This post is about eschatology. In honor of late literary critic Frank Kermode, whose influence on Carles's own praxis is subtle but pervasive, let us begin by considering the sense of an ending. Not merely the ending of this particular analysis by Carles, which is characteristically enigmatic and provocative, but what constitutes that experience of finality that signals the completion of the passage to adulthood, which, as the lives of the young people who are the subject of the New York Times article Carles examines can testify to, is often subjectively experienced as apocalyptic.
In many respects, all narratives of the passage to adulthood are at their essential core, fictions. Necessary fictions, yes, it's true, but fictions nonetheless whose structures and motifs and conventions are shaped ideologically by the society in which they are nestled. In truth the concept of adulthood is always a socioculutral concept superimposed on the biological life cycle of humans. As Carles points out, the confusion of the biological with the sociopolitical creates ambivalence: "So confused. Wish u were just considered an adult right after the first time u grew a nice bush of pubes / share an intense orgasm with a a member of the opposite sex." But rites of passage are no longer anchored to the reproductive imperatives of the species, and the categories of the life cycle now serve the larger purpose of mystifying the only incontestable transition that we all go through: death. Carles wryly acknowledges this with a question, "Does n e 1 know if it is true that every human on Earth will die one day?" The fantasies of postponing adulthood, naturally, are fantasies of postponing or even preventing death, which is spuriously associated with the corrosive effects of the reality principle -- or as Carles puts it, with having "to ‘take care of kids + a naggy, annoying life partner’".
As Carles sagely recognizes, it "seems like we are all trying to deal with ‘getting old’ or something". One method of coping is through aggrandizing our individual mortality by conflating it with the destiny of the cosmos. Another is to absorb oneself in work, though this is proving less plausible for the generation now entering the labor market confront dire conditions there. "Should we all just continue trying to be bloggers/social media gurus/buzzband members, instead of getting jobs as teachers/insurance agents/bank tellers?" Carles asks, situating the dilemma in a resolutely post-Fordist context of immaterial labor. In other words, Carles notes that the coming-of-age narrative resists turning on domestic issues and instead pivots on employment categories and one's emplacement in the sociocultural field. Cultural work and informational processing remain lifestyle proclivities rather than labor and seem to exempt subjects from the burden of labor, which they experience phenomenologically as leisure. But this only serves to expedite their expropriation, of course.
But this fretting merely invites a minor existential crisis that masks the larger one: "Are yall glad that ur not like ur parents, and u haven’t felt pressure to start a career that would probably ‘peak’ with a job in middle management? Is ur life meant for ’so much more’ than such inhumane desk work?" From the perspective of our inevitable death, this question can seem somewhat trivial, though. When Carles asks, "Should I get my life together before it is too late?" the implication is that it is always already too late.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
17 August 2010: "Steve Aoki and the Cobrasnake make some commercial for a deadly rave"
This post is about the sacrificial crisis. Carles signals his interest in the very title of this effort, linking commercial discourse with the elaboration of a liminal space in which the possibility for pleasure and for death comingle even more intimately then they must do generally. For Carles "deadly rave" has taken on the character of a Homeric epithet, so habitually does he stress the linkage between the cardinal concepts: raves, where subjectivity dissolves in a saturnine fizzle of psychoactive drugs and hypnotic rhythms, and death, not only the psychic death of the integrated identity but literal, somatic death, in which the body (with or without organs) ceases to function. Carles wants readers to consider whether a rave can be anything other than fatal -- "Feel like every music festival in California can be called a ‘deadly rave’," he notes -- and whether the words are metonyms for each other, death implying the apocalyptic jouissance of the rave, and the rave implying the finality of the rupture with continuous self-identity and the phoenix-like birth (the kind of resurrection so redolent of California) of the "lifestyle personal brand human," as Carles describes one of the promoters of this particular concatenation of necrotism and hedonism.
