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.