25 March 2011: "The End / Goodnight, bb."

This post is about fatal strategies. Every so often, Carles simulates retirement only to return to writing, enacting a kind of parody (or homage (or both)) of Beckett's famous conclusion to the The Unnamable (1949):

You must go on, that's all I know.

They're going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They're going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn't last, that still lasts? It will be I?

You must go on.

I can't go on.

You must go on.

I'll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)

It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.

You must go on.

I can't go on.

I'll go on.

Like Beckett, Carles seeks to point out the impossibility of silence when silence is construed as a form of speech. In the novel, Beckett lays radical claim to silence as the essence of his work; Carles attempts something similar, attempting to colonize the interstices of discourse, the words between words, inarticulateness itself to forward his critique of contemporary ontology and the dissolution of subjectivity into what he calls, in the terminological apparatus he has developed over a series of interventions, "alt memes."

"I feel like I have already blogged about everything and I am just a slave to boring alt memes," he announces, foregrounding the paradox of the closed set of the infinite: "everything," he implies, can be contained in the unbounded, always already unfinished form of writing, that "boring" inscription that cuts the implacable rock of interiority. But this enjoins servitude to the word, an indenture to the production of facticity, copious logorrhea, discourse that requires ever more explicative discourse, which he must feel compelled to unspool and which always inhibits us from experiencing ontological security or "fullness". "It's probably time to move on and find a real career," he remarks with despair, knowing that the "real" cannot be experienced by only pursued, and only in language, at that.

His wish to cease production of texts leads him only to seek a richer textuality, the "real", which defies silence, or is at least silence in a deeper key. A voluminous silence. We are kept at bay from a confrontation with the immanence of our phenomenological grasp of being through the suspensive medium of language which always discloses at the same time its inadequacies, its distortions, its phase shifts. But silence itself is a distortion, a textual element in an intersubjective narrative conducted by and through the culture, which will inscribe us whether or not we choose to engage in the conversation.

By problematizing the very notion of withdraw, of "exit" as an option or a modality of voice, Carles seeks to remind readers that the process of interpolation by the hegemonic ideological institutional discourses, conveyed and constituted primarily online, does not cease when we withdraw our participation. In a sense, Carles's blog continues to write itself with or without his participation.

22 March 2011: "Lord of the Pigs: Totally Alt performance artist rolls around naked with pigs in their own feces"

This post is about authentic species being. What is the cosmic destiny of the human race, and is it any different from that of, say, a cockroach or platypus? Should humans be regarded as ontologically different from animals, or is that a strictly religious conception that serves a purely propagandistic and evangelical function? Philosophers have long wrestled with such questions, focusing on metaphysical concerns like the nature and existence of the human soul in pursuit of differentiating features that could dignify humans and secure their exceptionality. For some, as scholars have noted, who "regard a purely materialistic account of the human soul unacceptable, an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul as the substantial form of the living body may appear to be an intriguing alternative. However, even if one is not afraid of the prospect of committing oneself to an apparently 'obsolete' metaphysics, developing such a commitment may not look to be a wise move after all, since upon closer inspection the doctrine may seem to be frustratingly obscure, if not directly self-contradictory."

Carles, never a stranger to obscurity and not one to let concerns about ambivalent expression and loose analytical semantics, plunges into the debate with this post, which abruptly and baldly announces, with stark language sure to inspire controversy, that

If u really think abt it
We're all pigs
being farmed [via steroids + hormones + corn]
in this modern society

Traditionally, "pig" has been used by the emergent counterculture in western societies to represent police authority, but Carles chooses to turn that on its head, depicting the porcine species as in some ways superseding authority, or eluding its totalitarian grasp. The prospect for human agency, he argues, has been so compromised by the accretion of capitalist relations of production over time that we are more or less no better than livestock, fattened hostages to the world capitalist system. That system manages to reproduce itself with no particular respect for human needs, which are far more malleable and amenable to devolution than the iron requirements of capitalism, which are as immutable as they are merciless. But as pigs, we can escape those laws, as well as the false consciousness conveyed by human perversions of language, speaking the pre-semiotic lalangue, the unspoiled language of the body: "We communicate together / Not using words but instead by rubbing our bodies together." Thus the posthuman utopian possibility can be inscribed on and through the body through the tactile medium of gestural contact, which is not subject to the symbolic manipulations which have sustained the phallologocentric regimes that have dominated human society since the invention of writing. Carles posits a postcommunicative future in which politics are subsumed by biological processes: "We don't talk about politics and global issues / Instead we snort and fart and shit." This, Carles implies, will be a more concrete socialist strategy to undermine the ever-shifting modalities of oppression and enact true democratic dialogue. "This is communism," he declares, "This is my oinkwave utopia."

