25 February 2010: "Does it make more sense to start a shitty band that goes viral, as opposed 2 wanting 2 change the world with ‘good music’?

This post is about interpellation. Interpellation, of course, is French structural Marxist Louis Althusser's term for the way ideology constitutes individuals into subjectivity, forming the field in which they can recognize themselves as subjects. Carles likens this process to the distinctively contemporary problem of forming a musical group and disseminating its product. While individuals seem to choose the music they will play and the means by which they will promote it, those forms in fact chose the individuals and interpellate them as particular kinds of performers, and rendering hegemonic a specific kind of performativity suitable to the reproduction of social relations, which in the last analysis are co-determinative with the specific material relations of production, including ownership of the means of production, whether in the form of constant, organic, or fixed capital. (Althusser would later spend time in a French psychiatric hospital after inadvertently strangling his wife.)

In this partially comprehensive treatise, Carles, in the guise of exploring the potential goals a musical group may conceivably pursue, lays out a veritable digest of the subject positions available to the post-postmodern dividual, with some speculation on their relative strengths and weaknesses as well as their interrelation with the spiritual metaphysics of earlier eras that once anchored the self's sense of identity. Some say that music has lost its soul. Carles borrows that trope to investigate into the ecumenical concept of the soul, with the universality of music itself serving as an enabling homology.

The linchpin of Carles's analysis can be derived from his taxonomy of the typical subject's desires, as finding their ontogenesis in the existing material conditions of post-industrial social formations.

Just want 2 be in a band that is heard by 1-5 million ppl.
Just want 2 find music that I can discuss with my friends that makes it clear that I ‘get’ ‘it.’
Just want to share memes with the world.

In other words, the typical subject is interpolated into identity through these primary objectives -- the narcissistic pursuit of fame, or the mirror stage writ large on a global scale; the sublimation of infantile desires for domination over intimates into the subcultural formation of group identities clustered around aesthetic pretensions; and the illusion of ontological security derived from those selfsame aesthetic pretensions magnified into eternal, transcendent verities. We want to "get it" indeed, and as Carles intimates, the less precisely we articulate this "it", the more ineffable our consequent subjectivity appears to be.

Carles seizes upon an explicitly religious musical group that attempts to seize upon popular styles to leverage its theological messages as a piquant metaphor for the modes of interpollated subjectivity currently operative. Pointing out the group's "larger ramifications," he notes that it is possibly "‘the future’ of relevant music" -- in other words, the future of the curtailed subject positions under the hegemonic regimes of capitalist domination, if we don't interpose a critical intervention along the lines Carles exemplifies. "It seems like this new band has totally ‘transcended’ the internet, creating a new model by which bands can reach a mass market of listeners," Carles warns, adding that inciting observers mockery may only be playing into the hands of this powerful new form of subjectivity. This mode is "a convenient model, because you can also ‘forget about the band’ and not feel bad about it, as opposed to thinking u have to keep giving them another chance to ‘recapture the magic.’" That is, this form of subjectivity disavows itself to intensify its hold, to propel its own claims to naturalness. The metaphysical, "magic" bases for the soul, as Carles suggests, are ironically subordinated in this quasi-religious group, with the Christian overtones supplying a veil of traditionalist nostalgia over their incontestably radical aufhebung.

What the band's video demonstrates, for Carles, is the triumph of simulacra over the outdated notions of authenticity, that may have died along with God in the post-Vatican II era: "Maybe we need to ’shift’ our expectations 4 new music, and accept low quality products that are failed imitations of previous products, as opposed to ’searching for something new and exciting.’" In other words, the band he dissects is the harbinger of a new, degraded mode of subjectivity, in which we are interpellated not by appeals to our grandiose fantasies for ourselves but by a irrepressible wish to be received as derivative, an echo of an echo, a "failed imitation" whose very failure to perfect the copy of the model marks it with the desired signs of uniqueness. Failure rather than novelty, Carles impresses upon his readers, will be the new measure of identity in a post-networked age. "It seems more realistic to consume 20-30 new shitty meme bands per year, as opposed to thinking you will find 20-30 new albums/bands that make u feel more fulfilled than ‘having a good lil laugh.’" That is to say, the bands/brands/individuals/cyborgs that we interact with increasingly through various levels of digital mediation need no longer impress us with a Turing Test level of human spontaneity, but rather they (and we) need only qualify for humanity by meeting a decreed level of inadequacy or "shittiness," to use the profane term Carles employs to shock us from our stupor. We become subjects not via aspiration but via an embrace of limitation as the fundamental principle of our agency. This comes with an attendant abdication of responsibility. So a band that sets out to "spread the word of our Lord Savior Jesus Christ, the only Son of God" in fact serves to deny the relevance of religion to the promulgation of identity. Jesus is just another meme, Carles suggests.

