23 May 2010: "PBR & A Pile of Blow: 2 Bros Who Will Never Let Me Down"

This post is about the face. Carles continues his recent investigations into the reification of human sentiment and the anthropomorphization of objects; the dialectic of these processes has effectively obfuscated the division between organic and nonorganic substance at the level of cognition, with a number of ramifications for social being and the socially induced effort to calculate the so-called rational utility of various practices.

"Are humans flawed?" Carles asks. He begins this poetic essay by noting the inherent limitations of human social relations: "h8 humans, they are only looking out 4 themselves / no 1 can really be there for you all the time." The failure of perfect reciprocity is of course preordained, an a priori constraint on our grasp of the noumenal. Knowing we know -- this occludes our ability to perfect our knowledge, as our awareness of our own subjectivity scuttles the objectivity of that which is being known. As Carles notes, "I want something that can be there for me forever," but mortal and immanent knowledge, which recognizes the transcendent without partaking of it or itself transcending, only reminds the subject of failure, of shortcomings, of the inability to recognize itself or the Other, even in a Levinasian gesture that aspires to perfect humility and total surrender to alterity. Carles, in the character of the substance abuser, pleads that "Blow will never die /
PBR will never die / Bros will die." But only in facing the reality of death can one incur the infinite responsibility of the ethical -- ethics is the portal through which one can defeat the epistemological limitations on one's own subjectivity.

Carles seeks a mediated escape from this burden of the Other ("Just wanna escape from the ‘human condish’") by transforming objects, for which there can be no reciprocity, into a form of being that can be dominated -- "bros". Limning the existential despair of the postpostmodern subject ("Do u ever feel like u can only trust brands and drugs?" Carles asks rhetorically) foundering in the stormy seas of consumerist identity politics, Carles notes that it has become "So hard to trust / just want to escape / 2 another world where there are no problems / where life is a party." But it is not so easy. As Levinas writes:

The self is a sub-jectum: it is under the weight of the universe ... the unity of the universe is not what my gaze embraces in its unity of apperception, but what is incumbent upon me from all sides, regards me, is my affair.

We are made real by the responsibilities we can occur to the Other, not by the duties we can evade through the fickle cleverness of our own ego wriggling from its shackles. "The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility," Levinas writes, as Carles in his critique of the "partier" full well knows:

People told me I ‘changed’ and ‘had problems’
and I ‘only cared abt partying.’
They just didn’t understand
that I had found the ultimate bros
I was in alt heaven

The double maneuver of depersonalizing humans and humanizing substances is both ontologically reactionary and psychologically regressive. The cathected objects merely take on the qualities isolated from human relations in a degraded, partial, distorted form, while the anxiety-producing material is displaced into the unconscious, where it can only strengthen itself. This may seem like "alt heaven" but is indeed a hell of libidinous energies feeding on themselves, destabilizing the psychic balance and allowing the thantopic drive to hold full sway. At which point, death becomes one's only "bro".

10 May 2010: "Pitchfork writes article about the brilliance/shittiness of HIPSTER RUNOFF "

This post is about the slogan of self-criticism. One can trace the concern with revolutionary self-criticism to an ur-text, Stalin's 1928 comments on the subject, but Chapter 27 of Mao's Quotations is of course the most significant text for the forward-thinking discussion of questions concerning the mandatory nature of self-criticism and the spirit in which such inquiries into one's own motivations must be conducted. Mao declares that "Conscientious practice of self-criticism" is what distinguishes the Communist Party, and the Marxist cause more generally, as sharpened dialectics hone the edge of the immanent critique of capitalism. Lazy and idle dichotomies are brought under severe scrutiny and opposed formations and positions are collapsed into more far-reaching syntheses.

Hence Carles, a Maoist in his praxis if not necessarily in his philosophical training, introduces the "brilliance/shittiness" opposition in the title of this essay -- or is it a struggle session redolent of Cultural Revolution piety? In responding to the critique of a competitor, Carles responds dialectically, amplifying and sublating the ambivalent assessment of his would-be judge (who only barely stops short of denouncing Carles as a "rootless cosmopolitan" in the grand Stalinist tradition) into an autotelic autocritique. But first, Carles must devolve authority over himself, disavow expertise over his own cultural identity as well as over the analytical methodologies and modalities he has perfected elsewhere: "Can n e 1 read this article and tell me what it is abt? Got super confused, like it might be too ‘high level’ for me, like writing that belongs in a book or magazine–not on the internet."

