29 April 2010: "An Arts & Crafts Bar Opens in San Fransisco"

This post is about multitude. With the ongoing crisis in capitalist accumulation and the demise of the financialization solution to the problems of overproduction and maintenance of effective demand, neoliberist hegemony is showing its cracks and the post-post-Fordist move to a new relation between capital and labor is begin to assert itself more robustly. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the breakdown of the work-leisure dichotomy, with capital asserting itself in the subsumption of identity labor. The production of identity and its repercussions and material manifestations and byproducts have all become central to a new problematic of productive forces and new socialized forms of the relations of production, with immaterial, affective and cognitive forms of labor stepping to the fore in lieu of the mechanization of Fordist approaches to labor expropriation. The productivity gains harnessed to the digitization of culture are contingent upon a given socialization of the collaborative labor processes, a development that is sometimes called the "social factory."

Carles highlights one instantiation of the social factory in this recent missive, which details they way in which craft labor has been assimilated to mass leisure and urban youth movements toward a more integrated subjectivity interpellated by a dispersed and highly networked economy. The Craft Bar that Carles discusses here is merely one node in a larger, rhizomatic structure for the production of pliant and disciplined subjectivities that ironically seize upon their very determination within the economic structure as the liberated expanse of their autonomy.

In his analysis, Carles hinges the argument upon a single word: "creative." First he reveals how creativity in its reified, alienated form as developed and extenuated by the new reigning regimes in the realm of production serves as the new means of social exclusion: "Would I fit in even if I am not creative/good at arts and crafts?" he asks -- sotto voce, one imagines -- in the manner of anxious "hipster" concerned about his or her cultural capital. Ersatz craft (kraft?) skills are a new field in which distinction can be manufactured and traced -- supplanting/supplementing the list of earlier mass-market social activities that served as a gateway to alcohol-fueled escape, "gambling, cards, Monopoly, darts, shuffle board, video games, frisbee golf, and Farmville." Now the impulse to escape from the pigeonhole in which we are placed by capitalism (which inevitably leads to our fashioning ourselves and even-more-narrow pigeon hole or "niche" for ourselves) is not sought merely through oblivion but through mediated small-scale manufacturing, a displacement of identity onto useless, by and large infantile baubles such as the ones ("plushies") seen in the photographic documentation Carles has presented. "Are plushies for uncreative people?" Carles asks incisively. Do these characters unwitting manifest and embody a contradiction? Are they helping paper over the contradictions inherent in late capitalism? Are they the apparent solution to capital's recent problems?

Though presumably these youths imagine themselves as left-leaning progressives, their unwitting adherence to the new paradigms for capitalist exploitation makes them fit members of the "Creative Society" -- Ronald Reagan's name for his vision of a neoliberalist paradise that he deployed in his successful 1966 California gubernatorial campaign. "The Creative Society, in other words, is simply a return to the people of the privilege of self-government," Reagan thundered, and it is not difficult, Carles implies, to imagine the youths pictured thrilling to such rhetoric as they crank out their geegaws en route to manufacturing their distributable identit(ies). "What kind of people go to craft bar?" he asks rhetorically. Those who "Just wanna get buzzed and get my create on."

Which takes us to Carles's second thesis about "creativity," that it serves as the post-fordist analogue for consumption, that it is a new guise for substance abuse, only magically transformed into something putatively more active and engaging. But as Carles frames the question: "Are ‘plushies’ a legitimate art, or are they bullshit?" What profits the left to further advance the production of stuffed cutesy avatars for narcissists? The difficulty in separating use from exchange value is exacerbated, thwarting the elaboration of a more egalitarian distribution of socially meaningful labor to benefit everyone and not merely those patrons of an "authentic ‘hipster dive bar,’" as Carles derisively deems it. Art and bullshit have become one under the pressure of immaterial labor, co-creation, and broad-based preoccupation and distribution of the various efforts made at self-fashioning.

