29 March 2010: "Every Day is An Alternative Carnival"

This post is about Mikhail Bakhtin. In particular, Carles confronts the heterogeneous forces in play in situations or scenarios that warrant the description "carnivalesque," which, as Bakhtin famously defined it in his magisterial work on Rabelais, is that which defies the hegemonic order through the modalities of humor or disruptive chaos, undermining seeming stable dichotomies and suspending the monologic discourse so that dialogic expression can reign. As Carles notes, "Such a crazy world. So many different rewards, treats, and distractions." The libidinal satisfactions that are tabooed under the dominant order are permitted full expression, and have their pleasurable quotient enhanced by their "difference." They operate in an alternative economy beyond or outside capital; attention may be paid to values other than efficiency and productivity; desire can speak with many voices that are otherwise repressed. This can be experienced as liberation, but as Carles warns, it can also manifest itself as corrosive confusion and neurosis:

so hard 2 know
what is happening
in this metaphorical alt carnival

Because of the labile nature of meaning under the pressure of desublimation, the carnivalesque is at once, as Carles notes, "An alt circus" and "a ‘goddamn shit show.’"

That apparent contradiction is not merely a product of the dialogic imaginary. It is also an indication of the tension between the carnivalesque order, which yearns for a timelessness, a permanent suspension of hierarchy, and the valve-like purposes of carnivals to vent off pent-up frustration with the ruling order, which regards the chaos as repugnant, as "sh_t". Freedom, liberation, appears to fall somewhere between these two stools. (Pun intended; c.f. Freud's discussion of the anal character in footnote 3 on page 52 of Civilization and Its Discontents. The carnivalesque can be considered as humankind "stooping" closer to its origin as a four-legged being with the full range of olfactory arousal at its psychic disposal. Hence Carles's use of the expletive "sh_t show," as in to show fecal matter as a means of exciting libidinous flows. A circus of the sort described is literally a sh_t show -- a revelation of repressed desire for the animal stench of excretory matter -- at the level of metapsychology.)

In short, heteroglossia dissolves the status quo, but only within established diachronic and synchronic boundaries, such that the ruling order can capitalize on the cathartic explosion of dissent and lawlessness to strengthen its regime when the carefully demarcated festival time-spaces become moribund.

Carles wants to interrogate the function of the carnivalesque and examine its true liberatory potential. He suggests that what seems like jouissance in the moment of its enactment may actually be an iteration of Spenglerian decline:

Round & Round we go
disoriented by the fast pace
everything happens in cycles
recycled trends, sounds, aesthetic, humans, air

The carnivalesque may prompt a despair and a craving for a stronger totalitarian force to restore the ruptured order. The cyclical nature of the traditional festival schedule may in post-postmodern times become something of a spiral, sending society ever further downward toward disintegrating anomie. Carles describes this neurosis in the midst of the would-be liberating saturnalia: "Don’t know where I’m going. Where I’m headed to. Which direction leads where. Standing in a conceptual forest, alone. Directionless. Need some1 to tell me ‘what’s cool’ so I can make sense of everything."

At the same time, the corollary of this observation is the way in which the carnivalesque engages the thantopic death instinct: the carnival "is a metaphor 4 how crazy life is," Carles points out. The devaluation of the life-giving drives of eros by their being granted free play within a circumscribed period only serves to strengthen the death drive, which receives no venting. Carles in a haunting incantatory passage captures this spirit of mounting destructive urges: "let go of all control // no longer in control."

As the death drive strengthens and the libidinous impulses devour themselves, the force behind social bonds melts away. Carles notes that the carnivalesque prompts a cosmic loneliness: "Just want to bond with some1 in this alt carnival. Really bond with some1. Feel not alone in this ‘mess’, experience a moment of clarity." But instead of clarity, there is only abjection, the "mess": "Sorta just wish I could stop this carnival ride and take time to enjoy my corn dog" -- a vulgar instantiation of the abject if ever there was one.

28 March 2010: "Disney Makes Show about Tween Bloggers"

This post is about écriture. Carles discusses a new mass media product aimed at disseminating the logocentric paradigm to a generation of media consumers socialized in visual communication media. Carles writes: "The show seems to try to let teens know that ‘blogging’ is the same as ‘being a writer.’" But is it? Isn't the absence of presence inscribed in the letter, in text as text, partially reversed if not obliterated by the connectivity implied by the "social media" that Carles laments having been deprived of in his philosophical nascence? "I remember when I was a tween, there wasn’t much 2 do," he confesses. "We didn’t really have ’social media’, so I couldn’t connect with other tweens on facebook, myspace, twitter, and chat roulette."

