27 October 2010: "Unruly Teens are starting to die/overdose from drinking Four Loko"

This post is about the convocated precariat. Like many of his contemporaries, Carles has felt it necessary to make a public intervention on his web-based publication on the subject of caffeinated alcoholic products. His verdict: it is the latest offensive on the part of capital to squeeze productivity out of an overstretched, globalized (and demoralized) workforce by normalizing the acceleration of lived experience, associating the dizziness of transnational capital and mandated employee flexibility with the intoxication of cheap malt-liquor beverages: "Really helps out ppl in today's fast paced world". Such beverages serve a narcotizing function as well as a disciplinary one, fetishizing speed and oblivion, or rather speeding toward oblivion, thus mimicking, one must note with some irony, the careening, chaotic course of the entire mechanism of capitalism.

Neoliberalism, Carles, suggests, seems to have backed itself into a corner by rendering the lives of the various underclasses, from the banlieues of France to the shanty towns of Lagos to the ghettos of American cities such as New York and Chicago, impoverished beneath the level at which they can be successfully exploited, while systematically stripping away aspects of the welfare state that would have serve to facilitate the reproduction of their exploitable labor power. "Do u think they were 'weak' cuz they couldn't handle Four Loko?" Carles asks mockingly. Of course they were not. The precariat, to use a convenient neologism recently coined by Leftist critics of post-Fordist labor practices and neoliberal tenets of governance, were already weakened by their socioeconomic conditions and their distanciation from the state as such, which has denatured them as a class even as it has concentrated them in dismaying and unconscionable circumstances of immiseration.

Carles seems to have in mind Spinoza's ethical injunction toward self-preservation and its fundamental expression of the irresolvable tensions between the individual and the collective, the subjectivity demanded by the state and the degree to which that is experienced as a "care of the self" rather than a form of biopolitical repression: Spinoza writes in the Ethics:

Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it demands that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage, what is really useful to him, want what will really lead man to a greater perfection, and absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can. This, indeed, is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part.

But can a community, particularly one fabricated by institutional distress or neglect, constitute a One, an entity that can pursue its own self-preservation with one mind and one will? Is the mass unified or several? Can it be psychologized as an individual, with an individual's liability to certain addictive pathologies? How does that affect the possibilities for liberatory intersubjectivity?

The makers of the liberating/enslaving alcoholic beverage, Carles believes, acknowledges the conundrum: "'we can't control whatever the eff they do.'" This even as the popularity of the beverage implies a conformity, a mutual recognition, albeit a distorted one, of interest. But is this simply a refutation of rhizomatic organizations of resistance, a reterritorialization of assemblages of addiction? More importantly, can the consumption of intoxication substances be understood as a subtraction, a specifically political praxis of nonengagement and the substitution of pleasure for the more traditional goals of power?

Carles reconceptualizes the problematic with a deceptively simple question: "Is Four Loko for tweens and minorities?" Carles asks -- for precisely the marginalized and disenfranchised? The implication, I believe is obvious. The biopolitics of reproducing flexible labor demands a facility with abstracted pleasures, with paradoxically blank yet hyperaware states, conditions of frantic passive activity. "Should u just do tons of blow and drink rubbing alcohol instead of doing Four Loko?" Carles asks, to indicate that there is, in fact, no alternative. We will experience the false euphoria of hedonic self-abnegation; we will replenish ourselves for alienated labor through alienated joy. We will march singly as one. In one way or another, Loko is something we are all forced to consume.

26 October 2010: "OP-ED: Snacks the Cat is tired of vibes being harshed"

This post is about the struggle for recognition. In this trenchant yet poignant interrogation of the discontents of intersubjectivity in a socioeconomic matrix given to interpellating individuals in isolation and shaping and delimiting consciousness with the so-called rational prerogatives of pure self-interest, Carles draws on the work of Axel Honneth, a follower of German social theorist Jürgen Habermas, to explore the consequences of neglect in social relations of structured care. Challenging the species-ist assumptions of many traditional moralists, Carles elects to pursue his ethical inquiry by means of imagining himself as a domesticated feline more or less abandoned in a caged world and presented with no justification for the improvisational Geworfenheit on which the animal finds he must rely. "I don't get any authentic attention or love," the cat comments, a remark that ironically speaks to the human condition.