Carles's final thesis about creativity unveils his fundamentally Lacanian reading of creativity as an elaboration of the pursuit of the object petit-a. Again, as is his wont, he frames the his critical intervention in an interrogatory fashion: "Do u want to chill at a bar where ’something positive / creative’ is going on, or do you just like loud, smoky places where people are trying to ‘get their fuck on’?" The either-or construct here is meant to call our attention to the fact that these two types of motivation have collapsed, or are at the very least collapse-able. After all, sexual reproduction is the most basic of reproductive acts, but it bears with it the annihilation of identity, the obverse of the instrumental use of creativity in such social scenes as Carles dissects here. Carles means to dismantle the "positive" aspects of creativity and expose the inherent negative dialectic to all such endeavors that deserve the name "creative." But the manufacture of plushies by inebriated youth does not constitute a politico-critical act; instead it serves as competitive positioning in the sexual-mating lottery. From such a viewpoint, the only creativity, ultimately, is desire itself, unfulfillable in its constituitive libidinal force. The unconscious, as we know, is itself a "loud, smoky place" and now amount of creative immaterial labor will be able to blow away the clouds.

26 April 2010: "St. Vincent “completely butchers” an INXS cover"

This post is about the sinthome. In the collective imaginary of the West, the antipodes have long served to hold several contradictory fantasies in tension -- both penal colony and blank slate, a place for a fresh start and a place of incarceration at the same time. Can we ever be said to escape from ourselves and our own destructive proclivities? Is every attempt at escape actually a prison sentence that has been passed upon us by the society whose norms we have failed to mediate? Carles mulls over these questions in considering archetypal Australian, rock-and-roll performer Michael Hutchence, and the efforts of Anglo-American society to exorcise his ghost, in this case by encouraging a woman who poses as a self-conscious innocent with a "cutesy indie girl voice aesthetic" to reinscribe the signature work of Hutchence and deny its subterranean masochism, its desperate commitment to cyclical self-abuse in a literally strangulated attempt at self-mastery. As Deleuze comments in his famous essay on masochism, "pain only acquires significance in relation to the forms of repetition which condition its use." Carles invites us to consider which kind of repetition, and which kind of pain is operant, in the "completely butchered" cover of one of Hutchence's songs.

The levels of obligation and ritual involved in the scenario Carles homes in on are multiple, beginning, of course, with the sexual rituals that led to Hutchence's untimely demise. That ritual of suffocation is paralleled in Carles's analysis with the ritual/compulsion/obligation of performing other artists' work within the popular-music industry. As Carles notes, the performer who works under the pseudonym St. Vincent (and as Deleuze notes, such pseudonyms are legion in the rituals of sadism and masochism) seems as though "she was ‘forced to sing’" Hutchence's song, "Need You Tonight," itself a multilayered depiction of erotic torment, about, as Carles notes, a "tortured man who just wants to get off in the dirtiest way possible." He adds that St. Vincent "would have a difficult time with this song unless she got ‘extremely dark’ in a personal/sexual type of way."

So it is that we see the sexualized, masochistic component of the classic anxiety-of-influence scenario, as artists are compelled pay homage to their predecessors at the same time as they attempt to escape from their shadow and shape their own distinctive artistic genius. In a sense, Carles cleverly implies, every attempt at a cover of another artist's work is a metaphoric trip to Australia. And simultaneously, at another level of consciousness, cover versions are psychosexual dramas, the adoption of false identities, the blurring of pain and pleasure in the dissolution of self: "I wonder if you should even be allowed to cover this song if you haven’t been choked during an orgasm," Carles shrewdly points out. The sublime moment of jouissance is at once the moment of the self's most severe constriction, a return to the primordial, to the abject, to the pre-self, to the consciousness that precedes consciousness, the collective genius that conditioned the ground upon which our very sense of self-awareness could be shaped. "Have you ever lost consciousness right after an orgasm?" Carles asks. Must we surrender the self for pleasure? Is recessive imitation an orgasmic expression of self-abnegation?

The final twist, implied by Carles's interrogatory methods in general, is that the very act of asking these questions is another iteration of the cycle of repetition, another suspension, another recursive return...

