30 March 2009: "Does n e 1 know what these ppl r doing?"

This post is about the McGuffin. To illustrate his point about the power of misdirection, Carles presents an image of a group of youths staring at something the we beholders of the photograph can't see. This is an homage, perhaps, to the filmic device of the "mysterious briefcase" whose contents are never disclosed, used to great effect in Repo Man and Pulp Fiction. But its art-historical roots lie even deeper, going back at least to the most majestic aesthetic evocation of unseen space, Velázquez's unsurpassed masterpiece, Las Meninas. As Foucault details at length in the introduction to The Order of Things, the painting is a careful orchestration of vanishing points the brings to a sublime tension the implied simultaneous presence and absence of the beholder. We are at once the subject that the artist in the painting is depicted as painting, and an invisible ghost, standing in the place of the royal subjects shown in the distant mirror without displacing them.

Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange. No gaze is stable, or rather in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles infinitely. And here the great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picture exercises its second function: stubbornly invisible, it prevents the relation of these gazes from ever being discoverable or de­finitely established. The opaque fixity that it establishes on one side renders forever unstable the play of metamorphoses established in the centre be­tween spectator and model. Because we can see only that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing?

The interlocking web of perspectives on possible representations of the same given reality reveal our epistemology as a palimpsest, made of layers or incrustations of sensory data, among which we must perpetually alternate. As Carles says of the image he uses to evoke this metaphysical complexity, "I think that they are in some sort of temporary space." Of course, all space is provisional to the extent that we constitute it in time through our ability to perceive it as distinct, as (in this case) walled off from the rest of the club.

But Carles is explicit about the dangers of this sort of epistemology: "Every group of friends might have a sectioned-off temporary structure, kinda like a cubicle at an office job." Thus the social construction of reality becomes rote, a routine labor devoid of the spontaneity that should come from direct experience of the real. The provisional spaces we set up to permit experience end up proscribing experience, even they they create the illusion for outsiders that many potential experiences are taking place at once. Carles demonstrates this conundrum with his facetious list of what may be possibly going on in the unseen realm of the photograph. The most telling item: that the group is "b) looking at how keut they look in pix." We annihilate space by always surveilling ourselves, removing ourselves from the scene in which we observe ourselves. The life lived on webcam consumes itself, freeing its subject utterly.

Ultimately, as Carles points out, space in a capitalist system is reducible not to time, or to shared perceptions, but to property: "Just kinda weird how if u think about ‘space‘ it’s just a series of boxes that people can either be inside of or outside of. Weird that ‘property’ even exists." The hope Carles extends is that property relations can be overcome by a reconceptualization of space, of the notions of "outside" and "inside" -- to banish "belonging" as a category in an all-inclusive social order. An order in which we coexist with/as royalty in the same all-encompassing gaze.

25 June 2009: "Day off for Carles! No news is good news!"

This post is about Michael Jackson. Rather then add his voice to the multitude of callous commentators glibly opining on the death of the much-ballyhooed pop singer, Carles chooses a strategy of misdirection, akin to Baudrillard's fatal strategy of silence. But of course his silence speaks volumes, and his offhand pretense of being on vacation from blogging when the news of Mr. Jackson's death was released and confirmed hides within it much coded comment. First, of course, is the critique of the idea of the 24-hour news cycle, the requirement that citizens be "always on," and the newfangled notion that every incident demands an immediate response from those self-appointed members of the commentariat -- which is gradually coming to include us all. The very idea of a vacation has become virtually impossible, as every one rushes to become a conduit for the circulation of information and have the widest possible reach. Who was the first person you told about Mr. Jackson? Carles chooses to tell no one. He also slyly tweaks his readers, upbraiding them gently for what he knows will be their eagerness to gossip: "If anything ‘relevant’ happens, leave them in the comments… I might be checking my email on my telephone. Kinda weird how if u rlly think about it, every day is ‘the same.’"

But with the last sentence in that comment, Carles shifts the focus to a metaphysical level, interrogating whehter time can be perceived as a uniform substance underlying contingent events, no matter how notable (Mr. Jackson's passing) or if time is "spiky", heterogeneous, leavened with stochastitcity.

Also at issue is the notion of manufacturing news, which threatens to render all newsworthy events into nonevents, spectacles, what Daniel Boorstin in The Image calls pseudoevents. These Carles of course calls memes. Boorstin suggests that we "have extravagant expectations" of primarily "the amount of novelty in the world" -- in other words, of everyday not being the same. But our expectations prompt us to develop an industry for creating significance that may attach itself to unremarkable happenstances -- the death of a man in ill health. As Baudrillard writes in the aforementioned Fatal Strategies, "Anyone's banal existence can be tranformed, but anyone's exceptional life can be made banal by this act." What has happened to you today?

Carles notes sardonically, "U can’t just force memes… A high level meme won’t just fall in ur lap every day. You need to be patient, work hard, and accept the memes that come ur way." What he means to do is call into question whether the death of Mr. Jackson, within the context of the contemporary media, is anything more than a meme. Trapped in the funhouse world of mirrors pointed at mirrors, we can only pretend to know our own minds as our thoughts grow dim in the infinite regress.