Hence the new principle of the self that Carles cites: "Just want a remixable meme." We just want to be constituent parts in the transpersonal metaphysical mush, the cesspool of memes from which meaning bubbles up and pops, releasing its gaseous semiology to the cosmic void that has supplanted man's belief in a deity. We are "hella confused" indeed.

24 February 2010: "Are soccer shin guards the new big trendy trend in alt fashion?"

This post is about the habitus. Carles takes on the mythologization of childhood competition in this Barthes-inspired critical investigation/evisceration/archeology of an emergent fashion trend, the donning of shin guards. "Maybe it means we r at war, and we need 2 be protected, but maybe it is a tribute 2 the past," Carles notes elliptically, referring to the generational war between parents and children -- between the vulnerable and their putative biological protectors -- and to how that struggle inevitably subsides into nostalgia, into a harmless and sublimating "tribute 2 the past." Wearing shin guards, in his reading, is a effort to eulogize the contradictions forged in the capitalist training grounds of youth sport, where parents force their children to adapt to the psychic realities of consumerism and the de-skilled workplace that awaits them. "Youth sports are important in facilitating a ‘normalized’ American childhood," notes Carles, with all the dour connotations that go along with the process of "normalization." Psychological neutering; the merciless establishment of Marcuse's one-dimensional man between the chalk lines of the soccer pitch.

The empty rewards and enticements secure the consent of those who will be dominated and perpetuate that domination in the subsequent generations. "Is ‘going out 4 a pizza party’ as a kid one of the formative ‘bro chill session experiences’ in ur life?" Carles asks rhetorically. Remember, in Carles's lexicon, "bro" is a not a term of fraternal bonhomie but a pejorative appellation that designates an individual who has surrendered critical autonomy and is instead driven to behaviors and postures by prevailing circumstances. A "bro" is a cultural opportunist.

The class-inflected blandishments at these early stages help reinforce class positionality and the stakes involved with conformity and cooperation in the exisitng social order: Carles points out that children playing soccer confront their relative privilege: impersonating one of these little Lord Fautleroys, he writes sardonically, "Felt relieved that my parents weren’t poor, and could always bring a ’sweet ass snack’ for the team after the soccer game. Felt bad for poor kids whose parents didn’t ‘man up’ and drop some dollars on a premium snack." This is how the terms of class contempt are reproduced. Indoctrination and subordination on the field, reinforced by callow rewards and rechanneled hatreds afterward. In the end, the properly programmed are apt to spit out notions like this one Carles supplies by way of oblique example: "The quality of snack ur parents brought on your assigned day was generally indicative of their parenting philosophy, and how far u would get in life." Class habitus is the all in all, parenting a matter of attaching the appropriate meanings to the requisite status symbols and impressing them on forming young minds.

Hence Carles spares no modicum of irony when he lays into the betrayal of one generation by the previous one: "This trend is 4 u, mom and dad. I know u think I have grown up, and I just wear things arbitrarily in order to ‘look cool.’ Not this time. This means something to me. These shin guards r 4 u." Adults will wear the marks of their childhood shame; the totems of safety that failed to protect them from the ideological enemy within, whose terrible victories are borne out by the very allegiance to trends the shin guards now epitomize. These failed methods of parenting leave children unprepared for the world, a point Carles humorously makes by referring to an image of a child finding an off-label use, as it were, for an orange rind: "Want to jam an orange wedge in my mouth, pretend it is a mouth guard, hope it protects me as I grow up and encounter new challenges in our world." Of course, it cannot protect her; moreover it may very well contribute to tooth decay. Metaphorically, a powerful statement about the long-term effects of youth-sport inculcation.

The contempt and confusion Carles ascribes to the generation now reaching adulthood stems from their perceived failure to live up to standards that never achieved hegemony or coherency among the youthful subject populations they were imposed upon. In a poignant passage, Carles captures this confusion:

Soccer Mom. She could do anything. Raise 2-4 kids with minimal emotional or physical support from our father. Get us to school, keep our grades up, and keep us ‘enriched’ with youth sports and miscellaneous community educational activities. I will not become you, mom. Not only because I sorta h8 what u represent, but also bc I am not strong enough 2 do what u did.

Ultimately, children attempt to escape the welter of adolescence by seizing upon differentiating trends marketed to youth for youth, of course with an individuating spin ("Maybe I will make my own conceptual shin guards," Carles bemusedly opines). They attempt to brand themselves from the detritus of a youth misspent: "So many different styles. just want to find some that match my personal brand. Hope Am Appy starts to manufacture them soon." This merely replicates the authority trap, replacing the parent-child relation with the corporation-consumer relation; both resonate with the same paternalism and naturalism. No one thinks to question their place in the existing order.

