11 May 2011: "Is Osama Bin Laden's son Omar an 'alt Arab'?"

This post is about lateral surveillance. Carles adopts as a problematic the subjectivity of the abject, the unassimilatable content that conditions the contours of the possible. What are the alternatives to biological identity, and what instantiates them? What are the necessary preconditions to posit an identity beyond identity, a "personal brand" that trades in the interlocking circuits of global networks and whose intersubjective nature is bound up with the constituitive properties of markers and capitalist imperatives? Does this constitute a true collective subjectivity or is this an introjection into disciplinary networks of flows and intensities that preclude the possibility of autonomy? As Carles frames his concerns at the conclusion (as always it is imperative to investigate Carles's texts with many synchronic approaches): "Without 'American ideas', can u form any sort of relevant iteration of 'alternative' and apply it 2 ur personal brand?" Has American-style neoliberalism precluded the formation of difference except as it is determined and contained by the networked systems of mediation it has fomented and inculcated subjects with? Or is there a relevant iteration that cracks the real abstraction of "alternative" and reopens the category to reconfiguration along the lines of a newly emerging political formation? If we make the effort to reconceive relevant alternatives, will they be identified as such or will they merely be indexed to our budding projects of self-valorization within neoliberalism?

In short Carles is concerned with the epistemological category of the individual as it has been developed within Judeo-Christian society and capitalism as an ecumenical form, which is why he focuses in this essay on Omar Binladen, the son of Osama bin Laden, who, until his assassination, was an outspoken foe of "weak" forms of Western subjectivity and favored a fundamentalist strain of Islam as a mode of mediating and controlling knowledge of the self and presenting "relevant alternatives" outside the American paradigm. But as Carles is quick to point out, his father's views did not protect Omar from being interpellated as a Western subject of brand-driven fashion and entertainment consumerism. Carles asks, "Will Omar ever be able 2 build his own personal brand instead of just being 'Osama's son'?" That is, can the formation of a personal brand exist outside the context of global terrorism? Is the "personal" always already terroristic?

Carles theorizes that this overdetermined subjectivation was driven in part by paternal absence:

Omar probably developed an alternative point-of-view to help him deal with his father being so absent in his life. He had to resort to 'consumerism' 2 buy his needs with terrorist-network money that his dad left in his bank account to buy Calvin Klein t-shirts and go on 'sick benders' in Qatar.

Carles chooses his words carefully in this passage. First, he qualifies the absent father with the intensifier "so", highlighting that absent/present is not experienced by the psyche in formative flux as a simple dichotomy but as a condition inflected by temporality. The void has degrees; the disordered subject measures the unmeasurable, posits impossible meliorations, justifies by these same degrees the evacuation that the id cannot forgive but that the ego must.

Also, Carles invokes a phenomenology that permits alternating "points-of-view" to coexist within consciousness, suggesting that sense perceptions are always already dual, or twinned, contextualized by emotionality as they are apprehended, preformatted as it were by psychic requirements, which must not be mistaken for "needs." Carles reminds us that the problematized subject must "buy his needs" rather than the means to gratify them; that is, needs follow the means of satisfaction and are posited retroactively as having been necessary, in accordance with what has been objectively accessible and normalized according to a given sociocultural positionality. Needs are not biological or physiological, as Baudrillard long ago taught us. They are structural and appear as an effect of being interpolated into the system of signification, not as an autonomous compass for directing the evolution of said system.

Lastly Carles implicit accuses Osama Bin Laden, notorious for developing terrorism on the basis of a globalized network organized by the principles of cellular automata, of a kind of psychic filicide, or at least a filial terrorism by supplying funds to his son to facilitate his insertion into the very system of consumerism he vilified and sought to disrupt. Consumerism and terrorism are revealed as co-existent on the same axis (as Carles's use of the verb "resort" archly reinforces), as a "sick bender" of overindulgence, of being engorged with fantasies of mass signification, of unignorable signaling through bodily praxis, through manipulation of the signs and resources made available by the operations of Western capitalism. Funds speny on consumerism to buy branded goods is no different, Carles suggests, from money spent on more overtly terroristic actions, only the medium through which the terror is disseminated is inflected in such a case by reflexive self-consciousness -- spread not through depictions of explosions on mass-media channels but in moments of self-doubt triggered by invidious comparisons within the ordinary course of everyday life, which through consumerism becomes a protracted slow-motion terrorist event. Osama bin Laden used his own son to spread this particular psycho-active poison, employing him against his conscious wishes as an epidemiological agent spreading the virus of brand consumerism, which reinscribes the weakness Osama bin Laden located at the heart of the Western liberal project, and its goals of replacing obedience with individual liberty in the service of self-determination.

