21 February 2009: "Do u ever wish u could sleep 4ever?"

This post is about the Basel II accords. These, as Carles suggests, were just a dream all along, as much a flawed system for providing financial stability as the adherence to the gold standard was in the early 20th century.

so while I keep hearing things about the economie
being ‘in the shitter’ [metaphor]
I realize that we just have to pretend that ‘gold’ is valuable
but in all reality
that’s just corporate bullshit

The Basel II accords proved easy to circumvent by globalized corporate banks, using various tactics enabled by the tolerated existence of a shadow banking system -- we see now how well that "bullshit" worked out. "if u really think about it even more there’s no such thing as money," Carles explains epigrammatically, summing up decades of research on the money illusion.

The Basel II accords have been, as Carles points out, an abject failure, just as maintaining the gold standard ("pretending" the metal had transcendental value) was in the face of the astronomical legacy debts from World War I. The period called for a international regime of loose monetary policy to maintain worldwide economic stability. Instead, the mercantilist mind-set of Wilson and his like-minded cohort at Versailles led directly to the hyperinflation in Weimar Germany, which in turn presented a ripe opportunity for the Nazis to seize power.

If only we had listened to Keynes and had forgiven more of that war debt! Carles, ever mindful of the threat of fsacism ("if u really think about it
there’s no such thing as ‘normal’ [metaphor]"), seems also to be thinking of this unfortunate turn of events, and wishes to prevent it from happening again:

Not sure if I’ll ever pay back my student loans
Not sure if I’ll ever own a home
Not sure if I’ll ever make more than $33K/year
Not sure if I’ll ever find what I’m looking for

What he is looking for, of course, is an international regime of financial regulation that features something more than a toothless enforcement division. Then he won't have to wonder whether it makes sense to repay debts that may well have been forgiven under a more sensible emergency fiscal policy. He won't have to perform devilish calculations riven with unaccountable political risks when trying to work out his inflation expectations and prepare to smooth his income out over the life cycle with judicious debt incursions.

Such a regulator would be heaven-sent -- "Sometimes I wish I had a beautiful angel in my life to take care of me and tell me that every thing’s gonna be alright," Carles laments -- but sadly, that means it is most likely to remain a dream. Would that we could "////SLEEP /// 4 /// EVER."

30 March 2009: " “It Doesn’t Matter if Ur Black or White.” - Michael Jackson"

This post is about assimilation. While superficially Carles explores the dialectic of racial politics, which often vacillates between assimilative and separatist poles, he also makes a more radical intervention into the question stylistic assimilation, by which the homogenization of humankind occurs under the auspices of fashion. "Sometimes yall need 2 do more to think about the power of imagery. Fashion is more than just ‘trying 2 look cool.’ Fashion is an opportunity to celebrate culture, comment on history, and make other people think, kind of like a progressive freshman English class with a teach with a passionate, liberal-minded teacher." Of course, by citing such the example of the intellectually flabby and flatulent humanistic liberal-arts instructor, with his thread-bare ideology of human progress that so often boils down to a naive faith and prayer in the goodness of others and a stupefaction in the face of the realities of cruelty and oppression, Carles places the entire nexus of fashion and race under the sign of suspicion. The "comment on history" he means to suggest goes beyond the indelible stain of slavery but to the master-slave dialectic itself, so often "celebrated" as progress when in fact it is cementing our bondage. The "power of imagery" is such that it exceeds symbolification and spills into action, gestural behaviors that reinscribe the racial relations as relations pertaining to, at once, both more and less than race as a simple abstraction. The "human metaphors" he selects to illustrate his postulate show how race itself dissolves into metaphor, into the irresolvable paradoxes of language and semiotics. Race is the alibi for the figurative violence of signification. Hence it truly doesn't matter if "Ur Black or White" -- you are still scarred by the traumatic passage into the Symbolic.

26 March 2009: "I want to move away to the city, dress like an altBro, and become a Pizza Alt"

This post is about the green revolution and the lasting ramifications of agricultural improvements, and their likely impact on the eating habits in developing economies. What has happened as a result of dramatically improved grain yields around the world is that fewer are consigned to agricultural labor while at the same time, the world's food diversity flattens out. So there is more consumerist individualism (i.e. globalized conformity to branded consumer products) as people are freed from peasantry, and more people eating the same things as the same foodstuffs are shipped around the world. As a result, Carles points out, the mechanics of sexual attraction are flattening out as well: "I have always wonder what makes ‘the perfect woman.’ I think she needs to be alternative, creative, endowed with a treasure chest of electro accessories, and she must have similar interests as me. She must ‘like alternative music and culture’ and ‘enjoy eating pizza.’"

Pizza stands in as a symbol of ubiquity itself, a genericness that haunts romantic dreams of unique particularity and transcendence, even in the most hallowed of intimate relations.