Recognizing that "insignificant constructs such as 'material things', 'social status', 'financial status', and 'relationships'" only serve to mystify the capitalist order and falsely elevate the human race to an ersatz transcendence, Carles here articulates a course of radical immanence and abjection, of rejecting exalted claims for humanity and instead going "back 2 nature" in search of a fundamentally different law, a posthuman social order that embraces rhizomatic change among molecular configurations across species, enacting viral processes of deterritorialization and defeating microfascisms inherent in the humanist hegemony. As French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari declare in their seminal tract, One-Thousand Plateaus:

The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its "aparallel evolution" through to the end.

Similarly, Carles, speaking for and as this female performance artist whose photographs have prompted his excursus, advocates an aparallel evolution, a splintering of the human, an acceptance of mortality and the inevitable cannibalistic return of our substance to be conjoined to that of the collective, albeit in a possibly degraded, commercial form: "I am free, Free to live knowing that I was born 2 die and be served in a delicious BLT or perhaps some tasty BBQ sausage at a relevant SXSW Austin eatery."

But nonetheless, even this fate of being literally consumed is preferable, in Carles's view, to merely being a consumer on the terms of post-late-capitalist consumer society.

16 March 2011: "Some bro tweets abt his first 'first.' Has 'first' commenting on HIPSTER RUNOFF gone too far?"

This post is about communicative capitalism. Carles is concerned about the emptying of discourse in the public sphere, of the replacement of intentional communicative gestures with purely notional ones, utterances that merely call attention to their existence as utterances without attempting to contribute to the information commons. In this case he refers to the paradigmatic example of readers' commenting on a weblog writings not with a reasoned response but merely a spasmic denotation of having been the first to register a response.

This aggressive act of colonization attempts to transform the field of discourse into a zero-sum competitive realm of privatized property, devoid of the will to instigate collective debate or initiate an epistemological dialectics. As Carles describes this graphological declaration of hostilities:

I rushed to comment
To be the first to see the post
To metaphorically plant the flag of my nation
on the moon that is this fresh HRO post

Though Carles stops short of explicitly employing metaphors of virginity, as were often employed by the first wave of European conquerors, the phallic implications of the flag-planting remain unmistakable: such comments as "First" literally rape Carles's inscriptions and violate their denotative and connotative purity, encrusting them with intentions from another semiological orbit, so to speak.

It didn't have to be this way, as Carles himself laments. Once, it seemed that the digitization of discourse and the public sphere would lead to an instantiation of Habermas's ideal speech situation, with democratic and uncoerced participation in public debate possible for perhaps the first time on a broad and undifferentiated scale. But this implicit promise of enhanced and widely distributed networks has not been realized in praxis. The ideal speech situation has never manifested itself; instead a Hobbesean world of nasty, brutish, and short declamations has emerged: "Are comments still an important, unique aspect of the blogosphere?" Carles asks, "or is it just where 'trolls and cowards lurk' to say mean things abt artists and relevant humans who are contributing something real 2 the world?" The answer is a foregone conclusion of course; that is to say, it is always already both. The utopian promise of uniqueness contains within it the unrevokable license for cowardliness and belligerence. With regard to "contributions to the world," it confronts the real with the Real. Human "relevance," Carles suggests, can be reduced to the effort to announce one's being and claim territory before one is denied the metaphysical space to breathe. All else is just "down the shitter," in Carles's terminology, meaning that it is no better than scatological ejaculations or the noises of flatulence.

So what is the status of the "Blog Theory" to which Carles obliquely calls his readers' attention? It seems likely that this is a reference to the 2010 work by political theorist Jodi Dean entitled: "Blog Theory: Feedback and capture in the circuits of drive." Clearly the repetitive cycle of claiming commenting priority is a manifestation of the circuit of drive, a return that masquerades as a way forward, an irresistible yet pointless impulsivity rooted in seemingly meaningless gestures that nonetheless raise the stakes of subjectivity. Carles expresses drive in this post in terms of spiritual possession: "something inside of me took over." It is too facile to label this something the unconscious; more likely it is the embedded subjectivity of the online medium itself that inhabits users as they attempt to seize its functionality. That is to say, the medium itself structures subjects as "firstwavers" cognizant only of reacting, of having their twitches monitored and transmitted through the global nervous system of the internet. They are neurons that only know how to fire, their creative expressive capacity nullified. Thus they are compelled to communciate but incapable of speaking anything other than their own priority. Narcissism degree zero.

