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:

It’s a chill song
a song about
watching some fireworks with bros
popping that shit off
reflecting on what an amazing country
we live in

We 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
(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 vlog
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

We 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.

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.