27 April 2009: "In Pursuit of Being the Ultimate Bro: The Life Goal of Ashton Kutcher"

This post is about Ashton Kutcher. For how long can one maintain celebrity simply on the strength of being a celebrity? Careles wonders. And is that celebrity diminished when he latches on to a celebrated media technology to try to catch a glint of its trendiness?

In a technology-saturated culture that so tailors the entertainment environment for individual consumers that they cannot help but feel uniquely important, Carles wonders whether celebrities are under corresponding pressure to appear ordinary.

Sometimes I wonder what ‘fame’ buys you. I think in the past, it ‘bought u distance’ and u got 2 keep people away from u behind ur gated home in a gated community. But now I think that is ‘frowned upon’ or something, and you seem ‘less human’, therefore ‘less marketable’ as a personal brand to ‘dumb people who believe that celebrities can be ur bro.’ These days, celebrities are required to ’seem human’ and ‘do normal stuff’ and ‘reflect on it’ in the same trivial ways that all humans do.

In a self-regarding culture where everyone has become a microcelebrity, it may that banality has become the new status symbol and trivial mundanity the most recondite social reserve of them all. Can we become boring again? Carles wonders. Could anyone be as boring and uninteresting as Ashton Kutcher? Or is he the apotheosis of dullness as the quintessence of fame?

In general, celebrities are people with a ‘limited education’ who ‘didn’t really fit in during high school’ (if they even went at all). Most celebrities feel comfortable living a life of ‘excess’ and ‘not worrying about stuff too much.’ But then there are those celebrities who ‘want something more’ and might start to feel guilty about their ‘voice’/'position in society’ [via their skewed perspective of where they sit in the world]. They look to ‘cultivate meaning’ by utilizing the only forces that they know–something that probably has to do with the celebrity gossip economy.

Outflanked by the constant disclosure of personal information exaggerated to the level of significance on social networking sites, celebrities must recalibrate the "celebrity-gossip economy" by deploying their unique mixture of ignorance, stupidity, and entitlement to produce data of incalculable insignificance. The economy runs in reverse. The penny has become the dollar. Inflation has become a black hole, growth a vacuum. Ideas are embraced for their vacancy and analysis has become the inarticulate blast of "followers" in a sheer numerical mass, unable to express themselves in any other way than to be counted. But Carles is here to give voice to their inarticulate cry: "I feel sad that we are all ‘trying to build a tribe’ of followers on the internet. I feel sad that I cannot be the most popular bro on the internet."

No matter how much microfame we experience, the epic popularity of epic banality is there to remind us that are achievements always remain marginal, no matter how much more intrinsically interesting they become. Celebrities must perform their piety, while ordinary people simply engage in the moral through straightforward praxis. But this lived-in morality becomes its own disadvantage in the post-moral age of celebrity, as the performance of the moral seems to guarantee its presence in absence, and render it absent where it is otherwise present.

I start to feel angsty and threatened when a celebrity ‘tells me I should care’ because I think my ‘education’ and the ‘extent to which I feel connected to an accurate version of reality/how-the-world-works’ makes me post-eligible for ‘being required to outwardly care’ about the ‘world getting better.’

The only escape for us is for celebrities to renounce their claim to species being, to renege on the human race. "I want celebrities to be ‘more than human.’
I want ‘fame’ to ‘mean something’ again." At that point fame will once signify a kind of death, an annunciation, as attention makes certain chosen ones into impossible and inaccessible angels who redeem our ordinariness by their own inability to be ordinary again. Saint Ashton, where have you gone?

27 April 2009: "Overwhelmed by the Swine Flu "

This post is about tautology. In a discussion about the current panic over teh so-called swine flu, Carles notes how a medical event has transmogrifed into a media event, rendering the information transmitted specious and unreliable: "Kinda weird when something that is ‘viral’ actually ‘goes viral,’" he remarks succinctly. Is information really a disease, he asks by way of implication, or is disease merely a form of information? What's needed, Carles suggests, is an epidemiology of folk epidemiologies: "Please use this post to share tips on how 2 avoid ‘catching’ the swine flu.’ Gonna go do some research." The underlying idea, as word about the disease spreads, is whether or not we can be said to have caught the flu merely by hearing of it and fearing it. There may be no practical difference if the fear disrupts our praxis, as Carles notes: "Don’t even feel like anything I blog about even matters. When u hear about a story so serious, it’s like all of this ‘alt music and culture’ stuff doesn’t even matter."

So in the end, rapid dissemination of medical information makes the content of the virus be its own description; the details of which become symptoms on the social body, obliterating information as more and more attention is sucked into its black hole.

24 April 2009: "Do the offices of the popular alt record label DIM MAK also serve as a porn studio?"

This post is about Immanuel Kant. In contemplating the connections between contemporary avant-garde popular music (that peculiar oxymoronic conundrum), Carles implicitly questions whether it is possible for a truly disinterested aesthetic can exist, or if the Kantian ideal is an outmoded fantasy from a predominantly precapitalist epoch.

Carles begins by tracing the trajectory of a fringe record lable that had become seized upon for its value in signifying an supposed exemption from the common run of society.

Yall might know the record label DIM MAK as the record label that was started by popular blog house DJ Steve Aoki. It has developed into a lifestyle brand, and they sell records, bangers, trinkets, t-shirts, and probably other stuff.

A combination for the making of art quickly dissolves into a commercial venture for the marketing of status signifiers. The presumption that the music could exist as a ding-an-sich seems to shrivel in the face of the freezing blast of capitalist entrepreneurship. The profit potential in art as cultural capital and as traded commodity are always already inherent in the conception of form, and constitute the matrix, the ground, from which artistic impulse now blossom, as so many weeds from the dung of laconic farm animals.

Carles then refigures this trajectory as the fall from art to pornography, the prostitution of beauty, and worse, the way this descent is inscribed on the subject/consumer: "Yalll…. s00 confused. Is the record industry dying? Do rcrdlbls start having to ‘do porn’ now?... Do yall like porn with alternative story lines, or do u just want 2 see ppl ‘cumming’ on 1another? Feel sad that I am ‘more excited’ about Dim Mak porn than Dim Mak music." The capitalistic imperative in the creation of art circumscribes the potential responsiveness of the viewer, rendered structurally in the aesthetic exchange into a passive consumer, Carles daringly posits, trapped in a prison of instrumentalism. Interestingly, he also demonstrates the terrible epidemiology of this debased relationship to art by referring his readers to the pornographic video, thus instantiating the process in a single gesture.

Is there an "alternative" to an aesthetic intimately bound up with interest? Or is every effort to bring art to an audience bound to be caught up with "viral marketing" practices? Perhaps a masturbatory response to art is the best way of severing the epistemological knot: As Kant would say, "we can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the respect in which I depend on the object's existence." As Carles would say, "Damn."

