7 December 2010: "Tired of being a blog that blogs abt worthless alt shit"

This post is about TK. Carles has long seemed haunted by the last of Wittgenstein's basic propositions in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." Carles has felt compelled to produce more and more discourse, to be a "blog worth blogging about" and create a feedback loop of language creating more labguage to explain it, which in turn requires more language, and so on, ad infinitum. Now he is ready to kick away the ladder of Hipster Runoff and enjoin us all to regard it as nonsense -- necessary nonsense for us to climb to whatever understanding of the "alt" world he has managed to bequeath us, but nonsense nonetheless.

However, is it possible to bring this spiral to a halt without surrendering whatever tenuous advances one has managed to eke out in illuminating the dark corners of the social problematic? In Carles's case, does a self-imposed silence mean a loss of the definitions and taxonomies he has established with regard to "alt" and "mainstream" that he long labored to elucidate and disseminate? Is his Wittgensteinian posture an elaborate bluff, a last-ditch attempt to rescue his labors before historical processes invalidate them? That is, is Carles rejecting historiography itself? "Maybe the indiesphere doesn't need me anymore," he frets in a fit of Spenglerian dismay. "No longer 'progressive'... 'the same shit' ovr and ovr again." Later, he adds "who cares about 'evolving' as a human" -- rejecting a teleological, Hegelian vision of history in favor of a more strictly Darwinian view, which regards evolution not as progress but entropic change.

Carles's position appears to be that his silence, like God's, will be more eloquent than any words he might contribute to the burgeoning informatic sphere. But though he emulates the divine deity even to the point at which he can transcend the temporal realm and declare "time is bullshit", he must also admit his mortality, which also makes all utterance absurd and overdetermines his mutedness. "Just going to die anyways / Going to be forgotten."

Perhaps the definitions can no longer cohere; progress, in Carles's view, has been supplanted by inescapable decline. It is no longer possible to distinguish sense from nonsense, as Wittgenstein had hoped. "No reason to blog," he suggests in the face of such perpetual provisionality. He even goes so far as to relate the breakdown of the structural, phonemetical components of language itself:

HRO blows
blog, tweet, hits
blah blah blah

In the place of signifiers and signifieds we have glossolalia, helpless babble recoiling from the mighty truth function.

24 November 2010: "Pitchfork continues negrofication, reviews albums by Rihanna + some other black grl"

This post is about the textualist critique of classificatory rationalism. Carles continues his rhetorical assault against hegemonic music-ranking website Pitchfork (Putschfork?) and its tentative elaboration of racialist hierarchies in the field of cultural capital and its reticulation of an apparatus of power/knowledge operant on the level of subjective consciousness and implemented on the body via the sensuous responsiveness to popular music. Carles notes that Pitchfork's recent foray into race politics "has confused many white indie music fans who used to think Pitchfork was their indie Bible, but now they are having an identity crisis."

As Carles suggests here, the "identity crisis" experienced by a substratum of the young white bourgeois class reflects the incursion of biopower across a new postracial axis that at once foregrounds race and seems to supplant it, render its encoded prejudices moribund. The basis of class dominance must rearticulate itself along lines that co-opt the divisive power of race rather than stand "independently" apart from it. "Indie" has become untenable with regard to race, as Carles notes. He asks, "Should 'hip hop/r&b/rap' albums be held to the same standards that white man's indie buzzband albums are held up 2?" In other words should the laws of miscegenation be reimported from the era of slavery to restructure inherited racial privilege in the field of culture, or can postraciality be used to cloak the cultural privileges being promulgated through other means, through other dichotomies, more récherché integuements. One example would be the gendered revaluation of cultural capital, often attacked by Carles in his febrile fulminations against the "slutwavers" -- female performers who have monetized their sexual symbology. Pitchfork and slutwave both are an ongoing exemplifications of the dialectical process Gayatri Spivak has called in a related context the "paradoxical empirical deconstruction of lexicographic ground."

This ideological upheaval naturally creates a consciousness of confusion on the level of the aesthetic, upon which redeployments of ideology often manifest themselves. "No idea what good music is any more," Carles reports, imagining the white man's dilemma. "Feeling so confused/betrayed/alone/scared." Betrayal, of course, is the key note in this symphony of distressed entitlement. Carles invokes Jackie Robinson, a black athlete who became the first to play in the erstwhile all-white professional American baseball league, as a reassuring emblem for the disoriented hegemon, a relatable figure whose codification in the media as nonthreatening could let "white indie altbros and cool dads feel like they were part of the decision making process." Though postraciality is being implemented in their name and for the extension of their privilege, their legacy of bigotry cannot be allowed to derail the transitionary process. Thus the critical importance of figures like Robinson, Obama, Kanye West and so on, whose personal prestige is an ironic proxy for the perpetuation of exclusionary power.

22 November 2010: "The Negrofication of Pitchfork and the Death of White Man's Indie"

This post is about instrumental reason. Trying to capture the ineffable aspects of ontic quality as a quantity that can drive a variety of econometric models and undergird a process of rational-choice analysis has long been a hardy tool in the capitalist arsenal, conjuring a seemingly empirical fact out of more or less thin air and then passing it off as hardened wisdom, as a realistic willingness to face cold facts rather than namby-pamby intangibilities, which, as all MBAs know, are no basis for a firm to make its investment decisions going forward. Carles takes an ironic stab at the mania for quantification so palpable among the thought leaders of high capitalist reason.

"Life is all about numbers."
-probably some smart person / business person / mathematician

Carles will not even grant authority to the purveyors of this line of reasoning in jest. They are only "probably" authoritative, even on their own ideology. Clearly Carles has in mind this trenchant passage from Dialektik der Aufklärung:

The standardization of the intellectual function through which the mastery of the senses is accomplished, the acquiescence of thought to the production of unanimity, implies an impoverishment of thought no less than of experience; the separation of the two realms leaves both damaged. A consequence of the restriction of thought to organization and administration, rehearsed by the those in charge from artful Odysseus to artless chairmen of the board, is the stupidity which afflicts the great as soon as they have to perform tasks other than the manipulation of the small.

Such stupidity has, in Carles's lucid opinion, afflicted the fatally compromised tastemakers at the popular-music weblog Pitchfork, who has become too explicit in their transformation of the fool's gold of aesthetic quality into the cold cash that can be derived from an accredited numeric rank. "I never thought I'd live 2 see this day a 10.0 on a new album," Carles admits, as this threatens to undermine the credibility of the entire ranking racket, establishing putative achievement of perfection as passé:

this will lead to a 'reactionary sect'
creating 'even more backlash' [via hits] for the Pitchforks
But also
It might get 'rlly boring'
And no1 will even care any more

The perfect score reveals a perfect vacuity, the total triumph of the administrative "muse" over the negative dialectic requisite for the apperception of aesthetic accomplishment within a society brutalized by commodified expression. The Pitchfork review is an act of aesthic terrorism, attempting to reduce the listening capabilities of its readership to that of an unthinking lizard, to a creature that can only respond when prodded from the outside, and then only with an instinctual recoil. To return, as Carles intends his readers to, to the relevant passage from Adorno and Horkheimer:

The elimination of qualities, their conversion into functions, is transferred by rationalized modes of work to the human capacity for experience, which tends to revert to that of amphibians. The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heard

The consequences for Pitchfork readers is plain: the apotheosis has been achieved, their marching orders issued. The holy number has been drawn, and no experience can exceed the current one in significance: "It might make us think that life is worth giving up on
[via having 'no identity'/no reason to 'go on']," Carles notes, pointing not only to the nihilism incipient in the quantification, but to the depersonalization, always implicit in making art commensurate with data, but now explicit, heralding a grand social order of remorseless efficiency in which every being, and every experience and every feeling is reducible to a number. Carles captures the dystopian subjectivity resulting from having all experience being integrated to the same numeric scale:
"My life is totally different
My life is totally the same"

The lapse into totalitarianism that comes in the wake of such regression, when all capacity to distinguish moral qualities without recourse to numeric data, is plain. When we can only hear rankings, when we must be stand and be counted, when we must relentlessly count, and tally the score, when we can only wonder about what our own number must be, the human spirit will have finally capitulated to the unleashed forces of dominative instrumental reason that adheres in no single man but dominates them all as a free-floating, omnipresent force that animates institutions across the social matrix.

Carles links the regression to an emerging racist order, which he sardonically salutes with these grim words evocative of the Nüremburg rallies: "An important day, a celebration of greatness."

But the hostility of this quantifying gesture is not merely an assault on the thinking ability of the weblog's readership, not merely an invitation for fascism. The perfect ranking from Pitchfork also implies the perfected ignorance and passive receptivity of the critic himself. Ultimately Carles is able to inspire hope by dismissing the critic, acknowledging his ranking gesture as a self-consuming artifact, one which annihilates him as it establishes his notoriety and authority:
"it seems like this is 'the defining moment of his journalistic bloggy life'
Even though I don't know anything abt him
And possibly will never know anything more abt him"
Nothing remains to be known; he has admitted to having had a perfect aesthetic experience, which can only mean that he can no longer experience anything. Power relies on the withheld threat, the unrealized pleasure, the iron fist of unimaginable deprivation wrapped in the velvet glove of promised jouissance. The reviewer surrenders that position by forwarding a number which in his operant scale is more than a number, thereby short-circuiting it. He strains for a quality through quantity, even having already dismissed quality, but the specter of sensuousness can only haunt his words, terrifying them in return for the terror he sought to inflict on his audience by evoking completeness. The cult of death. Full knowledge, the forbidden fruit. Perfect understanding, a perfectly told lie.