23 April 2010: "Hype Machine Employee Responds to Bitter Music Critic’s anti-Hype Machine tirade"

This post is about perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Though more and more subjects are involved with the production and dissemination of cultural product through the intercession of various interactive technological modalities enabled by networked interfaces distributed throughout all levels of the social body, Carles fears, rightly, that the process of cultural distribution is paradoxically becoming more and more automated. The surfeit of information generated by the influx of new freelance participants in the grand social project of marketing trends and the exponential multiplication of nodal points in the peer-to-peer relations among cultural consumers has overwhelmed the flow of relevant information (always a touchstone concern for Carles), diverted it into innumerable silt channels striating the networked information society. We demand automated sorting systems, truth procedures for eliminating effluvia. We want our culture purified without extinguishing our apparent autonomy in the aesthetic field.

For Carles, the conflict between popular-music critics, who characterize the pre-postpostmodern mode of cultural dissemination and the interdictive function of mass-media-propagated gatekeeper/hegemons, and the new internet-mediated forms of direct-to-end-user distribution of cultural product (product that once served as the object of gatekeeping discourse but now eludes such structuration) epitomizes the problematic of aesthetics in a meme-ified age. Writes Carles, assessing the argument between Mp3 aggregation service Hype Machine and popular music critic Christopher Weingarten:

Maybe the hype machine was created to kill music journalists, since they aren’t as functional as just streaming a song + deciding for urself. Seems like that is a good idea, but maybe it has ‘morphed into a whole new problem.’ Wonder if ‘the truth’/optimal system is somewhere in between. Maybe the government should give us preloaded iPods every year.

At stake: the role of the state in controlling the ebb and flow of trends and the evolution of tastes; i.e. regulating the flow of culture and the rate of turnover to suit the production and distribution capacities of the remaining culture-industry conglomerates and their satellite industrial supports. Another way of phrasing Carles critically important and incisive question: Have consumers been adequately constituted in their novelty-seeking subjectivity such that they can be trusted to decide for themselves and reach the conclusions that capital requires. Will consumers by virtue of the ways in which their identities have been constituted in highly networked social media formations, supply effective consumer demand sufficient to reward and repay the continued investment of capital in the cultural, affective and consciousness industries, discounted appropriately for inevitable temporal lags. Or should temporal lags become the "optimal" essence of capital formation itself? That is, the lags between trend formation and widespread adoption become the gaps for capital to exploit, the very essence of the investment opportunity. Those lags would require functionaries like Weingarten to police them, preserve the space, prevent "leaks" of cultural product before their appointed time -- the leaks that such services as Hype Machine thrive on and which have fashioned the "whole new problem" to which Carles refers.

In other words, Carles wants to consider two modes of disciplinarity with regards to cultural consumption (and its tertiary role as a form of symbolic production). As he points out, "Every1 is trying to be ‘first’," at the same time as they seek to be "‘exclusive’." The result is a game-theoretical situation (Carles dubs it "meme games") in which a non-cooperative game structure is transforming synchronically to a cooperative one as the players contest the very fact of whether their moves are simultaneous or sequential. What comes first? Hype or the product to be hyped? In the problematic of trends, is attention an end or a means? Is the function of players to share information to yield likely aesthetic and commercial successes? Or is the aim to use hegemonic discourse about popular culture to make cultural ubiquity a zero-sum game? DO we win or lose if the cultural output is limited to a few winners, while gatekeepers consign vast portions of the semiprofessional cultural output to obscurity and inconsequentiality?

The very fate of the libidinal economy hangs in the balance -- what will we be permitted to desire? Also, it is a question of the future of labor (Carles signals this dimension of his analysis with a sly allusion to the traditional union rallying cry: "Whose side are you on?"), of whether cultural product will be a matter of leisure consumption for the masses while only a select few are granted license to perform and produce and comment on it, or will our work become a matter of transforming ourselves into vectors, into living and breathing hype machines? Can we play dead to the ceaseless flow of new cultural information to process? Will we ever be adequately compensated for processing this information? IS the first to know about one trend always the last to know about its insignificance in a larger hierarchical schema? This may be a game that no one wins, though all are forced to play.

15 April 2010: "Steve Aoki and the Cobrasnake hand deliver merch to African Kids"

This post is about uneven development. In his epochal 1917 tract "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism," Russian political theorist and revolutionary V.I. Lenin makes a trenchant and important point about supermonopolies implemented at the global level.