23 April 2009: "Just want to be a good/cool parent."

This post is about the abject. Carles is talking about the threat to the subject/object dichotomy posed by the newborn child, which is at once with and without identity, but beyond that he is concerned with the same abjection inherent in conformist consumption that effaces subjectivity or confronts us with the threat that our subjectivity will be decentered in our own consciousness: appropriately Carles calls this material "the kewlest shit." Kristeva infamously argued that "Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of preobjectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" -- in other words the "powers of horror" in the primal ur-abject scene of childbirth. The substances of our own mortality and infirmity -- vomit, feces, a propensity to listen to Creed (whose lyrics Carles reproduces here to incite abject responses in his readers and thus inscribe on the body of the reader his philosophical axioms) -- evoke abjection. Carles, by merely appropriating the band's lyrics, figures Creed's music as an irruption of the Real:

With arms wide open
Under the sunlight
Welcome to this place
I’ll show you everything

Through the invasion of a culturally constituted object of desire (petit A?) into the space of our own self-automated subjectivity, "everything" becomes the intolerable assurance of our death. Our autonomous acculturation is threatened by the very existence of popular music that cannot be assimilated to an individualized notion of the good, in a Platonic or Aristotalian sense. "This place" is the womb space of pure abjection, covered in placental tissue and umbilical fluids as well as the the "tears of joy" that "stream down."

22 April 2009: "Every time I see a progressively dressed group of black males, I search for Kanye West. [Progressive Racial Profiling]"

This post is about invidious comparison. Drawing from the writings of 18th-century Dutch controversialist Bernard Mandeville, Thorstein Veblen presented a sociological theory of luxury that leaned heavily on the presumption that members of the lower social classes are ineluctably drawn to imitate their betters. One of the operative principles of his theory was "invidious comparison," the envious gaze we direct at others and our consequent efforts to inscribe our social distinction on the level of surface appearances. Unlike Adam Smith, who assumed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that we harbored in our breast a sympathetic observer who permitted us to regard ourselves as others saw us and adjust our social behaviour accordingly, Veblen presumed the essential and integral hostility of the gaze, which saw in the presence of the other a status threat. To neutralize that threat, he argued, we turn to the solace of conspicuous consumption, which seems to guarantee that we can't be seen without being envied, and that envy becomes the guarantor of our status -- we know we are secure inthe hierarchy only when we are assured that those below us envy and despise us.

As usual, Carles situates a sociological precept within the crucible of race to test its exegetical purity.

I feel like whenever I see a group of black males who are ‘dressed progressively’, I look for the face of Kanye West 2 be proudly looking at me, like ‘hey yall…just dressed nice and fashionable. not really dressed like a traditionally black person.’ Think that this might be some progressive kind of racial profiling.

Does invidious comparison explain what the image captures, or does it simply supply Carles' with an analytical alibi for a deeper racist tendency. Furthermore, how can that question be answered, since to pose it is to take on some of its racist taint? Carles concedes that he "Might be ‘too educated’ for my own good to the point that I have developed a post-racial mindset."

But of course, such a mind-set too would be a flashpoint for invidious comparison in a society rapidly destigmatizing both racism and postracism -- such that only the anxious politically correct middle remains suspect for its racial views. To position oneself outside of that flabby and compromised cohort is imperative, particularly for those with a profitable sideline in cultural consulting, such as Carles himself.

To that end, Carles adopts the nomenclature of the assault on scientism and declares that "it’s a good thing that Kanye West is shifting paradigms." By that Carles refers not only to the surface changes in apparel that West has effected by the larger shift of the contested geography of invidious comparison into the field of philosophical inquiries into the future of race. "I feel like 1 day we’ll look back and realize that this was one of the most important minority memes of all time," Carles announces.

20 April 2009: "Monitoring Emerging Trends: Socks with Sandals [via Chloe Sevigny]" and "Is Asher Roth the next Eminem?"

These posts are about deracination. Parasitic worm infestations are typically regarded as a third-world phenomenon, something Carles acknowledges in his analysis of a photo of celebrity Alicia Silverstone walking barefoot at a California culture-industry confab.

Yall I feel Clueless
walking around coachy
barefoot
hope I don’t get a disease
I think that’s actually how
kids in Africa transmit a lot of diseases

By projecting responsibility for the parasites' spread on the African children who are typically the victims, Carles captures the attitude celebrities telegraph in their high-profile efforts to adopt a few similarly situated children from the continent. Hardship and economic necessity makes such children seem a disease vector to ordinary Westerners, cozy in their hygienic insulation from Nature, whereas celebrities can transcend the cocoon of health paranoia and appear to make common cause with such children, whether by emulating them or co-opting them in their entirety by literally appropriating their physical person. The guinea worms figure a separate sphere of being for those above and below the typical middle-class burgher.

But this fusion or paralleling of rich and poor provokes confusion in the class it circumscribes: "Does n e 1 else miss when images of consumerism and rich white people were ’simple,’" Carles half asks, half declares. The result is a populist anger that rechannels contempt for the poor toward a contempt for that strata of celebrities who have become the poor's advocate and avatar: "Miss when we didn’t have to ‘resent white ppl’ s0 hard," Carles concludes. In other words, he is underscoring the nostalgia that recurs to the resentful when they are positioned into a contempt for that to which they also aspire.

"White ppl" is no longer simply a racial designation; thanks to the introjection of celebrity concern for Africans, one can have white skin and seem to fail to qualify as white. As Carles notes in his post about aspiring hip-hop artist Asher Roth, "most white people haven’t gone through an authentic struggle" -- namely they haven't qualified for the aid of celebrities or become famous enough to have their charity regaled in the mainstream media. They fail to become white, in the sense of being a "white knight" who rides to the rescue, and sink to the level of a post-racial underclass in the new attentional economy: If such people "did ’struggle’ it was probably in a gross white trash kind of way that we could probably ‘make fun of’ very easily," Carles explains.

The problem is exacerbated by celebrity attempts to play a peekaboo game with their admirers, making efforts to be at once seen and not seen.

It must be interesting and fun to be a celebrity. U kinda just wanna chill out in public and have people look @u and recognize u and want 2 be u but u also ‘want people 2 leave u alone’ so that u can experience the same stuff that ‘normal people’ do, like music festivals and wearing ur chillest sun wardrobe.

Celebrities, it would seem, are afflicted with an unreasonable nostalgia of their own, to return to a state of noncelebrity, to recur to an ontological awareness of being as opposed to an epistemological self-conception -- to simply be rather than to be known of. Their dilemma makes their followers into parasitic guinea worms, penetrating through unseen orifices to steal their identities -- "2 be u." No wonder the fading celebrity discussed wears both sandals and socks -- in dealing with a leeching mass of uninterpellated subjects hovering and orbiting like detached ions of a decaying radioactive isotope, no layer of protection can be considered superfluous. Next time, she may want to consider a HAZMAT suit.

