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.