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."