Hipster Runoff Exegesis

7 March 2010: "Is Retail Terrorism the Future of Alt Consumerism?"

2010-03-12T18:42:00.000-08:00

This post is about surplus repression. The question: how to rid oneself of the anxiety of consumerist identity, how to express identity in a totally administered society. Terrorism is the moment in which one realizes that one's desires are not spontaneous and self-generated but anticipated and inculcated. Is one then predestined to react with a desperate act of spontaneity in the only way conceivable, in a gesture that attempts to negate or refute society as it really exists? Or are those gestures already encoded in the operant program? This is the syllogism Carles attempts to articulate and deconstruct simultaneously.

As radical sociologists have long noted, consumerist capitalism shows its dark repressive side when consumers are motivated not by desire but by fear. Carles assesses the rippling ramifications of this proposition through the lens of "retail terrorism." With much deliberate irony, he proclaims that "I was sorta getting behind the concept of buying stuff from trusted brands to express who I am," but has been forced to reconsider by the actions of a mob who assailed an American Apparel location in an unnamed city. The hesitation he feigns about the embrace of consumerist modes of identity formation is not altogether fictitious, or factitious, for that matter; rather Carles means to suggest the provision, hesitant nature of all consumers, the fragility of identity that must hinge on the subject's ability to "trust" a corporate identity that bears no tangible ethical responsibility, has no face to show to the other in a Levinasian sense. He is "getting behind" the concept of branded identity in several senses of the expression, both as a provisional subscriber to the tenet and as someone who has literally fallen behind it, chronically late, finding it impossible to keep up with the various connotations and shifting meanings of brands. Carles professes to endorse the idea that "the concept of ‘consumerism’ has sort of become ‘chill’ these days, as opposed to something that we are supposed 2 h8," but that stance is in part attributable to his wish to withhold reifying emotion in the commodity relation -- anger spent deploring consumerism feeds the very system it deplores. Vampiristically it sucks the energy from such contempt and uses it to fuel fashion's revolutions. One is reminded of Marx's description of capital: "Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." Consumerism similarly sucks energy from those struggling against its confines; it rechannels retail terrorism -- attempts to strike it at its heart -- into new memes, or as CArles would have it, "a relevant alt trend."

A studied indifference, or even a bemused approval is instead called for -- a "chill", as Carles suggests, relaxed, yet cold and distant. He tentatively offers an aesthetic solution to the problems of alienation brought on by consumerism: "I like the way things are now, where I just have to keep up to date on buzzbands to be interesting." Yet he implicitly critiques the escapist mode of quotidian existence, in which decentered subjectivities "watch viral videos and forget" about class struggle, the inescapable immanence, mortality, etc. The escapism is itself a virus, a mass hypnotism that interpellates subjects at the moment it seems to be dissolving them.

Though consumerism is immediately responsible, there are some proximate causes. Carles identifies the state as one possibility, but dismisses "‘the government enables this bull shit society in which we are trapped’" as a reified concept, merely another brand rather than an immanent critique worth regarding and with any possible efficaciousness.

But Carles hesitates to pursue this line of argument to far, to a case built on a transcendental locus of authenticity. This is the true terrorism of the soul: "Worried I might have to ‘backpack bomb’ a local suburban mall or something in order to be alt + authentic," he points out, cutting to the reductio ad absurdem, of all arguments from authenticity. Ultimately the only thing that can stand as authentic in a nihilistic society built on an ever-shuffling set of ideals and values driven entirely by the processes of exchange, is violence. Carles offers this vertiginous syllogism: "terrorism is ‘violence’, but maybe ’standing up for something’ in the real world will become a more popular trend." Can one "stand up for" something one believes in only because it is a "trend" -- or is this the perfect, concise expression of the metaphysical violence the consumer society exercises/exorcises on our souls?

12 March 2010: "The Great Lo-Fi Hope."

2010-03-12T09:31:00.000-08:00

This post is about historical materialism. To what extent are the means of production determinative of the culture in which they are couched; that is to say to what degree does the base determine the superstructure, or are they in a perpetual state of dialectical play? That is the question Carles invites us yet again to ponder, picking up a debate that has long raged unsettled among Marxists and their fellow travelers.

In this particular instance, we are invited to consider the case of Ariel Pink, a "lo-fi" musician who has argued in print publications that the "presentation" of his music, dictated by the means of production he is able to seize control of, renders his art "something difficult for the money people to invest in." The artists asserts that he is "better now at producing," despite the limited means, which points to an uneven ideological development that has failed to harmonize aesthetic norms with commercial ones, as capitalism must do to underpin its superstructure and give weight to the notion that the markets can adjudicate and administer culture in a decentered, decentralized fashion. The "money people" must at once also be the most important critics, as Carles astutely recognizes: "A band’s product is just as important as how compelling they are to cover. When you are bloggable/buzzable/tweetable, the money people will come to your house with a truck full of money." Attention has become a convertible instrument in the libidinal economy.

But as Carles notes, this concatenation of attention, apperception, and commcercialization has created an ontological crisis, as being itself has become contingent on cultural categorization. "Rallying around Ariel Pink might be our last chance to turn our backs on the mainstreamication of indie," he explains -- a final problematization of the base-superstructure dialectic, recast as the collapsing mainstream-indie dichotomy. But note Carles's choice of words -- we may "turn our back" on it, but this means only that we have chosen to ignore the thorny question, not that we have resolved it by aestheticizing means. Also, Carles suggests we have reached a point when this base-superstructure will no longer be a concern merely for dogmatic theoreticians and fusty hair-splitters of the academic left. It will be a fundamental phenomenological concern with regard to subjectivity in its broadest possible conception. Our awareness of our own being may in the last analysis be determined by the means of production by which consciousness itself is produced, regardless of Kantian a prioris, which have been transformed into ideological propositions under a capitalist order that seizes upon the fundamental categories as a justification for its own given-ness. Carles notes that "the artist with minimal personal and cultural connections can focus on his art, and not have to excessively check the internet and worry about the impact of their work based on an undefined/evolving context." But these cultural connections are also prerequisites for creating art that can be self-sustaining, so a contradiction inheres. The energy to sustain artistic creation stems from the possibility of recognition, yet at the same time, contempt for recognition also fuels ambition recognized to be "authentic". Commercial success at once validates an invalidates cultural achievement and self-actualization. As a result, we are "pointlessly acclaimed" and then "forgotten" -- not merely by a social formation addicted to novelty but by ourselves, as we reject one identity after another in search of renewed surges of valuable attention.

Rather than a given dasein, being has appeared to take the form of a taxonomizing quest, seeking the cultural artifacts that can authorize and underwrite our pretensions to transcendence: "2k10 has led us on a ‘wild goose chase’ for relevant mp3s. We aren’t even looking for life-changing mp3s any more, like in the pre-Garden State/pre-Postal Service era. We are searching for MP3s that make us feel like we are at the pinnacle of human and artistic development." Can we really articulate our species being through commodified modes of expression, though? Capitalism has staked its survival on this audacious proposition.

Accordingly, it is incumbent upon commercial artists -- straddling the constituitive boundary between being for itself and being in itelf -- to establish their own ineffability, to belong to the category that is beyond categorization: "you need a lot of people asking you what genre you fit into in order to be successful. In depth ‘journalists’ will ask you if your genre even exists, then ‘connect’ with you by laughing about how silly ‘genres’ are." Consumers can then acquire this reified ineffability as a product that can be consumed by way of substantiating their claims to transcendence. They can listen to the uncategorizable music and vicariously assume uncategorizability themselves. One can then have a soul by association: one can "stand at the front of the show, already familiarized with his extensive discography, ready to smile with a shit eating grin that says, “Yes, I get it.”" What is "it"? Exactly.

9 March 2010: "THE ALT REPORT opens ‘TIP LINE’ 2 connect with readers"

2010-03-09T17:21:00.000-08:00

This post is about the panopticon. Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham first conceived of the panopticon as a form of prison architecture that would allow a guard stationed at the center to observe unseen all the inmates, who were arrayed around him in a radial configuration.

Michel Foucault famously adopted the concept as metaphor for the carceral society, in which ideological discipline operates regardless of the presence of overseers or punishers. The presence of the observer is instead always assumed. The Panopticon is designed "so to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers." The power relations are expressed through dominated people's relations with one another.

Carles adopts this critique and applies it to the growing social preoccupation with celebrities, which in its intrusive voyeurism is already an emblem of panoptic society. Thus he invites his readers to make explicit the implicit surveillance they are already conducting, led onward by an administered proclivity for passive curiosity and vicarious fascination with those famous persons who seem to dictate delineations and degrees of alterity and mainstream-ness, and become actual informants, supplying him with information as if he were a Stasi bureau chief in charge of cultural subversives:

Recommended TIP submissions:

* alt celeb scandals
* nude pix of alt celebs
* mild misunderstandings that need more exposure to turn into over-exposed controversies
* Photographs of Alt Encounters that happen
* Injustices...

And so on. Carles's point of course, is to demonstrate how the media machine no longer needs diabolical masters to operate it and use it to chew up and dismantle reality and the possibility of grasping it as a totality. Instead we ourselves fuel the machine with the sweat and blood of our own toil. We create the material bases for our own ideological predetermination through our own eagerness to participate in the mystified consciousness and culture industries.

In servicing the machine, we become machine-like ourselves, as Carles notes ironically: "This is an effort by the Alt Report Robots + Interns to connect with the fans, letting them know that they are ‘in charge’ of the content." Interns, robots, readers, jack-booted thugs, pogrom ralliers...these are all becoming one and the same.

Foucault notes that the panopticon "is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad." By reporting on one another, we feel as though we have become more famous ourselves, more certain that every move of our own is being watched and evaluated, that our ongoing performance has indeed hit the big time. Someday, as Carles suggests, we all become "premium content."

7 March 2010: "A cougar teacher engages in sexting, sends nude pix to her students"

2010-03-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

This post is about ideological state apparatuses. Carles confronts a series of synchronic power differentials deployed contemporaneously in the same education problematic.

