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:

They took my picture
It made my day
Felt better than listening

Listening 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.

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 realized
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

The 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.