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.

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.

26 January 2011: "Episode 5 - Blogxistentialism: Why Do Blogs Blog?"

This post is about lalangue. What is language? Carles adds a markedly multimedia dimension to his philosophical pursuits by incorporating a voice recording. putatively of his own voice, into his weblog. Writing of the voice, French poststructuralist critic Roland Barthes wrote famously about "the grain of the voice" -- "the very precise space (genre) of the encounter between a language and a voice ... at the level of which, I believe, the temptation of ethos can be liquidated." That is, the tension between the speaker and what he speaks bears a audible material trace. I would like to propose that it is that paradoxically diachronic "space," and not the specific content of Carles's ruminations, that he wishes to convey in his audio recordings, of which a mere five-second fragment is sufficient to convey the entirely of their incalculable import.

In the inscribed text supplied to supplement/supplant the audio text, readers are told of Carles's intention to "explore blogxistentialism," a portmanteau word formed from combining weblog and existentialism, the Heideggerian-derived philosophy of being espoused most prominently by Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism, in its vulgar form, was preoccupied with the absurdity of existence in the face of radical freedom, a critique that Carles extends to communication in the emerging techno-informational sphere. "Why does HIPSTER RUNOFF even exist?" he asks searchingly, leaving unmentioned the corollary question of in what sense Hipster Runoff can be said to exist -- that is, how best to describe the ontological status of indeterminate expression, the irony of the intertextuality of all texts, even those which manifest themselves as a mockery of speech. Is a blog both being-for-itself and being-in-itself, or rather is its immanence imbued with fatal contingencies?

As Heidegger himself declared, "In the present context of an existential analytic of factical Da-sein, the question arises whether the way of the giving of the I which we mentioned discloses Da-sein in its everydayness, if it discloses it at all." The same could be asked of Carles, if, in fact, Carles is not always already posing this interrogatory to himself whenever he attempts textual inscription or speech acts or the simultaneous balance of the two, as in this post with its admixture of media. Can blogs even be said to have lived, let alone die? What is the nature of the subject disclosed in positing such existence to mercurial text? Heidegger states that "Initially the who of Da-sein is not only a problem ontologically, it also remains concealed ontically" — a critical and too frequently overlooked distinction. "Why do blogs keep blogging?" Carles asks, similarly masking the agency of a subjective consciousness through a distinction with a difference, and attributing creation to the medium itself. This posits the deeper question, why do we all continue existing? What makes being keep being?

Carles implies an answer in the image he has selected, that of a newborn human child in the arms of its mother, an apt metaphor for the "body of text" Carles intends to convey. Is it an intimate scene of bonding, or a depiction of the traumatic wrenching of the (brain)child from the womb? Of course, it is both. It evinces the life process as a modality of the reproduction of existing conditions of reality, as process of biological communication between generations not unlike the conceptual heredity experienced by successive generations of artists, poets, writers, thinkers, etc. Carles asks, "Why do humans start blogs?" Well, why do humans have children. "Why does HIPSTER RUNOFF even exist, and what do u even want from blogs?" It is simply the reproduction of society by different means, through the flesh and the word, or the word made digital flesh. "Are blogs dying?" Yes, but everything then dies; there is no cure for mortality.

This should not discourage us from the effort to communicate, or prompt a fatal return to nonsemantic communication, to seek refuge (refuse?) in the gurgling baby talk of the lalangue, as Carles's photo selection warns us against. In that route of seeking an authentic means of presence in pure lingual language itself lies only a deeper awareness of our intrinsic connection not to the mother in her pangs of birthing but to the grim reaper who will lay waste to all our words, recorded or spoken, written or blogged.

