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

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."

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.”"

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"

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"

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.

22 November 2009: "We were alts. We were dreamers."

This post is about capitalist roaders. In Carles's parlance, as has become amply obvious, an "alt" is someone who has reified their attempts at defying the mainstream and has become a false revolutionary, a creature whose identity depends on the very practices it putatively rejects. Here Carles dissects a photograph of a small sample of such alts lying in a New York City street as interrogates the paucity of their ambitions, the craven ways in which he imagines they will service the existing economy of symbolic goods with their immaterial labor all while lauding themselves for their own imagined defiance.

One boy dreams of starting a buzzband which garners critical acclaim from multiple blogsites.
One girl dreams of becoming an alt model
One boy dreams of starting a t-shirt line
One girl dreams of ‘becoming the next Karen O/M.I.A.’
One alt dreams of opening up the best alternative nightclub in town
One alt dreams of starting the blogosphere’s next great influential website, making millions of AmAppy dollars from banner ads
One alt dreams of starting a zany twitter/tumblr meme blog and getting a book deal...

And on and on extends the list of entirely predictable modalities of selling out. The pursuit of personal credibility in the circles Carles here anatomizes is nothing more than the amassing of social capital deemed valuable by the culture industry. The success of these alts in developing their own personalities to their heart;s content is proportional to the degree that everyday life is stripped of its meaning, its revolutionary potential for the rest of us.

The alts, as Carles notes ruefully by adopting their voice, mean to use us as their running dogs:

We moved to this city
to ‘run this town’
and I gotta feeling
(that 2nites gonna be a good nite)
and also
that if we keep networking
having fun
meeting fascinating human beings with similar interests
being inspired by life
good things will come our way.

If we can't be assimilated into their networks and sapped of our creative ideas for new trends and new uses for consumer goods -- flattery will be their bait (we are after all, as Carles imagines them saying, "fascinating human beings with similar interests being inspired by life") -- then we will be run out of their neighborhoods in their town.

Carles asks in conclusion, "What is ur biggest alternative dream?" His implied answer: purging the world of the the very concept of alt and forging a truly transformative revolutionary praxis that involves a sterner commitment beyond a willingness to lie in a gutter.

13 November 2009: "What should I get my alternative son for Christmas?"

This post is about component instincts and erotogenic zones. Carles begins by turning Lacanian theory on its head: "I love my son. He truly is the mirror image of me." One might interpret that as a restatement of classical Freudian superego theory, that the child internalizes a "mirror image" of the bad father as an internal check on the raging incontinence of the id. Naturally, the father's implicit threatening of castration would be expressed as "love", and the demand for obedience as a kind of mimetic desire, the father's wish for the son to restore his lost youth is misrecognized as the child's desire to emulate the father. The superfluous "truly" underscores the false consciousness that is not quite unconsciousness. The father who speaks here knows that his son has already escaped the web of signifiers with which he hoped to snare him, that his entry into the prison-house of language still comes with occasional furloughs.

Carles proceeds to install this querulous father-son dialectic into the heart of consumer capitalist relations.

It’s kinda weird how kids are so impressionable… sorta reminds me of consumers… Maybe kids and consumers have the same kind of brain… all of us have so many wants and needs, and maybe products really can fulfill us/make us happy.

Thus the mimetic demands the father places on the son, to mirror him as he fades into irrelevance, is itself mirrored by the relation of corporation and consumer. The corporation hopes the consumer will internalize its demands for a passive, easily swayed subjectivity, a childlike sense of wonder at whatever new commoditized geegaw is foisted upon them. Wants and needs will be harmlessly and profitably cathected on to branded products, which will instill a false consciousness of happiness, a degraded sense of pseudo-fulfillment about as sturdy as a crepe-paper ladder. We shall not climb too far toward enlightenment here. And as Carles suggests, the entire ideological ediface rests on the presumption of "impressionablility" -- that one can literally stamp the minds of subjects with the desired embossment, to produce the desired behaviors. Impressionability, though, must itself be produced; the human subject must be perverted, its instinctual libidinous drives redirected against itself. (As Freud defined it, an instinct may be regarded as "the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuoulsy flowing source of stimulation .... The immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic stimulus.") Thus each retail encounter is a petite suicide, an abrogation of the source of sensation which within consumerist culture animates consciousness.

Carles imagines a pure alterity, though, may still be possible in this crucible of annhilating phenomenology -- "a pure alternative spirit" may emerge by administering arcane birthing rituals, by eschewing mass culture for its niches, by ceaselessly interrogating the "traditional." But it is a difficult road, fraught with the pressures of achieving something "truly unique" -- an oxymoron? A transcendent lie? An impossible possiblity ...

10 November 2009: "Carles Completes the New York City Marathon."

This post is about the consolation of philosophy. Is philosophy inspiring? Carles's own work at times exemplifies philosophy's reputation of pursing a negative dialectic and mounting an assault on the received traditional wisdom and the metaphysical spiritual edifice. While not a "dismal science" like economics, philosophy is frequently cold comfort for souls in bondage. Hence in this post wonders if philosophy can supply the uplift of commercial messaging -- if it can become a form of feel-good marketing.

I am Carles.
I am a Brand.
I am Hope.
This Brand Wants You to Be Happy.
This Brand Will Enable You to Accomplish Your Dreams.

This is Carles's effort to return philosophy to its Platonic/Aristotalian mission of teaching humans about the "good life", only filtered through the contemporary consumerist ideology of equating fulfillment with self-branding. "I truly believe that a brand can inspire a human to do something that they never thought they could accomplish," he writes drily. Hope is a matter of being able to conceive of a brand that could mark one as at once unique and preapproved. The brand is both ubiquitous and singular -- everyone is marked by brands, but the metaphorical flesh-scoring is felt by each as a wholly personal growing pain.

The good life for contemporary purposes, as Carles points out, is a matter of making an achievement of acquiring a personal brand. In an exquisite example of form and content harmonizing, Carles himself feigns an exuberance over his own brand's salience in this post. But as the post implies, the journey of self-branding is a marathon: "Life is sorta like a marathon. There’s a lot of other people competing against u, but u sorta just need 2 run ur own race, and u can sorta convince yourself that you some how ‘won.’" This addresses the underlying contradictions involved in making identity life's purpose. It is at once both competitive and transcendental, positional and ineffable. We need to win by convincing ourselves we are not in a competition.

2 November 2009 :"Should I attend my local community’s most prestigious Hair and Makeup College?"

This post is about technologies of the self. In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes's important intervention into the semantic production system of contemporaneity, the French thinker writes that language "shatters" fashion's "rudimentary structure into a thousand significant species, thus building a system whose justification is no longer utilitarian...but only semantic; it thus constitutes a true luxury of the mind." Carles clearly has this dictum in mind in investigating the intellectual situation of haberdashery in late capitalism and its close connection with the sociocultural capital of its practitioners and of its educational institutions as they stand contradistinct to traditional universities. Imagining the dilemma facing a youthful member of the emerging creative class, Carles writes, "I don’t wanna go to normal college, learning the same bullshit over and over… I have always been more of a creative spirit." Traditional education institutions do not confront the paradigmatic nature of fashion for current information industries, the way in which trends and memes now drive epistemology, human understanding. They are trapped in a repetitive, redundant cycle, repeating sterile tautologies -- "the same bullshit over and over." Later he notes, "I want a real education."

And this institutionalized learning negates the true import and efficacy of the emerging knowledge industries, those that equip the self with advanced iterations of signaling, teach the self how to display itself to its best advantage to enhance its ontological heft: "I really want to learn something that will help me help other people in ways that people don’t usually appreciate," Carles has his novice philosopher state, commenting on the academy's underappreciation of the fashion system and its ramifications.

