24 August 2009: "The Carlesfork 2000 (HRO2K: A List of the best mp3s ever burned)."

This post is about self-consuming rhetoric. Here I would like to call attention to a particular rhetorical trope of which Carles is fond: his tendency to combine the subjunctive, conditional, and imperative moods in single statements such as this: "It seems like I really just need to let the world know ‘what’s up’ and sort everything out." The "it seems like" negates the "really" and the combination of these two severely qualify the intention expressed in the predicate, forcing us to interrogate the possibility that any subject position can be "really" invested with the certainty necessary to "sort everything out." What Carles wants us to recognize is the fantasy element inherent in every command, in every will to power, that always threatens to bury the specific content of that wish. What we "really" want is always already only "seems like" it is so. A radical contingency haunts our expression; every attempt is overhung with the shadow of its own negation, its own admission of its limits, its incorporation of fictional wish-fulfillment elements, even when the wish so deeply held is to purge all utterances of dreamy falsity.

Hence the deliberately ludicrous, ludic nature of the list Carles proposes, for which he concocts a series of messianic promises, that his list of songs will save the record industry, individuality, local integrity, the world, etc. "I am not sure how to confidently state that I am ‘100% certain’ that my list is a compilation of the truly best songs ever created." Confidence always negates itself rhetorically -- the more emphatically it is expressed, the more likely the hollowness of its boasts will be evident. In a twist familiar to us from psychoanalysis, certainty always manifests itself as its opposite; a kind of projection occurs which reveals our certainty eroding itself, and our deep urge to enlist others in supporting the claims we have dared to make.

The problem is that every utterance we make has such sotieric intensity, not just our attempt to make lists of the best things the world has to offer in a particular category. When Carles declares, "We can’t be afraid to embrace social and historical responsibilities," he refers not to the compilation of spurious lists but to our continual skepticism of such lists and the static portrayal of the world they manifest. Our responsibility, at this unique moment in time in terms of media reach and dissemination, is to resist definition and reject identity of the puny sort that once held sway over youth: "We must define ourselves by defining the best music because mp3s define who u r [via iPod]." Devices like the iPood have sown the seeds of their own destruction; we listen to become not who we are but to destroy and dissolve the notion of self in an endless series of transformation, rewriting the media drives over and over again until the log of what we have consumed becomes inscrutable.

Carles concludes with a list of self-negating statements:

‘I honestly believe I have the best taste in music in the world.’
-every1

‘I just like to enjoy music without judging it or thinking about why I like it 2 much.’
-every1 trying 2 pretend they are not an ass hole

‘Have u heard of Animal Collective?’
-some bro

‘Have u heard of of Daughtry?’
-a real bro

‘Do u like my leather wrist band?’
-Daughtry when he goes home for Thanks giving

‘What r u having for lunch?’
-people in the office, right before 12 noon

‘I just brought my lunch.’
-office worker who doesn’t want to eat lunch in a group setting with sad coworkers

‘I save a lot of money by bringing my lunch every day.’
-some ass hole who brings his/her lunch every day

‘What’s ur favourite band?’
-trying to ‘connect’ with some1

‘______________’ (disappointing answer that leaves u feeling sad about what ‘real people’ listen to)
-a real person being realer than u will ever be

‘i have something 2 say.’
-a person who starts a lil blog site

‘I am interesting’
-every1

‘I am boring.’
-depressed person/person trying to ’seem interesting’ by ’saying they are boring.’

All of these statements are beyond true and false. The highlight the dichotomies that Carles is encouraging us to regard as yesterday's truths, now become irrelevant to the list-free future. All future sets are to be infinite.

25 August 2009: "Is it still authentic to be ‘alt’?"

This post is about the world as will. Carles is interested in investigating the possibilities for intersubjectivity opened up by new communication technologies. He begins with a syllogism for our times:

I am the SleepyHeadBro.
This bro is me.
This is my youtube presence.

