7 December 2010: "Tired of being a blog that blogs abt worthless alt shit"

This post is about TK. Carles has long seemed haunted by the last of Wittgenstein's basic propositions in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." Carles has felt compelled to produce more and more discourse, to be a "blog worth blogging about" and create a feedback loop of language creating more labguage to explain it, which in turn requires more language, and so on, ad infinitum. Now he is ready to kick away the ladder of Hipster Runoff and enjoin us all to regard it as nonsense -- necessary nonsense for us to climb to whatever understanding of the "alt" world he has managed to bequeath us, but nonsense nonetheless.

However, is it possible to bring this spiral to a halt without surrendering whatever tenuous advances one has managed to eke out in illuminating the dark corners of the social problematic? In Carles's case, does a self-imposed silence mean a loss of the definitions and taxonomies he has established with regard to "alt" and "mainstream" that he long labored to elucidate and disseminate? Is his Wittgensteinian posture an elaborate bluff, a last-ditch attempt to rescue his labors before historical processes invalidate them? That is, is Carles rejecting historiography itself? "Maybe the indiesphere doesn't need me anymore," he frets in a fit of Spenglerian dismay. "No longer 'progressive'... 'the same shit' ovr and ovr again." Later, he adds "who cares about 'evolving' as a human" -- rejecting a teleological, Hegelian vision of history in favor of a more strictly Darwinian view, which regards evolution not as progress but entropic change.

Carles's position appears to be that his silence, like God's, will be more eloquent than any words he might contribute to the burgeoning informatic sphere. But though he emulates the divine deity even to the point at which he can transcend the temporal realm and declare "time is bullshit", he must also admit his mortality, which also makes all utterance absurd and overdetermines his mutedness. "Just going to die anyways / Going to be forgotten."

Perhaps the definitions can no longer cohere; progress, in Carles's view, has been supplanted by inescapable decline. It is no longer possible to distinguish sense from nonsense, as Wittgenstein had hoped. "No reason to blog," he suggests in the face of such perpetual provisionality. He even goes so far as to relate the breakdown of the structural, phonemetical components of language itself:

HRO blows
blog, tweet, hits
blah blah blah

In the place of signifiers and signifieds we have glossolalia, helpless babble recoiling from the mighty truth function.