Since the time of youth has been colonized by the modalities of indoctrination, the representation of youth has broken away to stand altogether apart from actual praxis. Fashion, Carles implies, has managed to become the apotheosis of represented youth, or rather, the idealization of youth is the entelechy of fashion, which prevents its money-grubbing cycles of obsolescence from seeming entirely soulless.

An impressive immanent critique by Carles, knitting together the disparate threads of consumerism, the reproduction of social relations, the desiccated bourgeois family structure, the pleasures of spectatorship and the frayed safety net in social democracies in the time of resplendant neoliberalism. But still I am haunted by Carles's question: "Will u start wearing shin guards?" In a sense, have I ever stopped wearing them?

23 February 2010: "Angsty figure skating couple ice dances to Linkin Park at Winter Olympics"

This post is about being and nothingness. Is the sport of ice dancing fundamentally absurd? Carles wonders. He highlights the presence at the Olympics of a particularly "angsty couple" who brings the underlying tensions, the inherent nausea of competition for its own sake, of existence itself in all its apparent non-contingency, to the surface of the ice. By choosing a particularly overwrought song by a musical group that prefers the cacophonous and heterogeneous "mixed" style of rap rock, the skaters employed "a lyrical and textural soundscape upon which an interpretive skate dance can be performed," Carles explains ironically, as the dance itself, given in its own sensuousness, can withstand no interpretation. Words. What can they mean in comparison with actions themselves, with being in itself as opposed to for itself? Carles seems to ask. What is performance in relation to interpretation? At what stage does the performance begin, and can it ever end? Interpretations of interpretations, echoes of the event itself, which can never be isolated but can only be intuited through the miasma of words and meanings, pitiful gestures at staving off the horrible truth of naked existence.

The words of the chosen song, by echoing the vertiginous sense of nothingness, highlight this problem of interpretation, of all comment tending toward tautology. "there’s something inside me that pulls beneath the surface
consuming/confusing / this lack of self-control I fear is never ending." Carles implies that self-control itself is a myth, an always receding ideal that forever slips from our grasp, like the ice-dance routine that would receive a perfect score from the judges, silent in their chamber of decision. No wonder the singer feels "so insecure," as do the skaters by extension. Forever we are being judged by nameless observers, according to incomprehensible criteria that we shall never be able to master let alone understand. Ice dancing, in this regard, makes for the perfect sport to illustrate the hell into which we are all cast by simply being born. Always others, watching. What do they want, if not our freedom?
Of course, that is why Carles finds the song in question so well-chosen: "Wonder if “Crawling” is one of the best songs of the past century," he notes, referring to the century in which God was declared dead, and the traditional modes of transcendence, of flying above the fate of our limited species, were snuffed out systematically, leaving us all to "crawl" as it were. Carles notes that the skaters in question have been suspected of incestuous practices ("The ice dancing couple is named Sinead and John Kerr. The[y] are getting ‘mad coverage’ because they are siblings, and their dance moves get sexual and passionate.") Perhaps this is their effort to radically confront absurdity and meaninglessness with a violation of a fundamental principle of social structuration, to assault the very basis of the prohibitions by which cultural order is established. Carles dismisses the futile, whingeing effort without comment.

The effervescence of figures gliding on ice: could there be a more poignant symbol of humankind's doomed efforts to escape from immanence? Carles suggests that it is the "most authentic Olympic event," but such an assertion must be tempered by the implicit understanding that authenticity itself is indeterminate, with no reference point beyond being itself, raw existence.

19 February 2010: "Japanese Figure Skater wears keffiyeh at Olympics"

This post is about mimetic desire. In a pointed departure from his customary rhetorical approach, Carles deploys the second-person plural pronoun we with considerable and considered liberality in this post, a searing investigation of the relation between nativism (as exemplified by the Olympics and its fervor of barely sublimated nationalism and race pride), homophobia (intensified by the homosocial bonding among athletes and the alpha-male preening brought out through ritualized competition), and the legacy of postcolonialist struggle.

Who are "we"? This question haunts every population of any nation-state that is cajoled into becoming a "people" in the Hobbesean sense rather than a Spinozan multitude, and it haunts every attempt at solidarity that fractures along the lines of incompatible individual desires, often figured in terms of sexuality. From this quasi-Girardian viewpoint, sexual desire is selfish desire and imitative, a dangerous combination that sparks competition over mates and masks an irreducible fear of the Other with the compulsion to supplant/become the Other. "We" are those who have learned to want the same things,who have been rationalized by a hegemonic desire disseminated from the existing power structure.