20 April 2009: "h8 when u can’t tell the difference between ‘art’ and ‘advertising.’"

This post is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Carles begins with a commercial image that plays on the sublation of racial difference. "Don’t u h8 when u think something is ‘beautiful’, then u find out that it it being used 2 sell u something?" he asks, adding that he thought the photograph "was a beautiful picture that was about ‘ending racism’, celebrating 2 beautiful people coming together as 1." Of course, this is the dream and the rhetorical tenor used by all the intercessionary agents who seek to resolve the conflict in the Middle East. A resolution to the territorial impasse is sold through the dream of peaceful coexistence, "beautiful" picture to be sure, but one that functions as a veneer pasted over an integuement of grievances. No wonder Carles feels "manipulated." A two-state solution may be the best hope, but if marketed as the equivalent of a harmonious interracial relationship rather than a tenuous balance, a rueful compromise, it seems doomed to remain forever unrealized. With tact and discretion, Carles leaves us to draw the inescapable conclusion from the mise-en-scene of the image itself: the light-skinned woman posed dolllike across the dark-skinned man's lap is a representation of the far-right Israeli view that it will be made a passive mannequin naked and vulnerable to ceaseless violation at the hands of an increasingly confident dark-skinned Other -- the far right's worst fears rendered as a seductive and sexually enticing tableau.

Carles combines this striking and foreboding image with a parable about the theft of property -- a coded fable about the plight of the Palestians. "In my digital art class, I actually made a symbol that looked like the ‘Nike Swoosh’ without even ever seeing it. I thought it was beautiful, but then my classmates accused me of ‘ripping off Nike’ and wondering ‘how could u have never seen the Nike logo b4?’" When Israel was first settled by Zionists, the plain fact of the presence of the Palestinians was sometimes as conveniently overlooked as the Nike swoosh (a potent symbol of American cultural ubiquity and global force) in Carles' anecdote. The beauty of the Zionist dream -- like Carles' ersatz swoosh -- could only be credited and flourish if what was in plain sight could somehow, through the force of sheer ideology, be overlooked. But the righteous honesty of Carles' classmates -- the global community? -- anchors him to reality and obviates his effort to illegal appropriate the intelectual property that has already been proven so valuable. Should Israel "just do it" and impose a unilateral solution? Carles would appear to have his doubts. He sarcastically points to an advertisement in Hebrew depicting Woody Allen costumed as a rabbi -- "But I did like the recent Am Appy custom Woody Allen campaign. Feel like it really went viral" -- to mock Israel's diplomatic efforts on the international scene. These attempts have had no traction, and stripped of their "American Apparel" -- the U.S. government's backing, propped by the lobbying efforts of AIPAC -- these naked claims would lie as lifeless as the woman in the opening image. Fittingly, Carles' final image shows an American soldier being disarmed by a child. "Does n e 1 know where I can get an advertising/marketing internship?" he asks, suggesting that if we put the children in charge of the media-messaging machine, American aggression could finally be allowed to recede and the MIddle Eastern conflict could be left in the hands of the next generation.

13 April 2009: "Might not find girls who wear Am Appy to be ‘hot’ n e more."

This post is about empirical fallacies. Biological determinists and other tyrants of empiricism make the mistake of equating physiological reactions with unimpeachable truths, as though sensual experience made up the only stratum of experience, was reality in sum total. Carles dismisses this cleverly. Note how he brackets the physiological response in quotation marks to force us to interrogate the preconceived naturalness of this stimulus-response paradigm. "Yall. I remember the days when I would totally ‘get a hard on’ when I saw a girl wearing Am Appy." That erection was not a straightforward biological response but instead a conditioned response evoked by cultural means, in this case the sexualized marketing campaign of a contemporary clothes retailer. The mistaken, naive, empiricist presumption that the "hard on" was unmediated, or constituted a simple fact, leads to the embedding of historically determinant marketing techniques at the level of physiology.

Carles then illustrates the conundrums that derive from this, having his persona castigate himself for his sexualized response, which he has been prompted to regard as natural, as incontrovertible proof of desire that he can't control but must subject himself to, even as its awakening grants him subjectivity. His confusion about the source of his desire -- is it inherent in the phallic erection which is its sign; is it inherent in the women objectified in the marketing materials; is it inherent in the brand itself -- leads to a more profound existential confusion of ends and means, of how to achieve meaning in terms of a world view that denies transcendental metaphysics and insists on the cold, hard facts of images and biological responses.

All I want 2 do
is live in 1 of the cities on the Am Appy bag
Settle down
Start a family
Be the person I want 2 be
and grow old without feeling old
Getting more meaningful with each passing day

How to be old with "feeling" old? Naive empiricism denies the possibility out of hand. How do reconcile family with sexual impulsiveness? How to be "the person I want 2 be" once the sexual desires used to define subjectivity have been set in psychological parentheses?

The problem -- paradoxically empirco-symbolic sexual desire and its relation to self hood ("Kinda sad. Not even sure what I think it ‘hot’ any more.") -- then exacerbates itself into ritualized misogyny, as Carles warns in this disturbing conclusion, where he traces this thread of tangled and contested subjectivity to its bitter, contemptuous knot.

Might just start looking at ‘a ton of porn’
because it’s good 2 know that some girls ‘just want 2 get pounded’
and only consider themselves’ to be ‘lil fuck holes’

If empirical desire is the only basis for male subjectivity, what promise does that hold for female subjectivity, set into a dialectically subordinate position and degraded into a mere functionalism? Women's subjectivity evaporates into the aporia of pornography, the ecstasy of mechanistic male desire, with all its empirical proof sprayed, as it were, on the glossy pages or grimly stark verite images on the computer screen. The pornography of the real itself, once the real is understood as physiology as experienced by and between men.

But whose fragile identity can carry the weight of a "ton of porn" on its shoulders? In the last analysis, the burden of objectified desire ultimately breaks down even those it served to constitute as subjects. The would-be "pounder" finds himself "getting pounded" as well. The empirical data on which the self is vested itself continues to multiply until it becomes an indifferent and undifferentiated mass of ones and zeros (or: phalluses and vulvas), signifying the on and off of techno-rationalized desire. At this stage there is no protection in the distanciation of desire to brands that might contain them and make them organizable, compliant to taxonomy. There can be no escape to "the cities on the Am Appy bag" -- empiricism has made them enormous red-light districts of the self, and the price is going up all the time.

16 April 2009: "My Dad is all sad about getting older"

This post is about the oedipal scene and castration anxiety. Consider the opening lines of Carles bold exploration of the roots of the anxious masculinity of our contemporary age:

I walked in on my dad looking at himself in the mirror
naked
He did not know I was watching him

Here reflexivity meets a recession of reciprocal gazes as they follow each other down the rabbit hole of primal libidinous urges and ego formations, giving rise to the monstrous proscriptive superego, here figured as father figure posed naked to reveal his potential potency. Threatened by the looming phallus and the coordinated law of the father it represents in a cultural era that mandates hedonism, Carles shows how our immediate impulse is to try to cripple the image of the father semantically, confine and contain the threat he metastasizes by denigrating him with the depredations of age. "Lately, my father has been losing hair gaining weight getting older," Carles notes, speaking of the father, the repressive conscience as psychic burden. The father is figured as trying to steal youth -- the superego trying to suppress jouissance (Carles too recognizes the danger in this, framing radical hedonism as an interrogative: "Just want 2 b happie?") and subjugate us all under the phallologocentric order of rigid and programmatic rationalism, an apathy that ironically Carles directs back at the superego: "Maybe there is just a time in ur life where u need to ’sit on the couch, turn on the TV, and stop sulking.’" Maybe the superego should take a vacation into the mindless and castrating entertainments it seems to prescribe to the wayward ego, to stifle unbounded subjectivity.

