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.