22 February 2011: "Are Crusties the most authentic alts in the world?"

This post is about Seinsgläubigkeit. In his ceaseless quest for the negation of the negation, Carles interrogates an emergent anticapitalistic movement gaining a foothold in the interstices of Western commercial culture, at the literal heart of post-Fordist neoliberalism and yet at once on the margins of that political problematic's normative tenets, flourishing in the proverbial dung heaps of a wasteful and inefficient bourgeois society that presents itself as the telos of rationalistic and bureaucratic efficiency. There are so many paradoxes spuriously generated by the discourse and praxis of "crusties", and Carles is at pains to investigate them with unstinting methodological thoroughness. "They don't really know what alt relevancy is but at the same time they don't want 'relevancy'," Carles notes, indicating the slippage in the language used to characterize the movement, if this anarchic grab bag of countercultural gestures and parasitic acts of resistance indeed constitutes one. "What do they want out of life?" he asks, hinting that twant they want is to be "out of life" -- removed from a merely ontic level of being, an impossible wish that Carles suggests is self-negating.

Carles imagines the self-definition of a "crustie" as functioning as a typological poesis for his tactic of atavistic volunteerism: "I am a human/ Hunting and gathering for food." This spurious recourse to an ersatz natural law is intended to underwrite an originalist ontology, a theory of authenticity through a bold rearticulation of supposed first principles traced to the early prehistory of human social formations. At the same time, crusties posit a mode of nongendered being beyond the biological constraints of the species: "Crust kids are not homosexual or heterosexual. They are pansexual, omnisexual, metasexual, and pre-trans-sexual." In other words, they can imagine that they reproduce their specific mode of being without recourse to the traditional modes of sexual generation.

Evoking Plato's oft-cited allegory of the cave, Carles posits that the crusties believe this simultaneous retrogression/transgression admits adherents to their movement to a closer connection to an ideal world of forms, permits them to see the Real without mediation:

While we both live in the same world
I see a world
completely different than the 1 u r trapped in
You think 'being alt' means reading the internet every day
I don't know what 'alt' even is, I am just me

Whereas ordinary individuals, living according to established and accepted mores and accommodating themselves to the status quo, mediating their subjectivity through the dominant forms of communication (i.e. the protocols of the Internet), are trapped within ideology, crusties shatter ideology and transcend the categories of contingency imposed on being that are necessitated by the failure to reject historically given constraints. Cares walks us through a series of studied contrasts ("I see some sort of weird grave / pile of crap; U see ur dream home) to indicate the rigidity of crustie thought and the vulgarness of their dialectic, incapable of rising above crude and basic oppositions.

Crusties imagine they are "just" themselves, with their being immediately and reflexively given to themselves and their consciousnesses rather than constituting, as Carles seems to suspect it must, a phenomenological problem whose solutions unfold necessarily through lived time and sustained negativity. "Maybe the crust kids are 'truly living'..." Carles offers, with more than a small trace of ironic condescension, inverting the implied belief of the crusties that "we don't get U". They are only too easy to "get," in that they have attempted to elevate being into a kind of privileged spiritual belonging denoted by the lack of material belongings.

Of course, Carles is hardly the first philosopher to meet a transcendentalized posture of authenticity with immanent critique. In The Jargon of Authenticity, German philosopher and aesthetician Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno also assailed the essentialist cant of the postwar existentialist movement and its pretenses to a privileged access to being through a modality of voluntary simplicity, along the lines of the Süddeutsche peasantry Heidegger was prone to romanticize. Clearly Carles has this passage of Adorno's in mind: "In mystical heresy, the unsatisfiable purification of the divine from myth, which loves to tremble in the gesture of deeply involved questioning, hands the divine over to whoever relates to it in any way." The philosophical attempts to elevate an essentially ineffable authenticity to the basis of real ontological as opposed to ontic status are untenable mystifications liable to warrant the institution of more openly fascistic forms of social organization. (As Adorno points out, "the worst atrocities in the concentration camps were committed by the younger sons of farmers.")