Part of this proposition of Carles's is straight from the Mao playbook and the injunction to "guard against subjectivism, arbitrariness and the vulgarization of criticism." By problematizing the media on which criticism is levied, Carles seeks to shift the terms of the debate about his own relevance to a broader discussion of whether cultural critique can be conducted in the networked real-time space of contemporary internet communications. At the same time, he asserts not to understand something that is written about himself, implying that self-knowledge is not possible even within an epistemological schema that embraces transactionality with the other. It is a rejection of subjectivism at the root of a conjured, interpellated subjectivity in reflexive discourse. The essay he cites is at once about him and not about him; what it is about is thus radically indeterminate.

Carles also rejects the depth psychology implied by a "high level" assessment of his rhetorical subject positionality, implying instead that "Carles" as constructed in discourse is a self-consuming artifact that can bear no interpretation and about which no "deeper" motivations can be deduced. Carles is created with the public(s) he calls into being by beginning to speak. This is part of his larger dismissal of the intrusion of poetic language into dialectical criticism -- the "metaphors, similies, and other journalistic tools" he snorts at in this response. A truly scientific criticism must express itself without undue reliance on such tropes which prompt exponentially recursive semiotic and hermeneutical concerns. Whether this is an aspect of the "arch, pseudo-scientific tone," Carles's critic wishes to silence is unclear to this observer.

Carles concludes by investigating the ontology of the concept of "knowingness" -- a word which, as he points out, does not circulate sufficiently in everyday discourse to warrant inclusion in online spelling dictionaries. Does it therefore not exist? Is it interchangeable with epistemology, or is something more phenomenological intended?

Carles interrogates this conditionality through a dialectic of quality and quality: "Kept scanning the page everywhere searching 4 a ‘rating.’ From what I understand, Pitchfork is famous for giving ratings, so feeling disappointed that I didn’t get a 10.0. Not even a 1.0." Carles cannot negate the negation in this instance, despite employing the weapon of irony to defend himself from accusations of abusing it. The critical question is not knowingness, but what can be known with any certainty -- which is why Carles searches the critique for a rating -- a mathematical certainty within the uncertain imbrications of rhetoric. Instead there is only performativity, but even this Carles is quick to disavow. "Is HIPSTER RUNOFF ‘performance art’?" he asks. The implication is that performativity is always a metaperformance of the critique of the pre-existing performances. This is what self-criticism can and must be if it is to function as a progressive purgative.

19 May 2010: "Ode to a Fallen Bro of a Product: The CD Binder"

This post is about fields of intensity. To interrogate the relation between technological development and evolving parameters of subjectivity -- the limits to and for the very concept of the self as it can be apprehended reflexively -- Carles isolates what he calls the "auxiliary products" generated by newly disseminated modes of mediation, in this case the plastic and vinyl binders widely used to store optical-storage disks used primarily for music.

When the process of copying music or "burning" it to disks became paradigmatic, storage became the problematic through which one could perceive the limitations of possession and cultural identification as modalities of subjectivity. Endless copies of copies -- of course the most telling metaphor of identity (pun intended) in the digital era. But as Carles suggests, the liminal space opened by the transition to a fully digitized acculteration process created material-culture artifacts that testify to the hard-plastic physical limits that haunt the periphery of virtual being.

Digitization generates its own resistance, even as it promises abundance. Carles identifies the sensual, somatic experience of handling culture as already receding into nostalgia: "I loved the feeling of flipping a page against my fingers / the smell of plastic." This sort of tactile preoccupation with the exterior shells of cultural containers easily elides into fetishization.

Carles notes repeatedly the desire to "reconnect with the CD Binder," which he personifies as a "bro," as if the mere ability to store information was sufficient to make an object into an animate being. Here, of course, is a wry an cutting comment of the devolution of human species being, as we are being reduced to the status of burned disks, mere storage containers of data increasingly elicited from us and flowing through us but processed outside of us while we wait passively to have new information imprinted on us. Carle notes grimly: "no matter how many ’special editions’ u have / u might never be a special edition of a human." We can't collect data anymore, now that we have become data, and our human uniqueness has been reduced to one more mote of information in an endless sea...

Carles eulogizes the binder -- in this metaphor, the social norms that unite the stack of discrete disk/beings -- to lament the passing of those norms and the passing of the illusion that information could successfully be organized by human agency. "The CD Binder is a private, intimate experience," Carles notes, a deeply personal way of organizing personal information that has since been exploded by broad forces demanding the ritual confession of the self, extorted by corporate entities under the nefarious euphemism "sharing". We share rather than store, and we become a conduit with no ontological core.