In his careful analysis of the semiosis of sport, Carles draws a direct link between the costume of presumably gay figure skater Daisuke Takahashi and the disguises worn by the terrorists who struck at Israel during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

Popular Japanese Figure Skater Daisuke Takahashi had a keffiyeh integrated into his cute little costume for his Olympic Contest. We cannot confirm if he is ‘alt’ or if this was actually an anti-Israeli message, showing support for the 1972 massacre of members of the Israeli Summer Olympic Team at the Munich Olympics. Based on his Japanese heritage, we find it safe to assume that he was

Carles suggests that the Olympics are merely perpetuating in coded fashion the ideological struggles of World War II, and in a sense the Games have never left Berlin, 1936. But rather than openly attempt to establish racial dominance through athletic achievement, the fascist tropes of domination have modulated. Homosexuality is no longer barred and demonized; instead it is used symbolically as an overdetermined flashpoint, a subtle warning about the fruits of individualism and the rejection of nationalism. Carles, by flirting with the contemptuous tone of a bigot who is nonetheless attracted to what he wishes repelled him ("If ur a homosexual, would u ‘hook up’ with this kute AZN flying twink?"), means to illustrate the ways in which such muddled animus is the logical outcome of a competition rooted in national identity, which has been blurred by the various diasporas and forced resettlements and ressentiments of the colonialist era and its aftermath. The Other appears to us as ourselves, and as a forbidden "homo" desire, which we look to our athlete-avatars to defeat in competition. But at the same time the symbolism remains ambiguous enough to be disavowed in the heat of the excitement of competition: "Do u think this was a real ‘hipster scarf’ or a politically motivated message? Is he ‘just a harmless queen on ice’?" asks Carles, knowing full well that the question cannot be answered. For in fact, what has been achieved is optimal undecidability. The political motivations both disappear and become hegemonic the minute we ask ourselves the explosive question about the skater's identity: a harmless queen, indeed -- as harmless as any monarch whose power has seemed to become divinely ordained.

The fusion of nationalism with sexualized competition simultaneously rights the wrongs of the colonial era, serving as a kind of moral vindication of the so-called white-man's burden: The burden of medals, the burden of setting the bar for global competition, the burden of reproducing teh given social order wiht al its hierarchies. As Carles puts it, "We can only assume that his Palestinian scarf gave him the warrior power that won him the bronze medal."

As usual Carles penultimate question is a rhetorical one: "Are the Olympics alt, or does it require too much dedication for an authentic alt to participate [via Hipster Olympics]?" The Olympics, in their current ideological formulation, present the status quo as an alternative, to make reactionary nationalistic responses register as progressive and enlightened. The sort of dedication required of an "authentic alt" is the maintenance of a negative dialectic, of critical perspicacity, of a refusal to drift into the daydreams of communal competition and instead recognize with steely vigilance the persisting presence of the cries for nativist unity over global peace and harmony. The homeland, Palestinian or otherwise, may not be realized on Canadian ice, but that is, Carles tells us, because the very idea of it has so thoroughly colonized our minds.

17 February 2010: "Keut Hipster Girl Watches White Guy Beat up Black Guy on Public Bus"

This post is about first philosophy. Carles constructs a very cunning contrast between Rosa Parks, the enduring symbol of civil rights activism who famously refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white passenger as was mandated by the cruelly unjust laws of the time, and an anonymous white "keut hipster girl" who while riding a bus remains impassive and indifferent to racial injustice in our own time, locked in the solipsistic soundscape supplied by "her large headphones."

At first blush, the moral is perhaps too easy to draw from this set-up: the childish narcissism and self-centeredness that has been recklessly encouraged by late capitalism has put in jeopardy the gains in social justice so bravely fought for and so tentatively secured. As Carles notes, "Her purple American Apparel outfit and Converse lowtops clash violently with the racial tensions on the bus." There is no place for such tension in the dreamscapes of consumerism. Recognition of the other, in the sense of a pure, moral obligation, an uncompromisable responsibility to alterity as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas, has no apparent place on the bus to post-postmodernity. Instead, subjectivity nourishes itself on a thin pap of reciprocal decodings of the feeble, corporatized gestures of identity.

At this point, we are ready to investigate Carles's deeper argument, about the place of violence as a mode of social disruption, as a radical means of clearing the way for a return to ethics. Violence not as purification but as a visceral demonstration of the exhaustion of alternatives (pun intended) to awaken a somnambulant populace to the irreducible otherness present in every urban conflagration. As teh site of irrepressible conflict, the city is also at once the locus classicus for the birth of ethics. Hence the philological kinship between city and civility.

Carles draws upon controversial French social theorist Georges Sorel. Only violence, Sorel argues, could maintain the integrity of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle. Carles, therefore, means "Is public transportation 2 dangerous 2 be relied upon?" to be a rhetorical question, if not a call to action. The bus must once again become a site for insurrectionary confrontation. As Carles declares: "The bus puts volatile people together in a small space, and some times racial + class issues boil over into a youtubable fight." That is, it is the site of struggle that can be captured and exported, generalized. It must not become a realm of lifestyle escapism, a place where, as Carles notes, "young, alternative dreamers" can posture in an effort to convey how they "live a more meaningful life."