Online sharing is in the porcess of reaching its logical endpoint, in which identities become collective, and watching/consuming another's youtube presence becomes equivalent with becoming that presence. The technological miracle of transubstantiation takes place via hosts (IP hosts) that connect us up to the great cloud computers. Our displaced identities cannot be fixed in any particular place, disembodied we emanate and manifest in many servers at once; online we are legion. Naturally our boundaries dissolve -- we become what we regard on our screens, that with which we interact.

The consequence is that sociological labels or subcultural identifications shift perpetually in meaning, become unstable and uncertain, verge on meaningless: "Sometimes I get the feeling that ‘being alt’ is just some sort of game," Carles notes. The free play among the endless chain of signifiers means that "alt" can ultimately mean anything; the acceleration of the cycling of meaning online means that it means everything at once.

19 August 2009: "Seems like nothing relevant is happening."

This post is about media saturation. Carles stares into the void that is at once a surfeit. Too many pseudo-events is tantamount to no events at all, just as a Babel of tongues talking all at once resolves itself as incomprehensible static. The problem worsens when we situate ourselves at the eye of the storm and expect the flow of events to dance centripetally around us -- when everything must appear "relevant" to us personally or else it seems not to occur at all.

Of course, Carles is making a point about interpellated subjectivity at the point of ideological egress. We are constituted as a self through the ways in which hypermediatated events call out to us, seem to predict our interest and gratify it, fashion us with a consciousness that is prone to boredom to the same degree to which it is immediately engaged by trivia. In this sense, what is "relevant" is that which makes us feel as though we exist: "Maybe I am losing touch with ‘the world’" Carles worries, precisely at the moment as he becomes aware of events qua events, as something he should be paying attention to instead of merely being entertained by -- the cutting edge of the much-remarked-upon interactivity enabled by internet technology. Carles' ironic comment turns on the insight that we are already entirely severed from the world and can't "touch" it -- it comes to us already saturated with commentary and interpretation, mediated and appropriated to serve various ends and to serve our own subjectification. We can't be in touch with the world and "be" at the same time.

Carles posits an escape from mediation, and the emptiness it engenders as it interpellates us (we become aware of a self that can be bored and are thereby consumed by boredom), through drugs and stupor. This annihilation of self can only be temporary however -- the next post will be written, the pool of pseudoevents and trivial information will continue to be filled by those who are already fed up with it all. So when Carles suggests "Maybe it’s time 2 move on" he is only signaling his awareness that there's nowhere else to go.

18 August 2009: "The Ruralt."

This post is about exurban soteriology. Here, in a sort of preemptive phenomenological strike, Carles simultaneously defines a redemptive archetype for a future age and dismantles it with ironic ridicule, perhaps hoping to prevent its emergence, which would perpetuate the city-country stereotypes at a time when our environmental crises call for a sublation of this shopworn and counterproductive dichotomy. The false conflict between those rurals with a purity of intention and jaded citified exploiters masks the actual sources of exploitation, in capital and property itself, regardless of where it is situated.

Carles's ploy here is to indicate that a different map for the dissemination of ideology is needed; no more does it filter out from cities only to return warped and denatured and disavowed in its rustic and bumpkinized iterations. "One day I will leave my home in rural America. I will move to the city. I would even be willing to move to suburbia if there are more people who ‘get’ me." But this figure is not trapped by geography. "Did you know that only 13% of ruralts escape from their rural community?' Carles writes mockingly, aware that freedom from travel restrictions doesn't guarantee mobility. He adds, "40% of ruralts end up settling for ‘being a homosexual who works at an outlet mall.’" That is to say, many of them invert the motivations that might naturally be attributed. The ruralt is not misunderstood but understood too well; he seeks a place to go where his capacity to baffle will have an appreciative audience. At the "outlet mall," where what is left over culturally goes to be repurposed and disseminated; where the urban and the exurban meet to facilitate retail exchange. The ruralt figure, it turns out, is not trying to escape so much as get imprisoned, locked behind the iron bars of the judging eyes of peers.