From an economy of scarcity, which yielded a true localism, we have entered an age of cultural abundance built on a surfeit of staples. Carles grasps this: "Feel bad about the attention economy," which threatens to consume the surplus the agricultural revolution has yielded, that has forced a politico-social situation in which "altbros are evolving in2 pizzaAlts".

25 March 2009: "Should I h8 AZNs?"

This post is about the People's Bank of China, and more specifically, its tacit practice of supporting the value of the dollar and sustaining global trade imbalances. Carles is concerned primarily about interferences in exchange rates, how this has affected savings rates, and the long-term cultural implications of this: "Sad about the economic crisis, and how AZNs have been smarter than us about saving ‘money’ and only spending what they have. I think America is beautiful. We’ve had a good run, but maybe we’re not as special as we thought we were. Kinda sad. I still feel ‘cooler’ than a lot of foreigners, and like smarter." China has been in effect financing American consumers going into debt and indulging in consumption practices that allowed the U.S. to become "really good at branding" -- both at the level of corporate marketing practice, serving a buoyant consumer marketplace, and at the level of personal self-actualization, in copious acts of self-branding. The underdeveloped consumer market in China has meant that Chinese consumers are exempt both from the dilemmas of self-branding and of mounting resistance to hyper-targeted brand-marketing campaigns. Hence Carles remarks that we still believe ourselves in America to be "'cooler'" even though the economic relations of production underlying that ideological notion have now begun to shift. The equation of "cool" with "smart" has never seemed more tenuous, even though the entire hegemonic consumerist superstructure of American quotidian existence has been built upon that equivalence, operating as reflexive common sense. Americ as hyperpower has always been based on the perceived supremacy of its "lifestyle". As Carles recognizes so clearly, that is eroding: "I used to feel safe about being an American, since we were #1 in everything, but now I don’t know if I want to bring a kid into this world without the United States of America being what it once was. Not sure if my kid could handle growing up in a place that’s ‘not the best.’"

As the cool-consumerist nexus is challenged, the temptations of fascism loom larger: "should we construct some ‘internment camps’ in the middle of the USA where we force all AZNs to live and do manual labor, even if they are respected within society? Not trying 2 be radical, just know that we have 2 hold some1 accountable for our crisis, and it might ‘unite’ our country if we single out a group of people who are responsible." Currently we are united by the integrity and supremacy of our brands, which rely ultimately on debt financing to fund their evolution and their circulation. With China threatening to mitigate its purchase of Treasurys, the unifying stratum of consumerism is threatened as well -- gravely. Individualism, which relied on brands, will be "out" -- community will be in, and in order to unite a mass society, the techniques of fascism are all too familiar, they sit on the shelf waiting for the right demagogue with an aggrandizing mission to seize them.

What will be our Reichstag fire? Carles seems to be asking. He points to our very ignorance of China as a vulnerability: "I don’t really know much about China, except that they are ‘commie reds’, violate a lot of human rights, and pollute a lot. Learned that from the newspaper." The fifth column could easily be subverted, made a source of inflammatory information to stoke populist fires.

Carles wonders if now is the time to go into exile: "should I move out of the USA and move to an authentic city like Paris/Beijing/Tokyo/Cairo?" Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Carles seeks a refuge where he can continue his investigations into the ideological underpinnings of post-Enlightenment culture without fear of persecution. May he find himself somewhere as improbable and intellectually galvanizing as Los Angeles in the 1940s. But for now, Carles remains in an apparent state of internal exile, an emigre from the warrens of his own ever-shifting philosophical problematic.

23 March 2009: "The People in the Background of My Life"

This post is about proletarianization. Carle sis concerned that he is lapsing in his efforts to maintain the struggle. "Sometimes I take life for granted. But then I stop to think about how EZ and awesome my own life is. I really don’t have much to worry about, yall. I don’t have any ‘real commitments.’"

Admittedly, it is disturbing to this commentator to see Carles question his dedication to the revolution. Perhaps this is merely a tactic to foreclose the possiblity of an unproductive hegemony from coming into a more labile formation. In an effort to keep his dialectic sharp, Carles enumerates the various manifestations of class privilege that impact him in a personal way on the quotidian level of being. He addresses those whom his own praxis may be regarded as exploiting, recapitulating the ways in which their class consciousness is denied and must be imputed from without (by Carles) even as their status is imposed upon them by existing relations of production.

While ur life may feel ‘menial’
and u might not even be able to grasp the concept of ‘a better life’ from my point of view,
I just want you to know that without you,
my life wouldn’t be what it is

That is to say, his struggle is their struggle, even though it is imbued with contradiction and may in fact perpetuate that struggle rather than resolve it.