17 April 2009: "Some of my bros started a post-post-ironic rap group"

This post is about Jim Crow and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Carles' typically oblique and challenging analysis here pivots around this penultimate statement: "ughh…. so disenfranchised with hiphop/the scene/rap/art/everything." Using the schematic inverse of cultural disenfranchisement as a lever, Carles evokes the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout the 20th century and beyond. The contempt and disgruntlement that the spectacle of clueless "‘wannabe rap tribes’ in ur local scene" inevitably conjures serves as a rough parallel for the disgrace and outrage that should register with the denial of political rights to African Americans. The qualities Carles assigns to the insignificant hip-hop aspirants -- "I think the concept behind it is that they are ‘not black’, ‘privileged’, and ‘get’ global issues" -- are precisely those qualities that are presumed by the political establishment to qualify one for civic and democratic participation. This despite the token efforts to rectify the issue, solemnized as Jim Crow, in the wake of civil-rights protesting and rioting in the 1960s. And the crisis has perhaps deepened, as waves of immigrants pass African Americans by on the status ladder, a phenomenon Carles shrewdly captures with a reference to multicultural icon MIA: "Would u rather watch these bros or M.I.A., or are they ‘basically the same thing.’" Is there no difference now between privileged whites and heralded immigrant groups vis-a-vis the suppression of the more longstanding minority groups in America? How have the in-groups mobilized culture in an effort to preserve their privilege? Perhaps "beats" -- stolen or not -- have more in common than we are willing to admit with "beatings," like those traditionally handed out to dissident minority factions?

12 March 2009: "Reflecting on my Life Choices"

This post is about transportation alternatives. The key to understanding Carles' discursus here is the photograph, an image of a malfunctioning programmable traffic sign instructing drivers to take an alternate route. On the surface, Carles plays with the metaphoric resonance, the irony of regarding the imperative to develop a heterogeneous self-concept as an impersonal bureaucratic command issued literally in foot-high letters in the street to every passerby. The craving to become unique is in no way unique; it is in fact a mandatory prerequisite for social participation, for the efficient traffic flow of souls through the urban grid.

Carles rehearses a litany of ways in which we may be socially constructed, a series of interrogative "Did I" statements that reinforce the provisionality of identity in the flux of social forces. But cued by the initial frame of the photograph, a few of these statements carry an additional inflection. For instance: "Did my parents drive a minivan?" Not only is this a comment on how parents' obsessional concerns about safety afflict the ego in development in a childcentric culture, as well as a marking of how parental conformity to prevailing consumption norms circumscribes a child's potential personality; it is also a critique of a culture trapped in path dependency, rigidly reliant on the private auto as a mode of transportation. Within such a society, the avenues of personal development will inevitably have too many passing lanes, and will be restricted access, of course.

This motif is reinforced by the question: "Was I ’sad’ about the OJ Simpson verdict?" In other words, what emotional effect did it have to observe the culture unify itself around an interpretation of events that reconfigured race-inflected murder and an attempted flight from justice as an extended and especially lavish commercial for a particular brand of sport-utility vehicle? What was society's verdict on that particular process of radical redefinition? What of the aporia of moral condemnation? Carles is clearly concerned with the intergenerational effects of the minivan as cultural signifier and as moral vacuum, "driving" the development of subjectivity in an environment in which transportation/identity alternatives are at once mandated and foreclosed.

Conceiving the nexus between automobile-ridden society and the very possibilities of social reproduction, Carles comments, "Don’t want to ‘have a family’ and ‘live in suburbia.’" Starting a family has become contingent upon having the transportation available -- the auto -- that makes it possible to live in the only space deemed authentic and appropriate for the raising of middle-class children -- "suburbia." Carles pulls at the thread that binds this Gordian knot: "I think I would enjoy stuff like ‘falling out of love with my wife after she had 2 kids’ and ‘resenting my kids for being lil ass holes’" The way to destroy the car-centric culture and the tyranny of the auto is to destroy the childcentric culture and the cult of the nuclear family. This is the "alt route" available if only we would switch to more environmentally sustainable modes of transport; Carles proposes an "all-terrain vespa."

14 April 2009: "Who is the most authentically chill bro?"

This post is about Vichy France. Carles asks a leading and pressing question: "Does n e 1 know why artists always have to ‘collaborate’?" The notion of collaboration here works synchronically to suggest both artists working with one another, and artists working in collusion with the interests of a repressive state apparatus. That pop stars produce propaganda is so obvious that it embarrasses this commentator somewhat to even have to mention it. But the problematic that emanates from that simple abstraction can become, as Carles intimates in this post, somewhat complex.

First, the fluidity of the propagandistic needs within a given sociocultural hegemony leads to unusual and unlikely collaborations, such as the ones documented in the photographs Carles has archived here. Typically these collaborative constellations are forced and then publicized to dissolve tightly-unified subcultural formations that could develop a revolutionary consciousness if left unchecked and allowed to formulate a specific ethic. The unlikelihood of these pseudo-collaborations in the name of the status quo threatens to reveal their propagandistic nature, hence the need to cast a cowl of "chillness" over the entire proceedings, a ruse Carles dares to openly mock. "WHICH BRO DO U WANT 2 CHILL WITH/BRING HOME 2 UR PARENTS AND TELL THEM IS UR BFF?" The idea of establishing personal relationships with celebrities is of course "chilling" to the potential for radical resistance and subversion. The personal is not in this case the political, quite the opposite. And the reference to the figure of authority at that personal, subpolitical level -- parents -- reinforces the way that these collaborations help keep subjects mired in their strictly parochial psychological trauma rather than sublimating it into political awareness. The proper course of action when confronted with these false constructs of collaboration is to engage in vigorous self-criticism, and question the ways in which we collaborate with power.

Second, the problem of collaboration as trans-signification, the forced migration of meanings. Carles: "Tired of these artists trying to piggyback off 1 another 2 ‘reach new audiences’/assuming that ‘authenticity’ or ‘pop appeal’ is a transferrable force." This transferability is precisely the vulnerability of resistance groups, which can dissolve as the stable ground of meaning slips from beneath their feet, thanks to these collaborative re-valuations. Authenticity, the glue that unifies subjects in resistance, becomes a movable feast. The incentive for revolution erodes as multiple-choice options for the focus of grievances come to light. As the core of authenticity is challenegd with alternatives, the nature of our intrinsic rights and how the state violates them becomes hopelessly muddled. Consequently the "pop appeal" of any resistance strategy is undermined -- its appeal is diluted among competing claims for justice, competing configurations (collaborations) of social movements. The inertia of multiculturalism.

