23 September 2010: "Is your personal brand compromised when you attend a relevant alternative event with your partner?"

This post is about interpassivity. How do the social relations we adopt/adapt function as mechanisms of control rather than agency or liberation? Can we empower ourselves autonomously to foster the kinds of relations that will not sends us careening in to the traps prepared for us by the post-Fordist economy? Are the alternatives (obviously a key term for Carles) -- the vaunted flexibility required of us by neoliberalism -- tempered and balanced by the terms of traditional intimate relationships, or does it prompt us to experience such relations as unduly constricting, as further hedges on the ersatz autonomy promised us by the prevailing regime of power? Carles frames this question with his usual adroitness:

The alternative bro is growing up
entering relationships
still into buzzbands, still into ‘being alt’
but the pressure to mainstreamify
and find a ‘partner’
yet I still have my dreams
big dreams
of being relevant, buzzworthy, blogworthy

The legacy structures of private-sphere associations here register as a burden, a dismantling of dreams rather than supplying of their underlying form. Instead of the wish to considate private recognition of the unique self, the postmodern subject seeks "buzzworthiness" -- the allure of public attention, fame, of celebrity distributed through the nodes of the networked socioeconomic matrix.

In a sense, all of Carles's writings are concerned with the same subject: the inevitable need brought on by modern society of having to bow before the reality principle and surrender aspirations of pursuing an "alt" lifestyle well beyond the confines of postadolescence. The mood expressed in this adage of Carles's: "Sorta just hope life works itself out."

In premodern social formations, this transition was not nearly as acute and traumatic, simply because few had the opportunity to conceive of an alternative to the traditional folkways in which they were by and large embedded. Few experienced the luxury of leisure time as we understand it; they were content to annihiliate their surplus hours of non-productive time in bestial pursuits: revelry, fornication, intoxication, and so on. Some of this atavistically adheres to the fabled alt lifestyle, as Carles notes: "I am the modern alternative bro. I used to attend relevant concerts with a few bros, getting fucked up, standing in the front of the stage." The frequent nods to fantasies of exchanging sexual partners reflects this as well.

Only with the advent of modernity, and capitalism's development of broad-based markets for consumer goods and its elaboration of the circuit of capital that requires workers to also be consumers -- cannibalistically feeding on the fruits of their own expropriated labour time -- does the particular problematic of the "mainstream" or the "masses" emerge, along with the temporal component of the interpellated subject's inevitable surrender to it.

It remains unclear whether Carles wishes to advocate a rear-guard action against the reality principle, or whether he sees the masses who have bowed to it as a kind of Big Other whose existence is presumed but never pinned down. Carles's many posts are often, in fact, a search for the diametrically opposed Big Other, the quest for the ultimate "alt" individual who embodies all the implications of the so-called hipster lifestyle as it is elaborated online in a variety of memes and marketing ploys. (This particular post's reference to the "Altest Couple on Earth" and his earlier explanation of his desire to find this couple typifies this aspect of his writings.) The implied existence of this ultimate "alt" -- pure alterity, the Other with an emphatically capital O -- underwrites the submission to the reality principle in fact, as well as the toleration of the unmistakable cynicism inherent to much of allegedly alternative cultural product -- "buzzbands" and so forth. Somewhere a real hipster buys into all such pabulum; in rejecting it ourselves we reconcile ourselves to the mainstream without believing our abnegation will destroy the very possibility of an alternative.

21 September 2010: "SCIENTIFIC STUDY finds that women prefer chill bros"

This post is about the dividual. Always alert and attendant to the vagaries of postfeminism and the problematic of gender generally, Carles begins by exploding the myth that the women's liberation efforts in Western societies in the late 20th century had any lasting effect on reorienting the dreams and desires inculcated by centuries of patriarchal rule. "Now women are more independent, and are seeking a chill ass life partner. Women are ‘more independent’, and that basically means that they are ‘stressed and crazy’ so they need a chill ass bro who metaphorically danks them out in their down time." The modes of patriarchal control, as Carles acutely points out here, have changed their guise but have not disappeared -- in a shift akin to that of the society of discipline to one of control and biopower that Deleuze hypothesized in his much-remarked-upon essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control."

