27 June 2010: "My First Synth Recital"

This post is about performativity. Carles investigates the dilemma of the open-ended personality under conditions of modernity, the prevailing sense that all things are possible for the self while the reality of opportunity costs are suppressed. He imagines the questions that confront a young woman, whom he gives voice to for the purposes of this exploratory effort, in the midst of interpellation into a given social-historico-politcal matrix:

Every1 wanted to know
“What do u want 2 do?
What r ur interests?
What do u like?
What r u passionate about?”

Consumer capitalism, as Carles illustrates here, permits little in the way of organic preference formation; institutional pressure to shape the self, to declare enthusiasms and pursue constitutive pleasures begins at an early age and is generally unrelenting. The self is forced to yield a confession, an expression of what it will submit to in the guise of actualizing itself. And the compulsion to confess, as Foucault has taught us, will be felt by the subject continually, for as long as it is situated within the libidinal disciplinary mechanisms of late capitalism. We are, as the French thinker has put it, "under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire." We convert all desires into discourse, scoring them to the hegemonic language of power/knowledge. The biopolitical imperatives of identity production override any possible pleasures from sensual experience, overwriting them and, in a sense, overdetermining them. "My fingers pressed down on the keys / arpegiatting tons of rad shit." The experiences are already programmed in, yet it appears to the subject that she initiates them. This is a bald metaphor for the operation of subjectivity under the constraints of existing social relations. We press the keys on the toys the culture industry provides us, and we mistake those sounds for the barbaric yawp of the song of ourselves.

Pleasure, as Carles suggests, can be synthesized, and consumerist capitalism is the synthesizer that we are taught to "play", though of course all the while it is playing us. "I knew that I needed to learn more about synthesizers / I didn’t have time to waste learning mainstream skills." Carles's phrasing is intentionally ambiguous, suggesting the dialectic between the alternate meanings. One must at once not spend any time learning mainstream skills and also absorb such skills immediately and put them into direct use. "Education is an important tool/process," Carles notes, "But tons of mainstream educational opportunities are a waste of time." The apparatus of education is both "tool" and "process" -- a shaping of the subject across both space and time. We are "tooled" to fit certain well-tuned social mechanisms, but Carles is quick to disabuse us of the notion that our preordained place in the machine constitutes an "opportunity" -- we learn not recognize what we know, to assimilate operational knowledge for conducting ourselves within social milieux not as knowledge as such but as intuition, a habitus, that orients us to our class position while allowing us to experience that position as natural, a second nature.

That is to say, we must know without knowing, the classic instantiation of the effects of the unconscious under the repression of the ego.

This was all my dream
but first, it was time for synth lessons
My teacher was so chill
yet so demanding at the same time

The teacher, of course, here figures the superego, but a superego transformed into its antithesis, an insistent voice demanding the subject enjoy herself. Hence it is "chill" and "demanding" simultaneously; it presents mandatory consumerism and the problematic of the Baudrillardian fun morality as a mode of relaxation, as as the subject's own "dream". In this way, Carles suggests, we mistake domination for autonomy, indoctrination for identity. When we learn to play the instruments of culture, we also learn "a little bit about recording techniques" -- only what may not be at first so obvious is that the recording medium is our own personality -- once analog but slowly being converted to digital.

24 June 2010: "Lady Gaga ‘falls on her ass’ after wearing zany, nonfunctional shoes"

This post is about teleology. Recognizing the symbolic resonance of a prominent celebrity, known by the heteronym Lady Gaga, tumbling to the ground as a result of the props deemed strategically necessary to support her fame, Carles ponders the question of whether "she was ‘doomed’ 2 fall based on ‘how stupid’ her shoes were."

