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:

Nothing can save our Earth/world/environment/society
It doesn't matter what I do with my life

The 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?

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 house
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.'

So 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."