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.