Essay 3. The Public Freakout

This is the classic public freak-out scenario of the customer-worker confrontation. The immediate intuition of a public freakout is that it’s a socially acceptable way to purge frustrations out into an open, public space. What isn’t so obvious are the ways psychic repression reinvests itself back into the social fabric caused by conditioning global figures i.e. bosses, fathers, presidents, and even us. In the freakout scene, the cashier register mediates the flows of money coming in and flows of product coming out. To obtain a product, it must have an assigned price to exchange it with an equal amount of cash value. The same commercial transaction follows the pattern that psychic repression conditions lack for the product to be desired for and then purchased. For example, once the transaction is aggreged upon, there’s an obligation to exchange the product for money. This means that a customer makes an offer from their end, but from the service worker’s end, the dynamic becomes forceful because now the worker must match the value of the money with the desired-object. At the same time, another surface develops that exchange words with affects called the developed surface. In developed economies, final products can inflate their value by jumping that productive – developed chasm. A relationship between both surfaces permits someone to use a forceful push-or-pull by comparing codes between surfaces instead of on their surfaces. The difference is that the productive surface can exchange words (insults) even though their codes are meant to compare and exchange value with product, and the developed surface can exchange product as well (like we’ve seen in the example of the hyperinflated product) even though their codes are meant to exchange words with affects. The key to understanding this is that developed codes can only compare codes with their productive ones because the developed surface formed in non-comparative spaces. This allows the developed surface to from codes continuously by compounding onto its surface its own formation (since the labor of workers maintains productive codes to create developed nations in the first place). Incredibly developed codes can never be reached at the productive level unless codes are forced into non-comparative spaces (spoiler alert, it is done immanently). Since all encodings in comparative spaces will evenly exhaust themselves, a surplus is necessary to carry out an immanent layer that will appropriate this first layer, but it must take all the credit for the codes…. Even the labor force, for itself. All this means is that service will always fail to measure up to the inflated price of the product-service. This is the feeling of being shortchanged from a service that falls short from expectations. Why can’t we simply say that emotions got out of hand? Why can’t we say that the customer was in a hurry and the coffee took 1 minute later than expected.? Why we have to over-analyze this situation. These explanations are totally fine. The central question is: in what order do we place psychic repression and social repression? Does social repression come first and then psychic repression? If it does, then any condition from bipolar, unstable emotions or autism must always pass through a social structure for him to be oppressed and erupt emotions from it.


When a customer insults a service worker, it is seen as a complaint because the service was substandard. When a service worker insults a customer, it’s a retaliation for the negative affects that the insulted is attempting to hold on to for dear life. The entire overall value that is waged conflict over is called the product-service value. And this is used to make up for the difference  of being shortchanged on behalf of the customer. If you’ve been paying attention, the value must be paid in overcoded productive codes. That is why affects must not only be purged, but purged in negative terms (triggered, resentful, rage, vengeance). An insult is an attempt for service workers to purge additional affects in order to match developed codes which will never be reached. But a successful insult can only occur if the worker voluntarily purges additional investments to hyper inflate the product-service that fell short. in developed economies, individuals are given the freedom to grow or develop and so the worker must voluntarily give up his posture or his composure by experiencing an involuntary lapse of the will. So, the desire to attain revenge on behalf of the shortchanged customer was precisely the inability to attain revenge from a sovereign individual. Likewise, service workers are prohibited to lash out even if insulted for a minor inconvenience. The difference is that the forceful productive retaliation must happen involuntarily for it to return by an offer only which is why one quickly learns that the one who instigates a fight by force is typically the loser. Developed surfaces must become reterritorialized and encoded with new codes but in order to bring them back to the original aggressor the overcodes must remain in productive surfaces paradoxically bellow the sovereign individual. Because both the aggressor and worker participate in flows of growth the sovereign must be suspended in a double bind. The longer they stay there, the more overpriced the product-serve will return. The aggressor can not affirm it in retail value just like how the final products are sold to in retail value. This is essentially shortselling life-force and the psychic consequences is that paranoid individuals experiences breakdown in public from losing life-force (autonomy) by the same momentum that allows them be grow to be sovereign in society.

Fascistic insults: To be in the right, one must be in the wrong

For the insult to work, the aggressor must place the individual into a limbo of voluntary and involuntary purging of the paranoiac instincts (investments). An insult is the purest form of offer. The offer is deterritorialized space for the victims to purge their investments. The problem is that both customers and workers participate in inflows of growth. The purging must happen voluntarily in developed surfaces but also involuntarily in the deterritorialzed surface that was given. The feeling of enjoyment one gets from watching the victim suffer a loss is when the victim suffers a lapse of judgment and retaliates at his aggressor. It’s as if the victim was given a space where they become winners at first but space acts like a collector that demands its debt to be paid by force. So, the aggressor co-ops the operation by almost removing his agency to force a retaliation and using the immanant space to his advantage by ensnaring the purging individual. An argument is not two people pulling to ropes. It’s four ropes with 2 surfaces and 2 subjects pushing and pulling distances and displacements.ts.

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