The nature of the feminine enclosure has changed, as has her gaoler. No longer an ogre, the oppressing male figure is a "chill ass bro" who "danks them out" -- that is, makes women experience their oppression as a kind of blank pleasure, an annihilation of the stress associated with personal responsibility and true autonomy. A kind of pseudo independence for women takes hold, a shell within which women can enact a subjective freedom that is always already contained by patriarchal forces. The telling indicator is that women use their liberation to find a male "life partner" -- that is the smiling face for the oppressor that she can use to mask the true nature of her condition. Their only desire is for a man to administer their lives from the shadows. "Women just want to chill out, and have some1 plant a seed in them," Carles notes ironically. The biological roots of male domination are so often casually invoked in society as to become uncontroversial expressions of "common sense." Of course reproductive imperatives dictate social mechanisms of containtment. A theoretically neutral biological distinction thus becomes the kernal for elaborating the limitless postponements of equality in the name of species being.

Men, on the obverse face of this structure, are ideologically conditioned to serve as guards for the patriarchal order by being taught the following about female "nature": "women only value 3 things in a man: money, huge peens, and physical attractiveness." Men learn that women are essentially sentient programs, easily managed by manipulating the male-controlled and -dominated "inputs" into their consciousness, as it were.

But the entire structure of gender subservience and control is ideologically laundered under the aegis of medical science -- in this case the analysis of levels of cortisol, which is held by scientists to govern the relations between men and women within these culturally embedded structures of dominance. Carles will have none of it:

The study is based around some sort of imaginary concept called ‘cortisol’, which is some sort of ‘magic mojo’ or something like that

Though Carles postulates a radical solution to the problem of the perpetuation of patriarchy -- "Should all women ‘stop dealing with men’ and just be crazy lesbians 2gether?" -- he seems unwilling to commit to a praxis of de facto gender separation, knowing that such an arrangement can only foster an apartheid of the sexes. Instead he challenges men to question their own affective labor: "Can a bro be ‘too chill’?" Can men be fooling themselves with their own conceit of female indulgence? Carles reminds us that the controlling strategies of patriarchy also control the would-be controllers, but he leaves us to wonder who that leaves behind the curtain, pulling all of our strings, chilling all of us out.

17 September 2010: "DISASTER VIDEO: Tornado tears up Brooklyn, 2 altbros ‘flip a shit’ in their sweet loft"

This post is about infralapsarianiam. Yes, Carles takes a quick swipe at the personification of Mother Nature, comparing the weather anomaly in a renowned district for contemporary aspirants to the Bohemian lifestyle to a "‘pussy tornado’" in order to stress the libidinal energies that underwrite structures of postadolescence. The metaphor reminds us of the casual misogyny that attends natural disasters, the free-floating implication that untamed female desire always threatens to erupt as a destructive wind sweeping away existing schemes of containment and control. But that is not his primary subject in this essay. The tornado also presents Carles with an occasion for a searing critique of the folly of trying to deliberately ape an approach to everyday life that is marked in the very minds of its admirers by its accidental, organic quality.

"Apparently a tornado ‘ripped thru Brooklyn’, trying to transcend ‘hipster bashing’, and instead do some ‘hipster twisting’/'hipster natural disastering’/'hipster rapturing,’" Carles reports, drawing an explicit connection between the inauthentic approach to the quotidian and the wrath of divinely controlled, untamed forces. The implication is that the soul is involved in such matters -- that hipsterdom is akin to a kind of Calvinist Elect, with God choosing from those among us who to bless with cool, and that the salvation of hipster status cannot be achieved through our own deeds alone. The difference between hip-elect and reprobate rests entirely with God's sovereign and seemingly arbitrary decision to show mercy to some but not all. The Synod of Dort in 1613 addressed this issue: "Before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace, according to the free good pleasure of his will, [God] chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people out of the entire human race which had fallen by its own fault from its original innocence into sin and ruin."