6 January 2011: "The Art of the Sympathy Meme: Going from Homeless 2 Viral"

This post is about unheimlichkeit. What does it mean to have a home, Carles wonders in a lengthy disquisition about the sudden prominence of a homeless man named, curiously enough, Ted Williams, who once worked in the media as an announcer being returned to the kleig lights' glare as a human-interest story on account of his eloquent immiseration. In what ways is this man's plight representative of the soul's quest for its ultimate home, on the plane of ideal forms? What kind of eloquence, what pitch of our profane voice will open heaven's gates? Carles suspects the voice in our hearts speaks the crabbed language of guilt, and regards the internet as an enormous conspiracy to liberate us from that Schuldgefühl, which once purified our souls and prepared them for a religiously inspired afterlife:

The truth is most people who are 'successful' in a middle class way feel a little bit guilty that they have more than others. Usually, they can find some sort of release by 'going to church' or maybe 'dropping off some old clothes / canned goods at a local donation station', but in the modern world, you don't have to 'share' anything more than a hyperlink/video embed.

In the contemporary Lebenswelt, Carles suggests, mediated network proliferation has replaced the decidedly low-tech modes of networking facilitated by ecclesiastical organization. "Seems like every major network 'wanted a piece of him,' " Carles notes slyly, gesturing toward the threat implicit in the homeless man's rise to symbolic stature as a "meme" of symapthetic piety. "I feel like a better person now that I have 'shared' Ted Williams with u," he declares, suggesting the means by which sentimental recognitions can be activated within technologically empowered and engridded rhizomes to amplify the interpolated self's recognition of itself and suffuse that reflexivity with mediated pleasure. The misery of others can thereby be translated into onanistic self-enjoyment with ecumenical overtones, as well as therapeutic undertones. The care of the self, by means of sensitivity to the suffering of others, albeit at a safe, digitized protective distance. And in the meantime, actual carework remains deficient and underincentivized in networked capitalism; the simulacrum of caring and the broadcast of that simulation is much more rewarding and lucrative, both for the media companies that control the networks and for the personal brands involved in making idea "viral."

Carles dramatizes this process of mediatization of affective labor:

His sign claimed that he had a 'golden radio voice', so I offered him a Taco Bell taco in exchange for a few lines. He delivered. I took out my camera and asked him to re-create the process

Thus the man's suffering -- already made metonymic with his unlikely voice -- is monetized, rendered into currency, made fungible, readily replicable through being recorded. Like all exploited workers under capitalism, in order to live, to eat even the degraded and indifferent victuals manufactured by corporate food-service concerns like Taco Bell, one must enact and embrace one's suffering, perform it repeatedly as ordered.

The rapid and secular transmission of such homiletic anecdotes has, of course, upended the hierarchy by which religion once monitored and disciplined wayward souls and established the presence of the divine within them, as Paul declared in this passage from Ephesians, to which Carles delicately alludes:

That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.

This injunction to know the divine as a kind of in-filling of grace, as a recognition that "passeth knowledge," may be metaphorically understood as that feeling of being "at home" without having to seek it, a kind of reflexive certainty that descends upon one.

The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud famously discussed this feeling and secularized it entirely in his essay on the Uncanny, transforming it into a fleeting awareness of unconscious impulses rather than the intimations of the divine at work in humble aspects of the quotidian. Freud chooses to focus on "ingeniously constructed dolls and automata" as one particular instanciation of the uncanny. What is Ted Williams, once he begins to perform his suffering, but one such automaton, and what is the viral spread of his performance but an attempt to disavow, through sheer ubiquity, the uncanniness of his misery? Because in his homelessness he invokes our own existential condition, our mortality, our lack of certainty about our destiny, our lack of self-understanding, which we systematically deny with material comforts.

Freud notes the uncanniness of the "unintended repetition" but Carles demonstrates here how it has spread to compelled, then uncontrollable, repetitions: "What if I told u that I had a solution 2 end homelessness?
Let's help homeless people go viral."
What Carles hints at here is how homelessness itself is the result of viral dissemination, which spreads the uncanniness of repetition mechanically and overwhelmingly, the tools for the replication in all of our hands yet none of us seemingly responsible for making a meme too much present. Homelessness everywhere, even in the heart of our homes, even in our hearts themselves.

