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.