In Carles's interpretation, this desperate ploy by Disney, co-opting blogging as the scene/seen of writing, is the effort of a culture-industry conglomerate to maintain its monopoly on the means of entertainment, administered by its death-like grip on the very lineaments of subjectivity, as it is elaborated and articulated in language which heretofore has been hegemonically controlled by the oligarchical powers. Blogging represents the evolution of writing just as writing was the evolution of speech, serving as its dialectical opposite and its supplement simultaneously, always already subsuming writing in a complicitous evocation of the perpetually hidden origins of the speech act, the transcendental signifier. Carles is concerned that inversion of blogging as a superior form of writing perpetuates and reiterates the sterile ideology of presence that writing had effaced: "It seems to portray bloggers as people who ‘go out and get a scoop’ as opposed to the traditional blogger who ’sits on his ass’ and ‘blurbs about content in a tired voice, like a robot who is enslaved by a large group of readers.’" That is blogging is the dehumanization of the dehumanized, the absence of the absence. The robotic as not nonhuman but sheer negativity, fatigue, the weariness of the ages. The text speaks through the blogger and the writer alike, but only the blogger is "enslaved" by his méconnaissance of the scene of writing, whereas the possibility for free play always existed for the writer consumed by his own identity destroying acts of inscription. Carles notes grimly: "Blogging is serious. A lot of people get hurt. A lot of peoples’ lives’ are ruined because of blogs." Indeed. The ontological conundrum of a dispersed subjectivity conveyed in a networked presence is an epistemological vortex sufficient to trouble the most complacent phenomenologist. To speak is to be spoken. To blog is to be metablogged. The archive is not that which stores any longer but that which breathes the delicate hint of stored-ness. The pain of existential nausea.

As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: "To speak before knowing how to speak, not to be able either to be silent or to speak, this limit of origin is indeed that of a pure presence, present enough to be living, to be felt in jouissance but pure enough to have remained unblemished in the work of difference..." Clearly Carles has this passage in mind in investigating the transitive character of "‘glorifying’ blogs to tweens," who could in some very real ways be arguably considered to be innocent of language, to be speaking avant le lettre. Yet clearly in a pre-genital stage of personality organization and development, the tween remains closer to jouissance without the mediation of abjection or excess; he or she is "unblemished" in the sense of the pure abject locus of generation, the birth in all sense of the word of the Imaginary: As Carles puts the phenomenon in his own idiom: the tween is a "lil cunt with an imagination," birthing the idea of subjectivity itself in the possibility of wholly mediated fantasy. Paraphrasing Kristeva, Carles asks, "Is it ‘fucking garbage’?" but the phrase is overdetermined, with many simultaneous interpretations demanding hermaneutical priority. To "fuck" garbage, to be on intimate terms with it or to destroy it. Is that what Carles thinks of the medium of blogging? Both and? He asks, "Have u ever been in a blog war?" But the answer is plain; he is the schizophrenic product of the process of blogging itself.

26 March 2010: "Should I stay in this weekend and get buzzed off Reddi Wips / nitrous oxide?"

This post is about the supplement. Has postindustrial culture exhausted its alibis, its excuses for existence? Has the surplus repression it necessarily generates for its own reproduction transgressed its own boundaries and tipped the scale in favor of chaos rather than anomie? Carles surveys the psychic landscape and imagines the dilemma facing subjects at this critical junction in the late capitalist episteme: "I feel like I want to try a new drug."

But can this feeling be trusted? And hasn't consumerism exhausted the novelty of novelty itself, a endless repetition of sameness that reduces variety to monotonous variation? Whence pleasure in a society that has transformed pleasure into its most assured mode of domination? The libidinal economy has been thoroughly subsumed, such that even sexual gratification now takes the form of instrumentalized brutalization and self-harm, typically involving branded products, as depicted in the images Carles includes with his tentative hypothesis. "Want to feel the temporary buzz of nitrous oxide from Whip Cream containers, then reward myself with the sweet taste of cream," he suggests. He refers to "scissoring," a sexual practice the violence of which is encoded in its very name. Carles, having processed and rejected Bataille's position on expenditure, sees too well that extremes of sexuality it will yield only despair: "Might sit in my van, and ‘waste away’ my life after high school." Such are the fruits of pseudo-transgressive gratifications.

The new drug he seeks is of course the drug of consciousness. Conscience as altered consciousness. Truth serum. Carles promotes the negative dialectics of confrontational critique, urges himself, and by extension, his loyal readers, "to get serious about using this drug." He seems to be paraphrasing Derrida, who argues in "...That Dangerous Supplement..." that "since the sense of being is never produced as history outside if its determination as presence, has it not always already been caught within the history of metaphysics as the epoch of presence?" Carles notes that the "new drug" must be "Something more ‘light hearted’ and more readily accessible" -- that is, it can't be as ineffable as the traditional metaphysical account of human spirituality, which has proved insufficient for countering the material depredations of life under post-scarcity. What can be added when every addition is an overabundance? The supplement is a surfeit. Contra Derrida who argues that it "adds only to replace." It adds only to disappear in the preexisting superfluity.

What could be so "light-hearted"? The famous Derridean dictum of seeking free play of the signifier? Can Carles trace the movement of the trace of the movement of the trace of the movement of the ...

21 March 2010: "Some SXSW venue creates a ’snarky’ sign 2 repel bloggers"

This post is about Marshall McLuhan. In a deeply ironic turn, McLuhan, a once widely influential media theorist, is now primarily known, arguably, for appearing as a visual punch line in a wish-fulfillment gag in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall. In this way, McLuhans's reputation came to be the best evidence of much of what he had argued in his works, even though his works are no longer read because this stunt had discredited him to a degree. The equilibrium point of his fame, reputation, credibility and historicity has settled in a paradoxical point where the theoretical significance of his work is grasped mainly as intuition. The recursive commentary he provides on the very phenomenon he came to embody creates a short-circuiting loop impenetrable to standard modes of logical analysis. A self-canceling intellectual apparatus.

