14 December 2009: "Who did Tiger Woods let down more: black ppl or white ppl?"

This post is about one-dimensional man. Carles uses the lens of the Tiger Woods tragedy to examine the contested problematics of race, class, and gender in American society, and how these are interpolated by the commercial imperatives of multinational corporations and the neoliberal attitudes they wish to sponsor and personify through the use of athletic champions as spokespersons. Is Tiger Woods a fallen übermensch or merely a highly visible exemplar of late capitalism's propensity to produce one-dimensional men, who internalize the dictates of a hypercompetitive and hyperrational economic system and administer their lives in unsustainable ways. Woods constituted himself through his athletic remorselessness as "the human brand" and let the prerogatives of capital accumulation dictate his public behavior.

His racial heritage cast this accomplishment in a particularly postcolonial light, serving as an alibi for the unstriated transition from colonial to independent regimes. His success as global brand mirrored the hegemony of the Washington Consensus, while attaching a person of color to its ubiquitous dominance. Carles claims that Tiger Woods white-washes (pun intended) the trouble history of race politics, with his success serving as a vindication and a closing of the books on the history of the subject: "This is why we love Tiger Woods. He is an African-American+miscellaneous other races, without all of the baggage of traditional coloured athletes."

But Woods's deviation from the imposed social norms somewhat hypocritically imposed by his corporate masters in the world of sponsorship marks the potential for an epistemic break, in which the repressed politics of race return with a vengeance to radicalize practices in the post-neoliberal order that is only now just beginning to emerge. Carles suggests that Woods's "transgressions" are actually nothing more than the vehement response of the established order to the threat Woods was beginning to represent.

I feel like this white world that he conquered has turned his back on him. No longer is he a white person with black skin who white people are comfortable letting into their metaphorical club house.

Carles notes that Tiger began to exceed his function of serving as "a representative of corporate america, some1 who we expect to ‘have values’" -- the meaning of his "evolution into a human brand" had led to his accumulating too much capital in his image, a superfluity of meaning attached to his persona which could find investment in ideas and movements outside the control of the multinationals who made him. So it became imperative for the stability of the order to decathect him as signifier and signified. Woods as transcendental signifier? It was not to be borne. Just as the media interests had worked to "enable" the "dream worlds" of figures like Woods, it could be turned against them, to recapture them within the distributed economy of signs.

Having fixed Woods's saga within the Saussurean structure of late capitalist sign-play and attenuated its relations to international structures of economic power, Carles shifts perspective to consider Woods as a cautionary figure, an example of the metastasized techno-rational principle gone awry. Woods, by personifying the "champion" in the post-Fordist era, put a human face on this question of Marcuse's: "At the advanced stage of industrial civilization, scientific rationality, translated into political power, appears to be the decisive factor in the development of historical alternatives. The question then arises: does this power tend toward its own negation -- that is, toward the promotion of the 'art of life'?" Woods, in turning to personal hedonistic satisfaction apparently warranted by his mastery of the technological means of his field, manifested one such historical alternative, one such expression of political power as a shattering of the contractual arrangements which have hitherto held together the hierarchical organization of family life under the sign of "romantic love" since the 18th century. As Carles points out, Woods domination of the sports field betokened and modeled new forms of expression in the social field generally: The integrity of contracts "doesn’t always apply to people who experience levels of joy that are way better than ‘finding solace in a relationship’" -- instead a new kind of relation is implied, a reflexive one engaged with one's one sense of accomplishment, a mimetic desire for the self as it appears socially, a way of interfacing with one's own ambition through the means of docile bodies. Carles notes that "Woods may or may not be able to ‘love’ other people" but underscores the irrelevance of the question to the post-love libidinal economy Woods was attempting to pioneer from the position of significatory surplus: "you could really ‘get banged’ by a true champion, instead of the same loser bro who thinks he is ‘fucking rich/hot/special,’ and that he is the one doing you a favor by giving u the opportunity to sleep with him." In the social arrangement that Woods was beginning to flesh out through his praxis, the circuit of authority and mastery that Woods represented could valorize all the human capital it touched and invalidate the pretenses of those operating according to moribund economic imperatives.

But the immediate backlash in the media suggests the negation of the negation, a reinscription of power at the expense of a regime's now-deposed champion, his mastery redirected in the guise of humility and futility to serve the order he had come to challenge in his ceaseless pursuit of "winning" for its own sake. Though "We want Tiger to live the life that he wants to live," the social order can no longer afford it. Woods's victories, once they cease to indicate the triumph of the status quo and instead intimate the triumph of the will, must be prevented by all means necessary. It would not be shocking if Woods's quasi-vacation fromthe public sphere is an extended one.

10 December 2009: "Create your own HRO Post with this bloggable photo."

This post is about multitude. The text Carles has supplied for this post may disappear, consumed by its own premise, so I reproduce the salient portion below:

Since HRO has become so formulaic, I was gonna give yall an opportunity to ‘make ur own post.’ The Carles brand has been successful, embedding itself as the subconscious voice of so many people across the world. Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles. I thought I would give yall a chance to ‘get ur creativity on; this is an opportunity to construct your own HRO post.

This pseudo-democratic ploy is Carles's way of instantiating the end of democracy, and not merely because he goes on to provide the substance of the post pre-emptively, circumscribing the creative gesture he has solicited from readers. More significantly, Carles posits an audience of subjects who have merged to speak univocally rather than each in their own voice. The "formulaic" nature of Carles's discourse has provided a model through which a diverse body of individuals can unite as a "people" in the Hobbesian sense of the word.

Then Carles demands labor from readers without offering wage compensation, promising instead the uncertain reward of notoriety within the discursive space he himself controls entirely. The readers' immaterial labor serves to enhance the value of the Carles brand, to which Carles slyly begins his post with a paean.