At first, Carles argues, we embraced digitality because it promised to increase our control over information; it would fill our binders as we extended our "rich library of relevant CDs" and then we became "genuinely thankful for the ease at which I can find and steal new music." But when we discarded the disks as so many empty shells, and consigned our organizational binders to the trash in favor of the computing cloud ("it is better to just send it thru fiber wires/3g networks / as opposed to storing the data on a disc / and packaging it"), we turned ourselves into the storage disks. We have become the blank medium. Who will miss us when our inefficient biological information container is discarded for the more technologically expedient forms already being developed? Who will miss us when we fail to become that "special edition of human"?

16 May 2010: "Have yall ever pissed ur pants at a relevant alt party / buzzband concert?"

This post is about thetic rupture. With the insistent sense of timing of a migratory bird, Carles always returns, with a metronomic periodicity, to the question of authentic expression. How to verify language from within language, if there is truly nothing outside of language, or if thought is in fact bounded by what can be thought in language as such. Carles often considers the possibility of signification that bears no relation to thought but instead expressed something more primal and primary, a kind of desire that exists not within language but in the prelingual mode of reflexive understanding that theoretically precedes it. As Kristeva notes, "language lacks a subject or tolerates one only as a transcendental ego (in Husserl's sense or in Benaviste's more specifically linguistic sense), and defers any interrogation of its (alwats already dialectical because translinguistic) 'externality.' "

Carles wrestles with the consequences of this powerful insight and its impactfulness on the pursuit of self-conscious subjectivity and identity that characterizes the rites of passage and the coming of age rituals of the youth subcultures Carles is primarily interested in analyzing ("alts"), conscious as he is of their critical role in both reproducing the existing relations of consumer capitalism and bearing its ideological precepts ("buzz" and "lifestyles") in an embodied form. The quest for authentic identity not contingent on the fluctuating intersubjective values of various cultural signifiers, Carles recognizes, is the primary philosophical concern of our postpostmodern epoch. The interrogation of linguistic expression and the subjectivities it posits and supports must not be deferred but subjected to the precise form of immanent critique of which Carles has demonstrated a mastery.

Kristeva writes that the "thetic gathers up these facilitations and instinctual semiotic stases within the positing of signifiers, then opens them out in the three-part cluster of referent, signified and signfier.... 'Art' does not relinquish the thetic even while pulverizing it through the negativity of transgression." Carles's examination of excitable urination is an elaboration of these hints.

Often Carles locates authentic expression in sexual desire; here he focuses on a broader category of affect and somatic excitation. The key epistemological concerns are laid out in his opening proposition: "Sometimes I get excited and I don’t really know what do with myself." The alienation of consumer-capitalist existence manifests as a bodily disjunction between thoughts, feelings, emotions, and the capacity for their expression. What emerges is a split self, aware of its excitation but at once removed from it, scrutinizing itself for irrefutable signs of its own condition, if not its conditionality itself. In Carles's nomenclature, the self is "overwhelmed," with the consequences that there is both a semantic and literal leakage of meaning: "I will piss my pants, not because I have a weak bladder, but because I have a great life." The qualitative nature of jouissance exceeds language, exceeds linguistic containment, and manifests as a liquid explusion, a micturation of affect that surfaces as a stain, an indelible blot on the surface of the real. Carles notes that "there are truly beautiful ‘piss ur pants’ moments that u can’t really put into words."

(An aside: Carles chooses not to explore the metaphor of liquidity as it relates to recurring financial crisis within capitalism and potentially connects the libidinal economy with the transnational financial one. One can only hope this thread will be picked up in later investigations.)

The "great life" Carles recognizes as expressed in this semiotic effluence points to the ways in which the somatic has been striated by the superstructural, and how the body itself serves simultaneously as an ideological sounding board and underwriter. Carles points out that consumerism's persistence derives from its ability to ground itself as the essence of the real: "So many people call it some sort of ‘hollow form of consumerism’, but they don’t realize that we are real people, living real moments." Those "real moments" secure their aura of reality via the body, via such events as excited urination that seems to confirm the semiological linkage of experience, subjectivity, and consumerist interpretations of causality. It is not the negation of the negation so much as it is, as Kristeva would say, "a transgression of position, a reversed reactivation of the contradiction that instituted this very position." In other words, as Carles puts it, "Peeing in ur pants is a mix of emotions, sorta like a moment where u feel like “This is It…” [via the Strokes] in an accomplished/letdown kind of way....I piss my pants because it is the only natural / complex expression of my true feelings." Ironically, only a reflex action of the sphincter muscles can be regarded subjectively as sufficiently complex to render the nuances of identity, even as the ever more elaborate recombinations of semiotic bits and digitized bytes dominate more and more of our mediated existence. It is a "Content Stream," Carles drily adds.