Carles wrestles with McLuhan's memory when confronted with a sign that attempts to deny the significance of Carles's chosen medium. By publicizing the sign, Carles inverts the discursive logic of signs, prompting a chase along a daisy chain of signifiers and signifieds in an infinite loop. "This sign seems like it is trying to ‘get the attention’ of the internet through the collective blogospherian voice," Carles explains, thereby negating the signficance of the negation, presenting a radical critique of his own praxis in his own medium by adopting through a proxy the medium of an earlier age. How does one critique media through the media? What does it mean to speak when you deny the objectivity of your own voice? The writers of this sign were not entirely prepared for a skilled semoitician like Carles to note its existence, or rather one should argue that it seems far more likely that Carles wrote the sign himself in an effort to end the empire of signs, to borrow a Barthesean turn of phrase.

At the same time, Carles detaches a diachronic critique of time via a space of signs -- at a moment at which certain cultural commentators were forbidden from entering into the social factory, as it were, where elites were attempting to forge significance as a reified commodity through their collective biopolitical power, amplified at such a feted occasion by the intense traditional media scrutiny -- and resituates it as a synchronic critique of space throughout time. By this double move, time and space are both decentered, one category collapses into the other. Reality itself is called into question. "Are bloggers real writers?" Carles asks, in the very instantiation of the gesture that nullifies the inquiry's very basis. Does this text exist? Is it time? Space? Time-space? Space-time? A hitherto unnamed a priori dimension?

In Carles's gesture we sense the movement of the trace, which is the pulse of culture itself, as the festival where the sign was spotted pretends to be. Carles's point is precisely this, that a negative dialectic conducted at the level of a formal critique, that is a critique of forms, still serves to advance and extend and elaborate the kingdom of signs. "Should I stop blogging and start writing on poster boards?" Carles asks, pointing to the dialectical exchange of mediums, which inherently evinces an exchange of messages, which have become reducible to foregrounded formal qualities. As McLuhan had noted in his landmark work Understanding Media "One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded the talkies.)" What will Carles's strange concatenation of blog and sandwich board yield? Will the hybridization of media forever neutralize the potential of critique? In other words, how can this question be answered: "Is SXSW full of ‘fucking ass holes’ from every pseudo-industry in the Western World?"

A real critique of a pseudo-industry, Carles warns us by this ornate example, only legitimates erstwhile harmless pretensions. Even if, like Woody Allen, he could bring McLuhan himself out to refute the rampant posturings of the self-appointed cultural apparatchiks at the industry-sponsored bacchanalia, the critique would backfire, turning critique itself into a bad joke, the very sort of failed entertainment that SXSW tries to foist on the public at large. It is our duty not to listen to the siren's call. "What do u do when u can’t get into venues?" Carles asks -- and his answer is strongly implied. You thank the gods for their mercy.

14 March 2010: "I am a grassroots marketing representative for an energy drink."

This post is about the body without organs. Carles examines the contemporary phenomenon of energy drinks as a specific species of marketing, which is, after all, the "energy drink" of capitalism, artificially spurring it to greater, altogether unnatural heights of circulation and capital accumulation. "You won’t feel the same ‘crash’ that you feel when you consume other energy drinks," Carles promises with deep irony, considering the ongoing crisis of capital that has afflicted capitalist economies across the Western hemisphere. The crash is precisely predicated on the artificial stimulants -- not the fiscalization of the economy that has been introduced in many nations since the latter months of 2008 but the lax consumer credit practices of the mid-2000s. These promotional efforts on the behalf of indebtedness are homologous to the physiological debt that energy drinks, overtaxing our equilibrious metabolism, inevitably incur.

This stands in contrast to the coming regime of immaterial labor transmitted through computer networks and existing outside the hydraulic economy dictated by manipulations of wages and the money supply. Carles notes of his energy-drink hawkers: "We are real marketers. We don’t just sit back and pray that something goes viral on the internet." This hearkens back to a hand-on model of exploitation and expropriation, capitalism in its more rigorous and energetic form. The lamentation for the "viral" mode of accumulation signals the tension within the capitalist order. The epidemiology model for labor expropriation stands in stark contrast to the face-to-face modes of confrontation espoused by the marketing team Carles lampoons, who believe that "To really promote a brand, we have to take it to the people." Carles means that in every possible sense.

But beyond the critique of marketing lies a deeper critique of the use of energy as a metaphor for human agency. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the quest for the body without organs, a body that defies the organic restrictions seemingly imposed by biology: "Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and a larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breath with your belly..." Carles asks a similar question: "Are energy drinks ‘for ass holes’?"

Deleuze and Guattari continue that a body without organs is "populated only by intensities" but it makes no claim to incorporating them. "Matter equals energy," they insist. "Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero." Carles attacks this same notional concept through the vector of the "free": "I am not sure if people are excited about our brand, or if they are just excited to get something for free," he has his naive marketing team report. But the underlying argument should be clear: excitations, or intensities, can not be spoken of as a possession, but only as a circulating flow, a fluid, or an energy drink of sorts. Remember: "The body without organs is the field of immanence of desire." Bodies are branded by desire, by the experience of freedom, of "free", rendering the condition of subjectivity fundamentally indeterminate. That is why the degree of excitation contingent on freedom can never be made "sure," as Carles points out.

