28 May 2009: "Miss the days of authentic nip slip theory."

This post is about the three-fifths compromise. Carles begins the post with a note which actually contains the essence of its philosophical content:

This picture is not safe for browsing in environments which do not allow you to see more than 3/5 of a nipple.

Here, prohibition, pornography, wage slavery, and the ghosts of chattel slavery are brought together in one powerful sentence masquerading as a throwaway joke. Carles's true intent, hiding behind the cloak of humor, is to question whether obscenity can be parsed in this fractional way, or whether the effort to devise an airtight definition of what is pornographic is as doomed to failure as the absurd attempt to define the worth of human souls as mathematical proportions of one another.

At what point does an image become offensive? And at what point to we cede control over that decision to those who employ us or hold us under surveillance? Carles presents us with an image of a naked man and challenges us to defy his dignity: "Glad that the cobrabro is still willing to ‘be himself’." Were he three-fifths clothed, what would our assessment be? Chances are, Carles seems to imply, that we would find him that much less authentic, as each piece of apparel would be freighted with the fashion industry's significations and desperate stabs at social relevance.

Carles then defends the nip-slip as symbolic of an alternative to hedonistic abandon: Hedonism ultimately resolves in biological compulsion and unfreedom. Voluntary restraint, celebrating the hints and teases and seductions of postmodern society, as Jean Buadrillard suggested, offers a way out of the trap of the fun morality, of automatic pleasure devolving into unpleasure. Baudrillard:

To play is not to take pleasure. Seduction, as a passion and as a game at the level of the sign, acquires a certain sovereignty; it is seduction that prevails in the long term because it implies a reversible, indeterminate order.
The glamour of seduction is quite superior to the Christian consolation of the pleasures of the flesh. One wants us to consider the latter a natural finality – and many are driven mad for failing to attain it. But love has nothing to do with sex drives, if not in the libidinal look of our contemporary culture.

Carles:

nip slips might still be better than ’seeing a whole tit’ because it leaves more 2 the imagination. like it is ‘boring’ when a girl puts out 2 fast, so u sort of need her to ‘hold out’ so you can get emotionally connected+obsessed with the eventual goal of ‘cumming on/in her.’

13 May 2009: "Flags are metaphors worth protecting."

This post is about postcolonialism. Carles uses images of the casual desecration of flags in the pursuit of hedonism as a means of indicating the way in which consumer-product-oriented globalization has sapped the will to prosecute the imperialistic colonial projects capitalism demanded in the 19th century. The rage Carles feigns is explicitly connected to America's recent half-hearted and abortive escapades in adventurism -- "I feel ‘fucking enraged’ that some1 would deface my flag like that. I feel like this is what people in Iraq and Iran do whenever George W. Bush makes bad foreign policty." The flag, which once rose above symbolic exchange at the level of the brand, has now become indistinguishable from one, and can be consumed and used for identity construction just like any other.

For example, the Union Jack once represented the British dominance of the world's shipping lanes and the viability of its trade monopolies in continents around the world. Now? "I think that the British flag might actually be a ‘fashion statement.’" The fashion statement, of course, is the most definitive proclamation left to us, perhaps more potent and persuasive than a kick from the jackboot of the raj's henchmen, and certainly more thoroughly hegemonic.

What Carles's semi-ironic fury signifies is how this devaluation has deprived us of one of the most durable transcendental subject positions that had been left for us -- that of the patriot awash in the discourse of jingoism and its easy-to-comprehend pieties. This loss prompts Carles to an unusually stark level of despair:

Yall. I’ve been feeling really down lately. Just like ‘fuck everything’ and feelings like that. I decided that if u don’t care about any thing, ur life will never be meaningful.

