5 November 2010: "Which costumes deserve 2 win the HRO Halloween Costume Contest?"

This post is about geist. A specter is haunting Carles, the specter of identity, the projected ghost of the self that terrifies and chases, like the phantoms of a child's cartoon which inevitably are revealed to be nothing but filmed images shining on the wall and moans and wails on a tape recording. Is that not the self in an age of hypermediation and image saturation, of inescapable identity-signification, so many gasps and screams and Munch-like reflections of oneself, deployed by capital to terrify us into further acts of spectralization, further disguises, new reflexive hauntings, new ghost chases through the mansions of our mind, searching for the real truth, the spell that will usher away the ghosts in the blinding light of the real, of the authentic...

What could be more fitting, giving these entropic conditions afflicting ontology then to put the social self's disguises against one another, to employ capital's methodology of the market to unmask itself, to set embodied memes in motion and in conflict, in a contest where to win is to lose oneself and to lose is to win a cherished distance between the interpellated identity imposed by the social factory and the lived self that exceeds the event. "Who had relevant indie costumes?" Carles asks, implying of course, the richer questions: who among us does not have a costume? Who among us dares to eschew relevance? Who can independent of independence? Is there autonomy without relevance? Is anyone independent of disguises with independence is itself a relevant costume under current relations of social production?

In posing these questions, Carles of course has in mind a canonical passage from Derrida's Specters of Marx, which he neglects to cite presumably because he expects all alert readers to have it ready-at-hand: At risk of pedantry, I will include it here nonetheless:

to understand history, that is, the event-ness of the event, must one not ... think that the loss of the body can affect the specter itself? To the point that it is then impossible to discern between the specter and the specter of the specter, the specter searching for proper content and living effectivity?

What is the ritual assumption of a costume during the Halloween holiday, itself a secularization of the spiritual holiday devoted to recognizing the saints collectively, if not a search for the appropriate specter of the specter, the search for the proper ontological content of the self, externalized and purified? Carles gets at the mystery of this search with a piquant question: "Would u rather be intimate with 'real Bethany' or 'fake Bethany'?" The implication is that there is no difference between the two: between the real and the fake is only anachrony; intimacy occurs beyond real and fake, establishing its own truth retroactively. We are always already intimate with the real, but only in retrospect, and never in the moment, in which we only see presence in all its shifting veils.