Carles then has his marketers miminc the voice of hegemonic power: "We want to give you a sample, but we are not looking to give you a 1 month’s supply of energy drink." You can have a taste of subjective autonomy, but that is only to assure your further discipline. This echoes an axiom D&G articulate: "Destroy the instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces" (italics in original). In this way we all dissolve in the caustic solvent of energy drinks into one giant pool of flows of intensities, channeled and monitored by the state, that is unless we can coagulate. "Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life?" Carles has his innocent oppressors ask. But Carles forces them to acknowledge that "The road goes on forever and the demand for energy in a can never ends." A stark admission of how the marketing-inspired stimulation of desire ends by making us all into desiring machines starved for fuel, emptied of our organs, on a masochistic death march down the plane of undifferentiated experience.

Hence Carles's grasp for the Levinasian moment of recognition and ethical transcendence: "Show a little bit of respect. Not just for me, but for urself." See the Face. Honor its demand. Surrender the pursuit of energy in the assumption of infinite responsibility to the Other. These are the conditions. As Carles says, "This is the good life."

7 March 2010: "Is Retail Terrorism the Future of Alt Consumerism?"

This post is about surplus repression. The question: how to rid oneself of the anxiety of consumerist identity, how to express identity in a totally administered society. Terrorism is the moment in which one realizes that one's desires are not spontaneous and self-generated but anticipated and inculcated. Is one then predestined to react with a desperate act of spontaneity in the only way conceivable, in a gesture that attempts to negate or refute society as it really exists? Or are those gestures already encoded in the operant program? This is the syllogism Carles attempts to articulate and deconstruct simultaneously.

As radical sociologists have long noted, consumerist capitalism shows its dark repressive side when consumers are motivated not by desire but by fear. Carles assesses the rippling ramifications of this proposition through the lens of "retail terrorism." With much deliberate irony, he proclaims that "I was sorta getting behind the concept of buying stuff from trusted brands to express who I am," but has been forced to reconsider by the actions of a mob who assailed an American Apparel location in an unnamed city. The hesitation he feigns about the embrace of consumerist modes of identity formation is not altogether fictitious, or factitious, for that matter; rather Carles means to suggest the provision, hesitant nature of all consumers, the fragility of identity that must hinge on the subject's ability to "trust" a corporate identity that bears no tangible ethical responsibility, has no face to show to the other in a Levinasian sense. He is "getting behind" the concept of branded identity in several senses of the expression, both as a provisional subscriber to the tenet and as someone who has literally fallen behind it, chronically late, finding it impossible to keep up with the various connotations and shifting meanings of brands. Carles professes to endorse the idea that "the concept of ‘consumerism’ has sort of become ‘chill’ these days, as opposed to something that we are supposed 2 h8," but that stance is in part attributable to his wish to withhold reifying emotion in the commodity relation -- anger spent deploring consumerism feeds the very system it deplores. Vampiristically it sucks the energy from such contempt and uses it to fuel fashion's revolutions. One is reminded of Marx's description of capital: "Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." Consumerism similarly sucks energy from those struggling against its confines; it rechannels retail terrorism -- attempts to strike it at its heart -- into new memes, or as CArles would have it, "a relevant alt trend."

A studied indifference, or even a bemused approval is instead called for -- a "chill", as Carles suggests, relaxed, yet cold and distant. He tentatively offers an aesthetic solution to the problems of alienation brought on by consumerism: "I like the way things are now, where I just have to keep up to date on buzzbands to be interesting." Yet he implicitly critiques the escapist mode of quotidian existence, in which decentered subjectivities "watch viral videos and forget" about class struggle, the inescapable immanence, mortality, etc. The escapism is itself a virus, a mass hypnotism that interpellates subjects at the moment it seems to be dissolving them.

Though consumerism is immediately responsible, there are some proximate causes. Carles identifies the state as one possibility, but dismisses "‘the government enables this bull shit society in which we are trapped’" as a reified concept, merely another brand rather than an immanent critique worth regarding and with any possible efficaciousness.

But Carles hesitates to pursue this line of argument to far, to a case built on a transcendental locus of authenticity. This is the true terrorism of the soul: "Worried I might have to ‘backpack bomb’ a local suburban mall or something in order to be alt + authentic," he points out, cutting to the reductio ad absurdem, of all arguments from authenticity. Ultimately the only thing that can stand as authentic in a nihilistic society built on an ever-shuffling set of ideals and values driven entirely by the processes of exchange, is violence. Carles offers this vertiginous syllogism: "terrorism is ‘violence’, but maybe ’standing up for something’ in the real world will become a more popular trend." Can one "stand up for" something one believes in only because it is a "trend" -- or is this the perfect, concise expression of the metaphysical violence the consumer society exercises/exorcises on our souls?

12 March 2010: "The Great Lo-Fi Hope."

This post is about historical materialism. To what extent are the means of production determinative of the culture in which they are couched; that is to say to what degree does the base determine the superstructure, or are they in a perpetual state of dialectical play? That is the question Carles invites us yet again to ponder, picking up a debate that has long raged unsettled among Marxists and their fellow travelers.

