26 February 2009: "Where have all the altbros gone?"

This post is about ego formation in the crucible of consumerism. Seizing upon the question that has haunted Freud's followers since the dawn of the 20th century, Carles asks, "Do yall know if u just maintain the same personality from ur formative years 4 the rest of ur life?" Do the reaction formations we improvise to bridge our way across the Oedipal crisis permanently structure the categories of our experience and our ability to process them, or are these cathexes subject to revision and therapeutic interventions?

Carles couches these psychological inquiries in the specific iteration of what he calls "altbros," a personality typology of his own devising. Implicitly he questions whether personality assessment suffers from the phenomenological paradox of nominalism, namely that the act of naming itself can reconstitute the properties of the subject that it intends to fix categorically. "Are altbros undefinable, since they are ‘always changing’ with culture?" Carles asks, intimating that his own "relevance" is contingent on the provisional definitions he himself has improvised, in his own impromptu waking traumarbeit to heal the rifts threatening his own ego. Generalizing from his experience, we can conclude that Carles regards the spurious invention of taxonomies as the only viable and safe strategy for an ego confronting contemporary consumerism, as these allow the fragile ego to transcend the categories itself and elude the recognition that it is always already circumscribed by the pigeonholing assumptions embedded in the gaze of the Other, as transmogrified and reified into the commodities with confront us in the marketplace and through which we attempt to give our identity "purchase" as it were. "Feel kinda like I still ‘have the same mindset’ from _ years ago," Carles admits, suggesting that no matter how much time passes, ego authenticity remains elusive, progress feels like stagnation.

He contrasts that with the evolution in personality he attributes in those to whom he has consigned to his own stereotype:

I think that altbros were generally post-tweens, about to grow into adulthood, while taking part in adult activities. Now that they have grown up a lil bit more and are becoming ‘men’, they have different needs, and are a little bit more comfortable with ‘who they are.’ They have started listening to music that is more authentic than electro, and even constructed a positive personality which helped them to ‘get girls.’

Here we see the conflation of adulthood with reproductive viability, which itself is indexed to social conformity through the proxy of consuming socially acceptable music, which Carles wryly labels "authentic" when he means that is anything but. In fact, it is authenticity stood on its head; the comfort these individuals feel with "who they are" is a direct measure of the degree to which they have conformed and become, in an important sense, no one.

18 February 2008: "The State of Bro Comedy in 2k9"

This post is about humor as a form of ideological discipline. As Carles notes, "The ’stuff u find funnie’ is just as important as the mp3s on your iPod" -- in other words, it is just as integral to intersubjectivity and the reflexive comprehension of situated identity in the personal sense.

After pointing out with a deceptive blandness, "We are all searching for media that ‘makes us laugh’ without having to think about ‘why we are laughing at it,’" Carles asks, rhetorically: "Is there something inside of alts that feel the need to 'fit in' and find this humor 'funnie'?" But this is a trick question, the answer is that there is something outside of us -- the prerogatives of the culture industry -- that we imagine comes from the inside because it becomes bound up with a spontaneous, natural-seeming physiological process: breaking into laughter.

But is this merely the laughter of the Medusa? For as Carles points out, this specific form of "bro" humor, so prevalent in our contemporary spatio-socio-historical formation, is integral to male homosocial bonding, "fitting in." And the form it takes -- "‘poop+curse+reference from the past+extreme sexual innuendo’" employs a volatile admixture of nostalgia, the pornographic, the scopophilic, the scatological, and the coprophilic, entirely appropriate for staving off the feminist interrogation of repressive patriarchal codes of masculinity, which has found itself in crisis. Men are laughing, but they don't know why -- perhaps it is a reaction-formation of fear pushing down the emerging conscious intimations that their masculinist humor is a repressed expression of homosexual love. Carles is explicit about this, coining a neologism to taxonomize this particular comedic form: "BRO MAINSTREAMER BUTT BUDDY FGGT COMEDY."

