31 July 2009: "WTF is ‘art’?"

This post is about G.G. Allin. Here we are presented with the customary Carlesian complex of interwoven themes: the role of the artist in capitalist society, the evolution of media forms and how that shapes the public sphere, the nature of art itself and its parameters, metaphor vs. metonymy, the parasitical relationship of art to life, performativity and its natural boundaries, libido and its destructive potential with regard to civilization, scatology as epistemology. It begins with Carles rejecting the role of the artist: "A lot of people tell me ‘Carles, ur an artist’ but I have to tell them, ‘I’m not an artist. I’m a blog.’" Unlike blogging, making art has become a mere alibi for unrestrained self-expression devoid of theoretical content. Art has been reduced to diary-keeping:

Feel overwhelmed by ‘art.’ As we continue to move forward in time, there are just more&more ways 2 express yourself–more tools, more ways 2 communicate, and more metaphors to be showcased. Kinda makes u wonder what is ‘art’ and what is ‘just being alive.’

In other words, Carles, echoing the Frankfurt school philosophers, is complaining about art having lost its critical function. In his essay "Art and Mass Culture" Max Horkheimer writes:

The gradual dissolution of the family, the transformation of personal life into leisure and of leisure into routines supervised to the last detail, into the pleasures of the ball park and the movie, the best seller and the radio, has brought about the disappearance of the inner life. Long before culture was replaced by these manipulated pleasures, it had already assumed an escapist character. Men had fled into a private conceptual world and rearranged their thoughts when the time was ripe for rearranging reality. The inner life and the ideal had become conservative factors. But with the loss of his ability to take this kind of refuge -- an ability that thrives neither in slums nor in modern settlements -- man has lost his power to conceive a world different from that in which he lives. This other world was that of art.

Faced with an art that has lost its power to criticize and represent an alternate (or, as Carles would say, an "alt") ideal, Carles theorizes instead a kind of post-art that supersedes any mimetic or critical functions.

It’s kinda weird how art is supposed to ‘represent life’, and challenge u to think about some aspect of humanity/society is ‘kinda fucked up.’ I am not sure why people think expression is so important.

Carles seems to be advocating an art that moves beyond expression, and perhaps beyond abstract expressionism, to a different artistic mode, but he also accepts that this pursuit of transgression, of new ground for art to colonize, inevitably turns atavistic, degenerating into the most primitive forms of human interaction. His imaginary artist reaches the impasse where his pursuit of authenticity culminates in a polymorphously perverse infantile regression: "Just want to ‘jack off’ and ’shit’ on objects, but not because I want it to be ‘art’, but because I sincerely have the desire to ‘tug off’ and ‘defecate’ on stuff." The artist can no longer distinguish his creative impulses from his masturbatory or excretory ones, "art" and "shit" have become synonymous at the symbolic and literal levels. This solves the dilemma that had made conventional art history so meaningless to Carles: "I never went to Art History class during undergrad, and actually failed because of my poor attendance. Maybe if I had attended, I would have a better eye for ‘what is art’ and what is ‘bullshit.’" But of course Carles knew all along that there is no difference; no refinement of the beholder's aesthetic can lead to a tenable differentiation at this particular juncture in art's decline.

The only guarantor of artistic authenticity, once the artist has reached this level of disaffection, is his own ejaculate or feces, personal products that are uncontaminated with symbolic ideas which make reference to the work of others and hence become derivative. No artist of the late 20th century epitomized this conundrum more than Kevin "G.G." Allin, whose performances were frequently sanctified in the eyes of his admirers by the spilling of his own fluids.

So the pursuit of purity or originality is an unsustainable course for the development of art -- G.G. Allin, after all, is dead. Carles then consdiers a different kind of post-art: the possibly of wedding the aesthetic impulse to the commercial context of capitalism, in keeping with the way in which digitization has made once intangible ideas into commodified, tradable "memes": "Not sure how ‘the internet’ has changed art. It seems like u shouldn’t try to make ‘art’ n e more, maybe we should just focus on ‘designing and branding streams of memes.’" The process of branding itself becomes the substance of artistic practice -- artists will work with the tools of marketing, rather than with paint or pencil. The artistic product will not be a discrete work but the evocation of influence qua influence. In this way, the pejorative connotations of selling out the idea art to corporate design are sublated; corporate art frees the artist of the inhibitions of his own ego, design becomes a medium for pure craft, unpolluted by the mediocrity of ideas that fail by being too original.

29 July 2009: "Indie Buzzbands 2 watch in 2k10: Hooting@TheBlowfish"

This post is about the uncanny. Unusually for Carles, he draws heavily upon a Biblical source for the substance of these humorous theses about a once popular band from the 1990s. He seems to have in mind chapter one of the Book of Ecclesiastes, particularly these verses:

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

Of course, by speculating about a return to prominence for Hootie and the Blowfish, Carles is suggesting that whatever the next popular musical group with broad trans-subcultural appeal should be, it will be essentially no different from the bands that have achieved similar success in previous years. That is to say that no aesthetic progress is marked at the mass level. Instead, an entropy reigns at the level of popular culture; no new spiritual energy enters the closed circuit; there is only a repeat of the same forms and the same tired appeals. Hence Carles's incisive irony, along with a telling reference to our postmodern condition: "As you can see by their post-modern album cover, Cracked Rearview is surely going to change the way that music + album art are created for the rest of time." But his entire point is that nothing changes and nothing is new under the sun. Popular culture has traveled into a blind cul-de-sac, and the appropriative strategies of the postmodern only underscore the generalized poverty of inspiration.