In this particular instance, we are invited to consider the case of Ariel Pink, a "lo-fi" musician who has argued in print publications that the "presentation" of his music, dictated by the means of production he is able to seize control of, renders his art "something difficult for the money people to invest in." The artists asserts that he is "better now at producing," despite the limited means, which points to an uneven ideological development that has failed to harmonize aesthetic norms with commercial ones, as capitalism must do to underpin its superstructure and give weight to the notion that the markets can adjudicate and administer culture in a decentered, decentralized fashion. The "money people" must at once also be the most important critics, as Carles astutely recognizes: "A band’s product is just as important as how compelling they are to cover. When you are bloggable/buzzable/tweetable, the money people will come to your house with a truck full of money." Attention has become a convertible instrument in the libidinal economy.

But as Carles notes, this concatenation of attention, apperception, and commcercialization has created an ontological crisis, as being itself has become contingent on cultural categorization. "Rallying around Ariel Pink might be our last chance to turn our backs on the mainstreamication of indie," he explains -- a final problematization of the base-superstructure dialectic, recast as the collapsing mainstream-indie dichotomy. But note Carles's choice of words -- we may "turn our back" on it, but this means only that we have chosen to ignore the thorny question, not that we have resolved it by aestheticizing means. Also, Carles suggests we have reached a point when this base-superstructure will no longer be a concern merely for dogmatic theoreticians and fusty hair-splitters of the academic left. It will be a fundamental phenomenological concern with regard to subjectivity in its broadest possible conception. Our awareness of our own being may in the last analysis be determined by the means of production by which consciousness itself is produced, regardless of Kantian a prioris, which have been transformed into ideological propositions under a capitalist order that seizes upon the fundamental categories as a justification for its own given-ness. Carles notes that "the artist with minimal personal and cultural connections can focus on his art, and not have to excessively check the internet and worry about the impact of their work based on an undefined/evolving context." But these cultural connections are also prerequisites for creating art that can be self-sustaining, so a contradiction inheres. The energy to sustain artistic creation stems from the possibility of recognition, yet at the same time, contempt for recognition also fuels ambition recognized to be "authentic". Commercial success at once validates an invalidates cultural achievement and self-actualization. As a result, we are "pointlessly acclaimed" and then "forgotten" -- not merely by a social formation addicted to novelty but by ourselves, as we reject one identity after another in search of renewed surges of valuable attention.

Rather than a given dasein, being has appeared to take the form of a taxonomizing quest, seeking the cultural artifacts that can authorize and underwrite our pretensions to transcendence: "2k10 has led us on a ‘wild goose chase’ for relevant mp3s. We aren’t even looking for life-changing mp3s any more, like in the pre-Garden State/pre-Postal Service era. We are searching for MP3s that make us feel like we are at the pinnacle of human and artistic development." Can we really articulate our species being through commodified modes of expression, though? Capitalism has staked its survival on this audacious proposition.

Accordingly, it is incumbent upon commercial artists -- straddling the constituitive boundary between being for itself and being in itelf -- to establish their own ineffability, to belong to the category that is beyond categorization: "you need a lot of people asking you what genre you fit into in order to be successful. In depth ‘journalists’ will ask you if your genre even exists, then ‘connect’ with you by laughing about how silly ‘genres’ are." Consumers can then acquire this reified ineffability as a product that can be consumed by way of substantiating their claims to transcendence. They can listen to the uncategorizable music and vicariously assume uncategorizability themselves. One can then have a soul by association: one can "stand at the front of the show, already familiarized with his extensive discography, ready to smile with a shit eating grin that says, “Yes, I get it.”" What is "it"? Exactly.

9 March 2010: "THE ALT REPORT opens ‘TIP LINE’ 2 connect with readers"

This post is about the panopticon. Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham first conceived of the panopticon as a form of prison architecture that would allow a guard stationed at the center to observe unseen all the inmates, who were arrayed around him in a radial configuration.

Michel Foucault famously adopted the concept as metaphor for the carceral society, in which ideological discipline operates regardless of the presence of overseers or punishers. The presence of the observer is instead always assumed. The Panopticon is designed "so to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers." The power relations are expressed through dominated people's relations with one another.

Carles adopts this critique and applies it to the growing social preoccupation with celebrities, which in its intrusive voyeurism is already an emblem of panoptic society. Thus he invites his readers to make explicit the implicit surveillance they are already conducting, led onward by an administered proclivity for passive curiosity and vicarious fascination with those famous persons who seem to dictate delineations and degrees of alterity and mainstream-ness, and become actual informants, supplying him with information as if he were a Stasi bureau chief in charge of cultural subversives:

Recommended TIP submissions:

* alt celeb scandals
* nude pix of alt celebs
* mild misunderstandings that need more exposure to turn into over-exposed controversies
* Photographs of Alt Encounters that happen
* Injustices...

And so on. Carles's point of course, is to demonstrate how the media machine no longer needs diabolical masters to operate it and use it to chew up and dismantle reality and the possibility of grasping it as a totality. Instead we ourselves fuel the machine with the sweat and blood of our own toil. We create the material bases for our own ideological predetermination through our own eagerness to participate in the mystified consciousness and culture industries.

