23 September 2010: "Is your personal brand compromised when you attend a relevant alternative event with your partner?"

This post is about interpassivity. How do the social relations we adopt/adapt function as mechanisms of control rather than agency or liberation? Can we empower ourselves autonomously to foster the kinds of relations that will not sends us careening in to the traps prepared for us by the post-Fordist economy? Are the alternatives (obviously a key term for Carles) -- the vaunted flexibility required of us by neoliberalism -- tempered and balanced by the terms of traditional intimate relationships, or does it prompt us to experience such relations as unduly constricting, as further hedges on the ersatz autonomy promised us by the prevailing regime of power? Carles frames this question with his usual adroitness:

The alternative bro is growing up
entering relationships
still into buzzbands, still into ‘being alt’
but the pressure to mainstreamify
and find a ‘partner’
yet I still have my dreams
big dreams
of being relevant, buzzworthy, blogworthy

The legacy structures of private-sphere associations here register as a burden, a dismantling of dreams rather than supplying of their underlying form. Instead of the wish to considate private recognition of the unique self, the postmodern subject seeks "buzzworthiness" -- the allure of public attention, fame, of celebrity distributed through the nodes of the networked socioeconomic matrix.

In a sense, all of Carles's writings are concerned with the same subject: the inevitable need brought on by modern society of having to bow before the reality principle and surrender aspirations of pursuing an "alt" lifestyle well beyond the confines of postadolescence. The mood expressed in this adage of Carles's: "Sorta just hope life works itself out."

In premodern social formations, this transition was not nearly as acute and traumatic, simply because few had the opportunity to conceive of an alternative to the traditional folkways in which they were by and large embedded. Few experienced the luxury of leisure time as we understand it; they were content to annihiliate their surplus hours of non-productive time in bestial pursuits: revelry, fornication, intoxication, and so on. Some of this atavistically adheres to the fabled alt lifestyle, as Carles notes: "I am the modern alternative bro. I used to attend relevant concerts with a few bros, getting fucked up, standing in the front of the stage." The frequent nods to fantasies of exchanging sexual partners reflects this as well.

Only with the advent of modernity, and capitalism's development of broad-based markets for consumer goods and its elaboration of the circuit of capital that requires workers to also be consumers -- cannibalistically feeding on the fruits of their own expropriated labour time -- does the particular problematic of the "mainstream" or the "masses" emerge, along with the temporal component of the interpellated subject's inevitable surrender to it.

It remains unclear whether Carles wishes to advocate a rear-guard action against the reality principle, or whether he sees the masses who have bowed to it as a kind of Big Other whose existence is presumed but never pinned down. Carles's many posts are often, in fact, a search for the diametrically opposed Big Other, the quest for the ultimate "alt" individual who embodies all the implications of the so-called hipster lifestyle as it is elaborated online in a variety of memes and marketing ploys. (This particular post's reference to the "Altest Couple on Earth" and his earlier explanation of his desire to find this couple typifies this aspect of his writings.) The implied existence of this ultimate "alt" -- pure alterity, the Other with an emphatically capital O -- underwrites the submission to the reality principle in fact, as well as the toleration of the unmistakable cynicism inherent to much of allegedly alternative cultural product -- "buzzbands" and so forth. Somewhere a real hipster buys into all such pabulum; in rejecting it ourselves we reconcile ourselves to the mainstream without believing our abnegation will destroy the very possibility of an alternative.