Driven by asymmetrical power relations on the perpendicular co-ordinate axis of gender, Melinda Dennehy, the teacher involved in the incident Carles subjects to his probing analysis, manifested herself at the overdetermined point at which the axes of gender, age, state power, monopoly power, and technological development along capitalist lines converge. If she didn't exist, as the saying goes, perhaps Carles would have had to invent her. But with gender issues in play in the idling of a youth labor front, how does that affect institutionalized masculinity? Are we witnessing the crisis of phallologocentrism as it is impacted by spatio-visual technologies of communication -- "If a man sent cock shots of his peen to a girl, would he be more of a ‘perv’?" That is, is it more of a "violation" of gender normativity when males leverage the ageist power differential, or does it constitute a complementary hegemonic enterprise, grounding hierarchical prerogatives in homologous bases? Is becoming "more of a 'perv'" a matter of the perversion of power, or is the apotheosis of power itself?

The role of the institution of schools in a late capitalist or monopoly capitalist social formation is to delay the entry of young, redundant workers into the workforce and allow to constituting a stagnant puddle of reserve labor to be mobilized at a moment's notice (online) at capital's behest while depressing wage growth for the currently employed. Fruitless sexual relations mediated by technology within the institutional educational space is one strategy in the campaign to disperse the productive energies of young people: "Is sexting just part of growing up in the modern world?" Carles asks, trusting we will intuit the inescapable conclusion.

Thus a relation between teacher and student violates the fundamental underlying economic necessities that involve forestalling the students' assumption of maturity and the responsibilities and expectations that go along with that rite of passage in terms of the field of autonomy in which they may operate. The docile bodies of their instructors are not intended to be on that discursive field but transcend it, structure it. Dispersed sexual relations are supposed negate youth with youth, not elevate youth into burgeoning field of affective labor among adults, particularly adults already tenured in the workforce. "Should tweens be given the same rights as grownups to sext?" Carles wonders. If the dialectical development of the relation between students and teachers, unemployed and employed, unskilled and skilled, will thereby take a pre-post-industrial turn and eradicate the use of these dichotomies components of a striated strategy by which discrimination can be safely operated, then perhaps technology itself must be blamed and the course of innovation diverted. "Does love have an age? Is age just a number?" Are the categories of quantification dangerously close to becoming qualities, thus reversing the principles behind the double-entry bookkeeping of souls that capitalism require to manage and reproduce itself and allow for accumulation?

The crisis of phallologocentrism is of course paralleled, as Carles has demonstrated, by the serial crises of accumulation under late capitalism, and would seem to call for a gender panic in order to ameliorate displaced ideological tensions: "Is this story only compelling because she’s a ‘cougar’?" Carles asks in his hallmark trope of interrogatory misdirection. He does not mean to ask a question but propose a philosophical thesis: namely, the idea of "cougars" -- a vulgar term for adult females whose sexual drive is not safely atrophying in dormancy -- are a prerequisite for the telling of "compelling" cultural stories given existing social relations. The estrual libidinous forces are sublimated into the elaboration of minute points of differentiation of the continuums of power. As these stories are becoming more compulsory, future liberation movements will be seeking the liberation from sexuality. Carles traces this line of compulsion, the fall from agape to eros to apathetic narcissism: "Sorta wish i had a teacher who had fallen in love with me when I was 14, or at least a teacher who would have ‘tugged me off’…." This is a cutting, incisive comment on the future role of education, no longer to delay and to pacify but to teach us a modality of pleasure in a restricted libidinal economy. Soon, Carles warns us, the evaporation of our constructed desires in meaningless bursts of orgasmic pleasure will be the only thing that our teachers will be structurally capable of teaching us. They can't impregnate our minds; they can only "tug us off" for a fleeting moment of intellectual relief.

5 March 2010: "Animal Collective at the Guggenheim: a Conceptual Post for the Most Conceptual Experience in the History of Indie Music"

2010-03-05T10:25:00.000-08:00

This post is about the ecstasy of communication. Carles tests the limits of conceptuality in an era that has contested the very idea of the concept and forwarded the hypothesis that there can be no hypotheses; that referentiality is always tentative, contingent, a mirage, or, as the philosophical cum artistic presentation by the Animal Collective group suggests, a projection. "Lights projecting, utilizing space, altering space," Carles notes. "This is art, architecture, and design. This is life." Or is it the "live performance art economy," as he has descrobed it elsewhere?

In other words, the space of everyday life is a projection, and moreover, one that is in continual flux. So though the spiraling space in which this experience occurs implies a locus for a transcendental signified, a core of meaning -- "In the middle is authenticity, a portal to the centre of the Earth" -- the shattering truth is that there is no truth; "art, architecture and design" are as shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. "Visuals ’stunning’ me," Carles admits. "Taking me to a different place."

Carles has gone into orbit, one might say -- "5 senses taken 2 the next level," as he explains. Jean Baudrillard, in his seminal essay "The Ecstasy of Communication," describes the "satellitization of the real" -- "the very quotidian nature of the terrestrial habitat hypostastized in space means the end of metaphysics. The end of hyperreality now begins." Of course there is always movement, the inexorable movement of the trace. The spiral up out of immanence is revealed instead to be, as Carles puts it, "a downward spiral of altdom."

The space of the public sphere, the coordinated and deliberate confusion between virtuality and physical reality prompts difficulties in measuring the ontology of experientiality: "This experience can only be experienced if ur here," Carles notes, but we have lost the moorings, as he well knows, for determining presence. As Baudrillard has written, the reflexive space in which mirror scenes could be enacted to establish the illusion of identity have be supplanted by "a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold -- the smooth operational surface of communication." Physical presence has been supplanted by the "control screen" -- as Carles puts it: "Familiar technology. Lights. Button pressing."

With nothing to anchor shifting identities within the non-places of consumerism under late capitalism, we are forced to spin around and around, dervishes of desire, feverishly panting after subjectivity or longing for a ritualized dizzy oblivion. The uninterrupted interface. Carles linguisticaly emulates this phenomenology of experience: "swimming in metaphorical strawberry jam / I could touch it /I was swimming in it." But the sensorium manufactured at the Guggenheim museum, itself a testament to an old reification of the problematic of the aesthetic, was nothing more than a simulacrum, which allowed it to present the clearest manifestation of this nascent decade of a long familiar conundrum, but which nonetheless made it "for one night... into the most relevant space in the history of the world." Time and space are collapsed under the strain of eternal semiotic decentering. Relevance is an aporia, if not a existential vacuum. And still we continue to spiral...

3 March 2010: "American Apparel Finds the best bottom / butt / ass in the world."

2010-03-03T18:08:00.000-08:00

This post is about industrial revanchism. Carles takes advantage of a ribald visual pun to interrogate the possibilities for the dying manufacturing base to mount a rear-guard action, as it were, against the insurgent services industry in the U.S. Namely, can American Apparel, a manufacturer infamous for its combining progressive-seeming labor policies with retrograde sexist advertising campaigns for its products, turn the tide against the offshoring of apparel making to so-called third-world countries and instigate a U.S. revival in the moribund Fordist industrial base? As Carles asks, "Is Am Appy ‘revolutionary’ or are they exploiting women?" The implicit answer,as always, is "both/and": it is doing both, predicating the revolution on female exploitation, so that antiquated, Second Internationalist notions of the composition of the revolutionary class can once again be advanced to the fore and doom themselves to failure. That is to say, American Apparel advances a limited revolution that functions as a devolution, protecting its tenuous hold on the industrial firmament that is threatened by incipient globalization and the irresistible sweep of post-Fordist reform. All the old loyalities, epitomized by the objectification of women within the domestic sphere in a safely isolated nuclear family, are being swept away. Now, post-Fordist industry has produced a labile, mobile worker, with no allegiances to the firm that promises its workers nothing in return. American Apparel wishes to stand athwart history and say no to these changes, but can only do so but embracing "backward" (pun intended) social formations along with seemingly outdated methods for organizing the productive forces.

Fittingly, the term "ass," as Carles uses it in this post, is dialogic in its deployment, at once evoking the heavy laboring animals of the pre-industrial era of primitive accumulation as well as the overdetermined sexual fetish of the female gluteal muscles in the post-industrial era. Procreative "labor" in the sense of sexual attraction to vaginal coitus is subordinated to the fruitless expenditure inherent in anal fetishization, a metaphoric if not metonymic indication of the pressure to banish productivity from the now hegemonic consumerist desire. The calculatingly lascivious categorization of female posteriors from several geographic locations that have seen their industrial base decimated underscores the point that Carles wishes to emphasize: not only that "Am Appy [is] the future of marketing" but that this evolution is experienced by the nascent class formations as both sexually titillating and ethically nauseating: Thus Carles's inquiry "R u turned on or disgusted?" is yet another trick question. In the welter of contradictions that is post-postmodern subjectivity, one must already be disgusted to become turned on. Fascination is synthesized with repulsion; the abject becomes the glamorous; the fashion industry reaches the zero degree and casually brushes it aside. "Do the top 10 butts deserve more than a goodie bag worth $300?" Carles asks. Do women deserve to be prostituted in order to resurrect the working class? Or can we finally "turn our backs" on such ideas and forge a working class revolutionary movement that can upend all forms of domination and subjection?

1 March 2010: "The ‘Most Marketable’ Winter Olympians Whose Personal Brands make ‘the most bank’"

2010-03-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

This post is about socialism in one country. In a lengthy analysis of the 2010 Winter Olympic games in the neoliberalist haven of Western Canada, Carles attacks the myth of the so-called end of history on two fronts, analyzing both the shortcomings of neoliberalism since it achieved global hegemony in the aftermath of the dissolution of the socialist bloc and the limitations of bourgeois historiography that focuses on the achievements of individuals without accounting for the social milieu that permitted their actions and enabled them to be recognized as notable. Naturally, Carles synthesizes the critique into a ringing indictment of late capitalism as corrosive to the very possibility of freedom, detailing the ways in which even incontestable athletic achievement can be distorted in the lens of market-driven competition and individualistic ideology.

