23 Nov 2009: " “Going Home for Thanksgiving.” -A Reflection by Carles"

This post is about the singularity. The predictable approach to Thanksgiving would be to critique it from a postcolonialist perspective as voicing the aegis of empire, of rearticulating the hegemony first sought by the invading Europeans in the 15th century and achieved with all-too-forgotten bloodshed, oppression, merciless forced marches along countless trails of tears both metaphoric and literal. Carles is content to allow such a critique to form the deep structure of his investigation of the U.S.'s equinoctial holiday as a psychological rite inculcating governmentality, planting it into the rich soil of postconsumerist, late-capitalist identity. In other words, Carles attempts a postmodern hermaneutics of the self, following the path blazed by seminal French historian and thinker Michel Foucault in his late work on the axiology of the self.

Fittingly, Carles begins with an assault on the Cartesian ego.

I am one of you
I am one of many
I am the only ‘me’ in the world

Subjectivity, in its situatedness in the family is problematized, with the radical positionality of containing multitudes while retaining a discrete atomization of the self foregrounded. The self is at once Other and its self, in an unmediated and unresolved tensional paradox. Lacan's mirror stage is evoked and sublated in a few dozen words as the subjectivization process is opened to a wider scope, a more diverse array of discursive practices.

As Carles notes, foremost of these is the discourse of the brand, adopted as a generative language of self:

Feeling anxious
about my extended family
‘commenting’ on my new personal brand
that that won’t understand

The syntax is obscure here, but in a radical reversal of agency, Carles argues that the brand itself will not comprehend its deployment in the familial context -- an allusion to Deleuze and Guattari's rejection of the Oedipal drama as determinant in the last instance. Anxiety has leapt from the castration complex squarely into the field of exchange -- to the commercialized positioning within a discourse of competing objects. Though the family will attempt to "comment" and interpret the personal brand, the brand itself will transcend such commentary, leaving its mark, as it were on those who sought to master its code. It will objectify those who come into contact with it, reifying a living relation into the frozen gesture of mutual misrecognition (méconnaissance).

Hence Carles is able to posit the identification of unlike subjects as branded object:

New personal Brand
Finding out about new bands
Genuinely connecting with fascinating humans
Who want the same life that I do.

The human and the lifeless thing are converging at a point that suggest cybernetic posthumanity, in which all emotions, all attempts at connection, must have their "genuine" qualities affirmed in the face of impassive skepticism. In the networked world, as Carles suggests here, connection requires no genuineness; it merely requires compatible interfaces, automated protocols of informational exchange, a suitable markup language of the soul. The systems and institutions in which the human cyborg is deployed are no longer distinguishable from one another: "I just want to live inside of a living mishmash of humans/architecture/public transportation." This, Carles implies, is what we have made of our "New World".

The connection to the family then is vestigial, an obstacle to overcome in pursuit of the posthuman destiny:

Afraid to see my family now that it is 100% impossible for them to ‘get’ me
But maybe I need to ‘get’ them
to understand what I don’t want to be

To reject the family, to reject origins, to efface the biological connection in favor of digital "alternative" ones being built out by the ruling technocracy -- these are the sad remnants of old festival rituals that once bound the community, the tribe. Now there is only ritual rejections, a negative dialectics that carves out a space of pure negativity, in which one consists of only that one remembers and discards:

Momentarily I will get ‘caught up’ in the moment
and start to reconnect with zany high school stories
but then will remember
‘That’s not who I am any more. That bro is dead.’

Carles's fable pointedly reveals that what lives on is a rootless, zombified shell with corpses in its mouth.

22 November 2009: "We were alts. We were dreamers."

This post is about capitalist roaders. In Carles's parlance, as has become amply obvious, an "alt" is someone who has reified their attempts at defying the mainstream and has become a false revolutionary, a creature whose identity depends on the very practices it putatively rejects. Here Carles dissects a photograph of a small sample of such alts lying in a New York City street as interrogates the paucity of their ambitions, the craven ways in which he imagines they will service the existing economy of symbolic goods with their immaterial labor all while lauding themselves for their own imagined defiance.

