as Carles puts it, "Peeing in ur pants is a mix of emotions, sorta like a moment where u feel like “This is It…” [via the Strokes] in an accomplished/letdown kind of way....I piss my pants because it is the only natural / complex expression of my true feelings." Ironically, only a reflex action of the sphincter muscles can be regarded subjectively as sufficiently complex to render the nuances of identity, even as the ever more elaborate recombinations of semiotic bits and digitized bytes dominate more and more of our mediated existence. It is a "Content Stream," Carles drily adds.
But because the articulation of a seemingly authentic sign of transcendent experience ("Moments where ‘real life’ seems surreal, because u never thought something so beautiful / relevant could happen to you") occurs within the depredations of competitive capitalism, these moments of authenticity immediately lose their qualitative purity and become quantitative and comparative. Carles notes: "I piss my pants when my life feels more meaningful than any1 else’s life." The moment of transcendence becomes another immanent instantiation of petty rivalry and comparative anxiety. We piss ourselves to feel alive, then immediately it dawns on us that we should piss on one another.
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