This post is about the thetic. A trembling on the horizon of pure semiosis, and yet a threshold, shattered. An irruption of meaning that is at once a loss of the meaning. What is the thetic, Carles seems to dare to ask, if not "emotional rapping without music", as he observes in the laureatic strains of noted cultural gadfly Kanye West. Music, of course, is indicative of the semiotic component of linguistic utterance, the psychical charge in a state of motility. The key question, as Kristeva herself recognized, is "how is the thetic, which is the positing of a subject, produced?" That is not to reject the Bedeutung as Kristeva notes, but to acknowledge the precedence of the semiotic to the subject, to posit a language without symbolic content, a noncommunication that is nonetheless a psychically explosive discharge of libidinal drives of the protodoxa.
Carles suggests that West's poetic language, uttered in spontaneity, generates an analogical discharge without entirely surrendering thetic consciousness: "he is ‘coming back’," Carles declares, in a process of cyclical return to the prelingual, the lalangue of prenatal eidos. Naturally this poesis will "seem ‘raw’ and ‘humble’" to auditors, and may possible verge on the abject, the rejected significatory excess over transmitted meaning that threatens to subsume the rhetorical process in its deep structuration. Carles regards this flirting with the abject as a matter of "'overcoming demons’", a necessary purging through expurgation of the semiotic surplus.
The nature of that surplus in poetic language is juxtaposed rather adroitly by Carles with the immaterial surplus manipulated in what he deems "Web 3.0." The epistemic shift he anticipates in the digital technological interface with culture is precisely a matter of affectual components re-introjecting into digitally mediated communications: "enhancing the POKE functionality" -- as Carles playfully puts it. The semotic irrupts, in a kind of return of the repressed, at the heart of functionalist networked discourse, a kind of communication without meaning, an espousal of pure bond between situated beings, of the rhythms of communication liberated from the prison-house of semantic literality.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
22 July 2010: "Blipsterette gets ’street fashion blogged’, blogger chooses unflattering/racist background"
This post is about the notion of expenditure. French theorist and noted coprophiliac Georges Bataille coined the term expenditure to denote the species of consumption that is purely destructive, that is totally without issue, that is radically for its own sake and not for the reproduction of labor power. He argued in "La notion de dépense" that "the hatred of expenditure is the raison d'être of and the justification for the bourgeoisie; it is at the same time the principle of its horrifying hypocrisy." The hypocrisy stems from the way in which this potlatch-like destruction of erstwhile resources calibrates tensions within the social order and helps sustain a given distribution of power and status. Carles seems to have this dialectic in mind in his analysis of a photograph taken at a recent popular-music festival, which itself is an ersatz form of potlatch (Carles likens it to a portable toilet, a moveable concatenation of waste), a simulated surfeit of cultural production that disperses and dilutes prestige as it seems to manufacture it.
The subject of the photograph has her immaterial production in the form of her stylistic innovations and affirmations appropriated by the photographer, who pays her in turn in affect: Carles, ventriloquizing for the woman in question (another level of appropriation incited by the distribution of the photographic image) writes:
Yet even here, the dialectic of capitalist subsumption of the self insists, as Carles suggests, on that labor power being reinscribed as passivity -- "they took my picture," he imagines her saying (she is, in fact, appropriately silent), her agency is suppressed, and that suppression is pleasure: "it made my day."
But, as opposed to the ephemeral but uncompromised pleasure of sensual surrender to stimuli, that pleasure of social recognition for productive narcissism is quickly followed by shame, here metaphorically encapsulated by the presence of portable toilets in the image itself, a sign of both the disposability of this form of recognition and of its ultimate ontological status as excrement. The affect experienced in the moment of social production and appropriation is revealed as a waste product, not a reward. Carles describes the ambivalence commonly experienced when the ruse of productive consumption is unveiled and we recognize our complicity:
The subject of the photograph has her immaterial production in the form of her stylistic innovations and affirmations appropriated by the photographer, who pays her in turn in affect: Carles, ventriloquizing for the woman in question (another level of appropriation incited by the distribution of the photographic image) writes:
They took my pictureListening to the music being proffered at the festival would be to participate in a ritual of expenditure, to experience a pleasure that dissolves identity in the flow of purely sensual stimuli. But the woman, interrupted by the photographer in the midst of these sensations, is brought back into the properly capitalist order of production and moreover, productive consumption, as befits capitalism's post-Fordist problematic. Her self-presentation -- her objective appearance -- is foregrounded over her subjective experiencing, which is negated, supplanted by the affect associated with being recognized as a valuable object, as a useful (immaterial) labor power.