To secularize and rearticulate this position in lay language: even those who want to become Brooklyn bohemians know that it isn't a matter of simple decision and determination but requires a confluence of contingencies, an alignment of the field of social relations, status signifiers, and hegemonic power structures such that countercultural practices can have an apparently authentic meaning rather than functioning merely as one more consumer niche, one more entertainment option.

This is why Carles so frequently couches his critique in tentative language, as questions or conditional statements, as noncommittal musings, as in the following passage:

Not really sure if they followed standard tornado protocol. I think ur apparently supposed ‘duck and cover.’ Or maybe go into a room without many windows, like a basement or a cellar. Maybe I should move to Brooklyn and build a ‘sweet underground loft/mixed use art space/organic food dumpster diving co-op’/d.i.y. venue.’

The careful wording is meant to evoke the radical uncertainty of the soul's fate in the immanent realm of fashion and status, the curious impotency we all must confront when reckoning with our inherited habitus and the differential gifts of charisma and sprezzatura, as described by Castiglione. Will it make a difference to do anything at all? Should we commit an effort of will to any particular measure contrived to enhance our cool quotient? "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?" -- all Carles can say, Prufrock-like, is "Maybe."

14 September 2010: "Pitchfork writes article abt how bands take lofi photographs to brand themselves as ‘vintage’/authentic"

This post is about the trouvaille. Carles seizes upon an essay at the popular bastion of online music criticism, Pitchfork (p4k), to elaborate several of his own theses with regard to the ever-evolving artistic medium of photography. "Modern humans associate ‘vintage looking photographs’ with authenticity," Carles states, and then proceeds to examine some of the ramifications of this condition, namely the radically contingent aspect of both the photographic image and the experience of personal authenticity, which is in danger of being less a lived experience than an artfully procured or manufactured product akin to images contrived to elicit a nostalgic response to false or nonexistent memories. We become nostalgic for a lost authentic self that in fact is in the process of being made and consists of nothing but manufactured nostalgia. Nostalgia seems to be backward looking when it is in fact a projection into an impoverished future devoid of new ideas or the potential for progress. Carles asks: "Is it more alt to look like ur from the past instead of from the future?" Of course, the answer he implies is "both at the same time."

In his position on photography, Carles lies perhaps halfway between the Barthes of Camera Lucida and the Sontag of On Photography. Barthes famously claimed that "photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable, but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs." Carles traces a similar argument when he declares: "H8 our evolving society. Wish we could just live in our ideal vision of the future, but never forget the chill vibes of the past…
H8 how technology makes information/mp3s more accessible, but ‘cheapens’ moments that we once thought were meaningful."
Photography seizes upon experience and paradoxically drains it of its ontology; it becomes less real for being photographed, a kind of rough draft or dress rehearsal for the image, which supplants it as the real artifact. Technology colludes with capitialism in reifying experience in this fashion, as Carles notes. It decries the "notable" -- not our own aesthetic or emotional response to events. We take photographs to have meaningful experiences; the camera becomes the prerequisite. Meaningful experiences cannot occur outside the image medium. Experience is an image. Carles notes, "basically ‘photographs represent memories. Indie album covers are photographs that represent moments frozen in time, kinda like pictures.’" But photographs and memories are only radically equivalent when the mediated level of experience is immanent and not transcendent, when it can no longer be determined as preceding or following the Event, as such. Is a moment "frozen in time" still a "moment", epistemologically speaking? What sustains the difference that allows memories to remain only "kinda like pictures." How can we preserve the distinction, in the face of a betraying "indie" aesthetic that seeks to efface the difference? Indie appropriations of photos no longer permit images to bear witness; instead they falsify the self. "Do u just want to live a life of leisure without any modern technology, just capturing moments with vintage cameras?" Carles taunts. Of course we don't; the proposition is self-falsifying. The vintage appearance of the image with which we delineate our leisure does nothing to exempt it from the teleological critique of technology. "Capturing moments" still tears apart the integrity of the ego as it is embedded in time-space.