Indeed, Carles implicitly proposes a dramatic synthesis of the anarcho-syndicalism of Sorel with the uncompromising ethics of responsibility of Levinas. We must not waver in the violent confrontation with the Other, nor should we hesitate to attempt a general strike in the absence of a confirmed solidarity. The implied responsibility to the other should bear us forth in revolutionary struggle, in the pursuit of genuine alternatives. Carles asks: "What mp3s do yall think she was listening 2?" We can assume it was not Gil Scott Heron.

16 February 2010: "Tween Fashion Blogger, Tavi, shows up on lastnightsparty"

This post is about metonymy. What happens when you become a walking metaphor? Carles seizes upon the phenomenon of a preteen fashion commentator Tavi Gevinson to illustrate a larger point about the acceleration of the fashion cycle to the point where it has become self-consuming; it seems to have lapped itself, so that its dictates are invalid even before they can be promulgated and trickle down through the various castes of capitalist society.

Carles describes Gevinson as being prized for "her ‘youthful spirit’, ‘honesty’, and other generic positive elements that people in the fashion world use/value." Note the pun at the end on use value. Of course, fashion most distinctly has nothing to do with use value; it is about generating exchange value through obsolescence. Just as use value has been obliterated by late capitalism's emphasis on shifting criteria of value, the character traits that might once have adhered to an authentic, transcendental identity -- the ones which Carles puts in ironic quotation marks -- are now reified commodities in a media market for pseudosincerity, which has taken to exploiting child labor in pursuit of those ever-ephemeral of innocence and artlessness.

Sans use value, or beyond use value, as Baudrillard woudl say, there is only the relative value ascertained in a given moment, or in the proverbial 15 minutes of fame we all are alleged to be owed. Having exhausted teenagers in the pursuit of fresh material to exploit to connote "youth", the fashion industry has begun to seize upon ever younger recruits, willing victims fashionized far before their time. Bled of their individuality by the parasitic industry, these victims are left for "generic," as Carles puts it. He takes this logic to its endpoint, opening it to the reader's judgment whether or not Gevinson is "overated as a human." So thorough is her premature objectification at the hands of her manipulators, one is tempted to answer in the affirmative. As a fashion-world shill, she has become subhuman, in danger of becoming abject.

Where will the exploitation stop? Carles is being only partially facetious when he makes this remark with regard to the photographer who had taken the photos of the youngster: "we can only assume that his night was a failure after Tavi did not take off her top and show more skin." Child pornography is certainly not beyond the pale in the fashion industry, which routinely sexualizes its underage models. This connection sheds some light on Carles's cryptic parting challenge: "Are party pix worthless when there are ‘no tits’ in the photos?" Again, the question of value in a world that has mobilized exchange value and purged any essential truths. This bound to the question of scopophilia: what do we see when we see breasts? The image of a sexuality beyond the reach of fashion, or the ultimate expression of fashion's ability to condition our desires? Carles is asking: What sort of party are we at? What are we willing to be a party to in the pursuit of the ultimate "pix"?

11 February 2010: "British Youtube Tween goes ‘big in Japan’ because she looks like an anime character"

This post is about orientalism. Can it really have been more than 30 years since Edward Said wrote his seminal analysis of the sources and ideological purposes behind Occidental attitudes toward the East? Of course Said was principally concerned with the representation of Middle Eastern cultures in Europe, but Carles appropriates the basic limning of the argument and extends its application to Japan, and the exoticization of Japanese culture in contemporary Western societies.

In some ways Japanese culture has always beguiled Western observers, and the nation's tendency to cultural isolationism only exacerbates the situation. Yet that cultural isolationism is thrown into contradiction by the country's reputation as an early adopter of technological trends and a wellspring of exportable cultural motifs, many of which have been exploited in a range of Western fringe subcultures. This makes Japan, as Carles points, "an absurd place, where nothing makes sense."

But modern Japan yields a moment of opportunity for socialist struggle, albeit one also fraught with danger for those partisans seeking to use racial identity politics as a weapon within a larger, truly socialist strategy. As American Stanley Aronowitz has written, "People of color from postcolonial societies simply cannot afford to turn their backs on the opportunities afforded by economic and political inclusion, despite the increasingly insistent attacks by intellectuals on Eurocentrism."

The question then, as Carles chooses to frame it, is what sort of opportunity is presented by the phenomenon of a young white pop singer infiltrating the insular Japanese culture? Is this a reverse example of the orientalism in the West, a sort of Occidentalism in the east? Or does the asymmetry point up the persistent problems in assimilating Asians into Western culture paradigms? "Do u feel turned on by white girls who wish they were AZN / Japanese?" Carles asks, slyly referencing the shameful history of Western colonizers enslaving Asian women in prostitution and thus incurring the misdirected wrath of wives on the homefront. Also built in to this is a critique of the prevailing stereotype of Asian women as being unusually submissive or receptive to patriarchal culture -- infantialized, much as this pre-teen pop star is. Hence Carles's cutting assertion: "I have a feeling that this girl probably appeals to grown Japanese men, though." The comment plays both ways, a comment on partriarchy and the orientalism that locates the patriarchal more firmly in an othered culture.

