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.
Whoa
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