12 September 2010: "Justin Bieber tries 2 be alt, buys wayfarers at WalMart, seem too big for his face/lil nose"

This post is about the colophon of doubt. Ostensibly a meditation on a pair of ill-fitting sunglasses worn by a young musician propelled to superstardom by the leveraged network effects of the internet mechanism of cultural distribution, this photo-essay is in fact an interrogation of the exploded spectral dimension, of what it means to see and be seen, elevated exponentially by unthinkable degrees of fame -- that is, the erotics and the vicissitudes of being both the subject and the object of the gaze within the welter of celebrity. Carles posits the question of which Justin Bieber is representative: "By being a tween sensation
Will I get ‘fucked up’ [via psychologically]"? Is the castration anxiety inherent in the gaze likely to annihilate the ego-ideal or fortify it? The stare of the millions of Medusas -- what choice does one have but to don reflective shades to send that reifying specularity back its multiple sites of origin?

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan captured something of the dilemma represented by Justin Bieber in the conclusion to the Four Fundamental Concepts: "I love you, but inexplicably, I love in you something more than you -- the objet petit a -- I mutilate you." Carles recasts this into his own telegraphic style and terminology: "Feeling alone in my tweenage dream ... New feelings inside of me / my brain / my body .... Scared ... Sad ... Alone... Just wish my sunglasses fit my face." The idea of proportion, Carles recognizes haunts us all in the attentional economy, particularly with respect to, in this case, literal blinders -- visual filters to block out the infiltration of unwanted images, undesired data, spectral mirages -- the Other? the analyst? -- which have become necessary to approximate a stable sense of the self in the midst of the flux of overwhelming data. We are as Carles points out, deeply ambivalent about our necessary blinders, about the unconscious and its strategies of repression that permit us to function more or less acceptably within social formations: Carles repeats the koan "h8 u wayfarers" mesmerically, hypnotically, to summon something of the self-imposed filter's psychic power to both repress and structure phenomonlogically the flow of stimuli, to make consciousness, as it were, possible. We hate that which we necessarily desire, and this registers as an apprehension or anxiety of ill-fittingness -- of being forced to wear the costume which in fact is the essence of our self. Without the filter we can only feel "Sad/dead on the inside" as Carles explains. But that inner necrology makes possible an externalized ontic positionality. That is to say, our identity is our best disguise. It functions as a boundary, a rejection of psychic materials, not as a synthesis.

Lacan frames this condition, the problem of human onotlogy, this way: "I see from only one point, but in my existence, I am looked at from all sides.... The split that concerns us is not the distance that derives from the fact that there are forms imposed by the world toward which the intentionality of phenomenological experience directs us.... The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the thrust of our experience [pun possibly intended], namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety." Carles describes that "strange contingency" with the impossible if not paradoxical formulation "Going viral every day" and links it expressly to the non-reproductive thanatopic libidinous energy conducted by and through the gaze, the implicit promise of "‘beejes’ on the reg." But anxiety frames [pun intended] the self constructed by the desiring gazes of unseen and uncounted others and denies the perspective necessary to more or less successfully mediate the distance between self and unself, between conflicting poles of ego organization and orientation, to echo the constituitive méconnaissance without denaturing it in the petered-out trickle of circumscribed maturity.

Thus Carles suggests for Bieber the doom that confronts us all:

1 day I will grow in2 my wayfarers
I will be a man
I will be happie.

We will become synonymous with the limits we have set on our sensuality; on our intake of stimuli. We will associate this constricted vision with masculinity, with power within and flowing through a patriarchal matrix of relations, and with the Word in the phallo-logos cathexis. And we will mistake this psychic attrition as contentment, as the apotheosis of our being rather than the figurative, if not literal, extermination of our soul. "Sad/dead on the inside" indeed.