But Carles must assuredly be deploying the jargon of authenticity with an arch, critical purpose. As Adorno wrote of fascistic uses of such verbiage,

the sacred quality of the authentics' talk belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where -- for temporary lack of any other available authority -- its language resemble s the Christian. Prior to any consideration of particular content, this language molds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal.

Thus in the circumstances Carles references, Snacks the cat enjoys no particular or immanent dasein but instead voices demands that demonstrate its utter subjection and the degree to which its thinking has been preconditioned to subservience. It is not without irony that Carles has Snacks proclaim, "I honestly don't have too much to say." The gurgled mewling of the real-life Snacks is in truth not much different from the aggrieved squeals for the master's attention that Carles narrates for the cat, which in turn, the implication appears to be, are not all that different from our own pursuits of social recognition. "Things aren't going too well and I'm not very happy," Snacks complain. Welcome to the existential club. Echoing the insights of Sartre and Camus into the absurdity of life, Snacks notes that "Maybe the point of life isn't to be happy. Maybe it is just about enduring pain & sadness."

Carles links this dissipated posture of weltschmerz and angst to a general atmosphere of social neglect and restriction cultivated by elites for whom Bethany Cosentino, as a much-heralded "alt", is representative -- an environment in which the odor of hallucinogens mixes with the branded products geared toward supplying empty calories and artifical energy ("The place smells like dank, there are empty Mountain Dew cans everywhere"). As Honneth argued,

The forms of practical maltreatment in which a person is forcibly deprived of any opportunity freely to dispose over his or her own body represent the most fundamental sort of personal degradation. This is because every attempt to gain control of a person's body against his or her will -- irrespective of the intention behind it - causes a degree of humiliation that impacts more destructively than other forms of respect on a person's practical relation-to-self.

Thus it is no surprise that Snacks's revolution takes a decidedly coprophiliac form: "Sometimes we poop everywhere just to cause trouble." A primitive attempt to reassert bodily control through fundamental acts of disobedience, but even these fail to distract a preoccupied ruling class, absorbed in its own pleasure seeking ("they just laugh at us because they are stoned").

But as Snacks turns to despair, the language of its misery are intentionally designed to evoke a far more optimistic ethical positionality. "I am cloaked in darkness," Snacks exclaims, which can only make one think of Levinas's words in Existence and Existents:

When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not 'something.' But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence.

In the absence of the master, Snacks can become one with the presence that reaches beyond the ontological. Only in the absence of presence can Snacks really be...

25 October 2010: "Taylor Swift writes song abt how John Mayer 'hit it & quit it' just 2 generate buzz"

This post is about the phallic phase. In Lacan's seminal article, "The Phallic Phase and the Subjective Import of the Castration Complex," the French psychoanalytical thought leader made an important contribution to the understanding of the development of female subjectivity, underscoring the particular peculiaraties of female psycho-ontogenesis with regard to female children's necessarily imperfect relationship to the castration complex, which for male children ushers them into the period of tentatively balanced psychic organization that allows for a self-recognition of identity. Through an analysis a representative celebrity entering an explicitly transitional phase, both biologically and in her career, Carles is concerned to investigate whether Lacan's contentions about the genital organization of infantile sexuality still hold under postmodern, highly mediated conditions in which the production of subjectivity may have escaped from the foundry of the hyperrepressive nuclear family to instead be forged by a society-wide repressive tolerance. Or, as Carles frames the question, "Now that Taylor Swift admits to <3ing peen, does this mean she is a slutwaver?"

The question is not an idle one. The phallic stage as experienced in the individual female psyche, Carles suspects, has become a culture-wide phenomenon led by female pop stars who simulate the throes of somatic dystrophy and the dissimulation of identity. Swift, Carles sagely notes, "is dealing with hornie bros who just want to 'get off' but don't really want much emotional attachments" through an barely controlled experiment in sublimation, producing a record album that ostensibly processes and distantiates her passage through the phallic stage almost a decade after the fact. Not coincidentally, the album is preoccupied with information that Swift must at once keep secret and share ("She tried to be all 'secret' about it being abt John Mayer even though the song is called "Dear John.""). The paradox that proclaims its absence everywhere is precisely the unconscious, omnipresent yet elusive, invisible but overdetermined.

