This post is about the textualist critique of classificatory rationalism. Carles continues his rhetorical assault against hegemonic music-ranking website Pitchfork (Putschfork?) and its tentative elaboration of racialist hierarchies in the field of cultural capital and its reticulation of an apparatus of power/knowledge operant on the level of subjective consciousness and implemented on the body via the sensuous responsiveness to popular music. Carles notes that Pitchfork's recent foray into race politics "has confused many white indie music fans who used to think Pitchfork was their indie Bible, but now they are having an identity crisis."
As Carles suggests here, the "identity crisis" experienced by a substratum of the young white bourgeois class reflects the incursion of biopower across a new postracial axis that at once foregrounds race and seems to supplant it, render its encoded prejudices moribund. The basis of class dominance must rearticulate itself along lines that co-opt the divisive power of race rather than stand "independently" apart from it. "Indie" has become untenable with regard to race, as Carles notes. He asks, "Should 'hip hop/r&b/rap' albums be held to the same standards that white man's indie buzzband albums are held up 2?" In other words should the laws of miscegenation be reimported from the era of slavery to restructure inherited racial privilege in the field of culture, or can postraciality be used to cloak the cultural privileges being promulgated through other means, through other dichotomies, more récherché integuements. One example would be the gendered revaluation of cultural capital, often attacked by Carles in his febrile fulminations against the "slutwavers" -- female performers who have monetized their sexual symbology. Pitchfork and slutwave both are an ongoing exemplifications of the dialectical process Gayatri Spivak has called in a related context the "paradoxical empirical deconstruction of lexicographic ground."
This ideological upheaval naturally creates a consciousness of confusion on the level of the aesthetic, upon which redeployments of ideology often manifest themselves. "No idea what good music is any more," Carles reports, imagining the white man's dilemma. "Feeling so confused/betrayed/alone/scared." Betrayal, of course, is the key note in this symphony of distressed entitlement. Carles invokes Jackie Robinson, a black athlete who became the first to play in the erstwhile all-white professional American baseball league, as a reassuring emblem for the disoriented hegemon, a relatable figure whose codification in the media as nonthreatening could let "white indie altbros and cool dads feel like they were part of the decision making process." Though postraciality is being implemented in their name and for the extension of their privilege, their legacy of bigotry cannot be allowed to derail the transitionary process. Thus the critical importance of figures like Robinson, Obama, Kanye West and so on, whose personal prestige is an ironic proxy for the perpetuation of exclusionary power.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
22 November 2010: "The Negrofication of Pitchfork and the Death of White Man's Indie"
This post is about instrumental reason. Trying to capture the ineffable aspects of ontic quality as a quantity that can drive a variety of econometric models and undergird a process of rational-choice analysis has long been a hardy tool in the capitalist arsenal, conjuring a seemingly empirical fact out of more or less thin air and then passing it off as hardened wisdom, as a realistic willingness to face cold facts rather than namby-pamby intangibilities, which, as all MBAs know, are no basis for a firm to make its investment decisions going forward. Carles takes an ironic stab at the mania for quantification so palpable among the thought leaders of high capitalist reason.
[via having 'no identity'/no reason to 'go on']," Carles notes, pointing not only to the nihilism incipient in the quantification, but to the depersonalization, always implicit in making art commensurate with data, but now explicit, heralding a grand social order of remorseless efficiency in which every being, and every experience and every feeling is reducible to a number. Carles captures the dystopian subjectivity resulting from having all experience being integrated to the same numeric scale:
"My life is totally different
My life is totally the same"
The lapse into totalitarianism that comes in the wake of such regression, when all capacity to distinguish moral qualities without recourse to numeric data, is plain. When we can only hear rankings, when we must be stand and be counted, when we must relentlessly count, and tally the score, when we can only wonder about what our own number must be, the human spirit will have finally capitulated to the unleashed forces of dominative instrumental reason that adheres in no single man but dominates them all as a free-floating, omnipresent force that animates institutions across the social matrix.
Carles links the regression to an emerging racist order, which he sardonically salutes with these grim words evocative of the Nüremburg rallies: "An important day, a celebration of greatness."