As Cixous has so trenchantly pointed out, "the phallogocentric sublation is with us, and it's militant, regenerating the old patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration." Comedian Weird Al's nose job, as Carles suggests, is just a figuration of this castration, a self-defeating effort to transform cultural neutering at the hands of patriarchal rigidity into humor.

How this inscribes itself on contemporay culture, Carles hints, is through an enforced "zaniness," as joyless as the rote laughter it extorts from anxious male audiences, who want to subject "’sad, dumb people’" to rites of exclusion (laughing at them) in order to safeguard their own precarious sense of fixture in the given cultural matrix -- "to realize that life is precious in a meaningless way." These anxious bodies, molded through the culture industry into a demographic, then purchase comedy records whose sale has sparked Carles' ruminations:

Do you plan on listening to this album for the rest of your life? Or will you just put it on when you feel like having a laugh? Or is there something inside of you that wants to create bro-humor + be an alphaBro who makes the ppl laugh?

Again, the subtle reference to "inside," to the depth psychology so essential to this given construct of masculinity. And continuing laughing they must, lest they hear the abject maternal snickering back at them. "You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and laughing...."

24 February 2009: "Is HIPSTER RUNOFF ‘relevant’? [OPEN POLL]"

"This is a post about reader appreciation," Carles writes, but of course that is a feint. This post is actually about cultural capital. Carles demonstrates the petty strategizing of an other-directed ethos by suggesting that his readers can determine whether his own praxis is "relevant." The survey is a disguised expression of his will to power, since its outcome is irrelevent. By asking the question Carles has proved his relevence in a culture that hypocritically worships the forms of democracy while clinging fast to the social hierarchy that makes the cherished ideal of social mobility legible and meaningful. To organize an extension of the franchise demonstrates a mastery over those who then constitute the plebians. The faux equality of the vote reproduces the cultural integuement that truly organizes social existence.

Carles emphasizes the pseudo-democratic gesture as a bourgeois-making fait accompli by rendering the words "Am I 'making a difference' in the lives of smart/educated/wealthy/culturally-aware/authentic/meaningful people?" into an image that cannot be manipulated digitally as text, but only as a bloc. The question becomes an image of cultural capital itself, which is evident in the habitus that enables Carles to conceive of the question itself, as well as the middlebrow Gemeinschaft to which he appeals. The words seem open to alteration, but they are fixed, in the form he determined. The openness toward which they gesture is always already an illusion, a ruse, a tactic.

He also evokes the ersatz "hacking" episode, which is the obverse of democracy, and how democracy is truly perceived by those hypocritically championing it. When plebes are allowed to express their opinions, it is tantamount to their being permitted to "hack" society, if their views were counted toward making a meaningful, socially significant judgment. Fortunately for capitalism, their votes are restricted to superficial and superfluous matters. To hammer that point home, Carles offers his ersatz voters a travesty of meaningful choice: "Do u want more podcasts? More mp3s? More tweens? More mainstream coverage? More conceptual blogging?" And then he evokes the way in which, in the hegemonic official discourse of the media, meaningless votes are given the appearance of significance: "Do yall like pie charts or bar graphs or line graphs?" The dutiful and accurate measuring of votes conceals their fundamental triviality.

Cultural capital rests with those who can orchestrate sham democracy without getting caught up in it; with those who can make others feel "authentic" and "culturally-important" while exploiting them. Reader appreciation, indeed.

24 February 2009: "Is Bud Light the next Big Alternative Alcoholic Beverage?"

This post is about jouissance. Carles reproduces a photo depicting libidinous oral pleasure and links it to two of the questions that persistently haunt late-capitalist culture. The first is the same question that troubled Freud and his followers: What do women want? The second, related question: What allows brands to successfully cathect identity, particularly an identity that feels subjectively unique even as it manifests complacent conformity? As Carles succinctly sums up in describing the image: "Think this picture is a ‘metaphor’ for a ‘thirst 4 something new.’"

