9 September 2009: "Hope and Homelessness–Never give up on Personal Branding."

This post is about the punctum. The punctum, of course, is the great theorist Roland Barthes's term for the compelling and often unintentional detail in a photograph which seizes our attention and has metonymic force. It works in opposition to what the photo seems to want to be about. Describing a photo taken at an institution, he writes, "I, in the photograph of two retarded children, hardly see the monstrous heads and pathetic profiles; ... what I see ... is the off-center detail, the little boy's huge Danton collar, the girl's finger bandage; I am a primitive, a child -- or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own."

Carles's apprehension of a photo of a homeless man prompts a similar response:

I saw this picture portraying a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. Unfortunately, he had a pee pee accident as his dark yellow urine streamed down towards the star of a celebrity. I felt tons of emotions as my brain processed this digital image. Shame. Guilt. LOLability. Snarkfactor. Sadness. AmericanBeauty. Happiness. Loneliness. Fucksocietivity. Bloggy. Alive. Dead on the inside. Alone. Without a home. Metaphorical. This is the power of photography.

In this case, the punctum is the "pee pee accident," which undermines the composition's solemnity yet testifies to the power of the image.

But Carles pushes further than Barthes, ruminating on the disappearance of the authentic punctum in the miasma of images on which we now suffocate. He can't escape the positied role is is supposed to adopt as consumer of this image, can't "dismiss all culture". Instead he is positioned into responding in a mediated way, a way already captured by the form in which our aesthetic responses now must take -- reproduction of the image online in a social network along with our anticipated commentary, which falls into one of a number of certified genres -- snark, LOL, etc.

Once an image could prompt us into recognition of the way reality escapes media capture, the meaning always exceeding our attempt to record and fix reality. But now images and the hermeneutical apparatus that attends them threaten a total preformed interpretation of all reality, a foreclosed phenomenology, and encourages us to package ourselves in likewise fashion, as predigested image, with no punctum for a perceiver to seize upon to undermine our smooth self-presentation. No more can we "dismiss all culture" in a spontaneous response to a detail; instead there is a rigid certainty that there was no "accident" -- pee pee or otherwise -- in any image we consume. The consumption itself is so patterned as to make use only of what has be predestined for our conditioned appetites.

Carles compares the "pee pee" photo with a photograph purportedly taken spontaneously by a fashion blogger, who went on to pontificate about the punctum he allegedly discovered in his image, the manner in which a homeless man managed to match his shoes with his socks. The lesson the fashion blogger draws, naturally, is that human beings' need to be stylish trumps our need for shelter. This, in his opinion, should make us "hopeful". While it is readily understandable why the fashion industry might derive hope from this -- it's ceaseless bombardment of advertising is having its effect on 21st century subjectivity -- Carles, with unmistakable sarcasm, does the service of explaining why the message for the rest of us is somewhat less optimistic: "Never give up. Every day, u have the opportunity to brand yourself–you have the opportunity to let the world know that you are a person, and within this person is a brand which the whole world can consume."

There is no longer a meaningful distinction to make between the homeless man and his photographic image -- both are manifestations of the underlying brand to which we now habitually and solely respond. And in our current socio-historical formation, we are expected to seize upon this as an "opportunity" rather than an evisceration of our species being. When Carles sardonically labels the homeless as "a group of people living in some demented reality" it hardly takes a sophisticated analysis to recognize that he is referring to ourselves, not the indigent.

Carles then condenses the message with which we are daily interpolated by the current ideological regime:

Every day, you need to take pride in yourself. You need to realize that your personal brand is being interpreted by every1 who sees you. Do you want to depress your viewers? Or do you want to inspire them? Be a valuable person–not just to yourself, but also to society as a whole.

Can we escape from this net without sacrificing our knowledge of self as subject? Can we have subjectivity in such a society as ours without adopting these "demented" standards and responsibilities? If we can, Carles is not prepared to theorize it with his current set of concepts. Instead, we have the grim sense that language itself has been corrupted, and the vocabulary to express such an idea is beyond him. He concludes, with acid irony masking a deconstructionist despair: "This is a blog post about hope."

2 September 2009: "Do teens RLLY ‘drink coffee’?"

This post is about phenomenonlogy. How do we know that our sensual perceptual phenomena reach the mind without distortion, or rather, how to track the modes of refraction that experience pass through before it reaches consciousness, let alone language, another level of refraction that far too often is mistaken for simple reflection. "I just saw a picture of a teen/tween drinking a Starbucks product, and it really confused me," Carles begins, establishing what will become a leitmotif in this masterful essay. Can the picture of reality formed in his head match the image upon which he gazes, let alone the moment of time-space the image purports to have "captured." Layers and levels of representation, a palimpsest....