Barthes notes fashion's integral function in introducing diachrony into the system of meanings, offering a "dialectical solution" to the conflict between "event and structure." Carles grasps this implication, noting that one must be "using cutting-edge techniques to achieve some of the world’s most alt haircuts." The haircut must be achieved as event and rupture, harmonizing the social with the individual's need to experience novelty through the body, to embody the diachronic component of the social itself, as it were. Of course, this has Lacanian implications: Carles notes in conjunction with the fantasmic aspect of fashion that "some of the best highs I have experienced in life happen when I look in the mirror." Fashion brings the euphoria of jouissance to play in everyday flux of grooming --in confronting the Real of the self as routed through the spectral other, when the Other is properly coiffed in accordance to the implicit law of the father. (It's no accident that we speak of a hair cut, and that the threat of castration is mimicked many times over in the endurance of such an operation.)

In order to play such an important role in the construction of social reality, a would-be technologist of the self must be able to navigate liminal spaces with minimal dislocation: Hence Carles notes that his novice is "a bisexual emo tween" -- strung between sexualities, between emotion and reason, between demographics, and possibly between genders. Carles offers a telling prediction: "I honestly believe 1 day men and women will merge into 1 human." This androgyny will present a challenge to fashion, which plays off gender difference to achieve its semiotic effects. The question Carles leaves unanswered here, along with his usual red herring interrogatories, is precisely this, whether the self can survive a technology that efficiently does away with gender, or does gender constitute a fundamental category which fashion structurally requires in order to operate discursively. Carles, if he is reading, will hopefully clarify on this point further.

28 October 2009: "Indie Bro Obsession & the Objectification of Female Indie Alt Celeb Musicians."

This post is about libidinal cathexes. An especially rich piece of theorizing from Carles, taking on narcissism, phallologocentrism, writing from the body, the balance of ego-cathected and libidinally cathected forces in the neurotic male subject, sublimation and onanism, the fantasy of sexual purification through art, inherently gendered criticism and its biases, archetypal hero worship, initiation rituals, the reproduction of patriarchal bias through subcultural formations, and so on.

Carles asks a question that has haunted psychoanalysts since the time of Freud, the master himself: "Does some sort of subconscious sexual desire impact the acceptance of all females?" Can male subjectivity be deemed "healthy" without the subordination of female desire, or does it rely on that subordination in patriarchy? Or in Carles' preferred formulation, "Will men ever see women as ‘anything more than a fuck doll’?"

Carles's primary thesis is that the subculture associated with independent rock music is dictated by the vagaries of male psychopathology, with celebrated female performers serving fundamentally as cathexes for excess, semi-sublimated libidinal forces.

Will an ugly/not cute girl ever ‘make it’ as an indie artist? It seems like indie bros who ’shape’ the indie world will always have trouble evaluating female artists. I think the first thing men look at is ‘how attractive is the female.’ That seems to be ‘the most important element’ when evaluating a woman in any profession (strippers, actresses, accountants, secretaries, etc).

The sexual role the female plays in the fantasy scheme of the male arbiters of cultural taste in this particular subculture occludes the appreciation of the women's efforts at sublimation; instead their artistic efforts are recast as estrual posturings. Though Carles concedes that it is "important for indie females to ’seem like they are real musicians,’ " this pretense serves merely to help men circumvent their own superegos in developing strong libidinal attachments. The artistic performance in the woman becomes understood as projection -- a reflection of the man's own talent, which is laid over (so to speak) the woman's primary carnality. The man can then achieve a purified form of narcissism, which routes his wish to love his own creativity through the woman, who is reduced to a vessel for the man's ego-defenses. Typically this plays out in the medium of music-fan commentary: "All blurbs about female artists by men are unintentional manifestos in which we ’search 4 a sexual identity.’" That is, sexual identity is secured through the cathexis with an idealized female performer, who is part male-performer-in-drag and part redeemed, nonthreatening sexual object.

All that matters, as Carles notes, is the "the level of ‘into-it-ness’ of her presence" -- the feigned commitment to the satisfaction of the desires of her male onlookers. The female indie musician becomes the ultimate example of the woman who forgoes her own orgasmic capabilities to protect that of the men who objectify her, and enable her to satisfy her own narcissistic needs to love herself as object qua object. She embraces this degraded form of alienated self-love in lieu of the capacity for jouissance, which is surrendered once her creative talents are injected/introjected into the commercial-art nexus. As Carles explains, her performance no longer emanates from her body authentically, that is, in a way incomprehensible to men. "It seems impossible for men to ‘actually like’ music by women, since many of the lyrical themes are coming from the ‘fucking dreamworld’ that exists inside of a girl’s head." But when men embrace a female performer, this is prima facie evidence that the woman has submitted to phallologocentristic imperatives.

Carles leaves many questions unresolved here; he is willing to grant that male subjectivty is derived from female cooperation with male needs, but does not explain why women consent to subordination, given their primary significance as cathected objects.

27 October 2009: "I AM CARLES shirts are ‘almost dead.’"

This post is about the identity function. Carles here reprises his gambit of objectifying his philosophy in the form of an ambiguous slogan embossed on a tee-shirt. In a stroke Carles reifies identity and commercializes it, commenting on precisely the intervention capitalism perpetrates through mass psychologization of identity formation in the crucible of consumerism.

The identity, that is the equation of two like parts in a logical statement, the S=S, is both reaffirmed and denied by the proliferation of the cogito-like slogan "I am Carles." But I does not equal I in all instances; "Carles" becomes a transitive term between subjects, producing a manageable intersubjectivity open to corporate manipulation. "Maybe there’s a lil bit of Carles in every1 of us after all," Carles explains.

By limiting the run of the shirt, Carles hopes to symbolically kill this form of interpolation, as the title of the post indicates. "R I P I AM CARLES. u were a good meme. u did ur best," Carles writes, offering his tentative assessment of this particular tactic against social homogenization.

What Carles intends is that the "bro-est" of times will indeed be in the past, and friendship via conformity and affiliation with any partivular milieu (all of which, as the Invisible Committee declared, are inherently counter-revolutionary and timidly self-protective) will be consigned to the dust-bin of history once all possible "I am..." statements must remain contingent is not perpetually incomplete.

26 October 2009: "Should I invade my local mall dressed as a ‘zombie’ 2 scare consumer tweens+mnstrms?"

This post is about the pharmakon. Carles looks at the contemporary trend of zombie adulation and, as always, moves beyond the obvious interpretation. One would expect the phenomenon of zombies at a shopping mall to prompt an analysis linking the rudimentary costumes to an inchoate expression of revolt with regard to the death-in-life of late capitalist consumerism. With every desire always already co-opted by retailing interests, our own libido is turned against us, and every new pleasure we imagine is a new trap to cage us into the prison-house of consumerist subjectivity.

Carles grants all that from the outset. "Is ‘consumerism’ bullshit?" he asks mockingly, knowing precisely what answer his readers will give. But Carles is testing a new problematic, in which consumerism is not merely a metaphysical enemy, a parasite on authentic humanity, but is insteada medium, a dialiectic opportunity.

Posturing as a participant in the retail zombie parade, he makes this cutting comment about current economic praxis: "It was rlly crowded. It made me feel like I was finally chilling with a group of like-minded people, who just wanted to break free of their meaningless existences and participate in an event that would generate an internet meme/bloggable photos/etc." Desire have prompted an endless pursuit of self-marketing opportunities, of public behaviors that will make this cohort resemble the products which materially manifest the circumscribed desires they are now limited to conceiving. This common impulse has made them all "like-minded" in that they are without mind, much like the zombies whose guise they have adopted. Rather than feeding on "brains" as zombies are troped to do in popular film representations, this retail zombies subsist on online attention, for which they will stop at nothing.

Carles then recounts in images the way stations of the American retail center and exposes them as lifeless, soulless. But this merely sets the stage for his true analytical insights. In a very important and deceptively facile statement, Carles declares in the persona of the retail zombie:

I felt like I was a part of something larger than myself. It felt good to transcend this space that was meant to ’sell personal branding tools’ 2 humans.