In elucidating this position, Carles clearly has in mind Sontag's assertion that "as photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people take possession of space in which they are insecure." But the indie aesthetic extends that space of insecurity to the whole of everyday life. In one of his quintessential argumentative moves, Carles leaves the crux of argument open-ended, both unstated and overdetermined:

S000 crazy how we live in a modern world with hi-resolution cameras, but

The point: there is no "but"; there is only "but"; there is no "but"....
It can't be resolved for or against the contradiction, Carles shows, just as images themselves can't be resolved or synthesized with memories even as they appear to produce them. Images help us remember only to dent the possibility of memory. We have always never been here before.

12 September 2010: "Justin Bieber tries 2 be alt, buys wayfarers at WalMart, seem too big for his face/lil nose"

This post is about the colophon of doubt. Ostensibly a meditation on a pair of ill-fitting sunglasses worn by a young musician propelled to superstardom by the leveraged network effects of the internet mechanism of cultural distribution, this photo-essay is in fact an interrogation of the exploded spectral dimension, of what it means to see and be seen, elevated exponentially by unthinkable degrees of fame -- that is, the erotics and the vicissitudes of being both the subject and the object of the gaze within the welter of celebrity. Carles posits the question of which Justin Bieber is representative: "By being a tween sensation
Will I get ‘fucked up’ [via psychologically]"? Is the castration anxiety inherent in the gaze likely to annihilate the ego-ideal or fortify it? The stare of the millions of Medusas -- what choice does one have but to don reflective shades to send that reifying specularity back its multiple sites of origin?

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan captured something of the dilemma represented by Justin Bieber in the conclusion to the Four Fundamental Concepts: "I love you, but inexplicably, I love in you something more than you -- the objet petit a -- I mutilate you." Carles recasts this into his own telegraphic style and terminology: "Feeling alone in my tweenage dream ... New feelings inside of me / my brain / my body .... Scared ... Sad ... Alone... Just wish my sunglasses fit my face." The idea of proportion, Carles recognizes haunts us all in the attentional economy, particularly with respect to, in this case, literal blinders -- visual filters to block out the infiltration of unwanted images, undesired data, spectral mirages -- the Other? the analyst? -- which have become necessary to approximate a stable sense of the self in the midst of the flux of overwhelming data. We are as Carles points out, deeply ambivalent about our necessary blinders, about the unconscious and its strategies of repression that permit us to function more or less acceptably within social formations: Carles repeats the koan "h8 u wayfarers" mesmerically, hypnotically, to summon something of the self-imposed filter's psychic power to both repress and structure phenomonlogically the flow of stimuli, to make consciousness, as it were, possible. We hate that which we necessarily desire, and this registers as an apprehension or anxiety of ill-fittingness -- of being forced to wear the costume which in fact is the essence of our self. Without the filter we can only feel "Sad/dead on the inside" as Carles explains. But that inner necrology makes possible an externalized ontic positionality. That is to say, our identity is our best disguise. It functions as a boundary, a rejection of psychic materials, not as a synthesis.

Lacan frames this condition, the problem of human onotlogy, this way: "I see from only one point, but in my existence, I am looked at from all sides.... The split that concerns us is not the distance that derives from the fact that there are forms imposed by the world toward which the intentionality of phenomenological experience directs us.... The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the thrust of our experience [pun possibly intended], namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety." Carles describes that "strange contingency" with the impossible if not paradoxical formulation "Going viral every day" and links it expressly to the non-reproductive thanatopic libidinous energy conducted by and through the gaze, the implicit promise of "‘beejes’ on the reg." But anxiety frames [pun intended] the self constructed by the desiring gazes of unseen and uncounted others and denies the perspective necessary to more or less successfully mediate the distance between self and unself, between conflicting poles of ego organization and orientation, to echo the constituitive méconnaissance without denaturing it in the petered-out trickle of circumscribed maturity.

Thus Carles suggests for Bieber the doom that confronts us all:

1 day I will grow in2 my wayfarers
I will be a man
I will be happie.