Of course, novelty is always a powerful motive force in both branding and the construction of feminine desire, though in the case of the latter, it is often experienced as an objective force, something that must be exhibited rather than pursued. Carles notes, "Life is a never ending quest for the best brands 2 align urself with," suggesting that this is the aim toward which libidinous energy has been sublimated in a culture that reserves its most stirring rhetoric for the process of manufacturing and distributing branded products. But is there the possibility as well for jouissance -- for the dissolution of identity in a blissful awareness of the unity of all things or, if you prefer, the purity of our ultimate nothingness -- in the pursuit of corporatist totems? Having identified the woman consuming Bud Light in the image with a desire to find a more meaningful cathexis, Carles then shifts registers into a discussion of polymorphous perversity and accessing a semimystical state of ecstasy through rituals of intoxication: The image now signals not merely an effort of self-actualization through self-branding but also, "It is her desire to ‘get f*ckt up!’ and ‘get her partie on.’" The implication is that we can transcend the limits of consumerism by confronting them directly, by doubling down on them, as it were, consuming twice as much as we're expected to and find through that excess the keys to the gates of paradise. He concludes by punning somewhat lewdly on the concept of "double fisting" and asking "is it still authentic to ‘get fuckt up’?" As always the question of authenticity haunts postmodern desire; it is both the substance of the Other as well as the shadow that haunts the means of pursuing it. We want to possess authenticity and pursue it in an authentic fashion. But these cancel each other out, as the authentic is negated once it becomes anything other than a spontaneous object of desire. We are left trapped in a fatal spiral of self-consciousness; the double fist has become an inescapable double bind.

23 February 2009: "Oscar Recap (presented by HRO)"

This post is about legitimizing cultural capital. In it, Carles takes a satirical and irreverent look at the Academy Awards show, exposing the arbitrarity of the aesthetic standards and entertainment mores it attempts to establish as preconceived truths. By admitting that he didn't watch the show while going forward with a "lil recap" anyway, Carles mirrors the likely conduct of most Academy voters, who operate with an instinct for what they should vote for rather than through any reference to a personal subjective point of view. This also established the larger truth about awards shows: the winners and losers are irrelevant; and the culture industry as a system always wins. Who has it defeated? The subjugated consumers of its product. Having already joylessly consumed it out of social duty, consumers must again huddle together around a TV set on awards night to venerate the same product, a reiteration of the cycle that models how tenuous notions are elevated into shibboleths by rote social rituals of homage.

Carles compiles in his ersatz recap a seemingly random list of celebrities who are distributed across the accepted highbrow-lowbrow culture continuum, a parody of the way in which the awards attempt to sanctify the cultural worthiness of the chosen winners, establish them as franchises whose cultural capital (manufactured in the red-carpet glitz and kleiglight glare of Awards presentation) can then be transmuted into the cold, hard cash of future ticket sales and merchandising opportunities. To these efforts, Carles counters the true nature of the franchises, the superficial details, the casual semi-libels, the titillating cruidiés of our most famous faces, as crystallized and distributed in tabloids and gossip magazines. Hence, far more significant, though no one is licensed to admit it, is the award for "Tween most likely to participate in SEXTING (the act of sending sexually charged text messages)" to something like best supporting actress. Carles implies that these two awards are essentially the same in the fantasy life of viewers.

As usual, Carles concludes with cutting rhetorical questions, through which one must reevaluate the text that has preceded it. (In general, his posts are best read employing a nonlinear, adiachronic method, which encompasses his striking synchronic juxtapositions and the heteroglossic free play he permits to be expressed through his dialogic inscriptions.) The concluding question brings home the colonialist scope of the culture industry project enjoined by the media magnates assembled to glorify themselves: "Should I adopt a kid from Afrika as a performance art piece?" The culture industry produces celebrities who serve as their proxy, adopting the world's peoples and conscripting them into the army of entertainment consumers, for their own good. Then this act of aggression is disavowed as a mere act of entertainment itself, "performance art." But of course, to perform is to preform.