Certain bourgeois writers (now joined by Karl Kautsky, who has completely abandoned the Marxist position he had held, for example, in 1909) have expressed the opinion that international cartels, being one of the most striking expressions of the internationalisation of capital, give the hope of peace among nations under capitalism. Theoretically, this opinion is absolutely absurd, while in practice it is sophistry and a dishonest defence of the worst opportunism. International cartels show to what point capitalist monopolies have developed, and the object of the struggle between the various capitalist associations. This last circumstance is the most important; it alone shows us the historico-economic meaning of what is taking place; for the forms of the struggle may and do constantly change in accordance with varying, relatively specific and temporary causes, but the substance of the struggle, its class content, positively cannot change while classes exist.

Carles likely had this passage in mind when his muse was captured by a news item about cultural industry impresarios Steve Aoki and Mark Hunter, who recently toured Africa in pursuit of underexploited markets to saturate with their product. The "T-shirts, records, CDs, tons of ‘kewl shit’ that Californian kids with expendable income can purchase," as Carles points out, may readily be adopted in developing countries as well as the trend-manufacturing media outlets begin to come online in these remoter areas. As Lenin noted, such industrialists -- in this case a veritable "alt" cartel -- pretend to come in peace but in fact come to establish a beach head. They seek market share, and will develop the markets by force if need be, no matter how much "merch" they distribute freely in their initial foray. Though the focus of the moguls' trip seems to be on the village in which they were photographed, Carles argues that the "Dim Mak brand is transcending this shanty town / the entire continent of Africa." Indeed it is like a specter haunting the continent with the looming imperatives and machinations of the meme-producing industries, that seek to blanket the African nations in the hegemonic discourse of commercial cultural product. The threat of identity consciousness hovers over this village; soon the children that innocuous wear T-shirts whose symbols they can hardly understand will suffer the cutting awareness of their own global irrelevance exposed by such déclassé handouts.

As Carles points out, "It seems like in an act of ‘good will’" when Aoki distributes advertisements for his brand and inculcates defenseless children in "how to DJ / how to install a twitter app on their smart phone", but in fact these efforts merely serve to introject subject populations into preexisting media empires as the raw audience material to be processed and demograph-ied. Alas, "That’s what life is all about," Carles ruefully notes.

He proceeds to mock the cultural insensitivities of the invaders, one of whom callously wears a T-shirt with a profane slogan about cosmic irresponsiblity: "The Cobrsnake bro’s “Shit Happens” t-shirt is commentary on how you are born into a life, and even if ur stuck in Africa, you can still rise above and become President of the United States." Of course, Carles is expressing himself with exquisite irony. He means to suggest that the T-shirt exemplifies the injustice of uneven developments under the global capitalistic order that has doomed these children to a life of exploitation and cruel awareness of their cultural disadvantages. Life has indeed "happened" to them, rather than serving as something they can autonomously determine, and yes, it is in the schema of international socioeconomic relations, "shit."

11 April 2010: "Do u think girls who buzz off sections of their hair are sexie?"

This post is about the laugh of the medusa. Carles wrong-foots the progressives in his reading audience by asking a deceptively innocuous question that challenges the teleological view of liberty and gender equality: "Will women ever become as powerful as men?" The subtle implication built in to the very terms of such a question is that power need not be considered a zero-sum game between the genders, that women can gain power without men having to surrender any. By posing the question in those terms, Carles critiques the idea that redressing patriarchal inequities can be painless; instead it requires a painful psychological adjustment, not unlike the awkward cosmetological incursions performed with the electric hair clippers. That is to say, when Carles asks "Is it time for women to start buzzing of sections of their hair?" he is also at the same time asking: "Is it time to for women to demand a termination of patriarchal prerogative?"