Walking the fine line of pregnant incoherency, Carles notes "how ‘important’ / ‘relevant’ / ‘irrelevant’ the Olympics are" since they have become "a month long branding experiment." But of course any branding experiment is inherently an exercise in contradiction -- a brand is at once a approximation of uniqueness and unequivocal sigh of conformity to the consumerist code that reduces all social appearances to the commercialized language of replicable and salable objects. Thus
athletic achievement -- a proxy for being-for-itself -- is translated into the dead form of capital and is made to appear as a kind of inferior being-in-itself, an instrumentalized activity that finds its telos not in its own nature, in the praxis itself, but in the way the results can be leveraged in a consumerist system of circulated and circulatable meanings attached to commodities. The underlying lesson is that a socialist vanguard may not emerge from a process of natural selection and gradual enlightenment, as any accomplishment is rigorously appropriated for oligarchic ends and various actors are co-opted into a system that serves them at the expense of the struggle. This then indoctrinates the rapt mass audience into a lachrymose passivity that mimes subjectivity but is denuded of authentic significance or substance: Instead of seizing upon the contradictions of the post-industrial age to foment revolution and secure autonomy and prosperity for a greater share of the world's people, "In the modern world, humans like to talk abt the TV that they are watching while they are chillin on their laptops [via twitter]." The Olympics is thereby revealed in its true nature, as a forum for uniting the world in spectatorship, watching the meaningless achievement of others while capital continues to centralize and accumulate in the hands of the lucky or egregious rapacious few.

Carles then taxonomizes the various forms of mystification exercised through the various broadcasting tropes used to disseminate the athletes as readily consumable "stories," noting the various ways injustice, prejudice and bigotry are reproduced as readily digestible memes. Adopting the persona that the coverage of the Olympics attempts to fashion us into , Carles says of ice dancing athletes Charlie White and Meryl Davis: "From what I understand, it will always be ‘funny’ to make fun of ‘flamers prancing around on ice.’" Of Shani Davis, Carles express the expectation that he be "a flamboyant African American diva bro ‘pissing off’ all of the other irrelevant countries." Of curling athlete Cheryl Bernard, he writes, "This female broad has been branded as the ‘cougar’ of the sport, since she is mad hot + looks like she is down 2 fuck after baking you and your bros some rice krispie treats." And on it goes, with Carles exorcising all the stereotypes reinscribed by the Olympic coverage.

But Carles warns that we should not be distracted by the callous and relentless parade of capitalist triumphalism and the collateral damage it causes to human rights and diversity. Instead, he wonders about ideological blowback: The key question, of course, is how to subvert the Olympic games and make it paradoxically live up to its own ideological alibi, names that it unite the people of the world in struggle and accomplishment and the highest expression of human species being. How does a commercial festival that parasitically sucks the life out of human action become the seedling for a great strong oak of renewed socialism in our time? As Mouffe and Laclau have noted, we must prepare to move "beyond the positivity of the social" and explore new articulations of the social that defy the class positions that were popularly extinguished with the end of the great ideological struggle between East and West. Carles dismisses as apologetic fatalism the notion that the struggle is over with this taunting challenge: "Do the Olympics not matter any more bc the Cold War is over?"

Yes, it is most definitively so that we can no longer look to the Olympics as a forum for the sublimated expression of the struggle between socialism and capitalism -- Carles points out that China's effort to maintain this structure ("China loves a winner even more than America loves a winner, since they utilize Olympic triumphs as propaganda 2 brainwash their citizens who are trapped in their communist society") is ultimately unconvincing because the class formations are no longer persuasive: Chinese athletes "look too much like ‘working class’ AZNs" and can't posit the triumph of the working class as its abolition.

Instead it is imperative for nascent Left movements to look for fissures within the hegemony, for counter discourses within the overdetermined structure of the competition. As Mouffe and Laclau warn, "The task of the Left ... cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology, but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction ofd a radical and plural democracy." So in the context of the Olympics, as Carles notes, this is a matter not of critiqueing and denouncing the rampant branding of the athletes, but perhaps insisting that everyone be branded more thoroughly, that the rewards are more broadly dispersed among partcipating athletes: "Feel more confused than ever about the Olympics. It is like this celebration of cultures from all over the world, but also some sort of competition where we try to figure out whose brand will be the most valuable to a Fortune 500 / niche company." The solution is the fuse the competition he mentions with the celebration, to overturn the incipient and insistent individualism by perfecting it, by holding a competition where everyone wins merely by virtue of belonging to a culture, by espousing an ultimate irreducible otherness. If at first this otherness if reified and commercialized, that is to the detriment not of otherness but of reification. Carles radically proposes that the content can shatter the form of capitalist hegemony.

25 February 2010: "Does it make more sense to start a shitty band that goes viral, as opposed 2 wanting 2 change the world with ‘good music’?

2010-02-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

This post is about interpellation. Interpellation, of course, is French structural Marxist Louis Althusser's term for the way ideology constitutes individuals into subjectivity, forming the field in which they can recognize themselves as subjects. Carles likens this process to the distinctively contemporary problem of forming a musical group and disseminating its product. While individuals seem to choose the music they will play and the means by which they will promote it, those forms in fact chose the individuals and interpellate them as particular kinds of performers, and rendering hegemonic a specific kind of performativity suitable to the reproduction of social relations, which in the last analysis are co-determinative with the specific material relations of production, including ownership of the means of production, whether in the form of constant, organic, or fixed capital. (Althusser would later spend time in a French psychiatric hospital after inadvertently strangling his wife.)

In this partially comprehensive treatise, Carles, in the guise of exploring the potential goals a musical group may conceivably pursue, lays out a veritable digest of the subject positions available to the post-postmodern dividual, with some speculation on their relative strengths and weaknesses as well as their interrelation with the spiritual metaphysics of earlier eras that once anchored the self's sense of identity. Some say that music has lost its soul. Carles borrows that trope to investigate into the ecumenical concept of the soul, with the universality of music itself serving as an enabling homology.

The linchpin of Carles's analysis can be derived from his taxonomy of the typical subject's desires, as finding their ontogenesis in the existing material conditions of post-industrial social formations.

Just want 2 be in a band that is heard by 1-5 million ppl.
Just want 2 find music that I can discuss with my friends that makes it clear that I ‘get’ ‘it.’
Just want to share memes with the world.

In other words, the typical subject is interpolated into identity through these primary objectives -- the narcissistic pursuit of fame, or the mirror stage writ large on a global scale; the sublimation of infantile desires for domination over intimates into the subcultural formation of group identities clustered around aesthetic pretensions; and the illusion of ontological security derived from those selfsame aesthetic pretensions magnified into eternal, transcendent verities. We want to "get it" indeed, and as Carles intimates, the less precisely we articulate this "it", the more ineffable our consequent subjectivity appears to be.

Carles seizes upon an explicitly religious musical group that attempts to seize upon popular styles to leverage its theological messages as a piquant metaphor for the modes of interpollated subjectivity currently operative. Pointing out the group's "larger ramifications," he notes that it is possibly "‘the future’ of relevant music" -- in other words, the future of the curtailed subject positions under the hegemonic regimes of capitalist domination, if we don't interpose a critical intervention along the lines Carles exemplifies. "It seems like this new band has totally ‘transcended’ the internet, creating a new model by which bands can reach a mass market of listeners," Carles warns, adding that inciting observers mockery may only be playing into the hands of this powerful new form of subjectivity. This mode is "a convenient model, because you can also ‘forget about the band’ and not feel bad about it, as opposed to thinking u have to keep giving them another chance to ‘recapture the magic.’" That is, this form of subjectivity disavows itself to intensify its hold, to propel its own claims to naturalness. The metaphysical, "magic" bases for the soul, as Carles suggests, are ironically subordinated in this quasi-religious group, with the Christian overtones supplying a veil of traditionalist nostalgia over their incontestably radical aufhebung.

What the band's video demonstrates, for Carles, is the triumph of simulacra over the outdated notions of authenticity, that may have died along with God in the post-Vatican II era: "Maybe we need to ’shift’ our expectations 4 new music, and accept low quality products that are failed imitations of previous products, as opposed to ’searching for something new and exciting.’" In other words, the band he dissects is the harbinger of a new, degraded mode of subjectivity, in which we are interpellated not by appeals to our grandiose fantasies for ourselves but by a irrepressible wish to be received as derivative, an echo of an echo, a "failed imitation" whose very failure to perfect the copy of the model marks it with the desired signs of uniqueness. Failure rather than novelty, Carles impresses upon his readers, will be the new measure of identity in a post-networked age. "It seems more realistic to consume 20-30 new shitty meme bands per year, as opposed to thinking you will find 20-30 new albums/bands that make u feel more fulfilled than ‘having a good lil laugh.’" That is to say, the bands/brands/individuals/cyborgs that we interact with increasingly through various levels of digital mediation need no longer impress us with a Turing Test level of human spontaneity, but rather they (and we) need only qualify for humanity by meeting a decreed level of inadequacy or "shittiness," to use the profane term Carles employs to shock us from our stupor. We become subjects not via aspiration but via an embrace of limitation as the fundamental principle of our agency. This comes with an attendant abdication of responsibility. So a band that sets out to "spread the word of our Lord Savior Jesus Christ, the only Son of God" in fact serves to deny the relevance of religion to the promulgation of identity. Jesus is just another meme, Carles suggests.

Hence the new principle of the self that Carles cites: "Just want a remixable meme." We just want to be constituent parts in the transpersonal metaphysical mush, the cesspool of memes from which meaning bubbles up and pops, releasing its gaseous semiology to the cosmic void that has supplanted man's belief in a deity. We are "hella confused" indeed.

24 February 2010: "Are soccer shin guards the new big trendy trend in alt fashion?"

2010-02-24T12:03:00.000-08:00

This post is about the habitus. Carles takes on the mythologization of childhood competition in this Barthes-inspired critical investigation/evisceration/archeology of an emergent fashion trend, the donning of shin guards. "Maybe it means we r at war, and we need 2 be protected, but maybe it is a tribute 2 the past," Carles notes elliptically, referring to the generational war between parents and children -- between the vulnerable and their putative biological protectors -- and to how that struggle inevitably subsides into nostalgia, into a harmless and sublimating "tribute 2 the past." Wearing shin guards, in his reading, is a effort to eulogize the contradictions forged in the capitalist training grounds of youth sport, where parents force their children to adapt to the psychic realities of consumerism and the de-skilled workplace that awaits them. "Youth sports are important in facilitating a ‘normalized’ American childhood," notes Carles, with all the dour connotations that go along with the process of "normalization." Psychological neutering; the merciless establishment of Marcuse's one-dimensional man between the chalk lines of the soccer pitch.

