15 July 2010: "LOCAL NEWS REPORT: Teens using MP3s as drugs to get high/’fucked up’"

This post is about the metamorphosis of azimuths. On first reading, this polemic by Carles seems an unusually obvious interrogation of the leaking dichotomy between drugs and art when considered in light of their affective capabilities, or an assay of the problematic of the philosophical concept of substance itself, and whether it adheres as an oppositional construct to an idealist as opposed to a materialist ontology. From a strictly materialist perspective, phenomenological stimuli that prompt aesthetic experience cannot be differentiated from chemical compounds deliberately designed to alter the perceptual realm at the root, that is to say, to colonize the very means of perception and subvert their reliable transparency as a medium. As Carles notes, the reliability of our senses, and their tenuous relation to cognition and consciousness is very easily manipulatable: "You put on your headphones, close ur eyes, then ur brain gets ‘fucked with’ [via soundwaves]."

Perception is thereby problematized, and the subject undergoing an aesthetic or psychedelic experience becomes reflexively aware of the contingency of the modes of perception, begins to perceive the means by which he perceives and nothing more. This state of meta-awareness, of course, invokes the series of ironic truth procedures perfectly suited to the postmodernist strategic, whereby simulations of substances cannot be, for all pragmatic purposes, distinguished from the "real" thing, and reality itself becomes experienced as a construct whose apparitional phenomena must always be placed in metaphoric quotation marks. The internet becomes a complete simulacrum, only the difference between the simulation and what is simulated has become irrelevant, they are equal options for the situated subject who seeks to express a simulation of autonomy by choosing among realities. "Does it feel like the real thing?" Carles asks with arch sarcasm. How could one ever know? Every single word in the proposition presents an irresolvable epistemological question, including "does," "it" and "the." The whole point is that the real has become radically destablilized, it can be posited in an extreme act of pseudotranscendence rather than itself transcended in an establishing act of ur-spirituality.

Carles explains the principle of infinite substitutability that has overthrown the anthropology of human needs:

I am just happy we are getting to a phase in our society where you can do everything on the internet. You can fill out an eHarmony profile to get in2 a relationship. You can watch a girl put objects into her vagina via webcam instead of having sex. You can iDose to get high. You can read blogs instead of newspapers. Just hope they build some sort of ‘internet replacement’ for food, but might just munch on some computer paper with pictures of hamburgers printed on it.

As Carles notes, human needs are constructed in terms of the hegemonic medium available to us and through which we experience the quotidian, and as such are infinitely pliable, mutable, to suit existing economic relations. The prima facia absurdity of eating a piece of paper with a hamburger printed on its surface is not meant as a particularly hyperbolic metaphor for the lack of sustenance in the contemporary digital lifestyle but is meant to be taken entirely literally. The human organism itself can be reshaped in its basic biological functioning to adapt to its conditions of existence. There is no reason why consciousness itself could not migrate from the carbon-based brain cells to the silicon-printed chips we so frequently interface with, particularly if we operate within a dualistic Cartesian environment in which the body is a mere container for the soul. The possibility for a subjectivity rooted entirely in fragmentary, repetitive experience rather than rigidly imposed continuity and self-awareness becomes all too palpable, as Carles illustrates: "Might just lay in bed all day and vibe out to this audio drug called “Gates of Hades” until i get permafried and no longer know who I am."

The sublation of identity and the realization of oneness with being in time itself. That, Carles suggests, is the ultimate high.