Instead of a cycles of escape and return, we must deconstruct that myth of personal transformation through flight by refiguring it as stark contradiction: "No 1 ever leaves this town (I will leave this town)." Situated synchronically rather than diachroncally, the idea of exurban redemption becomes impossible, absurd.

The absurdity of the rehabilitated rustic then can be used to discredit the escape fantasies of environmentally conscious urban types -- the localvores and home-school advocates who seek to elude the ideological system in which they are embedded (or even constituted or as Althusser would say interpellated) or find its interstices. When the exurbs are "alt" there are no margins to which to flee; instead the hipster flight from urbanity becomes a epidemiological phenomenon, spreading the virus of identity-mongering and vertiginous self-consciousness. Carles notes: "In the end, I think we learn that we are all human 2gether after all, and it doesn’t matter where u live/come from." Only now "being human" and self-aware has become "being hipster" and being self-involved.

17 August 2009: "How do u deal with ur parents being super rich?"

This post is about the valorization of social capital. In The Philosophy of Money sociologist Georg Simmel writes that "Money is the reification of the general form of existence according to which things derive their significance from their relationship to each other." Carles poses this same premise as a false either/or construct: "do u think that ‘money’ is ‘bullshit’ or ‘what makes the world go round’?" Of course, it is both at once. Money is neither true nor false as an objective substance, but its motion in exchanges, which arbitrate fairness and economic justice in the key of market morality, makes the world go round and constitute the contours of what will register as falsity, as irrationality, as "bullshit".

In other words money decenters subjectivity and symbolizes and facilitates radical uncertainty and undecidabiliy. Hence, it renders impossible a stable concept of normality, prompting Carles to draw an implicit connection between wealth and uncertain identity, the crisis of a upper class child assessing the stochastic probabilities involved in her desire to "seem like a ‘normal kid.’" Inherent to an open class society, as Veblen most memorably demonstrated, is the threat of social mobility and its capability for disrupting expectations pegged to family background. This necessitates an endless of display of status using an ever-changing set of representative symbols to prevent their being appropriated and devalued. As Marx's dynamic analysis of capitalism teaches us, capital -- even social capital -- must be in motion to manifest value and valorize itself. This means that there is always a "new normal" shaping itself at the various levels of society, and these definitions are in suppressed but palpable dialectical tension. "R u ‘rich’?" may seem a straightforward question, but it can permit of no answer and must remain rhetorical unless altered into the question, "Are you richer than X, and in terms of Y?"

Carles illustrates this by having his would-be normal teen declare, in reference to the other children whose acceptance she seeks, "I have problems that they can’t even relate to." This is at once true and more than true. They can't relate to the problems fully even though they are simply alternate manifestations of the same problems all youths face in fashioning an identity within a shifting matrix of class relations. They must appear incomprehensible to fulfill their differentiating function, the very flight from the "normality" that the rich girl would at the same time like to pursue. Caught in the irreconcilable contradictions of aspiring to a normative egalitarian personality within a dramatically unequal society -- the unique outcome of the late capitalist weltanschauung -- the rich girl must balance the benefits beholden to her station with the the alienation that comes from vampiric exploitation of the lower orders. As Carles concludes, with classic understatement: "It’s hard dealing with social perception and class issues." The identity must always change to valorize the social capital inherent within it, yet this valorization only allows the identity as measured on the ladder/continuum of classes to remain the same. The girl in Carles's illustrative philosophical homily is doomed to this fate: She flies in the family jet only to arrive from whence she departed.

10 August 2009: "Carles Presents ‘IAmCarles.com’"

This post is about propaganda. Design is propaganda for the object, for materiality as such, and for the predominance of the material over the spiritual, positing ideality as a quality of materiality rather than the salvation from it. Carles, by posing as a budding designer, proclaims a radically materialist philosophy that denies transcendence as an ideal.

I believe that we can meaningfully impact the world by the not only the things that we own, but also the clothes that we wear. We live in a beautiful society which encourages tiered self-expression depending on your income. You can truly show the world who you are, and where you ‘fit in’ with society.