Carles forces the interrogation of the conditions that permit subjects to "make some commercial" -- that is to quantify the state of commerciality and render it conceptually conducive to being measured in terms of "more" and "less". Foregrounded in Carles's trenchant formulation is the fact of the commercial itself as product, as an achieved state rather than a natural condition or neutral description of pre-existing practices. To define the commercial is to conjure it into being, to "make" it. And making the commercial is engage the conjuncture of desire and death, the fatal appeal that can imbue products with desirability, to make people believe they can kill for the pleasure the products can provide, even if the only murder they ever commit in actuality is a kind of sad suicide of the psyche. "Even mainstream dbags who just want to pound their fists," Carles reminds us -- violence is everpresent beneath the thin veneer of institutionally orchestrated normality. The animal is caged restlessly beneath the human skin.
Carles wonders whether that that all public rituals are becoming analogues of the primordial ritual sacrifices that have always marked the evolution of human societies: "Worried that every music festival is ‘the same’ now," he notes, and links it to the repetition of the same faces and performers, the "sick artists" who emblematize in Carles's view the deracination inherent in a decadent and individualistic consumer culture. But the popular celebrities are not merely archetypes of triviality; they are lodestones of mimetic desire (""Do they seem like chill bros?" Carles asks, i.e. don't you want to be them, become them, take what they have?) that trigger and bring to crisis the resentments of individuals only barely driven by a tenuous social order to conform.
As Rene Girard argues, a sacrificial ritual is necessary to direct the seething rage onto a harmless scapegoat. The "deadly rave" then as Girard puts it "tricks violence into spending itself on victims whose death will provoke no reprisals." Girard dubs this "good violence", but as Carles darkly implies, the victims at this purgative rituals in the sun-soaked valleys of California may be our own holistic selves: "Whenever u hear about a music festival in California, do u get scared that some1 is gonna die?" Carles asks ominously. The implication: You should, and don't be surprised if you find yourself on the altar, with the high-priests of the culture industry looming over you, wielding the blood-drenched knife.
Carles forces the interrogation of the conditions that permit subjects to "make some commercial" -- that is to quantify the state of commerciality and render it conceptually conducive to being measured in terms of "more" and "less". Foregrounded in Carles's trenchant formulation is the fact of the commercial itself as product, as an achieved state rather than a natural condition or neutral description of pre-existing practices. To define the commercial is to conjure it into being, to "make" it. And making the commercial is engage the conjuncture of desire and death, the fatal appeal that can imbue products with desirability, to make people believe they can kill for the pleasure the products can provide, even if the only murder they ever commit in actuality is a kind of sad suicide of the psyche. "Even mainstream dbags who just want to pound their fists," Carles reminds us -- violence is everpresent beneath the thin veneer of institutionally orchestrated normality. The animal is caged restlessly beneath the human skin.
Carles wonders whether that that all public rituals are becoming analogues of the primordial ritual sacrifices that have always marked the evolution of human societies: "Worried that every music festival is ‘the same’ now," he notes, and links it to the repetition of the same faces and performers, the "sick artists" who emblematize in Carles's view the deracination inherent in a decadent and individualistic consumer culture. But the popular celebrities are not merely archetypes of triviality; they are lodestones of mimetic desire (""Do they seem like chill bros?" Carles asks, i.e. don't you want to be them, become them, take what they have?) that trigger and bring to crisis the resentments of individuals only barely driven by a tenuous social order to conform.
As Rene Girard argues, a sacrificial ritual is necessary to direct the seething rage onto a harmless scapegoat. The "deadly rave" then as Girard puts it "tricks violence into spending itself on victims whose death will provoke no reprisals." Girard dubs this "good violence", but as Carles darkly implies, the victims at this purgative rituals in the sun-soaked valleys of California may be our own holistic selves: "Whenever u hear about a music festival in California, do u get scared that some1 is gonna die?" Carles asks ominously. The implication: You should, and don't be surprised if you find yourself on the altar, with the high-priests of the culture industry looming over you, wielding the blood-drenched knife.