The empty rewards and enticements secure the consent of those who will be dominated and perpetuate that domination in the subsequent generations. "Is ‘going out 4 a pizza party’ as a kid one of the formative ‘bro chill session experiences’ in ur life?" Carles asks rhetorically. Remember, in Carles's lexicon, "bro" is a not a term of fraternal bonhomie but a pejorative appellation that designates an individual who has surrendered critical autonomy and is instead driven to behaviors and postures by prevailing circumstances. A "bro" is a cultural opportunist.

The class-inflected blandishments at these early stages help reinforce class positionality and the stakes involved with conformity and cooperation in the exisitng social order: Carles points out that children playing soccer confront their relative privilege: impersonating one of these little Lord Fautleroys, he writes sardonically, "Felt relieved that my parents weren’t poor, and could always bring a ’sweet ass snack’ for the team after the soccer game. Felt bad for poor kids whose parents didn’t ‘man up’ and drop some dollars on a premium snack." This is how the terms of class contempt are reproduced. Indoctrination and subordination on the field, reinforced by callow rewards and rechanneled hatreds afterward. In the end, the properly programmed are apt to spit out notions like this one Carles supplies by way of oblique example: "The quality of snack ur parents brought on your assigned day was generally indicative of their parenting philosophy, and how far u would get in life." Class habitus is the all in all, parenting a matter of attaching the appropriate meanings to the requisite status symbols and impressing them on forming young minds.

Hence Carles spares no modicum of irony when he lays into the betrayal of one generation by the previous one: "This trend is 4 u, mom and dad. I know u think I have grown up, and I just wear things arbitrarily in order to ‘look cool.’ Not this time. This means something to me. These shin guards r 4 u." Adults will wear the marks of their childhood shame; the totems of safety that failed to protect them from the ideological enemy within, whose terrible victories are borne out by the very allegiance to trends the shin guards now epitomize. These failed methods of parenting leave children unprepared for the world, a point Carles humorously makes by referring to an image of a child finding an off-label use, as it were, for an orange rind: "Want to jam an orange wedge in my mouth, pretend it is a mouth guard, hope it protects me as I grow up and encounter new challenges in our world." Of course, it cannot protect her; moreover it may very well contribute to tooth decay. Metaphorically, a powerful statement about the long-term effects of youth-sport inculcation.

The contempt and confusion Carles ascribes to the generation now reaching adulthood stems from their perceived failure to live up to standards that never achieved hegemony or coherency among the youthful subject populations they were imposed upon. In a poignant passage, Carles captures this confusion:

Soccer Mom. She could do anything. Raise 2-4 kids with minimal emotional or physical support from our father. Get us to school, keep our grades up, and keep us ‘enriched’ with youth sports and miscellaneous community educational activities. I will not become you, mom. Not only because I sorta h8 what u represent, but also bc I am not strong enough 2 do what u did.

Ultimately, children attempt to escape the welter of adolescence by seizing upon differentiating trends marketed to youth for youth, of course with an individuating spin ("Maybe I will make my own conceptual shin guards," Carles bemusedly opines). They attempt to brand themselves from the detritus of a youth misspent: "So many different styles. just want to find some that match my personal brand. Hope Am Appy starts to manufacture them soon." This merely replicates the authority trap, replacing the parent-child relation with the corporation-consumer relation; both resonate with the same paternalism and naturalism. No one thinks to question their place in the existing order.

Since the time of youth has been colonized by the modalities of indoctrination, the representation of youth has broken away to stand altogether apart from actual praxis. Fashion, Carles implies, has managed to become the apotheosis of represented youth, or rather, the idealization of youth is the entelechy of fashion, which prevents its money-grubbing cycles of obsolescence from seeming entirely soulless.

An impressive immanent critique by Carles, knitting together the disparate threads of consumerism, the reproduction of social relations, the desiccated bourgeois family structure, the pleasures of spectatorship and the frayed safety net in social democracies in the time of resplendant neoliberalism. But still I am haunted by Carles's question: "Will u start wearing shin guards?" In a sense, have I ever stopped wearing them?

23 February 2010: "Angsty figure skating couple ice dances to Linkin Park at Winter Olympics"

2010-02-23T12:09:00.000-08:00

This post is about being and nothingness. Is the sport of ice dancing fundamentally absurd? Carles wonders. He highlights the presence at the Olympics of a particularly "angsty couple" who brings the underlying tensions, the inherent nausea of competition for its own sake, of existence itself in all its apparent non-contingency, to the surface of the ice. By choosing a particularly overwrought song by a musical group that prefers the cacophonous and heterogeneous "mixed" style of rap rock, the skaters employed "a lyrical and textural soundscape upon which an interpretive skate dance can be performed," Carles explains ironically, as the dance itself, given in its own sensuousness, can withstand no interpretation. Words. What can they mean in comparison with actions themselves, with being in itself as opposed to for itself? Carles seems to ask. What is performance in relation to interpretation? At what stage does the performance begin, and can it ever end? Interpretations of interpretations, echoes of the event itself, which can never be isolated but can only be intuited through the miasma of words and meanings, pitiful gestures at staving off the horrible truth of naked existence.

The words of the chosen song, by echoing the vertiginous sense of nothingness, highlight this problem of interpretation, of all comment tending toward tautology. "there’s something inside me that pulls beneath the surface
consuming/confusing / this lack of self-control I fear is never ending." Carles implies that self-control itself is a myth, an always receding ideal that forever slips from our grasp, like the ice-dance routine that would receive a perfect score from the judges, silent in their chamber of decision. No wonder the singer feels "so insecure," as do the skaters by extension. Forever we are being judged by nameless observers, according to incomprehensible criteria that we shall never be able to master let alone understand. Ice dancing, in this regard, makes for the perfect sport to illustrate the hell into which we are all cast by simply being born. Always others, watching. What do they want, if not our freedom?
Of course, that is why Carles finds the song in question so well-chosen: "Wonder if “Crawling” is one of the best songs of the past century," he notes, referring to the century in which God was declared dead, and the traditional modes of transcendence, of flying above the fate of our limited species, were snuffed out systematically, leaving us all to "crawl" as it were. Carles notes that the skaters in question have been suspected of incestuous practices ("The ice dancing couple is named Sinead and John Kerr. The[y] are getting ‘mad coverage’ because they are siblings, and their dance moves get sexual and passionate.") Perhaps this is their effort to radically confront absurdity and meaninglessness with a violation of a fundamental principle of social structuration, to assault the very basis of the prohibitions by which cultural order is established. Carles dismisses the futile, whingeing effort without comment.

The effervescence of figures gliding on ice: could there be a more poignant symbol of humankind's doomed efforts to escape from immanence? Carles suggests that it is the "most authentic Olympic event," but such an assertion must be tempered by the implicit understanding that authenticity itself is indeterminate, with no reference point beyond being itself, raw existence.

19 February 2010: "Japanese Figure Skater wears keffiyeh at Olympics"

2010-02-19T11:01:00.000-08:00

This post is about mimetic desire. In a pointed departure from his customary rhetorical approach, Carles deploys the second-person plural pronoun we with considerable and considered liberality in this post, a searing investigation of the relation between nativism (as exemplified by the Olympics and its fervor of barely sublimated nationalism and race pride), homophobia (intensified by the homosocial bonding among athletes and the alpha-male preening brought out through ritualized competition), and the legacy of postcolonialist struggle.

Who are "we"? This question haunts every population of any nation-state that is cajoled into becoming a "people" in the Hobbesean sense rather than a Spinozan multitude, and it haunts every attempt at solidarity that fractures along the lines of incompatible individual desires, often figured in terms of sexuality. From this quasi-Girardian viewpoint, sexual desire is selfish desire and imitative, a dangerous combination that sparks competition over mates and masks an irreducible fear of the Other with the compulsion to supplant/become the Other. "We" are those who have learned to want the same things,who have been rationalized by a hegemonic desire disseminated from the existing power structure.

In his careful analysis of the semiosis of sport, Carles draws a direct link between the costume of presumably gay figure skater Daisuke Takahashi and the disguises worn by the terrorists who struck at Israel during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

Popular Japanese Figure Skater Daisuke Takahashi had a keffiyeh integrated into his cute little costume for his Olympic Contest. We cannot confirm if he is ‘alt’ or if this was actually an anti-Israeli message, showing support for the 1972 massacre of members of the Israeli Summer Olympic Team at the Munich Olympics. Based on his Japanese heritage, we find it safe to assume that he was

Carles suggests that the Olympics are merely perpetuating in coded fashion the ideological struggles of World War II, and in a sense the Games have never left Berlin, 1936. But rather than openly attempt to establish racial dominance through athletic achievement, the fascist tropes of domination have modulated. Homosexuality is no longer barred and demonized; instead it is used symbolically as an overdetermined flashpoint, a subtle warning about the fruits of individualism and the rejection of nationalism. Carles, by flirting with the contemptuous tone of a bigot who is nonetheless attracted to what he wishes repelled him ("If ur a homosexual, would u ‘hook up’ with this kute AZN flying twink?"), means to illustrate the ways in which such muddled animus is the logical outcome of a competition rooted in national identity, which has been blurred by the various diasporas and forced resettlements and ressentiments of the colonialist era and its aftermath. The Other appears to us as ourselves, and as a forbidden "homo" desire, which we look to our athlete-avatars to defeat in competition. But at the same time the symbolism remains ambiguous enough to be disavowed in the heat of the excitement of competition: "Do u think this was a real ‘hipster scarf’ or a politically motivated message? Is he ‘just a harmless queen on ice’?" asks Carles, knowing full well that the question cannot be answered. For in fact, what has been achieved is optimal undecidability. The political motivations both disappear and become hegemonic the minute we ask ourselves the explosive question about the skater's identity: a harmless queen, indeed -- as harmless as any monarch whose power has seemed to become divinely ordained.