To borrow a phrase commonly abused in the fashion press, immanence is the new black. Here Carles takes decentered subjectivity to its logical commercial endpoint, given its current situatedness within a late capitalist construct. The psychological underpinnings that once ushered in the transition to atomized possessive individualism have become unmoored; individualism is collapsing under the weight of globalization, and the more flexible branded self -- which is duplicatable while retaining an aura of unique particularity -- has replaced the idea of a coherent unified self. Hence identity is a brand, and a brand is identity, in a perfect tautology for the times: "I am Carles is a lifestyle brand, created by Carles." Being is the same as branding. Creating the self as brand is synonymous with having the self, with inhabiting the self.

The anomie and isolation inherent to virulent individualism, Carles proclaims, will be solved by a new commitment to lifestyle branding: "Just doing your best to ‘preserve/strengthen ur brand’ without ‘losing authenticity.’ It means not isolating ppl." A brand self is emptied out, eradicating the emotional problems brought on by depth psychology: "Do u feel alone? The IAMCARLES.com brand is attempting to be similar to the HIPSTERRUNOFF.com brand. It wants u 2 feel like it ‘gets’ u." Reduced to the superficial level of signals, we will all be easy to "get" -- the shared language of brands is potentially less heteroglossic than vernacular speech.

Speech is reduced to slogans and taglines, a point Carles emphasizes by emblazoning his slogan "R U CARLES? //// I AM CARLES?" -- which stresses the way brands resolve and unify individuals into a single concept -- repeatedly, in several different colors. Impoverished language and repetition deprives the self of those dark corners in which to pout and languish existentially. Instead, faces turned bravely toward the soon, the army of Carleses will march toward the new dawn...

9 August 2009: "Do animals have rights, or should we just eat them all?"

This post is about ethnocentrism. Not one to monkey around, as it were, with tallying up the greatest good for the greatest number, Carles demonstrates his skepticism of Animal Liberation author and noted utilitarian Peter Singer in this excursus, which looks at problems of nutrition from a decidedly post-scarcity perspective while maintaining a Malthusian wariness about the political abuse of the available food supply.

He begins with the essential anthropological question: what is pure and impure? What is fit for human culture? To put it in Levi-Strauss's terms, what is raw and cooked? What aspects of the natural world should we be forbidden from "cooking"? Or teleologically speaking, should every effort be made to assimilate the natural world to human culture eventually, as a fulfillment of a divine destiny or a realization of the Idea? Or is the desire to "cook" everything a sign of consumerism gone amok? "Sometimes I feel bored with all of the eating options available in America," Carles declares, throwing down the gauntlet, daring us to resolve the radical undecidability of the statement. A great deal hinges on the interpretation of boredom in this context, whether it betokens a justifiable exhaustion with the ready-at-hand, or if it indicates a psychological deficiency. And of course, there is an implicit interrogation of globalization in the implication that American mores should converge with those of other nations. Ethnocentrism and an ethics of animal welfare square off, threatening a contradiction in the common-run progressive's to-do list. This is why, in a classic Carlesian understatement, "It seems weird to think that nonAmerican countries eat dogs and cats."

In parsing an image of a feline barbecue, Carles states,

This picture sorta makes me feel ‘disturbed.’ These things that mean so much to American families can mean so little to AZNs. Wonder if they look at us, and think we are ‘retarded’ 4 pretending that these animals deserve to be treated like ’spoiled humans.’

Though he makes a passing joke about geographical dislocation -- "Can’t believe dogs + cats have been domesticated to the point where I ‘don’t even know where they come from,’" as if this aporia warrants treating them like stateless refugees without rights -- what is actually at stake is the definition of humanity itself, or rather what it means to be human/humane -- if we exclude domestic animals from the category, in its broadest conception, then should we, by the same logic, also bar the mentally disabled? In Carles's usage, too, to be "retarded" is at once a failure to transcend ethnocentrism and also a kind of generalized slowness, a temporal trap that produces "spoiled humans" whose responses to stimuli are always too late to be anything other than ambiguous.