But Carles's larger point is that Orientalism is an alibi, a distraction from teh larger issues of exploitation that face workers everywhere and which often takes a post-Reichian form of sexual deprivation or, rather, the disciplining of working-class sexuality from on high as a mode of social control. "Maybe it doesn’t matter what culture ur a part of–all that really matters is the simple truth that ’sex sells,’" Carles trenchantly argues.

As Laclau and Mouffe write, "the forms of an antagonism, therefore, far from being predetermined, are the result of hegemonic struggle.... There is therefore no subject -- nor, furhter, any 'necessity' -- which is absolutely radical and irrecuperable by the dominant order." Carles puts his own post-postmodern spin on this view:

Feel like I might not overthink our cultural divide, and just watch clips of Japanese game shows. I will ‘laugh’ at the disconnect between American culture and Japanese culture, but then maybe come to the conclusion that ‘all humans are the same’ because we just want to escape from ‘the grind’ of daily life. We just want things 2 laugh at, things 2 distract us from how sad/trapped we might feel on the inside.

The East/West divide is not overdetermined but instead underwritten by a biologically based commonality that transcends uneven cultural developments. But this prompts an equal resistance to the mantle of savior of the revolution, of adopting the radical praxis that social change requires to unseat an established hegemonic order. Hence Beckii Cruel, an unlikely Other, yet perhaps more radical for her very unlikelihood of being a torch bearer for a consciousness raising movement. Carles explains: "Beckii Cruel represents an ideal identity that they can obtain by consuming different media/art/goods." By they, Carles is clearly referring in a veiled manner to the New Left in all its transnational guises, most of which are under siege as the neoliberal order gasps its last breaths. By adopting teenage pop idols as wedges to break hegemony, the Left can strike a blow at the heart of the culture industry that would seek to nullify dissent, the "grind" of everyday life that Carles had invoked. And a child shall lead them.

If all standard bearers are "recuperable" as Laclau and Mouffe argue, perhaps it's best to seize upon a symbol already thoroughly co-opted and at the same time putatively "innocent."

Carles declares, "Maybe Beckii Cruel is the new ternative," a play on "alternative," that mirrors Deleuze's revealing language play in "Postscript on the Societies of Control," where he radically theorizes the existence of "dividuals" who has succeeded the moribund category of the individual. Carles is arguing that we must move beyond the conception of binary alternatives and strike instead at the root of the structure that gestates such dichotomies.

9 February 2010: "Is Die Antwoord a ternative band?"

This post is about expropriating the expropriators. In his epochal tract Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin, at the time waiting in exile for the opportunity to lead the first truly proletarian revolution, wrote a withering critique of optimism and opportunism in light of monopoly capital's ability to co-opt the working class by offshoring a certain amount of exploitation.

The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc., makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others. The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between imperialism and opportunism.... Some writers, L. Martov, for example, are prone to wave aside the connection between imperialism and opportunism in the working-class movement—a particularly glaring fact at the present time—by resorting to “official optimism” (à la Kautsky and Huysmans) like the following: the cause of the opponents of capitalism would be hopeless if it were progressive capitalism that led to the increase of opportunism, or, if it were the best-paid workers who were inclined towards opportunism, etc. We must have no illusions about “optimism” of this kind. It is optimism in respect of opportunism; it is optimism which serves to conceal opportunism. As a matter of fact the extraordinary rapidity and the particularly revolting character of the development of opportunism is by no means a guarantee that its victory will be durable: the rapid growth of a painful abscess on a healthy body can only cause it to burst more quickly and thus relieve the body of it. The most dangerous of all in this respect are those who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.

Carles seems to have this passage in mind in conducting his own rigorous analysis of the emerging cultural animus in Africa, which bears of course the marks of imperialism in its modern form perhaps more deeply than in any other region, colonial, post-colonial or otherwise. Carles directs his dissection of the problematic of imperialism in an era of globalization and multinational corporate entities at one particular instantiation of the incipient social relations, a "rap music" organization from South Africa known as Die Antwoord, who successfully staged an intervention in the media and disseminated their intersubjective positionality through a post-samizdat "viral" chain of transmission. In short, as Carles sums up bluntly, "Does n e 1 know what the deal with Die Antwoord is?" Or have they successfully masked themselves and their true intent as part of a larger and more shadowy socialist strategy that foregrounds outrageousness to conceal ambitions even more outrageous, at least to the running dogs of the neo-liberal capitalist front. The "deal" is no deal, or at least a refusal of the official optimism that Lenin had identified as crippling the left. The deal is in fact an opportunistic seizing hold of lacunae in the Western developed-world perception of Africa.