Carles declares his contempt for the reviewer by mocking his pretensions to perfectibility: "there is 'no where to go' now that I have experienced perfection" To paraphrase Adorno in another context, there can be no poetry after Kanye.

15 November 2010: NYTimes writes article abt how chain franchises are 'invading' Brooklyn"

This post is about nonplaces. Liminal spaces. Interzone. The interstices. Carles wonders where these mythical, near utopian (or are they the alternative to utopia, the alt beyond "a 'super alt' place," as Carles identifies the borough of Brooklyn?) might be located. Are they to be found in that most reviled of locales, "The_Suburbs," as he inscribes them, at once neither city nor country; both inhabited and vacated in a cycle whose periodicity can be closely monitored and calibrated; colonized by global multi-national entities but routinely governed by the most hyperlocal of Nimbyisms?

Carles suggests in this post that suburbia is as much a state of mind as a literal place, a diachronic rite of passage made synchronic, concrete, tangible, a social fact. As such he remains radically skeptical of the possibility of a emergent urbanism that would would contribute to the structuration of a postcapitalist subject: "Now that Brooklyn is 'gentrified' / retailed-out, will there be a new alt city?" he asks, rephrasing essentially a question he had already posed earlier, "do yall <3 convenience, or do u want to 'stay authentic' even when ur a consumer." Authenticity is now fatally imbued in the problematic of consumerism itself and is susceptible to no stable definition outside of the matrix of practices associated with the buying and selling of acutely branded products. The psycho-conceptual space for the articulation of a subject that would remain reflexively accessible to the citizen who inhabits such locales as the ones Carles describes must always already have been colonized, or rather "gentrified," by the "chain stores / restaurants / grocery centres / Whole Foodses" -- that is prepared by the assumptions embodied and embedded in these brands to receive a superstructure of axiomatic values. In the new Convenience is authenticity in the social relations of consumption now elaborated in bourgeois enclaves, and the vehement denials of this on the level of symbolic gesture only serves to confirm the underlying truth of this equivalence.

"Do u prefer the cost, convenience, and experience of a standardized franchised experience?" Carles asks, though the answer is inescapably obvious, that the preference has been the a priori for the subject's capability for self-knowledge. Convenience has become epistemology; we know only that which is easy, though its ease is made to be felt as an accomplishment of the individual in conjunction with society rather than the very grounding condition of the individual.

It follows that convenience is the effect rather than the cause of suburbanization, a post hoc moral imperative, though Carles's description of the how the infiltration of brands into everyday life proceeded -- "(via convenience)" -- is arguably ambiguous. But are chain stores nonplaces, in anthropologist Marc Augé's sense of the term, and thereby to be held culpable for the annihilation of identity? Or do these chain stores and their "gimmicky franchises" foreground the neoliberal assault on identity as such, and prepare the populace for biopolitical acts of resistance? It may be that only by inhabiting the chain-store subjectivity, only by inverting convenience and emnracing the dis-ease of ease, can one stake an oppositional dialectic, fashioning the countertactics that can redistribute the struggle to new battlefields much closer to home. It turns out that Carles parting shot -- "Does this look like 'utopia' 2 u?" -- is not as ironic as it at first appears.

10 November 2010: "I bought a hybrid car and a polar bear came 2 my house 2 thank me 4 saving the environment."

This post is about eschatology. How will the world end? With a extenuated whimper or with the proverbial bang? More pertinent to our inescapable immanence in the world, can we appropriately envision the apocalypse so as to forestall it? Is their a conception of inevitable doom that actually negates its inevitability; that is to say, with all due apologies to Fukuyama (not to mention G.W.F. Hegel) can one negate the ultimate negation and put an end to the end of history?

Carles has been considering such matters across a series of several related posts, in which he recurs to the same adages, often emblazoned on images purloined from our collective cultural consciousness of representative pop icons or avatars of our everyday life in all its curious contingency and technological mediation: "Goodnite world" and "Sad/Dead on the inside". Both of these elliptical aphorisms appear in the post under consideration in this exegesis, appropriately enough at the end, after Carles has contemplated the displaced, ecologically homeless polar bear as a metonym for the eventuality of environmental disaster on a truly global scale.

How do these adages relate dialectically? Is the end of the world a reflection of the evacuation of the individual human soul or a consequence of its voiding? Metaphysical death and the end of depth psychology: must these inevitably prompt eschatological prophesizing in an ecumenical, environmental vein? Carles tests this dialectic in the voice of the bear, a creature he imagines to be irrevocably doomed already on account of human negligence:

Nothing can save our Earth/world/environment/society
It doesn't matter what I do with my life

The implication, Carles suggests, is that these two statements are at once identical propositions, a tautology. But could they cancel one another out? Could apathy toward the world's fate assuage the absurd existential condition of soullessness and materialist determinism?

Carles traces in images the polar bear's fictitious journey as depicted in a hybrid-auto (itself a figure for biopower in the post-Fordist economy) commercial, using captions to parody the typical Western youth's quest for personal meaning: "H8 middle America"; "Tried 2 Move 2 the city 2 find myself". Both quests have been subsumed by capital's need to valorize itself -- the pursuit of self-actualization and the pursuit of "environmentally friendly" transportation alternatives are both subsidiaries of the pursuit of sustainable profit, and both can be understood best through the figure of an animal that is gratefully to be deprived of a natural ecosystem and instead eager to thank the forces that have decentered its subjectivity and disrupted its traditional approach to living.

Anyways, eventually got to that bro's house
and hugged him
Dude thought I was gonna kill him
but I was like 'no bro--thnx 4 buying a hybrid. U saved my life.'

So it is with the working classes, which have been given an endless number of compensatory blandishments and distracting struggles to prevent them from "killing" the "dude" -- aka the Man -- aka global capitalism. As Carles sagely notes, "Humans are kinda lame."

5 November 2010: "Which costumes deserve 2 win the HRO Halloween Costume Contest?"

This post is about geist. A specter is haunting Carles, the specter of identity, the projected ghost of the self that terrifies and chases, like the phantoms of a child's cartoon which inevitably are revealed to be nothing but filmed images shining on the wall and moans and wails on a tape recording. Is that not the self in an age of hypermediation and image saturation, of inescapable identity-signification, so many gasps and screams and Munch-like reflections of oneself, deployed by capital to terrify us into further acts of spectralization, further disguises, new reflexive hauntings, new ghost chases through the mansions of our mind, searching for the real truth, the spell that will usher away the ghosts in the blinding light of the real, of the authentic...

What could be more fitting, giving these entropic conditions afflicting ontology then to put the social self's disguises against one another, to employ capital's methodology of the market to unmask itself, to set embodied memes in motion and in conflict, in a contest where to win is to lose oneself and to lose is to win a cherished distance between the interpellated identity imposed by the social factory and the lived self that exceeds the event. "Who had relevant indie costumes?" Carles asks, implying of course, the richer questions: who among us does not have a costume? Who among us dares to eschew relevance? Who can independent of independence? Is there autonomy without relevance? Is anyone independent of disguises with independence is itself a relevant costume under current relations of social production?

In posing these questions, Carles of course has in mind a canonical passage from Derrida's Specters of Marx, which he neglects to cite presumably because he expects all alert readers to have it ready-at-hand: At risk of pedantry, I will include it here nonetheless:

to understand history, that is, the event-ness of the event, must one not ... think that the loss of the body can affect the specter itself? To the point that it is then impossible to discern between the specter and the specter of the specter, the specter searching for proper content and living effectivity?

What is the ritual assumption of a costume during the Halloween holiday, itself a secularization of the spiritual holiday devoted to recognizing the saints collectively, if not a search for the appropriate specter of the specter, the search for the proper ontological content of the self, externalized and purified? Carles gets at the mystery of this search with a piquant question: "Would u rather be intimate with 'real Bethany' or 'fake Bethany'?" The implication is that there is no difference between the two: between the real and the fake is only anachrony; intimacy occurs beyond real and fake, establishing its own truth retroactively. We are always already intimate with the real, but only in retrospect, and never in the moment, in which we only see presence in all its shifting veils.

27 October 2010: "Unruly Teens are starting to die/overdose from drinking Four Loko"

This post is about the convocated precariat. Like many of his contemporaries, Carles has felt it necessary to make a public intervention on his web-based publication on the subject of caffeinated alcoholic products. His verdict: it is the latest offensive on the part of capital to squeeze productivity out of an overstretched, globalized (and demoralized) workforce by normalizing the acceleration of lived experience, associating the dizziness of transnational capital and mandated employee flexibility with the intoxication of cheap malt-liquor beverages: "Really helps out ppl in today's fast paced world". Such beverages serve a narcotizing function as well as a disciplinary one, fetishizing speed and oblivion, or rather speeding toward oblivion, thus mimicking, one must note with some irony, the careening, chaotic course of the entire mechanism of capitalism.

Neoliberalism, Carles, suggests, seems to have backed itself into a corner by rendering the lives of the various underclasses, from the banlieues of France to the shanty towns of Lagos to the ghettos of American cities such as New York and Chicago, impoverished beneath the level at which they can be successfully exploited, while systematically stripping away aspects of the welfare state that would have serve to facilitate the reproduction of their exploitable labor power. "Do u think they were 'weak' cuz they couldn't handle Four Loko?" Carles asks mockingly. Of course they were not. The precariat, to use a convenient neologism recently coined by Leftist critics of post-Fordist labor practices and neoliberal tenets of governance, were already weakened by their socioeconomic conditions and their distanciation from the state as such, which has denatured them as a class even as it has concentrated them in dismaying and unconscionable circumstances of immiseration.