On the surface, it appears that Carles is satirizing those prophetic strains of Marxism that announced the inevitable demise of capitalism on account of the iron laws of the progressive immiseration of the working class and falling rate of profit. So too will the progressive "stupidity" of celebrity culture bring about its downfall, both literal and figurative. An eviscerating triviality will reach a point of insubstantiability that will leave the culture industry with nothing upon which to build -- an infinite regress becomes an abyss of replication and self-parody. Cultural "ideas" will be defective in their very inception, producing failures like the one depicted in Carles's series of photographs. In this sense, aesthetic judgment becomes unnecessary, as culture is manufactured within a set of tolerances that do not permit success as it has been understood traditionally. Cultural capital will have devalued itself, rendering its accumulation moot. The fat-cats of cool will have been laid low by the hyperinflation of associational affect. Carles blames the institutional forces behind the rise of design and fashion with in the superstructure: "Should Lady Gaga go to design / architecture / fashion school so that she can learn what makes fashion ‘beautiful’?" he asks mockingly, ridiculing the educational infrastructure for producing commodified conceptions of the beautiful subject to instrumental manipulation, quantification, and speculation.

But deeper issues lurk in Carles's analysis, with regard to the nature of knowledge itself, and what can be known and what will remain shrouded in ignorance. One can attribute Lady Gaga's fall to an ideology of excess, to a surfeit that is at once constrained, compelled from her by the very logic of the mobilized construct of her persona. The limits of autonomy are thus revealed, circumscribed by the empowering fame that, ideologically speaking, is believed to enhance it.

But it is nothing new to recognize notoriety as a prison, even as it promises a kind of subversive liberation from the rules and norms that modulate the behavior of plain folk. One can trace this sentiment back to Wilde and De Profundis: "Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain." It's no stretch to see this moment reenacted by Gaga as she stumbles -- fully aware that she is doomed to repeat the performance for as long as she can secure the popular attention and media spotlight. As Carles notes, "Lady Gaga is ‘a progressive artist’ who tries 2 take her personal brand to the next level by wearing ’stupid shit.’" And of course, there can be no finality in the perpetual climb to the next level, and the next... They are less levels than a carceral circle; only the ideology of celebrity fashions this death march into a hierarchical surmounting.

The false procession toward higher levels that are mere figments mirrors in a deeper sense the human quest for scientific knowledge, for incontestable proof of human progress toward omniscience. "Do yall know what makes Lady Gaga ’so revolutionary’?" Carles taunts, trusting readers to conclude for themselves the appropriate rejoinder, that her revolution is like all would-be socialist revolutions, trusting in the inherent progress of human societies rather than their cyclical rise and fall, and is corrupted by Utopian ideals that have curdled under the pressure of implementation and the folly and weakness of our kind. None of us, quite literally, could walk in her shoes. We cannot join this revolution, ambiguously being conducted in our name by vanguardists like Gaga. And like the French Revolution, it will lead to suffering and pain, disillusionment.

Carles wonders if this hubris on the part of our species, coupled with a puerile preoccupation with status and celebrity, is not preparing the way for a grand devolution back to primitive social relations. Thus he wonders, "Should Lady Gaga just let 1,000,000 men ‘gang bang’ her and put it on youtube / pornotube / xtube /redtube / cumtube / other popular porn video site?" In other words, is the bottom line of both the pursuit of publicity and the pursuit of knowledge eventually the pursuit of a sexuality unconditioned by sublimation, a sexuality that manifests the unchecked aggressions of the primordial species transmogrified, as if inverted in a convex mirror, into humanity's most splendiferous achievement?

23 June 2010: "Alt tween shows off her boring day while listening to Toro Y Moi’s “Blessa”"

This post is about the latency period. In this post, Carles analyzes a short film directed by a pre-teenaged girl in the suburban Untied States to interrogate the degree to which broader dissemination (pun most definitely intended) of the means of cultural production can solve the crisis of leisure in a post-Fordist, transitional economy: "Nothing 2 do / Gonna get creative /
Gonna vlog," Carles imagines the young auteur saying in a reflexive discourse as she prepares her mise-en-scène. But does the making of this film collude in the perpetuation of boredom and passivity, or does it strike a blow for the "destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon," to useLaura Mulvey's term, or does it re-radicalize libidinous pleasure by investing it directly in the mirrored female gaze without the patriarchal rerouting of sublimation.