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.

24 November 2010: "Pitchfork continues negrofication, reviews albums by Rihanna + some other black grl"

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.

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.

"Life is all about numbers."
-probably some smart person / business person / mathematician

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:

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'
creating 'even more backlash' [via hits] for the Pitchforks
But also
It might get 'rlly boring'
And no1 will even care any more

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:

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 heard

The 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.

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.

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."

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:

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.

27 October 2010: "Unruly Teens are starting to die/overdose from drinking Four Loko"

This post is about the convocated precariat. Like many of his contemporaries, Carles has felt it necessary to make a public intervention on his web-based publication on the subject of caffeinated alcoholic products. His verdict: it is the latest offensive on the part of capital to squeeze productivity out of an overstretched, globalized (and demoralized) workforce by normalizing the acceleration of lived experience, associating the dizziness of transnational capital and mandated employee flexibility with the intoxication of cheap malt-liquor beverages: "Really helps out ppl in today's fast paced world". Such beverages serve a narcotizing function as well as a disciplinary one, fetishizing speed and oblivion, or rather speeding toward oblivion, thus mimicking, one must note with some irony, the careening, chaotic course of the entire mechanism of capitalism.

Neoliberalism, Carles, suggests, seems to have backed itself into a corner by rendering the lives of the various underclasses, from the banlieues of France to the shanty towns of Lagos to the ghettos of American cities such as New York and Chicago, impoverished beneath the level at which they can be successfully exploited, while systematically stripping away aspects of the welfare state that would have serve to facilitate the reproduction of their exploitable labor power. "Do u think they were 'weak' cuz they couldn't handle Four Loko?" Carles asks mockingly. Of course they were not. The precariat, to use a convenient neologism recently coined by Leftist critics of post-Fordist labor practices and neoliberal tenets of governance, were already weakened by their socioeconomic conditions and their distanciation from the state as such, which has denatured them as a class even as it has concentrated them in dismaying and unconscionable circumstances of immiseration.

Carles seems to have in mind Spinoza's ethical injunction toward self-preservation and its fundamental expression of the irresolvable tensions between the individual and the collective, the subjectivity demanded by the state and the degree to which that is experienced as a "care of the self" rather than a form of biopolitical repression: Spinoza writes in the Ethics:

Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it demands that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage, what is really useful to him, want what will really lead man to a greater perfection, and absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can. This, indeed, is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part.

But can a community, particularly one fabricated by institutional distress or neglect, constitute a One, an entity that can pursue its own self-preservation with one mind and one will? Is the mass unified or several? Can it be psychologized as an individual, with an individual's liability to certain addictive pathologies? How does that affect the possibilities for liberatory intersubjectivity?

The makers of the liberating/enslaving alcoholic beverage, Carles believes, acknowledges the conundrum: "'we can't control whatever the eff they do.'" This even as the popularity of the beverage implies a conformity, a mutual recognition, albeit a distorted one, of interest. But is this simply a refutation of rhizomatic organizations of resistance, a reterritorialization of assemblages of addiction? More importantly, can the consumption of intoxication substances be understood as a subtraction, a specifically political praxis of nonengagement and the substitution of pleasure for the more traditional goals of power?

Carles reconceptualizes the problematic with a deceptively simple question: "Is Four Loko for tweens and minorities?" Carles asks -- for precisely the marginalized and disenfranchised? The implication, I believe is obvious. The biopolitics of reproducing flexible labor demands a facility with abstracted pleasures, with paradoxically blank yet hyperaware states, conditions of frantic passive activity. "Should u just do tons of blow and drink rubbing alcohol instead of doing Four Loko?" Carles asks, to indicate that there is, in fact, no alternative. We will experience the false euphoria of hedonic self-abnegation; we will replenish ourselves for alienated labor through alienated joy. We will march singly as one. In one way or another, Loko is something we are all forced to consume.

