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...