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.