26 October 2010: "OP-ED: Snacks the Cat is tired of vibes being harshed"

This post is about the struggle for recognition. In this trenchant yet poignant interrogation of the discontents of intersubjectivity in a socioeconomic matrix given to interpellating individuals in isolation and shaping and delimiting consciousness with the so-called rational prerogatives of pure self-interest, Carles draws on the work of Axel Honneth, a follower of German social theorist Jürgen Habermas, to explore the consequences of neglect in social relations of structured care. Challenging the species-ist assumptions of many traditional moralists, Carles elects to pursue his ethical inquiry by means of imagining himself as a domesticated feline more or less abandoned in a caged world and presented with no justification for the improvisational Geworfenheit on which the animal finds he must rely. "I don't get any authentic attention or love," the cat comments, a remark that ironically speaks to the human condition.

But Carles must assuredly be deploying the jargon of authenticity with an arch, critical purpose. As Adorno wrote of fascistic uses of such verbiage,

the sacred quality of the authentics' talk belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where -- for temporary lack of any other available authority -- its language resemble s the Christian. Prior to any consideration of particular content, this language molds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal.

Thus in the circumstances Carles references, Snacks the cat enjoys no particular or immanent dasein but instead voices demands that demonstrate its utter subjection and the degree to which its thinking has been preconditioned to subservience. It is not without irony that Carles has Snacks proclaim, "I honestly don't have too much to say." The gurgled mewling of the real-life Snacks is in truth not much different from the aggrieved squeals for the master's attention that Carles narrates for the cat, which in turn, the implication appears to be, are not all that different from our own pursuits of social recognition. "Things aren't going too well and I'm not very happy," Snacks complain. Welcome to the existential club. Echoing the insights of Sartre and Camus into the absurdity of life, Snacks notes that "Maybe the point of life isn't to be happy. Maybe it is just about enduring pain & sadness."

Carles links this dissipated posture of weltschmerz and angst to a general atmosphere of social neglect and restriction cultivated by elites for whom Bethany Cosentino, as a much-heralded "alt", is representative -- an environment in which the odor of hallucinogens mixes with the branded products geared toward supplying empty calories and artifical energy ("The place smells like dank, there are empty Mountain Dew cans everywhere"). As Honneth argued,

The forms of practical maltreatment in which a person is forcibly deprived of any opportunity freely to dispose over his or her own body represent the most fundamental sort of personal degradation. This is because every attempt to gain control of a person's body against his or her will -- irrespective of the intention behind it - causes a degree of humiliation that impacts more destructively than other forms of respect on a person's practical relation-to-self.

Thus it is no surprise that Snacks's revolution takes a decidedly coprophiliac form: "Sometimes we poop everywhere just to cause trouble." A primitive attempt to reassert bodily control through fundamental acts of disobedience, but even these fail to distract a preoccupied ruling class, absorbed in its own pleasure seeking ("they just laugh at us because they are stoned").

But as Snacks turns to despair, the language of its misery are intentionally designed to evoke a far more optimistic ethical positionality. "I am cloaked in darkness," Snacks exclaims, which can only make one think of Levinas's words in Existence and Existents:

When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not 'something.' But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence.

In the absence of the master, Snacks can become one with the presence that reaches beyond the ontological. Only in the absence of presence can Snacks really be...

25 October 2010: "Taylor Swift writes song abt how John Mayer 'hit it & quit it' just 2 generate buzz"

This post is about the phallic phase. In Lacan's seminal article, "The Phallic Phase and the Subjective Import of the Castration Complex," the French psychoanalytical thought leader made an important contribution to the understanding of the development of female subjectivity, underscoring the particular peculiaraties of female psycho-ontogenesis with regard to female children's necessarily imperfect relationship to the castration complex, which for male children ushers them into the period of tentatively balanced psychic organization that allows for a self-recognition of identity. Through an analysis a representative celebrity entering an explicitly transitional phase, both biologically and in her career, Carles is concerned to investigate whether Lacan's contentions about the genital organization of infantile sexuality still hold under postmodern, highly mediated conditions in which the production of subjectivity may have escaped from the foundry of the hyperrepressive nuclear family to instead be forged by a society-wide repressive tolerance. Or, as Carles frames the question, "Now that Taylor Swift admits to <3ing peen, does this mean she is a slutwaver?"