Carles's repeated references to the music media indicates his general skepticism of their ability to breathe new life into exhausted tropes through the tactics of marketing. With cutting sarcasm, he notes, "I am excited about the Pitchfork magazine picking up on this band. I think that with the right amount of blog buzz, and coverage from magazines and Pitchforks, they will be around for a long time to come." In a sense, this is more true than true, as bands in this mold will always be with us, though their faces and names will be superficially altered. Hype, always histrionic about the possibility of the new, perpetually repeats itself, reduces to an undifferentiated "buzz," and effaces novelty itself. When Carles urges "Please friend this band on myspace, so that if they get big, we can say that we wrote about them first, and found out about them because of blogs" he shows how the so-called new mnedia forms have already been co-opted and been made to succor the status quo.

Confronted with such an artistic impasse, Carles suggests, culture collapses in on itself, and blandness (represented here by his selection of a quintessentially dull band) becomes the only means of expressing aesthetic energy. "A lot of people say that the music industry is ‘in the shitter’, but I honestly believe these next 10 years are going to be the ‘Golden Age’ of Pop + Indie music." He is perhaps hoping here that the event horizon of mediocrity will be shattered, that in the quiescence of boredom, in the very outhouse of recycled and regurgitated pop excrement, a new cultural form can emerge that finds dynamism in stasis, gold in dross, sublimity in the monolithic sameness. In the post-backlash cultural era, about which Carles barely dares to theorize and can only imply through various mechanisms of negative theologistics, an audience's aesthetic responsiveness will be perfected in its ability to ignore altogether the contradictions involved in the safe and familiar being represented as the new. Familiarity itself will become deeply unfamilar. An unheimlichkeit will leave its indelible mark on all experience.

26 July 2009: "This is a metaphor abt growing older / ur innerchild being dead."

This post is about the uselessness of introspection. Carles declares: "Sad that my innerchild is ‘dead and gone, dead and gone.’" His psychic murder of the idea of a childlike aesthetics of innocence, of authentic responsiveness, is part of a more sweeping rejection of self-reflection as it pertains to aesthetic being.

Srsly feel like the only thing that could have made my childhood better would have been ‘having the opportunity to listen to Animal Collective without even knowing what pitchfork/music blogs were.’ Feel like I would have really ‘enjoyed it’ in an organic way.

The prefacing word srsly calls into question even the ability to articulate a critique, at this particular juncture of constructed reflexive subjectivity, without it automatically becoming ironized. So it is unclear if his mediated tastes in poipular culture are truly to be lamented, or if he is sardonically acknowledging that media outlets such as Pitchfork actually enable the enjoyment of culture rather than preempt it, that the fantasy of an "organic" response is in truth the most crippling legacy of the Romantic delusion of individual taste. It is no mistake that Carles provides the phrase "'enjoyed it'" with another layer of distanciation and irony with a set of quotation marks. Organic enjoyment is a fiction. Pleasures are produced socially, via a saturation of media commentary.

Thus introspection, the searching of one's soul for one's authentic being through the substantiating medium of expressed and recognized personal tastes, also leads one down a blind alley. We discover that our presupposed uniqueness is founded on a shallow base of mass-consumed trivia:

I had always thought that my childhood was special. I thought that me + my brother/sister had a more meaningful childhood than any1 else in the world. However, as I grew older, I found out that the people who lived around me generally had the same experience as me (they possibly had more lenient parents).

With regard to this point, Carles likely has in mind Schopenhauer's aphorisms on philosophy and the intellect. Schopenhauer declares:

The simplest unprejudiced self-observation, combined with the facts of anatomy, leads to the conclusion that intellect, like its objectivization the brain, is, together with its dependent sense-apparatus, nothing other than a very intense receptivity to influences from without and does not constitute our original and intrinsic being.

Carles translates this sentiment into a coruscating repudiation of nostalgia.

Sad abt growing up, losing touch with my innerchild, experiencing things like ‘joy’ or smiling for a reason other than ‘laughing @ some1.’ Sad that most of my connxns are so inauthentic. Sad that I can’t enjoy things. Sad that whenever I ‘connect’ with some1, I just feel like a ‘nostalgic fggt.’ H8 when ppl connect abt things that they used 2 watch/listen 2. Wish there was some way to connect with ppl abt who we will become in the future.

The key word is, naturally, "will" -- the determining force that renders the future malleable and differentiates being at a level above and beyond the circumscribed intellect, the limited circle of remembrance and experience that Carles indelicately suggests has unmanned him. The will is figured as masculine force; here Carles may be parodying Schopenhauer's notorious misogyny. Schopenhauer asserts that "the child receives from its father will and character, from its mother intellect" because "coitus is chiefly an affair of the man" and "coitus is the sign that, despite every increase in illumination through the intellect, the will to live continues to exist in time." Carles suggests that will is denatured and directed fruitlessly -- into a metaphorically homosexual relation that can produce no offspring -- by nostalgia and trivia. Instead the will must be directed toward vigorous expressions of future potentialities -- i.e. coital ejaculations, the only authentic objective expression of pleasure Carles is prepared to recognize philosophically.

Postscript: I just realized that the comments link on this blog was not working. It should be fixed now. Please use the comments to elucidate the analysis provided here as you see fit. Thank you.