We will become synonymous with the limits we have set on our sensuality; on our intake of stimuli. We will associate this constricted vision with masculinity, with power within and flowing through a patriarchal matrix of relations, and with the Word in the phallo-logos cathexis. And we will mistake this psychic attrition as contentment, as the apotheosis of our being rather than the figurative, if not literal, extermination of our soul. "Sad/dead on the inside" indeed.

7 September 2010: "Craiglist ‘cock blocks’ hard, won’t let u buy & sell local prostitutes n e more"

This post is about homosocial desire. In Between Men: English literature and male homosocial desire, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that the "male traffic in women," to borrow, as she does, Levi-Strauss's piquant phrase, replicates and relies upon a triangular structure of desire in which male-male libidinous energy is, as it were, laundered through its being routed through subordinated and subject-ed women under patriarchal relations.

In any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desires and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence.

Carles traces this congruence in his own textual narrative, which discusses through anecdotal strategies precisely the persistence of prostitution and thus patrraiarchy in postindustrial capitalism, through the radical use of rupture, of a literal lacuna in the fabric of his discourse:

I purchased my first ‘hooker’ off craigslist. It really is a great place to meet new people, and ‘have ur way with them.’ I met a user who was named “Samantha – 23 all natural big titties.’ She was located in a Ramada Inn close to the airport. I went to her room, and she was a little bit uglier than she looked in the pictures, but I was still super hornie, and got ‘turned on’ because I was doing something illegal. I had very aggressive sex with her, and said hateful, and potentially racists things 2 her. It was actually a positive experience, because I accepted that I was a ‘homosexual’ afterwards, and was only dominating women to deal with my

Here the text abruptly fragments itself, leaving the thought uncompleted, but in a larger sense, more than complete, as its resolution is of course overdetermined. The need to "dominate" women is coordinate with the expression of the priority of male-male relations as those properly constituitive of society, reinforcing the principle that men alone can form meaningful contractual bonds that shape the distribution of property, work, responsibility and leisure. Prostitution is simply the reverse of these male-male relations, a shadowplay or dumb show in which the male enacts his psychic distance from the libidinous desire of the female through the introjection of commerce -- mechanizing and rationalizing the expression of sexual desire for the other and neutralizing it, suppressing the possibility of a disruptive "love" that might upset patriarchal prerogatives. Women are bought and shared among men as property that solidifies the male bond, and certifies their mutual desire for the other's maintained mastery.

Carles is quick to posit the universality of this experience -- "What is ur craiglists prostitution experience?" -- which frames his assertion that Craigslist's efforts to thwart the practice of prostitution can only be regarded from within patriarchy as a "cockblock" -- a prevention of two "cocks" confirming one another's efficacy over the body of the purchased female, dehumanized as chattel, reduced to the level of "a fixed gear bicycle" or "a used IKEA sofa for $50," as Carles points out, using salient examples from contemporary Western life-styles.

But Carles hopes not only to underscore the ubiquity of homosocial desire but to contest its apparent naturalness: "Was it weird to go into their pussie/mouth/butt hole after some1 else had been in it hours before?" he asks of the generic male client of a prostitute, emphasizing the continuity of the circuit of somatic frictions that sustain the fiction of the given-ness of patriarchy. In Carles's interrogatory gambit, the phallus is marked and unmasked by its very absence, and by the persistence of its trace after its copulatory withdrawal. His point is that the phallus necessarily haunts all transactions of desire, even those that are purely linguistic in nature, and that the raw conjunction of meanings and signifiers too is a kind of marked sexual congress, a phantasm of presence that universalizes not male power but male guilt.

Hence Carles points out that the "Craigslist killer" -- more a metaphor than a particular villain in this construction -- "seems normal-looking, like any other bro just ‘trying to get off.’" The criminality of the patriarchal enterprise is normalized, homogenized (pun intended) by the nature of the orifice impregnated by the phallo-logos -- the process of meaning making is the scene of the crime, the primal scene, where the name of the father is both forbidden and always already echoing in our ears.

