Now, in the era of post-Fordist immaterial labor and nonstop work in the Web 2.0 social factory, the space for such relations has been curtailed. Carles elaborates this acute tension:
Sometimes I get so caught up in the internet that I forget to have real life goals, and experience real life joys. It’s really tough to be a blogger, because it’s like a social responsibility. At this point, I ‘can’t stop’, I can’t just decide to stop generating memes. There is a buzz economy that depends on me.The sense of responsibility to the entire faceless world of the internet places an impossible burden on postpostmodern networked subjectivity. The sense of an audience has replaced a real audience, placing the theoretically infinite burden of abstract others on us perpetually; we become clowns who cannot leave the stage, no matter how pitiful our performance.
This obviously affects the legacy structures of domesticity remaindered from earlier social formations. In the imaginative experiment of this post, Carles tries to imbricate domesticity and immaterial labor, imagining a wedding as an occasion for the elaboration of new memes and the consolidation of symbolic meanings for online dissemination. He argues that in such a conjunction, one would necessarily "embedded some video footage" of the matrimonial ceremony and ornament the ritual with popular-music trends lifted from the fervid online petri dish of memes. It would require recruiting guests into the production of broader cultural value: "members of the party to do ‘conceptual dances’," Carles envisions. It is now necessary that an "alternative wedding" be "‘more meaningful’ than just a mainstream wedding" -- it most manufacture more symbolic meanings that can exchanged beyond the ceremony itself. This stands apart from the institutional value once heralded within the wedding, which enshrined bourgeois domesticity and recruited friends and family to bear witness and police a couple's conformity to received ideas about intimacy and procreation.
As Donzelot has argued, the patriarchal family structure once provided "a minimum bulwark, a necessary base for maintaining the social order," but late capitalism has located other bases for power and discipline that rely less on hierarchical order and more on voluntary ascription and self-identifications with sets of behaviors promulgated as pleasurable. Carles depicts this as a generational clash, pitting a recalcitrant father who longs for traditional mores against the couple that has adapted to the new ethos of exhibitionistic egocentricity and cutting-edge conformity characterized by an acceleration of obedience and integration of social trends into personal rites of passage: "Her dad was kinda pissed, i think, because he just wanted us to walk down the aisle to the traditional wedding song. He doesn’t understand that we used the #1 song of the 2k0 decade. Maybe he’ll understand in a few years."
What this parable illustrates is that patriarchal pressure no longer codifies the structure of the family as we advance beyond postindustrial society. The means for socialization are not repressive but iterative, only the "language" used for this iteration is derived from a pool of products and commercial ideas that bear with them the encoded commands of the existing relations of power, commands that now take the form of pleasing popular music and are consumed eagerly and voluntarily as tokens of (ironically) alternative identity and mandated individualism. Marriage has become a celebration of the nominal fusion of two ontic identities engaged in the perpetual broadcast of their own desperate currency. The bride and groom look past each other to express their love, in their undying allegiance to signifying cultural practices that preclude the existence of the other. Their love can only exist insofar as it does not inhibit the ongoing production of identity and concordant distribution of normative cultural assessments. Till death do their status updates and online recommendations bid them part.
Just brilliant!
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