On December 5, 2006 the single and video “Chacarron Macarron” was released on the noosphere and quickly caught the attention of the world, thanks primarily to the Western Internet youth culture that frequents such joke sites as ytmnd.com, and spends all day laughing at stupid shit on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvkHIZg_954&feature=related

On the comments underneath every Youtube video, as well as on countless other chat rooms and message boards, the Chacarron video is the site of clashing- "this tipe of men are the worst of the world T_T what are u doing? u can't sing! u're ...u're..a shit... arg...I really hate this type of people"- as well as shared appreciation ("i love how he has a way with words!"), a space in which to come together in laughter- "OMG. This is a joke right? ABsolutely hilarious joke that is! And if hes being serious then.. Thats even funnier!" – as well as to argue out all sorts of tangential particulars- “i don't think we should be preaching or forcing religion in youtbe. this is a happy place and people should be free to believe what they want.”
Since the beginning, this video has wedged itself into an awkward space between the most absurd self-mockery, and the most brilliant and catchy consequence of modern pop culture. Viewer responses range from the appreciative- “I like this only for the pure fact that it makes me laugh”- to the despairing- “I think my faith in humanity just died”- to the suspiciously inquisitive- “There is something hynotic about this. Maybe it's like those old metal songs that have subliminal hidden messages”; in the midst of their attempts to figure out what is going on people offer up endless interpretations of the garbled lyrics- “those who don't understand/thinks it's sttupid.... IF YOU DON'T SPEAK CHACARRON OF COURSE YOU WON'T UNDERSTAND!”- or simply respond with virtual phonetic mimesis- "Wigigowigigagawrnagagagnawrign iga!" Overall it brings laughs, but leaves questions, occupying and opening an uncomfortable and unresolved space between parody and seriousness- “uhm...well for one it's funny, but I also think to myself, what is this guy thinking????”

Thanks to the creative participatory possibilities of the modern Internet world, thousands of iterations of this original theme have proliferated, spinning off of the absurdity of the original to reflect it into new expression. One of the most fascinating and annoying is ‘batman on drugs lol’, a thankfully short version of which I will show here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBsxqQIu_5s

As we trace the proliferation of this banal manifestation of ‘stoner culture’ we are given an example, a window, an operating tool through which to view the phenomenal workings of the floating imaginary called the Internet or noosphere, which embodies, reflects and proliferates the culture in which it participates.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this video is that , like the ‘Chaccaron Macarron’ song, it, in the words of a popup found on one of its many remakes, ‘goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on’, grafting itself mercilessly into the subconscious of the capitalist cyber-imaginary. In this way it repackages into final inescapable form the useless and infinite total homogenization of Western mass-produced culture, it funnels the post-historical eternal return of the simulacrum into its own particular absurd space that trips up on its own hyperreal fetishization. As the refrain repeats over and over, the viewer is thrown back through the absurdity of his own gaze, into a creeping uncanny space that is profoundly annoying, mind-numbingly senseless, inexplicably, inexcusably empty, downright stupid and even agonizing. Uncontrollable laughter and gut-wrenching disgust represent two equally sensitive reactions to this absolutely singular, ceaselessly repeating cultural nerve. As one continues to gaze through the screen, at that disgusting gyrating schizophrenic Batman, one asks to oneself “What has happened?”, in the same vein of numb hopelessness and speechless dread that one feels driving through the same shopping center all across America, or standing in the corner of a single CVS, surrounded by tinny lite pop muzak, staring at the dusty shelf space next to the paper towels for twenty minutes. Pushed past the tipping point of its own exhaustion, the ‘batman on drugs’ video explodes through its own existence as a desired commodity to confront the banal sterility of that McEssence in which it is shown, to expose in terrifying hilarity its own glaring cold hyperreality.
Many viewer comments suggest this role as a phenomenon of modernity that seems to conclude all history that preceded it- “it doesnt matter what he saying because this is the breakdown of this genre of music that sounds the same all the time”; “This song is the bar in place that shows what music should never be”; “Postmodern”; “aahahah that's the most stupid think i have heard in my life... OMG this is the end of the world !!!!”.