But Carles also suspects that the act of will necessary to disregard strongly embedded taboos stems from frustrated fantasies of immortality: "Sorta just want 2 stay alive 4ever," he remarks wittily, after speculating on the the connections between imagining eating a domestic animal and imagining oneself as a character in a popular science-fiction film, in this instance, The Matrix. Such fantasies take on a Taoist cast when Carles proclaims a reduction of the many to the Two, with hints that the Two may be unified in a undifferentiated wholeness. "feel like maybe I should think that ‘all animals are the same’, including cows, pigs, fish, chickens, and turkeys (stuff that ppl eat every day)." First all the many different species are harmonized into one master category, which is destined for absorption by the other category, the human, via the digestive tract and the alimentary canal.

This, then, is Carles's answer to the question posed in the title -- we should eat all the animals, that is, absorb them into our consciousness as part of a radical spiritual procedure to attain oneness.

6 August 2009: "Peace,"

This post is about syncretism. Carles composes an ironic encomium to Woodstock in order to problematize its organizing principle, that musical taste can somehow correspond with a suppression of violence. "I remember when ppl used to unite around ‘the best music in the world’ instead of getting ‘all divided’ abt it," he writes, mockingly positing the turbulent late 1960s as a golden age of togetherness. From the monolithic viewpoint of youth culture there was a cultural consensus in favor of marijuana-fogged mediocrity in pop music, and this was idealistically misrecognized as an artistic renaissance that would fuse aesthetics with progressive political goals, the pacifistic sublimation of war and capitulation to the totalitarians masquerading as socialists foremost among them. Instead youthful pacifism was transformed into consumerist passive-ism, and a generation learned to associate lifestyle branding as a sufficient surrogate for a civil society and individual liberty.

As Carles is all too aware, musical taste is the field on which violence among the self-conscious creative class is currently conducted, internalizing a struggle to the cohort that was once fought between generations, and distracting them from actual political engagement. "There really is more to life than ‘peace’, ‘love’, and ‘music’, and they don’t really have much 2 do with 1 another," he correctly notes. They shouldn't be fused in a falsifying synthesis that undermines the accomplishment of any of them. It is as false, Carles suggests, as the Bolshevik slogan upon which it is based: "Peace, Bread, Land." And so Carles subtly and somewhat surprisingly aligns himself with the right wing in the foundational split among the young Hegelians in the 1840s. He would rather ascribe a religious significance to the traditions concretized in the state than champion the dissolution of those ideals into an anarchic mob, as one may readily witness at any contemporary music festival, no matter how putatively progressive or, alternatively, mired in corporate sponsorship.

Efforts to celebrate the allegedly univocal music festivals of the past are nostalgic exercises in false hegemony. Carles declares: "It seems like people honor them as ‘being authentic’ but they seem ‘krappy’ 2 me." Festivals, then as now, merged incompatible cultural elements together in a bewildering amalgam that passed for coherence, modeling how the unified self-concept would come under pressure to disintegrate into disparate channels that mimicked the variety of entertainment channels being marketed to it, all while the presumption that this entropic decay was progress to a more-perfect union was upheld. Better, Carles explains, to regard meaning as a "gimmick", a spectral emanation from the genre-fication of popular culture and the niche-ification of reflexivity. Rather than trap oneself in the conundrum of competitive "specialness" --a contest for the purity of the ego -- one should resist the syncretic impulse for an embrace of unsublated free play: "In order to feel special, u must make 99.9% of the world feel unspecial. I am okay with the way things are 2day." I'm kay, you're okay, Carles is okay.

5 August 2009: "Trying 2 understand what is ‘racism’ and what is ‘challenging the way that ppl think abt culture.’"

This post is about idealism. Carles interrogates whether a concern with the cultural significance of race impedes the appreciation and creation of art rather than facilitating it, as been the hegemonic assumption in the post-Pop contemporary art world at least since the 1990 Whitney Biennial. "Just want racial issues to go away so that I can enjoy ‘art,’" Carles declares in his pseudo-racist character -- in philosophical blackface as it were.