The circuit Carles traces here is that of capital in the post-Fordist era. The culture and communications industry (represented with some irony in this depiction by Carles himself) produces the means of production for a new kind of labor force that works for no pay to produce its own notoriety, seeking its own distinction within mediatized reality to stand out from the teeming crowd of individuals. These efforts are harvested by the overarching industries and used to enhance the value of their capital. Readers become more insecure as they compete for attention; Carles becomes even more preeminent in his chosen matrix of cultural production.

So there is more than a little sarcasm in his admission that "Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles." Carles wants to point out that "Carles" has become a corporate entity, an efficient synthesis of the immaterial labor of the cultural producers the weblog sets out to satirize. This of course is the meaning of the title Carles has chosen for his enterprise -- the "runoff" from the behavior of "hipsters" -- the value they create through their public acts of consumeption and self-fashioning -- becomes the precious fuel for the unlimited accumulation of capital under the banner of the Carles brand.

8 December 2009: "Meme Content Breakdown: “The Evolution of the Hipster.”"

This post is about homo sacer. Giorgio Agamben has written about the plight of the exiled, the persons who are excluded from the customary protections of the law that come from belonging to a state and thus attaining a sanctioned personhood. Such persons are reduced to "bare life," devoid of rights. Carles, in retracing the steps of a promulgated taxonomy of the hipster, attempts to reveal how such categorization is perhaps the first stage in an effort to purge the hipster from the social field, to make the hipster into homo sacer in preparation for an ultimate liquidation. "Will the US Government ever decide to eliminate us?" Carles asks, in a gesture of radical solidarity with the threatened class. He admits to being "worried" about this possibility. The growing tide of tribalistic, reactionary rage across countries suffering economic setbacks seems to make such an outpouring of violence against a privileged class that prefers to set itself apart all too thinkable. A "breakdown" in the meme content is tantamount to a breakdown in the social fabric.

This "scientific/sociological/cultural timeline," as Carles designates it, epitomizes the "annihilation of space through time" that Marx attributed to the specific relations of production under capitalism. A teleology of the development of the hipster is posited and the uneven development and distribution of the cultural capital that hipsterism represents is suppressed. But this suppression serves to exacerbate the perception that hipsters have achieved a hegemonic condition of domination instead of themselves being dominated, in the sense of being determined and stripped of autonomous development from within the given social order, as is precisely the case. Carles notes with euphemistic discretion that "mainstreamers who don’t consume the internet and fringe alts who ‘would like to be more culturally relevant’ use exposes like this to plan their future adventures into the heartland of Altmerica" -- naturally those "future adventures" may include any and all of the repressive measures used to stifle dissent in totalitarian regimes throughout the 20th century. By rendering the hipster as Other, to be zoologically classifed and mocked, publications catering to the malcontented medocrity in our midst can symbolically declare open season on "alts", tacitly encouraging atrocities and brutality. Carles seems to be worrying: Can a Krystallnacht of vinyl record stores and American Apparel outlets be far behind?

29 November 2009: "Should Carles retire?" and 3 December 2009: "My Name is Carles. I was Born 2 Blog"

These posts are about the ecstasy of communication. Carles attempts an escape from postmodernity by announcing a retreat from his online persona. But as Baudrillard asks, "These fatal strategies, do they exist?... Faced with a delirious world, there is only the ultimatum of realism. This means that if you want to get away from the madness of the world yo have to sacrifice all of its charm as well.... In order to survive, we need to approach ever closer to the nullity of the real." Once, Carles appeared to flirt with nullity by choosing an intentionally impoverished texting-based language with which to express his nihilistic philosophy, so that form and content would approach each other asymptotically the more he would write, making the blogs extension in duration itself demonstrate that philosophy's the most significant tenet: We can continue to speak in clipped and debased language, but thought so expressed seems ever to mock itself more. Irony becomes a prerequisite condition for expression with such a set of linguistic tools. Now he must up the ante and promise silence, in his discursive efforts to theorize the end of discourse as it dissolves in incessant communication, in the palpable pressure of perpetual realtime expression.

As with Carles's earlier attempts at retirement and "digital suicide", Carles expresses an ultimately unfulfilled intention of retiring from blogging to expose how such intentions are in danger of becoming mere fantasies. It is no accident that the intention is presented as a question in the title of the first post linked above. The digital self is no longer autonomous, if it ever was autonomous in the first place. Our intentions are now subject to real-time referenda in the digital agora formed by mandatory social networking. Carles reduces this to a succinct formula: "This blog is me." What is "blogged" or expressed online in some other way is not lived or experienced from within our subjectivity. Our subjectivity is no longer stored in our brains but in water-cooler server farms located close to hydrelectric dams all across the world. Hence the preposterous premise of the film The Matrix -- we do not choose btween the real and the Real, but between no existence and digitally encoded ecstasy of the social network.

We can now only at best wish to remove ourselves from the digitization and social mediatization of our lives. We can only dream of not broadcasting the quotidian details of our lives and such and as such over the channels fashioned for us online. When Carles writes that "maybe my future is in ‘real life’ instead of the internet," the pivotal word is maybe. We are no longer in a position to see whether this is so for ourselves or not, no longer in a position to make the determination in the final analysis of whether real life and the internet can be extricated from each other.

In his return, Carles acknowledges the "readers who take this blog very seriously," of which this writer is admittedly one. Thereby Carles has cleverly forced one to consider one's own culpability in perpetuating the digital trap of consciousness. Is the act of reading itself, the digitally enhanced hermaneutics of the identity relation and its various levels of decoding, the consumer of discourse in the sense of consummating it, committing it to a great final conflagration? Is Carles really going silent precisely by continuing to blog?