Here we see Carles attempt to assimilate the parasitical discourse of branding and marketing and sublate it. He argues that identity as such can be purified through a devotion to the its prostitution in the cash nexus. By embracing mass consumerism as a kind of living death one is paradoxically freed from its vampiristic drain Thus, though "the vampire brand made us lose 23% of our fan base [via post-Twilight]" Carles believes "the zombie brand is still strong".

The zombie, overdetermined as both brainless and full of brains, alive and dead, animated and lifeless, is reminiscent of the figure of the pharmakon, as theorized by Derrida, drawing on the seminal works of the Greek philosopher Plato. Self-zombification is both poison and remedy to the retail sickness; it is presence in the midst of absence -- an absent presence, or as it were a present absence. Of course, as Derrida asks in "Différance"

are not the thought of the meaning or truth of Being, the determination of différance as the ontico-ontological difference, difference thought within the horizon of the question of Being, still intrametaphysical effects of différance?

That's easy for Derrida to ask, but less simple to resolve definitively. Carles would perhaps agree that the ontic-ontological difference implied by zombies vis-a-vis living creatures, vis-a-vis living creatures simulating zombies, is the "transcending" space imagined in the shopping mall -- the blissful utopian fantasy of eternal life and eternal desire -- much like the striving gods of Keats's famous Grecian urn -- dreamed by late capitalism itself. "I guess in a way, antiquated indoor malls are kinda like zombies…" Carles surmises, suggesting that both are liminal spaces and fatal strategies simultaneously, occupying an uncertain and indeterminate status in the current socioeconomic striation.

18 October 2009: "Is Target ‘ripping off’ American Apparel?"

This post is about la perruque. Important French sociologist Michel De Certeau defined la perruque in his seminal 1974 work The Practice of Everyday Life as "the worker's own work disguised as work for his employer" -- a way for labor to reappropriate valorized capital from within the site of exploitation, wresting away from capital the control of time. Carles admits, confronted with the collapsing of hierarchies of social capital within the sector of branded retailers, that he is "having a huge crisis." The nature of this crisis can only be understood as a cry of concern over the way in which the site of everyday life for the consumer has become a contested battleground over la perruque, that is to say, the disciplinary locus upon which the full scrutiny of capital, in the form of brands and symbols and their discursive distribution, is brought to bear on the individual, guilty or not, forcing a fatal self-awareness of corporate intellectual property, up to and including not merely the trademarked language with which fashion our identities but those very identities themselves. By freely adapting the look and language of branded products to self-promote, we have been pirating in the semiological sea. We commit the crime of trying to tout our own personal brand at the expense of those from which we construct it.

Carles doubts this specious form of existential reasoning by which we can misrecognize our own motives and thereby realize a surplus -- not of capital but of meaning, which may, in Carles postmodern view, assume a greater significance in terms of who controls the drift of the socio-politico-economic sphere. Considering the perruque-like practice of buying discount goods and passing them off as authentically branded gods, he remarks: "I started to wonder if these knock-offs would enable me to achieve the same brand goals." This is not because the knockoffs are inauthentic, but the because the authentic goods are always already knockoffs. The perceived inferiority is internal to the system of signs and bears no material trace on the physical goods themselves, which is to say the "work" of improvement has been performed not by the manufacturers who seek to reap the profit from it but by the cabal of meaning-makers who enhance value through the certain circulation of ideas about what is socially relevant, popular, necessary.

Thus Carles recognizes that given the current interpenetration of signs and meanings, producers and consumers, we "just don’t know what belongs to who, and what type of ‘intellectual design property’ can really be owned." When we attempt to appropriate the meaning of a brand, are we annexing our own labor or someone else's, and is that attempt to steal itself another iteration of semiotic work, adding to the value of that which we seek to harness for ourselves? Is the gesture of piracy simply a moment in circulation, another instantiation of valorization for that lump of cultural capital? When the ledger of cultural meanings is drawn up, who's bottom line is assessed? Who signs the profit-and-loss statement, and is it signed with the blood of the consuming classes? The seeming struggle between corporate entities over specific design motifs merely masks the real battle between corporations and consumers. The perruque is inverted and turned against itself.

Those, who as Carles notes, "need'branded logos’ + scribbly shit [via Ed Hardy] on their t-shirts to make them look like they are rich/fit-in," may yet escape the crucible of sign production and valorization. The hope lies in manufacturing a deliberate plethora, of a surfeit of signs, of, in Carles's metaphor, "creat[ing] files that make it on to as many computers as possible." The near-costfree replication and dissemination of signs in "viral" online culture could produce precisely the disease necessary to stagger the corporate blood-sucking beast. Kill it with a cancer, an overproliferation of signs being produced from within its own factories. The perruque of the perruque -- disguising corporate work as personal to subdue to corporate and subsume it within the personal

12 October 2009: "Not sure if I ‘get’ the goal of ‘magazines.’"

This post is about ritual orgy. Carles notes that "Magazines seem like they ‘try too hard’ to generate discussion" -- that discourse has a generalized forced felling as if it is being produced to mask the expression of a deeper truth. He may have in mind the transmogrifying libidinal economy, considering the covers he choose to illustrate his point.

In L'erotisme Bataille explores the crisis of coitus: "Sexual activity is a critical moment in the isolation of the individual. We know it from without, but we know that it weakens and calls into question the feeling of self.... The material basis of the crisis is the plethora." By this, he means the "superabundance of energy" that initiates sexual behavior and seeks its own expiration, in the process annihilating the boundaries of the self in the surge toward reproduction, destroying the illusion of continuity and providing the foretaste of death.

Carles may have Bataille in mind in his concern with the flood-tide of pornography, now spilling into other graphic arts in a high-profile semi-pornographic magazine. IS this the accursed share de-eroticized through a radical conflict directly with sexuality's commercial equivalent? Sexualized sexuality, a cartoon of sexuality, already its own fetish in a vetiginous recursivity, a plethora of plethora that seeks to destroy the excess by channelling the super-abundance into a more sterile form of viral socio-sexual image production?

searched the internet for nude pictures of the Simpsons, and happened to find a ’shit load’ of cartoon porn. Like graphic pictures of tons of characters doing ‘the kraziest shit possible’ to one another. It seems to indicate that there is already a niche of fans who are interested in seeing the Simpsons nude/performing sex acts.

Nonreproductive sexuality is taken to its logical endpoint -- voyeurism vis-a-vis representations of sex among cartoon characters -- as a defense against the reproductive, self-annihilating nature of the sexual impulse. Carles asks rhetorially, "Are cartoons for people who ‘live in a fucking dreamworld’ (no matter how trendy & progressive they are)?" A dream world of fucking, not progressive but transgressive, anarchic, an overabundance that surges beyond the containing mechanism of cyclical fashion distractions. The fucking cartoon, an oxymoron or a koan?

Carles is dismayed to see this ultimate psychological defense mechanism co-opted by media companies whose preveious efforts to siphon off the surplus have lost their effectiveness: "Playboy appears to be utilizing this Simpsons gimmick just 2 try to sell magazines to ‘people who usually aren’t interested in Playboy’ since showing C-list celebrity breasts no longer makes the Playboy Brand a valuable asset/resource to our society." Appropriating images of human sexuality, Carles suggests here, no longer suits the post-human society of late capitalism.

Bataille predicted this: "In the human sphere sexual activity has broken away from animal simplicity. It is in essence a transgression, not, after the taboo, a return to primitive freedom. Transgression belongs to humanity given shape by the business of work." Hence Carles asks the natural question: "What’s the ‘kraziest shit’ u’ve ever tugged off to?" The answer is not pertinent, what matters is that we think of sexuality in terms of extremity rather than generation, and with a diligent perspicacity. "Wild cries, wild violence of gesture, wild dances, wild emotions as well, all in the grip of immeasurably convulsive turbulence." What could these worlds of Bataille possibly signify, Carles implicitly asks, other than a media-cartoon orgy?