Monday, August 9, 2010
8 August 2010: VIBES
This post is about faciality. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, "the face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye." Carles, drawing on these words, produces an videographic essay exploring the phenomenological metaphysical interrelationships of consciousness, passion, recording devices, the soul, and the face, not to mention the looming potentiality of the body without organs as a theoretical if not literal construct. Carles deploys the term "vibes" to attempt to differentiate and signify the particular nexus of reflexivity, exhibitionism, and structures of feeling within the subjectivated object that he attempts to theorize here. The label is admittedly provisional, tentative: "Just trying trying to wrap my head around what ‘vibes’ really means," Carles confesses, and examines a series of amateur-recorded performances in which a young woman articulates the subject/object boundary through the fraught mimesis of popular songs circulating as a result of the urgent marketing activities of the fading media corporations. "All media outlets are trying to relay the ‘vibes’ that they are feeling 2 the human race," Carles recognizes, hinting at the culture industry's seminal role in interpolating subjectivity at the institutional-intrapersonal level, giving in some ways the face to the "white wall" of organic substance by conditioning its reactivity. Do we see this woman's real face? Does it bear with it the burden of Levinasian responsibility when it mouths the facile slogans of the sexualized and corporatized mass media? Is it a ritual that, as Adorno has written, has "an affirmative character, that of being accepted into a community of unfree equals"?
But as Deleuze and Guattari note, "It is certain that the signifier does not construct the wall that it needs all by itself; it is certain that subjetivity does not dig its hole all alone. Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of facilality (visagéité), which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole." Bearing this theoretical apparatus in mind, Carles supplies a textbook illustration of the face, its organs, the institutional insistence on orifices, on the interpenetration of stimuli, of knowledge, of experience, of self-apprehension in the mirror of recognition and reproduction of apprehended stimuli in the black field of consciousness. These are "vibes": "a ‘feeling’ inside of u. Some sort of natural reaction to something," as Carles explains. But the hesitant, careful language indicates not merely the provisionality of the concept but also the precarity of the concept of the "natural", let alone the slippery notion of "feeling" and interiority. Where do emotions happen? What is that space, if it can be called a space? To whom does it belong? To whom do we owe a rent for performing the ghost of ourselves within it?
What Carles would like to do is espouse a political economy of the vibe so that he may proceed on to the critique of such an economy, its ideological assumptions and its sustaining flows. "Seems like when u express urself, ur just trying ‘tell people how ur vibes are’" he announces, positing a sociolinguistic understanding of "vibe" as parole, but what, if anything, substantiates the langue? Following Husserl, Carles both accepts and rejects the idea that a physiognomy of vibes can be traduced: "ur vibe receptors incorporate some sort of ’sixth sense’ based on your social life + upbringing + exposure to vibes over the course of ur life." What seems like an organ of apprehension or a sixth sense is in fact a socially constructed capability, an expression of habitus, of social capital at the level of physical sensitivity to stimuli, breeding made sensuous and incontestable, and feasibly postideological, despite the system of privilege it reinscribes. "The act of vibing seems ’so natural’, like pure vibes," Carles argues, evoking the Heideggarian notion of dasein. Authenticity becomes self-referential and is experienced in an uncomplicated fullness as itself, the vibe qua vibe, with all the paradoxical ontic recursiveness that this implies. Hence Carles in his effort to "use this post to ‘explore vibes’" emulates the reflexivity of the concept itself, and demonstrates how to vibe about vibes, as it were, and exemplify the conditionality of vibeology as a prerequisite to the epistemology of the vibe. "Just vibing to some vibes," he concludes, completing the hermeneutic circle.