Carles traces the hierarchy of libidinal investment as indexed against modalities of mediation:

watching MTV
facebooking
tweeting
texting
sexting

Of course, what follows is development of the narcissistic cathexis of the self as filmed object, exhibitionistically displayed to unseen but vividly imagined audience: "Vlogging is the master art of the tween."

At this juncture it is worth considering to what degree Carles regards this sort of inverted reflexivity as characteristic of the latency period that Freud theorized as occupying the "tween" years of bourgeois youth. Is budding genital sexuality not entirely in psychic abeyance but instead cathected with the subject's image of herself as a public being? Does the increasingly mediatized conditions of maturation means that sexualized process of subjectivity returns from the dormancy of the latency period to be recorded and archived and integrated with the prevailing economies and rhythms of the culture at large. The filmed subjected identifies with herself and her own recorded image, the conditions of which she has directed. The public image and the excavation of the subject's depth psychology occur simultaneously, on display in a public forum: "i can show u my life / i can show u my face."

But that revelation of the "face" is not an evocation of the radical ethical responsibility to the other that Carles has in the past emphasized, following Levinas. Instead, I want to argue that Carles, by isolating and analyzing this particular scopophilic intervention (an altogether typical one, we are safe to conclude along with him), intends to assert that the mediations of networked culture have co-opted the maturation process, the development of normative sexuality within Western societies, and fused it to the process by which the distributed meanings of consumer culture are turned over and refreshed, revitalized, made urgent to those subjects who have proceeded out of the crisis of adolescence yet remain ontologically insecure because of the unstable meanings within the material environment. The projected image retains the security that the subject in real space has lost: "this video will last forever."

The concatenation of commercial objectives in flux and budding self-identity within the field of capital prompts the haunting final words of Carles's essay: "might go to the mall this weekend." Not only do we see the persistent indeterminacy and the frail, tenuous sense of agency in the subject, but we see that autonomy is circumscribed bot merely by the video camera's depth of field but by the broader consumer retail sphere which the subject believes contains all possibilities. This her "creativity" is wholly integrated with a preexisting structure of production, distribution, and consumption, and is merely an instantiation of a moment in that cycle, whose durability has been enhanced by her participation, and by extension, our own in watching her -- directly in proportion to our voyeuristic libidinal investment or the repression of such motivations into the unconscious. Boredom is revealed as the ultimate form of intimate engagement...

17 June 2010: "Lady Gaga releases sex doll so u can pretend 2 have sex with her"

This post is about the body without organs. Is sex, as constituted and constructed by the matrices of power/knowledge within the paradigms of consumer capitalism, ever anything but a pretense? Carles wonders. Are we always having to "pretend" to sex while finding ourselves trapped within the prison-house of language, climbing the walls, as it were, of textuality, hemmed in from the carnal and the somatic and even the abject by layers upon layers of discourse? Our own visceral sensual experiences are filtered through to our consciousness only in the hegemonic discourses of heteronormative sexuality, such that our bodies themselves become as lifeless and inanimate as mannequins, or better yet, ventriloquist's dummies waiting to be spoken through.

"Seems really lifelike," Carles points out sardonically, but the straitjacket of gender norms that have already transfigured popular culture are not so easily rendered inert. As Carles explains, the commodification of sexuality and its reification as a modality of discourse, a series of speech acts, has allowed the culture industry to produce a different kind of star engineered to massage the liminal nodes along the gender divide: "the new brand of female singers is all about ‘being a slut,’" he points out, detailing how they "try to make it seem like they are ‘the man’ of the relationship just to be edgy & empower women who don’t really have high self-esteem and consume 2 much celeb gossip." Libidinal subversion is reintegrated into the matrix of capitalist consumerism and distributed among a series of valves meant to dissipate it harmlessly, leaving subjects experiencing an impotent "empowerment" that consists of an actual intensification of subjection. The implication in the juxtaposition of this analysis with the inanimate doll is to indicate how reversing gender roles no longer decalcifies the status quo but instead serves as a virtual mortification of the flesh. Subversion itself has become rigidified, codified into prepackaged gestures, strategies of instrumental reason toward the ultimate systemic goal of profit.