The question is not an idle one. The phallic stage as experienced in the individual female psyche, Carles suspects, has become a culture-wide phenomenon led by female pop stars who simulate the throes of somatic dystrophy and the dissimulation of identity. Swift, Carles sagely notes, "is dealing with hornie bros who just want to 'get off' but don't really want much emotional attachments" through an barely controlled experiment in sublimation, producing a record album that ostensibly processes and distantiates her passage through the phallic stage almost a decade after the fact. Not coincidentally, the album is preoccupied with information that Swift must at once keep secret and share ("She tried to be all 'secret' about it being abt John Mayer even though the song is called "Dear John.""). The paradox that proclaims its absence everywhere is precisely the unconscious, omnipresent yet elusive, invisible but overdetermined.

It is not too much of an exaggeration to claim, as Carles seems to, that Swift's work is everywhere haunted by the phallus, and that her own artistic efforts are pantomimes of the castration complex in which she occupies the position of both subject and object. That is, the album is, as Carles explains, "abt how she is 'becoming a woman.'"

But what can this mean?  As Lacan himself notes, "The Other is not simply the locus in which truth stammers. It deserves to represent that to which woman is fundamentally related."  Can any truth be spoken about female subjectivity, and more important, can the subject identifying as a woman know anything about itself? Lacan claims women serve as the organizing void around which male metaphysical delusions can be structured: "So that the soul may come into being, woman is differentiated from it right from the beginning. She is called woman (on /a dit-femme) and defamed (difdme). The most famous (fameux) things that have come down to us about women in history are, strictly speaking, what one can say that is infamous (infamant)." Swift's destiny was always already to be defamed, and the transgressions committed against her in the public eye by various male aggressors are automatically inverted by the public so that she is recognized as the persecutor of every man's longing for transcendence and peace. She is "just another empty female" as Carles puts it, or to use Lacanian nomenclature she is "Woman barred," for "as soon as Woman is enunciated by way of a not-whole, the W cannot be written."

So it is no surprise to find Carles noting dryly, "Glad I am a bro." 

17 October 2010: "Protecting myself from society's toxic vibes [via gas mask]"

This post is about precarity. As in many of his writings, Carles is here concerned with the ways in which neoliberalism has stripped subjects of the very presumption of security as an anchoring concept around which to develop a reflexive sense of self. Instituted everywhere instead is an interpellation of subjectivity oriented toward radical flexibility, toward a certain malleable posture toward capital, a willingness to be remolded as it demands, a kind of "just-in-time" subjectivity that permits docile bodies to be adapted and embrace the various challenges capital needs them to solve in order to generate profit within the system. Such a subject has no intrinsic "needs" so much as a need to be inculcated with the needs of the moment, a deep imbrication with the processes and tempo of the fashion industry and its distribution channels.

Carles, in this post, has chosen to elaborate this thesis in response to an image of a particularly tragic case study, a youth who voluntarily dons the garb of the military industrial complex for which too many young people have been the "cannon fodder," to borrow the incendiary language of the Quebec Women’s Federation. "I must protect myself from toxic vibes," Carles imagines this figure thinking, but the thought itself already bears the trace of toxicity, or the toxic movement of the trace as it is brought to bear in the figure's epistemological reflexiveness. Can he think without adopting the toxic tropes with which neoliberalism has outfitted him, literally and figuratively, as it were? "This uniform is not 4 the sake of personal branding," he says, which is to say that is precisely what it is for, though the statement is not ironic nor sarcastic. It is the consequence of living an impossible contradiction forced upon us, to be uniform in our commitment to pursuing personal uniqueness through the detritus of mass culture and meme manufacturing.

The subject, in his wariness, fails to see the inadequancy of his protection, how that is part of the toxin delivery system. Carles hints at it in this passage:

We meet in a safe, dark environment
which has been aesthetically treated to
keep us safe

The safety is a prepackaged illusion, another contrivance that bears with it the impetus of constant flux. Carles suggests here that safety has become a form of blindness, an aesthetics of effacement, of nullification.