But there is a concordant praxis of vibes Carles seeks to limn, a process of knowing as a process of expressing: "React naturally to how things make u feel," Carles instructs, "and try to explain the vibes u pick up." This is the true meaning of faciality as Carles sees it, and his rejection of its implied binarisms -- organs opened or closed, mouths wide shut, smells both faint and overpowering, tasting colors, synasthesia -- the face as "veritable megaphone" in D&G's conception. Vibes are the process of explaining vibes, existence does not preclude or precede essence; neither can the poles in such a dialectic be simply reversed. The vibe is merely the expression of the experience of a vibe, anachronistically pitched backward into the past as it happens in the future. The vibe you see in the face of the other has both already and never occurred.
But as Deleuze and Guattari note, "It is certain that the signifier does not construct the wall that it needs all by itself; it is certain that subjetivity does not dig its hole all alone. Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of facilality (visagéité), which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole." Bearing this theoretical apparatus in mind, Carles supplies a textbook illustration of the face, its organs, the institutional insistence on orifices, on the interpenetration of stimuli, of knowledge, of experience, of self-apprehension in the mirror of recognition and reproduction of apprehended stimuli in the black field of consciousness. These are "vibes": "a ‘feeling’ inside of u. Some sort of natural reaction to something," as Carles explains. But the hesitant, careful language indicates not merely the provisionality of the concept but also the precarity of the concept of the "natural", let alone the slippery notion of "feeling" and interiority. Where do emotions happen? What is that space, if it can be called a space? To whom does it belong? To whom do we owe a rent for performing the ghost of ourselves within it?
What Carles would like to do is espouse a political economy of the vibe so that he may proceed on to the critique of such an economy, its ideological assumptions and its sustaining flows. "Seems like when u express urself, ur just trying ‘tell people how ur vibes are’" he announces, positing a sociolinguistic understanding of "vibe" as parole, but what, if anything, substantiates the langue? Following Husserl, Carles both accepts and rejects the idea that a physiognomy of vibes can be traduced: "ur vibe receptors incorporate some sort of ’sixth sense’ based on your social life + upbringing + exposure to vibes over the course of ur life." What seems like an organ of apprehension or a sixth sense is in fact a socially constructed capability, an expression of habitus, of social capital at the level of physical sensitivity to stimuli, breeding made sensuous and incontestable, and feasibly postideological, despite the system of privilege it reinscribes. "The act of vibing seems ’so natural’, like pure vibes," Carles argues, evoking the Heideggarian notion of dasein. Authenticity becomes self-referential and is experienced in an uncomplicated fullness as itself, the vibe qua vibe, with all the paradoxical ontic recursiveness that this implies. Hence Carles in his effort to "use this post to ‘explore vibes’" emulates the reflexivity of the concept itself, and demonstrates how to vibe about vibes, as it were, and exemplify the conditionality of vibeology as a prerequisite to the epistemology of the vibe. "Just vibing to some vibes," he concludes, completing the hermeneutic circle.
But there is a concordant praxis of vibes Carles seeks to limn, a process of knowing as a process of expressing: "React naturally to how things make u feel," Carles instructs, "and try to explain the vibes u pick up." This is the true meaning of faciality as Carles sees it, and his rejection of its implied binarisms -- organs opened or closed, mouths wide shut, smells both faint and overpowering, tasting colors, synasthesia -- the face as "veritable megaphone" in D&G's conception. Vibes are the process of explaining vibes, existence does not preclude or precede essence; neither can the poles in such a dialectic be simply reversed. The vibe is merely the expression of the experience of a vibe, anachronistically pitched backward into the past as it happens in the future. The vibe you see in the face of the other has both already and never occurred.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
5 August 2010: "Totally Alt Performance Artist squirts Spaghettios out of her vagina"
This post is about das Ding. Carles asks a deceptively flippant question: "If you had a vagina, what would u put up it to represent society?" But this seemingly innocuous feint in truth interrogates not only the whole of the construct of phallologocentrism in patriarchal society but the feministic representations of that construct that only serve to trivialize or reinforce its hegemonic power.