Part of this revolutionary feminist activity must come at the expense of woman's perceived sexual attractiveness, as this has been constructed within patriarchy. Hence, as Carles notes, it "seems weird." He then rehearses a predictable masculinist criticism: "Women are supposed to have long, beautiful, healthy hair, so any time a woman has short hair, there is a ‘backlash’ agains them, since they are ‘trying to be a man.’" It has long been the tactic of patriarchy to condition female servitude by disciplining women in terms of their appearance. Often this manifests itself as seeming compliments that are actually backhanded -- the bars of a velvet prison. Thus an intervention designed to subvert beauty norms can strike a "progressive sectional" blow for freedom -- that is the field of beauty can be deterritorialized, liberated for public expression of counterhegemonic practices. The oppositions structured by the gender divide can be assaulted and surmounted; sun and moon become one source of light; activity and passivity revealed as ultimately indistinguishable; the inside out and the outside in as linear phallologocentric logic devours itself and becomes a reflection of the spiraling cycles within cycles of cosmic entropy.

Naturally, patriarchal forces won't acquiesce without a fight. Cixous writes that "the phallogocentric sublation is with us, and it's militant, regenerating the old patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration." It's no accident that Carles attempts to interrogate this question of "progressive sectional" feminist change and the reaction formations that follow it, with a sortie about hair clippers, a sharp instrument that can only but evoke the threat of castration, which trembles so close to the surface in all patriarchal order.

Carles warns of the efforts at co-optation that are sure to follow any gesture toward dismantling the hierarchy of genders. "Should I buzz off the majority of my GF’s hair against her will?" he asks, wearing the mask of patriarchy to illustrate a likely reaction to female behavior that reveals itself as incontingent upon that of men. This is hardly a new phenomenon; Carles has in mind the patriarchal strictures of orthodox Judaism, in which ritual head shaving upon matrimony serves to reinforce inherited notions of woman's fundamental "uncleanliness." Men can seize the ancient initiative in female head shaving and reinvoke the same categorical right to control the appearance of women who function as reproductive chattel within a traditional society seeking to maintain its integrity in the face of the disintegrative trend of history

In this way "progressive sectional buzz cutting of women’s hair is sexy / authentic" -- authentic to the degree in which it echoes patriarchal codes from fundamentalist religious practices; sexy to the degree that it functions culturally as a mark or brand of male dominance -- signifying not female proactivity but submission, the mark of against her will.

For feminism to avoid the trap of reaction and dialectical exchanges that yield no progress toward liberation, women, Carles suggests, must look beyond ruses to make themselves "more interesting" and pursue instead a politics of confrontation that operates outside of the spectral dimension. He knows that "if Hillary Clinton had a buzz cut," she would not necessarily "have won the President of the World Vote." Female power must come through "winning back the body" as Cixous has declared, but this victory must not be declared prematurely on the basis of radical depilatory praxis. Hair can grow back, whereas patriarchy must not.

8 April 2010: "NYMag does profile piece on Solange Knowles, tries to make her sound like a ‘real indie artist’"

This post is about Nibiru. Carles takes a somewhat supernatural and metaphysical turn with this offering, on the surface an examination of the various strata of celebrity and the channels of mobility between them. But the deeper layer of his inquiry in this essay is not revealed until he poses this ultimate question: "Did the human race really start in Africa?"

Evolutionary theory and archeological data would seem to support that theory for the origin of humanity, but Carles seeks to alert us to heterodoxical possibilities, including, for example, the thesis put forward in the best-selling work of popular pseudo-science, Chariot of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken, who argued that human technology was originally brought to Earth from outer space by alien life-forms, who appeared to primitive earthlings as gods. It follows, if you accept that postulate, that these aliens may have mated with earth creatures, spawning human diversity familiar today.

Of course, as Carles deftly implies, a certain subset of humans today are commonly regarded as gods (broadly popular celebrities in the culture industries) and another are regarded as alien (self-appointed "alts" to whom Carles devotes so much scrutiny). The fusion of these two in the figure of Solange Knolwes supplies a metaphorical fulcrum for Carles, upon which he can pivot to a immanent critique of celebrity indie culture and the quasi-mystical nature of the "evolution from failed mainstream to indie schmoozing artist."