The disconnect between the physiological bases for sensations and our mental representations of these sensations creates a node in which socioeconomic conjunctions can be laid like so many bear traps, forging links between potential stimuli and implications desirable to various commercial interests. Carles explains it with reference to the invention of the Starbucks brand, and its burgeoning resonance across various demographics that it helps fashion, solidify and exploit:

It seems like the ‘Starbucks revolution’ really opened the doors for tweens and coffee. It seems like they branded ‘fun, sugary sweet drinks’ for ppl who didn’t ‘get’ coffee, or for ppl whose tastebuds weren’t developed enough for coffee

It is the nascent undeveloped state of the sensory organs that allows for their systematic development and exploitation. Starbucks and other lifestyle brands the purport to sell commodities are in fact in the business of strip-mining the senses of the young and building in the vacuum a perceptual machinery obedient to the triggers that the brands implant there. Taste buds that never learn to disguish sweet from sour from bitter but that only register abstractions like "fun" and the taste of pleasure. A tongue that tastes only emotions rather than physical properties of consumed substances. These physical properties become even more unknowable to the mind, the food-in-itself a lost dream to the consumer, who can only consume her own expectations. "What does coffee taste like?," Carles asks, "what does beer taste like?" We can never know. Our perceptions of these things are purely self-referential.

Once perception becomes a matter of interfacing with brands rather than our sensory organs, a trademark synesthesia ensues to the point where sound and taste are no different from one another, both are platforms for experiential design: "Is the Gogurt design a ‘more innovative’ design than the iPod?" Carles asks, highlighting this problematic. Whether we are squeezing pap into our mouths or into our ears is immaterial. All the matters is the industrial design of the device to which we are connected, and the brand with which that device is marked. Then the brand is written our our bodies, which are written and overwritten over and again like any other media storage device, which is that to which we have been reduced.

Carles suggests this transformation of the human into the digital processing device is the result of a conspiracy of the old against the young, implemented through the vector of celebrity: "Feel like tweens want to do what ‘famous people do’ and also appear to be ‘grown ups’ when they don’t realize that they already have the attention of grownups since it is so easy to resent them 4 having their whole lives’ ahead of them." By duping the young into emulating the famous, the worldweary convince youth to surrender its own perceptual faculties and have them replaced with a mimetic tendency, a duplicatability that mirrors the functionality of a copy machine. The youth don't realize the degree to which they are targeted, are under surveillance, precisely because of the way their perceptions slip through the social order's neural net. They have not yet been subsumed, subjected to the social order, fully socialized and absorbed. They still have a chance to escape. Thus the ideological cannons fire in their direction, and youth culture becomes an obsession for all -- and the poor fools, they think that youth culture is a celebration of youth rather than their imprisonment!

Carles, reasoning along these lines, mocks the young's innocence of marketing, how little they know about the strategems used to ensnare them: "I’ll nvr forget the time I stayed up all nite to study for marketing. Such a hard class, yall! Avoid it at all costs." They can't study marketing because they themselves are the subject of the course, the product that marketing has produced. They would be staring into the womb that contains them.

31 August 2009: "Will alternative people stop ‘driving hybrids’/'riding bikes’ and start ‘horseback riding’?"

This post is about path dependency. Because of the massive amount of investment and coordination required, societies tend to lock into the transport systems they develop collectively regardless of their future inefficiency. Would a return to a prior paradigm -- the use of domesticated horses as a primary mode of transport -- be anything but atavism, Carles wonders. Can outdated technologies be relegitimated as fashion, can they serve a symbolic use when their material use is exhausted? "It seems like owning a horse might declare 2 the world that u r an individual who ‘truly understands’ that the world is an ecosystem, and we need to start relying more on other humans and animals." Or would this willed reliance be a disruptive contradiction, further confusing the destiny of the species in history. But since "Truly alternative people will find a way to break free from society" a purposeful return to prior modes of living that are no longer supported by infrastructure seems on the face of it a mode of escape, an instantiation of resistance. "Not sure what sort of facilities you need to own a horse, or if there are any ‘traffic laws’ for horseback riding within the city."

The move backward into history already passed does not allow for a blithe reenactment of moral dilemmas that seem to have been solved, making for a shelter from ethical quandaries necessarily generated by the contemporary order. Instead it fosters anarchy, as incompatible stages of development collide in real time. By forcing the base and the superstructure to misalign, "alts" would perform a radical intervention into the quotidian as such and elevate it to the level of a problematic. While this confrontational mise-en-scene would allow us to prevent the dangerous iteration in which commuting transmogrifies into communing, in which it "degenerates into a celebration of ‘being stuck in ur life,’" it does not solve the contradictions of positing ahistorical solutions to the problem of history, that is, the problem of social classes -- alts and mainstreamers, if you will -- and the dilectical progression of their struggles. Horses wouldn't be able to drag us back to a moment in time in which we are innocent of history, innocent of our own self-knowledge as belonging to a social stereotype.