In servicing the machine, we become machine-like ourselves, as Carles notes ironically: "This is an effort by the Alt Report Robots + Interns to connect with the fans, letting them know that they are ‘in charge’ of the content." Interns, robots, readers, jack-booted thugs, pogrom ralliers...these are all becoming one and the same.

Foucault notes that the panopticon "is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad." By reporting on one another, we feel as though we have become more famous ourselves, more certain that every move of our own is being watched and evaluated, that our ongoing performance has indeed hit the big time. Someday, as Carles suggests, we all become "premium content."

7 March 2010: "A cougar teacher engages in sexting, sends nude pix to her students"

This post is about ideological state apparatuses. Carles confronts a series of synchronic power differentials deployed contemporaneously in the same education problematic.

Driven by asymmetrical power relations on the perpendicular co-ordinate axis of gender, Melinda Dennehy, the teacher involved in the incident Carles subjects to his probing analysis, manifested herself at the overdetermined point at which the axes of gender, age, state power, monopoly power, and technological development along capitalist lines converge. If she didn't exist, as the saying goes, perhaps Carles would have had to invent her. But with gender issues in play in the idling of a youth labor front, how does that affect institutionalized masculinity? Are we witnessing the crisis of phallologocentrism as it is impacted by spatio-visual technologies of communication -- "If a man sent cock shots of his peen to a girl, would he be more of a ‘perv’?" That is, is it more of a "violation" of gender normativity when males leverage the ageist power differential, or does it constitute a complementary hegemonic enterprise, grounding hierarchical prerogatives in homologous bases? Is becoming "more of a 'perv'" a matter of the perversion of power, or is the apotheosis of power itself?

The role of the institution of schools in a late capitalist or monopoly capitalist social formation is to delay the entry of young, redundant workers into the workforce and allow to constituting a stagnant puddle of reserve labor to be mobilized at a moment's notice (online) at capital's behest while depressing wage growth for the currently employed. Fruitless sexual relations mediated by technology within the institutional educational space is one strategy in the campaign to disperse the productive energies of young people: "Is sexting just part of growing up in the modern world?" Carles asks, trusting we will intuit the inescapable conclusion.

Thus a relation between teacher and student violates the fundamental underlying economic necessities that involve forestalling the students' assumption of maturity and the responsibilities and expectations that go along with that rite of passage in terms of the field of autonomy in which they may operate. The docile bodies of their instructors are not intended to be on that discursive field but transcend it, structure it. Dispersed sexual relations are supposed negate youth with youth, not elevate youth into burgeoning field of affective labor among adults, particularly adults already tenured in the workforce. "Should tweens be given the same rights as grownups to sext?" Carles wonders. If the dialectical development of the relation between students and teachers, unemployed and employed, unskilled and skilled, will thereby take a pre-post-industrial turn and eradicate the use of these dichotomies components of a striated strategy by which discrimination can be safely operated, then perhaps technology itself must be blamed and the course of innovation diverted. "Does love have an age? Is age just a number?" Are the categories of quantification dangerously close to becoming qualities, thus reversing the principles behind the double-entry bookkeeping of souls that capitalism require to manage and reproduce itself and allow for accumulation?

The crisis of phallologocentrism is of course paralleled, as Carles has demonstrated, by the serial crises of accumulation under late capitalism, and would seem to call for a gender panic in order to ameliorate displaced ideological tensions: "Is this story only compelling because she’s a ‘cougar’?" Carles asks in his hallmark trope of interrogatory misdirection. He does not mean to ask a question but propose a philosophical thesis: namely, the idea of "cougars" -- a vulgar term for adult females whose sexual drive is not safely atrophying in dormancy -- are a prerequisite for the telling of "compelling" cultural stories given existing social relations. The estrual libidinous forces are sublimated into the elaboration of minute points of differentiation of the continuums of power. As these stories are becoming more compulsory, future liberation movements will be seeking the liberation from sexuality. Carles traces this line of compulsion, the fall from agape to eros to apathetic narcissism: "Sorta wish i had a teacher who had fallen in love with me when I was 14, or at least a teacher who would have ‘tugged me off’…." This is a cutting, incisive comment on the future role of education, no longer to delay and to pacify but to teach us a modality of pleasure in a restricted libidinal economy. Soon, Carles warns us, the evaporation of our constructed desires in meaningless bursts of orgasmic pleasure will be the only thing that our teachers will be structurally capable of teaching us. They can't impregnate our minds; they can only "tug us off" for a fleeting moment of intellectual relief.

5 March 2010: "Animal Collective at the Guggenheim: a Conceptual Post for the Most Conceptual Experience in the History of Indie Music"

This post is about the ecstasy of communication. Carles tests the limits of conceptuality in an era that has contested the very idea of the concept and forwarded the hypothesis that there can be no hypotheses; that referentiality is always tentative, contingent, a mirage, or, as the philosophical cum artistic presentation by the Animal Collective group suggests, a projection. "Lights projecting, utilizing space, altering space," Carles notes. "This is art, architecture, and design. This is life." Or is it the "live performance art economy," as he has descrobed it elsewhere?