The question then becomes, as Carles limns it, "Do u know any better solutions 4 eCommerce than craigslist?" That is, does online sociality and networked digitial interfaces necessarily reinforce the bars of the prison-house of patriarachy, or can they model alternative forms of exchange and property relations that don't require the female body to sanctify? Are there forms of desire that transcend the homosocial yet retain structurating power? In the absence of these forms, the taboo markers of racial prejudice and miscegenation leap to the fore as organizing principles: "Would u rather be a ‘black pimp’ or a ‘drugged out white whore’?" Carles asks, delineating the constricted subjectivities available under the phallologocentric-postcolonialist regimes of control. Sexual relations are race relations are power relations are biopolitical relations. QED.

2 September 2010: "Some a-hole writes book abt how teens are inauthentic Christians, calls them ‘hipster X-tians’"

This post is about negative theology. "Is God real, or just ‘bullshit’?" Carles asks, taking no quarter in this bracing interrogation of contemporary religious mores, focusing his lens primarily on the practices of modern Christians in thriving "first-world" societies. Carles's analysis reveals that consumer capitalist prosperity tends to obviate religious practice and transform it into a market demographic, its rituals in no way distinguishable from the obsequious and ostentatious following of trends. The concept of the deity serves not to anchor a project of faith or even subordination, but is radically destablilized, becoming merely another transient meme in the marketplace of cultural ideas -- that is to say, "bullshit".

Christianity, Carles declaims, functions as a kind of in-group clique for upper-middle class youth discovering the boundaries and prerogatives of their privilege:

In high school, it seems like there is usually a ‘group of Christians teens’ who love 2 get together and talk about God, play acoustic guitar, and gather in some1′s parent’s huge, upper-middle class house [via being able to buy a huge house due to low property values in suburbia].... Since these kids are usually white and rich, they love 2 ‘drink and fuck’, and just try to seem ‘holier than thou’ cuz they chill out in youth groups while some 24 year old counselor bro ‘talks about God’ with them + throws down some Jack Johnson-like acoustic duets. Hella ‘inauthentic’ cuz tweens just wanna be teens–they don’t rlly care about God.

Religion bears no moral or ethical precepts with it; it merely expresses belonging and hierarchy -- but of course, as Carles suggests, this is nothing new. He wonders whether youth can be the measure of any cultural phenomenon -- "Are teens ‘authentic followers/fans’ of any trend, brand, band, or religion?" -- suggesting that they are a bellwether for cultural change, but not its agent. These youths may not care about God, but in this they are merely emulating longstanding religious practice, organizing society to protect and preserve status. Of course religious piety has long been a shabby cloak for northern-hemisphere imperialism and white ethnocentrism, as Carles is quick to point out: "Feel like I woulda turned out to be an authentic member of God’s white army if my parents ‘manned up’, gave up their middle class jobs, and chilled out in Central America teaching ‘dumb Mexicans’ about the way of the Lord/white man." In other words, religion is a mode for reinstantiating racially based power without openly exposing the contingency of that power. Often it operates outside of economic power or in opposition to it, but it relies on the same cohort of proletarians as its basis.

But this critique of the sublunary uses of religion in a fallen world should not distract us from Carles's more incisive and trenchant critique of religion on its own terms. Carles introduces the idea of God's silence with a seemingly trite jest: "Sad that my church doesn’t have the social tools to help me deal with real life/teen issues. Wish I understood why life was so unfair." The issues associated with youth -- identity formation within the existing social matrix as one comes to terms with inflexible hierarchies and the absence of meritocracy -- are all transmogrified religious concerns: Has God created souls as equals? Does God sanction the superiority of one group over another, despite what foundational documents of the American state proclaim? How can religion acclimate us to social reality while nourishing our sense of our own relevance? Carles's chief insight is that religion has surrendered the authority to resolve these contradictions by colluding with consumer capitalism, integrating with it rather than opposing it. God fails where Wal-Mart triumphs.

Carles suggests that "authentic alts are post-god" -- that have survived the existential crisis posited by god's absence to live in roiling state of metaphysical indifference, in which the heavenly firmament and its mysteries have been supplanted by technological doodads and the mechanistic rationality which finds its apotheosis in precision targeted marketing and the nichification of consumers. The notion of what is "unfair" is no longer salient in a realm where it "seems like God really needs a twitter account" to make his Word bear any authority. Who shall be the prophet for the digital flock when the decentered structure of the network permits no one to lead but everyone to follow?