18 March 2009: "Hey yall I came up with a plan 2 save the economy called ‘bracketologie’"

This post is about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Carles laments the compromises that must be made to channel populism into progressive movements. "h8 the modern world. h8 how leaders+celebrities have to be ‘human’ and ‘accessible’ these days." This cynicism, he intuits, is the very opposite program of that pursued by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. The historical mission of Lenin and his comrades had little energy to spare for humanistic sentiment or democratic window-dressing. Their destiny was to become larger-than-life heroes in the eyes of the proletarians they purported to represent, not salt-of-the-earth Everymen. If this required massive efforts of propaganda, then the Party was there to commandeer the entertainment and media infrastructure to perform this necessary task.

Today, of course, the propaganda functions in the reverse direction, to mask the dictatorial aspects of power in a putative democracy. Far from a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat, we have a dictatorship for the financial fat-cats and the various running dogs of decaying capitalism.

I think that his act is as reprehensible and disgusting as the ppl at that one bank giving themselves bonuses after they got bailed out.
-Carles with a hardhitting opinion

Encoded in this tactical position is Carles's deeper strategy: defy the celebritization and trivialization of democratic politics to make way for truly popular political movements capable of surmounting the power structure's efforts to render those movements into impotent niche markets. Rather than be bracketed off to the side of the given cultural discourse of any contemporary moment, Carles's bracketology would assure that the revolution will be televised.

17 March 2009: "What is the most authentic body part 2 do blow off of?"

This post is about post-colonialism. During the dismantling of colonial regimes and the sabotage that accompanied the transition from the departing colonial oligarchs to their native successors, various paramilitary powers and quasi-mafioso crime rings sprang to life to fill the power void left behind by the departing raj, as it were. Drugs, of course, have been rendered illegal in the so-called developed nations precisely to give these brigands, frequently rightist agents, leverage over their country's nascent and struggling left-wing leaderships as the illicit trade establishes itself as a steady flow of funding. We have seen how this plays out in Central America and Colombia, Bolivia and Vietnam, and most recently, Afghanistan. It has been a standard move in subjugation and exploitation playbook since the British perpetrated their opium wars in China.

Carles' innovation in this interventionary text is to recontextualize the struggle between the dominating and dominated nations as a relationship among individuals within those dominating nations:

Sometimes I wonder what I’m looking for in a friend/’bff.’ A lot of ppl say that a true friend would ’suck the venom out of ur butt’ if u were bitten by a poisonous snake. However, I don’t think I will ever be in the desert, so I think my ultimate friend would let me ‘do blow’ off any part of their body.

Once the developed countries provided protection -- sucking the venom, metaphorically speaking. Now what's done in the imperial exploiter nations -- false friends by any definition -- is the sucking up of the black-market exports from the their "ultimate friends" in exploited postcolonial nations. No compromising position between these parties is to be considered too shameful.

16 March 2009: "Gotta stop drinking bottled water // I feel guilty abt stuff"

This post is about Josef Stalin. Is our capacity to feel guilt what prevents us from succumbing to the ruthlessness of Stalin? Or does guilt become irrelevant when we become caught up in the fervor of a cause, like the social causes Carles itemizes in this post?

Sometimes I don’t ‘get’ why ppl care about ‘the environment’ so much… It’s like they think that we’re ‘going to be around 4ever’ and ‘we should care about ppl who live after we die.’ I think we should do everything we can 2 find pleasure in our lives’ while we can. We don’t have much time, and if we start worrying about 1 person can’t make a difference, so don’t make a ’sacrifice’ if not every1 else will.

Uncle Joe couldn't have said it better himself.

Stalin was a mediocre party functionary in the early days of the Bolshevik revolution, after which he demonstrated an uncanny power to shift blame and take credit, rising to the top of the bureaucracy by carefully pitting his rivals against each other. This is not unlike the competition between bottled waters that Carles notes. "I don’t rlly ‘get’ the Bottled Water Industry. It seems like every1 has ‘the same product’, but for different reasons, ppl tend to ‘like’ one type over the other. I feel confused." The Communist party in the Soviet Union bristled with differences of opinion, but Stalin was able to divide and conquer because he grasped the all-important bottom line, that beyond these differences all that matter was power for its own sake, exercised absolutely. His brand was undivided authority.

To extend its power, he routinely ignored science or had his minions recast it in his image. Carles offers this glimpse at what contemporary Stalinism might consist of: "but srsly… do yall know if some1 has scientifically proven that ‘recycling is bullshit’? If I were mayor of a city, I would give ppl recycling bins, but just take all of that trash 2 the landfill." Science is deployed to produce facts that an executive power can exploit to march the masses through meaningless acts of obedience.