Still the approach of die Antwoord must be interrogated carefully; as Carles notes, they force themselves into our "realm of relevant awareness" in a not entirely comfortable manner. Hence Carles regards them as "ternative," not quite a viable alternative to capitalism as such. But as Carles is forced to rejoin, "WTF is ternative? What is marketing?" Can socialist strategy in a late capitalist problematic be differentiated from marketing, or is that difficulty in discerning a difference the very essence of the tactic? Opportunism is a subtle dialectic, subject to abuse precisely because it is so hard to acknowledge or even identify when deployed.

Die Antwoord, then, intend to replicate their message in the form of the commodity itself, which is why Carles likens them to the purveyors of the song "Barbie Girl" -- a similar approach to subversion through careful detournement of a hegemonic idol of sexism and first-world domination. But Carles is alive to the possibility that the group will be co-opted:

Feel sorta confused by Die Antwoord. I wonder if they will be the type of band that ‘opens up for Kanye West/Radiohead’, or if they will be more like the band Aqua who sang the hit song “Barbie Girl.”

The racial and aesthetic progressiveness of the commercial bands he cites indicate the specific nature of the dangers the imperialist order can present to neutralize threats. There is always the threat of killing the revolution with kindness.

8 February 2010: "UNCONFIRMED RUMOR: Lady Gaga gave birth to a child"

This post is about matriarchy. The first thing to realize is that the baby is a red herring. There is no baby. That is to say, there are only babies. Carles's point is that American recording artist Lady Gaga is in the process of "giving birth," so to speak, to a matriarchal order, or at least a Utopian vision of that order that at once transcends the limitations of strictly procreative sex and reasserts the female's control over the destiny of the species.

In her pathbreaking, seminal work The Dialectic of Sex, Jewish Canadian-born feminist Shulamith Firestone articulates the conditionality for a post-patriarchal society, one tenet of which is the elimination of eroticism as such. But this is not the same as attempting to abolish sex.

When we demand the elimination of eroticism, we mean not the elimination of sexual joy and excitement but its rediffusion over -- there's plenty to go around, it increases with use -- the spectrum of our lives.

Through her praxis, Lady Gaga explores the ramifications of this statement, particular in her endorsement of heretofore outre sexual practices. Not only is her very gender the subject of some ambiguity -- she has oft been rumored to have male genitalia -- but also, as Carles notes, "the complex duality of Lady Gaga’s existence" makes it difficult to conclude with any certainty the terms under which she may have consented to more directly enter the realm of cultural reproduction through biological means.

Carles notes speculatively of the baby captured in photographs that "we must assume" it "was formulated in her conceptual womb." That is to say, Lady Gaga has dissolved the boundary between the genesis and gestation of artistic interventions into the culture and the literal womb in which a fetus may be brought to term. Thus it is that women are able to re-enter history and affect it directly; the once-subordinate historigraphical mode of mothering fuses with a regained capacity for ideological interventions, lifting women from subservience and into a matriarchal destiny.

Hence the father of the child here takes on the mother's name, as Carles explains: "sources speculate that there is a ‘cool dad’ involved. We can assume that his last name is ‘Gaga.’ Sources say that his name is David Gaga." And also consider the presence of multiple potential male mates for Gaga -- in contradistinction to the classic expression of patriarchy, polygamy. Through the lens of Gaga's radical inversions, the existing social order is viewed as if in a convex fun-house mirror, with the potentialities of the future already established as if they had passed, and the grim realities of the patriarchal present cast off into an inscrutable vanishing point.

It's not hard to see why Carles was confused by the apparently missing "conceptual baby outfit." No layer of clothes could possibly carry the semiological weight that this infant must bear as it serves as the sign of the post-patriarchial synthesis.

7 February 2010: "What is the functional use of the perfect alternative breasts?"

This post is about the event. Carles, having tried to call into being an epistemic shift through the sheer force of nominalism in an earlier post, renaming the era into which his subjectivity has been interpolated to attempt to force a historical rupture, finds himself suddenly confronted with the inadequacy of such an approach to ordering subjective experience, to seizing at least the illusion of autonomy: "Ultimately feeling lost in the ternative era. Floating around aimlessly in the blogosphere as tons of indie memes and newsbits fly every where." Instead of the feeling of control, there is drift, there is an out-of-controlness manifest in the appearance of determinate points of data appearing to be random, unmotivated, inexplicable, unjustifiable from an ontological or epistemological standpoint. The momentum of information is experienced not as telelogical stream flowing toward a certain historical destiny, but a chaotic explosion of multiplicity, of histories overwriting histories, of alternative (pun intended) histories and counterfactuals as simultaneous facts, of contradictions resolved in the impossible unmanageability of information surplus and surfeit.

