9 September 2009: "Hope and Homelessness–Never give up on Personal Branding."

This post is about the punctum. The punctum, of course, is the great theorist Roland Barthes's term for the compelling and often unintentional detail in a photograph which seizes our attention and has metonymic force. It works in opposition to what the photo seems to want to be about. Describing a photo taken at an institution, he writes, "I, in the photograph of two retarded children, hardly see the monstrous heads and pathetic profiles; ... what I see ... is the off-center detail, the little boy's huge Danton collar, the girl's finger bandage; I am a primitive, a child -- or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own."

Carles's apprehension of a photo of a homeless man prompts a similar response:

I saw this picture portraying a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. Unfortunately, he had a pee pee accident as his dark yellow urine streamed down towards the star of a celebrity. I felt tons of emotions as my brain processed this digital image. Shame. Guilt. LOLability. Snarkfactor. Sadness. AmericanBeauty. Happiness. Loneliness. Fucksocietivity. Bloggy. Alive. Dead on the inside. Alone. Without a home. Metaphorical. This is the power of photography.

In this case, the punctum is the "pee pee accident," which undermines the composition's solemnity yet testifies to the power of the image.

But Carles pushes further than Barthes, ruminating on the disappearance of the authentic punctum in the miasma of images on which we now suffocate. He can't escape the positied role is is supposed to adopt as consumer of this image, can't "dismiss all culture". Instead he is positioned into responding in a mediated way, a way already captured by the form in which our aesthetic responses now must take -- reproduction of the image online in a social network along with our anticipated commentary, which falls into one of a number of certified genres -- snark, LOL, etc.

Once an image could prompt us into recognition of the way reality escapes media capture, the meaning always exceeding our attempt to record and fix reality. But now images and the hermeneutical apparatus that attends them threaten a total preformed interpretation of all reality, a foreclosed phenomenology, and encourages us to package ourselves in likewise fashion, as predigested image, with no punctum for a perceiver to seize upon to undermine our smooth self-presentation. No more can we "dismiss all culture" in a spontaneous response to a detail; instead there is a rigid certainty that there was no "accident" -- pee pee or otherwise -- in any image we consume. The consumption itself is so patterned as to make use only of what has be predestined for our conditioned appetites.

Carles compares the "pee pee" photo with a photograph purportedly taken spontaneously by a fashion blogger, who went on to pontificate about the punctum he allegedly discovered in his image, the manner in which a homeless man managed to match his shoes with his socks. The lesson the fashion blogger draws, naturally, is that human beings' need to be stylish trumps our need for shelter. This, in his opinion, should make us "hopeful". While it is readily understandable why the fashion industry might derive hope from this -- it's ceaseless bombardment of advertising is having its effect on 21st century subjectivity -- Carles, with unmistakable sarcasm, does the service of explaining why the message for the rest of us is somewhat less optimistic: "Never give up. Every day, u have the opportunity to brand yourself–you have the opportunity to let the world know that you are a person, and within this person is a brand which the whole world can consume."

There is no longer a meaningful distinction to make between the homeless man and his photographic image -- both are manifestations of the underlying brand to which we now habitually and solely respond. And in our current socio-historical formation, we are expected to seize upon this as an "opportunity" rather than an evisceration of our species being. When Carles sardonically labels the homeless as "a group of people living in some demented reality" it hardly takes a sophisticated analysis to recognize that he is referring to ourselves, not the indigent.

Carles then condenses the message with which we are daily interpolated by the current ideological regime:

Every day, you need to take pride in yourself. You need to realize that your personal brand is being interpreted by every1 who sees you. Do you want to depress your viewers? Or do you want to inspire them? Be a valuable person–not just to yourself, but also to society as a whole.

Can we escape from this net without sacrificing our knowledge of self as subject? Can we have subjectivity in such a society as ours without adopting these "demented" standards and responsibilities? If we can, Carles is not prepared to theorize it with his current set of concepts. Instead, we have the grim sense that language itself has been corrupted, and the vocabulary to express such an idea is beyond him. He concludes, with acid irony masking a deconstructionist despair: "This is a blog post about hope."