It made my day
Felt better than listening
Yet even here, the dialectic of capitalist subsumption of the self insists, as Carles suggests, on that labor power being reinscribed as passivity -- "they took my picture," he imagines her saying (she is, in fact, appropriately silent), her agency is suppressed, and that suppression is pleasure: "it made my day."
But, as opposed to the ephemeral but uncompromised pleasure of sensual surrender to stimuli, that pleasure of social recognition for productive narcissism is quickly followed by shame, here metaphorically encapsulated by the presence of portable toilets in the image itself, a sign of both the disposability of this form of recognition and of its ultimate ontological status as excrement. The affect experienced in the moment of social production and appropriation is revealed as a waste product, not a reward. Carles describes the ambivalence commonly experienced when the ruse of productive consumption is unveiled and we recognize our complicity:
shoulda realizedThe social and cultural and so-called human capital that the subject had acquired in the form of self-fashioning skills proved to be stolen from her even as she presumably believed she was successfully deploying them. The conception of subjectivity as an investment turns out to have been a mistake, as that effort was not for the self, not constituitive of the self, but for the fashion system, sustaining it while emptying out the core of identity as indicative of a durable self-presence with continuity and autonomy. Training in design is exposed as a supple readiness to be designed. No wonder Carles imagines her to be angry. But he also emphasizes that "Every1 could share the blame" -- the anger tends to be redirected toward the self as a structural component of the system of appropriation; it safeguards the system when we are brought to acknowledge our own inevitable collaborations and failings. We see ourselves as the "shit" and the "shitter" ("Feeling like I let every1 down," Carles has his dejected subject say) and fail to see the ways in which we are "shit on," as it were.
and maybe coulda used my design background to suggest a different location.
Every1 could share the blame
but I was still mad pissed.
Standing in front of the shitter
looking down, ashamed
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
21 July 2010: "Lilith Fair can’t sell tickets because music fans would rather watch slutwave artists "
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Thursday, July 15, 2010
15 July 2010: "LOCAL NEWS REPORT: Teens using MP3s as drugs to get high/’fucked up’"
This post is about the metamorphosis of azimuths. On first reading, this polemic by Carles seems an unusually obvious interrogation of the leaking dichotomy between drugs and art when considered in light of their affective capabilities, or an assay of the problematic of the philosophical concept of substance itself, and whether it adheres as an oppositional construct to an idealist as opposed to a materialist ontology. From a strictly materialist perspective, phenomenological stimuli that prompt aesthetic experience cannot be differentiated from chemical compounds deliberately designed to alter the perceptual realm at the root, that is to say, to colonize the very means of perception and subvert their reliable transparency as a medium. As Carles notes, the reliability of our senses, and their tenuous relation to cognition and consciousness is very easily manipulatable: "You put on your headphones, close ur eyes, then ur brain gets ‘fucked with’ [via soundwaves]."
Perception is thereby problematized, and the subject undergoing an aesthetic or psychedelic experience becomes reflexively aware of the contingency of the modes of perception, begins to perceive the means by which he perceives and nothing more. This state of meta-awareness, of course, invokes the series of ironic truth procedures perfectly suited to the postmodernist strategic, whereby simulations of substances cannot be, for all pragmatic purposes, distinguished from the "real" thing, and reality itself becomes experienced as a construct whose apparitional phenomena must always be placed in metaphoric quotation marks. The internet becomes a complete simulacrum, only the difference between the simulation and what is simulated has become irrelevant, they are equal options for the situated subject who seeks to express a simulation of autonomy by choosing among realities. "Does it feel like the real thing?" Carles asks with arch sarcasm. How could one ever know? Every single word in the proposition presents an irresolvable epistemological question, including "does," "it" and "the." The whole point is that the real has become radically destablilized, it can be posited in an extreme act of pseudotranscendence rather than itself transcended in an establishing act of ur-spirituality.
Carles explains the principle of infinite substitutability that has overthrown the anthropology of human needs:
The sublation of identity and the realization of oneness with being in time itself. That, Carles suggests, is the ultimate high.
Perception is thereby problematized, and the subject undergoing an aesthetic or psychedelic experience becomes reflexively aware of the contingency of the modes of perception, begins to perceive the means by which he perceives and nothing more. This state of meta-awareness, of course, invokes the series of ironic truth procedures perfectly suited to the postmodernist strategic, whereby simulations of substances cannot be, for all pragmatic purposes, distinguished from the "real" thing, and reality itself becomes experienced as a construct whose apparitional phenomena must always be placed in metaphoric quotation marks. The internet becomes a complete simulacrum, only the difference between the simulation and what is simulated has become irrelevant, they are equal options for the situated subject who seeks to express a simulation of autonomy by choosing among realities. "Does it feel like the real thing?" Carles asks with arch sarcasm. How could one ever know? Every single word in the proposition presents an irresolvable epistemological question, including "does," "it" and "the." The whole point is that the real has become radically destablilized, it can be posited in an extreme act of pseudotranscendence rather than itself transcended in an establishing act of ur-spirituality.