19 February 2009:"H4X0R3D - fuck hipster runoff i hacked this blog. readers of this blog are idiot lemmings"

This post is about the persistence of socially constructed identity. As a tactic, Carles adopts an alterego diametrically opposed to the persona he has created for lingustical-philosophical-cultural space of HRO in an effort to problematize the identity that has been constructed therein and which perhaps has begun to deconstruct his subjectivity outside of the delineations of that space. Though Carles writes HRO, there is clearly a sense that it has begun to write him; this post presents a dialectical challenge to that lexico-graphical inevitability, as demonstrated by the text entirely being struck through, as if it is trying to deny its own textual status and exist as anti-text. The strike-through poses the possibility of text being both under erasure and enduring simultaneously, a homology for the process of identity always in the process of denying its construction and positing itself as an ontological a priori incapable of contingent constructedness.

Within the defaced text are some pointed attacks at Carles' audience, who are revealed in their disciplinary aspect, circumscribing the potentiality of expression: "fuck all of the readers of this stupid site. do you realize that this site is complete garbage? what do you people even value? why do you support this site?" The audience is blamed for the commercialization of expression, as if the terms of any kind of communication exchange have been ineradicably infected by commercial exchange, which no structures all efforts at reciprocity. The pseudo-Carles challenges the notion of creative consumption and derides a culture transfixed with surfaces: "you stupid fuck faces are just looking for the next big thing. but your lazy. get up off your a$$es and actually DO something. you probably come to this site because you think you’re a creative type. but your lazy and stupid and only care about how things LOOK-not what you actually are inside."

But this scatological and profane return to depth psychology is itself another tactic; by adopting this new persona, Carles tries to demonstrate the manner in which identity itself is surface, easily supplanted with its opposite. This is borne out in the way the hacker persona accuses Carles of "social terrorism" while in the midst of enacting (in theory) the arguably social terroristic act of hacking, of online impersonation. The critique is always in the process of invalidating itself, striking itself through -- this makes it of course a testimony to the site's imperviousness to criticism and to Carles's recognition of his precarious position beyond validation.

And this explains teh barely submerged contempt Carles has for his readership bursting to the surface, where it may be examined and purged by becoming itself the object of philosophical scrutiny rather than its submerged amimus -- a thanatopic assault on the concept of the thanatopic drive itself.

The post concludes with some efforts to muddy the epistemological waters with some game-theory inspired conundrum mongering: "you may think that this is just a charles joke gimmick, and he might even pretend that it is one after he contacts hsi blogger host. but i jsut want you all to know from the bottom of my heart that i fucking hate everything to do with this website and you fuckers are going down. trust me." The implication: no matter what we believe about the ontological status of the "hacker" identity, we will lose -- we will be able to be proiven wrong (unlike Carles himself in the realm of HRO) and we will be "going down." But this is a most fortunate fall. We can enjoy the sense of existential freedom that Carles's notoriety has curtailed for himself.

18 February 2009: "Pick an Authentic Group of Core Bros"

This post is about decentered subjectivity and the paradox of displaced identity. Carles investigates how our autonomous identity is beset with leakages through the various associations forced upon us by the contingency of our being and by how we are interpolated/interpellated socially. As Freud investigated, the ego is often at the mercy of group psychology. In "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," Freud writes:

an individual in a group is subjected through its influence to what is often a profound alteration in his mental activity. His emotions become extraordinarily intensified, while his intellectual ability becomes markedly reduced, both processes being evidently in the direction of an approximation to the other individuals in the group; and this result can only be reached by the removal of those inhibitions upon his instincts which are peculiar to each individual, and by his resigning those expressions of his inclinations which are especially his own.

Carles distills and modernizes that insight for late capitalism's distinct dasein. "I was looking at groups of bros who I might want 2 search for on FaceTwitspace, and I wondered which group would take my personal brand to the next level [via association]."

