6 January 2011: "The Art of the Sympathy Meme: Going from Homeless 2 Viral"

This post is about unheimlichkeit. What does it mean to have a home, Carles wonders in a lengthy disquisition about the sudden prominence of a homeless man named, curiously enough, Ted Williams, who once worked in the media as an announcer being returned to the kleig lights' glare as a human-interest story on account of his eloquent immiseration. In what ways is this man's plight representative of the soul's quest for its ultimate home, on the plane of ideal forms? What kind of eloquence, what pitch of our profane voice will open heaven's gates? Carles suspects the voice in our hearts speaks the crabbed language of guilt, and regards the internet as an enormous conspiracy to liberate us from that Schuldgefühl, which once purified our souls and prepared them for a religiously inspired afterlife:

The truth is most people who are 'successful' in a middle class way feel a little bit guilty that they have more than others. Usually, they can find some sort of release by 'going to church' or maybe 'dropping off some old clothes / canned goods at a local donation station', but in the modern world, you don't have to 'share' anything more than a hyperlink/video embed.

In the contemporary Lebenswelt, Carles suggests, mediated network proliferation has replaced the decidedly low-tech modes of networking facilitated by ecclesiastical organization. "Seems like every major network 'wanted a piece of him,' " Carles notes slyly, gesturing toward the threat implicit in the homeless man's rise to symbolic stature as a "meme" of symapthetic piety. "I feel like a better person now that I have 'shared' Ted Williams with u," he declares, suggesting the means by which sentimental recognitions can be activated within technologically empowered and engridded rhizomes to amplify the interpolated self's recognition of itself and suffuse that reflexivity with mediated pleasure. The misery of others can thereby be translated into onanistic self-enjoyment with ecumenical overtones, as well as therapeutic undertones. The care of the self, by means of sensitivity to the suffering of others, albeit at a safe, digitized protective distance. And in the meantime, actual carework remains deficient and underincentivized in networked capitalism; the simulacrum of caring and the broadcast of that simulation is much more rewarding and lucrative, both for the media companies that control the networks and for the personal brands involved in making idea "viral."

Carles dramatizes this process of mediatization of affective labor:

His sign claimed that he had a 'golden radio voice', so I offered him a Taco Bell taco in exchange for a few lines. He delivered. I took out my camera and asked him to re-create the process

Thus the man's suffering -- already made metonymic with his unlikely voice -- is monetized, rendered into currency, made fungible, readily replicable through being recorded. Like all exploited workers under capitalism, in order to live, to eat even the degraded and indifferent victuals manufactured by corporate food-service concerns like Taco Bell, one must enact and embrace one's suffering, perform it repeatedly as ordered.

The rapid and secular transmission of such homiletic anecdotes has, of course, upended the hierarchy by which religion once monitored and disciplined wayward souls and established the presence of the divine within them, as Paul declared in this passage from Ephesians, to which Carles delicately alludes:

That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.

This injunction to know the divine as a kind of in-filling of grace, as a recognition that "passeth knowledge," may be metaphorically understood as that feeling of being "at home" without having to seek it, a kind of reflexive certainty that descends upon one.

The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud famously discussed this feeling and secularized it entirely in his essay on the Uncanny, transforming it into a fleeting awareness of unconscious impulses rather than the intimations of the divine at work in humble aspects of the quotidian. Freud chooses to focus on "ingeniously constructed dolls and automata" as one particular instanciation of the uncanny. What is Ted Williams, once he begins to perform his suffering, but one such automaton, and what is the viral spread of his performance but an attempt to disavow, through sheer ubiquity, the uncanniness of his misery? Because in his homelessness he invokes our own existential condition, our mortality, our lack of certainty about our destiny, our lack of self-understanding, which we systematically deny with material comforts.

Freud notes the uncanniness of the "unintended repetition" but Carles demonstrates here how it has spread to compelled, then uncontrollable, repetitions: "What if I told u that I had a solution 2 end homelessness?
Let's help homeless people go viral."
What Carles hints at here is how homelessness itself is the result of viral dissemination, which spreads the uncanniness of repetition mechanically and overwhelmingly, the tools for the replication in all of our hands yet none of us seemingly responsible for making a meme too much present. Homelessness everywhere, even in the heart of our homes, even in our hearts themselves.