With ironic hauteur, Carles writes, "Miss the days when collabs were ‘authentic’ and ‘exciting.’" Clearly he has in mind the quintessential instantiation of collaboration: when French intellectuals (as well as an international quilt of fellow travelers) worked with the Nazis. No commitment could have felt more authentic or exciting than to align with a baroquely aestethicized fascist movement intent on such merciless purification that no collaboration would ever again be possible, because no society would ever be less than homogeneous. When pop stars combine in unlikely configurations, we should not hesitate to scrutinize closely, looking for the jackboots.

24 February 2009: "Miss u newspapers"

This post is about textuality. The written word as material object presents a sensual barrier to the semiotic interpentetration of signifiers, as the images of a woman wrapped in newsprint salaciously demonstrate. The images illustrate the degree to which we literally wrap ourselves up in words, the way in which the flow of mediated information clothes us, protects us. "Newspapers were created to be recycled," Carles declares, pointing to the inherent ephemeral nature of news content when considered categorically. But the apparent permanent-ness of text as print matter is belied by its eminent disposability, whereas textuality as the tightly woven blanket of memes and signifiers allows discrete texts to survive in perpetuity. As Carles notes, the problem with printed text is its isolation: "There are no hyperlinks on the page to read about related stories or issues." That is to say, the textuality is masked rather than foregrounded, a disguise that can be exploited by the forces who seek to assert control over the flow of information. Newspapers as counterfactuals. Their pretense to truth is a kind of nontruth which aspires to truth or masquerades as truth thanks to prevailing truth procedures: "Just want to create an accurate version of ‘the world’ according 2 my internet experience," Carles remarks slyly, a nod toward the way online textuality has fashioned a densely layered world that is more real than real. And faux truth, after all, comes at enivronmental cost: "Do yall know if ‘the rain forest’ is running out of trees?"

But within the dense thicket of textuality, it is easy for us to lose ourselves, as Carles warns. "Do u believe that u can create ur own internet, and within that context, cultivate meaning + an appreciation of ‘the world’ according 2 u?" With a rigorous interrogation of online interactivity, we may instigate an inversion of the subject and object, so that the referentiality of truth may become obscure and ontology a kind of vacuum. A negative theology of the self as searchability ("Is google the ‘anti-christ’/God?"), with the real pouring out of virtual worlds rather than into them.

My life takes place
on the internet
And then sometimes
real life happens
but I come back to the internet
to reflect on it
and record it
and 2 make it
history

Just as textuality allows for the infinititude of the text, of the Word as primordial substance, so does online density of presence permit dreams of immortality. But these are just dreams: "When I die, will my social network accounts be deactivated?" Carles asks. The networks are not yet self-sustaining, or rather, as Carles harshly reminds us, they sustain themselves only to the degree to which they efface the self.

2 April 2009: "Trying to make new music. Not sure if I should get a Macbook or an authentic studio"

This post is about free play. Technologically mediated aesthetic sublimation -- is it substantively different than onanistic satisfaction of rogue libidinous desires? Desiring machines, desiring the machine to make desire. Carles reduces the irreducible, posits the equivalence between musicmaking by means of synthesizers that mimic the organic sounds of authentic acoustic instruments, and the simulacrums of simplistic computer games and masturbation: Rather than make art with fetishized machines, Carles wonders, "should I buy a vintage Windows 3.1 computer, play Ski Free all day, ‘jerk off’ to JPGs of nude women on floppy discs, and then ‘off myself’?" All of these are inverted, insular distractions that offer an illusory control of time, signified primarily by how time is mapped onto space via the spatialization of musical measures in the music-recording software Carles details. Of course, as Carles shows, this indulgence in distractions, this fantasy of spatialized time, leads inevitable to the ultimate distraction, the ultimate expression of mastery: suicide.

The effort to justify "creativity" enabled by means of contemporary entertainment technology leads inevitably to the contemplation of nothingness, of self-effacement. The perfect technology for creativity would make the user himself irrelevant and superfluous. A useless appendage further hampered by its needs for material sustenance, which Carles aptly metaphorizes in this mock soliloquy through the vittles of popular chain-restaurant Chili's: "‘Carles. U had a good life. Let’s have 1 last meal at Chili’s’ then end my natural life in the parking lot of a local Chili’s, and ascend into electro heaven, where every1 has access to every ‘bad ass’ instrument and computer program ever created?" Once we have given ourselves over to music mediated by machines, then only there, in heaven, where the technology is always perfected in advance, can we experience the free play of creativity.

7 April 2009: "Think I wanna see this ‘indie’ love story"

This post is about phallologocentrism. The gaze. Does it obviate or activate the libido in its aggressive and atavistic permutations or does it facilitate the sublimation of sexual impulses into commercial and patriarchial forms, or further, does it merge commercial and patriarchal forms, making them for all intents and purposes synonymous? Love, deployed conceptually within the matrix of patriarchy, serves as the alibi for any number of repressive identity formations and underpins a subjectivity tantamount to slavery. It constitutes an ideology, purveyed in such propagandistic offerings as the ones Carles takes to task here, that excuses the gendering of subjection and the subjection of gender. Carles writes, "Yall. I really want 2 fall in love. Looking for an authentic interpretation of ‘love.’ Feel like most movies about relationships are ‘just bull shit romanticized crap’ but not this 1. I am pretty sure I identify with it." In his final analysis, the process of ideological disciplining through "love" begins with a desire to be "in love" -- a transvaluation of the desire to desire itself, a ramification of the social manufacture of desire by corporate interests invested in the circulation of commodities associated with such desires. But immediately with the desire to fall in love comes a concern with authenticity -- the subject is aware that "love" has been reified by his own desire and has had its integrity always already compromised. The desire to be "in love" is actually a wish to be "authentic" in oneself, to feel ownership of one's desires, which have in fact been manufactured elsewhere and implanted in the subject through the hydraulic means of the marketing-media nexus. Then the media is attacked -- it is "bull shit romanticized crap" -- to clean the glass in preparation for the recognition of a sincere and true reflection of self in the mirror of mass consumption. Hence the cycle concludes with an identification with the ersatz subjectivity hollowed out within the given culture product, which the subject experiences as a new potential for "love", a revaluing of that concept, which is loaded with new meaning, which is of course the same old meaning -- an insecurity in the self fostered by desire for an inaccessible other. Love as such becomes the pursuit of a recession of chimerical ideals: "Want to marry some1 who plays a character in an alternative movie and then pretend that I am married to a character from a movie."

This insecurity ultimately supplies the malleable energy that can be used to shore up repressive structures revolving around such related social categories as gender. This is how the cycle of love indoctrination leaves Carles's fictive protagonist in this post: "I'm just a bro who wants to be in love, living in a world full of 'crazy cunts' and 'krazie slutz' who 'don't know what they want' and 'don't realize that they have a good bf.'" Primed for love, the protagonist suddenly regards women categorically in terms of their sexual availability, and measures their rationality in terms of how cooperative they are in their own subjugation to make libidinous cravings, now unmoored from constraint while at the same time "married" to a nomenclature of romance and sanctioned longing.

