/lit/ - Literature

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Anonymous Mon Mar 2 23:52:37 2020 No.14823871 [Reply] [Original]

Let us try now to understand the "incel" as one of the characteristic forms that the Subject takes in relation to the phenomenal structure of lived experience in late capitalism.

In particular, I would like to suggest that one of the most striking triumphs of the digital culture industry--the Dating App--demands of its audience a relation to their own sexuality that, whatever their place in the fictitious "Sexual Marketplace" that they create through submission to it (incels "per se," only with the most self-consciousness), is essentially the alienated self-relation of the incel.

The self-made slaves of the Sexual Marketplace will feel resentment when, robbing them of the sensuous particulars proper to their apparent station, I put the most willfully enraged and jealous man on a level with those members of our youth who think themselves most liberated and wizened to the ways of modern love. But I want to say that those very sensuous particulars have already lost their particularity--which is to say, their quality of belonging necessarily to one human life-narrative as opposed to another--in the artificial fragmentation imposed upon their sequence by the temporal structure of the Dating App Experience--an episodic structure it shares with the television series, and perhaps most clearly with the pseudo-cinematic Prestige Television (with which it also shares a contemporary cultural ascendancy).

The television provided in this respect a crucial antecedent for the phenomenal structure of the Internet as a whole. (The Dating App shares, of course, in this general structure of the digital experience; its special power to illuminate this structure proceeds from the way it bluntly subsumes the phenomenal structure that purports to be most different from it--that of the primeval sexual act--to its own.) One knows precisely when a book, a concert, a movie, begins, and when it ends. Sure enough, a successful specimen of any of these is likely to make one feel as if "transported" to another, a more perfect, world. But, as for the most successful books, movies, and concerts, one discovers later that it was as if the transport had only taken one further into oneself. That is because the structure of that experience has become part of the larger narrative that is a human life, thereby enlarging the humanity of that life. One may reread, rewatch, or relisten, but, as we all know only too well, to do so has the ethereal quality of "reliving" any past experience. This is because the experiencing subject already contains the structure of the experience.

The abiding presence of the television series, of the Dating App, of the Internet--of a hundred million unrealized experiences and the hundred million faceless individuals who might inhabit them--is another matter entirely.

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