In other words, the space of everyday life is a projection, and moreover, one that is in continual flux. So though the spiraling space in which this experience occurs implies a locus for a transcendental signified, a core of meaning -- "In the middle is authenticity, a portal to the centre of the Earth" -- the shattering truth is that there is no truth; "art, architecture and design" are as shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. "Visuals ’stunning’ me," Carles admits. "Taking me to a different place."

Carles has gone into orbit, one might say -- "5 senses taken 2 the next level," as he explains. Jean Baudrillard, in his seminal essay "The Ecstasy of Communication," describes the "satellitization of the real" -- "the very quotidian nature of the terrestrial habitat hypostastized in space means the end of metaphysics. The end of hyperreality now begins." Of course there is always movement, the inexorable movement of the trace. The spiral up out of immanence is revealed instead to be, as Carles puts it, "a downward spiral of altdom."

The space of the public sphere, the coordinated and deliberate confusion between virtuality and physical reality prompts difficulties in measuring the ontology of experientiality: "This experience can only be experienced if ur here," Carles notes, but we have lost the moorings, as he well knows, for determining presence. As Baudrillard has written, the reflexive space in which mirror scenes could be enacted to establish the illusion of identity have be supplanted by "a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold -- the smooth operational surface of communication." Physical presence has been supplanted by the "control screen" -- as Carles puts it: "Familiar technology. Lights. Button pressing."

With nothing to anchor shifting identities within the non-places of consumerism under late capitalism, we are forced to spin around and around, dervishes of desire, feverishly panting after subjectivity or longing for a ritualized dizzy oblivion. The uninterrupted interface. Carles linguisticaly emulates this phenomenology of experience: "swimming in metaphorical strawberry jam / I could touch it /I was swimming in it." But the sensorium manufactured at the Guggenheim museum, itself a testament to an old reification of the problematic of the aesthetic, was nothing more than a simulacrum, which allowed it to present the clearest manifestation of this nascent decade of a long familiar conundrum, but which nonetheless made it "for one night... into the most relevant space in the history of the world." Time and space are collapsed under the strain of eternal semiotic decentering. Relevance is an aporia, if not a existential vacuum. And still we continue to spiral...

3 March 2010: "American Apparel Finds the best bottom / butt / ass in the world."

This post is about industrial revanchism. Carles takes advantage of a ribald visual pun to interrogate the possibilities for the dying manufacturing base to mount a rear-guard action, as it were, against the insurgent services industry in the U.S. Namely, can American Apparel, a manufacturer infamous for its combining progressive-seeming labor policies with retrograde sexist advertising campaigns for its products, turn the tide against the offshoring of apparel making to so-called third-world countries and instigate a U.S. revival in the moribund Fordist industrial base? As Carles asks, "Is Am Appy ‘revolutionary’ or are they exploiting women?" The implicit answer,as always, is "both/and": it is doing both, predicating the revolution on female exploitation, so that antiquated, Second Internationalist notions of the composition of the revolutionary class can once again be advanced to the fore and doom themselves to failure. That is to say, American Apparel advances a limited revolution that functions as a devolution, protecting its tenuous hold on the industrial firmament that is threatened by incipient globalization and the irresistible sweep of post-Fordist reform. All the old loyalities, epitomized by the objectification of women within the domestic sphere in a safely isolated nuclear family, are being swept away. Now, post-Fordist industry has produced a labile, mobile worker, with no allegiances to the firm that promises its workers nothing in return. American Apparel wishes to stand athwart history and say no to these changes, but can only do so but embracing "backward" (pun intended) social formations along with seemingly outdated methods for organizing the productive forces.

Fittingly, the term "ass," as Carles uses it in this post, is dialogic in its deployment, at once evoking the heavy laboring animals of the pre-industrial era of primitive accumulation as well as the overdetermined sexual fetish of the female gluteal muscles in the post-industrial era. Procreative "labor" in the sense of sexual attraction to vaginal coitus is subordinated to the fruitless expenditure inherent in anal fetishization, a metaphoric if not metonymic indication of the pressure to banish productivity from the now hegemonic consumerist desire. The calculatingly lascivious categorization of female posteriors from several geographic locations that have seen their industrial base decimated underscores the point that Carles wishes to emphasize: not only that "Am Appy [is] the future of marketing" but that this evolution is experienced by the nascent class formations as both sexually titillating and ethically nauseating: Thus Carles's inquiry "R u turned on or disgusted?" is yet another trick question. In the welter of contradictions that is post-postmodern subjectivity, one must already be disgusted to become turned on. Fascination is synthesized with repulsion; the abject becomes the glamorous; the fashion industry reaches the zero degree and casually brushes it aside. "Do the top 10 butts deserve more than a goodie bag worth $300?" Carles asks. Do women deserve to be prostituted in order to resurrect the working class? Or can we finally "turn our backs" on such ideas and forge a working class revolutionary movement that can upend all forms of domination and subjection?