23 July 2009: " Is M.I.A. continuing to exploit her child as a meme?"

This post is about the Verneinung. Is it too obvious to state that the child of Sri Lankan performing artist MIA may struggle with developing an autonomous ego formation, and that the very idea of subjectivity may remain objectively ungraspable for this particular bundle of aggressive desires? Remember that MIA also functions as a "producer" in many different sense of the word: As Deleuze and Guattari have declared, "Producing, a product: a producing/product identity. It is this identity that constitutes a third term in the linear series: an enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place -- and then the whole process will begin all over again." This seems an apt description of both this pregnant cultural moment vis-a-vis MIA, on the cusp of a level of success that will permanently deprive her of anonymity and the integrity of her desires qua desires, and of her infant, the undifferentiated object/abject par excellance. One can easily imagine this child thinking along the same track as Deleuze and Guattari when they continue: "From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through." That is to say, the constitution of MIA's child as a subject means also depriving it of its freedom from the socially produced mechanics of contrived desire.

When MIA dresses her baby in clothes designed to mimic her own most-famous wardrobe item, is she merely making a metaphor of the mirror stage famously promulgated by Lacan or actually trying to forestall the inevitable (and inevitably flawed) ego separation between child and mother? Is she trying to prevent her child from an unstable and unsuitable relation with language itself, the medium of her own achievements? Carles notes, "Lil bro seems lost, like he is unsure of what is happening, not confident in his lil personal brand." He is having trouble negotiating subjectivity even on the terms established by late capitalist self-branding imperatives. Carles is empathetic, rendering his sympathy at once as a command to the reader: "Feel bad for the kid. Seems like he is being branded to become an ‘independent spirit’, but u can’t be independent if your parents make free-spirited decisions for you, particularly when it comes to zany fashion decisions." The point here is that a child born into a certain level of notoriety will struggle with finding appropriate imagos to permit him to differentiate the real from the unreal, the self from the other from the Other. To wit: If the child recognizes his famous mother in the mirror when the crisis of identity comes, one can only imagine the myriad deformations incumbent upon such a misrecognition, the méconnaissance; the I/eye will remain in a state of atavistic immaturity, a purer consciousness perhaps, but a kind of incompetency for social being as currently constituted. He may not succeed in achieving the alienation that allows for social being and may stay suspended in a womb-like state of semi-selfhood, reliant ultimately on the mother as a filter for all experience. As Lacan notes, "We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis -- just as the captation of the subject by the situation gives us the general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums [or the impenetrable wall of psychic security afforded by ubiquity in the gossip pages?] but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury." Anyone who has listened to MIA's recordings will know the applicability of that last clause to our subject.

21 July 2009: "Is Wavves ‘ripping off’ AnCo / the ‘Panda Bear aesthetic’?"

This post is about alterity. Carles begins by admitting that "I have never actively listened to a Wavves song," by which he means much more than he seems at first to be declaring, calling into question what it means to actively listen as opposed to passively absorb. Is there a sense, he implicitly asks, in which active listening is appropriation? This post, as we know from the title, is about appropriation, "ripping off," whether intentionally or not. Carles wants to resituate the artist's supposed anxiety of influence within a Levinasian frame, investigating the radical responsibility we have to the otherness of another artist's work, whether this demands behavior that approaches the asymptotic limit of a blind and total passiveness in order to accord appropriate ethical respect.

Hence, it is no wonder that listening the musical work he brings under study here, he becomes "very confused." This confusion is an ethical mandate. Any less would evince the machinations of a mind not entirely reconciled to radical tolerance. Though the work in question "seems like a very ’simple song’, like to the point that you could say it is ’stupid,’ " Carles is unwilling to adopt a subject position of judgment, and instead commits himself to the far more trying philosophical position of patience, openness. He acknowledges the "cryptic metaphor" of the song, without forcefully arguing for a specific interpretation. Rather the gesture of metaphoricity alone is noted, with figuration serving as a mental key to unlock a door not yet conceptualized.

Carles then demonstrates the vertiginous and ultimately cannibalizing lines of reasoning a hermaneutics of suspicion can unfold:

Feel like he possibly might be ‘making fun of every1′ for ‘liking AnCo’, and made this song to say ‘this type of song is easy to make, I can shit out a song like this as a joke.’ Suddenly felt insecure, like he is making fun of me for wearing a Merriweather Post Pavvy tshirt. Not sure if he just ‘deconstructed’ the state of the modern indie-musicsphere with this song, or if he is ‘trying to break into it.’

The lesson here is that interpretation by reference to another's motives degrades the other and assimilates the pure alterity to a diminished and faulty instrumentalism. Ontological insecurity, a destabilizing of one's own reflexive consciousness can only ensue, as the positionality implied by prescribing the motives of the Other ultimately redounds on the self as proscriptions. For as Carles shows, this culminates in a demoralized cathexis, self-loathing, and infantile projection: "Wavves seems to h8 everything." Or in other words, "I hate myself."

20 July 2009: "Understanding the significance of ur semi-ironic athletic jersey"

This post is about false-flag operations. Often international espionage requires the recruitment of patsies who believe they are fighting for their own often ill-conceived cause while being fed orders that serve a larger purpose about which they remain entirely ignorant. They fight under a false flag, but in which they sincerely believe, making the masterminds behind this sort of operation safe from exposure should the operative fail. In his novel The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad laid out the scheme for an archetypal false-flag operation. Perhaps inspired by that work, Carles presents a hapless youth in an athletic jersey, and intends to call our attention to a cultural false-flag operation. He wants to enlist our aid in determining who or what is responsible. (Or maybe Carles himself is unaware of who is pulling his own strings. Or maybe once we begin to do as he wishes we fail to understand the nature of the intellectual work we are performing at his behest, under a false flag of our own. There are levels within levels.)

