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.