23 June 2009: "Who is the more authentic victim of violence?"

This post is about Pravda. Carles examines the current media landscape and the manner in which it disseminates news, particularly the popular notion that so-called citizen journalism will supplant the traditional press establishment, which has become moribund and superfluous. By conflating the murder of an Iranian protester with the assault of a onetime independent celebrity gossipmonger, Carles suggests that without institutions determining what should be considered significant -- a bureau of newsification, perhaps -- a dangerous flattening of all events into trivia ensues: "Feel like the downside of ’social media’ is that u can’t really tell what is important, and what is just a meme, since it is on the internet." Everything and nothing becomes worthy of our limited attention; left to our own devices we try to generate parameters for what to comprehend, but these are doomed to be woefully inadequate, generally misguided, hopelessly skewed by our desire to flatter or distract ourselves. We are prone to generate purely quantitative criteria of what is significant, as Carles illustrates in this account of Perez Hilton's alleged importance: "From what I understand, millions of people read his site every day, and this makes him possibly more important than most news sources. Basically, his brand is more important than ur local news and pitchfork combined. Sorta weird 2 think about." And to further emphasize the point, he likens the editing the news to indie rock: "It’s kinda weird how news is becoming like indie music–we can’t tell the difference between ‘whatz hyped’ and ‘what is actually important/relevant.’" Relativism reigns supreme as long-tail ethics rule the day and the individual as niche demographic becomes an institution of its own.

But Carles pushes beyond this fairly standard account of postmodernism pernicious effects on civic society. He highlights the details of the Perez Hilton incident -- a potentially slanderous remark made by a self-styled citizen journalist prompts a violent vigilante response. This mirrors at the micro level the macro story of the Iran rioting -- a potentially fraudulent election conducted by a de facto autocratic regime prompts vigilante street actions. What Carles is suggesting by interrogating the "authenticity" of violence is that the climate in which violence takes place is ultimately more significant than who are the specific perpetrators, and that victimhood is more of a speech act -- a matter of who controls the media -- than the consequence of violence. There are no authentic victims without authenticated news outlets. No heroes without Pravda.

21 June 2009: "Should I dance around sexily 2 my fave relevant mp3 songs?"

This post is about aesthetic relativism. Carles declares that he is "not even sure what the ‘best album’ of 2k9 is" -- a meaningless statement meant to highlight the uselessness of evaluative criteria for pop music, the value of which is established by network effects. This Carles demonstrates by describing the signaling effects of championing various albums -- already the obvious "best album" contenders because of the discussion they have proven capable of generating, as opposed to their intrinsic merit. What the albums represent has emerged within the crucible of contemporary pop punditry, as any would-be critic knows -- and it is mastering the nuances of this emergence that establishes a critic's reputation, not a thorough knowledge of music theory or any other basis for an objective criticism:

Wonder what ‘the internet pundits’ will say is the best album of 2k9. Feel like people will pick Grizzly Bear because they are ‘very personal bros’, and from what I have learned, personal connections ‘mean everything.’ While people ‘love’ anco, they are still not entirely engaging bros, nor could u imagine having a ‘chill convo’ with them. I think that people who pick the Dirty Projjies to be the best album of 2k9 will be the ‘type of music reviewing bros who are ghey/don’t get girls in real life and feel closer 2 women by enjoying female artists.’

Such fine-tuned interpretations of what consuming various albums signifies is the only viable avenue for contemporary criticism. Any effort to establish an aesthetic criticism with a pretense to objectivity is ultimately reducible to what is depicted in the video with which Carles begins the discussion: a youth masturbating alone, desperately eager to persuade others to watch him in his onanism. "Look at me, I appreciate music so much more thoroughly than you -- it provokes me to orgasm. Witness my jouissance, Other." Carles dismisses this sort of would-be critic with a stinging rebuke: "I think he might be one of those bros who has a post-post-pre-ironic internet personality, just trying to be ‘a think piece’ on the internet 2 set himself apart from ‘every other loser with a mnstrm facebook profile.’" In other words, attempts at objective pop criticism are not merely masturbatory, but they are pathetic ploys for attention for those too witless to make optimal use of the social networking tools now available to us. By trying to project criteria that transcends the social context, such critics cease to be the subject criticizing, but become instead an object in circulation, a "meme," a "think piece" rather than a thinker.

16 June 2009: "Is Calvin Klein the new Am Appy?"

This post is about scopophilia. In her seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey elaborates Freud's idea of the gaze as an erotogeneous organ, which generates for itself a zone of sexual excitation. Modern visual media allow that organ to orient itself narcissistically, so that it need not involve another on terms of equal subjectivity or admit any compromise of the pleasure sought. This means that visual pleasure, in Freudian terms, is regressive and infantile, a mode of eluding the reality principle. Mulvey supposes that the visual pleasure afforded in modern media is made male as a consequence of patriarchal control of the means of production; this results in a naturalization of a male gaze, and all the attendent protections against various male anxieties built into it.

In positing the typical male response to a particularly sexual advertisement, Carles narrates that gaze into an analytical object available for our scrutiny.

I couldn’t help but notice this huge Calvin Klein ad with 4 ppl in some sort of ‘orgy.’ It seems hot, and sexual. It reminds me of the feeling of when my ‘penis becomes erect’ while I am wearing jeans. I think that is what ‘advertising’/'marketing’ is all about–”SEX SELLS.”
Seems intense to have a 4some with a 3-to-1 boy-girl ratio. I would hope that I could be the one ‘doing the penetration.’ Then there is the bro who ‘awkwardly walks over and tries to position himself to ‘get a blowjie.’ Then there is ‘extra bro’ who is on the floor ‘tugging off’, hopefully getting his chance to ‘be inside’ of the girl eventually. Have yall ever had 3somes? Is it awkward when 1 of your bros is involved? Have u ever ‘crossed swords’?