The thrust (pun intended) of the performance art piece Carles explicates is that the female sexual organ is often the channel by which her insertion as subject into patriarchal society is most starkly achieved; that is, vaginal canal is not merely a passage by which society is literally reproduced and over which control by the powers that be must be guaranteed to perpetuate their regime, but it is also an informatized conduit that conducts the semiotics of domination by the phallus, which, as Carles suggests, "represents society" in its phallologocentric guise. The bodily insertion of symbolic forms into the very critical organs of the reproductive process transfers the process of semiosis to the body itself, the order of the symbolic is indeed "written on the body" of woman, underwriting the entire process of signification for the established order of hierarchical and gendered social relations. A bond of analogy is formed between the reproductive process and the semiotic process, a union, a fusion of practices, such that one may easily be translated into the other.
This makes the irruption of the phallic -- whether it take the form of a can of processed and branded pasta, the abject slurry of the pasta itself loosed from its container, or some other form -- into the politicized womb space an Event, in Badiou's sense, yes. Carles concededs that "maybe she’s right, words are bullshit. We are just covered in feces & lil pasta Os in a sweet marinara sauce." Sociohistorical processes as the excrement of collective action; industrially manufactured commodities to sustain life as a form of living death; the symbolic itself as abject; the contingencies by which biological requirements manifest in repressive forms and authorize domination, and so forth.
But the recontextualization of the womb as a networked node also allows sexualization and subjectivation to function as processes of elaboration of shared social languages in which the relations of domination adhere. As Kristeva writes in "Some Observations on Female Sexuality" the phallus is overdetermined as a signifier in its own right to represent inscription, the marking of the law:
Hence, Carles is critical of the artist's efforts to introduce lalangue into her performance, which, as already accessible to digital reproduction, is always already assimilated to the phallologocentric code:
Naturally Carles draws the only possible conclusion from the artist's being trapped in literalistic praxis: he confesses that he was "worried that she was going to cut off her clitoris to represent having ‘no more pleasure in her life’" -- in other words, that desire as embodied in ordinary language, even as it reproduces patriarchy, even as it metaphorically fills the vagina, also provides pleasure and stimulates the erogenous zones, as it were. A radical scission -- an intervention at the level of the physical body -- may succeed in rooting out sexual basis for the reproduction of domination in language, but in itself remains a communicative act, and thus still reiterates the mode of the phallic law. As Carles suggests, to speak from the body yet not reproduce the phallic code requires more than using a vagina as the vocal organ.
The thrust (pun intended) of the performance art piece Carles explicates is that the female sexual organ is often the channel by which her insertion as subject into patriarchal society is most starkly achieved; that is, vaginal canal is not merely a passage by which society is literally reproduced and over which control by the powers that be must be guaranteed to perpetuate their regime, but it is also an informatized conduit that conducts the semiotics of domination by the phallus, which, as Carles suggests, "represents society" in its phallologocentric guise. The bodily insertion of symbolic forms into the very critical organs of the reproductive process transfers the process of semiosis to the body itself, the order of the symbolic is indeed "written on the body" of woman, underwriting the entire process of signification for the established order of hierarchical and gendered social relations. A bond of analogy is formed between the reproductive process and the semiotic process, a union, a fusion of practices, such that one may easily be translated into the other.
This makes the irruption of the phallic -- whether it take the form of a can of processed and branded pasta, the abject slurry of the pasta itself loosed from its container, or some other form -- into the politicized womb space an Event, in Badiou's sense, yes. Carles concededs that "maybe she’s right, words are bullshit. We are just covered in feces & lil pasta Os in a sweet marinara sauce." Sociohistorical processes as the excrement of collective action; industrially manufactured commodities to sustain life as a form of living death; the symbolic itself as abject; the contingencies by which biological requirements manifest in repressive forms and authorize domination, and so forth.
