Category Archives: accumulation

From Euphoria to Boredom. Why did a teen drama turned into a show about narcos? A review to Euphoria’s third season

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The last season of Sam Levinson’s Euphoria (2019-2026) changed drastically its narrative arc. From being a teen drama or a coming-of-age television show that dealt with addiction, gender issues, and, to some extent, the “American dream,” the show turned into a show about narcos and cartels. And while shows about narcos promise entertainment and high emotions, many of them are simply boring: Euphoria is not the exception.

The third season kick-starts with Rue being a drug mule for Laurie, the emotionless drug dealer who Rue tried to outsmart in the previous season. If during the first two seasons Rue was trapped in the cycles of addiction and the almost death of her social existence (that is, of being detached from her capacity of socializing due to her addictions), now she is trapped in the cycle of exploitation that cancels her social life outside of the cartel she works for. From recovering addict, she became less than lumpen worker. In some way, all the main characters of the show follow Rue’s path. Nate piles up debt with the Armenian mafia because his major investment, the construction and development of a retirement home has been truncated by a protected species of flower that grows where complex would be built; Cassie feels Nate is not delivering his promises, she wants more money and more attention so she opens an only fans account; Maddy is stagnated in her career, she is close to the glamour and wealth of Los Angeles, but she is nothing but smoke and mirrors, she barely makes it to the end of the month, and her boss over exploits her; Jules has found a sugar daddy, and while are their needs are taken care of, and she is free to paint whatever she wants, all her paintings are but the repetition of the same motif, trans-gendered generic bodies. To add to all this, all the characters are caught up in a feud between Alamo Brown, a human trafficker and narco, and Laurie’s cartel, made up by her neo-nazi accomplices.

All of America’s problems lead to the narco. Or rather, all of America’s problems have become a matter of a narco anti-sociability. If the main intention of the genre of the “teen drama” or the coming-of-age television show is to teach audiences about the way society “receives” or “makes” a new member, Euphoria has always been a show concerned on the radical changes that have transformed sociability in the last twenty years. Indeed, for much of the way the show explores on the ambivalence of addiction, as an aesthetic, or as an ontology, the show also explores addiction as the limit of sociability. After all, addicts have been historically ostracized and placed at the margins of society. And while the first two seasons of the show demonstrate that addiction does not cancel sociability, since a precarious sociability is ambivalent, and at times, productive, the third season tosses all sociability away. One can see this clearly expressed in Rue’s transition from addict to drug-mule. While Rue’s addiction was the triggering point for ending the relationship with her mom, and ultimately with Jules, once she is a drug-mule, her relationships are out of bounds: she does not listen to her friends, and her friends do not listen to her. At a point in the season, she is chatting with Lexi, Cassie’s sister, that now works as an assistant in Hollywood. While the two friends are trying to reconnect, they hardly talk. In fact, this interaction is but a mis-encounter: Lexie expresses her concerns about her sister, Cassie, and Rue tells her about a miracle she witnessed. They seem to be having a conversation, but they are not. They are asocially interacting or are together in an anti-social way.

If the addict allowed some sort of precarious sociability, a narco does not. A narco is worse than an addict, seems to be the morale of the show. But for much of the show’s effort in describing what the narco can do, the show delivers a heterogeneous cocktail of canonical tropes of the US: the frontier, the old west, cowboys and Indians, racial issues, mafia, Christianity, and so on. If anything, the show tries to tell us that the narco does not make sense. Rue and Ali, Rue’s sponsor at the AA meetings, have a conversation about the fentanyl crises. Ali wonders why traffickers would sell a product that kills. “Why kill the consumer?” Ali wonders. “It does not make sense,” he concludes. And precisely, the narco does not make sense. If anything, the show would suggest that the narco would be not only the business of killing, a business that mixes human trafficking with sexual enslavement with territorial control, and drug-trafficking, but that the narco, ultimately, is to deliver death at all levels, even at the level of consumption and intoxication.

While for sure the show gives much to think. It is rather boring and dull. And to some extent, it also mimics what it tells us about the narco: it kills its main character and resolves a la Tarantino the tensions between drug lords (Alamo and Laurie). Why kill Rue? With Rue’s death the show shifts from the euphoria of the first season to a boredom that dully gives much to think but little, if not nothing, to enjoy.

Notes about Accumulation(s) I

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The following notes are merely a series of thoughts without any particular order but that later (hopefully) could be part of my dissertation project (a very [till today] basic and naive ideas about accumulation as a general movement of history and specially modernity)

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Accumulation(s) I

In a way, our times could be described as a series of seriated and seriating accumulations. This, of course, not only testifies for capitalism’s endeavour but also for the way the climate catastrophe has heaped in the horizon of history as our further extinction. Yet, to accumulate does not necessarily means to horde valuable items neither to just let catastrophes pile in the horizon of the coming future. In fact, accumulations are closer to disorganized heaps, piles or bodies amassed (and therefore, somewhat to a weird idea of ecology, meaning that even the smallest tossed or dispensed body, would heap somewhere and eventually return to the place where it was thrown away). Etymologically (if this helps to clarify where I’m going), to accumulate is a verb whose first appearance was in the early XIV (1520) century and is composed by two particles, the preposition “ad” (to) and the substantive “cumulus” (a heap). Hence, in the early years of that period commonly called modernity, at the babbling of what centuries later would become a world ordered for capital through capitalism, a direction was forged, and bodies were constantly directed and redirected to it. 

The coincidence between the origins of the word accumulation and the early period (if not the dawn) of modernity signal that history, somehow, could be understood as a way of directing “cumulus” (heaps). It is not only after the works of Ricardo, Adam Smith and later Marx, that accumulation becomes a direction of wealth, for the first and second, and later, for the third, a production of that “ad” that directs the cumulus. When Marx famously described how the whole economic process worked, with the analysis of commodification, fetishization (another word —as accumulation— that was firstly coined in the context of slave trading in the XV-XVI century), capital circulation, value and surplus value, he still found necessary to unveil what started everything. For Marx, it is not that capital is merely understood as a machine, but as something that is triggered, something that needs to be started. Irremediably when understanding the process of accumulation(s) of capital, as Marx puts it, we “turn in a defective circle, out of which we only get by supposing an “original” [primitive]”, an “accumulation that is not the result of capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point”. That starting point, for Marx, “plays in Political Economy the same role that plays the “original sin in theology”. The result of this ironic comparison (and maybe not so ironic) is the famous formulation of the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation: that is the demystifying of an idyllic process of enrichment. From this perspective, the “so-called” primitive accumulation is the systematic repetition of violence, land dispossession, forced migration, law prosecution and bloody legislations necessary to produce an ambivalent subject that both surrenders to the “ad” of accumulation while also seeks for its “cumulation” in a line of flight: the vogelfrei. 

If the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation is needed at every stage of capitalism, where would the “ad” this time be produced when there won’t be no earth to live? Would it be that at best the feverish science fiction fantasies finally have been conquered (as depicted in movies like Ad Astra [after all, another movie about the possibility of starting a new process of accumulation in space)? As much as these questions are necessary, perhaps it should also be thought the possibility of an accumulation without “ad”, or an accumulation without “ad” or “cumulus” but another form of piling. Even more, perhaps that’s the only cynical comfort we have, that of which today accumulation is collapsing, and we are just hoarding history, as new vogelfrei we are tied to our impossibility towards the future and yet with the possibility of take off in a line of flight.