Embedded in this account are a host of male anxieties, all ultimately locatable in the fear that the woman's subjectivity will demand recognition, thus negating male subjectivity in the zero-sum game of patriarchy and phallocentric selfhood. As Mulvey notes, "Women in representation can signify castration, and activate voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent this threat." In the advertising image, the threat is doubled by the introduction of sexual competition, negated by various fantasies of sharing conquests. This is supplanted by the fear that autonomy is compromised by manipulative marketing that deludes us into acting against ourselves -- the vulnerability of sexuality becomes a strictly economic vulnerability -- this serves both as a defense and an instigator of further anxiety. Carles follows psychoanalytic tradition here in presupposing that money is generally regarded as a simpler problem to solve than raw desire itself, unmediated. Man under capitalism has become efficient at recycling libido as greed, which is much easier to gratify instrumentally. Hence the effective of the ad itself that Carles analyzes; it evokes sexual anxiety that can be allayed by transforming lust into greed.

Carles contrasts this with a less successful ad, which neglects the fertile potential of scopophila and replaces the images with the icon, the emblem.

Not sure if this flag is ’still sexual.’ Sorta wish it was a picture of a real broad, or something, maybe with her areolas exposed. Not sure if this is the kind of flag that I would want to ‘put on the moon.’ Can’t believe they have an official flag.

As Carles recognizes, the tendency for advertising for companies as they mature in the business cycle is to move in the direction of ersatz jingoism for a nonexistent corporation-as-nation. The personal-sexual motive assumed in customers is replaced by a more generalized motive of allegiance and obedience; the sexual desire for a object represented in the ads is supplanted by the masochistic desire for subservience. It shifts the consumer's register of concern from the personal to the political, from conquering one's own urges to conquering territory abroad (the moon). This prepares a labile populace ready to serve totalitarian schemes of international or interplanetary Anschluss.

Carles's apparently innocent juxtaposition of these questions -- "Do u think it is natural to ‘get aroused’ when u see a sexie ad? Have u ever ‘made love’ 2 more than 1 person at the same time?" -- of course serves a deadly serious purpose. The question: Is unthinking fidelity to a leader the end result of having our sexual anxieties rechanneled by corporate entities and their advertising? Is the social value of monogamy translated into political obedience through the popular medium of salacious and lascivious marketing? When Carles asks "Are Calvin Klein jeans ‘the new skinny jeans’?" he really asks, "Are you prepared to give your life for the fuhrer?"

12 June 2009: "AltBro Baptism"

This post is about mimetic desire. Carles recounts a fable about aspirants for the same cache of social capital, fighting each other to occupy the same rung of the youth culture ladder.

We felt threatened by one another–not sure why. Maybe it was because we would ‘have crushes’ on the same girls. Maybe it was because we had a similar fashion sense. Maybe it was because we had the same fave band–Animal Collective. Maybe I felt threatened by the new bro in town because he was kinda like a mirror, held up to my face, and the things I didn’t like about him were the things I didn’t like about me.

Desire is always mimetic -- the model other shapes the desires that then seem to the subject to have preceded the encounter with the other. Of course the ensuing antipathy masks a deeper desire not merely to emulate but to possess the other, to merge with the other in a homosocial apotheosis. The consummation of relations would need expression as a purifying ritual if not as the sexual act: "Maybe we could help one another become better bros.... Maybe he was just like me–and that’s not a bad thing." Hence the evocation of baptism, inspired by the humorous photo Carles has chosen for this disquisition. It resembles the forbidden homosexual act, betokens ejaculation on and in the other without causing undue anxiety to the subject hyperconscious of his masculinity, and the threat his emulative desires pose.

But to leave the analysis there would be to miss the subtle undercurrent of Girardian anthropology that surely Carles meant to cue us to consult by his alluding to both doubling and religious ritual. Girard argues that mimetic desire causes violence and desire to be linked perpetually in the subject's mind -- the desire to become the other is inseparable from the desire to destroy him. The question is what do these "bros" sacrifice to prevent them (and the whole community of likeminded bros) from destroying one another. Carles suggests, much like the late Eve Sedgwick, that women will become the sacrifice -- when Carles has his altbro lout declare that he and his monstrous double may "date the same lil cunts together", we detect in the derogatory profanity the dehumanization and banishment to the state of Agambenian excpetion of the future victim as well as the barely suppressed urge to violence -- that between them they can destroy the spirit of the women they encounter and thereby preserve their tenuous relationship with each other. No doubt the manner in which they would humiliate women would be steeped in the trappings of ritual -- perhaps knowing high-fives during a "skipole" session will serve the purpose and protect their love from the threat of recognizing itself.