Carles concludes with another classic theme from Soviet propaganda. After noting his contempt for propagandists -- "I feel guilty for being so privileged and having a world of opportunities at my finger tips. h8 when ad gurus create these design/advertising/marketing memes that challenge my reality just bc they are trying to ’sell something’" -- he illustrates the tried-and-true Soviet theme of the knee-jerk callousness of the privileged capitalist classes:

Leave me alone /
Let me ‘be wasteful’ /
Stop reminding me abt /
the 3rd world /
And other sad shit /
like mortality /
and global sustainability /

But cleverly, Carles inverts the propaganda: the isolationist tendencies were actually most pronounced under Stalin, who advocated "socialism in one country," and who then pursued a policy of third-world imperialism to counter the capitalist countries' efforts in that domain. And no one knew the cleansing power of mortality like Stalin, who killed millions to protect the "sustainability" of the Soviet regime.

With this ambiguous lyric, Carles forces us to consider whether Stalinism lurks behind individualistic efforts to protect the enivronment, whether these gestures are the building blocks for a return to authoritarianism, for "the good of the planet."

15 March 2009: "Thinking about writing an autobiography"

This post is about textuality. Carles invites us to consider the primacy of writing as a method of inscription, and as the decentered source of the air of authenticity in cultural conditions that cast radical doubt on self-presentation and the notion of presence, as such. In writing an autobiography, the decentered subject confronts its own tenuousness, its own ontological uncertainty in the face of the graphicolexical. As Carles asks rhetorically, "Does n e 1 else know how difficult it is to write an autobiography?" Fundamentally, this question can't be answered; the subject position from which the question can be approached is inaccessible, lest it be addressed in writing itself. To write the self is at once to falsify being and discover it epistimologically. Autobiographical discourse evokes the notion of a "truth" about the self only to discover its permanent and ever-shifting ambivalence.

In that spirit, Carles proposes automating autobiography, to remove the tension between subject and object that the scene of writing invokes.

I’m thinking about starting a service that can convert a person’s online social networks into a book. For example, photos from ur flickr account, status updates from twitter, tagged FB photos, and posts from your blog/old live journal are aggregated into a meaningful book.

The key concept Carles isolates here is "meaningful aggregation," as a possible way out of the trap of the writing/speaking dichotomy into a free play based on accumulation, of an identity not limited by a selfsame consistency but open to assimilate more and more, as the movement of the trace continues through an endless replenishment of signifiers.

13 March: "Worried abt American Apparel"

This post is about alienated labor. In a subtle yet pointed performance of misdirection, Carles both reveals and disguises the underlying labor issues surrounding clothing manufacturer American Apparel. In the last analysis, American Apparel extracts surplus labor from its proletarian workforce and typically distracts its customers from this basic fact with commoditized sex and lascivious marketing come-ons. Naturally, Carles takes notice of an ad that strays from this formula.

I’m kinda worried about Am Appy. I saw this advertisement, and it wasn’t a traditional ad of a ‘hot girl’ showing off her perfect alternative figure. Instead, the advertisement was meant to highlight what a great company Am Appy is bc they hire unskilled ppl, make them skilled, and then pay them above-market wages + give them a chance to wear Am Appy clothes at work + learn English +etc.

In other words, when the company does foreground its labor practices, it is to cower in the cowl of relativism and point out how much worse the exploitation performed by other clothes manufacturers are. The irony here, and Carles' incisive point, is that American Apparel's enlightened labor practices consist of converting exploited and marginalized immigrant workers into fashion-conscious consumerist stooges who are no better off in real terms.

Carles then purposely belabors the consumer-retail end of American Apparel's business to illustrate how our preoccupations with self-fashioning and the meaningless, arbitrary cycles of fashion itself render us ignorant and apathetic about the vagaries of the contingent business cycle, its effects on the proletariat, and the ongoing immiseration it causes. "Kinda sad that I didn’t know there was a ‘financial crisis’ going on behind the scenes of Am Appy," Carles explains sardonically. "Not sure how businesses work, though, so maybe ‘mergers and acquisitions’ are . Feel like ’such a consumer’ sometimes."

Consumers, despite their fruitless efforts to differentiate themselves and realize their corporate-issue individuality, end up being less significant ontological entities than the corporations themselves, whose perpetuation they have unwittingly come to serve. Carles, in a damning epigram, captures this inversion concisely: "I wonder if businesses wish they could ‘live 4evr’ kinda like how ppl wish they could live 4evr." Unlimited by the mortality of any one of its constituent members, corporations can do more than dream of forever; individual consumers must merely consume furiously in an effort to forget it.

11 March: "Kermit the Frog ‘gets’ my existential/social crisis"

This post is about the stifling of revolutionary consciousness. On its face it deals with a puppet that figures in bourgeois children's entertainment, a preposterous green frog that speaks platitudes in a nasal voice meant to soothe young children who have turned to television to escape the loveless disciplinary embraces of their parents. Carles dispatches the notion that this "lovable" character of Kermit can be anything other than a capitalist-roader stooge with this lucid analytical passage:

Sometimes I wonder why the characters from childhood educational shows are such relevant figures in our lives’. Maybe it’s bc they represent ideals which parents feel comfortable ‘outsourcing’ to fictional characters. These creatures have a better chance of conveying these critical themes to us than our parents who are not ‘vulns’ enough 2 talk 2 us about life/issues. 95% of kids find ‘miscellaneous creatures’ to be easier to talk to than elders like parents, teachers, or civic/community leaders.