Still, his assumption of this mask makes it hard to decipher the intent behind seemingly innocuous utterances as "It really made me think," which Carles states in regard to the video he subjects to analysis in the post. How to read that really? Is it a reference to the ontological status of race as a category imminent in things as such? Is it an ironic qualifier suggesting that such cultural interventions as this video are inherently compromised by their origin in the milieu they seek to correct and thereby discourage rather than prompt proper dialectical thought? Or alternatively, is it an earnest testimony to the success of said intervention? Is it a reference to the concrete material nature of thought? The latter seems most likely, in this interpreter's opinion.

Thus the entire post must be understood as an exercise in materialist critique, with racism serving symbolically as a representation of a violated ideal, as an example of the ways in which ideal forms are actually subject to contamination and can stabilize objectionable social content, providing the metaphysical excuse for reactionary counterattacks on progressive political movements. Hence the ironic statement "Sorta just wish I could watch vintage ‘racist memes’ and grin without thinking 2 much abt what they ‘mean’" must be understood as an injunction to understand "vintage" racism as continuous and coterminous with its critique, forming two sides of the same coin, which Carles would like to see pitched in the wishing well with all the other unrealistic fantasies about the natural harmony of beings and nations. Idealized forms enshrine and revere conflict, domination, hierarchy and intolerance. Critique in terms of ideals repeats these mistakes in reverse form, as if seen in a convex mirror held upside-down.

There are only moments of power inflected materially by race, which coheres as a concept only after such moments coalesce into a pattern: This provokes Carles to declare "Not sure what I am allowed to ‘laugh at’, ‘laugh with’, and ‘embrace as part of black culture.’" The choice is not insignificant or irrelevant, as these involuntary responses serve as a bodily instance of race's material substance. The enduring fact of race coheres not primarily in the pigment of one's skin but in the mirth of others' cruel laughter.

3 August 2009: "Is ‘The Pope’ the next relevant buzz band?"

This post is about Vatican II. A mirthful Carles has playful fun at the Roman Cathlic Church's expense, gently mocking its efforts to recapture some of the market share, as it were, it has lost in the field of Christianity. Of course, compromises that embrace commercial methods seem to undermine the spiritual message of the Church. "Feel kinda afraid that the Catholic Church will ‘try 2 hard’ 2 sell records, and the church will turn into a ‘business’ instead of a place of worshiping the Lord." This invites satiric diatribes such as this, that rhetorically equate faith with enthusiasm for a pop-cultural trend: "The Popes will had ‘mad passion’ about God, and appeal to people who are ‘hella down’ with being Catholic + miscellaneous Christian themes." Marketing efforts for the Church symbolically reduce the transcendence of its message, meaning the Pope, in the marketplace of ideas, has become the equivalent of

* Feist
* Will Smith
* Eminem
* Fergie
* Black Eyed Peas
* Gwen Stefani
* Enrique Iglesias
* Jimmy Eat Worlds
* The Gaga Ladies
* Limp Bizkit
* Nelly Furtada
* Papa Roach
* Pussie Cat Dolls
* u2
* =w=
* Yeah Yes Yeas

This changes the evaluative criteria for spiritual tenets to those that govern cultural ephemera. While this brings the religion in line with the prevailing modes of verification in a consumer society, it threatens to trivialize the metaphysical postulates and make them into the equivalent of taglines or slogans. It some ways, this heralds a return to the pre-Reformation era, where the selling of papal indulgences -- the pop songs of their era? -- firmly planted the Catholic church in the commercial business nexus. Updating eternal truths to make them more palatable for a secular age is always conceptually dubious, as the mixed results of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church's most recent effort to modernize, convincingly demonstrate. Was the council merely an alibi for a recommercialization of the Church? Is modern piety so thoroughly infused with the discourse of consumerism that such a transformation is well-nigh inevitable?

The underlying question Carles is posing is whether spiritual concepts can be transmitted as memes, via the conduits of pop cultural diffusion, or whether the medium becomes the spiritual message -- transforming the Church's message of redemption to a very different sort of axiology: that one should always endeavor to participate in the zeitgeist. Of course, this strategy did work quite well for the Church in the Middle Ages, but it had a tight grip over the nascent media forms and modes of entertainment in that epoch.