17 June 2009: "Will fannypacks be this summer’s break-thru fashion accessory?" and 17 June 2009: "Might retire."

These posts are about the aufhebung. Carles often chooses to end his philosophical investigations by shifting from a granular discussion of a topic that is apparently mundane -- in the case of the first post under consideration here, fannypacks -- to a metaphysical examination of an existential crisis, of a soul in bondage. Consider the closing aria from the fannypack discourse:

Yall… I’m just looking for a better way to live–and I think the best way to improve your life is to bring as many ‘kick ass products’ as possible into your life. I don’t really understand why ‘we were put on this Earth’, but I do know that u can do whatever is in ur power to make urself look kewl/have a ‘functional wardrobe.’

might buy an iPhone 4.0

All the hallmarks of Carles's style are deployed: The direct appeal to his readers, the disarmingly casual language, the ironic distanciation through creative use of punctuation, a confession of cosmic confusion over spiritual meaning, the vertiginous collision of the specific and the universal, and a dizzying descent back into the mundane for the purposes of a punch line. But it would mistake to dismisses these paragraphs as mere jokes, as they are integral to Carles's problematic. What is at stake is ultimately the subject's ability to discover a tenable perspective on her own identity, whereas the social structure that has interpolated her as subject tends to encourage dramatic swings in self-recognition, from the self subsuming the entire of creation to the self being utterly insignificant in the material scheme of things. Carles's humorous moments of existential crisis actually disclose the idealist-materialist dilemma at its most acute, and mercilessly exposes the epistemological aporia in identity as it is constituted in capitalism. In other words, Carles intends to demonstrate how seemingly insignificant ephemera like fannypacks may in fact constitute the negation of the negation as far as the hypothesis of self-determining individualism is concerned, paving the way for the collective consciousness that currently finds its most apprehensible expression in memes.

The fannypack is particularly useful in this regard because it highlights the specter of utilitarianism that continues to haunt our society of the spectacle. The question: can functionality survive irony? "I know that fanny packs have been something ‘ironic’ to mention since the beginning of time. But srsly yall…I think that fanny packs are actually really functional now that I have finished my design school curriculum." The notion of utility itself has been under attack by postmodern modes of representation, but it always threatens to recur, nesting as it does close to the core of capitalist ideology. Fashion is always reducible to function, frivolousness is always the alibi for this ruthless reductionism of market societies.

Carles optimistically posits a future in which material possessions are minimized:

I feel like soon, ppl will want to carry ‘less belongings’ than ever. All u really need is ur debit card and ur smartphone. We will soon eliminate pockets, and either have specially designed pouches for specific items, or perhaps some sort of ‘camelbak’ that you can fill with the beverage of ur choice.

Clearly Carles's theory is that digital culture will spawn a kind of ersatz idealism, in which information supplants material culture, which we will attempt to render irrelevant -- the "beverage" represents all our summed efforts to transcend sensuality itself, the demands of the flesh, as we work our way toward uploaded consciousness and the ultimate atrophy of the body and its mortality and its puny fraility. We will stop carrying things -- no longer will we be beasts of burden for our own selfhood -- but instead we will exist in pure spontaneity, in the ether of ideas, part and parcel with all the memes we consume.

But, in a true Hegelian spirit, Carles follows that fannypack post with a post that proffers a dialectical inversion of that dematerialized utopia of unencumbered selves. He suggests online presence -- "blogging" -- is in fact the burden, not the physical things that anchor us to the material world. "Thinking about retiring from blogging. Not sure if I ‘have it in me’ any more. Feel like ‘the scene’ is just so negative." Here online presence is reimagined as an alienated consciousness, which can exist within a person without being integrated into that person's subjectivity. This is indeed a "negative" dialectic, as mediated consciousness then entails an infinite splitting, an endless striation of identities until our own ontology mimics a long-tail distribution curve, becoming a string of single-serving selves. In such a condition, we are thrown on the mercy of the recognition of the Other: "Don’t even know who I am. Should I just ‘retire’? help me. do I even ‘mean’ something 2 u?" Being and nothingness oscillate with increasing despair for subjects caught up in the evershrinking "news-cycle" of subjectivity, in which we must recount our identity in toto at ever more regular intervals. Carles attempts ironic distancing, trying to attribute and banish his despair to his online alter ego:

‘do i have a reason 2 be alive?’
-hipster runoff

‘why am I here? who am I? what do I believe in?’
-hro

But even here he cleverly shows us how this tactic doesn't become a tenable strategy but instead proliferates the names under which we suffer: Carles, Hipster Runoff, HRO, you, me, U, I ....

15 June 2009: "Are Sneaker Freaks giving Los Angeles/African-Americans a bad reputation?"

This post is about Elias Canetti. Carles presents a photoessay of sorts to investigate crowds and power, and the hypothesis that spontaneous acts of underclass rebellion have been coopted by the consumerism that should constitute their proper target. (The pun with the big-box retailer here is partially intentional, though Carles doesn't explicitly explore the class origins and demographics of the retailers besieged by rioters.) In his customary elliptical, circular, non-phallologocentric fashion, Carles ends his discourse with his starting point: "Worried about the world. Worried about ‘consumerism’ being evil."

But his main concern is whether it is possible to conceive of an "authentic" riot within our society of simulacrums, or whether dissent is always already doomed to come across as contrived, as an excuse to act in accordance with capitalism's possessive individualism. At first, Carles allows only one motive for rioting:

Last night, the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship, and people in Los Angeles decided 2 use it as an excuse to ‘riot.’ However, it doesn’t seem like it is an authentic riot–like one out of rage. I think the bros who were ‘rioting’ seem to have just used it as an excuse to ‘fuck shit up’ and possibly ‘break into some specialized boutique stores in a gentrified part of town.’

