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.