The fusion of nationalism with sexualized competition simultaneously rights the wrongs of the colonial era, serving as a kind of moral vindication of the so-called white-man's burden: The burden of medals, the burden of setting the bar for global competition, the burden of reproducing teh given social order wiht al its hierarchies. As Carles puts it, "We can only assume that his Palestinian scarf gave him the warrior power that won him the bronze medal."

As usual Carles penultimate question is a rhetorical one: "Are the Olympics alt, or does it require too much dedication for an authentic alt to participate [via Hipster Olympics]?" The Olympics, in their current ideological formulation, present the status quo as an alternative, to make reactionary nationalistic responses register as progressive and enlightened. The sort of dedication required of an "authentic alt" is the maintenance of a negative dialectic, of critical perspicacity, of a refusal to drift into the daydreams of communal competition and instead recognize with steely vigilance the persisting presence of the cries for nativist unity over global peace and harmony. The homeland, Palestinian or otherwise, may not be realized on Canadian ice, but that is, Carles tells us, because the very idea of it has so thoroughly colonized our minds.

17 February 2010: "Keut Hipster Girl Watches White Guy Beat up Black Guy on Public Bus"

2010-02-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

This post is about first philosophy. Carles constructs a very cunning contrast between Rosa Parks, the enduring symbol of civil rights activism who famously refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white passenger as was mandated by the cruelly unjust laws of the time, and an anonymous white "keut hipster girl" who while riding a bus remains impassive and indifferent to racial injustice in our own time, locked in the solipsistic soundscape supplied by "her large headphones."

At first blush, the moral is perhaps too easy to draw from this set-up: the childish narcissism and self-centeredness that has been recklessly encouraged by late capitalism has put in jeopardy the gains in social justice so bravely fought for and so tentatively secured. As Carles notes, "Her purple American Apparel outfit and Converse lowtops clash violently with the racial tensions on the bus." There is no place for such tension in the dreamscapes of consumerism. Recognition of the other, in the sense of a pure, moral obligation, an uncompromisable responsibility to alterity as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas, has no apparent place on the bus to post-postmodernity. Instead, subjectivity nourishes itself on a thin pap of reciprocal decodings of the feeble, corporatized gestures of identity.

At this point, we are ready to investigate Carles's deeper argument, about the place of violence as a mode of social disruption, as a radical means of clearing the way for a return to ethics. Violence not as purification but as a visceral demonstration of the exhaustion of alternatives (pun intended) to awaken a somnambulant populace to the irreducible otherness present in every urban conflagration. As teh site of irrepressible conflict, the city is also at once the locus classicus for the birth of ethics. Hence the philological kinship between city and civility.

Carles draws upon controversial French social theorist Georges Sorel. Only violence, Sorel argues, could maintain the integrity of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle. Carles, therefore, means "Is public transportation 2 dangerous 2 be relied upon?" to be a rhetorical question, if not a call to action. The bus must once again become a site for insurrectionary confrontation. As Carles declares: "The bus puts volatile people together in a small space, and some times racial + class issues boil over into a youtubable fight." That is, it is the site of struggle that can be captured and exported, generalized. It must not become a realm of lifestyle escapism, a place where, as Carles notes, "young, alternative dreamers" can posture in an effort to convey how they "live a more meaningful life."

Indeed, Carles implicitly proposes a dramatic synthesis of the anarcho-syndicalism of Sorel with the uncompromising ethics of responsibility of Levinas. We must not waver in the violent confrontation with the Other, nor should we hesitate to attempt a general strike in the absence of a confirmed solidarity. The implied responsibility to the other should bear us forth in revolutionary struggle, in the pursuit of genuine alternatives. Carles asks: "What mp3s do yall think she was listening 2?" We can assume it was not Gil Scott Heron.

16 February 2010: "Tween Fashion Blogger, Tavi, shows up on lastnightsparty"

2010-02-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

This post is about metonymy. What happens when you become a walking metaphor? Carles seizes upon the phenomenon of a preteen fashion commentator Tavi Gevinson to illustrate a larger point about the acceleration of the fashion cycle to the point where it has become self-consuming; it seems to have lapped itself, so that its dictates are invalid even before they can be promulgated and trickle down through the various castes of capitalist society.

Carles describes Gevinson as being prized for "her ‘youthful spirit’, ‘honesty’, and other generic positive elements that people in the fashion world use/value." Note the pun at the end on use value. Of course, fashion most distinctly has nothing to do with use value; it is about generating exchange value through obsolescence. Just as use value has been obliterated by late capitalism's emphasis on shifting criteria of value, the character traits that might once have adhered to an authentic, transcendental identity -- the ones which Carles puts in ironic quotation marks -- are now reified commodities in a media market for pseudosincerity, which has taken to exploiting child labor in pursuit of those ever-ephemeral of innocence and artlessness.

Sans use value, or beyond use value, as Baudrillard woudl say, there is only the relative value ascertained in a given moment, or in the proverbial 15 minutes of fame we all are alleged to be owed. Having exhausted teenagers in the pursuit of fresh material to exploit to connote "youth", the fashion industry has begun to seize upon ever younger recruits, willing victims fashionized far before their time. Bled of their individuality by the parasitic industry, these victims are left for "generic," as Carles puts it. He takes this logic to its endpoint, opening it to the reader's judgment whether or not Gevinson is "overated as a human." So thorough is her premature objectification at the hands of her manipulators, one is tempted to answer in the affirmative. As a fashion-world shill, she has become subhuman, in danger of becoming abject.

Where will the exploitation stop? Carles is being only partially facetious when he makes this remark with regard to the photographer who had taken the photos of the youngster: "we can only assume that his night was a failure after Tavi did not take off her top and show more skin." Child pornography is certainly not beyond the pale in the fashion industry, which routinely sexualizes its underage models. This connection sheds some light on Carles's cryptic parting challenge: "Are party pix worthless when there are ‘no tits’ in the photos?" Again, the question of value in a world that has mobilized exchange value and purged any essential truths. This bound to the question of scopophilia: what do we see when we see breasts? The image of a sexuality beyond the reach of fashion, or the ultimate expression of fashion's ability to condition our desires? Carles is asking: What sort of party are we at? What are we willing to be a party to in the pursuit of the ultimate "pix"?

11 February 2010: "British Youtube Tween goes ‘big in Japan’ because she looks like an anime character"

2010-02-11T17:14:00.000-08:00

This post is about orientalism. Can it really have been more than 30 years since Edward Said wrote his seminal analysis of the sources and ideological purposes behind Occidental attitudes toward the East? Of course Said was principally concerned with the representation of Middle Eastern cultures in Europe, but Carles appropriates the basic limning of the argument and extends its application to Japan, and the exoticization of Japanese culture in contemporary Western societies.

In some ways Japanese culture has always beguiled Western observers, and the nation's tendency to cultural isolationism only exacerbates the situation. Yet that cultural isolationism is thrown into contradiction by the country's reputation as an early adopter of technological trends and a wellspring of exportable cultural motifs, many of which have been exploited in a range of Western fringe subcultures. This makes Japan, as Carles points, "an absurd place, where nothing makes sense."

But modern Japan yields a moment of opportunity for socialist struggle, albeit one also fraught with danger for those partisans seeking to use racial identity politics as a weapon within a larger, truly socialist strategy. As American Stanley Aronowitz has written, "People of color from postcolonial societies simply cannot afford to turn their backs on the opportunities afforded by economic and political inclusion, despite the increasingly insistent attacks by intellectuals on Eurocentrism."

The question then, as Carles chooses to frame it, is what sort of opportunity is presented by the phenomenon of a young white pop singer infiltrating the insular Japanese culture? Is this a reverse example of the orientalism in the West, a sort of Occidentalism in the east? Or does the asymmetry point up the persistent problems in assimilating Asians into Western culture paradigms? "Do u feel turned on by white girls who wish they were AZN / Japanese?" Carles asks, slyly referencing the shameful history of Western colonizers enslaving Asian women in prostitution and thus incurring the misdirected wrath of wives on the homefront. Also built in to this is a critique of the prevailing stereotype of Asian women as being unusually submissive or receptive to patriarchal culture -- infantialized, much as this pre-teen pop star is. Hence Carles's cutting assertion: "I have a feeling that this girl probably appeals to grown Japanese men, though." The comment plays both ways, a comment on partriarchy and the orientalism that locates the patriarchal more firmly in an othered culture.

But Carles's larger point is that Orientalism is an alibi, a distraction from teh larger issues of exploitation that face workers everywhere and which often takes a post-Reichian form of sexual deprivation or, rather, the disciplining of working-class sexuality from on high as a mode of social control. "Maybe it doesn’t matter what culture ur a part of–all that really matters is the simple truth that ’sex sells,’" Carles trenchantly argues.

As Laclau and Mouffe write, "the forms of an antagonism, therefore, far from being predetermined, are the result of hegemonic struggle.... There is therefore no subject -- nor, furhter, any 'necessity' -- which is absolutely radical and irrecuperable by the dominant order." Carles puts his own post-postmodern spin on this view:

Feel like I might not overthink our cultural divide, and just watch clips of Japanese game shows. I will ‘laugh’ at the disconnect between American culture and Japanese culture, but then maybe come to the conclusion that ‘all humans are the same’ because we just want to escape from ‘the grind’ of daily life. We just want things 2 laugh at, things 2 distract us from how sad/trapped we might feel on the inside.

The East/West divide is not overdetermined but instead underwritten by a biologically based commonality that transcends uneven cultural developments. But this prompts an equal resistance to the mantle of savior of the revolution, of adopting the radical praxis that social change requires to unseat an established hegemonic order. Hence Beckii Cruel, an unlikely Other, yet perhaps more radical for her very unlikelihood of being a torch bearer for a consciousness raising movement. Carles explains: "Beckii Cruel represents an ideal identity that they can obtain by consuming different media/art/goods." By they, Carles is clearly referring in a veiled manner to the New Left in all its transnational guises, most of which are under siege as the neoliberal order gasps its last breaths. By adopting teenage pop idols as wedges to break hegemony, the Left can strike a blow at the heart of the culture industry that would seek to nullify dissent, the "grind" of everyday life that Carles had invoked. And a child shall lead them.

If all standard bearers are "recuperable" as Laclau and Mouffe argue, perhaps it's best to seize upon a symbol already thoroughly co-opted and at the same time putatively "innocent."