It is not too much of an exaggeration to claim, as Carles seems to, that Swift's work is everywhere haunted by the phallus, and that her own artistic efforts are pantomimes of the castration complex in which she occupies the position of both subject and object. That is, the album is, as Carles explains, "abt how she is 'becoming a woman.'"

But what can this mean?  As Lacan himself notes, "The Other is not simply the locus in which truth stammers. It deserves to represent that to which woman is fundamentally related."  Can any truth be spoken about female subjectivity, and more important, can the subject identifying as a woman know anything about itself? Lacan claims women serve as the organizing void around which male metaphysical delusions can be structured: "So that the soul may come into being, woman is differentiated from it right from the beginning. She is called woman (on /a dit-femme) and defamed (difdme). The most famous (fameux) things that have come down to us about women in history are, strictly speaking, what one can say that is infamous (infamant)." Swift's destiny was always already to be defamed, and the transgressions committed against her in the public eye by various male aggressors are automatically inverted by the public so that she is recognized as the persecutor of every man's longing for transcendence and peace. She is "just another empty female" as Carles puts it, or to use Lacanian nomenclature she is "Woman barred," for "as soon as Woman is enunciated by way of a not-whole, the W cannot be written."

So it is no surprise to find Carles noting dryly, "Glad I am a bro." 

17 October 2010: "Protecting myself from society's toxic vibes [via gas mask]"

This post is about precarity. As in many of his writings, Carles is here concerned with the ways in which neoliberalism has stripped subjects of the very presumption of security as an anchoring concept around which to develop a reflexive sense of self. Instituted everywhere instead is an interpellation of subjectivity oriented toward radical flexibility, toward a certain malleable posture toward capital, a willingness to be remolded as it demands, a kind of "just-in-time" subjectivity that permits docile bodies to be adapted and embrace the various challenges capital needs them to solve in order to generate profit within the system. Such a subject has no intrinsic "needs" so much as a need to be inculcated with the needs of the moment, a deep imbrication with the processes and tempo of the fashion industry and its distribution channels.

Carles, in this post, has chosen to elaborate this thesis in response to an image of a particularly tragic case study, a youth who voluntarily dons the garb of the military industrial complex for which too many young people have been the "cannon fodder," to borrow the incendiary language of the Quebec Women’s Federation. "I must protect myself from toxic vibes," Carles imagines this figure thinking, but the thought itself already bears the trace of toxicity, or the toxic movement of the trace as it is brought to bear in the figure's epistemological reflexiveness. Can he think without adopting the toxic tropes with which neoliberalism has outfitted him, literally and figuratively, as it were? "This uniform is not 4 the sake of personal branding," he says, which is to say that is precisely what it is for, though the statement is not ironic nor sarcastic. It is the consequence of living an impossible contradiction forced upon us, to be uniform in our commitment to pursuing personal uniqueness through the detritus of mass culture and meme manufacturing.

The subject, in his wariness, fails to see the inadequancy of his protection, how that is part of the toxin delivery system. Carles hints at it in this passage:

We meet in a safe, dark environment
which has been aesthetically treated to
keep us safe

The safety is a prepackaged illusion, another contrivance that bears with it the impetus of constant flux. Carles suggests here that safety has become a form of blindness, an aesthetics of effacement, of nullification.

And for precisely this reason the figure in the photograph manifestly lacks the courage to adopt the necessary fatal strategy: "I wear this gas mask 2 stay alive in our toxic ass society," he confesses, when in truth life is simply not possible in such a society, mask or no mask. And this is to say nothing of the psychic death we all suffer from the masks we are forced to wear and exchange in such rapid succession with the gyrations of the global economy. The figure believes "I will live 4ever escaping with my bros who participate in my relevant counter-culture lifestyle", but instead voluntarily lives an undead existence, like capital itself, preying on the living impulses of others in the past and future and recapitulating it in nihilism articulated in the most trivial form: a so-called "life-style."