One boy dreams of starting a buzzband which garners critical acclaim from multiple blogsites.
One girl dreams of becoming an alt model
One boy dreams of starting a t-shirt line
One girl dreams of ‘becoming the next Karen O/M.I.A.’
One alt dreams of opening up the best alternative nightclub in town
One alt dreams of starting the blogosphere’s next great influential website, making millions of AmAppy dollars from banner ads
One alt dreams of starting a zany twitter/tumblr meme blog and getting a book deal...

And on and on extends the list of entirely predictable modalities of selling out. The pursuit of personal credibility in the circles Carles here anatomizes is nothing more than the amassing of social capital deemed valuable by the culture industry. The success of these alts in developing their own personalities to their heart;s content is proportional to the degree that everyday life is stripped of its meaning, its revolutionary potential for the rest of us.

The alts, as Carles notes ruefully by adopting their voice, mean to use us as their running dogs:

We moved to this city
to ‘run this town’
and I gotta feeling
(that 2nites gonna be a good nite)
and also
that if we keep networking
having fun
meeting fascinating human beings with similar interests
being inspired by life
good things will come our way.

If we can't be assimilated into their networks and sapped of our creative ideas for new trends and new uses for consumer goods -- flattery will be their bait (we are after all, as Carles imagines them saying, "fascinating human beings with similar interests being inspired by life") -- then we will be run out of their neighborhoods in their town.

Carles asks in conclusion, "What is ur biggest alternative dream?" His implied answer: purging the world of the the very concept of alt and forging a truly transformative revolutionary praxis that involves a sterner commitment beyond a willingness to lie in a gutter.

13 November 2009: "What should I get my alternative son for Christmas?"

This post is about component instincts and erotogenic zones. Carles begins by turning Lacanian theory on its head: "I love my son. He truly is the mirror image of me." One might interpret that as a restatement of classical Freudian superego theory, that the child internalizes a "mirror image" of the bad father as an internal check on the raging incontinence of the id. Naturally, the father's implicit threatening of castration would be expressed as "love", and the demand for obedience as a kind of mimetic desire, the father's wish for the son to restore his lost youth is misrecognized as the child's desire to emulate the father. The superfluous "truly" underscores the false consciousness that is not quite unconsciousness. The father who speaks here knows that his son has already escaped the web of signifiers with which he hoped to snare him, that his entry into the prison-house of language still comes with occasional furloughs.

Carles proceeds to install this querulous father-son dialectic into the heart of consumer capitalist relations.

It’s kinda weird how kids are so impressionable… sorta reminds me of consumers… Maybe kids and consumers have the same kind of brain… all of us have so many wants and needs, and maybe products really can fulfill us/make us happy.

Thus the mimetic demands the father places on the son, to mirror him as he fades into irrelevance, is itself mirrored by the relation of corporation and consumer. The corporation hopes the consumer will internalize its demands for a passive, easily swayed subjectivity, a childlike sense of wonder at whatever new commoditized geegaw is foisted upon them. Wants and needs will be harmlessly and profitably cathected on to branded products, which will instill a false consciousness of happiness, a degraded sense of pseudo-fulfillment about as sturdy as a crepe-paper ladder. We shall not climb too far toward enlightenment here. And as Carles suggests, the entire ideological ediface rests on the presumption of "impressionablility" -- that one can literally stamp the minds of subjects with the desired embossment, to produce the desired behaviors. Impressionability, though, must itself be produced; the human subject must be perverted, its instinctual libidinous drives redirected against itself. (As Freud defined it, an instinct may be regarded as "the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuoulsy flowing source of stimulation .... The immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic stimulus.") Thus each retail encounter is a petite suicide, an abrogation of the source of sensation which within consumerist culture animates consciousness.

Carles imagines a pure alterity, though, may still be possible in this crucible of annhilating phenomenology -- "a pure alternative spirit" may emerge by administering arcane birthing rituals, by eschewing mass culture for its niches, by ceaselessly interrogating the "traditional." But it is a difficult road, fraught with the pressures of achieving something "truly unique" -- an oxymoron? A transcendent lie? An impossible possiblity ...

10 November 2009: "Carles Completes the New York City Marathon."

This post is about the consolation of philosophy. Is philosophy inspiring? Carles's own work at times exemplifies philosophy's reputation of pursing a negative dialectic and mounting an assault on the received traditional wisdom and the metaphysical spiritual edifice. While not a "dismal science" like economics, philosophy is frequently cold comfort for souls in bondage. Hence in this post wonders if philosophy can supply the uplift of commercial messaging -- if it can become a form of feel-good marketing.