Carles explains the principle of infinite substitutability that has overthrown the anthropology of human needs:
I am just happy we are getting to a phase in our society where you can do everything on the internet. You can fill out an eHarmony profile to get in2 a relationship. You can watch a girl put objects into her vagina via webcam instead of having sex. You can iDose to get high. You can read blogs instead of newspapers. Just hope they build some sort of ‘internet replacement’ for food, but might just munch on some computer paper with pictures of hamburgers printed on it.As Carles notes, human needs are constructed in terms of the hegemonic medium available to us and through which we experience the quotidian, and as such are infinitely pliable, mutable, to suit existing economic relations. The prima facia absurdity of eating a piece of paper with a hamburger printed on its surface is not meant as a particularly hyperbolic metaphor for the lack of sustenance in the contemporary digital lifestyle but is meant to be taken entirely literally. The human organism itself can be reshaped in its basic biological functioning to adapt to its conditions of existence. There is no reason why consciousness itself could not migrate from the carbon-based brain cells to the silicon-printed chips we so frequently interface with, particularly if we operate within a dualistic Cartesian environment in which the body is a mere container for the soul. The possibility for a subjectivity rooted entirely in fragmentary, repetitive experience rather than rigidly imposed continuity and self-awareness becomes all too palpable, as Carles illustrates: "Might just lay in bed all day and vibe out to this audio drug called “Gates of Hades” until i get permafried and no longer know who I am."
The sublation of identity and the realization of oneness with being in time itself. That, Carles suggests, is the ultimate high.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
6 July 2010: "Hot altbaguette Am Appy employees forced to sweep streets in front of store"
This post is about the formal subsumption of labor. In an era of increasingly immaterial labor, in which the lines between consumption and production have become subtly and not so subtly blurred, and in which the means of production increasingly consist of the elaboration of social relations in themselves, Carles is concerned to delineate the contours of what is held to constitute "real labor." Labor is no longer confined to certain specific sites of production, but has a tendency to spill out into the street, as it were, as the occasion that has prompted Carles's analysis in this instance demonstrates.
In fact, in a curious inversion brought on by the conditions of postpostmodern valorization of capital, and the increasing importance of ideational capital over the circulation of commodities to the valorization process, labor time spent within the confines of mandated work discipline has come to be experienced as not "real labor": inside the retail space of service production, workers can spend their time
Carles uses the attack on the retail space (both specifically and generally) by anarchist agitators to demonstrate the collision of the informal and formal work spaces and the dislocation and alienation that ensues. "I didn’t sign up for this /I didn’t sign up for the terrorism," Carles imagines the average narcissistic service worker protesting, though the identity of the terrorist in this construction is purposely ambiguous. In one sense, the employee did not want to be subject to terrorism, both the terrorism of exploitation within the construct of normalized relations of production under capitalism, and the terrorism of being subject to attack as the attractive face of consumer capitalism to its enemies. But in the more important sense that Carles is particularly concerned to articulate, the employee is appalled to discover, in the confrontation with the aftermath of anti-globalization protest, that she has been recruited by her employer to be a terrorist herself, a subject position in no way mitigated by the seemingly civic duty she performs in "cleaning up the street" -- itself laden with many metaphoric overtones along the lines of those explored in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which a reactionary xenophobe yearns for a "real rain/reign" to cleanse the urban scene.
Such is the fate, Carles suggests, of all employees who seek to assimilate the power of corporate brands to their own identity: "My life is hell /I started working at Am Appy to be a part of the brand." But being part of the brand means subsumption under the brand, and a surrender of autonomy: "Doesn’t matter how premium I am /How well my personal brand fits the corporate brand/ Feeling like a slave." Despite the pervasive ideological assertions to the contrary, personal and corporate brands are not commensurate; they don't "fit" together but instead resolve themselves to a master/slave dialectic with no possibility of synthesis. The "premium" identity is unmoored from the measures of value created with in the space of production and is instead arbitrated in the inescapable labor of self-creation, which is subject to increasing levels of volatility. And there is to be no comfort found in the old certainties of work, as Carles points out: "Might apply at ________" he imagines the employee telling herself, but the blank space no longer serving as infinite possibility but a reminder of how all subject positions within the world of production are reducible to the same nullity.