Is Carles calling for a resurrection of colonial projects and nationalism ("Sort of scared that the South will rise again")? Is he concerned that terrorism has supplanted the previous modes of reaction channeled into state-sponsored nationalism? He writes, "I think it’s kewl that even ‘the dark side’ of the world is a lil bit nationalistic. Think that we should limit their levels of ‘patriotism’ so that it doesn’t cause terrorism." He concludes with an unabashed paean to nationalism ("Think I’m gonna change my ways and rally around America/God/bad ass mp3s/ ‘the scene’"), but it is unclear if this merely meant to be provocative. The most likely interpretation is that Carles conflates state nationalism with the cultural-scene allegiance to show how these forces have been trivialized, and may in fact trivialize each other, as in the knee-jerk way in which music reviewers refer to where bands are from, as if that matters. One fears for an authoritarian turn in Carles thinking, not unlike that which afflicted Ezra Pound in the 1930s. Here's hoping that he pulls back from the brink of fascism and finds a renewed faith in the possibilities of pluralism.

25 May 2009: "Have yall ever accidentally gotten 2 drunk and tugged off 1 of ur bros and woke up naked next to him, and were like ‘whoa… bro… not cool

This post is about Proposition 8. Carles presents an anecdote of waking up to discover one has committed a sexual act stigmatized as "gay" to illustrate the detrimental effects of heteronormativity.

Maybe if u get drunk enough, there is not such thing as genders/sexes any more, and u can just love and connect with ppl based on who u r. I think what makes us all human is the fact that we all ‘just want 2 cum’ and keep our species alive. Even though we are part of a ’subculture’, we need to remember that we are just part of God’s Evolution.

By separating sexual pleasure from the species compulsion to reproduce, and linking that divorce to God's evolution, Carles proposes a radical reimagining of the religious function, not as reconciling us to biological constraints but to liberating us from them into a deeper and more open-ended spirituality. We can become who "we R" not by limiting ourselves to the prerequisites of survival but by connecting with other members of the species outside of that biologically determined paradigm. Homosexuality becomes a radical will to power, a way of becoming a human god, moving beyond the necessities of nature. When Carles mentions the need to be "Drunk enough" he is perhaps talking about being drunk on hubris. Or perhaps the implication is that the holy spirit only can enter into us when we move beyond animal rutting and quasi-estrus cycles to higher forms of love, as Plato suggested in the Symposium.

Having established that homosexual love, which many only glimpse in ecstatic, euphoric states in which their mental functioning is affected by drugs, is a spiritual gateway, Carles then ponders its fate within capitalistic, institutional strictures, which recast this spiritual striving as a kind of criminal transgression: "Worried that I might have committed ‘altbro rape’, the alt version of the popular 300 year old meme ‘bro rape.’" This is part and parcel with California's recent efforts to forbid gay marriage and delegitimize it. The true import of this, Carles suggests, goes beyond the disenfranchisement and implication that citizens have different rights on the basis of the fiction of fixed "sexual orientation"; the real significance is that Prop 8 enshrines in the state's constitution a kind of refusal of higher spiritual love and itself constitutes a rejection of love. The result is that spiritual aspiration in California must be failed in the cloak of humor; aspirants must act as though it is all a joke while being quite in earnest. Then perhaps someday, as Carles notes, the idea of higher love can transcend its own alibi and achieve acceptance under a new guise of laughter. "I feel like if we took our humor to the mainstream, there would be no stopping us. Looking 4ward 2 my future."

23 May 2009: "Always just trying 2 b authentic."

This post is about Walt Whitman. Carles adopts the poetic approach Whitman perfected in Leaves of Grass to catalog the many self-creating possibilities open to young Americans, which paradoxically produces a rolling crisis of identity.

In "Song of Myself," Whitman wrote,

In vain the speeding or shyness,
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones,
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying
low,
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

In a similar vein, Carles offers this apostrophe:

I am just trying to create an authentic life for myself.
I am just trying to fill up my apartment with meaningful items.
I am just trying to create authentic art.
I am just collecting some cameras from different eras.
I am just enjoying a beer, relaxing.
I am just collecting old magazines with pictures of nature/old stuff
I am just mashing up genres of music.
I am just sitting on my authentic couch.
I am just going buy some used books later that look ‘old’ and ‘historically relevant’.
I am just going to buy some humble shoes.