11 October 2009: "Should Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam be deported/blacklisted from The United States of America?"

This post is about the dialectics of liberation. Carles takes advantage of some provocative comments by a popular multi-ethnic hip-hop artist M.I.A. to investigate the possibilities for countercultural revolution within the given hegemonic power structure, the so-called pax Americana that has prevailed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc alternative. Americans are burdened with the albatross of globalization and proselytization of their supposed exceptionalism: "We can never forget who we are as a nation, and our special mission as ‘the best nation in the World.’" In order to challenge this habit of thinking, Americans must be woken from their dream of dominance carefully, must be brought to accept cosmopolitanism without reawakening a dormant tribalism forgotten as unnecessary in their supposed supremacy. We are backed in a corner with few choices for self-actualization: "You are either a patriot or a terrorist–there is nothing in between," Carles notes ruefully.

Carles points out that M.I.A.'s comments about Barack Obama's having won the Nobel Peace Prize suggest she is "talking mad shit" that displays her ignorance. On the face of things, it apppears Carles is criticizing M.I.A. when he states that "It seems like M.I.A. is ‘trying to take a shit’ on our nation/our leader/etc."

Bu that would be a superficial understanding. Carles may have in mind the problem of developing organic intellectuals without alienating would-be fellow travelers on the road to revolution. As Theodore Roszak noted in The Making of a Counter Culture, "The young, miserably educated as they are, bring with them almost nothing but healthy instincts. The project of building a sophisticated framework of thought atop those instincts is rather like trying to graft an oak tree upon a wildflower." Carles is asking, How can we follow M.I.A.'s crude lead in questioning the American hegemony without alienating the Americans whose cooperation will be necessary to change that country's politics? "It seems like making anti-Obama statements might diminish her appeal to liberal alts," he notes.

In order to engender truly epochal revolutionary change rather than the "peace" -- the maintenance of the status quo -- for which Obama has been amply rewarded, we must learn to subvert awards, detourn them along the lines of Debord and the situationists, as Carles recommends: "Think I might start an ‘awards system’ for some sort of alternative genre, and maybe it will appear to be ‘more real’ over time." The very idea of an award will become indubitably contested to the point in which it connotes honor and opprobrium in equal measure.

At that point we can honor ourselves for patriotism by undermining the supremacy of nations, and M.I.A.'s dream of disengagement from the institutionalized community of peace manufacturing and its ideological props and award ceremonies will become superfluous. Prizes will mean everything and nothing, they will be open to our interpretation and consumption as memes rather than memories.

2 October 2009: "Will a crocheted penis take my male brand to the next level? #cock_crafts #crocheting"

This post is about phallologocentrism. Carles' concern about the patriarcal order always reverts to the dilemma presented by the supposed aggressive evolutionary quest for mates in the male: "Feel bad for women in 2day’s society since a lot of men just see them as ‘fuck dolls’ without realizing it. Sad that men just think with their peters and hurt women and hurt themselves." But is this biological imperative in fact a phenomenological apparition, a product of the perception of an epiphenomenon in the wake of promiscuous expression?

To rephrase in the terms Carles chooses to explore this thorny question, is it inherently patriarchal to write of the penis in the context of craft, traditionally the preserved domain, the liminal space in which femininity blossomed free from predation by masculinist lawgivers? Domestic crafts such as crochet flourished in the gendered space set off by the sexual segregation predominant in Western bourgeois society. The yarn phallus is at once a parodic taunt at the patriarchal order and a manifestation of its hegemonic grip. As Luce Irigaray wrote in Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un, "It is only through the pleasure of the 'body' -- of the Other? -- that [perpetrators of the phallic economy] might articulate something. But men would understand nothing about it, because what they enjoy is the enjoyment of the organ: the phallic obstacle." The crochet penis, as Carles has adroitly observed is the material sign of that obstacle and its trace. "It’s always a good sign when u wonder if something could make ur life better," he remarks about the phallus, cleverly punning on the word "sign." And the wonder at the sign's usefulness, whether it effaces the body or lifts it to the level of meaning within a phallologocentric libidinal economy, whether the yarn phallus itself inscribes us into language objectively and subjectively, is a "good sign" indeed. But the question is a pregmant one: is our entrace into subjectivity via the phallus an "improvement" over the prelingual state conceptualized by Kristeva and lauded in The Newly Born Woman (La jeune née) by Cixous and Clément in these terms: "We know this perfectly well: it happens that women talk, that they step out of their function as sign...woman is in a primitive state; she is the incarnation of origin."

Carles is certainly thinking of these words when he proposes an inverse penis envy, in which one yearns not for the world-ordering phallus to anchor meaning in a biased language but the artificial phallus that can unfix meaning and free it to circulate, enabling the return of lalangue and pure expression -- the abject, the onanistic, the polymorphously perverse and the joyous scatology of the prenatal: "It’s chill to have a ‘real penis’, since u can do stuff with it like urinate or ‘tug off’, but sometimes I feel like there would be less pressure on men if they had some sort of yarn-based art+craft generated penis." Out from under the onus of the phallus, men would rediscover the body as it exists outside the domain of inscription/proscription. "I think life might be better if we could have some sort of ‘replica peens’/sexual organs." This would usher in the possibility of the conception of an egalitarian order beyond the Law, since "Most men just see penis size as a social status symbol."

After pointing out the metaphoric cancer that the genital sign system imparts to human society, Carles concludes by drawing together the stray threads of his argument, linking phallologocentrism with consumerism and the post-ironic pursuit of signifiers that retain their power to denote the self in the shadow of the Other: "Much like ‘unEarthing a buzzband’, early detection is critical." But we can only find a mirror in our critical scrutiny, and a return to the primordial substance, the earth. And the Earth mother?

7 October 2009: "Horrorcore is bad for society/humanity. Horrorcore must die."

This post is about the powers of horror. Carles contrasts two musical subcultures to investigate two possible escape routes available to disaffected or disenfranchised groups who either will not or can not abide conventional mores and the expectations of citizens in a consumer society. One might suspect that those who reject mainstream identities will have done so to avoid being implicated in its social class structure, but Carles demonstrates that the attempted mode of escape from the mainstream is perhaps more decisively indicative of class aspirations.

On the one hand there is the indie culture that Carles frequently documents (and subjects to critical scrutiny), which here he chooses to laud as a "healthy form of expression, celebrating ideas and themes the right way." The "right way" is a loaded term, redolent with hints of entitlement and class privilege, a point that becomes abundantly clear when indie is contrasted with horrorcore, which Carles veritably describes as anti-indie music. Horrorcore, Carles notes, is one of those "musical genres" which "are bad for society/inspire terrible people to perform terrible things". That is, it maintains coherent identity by setting itself in opposition to society, helping that society clarify its own values and strengthen their general appeal at the expense of the volunteer outcasts. This makes the would-be rebels dupes, useful idiots for the mainstream, which is why Carles confidently declares that "only ‘very stupid people’ would listen to [horrorcore]".

So indie music is in fact a distillation of mainstream values that allows people to internalize its codes of success without feeling coerced, or as though they have sold out and conformed. Horrorcore, though, is a moronic rebellion that props up those values while denying the success they offer to those propping them up. Horrorcore adherents become sacrificial lambs, which helps explain their lyrical preoccupations with gratuitous murder. This is the obverse of their own freely offered self-sacrifice, removing themselves from society so that it can function better in oppressing people like themselves.

