23 June 2010: "Alt tween shows off her boring day while listening to Toro Y Moi’s “Blessa”"

This post is about the latency period. In this post, Carles analyzes a short film directed by a pre-teenaged girl in the suburban Untied States to interrogate the degree to which broader dissemination (pun most definitely intended) of the means of cultural production can solve the crisis of leisure in a post-Fordist, transitional economy: "Nothing 2 do / Gonna get creative /
Gonna vlog," Carles imagines the young auteur saying in a reflexive discourse as she prepares her mise-en-scène. But does the making of this film collude in the perpetuation of boredom and passivity, or does it strike a blow for the "destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon," to useLaura Mulvey's term, or does it re-radicalize libidinous pleasure by investing it directly in the mirrored female gaze without the patriarchal rerouting of sublimation.

Carles traces the hierarchy of libidinal investment as indexed against modalities of mediation:

watching MTV
facebooking
tweeting
texting
sexting

Of course, what follows is development of the narcissistic cathexis of the self as filmed object, exhibitionistically displayed to unseen but vividly imagined audience: "Vlogging is the master art of the tween."

At this juncture it is worth considering to what degree Carles regards this sort of inverted reflexivity as characteristic of the latency period that Freud theorized as occupying the "tween" years of bourgeois youth. Is budding genital sexuality not entirely in psychic abeyance but instead cathected with the subject's image of herself as a public being? Does the increasingly mediatized conditions of maturation means that sexualized process of subjectivity returns from the dormancy of the latency period to be recorded and archived and integrated with the prevailing economies and rhythms of the culture at large. The filmed subjected identifies with herself and her own recorded image, the conditions of which she has directed. The public image and the excavation of the subject's depth psychology occur simultaneously, on display in a public forum: "i can show u my life / i can show u my face."

But that revelation of the "face" is not an evocation of the radical ethical responsibility to the other that Carles has in the past emphasized, following Levinas. Instead, I want to argue that Carles, by isolating and analyzing this particular scopophilic intervention (an altogether typical one, we are safe to conclude along with him), intends to assert that the mediations of networked culture have co-opted the maturation process, the development of normative sexuality within Western societies, and fused it to the process by which the distributed meanings of consumer culture are turned over and refreshed, revitalized, made urgent to those subjects who have proceeded out of the crisis of adolescence yet remain ontologically insecure because of the unstable meanings within the material environment. The projected image retains the security that the subject in real space has lost: "this video will last forever."

The concatenation of commercial objectives in flux and budding self-identity within the field of capital prompts the haunting final words of Carles's essay: "might go to the mall this weekend." Not only do we see the persistent indeterminacy and the frail, tenuous sense of agency in the subject, but we see that autonomy is circumscribed bot merely by the video camera's depth of field but by the broader consumer retail sphere which the subject believes contains all possibilities. This her "creativity" is wholly integrated with a preexisting structure of production, distribution, and consumption, and is merely an instantiation of a moment in that cycle, whose durability has been enhanced by her participation, and by extension, our own in watching her -- directly in proportion to our voyeuristic libidinal investment or the repression of such motivations into the unconscious. Boredom is revealed as the ultimate form of intimate engagement...