In fact, in a curious inversion brought on by the conditions of postpostmodern valorization of capital, and the increasing importance of ideational capital over the circulation of commodities to the valorization process, labor time spent within the confines of mandated work discipline has come to be experienced as not "real labor": inside the retail space of service production, workers can spend their time
Spending all day wasting time, hanging up t-shirts, folding clothesIn other words, they can extend their sense of identity without risk, buffered by the institutional confines of the wage relation. Formal working time is to be "wasted" from the subjective point of view of the worker, a luxury she does not have in the informal working time that begins once she clocks out, and the production of identity becomes "real".
listening to buzztunes
flirting
not doing real work
Carles uses the attack on the retail space (both specifically and generally) by anarchist agitators to demonstrate the collision of the informal and formal work spaces and the dislocation and alienation that ensues. "I didn’t sign up for this /I didn’t sign up for the terrorism," Carles imagines the average narcissistic service worker protesting, though the identity of the terrorist in this construction is purposely ambiguous. In one sense, the employee did not want to be subject to terrorism, both the terrorism of exploitation within the construct of normalized relations of production under capitalism, and the terrorism of being subject to attack as the attractive face of consumer capitalism to its enemies. But in the more important sense that Carles is particularly concerned to articulate, the employee is appalled to discover, in the confrontation with the aftermath of anti-globalization protest, that she has been recruited by her employer to be a terrorist herself, a subject position in no way mitigated by the seemingly civic duty she performs in "cleaning up the street" -- itself laden with many metaphoric overtones along the lines of those explored in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which a reactionary xenophobe yearns for a "real rain/reign" to cleanse the urban scene.
Such is the fate, Carles suggests, of all employees who seek to assimilate the power of corporate brands to their own identity: "My life is hell /I started working at Am Appy to be a part of the brand." But being part of the brand means subsumption under the brand, and a surrender of autonomy: "Doesn’t matter how premium I am /How well my personal brand fits the corporate brand/ Feeling like a slave." Despite the pervasive ideological assertions to the contrary, personal and corporate brands are not commensurate; they don't "fit" together but instead resolve themselves to a master/slave dialectic with no possibility of synthesis. The "premium" identity is unmoored from the measures of value created with in the space of production and is instead arbitrated in the inescapable labor of self-creation, which is subject to increasing levels of volatility. And there is to be no comfort found in the old certainties of work, as Carles points out: "Might apply at ________" he imagines the employee telling herself, but the blank space no longer serving as infinite possibility but a reminder of how all subject positions within the world of production are reducible to the same nullity.
Monday, July 5, 2010
4 July 2010: "Just watchin the fireworks… with my bros… riding chillwaves… 4th of Broly"
This post is about repressive desublimation. Carles punctuates his reflections on American independence and the associated values that have developed in tandem with the triumph of bourgeois liberalism of the Anglo-American inflection by asking a deceptively simple question: "Have Americans ‘exploited’ freedom & is our society ‘going 2 shit’?" But this is not as straightforward a proposition as it may seem. First, Carles makes a conjunction of two assertions that are themselves intertwined in complicated ways. It would seem that we would have to disentangle the postulates and consider them independently first before we could pursue the inquiry into their relative validity, but Carles is, I want to argue, pursuing the idea that these postulates can only be considered in conjunction, that they serve as opposing parts of a dialectic organic to American capitalism, linking entropic decay to an abused or disenchanted ideal of pure liberty, something the subjectivities fostered within capitalism have never been able to assimilate, render operational as a modality of being.
In short, Carles is echoing the argument made by Erich Fromm, Eric Hoffer and others regarding the insuperable burden of freedom, which bears with it crushing responsibilities the social relations of capitalism leave individuals ill-equipped to cope with. Hoffer: "The freedom the masses crave is not the freedom of self-expression, but freedom from the intolerable burden of autonomous existence." Hence Carles initiates this essay with a video clip of one of the "masses" performing a cover version of a song by a popular recording group that often figures as an emblem of mindless trendiness in Carles's writings. This performer in the video cannot bear the burden of his individuality, as promised by the infamous Declaration of Independence and its assertion of the individual's "pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right. Instead the performer must copy the performance of another, a song which itself raids the cupboard of stock images for means to express its paucity of ideas about liberty.