But perhaps more relevant to Carles's readers is the T.S. Eliot-like injunction to reinvigorate culture with a return to Catholic traditions: "Just yearning for ‘more’ out of music," he remarks, confessing the arid emptiness of what is currently offered as spiritual nourishment, and implying that a fractured church cannot not rise to the challenge posed by an ever more vulgarizing secular world. This Tractarian theme in a philosopher who is typically inclined to ecumenism if not outright agnosticism is surprising.

Carles, in his final comment, in which he anticipates a "remix" of the one true faith by some unknown person or entity (the blank space he leaves is pregnant and poetic, the Word posited as a vacuum and a graphological sign) sends a similarly mixed message. "Will yall buy an mp3 by the Pope, or will u wait til he is remixed by __________?" Is he rejecting all of Vatican II as being as superfluous and trivial as a DJ remix, or is he positing an eschatological invigoration of the Word, in a possible imminent Second Coming, which will take the form of the Pope being corrected spiritually by a higher power? Should we wait to embrace a Catholicism that may be subject to revision? Or do we "buy in" to the Pope as he speaks now? Interesting that Carles would seek to supplant the deist notion of God as the great watchmaker with a vision of God as the ultimate DJ.

3 August 2009: "Are festivAliens the new festival bros?"

This post is about the rapture. Carles concludes this post, which is ostensibly about the possibility of extraterrestial lifeforms, with an offhand reference about the future of his writing: "In 2k10, HIPSTERRUNOFF.com will be a blog about ‘The Mission: How can we transport 6 billion people outside of our solar system before the sun blows up.’" Of course, the solution to this apparently insolvable riddle is the evangelical Christian notion of the rapture, by which believers will be bodily removed by a deity from their condition of immanence and be physically transported into the heretofore metaphysical realm of a spiritual haven. This concept was memorably explored in a series of fictional works by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the Left Behind series, the theological and eschatological credibility of which has been questioned by some commentators.

Despite his oblique reference to the idea, Carles himself seems skeptical of the rapture solution to the intractable mind/body, substance/essence dualism problem which plagues philosophic inquiry. Is soul a substance, as the rapture implies? Or, as Carles questions, "Does ’space’ make yall feel insignificant/deep?" That is, is the principle of extension itself a death sentence on the species? Does it invalidate any sort of ultimate meaning, while rendering depth psychology uselessly relative? "Do yall believe that there is life somewhere out there?" Carles asks, externalizing the problem that plagues all mortal conscious creatures internally.Once we exist in a space-time continuum, is it possible to be anything other than agnostic on the question of immmortality? "How will we be able 2 live 4ever?" Carles asks, without resolving the dualism question, without identifying a unifying transcendental substance that can be held as guarantor of ontic continuity.

Carles seems to hold more faith in an extraterrestrial as opposed to transcendental being, though his references to "aliens" here are ambiguous in their reference points, as he may be conducting a multi-pronged critique of the status of the outsider in cultural, national, religious, metaphysical, and planetary terms. In that sense, as Carles notes, "aliens are the key to everything." They afford the potentiality of a standpoint from which to critique subjectivity that would not be marred with theusual conundrums of immanent critique. They allow us to escape the "‘house of mirrors’" Carles complains about: "all I can see are poorly executed reflections of myself whenever I look around." To achieve a view from beyond the noetic funhouse, one must be able to make a leap into the impossible, into a epistemology unconstrained by the Kantian a prioris.

Another way of looking at it: Only a perspective from outside the prevailing hegemony ("the only way left to let the world know that you are alternative would be by ‘being from another planet/galaxy/universe’") can offer transformative insight ("Maybe they could teach us all more about life. Maybe they could teach us how 2 be happy") -- if we can resist the reactionary urge to forcibly assimilate them: "It is important that we ’show them a good time’ when we run into them at music festivals, instead of ‘being snarky’ and ‘analyzing their personal brands.’" Philosophical profundity may appear to us in the guise of fashion novelty, Carles intimates, so using the critique familiar to us from consumer capitalism may lead to the premature dismissal of epistemic breaks.