Carles cites a report of an appearance by Knowles in the midst of many other hybrid alt celebrities that attempted to inflate the occurrence into a "special event" that requires an audience to bear "witness." The religious overtone, as we have seen, is not accidental, as Carles's implication is that the incident described so solemnly by New York Magazine was in fact a contemporary form of ecumenical ritual in which the Holy Spirit is supplanted by a presiding spirit of "cool," as suggested by this phrase from the press account: "...at an Ace Hotel party populated by all manner of cool people." Celebrity gods, a race apart, sanctified by an ineffable quality that appears wholly otherworldly -- an extensive mythos that supports itself through its saleability in the media marketplace. Compare with von Däniken's version of the myth, in which space beings are transmuted into deities by way of a process of hagiography. Carles's point: today's indie celebrities would set themselves up as alien gods over us, presenting their marketable appeal as the product of extraterrestrial technology. Hence the appellation "Dirty Projectors" can be understood in its proper light, as a veiled reference to ad hoc astral projection, yoked into service of corrupt, pecuniary ambitions. Carles's question, "Whatever happened 2 the Dirty Projectors?" at once ridicules the group's pretensions to spiritual transcendence (they would set themselves up as indie gods and tempt us all to alt-simony) and indicts the media's silence with regard to the abuse of supernatural tropes.

In a more elaborate iteration of the alien gods myth, in the work of Zecharia Sitchin, for example, who holds that aliens enslaved humanity and tricked us into mining gold for export to their home plant. The metaphoric possibilities here are almost too obvious to require elaboration. Like Sitchin's aliens, the culture industry whips us into a worshipful frenzy and we perform the slavish promotional work of spreading their gospel, helping line their coffers with gold.

7 April 2010: "Hipster Puppies blog gets book deal, authored by Bitter Music Critic"

This post is about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. In an unusually biting entry, Carles poses the quintessential question of our era: "Would u rather look at a cute hipster puppy, or read an out-of-touch bloggers’ 50000 word manifesto on Animal Collective?" Of course this is a false choice, a classic example of an either/or formulation masking what is in fact a tautology. Carles seeks to demonstrate that looking at a "hipster puppy" and reading a critical assessment of Animal Collective are in essence the same act. That is to say the visual and textual modes of apprehension have collapsed into one another under the pressure of concentrated, technologically abetted narcissism. Carles asks: "Do people care more about cute memes than tons of words?" The implied answer is that they "care more" about neither, because they care only about themselves and instrumentalizing memes to improve their own cachet. As Carles demonstrates, the reprocessing of culture into self-aggrandizing tidbits to be disseminated online leads inevitably to such unanswerable philosophical inquiries as this one: "Do u h8 him for expecting to get paid 4 writing about music? Do u h8 him for getting paid for blogging pix of puppies?" The question could easily be inverted and "h8" rendered as love; the specific emotional response is irrelevant to the subjectivization of the public re-presentation of cultural phenomena. The self no longer participates in an organic community of characterized by a common tradition. Instead the alienated self attempts to introject itself into an anomic social formation.

So we must bear witness to the evisceration of the figure of the artist (Carles figures this with the piquant image of a man with "his head up his own ass"). Carles suggests that "viral meme blogs" have become "more lucrative than trying to become an authentic writer" -- which of course evokes the question of what sort of authenticity as writer is possible after the alleged "death of the author" and the nullification of the "author function" have been widely proclaimed. The author function itself has become the virus, the content implied by any viral meme. The meme, regardless of its surface content, primarily signifies its transmitter and that transmitter's status as one who has been infected.

The irony here is that the particular transmitter in question that Carles critiques in this essay has himself criticized the state of social affairs "where every one has an opinion, and no single music critic is valued more." But this complaint is in vain, as his own praxis has contributed to the condition in which every critical voice is uniquely sanctified and ignored as the virus of authorship prompts the replication of superficial and degenerating content toxic to the social body. Gemeinschaft becomes geschellshaft in accordance with the laws of epidemiology. We are left to wonder: Is there any hope for inoculation?

5 April 2010: "Should Lil Wayne be allowed to blog + sell ‘merch’ from jail?"

This post is about organic intellectuals. Gramsci, while a political prisoner of conscience during the Mussolini regime in Italy, wrote extensively, producing a series of tracts in political theory that would profound alter the course of Marxism in the decades that followed their publication. Carles suspects that the writings of another prisoner of conscience, Lil Wayne, will have similar impact: "It seems like he is trying to utilize a blog to keep his brand alive. He is also selling t-shirts that say ‘Free Weezy.’ Instead of letting people think he is a ‘criminal’ who is ‘getting his ass pounded’ behind bars, he wants people to know he is having a ‘deep, reflective experience.’" Wayne, as Carles notes, has begun his carceral jottings by exploring the nexus of commercialism, domination and phenomenology, the intersection of "reflective experience" and personal branding under the sign of sexual threat.