Carles seems to have in mind Spinoza's ethical injunction toward self-preservation and its fundamental expression of the irresolvable tensions between the individual and the collective, the subjectivity demanded by the state and the degree to which that is experienced as a "care of the self" rather than a form of biopolitical repression: Spinoza writes in the Ethics:

Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it demands that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage, what is really useful to him, want what will really lead man to a greater perfection, and absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can. This, indeed, is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part.

But can a community, particularly one fabricated by institutional distress or neglect, constitute a One, an entity that can pursue its own self-preservation with one mind and one will? Is the mass unified or several? Can it be psychologized as an individual, with an individual's liability to certain addictive pathologies? How does that affect the possibilities for liberatory intersubjectivity?

The makers of the liberating/enslaving alcoholic beverage, Carles believes, acknowledges the conundrum: "'we can't control whatever the eff they do.'" This even as the popularity of the beverage implies a conformity, a mutual recognition, albeit a distorted one, of interest. But is this simply a refutation of rhizomatic organizations of resistance, a reterritorialization of assemblages of addiction? More importantly, can the consumption of intoxication substances be understood as a subtraction, a specifically political praxis of nonengagement and the substitution of pleasure for the more traditional goals of power?

Carles reconceptualizes the problematic with a deceptively simple question: "Is Four Loko for tweens and minorities?" Carles asks -- for precisely the marginalized and disenfranchised? The implication, I believe is obvious. The biopolitics of reproducing flexible labor demands a facility with abstracted pleasures, with paradoxically blank yet hyperaware states, conditions of frantic passive activity. "Should u just do tons of blow and drink rubbing alcohol instead of doing Four Loko?" Carles asks, to indicate that there is, in fact, no alternative. We will experience the false euphoria of hedonic self-abnegation; we will replenish ourselves for alienated labor through alienated joy. We will march singly as one. In one way or another, Loko is something we are all forced to consume.

26 October 2010: "OP-ED: Snacks the Cat is tired of vibes being harshed"

This post is about the struggle for recognition. In this trenchant yet poignant interrogation of the discontents of intersubjectivity in a socioeconomic matrix given to interpellating individuals in isolation and shaping and delimiting consciousness with the so-called rational prerogatives of pure self-interest, Carles draws on the work of Axel Honneth, a follower of German social theorist Jürgen Habermas, to explore the consequences of neglect in social relations of structured care. Challenging the species-ist assumptions of many traditional moralists, Carles elects to pursue his ethical inquiry by means of imagining himself as a domesticated feline more or less abandoned in a caged world and presented with no justification for the improvisational Geworfenheit on which the animal finds he must rely. "I don't get any authentic attention or love," the cat comments, a remark that ironically speaks to the human condition.

But Carles must assuredly be deploying the jargon of authenticity with an arch, critical purpose. As Adorno wrote of fascistic uses of such verbiage,

the sacred quality of the authentics' talk belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where -- for temporary lack of any other available authority -- its language resemble s the Christian. Prior to any consideration of particular content, this language molds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal.

Thus in the circumstances Carles references, Snacks the cat enjoys no particular or immanent dasein but instead voices demands that demonstrate its utter subjection and the degree to which its thinking has been preconditioned to subservience. It is not without irony that Carles has Snacks proclaim, "I honestly don't have too much to say." The gurgled mewling of the real-life Snacks is in truth not much different from the aggrieved squeals for the master's attention that Carles narrates for the cat, which in turn, the implication appears to be, are not all that different from our own pursuits of social recognition. "Things aren't going too well and I'm not very happy," Snacks complain. Welcome to the existential club. Echoing the insights of Sartre and Camus into the absurdity of life, Snacks notes that "Maybe the point of life isn't to be happy. Maybe it is just about enduring pain & sadness."

Carles links this dissipated posture of weltschmerz and angst to a general atmosphere of social neglect and restriction cultivated by elites for whom Bethany Cosentino, as a much-heralded "alt", is representative -- an environment in which the odor of hallucinogens mixes with the branded products geared toward supplying empty calories and artifical energy ("The place smells like dank, there are empty Mountain Dew cans everywhere"). As Honneth argued,

The forms of practical maltreatment in which a person is forcibly deprived of any opportunity freely to dispose over his or her own body represent the most fundamental sort of personal degradation. This is because every attempt to gain control of a person's body against his or her will -- irrespective of the intention behind it - causes a degree of humiliation that impacts more destructively than other forms of respect on a person's practical relation-to-self.

Thus it is no surprise that Snacks's revolution takes a decidedly coprophiliac form: "Sometimes we poop everywhere just to cause trouble." A primitive attempt to reassert bodily control through fundamental acts of disobedience, but even these fail to distract a preoccupied ruling class, absorbed in its own pleasure seeking ("they just laugh at us because they are stoned").

But as Snacks turns to despair, the language of its misery are intentionally designed to evoke a far more optimistic ethical positionality. "I am cloaked in darkness," Snacks exclaims, which can only make one think of Levinas's words in Existence and Existents:

When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not 'something.' But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence.

In the absence of the master, Snacks can become one with the presence that reaches beyond the ontological. Only in the absence of presence can Snacks really be...

25 October 2010: "Taylor Swift writes song abt how John Mayer 'hit it & quit it' just 2 generate buzz"

This post is about the phallic phase. In Lacan's seminal article, "The Phallic Phase and the Subjective Import of the Castration Complex," the French psychoanalytical thought leader made an important contribution to the understanding of the development of female subjectivity, underscoring the particular peculiaraties of female psycho-ontogenesis with regard to female children's necessarily imperfect relationship to the castration complex, which for male children ushers them into the period of tentatively balanced psychic organization that allows for a self-recognition of identity. Through an analysis a representative celebrity entering an explicitly transitional phase, both biologically and in her career, Carles is concerned to investigate whether Lacan's contentions about the genital organization of infantile sexuality still hold under postmodern, highly mediated conditions in which the production of subjectivity may have escaped from the foundry of the hyperrepressive nuclear family to instead be forged by a society-wide repressive tolerance. Or, as Carles frames the question, "Now that Taylor Swift admits to <3ing peen, does this mean she is a slutwaver?"

The question is not an idle one. The phallic stage as experienced in the individual female psyche, Carles suspects, has become a culture-wide phenomenon led by female pop stars who simulate the throes of somatic dystrophy and the dissimulation of identity. Swift, Carles sagely notes, "is dealing with hornie bros who just want to 'get off' but don't really want much emotional attachments" through an barely controlled experiment in sublimation, producing a record album that ostensibly processes and distantiates her passage through the phallic stage almost a decade after the fact. Not coincidentally, the album is preoccupied with information that Swift must at once keep secret and share ("She tried to be all 'secret' about it being abt John Mayer even though the song is called "Dear John.""). The paradox that proclaims its absence everywhere is precisely the unconscious, omnipresent yet elusive, invisible but overdetermined.

It is not too much of an exaggeration to claim, as Carles seems to, that Swift's work is everywhere haunted by the phallus, and that her own artistic efforts are pantomimes of the castration complex in which she occupies the position of both subject and object. That is, the album is, as Carles explains, "abt how she is 'becoming a woman.'"

But what can this mean?  As Lacan himself notes, "The Other is not simply the locus in which truth stammers. It deserves to represent that to which woman is fundamentally related."  Can any truth be spoken about female subjectivity, and more important, can the subject identifying as a woman know anything about itself? Lacan claims women serve as the organizing void around which male metaphysical delusions can be structured: "So that the soul may come into being, woman is differentiated from it right from the beginning. She is called woman (on /a dit-femme) and defamed (difdme). The most famous (fameux) things that have come down to us about women in history are, strictly speaking, what one can say that is infamous (infamant)." Swift's destiny was always already to be defamed, and the transgressions committed against her in the public eye by various male aggressors are automatically inverted by the public so that she is recognized as the persecutor of every man's longing for transcendence and peace. She is "just another empty female" as Carles puts it, or to use Lacanian nomenclature she is "Woman barred," for "as soon as Woman is enunciated by way of a not-whole, the W cannot be written."

So it is no surprise to find Carles noting dryly, "Glad I am a bro." 

17 October 2010: "Protecting myself from society's toxic vibes [via gas mask]"

This post is about precarity. As in many of his writings, Carles is here concerned with the ways in which neoliberalism has stripped subjects of the very presumption of security as an anchoring concept around which to develop a reflexive sense of self. Instituted everywhere instead is an interpellation of subjectivity oriented toward radical flexibility, toward a certain malleable posture toward capital, a willingness to be remolded as it demands, a kind of "just-in-time" subjectivity that permits docile bodies to be adapted and embrace the various challenges capital needs them to solve in order to generate profit within the system. Such a subject has no intrinsic "needs" so much as a need to be inculcated with the needs of the moment, a deep imbrication with the processes and tempo of the fashion industry and its distribution channels.

Carles, in this post, has chosen to elaborate this thesis in response to an image of a particularly tragic case study, a youth who voluntarily dons the garb of the military industrial complex for which too many young people have been the "cannon fodder," to borrow the incendiary language of the Quebec Women’s Federation. "I must protect myself from toxic vibes," Carles imagines this figure thinking, but the thought itself already bears the trace of toxicity, or the toxic movement of the trace as it is brought to bear in the figure's epistemological reflexiveness. Can he think without adopting the toxic tropes with which neoliberalism has outfitted him, literally and figuratively, as it were? "This uniform is not 4 the sake of personal branding," he says, which is to say that is precisely what it is for, though the statement is not ironic nor sarcastic. It is the consequence of living an impossible contradiction forced upon us, to be uniform in our commitment to pursuing personal uniqueness through the detritus of mass culture and meme manufacturing.