The bogus statistic, the sociological generalizing, the psychotropism of the late 20th century middle-class family, the evocation of humanist idealism within the explicitly commercial context of children's television, which function mainly to generate design ideas for commoditized toys -- all this conveys the brilliant parodic mode in which Carles conveys his most trenchant insights. In case the point was missed, Carles then wryly associates Kermit with a "Collective" to underscore the irony with heavy chalk.

Analyzing the signature tune through which Kermit indoctrinated children in the impotence of the Reality Principle, Carles notes that the frog "starts out singing about his ‘desire to stand out.’ He wishes he could have a different skin colour/be a different person on the outside. He feels ‘ordinary.’ He is sad. He wishes he could be unique. We all just wanna be special, yall." Through these narcissistic psychological leanings does pre-revolutionary consciousness peter out into garden variety egoism. "In the second half of the song, Kermit starts to accept the fate/circumstances that God and society have assigned him," Carles notes grimly. The reality principle returns with a vengeance: "These are messages that our parents wish they were able to communicate to us."

His analysis of another degenerate slab of musical treacle reinforces the point:

Cookie Monster represents ur ‘desire for more of stuff that tastes/feels good.’ He has no self-control. In his song “C is for Cookie”, he accepts that something as simple as a “cookie” is “good enough for me.” This is a song about accepting that life might not be THAT meaningful, but maybe u should just be happy about small stuff, and stop trying to search for big lifechanges 2 make u happy.

Again the quietist bias in children's "entertainment" is plain. We are programming our children to accept life in preformed shapes, precluding the very possibility of conceiving resistance. Human species being is reduced to a vacuous hedonism in which life's struggles amount to cookie hoarding. That's how the revolution crumbles.

11 March: "Bad News–Got Expelled from Design School"

This post is about la perruque. La perruque is an interventionist tactic analyzed by sociologist Michel de Certeau in his important and seminal 1984 masterwork, The Practice of Everyday Life. Borrowing "liberally" from the compendium of working class modes of spontaneous resistance, De Certeau defines the perruque as a "worker's own work disguised as work for his employer." This subversion of the capitalist's domain in the realm of production promises the recapture of lost time and a broach of alienation by rupturing the rupture caused by capitalist appropriation. "Far from being a regression toward a mode of production organized around artisans or individuals," De Certeau insists, "la perruque reintroduces 'popular' techniques of other times and other places into the industrial space (that is, into the Present order)."

Carles illustrates this with the pretense of being ejecting from "design school" -- itself a symbol for the homogenization the flies under the banner of innovation with the culture-industry factories of conformism -- for using the tools of the capitalist for his own ends, ends explicitly defined as libidinous and polymorphously perverse: "I just wanted to alt-ify my dorm room a bit [via tugging urself 2 sleep]." Imagining he is a student expelled from the educational institution "designed" to break his creative spirit, Carles then ironically claims he will continue to pretend he is still attending -- "Going to pretend that I am still going to college for the rest of the semester, then just pretend to drop out so that my parents aren’t mad at me/stop paying my rent and make me move back 2 suburbia" -- as if volunteering for conformism makes that very conformism a kind of subversion, just as wasting institutional resources is seen as a rebellious blow against power rather than collaboration at the deeper level of amoral selfishness. The family, the university, the art world, and the ideology of industrial design are here all brought together into a seamless totality, an edifice from which it is impossible to be expelled, no matter how hard we may try and no matter how many impotent acts of petulant protest we may commit.

4 March 2009: "Should we hold it against Kanye West for ‘dating outside of his race’?"

This post is about postcolonialism. Carles adopts a stance of racial essentialism to question the logic of ahistorical repudiations of the colonial past. Carles notes, "I know that Kanye’s personal brand is all about ‘being different’, but do u think he is stepping ‘too outside the box’ by dating such a progressive white woman with a shaved head." In speculating about whether West has become a race traitor, Carles is interrogating the limits of self-branding, which are curtailed not merely by their commercial prerogatives but by the preexisting a prioris regarding race and gender. These in turn derive from the historical inflections on the category of "human" as geographical dispersement has given way to technologically enabled globalization in the field of production, which has its reflection in the cultural sphere in which West operates. In short, West must either be considered the apotheosis of postracial potentiality within the circumscribed bounds dictated by reactionary remainders from past regimes of cultural apartheid, or he must be regarded as the new harbinger of race relations encoded in the inversion of previously hegemonic hierarchies.