The crusties, similarly, imagine they have left the merely ontic behind -- the concerns over degrees of "alt"-ness, to name one prominent concern in Carles's weltanschauung -- and entered into a privileged state that justifies cruelty and exploitation: "The Crust Kids don't care abt ur mainstream or altstream judgment," Carles notes. They have instead instituted a quasi-radical transvaluation of all values, parodic of the Christian dispensation, in which eating the refuse and garbage of the lowest capitalist classes (the food in the dumpsters of fast-food restaurants, in this case) is indicative of spiritual purity and fitness to dictate ethics to the rest of the world. They posture as being homeless, but at the same time more at home with dasein. But as Adorno writes, "The Being of the sheltering space of shelteredness is simply derived from the necessity that man should 'make for himself' such a space."

Carles, by suggesting the crusties are "the most authentic alts" is short circuiting their self-presentation at the level of a juxtaposition of jargon, crashing terminology from incompatible ideologies -- "authentic" and "alt". The former belongs to a lapsed, anachronistic Heideggerianism; the latter to the post-Fordist elaboration of flexible and ostentatious performed lifestyles. The work of the latter is the negation of the former; the former is the alibi for the latter; each cancels out the other, leaving an aporic void, a signifying vacuum into which the crusties will inevitably disappear. Authenticity collapses on itself, into pure alterity, such that the most authentic among us must necessarily be a stranger most of all to herself.

4 February 2011: "Will the Egyptian D.I.Y. helmet become a relevant alt fashion trend in 2k11?"

This post is about the event. Though obviously well-informed and more than merely capable of weighing in on a wide range of problematics as they erupt and emerge in the course of events and practices in the fraught nexus of everyday life, Carles is typically wary of entering into international political debates, preferring to hew to the concerns of speculative philosophy, technology, and applied aesthetics. As he admits in this post on the revolution under way in Egypt, "I am not really familiar with issues that exist in the real world (especially the non American suburban Arab world), mainly just alt issues that exist on the internet." Nonetheless, recent developments in the Mediterranean region has prompted Carles to end his silence on the questions confronting the multitudes in the global South, many of which are only now confronting the postcolonial legacy left in the wake of easing of Cold War tensions.

Carles frames his analysis in terms of the ad hoc safety procedures developed spontaneously by participants in the protests in Egypt: "the #1 meme of the riots has been the zany helmets that protesters are wearing in order 2 protect themselves from bricks / bullets / bombs / miscellaneous projectiles," he observes, pointing out the effects that real-time mediatization is having on the nascent protests in situ, namely that protesters are brought to a reflexive awareness of themselves as such. Much has been written and said about the degree to which internet technologies have contributed to the techniques and tactics of organizing and implementing dissent; Carles, by highlighting the centrality of the "meme" to organic revolutionary praxis, importantly raises awareness of the specific forms of commodification by which political resistance can pass virally and nodally throughout social networks. The immaterial laboring of the global masses has fused the general intellect into a fearsome entity for destabilizing moribund regimes. The power of protest belongs to the commons regardless of the corporatized means by which that power adapts itself in its flows. The outraged, improvisational spirit of the Arab street, Carles believes, will initiate "a relevant alt trend that sweeps thru the Eastern world, and eventually hits the west by storm."

As Gramsci recognized in his seminal Prison Notebooks: "All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals ... The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists therefore in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that the muscular-nervous effort itself, in so far as it is an element of a general practical activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world." Thus by wearing their humble yet inspiring helmets to enter into the great struggle against tyranny and capital, these ordinary yet extraordinary anonymous Egyptians place their names alongside the great insurrectionists of history.

And so it is that Carles issues a stern challenge to the muscular-nervous efforts of his readers in the West: "Have yall ever 'raged against the machine' in alt diy art & craft helmets?" The message: Do not be content to sit on the sidelines; seek solidarity with the global protest of the multitude. Carles urges that his readers harness the power of the collective innovation processes on display in the assemblage of images he has presented. He also warns subtly that we should not be anything but unflinching in our willingness to critique the protesters themselves in order to hone their dialectics for the coming struggle with counterrevolutionaries and other atavistic hangers-on of the now-deposed regime. In the most pertinent example, Carles admonishes a protester who bears only a cardboard box for protection: "Entry level cardboard box over head bro. Dude needs 2 step it up." One cannot bring a proverbial knife to a gun fight. One need not even cite Lenin's corpus for the innumerable exhortations of preparedness on this point. Carles wants to make sure that, with the eyes of the world fixed once again on the possibility of political change instigated from "below," no one forgets this important truth: The revolution has no entry level.