THE THREE PILLARS

At the terminus of American consumer culture, where every purchase is simultaneously identity, position, and data, emerges a figure whose consumption cannot be archived. The cultural apparatus in him failed to boot. His consumption (if it can be called that) is metabolic. The objects he loves are objects the culture has finished loving.

He lives downstream of intention, choices are unprocessed arrivals. A product enters his apartment and exhausts itself as an object there. The Pac Sun Avant Garde is the shape that remains when the transactional apparatus around an ordinary American life has run to completion and no one has shown up to collect the meaning.

The Pac Sun Avant Garde, although archetypally male, is genderless: the beach jock with the board shorts, the Brandy Melville regular on her thirteenth identical tank, and the (any pronouns) teenager fluent in the entire vocabulary of their own commodification all inhabit the same relation to the figure, but none of them can claim the name themselves because the name only arrives from the outside.

The aesthetics that have approached this territory have approached it through strategy. Conscious genericness²; the model consumer whose interior has been wholly furnished by the market³ ; the tactical refusal of digital visibility⁴. These are postures available to a subject who has registered what the stakes are. The Pac Sun Avant Garde lives upstream of the stakes. He gravitates toward the dated café whose coffee is burnt and where no one there has asked him to perform any relation to the coffee.

Demand is the burden he cannot operate under; his consumption registers, to every system built on signification, as the static hum of a signal too varied. The model assumes the rare event is a signal pointing at a latent preference. In him the rare event is the floor of the distribution, uncorrelated with the routine and uncorrelated with itself. He is the case the model was built to exclude as noise.

He is to the regime of signs what noise is to music.

Three pillars define the Pac Sun Avant Garde:

I: The Pac Sun Avant Garde achieves selfhood without lack.

Ordinary development proceeds by exit from immediacy. The infant begins in undifferentiated merger with its surround, in a pre-symbolic space⁵ in which language has not yet carved out the category of absence. Separation from the primordial unity with the caregiver installs the machinery of lack: the recognition of want, the apparatus of desire, the pursuit of a coherent self through the objects one has chosen to acquire. The result is the thing we now call lifestyle.

Across the apartment building from him lives the figure who pays forty dollars for a tin of olive oil in a squeeze bottle and tracks single-origin pour overs across three countries, and who brings along a different color Trader Joe's tote bag on every grocery excursion. Each purchase in their life is a small promise, broken at the moment of fulfillment, to restore a wholeness that was surrendered at the threshold of language⁶. Their consumption is powered by the gap between themselves and their objects. They will die inside this gap.

The Pac Sun Avant Garde has bypassed the machinery. The infant inhabits the pre-symbolic space where meaning has not yet arrived; he inhabits it as meaning has been used up. His is a post-symbolic indifference. What Freud named the oceanic feeling⁷, the dissolution of the boundary between self and world, is for him the ordinary weather of a Tuesday.

The system of objects runs on artificial scarcity⁸. Consumption requires that certain goods be held just out of reach, that certain milks be made scarce by where they are stocked, that certain bottles be rendered legible only to certain buyers willing to pay more for the gift of being seen. The 7Select milk at 7Eleven exists outside this economy entirely. It has been released from all the ways a milk can be held. Available at any hour, requiring no waitlist, no insider knowledge, no cachet, the 7Select has achieved the dignity of the object whose cultural work is finished. The Pac Sun Avant Garde drinks it.

Does your gut distinguish between a Big Mac and organic kale?

Want requires an absence, and in him absence has never been carved.He desires outwards, productively, generating the object in the act of flowing towards it. The digestive tract continues to operate regardless of the quality of what it has been given.

The Men's Health Home Workout Bible occupies the coffee table. The spine is cracked in several places and the pages are dog-eared from use. He performs the exercises in the order illustrated, at the repetitions prescribed, every evening, without skipping or embellishment. Another reader would find in the book the promise of a future body, a horizon toward which the present body strains. For him there is the instruction and the flesh that receives it; what looks like discipline is the collapse of the interval between the verb and the motion that answers it.

In the economy of lack, the perfect body is prefigured in tomorrow, transformation always a horizon one approaches. He dissolves it through his communion with the text as a physical object, wearing out rather than shattering. The Men's Health Home Workout Bible accomplishes, without knowing it, what scripture has always aspired to: the unity of word and flesh with the intercession of interpretation foreclosed.

II. The Pac Sun Avant Garde metabolizes abundance.

Everything accumulates; new storefronts, new platforms, new colorways, new subscription tiers. Every season a collection. Every day a notification. America has drowned in its own abundance, and the deluge has become so total that conscious selection has drowned inside it.

Each ecosystem develops its custodians. The ocean receives the oil spill and the dead fish with the same salt. The forest floor receives the redwood and the discarded couch with the same fungus. Once abundance crosses a threshold, metabolism becomes an environmental necessity. Fungi appeared on land through proximity to decaying matter that required dissolution, and they appeared without ambition. In the regime of total surplus, the remaining objective is breakdown.