Carles complicates this interpretation by adopting the mask of the "concern troll" racist: "u should know that I see beyond colour…but at the same time…kinda makes u think… We live in a modern world where transportation allows all different people to mingle and interact…but maybe…just maybe… that’s not as ‘natural’ as we think." This is misdirection played simultaneously at several levels. What is not "natural" is not the interracial relationship itself but the very idea of race as an a priori category. Carles foregrounds the geographical element, but this inevitably focuses our attention on historiography, liminal spaces, how the maps have been demarcated, how "territories" have been subject to control by foreign powers and the significance of internal dissidence as a racialized mode of resistance. By evoking the impossible, prehistorical continent of Pangea, Carles highlights the folly of dehistoricizing questions of reproductive fitness. Interestingly, for Carles, imagining the end of racism inherently involves a retrogression through time to a utopia of the past rather than the future. Globalization, he implies, is just another mode of internalizing the divsions imposed by colonialism, which have not been mitigated by the promises of free-trade prosperity.

7 March 2009: "h8 when memes are mrktng gimmicks"

This post is about tautology. The title itself confronts us with an impossible statement, the equivalent of the statement "x does not equal x." Memes, of course, are marketing gimmicks, the circulation of ideas as products. So what Carles means to tell us through this title is that he "h8s" the use of identities as a specious means of reasoning; he is challenging us to a more elliptical, inductive way of proceeding toward tentative truth.

The post cites a promotional video whose status as promotional video has been effaced, a process which makes its synthetic qualities more blatant -- it become more unmistakable as a command to beholders to behave in accordance with what is depicted. The video's disciplinary function becomes more explicit, more dangerous to resist, as audiences are expected to enthusiastically contract this particular cultural "virus" and conspire in its spread.

As Carles is wont to do, he takes the conundrum represented by the video to its libidinous roots: "Am I supposed to think that this is ‘cool’ or that it is ‘oddly entertaining’? Should part of me want to ‘cum’ with these broads because they are ‘talented and beautiful’?" In the economy of desire, where can these ambiguous performances be interpellated? We risk annihilation if we venture a sincere emotional response to an event that later proves a manipulative contrivance, but if we don't make the venture, we risk a neutered and sterile solipsism. So instead we must stake a positionality using the decayed and corrupted concepts in common parlance -- vague catch-all categories like "talent" and "beauty" that serve as masks to the more fundamental stake of sexual mastery, ""wanting to 'cum'". The orgasmic legitimates and resolves the otherwise undecideable status of the cultural performances that straddle the line of commercial and cultural discourse, resolving them in an intimate and abject responsiveness, unequivocal in its "stickiness". What sticks, of course, are the marketing memes themselves....

2 March 2009: "& I took a picture of u & U took a picture of me"

This post is about Northrop Frye. In his usual manner of indirection, Carles illustrates his theses narratologically; in this case he presents a myth of his own creation to call into question the idea of archetypes, or literature as secular myth, of criticism as a poetical rather than scientific mode of analytical truth-seeking. Carles reimagines the classic love myths -- Adam/Eve, Tristan/Isult, Heloise/Abelard, Orpheus/Eurydice, Ono/Lennon -- as a 21st century teenage romance, complete with trite references to contemporary cultural signifers. Has myth left our culture entirely, to be replaced by manufactured cultural product that serves archetypal functions? Carles directs our attention to the ephemeral nature of meaning in the nodal points of romantic love: "The night seemed to last forever–we had stolen a bottle of Boone’s Farm Wine, and eventually got so buzzed that there was no distinction between what was ‘meaningful’ and what was ‘idealistic tween banter.’" Meaning, as an earlier 20th century philosopher noted, "is the talk on the cereal box."

Carles' investigation into myth culminates in this elliptical passage:

& I took a picture of u & U took a picture of me
& if we had known that this was going to be our lasting memory
We would have done it all the same
We would have done it all differently

Here a perspective is opened up on the sublime in our midst; a heightened, irrational state in which opposites dissolve and images cease to be meaningful or necessary because a higher unity has been achieved. The mutual pictures are metaphors for the internalization of the imperative of love, which is itself is a figuration of eros as agape, love of one another as love of the eternal principle.

5 March 2009: "This Bro in a lil Box Is Me–This Is A Representation of Me [via the Internet] I am the bro in my avatar"

This post is about the dialectic of synchronous and diachronic modes of extension. As his lexical detournements and embrace of slang and technologically induced transformations in grammar and expression indicate, Carles is perpetually attempting to express his philosophy in a nontraditional method in order to overcome limitations in academic exposition. The self-referentiality of his ideas -- his linking to himself, creating false personae, asking rhetorical questions of himself and so on -- are tantamount to a challenge to deductive logic, opting instead for a an almost circular reason which defies reason. In this missive, his strategy is no different, as he takes on his customary theme of self-fashioning in the discursive space afforded by modern communication technologies. "It’s rlly hard to decide who u want 2 b on the internet," he notes, riffing on the infinitely expanding matrix which multiplies with the perpetual addition of more and more servers, a space that makes a paradoxical demand on us to be completely filled. "Like u have this lil box on your profile, and u have to choose an image which ‘represents u.’ U have like 300×300 pixels to show the world what ur all about. Seems like a lot of pressure." The pressure to be authnetic is a ideological inversion of the pressure to always be different actually being imposed upon us. We must make ourselves into replicating content; we need to make ourselves data-producing machines. And moreover, we need to continually revise our identities diachronically to meet the synchronic challenge.

