25 March 2011: "The End / Goodnight, bb."

This post is about fatal strategies. Every so often, Carles simulates retirement only to return to writing, enacting a kind of parody (or homage (or both)) of Beckett's famous conclusion to the The Unnamable (1949):

You must go on, that's all I know.

They're going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They're going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn't last, that still lasts? It will be I?

You must go on.

I can't go on.

You must go on.

I'll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)

It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.

You must go on.

I can't go on.

I'll go on.

Like Beckett, Carles seeks to point out the impossibility of silence when silence is construed as a form of speech. In the novel, Beckett lays radical claim to silence as the essence of his work; Carles attempts something similar, attempting to colonize the interstices of discourse, the words between words, inarticulateness itself to forward his critique of contemporary ontology and the dissolution of subjectivity into what he calls, in the terminological apparatus he has developed over a series of interventions, "alt memes."

"I feel like I have already blogged about everything and I am just a slave to boring alt memes," he announces, foregrounding the paradox of the closed set of the infinite: "everything," he implies, can be contained in the unbounded, always already unfinished form of writing, that "boring" inscription that cuts the implacable rock of interiority. But this enjoins servitude to the word, an indenture to the production of facticity, copious logorrhea, discourse that requires ever more explicative discourse, which he must feel compelled to unspool and which always inhibits us from experiencing ontological security or "fullness". "It's probably time to move on and find a real career," he remarks with despair, knowing that the "real" cannot be experienced by only pursued, and only in language, at that.

His wish to cease production of texts leads him only to seek a richer textuality, the "real", which defies silence, or is at least silence in a deeper key. A voluminous silence. We are kept at bay from a confrontation with the immanence of our phenomenological grasp of being through the suspensive medium of language which always discloses at the same time its inadequacies, its distortions, its phase shifts. But silence itself is a distortion, a textual element in an intersubjective narrative conducted by and through the culture, which will inscribe us whether or not we choose to engage in the conversation.

By problematizing the very notion of withdraw, of "exit" as an option or a modality of voice, Carles seeks to remind readers that the process of interpolation by the hegemonic ideological institutional discourses, conveyed and constituted primarily online, does not cease when we withdraw our participation. In a sense, Carles's blog continues to write itself with or without his participation.