In the end, Carles notes, the horse as transport mode will meet the same fate of the culture industry as beast of escapist burden: "Still kinda sad that Barbaro was executed. Miss him like I miss Heath."

24 August 2009: "The Carlesfork 2000 (HRO2K: A List of the best mp3s ever burned)."

This post is about self-consuming rhetoric. Here I would like to call attention to a particular rhetorical trope of which Carles is fond: his tendency to combine the subjunctive, conditional, and imperative moods in single statements such as this: "It seems like I really just need to let the world know ‘what’s up’ and sort everything out." The "it seems like" negates the "really" and the combination of these two severely qualify the intention expressed in the predicate, forcing us to interrogate the possibility that any subject position can be "really" invested with the certainty necessary to "sort everything out." What Carles wants us to recognize is the fantasy element inherent in every command, in every will to power, that always threatens to bury the specific content of that wish. What we "really" want is always already only "seems like" it is so. A radical contingency haunts our expression; every attempt is overhung with the shadow of its own negation, its own admission of its limits, its incorporation of fictional wish-fulfillment elements, even when the wish so deeply held is to purge all utterances of dreamy falsity.

Hence the deliberately ludicrous, ludic nature of the list Carles proposes, for which he concocts a series of messianic promises, that his list of songs will save the record industry, individuality, local integrity, the world, etc. "I am not sure how to confidently state that I am ‘100% certain’ that my list is a compilation of the truly best songs ever created." Confidence always negates itself rhetorically -- the more emphatically it is expressed, the more likely the hollowness of its boasts will be evident. In a twist familiar to us from psychoanalysis, certainty always manifests itself as its opposite; a kind of projection occurs which reveals our certainty eroding itself, and our deep urge to enlist others in supporting the claims we have dared to make.

The problem is that every utterance we make has such sotieric intensity, not just our attempt to make lists of the best things the world has to offer in a particular category. When Carles declares, "We can’t be afraid to embrace social and historical responsibilities," he refers not to the compilation of spurious lists but to our continual skepticism of such lists and the static portrayal of the world they manifest. Our responsibility, at this unique moment in time in terms of media reach and dissemination, is to resist definition and reject identity of the puny sort that once held sway over youth: "We must define ourselves by defining the best music because mp3s define who u r [via iPod]." Devices like the iPood have sown the seeds of their own destruction; we listen to become not who we are but to destroy and dissolve the notion of self in an endless series of transformation, rewriting the media drives over and over again until the log of what we have consumed becomes inscrutable.

Carles concludes with a list of self-negating statements:

‘I honestly believe I have the best taste in music in the world.’
-every1

‘I just like to enjoy music without judging it or thinking about why I like it 2 much.’
-every1 trying 2 pretend they are not an ass hole

‘Have u heard of Animal Collective?’
-some bro

‘Have u heard of of Daughtry?’
-a real bro

‘Do u like my leather wrist band?’
-Daughtry when he goes home for Thanks giving

‘What r u having for lunch?’
-people in the office, right before 12 noon

‘I just brought my lunch.’
-office worker who doesn’t want to eat lunch in a group setting with sad coworkers

‘I save a lot of money by bringing my lunch every day.’
-some ass hole who brings his/her lunch every day

‘What’s ur favourite band?’
-trying to ‘connect’ with some1

‘______________’ (disappointing answer that leaves u feeling sad about what ‘real people’ listen to)
-a real person being realer than u will ever be

‘i have something 2 say.’
-a person who starts a lil blog site

‘I am interesting’
-every1

‘I am boring.’
-depressed person/person trying to ’seem interesting’ by ’saying they are boring.’

All of these statements are beyond true and false. The highlight the dichotomies that Carles is encouraging us to regard as yesterday's truths, now become irrelevant to the list-free future. All future sets are to be infinite.

25 August 2009: "Is it still authentic to be ‘alt’?"

This post is about the world as will. Carles is interested in investigating the possibilities for intersubjectivity opened up by new communication technologies. He begins with a syllogism for our times:

I am the SleepyHeadBro.
This bro is me.
This is my youtube presence.

Online sharing is in the porcess of reaching its logical endpoint, in which identities become collective, and watching/consuming another's youtube presence becomes equivalent with becoming that presence. The technological miracle of transubstantiation takes place via hosts (IP hosts) that connect us up to the great cloud computers. Our displaced identities cannot be fixed in any particular place, disembodied we emanate and manifest in many servers at once; online we are legion. Naturally our boundaries dissolve -- we become what we regard on our screens, that with which we interact.