The subject, in his wariness, fails to see the inadequancy of his protection, how that is part of the toxin delivery system. Carles hints at it in this passage:

We meet in a safe, dark environment
which has been aesthetically treated to
keep us safe

The safety is a prepackaged illusion, another contrivance that bears with it the impetus of constant flux. Carles suggests here that safety has become a form of blindness, an aesthetics of effacement, of nullification.

And for precisely this reason the figure in the photograph manifestly lacks the courage to adopt the necessary fatal strategy: "I wear this gas mask 2 stay alive in our toxic ass society," he confesses, when in truth life is simply not possible in such a society, mask or no mask. And this is to say nothing of the psychic death we all suffer from the masks we are forced to wear and exchange in such rapid succession with the gyrations of the global economy. The figure believes "I will live 4ever escaping with my bros who participate in my relevant counter-culture lifestyle", but instead voluntarily lives an undead existence, like capital itself, preying on the living impulses of others in the past and future and recapitulating it in nihilism articulated in the most trivial form: a so-called "life-style."

23 September 2010: "Is your personal brand compromised when you attend a relevant alternative event with your partner?"

This post is about interpassivity. How do the social relations we adopt/adapt function as mechanisms of control rather than agency or liberation? Can we empower ourselves autonomously to foster the kinds of relations that will not sends us careening in to the traps prepared for us by the post-Fordist economy? Are the alternatives (obviously a key term for Carles) -- the vaunted flexibility required of us by neoliberalism -- tempered and balanced by the terms of traditional intimate relationships, or does it prompt us to experience such relations as unduly constricting, as further hedges on the ersatz autonomy promised us by the prevailing regime of power? Carles frames this question with his usual adroitness:

The alternative bro is growing up
entering relationships
still into buzzbands, still into ‘being alt’
but the pressure to mainstreamify
and find a ‘partner’
yet I still have my dreams
big dreams
of being relevant, buzzworthy, blogworthy

The legacy structures of private-sphere associations here register as a burden, a dismantling of dreams rather than supplying of their underlying form. Instead of the wish to considate private recognition of the unique self, the postmodern subject seeks "buzzworthiness" -- the allure of public attention, fame, of celebrity distributed through the nodes of the networked socioeconomic matrix.

In a sense, all of Carles's writings are concerned with the same subject: the inevitable need brought on by modern society of having to bow before the reality principle and surrender aspirations of pursuing an "alt" lifestyle well beyond the confines of postadolescence. The mood expressed in this adage of Carles's: "Sorta just hope life works itself out."

In premodern social formations, this transition was not nearly as acute and traumatic, simply because few had the opportunity to conceive of an alternative to the traditional folkways in which they were by and large embedded. Few experienced the luxury of leisure time as we understand it; they were content to annihiliate their surplus hours of non-productive time in bestial pursuits: revelry, fornication, intoxication, and so on. Some of this atavistically adheres to the fabled alt lifestyle, as Carles notes: "I am the modern alternative bro. I used to attend relevant concerts with a few bros, getting fucked up, standing in the front of the stage." The frequent nods to fantasies of exchanging sexual partners reflects this as well.

Only with the advent of modernity, and capitalism's development of broad-based markets for consumer goods and its elaboration of the circuit of capital that requires workers to also be consumers -- cannibalistically feeding on the fruits of their own expropriated labour time -- does the particular problematic of the "mainstream" or the "masses" emerge, along with the temporal component of the interpellated subject's inevitable surrender to it.

It remains unclear whether Carles wishes to advocate a rear-guard action against the reality principle, or whether he sees the masses who have bowed to it as a kind of Big Other whose existence is presumed but never pinned down. Carles's many posts are often, in fact, a search for the diametrically opposed Big Other, the quest for the ultimate "alt" individual who embodies all the implications of the so-called hipster lifestyle as it is elaborated online in a variety of memes and marketing ploys. (This particular post's reference to the "Altest Couple on Earth" and his earlier explanation of his desire to find this couple typifies this aspect of his writings.) The implied existence of this ultimate "alt" -- pure alterity, the Other with an emphatically capital O -- underwrites the submission to the reality principle in fact, as well as the toleration of the unmistakable cynicism inherent to much of allegedly alternative cultural product -- "buzzbands" and so forth. Somewhere a real hipster buys into all such pabulum; in rejecting it ourselves we reconcile ourselves to the mainstream without believing our abnegation will destroy the very possibility of an alternative.

21 September 2010: "SCIENTIFIC STUDY finds that women prefer chill bros"

This post is about the dividual. Always alert and attendant to the vagaries of postfeminism and the problematic of gender generally, Carles begins by exploding the myth that the women's liberation efforts in Western societies in the late 20th century had any lasting effect on reorienting the dreams and desires inculcated by centuries of patriarchal rule. "Now women are more independent, and are seeking a chill ass life partner. Women are ‘more independent’, and that basically means that they are ‘stressed and crazy’ so they need a chill ass bro who metaphorically danks them out in their down time." The modes of patriarchal control, as Carles acutely points out here, have changed their guise but have not disappeared -- in a shift akin to that of the society of discipline to one of control and biopower that Deleuze hypothesized in his much-remarked-upon essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control."

The nature of the feminine enclosure has changed, as has her gaoler. No longer an ogre, the oppressing male figure is a "chill ass bro" who "danks them out" -- that is, makes women experience their oppression as a kind of blank pleasure, an annihilation of the stress associated with personal responsibility and true autonomy. A kind of pseudo independence for women takes hold, a shell within which women can enact a subjective freedom that is always already contained by patriarchal forces. The telling indicator is that women use their liberation to find a male "life partner" -- that is the smiling face for the oppressor that she can use to mask the true nature of her condition. Their only desire is for a man to administer their lives from the shadows. "Women just want to chill out, and have some1 plant a seed in them," Carles notes ironically. The biological roots of male domination are so often casually invoked in society as to become uncontroversial expressions of "common sense." Of course reproductive imperatives dictate social mechanisms of containtment. A theoretically neutral biological distinction thus becomes the kernal for elaborating the limitless postponements of equality in the name of species being.

Men, on the obverse face of this structure, are ideologically conditioned to serve as guards for the patriarchal order by being taught the following about female "nature": "women only value 3 things in a man: money, huge peens, and physical attractiveness." Men learn that women are essentially sentient programs, easily managed by manipulating the male-controlled and -dominated "inputs" into their consciousness, as it were.

But the entire structure of gender subservience and control is ideologically laundered under the aegis of medical science -- in this case the analysis of levels of cortisol, which is held by scientists to govern the relations between men and women within these culturally embedded structures of dominance. Carles will have none of it:

The study is based around some sort of imaginary concept called ‘cortisol’, which is some sort of ‘magic mojo’ or something like that

Though Carles postulates a radical solution to the problem of the perpetuation of patriarchy -- "Should all women ‘stop dealing with men’ and just be crazy lesbians 2gether?" -- he seems unwilling to commit to a praxis of de facto gender separation, knowing that such an arrangement can only foster an apartheid of the sexes. Instead he challenges men to question their own affective labor: "Can a bro be ‘too chill’?" Can men be fooling themselves with their own conceit of female indulgence? Carles reminds us that the controlling strategies of patriarchy also control the would-be controllers, but he leaves us to wonder who that leaves behind the curtain, pulling all of our strings, chilling all of us out.

17 September 2010: "DISASTER VIDEO: Tornado tears up Brooklyn, 2 altbros ‘flip a shit’ in their sweet loft"

This post is about infralapsarianiam. Yes, Carles takes a quick swipe at the personification of Mother Nature, comparing the weather anomaly in a renowned district for contemporary aspirants to the Bohemian lifestyle to a "‘pussy tornado’" in order to stress the libidinal energies that underwrite structures of postadolescence. The metaphor reminds us of the casual misogyny that attends natural disasters, the free-floating implication that untamed female desire always threatens to erupt as a destructive wind sweeping away existing schemes of containment and control. But that is not his primary subject in this essay. The tornado also presents Carles with an occasion for a searing critique of the folly of trying to deliberately ape an approach to everyday life that is marked in the very minds of its admirers by its accidental, organic quality.

"Apparently a tornado ‘ripped thru Brooklyn’, trying to transcend ‘hipster bashing’, and instead do some ‘hipster twisting’/'hipster natural disastering’/'hipster rapturing,’" Carles reports, drawing an explicit connection between the inauthentic approach to the quotidian and the wrath of divinely controlled, untamed forces. The implication is that the soul is involved in such matters -- that hipsterdom is akin to a kind of Calvinist Elect, with God choosing from those among us who to bless with cool, and that the salvation of hipster status cannot be achieved through our own deeds alone. The difference between hip-elect and reprobate rests entirely with God's sovereign and seemingly arbitrary decision to show mercy to some but not all. The Synod of Dort in 1613 addressed this issue: "Before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace, according to the free good pleasure of his will, [God] chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people out of the entire human race which had fallen by its own fault from its original innocence into sin and ruin."