The Pac Sun Avant Garde is the custodial organism American commercial abundance has evolved to handle itself⁹. His role in the ecology is passage: things move through him. No ideology organizes his movement through retail space.

The compliance module glows on his Dell monitor. Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: Annual Training. Progress bar is at 12% with seven hours remaining. In the adjacent cubicles his coworkers click through the slides like people fleeing a burning building, skipping each video the instant the mandatory three-second hold has elapsed, selecting answers without reading the questions. This is how corporate ritual is ordinarily survived, by withholding everything the ritual has failed to extort. He watches every video to completion. He reads every slide. He considers each question. He selects an answer.

The extended warranty on the Vizio takes three hours on hold to verify. The Cisco hold system cycles through a distorted Vivaldi, a MIDI Für Elise, and some funk-adjacent muzak with too much reverb. He cancels dinner plans with no complaints as he waits another hour on hold. The bureaucracy is the bureaucracy, and he moves through it at the speed the bureaucracy has set.

This institutional fidelity produces the only aura that has ever gathered around him. The seven-hour training generates a barrier more impenetrable than any deliberate isolation. The automated voice that asks him to please continue to hold generates a distance more substantial than geography.

When the can opener breaks, he orders a new one through Postmates from the nearest CVS. It does not occur to him to visit Amazon, or to compare prices, or to read reviews, or to register that CVS is the wrong store for this errand. He sees can opener in the delivery catalog and taps it. What arrives is a CookWell brand manual opener, thirty-seven dollars plus delivery fee, manufactured by a company that has no existence apart from the product listing. It is very likely the worst can opener currently available for purchase in the continental United States. It works. He opens the can.

He drives fifteen minutes to Home Depot for the peanut M&Ms displayed at the checkout. The habit began by accident, on an afternoon when he was there for an unrelated reason and has since calcified into routine. The trip is habitus stripped of its social dimension¹⁰, embodied history liberated from the work of class. Home Depot is not a place one buys peanut M&Ms. He buys his peanut M&Ms at Home Depot.

Comparative value requires a subject who can see that the object in front of him is one of many. For him the object is one, and after it there is only the next object.

While everyone he knows is engineering a life of friction-avoidance, he is passing through every friction exactly as its designers intended, and in doing so becomes unreachable.

III. The Pac Sun Avant Garde fully experiences the everyday

Macy's, Tuesday afternoon. The white overhead lighting extends past peripheral vision in a grid of identical clarity, a shadowless perpetual noon in which the mannequins, the perfume counters, and the clothing racks hang in the same suspension. The Pac Sun Avant Garde arrives as a body pulled toward a space whose only remaining request of a visitor is that he be present in it.

Customers who bought this item also bought: the sentence remains open.

The Pac Sun Avant Garde's life is one of pure immanence, lived at the level of the life itself, before a subject has arrived to organize the living into a story about who is doing it. The contemporary apparatus is that of the story. He is the small remaining region where the story has not yet been told.

On the laptop in the evening, the Netflix algorithm has been trying to predict what he will watch next. It has registered a penguin documentary completed on a Tuesday. Half an episode of Judge Judy abandoned mid-scene on a Thursday. Twenty minutes of Cheaper by the Dozen on a Sunday. From these data points the system is building a model of preference, but the model presupposes preference, and there is no preference in him to model. He did not select these things. He watched what the autoplay surfaced. He stopped when he stood up. Prediction is an instrument calibrated against expectation. It is wrong when it is correctly applied.

His routines hold for years and then, on a Sunday morning with no precipitating event, he drives two and a half hours to Yuma, AZ to eat at Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and visit a museum dedicated to preserving the old west. He returns the next morning and resumes his rituals. The detour leaves no trace in the subsequent week. No algorithm can fit a curve through this.

A coworker invites him to the Immersive Van Gogh Experience at the convention center. The discourse around these shows has been written in advance. The serious critic calls the show edutainment. The influencer prepares her poses. Everyone who has already arrived at the show has already arrived at an opinion of it, and the opinion has been preloaded: "this is the market's final triumph over art, digitized commodity for the attention economy."

He stands in the center of the room for forty-seven minutes. When the projections cycle from midnight blues to sunflower yellows he turns his body slowly to follow the color across the walls. The apparatus that would have told him what to see has never arrived in him. Color and scale are what he sees. The yellow is very yellow.

"That was neat," he says afterward. "The yellow parts were so yellow."

The discourse is invisible to him. Those who defend the original canvas and those who celebrate the democratized screen speak a shared grammar that has never arrived in his mouth. He has contacted the heart of the experience of art. Everyone around him is still arguing over who has the right to.

He has been released from the labor of meaning.