The specifically male desires, inscribed in the discourse of love as mediated through popular culture, conflates the sexually willing female with a life rich with rewarding and spontaneous experience. "Want a girl who is alternative, but also ’seems like a slut who is down 2 fuck.’ Want life to seem like an indie movie that is a mix of realism, quirky convo, and surreal events like ‘dance sequences’ and ‘moments that seem larger than life.’" But of course such moments are plotted, are generic cliches that are used to signify spontaneity where none is possible.

So it turns out we are trapped in a machine -- the culture industry -- that manufactures patriarchal relations as "love" and embeds them in our consciousness through co-opting the very natural-seeming desire for intimacy and meaningful relationships. The real possibility of intimacy recedes as perpetual insecurity (the triumph of the culture industry's resourcefulness in always fostering lack -- its successful effort to generalize the castration horror) takes root and expresses itself in gender inequality, which expresses itself in casual vulgarities, throwaway misogyny. And as Carles grimly points out, the indoctrination starts young, and it comes at a great cost: "sad that tweens can’t go to the movies any more and fngrbang eachother without ‘a lil bit of popcorn butter on their fingers.’ just s00 expensive." The "love" depicted in films merely facilitates sterile sexual contact, mediated by overpriced food products sold as experience-economy adjuncts. Thus sexual energy is channeled through several commercial nodes before finding a joyless expression in mechanistic reciprocal masturbatory sessions.

10 April 2009: "everything has a natural life" and 12 April 2009: "hey guys. i’m jeff. the new blogger for hipsterrunoff.com"

These posts are about fatal strategies. In his late period, Baudrillard advocated a sort of nihilistic indulgence in place of perpetual resistance, and Carles has decided to dabble in this sort of paradoxico-ironical epistemology. "when will HRO end? should HRO have ended _ years ago?" Carles wonders, and leaps directly into enacting his tentative answer, that silence is the best response to co-optation, to the pressure of always having to find new ways to resist. "Trends/fads/websites that are ‘kewl’ and ‘authentic’ can’t always stay what u think they are," he notes ruefully, capturing the relentless churn of fashion's wheel and the cries of the souls crushed beneath it. How to avoid being ground in its gears, gears for which Carles himself, he now admits, had been supplying the grease. Chasing authenticity is the guarantee it will never be achieved. But as Baudrillard advocates, "We will not be looking for change, and will not oppose the fixed to the mobile; we will look for the more mobile than mobile: metamorphosis."

Enter "Jeffbro," the metamorphosis of Carles. "My name’s Jeff, and I’m gonna be takin’ over here at hipster runoff HQ! Needless to say, it’s gonna be tough to fill Carlester’s shoes, but I think I can do it if you just give me a chance." The only escape from the strictures of identity and authenticity is to present an entire new identity; schizophrenia, as Deleuze and Guittari had suggested in Anti-Oedipus, becomes the inevitable response to the structural necessity of capitalism to fashion a lack in the midst of excess. "There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together," they write. Similarly, there is no such thing as Carles of Jeff, only a processor -- the data network through which we view their communications -- that couples them together. They are produced within the matrix of information flows as the opposite of one another in a perfectly incomplete synthesis.

Carles confronts the unstable identity relation, as formulated by this tautology: "1 day, HRO will not exist u will still be alive." But we shouldn't make the mistake of conflating biological vitality with being, as Carles well knows. Hence the "natural life" mentioned in the title of the first post under consideration here is thrown into ontological confusion as it becomes bound up with the digital life cycle of memes, themselves subject to the inexorable laws of capitalism and the circulation of commodities in what may be considered their life cycle. Jeff, a fictional derivative of Carles, has a life cycle that expands to infinity as his usefulness as an anti-real meme is realized and spent. "Everything dies–even humans, Every thing has a natural life." But when humans are reconceptualized as desiring machines and retro fitted with cloud-computing-derived extensibility and perpetuity? Is Jeff a the first rain from that cloud? Are we all to expect to see Jeff in our mirrors, some unsuspecting morning?

10 April 2009: "Nirvana wasn’t ‘that good’ nor were they very ‘influential.’" and "Glad that Billy Corgan found true love"

These posts are about the fin de siècle "grunge" movement in American poetry and its lasting ramifications for poetry in the new millennium. The confluence of global prosperity, unchallenged American power, technological innovation, and aesthetic experimentation made the 1990s a very fertile period for poetry, the likes of which hadn't been experienced since the heyday of modernism between the world wars. The commercial and artistic triumph of Kurt Cobain was such that writers today are still intimidated by the awesome overhang of his influence and legacy. Carles writes approvingly that "there are certain artists who are apparently ’shattering genres’ and ‘changing the way that young people think about the concept of COOL.’" But when the genres we have known are smashed into irreconcilable pieces -- perhaps like a pumpkin heaved to the ground in a fit of impotent, post-bacchanal rage -- what remains of the possibilities of poetry? Can a new poetry emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the temple that the grunge poets burned to the ground with their fiery, uncompromising furor?

Ever the contrarian, Carles tries to flout Cobain's undeniable centrality to the postmodern poetic tradition, asserting that he was neither "good" nor "influential," but only reveals that his influence is actually beyond good and evil, and transcends mere poetic inspiration, reaching to the very possibility of writing itself. Carles is forced to admit "I think I’m just kinda bitter and jealous that I am not perceived as being as revolutionary as certain bros." What can it mean to be revolutionary after Cobain, whose anarchy of forms dispersed the the very tenets of style and expression that one could have mounted a revolution against? He left no targets standing. There can be no siege when the city has been so thoroughly razed.

Cobain raised the bar for poetic expression to an astoundingly high level and left an oasis of silence in his tragic wake. Realizing this, Carles understands that it is imperative that he destroy the idols of the previous generation and create a space in which poetic expression can rouse itself from its laconic stupefaction.

Was Cobain's death inevitable? Was it rendered cruelly yet logically necessary by the inexorable demands of poetry itself? Did he die so that poetry could live? Carles poses these questions, which are themselves poems, and attempts to answer them in a set of theses consciously modeled after those that Marx, Carles' spiritual and intellectual progenitor, composed for his attack on Feuerbach. The gist of these theses is that Cobain may not have thrived in the cultural climate his own death served to foster.

Then, as if to present evidence for this, he examines the sad case of William Corgan, Cobain's chief but distant rival in the "grunge" movement. Unmoored by the death of his literary antagonist, Corgan drifted into a life of decadence and self-loathing, exemplified by his drastically diminished output and his becoming subsumed in a demimonde of second-rate cable-television award shows and internet attention whores. His poetic muse flown, Corgan seems content to chase chimeras of sincere emotion. As Carles remarks dryly, commenting on a paparazzi photograph of Corgan and his current consort, "Think they look like they are ‘actually in <3', though. right?" But what is love in the absence of poetry? The poet without his muse is a mere shadow of his former self, a Samson shorn of his locks.

Carles' sudden interest in the past generation of poets evokes a question that has apparently begun to haunt him: Is poetry dead? The voices of the giants have grown quiet, and the best among the new generation are too timid to speak in lines longer than 140 characters. Just as Lukacs declared the end of the possibility to write epic poetry with the onset of capitalism, perhaps now, as capitalism dies, Carles is ready to proclaim the end of lyric poetry (sometimes figured as the death of rock and roll) and outline the genres that will come to fulfill the new functions that literature must fulfill in an age without illusions.