To secularize and rearticulate this position in lay language: even those who want to become Brooklyn bohemians know that it isn't a matter of simple decision and determination but requires a confluence of contingencies, an alignment of the field of social relations, status signifiers, and hegemonic power structures such that countercultural practices can have an apparently authentic meaning rather than functioning merely as one more consumer niche, one more entertainment option.

This is why Carles so frequently couches his critique in tentative language, as questions or conditional statements, as noncommittal musings, as in the following passage:

Not really sure if they followed standard tornado protocol. I think ur apparently supposed ‘duck and cover.’ Or maybe go into a room without many windows, like a basement or a cellar. Maybe I should move to Brooklyn and build a ‘sweet underground loft/mixed use art space/organic food dumpster diving co-op’/d.i.y. venue.’

The careful wording is meant to evoke the radical uncertainty of the soul's fate in the immanent realm of fashion and status, the curious impotency we all must confront when reckoning with our inherited habitus and the differential gifts of charisma and sprezzatura, as described by Castiglione. Will it make a difference to do anything at all? Should we commit an effort of will to any particular measure contrived to enhance our cool quotient? "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?" -- all Carles can say, Prufrock-like, is "Maybe."

14 September 2010: "Pitchfork writes article abt how bands take lofi photographs to brand themselves as ‘vintage’/authentic"

This post is about the trouvaille. Carles seizes upon an essay at the popular bastion of online music criticism, Pitchfork (p4k), to elaborate several of his own theses with regard to the ever-evolving artistic medium of photography. "Modern humans associate ‘vintage looking photographs’ with authenticity," Carles states, and then proceeds to examine some of the ramifications of this condition, namely the radically contingent aspect of both the photographic image and the experience of personal authenticity, which is in danger of being less a lived experience than an artfully procured or manufactured product akin to images contrived to elicit a nostalgic response to false or nonexistent memories. We become nostalgic for a lost authentic self that in fact is in the process of being made and consists of nothing but manufactured nostalgia. Nostalgia seems to be backward looking when it is in fact a projection into an impoverished future devoid of new ideas or the potential for progress. Carles asks: "Is it more alt to look like ur from the past instead of from the future?" Of course, the answer he implies is "both at the same time."

In his position on photography, Carles lies perhaps halfway between the Barthes of Camera Lucida and the Sontag of On Photography. Barthes famously claimed that "photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable, but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs." Carles traces a similar argument when he declares: "H8 our evolving society. Wish we could just live in our ideal vision of the future, but never forget the chill vibes of the past…
H8 how technology makes information/mp3s more accessible, but ‘cheapens’ moments that we once thought were meaningful."
Photography seizes upon experience and paradoxically drains it of its ontology; it becomes less real for being photographed, a kind of rough draft or dress rehearsal for the image, which supplants it as the real artifact. Technology colludes with capitialism in reifying experience in this fashion, as Carles notes. It decries the "notable" -- not our own aesthetic or emotional response to events. We take photographs to have meaningful experiences; the camera becomes the prerequisite. Meaningful experiences cannot occur outside the image medium. Experience is an image. Carles notes, "basically ‘photographs represent memories. Indie album covers are photographs that represent moments frozen in time, kinda like pictures.’" But photographs and memories are only radically equivalent when the mediated level of experience is immanent and not transcendent, when it can no longer be determined as preceding or following the Event, as such. Is a moment "frozen in time" still a "moment", epistemologically speaking? What sustains the difference that allows memories to remain only "kinda like pictures." How can we preserve the distinction, in the face of a betraying "indie" aesthetic that seeks to efface the difference? Indie appropriations of photos no longer permit images to bear witness; instead they falsify the self. "Do u just want to live a life of leisure without any modern technology, just capturing moments with vintage cameras?" Carles taunts. Of course we don't; the proposition is self-falsifying. The vintage appearance of the image with which we delineate our leisure does nothing to exempt it from the teleological critique of technology. "Capturing moments" still tears apart the integrity of the ego as it is embedded in time-space.

In elucidating this position, Carles clearly has in mind Sontag's assertion that "as photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people take possession of space in which they are insecure." But the indie aesthetic extends that space of insecurity to the whole of everyday life. In one of his quintessential argumentative moves, Carles leaves the crux of argument open-ended, both unstated and overdetermined:

S000 crazy how we live in a modern world with hi-resolution cameras, but

The point: there is no "but"; there is only "but"; there is no "but"....
It can't be resolved for or against the contradiction, Carles shows, just as images themselves can't be resolved or synthesized with memories even as they appear to produce them. Images help us remember only to dent the possibility of memory. We have always never been here before.

12 September 2010: "Justin Bieber tries 2 be alt, buys wayfarers at WalMart, seem too big for his face/lil nose"

This post is about the colophon of doubt. Ostensibly a meditation on a pair of ill-fitting sunglasses worn by a young musician propelled to superstardom by the leveraged network effects of the internet mechanism of cultural distribution, this photo-essay is in fact an interrogation of the exploded spectral dimension, of what it means to see and be seen, elevated exponentially by unthinkable degrees of fame -- that is, the erotics and the vicissitudes of being both the subject and the object of the gaze within the welter of celebrity. Carles posits the question of which Justin Bieber is representative: "By being a tween sensation
Will I get ‘fucked up’ [via psychologically]"? Is the castration anxiety inherent in the gaze likely to annihilate the ego-ideal or fortify it? The stare of the millions of Medusas -- what choice does one have but to don reflective shades to send that reifying specularity back its multiple sites of origin?

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan captured something of the dilemma represented by Justin Bieber in the conclusion to the Four Fundamental Concepts: "I love you, but inexplicably, I love in you something more than you -- the objet petit a -- I mutilate you." Carles recasts this into his own telegraphic style and terminology: "Feeling alone in my tweenage dream ... New feelings inside of me / my brain / my body .... Scared ... Sad ... Alone... Just wish my sunglasses fit my face." The idea of proportion, Carles recognizes haunts us all in the attentional economy, particularly with respect to, in this case, literal blinders -- visual filters to block out the infiltration of unwanted images, undesired data, spectral mirages -- the Other? the analyst? -- which have become necessary to approximate a stable sense of the self in the midst of the flux of overwhelming data. We are as Carles points out, deeply ambivalent about our necessary blinders, about the unconscious and its strategies of repression that permit us to function more or less acceptably within social formations: Carles repeats the koan "h8 u wayfarers" mesmerically, hypnotically, to summon something of the self-imposed filter's psychic power to both repress and structure phenomonlogically the flow of stimuli, to make consciousness, as it were, possible. We hate that which we necessarily desire, and this registers as an apprehension or anxiety of ill-fittingness -- of being forced to wear the costume which in fact is the essence of our self. Without the filter we can only feel "Sad/dead on the inside" as Carles explains. But that inner necrology makes possible an externalized ontic positionality. That is to say, our identity is our best disguise. It functions as a boundary, a rejection of psychic materials, not as a synthesis.

Lacan frames this condition, the problem of human onotlogy, this way: "I see from only one point, but in my existence, I am looked at from all sides.... The split that concerns us is not the distance that derives from the fact that there are forms imposed by the world toward which the intentionality of phenomenological experience directs us.... The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the thrust of our experience [pun possibly intended], namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety." Carles describes that "strange contingency" with the impossible if not paradoxical formulation "Going viral every day" and links it expressly to the non-reproductive thanatopic libidinous energy conducted by and through the gaze, the implicit promise of "‘beejes’ on the reg." But anxiety frames [pun intended] the self constructed by the desiring gazes of unseen and uncounted others and denies the perspective necessary to more or less successfully mediate the distance between self and unself, between conflicting poles of ego organization and orientation, to echo the constituitive méconnaissance without denaturing it in the petered-out trickle of circumscribed maturity.

Thus Carles suggests for Bieber the doom that confronts us all:

1 day I will grow in2 my wayfarers
I will be a man
I will be happie.

We will become synonymous with the limits we have set on our sensuality; on our intake of stimuli. We will associate this constricted vision with masculinity, with power within and flowing through a patriarchal matrix of relations, and with the Word in the phallo-logos cathexis. And we will mistake this psychic attrition as contentment, as the apotheosis of our being rather than the figurative, if not literal, extermination of our soul. "Sad/dead on the inside" indeed.

7 September 2010: "Craiglist ‘cock blocks’ hard, won’t let u buy & sell local prostitutes n e more"

This post is about homosocial desire. In Between Men: English literature and male homosocial desire, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that the "male traffic in women," to borrow, as she does, Levi-Strauss's piquant phrase, replicates and relies upon a triangular structure of desire in which male-male libidinous energy is, as it were, laundered through its being routed through subordinated and subject-ed women under patriarchal relations.

In any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desires and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence.

Carles traces this congruence in his own textual narrative, which discusses through anecdotal strategies precisely the persistence of prostitution and thus patrraiarchy in postindustrial capitalism, through the radical use of rupture, of a literal lacuna in the fabric of his discourse:

I purchased my first ‘hooker’ off craigslist. It really is a great place to meet new people, and ‘have ur way with them.’ I met a user who was named “Samantha – 23 all natural big titties.’ She was located in a Ramada Inn close to the airport. I went to her room, and she was a little bit uglier than she looked in the pictures, but I was still super hornie, and got ‘turned on’ because I was doing something illegal. I had very aggressive sex with her, and said hateful, and potentially racists things 2 her. It was actually a positive experience, because I accepted that I was a ‘homosexual’ afterwards, and was only dominating women to deal with my

Here the text abruptly fragments itself, leaving the thought uncompleted, but in a larger sense, more than complete, as its resolution is of course overdetermined. The need to "dominate" women is coordinate with the expression of the priority of male-male relations as those properly constituitive of society, reinforcing the principle that men alone can form meaningful contractual bonds that shape the distribution of property, work, responsibility and leisure. Prostitution is simply the reverse of these male-male relations, a shadowplay or dumb show in which the male enacts his psychic distance from the libidinous desire of the female through the introjection of commerce -- mechanizing and rationalizing the expression of sexual desire for the other and neutralizing it, suppressing the possibility of a disruptive "love" that might upset patriarchal prerogatives. Women are bought and shared among men as property that solidifies the male bond, and certifies their mutual desire for the other's maintained mastery.