The use of repetition by both Whitman and Carles conveys a sense of irresistible force that propels the modern quest for identity. But along with this relentlessness comes an everrefeshing disappointment. Whitman writes:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things

Carles echoes this sentiment in his coda:

I am just 1 bro
I am just 1 bro searching for meaning
I am just 1 bro searching for meaning in our modern world.
I am just 1 bro creating art in my meaningful space
looking to transcend
evrythng

Carles's allusion to Whitman's great poem allows him to refine his argument about the delusive quest for authenticity that he has delineated in several previous posts: The search for meaning is an effort at self-transcendence and self-forgetting, of becoming without ego like the lower orders of the animal kingdom, blessed with a spontaneity of action. The "mania of owning things" is fueled by the uniquely human quest for self, which finds its definition in the atavistic dream of being freed from the burden of reflexivity. The "modern world" Carles laments also at once offers protection from the realization that more unmediated contact with the natural world foists upon us, how impossible is our retreat into blissful animal impulsiveness. The modern world, with its indulgence and celebration of the aesthetic effects only humans are capable of, offers us slight but not negligible consolations for the pain of being human. But though we have "art" and "meaningful space," we have lost what the animals take for granted, a unity with the whole of creation as given, far beyond the need to ever spend time "discussing their duty to God."

11 May 2009: "Is it easier to be an altBro or an altGirl?"

This post is about castration. Carles begins with a litany of the difficulties women face in a patriarchal society and eventually enacts sexism to illustrate the ideas he explores more forcefully. Because women are invariably treated as sexual objects and are thereby denied the subjectivity that would allow them to exhibit creativity in forms that are sanctioned and socially recognized, they are forced into a craven and dependent relationship with the same sort of men who have been at pains to circumscribe their human potential:

Girls who are ‘trying to expand their personal brands’ are usually ‘annoying’ and ‘jappy’ or possibly ‘desperate’ and ’sad.’ Feel like it is always a combo that is ‘terrible’, and then they end up with some inauthentic bro, and the enable some sort of ‘weirdo reality.’

Women suspend their aspirations, or reformulate them in light of what seems possible and what might secure social approval. Hence Carles imagines women conceiving this: "Might feel ’sexie’ if they went home and ‘jerked off’ to thinking about touching me, though."

The story of the insidiousness of patriarchal oppression masquerading as a love relationship is all too depressingly familiar. What is less obvious is what drives men to so vehemently deny female subjectivity, to hoist women above them (as in the photo) so as to put them at one remove from direct experience, on a pedestal where they made be worshiped, only the gospel takes the form of "a lot of guys" groping their "'goods.’" The solution that Carles presents, derived from evolutionary psychology, is a bit of a red herring: "Feel like bros just want ‘2 cum’ on as many girls as possible. Feel like broads just want ‘to be special’ and ‘different’ in ways that might be difficult 2 fulfill." From this perspective, men are able to solve existential dilemmas by spreading seed, by embracing quantity over quality, while women are doomed to the "difficult 2 fulfill" quest for transcendental meaning.

This seems inadequate (and the pun is fully intended). To answer the question of misogyny, one must radically move beyond the looming threat of impotence and consider the overriding fear of castration that is formative and then thereby dominates male subjectivity. As Carles notes, it is "sad that ‘we’re all insignificant’," an awareness that we struggle to mask from ourselves with the labile tool of language, which permits the illusion of permanent expression, an ersatz eternal. But the entry into language comes with a recognition of our nonidentity with the world in its totality -- it announces are acceptance of lack, our surrender of the phallus as a death foretold. According to Lacan, the "clinical facts" show that "the relation of the subject to the phallus is set up regardless of the anatomical difference between the sexes," though he dwells on the analytical conundrums this creates for women. Carles makes passing reference to the inauthenticty that plagues female speech acts when he writes, "I feel like HRO would not have any readers if I blogged as ‘Carla’ or ‘Cynthia’ or ‘Jessica’ or some other female name." Phallologocentrism governs Carles even as he tries to expose its multifarious consequences.

Nevertheless, men are also afflicted with urges to evade the necessary symbolic ordering that castration commands. Carles mentions one when he entertains the notion of homosexuality: "I feel like being a ‘homosexual’ might make relationships easier. Not sure, though." But that is exactly the problem -- castration renders precise what otherwise remains always epistemologically uncertain. The fantasy of a monosexual race of humans doesn't eradicate the threat of castration -- even without another sex into which to transmogrify, castration remains structurally necessary.