The horrorcore fans both serve as the abject, as theorized by Julia Kristeva, for society and confront the abject at a more fundamental level in their practices. Carles notes that their "cries for understanding/empathy are ‘completely retarded.’ Probably ’subhuman’ cries for attention, since they are not yearning to be in touch with humanity." They grapple with the liminal to shore up the definition of humanity and in the process surrender their own. As Kristeva writes, "the more or less beautiful image in which I behold or recognize myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed." Horrorcore activates that repression for the rest of us, inspiring a repulsion we direct against the abject residue within our own psyche. Note the vehemence of Carles repudiation: "These horrorcore songs really make me ‘feel ill’, I think.... I even find the Dirty Projectors to be insanely more listenable than Horrorcore."

The cartoonish Kabuki corruption and evil of horrorcore -- so amply illustrated by the Juggalos that Carles carefully documents -- functions as a distraction, a mask for the inherent corruption embedded in capitalism and embraced as bourgeois values by the respectable classes. Horrorcore is Celine for the 21st century.

4 October 2009: "Is ‘bullying’ natural selection?"

This post is about Martin Heidegger. Unusually earnest, Carles declares that "in this blog post, Carles will controversially suggest that bullying is natural selection," but longtime readers of his should immediately comprehend in his third-person self-reference his favorite distanciation strategy -- of all the characters rhetorically adopted in his philosophical investigations, none is more of a fictional device than "Carles." His intention here is to show how an otherwise sensible thinker might be drawn into endorsing a baldly fascistic ideological position championing violence as a means for purging society of weakness and striating society into castes.

Purporting to draw inferences from nature, "Carles" proclaims that since "animals in the wild are ‘bullies,’" it is a matter of adherence to natural law to "find a way to intimidate the weak, kill them off early and eat them 2 stay alive." Species survival is thereby conflated with sadistic cannibalism, but Carles does not suggest anything so radical, though it would be the logical end of the assumptions he is testing. Instead he offers a strategy similar to that which guided the interment of the Jews in 1930s Germany: "It seems like we might need to keep the bullied alive so that they can perform ‘menial jobs’." But unlike the Nazis, who pursued a program of racial extermination under the auspices of species "purification," Carles maintains a more utilitarian line, picturing a Brave New World style system where different castes are prepared for different unpleasant but necessary fields of social work. "They learn how to ‘take shit’ so that they can prepare for being at the bottom of society when they are older/are trapped in their lives’." The view Carles espouses here is in some ways worse than the Nazis' murderous program in that it presents violence as serving somehow for the victim's own good. Though he is not afraid of adopting Nazi propaganda techniques, demonizing those singled out for abuse with loaded epithets that are somehow proved by the unwarranted attacks directed at them: "It seems like it is reasonable to conclude that all of these kids are ‘fucking pussies’ or possibly ‘fucking fggts."

But despite the obvious Nazi overtones, Carles demonstrates that peer violence flows not from a wellspring of inner fascism so much as it comes from anti-egalitarianism, a tribalistic fear of cosmopolitanism: "If every1 had money/the same colour skin, the world would not be a better place–there would be way 2 many issues 2 deal with."
In other words, the same fears of urbanism and modernism that led Heidegger to Nazism threaten to make anyone who thinks seriously about identity issues in contemporary capitalist societies, with their mandated but inequitably distributed division of labor, become a bit of a fascist, endorsing violence as expedient and usual as the ultimate form of branding. "Seems like sometimes u need to ’step on other people’ to make sure ur brand is strong + authentic." This helps explain the enduring appeal of the swastika as insignia, carrying with it the inherent power relationships embedded in branding within a stratified society. It also presents bullying as convenient: "Is it really cost/time effective to ‘worry about EVERY1’s feelings’?" Bullying works to streamline our emotional economy.

Carles then sees the argument through to its ultimate conclusion, bullying should be branded, since it is a profitable and necessary social service proffered by private firms: "I feel like my internet website might be some sort of bully. Perhaps a ‘cyber bully.’ Maybe I should ‘trademark’ that term since the internet is about to get really popular so that I can ‘make mad money’ in case it becomes a catchy buzzword." What Carles is concerned with is the ease with which he can make plausible arguments in favor of fascism and its modern consumer-capitalist equivalents. He sense defects in his own philosophical practice that greases the propagandistic sleds. He asks a serious of questions at the end of the post, but these only intimate the question he doesn't ask but which is everywhere posed, as it were, in the shadows of his discourse: Can he continue to speak? Can he ever speak in his own voice? Or is it too dangerous?

27 September 2009: "My little brother is turning alt. Should I stage an intervention?"

This post is about the tutelary complex. In The Policing of Families, French sociologist Jacques Donzelot uses the term tutelary complex to describe the strata of social workers that have emerged in 20th century states to facilitate the socialization of working-class children along mandated lines determined politically. The system effected "a redistribution of the market in maladjustment," Donzelot notes.

Carles, in his expression of concern for teenagers in this missive, illustrates not only how the composition of the minions of the tutelary complex has shifted -- to well-meaning members from within the family and members of peer group ("the Ranoff community"), prone to a more naked use of coercison ("Should I ‘beat the shit’ out of my brother/sister 4 being an ‘inauthentic piece of shit’?") -- but also how the stakes have changed: What is feared now is that youth will empty the meaning from the poses adopted by their elders, draining the earlier generations of their sense of self while in the process of finding their own. Maladjustment is now a matter of staking a positionality in regard to the current matrix of trends imposed by the consumer-goods industry. Identity (i.e. "authenticity") becomes a zero-sum game. "Are old ppl ‘naturally alt’?" Carles worries, or do they merely become strange, estranged, losers in that struggle, doomed to alienation? Are they inauthenticated by the aggressive moves onto the territory they have staked out by up-and-coming "alts"?

A deeper problem is the ways in which the tutelary complex is no longer preoccupied with forestalling delinquincy but instead focuses its interventions on guiding the development of a marketing-oriented subjectivity, a self-as-brand. Carles, imagining himself as such a social worker, complains, "I feel like I could help him become an authentic alt, but I don’t know if there is a ‘roadmap’ towards altdom that he could follow." He reveals how the consciences of those intervening are reconciled: "I guess I should just be happy that they are searching 4 meaning, attempting 2 be alt… attempting to express themselves… I guess ‘alt blood’ sorta runs in the family." Family bonds justify an intrusive prescription of identity, ironically in the name of enabling creativity and self-expression. But self-expression is the mere alibi for conformity to a more entrenched set of mores.

29 September 2009: "RAVE OR DIE: 2K9 Edition"

This post is about ecstasy. Carles is concerned about the politics of ecstasy, the class divisions that regulate it and perhaps provide the conditions for its spontaneous irruption. In particular, Carles, in his ethnographer modality, analyzes the popular youth gatherings known as raves to tease out and define the field of ecstasy, its contemporary social milieu, and draw some anthropological analogues that can perhaps guide his readers toward disruptive strategies to upset the parameters that close off large segments of excluded, demonized populations (the Agambenian exceptions?) from the possibility of pleasure in the unrestricted sense. "sometimes it is good to experience ‘lower class’ events," Carles jests drily.

As Carles frames his investigation: "Who are these ppl/teens/Mexicalts in Southern California who attend raves? What do they want out of life? What personal brand are these ‘ravers’ attempting to implement?" Is their pleasure contingent on their assumption of marketing prerogatives inculcated by their culture, or is their adoption of infantilizing tropes ("It seems like ppl are trying to ‘return to their childhoodz’ by utilizing images+products from youth [via bracelets, necklaces, other trinkets, and even backpacks]") an effort to reclaim lalangue, the primitive prelingual expressions of a pleasure unco-opted by sociocultural aims and other hegemonic appropriations?