Is the doll a desiring machine, or a body without organs? The doll is a metonym for the virtual, which has, in a dialectic reversal, begun to colonize the real. Tracing the emergent geneology of postpostmodern id, Carles points out that "now u can just buy this lifeless body to cum with, instead of just cumming while u look at your computer screen." The virtual stakes it claim to the living body, seeking to assimilate it by means of spatio-theoretical pleasure and countercathexis. By liberating pleasure from the tyranny of the other, the libidinal-industrial complex dupes individuals into adopting a cybernetic and highly programmable subject position. Carles dramatizes this abdication of reciprocity, the abiding ethical responsibility for the Other: "I sorta want the warmth/form of another human, but don’t always want to deal with the responsibility of ‘their feelings’ in the post-coital era."

In announcing the "post-coital era" Carles seems to be staking out a positionality beyond that of Foucault and his followers, positing an epistemic rupture that interrupts the operational flow of sexualized power/knowledge. He imagines an episteme of "progressive merch" which, under the banner of mechanized sexuality, becomes the "future of the music industry." The mode of reproduction, in other words, has become completely industrialized, along with the production of desire and its servicing. No escape from the circuit of synthesized pleasure.

14 June 2010: "Name that Community Event"

This post is about local knowledge. Interpretative anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously proposed a methodological intervention into the praxis of ethnographically oriented study, which he entitled "thick description," in which an effort is made by researchers not merely to record behavioral practices but to situate them within their sociocultural milieu. I want to argue that Carles intends to interrogate the validity of such emic analysis of cultural practices, positing instead, following French philosopher Alain Badiou, a theory of the community event as rupture, immediately present to the observer as such and yet resistant to immanent analysis.

To demonstrate, Carles claims he will "post a picture of what seems like a ‘community event’," anticipating that readers will "‘guess’ what kind of event it is, based on what it looks like in the photograph." Naturally, the term guess is set off in quotation marks, because the interpretative gesture always resides conceptually in the liminal space between nominalistic taxonomy and a constitutive structuration. In precisely this sense, and this sense alone, all names are guesses -- blind, linguistical-semiological stabs at essence... "Name that community event," indeed, as the act of naming itself establishes its rising to the level of interpretive significance.

But naming and knowing, of course, are two vastly different things. "Does n e 1 know what this place is," Carles asks, emphasizing the indeterminate status of all seemingly social formations, which straddle the line between psychological and sociological hermeneutics. The place, by virtue of its inhabitation in time, becomes ontologically ambiguous. It has become a "what" in addition to a "where" and possibly a "when".

But Carles, not content with an analysis that fixates on the distanciation of time and space, seeks to explicate the "how". The underlying phenomenological matter at stake for Carles in pursuing this "gimmick," as he calls this methodological feint, is the status of community -- do collectivities have their own ontology, or are they merely wisps of thought grasped by individual consciousnesses, such that a community cannot be said to exist outside of an event which fixates those disparate sentient beings on the awareness of their copresence? Is the event a mere simulation of community -- does it only "seem like", as Carles phrases it -- or is the event the psychic fissure that reorients cognitive systems to shared experiences, suppressing egoistic subjectivities as the fundamental needs are collectivized?

Carles, significantly, emphasizes the basic human needs: the event, he argues "Seems like it is really bringing people together to eat tons of authentic carnival food." That is, in the welter of sociality, sustenance merges with the carnivalesque; nutrition becomes saturated with semiology; food no longer is merely raw or cooked, edible or inedible, but also authentic or inauthentic. In other words, food begins to mark belonging to the collectivity established temporally by the dissemination of particularized practices of food consumption. The event triggers and bounds the significance of such tribalistic markers of acceptance. Carles adds that it "seems like it is some sort of mainstream community event, uniting an entire region/town." So it is that nativist impluses find expression in events that are immediately graspable in a single image, can be experienced as if it were second nature through the accident of mere presence.