But here, unfortunately, Carles's nomenclature is inadequately defined and somewhat obscure. It is not clear how "rage" is to be distinguished from "fucking shit up" or why vandalism and property destruction carried out along class lines is not an admissible expression of economic discontent. Surely Carles hasn't been taken in by the red herring of the professional basketball championship, which functions in this social equation as operator that joins together the volatile yet necessary riot ingredients of widespread media attention and spontaneous coordination of the otherwise disenfranchised. The Lakers victory signals not only that the basketball-watching world's attention is fixed on Southern California, but also that those who identify with the city and its manifold ills will be in the streets, ready for action. Sports is always an effort to quell or rechannel civic unrest, but ironically, winning championships undermines its function of siphoning off disgruntled energy and for that particular instance, instead channels it. Carles notes: "Wonder if riot pix are the new partie pix [via Iran]." Spectator-sport celebrations and elections are structurally homologous, but the tensions they engender boil into protest for inverse reasons -- whether the outcome is or is no longer in doubt.

Carles suspects the rioting is a matter of the transvaluation of values, a reaction to marketing or inadequate education, which might establish a basis for resistance to marketing materials: "I can’t help but think that these were ‘acts of greed’/'dumb ppl who value ‘kewl shit’ too much.’
Not sure who to ‘blame.’ Maybe the NBA for creating so many brands that people want to identify with. Maybe a racial group of people. Maybe ‘the media’. Maybe ‘the Los Angeles Public Education System.’ Possibly Nike / Phil Knight."
But of course, the real scandal, the real outrage, is not the rioting itself but the absence of rioting under "ordinary" circumstances, such that when dissent is expressed it can be easily be characterized as aberrant and motivated by trivial selfishness and maladapted civic pride. One day, a real rain will come and wash the streets of Los Angeles, and it won't be a matter of bouncing balls, zone defenses, and so called "dunk shots."

10 June 2009: "Just saw Kanye West shopping at Am Appy."

This post is about invidious comparison. Carles laments that celebrities sometimes fail to uphold their function in the structural system of fashion, instead deigning to stoop to brands that ordinary consumers can purchase. But Carles gives it a pointed racial spin, underscoring the apartheid dynamics that always are in play with the various species of fashion consciousness.

Can’t believe Kanye West shops at Am Appy. Not sure if this makes me want to wear it more/less. Not sure if this means that American Apparel is meant for people of all races, or that they are trying to be some sort of upscale blipster brand. Feeling very confused, like I want to burn all of my Am Appy/try to think of new conversion projects.

Fashion always striates society into classes and makes the striation seem arbitrary, thus masking its roots in various forms of race and class discrimination. From this perspective that Carles draws our attention toward here, Kanye West becomes the exception who proves the rule. In the process of achieving fame, he has not to serve as one of the most insidious kinds of collaborators.

I remember Kanye West had a song on his first album where he talked about being a black dude who worked at the Gap. He rapped about ‘murdering his boss’ and ’smoking blunts at work.’ He was just a disenfranchised black bro, still hungry to ‘transcend society.’

Now, the quisling West serves de facto apartheid as an alibi: His ability to wear American Apparel (the name itself captures some of the nationalistic fervor involved, and the trouble racialist history of the U.S.) disguises the fact that the brand typically serves as a whites-only marker. A double game is being played -- the brand can seem to symbolize postracial stylishness while retaining below the surface -- interwoven within it, as it were -- the racial codes society is alleged to have transcended. Carles shrewdly notes how the contradiction can't cohere for long: "Feel like I might need to find a new brand. Has any1 heard of Anthropologie / Hollister / Ammy Eagle?" The choices are not arbitrary; he evokes another nationalist symbol as well as an academic discipline known to have inscribed racialist notions into the very history of human genealogy. And Hollister, of course, refers to Hollister, California, home to one of the most dangerously unstable seismic faults in the country. Carles is making an obvious point: the fault line of race that divides America is about give way to an earthquake that could shake the foundations of American society to its core. "Can ppl change, or are they always the same?" Carles asks in this context, an ominous reference to the country's troubled racial past. One thing is for sure, Carles indicates. We cannot change our history by merely changing the labels on our designer clothing.

21 May 2009: "HRO READER SURVEY"

This post is about manufacturing consent. Here Carles poses a number of insignificant questions for his readers to answer in order to expose the mechanics of crypto-democracy. The illusion of participation is easily constructed, regardless of whether the data collected serves those who have volunteered it or the undisclosed purposes of the questioner.

The questions themselves make a mockery of the entire premise of political polling as a means to conduct late-capitalist, postmodern democracy. The first question is typical -- "1. What makes u happy about HRO?" The emphasis on personal happiness indicates the way poll questions often deflect respondents' attention away from shared reality and onto themselves, permitting solipsism to masquerade as political participation. Happiness, being impossible to define objectively for all possible respondents, becomes a meaningless counter in a game where worthless opinions are collected to placate a self-regarding populace trained to care for nothing but their own whimsy.

