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.