31 August 2010: "A Newspaper does in depth interview with ‘the guy who screens album submissions’ @ a radio station"

This post is about axiology. In his epochal 1757 essay "On the Standard of Taste" Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume writes of the difficulty of finding true critics:

Thus, though the principles of taste be universal, and, nearly, if not entirely the same in all men; yet few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty. The organs of internal sensation are seldom so perfect as to allow the general principles their full play, and produce a feeling correspondent to those principles. They either labour under some defect, or are vitiated by some disorder; and by that means, excite a sentiment, which may be pronounced erroneous.... Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.

Carles clearly has this passage in mind in his assessment of Eric K Lawry, a radio-station employee entrusted with sorting through music submissions and nominating certain recordings for broadcast airplay. Carles wonders if Lawry is doomed to "seem like ‘a pretentious ass hole’" because of the discriminatory powers invested in him by virtue of his privileged position relative to the means of media broadcasting.

Carles recognizes that "it all starts with this bro. The gatekeeper 2 the buzz economy," but he wrestles with the implications of the systemic concentration of power in the hands of one particular node in the networked libidinal economy. The critical question for Carles is not merely whether the position within the hierarchy constitutes the tastemaking power of this particular functionary, or whether Lawry's prternatural grasp of aesthetics allowed his to mount his own sui generis perch within the culture industry. Rather Carles is concerned with how the power to judge and disseminate a particular ideology of the aesthetic manages to circulate and legitimate itself.

For instance, Carles asks: "Do people who are ‘relevant tastemakers’ listen to the radio?" The import of this question is twofold. (1) what modes of mediation substantiate the social construction of relevance, and how immanent are those tasked with the construction of the field of relevance? Is relevance a tautological proposition? A clever piece of epistemological legerdemain? Can one decree relevance without presupposing the very concept one seeks to promulgate? Is the power of the broadcast medium itself an index to relevance or can media be invested with a relevance proportional to the message and its capability to trace or even circumscribe social imaginary at a given constellation of influences at a specific moment of time and space? (2) What is the proper way to analyze the experiential process of listening? Is a standard stimulus-response model appropriate, or has it become outmoded in an era of quantum approaches? Does the act of listening transcend the mere property of being struck passively by aural waves constrained within certain frequencies? Are there other organs with which one can listen? Is taste merely a matter of measured oscillation?

All of these inquiries open of course on Carles's more encompassing question: "Do people still listen to radio?" The critical distinction between "relevant tastemakers" and ordinary, run-of-the-mill "people" rests in the choice of the word "still". Radio as a medium, Carles implies, imposes passivity on auditors after repeated exposures; it ingrains receptive posture. Radio listeners expect to be inculcated with taste. Tastemakers, on the other hand, redefine the principle of listening along the lines of Hume's ideal, "tuning in," as it were, the disposition appropriate to the dispensation of aesthetic norms but taking pains to avoid being co-opted by their own instruments of dissemination.

Hence the first two criteria for receiving critical approbation are: "1. Make it personal. 2. get experienced." The effortless synthesis of the personal and and the empirical, Carles implies, abstracting from Lawry's remarks, forms the basis of aesthetic judgment, of enabling a critic to assume to appropriate critical posture with a minimum of self-consciousness. If the critic is brought to bear his critical posture awkwardly, the resulting judgments will be burdened with this awareness and discreditable. But this harms not the critic but the listeners who reap the benefits of his sacrifice only to that extent that his judgment appears natural and not labored, that is to say, disinterested.

Thus when Carles sardonically declares that he "Might just give that bro a call, and ‘demand to know’ why his ‘goddamn radio station’ hasn’t played my chillwave fuzzy buzz lofi sound project," he is calling our attention to a more specific meaning of fidelity. What is "lofi" is not the project but the transmission channels between critic, artist, and audience, which have become calcified with "buzz". The word "Buzz" implies the loss of fidelity not merely aurally but morally.