8 June 2009: "“The Arm.”

This post is about infanticide. In order to make yet another incisive point about castration, Carles pretends to be threatened to the point of paranoia by what he calls "the arm" -- the tendency of women who have attained a level of repute or self-confidence in patriarchal society to carry their bag with an arm extended perpendicular to their bodies in simulation (or unconscious mockery, perhaps) of the erect phallus. Carles, playing the role of the displaced patriarch to the letter, reacts with sheer outrage, upping the rhetorical ante on his profanity to denounce women on numerous occasions as "‘lil cunts’" or "cunty", as "broads" or "bitches." He fulminates about the presumptuousness of women who "cock" their arm in this fashion, attributing it to their false sense of social significance or fame. The embittered chauvinist, as Carles suggests, will regard such women as failing to know their place, and will act to mete out retribution with verbal abuse.

And of course, this is followed by a reminder of what women's proper place is -- the domestic sphere: nurturing infants, carrying only those bags that facilitate child rearing. "Sorta just wish women would buy ergonomically designed purses. Feel like women need to make better decisions being able to carry a baby in one arm, and baby supplies in the other." Women wouldn't create so much trouble for themselves and the men who take dominating them for granted if only they became biological machines of babymaking: "I wish that women who were obsessed with ‘life being terminal’ would have a child, and shift their focus to ‘caring for a lil person who came out of their wombs.’ I think that is actually part of eVolution/the Circle of Life."

This, Carles demonstrates, is how female independence -- measured solely in terms of the discomfort men experience at their assertiveness -- is construed as a kind of female betrayal of the human species, a refusal to raise the next generation, a metaphoric murder of children unborn and uncared for.

Most insidiously, this oppression is all presented insidiously in our culture as a kind concern for women -- "Feel very worried about women, and the stress that they are putting on their bodies." And this token, backhanded concern is topped off with a wistful retreat from the dream of gender equity, refashioned as an impossible ideal: "Wish men and women were ‘truly equal.’"

What Carles would propose as a feminist counterattck on this front is hard to extrapolate, but one would assume he would support a more aggressive gesture than the potentially ambiguous phallic "Arm." Though he remarks that he "Feel[s] like women should try to be more like men," that seems to be in patriarchal character and not his true voice. Perhaps he means to advocate the opposite: Since any attempt to collapse femininity into masculinity is doomed to failure and apt to be experienced as a kind of reverse castration, women should adopt a more radically vaginal symbolic posture. This may be the meaning of Carles' concern for how full women's purses tend to be -- were they to be emptied, they would serve society as a more powerful symbol of the vaginal orifice not as an absence but a positive presence, even a fashion totem.

7 June 2009: "I wish I could go back to high school and re-brand myself."

This post is about naive existentialism. Given that many of us exist in a culture that transmits a strong ideological bias toward possessive individualism, thanks to an economic system that demands the surrender of that individuality and generally offers instead a strong, well-defined identity only as the reward for performing work that has been microdivided into meaninglessness, we tend to reject reflexively the idea that our subjectivity is constituted through our social context. We prefer to believe that our consciousness is self-generated, that the Cartesian cogito is sufficient to explain everything about our ontology and our epistemology. We tend to imagine that a time existed when our consciousness was pure and untainted by cultural strictures and expectations; Carles suggests that for most of us, that time is adolescence, when we learn the painful art of compromise and confront the reality that we frequently don't subscribe to our own ideals, which in themselves often prove not to be our own but some else's idea of what constitutes the good.

Back in high school, there was no such thing as ‘authenticity’ because everything ‘just was.’ U could be bold, and u could ‘feel things.’ U could do drugs/drink for the first time, and be convinced that no1 had ever felt this way before.

Only with age do we recognize our own unique experience is actually second-hand, that our creative impulses and insights are hand-me-downs. The condition of postmodernity is such that these past feelings are suddenly invalidated by their lack of originality; we efface our own past when we deduce that it was not sui generis.

As Carles's performance as the wistful adult looking back indicates, the response to this grim recognition is often a futile nostalgia and a systematic program of misremembering one's own past. His videos from talent shows both capture the dream of nostalgia and, in the awkward ineptitude they reveal, its inevitable failure. But what is more interesting is the psychological motivation Carles assigns to this sad drama of the withering self: In his estimation, it derives from sexual anxiety. As a youth, in the full possession of the confidence of your unique genes, "U could take some1’s virginity, and tell urself that ur ‘making love’ 2 some1." One's presumed personal individuality seemed to provide the spark of attraction, seemed to fuel coital couplings in the absence of sexual technique. Carles associates the discovery of contingent identity with a loss of that sexual confidence, which is replaced by doubts and self-incriminations, the recognition that empathy with others is not a luxury but a constituitive aspect of our own mind.

Just want to go back in time.
and get an erection
back in my prime
before I became older
and realized the responsibility
and miscellaneous feelings
that go along with sexual relations

The immaturity of this fantasy of escaping from empathy, of regarding empathy as an impingement on our individuality, is given a ribald send-up in the final sexual fantasy Carles orchestrates. By having his character pine for a prepubescent girl, he exposes the manner in which these delusions of uniqueness, of existential self-creation, are actually atavistic regressions and counter to species survival.

Want to look at a tween ass
when we are both ‘illegal’ together
before she gains the freshman 15
and starts a life
with low metabolism
and expanding ass + beer bellie + thighs

Of course, if one is attracted only to prepubescent girls, one will never reproduce one's own genes. So Carles exposes existentialism as fundamentally sterile, an embarrassing and incompetent performance on the talent-show stage of life.