Carles declares, "Maybe Beckii Cruel is the new ternative," a play on "alternative," that mirrors Deleuze's revealing language play in "Postscript on the Societies of Control," where he radically theorizes the existence of "dividuals" who has succeeded the moribund category of the individual. Carles is arguing that we must move beyond the conception of binary alternatives and strike instead at the root of the structure that gestates such dichotomies.

9 February 2010: "Is Die Antwoord a ternative band?"

2010-02-10T17:13:00.000-08:00

This post is about expropriating the expropriators. In his epochal tract Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin, at the time waiting in exile for the opportunity to lead the first truly proletarian revolution, wrote a withering critique of optimism and opportunism in light of monopoly capital's ability to co-opt the working class by offshoring a certain amount of exploitation.

The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc., makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others. The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between imperialism and opportunism.... Some writers, L. Martov, for example, are prone to wave aside the connection between imperialism and opportunism in the working-class movement—a particularly glaring fact at the present time—by resorting to “official optimism” (à la Kautsky and Huysmans) like the following: the cause of the opponents of capitalism would be hopeless if it were progressive capitalism that led to the increase of opportunism, or, if it were the best-paid workers who were inclined towards opportunism, etc. We must have no illusions about “optimism” of this kind. It is optimism in respect of opportunism; it is optimism which serves to conceal opportunism. As a matter of fact the extraordinary rapidity and the particularly revolting character of the development of opportunism is by no means a guarantee that its victory will be durable: the rapid growth of a painful abscess on a healthy body can only cause it to burst more quickly and thus relieve the body of it. The most dangerous of all in this respect are those who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.

Carles seems to have this passage in mind in conducting his own rigorous analysis of the emerging cultural animus in Africa, which bears of course the marks of imperialism in its modern form perhaps more deeply than in any other region, colonial, post-colonial or otherwise. Carles directs his dissection of the problematic of imperialism in an era of globalization and multinational corporate entities at one particular instantiation of the incipient social relations, a "rap music" organization from South Africa known as Die Antwoord, who successfully staged an intervention in the media and disseminated their intersubjective positionality through a post-samizdat "viral" chain of transmission. In short, as Carles sums up bluntly, "Does n e 1 know what the deal with Die Antwoord is?" Or have they successfully masked themselves and their true intent as part of a larger and more shadowy socialist strategy that foregrounds outrageousness to conceal ambitions even more outrageous, at least to the running dogs of the neo-liberal capitalist front. The "deal" is no deal, or at least a refusal of the official optimism that Lenin had identified as crippling the left. The deal is in fact an opportunistic seizing hold of lacunae in the Western developed-world perception of Africa.

Still the approach of die Antwoord must be interrogated carefully; as Carles notes, they force themselves into our "realm of relevant awareness" in a not entirely comfortable manner. Hence Carles regards them as "ternative," not quite a viable alternative to capitalism as such. But as Carles is forced to rejoin, "WTF is ternative? What is marketing?" Can socialist strategy in a late capitalist problematic be differentiated from marketing, or is that difficulty in discerning a difference the very essence of the tactic? Opportunism is a subtle dialectic, subject to abuse precisely because it is so hard to acknowledge or even identify when deployed.

Die Antwoord, then, intend to replicate their message in the form of the commodity itself, which is why Carles likens them to the purveyors of the song "Barbie Girl" -- a similar approach to subversion through careful detournement of a hegemonic idol of sexism and first-world domination. But Carles is alive to the possibility that the group will be co-opted:

Feel sorta confused by Die Antwoord. I wonder if they will be the type of band that ‘opens up for Kanye West/Radiohead’, or if they will be more like the band Aqua who sang the hit song “Barbie Girl.”

The racial and aesthetic progressiveness of the commercial bands he cites indicate the specific nature of the dangers the imperialist order can present to neutralize threats. There is always the threat of killing the revolution with kindness.

8 February 2010: "UNCONFIRMED RUMOR: Lady Gaga gave birth to a child"

2010-02-08T19:35:00.000-08:00

This post is about matriarchy. The first thing to realize is that the baby is a red herring. There is no baby. That is to say, there are only babies. Carles's point is that American recording artist Lady Gaga is in the process of "giving birth," so to speak, to a matriarchal order, or at least a Utopian vision of that order that at once transcends the limitations of strictly procreative sex and reasserts the female's control over the destiny of the species.

In her pathbreaking, seminal work The Dialectic of Sex, Jewish Canadian-born feminist Shulamith Firestone articulates the conditionality for a post-patriarchal society, one tenet of which is the elimination of eroticism as such. But this is not the same as attempting to abolish sex.

When we demand the elimination of eroticism, we mean not the elimination of sexual joy and excitement but its rediffusion over -- there's plenty to go around, it increases with use -- the spectrum of our lives.

Through her praxis, Lady Gaga explores the ramifications of this statement, particular in her endorsement of heretofore outre sexual practices. Not only is her very gender the subject of some ambiguity -- she has oft been rumored to have male genitalia -- but also, as Carles notes, "the complex duality of Lady Gaga’s existence" makes it difficult to conclude with any certainty the terms under which she may have consented to more directly enter the realm of cultural reproduction through biological means.

Carles notes speculatively of the baby captured in photographs that "we must assume" it "was formulated in her conceptual womb." That is to say, Lady Gaga has dissolved the boundary between the genesis and gestation of artistic interventions into the culture and the literal womb in which a fetus may be brought to term. Thus it is that women are able to re-enter history and affect it directly; the once-subordinate historigraphical mode of mothering fuses with a regained capacity for ideological interventions, lifting women from subservience and into a matriarchal destiny.

Hence the father of the child here takes on the mother's name, as Carles explains: "sources speculate that there is a ‘cool dad’ involved. We can assume that his last name is ‘Gaga.’ Sources say that his name is David Gaga." And also consider the presence of multiple potential male mates for Gaga -- in contradistinction to the classic expression of patriarchy, polygamy. Through the lens of Gaga's radical inversions, the existing social order is viewed as if in a convex fun-house mirror, with the potentialities of the future already established as if they had passed, and the grim realities of the patriarchal present cast off into an inscrutable vanishing point.

It's not hard to see why Carles was confused by the apparently missing "conceptual baby outfit." No layer of clothes could possibly carry the semiological weight that this infant must bear as it serves as the sign of the post-patriarchial synthesis.

7 February 2010: "What is the functional use of the perfect alternative breasts?"

2010-02-07T14:39:00.000-08:00

This post is about the event. Carles, having tried to call into being an epistemic shift through the sheer force of nominalism in an earlier post, renaming the era into which his subjectivity has been interpolated to attempt to force a historical rupture, finds himself suddenly confronted with the inadequacy of such an approach to ordering subjective experience, to seizing at least the illusion of autonomy: "Ultimately feeling lost in the ternative era. Floating around aimlessly in the blogosphere as tons of indie memes and newsbits fly every where." Instead of the feeling of control, there is drift, there is an out-of-controlness manifest in the appearance of determinate points of data appearing to be random, unmotivated, inexplicable, unjustifiable from an ontological or epistemological standpoint. The momentum of information is experienced not as telelogical stream flowing toward a certain historical destiny, but a chaotic explosion of multiplicity, of histories overwriting histories, of alternative (pun intended) histories and counterfactuals as simultaneous facts, of contradictions resolved in the impossible unmanageability of information surplus and surfeit.

The subject, unmoored in such a shifting and tumultuous field of social production, tends to steer toward the comfort of seeming absolutes: in this case, as Carles points out, the sexual impulse and the nurturing instinct, the unstiflable feeding cries of the infantile, all of which is reducible to Carles's parting interrogatory: "If u had access to a pair of perfect alternative breasts, what would u do with them?"

The breast as event. That which cannot be contained yet which cannot be nullified, whose existence both transcends representation and anchors it. Carles is not surprised that breasts, standing at the critical juncture of dasein and nullity, would incite violence, a manifestation of the thanatopic drive: "Part of me wonders if breasts are called ‘fun bags’ because you are supposed to take out your stress on them."

As the apodictic metonym for the maternal as humanity faces its possible extinction or dissolution into posthuman forms (consciousness as digitized superbrain; bionic hybrid forms of life extension and so on), the breast represents the forms of dependency that can't be repressed or negated, the threat of eternal dependence of want, and the seductive drug-liek nature of that need that defines us as it subordinates. It is no accident that Carles links the breast explicitly with recreational drugs, forcing us to acknowledge their shared problematic. "Does cocaine ‘get u more effed up’ if you snort it off a breast/vagina/relevant CD jewel case?" Carles asks pointedly. In other words, can sexual union liberate the subject from itself as disassociative drugs purport to, or is the conditionality of sexual pleasure too reminiscent of the scene of birth and hence the scene of death, the ultimate loss of subjectivity. Death is the event as filtered through subjective consciousness, Carles seems to insist. No amount of "bags of love" can mitigate that harsh truth.

2 February 2010: "10 Musicians ‘using’ Haiti as a promotional tool"

2010-02-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

This post is about intentionality. Recently Carles has taken on new formal limitations in an effort to interrogate the function of brevity in the elaboration of philosophical speculation. This he has dubbed "the Alt Report," a pun on the concept of alterity and the epistemological undecidability of any "reported" content, its perpetually unresolved status as both knowledge and rumor, and the conditionality of the transformation of report into fact by the very nature of the distribution of the report. Carles seems to be asking, can reports make facts? Who invented the fact, or rather facticity? o what degree is it disclosed in the habitus of the journalist, in the access to the means of information distribution, and to what degree are those norms under assault now? Does linking to content feed it into a system in which reputation determines truth? How do we "use" information? Does it lose its moral content as it becomes instrumentalized or rhetorically weaponized?

These questions are all in play when Carles declares that this particular post "is intended to illustrate how ‘artists’ don’t genuinely care about human crises, and instead use them as an excuse to make/auction/promote their mediocre ‘art.’" It is also indicated by his placing the word using into quotes to highlight its ideological nature, and the oft-suppressed ideological components of use value. What is the nature of "use" -- that is how can a subject "intend" anything within a networked system which imputes motive ex post facto? Is Bethamite "intentionality" dead? Have we reached the end of phenomenology, in both senses of the word "end"? Is there any difference between consciousness and intentionality, and if so, what has flooded the gap?