1 March 2010: "The ‘Most Marketable’ Winter Olympians Whose Personal Brands make ‘the most bank’"

This post is about socialism in one country. In a lengthy analysis of the 2010 Winter Olympic games in the neoliberalist haven of Western Canada, Carles attacks the myth of the so-called end of history on two fronts, analyzing both the shortcomings of neoliberalism since it achieved global hegemony in the aftermath of the dissolution of the socialist bloc and the limitations of bourgeois historiography that focuses on the achievements of individuals without accounting for the social milieu that permitted their actions and enabled them to be recognized as notable. Naturally, Carles synthesizes the critique into a ringing indictment of late capitalism as corrosive to the very possibility of freedom, detailing the ways in which even incontestable athletic achievement can be distorted in the lens of market-driven competition and individualistic ideology.

Walking the fine line of pregnant incoherency, Carles notes "how ‘important’ / ‘relevant’ / ‘irrelevant’ the Olympics are" since they have become "a month long branding experiment." But of course any branding experiment is inherently an exercise in contradiction -- a brand is at once a approximation of uniqueness and unequivocal sigh of conformity to the consumerist code that reduces all social appearances to the commercialized language of replicable and salable objects. Thus
athletic achievement -- a proxy for being-for-itself -- is translated into the dead form of capital and is made to appear as a kind of inferior being-in-itself, an instrumentalized activity that finds its telos not in its own nature, in the praxis itself, but in the way the results can be leveraged in a consumerist system of circulated and circulatable meanings attached to commodities. The underlying lesson is that a socialist vanguard may not emerge from a process of natural selection and gradual enlightenment, as any accomplishment is rigorously appropriated for oligarchic ends and various actors are co-opted into a system that serves them at the expense of the struggle. This then indoctrinates the rapt mass audience into a lachrymose passivity that mimes subjectivity but is denuded of authentic significance or substance: Instead of seizing upon the contradictions of the post-industrial age to foment revolution and secure autonomy and prosperity for a greater share of the world's people, "In the modern world, humans like to talk abt the TV that they are watching while they are chillin on their laptops [via twitter]." The Olympics is thereby revealed in its true nature, as a forum for uniting the world in spectatorship, watching the meaningless achievement of others while capital continues to centralize and accumulate in the hands of the lucky or egregious rapacious few.

Carles then taxonomizes the various forms of mystification exercised through the various broadcasting tropes used to disseminate the athletes as readily consumable "stories," noting the various ways injustice, prejudice and bigotry are reproduced as readily digestible memes. Adopting the persona that the coverage of the Olympics attempts to fashion us into , Carles says of ice dancing athletes Charlie White and Meryl Davis: "From what I understand, it will always be ‘funny’ to make fun of ‘flamers prancing around on ice.’" Of Shani Davis, Carles express the expectation that he be "a flamboyant African American diva bro ‘pissing off’ all of the other irrelevant countries." Of curling athlete Cheryl Bernard, he writes, "This female broad has been branded as the ‘cougar’ of the sport, since she is mad hot + looks like she is down 2 fuck after baking you and your bros some rice krispie treats." And on it goes, with Carles exorcising all the stereotypes reinscribed by the Olympic coverage.

But Carles warns that we should not be distracted by the callous and relentless parade of capitalist triumphalism and the collateral damage it causes to human rights and diversity. Instead, he wonders about ideological blowback: The key question, of course, is how to subvert the Olympic games and make it paradoxically live up to its own ideological alibi, names that it unite the people of the world in struggle and accomplishment and the highest expression of human species being. How does a commercial festival that parasitically sucks the life out of human action become the seedling for a great strong oak of renewed socialism in our time? As Mouffe and Laclau have noted, we must prepare to move "beyond the positivity of the social" and explore new articulations of the social that defy the class positions that were popularly extinguished with the end of the great ideological struggle between East and West. Carles dismisses as apologetic fatalism the notion that the struggle is over with this taunting challenge: "Do the Olympics not matter any more bc the Cold War is over?"

Yes, it is most definitively so that we can no longer look to the Olympics as a forum for the sublimated expression of the struggle between socialism and capitalism -- Carles points out that China's effort to maintain this structure ("China loves a winner even more than America loves a winner, since they utilize Olympic triumphs as propaganda 2 brainwash their citizens who are trapped in their communist society") is ultimately unconvincing because the class formations are no longer persuasive: Chinese athletes "look too much like ‘working class’ AZNs" and can't posit the triumph of the working class as its abolition.

Instead it is imperative for nascent Left movements to look for fissures within the hegemony, for counter discourses within the overdetermined structure of the competition. As Mouffe and Laclau warn, "The task of the Left ... cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology, but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction ofd a radical and plural democracy." So in the context of the Olympics, as Carles notes, this is a matter not of critiqueing and denouncing the rampant branding of the athletes, but perhaps insisting that everyone be branded more thoroughly, that the rewards are more broadly dispersed among partcipating athletes: "Feel more confused than ever about the Olympics. It is like this celebration of cultures from all over the world, but also some sort of competition where we try to figure out whose brand will be the most valuable to a Fortune 500 / niche company." The solution is the fuse the competition he mentions with the celebration, to overturn the incipient and insistent individualism by perfecting it, by holding a competition where everyone wins merely by virtue of belonging to a culture, by espousing an ultimate irreducible otherness. If at first this otherness if reified and commercialized, that is to the detriment not of otherness but of reification. Carles radically proposes that the content can shatter the form of capitalist hegemony.