But because the articulation of a seemingly authentic sign of transcendent experience ("Moments where ‘real life’ seems surreal, because u never thought something so beautiful / relevant could happen to you") occurs within the depredations of competitive capitalism, these moments of authenticity immediately lose their qualitative purity and become quantitative and comparative. Carles notes: "I piss my pants when my life feels more meaningful than any1 else’s life." The moment of transcendence becomes another immanent instantiation of petty rivalry and comparative anxiety. We piss ourselves to feel alive, then immediately it dawns on us that we should piss on one another.

4 May 2010: "Free-spirited Mom Breastfeeds at a relevant alt party. Have we discovered the perf alt breasts?"

This post is about the phallus. Often Carles concludes his philosophical investigations with a series of rhetorical questions designed to challenge readers to articulate a more dialectical understanding of the issues he has attempted to raise in his analysis. Here, perhaps to keep his own dialectic sharp he supplements that practice by introducing his theme with a question as well as concluding with interrogatory provocations. The question invokes up a hegemonic dichotomy at play in the social field at large that Carles will then proceed to undermine, isolating the structuring phenomenological difference and problematizing it. The dichotomy here is between unreconstructed libidinal energy harnessed in the interest of preserving a gendered order in the regime of affective labor and reproductive labor, and the energy mustered by the organism for personal survival; in other words phylogenesis vs. ontogenesis; the erotic instinct versus the death instinct. At stake is the motive force of Darwinian sorting: does it derive from erotic attraction's role in mating rituals or does it derive from the instinctual competencies at nutritive acquisitiveness. Which is the more forceful impulse, sexual desire or hunger? As Carles phrases it: "Who seems more chill: the baby bro, or the background bro trying to ‘have a peep’ at some mom boob?"

Of course, this question is implicitly complicated by the dual status of the nodal point of the breast as both the simultaneous sign of the phallus and its absence. As Lacan writes in "The Meaning of the Phallus," "the phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark where the share of logos is wedded to the advent of desire." In other words, the breast bears with it not only nourished sustenance, but the birth of desire itself, and the birth of both metaphor and metonym if not language in general and the signification process as a somatic rather than cognitive procedure. Drawing on Lacanian theory, Carles argues that breasts "breasts… are actually 4 nourishing ur child with life + love + knowledge" -- in other words the sublimated libido that organizes the child's mental world and orients it toward an irresolvable lack, fueling the pursuit of knowledge as a substitute for impossible self-understanding.

Carles notes that "men like to ’suck on boobies’ because they are recreating the act of ‘being a lil baby.’" In this seemingly regressive infantilization, however, male sexuality is structured around an absent presence, the lost holistic unity with the mother whose memory is nonetheless evoked in the sexual arena by the breast transubstantiated into an erogenous zone for both partners to the sexual act. IN this sense, and in this sense only Carles admits that "I was holding on to ‘breasts’ as the ultimate sexual object."

But the cathexis of breasts with a particularized sexual hunger masks the way in which the breast also serves as an epigone for the castrated phallus, psychically grafted onto the female in an unconscious act of ego preservation. "Does milk from a bosom represent ‘life’?" Carles asks searchingly. The word represent of course is key. Life masquerades as mere representation when refracted through the various psychosexual symbols our species needs as well as our acculturation supplies us with. The breast as phallic mark constitutes desire, as Lacan suggests, but Carles's critique is precisely this: that if "perfect alternative breasts" are always already "lactating" -- in the process if leaking signifying meaning, as it were, then what is the alternative to the alternative? What can substitute for the substitute for the phallus if we attempt to abrogate the endless succession of inadequate metaphors? Can alternatives every be perfect or would this efface their status as alternatives and make them mere facsimilies of that which they seek to replace? Lacan teaches us that the search for an alternative is a self-limiting, self-defeating quest, a suspended desire that constitutes identity in its inability to fulfill itself. This is what makes the breast and its promise of completeness, of total regression and womb reversion, of perfect restoration of the lost unity in the Imaginary, of castration without loss or lack so ultimately threatening. Carles declares this epiphany in his inimitable "vulgar" style: "Now I realize that breasts don’t exist to have in your face while you’re making love, or as a ‘target’ to cum on when ur ‘finished with a woman.’" Femininity itself presents itself as the target, not the phallic symbols that negate it, though the fantasy of "finishing" off the feminine principle and thus defeating the Law of the Father is not upset by the deeply phallologcentric cycle of climax. The law reasserts itself as that which it has tried to prohibit. Remember, as Lacan says, "jouissance of the body is beyond the phallus" -- castration fears preserve the power of the phallus only at the price of self-denial. Carles warns: "One day, you will undress a woman, and the bulgy, hidden breasts will be the ultimate symbol of ‘becoming a man.’" A radical irruption of the mirror image and its obverse; castration turned inside out and doubled -- no wonder the urge to cradle and suck and regress!