Carles is quick to posit the universality of this experience -- "What is ur craiglists prostitution experience?" -- which frames his assertion that Craigslist's efforts to thwart the practice of prostitution can only be regarded from within patriarchy as a "cockblock" -- a prevention of two "cocks" confirming one another's efficacy over the body of the purchased female, dehumanized as chattel, reduced to the level of "a fixed gear bicycle" or "a used IKEA sofa for $50," as Carles points out, using salient examples from contemporary Western life-styles.

But Carles hopes not only to underscore the ubiquity of homosocial desire but to contest its apparent naturalness: "Was it weird to go into their pussie/mouth/butt hole after some1 else had been in it hours before?" he asks of the generic male client of a prostitute, emphasizing the continuity of the circuit of somatic frictions that sustain the fiction of the given-ness of patriarchy. In Carles's interrogatory gambit, the phallus is marked and unmasked by its very absence, and by the persistence of its trace after its copulatory withdrawal. His point is that the phallus necessarily haunts all transactions of desire, even those that are purely linguistic in nature, and that the raw conjunction of meanings and signifiers too is a kind of marked sexual congress, a phantasm of presence that universalizes not male power but male guilt.

Hence Carles points out that the "Craigslist killer" -- more a metaphor than a particular villain in this construction -- "seems normal-looking, like any other bro just ‘trying to get off.’" The criminality of the patriarchal enterprise is normalized, homogenized (pun intended) by the nature of the orifice impregnated by the phallo-logos -- the process of meaning making is the scene of the crime, the primal scene, where the name of the father is both forbidden and always already echoing in our ears.

The question then becomes, as Carles limns it, "Do u know any better solutions 4 eCommerce than craigslist?" That is, does online sociality and networked digitial interfaces necessarily reinforce the bars of the prison-house of patriarachy, or can they model alternative forms of exchange and property relations that don't require the female body to sanctify? Are there forms of desire that transcend the homosocial yet retain structurating power? In the absence of these forms, the taboo markers of racial prejudice and miscegenation leap to the fore as organizing principles: "Would u rather be a ‘black pimp’ or a ‘drugged out white whore’?" Carles asks, delineating the constricted subjectivities available under the phallologocentric-postcolonialist regimes of control. Sexual relations are race relations are power relations are biopolitical relations. QED.

2 September 2010: "Some a-hole writes book abt how teens are inauthentic Christians, calls them ‘hipster X-tians’"

This post is about negative theology. "Is God real, or just ‘bullshit’?" Carles asks, taking no quarter in this bracing interrogation of contemporary religious mores, focusing his lens primarily on the practices of modern Christians in thriving "first-world" societies. Carles's analysis reveals that consumer capitalist prosperity tends to obviate religious practice and transform it into a market demographic, its rituals in no way distinguishable from the obsequious and ostentatious following of trends. The concept of the deity serves not to anchor a project of faith or even subordination, but is radically destablilized, becoming merely another transient meme in the marketplace of cultural ideas -- that is to say, "bullshit".

Christianity, Carles declaims, functions as a kind of in-group clique for upper-middle class youth discovering the boundaries and prerogatives of their privilege:

In high school, it seems like there is usually a ‘group of Christians teens’ who love 2 get together and talk about God, play acoustic guitar, and gather in some1′s parent’s huge, upper-middle class house [via being able to buy a huge house due to low property values in suburbia].... Since these kids are usually white and rich, they love 2 ‘drink and fuck’, and just try to seem ‘holier than thou’ cuz they chill out in youth groups while some 24 year old counselor bro ‘talks about God’ with them + throws down some Jack Johnson-like acoustic duets. Hella ‘inauthentic’ cuz tweens just wanna be teens–they don’t rlly care about God.

Religion bears no moral or ethical precepts with it; it merely expresses belonging and hierarchy -- but of course, as Carles suggests, this is nothing new. He wonders whether youth can be the measure of any cultural phenomenon -- "Are teens ‘authentic followers/fans’ of any trend, brand, band, or religion?" -- suggesting that they are a bellwether for cultural change, but not its agent. These youths may not care about God, but in this they are merely emulating longstanding religious practice, organizing society to protect and preserve status. Of course religious piety has long been a shabby cloak for northern-hemisphere imperialism and white ethnocentrism, as Carles is quick to point out: "Feel like I woulda turned out to be an authentic member of God’s white army if my parents ‘manned up’, gave up their middle class jobs, and chilled out in Central America teaching ‘dumb Mexicans’ about the way of the Lord/white man." In other words, religion is a mode for reinstantiating racially based power without openly exposing the contingency of that power. Often it operates outside of economic power or in opposition to it, but it relies on the same cohort of proletarians as its basis.

But this critique of the sublunary uses of religion in a fallen world should not distract us from Carles's more incisive and trenchant critique of religion on its own terms. Carles introduces the idea of God's silence with a seemingly trite jest: "Sad that my church doesn’t have the social tools to help me deal with real life/teen issues. Wish I understood why life was so unfair." The issues associated with youth -- identity formation within the existing social matrix as one comes to terms with inflexible hierarchies and the absence of meritocracy -- are all transmogrified religious concerns: Has God created souls as equals? Does God sanction the superiority of one group over another, despite what foundational documents of the American state proclaim? How can religion acclimate us to social reality while nourishing our sense of our own relevance? Carles's chief insight is that religion has surrendered the authority to resolve these contradictions by colluding with consumer capitalism, integrating with it rather than opposing it. God fails where Wal-Mart triumphs.

Carles suggests that "authentic alts are post-god" -- that have survived the existential crisis posited by god's absence to live in roiling state of metaphysical indifference, in which the heavenly firmament and its mysteries have been supplanted by technological doodads and the mechanistic rationality which finds its apotheosis in precision targeted marketing and the nichification of consumers. The notion of what is "unfair" is no longer salient in a realm where it "seems like God really needs a twitter account" to make his Word bear any authority. Who shall be the prophet for the digital flock when the decentered structure of the network permits no one to lead but everyone to follow?

31 August 2010: "A Newspaper does in depth interview with ‘the guy who screens album submissions’ @ a radio station"

This post is about axiology. In his epochal 1757 essay "On the Standard of Taste" Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume writes of the difficulty of finding true critics:

Thus, though the principles of taste be universal, and, nearly, if not entirely the same in all men; yet few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty. The organs of internal sensation are seldom so perfect as to allow the general principles their full play, and produce a feeling correspondent to those principles. They either labour under some defect, or are vitiated by some disorder; and by that means, excite a sentiment, which may be pronounced erroneous.... Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.

Carles clearly has this passage in mind in his assessment of Eric K Lawry, a radio-station employee entrusted with sorting through music submissions and nominating certain recordings for broadcast airplay. Carles wonders if Lawry is doomed to "seem like ‘a pretentious ass hole’" because of the discriminatory powers invested in him by virtue of his privileged position relative to the means of media broadcasting.

Carles recognizes that "it all starts with this bro. The gatekeeper 2 the buzz economy," but he wrestles with the implications of the systemic concentration of power in the hands of one particular node in the networked libidinal economy. The critical question for Carles is not merely whether the position within the hierarchy constitutes the tastemaking power of this particular functionary, or whether Lawry's prternatural grasp of aesthetics allowed his to mount his own sui generis perch within the culture industry. Rather Carles is concerned with how the power to judge and disseminate a particular ideology of the aesthetic manages to circulate and legitimate itself.

For instance, Carles asks: "Do people who are ‘relevant tastemakers’ listen to the radio?" The import of this question is twofold. (1) what modes of mediation substantiate the social construction of relevance, and how immanent are those tasked with the construction of the field of relevance? Is relevance a tautological proposition? A clever piece of epistemological legerdemain? Can one decree relevance without presupposing the very concept one seeks to promulgate? Is the power of the broadcast medium itself an index to relevance or can media be invested with a relevance proportional to the message and its capability to trace or even circumscribe social imaginary at a given constellation of influences at a specific moment of time and space? (2) What is the proper way to analyze the experiential process of listening? Is a standard stimulus-response model appropriate, or has it become outmoded in an era of quantum approaches? Does the act of listening transcend the mere property of being struck passively by aural waves constrained within certain frequencies? Are there other organs with which one can listen? Is taste merely a matter of measured oscillation?

All of these inquiries open of course on Carles's more encompassing question: "Do people still listen to radio?" The critical distinction between "relevant tastemakers" and ordinary, run-of-the-mill "people" rests in the choice of the word "still". Radio as a medium, Carles implies, imposes passivity on auditors after repeated exposures; it ingrains receptive posture. Radio listeners expect to be inculcated with taste. Tastemakers, on the other hand, redefine the principle of listening along the lines of Hume's ideal, "tuning in," as it were, the disposition appropriate to the dispensation of aesthetic norms but taking pains to avoid being co-opted by their own instruments of dissemination.