This is the true "human crisis," Carles suggests, subsuming the overwhelming but nonetheless local tragedy in the Caribbean. The artist's gesture is indistinguishable from the promotional gesture, which is indistinguishable from the philanthropic. All have been reduced to the same narcissistic gesture of self-interested commerce in the trafficking of identities.

31 January 2010: "Getting ‘hornie’ viewing Am Appy’s latest gimmick searching for the Best Alternative Ass."

2010-02-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

This post is about scopophilia. In her seminal essay on the gaze and the cinematic experience, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey writes of the "pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight." Could this perversion still adhere if the "person" is always already constructed entirely of signs, such that the eroto-visual consumption takes place not on the somatic level but at the level of hermaneutic decoding?

Confronted with a American Apparel advertising scheme that invites customers to submit photos of their gluteus muscles, post in the coital position most associated with estrus, Carles asks the obvious question: is there any difference under late capitalism between a sexual experience and a branding experience? "Have u ever pleasured urself while looking at the Am Appy website?" In other words, is branding the self through goods an onanistic pursuit as well as a narcissistic one? Can any form of pleasure in a consumerist society escape the mediation of branding? Or are the calming and validating presence of logos now necessary even to put us in a receptive sexual mood. Hence Carles demonstrates that the estrual pose in the images is deeply ironic, as they serve as testimony of the failure of nature to inspire the impulse to coitus in (post-?) humans of our current era.

When Carles asks, "Do u think this gimmick will help Am Appy’s brand, or will they turn into a ‘hipster porn site’?" clearly he means to suggest that there is already no distinction left to maintain. To promote a brand is to become a hipster porn site; brands are porn for hipsters, in that they stimulate and excite the libido of the hyperidentity conscious citizen of post-postmodernism.

29 January 2010: "Classic Alt Literature: What is the Lasting Brand of ‘Catcher in the Rye’?"

2010-01-29T13:20:00.000-08:00

This post is about canonicity. The question of whether the works of the late 20th Century American author J.D. Salinger belong in the literature canon, Carles reveals, is a meaningless question if not an intentionally misleading and distracting one. The question Salinger's novel must make us consider is the politics of the canon itself and the identity investments that have been made by those who have made it their duty to police it.

Obviously reading novels is no longer the axiomatic locus of enculteration for youth, an idea Carles gently but pointedly mocks: "We must judge books by their covers in the modern world because of the rapid production output of the information economy," he notes, pointing out that cultural consumption for display and for show has by and large trumped earlier modes of consumption that supplied solace, instruction or even escape. Literature is now no more than a "brand extension," Carles suggests, and in those terms, the canon is a repository of dead trademarks, inefficiently leveraged as they are shackled to the anti-marketing ideologies of the academy. "I am not sure if ‘the brand’ of the book was very marketable," Carles proclaims, suggesting that the means of judging a work have dramatically shifted, that a fair appraisal must take into account the mediation of the market and of the media itself. "Catcher in the Rye should have been re-made/adapted into a modern alt tween flick/MTV series in order to see if the elements of the story truly stood the test of time.’" The new canons are unfolding before our eyes, perhaps, each on everyone's screen, in the programming we choose to extricate from the long and short tails.

Carles's analysis of the novel centers on the narratological mode: "Holden Caulfield seemed like he was a ’snarky’ bro." He then contextualizes the issue of the protagonist's defiantly univocality within the problematic of technology, which has endorsed a disseminated and decentralized heteroglossia, epitomized by the open discourses of the internet sphere: "Unfortunately, they didn’t have blogs back then, so he wasn’t able to become a snarkblogger and escape from society by ’sitting at home on his laptop and commenting abt how sillie stuff/people are.’"

Technology is implicated in the discourse of freedom and the freedom of discourse. The negation that Salinger sought to express or condemn in Holden Caulfield is rendered indeterminate in the passage of historical time and radically destabilized by the transmission through many vectors of subjective responses to the novel's interpolation of subjectivity. Many voices, one voice? Who speaks the speaker? Can Holden's "voice" be decoded by readers now familiar with a much different and instantaneous projection of negativity and resistance, of "angst" as such transsubstantiated in the consumerist cauldron of online self-fashioning. Or does he speak a self-consuming discourse whose skepticism undercuts its own legitimacy -- complaints about complainers cancelling themselves out,as they do in today's online welter of opinion, conveniently nullifying dissent in a chorus of rejectionism.

To quote French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser, "The idea of a 'pure and simple' non-overdetermined contradiction is, as Engels said of the economist turn of phrase, 'meaningless, abstract, senseless.' That it can serve as a pedagogical model, or rather that it did serve as a polemical and pedagogical instrument at a certain point in history does not fix its destiny for all time." Carles implicitly refers to this passage when he raises the question of whether Salinger's lasting influence may be supplanted by children's writer R.L. Stine, the author of the popular "Goosebumps" series of novels.

Carles suggests that online sociability may be destroying the ability to maintain a canon's impermeability: "Do yall think that books will play an important role in carving the ‘alternative spirit of tomorrow’? Or will most tweens just chill on the internet forever?" That is, will the sharing imperative of online presence banish the "alternative" spirit, which the humanist canon sought to reify and dignify as the transcendent respect for the uniqueness of every individual, from the world of the future. Has Salinger's death heralded the beginning of the post-humanist age in earnest?

14 December 2009: "Who did Tiger Woods let down more: black ppl or white ppl?"

2009-12-14T17:37:00.000-08:00

This post is about one-dimensional man. Carles uses the lens of the Tiger Woods tragedy to examine the contested problematics of race, class, and gender in American society, and how these are interpolated by the commercial imperatives of multinational corporations and the neoliberal attitudes they wish to sponsor and personify through the use of athletic champions as spokespersons. Is Tiger Woods a fallen übermensch or merely a highly visible exemplar of late capitalism's propensity to produce one-dimensional men, who internalize the dictates of a hypercompetitive and hyperrational economic system and administer their lives in unsustainable ways. Woods constituted himself through his athletic remorselessness as "the human brand" and let the prerogatives of capital accumulation dictate his public behavior.

His racial heritage cast this accomplishment in a particularly postcolonial light, serving as an alibi for the unstriated transition from colonial to independent regimes. His success as global brand mirrored the hegemony of the Washington Consensus, while attaching a person of color to its ubiquitous dominance. Carles claims that Tiger Woods white-washes (pun intended) the trouble history of race politics, with his success serving as a vindication and a closing of the books on the history of the subject: "This is why we love Tiger Woods. He is an African-American+miscellaneous other races, without all of the baggage of traditional coloured athletes."

But Woods's deviation from the imposed social norms somewhat hypocritically imposed by his corporate masters in the world of sponsorship marks the potential for an epistemic break, in which the repressed politics of race return with a vengeance to radicalize practices in the post-neoliberal order that is only now just beginning to emerge. Carles suggests that Woods's "transgressions" are actually nothing more than the vehement response of the established order to the threat Woods was beginning to represent.

I feel like this white world that he conquered has turned his back on him. No longer is he a white person with black skin who white people are comfortable letting into their metaphorical club house.

Carles notes that Tiger began to exceed his function of serving as "a representative of corporate america, some1 who we expect to ‘have values’" -- the meaning of his "evolution into a human brand" had led to his accumulating too much capital in his image, a superfluity of meaning attached to his persona which could find investment in ideas and movements outside the control of the multinationals who made him. So it became imperative for the stability of the order to decathect him as signifier and signified. Woods as transcendental signifier? It was not to be borne. Just as the media interests had worked to "enable" the "dream worlds" of figures like Woods, it could be turned against them, to recapture them within the distributed economy of signs.

Having fixed Woods's saga within the Saussurean structure of late capitalist sign-play and attenuated its relations to international structures of economic power, Carles shifts perspective to consider Woods as a cautionary figure, an example of the metastasized techno-rational principle gone awry. Woods, by personifying the "champion" in the post-Fordist era, put a human face on this question of Marcuse's: "At the advanced stage of industrial civilization, scientific rationality, translated into political power, appears to be the decisive factor in the development of historical alternatives. The question then arises: does this power tend toward its own negation -- that is, toward the promotion of the 'art of life'?" Woods, in turning to personal hedonistic satisfaction apparently warranted by his mastery of the technological means of his field, manifested one such historical alternative, one such expression of political power as a shattering of the contractual arrangements which have hitherto held together the hierarchical organization of family life under the sign of "romantic love" since the 18th century. As Carles points out, Woods domination of the sports field betokened and modeled new forms of expression in the social field generally: The integrity of contracts "doesn’t always apply to people who experience levels of joy that are way better than ‘finding solace in a relationship’" -- instead a new kind of relation is implied, a reflexive one engaged with one's one sense of accomplishment, a mimetic desire for the self as it appears socially, a way of interfacing with one's own ambition through the means of docile bodies. Carles notes that "Woods may or may not be able to ‘love’ other people" but underscores the irrelevance of the question to the post-love libidinal economy Woods was attempting to pioneer from the position of significatory surplus: "you could really ‘get banged’ by a true champion, instead of the same loser bro who thinks he is ‘fucking rich/hot/special,’ and that he is the one doing you a favor by giving u the opportunity to sleep with him." In the social arrangement that Woods was beginning to flesh out through his praxis, the circuit of authority and mastery that Woods represented could valorize all the human capital it touched and invalidate the pretenses of those operating according to moribund economic imperatives.

But the immediate backlash in the media suggests the negation of the negation, a reinscription of power at the expense of a regime's now-deposed champion, his mastery redirected in the guise of humility and futility to serve the order he had come to challenge in his ceaseless pursuit of "winning" for its own sake. Though "We want Tiger to live the life that he wants to live," the social order can no longer afford it. Woods's victories, once they cease to indicate the triumph of the status quo and instead intimate the triumph of the will, must be prevented by all means necessary. It would not be shocking if Woods's quasi-vacation fromthe public sphere is an extended one.