Spycraft of this nature was once limited to state-affiliated entities, but the rise of the culture industry and its supremacy over politics in regions where it retains control of media outlets has allowed celebrities and athletic stars to be recruited into this most dangerous game. Carles protests this development and issues a warning: "I think that it is irresponsible to wear the jersey of an athlete who you know nothing about. Much like any celebrity, there is a point where an athlete no longer ’stands for himself’" The athletes no longer represent themselves or their teams or their own statistics in any straightforward way, but have become counters in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse, where everything is not as it seems and the movement of the trace is quicker than the speed of light. What is irresponsible is to don a article of clothing so laden with significance that one can't possibly hope to control the various messages that one will be sending out to different audiences, each with its own interpretation and agenda. This hints at a much deeper problematic. How does one wear any sort of apparel whatsoever without losing control over the signs with which one associates oneself? Is fashion itself one gigantic, ongoing false-flag operation?

Carles details the uneventful career of failed professional athlete Grant Hill to make the point that the cover story always seems inconsequential and possibly even innocuous. "Grant Hill represents failed expectations," Carles suggests, but that is merely the alibi for the mobilization of untold millions in and around the idea that he represented. His failure masks a far greater success, but whose success that is remains unknowable to the extent that we remember Hill. The youth wearing his jersey, by extension, lays claim to this same ambiguous mantle. He perpetuates Hill's memory (as does Carles himself) further shrouding in mystery the machinations by which professional sports launders near uncountable sums, amassing mroe and more clout to the culture industry in the process.

So when Carles advises, "Always do ur research, and learn about what a brand means," we can't be sure if he is being ironic, and actually warning us that no amount of research will reveal the hidden significance of social symbols, and in fact research will only strengthen the cover stories, tighten our allegiance to our false flag. In a subtle, deeply freighted epigram, Carles concludes that failing to perform due diligence would be "like wearing a t-shirt that says ‘I <3 cock’ even if ur not ghey. Yall know what I mean?" Here sexual identity prefigures allegiance of all kinds, and Carles calls into question whether our patriotic impulses are genetic, beyond our control, as homosexuality is presumed to be, or whether, conversely, sexuality is a matter of preference, of prerogatives adopted for tactical advantages in given circumstances. Carles teases us with is final question, knowing full well that it is impossible for us to know what he means; that in fact the phenomenological status of all our impressions has been deeply destabilized. To wit: There are instances when feigning a love of cock will shroud one's sexual identity in the deepest of mysteries. Carles suggests one of the most nefarious paradoxes of all, one beloved of all double and triple agents: Who can fail to trust the man whose shirt declares "I'm a Liar"?

19 July 2009: "What does it mean when a kute indie girl has ‘bruises’?"

This post is about the theater of cruelty. In another effort to shock his readers out of their complacency, Carles deploys depictions of domestic abuse and self-harm in a faux facetious manner, hoping to prompt a response of shock, disgust, and most important, alertness. On the face of things, he seems to be proposing that bruises have become a new form of tattooing, a new social means of marking, in the alternative youth culture he so frequently draws upon: "Think that bruises on kute lil indie girls are sorta make the girls seem ‘more intriguing.’ Like there is a story behind her that u want 2 ‘find out.’" But the sensational and offensive subject matter here merely gives salience and potency to the underlying point, that storytelling itself is bruising, that self-created mysteries always amount to a sort of metaphysical self-harm, inflicting an epistemological wound on the surface of the skin of reality. The chart of violence Carles supplies actually serves as a travesty of a sort of story-spinner, not unlike the fiction-writing machines in George Orwell's 1984 (one of which, incidentally, wounds Julia). To tell a story is to inflict a wound, to enact a moment of violence, to fashion a site where violence can erupt, as different parties struggle to seize control of the interpretation of a story. When Carles tauntingly asks, "Do yall ever use any of the tactics to keep ur relationship alive?" he is passing judgment on all demagoguery, all attempts to motivate a response through careful control of rhetorical effects. The "relationship" here stands in for any number of social relations, between individuals as well as between social classes, and the state and its institutions.

Carles adds, to reinforce the point, "There’s just something rlly sexie about ‘the unknown.’" Storytelling is a matter of manipulating that curiosity and harnessing it to a particular agenda; leveraging it in the general struggle. It is also about wounding. He seems to have in mind Antonin Artaud's dictum that "a violent and concentrated action is a kind of lyricism; it summons up supernatural [utopian?] images, a bloodstream of images, a bleeding spurt of images in the poet's head and the spectator's as well." That is, narrative must wound the audience; the bruises we show must make others hurt and show spontaneous stigmata, on their hearts if not on their actual flesh. Carles writes, "bruises are a ’seal or approval’/'certificate of authenticity’, demonstrating that you are not just ‘living a lifestyle’, you are immersed in a true alternative life." And so the theater of cruelty transcends the boundaries of the performance space and spills into the performance of everyday life, only with everything and nothing at stake. If a story/bruise is well told, it bleeds its own authenticity from which an audience may drink, vampire-like.

The question: Can this power be harnessed safely to progressive movements, or do we all get "bruised" in this process. Mao declared that "works or art which lack artistic quality have no force, however progressive they are politically." Likewise, Carles seems to be suggesting with this distasteful but important post, works that may appear aesthetically backward and morally reprehensible still may contain politically progressive content.

14 July 2009: "Should record labels + festivals ban their artists from participating in XTREME ACTIVITIES?"

This post is about despair. Carles, as often is his wont, deploys a Straussian strategy of deception to placate less-engaged readers of his work, and supplies an "explanation" that merely serves as a sop, a tub to distract his less acute followers: "This is a blog post about generating a relevant discussion about independent artist medical insurance, artist depression, substance abuse, enablers, and the rise of xtreme sports in the 21st century." But as careful attention shows, that is hardly what Carles is concerned with in this particular philosophical investigation.