But can the significance of "community" extend beyond the fundamental needs; or rather, Carles wonders, does the authenticity spontaneously generated with regard to social practices centered around these fundamental needs serve to underwrite a panoply of secondary and tertiary social institutions? "What kind of community event could really unite so many ppl?" he asks. Consider these items from his list of possibilities for what a community can signify, at a glance: "a state fair" -- the juridical complex of law and authority as manifest in modalities of consumption; "a fundraiser for a local church" -- religious authority trespassing beyond the sacralized spaces and consecrating, as it were, new ground in the public sphere; "a scene from the movie “Independence Day”" -- the culture industry as a simulacrum of collectivities, the systematic attempt to co-opt social spontaneity and subsume it to profit-making entities that manufacture affect; "the beach" -- the attempt to reinscribe the natural world within the domain of social practice, as itself derivative of communal usage rather than preexisitng social formations; "a gun show" -- the extrapolation of violence embedded as potentiality in any crowd and subjecting it to accumulation and exogenous direction; and so on. (The analysis need not be exhaustive to establish the point with regard to the list, as each item is masterpiece of philosophical compression and thereby demands its own exegetical elaboration.)

The "Community event" resembles the Badiouian event in that it demands an emplacement of subjectivity contingent upon a synchronic separation from itself. The event is outside ontology, as Badiou claims and as Carles seems to agree by locating the community event outside all epistemological processes. It can't be "known" but can be apprehended instantaneously and "guessed" at. It can only ever "seem" to be that which it "is." All community events remain dominated by the conditionalities that make them recognizable as "community," thus to remain unnameable may ultimately increase their effectiveness at organizing a collective consciousness. So what is ultimately most important, as the structure of Carles's argument here strongly implies, is that we continue to list possibilities for the meaning and name of any apprehended event without ever settling on an explanation that bounds it. As Badiou instructs: "Decide on the undecidable." As Carles glosses it: We must always "‘guess’ what kind of event it is" without ever presuming to know.

4 June 2010: "Sorry I haven’t posted much lately, but I have some good news. I got married!"

This post is about the tutelary complex. In his landmark history of domesticity in Early Modern England, Lawrence Stone traced the rise of affective individualism and argued this yielded coordinate changes in the marital organization of society, reframing marriages as matter of companionship and romantic love rather than property conservation among the power elite and labor pooling among the impoverished classes. (The tensions in 19th century fiction trace this development.) The invention of leisure as a result of the rationalization of the working day under capitalism produced the time required for romantic love to flourish.

Now, in the era of post-Fordist immaterial labor and nonstop work in the Web 2.0 social factory, the space for such relations has been curtailed. Carles elaborates this acute tension:

Sometimes I get so caught up in the internet that I forget to have real life goals, and experience real life joys. It’s really tough to be a blogger, because it’s like a social responsibility. At this point, I ‘can’t stop’, I can’t just decide to stop generating memes. There is a buzz economy that depends on me.

The sense of responsibility to the entire faceless world of the internet places an impossible burden on postpostmodern networked subjectivity. The sense of an audience has replaced a real audience, placing the theoretically infinite burden of abstract others on us perpetually; we become clowns who cannot leave the stage, no matter how pitiful our performance.

This obviously affects the legacy structures of domesticity remaindered from earlier social formations. In the imaginative experiment of this post, Carles tries to imbricate domesticity and immaterial labor, imagining a wedding as an occasion for the elaboration of new memes and the consolidation of symbolic meanings for online dissemination. He argues that in such a conjunction, one would necessarily "embedded some video footage" of the matrimonial ceremony and ornament the ritual with popular-music trends lifted from the fervid online petri dish of memes. It would require recruiting guests into the production of broader cultural value: "members of the party to do ‘conceptual dances’," Carles envisions. It is now necessary that an "alternative wedding" be "‘more meaningful’ than just a mainstream wedding" -- it most manufacture more symbolic meanings that can exchanged beyond the ceremony itself. This stands apart from the institutional value once heralded within the wedding, which enshrined bourgeois domesticity and recruited friends and family to bear witness and police a couple's conformity to received ideas about intimacy and procreation.