But the hostility of this quantifying gesture is not merely an assault on the thinking ability of the weblog's readership, not merely an invitation for fascism. The perfect ranking from Pitchfork also implies the perfected ignorance and passive receptivity of the critic himself. Ultimately Carles is able to inspire hope by dismissing the critic, acknowledging his ranking gesture as a self-consuming artifact, one which annihilates him as it establishes his notoriety and authority:
"it seems like this is 'the defining moment of his journalistic bloggy life'
Even though I don't know anything abt him
And possibly will never know anything more abt him"
Nothing remains to be known; he has admitted to having had a perfect aesthetic experience, which can only mean that he can no longer experience anything. Power relies on the withheld threat, the unrealized pleasure, the iron fist of unimaginable deprivation wrapped in the velvet glove of promised jouissance. The reviewer surrenders that position by forwarding a number which in his operant scale is more than a number, thereby short-circuiting it. He strains for a quality through quantity, even having already dismissed quality, but the specter of sensuousness can only haunt his words, terrifying them in return for the terror he sought to inflict on his audience by evoking completeness. The cult of death. Full knowledge, the forbidden fruit. Perfect understanding, a perfectly told lie.
Carles declares his contempt for the reviewer by mocking his pretensions to perfectibility: "there is 'no where to go' now that I have experienced perfection" To paraphrase Adorno in another context, there can be no poetry after Kanye.
"Life is all about numbers."Carles will not even grant authority to the purveyors of this line of reasoning in jest. They are only "probably" authoritative, even on their own ideology. Clearly Carles has in mind this trenchant passage from Dialektik der Aufklärung:
-probably some smart person / business person / mathematician
The standardization of the intellectual function through which the mastery of the senses is accomplished, the acquiescence of thought to the production of unanimity, implies an impoverishment of thought no less than of experience; the separation of the two realms leaves both damaged. A consequence of the restriction of thought to organization and administration, rehearsed by the those in charge from artful Odysseus to artless chairmen of the board, is the stupidity which afflicts the great as soon as they have to perform tasks other than the manipulation of the small.Such stupidity has, in Carles's lucid opinion, afflicted the fatally compromised tastemakers at the popular-music weblog Pitchfork, who has become too explicit in their transformation of the fool's gold of aesthetic quality into the cold cash that can be derived from an accredited numeric rank. "I never thought I'd live 2 see this day a 10.0 on a new album," Carles admits, as this threatens to undermine the credibility of the entire ranking racket, establishing putative achievement of perfection as passé:
this will lead to a 'reactionary sect'The perfect score reveals a perfect vacuity, the total triumph of the administrative "muse" over the negative dialectic requisite for the apperception of aesthetic accomplishment within a society brutalized by commodified expression. The Pitchfork review is an act of aesthic terrorism, attempting to reduce the listening capabilities of its readership to that of an unthinking lizard, to a creature that can only respond when prodded from the outside, and then only with an instinctual recoil. To return, as Carles intends his readers to, to the relevant passage from Adorno and Horkheimer:
creating 'even more backlash' [via hits] for the Pitchforks
But also
It might get 'rlly boring'
And no1 will even care any more
The elimination of qualities, their conversion into functions, is transferred by rationalized modes of work to the human capacity for experience, which tends to revert to that of amphibians. The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heardThe consequences for Pitchfork readers is plain: the apotheosis has been achieved, their marching orders issued. The holy number has been drawn, and no experience can exceed the current one in significance: "It might make us think that life is worth giving up on
[via having 'no identity'/no reason to 'go on']," Carles notes, pointing not only to the nihilism incipient in the quantification, but to the depersonalization, always implicit in making art commensurate with data, but now explicit, heralding a grand social order of remorseless efficiency in which every being, and every experience and every feeling is reducible to a number. Carles captures the dystopian subjectivity resulting from having all experience being integrated to the same numeric scale:
"My life is totally different
My life is totally the same"
The lapse into totalitarianism that comes in the wake of such regression, when all capacity to distinguish moral qualities without recourse to numeric data, is plain. When we can only hear rankings, when we must be stand and be counted, when we must relentlessly count, and tally the score, when we can only wonder about what our own number must be, the human spirit will have finally capitulated to the unleashed forces of dominative instrumental reason that adheres in no single man but dominates them all as a free-floating, omnipresent force that animates institutions across the social matrix.
Carles links the regression to an emerging racist order, which he sardonically salutes with these grim words evocative of the Nüremburg rallies: "An important day, a celebration of greatness."