Instead, Carles is concerned with the Kierkegaardian question of a faith-based ethical imperative. Structurally and metaphorically, the question Carles asks -- "Do u think festivals/promoters/miscellaneous altbusiness ventures should make performing artists sign some sort of ‘contract’ banning their participation in xtreme activities?" -- both mirrors and interrogates the question Kierkegaard asked in Fear and Trembling, namely, the question of whether Abraham was correct in offering his son to sacrifice in the full horrific comprehension of the apparently meaningless consequences.

The commercial apparatus that currently cocoons artists doesn't protect artists from the fundamental ethical dilemmas. They can't give over their creative impulse to the insurance imperatives of those that have arranged to exploit their efforts in the marketplace. At best this would provide an excuse for uninspired pseudo-artistic work in which the artist has failed to engage entirely with his muse. It would, as Carles cleverly intimates, forbid the artist from "xtreme activities" -- from the peak states that differentiate the artist from the ordinary person and makes their praxis aesthetically valuable.

Once the capitalist alibi is dispensed with, we are left with artists confronting the dangers inherent in their own creativity, the praxis which may destroy them in its struggle to manifest itself materially. An artist must decide whether their work deserves the faith required to risk its creation, since the act of creation may annihilate the artist herself, not least because the appreciation of the beholders becomes psychically overwhelming. As Carles notes, "I feel like so many people out there are enabling people to ‘kill themselves’, kinda like the Michael Jacksons."
He suggests that a jaded populace has led to a debased aesthetics, a glorification of the more self-destructive artistic practices: "Xtreme, deadly activities will be branded as ‘kewl’, and a person will keep doing xtremer things, even if it means they are killing themselves’." This is ultimately, as he terms it, "xtreme gravedigging," not autonomous artistic practice that makes for the development of the Self, in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term. In fact, it is a ramification of the despair that sets the individual against the divine; the individual that prefers his own extremity in sinfulness or unredeemability rejects the redemption that is freely available from the divine source of all authentic creativity. The artist enthralled by the extreme is not merely the sad plaything of the marketplace and its fickle demands, but also is doomed to fail to transcend the either/or and reconcile himself with the cosmos. No amount of "xtreme reading existential literature," as Carles shows us through his caption for a photograph of the particular artist he uses as an example here, can rectify this failure. It is not enough to read Being and Nothingness; it is not enough to live up to commercial expectations or sufficiently insure yourself against future dangers. One must commit to faith itself, independent of any imagined payout.

15 July 2009: "Designing a fashion line."

This post is about the indeterminate. Here Carles reduces his philosophy to the most basic of ontological questions, representing himself not as a philosopher but as a fashion designer whose sole product is a shirt labeling others as himself. Does he intend to make a comment about the way in which subjectivity is transpersonal? Or he demonstrating how ideas have been reduced to the level of fashion, superficial, displayed rather than understood, and subject to a rigorous period of relevancy that expires on a corporately administered schedule?

The only clue provided comes in the punning words chosen to open the post: "‘leaked’ images." On the surface -- the superficial level that fashion, for example, operates -- these words refer to the notion that unauthorized images of his planned fashion line have been released to the press. But that is absurd, of course, since he would have "leaked" them himself via a media outlet which he himself controls. This conundrum suggests an alternative interpretation of the phrase, which must refer to ideological leakage, a seeping of meaning in which signs mean less than they appear to, and their potential for meaning remains deliberately depleted. Here the sign that has leaked meaning is his own name, insofar as it represents his own philosophical tenets. He crudely manipulates images to foist his name onto unsuspecting persons, much in the way he perhaps wishes us to understand the failures of his own philosophical method, which transmits itself only through crude manipulations, through nominalism and bald assertion. Of course, in this, Carles sells himself far too short, and if anything, his method is too subtle to be as effective and pervasive as it might be.

Which suggests another interpretation: that he seeks to spread his philosophy like it's fashion, to find suitably "leaky images" that can spill his ideas unsuspectingly onto consumers who intend only to latch on to a trend. Carles is plainly arguing that the struggle to pin down signs, to prevent the ebb and flow of fashion, to stop the turning wheel of memes, is a futile struggle. Images will always "leak," exceed themselves spontaneously and generate new meanings and unexpected possibilities that should be embraced rather than negated. In fact, in these may emerge the Great Negation, the rejection of the administered society in favor of dialogism. Carles does not equal Carles, as the shirts in the images prove; but the more radical conclusion of this syllogism is that therefore, Carles is not equal to any subjectivity; thus Carles can exist an din habit any positionality that can be conceived and clothed.

14 July 2009: "Do indie artists ‘genuinely have fun’ or are they just soulless robots who generate memes?"

This post is about intimate immensity. Carles seizes the opportunity presented by a paparazzi photograph of some marginal popular culture figures to explore the issue of space. As Carles mentions, in an unusually direct formulation, he is concerned with the "blurred ’sense of proximity’" that has resulted from the collapse of the distance between celebrities and those who consume their images. Because of the intensified coverage of celebrities to support ever more omnivorous media formats, and the increased efforts of celebrities themselves to leverage modern communication techniques to enhance their marketability by seeming to "do ‘normal things’", the charismatic qualities of the celebrities have been blunted.