Ecstasy, in rave circles, refers to the psychoactive drug MDMA, but Carles also deploys it in a metaphoric sense, as any deliberate instrumental means for inducing states of euphoria on command and also as the potential for jouissance. It allows the forbidden to remain protected even while it is performed: Carles ascribes this thought to a inebriated youth: "Got rlly ‘fucked up’ on E and gave DJ 420 a ‘beej.’ Regret it kinda." That "kinda" performs a great deal of semiological work -- regret is help in suspension as the forbidden, possibly homosexual pleasure is remembered, enjoyed and relished. Carles adds, "But srsly… have u ever fucked while on ecstasy? (they say u can never have an orgasm without it 4 the rest of ur life)" -- the concern here is the ideological conditioning that makes for pleasure, that enables it. Without certain constructs, crutches or props, pleasure itself becomes impossible -- there can be no release, orgasmic or otherwise. Carles means to warn us: Once you accept the pleasure that capitalist society offers, your capacity for pleasure is permanently altered by it. "I feel happy knowing that society is getting better and every1 is able to celebrate and be free," Carles notes sardonically, as it is precisely unfreedom that enables celebratory ardor.

In response to a photograph of two youths who appear to have ingested the drug, Carles notes, "I think that it means some1 is ‘mad fucked up’ when their pupils are dilated" -- a deceptively dialogic statement, as fucked up refers both to the state of intoxication and to the ideological conditions that transform intoxication into a phenomenon to be pejoratively dismissed with a ribald reference to coitus.

12 September 2009: "Authentic Alt Worth Blogging About."

This post is about legitimation crisis. Crisis, of course, in the social-scientific sense, as a normative concept implying an inherent destablilizing force in the structure of ordered concepts themselves. The definition of "authentic", of "alt", the oppositions used to secure their meanings as the gale-force winds of dialectical change gust through the superstructure. Social integration is the chip on the table as the roulette wheel of semiotics spins. As Carles declares, "as internet-centric humans, we are in a neverending search for ‘the best way 2 express ourselves’ via the internet." The quest is never-ending because the socially ratified meanings are always in the process of simplifying themselves, encrusting meanings around a kernel concept that becomes loaded with ambiguous and contradictory implications. The introduction of social networking capacity through mass reciprocal electronic communications has only accelerated this process of continual change. In the process, Einlösbarkeit is forfeited.

In such conditions, individual identity is provisional and the desire to end that provisionality perpetual: Some, Carles, notes, will search for an escape through a return to the sensual, to the body:

Just want 2 put on my most authentic outfits
show the world who I am
free spirited, open 2 new ideas and life experiences
and get my dance on

In the freedom of movement and the rituals of vanity is an abortive effort at self-legitimation, though the paradox is that the mirror can never recognize you. All efforts at vanity imply the Other who threatens always with psychic annihilation.

Alternatively, one can fall back on the traditional mode of legitimation in capitalist society: money: "Do u plan on making ‘tons of ad revenue’ via Google Adsense Ads?" Carles asks, neatly knitting the pervasiveness of marketing, the machinations of the world's largest corporation, and the aspirations of millions of atomized individuals lost in anomie. Under capitalism, authenticity is ultimately married to the cash nexus.

10 September 2009: "Does my life ‘make more sense’ now that PitchforkMedia.coms have reviewed the Beatles?"

This post is about convertible securities. Contemplating the purpose of rating the reissues of the long-playing albums by the pop-music group the Beatles, Carles notes that these ratings create a vertiginous comparability among otherwise unlike items from different cultural periods. The numeric rating for the records as imposed by the self-appointed critics (a will to power Carles impishly mocks: "My mind is free / I am a music critic / I honestly believe that my ‘taste in music’ is a direct reflection of the ‘best music’ in the world") renders a false exchangability akin to the way money functions in the world of commodities. The ratings, in a sense, begin to function as currency, as prices, and the value of a rating point, like currencies, float between publications and time periods. A "9" in Pitchfork in 2007 is quite different from a "9" in Spin or even a "9" in 2009. The problem is that points are inconvertible; ratings are not liquid. The records do not circulate to make the value of the ratings realizable. Carles notes that this means a kind of Bretton Woods for ratings systems is required:

it is our duty as ‘die hard music fans’
who are the most ‘culturally connected’ ppl in the world
to find out which albums are better than others
and create a forum for like-minded people to rally around them

Such an international governing body might in theory establish rates of conversion for the various aesthetic quantification modes.

But until then, we are in the dark, blindly wandering in search of comprehensible standards. The ratings have putative value but are in effect and in practice worthless. Carles is caustically sarcastic about this state of affairs: "My perception of the world finally makes sense. Like I finally ‘get’ music history since I can compare the Beatles to modern indie hits." In fact the attempt to compare these objets d'art in terms of inscrutable numbers makes the task of criticism Sisyphian.

As Marx writes of money in Capital, "the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value ... is inherent in the price-form itself." This creates an ambiguity where the number was a critic's attempt to fix a value. Carles draws the inevitable conclusion about how the attempt to complete the item being rated with its rating only makes the item more uncertain: "Just searching 4 perfection. Not all albums were created equally." The false equivalence implied by ratings prevents any thorough understanding of a given work's value. It merely adds another symbolic layer to decode, another occasion for méconnaissance.

9 September 2009: "Hope and Homelessness–Never give up on Personal Branding."

This post is about the punctum. The punctum, of course, is the great theorist Roland Barthes's term for the compelling and often unintentional detail in a photograph which seizes our attention and has metonymic force. It works in opposition to what the photo seems to want to be about. Describing a photo taken at an institution, he writes, "I, in the photograph of two retarded children, hardly see the monstrous heads and pathetic profiles; ... what I see ... is the off-center detail, the little boy's huge Danton collar, the girl's finger bandage; I am a primitive, a child -- or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own."

Carles's apprehension of a photo of a homeless man prompts a similar response:

I saw this picture portraying a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. Unfortunately, he had a pee pee accident as his dark yellow urine streamed down towards the star of a celebrity. I felt tons of emotions as my brain processed this digital image. Shame. Guilt. LOLability. Snarkfactor. Sadness. AmericanBeauty. Happiness. Loneliness. Fucksocietivity. Bloggy. Alive. Dead on the inside. Alone. Without a home. Metaphorical. This is the power of photography.

In this case, the punctum is the "pee pee accident," which undermines the composition's solemnity yet testifies to the power of the image.

But Carles pushes further than Barthes, ruminating on the disappearance of the authentic punctum in the miasma of images on which we now suffocate. He can't escape the positied role is is supposed to adopt as consumer of this image, can't "dismiss all culture". Instead he is positioned into responding in a mediated way, a way already captured by the form in which our aesthetic responses now must take -- reproduction of the image online in a social network along with our anticipated commentary, which falls into one of a number of certified genres -- snark, LOL, etc.

Once an image could prompt us into recognition of the way reality escapes media capture, the meaning always exceeding our attempt to record and fix reality. But now images and the hermeneutical apparatus that attends them threaten a total preformed interpretation of all reality, a foreclosed phenomenology, and encourages us to package ourselves in likewise fashion, as predigested image, with no punctum for a perceiver to seize upon to undermine our smooth self-presentation. No more can we "dismiss all culture" in a spontaneous response to a detail; instead there is a rigid certainty that there was no "accident" -- pee pee or otherwise -- in any image we consume. The consumption itself is so patterned as to make use only of what has be predestined for our conditioned appetites.

Carles compares the "pee pee" photo with a photograph purportedly taken spontaneously by a fashion blogger, who went on to pontificate about the punctum he allegedly discovered in his image, the manner in which a homeless man managed to match his shoes with his socks. The lesson the fashion blogger draws, naturally, is that human beings' need to be stylish trumps our need for shelter. This, in his opinion, should make us "hopeful". While it is readily understandable why the fashion industry might derive hope from this -- it's ceaseless bombardment of advertising is having its effect on 21st century subjectivity -- Carles, with unmistakable sarcasm, does the service of explaining why the message for the rest of us is somewhat less optimistic: "Never give up. Every day, u have the opportunity to brand yourself–you have the opportunity to let the world know that you are a person, and within this person is a brand which the whole world can consume."