And for precisely this reason the figure in the photograph manifestly lacks the courage to adopt the necessary fatal strategy: "I wear this gas mask 2 stay alive in our toxic ass society," he confesses, when in truth life is simply not possible in such a society, mask or no mask. And this is to say nothing of the psychic death we all suffer from the masks we are forced to wear and exchange in such rapid succession with the gyrations of the global economy. The figure believes "I will live 4ever escaping with my bros who participate in my relevant counter-culture lifestyle", but instead voluntarily lives an undead existence, like capital itself, preying on the living impulses of others in the past and future and recapitulating it in nihilism articulated in the most trivial form: a so-called "life-style."

23 September 2010: "Is your personal brand compromised when you attend a relevant alternative event with your partner?"

This post is about interpassivity. How do the social relations we adopt/adapt function as mechanisms of control rather than agency or liberation? Can we empower ourselves autonomously to foster the kinds of relations that will not sends us careening in to the traps prepared for us by the post-Fordist economy? Are the alternatives (obviously a key term for Carles) -- the vaunted flexibility required of us by neoliberalism -- tempered and balanced by the terms of traditional intimate relationships, or does it prompt us to experience such relations as unduly constricting, as further hedges on the ersatz autonomy promised us by the prevailing regime of power? Carles frames this question with his usual adroitness:

The alternative bro is growing up
entering relationships
still into buzzbands, still into ‘being alt’
but the pressure to mainstreamify
and find a ‘partner’
yet I still have my dreams
big dreams
of being relevant, buzzworthy, blogworthy

The legacy structures of private-sphere associations here register as a burden, a dismantling of dreams rather than supplying of their underlying form. Instead of the wish to considate private recognition of the unique self, the postmodern subject seeks "buzzworthiness" -- the allure of public attention, fame, of celebrity distributed through the nodes of the networked socioeconomic matrix.

In a sense, all of Carles's writings are concerned with the same subject: the inevitable need brought on by modern society of having to bow before the reality principle and surrender aspirations of pursuing an "alt" lifestyle well beyond the confines of postadolescence. The mood expressed in this adage of Carles's: "Sorta just hope life works itself out."

In premodern social formations, this transition was not nearly as acute and traumatic, simply because few had the opportunity to conceive of an alternative to the traditional folkways in which they were by and large embedded. Few experienced the luxury of leisure time as we understand it; they were content to annihiliate their surplus hours of non-productive time in bestial pursuits: revelry, fornication, intoxication, and so on. Some of this atavistically adheres to the fabled alt lifestyle, as Carles notes: "I am the modern alternative bro. I used to attend relevant concerts with a few bros, getting fucked up, standing in the front of the stage." The frequent nods to fantasies of exchanging sexual partners reflects this as well.

Only with the advent of modernity, and capitalism's development of broad-based markets for consumer goods and its elaboration of the circuit of capital that requires workers to also be consumers -- cannibalistically feeding on the fruits of their own expropriated labour time -- does the particular problematic of the "mainstream" or the "masses" emerge, along with the temporal component of the interpellated subject's inevitable surrender to it.

It remains unclear whether Carles wishes to advocate a rear-guard action against the reality principle, or whether he sees the masses who have bowed to it as a kind of Big Other whose existence is presumed but never pinned down. Carles's many posts are often, in fact, a search for the diametrically opposed Big Other, the quest for the ultimate "alt" individual who embodies all the implications of the so-called hipster lifestyle as it is elaborated online in a variety of memes and marketing ploys. (This particular post's reference to the "Altest Couple on Earth" and his earlier explanation of his desire to find this couple typifies this aspect of his writings.) The implied existence of this ultimate "alt" -- pure alterity, the Other with an emphatically capital O -- underwrites the submission to the reality principle in fact, as well as the toleration of the unmistakable cynicism inherent to much of allegedly alternative cultural product -- "buzzbands" and so forth. Somewhere a real hipster buys into all such pabulum; in rejecting it ourselves we reconcile ourselves to the mainstream without believing our abnegation will destroy the very possibility of an alternative.