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.