There is no longer a meaningful distinction to make between the homeless man and his photographic image -- both are manifestations of the underlying brand to which we now habitually and solely respond. And in our current socio-historical formation, we are expected to seize upon this as an "opportunity" rather than an evisceration of our species being. When Carles sardonically labels the homeless as "a group of people living in some demented reality" it hardly takes a sophisticated analysis to recognize that he is referring to ourselves, not the indigent.

Carles then condenses the message with which we are daily interpolated by the current ideological regime:

Every day, you need to take pride in yourself. You need to realize that your personal brand is being interpreted by every1 who sees you. Do you want to depress your viewers? Or do you want to inspire them? Be a valuable person–not just to yourself, but also to society as a whole.

Can we escape from this net without sacrificing our knowledge of self as subject? Can we have subjectivity in such a society as ours without adopting these "demented" standards and responsibilities? If we can, Carles is not prepared to theorize it with his current set of concepts. Instead, we have the grim sense that language itself has been corrupted, and the vocabulary to express such an idea is beyond him. He concludes, with acid irony masking a deconstructionist despair: "This is a blog post about hope."

2 September 2009: "Do teens RLLY ‘drink coffee’?"

This post is about phenomenonlogy. How do we know that our sensual perceptual phenomena reach the mind without distortion, or rather, how to track the modes of refraction that experience pass through before it reaches consciousness, let alone language, another level of refraction that far too often is mistaken for simple reflection. "I just saw a picture of a teen/tween drinking a Starbucks product, and it really confused me," Carles begins, establishing what will become a leitmotif in this masterful essay. Can the picture of reality formed in his head match the image upon which he gazes, let alone the moment of time-space the image purports to have "captured." Layers and levels of representation, a palimpsest....

The disconnect between the physiological bases for sensations and our mental representations of these sensations creates a node in which socioeconomic conjunctions can be laid like so many bear traps, forging links between potential stimuli and implications desirable to various commercial interests. Carles explains it with reference to the invention of the Starbucks brand, and its burgeoning resonance across various demographics that it helps fashion, solidify and exploit:

It seems like the ‘Starbucks revolution’ really opened the doors for tweens and coffee. It seems like they branded ‘fun, sugary sweet drinks’ for ppl who didn’t ‘get’ coffee, or for ppl whose tastebuds weren’t developed enough for coffee

It is the nascent undeveloped state of the sensory organs that allows for their systematic development and exploitation. Starbucks and other lifestyle brands the purport to sell commodities are in fact in the business of strip-mining the senses of the young and building in the vacuum a perceptual machinery obedient to the triggers that the brands implant there. Taste buds that never learn to disguish sweet from sour from bitter but that only register abstractions like "fun" and the taste of pleasure. A tongue that tastes only emotions rather than physical properties of consumed substances. These physical properties become even more unknowable to the mind, the food-in-itself a lost dream to the consumer, who can only consume her own expectations. "What does coffee taste like?," Carles asks, "what does beer taste like?" We can never know. Our perceptions of these things are purely self-referential.

Once perception becomes a matter of interfacing with brands rather than our sensory organs, a trademark synesthesia ensues to the point where sound and taste are no different from one another, both are platforms for experiential design: "Is the Gogurt design a ‘more innovative’ design than the iPod?" Carles asks, highlighting this problematic. Whether we are squeezing pap into our mouths or into our ears is immaterial. All the matters is the industrial design of the device to which we are connected, and the brand with which that device is marked. Then the brand is written our our bodies, which are written and overwritten over and again like any other media storage device, which is that to which we have been reduced.

Carles suggests this transformation of the human into the digital processing device is the result of a conspiracy of the old against the young, implemented through the vector of celebrity: "Feel like tweens want to do what ‘famous people do’ and also appear to be ‘grown ups’ when they don’t realize that they already have the attention of grownups since it is so easy to resent them 4 having their whole lives’ ahead of them." By duping the young into emulating the famous, the worldweary convince youth to surrender its own perceptual faculties and have them replaced with a mimetic tendency, a duplicatability that mirrors the functionality of a copy machine. The youth don't realize the degree to which they are targeted, are under surveillance, precisely because of the way their perceptions slip through the social order's neural net. They have not yet been subsumed, subjected to the social order, fully socialized and absorbed. They still have a chance to escape. Thus the ideological cannons fire in their direction, and youth culture becomes an obsession for all -- and the poor fools, they think that youth culture is a celebration of youth rather than their imprisonment!

Carles, reasoning along these lines, mocks the young's innocence of marketing, how little they know about the strategems used to ensnare them: "I’ll nvr forget the time I stayed up all nite to study for marketing. Such a hard class, yall! Avoid it at all costs." They can't study marketing because they themselves are the subject of the course, the product that marketing has produced. They would be staring into the womb that contains them.

31 August 2009: "Will alternative people stop ‘driving hybrids’/'riding bikes’ and start ‘horseback riding’?"

This post is about path dependency. Because of the massive amount of investment and coordination required, societies tend to lock into the transport systems they develop collectively regardless of their future inefficiency. Would a return to a prior paradigm -- the use of domesticated horses as a primary mode of transport -- be anything but atavism, Carles wonders. Can outdated technologies be relegitimated as fashion, can they serve a symbolic use when their material use is exhausted? "It seems like owning a horse might declare 2 the world that u r an individual who ‘truly understands’ that the world is an ecosystem, and we need to start relying more on other humans and animals." Or would this willed reliance be a disruptive contradiction, further confusing the destiny of the species in history. But since "Truly alternative people will find a way to break free from society" a purposeful return to prior modes of living that are no longer supported by infrastructure seems on the face of it a mode of escape, an instantiation of resistance. "Not sure what sort of facilities you need to own a horse, or if there are any ‘traffic laws’ for horseback riding within the city."

The move backward into history already passed does not allow for a blithe reenactment of moral dilemmas that seem to have been solved, making for a shelter from ethical quandaries necessarily generated by the contemporary order. Instead it fosters anarchy, as incompatible stages of development collide in real time. By forcing the base and the superstructure to misalign, "alts" would perform a radical intervention into the quotidian as such and elevate it to the level of a problematic. While this confrontational mise-en-scene would allow us to prevent the dangerous iteration in which commuting transmogrifies into communing, in which it "degenerates into a celebration of ‘being stuck in ur life,’" it does not solve the contradictions of positing ahistorical solutions to the problem of history, that is, the problem of social classes -- alts and mainstreamers, if you will -- and the dilectical progression of their struggles. Horses wouldn't be able to drag us back to a moment in time in which we are innocent of history, innocent of our own self-knowledge as belonging to a social stereotype.

In the end, Carles notes, the horse as transport mode will meet the same fate of the culture industry as beast of escapist burden: "Still kinda sad that Barbaro was executed. Miss him like I miss Heath."

24 August 2009: "The Carlesfork 2000 (HRO2K: A List of the best mp3s ever burned)."

This post is about self-consuming rhetoric. Here I would like to call attention to a particular rhetorical trope of which Carles is fond: his tendency to combine the subjunctive, conditional, and imperative moods in single statements such as this: "It seems like I really just need to let the world know ‘what’s up’ and sort everything out." The "it seems like" negates the "really" and the combination of these two severely qualify the intention expressed in the predicate, forcing us to interrogate the possibility that any subject position can be "really" invested with the certainty necessary to "sort everything out." What Carles wants us to recognize is the fantasy element inherent in every command, in every will to power, that always threatens to bury the specific content of that wish. What we "really" want is always already only "seems like" it is so. A radical contingency haunts our expression; every attempt is overhung with the shadow of its own negation, its own admission of its limits, its incorporation of fictional wish-fulfillment elements, even when the wish so deeply held is to purge all utterances of dreamy falsity.