In his notebooks, Gramsci questioned the usefulness of self-criticism for party discipline and the elaboration of theory. Carles may have that in mind in his skeptical evaluation of Lil Wayne's effort at rigorous self-criticism. Wayne writes:

Love. Live. Life. Proceed. Progress. That’s who I am and who I’ll always be. You see, we’re all living on borrowed time, so I’m not worried about this situation. Life happens quick. The more time you spend contemplating what you should have done…you lose valuable time planning what you can and will do.

Wayne commits himself to a progressive philosophy and dares to tread a line both teleological and paradoxically existential. He posits identity that is both contingent and transcendent -- in time and outside of it. But this may all be skirting the historical materialist questions that authorize such idle philosophical speculations. Gramsci argues that "when a struggle can be resolved legally, it is certainly not dangerous; it becomes so precisely when the legal equilibrium is recognised to be impossible." Lil Wayne's incarceration seems to provide a spectacle of the juridical, and his mode of contemplation a feat of evasion. But Gramsci also warns that this does not mean that "by abolishing the barometer one can abolish bad weather." Lil Wayne finds himself in a liminal position: is he the broken barometer?

Of course, while in prison Gramsci famously elaborated the concept of hegemony to theorize the durability of capitalism in the face of the international socialist threat, establishing the alienated social relations as a natural rather than contingent formation. The sustenance of consensus by purely socio-institutional means erects a veritable prison house of language, as discourse itself serves to negate the possibility of theorizing revolution. Carles, noting perceptively that "I wouldn’t have the same freedoms I have in normal society if I lived in a prison," indicates the double nature of incarceration -- while some freedoms are stripped away, new ones are suddenly revealed and made accessible to consciousness. Taboos fall away, as well as the scales from one's eyes. One's perspective on the given social conditions is in one sense purified: "There would be no HD TV, no personal space, no macbooks, no memes, no youtube videos, no retail shopping opportunities, no high quality fast food, and tons of minorities/uneducated ppl who don’t care how ‘alt’ u r." In other words, one's relation to mediated identity would be disrupted, and the interpellation of subjectivity would be suspended. Carles suggests that "Lil Wayne will end up ‘preferring life on the inside’" for precisely these reasons.

From such a position, the prisoner may access insights into the workings of society but at the same time lack the expressive resources to articulate them. The critque is experienced directly, written on the body as it were, and may not be articulatable in language as such. Carles notes that he is forced to "Wonder how Lil Wayne is blogging." This question cuts both ways: How does Lil Wayne muster the expressive resources on the one hand, and how does he maintain the critique of consciousness without encountering the prison guards in his own mind. In Freudian terms, the superego in the unconscious is suspended in favor of an explicit disciplinary apparatus, liberating libidinous energy heretofore trapped in the psyche by its repressive operations. In prison, then, a subject may be in a position to forge a truly radical critique rather than purely reactionary or partial one. "It seems ‘bad for America’ that we can glorify this bro who is ‘behind bars,’" Carles presciently notes, anticipating the critique that may potentially ignite a movement, that may allow those who have only comprehended Lil Wayne by way of aesthetics to reconcieve his recordings as praxis, as the elaboration of an entirely organic, immanent critique, expressed in the discourse of the oppressed rather than in terms of the hegemonic language that bears with it the conditions of its domination.

But there is danger as well in the sudden rupture with the received mores of consumer capitalism. One faces the threat of bodily perforation and one must also regress to a positively Hobbesean mode of social relations. Not only does it evoke atavistic predilections, raising the question of racial prejudice ("Does n e 1 know if racism in jail exists?" Carles asks wryly) but it prompts a reinscription of the prevailing assumptions that underwrite the neoliberal order, namely possessive individualism and the rejection of collective identity. Power as the essence of politics, in theory and practice. Carles points out that a prison inmate may "get ‘raped in the ass’ until you murder some1." It is this reversion to a more rigorously contractual theory of rights, of naked power as a philosophical basis for the erection of a theory of state power that troubles Carles and prompts him to suggest that "It seems unfair that Lil Wayne gets to blog from jail."

