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.
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