14 May 2009: "Not sure how to interpret Beth Ditto upskirt shots"

This post is about what Lacan called the "obscurity concerning the vaginal organ." Never one to underestimate his audience, Carles presumes his readership has an encyclopedic recollection of Lacan's notorious lectures on female sexuality. Carles, thus, is at liberty to leap in with his own gloss on the controversial positions Lacan had staked out without having to drop the allusive posturing that so thoroughly problematizes and enriches Carles's discourse. Identity and undecidability, humor as both repression and sublimation -- Lacan would be wont to strikethrough Carles's text while leaving it open to scrutiny despite appearing under the sign of negation from the great psychoanalyst(Lacan).

Carles uses a photograph of a large woman, reminiscent of the subject of the earliest known examples of human art and redolent of fertility rites and rituals, to explore the Lacanian position on feminine (as opposed to female) jouissance. Writes Carles: "Not even really sure if she is ‘alternative.’ Not even sure if we are supposed to take female artists seriously. Amywinehouselittlebootslilyallenfeistjewelsherylcrowadeleduffy. Not even really sure what I should be looking 4. Maybe ‘it’s a girl thing.’" The presence of the vagina l organ, postulating castration, throws the subject into crisis and throws open the deeply suppressed possibility that the female is simply the castrated male who has adjusted to his doom -- which is why Carles is not sure if the women in question represents an "alternative" -- to male subjectivity, to being within or outside of gender, to the possibility of a female writing, a female voice. Carles accordingly strings together a series of female singers in an undifferentiated mass, positing their homogeneity in stasis, and then purports to be incapable of taking them "seriously" -- of regarding their voice as authentic rather than castrated. Lacan goes so far as to accuse women of maintaining silence about jouissance, about vaginal orgasms, shrouded in mystery. With an arch pun, he declares: "the representatives of the female sex, however loud their voices at the analysts, do not seem to have done their utmost towards the breaking of this seal."

Carles makes a similar move, reducing feminism to a mysterious insouciance represented by a boundless female body: "I feel like she is just sort of ‘famous’ for ‘being hefty and not caring abt it’ [via feminism]. I feel like she should take care of herself so that she doesn’t teach young impressionable future lesbians to ‘let themselves’ go." Sweet surrender, the jouissance of perfect recognition. Of course, that is the threat lurking behind all of Carles's sardonics, that the feminine will collapse on itself and yield a sterile, inverted homosexuality concentrated on a female sexuality liberated from the limitations imposed by the male sexual response cycle.

Having cut too close to the quick [pun intended], Carles diverts the discussion into a type of vehicle that widely serves in Western society as a signifer of emasculation: the minivan. Contrasting the minivan with an alternative transportation mode, Carles notes "Seems like a chill way 2 live, especially if u have a big family who like to chill in captains chairs and watch some TV. Might be more authentic than minivans. Feel sad about ppl who drive minivans." Here he considers the possibility the ordinary genital sexuali relations need not be fraught with fears of inevitable emasculation, typically through the conduit of the pressures and expectations of family life. Instead the male can assume "the captain's chair" of patriarchy, turning the sexual equilibrium on its head and playing the lack of male jouissance as a trump card in the struggle over gender and power.

15 May 2009: "Feeling both hornie and conceptual."

This post is about the art instinct. Conservative ideologue and salonista Denis Dutton recently published a book that sought to explain aesthetics in terms of evolutionary necessity; this commentary is Carles's apparent reaction to the premise that sexual selection undergirds the urge toward aesthetic expression. He reveals economically how evolutionary theories such as Dutton's have the effect of negating feminism and presuppose a female subservience to the needs of the species. "I am in a weird mood this weekend. I feel like seeing some avant garde art/music/performances, but at the same time, I feel like doing something that objectifies women, like going to a strip club or something." In Dutton's view, these impulses are essentially synonymous, and the purest artistic expression is the exposed gyrating rump of the female simulating estrus.

If art is merely a matter of pursing evolutionary advantages, then nothing is to prevent Carles from drawing the reductio ad absurdem: "Part of me feels like ‘artists are bullshit people who want attention.’" Without anything more useful to contribute to human survival, artists try to beguile potential sexual partners with their sensory parlor tricks. And sexualized art will inevitably force out -- through natural selection -- art that has achieved a sublimiation of the sexual instincts: "Part of me wants to see Tom Morello with a bunch of sweet Effectz Pedals,
but a bigger part of me wants to see a woman on all-fours without a shirt on with sweet pedals."

Carles then dismisses theories that would explain "the real reasons" why we do things with this sarcastic swat: "I am not sure who I am any more. I am not sure why I do anything any more." Carles still believes in agency and subjectivity, in a consciousness that is not entirely determined or programmed by biological imperatives. For that, he remains a philosophical beacon in a ocean of reductive evo psych theory.

3 June 2009: "Sometimes I just want to float away…"

This post is about recovered memories. Carles begins by hazily recalling the plot of the film Forrest Gump, a movie that itself is about the false memories of nostalgia that affected the Baby Boomer generation in the 1990s. Carles highlights the aspects of the film that most parallel the substance of the so-called recovered memories induced by charlatan therapists and other dubious mental health practitioners: incest, the fundamental social taboo.