Thus Carles's answer to his question "Should blogging be allowed behind bars?" is multifarious. Behind bars may be the only authentic position with in the hegemonic prison of capitalist society, except that authenticity comes with an atavism that Carles is reluctant to endorse. Gramsci pointed out that "it is worth noting that the elaboration of intellectual strata in concrete reality does not take place on the terrain of abstract democracy but in accordance with very concrete traditional historical processes." Carles sees that Lil Wayne may very will emerge from his prison experience as an organic intellectual of the incarcerated masses, but the historical processes that have shaped the flow of his discourse will remain unaltered unless Wayne opts for a more aporic instantiation of his embedded critique of everyday life. The bars on his prison are there for all to see, but can he make us see the bars on our own?

23 March 2010: "I am the modern ice cream man."

This post is about hypercapitalism. What is modernity, or should we ask, what was modernity? Carles takes an unconventional approach to the question by viewing epistemic change through the lens of the delivery of iced-cream products.

I am not the man
driving a truck thru the poor part of town
selling ice treats to children
I am the modern ice cream man.

Modernity, Carles suggests, is the era in which subjects could dare to articulate a post-class social formation operating in the modality of a consumer-capitalist economy. The "poor part" of town has been abolished. There is no class hierarchy in play if all children have equal access to iced cream. (Note: It is no accident that "cream" has often served as an effulgent metaphor for the social surplus, as well as for what may be called the gross libidinal product, i.e. the male ejaculate. Carles notes, "So weird how u can make a metaphor about n e 1 with ice cream." As a signfier, it is polymorphously promiscuous.)

Of course, an alternative explanation is that modernity is precisely that epoch in which the demands and needs of the "poor part" of society would be explicitly ignored. "I am not that man," Carles declares in the guise of the modernist, evoking the notoriously hermetic aesthetic of refusal of the 1920s literary intelligentsia. The modernists arguably rejected political engagement in favor formalist pedantry and acrobatic hermeneutics of inscrutability. But Carles seems to reject explicitly an association of modernity with obscurantism: "Still want to be as approachable as the mainstream ice cream man."

But a willingness to service mass culture portends a possibly more distressing conception of the modern, in which Reisman-esque outer-directed functionaries guided by a neurotic eagerness to please administer a basically paternalistic state and a repressive culture of permissiveness. We all eat iced cream in a regime of anxious, compulsory "fun." Yes, iced cream can also serve as a metaphor for tolerance -- "Ice cream. So many flavors," Carles notes. But this same tolerance can masquerade as positive liberty when in fact it merely signifies the free choice from a limited palette of options. We may have whatever iced-cream we'd like, but nothing more nourishing. Free to choose -- our favorite form of pabulum. "Maybe ice cream
is what will set us free" Carles mocks.

This commitment to superficial choice leads to a multiplicitous quasi-dialogic self that is less the sum of its possibilities. Though "we are all our unique flavor," we are also all reduced to product, something that might be turned out by one of the "trusted franchises" Carles links to the iced cream and frozen yoghurt phenomenon. Iced cream, as Carles, notes, "Kinda represents how many different personal brands u can have." But brand here functions as a pun -- the different identities we "choose" are actually impressed upon us, turning us into chattel for the global corporate plutocracy. At the same time, our ego becomes insatiable, having transubstantiated the id under the blessing of a state committed to hedonistic consumption as a means of stifling domestic dissent: Hence Carles warns of the dangerously unsustainable and psychically unassimilatable business model of "encouraging people to get crazy serving sizes with even crazier topping selections." This is the freedom to choose gone amok; freedom as madness, or insanity. Inevitably, this will become regressive, abject, and such toppings as "weird azn shit" and "human hair" must be resorted to in order to create the necessary striations of identity within such an economic matrix. Iced cream captialism is haunted by the shadow of desperation, the impulse to cannibalistic self-annihilation.

Best we say "Laters" to the "ice cream bro," Carles suggests, and reject the repressive iced-cream freedom.