This post is about nonplaces. Liminal spaces. Interzone. The interstices. Carles wonders where these mythical, near utopian (or are they the alternative to utopia, the alt beyond "a 'super alt' place," as Carles identifies the borough of Brooklyn?) might be located. Are they to be found in that most reviled of locales, "The_Suburbs," as he inscribes them, at once neither city nor country; both inhabited and vacated in a cycle whose periodicity can be closely monitored and calibrated; colonized by global multi-national entities but routinely governed by the most hyperlocal of Nimbyisms?
Carles suggests in this post that suburbia is as much a state of mind as a literal place, a diachronic rite of passage made synchronic, concrete, tangible, a social fact. As such he remains radically skeptical of the possibility of a emergent urbanism that would would contribute to the structuration of a postcapitalist subject: "Now that Brooklyn is 'gentrified' / retailed-out, will there be a new alt city?" he asks, rephrasing essentially a question he had already posed earlier, "do yall <3 convenience, or do u want to 'stay authentic' even when ur a consumer." Authenticity is now fatally imbued in the problematic of consumerism itself and is susceptible to no stable definition outside of the matrix of practices associated with the buying and selling of acutely branded products. The psycho-conceptual space for the articulation of a subject that would remain reflexively accessible to the citizen who inhabits such locales as the ones Carles describes must always already have been colonized, or rather "gentrified," by the "chain stores / restaurants / grocery centres / Whole Foodses" -- that is prepared by the assumptions embodied and embedded in these brands to receive a superstructure of axiomatic values. In the new Convenience is authenticity in the social relations of consumption now elaborated in bourgeois enclaves, and the vehement denials of this on the level of symbolic gesture only serves to confirm the underlying truth of this equivalence.
"Do u prefer the cost, convenience, and experience of a standardized franchised experience?" Carles asks, though the answer is inescapably obvious, that the preference has been the a priori for the subject's capability for self-knowledge. Convenience has become epistemology; we know only that which is easy, though its ease is made to be felt as an accomplishment of the individual in conjunction with society rather than the very grounding condition of the individual.
It follows that convenience is the effect rather than the cause of suburbanization, a post hoc moral imperative, though Carles's description of the how the infiltration of brands into everyday life proceeded -- "(via convenience)" -- is arguably ambiguous. But are chain stores nonplaces, in anthropologist Marc Augé's sense of the term, and thereby to be held culpable for the annihilation of identity? Or do these chain stores and their "gimmicky franchises" foreground the neoliberal assault on identity as such, and prepare the populace for biopolitical acts of resistance? It may be that only by inhabiting the chain-store subjectivity, only by inverting convenience and emnracing the dis-ease of ease, can one stake an oppositional dialectic, fashioning the countertactics that can redistribute the struggle to new battlefields much closer to home. It turns out that Carles parting shot -- "Does this look like 'utopia' 2 u?" -- is not as ironic as it at first appears.
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