Hence the first two criteria for receiving critical approbation are: "1. Make it personal. 2. get experienced." The effortless synthesis of the personal and and the empirical, Carles implies, abstracting from Lawry's remarks, forms the basis of aesthetic judgment, of enabling a critic to assume to appropriate critical posture with a minimum of self-consciousness. If the critic is brought to bear his critical posture awkwardly, the resulting judgments will be burdened with this awareness and discreditable. But this harms not the critic but the listeners who reap the benefits of his sacrifice only to that extent that his judgment appears natural and not labored, that is to say, disinterested.

Thus when Carles sardonically declares that he "Might just give that bro a call, and ‘demand to know’ why his ‘goddamn radio station’ hasn’t played my chillwave fuzzy buzz lofi sound project," he is calling our attention to a more specific meaning of fidelity. What is "lofi" is not the project but the transmission channels between critic, artist, and audience, which have become calcified with "buzz". The word "Buzz" implies the loss of fidelity not merely aurally but morally.

18 August 2010: "NYTimes writes article abt how worthless 20-somethings can’t get jobs & try 2 stay young 4evr"

This post is about eschatology. In honor of late literary critic Frank Kermode, whose influence on Carles's own praxis is subtle but pervasive, let us begin by considering the sense of an ending. Not merely the ending of this particular analysis by Carles, which is characteristically enigmatic and provocative, but what constitutes that experience of finality that signals the completion of the passage to adulthood, which, as the lives of the young people who are the subject of the New York Times article Carles examines can testify to, is often subjectively experienced as apocalyptic.

In many respects, all narratives of the passage to adulthood are at their essential core, fictions. Necessary fictions, yes, it's true, but fictions nonetheless whose structures and motifs and conventions are shaped ideologically by the society in which they are nestled. In truth the concept of adulthood is always a socioculutral concept superimposed on the biological life cycle of humans. As Carles points out, the confusion of the biological with the sociopolitical creates ambivalence: "So confused. Wish u were just considered an adult right after the first time u grew a nice bush of pubes / share an intense orgasm with a a member of the opposite sex." But rites of passage are no longer anchored to the reproductive imperatives of the species, and the categories of the life cycle now serve the larger purpose of mystifying the only incontestable transition that we all go through: death. Carles wryly acknowledges this with a question, "Does n e 1 know if it is true that every human on Earth will die one day?" The fantasies of postponing adulthood, naturally, are fantasies of postponing or even preventing death, which is spuriously associated with the corrosive effects of the reality principle -- or as Carles puts it, with having "to ‘take care of kids + a naggy, annoying life partner’".

As Carles sagely recognizes, it "seems like we are all trying to deal with ‘getting old’ or something". One method of coping is through aggrandizing our individual mortality by conflating it with the destiny of the cosmos. Another is to absorb oneself in work, though this is proving less plausible for the generation now entering the labor market confront dire conditions there. "Should we all just continue trying to be bloggers/social media gurus/buzzband members, instead of getting jobs as teachers/insurance agents/bank tellers?" Carles asks, situating the dilemma in a resolutely post-Fordist context of immaterial labor. In other words, Carles notes that the coming-of-age narrative resists turning on domestic issues and instead pivots on employment categories and one's emplacement in the sociocultural field. Cultural work and informational processing remain lifestyle proclivities rather than labor and seem to exempt subjects from the burden of labor, which they experience phenomenologically as leisure. But this only serves to expedite their expropriation, of course.

But this fretting merely invites a minor existential crisis that masks the larger one: "Are yall glad that ur not like ur parents, and u haven’t felt pressure to start a career that would probably ‘peak’ with a job in middle management? Is ur life meant for ’so much more’ than such inhumane desk work?" From the perspective of our inevitable death, this question can seem somewhat trivial, though. When Carles asks, "Should I get my life together before it is too late?" the implication is that it is always already too late.

17 August 2010: "Steve Aoki and the Cobrasnake make some commercial for a deadly rave"

This post is about the sacrificial crisis. Carles signals his interest in the very title of this effort, linking commercial discourse with the elaboration of a liminal space in which the possibility for pleasure and for death comingle even more intimately then they must do generally. For Carles "deadly rave" has taken on the character of a Homeric epithet, so habitually does he stress the linkage between the cardinal concepts: raves, where subjectivity dissolves in a saturnine fizzle of psychoactive drugs and hypnotic rhythms, and death, not only the psychic death of the integrated identity but literal, somatic death, in which the body (with or without organs) ceases to function. Carles wants readers to consider whether a rave can be anything other than fatal -- "Feel like every music festival in California can be called a ‘deadly rave’," he notes -- and whether the words are metonyms for each other, death implying the apocalyptic jouissance of the rave, and the rave implying the finality of the rupture with continuous self-identity and the phoenix-like birth (the kind of resurrection so redolent of California) of the "lifestyle personal brand human," as Carles describes one of the promoters of this particular concatenation of necrotism and hedonism.

Carles forces the interrogation of the conditions that permit subjects to "make some commercial" -- that is to quantify the state of commerciality and render it conceptually conducive to being measured in terms of "more" and "less". Foregrounded in Carles's trenchant formulation is the fact of the commercial itself as product, as an achieved state rather than a natural condition or neutral description of pre-existing practices. To define the commercial is to conjure it into being, to "make" it. And making the commercial is engage the conjuncture of desire and death, the fatal appeal that can imbue products with desirability, to make people believe they can kill for the pleasure the products can provide, even if the only murder they ever commit in actuality is a kind of sad suicide of the psyche. "Even mainstream dbags who just want to pound their fists," Carles reminds us -- violence is everpresent beneath the thin veneer of institutionally orchestrated normality. The animal is caged restlessly beneath the human skin.

Carles wonders whether that that all public rituals are becoming analogues of the primordial ritual sacrifices that have always marked the evolution of human societies: "Worried that every music festival is ‘the same’ now," he notes, and links it to the repetition of the same faces and performers, the "sick artists" who emblematize in Carles's view the deracination inherent in a decadent and individualistic consumer culture. But the popular celebrities are not merely archetypes of triviality; they are lodestones of mimetic desire (""Do they seem like chill bros?" Carles asks, i.e. don't you want to be them, become them, take what they have?) that trigger and bring to crisis the resentments of individuals only barely driven by a tenuous social order to conform.

As Rene Girard argues, a sacrificial ritual is necessary to direct the seething rage onto a harmless scapegoat. The "deadly rave" then as Girard puts it "tricks violence into spending itself on victims whose death will provoke no reprisals." Girard dubs this "good violence", but as Carles darkly implies, the victims at this purgative rituals in the sun-soaked valleys of California may be our own holistic selves: "Whenever u hear about a music festival in California, do u get scared that some1 is gonna die?" Carles asks ominously. The implication: You should, and don't be surprised if you find yourself on the altar, with the high-priests of the culture industry looming over you, wielding the blood-drenched knife.

8 August 2010: VIBES

This post is about faciality. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, "the face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye." Carles, drawing on these words, produces an videographic essay exploring the phenomenological metaphysical interrelationships of consciousness, passion, recording devices, the soul, and the face, not to mention the looming potentiality of the body without organs as a theoretical if not literal construct. Carles deploys the term "vibes" to attempt to differentiate and signify the particular nexus of reflexivity, exhibitionism, and structures of feeling within the subjectivated object that he attempts to theorize here. The label is admittedly provisional, tentative: "Just trying trying to wrap my head around what ‘vibes’ really means," Carles confesses, and examines a series of amateur-recorded performances in which a young woman articulates the subject/object boundary through the fraught mimesis of popular songs circulating as a result of the urgent marketing activities of the fading media corporations. "All media outlets are trying to relay the ‘vibes’ that they are feeling 2 the human race," Carles recognizes, hinting at the culture industry's seminal role in interpolating subjectivity at the institutional-intrapersonal level, giving in some ways the face to the "white wall" of organic substance by conditioning its reactivity. Do we see this woman's real face? Does it bear with it the burden of Levinasian responsibility when it mouths the facile slogans of the sexualized and corporatized mass media? Is it a ritual that, as Adorno has written, has "an affirmative character, that of being accepted into a community of unfree equals"?

But as Deleuze and Guattari note, "It is certain that the signifier does not construct the wall that it needs all by itself; it is certain that subjetivity does not dig its hole all alone. Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of facilality (visagéité), which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole." Bearing this theoretical apparatus in mind, Carles supplies a textbook illustration of the face, its organs, the institutional insistence on orifices, on the interpenetration of stimuli, of knowledge, of experience, of self-apprehension in the mirror of recognition and reproduction of apprehended stimuli in the black field of consciousness. These are "vibes": "a ‘feeling’ inside of u. Some sort of natural reaction to something," as Carles explains. But the hesitant, careful language indicates not merely the provisionality of the concept but also the precarity of the concept of the "natural", let alone the slippery notion of "feeling" and interiority. Where do emotions happen? What is that space, if it can be called a space? To whom does it belong? To whom do we owe a rent for performing the ghost of ourselves within it?