But the hostility of this quantifying gesture is not merely an assault on the thinking ability of the weblog's readership, not merely an invitation for fascism. The perfect ranking from Pitchfork also implies the perfected ignorance and passive receptivity of the critic himself. Ultimately Carles is able to inspire hope by dismissing the critic, acknowledging his ranking gesture as a self-consuming artifact, one which annihilates him as it establishes his notoriety and authority:
"it seems like this is 'the defining moment of his journalistic bloggy life'
Even though I don't know anything abt him
And possibly will never know anything more abt him"
Nothing remains to be known; he has admitted to having had a perfect aesthetic experience, which can only mean that he can no longer experience anything. Power relies on the withheld threat, the unrealized pleasure, the iron fist of unimaginable deprivation wrapped in the velvet glove of promised jouissance. The reviewer surrenders that position by forwarding a number which in his operant scale is more than a number, thereby short-circuiting it. He strains for a quality through quantity, even having already dismissed quality, but the specter of sensuousness can only haunt his words, terrifying them in return for the terror he sought to inflict on his audience by evoking completeness. The cult of death. Full knowledge, the forbidden fruit. Perfect understanding, a perfectly told lie.
Carles declares his contempt for the reviewer by mocking his pretensions to perfectibility: "there is 'no where to go' now that I have experienced perfection" To paraphrase Adorno in another context, there can be no poetry after Kanye.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
15 November 2010: NYTimes writes article abt how chain franchises are 'invading' Brooklyn"
This post is about nonplaces. Liminal spaces. Interzone. The interstices. Carles wonders where these mythical, near utopian (or are they the alternative to utopia, the alt beyond "a 'super alt' place," as Carles identifies the borough of Brooklyn?) might be located. Are they to be found in that most reviled of locales, "The_Suburbs," as he inscribes them, at once neither city nor country; both inhabited and vacated in a cycle whose periodicity can be closely monitored and calibrated; colonized by global multi-national entities but routinely governed by the most hyperlocal of Nimbyisms?
Carles suggests in this post that suburbia is as much a state of mind as a literal place, a diachronic rite of passage made synchronic, concrete, tangible, a social fact. As such he remains radically skeptical of the possibility of a emergent urbanism that would would contribute to the structuration of a postcapitalist subject: "Now that Brooklyn is 'gentrified' / retailed-out, will there be a new alt city?" he asks, rephrasing essentially a question he had already posed earlier, "do yall <3 convenience, or do u want to 'stay authentic' even when ur a consumer." Authenticity is now fatally imbued in the problematic of consumerism itself and is susceptible to no stable definition outside of the matrix of practices associated with the buying and selling of acutely branded products. The psycho-conceptual space for the articulation of a subject that would remain reflexively accessible to the citizen who inhabits such locales as the ones Carles describes must always already have been colonized, or rather "gentrified," by the "chain stores / restaurants / grocery centres / Whole Foodses" -- that is prepared by the assumptions embodied and embedded in these brands to receive a superstructure of axiomatic values. In the new Convenience is authenticity in the social relations of consumption now elaborated in bourgeois enclaves, and the vehement denials of this on the level of symbolic gesture only serves to confirm the underlying truth of this equivalence.
"Do u prefer the cost, convenience, and experience of a standardized franchised experience?" Carles asks, though the answer is inescapably obvious, that the preference has been the a priori for the subject's capability for self-knowledge. Convenience has become epistemology; we know only that which is easy, though its ease is made to be felt as an accomplishment of the individual in conjunction with society rather than the very grounding condition of the individual.
It follows that convenience is the effect rather than the cause of suburbanization, a post hoc moral imperative, though Carles's description of the how the infiltration of brands into everyday life proceeded -- "(via convenience)" -- is arguably ambiguous. But are chain stores nonplaces, in anthropologist Marc Augé's sense of the term, and thereby to be held culpable for the annihilation of identity? Or do these chain stores and their "gimmicky franchises" foreground the neoliberal assault on identity as such, and prepare the populace for biopolitical acts of resistance? It may be that only by inhabiting the chain-store subjectivity, only by inverting convenience and emnracing the dis-ease of ease, can one stake an oppositional dialectic, fashioning the countertactics that can redistribute the struggle to new battlefields much closer to home. It turns out that Carles parting shot -- "Does this look like 'utopia' 2 u?" -- is not as ironic as it at first appears.
Carles suggests in this post that suburbia is as much a state of mind as a literal place, a diachronic rite of passage made synchronic, concrete, tangible, a social fact. As such he remains radically skeptical of the possibility of a emergent urbanism that would would contribute to the structuration of a postcapitalist subject: "Now that Brooklyn is 'gentrified' / retailed-out, will there be a new alt city?" he asks, rephrasing essentially a question he had already posed earlier, "do yall <3 convenience, or do u want to 'stay authentic' even when ur a consumer." Authenticity is now fatally imbued in the problematic of consumerism itself and is susceptible to no stable definition outside of the matrix of practices associated with the buying and selling of acutely branded products. The psycho-conceptual space for the articulation of a subject that would remain reflexively accessible to the citizen who inhabits such locales as the ones Carles describes must always already have been colonized, or rather "gentrified," by the "chain stores / restaurants / grocery centres / Whole Foodses" -- that is prepared by the assumptions embodied and embedded in these brands to receive a superstructure of axiomatic values. In the new Convenience is authenticity in the social relations of consumption now elaborated in bourgeois enclaves, and the vehement denials of this on the level of symbolic gesture only serves to confirm the underlying truth of this equivalence.