As Donzelot has argued, the patriarchal family structure once provided "a minimum bulwark, a necessary base for maintaining the social order," but late capitalism has located other bases for power and discipline that rely less on hierarchical order and more on voluntary ascription and self-identifications with sets of behaviors promulgated as pleasurable. Carles depicts this as a generational clash, pitting a recalcitrant father who longs for traditional mores against the couple that has adapted to the new ethos of exhibitionistic egocentricity and cutting-edge conformity characterized by an acceleration of obedience and integration of social trends into personal rites of passage: "Her dad was kinda pissed, i think, because he just wanted us to walk down the aisle to the traditional wedding song. He doesn’t understand that we used the #1 song of the 2k0 decade. Maybe he’ll understand in a few years."

What this parable illustrates is that patriarchal pressure no longer codifies the structure of the family as we advance beyond postindustrial society. The means for socialization are not repressive but iterative, only the "language" used for this iteration is derived from a pool of products and commercial ideas that bear with them the encoded commands of the existing relations of power, commands that now take the form of pleasing popular music and are consumed eagerly and voluntarily as tokens of (ironically) alternative identity and mandated individualism. Marriage has become a celebration of the nominal fusion of two ontic identities engaged in the perpetual broadcast of their own desperate currency. The bride and groom look past each other to express their love, in their undying allegiance to signifying cultural practices that preclude the existence of the other. Their love can only exist insofar as it does not inhibit the ongoing production of identity and concordant distribution of normative cultural assessments. Till death do their status updates and online recommendations bid them part.

18 April 2010: "I want to be self-employed and work in a conceptual work space / modern cubicle."

This post is about post-Fordism. Many have theorised the epistemic shift from a Fordist set of relations of production, based on a rigorous and hierarchical division of labor, the institution of Taylorist time-and-motion-saving procedures, and the rigorous appropriation of the knowledge of work processes by a technocratic management class along with a concordant deskilling of the rank-and-file labour force to a post-Fordist modality, involving the dissolution of the semi-artificial work-leisure divide, the harvesting of the productivity of everyday life, greater pseudo autonomy for the worker, and the evolution of consumption into a form of cognitive and symbolic production. Carles seizes upon these developments and broadens the import of their emplacement in the contemporary problematic. "One day, I will break free from my job in corporate America," he writes, in the persona of a current-day knowledge worker, anticipating impending structural unemployment and the need to prostitute oneself for a series of cognitive odd jobs without the safety net of the paternalistic corporation.

Carles links the ambivalent comforts of corporate expropriation as opposed to self-employment to the architectural spaces of postindustrial offices, the oft-noted "cubicles" in which knowledge work and data processing is implementated. "Space can really change your workplace / Inspire your employers / Help you to stay connected with the world / in order to make positive changes in our ever-changing societal world." But constrained by legacy conditions of the factory under Fordist relations, the stultifying cubicle spaces curtail not only the worker's practical autonomy in the work process but delimit her subjectivity as well: "H8 being stuck in my cubicle all day. Feel sad that all I can dream of is ‘getting my own office’ one day, but even that is just a bigger cubicle." Imagination itself is stunted by the physical implementation of late-stage corporatism. "Is life just a series of cubicles?" Carles asks rhetorically. Is every work space circumscribed by the "square" forces of the status quo and the established powers that be? Can labor be deterritorialized to the extent that the space of work becomes the time of identity?

This important theorization is explored through the analysis of a composite character of a contemporary cognitive worker: "I work in a generic office building," Carles complains in character, "feeling like a ‘brick in the wall’" and yearning for "Positive community space." Such space is of course the space of post-Fordist labor, the so-called social factory in which workers can "bond, work, thrive, and build peer-2-peer sharing networks of business information and intelligence," as Carles notes. In other words, the space in which affective labor can become productive labor as well.