Carles feigns being puzzled by the staged quality of these moments: "I am not sure if they are ‘real friends’ having ‘real fun’, or if this was a moment that was coordinated by an indie Public Relations firm." What he is suggesting is that the culture of celebrity has co-opted the once sacrosanct space of everyday life to stage pseudoevents. The safe distance once created by the otherness of celebrity existence has been obliterated. The space for the quotidian has evaporated; we must constantly recognize our own insignificance in relation to the popularity of the cultural industry's faces. We must compete for attention with culture industry strategies to compete with actual celebrities, and thereby become assimilated to the culture industry machine while still serving as its consumers. We become both the subject and object of the culture industry, depleted on all sides. Critical distance itself vanishes along with the very possibility to imagine such a thing. Instead a free-floating insecurity attaches to everyone -- the scrutiny that elevates celebrities, even the minor celebrities photographed, now catches us in its glare and shrinks us to further insignificance. Carles illustrates this by pointing the the figures in the periphery: "(Wonder if the latinos in the back realize that they are part of a larger meme)." They have no choice; they are caught in the process of celebrity unwillingly, as we all are now. He notes that this can lead to an all-encompassing paranoia about the nature of reality itself. "It’s like everything was just made to be blogged about." Reality ceases to confirm itself until it is mediated by a channel of the culture industry.

But at the same time, the close proximity of celebrity need not register as only a threat. It need not simply destroy the structuring separation between celebrity and quotidian life, rendering each without a stable definition. Instead, it can put us in touch with immensity. As Bachelard explained in The Poetics of Space, "Since immense is not an object, a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize in ourselves the pure being of pure imagination." Carles suggests that something like this happens when celebrities interject themselves into our lives at the intimate level. "Feels ‘almost surreal’ that two indie superstars would hang out and do ‘normal things’ like ride rollercoasters, eat funnel cakes, and ‘gawk’ at a freak show full of carnies." The world dissolves into possibility -- the ordinary takes on a new sparkle of surreality; the funnel cake, for example, becomes an objective correlative for a supernal world of sensual beauty. The immensity of the rollercoaster, of the fame of those riding it -- our ability to contemplate such images without having to depart from the quotidian elevates the quotidian to the realm of the supernal. Carles quietly extends the optimistic possibility that there has taken place a transfiguration of the commonplace in our very midst, mediated by the most humble and unlikely media sources -- indie meme generators.

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11 July 2009: "Carles Retires the old era of ‘MEMORABLE POSTS’ in order to save his blog brand."

This post is about the death of oral tradition. At first, the possibility that Carles was responding to our humble attempt here to explain the various implications of his writings was considered, with Carles seeking to seize control of the discourse around his ideas by adding his own meta-analysis, or as he calls it, "‘directorz commentary’. By explaining what he was trying to communicate after the fact, he doesn't invalidate the earlier impressions he conveyed but instead fashions a palimpsest that complicates and muddles the picture further, achieving more deeply ambiguous effects. If one were to take the advice Carles offers ironically about his Wes Anderson post -- "Feel like if I were some internet bro visiting HRO for the first time wondering what this site is all about, I would click on that link, and then I would sort of ‘get’ the site more" -- one would in fact become even more confused about the nature and substance of Carles's thought. One might even come to the nihilistic conclusion that there is nothing to "'get'". This appears to be a philosophical comment on the obfuscatory nature of all commentary, a gloss on the hopeless contradictions involved in glossing.

But as usual, Carles is playing a deeper game. In Orality and Literature, Walter J. Ong offers a psychological portrait of the pre-literate mind, of the different mental makeup of those living amidst an oral tradition, without writing. Without the written word as crutch, they must rely on formulas and mnemonics to preserve knowledge, as well as perpetual dialogue, since conversation is more likely to keep knowledge alive and prompt the development of ideas without a text to refer back to. Carles, in rehashing his posts, enacts a procedure unavailable to those in an oral culture, yet he discovers his own formulaic tendencies that as a member of a chirographic culture, he should have transcended. His ability to produce written texts has seemingly enriched the substance of his life, but at the same time it seems to have preserved in a state of atavistic ignorance: "While you are grateful that you accumulated ‘meaningful life experience’, you realize that your ‘view on life’ was warped+retarded."

And despite the opportunity to produce his texts self-referentially, without the need for an interlocutor, he discovers his own dependency on his commenters, realizing that some of his writings were produced entirely to provoke a sheer volume of response rather than a depth of response. Carles here recognizes that his ability to produce texts in a public forum has led him to reject his interiority. Subjectivity itself is at stake in the retrospective review of what one has produced for cultural consumption. "R u ashamed of the person who u used 2 b?" Carles asks, teasing us with the implication that shame has become the new cultural product par excellence, thanks to technological developments in our obsessively self-regarding culture.

In oral cultures, self-revelation of this kind was virtually impossible. As Ong explains, "Self-analysis requires a certain demolition of situational thinking" -- the predominant cognitive mode of oral cultures. "It calls for isolation of the self, around which the entire lived world swirls for each person, removal of the center of every situation from that situation enough to allow the center, the self, to be examined and described." Carles appears to be nostalgic for the oral culture, for the time where the very concept of personal identity remained undeveloped, and the idea of self-branding was utterly unthinkable. Instead, Carles finds himself caught in the trap of reflexivity, writing about his own writing.

7 July 2009: "Will a Helvetty tatty improve my personal brand?"

This post is about the triumph of form over content. By focusing on the non-transparency of fonts, Carles is concerned about various ways in which the medium can preclude the message, how form itself becomes discursive and competes with the ostensible message it was intended to simply contain and convey.

