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.
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