The transition to a more fundamentally insecure contract between the state, capital and labor is, as Carles points out, being sold ideologically as the new American Dream:

What I really want
is 2 break free
from a company employing me
and to break out of my cubicle

An imaginary escape from the confining space of the cubicle is equated to an escape from the constrictions of consumerist subjectivity into a pure productivity of the self. Self-employment becomes a intersubjective employment of the self as an ontological and productive category in its own right. The evolving work space will be one that is pointedly characterized as private, imbued with the pleasures of domesticity: "I want a window that overlooks my backyard. Watch my children grow. Monitoring the dog, making sure he doesn’t ‘dig up the flowers.’" These processes of the reproduction of the existing socioeconomic conditions preserve their quaint detachment from industrial processes, but only because the character of labor itself has changed, to a self-directed process motivated by anxiety about identity. Hence Carles's litany of para-culture-industry praxis:

Maybe I can start an mp3 music streaming service
a blog website
a music reviews zine
the next facebook
a microblogging community
a meme blog about hipster sea monkeys
The possibilities are endless
as long as I have
the right space to work in

Outside of the industrial office space, one is "free" to work on culturally oriented ideas, but these "endless" possibilities become constrained by their very limitlessness. Space becomes the alibi and the amelioration for a exacerbated scarcity of time. But the dream of autonomy, a freedom from contingency and determination by the wage relation remains just that, a dream. Still the monetary constraint weighs heavy on the possibilities for the self, which can still conceive of no greater aspiration or enplotment of species being than "to make millions of dollars." As Carles is forced to concede, we still must measure our freedom in hard currency.

1 June 2010: "New Alt Trend: Putting a watch on ur shoes. Do ur feet need 2 know what time it is?"

This post is about dasein. In Being and Time German philosopher and crypto-Nazi Martin Heidegger confronts the ontological ineffability of being and posits dasein as a theoretical crutch to resolve a host of phenomenological and epistemological conundrums in pursuit of an ultimate authenticity. In this specific and limited sense, Heidegger's philosophical quest greatly resembles that of Carles, who also seeks an absolute authenticity not compromised by contingency (c.f. this post for an example).

Heidegger insists on the historicity of dasein and thus delimits authenticity in terms of the subject's emplacement into historical time. Carles seems intent on an interrogation of this particular postulate, picking up on hints Heidegger left -- "a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible," he suggested gnomically -- but left unanswered.

"My timeliness is my move," Carles concedes, in a nod to the existentialist extrapolations of Heidegger popularized by novelists Camus and Sartre, among others. "It’s time 2 be me" -- time is a precondition of subjectivity. Being is a matter of "moves" undertaken in temporal sequence, with the precognition of finality and with a sense of individual culpability. "It’s time to move forward
in2 the future," he adds accordingly. But time itself is subjectively experienced and without objective definition in its own right. There is no absolute measure of time outside of the experience of being or Being. Being for itself as well as being in itself. Carles asserts that time is at once "a construct of society but also something natural." That is to say, its ontological status is fundamentally ambiguous. "We will never really know what time is time," Carles sagely notes.

This has a profound impact not merely on being's ability to know itself but also on how the body is experienced temporally. Carles recognizes a dysmorphia attendant upon this metaphysical confusion: appendages become like unto "contraptions" that experience their own sense of time and hence their own independent being.

My feet need 2 know what time it is
My feet need 2 know when to take me
to places that I need 2 go

Here responsibility for actions becomes displaced, life is lived as if in the passive voice. And subjectivity emerges from the baptism refreshed and transmogrified, entirely vulnerable to effervescences in determinate social relations: "This is a new trend. This is a new me."

Carles's syllogism threatens to collapse to tautology. Is the trend the only manifestation of time or temporality that can be known by being or that can posit being; is the trend or the meme actually dasein as it may be experienced from within the hermaneutical circle? The field of memes, Carles suggests, is the synchronic expression of diachronic ontology. Being traces itself in the movement of time measured objectively only in the collective social recognition of changing trends.