Fonts, once invisible to the average reader, have become palpable conduits of emotional valence as digital word processing has taught people from outside of the world of graphic design and print shops about the possibilities inherent in font selection. The result is that it is harder to access the words themselves free of distorting context, or rather, the context framing the message of the words themselves has been further complicated by technology that might have reasonably promised to streamline communications rather than muddle them. That Carles discusses this in the context of tattoos only amplifies the pathos -- even when paper is replaced by human skin, there is no guarantee that there will be no slippage of meaning, that the selected text will not mean something other than what is hoped due to contextual cues of which the author of the message is entirely unaware. We can't embody our ideas, which remain at several removes from our attempts to express them and retain an autonomy that we wish to deny them. Hence Carles, in his graphic arts character, admits that he is frustrated by the gap between being and creating: "I am interested in letting the world know what I’m all about, not only as a human, but also as a designer." Would that he could express his humanity through his design praxis, but the intrusion of form has foiled such a convenient identity between the two.

Rather than conquer alienation by fusing practice and theory, content and form, we are reduced to inane questions that intimate the loss of all possible meaning in form: "Do yall have a fave font that u would want to chill on ur body for the rest of ur life?" For the duration of our being, we are limited to such decisions, reduced to hosts for the design imperatives that have been loosed upon the social world, carriers for memes in the form of recognizable, taxonomized media. Thus Carles wonders if it is worth the trouble to tattoo anything but the name of the font in the font he has chosen to mark himself with. "Wonder if I should write the actual font name, or possibly something else sweet, like a Dave Matthews Band lyric." Nothing, Carles fears, can transcend that level of triviality.

With such a paucity of potential for expression, and with the relentless pressure to express ourselves uniquely, Carles knows something is about to blow: "Just trying 2 be an individual. Might just let the world know that I ‘h8′ America." Here he condenses the argument of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer into two sentences. Thwarted efforts at individuality produce a restless, reactionary populace ripe for exploitation by whatever dime-store fascist happens into the public eye.

6 June 2009: "I want to reconnect with my country."

This post is about the red holidays of genius. Carles is obviously composing in this entry an homage to Italian avant-gardist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose manifestos in the early 20th century called for a cleansing war to brace the modernist generation for the new world they inherited. With the industrial revolution trivializing human work and human subjectivity, the futurists sought to restaor dignity to man through a vigorous embrace of technology and a thorough rejection of pre-industrial traditions. Marinetti declared, "We Futurists, who for over two years, scorned by the Lame and Paralyzed, have glorified the love of danger and violence, praised patriotism and war, the hygiene of the world, are happy to finally experience this great Futurist hour of Italy."

Carles tries his best to emulate this breathless rhetoric: "This 4th of July, I realized that I want America to go to war soon, so that I am not part of a generation defined by the internet + 9/11 + ’social networks.’ I want 2 die fighting in the Final_War_of_Mankind. This will be our legacy." But curiously, rather than embrace the new possibilities afforded by technology, Carles seeks a cleansing war to efface them. War, in Carles's pointed formulation, rather than sweeping away the dessicated past, will forestall the coming of the future, will do away with our being intimately defined by the digital technology that does so much to shape us. But is war always the systematic implementation of the most advanced technology? Can a total war be atavistic? Carles wishes he were in a country that would not face this dilemma: "Sorta wish I lived in Iran, or possibly a ’shitty South American country’ where some sort of revolution/Civil War was happening. Feels like I would have ‘a real reason’ 2 use twitter, like to organize people for protests." Under such conditions, technology could still be embraced, but in conditions of hegemonic dominance, the citizenry are too insulated from the conventional cleansing force of war, which thus must be directed against itself. When Carles calls for war, he calls for a bloodthirsty civil war in which we joyously destroy ourselves.

Carles notes that, unlike liberals, "I feel different from ‘my generation’ because I ‘get’ that America is ‘bad ass.’" He tests the possibility of a cross-generational alliance, fitting with his posited rejection of digitalization, in which he would seek to strike at the heart of the hipsters he so loves to mock and challenge. He complains:

I just want to fight in a war, and kill a foreigner. I want to take control of my life, and prove to this land that I was born in that I deserve to be a part of it. I don’t want to stand around indie rock festivals for the rest of my life.

Notice how the "foreigner" that he wants to kill quickly transmogrifies into the image of his blase contemporaries "standing around at indie rock festivals." Is Carles suggesting that these become grotesque carnivals of gladiatorial combat and mercilessness? What would allow Carles to feel he "deserves" to be regarded as different from those he sees at such events? Who would he have to kill? This is the terrifying question he asks us to consider in contemplating the perplexities of modern youth identity.

5 July 2009: "Listening to Spoon, reflecting on my indie past…"

This post is about the base-superstructure theory. Or to be more precise, about whether aesthetic tastes are determined by socioeconomic forces, or whether they maintain a degree of autonomy. Carles uses the example of a small-to-middling exponent of pop culture, the band Spoon, to illustrate the ways in which terrain of cultural significance is demarcated, and how that map is perpetually in the process of being redrawn. As Raymond Williams noted in his epochal study Marxism and Literature: "While a particular stage of 'real social existence' or of 'relations of production' or of a 'mode of production' can be discovered and made precise by analysis, it is never, as a body of activities, either uniform or static." That is to say, Carles's governing concepts of "alt" and "mainstream" are not merely reducible to certain a priori universal categories, but instead respond to shifts in the emergant, dominant and residual cultures. The band Spoon is an example of residual culture morphing itself into something emergent at a personal level for Carles:

For a while, I think I would have called people who like Spoon ‘entry level alts’, or possibly ‘mainstreamers who like maltstream products’, but now I think I will just start listening to songs like this, and reflecting on my past. Just don’t have enough time on this Earth to h8 on people just because they like bands that a product that ‘can appeal 2 any 1.’

