22 March 2011: "Lord of the Pigs: Totally Alt performance artist rolls around naked with pigs in their own feces"

This post is about authentic species being. What is the cosmic destiny of the human race, and is it any different from that of, say, a cockroach or platypus? Should humans be regarded as ontologically different from animals, or is that a strictly religious conception that serves a purely propagandistic and evangelical function? Philosophers have long wrestled with such questions, focusing on metaphysical concerns like the nature and existence of the human soul in pursuit of differentiating features that could dignify humans and secure their exceptionality. For some, as scholars have noted, who "regard a purely materialistic account of the human soul unacceptable, an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul as the substantial form of the living body may appear to be an intriguing alternative. However, even if one is not afraid of the prospect of committing oneself to an apparently 'obsolete' metaphysics, developing such a commitment may not look to be a wise move after all, since upon closer inspection the doctrine may seem to be frustratingly obscure, if not directly self-contradictory."

Carles, never a stranger to obscurity and not one to let concerns about ambivalent expression and loose analytical semantics, plunges into the debate with this post, which abruptly and baldly announces, with stark language sure to inspire controversy, that

If u really think abt it
We're all pigs
being farmed [via steroids + hormones + corn]
in this modern society

Traditionally, "pig" has been used by the emergent counterculture in western societies to represent police authority, but Carles chooses to turn that on its head, depicting the porcine species as in some ways superseding authority, or eluding its totalitarian grasp. The prospect for human agency, he argues, has been so compromised by the accretion of capitalist relations of production over time that we are more or less no better than livestock, fattened hostages to the world capitalist system. That system manages to reproduce itself with no particular respect for human needs, which are far more malleable and amenable to devolution than the iron requirements of capitalism, which are as immutable as they are merciless. But as pigs, we can escape those laws, as well as the false consciousness conveyed by human perversions of language, speaking the pre-semiotic lalangue, the unspoiled language of the body: "We communicate together / Not using words but instead by rubbing our bodies together." Thus the posthuman utopian possibility can be inscribed on and through the body through the tactile medium of gestural contact, which is not subject to the symbolic manipulations which have sustained the phallologocentric regimes that have dominated human society since the invention of writing. Carles posits a postcommunicative future in which politics are subsumed by biological processes: "We don't talk about politics and global issues / Instead we snort and fart and shit." This, Carles implies, will be a more concrete socialist strategy to undermine the ever-shifting modalities of oppression and enact true democratic dialogue. "This is communism," he declares, "This is my oinkwave utopia."

Recognizing that "insignificant constructs such as 'material things', 'social status', 'financial status', and 'relationships'" only serve to mystify the capitalist order and falsely elevate the human race to an ersatz transcendence, Carles here articulates a course of radical immanence and abjection, of rejecting exalted claims for humanity and instead going "back 2 nature" in search of a fundamentally different law, a posthuman social order that embraces rhizomatic change among molecular configurations across species, enacting viral processes of deterritorialization and defeating microfascisms inherent in the humanist hegemony. As French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari declare in their seminal tract, One-Thousand Plateaus:

The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its "aparallel evolution" through to the end.

Similarly, Carles, speaking for and as this female performance artist whose photographs have prompted his excursus, advocates an aparallel evolution, a splintering of the human, an acceptance of mortality and the inevitable cannibalistic return of our substance to be conjoined to that of the collective, albeit in a possibly degraded, commercial form: "I am free, Free to live knowing that I was born 2 die and be served in a delicious BLT or perhaps some tasty BBQ sausage at a relevant SXSW Austin eatery."

But nonetheless, even this fate of being literally consumed is preferable, in Carles's view, to merely being a consumer on the terms of post-late-capitalist consumer society.