But the recontextualization of the womb as a networked node also allows sexualization and subjectivation to function as processes of elaboration of shared social languages in which the relations of domination adhere. As Kristeva writes in "Some Observations on Female Sexuality" the phallus is overdetermined as a signifier in its own right to represent inscription, the marking of the law:
Many authors have noted the specific features that destine the penis to be cathected by both sexes to become the phallus, that is, the signifier of privation and lack of being, but also of desire and the desire for meaning -- all the components that make the phallus the signifier of the symbolic law. Visible and narcissistically recognized, erectile and filled with strong erogenous sensitivity, detachable and thus “culpable,” capable of being lost -- the penis is, by this fact, suited to become the medium for difference, the privileged actor in the 0/1 binarism that forms the basis of all systems of meaning (marked/unmarked), the organic maker (therefore real and imaginary) of our psychosexual computer.Carles obviously had this passage in mind in calling attention sardonically and reflexively to "my ‘liveblog’/'livevlog’ of the performance," drawing parallels between the penis as "psychosexual computer" and the technological gadget as perhaps the apotheosis of the phallic device, epitomizing the simultaneous experience of presence and absence, the fundamental lack and the effort to fill the lack with communicative gestures that only delineate desire without resolving it.
Hence, Carles is critical of the artist's efforts to introduce lalangue into her performance, which, as already accessible to digital reproduction, is always already assimilated to the phallologocentric code:
Things were pretty chill, but then she got serious and delivered some sort of manifesto that eventually broke down into weird phonetic murmurs. Think she was trying to ‘transcend’ human language, and trying to get into some animalistic jargon vibes.Carles pointedly represents her gruntings not as explosions of infantile presymbolic murmur but instead as fragmented abbreviations of common terms from digital culture: hro, p4k, bzzband, etc. Rather than transcend language and its freighted meanings, her efforts merely reinscribe the problematic of patriarchy as it replicates itself in networked society. Lalangue, semiosis are reduced to "jargon" -- the most advanced form and yet emptiest form of the symbolic, the purest instantiation of hierarchy in language.
Naturally Carles draws the only possible conclusion from the artist's being trapped in literalistic praxis: he confesses that he was "worried that she was going to cut off her clitoris to represent having ‘no more pleasure in her life’" -- in other words, that desire as embodied in ordinary language, even as it reproduces patriarchy, even as it metaphorically fills the vagina, also provides pleasure and stimulates the erogenous zones, as it were. A radical scission -- an intervention at the level of the physical body -- may succeed in rooting out sexual basis for the reproduction of domination in language, but in itself remains a communicative act, and thus still reiterates the mode of the phallic law. As Carles suggests, to speak from the body yet not reproduce the phallic code requires more than using a vagina as the vocal organ.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
4 August 2010: "Herd of homeless alts live off free food at sponsored alt events"
This post is about être-en-soi. Another probing investigation of the nature of freedom from Carles, refracted through the cloudy lens of youth subcultural behavior as it metastasizes in the streets, both literally (the youths discussed are photographed lying in a street) and figuratively, the "street" where revolutionary praxis is realized and counterhegemonic practices are made a matter of the Lebenswelt. Carles is often interest in how such practices are figured from within the subjectivities of the participants in social movements, so here he adopts the voice of a young would-be subversive to flesh out the interior spaces of incipient politicization.
One aspect Carles highlights is the way a politics of resistance is first cast as a matter of "partying" in the problematic of the novitiate left:
But tellingly, Carles situates this seemingly open-ended subjectivity within what he ominously describes as "the industry" -- a brought reconception of what earlier countercultural elements might have dubbed the System, or the Man, or the Establishment. The new subversives seek to collaborate with the "industry" and derive nourishment for their identity from within its institutions. Does this makes them quislings? Carles is obscure on this point. He has his upstart utopian declare, "I really just want to spend some time forging meaningful relationships with other people who are young, who are searching 4 the same things that I am."
