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.