And jouissance remains elusive to either gender, as Carles final question suggests: "If u were able to ’switch genders’, would u masturbate more or less than u do now?" Of course, no gender has preferential access to pleasure, despite the fact that men do have preferential access to everything else social life has to offer.

11 May 2009: "Feeling trapped & meaningless. Sad abt suburban development."

This post is about manifest destiny. Humankind has long anchored the soul of its being as a species to the principle of the domination of nature. Carles shows us images of the contemporary way in which this transcendental imperative is pursued, by subjugating an inhospitable and irregular landscape and imposing upon it an extremely regular pattern of domiciles which incubate, propagate and spread with germ-like rapidity and organization. Hence Carles has his speaker say contemptuously and sarcastically, "feeling sad about trees being cut down and shit like that." The destruction of nature is just "shit" that needs to be processed so that human beings can establish their dominion. The sadness is pious yet gratuitous weltschmertz that crowns that dominion with the dignity that is supposed to derive from gracious sympathy with the ecological losers in man's war against nature.

The images of relentless residential development come primarily from the American West, the land annexed to human exploitation by the popular expansionist doctrines espoused in the 19th century, when land grabs forestalled crises of overaccumulation. Rows of single cells, independent yet fused in a larger organism guided by survival instincts. The first rule of this larger protoplasm -- let no cells break away and form a competing organism. Hence the suburban trap: "Fucking trapped in suburbia."

This cellular structure forms on a panoptic plan, where conformity and discipline is imposed not merely by the governing police apparatus but by mutual and perpetual surveillance of one cell on all the others: Note that Carles writes that "The police were called" before he has his speaker denounce "police brutality." And of course along with the surveillance inevitably comes social conformity, enacted and ingrained during the vulnerable years of adolescence:

h8 my local high school
h8 all the ppl who value ‘fitting in’
and don’t ‘get’ what life is all about

But the irony here is multifaceted. Carles' speaker is the one who don't "'get'" what is happening, that only within conformity can one escape the imperative to be different, to impose oneself on the social landscape, to do what humankind collectively has done to fashion suburbia in the first place as a testimony to its uniqueness among earth's species.

And the trap itself is not merely imposed by humankind's collective sociohistorical sense of destiny in the West. It is overdetermined by such homologous praxeological drives as the will to procreate on the individual, cellular level ("Not even sure if I will ever break free or if I will end up back in suburbia since it is a cost-effective place to raise a child") and pervasive status anxiety ("feel even sadder about poorer people who live in apartments, relieved that I have a spacious house").

Carles darkly intimates that the only escape from these cages within cages is wanton and willful destruction without cause or limits -- "I want 2 set this place on fire," his narrator asserts, presaging the impotent protest of terrorists everywhere. Such a fire would cleanse nothing; it would only further clear the grounds for the viral spread of identicla buildings, the triumph of the technorational will.

8 May 2009: "5/7/2009 - WHERE WERE U?"

This post is about the Kennedy assassination. Carles adapts the inescapable question for those of the Baby Boomer generation -- Where were you when you heard that Kennedy had been shot? -- to make it applicable to a passing trend in pop culture. While it is obvious that Carles is making a trenchant comment about diminished political engagement and the disintegrated social sphere that today's youth face, and the way in which a hypermediated society fixates itself on trivial, staged culture-industry pseudoevents. But more subversively, Carles suggests that the Kennedy assassination too was a pseudoevent, a prearranged media spectacle (along with its sequel, the advent of Jack Ruby) meant to propel any number of lucrative entertainment-industry opportunities and kickoff the acceleration of the news cycle as an accepted inevitability. And in this way, political assassination is trivialized, neutralized as a revolutionary gesture and assimilated into the society of the spectacle.