Of course, the "next level" is potentially the dissolution of the very concept of levels, as ego dissolves into a collective presence, typified by Carles' frequent and pointed use of the second person plural, "yall." But one must always also confront the danger that the ego will experience annihilating isolation, forcing a suboptimal identificatory gesturation. Carles captures that fear eloquently: "Glad I’m not associated with that pack of leftover bros who banded together to come bros"

All social structurations, and all semiotic transactions in general, entail an excess, a "leftover." The question is always how to process and assimilate this "accursed share," as Bataille dubbed it. Carles theorizes the possibility that the contemporary invention/intervention of identity distributed online offers a solution, and at the same time challenges and dispatches the Freudian depth psychology model as a whole. "Doesn’t matter if u hang out with hollow people in order to establish your brand before moving on to people with ‘more depth.’" When it comes to the ego, there is no depth, only movement.

17 February 2009: "What kind of an ALT is M.I.A.’s baby going 2 be?"

This post is about the generational social reproduction of class hierarchy and its attendant taxonomies, and the integral role of both cultural capital and media surveillance. Carles begins by making a reference to the sale of an image of childbirth, a paradigmatic emblem of how we enter this world already commoditized. Fittingly, an online media outlet -- one which represents the new establishment -- is responsible for provoking this archetypal transaction.

Carles then generates a taxonomy of the different acceptable identities one can assume and still regard oneself as ontologically unique, that is, as "alt." The whole notion of a "type of Alt" exposes the instability of these categories, the untenability of a Alt/conformist dichotomy. We come into this world preformed, bearers of the bundle of social relations our birth functions to reproduce. As Carles wryly notes, "We finally did it. We finally have a Prince to the Alt Throne." Always in publicized births is a replication of a hierarchy,a preservation of power, a reminder of the seat of power and its heirs.

15 February 2009: "The Future of Music Journalism means we all have access 2 our fave bands"

This post is about the crisis in commercial media and the corresponding collapse in authorized modes of spectatorship. The hegemony once enjoyed by the commercial media by virtue of its monopoly of the means of information distribution has become unexpectedly jeopardized. Technological innovation has sparked a border war between old media and new media; caught in the crossfire are dutifully disciplined audiences who have come to rely on the culture industry to mediate their relation to those manufactured idols through which they can experience their fantasies vicariously.
We are burdened suddenly with crushing responsibility: "It’s kinda weird how we’re all just ‘one man’ but we all have the power to do a lot–at least since the internet took over the world." We can no longer consume passively, but without a bounded field within which to chart our self-fashioned cultural articulations, our praxis tilts toward the grandiose. We have to "do a lot" without having a means to quantify our accomplishments, such as they are.

Now, as Carles points out, we must fashion our own mediations. We are driven to go beyond the former audience-performer dialectic and become "‘more than just a fan.’" But this demands we find an excess of signification in the culture we confront; overdetermination must be inverted, transformed into an a near-obscene profusion, a promiscuous prolificity. We must "wear a zany hat," by which Carles may mean that we must adopt a subjectivity that is radically other.

With the collapse of the stable mediations of culture comes the imperative to consume culture competitively. "we will use a pen/keyboard/video camera to make sure that ppl know that we are CLOSER to the music than they are, and that our concert experience was the most authentic, because we understand ‘the big picture’ when it comes to an artist’s history." But the asymptotic approach to "the music" and to the Archimedian vantage point from which the "big picture" could be seen precludes the possibility of ever achieving a state in which we could subjectively grasp our own authenticity. Instead we spiral toward ever-worsening stages of alienation, a St. Vitus dance set to the unforgiving and unforgiven bleatings of "our fave altCelebs."

16 February 2009: "The Day the Bloghouse Died"

This post is about appropriation. Carles is concerned about the way insurgent progressive movements, often identified in terms of the music that serves as their ideological manqué, often find themselves under symbolic assault by corporations, which seek to leverage the incipient power of spontaneous formations to more intransigently calcify the status quo. Of course, the music itself, as product, is never a means to self-realization. Carles's sly questions at the end call our attention to that: "Does the music still belong 2 the fans after it is in a commercial? Or is it less authentic since it was used to ’sell something’ besides records/mp3s?"