The consequence is that sociological labels or subcultural identifications shift perpetually in meaning, become unstable and uncertain, verge on meaningless: "Sometimes I get the feeling that ‘being alt’ is just some sort of game," Carles notes. The free play among the endless chain of signifiers means that "alt" can ultimately mean anything; the acceleration of the cycling of meaning online means that it means everything at once.

19 August 2009: "Seems like nothing relevant is happening."

This post is about media saturation. Carles stares into the void that is at once a surfeit. Too many pseudo-events is tantamount to no events at all, just as a Babel of tongues talking all at once resolves itself as incomprehensible static. The problem worsens when we situate ourselves at the eye of the storm and expect the flow of events to dance centripetally around us -- when everything must appear "relevant" to us personally or else it seems not to occur at all.

Of course, Carles is making a point about interpellated subjectivity at the point of ideological egress. We are constituted as a self through the ways in which hypermediatated events call out to us, seem to predict our interest and gratify it, fashion us with a consciousness that is prone to boredom to the same degree to which it is immediately engaged by trivia. In this sense, what is "relevant" is that which makes us feel as though we exist: "Maybe I am losing touch with ‘the world’" Carles worries, precisely at the moment as he becomes aware of events qua events, as something he should be paying attention to instead of merely being entertained by -- the cutting edge of the much-remarked-upon interactivity enabled by internet technology. Carles' ironic comment turns on the insight that we are already entirely severed from the world and can't "touch" it -- it comes to us already saturated with commentary and interpretation, mediated and appropriated to serve various ends and to serve our own subjectification. We can't be in touch with the world and "be" at the same time.

Carles posits an escape from mediation, and the emptiness it engenders as it interpellates us (we become aware of a self that can be bored and are thereby consumed by boredom), through drugs and stupor. This annihilation of self can only be temporary however -- the next post will be written, the pool of pseudoevents and trivial information will continue to be filled by those who are already fed up with it all. So when Carles suggests "Maybe it’s time 2 move on" he is only signaling his awareness that there's nowhere else to go.

18 August 2009: "The Ruralt."

This post is about exurban soteriology. Here, in a sort of preemptive phenomenological strike, Carles simultaneously defines a redemptive archetype for a future age and dismantles it with ironic ridicule, perhaps hoping to prevent its emergence, which would perpetuate the city-country stereotypes at a time when our environmental crises call for a sublation of this shopworn and counterproductive dichotomy. The false conflict between those rurals with a purity of intention and jaded citified exploiters masks the actual sources of exploitation, in capital and property itself, regardless of where it is situated.

Carles's ploy here is to indicate that a different map for the dissemination of ideology is needed; no more does it filter out from cities only to return warped and denatured and disavowed in its rustic and bumpkinized iterations. "One day I will leave my home in rural America. I will move to the city. I would even be willing to move to suburbia if there are more people who ‘get’ me." But this figure is not trapped by geography. "Did you know that only 13% of ruralts escape from their rural community?' Carles writes mockingly, aware that freedom from travel restrictions doesn't guarantee mobility. He adds, "40% of ruralts end up settling for ‘being a homosexual who works at an outlet mall.’" That is to say, many of them invert the motivations that might naturally be attributed. The ruralt is not misunderstood but understood too well; he seeks a place to go where his capacity to baffle will have an appreciative audience. At the "outlet mall," where what is left over culturally goes to be repurposed and disseminated; where the urban and the exurban meet to facilitate retail exchange. The ruralt figure, it turns out, is not trying to escape so much as get imprisoned, locked behind the iron bars of the judging eyes of peers.

Instead of a cycles of escape and return, we must deconstruct that myth of personal transformation through flight by refiguring it as stark contradiction: "No 1 ever leaves this town (I will leave this town)." Situated synchronically rather than diachroncally, the idea of exurban redemption becomes impossible, absurd.

The absurdity of the rehabilitated rustic then can be used to discredit the escape fantasies of environmentally conscious urban types -- the localvores and home-school advocates who seek to elude the ideological system in which they are embedded (or even constituted or as Althusser would say interpellated) or find its interstices. When the exurbs are "alt" there are no margins to which to flee; instead the hipster flight from urbanity becomes a epidemiological phenomenon, spreading the virus of identity-mongering and vertiginous self-consciousness. Carles notes: "In the end, I think we learn that we are all human 2gether after all, and it doesn’t matter where u live/come from." Only now "being human" and self-aware has become "being hipster" and being self-involved.