Carles imagines the performer reflexively contemplating his performance of the song:
(not cuz they were invented by AZNs
but because the are simple
they are like sharable memes from before the internet existed"
There are many ways to understand the "fireworks" -- the phenomenal apparition of pseudo-freedom, and Carles lists several, with pointed irony:
Carles clearly is relying heavily on the analysis of Frankfurt School refugee Erich Fromm. In Escape from Freedom, Fromm argued that
Note how Carles links the explosive potential invested in fireworks as a metaphor and the reality of the trap of freedom: "there is a ton of fireworks money 2 be made… feeling trapped…trapped in suburbia." Capitalism's opportunities supplant the opportunities inherent in human species being, in the life potential for the production of a truly engaged and engaging life praxis. Instead of escaping capitalism's strictures with the tool the system has itself provided, we continue to play by its rules, look for the main chance to make profit. Carles wryly notes that "It’s annoying having to explain pricing structures to people," his way of expressing his own weariness at continually pointing out the tricks and traps of capitalism and the subjectivities it warrants. To a limited but necessary and significant extent, we put the price on our own labor, and Carles can only reveal to us how cheaply we have sold ourselves out.
In short, Carles is echoing the argument made by Erich Fromm, Eric Hoffer and others regarding the insuperable burden of freedom, which bears with it crushing responsibilities the social relations of capitalism leave individuals ill-equipped to cope with. Hoffer: "The freedom the masses crave is not the freedom of self-expression, but freedom from the intolerable burden of autonomous existence." Hence Carles initiates this essay with a video clip of one of the "masses" performing a cover version of a song by a popular recording group that often figures as an emblem of mindless trendiness in Carles's writings. This performer in the video cannot bear the burden of his individuality, as promised by the infamous Declaration of Independence and its assertion of the individual's "pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right. Instead the performer must copy the performance of another, a song which itself raids the cupboard of stock images for means to express its paucity of ideas about liberty.
Carles imagines the performer reflexively contemplating his performance of the song:
It’s a chill songWe see the layers of reflexivity mounting. We have a performer thinking about himself thinking about freedom as an expression of that freedom, though in fact such reflexivity is an escape from freedom, an abnegation of its responsibilities to make positive use of such open-endedness in terms of the development of the self within society. By such means freedom becomes a mode of subjection, moreover one for which subjects themselves must feel responsible for and ashamed -- they failed to live up to the opportunities guaranteed them even as they walked in the cow paths presented to them by the prevailing social order. Our choices ultimately give us no choice, but we don't see that. All we see are the blinding explosions of combustible possibility, and we are duped into contentment with that: "I am gonna marvel at fireworks
a song about
watching some fireworks with bros
popping that shit off
reflecting on what an amazing country
we live in
(not cuz they were invented by AZNs
but because the are simple
they are like sharable memes from before the internet existed"
There are many ways to understand the "fireworks" -- the phenomenal apparition of pseudo-freedom, and Carles lists several, with pointed irony:
a country where we are free 2 vlogWe are "free," in other words, to determine that desperate attempts to keep up with technological trends and cultural effluvia to preserve our fragile sense of relevance. We are free to make ostentatious purchases and compulsively express ourselves to an indifferent theoretical public in increasingly revealing fashion in order to attempt to substantiate our sense of self within social reality.
a country where we are free 2 meme
a country where we are free 2 tweet
a country where we are free 2 sext
a country where we are free 2 hype buzzbands
a country where we are free 2 purchase Macbooks
a country where we are free 2 spend hours on books of faces per day
a country where we are free 2 determine what is important 2 us
whether it is personal branding
buzzbands
analysis of corporate brands
eating fast food
cumming with tons of ppl
or even just starting a family in suburbia
Carles clearly is relying heavily on the analysis of Frankfurt School refugee Erich Fromm. In Escape from Freedom, Fromm argued that
once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to 'positive freedom'; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world.That second course, which becomes "compulsive" according to Fromm, is what Carles seems to identity everywhere with the "indie" and "bro" scenes he so frequently interrogates and exposes to philosophical critique.
Note how Carles links the explosive potential invested in fireworks as a metaphor and the reality of the trap of freedom: "there is a ton of fireworks money 2 be made… feeling trapped…trapped in suburbia." Capitalism's opportunities supplant the opportunities inherent in human species being, in the life potential for the production of a truly engaged and engaging life praxis. Instead of escaping capitalism's strictures with the tool the system has itself provided, we continue to play by its rules, look for the main chance to make profit. Carles wryly notes that "It’s annoying having to explain pricing structures to people," his way of expressing his own weariness at continually pointing out the tricks and traps of capitalism and the subjectivities it warrants. To a limited but necessary and significant extent, we put the price on our own labor, and Carles can only reveal to us how cheaply we have sold ourselves out.
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