on the possibility of critique

The celebrity seduces, and every seduction must be taken seriously. For it is never the known and familiar pleasure, but the promise of an unknown pleasure, that seduced; even, perhaps, the pleasure of the unknown. Happiness is the name for this promise of pleasure. Every age has its own happiness, its own seductions: these are felt everywhere in the suspension of their realization, but recognized, if at all, only at the peripheries. Thus the celebrity comes to us in dreams.

Yet these dreams can be interpreted only in the sobriety of philosophical reflection. Hence the strange power of the music video, of music television (music television, the vision of music from afar — an unfathomed dialectical subtlety hides here): that odd companion to my adolescence. Not just sober revelry, Apollo and Dionysus, the tragedy packaged, made consumable: like those candied apples that in my childhood my mother forbade me to eat.

Brian Wilson composed “California Girls” while tripping for the first time. The most powerful utopian vision is never subtle, yet it is born of terror. And perhaps psychedelic drugs, at least in late capitalism, had little to do with exploring consciousness, and everything to do with dangling at the threshold between the divinatory and the childish — like Alice in Wonderland, the Nutcracker, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory— bringing to its fulfillment a  motif born in the furnaces of industrial capitalism. The ground beneath our feet, the walls of our house, becomes edible. The commodities begin to dance. And if the Christmas sweet, hidden away in cardboard chambers and meted out with the days of the month, was the only form of eschatology that could insinuate itself into an absolutely secular upbringing, then perhaps only this remains of the Christian God: a sugar daddy.

Uncanny, the uncandy. A bad pun, no doubt: but it gives a name to this feeling that grips me as I watch this video for the Nth time, trying to trace out the slight, strange, sinuous convulsions in that resonance machine of a soul that has already been infiltrated, and left tender, by world spirit.

Fine, fresh, fierce — the triune aspect not only of the commodity come to life, and the flesh turned into commodity, but a moment of revelation. Not to be ignored is the contradictory nature of these attributes: what could be at once refined and savage, fresh and yet processed, new to the world like a child and yet already inducted into its ways. At once consumer and consumed. Hence the numbing repetition of a candied-over fellation: oral intercourse, in which the delectable becomes delector, is the iconic gesture of late capitalism.