But the experience of appropriation is often inchoate for those subject to its invasive recontextualizations, as Carles effectively captures here: "Just feel kinda like my whole world is falling apart. I knew that eventually the whole world would realize that I listened to the best + most fun music in the world, but now that I don’t even listen 2 it any more and they are trying to utilize the aesthetic, I am just feeling a lot of emotions." Appropriation deprives insurgent movements of the very language with which they can express their political formations, leaving them only with ineffable and impotent "emotions" that can no longer be transformed into social praxis. The unbounded collective possibilities inherent to a social formation committed "just wanting 2 dance" devolve into despondent stasis.

More challenging is Carles's intimation that the seeds of spontaneous social formations are in fact planted by corporations themselves, which suggests that all youth movements are in fact always already appropriated. "I remember I used to be really into SoMe’s design aesthetic. I thought it was unique to the Ed Banger crew. I really felt like it was organic, and it BELONGED TO US. but I was wrong." This paradoxically means that no one can "sell out" even if they wanted to.

In the end, u just have to realize that everything is a brand. And every brand wants to be significant, so u can’t hold that against ppl. Brands can’t last 4ever–so u must do whatever u can 2 maximize ur value before you metaphorically ‘die’ a.k.a. become ‘irrelevant.’

Thsus it is that Carles proposes the radical, perhaps fatal, strategy of accepting brand praxeology as a way to channel the psychic energy from the thantopic drive cathected in such cultural forms as dance music and cola.

16 February 2009: "What do Poppers feel like?"

This post is about the limits of sensation, the corporeal boundaries on mental experience, and how these impinge on our liberty. Carles seizes upon the resurgence of amyl nitrate usage to question how the boundaries of the social curtail our opportunities to experience liberatory jouissance; he remarks that the drug "makes u feel free for 1 or 2 seconds." Implicit in the observation is a challenge. Constituted how we are by the current matrix of socieconomic and cultural forces, could we tolerate freedom for any duration? Are two seconds all we could stand before we collapsed into habits of unfreedom?

Carles also challenges dualist dichotomies of mind and substance, speculating that "if u do too many poppers, ur brain will start to come out of ur nose." Like Hegel, Carles ambitiously imagines the Mind as infinite in its capabilities, bounded by no contingency, destined to realize itself in full through the subsumption of experience in all its variegated forms, making our philosophical mission into the destiny of transcending history itself: "Want to ‘feel’ every possible feeling on Earth before I die."

13 February 2009: "Feelin Really Stuck Lately"

This post is about the production of alienation through geographical configurations necessitated by postindustrial capitalism. Carles explains: "Feeling down about architecture cuz space changes ur daily life more than u even realize." In other words, architecture is a kind of ideological imposition; our subjectivity is shaped by the spaces we inhabit to the degree in which we refashion those spaces to express identity. But the general inflexibility of architectural integuments makes these efforts at personalizing space doomed to a merely illusory success. The space has become so homogeneous in its articulation that it precludes even imaginary escapes: "I can’t get ‘lost’ and metaphorically get lose in my own thoughts." Consequently, despite efforts to apprehend and sublate such environments, suburban anomie can become nothing more than a mirror that reflects the lacunae we sense in our own being: "Feelin’ teen angst / Feelin’ feelings is what I do best." Emotions become as barren as the space which nurtures them, to the zero degree of tautological unnameability. Carles concludes, as he often does, with some pertinent philosophical questions. "Is San Francisco more authentic than Brooklyn? Or is Minnesota the new Brooklyn? Or is Minnesota the new Australia?" What are the terms for authentic being, when places has usurped the characteristics of and aspirations for authenticity. What happens to being when authenticity becomes a destination rather than an ontology? Is it more difficult to achieve authenticity once we can conceptually relocate it to Australia? Is it safer when it is fixed where the foot soldiers of the culture industry can carefully monitor it, in Brooklyn? Or is it best imagined in an American heartland, like Minnesota, shaped by recumbent nationalism?