Then to demonstrate, Carles facetiously interprets the "userpics" -- note the terminology; who is the user and who is being used? and how does the image play its role in the instrumental objectification? -- in apparently ad hoc and intentionally demoralizing terms. The efforts of two "users" -- "desiring machines, perhaps -- to assimilate their praxis to the libidinal economy becomes in Carles' words: "Me and my boyfriend (we have mediocre sex but we act like porn stars and talk rlly dirty and do dirty shit)."

These analyses build to the revelation of what is at stake in these efforts at online self-fashioning: "I feel like the internet is sometimes ‘more real’
than ‘real life’–I am confused?" The final statement is at once a command and a question. Our dislocation and decentered subjectivity are demanded of us, yet we feel it is our own inquisitiveness that has brought it about.

4 March 2009: "What’s the difference between fashion, design, art, and memes?"

This post is about différance. Derrida first floated that term as a way to evoke how signs both differ and defer -- that is they differentiate from one another to suggest a textual meaning with is in fact always deferred as "the movement of the trace" continues along a chain of signifiers. That is to say, movement only ever suggests meanings, which are never fixed, despite the illusion of fixity conjured by the printed page or textual artifact. Of course, the evaporative, noncorporeal nature of online textual production calls into question the ultimate significance of différance, hence Carles obsession with what is "bloggable": In this post he laments, "Sometimes I just feel like we live in a world where every1 is just trying 2 b blggd about." This, however, is the condition of being imposed upon us by hypertextuality, where the density of our being is confirmed by the thickness, in the anthropological sense, of our online linkedness.

Ironically this observation is made in the context of fashion, whose "meaning" is inherently in the movement of the fashion cycle itself as opposed to any of its specific iterations. The fashion cycle is the problem of continuous identity writ large, which is to say it is the refutation of that concept and the celebration of a seemingly free play, which is actually in fact bounded by the demands of commercial interests, their logistics, the schedules of depreciation, planned obsolescence, etc.

As Carles notes, “In the future, everyone will be internet-famous for 15 blog minutes.” The interent has unmoored conventional time, and thrown the fashion cycle into radical uncertainty. This has untold ramifications for individuals anchoring their self-fashioning on that cycle's ebbs and flows. With the movement of the trace of our being caught in the ever-thickening web of interconnections online, itself a mirror for the intertextuality of authentic being in the "brick and mortar" universe, this elasticity of time promises a more radical decentering of the privileged individualistic subjectivity on which capitalist ideology has been based. But, Carles asks, will this subjectivity be reappropriated for newer, more deeply encrusted forms of exploitation? "Still haven’t figured out[,] what’s the difference between design, art, and memes?" he asks. The answer of course is always postponed, so that the question is always already, as Carles intimates, being asked again even as we begin to formulate responses. The three concepts hang in eternal suspension, orbiting one another uncertainly. As always, an excess of meaning is generated through these orbits that we desperately try to harvest in more and more outrageous instantiations, as in the photographs Carles reproduces. These ensembles are assemblages that symbolize symbolification itself.

3 March 2009: "ALT or BRO?"

This post is about philosophical dualism. Carles calls into question dichotomizing structurations by immediately presenting a false choice between two derivative social positions and labeling it a "gimmick." It's a gimmick because these positionalities of "alt" and "bro" are reducible to the same substance; that is to say, they are positions on the same sociocultural matrix. And they are also oppositionally defined, relying on each other for their definitional precision. "There is a polarizing presence between true bros and true alts," Carles suggests, to undermine the very concept of true. Naturally, as the lessons of Levi-Strauss and Saussure suggest, there are no "bros" without "alts." The concepts are unthinkable without their antitheses.

Postmodern identity tends to drift in either direction along such ad hoc continua as this one that Carles has devised, but these continua themselves comprise a substratum that forms the entelechy of the monads.

By polling the audience to play the game of assigning individual beings to one category or another, Carles models the at a social level the conceptual structuring we too often experience as an a priori, thus problematizing the matrix of given identity categories ideology impels us to receive as fixed and preordained. But whichever category we may assign to the individual image in the post, being itself slips through the conceptual net. The more we defend our categorization, as Carles prompts us to in order to win a "free mix CD" -- itself a telling reward, indicative of the palimpsest nature of cultural experience and social desire -- the more we fall into the trap, but by so doing, we set the butterfly we were so eagerly attempting to pin down free to fly to new heights.