Interestingly, Carles expects hedonic lessons to come from outside the ideological veil, which seemingly uses the promise of happiness to keep itself fastened over our heads. Perhaps Carles is suggesting that what we recognize as happiness will have to be abandoned upon a radical confrontation with an alien hedonism. We will be on the brink of transcendence when our joy becomes sorrow. Perhaps the widespread epidemic of depression heralds that we are on the brink of a breakthrough. Bonjour tristesse!

2 August 2009: "Is it time 2 ‘retire’ ur digital camera?"

This post is about the libidinal economy. The crux of Carles's analysis in this post comes in x-axis of the chart he posts to illustrate an apparently off-handed comment about the relation of ubiquity to inauthenticity: "Because so many digital images exist, posted in places like facebooks, blogs, twitpics, and flickrs, all images became less meaningful." The chart depicts a power-law curve, with the x-axis meant to represent meaning. What is significant is the way in which Carles scales meaning numerically, suggesting that meaning can be quantified on a scale from 0 to 3. Covert references to the trinity aside, this quantification of qualitative experience negates the point the chart is meant to illustrate, which is that the sheer quantity of images has devalued them, that quantity itself, as a concept, militates against significance, with raw bulk ontology rendering a nuanced phenomenology implausible if not impossible.

For Carles, the question is not "how much is too much?" but "what is 'muchness'?" How do we experience meaning without it bearing the imprint of our rationalizing, calculating utilitarian age? Can their be degrees of meaning? Or is ranking experiences in such a way a way of eradicating them, supplanting their substance with the sameness of the numeric code. Meaning, Carles implies, may be a binary function; an experience either has meaning or it doesn't; the analysis of the content of meaning can not be quantified, or enumerated, as it were.

The digital image, at once existing as a facsimile of a memory and a piece of digital code, sits at the fault line between quantity and quality, between being and not being a mere number. Its status remains liminal even as it becomes commonplace. The hallmark of a digital artifact is that it doesn't degrade as it is replicated; the hallmark of memory is that it gets distorted with the pressures of the present as it is recalled to consciousness. At this nexus lies the opportunity for a new kind of depth psychology, facilitated by the mind observing itself being observed in digital images, in the comparison of a memory with the perfect image of what has been falsely recollected, albeit from the scopophilic perspective of a single lens, a unitary gaze. In rehearsing complaints about the digital camera, Carles notes that "We all thought ‘we can capture as many moments as we want, snap all of our friends, and never forget anything for the rest of our lives" but we found instead that as we multiplied our ersatz memories as images, we jeopardized our ability to manufacture memories that could reconcile us to our present condition, thus aggrieving the wounds of the dasein. Being-in-the-world and being-at-hand fall into needless contradiction, burdening the fragile self with misrecognitions of itself in misremembered mises-en-scene that threaten its very tenability. Are we what we have photographed? What we thought we photographed but did not? Are we more coherent in the photographs we wisely deleted? Carles concludes nihilistically that "because so many digital images exist, there is no point in even taking a picture." Representing (re-presenting) reality as apprehended from a particular self's constrained perspective no longer serves the social whole, the idea that the totality of an historical moment is a compilation of all the possible digital photos that could be taken at that given moment by any and all ontic positionalities is disputed, along with the methodological particularism that animated it. Carles, usually careful to remain on the sidelines of such internecine disputes among philosophers, here rises up to administer a slap at the analytical brethren among his tribe.

Confronted with the poverty of the image and the confusion in creates between being and knowing, between quantity and quality, between thought and feeling, Carles posits a radical iconclasm:

I seriously think I’m going to ‘destroy’ my point-and-shoot camera [via putting it on ebay] and using money to buy ‘marijuana cigarettes’ and ‘cocaine bumps.’

Perhaps the irresolvable philosophical conundrums are best solved through oblivion...