The songs by this band in and of themselves have little significance outside of whether or not they can be used to include or exclude those who prefer to listen to them -- preferences themselves formed in anticipation of such exclusions and inclusions. The sensual qualities of the music, Carles suggests, are lost in this criss-cross of social strategizing. His tentative solution? Solipsism, using the music as a way of sharpening his focus on his own past rather than on other people and the degree to which he might feel compelled to be jealous of their cultural capital, of their having become more "alt" -- his term for the integrity pertaining to what be termed "social entrepreneurs," those who make a business of elaborating their personality as a brand of broader influence. Carles may have felt obliged to "h8 on" such people because they threaten to devalue the concept of cultural resistance and render it impotent, another hollow pose or pretense. But with this particular rumination, he is prepared to take an introspective turn, develop potential internal resources for continuing the struggle. He remarks, in a self-reflective gesture, "Think I’ve really grown up a lot, and my taste has really evolved into something very authentic." Maturity, he suspects, may be a matter of rejecting the positional paradigms of pop-cultural capital and plumbing the depths instead of one's own experience, the opportunities it had presented for genuine self-discovery, that is, of a self that is not contextually determined by the matrix of social relationships and charisma competitions.

2 July 2009: "Should I regret my bloghouse era tattoo?"

This post is about recursivity. Tattoo removal is a bit of an obvious metaphor for Carles, referring to the legacy of history and the impact of irreversible decisions. Time cannot be reversed, decisions can not be unmade. A tattoo renders a moment's choice into a space on the body, that is, time becomes space written on the body. Self-injury transformed into art; or art reduced to self-injury. The soul as logo; the body as a billboard. Carles asks, "R u ashamed of the person who u used 2 b?" The answer is moot. Shame is structured by our understanding of being in time, our thing-ness.

But as Wittgenstein writes, "We picture facts to ourselves. A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs." The relation to tattooing is self-evident. But a picture cannot "depict its pictorial form" -- the only thing you can't get a tattoo of is a tattoo. Therefore the only tattoo one can't be ashamed of would be a tattoo of a tattoo, a meta-tattoo. A tattoo of a religious symbol, as Carles illustrates here, doesn't qualify. Religion itself is protection from shame; it can't be represented in a logical picture and branded on the skin in a form that doesn't at once reduce it and make it perishable, removable; yet without becoming a brand it fails to fulfill the function of anchoring the self publicly. Thus this double-edged statement: "Can’t believe I am ‘just another bro with a cross tattoo’ even though I don’t even really ‘get’ God." You don't possess religiosity, don't assume the god-like powers over time and space, simply by visibly affiliating oneself with the iconography of the deity. Nothing about tattooing allows one to understand God, even though it purports to assume some of the deity's apocalyptic power of making irrevocable decisions, of marking indelible signs. When we presume to make dread decisions of such finality, we invite shame and regret; we lack the clarity to see through to forever and after. Tattoos are sad signs of our all too fallible nature; and as we age and the images fade, the symboliize the folly of our youth and the inevitability of our death. When Carles asks, "Are my glory days behind me?" he really says, you shall never know glory.

1 July 2009: "Do music festivals help u connect with ‘the human spirit’?"

This post is about Malthus. Its title has a reference to geist or spirit, which may prompt some of Carles's interpreters to read this post in light of Hegel and his magisterial Phänomonogie des Geistes, which traces the destiny of the human spirit as history unfolds itself. And such an interpretation would not be strictly wrong or misguided. That dimension is definitely present, part of the palimpsest of meaning Carles has designed for his disciples. But in this exegete's view, Carles's main concern is with the potential but largely discredited threat of overpopulation most memorably advanced by Malthus in the 18th century. Malthus suspected human beings would run out of food, but Carles, confronted by the sheer mass of humanity attracted to entertainment-industry spectacles, is worried we will run out of something even more scarce: human sympathy.

Feel ‘overwhelmed’ to imagine a ‘live music experience’ with s000 many ppl. Wonder if I really want to ‘rally around music’ and ‘bask in the human spirit’ in that type of environment.

Mass production of "art", Carles suspects, leads to a mass diminishing of spirit, with crowds snuffing out the possibility of a genuine aesthetic experience. The human spirit suffocates in such close quarters, the dialectic has no room to move.

Carles makes an obligatory nod toward Malthusianism -- "Seems like an event that would ‘raise enough money’ to ‘end hunger’" -- reminding us that it remains difficult to conceive of crowds without conjuring the specter of famine. And he evokes the supposed rebuttal to Malthus, the belief that economic growth can trump apparent ecological limitations.

But his main concern is with the proletarianization the inevitably results wherever there is huddled masses. He fears that memes and trends are not being used as a debased or counterfeit currency to dupe unattached youths into thankless labor, channeling them toward a future of having no future. He reports that the music festival actually functions as a kind of recruiting venture for unpaid unskilled labor:

I wonder if a company could offer their workforce non-monetary ‘compensation’ for an entire fiscal year. Like a company that ‘pays workers’ with ‘kewl bands performing’/meaningful experiences, instead of ‘having a payroll.’ Feel like there is a ‘genre of people’ who would do that, as long as you gave them a tent and a community shower, or something.

That genre of people that works for subsistence wages without the opportunity for capital accumulation are known as proletarians, and they have nothing to lose but their chains.

So music festivals reveal themselves as postmodern slums for the slave laborers of the future. Carles has a modest proposal: "Feel like possibly building some sort of music festival that incorporates ‘actual slums.’... What if we had some sort of ’super authentic’ music festival in ’slums’...?" This would streamline the whole process of turning the future into a cashless economy where consumer-drones toil to recycle their own waste products for the privilege of being recognized as authentic.