What Carles would like to do is espouse a political economy of the vibe so that he may proceed on to the critique of such an economy, its ideological assumptions and its sustaining flows. "Seems like when u express urself, ur just trying ‘tell people how ur vibes are’" he announces, positing a sociolinguistic understanding of "vibe" as parole, but what, if anything, substantiates the langue? Following Husserl, Carles both accepts and rejects the idea that a physiognomy of vibes can be traduced: "ur vibe receptors incorporate some sort of ’sixth sense’ based on your social life + upbringing + exposure to vibes over the course of ur life." What seems like an organ of apprehension or a sixth sense is in fact a socially constructed capability, an expression of habitus, of social capital at the level of physical sensitivity to stimuli, breeding made sensuous and incontestable, and feasibly postideological, despite the system of privilege it reinscribes. "The act of vibing seems ’so natural’, like pure vibes," Carles argues, evoking the Heideggarian notion of dasein. Authenticity becomes self-referential and is experienced in an uncomplicated fullness as itself, the vibe qua vibe, with all the paradoxical ontic recursiveness that this implies. Hence Carles in his effort to "use this post to ‘explore vibes’" emulates the reflexivity of the concept itself, and demonstrates how to vibe about vibes, as it were, and exemplify the conditionality of vibeology as a prerequisite to the epistemology of the vibe. "Just vibing to some vibes," he concludes, completing the hermeneutic circle.

But there is a concordant praxis of vibes Carles seeks to limn, a process of knowing as a process of expressing: "React naturally to how things make u feel," Carles instructs, "and try to explain the vibes u pick up." This is the true meaning of faciality as Carles sees it, and his rejection of its implied binarisms -- organs opened or closed, mouths wide shut, smells both faint and overpowering, tasting colors, synasthesia -- the face as "veritable megaphone" in D&G's conception. Vibes are the process of explaining vibes, existence does not preclude or precede essence; neither can the poles in such a dialectic be simply reversed. The vibe is merely the expression of the experience of a vibe, anachronistically pitched backward into the past as it happens in the future. The vibe you see in the face of the other has both already and never occurred.

5 August 2010: "Totally Alt Performance Artist squirts Spaghettios out of her vagina"

This post is about das Ding. Carles asks a deceptively flippant question: "If you had a vagina, what would u put up it to represent society?" But this seemingly innocuous feint in truth interrogates not only the whole of the construct of phallologocentrism in patriarchal society but the feministic representations of that construct that only serve to trivialize or reinforce its hegemonic power.

The thrust (pun intended) of the performance art piece Carles explicates is that the female sexual organ is often the channel by which her insertion as subject into patriarchal society is most starkly achieved; that is, vaginal canal is not merely a passage by which society is literally reproduced and over which control by the powers that be must be guaranteed to perpetuate their regime, but it is also an informatized conduit that conducts the semiotics of domination by the phallus, which, as Carles suggests, "represents society" in its phallologocentric guise. The bodily insertion of symbolic forms into the very critical organs of the reproductive process transfers the process of semiosis to the body itself, the order of the symbolic is indeed "written on the body" of woman, underwriting the entire process of signification for the established order of hierarchical and gendered social relations. A bond of analogy is formed between the reproductive process and the semiotic process, a union, a fusion of practices, such that one may easily be translated into the other.

This makes the irruption of the phallic -- whether it take the form of a can of processed and branded pasta, the abject slurry of the pasta itself loosed from its container, or some other form -- into the politicized womb space an Event, in Badiou's sense, yes. Carles concededs that "maybe she’s right, words are bullshit. We are just covered in feces & lil pasta Os in a sweet marinara sauce." Sociohistorical processes as the excrement of collective action; industrially manufactured commodities to sustain life as a form of living death; the symbolic itself as abject; the contingencies by which biological requirements manifest in repressive forms and authorize domination, and so forth.

But the recontextualization of the womb as a networked node also allows sexualization and subjectivation to function as processes of elaboration of shared social languages in which the relations of domination adhere. As Kristeva writes in "Some Observations on Female Sexuality" the phallus is overdetermined as a signifier in its own right to represent inscription, the marking of the law:

Many authors have noted the specific features that destine the penis to be cathected by both sexes to become the phallus, that is, the signifier of privation and lack of being, but also of desire and the desire for meaning -- all the components that make the phallus the signifier of the symbolic law. Visible and narcissistically recognized, erectile and filled with strong erogenous sensitivity, detachable and thus “culpable,” capable of being lost -- the penis is, by this fact, suited to become the medium for difference, the privileged actor in the 0/1 binarism that forms the basis of all systems of meaning (marked/unmarked), the organic maker (therefore real and imaginary) of our psychosexual computer.

Carles obviously had this passage in mind in calling attention sardonically and reflexively to "my ‘liveblog’/'livevlog’ of the performance," drawing parallels between the penis as "psychosexual computer" and the technological gadget as perhaps the apotheosis of the phallic device, epitomizing the simultaneous experience of presence and absence, the fundamental lack and the effort to fill the lack with communicative gestures that only delineate desire without resolving it.

Hence, Carles is critical of the artist's efforts to introduce lalangue into her performance, which, as already accessible to digital reproduction, is always already assimilated to the phallologocentric code:

Things were pretty chill, but then she got serious and delivered some sort of manifesto that eventually broke down into weird phonetic murmurs. Think she was trying to ‘transcend’ human language, and trying to get into some animalistic jargon vibes.

Carles pointedly represents her gruntings not as explosions of infantile presymbolic murmur but instead as fragmented abbreviations of common terms from digital culture: hro, p4k, bzzband, etc. Rather than transcend language and its freighted meanings, her efforts merely reinscribe the problematic of patriarchy as it replicates itself in networked society. Lalangue, semiosis are reduced to "jargon" -- the most advanced form and yet emptiest form of the symbolic, the purest instantiation of hierarchy in language.

Naturally Carles draws the only possible conclusion from the artist's being trapped in literalistic praxis: he confesses that he was "worried that she was going to cut off her clitoris to represent having ‘no more pleasure in her life’" -- in other words, that desire as embodied in ordinary language, even as it reproduces patriarchy, even as it metaphorically fills the vagina, also provides pleasure and stimulates the erogenous zones, as it were. A radical scission -- an intervention at the level of the physical body -- may succeed in rooting out sexual basis for the reproduction of domination in language, but in itself remains a communicative act, and thus still reiterates the mode of the phallic law. As Carles suggests, to speak from the body yet not reproduce the phallic code requires more than using a vagina as the vocal organ.

4 August 2010: "Herd of homeless alts live off free food at sponsored alt events"

This post is about être-en-soi. Another probing investigation of the nature of freedom from Carles, refracted through the cloudy lens of youth subcultural behavior as it metastasizes in the streets, both literally (the youths discussed are photographed lying in a street) and figuratively, the "street" where revolutionary praxis is realized and counterhegemonic practices are made a matter of the Lebenswelt. Carles is often interest in how such practices are figured from within the subjectivities of the participants in social movements, so here he adopts the voice of a young would-be subversive to flesh out the interior spaces of incipient politicization.

One aspect Carles highlights is the way a politics of resistance is first cast as a matter of "partying" in the problematic of the novitiate left:

It was the summer of 2k10. That’s when me and my fam started arguing a lot. I’d stay out to late partying, raving, and giving oral sex to my bffs on my parent’s front porch.... I just wanna get a job working in ‘the industry.’ Not sure which ‘the industry’ i want to work in, but probably one with a ‘party’ lifestyle.

Partying stands in for the radical elevation of pleasure to the status of a guiding ethos for political struggle, for jouissance as social liberation, as the only authentic mode of being in society. This is a stark rejection of the binding ethical force of received sexual mores and familial obedience, in keeping with the efforts to reshape subjectivity outside of the forces which have traditionally circumscribed it. As Carles puts it, "There’s no such thing as ‘day’ or ‘night.’ We are truly free." That is, once we have transcendent the arbitrary polarization of opposites, we achieve true autonomy in the open field of the endless play of signifiers, and come to know the tremble of our own souls stirring in the Derridean movement of the trace and the Dylanesque rolling of the stone.

We don’t need a ‘home.’
We don’t need parents & ‘direction.’

But tellingly, Carles situates this seemingly open-ended subjectivity within what he ominously describes as "the industry" -- a brought reconception of what earlier countercultural elements might have dubbed the System, or the Man, or the Establishment. The new subversives seek to collaborate with the "industry" and derive nourishment for their identity from within its institutions. Does this makes them quislings? Carles is obscure on this point. He has his upstart utopian declare, "I really just want to spend some time forging meaningful relationships with other people who are young, who are searching 4 the same things that I am."

But as Carles has already suggested, those "things" are already commoditized, and sheer youthfulness alone can not reverse the reification. The culture industry determines the field in which identity and subversion is conceived and contained, and the process itself is experienced as "partying" -- as a deviation from quotidian practice, despite being de facto a new instantiation of the everyday. Living in the midst of a party is the new normal, which raises the question of how such subjects experience the mundanity with which earlier generations associated the concept of "ordinary life". Is dullness now extraordinary? Carles seems to imply that the consumerist disposition that is increasingly presumed and reproduced cannot register dullness against a background of ever more insistent and perpetual novelty, and thus has no measure by which to gauge the authenticity of her being.

Instead, impoverished lives are reconfigured experientially as rich with corporate opportunity, in a cruel echo of neoliberal management pieties about labor flexibility (and the real, unmentioned precarity that they induce):

Being a homeless alt enables me to live a truly on-the-go lifestyle (usually advertised by trendy mobile phones) where I am [literally] on the ground floor of relevant events across the country. Lucrative sponsorship deals enable alts like me to eat for free. In addition, u can find a lot of bread + bologna in Subway dumpsters.

The lack of even a subsistence wage becomes transformed into an icon of autonomy, of the potential to be sponsored in one's bare life. Carles has discovered that the future of the middle class is as a new lumpenproletariet that cannot recognize its own marginality even as it goes scrounging and begging for favors.