"Do u prefer the cost, convenience, and experience of a standardized franchised experience?" Carles asks, though the answer is inescapably obvious, that the preference has been the a priori for the subject's capability for self-knowledge. Convenience has become epistemology; we know only that which is easy, though its ease is made to be felt as an accomplishment of the individual in conjunction with society rather than the very grounding condition of the individual.
It follows that convenience is the effect rather than the cause of suburbanization, a post hoc moral imperative, though Carles's description of the how the infiltration of brands into everyday life proceeded -- "(via convenience)" -- is arguably ambiguous. But are chain stores nonplaces, in anthropologist Marc Augé's sense of the term, and thereby to be held culpable for the annihilation of identity? Or do these chain stores and their "gimmicky franchises" foreground the neoliberal assault on identity as such, and prepare the populace for biopolitical acts of resistance? It may be that only by inhabiting the chain-store subjectivity, only by inverting convenience and emnracing the dis-ease of ease, can one stake an oppositional dialectic, fashioning the countertactics that can redistribute the struggle to new battlefields much closer to home. It turns out that Carles parting shot -- "Does this look like 'utopia' 2 u?" -- is not as ironic as it at first appears.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
10 November 2010: "I bought a hybrid car and a polar bear came 2 my house 2 thank me 4 saving the environment."
This post is about eschatology. How will the world end? With a extenuated whimper or with the proverbial bang? More pertinent to our inescapable immanence in the world, can we appropriately envision the apocalypse so as to forestall it? Is their a conception of inevitable doom that actually negates its inevitability; that is to say, with all due apologies to Fukuyama (not to mention G.W.F. Hegel) can one negate the ultimate negation and put an end to the end of history?
Carles has been considering such matters across a series of several related posts, in which he recurs to the same adages, often emblazoned on images purloined from our collective cultural consciousness of representative pop icons or avatars of our everyday life in all its curious contingency and technological mediation: "Goodnite world" and "Sad/Dead on the inside". Both of these elliptical aphorisms appear in the post under consideration in this exegesis, appropriately enough at the end, after Carles has contemplated the displaced, ecologically homeless polar bear as a metonym for the eventuality of environmental disaster on a truly global scale.
How do these adages relate dialectically? Is the end of the world a reflection of the evacuation of the individual human soul or a consequence of its voiding? Metaphysical death and the end of depth psychology: must these inevitably prompt eschatological prophesizing in an ecumenical, environmental vein? Carles tests this dialectic in the voice of the bear, a creature he imagines to be irrevocably doomed already on account of human negligence:
Carles traces in images the polar bear's fictitious journey as depicted in a hybrid-auto (itself a figure for biopower in the post-Fordist economy) commercial, using captions to parody the typical Western youth's quest for personal meaning: "H8 middle America"; "Tried 2 Move 2 the city 2 find myself". Both quests have been subsumed by capital's need to valorize itself -- the pursuit of self-actualization and the pursuit of "environmentally friendly" transportation alternatives are both subsidiaries of the pursuit of sustainable profit, and both can be understood best through the figure of an animal that is gratefully to be deprived of a natural ecosystem and instead eager to thank the forces that have decentered its subjectivity and disrupted its traditional approach to living.
Carles has been considering such matters across a series of several related posts, in which he recurs to the same adages, often emblazoned on images purloined from our collective cultural consciousness of representative pop icons or avatars of our everyday life in all its curious contingency and technological mediation: "Goodnite world" and "Sad/Dead on the inside". Both of these elliptical aphorisms appear in the post under consideration in this exegesis, appropriately enough at the end, after Carles has contemplated the displaced, ecologically homeless polar bear as a metonym for the eventuality of environmental disaster on a truly global scale.
How do these adages relate dialectically? Is the end of the world a reflection of the evacuation of the individual human soul or a consequence of its voiding? Metaphysical death and the end of depth psychology: must these inevitably prompt eschatological prophesizing in an ecumenical, environmental vein? Carles tests this dialectic in the voice of the bear, a creature he imagines to be irrevocably doomed already on account of human negligence:
Nothing can save our Earth/world/environment/societyThe implication, Carles suggests, is that these two statements are at once identical propositions, a tautology. But could they cancel one another out? Could apathy toward the world's fate assuage the absurd existential condition of soullessness and materialist determinism?
