Desire of Another

Twice, Cardi B has built her career on making herself not just being wealthy, a status-icon as the common pop star, but by becoming wealth itself. Identifying with others coinage-printers, the Fuggers or de Medicis, Cardi B’s music videos consistently portray her as being currency itself. In Bodak Yellow, she parties in the Gulf, crossing the desert back and forth between America and the Gulf, identifying herself with transnational economic flows - oil. In Money, she is again and again the object of value itself. She’s dressed in gold, displayed behind glass to be viewed and objectified by the ruling class. She’s gilded, sitting in the bank vault itself. She’s surrounded by a cadre of bankers, her backup dancers dressed like bank tellers and making it rain from her. 

Financialization of the economy has at its core, the process of securitization whereby existing pluralities of assets are repackaged into standardized assets which can be traded easily. Much in the way that stocks allow for a uniform system of investment into diverse economic entities, securities allow for various forms of asset-backed value to be traded and speculated upon. This creates additional economic space, where more and more value is derived not from the thing in itself, but the transactions and movement of those things in itself.

Orange Caramel’s A-ing video directly considers the nature of desire in relation to alien narratives. The music video shows the awakening of desire via the song, its name showing the obvious topic, through the narratives given in childhood. The group members dress in modified versions of childish costumes, portraying various characters and tropes from traditional children’s media, symbolizing the protagonist of the video awakening herself via these narratives. Portrayed here is the entering-into that desire requires. As Andrea Long Chu pointed out, desire is not only nonconsensual, it’s completely directed by forces which are alien and outside oneself. The girl enters into narratives in order to run her libido, as her desire itself is not of her, but both pre-exists and post-exists her own personhood and intelligence. It’s via this that so much of desire is submissive, giving into the flow in which one finds themselves.

Clothes descend from on high as complete signs of meaning before they’re taken upon one’s person. The person emerges from the dressing room, now packaged into a set of meanings, a language of being assembled like the symbology of a blazon or a Poundian ideogram, thereby making the complete “character” of their personhood. This form of fashion is most directly shown in Versace’s adoption of the Medusa head, a symbol long associated with a similar form of transaction, the head descending downwards as a sign of affixing, as clothes affix the person into context by situation them into a set of social signs. Clothing taste is in this way linked to desire. The individual choice is based on forces which are wholly unindividual, with the individual’s expression being the junction-point of this flow, between the input and output, where they emerge as a being to symbolize the becoming their desire and status has situated them in.

Requiem for a Dream makes this explicit. The characters navigate their arcs by navigating in relation to desires outside themselves. The three drug dealers desire for a fantasy of fulfillment, finding a societal script for themselves, while the old woman wishes for a more direct version of this, fulfilling a literal script by appearing on television. Their desire is divorced from their personhood in the ending, where they find themselves caught up and destroyed in their attempts to fulfill these desires, ending up interacting with scripts not-desired. They retreat inwards, becoming infantile as their minds play movies of their fantasies while their bodies return to fetal positions.

Hayek’s calculation problem leads to an underground and fascinating topic in philosophy, which is the individualist reaction to the religious narratives of history so often taken for granted. By positing society as being wholly made of individuals, the question of origin for larger systems ends up leading to neurology. Like the mind, the network of isolated nodes interact in concert to produce system more complex than themselves in isolation. Adding to this, flowing between the nodes, in pathways of transmission, are desires, the electrical sparks traveling through the various pathways to excite the various nodes. It’s this interaction which forms the move of society,  beings situated within becomings in order to drive the grander systems of which they’re a part.