Hence the deliberately ludicrous, ludic nature of the list Carles proposes, for which he concocts a series of messianic promises, that his list of songs will save the record industry, individuality, local integrity, the world, etc. "I am not sure how to confidently state that I am ‘100% certain’ that my list is a compilation of the truly best songs ever created." Confidence always negates itself rhetorically -- the more emphatically it is expressed, the more likely the hollowness of its boasts will be evident. In a twist familiar to us from psychoanalysis, certainty always manifests itself as its opposite; a kind of projection occurs which reveals our certainty eroding itself, and our deep urge to enlist others in supporting the claims we have dared to make.

The problem is that every utterance we make has such sotieric intensity, not just our attempt to make lists of the best things the world has to offer in a particular category. When Carles declares, "We can’t be afraid to embrace social and historical responsibilities," he refers not to the compilation of spurious lists but to our continual skepticism of such lists and the static portrayal of the world they manifest. Our responsibility, at this unique moment in time in terms of media reach and dissemination, is to resist definition and reject identity of the puny sort that once held sway over youth: "We must define ourselves by defining the best music because mp3s define who u r [via iPod]." Devices like the iPood have sown the seeds of their own destruction; we listen to become not who we are but to destroy and dissolve the notion of self in an endless series of transformation, rewriting the media drives over and over again until the log of what we have consumed becomes inscrutable.

Carles concludes with a list of self-negating statements:

‘I honestly believe I have the best taste in music in the world.’
-every1

‘I just like to enjoy music without judging it or thinking about why I like it 2 much.’
-every1 trying 2 pretend they are not an ass hole

‘Have u heard of Animal Collective?’
-some bro

‘Have u heard of of Daughtry?’
-a real bro

‘Do u like my leather wrist band?’
-Daughtry when he goes home for Thanks giving

‘What r u having for lunch?’
-people in the office, right before 12 noon

‘I just brought my lunch.’
-office worker who doesn’t want to eat lunch in a group setting with sad coworkers

‘I save a lot of money by bringing my lunch every day.’
-some ass hole who brings his/her lunch every day

‘What’s ur favourite band?’
-trying to ‘connect’ with some1

‘______________’ (disappointing answer that leaves u feeling sad about what ‘real people’ listen to)
-a real person being realer than u will ever be

‘i have something 2 say.’
-a person who starts a lil blog site

‘I am interesting’
-every1

‘I am boring.’
-depressed person/person trying to ’seem interesting’ by ’saying they are boring.’

All of these statements are beyond true and false. The highlight the dichotomies that Carles is encouraging us to regard as yesterday's truths, now become irrelevant to the list-free future. All future sets are to be infinite.

25 August 2009: "Is it still authentic to be ‘alt’?"

This post is about the world as will. Carles is interested in investigating the possibilities for intersubjectivity opened up by new communication technologies. He begins with a syllogism for our times:

I am the SleepyHeadBro.
This bro is me.
This is my youtube presence.

Online sharing is in the porcess of reaching its logical endpoint, in which identities become collective, and watching/consuming another's youtube presence becomes equivalent with becoming that presence. The technological miracle of transubstantiation takes place via hosts (IP hosts) that connect us up to the great cloud computers. Our displaced identities cannot be fixed in any particular place, disembodied we emanate and manifest in many servers at once; online we are legion. Naturally our boundaries dissolve -- we become what we regard on our screens, that with which we interact.

The consequence is that sociological labels or subcultural identifications shift perpetually in meaning, become unstable and uncertain, verge on meaningless: "Sometimes I get the feeling that ‘being alt’ is just some sort of game," Carles notes. The free play among the endless chain of signifiers means that "alt" can ultimately mean anything; the acceleration of the cycling of meaning online means that it means everything at once.

19 August 2009: "Seems like nothing relevant is happening."

This post is about media saturation. Carles stares into the void that is at once a surfeit. Too many pseudo-events is tantamount to no events at all, just as a Babel of tongues talking all at once resolves itself as incomprehensible static. The problem worsens when we situate ourselves at the eye of the storm and expect the flow of events to dance centripetally around us -- when everything must appear "relevant" to us personally or else it seems not to occur at all.

Of course, Carles is making a point about interpellated subjectivity at the point of ideological egress. We are constituted as a self through the ways in which hypermediatated events call out to us, seem to predict our interest and gratify it, fashion us with a consciousness that is prone to boredom to the same degree to which it is immediately engaged by trivia. In this sense, what is "relevant" is that which makes us feel as though we exist: "Maybe I am losing touch with ‘the world’" Carles worries, precisely at the moment as he becomes aware of events qua events, as something he should be paying attention to instead of merely being entertained by -- the cutting edge of the much-remarked-upon interactivity enabled by internet technology. Carles' ironic comment turns on the insight that we are already entirely severed from the world and can't "touch" it -- it comes to us already saturated with commentary and interpretation, mediated and appropriated to serve various ends and to serve our own subjectification. We can't be in touch with the world and "be" at the same time.

Carles posits an escape from mediation, and the emptiness it engenders as it interpellates us (we become aware of a self that can be bored and are thereby consumed by boredom), through drugs and stupor. This annihilation of self can only be temporary however -- the next post will be written, the pool of pseudoevents and trivial information will continue to be filled by those who are already fed up with it all. So when Carles suggests "Maybe it’s time 2 move on" he is only signaling his awareness that there's nowhere else to go.

18 August 2009: "The Ruralt."

This post is about exurban soteriology. Here, in a sort of preemptive phenomenological strike, Carles simultaneously defines a redemptive archetype for a future age and dismantles it with ironic ridicule, perhaps hoping to prevent its emergence, which would perpetuate the city-country stereotypes at a time when our environmental crises call for a sublation of this shopworn and counterproductive dichotomy. The false conflict between those rurals with a purity of intention and jaded citified exploiters masks the actual sources of exploitation, in capital and property itself, regardless of where it is situated.

Carles's ploy here is to indicate that a different map for the dissemination of ideology is needed; no more does it filter out from cities only to return warped and denatured and disavowed in its rustic and bumpkinized iterations. "One day I will leave my home in rural America. I will move to the city. I would even be willing to move to suburbia if there are more people who ‘get’ me." But this figure is not trapped by geography. "Did you know that only 13% of ruralts escape from their rural community?' Carles writes mockingly, aware that freedom from travel restrictions doesn't guarantee mobility. He adds, "40% of ruralts end up settling for ‘being a homosexual who works at an outlet mall.’" That is to say, many of them invert the motivations that might naturally be attributed. The ruralt is not misunderstood but understood too well; he seeks a place to go where his capacity to baffle will have an appreciative audience. At the "outlet mall," where what is left over culturally goes to be repurposed and disseminated; where the urban and the exurban meet to facilitate retail exchange. The ruralt figure, it turns out, is not trying to escape so much as get imprisoned, locked behind the iron bars of the judging eyes of peers.

Instead of a cycles of escape and return, we must deconstruct that myth of personal transformation through flight by refiguring it as stark contradiction: "No 1 ever leaves this town (I will leave this town)." Situated synchronically rather than diachroncally, the idea of exurban redemption becomes impossible, absurd.

The absurdity of the rehabilitated rustic then can be used to discredit the escape fantasies of environmentally conscious urban types -- the localvores and home-school advocates who seek to elude the ideological system in which they are embedded (or even constituted or as Althusser would say interpellated) or find its interstices. When the exurbs are "alt" there are no margins to which to flee; instead the hipster flight from urbanity becomes a epidemiological phenomenon, spreading the virus of identity-mongering and vertiginous self-consciousness. Carles notes: "In the end, I think we learn that we are all human 2gether after all, and it doesn’t matter where u live/come from." Only now "being human" and self-aware has become "being hipster" and being self-involved.