27 June 2010: "My First Synth Recital"

This post is about performativity. Carles investigates the dilemma of the open-ended personality under conditions of modernity, the prevailing sense that all things are possible for the self while the reality of opportunity costs are suppressed. He imagines the questions that confront a young woman, whom he gives voice to for the purposes of this exploratory effort, in the midst of interpellation into a given social-historico-politcal matrix:

Every1 wanted to know
“What do u want 2 do?
What r ur interests?
What do u like?
What r u passionate about?”

Consumer capitalism, as Carles illustrates here, permits little in the way of organic preference formation; institutional pressure to shape the self, to declare enthusiasms and pursue constitutive pleasures begins at an early age and is generally unrelenting. The self is forced to yield a confession, an expression of what it will submit to in the guise of actualizing itself. And the compulsion to confess, as Foucault has taught us, will be felt by the subject continually, for as long as it is situated within the libidinal disciplinary mechanisms of late capitalism. We are, as the French thinker has put it, "under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire." We convert all desires into discourse, scoring them to the hegemonic language of power/knowledge. The biopolitical imperatives of identity production override any possible pleasures from sensual experience, overwriting them and, in a sense, overdetermining them. "My fingers pressed down on the keys / arpegiatting tons of rad shit." The experiences are already programmed in, yet it appears to the subject that she initiates them. This is a bald metaphor for the operation of subjectivity under the constraints of existing social relations. We press the keys on the toys the culture industry provides us, and we mistake those sounds for the barbaric yawp of the song of ourselves.

Pleasure, as Carles suggests, can be synthesized, and consumerist capitalism is the synthesizer that we are taught to "play", though of course all the while it is playing us. "I knew that I needed to learn more about synthesizers / I didn’t have time to waste learning mainstream skills." Carles's phrasing is intentionally ambiguous, suggesting the dialectic between the alternate meanings. One must at once not spend any time learning mainstream skills and also absorb such skills immediately and put them into direct use. "Education is an important tool/process," Carles notes, "But tons of mainstream educational opportunities are a waste of time." The apparatus of education is both "tool" and "process" -- a shaping of the subject across both space and time. We are "tooled" to fit certain well-tuned social mechanisms, but Carles is quick to disabuse us of the notion that our preordained place in the machine constitutes an "opportunity" -- we learn not recognize what we know, to assimilate operational knowledge for conducting ourselves within social milieux not as knowledge as such but as intuition, a habitus, that orients us to our class position while allowing us to experience that position as natural, a second nature.

That is to say, we must know without knowing, the classic instantiation of the effects of the unconscious under the repression of the ego.

This was all my dream
but first, it was time for synth lessons
My teacher was so chill
yet so demanding at the same time

The teacher, of course, here figures the superego, but a superego transformed into its antithesis, an insistent voice demanding the subject enjoy herself. Hence it is "chill" and "demanding" simultaneously; it presents mandatory consumerism and the problematic of the Baudrillardian fun morality as a mode of relaxation, as as the subject's own "dream". In this way, Carles suggests, we mistake domination for autonomy, indoctrination for identity. When we learn to play the instruments of culture, we also learn "a little bit about recording techniques" -- only what may not be at first so obvious is that the recording medium is our own personality -- once analog but slowly being converted to digital.