7 March 2011: "We are living in a world where Subway is more ubiquitous than McDonalds."

This post is about envisioning real utopias. Utopian thinking, as many on the Left have recently argued, is a necessary preliminary to broadening the political imaginary of progressives and others engaged in the fight for broader social justice. Utopias establish the contours of the alternative, delimiting the possible by redrawing the boundaries of the impossible, allowing for a re-visioning of the scope of political praxis and a modulation of what goals are to be considered "reasonable."

As a thinker engaged in theorizing a more egalitarian distribution of the cultural and material wealth of Western society as it has emerged in the so-called "information age," Carles naturally has a great deal to say on the question of what constitutes a utopia, and where the horizon of the communist hypothesis, as French Maoist Alain Badiou has termed it, should be fixed relative to the everyday lives and struggles of those merely casually engaged in the possibility of political change. Fred Jameson has noted that "the Utopian impulse ... is profoundly economic, and that everything in it, from the transformation of personal relations to that of production, of possession, of life itself, constitutes the attempt to imagine the life of a different mode of production, that is to say, of a different economic system."

Carles implicitly draws on this thesis, illustrating it by contrasting two fundamentally differing modes of production and reproduction of the laboring classes within a characteristic, if not the paradigmatic, service industry of the late capitalist period, namely the fast-food restaurant. Carles even calls fast-food dining "the only 'shared human experience' that we can use 2 relate 2 other humans."

On the one hand McDonald's, with its emphasis on fried food and "super sized" portions; on the other Subway, with its toasted sandwiches and relatively unprocessed vegetable toppings. In Subway's rise -- surpassing the once mighty McDonald's in number of worldwide locations -- Carles suggests that we see the rudiments of an emerging alternative, an economic order that stresses flexibility and opportunism in order to subsume more and more of quotidian experience to the all-encompassing ubiquity of the sandwich, an emblematic meal form of an accelerationist culture. This model stresses post-Fordist values of convenience and speed over other potential consumption goals, even somatic satisfaction, and produces an effective redundancy of options, an overdetermination of dining habits:

So many Subways in my local area
that whenever I am craving a sandwich
it just seems more cost + time effective 2 go 2 my local Subway
which is located 'just around the corner'
potentially inside of a gas station
inside of a Walmart

The "ubiquity" of Subway -- the word is critical to Carles's analysis, such that he leads the essay with its dictionary definition -- produces the subject's cravings, manufactures the desire for that which already exists in overabundance. In this way, debased utopias are forged, retrofitting existing surpluses that inefficiently serve the purposes of capitalist accumulation to a consumerist fantasy about easy access to what one longs for. That Subway promotes itself as a healthy alternative only attenuates the fantasy further. The chain promises longevity and convenience, as though they were mutually reinforcing, as if the time saved through hectic consumerism were to be added on to one's life expectancy. Carles coins a clever name for this particular utopian vision: "plausible 'over-expansion.'" The crises of overproduction that have threatened capitalism since the late 20th century are magically waved away.

But another discursive label for this phenomenon has been circulating in leftist circles. Subway presents itself, Carles seems to suggest, as what Erik Olin Wright has dubbed, somewhat oxymoronically, a "real Utopia," which Wright defines as "utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change." That Subway can vanquish McDonald's and promote healthful convenience would seem a really existing manifestation of progressive politics in action, of solidarity manifesting itself spontaneously:

Taking a step back
And thinking abt what we have in common with other humans
What common ground we have with ppl from all over the world
Ppl who are poor, rich, middle class, uneducated, black, white, Chinese, etc.

The only thing we share
is the low price consumer experience

But as Carles is quick to insist, we must not be taken in by the consumerist ruse and blind ourselves to the labor realities that underwrite this ersatz real utopia.

Subway couldn't do this without the little people
The Sandwich artists who come into work every day
and resentfully make your sandwich 4 u
and h8 u for asking for 'a little bit more spinach/lettuce'

Carles adroitly suggests that "little people" are at once "artists," demonstrating the way post-Fordist labor arrangements are such that workers are often "paid" in flattering titles rather than wages, and of course this leads to mounting rage, as the proletariat is pitted against itself, fictitiously split into laborers and consumers. This divide-and-conquer strategy, by which proles vent their frustration on each other in bouts of consumer petulance over allegedly negligent service from their fellow comrades exhausted by inhumane demands made by capitalist bosses, exposes the true divisions underlying the false consumerist unity.

So it is that we are confronted with a dialectical movement that meets "our own version of sandwichian utopia" promising "more consumer freedom than ever" and the capability "to customize our own version of reality" with the antithesis of exploitation, suffering, alienation, belittlement and ignominy in the workplace experience in which one must ask whether "the ppl who work at Subway 'complete ass holes' or just modern slaves?."

"Our own version of fast food Subway has liberated us," Carles declares ironically, for it is a false freedom, a real utopia that is in fact an underground train to hell.