But as Carles has already suggested, those "things" are already commoditized, and sheer youthfulness alone can not reverse the reification. The culture industry determines the field in which identity and subversion is conceived and contained, and the process itself is experienced as "partying" -- as a deviation from quotidian practice, despite being de facto a new instantiation of the everyday. Living in the midst of a party is the new normal, which raises the question of how such subjects experience the mundanity with which earlier generations associated the concept of "ordinary life". Is dullness now extraordinary? Carles seems to imply that the consumerist disposition that is increasingly presumed and reproduced cannot register dullness against a background of ever more insistent and perpetual novelty, and thus has no measure by which to gauge the authenticity of her being.
Instead, impoverished lives are reconfigured experientially as rich with corporate opportunity, in a cruel echo of neoliberal management pieties about labor flexibility (and the real, unmentioned precarity that they induce):
One aspect Carles highlights is the way a politics of resistance is first cast as a matter of "partying" in the problematic of the novitiate left:
It was the summer of 2k10. That’s when me and my fam started arguing a lot. I’d stay out to late partying, raving, and giving oral sex to my bffs on my parent’s front porch.... I just wanna get a job working in ‘the industry.’ Not sure which ‘the industry’ i want to work in, but probably one with a ‘party’ lifestyle.Partying stands in for the radical elevation of pleasure to the status of a guiding ethos for political struggle, for jouissance as social liberation, as the only authentic mode of being in society. This is a stark rejection of the binding ethical force of received sexual mores and familial obedience, in keeping with the efforts to reshape subjectivity outside of the forces which have traditionally circumscribed it. As Carles puts it, "There’s no such thing as ‘day’ or ‘night.’ We are truly free." That is, once we have transcendent the arbitrary polarization of opposites, we achieve true autonomy in the open field of the endless play of signifiers, and come to know the tremble of our own souls stirring in the Derridean movement of the trace and the Dylanesque rolling of the stone.
We don’t need a ‘home.’
We don’t need parents & ‘direction.’
But tellingly, Carles situates this seemingly open-ended subjectivity within what he ominously describes as "the industry" -- a brought reconception of what earlier countercultural elements might have dubbed the System, or the Man, or the Establishment. The new subversives seek to collaborate with the "industry" and derive nourishment for their identity from within its institutions. Does this makes them quislings? Carles is obscure on this point. He has his upstart utopian declare, "I really just want to spend some time forging meaningful relationships with other people who are young, who are searching 4 the same things that I am."
But as Carles has already suggested, those "things" are already commoditized, and sheer youthfulness alone can not reverse the reification. The culture industry determines the field in which identity and subversion is conceived and contained, and the process itself is experienced as "partying" -- as a deviation from quotidian practice, despite being de facto a new instantiation of the everyday. Living in the midst of a party is the new normal, which raises the question of how such subjects experience the mundanity with which earlier generations associated the concept of "ordinary life". Is dullness now extraordinary? Carles seems to imply that the consumerist disposition that is increasingly presumed and reproduced cannot register dullness against a background of ever more insistent and perpetual novelty, and thus has no measure by which to gauge the authenticity of her being.
Instead, impoverished lives are reconfigured experientially as rich with corporate opportunity, in a cruel echo of neoliberal management pieties about labor flexibility (and the real, unmentioned precarity that they induce):
Being a homeless alt enables me to live a truly on-the-go lifestyle (usually advertised by trendy mobile phones) where I am [literally] on the ground floor of relevant events across the country. Lucrative sponsorship deals enable alts like me to eat for free. In addition, u can find a lot of bread + bologna in Subway dumpsters.The lack of even a subsistence wage becomes transformed into an icon of autonomy, of the potential to be sponsored in one's bare life. Carles has discovered that the future of the middle class is as a new lumpenproletariet that cannot recognize its own marginality even as it goes scrounging and begging for favors.
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