9 April 2009: "Who is the most authentic South Park celebrity interpretation?"

This post is about the carnivalesque. Can humor be deployed as a weapon against the forces of reaction and petit bourgeois conventionalism? Or are the mediums used to disseminate humor themselves antagonistic to radicalism, denaturing the would-be subversive messages and making them safe for middlebrow consumption? Carles uses the popular comedic show South Park to explore the question of how to disrupt hegemonic structures. "Not sure who I should like the most/find the funniest. Feel ‘jealous’ of South Park for being ’so mainstream’ but also ‘being cutting edge.’ Not sure if I should ‘respect it’, ‘go out of my way 2 h8 it’, or ‘pretend I don’t watch it.’" The show exists on the boundary between irony and collaboration; it seems to collude with the forces it mocks, so it mirrors the positionality of a "cool" audience that relies on that which it spurns for its identity.

As Carles makes clear, using cartoons to parody famous personages is a strategy that has exhausted its subversive potential. The examples he images in this post reveal their spent force in their bland inability to shock; their impotent lampoons play to a decadent culture of celebrity, and are little more than more bread and circuses for a jaded and otherwise indifferent public -- as Carles notes, "the kind of people who just ‘make fun of shit’ but ‘don’t make the world better’".

Carles argues that shows like South Park work by enhancing the bourgeois sense of individualistic entitlement: "Sometimes I feel like South Park is ‘funnie’ and that I am the only bro who ‘gets it’ like it is supposed 2 be ‘gotten.’" This illusion masks the shows disciplinary function, to condition our sense of humor and denude it, strip it of its subversive capabilities. Instead of aligning with longstanding carnivalesque tropes of upending hierarchies and undermining authority, we learn to laugh at what the bosses want us to, at one another so that collective action becomes impossible. When this humiliating state of subjection is achieved, any act of resistance can be mocked as trivial self-expression: "Just wanna go ‘adult swimming’, and laugh at progressive comedy, dreaming about how ‘I am random and smart…maybe 1 day I can write this stuff… Might start a pop culture blog instead with political opinions.’" Carles stops short of drawing the inevitable conclusion, perhaps because it's so obvious. The only revolutionary position is to call for the complete abolishing of laughter.

5 April 2009: "An intense feeling of ‘being trapped in suburbia’ overwhelms me when I have to ‘run errands.’"

This post is about the democratization of luxury. Phrases like the third world and its euphemistic derivative, the "developed world," have the effect of naturalizing the political divisions imposed by conquest and colonialism, recasting exploitation and despoliation as progress and "humanitarian aid." Using a lyric style to subtly underscore the poetic pretenses of developed-world narcissism, Carles looks at this history of territorial war through the lens of golden age myths that idealize the "primitive" state of nature.

It makes me sad
That all humans in the developed world
must go to the grocery store / an ‘everything store’
in order to stay alive

Wish things were more natural
and we had to hunt and gather
instead of ‘gathering money’ [via job]

Carles thereby sets up the opposition between decadent consumers in the first world and the noble savages elsewhere who have the unfair privilege of leading a more authentic-seeming existence.

I buy ‘groceries’
Makes me feel less unique
because I see every one there
rich or poor.

Class struggle, seen from the worm's-eye level of the individual consumer, seems like a struggle over personal identity, and how to make it redolent of the most cultural capital as possible -- to be "cool" and, if one is especially savvy, to leverage this "coolness" into economic advantages. Identity is proven to be itself a weapon of the bourgeoisie, a luxury good made up of decadent individualism that they lord over the proletariat even as workers struggle to unite and forge a collective resistance.

The simple solution to protecting this valuable aura of "cool" for the wealthy is a regime of sumptuary laws -- forbidding the rich and poor to shop for the same products. But the colonialist system of exploiting overseas workers achieves the same effects with less coercion and less unpleasantness for the individual consumers shaped by such market structurations. Then it just seems like fate that the poor and the rich have access to a different quality of goods, or more pernicious, that the poor simply make bad choices:

the poor usually buy stuff that’s ‘bad 4 u’
and I am fortunate enough to buy
stuff that’s ‘better 4 u’

The poor, displaced conceptually to some primitive other place, are presumably compensated by their more natural way of life in that elsewhere which of course does not exist. In reality, they suffer an existence to that chronicled by Marx in the blistering middle chapters of the first volume of Capital.

But if upper-class "uniqueness" is protected because of geographical segregation between rich and poor, far fewer feelings will be hurt through unpleasant confrontations, as when one discovers that one shares brands with one's house cleaner or nanny. Carles, naturally, uses his poet persona to skewer such snobbery:

I have built my personal brand around
’seeming like I have nothing 2 do with ppl
who have 2 perform trivial tasks 2 stay alive’

De-democratizing luxury may ultimately be a primary effect of our current financial crisis. The luxury goods may again become inaccessible, but the true posture of luxury transcends goods and instead depends on an ingrained attitude toward what is perceived culturally as work:

I want to be some1 who seems ‘young’
and ‘out of touch’ with ‘real life’ and ‘real errands.’

Insofar as luxury goods convey this distance, they are successful markers, functioning like barbed wire on the fence that separates the echelon of fat-cat vultures from the walking-dead working-class carrion they prey on. But when they fail to fulfill that function, the act of shopping itself can be brought into the breach. Ordinary consumption can be transvalued as degrading work, to better set it off from the discretionary spending in which the parasitical classes can indulge. But Carles, in a delicious piece of irony, intimates that the work shunned by the idle rich is precisely the nexus of the Real, wherein human can realize their species being through directed efforts and cooperation with their compatriots. Meanwhile, the idle, locked in individualistic isolation, can take solace only in the endless quest for the next distinction the preserves their trasured illusion of unique selfhood.

6 April 2009: "Feel like making an impulse purchase."

This post is about organic intellectuals. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci theorized that a revolution would have to be led by organic intellectuals, self-aware thinkers who problematize their place in the power structure and their culpability in perpetuating class oppression. Carles, obviously, is an organic intellectual par excellence. The reason organic intellectuals are so integral is that the running dogs of bourgeois capitalism have an easy time discrediting the inchoate revolutionary impulses of thinkers whose dialectics are not so sharpened, those disgruntled dilettantes who long for a more meaningful existence outside capitalism but cannot sacrifice the supercilious comforts of being among its protected and entitled ranks.

