19 May 2010: "Ode to a Fallen Bro of a Product: The CD Binder"

This post is about fields of intensity. To interrogate the relation between technological development and evolving parameters of subjectivity -- the limits to and for the very concept of the self as it can be apprehended reflexively -- Carles isolates what he calls the "auxiliary products" generated by newly disseminated modes of mediation, in this case the plastic and vinyl binders widely used to store optical-storage disks used primarily for music.

When the process of copying music or "burning" it to disks became paradigmatic, storage became the problematic through which one could perceive the limitations of possession and cultural identification as modalities of subjectivity. Endless copies of copies -- of course the most telling metaphor of identity (pun intended) in the digital era. But as Carles suggests, the liminal space opened by the transition to a fully digitized acculteration process created material-culture artifacts that testify to the hard-plastic physical limits that haunt the periphery of virtual being.

Digitization generates its own resistance, even as it promises abundance. Carles identifies the sensual, somatic experience of handling culture as already receding into nostalgia: "I loved the feeling of flipping a page against my fingers / the smell of plastic." This sort of tactile preoccupation with the exterior shells of cultural containers easily elides into fetishization.

Carles notes repeatedly the desire to "reconnect with the CD Binder," which he personifies as a "bro," as if the mere ability to store information was sufficient to make an object into an animate being. Here, of course, is a wry an cutting comment of the devolution of human species being, as we are being reduced to the status of burned disks, mere storage containers of data increasingly elicited from us and flowing through us but processed outside of us while we wait passively to have new information imprinted on us. Carle notes grimly: "no matter how many ’special editions’ u have / u might never be a special edition of a human." We can't collect data anymore, now that we have become data, and our human uniqueness has been reduced to one more mote of information in an endless sea...

Carles eulogizes the binder -- in this metaphor, the social norms that unite the stack of discrete disk/beings -- to lament the passing of those norms and the passing of the illusion that information could successfully be organized by human agency. "The CD Binder is a private, intimate experience," Carles notes, a deeply personal way of organizing personal information that has since been exploded by broad forces demanding the ritual confession of the self, extorted by corporate entities under the nefarious euphemism "sharing". We share rather than store, and we become a conduit with no ontological core.

At first, Carles argues, we embraced digitality because it promised to increase our control over information; it would fill our binders as we extended our "rich library of relevant CDs" and then we became "genuinely thankful for the ease at which I can find and steal new music." But when we discarded the disks as so many empty shells, and consigned our organizational binders to the trash in favor of the computing cloud ("it is better to just send it thru fiber wires/3g networks / as opposed to storing the data on a disc / and packaging it"), we turned ourselves into the storage disks. We have become the blank medium. Who will miss us when our inefficient biological information container is discarded for the more technologically expedient forms already being developed? Who will miss us when we fail to become that "special edition of human"?