I remember in the popular movie Forrest Gump,
Tom Hanks and Jenny say ‘make me a bird, so I can fly far, far away’
as Jenny tries to escape from her father’s physical and sexual abuse
Eventually she ‘becomes a slut’ when she grows up
and in a way she sort of became a bird
and flew far, far away from ‘innocence’ [via dying of AIDS]

With the image he has selected, Carles highlights the motif of "floating away" as an objective correlative for both the experience of processing trauma and repressing it.

Is forgetting a "healthy" response to traumatic experience? Or is it a dangerous evasion, a means of circumventing the necessary work for healing? Moreover, is the pressure to remember a inadvertent means of grounding the real in fiction, of demanding the manufacture of trauma to provide the working material for the construction of mental health? Overzealous therapists would have us cast all adult experience as a kind of fall from grace, a flight from innocence, so that it can be "healed" by their ministrations into invented, paradigmatic experiences from childhood. Using various hypnotic and autosuggestive techniques, such therapists can call forth archetypal but entirely contrived memories, conforming those unfortunates in whom these memories are planted to established labile personality types. These unwitting conformists Carles is in the practice of calling "alts."

Just want to be a lite lil alt
and float away while holding some balloons
and have the balloons represent some sort of ‘guiding force’
or maybe something that helps me 2 ‘escape’

Here, of course, the guiding force is the therapist, and behind the therapist is the collective force of the entire normative mental-health establishment, and behind that is the state itself, ever vigilant in pursuing ever more innovative techniques for the formation of a more docile populace. The escape into false memories that then can themselves be purified through the therapist's intervention, with transforms the underlying personality structure tout court.

As a consequence of the social promise of recovered false memories, individuals become lazy about generating their own authentic memories, expecting instead that society will perpetually supply a steady stream of synthetic ones that will make everyone feel unique in their life experience, what they have endured.

I know that I can escape from the status quo of my life
but I do not want 2 work hard 2 get there
Even though I feel like I am entitled to a better life
I wish it would just fall in my lap

Many of us may feel exempt from this disturbing method of personality structuration, but the nature of recovered memories, once granted an iota of credibility, is that anything any individual believes he or she knows about themselves can be called into question by a perceived therapeutic authority. A state-sanctioned psychologist can always tell you what you must remember and what you must know to be true about yourself. As Carles darkly suggests, "All we are are alts in the wind…"

1 June 2009: "Have yall heard of the popular video game band ‘The Beatles’?"

This post is about the death of Paul McCartney. One of the signs of the fading 1960s dream was the wide circulation given to conspiracy theories about Paul McCartney's death in the wake of the artistic left turn the Beatles made with the confused concept album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The heedless optimism of the "summer of love" generated its own undertow of paranoid reaction, which found expression in perversely gleeful accounts of the death of one of the most conspicuous proponents of that youthful spirit.

We are still haunted by the ghosts of 1968. The revolutionary ideals remain with us, even if that generation of rebels sold them out. That is why the wound still feels fresh when, as Carles points out, the Beatles license their music to the production of stupefying entertainments such as the video game Rock Band. Carles description is aptly sardonic: "I saw a group of bros with the door open ‘having a great time’ playing original music. But then I realized they weren’t actually creating the music themselves, it was actually a ’sweet ass game’ where u pressed buttons along with a kewl guitar rock song." In this "sweet ass game," participants simulate the creative freedom of music making but experience it as unfreedom, in which a machine keeps score of how well the humans can emulate the machine's marching orders.

Perhaps consenting to have heir music included in such a clear manifestation of the exhaustion of postmodern society is the Beatles revenge on their audience for the pressures they experienced as the culture industry's primary exponent, when the demands that they produce pabluum subverted their own clearly revolutionary instincts. Accordingly, Carles defends his parents' appreciation of the Beatles, regarding it as emblematic of the upbringing he received, the moral and philosophical education which still resounds in his writings. But he recognizes that their generation failed to follow through on the conditions that made an overthrow of consumer capitalism ripe:

Maybe this is why our parents loved the Beatles so much. Maybe they knew that their songs would last 4ever, eventually ending up in some ’sweet ass’ video game that ‘doesn’t promote musicianship’, ‘the spirit of music’, but primarily highlights the fact that bands are ‘brands’ which ‘create art’ that can be protected and licensed out whenever u need some more money.

The failure to seize the opportunity presented by 1968 led directly to the hegemony of brands, the triumph of a surfeit of consumer goods sweetly stifling dissent. Why don't we do it in the road?

Carles contends that John Lennon, were he not assassinated, would have prevented this project. But there is a sense that Lennon's murder makes the continued confusion over Paul McCartney's living death more salient. Have the Beatles now purposely restaged the "Paul is Dead" controversy, by allowing any random person to simulate him in an ersatz Beatles? Is the licensing deal actually an intricate way of disassociating their radical legacy from the degenerate and reactionary uses to which their music is put in these disaffected times, passing the blame onto some other band made up of what are in effect simulations of the band's original members -- precisely in the fashion that people who play the video game Rock Band supplant them? Is this the Beatles way of disaowing responsibility both for the spirit of the 1960s and its disillusioning dissolution? Carles asks the key question: "Do yall think that Sir Paul McCartney is ‘rolling around in his grave’?"

The implications are crystal clear: When we believe Paul was dead, we become both his killer and his replacement. His actual ontological status, it goes without saying, is irrelevant.