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.