It doesn't matter what I do with my life
Carles traces in images the polar bear's fictitious journey as depicted in a hybrid-auto (itself a figure for biopower in the post-Fordist economy) commercial, using captions to parody the typical Western youth's quest for personal meaning: "H8 middle America"; "Tried 2 Move 2 the city 2 find myself". Both quests have been subsumed by capital's need to valorize itself -- the pursuit of self-actualization and the pursuit of "environmentally friendly" transportation alternatives are both subsidiaries of the pursuit of sustainable profit, and both can be understood best through the figure of an animal that is gratefully to be deprived of a natural ecosystem and instead eager to thank the forces that have decentered its subjectivity and disrupted its traditional approach to living.
Anyways, eventually got to that bro's houseSo it is with the working classes, which have been given an endless number of compensatory blandishments and distracting struggles to prevent them from "killing" the "dude" -- aka the Man -- aka global capitalism. As Carles sagely notes, "Humans are kinda lame."
and hugged him
Dude thought I was gonna kill him
but I was like 'no bro--thnx 4 buying a hybrid. U saved my life.'
Saturday, November 6, 2010
5 November 2010: "Which costumes deserve 2 win the HRO Halloween Costume Contest?"
This post is about geist. A specter is haunting Carles, the specter of identity, the projected ghost of the self that terrifies and chases, like the phantoms of a child's cartoon which inevitably are revealed to be nothing but filmed images shining on the wall and moans and wails on a tape recording. Is that not the self in an age of hypermediation and image saturation, of inescapable identity-signification, so many gasps and screams and Munch-like reflections of oneself, deployed by capital to terrify us into further acts of spectralization, further disguises, new reflexive hauntings, new ghost chases through the mansions of our mind, searching for the real truth, the spell that will usher away the ghosts in the blinding light of the real, of the authentic...
What could be more fitting, giving these entropic conditions afflicting ontology then to put the social self's disguises against one another, to employ capital's methodology of the market to unmask itself, to set embodied memes in motion and in conflict, in a contest where to win is to lose oneself and to lose is to win a cherished distance between the interpellated identity imposed by the social factory and the lived self that exceeds the event. "Who had relevant indie costumes?" Carles asks, implying of course, the richer questions: who among us does not have a costume? Who among us dares to eschew relevance? Who can independent of independence? Is there autonomy without relevance? Is anyone independent of disguises with independence is itself a relevant costume under current relations of social production?
In posing these questions, Carles of course has in mind a canonical passage from Derrida's Specters of Marx, which he neglects to cite presumably because he expects all alert readers to have it ready-at-hand: At risk of pedantry, I will include it here nonetheless:
What could be more fitting, giving these entropic conditions afflicting ontology then to put the social self's disguises against one another, to employ capital's methodology of the market to unmask itself, to set embodied memes in motion and in conflict, in a contest where to win is to lose oneself and to lose is to win a cherished distance between the interpellated identity imposed by the social factory and the lived self that exceeds the event. "Who had relevant indie costumes?" Carles asks, implying of course, the richer questions: who among us does not have a costume? Who among us dares to eschew relevance? Who can independent of independence? Is there autonomy without relevance? Is anyone independent of disguises with independence is itself a relevant costume under current relations of social production?
In posing these questions, Carles of course has in mind a canonical passage from Derrida's Specters of Marx, which he neglects to cite presumably because he expects all alert readers to have it ready-at-hand: At risk of pedantry, I will include it here nonetheless:
to understand history, that is, the event-ness of the event, must one not ... think that the loss of the body can affect the specter itself? To the point that it is then impossible to discern between the specter and the specter of the specter, the specter searching for proper content and living effectivity?What is the ritual assumption of a costume during the Halloween holiday, itself a secularization of the spiritual holiday devoted to recognizing the saints collectively, if not a search for the appropriate specter of the specter, the search for the proper ontological content of the self, externalized and purified? Carles gets at the mystery of this search with a piquant question: "Would u rather be intimate with 'real Bethany' or 'fake Bethany'?" The implication is that there is no difference between the two: between the real and the fake is only anachrony; intimacy occurs beyond real and fake, establishing its own truth retroactively. We are always already intimate with the real, but only in retrospect, and never in the moment, in which we only see presence in all its shifting veils.
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