But then one must consider the other implications of the implicit comparison Carles is making, regarding the conspiracy that led to Kennedy's death and the one that has led to Animal Collective's popularity. Carles, in the guise of offering random quotes from readers, actually assembles a rogue's gallery of co-conspirators: the "tween" son of an alcoholic, expressing his codependency and confusion by latching on to the band's ersatz tribalism; the middle aged parent who is trying to preserve his cultural relevance in face of the socially enforced isolation and dyadic withdrawal that comes with modern parenting in capitalist cultures; the colleges student floundering around for cultural tokens that can be her generation's calling card; the underemployed culture-industry attache looking to hype a trend and establish his reputation as intermediary and dependable flunky; and the stupified drug addict who perhaps represents the projected ideal fan conjured by the labile and somnolent musical approach favored by the band. The unlikely amalgamation of this cohort has turned the group into a signifier for something larger than its insignificant music. As Carles declaims, "WE MADE IT, YALL. THIS IS OUR TIME." Animal Collective stands in as the unifying force among an idiot vanguard who have achieved a coherent visibility on the contemporary social scene. Their defiant inconsequentiality has become a revolutionary force of its own, foretelling the ultimate triumph, as the privilege of boredom finally becomes a universal right.

6 May 2009: "Need 2 listen to more music that is more ‘glam’ and ‘fabulous.’"

This post is about Roland Barthes. Carles discloses the secret truth hidden within disposable and ever-revolving pop culture, what fuses fashion to culture to make it ephemeral: fashion is a way to become nothing, the ultimate disappearing act. He begins with a wry quip: "‘I have always been inspired by fashion.’ -generic pop icons." Of course, the strain to find a unique and expressive fashion to augment one's artistic presentation guarantees that art will be reduced to a generic status, unable to overcome the burden with which it is encumbered by the trends voluntarily sought after and adopted.

Music and fashion in practice, as Carles notes, are parallex discourses, with no common ground or premises upon which they can synthesize themselves into a unified whole. This metaphysical incompatibility manifests itself in robotic, dehumanized musicians intoning words they barely understand in a foreign language, empty, vacant signifiers that nonetheless succeed in signifying the vacuum left in the wake of fashion's mercurial movements across the surface of the collective popular mind. As Carles notes, this somewhat nihilistic view is in keeping with developments in Continental philosophy in the late 20th century: "I think it is easier for Europeans to get into songs where some1 says ‘fashion’ over and over again because it is one of the only English words that they know." With this, Carles has in mind Barthes The Fashion System, his exhaustive analysis of the fashion industry, deploying an anthropological structuralist apparatus. Barthes asks, "What happens when an object, whether real or imaginary, is converted into language?... If the garment of Fashion appears a paltry thing in the face of so broad a question, we would do well to keep in mind that the same relation is established between literature and the world." Carles makes this much more specific, situating the dilemma within our particular historico-political confluence: "I feel like this ‘glam-core’ fashion music seems like it is written by a tween who is interpreting the world after he/she reads a magazine + they are exploring their sexuality."

Carles furthers his analysis by examining the example of Lady Gaga:

I want to seem like a pop star who ‘gets’ that popculture ‘means nothing’ but still ‘wants more fame’ or something like that. I want to be a pop sensation who sort of thinks that my product is more artistic than it actually is. I want to be a ’sex object’ but have it be ‘artistic’ cuz I ‘realize that dudes wanna fuck me in crazie costumes.’

As usual, in Carles' grim, uncompromising outlook, aestheticism breaks down into atavism and carnal sexuality, the horizon art cannot overcome when it has become caught in the web of fashion, which works most effectively when it triggers a latent, prehuman (posthuman?) estrus cycle of reproduction facilitation. This means nothing precisely because it means everything, it is the precondition for the survival of the species. When popular culture is reduced to this function it ceases to operate autonomously and collapses into ritual, the conservation of the sacred seed amid costumed deities appeasing the fertility gods.

29 April 2009: "Can’t believe Iceland elected an openly gay Prime Minister"

This post is about the shadow banking system. When the practice of securitization and off-balance sheet lending and special-purpose investment vehicles and unchecked leverage and so forth collapsed in the great unwinding of 2008, the nation of Iceland, thanks to its hyperactive and hubristic group of banks, was left with a ruined, worthless currency and a mountain of debt. The utter wreck rendered by the innumerate speculators who has seized control was enough to make Carles skeptical of the entire educational system: "Wonder if their educational systems are helping out, or if they just have arts&crafts programs instead of ‘math.’" As Carles notes, "they started to build some sort of ‘imaginary reality'," in which they could operate the entire country as a giant, aggressive hedge fund without the participation or consent of ordinary citizens. Carles points out that "While that is good for 1-5 artists [read Glitnir, Landsbanki, and Kaupthing] who become successful, I can’t help but stereotype the rest of the population as being ‘zany’ and ‘ppl who wear weird clothes.’"