The subject, unmoored in such a shifting and tumultuous field of social production, tends to steer toward the comfort of seeming absolutes: in this case, as Carles points out, the sexual impulse and the nurturing instinct, the unstiflable feeding cries of the infantile, all of which is reducible to Carles's parting interrogatory: "If u had access to a pair of perfect alternative breasts, what would u do with them?"

The breast as event. That which cannot be contained yet which cannot be nullified, whose existence both transcends representation and anchors it. Carles is not surprised that breasts, standing at the critical juncture of dasein and nullity, would incite violence, a manifestation of the thanatopic drive: "Part of me wonders if breasts are called ‘fun bags’ because you are supposed to take out your stress on them."

As the apodictic metonym for the maternal as humanity faces its possible extinction or dissolution into posthuman forms (consciousness as digitized superbrain; bionic hybrid forms of life extension and so on), the breast represents the forms of dependency that can't be repressed or negated, the threat of eternal dependence of want, and the seductive drug-liek nature of that need that defines us as it subordinates. It is no accident that Carles links the breast explicitly with recreational drugs, forcing us to acknowledge their shared problematic. "Does cocaine ‘get u more effed up’ if you snort it off a breast/vagina/relevant CD jewel case?" Carles asks pointedly. In other words, can sexual union liberate the subject from itself as disassociative drugs purport to, or is the conditionality of sexual pleasure too reminiscent of the scene of birth and hence the scene of death, the ultimate loss of subjectivity. Death is the event as filtered through subjective consciousness, Carles seems to insist. No amount of "bags of love" can mitigate that harsh truth.

2 February 2010: "10 Musicians ‘using’ Haiti as a promotional tool"

This post is about intentionality. Recently Carles has taken on new formal limitations in an effort to interrogate the function of brevity in the elaboration of philosophical speculation. This he has dubbed "the Alt Report," a pun on the concept of alterity and the epistemological undecidability of any "reported" content, its perpetually unresolved status as both knowledge and rumor, and the conditionality of the transformation of report into fact by the very nature of the distribution of the report. Carles seems to be asking, can reports make facts? Who invented the fact, or rather facticity? o what degree is it disclosed in the habitus of the journalist, in the access to the means of information distribution, and to what degree are those norms under assault now? Does linking to content feed it into a system in which reputation determines truth? How do we "use" information? Does it lose its moral content as it becomes instrumentalized or rhetorically weaponized?

These questions are all in play when Carles declares that this particular post "is intended to illustrate how ‘artists’ don’t genuinely care about human crises, and instead use them as an excuse to make/auction/promote their mediocre ‘art.’" It is also indicated by his placing the word using into quotes to highlight its ideological nature, and the oft-suppressed ideological components of use value. What is the nature of "use" -- that is how can a subject "intend" anything within a networked system which imputes motive ex post facto? Is Bethamite "intentionality" dead? Have we reached the end of phenomenology, in both senses of the word "end"? Is there any difference between consciousness and intentionality, and if so, what has flooded the gap?

This is the true "human crisis," Carles suggests, subsuming the overwhelming but nonetheless local tragedy in the Caribbean. The artist's gesture is indistinguishable from the promotional gesture, which is indistinguishable from the philanthropic. All have been reduced to the same narcissistic gesture of self-interested commerce in the trafficking of identities.

31 January 2010: "Getting ‘hornie’ viewing Am Appy’s latest gimmick searching for the Best Alternative Ass."

This post is about scopophilia. In her seminal essay on the gaze and the cinematic experience, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey writes of the "pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight." Could this perversion still adhere if the "person" is always already constructed entirely of signs, such that the eroto-visual consumption takes place not on the somatic level but at the level of hermaneutic decoding?

Confronted with a American Apparel advertising scheme that invites customers to submit photos of their gluteus muscles, post in the coital position most associated with estrus, Carles asks the obvious question: is there any difference under late capitalism between a sexual experience and a branding experience? "Have u ever pleasured urself while looking at the Am Appy website?" In other words, is branding the self through goods an onanistic pursuit as well as a narcissistic one? Can any form of pleasure in a consumerist society escape the mediation of branding? Or are the calming and validating presence of logos now necessary even to put us in a receptive sexual mood. Hence Carles demonstrates that the estrual pose in the images is deeply ironic, as they serve as testimony of the failure of nature to inspire the impulse to coitus in (post-?) humans of our current era.

When Carles asks, "Do u think this gimmick will help Am Appy’s brand, or will they turn into a ‘hipster porn site’?" clearly he means to suggest that there is already no distinction left to maintain. To promote a brand is to become a hipster porn site; brands are porn for hipsters, in that they stimulate and excite the libido of the hyperidentity conscious citizen of post-postmodernism.