Tuesday, October 27, 2009

27 October 2009: "I AM CARLES shirts are ‘almost dead.’"

This post is about the identity function. Carles here reprises his gambit of objectifying his philosophy in the form of an ambiguous slogan embossed on a tee-shirt. In a stroke Carles reifies identity and commercializes it, commenting on precisely the intervention capitalism perpetrates through mass psychologization of identity formation in the crucible of consumerism.

The identity, that is the equation of two like parts in a logical statement, the S=S, is both reaffirmed and denied by the proliferation of the cogito-like slogan "I am Carles." But I does not equal I in all instances; "Carles" becomes a transitive term between subjects, producing a manageable intersubjectivity open to corporate manipulation. "Maybe there’s a lil bit of Carles in every1 of us after all," Carles explains.

By limiting the run of the shirt, Carles hopes to symbolically kill this form of interpolation, as the title of the post indicates. "R I P I AM CARLES. u were a good meme. u did ur best," Carles writes, offering his tentative assessment of this particular tactic against social homogenization.

What Carles intends is that the "bro-est" of times will indeed be in the past, and friendship via conformity and affiliation with any partivular milieu (all of which, as the Invisible Committee declared, are inherently counter-revolutionary and timidly self-protective) will be consigned to the dust-bin of history once all possible "I am..." statements must remain contingent is not perpetually incomplete.

1 comment:

  1. I very much appreciate the link to the Invisible Committee article. If you are discussing an esoteric topic and have a link that you like which further deconstructs it, please post it. I need all the help I can get.

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