10 December 2009: "Create your own HRO Post with this bloggable photo."

2009-12-10T13:43:00.000-08:00

This post is about multitude. The text Carles has supplied for this post may disappear, consumed by its own premise, so I reproduce the salient portion below:

Since HRO has become so formulaic, I was gonna give yall an opportunity to ‘make ur own post.’ The Carles brand has been successful, embedding itself as the subconscious voice of so many people across the world. Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles. I thought I would give yall a chance to ‘get ur creativity on; this is an opportunity to construct your own HRO post.

This pseudo-democratic ploy is Carles's way of instantiating the end of democracy, and not merely because he goes on to provide the substance of the post pre-emptively, circumscribing the creative gesture he has solicited from readers. More significantly, Carles posits an audience of subjects who have merged to speak univocally rather than each in their own voice. The "formulaic" nature of Carles's discourse has provided a model through which a diverse body of individuals can unite as a "people" in the Hobbesian sense of the word.

Then Carles demands labor from readers without offering wage compensation, promising instead the uncertain reward of notoriety within the discursive space he himself controls entirely. The readers' immaterial labor serves to enhance the value of the Carles brand, to which Carles slyly begins his post with a paean.

The circuit Carles traces here is that of capital in the post-Fordist era. The culture and communications industry (represented with some irony in this depiction by Carles himself) produces the means of production for a new kind of labor force that works for no pay to produce its own notoriety, seeking its own distinction within mediatized reality to stand out from the teeming crowd of individuals. These efforts are harvested by the overarching industries and used to enhance the value of their capital. Readers become more insecure as they compete for attention; Carles becomes even more preeminent in his chosen matrix of cultural production.

So there is more than a little sarcasm in his admission that "Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles." Carles wants to point out that "Carles" has become a corporate entity, an efficient synthesis of the immaterial labor of the cultural producers the weblog sets out to satirize. This of course is the meaning of the title Carles has chosen for his enterprise -- the "runoff" from the behavior of "hipsters" -- the value they create through their public acts of consumeption and self-fashioning -- becomes the precious fuel for the unlimited accumulation of capital under the banner of the Carles brand.

8 December 2009: "Meme Content Breakdown: “The Evolution of the Hipster.”"

2009-12-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

This post is about homo sacer. Giorgio Agamben has written about the plight of the exiled, the persons who are excluded from the customary protections of the law that come from belonging to a state and thus attaining a sanctioned personhood. Such persons are reduced to "bare life," devoid of rights. Carles, in retracing the steps of a promulgated taxonomy of the hipster, attempts to reveal how such categorization is perhaps the first stage in an effort to purge the hipster from the social field, to make the hipster into homo sacer in preparation for an ultimate liquidation. "Will the US Government ever decide to eliminate us?" Carles asks, in a gesture of radical solidarity with the threatened class. He admits to being "worried" about this possibility. The growing tide of tribalistic, reactionary rage across countries suffering economic setbacks seems to make such an outpouring of violence against a privileged class that prefers to set itself apart all too thinkable. A "breakdown" in the meme content is tantamount to a breakdown in the social fabric.

This "scientific/sociological/cultural timeline," as Carles designates it, epitomizes the "annihilation of space through time" that Marx attributed to the specific relations of production under capitalism. A teleology of the development of the hipster is posited and the uneven development and distribution of the cultural capital that hipsterism represents is suppressed. But this suppression serves to exacerbate the perception that hipsters have achieved a hegemonic condition of domination instead of themselves being dominated, in the sense of being determined and stripped of autonomous development from within the given social order, as is precisely the case. Carles notes with euphemistic discretion that "mainstreamers who don’t consume the internet and fringe alts who ‘would like to be more culturally relevant’ use exposes like this to plan their future adventures into the heartland of Altmerica" -- naturally those "future adventures" may include any and all of the repressive measures used to stifle dissent in totalitarian regimes throughout the 20th century. By rendering the hipster as Other, to be zoologically classifed and mocked, publications catering to the malcontented medocrity in our midst can symbolically declare open season on "alts", tacitly encouraging atrocities and brutality. Carles seems to be worrying: Can a Krystallnacht of vinyl record stores and American Apparel outlets be far behind?

29 November 2009: "Should Carles retire?" and 3 December 2009: "My Name is Carles. I was Born 2 Blog"

2009-12-07T17:41:00.000-08:00

These posts are about the ecstasy of communication. Carles attempts an escape from postmodernity by announcing a retreat from his online persona. But as Baudrillard asks, "These fatal strategies, do they exist?... Faced with a delirious world, there is only the ultimatum of realism. This means that if you want to get away from the madness of the world yo have to sacrifice all of its charm as well.... In order to survive, we need to approach ever closer to the nullity of the real." Once, Carles appeared to flirt with nullity by choosing an intentionally impoverished texting-based language with which to express his nihilistic philosophy, so that form and content would approach each other asymptotically the more he would write, making the blogs extension in duration itself demonstrate that philosophy's the most significant tenet: We can continue to speak in clipped and debased language, but thought so expressed seems ever to mock itself more. Irony becomes a prerequisite condition for expression with such a set of linguistic tools. Now he must up the ante and promise silence, in his discursive efforts to theorize the end of discourse as it dissolves in incessant communication, in the palpable pressure of perpetual realtime expression.

As with Carles's earlier attempts at retirement and "digital suicide", Carles expresses an ultimately unfulfilled intention of retiring from blogging to expose how such intentions are in danger of becoming mere fantasies. It is no accident that the intention is presented as a question in the title of the first post linked above. The digital self is no longer autonomous, if it ever was autonomous in the first place. Our intentions are now subject to real-time referenda in the digital agora formed by mandatory social networking. Carles reduces this to a succinct formula: "This blog is me." What is "blogged" or expressed online in some other way is not lived or experienced from within our subjectivity. Our subjectivity is no longer stored in our brains but in water-cooler server farms located close to hydrelectric dams all across the world. Hence the preposterous premise of the film The Matrix -- we do not choose btween the real and the Real, but between no existence and digitally encoded ecstasy of the social network.

We can now only at best wish to remove ourselves from the digitization and social mediatization of our lives. We can only dream of not broadcasting the quotidian details of our lives and such and as such over the channels fashioned for us online. When Carles writes that "maybe my future is in ‘real life’ instead of the internet," the pivotal word is maybe. We are no longer in a position to see whether this is so for ourselves or not, no longer in a position to make the determination in the final analysis of whether real life and the internet can be extricated from each other.

In his return, Carles acknowledges the "readers who take this blog very seriously," of which this writer is admittedly one. Thereby Carles has cleverly forced one to consider one's own culpability in perpetuating the digital trap of consciousness. Is the act of reading itself, the digitally enhanced hermaneutics of the identity relation and its various levels of decoding, the consumer of discourse in the sense of consummating it, committing it to a great final conflagration? Is Carles really going silent precisely by continuing to blog?

23 Nov 2009: " “Going Home for Thanksgiving.” -A Reflection by Carles"

2009-11-24T21:16:00.000-08:00

This post is about the singularity. The predictable approach to Thanksgiving would be to critique it from a postcolonialist perspective as voicing the aegis of empire, of rearticulating the hegemony first sought by the invading Europeans in the 15th century and achieved with all-too-forgotten bloodshed, oppression, merciless forced marches along countless trails of tears both metaphoric and literal. Carles is content to allow such a critique to form the deep structure of his investigation of the U.S.'s equinoctial holiday as a psychological rite inculcating governmentality, planting it into the rich soil of postconsumerist, late-capitalist identity. In other words, Carles attempts a postmodern hermaneutics of the self, following the path blazed by seminal French historian and thinker Michel Foucault in his late work on the axiology of the self.

Fittingly, Carles begins with an assault on the Cartesian ego.

I am one of you
I am one of many
I am the only ‘me’ in the world

Subjectivity, in its situatedness in the family is problematized, with the radical positionality of containing multitudes while retaining a discrete atomization of the self foregrounded. The self is at once Other and its self, in an unmediated and unresolved tensional paradox. Lacan's mirror stage is evoked and sublated in a few dozen words as the subjectivization process is opened to a wider scope, a more diverse array of discursive practices.

As Carles notes, foremost of these is the discourse of the brand, adopted as a generative language of self:

Feeling anxious
about my extended family
‘commenting’ on my new personal brand
that that won’t understand

The syntax is obscure here, but in a radical reversal of agency, Carles argues that the brand itself will not comprehend its deployment in the familial context -- an allusion to Deleuze and Guattari's rejection of the Oedipal drama as determinant in the last instance. Anxiety has leapt from the castration complex squarely into the field of exchange -- to the commercialized positioning within a discourse of competing objects. Though the family will attempt to "comment" and interpret the personal brand, the brand itself will transcend such commentary, leaving its mark, as it were on those who sought to master its code. It will objectify those who come into contact with it, reifying a living relation into the frozen gesture of mutual misrecognition (méconnaissance).

Hence Carles is able to posit the identification of unlike subjects as branded object:

New personal Brand
Finding out about new bands
Genuinely connecting with fascinating humans
Who want the same life that I do.

The human and the lifeless thing are converging at a point that suggest cybernetic posthumanity, in which all emotions, all attempts at connection, must have their "genuine" qualities affirmed in the face of impassive skepticism. In the networked world, as Carles suggests here, connection requires no genuineness; it merely requires compatible interfaces, automated protocols of informational exchange, a suitable markup language of the soul. The systems and institutions in which the human cyborg is deployed are no longer distinguishable from one another: "I just want to live inside of a living mishmash of humans/architecture/public transportation." This, Carles implies, is what we have made of our "New World".

The connection to the family then is vestigial, an obstacle to overcome in pursuit of the posthuman destiny:

Afraid to see my family now that it is 100% impossible for them to ‘get’ me
But maybe I need to ‘get’ them
to understand what I don’t want to be

To reject the family, to reject origins, to efface the biological connection in favor of digital "alternative" ones being built out by the ruling technocracy -- these are the sad remnants of old festival rituals that once bound the community, the tribe. Now there is only ritual rejections, a negative dialectics that carves out a space of pure negativity, in which one consists of only that one remembers and discards:

Momentarily I will get ‘caught up’ in the moment
and start to reconnect with zany high school stories
but then will remember
‘That’s not who I am any more. That bro is dead.’

Carles's fable pointedly reveals that what lives on is a rootless, zombified shell with corpses in its mouth.