1 March 2009: "The Yoko OnAlt"

This post is about entropy. "Kinda worried about ‘aging’ and not looking ‘youthful’ and ‘relevant’ n e more," Carles admits, contemplating an ambivalent pop-culture icon, Yoko Ono, who at once regarded as both an arriviste and a longstanding member of the avant-garde. Contemplating his own relevance in terms of Ono's is of course an ironic strategy, because Ono's significance to culture has always remained indeterminate. She had been instrumental in dismantling one of the most significant groups in 20th-century popular music and led efforts to trivialize the attempts of celebrities to leverage their fame for political causes. Her own artistic output defies easy appreciation but rarely pays off considered contemplation. Her continued relevance is more a matter of her ambiguity as a cultural force rather than a testament to any of her positive achievements.

Carles seems to want to generalize from her particular notoriety to make a comment about ambiguous identity in general, and the ways in which our efforts to fix it only serve to make it more forgettable. At the conclusion of the post, he reveals his formula for this conundrum: "I want so badly to believe that there is truth that ______ is real." Not only is ontological status uncertain, but so is the epistemological status; the entities whose being is questioned can't even be named -- there is no sure way of knowing what to call anything without devolving into question-begging nominalism. So the momentum of experience leads to an ever-accelerating decay in subjectivity; we age, and the blandishments of consumerism cannot salve the leakage from our self-concepts: As Carles jokes, grimly, "Kinda worried about ‘aging’ and not looking ‘youthful’ and ‘relevant’ n e more. Might have to buy some Proactiv, or a different anti-aging cream."

With entropic identity comes the problematic of recognition: "I just feel like only another artist could ‘get’ me, or maybe another blggr." In order to achieve recognition for one's own singularity, one must encounter the Other who is also perfectly unique in the same way. This apparent impossibility prompts existential crisis that the casual racial stereotyping (AZN) that Carles indulges in for effect can do nothing to allay. There is no safety from atomization in nationalistic or racial stereotypes. We are still doomed to encryption in the airless, solipsistic tombs of selfhood.

28 February 2009: "I love my dog"

This post is about species being. The concept of species being, an inheritance from German idealist philosophy, is controversial for its explicit and uncompromising humanism. It implies the world as we experience it already has built into our perceptions the bias of human utility, that is, we can only apprehend the world in terms of transforming it for explicitly human use. We cannot comprehend nature from the point of view of nature, nor does it make sense to regard ourselves as an undifferentiated part of nature.

This is what Carles is suggesting with his postulate that "Dogs are meaningful bc no1 understands ur relaish with them." The relationship is wholly imaginary, an aspect of the individual's unique reconciliation of mental and material substance. A relationship with a pet is one iteration of the attempt to reorganize the whole of the material world around one's thinking subjectivity, to recreate a perfect integration to heal the alienation incipient in the gap between thought and material limitations on the action thought prompts.

As such, the relationship takes on a special significance to our existential condition, being fundamental to both our realization of our species being, our inalienable subjectivity in relation to the objectivity of a material world without will, and to our realization of our uniqueness within that species, given to contingencies that make our subjectivity wholly singular. As Carles explains, "there is a trivial yet meaningful connection with ur pet. When ur pet passes away, while it ‘meant a lot to you’, it’s more comfortable than losing something ‘real’, like a parent, sibling, or child. So while ur ’sad’, u also kinda get to pretend that ur ‘rlly sad.’" This relation to a pet represents the fictitious sense of our own singularity above our species, which "means a lot to us" but is not in fact "real" and is actually a crushing burden to the ego if held too closely. So the severance of a particular human-pet relationship is a termination of a false positionality of transcendence. In the returning rush of immanence, we perceive our own mortality afresh, as well as the links in the reproductive chain that bind us to the historical destiny of the species.

Carles announces that "the only authentic sadness might come when u lose ur parent who loved u." This radical position rejects the fundamental weltschmertz of alienated existence, suggesting that failures to reclaim a unity of the dualisms upon which consciousness is founded -- that of mind and body, of being and the world, of subjectivity and objectivity -- are strictly personal failures and not universal philosophical dilemmas. The potentialities within species being are there for us to seize and are limited only by the "authentic" sadness inherent in the mortality of that which created our being. But this sadness too is a reminder of a larger unity within history, a holistic subjective position from which loss itself is impossible to conceive.

But Carles himself sense his failure to achieve this exalted level of transcendence, the state of oneness with the created world that is the end of all meditative contemplation and all mystical investigations in to metaphysics. Having touched on the edge of such ecstasy, Carles must back away with the honest recognition of his own limited mortal being and his own awareness of his capacity for loss: "miss yall."