22 February 2011: "Are Crusties the most authentic alts in the world?"

This post is about Seinsgläubigkeit. In his ceaseless quest for the negation of the negation, Carles interrogates an emergent anticapitalistic movement gaining a foothold in the interstices of Western commercial culture, at the literal heart of post-Fordist neoliberalism and yet at once on the margins of that political problematic's normative tenets, flourishing in the proverbial dung heaps of a wasteful and inefficient bourgeois society that presents itself as the telos of rationalistic and bureaucratic efficiency. There are so many paradoxes spuriously generated by the discourse and praxis of "crusties", and Carles is at pains to investigate them with unstinting methodological thoroughness. "They don't really know what alt relevancy is but at the same time they don't want 'relevancy'," Carles notes, indicating the slippage in the language used to characterize the movement, if this anarchic grab bag of countercultural gestures and parasitic acts of resistance indeed constitutes one. "What do they want out of life?" he asks, hinting that twant they want is to be "out of life" -- removed from a merely ontic level of being, an impossible wish that Carles suggests is self-negating.

Carles imagines the self-definition of a "crustie" as functioning as a typological poesis for his tactic of atavistic volunteerism: "I am a human/ Hunting and gathering for food." This spurious recourse to an ersatz natural law is intended to underwrite an originalist ontology, a theory of authenticity through a bold rearticulation of supposed first principles traced to the early prehistory of human social formations. At the same time, crusties posit a mode of nongendered being beyond the biological constraints of the species: "Crust kids are not homosexual or heterosexual. They are pansexual, omnisexual, metasexual, and pre-trans-sexual." In other words, they can imagine that they reproduce their specific mode of being without recourse to the traditional modes of sexual generation.

Evoking Plato's oft-cited allegory of the cave, Carles posits that the crusties believe this simultaneous retrogression/transgression admits adherents to their movement to a closer connection to an ideal world of forms, permits them to see the Real without mediation:

While we both live in the same world
I see a world
completely different than the 1 u r trapped in
You think 'being alt' means reading the internet every day
I don't know what 'alt' even is, I am just me

Whereas ordinary individuals, living according to established and accepted mores and accommodating themselves to the status quo, mediating their subjectivity through the dominant forms of communication (i.e. the protocols of the Internet), are trapped within ideology, crusties shatter ideology and transcend the categories of contingency imposed on being that are necessitated by the failure to reject historically given constraints. Cares walks us through a series of studied contrasts ("I see some sort of weird grave / pile of crap; U see ur dream home) to indicate the rigidity of crustie thought and the vulgarness of their dialectic, incapable of rising above crude and basic oppositions.

Crusties imagine they are "just" themselves, with their being immediately and reflexively given to themselves and their consciousnesses rather than constituting, as Carles seems to suspect it must, a phenomenological problem whose solutions unfold necessarily through lived time and sustained negativity. "Maybe the crust kids are 'truly living'..." Carles offers, with more than a small trace of ironic condescension, inverting the implied belief of the crusties that "we don't get U". They are only too easy to "get," in that they have attempted to elevate being into a kind of privileged spiritual belonging denoted by the lack of material belongings.

Of course, Carles is hardly the first philosopher to meet a transcendentalized posture of authenticity with immanent critique. In The Jargon of Authenticity, German philosopher and aesthetician Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno also assailed the essentialist cant of the postwar existentialist movement and its pretenses to a privileged access to being through a modality of voluntary simplicity, along the lines of the Süddeutsche peasantry Heidegger was prone to romanticize. Clearly Carles has this passage of Adorno's in mind: "In mystical heresy, the unsatisfiable purification of the divine from myth, which loves to tremble in the gesture of deeply involved questioning, hands the divine over to whoever relates to it in any way." The philosophical attempts to elevate an essentially ineffable authenticity to the basis of real ontological as opposed to ontic status are untenable mystifications liable to warrant the institution of more openly fascistic forms of social organization. (As Adorno points out, "the worst atrocities in the concentration camps were committed by the younger sons of farmers.")

The crusties, similarly, imagine they have left the merely ontic behind -- the concerns over degrees of "alt"-ness, to name one prominent concern in Carles's weltanschauung -- and entered into a privileged state that justifies cruelty and exploitation: "The Crust Kids don't care abt ur mainstream or altstream judgment," Carles notes. They have instead instituted a quasi-radical transvaluation of all values, parodic of the Christian dispensation, in which eating the refuse and garbage of the lowest capitalist classes (the food in the dumpsters of fast-food restaurants, in this case) is indicative of spiritual purity and fitness to dictate ethics to the rest of the world. They posture as being homeless, but at the same time more at home with dasein. But as Adorno writes, "The Being of the sheltering space of shelteredness is simply derived from the necessity that man should 'make for himself' such a space."

Carles, by suggesting the crusties are "the most authentic alts" is short circuiting their self-presentation at the level of a juxtaposition of jargon, crashing terminology from incompatible ideologies -- "authentic" and "alt". The former belongs to a lapsed, anachronistic Heideggerianism; the latter to the post-Fordist elaboration of flexible and ostentatious performed lifestyles. The work of the latter is the negation of the former; the former is the alibi for the latter; each cancels out the other, leaving an aporic void, a signifying vacuum into which the crusties will inevitably disappear. Authenticity collapses on itself, into pure alterity, such that the most authentic among us must necessarily be a stranger most of all to herself.