Hence the title of this post, which reveals how revolutionary consciousness can be made to seem like nothing but an "impulse purchase", an act of selfish whimsey. Carles can run through the litany of dismissals reactionaries can easily construct to defuse revolution and mock the motives of nascent malcontents. The would-be leaders of the working class are enamored of their own creativity ("Might get this Photoshop tie. Need it 2 prove that I ‘get’ design. Need people to know that these icons are the tools through which I can make anything happen.") They are patronizing ("Might get this shirt that is ‘a clever take’ on that line from the Sixth Sense, and talks about how I feel like I am superior to most people who I encounter during the day.") They are smug, intellectual bullies ("Might get this shirt that also lets people know that I have a higher state of consciousness/self-awareness than they do. Want them to know not to try to have some dumb conversation with me–I don’t have time for that shit.") They are pretentious faux cosmopolitan wannabes ("Might ‘brand myself’ as some creepy, foreign douchebag who probably ‘has too much confidence around women’ and ‘at his job’, and decide to buy a new computer.") They are anarchic nihilists, or -- the same thing -- adroit self-marketers ("Might start an ad agency, and organize a cult’s mass-suicide as a viral marketing campaign for Nike/the company of ur choice.") They are closet racists with a fascistic will to power("This will be part of a global plan/brainwashing scheme to ‘take down the Chinese’ and take back control of being ‘the most relevant country on the Earth.’") They have reduced politics to self-branding consumerism ("Have yall seen n e thing kewl 2 buy lately?")

The lines of attack are familiar, and have been deployed with metronomic consistency since the Red Scare of the 1950s. As a result, organic intellectuals must work in the interstices, speaking through a discourse that seems to trivialize itself, like Carles put-on pseudo-naive texting-derived argot. This prevents it from raising alarms in the wrong political quarters even as it raises consciousness and sharpens dialectics in the breasts of Carles' comrades everywhere. Struggle, Carles, always struggle!

3 April 2009: "People who wait in line overnight to buy shit."

This post is about the collapse of diachronic into synchronic analysis, or how we transform anxieties about time into the mastery of space, or in this case, how being first in line allows a moment of transcendence amidst our inevitable mortality. We anchor lost time in a place of unquestioned priority to succor the illusion that time's arrow doesn't fly in only one direction.

Carles notes, in a somewhat Socratic ruse, that he wrestles with the question of value, of which he pretends to know very little: "Sometimes it is hard for me to evaluate what I truly value, and how much I value it." What he's suggesting is that desire is experienced as a kind of demonic possession, inhabiting our consciousness and allowing us no point from which to assess it objectively. As a result we rely on the social mirror: "Wonder if I could ‘bond’ with the people who wait in line for new products, since we basically value the same stuff." We know our desires from the reflection we see of them in the desires of others. Hence the formation of lines, lines of desire between one another in physical queues, with the lines making a kind of net within which to catch fleeting moments of eternity. The moment of utter satiation in possession which can suspend death.

However, this net is rent by the competitive impulse that capitalism introduces into society, in the social mobility that prompts invidious consumption: "Feels weird when ‘everything feels like a toy’, but there are still these adults who ‘really want to buy a kewl new toy that will make people think they are kewler.’" The jouissance that might have resulted from free play amongst desiring machines is negated by the mechanico-rationalistic interplay of tactics, of strategies we adopt to end the game. To win once and for all.

"Have yall ever ’sacrificed’ ur time 2 ‘wait for the right’ to ‘buy something fuckin awesome’?" But the irony is the jouissance -- "the fucking awesome" -- evaporates as the triumph is secured -- the line disappears behind us; we are alone again, with our inescapable death, hoping merely to join another meaningful queue that is not the one for the last judgment.

3 April 2009: "Carles Presents MEME: a Blog Post on HIPSTERRUNOFF.com"

This post is about the Other. Or in other words, it is about words, about the mediation of language that separates us from the Real. That is to say, it is about the transcendental signifier which is not itself made up of significations. It is about finding the Archimedian point from which one can use a lever to move the world.

Carles translates this quest into his preferred nomenclature, shifting the semiotic analysis from the study of phonemes and signifiers to the study of memes, truncated and perhaps liberated units of meaning, a pure ecstasy of meaning, infinitely varied and eminently quantifiable at the same time. By creating what he calls a meme, but which Leibniz would have called a monad, Carles risk falling into a perpetually tautological discourse, but this is only to expose the sense in which all our discourse is always already tautological, and how meaning in its ultimate and fully resolved essence, always manages to elude us. Carles evokes the meme to end all memes, the transcendental meme which would authorize and guarantee the sense of all the others, but realizes, naturally that such a meme is not possible:

What happens if 1 meme changed everything we once knew about memes, changing the way that we meme, and shattering pre-existing notions of memery? Is the world ready for this meme? So many memes–but when can a meme be more than ‘just another meme in the meme economy’?

The answer lies in the movement of the trace. The meme economy is precisely that movement of meaning among memes, not in an ontology of a meme as such.

So his concluding question is more of a rhetorical taunt than a challenge: "Carles asks: Can 1 meme …change the world?" The answer is plain. One meme in isolation can achieve nothing, would not even be recognizable as a meme. All memes rely on their supplement to become legible. The meme is only epistimologically salient after it has been exposed, discredited, revealed to be nothing but an old meme. Perhaps Carles warns us of identifying ourselves and reducing ourselves to such a meme.

31 March 2009: "People who go to Dan Deacon concerts seem like real bros"

This post is about mimesis. Drawing liberally from both Erich Auerbach and Harold Bloom, Carles notes that "I guess in a way, every1 wants to ‘look like their favourite musician.’" Balanced ever-so-precariously between the anxiety of influence and the cult of personality, budding artists today must navigate choppy waters on route to establishing their authority. Wisely, Carles discusses their plight as though they were merely audience members, to highlight the contradictions inherent in the "society of the spectacle" -- can we create, perform, and watch ourselves creating simultaneously? Are we our own audience, stifling the erstwhile spontaneous flow of seminal artistic forces with our autocritiques, our anticipatory calculations. Have we lost all sight of an audience besides ourselves -- which leads to our seeing nothing but our own reflection in the crowd, as the musician in question in this post does?

Often, in commercial contexts, these questions about the role of imitation in art and its paradoxical effects of authenticity are simply side-stepped by an adoption of a libidinal/atavistic construct. Never one to neglected the libidinal economy, Carles posits a sex-inflected solution to the artistic problem here -- "Think he is ‘trying to be artsy’ or something, but he probs needs to ’sell out’ and hire a female singer or something who is ‘hella sexy’" -- only to reject it for a more frankly impossible quantum-mechanics approach to the deeper problems of mimesis: "Do yall like Dan Deacon, or do you think you would have naively been more into him if u could travel back in time to the year 2002?" As always the question regarding influence is whether we are content to emulate masters or do we always seek to supplant them. Lurking in our appreciation and our imitation of an artist is a desire to destroy that which we emulate. Nevertheless, in this will to power, Carles intimates, is ultimately a transcendence of the more primordial and savage urges of reproduction, the perpetuation of genes with the most youthful and viable partners. What mimetic strategies allow for, with their Neo-Platonic transmutation of lust into emulation, is a "sausagefest without any twinks."

But Carles hesitates to commit to this analysis: "not sure if that’s ‘really my scene,’" he admits. Instead we're suspended between gestalts, not sure if Carles endorses a passive mode of appreciation to avoid the conundrums of creativity (his dismissal of this musician's album is telling -- "he has a new album out, but I think it probably sounds like his old albums, and that means it is ‘pretty whatever’"), or if he is preparing a more far-reaching critique of mimesis. We hope that we have not become overweeningly optimistic in anticipating the latter.