With the collapse of the bankocracy, however, those marginalized citizens have no other option but attempt to reorient the island's economy in a more plausible direction. On this point, Carles isolates the recent election of a gay prime minister as a metaphor for the future of the country's economy as it inverts itself and attempts to cash in on its alleged ethnic homogeneity. "Not sure if I really ‘believe’ that she can turn the Icelandic economie around. Heard that it is really in the shitter because Iceland doesn’t produce anything valuable for the world." What is value? Is it the product of mimesis, a kind of "homosexual" production, or is it the product of assimilating opposites, the "heterosexual" mode? Can an economy become bisexual? Does the Icelandic economy need queering to reproduce its radical otherness as a kind of accessible familiarity to the international community? Carles speculates over whether the election portends some larger frenzy of self-referentiality: "I wonder if they think that ‘I will be the next Bjork’ and neglect cultivating functional skills that will contribute 2 society." In short, the "artistry" of the country's young turk bankers provoked a rejection of the "natural" economy dictated by its geography, but it remains unclear to Carles whether the gay prime minister will represent a rejection of "natural" proclivities (figured by the supposed naturalness of heterosexuality) or a return to such natural proclivities (figured by homosexuality as a kind of metaphor for self-love).

30 April 2009: "Looking 4 something that will protect me from Swine Flu [via American Apparel]"

This post is about fashion victimhood. Under the guise of seeking protection from the current pandemic, Carles makes explicit the kind of contagion of which so many of us have become malignant carriers: " Feel like I might actually ’start taking the swine flu’ more seriously. Just want to protect myself without compromising my fashion sense." Fashion sense, of course, is the more insidious virus with which Carles, in the persona he adopts for purposes of philosophical investigation, has already become infected. And through the very act of airing his concerns about compromising it in response to real-world exigencies, Carles -- who admits to "feeling paranoid about ‘germs’" -- attempts to disseminate the recombined virus further, theoretically making readers aware of their own fashion shortcomings and exacerbating the illness for everybody. To comment on clothes, to praise or blame such assembleges, is like blowing one's nose in one's palm and then endeavoring to shake hands with as many strangers as one can bump into.

The question Carles mockingly asks at the end of the post -- "Does n e 1 know any other signature Am Appy / Urban Outfitters / H&M styles that might help 2 protect me from catching ‘pig fever’ without ‘looking like a poor mainstreamer?" -- is an indictment of a society that reduces biohazards to trends and elevates trends over natural disasters in terms of emotional valence. The protection we seek is from appearing foolish and unsophisticated, common or "mainstream", a consequence far worse than contracting an illness.

But with the diagnosis Carles presents notes toward a hint at a cure. "It is also essential to have some sort of mask that filters out germs," he explains at the beginning, a remark whose significance becomes clear only in light of what follows. What Carles is suggesting is that the thinking person needs a cognitive filter to strip away the contaminants that emanate from the fashion industry and the poor diseased souls who have been afflicted with the disease of surface-level self-awareness. Carles dubs this filter a "mask," but he means to suggest a "masque," that elaborate and ritualized mode of performance that flattered royalty and invested the courts of 17th century Europe with a spirit of languid indulgence charmed by allegorical figments. Carles tanatalizingly implies that amid the climate of crisis in contemporary society, one can inhabit the positionalities made legible in masques, that rituals of disguise and flattery can serve as protection from the fashion disease. Mas(qu/k)ing as performance rather than disguise, or as the sublated synthesis of both. We can become our own allegory and evade the circumscribed self-presentations made available through the interplay of commercial apparel companies and the minions who exploit the hierarchies they project. Thereby we escape the quarantine imposed by fashion, and the paranoia it conspires to induce.