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 ....