I am Carles.
I am a Brand.
I am Hope.
This Brand Wants You to Be Happy.
This Brand Will Enable You to Accomplish Your Dreams.

This is Carles's effort to return philosophy to its Platonic/Aristotalian mission of teaching humans about the "good life", only filtered through the contemporary consumerist ideology of equating fulfillment with self-branding. "I truly believe that a brand can inspire a human to do something that they never thought they could accomplish," he writes drily. Hope is a matter of being able to conceive of a brand that could mark one as at once unique and preapproved. The brand is both ubiquitous and singular -- everyone is marked by brands, but the metaphorical flesh-scoring is felt by each as a wholly personal growing pain.

The good life for contemporary purposes, as Carles points out, is a matter of making an achievement of acquiring a personal brand. In an exquisite example of form and content harmonizing, Carles himself feigns an exuberance over his own brand's salience in this post. But as the post implies, the journey of self-branding is a marathon: "Life is sorta like a marathon. There’s a lot of other people competing against u, but u sorta just need 2 run ur own race, and u can sorta convince yourself that you some how ‘won.’" This addresses the underlying contradictions involved in making identity life's purpose. It is at once both competitive and transcendental, positional and ineffable. We need to win by convincing ourselves we are not in a competition.

2 November 2009 :"Should I attend my local community’s most prestigious Hair and Makeup College?"

This post is about technologies of the self. In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes's important intervention into the semantic production system of contemporaneity, the French thinker writes that language "shatters" fashion's "rudimentary structure into a thousand significant species, thus building a system whose justification is no longer utilitarian...but only semantic; it thus constitutes a true luxury of the mind." Carles clearly has this dictum in mind in investigating the intellectual situation of haberdashery in late capitalism and its close connection with the sociocultural capital of its practitioners and of its educational institutions as they stand contradistinct to traditional universities. Imagining the dilemma facing a youthful member of the emerging creative class, Carles writes, "I don’t wanna go to normal college, learning the same bullshit over and over… I have always been more of a creative spirit." Traditional education institutions do not confront the paradigmatic nature of fashion for current information industries, the way in which trends and memes now drive epistemology, human understanding. They are trapped in a repetitive, redundant cycle, repeating sterile tautologies -- "the same bullshit over and over." Later he notes, "I want a real education."

And this institutionalized learning negates the true import and efficacy of the emerging knowledge industries, those that equip the self with advanced iterations of signaling, teach the self how to display itself to its best advantage to enhance its ontological heft: "I really want to learn something that will help me help other people in ways that people don’t usually appreciate," Carles has his novice philosopher state, commenting on the academy's underappreciation of the fashion system and its ramifications.

Barthes notes fashion's integral function in introducing diachrony into the system of meanings, offering a "dialectical solution" to the conflict between "event and structure." Carles grasps this implication, noting that one must be "using cutting-edge techniques to achieve some of the world’s most alt haircuts." The haircut must be achieved as event and rupture, harmonizing the social with the individual's need to experience novelty through the body, to embody the diachronic component of the social itself, as it were. Of course, this has Lacanian implications: Carles notes in conjunction with the fantasmic aspect of fashion that "some of the best highs I have experienced in life happen when I look in the mirror." Fashion brings the euphoria of jouissance to play in everyday flux of grooming --in confronting the Real of the self as routed through the spectral other, when the Other is properly coiffed in accordance to the implicit law of the father. (It's no accident that we speak of a hair cut, and that the threat of castration is mimicked many times over in the endurance of such an operation.)

In order to play such an important role in the construction of social reality, a would-be technologist of the self must be able to navigate liminal spaces with minimal dislocation: Hence Carles notes that his novice is "a bisexual emo tween" -- strung between sexualities, between emotion and reason, between demographics, and possibly between genders. Carles offers a telling prediction: "I honestly believe 1 day men and women will merge into 1 human." This androgyny will present a challenge to fashion, which plays off gender difference to achieve its semiotic effects. The question Carles leaves unanswered here, along with his usual red herring interrogatories, is precisely this, whether the self can survive a technology that efficiently does away with gender, or does gender constitute a fundamental category which fashion structurally requires in order to operate discursively. Carles, if he is reading, will hopefully clarify on this point further.