23 May 2010: "PBR & A Pile of Blow: 2 Bros Who Will Never Let Me Down"

This post is about the face. Carles continues his recent investigations into the reification of human sentiment and the anthropomorphization of objects; the dialectic of these processes has effectively obfuscated the division between organic and nonorganic substance at the level of cognition, with a number of ramifications for social being and the socially induced effort to calculate the so-called rational utility of various practices.

"Are humans flawed?" Carles asks. He begins this poetic essay by noting the inherent limitations of human social relations: "h8 humans, they are only looking out 4 themselves / no 1 can really be there for you all the time." The failure of perfect reciprocity is of course preordained, an a priori constraint on our grasp of the noumenal. Knowing we know -- this occludes our ability to perfect our knowledge, as our awareness of our own subjectivity scuttles the objectivity of that which is being known. As Carles notes, "I want something that can be there for me forever," but mortal and immanent knowledge, which recognizes the transcendent without partaking of it or itself transcending, only reminds the subject of failure, of shortcomings, of the inability to recognize itself or the Other, even in a Levinasian gesture that aspires to perfect humility and total surrender to alterity. Carles, in the character of the substance abuser, pleads that "Blow will never die /
PBR will never die / Bros will die." But only in facing the reality of death can one incur the infinite responsibility of the ethical -- ethics is the portal through which one can defeat the epistemological limitations on one's own subjectivity.

Carles seeks a mediated escape from this burden of the Other ("Just wanna escape from the ‘human condish’") by transforming objects, for which there can be no reciprocity, into a form of being that can be dominated -- "bros". Limning the existential despair of the postpostmodern subject ("Do u ever feel like u can only trust brands and drugs?" Carles asks rhetorically) foundering in the stormy seas of consumerist identity politics, Carles notes that it has become "So hard to trust / just want to escape / 2 another world where there are no problems / where life is a party." But it is not so easy. As Levinas writes:

The self is a sub-jectum: it is under the weight of the universe ... the unity of the universe is not what my gaze embraces in its unity of apperception, but what is incumbent upon me from all sides, regards me, is my affair.

We are made real by the responsibilities we can occur to the Other, not by the duties we can evade through the fickle cleverness of our own ego wriggling from its shackles. "The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility," Levinas writes, as Carles in his critique of the "partier" full well knows:

People told me I ‘changed’ and ‘had problems’
and I ‘only cared abt partying.’
They just didn’t understand
that I had found the ultimate bros
I was in alt heaven

The double maneuver of depersonalizing humans and humanizing substances is both ontologically reactionary and psychologically regressive. The cathected objects merely take on the qualities isolated from human relations in a degraded, partial, distorted form, while the anxiety-producing material is displaced into the unconscious, where it can only strengthen itself. This may seem like "alt heaven" but is indeed a hell of libidinous energies feeding on themselves, destabilizing the psychic balance and allowing the thantopic drive to hold full sway. At which point, death becomes one's only "bro".