This cultural icon has proliferated largely thanks to the impulse, easily satisfied by the Internet, to re-present it in a slightly new form, to use its power to animate a different video, to re-create its effect in a different setting that nonetheless slips back into the hilarious doom of the eternal refrain of the original. Here we find a clean snapshot of this metaphoric process that juxtaposes two heterogeneous elements atop the common ground of cyberspace to create a new synthetic experience- http://mindlessbatman.ytmnd.com/. Creations can be personalized for the most particular occasion, as at the end of a tiny back alleyway of the noosphere we find the haunting remainder of someone’s birthday (http://williamchac.ytmnd.com); elsewhere on Youtube an animated dog sings his version forever, echoed by a human with a backpack on in the middle of a classroom (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAulMB-pW04&feature=related); again on teen-stoner website ytmnd.com, the theme is refound in an only tangentially related light- http://batmanfreakout.ytmnd.com/. Through the re-presentation of this theme by individual viewers into many different contexts of image and sound, it seems as if the theme itself is proliferating itself throughout the Internet in a myriad of deceptive forms and guises, drawing into its grasp and revivifying a plethora of cultural artifacts and associations through which it reappears, confronts itself and evolves. Here we see a dense web of images embedded in a thick soup of context, reflecting, commenting on, embodying a fluid culture in which it participates, which meets its gaze in each online viewing.

On YouTube alone one can find countless ‘interpretations’ or ‘remixes’ of the original- if the notion of such an original still carries any meaning- in which people overlay their own slideshows, filled with images and suggestive text, atop the music, which is also sometimes altered or re-created (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_glWWusfqfU&NR=1); here any viewer can himself be the originary artist, adding his own voice to the larger wave in an interpretive spin that carries the reach of the song into expanded dimensions of suggestive associative meaning. Images of Ron Weasley, Show Boat, rope, rum, watches, the Mini, macaroni, Ghana, a waterfall- the image as the site of culture is just as free-floating as the individual as the site of agency; the latter recontextualizes the myriad former and offers his individual voice up as an expression of the larger stream of pop culture emanating from this enigmatic Chacarron. In another slideshow, the song issues from the stereotyped face of Osama bin Laden himself (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXCzmbSmDSw&feature=related); at the end of this clip we even hear the jumbled words of a Spanish broadcast in the background, as if Indian and Spanish cultures are grouped together as a single unintelligible, backwards Other. This reanimation of the exotic East occurs again in the video ‘Chacarron vs. Indian Midget’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKBNNYg3Ly8&feature=related; in both of these videos the all-too-familiar refrain casts itself as a mockery of Eastern culture, serving both as a pointing, laughing finger and as a voice emanating from the object of mockery itself.
The refrain is pointed by Western culture, however, not only at its enemies but also at its own leaders- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyXon1dswiU&feature=fvsr; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUPfPBDdtMc. The former is particularly disturbing in its convincing digital manipulation- it really looks like Obama and McCain are dancing- so that again the lines between political reality and public fantasy begin to fade as the latter subverts the former by reappropriating and re-presenting its own images, forming a shared sensitive underlying imaginary commentary on similarly imaginary electronic news events. The Chacarron song has now come to undergo a variety of self-transformations in which it fleshes out its contextual implications within the larger culture that births and nurtures it. We can conceive then of the totality of web sites, videos, images and other virtual objects which display or discuss the Chacarron song, a totality which, represented as a single object, can never be fully captured because it is always growing, in and through even the perception of the subject who views it on his browser. Individuals thus share this object repeatedly with each other 1. in the real world where it is spoken between bodies or remembered, 2. in the symbolic noosphere where it is viewed in an endless array of cultural artifacts, and 3. in the online imaginary landscape where it is discussed through text chat or where (as is described by an anonymous online commentator) “I know this! Someone in that online sim Second Life decided to create flying cubes with this animation constantly playing and sounding. The cubes chase around whoever is closest to them, and push constantly.” This Chacarron-object, in all its manifestations, can be read symptomatically to bring to light underlying cultural reflections or trends, can be viewed materially in its historical self as it appears on the web, and can also be viewed as a tool of individual self-expression, through which consumers of media culture can themselves produce their own unique objects of consumption, and add their own voice to the choir that surrounds and influences them from all sides.

Such an optimistic agency-oriented view, however, both broadens in scope and threatens to sink under the heavy feeling one gets after surveying video after video of this mind-numbing cultural vacuity. Particularly touching and disturbing here is that an animated sound byte on the imaginary internet landscape should inspire human bodies to imitate its actions in space and time, and then to project video of their bodies back out into the noosphere- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou9GvEfd8G0&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG8R9wfn7JA&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJPp-vsuQrI&feature=related. Here, there is no longer any meaningful distinction between imaginary icon and real event, as both alike are symbolically registered and offered up as consumable objects in the same hyper-contextualized rhizomatic Youtube signifying chain. A live acoustic rendition of the song-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NRnWjHfWg&feature=related- is mysteriously transmutated by another user into a cartoon animation of itself- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ISxIzjYhlw&feature=related- but we cannot assume this causality (from real life into digital animation) for the rest of the plethora of images, where animated Mario sings side by side with doctored film clips and live videotaped performances. Who is acting here? What has happened? Is it ‘qwert001’ who has made this video to show to me, or is it not rather YouTube that spawns out of its own prolific depths an endless plethora of reproductive associations that flit past my specular gaze as if the latter itself were the projector that throws these images into actuality?

In the game of specular commodity fetishism, Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, the object of use value, in entering the social sphere and capitalizing on the desire inherent therein to become a commodity, “is transfigured, it becomes someone…it is metamorphosed into a supernatural thing…sensuously supersensible…what surpasses the senses still passes before us in the silhouette of the sensuous body that it nevertheless lacks or that remains inaccessible to us…[so that] one touches there on what one does not touch, one feels there where one does not feel…this haunting displaces itself like an anonymous silhouette or the figure of an extra who might be the principal or capital character. It changes places, one no longer knows exactly where it is, it turns, it invades the stage with its moves” (189). The ‘batman on drugs’ appears before us in a harsh confrontation, a specter against which we may butt our heads, but which is always repeating, waiting for us to return to it. In its organic totality the Chacarron-object reflects but is not reducible to the culture which produces and consumes it; its voice subsists in an insistent singularity, a nagging urgency that speaks through, but remains after the disappearances of the images it animates. If we approach this enigmatic voice of Chacarron and ask where it came from, it will only respond by flailing the infinite tentacles it gives to us at the push of a button. We may draw connections between its myriad parts and deconstruct each to glimpse the subtler strands of the larger web of culture, but the thing itself becomes more mysterious to us the more its voice drills on in our head, the more all songs on the radio seem to warp towards this monotonous, homogenous eternal refrain that waits as their necessary apotheosis. Though we may use it as a lens through which to view the determining forces of globalization which it reflects, and though we may see it as a site of dynamic cosmopolitan exchange, still “this Thing, which is no longer altogether a thing, here it goes and unfolds, it unfolds itself, it develops what it engenders through a quasi-spontaneous generation…a whole lineage of fantastic or prodigious creatures, whims, chimera, non-ligneous character parts, that is, the lineage of a progeniture that no longer resembles it, inventions far more bizarre or marvelous than if this mad, capricious, and untenable [thing]…started to dance on its own initiative”. Through the conduit of the modern planetary imaginary in which its spark has dispersed itself, even here in this very analytic article, “now here it is standing up, not only holding itself up but rising, getting up and lifting itself, lifting its head, redressing itself and addressing itself. Facing the others, and first of all other commodities, yes, it lifts its head” (190).